The British Noteworthy

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2001–2004 edited by Lawrence Goldman; Oxford University Press, 2009, £95.

When the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was published (in print and online) in September 2004 it produced a wave of superlatives—“the greatest cultural enterprise on earth”, “the greatest reference work on earth”. The libraries of those bibliophiles and scholars who had £1500 to purchase the work made room for sixty volumes in the simple livery of the Oxford University Press—dark blue with gold lettering—running twelve feet along the shelf, weighing 280 pounds, comprising 60,000 pages, 54,922 lives in 60 million words written by 10,000 contributors. Now these libraries will need to make room for another volume. Oxford has published a supplement—a 1268-page volume of 819 eminent Britons who died between 2001 and 2004, from “Roy Acheson, epidemiologist” to “Arnold Ziff, businessman and philanthropist”.

Like an obituary, a life must be spent to qualify; but unlike an obituary, it is written at some distance, when sympathy at the passing and respect for the deceased have faded. The contributors (590 for this volume) of even the most recently lived life have had about four years to wade through the facts and weigh the subject’s contribution; to assess his or her qualification as someone of note who made a contribution to British life—noteworthy rather than worthy. And so Dr Harold Shipman—from a Nottingham family that “was the epitome of working-class decency” to “a cruel, remorseless, and self-infatuated criminal” convicted of fifteen murders, who in “order to protect his wife’s pension rights and financial entitlements” hanged himself in prison. Myra Hindley (who died in November 2002 after thirty-six years in prison) also qualifies. Her antecedents, deeds and trial for the murder with her lover Ian Brady of a number of children are coolly recounted. (“Her fellow pupils remembered her as a class clown”… “A police photograph of her taken in 1965—showing a Medusa with peroxide-dyed hair and staring eyes—became an infamous symbol of evil.”)

Interestingly, Hindley’s long-time champion, Lord Longford, also makes an appearance—the ultimate eccentric peer. “He led a long, passionate but ultimately futile campaign to secure her release, enduring savage abuse and threats in the process. This was one of the causes that testified to his integrity and gallant heart, if not to his head.” His unworldliness provided a wealth of anecdotage. Once he was dining with Clement Attlee at Sloane Square. Having no cash they offered a cheque. The management refused, even when Longford declared, “But this is the Prime Minister, and I am the First Lord of the Admiralty.” They were held hostage till Lady Longford could fetch funds from home. She too gains an entry, not so much as a spouse (like Denis Thatcher, Angus Ogilvy and Diana Mosley) but as a biographer and a model for any DNB contributor, “she brought immense and judicious industry … a superb eye for the telling detail, a shrewd and broadminded sense of character, and a pellucid grasp of written English”.

Writers figure among the 891. The life of the poet Kathleen Raine, although it inspired some memorable verse, is a tale of unrequited, unconsummated love, missing out on the Oxford University professorship and the poet laureateship and finally “knocked down by a car while posting a letter at the end of her street”. At the other extreme was the novelist and screenwriter Simon Raven. Expelled from his public school for “the usual thing”, he emerged from Cambridge with a first despite the fact that “drink was consumed in large quantities, and men and women were seduced with equal enthusiasm”. He abandoned his wife and child and when she telegrammed him, “Wife and baby starving send money soonest”, he responded, “Sorry no money suggest eat baby”. “Raven’s reputation as an idler was belied by the prodigious amount of work he produced …”

Arthur Hailey’s first literary role was as editor of the Canadian magazine Bus and Truck Transport at the age of twenty-nine, two years after he had emigrated from Britain. He was born in Luton and flew for the RAF. His extraordinary popularity is quantified as “eleven novels [which] sold 160 million copies in thirty-nine languages in forty countries”. What is striking is Hailey’s second wife (and widow’s) description of him: “temperamental, ruthless, sensitive, impatient, emotional, unreasonable, demanding, self-centred, and excessively hard-working … also precise, pig-headed, fastidious, fanatically clean, maniacally tidy”.

This is of course a national dictionary but almost two centuries of settlement, colony and empire meant that Australian lives figured throughout the sixty volumes. Aborigines from Bennelong and Pemulwoy to Truganini and Albert Namatjira are there; governors-general from Lord Hopetoun to Sir Paul Hasluck; chief justices from Sir Samuel Griffith to Sir Owen Dixon; and prime ministers from Edmund Barton to Sir Robert Menzies. But the link stops there—Neville Bonner, Sir John Kerr, Sir Garfield Barwick and Harold Holt (despite the fact that the last three were Privy Councillors) were all deemed to fall outside the imperial circle.

The Oxford DNB’s worthy Antipodean sibling, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, does justice to these lives. A project begun in 1957, the first volume appeared in 1966 and the latest, Volume 17, in 2007, covering 670 lives—surnames A to K—who died between 1981 and 1990. Progress is more stately than Oxford’s. Judith Wright, who died in 2000, will not appear until 2019, when Volume 20 is published. As the General Editor of the ADB, Professor Melanie Nolan, puts it, “You don’t have to be dead to appear in the ADB—you have to be long dead.” Still, the breadth of subjects and the depth of scholarship make it worth the wait (and its free online access is unparalleled).

In any case, the supplementary Oxford DNB has found room for a number of recent lives which began or ended in Australia or were partly lived within our shores. One of the most remarkable is that of Sir Ian McIntosh, who was born in Melbourne, educated at Geelong Grammar School and left early to join the Royal Navy. In March 1941, the troopship Britannia carrying him to Alexandria was sunk by the Germans in the mid-Atlantic. He was one of five officers on an overloaded lifeboat of eighty-two but, although just twenty-one and a sub-lieutenant, he emerged as the leader. It was he who plugged shot-holes underwater. With rudimentary sailing rig and some knowledge of winds and currents they decided to sail for Brazil rather than the nearer African coast. On a ration of an egg-cup of water, one ship’s biscuit and a smear of condensed milk on the hand, twice a day, they reached the Brazilian coast after twenty-three days. Thirty-eight survived. McIntosh said he had been sustained by his knowledge of the epic journey of Captain Bligh after the Bounty mutiny and the memory of a beautiful Norwegian girl he had met in Australia. They married two years later. He became a vice-admiral and deputy chief of defence staff, “a byword for courtesy, intellectual breadth, and relaxed leadership that inspired confidence and affection”. A national serviceman recalled his memorable advice “of always keeping in our pocket a soft-back book so as not to miss a moment of good reading”.

Other splendid characters emerge—like Sydney-born theatre producer Helen Montagu, who moved to Britain with her husband in the early fifties. She worked with such legends as Gielgud, Richardson and Guinness and “hugely relished her battles with the lord chamberlain in his attempts at censorship”. She produced shows starring Peter O’Toole, Paul Scofield, Warren Mitchell, Wendy Hiller, Helen Mirren and Robyn Archer. Failure or success “never dented her enthusiasm”. She was also “an excellent first-night guest and could be relied on to manufacture an appreciative and loud laugh (even when a show was not that funny) to galvanize the audience into applause … she invariably greeted friends with the cry of ‘Daaaahling’ across a crowded bar or theatre lobby.”

Other performers who trod Australian boards and died in Australia, include ballerina Sally Gilmour, and brilliant Wagnerian soprano Rita Hunter; so did screenwriters Jack Lee (Laurie’s estranged brother) and Diane Cilento’s husband, Anthony Shaffer (“a genial and extremely witty man, very fond of food and even more so of drink”, “with a fine head of hair, of which he often seemed prouder than of some of his film scripts”).

That sometime resident of Woy Woy and complex comic genius, Spike Milligan, leaps across five pages. He said of The Goon Show, “It had made me famous, made me ill, destroyed my first marriage … It is still hell to think about it.” As Ned Sherrin puts it:

He mellowed a little with the frailty of his later years … But the hint of danger which had brought him to despair so often and triggered uncontrollable laughter in so many, remained unextinguished, and frustrated all efforts to endow him with the innocuous standing of a national treasure.

(Strangely, his fellow Goon, Harry Secombe—also in these pages—fitted the clichéd accolade to perfection.) Milligan died at home in Dumb Woman’s Lane, Udimore, near Rye, Sussex, and his headstone, after a long tussle with the diocese, was inscribed as he had wished (but in Gaelic): “I told you I was ill”.

Another extraordinary entry, and surely one of the shortest lives in the entire canon, is Anthony Nolan, born in Adelaide in 1971 and died aged seven in London in 1979. He, a sufferer of a rare bone marrow disease, is listed as an “inspiration of a medical charity” with his mother Shirley, who campaigned for a register of tissue-typed potential donors. “By 2002, 3500 donors had been found for transplants through the work of the trust, which by then maintained a register of 330,000 tissue-typed volunteers”, although no single suitable donor was ever found for Anthony. At the age of thirty-nine Shirley was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and she campaigned for the legalisation of assisted death. After her suicide in Adelaide, aged sixty, two letters were published around the world in which she named the gift of life “the greatest gift of all”, yet claimed “the right to die—with dignity”.

One expects to cite peers among the great and the good of British lives; and to see the dukes of Norfolk, Devonshire and Bedford is de rigueur (the last of this ducal trio, the ultimate entrepreneur, wrote in the visitors’ book of a rival: “You should come to Woburn. It is better”) but to find Hugh (Baron) Scanlon, born in Melbourne, son of an upholsterer, is a surprise. In fact his acquaintance with Australia was fleeting. His parents arrived from Lancashire not long before his birth and his mother returned to England after his father died a year later. Young Hugh left school at fourteen and became an apprentice to an instrument maker in Manchester. “There he quickly acquired a reputation of being sharp-witted, outspoken and mischievous.” Soon after starting he was overpaid. When the following week the excess amount was deducted he complained. “On being told ‘You did not complain last week when we paid you too much’, he replied, ‘One mistake I can forgive, but not two.’” He was to become “the most credible leader of the left within [his] union”. He “could be uncompromisingly intransigent on the issue of state intervention in collective bargaining, causing enormous problems for both Labour and Conservative governments”. On his retirement, he was offered—and accepted—a peerage, “only one of many aspects of his behaviour that contemporaries found surprising”.

In fact there is much in this volume that surprises, even from well-known public figures. In a sympathetic but perceptive entry on the unhappy life of Princess Margaret, Sarah Bradford recounts the princess’s bitterness at her lack of education. When Queen Mary remonstrated with her daughter-in-law about the girls’ confined instruction, the Queen Mother (also in these pages) said airily, “I don’t know what she meant. After all, I and my sisters only had governesses and we all married well—one of us very well.”

The number of women who people this book confirms that the Victorian values with which Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was imbued had well and truly passed. Columnist Lynda Lee-Potter; head teachers Judith Kilpatrick and Helen Metcalf; Lord Mayor of London Mary Donaldson; publisher Frances Lincoln; theatre director Joan Littlewood; physician Alice Stewart; Queensland-born serologist Ruth Sanger; hepatologist Sheila Sherlock; and biologist Rosa Beddington—all bear testament to advances in the postwar Western world where women have had a greater chance to shine. Women make up 10 per cent of all lives in the whole dictionary and one can logically expect that a greater proportion will feature in future volumes, reflecting the course of twenty-first-century life.

In the meantime the publishers of the Oxford DNB continue to add lives to the online edition of the work, correcting, updating and extending three times a year. Every January since 2005 the dictionary’s coverage has extended by a further year, adding approximately 200 new articles on notable people. In January 2009 another 215 lives that ended in 2005 joined (online) the illustrious roll call.

William F. Buckley once pronounced the Oxford English Dictionary to be Britain’s equivalent of the moon landing. As it continues to capture and record—with great precision but at a respectful distance—the lives of its people, the Oxford DNB might well be said to be Britain’s equivalent of the Hubble. Long may it spin.

Mark McGinness reviewed the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in the November 2004 issue.