 |
 |
|
|
||
| Subscriber home page |
| |
|
||
Preface to the online release, January 2010By Lawrence Goldman
New online contents, January 2010Welcome to the sixteenth update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which adds 208 new articles and, in total, 213 new biographies to the dictionary. All but two of these 213 people died in 2006. Of those who died in 2006, 41, or one in five, were women. The earliest born, in June 1900, was Philip d’Arcy Hart, medical researcher; the latest, born in August 1962, was Aleksandr Litvinenko, the Russian dissident who was assassinated in London by means of radioactive material. The majority, some 116, were born in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. As ever, a selection of these new articles and a list of all new subjects added to the dictionary are freely available. The complete dictionary (57,258 biographies and 462 theme articles) is available, free, in nearly all public libraries in the UK, with most now offering remote access, which enables library members to log in at any time at home (or anywhere they have internet access). Full details of participating public libraries and how to gain access to the complete dictionary are available here. Popular entertainment and broadcastingThe Oxford DNB takes a broad and inclusive view of national history and contemporary achievement and includes many subjects who played notable roles in popular culture, including the worlds of entertainment, broadcasting, and journalism. A large proportion of the lives added in January 2010, including some of the most notable figures, are drawn from these areas and made their most important contributions in the 1960s. Elkan Allan was never a household name, but he created and produced the pioneering Ready, Steady, Go!, one of the first British pop music television programmes, which was broadcast on Friday evenings from 1963 with its catchphrase, ‘the weekend starts here’. He is joined by Alan (Fluff) Freeman, the eternal disc jockey—a term that entered the language about this time—who was still broadcasting into his seventies, and Arthur Chisnall, who turned Eel Pie Island in the River Thames at Twickenham into an influential venue for the leading ‘rhythm ‘n blues’ bands of the era, including the Rolling Stones. The breadth of popular music is illustrated by the inclusion of Freddie Garrity, lead singer and all-round clown with Freddie and the Dreamers, Desmond Dekker, who pioneered reggae in Britain and is remembered for the song ‘Israelites’, and also Syd Barrett, a founding member of Pink Floyd, who composed their quirky early songs but whose talent was dissipated by drug abuse and mental decline. He was the ‘crazy diamond’ of one famous song; he ‘shines on’ in our article. Other and older styles of popular music are represented by the trombonist and bandleader Don Lusher, who took over the leadership of the famous Ted Heath Band; Ambrose Campbell, leader of the West African Rhythm Brothers, who were popular from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, and Gracie Cole, a pioneering female brass-band trumpeter of the 1930s and 1940s. Ivor Cutler, the gravel-voiced poet and humorist championed by the late John Peel, is also included. Few films better exemplify the strengths and weaknesses of British post-war film-making than the Quatermass series of science fiction adventures of the 1950s and 1960s: imaginative fantasies about alien invasion yet with a quaintly English feel, held together with balsa wood and sticky-backed plastic. Their director, Val Guest, whose film career stretched across several decades, is a notable entrant to the dictionary. No television creation better encapsulated the attractions to a mass audience of a suave and sophisticated secret agent than The Saint, played by Roger Moore, which was a highlight of Sunday evening viewing through the 1960s. Its creator, the producer Monty Berman, who was also responsible for the television crime dramas Gideon’s Way and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), is also added to the Oxford DNB in this update. Charlie Drake, who was famous in the early days of British television for his slapstick humour, is joined in the dictionary by a popular black comedian of his era, Charlie Williams, and by a comedian of a very different type, a stalwart of radio panel shows who was once voted ‘the wittiest living person’, the much admired Linda Smith. We include three television actors who were often on our screens: Tom Bell, who specialized in menacing roles as a criminal or a ‘hard copper’; Derek Bond, whose career included several Ealing films and who was a controversial president of the actors’ trade union Equity; and the quiet and understated Peter Barkworth, whose most significant role may have been in Tom Stoppard’s television play of the 1970s, Professional Foul. In this he played a professor of philosophy attending an academic conference in Prague who was uncharacteristically emboldened to speak out on freedom and justice. This update also includes the actress Sally Gray, a star of the 1930s and 1940s in films like They Made Me a Fugitive and Obsession; the theatrical agent Kitty Black; Philip Tomlinson, a pioneer of drama written and staged by disabled people; and the playwright David Halliwell, who had early success with Little Malcolm and his Struggle against the Eunuchs. They are joined by two notable women in the theatre, Mary O’Malley, who founded the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, and Jill Fraser, who was director of the Watermill Theatre in Aylesbury. Among broadcasters now added to the dictionary pride of place must go to Raymond Baxter in television and Nick Clarke in radio. Baxter’s calm, headmasterly tones may now seem dated, especially for a weekly programme on technology. Yet in the 1960s he made Tomorrow’s World into one of the most memorable programmes of the first age of television and his part in the first transatlantic broadcast ensures him a place in broadcasting history. Clarke was the authoritative voice of radio news and current affairs, a firm but courteous interlocutor who personified a certain BBC house style, as did June Knox-Mawer, who presented Woman’s Hour on Radio 4. Naomi Sargant, a pioneer of educational television, Tom Weir, a mountaineer and naturalist and a ubiquitous figure on Scottish television, and Kenneth Griffith, the irascible and controversial Welsh documentary-maker, are also included in this update, as is Robert Carrier, who was one of the earliest of TV chefs and also a popular writer on food and cookery and a flamboyant entrepreneur. We also include several notable television executives, among them Marmaduke Hussey, who was very much the choice of the Conservative government as chairman of the BBC when appointed in 1986; the eccentric and autocratic Peter Cadbury, who ran Westward Television for two decades; and Sir Iain Tennant, chairman of Grampian Television. From the world of journalism they are joined by Eric Mackay, editor of The Scotsman; Glen Renfrew of the news agency Reuters; and a committed journalist of a different sort, Richard Clements, the editor of Tribune for two decades from 1961, when its columns and editorials held together the Labour left wing and set out its distinctive political viewpoint. Among those writing for the national press pride of place must go to three remarkable humorists. Richard Boston wrote regularly for The Guardian and was an early supporter of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), which did so much to improve national morale in the 1970s and 1980s. Frank Johnson’s distinctive columns and sketches, famous for their insight into the quirks and eccentricities of politicians and the age in general, were enormously popular in whichever publication they appeared, whether the Daily Telegraph, The Times or The Spectator. And Michael Wharton scaled the heights of satirical journalism in his ‘Peter Simple’ column for the Telegraph and showed a remarkable prescience in the process: in an example of the way that life can imitate art, some of his comic creations seem now to have come alive to inhabit our town halls, schools, universities, and churches. This sporting lifeThe influence of the media on modern sport is evident in the lives of some of the sportsmen and sportswomen now added to the dictionary. Pride of place goes to the great Fred Trueman, the Yorkshire and England fast bowler and the first man to take 300 wickets in test cricket. Trueman was the personification of that common conjunction, a great sportsman and a ‘difficult’ person. He spoke as he played, with an honesty and directness that made him admired, but also made him enemies among the cricket hierarchy. Those same qualities transferred well to the radio commentary box where Fred was a fixture for many years, pronouncing (almost always dolefully) on the merits of successive England cricket teams. ‘In my day’ was the start of many a Trueman comparison, almost always to the detriment of the England team then playing. But his authority was rarely questioned: Fred was a national institution—‘pipe smoker of the year’ on one occasion—whose exploits in the game at every level were his entitlement to speak as he found. John Spencer, the snooker player, was propelled to stardom by the sudden popularity of snooker in the first years of colour television. Pot Black was so much more compelling when you could also see the red, yellow, green, brown, blue, and pink as well. Jackie Pallo, the wrestler, now joins Shirley Crabtree (aka Big Daddy) and Martin Ruane (aka Giant Haystacks), his opponents in many Saturday teatime televised bouts, in the Oxford DNB. Pallo with the distinctive jack-tar ribbon in his hair was the buccaneer audiences loved to hate, who also became distinctly unpopular with his fellow wrestlers when he admitted to their fakery in the ring. Another sportsman whose career attracted publicity and attention was Peter Osgood, the Chelsea centre-forward at a time when his team were an attraction of ‘swinging London’ at the end of the 1960s. A footballer of an entirely different sort—diminutive where Osgood was tall and physically commanding—was Jimmy (known as Jinky) Johnstone, the Celtic midfielder with remarkable ball control who in 1967 was a member of the first British team to win the European cup. Ron Greenwood did not excel on the football field himself, but as that rare and almost contradictory thing, a thinker about the game, he fashioned West Ham United into one of the most attractive teams of 1960s (nurturing along the way the remarkable world cup-winning talents of Bobby Moore, Martin Peters, and Geoff Hurst), and was a well-respected manager of England between 1977 and 1982. Other sportsmen featured in this release include three athletes: the short and bespectacled Sydney Wooderson, who held the world records for the mile and half mile; Don Thompson, who won the gold medal at the Rome Olympics in 1960 for the 50 kilometre walk; and Ken Jones, who was both a record-breaking sprinter and a try-scoring rugby union international. David Nicholson the jockey and racehorse trainer is also included, along with the cricket writer and advocate of women’s cricket Netta Rheinberg. Music, art, and literatureThe most notable composer added to the Oxford DNB in this update is Sir Malcolm Arnold, whose music was always popular but perhaps for that reason fell out of favour with the critics. He won an Oscar for his score for the quintessential British film of the era, Bridge on the River Kwai. Other compositions included Concerto for Hosepipe and Grand Concerto Gastronomique! He is joined by the composer Robin Orr and by Sir John Drummond, television producer, director of the Edinburgh Festival, and an influential arbiter of musical taste. Edgar Hunt, a key figure in the modern revival of the recorder and recorder music, who did so much to promote recorder playing in primary schools, is included. So too is Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, the great soprano—and not just for her music, as she was controversial for alleged collaboration with Nazism and for the influence of her svengali-like husband, Walter Legge. Another story of the manipulation of a performer can be found in the biography of the pianist Joyce Hatto, whose accomplishments were overshadowed by the discovery after her death that her husband had plagiarized other recordings and issued them as hers. Moira Shearer, the ballet dancer, is a much loved entrant to the dictionary to whom no scandal attaches. The film with which she is most frequently associated, The Red Shoes (1948), has never dimmed in popularity and is now the subject of renewed interest in a revised and retouched version. Our release features a number of notable artists, including the painters Sandra Blow (abstract collages), Dennis Bowen (abstract landscapes), and John Latham, whose use of mixed media led to his being sacked from St Martin’s School of Art for making artworks out of library books. Sir Kyffin Williams is famous for his landscapes of Snowdonia. Joash Woodrow was discovered only very late in his life when scenes of his native Leeds were compared by many to Lowry. Alongside these practising artists we include other figures from the art world: Dennis Farr, an authority on modern British art and director of the Courtauld Institute; the art journalist and critic Peter Townsend; the architectural critic Colin Boyne; Frank Willett, a scholar of African art; Annely Juda, the gallery owner who specialized in modernist Russian art; and Alan Fletcher, the ‘father figure of British graphic design’. Garden design in Britain is also represented in the lives of Christopher Lloyd, journalist and gardener, Valerie Finnis, gardener and photographer, and Ian Hamilton Finlay, creator of the influential garden Little Sparta. The leading literary life added to the dictionary in this release is that of Dame Muriel Spark, author among many other works of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Prickly, feisty, controversial, and eccentric, Muriel Spark by character and lifestyle was not suited to the metropolitan literary world and could be difficult to pin down in all senses of the term. Indeed she reinvented herself and her oeuvre several times in her career. Even her roots and religion were deliberately obscured and became the subject of an acrimonious public argument with her son later in her life. Many of the other authors included in this release had international connections. The German-born author Sybille Bedford wrote novels as well as travelogues, autobiography, and other non-fiction. She is joined by the Indian-born novelist Raja Rao and the publisher John La Rose, a key figure in the black community in Britain. Peggy Appiah, the daughter of the Labour politician Stafford Cripps, joins her husband Joe in the Oxford DNB; she was a notable anthologist of west African stories. Eric Newby was one of the foremost travel writers of the era, famous for his Short Walk in the Hindu Kush among other volumes of memoirs. The children’s writers added include Jan Mark, Philippa Pearce—who wrote Tom’s Midnight Garden, several times adapted for television—and Ursula Moray Williams, who wrote the Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse. The poet John Heath-Stubbs is also included among those who died in 2006. Politics and scandalAmong political lives one stands out above all, that of John (Jack) Profumo. He was not an especially notable figure in post-war British politics and would probably not have been included in the Oxford DNB if he had merely been a diligent secretary of state for war, his position in 1963 when the ‘Profumo affair’ broke. But his personal indiscretions and political errors at that time gave a name to a complex set of events, many of them played out before a shocked but also prurient public, that marked not only the decline of a government, that of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, but the end of an era. The combination of sex, spies, drugs, suicide, high politics, and low cunning was irresistible and emboldened the press and broadcasters to go further than ever before in uncovering the lives of the rich and irresponsible, and satirizing the traditional governing class. The world looked different a year later when Harold Wilson led Labour back into power in ‘the white heat of [technological] revolution’. Simon Heffer’s biography explains these events, including Profumo’s affairs and his infamous lie to the House of Commons. He also shows how Jack Profumo redeemed himself through forty years of dedicated and selfless social work, out of the public eye, for good causes in the East End of London. It is a life that reads like a morality tale with many different messages for our age. Profumo will forever be remembered for giving a name to a transition in the cultures of politics, the press, and even British humour. When, a decade later, Lord Lambton, another Conservative minister who is also included in this release, was also involved in a sexual scandal there was far less comment and only very limited political impact. This is another measure of the effects of the Profumo affair, which accustomed the British public to a new public morality and changing rules of behaviour. As Philip Larkin reminded us later:
Sexual intercourse began Other political lives added to the dictionary include two colourful backbenchers from either side of the Commons: Tony Banks, the populist London Labour MP, who obscured his roots as the son of a diplomat and acquired a reputation as a sharp-tongued Cockney wit, and Eric Forth, the Conservative noted for his garish appearance and forthright, ‘politically incorrect’ opinions. Merlyn Rees, a leading figure in the Labour administration of the 1970s as Northern Ireland and then home secretary, is also included. Though no fluent speechmaker in public, he was a close and trusted ally of the prime minister, Jim Callaghan (who entered the Oxford DNB last year). Other political additions include a special forces officer and an intelligence officer who both became Tory MPs, respectively Sir Douglas Dodds-Parker and Sir Peter Smithers; the moderate Conservative John Peyton; Margaret Bain (née Ewing), who was well known as a Scottish Nationalist MP under both her names; and Ted Grant, the Trostkyist creator of the Militant Tendency, which in the 1970s and 1980s attempted to enter and subvert the Labour Party.
Perhaps the most influential political figures included here were neither MPs nor ministers: in Ralph Harris, later Baron Harris of High Cross, and in Alfred Sherman, we have two of the key figures behind the rise of Margaret Thatcher and the invention of Thatcherism in the 1970s. Sherman, once a communist, was an important figure behind the intellectual changes in Conservative ideology that led to the Thatcherite break with the post-war social and political consensus, but he fell out of favour once the Conservatives were in power. Harris, on the other hand, had been a radical Conservative thinker and follower of the free-market economist Friedrich Hayek since his working-class youth. After a brief stint as a university lecturer he founded the Institute of Economic Affairs to propound classical liberal economics at a time when such ideas were deeply unfashionable. His work as a writer and propagandist helped to re-establish a political economy based on the market rather than the state at a time, in the mid- and late 1970s, when Keynesian orthodoxy was under stress. Law and public serviceThe worlds of politics and law are straddled by Victor Mishcon, Baron Mishcon, who served many high-profile clients. He is joined by three law lords: Ackner, who had represented the families at the Aberfan inquiry in the 1960s and who was an expert on libel and administrative law; Brightman, a trusts and taxation lawyer, who had recruited Margaret Thatcher to his chambers in the 1950s; and Simon of Glaisdale, a family lawyer held in high esteem by his profession. The legal scholars Kurt Lipstein (international law) and Sir Robert Megarry (equity and the law of property) are also included. Among diplomats in this release are Sir Julian Bullard, whose final posting was as ambassador in Bonn, West Germany (and who joins in the dictionary his father Sir Reader Bullard and his brother Sir Giles); the strongly pro-European Sir Roy Denman; the Arab expert Sir Michael Weir; and the ambassador to Japan Sir Michael Wilford. A refugee from Germany in the 1930s, Sir Hans Singer worked for many years as a senior United Nations economist, becoming one of the most influential figures in the economics of development. The January update also includes a notable collection of figures from the intelligence community. Francis Cammaerts was an SOE officer in France during the Second World War; Milicent Bagot was a Soviet expert in MI5 and is believed to have been the model for John le Carré’s fictional creation Connie Sachs; and Sir Colin Figures served as the head of the Special Intelligence Service (MI6) at the time of the Falklands War. In contrast Aleksandr Litvinenko was a former KGB agent who became a public critic of the Russian government and was a naturalized British citizen domiciled in London at the time he was killed, quite possibly by Russian operatives acting on state orders, by poisoning with the radioactive material Polonium-210. The most notable figure from the armed services whom we add to the dictionary in this update is Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley. The first Dictionary of National Biography was notable for the profuse inclusion of scholars and soldiers, though these were usually two different sets of people. In Farrar-Hockley the two categories were combined in a single figure—a hugely influential army officer who saw service in many of the major conflicts since the Second World War, and a military historian and commentator on military affairs who wrote and spoke with unexampled authority. Business lifeTwo contrasting leaders of aviation head our list of business figures. Sir Peter Masefield trained as an aeronautical engineer, wrote widely on aviation, and as a businessman and senior public official was a key figure in the development of British aviation from the 1950s to the 1990s. Sir Freddie Laker was different in style and approach. His experience during the Second World War launched his career as an entrepreneur of the skies and he is remembered as the larger-than-life figure who pioneered cheap aviation for the ordinary traveller. His Skytrain, which provided cheap transatlantic flights from London to New York, went into administration in 1982 after less than five years in business, but it was the start of a process that has led to affordable air travel for millions. Those businessmen with their feet planted altogether more firmly on the ground include Sir Kenneth Bond, the accountant and indispensible assistant to Arnold Weinstock at GEC; Sir Leslie Smith, chairman of British Oxygen; Simon Sainsbury, a key figure in the growth of the family firm in the 1960s and 1970s who then turned to philanthropy; and Edward Brech, the management consultant and historian of management. We also include John Macsween of the eponymous family firm famous for the manufacture of the haggis. Finally we mark the creative genius of advertising executive John Webster, who brought to the British public the Sugar Puffs honey monster, the bicycling bear promoting Hofmeister Beer, and perhaps most memorably of all, the chimpanzees in the different Brooke Bond PG Tips advertisements. Religion and scholarshipFrom Mammon to God, who has been worshipped and studied by many different faiths and denominations in modern Britain, as our religious entries demonstrate. Prominent Anglicans in this release include David Hand, the missionary and archbishop of Papua New Guinea, Michael Mayne, dean of Westminster, and the leading church administrator Sir Derek Pattinson. We also include the evangelical leader Selwyn Hughes; Zaki Badawi, the Islamic scholar and leader of moderate Muslim opinion who founded the Muslim College in London for the domestic training of imams and was committed to inter-faith dialogue; William Montgomery Watt, the Scottish Episcopalian who studied Islam and wrote an acclaimed biography of Muhammad; Mary Boyce, scholar of Zoroastrianism; and Arthur Peacocke, a biochemist who devoted his career to reconciling science and belief. The entry on Rabbi Louis Jacobs takes us to the heart of the most controversial episode in the religious history of modern Anglo-Jewry, in which Jacobs lost his position as a minister of the United Synagogues and a likely future chief rabbi when he integrated modern scholarship on the provenance and composition of the Torah into his writings and teachings. Among the scholars included in this release are several notable linguists: Peter Ganz, who played a role in transcribing and eavesdropping on the conversations of captured German officers and scientists during and after the Second World War; the Hispanists Ivy McClelland and Sir Peter Russell; the French scholar Alan Raitt; and the Esperanto poet and writer William Auld. The anthropologist Rodney Needham, who was influenced by structuralism, is joined by the classical archaeologist Peter Megaw, whose major excavations were in Cyprus, and by the Cambridge numismatist Philip Grierson. The philosopher Sir Peter Strawson, the economists Alfred Maizels and Michael Posner, and the urban geographer Emrys Jones are also included. Enid Mumford studied the impact of technology in the workplace; Olive Banks (who now joins her husband and collaborator Joe Banks in the Oxford DNB) was a feminist, sociologist, and historian, and an expert on the history and sociology of the modern family. The several doctors and medical experts evident in January’s update include Sir Henry Yellowlees, the influential chief medical officer of health in the 1960s and 1970s; the paediatricians June Lloyd (Baroness Lloyd of Highbury) and Michael Chan (Baron Chan, the first peer from a Chinese background); Sir Richard Bayliss, physician to the queen; and the influential geneticist Paul Polani. Paul Beeson, born in the United States, was a key figure in the development of medicine in Oxford; Sir Martin Roth, based in Cambridge, was an influential psychiatrist whose work countered the ‘anti-psychiatry movement’ of figures like R. D. Laing. This release also includes the leading molecular biologist Vernon Ingram; the biochemist Philip Randle; the zoologist Keith Eltringham, who refined the aerial survey methods required for animal population counts; the plant chemist Arthur Bell, whose work on plant toxins was important for the manufacture of new medicines and who became director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; the particle physicist Richard Dalitz; and Brebis Bleaney, who was notable for the study of electron paramagnetic resonance. The work of Sir Nicholas Shackleton on palaeoclimatology is now recognized as a pioneering venture into a subject of the greatest contemporary scientific and popular interest. Shackleton, a talented clarinettist, is also notable for building a very valuable collection of musical instruments that he left to the University of Edinburgh. A final category covers those with a foot in the past: the Byzantine historian Joan Hussey; the historian of late medieval Italy Philip Jones; Dennis Twitchett, who was an expert on medieval China; and John McManners, who wrote extensively on France before, during, and after the revolution of 1789. Two of the biographers we now include, Georgina Battiscombe and Alethea Hayter, wrote studies of the same Victorian writer, Charlotte Yonge. Battiscombe also wrote biographies of John Keble and the reforming Victorian earl of Shaftesbury, while Hayter made an important study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Two further figures link the dictionary to the world of public history and heritage: Levi Fox was a key figure in the founding and development of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford upon Avon, while Marie Hartley founded the Dales Countryside Museum, a gem of a provincial museum. Finally, if the Oxford DNB may be allowed to honour its own, we include the life of the portrait photographer Godfrey Argent, sixty-seven of whose images are used as illustrations in the dictionary. Our next online updateOur next online update will be published in May 2010 and will include men and women active from the ‘earliest times’ to the late twentieth century. May’s update will include sets of biographies of civilian heroes, commemorated for acts of ‘everyday heroism’; of provincial artists and artistic networks; and of Britons in Japan. May’s update also sees the start of a new research project to extend the dictionary’s coverage of modern linguists and foreign language scholars. In addition we will continue to extend the themes area of the dictionary with essays on historical networks including the Marlborough House set, the Persia Committee, the Bristol school of painters, and the modernist Penwith Society of Arts, based in St Ives, Cornwall. Lawrence Goldman, editor |
