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Today, 27 October sees the centenary of the birth of the poet, Dylan Marlais Thomas. Born on Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, and brought up in the genteel district of Uplands, Thomas’s childhood was suburban and orthodox — his father an aspirational but disappointed English teacher at the local grammar school.
Swansea would remain a place for home comforts. But from the mid-1930s, Thomas began a wandering life that took in London’s Fitzrovia — and in particular its pubs, the Fitzroy Tavern and the Wheatsheaf — and then (as a dysfunctionally married man) the New Forest, squalid rooms in wartime London, New Quay on Cardigan Bay, Italy, Laugharne in Carmarthenshire, and from 1950 the United States where he gained a popular student following and where he died in Manhattan, aged thirty-nine.
For all his wanderings, few of Thomas’s poems were written outside Wales. Indeed, half of the published poems for which he is known were written, in some form, while he was living at home in Swansea between 1930 and 1934. As Paul Ferris, his Oxford DNB biographer writes, “commonplace scenes and characters from childhood recur in his writing: the park that adjoins Cwmdonkin Drive; the bay and sands that were visible from the windows; a maternal aunt he visited” — the latter giving rise to one of Thomas’s best-known poems, “Fern Hill.” In literary London, and in numerous bar rooms thereafter, Thomas’s “drinking and clowning were indispensable to him, but they were only half the story; ‘I am as domestic as a slipper’ he once observed, with some truth.”
Dylan Thomas, “Was there a time” by Biccie. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Autumn 2014 marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In a series of blog posts, academics, researchers, and editors look at aspects of the ODNB’s online evolution in the decade since 2004. Here the ODNB’s publication editor, Philip Carter, considers how an ever-evolving Dictionary is being transformed by new opportunities in digital research.
When it was first published in September 2004, the Oxford DNB brought together the work of more than 10,000 humanities scholars charting the lives of nearly 55,000 historical individuals. Collectively it captured a generation’s understanding and perception of the British past and Britons’ reach worldwide. But if the Dictionary was a record of scholarship within a particular timeframe, it was also seen from the outset as a work in progress. This is most evident in the decision to include in the ODNB every person who had appeared in the original, Victorian DNB. Doing so defined the 2004 Dictionary (to quote the entry on Colin Matthew, its founding editor) as ‘a collective account of the attitudes of two centuries: the nineteenth as well as the twentieth, the one developing organically from the other.’
In the decade since 2004 this notion of the ODNB as an organic ‘work in progress’ has gone a step further. This is seen, in part, in the continued extension of biographical coverage, both of the ‘recently deceased’ and of newly documented lives from earlier periods—as discussed in other articles in this 10th anniversary series. But in addition to new content there’s also been the evolution—in the form of corrections, revisions, amplifications, and re-appraisals—of a sizeable share of the ODNB’s 55,000 existing biographies, as new scholarship comes to light.
The need to ‘keep-up’ with fresh research is not new. In 1908 the Victorian DNB was reprinted in an edition that collated the marginalia and correspondence born of several decades of reading. Thereafter, no further reprints were undertaken and later findings remained on file: information relating to the birthplace of the Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry, for example—submitted by postcard in 1918—could not be address until the 2004 edition of the Dictionary. Such things are today unimaginable. Over the past ten years, and alongside the programme of new biographies, existing ODNB entries have been regularly updated online—with proposed amendments reviewed by the Dictionary’s academic editors in consultation with authors and reviewers. It’s worth remembering that today’s expectation of regular online updating is one that’s emerged in the lifetime of the published ODNB. Just 10 years ago, many saw online reference as a means of delivery not a new entity in its own right. The expectation that scholarly online reference could and should keep in step with new research and publications (and could be done while maintaining academic standards) is one pioneered, in part, by works like the ODNB.
One consequence is that Dictionary editors now focus on conservation (just as museum or gallery curators care for items in their collection) as well as on commissioning. In doing so we draw heavily on an ever-growing range of digitized records that have become available in the lifetime of the published Dictionary. This has been a truly remarkable development in humanities research in the past 5 to 10 years. For British history we’ve seen the digitization of (to name a few): the census returns for England and Wales (to 1911); indexes of civil registration in England and Wales (births, marriages, and deaths from 1838); Scottish parish registers from about 1500; early modern wills and probates; and 300 years’ worth of national and provincial newspapers. And this just scratches the surface.
Portrait of Lady Meux by James Abbot McNeill Whistler, 1881. Frick Collection. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
In 2004 there were many people in the ODNB for whom the biographical trail ran cold. Access to paper records alone once meant that certain individuals simply disappeared from the historical record. Of course, some lives remain puzzles. But with these newly digitized sources we’re now able to address many of the previously unknown and untraceable episodes that were scattered across the 2004 edition. A decade on we’ve added details of nearly 3000 previously unknown births, marriages, and deaths for ODNB subjects. Access to newly digitized sources also prompts more wide-ranging revisions. Take, for example, the traveller Eliza Fay (1755/6-1816), known for her Original Letters from India, whose Dictionary entry has recently doubled in length owing to new genealogical research that minutely plots a troubled personal life that led Fay to travel to India and the business ventures she maintained there.
The case of Eliza Fay reminds us that this boom in digitized resources is particularly valuable for better understanding the lives of nineteenth and twentieth-century women. As a result of multiple marriages and/or multiple name changes many such biographies are prone to obscurity. There are also many occasions when women gave false information about their age, often for professional reasons. With digital resources, and a little detective work, it’s now possible to recover these stories. One example is Valerie, Lady Meux (1852-1910), who married into one of Britain’s wealthiest brewing families. To her contemporaries, and to generations of researchers, Lady Meux appeared the epitome of high society. But recent research uncovers a very different story: that of Susie Langton, the daughter of a Devon baker who—via multiple changes of birthdate and name—worked her way into the London elite. To Susie Langton (or Lady Meux), the discovery of her true past may not have been welcome, but for modern historians it becomes a key part of her story, and a fascinating case study of late-Victorian social mobility.
A good deal of this detective work is being done from the ODNB office. But much more comes in from thousands of researchers worldwide who are also making use of digitized resources. It’s our good fortune that the ODNB online is growing up with the Who Do You Think You Are? generation—a band of genealogists from whom we’ve benefited greatly thanks to their willingness to share new information. Such discoveries obviously enhance our understanding of the ODNB’s 60,000 main subjects, but they’re similarly adding much to the Dictionary’s 300,000 ‘other’ people: the parents, children, spouses, in-laws, patrons, teachers, business partners, and lovers who also populate these biographies. Looking ahead to our second decade, we anticipate that more will be made of these hundreds of thousands of ‘extras’ in creating a richer picture of the British past—as the ODNB continues to document and add to what we know.
Way back in 2007, when Twittering truly was for the birds, a far-sighted editor at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography piped up: maybe people would like to listen as well as read? So was devised the Oxford DNB’s biography podcast which this week released its 200th episode—the waggerly tale of Charles Cruft (1852-1938), founder of the eponymous dog show held annually in early March.
Over the last seven years we’ve offered two episodes of the podcast per month. Each lasts between 10 and 25 minutes and follows a set format: the reading aloud of a single biography of a historical figure, taken from the Oxford DNB and chosen by Dictionary editors. The structure of an ODNB biography is ideal for the podcast format; dictionary entries being concise, rounded accounts of a life (personal as well as public), told chronologically, and written by specialist authors. Notable writers whose work appears in the podcast list include Will Self on J.G Ballard, Bernard Crick on George Orwell, David Lodge on Malcolm Bradbury, and Anthony Thwaite on Philip Larkin.
Since 2007 many episodes have been commissioned to mark noteworthy anniversaries. For example, Captain Edward Smith and the bandleader Wallace Hartley on the centenary, in 2012, of the sinking of the Titanic; or Ludwig Guttmann, creator of the Paralympics, for the London Games later that year. Others mark notable birthdays (the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing in June 2012, for instance); or dates in the British history calendar (the extraordinary story of Guy Fawkes for 5 November and Fred Perry for Wimbledon fortnight); or one-off events such as the enthronement in March 2013 of Justin Welby, the 105th archbishop of Canterbury, with the story of the first incumbent, St Augustine.
A great many of the 200 episodes—all of which are available free in the archive—chart the lives of well-known people: Anita Roddick, Roald Dahl, Scott of the Antarctic, Dr Crippen, Wallis Simpson, and so on. There are many more familiar names we’d love to include. However, the restrictions of the podcast format (a 25-minute recording allows an upper limit of c.3000 words for a script) means that this isn’t, unfortunately, the place for a Dickens or a Darwin whose ODNB entries run to more than 20,000 words. Even so, it’s possible to touch on major historical figures through the lives of those with whom they spent time: the story of Nora Joyce sheds light on James; that of Alice Liddell (of ‘Wonderland’ fame) on Lewis Carroll.
Photographic study “Pomona” (Alice Liddell as a young woman) by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1872. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
A few episodes, among them Orwell and Diana, princess of Wales, have been reduced from the original Oxford DNB article for reading aloud. Likewise, a handful of episodes take the form of dual lives comprising two Dictionary entries fused together: 15 minutes with the motor-car designer Charles Rolls just wouldn’t seem right without the accompanying story of Henry Royce; and so too the combined talents of Fortnum & Mason, Mills & Boon, or Eric & Ernie. Aside from these edits, what’s read aloud is pretty close to what you’ll find in the Oxford DNB for that individual. People with complex lives tend not to receive the podcast treatment: complicated, multi-layered stories are hard to untangle in 15-20 minutes. More suitable are recognizable people who dedicated themselves to a particular purpose (Alexander Fleming and penicillin, for instance) or lesser-known individuals closely associated with a familiar event or artefect, such as Charles Lucas, first recipient of the Victoria Cross.
Over the course a year, we hope to put out a mix of episodes covering a range of time periods, topics, and tones. Our earliest life is Boudicca (d.60/61 AD), the most recent (in terms of date of death) is Beryl Bainbridge (1932-2010). In between there’s plenty for the medievalist as well as the modernist—the life of Emperor Hadrian is much more than the story of wall-building, while that of the hermit St Godric is an ear-catching account of the privations of an 11th-century anchorite. Some of the chosen stories make for difficult listening. Try, for instance, Margaret Roper or Annie Darwin, daughters of Thomas More and Charles Darwin respectively. Others, like the scandalous medieval cleric, Bogo de Clare, or the raffish socialite Neil ‘Bunny’ Roger, are pure pleasure.
Entertainment is important, of course. But the podcast also provides an alternative route to historical biography for school teachers and pupils—many of whom, it’s fair to say, would not otherwise turn to a work of academic reference like the Oxford DNB. Episodes on Wilfred Owen, the abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, or the suffragette Emily Davison relate to aspects of the UK’s national curriculum. Hopefully, the series can also spring a few surprises on older listeners, be they the Hanoverian female soldier Hannah Snell; the doyen of pigeon racing, Albert Osman; or Charles Isham, bringer of garden gnomes to England.
About 650,000 episodes are downloaded annually from the ODNB podcast. Three things may account for this. First, there are our readers, Paul and Lynne—professional voice actors who have brought to life the words and worlds of writers, politicians, criminals, inventors, eccentrics, and—with Elizabeth Parsons—a would-be ghost. Then there’s the London studio where each episode is recorded, edited, and polished to a high standard.
Finally, and most importantly, there’s our common love of human stories, and of other people’s business—as testified by popular BBC radio series, such as “Great Lives”, “Last Word”, or the “New Elizabethans”. The Oxford DNB biography podcast makes a modest contribution to our fascination with real lives, albeit one that spans nearly 2000 years of British history and offers more than 50 hours listening time. That you can—while cooking dinner or walking the dog—be in the company of Mrs Beeton or, now, Charles Cruft seems rather wonderful.
Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a collection of 59,003 life stories of noteworthy Britons, from the Romans to the 21st century. The Oxford DNB online is freely available via public libraries across the UK, and many libraries worldwide. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to gain access free, from home (or any other computer), 24 hours a day. You can also sample the ODNB with its changing selection of free content: in addition to the podcast; a topical Life of the Day, and historical people in the news via Twitter @odnb. A new e-brochure offers more on the Oxford DNB podcast, along with selected content. All 200 episodes are available as free downloads in the Archive. New episodes in the podcast are available on alternate Wednesdays as ‘Oxford Biographies’ via iTunes.
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Today, 11 February 2013, marks the 50th anniversary of the death of the poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). It is an event that has significantly shaped biographies and critical studies of her work — particularly following the publication of Ariel (1965), her posthumous collection edited and prepared by Ted Hughes. Then, as now, many reviewers regarded these poems as foretelling the circumstances of her death. Plath’s biography in the Oxford DNB offers an alternative perspective. As its authors Sally Brown and Clare Taylor write:
‘Such criticism helped to perpetuate the idea that [Plath’s] death was the most famous thing about her, and encouraged further critics to read the poems as solely charting her increasing mental agitation. But even a cursory reading of the poems reveals the many voices of her work—the amused, hopeful, triumphant, as well as the enraged and vitriolic—and Plath herself, when talking about her work, was amusing and charming, her voice controlled, guttural, and powerful. … A writer and a mother, Plath provided a model for a new generation of poets of the consciousness-raising movement, and she remains enormously popular especially with young female readers. Her lasting triumph will be the power and precision of her poetic voice, and her vision of new possibilities for women writers.’
In addition to Plath’s life in the Oxford DNB, an edited audio version of her biography is also available.
Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Read more about Sylvia Plath on the Oxford DNB website. The Oxford DNB online is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,500 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 175 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @odnb on Twitter for people in the news.
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Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS. Image credit: By Jprw [Creative Commons] via Wikimedia Commons
Ever wondered what the Latin word for owl is? Or what links Fred Perry and Ping Pong? Maybe not, but you may be able to find the answers to these questions and many more at your fingertips in your local library. As areas for ideas, inspiration, imagination and information, public libraries are stocked full of not only books but online resources to help one and all find what they need. They are places to find a great story, research your family or local history, discover the origins of words, advice about writing a CV, or help with writing an essay on topics from the First World War to feminism in Jane Austen.
Saturday 9 February 2013 is National Libraries Day in the UK, and here at Oxford we publish a variety of online resources which you can find in many local libraries. To help with the celebrations we have asked a selection of our editors to write a few words about what they feel the resource they work on offers you, why they find it so fascinating, and what it can do when put to the test! And here is what they said…
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Philip Carter, Publication Editor, Oxford DNB
First, with life stories of 58,552 people who’ve shaped British history, there’s always someone new to meet: the first woman to swim the English Channel, perhaps? Or the last person convicted of witchcraft; the owner of Britain’s first curry house, the founder of the Mothers’ Union, the man who invented the football goal net. Plus 58,547 others — Julius Caesar to Jade Goody.
Second, there are new things to discover about some familiar figures. Did you know, for instance, that the cookery writer Mrs Beeton grew up in the stand of Epsom racecourse? That before tennis Fred Perry led the world at ping pong? That Roald Dahl kept 100 budgerigars and was a chocaholic, or that Dora Russell (wife of Bertrand) was the first woman to wear shorts in Britain?
Third (and perhaps most importantly) there’s the chance for some social networking — British history style. Traditionally, print dictionaries laid out their content A to Z. Online, the opportunities for new research — by local and family historians, or by teachers and students — are so much greater. Of course, the ODNB online still allows you to look up people ‘A to Z’. But it can also bring historical figures together in new ways, often for the first time — by dates, places, professions or religious affiliations. Simplest is date: for instance, it takes moments to gather the 92 men and women who were born on 9 February (National Libraries Day, 2013), including (appropriately) 15 who made their mark as writers, editors, lexicographers, and publishers.
But it’s with place searching that new discoveries really become possible, and a dictionary of the nation’s past becomes a resource for local and family history — from street level upwards. Which historical figures have connections to my county? Who once lived in my village, town, or city? Who went to my school or college? Who was baptized in this church or buried in that churchyard?
If you’d like to try for yourself, we’ve guides on using the ODNB for local history and family research, as well as bespoke pages to introduce historical figures by individual library authority (for example, Aberdeenshire or Sheffield. If you’re a librarian and would like one to promote historical figures near you, just let us know.
Oxford English Dictionary Owen Goodyear, Editorial Researcher
For me, what makes the OED so fascinating is the fact it is one of a kind. What sets the OED apart is the attention it pays to each word’s history. I trained in historical linguistics, and when I look at an entry, I’m always drawn to the etymology first. Take the word owl. The Latin for owl is ulula, and the early modern German huhu, rather delightfully imitating the sound of the bird. Owl is also used for varieties of pigeon — not for the sound, but its distinctive ruff — and, apparently, moths and rays, for their barn-owl-like colouring. One such type of moth is more commonly known as the garden tiger moth, which leads me to look up tiger and find the theory that its name comes from the Avestan word for sharp or arrow… then I find myself distracted by tiger as a verb, meaning to prowl about like a tiger. Pretty much what I’m doing now, in fact, following the connections from entry to entry. It’s hard to resist. Like an owl to a flame, you might say.
The new British citizenship test has been in the news lately — with commentators speculating that many people born and brought up in the UK would not be able to answer some of the questions on Britain’s history or culture. One of the wonderful things about living in Britain must surely be the access to free information found provided by the public library system, so I found myself wanting to remind all the lucky UK library users that they could find the answers they needed by logging onto Oxford Reference with their library cards. So, using a small sample of the questions featured in many newspapers, I decided to put Oxford Reference to the citizenship test — would it get the 75% necessary to prove itself well-versed in what it means to be British?
Searching for ‘Wiltshire monument’ across the 340 subject reference works on Oxford Reference, it correctly identifies Stonehenge as the multiple choice answer for the question on famous landmarks.
As I follow links from the information on Stonehenge to editorially recommended related content, I find results from OUP’s archaeology reference works which offer information on other ancient monument sites in Wiltshire like Avebury and Silbury Hill.
The admiral who died in 1805 causes no problems for our History content, and neither does the popular name for the 1801 version of the flag for the United Kingdom.
There are ten entries on St Andrew the patron Saint of Scotland, and I linger for a while to re-read his entry in one of the most colourful reference works on Oxford Reference, the Dictionary of Saints. The Dictionary of English Folklore quickly confirms that poppies are worn on Remembrance Day, and from that entry I follow a link to information about how poppies were used as a symbol of sleep or death on bedroom furniture and funerary architecture — my new fact for the day.
Other questions on the House of Commons and jury service take me to the extensive political and legal content on the site, and before long I am pleased to confirm that Oxford Reference has passed its citizenship test with flying colours.
I’ve been reminded along the way of the depth and richness of the content to be found on Oxford Reference covering all subject areas from Art to Zoology; the speed with which you can find a concise but authoritative answer to your question; the unexpected journeys you can follow as you investigate the links to related content around the site; and the pleasure in reading reference entries which have been written and vetted by experts.
Oxford Dictionaries Online Charlotte Buxton, Project Editor, Oxford Dictionaries Online
As a dictionary editor, I work with words on a daily basis, but I still can’t resist turning to Oxford Dictionaries Pro when I’m out of the office. It’s not just for those moments when I need to find out what a word means (although, contrary to what my friends and family seem to believe, I don’t actually know the definition of every word, so find myself looking them up all the time). I’m a particular fan of the thesaurus: why say idiot, after all, when you could use wazzock, clodpole, or mooncalf? Most importantly, I can access the site on the move. This helps to end those tricky grammar arguments in the pub — a few taps and I can confidently declare exactly when it’s acceptable to split an infinitive, whether we should say spelled or spelt, and if data centre should be hyphenated. And thus my reputation as an expert on all matters relating to language is maintained.
And now take our UK Public Library Members Quiz for a chance to win either £50 worth of Oxford University Press books or an iPod shuffle (TM).
The majority of UK public library authorities have subscribed to numerous Oxford resources. Your public library gives you access, free of charge within the library or from home to the world’s most trusted reference works. Learn more at our library resource center and in this video:
The Oxford DNB online is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,000 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 165 life stories now available (including the lives of Alan Turing, Piltdown Man, Wallace Hartley, and Captain Scott). You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @ODNB on Twitter for people in the news.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words — past and present — from across the English-speaking world. Most UK public libraries offer free access to OED Online from your home computer using just your library card number.
Oxford Reference is the home of Oxford’s quality reference publishing bringing together over 2 million entries, many of which are illustrated, into a single cross-searchable resource. Made up of two main collections, both fully integrated and cross-searchable in the same interface, Oxford Reference couples Oxford’s trusted A-Z reference material with an intuitive design to deliver a discoverable, up-to-date, and expanding reference resource.
Oxford Dictionaries Online is a free site offering a comprehensive current English dictionary, grammar guidance, puzzles and games, and a language blog; as well as up-to-date bilingual dictionaries in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. We also have a premium site, Oxford Dictionaries Pro, which features smart-linked dictionaries and thesauruses, audio pronunciations, example sentences, advanced search functionality, and specialist language resources for writers and editors.
A year of street parties and river processions for the Jubilee; of officially the best Olympics ever; of opening and closing ceremonies; of Britons winning every medal on offer; of the (admittedly, not British) Tour de France, of David Hockney’s Yorkshire; and of a new James Bond film. Even a first tennis Grand Slam since the days when shorts were trousers and players answered to ‘Bunny’. If asked for the people of 2012 you’d obviously opt for Wiggins, Boyle, Farah, Ennis, Craig, Murray and, of course, Her Majesty the Queen, complete with parachute.
At the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography we too have delighted in these achievements. But, as our remit demands, we’ve also spent this year looking further back at some of the historical Britons celebrated or commemorated during 2012. As the year comes to a close, here are a few highlights — a look back, if you will, on looking back.
It’s been a strong year for anniversaries. We began in February with what’s proved the biggest and longest-running of these celebrations: the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens about whom so much has been said and done in 2012. Other bicentenaries are available, however. In addition to the mighty ‘Boz’, the Oxford DNB includes a further 242 men and women born in 1812. A few did gain some recognition, notably the poets Robert Browning (born 7 May 1812) and Edward Lear, whose birthday fell a week later, but neither could compete with the Our Mutual Friend.
Any smaller and you were submerged in a Dickensian backwash. Thus only a handful of parties for the great Gothic architect Augustus Pugin (1 March) or the Russian-born radical and Anglophile, Alexander Herzen (6 April [New Style]), and probably nothing at all for these two gems from the ODNB list. First, Samuel Isaac (1812-1886) who, despite having ‘no engineering experience’, accepted an invitation to undertake and underwrite the building of the Mersey Tunnel — what’s more successfully (it opened in February 1885). Then there’s Henry James Jones (1812-1891), Bristol baker and ‘the inventor of self-raising flour’ — surely a man deserving a little more recognition in the year of Boz. No Henry James Jones (or yeast) means no fluffy loaf, however Great your Expectations.
Popular anniversaries often highlight artistic or cultural, rather than science-related, episodes from our past. 2012 was a bit different in that it saw celebrations (in June) for the centenary of the mathematician, Alan Turing (1912-1954). Turing’s appeal is due in part to the near universal reach of his work — even if the details of The Turing Machine, and later developments in computer science, leave most of us baffled. There’s also his wartime association with Bletchley Park where he spearheaded the breaking of the German Enigma and Fish codes. But Turing also catches the imagination for his (then) unusual openness towards his sexuality, his arrest and controversial punishment for indecency, his curious death, and the ongoing campaign to have him granted a posthumous pardon.
Turing was rightly deserving of the anniversary events held in 2012, though — as the Oxford DNB again shows — he wasn’t alone among scientific centenarians. In fact, the dictionary offers a further 29 men and women born in 1912 and now remembered for their contributions to scientific and medical fields. They include some remarkable lives: among them the astronomer George Alcock (born 28 August) — who discovered five comets (a British record) and boasted a photographic memory of 30,000 stars — and cardiologist Bill Cleland (30 May), the pioneer of open heart surgery in Britain in the early 1950s. Centenary science (albeit of a much less robust kind) is also marked this month, indeed this week, with the 100th anniversary of the public unveiling of Piltdown Man. Discovered in Sussex, these bone fragments were dated by their finder, Charles Dawson, to 4 million BC and identified as the ‘missing link’ between apes and man. The announcement, made on 18 December 1912, caused a sensation. For four decades Piltdown Man — or Eoanthropus dawsoni, Dawson’s Dawn Man — enjoyed the status of Europe’s oldest known human. Then, in the 1950s, Piltdown was revealed for what he really was: parts of a relatively recent human skull mingled with bones from a small orangutan. In December, therefore, we remember a 100 year-old hoax.
2012 was also a year for looking back at some dramatic, indeed shocking, events. Charles Dickens was just three months old when, on 11 May 1812, the prime minister Spencer Perceval was shot and killed in the Commons lobby — the first and only British premier to suffer this fate. His assailant was John Bellingham, a bankrupt commercial agent who was arrested, tried, and hanged within the week.
On 18 May 1912, exactly 100 years after Bellingham’s execution, 30,000 people gathered in Colne, Lancashire, for the funeral of a local man, Wallace Hartley, a former ship’s musician. So many gathered because that ship was the RMS Titanic, captained by Edward Smith who with Hartley, and more than 1500 others, lost their lives on 15 April 1912. The Titanic disaster — undoubtedly the anniversary event of the year — came within weeks of an equally celebrated episode in popular histories of Britishness. On 19 March 1912 Captain Robert Scott and his two surviving companions pitched their tent for the final time. It was three months since their ‘defeat’ at the South Pole, and three days since their fellow explorer Captain Oates had walked to his death. The men got no further, with Scott the last to die on about 29 March. Looking back from 2012 the tragedies of ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ and the Titanic come in quick succession, a severe blow to Edwardian self-confidence seemingly delivered in the spring of 1912. A centenary ago the chronology was, of course, a little different: not until November 1912 did a search team confirm the deaths of Scott and his party, and it took a further three months for news of this disaster to reach London.
In the coming decades, delays of this kind would become a thing of the past. And last month the BBC marked the 90th anniversary of the reason why: the institution’s first radio broadcast, an event that would soon bring new sounds, voices, opinions, and information into millions of homes. At the helm on 14 November 1922 was the imperious John Reith, manager of what was then the British Broadcasting Company. At the microphone, Arthur Burrows, who announced the results of the general election: Mr Bonar Law 332, David Lloyd George 127.
If you missed Dickens, Turing, Perceval, and Piltdown Man, and would like to get involved there is still time. Between now and the year end why not hold a do-it-yourself celebration for the author of Self-Help, Samuel Smiles (born 23 December 1812)? Or throw a ‘happening’ for the centenary of Birmingham surrealist, Conroy Maddox (27 December)? In a striking coming together of dates, 12 December is also the 150th anniversary of J. Bruce Ismay’s birth. The owner of the White Star shipping line, Ismay is now remembered for his controversial escape from his greatest ship — the RMS Titanic.
And the future? A quick search of the Oxford DNB reveals many reasons to celebrate and commemorate in 2013. Take, for instance, the quatercentenary of library founder Thomas Bodley; the bicentenary of Pride and Prejudice; the 150th anniversary of the London Underground; 100 years of British film censorship; 50 years since Kim Philby’s flight to Russia; Britain’s 40 years in the European Union; or 20 years since the death of Audrey Hepburn. And that’s just January.
Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The Oxford DNB online is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,000 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 165 life stories now available (including the lives of Alan Turing, Piltdown Man, Wallace Hartley, and Captain Scott). You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @ODNB on Twitter for people in the news.
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Published in 1937 The Hobbit was Tolkien’s first published work of fiction, though he had been writing on legends since at least 1915. His creation — a mythological race of ‘hobbits’, in which Bilbo Baggins takes the lead — had originally been intended for children. But from the outset Tolkien’s saga also proved popular with adults, perhaps appreciative of the hobbits’ curiously English blend of resourcefulness and respectability. The book was published by Stanley Unwin, following the recommendation of his 10-year old son, Rayner, who received a one shilling reader’s fee. Its success prompted Unwin to press for a sequel, and Tolkien now began work on The Lord of the Rings — a story that ‘grew in the telling’ at readings for the famous Inklings circle in Oxford.
Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Read more about J.R.R. Tolkien on the Oxford DNB website. The Oxford DNB online is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,000 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 130 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @ODNB on Twitter for people in the news.
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This month is the 75th anniversary of the London version of the popular board game, Monopoly. To mark the anniversary, editors at the Oxford DNB wondered what a historical version of the game might look like. The Oxford DNB includes the stories of more than 57,000 men and women from British history, of whom nearly half had ties to the capital city.
So who would you have met if you’d made your way around a Monopoly board in the 1400 years since Mellitus (d.624), our first definite capital dweller and, incidentally, the first ever bishop of London? Throw a 3 and you’re rubbing shoulders with pugilist Daniel Mendoza on the Whitechapel Road, while a 10 has you ‘just visiting’ a London jail, alongside Elizabeth Fry. (Perhaps you’re there to see Dr Crippen, who spent his last days in Pentonville prison before his execution 100 years this month.) Another 3 gets you to the more salubrious Whitehall (the ODNB has articles on over 1700 civil servants); an 11 sees you on the Strand, developed for real by the 17th-century property tycoon Nicholas Barbon after the Great Fire. Shake a 7 and it’s the Water Works (how about Hugh Myddelton?) Follow this with a 6 and you can browse in Bond Street, perhaps stopping at no. 123, where the Italian confectioner William Jarrin set up shop in 1822. Posh Park Lane (126 residents) and swanky Mayfair (232) beckon, not to mention £200 on passing ‘Go’. But, oh no! a 4 and it’s ‘Super Tax, Pay £100’: welcome to the ODNB’s 54 accountants.
If you’d like to play on, you can. Online you can search the Oxford DNB by city, town, and street, as well as profession.
Dr Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In the UK the ODNB is available free via nearly all public libraries and you can log-in at home by adding your library card number here. The ODNB is also available in libraries worldwide—leaving you a little bit more for that hotel on the Old Kent Road.
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