Full text of "The dictionary of national biography : founded in 1882 by George Smith"

See other formats

v.. 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 

in  2009  with  funding  from 

University  of  Toronto 


http://www.archive.org/details/dictionaryofnati19511960lees 


DICTIONARY 

OF 

NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


1951-1960 


'TO 

00  .   . 


THE 

DICTIONARY 


OF- 


NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


1951-1960 


EDITED    BY 

E.J^tWILLIAMS 

//  AND  A 

HELEN  M.  palmer/ 


With  an  Index  covering  the  years  1901-1960 
in  one  alphabetical  series 


OXFORD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 
1971 


Oxford  University  Press,  Ely  House,  London  W.  1 

GLASGOW  NEW  YORK  TORONTO  MELBOURNE  WELLINGTON 

CAPE  TOWN  SALISBURY  IBADAN  NAIROBI  DAR  ES  SALAAM  LUSAKA  ADDIS  ABABA 

BOMBAY  CALCUTTA  MADRAS  KARACHI  LAHORE  DACCA 

KUALA  LUMPUR  SINGAPORE  HONG  KONG  TOKYO 


OXFORD   UNIVERSITY   PRESS    I97I 


PRINTED    IN   GRi;AT  BRITAIN 


PREFATORY  NOTE 

THE  notices  in  this  Supplement  describe  the  lives  of  men  and 
women  who  for  a  significant  period  of  their  careers  were  British 
subjects  and  died  between  1  January  1951  and  31  December  1960. 
The  earliest  born  was  John  Scott  Lidgett,  the  Methodist,  in  1854  during 
the  Crimean  war ;  the  most  recent,  J.  M.  Hawthorn,  the  racing  motorist, 
was  born  in  1929,  the  year  in  which  the  second  Labour  Government  took 
office.  Many  lived  to  a  great  age:  some  fifty  worthies  lived  into  their 
nineties ;  two  were  centenarians,  both  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society, 
H.  N.  Ridley,  the  botanist,  and  James  Swinburne,  a  pioneer  of  plastics. 
Many  of  our  number  were  born  abroad ;  some,  of  course,  in  India  or  the 
colonies ;  more  than  thirty  came  to  this  country  as  refugees  from  Hitler's 
or  earlier  continental  tyrannies.  One  is  impressed  by  how  many  there 
were — some  sixty  of  all  those  included — who  lost  their  father  when 
very  young.  Some  scarcely  knew  a  father  at  all ;  some,  indeed,  who  he 
may  have  been.  Much  was  owed  to  mothers.  Nearly  all  of  the  men  and 
women  recorded  here  died  in  peace,  if  some  in  pain ;  but  too  many,  and 
they  include  the  three  youngest,  Hawthorn,  Dennis  Brain,  and  Michael 
Ventris,  were  killed  as  a  result  of  road  accidents.  Some  took  their 
own  lives ;  some  died  of  drink ;  four  were  assassinated ;  and  one  was 
murdered. 

They  were  subjects  of  King  George  VI  whose  own  life  is  recorded  here, 
with  that  of  his  mother  Queen  Mary ;  Cromer  and  Clarendon,  his  lord 
chamberlains ;  Hardinge,  one  of  his  secretaries ;  Dunhill,  Smart,  and 
Horder,  his  surgeon,  manipulative  surgeon,  and  physician  respectively ; 
Arnold  Bax,  thfe  Master  of  his  Musick ;  Edmund  Dulac,  the  designer 
of  the  postage  stamps  which  bore  his  image;  and  one  of  the  first 
recipients  of  the  award  which  the  King  himself  initiated,  Henry  Blogg, 
G.C. 

If  this  volume  follows  the  pattern  of  its  immediate  predecessor,  it 
differs  in  three  obvious  regards.  Nobody  was  killed  in  battle ;  there  are 
more  scientists  and  engineers  to  be  discovered  here ;  and  there  are  more 
women.  If  some  spent  serene  lives  of  service  and  fulfilment  or  found 
a  serenity  in  their  beliefs,  it  is  evident  that  for  many  others  life  was 
marked  by  struggle  and  difficulty,  not  only  because  of  two  world  wars. 
To  help  to  edit  these  brief  biographies  of  760  men  and  women — who 
come  together  here  only  because  they  are  chosen  from  amongst  those  who 
died  in  the  first  decade  of  the  second  half  of  our  century — is  to  become 
increasingly  aware,  in  the  thousand  or  so  pages  which  follow,  of  the  virtues 
and  defects  of  obstinacy,  conviction,  prejudice,  or  determination ;  and 
to  be  reinforced  in  the  humility  of  one's  admiration  for  courage,  genius, 
sacrifice,  or  sheer  hard  work.  If  times  were  difficult,  so  sometimes  were 


Prefatory  Note 

people.  If  there  were  storms,  there  was  no  shortage  of  petrels :  Hilaire 
Belloc  or  Wyndham  Lewis,  for  example;  Bishop  Barnes  or  Gilbert 
Harding;  Ernest  Benn  who  refused  to  complete  his  census  form. 
Inevitably,  there  are  conflicts  and  controversies  to  be  recorded  here, 
and  causes  cilebresi  Henry  Harrison  champions  Parnell;  Gertrude 
Tuckwell  fights  for  Dilke's  good  name ;  Bodkin  and  Humphreys  appear 
for  the  prosecution,  Serjeant  Sullivan  and  J.  H.  Morgan  for  the  defence, 
in  the  Casement  trial.  Frederick  Maurice  challenges  Lloyd  George's 
veracity.  Marie  S topes  and  Halliday  Sutherland  argue  the  question 
of  birth  control;  Christabel  Pankhurst  and  Annie  Kenney  fight  for 
women's  suffrage;  Elizabeth  Kenny  urges  her  methods  of  treating 
polio  on  a  reluctant  medical  profession;  Ernest  Bevin  challenges 
A.  L.  Bowley  on  what  a  docker  needs  to  eat;  D.  R.  Jardine  ruffles 
Anglo- Australian  relations  in  the  row  about  'bodyline'  bowling.  The 
Duchess  of  AthoU  supports  one  side  in  the  Spanish  civil  war,  Roy 
Campbell  the  other.  Hoare,  Simon,  and  Halifax  favour  one  approach  in 
foreign  policy  in  the  thirties:  Duff  Cooper  and  Vansittart  disagree. 
Trenchard  and  Sykes  are  in  conflict  from  the  early  days  of  the  first 
war,  Lindemann  and  Tizard  before  the  outbreak  of  the  second. 

Clearly,  there  are  divisive  matters  too,  as  well  as  temperaments :  two 
wars,  most  obviously,  and  how  best  to  avoid  or  to  win  them ;  poverty ; 
industrial  relations ;  the  role  of  women ;  Ireland ;  India ;  'Appeasement' ; 
Palestine;  'Apartheid'.  There  are  dreamers  of  dreams,  some  realized. 
Chaim  Weizmann  and  Selig  Brodetsky  work  untiringly  for  the  Zionist 
movement  and  live  to  see  the  foundation  of  Israel.  D.  S.  Senanayake 
and  Liaqat  Ali  Khan  finally  obtain  the  independence  of  Ceylon  and 
Pakistan;  Malan  and  Strijdom  relentlessly  pursue  their  Afrikaner 
goal  in  South  Africa.  It  is  a  far  cry  from  the  hopes  of  the  Round 
Table  group,  such  as  Dougal  Malcolm  or  Lionel  Curtis  who  had  served 
under  Milner,  to  the  secession  of  another  South  African  republic 
from  British  allegiance,  in  this  instance  from  that  Commonwealth  of 
Nations  which  had  been  accorded  their  separate  but  shared  recognition 
at  the  peace  conference  in  1919  which  so  many  recorded  here — and 
notably  W.  M.  Hughes — had  attended  in  their  varying  capacities; 
and  which  in  the  Statute  of  Westminster  barely  a  dozen  years  later  had 
seemed  in  the  coinage  of  Edward  Harding  and  Maurice  Gwyer  to  have 
elicited  a  formula  flexible  enough  to  link  without  shackling ;  and  was  to 
survive  another  world  war.  Most  disappointing  of  all  was  the  failure  of 
the  League  of  Nations,  both  the  first  and  last  secretary-general  of 
which,  Eric  Drummond  and  Sean  Lester,  are  described  in  this  volume, 
with  Lord  Robert  Cecil,  Gilbert  Murray,  Maxwell  Garnett,  Alfred 
Zimmern,  and  Harold  Butler,  the  second  director  of  the  International 
Labour  Office. 

If  nobody  included  in  this  Supplement  was  killed  in  battle,  there  was 
nobody  whose  life  war  did  not  affect.  The  King  himself  had  served  at 

vi 


Prefatory  Note 

Jutland  where  Dreyer  was  Jellicoe's  flag  captain  and  Forbes  his  flag 
commander  in  the  Iron  Duke,  and  Cowan  flag  captain  in  the  Princess 
Royal,  We  note  Gordon  Campbell  and  his  Q-ships,  Evans  of  the  Broke, 
Carpenter  in  command  of  the  Vindictive  at  Zeebrugge  where  he  won 
the  V.C.  and  Hilton  Young  lost  an  arm ;  and  Reginald  Tyrwhitt  who, 
commanding  the  Harwich  Force  throughout,  took  the  first  ships  into 
action  on  5  August  1914  and  the  first  U-boat  surrenders  in  the  Novem- 
ber when  the  war  ended.  Those  who  served  on  the  western  front  include 
two  of  Haig's  intimate  staff,  Kiggell  and  Davidson,  and  two  of  his  corps 
commanders,  Ivor  Maxse  and  Charles  Fergusson.  There  too  were 
Trenchard  and  Brooke-Popham  laying  the  foundations  of  the  Royal 
Air  Force.  Many  had  a  share  in  the  evolution  of  the  tank:  Ernest 
Swinton,  Murray  Sueter,  Tennyson-d'Eyncourt,  W.  G.  Wilson  among 
them.  Arden-Close  furnished  the  maps,  W.  H.  Mills  the  photographic 
plates,  P.  F.  B.  Bennett  the  aeromagnetos,  Bruce  Bairnsfather  and 
Ian  Hay  the  lighter  relief,  Muirhead  Bone,  Eric  Kennington,  and  others 
the  artistic,  and  eventually  J.  E.  Edmonds  the  not  undisputed  historical, 
record.  Farther  afield  than  Flanders,  Birdwood  and  Godley  were  at 
Gallipoli,  Cassels  at  Sharqat,  Ironside  at  Archangel.  The  increasing 
application  of  science  and  engineering  to  warfare  may  be  noted  in  the 
contributions  of  G.  M.  Bennett,  M.  Copisarow,  F.  G.  Donnan,  H.  A. 
Humphrey,  P.  V.  Hunter,  Mouat  Jones,  or  O.  J.  Silberrad ;  and  the 
involvement  of  business  men  in  the  notices  of  Maclay  as  shipping  con- 
troller, Waley  Cohen  as  petroleum  adviser,  or,  at  the  new  Air  Ministry, 
William  Weir  who  later,  with  Balfour  and  Lithgow,  was  to  devise 
shadow  factories  against  the  coming  of  renewed  hostilities.  At  home  on 
leave  there  was  a  welcome,  for  some,  from  Rosa  Lewis  at  the  Cavendish, 
or  an  evening  in  the  theatre  with  George  Robey  and  Violet  Loraine, 
with  Jack  Buchanan,  or  with  Jose  Collins  in  Frederick  Lonsdale's 
The  Maid  of  the  Mountains. 

The  cause  of  women  was  perhaps  one  of  the  few  to  achieve  its  assured 
victory  when  the  war  ended,  not  only  by  reason  of  the  organization  of  J 
V.A.D.s  and  W.R.N.S.  by  Katharine  Furse,  but  through  the  work  of 
those  who  toiled  in  munitions  and  other  factories  with  remarkable 
leadership  from  such  women  as  Hilda  Martindale,  Violet  Markham, 
Lilian  Barker,  or  Margaret  Bondfield  who  in  1924  was  to  become  the 
first  woman  Cabinet  minister.  Between  the  wars  two  strongly  indepen- 
dent papers — to  Left  and  Right — were  controlled  by  women:  Time 
and  Tide  by  Lady  Rhondda  and  the  National  Review  by  Lady  Milner. 
Rose  Macaulay  was  coming  to  the  fore  as  a  novelist,  Maude  Royden  as 
a  preacher.  Caroline  Haslett  founded  the  Electrical  Association  for 
Women;  Lady  Bailey  was  popularizing  aviation;  Winifred  CuUis 
became  the  first  woman  professor  in  a  British  medical  school; 
medical  men  like  Victor  Bonney,  Dick- Read,  Gilliatt,  and  Munro  Kerr 
were  making  life  easier  for  women.  Constance  Spry  was  turning  flower 


Prefatory  Note 

arrangement  into  an  art  and  a  profession;  Margery  Fry  was  urging 
penal  reform  and  helping  to  organize  higher  education ;  and  far  away 
in  Central  Asia  Mildred  Cable  and  the  two  French  sisters  were  follow- 
ing the  desert  trade  routes  in  pursuit  of  their  missionary  vocation. 
The  advent  of  the  second  war  brought  their  journeys,  as  so  much  else, 
to  an  end,  and  overshadowed  Evelyn  Lowe's  chairmanship  of  the 
L.C.C. 

And  so  it  became  time  for  Vera  Laughton  Mathews  to  revive  the 
W.R.N.S.  and  Lady  Denman  to  evolve  the  Land  Army.  Ernest  Bevin 
took  over  the  Ministry  of  Labour,  with  Godfrey  Ince  at  his  side. 
Hudson  was  at  the  Ministry  of  Agriculture,  Llewellin  eventually  at  the 
Ministry  of  Food,  and  Andrew  Duncan  at  the  Ministry  of  Supply  where 
he  was  aided  by  men  like  Garner,  Claude  Gibb,  Lennard-Jones,  Guy, 
Lithgow,  and  Cecil  Weir.  C.  D.  Howe  organized  the  Canadian  arsenal. 
Richard  Hopkins  was  still  at  the  Treasury  when  John  Anderson,  the 
greatest  administrator  of  his  time,  became  chancellor  of  the  Exchequer. 
At  sea  the  Western  Approaches  were  guarded  in  turn  by  Percy  Noble 
and  Max  Horton;  Bowhill's  Coastal  Command  tracked  down  and 
helped  to  sink  the  Bismarck ;  Burnett's  cruisers  sent  the  Scharnhorst  to 
her  destruction  on  one  of  his  many  Arctic  convoys ;  Agnew  in  the 
Aurora  was  in  the  Mediterranean  where,  like  McGrigor  and  Arthur 
Power,  he  played  his  part  in  the  invasion  of  Sicily  and  Italy.  Before  that 
could  happen  Morshead's  Ninth  Australians  had  held  Tobruk  and  later 
the  right  flank  at  Alamein.  In  Whitehall,  Charles  Lambe  was  director  of 
naval  planning  and  Ronald  Weeks,  a  Territorial  soldier,  deputy  chief 
of  the  imperial  general  staff.  Roderic  Hill  organized  defence  against 
flying  bombs,  as,  earlier,  William  Paterson  and  Stradling  had  devised 
air-raid  shelters;  and  Richard  Fairey  aircraft  such  as  the  Swordfish 
which  helped  to  cripple  the  Italian  fleet  at  Taranto.  F.  B.  Halford,  who 
had  redesigned  the  engine  of  the  D.H.  4  in  the  first  war,  now  designed 
the  Goblin  engine  for  the  first  British  jet  propulsion  aircraft  to  fly.  For 
the  invasion  of  Normandy,  Alexander  Gibb,  W.  T.  Halcrow,  and  Oscar 
Faber  helped  to  provide  the  Mulberry  harbour ;  Bassett-Lowke  the 
models ;  A.  C.  Hartley  the  pipelines  under  the  ocean.  In  Normandy 
itself  and  beyond  Percy  Hobart's  79th  Armoured  Division  deployed 
further  mechanical  ingenuity.  If  in  the  first  war  the  signal  British 
contributions  to  warfare  had  been  the  tank  and  the  aeroplane,  in  the 
second  they  were  radar  and  in  the  earlier  stages  of  what  became  an 
atomic  bomb.  Tizard,  Wimperis,  Wilfrid  Freeman,  and  Raymund  Hart 
had  their  share  in  the  development  of  radar ;  F.  E.  Simon  and  F.  A. 
Paneth  were  among  those  scientists  born  in  a  foreign  land  whose  re- 
searches helped  eventuafly  to  develop  the  bomb  which  brought  a  long 
war  to  its  controversial  conclusion.  While  scientists  like  Lindemann  and 
Tizard  disagreed  about  the  effectiveness  of  allied  bombing  strategy,  and 
Bishop  Bell  condemned  it,  we  recognize  how  devastatingly  changed 


Prefatory  Note 

warfare's  dimension  had  come  to  be  since  that  first  raid  by  Verdon-Roe's 
Avro  504s  on  the  ZeppeUn  sheds  at  Friedrichshafen  on  21  November 
1914. 

In  the  first  war  Plimmer  studied  foodstuffs  at  the  War  Office  and 
Charles  Martin  advanced  the  study  of  nutrition  while  in  Lemnos ;  in 
the  second  war  Martin  helped  to  devise  the  national  loaf ;  Drummond 
was  at  the  Ministry  of  Food  as  scientific  adviser  and  Mellanby  in  the 
Medical  Research  Council  was  concerning  himself  with  wartime  diet. 
Harold  Gillies's  pioneering  of  plastic  surgery  in  the  first  war  was 
renewed,  with  him,  in  the  second  by  his  cousin  Archibald  Mclndoe. 
Gordon-Taylor's  surgical  skill  served  the  army  in  the  first  war,  the  navy 
in  the  second.  We  remember  with  gratitude  the  advance  surgical  teams 
created  by  Hugh  Cairns  for  the  western  desert ;  or  the  blood  transfusion 
services  organized  by  Lionel  Whitby  and  T.  B.  Davie;  the  research 
on  insecticides  of  P.  A.  Buxton,  which  resulted  in  the  introduction  of 
D.D.T.  urged  by  Ian  Heilbron,  or  of  Tattersfield  who  developed  pyr- 
ethrum.  Alexander  Fleming's  discovery  of  penicillin  ushered  in  the  anti- 
biotic era;  and  the  realm  of  chemotherapy  was  explored  by  Harold  King, 
by  Otto  Rosenheim,  and  by  A.  J.Ewins  who  with  his  collaborators  gave 
us  'M  &  B  693'. 

It  was  a  changed,  shrinking  world  into  which  men  stepped  in  the 
demobilization  suits  from  Montague  Burton's  factories.  The  second 
world  war  ended  with  the  first  real  taste  of  power  by  a  Labour  Govern- 
ment. Clement  Attlee  and  some  others  of  his  Cabinet  contribute  to  this 
Supplement ;  some  are  included  in  it :  Stafford  Cripps,  chancellor  of  the 
Exchequer;  Ernest  Bevin  and  Aneurin  Bevan;  Jowitt,  the  lord 
chancellor ;  Addison,  the  leader  in  the  Lords ;  Shepherd  his  whip  there ; 
George  Tomlinson,  a  minister  of  education,  and  William  Whiteley,  chief 
whip  in  the  Commons,  both  to  remind  us  of  the  strong  links  between 
trade-unionism  and  Methodism.  The  Bank  of  England  was  nationalized 
with  Catto  as  its  governor ;  Cable  and  Wireless  with  Angwin  as  its  chair- 
man. The  National  Coal  Board  was  set  up  with  Hubert  Houldsworth 
and  Arthur  Street  upon  its  directorate ;  the  National  Assistance  Board 
with  George  Buchanan.  Aneurin  Bevan  with  William  Douglas  at  his 
right  hand  brought  the  National  Health  Service  into  existence  with 
the  help  of  Webb-Johnson  and  Boldero.  The  railways,  which  had  been 
served  in  their  day  by  executives  such  as  Sam  Fay,  Ralph  Wedgwood, 
and  Felix  Pole,  engineers  like  Lemon,  and  trade-unionists  like  A.  G. 
Walkden,  came  into  the  nationalized  orbit.  And  the  Government 
decided  to  benefit  from  the  earlier  organization  of  Wallace  Akers  and 
John  Anderson  by  calling  on  the  services  of  engineers  like  Claude  Gibb 
in  the  creation  of  Harwell  and  Calder  Hall  to  harness  nuclear  energy  for 
peaceful  uses. 

The  Indian  and  the  colonial  empires  were  coming  to  their  close. 
King  George  VI  was  the  last  Emperor,  Edwina  Mountbatten  the  last 


Prefatory  Note 

vicereine,  of  India.  Aspects  of  the  Indian  story  may  be  perceived  in  this 
volume  in  the  Hves  of  the  Aga  Khan,  Ambedkar,  Wedgwood  Benn, 
Cripps,  HaUfax,  Hoare,  Simon,  Findlater  Stewart,  Rowlands,  or  L.  S. 
Amery.  No  longer  may  we  expect  viceroys  like  Linlithgow  who  could 
bring  a  sub-continent  into  a  world  war ;  or  careers  in  a  colonial  service 
like  those  of  Ronald  Storrs  or  Arthur  Grimble,  proconsuls  like  Kinahan 
Cornwallis  or  Ronald  Wingate.  Russell  Pasha,  retiring  in  1946,  was  the 
last  British  officer  in  Egyptian  service. 

There  are  vast  changes  to  be  recorded  too  in  the  sciences 
and  in  engineering.  Take,  for  readiest  example,  the  five  scientific 
Nobel  prizemen  included  here:  Fleming;  Frederick  Soddy,  who 
coined  the  term  'isotope';  O.  W.  Richardson  the  word  'thermion'; 
C.  T.  R.  Wilson  who  devised  the  cloud  chamber;  and  Charles 
Scott  Sherrington,  'the  philosopher  of  the  nervous  system'.  Other 
scientists  have  furnished  their  personal  labels :  in  the  Chapman  theory 
of  detonation,  Dakin's  solution,  the  Evershed  and  the  Townsend 
effects,  the  Lennard-Jones  formula,  the  Richardson  number,  the  Saha 
equation,  or  the  Whittaker  integral.  Some  will  be  remembered  by  their 
inventions :  the  Martel  box  girder  bridge,  the  Michell  thrust-block,  the 
Denny-Brown  stabilizer,  the  Twyman-Green  optical  interferometer, 
the  Hartley  hoister,  or  the  Humphrey  gas  pump.  In  the  evolution  of 
the  motor-car  we  notice  Wilson's  gearbox;  Egerton's  investigation 
of  'knock' ;  Tizard's  and  Pye's  work  on  the  internal  combustion  engine 
financed  by  Waley  Cohen ;  du  Cros's  development  of  the  pneumatic 
tyre ;  Bennett's  magnetos ;  or  Woollard's  application  of  automation  to 
the  industry.  The  resultant  traffic  led  to  the  Belisha  beacon.  In  agri- 
culture we  remark  the  revolution  brought  about  by  Harry  Ferguson's 
tractors;  and  indoors  a  domestic  revolution  due  to  H.  C.  Booth's 
invention,  as  early  as  1901,  of  the  vacuum  cleaner.  Turing  and  Hartree 
helped  to  bring  us  into  the  age  of  the  computer.  Small  wonder  that  in 
this  volume  we  record  Holmyard  and  Singer  producing  their  History 
of  Technology. 

Significant  names  emerge  too  in  humane  scholarship  and  the  arts. 
G.  E.  Moore,  Wittgenstein  (whose  Tractatus  C.  K.  Ogden  translated), 
and  J.  L.  Austin  altered  our  ways  of  going  about  philosophy ;  L.  B. 
Namier  our  ways  of  writing  history ;  O.  G.  S.  Crawford,  Childe,  J.  L. 
Myres,  Woolley,  and  Ventris  our  study  of  the  more  distant  past; 
Bowley  and  Yule  our  approach  to  statistics ;  William  Craigie  our  lexico- 
graphy. The  days  and  ways  of  Max  Beerbohm  seem  far  removed  from 
Malcolm  Lowry's;  those  of  Edward  Marsh's  'Georgians',  such  as 
Frances  Cornford  or  even  Walter  de  la  Mare,  remote  from  those  of  Dylan 
Thomas.  E.  C.  Bentley  devised  a  rival  method  of  writing  biography 
and  a  novel  approach  to  detective  fiction  which  Dorothy  Sayers  was  to 
bring,  some  held,  into  the  field  of  literature;  and  Ronald  Knox,  another 
writer  of  detective  stories,  produced  a  new  translation  of  the  Bible. 


Prefatory  Note 

There  were  changes  too  in  journahsm.  Belloc's  Eye-Witness  and 
Squire's  and  then  Scott- James's  London  Mercury  have  not  survived. 
The  Athenaeum^  edited  by  Middle  ton  Murry,  merges  with  the  Nation^ 
edited  for  a  time  by  Hubert  Henderson,  but  soon  to  unite  with  the 
New  Statesman  of  which  Ernest  Simon  had  been  a  founder  and  Desmond 
MacCarthy  an  original  member  and  to  which  H.  N.  Brailsford,  G.  D.  H. 

^  -^  and  Aylmer  Vallance  were  also  to  contribute.  Seton- Watson  wrote 

^""^ator,  of  which  Beach  Thomas  was  the  annalist,  and  Wilson 

^ditor.  F.  W.  Hirst  edited  The  Economist,  Wadsworth 

'  •  and  Wickham  Steed  and  W.  F.  Casey  The 

A  .  "n  was  for  long  the  dramatic  critic; 

and  for  .  'vrote  a  weekly  article  in  the. 

Evening  Stanau,.  " '  ^''^.  C.  G.  Grey  the  Aero^ 

plane,  Malan  Die  Bu^^  taken  over  by 

Camrose  and  Iliffe;  and  one  rtx..  '  e  thirties 

with  Astor's  Observer  or  more  especit*.  ^  edited  by 

W.  W.  Hadley,  when  Ernest  Newman,  Ma^^  M.  Young 

were  contributors,  to  be  joined  later  by  R.  C.  i^.  >v.  In  more 

specialized  fields  L.  P.  Jacks's  editorship  of  the  Hibbert  Journal  goes 

back  as  far  as  its  foundation  in  1902  and  Richard  Gregory  joined 

Nature  as  early  as  1893. 

W.  J.  Macqueen-Pope  and  John  Parker  were  noteworthy  chroniclers 
of  the  theatre,  which  was  enlivened  by  impresarios  like  C.  B.  Cochran 
and  Andre  Chariot  and  enhanced  significantly  by  Ashley  Dukes  at  the 
Mercury,  Lennox  Robinson  at  the  Abbey  in  Dublin,  William  Armstrong 
at  Liverpool,  and  by  Komisarjevsky's  revolutionary  seasons  at  Strat- 
ford. Three  notable  landmarks  in  the  profession  were  the  encharter- 
ing  of  R.  A.D.  A.  under  the  direction  of  Kenneth  Barnes ;  the  foundation 
of  the  British  Drama  League  by  Geoffrey  Whit  worth ;  and  the  forma- 
tion of  Equity  of  which  Godfrey  Tearle  was  first  president.  If  the  days  of 
the  actor-manager  seemed  perhaps  to  be  on  the  wane,  the  public  were 
coming  to  associate  performers  with  the  plays  of  certain  writers: 
Lillah  McCarthy  with  Shaw's,  Hilda  Trevelyan  with  Barrie's,  Gertrude 
Lawrence  with  Noel  Coward's,  Robert  Donat  with  James  Bridie's, 
maybe,  or  Ivor  Novello  with  his  own.  But  they  would  see  their 
favourites  more  often  on  the  screen :  the  silent  film,  to  the  accompani- 
ment of  Ketelbey's  music,  had  by  now  given  way  to  the  lavish  produc- 
tions of  Alexander  Korda.  Meanwhile,  at  Sadler's  Wells,  British  ballet 
has  been  greatly  enriched  by  the  musical  directorship  of  Constant 
Lambert  as  has  the  whole  field  of  music  by  the  work  of  Vaughan 
Williams.  To  hear  a  recording  of  the  voice  of  Kathleen  Ferrier  is 
sadly  to  observe  that  all  the  work  in  the  field  of  cancer  research  and 
surgery — ^by  men  like  Gask,  Kennaway,  Robert  Muir,  Rock  Carling, 
W.  C.  M.  Lewis,  or  Holburt  Waring — has  not  so  far  found  a  certaih^^ 
cure..  .....     ■   -•'- 


Prefatory  Note 

vicereine,  of  India.  Aspects  of  the  Indian  story  may  be  perceived  in  this 
volume  in  the  Hves  of  the  Aga  Khan,  Ambedkar,  Wedgwood  Benh, 
Cripps,  HaUfax,  Hoare,  Simon,  Findlater  Stewart,  Rowlands,  or  L.  S. 
Amery.  No  longer  may  we  expect  viceroys  like  Linlithgow  who  could 
bring  a  sub-continent  into  a  world  war :  or  ^qt.^'—  - — ^  -  .^    •  - 

ERRATUM 

rasex,line7,/orIlonaldr.adReginald__^  ^^^   ^^^^^^^^ 

xxi  v;iigiiieermg.  Take,  for  readiest  example,  the  five  scientific 

Nobel  prizemen  included  here:  Fleming;  Frederick  Soddy,  who 
coined  the  term  'isotope' ;  O.  W.  Richardson  the  word  'thermion' ; 
C.  T.  R.  Wilson  who  devised  the  cloud  chamber;  and  Charles 
Scott  Sherrington,  'the  philosopher  of  the  nervous  system'.  Other 
scientists  have  furnished  their  personal  labels :  in  the  Chapman  theory 
of  detonation,  Dakin's  solution,  the  Evershed  and  the  Townsend 
effects,  the  Lennard-Jones  formula,  the  Richardson  number,  the  Saha 
equation,  or  the  Whittaker  integral.  Some  will  be  remembered  by  their 
inventions :  the  Martel  box  girder  bridge,  the  Michell  thrust-block,  the 
Denny-Brown  stabilizer,  the  Twyman-Green  optical  interferometer, 
the  Hartley  hoister,  or  the  Humphrey  gas  pump.  In  the  evolution  of 
the  motor-car  we  notice  Wilson's  gearbox;  Egerton's  investigation 
of  'knock* ;  Tizard's  and  Pye's  work  on  the  internal  combustion  engine 
financed  by  Waley  Cohen ;  du  Cros's  development  of  the  pneumatic 
tyre ;  Bennett's  magnetos ;  or  Woollard's  application  of  automation  to 
the  industry.  The  resultant  traffic  led  to  the  Belisha  beacon.  In  agri- 
culture we  remark  the  revolution  brought  about  by  Harry  Ferguson's 
tractors;  and  indoors  a  domestic  revolution  due  to  H.  C.  Booth's 
invention,  as  early  as  1901,  of  the  vacuum  cleaner.  Turing  and  Hartree 
helped  to  bring  us  into  the  age  of  the  computer.  Small  wonder  that  in 
this  volume  we  record  Holmyard  and  Singer  producing  their  History 
of  Technology.    ;^«'^^I  rti^*; 

Significant  names  emerge  too  in  humane  scholarship  and  the  arts. 
G.  E.  Moore,  Wittgenstein  (whose  Tractatus  C.  K.  Ogden  translated), 
and  J.  L.  Austin  altered  our  ways  of  going  about  philosophy ;  L.  B. 
Namier  our  ways  of  writing  history ;  O.  G.  S.  Crawford,  Childe,  J.  L. 
Myres,  Woolley,  and  Ventris  our  study  of  the  more  distant  past; 
Bowley  and  Yule  our  approach  to  statistics ;  William  Craigie  our  lexico- 
graphy. The  days  and  ways  of  Max  Beerbohm  seem  far  removed  from 
Malcolm  Lowry's;  those  of  Edward  Marsh's  'Georgians',  such  as 
Frances  Cornford  or  even  Walter  de  la  Mare,  remote  from  those  of  Dylan 
Thomas.  E.  C.  Bentley  devised  a  rival  method  of  writing  biography 
and  a  novel  approach  to  detective  fiction  which  Dorothy  Sayers  was  to 
bring,  some  held,  into  the  field  of  literature;  and  Ronald  Knox,  another 
writer  of  detective  stories,  produced  a  new  translation  of  the  Bible. 


Prefatory  Note 

There  were  changes  too  in  journaHsm.  Belloc's  Eye-Witness  and 
Squire's  and  then  Scott-James's  London  Mercury  have  not  survived. 
The  Athenaeum y  edited  by  Middleton  Murry,  merges  with  the  Nation, 
edited  for  a  time  by  Hubert  Henderson,  but  soon  to  unite  with  the 
New  Statesman  of  which  Ernest  Simon  had  been  a  founder  and  Desmond 
MacCarthy  an  original  member  and  to  which  H.  N.  Brailsford,  G.  D.  H. 
Cole,  and  Aylmer  Vallance  were  also  to  contribute.  Seton- Watson  wrote 
for  the  Spectator,  of  which  Beach  Thomas  was  the  annalist,  and  Wilson 
Harris  for  long  the  editor.  F.  W.  Hirst  edited  The  Economist,  Wadsworth 
the  Manchester  Guardian ;  and  Wickham  Steed  and  W.  F.  Casey  The 
Times,  of  which  Charles  Morgan  was  for  long  the  dramatic  critic; 
and  for  twenty-five  years  Dean  Inge  wrote  a  weekly  article  in  the 
Evening  Standard,  Eric  Parker  edited  the  Field,  C.  G.  Grey  the  Aero^ 
plane,  Malan  Die  Burger,  The  Daily  Telegraph  was  taken  over  by 
Camrose  and  Iliffe;  and  one  recalls  pleasurable  weekends  in  the  thirties 
with  Astor's  Observer  or  more  especially  the  Sunday  Times,  edited  by 
W.  W.  Hadley,  when  Ernest  Newman,  MacCarthy,  and  G.  M.  Young 
were  contributors,  to  be  joined  later  by  R.  C.  K.  Ensor.  In  more 
specialized  fields  L.  P.  Jacks's  editorship  of  the  Hibbert  Journal  goes 
back  as  far  as  its  foundation  in  1902  and  Richard  Gregory  joined 
Nature  as  early  as  1893. 

W.  J.  Macqueen-Pope  and  John  Parker  were  noteworthy  chroniclers 
of  the  theatre,  which  was  enlivened  by  impresarios  like  C.  B.  Cochran 
and  Andre  Chariot  and  enhanced  significantly  by  Ashley  Dukes  at  the 
Mercury,  Lennox  Robinson  at  the  Abbey  in  Dublin,  William  Armstrong 
at  Liverpool,  and  by  Komisarjevsky's  revolutionary  seasons  at  Strat- 
ford. Three  notable  landmarks  in  the  profession  were  the  encharter- 
ing  of  R. A.D.A.  under  the  direction  of  Kenneth  Barnes ;  the  foundation 
of  the  British  Drama  League  by  Geoffrey  Whit  worth ;  and  the  forma- 
tion of  Equity  of  which  Godfrey  Tearle  was  first  president.  If  the  days  of 
the  actor-manager  seemed  perhaps  to  be  on  the  wane,  the  public  were 
coming  to  associate  performers  with  the  plays  of  certain  writers: 
Lillah  McCarthy  with  Shaw's,  Hilda  Trevelyan  with  Barrie's,  Gertrude 
Lawrence  with  Noel  Coward's,  Robert  Donat  with  James  Bridie's, 
maybe,  or  Ivor  Novello  with  his  own.  But  they  would  see  their 
favourites  more  often  on  the  screen :  the  silent  film,  to  the  accompani- 
ment of  Ketelbey's  music,  had  by  now  given  way  to  the  lavish  produc- 
tions of  Alexander  Korda.  Meanwhile,  at  Sadler's  Wells,  British  ballet 
has  been  greatly  enriched  by  the  musical  directorship  of  Constant 
Lambert  as  has  the  whole  field  of  music  by  the  work  of  Vaughan 
Williams.  To  hear  a  recording  of  the  voice  of  Kathleen  Ferrier  is 
sadly  to  observe  that  all  the  work  in  the  field  of  cancer  research  and 
surgery — ^by  men  like  Gask,  Kennaway,  Robert  Muir,  Rock  Carling, 
W.  C.  M.  Lewis,  or  Holburt  Waring— has  not  so  far  found  a  certain^ 
cure. ■   •■'' 


Prefatory  Note 

Some  of  our  subjects  have  been  recorded  for  us  too  by  portrait 
painters  such  as  Birley,  Codner,  or  Henry  Lamb.  To  mention 
artists  is  but  to  return  to  dreams  and  difficulties:  Matthew  Smith 
becomes  a  painter  despite  intense  parental  disapproval ;  Stanley 
Spencer  pursues  his  vision  of  heaven  in  the  village  streets  of  Cookham ; 
Munnings  loses  an  eye  when  he  is  twenty  but  he  goes  on  painting ;  and 
Epstein  is  the  centre  of  controversy,  not  least  over  his  sculptural  work 
for  the  architect  C.  H.  Holden  to  whom  we  owe  the  university  of 
London  complex.  Giles  Gilbert  Scott,  by  contrast,  was  in  the  family 
tradition  and  no  more  than  twenty-two  when  he  entered  the  winning 
design  for  the  Anglican  cathedral  at  Liverpool.  In  London,  Battersea 
power-station,  Waterloo  Bridge,  and  the  rebuilt  House  of  Commons, 
with  engineering  by  Faber,  are  all  his,  while  the  planning  for  post-war 
London  was  stimulated  by  Patrick  Abercrombie.  Places  come  to  have 
their  particular  association  in  sport  as  well  as  architecture :  Wembley, 
developed  by  Elvin,  where  Charles  Buchan  and  Alex  James  played 
association  football ;  Twickenham  typified  by  Adrian  Stoop  and  where 
Barrington-Ward  the  surgeon  played  in  the  first  rugby  international 
match  there;  Scarborough  where  Leveson  Gower  presided  annually 
over  its  cricket  festival ;  or  the  Oval  where  George  Hirst  and  Gilbert 
Jessop  batted  memorably  in  1902;  Wimbledon  where  Mrs.  Lambert 
Chambers  played  lawn  tennis;  Henley  recalled  for  us  by  Harcourt  Gold. 

Many  we  meet  here  took  their  recreation  in  climbing,  especially  in  the 
Alps,  of  which  Geoffrey  Winthrop  Young  was  an  accomplished  recorder 
too.  Some  explored  virtually  unknown  regions:  St.  John  Philby,  for 
example,  in  Central  Arabia ;  or  geologists  like  Lees  in  search  of  the 
oil  which  mechanization  was  increasingly  requiring.  Kingdon-Ward 
brought  back  for  English  gardens  plants  which  he  had  collected  wander- 
ing in  India,  Burma,  China,  and  Tibet.  Of  those  struggles  which  did  not 
avail  two  especially  are  once  again  recalled  here:  the  Everest  expedition, 
later  described  by  David  Pye,  which  E.  F.  Norton  came  to  lead  in  1924 ; 
and  the  story  of  the  world's  worst  journey  which  Apsley  Cherry- 
Garrard  was  to  tell  of  Scott's  last  expedition  in  which  he,  Evans,  and 
Murray  Levick  all  took  part.  Polar  exploration  came  to  be  more 
scientifically  organized,  more  mechanically  assisted,  as  the  expeditions 
of  Douglas  Mawson  and  Hubert  Wilkins  were  to  demonstrate;  yet 
Augustine  Courtauld  was  to  show  how  one  man  could  brave  an  Arctic 
winter  alone. 

Endurance  has  been  well  matched  by  enterprise.  Of  institutions  with 
which  we  have  grown  familiar  one  may  notice  in  browsing  through  this 
volume  that  the  year  1903,  to  take  but  one  example,  saw  the  launching 
of  the  Workers'  Educational  Association  by  Albert  Mansbridge ;  the 
opening  at  Bedford  of  Margaret  Stansf eld's  Physical  Training  College ; 
the  first  welcome  by  Francis  Wylie  of  a  Rhodes  scholar  to  Oxford ; 
the  establishment,  with  much  collaboration,  of  the  National  Art- 


Prefatory  Note 

Collections  Fund  by  Robert  Witt ;  a  new  constitution  of  the  British 
Medical  Association  which  Alfred  Cox  was  soon  to  operate ;  the  recom- 
mendation of  a  school  medical  service,  in  which  Janet  Campbell  was 
to  serve.  Tissington  Tatlow  became  general  secretary  of  the  Student 
Christian  Movement ;  C.  B.  Fry  played  a  memorable  innings  at  Lord's ; 
Charles  Peers  was  appointed  architectural  editor  of  the  Victoria  County 
Histories ;  and  Bethune-Baker  editor  of  the  Journal  of  Theological 
Studies, 

Other  disparate  but  familiar  institutions  glimpsed  in  this  Supplement 
include  the  Agricultural  Research  Council  with  Dampier  as  its  first 
secretary;  the  Anglo  American  Corporation  of  South  Africa  which 
Ernest  Oppenheimer  effected  in  1917;  the  Church  Assembly  to  which 
Lord  Hugh  Cecil  and  Philip  Baker  Wilbraham  dedicated  so  much  of 
their  devotion ;  the  British  Postgraduate  Medical  School  at  Hammer- 
smith which  the  Athlone  committee  initiated,  Gask  helped  to  plan, 
and  where  Grey  Turner  was  first  director  of  surgery ;  the  Heritage  Craft 
Schools  founded  by  Dame  Grace  Kimmins;  the  British  Communist 
Party  of  which  Pollitt  was  a  founder-member  in  1920  and  later  general 
secretary ;  the  Council  for  the  Preservation  of  Rural  England,  fostered 
by  planners  like  Pepler  and  Abercrombie;  the  Royal  Institute  of 
British  Architects  to  which  MacAlister  gave  his  service ;  the  Fabian 
Society  with  which  E.  R.  Pease  and  G.  D.  H.  Cole  were  long  associated ; 
the  Family  Planning  Association  of  which  Lady  Denman  was  first 
chairman;  James  Caird's  gift  of  the  National  Maritime  Museum; 
Robinson  in  the  Forestry  Commission;  the  Pilgrim  Trust  of  which 
the  first  secretary  was  Thomas  Jones,  later  to  follow  Macmillan  as 
chairman ;  the  British  Academy  which  Frederic  Kenyon  had  a  hand 
in  founding  and  of  which  he  compiled  the  early  history ;  the  series  of 
Nuffield  benefactions  which  Goodenough  steered  so  skilfully,  and 
notably  here  Nuffield  College  of  which  Harold  Butler  and  Henry  Clay 
were  early  wardens.  The  list  of  public  school  headmasters  like  Cyril 
Alington,  Frank  Fletcher,  Spencer  Leeson,  and  Cyril  Norwood  is 
joined  by  J.  F.  Roxburgh  who  invented  Stowe ;  and  Roedean  appears 
in  the  life  of  a  judge,  Paul  Lawrence,  who  helped  to  found  and  sustain 
this  public  school  for  girls.  Christine  Burrows  was  involved  in  the 
foundation  of  two  colleges  for  women  at  Oxford ;  Kenneth  Vickers 
devotedly  built  up  what  is  now  the  university  of  Southampton ;  and 
after  the  second  war  came  new  schools  in  Hertfordshire  designed  by 
Aslin ;  and  a  new  university  college  in  Staffordshire,  here  commemora- 
ted in  the  lives  of  its  first  three  principals :  A.  D.  Lindsay,  John  Lennard- 
Jones,  and  George  Barnes  to  whom  we  were  indebted  also  for  the  Third 
Programme  and  the  expansion  of  television.  Overseas,  Thomas  Taylor 
was  establishing  the  university  of  the  West  Indies  at  Mona,  whilst  at 
home  Arthur  Trueman  was  amongst  those  guiding  the  post-war  work 
of  the  University  Grants  Committee. 

3^ 


Prefatory  Note 

As  well  as  novelty  and  upheaval  there  were  continuities.  The 
inclusion  of  more  scientists  in  this  Supplement  is  by  no  means  the  sole 
explanation  why  no  fewer  than  fifty  of  the  worthies  recorded  here 
were  members  in  their  day  of  Trinity  College,  Cambridge.  If  much 
was  changing,  one  may  perceive  a  core  of  stability  also:  reflected 
in  the  monarchy  and  in  religious  leaders  like  Archbishop  Garbett  or 
Cardinal  Griffin  and  those  many  others  who  chose  to  pursue  religion, 
justice,  scholarship,  the  public  service,  or  diverse  other  avocations 
with  dedication  and  without  flamboyance.  These  may  be  quietly  seen 
here  too. 

We  are  most  grateful  for  permission  to  quote  to:  Messrs.  Cassell  &  Co. 
(from  volume  iv  of  The  Second  World  War  by  Winston  S.  Churchill) ; 
Messrs.  Collins  (from  Triumph  in  the  West  by  Arthur  Bryant  and  from 
The  Private  Papers  of  Hore-Belisha  edited  by  R.  J.  Minney ) ;  Messrs. 
Curtis  Brown  (from  Present  Indicative  by  NoSl  Coward);  Messrs. 
Faber  and  Faber  (from  Walter  de  la  Mare's  poem  'The  Bottle'  in  his 
Collected  Poems) ;  and  Messrs.  Michael  Joseph  (from  Pm  on  a  See-Saw 
by  Vivian  Ellis). 

Contributors  have  been  most  kind  both  in  consenting  to  prepare  their 
notices  and  in  settling  with  us  what  is  printed  here.  We  are  sorry  that 
they  have  had  to  wait  so  long  to  see  it.  For  more  than  a  hundred,  alas,  it  is 
too  late.  Many  of  them  have  been  most  generous,  in  addition,  with  the 
counsel  we  have  sought  from  them.  We  are  very  grateful  to  them  all. 
We  have  continued  the  practice  of  inviting  to  contribute  when  possible 
those  who  knew  the  subjects  personally.  We  have  tried  to  check  the 
facts ;  their  opinions  are  their  own.  We  do  not  necessarily  share  them. 
In  the  acknowledgements  which  follow  we  have  not  thanked  contribu- 
tors individually  but  we  would  like  to  express  gratitude  for  advice  from: 
Sir  George  Abell ;  Sir  Thomas  Armstrong ;  Mr.  Michael  Ayrton ;  Profes- 
sor R.  P.  Bell ;  Dr.  T.  S.  R.  Boase ;  the  late  Sir  Alexander  Cadogan ; 
Mr.  D.  N.  Chester ;  Sir  George  Clark ;  Lord  Cohen  of  Birkenhead ;  Dr. 
Alexander  Cooke;  Professor  R.  M.  Crawford;  Mr.  G.  R.  Crone;  Professor 
Rupert  Cross ;  Mr.  R.  H.  S.  Crossman ;  Lord  Devlin ;  Sir  Ralph  Furse ; 
the  late  Mr.  A.  D.  Garson ;  Professor  J.  A.  Gibson ;  Lord  Gladwyn ;  Mr. 
Strathearn  Gordon;  the  late  Lord  Hailey ;  Sir  Arnold  Hall;  Sir  Keith 
Hancock;  Sir  William  Hayter;  Professor  D.  W,  Holder;  Professor  A.  M. 
Keppel- Jones ;  Mr.  J.  F.  Kerslake;  Mr.  R.  B.  McCallum;  Air  Vice- 
Marshal  W.  F.  MacNeece  Foster;  Professor  Arthur  J.  Marder;  Sir  David 
Martin ;  Mr.  R.  W.  Mason ;  Sir  Penderel  Moon ;  the  late  Professor  C.  L. 
Mowat;  the  late  Sir  Archibald  Nye;  Sir  George  Pickering;  Captain 
Stephen  Roskill;  Professor  J.  A.  Steers;  Lord  Strang;  the  late  Lord 
Tedder ;  Professor  L.  M.  Thompson.  The  Editor  would  like  to  mention 
two  friends  who  have  sustained  him  particularly:  Sir  Harold  Hartley, 
doyen  of  the  Royal  Society,  and  Sir  Kenneth  Wheare,  the  president  of 
the  British  Academy, 

3EiV 


Prefatory  Note 

This  volume  would  not  have  appeared  even  now  but  for  the  continued 
devotion  of  Miss  Helen  M.  Palmer,  the  assistant  editor.  Since  she  has 
undertaken  by  far  the  heaviest  load  from  beginning  to  end,  it  would 
be  wholly  inappropriate  were  her  name  not  to  appear,  with  a  most 
grateful  editor's,  on  the  title-page.  He  is  indeed  deeply  indebted  to 
her.  We  would  wish  to  acknowledge  too,  .especially  on  her  behalf,  the 
most  willing  assistance  of  the  staffs  of  the  Bodleian  and  its  associated 
libraries.  Finally,  we  would  like  to  thank  the  Oxford  University  Press 
and  in  it  especially  Mr.  C.  H.  Roberts,  the  secretary  to  the  Delegates, 
and  Mr.  D.  M.  Davin,  the  Oxford  publisher. 


Rhodes  House,  Oxford 
October  1970 


XV 


■I. 


htu&AO  irs 


LIST  OF  CONTRIBUTORS 


fABEL,  Deryck: 
Benn. 
Aberconway,    Charles    Melville    McLaren, 
Baron : 
McLaren  (Aberconway). 
•j-Aberdare,  Clarence  Napier  Bruce,  Baron : 

Latham. 
fADCOCK,  Sir  Frank  Ezra: 
Tarn. 
AiTKEN,  Adam  Jack : 
Craigie  (W.  A.). 
t Allen,  Sir  Carleton  Kemp: 
Wylie. 
Allen,  Sir  Roger: 

Peterson. 
Allen,  Sir  Roy  George  Douglas : 

Bowley. 
Allen,  Victor  Leonard: 

Deakin. 
Allsopp,  Cecil  Benjamin: 
Twyman. 
fALTHAM,  Harry  Surtees: 
Fry  (C.  B.). 
Andrews,  Sir  (William)  Linton: 

Clarke  (T.);  Cummings;  Wadsworth, 
Angle,  Aidan: 
Carlyle. 
t Arberry,  Arthur  John : 
Thomas  (F.  W.). 
AsHTON-GwATKiN,  Frank  Trelawny  Arthur: 

Wellesley. 
Atkinson,  William  Christopher: 
Peers  (E.  A.). 
fATTLEE,  Clement  Richard  Attlee,  Earl: 
Whiteley. 

Babington  Smith,  Constance: 

Macaulay. 
f Bailey,  Cyril: 

Fletcher  (F.). 
Bailey,  Stanley  John: 

Winfield. 
Baker,  George: 

Hambourg. 
Baker,  Sir  John  Fleetwood: 

Inglis. 
Baleour,  Sir  John : 

Campbell  {R.  H.). 
Barclay-Smith,  ( Ida)  Phyllis : 

Kinnear. 
Barnaby,  Kenneth  Cloves: 

Tennyson-cT  Eyncourt. 
Barnett,  Correlli  Douglas :  « i 

Davidson;  Kiggell;  Maxse*  rt't 

Barry,  Frederick  Donal:  '  - 

Atkinson. 
fBARRY,  Sir  Gerald  Reid: 

Cruikshank;  Vallance. 
Batey,  Charles  Edward: 

Johnson  (J.  de  M.). 
Battle,  Richard  John  Vulliamy: 

Gillies:  Mclndoe.  .  v 


:/irfoU  ,)>iVf^ii'M 

:.  I) «/)« 

:  vbi-vT 
Bawden,  Sir  Frederick  Charles: 

Goodey. 
Bawn,  Cecil  Edwin  Henry: 

Garner;  Lewis  (W.  C.  M.). 
fBELL,  Sir  Harold  Idris: 

Kenyon.  rU 

Bellasis,  Margaret  Rosa: 

Arlen;  Farnol;  Mercer  (Domford  Yates), 
Bennet-Clark,  Thomas  Archibald: 

Dixon. 
Bentley,  Nicolas  Clerihew: 

Baimsfather;  Freedman. 
Bertram,  (Cyril)  Anthony  (George): 

Lewis  (P.  W.). 
fBiLSLAND,     Alexander     Steven     Bilsland, 
Baron : 

Colville  (Clydesmuir);  Denny;  Weir(C,  M.), 
fBLAiKLEY,  Ernest: 

Codner. 
Blake,  Robert  Norman  William:  '-'3 

Lindemann  (Cherwell);  Sykes.  <:. 

Bland,  Sir  (George)  Nevile  (Maltby):     /.J 

Vansittart.  v 

Blundell,  Sir  Michael :  •  ^  /.} 

Scott,  Montagu-Douglas-. 
Blunden,  Edmund  Charles ;  >  ?+ 

Squire.  - 

Blunt,  Sir  Anthony  Frederick:  ~: 

Antal.  ,: 

BoARDMAN,  John:  uaD 

Myres.  r.  v 

BowDEN,  Ruth  Elizabeth  Mary:  -uO 

Cullis.  > 

BowEN,  Edmund  John:  /3 

Chapman  (D.  L.).  \\ 

fBoYD,  James  Dixon :  -  k') 

Duckworth.  \ 

BoYLE,  David  Hugh  Montgomerie:       ;  c&'J 

Cornwallis.  '-, 

fBRAiN,  Walter  Russell  Brain,  Baron:      ;{  ; 

Boldero. 
fBRAMBELL,  Francis  William  Rogers : 

Gatenby. 
fBRAND,  Robert  Henry  Brand,  Baron:     . 

Curtis;  Kindersley.  n') 

Briggs,  Asa:  ^i 

Cole.  ,b') 

Brock,  Michael  George: 

Ensor. 
Brocklehurst,  Robert  James: 

Kent. 
Brockway,   Archibald  Fenner  Brockway, 
Baron:  ,3 

Buchanan  (G.). 
Brogan,  Sir  Denis  William: 

Harding  (G.  C). 
Brooke,  John : 

Namier. 
Brooks,  Peter  Wright:  ih) 

Scott-JPaine. 
Brown,  Ivor  John  Carnegie :  |  ^fj 

Ashwell;  Donat;  Robey.  i;;  4/3 


List  of  Contributors 


Brown,  Sir  James  Raitt: 

Wilbraham. 
Brown,  John:  _ 

BeUiT.),  prrnr 

Brunner,    Dorothea    Elizabeth    Bruimer» 
Lady: 
Denman.. 
Bryan,  Sir  Andrew  Meikle : 
Redmayne. 
fBuRN,  William  Laurence: 

Percy. 
Burnet,  Sir  (Frank)  Macfarlane: 

Ross. 
BtJRTON,  Hester: 

Kenney. 
fBuTLER,  Arthur  Stanley  George: 

Scott. 
Butler,  Ruth  Florence: 

Burrows. 
Butter,  Peter  Herbert: 
,brMuif  (E.), 

.v.U  .  > 
Cade,  Sir  Stanford: 

Carting. 
Cairns,  Julia  (Mrs.  Paul  Davidson): 

Spry. 
Calder-Marshall,  Arthur: 

Lowry. 
Callow,  Robert  Kenneth: 

Rosenheim.  .,  x  ., 

fCAMERON,  Sir  Roy6/{J  bmn 

Muir  (R.). 
Campbell- Johnson,  Alan: 

Mountbatten. 
Caroe,  Sir  Olaf  Kirkpatrick: 

Bajpai. 
Carr,  Frank  George  Griffith: 

Caird. 
Carr,  Samuel: 

Batsford. 
Caslon,  Clifford: 

Forbes. 
Catlin,  Sir  George  Edward  Gordon: 

Barker  (E.). 
Cecil,    Lord    (Edward    Christian)    David 
(Gascoyne): 

Asquith;  Beerbohm. 
Cecil,  Robert: 

Clark  Kerr  (Inoerchapel)* 
Chad  WICK,  Henry: 

Bethune-Baker. 
Chad  WICK,  John: 

Ventris. 
Chalmers,  William  Scott: 

Horton. 
Chapman,  Frederick  Spencer: 

Courtauld. 
Charles,  Sir  John  Alexander: 

Spence. 
Charles,  Robert  Lonsdale : 

Brangwyn;  John. 
fCHERRY,  Sir  Thomas  MacFarland: 

Michell. 
Chick,  Dame  Harriette: 

Martin  (C.  J.). 
Child,  Clifton  James: 

Peterson, 


Chopra,  Iqbal  Chand: 

Williamson. 
•j-Christian,  Garth  Hood: 

Massingham. 
Christie,  John  Traill: 

Bailey  (C). 
Church,  Richard  Thomas: 

De  la  Mare. 
Citrine,  Walter  McLennan  Citrine,  Baron: 

Haslett;  Pugh. 
Clark,  Sir  Wilfrid  Edward  Le  Gros: 

Jones  (F.  W.);  Keith.  (/  t 

Clarke,  Arthur  Wellesley: 

Burnett.  .j/^| 

Clauson,  Sir  Gerard  Leslie  Makins: 

Shuckburgh. 
Clegg,  Hugh  Anthony: 

Cox. 
fCLiFFORD,  Hon.  Sir  Bede  Edmund  Hugh: 

Cambridge  (Athlone). 
Cole,  Dame  Margaret  Isabel: 

Pease. 
Cook,  Arthur  Herbert: 

Heilbron. 
Coote,  Sir  Colin  Reith:  \ 

Elliot;  Milner.  ,;j/^ 

Couratin,  Arthur  Hubert: 

Dix.  i/t 

Co WPER,  Francis  Henry: 

Greene;   Humphreys;   Lawrence   (P.    O.); 

Sullivan. 
fCox,  Leslie  Reginald: 

Arkell;  Woods. 
Cox,  Sir  Trenchard: 

Maclagan. 
fCKASTER,  Sir  (Herbert  Henry)  Edmund: 

Salter. 
Cripps,  John  Stafford: 

Orwin;  Parker  (E.). 
Crisp,  Leslie  Finlay: 

Chifley. 
Crookshank,  Henry: 

F&rmor.  .^i 

Cruickshank,  Robert: 

Fleming  {A.). 
CuMBERLEGE,  Gcoffrcy  Fenwiek  Jocelyn: 

Corbett. 

Daiches,  David:  ' 

Grierson. 
fDALE,  Sir  Henry  Hallett: 

Dakin;  Ewins;  Hill  (L.  E.);  Kellaway. 
Daniel,  Glyn  Edmund: 

Crawford. 
Darlington,  William  Aubrey: 

Banks;  Lane;  Loraine;  Tearle, 
fDARwiN,  Sir  Charles  Galton: 

Hartree. 
Davies,  Aneirin  Talfan:  Jl 

Thomas  (D.  M.). 
Davin,  Winifred  Kathleen: 

Cary. 
Davis,  Sidney  George: 

Geddes. 
Davis,  Sydney  Charles  Houghton: 

Cobb. 
Davis,  Sir  William  Wellclose: 

Larnbe. 


Tvia 


List  of  Contributors 


Dean,  Basil: 

Henson. 
f  Debenham,  Sir  Piers  Kenrick,  Bart. : 

Henders(m. 
Del  Mar,  Norman  Rene: 

Brain. 
de  Normann,  Sir  Eric : 

Hicks. 
Dent,  Alan  Holmes: 

Lawrence  (G.);  Macqtieen-Pope;  Millar. 
fDERRY,  Cyril: 

Bassett-Lowke. 
Dickinson,  John  Compton: 

Thompson  (A.  H.). 
Dickson,  (Horatio  Henry)  LovatS 

Hilton. 
DoDDS,  Sir  James  Leishman: 

Craigie  {R.  L.). 
DoNNisoN,  Frank  Siegfried  Vernon: 

Mason-MacFarlane. 
fDouGLAS  OF   KiRTLESiDE,  William  Sholto 
Douglas,  Baron: 

Freeman. 
DouGLAs-HoME,  Hon.  William: 

Maithews. 
Dow,  George: 

Fay;  Wedgwood. 
Drake,  John  Collard  Bernard: 

Chatterjee. 
Dudley,  Norman  Alfred: 

Bennett  {Bennett  of  Edgbaston);  Woollard, 
Duke-Elder,  Sir  Stewart: 

Parsons. 

fEADY,  Sir  (Crawfurd)  Wilfrid  Griffin: 
Hopkins. 
Edgcumbe,  John  Aubrey  Pearce: 

Clark. 
Edwards,  Joseph: 
Walton. 
fELLis,  Lionel  Frederic: 
Deedes. 
Ellis,  Vivian: 

Cochran. 
Elwes,  Simon: 

Lonsdale. 
Engel  de  Janosi,  Alfred  Hans: 
Townsend. 
fEvERSHED,    FrMicis    Raymond    Evershed, 

Baron : 
r      Somervell. 

Falcon,  Norman  Leslie:     ''^^f^^,  ,'^Jamti 

Lees.  •'"'  '^')  TtsA 

Falls,*  Cyril  Bentham:  lo^iOTxai 

Cassels;  Edmonds.  -  noxaR 

Farr,  Dennis:  -(-^^  -'^^  '-^^^'^^ 

Lamb.  illi/^  ii>»  .aoonU 

tFAY,  Gerard: 

Robinson  {E.  S.  L.). 
fFELLOWES,  Sir  Edward  Abdy: 

Brown  -{Ruffside). 
Fernald,  John  Bailey: 

Barnes  (K.  R.). 
Field,  John  William: 

Watson.  -\^'iV^oVi 

Fitzherbert,  Cuthbert:      %'i»^f'  .ht«a«)oH 

Goodenough.  ^L  .\,)\\^*mt^ 


fFLECK,  Alexander  Fleck,  Baronj  v,  ttooo;") 

Akers;  Soddy.  .^iMV?*.!. 

Foot,  Michael  Richard  Daniell:    </  iroow-) 

Cope.  .\v>vi''V. 

Ford,  Brinsley:  ;„.;%    .,ci.,viAKi.ioor)t 

OppL  .\vViibttV\ 

Ford,  Sir  Edward  William  Spenceri.tj)  'O 

Villiers  (Clarendon).  \  noVA' 

Forge,  Andrew  Murray i      ,  j      .ki<',  ,.iAqoO 

Bomber g.  .vvv>5\ 

Forsey,  George  Frank:     ;   '    ■  ;  1  ./oaiioi) 

Vickers.  vvu*?^^ 

Foster,  Edward  Waddington:        'I  .nnoO 

Richardson  (O.  W.). 
fFnANCis-WiLLiAMS,    Edward   Francis   Wil- 
liams, Baron:  1,  ::;    .  -^/<u) 

Bevin.  .\i\<X 

fFnASER,  Sir  Francis  Richard:       TT^^Tj/.^jiyi 

Dunhill.  -  As^tv-tk 

Eraser,  Peter  Marshall:  .!/:ah/h3 

Last.  /vAv;n\C 

fFREETH,  Francis  Arthur:  f  .nvtnO 

Donnan;  Swinburne.  n 

Frostick,  John  Michael  Lawrence :       /  - ; ) 

Hawthorn.  .   \\  uviV 

Fryberg,  Sir  Abraham«-»<^)irr  n^  ,YacK)a'=jOt 

Kenny.  -  *'\i) 

FuLFORD,  Roger  Thomas  Baldwin:        onO 

Hirst  (F.  W.);  Housman;  Pankhur^x 
FuLLMAN,  Molina j.>i|  imij^ti  .urnu^wiTnO 

JomM.  ■r-T^  •( ~"  ,- .i-^^O^  \m;^V\ 

Fulton,  Alexander  Strathern:     \  ,,ViA'M 

Barnett.  D    rviiD 

Fulton,  John  Scott  Fulton,  Baron:    ' 

Duncan. 

.....  ,u.,3 
Galbraith,  Vivian  Hunter:      .-Ado-^^X iVvW 

Sumner.  y/'dO  v rc/rajD 

Gardner,  Arthur  Duncan:         .^«»t«Tr>'v) 

Whitby.  '.■!,,,.' SI  ,  r  r    Of 

fGARDNER,  William  Henry: 

Campbell  (I.  R.  D.). 
Garrard,  Lancelot  Austin: 

Jacks.  miff 

Garrod,  Lawrence  Paul: 

Gordon. 
Garry,  Robert  Campbell: 

Cathcart.  i/llt 

Garson,  Noel  George:  .  / 

Pirow;  Strijdom.  ,\*h 

fGAViN,  Sir  William:  '  cf^ 

Hudson. 
Gaye,  Freda:  * 

Parker  (J.). 
Geddes,  Hon.  David  Campbell:  i^i'T 

Geddes.  "^^ 

GiELGUD,  Val  Henry:  i/aHt 

Neilson.  ''^^ 

Gillespie,  William  Hewitt:  ft«Al£ 

Jones  (A.  E.). 
fGiLLiAM,  Laurence  Duval :  ^' 

Barnes  (G.  R.). 
Gold,  Ernest:  ^ 

Richardson  (L.  F.).  ^i  -> 

GoLDiE,  Grace  Wyndham :  i t  aI  £ 

Armstrong.  -'^ 

Good  ALL,  Norman:  '''^I 

Mathews  (B.  J.).  •   >''»'H 


xix 


List  of  Contributors 


GooDHART,  Arthur  Lehman  r 

Asquith  (Asquith  of  Bishopstone). 
Goodman,  Stanley: 

Foot. 
f  Goodman,  Sir  Victor  Martin  Reeves : 

Badeley. 
Goodwin,  Albert: 

Thompson  (J.  M.). 
GoPAL,  Sarvepalli: 

Rau. 
Gordon,  Isabella: 

Caiman. 
Gore,  John  Francis: 

Baring  (Cromer);  Queen  Mary;  Ponsonby 

(Bessborough);  Wigram. 
GossE,  Richard  Fraser: 

Duff. 
fGRAAFF-HuNTER,  Jamcs  dc: 

Arden-Close. 
Graham,  Roger: 

Meighen. 
Grand,  Keith  Walter  Chamberlain: 

Pole. 
Gray,  Sir  James : 

Bidder. 
fGREGORY,  Sir  Theodore  Emanuel: 

Oppenheimer. 
Griffiths,  Sir  PercivalJoseph: 

Liaqat  AH  Khan. 
Grimsditch,  Herbert  Borthwick: 

Berry  (Camrose);  Connard;  Fyfe;  Grahame- 

White;  Heal;  Iliffe;  Reed. 
Guest,  Christopher  William  Graham  Guest, 
Lord: 

Macmillan. 
GuiLLEBAUD,  Claudc  William: 

Hitchcock. 
GuRNEY,  Oliver  Robert : 

Garstang. 
fGYDE,  Edward  Arnold: 

Young  {F.  B.). 


Haddow,  Sir  Alexander: 

Kennaway. 
Hadfield,  John  Charles  Hejrw'ood: 
Gibbings. 
fHAiNES,  Frederick  Merlin: 
Fritsch. 
Hale,  (Charles)  Leslie: 
Benn  (Stansgate). 
fHALL,  Wilfrid  John: 

Marshall  (G.  A.  K.). 
fHALLiDAY,  Sir  W^illiam  Reginald: 

Dawkins. 
fHAMiLTON,  Mary  Agnes: 
Bondfield. 
Hamilton-Edwards,       Gerald       Kenneth 
Savery : 
Carpenter;   de   Chair;  du    Cros;   Lithgow; 
Weir  (Inverforth). 
Hampshire,  Arthur  Cecil: 

Campbell  (G.). 
Hamson,  Charles  John: 

Lauterpacht. 
Hanbury,  Harold  Greville: 
Porter. 


Hankey,   Robert   Maurice  Alers    Hankey, 
Baron : 

Kennard. 
Hardy,  Peter: 

Sarkar. 
Hargreaves,  Frederick  James: 

Evershed. 
Harington,  Sir  Charles  Robert: 

King. 
Harrison,  John  Richard : 

Faber. 
Hart,  Herbert  Lionel  Adolphus : 

Austin. 
Hart-Davis,  Sir  Rupert  Charles: 

Cape;  House. 
Hartley,  Sir  Harold: 

Gregory;  Jones  (B.  M.);  Lemon;  Raikes; 

Sidgwick;  Tizard. 
"fHARVEY     OF    Tasburgh,     Oliver    Charles 
Harvey,  Baron: 

Mendl. 
fHASSALL,  Christopher  Vemon: 

Marsh. 
Havergal,  Henry  MacLeod : 

Finzi;  Quilter. 
Hayes,  Kevin  Henry  Joseph  O'Connell: 

Bonham-Carter. 
Haylock,  Edward  Fowles : 

Nicholson. 
Hazell,  James  Temple: 

Hunter. 
Heaton,  Herbert: 

Lipson. 
Heckstall-Smith,  Hugh  William: 

Roxburgh. 
J-Henderson,  Mary  Isobel: 

Murray. 
Henderson,  Roy  Galbraith: 

Ferrier. 
Herbage,  Julian  Livingston- : 

Box. 
Heuston,  Robert  Francis  Vere: 

Simon  (J.  A.). 
fHEVESY,  George: 

Paneth. 
HiLDRED,  Sir  W^illiam  Percival: 

Bowhill. 
Hill,  (John  Edward)  Christopher: 

Lindsay  {Lindsay  of  Birker). 
fHiLL,  Richard  Hamilton : 

Gower,  Leveson. 
HiNDLE,  Edward : 

Kerr  (J.  G.). 
HiNTON  OF  Bankside,  Christopher  Hinton, 
Baron : 

Gibb  (C.  D.). 
Hodge,  Sir  William  Vallance  Douglas: 

Baker. 
HoDGKiN,  Thomas  Lionel : 

Fry  (S.  M.). 
HoDSON,   Francis  Lord   Charlton   Hodson, 
Baron : 

Singleton. 
Hodson,  Henry  Vincent: 

Hadley. 
Hogarth,  Margaret  Cameron: 

Campbell  (J.  M.). 


List  of  Contributors 


HoLFORD,  William  Graham  Holford,  Baron: 

Abercrombie. 
HoLLis,  (Maurice)  Christopher: 

Brman  (W.  J.);  Knox  {R.  A.). 
Holt,  Richard: 

Lindrum. 
HoNORE,  Antony  Maurice: 

Lee. 
Hooper,  Howard  Owen: 

Rowlands;  Weeks. 
HoPE-SiMPSON,  John  Frederic: 

Tansley. 
Houghton,  (Arthur  Leslie  Noel)  Douglas : 

White. 
fHowARD,  George  Wren: 

Simon  (O.  J.). 
Howes,  Frank  Stewart: 

Newman;  Vaughan  Williams. 
Hudson,  Derek: 

Blackwood;  Harris  (H.  W.);  Sadleir;  Stac- 

poole;  Strong;  Thomas  {W.  B.);  Tomlinson 

(H.  M.). 
Humphreys,  (Travers)  Christmas: 

Bodkin;  Leyel. 
Hurst,  Harold  Edwin: 

MacDonald. 
HuTTON,  Charles  William: 

Holden. 

Innes,  Fergus  Munro: 

Khan  Sahib.  -^ti/  n- 

Irvine,  John  Graham  Gerard  Charles: 

Comper. 

fJACKSON    OF    Burnley,    Willis    Jackson, 
Baron : 

Fleming  (A.  P.  M.). 
t James,  Sir  Frederick  Ernest: 

Dadabhoy;  Ismail. 
James,  Robert  Vidal  Rhodes: 

Birdwood. 
James,  William  Owen: 

Keeble. 
Jarvis,  William  Arthur  Walter: 

Sorabji. 
Jasper,  Ronald  Claud  Dudley: 

Bell  {G.  K.  A.). 
Jeffries,  Sir  Charles  Joseph : 

Bell  {H.  H.  J.);  Shiels;  Stanley, 
Jewkes,  John: 

Clay. 
Jewkes,  Sylvia: 

Clay. 
Johnston,  Muir: 

Booth. 
t Johnston,  Thomas: 

Kirkwood. 
Johnstone,  Kenneth  Roy: 

Kelly. 
t  Jones,  Sir  Lawrence  Evelyn,  Bart. : 

Young  {G.  M.). 
Jones,  Martin: 

Stapledon. 

fKABiR,  Humayun  Zahiruddin  Amir: 
Azad. 
Karmel,  David: 
Burton, 


Keeton,  George  Williams :  t  If 

Morgan  (J.  H.). 
fKJEiTH  OF  Avonholm,  Jamcs  Keith,  Baron: 

Cooper. 
Kelf-Cohen,  Reuben:  '*>. 

Street.  <oJ, 

Kelly,  Sir  Gerald  Festus: 

Munnings. 
Kemp,  Eric  Waldram: 

Kirk. 
Kemp,  Peter  Kemp:  J 

Dreyer;  Noble;  Power;  Sueter;  Tyrwhitt. 
f  Kennedy,  Sir  John  Noble : 

Anderson  (K.  A.  N.);  Maurice, 
Kent,  Sir  Harold  Simcox:  'oJ 

Ram. 
Keogh,  Eustace  Graham: 

Blarney;  Morshead. 
Kerrison,  Oscar  Carl:  /'uif 

Pater  son.  \ 

Keynes,  Sir  Geoffrey  Langdon:  oJ 

Comford.  '\ 

Kimmins,  Sir  Brian  Charles  Hannam:       .1 

Kimmins. 
Klinck,  Carl  Frederick:  ;._  f 

Service. 
fKNOx,  Edmund  George  Valpy:  .1 

Milne. 
Kothari,  Daulat  Singh: 

Meghnad  Saha.  : 

KuRTi,  Nicholas: 

Simon  {F.  E.). 

Laithwaite,  Sir  (John)  Gilbert: 

Aga   Khan;    Hope    {Linlithgow);    Stewart 

(S.F.). 
fLANG,  Herbert  Raphael: 

Whipple.  \ 

Lauwerys,  Joseph  Albert:  aJS 

Clarke  (F.). 
Layer,  James: 

Bone  (M.  andS.);  Gooden;  Hardie;  McBey; 

Spare. 
Lawrence,  Harry  Gordon: 

Malan. 
Lawson,  Frederick  Henry: 

Jolowicz;  Wolff;  Zulueta. 
Legerton,  Harold  John  Webb : 

Martin  (//.  //.)• 
Leigh-Pemberton,  John: 

Birley. 
Lejeune,  Anthony  (E.  A.  Thompson) : 

Hastings;  Thomas  (Rhondda). 
Leslie,  Sir  (John  Randolph)  Shane,  Bart. : 

Noyes. 
Lewis,  Eiluned : 

Morgan  (C.  L.).  ij.lZ 

Lewis,  Jonathan  Tudor  Stafford:  i\ 

Llewellin.  '* 

fLiDDELL  Hart,  Sir  Basil  Henry : 

Brown  (J.);  Burnett-Stuart;  Hore-Belisha; 

Lindsay;  Martel;  Stirling;  Swinton. 
LiNKLATER,  Eric  Robert  Russell: 

Mavor  (James  Bridie).  .  u 

Livermore,  Harold  Victor:  ..^/ 

Prestage. 
fLLOYD,  Roger  Bradshaigh: 

Garbett,  .,      >.    , 


List  of  Contributors 


fLLOYD,  Sir  Thomas  Ingram  Kynaston: 

Chancellor. 
fLoNGFORD,  Edward  Arthur  Heray  Paken- 
ham,  Earl  of: 
Plunkett  (Dunsany). 
Longford,    Francis    Aimgier    Pakenham, 
Earl  of: 
Shepherd. 
fLoNGSTAFF,  Tom  Gcorgc: 
Norton. 
Love,  Robert  John  McNeill: 
Barrington-  Ward. 
fLovEDAY,  Alexander: 

Butler  (H.  B.). 
LovELL,  Reginald: 

Minett. 
Low,  David  Morrice: 
Douglas  {G.  N.). 
fLowERY,  Harry: 
Paget. 
Lowndes,  John: 

Plimmer. 
Lubbock,  Mark  Hugh; 
Ketilbey. 
fLuKE,  Sir  Harry  Charles: 
Storrs. 
LuNN,  Sir  Arnold  Henry  Moore : 

Young  {G.  W.). 
Lyons,  Francis  Stewart  Leland: 
Harrison. 


MacDermott,    John   Clarke    MacDermott, 
Baron : 

Andrews. 
McDouall,  Robin  (Robert  Ninian  Huddle- 
stone  Pennington): 

Lewis  (R.). 
MAcGrasoN,  James: 

MacCarthy;  Pollitt;  Slopes, 
MacGibbon,  Jean: 

Klein. 
Machtig,  Sir  Eric  Gustav: 

Harding  {E.  J.). 
Mackenzie,  Chalmers  Jack: 

Howe. 
Mackenzie,  Kenneth  Roderick: 

Campion.  nuot.  bioTBii 

fMcKiE,  Douglas:  •(  V>  .^ 

Taylor  (F.  S.). 
Maclagan,  Michael: 

Bruce  (Aberdare). 
Macleod,  Roderick: 

Ironside. 
McNair,  Arnold  Duncan  McNair,  Baron : 

Chitteridge. 
Macpherson,  Crawford  Brough : 

Douglas  (C.  H.). 
f  Macqueen-Pope,  Walter  James : 

Nooello;  Tilley. 
Mallaby,  Sir  (Howard)  George  (Charles) : 

Garrod. 
Mallowan,  Sir  Max  Edgar  Lucien: 

Woolley. 
Mann,  Frederick  George : 

Mills. 
f  Markham,  Violet  Rosa  (Mrs.  Carruthers) : 

TuckweU. 


Marquard,  Leopold: 

Davie. 
Marshall,  Norman: 

Komisarjevsky. 
Martin,  Sir  Alec: 

Witt. 
fMARTiN,  (Basil)  Kingsley: 

Brailsford. 
fMARTiN,  Hugh: 

Tatlmv. 
fMARYON-WiLSON,      Sir      (George)      Percy 
(Maryon),  Bart. : 

Royden. 
fMASCHWiTZ,  Eric: 

Chariot. 
Masefield,  Peter  Gordon: 

Grey. 
fMATHEws,  Dame  Vera  Laughton: 

Furse. 
Matthews,  Walter  Robert: 

Inge. 
Melville,  Sir  Harry  Work: 

Evans. 
Merritt,  John: 

Pearce. 
fMETHVEN,  John  Cecil  Wilson: 

East. 
MiDDLETON,  Michael: 

Minion. 
Miller,  Albert  Arthur: 

Wils<m  (W.  G.). 
MiLTON,  Sir  Frank: 

Harris  {P.  A.). 
MiNNEY,  Rubeigh  James: 

Frankau. 
Moffat,  Rennie  John: 

Houldsworth. 
MoiR,  John  Chassar:  t 

Kerr  (J.  M.  M.).  ■  r, 

Moncrieff,  Sir  Alan  Aird: 

Hutchison. 
fMooRE,  Sir  Henry  Monck-Mason: 

Gurney;  Senanayake. 
MoRAES,  Frank: 

Ambedkar. 
MoRRAH,  Dermot  Michael  Macgregor: 

Malcolm. 
fMoRRisoN  OF  Lambeth,   Herbert  Stanley 
Morrison,  Baron: 

Lowe. 
Morrison,  Samuel: 

Aslin. 
MoTT,  Sir  Nevill  Francis : 

Lennard-Jones. 
Mott-Radclyffe,  Sir  Charles  Edward: 

Hoare  (Templewood). 
Moult,  Thomas: 

Coppard;  Phillpotts. 
MuLLiNS,  Claud: 

Page. 
MuNRO,  Mary: 

Lenox-Conyngham. 
Murray,  Patrick: 

Beith  {Ian  Hay). 
Mynors,    Sir   Humphrey   Charles   Basker- 
ville,  Bart. : 

Catto. 


xxii 


List  of  Contributors 


'(  "ff?  .'^wm^!'.*.-'-.^. 


Napier,  Hon.  Sir  Albert  Edward  Alexander: 

SchtisteT. 
Nevinson,  John  Lea: 

Marillier. 
Newitt,  Dudley  Maurice: 

Egerton.  '-ajt.ir/H0A8t 

Newsome,  Noel  Francis :  .  .. i  .    -'^ 

Ferguson. 
NicHOLL,  Angus  Dacres: 

Agnew.  •<•<**  '^'^J  fcjvvo'v. 

NicKALLS,  Guy  Oliver: 

Gold. 
fNicoLSON,  Hon.  Sir  Harold  George: 

Cooper  (Norwich). 
fNocK,  Arthur  Darby: 

Cook. 
Noel-Baker,  Philip  John: 

Cecil. 
NoRRiNGTON,  Sir  Arthur  Lionel  Pugh; 

Milford. 
fNoswoRTHY,  Sir  Richard  Lysle: 

Crowe. 
Noweix-Smith,  Simon  Harcourt: 

Fox-Strangioays  (Ilchester). 

Oakeshott,  Walter  Fraser: 

Leeson. 
fOuPHANT,  Sir  Lancelot: 

Clerk. 
Opie,  lona: 

Fyleman. 
O'Regan,  John  William  Hamilton: 

Caldecott. 
fORWiN,  Charles  Stewart: 

Mansbridge. 
OsBORN,  Sir  Frederic  James: 

Pepler. 
OvEREND,  William  George: 

Wardlaw. 


Palmer,  Helen  Maud: 

Bevan;  Blogg;  Boothman;  Dampier;  King 

George  VI;  Hardinge;  Livingstone;  Turing. 
Palmer,  John  Wood: 

dinner. 
Palmer,  Joseph  Mansergh: 

Mathews  {V.  L.). 
fPANiKKAR,  Kavalam  Madhava: 

Bhopal. 
Parker,  Henry  Michael  Denne: 

Ince. 
Parkes,  James  William: 

Brodetsky. 
Parry,  John  Horace: 

TayUyr  (T.  W.  J.). 
Payne,  Edward  Raymond: 

Gere. 
Payne,  Ernest  Alexander: 

Aubrey. 
Peel,  Sir  John  Harold: 

Gilliatt. 
Penfield,  Wilder  Graves: 

Sherrington. 
Perkins,  John  Frederick; 

Perkins. 
Peterkin,  Norman; 

F088, 


fPHELAN,  Edward  Joseph;        »3  tf(*.  hun  jiH 

Lester.  .!tuv\oV.-v^^b"^  I 

Phemister,  James:         i-jU  imnnoYi  ,ym  nil 

McLintock.  ,ivria'<o\. 

Pickersgill,  John  Whitney;  ,«;isiHao|}  j- 

Claxton.  \\\v\ixl^ 

PiGGOTT,  Stuart :  . 5 :  i  M  .  ^  / 1  hhoH 

Childe.  .^u;> 

Ping,  Aubrey  Charles:  '-•  i?i(>;i 

Walkden.  ,,,> 

fPiPPARD,  Alfred  John  Sutton;  ijioH 

Gihb  {A.);  Stradling.  \\ 

fPLATT,  Benjamin  Stanley:  ^n^ 

Mellanby. 
Platt,  Robert  Piatt,  Baron: 

Hall. 
Platt,  William  James : 

Cable;  French  {E.  F.  qnd,  F^,  X,). 
fPoPHAM,  Arthur  Ewart;  j^|;^  ^-^-^ 

Hind. 
Potter,  Charles:  ,, 

Tattersfield.  \^ 

Powell,  Lawrence  Fitzroy :  ;  ^,  ^  "„,  ^  ^r 

Chapman  (R.  W.).  ,,^^.^^^ 

•fPowicKE,  Sir  (Frederick)  Maurice :         "^  „    < ! 

Webb. 
Price,  Sir  Archibald  Grenfell;  ^ . 

Mawson.  ,\  " 

Price,  Morgan  Philips: 

Trevelyan  (C.  P.). 
Priestley,  Sir  Raymond  Edward: 

Levick. 
Pritchard,  Sir  Fred  Eills: 


^Vi 


QoMt 


.^h>»uHV(\ 


Lynskey. 
fPRiTCHARD,  John  Laurcucc :     ,  .„^  .^^'^ »»V4 v 

Fairey;  Halfard;  Ferdon-12oe,*^"".t'\.''^f;^^ 
Pugh,  Sir  WUliam  John:  '  *    ^*'^\; 

Trueman.  '  m«n 


:uil 


fRADLEY,  Sir  (WiUiam)  Gordon:  '^^^^ 

Angwin. 
Randall,  Sir  Alec  Walter  George: 

Palairet, 
Ratcliffe,  John  Ashworth: 

Eckersley. 
fRAWLiNSON,  Alfred  Edward  John; 

Barnes  (E.  W.). 
Reader,  William  Joseph; 

Weir(W.D.). 
Redman,  Roderick  Oliver: 

Stratton. 
fREES,     Sir     Richard     Lodowick     Edwaid 
Montagu,  Bart.:  voH 

Murry.  ■'' 

Reese,  Max  Meredith:  ; 

Buchan;  Hirst  {G.  H.);  James;  Jardine; 

Jessop.  J.  51 

Reeves,  Joseph:  '..--.W 

McCabe.  i 

Rennell,   Francis   James   Rennell   Rodd, 
Baron:  ..,.;.. 

Smith  (Bicester), 
Rhodes,  Philip:       -r;    '  v  ' 

Dick-Read. 
Richards,  Denis  George: 

HiU  {R.  M.). 
Richardson,  Sir  Ralph  David:  { 

Korda,  .  ..i..ri- ...i. 


xxHi 


List  of  Contributors 


Riches,  Sir  Eric  William: 

Webb- Johnson. 
Riley,  Norman  Denbigh: 
Jordan. 
tRoBBiNS,  Alan  Pitt: 

Casey;  Steed. 
RoBBiNS,  Brian  Gordon: 

Guy. 
Roberts,  Arthur  Loten: 

Smith  (E.  W.). 
Roberts,  Harold: 

Lidgett. 
Roberts,  Harold  Vernon  Molesworth: 

Fletcher  (B.  F.). 
Roberts,  Michael  Rookherst: 
IJobart. 
fRoBERTS,  Sir  Sydney  Castle: 
Bentley;  Butler  (M.  S.  D.). 
Robertson,  Sir  James  Wilson: 

Wingate. 
Robins,  Robert  Henry: 

Firth  (J.  R.). 
Robinson,  Edward  Austin  Gossage: 

Pigou. 
Robinson,  Sir  Robert: 
Copisarow;  Simonsen. 
Roche,  Hon.  Thomas  Gabriel: 

Holmes;  Roche. 
Rogers,  David  MacGregor: 

Perrins. 
RoLO,  Paul  Jacques  Victor: 
Russell  (T.  W.). 
fRoQUES,  Frederick  William : 

Bonney. 
Rose,  Kenneth  Vivian: 

Cecil    {Quickswood);    Grigg    (Altrincham); 
Princess  Marie  Louise;   Thomas  {Cilceti- 
nin);  Wood  {Halifax). 
Ross  ,  Angus : 

Godley. 
Ross,  Sir  James  Paterson,  Bart.: 

Gask. 
Rothenstein,  Elizabeth  Kennard  ^\'liitting- 
ton  Rothenstein,  Lady: 
Spencer  (S.). 
f Rotter,  Godfrey: 

Silberrad. 
Rouse,  Edward  Clive: 

Tristram. 
Routh,  Charles  Richard  Naime : 

Alingion. 
Rowan,  Frederick  Claude: 
Bandaranaike. 
f Rowley,  Harold  Henry: 

Manson. 
Ruggles-Brise,  Sir  John  Archibald,  Bart. : 
Bathurst  (Bledisloe). 
fRuNGE,  Sir  Peter  Francis: 
Lyle. 
Rupp,  Ernest  Gordon: 

Workman. 
Russell,  Dorothy  Stuart: 

Tumbull. 
Russell,  John: 

Smith  {M.  A.  B.). 
Russell,  Peter  Edward  Lionel  Russell: 
Entwistle, 


Russell,  William  Ritchie: 

Cairns. 
Ryan,  Alfred  Patrick: 

Amery;  Norway  {Nevil  Shute). 

fSACKViLLE-WEST,  HoH.  Victona  Mary  (Lady 
Nicolson) : 

Wellesley  ( Wellington). 
Sadler,  Donald  Harry: 

Jones  (//.  S.). 
Salisbury,  Sir  Edward  James: 

Oliver;  Ridley. 
Salter,  James  Arthur  Salter,  Baron: 

Anderson  (Waverley);  Drummond  {Perth); 

Maclay;  Zimmern. 
Samuels,  Sir  Alexander: 


Saunders,  Sir  Owen  Alfred: 

Pye. 
Saw,  Ruth  Lydia: 

Joad. 
Sawer,  Geoffrey: 

Hore-Ruthven  {Gowrie);  Hughes. 
Scanlan,    James    Donald,    Archbishop    of 
Glasgow  (R.C.): 

Brown  {W.  F.). 
Scholderer,  (Julius)  Victor: 

Thomas  {H.). 
Scott,  Sir  David  John  Montagu  Douglas : 

Hodgson;  Knox  {G.  G.). 
fScoTT,  Sir  Harold  Richard: 

Barker  {L.  C). 
Scott,  Joseph  William: 

Ogden. 
Scott-Kilvert,  Ian  Stanley:  t 

Scott-James. 
Searle,  Humphrey: 

Dent;  Lambert  (C). 
Seaveb,  George: 

Cherry-Garrard. 
Seddon,  Richard  Harding: 

Epstein. 
Serby,  John  Edward: 

Perring;  Wimperis. 
Shakespeare,     Sir     Geoffrey     Hithersay, 
Bart. : 

Lambert  {G.);  Stewart  {P.  M.). 
Sharp,  Evelyn  Adelaide  Sharp,  Baroness: 

Douglas  {W.  S.);  Martindale, 
Shaw,  Albert  Thompson: 

Atkins. 
Shaw,  Harold  Watkins : 

Fellowes. 
Shaw,  James  Byam: 

Dodgson;  Gibson. 
Sheppard,  Percival  Albert: 

Walker  {G.  T.). , 
Shock,  Maurice: 

Addison. 
SiLLERY,  Anthony: 

Tshekedi  Khama. 
fSiMEY,  Thomas  Spensley  Simey,  Baron: 
Rowntree. 
Simon,  John  Gilbert  Simon,  Viscount: 

Anderson  {A.  G.). 
SiMONDS,    Gavin    Tumbull    Simonds,    Vis- 
count : 
Maugham, 


XXIV 


List  of  Contributors 


Sinclair,  Hugh  Macdonald: 

Drummond;  McCarrison. 
fSLADE,  Roland  Edgar: 

Humphrey. 
Smith,  Arthur  Lionel  Forster: 

Tallents. 
Smith,  Isobel  Agnes : 

McKenzie. 
Smith,  Kenneth  Manley: 

Salaman. 
Smith,  Walter  Campbell : 

Spencer  (L.  J.). 
Smyth,  Sir  John  George,  Bart. : 

Chambers  {D.  K.). 
Snow,  Philip  Albert: 

Buck;  Grimble. 
SoRSBY,  Arnold: 

Edridge-Green. 
Spragg,  Cyril  Douglas: 

MacAlister. 
fSTEED,  Henry  Wickham: 

Seton- Watson. 
Stein,  Leonard  Jacques : 

Weizmann. 
fSTEVEN,  Henry  Marshall: 

Robinson  {R.  L.). 
Stewart,  John  Innes  Mackintosh: 

Sayers. 
Stewart,  Oliver: 

Bailey  (M.);  Mollison. 
Stocks,  Mary  Danvers  Stocks,  Baroness : 

Simon  (Simon  of  Wythenshawe);  Stewart- 

Murray  (Atholl). 
Stone,  (Alan)  Reynolds: 

Raverat. 
Stowers,  Arthur: 

Dickinson. 
Streat,  Sir  (Edward)  Raymond: 

Chapman  (S.  J.). 
fSTRONG,  Leonard  Alfred  George: 

Vachell. 
SuMMERSON,  Sir  John  Newenham: 

Goodhart-Rendel. 
Sutherland,  David  Macbeth: 

Watt. 
Sutton,  Sir  (Oliver)  Graham: 

Johnson  {N.  K.). 
Swan,  Robert  Arthur: 

Wilkins. 
Sykes,  Christopher  Hugh: 

Hoare;  Mann. 

Tait,  Sir  Victor  Hubert: 

Hart. 
Taplin,  Walter: 

Craig;  Firth  (W.  J.);  Larke, 
Taylor,  Cyril: 

Downey. 
Taylor,  Sir  George: 

Kingdon-  Ward. 
Teale,  Godfrey  Benjamin: 

McGrigoT. 
Temple,  George: 

Whittaker. 
IThomas,  Alan  Ernest  Wentworth: 

Garnett. 
Thomas,  Sir  Ben  Bowen: 

J<mes  (T.). 


Thomas,  Edgar:     "  >T9V  sh  oonot^T  ,a:Tin7f 
Ashby.  ^''      -  • 

fTnoMAS,  Hugh  Hamshaw: 
Arber. 
Thomas,  Ruth  Rees:  mVV 

Fox.  - 

fTnuRSFiELD,  Henry  George: 
Cowan;  Evans  (Motmtevans). 
TiBBOTT,  Gildas: 
Davies. 
fTiTCHMARSH,  Edward  Charles: 

Jeffery.  \ 

Traill,  David:  V^ 

Irvine. 
Trewin,  John  Courtenay: 

Collins;  Dukes;  McCarthy;  Trevelyan  (H.); 
Whitworth. 
Tucker,  William  Eldon: 
Smart. 
■fTuRNER,  George  Charlewood: 

Norwood. 
TwEEDSMUiR,     Susan    Charlotte    Buchan, 
Lady: 
Markham. 

Underwood,  Edgar  Ashworth: 
Singer. 

Veale,  Sir  Douglas : 

Goodenough;  Gwyer, 
Venables,  Cedric: 

Stoop. 
Vivian,  Arthur  Cecil : 

Hartley. 

Wain,  Ralph  Louis: 

Bennett. 
Wakeley,  Sir  Cecil  Pembrey  Grey,  Bart. : 

Gordon-Taylor;  Turner;  Waring. 
Waldock,   Sir  (Claud)   Humphrey   (Mere- 
dith): 

Brierly. 
Walton,  Mary: 

Balfour  (Riverdale). 
Ward,  John  Owen: 

Scholes. 
Wardlaw,  Claude  Wilson: 

Lang. 
Watson,  David  Meredith  Scares: 

Broom. 
Wells,  William: 

Burrell. 
Westaway,  Katharine  Mary: 

Stansfeld. 
Wheare,  Sir  Kenneth  Clinton: 

Coupland. 
Wheeler,  Sir  Charles  Thomas: 

Ledward. 
Wheeler,  Sir  (Robert  Eric)  Mortimer: 

Marshall  (J.  H.);  Peers  (C.  R.). 
Wheeler-Bennett,  Sir  John  Wheeler: 

Alexandra  (Princess  Arthur  of  Connaught); 

Fergu^son. 
tWniTAKER,  Sir  (Frederick)  Arthur; 

Halcrow. 
White,  James: 

Hone;  Yeats, 


XXV 


List  of  Contributors 


White,  Terence  de  Vere: 

Gogarty. 
Whiteley,  Derek  Pepys: 

Buchanan  {W.  J.). 
Whittet,  George  Sorley: 

Kennington. 
Whittick,  Arnold: 

Mendelsohn, 
Wiggles  WORTH,  Sir  Vincent  Brian: 

Buxton. 
WiLENSKi,  Reginald  Howard: 

Dulac. 
Williams,  David: 

Boswell. 
Williams,  Edgar  Trevor: 

Whitehead,'  Young  (G.  M.). 
fWiLLiAMS,  Sir  (Evan)  Owen: 

Elvin, 
Williams,  Sir  Griffith  Goodland: 

Tomlinson  (G.). 
Williams,  John  Hargreaves  Harley: 

Sutherland,'  Young  {R.  A.), 
Williams,  Trevor  Ultyd: 

Holmyard. 
Williams-Ellis,  Clough: 

Elkan. 
Wilson,  Sir  (Archibald)  Duncan: 

Peake. 
•f Wilson,  Frank  Percy: 

Chambers  (E.  K.);  Greg. 
•fWiLSON,  Sir  (James)  Steuart: 

Bovghton. 
Wilson,  John  Graham: 

Wilsmi  (C.  T.  R.). 
Wimpenny,  Ronald  Stenning: 

Russell  {E.  S.). 
WiNGATE,  Sir  Ronald  Evelyn  Leslie,  Bart. : 

Jarvis;  Philby. 


fWiNTER,  Carl: 

Clarke  {L.  C.  G.). 
fWiSEMAN,  Herbert  Victor: 

Greenwood. 
Wiskemann,  Elizabeth  Meta: 

V&igt. 
Witts,  Leslie  John: 

Horder. 
WooDALL,  Mary: 

Walker  (£.). 
Woodruff,  (John)  Douglas: 

Belloc;  Bracken. 
Woods,  Oliver  Frederick  John  Bradley: 

Astor. 
fWooLF,  Leonard  Sidney: 

Moore. 
WoRLOCK,  Derek  John  Harford,  Bishop  of 
Portsmouth  (R.C.): 

Gnffin. 
■fWoRTHiNGTON,  Sir  (Johu)  Hubert; 

Green. 
Wright,  Georg  Henrik  von : 

Wittgenstein. 
Wright,  Kenneth  Anthony: 

Coates. 
Wyatt,  Woodrow  Lyle : 

Cripps. 
Wykeham,  Sir  Peter  Guy: 

Brooke-Popham;  Trenchard. 


Yates,  Frank: 

Yule. 
Young,  Wayland  Hilton  (Baron  Kennet): 

Young  (Kennet). 
Younger,  Hon.  Kenneth  Gilmour: 

McNeil, 


V'jFj'J-i'T  \ 


xxvi 


DICTIONARY 


OF 


NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


(TWENTIETH  CENTURY) 
PERSONS  WHO  DIED   1951-1960 


Aberconway 


Abercrombie 


ABERCONWAY,  second  Baron  (1879- 
1953),  industrialist.  [See  McLaren, 
Henry  Duncan.] 

ABERCROMBIE,  Sir  (LESLIE) 
PATRICK  (1879-1957),  architect  and 
professor  of  town  planning,  was  born  6 
June  1879  at  the  Manor  House,  Ashton- 
upon-Mersey,  the  seventh  of  nine  children 
of  William  Abercrombie,  stockbroker,  a 
Fifeshire  man,  by  his  Yorkshire  wife, 
Sarah  Ann  Heron.  Patrick's  junior  by 
some  eighteen  months  was  his  brother 
Lascelles  Abercrombie,  the  poet  [q.v.]. 
The  family  later  moved  to  Brooklands,  in 
Cheshire ;  and  it  was  in  Chester,  the  county 
town  so  often  quoted  in  Abercrombie's  lec- 
tures on  town  planning,  that  in  1920  he 
became  a  partner  in  the  architectural  firm 
of  Lockwood,  Abercrombie,  and  Saxon. 
Meanwhile,  after  going  to  Uppingham,  he 
had  been  articled  to  Charles  Heathcote, 
a  Manchester  architect,  then  to  (Sir) 
Arnold  Thornely's  firm  in  Liverpool.  The 
Cunarders  in  those  days  embarked  their 
passengers  at  Prince's  landing  stage  and 
the  great  joy  of  coming  into  Liverpool 
from  the  Cheshire  side  was  the  crossing 
by  ferryboat  from  Birkenhead,  where 
Abercrombie  had  his  lodgings.  This  daily 
journey  and  the  walking  excursions  in 
the  other  direction,  across  the  Dee  into 
Wales,  must  have  made  permanent  im- 
pressions of  town  and  suburb,  industry 
and  the  countryside,  on  his  perceptive  eye 
and  retentive  mind;  and  it  was  on  the 
ferryboat  that  he  met  and  fell  in  love 
with  Emilia  Maud,  schoolgirl  daughter  of 
Robert  Gordon,  whom  he  subsequently 
married  (1909).  She  bore  him  a  daughter 
and  a  son,  Neil,  who  afterwards  became 
town  planning  commissioner  in  Tasmania ; 
her  death  in  1942  was  a  most  grievous  loss. 
Abercrombie's  first  academic  post  was 
that  of  assistant  lecturer  in  architecture 
and  instructor  for  architectural  students 

8662062  1 


in  drawii^  at  the  university  of  Liverpool. 
He  was  himself  a  draughtsman  out  of  the 
ordinary.  He  wrote,  until  the  end  of  his 
life,  an  elegant  Italian  hand,  lettered  his 
own  maps  and  geological  sections,  and 
made  clear  and  distinctive  drawings  of 
joinery,  the  facades  of  buildings,  bird's- 
eye  views  of  towns  and  features  in  land- 
scape— of  which  he  had  an  intuitive  as 
well  as  a  self-disciplined  understanding. 
This  post  in  the  School  of  Architecture, 
beginning  to  flourish  under  the  presiding 
genius  of  (Sir)  C.  H.  ReiUy  [q.v.],  he  held 
from  1907  to  1909.  He  was  then  appointed 
to  the  research  fellowship  in  town  plan- 
ning and  civic  design,  newly  endowed  by 
W.  H.  Lever  (later  Viscount  Leverhulme, 
q.v.),  along  with  the  publication  of  the 
Town  Planning  Review,  of  which  Aber- 
crombie was  the  first  editor,  and  the 
inauguration  of  the  Lever  professorship  to 
which  S.  D.  Adshead  [q.v.]  was  appointed. 
Abercrombie  doubled  the  role  of  research 
fellow  under  Adshead  with  that  of  lec- 
turer in  building  construction  and  Gothic 
architecture  under  Reilly,  who  naturally 
reserved  to  himself  the  more  important 
lectures  on  classical  architecture. 

This  was  a  time  of  great  activity  in  civic 
survey,  town  planning,  and  housing.  The 
Housing,  Town  Planning,  etc.  Act  of  1909 
first  gave  statutory  recognition  to  the  pro- 
cess of  planning  the  use  of  land.  At  the  big 
town  planning  conference  in  London  in 
1910,  Abercrombie  acted  as  one  of  the 
secretary-reporters.  Soon  after,  he  began 
a  series  of  analytical  and  descriptive  re- 
ports on  the  growth  and  condition  of  Paris, 
Vienna,  Berlin,  Brussels,  Karlsruhe,  and 
other  European  cities  and  contributed  to 
the  first  World  Congress  of  Cities  at  Ghent 
in  1913.  The  title  of  Abercrombie's  thesis, 
for  which  he  gained  distinction  in  the  final 
professional  examinations  of  the  Royal 
Institute  of  British  Architects  in  1915,  was 
'Three  Capital  Cities';  and  although  he 


Abercrombie 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


became  a  fellow  of  the  R.I.B.A.  in  1925, 
and  vice-president  in  1937-9,  and  main- 
tained an  interest  as  well  as  a  skill  in 
architectural  design  throughout  his  work- 
ing life,  he  never  undertook  a  major 
building  commission  as  sole  executive 
architect.  But  his  energy  and  resourceful- 
ness as  writer,  editor,  illustrator,  teacher, 
and  student  of  cities  were  prodigious. 

The  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  put  an  end 
to  European  travel,  but  he  managed  to 
visit  Dublin  to  take  part  in  an  open  inter- 
national competition  for  the  replanning  of 
the  city.  Despite  the  war  the  judging  went 
forward,  and  in  1916  Abercrombie  and  his 
associates,  Sydney  and  Arthur  Kelly,  were 
awarded  first  prize.  Dublin  of  the  Future: 
the  new  town  plan  was  not,  in  fact,  pub- 
lished until  1922 ;  the  proposals  were  not 
adopted  for  another  sixteen  years;  and 
the  amending  report  and  'sketch  develop- 
ment plan'  did  not  come  out  until  1941. 
Nevertheless  the  skill  and  originality  of 
his  competition  entry  made  an  immediate 
impression. 

In  1915  Adshead  was  appointed  to  the 
chair  of  town  planning  at  University  Col- 
lege, London,  and  Abercrombie  at  the  age 
of  thirty-six  became  professor  of  civic 
design  at  Liverpool,  a  post  he  held  for 
twenty  years  until  in  1935  he  succeeded 
Adshead  in  London.  The  advisory  reports 
and  plans  which  he  prepared  during  these 
twenty  years,  sometimes  on  his  own  and 
sometimes  jointly,  are  legion.  This  was  his 
period  of  discovery  in  England  and  Wales, 
in  which  he  depicted  landscapes  and  town- 
scapes,  analysed  the  form  and  extent  of 
urban  growth,  and  became  involved  in  the 
consequences  of  industrial  development. 
At  Dormanstown,  for  example,  he  was 
responsible  with  Adshead  and  Stanley 
Ramsey  for  the  design  of  this  new  indus- 
trial settlement,  with  its  early  attempt  to 
combine  standard  houses  in  a  varied  lay- 
out; and  for  the  Doncaster  coalfield  he 
formulated  in  1922,  on  the  satellite  prin- 
ciple, the  first  regional  scheme  in  this 
country  to  be  consciously  planned  as  such. 
This  was  followed  by  a  study  of  Deeside  in 
1923  and  of  the  East  Kent  coalfield  in 
1925.  Of  the  older  industrial  towns  them- 
selves one  of  his  most  interesting  reports 
was  on  Sheffield  where  he  made  his  civic 
survey  in  1924  and  the  embracing  regional 
plan  in  1931. 

The  impact  of  growth  on  the  country- 
side could  not  fail  to  engage  his  mind  and 
trouble  his  vision  of  an  orderly  Britain. 
Reports  on  the  Thames  Valley  (1929), 
Cumberland  (1932),  the  Wye  Valley  and 


East  Suffolk  (1935)  show  a  growing  con- 
cern with  the  legislative  and  administra- 
tive means  necessary  to  canalize  and  control 
development.  Already  in  1926,  during  his 
term  of  office  as  president  of  the  Town 
Planning  Institute,  he  had  published  a 
tract  for  the  times  called  The  Preservation 
of  Rural  England.  This  led  directly  to 
the  establishment  of  the  Council  for  the 
Preservation  of  Rural  England  of  which 
Abercrombie  was  honorary  secretary  and 
later  executive  chairman.  He  often  said 
that  preservation  for  its  own  sake  was 
never  his  aim,  but  that  a  country  so  rich 
and  varied  in  its  landscape  and  in  its 
traditions  could  not  afford  to  rely  on  offi- 
cial regulation  only,  but  should  cultivate  an 
informed  and  vigilant  body  of  opinion  of 
a  voluntary  kind.  Thus  he  campaigned  for 
the  Green  Belt  around  London,  not  only  in 
theory  but  in  practice  and  in  detail.  In  all 
this  Abercrombie  was  the  link  between  the 
enlightened  amateur  of  the  nineteenth 
century  and  the  professional  expert  of  the 
twentieth. 

Looking  through  some  thirty  pre-war 
reports,  all  delightfully  presented  but  now 
largely  superseded  and  dust-laden,  one  is 
made  aware  of  Abercrombie's  immense 
industry  and  fertility ;  but  also  of  the  fact 
that  although  they  were  persuasive,  and 
beginning  to  be  influential,  they  were  not 
yet  backed  by  administrative  power  or  by 
economic  incentives.  Nevertheless,  if  any 
one  man  had  a  truly  synoptic  view  of  the 
physical  planning  problems  of  the  British 
Isles,  that  man  was  Abercrombie ;  and  it 
was  this  endowment  which  he  brought  to 
the  royal  commission  on  the  distribution 
of  the  industrial  population,  appointed  in 
1937  under  the  chairmanship  of  Sir  An- 
derson Montague -Barlow.  Abercrombie's 
quick  mind  and  wide  experience  helped  to 
make  the  minutes  of  evidence  illuminating 
and  the  recommendations  of  more  lasting 
value  than  usual.  His  additional  minority 
report  made  a  permanent  contribution 
to  the  development  of  British  planning 
machinery. 

The  Barlow  report  appeared  after  the 
war  of  1939-45  had  begun  and  it  threw 
into  lurid  relief  the  hazards  of  industrial 
and  urban  concentration  which  the  com- 
mission had  been  assessing.  The  challenge 
to  the  future  which  this  created,  coupled 
with  the  desire  to  maintain  civilian  rnorale 
in  the  face  of  destruction  by  bombing, 
caused  early  in  the  war  a  concern  with 
the  principles  of  post-war  reconstruction. 
In  April  1941  Lord  Reith,  as  minister  of 
works  and  buildings,  by  agreement  with 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Addison 


the  London  County  Council,  appointed 
Abercrombie,  in  association  with  J.  H. 
Forshaw,  the  L.C.C.  architect,  to  prepare 
a  plan  for  post-war  rebuilding  over  the 
whole  area  of  the  county  of  London.  Fif- 
teen months  later  Lord  Reith's  successor, 
Lord  Portal  [q.v.],  announced  that  con- 
sideration was  to  be  given  to  the  planning 
of  the  area  surrounding  the  county. 
Abercrombie  was  again  called  on  to  under- 
take this  very  considerable  task,  assisted 
by  a  team  of  younger  men  from  the  staff  of 
what  was  about  to  become  the  Ministry  of 
Town  and  Country  Planning. 

These  two  reports,  the  County  of  London 
Plan  (1943)  and  the  Greater  London  Plan 
(1944),  were  the  most  comprehensive,  the 
most  far-reaching  and  the  most  effective 
of  Abercrombie's  career.  Undertaken  in 
conditions  of  emergency,  and  in  a  spirit 
almost  of  bravado,  the  plans  could  not  be 
profound  as  social  or  economic  studies. 
But  they  matched  the  needs  of  the  time, 
and  provided  a  usable  framework  for  post- 
war development  policy,  including  the 
launching  of  the  New  Towns  programme 
in  1946.  Abercrombie  made  many  other 
plans  after  the  war,  notably  for  Plymouth, 
Hull,  Edinburgh,  the  Clyde  region,  and 
the  West  Midlands.  And  he  made  many 
reports  abroad,  not  only  in  countries  such 
as  Ceylon  and  Israel  where  he  had  worked 
before,  but  in  Malta,  Ethiopia,  Cyprus, 
and  Hong  Kong,  where  the  reputation  of 
his  London  plans  had  run  ahead  of  him, 
for  by  this  time  he  was  an  international 
figure.  He  had  retired  from  his  London 
chair  in  1946 ;  and  his  students  were  scat- 
tered all  over  the  world,  many  in  posts  he 
had  helped  to  create.  It  was  typical  of  him 
that  he  should  devote  so  much  time  in  his 
later  years  to  yet  another  voluntary  and 
unpaid  post,  new  in  its  conception  but  this 
time  international  in  scope,  the  Union 
Internationale  des  Architectes,  established 
by  means  of  conferences  in  London  and 
Brussels  in  1947  and  1948.  It  was  due 
mainly  to  Abercrombie's  energy  and  tact 
that  constitutional  teething  troubles  were 
overcome,  that  the  U.S.S.R.  and  Yugo- 
slavia supported  the  Union,  along  with 
the  U.S.A.,  the  South  American  republics, 
and  all  the  countries  of  western  Europe. 
He  was  president  from  1951  to  1956,  suc- 
ceeding Auguste  Perret ;  and  confessed  to 
a  friend  that  these  were  the  most  taxing 
years  of  his  life. 

Sir  Frederic  Osborn,  a  lifelong  colleague 
in  the  town  and  country  planning  move- 
ment, remarked  of  Abercrombie  that  'he 
never  began  to  ossify  mentally'.  Certainly, 


his  quick  enthusiasm,  his  characteristic 
high-pitched  laugh,  the  pace  at  which  he 
lectured  and  the  speed  at  which  he  took 
a  point  at  a  public  meeting,  did  not  appear 
to  have  slowed  down  at  all  over  the  fifty 
years  of  his  professional  life.  Yet  he  never 
sought  the  limelight,  was  generous  to 
students  and  colleagues,  and  wore  his 
honours  lightly.  Knighted  in  1945,  he  was 
also  an  officer  of  the  Order  of  the  Crown 
in  Belgium,  of  the  Legion  of  Honour  in 
France,  and  an  honorary  graduate  of  the 
universities  of  London,  Melbourne,  and 
Liverpool.  Among  many  other  awards  he 
received  the  royal  gold  medal  for  archi- 
tecture in  1946,  and  the  gold  medal  of  the 
American  Institute  of  Architects  in  1949. 
He  never  really  retired,  saying  that  he 
could  not  afford  to,  but  in  fact  it  was  not 
in  his  nature ;  and  he  died  in  harness,  with 
projects  and  reports  as  widely  different  as 
the  precincts  of  Winchester  Cathedral  and 
the  revision  of  his  plan  for  Addis  Ababa 
still  receiving  his  unflagging  attention.  He 
died  23  March  1957  at  his  house  at  Aston 
Tirrold  in  Berkshire  and  was  buried  at 
Rhoscolyn  in  Anglesey,  a  countryside 
which  he  loved  and  had  laboured  to 
preserve. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

HOLFORD. 


ABERDARE,  third  Baron  (1885-1957), 
athlete.  [See  Bruce,  Clarence  Napier.] 

ABUL  KALAM  AZAD,  Maulana 
(1888-1958),  Indian  minister  of  education. 
[See  Azad.] 

ADDISON,  CHRISTOPHER,  first  Vis- 
count Addison  (1869-1951),  statesman, 
was  born  at  Hogsthorpe,  Lincolnshire,  19 
June  1869.  His  father,  Robert  Addison, 
came  of  a  line  of  yeomen  who  had  farmed 
in  the  vicinity  of  Hogsthorpe  for  genera- 
tions. In  1861  he  had  married  Susan, 
daughter  of  Charles  Fanthorpe,  a  customs 
official  in  Newcastle.  There  were  twelve 
children  of  the  marriage  of  whom  seven 
survived ;  Christopher  was  the  youngest  of 
three  boys. 

Brought  up  on  a  farm,  Addison  retained 
throughout  his  life  a  taste  for  country 
ways.  But  it  was  so  clear  at  an  early  age 
that  he  possessed  exceptional  abilities 
that  it  was  decided  he  should  receive  an 
education  beyond  that  customary  in 
the  neighbourhood  for  a  farmer's  son. 
At  thirteen  he  was  sent  to  Trinity  College, 


3 


Addison 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Harrogate,  and  later,  in  conditions  of 
considerable  financial  stringency,  he  went 
to  the  medical  school  at  Sheffield  and 
thence  to  St.  Bartholomew's.  He  special- 
ized in  anatomy  and,  soon  after  qualifying 
in  1892,  returned  to  Sheffield  to  teach. 
In  1897  he  was  appointed  professor  of 
anatomy  in  the  University  College  of 
Sheffield,  leaving  in  1901  to  become  a 
lecturer  in  anatomy  at  the  Charing  Cross 
Hospital  in  London.  During  these  years 
he  taught,  researched,  published,  and 
administered  with  the  energy  and  en- 
thusiasm which  were  later  to  characterize 
his  political  activities.  He  published 
several  works  on  anatomy,  delivered  the 
Hunterian  lectures,  edited  the  Quarterly 
Medical  Journal,  and,  as  a  result  of  one 
piece  of  research,  gave  his  name  to  a  part 
of  the  human  body,  the  Addison  plane. 

In  1902  he  married  Isobel  Mackinnon, 
daughter  of  Archibald  Gray  who  had 
made  a  considerable  fortune  in  trade  with 
India.  They  were  to  have  three  sons  (one 
of  whom  died  in  early  childhood)  and  two 
daughters.  The  money  which  his  wife 
brought  to  the  marriage  made  it  possible 
for  Addison  to  think  seriously  of  a  politi- 
cal career.  In  1907  he  was  adopted  as  a 
Liberal  candidate  for  the  Hoxton  division 
of  Shoreditch. 

His  decision  to  abandon  medicine  and 
enter  politics  was  taken  at  a  time  of 
political  ferment.  The  Liberal  upsurge 
which  culminated  in  the  victory  at  the 
election  of  1906  appeared  to  open  up 
totally  new  prospects  for  radical  reform. 
Addison's  own  interests  were  in  matters 
of  health  and  social  welfare.  His  general 
political  outlook  was  that  of  a  typical 
Radical.  He  was  well  read  in  John  Stuart 
Mill  [q.v.],  was  in  favour  of  Home  Rule, 
and  supported  the  nationalization  of  land. 
But  what  had  moved  him  to  enter  politics 
was  the  plight  of  the  poor  which  he  had 
witnessed  as  a  doctor,  their  chronic  state 
of  undernourishment,  the  lack  of  adequate 
medical  attention  when  they  were  ill,  the 
miserable  and  overcrowded  conditions  in 
which  so  many  of  them  lived. 

Addison  entered  the  Commons  at  the 
first  election  of  1910  and,  astonishingly 
for  a  man  with  no  connections  and  little 
skill  as  an  orator,  had  made  his  mark  in 
not  much  more  than  a  year.  His  chance 
came  with  the  national  health  insurance 
bill  of  1911.  His  special  knowledge  made 
him  an  invaluable  member  of  the  group  of 
politicians  and  civil  servants  around  Lloyd 
George  which  was  responsible  for  the 
measure.  Addison  helped  with  the  drafting 


of  amendments,  served  as  a  link  with  the 
doctors,  and  worked  indefatigably  in  the 
lobbies.  It  was  the  sort  of  work  for  which 
he  had  entered  politics  and  for  which, 
within  the  Liberal  Party,  he  was  uniquely 
fitted. 

During  these  months  he  fell  under  the 
spell  of  Lloyd  George.  It  was  the  making 
of  an  association  which  was  to  shape  his 
whole  political  future.  Lloyd  George,  a 
politician  to  his  finger  tips,  had  popular 
appeal,  a  subtlety  of  approach  to  difficult 
issues,  an  ability  to  charm  and  manage 
men,  qualities  which  Addison  almost 
totally  lacked.  But  Addison's  own  skills 
were  not  inconsiderable,  especially  as 
they  were  complementary.  He  had  a 
capacity,  unusual  in  politicians,  for  mas- 
tering technical  problems,  his  appetite  for 
work  was  inexhaustible,  and  he  was  to 
prove  himself  a  sound  and  thorough  ad- 
ministrator. Moreover,  he  was  content  to 
be  a  subordinate  since  he  was  almost  with- 
out the  kind  of  political  ambition  and 
competitiveness  which  Lloyd  George  him- 
self possessed  in  such  abundance.  Believ- 
ing that  Lloyd  George  shared  his  aims  and 
that  he  was  the  only  man  in  politics 
capable  of  achieving  them,  Addison  was 
to  serve  him  with  total  loyalty. 

At  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  Addison 
was  still  a  backbencher,  although  since 
1911  he  had  been  much  involved  as  Lloyd 
George's  aide  in  a  number  of  schemes  for 
the  expansion  of  welfare  services.  He  was 
appointed  parliamentary  secretary  to  the 
Board  of  Education  in  August  1914 ;  then, 
when  a  ministry  of  munitions  was  set  up 
with  Lloyd  George  at  its  head  in  May 
1915,  Addison  joined  him.  His  post  was 
that  of  parliamentary  secretary,  but  to 
him  Lloyd  George  assigned  the  main  re- 
sponsibility for  organizing  from  scratch 
a  ministry  which,  in  the  range  of  its  per- 
sonnel and  the  scope  of  its  functions,  had 
no  precedent.  It  came  into  existence  at  a 
time  of  crisis  when  the  traditional  methods 
of  supplying  the  army  had  proved  in- 
capable of  meeting  the  demands  generated 
by  modern  war.  By  the  application  of 
new  techniques,  soon  to  be  labelled  'war 
socialism',  a  transformation  was  wrought 
in  the  British  economy.  Production  soared, 
private  industry  was  brought  under  a 
system  of  control  and  supervision,  the 
Government  itself  built  and  operated,  fac- 
tories on  an  enormous  scale.  In  all  this, 
Addison  was  invaluable,  undertaking 
much  of  the  detailed  ministerial  work 
which  Lloyd  George  was  only  too  happy 
to   delegate.    Perhaps   Addison's   largest 


D*NJB.  1951-1960 


Addison 


contribution  was  to  work  out  a  costing 
system  for  munitions  which  by  the  end  of 
the  war  had  saved  the  country  an  esti- 
mated £440  million.  He  was  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council  in  June  1916. 

In  July  Lloyd  George  left  munitions  to 
become  secretary  for  war,  but  Addison  re- 
mained absolutely  his  man.  In  the  minis- 
terial crisis  of  December  his  canvass  of 
Liberal  members  of  Parliament  was  of 
key  importance.  The  assurance  that  many 
Liberals  would  be  willing  to  support 
Lloyd  George  if  he  could  form  a  govern- 
ment enabled  Lloyd  George  to  demon- 
strate not  only  that  he  could  muster 
sufficient  support  to  maintain  himself  in 
office,  but  that  he  was  the  only  man  who 
could  do  so. 

Addison's  reward  was  the  Ministry  of 
Munitions  which  by  now  exercised  con- 
trol over  almost  every  aspect  of  war 
production.  But  in  July  1917  he  left  to 
become  minister  of  reconstruction.  He 
went  with  some  reluctance,  but  Lloyd 
George  was  anxious  to  replace  him  by  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill  and  had  taken  pains 
to  weaken  Addison's  position  by  some 
characteristically  devious  activities  during 
an  engineers'  strike  in  June.  Addison, 
however,  was  soon  enthusiastic  about  his 
new  task :  reconstruction  not  only  offered 
a  chance  to  plan  the  transition  of  the 
economy  from  war  to  peace,  but  also  to 
produce  longer-term  schemes  for  social 
reform.  Once  again  he  threw  himself  into 
the  organization  of  a  new  ministry.  Com- 
mittees in  abundance  were  set  to  work  to 
draw  up  blueprints  for  the  future. 

As  the  war  drew  to  a  close,  Addison 
began  to  realize  that  most  of  his  hopes 
were  to  be  dashed.  His  capacity  to  in- 
fluence policy  had  always  derived  from 
his  relationship  with  Lloyd  George.  He 
had  neither  party  support  nor  political 
backing  of  his  own.  To  the  public  at  large 
he  was  still  'Dr.  Addison',  remote  and  al- 
most unknown.  By  1918  he  was  no  longer 
as  close  to  Lloyd  George  as  before.  The 
prime  minister  was  preoccupied  with  more 
pressing  problems  than  reconstruction  and 
on  matter  after  matter  Addison  found 
himself  unable  to  get  a  decision. 

From  the  general  wreck  of  reconstruc- 
tion, however,  Addison's  favourite  scheme, 
the  establishment  of  a  ministry  of  health, 
was  salvaged.  He  became  president  of  the 
Local  Government  Board  in  January  1919 
and  then  introduced  a  bill  to  establish  a 
ministry  of  health,  becoming  the  first 
minister  himself  in  June.  He  had  always 
been     attracted    by    the     opportunities 


offered  by  the  consolidation  of  all  health 
questions  in  one  ministry,  but  in  1919  the 
first  priority  was  to  devise  ways  of  imple- 
menting the  pledge  of  'Homes  fit  for 
heroes'  which  had  been  so  loosely  given  at 
the  election  of  1918.  Before  the  war  the 
provision  of  housing  for  the  working 
classes  had  been  left  almost  completely  to 
private  builders  and  Addison  knew  from 
the  start  that  the  situation  required  a 
solution  such  as  had  been  imposed  by  the 
Ministry  of  Munitions  in  1915.  But  he  had 
no  control  over  prices  and  raw  materials 
and  no  power  to  direct  capital  or  labour 
from  inessential  work  to  housing.  Houses 
could  be  built  only  by  stimulating  the 
local  authorities  to  build  them.  The 
Housing,  Town  Planning,  etc.  Act  of  1919 
(usually  called  the  Addison  Act)  provided 
that  local  authorities  should  build  a  vir- 
tually unlimited  number  of  houses,  that 
their  rents  should  be  controlled  at  a  low 
level,  and  that  the  Government  would 
meet,  by  subsidy,  any  loss  beyond  that 
which  could  be  covered  by  a  penny  local 
rate.  During  the  next  three  years  the  State 
built  or  financed  well  over  200,000  houses 
but,  in  conditions  of  post-war  boom,  the 
cost  was  tremendous.  There  was  an  out- 
cry among  many  of  the  Conservative  sup- 
porters of  the  coalition  and,  in  April  1921, 
Lloyd  George  decided  to  let  them  have 
Addison's  head.  Addison  kicked  his  heels 
until  July  as  minister  without  portfolio 
and  then,  his  housing  policy  having  been 
torn  to  shreds,  left  the  Government. 

There  was  some  force  in  Lloyd  George's 
complaint  that  Addison  regarded  himself 
'as  a  martyr  to  the  cause  of  public  health' 
and  refused  to  understand  that  not  even 
the  prime  minister  had  any  hope  of  stem- 
ming the  tide  running  in  favour  of  economy 
and  against  extravagance.  But  Addison 
could  see  only  the  betrayal  of  the  pro- 
mises that  had  been  made  to  the  homeless 
and  the  sliun  dwellers.  It  was  for  him  a 
period  of  deep  bitterness  and  frustration. 
His  attachment  to  Lloyd  George  had  long 
since  cut  him  off  from  the  main  body  of 
Liberals  so  that,  after  a  defeat  at  the  elec- 
tion of  1922,  it  was  almost  inevitable  that 
he  should  turn  to  the  Labour  Party.  His 
experience  of  the  post-war  coalition  had 
persuaded  him  that  the  Labour  Party 
offered  the  sole  hope  of  achieving  the 
social  reforms  on  which  his  heart  was  set 
and,  as  he  reflected  on  the  lessons  to  be 
drawn  from  his  years  at  munitions  and 
reconstruction,  he  became  convinced  that 
socialist  forms  of  control  were  not  only 
socially    desirable    but    could    also    be 


Addison 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


considerably  more  efficient  than  the 
methods  of  traditional  capitalism. 

Addison  failed  to  get  back  to  the  Com- 
mons at  the  election  of  1924  when  he 
stood  for  Hammersmith  South,  and  these 
years  were  mainly  devoted  to  writing.  He 
gave  his  version  of  the  housing  contro- 
versy in  The  Betrayal  of  the  Slums  (1922) 
and  this  was  followed  by  Politics  from 
Within  (2  vols.,  1924)  and  Practical  Social- 
ism (2  vols.,  1926).  In  1929  he  was  returned 
for  Swindon  and  was  appointed  parlia- 
mentary secretary  to  the  Ministry  of 
Agriculture  in  the  second  Labour  Govern- 
ment, succeeding  Lord  Noel-Buxton  [q.v.] 
as  minister  in  June  1930.  In  a  Cabinet 
which  contained  few  energetic  figures 
Addison  was  quickly  ready  with  a  major 
legislative  programme  for  agriculture. 
Then  came  a  stroke  of  fortune.  Because 
Addison's  parliamentary  secretary  was  in 
the  Lords,  it  was  agreed  that  he  would 
need  help  with  piloting  what  were  certain 
to  be  extremely  controversial  measures 
through  the  Commons.  C.  R.  (later  Earl) 
Attlee,  who  had  recently  succeeded  Sir 
Oswald  Mosley  as  chancellor  of  the  Duchy 
of  Lancaster,  was  assigned  the  task.  He 
was  deeply  impressed  by  Addison's  ability 
to  master  a  subject  and  by  the  skill  with 
which  he  ran  his  department  and  managed 
both  his  own  party  and  the  Opposition  in 
standing  committee. 

In  major  political  matters,  Addison  was 
on  the  outer  fringe  of  the  Cabinet.  But 
when  the  financial  crisis  which  destroyed 
the  Government  came  to  a  head  on  23 
August  1931  he  stood  with  those  who 
opposed  MacDonald  and  Snowden  on 
cuts  in  unemployment  benefit,  the  only 
middle-class  member  of  the  Cabinet  to 
do  so.  Loss  of  office  was  followed,  at  the 
election  in  October,  by  loss  of  his  seat  in 
the  Commons.  He  regained  it  at  a  by- 
election  in  1934  only  to  be  defeated  at  the 
election  of  1935.  His  wife  had  died  in  the 
previous  year. 

In  May  1937,  powerfully  persuaded  by 
Attlee,  he  was  created  a  baron.  Later  in 
the  same  year  he  married  (Beatrice) 
Dorothy,  daughter  of  Frederick  Percy 
Low,  a  solicitor.  He  continued  to  be  an 
active  writer  and  publicist,  his  most  im- 
portant books  of  these  years  being  Four 
and  a  Half  Years  (2  vols.,  1934)  and 
A  Policy  for  British  Agriculture  (1939).  In 
1940  he  became  leader  of  the  Labour 
peers,  but  the  war  afforded  no  outlet  for 
his  talents  more  considerable  than  the 
chairmanship  of  the  Buckinghamshire 
war  agricultural  executive  committee. 


But,  after  the  Labour  victory  at  the 
election  of  1945,  Attlee  appointed  him 
leader  of  the  House  of  Lords.  He  was  then 
seventy-six,  yet  he  was  still  in  the  Attlee 
government  when  it  fell  in  October  1951, 
having  held  meanwhile  the  posts  of  secre- 
tary of  state  for  dominion  affairs  (1945-7), 
lord  privy  seal  (1947-51),  paymaster- 
general  (1948-9),  and  lord  president  of  the 
Council  (1951).  Throughout  this  period 
if  his  administrative  responsibilities  had 
been  small,  in  the  Lords  he  faced  a  task 
which  tested  his  skill  to  the  utmost.  He 
was  responsible,  in  the  face  of  an  over- 
whelming Conservative  majority,  for  the 
passage  of  a  large  and  far-reaching  legisla- 
tive programme.  He  managed  the  Lords 
superbly,  greatly  aided  by  the  fact  that 
Lord  Salisbury,  with  whom  he  struck  up 
a  remarkable  understanding,  was  leader  of 
the  Conservative  peers.  To  explain  Addi- 
son's success,  Attlee  was  wont  to  quote 
what  a  Conservative  whip  had  said  of  him 
in  1931,  'How  can  we  oppose  this  man? 
He  is  so  decent.'  No  doubt  deeper  political 
consideration  than  this  lay  at  the  root  of 
the  decision  of  the  Conservative  peers  to 
make  sparing  use  of  their  strength  after 
the  debacle  of  1945,  but  Addison's  per- 
suasiveness did  much  to  reconcile  them  to 
their  lot. 

As  an  elder  statesman  with  no  political 
ambitions  of  his  own,  he  was  of  great 
value  to  Attlee  in  the  Cabinet.  His  advice 
was  listened  to  and  he  could  always  be 
relied  upon  for  help  in  dealing  with  'diffi- 
cult people  like  Aneurin  Be  van'.  Attlee, 
who  rarely  allowed  personal  and  political 
relationships  to  come  into  contact,  had 
a  great  admiration  and  affection  for  Addi- 
son and  turned  to  him  constantly  as  friend 
and  adviser. 

Addison  was  advanced  to  a  viscountcy 
in  1945  and  created  K.G.  in  1946.  He  died 
11  December  1951  at  his  home  at  Radnage 
in  Buckinghamshire,  and  was  succeeded 
by  his  eldest  son,  Christopher  (born  1904). 
His  career  had  been  one  of  the  most  un- 
usual of  his  time.  Not  entering  the  Com- 
mons until  he  was  forty,  he  was,  apart 
from  Lloyd  George,  the  only  man  to  hold 
office  continuously  from  1914  to  1921. 
Then,  his  career  seemingly  in  ruins,  he  had 
to  wait  until  he  was  seventy-six  for  a 
second  chance.  His  responsibilities  in  the 
Attlee  government  were  general  and  legis- 
lative, but  few  politicians  of  the  second 
rank  can  match  his  record  of  innovation  in 
the  earlier  part  of  his  career.  Before  1914 
he  helped  to  work  out  the  details  of  a  new 
medical  and  welfare  system.  During  the 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Aga  Khan 


war  of  1914-18  he  played  a  large  part  in 
initiating  the  methods  of  'war  socialism' 
which  began  the  conversion  of  individualist 
capitalism  to  the  collectivism  of  a  later 
age.  The  Ministry  of  Health  was  his  per- 
sonal creation  and,  in  spite  of  the  circum- 
stances of  his  political  fall,  it  was  Addison 
who  more  than  any  other  man  transformed 
the  housing  of  the  working  classes  from 
a  capitalist  enterprise  into  a  social  service. 
The  setting  up  of  the  research  councils  for 
medicine,  science  and  industry,  and  agri- 
culture was  largely  due  to  his  energy  and 
determination. 

Attlee  wrote  of  him,  'Patience,  friend- 
liness, common  sense — ^these  were  his 
virtues — nobody  wanted  to  quarrel  when 
Addison  was  around.  He  made  it  seem 
wrong.'  But  Addison's  career  was  based 
on  more  than  these  personal  qualities. 
He  represented  the  idealist  and  humani- 
tarian tradition  in  British  poUtics  and 
part  of  his  importance  is  that  he  empha- 
sized the  chain  of  continuity  which 
linked  the  Labour  Party  to  a  Radical  past. 
But  he  was  at  his  best  in  office,  loyal  to 
colleagues,  active  in  innovation,  sage  in 
council,  and  skilled  in  administration. 

[Addison's  own  writings ;  R.  J.  Minney, 
Viscount  Addison:  Leader  of  the  Lords,  1958 ; 
Observer,  7  February  1960;  private  informa- 
tion.] Maurice  Shock. 

AGA  KHAN,  AGA  SULTAN  Sir 
MOHAMMED  SHAH  (1877-1957),  third 
holder  of  the  title  Aga  Khan  (bestowed  on 
his  grandfather  by  the  British  Govern- 
ment), 48th  head  of  the  Ismaili  sect  of  the 
Shiah  Moslem  community,  and  a  member 
of  the  ruling  Kajar  dynasty  in  Persia,  was 
born  in  Karachi  2  November  1877.  Son 
of  Aga  Khan  II,  he  succeeded  his  father 
in  1885.  His  mother.  Lady  Ali  Shah,  a 
former  Persian  princess,  and  a  woman  of 
character  and  vision,  alive  to  the  impor- 
tance of  the  role,  political  and  religious, 
which  her  son  would  have  to  fill,  brought 
him  up  with  a  care,  skill,  and  judgement 
for  which  he  always  remained  grateful. 

He  assumed  the  active  administration 
of  the  Imamate  in  1893,  in  his  sixteenth 
year.  His  eleven  to  twelve  million  fol- 
lowers, scattered  over  India,  Burma,  the 
Middle  East,  and  Africa,  looked  to  him 
not  only  as  their  spiritual  leader,  but  for 
the  resolution  of  their  temporal  problems. 
So  early  as  1893  he  instructed  his  followers 
in  Bombay  to  keep  out  of  communal 
rioting;  in  1901  he  applied  spiritual  sanc- 
tions to  Ismailis  who  had  made  mur- 
derous attacks  on  Sunnis ;  he  consistently 


urged  his  followers  to  identify  themselves, 
in  manners,  language,  and  customs,  with 
the  countries  in  which  they  lived.  There 
were  occasions  when  his  liberal  and 
moderate  attitude  failed  to  carry  his  com- 
munity with  him,  as  in  1901,  when  the 
Isma  Asri  sect  broke  away,  and  again  dur- 
ing the  Balkan  wars  (1912-13)  and  the 
Khilafat  agitation  (1919-21).  But  his  was 
a  restraining  influence  and  broadly  speak- 
ing the  community  responded  to  his  lead 
over  political  issues.  His  spiritual  in- 
fluence remained  unshaken,  even  after  old 
age  and  ill  health  had  reduced  his  political 
importance. 

The  Aga  Khan  was  chosen  in  1897  by 
the  Moslems  of  Western  India  to  convey 
to  the  viceroy  their  greetings  to  the 
Queen  Empress  on  her  diamond  jubilee. 
In  1898  he  began  a  hfelong  series  of  visits 
to  Europe,  Africa,  Asia,  and  America  and 
was  received  at  Windsor  by  Queen  Vic- 
toria. 

In  1902  Lord  Curzon  [q.v.]  nominated 
him  to  the  viceroy's  legislative  council, 
on  which  he  served  for  two  years,  declin- 
ing a  second  term.  He  used  the  oppor- 
tunity to  urge  the  claims  of  a  Moslem 
university  at  Aligarh,  to  which  he  had  lent 
substantial  financial  support. 

The  Aga  Khan  had  throughout  main- 
tained the  friendliest  of  relations  with  the 
Indian  Congress  leaders,  and  particularly 
with  G.  K.  Gokhale.  He  had  spared  no 
pains  to  maintain  communal  unity,  to 
integrate  Moslem  political  feeUng  with  the 
Congress  Party,  and  so  to  present  a  united 
front,  with  constitutional  advance  as  its 
objective,  to  the  British  Government.  He 
had,  too,  done  his  best  to  reduce  the 
communal  antagonisms  which  derived 
from  the  partition  of  Bengal  of  1905.  But 
by  1906,  now  established  as  a  political 
force,  and  as  the  recognized  leader  and 
spokesman  of  the  Indian  Moslems  as  a 
whole,  he  began  to  conclude  that  Congress 
would  prove  incapable  of  representing 
Indian  Moslem  feeling :  'already  that  arti- 
ficial unity  which  the  British  Raj  had  im- 
posed from  without  was  cracking' ;  'our 
only  hope  lay  along  the  fines  of  indepen- 
dent organization  and  action'. 

In  that  year  he  led  a  delegation  to  Lord 
Minto  [q.v.]  which  urged  the  case  for  in- 
creased Moslem  participation  in  the  politi- 
cal fife  of  the  country  and  pressed  that 
they  should  be  regarded  as  a  nation  within 
a  nation,  with  rights  and  obligations  safe- 
guarded by  statute,  with  adequate  and 
separate  representations  both  in  local 
bodies  and  on  legislative  councils,   and 


Aga  Khan 


D.NiB.  1951-1960 


with  a  separate  communal  franchise  and 
electoral  roll.  Lord  Minto's  reply  was  re- 
assuring. 

Later  in  1906  the  All-India  Moslem 
League  was  foiuided,  and  the  Aga  Khan 
was  elected  its  first  president,  an  office 
which  he  held  until  1912.  He  lent  his  active 
support  to  the  Morley-Minto  reforms  of 
1909,  but  intercommunal  feeling  con- 
tinued to  grow,  despite  the  cancellation  of 
the  partition  of  Bengal. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  the  Aga 
Khan,  who  had  exercised  a  restraining 
influence  on  Indian  Moslem  opinion  during 
the  Balkan  wars  of  1912-13,  was  in  Zanzi- 
bar. He  at  once  volunteered  his  services 
and  instructed  his  followers  to  render  all 
possible  support.  He  was  advised  that  he 
could  help  best  in  the  diplomatic  field.  His 
endeavours  to  promote  Turkish  neutrality 
failed,  but  when  Turkey  joined  the  Cen- 
tral Powers  and  by  declaring  a  jehad  or 
holy  war  created  a  difficult  situation  for 
Indian  and  other  Moslems,  he  unhesi- 
tatingly and  successfully  urged  on  them 
full  co-operation  with  the  Allies.  In  1915 
he  was  entrusted  with  a  mission  of  major 
importance  to  Egypt,  the  effect  of  which 
was  to  reassure  Egyptian  opinion  and  to 
secure  the  internal  stabiUty  of  the  country, 
with  the  invaluable  consequent  assistance 
to  the  Allies  of  a  strategically  placed  and 
dependable  base. 

On  his  return  to  England  in  September 
1914  the  Aga  Khan  had  again  met  Gok- 
hale,  and  with  him  strove  to  compose  a 
memorandum  on  Indian  constitutional 
progress  representing  their  joint  views  on 
the  establishment  of  federation  in  India 
as  a  step  towards  self-government.  Early 
in  1915  Gokhale  died,  addressing  his 
political  testament  to  the  Aga  Khan,  and 
not  to  M.  K.  Gandhi  [q.v.]  or  any  Hindu 
leader,  for  publication  two  years  later,  by 
when  he  hoped  the  war  would  be  over  and 
India  capable  of  working  out  her  own 
destiny.  The  testament  was  duly  pub- 
lished, with  a  further  plea  by  the  Aga 
Khan  that  after  the  war  East  Africa  might 
be  reserved  for  Indian  colonization  in 
recognition  of  India's  services.  But  it  was 
overtaken  by  events  which  led  to  the 
Montagu-Chelmsford  reforms  of  1919. 

Ill  health  prevented  the  Aga  Khan  from 
taking  the  part  he  would  have  wished  in 
these  developments.  But  his  enforced 
leisure  resulted  in  1918  in  his  India  in 
Transition,  dedicated  to  his  mother,  a 
thoughtful  and  closely  argued  study  which 
attracted  much  attention.  He  reminded 
the  British  of  their  grant  of  full  self- 


government  to  South  Africa,  and  urged 
the  case  for  the  sharing  of  power  in  India, 
and  for  a  widely  based  South  Asian 
Federation  of  which  an  India  ultimately 
self-governing  must  be  the  centre  and 
pivot. 

After  the  war  the  Aga  Khan  was  active 
in  pressing  on  the  Allies  the  long-term  im- 
portance of  the  question  of  the  Caliphate, 
and  of  a  policy  towards  Turkey  which 
should  be  practical  as  well  as  temperate, 
just,  and  equitable.  Strongly  as  his  own 
sympathies  lay  with  Turkey,  he  was  a 
realist  and  restraining  influence  on  Mos*- 
lems  in  India,  and  as  such  sharply  criti- 
cized by  many  members  of  his  community 
during  the  Khilafat  agitation  in  which  the 
Ali  brothers  had  the  active  support  of 
Gandhi  and  the  Congress. 

By  1924  difficulties  in  Kenya  between 
the  British  settlers  on  the  one  hand,  and 
the  British  Government  and  the  local 
Indian  interests  on  the  other,  resulted  in 
a  committee  of  inquiry  under  (Sir)  John 
Hope  Simpson.  The  Aga  Khan,  who  had 
declined  the  chairmanship,  was  a  member, 
and  the  committee's  report  proposed  com- 
promises, more  particularly  over  Indian 
immigration  into  East  Africa,  and  the 
reservation  of  certain  districts  in  the 
coastal  lowlands  which  were  of  much  im- 
portance to  India. 

From  1924  to  1928  the  Aga  Khan 
spent  'a  period  devoted  almost  ex- 
clusively to  my  own  personal  and  private 
life'. 

At  the  end  of  1928  an  All-Indian  Mos- 
lem conference  met  at  Delhi  under  his 
chairmanship  to  formulate  Moslem  opinion 
in  view  of  the  commission  under  Sir  John 
(later  Viscount)  Simon  [q.v.]  on  India's 
constitutional  future.  Its  unanimous  con- 
clusions, the  more  significant  in  that  they 
had  the  support  of  M.  A.  Jinnah  [q.v.], 
remained  the  guiding  light  for  the  Moslem 
community  in  all  subsequent  discussions. 
They  contemplated  a  federal  system  with 
complete  autonomy  and  residuary  powers 
vested  in  the  constituent  states :  took  note 
that  the  right  of  Moslems  to  elect  their 
representatives  in  the  various  Indian 
legislatures  was  now  the  law  of  the  land, 
of  which  they  could  not  be  deprived  with- 
out their  consent:  and  stipulated  that  in 
the  provinces  in  which  Moslems  consti- 
tuted a  minority  they  should  have  a 
representation  in  no  case  less  than  that 
already  enjoyed :  and  that  they  must  have 
their  due  share  in  the  central  and  provin- 
cial cabinets. 

The  Simon  report  of  1930  was  followed 


D.NiB.  1051-1960 


Aga  Khan 


by  the  three  Round  Table  conferences  of 
1930-32.  The  Aga  Khan  was  elected  chair- 
man of  the  British-India  delegation  and 
throughout  played  a  material  part  in  the 
discussions.  At  all  times  alive  to  the  im- 
portance of  compromise,  and  of  adapting 
communal  claims  to  the  interests  of  India 
as  a  whole,  he  made  an  important  con- 
tribution to  securing  a  unanimous  report 
from  the  joint  select  committee  (1933-4) 
presided  over  by  Lord  Linlithgow  [q.v.] 
which  resulted  in  the  Government  of  India 
Act  of  1935.  But  he  failed  to  secure  Con- 
gress acceptance  of  a  joint  memorandum, 
with  the  drafting  of  which  he  was  closely 
concerned,  embodying  a  united  demand 
on  behalf  of  all  communities  covering 
almost  every  important  political  point  in 
issue,  which  sought  to  ensure  continuity  in 
the  process  of  the  further  transfer  of  re- 
sponsibility, and  which,  in  his  judgement, 
would  have  immensely  simplified  all 
future  constitutional  progress. 

With  the  passing  of  the  Government  of 
India  Act  he  ceased  for  the  time  actively 
to  concern  himself  with  Indian  constitu- 
tional advance.  But  his  high  standing, 
religious  and  political,  his  extensive 
travels  and  wide  contacts,  his  fluency  in 
the  principal  European  languages,  and  his 
independence  of  outlook,  had  made  him 
increasingly  a  figure  not  merely  of  Indian 
and  Commonwealth  but  of  international 
importance,  and  from  1932  he  was  for 
some  years  prominent  in  the  League  of 
Nations.  He  was  a  representative  of  India 
at  the  world  disarmament  conference  at 
Geneva  in  1932,  was  leader  of  the  Indian 
delegation  to  the  League  of  Nations  As- 
sembly in  1932  and  1934-7,  and  in  1937 
president  of  the  Assembly.  It  was  while 
president  that  he  visited  Hitler.  He  subse- 
quently lent  his  fullest  support  to  the 
Munich  settlement,  suggesting  in  a  much 
criticized  article  in  The  Times  that  the 
Fiihrer  should  be  taken  at  his  word,  and 
questioning  whether  he  had  really  meant 
what  he  had  said  in  Mein  Kampf. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  the  Aga 
Khan  was  in  Europe.  He  at  once  issued 
a  manifesto  urging  his  followers  to  give 
the  fullest  support  to  Britain.  In  the 
winter  of  1939-40  he  visited  India,  when 
he  persistently  restated  British  war  aims, 
and  endeavoured  to  act  as  an  inter- 
mediary with  Reza  Shah  of  Persia.  He  led 
a  deputation  to  the  viceroy  on  behalf  of 
Indians  in  South  Africa,  and  endeavoured, 
unsuccessfully,  by  discussion  with  the 
Nawab  of  Bhopal  [q.v.]  and  Gandhi,  to 
bring   about   mutual   understanding  be- 


tween the  Indian  parties  for  the  prosecu- 
tion of  the  war.  He  returned  to  Europe 
in  April  1940,  and  on  the  fall  of  France 
withdrew  to  Switzerland,  where  he  re- 
mained under  medical  treatment,  barred 
from  political  activity,  until  the  end  of  the 
war.  The  criticism  which  his  inactivity 
provoked  took  perhaps  insufficient  ac- 
count of  his  serious  and  continued  ill 
health. 

He  returned  to  India  in  1946  to  find 
that,  while  his  influence  remained  un- 
shaken with  his  own  community,  which 
celebrated  his  diamond  jubilee  in  India 
and  East  Africa  in  1946,  the  Moslem  politi- 
cal leadership  had  passed  decisively  to 
Jinnah,  to  whom  he  was  to  pay  a  generous 
tribute  in  his  Memoirs.  After  partition  in 
1947  the  Aga  Khan  ceased  to  be  an  active 
participant  in  Indian  politics. 

Ill  health  in  his  later  years  greatly  re- 
duced his  activity,  but  he  maintained  the 
closest  touch  with  the  Ismaili  community, 
and  continued  to  travel  extensively.  In 
1949  he  took  up  Persian  citizenship,  while 
remaining  a  British  subject.  His  platinum 
jubilee  was  celebrated  in  Karachi  in  Feb- 
ruary 1954.  In  that  year  he  published  his 
Memoirs. 

Throughout  his  life  he  was  keenly  in- 
terested in  horse-racing,  and  his  scientific 
concern  with  bloodstock  and  breeding 
methods  had  a  material  effect  on  English 
horse-breeding.  Coming  to  the  English 
turf  after  1918,  he  won  the  Queen  Mary 
Stakes  at  Ascot  in  1922  (Cos)  and  had 
thereafter  a  record  of  outstanding  distinc- 
tion, winning,  in  addition  to  many  minor 
successes,  the  Derby  in  1930  (Blenheim); 
the  Two  Thousand  Guineas,  Derby,  and 
St.  Leger  (the  triple  crown)  with  Bahram 
in  1935;  and  the  Derby  again  in  1936 
(Mahmoud),  1948  (My  Love),  and  1952 
(Tulyar).  In  1954  he  finally  disposed  of  his 
studs. 

Shrewd,  active,  a  connoisseur  of  the 
arts,  a  good  scholar,  a  citizen  of  the  world, 
an  experienced  and  courageous  politician, 
a  hardworking  religious  leader  alive  to  the 
importance  of  the  education  and  physi- 
cal fitness  of  his  community,  with  great 
material  resources,  he  was  for  long  a  major 
figure  in  Indian  politics,  and  in  his  time, 
helped  by  his  broadminded  and  construc- 
tive approach  and  his  instinct  for  com- 
promise, he  gave  service  of  great  value  to 
his  community  and  to  the  Commonwealth. 

The  Aga  Khan  was  married  in  1896  to 
a  cousin  in  her  teens,  Shahzadi  Begum. 
There  was  no  issue,  and  the  marriage  was 
dissolved.  In  1908  he  married,  in  Cairo, 


Aga  Khan 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


by  Moslem  rites,  an  Italian  lady,  Teresa 
Magliano,  by  whom  he  had  a  son  who  died 
in  infancy,  and  Aly  Khan. 

The  Begum  died  in  1926.  In  1929  he 
married  Andree  Carron,  by  whom  he  had 
one  son,  Sadruddin.  This  union  having 
been  dissolved  by  divorce  in  the  Geneva 
civil  courts  in  1943  (the  Aga  Khan  being 
awarded  custody  of  the  son),  he  married  in 
1945  Yvette  Larbousse,  who  survived  him, 
and  to  whose  devoted  care  in  old  age  and 
illness  he  owed  much. 

In  1898  Queen  Victoria  had  personally 
invested  him  with  the  K.C.I.E.  He  was 
appointed  G.C.I.E.  (1902),  G.C.S.I.  (1911), 
G.C.V.O.  (1923),  and  G.C.M.G.  (1955), 
thus  receiving  his  last  decoration  from 
Queen  Elizabeth.  He  held  filso  the  Bril- 
liant Star  of  Zanzibar  1st  Class  (1900)  and 
(1901)  the  Royal  Prussian  Order  of  the 
Crown,  1st  Class  (which  he  returned  on 
the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914). 

In  1934  he  was  sworn  of  the  Privy 
Council,  the  first  Indian,  other  than  mem- 
bers of  the  Judicial  Committee,  to  receive 
this  honour.  He  was  an  honorary  LL.D.  of 
Cambridge  (1911).  In  1916,  an  honour 
which  he  particularly  valued.  King 
George  V  gave  him  a  salute  of  eleven  guns, 
and  the  rank  and  precedence  for  life  of 
a  first-class  ruling  chief  of  the  Bombay 
Presidency. 

The  Aga  Khan  died  at  Versoix,  near 
Geneva,  11  July  1957,  and  is  buried  at 
Aswan.  He  nominated  as  his  successor  as 
Aga  Khan  IV  his  grandson  Karim  (born 
1936),  elder  son  of  Aly  Khan. 

The  Begum  Aga  Khan  has  two  por- 
traits by  Van  Dongen;  Princess  Andree 
Aga  Khan  has  one  by  Sir  Oswald  Birley 
and  another  by  Edmond  Souza;  Prince 
Sadruddin  Aga  Khan  has  one  by  John 
Berwick. 

[The  Aga  Khan,  Memoirs,  1954;  Stanley 
Jackson,  The  Aga  Khan,  1952 ;  H.  J.  Green- 
wall,  The  Aga  Khan,  1952;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Gilbert  Laithwaite. 

AGNEW,  Sir  WILLIAM  GLADSTONE 
(1898-1960),  vice-admiral,  was  born  in 
London  2  December  1898,  the  fifth  son  of 
Charles  Morland  Agnew,  art  dealer,  and 
his  wife,  Evelyn  Mary,  daughter  of  Wil- 
liam Naylor,  and  grandson  of  Sir  William 
Agnew  [q.v.].  He  joined  the  Royal  Navy 
in  September  1911  and  was  at  Dartmouth 
when  war  broke  out  in  1914.  He  was  sent 
to  sea  as  a  midshipman,  serving  in  the 
battleships  Glory  and  Royal  Oak  and  in 
the  destroyer  Skilful.  After  the  war  his 
appointments  included  the  royal  yacht 


and  in  1924  he  went  to  the  Excellent,  the 
gunnery  school  at  Portsmouth,  to  qualify 
as  a  sp>ecialist  in  gunnery.  During  these 
years  he  played  rugby  football  regularly 
for  the  navy  as  well  as  cricket,  hockey, 
and  tennis. 

Agnew's  first  ship  as  a  specialist  officer 
was  the  cruiser  Durban  and  in  1931  he  was 
appointed  gunnery  officer  of  the  battle- 
ship Queen  Elizabeth,  flagship  of  the 
Mediterranean  Fleet.  He  was  promoted 
commander  in  1932  and  captain  in  1937. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  he  was 
given  command  of  the  armed  merchant 
cruiser  Corfu  and  in  October  1940  was 
transferred  to  the  cruiser  Aurora.  It  was 
the  start  of  a  period  in  which  his  name  and 
that  of  his  ship  became  world-famous.  In 
the  summer  of  1941  the  Aurora  had  a 
share  in  the  sinking  of  a  German  cruiser, 
a  destroyer,  and  two  supply  ships.  Then  in 
the  autumn  Agnew  was  sent  to  the  Medi- 
terranean as  the  senior  officer  of  Force  K, 
consisting  of  the  Aurora,  her  sister  ship 
the  Penelope,  and  the  destroyers  Lance 
and  Lively.  This  move  was  quickly  justi- 
fied. On  the  night  of  8  November,  Force 
K  intercepted  a  strongly  escorted  enemy 
supply  convoy  of  seven  ships  bound  for 
North  Africa.  Agnew  had  made  carefully 
thought-out  plans  for  just  such  an  en- 
counter and  had  discussed  his  tactics  in 
detail  with  the  other  commanding  officers. 
As  a  result  he  was  able  to  stalk  the  convoy 
undetected  and  took  the  enemy  com- 
pletely by  surprise.  All  the  supply  ships 
and  one  of  their  escorting  destroyers  were 
sunk  without  so  much  as  a  scratch  on 
Force  K.  As  he  left  his  ship  on  return  to 
harbour  to  report  to  the  vice-admiral, 
Malta,  Agnew  was  spontaneously  cheered 
by  the  officers  and  men  of  the  Penelope — 
a  rare  tribute.  A  great  leader,  he  was  at 
the  same  time  the  most  likeable  and 
modest  of  men.  For  his  services  in  this 
action  he  was  appointed  C.B.  (1941). 

Further  sorties  by  Force  K  led  to  the 
sinking  of  three  fuel  tankers.  All  these 
successes  created  a  critical  fuel  situation 
for  the  German  Air  Force  in  North  Africa 
and  had  an  important  effect  on  Axis  plans. 
In  December  the  Aurora  struck  a  mine  but 
Agnew  got  her  safely  back  to  England 
after  temporary  repairs  in  Malta  and  she 
soon  returned  to  the  thick  of  the  fighting. 
At  the  end  of  1942  the  Aurora  formed  part 
of  the  naval  force  in  Operation  Torch,  the 
allied  invasion  of  North  Africa,  and  from 
then  on  was  constantly  in  action,  attack- 
ing enemy  warships  and  convoys  and 
fighting  off  enemy  air  attacks.  It  was  a 


IP 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Akers 


tribute  to  Agnew  and  the  Aurora  that  the 
ship  was  chosen  to  carry  King  George  VI 
from  TripoH  to  Malta  for  the  royal  visit  to 
the  island  in  June  1943.  For  this  service 
the  King  appointed  Agnew  C.V.O. 

The  Aurora  played  a  full  part  in  the 
allied  invasions  of  Italy  and  Sicily,  carry- 
ing out  a  great  many  bombardments  in 
support  of  the  landings.  In  October,  how- 
ever, she  was  severely  damaged  in  an  air 
attack  in  the  Eastern  Mediterranean. 
Agnew  took  his  damaged  ship  into 
Alexandria  whence  he  was  ordered  home 
to  take  command  of  the  Excellent.  He  had 
been  appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  in  April  1943 
and  subsequently  received  a  bar  (1944). 

After  the  war,  in  March  1946,  Agnew 
was  appointed  to  command  the  battleship 
Vanguard.  He  was  promoted  rear-admiral 
in  January  1947  and  remained  in  com- 
mand for  the  royal  visit  to  South  Africa. 
On  conclusion  of  the  tour  he  was  promoted 
K.C.V.O.  In  August  1947  Agnew  was  ap- 
pointed director  of  personal  services  at  the 
Admiralty,  where  he  remained  until  Octo- 
ber 1949.  In  January  1950  he  retired  from 
the  navy  at  his  own  request,  and  later 
in  the  year  was  promoted  to  vice-admiral 
on  the  retired  list. 

For  the  next  three  years  Agnew  was  the 
general  secretary  of  the  National  Playing 
Fields  Association.  By  his  drive,  inspira- 
tion, and  sheer  hard  work  he  put  it  on 
its  feet  again  after  its  lapse  during  the 
war  and  re-established  its  effectiveness 
throughout  the  country.  In  1953  he 
turned  his  energies  to  the  work  of  local 
government.  He  also  took  a  lead  in  the 
Christian  Stewardship  campaign  in  his 
local  parish.  In  the  midst  of  these  many 
and  varied  activities  he  died  suddenly  at 
his  home  in  Alverstoke  12  July  1960. 

In  1930  Agnew  married  Patricia  Caro- 
line, daughter  of  Colonel  Alfred  William 
Bewley,  C.M.G. ;  they  had  no  children. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

A.  D.  NiCHOLL. 

AKERS,  Sir  WALLACE  ALAN  (1888- 
1954),  chemist,  was  born  at  Walthamstow 
9  September  1888,  the  son  of  Charles 
Akers,  a  chartered  accountant,  and  his 
wife,  Mary  Ethelreda  Brown.  He  was  the 
second  child  in  a  family  of  five,  and  the 
middle  of  three  brothers.  He  was  educated 
at  Bexhill-on-Sea  and  at  Aldenham  School. 
From  there  he  went  to  Christ  Church, 
Oxford,  where  he  studied  chemistry  and 
obtained  first  class  honours  in  1909.  He 
took  a  prominent  part  in  rowing  and  was 
in  his  college  boat  which  won  the  Grand 


Challenge  cup  at  Henley  in  1908  and  the 
Visitors'  Challenge  cup  in  1909. 

In  1911  Akers  joined  Brunner  Mond  & 
Co.  in  Cheshire  where  apart  from  a  brief 
spell  in  the  research  laboratory  he  was 
occupied  with  process  work  for  its  de- 
velopment and  better  understanding.  He 
was  by  training  a  physical  chemist — one  of 
the  first  Oxford  produced — and  the  type 
of  work  he  had  in  Cheshire  suited  him 
very  well. 

In  1924  he  went  for  some  three  years 
to  the  Far  East  in  the  employment  of 
the  Borneo  Company,  Ltd.  Meanwhile, 
Imperial  Chemical  Industries  had  been 
formed  in  1926  and  in  1928  he  returned  to 
London  to  work  in  close  conjunction  with 
Colonel  George  Paton  PoUitt  who  was  then 
I.C.I.'s  technical  director.  This  work  gave 
Akers  wide  experience  in  many  branches 
of  chemical  technology  and  so  in  1931, 
when  a  process  of  decentralization  was  put 
into  effect  throughout  I.C.I.,  Akers  was 
made  responsible"  for  their  Billingham  ac- 
tivities. These  were  essentially  concerned 
with  high  pressure  techniques  using  hydro- 
gen. Ammonia  synthesis  was  a  major 
interest  at  this  time. 

In  his  period  of  responsibility  at  Billing- 
ham much  prominence  was  given  to  the 
possibility  of  an  industry  based  on  the 
hydrogenation  of  coal  and  its  derivatives 
to  yield  various  oil  products  and  it  was 
under  his  general  direction  that  the  im- 
portant experiment  of  treating  something 
of  the  order  of  450T  per  day  of  coal 
(designed  to  produce  of  the  order  of 
100,000T  per  year  of  petrol)  was  in- 
augurated, to  be  continued  until  the 
unexpected  economic  conditions  conse- 
quent on  the  war  inevitably  brought  it  to 
a  conclusion. 

When  he  returned  to  I.C.I,  head- 
quarters in  1937  Akers  worked  with  (Sir) 
Holbrook  Gaskell  mainly  in  connection 
with  the  enormous  wartime  factory  ex- 
pansion programme.  In  1939  he  was 
appointed  an  executive  manager,  in  1941 
a  director,  and  in  1944  director  responsible 
for  research.  He  held  that  position  until 
his  retirement  from  the  company  in  1953. 

In  1941  Akers  was  seconded  to  a  special 
section  of  the  Department  of  Scientific 
and  Industrial  Research  to  be  director, 
under  the  general  guidance  of  Sir  John 
Anderson  (later  Viscount  Waverley,  q.v.) 
as  lord  president  of  the  Council,  for  all  the 
British  contribution  to  the  development 
of  atomic  energy.  Lord  Waverley  wrote: 
'Experience  showed  clearly  that  no  better 
selection  could  have  been  made.  His  wide 


11 


Akers 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


knowledge,  unbounded  ener^,  even  tem- 
per, and  absolute  integrity  fitted  him 
admirably  for  a  task  which  called  for  in- 
genuity, tact,  and  organizing  ability  of 
a  high  order.  He  had  not  only  to  co- 
ordinate the  activities  of  scientists  of  the 
greatest  eminence  here  and  abroad,  but 
also  to  conduct  negotiations  of  great 
delicacy  in  both  the  United  States  and 
Canada.  His  services  were  recognized  by 
the  award  of  a  C.B.E.  in  1944  and  a 
knighthood  in  1946.' 

In  1946  Akers  reverted  whole  time  to 
his  position  on  the  board  of  I.C.I.  In 
carrying  out  his  responsibilities  as  research 
director  he  made  it  the  outstanding  feature 
of  his  work  to  be  a  guiding  inspiration  and 
not  in  any  sense  an  instructor.  He  never 
interfered  in  the  detailed  work  of  the  re- 
search staff  working  in  the  decentralized 
divisions.  The  broad  way  in  which  he 
interpreted  his  duties  enabled  him  to  con- 
centrate some  of  his  activities  so  that  they 
had  far-reaching  influences.  Thus  he  was 
instriunental  in  establishing  a  series  of 
I.C.I,  research  fellowships  which  have 
sponsored  research  activities  in  many  uni- 
versities. He  was  a  guiding  inspiration  in 
securing  the  publication  of  Endeavour  to 
fill  a  unique  place  among  regular  scientific 
publications.  He  was  also  largely  respon- 
sible for  setting  up  in  1946  near  Welwyn 
a  central  research  laboratory  to  study 
problems  not  directly  the  concern  of 
any  of  the  decentralized  divisions.  It  was 
fittingly  renamed  the  Akers  Research 
Laboratory  after  his  death. 

Akers  was  a  most  clubbable  man.  For 
many  years  he  resided  in  the  Royal 
Thames  Yacht  Club  where  he  delighted  in 
having  friends  and  acquaintances  to  dine. 
If  he  could  do  a  friend  a  service  he  did  it 
thoroughly,  to  the  smallest  detail.  A  hard 
worker,  he  readily  occupied  himself  read- 
ing and  writing  to  the  small  hours.  Outside 
professional  affairs  his  interests  were  in 
music  and  art,  but  a  reputation  as  a  good 
pianist  was  brought  to  an  end  by  an  acci- 
dent to  his  hand.  His  interest  in  the  arts 
was  acknowledged  by  his  appointment  as 
a  member  of  the  scientific  advisory  com- 
mittee, and  subsequently  a  trustee,  of  the 
National  Gallery. 

He  received  the  honorary  degree  of 
D.Sc.  from  Durham  (1949)  and  of  D.C.L. 
from  Oxford  (1952)  and  was  elected  F.R.S. 
in  1952.  He  was  treasurer  of  the  Chemical 
Society  from  1948  until  1954. 

His  friends  looked  upon  him  as  a  con- 
firmed bachelor  and  were  surprised  when 
in  1953  he  married  Mademoiselle  Berna- 


dette  La  Marre.  After  he  died  at  Alton, 
Hampshire,  1  November  1954,  his  widow 
returned  to  France  where  she  survived 
him  by  nearly  six  years. 

{Manchester  Guardian  and  The  Times, 
2  November  1954;  Lord  Waverley  and  Sir 
Alexander  Fleck  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  i,  1955; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Fleck. 

ALEXANDRA  VICTORIA  ALBERTA 
EDWINA  LOUISE  DUFF,  Princess 
Arthur  of  Connaught,  Duchess  of 
Fife  (1891-1959),  elder  daughter  of  the 
first  Duke  of  Fife  and  of  Princess  Louise 
[q.v.],  eldest  daughter  of  the  then  Prince 
of  Wales,  was  born  at  Mar  Lodge,  Brae- 
mar,  17  May  1891.  Her  father,  the  sixth 
Earl  of  Fife,  who  bore  titles  in  the  peerages 
of  both  the  United  Kingdom  and  Ireland, 
had  been  created  a  duke  by  Queen  Victoria 
on  the  occasion  of  his  marriage  with  the 
Queen's  granddaughter  in  1889 ;  but  a  new 
creation  was  made  in  1900  whereby  the 
succession  might  pass  to  his  daughters, 
the  second  of  whom,  the  Lady  Maud,  was 
born  in  1893.  In  1905  King  Edward  VII 
created  his  eldest  daughter  Princess  Royal 
and  granted  her  two  children  the  style  and 
title  of  Princess  and  Highness,  with  pre- 
cedence after  members  of  the  royal  family 
styled  Royal  Highness. 

In  December  1911,  Princess  Alexandra 
set  out  with  her  parents  and  sister  for 
their  fourth  winter  in  Egypt.  In  the  early 
hours  of  13  December,  their  ship,  the  P.  & 
O.  liner  Delhi,  ran  ashore  off  Cape  Spartel, 
on  the  coast  of  Spanish  Morocco.  Boats 
from  the  Duke  of  Edinburgh  put  off  to  the 
rescue,  but  many  passengers,  including 
the  Duke  of  Fife's  party,  were  completely 
submerged  and  greatly  buffeted  by  the 
waves  before  reaching  shore.  Wet  through 
and  in  piercing  cold,  they  struggled 
through  a  gale  of  wind  and  rain  to  Cape 
Spartel  lighthouse,  where  they  were  re- 
vived ;  but  they  did  not  reach  the  British 
legation  at  Tangier  until  six  o'clock  in  the 
evening,  after  a  ten-mile  ride  on  mule- 
back.  After  a  few  days'  rest  the  party 
returned  to  Gibraltar  and  thence  pro- 
ceeded to  Egypt  and  the  Sudan.  On  19 
January  the  Duke  of  Fife  contracted  a 
chill  which  developed  into  pleurisy  and 
pneumonia ;  he  died  at  Aswan,  29  January 
1912,  aged  sixty-two.  His  titles,  other 
than  those  of  the  creation  of  1900,  became 
either  extinct  or  dormant,  but  Princess 
Alexandra  succeeded  him  as  Duchess  of 
Fife  and  Countess  of  Macduff. 


It 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Alington 


In  July  of  the  following  year  came  the 
announcement  of  the  engagement  of  the 
Duchess  of  Fife  to  her  cousin  Prince 
Arthur  [q.v.],  the  only  son  of  the  Duke  of 
Connaught  [q.v.]  and  Princess  Louise  of 
Prussia.  They  were  married  in  the  Chapel 
Royal,  St.  James's,  15  October  1913,  and 
on  9  August  1914  was  born  their  only 
child,  Alastair  Arthur,  who  bore  the  title 
of  Earl  of  Macduff. 

The  war  of  1914-18  gave  to  Princess 
Arthur  of  Connaught  the  opportunity  to 
embrace  a  vocation  of  nursing  in  which 
she  subsequently  made  a  highly  successful 
career.  In  1915  she  joined  the  staff  of  St. 
Mary's  Hospital,  Paddington,  as  a  full- 
time  nurse  and  worked  untiringly  in  this 
capacity  until  the  armistice.  After  the  war 
she  continued  her  training  at  St.  Mary's, 
becoming  a  state  registered  nurse  in  1919 
and  being  awarded  a  first  prize  for  a  paper 
on  eclampsia  (convulsions  in  late  preg- 
nancy). She  also  served  in  Queen  Char- 
lotte's Hospital  where  she  specialized 
in  gynaecology,  receiving  a  certificate 
of  merit.  Throughout  these  years  Prin- 
cess Arthur  increasingly  impressed  her 
superiors  by  her  technical  skill  and  practi- 
cal efficiency. 

When  in  1920  Prince  Arthur  of  Con- 
naught was  appointed  governor-general 
of  the  Union  of  South  Africa,  Princess 
Arthur  ably  seconded  him  and  shared  his 
popularity.  Her  tact  and  friendliness 
made  her  many  friends  among  the  South 
Africans,  who  also  greatly  admired  the 
interest  which  she  displayed  in  hospitals, 
child  welfare,  and  maternity  work 
throughout  the  Union.  To  these  subjects 
she  brought  her  exceptional  personal 
knowledge  and  experience,  which  enabled 
her  to  make  many  effective  and  valuable 
suggestions. 

On  her  return  to  London  (1923)  Princess 
Arthur  resumed  her  nursing  career  at  the 
University  College  Hospital,  where  she 
was  known  as  'Nurse  Marjorie',  and  at 
Charing  Cross  Hospital.  At  this  time  she 
was  specializing  in  surgery,  proving  her- 
self a  competent,  dependable,  and  imper- 
turbable theatre  sister,  who  was  capable 
of  performing  minor  operations  herself 
and  of  instructing  juniors  in  their  duties. 
Her  services  to  the  nursing  profession 
were  recognized  in  July  1925,  when  she 
was  awarded  the  badge  of  the  Royal  Red 
Cross. 

The  outbreak  of  war  in  1989  afforded 
Princess  Arthur  further  scope  for  her 
nursing  abilities.  She  refused  the  offer  of 
a  post  as   matron  of  a  hospital  in  the 


coimtry,  preferring  to  become  sister-in- 
charge  of  the  casualty  clearing  station  of 
the  2nd  London  General  Hospital.  Shortly 
thereafter,  however,  she  opened  the  Fife 
Nursing  Home  in  Bentinck  Street  which 
she  personally  equipped,  financed,  and  ad- 
ministered as  matron  for  ten  years  with 
great  competence. 

The  death  of  her  husband  in  1938  was 
followed  by  that  of  her  father-in-law,  the 
Duke  of  Connaught,  in  1942.  He  was  suc- 
ceeded by  his  grandson,  Alastair,  but 
little  more  than  a  year  later  the  young 
Duke,  who  had  seen  service  in  Egypt  as 
a  subaltern  in  the  Scots  Greys,  died  of 
pneumonia  in  Ottawa,  26  April  1943. 

Princess  Arthur  served  as  a  counsellor 
of  state  during  King  George  VI's  ab- 
sences abroad  in  1939,  1943,  and  1944. 
She  was  appointed  colonel-in-chief  of  the 
Royal  Army  Pay  Corps  in  1939  and  was 
also  president  and  later  patron  of  the 
Royal  British  Nurses'  Association  (of 
which  she  held  the  honorary  diploma)  and 
patron  of  the  Plaistow  Maternity  Hospital. 

In  1949  the  multiple-rheumatoid- 
arthritis,  from  which  Princess  Arthur  had 
suffered  for  many  years,  rendered  her 
completely  crippled  and  necessitated  the 
closing  of  her  nursing-home.  She  retired 
to  her  house  in  Regent's  Park  where  she 
wrote  for  private  circulation  two  auto- 
biographical fragments  in  a  vivid  and 
entertaining  style :  A  Nurse's  Story  (1955) 
and  Egypt  and  Khartum  (1956),  in  which 
she  gave  a  graphic  account  of  the  wreck 
of  the  Delhi ;  she  was  engaged  on  a  further 
volume  on  big-game  hunting  in  South 
Africa  when  she  died  at  her  London  home, 
26  February  1959.  At  her  special  request 
she  was  cremated,  her  ashes  being  laid  in 
the  chapel  of  Mar  Lodge.  The  dukedom  of 
Fife  devolved  upon  her  nephew.  Lord 
Carnegie,  the  son  of  her  sister,  who  had 
married  the  eleventh  Earl  of  Southesk  in 
1923  and  died  in  1945. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
John  Wheeler-Bennett. 

ALINGTON,      CYRIL      ARGENTINE 

(1872-1955),  headmaster  and  dean,  was 
born  in  Ipswich  22  October  1872,  the 
second  son  of  the  Rev.  Henry  Giles  Aling- 
ton, an  inspector  of  schools,  and  his  wife, 
Jane  Margaret  Booth.  He  went  with 
classical  scholarships  to  Marlborough 
where  he  was  in  the  cricket  eleven  and  to 
Trinity  College,  Oxford.  A  first  class  in 
honour  moderations  (1893)  and  in  literae 
humaniores  (1895)  was  followed  by  his 
election    at    the    second    attempt    to    a 


Id 


Alington 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


fellowship  at  All  Souls  in  November  1896. 
In  that  year  he  had  returned  as  sixth-form 
master  to  Marlborough.  He  was  ordained 
deacon  (1899)  and  priest  (1901)  and  in  the 
former  year  moved  to  Eton  where  in  1904 
he  became  master  in  College.  In  the  nine 
years  between  1899  and  1908  he  was  'the 
most  alive  and  brilliant  of  the  younger 
masters — the  best  preacher,  the  most 
entertaining  division  master,  the  most  in- 
spiring tutor'.  In  1908  he  was  appointed 
headmaster  of  Shrewsbury  School  and  in 
January  1917  he  succeeded  his  brother- 
in-law,  Edward  Lyttelton  (whose  bio- 
graphy he  subsequently  wrote  for  this 
Dictionary),  as  headmaster  of  Eton. 
He  retired  in  1933  and  until  1951  was 
dean  of  Durham. 

AUngton  was  endowed  with  almost 
every  gift  to  ensure  a  successful  career. 
Extraordinarily  handsome,  especially  in 
later  years  when  robed  and  in  the  pulpit, 
he  never  failed  to  impress  the  boys  at 
Shrewsbury  and  Eton.  As  a  young  man 
he  was  a  very  successful  cricketer  and  for 
years  afterwards  he  maintained  a  high 
standard  as  a  player  of  fives  and  rackets. 
He  was  never  quite  a  first-class  classical 
scholar,  nor  was  he  looked  upon  as  a  pro- 
foimd  theologian.  He  possessed  a  wide 
and  extraordinarily  retentive  memory 
which  enabled  him  to  produce  the  apt 
quotation  for  any  occasion.  He  was  a  most 
facile  and  brilliant  versifier  and  he  com- 
posed some  admirable  hymns.  He  was 
greatly  interested  in  political  history  and 
wrote  some  historical  works  which  are 
lively,  readable,  and  often  illimiinating. 
Probably  the  best  is  Twenty  Years,  a 
study  of  the  party  system,  1815-1833 
(1921).  He  also  wrote  a  number  of  detec- 
tive stories  and  other  novels :  clever,  witty, 
but  quickly  perishable.  All  these  varied 
publications  bear  witness  to  the  in- 
credible speed  at  which  his  mind,  his 
imagination  and  his  pen  worked  and 
which  characterized  also  the  briUiance  of 
his  conversation.  In  everyday  Ufe,  at  the 
dinner  table,  in  after-dinner  talk,  it  was 
possible,  especially  for  a  stranger,  to  write 
AUngton  off  as  a  brilliant  but  facile  and 
ungenuine  man.  But  his  ephemeral  books 
and  pyrotechnic  conversation  served  as 
a  safety-valve  for  the  volcanic  energy  of 
his  mind  and  for  the  depth  of  his  very  real 
emotions. 

Undoubtedly  his  greatness  lay  in  his 
genius  for  teaching,  especially  for  teaching 
religion  as  distinct  from  theology.  In 
A  Dean's  Apology  (1952)  Alington  quotes 
Bishop   Creighton   [q.v.]   as   saying   'the 


function  of  a  teacher  is  to  be  an  intellec- 
tual mustard  plaster'.  This  function  he 
carried  out  to  the  full.  He  was  probably 
a  better  teacher  of  the  ordinary  boy  than 
of  the  first-class  scholar.  His  teaching  was 
at  first  a  bewildering,  exhausting,  and 
always  an  exciting  and  rewarding  ex- 
perience for  those  boys  who  had  ears  to 
hear ;  and  it  was  Alington's  triumph  that 
the  deaf  were  made  to  hear.  He  was  not 
concerned  with  imparting  information 
but  with  bringing  boys'  minds  alive. 

In  the  pulpit  Alington  was  much  nearer 
to  the  mind  of  the  public-school  boy  than 
was  any  other  preacher  of  his  time.  His  \ 
series  of  Shrewsbury  and  Eton  Fables  pro- 
vided a  wholly  new  approach  to  illustrat- 
ing in  modern  idiom  the  fundamental 
Christian  doctrine.  His  addresses  to  boys 
and  also  to  masters  and  their  families 
during  Holy  Week  were  without  doubt 
his  greatest  contribution  to  the  religious 
education  of  the  young. 

Alington  always  had  a  tremendous  zest 
for  living.  Probably  he  was  most  serenely 
happy  during  his  years  in  College,  where 
he  produced  one  of  the  most  brilliant 
generation  of  scholars  Eton  had  ever 
known;  and  at  Shrewsbury  where  the 
time  had  come  for  new  men  and  new 
measures  and  he  gave  himself  wholly  to 
the  task  of  putting  the  school  back  on  the 
map.  He  returned  to  Eton  to  triumph  over 
the  difficulties  of  the  war  years.  To  each 
successive  stage  of  his  life  he  brought  the 
same  infectious  enthusiasm,  the  same 
kindness  and  capacity  for  friendship,  so 
that  the  care  he  lavished  on  beautifying 
the  site  at  Shrewsbury  was  easily  trans- 
ferred to  the  cathedral  at  Durham,  and 
the  affection  which  he  had  for  the  boys 
at  Eton  and  Shrewsbury  was  equally  dis- 
played to  the  miners  of  Durham.  He  was 
blessed  with  the  most  perfect  family  life  in 
which  his  wife  played  at  least  half  the 
main  part.  The  deaths  in  his  lifetime  of 
two  of  their  six  children  were  bitter  blows, 
but  they  were  met  with  a  fortitude  made 
possible  only  by  their  invincible  belief  in 
the  Christian  religion. 

In  1904  Alington  married  Hester  Mar- 
garet, daughter  of  the  fourth  Lord 
Lyttelton  [q.v.].  She  was  appointed  C.B.E. 
in  1949  and  died  in  1958.  They  had  two 
sons  and  four  daughters.  The  elder  son, 
Giles,  became  dean  and  senior  tutor  of 
University  College,  Oxford,  and  died  in 
1956 ;  he  was  a  much  loved  man,  of  wit, 
wisdom,  and  compassion.  The  second  son 
was  killed  at  Salerno  in  1943.  The  eldest 
daughter  died  at  the  age  of  thirty.  The 


14 


D.N,B.  1951-1960 


Ambedkar 


three  other  daughters  became  the  wives 
respectively  of  (Sir)  Alec  Douglas-Home, 
(Sir)  Roger  Mynors,  and  the  Rev.  John 
Wilkes,  warden  of  Radley  College 
(1937-54). 

Alington  proceeded  D.D.,  Oxford,  in 
1917  and  received  an  honorary  D.C.L., 
Durham,  in  1937.  He  was  elected  an 
honorary  fellow  of  Trinity  in  1926  and  was 
chaplain  to  the  King  in  1921-33.  He  died 
at  Treago,  Herefordshire,  16  May  1955. 
A  portrait  by  G.  Fiddes  Watt  is  in  the 
possession  of  the  family,  and  a  drawing  by 
Francis  Dodd  is  at  Eton. 

[C.  A.  Alington,  A  Dean's  Apology,  1952; 
Eton  College  Chronicle,  27  May  1955 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

C.  R.  N.  RouTH. 

ALTRINCHAM,  first  Baron  (1879- 
1955),  administrator  and  politician.  [See 
Grigg,  Edward  William  Macleay.] 

AMBEDKAR,  BHIMRAO  RAMJI  (1891- 
1956),  Indian  statesman,  was  born  at 
Mhow  in  Central  India  14  April  1891,  the 
youngest  of  the  fourteen  children  of  Ramji 
Maloji  Sakpal,  a  subedar-major  in  the 
British  Indian  Army  and  headmaster  in 
a  military  school,  and  his  wife,  Bhimabai 
Murbadkar.  When  the  boy  was  barely  two 
his  father  retired  and  settled  first  at 
Dapoli,  then  at  Satara,  where  he  attended 
the  high  school.  His  family  were  Un- 
touchables, belonging  to  the  community 
of  Mahars  who  though  of  lowly  caste  are 
reputed  to  be  a  spirited  and  sensitive 
people  from  whom  the  Bombay  Army 
obtained  its  earliest  recruits.  The  in- 
dignities, humiliations,  and  hardships  to 
which  he  was  subjected  stirred  in  this 
proud,  intelligent,  and  sensitive  boy  a  bit- 
ter resentment  which  lingered  with  him  to 
the  end.  From  a  teacher  who  showed  him 
kindness  he  adopted  the  surname  Am- 
bedkar. 

He  next  attended  Elphinstone  High 
School  in  Bombay  and  later  Elphinstone 
College  with  financial  help  from  the 
Maharaja  Gaekwar  of  Baroda  [q.v.].  He 
graduated  in  1912  and  in  the  following 
year  went  with  a  scholarship  from  the 
Maharaja  to  Columbia  University,  New 
York,  graduating  in  1915  with  a  thesis  on 
'Ancient  Indian  Commerce'.  Proceeding 
to  London  he  joined  the  London  School  of 
Economics  and  was  admitted  to  Gray's 
Inn.  His  scholarship  expired  in  1917  and 
unable  to  afford  further  studies  he  re- 
turned to  India  where  the  terms  of  his 
scholarship  required  him  to  enter  the  ser- 


vice of  Baroda  State.  Although  a  junior 
administrative  officer  he  found  himself  as 
an  Untouchable  treated  with  contempt  by 
clerks  and  office  boys,  unable  to  obtain 
accommodation,  and  even  denied  food. 

Consequently  Ambedkar  left  Baroda 
State  in  disgust  and  in  November  1918 
managed  to  secure  a  job  as  lecturer  in 
political  economy  at  Sydenham  College, 
Bombay.  Two  years  later  he  returned  to 
England  where  he  was  called  to  the  bar  in 
1922  and  obtained  his  M.Sc.  (1921)  and  his 
D.Sc,  London,  in  1923  for  a  thesis,  subse- 
quently published,  on  'The  Problem  of  the 
Rupee'.  After  a  brief  stay  at  the  university 
of  Bonn  he  returned  to  India  in  April  1923 
and  started  legal  practice  in  Bombay. 
In  his  professional  career  he  was  again 
handicapped  by  the  fact  of  being  an 
Untouchable;  and  his  intellectual  arro- 
gance did  little  to  further  his  popularity. 
He  was  a  better  jurist  than  lawyer,  com- 
bining a  combative  manner  with  massive 
scholarship  which  he  flourished  rather 
ponderously.  He  was  less  impressive  as  an 
advocate  in  court  than  as  a  politician  on 
a  platform. 

Ambedkar  soon  began  to  organize  the 
Untouchables  and  to  make  them  politi- 
cally conscious  of  their  lack  of  status.  In 
1924  he  founded  the  Society  for  the  Wel- 
fare of  Outcastes  and  three  years  later  the 
British  Government  nominated  him  as  a 
representative  of  the  Untouchables  to  the 
Bombay  legislative  council.  It  M^as  the 
beginning  of  his  political  career.  He  soon 
grew  to  be  a  prominent  figure  on  pubUc 
platforms,  became  a  professor  of  the 
Government  Law  College,  Bombay  (1928), 
and  not  long  after  was  appointed  by  the 
Government  to  the  Bombay  committee 
which  on  a  provincial  basis  assisted  the 
reforms  commission  headed  by  Sir  John 
(later  Viscount)  Simon  [q.v.]. 

In  September  1930  Ambedkar  was  offi- 
cially invited  to  attend  the  Indian  Round 
Table  conference  in  London  as  a  repre- 
sentative of  the  so-called  Depressed 
Classes.  His  appointment  marked  a  mile- 
stone in  the  socio-political  struggle  of  the 
Untouchables,  for  never  before  had  they 
been  consulted  in  framing  the  future  of 
India.  Ambedkar  became  an  all-India 
figure.  He  used  this  vantage-point  success- 
fully to  question  with  blunt  and  miUtant 
doggedness  the  claim  of  M.  K.  Gandhi 
[q.v.]  to  represent  all  India,  including  the 
Untouchables.  The  inability  of  the  Con- 
gress Party  to  reach  a  Hindu-Moslem 
settlement  at  the  second  Round  Table 
conference  led  the  British  Government  to 


15 


Ambedkar 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


announce  its  own  communal  award  which 
treated  the  Untouchables  as  politically 
separate  from  the  Hindus.  Gandhi,  then  in 
prison,  launched  on  a  protest  fast  which 
led  ultimately  to  negotiations  with  Am- 
bedkar culminating  in  the  Poona  Pact  of 
1932  which  conceded  far  more  parliamen- 
tary representations  to  the  Untouchables 
than  they  had  been  allotted  under  the 
British  award.  It  was  the  price  which  Con- 
gress had  to  pay  to  keep  the  Untouchables 
within  the  Hindu  fold. 

Ambedkar's  attitude  to  the  Congress 
Party  and  particularly  to  the  caste  Hindus 
thereafter  grew  increasingly  bitter  and 
demanding.  In  1935  he  first  announced 
his  intention  to  convert  the  Depressed 
Classes  to  some  other  religion.  In  1945  he 
founded  the  People's  Education  Society 
which  was  devoted  primarily  to  their  edu- 
cational uplift.  In  the  meantime,  on  the 
declaration  of  war  in  1939  Ambedkar  op- 
posed the  claim  of  Congress  to  speak  on 
behalf  of  the  country  and  drew  politically 
nearer  to  M.  A.  Jinnah  [q.v.]  and  the 
Moslem  League  in  their  opposition  to  what 
both  characterized  as  Hindu  chauvinism. 
In  1940  Ambedkar  published  Thoughts  on 
Pakistan  which  though  critical  of  some 
aspects  of  Jinnah' s  thinking  was  not  hos- 
tile to  the  idea  of  Pakistan.  When  in  1942 
Lord  Linlithgow  [q.v.]  decided  to  expand 
his  Executive  Council,  Ambedkar  was  in- 
vited to  join  it  as  the  member  in  charge  of 
labour. 

As  independence  drew  near  Ambedkar 
turned  his  attention  and  energies  to  the 
constructive  constitutional  tasks  for  which 
he  was  well  equipped  by  training  and 
temperament.  He  became  a  member  of  the 
Constituent  Assembly  in  1946  and  figured 
prominently  and  to  much  positive  purpose 
in  its  deliberations.  His  interest  in  and 
knowledge  of  constitutional  law  inevitably 
marked  him  as  one  of  the  principal  archi- 
tects of  independent  India's  constitution. 
Poetic  justice  and  natural  aptitude  com- 
bined to  enable  this  distinguished  Un- 
touchable leader  to  introduce,  as  law 
minister  of  the  first  government  of  free 
India,  the  draft  constitution  in  the  Con- 
stituent Assembly  on  4  November  1948. 
Ambedkar  also  contributed  to  the  drafting 
of  the  Hindu  code  bill,  in  the  process 
earning,  not  without  some  irony,  the  acco- 
lade of  'a  modern  Manu'  after  the  cele- 
brated Hindu  lawgiver.  On  27  September 
1951  he  resigned  from  Jawaharlal  Nehru's 
government,  thereby  abruptly  ending  an 
association  wherein  neither  he  nor  the 
Congress  Party  was  uniformly  at  ease. 


Ill  health  hampered  the  tempo  of  his 
normal  activities  and  his  last  days  were 
occupied  with  the  thought  of  embracing 
Buddhism  which  he  did,  with  many  of  his 
followers,  at  a  ceremony  in  Nagpur  in 
October  1956.  In  November  he  attended 
the  fourth  conference  of  the  World  Fellow- 
ship of  Buddhists  at  Katmandu,  Nepal.  It 
was  his  last  pubhc  appearance.  He  died  in 
his  sleep  on  the  night  of  5-6  December 
1956  at  Delhi. 

Ambedkar  was  twice  married:  first,  in 
1908  to  Ramabai  (died  1935),  daughter  of 
Bhiku  Walangkar,  a  railway  porter  at 
Dapoli.  They  had  four  sons  and  one 
daughter.  In  1948  he  married  Sharda 
Kabir,  a  Saraswat  Brahmin  by  caste  and 
a  doctor  by  profession.  They  had  no 
children. 

[Dhananjay  Keer,  Dr.  Ambedkar,  Life  and 
Mission,  1954.]  Frank  Moraes. 

AMERY,  LEOPOLD  CHARLES 
MAURICE  STENNETT  (1873-1955), 
statesman  and  journalist,  was  born  22 
November  1873  at  Gorakhpur  in  the  then 
North-Western  Provinces  of  India,  the 
eldest  of  the  three  sons  of  Charles 
Frederick  Amery,  of  the  Indian  Forest 
Department,  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth 
Leitner.  His  father  came  of  an  ancient 
Devon  family.  His  mother  was  a  Hun- 
garian who  had  left  after  the  unsuccessful 
revolution  of  1848,  her  widowed  mother 
marrying  in  Constantinople  Dr.  J.  M. 
Leitner,  a  British  subject  of  Austrian 
origin  who  was  a  medical  missionary.  She 
was  brought  to  London  in  1861  at  the  age 
of  eighteen.  When  Amery  was  three  she 
was  left  almost  penniless  when  her  hus- 
band threw  up  his  job  and  went  off  to 
America  leaving  her  no  alternative  but  to 
divorce  him.  She  contrived  to  obtain  a 
good  education  for  her  sons  and  it  was  to 
her  that  Amery  owed  an  inherited  gift  for 
languages  and  an  early  background  of 
historical  and  political  knowledge. 

In  1887,  two  terms  ahead  of  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill,  Amery  went  to  Har- 
row where  he  won  a  number  of  scholar- 
ships; a  'pocket  Hercules',  he  represented 
the  school  at  gymnastics.  He  went  as  an 
exhibitioner  to  Balliol  College,  Oxford, 
where  he  took  firsts  in  classical  modera- 
tions (1894)  and  liter ae  humaniores  (1896), 
was  proxime  accessit  to  the  Craven  scholar 
(1894),  and  won  his  half -blue  as  a  cross- 
country runner.  He  was  awarded  the 
Ouseley  scholarship  in  Turkish  by  the 
Imperial  Institute  in  1895.  After  one  un- 
successful attempt,  he  was  elected  a  fellow 


10 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Amery 


of  All  Souls  for  history  in  1897,  his  friend 
John  (later  Viscount)  Simon  [q.v.]  be- 
coming law  fellow  at  the  same  election. 
Between  the  two  examinations  Amery  had 
his  first  glimpse  of  public  life  by  acting 
as  private  secretary  to  Leonard  Courtney 
(later  Lord  Courtney  of  Penwith,  q.v.), 
the  blind  Liberal  statesman. 

At  the  end  of  his  first  term  at  All  Souls, 
Amery  telegraphed  to  C.  P.  Scott  [q.v.], 
editor  of  the  Manchester  Guardian,  offering 
to  visit  the  Near  East.  A  midnight  inter- 
view resulted  in  a  cheque  for  £100  and  a 
free  hand  to  write  on  whatever  interested 
him  from  Vienna  to  Constantinople.  He 
had  already  travelled  in  the  Balkans  and 
knew  at  various  levels  of  proficiency 
French,  German,  Italian,  Turkish,  Mag- 
yar, Serbian,  Bulgarian,  and  Sanskrit.  His 
special  qualifications  as  a  journalist  were 
noted  by  the  correspondent  of  The  Times 
in  Vienna  and  this  led  to  an  appointment 
in  1899  as  assistant  to  (Sir)  Valentine 
Chirol  [q.v.],  its  foreign  editor.  He  re- 
mained on  the  staff  of  The  Times  for  the 
next  ten  years,  writing  leading  articles, 
relieving  the  Berlin  correspondent,  and 
carrying  out  general  editorial  duties. 

The  South  African  war  gave  him  ex- 
periences which  had  a  lasting  effect  on  his 
political  creed.  Falling  under  the  spell  of 
Sir  Alfred  (later  Viscount)  Milner  [q.v.], 
he  became  a  passionate  advocate  of 
British  imperialism.  Having  made  friends 
among  the  Boers  before  the  outbreak  of 
war,  he  recognized  their  sturdy  qualities, 
yet  had  no  doubts  that  Joseph  Chamber- 
lain [q.v.]  was  in  the  right  and  Kruger  the 
aggressor.  Organizing  the  war  correspon- 
dents of  The  Times  and  serving  at  the 
front,  he  added  greatly  to  his  professional 
reputation.  He  might  have  been  taken 
prisoner  with  Churchill  had  he  not  stayed 
in  the  tent  they  shared  when  Churchill 
went  out  to  catch  the  armoured  train 
which  the  enemy  intercepted. 

Returning  to  London  after  a  year  in 
South  Africa,  Amery  edited  and  wrote 
much  of  The  Times  history  of  the  war 
which  ran  to  seven  volumes  and  occupied 
him,  intermittently,  until  1909.  He  was 
able  to  persuade  All  Souls,  his  *wider 
family'  with  which  he  maintained  a  life- 
long connection,  to  endow  a  chair  of  mili- 
tary history  at  Oxford ;  and  he  was  equally 
successful  in  his  suggestion  to  Alfred  Beit 
[q.v.]  that  he  should  endow  a  chair  of 
colonial  history. 

Called  to  the  bar  in  1902  by  the  Inner 
Temple,  Amery  continued  to  be  active  in 
daily  journalism  but  became  more  and 


more  drawn  into  extreme  right-wing  poli- 
tics. He  advocated  army  reform  and 
national  service  and  was  Chamberlain's 
loyal  disciple  on  the  tariff  reform  and  free- 
trade  issue.  Lord  NorthcUffe  [q.v.]  offered 
him  the  editorship  of  the  Observer  in  1908, 
and  wanted  him  to  succeed  G.  E.  Buckle 
[q.v.]  in  the  editorial  chair  of  The  Times 
in  1912.  But  by  then  Amery  had  turned 
to  politics,  and  he  supported  Geoffrey 
Robinson  (later  Dawson,  q.v.)  as  candi- 
date for  the  editorship.  After  failing  in 
four  attempts  to  enter  Parliament,  Amery 
was  returned  unopposed  in  1911  as  mem- 
ber for  South  Birmingham  (later  named 
Sparkbrook)  and  held  the  seat  until  1945. 

Once  in  the  House  of  Commons,  Amery 
threw  himself  with  zest  into  opposing 
the  Liberal  Government.  He  sided  with 
the  *Diehard'  Conservatives,  the  'Last 
Ditchers'  who  thought  the  Lords  should 
insist  upon  their  amendments  to  the 
Parliament  bill  despite  Asquith's  threat 
to  create  sufficient  peers  to  obtain  its  pas- 
sage. This  cause  lost,  the  Irish  Home  Rule 
crisis  gave  full  rein  to  his  delight  in  battle. 
He  visited  Ireland  early  in  1912  and  in  six 
weeks  wrote  seventeen  articles  for  the 
Morning  Post,  reprinted  as  The  Case 
Against  Home  Rule.  As  the  Government's 
difficulties  mounted,  after  the  Curragh 
incident,  so  did  Amery's  spirits.  The  harry- 
ing of  ministers  on  the  Irish  question,  he 
recalled  in  later  years,  'afforded  splendid 
hunting — or  perhaps  dentistry  might  be 
a  more  appropriate  word  ...  I  thoroughly 
enjoyed  the  hunt  myself . . .'.  By  contrast, 
his  service  on  the  select  committee  on  the 
Marconi  contract  in  1912-13  was  'the  most 
unpleasant  and  exasperating  experience* 
of  his  political  life. 

During  the  war  of  1914-18  Amery 
helped  to  organize  the  earliest  recruiting 
drives ;  then  saw  service  as  an  intelligence 
officer  in  Flanders,  the  Balkans,  GalUpoli, 
and  Salonika.  He  was  in  the  Caledonian 
when  she  was  torpedoed  by  a  submarine  in 
the  Mediterranean  and  escaped  by  con- 
cealing his  small  body  in  the  stern  sheets 
of  an  open  boat  afterwards  picked  up  by 
a  hospital  ship.  In  1916  Milner  took  Amery 
into  the  cabinet  secretariat  as  one  of  two 
political  secretaries,  the  other  being  Sir 
Mark  Sykes  [q.v.].  This  brought  him  into 
close  contact  with  the  inner  workings 
of  the  Imperial  War  Cabinet  and  the 
Supreme  War  Council  at  Versailles. 

When  Milner  went  to  the  Colonial  Office 
in  1919  he  chose  Amery  as  his  parliamen- 
tary under-secretary,  a  post  he  held  until 
1921  when  he  became  parliamentary  and 


17 


Amery 

financial  secretary  to  the  Admiralty.  He 
was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council  in  the  fol- 
lowing year.  Although  he  admired  Lloyd 
George's  'imagination  and  driving  power' 
Amery  became  convinced  that  the  coali- 
tion was  a  menace  by  reason  of  the  ascen- 
dancy of  Churchill  with  his  free-trade 
convictions.  The  return  of  the  Conserva- 
tives in  1922  brought  Amery  promotion  as 
first  lord  of  the  Admiralty.  His  defence  of 
the  navy  against  the  Geddes  economies 
was  vigorous  and  adroit  and  made  him  a 
controversial  figure  in  the  eyes  of  the 
public.  He  stood  up  for  the  admirals  in 
their  stubborn  attempt  to  regain  control 
of  their  own  air  service.  He  claimed  some 
share  in  the  suggestion  of  Baldwin  in  pre- 
ference to  Lord  Curzon  [q.v.]  as  prime 
minister  when  Bonar  Law  resigned  and  he 
was  in  the  forefront  of  Baldwin's  unsuc- 
cessful appeal  to  the  country  over  a  tariff 
policy  in  1923.  In  the  new  Conservative 
ministry  of  1924,  after  the  downfall  of 
Labour,  Amery  became  colonial  secretary : 
the  office  which  most  attracted  him.  His 
faith  in  Britain's  imperial  destiny  sprang 
from  his  loyalty  to  Milner  and  Chamber- 
lain and  to  the  convictions  he  had  formed 
by  extensive  travel  in  the  Empire.  For  the 
next  five  years  he  played  a  leading  part 
in  the  revolution  which  transformed  the 
Empire  into  an  association  of  indepen- 
dent partner  states  linked  by  the  Crown. 
His  whole-hogging  advocacy  of  closer 
economic  relations  between  the  British 
member  countries  led  to  clashes  with  col- 
leagues, especially  with  Churchill,  whose 
appointment  to  the  Treasury  he  considered 
disastrous.  Desiring  passionately  to  have 
the  Conservative  Government  go  all  the 
way  with  him  over  tariffs  and  preference, 
Amery  saw  in  Churchill  the  incarnation 
of  those  nineteenth-century  political  and 
economic  habits  of  thought  whose  dead 
hand  had,  in  his  view,  frustrated  Cham- 
berlain's grand  plan.  Amery  always  main- 
tained that  failure  to  put  his  imperial 
creed  into  practice  in  the  twenties  led  to 
industrial  woes  and  to  the  working  classes 
being  won  over  to  the  illusion  that  social- 
ism was  the  remedy.  Nemesis,  he  reflected, 
had  overtaken  the  impenitent  free  trader 
Churchill  when  the  country  rejected  him 
in  1945.  Zeal  amounting  to  bigotry  on  this 
issue  did  not  prevent  Amery  from  keeping 
on  friendly  personal  terms  with  his  col- 
leagues, including  Chiu"chill.  Often  a  lone 
wolf  in  urging  the  adoption  of  measures 
which  had  no  chance  of  attracting  majority 
opinion  even  inside  his  own  party,  he 
never  grew  embittered  and  continued  to 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


enjoy  social  life  in  wide  political,  intellec- 
tual, and  business  circles,  where  he  was 
always  a  welcome  figure. 

He  got  the  new  office  of  secretary  of 
state  for  dominion  affairs  created  in  1925 
and  held  it  jointly  with  the  colonial 
secretaryship  until  1929.  Baulked  of  im- 
perial preference  he  set  up,  in  the  face  of 
strong  Whitehall  opposition,  an  Empire 
Marketing  Board  with  an  annual  grant  of 
a  million  pounds  and  (Sir)  Stephen  Tal- 
lents  [q.v.]  as  its  secretary  to  promote  the 
sales  of  empire  produce  in  Great  Britain. 
This  body  gave  a  great  impetus  to  team 
work  in  agricultural  scientific  research  on 
an  empire-wide  scale.  The  imperial  con- 
ference of  1926  brought  the  definition  of 
dominion  status  later  enshrined  in  the 
Statute  of  Westminster.  In  1927-8  Amery 
visited  all  the  dominions  in  a  single  tour 
which  took  him  away  from  London  for  six 
months  and  in  the  course  of  which  he  made 
nearly  300  speeches.  This  experience  gave 
a  fresh  impetus  to  his  urge  for  imperial 
preference.  But  the  general  election  of 
1929  put  Labour  in  and  Amery  charac- 
teristically blew  away  the  cobwebs  by  a 
holiday  in  Canada,  where  he  made  the  first 
ascent  of  Mount  Amery,  a  10,940-feet 
peak  in  the  Rockies  which  had  already 
been  named  after  him. 

In  the  'national'  Government  of  1931 
Baldwin  was  unable  to  obtain  a  place  for 
Amery  who  was  thought  too  uncompro- 
mising. Throughout  the  thirties  he  made 
himself  heard  as  an  independent-minded 
critic  of  successive  ministries  on  economic 
and  foreign  policy  issues.  Baldwin  did  not 
go  far  enough  for  him  over  the  safeguard- 
ing of  industries ;  in  Empire  and  Prosperity 
(1930)  and  The  Forward  View  (1935)  and 
other  writings  Amery  continued  to  be  an 
undaunted  advocate  of  his  central  creed. 
This  was  far  from  absorbing  all  his  ener- 
gies. He  attacked  disarmament  and  the 
conception  of  a  League  of  Nations  with 
power  to  coerce  as  'imaginary  imperial 
robes'.  Unmoved  by  the  clamour  against 
the  Hoare-Laval  pact  over  Abyssinia,  he 
defended  it  as  a  common-sense  agreement. 
While  seeing  the  weakness  of  the  Munich 
settlement  his  first-hand  knowledge  of 
Central  European  affairs  held  him  back 
from  being  a  root-and-branch  critic  of  the 
Government.  Gradually  his  pleas  for  an 
agreed  national  policy  gained  him  the  ear 
of  the  House.  His  finest  parliamentary 
hour  came  in  May  1940  when  in  a  perora- 
tion, pointing  directly  at  the  prime 
minister.  Chamberlain,  he  quoted  Crom- 
well's words  when  turning  out  the  Long 


18 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Anderson,  A.  G. 


Parliament:  'You  have  sat  too  long  here 
for  any  good  you  have  been  doing.  Depart, 
I  say,  and  let  us  have  done  with  you. 
In  the  name  of  God,  go.' 

On  the  formation  of  the  Churchill 
ministry  Amery  hoped  to  be  put  in  charge 
of  defence  or  economic  policy  but  loyally 
accepted  the  India  Office,  although  feeling 
that  he  was  being  side-tracked.  In  the 
event  he  had  his  hands  full,  working  to 
bring  India  into  free  and  equal  partner- 
ship within  the  Commonwealth ;  he  had  to 
face  the  pacifist  Congress,  influenced  by 
M.  K.  Gandhi  [q.v.] ;  the  failure  of  the 
mission  under  Sir  Stafford  Cripps  [q.v.]  in 
1942 ;  the  'quit  India'  movement ;  and  the 
Bengal  famine  of  1943-4.  Amery 's  in- 
fluence had  helped  to  carry  the  Govern- 
ment of  India  Act  of  1935  which  Churchill 
had  opposed  and  the  latter's  continued 
reluctance  to  allow  any  fundamental 
change  made  in  the  Raj  added  to  Amery's 
burdens.  But  Indian  affairs  were  not  an 
all-absorbing  task :  he  found  time  to  send 
letters  and  memoranda  to  his  colleagues 
on  a  diversity  of  subjects.  These  interven- 
tions were  not  always  welcome. 

Amery  was  appointed  C.H.  in  1945.  He 
lost  his  seat  at  the  Labour  victory  in  that 
year  and  did  not  stand  again.  But  the  last 
ten  years  of  his  life  were  spent  with  un- 
flagging industry,  in  public  life,  and  as  an 
author.  The  three  volumes  of  My  Political 
Life  (1953-5),  going  from  his  birth  to  1940, 
all  written,  without  undue  modesty,  in  his 
seventies,  are  a  vivid  historical  chronicle 
as  well  as  a  testimony  of  faith. 

Amery  was  a  very  short,  wiry  man ;  an 
athlete  who  kept  up  his  prowess  as  a 
mountaineer  into  advanced  age.  A  dull, 
prosy  speaker  unless  aroused  by  indigna- 
tion, he  might  have  been  prime  minister, 
it  was  said,  had  he  been  half  a  head  taller 
and  his  speeches  half  an  hour  shorter.  His 
table  talk  brought  out  his  broad  range  of 
learning,  his  knowledge  of  men  and  places, 
his  wit  and  kindly  humanity.  While  he 
told  a  good  story  his  eyes  twinkled  imp- 
ishly from  behind  old-fashioned  glasses. 
His  delight  in  strenuous  escape  from  West- 
minster shines  through  Days  of  Fresh  Air 
(1939)  and  In  the  Rain  and  the  Sun  (1946). 
Pleasure  in  re-reading  the  classics,  above 
all  the  Odyssey  and  Horace,  stayed  with 
him  to  the  end.  So  did  his  remarkable  pro- 
ficiency in  many  modern  languages.  He 
had  been  in  his  time  president  of  the 
Classical  Association,  the  Alpine  Club,  and 
the  Ski  Club  of  Great  Britain,  and  was 
elected  an  honorary  fellow  of  Balliol  in 
1946.   A  founder   of  the   Empire   (later 


Commonwealth)  Parliamentary  Associa- 
tion, he  served  it  in  one  capacity  or  an- 
other for  over  twenty-five  years. 

In  1910  Amery  married  Adeliza  Florence 
('Bryddie'),  daughter  of  John  Hamar 
Greenwood,  of  Whitby,  Ontario,  and  sister 
of  Hamar  (later  Viscount)  Greenwood 
[q.v.].  There  were  two  sons.  The  elder, 
John,  was  executed  in  1945  for  treason. 
He  had  formed  the  belief  that  Commun- 
ism was  the  great  menace  and,  spending 
the  war  in  Germany  and  occupied  Europe, 
had  sought  to  enlist  British  prisoners  of 
war  or  internees  to  fight  against  Russia 
but  not  against  Britain.  The  younger  son, 
Harold  Julian  Amery,  after  a  distinguished 
war  career,  entered  politics,  married  a 
daughter  of  Harold  Macmillan,  and  was 
secretary  of  state  for  air  (1960-62)  and 
minister  of  aviation  (1962-4). 

Amery  died  in  London  16  September 
1955.  A  portrait  by  (Sir)  James  Gunn  is 
in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery ;  and  by 
Simon  Elwes  at  Rhodes  House,  Oxford. 
Amery  had  been  a  Rhodes  trustee  from 
1919  and  was  senior  trustee  from  1933. 

[Amery's  own  writings ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.]  A.  P.  Ryan. 


ANDERSON,  Sir  ALAN  GARRETT 

(1877-1952),  shipowner  and  public  ser- 
vant, was  born  in  London  9  March  1877, 
the  only  son  of  James  George  Skelton 
Anderson  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth  Garrett 
Anderson  [q.v.],  the  first  woman  to  qualify 
as  a  doctor  in  Great  Britain.  The  family 
came  from  Aberdeen  where  they  had  been 
shipowners  and  traders  since  the  seven- 
teenth century.  Anderson's  great-uncle, 
James,  had  established  a  branch  of  the 
business  in  London,  and  it  was  here  that 
his  father  was  engaged. 

Anderson  was  a  scholar  of  Eton  and  of 
Trinity  College,  Oxford,  of  which  he  later 
became  an  honorary  fellow.  On  leaving 
the  university  he  entered  the  family 
business,  Anderson,  Anderson  &  Co.,  joint 
founders  and  joint  managers  of  the  Orient 
Line.  They  subsequently  amalgamated 
with  their  partners  as  Anderson,  Green 
&  Co.  and  later  became  associated  with  the 
wider  shipping  businesses  controlled  by 
the  first  Earl  of  Inchcape  [q.v.].  Anderson 
then  became  one  of  Inchcape's  most 
valued  colleagues  and  a  director  of  the 
P.  &  O.  Company. 

It  did  not  take  Anderson  long  to  estab- 
lish his  reputation  in  the  w^orld  of  shipping. 
He  brought  to  the  business  a  powerful 
intellect   and   an  immense   capacity  for 


Id 


Anderson,  A.  G. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


work.  But  beyond  that  he  understood  and 
loved  ships,  and  maintained  throughout 
his  Ufe  the  closest  ties  of  friendship  with 
those  who  served  afloat.  Brought  up  in  his 
mother's  home  town,  Aldebiu-gh,  he  early 
became  a  keen  sailor ;  this  gave  him  added 
interest  in  his  contacts  with  the  captains 
and  officers  of  the  Orient  Line,  and  they  in 
turn  understood  and  trusted  him. 

In  1923  Anderson  was  vice-president  of 
the  Chamber  of  Shipping,  becoming  presi- 
dent in  the  following  year.  He  was  also, 
from  1927  to  his  death,  one  of  the  British 
directors  of  the  Suez  Canal  Company.  It  is 
interesting  to  find  him  in  1952  giving 
serious  consideration  to  the  future  ad- 
ministration of  the  Canal  when  ownership 
reverted  to  Egypt,  and  suggesting  lines  of 
a  possible  understanding  with  Egypt  in 
advance  of  the  crisis  which  he  foresaw. 

Although  shipping  was  Anderson's  first 
love,  he  had  wide  interests  in  other  fields. 
In  1911  he  was  elected  a  director  of  the 
Midland  Railway  Company,  and  so  con- 
tinued when  the  company  was  absorbed 
in  the  London,  Midland,  and  Scottish 
Railway.  This  was  the  start  of  a  long 
association  with  railway  administration, 
culminating  in  his  appointment  as  chair- 
man of  the  Railway  Executive  Committee 
and  controller  of  railways  during  the  war 
years  from  1941  to  1945. 

Long  before  this,  Anderson  had  per- 
formed valuable  public  work  in  other 
spheres.  During  the  war  of  1914-18  he 
served  in  various  capacities  under  Walter 
(later  Viscount)  Runciman  [q.v.],  the 
president  of  the  Board  of  Trade,  and  then 
in  1916  was  appointed  vice-chairman  of 
the  royal  commission  on  wheat  supplies 
and  chairman  of  the  Wheat  Executive 
which  controlled  the  supply  of  grain  to  the 
western  AUies.  In  1917  he  was  a  member 
of  Balfour's  mission  to  the  United  States, 
and  played  a  part  in  setting  up  the 
machinery  for  the  control  of  wheat  in 
North  America.  His  success  in  this  field 
led  to  his  appointment  in  1938  as  chair- 
man of  the  cereals  advisory  committee, 
and  later,  on  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939, 
as  chairman  of  the  Cereals  Control  Board 
— a  post  he  relinquished  on  becoming  con- 
troller of  railways. 

After  returning  from  the  United  States 
in  1917  he  left  the  Wheat  Commission  and 
was  appointed  controller  in  the  Admiralty, 
responsible  for  the  supply  of  ships  and 
equipment  for  both  the  Royal  and  Mer- 
chant navies.  So  far  as  the  Royal  Navy 
was  concerned,  this  had  previously  and 
has  since  always  been  undertaken  by  one 


of  the  sea  lords.  Anderson  displayed,  in 
difficult  circumstances,  his  remarkable 
ability  of  getting  on  with  other  people, 
and  his  skill  in  guiding  a  team  with  tact 
and  firmness.  In  this,  as  always,  he  made 
valuable  use  of  a  sense  of  humour,  with 
which  he  was  able  to  break  down  formid- 
able barriers. 

His  wide  experience  led,  in  1918,  to  his 
being  invited  to  join  the  court  of  the  Bank 
of  England,  and  he  was  chosen  as  deputy 
governor  in  1925-6.  In  1935,  against  his 
natural  inclination,  he  was  persuaded  by 
Montagu  (later  Lord)  Norman  [q.v.]  and 
others  to  enter  Parliament  as  one  of  the 
representatives  of  the  City  of  London. 
Accustomed  as  he  was  to  reach  decisions 
after  calm  reflection  and  carefully  reasoned 
argument,  he  did  not  find  the  atmosphere 
of  the  House  of  Commons  much  to  his 
Uking,  but  his  knowledge  and  experience 
of  business  and  finance  ensured  him  an 
attentive  hearing.  He  gave  up  his  seat  in 
1940  to  make  way  for  Sir  Andrew  Duncan 
[q.v.]  who  had  just  been  appointed  presi- 
dent of  the  Board  of  Trade,  and  thereafter 
devoted  all  his  energies  to  his  wartime 
tasks. 

When  Anderson  was  rising  to  a  position 
of  influence  in  the  British  shipping  in- 
dustry, it  was  still  dominated,  like  most 
industries,  by  men  brought  up  in  the 
traditions  of  rugged  individualism.  This 
was  his  own  background,  but  well  in  ad- 
vance of  most  of  his  contemporaries  he 
saw  the  need  for  international  co-opera- 
tion and  vigorously  espoused  the  cause  of 
the  International  Chamber  of  Commerce, 
in  the  development  of  which  he  played  an 
outstanding  part,  serving  successively  as 
vice-president,  president,  and  honorary 
life  president. 

His  firm  belief  in  the  need  for  economic 
co-operation  between  nations  led  Ander- 
son inevitably  to  the  view  that  co-opera- 
tion over  a  wider  field,  especially  between 
the  industrially  developed  nations  of 
western  Europe,  must  be  sought.  He  ac- 
cordingly gave  strong  support  to  the 
moves  initiated  in  1948  towards  some  form 
of  political  unity  in  Europe.  In  his  last 
major  contribution  to  the  deliberations  of 
the  International  Chamber  of  Commerce, 
at  its  Lisbon  conference  in  the  summer  of 
1951,  he  outlined  his  beliefs  and  called  for 
a  readiness  among  business  men  to  sup- 
port organic  change  in  Europe.  'For  thirty 
years  we  have  framed  liberal  resolutions 
pointing  the  road  to  prosperity  and  peace ; 
for  thirty  years  national  divisions,  hopes, 
and  jealousies  have  blocked  the  road  to 


20 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Anderson,  J. 


progress.  Shall  we  be  "minding  our  busi- 
ness" if  we  do  not  make  sure  that  the 
public  know  how  much  of  their  poverty,  of 
their  fear,  of  their  danger,  they  owe  to 
frontiers  and  sovereignties  ?' 

Perhaps  the  most  striking  thing  about 
this  many-sided  man  was  the  thorough- 
ness with  which  he  was  prepared  to  probe 
in  depth  any  matter  he  took  up.  His 
mother's  influence  had  naturally  led  him 
to  interest  himself  in  hospitals,  and  he 
threw  himself  energetically  into  problems 
of  hospital  management,  and  finally 
found,  in  this  sphere,  the  activity  which, 
of  all  others,  captivated  his  interest  and 
enthusiasm.  This  lay  in  the  establishment 
of  the  Hospital  Saving  Association.  The 
idea  was  not  his;  but  it  was  his  own 
determination  which  transformed  it  into 
a  valuable  and  successful  social  organiza- 
tion. 

Anderson  was  appointed  K.B.E.  in  1917 
and  G.B.E.  in  1934.  In  spite  of  all  his 
many  interests,  he  could  always  find  time 
for  relaxation,  especially  yachting,  was  a 
delightful  host  and  companion,  and  the 
father  of  a  strongly  united  family.  He 
married  in  1903  Muriel  Ivy,  daughter  of 
G.  W.  Duncan,  of  Richmond,  Surrey. 
They  had  two  sons  both  of  whom  became 
prominent  in  the  shipping  world  and  two 
daughters.  He  died  in  London  4  May  1952. 

A  bronze  bust  by  W.  A.  Verbon  is  at 
the  headquarters  of  the  Hospital  Saving 
Association.  Another  cast  is  at  his  old 
home,  Notgrove  Manor,  near  Cheltenham. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Simon. 


ANDERSON,  JOHN,  first  Viscount 
Waverley  (1882-1958),  administrator 
and  statesman,  was  born  in  Edinburgh 
8  July  1882,  the  only  surviving  son  of 
David  Alexander  Pearson  Anderson,  fancy 
stationer,  and  his  wife,  Janet  Kilgour, 
daughter  of  Charles  Briglemen,  of  Edin- 
burgh. He  was  educated  at  George  Wat- 
son's College  and  Edinburgh  University, 
where  in  1903  he  graduated  B.Sc, 
with  special  distinction  in  mathematics, 
natural  philosophy,  and  chemistry,  and 
M.A.  with  first  class  honours  in  mathe- 
matics and  natural  philosophy.  He  then 
spent  a  year  at  Leipzig  making  a  special 
study  of  uranium.  The  combination  of  the 
humanities  and  science  in  his  education 
noticeably  affected  his  attitude  to  the 
problems  which  later  confronted  him  and 
added  to  the  value  of  his  contribution  to 
their  solution. 


In  1905,  after  winning  the  first  place  in 
the  Civil  Service  examination  of  that  year, 
he  entered  the  Colonial  Office  where  he 
served  as  secretary  to  committees  on 
Nigerian  lands  (1908)  and  West  African 
currency  (1911-12).  In  1912  he  transferred 
to  the  National  Health  Insurance  Com- 
mission of  which  Sir  Robert  Morant  [q.v.] 
was  chairman  and  of  which  in  1913  Ander- 
son became  secretary.  The  creation  of  the 
new  health  insurance  system  confronted 
the  Civil  Service  with  a  greater  task  than 
any  it  had  previously  undertaken,  and 
some  of  the  best  civil  servants,  like  Ander- 
son, were  hastily  recruited  from  a  number 
of  different  departments.  It  was  a  great 
opportunity  both  to  reveal  and  to  develop 
personal  ability.  Anderson's  own  distinc- 
tive quaUties  were  already  evident:  the 
poise  and  gravitas  which  inspired  confi- 
dence in  the  fairness  and  soundness  of  his 
decisions;  the  depth  and  range  of  his 
knowledge;  his  transparent  integrity  of 
character  and  intellectual  objectivity. 

In  1917  he  became  secretary  of  the 
Ministry  of  Shipping  under  Sir  Joseph 
(later  Lord)  Maclay  [q.v.] ;  and  in  dealing 
with  shipowners  he  showed  again  that  to 
an  exceptional  extent  he  was  able  to  im- 
press and  guide  men  of  widely  differing 
experience.  In  March  1919  he  was  ap- 
pointed additional  secretary  to  the  Local 
Government  Board,  and  when  in  July  the 
new  Ministry  of  Health  absorbed  both  that 
office  and  the  work  of  the  Insurance  Com- 
mission, he  became  its  second  secretary. 
In  October  of  the  same  year  he  became 
chairman  of  the  Board  of  Inland  Revenue 
but  in  1920  went  to  Ireland  as  joint  under- 
secretary, with  Sir  Hamar  (later  Viscount) 
Greenwood  [q.v.]  as  chief  secretary,  dur- 
ing the  critical  and  dangerous  period  of 
the  'Black  and  Tans'.  In  1922  he  succeeded 
Sir  Edward  Troup  as  permanent  under- 
secretary at  the  Home  Office  where  he  re- 
mained for  ten  years  and  matured  his 
purely  administrative  qualities — a  readi- 
ness to  delegate,  an  unflurried  and 
objective  judgement  on  issues  of  policy — 
together  with  an  air  of  somewhat  pontifi- 
cal authority.  In  1924-5  he  was  chairman 
of  a  sub-committee  of  the  Conunittee  of 
Imperial  Defence  on  air-raid  precautions 
whose  reconunendations  were  the  basis  of 
the  measures  adopted  in  1939.  A  more 
immediate  task  was  his  chairmanship  in 
1925-6  of  the  committee  controlling  pre- 
parations for  the  emergency  of  a  general 
strike.  In  Whitehall  he  was  by  now 
'among  the  giants'. 

In   1932  Anderson  went  to  India  as 


21 


Anderson,  J. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


governor  of  Bengal  at  a  time  of  especial 
difficulty  and  danger.  His  life  was  twice 
attempted  and  in  each  case  he  narrowly 
escaped  death.  There  again  he  showed  that 
rare  combination  of  physical  with  moral 
courage  which  enabled  him,  whatever  the 
personal  risk  and  violent  opposition  in- 
volved, to  carry  on  his  task,  undeflected 
and  unperturbed.  The  respect  which  he 
won  helped  to  end  the  terrorism  and  he 
proceeded  with  the  social  and  economic 
measures  which  the  condition  of  the  pro- 
vince made  urgently  necessary.  There 
were  serious  financial  difficulties  and  much 
sickness,  poverty,  and  distress,  aggravated 
at  the  time  by  the  world-wide  fall  in 
agricultural  prices.  Among  the  steps  he 
took  was  the  establishment  in  small  in- 
dustries of  many  of  the  ddtenus  of  the 
terrorist  period,  and  the  creation  of  an 
industrial  credit  corporation.  After  a 
considerable  success  with  these  reforms 
he  carried  through  the  transition  from 
dyarchy  to  full  provincial  authority ;  and 
his  normal  five-year  term  of  office  was 
extended  by  six  months  to  enable  him  to 
supervise  its  completion. 

Returning  to  England,  he  was  elected 
to  the  House  of  Commons  in  February 

1938  as  an  independent  nationalist  for 
the  Scottish  Universities  which  he  repre- 
sented until  the  abolition  of  the  university 
seats  in  1950.  In  May-July  1938  he  was 
chairman  of  a  committee  inquiring  into 
problems  of  evacuation  and  at  the  time  of 
the  Munich  crisis  he  was  regional  commis- 
sioner for  London  and  the  Home  Counties. 
In  November  1938  he  accepted  office  un- 
der Neville  Chamberlain  as  lord  privy  seal, 
with  special  responsibility  for  manpower 
and  civil  defence.  He  then  invited  his  old 
friend  (Sir)  William  Paterson  [q.v.],  the 
Scottish  engineer,  to  design  what  was, 
with  some  modification,  to  become  known 
as  the  'Anderson  shelter'.  In  September 

1939  he  became  home  secretary  and  minis- 
ter of  home  security.  He  was  responsible 
for  the  arrangements  for  evacuation,  the 
internment  of  aliens,  and  in  general  for 
many  of  the  measures  involved  in  the 
transition  from  peace  to  war.  The  rapid 
improvement,  and  indeed  transformation, 
of  civil  defence,  in  which  he  was  assisted 
by  the  work  of  the  unofficial  Air  Raid 
Defence  League,  was  due  to  his  drive  and 
administrative  ability. 

Anderson  entered  the  War  Cabinet  as 
lord  president  of  the  Council  in  October 

1940  and  thenceforward  had  an  over-all 
responsibility  for  the  organization  of  the 
country's  civilian  and  economic  resources 


for  total  war.  By  adaptation  and  co- 
ordination he  was  mainly  responsible  for 
the  efficiency  of  the  machine  of  civil  ad- 
ministration and  thus  enabled  the  prime 
minister  to  devote  himself  more  exclu- 
sively to  military  problems.  He  also  took 
charge  of  much  secret  work,  for  which  his 
scientific  training  helped  him.  This  in- 
cluded work  on  the  atomic  bomb  and  the 
use  of  atomic  energy,  with  which  he  con- 
tinued to  be  concerned  after  the  war  as 
chairman  of  the  advisory  committee  on 
atomic  energy  (1945-8)  and  of  the  com- 
mittee which  led  to  the  establishment  of 
the  Atomic  Energy  Authority  in  1954.  In 
1943  he  became  chancellor  of  the  Ex- 
chequer and  remained  in  office  until  the 
fall  of  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill  in  July 
1945.  Earlier  in  the  year,  on  the  eve  of  his 
departure  for  the  Yalta  conference,  Chur- 
chill had  advised  the  King  to  send  for 
Anderson  as  prime  minister  should  he  and 
Anthony  Eden  (later  Earl  of  Avon)  perish 
on  their  journey.  Anderson's  work  during 
the  war  was  of  outstanding  importance 
but  little  known  except  to  his  colleagues  in 
the  Cabinet  and  others  who  worked  with 
and  under  him  in  Whitehall.  Although 
recognized  later  in  the  official  history  of 
the  war  (e.g.  W.  K.  Hancock  and  M.  M. 
Gowing,  British  War  Economy,  1949),  it 
has  perhaps  never  been  appreciated  ade- 
quately by  the  general  public. 

Throughout  his  political  career  Ander- 
son continued  to  be  an  independent  with- 
out membership  of  any  of  the  political 
parties.  When  he  joined  the  Chamberlain 
government  it  was  for  a  war  task  and  in 
the  subsequent  Churchill  government  he 
had,  of  course.  Labour  as  well  as  Conserva- 
tive colleagues.  Nevertheless  the  Labour 
members  regarded  him  as  aligned  with  the 
Conservatives  and  probably  resented  his 
attitude  more  because  he  was  not  a  mem- 
ber of  the  Conservative  Party  but  an 
independent  university  member.  This  led 
to  what  was  probably  the  most  wounding 
personal  experience  in  his  career.  Shortly 
after  he  had  been  raised  to  the  peerage 
as  Viscount  Waverley  in  1952,  his 
appointment  was  announced  as  chairman 
of  the  royal  commission  on  taxation  of 
profits  and  incomes,  for  which  his  ex- 
perience so  well  qualified  him.  He  was 
subjected  to  bitter  and  sustained  attack 
from  the  Labour  benches  as  not  being 
sufficiently  impartial,  and  after  a  protest 
against  the  'wholly  unjustified  personal 
aspersions',  he  resigned.  Thereafter  his 
political  interventions  were  comparatively 
infrequent  and  his  main  activity  was  in 


W 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Anderson,  J, 


business  and  in  many  forms  of  unofficial 
public  work. 

Anderson  became  chairman  of  the  Port 
of  London  Authority  in  1946  and  was 
associated  with  a  number  of  other  organi- 
zations including  the  Canadian  Pacific 
Railway,  Imperial  Chemical  Industries, 
and  the  Hudson's  Bay  Company.  He  took 
a  leading  part  in  the  foundation  of  the 
Royal  Institute  of  Public  Administration 
of  which  he  became  president ;  and  when 
he  gave  the  Romanes  lecture  at  Oxford  in 
1946  he  chose  as  his  subject  'The  Machinery 
of  Government'.  In  this,  as  the  main 
lesson  he  had  learnt  from  personal  ex- 
perience, he  emphasized  the  need  for 
improving  the  machinery  for  making  a 
reality  of  the  collective  responsibility  of 
the  Cabinet,  especially  through  a  per- 
manent but  flexible  system  of  cabinet 
committees,  and  the  reinforcement  of  the 
cabinet  secretariat  by  the  addition  of 
technical  sections.  He  undertook  a  num- 
ber of  public  tasks  such  as  that  of  presid- 
ing over  the  committee  on  the  export  of 
works  of  art  (1950-52)  and  over  the  com- 
mittee of  inquiry  after  the  floods  of  1953. 
And  in  this  late  period  of  his  fife  he 
entered  a  new  field  as  patron  of  the  arts, 
becoming  chairman  of  the  Covent  Garden 
Opera  Trust  in  succession  to  Lord  Keynes 
[q.v.].  With  devoted  industry  he  took  a 
leading  part  in  the  development  of  both 
the  opera  and  the  ballet. 

The  range  of  Waverley's  career — 
official,  proconsular,  ministerial — ^was  per- 
haps unique.  He  was  great  both  as  an 
administrator  and  as  a  minister,  but  it  was 
his  quality  as  an  administrator  which  was 
dominant.  He  was,  in  the  general  judge- 
ment of  Whitehall,  the  greatest  adminis- 
trator of  his  time,  perhaps  of  any  time 
in  the  country's  history.  Many  qualities 
contributed  to  this :  a  shrewd  and  mature 
judgement,  a  capacious  and  retentive 
memory  and  an  exceptional  capacity  for 
hard  work  which  put  at  his  service  the 
precedents  of  past  experience  without  im- 
pairing a  flexible  adjustment  to  new  con- 
ditions. He  wrote  sparingly  and  rather 
than  impose  detailed  instructions  en- 
couraged those  under  him  to  come  to 
him  for  counsel.  In  dealing  with  his  vast 
responsibilities  during  the  second  war, 
instead  of  creating  a  large  new  office  of 
his  own,  he  preferred  to  use  fully,  while 
retaining  his  own  effective  decision  and 
control,  both  the  other  agencies  of  the 
Government  and  the  experience  and  skill 
to  be  found  in  the  great  business  organiza- 
tions. With  this  administrative  technique 


there  was  always  a  willingness  to  accept 
personal  responsibility,  however  onerous, 
as  well  as  the  exceptional  combination  of 
physical  and  moral  courage  which  has 
already  been  remarked. 

He  was  not  equally  great  as  a  parlia- 
mentarian. For  an  official  helping  a  minis- 
ter to  decide  between  alternative  policies, 
or  for  a  minister  taking  the  decision,  an 
objective  analysis  of  the  reasons  for  and 
against  is  desirable.  But  in  Parliament  a 
member  or  a  minister  is  an  advocate.  He 
needs  to  win  the  interest  of  the  House 
(and  for  this  wit,  lightness  of  touch,  and 
occasional  felicity  of  phrasing  are  a  great 
help),  then  to  present  convincingly  the 
policy  on  which  he  has  decided.  Ander- 
son was  listened  to  with  respect,  and  there 
were  often  at  the  core  of  what  he  said  new 
facts  or  arguments  hitherto  unappreciated 
and,  when  realized,  convincing.  But  they 
were  sometimes  made  less  effective  by 
a  wider  exposition  more  appropriate  to 
a  judge  than  to  an  advocate.  In  general 
his  speeches  were  impressive  because  they 
reflected  and  recalled  the  reputation  which 
he  had  won  in  Whitehall  rather  than  in 
Westminster. 

Anderson  never  courted,  indeed  seemed 
rather  to  shun,  publicity ;  and  he  had  no 
urge  to  write.  His  published  work  com- 
prises little  more  than  a  few  articles  in  the 
press.  He  left  no  books  or  autobiographical 
memoirs.  His  physical  characteristics, 
presence,  and  manner  were  appropriate 
to  his  quaUties  and  attainments. 
Anderson's  seriousness  of  manner  some- 
times for  a  time  disguised,  but  did  not 
long  conceal,  a  rather  pawky  himiour, 
a  rich  humanity,  and  a  capacity  for 
friendship. 

He  received  a  number  of  honorary  doc- 
torates and  foreign  decorations  and  was 
elected  F.R.S.  in  1945  after  his  work  on 
atomic  research.  He  was  appointed  C.B. 
(1918),  K.C.B.  (1919),  G.C.B.  (1923), 
G.C.I.E.  (1932),  and  G.C.S.I.  (1937).  He 
was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council  (Ireland, 
1920,  United  Kingdom,  1938);  and  the 
Order  of  Merit  was  conferred  on  him 
during  his  last  illness,  a  few  weeks  before 
he  died  in  London  4  January  1958. 

Anderson  married  first,  in  1907,  Chris- 
tina (died  1920),  daughter  of  Andrew 
Mackenzie,  commercial  traveller,  of  Edin- 
burgh, by  whom  he  had  one  son,  a  doctor, 
David  Alastair  Pearson  (born  1911),  who 
succeeded  him,  and  one  daughter,  Mary 
Mackenzie,  who  became  director  of  the 
Women's  Royal  Army  Corps  in  1967; 
secondly,  in  1941,  Ava,  daughter  of  the  late 


9^ 


Anderson,  J. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


John  Edward  Courtenay  Bodley,  historian, 
and  widow  of  Ralph  FoUett  Wigram,  of 
the  Foreign  Office. 

A  bust  of  Anderson  by  (Sir)  Jacob 
Epstein  was  commissioned  during  the 
war  for  the  Imperial  War  Museum ;  a  later 
cast  is  in  the  village  church  of  Westdean, 
Sussex,  in  the  yard  of  which  he  is  buried. 

[Tlie  Times,  6  January  1958 ;  Sir  John  W. 
Wheeler-Bennett,  John  Anderson,  Viscount 
Waverley,  1962 ;  private  information ;  personal 
knowledge.]  Salter. 

ANDERSON,  Sir  KENNETH  ARTHUR 
NOEL  (1891-1959),  general,  was  born  at 
Dhazwar,  Madras,  25  December  1891,  the 
only  son  of  (Sir)  Arthur  Robert  Anderson, 
railway  engineer,  and  his  wife,  Gertrude, 
daughter  of  J.  D.  Eraser,  of  Tiverton.  He 
was  educated  at  Charterhouse  and  the 
Royal  MiUtary  College,  Sandhurst,  from 
which  he  was  commissioned  in  1911  in 
the  Seaforth  Highlanders.  In  the  war  of 
1914-18  he  served  on  the  western  front, 
was  awarded  the  M.C.,  and  was  seriously 
wounded.  Later  he  took  part  in  Allenby's 
campaign  in  Palestine. 

Between  the  wars  he  graduated  at  the 
Staff  College,  and  in  1930  he  commanded 
the  2nd  Seaforths  in  operations  on  the 
North- West  Frontier  and  was  mentioned 
in  dispatches. 

In  the  war  of  1939-45  Anderson's  first 
active  service  was  as  commander  of  the 
11th  Infantry  brigade  during  the  with- 
drawal to  Dunkirk ;  in  the  final  stages  of 
the  evacuation  he  took  over  the  conmiand 
of  the  3rd  division  from  (General  Mont- 
gomery (later  Viscount  Montgomery  of 
Alamein). 

Becoming  a  major-general  he  spent  the 
next  two  years  in  the  Home  Forces,  com- 
manding in  succession  the  1st  division, 
VIII  Corps,  II  Corps,  and  the  Eastern 
Command. 

In  the  autumn  of  1942  he  was  nominated 
to  command  the  Eastern  Task  Force 
which  was  being  prepared  for  the  landings 
in  French  North  Africa.  These  took  place 
successfully  on  8  November  1942,  and 
three  days  later  Anderson  took  over  the 
conMnand  of  the  First  British  Army,  which 
consisted  at  first  of  only  four  brigades, 
and  of  the  II  United  States  Corps;  the 
XIX  French  Corps  came  under  his 
orders  a  Uttle  later.  His  mission  was  to 
dash  eastwards  from  Algiers  as  rapidly  as 
possible  in  an  effort  to  secure  Tunis  over 
500  miles  away.  As  there  had  been  no 
assault  landing  east  of  Algiers,  it  was 
doubtful  from  the  first  that  Tunis  could 


be  reached  before  it  had  been  reinforced 
by  the  Germans.  French  co-operation  was 
not  at  first  forthcoming,  the  American 
troops  were  new,  communications  through 
the  mountainous  country  were  sparse,  and 
there  was  a  shortage  of  motor  transport 
and  of  aircraft.  Yet  another  handicap 
was  the  supreme  commander  (General 
Eisenhower)'s  lack  of  experience  in  the 
field  and  his  preoccupation  with  politi- 
cal rather  than  military  matters.  By  28 
November,  Anderson  reached  a  point 
only  twelve  miles  short  of  Tunis,  having 
overcome  slight  German  resistance, 
which  he  first  encountered  near  Bone. 
He  undertook  an  assault  on  22  Decem- 
ber, but  was  held  up  by  torrential  rain. 
The  attack  then  had  to  be  postponed 
until  the  spring,  since  it  had  become  clear 
that  much  larger  forces  would  be  required 
and  a  more  deliberate  operation  planned. 
Strong  German  forces  were  pouring  into 
Tunisia  by  sea  and  air  as  well  as  by  land 
from  Rommel's  army  as  it  withdrew  be- 
fore Montgomery's  victorious  advance 
from  Alamein. 

The  winter  was  spent  in  reorganizing 
and  reinforcing  the  allied  forces  and  in 
repelUng  German  counter-attacks,  the 
most  serious  of  which  penetrated  the  hne 
at  the  Kasserine  Pass.  In  February  the 
18th  Army  Group  headquarters  was  set  up 
under  General  Sir  Harold  Alexander  (later 
Earl  Alexander  of  Tunis)  to  co-ordinate 
the  operations  of  all  the  ground  forces. 
He  moved  round  powerful  reinforcements 
from  the  Eighth  Army  and  resumed  the 
offensive  at  the  end  of  March.  After  some 
clearing-up  operations  the  final  attack  was 
launched  on  6  May. 

Pressure  was  applied  along  the  whole 
front  of  the  Axis,  now  about  130  miles  in 
length.  Then  a  concentrated  attack  was 
made  under  Anderson's  command,  up  the 
Mejerda  Valley  direct  on  Tunis,  supported 
by  intense  bombing  and  by  the  fire  of  over 
a  thousand  guns.  Two  infantry  divisions 
broke  through  on  a  frontage  of  three 
thousand  yards.  These  were  followed  by 
two  armoured  divisions  which  occupied 
Tunis  on  the  following  day.  A  quarter  of 
a  miUion  men,  of  whom  125,000  were 
German,  laid  down  their  arms  in  uncondi- 
tional surrender.  The  alhed  casualties 
were  fewer  than  2,000  men. 

After  Tunis,  Anderson  was  given  com- 
mand of  the  Second  Army  which  was  pre- 
paring for  the  landing  in  Normandy,  but 
a  few  months  later,  not  long  after  Mont- 
gomery's arrival  to  command  21st  Army 
Group   for  the   invasion,   Anderson  was 


24 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Andrews 


transferred  to  the  Eastern  Command  and 
replaced  by  General  (Sir)  Miles  Dempsey. 
This  was,  of  com^e,  a  sad  disappointment 
for  Anderson.  His  last  military  appoint- 
ment was  the  East  African  Command 
(1945-6).  He  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1940, 
K.C.B.  in  1943,  and  promoted  general 
in  1949. 

From  1947  mitil  1952  Anderson  was 
governor  of  Gibraltar.  His  term  of  office 
was  marked  by  considerable  improve- 
ments in  the  housing  conditions  of  the 
population  and  by  the  introduction  of  far- 
reaching  constitutional  and  administra- 
tive reforms,  including  the  estabhshment 
of  a  legislative  council. 

Anderson  was  a  courageous,  competent, 
energetic  conunander,  with  a  high  sense 
of  duty  and  an  abundance  of  common 
sense.  He  could  be  forceful  and  frank, 
almost  to  the  point  of  rudeness,  in  argu- 
ment, but  his  shy,  reserved  manner  made 
him  a  difficult  person  to  know  well  and  he 
lacked  those  characteristics  which  catch 
the  public  eye. 

His  later  years  were  saddened  by  illness 
and  by  personal  tragedy.  His  only  son  was 
killed  in  action  in  Malaya  in  1949  and  his 
daughter  died  a  few  years  later.  He  had 
married  in  1918  Kathleen  Loma  Mary, 
daughter  of  Sir  Reginald  Gamble,  comp- 
troller and  auditor-general  in  India. 
Anderson  died  in  Gibraltar  29  April  1959. 

A  drawing  by  S.  Morse  Brown  is  in  the 
Imperial  War  Museum. 

[T?ie  Times,  30  April  1959 ;  Earl  Alexander 
of  Tunis,  Memoirs  1940-1945,  1962;  Dwight 
D.  Eisenhower,  Crusade  in  Europe,  1948; 
official  dispatches ;  private  information ;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  John  Kennedy. 

ANDREWS,  Sir  JAMES,  baronet  (1877- 
1951),  lord  chief  justice  of  Northern  Ire- 
land, was  born  in  Comber,  county  Down, 
3  January  1877,  the  third  son  of  Thomas 
Andrews,  flax  spinner,  of  Ardara,  Comber, 
by  his  wife,  Eliza,  daughter  of  James 
Alexander  Pirrie  and  sister  of  William 
James,  Viscount  Pirrie  [q.v.].  Thomas 
Andrews  was  president  of  the  Ulster 
Liberal  Unionist  Association  from  1892 
and  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council  of 
Ireland  in  1903.  James  Andrews  was  a 
brother  of  Thomas  Andrews,  shipbuilder, 
who  perished  in  the  Titanic  disaster  in 
1912,  and  of  John  Miller  Andrews,  prime 
minister  of  Northern  Ireland,  1940-43.  He 
was  educated  at  the  Royal  Academical 
Institution,  Belfast,  and  then  at  Stephen's 
Green  School,  DubUn.  At  Trinity  College, 
Dublin,   he   had  a  distinguished  career. 


becoming  a  senior  exhibitioner  (1897),  a 
prizeman  in  civil  and  international  law 
(1898),  and  graduating  in  1899  with 
honours  in  ethics  and  logics.  He  was  also 
gold  medallist  and  auditor  of  the  College 
Historical  Society. 

Although  his  family  was  closely  asso- 
ciated with  the  shipbuilding  and  hnen 
industries,  Andrews's  decision  to  read  for 
the  bar  was  no  break  with  family  tradi- 
tion since  his  uncle,  William  Drennan 
Andrews  (1832-1924),  had  a  distinguished 
career  in  Dublin  as  a  iDarrister  and  then  as 
a  judge.  At  King's  Inns,  Dublin,  James 
Andrews  proved  himself  an  industrious 
student ;  in  1900  he  was  called  to  the  Irish 
bar  and  joined  what  was  then  the  north- 
east circuit.  He  built  up  a  lucrative  prac- 
tice and  soon  established  himself  as  a 
sound  lawyer  and  a  shrewd  and  capable 
advocate.  In  1918  he  took  silk ;  in  1920  he 
was  elected  a  bencher  of  King's  Inns ;  and 
in  1921  he  was  appointed  a  lord  justice 
of  appeal  in  the  new  Supreme  Court  of 
Northern  Ireland  set  up  under  the  Govern- 
ment of  Ireland  Act,  1920.  In  1924  he  was 
sworn  of  the  Privy  Council  of  Northern 
Ireland.  In  1926,  on  its  foundation,  he  was 
made  a  bencher  of  the  Inn  of  Court  of 
Northern  Ireland,  and  in  1928  he  was 
appointed  deputy-lieutenant  for  county 
Down.  In  1937  he  succeeded  Sir  Willeim 
Moore  as  lord  chief  justice,  an  office 
which  he  adorned  until  his  death  at 
Comber  18  February  1951.  In  1938  an 
honorary  LL.D.  from  his  old  university 
reflected  the  general  satisfaction  with 
which  this  appointment  had  been  received, 
and  in  1942  he  was  created  a  baronet. 

Throughout  his  career  on  the  bench 
Andrews  maintained  the  firm  grasp  of 
legal  principles  which  he  had  gained  as  a 
student  and  at  the  bar.  This,  together  with 
an  alert  intelligence,  a  marked  capacity 
for  taking  pains  to  master  the  facts  of  a 
case,  and  the  ability  to  express  himself 
simply  and  clearly,  made  him  a  competent 
and  businesshke  judge.  But  his  undoubted 
success  also  owed  much  to  the  quality  of 
his  character  and  his  constant  anxiety 
to  do  justly  and  love  mercy.  Although 
firm  in  his  rulings  and  capable  of  re- 
buking error,  the  essential  kindness  of 
his  nature  was  never  obscured.  His 
patience  and  care  were  matched  by  a 
courtesy  which  was  the  same  for  all,  from 
the  humblest  to  the  greatest,  from  the 
rawest  junior  to  the  most  experienced  silk. 
He  did  not  often  show  the  exasperation 
which  aU  judges  must  feel  on  occasion, 
and  when  he  did  he  was  not  given  to 


85 


Andrews 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


sarcasm.  Whatever  their  disappointment, 
those  who  lost  before  him  as  a  trial  judge 
seldom  left  his  court  with  a  sense  of 
grievance  or  injustice,  for  he  had  the 
natural  gift  of  presiding  in  a  manner  which 
was  manifestly  fair. 

Andrews's  interests  were  not  confined  to 
the  law.  The  cause  of  higher  education  was 
also  close  to  his  heart  and  he  was  an  active 
member  of  the  senate  of  the  Queen's  Uni- 
versity of  Belfast  and  of  many  of  its  com- 
mittees from  1924  and  a  pro-chancellor 
from  1929.  During  the  war  of  1939-45  he 
devoted  himself  to  promoting  the  savings 
movement  in  Northern  Ireland  and  was 
chairman  and  later  president  of  the  Ulster 
Savings  Committee. 

Physically,  Andrews  was  a  tall  man  of 
dignified  appearance.  He  had  a  pleasant 
speaking  voice  and  spoke  fluently  and 
well ;  he  had  a  good  command  of  language, 
a  sense  of  the  appropriate,  and  a  sincerity 
which  informed  all  he  said.  He  liked  the 
open  air  and  enjoyed  shooting  and  golf. 
But  perhaps  his  keenest  outdoor  pleasure 
was  sailing  on  Strangford  Lough  or  pro- 
moting the  fortunes  of  the  North  Down 
Cricket  Club  either  as  an  enthusiastic 
spectator  or  on  the  field,  for  in  his  day  he 
was  an  enterprising  batsman  and  in  1904- 
7  captained  the  first  eleven.  While  holding 
in  private  as  in  public  life  to  the  highest 
standards,  he  remained  the  most  com- 
panionable and  approachable  of  men,  with 
few  enemies  and  many  friends.  He  en- 
joyed the  support  and  encoiu-agement  of 
a  very  happy  marriage,  having  in  1922 
married  Jane  Lawson  (died  1964),  daugh- 
ter of  Joseph  Ormrod,  of  Bolton,  and 
widow  of  Captain  Cyril  Gerald  Haselden, 
R.E.  They  had  no  children. 

No  portrait  of  Andrews  exists  but  there 
is  an  excellent  photograph  of  him  in  robes 
in  the  Royal  Courts  of  Justice,  Belfast. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
MacDermott. 

ANGWIN,   Sir  (ARTHUR)   STANLEY 

(1883-1959),  engineer,  was  born  in  Pen- 
zance 11  December  1883,  the  son  of  the 
Rev.  George  William  Angwin,  noncon- 
formist minister,  and  his  wife,  Lucinda 
Cambellock.  Change  of  circuit  brought  the 
family  nearer  London  and  Angwin  went 
to  school  in  Chatham  and  Rochester. 
He  obtained  a  Whitworth  exhibition  and 
studied  engineering  at  East  London  (later 
Queen  Mary)  College,  obtaining  his  B.Sc. 
(Eng.)  in  1907.  His  first  practical  ex- 
perience was  with  Yarrow  &  Co.,  ship- 
builders on  the  Clyde,  but  when  still  in  his 


early  twenties  he  entered  the  Post  Office 
engineering  department.  He  was  sent  back 
to  Glasgow  where  he  was  engaged  in  tele- 
phone installation  work.  While  in  Scot- 
land he  raised  the  Lowland  Division 
Telegraph  Company  of  the  Territorial 
Army  which  was  mobilized  in  1914  as  the 
52nd  Divisional  Signal  Company.  Angwin 
commanded  it  in  Gallipoli,  Egypt,  Pales- 
tine, and  France  and  was  appointed  to  the 
D.S.O.,  awarded  the  M.C.,  and  five  times 
mentioned  in  dispatches.  After  the  war  he 
commanded  the  44th  (H.C.)  Divisional 
Signals  and  subsequently  retained  a  close 
association  with  Army  Signals  for  many 
years. 

Angwin's  identification  with  radio  be- 
gan after  the  war.  His  seniors  in  the  Post 
Office  recognized  that  they  had  a  young 
engineer  with  knowledge  of  mechanical, 
civil,  and  electrical  engineering  and  used 
his  ability  to  the  full  in  the  design  and 
construction  of  the  large  radio  stations  at 
Leafield,  Cairo,  and  Rugby.  It  was  during 
this  period  that  Angwin  began  his  associa- 
tion with  other  radio  engineers  in  the  Post 
Office,  such  as  (Sir)  George  Lee,  Edward 
Shaughnessy,  and  (Sir)  Archibald  Gill. 
Together  they  built  up  the  reputation 
of  the  engineering  department's  radio 
branch.  Angwin  took  charge  of  it  in  1928 
and  under  his  leadership  they  went  on  to 
develop  the  shortwave  radio  installations 
which  gave  Great  Britain  a  predominating 
position  in  world  telephony. 

In  1932  Angwin  became  assistant 
engineer-in-chief,  in  1935  deputy,  and  in 
1939,  three  months  before  the  outbreak  of 
war,  engineer-in-chief.  He  was  responsible 
for  maintaining  Post  Office  communica- 
tions throughout  the  period  of  bombing. 
Furthermore  his  wide  knowledge  of  mili- 
tary requirements  enabled  him  to  be  of 
exceptional  assistance  to  the  fighting  Ser- 
vices :  he  knew  and  helped  to  find  the  kind 
of  equipment  and  the  kind  of  engineers 
they  needed.  During  these  years  of  strain, 
which  must  have  taxed  a  constitution  at 
no  times  robust,  those  who  were  close  to 
him  never  once  saw  him  rattled.  He  con- 
tinued to  study  calmly  each  problem 
submitted  to  him  and,  having  done  so, 
made  his  decision. 

Angwin's  service  in  the  Post  Office  was 
always  in  a  technical  capacity,  but  as 
engineer-in-chief  he  was  also  an  assistant 
director-general  and  as  such  played  an 
important  part  in  shaping  Post  Office 
policies.  It  was  his  association  and  friend- 
ship with  Sir  Raymond  Birchall,  who 
later  became  director-general,  and  others 


26 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Antal 


which  did  much  to  draw  together  the 
administrative  and  engineering  sides  of 
the  Post  Office. 

Early  in  1945  Angwin  accompanied 
Lord  Reith  on  a  tour  to  discuss  with 
Commonwealth  governments  the  future 
of  the  then  privately  owned  Cable  and 
Wireless  Company.  The  trip  was  ex- 
tremely arduous  and  involved  44,000 
miles'  flying  in  six  weeks.  The  Government 
took  over  the  company  on  1  January  1947 
and  Angwin  then  retired  from  the  Post 
Office  to  become  its  chairman.  He  had  the 
difficult  task  of  merging  a  private  enter- 
prise into  a  government-owned  organiza- 
tion, but  his  understanding  of  the  feelings 
of  the  staff  did  much  to  ease  their  resent- 
ment. He  remained  chairman  until  1951 
when,  following  Lord  Reith's  resignation, 
he  was  unanimously  invited  by  all  the 
Commonwealth  governments  concerned 
to  become  chairman  of  the  Commonwealth 
Telecommunications  Board.  For  the  next 
five  years  he  filled  this  office  with  distinc- 
tion and  did  much  to  further  Common- 
wealth co-operation  in  all  spheres  of 
telecommunications.  In  1954  he  headed 
a  delegation  of  the  Board  to  Australia  and 
New  Zealand.  This  was  his  last  major 
overseas  task  and  in  1956  he  felt  obliged  to 
retire  owing  to  ill  health. 

Angwin  was  widely  known  in  inter- 
national circles.  He  made  his  name  as 
chairman  at  the  Telecommunications  Con- 
ference at  Madrid  in  1932.  Thereafter  he 
represented  the  United  Kingdom  at  in- 
ternational conferences  at  Lucerne,  Lis- 
bon, Bucharest,  Cairo,  Montreux,  Bermuda, 
Moscow,  and  Atlantic  City.  His  abilities  as 
a  chairman  were  outstanding.  Despite  the 
rival  or  vested  interests  with  which  dele- 
gates came  to  a  meeting — and  these  were 
many  when  frequency  allocations  were 
under  discussion — they  went  away  feeling 
that  his  judgements  had  been  fair.  At 
home  he  was  chairman  of  the  Radio 
Research  Board  in  1947-52  and  was  also 
very  much  in  demand  for  government  and 
official  committees,  among  them  the  first 
(1934)  and  subsequent  committees  on 
television,  in  the  development  of  which  he 
was  keenly  interested. 

Angwin  was  always  interested  in  the 
education  of  young  engineers  and  for  some 
years  was  a  member  of  the  board  of  studies 
of  the  university  of  London.  He  was  a 
member  of  council  of  the  Institution  of 
Civil  Engineers  and  of  the  Institution  of 
Electrical  Engineers.  In  the  latter  he  was 
chairman  of  the  wireless  section  (1931-2), 
vice-president  (1939-42),  president  (1943- 


4),  and  was  awarded  the  Faraday  medal 
(1953)  and  made  an  honorary  member 
(1956).  Other  honours  included  a  fellow- 
ship of  his  old  college,  and  the  honorary 
degree  of  D.Sc.  (Eng.)  from  London  (1953). 
He  was  knighted  in  1941,  appointed 
K.B.E.  in  1945  and  K.C.M.G.  in  1957,  and 
was  awarded  the  Haakon  VII  cross  of 
freedom  for  services  to  Norway  in  1939-45. 

A  great  engineer,  who  did  much  to  ad- 
vance telecommunications,  Angwin  also 
held  posts  of  high  administrative  responsi- 
bility. He  had  the  rare  gift  of  being  able 
to  inspire  a  team  to  work  harmoniously 
together  and  his  staff  always  remembered 
him  with  affection.  His  counsel  and  kindly 
wisdom  helped  many  of  them  round  diffi- 
cult corners. 

In  1921  Angwin  married  Dorothy 
Gladys,  daughter  of  Walter  H.  Back,  of 
Exeter.  There  were  three  sons  and  a 
daughter  of  the  marriage  and  they  were  an 
exceptionally  united  family.  Lady  Ang- 
win did  much  to  support  her  husband 
on  his  travels  when,  as  chairman  of 
the  Commonwealth  Telecommunications 
Board,  he  visited  various  Commonwealth 
countries. 

Angwin  died  at  his  home  at  Welwyn 
Garden  City  21  April  1959. 

[The  Times,  22  April  1959;  Journal  of 
the  Institution  of  Electrical  Engineers,  June 
1959;  Post  Office  and  Telecommunications 
Board  records ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Gordon  Radley. 

ANTAL,  FREDERICK  (1887-1954),  art 
historian,  was  born  in  Budapest  21 
December  1887,  the  only  child  of  Alajos 
Antal,  M.D.,  and  his  wife,  Sofia  Gerstl.  He 
first  studied  at  the  university  of  his  native 
city,  where  he  graduated  as  a  doctor  of 
law,  but  later  he  went  to  Vienna  to  study 
art  history  under  Max  Dvorak,  for  whom 
he  wrote  a  thesis  on  French  painting  of  the 
neo-classical  and  early  romantic  periods. 
From  1914  to  1919  he  worked  in  the  print 
room  of  the  Museum  of  Fine  Arts  at 
Budapest  where,  with  Professor  Johannes 
Wilde,  he  catalogued  the  collection  of 
drawings.  In  1917-18  he  was  sent  to 
Udine  by  the  Austro-Hungarian  Govern- 
ment to  look  after  the  works  of  art  in 
Italian  territory  occupied  by  the  Austro- 
Hungarian  army.  In  1919  at  the  time  of 
the  Communist  regime  he  was  commis- 
sioned to  make  a  record  of  paintings  by 
Old  Masters  and  the  nineteenth-century 
French  painters  in  private  collections 
which  had  been  confiscated  by  the  State, 
and  he  organized  a  remarkable  exhibition 


S7 


Antal 


D.N3.  1951-1060 


of  them  in  Budapest.  After  the  collapse  of 
the  Communist  regime  he  left  Hungary, 
going  for  a  short  time  to  Florence  and 
Vienna  before  settling  in  Bprlin  in  1922. 
In  1933  he  came  to  England  where  he 
lived  for  the  remainder  of  his  hfe,  becom- 
ing a  naturalized  citizen  in  1946. 

In  Berlin,  Antal  devoted  himself  pri- 
marily to  the  study  of  sixteenth-century 
ItaUan  and  Flemish  painting  and  was  one 
of  those  who  first  clarified  the  meaning 
of  the  word  Mannerism.  He  was  deeply 
interested  in  the  method  of  art  history  and 
was  one  of  the  founders  of  the  Kritische 
Berichte,  a  short-lived  journal  which  was 
mainly  devoted  to  the  critical  examina- 
tion of  the  literature  of  art  history.  In  this 
and  in  other  periodicals  he  published  a 
series  of  important  articles  devoted  to 
the  stylistic  examination  of  Mannerist 
painting. 

At  the  same  time  he  was  working  on 
what  was  to  be  the  major  undertaking  of 
his  life,  a  history  of  Florentine  painting  of 
the  sixteenth  century.  The  text  of  this  was 
finished  in  the  late  twenties,  but  Antal 
decided  not  to  publish  it  for  two  reasons. 
First,  he  had  become  increasingly  in- 
terested in  the  Marxist  interpretation  of 
history  and  its  application  to  his  own 
special  field  of  art  history,  and  as  a  result 
he  felt  that  he  must  master  the  social  and 
economic  history  of  Florence  before  he 
could  write  a  full  history  of  Florentine  art. 
Secondly,  he  realized  that  the  crucial 
revolution  in  the  development  of  Floren- 
tine art  had  occurred  in  the  late  four- 
teenth and  fifteenth  centuries,  and  that,  in 
order  to  see  the  later  history  of  Florentine 
art  in  correct  perspective,  it  was  essential 
to  begin  with  an  account  of  the  earlier 
period,  particularly  since  he  saw  Floren- 
tine Mannerism  as  in  some  ways  a  revival 
of  late  Gothic  art.  By  1933  he  had 
finished  the  draft  of  the  first  volume  deal- 
ing with  the  period  up  to  about  1430,  and 
he  spent  much  of  his  first  years  in  England 
reworking  it  and  collaborating  with 
various  English  art  historians  in  the  diffi- 
cult task  of  translating  it.  Publication  was 
held  up  owing  to  the  war,  and  the  book 
appeared  in  1948  under  the  title  Florentine 
Painting  and  its  Social  Background.  The 
Bourgeois  Republic  before  Cosimo  de' 
Medici's  Advent  to  Power.  This  work  con- 
stituted a  major  contribution  to  know- 
ledge of  the  early  Renaissance,  but  it  was 
also  intended  as  a  demonstration  of  how 
the  Marxist  interpretation  of  history 
could  be  applied  to  the  arts.  Its  impor- 
tance is  widely  recognized  and  it  has  been 


published  in  a  number  of  languages,  but  it 
has  been  attacked  by  some  critics  as  being 
over-rigid  in  its  attempt  to  link  artistic 
phenomena  with  social  and  economic 
causes. 

During  the  war  Antal  devoted  much 
time  to  the  study  of  Italian  sixteenth- 
century  drawings  in  the  Royal  Library 
at  Windsor  Castle,  the  results  of  his  re- 
search being  incorporated  in  the  catalogue 
published  in  1949  by  A.  E.  Popham  and 
Johannes  Wilde. 

In  his  last  years  Antal  returned  to  his 
early  interest  in  the  eighteenth  century 
and  in  1956  published  a  volume  of  studies 
on  Fuseli  and  his  contemporaries,  in  which 
he  analysed  brilliantly  the  connections 
between  the  art  of  Fuseli  and  sixteenth- 
century  Mannerism.  Even  more  important 
was  his  study  of  Hogarth,  who  fascinated 
him  as  an  expression  of  English  middle- 
class  morality  and  culture.  In  his  book  on 
this  artist,  which  was  not  published  until 
1962,  after  his  death,  his  methods  were 
applied  more  flexibly  and  more  subtly 
than  in  his  book  on  Florentine  painting. 

Many  of  Antal's  most  original  ideas 
were  published  in  the  form  of  articles.  The 
most  important  of  these  were  republished 
in  1966  in  a  volume  entitled  Classicism 
and  Romanticism,  with  Other  Studies  in  Art 
History.  This  volume  included  his  'Re- 
marks on  the  method  of  art  history'  which 
is  a  statement  of  his  own  credo. 

Antal  never  held  a  regular  teaching  post 
in  England,  although  he  occasionally  lec- 
tured at  the  Courtauld  Institute  of  Art  in 
the  university  of  London ;  but  he  exerted 
considerable  influence  on  a  small  group  of 
students,  to  whom  his  enthusiasm  and  his 
astonishing  range  of  knowledge  were  an 
inspiration. 

In  1936  Antal  married  Evelyn  Foster, 
daughter  of  the  late  Rev.  Thomas  Foster 
Edwards,  Presbyterian  minister.  Three 
previous  marriages  had  been  dissolved. 
He  had  one  son  by  his  third  marriage, 
Antal  died  in  London  4  April  1954. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Anthony  Blunt. 

ARBER,  AGNES  (1879-1960),  botanist, 
was  born  in  London  23  February  1879,  the 
eldest  child  of  Henry  Robert  Robertson, 
an  artist  who  during  most  of  his  life 
worked  at  Steele's  Studios,  Haverstock 
Hill.  Her  mother,  Agnes  Lucy  Turner, 
was  descended  from  Robert  Chamberlain 
[q.v.],  of  Worcester,  and  related  to  two 
fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  John 
Davidson    and    George   Fownes    [qq.v.]. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Arber 


Her  brother,  Donald  Struan  Robertson, 
became  regius  professor  of  Greek  at 
Cambridge  (1928-50),  and  a  sister, 
Janet,  a  portrait  painter. 

Agnes  Robertson  received  early  draw- 
ing lessons  from  her  father,  and  her 
mother  gave  her  an  interest  in  plants. 
From  the  age  of  eight  she  was  a  pupil  at 
the  North  London  Collegiate  School  for 
Girls.  She  obtained  an  entrance  scholar- 
ship to  University  College,  London,  where 
she  came  under  the  stimulating  influence 
of  F.  W.  Oliver  [q.v.].  Having  taken  her 
B.Sc.  with  first  class  honours  (1899),  she 
proceeded  with  an  entrance  scholarship  to 
Newnham  College,  Cambridge,  where  she 
obtained  first  classes  in  both  parts  of  the 
natural  sciences  tripos  (1901-2),  in  part  i 
adding  chemistry  and  physics  to  her  study 
of  botany  and  geology. 

On  leaving  Cambridge  she  became  re- 
search assistant  to  Ethel  Sargant  in  whose 
private  laboratory  at  Reigate  she  learnt 
the  technique  of  the  study  of  anatomy  by 
serial  sections.  Miss  Sargant  had  estab- 
lished a  reputation  as  a  plant-anatomist, 
especially  for  her  work  on  seedling  struc- 
ture. From  1903  to  1908  Agnes  Robertson 
held  the  Quain  studentship  in  biology  and 
in  1908-9  a  lectureship  in  botany  at 
University  College,  London,  and  devoted 
much  attention  to  the  Gymnosperms,  in- 
cluding a  valuable  study  of  the  seed  of  the 
fossil  form  Mitrospermum  compressum  and 
a  detailed  study  of  the  palaeozoic  cone 
genus  Lepidostrobus. 

In  1909  she  married  Edward  Alexander 
Newell  Arber  (1870-1918),  elder  son  of 
Edward  Arber  [q.v.]  and  university 
demonstrator  in  palaeobotany  at  Cam- 
bridge ;  he  was  responsible  for  the  collec- 
tions of  fossil  plants  in  the  Sedgwick 
Museum,  Cambridge,  and  published  many 
papers  on  palaeobotany,  and  books  on 
fossil  plants,  alpine  plants,  and  coast 
scenery.  They  had  one  daughter  who  be- 
came a  geologist. 

Until  1927  Agnes  Arber  carried  on 
research  work  at  the  Balfour  labora- 
tory which  then  belonged  to  Newn- 
ham. Thereafter  she  worked  in  a  room 
fitted  up  as  a  laboratory  in  her  private 
house.  She  was  almost  continuously  con- 
cerned in  research  on  plant  anatomy. 
Water-plants:  a  Study  of  Aquatic  Angio- 
sperms  (1920)  dealt  mainly  with  both  the 
morphology  and  the  biology  of  species 
common  in  Britain,  illustrated  with  many 
beautiful  original  drawings  by  the  author. 
It  was  accompanied  by  a  series  of  papers 
mainly  on  the  structure  and  morphology 


of  monocotyledonous  plants.  In  1925  a 
book  on  the  Monocotyledons:  a  Morpho- 
logical Study  reviewed  the  vegetative 
structure  seen  in  the  group,  and  examined 
the  conclusions  drawn  from  comparative 
anatomical  study.  A  second  volume  was 
Gramineae  (1934)  which  showed  the  simi- 
larities and  differences  in  structure  in  this 
group  of  organisms  of  considerable  eco- 
nomic importance.  The  interpretation  of 
the  many  facts  of  structure  which  she 
recorded  and  the  discussions  which  she 
initiated  about  their  significance,  added 
considerably  to  the  material  bearing  on 
the  origin  and  evolution  of  species,  as 
understood  at  that  time.  The  value  placed 
on  her  work  was  shown  by  her  election  as 
a  corresponding  member  of  the  Botanical 
Society  of  America,  by  the  award  of  the 
gold  medal  of  the  Linnean  Society  of  Lon- 
don (1948),  and  by  her  election  as  F.R.S. 
(1946). 

The  history  and  philosophy  of  botany 
were  among  the  chief  interests  of  Mrs. 
Arber  throughout  her  Hfe.  Her  first  and 
most  widely  read  book  was  Herbals,  their 
Origin  and  Evolution,  an  account  of  the 
printed  works  on  plants  which  appeared 
between  1470  and  1670,  with  biographical 
notes  on  their  authors  and  typical  repro- 
ductions of  their  illustrations.  First  pub- 
lished in  1912,  it  soon  became  the  standard 
work  on  the  subject;  a  second  enlarged 
edition  appeared  in  1938.  She  made  other 
important  contributions  to  the  history  of 
botany,  especially  in  connection  with 
Nehemiah  Grew  [q.v.]. 

During  her  anatomical  and  comparative 
studies  she  turned  her  attention  to  the 
botanical  work  of  Goethe  and  to  the 
philosophy  of  biology  which  he  introduced, 
publishing  Goethe's  Botany  as  a  number  of 
Chronica  Botanica  (1946).  This  eventually 
led  to  her  important  study  on  The  Natural 
Philosophy  of  Plant  Form  (1950)  which 
distinguishes  between  a  relationship  based 
on  objective  relationship  due  to  descent 
from  a  common  ancestor  and  a  resemb- 
lance due  to  similarities  in  form  or  struc- 
ture without  any  genetic  relationship.  This 
distinction  is  one  of  the  most  important 
and  fundamental  in  comparative  biology. 
Other  studies  of  a  philosophical  nature 
were  the  outcome  of  a  long  series  of 
observations  on  plant  structures  reviewed 
from  a  critical  standpoint.  The  Mind  and 
the  Eye,  a  Study  of  the  Biologist's  Stand- 
point (1954)  outlines  the  stages  through 
which  the  biologist  passes  on  the  road 
towards  reality.  She  read  deeply  in 
philosophy,  being  especially  influenced  by 


2fr 


Arber 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Spinoza,  and  the  outcome  of  her  contem- 
plation was  The  Manifold  and  the  One,  a 
philosophical  essay  published  in  1957.  She 
died  in  Cambridge  22  March  1960  and  was 
buried  in  the  churchyard  at  Girton, 

[H.  Hamshaw  Thomas  in  Biographical 
Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  vi, 
1960 ;  The  Times,  24  March  1960 ;  Taxon,  vol. 
ix,  No.  9,  I960.]  H.  Hamshaw  Thomas. 

ARDEN-CLOSE,  Sir  CHARLES 
FREDERICK  (1865-1952),  geographer, 
was  born  10  August  1865  at  St.  Saviour's, 
Jersey,  the  eldest  son  of  Captain  (later 
Major-General)  Frederick  Close,  R.A.,  by 
his  second  wife,  Lydia  Ann  Stevens.  He 
changed  his  name  to  Arden- Close  by  deed 
poll  in  1938.  He  was  educated  at  Thomp- 
son's School,  Jersey,  and  at  a  crammer's, 
passing  second  into  the  Royal  Mihtary 
Academy,  Woolwich,  in  1882.  In  1884  he 
passed  out  first,  with  the  Pollock  memorial 
medal,  was  commissioned  in  the  Royal 
Engineers,  and  joined  the  School  of  Mili- 
tary Engineering,  Chatham.  After  a  year 
(1886)  in  Gibraltar  he  was  first  attached 
to  and  later  commanded  the  balloon  sec- 
tion at  Chatham  (1887-8).  He  was  next 
posted  to  India  where  he  served  one 
year  on  battery  construction,  Hooghly 
defences,  and  then  four  years  (1889-93) 
with  the  Survey  of  India,  engaged  on 
topographic  work  in  Upper  Burma  and 
geodetic  triangulation  on  the  Mandalay 
primary  series  (Toungoo-Katha)  and  the 
Mong  Hsat  secondary  series  up  to  the  Siam 
border. 

Returning  to  Chatham  at  his  own  re- 
quest, he  was  sent  in  the  next  year  (1895) 
to  West  Africa  to  survey  the  boundary 
between  the  Niger  Coast  Protectorate  and 
the  German  Cameroons.  On  his  return  he 
was  appointed  to  the  Ordnance  Survey 
and  in  1898,  at  the  age  of  thirty-three,  was 
made  British  commissioner  to  delimit  the 
frontier  of  British  Central  Africa  and 
Northern  Rhodesia  with  German  East 
Africa  for  over  two  hundred  miles  between 
lakes  Nyasa  and  Tanganyika.  Before  leav- 
ing England  he  had  an  interview  with 
Cecil  Rhodes  [q.v.] ;  and  subsequently 
there  was  collaboration  with  (Sir)  David 
Gill  [q.v.],  H.M.  astronomer  at  the  Cape, 
in  relation  to  longitude  fixation  of  points 
on  the  German  frontier.  He  was  appointed 
C.M.G.  in  1899.  Next  year  he  led  a  small 
survey  detachment  for  the  South  African 
war,  for  which  practically  no  maps  existed, 
but  developed  enteric  and  was  invalided 
home.  In  1902-5  he  was  chief  instructor 
in  surveying  at  Chatham.  There  he  intro- 


duced new  methods  and  wrote  a  Text  Book 
of  Topographical  and  Geographical  Sur- 
veying (1905)  which  remained  the  standard 
work  for  the  next  half-century. 

Thus  by  1905  Close  had  very  wide 
practical  experience  of  surveying,  both 
geodetic  and  topographic,  in  three  con- 
tinents, as  well  as  first-hand  knowledge  of 
international  boundary  surveys  and  settle- 
ments. In  that  year  he  became  head  of  the 
geographical  section,  general  staff,  at  the 
War  Office,  of  which  a  major  concern  was 
overseas  maps.  He  pressed,  with  success, 
for  the  formation  of  the  colonial  survey 
committee  and  for  surveying  in  British 
colonies.  An  even  wider  project  was  the 
Carte  Internationale  du  Monde  au  Mil- 
lionieme — first  proposed  in  1891  and  ex- 
haustively discussed  later  but  with  little 
progress.  With  support  from  the  War  and 
Foreign  Offices,  Close  arranged  an  inter- 
national conference  at  the  Foreign  Office  in 
1909,  attended  by  delegates  of  the  great 
powers,  at  which  concrete  proposals  were 
made.  The  large  number  of  maps  on  this 
system  now  in  existence  is  a  glowing 
tribute  to  Close's  driving  power. 

In  1911  Close  became  director-general 
of  the  Ordnance  Survey  which  he  found 
'rather  out  of  touch  with  the  scientific 
world'.  He  proceeded  with  a  second  geo- 
detic levelling  of  the  United  Kingdom  and 
directed  the  creation  of  'fundamental 
points'  'likely  to  last  for  hundreds  of 
years',  as  well  as  three  mean-sea  level 
tidal  stations — at  Dunbar,  Newlyn,  and 
Fehxstowe,  of  which  the  second  remains 
in  operation.  Close  also  secured  the 
appointment  of  two  advisers,  one  scien- 
tific and  one  archaeological ;  the  one-inch 
map  of  the  United  Kingdom  was  re- 
designed; and  a  map  of  Roman  Britain 
was  published.  In  1914  he  delivered  the 
Halley  lecture  at  Oxford  which  was  in- 
corporated in  his  'Notes  on  the  Geodesy 
of  the  British  Isles'  (O.S.  Prof.  Pap.No.  3). 

During  the  war  of  1914-18  32  million 
maps  were  printed  by  the  Ordnance  Sur- 
vey for  the  armies  in  France  and  elsewhere. 
Close,  who  had  been  promoted  major 
(1901),  lieutenant-colonel  (1908),  and 
colonel  (1912),  periodically  visited  the 
western  front.  After  the  war  various  com- 
mittees produced  recommendations  for 
drastic  cuts  which  Close  had  the  un- 
pleasant task  of  implementing  until  his 
retirement  in  1922.  His  record  of  The  Early 
Years  of  the  Ordnance  Survey  appeared  in 
1926. 

In  the  many  productive  years  still  before 
him  Close  devoted  himself  mainly  to  work 


30 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Arkell 


on  geographical  and  kindred  matters. 
He  served  on  the  council  of  the  Royal 
Geographical  Society  (1904-40),  was 
Victoria  gold  medallist  (1927),  and  presi- 
dent (1927-30).  He  was  chairman  of  the 
National  Committee  for  Geography  and 
general  secretary  of  the  International 
Union  of  Geography,  becoming  president 
in  1934-8.  He  was  chairman  of  the  Pales- 
tine Exploration  Fund  (1930-45)  and 
president  of  the  Hampshire  Field  Club 
(1929-32  and  1935-6).  In  1927,  when 
president  of  the  Geographical  Association, 
he  addressed  that  body  on  'Population 
and  Migration'.  His  broad  open  mind 
found  interest  in  social  problems  concern- 
ing population  and  age  of  marriage.  His 
paper  'Our  Crowded  Island'  in  which 
matters  relating  to  over-population  are 
considered  may  be  found  in  the  Eugenics 
Review  for  April  1948.  He  was  president  of 
the  International  Union  for  the  Scientific 
Investigation  of  Population  Problems  in 
1931-7. 

Close  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1919;  re- 
ceived an  honorary  Sc.D.  from  Cambridge 
(1928) ;  and  was  an  honorary  member  of 
the  Russian,  German,  Belgian,  Dutch, 
Spanish,  and  Swiss  geographical  societies. 
He  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1916  and  K.B.E. 
in  1918 ;  was  an  officer  of  the  Order  of 
Leopold,  and  a  member  of  the  Afghan 
Order  of  Astaur. 

In  1913  Close  married  Gladys  Violet 
(died  1953),  daughter  of  the  late  Theodore 
Henry  Percival,  sometime  of  the  India 
Office.  They  had  one  daughter  and  two 
sons,  the  younger  of  whom  died  in  1943  as 
a  Japanese  prisoner  of  war  on  the  Burma- 
Siam  railway.  Arden-Close  died  at  Win- 
chester 19  December  1952. 

[J.  de  Graaff-Hunter  in  Obituary  Notices  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  No.  22,  November 
1953;  Geographical  Journal,  June  and  Sep- 
tember 1953;  Eugenics  Review,  April  1953; 
Royal  Engineers  Journal,  March  195.3;  The 
Times,  22r  December  1952 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.  DE  Graaff-Hunter. 


ARKELL,       WILLIAM       JOSCELYN 

(1904-1958),  geologist,  was  born  in 
Highworth,  Wiltshire,  9  June  1904,  the 
youngest  of  a  family  of  seven  of  James 
Arkell,  brewer,  and  his  wife,  a  talented 
artist,  Laura  Jane,  daughter  of  Augustus 
William  Rixon,  a  London  solicitor.  From 
an  early  age  Arkell  displayed  a  keen  in- 
terest in  natural  history,  explored  the 
countryside,  and  collected  insects,  plants, 
and  fossils.  At  WeUington  College,  Berk- 


shire, he  was  an  enthusiastic  member 
of  the  school  natural  history  society.  At 
New  College,  Oxford,  he  decided  to  make 
geology  and  palaeontology  his  special  sub- 
jects, receiving  much  encouragement  from 
W.  J.  SoUas  [q.v.],  then  professor  of 
geology.  In  1925  he  gained  the  only  first 
class  honours  of  his  year  in  geology  and 
a  few  months  later  was  awarded  the 
Burdett-Coutts  scholarship,  which  opened 
the  way  for  research  in  his  chosen  field.  In 
1929-33  he  was  lecturer  in  geology  at  New 
College,  an  appointment  which  enabled 
him  to  devote  most  of  his  time  to  research, 
and  thereafter  he  held  senior  research 
fellowships:  at  New  College  (1933-40) 
and  at  Trinity  College,  Cambridge  (1947- 
58).  He  received  the  D.Sc.  degree  of  the 
university  of  Oxford  in  1934. 

Arkell's  name  will  long  be  associated 
with  the  study  of  the  rocks  of  the  Jurassic 
system  and  their  fossils.  His  earliest  work 
was  on  the  Corallian  beds  of  Oxfordshire 
and  neighbouring,  counties  and  his  first 
paper,  which  dealt  with  certain  fossil  bi- 
valve molluscs  from  these  strata,  appeared 
in  1926.  It  was  the  forerunner  of  his 
voluminous  Monograph  of  British  Coral- 
lian Lamellibranchia,  published  by  the 
Palaeontographical  Society  in  1929-37. 
His  first  stratigraphical  paper,  dealing 
with  the  Corallian  rocks  of  the  area  just 
mentioned,  was  published  in  1927  in  the 
Philosophical  Transactions  of  the  Ro^^al 
Society.  It  was  soon  followed  by  contribu- 
tions on  the  Cornbrash  (with  J.  A.  Doug- 
las) and  on  the  Great  Oolite.  At  the  same 
time,  he  was  also  working  industriously  at 
the  literature,  and  his  Jurassic  System  in 
Great  Britain  appeared  in  1933.  A  great 
work  of  major  importance  and  an  amazing 
achievement  for  a  man  still  in  his  twen- 
ties, it  presented  a  critical  and  exhaustive 
survey  of  information  scattered  in  hun- 
dreds of  memoirs  and  papers.  It  im- 
mediately gained  for  its  author  an 
international  reputation. 

While  continuing  with  stratigraphical 
researches  in  a  number  of  areas  in  southern 
England,  Arkell  now  also  took  up  the 
study  of  ammonites  as  being  most  usefully 
applicable  to  problems  of  Jurassic  correla- 
tion. His  Monograph  on  the  Ammonites  of 
the  English  Corallian  Beds  was  published 
by  the  Palaeontographical  Society  in 
1935-48,  while  pubUcation  by  the  same 
society  of  his  Monograph  of  the  English 
Bathonian  Ammonites,  begun  in  1951,  was 
completed  posthumously  towards  the  end 
of  1958.  Shorter  papers  dealt  with  am- 
monites from  the  Oxford  and  Kimmeridge 


31 


Arkell 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Clays  of  England  and  with  several  collec- 
tions from  overseas.  He  was  also  respon- 
sible for  the  sections  on  Jurassic  ammonites 
in  Part  L  (1957)  of  the  Treatise  on  Inverte- 
brate Paleontology  (ed.  R.  C.  Moore). 
Arkell' s  Geology  of  Oxford  appeared  in  1947 
and  his  Jurassic  Geology  of  the  World  in 
1956.  The  latter,  his  second  major  strati- 
graphical  work,  was  not  only  an  able  and 
critical  digest  of  a  very  extensive  litera- 
ture, but  also  embodied  much  original 
information.  It  became  a  standard  work 
of  reference  throughout  the  world  and 
a  translation  has  been  published  in 
Russia. 

Arkell's  interests  were  by  no  means 
confined  to  his  Jurassic  studies.  For  four 
winter  seasons  (1926-30)  he  accompanied 
Dr.  K.  S.  Sandford  on  a  sm-vey  of  traces  of 
Palaeolithic  man  in  Egypt  organized  by 
the  Oriental  Institute  of  the  university  of 
Chicago.  Four  notable  monographs  under 
their  joint  authorship  (1929-39)  were  the 
outcome  of  this  work  and  occasional 
papers  on  palaeoliths  and  Pleistocene 
chronology  appeared  from  Arkell's  pen 
even  later  in  life.  Tectonic  problems  also 
attracted  him,  and  among  his  papers  on 
this  subject  was  one  on  Mesozoic  and 
Cainozoic  folding  in  England  read  at  the 
International  Geological  Congress  in 
Washington  when  he  visited  America 
in  1933.  Topographical  names  and  local 
dialects  interested  him  considerably. 
Place-names  in  Wiltshire,  Dorset,  and 
Gloucestershire  formed  the  subject  of 
papers  in  1940-42  and  in  1953  he  published 
(with  S.  I.  Tomkeieff)  a  work  entitled 
English  Rock  Terms,  Chiefly  as  Used  by 
Miners  and  Quarrymen,  He  was  an 
authority  on  building  stones  and  his 
Oxford  Stone  appeared  in  1947.  An  artist 
of  no  mean  ability,  he  not  only  drew 
many  of  the  illustrations  for  his  various 
works,  but  painted  in  water  colours  as 
a  hobby. 

Elected  F.R.S.  in  1947,  Arkell  was 
awarded  the  Mary  Clark  Thompson  gold 
medal  of  the  National  Academy  of 
Sciences  of  America  in  1944,  the  Lyell 
medal  of  the  Geological  Society  of 
London  in  1949,  and  the  von  Buch  medal 
of  the  German  Geological  Society  in  1953. 
He  was  also  an  honorary  member  or 
correspondent  of  several  foreign  learned 
societies. 

Tall,  robust  in  appearance,  and  fair- 
haired,  Arkell  was  somewhat  reserved  and 
aloof  in  manner,  but  was  nevertheless 
very  approachable  and  always  ready  to 
help  younger  workers.  He  had  a  strong 


inclination  to  participate  in  controversies 
(particularly  in  print),  but  bore  no  malice 
towards  those  with  whom  he  disagreed. 
Less  strong  physically  than  he  appeared, 
he  did  not  recover  completely  from  a  war- 
time illness  after  work  in  London  as  a 
temporary  civil  servant  (1941-3),  and  at 
the  Sedgwick  Museum  in  Cambridge  he 
was  allotted  a  downstairs  room  to  save 
fatigue.  A  stroke  in  1956  left  him  par- 
tially paralysed  and  he  died  in  Cambridge 
18  April  1958.  He  was  survived  by  his 
wife,  Ruby  Lilian,  daughter  of  S.  R.  S. 
Percival,  of  Boscombe,  Hampshire,  whom 
he  had  married  in  1929,  and  by  his  three 
sons. 

[L.  R.  Cox  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iv,  1958 ; 
Proceedings  of  the  Dorset  Natural  History 
Society,  1959 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

L.  R.  Cox. 

ARLEN,  MICHAEL  (1895-1956),  novehst, 
began  life  as  Dikran  Kouyoumdjian,  son 
of  an  Armenian  merchant,  Sarkis  Kou- 
youmdjian. He  was  born  at  Rustchuk  in 
Bulgaria  16  November  1895,  and  with  an 
elder  brother  was  educated  at  Malvern 
College.  In  1922  he  was  naturalized  in  the 
name  under  which  he  had  begun  to  pub- 
lish novels  and  short  stories.  With  these 
he  was  soon  to  achieve  considerable,  if 
temporary,  fame.  His  first  novel,  The 
London  Venture,  was  published  in  1920 
on  the  recommendation  of  (Sir)  Edmund 
Gosse  [q.v.].  Surprisingly  George  Moore 
[q.v.]  was  his  early  model;  but  his  man- 
nered and  ornamented  style  had  certainly 
a  reminiscent  tang  of  the  nineties.  Three 
more  books  in  the  next  three  years  estab- 
Ushed  him  on  the  literary  scene,  and  in 
1924  came  The  Green  Hat  which  was  ac- 
claimed, attacked,  parodied,  and  read,  to 
the  most  fabulous  degree  of  best-seller- 
dom ;  and  made  him  a  comfortable  small 
fortune.  It  was  a  romance  suited  to  its 
decade — cynical,  sophisticated,  yet  senti- 
mental, highly  coloured,  and  glittering.  If 
the  colours  have  now  faded,  and  the  glitter 
seems  mostly  tarnished  tinsel,  the  book 
cast  a  spell  in  its  day  and  influenced 
many  young  writers.  The  character  of 
the  heroine.  Iris  Storm,  that  wanton  of 
quality,  'shameless,  shameful  lady',  gal- 
lantly crashing  to  her  death  in  her  great 
yellow  Hispano-Suiza — 'for  Purity' — set 
a  new  fashion  in  fatal  charmers ;  and  the 
pictures  of  London  cafe  society  were  exact 
as  glossy  photographs.  'The  Loyalty' — 
recognizable  as  the  Embassy  Club,  at 
which    the    smartest    people,    including 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


young  princes,  then  danced  to  the  blues 
— was  depicted  almost  table  by  table,  with 
a  mixture  of  mockery  and  romanticism 
which  delighted  those  who  read  of  them- 
selves. 

Perhaps  because  he  was  a  foreigner, 
who  while  mingling  among  them  viewed 
them  from  outside,  Michael  Arlen  had 
free  licence  to  mock  these  people.  Rather 
as  English  society  had  petted  the  young 
Disraeli,  it  forgave  Arlen  his  cleverness 
and  his  exuberant  elegance.  Even  when 
poor  and  struggUng  this  young  man  had 
contrived  to  be  elegant;  and  in  pros- 
perity, it  was  said  that  his  white  waistcoat 
always  seemed  to  be  whiter  than  anybody 
else's;  but  Arlen  himself  was  forestall- 
ingly  ready  to  disarm  criticism — describ- 
ing himself  as  'Every  other  inch  a 
gentleman',  'The  one  the  Turks  forgot',  or 
'A  Case  of  Pernicious  Armenia'.  His  wit 
not  being  above  the  heads  of  his  fashion- 
able hearers,  they  found  him  the  best  of 
company;  moreover,  he  was  a  man  of 
whom  his  friends  spoke  with  lasting  re- 
gard. 

Arlen  took  a  hand  in  several  plays, 
published  collections  of  his  short  stories 
and,  among  further  novels,  Lily  Christine 
(1929),  Men  Dislike  Women  (1931),  HeW 
said  the  Duchess  (1934),  and  finally  Flying 
Dutchman  (1939).  All  had  the  professional 
touch  of  the  born  story-teller;  but  he 
never  believed  himself  an  important 
writer,  and  in  after  years  steadily  de- 
clined to  have  his  'rubbishy'  best-sellers 
reprinted.  His  gains  were  well  invested; 
and  when  he  was  happily  married  in  1928 
to  Atalanta,  daughter  of  Count  Mercati, 
they  presently  settled  in  the  south  of 
France.  They  had  one  son  and  one  daugh- 
ter. At  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  Arlen 
returned  to  England  to  offer  his  services 
and  was  injured  in  the  bombing  of  the  city 
which  had  formed  a  background  to  his 
most  successful  fictions.  The  world  of 
which  he  had  written  was  destroyed  in  the 
flames  of  that  bombing;  but  it  can  still 
be  resurrected  from  his  pages;  and  his 
name,  whenever  remembered,  connected 
with  that  coign  of  Majrfair,  that  'col- 
lection of  Uvely  odours'  called  Shepherd's 
Market.  Eventually  settling  in  New  York 
he  died  there  23  June  1956. 

[The  Times,  25  June  1956 ;  private  informa- 
tion.] M.  Bellasis. 

ARMSTRONG,  WILLIAM  <1882-1952), 
actor  and  producer,  eldest  son  of  John 
Armstrong  and  his  wife,  Annie  Tait,  was 
bom  in  Edinbiurgh  30  November  1882.  His 


Armstrong 

father,  a  grocer  who  forgave  too  many 
debts  to  be  prosperous,  brought  William 
up  to  be  proud  of  an  ancestry  which  in- 
cluded many  schoolmasters  and  ministers, 
to  be  a  devout  Baptist  and  a  crusading 
teetotaller,  singing 

When  the  wine  around  you  is  passing. 
Have  courage,  my  boy,  to  say  'No', 

at  Band  of  Hope  concerts.  He  never  forgot 
his  Edinburgh  backgroimd  and,  since  he 
was  a  brilliant  raconteur,  his  stories  of 
Edinburgh  life;  of  his  experiences  as 
a  conductor  of  Polytechnic  tours;  and 
of  theatrical  personalities — notably  Mrs. 
Patrick  Campbell  [q.v.] — ^were  a  delight 
to  his  friends  and,  when  broadcast,  to 
wider  audiences. 

He  was  educated  at  Heriot's  School  but 
left  at  fourteen.  His  main  interest  was 
music  and  he  wanted  to  be  a  schoolmaster. 
Helped  by  the  Carnegie  Trust,  he  was  en- 
rolled as  a  student  in  the  faculty  of  music 
at  Edinburgh  University ;  but,  as  always, 
his  interest  was  in  performance  not  theory 
and,  although  he  passed  his  first  profes- 
sional examination  for  the  degree  of 
Mus.B.,  the  purely  theoretical  study  of 
music  chilled  him  and  he  turned  to  the 
theatre.  He  joined  an  amateur  dramatic 
society;  frequented  the  sixpenny  gallery 
at  the  Lyceum  to  see  Sir  Henry  Irving  and 
(Sir)  Herbert  Beerbohm  Tree,  and  (Dame) 
Ellen  Terry  [qq.v.];  and  founded  the 
Edinburgh  University  Dramatic  Club  with 
(Sir)  J.  M.  Barrie  [q.v.]  as  president.  By 
the  time  he  was  twenty-six  he  had  started 
his  career  as  a  professional  actor  with 
(Sir)  Frank  Benson  [q.v.],  playing  Jamy 
in  Henry  V  at  the  Stratford  Memorial 
Theatre.  He  was  tall,  willowy,  with  red- 
dish fair  hair  and  a  Scottish  accent ;  shy 
but  with  a  gift  of  humom*  which  won  him 
friends.  He  interested  G.  B.  Shaw  [q.v.], 
who  wrote  the  one-act  play  The  Music 
Cure  for  him  and  Madge  Mcintosh.  He 
acted  innumerable  parts  with  reasonable 
success,  and  was  for  two  years  a  member  of 
the  Glasgow  Repertory  Theatre. 

His  connection  with  Liverpool  began  in 
1914  when  he  became  a  member  of  the 
'Commonwealth',  an  experiment  which 
kept  the  Repertory  Theatre  alive  during 
the  early  war  years.  He  was  remembered ; 
and  when,  in  1922,  a  permanent  producer 
was  needed,  he  was  offered  the  post.  From 
1922  as  producer,  and  from  1923  to  1944 
as  a  director  as  well  as  producer,  he  ran 
what  was  undoubtedly  the  most  successful 
repertory  theatre  in  the  country.  From  his 
Liverpool  base  he  had  a  great  influence 


Armstrong 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


upon  the  English  theatre.  Under  him,  the 
Liverpool  Repertory  Theatre  certainly  did 
not  become,  as  had  been  hoped,  the  centre 
of  a  new  school  of  dramatic  writing ;  but, 
at  a  time  when  English  playwrights  had 
ceased  to  be  inspired  by  the  energies  of 
Shaw,  Galsworthy,  and  Granville-Barker 
[qq.v.]  and  were  seeking  new  forms  amid 
the  drawing-room  dramas  of  (Sir)  Noel 
Coward,  Somerset  Maugham ,  and  Frederick 
Lonsdale  [q.v.],  Liverpool  became  a  great 
school  of  acting.  Players,  later  well  known 
and  even  famous,  grew  up  under  him,  (Sir) 
Michael  Redgrave,  Rex  Harrison,  Diana 
Wynyard,  Marjorie  Fielding,  Robert 
Donat  [q.v.],  Wyndham  Goldie,  Cecil 
Parker,  Harry  Andrews,  and  Alan  Webb 
among  them.  He  was  not  intellectual  in 
his  approach  and  never  forced  his  own 
interpretation  of  a  play  upon  his  com- 
pany; he  rather  seemed  to  feel  for  the 
tone,  the  pace,  and  the  style  which  was 
developing.  Generous,  emotional,  easily 
moved  by  pathos  and  by  beauty,  he  de- 
manded, and  recognized,  sensibility  in  his 
actors ;  but  his  irrepressible  humour  made 
him  detect  instantly,  with  destroying 
laughter,  a  false  note.  His  musical  back- 
ground affected  his  work ;  he  listened  for 
the  harmonies  in  a  play,  rather  than 
analysed  it,  and  changed  moves  and  in- 
tonations because  they  were  discordant 
rather  than  because  they  did  not  fit  into 
a  preconceived  pattern.  His  informality, 
his  wit,  his  appreciation  of  youth,  made 
young  actors  and  actresses  flock  to  Liver- 
pool where  they  flowered  under  his  will- 
ingness to  develop  their  talents  rather 
than  force  them  into  a  mould.  They  left 
with  an  unforgettable  training  in  a 
flexible,  sensitive  style  of-  acting  which 
could  never  be  forced  or  heavy-handed. 

He  made  the  Repertory  Theatre  a 
powerful  influence  in  Liverpool  life  and, 
although  the  laddie  from  Edinburgh  had 
become  a  sophisticated  and  even  flam- 
boyant man  of  the  theatre,  he  never  lost 
his  shrewd  hold  on  those  financial  realities 
which  reassured  his  fellow  directors,  many 
of  them  Liverpool  business  men.  He  gave 
the  Shute  lectures  on  'The  Art  of  the 
Theatre'  at  the  university  of  Liverpool  in 
1928 :  was  made  an  honorary  M.A.  by  the 
university  in  1930,  and  was  appointed 
C.B.E.  in  1951  for  services  to  the  Liver- 
pool and  Birmingham  repertory  theatres. 
He  left  Liverpool  in  1944 ;  directed  many 
plays  in  London  and  was  assistant  director 
to  Sir  Barry  Jackson  at  the  Birmingham 
Repertory  Theatre  in  1945-7.  He  died,  un- 
married, at  his  home  near  Birmingham 


5  October  1952.  A  portrait  of  him  by  Wil- 
hem  Kaufman  hangs  in  the  Walker  Art 
Gallery,  Liverpool. 

[Grace  Wyndham  Goldie,  The  Liverpool 
Repertory  Theatre,  1935 ;  Who''s  Who  in  the 
Theatre ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Grace  Wyndham  Goldie. 

ARTHUR  OF  CONNAUGHT,  Princess 
(1891-1959).  [See  Alexandra  Victoria 
Alberta  Edwina  Louise  Duff.] 

ASHBY,  ARTHUR  WILFRED  (1886- 
1953),  agricultural  economist,  was  born 
in  the  Warwickshire  village  of  Tysoe,  19 
August  1886,  the  eldest  of  eight  children 
of  Joseph  Ashby  and  his  wife  and  cousin, 
Hannah  Ashby.  His  father  was  a  remark- 
able man  whose  life,  as  told  by  his  daugh- 
ter, is  the  classic  story  of  the  articulate 
village  leader  of  the  second  half  of  the 
nineteenth  century  for  whom  religion, 
farming,  and  politics  were  the  stuff  of  life. 
Leaving  the  village  school  a  little  before 
his  twelfth  birthday,  young  Ashby  spent 
the  next  eleven  years  helping  his  father  in 
the  multifarious  duties  of  small  farmer, 
self-taught  surveyor,  Methodist-  lay- 
preacher,  poor-law  guardian,  organizer  of 
village  clubs,  and  local  agent  for  the 
Liberal  Party.  This  apprenticeship  to  a 
robust  heritage  laid  the  foundation  for 
Ashby' s  lifelong  study  of  rural  society. 

His  orderly  studies  started  in  1909  when 
he  went  to  Ruskin  College,  Oxford,  with  a 
Charles  Buxton  scholarship.  There  he  took 
the  diploma  (with  distinction)  in  eco- 
nomics and  political  science  and  wrote  his 
contribution  on  the  administration  of  the 
poor  law  (1912)  for  Oxford  Studies  in  Social 
and  Legal  History  edited  by  (Sir)  Paul 
Vinogradoff  [q.v.].  In  1912  the  Board  of 
Agriculture  awarded  him  the  first  of  its 
scholarships  in  agricultural  economics. 
This  took  him  in  turn  to  the  newly  founded 
Institute  for  Research  in  Agricultural 
Economics  at  Oxford  and  to  the  univer- 
sity of  Wisconsin  where  he  was  honorary 
fellow  in  political  science. 

In  1915  he  returned  to  the  Oxford 
Institute  to  study  the  history  of  allot- 
ments and  smallholdings ;  his  book  (1917) 
on  this  topic  has  not  been  superseded. 
From  1917  to  1919  he  was  seconded  to 
the  Board  of  Agriculture  where  he  had  a 
big  share  in  shaping  the  first  Agricultural 
Wages  Board  and  in  the  work  of  the 
food  production  department.  Back  at  the 
Institute  he  was  senior  research  assistant 
until,  in  1924,  he  went  to  Aberystwyth  as 
head  of  the  new  department  of  agricultural 


84 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Ashby 


economics  in  the  University  College  of 
Wales.  His  work  there  was  recognized  by 
his  elevation  in  1929  to  the  first  professor- 
ship in  agricultural  economics  in  this 
country.  It  was  entirely  fitting  that,  in 
1946,  he  should  return  to  the  Institute  at 
Oxford  to  succeed  C.  S.  Orwin  [q.v.]  as 
director,  the  post  he  held  until  his  retire- 
ment in  1952. 

Ashby  was  a  prominent  member  of 
the  small  group  who  were  pioneers  in  the 
study  of  agricultural  economics  as  a  sub- 
ject in  its  own  right.  It  was  his  efforts 
which  led,  in  the  face  of  considerable 
opposition,  to  the  formation  in  1926  of  the 
Agricultural  Economics  Society,  of  which 
he  was  twice  president.  He  was  also  a 
founder-member  and,  from  1949  to  1952, 
a  vice-president  of  the  International 
Conference  of  Agricultural  Economists. 
Through  his  contributions  to  teaching,  to 
research,  and  to  policy  over  a  period  of 
forty  years  he  made  a  decisive  and  endur- 
ing impact  on  the  development  of  his 
chosen  subject. 

His  undoubted  greatness  as  a  teacher 
was  given  full  scope  with  his  translation 
to  Aberystwyth.  His  deliberate  manner  of 
speaking  coupled  with  his  tall  and  digni- 
fied presence  was  always  calculated  to 
command  full  attention;  but  it  needed 
the  encouragement  of  sympathetic  Welsh 
farmer-audiences  to  mould  the  halting 
lecturer  of  earlier  years  into  the  familiar 
platform  figure  who  spoke  with  such  con- 
fidence and  authority.  On  returning  to 
Oxford  in  1946  he  used  his  twenty  years' 
experience  in  Wales  to  give  a  new  empha- 
sis to  the  teaching  side  of  the  work  of 
the  Institute.  Both  at  Aberystwyth  and 
at  Oxford  he  attracted  students  from  all 
over  the  world.  Having  himself  been 
denied  the  educational  advantages  which 
usually  lead  to  an  academic  career,  he 
was  particularly  sympathetic  to  overseas 
students;  when  he  visited  India  in  1949 
to  advise  on  the  development  of  agricul- 
tvu*al  economics  it  gave  him  great  pleasure 
to  be  greeted  by  old  pupils. 

He  was  equally  gifted  as  a  director  of 
research,  for  he  was  indefatigable  both  as 
instigator  of  original  work  and  as  super- 
visor of  advanced  studies.  He  was  himself 
a  prolific  contributor  to  the  Uterature  of 
his  subject.  His  writings  are  scattered 
in  many  journals  and  a  selected  list  re- 
presentative of  their  wide  range  is  given  in 
the  Journal  of  Agricultural  Economics,  vol. 
xii,  1956.  Many  of  his  most  stimulating 
contributions  were  made,  however,  in 
extempore  discussions  at  conferences  and 


meetings.  Some  of  the  best  of  these  con- 
tributions will  be  found  fully  indexed  in 
the  Journal  of  Proceedings  of  the  Agricul- 
tural Economics  Society  and  in  the  Pro- 
ceedings of  the  International  Conference 
of  Agricultural  Economists,  which  also 
contain  some  of  his  more  important 
papers. 

Ashby' s  background  meant  that  to  him 
agricultural  economics  could  never  be  an 
arid  exercise.  Hence  his  untiring  work  on 
the  many  official  and  voluntary  bodies 
on  which  he  served  from  1919  onwards. 
Three  of  these  are  worth  special  mention 
because  they  concerned  causes  in  which 
he  had  a  special  interest.  First,  his  mem- 
bership of  several  important  marketing 
committees  in  the  inter-war  years  gave 
him  the  chance  to  propagate  his  profound 
belief  in  the  efficacy  of  co-operation.  His 
knowledge  of  milk  marketing  was  prob- 
ably unequalled  and,  in  the  background, 
he  played  a  big  part  in  designing  the  Milk 
Marketing  Board  for  England  and  Wales. 
Secondly,  as  an  appointed  member  of  the 
Agricultural  Wages  Board  from  1924  on- 
wards he  was  able  to  use  his  influence  in 
the  furtherance  of  good  relations  between 
master  and  man  on  the  farm.  Finally,  he 
welcomed  the  opportunity  which  service 
on  the  awarding  committee  for  scholar- 
ships to  the  sons  and  daughters  of  rural 
workers  gave  him  to  express  his  Ufelong 
interest  in  the  education  of  country 
children. 

Throughout  his  life  Ashby  remained 
true  to  his  radical-reformist  upbringing. 
In  politics  he  was  a  supporter  of  the 
Labour  Party,  yet  successive  Labour 
governments  failed  effectively  to  utilize 
his  unrivalled  knowledge  of- the  problems 
facing  British  agriculture. 

Ashby  was  a  shy,  reserved  person  with 
a  touch  of  the  suspicious  caution  of  the 
typical  countryman.  In  academic  circles 
he  was  never  entirely  at  ease  and  he  never 
rid  himself  completely  of  a  certain  ner- 
vous tension  in  public,  characteristics 
which  led  him,  on  occasion,  to  do  less  than 
justice  to  himself.  But  he  was  essentially 
a  kind  and  friendly  man,  always  generous 
with  his  help  to  those,  especially  young 
people,  who  sought  it.  His  sense  of 
humour  was  of  the  quiet  kind ;  he  loved  to 
hear  a  good  story  and  to  chuckle  loudly  at 
one  of  his  own. 

In  1923  Ashby  received  the  honorary 
degree  of  M.A.  from  the  university  of 
Oxford  (and  M.A.  by  decree  in  1946)  and 
he  was  elected  a  fellow  of  Lincoln  College 
in  1947.  He  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1946. 


35 


Ashby 


D,N.B.  1051-1960 


A  justice  of  the  peace,  he  sat  on  the  bench 
both  in  Cardiganshire  (1940-46)  and  in 
Oxfordshire  (1946-53).  He  became  a 
foreign  member  of  the  Royal  Swedish 
Academy  of  Agriculture  (1951)  and  a 
member  of  the  Scientific  Agricultural 
Society  of  Finland  (1953). 

A  commemorative  portrait  by  Percy 
Horton  (1953)  hangs  in  the  Institute  for 
Research  in  Agricultural  Economics  at 
Oxford. 

In  1922  Ashby  married  Rhoda,  daugh- 
ter of  John  Dean  Bland.  They  had  one  son 
who  also  became  an  agricultural  eco- 
nomist. Ashby  died  in  Oxford  9  Septem- 
ber 1953. 

[The  Times,  11  September  1953;  Country- 
man, Winter  1953;  Journal  of  Agricultural 
Economics,  vol.  xii,  1956;  M.  K.  Ashby, 
Joseph  Ashby  of  Tysoe  1859-1919,  1961; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Edgar  Thomas. 

ASHWELL,  LENA  MARGARET  (1872- 
1957),  actress,  was  born  28  September 
1872  on  board  the  training  ship  Wellesley, 
moored  in  the  Tyne,  the  daughter  of  Cap- 
tain Charles  Ashwell  Botelar  Pocock  and 
his  wife,  Sarah  Margaret  Stevens.  Nicholas 
Pocock  [q.v.],  the  marine  painter,  was  her 
great-uncle  and  Roger  Pocock,  the  travel- 
ler and  founder  of  the  Legion  of  Frontiers- 
men, her  brother.  Her  father  was  then  in 
charge  of  the  lads  sent  to  the  Wellesley 
for  entry  to  a  maritime  life.  A  deeply  re- 
ligious man,  he  later  took  deacon's  orders 
in  the  Church  of  England.  He  was  the 
owner  of  some  property  but  this  was  lost 
by  bad  investment ;  the  family  moved  to 
Canada  and  Lena  Pocock,  who  was  to  use 
her  father's  second  name  on  the  stage,  was 
educated  at  Bishop  Strachan's  School  for 
Young  Ladies  in  Toronto  and  also  at  the 
university.  Owing  to  her  proficiency  in 
music  she  was  then  sent  to  study  at 
the  Lausanne  Conservatoire  and  later  at- 
tended the  Royal  Academy  of  Music  in 
London.  It  was  hoped  that  she  would  have 
a  career  as  a  singer,  but  her  voice  did  not 
develop  as  expected.  (Dame)  Ellen  Terry 
[q.v.],  who  came  to  examine  the  elocution 
class,  was  impressed  by  the  vivid  feeling 
as  well  as  good  diction  displayed  and 
wisely  advised  her  to  concentrate  on 
becoming  an  actress. 

There  was  no  easy  start  or  swift  pro- 
motion, but  in  1892  Lena  Ashwell  was 
tom-ing  with  (Sir)  George  Alexander  [q.v.], 
taking  a  small  part  in  Lady  Windermere's 
Fan.  In  1895  she  realized  the  highest 
ambition  of  all  aspiring  actresses  at  that 


time  and  played  for  Sir  Henry  Irving 
[q.v.]  at  the  Lyceum,  as  Elaine  in  King 
Arthur.  In  1896  she  returned  to  take  the 
part  of  the  Prince  of  Wales  in  Richard  III. 
G.  B.  Shaw  [q.v.],  then  dramatic  critic  of 
the  Saturday  Revieiv,  found  her  perfor- 
mance in  the  former  play  to  be  'weak, 
timid,  subordinate'  with  her  voice  'a 
squawl',  but  in  the  latter  he  thought  she 
had  'developed  precipitously'  and  now 
p>ossessed  'authority  and  assurance  as 
one  of  the  younger  generation  knocking 
vigorously  at  the  door'.  The  door  was  de- 
cisively opened  when  in  1900  she  was 
chosen  to  play  Mrs.  Dane  in  Mrs.  Dane's 
Defence  by  Henry  Arthur  Jones  [q.v.] 
under  (Sir)  Charles  Wyndham  [q.v.]  at 
Wyndham's  Theatre.  Both  play  and 
player  had  a  notable  success. 

With  the  status  of  a  leading  actress  she 
went  in  1903  to  (Sir)  Herbert  Beerbohm 
Tree  [q.v.]  in  a  dramatized  version  of 
Tolstoy's  Resurrection  and  was  much  ad- 
mired both  in  this  and  in  The  Darling  of 
the  Gods  in  the  same  year.  She  won  further 
tribute  in  another  play  of  Russian  life, 
Leah  Kleschna,  in  1905.  She  next  had  her 
first  experience  of  management  at  the 
Savoy  Theatre  in  1906,  appearing  as 
Ninon  de  I'Enclos  in  The  Bond  of  Ninon ; 
this  was  not  successful  and  a  visit  to 
America  also  proved  disappointing.  But 
she  had  backing  for  a  new  and  memorable 
venture,  the  reopening  in  1907  of  the 
Great  Queen  Street  Theatre  under  the 
new  name  of  the  Kingsway  with  a  dis- 
tinguished company  in  a  series  of  contem- 
porary plays.  Lena  Ashwell  modernized 
the  decoration  of  the  house,  chose  plays 
outside  the  west-end  routine,  and  made 
this  small  playhouse,  on  the  eastern 
fringe  of  the  theatre  area,  a  centre  of 
intelligent  drama.  The  adventure  had  its 
risks  since  the  theatre  was  in  a  side  street 
and  somewhat  remote,  but  it  was  gal- 
lantly sustained. 

Opening  with  Irene  Wycherley,  Lena 
Ashwell,  who  had  the  powerful  aid  of 
Norman  McKinnel,  secured  an  immediate 
success  in  a  play  of  great  emotional  force. 
She  followed  it  with  a  piece  about  shop- 
girl life,  Diana  of  Dobson's,  by  Cicely 
Hamilton,  later  a  prominent  champion  of 
women's  causes  in  whose  work  for  women's 
franchise  Lena  Ashwell  actively  joined. 
Plays  about  working-class  conditions  were 
then  unusual  but  it  made  its  impact.  The 
productions  following  proved  less  attrac- 
tive and  the  Kingsway  venture  had  to  be 
given  up.  Lena  Ashwell  returned  there  in 
1915  to  play  Margaret  Knox,  the  defiant 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Aslin 


young  feminist,  in  Shaw's  Fanny^s  First 
Play. 

She  had  inherited  rehgious  faith  and 
was  always  ready  to  back  a  good  cause.  In 
1912  she  helped  to  found  the  Three  Arts 
Club  as  a  centre  where  young  women 
working  in  the  arts,  especially  on  the 
stage,  could  Uve,  as  well  as  meet,  com- 
fortably and  economically.  When  the  war 
continued  she  engaged  herself  in  an  enter- 
prise which  took  all  her  time,  the  provision 
of  concerts  and  later  on  dramatic  per- 
formances for  the  troops  at  the  front.  Thus 
she  anticipated  the  work  of  E.N.S.A.  in 
the  second  war.  At  first  the  effort  had 
to  be  privately  financed  and  to  this  end 
£100,000  was  raised.  By  the  time  of  the 
armistice  there  were  twenty-five  com- 
panies in  the  field.  For  her  pioneering 
work  she  was  appointed  O.B.E.  in  1917. 

When  peace  came  she  determined  to 
provide  the  suburbs  with  a  somewhat 
similar  service.  With  the  remnant  of  the 
Concert  Fund  she  founded  the  Once-a- 
Week  Players,  later  known  as  the  Lena 
Ashwell  Players,  and  with  the  aid  of  the 
London  mayors  obtained  the  right  to  act 
in  town  halls  and  public  baths  at  a 
nominal  fee.  Excellent  work  was  done,  not 
only  for  the  public  who  could  see  work  of 
quality,  Shakespeare  as  well  as  the  plays 
of  the  leading  contemporary  authors,  at 
prices  ranging  from  sixpence  to  half  a 
crown,  but  also  for  young  actors  and 
actresses  seeking  opportunity.  Many 
players  who  subsequently  reached  the 
front  rank  had  precious  experience  in  this 
exhausting  but  stimulating  work  which 
involved  continual  rehearsal  of  new  pieces 
by  day  and  journeys  to  fit  up  stages  in 
the  suburbs,  some  quite  distant,  by  night. 
Central  premises  were  established  in  1924 
at  the  Century  Theatre.  Unfortunately 
there  was  financial  stringency  after  the 
general  strike  of  1926  and  a  serious  in- 
fluenza epidemic ;  but  the  venture  might 
have  survived  had  there  been  any  escape, 
for  such  work  of  civic  value,  from  the 
entertainment  duty.  'During  the  season 
1926-7',  Lena  Ashwell  recorded,  'for  enter- 
taining 174,000  people,  we  were  taxed 
£2,683.6.8.'  The  experiment  ended  in  1929. 

Lena  Ashwell  did  not  thereafter  return 
to  the  stage.  She  had  overcome  many 
difficulties.  Her  features  were  not  those 
of  the  conventional  stage  beauty  and  she 
entered  the  profession  with  no  friends  in  it 
to  help  her.  But  from  the  time  of  Mrs. 
Dane's  Defence  she  was  much  in  demand 
for  roles  where  intensity  of  feehng  was 
necessary:  she  could  play  light  comedy 


with  a  sure  technique,  but  it  was  in  the 
portrayal  of  suffering  that  she  was  essen- 
tially herself.  Her  personality  was  in- 
vigorating to  any  company  with  which 
she  played  or  which  she  organized.  Her 
sphere  of  activities  was  centred  on  the 
stage,  but  not  confined  to  it.  She  was  an 
able  writer,  recording  her  war  work  in 
Modem  Troubadours  (1922)  and  telling 
her  own  life  story  in  Myself  a  Player 
(1936). 

After  a  most  unhappy  first  marriage 
to  the  actor  Arthur  Wyndham  Playfair 
(1869-1918)  she  married  in  1908  (Sir) 
Henry  John  Forbes  Simson  (died  1932), 
a  brilliant  surgeon  who  had  qualified  in 
Edinburgh  and  who  rose  to  a  high  place 
in  London,  specializing  in  maternity  cases 
and  serving  the  royal  family  in  that 
capacity.  This  union  was  one  of  entire 
happiness.  Lena  Ashwell  had  no  children 
and  died  in  London  13  March  1957. 

[Her  own  writings;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  Ivor  Brown. 


ASLIN,  CHARLES  HERBERT  (1893- 
1959),  architect,  was  born  in  Sheffield  15 
December  1893,  the  younger  of  two  sons 
of  Arthur  William  and  Louisa  Aslin.  His 
parents,  both  north-country  people,  came 
from  Lincolnshire  and  Derbyshire.  By  the 
time  Aslin  was  born  his  father  was  fore- 
man in  a  Sheffield  steelworks  and  Aslin 
was  a  Yorkshireman  by  birth  and  adop- 
tion. He  received  his  early  education  at 
Sheffield  Central  School  and  later  at 
Sheffield  University.  At  the  outbreak  of 
war  in  1914  he  immediately  volunteered 
for  the  infantry  but  was  rejected  because 
of  defective  vision.  After  a  period  in  the 
Army  Pay  Corps  and  the  Oxford  and 
Bucks.  Light  Infantry  he  was  commis- 
sioned in  the  Royal  Artillery  in  1916. 
Holding  the  rank  of  captain  he  served 
with  a  field  regiment  on  the  western  front 
until  1919. 

Before  enlisting  Aslin  had  passed  the 
final  examination  of  the  Royal  Institute 
of  British  Architects  and  in  1920  he  was 
admitted  an  associate,  becoming  a  fellow 
in  1932.  After  service  on  the  staff  of  the 
city  architect  of  Sheffield  he  was  ap- 
pointed in  1922  architect  to  the  borough 
engineer  of  Rotherham  where  he  designed 
the  new  municipal  offices.  During  the 
following  years  he  lectured  at  Sheffield 
University,  became  an  associate  of  the 
Institution  of  Civil  Engineers,  and  in  1926 
was  appointed  deputy  county  architect 
of  Hampshire.   In   1929  he  became  the 


87 


Aslin 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


borough  architect  of  Derby  where  he  first 
demonstrated  the  talent  which  was  later 
to  carry  him  to  the  top  of  his  profession. 
Apart  from  more  orthodox  schemes  he 
was  responsible  for  the  complete  re- 
development of  the  central  areas  of  the 
town  including  new  municipal  offices, 
police  courts,  bus  station,  covered  mar- 
kets, and  riverside  gardens.  Common  as 
this  kind  of  work  later  became,  it  was 
then  a  pioneer  task. 

When  in  1945  Aslin  became  county 
architect  to  Hertfordshire  it  was  clear  to 
him  that  the  Education  Act  of  1944  would 
create  a  national  demand  for  new  school 
building  far  in  excess  of  the  capacity  of 
the  traditional  building  industry,  de- 
pleted moreover  by  wartime  require- 
ments; committed  to  essential  tasks  of 
repairing  war  damage,  providing  new 
houses  to  cater  for  the  shift  in  population, 
and  at  grips  with  the  problems  of  New 
Town  construction.  In  no  part  of  the 
country  were  these  problems  more  acute 
than  in  Hertfordshire  and  Aslin  deter- 
mined on  the  bold  course  of  developing 
prefabricated  construction  which  would 
make  extensive  use  of  factory  capacity 
and  so  relieve  the  strain  on  the  traditional 
industry.  He  was  fortunate  in  the  en- 
couragement and  co-operation  of  the 
county  council  and  his  associated  chief 
officials;  nevertheless  the  responsibility 
was  his  and  the  enterprise  was  regarded  by 
many  in  the  profession  as  daring  to  the 
point  of  foolhardiness. 

Aslin's  vision  was  completely  justified 
and  the  system  proved  remarkably  suc- 
cessful. The  Hertfordshire  schools  became 
places  of  pilgrimage  by  architects  from 
all  over  the  world.  Existing  values  were 
challenged ;  new  technical  and  administra- 
tive procedures  were  adopted ;  and  a  new 
aesthetic  evolved  using  space,  light,  and 
colour  to  create  an  entirely  new  kind  of 
environment.  When  in  1955  his  hundredth 
school  was  opened  by  the  minister  of  edu- 
cation Aslin's  approach  had  been  com- 
pletely vindicated  and  his  methods  had 
been  adopted  by  leading  authorities 
throughout  the  country.  Aslin,  an  out- 
standing team  leader,  collected  on  his 
staff  some  of  the  brightest  young  men  of 
the  day.  His  judgement  in  their  selection, 
the  encouragement  he  gave  them,  and  his 
generous  acknowledgement  of  their  con- 
tribution to  the  task  were  part  of  his 
strength.  Jobs  in  his  office  were  amongst 
the  most  sought  after  in  the  country. 

Although  Aslin  will  be  remembered 
primarily  for  his  contribution  in  this  field, 


it  did  not  represent  his  total  effort.  From 
1941  to  1943  he  was  president  of  the 
Notts.,  Derby,  and  Lincoln  Society  of 
Architects  and  was  their  representative  on 
the  council  of  the  R.I.B.A.  He  continued 
to  do  valuable  committee  work  at  the 
R.I.B.A.  in  particular  as  chairman  of 
the  official  architects  committee  on  which 
he  helped  to  heal  the  breach  developing 
between  architects  in  private  practice  and 
those  in  salaried  posts  who  were  justi- 
fiably dissatisfied  with  their  conditions  of 
service.  In  1945  he  was  elected  in  his  own 
right  to  the  council  of  the  R.I.B.A.  and  in 
1954-6  was  president.  His  presidency 
coincided  with  the  end  of  building  licen- 
sing when  the  industry  was  in  a  more 
confident  and  optimistic  mood  than  for 
many  years  past.  In  his  presidential  ad- 
dress he  spoke  of  the  need  to  study  the 
structure  of  the  profession,  to  make  it 
more  efficient  and  to  equip  it  to  give 
better  service  to  the  client  and  the  pubfic 
at  large.  His  ideas  introduced  a  period  of 
reform  which  began  to  bear  more  fruit  as 
time  passed.  Appointed  C.B.E.  in  1951, 
Aslin  was  an  associate  of  the  Institution 
of  Structural  Engineers,  a  member  of  the 
Royal  Society  of  Arts,  honorary  fellow  of 
the  American  Institute  of  Architects,  and 
R.I.B.A.  bronze  medallist  (1951). 

Always  respected  for  his  kindness  and 
wisdom,  Aslin  made  friends  easily  and 
amongst  his  wide  circle  was  equally  at 
ease  with  people  of  widely  differing  age, 
background,  race,  and  temperament. 
Coupled  with  his  charm  he  retained  a 
native  north-country  shrewdness  and 
strength  enabling  him  to  adopt  a  firm 
stand  when  serious  issues  were  at  stake. 
Above  all  he  detested  pomposity  or  pre- 
tension. During  the  whole  of  his  career  he 
was  supported  and  encouraged  by  his  wife 
without  whom,  as  he  freely  acknowledged, 
he  could  not  have  developed  anything  like 
his  full  potential.  The  help  and  hospitality 
which  were  extended  to  all  with  whom 
they  came  in  contact  were  remarkable. 
Aslin  led  too  full  a  life  to  have  much  time 
for  hobbies.  Nevertheless,  he  played 
a  good  game  of  tennis,  was  interested 
in  cricket,  and  a  keen  devotee  of  the 
theatre,  particularly  Shakespeare.  He 
was  an  expert  photographer,  an  inde- 
fatigable reader  over  a  wide  field  of  litera- 
ture, and  supporter  of  numerous  societies. 
He  did  a  great  deal  during  the  second  war 
to  foster  Anglo-Polish  relations.  Brought 
up  as  a  strict  nonconformist,  he  embraced 
the  Church  of  England.  Although  never 
sanctimonious  he  was  a  staunch  member 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Asquith,  C.  M.  E. 


of  that  Church  and  a  man  of  sincere 
religious  principles. 

Aslin  had  a  narrow  escape  from  death 
during  a  visit  to  Staffordshire  in  1955  on 
R.I.B.A.  business  when  his  bedroom  filled 
with  gas  owing  to  a  fractured  main.  He 
was  seriously  ill  and  it  is  doubtful  whether 
he  ever  completely  recovered  his  previous 
robust  health.  He  retired  in  1958  and  died 
in  Hertford  18  April  1959. 

In  1920  Aslin  married  Ethel  Fawcett 
Armitage,  also  of  Sheffield ;  they  had  one 
daughter.  His  portrait,  by  Allan  Gwynne- 
Jones,  may  be  seen  at  the  headquarters  of 
the  Royal  Institute  of  British  Architects. 

[Private  information;  personal  knowledge.] 
S.  Morrison. 

ASQUITH,  Lady  CYNTHIA  MARY 
EVELYN  (1887-1960),  writer,  eldest 
daughter  of  Lord  Elcho,  later  the  eleventh 
Earl  of  Wemyss,  and  his  wife,  Mary  Con- 
stance, daughter  of  Percy  Scawen  Wynd- 
ham,  was  born  27  September  1887  at 
Clouds,  East  Knoyle,  Wiltshire.  Her  child- 
hood was  unusually  happy,  spent  amid  an 
intelligent  and  affectionate  family  and  in 
a  home  which  was  one  of  the  most  bril- 
liant social  centres  of  the  age.  Her  mother 
was  a  leading  figure  in  that  circle  called 
'The  Souls'  which  included  among  others 
Curzon,  Balfour,  her  brother,  George 
Wyndham,  and  Margot  Tennant  [qq.v.] 
and  which  was  celebrated  as  uniting  the 
attractions  of  intellect  and  of  fashion.  In 
1910  Cynthia  Charteris  married  Herbert, 
the  second  son  of  H.  H.  Asquith,  later 
first  Earl  of  Oxford  and  Asquith  [q.v.], 
the  Liberal  leader,  by  whom  she  had  three 
sons. 

After  1914  Lady  Cynthia's  life  was 
darkened  by  trouble.  She  lost  two  of  her 
brothers,  to  whom  she  was  devoted,  in  the 
war.  Further,  now  that  Herbert  Asquith 
was  in  the  army,  he  was  unable  to  sup- 
port his  family.  Lady  Cynthia  in  1918 
accepted  an  appointment  as  private  secre- 
tary to  Sir  J.  M.  Barrie  [q.v.].  She  soon 
became  responsible  for  running  his  whole 
social  and  domestic  life.  She  went  on  with 
this  until  his  death,  for  Asquith  returned 
from  the  war  with  his  health  too  much 
weakened  to  take  up  regular  work.  She 
also  added  to  her  income  by  freelance 
writing.  During  the  next  thirty  years  her 
publications  included  anthologies  of  ghost 
stories  and  children's  tales,  biographies  of 
the  Duchess  of  York  (1928)  and  Princess 
Elizabeth  and  Princess  Margaret  (1937); 
two  novels,  The  Spring  House  (1936)  and 
One  Sparkling  Wave  (1943),  and  a  book 


of  short  stories  What  Dreams  May  Come 
(1951). 

Barrie  died  in  1937  leaving  her  heir  to 
the  greater  part  of  his  fortune  and  the 
Asquiths  left  London  to  live  first  at  Sul- 
lington  in  Sussex  and  afterwards  at  Bath 
where  Herbert  Asquith  died  in  1947.  Lady 
Cynthia  later  returned  to  London.  Mean- 
while a  play  of  hers  about  the  Tolstoys, 
entitled  No  Heaven  for  Me,  had  been  pro- 
duced at  the  Little  Theatre,  Bristol,  in 
1947.  She  published  three  volumes  of 
reminiscences.  Haply  I  May  Remember 
(1950),  Remember  and  Be  Glad  (1952),  and 
Portrait  of  Barrie  (1954).  A  Hfe  of  Countess 
Tolstoy,  entitled  Married  to  Tolstoy,  was 
published  posthumously  in  1960  and  Lady 
Cynthia's  Diaries  {1915-18)  in  1968. 

Lady  Cynthia  was  a  competent  writer 
and  her  reminiscences,  in  particular,  were 
an  agreeable  contribution  to  contem- 
porary social  history.  But  it  was  in  the 
sphere  of  private  life  that  her  nature  ful- 
filled itself.  Here  she  was  revealed  as  one 
of  the  most  interesting  and  fascinating 
women  of  her  time.  Hauntingly  beautiful 
with  a  tall,  graceful  figure,  magnolia- 
white  skin,  and  slanting,  elfin  glance,  her 
appearance  was  the  true  image  of  a  per- 
sonality at  once  intimate  and  mysterious, 
romantic  and  ironical,  whose  conversation 
was  remarkable  alike  for  its  poetic  sensi- 
bility and  its  infectious  unpredictable 
humour.  Further,  she  had  a  talent  for 
friendship,  more  especially  with  writers 
and  artists,  which  she  assiduously  culti- 
vated all  her  life ;  with  the  result  that  she 
was  a  close  friend  of  some  of  the  most 
distinguished  men  of  the  day,  including 
D.  H.  Lawrence,  Sir  Desmond  MacCarthy, 
Walter  de  la  Mare,  Sir  Walter  Raleigh, 
Rex  Whistler  [qq.v.],  L.  P.  Hartley,  and 
Augustus  John.  She  was  never  the  mis- 
tress of  a  salon,  still  less  a  lion  huntress :  it 
was  unobtrusively  in  the  tete-a-tete  inter- 
view and  the  private  correi^ondence  that 
her  friendships  flourished.  They  were 
singularly  lasting  and  untroubled,  for 
Lady  Cynthia's  character  was  faithful, 
discreet,  even-tempered,  and  unposses- 
sive.  Although  too  intelligent  to  be 
unaware  of  her  own  attractions,  she  was 
also  too  wise  to  presume  upon  them.  She 
died  in  Oxford  31  March  1960. 

There  is  a  drawing  of  her  as  a  child 
by  Burne-Jones  in  the  possession  of  her 
family  and  as  a  girl  by  Sargent ;  also  paint- 
ings by  Augustus  John  (in  the  National 
Gallery  of  Canada),  Ambrose  McEvoy, 
Tonks,  and  others. 

[Personal  knowledge.]  David  Cecil. 


Asquith,  C.    'p^A 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


ASQUITH,  CYRIL,  Baron  Asquith  of 
BiSHOPSTONE  (1890-1954),  judge,  was 
born  at  Eton  House,  in  what  used  to  be 
John  Street,  Hampstead,  5  February 
1890.  He  was  the  fourth  son  and  the 
youngest  of  the  five  children  of  Herbert 
Henry  Asquith,  later  first  Earl  of  Oxford 
and  Asquith  [q.v.],  by  his  first  wife,  Helen 
Melland,  daughter  of  a  distinguished 
Manchester  physician.  The  daughter  be- 
came Lady  Violet  Bonham  Carter  in  1915 
and  was  created  a  life  peeress  in  1964. 
Their  mother's  death  in  1891  may  have 
contributed  to  the  shyness  which  affected 
*Cys',  as  he  was  always  known  to  his 
friends,  throughout  his  life.  From  Sum- 
mer Fields,  Oxford,  Asquith  went  as  a 
scholar  to  Winchester  where  he  was  a 
notable  player  of  football.  Like  his  father 
and  his  brother  Raymond,  he  became 
a  foundation  scholar  of  Balliol  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  obtained  first  classes  in 
classical  moderations  (1911)  and  liter ae 
humaniores  (1913),  and  won  the  Hertford, 
Craven,  and  Ireland  scholarships.  He  then 
became  an  Eldon  scholar  and  was  elected 
a  fellow  of  Magdalen  College  in  1913.  His 
reserve  kept  him  from  taking  the  same 
active  part  in  college  and  university 
affairs  as  had  his  brothers  Raymond  and 
Herbert  who  had  both  been  president  of 
the  Union.  When  the  war  began  he  im- 
mediately volunteered  in  the  Queen's 
Westminster  Rifles,  later  being  promoted 
captain.  From  1916  to  1918  he  was  em- 
ployed in  the  Ministry  of  Munitions. 

In  1920  Asquith  was  called  to  the  bar 
by  the  Inner  Temple  and  became  a  pupil 
in  the  chambers  of  W.  A.  (later  Earl) 
Jowitt  [q.v.],  a  choice  of  considerable 
significance  later  in  Asquith' s  career.  His 
main  practice  was  in  the  common  law 
courts.  It  is  surprising  that,  with  his  many 
qualities,  he  was  not  more  successful,  yet 
his  father  had  also  been  slow  in  acquiring 
a  practice.  From  1925  to  1938  Asquith  was 
assistant  reader  in  common  law  to  the 
Council  of  Legal  Education.  Throughout 
his  life  he  showed  great  interest  in  the 
academic  side  of  the  law.  He  seemed  to  be 
more  concerned  with  legal  questions  than 
with  questions  of  fact.  If  he  found  some 
difficulty  in  understanding  the  ordinary 
man,  it  did  not  arise  from  any  sense  of 
class  distinction.  In  1936  he  took  silk  and 
in  1937  he  was  made  recorder  of  Sahsbury 
where  he  obtained  useful  experience  in  the 
trial  of  criminal  cases. 

In  1938  Asquith  was  appointed  a  judge 
of  the  King's  Bench  division  (with  the 
customary  knighthood)  by  the  lord  chan- 


cellor, Lord  Maugham  [q.v.].  The  appoint- 
ment caused  some  surprise  at  the  bar, 
for  his  practice  had  been  a  comparatively 
limited  one ;  but  this  lack  of  experience 
did  not  prove  a  handicap.  It  was  said  that 
the  lord  chief  justice.  Lord  Hewart  [q.v.], 
had  felt  that  he  had  not  been  shown  suffi- 
cient respect  in  being  consulted  regarding 
Asquith' s  appointment,  and  that  for  this 
reason  he  assigned  him  to  try  a  number  of 
notorious  criminal  cases  at  the  Old  Bailey 
where  an  error  would  have  had  an  un- 
fortunate effect  on  Asquith's  reputation. 
It  was,  however,  in  the  trial  of  criminal 
cases  that  Asquith  proved  particularly 
successful,  because  his  clarity  of  expres- 
sion and  his  skill  in  explaining  the  law 
when  charging  a  jury  were  of  special 
value.  There  was  some  complaint  that 
he  was  over-merciful  in  sentencing  the 
guilty,  but  this  did  not  bother  him. 

In  1946  he  was  appointed  a  lord  justice 
of  appeal  by  C.  R.  (later  Earl)  Attlee  on 
Jowitt's  recommendation,  and  was  sworn 
of  the  Privy  Council.  His  knowledge  of  the 
law,  coupled  with  his  delightful  literary 
quotations  and  his  flashes  of  humour, 
gave  distinction  to  his  judgements.  Of 
these,  perhaps  the  most  frequently  quoted 
are  Victoria  Laundry  (Windsor)  Ltd.  v. 
Newman  Industries  Ltd.,  [1949]  2  K.B. 
528,  in  which  he  stated  the  law  concerning 
the  measure  of  damages  on  the  breach  of 
a  contract ;  Thurogood  v.  Van  Den  Berghs 
&  Jurgens,  [1951]  2  K.B.  537,  on  the 
measure  of  damages  in  tort ;  and  Candler 
V.  Crane,  Christmas  &  Co.,  [1951]  2  K.B. 
164,  in  which  he  replied  to  his  friend  Lord 
Denning's  remark  that  'there  were  the 
timorous  souls  who  were  fearful  of  allow- 
ing a  new  cause  of  action'  by  saying  'If 
this  relegates  me  to  the  company  of 
* 'timorous  souls",  I  must  face  that  conse- 
quence with  such  fortitude  as  I  can  com- 
mand.' 

In  1951  Asquith  became  a  lord  of  appeal 
in  ordinary,  with  a  life  peerage,  again 
on  Jowitt's  recommendation.  It  was  re- 
marked that  'the  higher  he  went  the  better 
he  became'.  He  held  this  post  for  only 
three  years  before  he  died,  but  during  that 
time  he  gave  a  number  of  judgements  of 
great  interest.  In  Bank  of  New  South 
Wales  V.  Laing,  [1954]  A.C.  135,  he  de- 
livered the  decision  of  the  Judicial  Com- 
mittee of  the  Privy  Council  on  a  difficult 
procedural  point  concerning  the  onus  of 
proof  in  an  indebitatus  assumpsit  count. 
His  two  dissenting  judgements  in  King 
V.  King,  [1953]  A.C.  124,  and  in  Stapley 
V.  Gypsum  Mines  Ltd.,  [1953]  A.C.  663, 


m 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Astor 


illustrate  the  clarity  and  liveliness  of  his 
style. 

The  most  remarkable  moment  in 
Asquith's  life  came  in  October  1951  when 
(Sir)  Winston  Churchill  offered  him  the 
lord  chancellorship.  He  refused  it,  to  the 
deep  disappointment  of  the  few  persons 
who  had  heard  about  the  offer,  and 
Asquith  himself  never  referred  to  it  again. 
The  offer  was  unexpected,  since  Asquith 
had  no  political  experience  which  would 
have  aided  him  in  presiding  in  the  House 
of  Lords  as  a  legislative  body.  Perhaps 
Churchill's  choice  was  influenced  in  part 
by  the  fact  that  Asquith  was  the  son  of 
the  prime  minister  under  whom  he  had 
first  served  in  the  Cabinet;  it  may  also 
have  been  due  in  part  to  the  fact  that  they 
were  fellow  members  of  The  Other  Club, 
where  they  often  met  at  dinner,  and 
where  Churchill  had  an  opportunity  to 
judge  Asquith's  brilliance  of  mind.  But 
Asquith  was  far  too  high-minded  to  ac- 
cept a  post  which  he  felt  he  was  not  strong 
enough  physically  to  perform  adequately. 
In  a  letter  to  his  son-in-law  (Sir)  John 
Stephenson  he  insisted  that  Churchill 
^mustn't  be  saddled  with  a  lame  duck  on 
the  Woolsack'. 

Apart  from  his  Judicial  career,  Asquith 
filled  a  number  of  posts  of  importance.  He 
became  a  member  of  the  lord  chancellor's 
Law  Revision  Committee  in  1934.  He  was 
the  high  court  judge  attached  to  the 
General  Claims  Tribunal  (1939)  and  he 
was  chairman  for  six  months  in  1940  of  the 
advisory  committee  on  aliens.  He  was 
chairman  of  the  commission  on  higher 
education  in  the  colonies,  1943-4,  and 
chairman  of  the  royal  commission  on 
equal  pay  for  equal  work,  1944-6.  This 
particularly  onerous  assignment  gave  rise 
to  some  complaints  concerning  the  length 
of  time  that  the  commission  sat,  but  the 
report  when  finally  issued  justified  the 
work  done  in  preparing  it. 

Asquith  must  have  been  one  of  the 
major  contributors  to  The  Times  in  the 
number  of  letters  he  wrote  to  it  and  in 
the  unsigned  leaders.  They  varied  from 
extreme  seriousness  to  delightful  humour. 
Most  of  the  leaders  concerned  possible 
reforms  in  the  law  and  dealt  with  such 
subjects  as  'The  Cost  of  Litigation',  'Re- 
forming the  Law',  'The  Legal  Machine', 
and  'The  Law  relating  to  Married  Women'. 

Asquith's  publications  included  Trade 
Union  Law  for  Laymen  (1927)  which 
achieved  a  popular  success ;  Versions  from 
'A  Shropshire  Lad'  (1930),  a  translation 
into  Latin  of  poems  by  A.  E.  Housman 


[q.v.]  which  was  less  popular  but  received 
the  approval  of  his  former  Balliol  tutor, 
Cyril  Bailey  [q.v.] ;  and  in  1932  with  J.  A. 
Spender  [q.v.]  the  Ufe  of  his  father.  About 
half  the  first  volume,  which  deals  with  his 
father's  early  and  family  life,  was  written 
by  Asquith,  and  a  smaller  part  of  the 
second  volume ;  they  would  probably  have 
been  more  successful  if  he  had  written  the 
whole  of  them. 

His  conversation  and  his  writings  have 
been  described  as  showing  'the  same 
deliberation,  dry  humour  and  careful 
choice  of  words  that  marked  his  father's 
style'.  Cyril  Asquith  was  himself  an  illus- 
tration of  his  father's  famous  remark 
concerning  'the  effortless  superiority  of 
Balliol  men'.  Like  his  father  he  was  elected 
an  honorary  fellow  of  the  college. 

In  1918  Asquith  married  Anne  Stephanie 
(died  1964),  daughter  of  (Sir)  Adrian 
Donald  Wilde  Pollock,  chamberlain  of  the 
City  of  London;  they  had  two  sons  and 
two  daughters.  He  died  in  London  24 
August  1954. 

A  portrait  by  Honor  Earl  is  in  the  pos- 
session of  the  family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

A.  L.  GOODHART. 

ASTOR,  WALDORF,  second  Viscoukt 
Astor  (1879-1952),  public  servant,  was 
born  in  New  York  19  May  1879,  the  elder 
son  of  William  Waldorf  (later  first  Vis- 
count) Astor,  who  settled  in  England  in 
1889  and  was  naturalized  ten  years  later, 
and  his  wife,  Mary  Dahlgren  Paul,  of 
Philadelphia.  He  had  a  distinguished 
career  at  Eton  where  he  won  the  Prince 
Consort's  first  French  prize  (1897),  was 
captain  of  the  boats  (1898),  and  one  of  the 
editors  of  the  Eton  College  Chronicle.  He 
went  on  to  New  College,  Oxford,  where  he 
obtained  a  fourth  class  in  history  (1902) 
and  represented  the  university  at  polo, 
steeplechasing,  and  sabres. 

In  1906  Astor  married  Mrs.  Nancy 
Witcher  Shaw  (died  1964),  daughter  Of 
Chiswell  Dabney  Langhorne,  of  Virginia. 
She  was  one  of  the  sisters  whose  grace  and 
beauty  were  made  famous  by  the  artist 
Charles  Dana  Gibson  who  was  himself 
married  to  one  of  them.  His  father  gave 
them  as  a  wedding  present  his  house 
Cliveden,  built  by  Sir  Charles  Barry  [q.v.] 
in  1850,  overlooking  the  Thames. 

After  a  defeat  in  January  1910  Astor 
entered  Parliament  in  December  as  a 
Unionist  member  for  Plymouth.  In  the 
following  year,  1911,  his  father  bought 
the  Sunday  newspaper,  the  Observer ^  from 


Astor 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lord  Northcliffe  [q.v.].  Since  his  father 
lived  mainly  in  Italy,  Astor,  as  the  man 
on  the  spot,  became  in  many  ways  the  de 
fjcto  proprietor,  especially  in,  matters  re- 
lating to  editorial  policy.  A  close  political 
co-operation  with  the  editor,  J.  L.  Garvin 
[q.v.],  developed.  Ownership  of  the  paper 
enhanced  Astor's  influence  as  a  young 
Tory  member  of  Parliament.  In  other 
ways,  too,  he  widened  his  influence.  He 
was  a  prominent  member  of  the  Round 
Table  group  concerned  with  the  advance- 
ment of  imperial  unity  which  included  his 
brother-in-law  Lord  Brand;  and  Lionel 
Curtis,  Philip  Kerr  (later  Marquess  of 
Lothian),  and  Edward  Grigg  (later  Lord 
Altrincham)  [qq.v.].  These  remained  his 
friends  and  poUtical  associates  for  many 
years. 

In  1914,  because  of  poor  health  con- 
tracted as  a  young  man,  he  was  unable  to 
join  the  armed  forces  and  served  as  an 
inspector  of  ordnance  factories  for  which 
he  was  mentioned  in  dispatches.  His  politi- 
cal career  prospered.  He  became  succes- 
sively parliamentary  private  secretary  to 
the  prime  minister,  Lloyd  George  (1917), 
parliamentary  secretary  to  the  Ministry  of 
Food  (1918)  and  to  the  Ministry  of  Health 
(1919-21).  Meanwhile  in  1916  his  father 
was  created  a  baron  and  in  1917  a  vis- 
count, and  on  his  death  in  1919  Astor 
had  to  resign  his  seat.  He  endeavoured  to 
decline  the  title  in  order  to  remain  in  the 
House  of  Commons,  but  this  proved  to  be 
legally  impossible.  His  wife  stood  for  the 
Sutton  division  of  Plymouth  in  his  stead 
and  was  elected,  and  thereby  became  the 
flrst  woman  to  take  her  seat  in  the  British 
Parliament,  thus  beginning  a  career  which 
was  to  make  her  one  of  the  most  widely 
known  public  figures  in  Britain. 

Although  after  a  few  years  Astor  gave 
up  political  office,  he  did  not  give  up 
his  political  interests  but  pursued  them 
through  other  channels.  He  remained  pro- 
prietor of  the  Observer.  He  was  an  original 
member  of  the  Royal  Institute  of  Inter- 
national Affairs  (Chatham  House)  and 
served  as  chairman  of  its  study  groups 
committee  and  later  as  chairman  of  coun- 
cil (1935-49).  He  was  an  active  supporter 
of  the  League  of  Nations,  and  was  a 
British  delegate  to  the  Assembly  in  1931. 
He  developed  his  lifelong  special  interest 
in  agriculture.  He  was  the  joint  author 
with  Keith  Murray  (later  Lord  Murray  of 
Newhaven)  of  Land  and  Life  (1932).  In 
the  following  year,  also  with  Murray,  he 
published  The  Planning  of  Agriculture 
and  in  1938  British  Agriculture  to  which 


B.  Seebohm  Rowntree  [q.v.]  and  others 
contributed.  After  the  war,  with  Rown- 
tree, he  published  Mixed  Farming  and 
Muddled  Thinking  (1946).  In  1936  Astor 
became  chairman  of  the  joint  committee 
of  agricultural,  economic,  and  health  ex- 
perts appointed  by  the  League  of  Nations, 
the  progenitor  of  the  subsequent  United 
Nations  Food  and  Agricultural  Organi- 
zation. 

Cliveden,  situated  conveniently  half- 
way between  Oxford  and  London,  was  a 
week-end  rendezvous  for  politicians,  jour- 
nalists, and  dons.  In  the  late  thirties  those 
who  regularly  gathered  there  as  the 
guests  of  the  Astors  became  popularly 
known  as  the  'Cliveden  set'.  They  in- 
cluded the  prime  minister,  Neville  Cham- 
berlain, the  editor  of  The  Times,  Geoffrey 
Dawson  [q.v.],  and  Lord  Lothian  who  was 
later  ambassador  in  Washington.  They 
were  the  people  who  believed,  in  varying 
degrees,  in  the  general  thesis  that  a 
second  world  war  could  be  averted  by 
making  restitution  to  Hitler's  Germany 
for  the  disabilities  laid  upon  her  by  the 
treaty  of  Versailles.  The  opponents  of  this 
policy  of  'appeasement'  as  it  came  to  be 
known  claimed  that  members  of  this 
group,  meeting  as  they  did  regularly  at 
Cliveden,  were  exercising  an  undue  and 
even  unconstitutional  influence  on  foreign 
policy.  As  those  who  met  regularly  at 
Cliveden  were  people  holding  key  positions 
of  power  in  the  country  it  was  natural  that 
they  influenced  policy,  but  their  conduct 
was  neither  unconstitutional  nor  un- 
precedented in  English  history.  Neverthe- 
less in  1938  Astor  felt  it  necessary  to  rebut 
the  charges  in  a  letter  to  The  Times. 

While  engaged  in  these  wider  activities, 
Astor  did  not  neglect  Plymouth,  for  which 
his  wife  remained  the  sitting  member 
until  1945.  He  built  a  housing  estate  there 
which  bore  his  name.  He  founded  Virginia 
House  as  a  social  centre  for  women  and 
girls:  besides  playing  fields,  an  institute, 
and  a  university  hall  of  residence.  After 
the  war  of  1939-45,  during  which  Ply- 
mouth was  severely  damaged  by  bombing, 
he  played  a  leading  part  in  planning  its 
reconstruction.  He  was  made  an  honorary 
freeman  of  the  city  in  1936  and  was  lord 
mayor  in  1939-44. 

In  1942  Astor  parted  company  with 
Garvin.  During  the  latter  years  of  the 
partnership  there  had  been  mounting 
difficulties.  Garvin  had  been  editor  of  the 
Observer  for  over  thirty  years  and  Astor 
was  looking  to  the  succession.  There  was 
an  open  breach  when  Garvin  wrote  an 


42 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Atkins 


article  in  the  Observer  dealing  with  the 
higher  direction  of  the  war ;  his  views  were 
in  direct  opposition  to  Astor's.  The  tri- 
bunal which  existed  to  adjudicate  on  the 
relations  between  them  decided  against 
Garvin.  In  1945  Astor  set  up  a  trust, 
which  was  to  own  all  the  shares  in  the 
Observer  and  to  devote  the  income  to 
charitable  purposes,  chiefly  connected 
with  newspapers  or  journalism. 

One  of  Astor's  abiding  interests  through- 
out his  life  was  his  racing  stable.  While  at 
Oxford  he  bought  the  mare  Conjure,  and 
later  Popinjay  and  Maid  of  the  Mist. 
From  these  brood  mares  and  their  stock 
were  bred  the  winners  of  eleven  classic 
races.  His  horses  ran  second  in  the  Derby 
five  times,  but  he  never  succeeded  in 
winning  it.  The  building  up  of  one  of  the 
best-known  studs  in  the  coimtry  from 
scratch  was  his  personal  consideration,  the 
fruit  of  much  study  and  care. 

Born  to  great  wealth  and  the  first  of  his 
line  to  be  brought  up  in  England  from  an 
early  age,  Astor  devoted  his  energies  to 
public  service,  without  asking  or  expect- 
ing reward  or  recognition.  He  was  a  good, 
modest,  and  dedicated  man,  who  in  the 
public  eye  was  inevitably  overshadowed 
by  the  powerful  and  vivid  personality  of 
his  wife.  In  agriculture  he  possessed 
especial  expertise  and  his  views  were 
ahead  of  his  time.  He  was  a  committee 
man,  rather  than  an  individualist,  and  for 
this  reason  his  influence  on  affairs  was  not 
always  easy  to  trace.  One  result,  as  in  the 
case  of  the  'Cliveden  set'  myth,  was  that 
responsibility  was  sometimes  attributed 
to  him  for  views  or  actions  which  he  would 
not  necessarily  have  agreed  with  in  their 
entirety,  particularly  in  their  more  ex- 
treme expressions.  In  youth  an  outstand- 
ing games  player  and  sportsman,  he  was 
addicted  to  country  pursuits,  but  ill 
health  put  a  limit  on  his  activity.  Like  his 
wife,  he  was  a  Christian  Scientist. 

Astor  died  at  Cliveden  30  September 
1952  and  was  succeeded  by  his  eldest  son, 
WiUiam  Waldorf  (1907-66).  His  second 
son,  David  Astor,  became  editor  of  the 
Observer  in  1948.  He  had  two  other  sons, 
both  of  whom  served  as  members  of 
Parliament,  and  a  daughter  (the  Countess 
of  Ancaster). 

A  portrait  of  Astor  by  (Sir)  James  Gunn 
hangs  in  the  Astor  Room  in  Chatham 
House.  Another,  in  lord  mayor's  robes,  by 
the  same  artist  hangs  in  the  Astor  Room 
at  the  Guildhall,  Plymouth,  and  a  copy 
of  this,  in  ordinary  dress,  is  in  the  board- 
room of  the  Observer.  A  portrait  by  P.  A. 


de  Laszlo  is  at  Cliveden  which  in  1942  was 
handed  over  to  the  National  Trust. 

[The  Times,  1  October  1952 ;  Michael  Astor, 
Tribal  Feeling,  1963;  Alfred  M.  GoIIin,  The 
Observer  and  J.  L.  Garvin,  1908-14,  1960; 
private  information.]  Oliver  Woods. 


ATHLONE,  Earl  of  (1874-1957). 
[See  Cambridge,  Alexander  Augustus 
Frederick  William  Alfred  George.] 


ATHOLL,  Duchess  of  (1874-1960), 
public  servant.  [See  Stewart-Murray, 
Katharine  Marjory.] 


ATKINS,  Sir  IVOR  ALGERNON  (1869- 
1953),  organist  and  choirmaster,  the  fifth 
child  and  third  son  of  Frederick  Pyke 
Atkins,  professor  of  music  and  for  many 
years  organist  of  St.  John's,  Cardiff,  by 
his  wife,  Harriet  Maria  Rogers,  was  born 
29  November  1869  at  Llandaff.  He  was 
educated  privately  before  passing  into  the 
hands  of  Charles  Lee  Williams  at  Llandaff 
Cathedral.  In  1885  he  became  pupil- 
assistant  to  George  Robertson  Sinclair  and 
served  in  that  capacity  at  the  cathedrals 
of  Truro  and  (from  1890)  at  Hereford.  In 
1892  he  matriculated,  through  the  Queen's 
College,  Oxford,  as  a  non-resident  musical 
scholar,  and  was  admitted  to  the  degree  of 
bachelor  of  music.  Thus  qualified,  he  was 
appointed,  in  1893,  organist  of  Ludlow 
parish  church.  There  he  enlarged  his  ex- 
perience, and  in  1897  he  was  appointed 
organist  at  Worcester  Cathedral,  a  post 
carrying  with  it  the  duty  of  conducting 
the  triennial  festival  of  the  Three  Choirs. 
At  first  conditions  at  Worcester  were 
not  easy.  His  taste  was  offended  by  the 
facile  music  which  bulked  large  in  the 
repertory.  And  it  was  not  until  the  Ed- 
wardian decade  was  drawing  to  its  close 
that  Atkins's  views  prevailed.  Then,  in  his 
zeal  for  reform,  he  discarded  much  Vic- 
torian music  and  by  1930  had  revived  the 
works  of  his  Tudor  predecessors,  Thomas 
Tomkins  [q.v.]  and  Nathaniel  Patrick.  He 
also  showed  proofs  of  his  scholarship  by 
reviving  the  use  of  portions  of  the  thir- 
teenth-century Worcester  Antiphonar  and 
producing  for  the  Worcestershire  Histori- 
cal Society  an  account  of  the  early  or- 
ganists of  Worcester  Cathedral  (1918); 
by  a  preface  to  Worcester  Mediaeval 
Harmony  (1928),  and  (with  Neil  R.  Ker) 
the  Catalogus  Librorum  Manuscriptorum 
Bibliothecae  Wigorniensis  1622-23  (1944). 


48 


Atkins 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Atkins  was  cathedral  librarian  for  twenty 
years  (1933-53)  and  was  elected  F.S.A.  in 
1921. 

He  was  an  excellent  organist  but  his 
daily  work  did  not  involve  the  regular 
exercise  of  a  conductor's  skill.  During 
his  first  festival  in  1899  his  conducting 
was  criticized  adversely ;  notwithstanding, 
ftom  1902  onwards  his  great  powers  of 
organization  and  all-round  musicianship 
cairried  him  through.  His  greatest  service 
to  the  festival,  enlarging  the  repertory, 
was  the  fruit  of  broad  musical  sympathies. 
In  1902,  while  the  repercussions  of  the 
secession  of  John  Henry  Newman  [q.v.], 
were  still  felt,  his  courageous  introduction 
of  The  Dream  of  Gerontius  was  the  begin- 
ning of  the  close  association  of  (Sir)  Edward 
Elgar  [q.v.]  with  the  Three  Choirs.  In  the 
same  year  he  gave  a  first  festival  commis- 
sion to  (Sir)  Walford  Davies  [q.v.],  thus 
inaugurating  the  enterprising  policy  with 
regard  to  new  works  which  distinguished 
all  his  programmes. 

Atkins's  love  of  Bach  was  supreme.  He 
produced  a  valuable  edition  of  the  Orgel- 
biichlein  (1916)  and,  with  Elgar,  prepared 
an  edition  of  the  St.  Matthew  Passion 
(1911),  and  established  that  work  as  a 
regular  feature  of  the  festival.  He  also 
edited  the  St.  John  Passion  (1929), 
Brahms' s  Requiem  (1947),  and  the  Worces- 
ter Psalter  (1948).  Although  not  ambitious 
as  a  composer,  he  produced  a  cantata, 
*Hymn  of  Faith'  (1905),  and  several 
anthems,  services,  and  songs. 

In  1914  the  declaration  of  war  led  to 
a  break  in  the  sequence  of  the  festivals 
which  lasted  for  six  years.  Many  influen- 
tial persons  felt  that  it  would  be  impos- 
sible to  revive  them.  But  in  1920  Atkins 
undertook  the  immense  task.  The  revived 
festival  at  Worcester  was  almost  entirely 
his  own  creation  and  its  success  brought 
the  honour  of  knighthood  in  the  following 
year. 

Thereafter,  until  he  conducted  his  last 
festival  at  Worcester  in  1948,  his  life  was 
uneventful  and  his  employment  never 
varied.  At  Easter  1950  he  retired. 

Atkins  became  an  honorary  R.A.M.  in 
1910 ;  doctor  of  music  in  1920 ;  a  fellow  of 
St.  Michael's  College,  Tenbury  Wells,  in 
1921.  He  was  president  of  the  Royal  Col- 
lege of  Organists  in  1934-6. 

In  1899  Atkins  married  Katharine  May 
Dorothea,  daughter  of  the  Rev.  Edward 
Butler,  of  Llangoed  Castle,  and  had  one 
son.  Atkins  died  at  Worcester  26 
November  1953.  Lady  Atkins,  who  was 
prominent  in  the  life  of  the  city  and  the 


first  woman  to  become  high  sheriff  of 
Worcester,  died  in  1954. 

[Watkins  Shaw,  The  Three  Choirs  Festival, 
1954 ;  Grove's  Dictionary  of  Music  and  Musi- 
cians; Berrow's  Worcester  Journal,  passim; 
personal  knowledge.]  A.  T.  Shaw. 


ATKINSON,  Sir  EDWARD  HALE  TIN- 

DAL  (1878-1957),  lawyer,  was  born  in 
Beckenham  19  September  1878,  the  only 
son  of  Henry  Tindal  Atkinson,  county 
court  judge,  by  his  wife,  Marion  Amy 
Lewin,  and  grandson  of  Henry  Tindal 
Atkinson,  serjeant-at-law.  (Sir)  Edward 
Tindal  Atkinson,  his  uncle,  became  chan- 
cellor of  the  county  palatine  of  Durham ; 
all  were  members  of  the  Middle  Temple. 
Atkinson  was  educated  at  Harrow  and  at 
Trinity  College,  Oxford,  where  he  lodged 
in  the  Garden  Quad.,  and  was  known  to 
his  friends  as  'Tatters'.  He  obtained  a  third 
in  classical  honour  moderations  (1899)  and 
a  second  in  modern  history  (1901).  Inevi- 
tably, he  joined  the  Middle  Temple ;  he  was 
called  in  1902.  He  practised  in  chambers 
and  joined  the  South-Eastern  circuit  and 
the  Herts,  and  Essex  sessions.  The  greater 
part  of  his  practice  consisted  of  rating  and 
local  government  work  and  to  a  lesser 
degree  taxation,  fields  in  which  he  built 
up  a  substantial  practice. 

Atkinson  was  elected  to  the  Bar  Coun- 
cil in  1913  and  served  until  1921.  His  prac- 
tice was  interrupted  by  the  war  when  he 
enlisted  in  1917  as  a  lieutenant  in  the 
Royal  Naval  Volunteer  Reserve  and  was 
transferred  as  a  captain  to  the  Royal  Air 
Force  in  1918,  being  promoted  major  in 
1919.  He  went  to  Paris  as  legal  adviser  to 
the  air  section  of  the  British  delegation  at 
the  peace  conference  and  became  British 
secretary  to  the  International  Air  Com- 
mission. For  his  work  he  was  appointed 
C.B.E.  and  received  the  French  Legion  of 
Honour. 

Returning  to  his  chambers  in  1920  he 
soon  built  up  a  substantial  practice  again. 
In  1928-30  he  was  an  additional  member 
of  the  Bar  Council.  In  1929  he  followed  in 
his  father's  footsteps  as  a  bencher  of  the 
Middle  Temple;  and  in  the  same  year 
he  was  appointed  the  first  recorder  of 
Southend-on-Sea.  In  March  1930  he  was 
appointed  director  of  public  prosecutions, 
somewhat  unexpectedly  and  very  much 
to  his  own  smprise.  Invited  to  visit  the 
Home  Office  to  discuss  'a  certain  matter', 
he  went  convinced  that  he  had  made  some 
fearful  blunder  as  recorder;  when  it  was 
suggested  that  he  should  become  director 


44 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Aubrey 


he  refused  to  believe  it,  walked  out  of  the 
room,  and  had  to  be  fetched  back. 

Once  in  the  director's  chair,  Atkinson 
displayed  his  extraordinary  grip  of  law. 
His  experience  of  criminal  practice  was 
limited  and  at  almost  a  moment's  notice 
he  was  now  called  upon  to  devote  his  days 
exclusively  to  the  criminal  law.  He  knew 
none  of  his  staff  and  few  of  the  counsel 
engaged  in  that  type  of  work.  His  pre- 
decessor, Sir  Archibald  Bodkin  [q.v.],  one 
of  the  most  experienced  criminal  lawyers 
in  the  country,  was  a  difficult  man  to 
follow.  But  Atkinson  soon  showed  that  his 
knowledge  of  criminal  law  was  consider- 
ably greater  than  was  at  first  thought. 
During  his  first  two  years  he  was  haunted 
by  the  fear  that  he  was  not  making  a  suc- 
cess of  his  appointment ;  later  he  described 
this  period  as  the  most  unpleasant  of  his 
life.  His  doubts  disappeared  as  his  ex- 
perience widened,  particularly  after  he  was 
appointed  K.C.B.  in  1932.  Soon  he  became 
involved  in  the  preparation  of  possible 
wartime  legislation.  The  defence  regula- 
tions in  use  throughout  and  subsequent  to 
the  war  were  in  no  small  measure  the  re- 
sult of  his  advice.  During  the  war  he  was 
deeply  involved  in  many  serious  and  im- 
portant cases  including,  of  course,  all  the 
spy  cases.  He  expressed  personal  sym- 
pathy for  enemy  nationals  who  were 
caught  but  had  no  patience  with  British 
subjects  who  assisted  the  enemy. 

Atkinson  was  a  modest  man  with  a 
quiet  sense  of  hvunour  who  treated  his 
staff  with  a  rather  shy  courtesy.  He  was 
an  excellent  example  of  a  gentle  man :  he 
never  lost  his  temper  or  raised  his  voice ; 
he  was  polite  and  considerate ;  he  was  also 
extremely  generous,  but  this  he  was  at 
great  pains  to  conceal.  To  a  member  of  his 
department  who  had  suffered  a  great  dis- 
appointment he  gave  a  cheque,  pointing 
out  that  it  was  post-dated  by  ten  days, 
because  he  was  satisfied  that  if  the  re- 
cipient was  going  to  mention  the  matter 
he  would  do  so  within  that  period,  where- 
upon the  cheque  would  be  stopped. 

When  Atkinson  had  time  to  consider 
a  legal  problem  in  detail  he  could  write 
an  opinion  which  was  a  masterpiece  of 
clarity.  But  when  he  was  expected  to  give 
a  *snap'  judgement  he  often  had  to  alter  it 
on  reconsideration.  He  was  most  reluctant 
to  express  such  an  opinion  unless  specifi- 
cally asked  and  in  that  event  his  advice 
was  sometimes  at  fault  because  of  his  un- 
certainty. He  retired  in  1944  and  in  the 
following  year  was  appointed  chairman  of 
the  central  price  regulation  committee 


which  was  set  up  under  the  Prices  of 
Goods  Act,  1939.  It  was  the  duty  of  this 
committee  to  advise  the  Board  of  Trade 
on  orders  to  be  made  under  the  Act  and 
to  supervise  the  enforcement  of  the  pro- 
visions of  the  1919  Act  and  the  orders 
made  thereunder.  His  advice  and  ex- 
perience on  the  enforcement  of  price 
control  legislation  were  invaluable.  Here 
again  his  shyness  and  reluctance  to  ex- 
press anything  other  than  a  carefully 
considered  opinion  made  his  work  in 
negotiating  fair  prices  with  trade  associa- 
tions more  arduous  than  was  necessary. 
He  remained  chairman  of  the  committee 
until  it  was  dissolved  in  April  1953. 

In  1948  Atkinson  exceeded  the  records 
of  his  father  and  grandfather  and  followed 
his  uncle  by  becoming  treasurer  of  his 
Inn;  he  has  the  distinction — with  two 
other  treasurers — of  having  his  initials 
carved  in  the  stonework  of  the  entrance 
of  the  Middle  Temple  hall  to  commemorate 
the  fact  that  all  three  held  office  during 
the  period  of  post-war  restoration. 

Atkinson  died  in  Windsor,  after  an 
accident,  26  December  1957.  He  was  im- 
married. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
F.  D.  Babry. 


AUBREY,  MELBOURN  EVANS  (1885^ 
1957),  Baptist  minister,  the  eldest  child 
of  the  Rev.  Edwin  Aubrey  by  his  wife, 
Ehzabeth  Jane  Evans,  was  born  in  the 
Rhondda  21  April  1885.  His  father  was 
then  pastor  of  Zion  Baptist  church, 
Pentre,  and  subsequently  ministered  in 
Abercarn,  Glasgow,  and  Merthyr  Tydfil. 
Aubrey's  boyhood  was  therefore  set  amid 
changing  scenes.  He  early  heard  the  call  to 
the  Christian  ministry  and,  after  proving 
himself  an  able  student  at  Cardiff  Baptist 
College,  went  on  in  1908  to  Mansfield  Col- 
lege, Oxford,  where  A.  M.  Fairbairn  [q.v.] 
was  nearing  the  end  of  his  principalship. 
In  1911  Aubrey  was  ordained  to  the 
ministry  at  Victoria  Road  church,  Leices- 
ter, as  assistant  to  P.  T.  Thomson,  a  man 
of  great  ability  and  charm,  who  became 
his  lifelong  friend.  After  only  eighteen 
months  there  he  was  persuaded  to  under- 
take the  pastorate  of  the  historic  Baptist 
church  in  St.  Andrew's  Street,  Cambridge, 
to  which  Robert  Robinson  and  Robert 
Hall  [qq.v.]  at  one  time  ministered. 
Aubrey's  gifts  as  a  preacher  and  speaker 
matured  quickly  and  in  spite  of  the 
difficulties  brought  by  the  war  of  1914r-» 
18  he  drew  large  congregations,  which 


Aubrey 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


included  many  students  and  others  con- 
nected with  the  university.  T.  R.  Glover 
[q.v.],  of  St.  John's  College,  became  a 
deacon  of  the  church  and  Aubrey  was  one 
of  the  first  consulted  about  the  addresses 
which  became  The  Jesus  of  History  (1917). 

In  1925,  after  twelve  happy  years  in 
Cambridge,  Aubrey  was  chosen  to  suc- 
ceed J.  H.  Shakespeare  as  secretary  of  the 
Baptist  Union  of  Great  Britain  and  Ire- 
land. He  faced  no  easy  task  for  Shake- 
speare's health  had  given  way  some  time 
before  and  the  mind  of  the  denomination 
was  confused  and  uncertain  as  a  result  of 
sharp  differences  of  opinion  on  Church 
union.  The  first  annual  assembly  for  which 
Aubrey  was  responsible  coincided  with  the 
general  strike.  His  immediate  task  was 
the  raising  of  a  ministerial  superannuation 
fund  of  £300,000.  Thereafter  he  had  to 
guide  the  Baptist  denomination  during 
the  economic,  constitutional,  and  inter- 
national crises  which  preceded  the  second 
world  war,  a  period  when  almost  all  the 
British  Churches  suffered  severe  losses 
from  their  membership.  But  he  was  a  man 
of  courage,  wisdom,  and  resource,  deeply 
devoted  to  his  task,  and  his  powers  of 
leadership  were  soon  recognized  beyond 
the  borders  of  his  own  denomination.  In 
1936  he  was  appointed  moderator  of  the 
Federal  Council  of  the  Evangelical  Free 
Churches  and  in  1937  he  was  made  a  C.H. 

Aubrey  was  closely  involved  in  the 
ecumenical  movement  and  in  1937  was 
a  prominent  figure  at  the  Oxford  con- 
ference on  Church,  Community,  and  State 
and  the  Edinburgh  Faith  and  Order  con- 
ference. As  a  member  of  the  Committee  of 
Fourteen,  he  helped  to  draft  the  constitu- 
tion of  the  World  Council  of  Churches. 
Dm*ing  the  war  years  of  1939-45  his 
steadiness  and  faith  proved  an  inspiration 
to  his  colleagues  at  the  Baptist  Church 
House  and  to  the  churches  in  all  parts  of 
the  country.  He  took  a  close  interest  in  the 
work  of  Baptist  and  Congregational  chap- 
lains and  during  a  visit  to  the  Mediter- 
ranean and  the  Near  East  he  interviewed 
many  servicemen  whose  thoughts  were 
turning  to  the  ministry.  He  had  been  ap- 
pointed chairman  of  the  Churches'  Com- 
mittee for  Christian  Reconstruction  in 
Europe  and  was  one  of  the  first  British 
churchmen  to  visit  Germany  at  the  close 
of  hostilities.  In  1947  he  was  appointed 
a  member  of  the  royal  commission  on  the 
press  and  in  the  same  year,  during  a  visit 
to  Canada  and  the  United  States,  re- 
ceived an  honorary  LL.D.  from  McMaster 
University  and  an  honorary  D.C.L.  from 


Acadia  University.  From  1948  to  1950  he 
was  a  vice-president  of  the  British  Council 
of  Churches,  in  the  formation  of  which  he 
had  taken  a  deep  interest.  From  1948  to 
1954  he  served  on  the  central  committee 
of  the  World  Council  of  Churches.  For 
twenty-seven  years  he  was  a  member  of 
the  executive  of  the  Baptist  World 
Alliance. 

These  manifold  activities  did  not  deflect 
Aubrey  from  his  constant  concern  for  the 
spiritual  welfare  of  the  Baptist  churches 
and  the  needs  of  ministers  in  this  country. 
In  his  personality  strength,  spiritual  pas- 
sion, and  tenderness  were  blended.  He  was 
gifted  both  as  a  preacher  and  as  an  ad- 
ministrator and,  without  ever  concealing 
his  own  convictions,  successfully  held 
together  the  diverse  elements  in  the  Bap- 
tist denomination  during  a  period  of  no 
little  difficulty.  His  services  gained  for  him 
widespread  confidence  and  gratitude,  and 
on  the  eve  of  his  retirement  he  was  unani- 
mously called  to  the  presidency  of  the 
Baptist  Union  for  1950-51.  There  followed 
further  visits  to  the  United  States,  where 
a  number  of  members  of  his  family  had 
settled,  including  his  brother.  Dr.  Edwin 
Ewart  Aubrey,  one  time  president  of 
Crozer  Seminary. 

Aubrey  married  in  1912  Edith  Maria, 
daughter  of  Joseph  G.  Moore,  a  furniture 
dealer,  of  Watford,  and  by  her  had  one 
son  and  one  daughter.  He  died  in  Godal- 
ming  18  October  1957.  A  portrait  by 
Frank  O.  Salisbury  hangs  in  the  library  of 
the  Baptist  Church  House,  London. 

[E.  A.  Payne,  The  Baptist  Union:  A  Short 
History,  1959 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

E.  A.  Payne. 

AUSTIN,  JOHN  LANGSHAW  (1911- 
1960),  philosopher,  was  born  in  Lancaster 
28  March  1911,  the  second  son  of  Geoffrey 
Langshaw  Austin,  architect,  of  St.  And- 
rews, and  his  wife,  Mary  Bowes-Wilson. 
He  was  educated  at  Shrewsbury  School 
and  Balliol  College,  Oxford,  of  which  he 
was  a  classical  scholar,  winning  the  Gais- 
ford  prize  (1931)  and  obtaining  first  classes 
in  honour  moderations  (1931)  and  literae 
humaniores  (1933).  He  was  a  fellow  of  All 
Souls  (1933),  fellow  and  tutor  in  philosophy 
of  Magdalen  (1935),  and  from  1952  White's 
professor  of  moral  philosophy  and  fellow 
of  Corpus  Christi.  He  was  junior  proctor 
in  1949-50  and  was  appointed  a  delegate 
of  the  Oxford  University  Press  in  1952, 
serving  as  chairman  of  its  finance  commit- 
tee from  1957  until  his  death.  In  1955  he 
delivered  the  William  James  lectures  at 


49 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Austin 


Harvard  University  and  in  1958  was 
visiting  professor  at  the  university  of 
California  in  Berkeley.  He  was  elected 
F.B.A.  in  1958  and  was  president  of  the 
Aristotelian  Society  in  1956-7.  During  the 
war  of  1939-45  he  served  in  the  Intelli- 
gence Corps,  from  1944  in  S.H.A.E.F., 
reaching  the  rank  of  lieutenant-colonel.  In 
1945  he  was  appointed  O.B.E.,  received 
the  croix  de  guerre,  and  was  made  an 
officer  of  the  Legion  of  Merit. 

When  war  broke  out  in  1939  Austin  had 
taught  philosophy  for  only  four  years 
and  had  published  only  one  philosophical 
paper  ('Are  there  a  priori  Concepts?', 
1939),  but  his  power,  originality,  and 
critical  acumen  were  already  respected  by 
his  contemporaries  and  by  many  of  his 
seniors.  From  1946  when  he  returned  to 
Oxford  until  his  death  at  the  age  of  forty- 
eight,  his  was  the  most  powerful  single 
influence  on  the  development  of  philo- 
sophy in  Oxford.  It  was  also  widely  felt  in 
the  universities  of  America  and  the  Com- 
monwealth. He  was  a  gifted  teacher  and 
his  lectures  and  classes  were  eagerly  at- 
tended; but  his  influence  was  perhaps 
most  seminally  exercised  in  regular  in- 
formal meetings  for  philosophical  discus- 
sion attended  by  a  varying  group  of 
philosophy  dons.  He  regarded  discussion 
not  only  as  the  best  but  as  an  indispens- 
able instrument  of  progress  in  philosophy ; 
and  though  he  was  utterly  without  pomp 
or  pretension  his  intellectual  power, 
serene  lucidity,  and  astringent  wit  con- 
ferred on  him  a  natural  authority  in  any 
gathering  of  philosophers.  He  believed 
that  by  such  co-operative  discussion, 
conducted  with  sufficient  care  for  detail, 
step-by-step  progress  could  be  made  and 
recordable  solutions  of  philosophical  prob- 
lems reached. 

Austin  believed  that  philosophers  had 
altogether  imderestimated  the  subtlety 
and  complexity  of  ordinary  language  and 
neglected  the  important  distinctions  in- 
corporated in  it;  and  he  thought  it  one 
of  the  main  tasks  of  philosophy  to  bring 
these  to  light  by  patient  and  minute 
inquiries  conducted  without  theoretical 
preconceptions.  Much  philosophical  dis- 
cussion, e.g.  of  the  problems  of  percep- 
tion, was,  in  his  view,  condemned  to  end 
in  inconclusiveness,  irrelevance,  or  inco- 
herence because  it  was  conducted  in  a 
technical  classificatory  language  such  as 
that  of  'sense  datum'  and  'material  object' 
which  had  been  hastily  and  uncritically 
adopted  and  had  obscured  vital  differences 
in  the  phenomena  which  were  the  subject 


of  conflicting  theories.  A  new  start  was 
required  in  which  expressions  such  as 
'looks',  'seems',  'appears',  'illusion',  'de- 
lusion' were  carefully  discriminated,  and 
(in  his  words)  'a  sharpened  awareness' 
obtained  both  of  these  expressions  and  the 
facts  to  which  they  refer.  Such  a  new  start 
Austin  made  in  his  lectures  on  perception 
given  under  the  title  (a  characteristic 
joke)  of  'Sense  and  Sensibilia'.  The  recon- 
struction of  these  lectures  made  by  G.  J. 
Warnock  from  Austin's  notes  was  pub- 
lished under  the  same  title  in  1962. 

Much  of  Austin's  work  was  destruc- 
tively critical  and  the  object  of  his 
criticism  was  often  some  technical  term 
which  he  thought  too  coarse-grained  to  be 
fit  for  use  in  philosophy.  But  he  was  not 
solely  concerned  to  criticize  nor  was  he  in 
the  least  averse  from  the  introduction  of 
technical  classificatory  terms  in  order  to 
exhibit  important  features  of  language 
previously  neglected.  His  most  construc- 
tive work  in  fact  made  much  use  of  these 
in  a  systematic  classification  of  'speech 
acts'  outlined  in  his  William  James  lec- 
tures and  published  posthumously  in  1962 
imder  the  title  of  How  to  do  Things  with 
Words.  Here  Austin  reconsidered  with 
impressive  detachment  a  distinction  which 
he  himself  had  earlier  introduced  ('Other 
Minds',  1946)  between  statements  suscep- 
tible of  assessment  as  true  or  false  ('con- 
statives')  and  a  class  of  utterances  not  so 
assessed  which  he  termed  'performative' 
because  they  are  best  understood  as  the 
performance  of  an  action  by  the  use  of 
words  (such  as  'I  hereby  bequeath'). 
Austin's  further  examination  of  this  dis- 
tinction led  him  to  absorb  the  performa- 
tive aspect  of  language  into  a  general 
classificatory  theory  exhibiting  the  various 
senses  and  ways  in  which  in  saying  some- 
thing we  are  also  doing  something  else. 
This  theory  is  likely  to  illumine  many 
different  philosophical  problems. 

Austin  himself  published  only  seven 
papers  and  these  together  with  three 
previously  unpublished  essays  were  post- 
humously published  under  the  title  of 
Philosophical  Papers  in  1961.  Two  of  these, 
'Ifs  and  Cans'  (1956)  and  'A  Plea  for 
Excuses'  (1956),  contain  his  important 
and  widely  discussed  contributions  to  the 
philosophical  study  of  human  action, 
responsibility,  and  freedom.  He  was  also 
a  talented  classical  scholar  and  in  earlier 
years  frequently  lectured  on  philosophical 
problems  in  Plato  and  Aristotle. 

Austin  was  a  skilled  and  devoted  ad- 
ministrator  whose   services   were   much 


47 


Austin 


D,RB.  1951-1960 


valued  for  the  same  qualities  of  inventive- 
ness, acumen,  and  integrity  which  dis- 
tinguished his  philosophical  work.  He  was 
often  reserved  in  manner  and  on  occasions 
formidable.  But  he  had  great  natural 
courtesy,  gaiety,  and  charm,  and  much 
manifest  benevolence,  especially  for  his 
pupils.  His  intellectual  daring,  power,  and 
wit  made  his  company  a  constant  source  of 
pleasure  as  well  as  of  instruction. 

In  1941  Austin  married  Jean,  daughter 
of  the  late  C.  R.  V.  Coutts,  actuary,  by 
whom  he  had  two  sons  and  two  daughters. 
He  died  in  Oxford  8  February  1960. 

[Times  Literary  Supplement,  9  February 
1962;  G.  J.  Warnock  in  Proceedings  of  the 
British  Academy,  vol.  xlix,  1963 ;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

H.  L.  A.  Hart. 


AZAD,  Maulana  ABUL  KALAM  (1888- 
1958),  Indian  minister  of  education,  whose 
original  name  was  Ahmad,  was  born  at 
Mecca  11  November  1888,  in  an  Indian 
family  of  scholars,  several  of  whom  had 
held  high  position  under  the  Mogul  em- 
perors. His  father,  Maulana  Khairuddin, 
had  migrated  to  Mecca,  where  he  married 
the  daughter  of  Sheikh  Mohammed  Zaher 
who  was  a  well-known  scholar  of  Medina, 
and  himself  became  well  known  through- 
out the  Islamic  world  after  an  Arabic  work 
of  his  in  ten  volumes  was  published  in 
Egypt.  When  Ahmad  was  two  years  old 
his  father  returned  to  India  and  settled  in 
Calcutta  where  before  his  death  in  1909  he 
had  attracted  many  disciples  throughout 
India.  Ahmad,  who  had  two  sisters  and  one 
brother  older  to  him  and  a  younger  sister, 
was  taught  at  home  according  to  the 
traditional  system  of  education  for  ortho- 
dox Moslems  in  India.  He  was  taught  first 
Persian,  then  Arabic.  Then  came  philo- 
sophy, geometry,  arithmetic,  algebra, 
and  Islamic  theology.  He  completed  his 
studies  at  the  unusually  early  age  of  six- 
teen and  soon  afterwards  adopted  Abul 
Kalam  Azad  as  his  pen  name.  In  view  of 
his  learning  and  scholarship  he  was  ac- 
claimed as  a  Maulana  (Teacher),  by  which 
name  he  became  known  throughout  India 
and  beyond. 

It  was  about  this  time  that  Maulana 
Azad  came  across  the  writings  of  Sir  Syed 
Ahmed  Khan  and  was  greatly  impressed 
by  his  views  on  modern  education  and  his 
interpretation  of  the  Koran.  He  decided  to 
study  English  and  this  led  to  an  intellec- 
tual crisis.  Born  in  an  orthodox  family 
where  traditions  were  accepted  without 


question,  Maulana  Azad  became  a  rebel 
and  sought  to  find  out  the  truth  for  him- 
self. The  differences  among  the  sects  of 
Moslems  increased  his  scepticism.  The  im- 
pact of  western  ideas  also  led  him  to 
political  activity.  Believing  that  literature 
and  philosophy  can  flourish  only  in  an 
atmosphere  of  freedom,  he  was  attracted 
by  the  revolutionary  movement  sweeping 
through  Bengal  after  the  partition  of  1905 
and  joined  one  of  the  revolutionary  groups. 
He  regarded  it  as  one  of  his  first  tasks  to 
draw  Moslems  into  the  Indian  political 
struggle.  When  he  was  about  twenty  he 
toured  extensively  in  the  Middle  East,  and 
these  travels  strengthened  his  conviction 
that  independence  was  necessary  not  only 
for  the  sake  of  India  but  also  for  the 
liberation  of  the  whole  of  western  Asia. 

In  June  1912  Maulana  Azad  started 
Al  Hilal,  a  weekly  paper  in  Urdu  which 
marks  the  turning-point  in  the  history  of 
Urdu  journalism  which  hitherto  had  had 
hardly  any  influence  on  public  opinion. 
The  vigour  of  his  political  views  and  the 
power  of  his  style  led  to  an  unprecedented 
success  for  the  journal.  He  had  already 
been  recognized  as  a  promising  poet,  but 
even  before  he  went  abroad  he  had  decided 
that  he  must  devote  himself  to  political 
and  religious  writing.  In  fact  he  achieved 
a  fusion  between  the  poet's  passion  and 
the  scholar's  erudition,  so  that  his  style 
set  a  new  model  for  Urdu  prose.  All  his 
writings  were  marked  by  a  strong  note  of 
nationalism  and  created  a  revolutionary 
stir  among  the  masses.  Maulana  Azad  had 
accepted  Sir  Syed's  educational  pro- 
gramme but  in  Al  Hilal  he  challenged  his 
political  policies.  The  Government  was 
disturbed  by  the  success  of  Al  Hilal  and 
in  1915  confiscated  its  press.  Maulana 
Azad  then  started  a  new  journal  called 
Al  Balagh.  The  Government  retorted  by 
externing  him  from  Calcutta  in  April  1916 
and  soon  after  interned  him  at  Ranchi. 
He  was  released  in  January  1920.  In  this 
period  he  wrote  his  Tazkirah,  a  new  style 
of  writing  which  introduced  belles-lettres 
into  Urdu  Uterature,  and  he  also  prepared 
the  first  draft  of  his  famous  translation, 
with  commentary,  of  the  Koran.  Unfor- 
tunately the  manuscript  was  lost  through 
the  action  of  the  police  and  he  had  to 
undertake  the  work  afresh  after  release. 
He  had  planned  to  complete  the  work  in 
three  volumes  and  follow  it  by  a  critical 
study,  but  owing  to  the  uncertainties  of 
political  life  he  was  able  to  publish  only 
two  volumes.  Nevertheless,  many  scholars 
regard  it  as  the  most  important  commen- 


48 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Badeley 


tary  written  on  the  Koran  in  the  last  three 
hundred  years.  It  has  since  been  trans- 
lated into  English. 

Soon  after  his  release  Maulana  Azad 
went  to  Delhi  and  became  one  of  the  lead- 
ing figures  in  the  non-co-operation  move- 
ment launched  by  M.  K.  Gandhi  [q.v.].  He 
was  again  imprisoned.  After  his  release  in 
January  1923  he  was  elected  president  of 
the  special  session  of  the  Congress  held  at 
Delhi  in  September.  He  was  then  thirty- 
five,  the  youngest  man  to  be  elected  to  this 
office.  Thereafter  his  life  centred  round  the 
Indian  political  struggle.  He  took  part  in 
the  civil  disobedience  movement  of  1930, 
was  imprisoned,  but  released  in  1934. 
When,  after  the  elections  of  1937,  Con- 
gress decided  to  accept  office  in  the  pro- 
vinces, it  was  decided  that  there  should 
be  a  small  parliamentary  board  of  three 
to  supervise  the  work  of  the  provincial 
Congress  ministries.  Maulana  Azad  was 
one  of  the  members  and  placed  in  charge 
of  parliamentary  affairs  in  Bengal,  Bihar, 
United  Provinces,  Punjab,  Sind,  and  the 
North- West  Frontier  Province.  Soon  after 
the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  Congress 
ministers  in  the  provinces  resigned  and 
Congress  leaders,  including  Maulana  Azad, 
were  again  arrested.  In  1940  he  was  elected 
president  of  Congress  for  the  second  time 
and  held  that  office  until  June  1946,  the 
longest  period  that  anyone  had  held  that 
office  continuously;  but  much  of  this 
period  was  passed  in  jail.  With  Gandhi 
and  other  leaders  he  was  arrested  in 
August  1942  immediately  after  the  Con- 
gress had  passed  the  'quit  India'  resolu- 
tion. He  remained  in  the  Ahmednagar 
Fort  jail  until  June  1945.  There  he  wrote 
Ghubar-i-Khatir,  which  contains  some  of 
the  most  exquisite  personal  essays  in 
Urdu  or  any  other  Indian  language. 

Maulana  Azad  was  the  chief  spokesman 
of  Congress  during  the  mission  imder  Sir 
Stafford  Cripps  [q.v.]  in  1942,  the  Simla 
conference  convened  by  Lord  Wavell 
[q.v.]  in  1945,  and  the  more  successful 
cabinet  mission  under  Lord  Pethick- 
Lawrence  in  1946.  In  spite  of  requests 
from  many  quarters  he  did  not  join  the 
provisional  government  in  September 
1946,  but  later  became  education  minister 
of  India  in  January  1947.  There  were 
many  suggestions  of  some  other  portfoUo, 
but  he  considered  education  to  be  the 
most  important  instrument  for  nation- 
building  after  the  attainment  of  indepen- 
dence in  August  1947.  Accordingly,  he 
held  this  office  until  his  death  at  Delhi  22 
February  1958,  and  was  the  chief  archi- 


tect of  the  educational  policy  of  new 
India. 

Maulana  Azad  was  an  intellectual  in 
politics  who  sought  to  judge  everything  in 
the  fight  of  reason.  Trained  in  traditional 
oriental  learning,  he  welcomed  the  know- 
ledge of  science  and  technology  contri- 
buted by  the  West.  He  was  mainly 
responsible  for  sponsoring  a  History  of 
Philosophy:  Eastern  <&  Western  (2  vols., 
1952-3)  and  was  the  founder-president  of 
the  Indian  Council  for  Cultural  Relations, 
which  has  a  portrait  of  him  by  K.  K. 
Hebbar.  Another  by  the  same  artist  is  in 
the  Central  Hall  of  Parliament  and  the 
Delhi  corporation  has  one  by  Satish 
Gujral. 

Maulana  Azad  married  Zuleikha  Begum 
(died  1944),  the  daughter  of  a  government 
official ;  they  had  one  son  who  died  young. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

HUMAYUN  KaBIR. 

BADELEY,  HEJNRY  JOHN  FAN- 
SHAWE,  Baron  Badeley  (1874-1951), 
clerk  of  the  Parfiaments  and  engraver,  was 
born  at  Elswick,  Newcastle  upon  Tyne,  27 
June  1874,  the  elder  child  and  only  son  of 
Captain  Henry  Badeley,  of  Guy  Harfings, 
Chelmsford,  and  his  wife,  Blanche,  daugh- 
ter of  Christian  Augustus  Henry  Allhusen, 
of  Elswick  Hall,  and  of  Stoke  Court,  Stoke 
Poges.  He  was  educated  at  Radley  College 
and  Trinity  College,  Oxford,  of  which  in 
1948  he  became  an  honorary  fellow.  Here 
his  small  energetic  figure,  which  changed 
but  fittle  throughout  his  life,  marked  him 
for  athletics,  and  in  the  years  1895  to  1897 
he  was  chosen  to  represent  his  university 
in  the  quarter  mile  against  Cambridge. 
Rowing  also  became  one  of  Badeley's 
accompUshments,  although  golf  remained 
his  favourite  form  of  relaxation. 

In  1897  Badeley  won  first  place  in  a 
Civil  Service  competition  for  a  clerkship 
in  the  ParUament  Office,  and  in  that  year 
began  a  career  remarkable  for  its  loyalty 
to,  and  affection  for,  the  institution  which 
he  served.  He  eagerly  threw  himself  into 
his  official  life  and,  when  not  employed  on 
his  routine  work,  was  often  found  helping 
the  lord  chancellor's  secretaries,  and  build- 
ing an  interest  in  matters  parliamentary, 
legal,  and  heraldic.  It  was  in  the  last  of 
these  interests  that  Badeley  first  made  his 
mark. 

After  studying  under  (Sir)  Frank  Short 
[q.v.]  at  the  Royal  College  of  Art,  Badeley 
was  elected  an  associate  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Painter-Etchers  and  Engravers, 
and  was  almost  at  once  appointed  honorary 


Badeley 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


secretary  (1911-21).  In  1914  he  was  elected 
a  fellow  and  exhibited  regularly  until  his 
death.  His  combined  interest  in  heraldry 
and  line-engraving  turned  his  talent  for 
the  latter  towards  the  engraving  of  book- 
plates. His  work  in  this  field  became 
widely  known  and  he  executed  commis- 
sions for  a  large  number  of  individuals  and 
institutions,  which  included  plates  for  the 
hbrary  of  the  House  of  Lords. 

In  1919  Badeley  became  principal  clerk 
of  the  Judicial  Office  and  judicial  taxing 
officer  of  the  House  of  Lords.  Here  his 
energy  and  capacity  for  making  personal 
contacts  soon  enabled  him  to  break 
through  formalities,  and  he  became  the 
adviser  both  of  the  lord  chancellor  of  the 
day  and  of  the  law  lords  as  well  as  of  all 
those  members  of  the  legal  profession 
whose  business  brought  them  to  the 
House. 

The  turning-point  of  Badeley's  career 
came  in  1930  when  he  was  appointed  clerk 
assistant  of  the  ParUaments,  while  re- 
taining the  principal  judicial  clerkship. 
This  was  the  first  known  promotion  to  the 
Table  of  the  House  of  Lords  from  the  staff 
of  the  Parliament  Office,  and  opened  for 
Badeley  himself  and  for  his  successors 
an  avenue  to  the  top  of  their  profession. 
Badeley  strode  this  avenue  in  four  years, 
and  in  1934  became  clerk  of  the  Parlia- 
ments. He  was  clearly  suited  for  this 
office,  although  his  quahfications  differed 
somewhat  from  those  of  his  predecessors. 
His  strength  lay  in  the  force  of  his  per- 
sonality, coupled  with  a  quick  intelligence 
and  a  broad  practical  knowledge  of  parlia- 
mentary affairs. 

Badeley  was  appointed  K.C.B.  in  1935. 
He  had  also  been  made  C.B.E.  in  1920  for 
his  work  as  county  director  of  auxiliary 
hospitals  and  voluntary  aid  detachments 
in  the  county  of  London  (1917-19). 
From  1919  to  1923  he  was  president  of 
the  county  of  London  branch  of  the 
British  Red  Cross  Society. 

On  reaching  the  age  of  seventy  in  1944, 
Badeley  was  due  to  retire  but  the  House 
had  no  wish  to  lose  such  a  valuable  ser- 
vant whose  vigour  was  in  no  way 
diminished,  and  Badeley  was  granted  by 
the  Crown  an  extension  of  five  years. 
When  this  final  term  of  service  was  com- 
pleted he  was  created  (1949)  a  member  of 
the  House  he  had  served  so  well,  with  the 
title  of  Baron  Badeley,  of  Badley,  in  the 
county  of  Suffolk. 

The  position  he  had  attained  in  the 
parliamentary  world  may  perhaps  best  be 
summarized  in  the  words  of  the  Marquess 


of  Sahsbury  on  the  occasion  of  Badeley's 
retirement :  'In  an  age  when  a  great  many 
things  have  altered,  he  has  appeared  to 
be  the  one  unchanging  element,  and  that 
shrewd,  kindly  face  has  seemed  as  much  a 
part  of  the  House  of  Lords  as  the  Table  at 
which  he  sat.  But  for  the  fact  that  he  did 
not  technically  qualify,  I  think  he  might 
certainly  have  been  described  as  the 
Father  of  the  House.' 

Badeley  died  in  London  27  September 
1951.  He  was  unmarried  and  the  peerage 
became  extinct. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Victor  Goodman. 


BAILEY,  CYRIL  (1871-1957),  classical 
scholar,  was  born  in  Kensington  13  April 
1871,  the  eldest  son  of  Alfred  Bailey, 
barrister-at-law  and  some  time  Stowell 
law  fellow  of  University  College,  Oxford, 
and  his  wife,  Fanny  Margaret,  eldest 
daughter  of  George  Coles,  of  the  firm  of 
Warne  &  Co.,  rubber  merchants.  He  was 
educated  at  St.  Paul's,  where  he  was  cap- 
tain of  the  school  in  1888-90.  Going  up  to 
Balliol  as  a  scholar  in  1890,  he  was  among 
the  outstanding  classics  of  his  genera- 
tion, obtaining  the  Hertford  scholarship 
and  a  Craven  scholarship  (1891)  and  first 
classes  in  honour  moderations  (1892)  and 
literae  humaniores  (1894).  He  was,  be- 
sides, a  good  cricketer  and  a  notable  actor ; 
in  later  years  he  did  much  to  encourage 
and  inspire  Oxford  Greek  plays.  His  love 
of  walking  and  mountaineering,  begim  as 
an  undergraduate,  remained  with  him  for 
the  rest  of  his  active  life,  and  he  was  for 
many  years  a  member  of  the  Alpine  Club. 
From  1894  he  was  classical  fellow  and 
tutor  of  Exeter  College  until  his  election  in 
1902  to  a  fellowship  at  Balliol  where  he 
remained  for  nearly  forty  years.  He  re- 
tired in  1939  but  returned  during  the  war. 
Bailey  was  wholly  devoted  to  Balliol 
and  might  well  have  expected  to  succeed 
A.  L.  Smith  [q.v.]  as  master ;  but  it  was 
as  a  superb  classical  teacher  that  he  was 
remembered  by  many  generations  of 
pupils,  by  no  means  all  of  them  first-class 
men.  Humane  but  exacting,  and,  if  neces- 
sary, faithful  in  rebuke,  he  not  only  left 
them  with  a  taste  for  good  literature,  but 
loved  to  share  with  them  his  vacations  and 
his  own  varied  interests.  They  drew  on 
him  for  counsel  in  after  life,  and  many  felt 
that  a  retm-n  to  Oxford  was  not  complete 
without  a  journey  to  East  Hanney  where 
Bailey  lived  during  his  last  years.  He  had 
no  great  inclination  for  imiversity  busi- 


50 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bailey,  C. 


ness,  but  he  was  a  strong,  if  unobtrusive, 
force  in  the  university.  Anyone,  young  or 
old,  who  was  interested  in  Oxford  music  or 
Oxford  philanthropy  or  the  progress  of 
women's  education  was  sure  to  find  Cyril 
Bailey  near  the  centre  of  things.  An 
enthusiastic  member  of  the  Bach  Choir, 
he  became  its  president,  and  wrote  a  vivid 
memoir  of  Sir  Hugh  Allen  [q.v.].  He  was 
a  devoted  supporter  of  the  Balliol  Boys' 
Club.  From  1921  to  1939  he  was  chairman 
of  the  council  of  Lady  Margaret  Hall  on 
which  he  served  from  1915  until  1953. 

An  elegant  classical  composer,  especially 
in  Latin,  Bailey's  venerable  appearance, 
mellow  voice,  and  touches  of  scholarly 
humour,  concise  and  not  too  recondite, 
qualified  him  perfectly  for  the  post  of 
public  orator  which  he  held  from  1932  to 
1939 ;  his  long  service  as  a  delegate  of  the 
University  Press  was  a  testimony  to  his 
wise  and  discriminating  scholarship;  for 
many  years  he  gave  the  benefit  of  his  ad- 
vice to  the  projected  Oxford  Latin  Dic- 
tionary. He  was  an  admirable  and  popular 
lecturer,  alike  on  Cicero  and  Aristophanes, 
but  a  chance  request  while  he  was  a  young 
fellow  of  Exeter  to  lecture  on  Lucretius 
was  the  starting-point  for  what  proved  to 
be  his  lifelong  study.  He  published  the 
Oxford  Text  of  Lucretius  in  1900  (2nd  ed. 
1922)  and  in  1947  produced  his  magnum 
opus,  a  text  with  full  commentary  and 
translation.  Neither  in  his  powers  as  a 
textual  critic,  nor  in  his  knowledge  of 
early  Latin,  is  he  to  be  compared  to  a 
Lachmann  or  a  Munro.  Indeed  in  these 
respects  the  work  was  already  done. 
But  as  an  expert  in  the  background 
of  Lucretius'  thought,  as  a  sympathetic 
interpreter  of  his  ideas  and  a  sensitive 
expositor  of  his  argument,  Bailey  pro- 
duced an  edition  which  will  stand  for 
many  generations  and  is  indispensable  to 
any  study  of  the  poet. 

His  Lucretian  studies  led  him  to  the 
adjacent  but  more  arid  field  in  which 
he  published  Epicurus  (1926)  and  The 
Greek  Atomists  and  Epicurus  (1928).  From 
Lucretius  there  began  also  his  study  of 
Roman  rehgion  in  general.  Here  he  was 
the  heir  to  Warde  Fowler  [q.v.]  whom  he 
greatly  admired,  and  on  this  subject  he 
published,  besides  many  articles  and  re- 
views, a  volume  of  Sather  lectures  Phases 
in  the  Religion  of  Ancient  Rome  (1932)  and 
Religion  in  Virgil  (1935).  On  a  more 
popular  level  he  contributed  to  The 
Legacy  of  Rome  (1923)  of  which  he  was  the 
editor.  He  projected  an  edition  of  Ovid's 
Fasti  but  did  not  proceed  with  it  in  view 


of  the  forthcoming  edition  by  Sir  James 
Frazer  [q.v.]. 

Bailey  deserves  to  be  remembered  not 
only  as  a  scholar  and  teacher,  but  as  a 
great  Oxford  personality  whose  prime  vir- 
tues were  his  humanity,  his  modesty,  and 
his  power  of  friendship.  He  had  entered 
Balliol  in  the  reign  of  Benjamin  Jowett 
[q.v.]  and  throughout  the  years  he  kept 
alive  what  was  best  in  the  Jowett  tradi- 
tion by  his  personal  and  affectionate  in- 
terest in  individual  Balliol  men,  whether 
or  not  they  were  classics,  an  interest 
which  extended  to  men  from  other  col- 
leges if  they  happened  to  be  his  pupils. 
These  friendships  he  kept  in  repair  if 
possible  by  meeting;  if  not,  by  faithful 
and  assiduous  correspondence  which  was 
always  full  of  good  humour  and  good 
judgement. 

BalUol  meant  to  Bailey  far  more  than 
any  given  generation  of  undergraduates. 
It  meant  the  whole  conmiunity  of  Balliol 
men  spread  over  the  world,  and  he  had 
an  astonishingly  accurate  memory  for 
their  achievements  and  personalities,  well- 
known  or  unknown,  as  was  evident  from 
a  speech  which  he  made  at  a  dinner  to 
celebrate  his  eightieth  birthday,  when  he 
spoke  of  representative  figures  from  five 
decades  of  BaUiol  history  as  intimately  as 
though  the  men  had  just  gone  down.  In- 
deed, his  interest  in  them  began  before 
they  came  up.  As  an  examiner  and  a 
frequent  visitor  to  schools,  he  kept  in 
touch  with  potential  Balliol  scholars  and 
their  teachers.  Few  dons  were  better 
known  to  the  fraternity  of  schoolmasters, 
and  for  many  years  he  was  chairman  of 
the  annual  conference  known  as  'Dons  and 
Beaks'.  They  admired  the  unassuming 
modesty  of  so  eminent  a  scholar  and  the 
Christian  faith  which  was  transparently 
the  foundation  of  his  ideas  and  ideals. 
He  was  heard  in  later  life  to  regret,  half- 
humorously  perhaps,  that  he  had  allowed 
this  gift  for  friendship  to  rob  him  of  time 
which  he  might  have  devoted  to  pure 
scholarship,  but  those  who  knew  him  best 
would  maintain  that  the  loss  (if  loss  it  was, 
for  he  was  by  any  standard  a  fine  scholar) 
was  far  less  than  the  gain. 

Bailey  was  an  honorary  fellow  of  Bal- 
Hol  and  of  Lady  Margaret  Hall  and  re- 
ceived honorary  degrees  from  Oxford, 
Durham,  Wales,  Glasgow,  and  Cali- 
fornia. He  was  elected  F.B.A.  in  1933,  was 
president  of  the  Classical  Association  in 
1934,  and  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1939. 
He  was  elected  a  governor  of  St.  Paul's 
School  in  1901  and  for  over  fifty  years  was 


51 


Bailey,  C. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


a  moving  spirit  of  that  body.  He  was  a 
member  of  the  council  of  Marlborough 
CoUege  from  1932  to  1945.  During  the 
first  war  he  worked  in  the  Ministry  of 
Munitions  and  in  the  second  he  was  an 
ideal  member  of  the  conscientious  objec- 
tors tribunal. 

Bailey  married  in  1912  Genrnia, 
yoimgest  daughter  of  Mandell  Creighton 
[q.v.],  by  whom  he  had  three  daughters 
and  one  son.  He  died  at  East  Hanney 
5  December  1957.  There  is  a  drawing  of 
Cyril  Bailey  in  chalk  by  Sir  William 
Rothenstein  and  an  etching  by  Andrew 
Freeth,  both  in  BaUiol;  the  latter  may 
seem  to  Bailey's  friends  the  better  like- 
ness of  the  two. 

[Balliol  College  Record,  1958;  personal 
knowledge.]  J.  T.  Christie. 

BAILEY,  MARY,  Lady  Bailey  (1890- 
1960),  airwoman,  was  born  in  London  1 
December  1890,  the  only  daughter  of  the 
fifth  Lord  Rossmore,  of  Monaghan,  and 
his  wife,  Mittie  Naylor.  In  1911  she  mar- 
ried Sir  Abe  Bailey  [q.v.]  by  whom  she 
had  two  sons  and  three  daughters. 

Lady  Bailey  learnt  to  fly  in  Moth  light 
aeroplanes  at  the  London  Aeroplane  Club 
at  Stag  Lane  in  1926  and  took  her  pilot's 
licence  in  1927.  She  was  the  first  woman 
to  fly  across  the  Irish  Sea,  and  in  July 
1927,  with  Mrs.  Geoffrey  de  Havilland,  in 
a  Moth,  she  climbed  to  over  17,280  feet, 
the  greatest  height  to  which  any  woman 
had  flown  in  a  light  aeroplane. 

On  9  March  1928  Lady  Bailey  set  off 
alone  from  Croydon  in  a  Cirrus-engined 
de  Havilland  Moth  to  fly  to  Cape  Town  to 
meet  her  husband.  She  was  thirty-eight 
and  the  mother  of  five  children.  Her 
action  emphasized  the  increasing  indepen- 
dence of  women  and  at  the  same  time 
directed  public  attention  to  the  practical 
transport  capabiUties  of  the  light  aero- 
plane. By  the  almost  casual  manner  in 
which  she  undertook  long  and  difficult 
flights  she  showed  that  Ught  aeroplanes 
could  be  used  for  personal  travel  in  all 
parts  of  the  world  and  this  gave  a  wider 
popularity  to  personal  aviation.  In  her 
flight  to  the  Cape  she  suffered  set-backs 
which  would  have  deterred  anyone  less 
determined.  A  month  after  her  departure, 
at  Tabora,  her  aeroplane  was  badly 
damaged  when  she  landed  in  turbulent 
conditions  and  a  replacement  had  to  be 
sent  to  her.  Travelling  southward  from 
Cairo,  through  Malakal,  Kisumu,  Tabora, 
and  Johannesburg,  she  reached  the  Cape 
30  April  1928  and  decided  to  make  the 


return  flight.  Soon  after  starting  her  air- 
craft was  again  damaged;  but  repairs 
were  completed  and  she  restarted  from 
Broken  Hill  on  21  September  1928.  Flying 
westwards  through  Kano  and  Dakar  and 
then  north  along  the  French  A6ropostale 
route,  she  reached  Croydon  on  16  January 
1929.  In  an  aeroplane  with  a  top  speed  of 
less  than  100  miles  an  hour,  she  had  com- 
pleted 18,000  miles  in  the  air.  It  was  for 
this  flight  that  she  was  awarded  the 
Britannia  Trophy  in  1930.  She  was  ap- 
pointed D.B.E.  in  the  same  year  for  her 
services  to  aviation. 

Lady  Bailey  took  part  in  many  sporting 
and  competitive  flying  events.  She  en- 
tered for  the  King's  Cup  air  race  in  1927, 
1929,  and  1930,  the  last,  which  was  won 
by  Miss  Winifred  Brown,  attracting  over 
a  hundred  entries.  She  flew  in  the  inter- 
national challenge  competition  round 
Europe  in  1929  and  1930.  Some  of  her 
exploits  occurred  when  she  was  still  an 
inexperienced  pilot  and  her  remarkable 
will  power  and  courage  were  the  deter- 
mining factors  in  her  success.  But  she 
worked  hard  to  develop  her  piloting 
technique  and  took  a  course  of  instruction 
in  instrument  flying  and  obtained  a 
certificate  of  proficiency. 

She  died  at  her  home  at  Kenilworth, 
near  Cape  Town,  29  August  1960. 

[The  Times,  30  August  1960 ;  Sir  Geoffrey 
de  Havilland,  Sky  Fever,  1961 ;  Terence 
Boughton,  The  Story  of  the  British  Light 
Aeroplane,  1963;  Royal  Aero  Club  Gazette, 
November  1963 ;  Who's  Who  in  British  Avia- 
tion, 1935 ;  private  information.] 

Oliver  Stewart. 

BAIRNSFATHER,  CHARLES  BRUCE 

(1888-1959),  cartoonist,  was  born  at 
Murree,  India,  9  July  1888,  the  son  of 
Lieutenant  (later  Major)  Thomas  Henry 
Bairnsfather.  His  mother's  maiden  name 
was  Every.  He  was  educated  at  the  United 
Services  College,  Westward  Ho!  Having 
chosen  the  army  as  his  profession  he 
served  for  a  time  with  the  Royal  Warwick- 
shire Regiment  but  soon  decided  to 
abandon  a  military  career  and  take  up  art. 
He  became  a  student,  under  Charles  van 
Havermaet,  at  an  art  school  run  by  John 
Hassall  [q.v.],  but  was  not  long  in  arriving 
at  the  conclusion  that  he  was  no  more 
likely  to  be  successful  as  an  artist  than  as 
a  soldier.  He  therefore  gave  up  studying 
art,  although  continuing  to  draw  in  his 
spare  time,  and  became  apprenticed  to  a 
firm  of  electrical  engineers,  Spensers,  Ltd., 
at  Stratford  on  Avon.  In  due  course  he 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bajpai 


was  appointed  one  of  their  representa- 
tives and  travelled  widely  on  the  firm's 
behalf.  At  the  same  time,  he  kept  up  his 
drawing  and  also  became  an  amatem* 
comedian. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  August  1914 
he  rejoined  his  regiment  and  in  the  fol- 
lowing November  went  out  to  the  1st 
battalion  in  France.  In  July  1915  he  was 
promoted  captain.  During  the  same  year 
the  first  of  his  cartoons  depicting  life 
at  the  front  appeared  in  the  Bystander, 
Seven  collections  of  these  were  subse- 
quently published  under  the  title  'Frag- 
ments from  France'  and  achieved  an 
enormous  popularity.  His  two  famous 
characters  were  Old  Bill,  a  blob-nosed, 
middle-aged  cockney  with  a  walrus  mous- 
tache, and  Bert,  a  gormless  youth  with 
a  cigarette  dangling  permanently  from  his 
Ups.  Best  remembered  of  his  cartoons  was 
that  of  two  men  immured  in  a  shell-hole 
at  the  height  of  a  barrage  with  the  caption 
'Well,  if  you  knows  of  a  better  'ole,  go  to 
it'  {Bystander,  24  November  1915)  which 
became  a  wartime  catchword. 

Bairnsfather  continued  to  serve  in 
France  until  December  1916  when  he 
joined  the  intelligence  department  of  the 
War  Office  as  an  officer-cartoonist  and 
was  sent  to  various  fronts.  He  also  wrote 
sketches  of  life  in  the  trenches  for  a  revue 
at  the  London  Hippodrome,  and  for 
another  produced  by  Andre  Chariot  [q.v.] 
at  the  Comedy  Theatre,  as  well  as  a  play 
(in  collaboration).  The  Better  ''Ole,  pro- 
duced by  (Sir)  C.  B.  Cochran  [q.v.]  at  the 
Oxford  Theatre  in  1917. 

So  far  as  any  marked  influence  is  dis- 
cernible in  Bairnsfather' s  work  as  a 
draughtsman — his  style  though  common- 
place was  paradoxically  distinctive,  in 
that  it  was  unmistakably  his  own — it 
would  seem  to  be  that  of  the  comic  maga- 
zines of  the  period,  and  in  particular  the 
work  of  Tom  Brown  in  the  Sketch,  of 
whose  fruitier  characters  Old  Bill  might  be 
claimed  as  a  distant  connection  by  reason 
of  the  exaggerated  emphasis  placed  upon 
physical  features.  Bairnsfather' s  drawing 
in  its  coarse  and  facile  way  was  sound  and 
his  observation  of  externals  accurate,  but 
there  was  little  attempt  at  subtlety  either 
in  his  humour  or  in  his  technique.  The 
immense  popularity  of  his  cartoons  must 
be  attributed  partly  to  the  conditions  of 
the  period;  anyone  who  could  extract 
humour  from  the  grim  realities  of  trench 
warfare  could  not  fail  to  be  regarded  in 
some  degree  as  a  comic  genius.  The  appeal 
of  his   cartoons   was   not  only  in  their 


topicality  but  in  the  simplicity  of  his 
ideas :  Bert  to  Old  Bill,  apropos  a  gigantic 
shell-hole  in  the  middle  of  the  wall: 
'What  made  that  'ole?'  Bill:  'Mice.' 

In  exploiting  such  humour  as  was  to  be 
found  in  the  tensions,  the  grievances,  and 
the  frustrations  of  the  period  Bairns- 
father was  at  his  best,  giving  succinct 
expression  to  the  universal  determination 
to  'grin  and  bear  it'.  With  the  return  to 
peacetime  conditions,  however,  attitudes 
changed  and  the  appeal  of  this  particular 
vein  of  humour  declined.  He  drew  for  the 
Passing  Show  and  the  Bystander  in  Eng- 
land, for  Life,  the  New  Yorker,  and  Judge 
in  the  United  States,  but  his  cartoons 
never  achieved  the  same  popularity.  He 
spent  his  time  in  both  America  and  Eng- 
land, lecturing,  drawing,  writing,  and 
appearing  in  music-halls.  He  also  wrote 
the  synopsis  for  a  film  made  in  Canada 
called  Carry  on.  Sergeant.  In  1942-4  he 
was  attached  as  an  official  cartoonist  to 
the  United  States  Army  in  Europe. 

In  1921  Bairnsfather  married  Cecilia 
Agnes  (died  1966),  daughter  of  the  late 
William  Bruton,  of  Sydney,  Australia, 
and  formerly  the  wife  of  the  Hon. 
Michael  Scott.  They  had  one  daughter. 
He  died  in  Worcester  29  September  1959. 

[Bruce  Bairnsfather,  Wide  Canvas,  1939; 
private  information.]         Nicolas  Bentley. 

BAJPAI,  Sir  GIRJA  SHANKAR  (1891- 
1954),  Indian  statesman,  was  born  in 
Lucknow  3  April  1891,  the  second  of  three 
sons  of  Rai  Bahadur  (Sir)  Seetla  Prasad 
Bajpai  and  his  wife,  Rukmini,  daughter  of 
Pandit  Uma  Charan  Shukla.  His  father, 
the  scion  of  a  conservative  Brahmin 
family,  who  became  chief  justice  of  Jaipur, 
Rajputana,  was  knighted  in  1939  and  died 
in  1947.  Educated  at  the  Muir  Central 
College,  Allahabad,  and  at  Merton  Col- 
lege, Oxford,  where  he  obtained  a  second 
class  in  modern  history  in  1914,  Bajpai  in 
the  same  year  entered  the  Indian  Civil 
Service,  in  which  he  was  perhaps  the  most 
brilliant  younger  Indian  member  during 
the  period  between  the  wars.  Almost  the 
whole  of  his  career  during  the  British 
period  was  passed  in  secretariat  appoint- 
ments, or  representing  India  in  various 
posts  in  the  Commonwealth  and  at  Round 
Table  conferences.  This  part  of  his  life 
attained  its  peak  in  his  appointment  as 
member  of  Council  for  the  education 
department  in  1940,  and  in  1941  as  the 
first  agent-general  for  India  in  the  United 
States,  a  post  which  he  held  for  six  years, 
laying   the   foimdations   for  the   Indian 


53 


Bajpai 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Embassy  set  up  when  India  attained 
independence  in  1947. 

During  the  British  period  it  was  Baj- 
pai's  fortune  to  serve  at  a  time  when,  with 
the  advance  towards  independence,  there 
came  within  the  reach  of  able  Indians  new 
and  challenging  opportunities  for  proving 
their  worth  both  in  administration  at  the 
top  and  as  spokesmen  in  the  central  legis- 
lature. To  this,  towards  the  end,  was 
added  the  responsibility  for  the  conduct 
of  India's  relations  overseas,  not  only  in 
parts  of  the  Commonwealth  where  Indian 
expatriates  resided,  but,  in  Bajpai's  case, 
in  America.  In  all  these  fields  he  showed 
himself  to  be  a  fine  craftsman.  He  was 
inmiensely  industrious;  he  was  a  good 
orator,  skilled  in  repartee  and  debate,  in 
which  he  had  to  match  men  of  the  calibre 
of  Bhulabhai  Desai  and  M.  A.  Jinnah 
[q.v.];  and  he  was  possessed  of  those 
quaUties  of  persistence  and  persuasion 
associated  with  the  successful  diplomatist. 
In  Washington  he  impressed  Roosevelt 
and  was  at  pains  to  correct  many  of  the 
more  naive  American  opinions  on  the 
realities  of  the  British  relationship  with 
India ;  he  was  able  to  show  that  in  deaUng 
from  Delhi  with  the  problems  of  Indians 
overseas  it  was  easier  to  negotiate  with 
the  British  than  it  was  later  with  the 
independent  governments. 

Bajpai's  career  won  its  crown  with 
independence  in  1947.  The  new  India 
had  not  unnaturally  inherited  prejudices 
against  the  Indian  Civil  Service,  and  for 
a  period  he  seemed  to  meet  with  a  studied 
lack  of  courtesy  and  consideration.  This 
he  bore  with  unfailing  dignity,  and  it  was 
not  long  before  his  merit  was  recognized 
by  Jawaharlal  Nehru.  Late  in  1947  he  was 
appointed  secretary-general,  the  post  at 
the  head  of  the  Indian  Ministry  of  Exter- 
nal Affairs  recognized  as  parallel  with  the 
Treasury  secretaryship  in  Britain.  In  this 
office  he  was  associated  with,  and  in- 
fluenced, many  decisions  of  high  policy. 

In  Bajpai  the  Commonwealth  had  a 
doughty  champion,  and  the  reality  of  the 
Commonwealth  bond  between  India  and 
Britain  in  all  probability  owed  more  to  his 
steady  counsel  behind  the  scenes  than  to 
the  decisions  of  statesmen.  Above  all  he 
stood  for  that  synthesis  of  eastern  and 
western  values  which  is  the  most  profound 
result  of  Britain's  association  with  India. 
The  last  appointment  of  an  outstanding 
career  was  in  1952  to  the  governorship  of 
Bombay,  in  some  ways  the  most  dignified 
post  in  India.  In  1953  he  represented  India 
at  the  Geneva  United  Nations  talks  on 


Kashmir.  He  died  in  Bombay,  in  harness, 
5  December  1954,  full  of  honours,  a  great 
Indian  who  cared  deeply  for  the  British 
heritage.  He  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in 
1922,  CLE.  in  1926,  K.B.E.  in  1935,  and 
K.C.S.I.  in  1943. 

Outwardly  Bajpai  seemed  a  little  aus- 
tere and  aloof.  He  was  fond  of  reading, 
and  in  the  Indian  manner  cultivated  an 
air  of  detachment  designed  to  ensure  a 
privacy  which  he  prized.  In  his  lighter 
moments  he  turned  to  things  of  beauty,  in 
particular  carpets,  paintings,  and  flowers 
— he  loved  roses  and  cultivated  fine 
varieties  in  his  garden.  He  was  devoted  to 
Persian  poetry.  Born  to  the  gracious  way 
of  Uving,  with  all  his  elegant  manners  and 
his  courtesy  he  had  a  Puckish  streak  and 
liked  both  to  poke  fun  yet  be  willing  to  be 
its  object.  He  hked  to  tell  against  himself 
of  his  encounter  with  a  Washington 
poHceman  when  he  crossed  the  road 
against  the  lights:  'You  had  better  have 
my  name,  I  am  Sir  Girja  Shankar  Bajpai.' 
'You  may  be  meat-pie  or  pork-pie,  or  any 
other  sort  of  pie',  replied  the  policeman, 
'but  you'll  be  mince-pie  next  time !' 

In  1911  Bajpai  married  Rajni,  daugh- 
ter of  R.  A.  Misra,  a  Brahmin  lady  of 
Cawnpore,  by  whom  he  had  three  sons 
and  four  daughters. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Olaf  Caroe. 


BAKER,  HENRY  FREDERICK  (1866- 
1956),  mathematician,  was  born  in  Cam- 
bridge 3  July  1866,  the  son  of  Henry 
Baker,  a  domestic  butler,  and  his  wife, 
Sarah  Ann  Britham.  After  attending 
various  small  schools  he  entered  the  Perse 
School,  Cambridge.  He  was  awarded  a 
sizarship  at  St.  John's  College,  Cam- 
bridge, in  the  summer  of  1883,  but  re- 
mained at  school  in  order  to  prepare  for 
the  entrance  scholarship  examination  to 
be  held  in  the  following  December.  He 
was  successful  in  being  elected  to  a  founda- 
tion scholarship  and  began  residence  in 
October  1884.  In  1887  he  was  bracketed 
senior  wrangler  with  three  others,  and  in 
the  following  year  he  was  placed  in  the 
first  division  of  the  first  class  in  part  ii  of 
the  mathematical  tripos.  He  was  elected 
into  a  fellowship  of  St.  John's  College  in 
1888  and  remained  a  fellow  for  nearly 
sixty-eight  years.  In  1889  he  was  awarded 
a  Smith's  prize  and  in  the  next  year  he 
was  appointed  a  college  lecturer. 

Baker  spent  the  whole  of  his  working 
life  in  Cambridge,  first  as  a  college  lec- 


54 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Baker,  H.  F. 


turer,  then  as  a  university  lecturer  (1895- 
1914),  holding  the  special  Cayley  lecture- 
ship (1903-14),  and  finally  as  Lowndean 
professor  of  astronomy  and  geometry 
(1914-36).  He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1898 
and  received  the  Sylvester  medal  in  1910. 
He  was  awarded  the  De  Morgan  medal  of 
the  London  Mathematical  Society  in  1905 
and  was  president  of  the  society  in  1910 
and  1911.  In  1923  the  university  of  Edin- 
burgh conferred  on  him  the  honorary 
degree  of  LL.D.  and  in  1943  the  Royal 
Society  of  Edinburgh  made  him  an 
honorary  fellow. 

Baker's  whole  life  was  devoted  to  the 
service  of  mathematics,  by  his  erudition, 
by  his  own  research,  and  by  his  power  to 
communicate  his  enthusiasm  to  his  pupils. 
His  researches  covered  a  wide  range  of 
subjects,  but  chronologically  they  fall  into 
two  distinct  periods.  In  the  earlier  period, 
which  lasted  until  about  1911  or  1912, 
Baker's  main  interest  was  in  the  theory 
of  algebraic  functions  and  related  topics. 
But  his  work  on  this  often  had  a  bearing 
on  other  branches  of  pure  mathematics, 
to  which  he  made  useful  contributions 
from  time  to  time.  Subjects  on  which  he 
wrote  included  invariant  theory,  differ- 
ential equations,  and  Lie  groups;  more- 
over his  work  on  algebraic  functions  led 
him,  after  the  turn  of  the  century,  to 
consider  wider  problems  in  the  theory  of 
functions,  including  functions  of  several 
complex  variables.  While  many  of  Baker's 
papers  were  noteworthy  in  their  day,  it 
was  his  two  books,  AbeVs  Theorem  and  the 
Allied  Theory,  including  Theta  Functions 
(1897)  and  Multiply  Periodic  Functions 
(1907),  which  were  his  most  lasting  con- 
tributions to  mathematics  during  this 
first  period. 

Some  of  the  problems  which  Baker  was 
considering  when  he  wrote  his  Multiply 
Periodic  Functions  led  him  to  take  an 
interest  in  geometry ;  on  the  one  hand,  he 
came  to  read  T.  Reye's  Geometric  der  Lage, 
on  the  other,  he  came  in  contact  with  the 
work  of  the  Italian  school  of  geometers  on 
the  theory  of  surfaces.  These  subjects 
fascinated  him,  and  he  soon  began  to 
write  on  them.  He  made  the  work  of  the 
Italian  geometers  the  subject  of  his 
presidential  address  to  the  London  Mathe- 
matical Society  in  1911  which  became  one 
of  the  classic  surveys  of  the  subject,  and 
he  was  soon  recognized  as  a  leader  of 
British  geometers.  On  the  death  of  the 
Lowndean  professor.  Sir  Robert  Ball 
[q.v.],  in  November  1913,  Baker  was  the 
obvious  choice  of  those  electors  to  the 


chair  who  wished  to  appoint  a  geometer. 
It  was,  however,  contested  by  other  elec- 
tors who  wished  to  continue  the  astro- 
nomical traditions  of  the  chair.  The 
appointment  passed  to  the  chancellor, 
who  selected  Baker.  Baker  had  no  inten- 
tion, however,  of  neglecting  that  part 
of  his  responsibiUties  which  related  to 
astronomy,  and  for  many  years  he  lec- 
tured with  considerable  success  on  gravi- 
tational astronomy  and  wrote  some  useful 
papers  on  this  subject.  But  for  the  rest  of 
his  life  his  real  love  was  geometry,  and  for 
over  twenty  years  he  taught  and  wrote  on 
it,  and  it  is  indeed  for  the  work  done  as  a 
professor  that  he  will  best  be  remembered. 
His  own  contributions  are  summed  up  in 
a  treatise  of  six  volumes,  entitled  Prin- 
ciples of  Geometry  (1922-33).  He  continued 
working  on  geometry  after  his  retirement 
and  published  his  last  paper  when  he  was 
eighty-six. 

Baker's  standing  as  a  mathematician 
has  to  be  judged  ^-gainst  the  background 
of  the  mathematical  traditions  in  the 
university.  He  early  came  under  the  in- 
fluence of  Arthur  Cayley  [q.v.]  and  from 
him  derived  his  concern  with  algebraic 
manipulations.  But  Cayley  was  an  old  man 
and  pure  mathematics  in  Cambridge  had 
little  in  common  with  the  exciting  things 
which  were  going  on  in  the  subject  on  the 
Continent.  A.  R.  Forsyth  [q.v.]  who  suc- 
ceeded Cayley  as  professor  in  1895  strove 
hard  to  bring  the  continental  ideas  into 
Cambridge,  but  was  not  himself  able  to 
assimilate  the  continental  standards  of 
rigour.  Baker,  who  learned  much  during 
some  visits  which  he  paid  to  Gottingen 
as  a  young  man,  was  a  better  mathema- 
tician than  Forsyth,  and  was  thoroughly 
at  home  with  continental  ideas,  but  his 
early  training  led  him  to  prefer  the  objec- 
tives of  the  older  Cambridge  mathema- 
ticians, using  the  new  ideas  primarily  as 
tools.  The  result  was  that  he  was  little 
affected  by  the  revolution  brought  about 
amongst  the  Cambridge  mathematical 
analysts  by  G.  H.  Hardy  [q.v.]  in  the  first 
decade  of  the  twentieth  century.  During 
this  period  Baker's  position  was  essen- 
tially that  of  one  of  the  leaders  of  the 
older  generation. 

When  he  changed  his  interests  to 
geometry.  Baker  again  came  to  the  sub- 
ject at  an  awkward  stage.  In  spite  of  the 
great  advances  which  the  Itahans  had 
achieved  in  the  theory  of  surfaces,  it  was 
already  apparent  that  their  methods  were 
not  proving  adequate,  and  indeed  the 
proofs  of  a  number  of  the  most  important 


«5 


Baker,  H.  F, 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


theorems  had  aheady  been  shown  to  be 
faulty.  Baker  did  not  invent  any  new 
methods  and  his  work  was  largely  devoted 
to  examining  the  difficulties  and  to  using 
algebraic  methods  of  the  type  used  years 
before  by  Cayley  to  examine  special  cases ; 
this  he  did  extremely  well,  but  his  work 
served  to  make  it  still  clearer  that  radical 
changes  in  approach  were  necessary  before 
real  progress  could  be  made.  In  projective 
geometry  the  situation  was  different. 
There  were  no  structural  problems,  and 
each  individual  problem  was  an  end  in 
itself.  It  was  here  that  Baker  was  at  his 
best;  for  at  heart  he  believed  that  the 
object  of  mathematics  was  to  solve  special 
problems  completely,  basic  principles  and 
general  theories  being  of  less  interest  to 
him.  The  fact  that  Baker  did  not  achieve 
any  major  break-through  was  to  a  large 
degree  due  to  his  native  modesty ;  he  had 
an  admiration  amounting  to  veneration 
for  the  great  masters  of  mathematics,  and 
he  could  not  imagine  that  he  could  ever 
take  his  place  beside  them. 

While  Baker's  original  contributions  to 
mathematics  were  considerable,  his  forte 
lay  in  expounding  the  work  of  others 
and  in  inspiring  the  younger  generation 
of  geometers.  In  this  last  he  was  con- 
spicuously successful.  Between  1920  and 
1936  he  attracted  around  him  a  large 
following  of  young  and  enthusiastic 
geometers,  many  of  whom  subsequently 
achieved  high  positions.  An  important 
feature  of  the  school  he  foimded  was  his 
Saturday  afternoon  seminar  or  *tea-party', 
one  of  the  earliest  seminars  held  in  Cam- 
bridge. This  was  the  focus  of  the  great 
activity  in  geometry  which  he  stirred  up, 
and  was  the  essential  key  to  his  success. 

In  appearance  Baker  was  a  heavily 
built  man,  with  a  thick  moustache.  This 
made  him  rather  formidable  to  strangers 
and  as  he  was  also  very  shy  some  found 
him  difficult  to  approach  at  first.  But  once 
the  barriers  were  broken  down  his  pupils 
found  him  less  awe-inspiring,  although 
they  always  treated  him  with  great 
respect.  The  protocol  at  his  'tea-parties' 
was  strict,  and  a  pupil  could  not  stay 
away  without  an  acceptable  excuse ;  but 
provided  the  rules  were  obeyed  the 
atmosphere  was  extremely  friendly. 

In  1893  Baker  married  Lily  Isabella 
Homfield,  daughter  of  O.  C.  Klopp,  of 
Putney,  formerly  of  Leer,  Germany.  She 
died  in  1903,  leaving  two  sons.  In  1913 
Baker  married  Muriel  Irene  Woodyard, 
of  Norfolk,  by  whom  he  had  a  daughter. 
When  Baker  died  in  Cambridge  1*7  March 


1956  his  widow  survived  him  by  only  a      1 
few  months. 

[The  Times,  19  March  1956;  w!  Vt  D. 
Hodge  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of  Fellows  of 
the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ii,  1956;  autobio- 
graphical notes ;  personal  knowledge.] 

W.  V.  D.  Hodge. 

BAKER,  JAMES  FRANKLIN 
BETHUNE-  (1861-1951),  professor  of 
divinity.  [See  Bethune-Baker.] 

BALFOUR,  ARTHUR,  first  Baron 
RivERDALE  (1873-1957),  industrialist, 
was,  by  his  own  account,  born  in  London 
9  January  1873,  the  elder  of  the  two  sons 
of  Herbert  Balfour.  The  birth  was  not 
registered.  He  finished  his  education  in 
1887-9  at  Ashville  College,  Harrogate, 
and  was  afterwards  employed  in  the 
office  of  Seebohm  and  Dieckstahl,  of 
Sheffield,  a  firm  which  sold  crucible  steel 
all  over  Europe.  Balfour  went  to  the 
United  States  for  a  few  years  to  enlarge 
his  experience,  and  did  well ;  he  thus  began 
early  the  interest  in  overseas  trade  for 
which  he  and  his  firm  became  famous.  He 
returned  to  Sheffield  in  1897,  and  in  1899, 
when  the  firm  became  a  limited  company, 
he  was  appointed  managing  director, 
taking  over  also  the  work  of  local  vice- 
consul  for  Denmark.  In  the  same  year 
Balfour  married  Frances  Josephine  (died 
1960),  daughter  of  Charles  Henry  Bing- 
ham, a  partner  in  the  silver  and  electro- 
plating firm  of  Walker  and  Hall.  He  chose 
a  world  tour  for  his  honeymoon,  opening 
new  branches  for  his  firm. 

The  company  was  then  a  considerable 
producer  of  rifles,  interested  in  obtaining 
overseas  markets  for  rifle  parts  steels ;  but 
at  this  time  it  was  one  of  the  first  two  in 
Sheffield  to  develop  high  speed  steel,  and 
in  1901  Balfour  negotiated  with  American 
researchers  to  launch  this  product.  The 
company  prospered,  establishing  a  re- 
search laboratory  in  1905  and  selling  in 
the  United  States  considerable  quantities 
of  tool  steels.  The  engineers'  tool  depart- 
ment established  in  1910  became  the  most 
considerable  of  the  company's  activities. 
The  name  of  the  firm  was  changed  in  1915 
to  Arthur  Balfour  &  Co.,  Ltd. 

From  1911  when  he  was  the  master 
cutler,  honours  and  interests  came  to 
Balfour  yearly.  He  chaired  a  committee  to 
deal  with  the  new  national  insurance  in 
Sheffield  in  1912 ;  he  was  a  member  of  the 
royal  commission  on  railways  in  1913,  and 
in  1914  became  a  member  of  the  advisory 
committee    on    war    munitions    and    of 


56 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Balfour 


the  industry  advisory  committee  to  the 
Treasury,  on  which  he  served  until  1918. 
In  1915  he  was  made  consul  for  Belgium, 
and  undertook  much  work  for  the  9,000 
Belgians  who  were  given  asylum  in  his 
district.  He  was  a  member  of  the  man- 
power committee,  the  Advisory  Council 
for  Scientific  and  Industrial  Research  (of 
which  he  was  chairman  in  1937-46),  the 
engineering  industries  committee,  and  the 
committee  on  commercial  and  industrial 
policy  after  the  war  under  Lord  Balfour  of 
Burleigh  [q.v.].  On  a  visit  to  Italy  he  had 
a  long  talk  on  the  prospect  of  her  entry 
into  the  war  with  the  prime  minister, 
Salandra,  who  thought  his  country  unable 
to  stand  a  long  war.  Only  Great  Britain, 
he  remarked,  could  go  to  war  for  a  right 
and  just  cause  and  stay  in  the  war  to 
the  end. 

During  the  period  of  reconstruction 
Balfour  served  on  the  coal  industry  com- 
mission (1919)  and  the  therm  charges 
committee  (1922-3),  and  on  the  advisory 
councils  of  the  Post  Office,  the  Board  of 
Trade,  and  the  Department  of  Overseas 
Trade,  as  well  as  on  the  safeguarding  of 
industries  permanent  panel.  He  was 
British  delegate  to  the  international  con- 
ference on  customs  and  other  formalities 
in  1923.  In  the  same  year  he  was  ap- 
pointed K.B.E.  and  was  a  member  of 
the  government  committee  appointed  to 
draw  up  the  agenda  for  the  Imperial 
Conference. 

He  was  chairman,  appointed  in  1924,  of 
the  industry  and  trade  commission  which 
produced  its  important  reports  in  six 
volumes  up  to  1929.  He  was  a  British 
delegate  in  preparing  for  and  at  the 
League  of  Nations  economic  conference  of 
1927.  And  in  October  1930,  as  a  member 
of  the  Economic  Advisory  Council,  he 
wrote  to  the  prime  minister  prophesying 
the  severity  of  the  approaching  'slump'  in 
terms  which  shook  both  the  Cabinet  and 
the  King,  who  considered  him  'of  almost 
unique  experience'.  An  address  which  he 
gave  to  a  meeting  of  business  men  in 
Sheffield  in  1932  outlined  his  recipe  for 
recovery;  he  was  a  shrewd  if  orthodox 
economist,  with  staunch  faith  in  retrench- 
ment and  a  wholesome  hatred  of  inflation. 
In  this,  as  in  many  spheres,  his  personal 
opinions  were  those  which  so  often  go 
with  the  political  temperament  of  the 
Conservative. 

He  continued  to  serve,  often  as  chair- 
man, on  innumerable  committees  and 
advisory  bodies  right  up  to  the  threshold 
of  war.   His   last   direct   service   to   the 


Government  was  to  lead  the  commission 
which  went  to  Canada  in  1939  to  negotiate 
the  scheme  for  training  Royal  Air  Force 
pilots  there,  a  difficult  assignment  success- 
fully carried  out.  In  1942  he  was  promoted 
G.B.E.  He  had  been  created  a  baronet  in 
1929,  and  raised  to  the  peerage  as  Baron 
Riverdale,  of  Sheffield,  in  1935.  He  took 
the  title  from  his  home,  Riverdale  Grange, 
on  the  wooded  slopes  of  western  Sheffield. 
In  1921  he  had  headed  a  deputation  to 
the  United  States  on  behalf  of  Sheffield 
firms  to  put  their  case  to  the  Senate 
finance  committee  against  certain  sections 
of  the  Fordney  tariff,  and  was  instru- 
mental in  obtaining  some  modifications. 
In  the  midst  of  all  the  travel  and  work  of 
national  importance  during  the  thirty 
years  when  he  was  a  favourite  of  succes- 
sive Governments,  this  energetic  man 
was  chairman  and  managing  director  of 
Arthur  Balfour  &  Co.,  Ltd.,  of  C.  Meadows 
&  Co.,  Sheffield,  and  of  High  Speed  Alloys, 
Ltd.,  of  Widnes,  and  a  director  of  six  other 
companies,  besides  serving  on  several 
Sheffield  trade  bodies,  as  a  justice  of  the 
peace,  and,  for  a  short  time,  on  the  city 
council.  In  the  words  of  another  Sheffield 
business  man ;  'He  was  a  great  Sheffielder, 
and  was  always  pushing  Sheffield.'  The 
university  of  Sheffield  conferred  on  him 
the  honorary  degree  of  LL.D.  in  1934. 

Riverdale  was  continuously  successful 
in  promoting  overseas  trade  both  in  his 
own  business  and  as  a  national  policy ;  he 
was  a  colleague  of  every  economic  expert 
of  his  day ;  but  the  reason  why  he  achieved 
a  general  reputation  as  a  necessary  source 
of  advice  is  not  for  brief  description.  He 
had  a  firm  grasp  of  fact  and  a  direct  and 
courageous  line  of  thought  and  conduct. 
He  was  always  interested  in  the  matter 
in  hand  and  not  in  its  effect  on  himself. 
He  never  consciously  sought  honours,  and 
only  incidentally  sought  wealth.  He  has 
been  described  as  'a  big  man,  without 
conceit,  willing  to  listen  to  humbler  men' 
and  'a  man  of  outstanding  mental  ability'. 
This  ability  was  not  of  the  intellectual 
order ;  it  was  a  matter  of  practical  grasp 
and  judgement.  He  never  put  things  ott; 
he  never  took  the  easy  things  first.  Added 
to  boundless  health  and  energy,  these 
gifts  enabled  him  to  get  through  far  more 
than  a  lifetime's  work  and  to  take  more 
right  decisions  than  would  seem  possible 
at  such  a  speed  of  working. 

Personally  he  was  a  jovial  man,  who 
loved  fun,  lived  simply,  and  was  easy  and 
affectionate  with  his  family.  He  died  in 
Sheffield  7  July  1957,  and  was  cremated. 


a^ 


Balfour 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


His  elder  son,  Robert  Arthur  (born  1901), 
succeeded  to  the  title  and  as  head  of  the 
business;  he  had  another  son,  and  three 
daughters. 

A  portrait  by  Harold  Knight  is  in  the 
possession  of  the  family.  A  portrait  in  the 
board-room  at  Arthur  Balfour  &  Co., 
Ltd.,  presented  by  Belgian  war  refugees  in 
recognition  of  his  work  for  them,  is  by  an 
unknown  Belgian  painter.  There  is  another 
portrait,  unsigned,  in  the  possession  of  the 
company,  given  to  them  by  the  directors 
of  the  Telegraph  Construction  Company. 

[The  Times  and  Sheffield  Telegraph,  8  July 
1957 ;  private  information.]    Mary  Walton. 


BANDARANAIKE,  SOLOMON  WEST 
RIDGEWAY  DIAS  (1899-1959),  fourth 
prime  minister  of  Ceylon,  was  born  at 
the  family  home,  HoragoUa,  Veyangoda,  8 
January  1899,  the  only  son  of  (Sir)  Solo- 
mon Dias  Bandaranaike  and  his  wife, 
Daisy  Ezline,  daughter  of  (Sir)  Solomon 
Christoffel  Obeyesekera.  One  of  his  god- 
fathers was  Sir  Joseph  West  Ridgeway 
[q.v.],  the  governor  of  the  colony.  As 
Maha  Mudaliyar  and  aide-de-camp  to  no 
fewer  than  eight  governors  over  a  period 
of  thirty-two  years  his  father  was  the 
principal  Sinhalese  confidant  and  digni- 
tary in  a  governor's  personal  entourage. 
He  was  also  in  his  own  right  a  leading 
member  of  Sinhalese  society,  a  landowner, 
a  patron  of  the  turf,  and  a  pillar  of  the 
Anglican  Church. 

In  this  setting  of  affluence,  authority, 
and  high  social  status  Bandaranaike  grew 
up,  with  a  Cambridge  graduate  for  tutor 
for  four  years  before  he  went  at  sixteen 
to  St.  Thomas's  College,  Colombo.  It  was 
the  first  time  'Sonny'  had  left  his  father's 
supervision.  He  went  on  to  Christ  Church, 
Oxford,  where  he  obtained  a  second  class 
in  classical  honour  moderations  in  1921 
and  in  1923  a  third  in  jurisprudence  to 
which  he  had  changed  as  unlikely  'to 
cause  too  great  a  strain  on  my  time  or 
energy'.  It  was  not  until  November  1921 
that  he  spoke  at  the  Union  and  was  re- 
ported by  Isis  to  have  made  the  best 
speech  of  the  evening.  Thereafter  he  spoke 
frequently  and  was  recognized  as  a  bril- 
liant debater  with  an  outstanding  com- 
mand of  English.   In  Michaelmas  term 

1923  he  served  as  secretary  and  in  Trinity 
term  1924  as  junior  treasurer.  His  lack  of 
success  in  contesting  the  presidency  in 

1924  he  attributed  to  the  determination  of 
Ufe  members,  who  did  not  normally  exer- 
cise their  right  to  vote,  to  prevent  the 


election  of  a  president  who  was  not  white. 
WTiether  or  not  he  was  right  in  this  belief, 
it  had  some  influence  on  his  future  career. 
He  went  down,  was  called  to  the  bar,  and 
in  1925  returned  to  Ceylon  to  practise  as 
an  advocate. 

In  a  series  of  entertaining  and  sensitive 
articles  in  the  early  thirties  Bandaranaike 
nevertheless  wrote  without  rancour  of  the 
problems  of  an  Asian  undergraduate  at 
Oxford  and  of  the  awakening  of  his  politi- 
cal consciousness.  Lingering  on  Magdalen 
bridge  on  his  last  afternoon  in  a  mood 
of  somewhat  uncharacteristic  sentimenta- 
lity he  contrasted  the  mellowness  of  the 
English  scene  with  the  disease  and  poverty 
of  his  own  country :  'Oxford  had  revealed 
to  me  my  life's  mission  and  Oxford  was 
the  dearer  to  me  because  she  had  taught 
me  to  love  my  country  better.' 

At  a  by-election  in  1927  to  the  Colombo 
municipal  council  Bandaranaike  defeated 
the  most  influential  trade-union  leader  of 
the  time.  In  the  same  year  he  was  elected 
secretary  of  the  Ceylon  National  Congress, 
the  spearhead  of  agitation  for  constitu- 
tional reforms.  Wben  the  Donoughmore 
constitution  of  1931  introduced  adult 
suffrage  and  a  measure  of  self-government 
Bandaranaike  was  elected  unopposed  and 
was  thereafter  continuously  a  member  of 
the  legislature.  In  1936  he  became  minister 
of  local  administration.  Although  the 
constitution  did  not  encourage  the  de- 
velopment of  the  party  system  certain 
alignments  became  manifest.  Banda- 
ranaike became  a  Buddhist:  there  was 
an  irresistible  appeal  to  his  mentality  in 
its  doctrine  that  man  must  work  out  his 
own  salvation  and  was  not  dependent 
upon  a  God  whose  favour  must  be  sought 
and  wrath  appeased.  An  ardent  nationalist, 
in  1937  he  formed  the  Sinhala  Mahasabha 
to  represent  Buddhist  Sinhalese  interests. 
When  in  1947  Ceylon  became  fully  self- 
governing  this  party  joined  the  Ceylon 
National  Congress  to  form  the  United 
National  Party  which  at  the  ensuing  elec- 
tion emerged  the  largest  party  and  formed 
the  government  under  D.  S.  Senanayake 
[q.v.]  with  Bandaranaike  as  minister  of 
health  and  local  government. 

Although  Bandaranaike  was  an  out- 
standing debater  and  speaker  and  an 
energetic  minister  he  invariably  had  an 
unfavourable  press;  this  he  felt  to  be 
inspired  by  his  colleagues  who  were  irri- 
tated by  the  continued  existence  of  the 
Sinhala  Mahasabha  which  Bandaranaike 
used  as  his  personal  political  platform.  He 
complained  that  he  was  being  used  and  at 


^ 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bandaranaike 


the  same  time  discredited.  He  became  in- 
creasingly disenchanted  with  the  United 
National  Party,  not  only  because  he  was 
not  in  accord  with  the  party's  policies  but 
also  because  he  felt  himself  excluded  from 
the  inner  councils  of  the  prime  minister 
and  believed  that  he  was  being  edged 
out  of  his  position  as  heir  apparent  to 
Senanayake.  In  1951  he  resigned  from  the 
party  and  on  joining  the  Opposition  dis- 
solved the  Sinhala  Mahasabha  and  formed 
the  Sri  Lanka  Freedom  Party  (S.L.F.P.) 
to  enable  members  of  other  communities 
to  join  him.  Although  in  the  election  of 
1952  his  party  obtained  very  few  seats 
they  sufficed  to  make  him  leader  of  the 
Opposition. 

Bandaranaike  was  not  slow  to  realize 
that  the  role  of  friend  of  the  under- 
privileged in  which  he  had  cast  himself 
offered  his  party  the  greatest  opportunity 
to  develop  what  he  regarded  as  his  pro- 
gressive policies.  The  peasants  were  asking 
what  independence  had  done  for  them; 
the  Buddhists  felt  they  had  received  too 
little  recognition  after  centuries  of  alien 
rule;  a  multiplicity  of  parties  had  no 
chance  of  defeating  the  United  National 
Party.  Bandaranaike  offered  a  govern- 
ment of  the  People  or  the  'Masses',  with  a 
programme  including  the  adoption  of  Sin- 
halese as  the  sole  official  language,  a 
special  status  for  Buddhism,  the  termina- 
tion of  British  military  bases,  and  the 
nationalization  of  certain  key  sectors 
of  the  economy  including  the  transport 
services,  a  principal  source  of  financial 
support  to  the  U.N.P.  In  addition  he  estab- 
lished the  Mahajana  Eksath  Peramuna 
(The  Peoples  United  Front)  comprising 
his  own  S.L.F.P.  party  with  three  other 
groups  of  the  Left  and  entered  into  a  no- 
contest  pact  with  the  Marxist  and  Com- 
munist parties.  At  the  1956  election  he 
secured  an  astounding  victory  with  51 
seats;  the  U.N.P. ,  partly  through  the 
ineptitude  of  their  campaign,  retained  but 
eight. 

The  victory  was  unexpected  not  only  by 
the  country  but  by  Bandaranaike  himself 
who  had  no  capable  and  experienced 
poUticians  from  whom  to  choose  his 
government,  in  which  he  included  two 
left-wing  Marxists,  an  uneasy  association 
which  ended  with  the  latter' s  being 
forced  to  resign  in  the  spring  of  1959. 
Bandaranaike  became  the  victim  of  the 
manifesto  on  which  his  party  had  been 
elected.  The  People's  Government  became 
a  government  not  of  the  people  but  by  the 
people  and  he  could  not  control  the  ex- 


tremists. He  was  slow  to  recognize  the 
communal  and  religious  conflicts  and 
antagonisms  which  his  policies  had  un- 
leashed or  the  consequences  of  the  in- 
discipline which  they  induced.  In  1958 
there  were  widespread  communal  dis- 
turbances with  much  loss  of  life  which 
created  a  wide  gulf  between  the  majority 
Sinhalese  and  the  minority  Tamils  and 
resulted  in  a  rather  tardy  declaration  of  a 
state  of  emergency. 

Some  of  Bandaranaike's  Buddhist  sup- 
porters were  angered  by  his  failure  to 
implement  pre-election  promises  and  a 
group  of  them,  headed  by  a  small  but 
influential  section  of  the  Buddhist  clergy, 
realized  that  they  could  not  win  his  back- 
ing to  serve  their  own  personal  ambitions. 
On  25  September  1959  he  was  attacked  by 
a  Buddhist  monk  in  his  own  house  where 
each  morning  he  was  accustomed  to 
receive  people  with  grievances  or  requests. 
He  died  the  following  day. 

His  death  cast  a  long  shadow  over  the 
public  life  of  Ceylon  and  lost  to  his 
country  a  man  of  outstanding  intellectual 
gifts,  culture,  and  sincerity  of  purpose 
who  was  moving  towards  more  practical 
policies  whilst  preserving  what  he  con- 
sidered to  be  the  requirements  of  social 
justice.  He  had  a  sharp  mind  and  a  biting 
tongue  which  estranged  him  from  many — 
yet  he  was  a  generous  political  opponent 
and,  unlike  many  of  his  contemporaries, 
did  not  bear  grudges.  He  was  a  keen,  use- 
ful tennis  player,  bred  greyhounds,  wrote 
some  short  stories,  and  enjoyed  both 
bridge  and  billiards. 

In  1940  Bandaranaike  married  Siri- 
mavo,  daughter  of  Barnes  Ratwatte 
Dissawa,  a  Kandyan  chief ;  they  had  a  son 
and  two  daughters. 

The  tragic  death  of  Bandaranaike  im- 
mediately cast  him  in  the  role  of  martyr. 
At  the  general  election  of  1960  his  widow, 
helped  by  and  making  full  use  of  the 
mounting  wave  of  popular  sympathy,  led 
the  S.L.F.P.  to  victory  with  a  convincing 
majority  and  herself  became  prime 
minister. 

There  is  a  portrait  of  Bandaranaike  at 
the  Oxford  Union. 

[S.  W.  R.  D.  Bandaranaike,  Speeches  and 
Writings,  Ceylon,  1963,  and  Towards  a  New 
Era,  Ceylon,  1961 ;  Ceylon  Causerie  Plati 
Ltd.,  Ceylon,  1933-5;  W.  Howard  Wriggins, 
Ceylon — Dilemmas  of  a  New  Nation,  Prince- 
ton, 1960;  Sir  Solomon  D.  Bandaranaike, 
Remembered  Yesterdays,  1929;  Christopher 
Hollis,  The  Oxford  Union,  1965;  personal 
knowledge.]  F.  C.  Rowan. 


59 


Banks 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


BANKS,  LESLIE  JAMES  (1890-1952), 
actor,  was  born  9  June  1890  in  West 
Derby,  Lancashire,  son  of  George  Banks, 
general  merchant,  and  his.  wife,  Emily 
Dalby.  He  won  a  classical  scholarship  at 
Glenalmond  and  then  went  on  to  Keble 
College,  Oxford,  again  as  a  classical 
scholar.  He  made  his  first  professional 
appearance  on  the  stage  in  1911  at  the 
town  hall,  Brechin,  as  old  Gobbo  in  The 
Merchant  of  Venice  with  the  company  of 
(Sir)  Frank  Benson  [q.v.].  He  remained 
with  Benson  until  the  following  year,  when 
he  went  on  tour  with  (Sir)  George  Dance's 
company  in  The  Hope,  a  racing  melo- 
drama from  Drury  Lane.  He  then  joined 
H.  V.  Esmond  [q.v.]  and  Eva  Moore  in 
a  tour  of  the  United  States  and  Canada, 
making  his  first  New  York  appearance  in 
a  small  part  in  Esmond's  comedy  Eliza 
Comes  to  Stay.  Returning  to  London,  he 
made  his  west-end  debut  at  the  Vaude- 
ville, in  May  1914,  in  a  play  called  The 
Dangerous  Age. 

The  war  cut  short  his  career  just  as  it 
was  beginning  to  show  promise.  He  served 
in  the  Essex  Regiment,  receiving  a  dis- 
figuring wound  in  the  face  which  might 
have  driven  a  less  firm  character  to  seek 
some  less  public  profession.  Banks  never 
allowed  it  to  deter  him  and  when  he 
started  again  after  the  war  he  found  that 
it  did  not  handicap  him.  A  month  after 
the  armistice  he  made  a  fresh  start  under 
(Sir)  Nigel  Playfair  [q.v.]  at  the  Lyric, 
Hammersmith;  from  there  he  went  to 
the  Birmingham  Repertory  Theatre  under 
(Sir)  Barry  Jackson,  and  in  1919-20  played 
leads  in  the  repertory  company  of  Lena 
Ashwell  [q.v.].  A  Shaw  season  at  the 
Everyman,  Hampstead,  followed  early  in 
1921,  and  in  May  of  the  same  year  he 
had  his  first  important  part  in  a  successful 
west-end  play,  as  Archie  Beal  in  //  by 
Lord  Dunsany  [q.v.]  at  the  Ambassadors. 

In  little  more  than  two  years  he  had 
estabhshed  himself  in  the  good  opinion  of 
most  of  the  managements  in  London  who 
could  be  relied  on  to  show  discrimination 
in  their  choice  of  plays  and  players,  and 
this  at  a  time  when  the  disillusion  conse- 
quent on  the  war  had  forced  down  the 
standard  of  pubUc  taste  to  a  depressingly 
low  level.  Because  he  was  so  much  in 
demand,  he  was  free  to  pick  what  plays 
he  acted  in ;  and  to  study  the  long  list  of 
parts  he  played  is  to  realize  what  care  he 
took  to  avoid  claptrap  or  rubbish.  To  see 
Leslie  Banks's  name  on  a  playbill  or  in  a 
theatre  programme  was  to  be  given  a  vir- 
tual guarantee  that  the  play  had  merit. 


He  was  an  actor  of  very  wide  range  and  as 
his  services  were  constantly  in  demand  in 
films  as  well  as  on  the  stage  he  was  able 
to  avoid  being  stereotyped.  No  better 
evidence  of  this  need  be  asked  for  than  the 
fact  that  in  a  season  of  repertory  at  the 
Haymarket,  October  1944-June  1945,  he 
played  Lord  Porteous  in  The  Circle^ 
Tattle  in  Love  for  Love,  Claudius  in  Ham- 
let, Bottom  in  A  Midsummer  NighVs 
Dream,  and  Antonio  Bologna  in  The 
Du£hess  of  Malfl ;  and  that  he  played  such 
disparate  leading  roles  as  those  in  Goodbye 
Mr.  Chips  (1938)  and  Life  with  Father 
(1947).  Among  the  many  films  in  which  he 
appeared  may  be  mentioned  such  Hitch- 
cock productions  as  The  Man  Who  Knew 
Too  Much  and  Jamaica  Inn.  Banks  be- 
longed to  that  stalwart  type  of  actor 
which,  ranking  as  leading  man  rather  than 
popular  star,  is  able  for  that  very  reason 
to  reach  a  pitch  of  distinction  in  his  career 
which  many  stars  miss. 

One  of  the  most  variously  talented  and 
deeply  respected  figures  on  the  British 
stage  of  his  time,  no  man  in  private  life 
ever  looked  or  behaved  less  like  the  popu- 
lar conception  of  a  stage  player.  He  showed 
no  trace  of  that  exhibitionism,  that  desire 
to  be  noticed,  which  is  the  motivating 
force  with  many  actors  of  every  degree  of 
distinction.  'He  remained  through  all  his 
success',  said  A.  A.  Milne  [q.v.],  'the  man 
next  door,  a  good  neighbour  and  a  good 
friend.'  Yet  the  serene  integrity  of  his 
nature  did  not  interfere  with  his  versa- 
tility as  an  artist.  He  was  able  to  under- 
stand and  play  with  sympathy  a  character 
with  whom  it  seemed  he  could  have 
nothing  at  all  in  common.  As  Gerald 
Coates  in  Grand  National  Night  at  the 
Apollo  in  1946  his  besetting  fault,  which 
brought  him  to  ruin,  was  a  streak  of  wild 
recklessness.  It  was  unthinkable  that 
Leslie  Banks  in  his  own  person  could  ever 
yield  to  such  weakness ;  and  yet  it  seemed 
inevitable  that  the  man  on  the  stage, 
undoubtedly  and  without  disguise  Leslie 
Banks,  should  be  brought  low  by  a  fatal 
flaw  in  his  character. 

In  1915  Banks  married  Gwendoline 
Haldane,  daughter  of  Edwin  Thomas 
Unwin ;  they  had  three  daughters.  He  was 
appointed  C.B.E.  in  1950  and  died  in 
London  21  April  1952. 

A  portrait  by  W.  R.  Sickert  of  Leslie 
Banks  as  Petruchio  with  Dame  Edith 
Evans  as  Katharine  is  in  the  Bradford 
City  Art  Gallery. 

[Who^s  Who  in  the  Theatre ;  private  informa- 
tion;  personal  knowledge.]  W.  A.  Darlington. 


60 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Baring 


BARING,  ROWLAND  THOMAS,  second 
Earl  of  Cromer  (1877-1953),  lord  cham- 
berlain to  the  household,  1922-88,  elder 
son  of  Evelyn  Baring,  later  first  Earl 
of  Cromer  [q.v.],  by  his  first  marriage, 
to  Ethel  Stanley,  second  daughter  of 
Sir  Rowland  Stanley  Errington,  eleventh 
baronet,  was  born  29  November  1877  at 
Cairo.  A  bad  attack  of  typhoid  contracted 
in  Egypt  in  his  boyhood  affected  his 
health  all  his  life.  His  mother  died  when  he 
was  nearly  twenty-one,  but  the  influence 
of  her  noble  character  helped  to  mould  his 
own  and  remained  potent  throughout  his 
career.  He  was  educated  at  Eton  where  he 
made  many  friends,  but  left  early  by  his 
father's  wish,  without  particular  distinc- 
tion in  scholarship  or  games,  in  order  to 
learn  foreign  languages.  His  knowledge  of 
French  was  unusually  good  in  an  English- 
man. In  1900  he  entered  the  Diplomatic 
Service,  serving  as  third  and  second 
secretary  between  1902  and  1906  at 
Cairo,  Tehran,  and  St.  Petersburg.  He 
then  transferred  to  the  Foreign  Office  and 
acted  as  private  secretary  to  successive 
permanent  under-secretaries  of  state 
between  1907  and  1911  when  he  resigned 
the  service. 

In  1913  Lord  Errington,  as  he  then  was, 
became  a  managing  director  of  Baring 
Brothers  and  in  a  short  time  acquired  a 
useful  knowledge  of  finance.  In  1914  he 
joined  the  Grenadier  Guards,  serving  in 
the  special  reserve  imtil  1920.  In  1915  he 
became  aide-de-camp  to  successive  vice- 
roys of  India  (Lord  Hardinge  of  Penshurst 
and  Lord  Chelmsford,  qq.v.).  The  follow- 
ing year  he  was  appointed  assistant 
private  secretary  and  equerry  to  King 
George  V.  In  1917  he  succeeded  his  father 
as  second  Earl  of  Cromer.  He  acted  as 
chief  of  staff  to  the  Duke  of  Connaught 
[q.v.]  during  his  visit  to  India  (1920-21) 
and  to  the  Prince  of  Wales  during  his 
Indian  tour  (1921-2)  when  his  knowledge 
of  India  proved  of  great  service. 

In  1922  Cromer  was  appointed  lord 
chamberlain  to  the  household,  a  post 
which  he  held  with  distinction  under  three 
sovereigns  until  1938  when  he  became  a 
permanent  lord-in-waiting.  Apprehension 
about  the  status  of  the  monarchy  during 
the  war,  despite  the  devotion  to  duty  of 
the  King  and  Queen,  had  been  expressed 
in  1918,  notably  by  Cromer  himself  and  by 
Lord  Esher  [q.v.].  This  disquiet  was  soon 
dissipated  but  Cromer  never  forgot  the 
need  for  the  monarchy  to  adjust  itself  to 
the  post-war  social  revolution.  By  his  tact 
and  imperturbability  and  his  liberal  and 


shrewd  interpretation  of  his  diverse  func- 
tions he  gave  general  satisfaction  and  very 
little  cause  for  offence,  according  the  same 
serious  but  always  sympathetic  attention 
to  his  social  as  to  his  political  functions. 
Probably  his  work  as  censor  of  plays  in- 
terested him  most.  He  came  to  know  a 
great  deal  about  the  theatre,  and  in  this 
contentious  field  his  tact  and  sympathy 
earned  the  respect  and  gratitude  of 
dramatists  and  actors.  In  his  administra- 
tion and  reformation  of  royal  household 
affairs  his  business  experience  stood  him  in 
good  stead.  A  sense  of  humour  lightened 
the  burden  of  his  responsibilities,  if  on 
social  occasions  his  determination  to  keep 
inviolable  the  confidences  of  his  office 
sometimes  kept  it  in  check.  Throughout 
his  term  of  office  he  enjoyed  the  complete 
confidence  and  true  friendship  of  the  three 
sovereigns  he  served. 

Cromer  was  of  middle  height  and  slim 
build.  Never  robust,  he  enjoyed  shooting 
and  riding  but  his  favourite  recreations 
were  reading,  family  golf,  and  gardening. 
A  chief  virtue  of  his  character  was  an 
endearing  modesty,  to  which  were  added 
shrewd  common  sense,  great  tact,  im- 
perturbability and  moral  courage,  and  a 
farsighted  liberalism  of  outlook.  He  was 
devoted  to  children,  and  young  people 
were  always  at  ease  in  his  company.  He 
devoted  much  time  and  trouble  to  the 
Cheyne  Hospital  for  children,  and  was 
president  of  the  National  Hospital  for 
Chest  Diseases.  At  various  times  he  was 
a  British  Government  director  of  the  Suez 
Canal  Company,  a  director  of  the  P.  &  O. 
and  the  B.I.  steam  navigation  companies 
and  various  banking  and  insurance  con- 
cerns. He  was  not  a  rich  man,  and  these 
City  interests  were  of  importance  to  him 
since  the  office  of  lord  chamberlain  carried 
no  pension  rights.  In  1934-5  he  was  presi- 
dent of  the  M.C.C.  He  received  many  high 
British  honours  and  a  variety  of  foreign 
Orders.  He  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council 
in  1922  and  rose  to  the  rank  of  grand  cross 
in  the  Orders  of  the  Bath,  the  Indian 
Empire,  and  the  Victorian,  and  received 
the  Victorian  Chain  in  1935. 

In  1908  Cromer  married  Lady  Ruby 
Florence  Mary  EUiot,  daughter  of  the 
fourth  Earl  of  Minto  [q.v.]  by  whom  he 
had  a  son  and  two  daughters.  Lady 
Cromer  was  of  constant  help  to  him  in  his 
career  and  his  family  life  was  ideal.  Some 
of  their  happiest  days  were  spent  at  a 
modest  estate  he  acquired  in  Somerset. 
Cromer  died  rather  suddenly  13  May  1953 
in  London  and  was  succeeded  by  his  only 


^ 


Baring 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


son,  George  Rowland  Stanley  (born  1918), 
who  was  governor  of  the  Bank  of  England 
in  1961-6. 

A  portrait  of  Cromer  by  P.  A.  de 
Laslo  is  in  family  possession. 

[John  W.  Wheeler-Bennett,  King  George  VI, 
1958;  John  Gore,  King  George  F,  1941; 
H.R.H.  the  Duke  of  Windsor,  A  King's  Story, 
1951 ;  private  information.]  John  Gore. 

BARKER,  Sir  ERNEST  (1874-1960), 
scholar,  was  born  at  Woodley,  Cheshire, 
23  September  1874,  the  eldest  of  the  seven 
children  of  George  Barker  and  his  wife, 
Elizabeth  Pollitt.  His  father  had  been  a 
miner  but  was  then  working  on  the  farm 
belonging  to  his  wife's  family.  Ernest 
Barker  owed  a  vast  debt  to  the  energy 
and  sober  ambition  of  his  mother ;  to  the 
accident  that  he  was  tutored,  mainly  as 
pace-maker  to  another  boy,  for  a  scholar- 
ship to  Manchester  Grammar  School  by 
an  imaginative  village  schoolmaster ;  and 
to  the  high  standards  of  scholarship  of 
Manchester  Grammar  School  itself.  On 
these  matters  Barker  conmients  in  the 
pamphlet  which  expresses  much  of  his 
personal  philosophy,  'The  Father  of  the 
Man',  reprinted  in  his  autobiographical 
Age  and  Youth  (1953). 

A  classical  scholar  of  Balliol  College, 
Oxford,  Barker  obtained  first  classes 
in  honour  moderations  (1895),  literae 
humaniores  (1897),  and  modern  history 
(1898) ;  and  a  Craven  scholarship  in  1895. 
He  was  a  classical  fellow  at  Merton  (1898- 
1905);  lectiu-er  in  modern  history  at 
Wadham  (1899-1909);  fellow  and  lec- 
turer at  St.  John's  (1909-13) ;  and  fellow 
and  tutor  of  New  College  (1913-20).  In 
1920  he  left  Oxford  to  become  principal 
of  King's  College,  London.  Although  his 
years  there  were  those  of  much  interest  in 
the  university's  development,  thanks  to 
the  politics  of  administration  they  were 
not  perhaps  personally  his  happiest.  In 
January  1928  he  moved  to  Cambridge  as 
first  professor  of  political  science  and  fel- 
low of  Peterhouse.  He  retired  from  the 
chair  in  1939,  becoming  an  honorary 
fellow  of  Peterhouse,  as  he  had  been  of 
Merton  since  1931. 

Barker  will  probably  be  remembered  as 
a  tutor  and  man  of  character,  emphati- 
cally 'a  character'  in  the  Oxford  tradition ; 
as  a  polymath  scholar ;  and  as  a  political 
philosopher  and  first  holder  of  a  dis- 
tinguished chair  of  political  science.  The 
first  element  enters  profoundly  into  his 
matured  philosophy  as  a  moralist.  He 
himself  described  as  his  'golden  year'  that 


of  1919-20  when  the  young,  but  unusually 
mature,  men  had  just  returned  to  New 
College  from  the  war ;  for  him  they  were 
all  Rupert  Brookes  redivivi.  Even  in  an 
age  accustomed  to  undepartmentalized 
and  humane  learning,  he  was  conspicuous 
in  that  he  could  pass  with  equal  felicity 
from  classical  studies  to  medieval  history 
and,  then,  to  political  theory.  Not  a  Bent- 
ley,  or  a  Stubbs,  or  a  Max  Weber,  he  could 
yet  move  with  familiarity  in  all  their 
fields — ^perhaps  least  in  that  of  Weber.  In 
later  life  an  Anglican,  he  owed  much  to 
his  nonconformist  (Congregationalist)  and 
Liberal  background;  but  the  staunch  in- 
dividualism which  he  derived  therefrom 
was  tempered  by  his  classical  and  medieval 
studies.  He  appreciated  to  the  full  Aris- 
totle's doctrine  of  the  welfare  state,  'the 
polis  continues  in  being  for  the  sake  of 
the  good  life' ;  and  he  remained  a  lifelong 
friend  of  the  Co-operative  Movement,  the 
Workers'  Educational  Association,  and  of 
the  National  Council  of  Social  Service. 

Among  his  most  valuable  services,  as 
a  political  theorist,  were  his  translations 
from  the  great  German  writers,  Otto  von 
Gierke — ^here  adding  to  the  work  of  F.  W. 
Maitland  [q.v.] — and  Ernst  Troeltsch, 
although  his  most  brilliant  writings  were 
perhaps  his  early  Political  Thought  of  Plato 
and  Aristotle  (1906)  which  he  later  in- 
tended to  rewrite  in  two  volumes  on  Greek 
Political  Theory  of  which  only  one,  Plato 
and  his  Predecessors  (1918),  was  com- 
pleted; and  his  brief  Home  University 
Library  Political  Thought  in  England  from 
Herbert  Spencer  to  Today  (1915;  revised 
ed.  1947).  His  stress,  in  his  own  life,  upon 
personal  character  naturally  led  on  to 
an  interest  in  and  stress  upon  national 
character,  a  subject  upon  which  he  gave 
the  Stevenson  lectures  at  Glasgow  in 
1925-6.  They  were  published  under  the 
title  National  Character  (1927;  4th  and 
revised  ed.  1948);  and  later  he  wrote 
Britain  and  the  British  People  (1942 ;  re- 
vised ed.  1955)  and  edited  a  symposium, 
The  Character  of  England  (1947).  Barker's 
thought  on  the  theme  crystallized  in  one 
of  the  most  characteristic  books  that  he 
wrote,  Traditions  of  Civility  (1948),  in 
which  he  was  able  to  expound  the  guiding 
creed  of  a  humanist  with  all  the  authority 
of  an  historian  of  wide  range  as  well  as  a 
classical  scholar.  His  two  books.  Reflections 
on  Government  (1942)  and  Principles  of 
Social  and  Political  Theory  (1951),  based 
on  his  earlier  academic  lectures  and  dis- 
playing the  knowledgeableness  which  one 
would  expect  of  him,  are  sound  but  on  the 


62 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Barker,  E. 


whole  conventional  expositions  of  their 
subject. 

It  was  characteristic  of  Barker  that,  as 
with  his  students  in  personal  relations  so 
with  their  academic  ideas,  he  was  happy 
to  stir  thought  and  even  to  encourage 
innovations,  but — being  a  cautious  man, 
emotionally  conservative  if  culturally 
liberal — he  was  disinclined  to  commit  him- 
self to  any  final  judgement  on  their  value. 
It  was  consistent  with  his  temper  that, 
in  his  last  years,  instead  of  summarizing 
some  particular  political  theory  (although 
guiltless  of  that  contempt  for  theory 
which  has  occasionally  been  fashionable), 
he  preferred  to  fill  in  gaps  in  scholarship, 
not  covered  by  the  great  work  of  Sir 
R.  W.  and  A.  J.  Carlyle  [qq.v.]  by  sur- 
veying Hellenic,  Patristic,  and  Byzantine 
political  thought,  in  his  From  Alexander  to 
Constantine  (1956)  and  in  his  Social  and 
Political  Thought  in  Byzantium  (1957).  He 
was  perhaps  happiest  when  'dividing  the 
swift  mind'  in  discussing  medieval  history 
with,  for  example,  the  headmaster  of 
Ampleforth. 

Possibly  one  of  the  most  important 
movements  in  political  thought  in  western 
Europe  and  America  in  this  century  has 
been  the  emergence  of  Pluralism,  with  its 
immense  repercussions  on  ciurent  views 
of  the  State  and  Society,  and  with  its 
repudiation  of  'monistic'  or  centralizing 
theories,  especially  in  German  thought 
since  Hegel  and  including,  in  some  aspects, 
Marx.  This  theory  in  no  small  part  traces 
from  the  historical  work  of  von  Gierke,  of 
which  Maitland  and  Barker  himself  were 
the  leading  expositors  in  the  English 
language.  Barker  was  the  contemporary 
of  J.  N.  Figgis  and  G.  D.  H.  Cole  and 
the  tutor  of  H.  J.  Laski  [qq.v.].  He 
assiduously  called  attention  to  the  new 
ideas,  although  with  especial  reservations 
about'  Laski.  Some  writers  were  prepared 
to  acclaim  him  as  'the  godfather  of 
modern  Pluralism',  but  such  an  honour 
he  modestly  and  characteristically  dis- 
claimed. His  important  article  'The 
Discredited  State'  (February  1915  in  the 
Oxford  Political  Quarterly)  expressed  in- 
terest- but  was  critical  of  the  theory.  The 
historical  arguments  he  could  appreciate ; 
but  of  the  conclusions  he  fought  shy.  He 
had  an  aversion  from  theories  which  he  re- 
garded as  not  quite  sound,  and  the  neces- 
sary crudity  and  one-sidedness  of  the 
pioneer  did  not  come  naturally  to  him. 
He  wore  his  great  erudition  easily,  but  it 
inhibited  violent  new  departures. 

When   Barker  was   appointed   to   the 


chair  of  political  science  at  Cambridge 
some  thought  that  this  might  herald  a 
renaissance  of  a  subject  which,  in  Eng- 
land, had  been  neglected  since  the  days 
of  Sir  J.  R.  Seeley  and  Henry  Sidgwick 
[qq.v.]  and  the  eclipse  of  the  Utilitarian 
School.  Barker,  however,  was  content  to 
accommodate  his  chair  to  the  mood  of  the 
history  faculty  in  Cambridge  to  which  it 
was  attached,  although  he  records  in  his 
autobiography  his  shy  embarrassment  at 
finding  himself,  as  a  polymath,  in  the 
society  of  historical  specialists.  He  was  by 
nature  a  great  Oxford  tutor  and  he  car- 
ried this  mood  over  to  Cambridge,  where 
he  was  at  his  happiest  discussing  ideas 
with  the  young  men.  Although  he  showed 
curiosity  about  psychology  he  did  not 
affirm,  with  Lord  Bryce  [q.v.],  that  poH- 
tics,  as  a  study,  was  based  on  it  or  follow 
up  the  contemporary  and  fascinating 
initiative  given  by  Graham  Wallas  [q.v.]. 
He  remained  the  philosopher-historian  (as 
distinct  from  being  any  'philosopher  of 
history'),  outlining  his  theory  of  tradition, 
and  endeavouring  to  reconcile  English 
individualism  in  the  style  of  J.  S.  Mill 
[q.v.]  and  even  of  the  earlier  Puritans  with 
his  strong  'sense  for  the  community'  which 
he  believed  that  Laski  lacked. 

Barker's  large,  lanky  figure  and  broad 
Manchester  accent  were  of  the  material 
of  which  anecdote  is  made.  Together  with 
natural  dignity  he  had  that  individual 
personality  which  is  vital  in  university 
life  and  he  occupied  for  thirty  and  more 
years  a  prominent  position  in  the  Enghsh 
academic  world.  He  was  chairman  of  the 
drafting  committee  of  the  Hadow  report 
on  The  Education  of  the  Adolescent  (1927) ; 
presided  over  the  education  section  of  the 
British  Association  meeting  in  Toronto  in 
1924;  was  visiting  professor  at  Amherst 
College,  Massachusetts  (1920),  and  Lowell 
lecturer  in  Boston  (1929).  It  was  charac- 
teristic that,  already  retired,  he  was  pre- 
pared, as  the  contribution  of  a  good 
European,  to  accept  an  invitation  from 
Cologne  where  he  went  as  professor  of 
political  science  in  1947-8  and  was 
awarded  the  Verdienstkreuz.  He  was  one 
of  the  chief  contributors  to  the  Oxford 
volume,  Why  We  are  at  War:  Great 
Britain's  Case  (1914),  examining  the 
origins  of  the  first  war ;  in  the  second  he 
was  chairman  of  a  wartime  books  com- 
mission under  the  Conference  of  Allied 
Ministers  of  Education,  president  of  its 
history  committee,  and  one  of  the  editors 
of  The  European  Inheritance  (1954).  His 
career  was   a  protest  against   excessive 


Barker,  E. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


departmentalism  in  learning;  and  his 
reputation  finally  is  that  of  an  eminent 
humanist,  leaving  his  impress  upon 
generations  of  students  in  three  major 
imiversities. 

Barker  received  a  number  of  honorary 
doctorates  and  foreign  decorations,  was 
elected  F.B.A.  in  1947,  and  knighted  in 
1944.  In  1900  he  married  Emily  Isabel 
(died  1924),  daughter  of  the  Rev.  Richard 
Salkeld,  vicar  of  St.  Mark's,  Dukinfield,  by 
whom  he  had  one  son  and  two  daughters ; 
in  1927  he  married  Olivia  Stuart,  daughter 
of  John  Stuart  Horner,  of  Mells,  a  Balliol 
man  and  director  of  an  engineering  firm, 
by  whom  he  had  one  son  and  one  daugh- 
ter. Barker  died  in  Cambridge  17  February 
1960. 

Drawings  by  Mrs.  Campbell  Dodgson 
and  John  Mansbridge  are  in  the  possession 
of  the  family. 

[Sir  Ernest  Barker,  Age  and  Youth,  1953 ; 
G.  E.  G.  Catlin  in  Proceedings  of  the  British 
Academy,  vol.  xlvi,  1960;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.] 

George  E.  Gordon  Catlin. 

nv 

BARKER,  Dame  LILIAN  CHARLOTTE 

(1874-1955),  first  woman  assistant  prison 
commissioner,  was  born  in  Ishngton  21 
February  1874,  the  fifth  of  seven  children 
and  youngest  daughter  of  James  Barker, 
tobacconist,  and  his  wife,  Caroline  Wil- 
liams. Educated  at  the  local  elementary 
school,  she  was  trained  at  Whitelands 
College,  Chelsea,  and  began  her  career  as 
a  teacher  in  elementary  schools  under  the 
London  County  Council.  After  a  break  of 
seven  years  to  nurse  her  invahd  mother 
she  resumed  her  teaching.  Her  success, 
first  with  a  class  of  boys  and  later  with  a 
group  of  difficult  girls,  showed  her  to  be  of 
exceptional  ability,  and  led  to  her  appoint- 
ment in  1913  as  principal  of  the  Council's 
Women's  Institute  which  from  1914  was  in 
Cosway  Street,  Marylebone. 

The  outbreak  of  war  interrupted  her 
career  and  in  1915  she  was  appointed  the 
first  commandant  of  the  Women's  Legion 
cookery  section  in  which  she  did  valuable 
work  in  training  cooks  for  the  army.  Later 
in  1915  she  became  lady  superintendent 
at  Woolwich  Arsenal  where  her  talent  for 
dealing  with  people  first  foimd  full  scope. 
She  was  responsible  eventually  for  the 
welfare  of  some  30,000  women  in  an 
organization  where  women  had  never  be- 
fore been  employed.  She  set  up  canteens, 
first-aid  posts,  cloakrooms,  and  rest  rooms. 
Not  content  with  her  official  tasks,  she 
went  on  to  organize  outside  recreation, 


sick  visiting,  convalescent  and  holiday 
homes,  and  the  care  of  unmarried  mothers 
and  their  babies;  for  all  of  which  she 
raised  the  necessary  private  funds.  Her 
services  were  recognized  by  her  appoint- 
ment as  C.B.E.  in  1917. 

In  1919  she  joined  the  training  depart- 
ment of  the  Ministry  of  Labour ;  then  in 
1920  became  executive  officer  of  the 
Central  Committee  on  Women's  Training 
and  Employment  to  administer  a  sum 
of  £600,000  for  the  training  and  main- 
tenance of  women  who  had  suffered  from 
the  economic  effects  of  the  war.  In  1923 
she  became  governor  of  the  Borstal  Insti- 
tution for  Girls  at  Aylesbury.  Borstal 
training  for  girls  had  at  that  time  fallen 
seriously  behind  that  for  boys,  and  the 
prison  commissioners  were  fortunate  to 
attract  the  services  of  one  who  had  already 
made  a  position  for  herself  in  social  and 
educational  work.  Although  acceptance 
meant  a  considerable  loss  of  salary  she 
realized  the  importance  of  the  post  and 
agreed  to  undertake  it  on  being  assured  of 
a  free  hand  by  the  commissioners. 

Up  to  that  time  Aylesbury  as  an  insti- 
tution housing  about  a  hundred  of  the 
worst  girl  offenders  between  the  ages  of 
sixteen  and  twenty-one  had  been  run  on 
lines  which  differed  little  from  the  conven- 
tional prison  regime  of  the  previous 
century,  and  the  results  were  not  en- 
couraging. Lilian  Barker  brought  a  new 
spirit.  She  realized  that  the  will  to  lead 
a  good  and  useful  life  is  never  manifest  in 
the  unhappy  and  unfulfilled,  and  at  once 
set  to  work  to  humanize  the  treatment  of 
her  girls.  Print  dresses  replaced  the  old 
prison  clothes,  cells  were  transformed  into 
pleasantly  furnished  rooms  with  comfort- 
able beds,  meals  became  appetizing,  and 
organized  games  and  a  swimming  pool 
were  introduced.  Even  more  important 
was  her  own  personal  influence. 

Short  and  stocky,  with  iron-grey  hair 
cut  short  under  a  pork-pie  hat,  and  almost 
always  dressed  in  a  tweed  suit  of  severe 
cut,  her  somewhat  mannish  appearance 
was  emphasized  by  a  deep  voice  and  a 
manner  which  could  be  very  direct  and 
even  brusque.  Beneath  this  rather  im-  j 
compromising  exterior  was  concealed  a 
deep  humanity,  supported  by  a  firm 
Christian  faith  and  a  will  to  comfort  and 
help  anyone  in  trouble.  Her  laugh  was 
full  and  infectious,  her  humour  dry  but 
penetrating;  her  bright  eyes  could  flash 
with  fun  as  well  as  anger.  Her  nightly 
talks  to  her  girls  over  a  cigarette  were  one 
of  the  secrets  of  her  success.  But  any  who 


M 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Barnes,  E.  W. 


tried  to  kick  over  the  traces  found  an 
iron  hand  in  the  velvet  glove.  Her 
punishments  were  imaginative  if  uncon- 
ventional and  designed  to  fit  the  crime: 
the  girl  who  in  a  fit  of  temper  tore  her 
blankets  into  strips  was  made  to  sew  them 
up  and  sleep  under  the  resulting  exiguous 
covering.  It  was  not  long  before  Lilian 
Barker  won  the  respect  and  affection  of 
her  difficult  charges,  yet  there  was  never 
any  doubt  that  at  Aylesbury  discipline 
was  maintained.  Long  after  they  had  left 
she  continued  to  receive  a  voluminous 
fan  mail  from  her  old  girls  and  to  take 
an  interest  in  their  weddings  and  their 
children. 

In  1935  Lilian  Barker  was  invited  to 
become  the  first  woman  assistant  com- 
missioner of  prisons,  and,  although  it  cost 
her  a  great  deal  to  leave  Aylesbury,  she 
responded  at  once  to  this  call  to  wider 
service.  She  became  responsible  for  all 
women's  prisons  in  England  and  Wales, 
and,  by  arrangement  with  the  prison 
department  there,  also  in  Scotland.  Under 
her  guidance  improvements  were  made 
in  the  clothing  and  feeding  of  women 
prisoners,  and  she  was  immersed  in  plans 
for  the  creation  of  a  new  prison  for  women 
outside  London  when  the  outbreak  of  war 
in  1939  brought  this  and  other  develop- 
ments in  which  she  was  interested  to  an 
end.  She  retired  in  1943  and  was  ap- 
pointed D.B.E.  in  1944.  She  continued  to 
live  at  her  cottage  at  Wendover  Dean 
and  to  maintain  a  lively  interest  in  affairs 
until  her  death,  21  May  1955,  while  on 
holiday  at  Hallsands,  Devon. 

[The  Times,  23  May  1955  ;  Observer,  29  May 
1955 ;  Annual  Report  of  the  Prison  Commis- 
sioners, 1955;  Elizabeth  Gore,  The  Better 
Fight,  1965;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  Harold  Scott. 

BARNES,  ERNEST  WILLIAM  (1874- 
1953),  bishop  of  Birmingham,  was  born 
1  April  1874  in  Altrincham,  Cheshire,  the 
eldest  of  the  four  sons  of  John  Starkie 
Barnes  and  his  wife,  Jane  Elizabeth 
Kerry,  of  Charlbury,  Oxfordshire.  An 
elementary  schoolteacher,  J.  S.  Barnes 
was  appointed  headmaster  of  a  school  in 
Birmingham,  so  that  the  son's  boyhood 
was  spent  in  the  city  which  was  later  to 
know  him  as  bishop.  Educated  at  King 
Edward's  School  (the  school  of  Westcott, 
Lightfoot,  and  Benson,  qq.v.),  Barnes 
went  up  to  Cambridge  as  a  scholar  of 
Trinity  College  in  1893  and  in  1896  was 
bracketed  second  wrangler.  In  1897  he 
became  president  of  the  Union  and  was 

86520e2  65 


placed  in  the  first  division  of  the  first  class 
in  part  ii  of  the  mathematical  tripos.  In 
the  following  year  he  was  first  Smith's 
prizeman  and  was  elected  a  fellow  of  his 
college,  becoming  assistant  lecturer  in 
1902,  junior  dean  in  1906-8,  and  tutor 
from  1908  to  1915.  In  1909  he  was  elected 
F.R.S. 

Barnes's  relations  with  his  Cambridge 
colleagues  were  not  always  harmonious. 
A  shy  man,  who  was  yet  conscious  of 
unusual  powers,  he  could  be  arrogant  in 
controversy  and  did  not  shrink  from  de-* 
daring  his  views.  In  particular,  the  strong 
pacifist  principles  of  which  the  outbreak 
of  war  in  1914  found  him  an  ardent  cham- 
pion failed  to  endear  him  to  the  more 
bellicose  of  his  colleagues  at  Trinity.  It  is 
said  that  Barnes,  whose  father  was  a 
Baptist,  was  a  professed  atheist  when  he 
first  went  up  to  Cambridge  but  as  an 
undergraduate  experienced  a  conversion 
to  Christianity.  In  1902  he  was  made 
deacon  and  in  1903  was  ordained  priest. 
In  1915-19  he  was  master  of  the  Temple  j 
in  1918  he  was  made  canon  of  West- 
minster ;  and  in  1924  Ramsay  MacDonald 
nominated  him  bishop  of  Birmingham. 

A  broad  churchman,  whose  training  at 
Cambridge  had  been  primarily  mathe- 
matical, Barnes  conceived  it  to  be  his 
mission  and  duty  to  urge  the  necessity  of 
substituting  a  world  outlook  based  on  the 
natural  sciences  for  the  traditionally  scrip- 
tural outlook  characteristic  of  Christian 
theology.  He  preached  what  came  to  be 
known  as  'gorilla'  sermons,  supporting  the 
evolutionary  theory  of  man's  biological 
descent  from  some  creature  akin  to  the 
apes.  He  showed  himself  negatively  hos- 
tile towards  all  forms  of  the  doctrine  of 
the  Real  Presence  of  Christ  in  the 
Eucharist;  sacramentalism,  as  under- 
stood by  Anglican  churchmen  not  only 
of  the  Anglo-Catholic  school  but  of  other 
schools  as  well,  was  outside  his  purview. 
The  essence  of  Christianity,  as  he  under- 
stood it  and  as  he  practised  it,  was  to  bes 
found  in  a  personal  discipleship  of  the 
Jesus  of  the  Gospels,  and  in  the  accep- 
tance of  an  ethic  based  on  the  Sermon 
on  the  Mount.  His  congregation  at  the 
Temple,  during  his  mastership,  he  be-' 
lieved  to  consist  of  'wistful  agnostics'  in^ 
need  of  the  spiritual  diet  of  somewhat 
self-conscious  modernism  which  he  pro-- 
vided. 

It  is  indeed  probable  that  it  was  during 
this  period  that  Barnes's  best  work  as  a 
preacher  was  done.  There  was  a  challeng- 
ing incisiveness  about  his  utterances,  and 


Barnes,  E.  W. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


an  evident,  if  somewhat  naive,  intellectual 
honesty,  which  his  congregation  of  able 
lawyers  could  appreciate ;  nor  at  this  stage 
does  controversy  of  a  public  kind  appear 
to  have  arisen,  although  at  the  Temple  as 
in  Cambridge  there  were  those  who  shook 
their  heads  at  Barnes's  pacifism.  The 
canonry  of  Westminster  gave  him  a  wider 
audience,  and  by  the  time  of  his  appoint- 
ment to  Birmingham  he  had  already  be- 
come something  of  a  controversial  figure. 
His  opinions  were  by  now  well  known. 
His  'gorilla'  sermons  were  generally  held 
to  be  unnecessary  since  the  theory  of 
evolution  had  long  ceased  to  be  a  matter 
of  dispute  among  educated  churchmen. 
But  his  attacks  upon  the  doctrine  of  the 
Real  Presence  caused  pain  and  distress  to 
many  and  were  widely  resented. 

The  Birmingham  diocese  to  which  he 
went  in  1924  was  largely  high  church  in 
tone  and  there  were  plenty  of  parishes  in 
which  the  accustomed  usages  were  not 
such  as  the  bishop  approved.  In  1925 
trouble  threatened  by  reason  of  his  re- 
fusal to  institute  a  patron's  nominee  to 
a  vacant  benefice  unless  he  agreed  in 
advance  to  discontinue  the  practice  of 
reservation  which  had  been  customary  in 
the  parish.  The  incumbent  designate  pre- 
ferred to  withdraw;  the  next  candidate 
gave  the  assurance  although  it  went 
beyond  anything  the  bishop  was  legally 
entitled  to  demand. 

In  September  1927  the  bishop  preached 
a  vigorous  'gorilla'  sermon  in  West- 
minster Abbey,  and  in  Birmingham  a 
fortnight  later  delivered  an  address  on 
sacramental  teaching  which  contained  a 
provocative  onslaught  upon  the  doctrine 
of  the  Real  Presence.  A  public  protest 
was  made  ten  days  later  in  St.  Paul's 
Cathedral,  where  the  bishop  was  about 
to  preach,  by  a  London  incumbent  who 
appeared  with  a  large  body  of  laymen 
and,  denouncing  the  bishop  as  a  heretic, 
demanded  that  the  bishop  of  London 
should  inhibit  him  from  preaching  in  his 
diocese  and  that  the  archbishop  of  the 
province  should  arrange  for  his  trial.  The 
bishop  took  the  unusual  course  of  ad- 
dressing an  open  letter  to  Archbishop 
Davidson  [q.v.]  in  which  he  complained  of 
the  disturbance  and,  defending  his  posi- 
tion, remarked  that  no  one  should  drive 
him  to  Tennessee  or  to  Rome.  The  arch- 
bishop published  a  courteous  reply,  assur- 
ing the  bishop  that  no  one  in  England 
desired  to  lead  or  to  drive  him  to  either, 
dismissing  the  evolutionary  sermons  as  of 
little  importance,  but  criticizing,  as  being 


needlessly  wounding,  what  the  bishop  had 
said  about  sacramentalism.  Before  the  end 
of  the  year  the  bishop  published,  in  reply 
to  his  critics,  a  book  giving  a  positive 
account  of  his  beliefs,  bearing  the  title 
Should  Such  a  Faith  Offend?,  which  had 
the  effect  of  causing  the  controversy  to  die 
down  for  a  time. 

In  1929  there  occurred  a  renewed  in- 
stance of  the  bishop's  refusal  to  institute 
to  a  benefice  the  nominee  of  the  patrons 
unless  promises  were  made  which  went 
beyond  those  required  by  law.  The  pa- 
trons in  this  case  included  the  bishop  of 
Truro  and  the  controversy  went  on  for 
eighteen  months.  In  the  end  the  patrons 
obtained  from  a  judge  of  the  High  Court 
a  writ  of  mandamus  directed  to  the  arch- 
bishop of  Canterbury  enjoining  him  to 
license  a  fit  person  to  the  benefice. 
Archbishop  Lang  [q.v.]  admitted  the 
patrons'  original  nominee. 

The  course  of  the  war  of  1939-45  saw 
Barnes  involved  in  a  controversy  with 
the  makers  of  cement.  At  a  public  meet- 
ing in  Birmingham  in  November  1940 
concerned  with  the  provision  of  air-raid 
shelters,  he  had  attacked  the  Cement 
Makers'  Federation  as  a  ring  of  monopolists 
holding  up  the  supply  of  cement  at  a  time 
of  great  public  need  in  the  interests  of  their 
own  private  profit.  The  bishop  was  sued 
for  slander.  He  did  not  appear  in  court, 
although  he  was  represented  by  counsel. 
The  cement  companies  were  awarded 
£1,600  damages.  It  was  an  index  of  the  res- 
pect, and  even  affection,  in  which  Barnes 
was  by  this  time  held  that  the  money  was 
raised  by  lay  friends  in  the  diocese.  The 
bishop  in  a  speech  in  the  House  of  Lords 
in  June  1941  returned  undaunted  to  the 
attack,  maintaining  that  a  cement  ring 
did  exist,  that  it  was  contrary  to  the 
public  interest,  and  that  big  business  was 
using  libel  and  slander  actions  to  suppress 
criticism. 

In  1947  Barnes  entered  the  lists  as  a 
theological  author,  his  book.  The  Rise  of 
Christianity,  arousing  fierce  opposition. 
History  cannot  be  written  without  pre- 
suppositions, and  the  bishop's  presup- 
positions precluded  the  recognition  of 
miracles.  In  his  reconstruction  of  the 
beginnings  of  Christianity  he  relied  too 
exclusively  upon  the  conclusions  of  a 
limited  number  of  scholars  whose  ten- 
dency was  to  date  the  New  Testament 
writings  impossibly  late.  The  outraged 
orthodox  demanded  his  condemnation. 
Under  great  pressure  to  take  action  of 
some  kind,  but  unwilling  to  prosecute, 


66 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Barnes,  G.  R. 


Archbishop  Fisher,  in  a  presidential  ad- 
dress to  Convocation,  after  expressing 
deep  appreciation  of  the  bishop's  Chris- 
tian character  and  of  the  sincerity  of  his 
aims,  deUvered  a  strong  and  damaging 
criticism  of  his  book  and  of  certain  of  its 
presuppositions,  and  cautioned  readers 
against  accepting  its  claim  to  be  an  ade- 
quate and  impartial  setting  forth  of  the 
truth.  While  declaring  that  he  'would 
have  no  trial  in  this  matter',  he  went  on  to 
say :  'If  his  views  were  mine,  I  should  not 
feel  that  I  could  still  hold  episcopal  office 
in  the  Church.'  The  hint  was  ignored  by 
Barnes  who  made  in  the  House  of  Bishops 
a  personal  statement  which  their  lord- 
ships did  not  discuss.  Action  parallel  with 
that  of  the  archbishop  of  Canterbury  hav- 
ing been  taken  also  in  York  Convocation 
by  Archbishop  Garbett  [q.v.],  the  matter 
was  allowed  to  drop. 

The  external  record  of  recurring  crises 
and  controversies  by  which  his  tenure  of 
the  see  of  Birmingham  was  marked  ex- 
hibits Barnes  as  a  very  unusual  type  of 
prelate :  a  stormy  petrel  of  the  episcopate. 
Yet  there  is  another  side  to  the  story. 
Thorny  and  unbending  in  controversy, 
and  indifferent  to  the  exasperation  roused 
by  his  utterances,  he  was  none  the  less 
personally  charming  and  manifestly  a 
man  of  the  highest  character  and  purpose. 
He  had  made  initial  mistakes,  but  in  the 
later  phases  of  his  episcopate  he  ap- 
preciably mellowed.  He  had  either  worn 
down  opposition  or  had  reached  a  tacit 
modus  Vivendi  with  his  opponents.  His  was 
a  complicated  and  many-sided  character ; 
he  could  be  shy  a^^d  awkward,  but  he  was 
inwardly  eager  for  friendship  and  capable 
of  great  personal  kindness.  The  story  is 
told  that  a  young  Anglo-Catholic  curate 
who  went  to  tea  with  him  returned  from 
the  encounter  remarking:  'I  do  not  know 
whether  I  agree  with  him,  but  I  know  he  is 
a  saint.'  By  all  but  a  few  of  the  laity  of  his 
diocese  he  was  held  in  the  highest  honour 
and  admired  as  a  man  of  inflexible 
courage.  The  administrative  side  of  a 
bishop's  work  was  admittedly  not  con- 
genial to  him,  but  during  his  time  at 
Birmingham  a  considerable  nvunber  of 
new  churches  were  built  and  consecrated, 
and  new  parishes  were  formed  to  meet 
changing  conditions.  He  resigned  his  see  in 
May  1953  and  died  on  29  November  of  the 
same  year  at  his  home  at  Hurstpierpoint 
in  Sussex. 

Barnes  was  a  fellow  of  King's  College, 
London  (1919),  Gifford  lecturer  at  Aber- 
deen (1926-8),  and  received  the  honorary 


degrees  of  D.D.  from  Aberdeen  (1925) 
and  Edinburgh  (1927),  and  LL.D.  from 
Glasgow  (1926). 

In  1916  Barnes  married  Adelaide  Caro- 
line Theresa  (died  1963),  daughter  of  Sir 
Adolphus  Ward  [q.v.],  master  of  Peter- 
house,  Cambridge ;  there  were  two  sons  of 
the  marriage.  A  bronze  plaque  of  Barnes 
by  David  Wynne  is  in  Birmingham 
Cathedral. 

[The  Times,  30  November  1953 ;  Chronicle 
of  Convocation,  1947 ;  Sir  Edmund  Whittaker 
in  Obituary  Notices  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal 
Society,  vol.  ix,  1954 ;  G.  K.  A.  Bell,  Randall 
Davidson,  1935;  private  information;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  A.  E.  J.  Rawlinson. 

BARNES,    Sir    GEORGE    REGINALD 

(1904-1960),  broadcasting  director  and 
college  principal,  was  born  in  Byfleet  13 
September  1904,  the  son  of  Sir  Hugh 
Shakespear  Barnes,  lieutenant-governor  of 
Burma,  and  his  second  wife,  Edith  Helen, 
sister  of  (Sir)  Kenneth  Barnes  and  Irene 
and  Violet  Vanbrugh  [qq.v.].  Educated  at 
the  Royal  Naval  Colleges  at  Osborne  and 
Dartmouth,  he  was  ultimately  rejected 
for  the  navy  because  of  his  eyesight. 
But  his  interest  in  naval  affairs  never 
diminished,  however  varied  and  strong  his 
other  interests.  With  Commander  J.  H. 
Owen  he  published  in  1932-8  four  volumes 
of  the  private  papers  of  the  fourth  Earl  of 
Sandwich  [q.v.]  and  he  always  cherished 
the  dream  of  finding  time  to  write  a  study 
of  the  British  navy  in  the  early  nine- 
teenth century. 

From  Dartmouth  he  went  to  King's 
College,  Cambridge,  where  he  obtained  a 
second  class  in  part  i  of  the  historical 
tripos  (1924)  and  a  first  in  part  ii  (1925). 
There  was  some  expectation  that  he  would 
try  for  the  Foreign  Office  but  the  pull 
of  the  navy  proved  too  strong  and  he 
returned  to  Dartmouth  for  three  years 
(1927-30)  as  an  assistant  master.  In  1930 
he  went  as  assistant  secretary  to  the  Cam- 
bridge University  Press  where  he  de- 
veloped 'a  fine  taste  and  a  good  judgement 
in  the  economics  as  well  as  the  aesthetics 
of  the  trade',  and  revised  the  Hand-List  of 
Cambridge  Books  extending  it  to  1800. 

In  1935  Barnes  joined  the  British 
Broadcasting  Corporation  where  his  strong 
social  conscience  gave  an  educational  im- 
petus to  his  work.  He  believed  that  public 
taste  needs  guiding :  that  it  should  be  led, 
not  followed.  Coupled  with  this  belief  was 
his  sense  of  responsibility  towards  listener 
minorities  and  the  complex  needs  of 
each  individual  listener.  In  1941  he  was 


67 


Barnes,  G.  R. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


appointed  director  of  talks  in  succession  to 
Sir  Richard  Maconachie  under  whom  he 
had  worked  since  Maconachie  joined  the 
Corporation  in  1937;  in  1945  he  became 
Maconachie's  assistant  controller  of  talks. 
In  that  year  he  made  his  first  visit  to 
the  United  States  from  which  he  returned 
with  his  horizons  widened  and  with  a  final 
access  of  assurance  which  never  deserted 
him. 

When  the  Third  Programme  was  estab- 
lished in  1946  Barnes  was  the  obvious 
choice  to  give  the  idea  practical  form.  He 
aimed  at  the  highest  standards  in  both 
programme  and  performance:  'We  shall 
live  or  die  by  the  amount  we  are  prepared 
to  experiment . . .  We  will  experiment  with 
new  forms  of  radio,  new  writers,  new  per- 
formers, and  new  presentations.'  His  own 
lifelong  devotion  to  music  found  scope 
which  he  described  as  'vast  and  even 
thrilling'  in  the  Third  Programme's  long- 
term  plan  to  give  the  finest  available 
performances  of  music  of  every  style  and 
epoch,  with  special  emphasis  on  rarely 
heard  works  of  interest  and  beauty. 
Comparably  large  in  conception  was  the 
great  series  of  programmes  on  the  'Ideas 
and  Beliefs  of  the  Victorians'  (1948). 

In  1948  Barnes  joined  the  B.B.C.'s 
board  of  management  as  director  of  the 
spoken  word  and  in  October  1950  he  was 
appointed  to  the  newly  created  post  of 
director  of  television.  The  B.B.C.'s  five- 
year  plan  to  expand  and  develop  its 
television  service,  giving  priority  to 
'coverage',  had  been  under  way  for  a  year. 
New  transmitters  were  opened  at  Sutton 
Coldfield  (1949)  and  Holme  Moss  (1951) 
and  the  Lime  Grove  studios  were  taken 
over  early  in  1950.  But  the  service  was 
still  based  on  Alexandra  Palace  and  'for 
two  nightmare  years',  as  Barnes  later  re- 
corded in  the  B.B.C.  Quarterly  (Summer 
1954),  'every  piece  of  scenery  and  every 
property  for  the  half-dozen  different  pro- 
ductions each  day  had  to  be  transported 
twenty-four  miles'.  It  was  not  until  1954 
that  concentration  at  Shepherds  Bush  was 
achieved. 

The  enormous  increase  in  range  which 
B.B.C.  television  obtained  during  the  six 
years  of  Barnes's  directorship  is  reflected 
in  an  increase  in  hcences  from  343,882 
(1950)  to  5,739,593  (1956).  Among  the 
many  new  ventures  were  the  first  experi- 
mental schools  television  programmes 
(May  1952) ;  the  televising  of  the  corona- 
tion of  Queen  Elizabeth  II  (June  1953) ; 
the  first  large-scale  Eurovision  link-up  of 
eight  countries  (June  1954) ;  the  inaugura- 


tion of  a  daily  'News  and  Newsreel'  (July 
1954);  and  ceaseless  experiment  with 
colour  television  (the  first  colour  tele- 
vision outside  broadcast,  transmitted  on 
closed  circuit  to  the  Children's  Hospital, 
Great  Ormond  Street,  was  of  the  corona- 
tion). In  October  1953  on  a  visit  to  Lime 
Grove  studios  the  Queen  knighted  Barnes 
with  a  sword  which  had  been  smuggled  in 
from  Buckingham  Palace. 

In  1955  the  Independent  Television 
Authority  began  commercial  television. 
In  the  previous  year  Barnes  had  stressed 
the  necessity  of  a  second  channel  for  the 
B.B.C.  to  provide  a  planned  alternative 
programme  in  order  to  cater  for  the  vary- 
ing tastes  of  its  public ;  in  1956  he  empha- 
sized the  need  to  maintain  high  standards 
and  avoid  the  exclusive  pursuit  of  mass 
popularity :  'The  audience  figures  that  are 
being  bandied  about  in  the  fine  shouting- 
war  that  is  going  on  are  not  a  criterion  of 
excellence.  To  seek  success  in  popularity 
alone  is  a  trivial  use  of  a  great  invention. 
Mass  without  mind  always  comes  a 
cropper  .  .  .'. 

In  1956  Barnes  became  principal  of  the 
University  College  of  North  Staffordshire 
which  had  been  unfortunate  in  the  death 
of  its  first  two  principals  (Lord  Lindsay 
of  Birker  and  Sir  John  Lennard-Jones, 
qq.v.)  within  a  few  years  of  their  appoint- 
ment. A  similar  fate  was  to  strike  Barnes 
who  died  at  Keele,  22  September  1960, 
after  no  more  than  four  years  of  stimu- 
lating service  to  the  new  foundation. 
A  memorial  fund  was  devoted  to  the  de- 
velopment and  teaching  of  music  in  the 
university  which  Barnes  had  done  much 
to  improve.  His  concern  was  ever  with 
quality,  whether  in  music,  the  visual  arts, 
or  human  relationships.  From  a  wide 
circle  of  friends  he  entertained  at  Keele 
distinguished  writers,  politicians,  paint- 
ers, and  scholars,  whose  visits  greatly 
enriched  the  life  of  a  small  and  relatively 
isolated  university;  and  by  his  own  dili- 
gence in  accepting  public  engagements 
he  sought  in  his  turn  to  make  Keele 
more  widely  known.  A  frail-looking  man, 
he  possessed  great  resilience  and  inner 
strength,  nourished  by  his  deep  concern 
for  the  life  of  the  chapel.  His  naval  train- 
ing imbued  him  with  a  sense  of  service  and 
he  devoted  all  his  energy  and  practical 
idealism  to  the  furtherance  of  the  things 
of  the  mind  and  of  the  spirit  which  he 
valued. 

At  one  time  or  another  Barnes  served  on 
many  bodies  concerned  with  the  interests 
he  had  at  heart.  They  included  the  coimcil 


68 


D.N.B.  1951^1960 


BarneSj  K.  R. 


of  the  Royal  College  of  Art,  the  British 
Film  Institute,  the  Standing  Commission 
on  Museums  and  Galleries,  the  Council  of 
Industrial  Design,  the  Wedgwood  Society 
(formed  early  in  1955  with  Barnes  as  first 
chairman),  the  British  Pottery  Manufac- 
turers' Federation,  and  the  committee 
appointed  in  January  1958  by  the  Gul- 
benkian  Foundation  to  inquire  into  the 
needs  of  the  arts  in  Britain.  He  received 
an  honorary  D.C.L.  from  Durham  in  1956. 

In  1927  Barnes  married  Dorothy  Anne, 
daughter  of  Henry  Bond,  master  of 
Trinity  Hall,  Cambridge  (1919-29) ;  they 
had  one  son. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Laurence  Gilliam. 

BARNES,  Sir  KENNETH  RALPH 

(1878-1957),  principal  of  the  Royal 
Academy  of  Dramatic  Art,  was  the 
youngest  son  of  the  Rev.  Reginald  Henry 
Barnes,  vicar  of  Heavitree,  Devonshire, 
prebendary  of  Exeter  Cathedral.  He  was 
born  at  the  vicarage  11  September  1878, 
the  youngest  of  a  family  of  six.  His 
mother,  Frances  Mary  Emily  Nation,  had 
a  natural  but  unfulfilled  talent  for  acting 
and  encouraged  the  dramatic  spirit  in  her 
children ;  this  flourished  in  two  of  Barnes's 
sisters,  Violet  and  Irene  Vanbrugh  [qq.v.]. 
In  Kenneth  a  natural  interest  in  the 
drama  was  matched  by  a  bias  towards  the 
climate  of  simple  piety  and  conventional 
religious  faith  into  which  he  was  born.  His 
father  died  when  he  was  still  a  boy  and  his 
upbringing  owed  much  to  the  influence  of 
his  mother  and  sisters ;  the  latter,  in  par- 
ticular, had  a  considerable  influence  on  his 
life  and  subsequent  career. 

He  was  educated  at  Westminster  School 
but  left  when  not  yet  seventeen  to  pay  an 
extended  visit  to  a  sister  who  had  recently 
married  the  British  resident  in  Kashmir 
and  who  was  to  be  the  mother  of  Sir  G.  R. 
Barnes  (see  above).  There  began  the 
familiarity  with  the  personalities  of  English 
ruling  society  which  was  to  assume  impor- 
tance when  his  ambitions  became  more 
clearly  defined.  After  three  years  at  Christ 
Church,  Oxford,  he  was  still  uncertain 
what  his  calling  should  be.  At  one  time  he 
had  almost  been  persuaded  to  follow  his 
father's  profession,  but  a  desire  for  variety 
and  dislike  of  a  predictable  future  led  him, 
after  a  short  period  as  a  clerk  in  the  Land 
Registry,  towards  freelance  journalism. 
This  gave  him  opportunity  for  travel,  for 
many  acquaintanceships,  and  for  frequent 
visits  to  the  theatre,  a  world  open  to  him 
through  the  success  of  his  sisters.   The 


editor  of  the  Daily  Mirror  soon  commis- 
sioned him  to  write  criticisms  of  plays; 
the  Standard  and,  later.  The  Times  also 
engaged  him  from  time  to  time  to  write 
on  theatrical  matters.  In  1907  he  toured 
Canada  with  a  party  of  journalists  for 
the  Westminster  Gazette  and  the  next  two 
years  were  spent  in  journalism,  in  writing 
two  one-act  plays,  and  in  translating 
Hervieu's  Connais-Toi  which  was  pre- 
sented, as  Glass  Houses,  at  the  Globe 
Theatre  in  1910. 

His  opportunity  came  in  1909  when 
George  Bancroft,  the  administrator  of  the 
Academy  of  Dramatic  Art  founded  by 
(Sir)  Herbert  Beerbohm  Tree  [q.v.]  in 
1904,  invited  him  for  an  interview  at  62 
Gower  Street.  The  Academy  was  neither 
very  flourishing  nor,  in  the  opinion  of  many 
of  the  theatrical  profession,  very  necessary. 
Yet  certain  distinguished  men  of  the 
theatre  whom  Tree  had  gathered  into  a 
governing  body  obstinately  believed  in  its 
value.  It  could  not  pay  a  large  salary  and 
Bancroft  was  giving  up  his  post.  Barnes 
was  engaged  as  principal  of  *ADA',  as  it 
was  flippantly  called,  at  a  salary  of  £250 
per  annum. 

From  the  beginning  the  new  principal 
was  in  conflict.  He  was  himself  no  actor. 
Actors  were  customarily  trained  in  the 
rough  school  of  the  companies  of  the 
actor-managers.  The  tradition  had  lasted 
since  Burbage,  and  it  seemed  to  many 
members  of  the  profession  that  there 
was  no  need  for  the  academic  aura  which 
Barnes  seemed  to  be  striving  to  give  to 
their  calling.  Time,  however,  was  on  the 
principal's  side:  the  actor-managers  were 
dying  out  and  in  their  place  were  avowed 
business  men  who  had  neither  the  inten- 
tion nor  the  ability  to  train  young  per- 
formers. The  number  of  students  attracted 
to  ADA  increased  steadily  and  it  seemed 
that  a  dramatic  school  was  after  all  a 
welcome  institution. 

After  serving  with  the  Hampshire 
Regiment  during  the  war  years,  in  India, 
the  Middle  East,  and  Siberia,  Barnes  re- 
turned to  Gower  Street  in  1919  to  face  a 
series  of  formidable  tasks.  He  brought  to 
them  a  sense  of  high  duty  and  dedication 
and  qualities  of  indefatigable  tenacity, 
courage,  and  simple  faith.  By  persistent 
begging  for  the  cause  of  his  heart  he  found 
space  and  money  for  the  Academy  to  ex- 
pand. A  student  theatre  in  Malet  Street, 
started  before  the  war,  was  completed 
in  1921 ;  and  the  modern  building  in 
Gower  Street  in  1931.  No  sooner  was  the 
theatre  destroyed  in  1941  than  plans  were 


Barnes,  K.  R. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


worked  out  for  its  replacement  by  some- 
thing better.  The  Vanbrugh  Theatre, 
named  after  his  sisters,  for  which  he 
successfully  launched  a  mass,  appeal  for 
£78,000,  was  opened  in  1954,  the  year 
before  his  retirement. 

Barnes  wanted  more  than  imposing 
buildings  and  prosperity  for  his  Academy. 
He  wanted  official  recognition  of  his 
institution  and  of  the  art  of  acting. 
Through  his  continued  efforts  the  Academy 
received  a  royal  charter  and  became  the 
Royal  Academy  of  Dramatic  Art  in  1920. 
The  Treasury  accorded  it  a  grant-in-aid  in 
1924 ;  and  the  Inland  Revenue  recognized 
it  as  a  charity,  with  consequent  exemption 
from  income-tax,  in  1926.  In  1930,  after 
taking  seven  legal  actions,  he  obtained 
from  the  quarter-sessions  a  decision  of 
historic  significance.  This  was  that  acting 
was  henceforth  to  be  classed  as  a  fine 
art  in  company  with  literature,  painting, 
sculpture,  architecture,  and  music.  It  was 
characteristic  of  Barnes's  thrift  that  this 
decision  was  obtained  in  pursuance  of  a 
claim  for  the  Academy  to  be  exempted 
from  the  burden  of  the  general  rate.  So 
successful  were  the  principal's  financial 
methods  in  general  that  by  the  time  of  his 
retirement  he  had  steered  the  Academy  at 
last  into  a  position  of  complete  economic 
security. 

The  success  of  his  life-work  was  the 
reward,  he  would  have  said,  of  many 
years  of  single-minded  devotion  to  a 
worthy  cause  under  the  blessing  of  God. 
He  was  a  kindly  man  who,  when  faced 
with  controversy  in  matters  of  religion  or 
art,  accepted  naturally  the  views  of  the 
Chiurch  of  England  and  conservative 
opinion.  Without  his  faith  in  what  were 
for  him  eternal  values,  it  is  doubtful 
whether  his  achievements  would  have 
been  possible.  He  believed  firmly  that  the 
theatre  could  serve  towards  the  spiritual 
betterment  of  man;  more  firmly  still  he 
believed  in  the  theatre's  importance  as  a 
part  of  society,  and  he  was  well  placed  to 
guide  his  students  towards  achieving  the 
necessary  social  graces.  Instruction  in  the 
artistic  and  technical  problems  of  acting 
was  a  matter  for  his  staff.  Sometimes  the 
charge  of  snobbery  was  laid  at  his  door ; 
and  it  was  true  that  he  sometimes  failed 
to  recognize  talent  when  it  was  concealed 
beneath  an  uncouth  or  provincial  exterior. 
Matters  of  social  distinction  had  impor- 
tance for  him,  if  only  because  he  had  to 
rely  so  often  for  help  to  the  Academy  on 
the  generosity  of  titled  people.  The  social 
aspirations  which  he  had  for  his  institu- 


tion and  for  its  products  were  greatly 
aided  by  his  happy  and  successful  mar- 
riage in  1925  to  Daphne,  daughter  of  Sir 
Richard  James  Graham,  fourth  baronet, 
of  Netherby,  Cmnberland.  They  had  one 
son. 

Barnes  was  knighted  in  1938  and  died  at 
Kingston  Gorse,  Sussex,  16  October  1957. 
A  bust  in  bronze  by  Clemence  Dane  was 
placed  in  the  entrance  hall  of  the  Royal 
Academy  of  Dramatic  Art  in  Gower 
Street. 

[Sir  Kenneth  Barnes,  Welcome,  Good 
Friends,  1958;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  John  Fernald. 

BARNETT,  LIONEL  DAVID  (1871- 
1960),  orientalist,  was  born  in  Liverpool 
21  October  1871,  the  eldest  son  of  Baron 
Barnett,  banker,  by  his  wife,  Adelaide 
Cowan.  He  was  educated  at  the  High 
School,  Institute,  and  University  College, 
Liverpool.  He  went  up  to  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge,  in  1892  and  was  elected 
a  scholar  in  1893.  He  was  Sir  William 
Browne's  medallist  (Greek  ode,  1893, 
1894,  1896 ;  Greek  epigram,  1893) ;  gained 
a  first  class  (division  1)  in  part  i  of  the 
classical  tripos  in  1894  and  was  elected 
Craven  scholar  the  same  year.  In  1896  he 
was  awarded  a  first  class,  with  special 
distinction  in  language,  in  part  ii  of  the 
classical  tripos,  together  with  the  Chan- 
cellor's medal.  He  was  appointed  Craven 
student  in  1897  and  in  1900  the  university 
of  Manchester  conferred  on  him  the  degree 
of  Litt.D.  He  studied  Sanskrit  at  Cam- 
bridge and  Halle. 

In  1899  Barnett  joined  the  staff  of  the 
British  Museum  as  assistant  keeper  in  the 
department  of  oriental  printed  books  and 
manuscripts  and  after  only  nine  years  was 
promoted  keeper  of  the  department  in 
succession  to  Sir  Robert  Douglas.  To  the 
duties  of  this  post,  its  functions  officially 
defined  as  'to  conserve,  augment  and 
catalogue  the  collections',  he  brought  a 
remarkable  threefold  equipment  of  fine 
scholarship,  administrative  ability,  and 
business  acumen  which  resulted  in  the 
museum's  store  of  oriental  manuscripts 
and  books  being  enormously  enriched  dur- 
ing his  twenty-eight  years  of  office.  The 
vast  range  of  his  erudition  in  the  cultures 
of  both  East  and  West  was  probably 
unique  in  the  museum's  history.  He  com- 
piled a  monumental  series  of  no  fewer 
than  ten  descriptive  catalogues  of  oriental 
printed  books  in  the  Indo-Aryan  and 
Dravidian  languages,  covering  Sanskrit, 
Pali,  Prakrit,   Kannada,  Badaga,   Kurg, 


«> 


D.N.B.   1951-1960 


Barrington-Ward 


Tamil,  Telugu,  Burmese,  Hindi,  Bihari, 
Pahari,  Panjabi,  Saurashtra,  and  other 
dialects,  large  quarto  volumes  containing 
in  all  some  8,000  columns  of  text. 

Library  administration  and  biblio- 
graphy on  this  massive  scale  were  only  a 
part  of  his  many-sided  activity.  From 
1906  to  1917  he  held  the  professorship  of 
Sanskrit  at  University  College,  London. 
When  the  university's  School  of  Oriental 
Studies  was  founded  he  was  included  on 
its  staff  as  lecturer  in  Sanskrit  (1917-48) ; 
lecturer  in  ancient  Indian  history  and 
epigraphy  (1922-48) ;  and  librarian  (1940- 
47).  When  he  retired  from  the  School  in 
1948  a  special  volume  of  its  Bulletin  was 
published  in  his  honour.  He  was  elected 
F.B.A.  in  1936  and  appointed  C.B.  in 
1937.  A  prominent  figure  in  the  Royal 
Asiatic  Society,  he  was  at  various  times 
a  member  of  council  and  vice-president, 
its  honorary  librarian  from  1939  onwards, 
and  was  awarded  its  gold  medal  in  1950. 

The  Greek  and  Latin  classics  were 
Barnett's  first  love  and  throughout  life  his 
prodigious  memory  was  stored  with  them. 
For  the  benefit  of  the  young  student  and 
the  cultured  lay  public  he  published  be- 
tween 1900  and  1904  a  succession  of  useful 
volumes,  some  translated  from  the  Ger- 
man, on  classical  history  and  literature. 
Thereafter  the  works  he  produced,  as 
separate  books  or  as  monographs  in 
learned  periodicals,  dealt  almost  entirely 
with  Indological  subjects:  The  Antagada- 
dasdo,  etc,  translated  from  the  Prakrit 
(1907);  The  Paramarthasara  (text  and 
translation,  1910);  Lalla-vdhydni,  edited 
and  translated  (with  Sir  George  Grierson, 
q.v.,  1920).  While  studies  such  as  these 
appeal  mainly  to  the  specialist,  he  also 
aimed,  and  with  remarkable  success,  to 
interest  a  wider  audience  in  India's  his- 
tory and  culture  with  Antiquities  of  India 
(1913)  and  a  number  of  works,  mostly 
translations  from  the  Sanskrit,  published 
in  'The  Wisdom  of  the  East'  series  and 
elsewhere,  such  as  The  Bhagavadgitd 
(1905);  Brahma-knowledge  (1907);  The 
Heart  of  India  (1908) ;  The  Golden  Town, 
etc.  (1909) ;  The  Path  of  Light  (1909 ;  2nd 
ed.  1947) ;  Hindu  Gods  and  Heroes  (1922). 
His  numerous  contributions  to  learned 
journals  embraced  Indian  history,  epi- 
graphy, folk-lore,  drama,  philology,  and 
also  Tibetan  texts.  He  even  published 
translations  of  Spanish  documents  relat- 
ing to  the  history  of  the  Jewish  com- 
munity of  which  he  was  a  faithful  and 
active  member,  holding  several  of  its 
honorary  offices. 


His  encyclopedic  learning  was  carried 
with  effortless  ease  and  with  never  a  trace 
of  ostentation;  indeed,  he  was  only  too 
prone  to  over-estimate  the  intelligence 
and  erudition  of  others.  This  natural 
humility  and  his  countless  unobtrusive 
kindnesses,  especially  towards  younger 
scholars,  drew  to  him  the  affection  of  a 
host  of  friends.  Although  little  given  to 
outdoor  recreation  he  enjoyed  constant 
good  health,  until  suddenly  in  1932  his 
eyesight  gave  way  under  the  intense  strain 
of  years,  one  eye  becoming  permanently 
useless  and  the  sight  of  the  other  im- 
paired. This  grievous  blow  did  not  deter 
him,  after  a  brief  convalescence,  from 
pressing  on  with  fruitful  academic  work 
both  in  the  study  and  in  the  lecture-room. 
In  1948  when  he  retired  from  his  univer- 
sity duties  he  might  reasonably  have 
sought  an  easier  life  after  half  a  century 
of  ceaseless  industry,  but  hearing  that  his 
old  department  at  the  British  Museum 
from  which  he  had  retired  in  1936  was  in 
sore  straits  for  staff,  he  offered  his  services 
as  an  assistant  keeper  and  for  the  last 
twelve  years  of  his  life  the  museum  once 
more  profited  from  his  vast  knowledge  and 
experience.  A  fortnight  before  his  death  in 
London,  28  January  1960,  the  Asiatic 
Society  of  Calcutta  awarded  him  the  Sir 
William  Jones  gold  medal. 

In  1901  Barnett  married  Blanche  Esther 
(died  1955),  daughter  of  the  Rev.  B. 
Berliner,  minister  of  the  St.  John's  Wood 
synagogue.  They  had  a  daughter  and  a 
son,  Richard  David  Barnett,  who  in  1955 
became  keeper  of  the  department  of 
western  Asiatic  antiquities  in  the  British 
Museum. 

[Bibliography  of  the  published  writings  of 
Dr.  L.  D.  Barnett,  by  Edith  M.  White,  in  the 
Bulletin  of  the  School  of  Oriental  and  African 
Studies,  vol.  xii,  1948 ;  A.  L.  Basham  in 
Proceedings  of  the  British  Academy,  vol.  xlvi, 
1960;  The  Times,  29  January  1960;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

A.  S.  Fulton. 


BARRINGTON-WARD,  Sm  LANCE- 
LOT EDWARD  (1884-1953),  surgeon, 
was  born  at  Worcester  4  July  1884,  the 
second  son  of  Mark  James  Barrington- 
Ward,  inspector  of  schools,  later  rector  of 
Duloe  in  Cornwall  and  an  honorary  canon 
of  Truro  Cathedral,  and  his  wife,  Caroline 
Pearson.  Barrington-Ward' s  four  brothers 
all  distinguished  themselves  in  their 
various  professions,  one  of  them,  R.  M. 
Barrington-Ward  [q.v.],  becoming  editor 
of  The  Times.  Barrington-Ward  entered 


71 


Barrington-Ward 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Wiestminster  School  as  a  classical  scholar, 
but  owing  to  ill  health  he  was  transferred 
to  Bromsgrove  in  his  native  county  where 
he  was  restored  to  vigorous  health  and 
gained  a  classical  exhibition  at  Worcester 
College,  Oxford.  Throughout  his  life  his 
classical  education  was  in  evidence  by  his 
masterly  command  of  word  and  phrase. 
He  decided,  however,  upon  medicine  as 
his  career  and  entered  Edinburgh  Univer- 
sity where  he  qualified  with  second  class 
honours  in  1908  and  was  captain  of  the 
university  rugby  fifteen.  Although  light 
of  build  for  a  forward,  he  was  awarded 
four  English  international  caps  and  had 
the  distinction  of  playing  against  Wales 
in  the  first  international  match  played 
on  the  new  ground  at  Twickenham.  His 
other  interest  in  sport  was  boxing,  and 
he  represented  his  university  as  a  middle- 
weight. 

Barrington-Ward  passed  the  Edinburgh 
Fellowship  examination  in  1910  and  the 
English  Fellowship  two  years  later  after 
studying  for  this  at  the  Middlesex  Hospi- 
tal. In  1913  he  returned  to  Edinburgh 
to  obtain  the  degree  of  Ch.M.  and  was 
awarded  the  much  coveted  Chiene  medal 
for  outstanding  ability.  His  London  career 
in  surgery  began  with  his  appointment  in 
1910  as  a  resident  at  Great  Ormond  Street 
Hospital  for  Sick  Children,  where  he  had 
the  good  fortune  of  assisting  two  of  the 
leading  children's  surgeons  of  the  day — 
George  E.  Waugh  and  (Sir)  Thomas  Fair- 
bank.  He  continued  his  work  at  this 
hospital  as  medical  superintendent,  and 
was  appointed  to  the  consulting  staff  in 
1914.  Inmiediately  after  the  outbreak  of 
war  later  in  that  year  he  volunteered  to  go 
to  the  Balkans  as  surgeon-in-chief  of  No.  2 
Serbian  Relief  Fund  Hospital,  with  the 
honorary  rank  of  Ueutenant-colonel.  He 
was  awarded  the  grand  cross  of  the  Order 
of  St.  Olave  and  St.  Sava. 

While  still  a  young  man  Barrington- 
Ward's  skill  as  a  surgeon  was  widely 
recognized.  He  was  much  sought  after  by 
private  patients  and  operated  on  several 
members  of  the  royal  family.  In  1935  he 
was  appointed  K.C.V.O.  and  two  years 
later  he  was  made  surgeon  to  His  Majesty's 
household.  In  1952  he  was  invited  to 
become  an  extra-surgeon  to  the  Queen. 

His  experience  in  children's  surgery  is 
recorded  in  numerous  articles  which  he 
published  in  various  journals  and  a  stan- 
dard textbook  entitled  Abdominal  Surgery 
of  Children  (1928).  In  1952  he  delivered 
a  Hunterian  lecture  at  the  Royal  College 
of  Surgeons  on  'Swellings  of  the  neck  in 


children'  and  the  council  minutes  record 
that  the  attendance  was  175,  a  striking 
tribute  to  the  reputation  of  the  lecturer. 

In  addition  to  his  work  at  Great  Or- 
mond Street,  Barrington-Ward  was  on 
the  staff  of  the  Wood  Green  and  Royal 
Northern  hospitals.  At  the  last  he  even- 
tually became  senior  surgeon.  To  his 
colleagues  there  he  suggested  that  they 
should  co-operate  in  producing  a  textbook 
of  operative  surgery  in  which  each  mem- 
ber of  the  staff,  many  of  whom  were 
well-known  authors,  dealt  with  his  own 
speciality.  Royal  Northern  Operative  Sur' 
gery  was  published  in  1939  under  his 
editorship  and  proved  a  notable  addition 
to  the  literature  of  British  surgery. 

Barrington-Ward's  success  as  a  surgeon 
was  not  only  due  to  his  clinical  judgement 
and  technical  skill;  he  was  a  most  gentle 
and  sympathetic  surgeon  and  had  the 
enviable  knack  of  obtaining  the  confidence 
of  children  who  were  his  patients.  Hand- 
some and  debonair  in  appearance,  kindly 
and  courteous  in  manner,  he  invited  con- 
fidences and  inspired  instinctive  trust. 
The  numerous  medical  colleagues  (and 
their  families)  who  sought  his  advice  were 
an  indication  of  the  high  esteem  in  which 
he  was  held.  In  the  operating  theatre  he 
showed  punctilious  courtesy  to  all  the 
staff  including  the  most  junior  nurse,  and 
in  consequence  the  atmosphere  was  never 
tense.  One  gained  the  impression  that  he 
considered  temperamental  outbursts  on 
the  part  of  the  surgeon  to  be  the  result  of 
either  bad  manners  or  poor  surgery.  His 
critical  mind  and  sound  judgement  were 
invaluable  in  committee  work  and  most 
helpful  in  maintaining  good  relations 
between  medical  and  lay  bodies. 

Barrington-Ward  was  twice  married: 
first,  in  1917  to  Dorothy  Anne,  second 
daughter  of  T.  W.  Miles,  of  Caragh, 
county  Kerry,  who  did  much  charitable 
work  for  hospitals  with  which  her  husband 
was  connected  and  also  for  the  Peter  Pan 
League.  She  died  in  1935,  leaving  three 
daughters.  Barrington-Ward  married 
secondly,  in  1941,  Catherine  Wilhelmina, 
only  daughter  of  E.  G.  Renter,  of  Harro- 
gate ;  they  had  one  son. 

Barrington-Ward  enjoyed  welcoming 
his  friends  to  his  happy  and  charming 
country  home,  Hawkedon  House,  near 
Bury  St.  Edmunds.  He  was  knowledge- 
able enough  about  agriculture  to  be 
elected  president  of  the  Suffolk  Agricul- 
tural Association.  Unfortunately  he  was 
not  long  spared  to  enjoy  the  retirement 
to  which  he  had  been  looking  forward,  for 


TS 


r>.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bathursl 


despite  undergoing  drastic  surgery  he  died 
at  his  home  17  November  1953.  A  bust  by 
June  Barrington-Ward  was  shown  at  the 
Society  of  Portrait  Sculptors  exhibition  in 
1959. 

[The  Times,  18  November  1953;  British 
Medical  Journal,  28  November  and  12 
December  1953;  Lancet,  28  November  1953; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

McNeill  Love. 

BASSETT-LOWKE,  WENMAN 

JOSEPH  (1877-1953),  model  maker,  was 
born  in  Northampton  27  December  1877, 
the  eldest  son  of  Joseph  Thomas  Lowke, 
and  his  wife,  Eliza  Goodman.  After  leaving 
school  he  worked  with  his  father  in  the 
firm  of  J.  T.  Lowke  &  Sons,  engineers  and 
boiler  makers,  of  Northampton,  founded 
as  Bassett  &  Sons  by  his  grandfather  in 
1859.  It  was  while  working  for  his  father 
that,  with  Harry  Franklin  as  cashier,  he 
founded  the  firm  of  Bassett-Lowke,  Ltd., 
a  small  mail-order  business  selling  com- 
ponents for  model  engines.  At  the  Paris 
exhibition  of  1900  he  met  Stephen  Bing 
of  Nuremberg,  chairman  of  a  toy-making 
firm,  who  agreed  to  manufacture  for  him 
and  to  specialize  in  O -gauge  steam  engines 
of  British  railway  design,  more  closely  to 
scale  than  any  previous  production. 

By  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914,  works 
and  offices  were  functioning  in  Northamp- 
ton and  shops  had  been  opened  in  London, 
Manchester,  and  Edinburgh.  The  shop  at 
High  Holborn,  London,  became  a  centre 
of  attraction  to  boys  of  all  ages  and  its 
catalogues  are  greatly  treasured.  After  the 
war  the  firm  not  only  manufactured  scale 
model  toys  but  also  entered  the  business 
of  making  all  types  of  exhibition  models. 
The  results  of  his  firm's  endeavours  can  be 
seen  in  the  windows  of  many  steamship 
companies,  in  museums,  as  well  as  in  the 
playrooms  of  countless  private  homes.  His 
customers,  said  the  Daily  Mail,  'ranged 
from  small  boys  to  oriental  princes,  from 
millionaires  to  kings'. 

In  warfare  as  in  peaceful  industry, 
models  play  an  important  part,  and 
Bassett-Lowke  was  always  equal  to  the 
calls  made  upon  him  by  the  armed  Ser- 
vices, in  particular  those  for  the  Normandy 
invasion  of  1944.  Plans  and  models  of 
Mulberry  harbours,  landing-craft,  pon- 
toons, block-ships,  Bailey  bridges,  and 
unit  construction  bridges  were  all  made 
in  Northampton.  As  a  result.  Combined 
Operations  headquarters  were  said  to  have 
had  the  most  up-to-date  fleet  of  models  of 
landing  ships  and  equipment  in  the  world. 


Bassett-Lowke  travelled  extensively  in 
Europe  and  America  and  often  lectured 
and  broadcast  on  models,  railways,  and 
ships.  In  1948  there  appeared  the  four- 
teenth edition  of  The  Model  Railway 
Handbook  which  he  had  edited  since  1906, 
He  was  joint  author  of  Ships  and  Men 
(1946)  and  of  two  Puffin  books,  Waterways 
of  the  World  (1944)  and  Marvellous  Models 
(1945).  He  also  produced  the  Penguin 
Book  of  Trains  (1941)  and  the  Puffin  book 
Locomotives  (1947). 

Bassett-Lowke  was  a  member  of  the 
Institution  of  Locomotive  Engineers,  a 
fellow  of  the  Royal  Society  of  Arts,  a 
founder-member  of  the  Design  and  In- 
dustries Association,  and  a  member  of  the 
Town  and  Country  Planning  Association. 
In  Northampton  he  was  a  founder- 
member  of  the  Rotary  Club  and  founder- 
director  of  the  repertory  theatre.  For 
several  years  he  did  much  useful  work  on 
the  town  council;  was  finally  an  alder- 
man ;  and  in  1948  was  asked  to  become 
mayor  but  was  unable  to  accept.  He 
brought  Northampton  into  prominence 
through  his  modern  architectural  ideasj 
some  of  which  were  strikingly  embodied  iti 
his  own  home. 

A  disciple  of  Fabianism  before  he  en- 
tered into  the  wider  sphere  of  socialism 
and  Labour  politics,  Bassett-Lowke  was 
a  friend  of  G.  B.  Shaw  [q.v.]  who  used  to 
stay  with  him  when  he  visited  Northamp- 
ton. Declining  an  invitation  in  his  eighty- 
seventh  year  Shaw  wrote:  'I  am  too 
damned  old  to  go  summer  schooling 
nowadays.  ...  I  forget  everything  now  in 
ten  minutes  but  not  the  happy  days  at 
Northampton.  Dotty  and  doddering  but 
still  able  to  write  a  bit.'  r 

In  1917  Bassett-Lowke  married 
Florence,  third  daughter  of  Charles  Jones, 
of  Crockett  and  Jones,  shoe  manufac- 
turers, of  Northampton,  and  niece  of  (Sir) 
James  Crockett;  there  were  no  children* 
He  died  in  Northampton  21  October  1953; 
A  portrait  by  J.  A.  A.  Berrie  hangs  in  the 
Northampton  offices. 

[Northampton  Independent,  23  October 
1958 ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Cyril  Derby* 


BATHURST,  CHARLES,  first  Viscount 
Bledisloe  (1867-1958),  agriculturist 
and  public  servant,  was  born  at  Lydney, 
Gloucestershire,  21  September  1867,  the 
second  son  of  Charles  Bathurst,  of  Lydney 
Park,  and  his  wife,  Mary  Elizabeth,  only 
daughter  of  Lieutenant-Colonel  Thomasi 


W 


Bathurst 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Pasley  Hay.  Educated  at  Sherborne, 
Eton,  and  University  College,  Oxford,  he 
obtained  third  classes  in  classical  honour 
moderations  (1888)  and  jurisprudence 
(1890).  In  1935  he  was  made  an  honorary 
fellow  of  his  college  and  received  an 
honorary  D.C.L. 

In  1892  Bathurst  was  called  to  the  bar 
by  the  Inner  Temple  but  from  1893  until 
1896  he  studied  at  the  Royal  Agricultural 
College,  Cirencester,  where  he  obtained  his 
diploma,  was  Ducie  gold  medallist,  edited 
the  college  journal,  and  helped  in  the 
compilation  of  the  students'  register.  His 
interest  in  the  college  was  enduring;  he 
was  chairman  of  its  governors  in  1919-25 
and  for  over  fifty  years  was  active  in  its 
cause.  In  1950  a  college  hostel  was  named 
after  him.  It  became  customary  for  the 
estate  management  students  to  visit  his 
estate  from  time  to  time  to  study  its 
organization  and  his  farming — he  was 
famous  for  his  herd  of  Red  Poll  cattle  and 
the  excellent  fruit  he  grew  in  his  orchards. 

Meantime  Bathurst  practised  as  a  Chan- 
cery barrister  and  conveyancer,  until  1910 
when  he  became  Conservative  member  of 
Parliament  for  the  South  or  Wilton  divi- 
sion of  Wiltshire.  But  his  lifelong  pre- 
occupation was  essentially  agriculture. 
A  founder -member  of  the  Central  Land 
Association,  as  it  was  originally  called, 
Bathurst  was  its  first  honorary  secretary 
from  1907  to  1909.  In  1921-2  he  was  its 
president  and  in  1922  gave  his  celebrated 
address  as  president  of  the  agricultural 
section  of  the  British  Association  in  which 
he  criticized  the  unbusinesslike  attitude  of 
some  landowners.  He  fathered  the  modern 
concept  of  landownership  as  a  profession 
useful  to  the  community,  demanding 
specialized  training  to  meet  changed  con- 
ditions. On  these  matters  he  had  deep 
convictions:  that  agricultural  landowners 
should  continue  to  give  constructive 
leadership  to  the  industry  and  help  to 
apply  the  latest  scientific  methods  to  its 
problems ;  that  the  C.L.A.  should  remain  a 
rural  organization  and  never  join  forces 
with  urban  landowners  (it  was  renamed 
the  Country  Landowners'  Association); 
that  the  growth  of  owner-occupation 
brought  a  beneficial  infusion  of  new  blood 
to  landownership.  He  regarded  the  agri- 
cultural depression  of  the  twenties  and 
thirties  as  a  challenge  to  farmers'  enter- 
prise and  ingenuity  and  always  kept  up  to 
date  in  the  application  of  the  latest  scien- 
tific methods  to  running  his  own  estate. 

In  1916-17  Bathurst  was  parliamentary 
secretary  to  the  Ministry  of  Food  and  at 


the  same  time  chairman  of  the  Federation 
of  County  Agricultural  Executive  Com- 
mittees. In  1917-19  he  was  chairman  of 
the  royal  commission  on  sugar  supplies 
and  director  of  sugar  distribution.  He  was 
appointed  K.B.E.  in  1917  and  created  a 
baron  in  the  following  year.  In  1924,  now 
Lord  Bledisloe,  he  became  parliamentary 
secretary  to  the  Ministry  of  Agriculture 
and  in  1926  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Coun- 
cil. In  the  next  year  he  was  chairman  of 
the  royal  commission  on  land  drainage  in 
England  and  Wales  and  of  the  imperial 
agricultural  research  conference.  He  re- 
signed office  in  1928  when  he  became 
chairman  of  the  Imperial  Grassland 
Association. 

In  1930  Bledisloe  was  appointed 
governor-general  of  New  Zealand,  a 
country  to  which  he  took  much  that 
appealed  to  its  people:  a  knowledge  of 
farming ;  an  eye  for  an  animal ;  a  gift  of 
extensive  oratory ;  the  charm  of  a  typical 
aristocrat  of  the  'old  country'.  Among  the 
highlights  of  a  most  successful  term  of 
office  was  his  gift  to  New  Zealand  of  the 
historic  site  where  the  treaty  of  Waitangi 
was  signed.  The  years  of  his  administra- 
tion were  happy  ones  on  both  sides.  On  its 
conclusion  in  1935  he  was  created  a  vis- 
count ;  he  had  been  appointed  G.C.M.G.  in 
1930. 

There  were  few  countries  Bledisloe  did 
not  visit  on  tours  of  agricultural  investiga- 
tion or  other  missions.  In  1938  he  was 
chairman  of  the  royal  commission  on  the 
closer  union  of  the  Rhodesias  and  Nyasa- 
land.  In  early  1947  he  carried  out  a 
goodwill  visit  to  Australia  and  New 
Zealand  and  in  1948  made  another  to 
South  Africa  and  Southern  Rhodesia,  both 
on  behalf  of  the  Royal  Agricultural 
Society  of  England  of  which  he  had  been 
president  in  1946.  He  held  office  at  one 
time  or  another  in  all  the  important 
agricultural  societies  of  the  country  and  in 
such  other  varied  fields  as  the  National 
Council  of  Social  Service,  the  Empire  Day 
Movement,  and  the  Museums  Association. 
In  1949  he  was  president  of  the  second 
international  congress  of  crop  protection. 
He  was  an  honorary  D.Sc.  (and  pro- 
chancellor)  of  Bristol  University  and 
LL.D.  of  Edinburgh.  For  many  years  he 
was  a  verderer  of  the  Forest  of  Dean  and 
he  was  active  in  all  local  affairs.  His 
benefactions  locally  were  most  generous. 
Deeply  religious  and  a  man  of  culture,  he 
combined  breadth  of  sympathy  with  a 
high  sense  of  public  duty,  but  probably 
the  services  he  rendered  to  his  well-loved 


74 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bax 


Lydney  and  Aylburton  and  the  Forest  of 
Dean  gave  him  the  most  pleasure. 

In  1898  Bathurst  married  Bertha  Susan 
Lopes,  youngest  daughter  of  the  first 
Baron  Ludlow  [q.v.] ;  they  had  two  sons 
and  a  daughter.  His  wife  died  in  1926  and 
Bledisloe  married  in  1928  Alina  Kate 
Elaine  (died  1956),  daughter  of  the  first 
and  last  Baron  Glantawe  and  widow  of 
Thomas  Cooper-Smith.  There  were  no 
children  of  this  marriage.  Bledisloe  died  at 
his  home  at  Lydney  3  July  1958  and  was 
succeeded  by  his  elder  son,  Benjamin 
Ludlow  (born  1899). 

[Country  Landowner,  August  1958 ;  private 
information.]  John  Ruggles-Brise. 


BATSFORD,  HARRY  (1880-1951),  pub- 
lisher, bookseller,  and  author,  was  born 
in  London  18  April  1880,  the  only  son  of 
Henry  George  Batsford,  publisher,  who 
died  two  years  later,  by  his  wife,  Matilda, 
daughter  of  William  Ward.  He  was 
educated  at  Henley  House  School,  Kil- 
burn,  where  he  was  taught  for  a  time  by 
H.  G.  Wells  [q.v.]  and  at  the  City  of 
London  School.  In  1897  he  entered  the 
family  bookselling  and  publishing  business 
which  had  been  founded  fifty-four  years 
earlier  by  his  grandfather,  Bradley  Thomas 
Batsford.  In  1917  he  succeeded  his  uncle, 
Herbert  Batsford,  as  chairman  and 
managing  director  of  B.  T.  Batsford,  Ltd., 
and  he  remained  in  that  position  until  his 
death. 

In  1926  Batsford's  work  as  a  publisher 
of  books  on  the  technique  and  history  of 
architecture  was  recognized  by  his  elec- 
tion as  an  honorary  associate  of  the  Royal 
Institute  of  British  Architects.  In  the 
early  thirties,  responding  to  economic 
pressure  and  changing  taste,  Batsford 
widened  the  scope  of  his  firm's  activities : 
he  initiated  more  than  one  series  of  books, 
fully  illustrated  by  photographs,  on  the 
architecture  and  topography  of  Britain, 
which  gave  the  term  'a  Batsford  book'  a 
recognized  significance.  These  series,  of 
which  the  best  known  were  the  'British 
Heritage'  and  the  'Face  of  Britain',  intro- 
duced to  a  new  and  wider  public  the 
beauties  of  Britain's  landscape  and 
ancient  buildings  and  were  not  without 
influence  in  helping  to  preserve  both  from 
destruction.  Batsford  himself  wrote,  some- 
times pseudonymously,  or  in  collaboration 
with  Charles  Daniel  Fry,  a  number  of 
works,  among  them  Homes  and  Gardens  of 
England  (1932),  The  Landscape  of  England 
(as    Charles    Bradley   Ford,    1933),    The 


Cathedrals  of  England  (1934),  and  The 
English  Cottage  (1938). 

The  more  important  part  of  Batsford's 
work  and  influence,  however,  was  in- 
direct, in  the  books  which  he  stimulated 
others  to  write.  Most  of  those  whose  works 
were  published  by  his  firm  during  more 
than  half  a  century  gladly  acknowledged 
the  help  and  stimulus  which  he  gave  them 
from  a  mind  fully  and  variously  stored. 
Among  the  authors  whose  work  he  pub- 
lished were  Katharine  Esdaile  and  H.  J. 
Massingham  [qq.v.],  Margaret  Jourdain, 
(Sir)  Sacheverell  SitweU,  (Sir)  A.  E. 
Richardson,  and  John  Russell,  who  re- 
corded (Architectural  Review,  April  1952) 
that  of  Batsford's  'passion  for  architecture 
there  could  never  be  any  doubt;  and  in 
this,  as  in  everything  else,  his  inclination 
was  always  to  put  aside  what  was  notor- 
ious and  large  in  favour  of  what  was  plain, 
inviolate  and  true'. 

In  himself  Batsford  was  vital,  generous, 
and  individualistic.  He  loved  England  and 
knew  the  country  and  its  antiquities  with 
exceptional  intimacy,  but  he  also  felt 
himself  a  citizen  of  the  world  and  had 
travelled  enthusiastically  in  Europe  and 
America.  Apart  from  architecture,  he  had 
a  keen  amateur's  knowledge  of  subjects 
as  diverse  as  astronomy,  natural  history, 
geology,  railway  locomotives,  and  watches. 
He  had  a  great  fondness  for  animals,  par- 
ticularly for  cats,  for  whose  welfare  he 
left  a  special  legacy  when  he  died  in 
London  20  December  1951. 

In  1928  Batsford  married  Rose  Verene 
(died  1930),  daughter  of  Francois  Andre 
Sennwald,  of  Chaux  de  Milieux,  Neuchatel, 
Switzerland;  there  were  no  children.  A 
portrait  of  Batsford  by  John  Berry  is  in 
the  possession  of  the  firm. 

[The  Times,  21  December  1951 ;  Hector 
Bolitho,  A  Batsford  Century,  1943;  personal 
knowledge.]  Samuel  Carb. 


BAX,  Sir  ARNOLD  EDWARD 
TREVOR  (1883-1953),  composer,  eldest 
son  of  Alfred  Ridley  Bax  and  his  wife, 
Charlotte  Ellen  Lea,  was  born  in  Streat- 
ham  8  November  1883.  His  father,  a  man 
of  independent  means,  was  a  fellow  of  the 
Society  of  Antiquaries  and  a  regular  sub- 
scriber to  the  Saturday  concerts  of  Sir 
August  Manns  [q.v.]  at  the  Crystal  Palace. 
Clifford  Bax,  the  author  and  playwright, 
was  a  younger  brother.  According  to  Bax's 
autobiographical  Farewell,  my  Youth 
(1943)  he  could  not  remember  the  time 
when  he  was  not  able  to  read  music  at  the 


75 


Bax 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


piano  'with  the  same  unthinking  ease  with 
which  a  man  reads  a  book\  His  early 
education  was  private,  and  in  1898  he 
became  a  student  of  the  Hampstead  Con- 
servatoire, then  in  the  charge  of  Cecil 
Sharp  [q.v.].  Even  in  youth,  however,  Bax 
was  not  interested  in  English  folksong, 
and  two  years  later  he  entered  the  Royal 
Academy  of  Music,  studying  composition 
with  Frederick  Corder  and  pianoforte 
with  Tobias  Matthay.  He  won  the  Batti- 
son  Haynes  prize  for  composition  in  1902, 
and  in  the  following  year,  which  saw  his 
first  public  appearance  in  St.  James's  Hall 
as  a  composer,  he  was  awarded  the  Mac- 
farren  scholarship  for  composition,  which 
he  held  until  he  left  the  Academy  in  1905. 
He  distinguished  himself  also  by  winning 
the  Charles  Lucas  medal  for  composition 
and  the  Walter  Macfarren  prize  for  piano 
playing.  In  addition  to  these  achieve- 
ments he  was  considered  unique  in  his 
ability  to  read  complex  modern  scores  at 
the  piano.  Later  he  was  to  be  elected  an 
associate  (1910)  and  a  fellow  (1921)  of  the 
Academy. 

A  formative  influence  during  his  early 
years  was  his  private  study  of  scores  by 
Wagner,  Strauss,  and  Debussy,  whose 
music  was  then  largely  frowned  on  in 
academic  circles.  On  leaving  the  Academy 
he  twice  visited  Dresden,  where  he  heard 
the  original  production  of  Strauss's  Salome, 
But  already  another  influence  had  entered 
his  life.  In  1902  he  had  come  across  'The 
Wanderings  of  Oisin'  by  W.  B.  Yeats 
[q.v.]  and  in  his  own  words,  'in  a  moment 
the  Celt  within  me  stood  revealed'.  For  a 
time,  indeed,  he  adopted  a  dual  per- 
sonality, and  published  three  books  of 
tales  as  'Dermot  O'Byrne'.  Musically, 
also,  he  deliberately  adopted  a  Celtic 
idiom  to  free  himself  from  the  influence  of 
Wagner  and  Strauss,  and  in  the  tone-poem 
In  the  Faery  Hills,  first  given  at  a  pro- 
menade concert  in  1910,  he  employed  what 
he  described  as  'figures  and  melodies  of  a 
definitely  Celtic  curve'.  A  visit  to  Russia 
in  the  same  year  also  contributed  to  Bax's 
formulative  musical  experiences,  provid- 
ing material  for,  amongst  other  works,  the 
First  Piano  Sonata. 

The  orchestral  tone-poems  were  the 
first  of  Bax's  works  to  attract  attention, 
and  The  Garden  of  F and  (1916)  is  perhaps 
the  most  immediately  appealing  of  them. 
No  less  important,  however,  are  the  later 
Tintagel  and  November  Woods  (both  1917) 
and  The  Tale  the  Pine  Trees  Knew  (1931). 
None  of  these  later  works  is  based  on 
Celtic  subjects,  and  indeed  this  influence 


almost  completely  disappeared  from  his 
music  in  the  twenties.  Colin  Scott- 
Sutherland  has  listed  the  following  among 
the  inspirational  origins  of  Bax's  music — 
Wagner,  Strauss,  Yeats,  Swinburne,  Shel- 
ley, Grieg,  the  Icelandic  sagas,  the  pre- 
Raphaelites,  Finland,  the  seascapes  of  the 
North.  The  turning-point  from  the  Celtic 
to  the  Nordic  was  possibly  the  Symphonic 
Variations  for  Piano  and  Orchestra  (1917) 
written  for  Harriet  Cohen,  and  it  is  signifi- 
cant that  Winter  Legends,  composed  for 
the  same  pianist  thirteen  years  later, 
should  have  a  Nordic  and  not  a  Celtic 
setting. 

The  music  critic  Edwin  Evans,  writing 
about  Bax's  music  in  1919,  described  it  as 
containing  two  complementary  and  com- 
pensatory qualities — robustness  and  wist- 
fulness.  The  first  he  regarded  as  respon- 
sible for  the  elements  of  structure  and 
inventiveness,  while  the  second  provided 
the  music  with  its  chromatic  character: 
'to  be  wistful  and  at  the  same  time  robust 
is  a  combination  of  qualities  that  falls  to 
few'.  Although  none  of  the  symphonies 
had  then  been  produced,  Evans  had  al- 
ready observed  in  Bax's  music  the  emer- 
gence of  a  more  abstract,  austere  art ;  'the 
harmony  has  become  more  incidental  to 
the  polyphonic  interest'.  As  if  to  prove 
the  rightness  of  Evans's  judgement,  Bax 
composed  the  unaccompanied  motet  Mater 
ora  Filium  (1921),  an  exercise  in  pure 
polyphony  which  undoubtedly  prepared 
him  for  the  seven  symphonies  (1922-39) 
upon  which  his  ultimate  reputation  rests. 

The  symphonies  may  be  divided  into 
two  groups,  the  first  three  and  the  last 
three,  with  the  Fourth  Symphony,  written 
in  both  Donegal  and  Inverness-shire, 
forming  an  extrovert  interlude  between 
these  largely  introspective  works.  To- 
gether with  the  symphonies  must  be  con- 
sidered the  two  important  works  for  piano 
and  orchestra  already  mentioned,  the 
Cello  Concerto  (1932),  which  Bax  con- 
sidered one  of  his  finest  works,  and  the 
Violin  Concerto  (1937-8)  distinguished 
both  for  its  geniality  and  for  its  inventive 
musical  structure. 

Bax's  orchestral  virtuosity  was  equalled 
in  the  chamber  music  field,  and  his  output 
of  some  thirty  works  includes  several  un- 
usual instrumental  combinations,  such  as 
the  Nonet  for  string  quartet,  double-bass, 
flute,  clarinet,  oboe,  and  harp.  The  harp, 
indeed,  is  an  instrument  much  exploited 
by  Bax,  as  is  the  viola.  The  piano  music, 
which  includes  four  solo  sonatas,  is  im- 
portant, and  there  is  much  fine  choral 


76 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Beerbohm 


music  and  also  many  songs  of  character. 
Bax  also  composed  ballet  and  film  music, 
his  principal  works  in  these  fields  being  the 
ballet  The  Truth  about  the  Russian  Dancers 
(1020),  written  in  collaboration  with  Kar- 
savina  and  Sir  J.  M.  Barrie  [q.v.],  and  the 
film  Malta,  G.C.  (1943).  Like  his  contem- 
porary John  Ireland,  he  never  showed  any 
interest  in  opera. 

Bax  described  himself  as  a  'brazen 
Romantic'.  His  life  was  conditioned  both 
by  literature  and  by  nature:  he  was 
remarkably  well  read,  and  w  as  never  hap- 
pier than  when  contemplating  the  ever- 
changing  panorama  of  nature.  Naturally 
such  a  man  avoided  public  occasions  when- 
ever possible,  and  though  he  could  mix 
easily  with  country  people  he  had  an  al- 
most claustrophobic  distaste  for  urban 
society.  The  only  time  he  could  be  seen 
in  a  crowd  was  at  Lord's,  for  he  was  an 
enthusiastic  lover  of  cricket. 

In  1911  he  married  Elsita  Luisa,  a  con- 
cert pianist,  daughter  of  Carlos  Sobrino, 
the  Spanish  pianist ;  they  had  one  son  and 
one  daughter.  Bax's  increasing  reputation 
as  a  composer  brought  him  many  honours, 
including  a  knighthood  in  1937.  He  re- 
ceived honorary  doctorates  of  music  from 
Oxford  (1934),  Durham  (1935),  and  the 
National  University  of  Ireland  (1947).  In 
the  last  year  of  his  life  he  was  appointed 
K.C.V.O. 

Possessing  private  means,  Bax  never 
needed  to  seek  a  musical  appointment, 
which  indeed  would  not  have  suited  his 
temperament;  when  in  1942  he  accepted 
the  post  of  Master  of  the  King's  Musick, 
he  did  not  overburden  royal  ears  with  oc- 
casional compositions.  He  probably  found 
it  embarrassing  to  'shuffle  around  in  knee- 
breeches',  as  he  once  put  it,  but  he  was 
a  man  who  realized  both  the  responsibility 
of  the  artist  and  the  dignity  of  the  com- 
poser. 

He  died  in  Cork  3  October  1953,  on  the 
day  after  he  had  taken  part  in  the  uni- 
versity's autumn  music  examinations. 
A  memorial  room  dedicated  to  his  memory 
has  been  created  in  Cork  University  which 
includes  a  death  mask,  his  compositions, 
including  some  manuscripts,  and  the 
books  he  wrote  as  Dermot  O'Byrne.  A 
portrait,  by  Vera  Bax,  is  on  permanent 
loan  to  the  Royal  Academy  of  Music,  and 
a  drawing  by  Powys  Evans  is  in  the 
National  Portrait  Gallery. 

[Sir  Arnold  Bax,  Farewell,  my  Youth,  1943 ; 
R.  H.  Hull,  A  Handbook  on  Arnold  Bax's 
Symphonies,  1932 ;  Edwin  Evans  in  Musical 
Times,  March  and  April  1919;  Grove's  Dic- 


tionary of  Music  and  MuMdans ;  private  in* 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Julian  Herbage^ 

BEERBOHM,  Sir  HENRY  MAXI- 
MILIAN  (MAX)  (1872-1956),  author  and 
cartoonist,  was  born  in  London  24  August 
1872,  the  youngest  child  of  Julius  Ewald 
Beerbohm,  a  man  of  good  Baltic  family 
who  had  settled  in  England  as  a  corn 
merchant,  and  of  his  second  wife,  Eliza 
Draper.  Max  Beerbohm  was  educated  at 
a  preparatory  school  in  Orme  Square, 
at  Charterhouse,  and  at  Merton  College, 
Oxford.  Gifted  and  precocious,  by  the 
time  he  left  Oxford  Beerbohm  was  already 
an  accomplished  personality,  delicately 
dandified  in  looks  and  manner,  and  a  de- 
tached, ironical  observer  of  the  human 
comedy.  In  1893  he  met  young  (Sir) 
William  Rothenstein  [q.v.]  who,  struck 
by  his  talent  as  a  cartoonist,  introduced 
him  to  the  literary  and  aesthetic  circle  in 
London  which  revolved  round  the  Bodley 
Head  and  whose  most  famous  member 
was  Aubrey  Beardsley  [q.v.].  By  this  time 
Max  was  also  friendly  with  Oscar  Wildq 
[q.v.].  He  contributed  'A  Defence  of  Cos- 
metics' to  the  first  number  of  the  Yellow 
Book  in  1894 ;  this  had  the  distinction  of 
being  attacked  angrily  in  Punch.  In  1895, 
after  going  down  from  Oxford,  Beerbohm 
made  a  short  visit  to  the  United  States  as 
secretary  to  his  half-brother  (Sir)  Herbert 
Beerbohm  Tree  [q.v.],  the  actor.  During 
this  journey  Max  became  engaged  to 
Grace  Conover,  a  member  of  Tree's  com- 
pany. He  then  settled  in  London,  living 
with  his  sisters  and  widowed  mother, 
drawing  and  writing:  he  contributed  to 
various  periodicals,  notably  the  Yellow 
Book,  the  Savoy,  and  to  the  Daily  Mail.  In 
1898  he  succeeded  G.  B.  Shaw  [q.v.]  as 
dramatic  critic  for  the  Saturday  RevieWt 
a  post  which  he  held  for  twelve  years. 
For  the  rest  he  occupied  himself  in  social 
life,  artistic  and  fashionable,  where  he  was 
much  in  demand  as  a  charming  and  witty 
talker.  He  became  a  friend  of  various 
distinguished  persons  including  Henry 
James,  Swinburne,  Meredith,  Conder,  G.  K. 
Chesterton  [qq.v.],  Gordon  Craig,  and, 
later,  (Sir)  Desmond  MacCarthy  [q.v.]. 
The  Works  of  Max  Beerbohm,  a  volume 
of  essays,  appeared  in  1896,  followed  by 
The  Happy  Hypocrite  (1897),  More  (1899), 
Yet  Again  (1909),  and  three  volumes  of 
drawings :  Caricatures  of  Twenty -five  Gentle- 
men (1896),  The  Poets'  Corner  (1904),  and 
A  Book  of  Caricatures  (1907). 

Meanwhile    his    love   life   followed  an 


77 


Beerbohm 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


uncertain  course.  His  engagement  with 
Miss  Conover  ended  in  1903  to  be  followed 
by  a  brief  engagement  to  the  well-known 
actress  Constance  Collier.  She  broke  it  off 
and  a  few  months  later  Max  began  a  ro- 
mantic friendship  with  yet  another  actress, 
Florence  Kahn,  an  American  known  for 
her  performances  in  the  plays  of  Ibsen.  In 
1910  he  married  her.  Partly  because  they 
were  poor  and  Italy  was  cheap,  partly 
because  Max  had  grown  tired  of  the  pres- 
sure of  London  social  life,  they  retired  to 
Rapallo  which  was  to  be  Beerbohm's  main 
home  for  the  rest  of  his  life.  In  1911  Max 
published  his  prose  fantasy  Zuleika  Dob- 
son  ;  in  1912  ^  Christmas  Garland,  a  book 
of  parodies;  in  1911  the  cartoons  The 
Second  Childhood  of  John  Bull;  in  1913 
Fifty  Caricatures.  But  his  life  was  passed 
mainly  in  humorous  and  leisurely  con- 
templation, only  interrupted  by  an  oc- 
casional visit  to  England  to  superintend 
an  exhibition  of  his  drawings.  In  1915, 
however,  too  keenly  concerned  for  his 
country's  fate  in  the  war  to  stay  abroad, 
he  returned  to  England.  Here  he  remained 
until  1919.  During  this  period  he  produced 
Seven  Men  (1919),  much  of  the  work  em- 
bodied in  And  Even  Noiv  (1920),  and  a 
memorial  volume  (1920)  to  his  half-brother 
Herbert.  His  drawings  were  published  in 
A  Survey  (1921);  Rossetti  and  his  Circle 
(1922);  Things  New  and  Old  (1923); 
Observations  (1925);  and  Heroes  and 
Heroines  of  Bitter  Sweet  (1931).  A  selection 
of  his  dramatic  criticisms  entitled  Around 
Theatres  appeared  in  two  volumes  in  1924. 
Two  exhibitions,  in  1921  and  1923,  met 
with  a  more  mixed  reception  than  hither- 
to. His  caricatures  of  Labour  in  1921  led 
left-wing  critics  to  rebuke  him  as  a  re- 
actionary, whereas  in  1923  his  caricatures 
of  royalty  made  Conservative  writers  at- 
tack him  as  an  iconoclast.  Amused  but 
unwilling  to  cause  scandal,  Beerbohm 
agreed  to  withdraw  some  of  the  royal 
caricatures.  Meanwhile,  back  in  Italy,  he 
had  settled  down  into  his  old  routine. 
A  Variety  of  Things,  his  last  volume  of 
essays,  appeared  in  1928.  Failing  energy 
combined  with  a  rigidly  high  standard  of 
performance  to  make  him  write  very  little : 
and  for  the  most  part  he  set  up  as  a  figure 
from  the  past,  happily  resigned  to  the  fact 
that  his  day  was  done.  He  continued  now 
and  again  to  visit  London,  notably  in  1930 
(when  he  was  awarded  an  honorary  LL.D. 
at  Edinburgh),  and  in  1935  when  his  wife 
made  a  return  to  the  stage  in  Peer  Gynt 
at  the  Old  Vic.  In  1935  he  was  persuaded 
to  broadcast  on  the  subject  of  'London 


Revisited'.  He  applied  himself  to  the  task 
with  his  usual  high  standard  of  perfection 
as  regards  both  the  text  and  the  per- 
formance, with  the  result  that  in  this 
wholly  modern  medium  he  made  an  extra- 
ordinary success.  During  the  rest  of  his 
life  he  gave  occasional  broadcasts,  some  of 
which  were  published  in  Mainly  on  the  Air 
in  1946.  An  enlarged  edition  appeared  in 
1957,  after  his  death.  He  was  knighted  in 
1939  and  made  an  honorary  D.Litt.  of 
Oxford  and  an  honorary  fellow  of  Merton 
in  1942.  The  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  had 
again  kept  the  Beerbohms  in  England: 
but  they  returned  to  Italy  in  1947.  In  1951 
Florence  Beerbohm  died.  For  the  rest  of 
his  life  Beerbohm  was  looked  after  by 
Elisabeth  Jungmann  (died  1959),  an  old 
friend  of  himself  and  his  wife,  although 
many  years  younger  than  either  of  them. 
Beerbohm  married  her  in  1956;  a  few 
weeks  later,  20  May  1956,  he  died  in 
Rapallo.  His  ashes  were  placed  in  the 
crypt  of  St.  Paul's  Cathedral,  where  there 
is  a  memorial  tablet.  He  had  no  children. 

Max's  character  was  unique  and  para- 
doxical: at  once  friendly  and  detached, 
childlike  and  prudent,  sensible  and  fan- 
tastic. But  he  was  much  loved:  for  be- 
neath his  dandy's  mask  he  hid  a  modest, 
honourable,  and  affectionate  nature  and 
an  easy  agreeability,  enlivened  by  the  play 
of  a  whimsical  fancy  and  a  demure,  impish 
humour.  The  work  mirrored  the  man.  He 
aspired  only  to  entertain;  but  it  was 
entertainment  of  classical  quality:  the 
expression  of  a  distinguished  highly  culti- 
vated intelligence  and  an  unfailing  sense 
of  style.  He  was  a  shrewd  if  not  a  profound 
critic  and  the  best  essayist,  parodist,  and 
cartoonist  of  his  age.  His  satire  was  ruth- 
less and  urbane,  the  manifestation  of  a 
civilized  and  independent  conservatism, 
repelled  alike  by  the  work  of  Kipling  and 
of  Wells  [qq.v.].  Meanwhile,  in  his  master- 
pieces, Zuleika  Dobson  and  Seven  Men,  he 
discovered  an  original  form  of  ironical 
fantasy.  The  blend  of  aesthete  and 
comedian  in  him  gave  his  work  a  double 
charm :  it  is  at  once  exquisitely  pretty  and 
exquisitely  comic. 

A  portrait  of  Beerbohm  by  J.-E.  Blanche 
is  on  loan  from  the  Ashmolean  Museum  to 
Merton  College  where  there  is  also  a  por- 
trait statuette  by  Lady  Kennet  and  a 
drawing  by  Rothenstein ;  another  drawing 
by  Rothenstein  is  in  the  Manchester  City 
Art  Gallery ;  the  National  Portrait  Gallery 
has  a  portrait  by  Sir  William  Nicholson, 
pencil  drawings  by  R.  G.  Eves  and 
Rothenstein,  and  a  lithograph  by  C.  H. 


78 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Beith 


Shannon ;  a  portrait  in  oils  by  Eves  is  in 
the  Tate  Gallery. 

[A.  E,  Gallatin  and  L.  M.  Oliver,  A  Biblio- 
graphy of  the  Works  of  Max  Beerbohm,  1952  ; 
J.  G.  Riewald,  Sir  Max  Beerbohm,  The 
Hague,  1953 ;  David  Cecil,  Max,  1964  ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

David  Cecil. 


BEITH,  JOHN  HAY  (1876-1952),  writer 
under  the  pseudonym  of  Ian  Hay,  was 
born  17  April  1876  in  Manchester,  the 
third  son  and  sixth  child  of  John  Alexan- 
der Beith,  a  cotton  merchant  prominent  in 
the  public  life  of  the  city,  and  his  wife, 
Janet,  daughter  of  David  Fleming,  also  a 
merchant  in  Manchester.  He  was  the 
grandson  of  Alexander  Beith  [q.v.],  one 
of  the  founders  of  the  Free  Church  of 
Scotland  in  1843,  and  his  background 
was  passionately  old-style  Scottish.  From 
Fettes  he  went  to  St.  John's  College, 
Cambridge,  where  he  obtained  a  second 
class  in  part  i  of  the  classical  tripos  (1898) 
and  distinguished  himself  at  rowing ;  later, 
'large  oars'  were  to  garnish  his  house.  He 
showed  early  interest  in  writing  and  the 
theatre,  submitting  'pars'  to  the  popular 
press,  and  haunting  country-houses  de- 
voted to  amateur  theatricals. 

In  1901  Beith  was  a  junior  master  at 
Fettes  before  returning  to  Cambridge  for 
a  short  period  to  study  science.  In  1902  as 
a  junior  science  master  he  joined  Durham 
School  where  he  worked  supremely  hard ; 
he  coached  the  rugby  teams  and  river 
crews  and  did  house  tutoring.  A  charming 
companion,  with  a  developed  social  sense, 
he  was  extremely  popular.  Although  not  in 
the  plot,  Durham  featured  in  one  of  his 
best  books.  Housemaster  (1936). 

In  1906  Beith  returned  to  Fettes.  Whilst 
sharing  largely  in  school  life,  reviving  the 
debating  society,  fostering  school  and 
house  concerts,  and  helping  to  form  the 
O.T.C.,  he  spent  most  of  his  leisure  writ- 
ing, curiously  usually  in  cynosural  spots. 
He  was  a  resourceful  if  unconventional 
teacher — lessons  on  compound  interest 
might  wander  into  New  York's  finances 
and  end  by  stabilizing  the  national  debt, 
but  he  knew  pubhc-school  boys  instinc- 
tively and  enjoyed  schoolmastering.  When 
in  1912  he  left  Fettes  to  make  writing  his 
career  his  decision  was  generally  regretted, 
perhaps  even  eventually  by  himself. 

Beith's  first  novel,  Pip  (1907),  coloured 
by  early  Manchester  schooldays,  had 
been  a  best-seller  and  had  been  followed 
by  other  equally  light  and  humorous 
novels,  among  them  The  Right  Stuff  (1908) 


and  A  Man's  Man  (1909).  With  the 
publication  in  1914  of  ^  Knight  on  Wheels 
and  his  Lighter  Side  of  School  Life  which 
owes  much  to  Fettes,  his  career  as  a 
writer  was  assured.  His  humour,  family 
gift  for  story  telling,  shrewd  observation, 
sentimentality,  and  truly  'English'  grace 
of  sympathetically  conveying  eccentric 
characters  perfectly  suited  the  age. 

In  the  war  of  1914-18  Beith  served  first 
with  the  Argyll  and  Sutherland  High- 
landers, then  transferred  to  the  Machine 
Gun  Corps.  He  reached  the  rank  of  cap- 
tain in  1915  and  major  in  1918  and  was 
mentioned  in  dispatches  and  awarded  the 
M.C.  in  1916.  In  the  meantime  his  most 
famous  book.  The  First  Hundred  Thousand, 
had  been  pubHshed  in  1915.  Written  in 
billets  at  home  and  in  France,  it  was  effec- 
tive beyond  its  apparent  literary  stature, 
especially  in  America,  then  isolated  by 
war  conditions  from  British  thought.  It 
was  followed  by  Carrying  On  (1917)  and 
The  Last  Million  (1918).  Earlier  employed 
in  recruiting,  Beith  spent  1916-18  in 
America  with  the  information  bureau  of 
the  British  War  Mission  where  his  energy 
and  success  were  rewarded  by  a  C.B.E. 
(1918). 

In  1919  Beith  took  up  the  theatre, 
living  from  then  on  in  London,  absorbed 
in  its  social  and  theatrical  life.  He  was 
particularly  successful  in  translating  his 
own  novels  into  plays,  among  them  A 
Safety  Match  (1921),  Housemaster  (1936), 
and,  perhaps  his  most  successful  play, 
Tilly  of  Bloomsbury  (1919,  based  on  his 
novel  Happy-go-Lucky,  1913).  This  has 
considerable  merit  and  largely  through  his 
skill  in  making  small  parts  interesting  has 
remained  an  amateurs'  favourite.  Despite 
the  cynicism  and  vulgarity  of  the  age, 
his  wit,  romanticism,  decorous  mind,  and 
exceptional  theatrical  sense  kept  his  plays 
popular.  He  proved  an  excellent  collabora- 
tor with  other  writers,  among  them 
Anthony  Armstrong  {Orders  are  Orders , 
1932) ;  Guy  Bolton  {A  Song  of  Sixpence, 
1930);  (Sir)  Seymour  Hicks  (q.v.,  Good 
Luck,  1923);  Stephen  (later  Lord)  King- 
Hall  {The  Middle  Watch,  1929,  and 
others) ;  A.  E.  W.  Mason  (q.v.,  A  Present 
from  Margate,  1933) ;  L.  du  Garde  Peach 
{The  White  Sheep  of  the  Family,  1951) ;  and 
P.  G.  Wodehouse  {A  Damsel  in  Distress, 
1928,  Leave  it  to  Psmith,  1930,  and  others). 

Although  Beith's  gay  theatrical  flair 
was  unfaltering,  through  some  curious 
change  in  emphasis  his  later  novels  never 
achieved  his  pre-war  success.  He  even- 
tually failed  to  adjust  and  his  last  works 


78 


Beith 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


were  considered  failures.  The  King's  Ser- 
vice (1938),  an  informal  history  of  the 
army,  may  have  helped  him  to  the 
directorship  of  War  Office  public  relations 
(1938-41)  and  the  rank  of  major-general, 
but  this  and  the  war  cut  him  off  from  his 
public.  His  tribute  to  Malta,  The  Un- 
conquered  Isle  (1948),  an  attempt  at  a 
second  Hundred  Thousand,  misjudged  the 
mood  of  a  people  who  with  their  own 
experience  of  bombing  resented  his  cheer- 
ful glossing. 

On  the  lapse  of  his  directorship  Beith 
returned  to  work  in  America.  After  1945 
he  wrote  semi-official  histories,  deemed 
failures,  though  none  is  bad;  his  one 
serious,  and  inexplicable,  play,  Hattie 
Stowe  (1947),  about  Harriet  Beecher 
Stowe,  failed,  possibly  only  through  an 
over-large  cast. 

Beith  had  apparently  enjoyed  his  Lon- 
don years.  He  travelled,  was  chairman  of 
the  Society  of  Authors  (1921-4,  1935-9), 
a  member  of  the  council  of  the  League  of 
British  Dramatists  from  1933,  and  presi- 
dent of  the  Dramatists  Club  from  1937. 
He  was  an  officer  of  the  Order  of  St.  John 
of  Jerusalem,  for  long  a  governor  of 
Guy's  Hospital,  and  gave  his  services  also 
to  St.  Dunstan's.  A  very  fine  bow  shot  he 
was  a  member  of  the  Queen's  Body  Guard 
for  Scotland,  the  Royal  Company  of 
Archers,  a  history  of  which  he  wrote  in 
1951.  He  was  noted  for  charm,  striking 
personality,  equable  temperament,  after- 
dinner  speeches,  and  personal  austerity. 
Some  observers,  however,  thought  they 
detected  an  inner  unhappiness;  perhaps 
his  essential  Calvinism  evoked  a  sense  of 
regret  discernible  in  his  own  reported  re- 
mark, bitter  though  humorously  offered, 
that  all  his  life  he  had  lived  on  his  wits. 

In  1915  Beith  married  Helen  Margaret, 
only  daughter  of  the  late  Peter  Alexander 
Speirs,  of  Polmont  Park,  Stirlingshire; 
they  had  no  children.  He  died  near  Peters- 
field  22  September  1952.  There  is  a  por- 
trait at  the  Garrick  Club  by  T.  C.  Dugdale. 

[The  Times  and  Scotsman,  23  September 
1952;  The  Fettesian,  December  1952;  Fifty 
Years  of  Fettes,  1870-1920,  1931;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Patrick  Murray. 

BELISHA,  (ISAAC)  LESLIE  HORE-, 
Baron  Hore-Belisha  (1893-1957),  poli- 
tician. [See  Hore-Belisha.] 

BELL,  GEORGE  KENNEDY  ALLEN 
(1883-1958),   bishop  of  Chichester,   was 


born  at  Hayling  Island  4  February  1883, 
the  eldest  of  the  five  sons  and  seven 
children  of  the  Rev.  James  Allen  Bell  and 
his  wife,  Sarah  Georgina,  daughter  of 
John  George  Megaw,  merchant  banker,  of 
Upper  Norwood,  London.  His  father,  then 
the  incumbent  of  Hayhng  Island,  finally 
became  canon  residentiary  of  Norwich 
Cathedral  in  1918.  Bell  was  educated  at 
Westminster  School  and  Christ  Church, 
Oxford,  where  he  obtained  a  first  in  classi- 
cal moderations  (1903)  and  a  second  in 
liter ae  humaniores  (1905).  At  Oxford  he 
established  a  reputation  as  a  poet,  win- 
ning the  Newdigate  prize  in  1904  and 
becoming  general  editor  of  the  Golden 
Anthologies  of  verse  while  still  an  under- 
graduate. After  a  year  at  Wells  theological 
college  he  was  ordained  deacon  in  1907 
(priest  in  1908)  to  a  curacy  of  Leeds  parish 
church  under  Samuel  Bickersteth.  Here  he 
developed  a  keen  interest  in  social  affairs 
and  began  a  lifelong  connection  with 
Albert  Mansbridge  [q.v.]  and  the  Workers' 
Educational  Association.  This  interest 
developed  further  after  1910  when  he  re- 
turned to  Christ  Church  as  tutor  and 
lecturer  (1910)  and  student  (1911).  It 
brought  him  into  close  contact  with  such 
kindred  spirits  as  Scott  Holland  and 
William  Temple  [qq.v.]  and  he  played 
a  leading  part  in  the  establishment  of 
university  settlements  in  London  and  in 
the  industrial  north. 

At  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  Bell 
accepted,  although  not  without  some 
hesitation,  the  invitation  of  Archbishop 
Davidson  (whose  notice  he  later  contri- 
buted to  this  Dictionary)  to  become  one  of 
his  domestic  chaplains,  thereby  inaugurat- 
ing a  long  and  fruitful  partnership.  Thanks 
to  an  unusual  combination  of  affairs  both 
civil  and  ecclesiastical,  arising  primarily 
from  the  war  and  its  aftermath.  Bell 
became  the  linchpin  of  Lambeth  ad- 
ministration, and  the  accomplished  inter- 
mediary between  the  archbishop  and  a 
host  of  leaders  in  Church  and  State  both 
at  home  and  abroad.  His  introduction  to 
the  ecumenical  movement  took  place  in 
1919,  when  he  attended  the  first  post-war  | 
meeting  of  the  World  Alliance  for  Inter-  * 
national  Friendship  through  the  Churches 
in  Holland,  as  a  member  of  the  British 
delegation.  Here  he  first  met  Archbishop 
Soderblom  of  Sweden  and  heard  him  pro- 
pound the  then  apparently  Utopian  plan 
for  a  permanent  Ecumenical  Council  of 
the  Christian  Churches.  In  the  following 
year,  when  he  acted  as  assistant  secretary 
of   the    Lambeth    Conference,    Bell   was 


80 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bell,  G.  K.  A. 


largely  responsible  for  the  initiation  of  the 
private  discussions  which  resulted  in  the 
issue  of  the  Appeal  to  all  Christian  People. 
It  was  obvious  that  his  preferment  could 
not  long  be  delayed,  and  in  1924  he  was 
appointed  dean  of  Canterbury  at  the  early 
age  of  forty-one — Ramsay  MacDonald's 
first  important  ecclesiastical  appointment. 

His  tenure  of  the  deanery  (1924-9)  was 
marked  by  vast  changes  in  the  life  of 
the  cathedral.  The  Chapter  Office  was 
reorganized,  the  Friends  of  the  Cathe- 
dral were  instituted,  visitors'  fees  were 
abolished,  pilgrimages  were  encouraged, 
services  were  broadcast  regularly,  and 
non-Anglicans  were  invited  to  preach. 
The  most  remarkable  of  Bell's  ventures 
was  the  production  of  John  Masefield's 
The  Coming  of  Christ  in  1928,  the  first 
dramatic  performance  in  an  English 
cathedral  since  the  Middle  Ages.  This  set 
the  pattern  for  a  succession  of  productions 
in  which  he  still  took  an  interest  even 
after  he  had  left  Canterbury.  It  was,  for 
example,  at  his  instigation  that  T.  S.  Eliot 
wrote  Murder  in  the  Cathedral  for  the 
Canterbury  Festival  in  1935;  and  this 
achievement  was  followed  by  other  new 
plays  from  Charles  Williams,  Dorothy  L. 
Sayers  [qq.v.],  Christopher  Hassall,  and 
Christopher  Fry. 

Bell  adopted  a  similar  forward-looking 
policy  when  he  became  bishop  of  Chiches- 
ter in  1929.  His  willingness  to  try  new 
methods  of  evangelism  was  evinced  by  a 
series  of  appointments  at  the  time  quite 
unique  in  the  Church  of  England :  a  direc- 
tor of  religious  drama,  a  liturgical  mis- 
sioner,  a  bishop's  chaplain  for  schools,  and 
a  canon  teacher.  He  continued  his  pioneer 
work  of  encouraging  the  arts,  and  he 
firmly  believed  that  the  artist  should  be 
given  freedom  to  respond  to  his  own 
vision.  This  principle  was  clearly  enun- 
ciated in  his  famous  judgement  on  the 
Goring  case  in  1954,  when  he  granted  a 
faculty  for  a  mural  painting  by  Hans 
Feibusch  depicting  Christ  in  Glory  despite 
the  objections  of  the  advisory  committee 
to  the  preliminary  drawings. 

Before  moving  to  Chichester,  Bell  had 
already  established  himself  as  one  of  the 
leaders  of  the  Life  and  Work  movement. 
He  had  been  one  of  the  small  group  re- 
sponsible for  drafting  the  Message  of  its 
first  conference  at  Stockholm  in  1925, 
which  affirmed  the  duty  of  all  Churches 
to  apply  the  Gospel  to  every  sphere  of 
human  life.  As  chairman  of  the  council 
from  1932  to  1934  and  as  chairman  of  the 
administrative  committee  from  1934  to 


1938  his  guidance  not  only  brought  the 
movement  safely  through  a  period  of 
crisis,  but  also  gave  it  purpose  and  a 
poUcy.  Nothing  indicated  this  more  clearly 
than  his  attitude  to  the  Church  conflict  in 
Nazi  Germany.  He  firmly  supported  the 
Confessional  Church  in  its  struggle  for 
freedom.  During  the  war  of  1939-45  his 
consistent  refusal  to  identify  the  German 
people  as  a  whole  with  National  Socialism 
and  his  courageous  condemnation  of  the 
indiscriminate  allied  bombing  of  German 
cities  despite  considerable  adverse  criti- 
cism undoubtedly  contributed  to  the 
disregard  of  his  strong  claims  to  succeed 
William  Temple  as  archbishop  of  Canter- 
bury in  1944.  His  work  in  re-establishing 
fellowship  between  the  German  Church 
and  other  Churches  after  the  war  was  a 
major  contribution  to  the  success  of  the 
first  meeting  of  the  World  Council  of 
Churches  in  1948,  when  the  Life  and  Work 
and  the  Faith  and  Order  movements 
joined  forces.  He  was  the  first  chairman  of 
its  central  conmiittee  from  1948  to  1954, 
and  honorary  president  from  1954  until 
his  death.  Official  recognition  of  his  work 
in  the  cause  of  Anglo-German  understand- 
ing came  in  1958  when  the  Federal  German 
Republic  awarded  him  the  grand  cross  of 
the  Order  of  Merit. 

Bell's  great  moral  courage  in  consis- 
tently proclaiming  the  Christian  truth  as 
he  saw  it,  however  unpopular  it  might  be, 
was  matched  by  his  passionate  concern  for 
the  individual.  His  definition  of  the  task 
confronting  the  World  Council  of  Churches 
in  1953  indicated  this  clearly:  'The  World 
Council  of  Churches  stands  before  the 
nations,  and  before  the  United  Nations,  as 
a  world-wide  fellowship  appealing  for  an 
end  of  hatred  and  suspicion  and  war, 
declaring  that  the  world  of  nations  is  one 
single  family  and  that  all  are  responsible 
for  their  neighbour's  welfare.'  In  1936 
he  had  sponsored  a  National  Christian 
Appeal  for  Refugees  from  Germany  from 
which  there  resulted — again  with  his  help 
— an  International  Christian  Committee 
for  German  Refugees.  He  was  also  chair- 
man of  the  Church  of  England  conmiittee 
for  non-Aryan  Christians,  and  chairman  of 
the  Famine  Relief  Committee,  while  after 
the  war  he  took  the  lead  in  mobilizing  the 
British  Churches  to  help  with  the  work  of 
reconstruction  in  Europe.  Nor  was  all  this 
work  undertaken  at  the  committee  level ; 
he  took  a  personal  interest  in  a  pheno- 
menal number  of  cases.  In  1947  the  Inter- 
national Hebrew  Christian  Alliance  invited 
him    to    accept    honorary    membership 


91? 


Bell,  G.  K.  A. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


in  recognition  of  his  services  to  Jewish 
Christians  throughout  the  world. 

Bell's  devotion  to  Christian  unity  was 
also  manifest  in  a  number  of  other  ways. 
A  firm  believer  in  personal  contacts,  his 
visits  to  other  Churches  were  extensive. 
He  shared  with  A.  C.  Headlam  [q.v.], 
bishop  of  Gloucester,  the  responsibility  of 
urging  upon  the  Church  of  England  the 
need  for  a  Council  on  Foreign  Relations, 
and  he  succeeded  Headlam  as  its  chair- 
man from  1945  to  1958.  He  was  a  strong 
supporter  of  the  Church  of  South  India, 
which  was  created  in  1947 ;  he  was  joint- 
chairman  of  the  Anglican-Methodist  con- 
versations in  this  country  which  began  in 
1956 ;  and  he  wrote  a  number  of  books  to 
further  the  cause  of  unity — four  volumes 
of  Documents  on  Christian  Unity  (1924- 
58),  Christian  Unity,  the  Anglican  Position 
(1948),  and  The  Kingship  of  Christ  (1954). 
Two  other  of  his  literary  works  deserve 
mention.  The  first  is  his  two-volume  bio- 
graphy of  Randall  Davidson  (1935)  which 
presented  not  only  a  vivid,  hfelike  por- 
trait of  the  archbishop  but  also  an 
authoritative  history  of  the  Church  of 
England  during  the  first  three  decades 
of  the  twentieth  century,  and  has  been 
justifiably  acclaimed  as  the  finest  of 
modern  ecclesiastical  biographies.  The 
second  is  Christianity  and  World  Order 
(1940)  which  argued  that  the  Christian 
religion  provided  the  only  solution  to  the 
bankruptcy  of  common  social  purpose  in 
the  twentieth  century:  it  was  a  pioneer 
work — the  first  theological  book  to  be 
written  specifically  as  a  paperback — and 
over  eighty  thousand  copies  were  sold  in 
three  years. 

Throughout  his  life  Bell's  interests 
covered  an  astonishingly  wide  field.  He 
was  closely  concerned  with  the  problems 
of  Church-State  relations,  and  he  was  an 
active  member  of  the  Archbishops'  Com- 
mission on  Church  and  State  appointed  in 
1930.  He  firmly  supported  the  Establish- 
ment, but  he  was  also  convinced  that  the 
Church  should  have  freedom  to  deal  with 
matters  of  worship  and  doctrine — a  prin- 
ciple for  which  he  fought  strenuously  but 
unsuccessfully  throughout  his  episcopate. 
His  early  interest  in  social  affairs  never 
waned,  he  was  a  keen  supporter  of  the 
trade-union  movement,  and  he  was  well 
versed  in  the  intricacies  of  international 
politics.  From  1923  he  was  a  member 
of  the  Royal  Institute  of  International 
Affairs.  It  must  not  be  thought,  however, 
that  he  neglected  his  diocese.  Chichester 
was  given  the  major  portion  of  his  time 


and  energy,  and  he  proved  himself  to  be 
an  excellent  administrator  and  a  devoted 
pastor.  His  knowledge  of  the  parishes  and 
their  clergy  and  people  was  profound,  and 
he  excelled  at  personal  contacts.  His  effec- 
tiveness in  so  many  fields  was  due  to  a 
strong  constitution,  tremendous  energy, 
and  a  retentive  mind.  Until  the  last  year 
of  his  life  he  was  never  seriously  ill,  despite 
the  fact  that  he  had  few  relaxations  except 
reading  and  poetry:  and  he  always  re- 
tained a  youthful  appearance,  his  almost 
cherubic  countenance  being  dominated  by 
large,  prominent,  clear  blue  eyes. 

He  resigned  from  the  see  of  Chichester 
31  January  1958,  and  a  few  weeks  later 
suffered  a  stroke  while  attending  a  session 
of  the  Anglican-Methodist  conversations 
at  Oxford.  He  recovered  sufficiently,  how- 
ever, to  attend  the  Lambeth  Conference  in 
July  and  August,  and  a  meeting  of  the 
executive  of  the  World  Council  of  Churches 
in  Denmark  immediately  afterwards.  Here, 
at  the  tenth  anniversary  of  the  inaugura- 
tion of  the  Council,  he  preached  his  last 
sermon.  He  died  at  Canterbury  3  October 
1958. 

He  married  in  1918  Henrietta  Millicent 
Grace  (died  1968),  eldest  daughter  of  the 
late  Canon  R.  J.  Livingstone  and  sister 
of  (Sir)  Richard  Livingstone  [q.v.].  There 
were  no  children.  There  are  four  portraits 
of  Bell :  by  Sir  William  Coldstream  in  the 
Tate  Gallery,  by  A.  R.  Middleton  Todd 
at  Chichester,  by  P.  A.  de  Laszl6  and  by 
Eric  Kennington  at  Canterbury. 

[The  Times,  4  October  1958;  R.  C.  D. 
Jasper,  George  Bell,  Bishop  of  Chichester, 
1967;  Bell  private  papers;  private  informa- 
tion.] R.  C.  D.  Jasper. 

BELL,  Sir  HENRY  HESKETH 
JOUDOU  (1864-1952),  colonial  adminis- 
trator, was  born  17  December  1864. 
Beyond  indications  that  he  was  born  in 
the  West  Indies,  was  the  eldest  son  of 
Henry  A.  J.  Bell,  and  was  educated  in 
Brussels  and  Paris,  information  regarding 
his  parentage  and  upbringing  is  lacking. 
Any  informality  in  his  education  did  not 
prevent  him  from  becoming  a  highly  dis- 
tinguished public  servant,  a  writer  and 
artist  of  considerable  merit,  and  a  recog- 
nized authority  on  the  subject  of  witch- 
craft. 

In  1882  he  was  appointed  a  clerk  in  the 
office  of  the  governor  of  Barbados  and  the 
Windward  Islands,  and  in  the  following 
year  he  was  transferred  to  Grenada.  He 
became  established  as  a  regular  colonial 
civil  servant,   and  in  1890  was  moved 


SSi, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bell,  T, 


by  the  Colonial  Office  to  the  Gold  Coast, 
where  he  served  for  four  years.  He  was 
then  promoted  to  be  receiver-general  and 
treasurer  of  the  Bahamas,  where  he  gained 
a  varied  and  useful  experience  of  colonial 
administration  and  politics,  and  became 
known  to  the  Colonial  Office  as  a  promis- 
ing young  man. 

In  1899  he  applied  for  the  administra- 
torship of  Seychelles,  and  although  he 
was  not  successful,  he  was  shortly  after- 
wards offered  the  administratorship  of  St. 
Kitts-Nevis.  This  he  accepted,  but  later 
agreed  to  go  to  Dominica  instead.  His 
energetic  work  in  this  small  independent 
command  attracted  the  notice  of  the 
colonial  secretary,  Joseph  Chamberlain 
[q.v.],  and  marked  him  out  for  further 
promotion. 

In  1906  Bell  became  commissioner  for 
the  Uganda  Protectorate,  responsibility 
for  which  had  just  been  transferred  from 
the  Foreign  Office  to  the  Colonial  Office. 
He  could  not  refuse  so  fine  an  oppor- 
tunity, but  it  was  with  real  regret  and 
some  apprehension  about  the  future  that 
he  parted  company  with  the  West  Indies. 

His  four  years  in  Uganda  (the  title  of  his 
office  being  changed  to  governor  in  1907) 
proved  to  be  fruitful  and  rewarding.  He 
found  the  country  in  the  grip  of  an  epi- 
demic of  sleeping  sickness  which  called 
out  his  powers  of  vigorous  administration 
and  of  improvisation  with  very  limited 
financial  resources.  He  conceived  many 
plans  for  the  development  of  the  country, 
and  the  cotton-growing  industry,  so  im- 
portant to  the  future  prosperity  of 
Uganda,  may  fairly  be  considered  as  a 
monument  to  his  period  of  office  and  to 
what  Lord  Elgin  [q.v.],  as  secretary  of 
state,  described  as  his  system  of  benevo- 
lent despotism. 

Colonial  Office  practice  normally  limited 
the  term  of  governorship  to  four  or  five 
years,  and  in  1909  Bell  was  moved  to 
Northern  Nigeria,  which  he  governed  until 
it  was  amalgamated  with  the  South  under 
Sir  Frederick  (later  Lord)  Lugard  [q.v.]. 
His  work  there  was  largely  concerned  with 
the  economic  development  of  the  region 
and  the  opening  up  of  communications.  In 
1912  he  was  posted  to  the  governorship  of 
the  Leeward  Islands  and  in  1916  he  went 
on  his  last  governorship,  Mauritius.  This 
colony  was  particularly  congenial  to 
him,  in  view  of  his  partly  French  back- 
ground. He  enjoyed  the  comparatively 
sophisticated  social  life  of  the  island,  and 
frankly  relished  the  prestige  and  glamour 
attached  to  the  office  and  person  of  a 


colonial  governor  in  those  days.  But  in 
Mauritius,  as  elsewhere,  his  main  interest 
was  in  development.  One  of  his  notable 
achievements  was  the  building  up,  by 
placing  an  export  duty  on  sugar  during 
years  of  prosperity,  of  a  reserve  fund 
which  was  to  prove  of  great  value  when 
the  price  of  the  colony's  principal  com- 
modity declined.  He  also  did  much  for  the 
housing  and  welfare  of  the  poorer  mem- 
bers of  the  population. 

After  his  retirement  in  1924,  Bell  went 
to  live  in  Cannes,  but  he  continued  to  take 
an  active  interest  in  colonial  affairs,  and 
in  1926  he  made  a  tour  of  Java  and 
French  Indo-China,  producing,  as  a  result, 
a  valuable  study  of  foreign  colonial  ad- 
ministration in  the  Far  East  which  was 
awarded  the  gold  medal  of  the  Royal 
Empire  Society.  He  also  undertook  a 
business  mission  to  what  was  then  the 
new  country  of  Yugoslavia. 

Bell  wrote  well,  and  took  much  trouble 
over  his  official  dispatches,  considering, 
perhaps  with  justice,  that  this  was  the 
way  to  ensure  their  full  consideration  in 
the  Colonial  Office.  His  published  works, 
including  Glimpses  of  a  Governor's  Life 
(1946)  and  Witches  and  Fishes  (1948),  are 
readable,  instructive,  and  informed  by  a 
strong  sense  of  humour. 

Bell  was  appointed  C.M.G.  in  1903, 
promoted  to  K.C.M.G.  in  1908,  and  to 
G.C.M.G.  in  1925. 

During  the  war  of  1939-45  Bell  re- 
turned to  the  Bahamas.  Although  he 
never  made  a  home  in  England,  he  visited 
London  frequently,  and  it  was  there  that 
he  died  1  August  1952.  His  last  years  were 
saddened  by  increasing  deficiency  of  eye- 
sight. He  was  unmarried. 

A  portrait  by  P.  A.  de  Laszlo  was  in- 
cluded in  the  collection  of  governors' 
portraits  at  the  official  residence  of  the 
governor  of  Mauritius. 

[The  Times,  5  and  14  August  1952 ;  private 
information.]  Charles  Jeffries. 

BELL,  Sir  THOMAS  (1865-1952),  ship- 
builder, was  born  at  Sirsawa,  India,  21 
December  1865,  the  son  of  Imrie  Bell,  a 
consulting  engineer  well  known  as  a  de- 
signer of  lighthouses,  and  his  wife,  Jane 
Walker,  of  Edinburgh.  His  early  education 
took  him  to  King's  College  School,  Lon- 
don, and  in  1880  he  entered  the  Royal 
Naval  Engineering  College,  Devonport, 
from  which  he  graduated  in  1886  with 
the  full  qualifications  of  an  engineer  officer. 
To  his  regret,  he  was  prevented  from  fol- 
lowing that  career  because  of  his  eyesight. 


sa 


Bell,  T. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Instead  he  joined  the  engineering  design 
staff  at  the  Clydebank  Engineering  & 
Shipbuilding  Yard,  then  owned  by  James 
and  George  Thomson,  where  his  promotion 
was  rapid  and  his  experience  embraced 
both  office  and  workshop  positions  of 
responsibility.  When  the  firm  was  ac- 
quired by  John  Brown  &  Co.,  Ltd.,  in  1899 
Bell  was  appointed  engineering  manager 
and  his  ability  was  recognized  by  his  new 
principals  when,  in  1903,  he  was  appointed 
a  local  director.  In  1909  he  took  control 
as  director  in  charge,  later  to  be  known  as 
managing  director. 

Bell  was  tall  of  stature,  grave  in  de- 
meanour, and  his  strength  of  character 
was  evident  to  all  who  met  him.  He  was  a 
strict  disciplinarian,  not  least  with  him- 
self, yet  withal  mindful  of  the  needs  and 
interests  of  all  who  served  under  him,  as 
was  best  shown  by  his  untiring  efforts  to 
end  the  period  of  unemployment  for  the 
workpeople  of  Clydebank  in  the  critical 
years  of  the  suspension  of  the  construction 
of  the  Queen  Mary  in  1932-4. 

His  breadth  of  outlook  made  him  alert 
to  the  many  technical  developments  in  his 
professional  field  and  he  applied  himself 
with  vigour  to  keeping  the  Clydebank  firm 
in  the  forefront  of  these  advances.  Bell 
undertook  his  management  duties  when 
the  steam  turbine  was  appearing  in  the 
field  of  marine  propulsion.  Clydebank 
built  an  experimental  set,  subsequently 
fitted  in  the  Clyde  passenger  ferry 
Atalanta,  and  went  on  to  install  turbines 
in  the  Carmania,  Cimard's  first  venture 
of  this  kind,  and  the  prototype  for  the 
quadruple  screw  machinery  of  the  Lusi- 
tania.  The  performance  of  this  machinery 
was  the  subject  of  a  paper  presented  in 
1908  by  Bell  to  the  Institution  of  Naval 
Architects.  This  early  application  to  the 
development  of  turbine  machinery  was 
carried  a  stage  further  in  the  building  of 
the  Aquitania,  which,  leaving  Clydebank 
in  1913,  had  a  remarkable  career  of  thirty- 
seven  years  of  service  to  her  owners  and 
the  nation.  The  production  of  turbine 
machinery  for  merchant  ships  under 
Bell's  guidance  reached  its  climax  in  the 
propelUng  plant  of  the  Queen  Mary 
launched  in  1934. 

Similar  progress  was  achieved  in  the 
field  of  naval  machinery.  The  first  Brown- 
Curtis  turbines  were  fitted  in  the  cruiser 
Bristol.  The  first  naval  installation  of 
geared  turbines  was  in  the  Repulse,  to  be 
followed  by  the  powerful  machinery  for 
the  Hood,  the  world's  largest  warship  of 
her  day.   The   Admiralty   sought  Bell's 


assistance  in  1917  as  deputy  controller 
of  dockyards  and  war  shipbuilding.  In 
that  year  he  was  appointed  K.B.E. 

Bell's  record  of  devoted  work  at  Clyde- 
bank was  matched  by  the  service  he 
rendered  in  many  other  spheres.  He  was 
a  member  of  the  Institution  of  Engineers 
and  Shipbuilders  in  Scotland  for  65  years ; 
of  the  Institution  of  Naval  Architects  for 
49  years,  including  36  as  vice-president 
and  honorary  vice-president;  and  of  the 
Institution  of  Civil  Engineers  for  48  years. 
He  was  a  senior  liveryman  of  the  Worship- 
ful Company  of  Shipwrights.  In  Lloyd's 
Register  of  Shipping  his  counsel  was 
valued  in  both  the  technical  and  general 
committees  of  which  he  was  a  member. 

In  1935  Bell  retired  from  the  position  of 
managing  director  of  Clydebank  but  con- 
tinued in  office  as  a  director  of  John 
Brown  &  Co.,  Ltd.,  until  1946. 

In  addition  to  his  professional  work. 
Bell  interested  himself  in  the  public  life  of 
Clydebank.  He  was  an  active  member  and 
benefactor  of  St.  Columba's  Episcopal 
church.  Early  in  the  century  he  founded 
the  Clydebank  Nursing  Association,  and  in 
1914  established  for  it  a  residential  home 
in  which  he  and  his  wife  took  a  keen  in- 
terest in  subsequent  years.  After  his  re- 
tirement from  executive  duties  in  1935,  he 
became  district  commissioner  of  the  Boy 
Scouts  in  the  Clydebank  area,  and  in  1947 
was  elected  honorary  president  of  the 
Dunbartonshire  Association,  to  the  affairs 
of  which  he  had  given  very  vigorous 
support.  As  a  young  man  he  was  a  keen 
gymnast;  in  later  years  his  recreations 
were  golf  and  gardening. 

In  1900  Bell  married  Helen  (died  1926), 
daughter  of  Malcolm  Macdonald,  a  Scot- 
tish wool  merchant ;  they  had  two  daugh- 
ters, one  of  whom  died  in  childhood.  Bell 
died  at  Helensburgh  9  January  1952. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
John  Brown. 

BELLOC,  JOSEPH  HILAIRE  PIERRE 
RENE  (1870-1953),  poet  and  author,  was 
born  at  St.  Cloud  near  Paris  27  July  1870 
at  the  outbreak  of  the  Franco-Prussian 
war.  He  was  of  curiously  mixed  descent ; 
the  Bellocs  were  a  Nantes  family  engaged 
in  the  sugar  trade  with  the  French  West 
Indies,  with  a  tradition  of  having  come 
from  the  South.  Belloc's  grandfather, 
after  whom  he  was  named  Hilaire,  was 
a  painter  of  some  note  of  the  school  of 
Delacroix,  and  some  of  his  pictures  were 
hung  in  the  Louvre.  He  married  Louise, 
the  daughter  of  a  Colonel  Swanton,  of  an 


94 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Belloc 


Irish  family  which  settled  in  France  in 
the  eighteenth  century.  Their  son  Louis 
married  an  English  wife,  Bessie  Rayner 
Parkes.  She  was,  through  her  mother,  a 
great-granddaughter  of  Joseph  Priestley 
[q.v.];  her  father  was  Joseph  Parkes 
[q.v.],  a  Birmingham  Unitarian,  the 
historian  of  the  Chancery  bar,  and  one  of 
the  founders  of  the  Reform  Club.  She  had 
become  a  Catholic  before  her  marriage 
and  lived  much  with  her  French  relations. 
But  when  her  husband  died  in  1872  she 
brought  her  young  daughter,  afterwards 
to  be  the  well-known  authoress  Mrs. 
Belloc  Lowndes,  and  her  son  to  London. 
Having  rashly  entrusted  a  lodger  who 
worked  on  the  Stock  Exchange  with  much 
of  her  capital,  she  found  herself  suddenly 
reduced  to  near-poverty,  and  in  1878  re- 
tired to  Slindon  in  Sussex. 

Here  Belloc,  in  a  boyhood  full  of  open- 
air  life,  learning  to  tramp  the  downs,  to 
sail  and  ride,  acquired  a  lifelong  devotion 
to  the  country  of  the  South  Downs.  But 
he  was  equally  at  home  in  France  where 
the  summers  were  regularly  spent  at  St. 
Cloud.  At  the  age  of  ten  he  was  sent  with 
the  help  of  relatives  to  Cardinal  Newman's 
Oratory  School  at  Edgbaston,  Birming- 
ham. There  he  acted  with  verve  in  the 
Latin  plays  which  the  Cardinal  himself 
liked  to  direct,  and  won  a  good  number  of 
prizes  without  showing  particular  promise 
as  a  scholar.  He  left  the  school  just  before 
his  seventeenth  birthday,  and  was  very 
unsettled,  with  many  false  starts,  includ- 
ing a  period  at  the  College  Stanislas  in 
Paris  with  a  view  to  entering  the  French 
navy.  He  threw  himself  into  the  London 
dock  strike  of  1889  and  acquired  some 
first-hand  knowledge  of  the  east  end  to 
give  body  to  his  radicalism.  His  sister, 
who  was  two  years  older,  was  already 
making  her  first  steps  towards  journalism 
and  authorship,  working  for  W.  T.  Stead 
[q.v.]  of  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette.  Stead  was 
prevailed  upon  to  advance  a  small  sum  to 
enable  Belloc  to  travel  about  France  on 
the  new  invention,  the  bicycle,  and  write 
some  impressions.  This  was  the  beginning 
of  the  kind  of  writing  about  places  and 
men  in  which  Belloc  was  later  to  show 
himself  pre-eminent. 

His  next  wanderings  took  him  farther 
afield,  to  the  United  States  which  he 
traversed  largely  on  foot,  earning  his  food 
and  lodging  at  farms  by  sketches  which 
he  made.  The  purpose  of  his  journey  was 
romantic  and  practical.  He  reached  Cali- 
fornia in  quest  of  the  girl  with  whom  he 
had  fallen  in  love  at  sight  in  London  and 


who  was  later  to  become  his  wife.  She 
was  Elodie  Agnes,  daughter  of  the  late 
Joseph  Smethwick  Hogan,  of  Napa,  Cali- 
fornia, of  Irish  Catholic  origin. 

Still  imsettled  at  twenty-one,  Belloc 
decided  to  perform  his  military  service  as 
the  French  citizen  which  he  was,  and  he 
served  for  ten  months  in  the  French 
artillery  at  Toul.  His  sister  had  by  then 
become  engaged  to  Frederic  Lowndes,  and 
by  their  generosity  Belloc  was  enabled  to 
contemplate  going  to  Oxford.  After  his 
being  refused  at  one  or  two  colleges, 
Jowett's  Balliol  accepted  him,  and  he 
went  up  in  Hilary  term  in  1893.  He  soon 
justified  the  college  authorities  by  winning 
a  Brackenbury  history  scholarship,  which 
was  duly  followed  by  a  first  in  history  in 
1895,  but  this  was  the  least  part  of  the 
great  impression  he  made  on  Oxford. 
After  the  lonely  boyhood  of  the  only  son 
of  an  impoverished  widow,  he  rejoiced  in 
the  wide  companionship,  and  made  many 
Ufelong  friends.  He  was  a  resounding  suc- 
cess at  the  Oxford  Union,  where  he  was 
contemporary  and  often  matched  with 
the  future  Earl  of  Birkenhead  [q.v.]  and 
where  he  became  president  in  1895.  He 
was  older  than  most  of  his  companions 
and  with  a  much  wider  experience,  burst- 
ing with  energy  and  zest  for  physical 
and  mental  activity.  He  championed  un- 
familiar and  rarely  combined  enthusiasms : 
for  the  France  of  the  Revolution,  and  for 
the  anti-Dreyfusards,  with  a  stout  al- 
legiance to  the  Roman  Church  which 
became  more  marked  after  his  marriage. 

Being  anxious  to  marry  without  further 
delay,  he  wanted  to  become  a  history 
tutor  in  an  Oxford  college  and  stayed  on 
after  graduation  in  the  unfulfilled  hope  of 
such  an  appointment.  He  married  his  wife 
in  California  (1896)  and  brought  her  back 
to  Holywell  Street,  Oxford,  where  he 
Uved  by  taking  pupils,  giving  university 
extension  lectures  mainly  in  the  north  of 
England,  and  writing  books.  To  these 
years  belong  his  first  book  of  poems, 
Verses  and  Sonnets  (1896)  which  fell  quite 
flat,  and  The  Bad  Child's  Book  of  Beasts 
(1896)  which  with  three  or  four  successors 
in  the  same  triumphant  vein  first  made 
him  known  to  a  wider  world. 

In  1897  he  contributed  'The  Liberal 
Tradition'  to  Essays  in  Liberalism  by  Six 
Oxford  Men,  and  after  the  publication  of 
his  Danton  in  1899  he  left  Oxford  for 
Chelsea  and  Fleet  Street.  Here  he  im- 
mediately made  his  mark.  On  the  Speaker , 
a  Liberal  weekly  edited  by  his  Oxford 
contemporary  J.  L.  Hammond  [q.v.],  he 


Belloc 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


threw  himself  into  the  opposition  to  the 
South  African  war,  and  at  this  time  he 
met  G.  K.  Chesterton  [q.v.]  and  his 
younger  brother  Cecil.  Together  they 
brought  something  new  into  Liberal 
journalism,  particularly  through  the 
columns  of  the  Daily  News.  They  de- 
veloped a  high-spirited  and  stingingly 
satirical  attack  on  the  Edwardian  pluto- 
cracy and  its  great  South  African 
connection.  This  was  carried  on  by  Belloc 
through  a  succession  of  novels,  Emmanuel 
Burden  (1904),  Mr.  Clutterbuck's  Election 
(1908),  Pongo  and  the  Bull  (1910),  and  half 
a  dozen  more.  Belloc  may  be  said  to  have 
derived  equally  clearly  and  strongly  from 
his  two  grandfathers.  The  French  painter 
made  him  an  artist.  Although  his  Belloc 
grandmother,  too,  was  a  writer  of  some 
note,  it  was  from  his  grandfather  that 
Belloc  inherited  a  particular  gift  for 
describing,  as  well  as  for  sketching, 
scenery,  and  the  eye  for  places  and  people 
which  marks  the  most  famous  of  his  books. 
The  Path  to  Rome  (1902),  written  when 
he  was  thirty-one.  It  followed  an  historical 
study  of  Paris  (1900)  and  a  serious 
Robespierre  (1901) ;  and  it  was  this  Belloc, 
the  man  of  letters,  who  was  offered  and 
accepted  the  literary  editorship  (1906-10) 
of  the  Morning  Post,  without  having  the 
least  sympathy  with  the  politics  of  that 
paper. 

From  his  Birmingham  Radical  grand- 
father he  inherited  a  preoccupation  with 
public  life,  and  a  reforming  zeal  against 
corruption  which  led  him  to  seek  naturali- 
zation (1902)  and  adoption  as  a  parliamen- 
tary candidate.  He  was  returned  for  South 
Salford  in  the  Liberal  landslide  of  1906 
and  sat  in  Parliament  for  five  years 
without  allowing  his  membership  to 
diminish  an  extraordinary  literary  output. 
Three  or  four  books  a  year  flowed  from 
his  pen,  not  only  essays  contributed 
originally  to  the  Morning  Post  and  other 
journals,  but  full-length  works  like  his 
Marie  Antoinette  (1909),  his  political 
novels,  and  topographical  works  like  The 
Historic  Thames  (1907)  and  The  Pyrenees 
(1909).  At  this  time  he  bought  a  small 
house  with  a  mill  and  some  land  six  miles 
south  of  Horsham,  and  this  becanie  his 
home  for  nearly  forty  years. 

One  of  Belloc's  professed  objects  in 
seeking  election  to  Parliament  had  been 
to  secure  an  audit  of  the  party  accounts, 
and  he  was  soon  a  problem  to  his  own 
party  leaders.  For  his  part,  he  found  in 
Parliament  the  corroboration  of  what  he 
had  already  been  asserting :  that  the  party 


struggle  was  largely  unreal,  the  govern- 
ment of  England  being  carried  on  by  an 
understanding  between  the  two  front 
benches  to  maintain  the  system.  Although 
party  funds  were  not  forthcoming  for  his 
campaign  in  the  first  election  of  1910,  he 
held  the  seat.  But  he  was  not  happy  in 
Parliament,  and  a  single  phrase  in  a 
speech  on  the  Address  in  February  1910, 
in  which  he  spoke  of  'the  modern  Anglo- 
Judaic  plutocracy  under  which  we  live', 
did  him  immense  harm.  When  a  second 
election  followed  in  the  same  year,  he 
declined  the  expense  of  a  further  cam- 
paign and  left  the  House.  Immediately 
afterwards  he  published  in  collaboration 
with  Cecil  Chesterton  The  Party  System 
(1911),  describing  as  a  corrupt  collusion 
what  was  more  generally  regarded  as 
proofs  of  English  moderation  and  com- 
mon sense  and  of  a  recognition  that  the 
English  parliamentary  system  presup- 
posed a  large  measure  of  common  ground 
between  the  political  parties. 

Belloc  founded  his  own  journal  the  Eye- 
witness in  1911  which  in  1912  fastened 
on  the  disclosures  that  some  of  the  Liberal 
ministers  had  bought  American  Marconi 
shares  at  a  time  when  the  Governn>ent 
was  giving  a  Post  Office  contract  to  the 
English  Marconi  Company.  In  this  cam- 
paign, as  in  others,  Cecil  Chesterton,  who 
had  succeeded  Belloc  as  editor  after  a 
year,  took  the  lead  in  vehemence  and 
invective,  until  he  was  convicted  of 
criminal  libel.  But  he  continued  to  edit  the 
paper,  now  called  the  New  Witness,  in  a 
way  which  often  distressed  Belloc  who  had 
more  critical  standards  of  proof,  but  who 
stood  loyally  by  his  friends. 

Belloc  had  by  this  time  three  sons  and 
two  daughters  at  or  approaching  school 
age  and  in  addition  to  his  unremunerative 
and  often  misdirected  writing  on  public 
questions  had  his  living  to  make  by  writ- 
ing. He  accepted  great  numbers  of 
publisher's  commissions,  one  of  them,  for 
an  American  publisher,  the  completion  of 
Lingard's  History  of  England,  carrying  it 
from  1689  to  1910  (1915).  His  reaction  to 
Lloyd  George's  Insurance  Act  was  The 
Servile  State  (1912)  which  predicted  the 
steady  diminution  of  personal  liberty 
among  the  mass  of  the  people,  who  would 
exchange  freedom  for  a  measxu'e  of 
security. 

Then  in  1914  came  a  shattering  blow 
with  the  death  in  her  early  forties  of  his 
dearly  loved  wife,  and  it  may  be  said  that 
Belloc  was  never  the  same  man  again,  that 
the   black  he  habitually  wore   and  the 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Belloc 


mourning  paper  he  always  used  were  the 
outward  signs  of  an  inward  tragic  grief. 
When  war  broke  out  a  few  months  later, 
Belloc  found  a  new  outlet  for  his  energies 
and  gifts  as  an  expounder  to  the  general 
public  of  the  strategy  of  the  war.  He  lec- 
tured up  and  down  the  country  with 
diagram  lantern  slides,  heartened  his 
listeners  with  estimates  of  the  rate  of 
attrition  of  the  German  forces,  and  carried 
a  weekly  journal,  Land  and  Water ^  to  a 
six-figure  circulation  by  an  exhaustive 
military  commentary  which  he  kept  up 
week  by  week  to  the  very  end  of  the  war. 
In  1915-16  he  was  Lees  Knowles  lecturer 
in  military  history  at  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge.  Belloc  had  good  contacts, 
particularly  with  the  French  general 
staff,  and  his  analyses  and  predictions, 
while  in  general  over-optimistic,  were 
seriously  informed  as  well  as  singularly 
lucid,  and  may  be  said  to  have  been  at 
the  level  of  the  professional  staff  thinking 
of  the  time.  He  made  very  considerable 
sums,  but  invested  his  savings  in  France 
and  lost  very  heavily  through  the  de- 
valuation of  the  franc. 

The  end  of  the  war  found  him  a  man 
of  fifty  with  a  family  still  to  educate,  al- 
though he  had  lost  his  eldest  son  in  the 
war,  and  there  began  twenty  years  of 
unremitting  literary  labour  which  carried 
the  total  of  his  books  to  well  over  a 
hundred.  They  were  of  uneven  quality; 
all  had  a  distinction  and  power,  but  in 
general  it  must  be  recognized  that  only  a 
few  of  this  second  period  are  equal  in 
literary  merit  to  the  extraordinary  galaxy 
of  his  works  written  before  1914.  Mention 
should  be  made  of  one  of  them,  Europe  and 
the  Faith  (1920),  based  on  lectures  given 
to  a  London  historical  society  of  his  co- 
religionists during  the  war  years.  It 
illustrates  what  may  be  called  the  classic 
French  thesis  against  the  Germans,  about 
the  dark  ages:  that  the  society  of  the 
Roman  Empire  was  not  replaced  from 
outside  but  transformed  itself,  taking  in 
new  blood  but  maintaining  the  continuity 
of  Latin  civilization,  with  the  Catholic 
Church  as  its  inspiration  and  guide.  The 
conclusion  was  twofold:  that  Europe  is 
nothing  without  the  Faith  and  would 
perish  without  it,  but  equally  that  the 
Church  is  the  creation  of  Europe.  There 
were  here  ideas  as  unfamiliar  as  they  were 
controversial,  not  only  to  the  general 
public  but  also  to  Belloc's  own  co- 
religionists who  were  more  concerned  to 
emphasize  the  universal  character  of  the 
Church  in  the  twentieth  century  than  its 


historical  origin  in  the  Roman  world. 
When  Belloc  wrote  'Europe'  the  reader 
can  often  substitute  'Gaul'  or  'France'.  He 
had  little  feeling  for  the  Europe  which 
was  not  Latin.  But  the  book  marked  the 
change  which  the  years  and  bereavement 
had  wrought  in  Belloc:  he  devoted  his 
pen  increasingly  through  the  twenties  and 
thirties  to  the  Catholic  cause.  He  em- 
barked on  a  large-scale  History  ofEngland, 
projected  in  four  volumes  (1925-31),  but 
the  fourth  volume  ended  in  1612.  A 
shorter  one- volume  history  (1934)  covered 
the  whole  range,  while  separate  bio- 
graphies of  Wolsey  (1930)  and  Cranmer 
(1931),  Charles  I  (1933),  Cromwell  (1934), 
and  Charles  II  (The  Last  Rally,  1940),  and 
James  II  (1928)  gave  him  further  oc- 
casion to  elaborate  his  guiding  ideas  on 
the  English  Reformation  as  a  movement 
of  the  rich  against  the  poor,  ideas  which 
he  had  found  in  Cobbett  and  espoused  at 
Oxford. 

From  time  to  time  Belloc  showed  that 
his  old  virtuosity  as  a  writer  of  comic 
verse  or  deliberately  mannered  prose,  as  in 
Belinda  (1928),  was  as  great  as  ever,  and 
he  continued  to  travel  from  the  Baltic  to 
the  Holy  Land  for  the  topographical  works 
which  he  wrote  so  well.  He  engaged  in 
controversy  with  H.  G.  Wells,  Dean 
Inge,  and  Dr.  Coulton  [qq.v.].  He  wrote 
studies  of  the  Jews  (1922),  of  America 
{The  Contrast,  1923),  and  delivered  the 
Taylorian  lecture  at  Oxford  'On  Transla- 
tion' (1931).  He  helped  G.  K.  Chesterton 
who  carried  on  Cecil  Chesterton's  old 
paper,  renamed  G.K.'s  Weekly,  until  his 
own  death  in  1936  when  Belloc  himself 
edited  it  for  a  time.  He  was  a  man  of  quite 
exceptional  stamina  and  power  of  sus- 
tained application  who  would  on  occasion 
dictate  as  much  as  ten  or  twelve  thousand 
words  in  a  long  morning's  work  before 
meeting  to  relax  with  companions  over 
wine.  He  wrote  with  a  continual  sense  of 
the  urgency  of  earning  money  as  each 
decade  increased  the  difficulty  for  the 
serious  author  who  made  no  appeal  to  the 
woman  reader  and  could  not  write  popular 
fiction.  He  remained  in  many  ways 
severely  Victorian,  particularly  in  his  dis- 
like of  personal  publicity,  and  the  nearest 
he  could  ever  be  persuaded  towards 
writing  an  autobiography  was  The  Cruise 
of  the  'Nona'  (1925)  which  remains  in 
many  ways  next  to  his  poetry  his  most 
personal  memorial  but  is  characteristic  by 
its  reticence.  He  always  wrote  in  the  sense 
of  Newman's  dictum  to  writers — aim  at 
tilings ;  and  though  his  essays  are  full  of 


871 


Belloc 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


personal  experience,  they  are  the  ex- 
periences of  an  impersonal  'I'.  The  last 
thing  he  ever  dreamt  of  doing  was  what 
he  described  in  the  dedicatory  ode  to  an 
early  Oxford  jeu  d'esprity  Lambkin's  Re- 
mains (1900),  as  turning  'a  lax  and  fluent 
pen  to  talking  of  my  private  friends'.  Yet 
as  a  poet,  and  it  was  as  a  poet  he  most 
wished  to  be  remembered,  his  gift  was  the 
lyric  gift  for  the  expression  of  deeply  felt 
personal  emotion,  for  love  poetry,  and  in 
such  a  work  as  An  Heroic  Poem  in  Praise 
of  Wine  (1932)  there  are  sudden  personal 
touches  of  a  kind  from  which  he  would 
always  have  shrunk  in  prose. 

Belloc  was  a  man  tenacious  of  his  friend- 
ships, with  deep  and  strong  feehngs,  who 
had  the  unhappiness  to  lose  by  death  the 
majority  of  his  contemporary  friends.  But 
he  also  had  the  gift  of  making  new  ones 
from  younger  generations.  He  inspired 
affection  and  even  devotion.  Strongly  as 
he  had  written  against  the  plutocracy, 
holding  up  to  admiration  the  yeoman 
and  the  peasant  farmer,  he  acquired  at 
Oxford  and  maintained  a  fondness  for 
birth  and  great  houses  and  established 
position,  and  he  had  a  growing  distaste  in 
practice  for  the  kind  of  roystering  public- 
house  Ufe  which  his  early  writing  had 
invested  with  so  much  authority  and 
romance  for  many  of  his  younger  disciples. 
Few  men  with  such  literary  gifts  can  have 
held  the  calling  of  letters  in  less  regard, 
though  if  he  had  been  endowed  with 
private  means  he  would  still  have  written 
copiously  from  a  combative  sense  of  duty 
and  of  the  obligation  laid  on  every  man  to 
proclaim  the  truth  as  far  as  he  can  see  it. 
Even  those  who  most  strongly  disagreed 
with  his  general  conclusions  respected  his 
immense  integrity,  that  of  a  man  who 
never  stopped  to  think  what  it  was  pohtic 
to  write,  but  only  what  was  the  truth  to  be 
stated. 

Belloc  used  to  speak  slightingly  of 
*books  about  books',  found  reviewing 
difficult,  grew  more  and  more  addicted  to 
talking  of  writing  as  a  trade,  and  one  of 
the  least  satisfactory  of  trades  because 
there  was  little  or  no  relation  between  the 
merit  of  the  work  done,  the  time  and 
pains  involved  in  doing  it,  and  the 
financial  reward.  Throughout  most  of  his 
life,  he  always  had  plenty  of  other  things 
he  wanted  to  do,  and  felt  the  constraint 
of  having  to  write  so  much  in  order  to 
keep  for  himself  and  his  family  a  reason- 
able standard  of  comfort.  The  life  of  the 
countryside,  activities  like  the  bottling  of 
wine  on  a  large  scale,  constant  travel,  par- 


ticularly in  the  French  countryside,  these, 
with  his  boat  and  his  country-house  visits, 
provided  the  relaxation  of  a  life  otherwise 
filled  with  determined  work.  In  the  second 
half  of  his  life  those  who  knew  him  best 
were  increasingly  glad  that  he  had  so 
much  work  that  he  had  to  do,  because  he 
was  inclined  to  melancholy,  restless  and 
never  anywhere  for  very  long.  Although 
he  became  increasingly  pessimistic  in  his 
prognostications,  and  maintained  in  all 
their  severity  the  judgements  he  had 
formed  early  in  life  about  the  quality  of 
English  public  life  and  the  social  evolu- 
tion that  was  going  on,  he  was  never  out 
of  the  country  for  very  long.  His  longest 
absences  were  to  lecture,  reluctantly  and 
from  a  strictly  business  point  of  view,  in 
the  United  States.  Naturally  a  man  of 
extreme  courtesy,  of  an  old-fashioned  sort, 
he  could  also  be  brusque  and  difficult 
with  the  importunate  strangers  and  with 
the  editors  and  publishers  whom  his  fame 
attracted. 

Belloc  suffered  increasingly  from  in- 
somnia in  middle  life,  and  his  health 
deteriorated  when  he  was  seventy.  The 
fall  of  France  in  1940  was  something  he 
felt  very  deeply,  after  he  had  for  fifty 
years  proclaimed  the  military  and  civic 
virtues  of  his  father's  country.  In  1941  his 
youngest  son  died  on  service  with  the 
Royal  Marines.  In  the  next  year  Belloc 
suffered  a  stroke  which  impaired  his 
memory  so  that  he  became  progressively 
incapable  from  then  onwards  of  sustained 
intellectual  work  and  the  last  twelve 
years  of  his  life  were  a  sad  period  of  failing 
powers.  But  he  bore  his  afflictions  with 
fortitude  and  resignation,  and  never 
wholly  lost  the  high  spirits  which  had 
marked  his  prime.  In  the  month  of  his 
eighty-third  birthday  a  fall  in  his  study  in 
front  of  the  fire  caused  burns  and  shock 
which  ended  in  his  death  in  hospital  in 
Guildford  17  July  1953.  He  was  buried 
at  West  Grinstead  next  to  his  wife  and 
youngest  son.  Of  his  seven  grandchildren 
two  have  entered  religion. 

Belloc  received  the  honorary  degree  of 
LL.D.  from  Glasgow  in  1920.  He  refused 
the  honorary  fellowship  offered  to  him  by 
Balliol  when  he  was  over  eighty ;  and  de- 
clined the  C.H.  in  1943.  He  was  three 
times  painted  by  his  friend  (Sir)  James 
Gunn:  in  a  full-length  portrait  which 
shows  him  in  later  middle  age,  a  com- 
manding figure  in  a  black  cape;  and  one 
seated,  in  old  age  after  he  had  grown  a 
beard.  This  second  portrait  now  hangs  in 
the  Oxford  Union.  There  is  also  a  striking 


esk 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Benn,  E.  J.  P, 


likeness  of  him  in  the  same  artist's  con- 
versation piece  which  shows  him  with 
Chesterton  and  Maurice  Baring  [q.v.]. 
This  hangs  in  the  National  Portrait  Gal- 
lery, where  there  is  also  a  chalk  drawing 
by  Daphne  Pollen  and  a  sketch  by  an 
unknown  artist.  A  lithograph  by  (Sir) 
William  Rothenstein  was  reproduced  in 
Oxford  Characters  (1896)  and  a  sketch  by 
Eric  Gill  in  Testimony  to  Hilaire  Belloc 
(1956). 

[Robert  Speaight,  Life  of  Hilaire  Belloc, 
1957,  and  (ed.)  Letters  from  Hilaire  Belloc, 
1958  ;  J.  B.  Morton,  Hilaire  Belloc,  a  Memoir, 
1955 ;  Eleanor  and  Reginald  Jebb,  Testimony 
to  Hilaire  Belloc,  1956 ;  Mrs.  Belloc  Lowndes, 
'i,  too,  have  lived  in  Arcadia',  1941,  and  Where 
Love  and  Friendship  Dwelt,  1943;  G,  K. 
Chesterton,  'Portrait  of  a  Friend',  chapter  in 
Autobiography,  1936;  C.  Creighton  Mandell 
and  Edward  Shanks,  Hilaire  Belloc,  1916; 
Patrick  Cahill,  The  English  First  Editions  of 
Hilaire  Belloc,  listing  153  separate  publica- 
tions, 1953;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  Douglas  Woodruff. 

BENN,  Sir  ERNEST  JOHN  PICK- 
STONE,  second  baronet,  of  Old  Knoll, 
Lewisham  (1875-1954),  publisher,  eco- 
nomist, and  individualist,  was  born  in 
Hackney,  London,  25  June  1875,  the 
eldest  son  of  (Sir)  John  Williams  Benn, 
later  publisher,  Liberal  member  of  Parlia- 
ment, leader  of  the  Progressive  Party  in, 
and  sometime  chairman  of,  the  London 
County  Council,  and  first  baronet,  by  his 
wife,  Elizabeth,  daughter  of  John  Pick- 
stone,  of  Hyde,  Cheshire.  Viscount  Stans- 
gate,  of  whom  a  notice  appears  below, 
was  a  younger  brother.  Ernest  Benn  was 
educated  at  the  Lycee  Condorcet,  Paris, 
and  the  Central  Foundation  School, 
Cowper  Street,  City  Road.  In  1891  he 
joined  the  firm  of  Benn  Brothers,  Ltd., 
founded  in  1880  to  publish  the  Cabinet 
Maker,  This  journal,  declared  the  father, 
*was  the  cornerstone,  but  the  bricks  for 
the  House  that  Benn  built  have  been 
collected  and  well  and  truly  laid  by  my 
eldest  son'.  By  the  turn  of  the  century 
Ernest  Benn  had  taken  effective  control ; 
during  the  next  thirteen  years  the  busi- 
ness developed  at  a  rapid  tempo;  the 
Hardware  Trade  Journal  and  other  trade 
papers  were  acquired ;  others  were  newly 
launched.  He  succeeded  his  father  in  1922 
and  in  the  next  year  founded  the  book 
pubHshing  company  of  Ernest  Benn,  Ltd., 
introducing  in  the  late  twenties  the 
Augustan  Poets  and  Benn's  Sixpenny 
Library  as  the  precursors  of  the  paper- 
back. Erecting  Bouverie  House,  he  'put 


the  trade  press  into  its  proper  place  in  the 
heart  of  Fleet  Street'. 

In  1927  Ernest  Benn  sponsored  what 
became  the  Boys'  Hostels  Association,  of 
which  the  Prince  of  Wales  became  patron, 
to  provide  residential  clubs  for  homeless 
boys  in  the  metropolis.  He  was  president 
of  the  National  Advertising  Benevolent 
Society  (1928),  the  Readers'  Pensions 
Committee  (1983),  the  Royal  Commercial 
Travellers'  Schools  (1935),  and  the  Adver- 
tising Association  (1985).  In  1932  he 
became  high  sheriff  of  the  county  of 
London.  From  1934  until  1949  he  was 
chairman  of  the  United  Kingdom  Provi- 
dent Institution. 

In  the  war  Benn  famiUarized  himself 
with  the  ways  of  Whitehall,  serving  first 
at  the  Ministry  of  Munitions  and  later  at 
the  Ministry  of  Reconstruction,  being  ap- 
pointed C.B.E.  in  1918.  At  this  time  he 
advocated  collaboration  between  Govern- 
ment and  business  to  win  the  coming 
trade  war,  expounding  these  plans  in  his 
first  three  books.  After  this  relatively 
brief  period,  and  a  five-week  visit  to  the 
United  States  in  1921,  he  repudiated  his 
earlier  mild  collectivism  and  embraced 
a  full-blooded  individualism. 

Benn's  classic.  Confessions  of  a  Capitalist 
(1925),  illustrating  the  individualist  theme 
by  the  story  of  the  foundation  of  a  trade- 
periodical  empire,  exemplified  his  rich 
intellectual  and  spiritual  qualities.  Among 
them  were  courage,  application,  relentless 
energy  tempered  by  kindliness,  and  an 
engaging  frankness  and  directness  which 
at  once  shocked  and  charmed.  His  writings 
displayed  a  French  wit,  reminiscent  of 
Bastiat,  but  with  a  taste  of  London  salt. 
His  public  philosophy  was  an  austere  Vic- 
torian laisser-faire  I  his  private  conduct 
was  inspired  by  the  generous  dictates  of 
his  warm  humanity. 

From  1925  Individualism  was  the  very 
kernel  of  Ernest  Benn's  life.  To  him  the 
State  was  the  acme  of  immorality,  the 
individual  good,  the  collective  evil.  Faith 
and  works  were  the  individual's  province. 
'It  was  easy  to  mock  his  views',  declared 
The  Times,  'for  he  knew  no  middle  way 
and  was  often  exaggerated  in  the  emphasis 
of  his  warnings.  . . .  He  was  the  spokesman 
of  no  interest  but  of  an  idea — of  one  as- 
pect of  liberalism  which  not  even  a  col- 
lectivist  society,  if  it  wishes  to  remain  free, 
dare  ignore.'  In  1926,  with  Sir  Hugh  Bell, 
he  founded  the  Individualist  Bookshop, 
whose  luncheons  were  to  form  the  model 
for  the  Foyle  literary  luncheons.  The 
launching  of  the  Individualist  movement 


Benn,  E.  J.  P, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


thrust  him  at  the  very  centre  of  a  cam- 
paign which  was  not  to  cease  until  his 
death.  Throughout  1931,  as  leader  of  the 
Friends  of  Economy,  he  concentrated  his 
fire  primarily  on  swollen  state  expendi- 
tures. 'One  of  my  glorious  failures'  was 
Benn's  foundation  and  editorship  of  the 
Independent  (1933-5).  Between  1916  and 
1953  he  wrote  some  twenty  books,  supple- 
menting them  between  1941  and  1948 
with  eleven  pamphlets.  Although  the  war- 
time and  post-war  pamphlets  published  in 
the  'Liberty  Library'  series  of  the  Society 
of  Individualists  were  primarily  tracts  for 
the  times,  the  argvunent  of  some  enjoys  a 
broader  currency.  In  1941  Benn  initiated 
the  most  powerfully  sustained  campaign 
of  his  life — a  crusade  in  defence  of  per- 
sonal and  civil  liberty,  the  rule  of  law  and 
the  free  market,  coupled  with  resistance 
to  bureaucratic  controls  and  to  every 
project  for  a  state-planned  economy.  All 
this  was  characteristically  heralded  by 
two  Benn  pamphlets,  The  Political  Method 
and  The  Profit  Motive.  He  took  the  leading 
part,  with  Sir  Frederic  Hamilton,  (Sir) 
Carleton  Allen,  Lord  Leverhulme,  Collin 
Brooks,  and  F.  W.  Hirst  [q.v.],  in  drafting 
in  August  1942  a  Manifesto  on  British 
Liberty  and  in  founding  in  November 
1942  the  Society  of  Individualists.  As 
president  of  the  society,  which  was  to 
become  a  model  for  Antipodean  and 
Canadian  sister-societies  and  for  thirty 
branches  at  home,  Benn  undertook  the 
task  of  furnishing,  as  he  termed  it,  'the 
pabulum',  writing  libertarian  feature 
articles  for  scores  of  newspapers  and 
journals  at  home  and  overseas,  and  con- 
tributing for  many  years  his  regular 
weekly  'Murmurings  of  an  Individualist' 
to  Truth  during  the  editorship  of  Collin 
Brooks. 

In  1951  came  Benn's  census  protest. 
He  embellished  his  census  form  with  the 
words :  'In  view  of  the  critical  state  of  the 
national  economy,  I  must  refuse  to  take 
any  part  in  this  unnecessary  waste  of 
manpower,  money,  paper  and  print.'  He 
was  fined  five  pounds  and  two  guineas 
costs. 

In  the  free-trade  general  election  of 
1923,  Benn  was  sounded  on  behalf  of  four 
constituencies  as  a  Liberal  candidate. 
He  declined.  In  1929  he  broke  with  the 
Liberal  leaders  over  the  Yellow  Book  pro- 
gramme. In  1935  a  technicality  brought 
to  naught  an  attempt  to  secure  him  as 
Conservative  candidate  for  East  Surrey. 
This  did  not  perturb  him.  He  preferred  his 
own  Individualist  banner,  'The  State  the 


Enemy',  to  any  party  standard.  He  was, 
too,  a  lifelong  free-trader  and  a  zealous 
Cobdenite.  His  life  and  career  demon- 
strated, as  the  Sunday  Times  said,  'what 
can  be  done  with  an  idea  when  exploited 
to  the  full  by  a  latter-day  Hampden'.  The 
net  result  of  the  influence  of  Benn  and 
his  fellow  libertarians  was  that,  by  1960, 
liberty  was  fashionable  once  again. 

In  1903  Benn  married  Gwendoline 
Dorothy  (died  1966),  daughter  of  Frederick 
May  Andrews,  of  Edgbaston,  Birming- 
ham; they  had  three  sons  and  two 
daughters.  On  17  January  1954  Benn  died 
at  Oxted,  Surrey,  where  he  had  lived  since 
1913,  and  was  succeeded  in  the  baronetcy 
by  his  eldest  son,  John  Andrews  (born 
1904).  A  portrait  of  Sir  Ernest  Benn  by 
Sir  William  Orpen  hangs  in  the  board- 
room at  Bouverie  House,  Fleet  Street;  a 
sketch  of  him  at  the  age  of  thirty,  by 
Edward  Grindlay,  forms  the  frontispiece 
to  Benn's  Happier  Days. 

[The  Times,  18,  21,  23,  and  29  January 
1954;  Sir  Ernest  Benn,  The  Confessions  of 
a  Capitalist,  1925,  The  Letters  of  an  Indivi- 
dualist to  'The  Times',  1921-1926,  1927, 
Happier  Days,  1949,  and  other  writings; 
A.  G.  Gardiner,  John  Benn  and  the  Progressive 
Movement,  1925 ;  Deryek  Abel,  Ernest  Benn: 
Counsel  for  Liberty,  1960;  Freedom  First, 
Spring  1960;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  Deryck  Abel. 

BENN,  WILLIAM  WEDGWOOD,  first 
Viscount  Stansgate  (1877-1960),  parlia- 
mentarian, was  born  10  May  1877  at 
Hackney,  the  younger  brother  of  (Sir) 
Ernest  Benn,  a  notice  of  whom  appears 
above.  He  was  educated  at  the  Lycee 
Condorcet,  Paris,  and  at  University  Col- 
lege, London,  where  he  obtained  a  first  in 
French  (1898)  and  later  became  a  fellow 
(1918).  He  worked  for  some  years  in  his 
father's  publishing  business.  Deeply  in- 
fluenced by  social  conditions  in  the  east 
end  of  London,  associated  with  the 
London  Progressive  Party,  a  lifelong 
radical  nonconformist,  Benn  was  soon 
adopted  as  Liberal  candidate  for  his 
father's  former  seat  of  St.  George's, 
becoming  member  at  the  general  elec- 
tion of  1906.  He  gained  experience  at 
the  Treasury,  Board  of  Education,  and 
Admiralty  as  parliamentary  private  secre- 
tary to  Reginald  McKenna  [q.v.] ;  retain- 
ing his  seat  at  both  general  elections  in 
1910  he  became  a  junior  lord  of  the 
Treasury  and  thereafter  a  full-time  and 
singularly  active  politician.  In  1912  he  was 
a  successful  organizer  of  relief  of  suffering 


90 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Benn,  W.  W, 


during  the  dock  strike  and  two  years  later, 
when  war  broke  out,  he  became  chair- 
man of  the  organizing  committee  of  the 
National  Relief  Fund. 

In  October  when  over  two  million 
pounds  had  already  been  raised,  he  re- 
signed to  respond  to  the  inner  call  for 
more  personal  service.  Despite  his  short 
stature,  Benn  secured  a  commission  in  the 
Middlesex  Yeomanry,  and  took  part  in 
the  fierce  fighting  on  the  heights  above 
Suvla  Bay,  in  the  Gallipoli  campaign.  He 
next  became  an  observer  with  the  Royal 
Naval  Air  Service  and  personally  par- 
ticipated in  the  pinpoint  bombing  of  the 
Baghdad  Railway,  was  rescued  from  a 
sinking  aeroplane  in  the  Mediterranean, 
and  was  in  an  improvised  aircraft  carrier 
sunk  by  shore  batteries  at  Castelorizo. 
He  commanded  a  party  of  French  sailors 
in  guerrilla  activities  against  the  Turks, 
served  in  authorized  privateering  in  the 
Red  Sea,  and  returned  to  England  to 
qualify  as  a  pilot. 

Refusing  the  office  of  chief  whip  from 
the  hand  of  Lloyd  George,  Benn  returned 
to  service  in  Italy  and  was  eventually 
seconded  to  the  Italian  Army  to  organize 
and  participate  in  the  first  parachute 
landing  of  a  secret -service  agent  behind 
the  enemy  lines.  He  was  twice  mentioned 
in  dispatches,  appointed  to  the  D.S.O., 
awarded  the  D.F.C.,  was  made  a  chevalier 
of  the  Legion  of  Honour,  received  the 
croix  de  guerre,  the  Italian  war  cross,  and 
the  Italian  bronze  medal  for  valour. 

At  the  general  election  of  1918,  his 
former  constituency  having  been  redistri- 
buted, Benn  was  returned  as  member  for 
Leith,  a  seat  which  he  held,  through  three 
more  general  elections,  for  nine  years  of 
intense  parliamentary  activity.  He  and 
Lord  Winterton,  in  the  judgement  of 
Lord  Halifax  [q.v.],  were  'two  of  the 
best  parliamentarians  of  my  time  in  the 
House'.  A  supporter  of  Asquith  just  this 
side  of  idolatry  Benn  chafed  under  the 
leadership  of  Lloyd  George,  and  finding 
himself  increasingly  voting  with  the 
Labour  Party,  applied  for  membership  in 
1927  and  resigned  his  seat. 

He  was  returned  at  a  by-election  in  the 
following  year  as  member  for  North  Aber- 
deen, and,  holding  this  seat  in  the  general 
election  of  1929,  became  secretary  of  state 
for  India  with  a  seat  in  the  Cabinet,  and 
was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council. 

Benn  occupied  this  high,  but  exposed, 
position  for  the  next  two  years  under 
fairly  constant  attack.  The  controversial 
political  trial  at  Meerut,  authorized  by  his 


predecessor,  was  about  to  commence.  The 
report  of  the  Indian  statutory  commission 
under  Sir  John  (later  Viscount)  Simon 
[q.v.]  was  in  course  of  preparation  and  was 
published  in  June  1930.  Meantime  Benn 
authorized  the  viceroy,  in  1929,  to  make 
the  historic  declaration  that  the  legitimate 
goal  of  Indian  aspirations  was  dominion 
status.  Simon's  concurrence  was  not  ob- 
tained. In  a  short  but  bitter  parliamentary 
debate  Benn  defended  his  action  with 
courage  and  when  Lloyd  George  de- 
nounced him  as  a  'pocket  edition  of 
Moses'  retorted  'But  I  never  worshipped 
the  golden  calf.'  In  1930  the  Indian  leader 
M.  K.  Gandhi  [q.v.]  initiated  a  successful 
campaign  of  civil  disobedience,  directed 
against  the  salt  tax,  and  Benn  ultimately 
felt  compelled  to  order  his  arrest.  Gandhi 
was  released  next  year  for  talks  with  the 
viceroy  which  resulted  in  the  Delhi  Pact, 
but  by  the  time  he  arrived  in  London  for 
the  second  Round  Table  conference,  Benn 
was  out  of  office.  On  the  formation  of 
the  'national'  Government  Benn  had  re- 
mained loyal  to  the  Labour  Party,  was 
decisively  defeated  at  the  ensuing  general 
election,  and  was  again  defeated  in  1935  as 
a  candidate  for  Dudley. 

The  period  of  enforced  parliamentary 
inactivity  was  used  to  make,  with  his  wife, 
a  journey  round  the  world  by  almost  every 
known  means  of  transport,  an  extensive 
visit  to  the  United  States  being  con- 
tinued via  the  Far  East,  Japan,  Mongolia, 
Siberia,  and  Moscow. 

At  a  by-election  in  1937  Benn  was  re- 
turned as  member  for  the  Gorton  division 
of  Manchester.  On  the  outbreak  of  war  in 
1939  he  enlisted  as  a  pilot  officer  in  the 
Royal  Air  Force,  rising  to  the  rank  of  air 
commodore,  being  again  mentioned  in 
dispatches,  and  though  officially  grounded 
was  known  to  have  taken  part  in  air 
operations.  In  January  1942  he  was  called 
to  the  House  of  Lords  as  first  Viscount 
Stansgate,  the  peerage  being  expressly 
granted  to  strengthen  Labour  representa- 
tion in  the  Upper  House.  In  1943-4  he  was 
vice-president  of  the  Allied  Control  Com- 
mission in  Italy. 

In  the  Labour  Government  of  1945 
Stansgate  became  secretary  of  state  for 
air.  In  1946  he  was  entrusted  by  the 
foreign  secretary,  Ernest  Bevin  [q.v.], 
with  the  conduct  in  Cairo  of  the  abortive 
negotiations  for  a  revision  of  the  Anglo- 
Egyptian  Treaty.  Late  in  1946,  on  a 
minor  reconstruction  of  the  Government, 
he  resigned  his  office  at  the  Air  Ministry. 

In     1947,     at    the    age     of    seventy, 


m. 


Benn,  W.  W. 


D.N.B.  1051>1960 


Stansgate  became  president  of  the  Inter- 
Parliamentary  Union,  and  held  this  posi- 
tion for  ten  years  with  universal  esteem. 
In  the  House  of  Lords  he  became  the 
authentic  voice  of  liberalism.  His  persis- 
tence might  cause  temporary  annoyance 
and  once  Lord  Hailsham  (later  Mr.  Quin- 
tin  Hogg)  carried  a  motion  that  'the  noble 
lord  be  no  longer  heard',  but  Stansgate's 
patent  sincerity,  his  complete  freedom 
from  malice,  his  natural  modesty  of  man- 
ner, made  many  admirers  and  no  enemies. 
His  perpetual  effervescence,  his  buoyancy, 
his  wit,  conveyed  an  impression  of  the  gay 
cavalier ;  but  'Wedgy  Benn'  was  really  the 
happy  warrior,  a  man  of  profound  ethical 
conviction,  with  a  great  love  for  his 
fellow  men. 

Stansgate  was  taken  ill  in  the  Palace  of 
Westminster  whilst  waiting  to  speak.  He 
had  closed  the  previous  day's  debate  with 
an  appeal  for  understanding  of  the  prob- 
lems of  India.  He  was  taken  to  hospital 
where  he  died  17  November  1960. 

Benn  married  in  1920  Margaret  Eadie, 
daughter  of  Daniel  Turner  Holmes, 
Liberal  member  for  Govan,  Lanark,  from 
1911  to  1918.  There  were  four  sons  of  the 
marriage  of  whom  the  youngest  died  at 
birth.  The  eldest,  a  flight  lieutenant,  was 
awarded  the  D.F.C.,  and  died  in  1944  of 
injuries  received  in  action.  His  second  son, 
Anthony  Neil  Wedgwood  (born  1925), 
sought  to  renounce  the  succession,  was 
held  to  be  disquahfied  from  the  Commons, 
headed  the  poll  at  the  ensuing  by-election, 
was  again  ruled  disqualified  and  con- 
tinued the  struggle  until,  following  the 
report  of  a  select  committee  of  the  Lords 
and  Commons,  the  law  was  changed  in 
1963  and  having  renounced  his  peerage  he 
was  again  returned  for  Bristol  and  took 
his  seat.  He  became  postmaster-general  in 
the  Labour  Government  of  1964  and 
minister  of  technology  in  1966.  The 
viscountcy  remained  in  abeyance. 

[W.  W.  Benn,  In  the  Side  Shows,  1919; 
W.  W.  and  Margaret  Benn,  Beckoning  Hori- 
zon, 1935;  The  Times,  18  November  1960; 
personal  knowledge.]  Leslie  Hale. 

BENNETT,  GEORGE  MACDONALD 

(1892-1959),  chemist,  was  born  in  Lincoln 
25  October  1892,  the  third  of  a  family  of 
two  sons  and  one  daughter.  He  was  named 
after  George  MacDonald  [q.v.],  a  friend  of 
his  father,  the  Rev.  John  Ebenezer  Ben- 
nett. His  mother  was  Hannah  Martha, 
daughter  of  William  Grange,  a  farmer  in 
Hertfordshire.  For  a  number  of  years 
Bennett's  father  had  been  a  schoolteacher 


at  Tring  and  later  in  Peckham  Rye,  but  he 
subsequently  became  a  Baptist  minister  at 
Lincoln.  In  1893  he  moved  to  a  living  in 
Hackney  but  six  years  later  had  to  resign 
owing  to  ill  health.  Thereafter  he  ran 
a  private  boarding-school  at  Clacton-on- 
Sea,  together  with  Harold  Picton  who  had 
previously  been  a  pupil  of  (Sir)  William 
Ramsay  [q.v.]  at  University  College, 
London.  Picton  was  responsible  for 
science  teaching  and  took  charge  of  the 
school  when  J.  E.  Bennett  died  in  1906. 

Bennett  was  a  pupil  in  the  school  for 
ten  years  and  under  Picton' s  influence 
developed  a  liking  for  chemistry  which 
decided  him  to  take  it  up  as  a  career.  He 
obtained  a  London  University  exhibition 
in  1909  and  entered  East  London  (later 
Queen  Mary)  College  as  an  internal 
student,  subsequently  obtaining  a  scholar- 
ship in  chemistry.  In  1911  he  took  the 
B.A.  degree  externally  in  French,  Latin, 
physics,  and  chemistry,  and  in  the  follow- 
ing year  he  was  awarded  first  class  honours 
in  chemistry.  He  then  began  research  in 
organic  chemistry  but  in  1913  he  ob- 
tained an  open  exhibition  at  St.  John's 
College,  Cambridge,  becoming  a  founda- 
tion scholar  and  taking  a  first  class  in 
part  i  of  the  natural  sciences  tripos  in  the 
following  year.  In  1915,  when  he  obtained 
a  first  class  in  chemistry  in  part  ii,  he  be- 
came a  research  assistant  to  (Sir)  William 
Pope  [q.v.]  with  whom,  and  with  C.  S. 
Gibson,  he  made  notable  contributions  in 
the  field  of  explosives  and  war  gases.  He  was 
a  fellow  of  St.  John's  from  1917  until  1923. 

In  1918  Bennett  left  Cambridge  to  take 
up  a  post  in  industry,  but  he  was  not 
particularly  happy  there  and  in  1921 
he  became  a  senior  demonstrator  in  the 
chemistry  department  of  Guy's  Hospital 
medical  school.  In  1924  he  became  lec- 
turer in  organic  chemistry  in  the  univer- 
sity of  Sheffield  where  he  built  up  an 
enthusiastic  team  of  research  and  in  1931 
was  appointed  to  the  Firth  chair  of 
chemistry.  During  the  next  seven  years 
at  Sheffield  notable  contributions  to  re- 
search were  made  and  all  those  who  were 
fortunate  enough  to  work  under  Bennett's 
guidance  derived  much  inspiration. 

In  1938  Bennett  became  professor  of 
organic  chemistry  at  King's  College,  Lon- 
don, and  was  in  charge  of  the  chemistry 
department  when  the  college  was  evacuated 
to  Bristol  at  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939. 
There,  in  addition  to  his  teaching  and 
administrative  duties,  he  made  studies 
on  the  mechanism  of  aromatic  nitration 
which  were  of  great  importance  in  relation 


02 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bennett,  P.  F.  B. 


to  the  development  of  explosives.  King's 
College  returned  to  London  in  1943  but  in 
1945  Bennett  left  academic  work  to  be- 
come the  government  chemist.  Here  he 
found  much  administrative  work.  He  also 
served  on  numerous  government  and  other 
committees  but  he  maintained  a  close  con- 
tact with  the  academic  world  through 
the  university  of  London,  the  Chemical 
Society,  and  the  Royal  Society.  He  was 
also  concerned  in  the  development  of  new 
experimental  techniques  such  as  X-ray 
diffraction  and  gas  chromatography. 

Bennett  obtained  the  degrees  of  Ph.D. 
(London,  1924)  and  Sc.D.  (Cantab.,  1932). 
He  was  elected  a  fellow  of  Queen  Mary 
College  in  1939  and  F.R.S.  in  1947.  In 
1948  he  was  appointed  C.B.  He  gave 
generously  of  his  time  in  the  service 
of  chemistry,  being  a  member  of  the 
council  of  the  Chemical  Society  (1929-32), 
honorary  secretary  (1939—46),  and  vice- 
president  (1948-51) ;  he  was  a  member 
of  the  council  of  the  Royal  Institute  of 
Chemistry  (1949-51)  and  vice-president 
(1951-3).  He  was  also  a  member  of  the 
council  of  the  Faraday  Society  (1946-8) 
and  honorary  secretary  of  the  Chemical 
Council  (1945-51). 

Bennett  was  reserved  in  nature  but 
could  show  tremendous  enthusiasm  and 
excitement  when  research  investigations 
were  going  well.  In  all  his  dealings  with 
students  he  was  strictly  honest  and  only 
the  hard  worker  would  get  his  fullest  sup- 
port. He  was  a  prolific  reader  but  his  main 
interest  was  always  chemistry  and  apart 
from  walking  he  had  few  outdoor  activi- 
ties. He  was  in  every  sense  a  true  scientist, 
scrupulous  and  conscientious,  and  a  good 
and  inspiring  teacher.  His  contributions  to 
chemical  knowledge  ranged  over  a  wide 
field  and  he  was  author  or  joint  author  of 
some  ninety  publications,  most  of  which 
appeared  in  the  Journal  of  the  Chemical 
Society. 

He  suffered  a  severe  heart  attack  in 
1953  after  which  he  did  little  beyond  his 
official  duties  at  the  Government  Labora- 
tory. In  1918  he  married  Doris,  daughter 
of  James  Laycock,  M.P.S.,  of  Fulham, 
and  when  she  died  in  1958  he  felt  this 
severely.  They  had  no  children  and  when 
Bennett  himself  died  in  London,  after  a 
further  heart  attack,  9  February  1959,  he 
left  the  bulk  of  his  estate  to  Dr.  Bar- 
nardo's  Homes. 

[The  Times,  11  February  1959;  R.  D. 
Haworth  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of  Fellows 
of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  v,  1959 ;  personal 
knowledge.]  R.  L.  Wain. 


BENNETT,  PETER  FREDERICK 
BLAKER,  Bahon  Bennett  of  Edqbas- 
TON  (1880-1957),  industrialist,  was  born 
at  Dartford,  Kent,  16  April  1880,  the 
eldest  son  of  Frederick  Charles  Bennett, 
a  carpenter  and  sometime  organizing 
secretary  for  the  Y.M.C.A.,  and  his  wife, 
Annie  Eliza  Blaker.  The  family  moved  to 
Birmingham  when  he  was  twelve  and  he 
was  educated  at  King  Edward's  School, 
Five  Ways,  Birmingham.  His  lifelong  con- 
nection with  the  motor  industry  began 
in  1903  when  he  joined  the  Electrical 
Ignition  Company.  Four  years  later,  when 
sales  manager,  he  left  the  firm  and 
entered  into  partnership  with  James 
Albert  Thomson,  founding  a  small  con- 
cern in  Birmingham  known  as  Thomson 
Bennett,  Ltd.  WTien  the  company,  em- 
ploying only  a  hundred  or  so,  moved  to  a 
new  site,  a  furniture  van  sufficed  to  trans- 
fer all  the  machinery.  In  December  1914, 
on  the  initiative  of  Harry  Lucas,  the 
company  was  amalgamated  with  Joseph 
Lucas,  Ltd.,  to  promote  the  manufacture 
of  combined  ignition  and  hghting  systems 
for  cars,  tanks,  and  aircraft.  At  that 
time  the  company  employed  some  four 
thousand  workers;  by  1939  there  were 
thirty  thousand.  This  success  was  due 
largely  to  the  technical  vision  of  Bennett 
and  the  commercial  ability  of  his  joint 
managing  director,  Oliver  Lucas,  both  of 
whom  provided  the  necessary  drive  and 
sense  of  piu-pose.  WTien  the  latter  died 
in  1948  Bennett  became  chairman  and 
managing  director  of  the  Joseph  Lucas 
group  of  companies. 

Considerable  difficulties  were  encoun- 
tered during  the  critical  period  of  the  war 
of  1914-18  principally  because  the  manu- 
facture of  magnetos  and  other  components 
was  a  German  monopoly.  Bennett  was 
appointed  chairman  of  the  Aero  Magneto 
Manufacturers  Association  and  of  the 
British  Ignition  Apparatus  Association — 
both  newly  sponsored  by  the  Admiralty. 
In  the  inter-war  years  Bennett  was  a 
member  of  the  British  trade  deputation 
to  Virginia  in  1930  and  represented  the 
British  motor  industry  at  the  Ottawa  con- 
ference of  1932,  the  year  in  which  he  was 
president  of  the  Birmingham  chamber  of 
commerce.  He  was  president  of  the 
Society  of  Motor  Manufacturers  and 
Traders  in  1935-^  and  president  of  the 
Federation  of  British  Industries  i  in 
1938-9.  V  ■ 

From  1938  until  the  outbreak  of  war  in 
the  following  year  Bennett  was  a  member 
of  the  prime  minister's  panel  of  industrial 


98 


Bennett,  P.  F.  B. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


advisers.  In  1939-40  he  was  director- 
general  of  tanks  and  transport  at  the 
Ministry  of  Supply  and  from  1940  to  1941 
director-general  of  emergency  services 
organization  at  the  Ministry  of  Aircraft 
Production.  In  1941-4  he  was  chairman 
of  the  Automatic  Gun  Board.  He  was  also 
honorary  colonel  of  the  9th  battalion 
Royal  Warwickshire  Regiment. 

In  1940  Bennett  entered  Parliament  as 
member  for  the  Edgbaston  division  of 
Birmingham  in  succession  to  Neville 
Chamberlain.  Although  formerly  a  Liberal 
he  held  his  seat  as  a  Conservative  and  re- 
tained it  until  1953,  serving  as  parliamen- 
tary secretary  to  the  Ministry  of  Labour 
in  1951-2.  He  was  knighted  in  1941  and 
raised  to  the  peerage  in  1953. 

Brought  up  as  a  Methodist,  Bennett  was 
a  religious  man  and  a  teetotaller  and  as  a 
young  man  was  a  superintendent  of  Sun- 
day schools  in  Acocks  Green.  He  was 
president  of  the  Birmingham  Y.M.C.A. 
and  of  the  Birmingham  General  Dispen- 
sary and  a  county  commissioner  of  the 
Boy  Scout  movement  to  which  he  gave 
lifelong  support.  He  endowed  a  social 
centre  for  a  large  new  housing  area  in 
Kingstanding  and  was  a  generous  bene- 
factor of  various  Midlands  institutions, 
including  the  Y.M.C.A.  for  which  he 
provided  funds  for  the  concert  hall  which 
bears  his  name. 

In  the  field  of  education,  he  was  a 
governor  of  the  university  of  Birmingham 
which  in  1950  conferred  on  him  an 
honorary  LL.D.  and  he  established  a 
scholarship  fund  to  enable  unsponsored 
students  to  attend  the  university's  post- 
graduate course  in  engineering  production 
under  the  Lucas  professor  of  engineering 
production.  The  Lucas  chair  had  been 
endowed  a  few  years  earlier  by  his  com- 
pany as  a  result  of  the  efforts  and  advice 
of  Bennett  and  his  deputy  (Sir)  Bertram 
Waring  who  was  later  to  succeed  him  as 
chairman  of  his  company. 

Throughout  his  life  Bennett  maintained 
a  keen  interest  in  sporting  activities,  play- 
ing rugby  football  in  his  younger  days  and 
continuing  to  play  golf  and  tennis  in  his 
later  years.  He  was  also  particularly  fond 
of  walking.  He  took  a  lively  interest  in 
cricket  and  derived  much  satisfaction 
from  his  election  as  president  of  the  War- 
wickshire County  Cricket  Club  in  1955. 

In  1905  Bennett  married  Agnes,  daugh- 
ter of  Joseph  Palmer,  who  survived  him 
and  who  had  a  distinguished  record  in 
social  service  and  to  whom  he  looked  for 
guidance  and  encouragement  throughout 


his  long  career.  Of  exceptional  wisdom 
and  strong  character,  Bennett  was  always 
honest,  fair,  and  often  generous  in  his 
dealings.  He  had  no  children  and  the  title 
became  extinct  when  he  died  at  his  home 
at  Four  Oaks,  Warwickshire,  27  Septem- 
ber 1957.  A  portrait  by  (Sir)  James  Gunn 
is  in  the  possession  of  the  Joseph  Lucas 
Company,  Ltd. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
N.  A.  Dudley. 

BENTLEY,  EDMUND   CLERIHEW 

(1875-1956),  writer,  was  born  in  London 
10  July  1875,  the  eldest  son  of  John 
Edmund  Bentley,  a  civil  servant  in  the 
Queen's  Bench  office,  and  his  wife,  Mar- 
garet Richardson  Clerihew.  He  was  a  boy 
at  St.  Paul's  School  in  the  great  days  of 
Frederick  Walker  [q.v.]  and  there  his 
lifelong  friendship  with  G.  K.  Chesterton 
[q.v.]  was  formed.  He  was  a  member  of 
the  history  eighth,  newly  created  by 
Walker,  and  won  a  history  exhibition  at 
Merton  College,  Oxford.  He  fell  in  love 
with  the  college  at  once  and  never  fell  out 
of  it.  Furthermore,  he  quickly  and  grate- 
fully absorbed  the  spirit  of  Oxford.  At 
the  Union  he  was  an  effective  debater  in 
a  quiet  and  scholarly  style  and  became 
president  in  1898.  F.  E.  Smith  (afterwards 
Earl  of  Birkenhead,  q.v.),  then  a  recent 
ex-president,  was  still  a  prominent  figure 
at  debates,  and  when  he  became  a  fellow 
of  Merton  gave  Bentley  much  friendly 
counsel,  including  the  advice  to  disregard 
the  practice  of  a  candidate  not  voting  for 
himself  at  a  presidential  election.  John 
(later  Viscount)  Simon,  F.  W.  Hirst,  and 
John  Buchan  (later  Lord  Tweedsmuir) 
[qq.v.]  were  also  among  his  friends ;  he 
knew  Hilaire  Belloc  [q.v.]  slightly,  but  it 
was  not  until  later  that  he  became  inti- 
mate with  him.  His  interests  during  his 
Oxford  years  were  far  from  being  con- 
fined to  political  and  intellectual  discus- 
sion. He  was  captain  of  the  Merton  boat 
club  and  remained  a  faithful  apologist  of 
the  rowing  man.  Regretfully  he  gave  up 
rowing  in  his  fourth  year  in  order  to  work 
for  his  degree  and  the  great  disappoint- 
ment of  his  life  was  his  failure  in  1898  to 
obtain  a  first  in  history. 

In  1898  he  went  down  from  Oxford  and 
read  for  the  bar.  He  did  well  in  his  exami- 
nations at  the  Inner  Temple,  became  a 
pupil  in  (Sir)  William  HanseU's  chambers 
in  1900,  and  was  called  in  1902.  One  of  his 
closest  friends  recorded  that  Bentley  had 
all  the  qualifications  of  a  successful  barrister 
except  the  legal  mind.  On  the  other  hand. 


94 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Berry 


he  had  from  his  schooldays  onwards  been 
active  with  his  pen.  At  St.  Paul's  he 
had  been  a  contributor  to  the  Debater, 
founded  by  his  friend,  Lucian  Oldershaw ; 
at  Oxford  he  had  written  regularly  for  the 
I  sis  and  for  the  J.C.R.,  the  magazine  in 
which  Belloc's  Lambkin's  Remains  first 
appeared.  While  still  in  chambers  he 
wrote  light  verse  for  Punch  under  the 
critical  eye  of  (Sir)  Owen  Seaman  [q.v.], 
and  by  the  end  of  1899  he  was  a  regular 
contributor  to  the  Speaker,  the  Liberal 
weekly  edited  by  J.  L.  Hammond  [q.v.]. 
For  that  paper  he  wrote  many  reviews  and 
took  some  satisfaction  in  being  the  first 
critic  to  recognize  the  quality  of  Ernest 
Bramah's  The  Wallet  ofKai  Lung,  In  1901 
his  forthcoming  marriage  was  one  of  the 
reasons  which  led  to  his  decision  to  be  a 
journalist  by  profession  and  to  join  the 
staff  of  the  Daily  News.  The  editor  was 
Rudolph  Chambers  Lehmann,  a  good 
Liberal,  a  strong  opponent  of  the  South 
African  war,  and  a  great  oarsman.  Thus 
Bentley  felt  thoroughly  at  home  in  his 
new  work  and  with  his  new  colleagues, 
among  whom  were  Herbert  Paul,  H.  W. 
Massingham  [qq.v.],  and  Harold  Spender. 
Lehmann  was  succeeded  by  A.  G. 
Gardiner  [q.v.]  under  whom  Bentley  in 
due  course  became  deputy  editor.  In  that 
capacity  he  was  faced  at  times  with 
critical  decisions  and  he  confessed  that  he 
enjoyed  the  experience.  When  the  Daily 
News  was  amalgamated  with  the  Morning 
Leader,  Bentley  felt  that  he  was  no  longer 
in  sympathy  with  the  more  violent  ten- 
dencies of  Liberal  journalism  and  in  1912 
he  joined  the  Daily  Telegraph  with  which 
he  remained  for  twenty-two  years. 

Had  Bentley  confined  his  activities  to 
leading  articles,  his  name,  like  that  of 
many  eminent  journalists,  might  well 
have  been  little  known  and  gradually  for- 
gotten. In  fact,  his  name  is  linked  with 
two  highly  individual  achievements:  he 
added  a  new  word  to  the  language  and  he 
wrote  what  was  described  as  the  best 
detective  novel  of  the  century. 

As  he  sat  in  the  science  class  at  St. 
Paul's  at  the  age  of  sixteen,  the  following 
lines  came  into  his  head: 

Sir  Humphrey  Davy 

Abominated  gravy. 

He  lived  in  the  odium 

Of  having  discovered  Sodium. 

Such  was  the  beginning  of  what  Chester- 
ton called  the  'severe  and  stately  form  of 
free  verse  known  as  the  Clerihew'.  Sir 
Humphry  soon  had  a  number  of  com- 
panions and  their  lives  were  entered  into 


a  notebook  with  appropriate  sketches  by 
Chesterton.  Bentley  chose  to  drop  his  sur- 
name for  the  occasion  and  Biography  for 
Beginners  by  E.  Clerihew,  with  illustrations 
by  G.K.C.,  was  published  in  1905.  The 
book  did  not  have  an  immediate  success, 
but  in  Bentley's  own  words,  'in  course  of 
time  it  seemed  to  find  its  way  into  the 
hands  of  connoisseurs  of  idiocy  every- 
where'. More  Biography  followed  in  1929 ; 
Baseless  Biography,  with  illustrations  by 
the  author's  son,  Nicolas,  in  1939 ;  finally 
Clerihews  Complete  appeared  in  1951. 

It  was  in  1910  that  Bentley  meditated 
upon  a  new  kind  of  detective  story.  Like 
all  boys  of  his  generation  he  had  revelled 
in  the  Sherlock  Holmes  series;  but 
Holmes's  eccentricities  and  his  reputed 
infallibility  irritated  him  and  he  con- 
ceived the  notion  of  a  detective's  con- 
vincing solution  being  proved  wrong  in 
the  end.  The  result  of  his  meditation  was 
Trent's  Last  Case,  published  as  one  of 
Nelson's  two-shilling  novels  in  1913.  It 
was  a  best-seller  immediately  and  unUke 
some  other  best-sellers  it  remains  very 
much  alive — in  many  languages — after 
fifty  years.  Amid  the  torrential  output  of 
detective  stories  in  that  period,  it  still  holds 
its  distinctive  place.  What  Trent  deduced 
was  true,  but  it  was  not  the  whole  truth, 
and  the  complete  revelation  is  reserved, 
with  effective  artistry,  for  the  last  chapter. 

Although  he  never  wholly  recovered 
from  the  'shame  and  disappointment'  of 
his  second  class  at  Oxford,  Bentley  was 
happy  in,  and  proud  of,  his  profession  as  a 
journalist.  When  war  broke  out  in  1939  he 
returned  to  the  Daily  Telegraph ;  but  the 
worlds  that  he  loved  best — Oxford  in  the 
nineties  and  pre-1914  Fleet  Street — had 
vanished  and  he  recalled  them  nostalgic- 
ally in  Those  Days  ( 1 940). 

In  1902  Bentley  married  Violet  Alice 
Mary  (died  1949),  fourth  daughter  of 
General  Neil  Edmonstone  Boileau,  late  of 
the  Bengal  Staff  Corps.  They  had  one 
daughter  and  two  sons,  of  whom  the 
younger,  Nicolas  (who  contributes  to  this 
Supplement),  has  illustrated  his  father's, 
and  many  other,  books.  Bentley  died  in 
London  30  March  1956.  A  life-size  char- 
coal head  by  H.  G.  Riviere  is  in  the  pos- 
session of  the  family. 

[E.  C.  Bentley,  Those  Days,  1940 ;  Nicolas 
Bentley,  A  Version  of  the  Truth,  I960.] 

S.  C.  Roberts. 


BERRY,  WILLIAM  EWERT,  first  Vis- 
count Camrose  (1879-1954),  newspaper 


9S; 


Berry 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


proprietor,  was  bom  at  Merthyr  Tydfil 
23  June  1879,  the  second  of  the  three  sons, 
all  to  be  raised  to  the  peerage,  of  Alder- 
man John  Mathias  Berry,  estj^te  agent,  by 
his  wife,  Mary  Ann,  daughter  of  Thomas 
Rowe,  of  Pembroke  Dock.  At  the  age  of 
fourteen  he  was  given  his  opportunity  as 
a  cub  joumahst  on  the  Merthyr  Times  by 
W.  W.  Hadley  [q.v.].  After  working  on 
other  South  Wales  papers  he  moved  to 
London  in  1898  and  became  a  reporter 
on  the  Investors'  Guardian  at  thirty-five 
shillings  a  week.  This  post  did  not  last 
long,  and  three  months  of  unemployment 
was  a  chastening  experience  which  Berry 
was  never  to  forget  in  his  subsequent 
dealings  with  staff.  He  next  became  a  re- 
porter on  the  Commercial  Press  Associa- 
tion but  in  1901  adventurously  launched 
a  paper  of  his  own,  the  Advertising  World, 
the  pioneer  journal  in  that  field.  His  only 
capital  was  a  hundred  pounds  lent  by 
his  elder  brother  (Henry)  Seymour  (later 
Lord  Buckland),  a  coadjutor  of  D.  A. 
Thomas  (later  Viscount  Rhondda,  q.v.)  in 
various  coal  and  steel  enterprises.  Berry 
was  editor,  sub-editor,  advertisement 
canvasser  and  copy-writer,  and  layout 
man.  He  is  reputed  to  have  written  every 
word  of  the  first  issue.  He  lived  frugally, 
worked  long  hours,  and  walked  to  his 
office  from  his  lodgings  in  Forest  Gate. 
Before  long  he  was  able  to  bring  his 
brother  (James)  Gomer  (later  Viscount 
Kemsley)  from  Wales  to  operate  on  the 
business  side.  It  was  a  most  friendly  part- 
nership, unclouded  by  any  disagreement. 
In  their  bachelor  days  they  shared  a  flat 
at  Arundel  Street,  Strand;  and  until  1936 
they  had  a  joint  banking  account,  on 
which  either  could  draw  without  consult- 
ing the  other.  By  1905  they  were  in  a 
position  to  sell  the  Advertising  World  at  an 
excellent  price.  They  bought  a  publishing 
business  and  started  sundry  periodicals, 
notably  in  1909  Boxing  (of  which  William 
was  a  devotee).  Their  interests  widened 
rapidly  but  they  were  always  discerning  in 
their  acquisitions. 

A  major  operation  was  the  purchase  in 
1915  of  the  Sunday  Times  which  William 
Berry  happily  supervised  as  editor-in-chief 
for  twenty-two  years,  taking  a  keen  per- 
sonal interest  in  its  progress  and  nursing 
its  circulation  against  that  of  its  rival, 
the  Observer.  At  the  time  of  the  purchase 
the  Observer  sold  about  200,000  weekly 
and  the  Sunday  Times  fewer  than  50,000 ; 
by  1949  the  respective  figures  were  384,001 
and  568,346. 

In  1919  the  brothers  acquired  the  St. 


Clement's  Press,  with  which  went  the 
Fi7iancial  Times.  Berry  remained  chair- 
man of  this  paper  until  it  passed  into  the 
ownership  of  the  Financial  News  in  1945. 
In  these  post-war  years  the  activities  of 
the  Berrys  took  on  an  ever-increasing 
momentum,  and  important  acquisitions 
were  the  Weldon's  group,  Kelly's  Direc- 
tories, and  the  Graphic  publications.  In 
1921  William  Berry  became  a  baronet. 

The  year  1924  saw  the  foundation  of 
Allied  Newspapers  (later  Kemsley  News- 
papers), controlled  by  the  Berry  brothers 
and  Sir  E.  M.  (later  Lord)  Iliffe  [q.v.].  The 
purpose  of  this  group  was  to  take  over 
most  of  the  Hulton  papers  from  Lord 
Rothermere  [q.v.].  These  included  the 
Daily  Dispatch,  the  Manchester  Evening 
Chronicle,  and  the  Sunday  Chronicle. 
During  the  years  up  to  1928  Allied  News- 
papers further  acquired  papers  in  Glasgow, 
Sheffield,  Newcastle,  Middlesbrough,  and 
Aberdeen.  They  also  bought  the  Daily 
Sketch  and  Illustrated  Sunday  Herald  from 
Rothermere's  Daily  Mail  Trust.  In  Car- 
diff, where  they  already  held  the  Western 
Mail  and  the  Evening  Express,  they 
acquired  the  South  Wales  Daily  News  and 
the  South  Wales  Echo,  merging  the  two 
morning  and  the  two  evening  papers. 

Newspapers  apart,  the  group's  biggest 
purchase  was  made  in  1926:  the  Amalga- 
mated Press  from  the  executors  of  Lord 
Northcliffe  [q.v.].  This  great  concern 
comprised  a  large  number  of  non-political 
periodicals,  ranging  from  Woman's  Journal 
to  children's  comic  sheets.  It  included  a 
powerful  encyclopedia  and  book  section 
which  had  been  built  up  under  North- 
cUffe's  aegis  chiefly  by  (Sir)  John  Ham- 
merton  and  Arthur  Mee  [q.v.].  There  were 
also  printing  works  at  Blackfriars  and 
Gravesend  and  the  Imperial  Paper  Mills, 
also  at  Gravesend.  In  1927  paper  supplies 
were  further  augmented  by  the  acquisi- 
tion of  Edward  Lloyd,  Ltd.,  one  of  the 
largest  mills  in  the  world. 

The  vast  pubhshing  enterprise  which 
had  been  built  up  lacked  only  one  element 
to  make  it  complete — the  possession  of  a 
first-rate  serious  London  daily  newspaper. 
When  in  1927  Lord  Burnham  [q.v.],  chief 
proprietor  of  the  Daily  Telegraph,  was 
appointed  to  the  Indian  statutory  com- 
mission at  a  time  when  the  paper  was 
in  urgent  need  of  modernization,  he  ap- 
proached the  Berry-Iliffe  group,  and  the 
sale  was  quickly  arranged.  The  new  owners 
took  over  on  1  January  1928 ;  Burnham's 
nephew  G.  E.  F.  Lawson  (later  fourth 
Lord  Burnham)  remained  as  manager  and 


96 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bethune-Baker 


subsequently  became  managing  director 
(1945-61). 

The  Berry  brothers  now  controlled  two 
national,  one  specialized,  and  six  provin- 
cial, morning  papers;  eight  provincial 
evenings;  eight  provincial  weeklies;  and 
about  seventy  periodicals.  No  attempt  was 
made  to  dictate  or  alter  the  politics  of  any 
of  these  papers. 

William  Berry,  raised  to  the  peerage  in 
1929  as  Baron  Camrose,  gradually  carried 
out  necessary  changes  in  the  type  and  for- 
mat of  the  Daily  Telegraph.  On  1  Decem- 
ber 1930  he  reduced  the  price  from  2d.  to 
Id.  and  the  circulation  virtually  doubled 
itself  in  one  day  to  200,000.  While  the 
more  popular  sheets  were  vying  with  one 
another  to  attract  readers  by  free  in- 
surance and  gift  schemes,  the  Daily 
Telegraph,  eschewing  such  adventitious 
aids  and  preserving  its  dignity  of  approach 
and  presentation,  slowly  but  steadily  in- 
creased its  readership,  and  by  1939  the 
figure  exceeded  750,000.  In  1937  it  had 
absorbed  the  right-wing  Conservative 
Morning  Post,  most  of  whose  100,000 
readers  went  with  it.  In  1949  the  circula- 
tion was  given  as  1,015,514. 

The  long  and  close  association  between 
Camrose,  Kemsley,  and  Iliffe  was  amic- 
ably dissolved  in  1937,  chiefly  because 
each  had  a  growing  family,  and  it  was  felt 
expedient  to  spUt  the  holdings,  Camrose 
took  the  Daily  Telegraph,  the  Amalga- 
mated Press,  and  the  Financial  Times.  In 
1941  he  was  advanced  to  a  viscountey. 

For  a  few  weeks  in  1939  Camrose  was 
controller  of  press  relations  in  the  Ministry 
of  Information  where  he  effected  a  reduc- 
tion over  30  per  cent  in  the  number 
of  responsible  officials  and  then  retired, 
'having  organized  myself  out  of  a  job'. 

Camrose  had  a  high  conception  of  the 
professional  journalistic  function,  and  dis- 
liked vulgar  sensationalism.  He  took  great 
care  in  the  selection  of  authoritative  con- 
tributors. He  required  distinction  in  Eng- 
lish style  and  was  a  connoisseur  of 
typography  and  layout.  Worlds  away 
from  the  conventional  picture  of  the  ruth- 
less newspaper  proprietor,  he  treated  his 
staff  with  courtesy  and  solicitude  and  he 
kept  many  of  them  over  long  periods  of 
years.  It  was  characteristic  that  he  should 
resist  the  Fleet  Street  trend  towards 
young  staffs,  preferring  to  make  the  fullest 
use  of  older  men  of  long  service  and 
experience. 

Distinguished  in  bearing  and  dress,  and 
a  gifted  after-dinner  speaker,  Camrose 
wa3  punctilious  in  his  habits,  accessible, 


genial,  good-tempered,  with  a  lively  sense 
of  humour.  In  financial  matters  he  was 
strictly  honourable.  His  self-confidence 
was  tempered  by  good  judgement  and 
prudence.  He  had  no  political  ambitions 
and  had  no  liking  for  controversy,  but  he 
always  knew  his  mind  about  public  affairs. 
Brought  up  a  Liberal,  he  became  a 
convinced  Conservative  of  the  centre. 
Although  a  warm  admirer  of  Neville 
Chamberlain,  he  broke  with  him  on  his 
Munich  policy.  On  that,  as  on  most  other 
questions,  he  was  a  firm  supporter  of 
(Sir)  Winston  Churchill  and  one  of  his 
closest  friends. 

Camrose  was  interested  in  motoring  and 
yachting.  In  early  years  he  was  a  keen 
rider  but  gave  this  up  after  sustaining 
severe  injuries  when  thrown  in  1926.  It 
was  as  the  result  of  a  riding  accident  that 
his  brother.  Lord  Buckland,  died  in  1928. 
Camrose  and  Kemsley  acquired  from  their 
brother  some  steel  and  coal  holdings,  but 
this  was  after  their  establishment  as  news- 
paper owners,  and  both  lost  money  in 
preventing  the  closure  of  some  collieries 
near  Merthyr  Tydfil. 

In  1905  Berry  married  Mary  Agnes 
(died  1962),  eldest  daughter  of  Thomas 
Corns,  of  Bolton  Street,  London,  W.  1,  by 
whom  he  had  four  sons  and  four  daugh- 
ters. His  eldest  son,  John  Seymour  (bom 
1909),  who  succeeded  to  the  title  when 
Camrose  died  in  Southampton  15  June 
1954,  became  deputy  chairman  of  the 
Daily  Telegraph;  the  second  son  (Wil- 
liam) Michael,  became  its  editor-in-chief) 
and  a  life  peer  (Baron  Hartwell)  in  1968. 
In  1958  they  disposed  of  the  Amalgamated 
Press  to  Cecil  H.  King  of  Daily  Mirror 
Holdings,  who  renamed  the  group  Fleet-* 
way  Publications,  Ltd.  A  portrait  in  oils  of 
Canu-ose  by  Maurice  Codner  is  in  the 
offices  of  the  Daily  Telegraph;  and  a 
memorial  tablet  by  Sir  Albert  Richardson 
in  the  crypt  of  St.  Paul's  Cathedral. 

[Daily  Telegraph,  Manchester  Guardian,  and' 
The  Times,  16  June  1954 ;  Sunday  Times,  2a 
June  1954;  Bernard  Falk,  Five  Years  Dead; 
1937 ;  Viscount  Camrose,  British  Newspapers 
and  their  Controllers,  1947 ;  Report  of  the  Royal 
Commission  on  the  Press,  1947-9,  1949; 
private  information.] 

Herbert  B.  Grimspiti;;?, 

BESSBOROUGH,  ninth  Earl  of  (ISSOt' 
1956),  governor-general  of  Canada.  [See 
PoNSONBY,  Verb  Brabazon.J      ,  ^  ...v  .    j 

BETHUNE-BAKER,  JAMES  TTIANK- 
LIN  (1861-1951),  professor  of  divinity. 


8662062 


Bethune-Baker 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


was  born  23  August  1861  in  Birmingham, 
the  third  son  of  Alfred  Baker,  surgeon,  by 
his  wife  Emmehne  Bethune,  daughter  of 
George  Armitage,  Charles  and  Franklin 
Baker  [qq.v.]  were  his  uncles  and  his  aunt 
was  the  mother  of  Archbishop  E.  W.  Ben- 
son [q.v.].  In  1884  Baker  assumed  the 
additional  name  of  Bethune.  He  was 
educated  at  King  Edward's  School,  Bir- 
mingham, whence  he  gained  a  classical 
scholarship  at  Pembroke  College,  Cam- 
bridge. In  1884  he  took  a  first  class  in  part 
i,  in  1885  a  third  class  in  part  ii  of  the 
classical  tripos ;  in  1886  a  first  class  in  part 
ii  of  the  theological  tripos.  In  1886  he  won 
the  George  Wilhams  prize  and  submitted 
an  unsuccessful  (and  so  unpublished) 
essay  for  the  Burney  prize  in  which  his 
later  modernist  theology  is  clearly  fore- 
shadowed ;  in  1887  he  submitted  a  success- 
ful essay  on  *The  Influence  of  Christianity 
on  War',  and  in  the  following  year  won  the 
Norrisian  prize.  In  1886  he  returned  to 
teach  at  King  Edward's  School;  and  in 
1888,  although  an  anxious  request  for 
reassurance  of  his  orthodoxy  came  from 
the  dean  of  Pembroke,  E.  J.  Heriz  Smith, 
he  was  ordained  deacon,  accepting  a 
title  at  St.  George's,  Edgbaston.  He  was 
ordained  priest  in  the  next  year  and  in 
1891  was  elected  into  a  fellowship  at  Pem- 
broke which  he  retained  until  his  death. 
He  was  also  made  dean,  an  office  to  which 
in  1906  he  was  not  reappointed  in  conse- 
quence of  complaints  concerning  his  atti- 
tude to  biblical  criticism.  Thereafter, 
although  continuing  to  attend  college 
chapel  regularly,  he  never  again  felt  con- 
fident to  preach  there,  except  on  the 
occasion  of  a  memorial  service  for  his 
friend  A.  J.  Mason  whose  notice  he  con- 
tributed to  this  Dictionary. 

Bethune-Baker  proceeded  B.D.  in  1901 
and  D.D.  in  1912.  His  scholarly  reputa- 
tion was  established  by  The  Meaning  of 
Homoottsios  in  the  Constantinopolitan  Creed 
(1901)  and  his  Introduction  to  the  Early 
History  qf  Christian  Doctrine  (1903)  which 
became  a  standard  textbook.  Through  the 
Archbishop's  Mission  to  Assyrian  Chris- 
tians a  copy  of  a  Syriac  manuscript  con- 
taining the  Bazaar  of  Heraclides  by 
Nestorius  came  into  his  hands;  with  the 
aid  of  a  translation  by  Dom  Richard 
Hugh  Connolly  (whose  name  did  not 
appear  on  account  of  the  papal  anti- 
modernist  decrees  of  1907)  he  wrote  Nes- 
torius and  his  Teaching  (1908),  claiming 
that  Nestorius  did  not  hold  the  doctrines 
attributed  to  him  and  was  wrongly  con- 
denmed  by  the  Ecumenical  Council  of 


Ephesus,  431.  In  1911  he  succeeded  W.  R. 
Inge  [q.v.]  as  Lady  Margaret's  professor. 
Except  for  his  time-absorbing  work  as 
editor  of  the  Journal  of  Theological  Studies 
(1903-35)  by  which  he  guided  and  main- 
tained the  standards  of  British  theology 
for  a  generation,  his  interest  now  turned 
from  personal  contributions  to  learning 
and  was  more  devoted  to  teaching  in  Cam- 
bridge and  to  the  advancement  of  liberal 
Christianity.  In  1913-14  he  became  in- 
volved in  the  controversy  concerning 
clerical  orthodoxy  in  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land. His  open  letter  to  Charles  Gore 
[q.v.],  The  Miracle  of  Christianity  (1914), 
pleads  for  the  logical  consequences  of  the 
liberal  view  of  the  Bible  adopted  by  Gore 
himself  in  Lua;  Mundi  (1889).  This  avowal 
of  sympathy  with  'the  critical  school'  led 
his  friend  Bishop  J.  R.  Harmer  of  Roches- 
ter to  request  his  resignation  from  the 
office  of  examining  chaplain  which  he  had 
held  since  1905;  believing  that  hope  lay 
only  in  the  coexistence  of  conservative 
and  modernist  views  he  refused  and  Har- 
mer (who  did  not  share  this  belief)  relieved 
him  of  his  post.  The  claim  that  the  Angli- 
can principle  of  comprehensiveness  ex- 
tended not  only  to  the  unity  of  Catholic 
and  Protestant  but  also  to  that  of  con- 
servative and  modernist  he  later  ex- 
pounded in  Unity  and  Truth  in  the  Church 
of  England  (1934).  His  dogmatic  beliefs 
are  best  seen  in  The  Faith  of  the  Apostles^ 
Creed  (1918)  and  in  a  collection  of  essays, 
published  at  the  suggestion  of  (Sir)  S.  C. 
Roberts,  2'he  Way  of  Modernism  (1927). 
He  advocated  an  evolutionary,  immanen- 
tist  approach  to  the  Incarnation  and  free 
inquiry  in  historical  criticism,  rejecting  as 
irreligious  the  view  that  the  Virgin  Birth 
and  the  Resurrection  are  truths  to  be 
accepted  on  supernatural  authority  by  all 
believers.  He  lacked  the  philosophical 
equipment  to  make  these  writings  wholly 
successful,  but  their  subject-matter  was 
his  deepest  concern.  He  was  examining 
chaplain  (1924^35)  to  Bishop  E.  W. 
Barnes  [q.v.]  of  whose  Rise  of  Christianity 
(1947)  he  disapproved.  He  was  elected 
F.B.A.  in  1924  and  resigned  his  profes- 
sorship in  1935.  He  took  part  in  college 
meetings  almost  until  the  end  of  his  life 
and  still  drove  his  car  in  his  eighty-ninth 
year. 

In  the  teaching  of  theology  at  Cam- 
bridge Bethune-Baker  played  a  leading 
part,  encouraging  in  his  pupils  an  attitude 
of  detachment  and  impartiality.  In  1922 
he  founded  the  Cambridge  D  Society  for 
the  discussion  of  philosophical  and  sys- 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bevan 


tematic  theology.  He  had  a  keenly  critical 
mind,  a  strong,  sometimes  obstinate  per- 
sonality, and  a  satirical  tongue  which 
enjoyed  opposition  and  in  some  induced 
alarm.  He  had  also  a  capacity  for  deep  and 
generous  friendship,  and  above  all  a  pro- 
found concern  for  the  presentation  of  the 
faith  in  a  form  tenable  to  the  modern 
mind. 

Bethune -Baker  married  in  1891  Ethel 
(died  1949),  daughter  of  Furneaux  Jordan, 
surgeon,  of  Birmingham,  by  whom  he  had 
one  son  who  died  as  a  schoolboy  at  Marl- 
borough. Bethune-Baker  died  in  Cam- 
bridge 13  January  1951.  A  pencil  drawing 
by  Randolph  Schwabe  is  in  the  Cambridge 
Divinity  School. 

[H.  E.  Wynn,  Bishop  of  Ely,  in  Proceedings 
of  the  British  Academy,  vol.  xxxix,  1953  ;  The 
Times,  15  January  1951 ;  Cambridge  Review, 
5  May  1951 ;  W.  N.  Pittenger,  'The  Christian 
Apologetic  of  James  Franklin  Bethune-Baker', 
in  Anglican  Theological  Review,  vol.  xxxvii, 
1955 ;  private  information.] 

H.  Chadwick. 


BEVAN,  ANEURIN  (1897-1960),  poU- 
tician,  was  born  15  November  1897  in 
Tredegar,  Monmouthshire,  the  sixth  of  the 
ten  children,  seven  of  whom  survived,  of 
David  Bevan  and  his  wife,  Phoebe,  daugh- 
ter of  John  Prothero,  blacksmith.  David 
Bevan  was  a  miner,  a  Baptist,  a  regular 
reader  of  Blatchford's  Clarion,  a  lover  of 
music  and  of  books:  a  gentle,  romantic 
man  who  had  more  cultural  influence  on  his 
son  than  the  elementary  school  in  which 
Bevan  was  a  rebellious  pupil  and  acquired 
little  but  the  ability  to  read.  A  stammer 
which  he  later  persevered  to  overcome 
probably  had  some  part  in  his  hatred  of 
school ;  his  inmiense  desire  for  knowledge 
had  hardly  developed  when  at  thirteen  he 
left ;  thereafter  he  had  to  educate  himself. 
The  Workmen's  Library  was  well  stocked 
with  'the  orthodox  economists  and  philo- 
sophers, and  the  Marxist  source  books'. 
But  it  was  not  in  Nye  Bevan's  undisci- 
plined temperament  to  become  a  Com- 
munist. Until  the  failure  of  the  general 
strike  of  1926  he  believed  that  industrial 
action  would  bring  the  workers  to  the 
promised  land  of  which  he  dreamed  as  he 
roamed  the  Welsh  mountains,  disputed 
with  his  friends,  or  declaimed  the  poetry 
which  he  loved. 

Meantime  Bevan  had  gone  into  the  pits. 
He  became  an  expert  collier  and  almost 
equally  expert  at  making  trouble  for  his 
employers:  by  1916  he  was  chairman  of 
his  lodge.  He  was  exempt  from  military 


service  on  account  of  an  eye  disease  and 
became  well  known  in  Tredegar  and 
beyond  for  his  opposition  to  what  he  con- 
sidered a  capitalist  war.  In  1919  the  South 
Wales  Miners'  Federation  sent  him  to  the 
Central  Labour  College  in  London  for  two 
years  which  were  probably  not  quite  the 
waste  of  time  he  thought  them :  his  hori- 
zons widened  and  his  debating  skill  im- 
proved. 

Bevan  returned  in  1921  to  Tredegar  and 
his  conflict  with  the  owners  who  had  re- 
sumed control  of  the  mines  after  the  war, 
despite  the  Sankey  recommendation  of 
nationalization.  It  was  not  perhaps  sur- 
prising that  Bevan  could  find  no  work.  His 
meagre  unemployment  benefit  was  stopped 
when  his  sister  began  to  earn,  and  when 
his  father  fell  ill  with  the  chest  disease 
which  was  to  kill  him  he  received  no  sick- 
ness benefit  until  his  son  fought  the  case. 
Bevan's  enforced  familiarity  with  the 
intricacies  of  sickness  and  unemployment 
benefit  was  at  the  disposal  of  all  who  cared 
to  consult  him.  To  keep  his  position  in 
the  mining  industry  he  worked  for  some 
months  as  a  checkweighman  until  the  pit 
closed  down  and  he  was  once  more  on  the 
dole.  Then  in  1926  he  became  disputes 
agent  for  his  lodge  at  a  salary  of  £5  a  week. 
In  the  long  conflict  with  the  owners  in 
that  year  he  showed  himself  an  efficient 
organizer  of  relief ;  made  fighting  speeches 
at  special  national  conferences  of  the 
Miners'  Federation  in  July  and  October; 
yet  a  month  later  opposed  Arthur  Horner 
by  recommending  negotiation  before  the 
drift  back  to  work  should  bring  about  the 
disintegration  of  the  Federation. 

In  the  following  year  the  local  guardians 
who  were  deemed  to  have  been  too 
generous  with  poor  relief  were  replaced 
by  commissioners :  'a  new  race  of  robbers' 
whom  Bevan  never  forgot  or  forgave.  He 
realized  now  that  power  to  redress  the 
miseries  of  the  unemployed  in  the  South 
Wales  coalfield  must  come  through  politi- 
cal action.  Abeady  a  member  since  1922 
of  the  Tredegar  urban  district  council,  in 
1928  he  was  elected  to  the  Monmouth- 
shire county  council  and  in  1929  was  re- 
turned to  Parliament  as  Labour  member 
for  Ebbw  Vale,  a  seat  which  he  retained 
until  his  death.  For  all  his  turbulence,  his 
highly  independent  outlook,  his  criticism 
of  his  own  leaders,  Bevan  remained  to  the 
last  convinced  that  only  through  Parlia- 
ment and  the  Labour  Party  could  he 
achieve  his  aims. 

Throughout  the  early  thirties  unemploy- 
ment was  a  major  issue  on  which  Bevan 


«>«» 


Bevan 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


had  plenty  to  say  and  he  soon  became 
known  in  Parliament  as  an  attacking 
speaker  of  considerable  if  erratic  bril- 
liance, marred  by  a  vituperative  inability 
to  keep  his  temper.  He  was  prominent  in 
opposing  non-intervention  in  the  Spanish 
civil  war,  and  as  foreign  affairs  became  of 
increasing  concern  found  himself  allied 
with  Sir  Stafford  Cripps  [q.v.]  whom  he 
supported  in  his  unity  campaign  of  1937 
and  as  a  founder  of  and  regular  contributor 
to  Tribune,  which  he  was  himself  to  edit 
in  1942-5.  Early  in  1939  he  was  expelled 
from  the  Labour  Party  for  supporting 
Cripps  in  his  Popular  Front  campaign, 
but  he  was  readmitted  in  December. 

The  outbreak  of  war  meanwhile  had 
brought  Bevan  new  fields  of  discontent. 
His  opposition  to  the  Government 
throughout  the  war  earned  him  notoriety 
and  suspicion  and  Churchill's  description 
of  him  as  'a  squaUd  nuisance'  probably 
reflected  the  opinion  of  the  man  in  the 
street.  Yet  his  complaints  had  some  basis : 
Churchill,  he  maintained,  was  conducting 
a  one-man  government ;  furthermore,  was 
no  strategist.  Bevan  pressed  for  an  early 
second  front;  and  later  mistrusted  the 
'Big  Three'  conferences  as  ignoring  the 
claims  of  lesser  countries  and  preventing 
the  post-war  development  of  a  western 
Europe  strong  enough  to  stand  between 
the  opposing  American  and  Soviet  powers. 
He  came  into  conflict  with  Ernest  Bevin 
[q.v.]  over  his  treatment  of  the  coalmining 
industry,  and  in  1944  was  nearly  expelled 
again  from  the  Labour  Party  for  his 
violent  opposition  to  a  regulation  imposing 
penalties  for  incitement  to  unofficial  strike 
action  in  essential  industries:  'the  dis- 
franchisement of  the  individual' .  He  was 
asked  for,  and  gave,  a  written  assurance 
that  he  would  abide  by  standing  orders. 
At  the  Labour  Party  conference  of 
December  1944  he  was  elected  for  the  first 
time  to  the  national  executive ;  and  in  the 
labour  Government  of  the  following  year 
C.  R.  (later  Earl)  Attlee  made  him  minis- 
ter of  health  and  housing.  He  was  then 
sworn  of  the  Privy  Council. 

The  National  Health  Service  Act  of 
1946  provided  free  medical  and  dental 
care  for  all  who  cared  to  avail  themselves 
of  it  and  in  the  event  ninety-five  per  cent 
of  the  nation  did.  The  scheme  derived 
from  a  number  of  sources  but  Bevan  in- 
cluded such  daring  ideas  as  the  nationaU- 
zation  of  the  hospitals,  to  be  run  by 
regional  boards,  and  the  abolition  of  the 
sale  of  general  practices.  The  service  was 
to  be   financed  from  general  taxation. 


There  followed  two  years  of  negotiation 
with  the  doctors  before  the  scheme  came 
into  effect  in  1948.  The  battle  was  fought 
on  the  grand  scale.  Yet  Bevan  displayed 
more  patience  and  flexibility  than  were 
usually  at  his  command  in  bringing  to  a 
successful  outcome  a  cause  which  was 
very  dear  to  his  heart  and  was  certainly 
his  finest  achievement.  He  was  ably  as- 
sisted by  his  permanent  secretary,  Sir 
WilHam  Douglas  [q.v.].  With  the  minister 
of  national  insurance  Bevan  was  also 
responsible  for  the  National  Assistance 
Act  of  1948  which  completed  the  break-up 
of  the  Poor  Law  and  introduced  a  com- 
prehensive scheme  of  assistance  and  wel- 
fare services.  Housing  he  tackled  with 
schemes  for  the  repair  of  war  damage,  for 
prefabricated  houses,  and  for  large  sub- 
sidies to  local  authorities  to  enable  them 
to  provide  houses  to  rent  to  people  in  the 
lower  income  groups. 

For  all  his  achievement,  Bevan  was  still 
an  uncertain  asset  to  his  party.  He  was 
apt  to  get  carried  away  by  his  own 
rhetoric:  his  'lower  than  vermin'  on- 
slaught on  the  Tories  in  July  1948  did  him 
more  harm  than  it  did  the  Tories  who  were 
estimated  by  Harold  Laski  [q.v.],  no 
friend  of  Bevan,  to  have  gained  some  two 
million  votes  thereby.  It  was  seized  upon 
by  the  British  press,  still  smarting  from 
Bevan's  attack  upon  it  as  'the  most 
prostituted  in  the  world'.  With  his  own 
Government  Bevan  was  increasingly  out 
of  sympathy,  mainly  over  armaments 
expenditure  and  Ernest  Bevin's  policy  of 
aUiance  with  the  United  States  and  the 
containment  of  Russia.  It  was  unfor- 
tunate that  Cripps,  to  whom  Bevan  was 
much  attached  and  who  could  exercise  a 
moderating  influence  upon  him,  fell  ill  and 
resigned  in  October  1950.  In  January  1951 
Bevan  moved  to  the  Ministry  of  Labour, 
only  to  resign  in  April  when  he  came  into 
conflict  with  Hugh  Gaitskell  over  the 
latter' s  proposal  to  introduce  certain 
charges  into  the  health  service.  Harold 
Wilson  and  John  Freeman  also  resigned: 
the  armament  programme,  it  was  thought, 
would  impoverish  the  country.  In  the 
election  of  constituency  members  to  the 
national  executive  in  October  Bevan 
headed  the  poU,  with  Mrs.  Barbara  Castle 
second  and  two  other  supporters  gaining 
places:  a  shift  of  opinion  within  the 
Labour  Party  noted  perhaps  by  the  elec- 
torate which  returned  the  Conservatives 
to  power  at  the  general  election  later  in 
the  month. 

For  the  remainder  of  his  life  Bevan  was 


100 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Bevan 


in  opposition.  In  Place  of  Fear  (1952),  his 
only  book,  set  out  his  belief  in  democratic 
socialism  'based  on  the  conviction  that 
free  men  can  use  free  institutions  to  solve 
the  social  and  economic  problems  of  the 
day,  if  they  are  given  a  chance  to  do  so'. 
He  deplored  American  foreign  policy  and 
discounted  Russia's  military  aims.  For  a 
time  it  seemed  that  Bevan  would  bring 
about  a  split  in  his  own  party  by  the 
growth  of  the  'Bevanite'  group  within  it. 
At  the  Labour  Party  conference  of  1952 
six  Bevanites  were  elected  to  the  national 
executive  with  Bevan  again  at  the  head  of 
the  poll.  But  at  a  subsequent  meeting  of 
the  parliamentary  Labour  Party  in  Octo- 
ber Attlee  successfully  moved  a  resolution 
calling  for  the  abandonment  of  all  un- 
official groups  within  the  party.  The 
Bevanites  protestingly  complied,  but  the 
philosophy  of  'Bevanism'  remained.  At 
the  ensuing  annual  elections  of  the  parlia- 
mentary party  Bevan  unsuccessfully 
challenged  Herbert  Morrison  (later  Lord 
Morrison  of  Lambeth)  for  the  deputy 
leadership;  but  he  was  elected  to  the 
shadow  Cabinet.  This  position  he  resigned 
in  April  1954  when  he  attacked  Attlee's 
approval  of  S.E.A.T.O.  In  the  summer  he 
went  with  Attlee  in  a  Labour  Party  dele- 
gation to  Russia  and  Red  China.  But  in 
March  1955  he  was  again  defying  his 
leader  in  the  House :  this  time  over  the  use 
of  nuclear  weapons  in  the  event  of  hos- 
tilities, even  if  not  used  by  the  aggressor. 
The  party  whip  was  withdrawn  and  his 
expulsion  from  the  Labour  Party  sought, 
but  again  Bevan  gave  an  assurance  of 
conformity.  Once  again  a  general  election 
was  in  sight  and  again  Labour  lost.  When 
Attlee  resigned  in  December,  Bevan 
unsuccessfully  challenged  Gaitskell  for 
the  leadership,  although  he  outstripped 
Morrison;  then4ie  stood  for  the  deputy 
leadership,  only  to  be  defeated  by  James 
Griffiths.  But  in  October  1956,  by  a 
narrow  majority  over  George  Brown,  he 
attained  the  post  of  party  treasurer  which 
he  had  failed  to  wrest  from  Gaitskell  in 
the  two  preceding  years. 

In  Gaitskell's  shadow  Cabinet  Bevan 
was  entrusted  with  first  colonial,  then 
foreign,  affairs:  an  attempt  to  close  the 
ranks  in  which  Bevan  saw  that  he  must 
co-operate  if  Labour  were  to  return  to 
power,  even  if  he  regarded  Gaitskell  as 
*a  desiccated  calculating  machine'.  On 
colonial  problems,  Malta,  Cyprus,  Kenya, 
and  during  the  Suez  crisis,  Bevan  spoke 
with  skill  and  moderation  for  the  Opposi- 
tion. Although  he  urged  the  banning,  by 


agreement  with  Russia  and  America,  of 
nuclear  and  hydrogen  bomb  tests,  at  the 
party  conference  of  1957  he  helped  to 
defeat  a  motion  demanding  that  Britain 
should  make  a  unilateral  renunciation  of 
such  bombs,  saying  that  it  would  send  a 
British  foreign  secretary  naked  into  the 
conference  chamber.  His  standing  within 
his  party  became  more  secure  and  in 
October  1959  he  was  elected  unopposed  as 
deputy  leader  of  the  parliamentary  party ; 
he  continued  as  party  treasurer.  His 
speeches  had  become  persuasive  rather 
than  aggressive,  but  were  delivered  with 
all  the  old  felicity  which,  despite  the  hatred 
and  fear  he  could  engender,  had  made  him 
generally  considered  the  best  speaker^ 
after  Churchill,  to  be  heard  in  the  House. 
If  a  touch  of  melancholy  was  to  be  de- 
tected now,  it  might  be  attributed  to  the 
trend  of  international  affairs  and  to  the 
decline  of  his  own  physical  powers.  After 
some  months  of  illness  he  died  at  his  home 
at  Chesham,  Buckinghamshire,  6  July 
1960. 

With  Bevan's  passing  some  of  the 
colour  and  much  of  the  passion  went  out 
of  politics.  He  fought  vehemently,  with 
deadly  invective,  but  with  gaiety  and  wit 
as  well,  for  his  beliefs.  Not  everybody 
shared  them,  least  of  all  within  his  own 
party  where  he  was  strongly  opposed  by 
the  trade-unionists.  He  was  essentially  an 
original — complex,  baffling,  and  infuriat- 
ing, especially  when  he  gave  way  to 
indolence  or  showed  a  tendency  to  dis- 
appear at  times  of  crisis ;  but  the  sincerity 
and  stature  of  the  man  were  not  in  doubt. 
If  on  occasions  he  could  be  a  menace  to, 
he  also  vitalized,  the  Labour  Party  and 
enlarged  and  influenced  its  thinking.  He 
was  sustained  throughout  by  Jennie  Lee, 
herself  a  staunch  left-wing  member  of  the 
Labour  Party,  later  to  hold  office,  whom 
he  married  in  1934 ;  they  had  no  children. 
Art,  literature,  and  music,  as  well  as 
politics,  contributed  to  the  richness  of  the 
domestic  life  which  they  enjoyed,  for  pre- 
ference in  the  country.  Bevan  always 
hated  London  and  indeed  would  per- 
sonally have  fitted  better  into  a  more 
exotic  background  than  the  British,  al- 
though politically  he  would  have  been 
unlikely  to  survive.  A  large  man  whose 
thatch  of  black  hair  silvered  elegantly 
early,  he  was  immensely  alive,  exercising 
a  personal  magnetism  which  made  it  diffi- 
cult even  for  those  who  most  detested  his 
views  to  resist  his  charm.  The  very  large 
congregation  which  attended  the  memorial 
service    in    Westminster   Abbey    was    a 


101 


Bevan 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


tribute  to  the  affection  and  respect  in 
which  he  had  come  to  be  held. 

[Aneurin  Bevan,  Jn  Place  of  Fear,  1952; 
Jennie  Lee,  This  Great  Journey,  1963 ;  Michael 
Foot,  Aneurin  Bevan,  vol.  i,  189Y-1945, 1962 ; 
Vincent  Brome,  Aneurin  Bevan,  1953 ;  Mark 
M.  Knig,  Aneurin  Bevan:  Cautious  Rebel, 
1961 ;  Francis  Williams  (with  Earl  Attlee), 
A  Prime  Minister  Remembers,  1961 ;  The 
Times,  7  July  1960 ;  private  information.] 

Helen  M.  Palmer. 


BEVIN,  ERNEST  (1881-1951),  trade- 
union  leader  and  statesman,  was  born  7 
March  1881  in  the  small  Somerset  village 
of  Winsford  on  the  edge  of  Exmoor,  the 
illegitimate  son  of  a  forty-year-old  vil- 
lage midwife  named  Mercy  Bevin  who 
had  separated  from  her  husband,  William 
Bevin,  some  years  before  and  at  the  time 
of  Ernest's  birth  described  herself  as  a 
widow.  It  was  a  period  of  acute  rural 
depression  and  she  sometimes  found  it 
difficult  to  keep  a  roof  over  her  family's 
head.  She  worked  as  a  domestic  help  on 
local  farms  and  in  the  village  public  house 
as  well  as  village  midwife,  but  was  several 
times  forced  to  apply  for  parish  relief.  She 
died  after  months  of  illness  when  Ernest, 
youngest  of  her  six  sons,  was  eight.  He 
never  knew  who  his  father  was.  After  his 
mother's  death  Bevin  was  given  a  home 
by  his  half-sister  Mary  and  at  the  age  of 
eleven,  after  reaching  Standard  IV  at  the 
Hayward  Boys'  School  in  Crediton  and 
getting  his  labour  certificate,  was  found 
work  as  a  farm  boy  at  a  wage  of  6s.  6d, 
a  quarter,  Uving  in.  He  could  read,  write, 
and  do  simple  arithmetic.  That  was  the 
end  of  his  formal  education. 

Although  in  some  ways  he  remained  a 
countryman  all  his  life,  Bevin  had  no  lik- 
ing for  farm  life  and  when  he  was  thirteen 
he  joined  two  of  his  brothers  who  had 
found  casual  work  in  Bristol.  A  succession 
of  blind-alley  jobs  followed.  He  was 
kitchen  boy  at  a  cheap  eating-house,  a  van 
boy,  a  page  boy  at  a  restaurant,  conductor 
on  the  horse  trams,  until  in  1901  he 
became  van  driver  with  a  mineral  water 
firm.  He  was  soon  earning  25s.  a  week  in 
wages  and  commission  which  he  later  in- 
creased to  nearly  £2  by  working  longer 
hours  and  extending  his  round.  Although 
he  was  an  unskilled  man  this  put  him  on 
the  level  of  a  skilled  artisan  in  regular 
employment  and  he  seemed  perfectly  con- 
tent to  remain  at  this  level.  In  other  ways, 
also,  the  job  suited  him.  Once  he  had 
climbed  on  his  two-horse  dray  at  six 
o'clock  in  the  morning  he  was  on  his  own 


in  the  open  air  for  the  rest  of  the  day,  a 
tough,  barrel-chested  figure  of  a  man,  well 
able  to  look  after  himself  in  a  fight  or  an 
argument.  From  the  comparative  security 
of  this  employment  Bevin  in  his  early 
twenties  began  his  lifelong  partnership 
with  Florence  Anne  Townley  (died  1968), 
the  daughter  of  a  wine  taster  at  a  Bristol 
wine  merchants ;  they  had  one  daughter. 

Bevin  had  a  hard  boyhood  and  youth. 
He  was  often  hungry,  and  later  claimed 
that  he  sometimes  had  to  steal  for  food. 
But  his  struggles  left  no  personal  scars 
and  their  importance  lay  far  more  in  their 
representative  than  in  their  personal 
quality :  they  gave  him  a  permanent  sense 
of  identification  with  all  those  others  in 
the  working  class  whose  experience  had 
been  much  the  same.  He  had  many  of 
the  qualities  of  a  captain  of  industry.  But 
unlike  many  self-made  men  of  the  Vic- 
torian age  he  never  had  any  wish  to  climb 
out  of  his  own  class.  He  preferred,  instead, 
to  help  it  to  rise  and  to  rise  with  it. 

His  mother,  who  had  been  the  one  sure 
centre  of  affection  in  his  early  life,  had 
been  a  keen  Chapel  woman,  a  Methodist 
when  Methodism  was  as  much  a  social  as  a 
religious  creed,  a  vehicle  of  dissent  against 
the  massed  forces  of  Church,  State,  and 
landlord.  Bevin  turned  naturally  to  the 
Chapel  in  Bristol.  He  joined  the  Manor 
Hall  Baptist  Mission  and  had  some 
thought  of  becoming  a  minister  or  even 
a  missionary.  He  attended  the  Quaker 
Adult  School  and  other  discussion  and 
study  classes  and  as  with  many  other 
early  labour  and  trade-union  leaders  non- 
conformity provided  the  nursery  of  politi- 
cal action  and  the  bridge  to  socialism.  His 
interests  turned  gradually  from  Chapel  to 
politics:  he  joined  the  Bristol  Socialist 
Society,  affiliated  to  the  Social  Democratic 
Federation,  and  became  ;m  active  speaker 
and  organizer  in  its  ranks,  and,  after  1908, 
in  the  Right  to  Work  movement  which 
developed  as  a  result  of  mounting  un- 
employment. In  November  of  that  year 
he  led  a  procession  of  400  unemployed 
men  into  morning  service  at  the  cathedral 
to  draw  attention  to  their  plight.  In  1909 
he  was  defeated  as  a  socialist  candidate 
for  the  city  council.  In  June  1910  a  strike 
at  Avonmouth  which  later  spread  to  the 
whole  of  the  Bristol  docks  pushed  Bevin  in 
a  new  direction.  Most  of  the  dockers  were 
organized  in  the  Dock,  Wharf,  Riverside 
and  General  Workers'  Union.  The  carters, 
many  of  whom  worked  out  of  the  docks, 
were  unorganized.  However,  they  could 
not  escape  the  implications  of  the  dockers' 


102 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bevin 


struggle,  especially  when  attempts  were 
made  to  use  them  as  strike  breakers  to 
load  and  unload  ships  at  the  docks.  Harry 
Orbell,  a  local  organizer  of  the  Dockers' 
Union  (later  its  national  organizer),  who 
knew  of  Bevin's  activities  in  the  Right  to 
Work  committee,  persuaded  him  to  bring 
the  carters  together.  A  carmen's  branch 
of  the  Dockers'  Union,  with  Bevin  as  its 
chairman,  was  formed  in  August  1910,  and 
Bevin,  although  he  could  not  know  it,  pre- 
pared to  enter  upon  his  kingdom.  In  the 
spring  of  1911  he  climbed  down  from  his 
mineral  water  van  for  the  last  time  and 
became  a  full-time  official  of  the  Dockers' 
Union. 

The  union  had  been  born  out  of  the 
great  London  dock  strike  of  1889  led  by 
Ben  Tillett,  Tom  Mann,  and  John  Burns 
[qq.v.].  Bevin's  contribution  to  the  trade- 
union  movement  was  something  very  dif- 
ferent from  the  passion  and  demagogy  of 
a  man  such  as  Tillett.  He  brought  it 
massive  self-confidence,  great  negotiating 
ability,  and  a  conviction  of  the  need 
for  centrahzed  authority.  None  of  these 
qualities  had  shown  themselves  in  Bevin 
earUer :  they  grew  out  of  his  first  years  as 
a  trade-union  official  when  the  failure  of 
a  series  of  dockers'  and  seamen's  strikes 
called  by  the  loosely  organized  Transport 
Workers'  Federation  forced  him  to  go 
back  to  the  grass  roots  of  trade-union 
organization.  As  he  stumped  Wales  and 
the  west  country  trying  to  rebuild  the 
branches  he  learnt  the  vital  importance  of 
carrying  the  rank  and  file  with  him  in 
every  decision.  He  absorbed  also  another 
lesson  which  remained  with  him  through- 
out his  trade-union  life:  that  numerical 
strength  without  central  authority  is 
illusory. 

By  1913  he  had  become  an  assistant 
national  organizer  and  in  1914  one  of  the 
union's  three  national  organizers.  Because 
of  his  direct  personal  links  with  the  local 
secretaries  and  branch  officials  and  their 
personal  loyalty  to  himself  he  held  the 
most  important  strings  of  union  power 
in  his  hands.  To  him  trade-unionism 
was  essentially  an  instrument  to  enable 
workers  to  meet  employers  as  equals  in 
the  negotiating  chamber.  But  because  he 
learned  his  business  of  leadership  when 
conciliation  was  out  of  fashion  on  both 
sides,  his  public  character  had  a  curious 
duality.  Capable  of  great  suppleness  in 
negotiation  and  sensitive  to  the  mutual 
interests  which  made  industrial  co-opera- 
tion desirable,  he  presented  in  public  an 
image  which  was  dogmatic,  overbearing, 


uncompromising,  and  egotistical.  In 
negotiation  he  was  a  realist  who  under- 
stood the  need  for  compromise.  On  the 
public  platform  he  permitted  himself 
every  licence  of  venom,  innuendo,  and  the 
grossest  partiality. 

This  duality  of  posture  stood  him  in 
good  stead.  Among  the  rank  and  file  it 
gave  him  a  reputation  for  left-wing  icono- 
clasm,  valuable  to  those  who  wish  to  push 
their  way  to  the  front  in  the  Labour  move- 
ment, while  in  private  negotiations  his 
realism  won  many  practical  advantages 
for  his  members.  Both  sides  of  this  per- 
sonality were  evident  during  the  war  of 
1914-18.  He  had  no  doubt  where  the 
sentiments  of  the  great  mass  of  the 
workers  lay  and  spat  scorn  on  the  pacifism 
of  the  politicians  of  the  Independent 
Labour  Party.  But  he  found  it  possible  to 
be  equally  contemptuous  of  trade-union 
leaders  like  Arthm*  Henderson  and  J.  R. 
Clynes  [qq.v.]  who  'betrayed  their  class* 
by  joining  a  Lloyd  George  government, 
while  he  himself  took  an  active  and  force- 
ful part  in  the  work  of  joint  conmiittees 
to  secure  the  efficient  use  of  manpower. 

In  1915  for  the  first  time  Bevin  was  a 
delegate  of  his  union  at  the  Trades  Union 
Congress  and  in  the  winter  of  1915-16  he 
went  as  a  fraternal  delegate  to  the  annual 
convention  of  the  American  Federation  of 
Labor.  It  was  his  first  journey  abroad  and 
his  visit  broadened  his  outlook  and  stimu- 
lated his  imagination.  In  the  smnmer  of 
1916  he  was  elected  to  the  executive  coun- 
cil of  the  Transport  Workers'  Federation. 
When  the  war  ended  Bevin  had  become 
an  important  trade-union  official  of  the 
second  rank.  He  was  one  of  his  union's 
permanent  delegates  to  the  Trades  Union 
Congress  and  Labour  Party  conferences 
and  its  representative  on  close  to  a  dozen 
committees  set  up  by  the  ministries  of 
Labour  and  Reconstruction.  Moreover, 
without  ever  loosening  his  strong  emo- 
tional link  with  the  rank  and  file  he  had 
become  a  disciplined  administrator  with 
a  remarkable  talent  for  absorbing  docu- 
ments and  sifting  evidence. 

In  the  general  election  of  1918  Beviri 
was  defeated  as  the  Labour  candidate  for 
Central  Bristol.  In  1920  he  became  assis- 
tant general  secretary  of  his  union.  In  that 
year  he  became  a  national  figure  for  the 
first  time,  as  the  *Dockers'  K.C  when  he 
persuaded  the  dockers  instead  of  striking 
to  submit  a  claim  for  16s.  a  day  to  a  court 
of  inquiry  under  the  new  Industrial  Courts 
Act.  He  won  their  case  by  brilliant  ad- 
vocacy, at  one  stage  producing  before  the 


108 


Bevin 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


court  a  number  of  plates  on  which  were 
set  out  the  derisory  scraps  of  food  on 
which  dockers  would  have  to  move 
seventy-one  tons  of  wheat  a  day  on  their 
backs  if  the  court  accepted  as  adequate 
the  family  budgets  advanced  by  the  em- 
ployers supported  by  the  professional 
witness  of  (Sir)  A.  L.  Bowley  [q.v.]. 
Bevin's  national  status  was  confirmed  by 
his  leadership  in  the  Council  of  Action 
which  successfully  boycotted  the  sending 
of  arms  to  Poland  for  use  against  the 
Russian  revolutionary  armies. 

The  collapse  of  the  Triple  Alliance  of 
miners,  railwaymen,  and  transport  workers 
on  Black  Friday,  15  April  1921,  endorsed 
all  Bevin's  earlier  suspicions  of  the 
fragility  of  alliances  without  central  com- 
mand. He  was  already  engaged  on  the 
complex  and  often  tortuous  negotiations 
designed  to  replace  the  Transport  Workers' 
Federation  with  its  loose  alliance  of 
autonomous  unions  by  a  compact  struc- 
ture of  which  his  own  union  should  be 
the  centre.  The  Transport  and  General 
Workers'  Union  which  merged  fourteen 
unions  with  a  combined  membership  of 
300,000  came  into  being  on  1  January 
1922  with  Bevin  as  general  secretary. 
It  was  a  monohthic  achievement  ruth- 
lessly secured.  Tillett,  nominally  Bevin's 
superior  in  the  hierarchy  of  the  Dockers' 
Union,  was  swept  aside  and  turned  into  an 
ineffectual  pensioner  after  being  allowed 
to  believe  almost  to  the  very  end  that  he 
would  be  president  of  the  new  organiza- 
tion, although  Bevin  had  decided  at  an 
early  stage  that  he  would  have  to  be  sacri- 
ficed in  a  deal  with  one  of  the  other 
unions.  The  withdrawal  of  the  union 
from  the  Transport  Workers'  Federation 
brought  about  the  disappearance  of  the 
latter,  a  blow  from  which  its  secretary 
Robert  Williams  never  recovered.  The 
fate  of  neither  man  moved  Bevin  to  any 
compunction  any  more  than  did  that  of 
George  Lansbury  [q.v.]  when  years  later 
Bevin  used  all  the  force  he  could  command 
to  destroy  Lansbury's  influence  in  the 
Labour  movement  over  the  issue  of  sanc- 
tions against  Italy  over  Abyssinia. 

Had  Bevin  turned  to  Conununism  in 
the  twenties  as  some  militant  trade- 
unionists  were  tempted  to,  the  history  of 
British  Labour  might  have  taken  a  dif- 
ferent course.  But  for  all  his  ruthlessness 
and  concern  for  power  Bevin  could  never 
have  been  a  Marxist  and  was  indeed  to 
become  British  Communism's  most  im- 
placable enemy.  He  never  lost  the  saving 
grace  of  human  involvement.  When  he 


talked  of  the  working  class  as  'my  people' 
he  did  not  think  of  an  economic  class,  the 
proletariat,  but  of  individual  men  and 
women  who  seemed  to  him  the  salt  of  the 
earth.  To  him  the  trade-union  movement 
was  not  a  tool  to  be  used  in  the  pursuit  of 
an  ideology.  It  was  the  living  embodiment 
of  the  best  hopes  and  truest  comrade- 
ship of  ordinary  men  and  women  who  had 
given  him  their  trust  and  to  whom  he  had 
given  his  loyalty,  and  he  was  only  happy 
when  he  could  feel  he  was  referring  back 
to  them.  Thus  the  constitution  of  the 
Transport  Workers'  Union  with  almost  as 
many  checks  and  balances  as  the  Ameri- 
can Constitution  which  he  much  admired 
was  meticulously  designed  to  create  a 
chain  of  command  going  right  back  to 
the  individual  members  in  the  branches, 
while  providing  for  a  national  leadership 
with  power  to  act  decisively  at  times  of 
crisis.  It  was  in  some  ways  a  cumbersome 
constitution  and  more  democratic  in 
theory  than  in  practice,  for  it  required  an 
active  participation  which  only  a  minority 
was  ready  to  give.  At  the  beginning  it 
drew  its  strength  much  more  from  Bevin's 
own  character  than  from  any  formal  safe- 
guards. But  it  stood  the  test  of  time. 

The  pattern  of  union  advance  on  which 
Bevin  had  set  his  hopes  was  interrupted 
by  the  general  strike  of  1926.  The  failure 
of  that  strike,  in  which  Bevin's  working- 
class  loyalties  were  deeply  committed  but 
which  ran  counter  to  his  strongest  con- 
victions about  the  proper  use  of  industrial 
power,  confirmed  him  in  his  belief  that 
industrial  animosities,  if  allowed  to  con- 
tinue at  their  former  level,  must  prove 
self-destructive  to  both  sides  and  that  the 
best  hope  of  advance  for  the  workers  lay  in 
negotiation  from  strength  rather  than  in 
industrial  conflict.  The  number  of  unions 
absorbed  by  his  union  had  reached  22  by 
the  end  of  1928.  By  the  end  of  1926  this 
had  been  increased  to  27.  In  1929  the 
hundred-thousand-strong  Workers'  Union 
was  added.  From  this  powerful  base  Bevin, 
a  member  of  the  general  council  of  the 
T.U.C.  since  1925,  set  himself  to  secure  a 
change  in  the  whole  climate  of  industrial 
relations. 

In  this  he  had  the  strong  support  of 
Walter  (later  Lord)  Citrine,  the  general 
secretary  of  the  T.U.C.  These  two  were 
cast  in  very  different  moulds  and  there 
was  little  personal  sympathy  between 
them.  But  they  saw  industrial  problems 
in  the  same  terms  and  together  helped  to 
bring  about  a  decisive  shift  towards  in- 
dustrial conciliation,  beginning  with  the 


104 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bevih 


Mond-Turner  talks  in  1928.  It  was  in  this 
year  that  Transport  House  was  opened, 
as  the  headquarters  not  only  of  Bevin's 
union  but  of  the  T.U.C.  and  the  Labour 
Party,  and  an  example  of  Bevin's  imagina- 
tive thinking. 

Bevin  was  also  branching  out  in  other 
directions.  He  travelled  abroad  as  a 
tradc'iuiion  delegate  to  international 
conferences  and  to  the  I.L.O.  and  began 
to  take  a  perceptive  interest  in  foreign 
affairs.  He  became  a  member  of  the  Mac- 
millan  committee  on  finance  and  industry 
appointed  by  the  MacDonald  government 
and  with  J.  M.  (later  Lord)  Keynes  [q.v.] 
as  a  fellow  member  he  acquired  a  shrewd 
— and  highly  critical — understanding  of 
the  operations  of  international  finance  and 
the  working  of  the  gold  standard.  He  was 
a  member  of  the  Economic  Advisory 
Council  and  of  the  T.U.C.  economic  com- 
mittee. He  was  instrumental  in  turning 
the  Daily  Herald,  founded  by  Lansbury, 
subsequently  owned  by  the  trade  unions, 
but  too  much  of  a  narrowly  based  official 
organ,  into  a  successful  popular  newspaper 
under  the  joint  ownership  of  the  T.U.C. 
and  Odhams  Press.  Although  still  sus- 
picious of  politicians  and  decUning  in 
November  1930  an  invitation  to  go  to  the 
House  of  Lords,  he  began  to  play  a  much 
more  active  political  role,  especially  after 
Ramsay  MacDonald,  whom  he  had  never 
trusted,  became  the  head  of  a  'national' 
government  and  Labour  suffered  the 
electoral  disasters  of  1931.  Bevin  himself 
was  defeated  at  Gateshead.  He  was 
among  the  first  to  recognize  the  threat 
of  Nazism  and  among  the  most  powerful 
opponents  of  pacifism  in  the  Labour  Party, 
urging  the  case  for  rearmament  at  Labour 
conference  after  conference  and  at  the 
meetings  of  the  National  Council  of 
Labour.  In  1936-7  he  was  chairman  of  the 
T.U.C.  In  1938  he  made  a  tour  round  the 
world  and  the  knowledge  which  he  gained 
of  Canada,  Australia,  and  New  Zealand 
inspired  him  with  the  idea  of  the  British 
Commonwealth  as  the  nucleus  of  a  new 
League  of  Nations  with  an  economic 
basis. 

Bevin  was  now  generally  accepted  as 
one  of  the  most  powerful  of  Labour  leaders 
not  only  on  the  industrial  but  also  on  the 
political  side.  Although  his  power  came  in 
part  from  the  size  of  the  block  vote  he 
commanded  at  Labour  Party  conferences 
it  derived  even  more  from  the  natural 
authority  of  his  personality.  He  was 
not  by  any  standard  a  great  orator  but 
his  utterances  had  a  raw  strength  which 


compelled  conviction.  The  very  clumsiness 
of  his  sentences,  his  contempt  for  syntax 
and  the  niceties  of  pronunciation,  the 
harshness  of  his  voice  and  the  powerful 
emphasis  of  his  gestures  seemed  when  he 
was  speaking  to  a  mass  audience  to  make 
him  the  embodiment  of  all  natural  and 
unlettered  men  drawing  upon  wells  of 
experience  unknown  to  the  more  literate. 
To  watch  him  advance  to  the  rostrum 
on  such  occasions  in  his  thick-soled  boots 
with  his  customary  rolling  walk  and  hear 
him  begin  to  speak  after  a  long  slow  look 
around  his  audience  which  seemed  to  say, 
'now  you  are  going  to  hear  one  of  your- 
selves', was  to  be  brought  up  against 
something  resembling  a  force  of  nature: 
implacable,  confident,  yet  often  lit  by 
flashes  of  imagination  which  outspanned 
and  transcended  the  ordinary  limitations 
of  debate.  There  was,  of  course,  a  good 
deal  of  the  actor  in  all  this ;  and  he  had  an 
actor's  sense  of  occasion  and  timing.  But 
what  counted  most  in  the  end  was  the 
hard  content  of  what  he  had  to  say.  It  was 
the  broad  and  penetrating  sweep  of  his 
judgement  and  the  force  of  his  personality 
which  gave  him  his  great  influence,  no  less 
than  the  proven  strength  of  his  position  as 
a  trade-union  leader. 

All  these  qualities  converged  when  in 
May  1940  Bevin  became  wartime  minister 
of  labour  and  national  service.  He  was 
member  of  Parliament  for  Central  Wands- 
worth (1940-50)  and  East  Woolwich 
(1950-51)  but  he  was  never  wholly  at 
home  in  the  House  of  Commons.  He  came 
to  it  too  late.  He  was  nearly  sixty  when  he 
entered  it  as  a  minister — and  from  a  back- 
ground to  decision-making  very  different 
from  that  of  political  debate.  But  his 
impact  upon  the  War  Cabinet,  which  he 
entered  in  October  1940,  was,  as  the  Man- 
chester Guardian  reported,  'as  decisive  for 
the  ends  he  set  himself  as  was  that  of 
Winston  Churchill  as  war-time  Prime 
Minister'.  Nor  would  many  of  those  in  a 
position  to  assess  what  he  accomplished 
dissent  from  the  Guardian's  further  judge- 
ment that  'the  work  he  did  in  mobilising 
the  manpower  and  the  industrial  resources 
of  the  country  could  have  been  done  with 
equal  efficiency,  sure  judgment  and  reso- 
lute purpose  by  no  other  man'.  The  eight 
months  which  preceded  the  Churchill  adr 
ministration  had  been  for  Bevin,  as  for 
many  others,  a  period  of  frustration, 
anxiety,  and  suspicion.  He  had  always 
distrusted  Chamberlain,  and  his  ani- 
mosity, which  had  long  roots  in  the  past, 
was  confirmed  by  what  seemed  to  him 


105 


Bevin 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Chamberlain's  failure  to  understand  the 
spirit  in  which  the  majority  of  the  British 
people  had  gone  to  war  and  his  patroni- 
zing attitude  to  the  trade  unions.  The  only 
minister  with  whom  he  found  it  possible 
to  establish  friendly  relations  during 
this  period  was,  to  his  surprise,  Churchill. 
There  was  long  political  enmity  between 
them  but  this  was  submerged  in  their 
appreciation  of  each  other's  understanding 
of  the  need  for  total  war. 

Despite  the  shortage  of  armaments  and 
equipment  of  all  kinds  there  were  more 
than  a  million  workers  unemployed  in 
April  1940.  When  Bevin  became  minister 
of  labour  and  national  service  he  claimed 
responsibility  for  all  manpower  and  labour 
questions,  including  the  right  to  examine 
the  use  made  of  labour  and  if  necessary 
withdraw  it.  He  was  given,  although  he 
did  not  ask  for  it,  power  to  conscript  and 
direct  labour,  and  for  some  time  was  criti- 
cized for  his  reluctance  to  use  this  power. 
He  believed  that  compulsion  hastily  used 
would  produce  grievance  which  could  lead 
to  bad  workmanship  and  he  preferred  to 
wait  until  the  necessity  for  compulsion 
was  fully  accepted  by  the  working  class. 
To  obtain  the  support  of  both  sides  of 
industry  he  called  a  meeting  of  the 
National  Joint  Advisory  Council  of  sixty 
industrialists  and  trade-union  leaders  and 
asked  them  to  appoint  a  committee  of 
seven  trade-union  leaders  and  seven  em- 
ployers to  advise  on  all  problems  arising 
from  the  legislation  which  had  given  effect 
to  his  powers — greater  than  those  ever 
previously  vested  in  any  man  in  peace  or 
war.  On  the  same  day  he  met  the  Engineer- 
ing and  Allied  Employers'  Federation,  the 
Amalgamated  Engineering  Union,  and 
the  two  big  general  workers  unions  and 
began  negotiating  agreements  permitting 
the  breakdown  of  skilled  jobs  in  factories 
and  the  introduction  of  large  numbers  of 
unskilled  and  semi-skilled  workers,  in- 
cluding women.  This  he  followed  with  the 
appointment  of  a  Labour  Supply  Board 
— ^two  trade-unionists,  two  managers — 
which  until  March  1941  met  daily  under 
his  chairmanship  to  see  that  labour  was 
made  available  wherever  it  was  needed. 
Subsequently  (Sir)  Godfrey  Ince  [q.v.] 
was  director-general  of  manpower.  Bevin 
also  set  up  a  factory  and  welfare  division 
of  the  Ministry  under  Ince  which  con- 
cerned itself  not  only  with  working  con- 
ditions but  with  the  hving  conditions, 
feeding  arrangements,  and  leisure  of  the 
workers. 

Within  a  week  Bevin  had  transformed 


the  whole  industrial  atmosphere.  His 
reputation  as  a  wartime  minister  of  labour 
does  not,  however,  rest  solely  or  even 
primarily  on  the  speed  with  which  he 
acted,  although  this  made  a  substantial 
contribution  to  industrial  morale.  There 
was  no  aspect  of  industrial  affairs  he  did 
not  touch  upon.  By  the  middle  of  1943 
he  had  so  organized  the  mobilization  of 
labour  that  there  had  been  an  expansion 
of  three  and  three-quarter  million  in  four 
years  of  those  serving  in  the  armed  forces, 
civil  defence,  or  industry.  The  armed 
forces  had  increased  by  nearly  four  mil- 
lion and  the  munitions  industries  by  two ; 
there  had  been  a  transfer  of  more  than 
three  and  a  quarter  million  workers  from 
the  less  essential  industries.  This  vast  dis- 
ruption of  the  ordinary  life  of  the  com- 
munity was  carried  through  not  only  with 
a  speed  and  efficiency  completely  un- 
matched in  any  of  the  dictatorships,  but 
with  a  remarkable  lack  of  industrial 
trouble.  The  time  lost  by  industrial  stop- 
pages was  eventually  reduced  to  rather 
less  than  one  hour  per  worker  per  year. 
The  elaborate  organization  he  built  was 
always  touched  with  humanity.  When 
there  were  criticisms  of  the  call-up  of 
women  who  had  never  done  outside  work 
in  their  lives  he  could  snap,  'It  never  hurt 
anyone  to  work' ;  but  when  there  were 
complaints  of  absenteeism  because  girls 
stayed  home  from  the  factories  when  their 
sweethearts  were  on  leave  from  the  forces, 
he  retorted,  'That's  not  absenteeism, 
that's  human  nature' ;  and  he  saw  to  it 
that  there  was  a  proper  system  of  leave  in 
all  factories  for  such  occasions.  To  him  the 
workers  were  'my  people'.  To  them  he  was 
'Ernie'  and  he  knew  by  instinct  what  their 
reactions  would  be  to  the  demands  placed 
on  them.  He  made  some  mistakes,  among 
them  the  too  hurried  withdrawal  of  labour 
from  the  mines  after  the  fall  of  France 
which  the  later  direction  of  'Bevin  boys' 
underground  did  little  to  correct,  al- 
though it  was  dear  to  his  heart  because  he 
hoped  it  would  not  only  ease  an  emergency 
but  help  to  break  down  class  barriers. 
Yet  when  the  scale  of  his  activities  is 
taken  into  account,  the  proportion  of 
failures  was  amazingly  small. 

These  activities  were,  of  course,  directed 
first  and  foremost  to  winning  the  war.  But 
he  was  also  determined  to  establish  a  new 
framework  of  co-operation  in  industry  and 
permanently  raise  the  status  of  the  in- 
dustrial and  agricultural  worker.  'They 
used  to  say  Gladstone  was  at  the  Treasury 
from  1860  to  1930',  he  said  jokingly.  'I'm 


106 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bevin 


going  to  be  at  the  Ministry  of  Labour  from 
1940  to  1990.'  The  long-term  impact  of 
his  policies  may  in  the  end  be  seen  in  the 
acceptance  of  joint  machinery  for  indus- 
trial relations  by  both  sides  of  industry. 
The  efficiency  and  fairness  of  the  demobili- 
zation procedures  at  the  end  of  the  war 
and  the  avoidance  of  the  economic  disloca- 
tion and  industrial  strife  that  had  followed 
the  war  of  1914-18  were  a  tribute  to  his 
foresight.  At  the  end  of  May  1945  Churchill 
offered  Bevin  the  C.H.  for  his  'remarkable 
work  at  the  Ministry  of  Labour',  but  this 
Bevin  declined  saying  that  he  desired  no 
special  honours  for  doing  his  job,  like 
thousands  of  others,  in  the  interests  of  the 
nation. 

Bevin  had  come  to  be  regarded  as  one 
of  the  most  helpful  members  of  the 
Government,  not  only  by  reason  of  his 
work  as  minister  of  labour  but  as  a  leading 
member  of  the  lord  president's  committee 
on  the  civilian  and  economic  resources  of 
the  country,  as  chairman  of  the  Produc- 
tion Executive,  and  as  a  member  of  many 
other  committees.  In  the  last  two  years 
of  the  war,  as  his  own  departmental  pres- 
sures decreased,  he  had  applied  himself 
vigorously  to  questions  of  post-war  re- 
construction such  as  ways  of  implement- 
ing the  Beveridge  report  and  he  had 
strongly  supported  the  Education  Act  of 
1944.  He  was  also  deeply  interested  in 
international  relationships  and  had  be- 
come a  close  student  of  the  foreign  tele- 
grams which  flowed  across  his  ministerial 
desk.  His  first  ambition  when  Labour 
won  its  victory  at  the  polls  in  1945  was, 
however,  for  the  Treasury.  He  had 
greatly  developed  the  interest  in  monetary 
and  economic  policy  he  had  first  acquired 
as  a  member  of  the  Macmillan  committee, 
and  was  full  of  ideas  for  making  the 
Treasury  a  much  more  creative  force  in 
the  national  economic  hfe.  Attlee  con- 
sidered offering  Bevin  the  chancellorship 
and  Hugh  (later  Lord)  Dalton  the  Foreign 
Office;  indeed  he  actually  discussed  this 
with  both  of  them.  Further  thought  over 
a  solitary  lunch  persuaded  him,  however, 
that  Bevin  would  be  better  at  the  Foreign 
Office  for  two  reasons.  The  first  and  most 
important  was  that  Attlee  had  become 
convinced  that  with  the  end  of  the  war 
in  Europe,  Soviet  Russia  would  become 
tough,  aggressive,  and  unco-operative  and 
that  Bevin  was  temperamentally  the  more 
suited  of  the  two  to  meet  this  situation 
and  also  more  likely  by  reason  of  his 
standing  in  the  Labour  movement  to  carry 
the  party  with  him  in  doing  so.  The  second 


was  that  he  had  decided  to  invite  Herbert 
Morrison  (later  Lord  Morrison  of  Lam- 
beth) to  be  lord  president  of  the  Council 
and  leader  of  the  House  of  Commons  with 
a  general  oversight  of  home  affairs  and 
thought  it  better  in  view  of  the  personal 
antipathy  between  Bevin  and  Morrison — 
particularly  on  Bevin's  side — ^to  keep  the 
two  apart. 

It  was,  therefore,  Bevin  who  accom- 
panied Attlee  to  the  adjourned  Potsdam 
conference  as  foreign  secretary.  There, 
according  to  James  Byrnes  the  United 
States  secretary  of  state,  the  first  impact 
he  made  was  'so  aggressive  that  both  the 
President  and  I  wondered  how  we  would 
get  along  with  this  new  Foreign  Secre- 
tary'. However,  it  did  not  take  Byrnes 
long  in  his  own  words  'to  learn  to  respect 
highly  his  fine  mind,  his  forthrightness,  his 
candour  and  his  scrupulous  regard  for  a 
promise'. 

In  the  Foreign  Office  itself  there  were 
many  who  at  first  feared  that  they  had 
been  given  into  the  untutored  hands  of  a 
clumsy  Visigoth.  These  anxieties  departed 
as  they  got  to  know  him.  In  the  Office  it- 
self he  became  one  of  the  most  admired 
and  best  loved  of  foreign  secretaries — a 
response  to  his  humanity  and  his  loyalty 
to  and  concern  for  his  staff  touchingly 
demonstrated  on  his  seventieth  birthday 
when  every  member  of  the  Foreign  Office 
from  the  permanent  under-secretary  to 
the  messengers  and  junior  typists  each 
contributed  sixpence — the  dockers'  tan- 
ner— to  give  him  a  birthday  party  to 
which  much  to  his  joy  they  all  came,  an 
event  unique  in  Foreign  Office  history. 

But  although  he  sought  advice  from  his 
permanent  officials  he  made  his  own  de- 
cisions and  formed  his  own  policy:  there 
was  never  a  man  less  run  by  his  depart- 
ment. He  had  hoped  and  had  publicly 
declared  at  the  pre-election  Labour  Party 
conference  that  in  dealing  with  Russia  it 
would  be  possible  for  'Left  to  speak  to 
Left'.  He  even  hoped  that  there  might  be 
some  residue  of  gratitude  for  his  part  in 
preventing  the  sending  of  arms  to  aid  the 
anti-Bolshevik  forces  at  the  end  of  the 
first  world  war.  He  proved  mistaken  in 
both  beliefs  as  Attlee — ^more  shrewd  in  his 
judgement  of  Soviet  ambitions — had  from 
the  first  assumed  would  be  the  case.  Nine 
months  of  arduous  negotiations  on  peace 
treaties  with  Italy  and  the  German  satel- 
lite countries  and  for  a  more  permanent 
settlement  with  Germany  than  had  been 
reached  at  Potsdam  convinced  Bevin  that 
although  broad  agreement  between  Britain 


m 


I 


Bevin 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


and  the  United  States  was  possible  on 
most  matters  despite  differences  in  detail, 
Russia  saw  in  European  disorder  the  best 
opportunity  for  ideological  and  territorial 
expansion.  He  believed  that  behind  this 
lay  suspicions  of  western  motives  and 
fears  of  capitalist  attacks  that  had  a  cer- 
tain historical  justification  and  tried  to 
allay  them  in  a  personal  meeting  with 
Stalin  in  Moscow  by  offering  to  extend 
the  wartime  Anglo-Russian  Treaty  into  a 
fifty-year  alliance.  But  although  Stalin  at 
first  expressed  some  interest  every  effort 
to  negotiate  such  a  treaty  failed  and 
Bevin  found  himself  increasingly  forced  to 
the  opinion  that  Stalin  was  determined  to 
exploit  Britain's  post-war  weakness  and 
American  preoccupation  with  domestic 
problems  to  expand  Communist  power 
right  across  Europe. 

The  extent  to  which  Britain  was  at  this 
time  the  primary  and  for  long  periods  the 
sole  target  of  Soviet  attack  both  at  the 
United  Nations  and  in  Turkey,  the  Dar- 
danelles, Northern  Persia,  Greece,  Trieste, 
and  in  the  Middle  East  has  often  been  for- 
gotten. But  it  forced  Bevin  to  concentrate 
all  the  power  he  could  command  on  con- 
fining Soviet  expansion  until  America 
could  be  persuaded  to  commit  her  weight 
in  the  political  and  ideological  struggle. 
His  forces  were  small.  Indeed,  along  with 
the  wartime  prestige  Britain  still  enjoyed 
they  rested  very  largely  on  Bevin' s  own 
character  and  his  refusal  to  admit  even  to 
himself  how  slight  was  his  freedom  of 
manoeuvre.  He  was  urged  by  many  on  the 
democratic  Left,  hostile  to  what  they  re- 
garded as  his  too  great  dependence  on 
America,  to  seek  to  build  a  'third  force' 
of  western  European  powers  standing 
apart  from  and  between  the  great  power 
blocs  of  the  United  States  and  the  U.S.S.R. 
and  acting  as  a  counter-balance  to  both. 
For  a  time  he  was  drawn  to  the  idea.  It 
fitted  in  with  many  of  his  socialist  con- 
ceptions. But  the  socialist  idealist  was 
over-ruled  by  the  trade-union  realist.  He 
remembered  the  collapse  of  the  paper 
forces  of  the  Transport  Workers'  Federa- 
tion and  the  Triple  Alliance  and  came  to 
the  conclusion  that  however  numerically 
impressive  it  might  seem  on  paper  a  third 
power  would  lack  both  the  cohesion  and 
the  resources  to  fill  the  power  gap.  In  any 
event  the  American  presence  in  Europe 
was  already  a  fact  and  as  such  was  capable 
ultimately,  if  properly  deployed,  of  re- 
storing in  a  way  nothing  else  would  the 
balance  of  power  jeopardized  by  British 
weakness  and  Soviet  ambition.  For  the 


time  being,  however,  American  public 
opinion  was  still  resistant  to  the  idea  of 
any  further  involvement  in  Europe.  More- 
over a  sizeable  official  opinion  inclined  to 
Harry  Hopkins's  view  that  no  basic  con- 
flict existed  between  Russian  and  Ameri- 
can interests  and  to  Admiral  Leahy's 
much-canvassed  judgement  that  Britain 
was  'prostrate  economically'  and  'rela- 
tively impotent  militarily'  and  that  the 
Soviet  Union  must  therefore  be  accepted 
by  the  United  States  as  the  'unquestioned, 
all  powerful  influence  in  Europe'. 

In  these  circumstances  Bevin  saw  his 
responsibility  as  that  of  holding  the  line 
until  such  time  as  the  United  States  could 
be  awakened  by  a  clear  issue  to  the  real 
situation,  fully  knowing  that  it  was  a 
gamble  in  which  time  and  his  own  re- 
sources were  running  out.  In  February 
1947  he  judged  the  time  and  the  issue  had 
arrived  in  Greece  where  for  two  years  of 
civil  war  Britain  had  accepted  alone  the 
responsibility  for  meeting  and  holding 
Communist  pressure.  Now  as  mounting 
pressure  coincided  with  the  first  signs,  as 
he  judged,  of  American  disillusionment 
with  Russia  he  instructed  the  British 
ambassador  to  deliver  a  memorandum  to 
General  Marshall,  the  secretary  of  state, 
informing  him  that  Britain's  economic 
position  would  no  longer  allow  her  to  act 
as  the  main  reserve  of  economic  and  mili- 
tary support  for  Greece  or  Turkey  and 
that  if  America  agreed  that  their  freedom 
from  Soviet  control  was  essential  to 
western  security  she  must  be  prepared  to 
step  in.  The  immediate  effect  of  this 
memorandum  on  American  official  opinion 
was  of  shock  and  anger.  But  sixteen  days 
later  came  the  'Truman  doctrine'  declar- 
ing security  throughout  the  whole  of  the 
eastern  Mediterranean  to  be  an  American 
interest.  Judged  by  the  developing  conse- 
quences of  this  doctrine  Bevin's  carefully 
timed  stroke  can  be  seen  as  one  of  the  most 
decisive  diplomatic  acts  in  modern  history. 

Satisfied  that  the  inevitable  British 
withdrawal  from  areas  of  traditional 
British  influence  would  no  longer  leave 
a  power  vacuum  which  could  tempt  the 
Soviet  to  dangerous  adventures,  Bevin 
turned  his  attention  to  building  a  pattern 
of  European  alliances  which  would  enable 
western  Europe  to  play  its  full  part  in 
western  security.  The  treaty  of  Dunkirk 
with  France  (March  1947)  was  the  first 
substantial  brick  in  this  structure.  It  was 
followed  a  year  later  by  a  treaty  of  mutual 
assistance  binding  together  Britain, 
France,  Belgium,  Holland,  and  Luxem- 


108 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Beviti 


bourg.  The  shock  to  American  opinion  of 
the  Communist  coup  in  Czechoslovakia  in 
1948  enabled  Bevin  to  achieve  his  larger 
purpose  of  widening  this  alliance  into  a 
North  Atlantic  Treaty  of  which  the  United 
States  and  Canada  would  be  a  part.  The 
treaty  was  signed  4  April  1949. 

The  creation  of  N.A.T.O.  came  as  the 
climax  of  Bevin'S'  efforts.  But  it  was  not 
his  only  achievement.  More  than  any  man 
— including  even  Marshall  himself — he 
was  responsible  for  the  development  of 
Marshall  Aid  to  Europe.  When  Marshall 
made  his  Harvard  speech  in  June  1947 
suggesting  that  if  the  European  nations 
would  organize  themselves  for  mutual  help 
American  economic  aid  for  reconstruction 
might  be  forthcoming  he  had,  as  he  subse- 
quently stated,  no  clear  plan  in  mind ;  and 
indeed  nearly  three  weeks  later  the  U.S. 
secretary  to  the  Treasury  was  still  denying 
that  the  speech  had  any  special  signifi- 
cance. It  was  Bevin' s  response  which 
brought  the  speech  to  life — within  a  mat- 
ter of  hours  he  had  not  only  cabled 
Britain's  appreciation  of  the  offer  and 
readiness  to  take  it  up  but  had  set  in 
motion  the  machinery  necessary  to  create 
the  Organization  for  European  Economic 
Co-operation.  He  hoped  it  would  be  pos- 
sible to  bring  the  U.S.S.R.  and  satellites  in 
too  and  with  Marshall's  agreement  invited 
Molotov  to  meet  the  French  foreign  minis- 
ter and  himself  in  Paris  to  discuss  their 
participation.  Although  Molotov  came, 
the  talks  were  without  result ;  not  for  lack 
of  trying  on  Bevin's  part. 

It  can  be  argued  that  in  doing  every- 
thing he  could  to  bring  America  into 
Europe  Bevin  helped  to  make  inevitable 
the  division  between  East  and  West.  But 
this  division  was  not  of  his  making.  It  was 
a  fact  of  Soviet  immediate  post-war  policy 
to  which  he  had  to  reconcile  himself  and 
was  nowhere  more  apparent  than  in  Ger- 
many whose  problems  occupied  so  much 
of  Bevin's  time.  The  alternative  to  Ameri- 
can co-operation  in  Europe  was  Soviet 
hegemony  over  most  of  the  Continent  and 
having  once  convinced  himself  that  this 
was  the  major  post-war  danger  he  played 
his  cards  with  stubborn  skill,  although  his 
hand  was  weak  and  he  knew  that  he  would 
be  bitterly  attacked  by  many  on  his  own 
side.  The  objectives  he  set  himself  he 
achieved,  even  if  he  was  never  able  'to  go 
down  to  Victoria  Station  and  take  a  ticket 
to  where  the  hell  I  like  without  a  passport'. 

Nor  was  he  always  so  successful  else- 
where. He  hoped  to  bring  both  stability 
and   economic   progress   to   the    Middle 


East.  One  of  his  first  policy  declarations 
when  he  went  to  the  Foreign  Office  was  a 
memorandum  declaring  Britain's  interest 
to  be  peasants  not  pashas.  But  Britain  no 
longer  had  the  economic  strength  to  prime 
the  pumps  for  the  reconstruction  policies 
he  dreamed  of  and  he  himself  under- 
estimated the  forces  of  revolutionary 
nationalism  that  the  war  had  helped  to 
set  in  motion  in  the  Arab  world.  Sometimes 
he  seemed  too  ready  to  dismiss  those  who 
would  not  fit  into  his  larger  plans  as  no 
better  than  break-away  unions.  He  was 
essentially  a  pragmatist  and  pragmatism 
was  not  enough,  although  it  is  difficult  to 
see  what  else  he  could  have  done  with  the 
resources  he  had.  He  tried  desperately 
hard  to  find  a  Palestine  solution  accept- 
able to  both  Jews  and  Arabs.  He  failed 
partly  because  he  underestimated  the 
passions  on  both  sides  and  partly  because 
his  efforts,  although  supported  by  the 
U.S.  State  Department,  were  continually 
undermined  by  the  pressures  of  American 
domestic  policy  on  the  President.  He  did 
not  hide  his  anger,  believing — perhaps 
optimistically — ^that  with  American  back;- 
ing  he  might  have  achieved  an  agreement 
which  would  have  met  the  reasonable 
claims  of  Jewry  without  permanently 
antagonizing  their  Arab  neighbours  and 
have  enabled  Jewish  skill  and  intelligence 
to  assist  in  raising  the  level  of  life  through- 
out the  Middle  East.  Failure  was,  perhaps, 
inevitable.  It  was  in  the  end  sharpened  by 
his  impatience  in  handing  over  the  prob- 
lem to  the  United  Nations  and  pulling 
out  the  British  administration  when  a 
decision  was  imposed  which  he  thought 
to  be  wrong. 

Looking  at  the  whole  field  of  foreign 
affairs  his  total  achievement  must,  despite 
his  failures,  be  judged  remarkable  and 
Bevin  himself  a  great  foreign  secretary. 
He  was  moreover  the  strong  man  of  the 
Government  and  Attlee's  closest  and  most 
loyal  associate  with  a  powerful  voice  in  all 
major  decisions.  Bevin  had  three  careers: 
trade-union  leader ;  wartime  Labour  minis- 
ter; foreign  secretary.  He  was  nearly 
sixty  when  he  embarked  on  the  second 
and  entered  the  House  of  Commons  for 
the  first  time ;  and  only  six  years  short  of 
his  death  when  he  went  to  the  Foreign 
Office.  To  each  he  brought  integrity, 
loyalty,  and  a  powerful  and  imaginative 
mind.  In  each  his  impact  was  massive  and 
creative.  He  grew  with  each  demand  made 
upon  him  and  in  whatever  situation  he 
found  himself  had  in  the  highest  degree 
that  quality  which  Goethe  once  thought 


OOP 


Bevin 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


was  to  be  noted  in  the  English:  'The 
courage  they  have  to  be  that  which  Nature 
made  them.'  'A  turn-up  in  a  million'  was 
Bevin's  own  description  of  himself. 

In  March  1951  Bevin  became  lord  privy 
seal  but  his  health  was  rapidly  declining 
and  he  died  in  London  14  April  1951.  His 
ashes  were  buried  in  Westminster  Abbey. 

Bevin  was  sworn  of  the  Pri\^  Council 
in  1940,  elected  an  honorary  fellow  of 
Magdalen  College,  Oxford,  in  1946,  and 
received  honorary  degrees  from  Cambridge 
and  Bristol.  Busts  by  E.  Whitney  Smith 
went  to  Transport  House,  the  Ministry  of 
Labour,  and  the  Foreign  Office;  by  Sir 
Jacob  Epstein  to  the  Tate  Gallery;  the 
National  Portrait  Gallery  has  a  portrait  by 
T.  C.  Dugdale. 

[Francis  Williams,  Ernest  Bevin,  1952 ;  Alan 
Bullock,  The  Life  and  Times  of  Ernest  Bevin, 
2  vols.,  1960-67 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Francis- Williams. 

BHOPAL,  HAMIDULLAH,  Nawab  of 
(1894-1960),  the  third  son  of  Her  High- 
ness Nawab  Sultan  Jehan,  the  Begum 
regnant  of  that  state  and  her  consort 
Ali  Ahmed  Khan,  was  born  at  Bhopal 
9  September  1894.  He  was  educated  as 
a  commoner  at  the  Mahommedan  Anglo- 
Oriental  College  at  Aligarh,  the  centre  of 
Islamic  feeling  in  India,  and  obtained  his 
B.A.  (1915)  from  the  Allahabad  Univer- 
sity to  which  the  college  was  then 
affiliated.  During  his  time  at  Aligarh 
(1911-15)  the  temper  of  that  institution 
was  undergoing  a  very  radical  change. 
A  wave  of  pan-Islamism  following  the 
Tripolitan  and  the  Balkan  wars  had  begun 
to  influence  the  younger  generation  to- 
wards an  attitude  of  criticism  of  British 
policies,  primarily  in  respect  of  Islam. 
There  was  also  a  noticeable  growth  of 
national  feeling.  At  the  university,  Hami- 
duUah  Khan  came  under  these  influences 
and  all  through  his  life  these  contradictory 
tendencies  were  strongly  marked  in  him. 
At  Aligarh  he  also  came  into  contact  with 
leading  public  men,  especially  among  the 
Moslems,  and  with  them  he  remained  on 
terms  of  friendship  throughout  his  life. 

On  return  to  the  state  he  was  employed 
in  administration  in  various  capacities 
imder  his  mother,  notably  as  chief  secre- 
tary (1916-22)  and  as  minister  of  law 
and  justice  (1922-6).  When  HamiduUah 
Khan's  elder  brothers  died.  Lord  Birken- 
head [q.v.],  overriding  the  decision  of  the 
Government  in  Delhi,  declared  him  heir- 
apparent  in  preference  to  the  children  of 
the  elder   brothers.    This   was  in  strict 


accordance  with  Moslem  law.  Soon  after- 
wards his  mother  abdicated  and  Hami- 
duUah Khan  assumed  full  ruling  powers 
over  his  state  (1926). 

From  the  very  first,  HamiduUah  took 
a  deep  interest  in  the  political  evolution 
of  princely  India.  In  view  of  the  rapid 
growth  of  the  national  movement,  the 
ruling  princes,  organized  under  a  Chamber 
of  Princes,  were  then  seeking  to  have  their 
rights  defined  and  strengthened.  These 
claims  were  being  pressed  under  the  leader- 
ship of  the  Standing  Committee  of  Princes 
to  which  Nawab  HamiduUah  was  elected 
in  the  first  year  of  his  rule.  He  occupied 
that  position  almost  continuously  to  the 
end  of  the  British  power  in  India.  As  a 
leading  member  of  the  princely  order  he 
was  an  unbending  champion  of  the  treaty 
rights  of  the  princes  and  argued  strongly 
for  a  rigid  limitation  of  the  Crown's 
powers  of  paramountcy,  and  for  the  recog- 
nition of  the  claim  that  the  relationship  of 
the  princes  was  with  the  Crown  of  Eng- 
land and  not  with  the  Government  of 
India.  Although  a  staunch  champion  of 
the  sovereign  rights  of  princes,  Nawab 
HamiduUah  was  realist  enough  to  recog- 
nize that  a  machinery  of  co-operation  with 
British  India  had  of  necessity  to  be  evolved 
if  the  princely  states  were  to  survive.  He 
was,  therefore,  nominated  by  the  Cham- 
ber of  Princes  as  one  of  its  delegates  to 
the  Round  Table  conference,  convened  in 
London  in  1930  to  discuss  the  problem  of 
Indian  self-government,  where  he  played 
a  notable  part  in  persuading  the  rulers  of 
states  to  accept  the  principle  of  federal 
union  with  British  India.  In  the  commit- 
tee presided  over  by  Lord  Sankey  [q.v.] 
which  was  entrusted  with  the  working  out 
of  the  details  of  federal  structure,  Hami- 
duUah was  one  of  the  most  constructive 
spokesmen  of  the  princes.  As  chancellor  of 
the  Chamber  of  Princes  (1931-2)  he  exer- 
cised a  leadership  in  the  negotiations 
which  safeguarded  the  rights  of  the  princes 
in  the  federal  constitution.  His  close  as- 
sociation with  the  political  leaders  of 
British  India  enabled  him  to  present  the 
case  of  the  states  in  a  manner  acceptable 
to  national  sentiment. 

The  growth  of  the  Moslem  League 
under  M.  A.  Jinnah  [q.v.],  the  demand 
for  the  partition  of  India  and  the 
creation  of  a  separate  state  of  Pakistan 
placed  him  in  a  very  awkward  dilemma. 
The  original  solution  of  federal  union 
seemed  no  longer  possible  and  he  along 
with  some  other  princes  put  forward  the 
idea  of  a  division  of  India  into  three  areas: 


110 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bidder 


Hindustan,  Pakistan,  and  Rajasthan — 
tiie  last  being  itself  a  confederation  of 
princely  states  bound  to  the  other  two  in 
matters  connected  with  defence,  foreign 
policy,  and  transport.  He  fought  for  this 
idea  to  the  very  end.  As  chancellor  of  the 
Chamber  of  Princes,  elected  a  second  time 
in  1944,  he  was  able  to  exert  considerable 
pressure  on  the  Government  in  the  poli- 
tical discussions  which  ended  only  with 
the  independence  of  India  in  1947.  In  the 
negotiations  with  Sir  Stafford  Cripps 
[q.v.]  (1942)  and  with  the  cabinet  mission 
(1946)  he  was  one  of  the  leading  spokes- 
men of  the  princely  states.  When  indepen- 
dence came,  like  the  majority  of  his 
brother  princes,  he  surrendered  his  state 
voluntarily  to  the  Indian  Union.  From 
1947,  until  he  died  at  Bhopal  4  February 
1960,  he  lived  a  retired  life  interesting  him- 
self mainly  in  agriculture. 

Nawab  HamiduUah,  like  his  mother 
before  him,  was  deeply  attached  to  the 
British  royal  family  with  whom  he  main- 
tained close  connection  until  the  time  of 
India's  independence.  As  a  younger  son  he 
was  attached  to  the  staff  of  the  Prince  of 
Wales  when  he  visited  India  in  1921.  He 
was  appointed  C.S.I.  (1921),  C.V.O.  (1922), 
G.C.I.E.  (1929),  and  G.C.S.I.  (1932). 
During  the  war  of  1939-45  his  unremitting 
efforts  to  keep  up  the  loyalty  of  the  Mos- 
lems to  the  allied  cause  and  his  own 
sacrifices  brought  him  the  rank  of  honorary 
air  vice-marshal  in  the  Indian  Air  Force 
and  honorary  major-general  in  the  Indian 
Army. 

Nawab  HamiduUah  was  one  of  the 
best-known  all-round  sportsmen  in  India. 
He  excelled  in  cricket,  squash,  hockey, 
and  other  games,  but  it  was  as  a  polo 
player  that  he  was  internationally  known. 
He  was  one  of  the  most  outstanding 
players  of  his  time  and  he  kept  up  the 
game  almost  to  the  end. 

The  Nawab  married  in  1905  the  Prin- 
cess Shah  Bano  Maimoona  Sultan  Begum, 
the  daughter  of  Shahzada  Humayun,  the 
great-grandson  of  Shah  Shuja,  King  of 
Afghanistan.  By  her  he  had  three  daugh- 
ters, the  first,  Gauhar-i-Taj  (Begum 
Kurwai),  opted  for  Pakistan  and  thereby 
lost  her  claim  to  succeed  to  the  title.  The 
second  daughter,  Princess  Mehr  Taj, 
married  the  Nawab  of  Pataudi,  the 
Oxford  and  test  cricketer  who  died  in 
1952.  She  succeeded  on  the  death  of  her 
father  to  the  title  and  dignity  of  the 
Nawab  Begum  of  Bhopal. 

[Publications  of  the  former  state  of  Bhopal ; 
personal  knowledge.]  K.  M.  Panikkar. 


BICESTER,  first  Baron  (1867-1956), 
banker.  [See  Smith,  Vivian  Hugh.] 

BIDDER,  GEORGE  PARKER  (1863- 
1953),  marine  biologist,  was  born  in  Lon- 
don 21  May  1863,  the  son  of  George  Parker 
Bidder,  barrister,  later  a  Q.C.  and  bencher 
of  Lincoln's  Inn,  and  grandson  of  George 
Parker  Bidder  [q.v.],  the  calculating 
phenomenon  among  whose  engineering 
works  are  the  London  Victoria  Docks. 
His  mother  was  Anna,  daughter  of  John 
Robinson  McClean,  M.P.,  F.R.S.  Bidder 
was  educated  at  Harrow  and  after  work- 
ing at  University  College,  London,  under 
(Sir)  Ray  Lankester  [q.v.]  entered  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge,  where  he  obtained 
a  first  class  in  part  i  (1884)  and  a  second 
in  part  ii  (1886)  of  the  natural  sciences 
tripos.  He  next  spent  a  considerable 
amount  of  his  time  at  the  Stazione 
Zoologica  at  Naples  and  at  the  laboratory 
of  the  Marine  Biological  Association  at 
Plymouth,  where  he  quickly  established 
his  reputation  as  a  leading  authority  on 
sponges.  To  this  group  he  devoted  most 
of  his  scientific  energy  for  the  rest  of  his 
life ;  he  was  the  author  of  many  scientific 
papers  and  edited  Vosmaer's  posthumous 
Bibliography  of  Sponges  (1928).  Important 
as  these  papers  were.  Bidder's  most 
valuable  contributions  to  biology  arose 
from  an  intense  desire  to  promote  the  in- 
terests of  science  and  from  the  business 
experience  gained  as  managing  director 
(1897-1908)  and  later  as  chairman  (1915- 
19)  of  the  Cannock  Chase  Colliery  Com- 
pany, for  he  applied  this  experience 
wholeheartedly  to  the  welfare  of  biological 
projects.  He  purchased  a  trawler  and 
placed  it  at  the  disposal  of  the  Marine 
Biological  Association  in  order  to  carry 
out  fishery  research  in  the  North  Sea; 
with  the  proceeds  of  its  subsequent  sale 
he  endowed  a  Ray  Lankester  research 
studentship  at  Plymouth.  By  other 
equally  timely  gifts  and  loans  he  enabled 
the  laboratories  at  Naples  and  Plymouth 
to  survive  very  critical  periods  in  their 
history  and  ensured  the  continuity  of 
publication  of  two  very  important  bio- 
logical journals:  The  Quarterly  Journal  of 
Microscopical  Science  and  the  Journal  of 
Experimental  Biology,  He  had  an  out- 
standing ability  to  give  financial  advice 
and  help  at  the  right  time  and  in  the  right 
way. 

Bidder's  work  on  sponges  won  him  the 
degree  of  Sc.D.  from  Cambridge  in  1916. 
He  served  on  the  council  of  the  Plymouth 
laboratory  from  1899  until  shortly  before 


111 


Bidder 


D.N.B.  1651-1960 


his  death.  He  was  president  of  the  Marine 
Biological  Association  (1989-45)  and  of 
the  zoology  section  of  the  British  Associa- 
tion at  Leeds  in  1927.  He  took  a  very 
active  part  in  the  work  of  the  Linnean 
Society,  being  vice-president  in  1924  and 
1981,  and  zoological  secretary  in  1928-31. 
His  period  of  office  as  president  of  the 
Marine  Biological  Association  covered  a 
period  of  intense  air  raids;  his  imper- 
turbability during  a  particularly  un- 
pleasant incident  made  him  an  almost 
legendary  figure. 

Although  in  latter  years  he  enjoyed 
reasonably  robust  health,  at  least  fifteen 
years  of  his  life  were  marred  by  illness.  He 
developed  phthisis  as  a  young  man  and 
later  took  an  active  interest  in,  and  was  a 
founder-member  of,  the  Papworth  Hospi- 
tal. As  he  grew  older  he  became  more  and 
more  nocturnal  in  habit.  He  rose  about 
tea  time  and  worked  far  into  the  night.  It 
is  generally  believed  that  his  purchase  of 
Parker's  Hotel  in  Naples  was  prompted 
by  his  dislike  of  being  roused  at  conven- 
tional hours.  He  was  a  Liberal  in  politics 
and  for  many  years  helped  in  the  organiza- 
tion of  the  party  in  Cambridge. 

In  1899  Bidder  married  Marion  (died 
1932),  daughter  of  George  Greenwood; 
they  had  two  daughters.  Bidder  died  in 
Cambridge  31  December  1953.  There  are 
portraits  by  R.  G.  Eves  in  the  possession 
of  the  family  and  of  the  Marine  Biological 
Association  at  Plymouth. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
James  Gray. 

BIRDWOOD,  WILLIAM  RIDDELL, 
first  Baron  Birdwood  (1865-1951),  field- 
marshal,  was  born  at  Kirkee,  India,  13 
September  1865,  the  second  son  of  Her- 
bert Mills  Birdwood  [q.v.],  under-secretary 
to  the  Government  of  Bombay,  later  a 
high  court  judge,  and  his  wife,  Edith 
Marion  Sidonie,  daughter  of  Surgeon- 
Major  Elijah  George  Halhed  Impey,  of 
the  Bombay  Horse  Artillery.  All  five  sons 
were  to  serve  the  army  in  India. 

Educated  at  Clifton  College,  Birdwood 
obtained  a  commission  in  the  4th  bat- 
talion, Royal  Scots  Fusiliers,  in  1883.  He 
entered  the  Royal  Military  College,  Sand- 
hurst, but  as  a  result  of  the  Penjdeh  inci- 
dent of  1885  he  was  gazetted  earlier  than 
he  expected  to  the  12th  Lancers  and 
embarked  for  India  in  that  year ;  he  trans- 
ferred to  the  11th  Bengal  Lancers  at  the 
end  of  1886.  He  first  saw  active  service  in 
the  Black  Moimtain  expedition  in  1891 ; 
and  acquitted  himself  well  in  the  Tirah 


expedition  in  1897.  In  1893-8  he  was 
adjutant  of  the  Viceroy's  Body  Guard. 

Promoted  captain  in  1896,  Birdwood 
went  in  November  1899  to  South  Africa  as 
a  special  service  officer  and  was  appointed 
to  the  staff  of  the  Natal  mounted  brigade 
commanded  by  Lord  Dundonald  [q.v.]. 
He  took  part  in  the  battle  of  Colenso  and 
in  the  further  campaigns  to  relieve  Lady- 
smith  ;  was  later  wounded ;  and  five  times 
mentioned  in  dispatches.  When  the  Natal 
Force  was  broken  up  towards  the  end  of 
1900  Birdwood  became  deputy  assistant 
adjutant-general  to  Lord  Kitchener  [q.v.] 
and  on  the  conclusion  of  the  South  African 
war  accompanied  him  to  India  as  his 
assistant  military  secretary  (1902-4)  and 
military  secretary  (1905-9).  Birdwood's 
relationship  with  Kitchener  was  one  of  the 
decisive  elements  in  his  career :  'we  seemed 
to  take  to  each  other  at  once,  and  for 
the  next  nine  years  [1900-1909]  I  was 
scarcely  ever  away  from  him.' 

Birdwood  was  promoted  colonel  in  1905 
and  in  1908  was  chief  staff  officer  to  Sir 
James  Willcocks  [q.v.]  in  the  Mohmand 
Field  Force.  He  was  appointed  to  the 
D.S.O.,  mentioned  in  dispatches,  and  ap- 
pointed CLE.  He  became  brigadier- 
general  in  1909  and  major-general  in  1911. 
From  1909  to  1912  he  was  in  command  of 
the  Kohat  independent  brigade.  In  1912, 
after  a  short  period  as  quartermaster- 
general,  he  became  secretary  to  the 
Government  of  India  in  the  army  depart- 
ment and  a  member  of  the  governor- 
general's  legislative  council.  He  was  thus 
called  upon  to  play  an  important  part  in 
the  dispatch  of  the  Indian  Army  units  to 
France,  Egypt,  and  Mesopotamia  after 
the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914.  In  December 
he  was  given  command  of  the  new 
Australian  and  New  Zealand  contingents 
being  sent  to  Egypt,  with  corps  comman- 
der status  and  the  rank  of  lieutenant- 
general. 

Birdwood  at  once  discerned  the 
outstanding  quality  of  the  independent 
and  ardent  young  Anzacs.  He  built  up  an 
excellent  staff  and  training  was  put  in 
hand.  The  original  intention  was  to  send 
the  troops  to  France  after  training  but 
they  were  destined  for  an  earlier  and  more 
spectacular  initiation.  A  few  days  after 
Admiral  Carden  [q.v.]  opened  the  naval 
assault  on  the  Dardanelles  on  19  Feb- 
ruary 1915,  Birdwood  was  instructed  by 
Kitchener,  now  secretary  of  state  for  war, 
to  proceed  to  the  Dardanelles  and  to  re- 
port back.  Birdwood  was  at  once  impressed 
by  the  difficulties  of  a  purely  naval  attack 


112 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Birdwood 


and  reported  in  this  sense  at  a  time 
when  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill  was  urging 
Kitchener  to  send  the  29th  division  to  the 
Eastern  Mediterranean  theatre  'to  support 
our  diplomacy'.  Kitchener  at  this  stage 
was  vacillating,  but  some  Anzac  units  and 
others  of  the  Royal  Naval  Division  were 
sent  to  the  island  of  Lemnos  where  Ad- 
miral Wemyss  [q.v.]  was  endeavouring  to 
create  an  advanced  supply  base  with  no 
staff  and  hardly  any  facilities.  It  was 
Kitchener's  intention  that  Birdwood 
should  command  any  military  force  that 
might  be  needed;  but  his  decision  on  10 
March  to  send  the  29th  division  was  one 
of  the  factors  which  resulted  in  the  ap- 
pointment of  Sir  Ian  Hamilton  [q.v.]  to 
take  command  of  what  was  to  be  called 
the  Mediterranean  Expeditionary  Force. 
One  consequence  of  this  decision  was  that 
the  preparatory  work  done  by  Birdwood's 
staff  was  largely  negatived.  Hamilton's 
failure  to  bring  Birdwood's  staff  into  his 
planning  and  the  extent  to  which  he 
ignored  his  administrative  staff  were 
factors  which  caused  friction. 

After  the  failure  of  the  naval  attack  of 
18  March  and  the  decision  taken  jointly 
on  22  March  and  without  reference  to 
London  by  Hamilton  and  Garden's  succes- 
sor Admiral  De  Robeck  [q.v.]  to  deliver 
a  combined  naval  and  military  attack  as 
soon  as  Hamilton's  force  had  been  re- 
organized, Birdwood  was  strongly  opposed 
to  any  landings  on  the  Helles  beaches  of 
the  Gallipoli  Peninsula  (which  he  had 
previously  favoured)  as  the  vital  element 
of  surprise  had  been  lost.  In  this  he  was 
strongly  supported  by  (Sir)  Aylmer 
Hunter- Weston  (29th  division),  (Sir) 
Archibald  Paris  (Royal  Naval  Division), 
and  Sir  John  Maxwell  (G.O.C.  Egypt) 
[qq.v.].  Hamilton  stuck  firmly  to  the  plan 
to  land  the  29th  division  at  Helles  and 
rejected  Birdwood's  arguments  for  a  land- 
ing on  the  Asiatic  shore  of  the  Dardanelles. 

The  role  of  the  Anzac  Corps  was  to  land 
on  the  peninsula  at  a  point  just  north  of 
the  conspicuous  promontory  of  Gaba 
Tepe  on  the  western  shore  of  the  GaUipoli 
Peninsula  and  advance  eastwards  to  the 
eminence  of  Mai  Tepe,  thus  cutting  off  the 
Turkish  forces  opposed  to  the  29th  divi- 
sion at  Helles.  Birdwood  determined  to 
land  his  covering  force  at  first  Ught,  with 
no  preliminary  naval  bombardment,  in 
order  to  achieve  the  maximum  of  surprise. 
The  combined  assault  took  place  on  Sun- 
day, 25  April.  The  Anzac  covering  force, 
for  reasons  which  have  never  been  satis- 
factorily explained,  landed  in  some  con- 


fusion well  to  the  north  of  Gaba  Tepe  in  a 
small  bay  subsequently  known  as  Anzac 
Cove.  In  spite  of  this  initial  error,  the  sur- 
prise was  almost  complete  and  some  units 
penetrated  deep  inland  against  hastily 
gathered  Turkish  resistance.  The  momen- 
tum of  the  advance  was  not  maintained. 
Colonel  Mustapha  Kemal,  commanding 
the  Turkish  19th  division  at  Boghali, 
engaged  all  available  forces.  The  steep 
cliffs  and  precipitous  gullies  above  Anzac 
Cove  became  the  scenes  of  fierce  and  un- 
co-ordinated  fighting  throughout  the  day. 
By  evening  a  thin  drizzle  was  falling  on 
the  exhausted  dominion  troops,  Anzac 
Cove  was  the  scene  of  serious  congestion 
and  confusion,  and  the  ground  secured  was 
in  fact  a  small  perimeter  which  penetrated 
inland  barely  a  thousand  yards  in  places. 
In  these  depressing  circumstances,  Bird- 
wood's  divisional  commanders  urged  him 
to  recommend  evacuation.  Against  his 
own  inclinations  Birdwood  did  so.  In  the 
general  confusion  the  message  was  not 
addressed  to  anyone  and  it  was  only  by 
chance  that  Hamilton  received  it.  His 
reply  was  a  firm  order  to  hold  on. 

For  six  months  the  Anzacs  defended 
their  wretched,  tiny,  and  arid  fragment  of 
coast,  overlooked  by  the  enemy  and  con- 
stantly exposed  to  his  fire.  Intense  heat 
and  disease  subsequently  added  to  the 
already  severe  burdens  of  the  resolute 
dominion  troops.  Birdwood  may  be  faulted 
for  certain  aspects  of  his  handling  of 
Anzac  operations,  and  particularly  for  the 
failures  of  the  night  attacks  of  2-8  May 
and  for  the  heroic  but  poorly  commanded 
attempt  to  seize  the  Sari  Bair  heights  on 
6-9  August.  He  may  also  be  criticized  for 
failing  to  appreciate  imtil  too  late  the 
debilitating  effects  of  sickness  on  the 
Anzac  troops  which  played  a  significant 
part  in  the  failure  of  the  August  attacks. 
But  in  defence  his  confident  and  deter- 
mined example  and  bearing  fully  merited 
the  tribute  of  Hamilton  that  he  was  'the 
soul  of  Anzac'. 

Birdwood  was  one  of  the  very  few 
British  conmianders  to  leave  Gallipoli 
with  an  increased  reputation.  In  one  re- 
spect he  was  fortunate.  The  failure  of  the 
IX  Corps  under  Sir  Frederick  Stopford 
[q.v.]  at  Suvla  on  6-9  August  obscured 
the  errors  of  Birdwood  and  (Sir)  Alexan- 
der Godley  [q.v.]  at  Anzac,  both  then  and 
later.  When,  following  Hamilton's  recall  in 
October,  Sir  Charles  Monro  [q.v.]  recom- 
mended evacuation.  Kitchener  wanted  to 
appoint  Birdwood  in  his  stead.  Birdwood, 
greatly  to  his  credit,  protested  and  the 


118 


Birdwood 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


proposal  was  shelved.  It  was  ironic  that 
Birdwood,  the  only  senior  commander 
initially  opposed  to  evacuation  (he  sub- 
sequently agreed  that  the  decision  was 
right),  should  eventually  be  in  executive 
command  of  the  evacuation,  as  comman- 
der of  the  Dardanelles  Army  under  Monro, 
when  the  Cabinet  decided  upon  it.  This 
brilliantly  successful  operation  in  Decem- 
ber 1915  and  January  1916  rightly  in- 
creased his  already  high  reputation. 

After  the  death  of  Sir  William  Bridges 
[q.v.]  at  Anzac  in  May  1915,  Birdwood 
had  been  made  responsible  to  the  Aus- 
tralian minister  of  defence  for  administra- 
tion in  addition  to  his  responsibility  to 
the  War  Office  for  the  conduct  of  miUtary 
operations.  It  was  largely  due  to  Birdwood 
that  this  arrangement  worked  so  well. 

At  the  end  of  March  1916  the  two  Anzac 
Corps  embarked  for  France,  the  first  under 
Birdwood's  command.  In  November  1917 
it  was  renamed  the  Australian  Corps  and 
comprised  the  five  AustraUan  divisions  in 
France.  In  May  1918  Birdwood  took  com- 
mand of  the  Fifth  Army.  He  was  pro- 
moted general  in  1917  and  after  the  war 
was  awarded  £10,000  and  created  a 
baronet  (1919). 

Birdwood  had  proved  himself  a  brave 
and  resolute  soldier  and  keenly  alive  to  the 
importance  of  personal  relations.  But  the 
failings  demonstrated  in  attack  on  GaUi- 
poli  were  also  evident  in  France.  As  was 
written  after  his  death  'he  remained  a 
"character",  a  virile  personaUty  rather 
than  a  master  of  war'.  His  unconcealed 
eagerness  for  personal  recognition  was  one 
facet  of  his  character  which  some  found 
unattractive.  If  not  in  the  first  he  was  high 
in  the  second  rank  of  British  commanders 
in  the  war  of  1914r-18. 

After  the  war  Birdwood  commanded 
the  Northern  Army  in  India  (1920-24)  and 
in  1925  was  preferred  to  Sir  Claud  Jacob 
[q.v.]  as  commander-in-chief.  He  was  pro- 
moted field-marshal  at  the  same  time.  He 
was  a  good  commander-in-chief  with  a 
deep  and  sympathetic  knowledge  of  the 
country  and  its  peoples. 

The  one  position  Birdwood  coveted  but 
did  not  attain  was  the  governor-general- 
ship of  Australia.  On  his  retirement  from 
India  in  1930  he  was  elected,  somewhat 
unexpectedly,  to  the  mastership  of  Peter- 
house,  Cambridge,  an  office  which  he 
exercised  with  manifest  enjoyment  until 
1938.  In  1935  he  was  appointed  captain  of 
Deal  Castle  and  in  1938  was  created  Baron 
Birdwood,  of  Anzac  and  Totnes.  He  had 
been     appointed     C.B.     (1911),     K.C.B. 


(1917),  and  G.C.B.  (1923) ;  K.C.S.I.  (1915) 
and  G.C.S.I.  (1930) ;  K.C.M.G.  (1914)  and 
G.C.M.G.  (1919) ;  and  G.C.V.O.  (1937).  His 
long  and  distinguished  life,  darkened  in 
later  years  by  failing  eyesight,  ended  on  17 
May  1951  when  he  died  at  Hampton  Court 
Palace. 

Birdwood  married  in  1894  Janetta 
Hope  Gonville  (died  1947),  daughter  of 
Sir  Benjamin  Parnell  Bromhead,  fourth 
baronet.  It  was  a  very  happy  marriage. 
They  had  two  daughters  and  a  son, 
Christopher  Bromhead  (1899-1962),  who 
succeeded  to  the  title. 

The  Imperial  War  Museum  has  por- 
traits by  Alfred  Hayward  and  Francis 
Dodd,  a  pencil  and  water-colour  'General 
Birdwood  returning  to  his  headquarters' 
by  Sir  William  Orpen,  and  a  bust  by 
Sigismund  de  Strobl ;  Birdwood  is  included 
in  the  group  'Some  General  Officers  of 
the  Great  War'  by  J.  S.  Sargent  in  the 
National  Portrait  Gallery  where  there  is 
also  a  drawing  by  Sargent. 

The  Birdwood  papers  (Australian  War 
Memorial,  Canberra) ;  Lord  Birdwood,  Khaki 
and  Gown,  1941,  and  In  My  Time,  1945 ;  C.  F. 
Aspinall-Oglander,  (Official)  History  of  the 
Great  War.  Military  Operations,  Gallipoli,  2 
vols.,  1929-32;  C.  E.  W.  Bean,  Official 
History  of  Australia  in  the  War,  6  vols., 
1921^2 ;  R.  R.  James,  Gallipoli,  1965 ;  The 
Times,  18,  22,  25,  and  30  May  1951 ;  private 
information.] 

Robert  Rhodes  James. 


BIRLEY,  Sir  OSWALD  HORNBY 
JOSEPH  (1880-1952),  painter,  was  born 
31  March  1880  at  Auckland,  New  Zealand, 
the  son  of  Hugh  Francis  Birley,  of  St. 
Asaph,  North  Wales,  and  his  wife,  EHza- 
beth,  daughter  of  George  McCorquodale, 
of  Newton-le-Willows,  who  were  at  that 
time  engaged  upon  a  world  tour.  Oswald 
was  their  only  child  and  his  father,  a  man 
of  volatile  and  artistic  temperament,  was 
determined  to  ensure  the  development  of 
his  son's  talent  which  had  shown  itself  at 
an  early  age.  He  was  educated  at  Harrow 
and  then,  in  1897,  was  taken  by  his  father 
to  Dresden,  Munich,  and  Florence.  In  1898 
he  went  up  to  Trinity  College,  Cambridge, 
moving  on  to  Paris  in  1901  where  he 
studied  under  Marcel  Baschet  at  Julian's 
and  exhibited  regularly  at  the  Salon  until 
1904.  In  1905  he  visited  Madrid,  staying 
there  for  a  year  and  executing  a  remark- 
able series  of  copies  from  Velazquez ;  it 
was  perhaps  this  more  than  any  other  in- 
fluence which  presented  him  with  an  ideal 
and  formulated  his  style. 


114 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Blackwood 


From  1906  he  was  working  in  London, 
rapidly  establishing  a  reputation  as  a  por- 
trait painter  in  an  era  which  included 
Sargent,  Orpen,  Nicholson,  McEvoy,  and 
Lavery  [qq.v.].  He  exhibited  at  the  Royal 
Academy  and  at  the  Modern  Society  of 
Portrait  Painters,  and  from  time  to  time 
continued  to  exhibit  at  the  Salon  and 
elsewhere. 

At  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  he  en- 
listed in  the  Royal  Fusiliers  with  whom  he 
served  until  1915  when  he  was  transferred 
to  the  Intelligence  Corps,  flying  as  an 
observer  with  the  Royal  Flying  Corps.  He 
became  a  captain  in  1916;  received  the 
M.C.  in  1917 ;  and  returned  to  civil  life  in 
1919. 

In  1921  he  married  Rhoda  Vava  Mary, 
daughter  of  Robert  Lecky  Pike,  of  Kil- 
nock,  county  Carlow  (they  had  one  daugh- 
ter and  one  son),  and  the  following  year 
moved  into  62  Wellington  Road,  St. 
John's  Wood,  which  had  been  built  for 
him  to  the  design  of  Clough  Williams-Ellis. 
From  here  he  set  out  on  a  series  of  painting 
travels  which,  besides  Europe,  included 
visits  to  America  (1922  and  subsequently), 
Mexico  in  1926,  where  he  painted  Presi- 
dent Calles;  India  (1927),  and  Siam, 
painting  the  King  and  Queen,  in  1929. 
During  this  period  he  received  his  first 
royal  commission,  a  portrait  of  King 
George  V  for  the  National  Museum  of 
Wales  (1928);  and  thereafter  he  was  to 
paint  virtually  every  member  of  the  royal 
family.  He  continued  to  exhibit,  chiefly 
with  the  Royal  Society  of  Portrait 
Painters,  of  which  he  was  for  some  years 
vice-president. 

In  1943,  while  serving  with  the  Sussex 
Home  Guard,  he  lost  the  sight  of  an  eye 
in  an  accident  when  a  weapon  exploded. 
Typically  he  uttered  no  word  of  complaint 
and  started  to  paint  again,  adapting  him- 
self with  great  patience  to  the  new  type  of 
vision.  He  painted  most  of  the  statesmen 
and  military  leaders  of  the  war,  particu- 
larly a  series  for  the  Royal  Naval  College, 
Greenwich,  of  King  George  VI  and  his 
admirals,  and  four  portraits  of  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill.  After  the  war  he  made 
other  visits  to  America  in  1949  and  1950 ; 
but  he  was  no  longer  young  or  robust  and 
certainly  took  on  more  work  than  was 
good  for  him. 

Birley  was  knighted  in  1949.  In  1951  an 
exhibition  of  his  work,  ranging  over  half 
a  century,  was  held  at  the  Royal  Institute 
Galleries  which  revealed  remarkably  the 
record  he  had  made  of  the  personalities  of 
his  time,  almost  always  faithful  likenesses 


and  of  a  consistently  high  quality,  while 
the  landscape  and  subject  pictures  demon- 
strated his  versatility  and  breadth  of 
interest.  A  year  later,  after  a  final  visit  to 
America  and  a  long  period  of  increasingly 
poor  health,  he  died  at  his  London  home 
6  May  1952.  He  is  buried  in  the  country 
churchyard  at  West  Dean  near  his  Sussex 
home  of  Charleston  Manor. 

Exceptionally  handsome,  with  very  well- 
shaped  head  and  hands,  Oswald  Birley 
had  immense  charm  of  manner  devoid 
of  all  affectation  or  conceit.  He  was  a 
delightful  companion  who  did  most  things 
well  and  gracefully — he  spoke  perfect 
French  and  was  a  first-rate  shot.  He  had 
an  enormous  circle  of  friends,  most  of 
whom  had  been  his  sitters,  and  not  least 
among  them  were  those  who  worked  for 
him  or  with  him.  He  was  much  more  than 
a  'society'  or  'boardroom'  painter — apart 
from  royalty  and  the  court  circle  he  had 
painted  American  millionaires  and  Indian 
beggars,  soldiers  and  artists,  statesmen 
and  dancers,  children  and  viceroys,  all  of 
them  with  insight  and  sympathy  and,  as 
he  said  himself,  with  the  intention  not  of 
flattery  but  of  paying  a  compliment.  His 
work  is  to  be  found  in  the  National  Por- 
trait and  many  other  galleries  and  there 
is  a  self-portrait  (1915)  in  the  Musee  de 
Luxembourg,  Paris. 

[Personal  knowledge.] 

John  Leigh-Pemberton. 

BLACKWOOD,   ALGERNON   HENRY 

(1869-1951),  author,  was  born  at  Shooters 
Hill,  Kent,  14  March  1869,  the  second  son 
of  (Sir)  Stevenson  Arthur  Blackwood,  who 
became  secretary  to  the  Post  Office,  and  his 
wife,  Harriet  Sydney,  daughter  of  Conway 
R.  Dobbs,  of  Castle  Dobbs,  county  Antrim, 
Ireland,  and  widow  of  George,  sixth  Duke 
of  Manchester.  He  was  educated  at  a 
school  of  the  Moravian  Brotherhood  in  the 
Black  Forest,  and  at  Wellington  College 
and  Edinburgh  University.  His  father,  in 
his  youth  a  man  of  fashion  known  as 
'Beauty  Blackwood',  underwent  a  sudden 
conversion  and  became  a  leading  speaker 
and  writer  in  the  evangelical  movement. 
Although  Algernon  may  have  inherited 
something  of  his  father's  religious  and 
emotional  temperament,  and  more  of  his 
mother's  innate  wisdom,  he  did  not  follow 
the  path  of  Christian  evangelism,  but  at 
seventeen  began  a  study  of  the  eastern 
religions  which,  with  his  deep  love  of 
nature,  became  leading  influences  in  his 
life. 

At  twenty  he  was  sent  out  to  Toronto 


115 


Blackwood 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


with  a  small  allowance  and  for  the  next 
ten  years  he  lived  a  perilous  existence 
in  Canada  and  the  United  States,  during 
which  he  tried  many  occupations,  touch- 
ing the  depths  of  poverty  and  despair 
before  he  found  work  as  a  reporter  on  the 
New  York  Sun  and  later  on  the  New  York 
Times.  He  described  these  years  in  a  vivid 
autobiography  Episodes  before  Thirty 
(1923)  which  was  included  by  Jonathan 
Cape  [q.v.]  in  his  Travellers'  Library  as 
Adventures  before  Thirty  (1934). 

On  his  return  to  England,  Blackwood 
was  at  first  employed  in  the  dried  milk 
business,  but  he  had  been  in  the  habit  of 
writing  tales  for  his  own  pleasure,  and 
after  the  encouragement  of  the  publisher 
Eveleigh  Nash  had  led  to  the  appearance 
of  his  first  book  of  stories,  The  Empty 
House  (1906),  he  soon  decided  to  devote 
himself  entirely  to  authorship,  for  which 
his  American  experience  had  provided 
much  curious  material.  From  the  first 
he  was  preoccupied  with  the  supernatural, 
but  before  long  he  extended  his  range 
from  the  macabre  'ghost  stories'  strictly 
so-called,  as  exempUfied  in  John  Silence 
(1908,  a  collection  of  cases  involving  a 
psychologist-detective  of  that  name),  to 
more  ambitious  full-length  novels  of  fancy 
and  fantasy.  Several  of  these  disclosed  his 
interest  in  the  child  mind,  notably  Jimbo 
(1909),  The  Human  Chord  (1910),  and  A 
Prisoner  in  Fairyland  (1913)  which  he 
dramatized  with  Violet  Pearn  as  The  Star- 
light Express  (1915)  and  for  which  Sir 
Edward  Elgar  [q.v.]  composed  music. 
Among  his  more  powerful  and  persuasive 
mystical  conceptions  was  The  Centaur 
(1911),  in  which  an  Irish  traveller  feels  the 
call  of  the  JJrwelt  and  has  a  vision  in  the 
Caucasus  of  the  morning  of  the  world; 
while  there  is  an  impressive  strain  of 
poetic  feeling  in  Pan's  Garden  (1912),  a 
volume  of  nature  stories.  Dudley  and 
Gilderoy  (1929),  the  story  of  a  cat  and  a 
parrot,  showed  more  of  the  light  touch  and 
sense  of  humour  which  he  always  had  at 
his  command. 

In  his  later  years  two  comprehensive 
anthologies  of  Blackwood's  stories  were 
pubUshed,  The  Tales  of  Algernon  Black- 
wood (1938)  and  Tales  of  the  Uncanny  and 
Supernatural  (1949).  Altogether  Black- 
wood published  more  than  thirty  books. 
His  craftsmanship,  gift  of  narrative, 
original  turn  of  mind,  and  genuine  poetic 
and  imaginative  force,  make  him  an  author 
to  be  remembered  with  respect.  Perhaps  it 
was  only  in  some  of  his  short  stories  that 
he  was  entirely  successful  artistically,  for 


a  certain  diffuse  and  nebulous  quality 
hampered  the  novels ;  nor,  on  the  whole, 
did  he  receive  the  financial  return  which 
he  deserved.  But  towards  the  close  of  his 
life,  from  1947  onwards,  he  came  into  his 
own  as  a  performer  on  television,  where 
his  strongly  marked  features  and  dis- 
tinguished presence  enhanced  the  effec- 
tiveness of  his  story- telling.  He  received 
the  Television  Society's  medal  in  1948  and 
in  1949  he  was  appointed  C.B.E.  for  his 
services  to  Uterature. 

Personally,  Blackwood,  although  con- 
vivial, was  a  strongly  independent,  deeply 
thoughtful  character,  whose  philosophical 
detachment  did  not  prevent  him  from 
winning  the  warm  affection  of  many 
friends.  Tall  and  active,  he  spent  much  of 
his  time  in  Europe,  especially  in  Switzer- 
land, and  was  a  fine  skier  and  a  believer  in 
the  open-air  life. 

Blackwood  died  in  London  10  December 
1951.  He  was  unmarried.  Portraits  by 
John  Flanagan  and  Herbert  Gurschner 
and  a  pencil  drawing  by  Walter  Tittle 
are  privately  owned. 

[The  Times ^  11  December  1951 ;  Essays  and 
Studies,  1961 ;  private  information.] 

Derek  Hudson. 

BLAMEY,  Sir  THOMAS  ALBERT 
(1884r-1951),  field-marshal,  was  born  24 
January  1884  at  Lake  Albert,  near 
Wagga  Wagga,  New  South  Wales,  the 
seventh  child  and  fourth  son  of  Richard 
Blamey,  drover  and  farmer,  by  his  wife, 
Margaret  Murray.  Blamey  was  educated 
at  the  Wagga  Wagga  superior  public 
school.  In  1899  he  was  appointed  a  pupil 
teacher  in  the  New  South  Wales  educa- 
tion department,  and  began  teaching  at 
the  Lake  Albert  public  school.  In  1901 
he  was  transferred  to  the  South  Wagga 
school  where  he  became  an  officer  in  the 
school  cadet  corps.  In  1903  he  went  to 
Western  Australia  where  he  secured  an 
appointment  as  assistant  teacher  in  the 
Fremantle  boys'  school.  In  1906  he  won 
by  competitive  examination  a  commission 
in  the  administrative  and  instructional 
staff  of  the  Australian  Army  and  was  ap- 
pointed staff  officer  (cadets)  in  the  state  of 
Victoria. 

In  1910  Blamey  was  promoted  captain 
and  in  the  following  year  he  won  by  com- 
petitive examination  the  place  reserved 
for  Australian  regular  officers  at  the  Staff 
College,  Quetta.  On  graduation  from  the 
college  in  December  1913,  he  served  in 
regimental  and  staff  postings  with  the 
Indian  Army  before  sailing  for  the  United 


lie 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Blarney 


Kingdom  for  further  experience  with  the 
British  Army.  He  was  promoted  major  in 
July  1914.  Wlien  war  broke  out  he  was 
appointed  general  staff  officer  (intelli- 
gence) on  the  headquarters  of  the  1st 
Australian  division  and  joined  that 
formation  in  Egypt  in  December. 

After  three  months'  service  in  the  Galli- 
poli  campaign,  Blamey  was  appointed 
assistant  adjutant  and  quartermaster- 
general  of  the  2nd  AustraUan  division,  and 
soon  after  the  Australian  Imperial  Force 
was  transferred  to  France  he  became 
the  division's  senior  general  staff  officer. 
During  the  campaigns  on  the  western 
front  he  served  in  various  staff  appoint- 
ments, with  brief  periods  in  command  of 
an  infantry  battaUon  and  a  brigade  until, 
in  May  1918,  he  became  brigadier,  general 
staff,  of  the  Australian  Corps. 

After  the  war  Blamey  became  in  succes- 
sion director  of  military  operations  at 
army  headquarters,  colonel,  general  staff, 
at  the  Australian  high  commissioner's 
oflftce  in  London,  and  deputy  chief  of  the 
AustraUan  general  staff.  In  1925  the  Vic- 
torian government  offered  him  the  post  of 
chief  commissioner  of  police.  Blamey  ac- 
cepted, resigned  his  regular  commission, 
and  took  up  the  appointment  on  1  Sep- 
tember. 

The  force  had  recently  been  shaken  by 
a  mutiny  staged  in  protest  against  poor 
rates  of  pay  and  conditions  of  service.  In 
energetically  undertaking  the  task  of  re- 
storing morale  and  efficiency,  Blamey 
introduced  many  reforms,  including  an 
orderly  system  of  promotion.  Unfor- 
tunately the  manner  in  which  he  handled 
some  demonstrations  by  the  unemployed 
during  the  economic  depression  brought 
him  into  disfavour  with  powerful  political 
elements.  In  May  1936  a  senior  police 
officer  was  severely  wounded  in  circum- 
stances which  reflected  little  credit  on  the 
force.  Blamey  vainly  endeavoured  to  con- 
ceal the  truth,  and  in  the  political  storm 
which  followed  he  was  forced  to  resign. 

On  his  resignation  from  the  regular 
army,  Blamey  had  been  granted  a  com- 
mission in  the  Citizen  Forces  and  he  com- 
manded the  3rd  division  from  1931  to  1937. 
Soon  after  war  broke  out  in  1939  he  was 
promoted  lieutenant-general  and  given 
command  of  the  Australian  Army  Corps 
raised  for  service  in  the  Middle  East. 

Blamey  commanded  the  Australian 
Corps  during  the  latter  portion  of  the  first 
Libyan  campaign  and  the  Anzac  Corps 
during  the  brief  campaign  in  Greece.  He 
was  then  appointed  deputy  commander- 


in-chief.  Middle  East,  but  retained  his 
office  of  commander  of  the  Australian 
troops  in  that  theatre. 

After  Japan  entered  the  war  in  Decem- 
ber 1941,  Blamey  was  recalled  to  Australia 
and  appointed  conunander-in-chief  of  the 
Australian  Army.  The  Australian  war 
effort  had  so  far  been  concentrated 
chiefly  on  the  maintenance  of  the  forma- 
tions serving  overseas  and  the  forces  in 
Australia  were  ill  equipped,  ill  trained, 
and  badly  organized.  With  the  Japanese 
advancing  through  the  northern  ap- 
proaches, Blamey  was  faced  with  the 
formidable  task  of  rapidly  expanding  the 
army  and  bringing  it  to  a  state  of  war 
efficiency.  In  executing  this  task,  he  bril- 
liantly demonstrated  his  talents  as  a 
military  organizer  and  administrator. 

Blamey  was  also  the  commander  of 
Allied  Land  Forces  under  General  Douglas 
MacArthur,  the  allied  commander-in- 
chief.  South- West  Pacific,  and  it  was  on 
orders  from  him  that  Blamey  assumed 
personal  command  of  the  allied  land 
forces  in  New  Guinea  on  23  September 
1942.  However,  soon  after  the  recapture 
of  Buna  in  January  1943,  he  returned 
to  his  Australian  army  headquarters  on 
the  mainland.  In  subsequent  operations, 
MacArthur  avoided  the  difficult  issue  of 
Blamey's  dual  roles  by  appointing  task 
force  commanders  operating  directly  un- 
der his  own  command.  Blamey's  appoint- 
ment of  commander  of  Allied  Land  Forces 
became  purely  nominal,  although  he  was 
given  the  direction  of  the  Australian 
mopping-up  operations  in  New  Guinea 
and  the  Solomons. 

At  the  conclusion  of  hostilities,  Blamey 
retired  from  the  army  and  took  up  busi- 
ness pursuits.  But  his  name  was  restored 
to  the  active  list  shortly  before  his  promo- 
tion to  field-marshal  in  1950.  It  has  been 
remarked  that  the  heaviest  handicap  of  so 
gifted  a  soldier  was  'not  his  private  life  but 
the  fact  that  it  fell  so  far  short  of  being 
private*. 

Blamey  was  appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  in 
1917,  C.M.G.  in  1918,  C.B.  in  1919,  and 
knighted  in  1935.  He  was  advanced  to 
K.C.B.  in  1942  and  G.B.E.  in  1943,  and 
held  a  number  of  foreign  decorations. 

He  married  first,  in  1908,  Minnie  (died 
1935),  daughter  of  Edwin  Millard,  of 
Melbourne,  by  whom  he  had  two  sons; 
secondly,  in  1939,  Olga,  daughter  of 
Henry  Farnsworth,  of  Melbourne. 

Blamey  died  in  Melbourne  27  May  1951. 
A  portrait  by  Ivor  Hele  is  in  the  Australian 
War  Memorial  and  a  statue  by  Raymond 


117 


Blarney 


iD.N.B.  1951-1000 


Ewers  is  at  the  approach  to  Government 
House,  Melbourne. 

[Australian  War  Memorial  records; 
Australia  in  the  War  of  1939-45,  Series  1 
(Army),  vols,  i-vii,  ed.  Gavin  LoYig,  1952-63; 
John  Hetherington,  Blarney ,  1954;  personal 
knowledge.]  E.  G.  Keogh. 

BLEDISLOE,  first  Viscount  (1867- 
1958),  agriculturist  and  public  servant. 
[See  Bathurst,  Charles.] 

BLOGG,  HENRY  GEORGE  (1876- 
1954),  coxswain  of  Cromer  lifeboat,  son  of 
Ellen  Blogg,  was  born  in  Cromer  6  Feb- 
ruary 1876.  He  was  educated  at  the  Gold- 
smiths' School  where  he  proved  quick  at 
learning  and  revealed  an  unusually  reten- 
tive memory.  He  took  no  part  in  games, 
was  unsuccessful  in  defending  himself 
against  bullying,  and  never  learnt  to 
swim.  When  nearly  twelve  he  began  life  as 
a  longshore  fisherman.  In  1894  he  joined 
the  Cromer  lifeboat  crew,  becoming 
second  coxswain  in  1902,  and  coxswain  in 
1909.  His  record  of  service  was  unique  and 
when  he  retired  in  1947  Cromer's  had  long 
been  the  most  famous  of  all  lifeboats  and 
Blogg  himself  an  international  character. 
A  silent,  reticent  man  who  neither  smoked 
nor  drank,  he  had  a  quiet  kindliness 
and  humour  and  remarkable  qualities 
of  personality  and  endurance.  He  in- 
spired complete  confidence  in  his  lifeboat 
crew  who  knew  him  as  a  superb  seaman: 
quick  and  resolute  in  decision,  unerring  in 
judgement,  fearless  before  danger. 

During  Blogg' s  fifty-three  years  with 
Cromer  lifeboats  873  lives  were  saved  and 
he  was  thrice  awarded  the  gold  medal  of 
the  Royal  National  Life-boat  Institution. 
The  first  of  these  he  received  for  the  rescue 
in  1917  of  11  men  from  the  Swedish 
steamer  Fernebo.  His  crew  of  ageing  men 
had  already  been  at  sea  for  several  hours 
and  had  taken  16  men  from  a  Greek 
steamer  Pyrin.  When  the  call  to  the 
Fernebo  came  it  proved  impossible  to 
launch  the  lifeboat  against  the  moun- 
tainous seas.  A  second  attempt  was  made 
after  darkness  fell,  but  when  the  boat  was 
halfway  to  the  wreck  she  was  hit  by  a 
tremendous  sea  and  losing  several  oars 
was  forced  back  to  the  shore.  Undaunted, 
Blogg  seized  his  moment  to  make  yet 
another  attempt :  which  proved  successful. 

By  1927,  when  Blogg  received  his  second 
gold  medal  (for  the  rescue  of  15  men  from 
the  Dutch  tanker  Georgia  after  20  hours  at 
sea),  he  was  using  a  motor-lifeboat  and  the 
difficulties  of  launching  had  been  over- 


come by  the  building  of  a  slipway.  In  1941 
he  was  awarded  his  third  gold  medal  and 
also  the  British  Empire  medal  for  the 
rescue  of  88  men  from  six  steamers  in  con- 
voy. He  was  four  times  awarded  the  Life- 
boat Institution's  silver  medal,  for  the 
rescue  of:  30  men  from  the  Italian  steamer 
Monte  Nevoso  (1932);  2  from  the  barge 
Sepoy  of  Dover  (1933) ;  29  from  the  Greek 
steamer  Mount  Ida  (1939) ;  and  44  from 
the  steamer  English  Trader  (1941).  He  re- 
ceived the  Empire  gallantry  medal  in  1924 
and  was  decorated  with  the  George  Cross 
in  1941 ;  in  1948  the  new  Cromer  lifeboat 
was  named  the  Henry  Blogg. 

In  1901  Blogg  married  Annie  Elizabeth 
(died  1950),  daughter  of  Henry  Bracken- 
bury,  fisherman,  of  Cromer.  Their  only 
son  died  in  infancy  and  their  only  daugh- 
ter in  her  twenties.  Blogg  died  in  Cromer 
13  June  1954.  A  portrait  by  T.  C.  Dugdale 
hangs  in  Life-boat  House,  Grosvenor  Gar- 
dens, London ;  and  there  is  a  bronze  bust 
by  James  Woodford  on  the  east  cliff  at 
Cromer.  The  Imperial  War  Museum  has  a 
pastel  by  William  Dring. 

[The  Life-boat,  September  1954 ;  Year  Book 
of  the  Royal  National  Life-boat  Institution 
for  1955 ;  Cyril  Jolly,  Henry  Blogg  of  Cromer, 
1958 ;  private  information.] 

Helen  M.  Palmer. 

BODKIN,  Sir  ARCHIBALD  HENRY 
(1862-1957),  lawyer,  was  born  in  High- 
gate  1  April  1862,  the  youngest  of  the 
eight  children  of  William  Peter  Bodkin 
and  his  wife,  Elisabeth,  daughter  of 
William  Clowser,  of  Hampstead.  He  came 
of  a  line  of  lawyers :  his  grandfather  was 
(Sir)  William  Henry  Bodkin  [q.v.],  chair- 
man of  Middlesex  quarter-sessions  and 
a  prolific  writer  on  criminal  law,  and  his 
father  was  for  forty-four  years  chairman 
of  the  Highgate  bench.  There  were  plans 
after  'Archie'  left  Highgate  School  to  send 
him  to  South  Africa  to  join  one  of  his 
brothers  on  a  farm,  and  he  actually  spent 
a  year  on  a  farm  at  Barnsley;  but  the 
boy's  interests  were  already  fixed  on  the 
criminal  bar,  and  when  the  South  Africa 
scheme  fell  through  he  was  without  delay 
entered  at  the  Inner  Temple.  He  was 
called  in  1885,  and  became  a  pupil  of 
E.  T.  E.  Besley,  then  the  busiest  junior  of 
the  day,  where  he  was  later  joined  by  (Sir) 
Travers  Humphreys  [q.v.]. 

From  the  first  Bodkin  was  a  tremendous 
worker,  meticulous  in  detail,  and  specializ- 
ing in  drafting  indictments  which,  before 
the  passing  of  the  Indictments  Act  of 
1915,  was  a  highly  technical  accomplish- 


118 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bodkin 


ment.  His  style,  as  a  prosecuting  advocate, 
at  North  London  and  Middlesex  sessions 
and  at  the  Old  Bailey,  was  early  formed. 
Simple  and  direct  in  manner,  he  scorned 
the  dramatic  mannerisms  popular  in  his 
day,  and  although  possessed  of  a  bubbling 
if  somewhat  heavy  sense  of  humour, 
never  allowed  it  to  get  out  of  hand.  He  re- 
lied on  accurate  and  detailed  knowledge 
of  the  facts  and  law  contained  in  his  brief, 
and  a  strong  mind  directed  to  the  task  in 
hand :  the  conviction  of  the  accused.  Yet, 
powerful  advocate  that  he  became,  he 
never  pressed  a  case  beyond  its  merits, 
and  in  a  period  when  for  some  counsel  to 
prosecute  meant  to  persecute,  he  was  a 
pioneer,  with  Travers  Humphreys,  of  a 
style  which  aimed  to  'kill  with  fairness', 
however  powerful  the  attack  might  be. 

Bodkin's  innate  abiUty  and  sheer  hard 
work  were  early  recognized.  He  took  few 
and  short  holidays,  and  save  for  a  game  of 
billiards  allowed  himself  few  other  interests 
than  the  law.  And  the  law  for  him  meant 
criminal  prosecutions,  for  his  defence 
briefs  were  rare.  He  built  up  a  large 
licensing  practice,  but  as  brewster  sessions, 
when  most  of  the  work  was  done,  were 
then  held  in  August,  these  briefs  did  not 
clash  with  his  work  at  the  Old  Bailey. 
He  was  already  saving  money,  and  in 
1891,  only  six  years  after  call,  was  able  to 
marry  Maud  Beatrice,  daughter  of  the 
Rev.  Robert  Wheler  Bush,  rector  of 
St.  Alphage,  London  Wall,  a  marriage 
of  great  contentment  which  ended  only 
with  his  death. 

In  1892  Bodkin  was  appointed  junior 
Treasury  counsel  at  the  Old  Bailey,  and 
rapidly  built  up  a  reputation  which  he 
shared  with  (Sir)  Horace  Avory  [q.v.],  (Sir) 
Charles  Gill,  and  (Sir)  Richard  Muir  as 
one  of  the  four  leading  criminal  advocates 
of  the  day.  In  1908  he  was  appointed 
senior  Treasury  counsel.  By  now  he  had 
joined  the  chambers  of  his  uncle.  Sir 
Harry  Poland  [q.v.],  at  5  Paper  Buildings, 
and  in  time  became  head  of  them.  In  1901 
he  succeeded  Poland  as  recorder  of  Dover, 
and  although  he  had  to  resign  in  1920  on 
becoming  director  of  public  prosecutions, 
he  was  reappointed  in  1931  and  only 
resigned  at  the  age  of  eighty-five  in  1947. 
Tall  and  lean  of  build — he  was  a  con- 
siderable athlete  as  a  young  man — he  had 
a  magnificent  physique,  and  although  well 
able  to  afford  it  never  drove  a  car.  He  pre- 
ferred to  walk  long  distances  from  court 
to  court,  and  at  an  advanced  age  was 
quite  content  with  public  transport. 
In   the   war  of  1914-18   Bodkin   was 


largely  concerned  with  the  prosecution  of 
spies,  where  his  knowledge  of  the  law, 
great  industry,  and  ability  to  marshal  and 
direct  a  mass  of  deadly  detail  were  of 
the  greatest  value.  He  was  responsible  for 
the  prosecution  of  Lody,  and  built  up  the 
complex  case  against  Sir  Roger  Casement 
[q.v.]  for  the  attorney-general.  Perhaps 
his  greatest  murder  prosecution  was  that 
known  as  the  'Brides  in  the  Bath'  (G.  J. 
Smith)  in  1915,  in  which  he  called  112 
witnesses  for  the  Crown. 

In  the  troubled  post-war  period  it  was 
essential  to  appoint  a  strong  man  to  suc- 
ceed Sir  Charles  Mathews  [q.v.]  as  direc- 
tor of  public  prosecutions  and  in  1920 
Bodkin  began  the  most  strenuous  ten 
years  of  his  life.  He  would  personally 
examine  some  2,000  sets  of  papers  a  year, 
and  here  his  industry  was  at  times  a 
defect,  for  he  was  unwilling  to  delegate 
responsibility.  Day  after  day  he  would  be 
first  at  his  office  at  Richmond  Terrace, 
personally  drafting  indictments  which 
should  have  been  left  to  junior  Treasury 
counsel,  and  always  taking  work  home  at 
the  weekend.  Here,  too,  his  understanding 
of  contemporary  thought  and  habit  may 
have  been  narrowed  by  the  limited  range 
of  his  own  private  life.  Famous  cases  to 
which  he  gave  the  whole  of  his  attention 
included  those  arising  from  the  I.R.A. 
troubles  in  Ireland,  the  prosecution  of 
Horatio  Bottomley  [q.v.] ;  of  Armstrong, 
Mason,  Vaquier,  Mahon,  Thorne,  and 
Browne  and  Kennedy  for  murder,  and  of 
Clarence  Hatry  and  his  associates.  The 
prosecution  of  the  acting  editor  of  the 
Workers'  Weekly  (1924)  brought  him  as 
near  as  he  ever  came  to  politics  when  the 
withdrawal  of  the  'Campbell  case'  at  the 
orders  of  the  attorney-general  (Sir  Patrick 
Hastings,  q.v.)  brought  down  the  Govern- 
ment of  the  day.  The  inquiry  ordered 
by  Parliament  in  1928  to  consider  the 
behaviour  of  the  police,  and  incidentally 
of  the  director  of  public  prosecutions, 
after  the  dismissal  of  a  charge  against  Miss 
Savidge  and  Sir  Leo  Chiozza  Money  for  an 
alleged  offence  in  Hyde  Park,  was  the  sole 
occasion  when  Bodkin's  conduct  of  his 
office  was  in  any  way  impugned,  and  he 
came  out  of  the  ordeal  entirely  exonerated 
from  any  blame. 

Bodkin  was  knighted  in  1917  and  ap- 
pointed K.C.B.  in  1924.  In  1930  he  re- 
signed and  went  to  live  in  Sidmouth  where 
he  became  a  noted  gardener.  He  soon, 
however,  found  new  employment  in  the 
field  of  criminal  law  as  chairman  of  Devon 
quarter-sessions,  where  he  sat  until  1947. 


110 


Bodkin 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


As  a  judge  he  loved  a  legal  argument, 
and  insisted,  with  some  pedantry,  on  the 
meticulous  proof  of  every  fact  in  dispute. 
With  failing  powers  he  finally  relinquished 
his  various  appointments  and  retired  to 
live  with  his  wife  and  son  at  Rogate, 
Sussex.  There,  at  the  age  of  ninety-five, 
a  wealthy  man  from  the  savings  of  his 
hard-earned  income,  he  died  on  the  last 
day  of  1957. 

[Robert  Jackson,  Ccise  for  the  Prosecution, 
1962;  Douglas  G.  Browne,  Sir  Travers 
Humphreys,  1960;  private  information;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]      Christmas  Humphreys. 

BOLDERO,  Sir  HAROLD  ESMOND 
ARNISON  (1889-1960),  physician  and 
medical  administrator,  was  born  in  Maida 
Vale  20  August  1889,  the  elder  son  of 
John  Boldero,  company  director,  and  his 
wife,  Clara  Arnison,  of  Penrith,  Cumber- 
land. Boldero  was  educated  at  Charter- 
house and  Trinity  College,  Oxford,  where 
he  obtained  a  third  class  in  physiology  in 
1912.  He  was  an  outstanding  athlete, 
representing  Oxford  in  the  440  yards  in 
1911,  and  then  as  a  hockey  player.  At  the 
Middlesex  Hospital  he  continued  to  play 
hockey  and  gained  a  reputation  and  inter- 
national representation  as  a  fast  and  clever 
centre-half.  Having  qualified  M.R.C.S., 
L.R.C.P.  in  1915,  he  served  in  France  as 
a  regimental  medical  officer  in  a  field 
ambulance  and  as  a  deputy  assistant 
director  of  medical  services,  and  was  twice 
mentioned  in  dispatches.  He  returned 
to  the  Middlesex  in  1919  and  took 
his  Oxford  B.M.,  B.Ch.  (1920)  and  D.M. 
(1925).  While  holding  junior  posts  at 
the  Middlesex,  he  became  interested  in 
paediatrics  and  after  a  period  as  clinical 
assistant  at  the  Hospital  for  Sick  Children, 
Great  Ormond  Street,  in  1921,  he  was  ap- 
pointed to  the  staff  of  the  EveHna  Hospital 
for  Children  (1921-34),  and  in  1922  was 
elected  an  assistant  physician  to  the 
Middlesex  Hospital  where  in  those  days 
the  junior  physician  looked  after  the 
children.  This  appealed  to  Boldero  who 
had  a  flair  for  dealing  with  children  and 
appeared  to  be  able  to  enter  into  their  way 
of  thinking. 

In  1934  Boldero  became  dean  of  the 
Middlesex  Hospital  medical  school,  an  ap- 
pointment which  largely  determined  his 
subsequent  career.  He  proved  a  most  able 
administrator  and  served  the  hospital  with 
distinction  as  dean  until  he  retired  in  1954. 
He  was  at  first  concerned  with  the  better 
integration  of  clinical  medicine,  teaching, 
and  research,  and  was  responsible,  with 


A.  E.  (later  Lord)  Webb-Johnson  [q.v.], 
for  the  concept  of  the  Courtauld  research 
wards  to  which  patients  were  admitted  for 
investigation  under  the  joint  care  of  a 
member  of  the  staff  of  the  hospital  and 
a  professor  of  one  of  the  basic  sciences  in 
the  school.  As  soon  as  the  hospital  building 
was  completed,  he  drew  up  plans  for  the 
rebuilding  of  the  medical  school,  but  only 
the  first  phase,  an  administrative  block, 
could  be  completed  before  the  outbreak  of 
war  in  1989.  Boldero,  Uke  other  medical 
deans,  had  been  involved  in  plans  for  the 
continuation  of  the  work  of  the  school  and 
hospital  in  the  event  of  war,  and  he  now 
became  a  sector  officer  in  the  Emergency 
Medical  Service.  He  kept  the  school  to- 
gether without  interruption  of  teaching 
through  two  evacuations,  to  Bristol  and 
Leeds,  and,  when  the  hospital  was 
damaged,  he  was  responsible  for  getting 
repairs  and  rebuilding  carried  out  so  that 
the  medical  staff  returned  to  a  hospital 
ready  not  only  to  carry  on,  but,  as  it 
rapidly  turned  out,  to  expand.  Boldero's 
work  as  an  educationist  included  member- 
ship of  the  senate  of  the  university  of 
London,  and  he  was  chairman  for  many 
years  of  its  board  of  advanced  medical 
studies. 

The  war  also  saw  the  beginning  of  a  new 
phase  in  Boldero's  career.  Sir  Charles 
Wilson  (later  Lord  Moran)  became  presi- 
dent of  the  Royal  College  of  Physicians  of 
London  in  1941,  and,  looking  for  a  capable 
administrator  to  help  in  the  work  of  the 
College,  chose  Boldero,  who  had  been 
elected  F.R.C.P.  in  1933,  first  as  treasurer 
(1941),  then  as  registrar,  a  post  which 
he  occupied  from  1942  until  his  death. 
Consequently  Boldero  became  closely  in- 
volved in  the  development  of  British 
medicine  during  the  planning  and  estab- 
lishment of  the  National  Health  Service. 
He  represented  the  College  in  the  negotia- 
tions between  the  medical  profession  and 
the  Government,  which  eventuated  in  the 
National  Health  Service  Act,  and  he  con- 
tinued to  do  so  on  the  Joint  Consultants' 
Conmiittee  which  was  subsequently  ac- 
cepted by  the  Ministry  of  Health  as  the 
spokesman  of  the  consultants'  interests. 
There  were  stormy  times  when  disputes 
between  the  profession  and  the  Govern- 
ment on  questions  of  remuneration  led  to 
threats  of  withdrawal  from  the  Service. 
Boldero  was  by  nature  conservative  and 
strongly  attached  to  traditional  ideas  and 
practices,  but  he  recognized  the  need  for 
change  and  saw  that  on  the  whole  more 
was  to  be  gained  from  co-operation  with 


120 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bomberg 


the  Government  than  from  merely  nega- 
tive opposition.  His  counsel  in  committee 
was  always  shrewd  and  often  quietly 
humorous.  He  helped  to  maintain  the 
influence  of  the  College  and  gave  wise 
guidance  to  the  profession  in  difficult 
times.  He  spoke  also  as  a  man  with 
much  practical  experience  since  he  was 
a  member  of  the  North-West  Metro- 
politan Regional  Hospital  Board  and  of 
the  council  of  the  Medical  Protection 
Society.  He  also  served  on  the  General 
Medical  Council.  For  six  years  before  his 
death  he  was  chairman  of  the  council  of 
the  Chartered  Society  of  Physiotherapy. 
He  was  knighted  in  1950. 

In  1917  Boldero  married  Margery 
Florence  (died  1950),  elder  daughter  of 
Arthur  Tempest  Blakiston  Dunn,  the 
founder  and  later  headmaster  of  Ludgrove 
preparatory  school,  Barnet,  and  also  a 
well-known  international  amateur  foot- 
baller. They  had  two  sons.  Boldero  died  in 
London  30  November  1960.  His  portrait, 
painted  by  Harold  Knight  in  1957,  is  in 
the  Middlesex  Hospital  and  a  copy  is  in 
the  Royal  College  of  Physicians. 

[British  Medical  Journal,  10  December 
1960;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Brain. 

BOMBERG,  DAVID  GARSHEN  (1890- 
1957),  painter,  was  born  in  Birmingham 
5  December  1890,  the  fifth  child  of  Abra- 
ham Bomberg,  leatherworker,  an  emi- 
grant from  Warsaw  in  the  eighties,  and  his 
wife,  Rebecca  Klein ;  the  family  moved 
to  Whitechapel  in  1895.  Apprenticed  to 
a  trade  lithographer,  Bomberg  broke  his 
indentures  in  1908  to  devote  all  his  time 
to  art.  He  studied  for  two  years  at  evening 
classes  at  the  City  and  Guilds  Institute 
and  at  Westminster  under  W.  R.  Sickert 
[q.v.].  In  1911-13  he  was  a  full-time 
student  at  the  Slade  School,  winning  a 
prize  for  drawing  in  his  second  year.  His 
work  at  this  time  revealed  a  knowledge  and 
understanding  of  advanced  continental 
art,  particularly  cubism  and  futurism. 
While  still  a  student  he  was  in  touch  with 
the  circle  of  Wyndham  Lewis  [q.v.].  In 
1913  he  visited  Paris  and  met  Picasso, 
Modigliani,  and  Kisling,  and  in  the  same 
year  was  a  founder-member  of  the  London 
Group.  Among  the  pictures  exhibited  at 
his  first  one-man  exhibition  at  the  Chenil 
Galleries  in  1914  was  his  'Ju-Jitzu',  now 
in  the  Tate  Gallery. 

In  1915  Bomberg  enlisted  and  served  in 
France  with  the  Royal  Engineers.  In  1918 
he  was  commissioned  by  the  Canadian 


Government  to  contribute  to  the  Canadian 
War  Memorial;  his  'The  Canadian  Tun- 
nelling Company — Sappers  at  Work'  is 
now  in  the  National  Gallery  at  Ottawa, 
and  a  study  for  it  is  in  the  Tate.  In  1923 
Bomberg  went  to  Palestine  and  painted 
commissions  for  the  Zionist  Organization, 
He  worked  for  six  months  in  isolation  at 
Petra  (paintings  in  the  Manchester  and 
Birmingham  city  art  galleries).  He  re- 
turned to  London  in  1927  and  in  the  fol- 
lowing year  exhibited  his  work  at  the 
Leicester  Galleries.  He  travelled  to  Toledo 
(1929),  Morocco  and  the  Aegean  (1930), 
the  Soviet  Union  (1933),  and  in  1934-5  re- 
turned to  Spain,  visiting  Cuenca,  Ronda, 
and  Linares.  In  1935-45  he  was  based  in 
London,  making  occasional  expeditions  to 
the  country.  His  travels  were  resumed  in 
1948  when  he  went  to  Cyprus  (paintings  in 
Liverpool  and  Southampton  art  galleries), 
and  in  1953  he  visited  Paris,  Chartres,  and 
Vezelay.  He  returned  to  Ronda  in  Feb- 
ruary 1954,  intending  to  stay  for  several 
years,  but  became  ill  in  May  1956  and 
returned  to  England  where  he  died  in 
London  19  August  1957. 

Although  in  his  youth  Bomberg  received 
critical  attention,  he  was  generally  neg- 
lected and  died  in  obscure  poverty.  It  was 
only  when  the  Arts  Council  organized  a 
retrospective  exhibition  in  1958  that  the 
richness  and  originality  of  his  work  were 
recognized  outside  the  small  circle  of  his 
admirers.  Fuller  recognition  came  in  1967 
with  an  exhibition  at  the  Tate  Gallery.  In 
temperament  he  was  intractable  and  un- 
compromising and  never  capable  of  con- 
cessions which  might  have  eased  his  path. 
A  prolific  painter,  he  dedicated  his  life  to 
his  work.  By  1945  he  was  convinced  that 
recognition  was  not  forthcoming  and 
began  to  attach  increasing  importance  to 
teaching.  Classes  held  at  the  Borough 
Polytechnic  attracted  a  nucleus  of  talented 
students  who  identified  themselves  with 
his  viewpoint.  The  Borough  Group  (active 
in  1947-9),  founded  by  Chfford  Holden, 
organized  exhibitions  to  several  of  which 
Bomberg  contributed.  A  similar  group 
called  the  Borough  Bottega  was  active  in 
1953-5. 

The  importance  of  Bomberg's  contribu- 
tion lay  in  his  profound  understanding  of 
the  art  of  the  past,  his  independence  from 
critical  orthodoxies  and  fashions,  and  the 
single-minded  intensity  of  his  work.  From 
quasi-abstract  beginnings  he  evolved  a 
monumental  and  painterly  figurative  style, 
first  adumbrated  in  the  early  twenties, 
set   aside   in   favour  of  a   more  limited 


12X 


Bomberg 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


topographical  approach  in  Palestine,  and 
returned  to  and  developed  with  increasing 
mastery  after  his  first  visit  to  Spain.  His 
work  was  founded  on  a  highly  personal 
philosophy  of  art  which  owed  much  to  the 
writings  of  Bishop  Berkeley  [q.v.].  His 
usual  subjects  were  landscapes,  still-life, 
and  the  human  head.  He  was  a  magnifi- 
cent draughtsman,  and  his  work  was  dis- 
tinguished by  its  firm  structure  and  a 
sonority  of  colour  unique  in  EngUsh  paint- 
ing. A  selection  from  the  extensive  manu- 
scripts left  by  him  was  published  in  the 
review  X,  June  1960. 

Small  in  stature,  alert  and  vigorous, 
Bomberg's  appearance  is  recorded  in  an 
early  portrait  by  Gerald  Summers,  also  in 
numerous  self-portraits,  in  the  possession 
of  the  family.  There  is  also  a  self-portrait 
in  the  Slade  Collection. 

In  1915  Bomberg  married  Alice,  daugh- 
ter of  John  Burton  Mayes.  The  marriage 
was  subsequently  dissolved  and  he  married 
a  fellow  painter,  Lilian,  daughter  of  OUver 
Oswald  Holt ;  they  had  one  daughter. 

[Catalogues  of  the  Arts  Council  (1958)  and 
Marlborough  Fine  Art  (1964)  exhibitions; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Andrew  Forge. 

BONDFIELD,     MARGARET     GRACE 

(1873-1953),  trade-union  leader  and  first 
British  woman  cabinet  minister,  was  born 
at  Furnham,  near  Chard,  Somerset,  the 
tenth  of  the  eleven  children  of  William 
Bondfield  and  his  wife,  Ann,  daughter 
of  George  Taylor,  a  Wesleyan  Methodist 
minister.  Her  father,  who  came  of  yeoman 
stock  with  long  traditions  in  the  west,  was 
a  foreman  lace  worker  with  a  talent  for 
invention  which  he  failed  to  exploit 
financially  so  that  the  closing  of  the  firm 
for  which  he  had  worked  for  forty  years 
left  the  family  in  straitened  circumstances. 
Nevertheless  both  he  and  his  vital  ener- 
getic wife  opened  wide  windows  for  their 
children,  for  they  were  spiritually  minded 
persons,  devout  nonconformists,  with 
strong  Radical  interests.  *Maggie'  was 
happy  at  home,  but  her  schooling  was 
brief:  she  was  teaching  in  the  boys'  school 
at  thirteen ;  at  fourteen  she  was  an  appren- 
tice in  a  draper's  shop  in  Brighton.  She  was 
*a  thoroughly  smart  business  young  person' 
said  the  testimonial  which  she  took  with 
her  to  London  five  years  later.  After  three 
months'  search  she  found  work,  but  the 
conditions  roused  her  to  rebellion.  Shop 
assistants  had  then  to  live  in ;  the  statu- 
tory maximum  of  74  hours  was  regularly 
exceeded ;  her  earnings  were  between  £15 
and  £25  a  year.  TOien  she   learned  of 


the  formation  of  the  National  Union  of 
Shop  Assistants,  she  joined  it  and  threw 
herself  ardently  into  its  work,  attended 
conferences  and  made  her  mark.  For 
the  union  journal  she  wrote  lively  pieces 
under  the  pen-name  Grace  Dare.  For  the 
Women's  Industrial  Council  she  under- 
took a  two-year  survey,  obtaining  work  in 
various  shops  on  a  descending  scale  as  her 
references  grew  shorter.  While  thus  ruin- 
ing her  own  chances  of  advancement  she 
obtained  valuable  first-hand  evidence  of 
the  conditions  which  she  sought  to  remedy. 

All  this  time  Margaret  Bondfield  was 
cultivating  the  habit  of  making  clear 
decisions,  was  reading  widely,  and  meet- 
ing people  like  the  Dilkes,  Shaw,  and  the 
Webbs  [qq.v.].  She  joined  the  Indepen- 
dent Labour  Party  and  shared  platforms 
with  Keir  Hardie,  John  Burns,  George 
Lansbury,  Ramsay  MacDonald  [qq.v.], 
and  other  leaders.  In  1898  she  became 
assistant  secretary  of  her  union  ('I  learnt 
to  smoke  in  self-defence,  as  the  men's 
pipes  were  awful')  and  in  the  following 
year  she  was  the  sole  woman  delegate 
to  the  Trades  Union  Congress  where  her 
speech  made  a  great  impression.  Small  in 
stature,  with  dark  hair,  wide  brows,  and 
bright  dark  eyes,  she  reminded  her  hearers 
of  a  courageous  robin  as,  in  her  clear, 
resonant,  musical  voice,  she  told  them 
that  the  unions  must  get  together  for 
political  action  if  they  were  to  achieve 
their  larger  aims.  The  long  struggle  for 
a  Shop  Hours  Act  confirmed  this  view. 
So  did  her  close  friendship  with  Mary 
Macarthur  [q.v.]  who  joined  her  union  and 
whom  she  proposed  to  the  Dilkes  and 
Gertrude  Tuckwell  [q.v.]  as  secretary  of 
the  Women's  Trade  Union  League.  She 
helped  Mary  Macarthur  to  found  the 
National  Federation  of  Women  Workers 
(1906),  became  its  assistant  secretary  in 
1915,  and  on  Mary's  death  (1921)  and  the 
amalgamation  of  the  federation  with  the 
National  Union  of  General  and  Municipal 
Workers,  herself  became  chief  woman 
officer  of  that  union. 

In  the  meantime  she  had  resigned  her 
post  with  the  shop  assistants'  imion  in 
1908  to  work  in  a  wider  field,  lecturing 
for  the  Independent  Labour  Party,  on  the 
executive  of  which  she  served  from  1913 
until  1921.  She  worked  also  for  the 
Women's  Labour  League  of  which  she  was 
for  a  time  organizing  secretary,  and  for  the 
Women's  Co-operative  Guild ;  for  the  lat- 
ter's  notable  report  on  maternity  she  was 
largely  responsible.  Her  mind  was  always 
her  own,  and,  unlike  many  of  her  Labour 


122 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bone,  M. 


colleagues,  she  opposed  the  limited  bill 
for  female  emancipation  and  stood  four- 
square for  adult  suffrage.  On  this  she  and 
Mary  Macarthur  fought  not  as  feminists 
but  as  socialists.  While  holding  staunchly 
to  the  view  that  war  in  1914  was  unjust 
and  unnecessary,  Margaret  Bondfield 
worked  mainly  on  the  industrial  side.  She 
was  a  member  of  the  Central  Committee 
on  Women's  Training  and  Employment 
and  was  in  the  forefront  of  the  fight 
for  proper  conditions  for  women  war 
workers.  In  1918  she  was  at  last  elected 
directly  to  the  Parliamentary  Committee 
of  the  Trades  Union  Congress  and  went 
as  its  delegate  next  year  to  the  congress 
of  the  American  Federation  of  Labor. 
In  that  year  also  she  was  a  delegate  to 
the  Socialist  International  Conference  at 
Berne  and  at  the  International  Labour 
Conference  in  Washington.  In  1920  she 
went  with  the  British  Labour  delegation 
to  Russia  and  in  1923  she  became  the  first 
woman  chairman  of  the  Trades  Union 
Congress. 

All  this  led  naturally  to  parliamentary 
candidature.  She  was  unsuccessful  at 
Northampton  in  1920  and  again  in  1922 
but  she  captured  the  seat  for  Labour  in 
1923.  On  occasion  an  electrifying  speaker 
who  could  wave  the  fiery  torch  as  can  few, 
her  maiden  speech  in  the  House  was  not 
a  complete  success,  perhaps  because  it  was 
'the  first  intellectual  speech  from  a  woman' 
which  the  House  had  heard.  Her  next, 
from  the  Treasury  bench,  was  much  bet- 
ter :  she  was  made  parliamentary  secretary 
to  the  Ministry  of  Labour  as  soon  as  her 
party  took  office  in  1924  and  by  the  end  of 
that  brief  troubled  session  she  had  estab- 
lished herself  with  the  House;  with  her 
department  she  never  had  any  difficulty ; 
and  she  did  good  work  for  the  Inter- 
national Labour  Organization.  In  the  'Red 
letter'  election  Northampton  turned  her 
down ;  two  years  later  (1926)  she  got  back 
at  a  by-election  in  Wallsend.  She  received 
some  criticism  from  Labour  for  signing 
the  unanimous  report  of  the  Blanesburgh 
committee  on  unemployment  insurance 
in  1927  and  still  more  in  1929  when  as 
minister  of  labour  in  MacDonald's  second 
administration  she  introduced  an  un- 
employment insurance  bill  as  unsatisfac- 
tory to  her  extreme  left  wing  for  not  going 
far  enough  as  it  was  to  the  Tory  opposi- 
tion for  going  too  far.  Nevertheless  she 
conducted  it  to  the  statute  book  with  a 
competence  worthy  of  the  first  British 
woman  cabinet  minister  and  the  first 
woman  to  be  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council. 


When  cuts  in  unemployment  benefit  were 
proposed  among  the  measures  to  meet  the 
financial  crisis  of  1931  Margaret  Bondfield 
together  with  most  of  the  Cabinet  declined 
to  join  the  consequent  'national'  govern- 
ment. She  lost  her  seat  in  the  election  and 
she  was  defeated  again  at  Wallsend  in 
1935.  She  was  then  adopted  as  Labour 
candidate  for  Reading  but  resigned  when 
the  outbreak  of  war  postponed  an  elec- 
tion. 

In  the  meantime  she  had  continued  her 
trade-union  work,  retiring  in  1938.  From 
1939  she  was  an  active  vice-president  of  the 
National  Council  of  Social  Service  and  as 
chairman  of  the  Women's  Group  on  Public 
Welfare  until  1949  she  directed  valuable  re- 
search and  practical  social  work.  Her  re- 
action to  the  war  was  entirely  different  from 
that  in  1914,  and  between  1941  and  1943  she 
lectured  for  the  Government  in  the  United 
States  and  Canada.  Failing  health  did 
not  diminish  her  keen  interest  in  public 
affairs  or  her  enjoyment  of  her  small 
house  and  garden  in  the  country  where 
friends  found  her  as  alert  in  mind  as  ever. 
She  was  sustained,  as  always,  by  the 
strong  Christian  faith  which  had  ever 
been  the  mainspring  of  her  disinterested 
service  and  glowing  serenity.  Her  auto- 
biography, characteristically  entitled  A 
Life's  Work  (1949),  is  concerned  mainly 
with  the  causes  for  which  she  worked ;  its 
extreme  modesty  underrates  both  the  in- 
fluence and  the  impact  on  others  of  the 
vivid  and  transparently  honest  personality 
of  a  woman  who  had  remarkable  qualities 
of  mind  and  character.  She  was  appointed 
C.H.  in  1948  and  received  the  honorary 
degree  of  LL.D.  from  Bristol  University  in 
1929  and  the  freedom  of  Chard  in  1930. 
She  died,  unmarried,  at  Sanderstead, 
Surrey,  16  June  1953. 

A  miniature  by  W.  M.  Knight  (1937)  is  in 
the  National  Portrait  Gallery,  and  a  black 
chalk  drawing  by  Colin  Gill  is  in  the 
Manchester  City  Art  Gallery. 

[M.  G.  Bondfield,  A  Life's  Work,  1949; 
M.  A.  Hamilton,  Margaret  Bondfield,  1924; 
personal  knowledge.]  M.  A.  Hamilton. 

BONE,  Sir  MUIRHEAD  (1876-1953), 
water-colour  painter  and  etcher,  was  born 
in  Glasgow  23  March  1876,  the  fourth  of 
eight  children  of  the  journalist  David 
Drummond  Bone  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth 
Millar  Crawford.  His  elder  brothers  were 
James  Bone,  who  became  London  editor 
of  the  Manchester  Guardian,  and  Sir 
David  Bone,  commodore  of  the  Anchor 
Line  and  writer  on  life  at  sea.  Muirhead 


itse 


Bone,  M. 


DJ^*B.  1951-^1960 


Bone  early  showed  a  talent  for  drawing 
and  studied  first  at  the  Glasgow  School  of 
Art  evening  school  while  serving  his  ap- 
prenticeship as  an  architect.  This  double 
training  not  only  inspired  him  to  depict 
the  streets  of  his  native  town  with  meticu- 
lous realism  but  left  a  permanent  mark  on 
his  art.  Finding  little  support  in  Glasgow 
he  set  up  as  an  art  master  at  Ayr,  his 
father's  birthplace.  No  pupils  came  and  in 
1901  he  moved  to  London. 

He  had  already  produced  more  than  a 
hundred  plates :  figure  subjects,  portraits, 
landscapes,  scenes  in  the  dockyards  of  the 
Clyde.  His  first  London  plate  was  of  'Bel- 
grave  Hospital,  Kennington',  designed  by 
his  friend  Charles  Holden  [q.v.],  and  re- 
presented a  brick  building  in  course  of 
construction,  with  the  scaffolding  still 
standing  round  it.  Soon  after,  in  1903, 
came  the  unfinished  drypoint  of  'London 
Bridge' ;  unfinished  because  a  policeman 
moved  the  artist  on,  but  enough  had  been 
done  to  show  the  first  span  of  the  bridge 
with  the  scaffolding  erected  for  widening. 
Both  these  plates  reflect  the  mind  of  the 
architect,  an  almost  mathematical  feeling 
for  strains  and  stresses,  far  removed  from 
the  sketchiness  of  etchers  working  in  the 
tradition  of  Sir  Seymour  Haden  [q.v.]. 
Bone  preferred  the  drypoint  to  the  etching 
needle,  and  this  lent  a  certain  precision 
to  his  work  and  sometimes  almost  assimi- 
lated it  to  the  art  of  the  line-engraver. 

Bone  despised  the  protection  of  steel 
facing  and,  as  drypoint  soon  wears  out, 
the  editions  of  his  plates  were  necessarily 
small.  However,  he  soon  began  to  obtain 
recognition  and  made  a  resolute,  and  ulti- 
mately successful,  attempt  to  widen  his 
scope.  His  first  landscapes  were  not  very 
accomplished,  but  very  soon,  at  Winches- 
ter, at  Cambridge,  and  among  the  villages 
of  Sussex,  he  was  once  more  able  to  subdue 
his  subject  matter.  In  the  drypoint  of  the 
*01d  and  New  Gaiety  Theatres'  he  re- 
turned to  his  first  love,  and  in  the  same 
year  (1904)  he  indulged  in  a  perfect  orgy, 
in  the  plate  called  'Building'.  In  this  the 
planks  and  poles  of  the  scaffolding,  as 
well  as  the  cords  and  pulleys,  are  lingered 
over  with  the  most  loving  care.  There 
exist  of  this  plate  three  trial  proofs  and  no 
fewer  than  nine  published  states  showing 
the  trouble  which  the  artist  must  have 
taken  to  obtain  the  effect  he  desired.  Then, 
as  if  to  prevent  himself  from  hardening 
into  a  specialist.  Bone  produced  a  whole 
series  of  portraits,  and  after  these  came 
the  work  which  many  regard  as  his  master- 
piece, 'Ayr  Prison'. 


Increasing  success  enabled  Bone  to 
travel  abroad,  and  he  lived  for  some  years 
in  Italy  and  Spain.  Yet  he  brought  to  both 
countries  the  same  austerity  of  outlook. 
The  grandiose  and  the  picturesque  were 
alike  foreign  to  his  temperament,  and  he 
could  write  of  Florence  that  there  was 
nothing  left  for  an  artist :  'Every  cat  in  the 
world  had  been  there  and  the  plate  had 
been  licked  clean.' 

After  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  he  was 
the  first  official  artist  to  be  appointed,  and 
the  masterly  lithographs  which  resulted 
were  published  in  two  volumes  by  the  War 
Office,  under  the  title  of  The  Western  Front 
(1917),  with  a  text  by  C.  E.  Montague 
[q.v.].  It  was  largely  owing  to  Bone*s 
energy  and  his  generous  enthusiasm  for 
the  work  of  other  artists  that  the  Imperial 
War  Museum  was  established.  In  the  war 
of  1939-45  he  was  the  doyen  of  the  war 
artists. 

He  was  a  trustee  of  the  National  Gallery 
and  the  Tate ;  an  honorary  LL.D.  of  St. 
Andrews,  Liverpool,  and  Glasgow,  and 
D.Litt.  of  Oxford ;  and  honorary  R.S.A. 
He  was  knighted  in  1937.  He  died  in  Oxford 
21  October  1953.  There  is  a  memorial 
tablet  in  the  crypt  of  St.  Paul's  Cathedral. 

In  1903  Bone  married  Gertrude  Helena 
Dodd  (died  1962),  the  writer  and  sister  of 
Francis  Dodd  [q.v.],  one  of  the  best  por- 
trait etchers  then  working  in  England. 
Among  his  most  successful  plates  is  his 
portrait  of  Muirhead  Bone.  Bone  had  two 
sons :  Gavin,  fellow  and  tutor  of  St.  John's 
College,  Oxford,  who  died  in  1942,  and 
Stephen,  a  notice  of  whom  appears  below. 

There  is  an  etched  self-portrait  and  in 
the  possession  of  the  family  there  is  a  bust 
by  Sir  Jacob  Epstein.  The  National  Por- 
trait Gallery  has  a  drawing  by  Sir  Stanley 
Spencer  and  another  by  Francis  Dodd. 

[The  Times,  23  October  1953 ;  Graphischen 
Kilnste,  1906 ;  Print  Collectors'"  Quarterly,  vol. 
ix,  1922;  Campbell  Dodgson,  Etchings  and 
JDrypoints  by  Muirhead  Bone,  1909 ;  G.  Bier- 
man,  'Der  Sehotte  Muirhead  Bone',  Kunst- 
welt,  1912;  Drawings  and  Dry  Points  by  Sir 
Muirhead  Bone,  Arts  Council,  1955 ;  personal 
knowledge.]  James  I^veb. 

BONE,  STEPHEN  (1904-1958),  painter 
and  art  critic,  elder  son  of  (Sir)  Muirhead 
Bone,  a  notice  of  whom  appears  above, 
was  born  at  Chiswick  13  November  1904, 
inheriting  from  both  his  parents  a  strong 
artistic  tradition.  He  began  to  draw  in 
infancy  and  while  a  schoolboy  at  Bedales 
had  a  water-colour  accepted  by  the  New 
English  Art  Club.  After  leaving  school  in 


124 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bonham-Carter 


1920  he  travelled  with  his  father  all  over 
Europe  and  in  1922  went  to  the  Slade 
School  under  Henry  Tonks  [q.v.].  His  pro- 
fessional career  began  with  wood-engraved 
book  illustrations,  for  which  he  won  a  gold 
medal  at  the  Paris  International  Exhibi- 
tion in  1925. 

Wood-engraving  and  water-colour  were 
followed  by  oil  paintings,  including  some 
murals.  It  was  perhaps  in  oil  landscape 
that  he  found  himself  most  completely, 
generally  choosing  his  subjects  from 
ordinary  scenes  not  beautiful  in  them- 
selves. 

He  was  an  inveterate  traveller  and  he 
was  much  appreciated  abroad,  especially 
in  Sweden  where  one  of  the  biggest  exhibi- 
tions of  his  work  was  held  at  the  Galerie 
Moderne  in  1937.  He  exhibited  also  in 
London,  Glasgow,  Dundee,  and  Oxford. 
He  was  a  member  of  the  New  English 
Art  Club  and  showed  work  frequently  at 
the  Royal  Academy. 

In  later  years  he  was  widely  known  for 
his  art  criticism  in  the  Manchester  Guar- 
dian, and  as  a  broadcaster  on  art  subjects. 
He  was  an  official  naval  artist  in  the  war 
of  1939-45.  In  1929  he  married  Mary, 
daughter  of  S.  D.  Adshead  [q.v.],  architect 
and  town  planner;  they  had  two  sons  and 
a  daughter.  He  died  in  London  15  Sep- 
tember 1958.  Glasgow  City  Art  Gallery  has 
a  pencil  self-portrait. 

[The  Times,  16  September  1958;  personal 
knowledge.]  James  Layer. 

BONHAM-CARTER,  Sir  EDGAR  (1870- 
1956),  jurist  and  administrator,  was  born 
in  London  2  April  1870,  the  fifth  of  the 
eleven  sons  of  Henry  Bonham-Carter, 
barrister  and  managing  director  of  the 
Guardian  Assurance  Company,  and  his 
wife,  Sibella  Charlotte,  daughter  of  George 
Warde  Norman  [q.v.],  a  director  of  the 
Bank  of  England.  Florence  Nightingale 
[q.v.]  was  a  relative,  and  took  great 
interest  in  his  early  career.  General  Sir 
Charles  Bonham-Carter  and  Sir  Maurice 
Bonham  Carter  were  among  his  brothers. 
He  was  educated  at  Clifton  College,  to 
which  his  loyalty  was  hfelong:  he  was 
vice-chairman  of  its  council  in  1934-46. 
At  New  College,  Oxford,  he  obtained 
second  class  honours  in  jurisprudence  in 
1892,  and  played  rugby  football  as  a  for- 
ward for  the  university  and  for  England. 
He  read  law  with  Edward  Beaumont,  and 
was  called  to  the  bar  by  Lincoln's  Inn  in 
1895. 

In  1899,  after  the  conquest  of  the  Sudan, 
he  was  chosen  by  Lord  Cromer  [q.v.]  at 


the  age  of  twenty-nine  to  devise  and  set 
on  foot  a  complete  system  of  civil  and 
criminal  law  in  the  Sudan  where  no  legal 
system  existed.  He  became  judicial  ad- 
viser, later  legal  secretary  and  a  member 
of  the  governor-general's  council :  the  only 
senior  civilian  member  of  a  military  ad- 
ministration. His  success  was  immediate 
and  brilliant.  In  the  year  of  his  appoint- 
ment he  introduced  a  simplified  version  of 
the  Indian  penal  and  criminal  procedure 
codes ;  his  modification  of  the  Indian  law 
of  murder  and  homicide  was  considered  by 
most  Sudan  judges  an  improvement  on  the 
original.  In  1900  there  followed  a  simple 
code  of  civil  procedure,  derived  from  the 
Indian :  substantive  law  being  based  on  the 
English  common  law,  Sudan  statute,  and 
(particularly  as  to  land)  local  customary 
law.  He  rescued  Mohammedan  law  courts 
from  decay,  and  gave  them  a  solid  organi- 
zation under  an  ordinance  promulgated  in 
1902.  These  codes  established  a  complete 
system  of  courts  with  appropriate  juris- 
diction, and  he  followed  up  his  acts  as  a 
lawgiver  by  years  of  guidance,  firm  but 
courteous  and  patient,  of  the  British, 
Egyptian,  and  Sudanese  officers  and  magis- 
trates who  then  staffed  the  courts.  The  law 
so  declared  and  administered  was  under- 
stood by  the  people,  by  the  early  amateur 
magistracy,  and  later  by  the  professional 
judges ;  to  the  ordinary  Sudanese  his  work 
seemed  the  embodiment  of  justice;  the 
structure  was  maintained  after  the  in- 
dependence of  the  Sudan. 

In  1917  Bonham-Carter  became  senior 
judicial  officer  in  Baghdad  and  in  1919 
judicial  adviser  in  Mesopotamia,  then 
freed  from  Turkish  rule.  There  his  task 
was  different,  for  the  Ottoman  law  existed 
in  the  vilayets ;  he  laid  no  foundations,  but 
built  up  and  modernized  what  he  found, 
and  established  a  system  of  courts  under 
judges  with  professional  qualifications, 
and  a  competent  clerical  staff.  He  foimded 
a  School  of  Law ;  established  the  machinery 
of  justice ;  and  drafted  a  great  deal  of  the 
necessary  legislation  himself.  In  the  face 
of  the  political  ferment  engendered  by  an 
ardent  nationalism  which  accompanied 
the  transition  from  subjection  to  freedom^ 
by  the  sympathy  and  trust  which  he  in- 
spired he  set  up  a  soundly  based  Iraqi 
judicial  system  under  Iraqi  judges  which 
survived  the  transition  from  mandate  to 
treaty,  and  finally  to  complete  indepen- 
dence. Nuri  Said  called  him  the  father  and 
founder  of  the  legal  system  in  the  coimtry ; 
Gertrude  Bell  [q.v.]  wrote  of  him  as  tj^ 
wisest  of  men.  i  io 


»M 


Bonham- Carter 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


In  1921  Bonham-Carter  left  the  Middle 
East  to  begin  a  new  phase  of  public  work 
at  home,  which  continued  until  his  death, 
in  spite  of  increasing  lameness  in  his  later 
years.  From  1922  to  1925  he  represented 
North-East  Bethnal  Green  as  a  Liberal 
member  of  the  London  County  Council, 
and  became  the  council's  representative 
on  the  governing  body  of  the  School  of 
Oriental  and  African  Studies,  to  which  he 
was  regularly  reappointed  until  his  resig- 
nation in  1945.  With  the  decline  in  Liberal 
fortunes,  he  did  not  sit  again,  but  an 
interest  in  housing  and  planning  remained 
with  him.  He  was  chairman  of  the 
National  Housing  and  Town  Planning 
Council  from  1940  until  1942;  and  re- 
mained a  member  of  the  council  of  the 
Town  and  Country  Planning  Association 
until  his  death.  From  1927  to  1950  he  was 
a  member  of  the  executive  committee  of 
the  National  Trust,  and  also  of  its  finance 
and  general  purposes  committee;  and 
he  gave  long  service  to  the  Commons, 
Open  Spaces  and  Footpaths  Preservation 
Society.  From  the  twenties  he  had  been 
interested  in  the  work  of  First  Garden 
City  Ltd.  in  developing  the  garden  city  at 
Letchworth;  and  in  1929-39  he  was  a 
chairman  in  whom  there  was  complete 
confidence.  His  vision  and  understanding 
of  educational  matters  as  a  governor  of 
Letchworth  Grammar  School  won  the  ad- 
miration of  his  colleagues.  At  his  death  he 
was  the  last  surviving  founder-member 
of  the  Gordon  Memorial  and  Kitchener 
School  Trusts. 

From  the  thirties  he  was  closely 
associated  with  the  British  School  of 
Archaeology  in  Iraq,  towards  the  founda- 
tion of  which  Gertrude  Bell  had  left  a 
legacy.  The  friendship  and  respect  which 
had  grown  up  between  Gertrude  Bell  and 
Bonham-Carter  during  his  years  in  Iraq 
impelled  him,  with  his  wife,  to  throw  him- 
self into  the  task  of  raising  by  public 
subscription  a  sufficient  fund  to  realize  the 
project.  In  1932  the  School  was  launched 
with  adequate  finances,  and  with  Bonham- 
Carter  as  the  first  chairman  of  the  execu- 
tive committee,  an  office  which  he  held 
until  1950,  when  he  yielded  to  eighty 
years  and  impaired  health,  but  remained 
a  member  until  his  death.  From  1953  he 
was  president  of  the  North-East  Hamp- 
shire Agricultural  Association. 

He  was  distinguished  in  appearance, 
and  was  remarkable  for  his  courtesy.  Al- 
though not  a  fluent  speaker,  he  impressed 
all  who  knew  him  with  the  great  range 
of  his  knowledge,  his  gentle  wisdom,  his 


solicitude  for  those  with  or  for  whom  he 
worked,  and  his  moral  strength,  touched 
with  a  delicate  humour. 

In  1916  he  was  awarded  the  Order  of 
the  Nile,  first  class;  he  was  appointed 
C.M.G.  in  1909,  CLE.  in  1919,  and 
K.C.M.G.  in  1920.  In  1926  he  married 
Charlotte  Helen,  daughter  of  Colonel  Wil- 
liam Lewis  Kinloch  Ogilvy,  60th  Rifles; 
they  had  no  children.  He  died  at  his  wife's 
estate,  Binsted  Wyck,  Alton,  Hampshire, 
24  April  1956. 

[The  Times,  25  April  1956;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Kevin  O'C.  Hayes. 

BONNEY,  (WILLIAM  FRANCIS)  VIC- 
TOR (1872-1953),  gynaecologist,  was 
born  in  Chelsea  17  December  1872,  the 
son  of  William  Augustus  Bonney,  surgeon, 
and  his  wife,  Anna  Maria  Alice  Polixine 
Poulain.  Educated  privately,  he  qualified 
in  1896  from  Middlesex  Hospital  with  the 
M.B.,  B.S.  (London)  and  proceeded  to  his 
M.D.  (1898),  M.S.  and  F.R.C.S.  (1899), 
and  B.Sc,  with  first  class  honours  (1904). 
In  1903  he  was  appointed  obstetric  tutor 
to  Middlesex  Hospital  and  concomitantly 
held  a  research  post.  In  1908  he  was 
elected  to  the  honorary  staff  as  assistant 
gynaecological  surgeon  and  in  1930  he 
succeeded  Sir  Comyns  Berkeley  as  senior 
gynaecological  surgeon.  He  also  gave  his 
services  to  the  Chelsea  Hospital  for 
Women,  the  Royal  Masonic  Hospital,  the 
Miller  Hospital,  and  Queen  Alexandra's 
Military  Hospital,  and  was  visiting  gynae- 
cologist to  the  British  Postgraduate 
Medical  School.  He  retired  from  hospital 
practice  in  1937. 

When  Bonney  was  appointed  to  the 
Middlesex,  gynaecology  was  professionally 
regarded  askance,  even  though  it  formed 
a  third  part  of  the  qualifying  examination 
for  medical  students.  With  his  acute  surgi- 
cal acumen  Bonney  was  not  slow  to 
recognize  that  the  true  position  of  the 
gynaecologist  should  be  co-equal  with  his 
surgical  colleagues  and  he  devoted  all  his 
great  energy  towards  this  end,  raising 
gynaecology  from  its  medical  obscurity 
into  the  important  position  it  came  to  hold 
as  a  major  branch  of  surgery.  He  was  the 
pioneer  of  the  operation  of  myomectomy, 
i.e.  the  removal  of  fibroid  tumours  from 
the  womb  without  the  removal  of  the 
womb  itself;  and  with  Berkeley  he  ex- 
tended and  perfected  the  operation  for 
cancer  of  the  neck  of  the  womb.  He  de- 
vised a  superb  operative  technique  which 
has  been  emulated  by  countless  pupils. 


126 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Booth 


He  was  a  stimulating  and  invigorating 
teacher  with  the  kindest  of  dispositions. 
He  could  be  a  severe  critic ;  but  always  of 
the  method,  never  of  the  man.  He  was  a 
loyal  and  true  colleague,  who  was  never 
heard  to  speak  ill  of  anybody. 

A  prolific  writer,  Bonney  wrote  many  of 
his  books  with  Sir  Comyns  Berkeley ;  the 
best  known  is  A  Textbook  of  Gynaecological 
Surgery  which  was  first  published  in  1911 
and  reached  a  sixth  edition  in  1952.  The 
illustrations  in  Bonney 's  books,  drawn  by 
himself,  point  to  the  artist  in  him,  as 
do  his  water-colours.  Like  other  ready 
writers  he  was  an  avid  reader.  A  great 
admirer  as  well  as  a  friend  of  Rudyard 
Kipling  [q.v.],  Bonney  became  vice- 
president  of  the  Kipling  Society.  In  early 
days  a  useful  tennis  player,  in  later  life  he 
became  a  keen  fisherman,  owning  a  long 
stretch  of  water  on  the  River  Wye. 

Bonney's  spiritual  home  was  the  Royal 
College  of  Surgeons  where  he  was  the  first 
gynaecologist  to  secure  a  seat  by  open 
election  on  the  council,  on  which  he  served 
for  twenty  years ;  he  was  three  times  Hun- 
terian  lecturer,  Bradshaw  lecturer  (1934), 
and  Hunterian  orator  (1943).  In  1946  he 
was  elected  an  honorary  fellow  of  the 
Royal  College  of  Obstetricians  and  Gynae- 
cologists, and  he  was  the  first  gynaecologist 
to  be  elected  an  honorary  fellow  of  the 
Royal  Australasian  College  of  Surgeons 
(1928). 

In  1905  Bonney  married  Annie,  daugh- 
ter of  Dr.  James  Appleyard,  of  Tasmania ; 
they  had  no  children.  He  died  in  London 
4  July  1953.  A  portrait  by  Sir  Oswald 
Birley  is  at  the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Frederick  W.  Roques. 

BOOTH,  HUBERT  CECIL  (1871-1955), 
engineer,  was  born  4  July  1871  in  Glouces- 
ter, the  sixth  child  of  Abraham  Booth, 
timber  importer,  by  his  wife,  Elizabeth 
Ann    Watts.    Educated    at    the    College 
School,    Gloucester,    and    at    Gloucester 
County  School,  he  entered  the  City  and 
Guilds  Central  Institution  (later  the  City 
and  Guilds  College)  in  1889  where  he  took 
a  three-year  course  in  civil  and  mechanical 
engineering.  He  obtained  the  associate- 
ship  of  the   City  and   Guilds   Institute, 
having  distinguished  himself  in  his  aca- 
demic studies.  He  became  an  associate 
member  and  later  member  of  the  Institu- 
,    tion  of  Civil  Engineers  and  was  elected  a 
I    fellow  of  the  City  and  Guilds  Institute. 
I        Booth's    first    employment    was    with 
'    Maudslay,  Sons  &  Field,  then  the  leading 


marine  engine  builders  in  the  country, 
where  he  was  first  employed  as  a  draughts- 
man attached  to  a  group  designing  the 
engines  for  two  new  battleships  for  the 
Royal  Navy.  In  1894  he  was  chosen  by 
W.  B.  Bassett  (a  director  of  Maudslays 
who  had  floated  a  company  for  the  con- 
struction and  operation  of  'Great  Wheels') 
to  assist  with  the  correction  of  faulty 
techniques  which  had  complicated  the 
erection  of  the  'Great  Wheel'  then  being 
built  at  Earl's  Court.  He  was  then  com- 
missioned by  Bassett  to  design,  plan,  and 
control  the  erection  of  three  similar  struc- 
tures at  Blackpool,  Vienna,  and  Paris. 
The  Paris  example  was  300  feet  in  dia- 
meter and  remained  a  familiar  landmark 
until  it  was  dismantled  in  the  twenties. 
The  'Great  Wheel'  in  Vienna  continued  to 
be  much  patronized.  The  interest  of  these 
three  huge  wheels  designed  by  Booth 
between  the  age  of  24  and  26  lies  in  their 
being  the  first  major  structures  into  which 
a  degree  of  flexibility  was  deliberately 
introduced  in  a  mathematically  controlled 
manner.  This  resulted  in  notable  econo- 
mies, the  principles  governing  their  design 
being  fundamentally  identical  with  those 
upon  which  the  design  of  modern  long- 
span  suspension  bridges  is  based. 

In  1901  Booth  started  his  own  business 
in  London  as  a  consulting  engineer.  He 
continued  in  active  practice  for  the  next 
forty  years,  apart  from  a  break  in  1902-3 
when  he  took  complete  charge  of  the  erec- 
tion of  Connel  Ferry  Bridge  over  Loch 
Etive.  At  that  time  the  bridge  was  about 
one-quarter  built  and  running  badly  be- 
hind schedule.  He  returned  to  London 
when  this  task  had  been  successfully 
completed. 

In  1901  Booth  invented,  perfected,  and 
named  the  first  vacuum  cleaner,  and  it  is 
in  this  connection  that  he  is  most  widely 
remembered.  In  that  year  he  founded  the 
British  Vacuum  Cleaner  Company  which 
was  registered  in  1903  and  of  which  he 
continued  as  chairman  until  his  retirement 
at  the  age  of  eighty-one  in  1952,  having 
seen  the  industry  which  he  brought  into 
being  grow  to  world-wide  proportions. 
He  was  particularly  interested  in  the  in- 
dustrial possibihties  of  the  process  and  was 
responsible  for  much  of  the  basic  experi- 
mental work  needed  for  the  successful 
development  of  the  large  installations  such 
as  those  forming  a  familiar  and  vital  part 
of  the  equipment  of  modern  coal-fired 
generating  stations.  Although  he  regarded 
the  domestic  electric  cleaner  as  a  mere  toy, 
he  derived  a  deep  satisfaction  from  the 


127 


Booth 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


invention  of  a  process  which,  apart  from 
its  labour-saving  characteristics,  has  led 
to  an  incalculable  improvement  in  the 
hygiene  of  nearly  every  civiMzed  home. 

Booth  was  gifted  with  a  remarkable  in- 
sight into  the  elements  of  any  technological 
or  intellectual  problem  he  was  called  on  to 
solve,  and  he  was  meticulous  in  his  atten- 
tion to  detail.  Consequently  his  work, 
much  of  it  original,  was  rarely  susceptible 
of  improvement  save  through  the  develop- 
ment of  improved  manufacturing  tech- 
niques. His  personal  qualities  of  charm 
and  integrity  won  him  the  affection  and 
respect  of  a  wide  circle  of  friends  in  all 
walks  of  life.  When  young  he  was  a  keen 
amateur  boxer.  In  later  years  his  recre- 
ations lay  in  the  field  of  philosophical 
speculation  of  an  intuitive  but  realistic 
kind  and  in  good  talk  generally. 

In  1903  Booth  married  Charlotte  Mary 
(died  1948),  eldest  daughter  of  Francis 
Tring  Pearce,  of  Gloucester,  by  whom  he 
had  two  sons.  He  died  in  Croydon  14 
January  1955.  A  portrait  by  David 
Jagger  is  in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
MuiB  Johnston. 

BOOTHMAN,  Sir  JOHN  NELSON 
(1901-1957),  air  chief  marshal,  was  born  in 
Wembley,  Middlesex,  19  February  1901, 
the  son  of  Thomas  John  Boothman,  rail- 
way clerk,  and  his  wife,  Mary  Burgess.  He 
was  educated  at  Harrow  County  School 
which  he  left  to  become  a  voluntary 
motor  driver  with  the  French  Red  Cross, 
serving  in  Salonika  in  1918  and  being 
awarded  the  croix  de  guerre. 

In  1921  Boothman  was  commissioned  in 
the  Royal  Air  Force  and  became  a  flying 
instructor  before  serving  for  two  years 
(1926-8)  in  Iraq.  There  followed  special 
training  in  high-speed  flight  and  in  1931 
it  was  Boothman  who  piloted  the  Super- 
marine  S.6.B.  which  won  the  Schneider 
Trophy  outright  for  Great  Britain.  He  was 
awarded  the  A.F.C.  The  next  four  years 
were  spent  on  flying  duties  with  the 
performance  testing  squadron  at  the 
Aeroplane  and  Armament  Experimental 
Establishment. 

After  graduating  from  the  R.A.F.  Staff 
College  in  1935  Boothman  spent  three 
years  on  air  staff  duties.  When  war  broke 
out  in  1939  he  was  in  command  of  No.  44 
Squadron  but  moved  in  December  to 
fighter,  and  in  1940  to  bomber,  operations 
duties.  For  a  time  in  1941  he  commanded 
the  base  at  Waddington  and  after  a 
couple  of  months  on  special  duties  in 


Washington  returned  to  command  at 
Finningley.  In  1942-3  he  was  working 
on  operational  requirements  at  the  Air 
Ministry  and  from  June  1943  commanded 
No.  106  Wing  (later  Group)  at  Benson 
which  was  engaged  on  the  photographic 
reconnaissance  vital  for  the  landings  in 
Normandy.  In  July  1944  Boothman  was 
appointed  to  command  the  Aeroplane  and 
Armament  Experimental  Establishment 
but  in  the  following  year  he  was  moved  to 
the  Air  Ministry  as  assistant  chief  of  air 
staff  (technical  requirements),  an  impor- 
tant post  for  the  post-war  development  of 
the  Royal  Air  Force,  in  which  he  remained 
until  1948. 

Boothman  went  next  to  the  Iraq  Com- 
mand until  1950  when  he  became  con- 
troller of  supplies  (air)  in  the  Ministry  of 
Supply  at  a  time  of  rapid  expansion  in 
face  of  the  threat  of  war.  To  this  exacting 
task  he  brought  a  wide  experience,  a  lively 
intelligence,  and  a  pleasant  personality 
which  made  him  an  agreeable  as  well  as 
a  calmly  efficient  colleague.  Coastal  Com- 
mand, his  last  appointment  (1953-6),  he 
held  concurrently  with  the  N.A.T.O.  ap- 
pointments of  air  commander-in-chief, 
Channel  Command,  and  air  commander- 
in-chief.  Eastern  Atlantic  Area.  He  was 
promoted  air  marshal  in  1952  and  air  chief 
marshal  in  1954. 

Boothman  was  a  natural  pilot  and 
throughout  his  Service  career  was 
fascinated  by  the  art  of  flying.  In  his 
higher  appointments  he  would  escape 
from  his  chair  in  the  Ministry  whenever 
possible  to  fly  off,  perhaps  to  North 
Africa,  in  a  Spitfire  or  a  Mosquito ;  or  to 
try  out  some  new  development  such  as  the 
gas  turbine  or  the  tricycle  undercarriage. 
He  got  the  feel  of  a  new  aircraft  im- 
mediately. Although  he  was  by  no  means 
unsociable  he  seemed  to  have  few  in- 
terests outside  the  Service.  He  was  scorn- 
ful of  what  he  regarded  as  the  games  fetish 
and  did  not  consider  strenuous  exercise 
essential  for  physical  fitness. 

In  1922  Boothman  married  Gertrude, 
daughter  of  Hubert  Andrews.  His  only 
child,  a  son,  followed  him  into  the  R.A.F. 
and  both  were  invested  with  the  D.F.C.  on 
the  same  day  in  1945.  The  son  was  killed 
in  a  flying  accident  in  the  following  year. 

Boothman  was  appointed  C.B.  (1944), 
K.B.E.  (1951),  and  K.C.B.  (1954),  re- 
ceived the  American  D.F.C,  and  was  a 
commander  of  the  Legion  of  Merit.  He 
died  in  London  29  December  1957. 


[Private  information.]  Helen  M.  Palmer. 


t^8 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Boswell 


BOSVS^.LL,  PERCY  GEORGE  HAM- 
NALL  (1886-1960),  geologist,  was  born 
at  Woodbridge,  Suffolk,  7  August  1886, 
the  second  son  of  George  James  Boswell, 
master  printer,  of  Ipswich,  by  his  wife, 
Mary  Elizabeth  Marshall,  of  Tasmania. 
Nurtured  strictly  in  a  Victorian  household 
on  English  grammar  and  punctuation, 
Charles  Dickens  and  the  Bible,  Boswell 
soon  acquired  a  disciplined  mind  and  a 
flair  for  lucid  wTiting.  As  a  youth  in  the 
higher  grade  school  at  Ipswich  his  interest 
in  geology  was  kindled  by  fossil  collecting 
in  the  near-by  fossiliferous  crag  and  Chalk 
pits  and  by  poring  over  displays  in  the 
local  museum.  Rather  than  join  the 
family's  printing  business  he  left  home 
and  became  first  a  pupil  teacher,  later 
(1905-12)  a  science  instructor  at  the 
Technical  School  at  Ipswich. 

While  still  in  his  teens  he  became  a 
founder-member  of  the  Ipswich  and  Dis- 
trict Field  Club,  though  his  early  geo- 
logical pursuits  were  carried  out  mostly  in 
solitude,  and  often  continued  far  into  the 
night.  Unfortunately,  excessive  zeal  took 
its  toll,  for  at  the  age  of  eighteen  he  de- 
veloped choroiditis  in  both  eyes  and  was 
virtually  blind  for  several  months,  his 
right  eye  being  so  irreparably  damaged 
that  he  never  regained  stereoscopic  vision. 
Providentially,  at  about  this  time,  his  zest 
for  geology  was  further  stimulated  by  the 
contagious  enthusiasm  of  George  Slater, 
a  schoolmaster  from  the  north  country, 
who  was  destined  to  remain  a  lifelong 
friend  and  mentor. 

In  1911  Boswell  obtained  his  London 
B.Sc.  and  in  1912,  at  the  comparatively 
advanced  age  of  twenty-six,  entered  the 
Imperial  College  to  study  under  W.  W. 
Watts,  and  to  continue  his  researches  on 
the  Pliocene-Pleistocene  succession  in 
East  Anglia,  the  zoning  of  the  Chalk,  and 
the  inter-relation  between  the  culture 
stages  of  Early  Man  and  successive  phases 
of  the  Glacial  Period.  These  investigations 
were  recognized  by  the  Geological  Society's 
bestowal  of  the  Daniel  Pidgeon  Fund  in 
1914,  and  the  WoUaston  Fund  in  1917,  and 
by  the  award  of  the  degree  of  D.Sc.  by  the 
university  of  London  in  1916. 

It  was  the  dearth  of  fossils  in  the  Ter- 
tiary rocks  of  the  London  Basin  which 
prompted  Boswell's  prescient  concept  of 
using  their  detrital  mineral  assemblages 
for  purposes  of  stratigraphic  correlation. 
This  led  him  naturally  to  acquire  an  un- 
rivalled knowledge  of  the  mineralogy  of 
a  wide  range  of  British  rocks,  and  to 
specialize  on  the  qualitative  and  quantita- 


tive aspects  of  sedimentary  petrology, 
later  to  prove  so  helpful  in  deciphering  the 
palaeogeography,  tectonics,  and  climatic 
conditions  of  past  epochs.  These  pioneer 
investigations  were  turned  to  vital  use 
during  the  war  of  1914-18,  when  as  geo- 
logical adviser  to  the  Ministry  of  Munitions 
he  discovered  much-needed  domestic  re- 
sources of  glass-,  foundry-,  and  furnace- 
sands.  He  was  appointed  O.B.E.  in  1918. 

During  his  tenure  of  the  newly  founded 
George  Herdman  chair  of  geology  at 
Liverpool  (1917-30),  he  inspired  an  en- 
thusiastic band  of  students  to  engage  on 
researches  on  the  volcanic  rocks  of  Snow- 
donia  and  the  Lake  District,  the  Silurian 
and  Carboniferous  strata  of  North  Wales, 
and  the  Triassic  and  Pleistocene  deposits 
of  the  Liverpool  district,  besides  embark- 
ing on  his  own  protracted  studies  on  the 
stratigraphy  and  tectonics  of  the  Silurian 
rocks  of  the  Denbighshire  moors. 

Always  keenly  alive  to  the  applications 
of  geology  to  civil  engineering,  he  contri- 
buted valuable  advice  during  the  planning 
and  construction  of  the  Mersey  road 
tunnel  and  on  the  silting  of  the  Mersey 
estuary,  besides  acting  for  long  as  a  con- 
sultant to  various  water  undertakings, 
notably  the  Metropolitan  Water  Board. 
He  was  an  exemplary  expert  witness,  for 
he  had  a  lucid  and  incisive  mind  coupled 
with  an  ability  to  present  evidence  with 
persuasive  clarity. 

In  1930  he  succeeded  his  old  master. 
Watts,  as  professor  of  geology  at  Imperial 
College,  but  owing  to  the  ill  health,  mainly 
bronchitis  and  asthma,  which  had  scourged 
him  since  childhood  he  was  compelled  to 
resign  in  1938.  Nevertheless,  during  this 
period  he  extended  his  studies  of  the 
Silurian  rocks  of  North  Wales,  published 
his  classic  volume  On  the  Mineralogy  of 
the  Sedimentary  Rocks  (1933),  and  visited 
East  Africa  to  adjudicate  on  disputed 
evidence  concerning  the  age  of  skeletal 
remains  of  Early  Man. 

After  retirement,  he  continued  to  work 
until  1953  on  the  Denbighshire  moors  and 
as  a  consultant  in  engineering  geology; 
thereafter,  though  gravely  incapacitated 
in  his  declining  years,  he  still  wrote  a  num- 
ber of  papers  on  thixotropy  and  cognate 
subjects,  together  with  a  final  book  of 
essays  on  Muddy  Sediments  published 
posthumously  (1961). 

Boswell's  flair  for  administration  and 
organization  found  expression  not  only  in 
university  affairs,  but  also  in  the  offices  of 
secretary  (1932-4)  and  president  (1940- 
41)  of  the  Geological  Society  of  London, 


8662062 


120 


Boswell 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


from  whom  he  received  the  Bigsby  medal 
(1929) ;  president  of  the  Liverpool  Geo- 
logical Society  (1921-3)  and  of  the  Pre- 
historic Society  (1936);  andjn  the  posts 
of  general  secretary  (1931-5),  general 
treasurer  (1935-^3),  and  president  of  the 
geology  section  (1932)  of  the  British  Asso- 
ciation. He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1931 
and  was  honorary  member  of  numeipus 
scientific  societies  at  home  and  abroad. 

His  scientific  writings,  embodied  in 
more  than  a  hundred  publications,  may 
be  epitomized  under  the  headings  of  East 
Anglian  stratigraphy,  the  geological  re- 
lationships of  Early  Man,  the  stratigraphy 
and  tectonics  of  the  Silurian  rocks  of 
Denbighshire,  the  economic  and  engineer- 
ing applications  of  geology,  and  perhaps 
especially  the  petrology  and  physical 
characters  of  sedimentary  rocks. 

A  member  of  the  Alpine  Club,  he  often 
found  refreshing  relaxation  among  the 
mountains  of  Snowdonia  and  the  Swiss 
Alps.  Of  medium  height  and  somewhat 
lean  features,  he  had  a  ready  twinkle,  was 
ever  friendly  and  encouraging  to  amateur 
and  professional  geologists  alike,  and  took 
immense  pride  in  the  accomplishments  of 
his  students.  His  recreations  were  recorded 
in  Who's  Who  as  'letter-writing  and  raising 
professors'.  He  married  in  1939  Hope, 
daughter  of  William  Blount  Dobell,  coal 
merchant;  she  was  a  sister  of  Clifford 
Dobell,  F.R.S. ,  and  an  'adopted  daughter' 
of  Sir  Basil  Mott  [q.v.].  They  had  no 
children.  After  Boswell's  death  at  Ruthin 
Castle  Clinic  in  North  Wales  22  December 
1960,  his  ashes  were  scattered  on  the  head- 
land of  Great  Orme. 

[The  Times,  23  December  1960;  G.  H. 
Mitchell  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of  Fellows  of 
the  Royal  Society,  vol.  vii,  1961 ;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

David  Williams. 

] 

BOUGHTON,  RUTLAND  (1878-1960), 
composer,  was  born  in  Aylesbury  23 
January  1878,  the  eldest  child  of  William 
Rutland  Boughton,  grocer,  and  his  wife, 
Grace  Martha  Bishop.  He  was  educated 
at  the  Aylesbury  Endowed  School,  and 
throughout  his  childhood  his  mother  en- 
couraged his  obvious  devotion  to  music. 
Before  his  fourteenth  year  he  conceived  a 
cycle  of  music  dramas  on  the  life  of  Jesus, 
to  be  enacted  by  soloists  with  the  choir  of 
the  local  Sacred  Harmonic  Society  grouped 
round  three  sides  of  a  raised  platform. 
This  conception  of  choral  drama  was  his 
unique  contribution  to  English  music.  He 
had  never  been  in  a  theatre,  but  he  had 


seen  at  the  seaside  a  concert  party  on  a 
raised  platform,  had  been  given  Shake- 
speare's plays  as  a  school  prize,  and  had 
heard  oratorio.  It  also  enabled  him  to 
write  music  on  Sunday  without  offending 
the  family  conscience.  In  the  same  year, 
1892,  he  was  apprenticed  to  the  concert 
agency  of  Cecil  Barth.  His  employer  was 
lenient  to  his  shortcomings  and  generous 
with  material  and  artistic  help. 

In  1898  he  was  accepted  by  (Sir) 
Charles  Stanford  [q.v.]  at  the  Royal  Col- 
lege of  Music.  His  formal  education  had 
been  scanty,  but  his  musical  experience, 
obtained  in  complete  isolation,  was  al- 
ready greater  than  that  of  his  fellow 
students,  and  perhaps  of  his  teachers. 
This  self-education  did  not,  unfortunately, 
at  any  time  include  self-criticism. 

In  1901  he  left  the  College  as  the  fund 
raised  for  his  studies  was  exhausted.  He 
failed  as  a  music  journalist,  and,  nearing 
starvation,  accompanied  singing  lessons 
for  David  Ffrangcon  Davies  and  filled  in 
wind  parts  on  the  harmonium  in  the  pit  of 
the  Haymarket  Theatre. 

Nevertheless,  in  1903  he  married 
Florence  Hobley.  In  1905  (Sir)  Granville 
Bantock  [q.v.]  offered  him  a  post  in  the 
Midland  Institute  in  Birmingham,  where 
he  was  greatly  influenced  by  the  activi- 
ties of  Bishop  Gore  [q.v.]  and  Father 
Adderley. 

In  1907  Boughton  met  Reginald  Buck- 
ley, poet  and  journalist,  who  had  vague 
ideas,  born  of  Wagnerian  influences,  of  a 
music  drama  of  the  Arthurian  legend. 
Boughton  had  also  visualized  such  a 
scheme  in  his  childhood's  Jesus  drama. 
Together  in  1911  they  produced  a  booklet 
Music-Drama  of  the  Future.  Boughton's 
essay,  though  naive  and  high-flown  in 
language,  urged  his  point  that  'the  Wag- 
nerian drama  lacks  just  that  channel  of 
musical  expression  which  is  absolutely 
necessary  to  the  English  people',  namely 
choral  singing. 

At  that  moment,  Boughton's  personal 
life  became  complicated.  His  marriage 
was  ended  in  1910  by  a  deed  of  separation 
— divorce  was  beyond  his  means — and  he 
joined  his  life  with  that  of  Christina 
Walshe,  an  art  student  in  Birmingham, 
who  was  a  member  of  Boughton's  Literary 
and  Musical  Fellowship.  Christina's  home 
background  had  been  as  strict  as  Bough- 
ton's own,  but  their  ideas  of  'social  free- 
dom' were  alike.  Local  scandals  and 
reproaches  were  inevitable  and  they  left 
Birmingham,  but  Boughton's  complete 
candour  overcame  many  objections.  He 


130 


S0OSM9 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bowhill 


had  the  capacity  for  demanding  and  re- 
taining the  support  of  many  distinguished 
friends,  among  them  G.  B.  Shaw  [q.v.]. 

In  the  spring  of  1913  Buckley  and 
Boughton  settled  on  Glastonbury  as  the 
Bayreuth  of  their  new  Arthurian  enter- 
prise. The  first  performance  of  the  first 
Glastonbury  Festival  was  held  on  5 
August  1914,  the  war  taking  precedence 
by  twenty-four  hours.  The  annual  festival 
was  suspended  after  1916  when  Boughton 
was  called  up,  to  become  ultimately  band- 
master in  the  Royal  Flying  Corps  of  which 
(Sir)  Walford  Davies  [q.v.]  had  been 
appointed  director  of  music.  The  festivals 
were  resumed  in  1919. 

In  1921  (Sir)  Barry  Jackson  put  on 
Boughton's  The  Immortal  Hour,  an  opera 
based  on  the  Celtic  drama  by  Fiona  Mac- 
leod  [q.v.],  and  first  performed  at  Glaston- 
bury in  1914,  at  his  repertory  theatre  in 
Birmingham.  Encouraged  by  its  success, 
he  offered  a  London  production,  to  which 
Boughton  agreed  unwillingly,  as  he 
thought  the  sophistication  of  a  normal 
theatre  would  destroy  its  magic.  In  fact,  it 
ran  from  October  1922  for  216  perform- 
ances and  was  revived  in  1923,  1926,  and 
1932,  making  a  total  of  some  500  per- 
formances in  London  alone.  This  work  and 
Bethlehem  (1915),  based  on  the  Coventry 
mystery,  represent  the  only  marketable 
successes  of  Boughton's  music. 

Two  other  works  achieved  a  temporary 
success:  a  translation  of  Alkestis  by  Gil- 
bert Murray  [q.v.]  in  1922  and  Queen  of 
Cornwall  (1924)  by  Thomas  Hardy  [q.v.], 
both  produced  at  Glastonbury.  These  two 
works  may  be  said  to  reflect  Boughton's 
domestic  problems  which  in  1923  cul- 
minated in  the  rupture  of  his  union  with 
Christina  and  an  alliance  with  Kathleen 
Davis,  a  senior  pupil  at  his  new  school  at 
Glastonbury. 

In  1926  Glastonbury  was  finally  aban- 
doned, both  as  a  festival  and  as  a  home, 
and  the  family  settled  at  Kilcote,  near 
Gloucester,  Boughton  working  a  small- 
holding with  some  success  and  deeply 
absorbed  in  composition.  He  was  granted 
a  Civil  List  pension  in  1938  under  the 
newly  established  rules  enabling  'men  of 
genuine  distinction  to  continue  their  work 
without  the  haunting  fear  of  immediate 
penury'. 

Boughton's  political  and  personal  creed 
governed  his  life  and  influenced  his  music, 
which  tempts  the  reader  to  marvel  at  its 
naivety,  from  which,  however,  it  derives 
its  peculiar  strength.  He  wrote  in  all 
forms,   but  more   than   half  his  output 


remained  in  manuscript,  deposited  in  the 
British  Museum.  His  literary  remains, 
other  than  the  hbretti  of  the  music 
dramas,  are  contained  in  two  propaganda 
pamphlets  of  1911  and  two  fuU-scale 
books  on  music:  Bach  (1907,  revised  ed. 
1930)  and  The  Reality  of  Music  (1934). 
The  journalistic  articles  have  not  been 
collected. 

Boughton  died  in  London  25  January 
1960.  His  portrait  (1911)  by  Christina 
Walshe  became  the  possession  of  his  son- 
in-law  Christopher  Ede,  husband  of  Joy 
Boughton  (died  1963),  oboist,  who  alone  of 
his  children  (three  sons  and  five  daughters) 
made  a  name  for  herself  in  music. 

[Michael  Kurd,  Immortal  Hour,  1962 ;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  Steuabt  Wilson. 

BOWHILL,  Sir  FREDERICK  WIL- 
LIAM (1880-1960),  air  chief  marshal,  was 
born  1  September  1880  at  Morar  Gwalior, 
India,  son  of  James  Henry  Bowhill,  then 
a  captain  in  the  62nd  Foot,  and  his  wife, 
Mary  Noel  Carter.  Educated  at  Black- 
heath  School  and  in  the  training  ship 
Worcester,  he  went  to  sea  in  the  Merchant 
Service  for  sixteen  years  and  left  with  a 
certificate  as  extra  master  square  rigged. 
He  was  attached  to  the  Royal  Naval 
Reserve  and  went  through  a  course  of 
flying  instruction  in  1912  as  lieutenant 
R.N.R.  Not  infrequently  he  crash-landed 
on  sewage-farms  which,  despite  obvious 
disadvantages,  had  the  great  merit,  as 
he  said,  of  being  soft  to  land  on.  He  was 
posted  to  the  Actaeon  and  in  1913  went 
to  the  Central  Flying  School  and  obtained 
his  Royal  Aero  Club  certificate.  In  April 
he  was  appointed  flying  officer.  Royal 
Flying  Corps,  Naval  Wing.  As  flight 
lieutenant  he  was  placed  in  command  of 
the  Empress  and  engaged  on  raids  against 
enemy  submarine  bases,  until  in  1915  he 
was  appointed  to  the  air  department  of 
the  Admiralty.  He  became  squadron  com- 
mander and  was  sent  to  Mesopotamia  to 
assist  the  Tigris  Corps  in  the  attempt 
to  relieve  the  force  under  (Sir)  Charles 
Townshend  [q.v.]  besieged  in  Kut,  and 
was  engaged  in  various  air/sea  hostilities 
for  which  he  was  appointed  in  1918  to 
the  D.S.O.  In  that  year,  as  wing  com- 
mander, he  took  command  of  the  sea- 
plane station  at  Felixstowe,  went  next 
to  Killingholme,  fighting  Zeppelins  off  the 
Humber,  and  thence  to  the  Mediterranean 
to  command  the  Sixty-second  Wing  where 
he  gained  a  bar  to  his  D.S.O.  In  1919  he 
was  chief  staff  officer  to  an  R.A.F.  de- 
tachment fighting  the   'Mad  Mullah'  in 


131 


Bowhill 


D.N'.B.  1051-1960 


Somaliland  and  was  appointed  C.M.G. ; 
and  after  a  spell  on  technical  staff  duties 
was  posted  in  1921  for  three  years  with 
Coastal  Area  as  group  captain.  As  chief 
staff  officer,  Middle  East  Area,  he  saw 
service  in  Egypt  and  Iraq.  In  1928  he 
became  air  commodore  and  in  1929-81 
was  director  of  organization  and  staff 
duties  at  the  Air  Ministry.  In  1931,  as  air 
vice-marshal,  he  became  air  officer  com- 
manding Fighting  Area,  Air  Defence  of 
Great  Britain.  In  1933  he  became  a  mem- 
ber of  the  Air  Council  (as  air  member  for 
personnel),  being  appointed  C.B.  in  1935, 
and  promoted  K.C.B.  in  1936  the  year  in 
which  he  became  air  marshal. 

In  August  1937  Bowhill  became  head 
of  Coastal  Command,  a  post  he  held  until 
1941,  in  which  year  he  was  appointed 
G.B.E.,  having  been  promoted  air  chief 
marshal  in  1939.  Before  the  outbreak  of 
war  Bowhill  worked  on  a  system  of  plot- 
ting aircraft  movements  and  of  controlling 
aircraft  from  the  ground  which  was 
developed  to  a  high  pitch  of  efficiency  in 
the  Battle  of  Britain.  He  also  advocated 
the  use  of  barrage  balloons  to  float  over 
large  cities  as  protection  against  low  level 
attack,  an  idea  adopted  on  a  large  scale 
during  the  war.  Further,  he  was  one  of  the 
officers  responsible  for  the  development  of 
the  Women's  Auxiliary  Air  Force.  In  1940 
his  command  located  the  German  blockade 
runner  Altmark  which  had  captive  British 
seamen  aboard  and  made  possible  their 
release  by  the  follow-up  action  of  the 
Cossack  in  Josing  Fjord. 

The  greatest  exploit  of  Coastal  Com- 
mand was  the  destruction  of  the  German 
battleship,  the  Bismarck,  in  May  1941. 
After  sinking  the  Hood  in  Denmark  Sound 
the  Bismarck  proceeded  to  get  lost  by  the 
Home  Fleet  and  it  was  a  matter  of  psycho^ 
logy  to  guess  where  she  might  be  heading. 
Bowhill,  with  insufficient  aircraft  to  cope 
with  every  possible  manoeuvre,  guessed 
that  the  Bismarck  would  be  ordered  to 
make  for  the  French  coast  and  he  sent  his 
Catalinas  there  to  welcome  her.  One  of 
them  came  out  of  the  cloud  right  over  the 
Bismarck  and  she  was  sunk  when  the 
Royal  Navy  closed  in. 

Bowhill  was  aheady  under  orders  to  go 
to  Canada  to  organize  the  R.A.F.  Ferry 
Command,  set  up  because  Britain's 
desperate  need  of  aircraft  had  outgrown 
the  voluntary  organization  established  the 
previous  year  by  a  group  of  Montreal 
business  men.  It  was  a  delicate  task  to 
take  over  from  a  dedicated  voluntary 
civilian  effort  and  create  a  para-military 


organization;  but  Bowhill  achieved  the 
translation  with  diplomacy  and  sheer 
sincerity.  He  made  good  friends  with  the 
Atfero  Group  and  he  and  his  wife  became 
very  popular  and  highly  regarded  in 
Montreal.  Dorval  airport  was  taken  over 
for  Ferry  Command  operations  as  St. 
Hubert  was  wanted  for  training  and  mili- 
tary purposes.  Bowhill  remained  head  of 
the  Ferrying  Ch-ganization  until  1943,  then 
became  air  officer  commanding-in-chief. 
Transport  Command,  until  1945,  four 
years  after  the  normal  age  for  retirement. 
His  services  were  then  sought  by  the 
Ministry  of  Civil  Aviation;  and  he  re- 
turned to  Montreal  for  another  two  years 
as  British  member  on  the  council  of  the 
provisional  International  Civil  Aviation 
Organization.  In  1946  he  returned  to 
England  and  was  chief  aeronautical  ad- 
viser to  the  Ministry  of  Civil  Aviation 
until  1957.  He  was  elected  master  of  the 
Master  Mariners  Company  and  enter- 
tained with  naval  bonhomie  in  the  ward 
room  of  the  Wellington  on  the  Thames.  He 
was  also  a  younger  brother  of  Trinity 
House,  two  appointments  which  linked 
back  a  dedicated  air  leader  to  his  early 
love  of  the  sea. 

During  his  colourful  career  he  was  a 
first  on  unique  occasions — the  first  airman 
to  fly  a  plane  off  the  deck  of  a  ship ; 
whilst  in  command  of  the  Empress  the  first 
to  make  an  air  attack  on  a  naval  fleet ;  the 
first  high  ranking  officer  to  cut  off  a  sea- 
man's leg  on  board  ship.  Bowhill  was  a 
commander  of  the  American  Legion  of 
Merit  and  received  a  number  of  other 
foreign  decorations. 

He  was  spare  and  compact  in  figure 
with  hair  which  gave  him  the  nickname  of 
'Ginger'  or  'Ginge'  to  his  intimates.  His 
tremendous  eyebrows  were  a  Uterally  out- 
standing characteristic,  a  daunting  feature 
of  his  leadership.  He  addressed  all  men  by 
their  surnames  and  never  hesitated  to  tell 
them  to  take  running  jumps  at  them- 
selves. Behind  this  fa9ade  he  was  kindly, 
humorous,  decisive,  a  good  mixer,  and  a 
diplomat  through  sheer  straightforward- 
ness and  honesty. 

He  married  in  1932  Dorothy  (died 
1966),  daughter  of  R.  H.  Arlingham- 
Davies,  of  Crickhowell,  South  Wales,  and 
widow  of  Wing  Commander  A.  B.  Gaskell. 
A  squadron  officer  in  the  W.A.A.F.,  she 
was  on  Bowhill's  staff  in  Montreal, 
saluted  him  punctiliously,  played  a  hard 
game  of  tennis  with  him,  was  a  gracious 
hostess  and  a  good  friend  and  companion 
for  Ginge.  Two  portraits  of  Bowhill  were 


132 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bowley 


painted  by  Sir  Oswald  Birley  and  one  by 
Richard  Jack.  A  drawing  by  Sir  William 
Rothenstein  is  reproduced  in  Men  of  the 
R.A.F.  (1942).  Bowhill  died  in  London  12 
March  1960. 

[The  Times  and  Montreal  Star,  14  March 
1960 ;  A.  O.  Pollard,  Leaders  of  the  Royal  Air 
Force,  1940 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

William  P.  Hildred. 

BOWLEY,  Sm  ARTHUR  LYON  (1869- 
1957),  statistician,  was  born  in  Bristol 
6  November  1869,  the  son  of  the  Rev. 
James  William  Lyon  Bowley,  vicar  of  St. 
Philip  and  St.  Jacob,  and  his  wife,  Maria 
Johnson.  Bowley  spent  nine  years  at 
Christ's  Hospital  which  left  a  lasting  im- 
pression on  him ;  later  in  his  life  he  served 
as  a  governor  for  more  than  ten  years.  He 
went  to  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  with 
a  major  scholarship  in  mathematics ;  was 
bracketed  tenth  wrangler  in  1891,  and 
later  obtained  both  the  Cobden  and  the 
Adam  Smith  prizes.  He  was  awarded  the 
Sc.D.  by  his  university  in  1913. 

On  leaving  Cambridge  Bowley  seemed 
destined  to  teach  mathematics  in  schools 
and  he  was  on  the  staff,  briefly  at  Brighton 
College,  then  at  St.  John's  School, 
Leatherhead,  until  1899.  Fortunately  for 
his  career  he  had  been  in  contact  with 
Alfred  Marshall  [q.v.]  and  others  active 
at  Cambridge  in  developing  the  social 
sciences.  He  was  much  concerned  both 
with  the  refinements  of  economic  analysis 
and  with  the  investigation  of  solutions  to 
problems  of  social  reform.  He  published  in 
1893  his  Cobden  prize  essay,  on  England's 
foreign  trade  in  the  nineteenth  century. 
Somewhat  later  he  began  an  extensive 
series  of  research  projects,  mainly  in  col- 
laboration with  G.  H.  Wood,  on  the 
relationship  between  movements  in  wages 
and  prices,  and  he  read  his  first  paper  to 
the  Royal  Statistical  Society  early  in  1895. 
He  published  many  further  papers  on  this 
subject,  all  of  them  put  together  with 
great  historical  and  statistical  care. 

These  interests  outside  his  teaching 
duties  led,  in  1895,  to  a  complete  and  per- 
manent change  in  Rowley's  career.  In 
that  year  Sidney  Webb  [q.v.]  and  others 
founded  the  London  School  of  Economics 
and  assembled  a  small  staff  of  part-time 
experts  to  begin  teaching  in  the  autumn. 
On  the  basis  of  his  current  research  work, 
and  on  the  recommendation  of  Marshall, 
Bowley  was  chosen  to  take  charge  of  the 
teaching  of  statistics.  He  gave  his  first 
lecture  on  statistics  at  the  School  in 
October    1895    and   continued   to   teach 


there  without  interruption  for  more  than 
forty  years.  He  was  never  a  socialist  in 
Webb's  sense  but,  as  a  good  liberal,  he 
found  the  senior  common-room  a  con- 
genial and  stimulating  background  to  his 
activities  in  teaching,  research,  and  public 
service. 

It  was,  however,  some  years  before  he 
became  a  full-time  member  of  the  staff 
of  the  London  School  of  Economics.  The 
focus  of  his  work  was  increasingly  at  the 
School,  but  for  more  than  twenty  years 
his  main  source  of  income  was  elsewhere. 
He  held  appointments  at  the  University 
College  at  Reading  from  1900  to  1919: 
as  lecturer  in  mathematics  (1900-7),  in 
economics  (1913-19),  and  professor  in 
both  subjects  (1907-18).  Meanwhile,  at 
the  School,  he  became  part-time  reader  in 
statistics  in  1908  and  was  given  the  title  of 
professor  in  1915.  But  it  was  only  in  1919 
that  the  university  of  London  created  a 
full-time  chair  in  statistics,  tenable  at  the 
London  School  of  Economics,  of  which 
Bowley  became  the  first  occupant.  Al- 
though he  retired  from  the  chair  in  1936, 
he  continued  many  of  his  activities  both  at 
the  School  and  elsewhere  until  the  early 
fifties.  He  acted  as  director  of  the  Oxford 
University  Institute  of  Statistics  during 
the  war  years  (1940-44)  and  received  an 
honorary  D.Litt.  in  1943.  He  was  elected 
F.B.A.  in  1922,  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1937, 
and  knighted  in  1950. 

As  a  mathematician  Bowley  was  com- 
petent but  rather  old-fashioned.  He  pub- 
lished relatively  little  which  was  original 
in  mathematical  statistics,  rather  more 
on  mathematical  economics  and  econo- 
metrics. He  was  one  of  the  founders  of  the 
international  Econometric  Society  in  1933 
and  he  served  later  as  its  president.  How- 
ever, first  and  foremost  Bowley  was  a 
practitioner  in  applied  statistics  and  he 
took  the  whole  of  the  social  sciences  as  his 
field.  He  was  highly  regarded  by  official 
statisticians  but  it  was  unfortunately  not 
the  custom  in  Bowley's  day  for  the  British 
Government  to  call  upon  outside  experts 
for  advice.  Undoubtedly  British  official 
statistics  in  the  twenties  and  thirties  would 
have  advanced  more  rapidly,  particularly 
in  the  use  of  sampling  techniques,  if 
Bowley  had  had  more  to  do  with  them. 
He  exercised  his  main  influence  there- 
fore through  his  teaching  and  research 
work  on  the  one  hand  and  his  extensive 
contacts  in  international  circles  on  the 
other.  And  he  was  called  upon  as  an  expert 
witness  in  cases  such  as  the  inquiry  into 
dockers'  wages  (1920)  which  earned  Ernest 


138 


Bowley 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bevin  [q.v.]  the  title  of  the  'Dockers' 
K.C 

Two  of  Bowley 's  pioneer  activities  were 
in  the  economic  field.  One  comprised  a 
number  of  studies  on  the  definition  and 
measurement  of  national  income  which 
occupied  his  attention,  on  and  off,  for 
more  than  twenty  years  before  the  first 
official  estimates  were  made  under  the 
guidance  of  Lord  Keynes  [q.v.],  during  the 
war  of  1939-45.  Without  Bowley's  careful 
and  precise  work  and  the  more  adven- 
turous studies  undertaken  independently 
by  Colin  Clark  the  official  computations 
would  scarcely  have  been  possible.  His 
other  pioneer  activity  in  this  field  was 
with  the  London  and  Cambridge  Economic 
Service,  the  first  venture  of  this  kind  in 
Britain,  a  private  luidertaking  financed 
by  subscriptions  from  the  outset  in  1923. 
Bowley  was  the  first  editor  and  he  served 
in  this  capacity  continuously  until  1945, 
remaining  a  regular  contributor  until 
1953.  His  editorship  was  characterized 
both  by  the  skill  with  which  he  pulled 
together  the  various  views  of  economists 
in  his  own  succinct  assessment  of  the  cur- 
rent economic  position  as  published  in  the 
Bulletins  of  the  Service,  and  by  the  statis- 
tical techniques  he  used  in  designing 
economic  series  and  in  devising  ways  of 
presenting  them.  He  showed  how  economic 
analysis  depends  on  long  runs  of  com- 
parable series,  presented  in  graphical  form 
(e.g.  by  the  use  of  ratio  scales)  and  ad- 
justed where  necessary  for  seasonal 
variation. 

The  major  contribution  which  Bowley 
made — and  it  was  one  of  the  utmost  im- 
portance to  statistics — lay  in  the  develop- 
ment of  sampling  techniques  in  their 
application  to  social  studies.  This  was  a 
major  concern  to  him  for  most  of  his 
active  life,  both  in  his  own  researches  and 
in  discussions  among  statisticians  at  the 
international  level.  While  Bowley  was 
forming  his  own  ideas  in  the  nineties, 
official  statisticians  from  all  over  the 
world  were  engaged  in  a  continuing 
debate  on  sampling,  the  'representative 
method'  as  it  was  then  called.  A.  N.  Kiaer 
(1838-1919),  the  head  of  the  Norwegian 
statistical  service  for  many  years,  led  the 
case  for  sampling  at  sessions  of  the  Inter- 
national Statistical  Institute  from  1895 
(Berne)  to  1901  (Budapest).  He  was  sup- 
ported by  C.  D.  Wright  of  the  U.S. 
Department  of  Labor,  and  then  by  Bow- 
ley himself.  Between  them  they  won  over 
the  reluctant  body  of  official  statisticians 
in  general. 


Bowley  explored  for  himself,  and  largely 
for  the  first  time,  the  appropriate  design  of 
sample  surveys,  the  proper  formulation  of 
sampling  precision,  and  the  ways  of  inter- 
preting the  results  in  their  application.  He 
devised  and  conducted  sample  surveys  of 
working-class  households  in  four  English 
towns  and,  in  presenting  the  results  in 
1915  in  a  volume  of  elegant  simplicity 
{Livelihood  and  Poverty,  with  A.  R. 
Burnett-Hurst),  he  was  far  ahead  of  his 
time  both  in  explaining  the  methods  used 
and  in  formulating  the  precision  of  the 
results.  He  distinguished  four  sources  of 
error:  incorrect  information,  loose  defini- 
tions, bias  in  selection  of  samples,  and 
calculable  errors  of  sampling.  He  may  not 
have  been  entirely  correct  in  his  use  of 
what  is  now  known  as  cluster  sampling, 
but  what  he  wrote  in  1915  would  for  the 
most  part  be  readily  accepted  today. 

It  was  natural  that  Bowley  should  be- 
come the  dominant  member  of  the  com- 
mittee set  up  in  1924  by  the  International 
Statistical  Institute  to  report  on  the 
representative  method.  At  the  1925  ses- 
sion (Rome),  Bowley's  influence  was 
clearly  visible  in  the  main  recommenda- 
tion of  the  committee  that  'the  in- 
vestigation should  be  so  arranged  wherever 
possible  as  to  allow  of  a  mathematical 
statement  of  the  precision  of  the  results, 
and  that  with  these  results  should  be 
given  an  indication  of  the  extent  of  the 
error  to  which  they  are  liable',  and  in  the 
technical  appendix  on  the  measurement  of 
precisions  which  accompanied  the  report. 
Bowley  continued  to  practise  what  he 
preached  and  he  himself  regarded  as  his 
most  important  work  his  contribution  to 
the  New  Survey  of  London  Life  and  Labour 
conducted  in  the  period  1930-35. 

Bowley  was  effective,  if  rather  dour,  on 
committees  and  he  held  many  high  offices 
in  the  British  Association,  the  Royal 
Statistical  Society,  the  Royal  Economic 
Society,  and  the  International  Statistical 
Institute.  He  was  shy  and  retiring,  never 
happier  than  when  talking  quietly  to  his 
research  students  or  playing  Bach  with  his 
family.  He  was  respected  by  all  his  col- 
leagues and  students  but  intimate  with 
few.  One  of  his  close  friendships  was  with 
the  distinguished  economist  Edwin  Can- 
nan  [q.v.]  who  shared  his  enthusiasm  for 
cycling.  Sometimes  they  were  joined  by 
F.  Y.  Edge  worth  [q.v.]  who  was  apt  to 
continue  discussions  of  abstract  economics 
even  on  his  bicycle.  On  one  occasion 
Cannan  is  reported  to  have  said :  'Bowley, 
let  us  go  a  little  faster ;  Edgeworth  cannot 


134 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bracken 


talk  mathematics  at  more  than  eight  miles 
an  hour.' 

Bowley's  published  work  was  very- 
extensive.  A  fairly  complete  list  of  his 
publications  is  to  be  found  in  the  Journal 
of  the  Royal  Statistical  Society,  part  2, 
1957. 

In  1904  Bowley  married  Julia,  daughter 
of  Thomas  Hilliam,  land  agent ;  they  had 
three  daughters,  one  of  whom,  Marian 
Bowley,  became  professor  of  political 
economy  at  University  College,  London. 
Bowley  died  at  Haslemere  21  January 
1957.  A  portrait  by  Stella  Bowen  (1936)  is 
owned  by  the  London  School  of  Eco- 
nomics. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
R.  G.  D.  Allen. 

BRACKEN,     BRENDAN     RENDALL, 

Viscount  Bracken  (1901-1958),  politi- 
cian and  publisher,  was  born  at  Temple- 
more,  county  Tipperary,  15  February 
1901,  the  younger  son  of  J.  K.  Bracken,  of 
Ardlaugh  House,  Kilmallock,  and  Temple- 
more,  county  Tipperary,  a  builder  and 
monumental  mason,  and  one  of  the  leading 
spirits  in  reviving  the  Gaelic  games  at 
Thurles.  Brendan  lost  his  father  when  he 
was  very  young  and  his  mother  moved  to 
Dublin,  where  he  attended  the  Christian 
Brothers'  School.  But  she  found  him  hard 
to  manage,  and  sent  him  to  the  Jesuit 
College,  Mungret,  near  Limerick,  from 
which  he  ran  away,  about  the  time  of 
his  fifteenth  birthday.  His  mother  then 
shipped  him  to  Australia  in  1916,  although 
she  had  no  connections  there  except  a 
priest,  brother  of  the  Patrick  Laffan,  a 
builder,  whom  she  was  soon  afterwards  to 
marry  as  her  second  husband. 

Bracken  was  put  on  a  sheep  station  in 
New  South  Wales,  but  soon  displeased  his 
employer  by  his  addiction  to  reading  in- 
stead of  sheep  tending.  The  Brigidin  nuns 
near  by  at  Echuca  were  kind  to  him,  and 
let  him  read  the  books  in  the  convent 
library.  But  he  had  an  unhappy  time  until 
he  made  his  way  to  Sydney.  There  he 
sought  more  congenial  work,  offering  him- 
self to  the  Christian  Brothers  as  a  teacher, 
and  obtaining  employment  on  the  dio- 
cesan newspaper,  to  secure  advertisements. 
From  this  precarious  life  he  made  his  way 
back  to  Ireland  in  1919,  after  the  war  had 
ended.  He  found  that  his  mother  had 
married  Laffan  and  he  was  not  wanted  at 
home,  but  that  he  had  a  small  legacy  of 
a  few  hundred  pounds.  With  this  he  made 
his  way  for  the  first  time  to  England.  It 
was  the  time  of  the  Black  and  Tans,  but 


he  represented  himself  not  as  coming  from 
Ireland,  or  as  a  Catholic,  and  of  a  strongly 
nationalist  family,  but  from  Australia, 
where,  he  said,  his  parents  had  perished  in 
a  bush  fire. 

He  applied  to  various  public  schools, 
and  had  the  good  fortune  to  secure  ad- 
mittance to  Sedbergh,  where  he  was  one 
day  to  become  chairman  of  the  board  of 
governors.  He  was  nineteen  but  repre- 
sented himself  as  sixteen.  He  stipulated 
what  subjects  he  wished  to  study — history 
and  languages — and  paid  his  own  fees  in 
advance.  But  his  money  ran  out  after  two 
terms,  and  he  then  secured  teaching  posts, 
first  in  Liverpool,  then  in  a  preparatory 
school  at  Bishop's  Stortford.  This  second 
move  had  the  great  advantage  of  bringing 
him  near  London.  He  made  the  acquain- 
tance of  J.  L.  Garvin  [q.v.]  who  introduced 
him  to  Oliver  Locker-Lampson,  then  the 
owner  of  the  Empire  Review,  for  which 
Bracken  undertook  to  gain  subscriptions. 
It  was  about  this  time  that  he  met  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill,  to  whom  he  was  to 
attach  himself  for  the  rest  of  his  life. 
Garvin  recommended  him  and  he  worked 
for  Churchill  in  his  unsuccessful  election 
campaign  at  Leicester  (1923),  and  in  the 
by-election  for  the  Abbey  division  of 
Westminster  (1924),  and  those  who  were 
with  him  remember  him  as  a  colourful 
figure,  tall,  red-haired,  vigorous,  with  a 
great  power  of  invective. 

The  turning-point  of  his  fortunes  came 
in  1924  when  he  met  the  head  of  the 
publishers  Eyre  &  Spottiswoode,  Major 
Crosthwaite  Eyre,  a  retired  Indian  Army 
officer  who  had  married  Miss  Eyre  and  was 
looking  for  young  talent.  He  recruited 
Bracken  to  help  with  an  illustrated  monthly 
of  which  Hilaire  Belloc  [q.v.]  was  the 
editor.  From  this  small  beginning.  Bracken 
emerged  in  1925  as  a  director  of  the  firm, 
and  proved  himself  full  of  ideas  and  drive, 
with  an  excellent  business  judgement.  He 
persuaded  Eyre  &  Spottiswoode  to  acquire 
the  Financial  News,  to  give  him  a  share  of 
the  equity,  and  to  let  him  run  it.  This 
was  the  first  of  a  number  of  successful 
newspaper  and  periodical  enterprises.  He 
founded  the  Banker,  a  handsomely  pro- 
duced monthly,  and,  as  editor,  used  his 
position  to  secure  the  entree  to  City  insti- 
tutions. He  acquired  the  particular  friend- 
ship of  Sir  Henry  Strakosch  [q.v.],  with 
whom  in  1929  he  joined  in  the  control  of 
The  Economist  with  a  special  constitution 
guaranteeing  the  editor's  independence.  He 
acquired  control  of  the  Investors  Chronicle 
and  the  Practitioner,   an  old-established 


135 


Bracken 


•D.N*B.  1951-1960 


medical  journal.  All  these  prospered,  but  it 
was  the  Financial  News  which  established 
him,  and  enabled  him  to  secure  adoption, 
with  the  support  of  Churchill,  then  chan- 
cellor of  the  Exchequer,  as  Conservative 
candidate  for  North  Paddington,  for  which 
he  was  duly  returned  in  1929.  In  the 
Parliaments  of  the  thirties  he  made  him- 
self, in  Stanley  Baldwin's  phrase,  'the 
faithful  Chela'  of  Winston  Churchill,  in 
those  years  in  which  Churchill  was  not  only 
out  of  office  but  very  much  out  of  favour 
with  the  Conservative  Party.  Bracken,  like 
Churchill,  was  a  staunch  imperialist,  op- 
p>osing  the  government  of  India  bill,  and 
the  foreign  policy  pursued  by  Baldwin  and 
Chamberlain. 

When  on  the  declaration  of  war  Chur- 
chill was  called  to  office  at  the  Admiralty, 
Bracken  went  with  him  as  his  parlia- 
mentary private  secretary ;  and  when,  in 
May  1940,  Churchill  formed  his  own  war- 
time coalition  government,  he  brought 
Bracken  with  him,  still  as  his  P.P.S.,  to 
No.  10.  Bracken,  who  was  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council  in  June,  asked  for  nothing 
higher  than,  as  he  put  it,  'to  stand  round 
and  collect  the  coats' ;  but  he  was  in  his 
element  at  the  centre  of  power  through- 
out the  war,  one  of  the  two  or  three  men 
closest  to  Churchill,  sitting  up  with  him  in 
the  small  hours,  and  living  at  10  Downing 
Street  or  its  annex.  He  went  out  of  his 
way  to  ease  Churchill's  burdens  and  to 
take  the  strain  from  'the  Boss'  as  he 
genially  called  his  master.  The  extent  of 
his  influence  cannot  easily  be  estimated, 
but  certainly  he  prompted  many  of 
Churchill's  appointments,  and  the  dis- 
posal of  patronage,  not  excluding  appoint- 
ments in  the  Church  of  England  which 
interested  him  more  than  they  did  the 
prime  minister.  He  had  a  wide  knowledge 
of  English  journahsm,  and  particularly 
cultivated  the  Commonwealth  and  Ameri- 
can correspondents  whose  goodwill  was  so 
important  to  Britain  at  that  time.  This 
paved  the  way  for  his  appointment  as 
minister  of  information  in  1941,  a  post  in 
which  he  won  golden  opinions  from  Fleet 
Street  for  his  direct  and  informal  manner. 
He  was  fortunate  to  come  to  the  Ministry 
when  it  was  beginning  to  settle  down 
after  an  uncertain  start.  He  was  one  of  the 
three  political  chiefs  of  the  Political  War- 
fare Executive.  He  deserves  great  credit 
for  the  vitaUty  and  imagination  which  he 
brought  to  the  Ministry  and  for  lifting 
it  out  of  the  disregard  into  which  it  had 
fallen.  At  the  end  of  the  war  Bracken  was 
made    first    lord    of   the    Admiralty    in 


Churchill's  caretaker  government;  and 
when  he  lost  his  seat  in  the  general  elec- 
tion of  1945,  he  was  promptly  found  the 
safest  of  seats  at  Bournemouth. 

He  pursued  his  business  interests  as 
thoroughly  as  ever,  and  became  chairman 
of  the  amalgamated  Financial  Times  and 
Financial  News,  and  contributed  for  many 
years  every  Monday  a  weekly  column  un- 
der the  pen-name  'Observer'  on  'Men  and 
Matters'  in  the  City.  After  his  death  the 
new  offices  of  the  paper  were  named  in  his 
honour  Bracken  House.  He  founded  His- 
tory Today  as  a  monthly  periodical  under 
the  wing  of  the  Financial  Times.  His 
friend  Strakosch  had  arranged  for  him  to 
become  his  successor  as  chairman  of  the 
Union  Corporation,  a  large  mining  and 
financial  house  operating  in  South  Africa, 
and  he  did  so  in  1945.  When  Churchill  re- 
turned to  power  in  1951,  Bracken  declined 
office  in  the  Government,  but  in  1952 
accepted  a  viscountcy,  although  he  never 
took  his  seat  in  the  House  of  Lords.  In  his 
later  years  he  became  increasingly  in- 
terested in  public  schools :  Trinity  College, 
Glenalmond,  and  Ampleforth,  as  well  as  his 
old  school  Sedbergh  for  which  he  built  a 
fine  school  library,  to  which  he  bequeathed 
his  own  excellent  collection  of  books  on 
English  literary  and  political  history  of  the 
last  two  centuries. 

He  was  a  man  of  much  architectural 
and  artistic  taste,  who  formed  close 
friendships  with  the  leading  figures  in  the 
world  of  architecture  and  art,  and  was 
instrumental  in  many  good  aesthetic 
causes.  He  avoided  pubUcity,  especially 
for  his  benefactions.  In  the  last  ten  years 
of  his  life  his  health  deteriorated  and 
he  spent  long  periods  abroad.  Finally  he 
developed  cancer  of  the  throat  which  he 
faced  with  great  fortitude,  until  he  died 
in  London  8  August  1958.  Such  a  volume 
of  tributes  was  paid  to  him  by  contem- 
poraries of  distinction  that  they  were  col- 
lected in  a  book.  But  he  ordered  all  his 
papers  to  be  destroyed,  so  that  there 
should  be  no  biography. 

There  is  an  old  Irish  proverb  'From  the 
fury  of  the  Brackens,  good  Lord  deliver 
us'  and  Brendan  Bracken,  inexhaustibly 
voluble,  was  an  overpowering  figure,  who 
stormed  his  way  to  commercial  and  politi- 
cal success.  Arriving  with  neither  con- 
nection nor  wealth,  he  established  himself 
before  he  was  thirty  as  a  well-placed 
director  and  member  of  Parliament,  im- 
posing himself  at  his  own  valuation.  He 
was  impervious  to  rebuffs,  and  he  dis- 
regarded   the    conventions:    arriving    at 


136 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Brailsford 


parties  to  which  he  had  not  been  invited, 
or  changing  his  place  at  the  dinner  table 
to  talk  to  those  to  whom  he  wished  to 
talk.  If  these  habits  made  him  many 
enemies,  there  was  also  about  him  a  warm- 
heartedness, a  generosity,  an  imaginative 
sympathy,  and  a  readiness  to  take  trouble 
over  individuals,  however  lowly  placed, 
which  won  him  a  great  deal  of  affection. 
He  was  a  gifted  phrase-maker,  a  ceaseless 
talker,  with  unlimited  powers  of  invention, 
but  also  with  an  immense  range  of  in- 
formation, not  always  exact,  but  always 
delivered  with  an  extreme  self-assurance, 
very  galling  to  those  who  knew  better 
but  lacked  his  overriding  personality.  He 
never  married,  and  bequeathed  a  large 
part  of  his  wealth,  proved  at  over 
£145,000,  to  Churchill  College,  Cambridge, 
where  there  is  a  charcoal  drawing  by 
Robert  Lutyens  in  the  Bracken  Library. 
There  is  a  bust  by  Uli  Nimptsch  at 
Bracken  House. 

There  are  many  references  to  Bracken  in 
works  on  Churchill,  notably  Lord  Moran's 
Winston  Churchill:  The  Struggle  for  Sur- 
vival, 1940-65  (1966). 

[Private  and  family  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  Douglas  Woodruff. 

BRAILSFORD,  HENRY  NOEL  (1873- 
1958),  journalist,  was  born  at  Mirfield, 
Yorkshire,  25  December  1873,  the  only 
son  of  the  Rev.  Edward  John  Brailsford, 
a  Wesleyan  minister,  by  his  wife,  Clara 
Pooley.  He  had  one  younger  sister,  Mabel, 
author  of  A  Tale  of  Two  Brothers  (1954), 
a  biography  of  the  Wesleys.  Brailsford' s 
character  and  career  were  much  in- 
fluenced by  early  conflict  with  his  Puritan 
father  who  permitted  him  after  early 
education  at  George  Watson's  College, 
Edinburgh,  and  Dundee  High  School,  to 
take  up  a  scholarship  at  Glasgow  Univer- 
sity on  condition  that  he  did  not  shave 
and  wore  a  costume  of  his  father's  design 
— knickerbockers,  a  tam  o'shanter,  and  an 
Eton  collar.  Although  Brailsford  quickly 
rebelled  against  this  attempt  to  mark  him 
out  from  his  fellows,  the  incident  typified 
for  him  the  authoritarian  rule  which  he 
was  to  spend  his  life  combating.  It  no 
doubt  contributed  to  the  extreme  sensi- 
tivity and  morbid  self-consciousness  with 
which  he  was  afflicted  throughout  his 
career. 

At  Glasgow  Brailsford  made  friends 
with  such  contemporaries  as  John  Buchan 
(later  Lord  Tweedsmuir,  q.v.),  A.  Mac- 
Callum  Scott,  James  and  (Sir)  Muirhead 
Bone  [q.v.],  and  A.  H.  Charteris,  later 


professor  of  international  law  at  Sydney. 
His  many  academic  distinctions  included 
medals  for  moral  philosophy  and  Greek. 
Gilbert  Murray  [q.v.]  spoke  of  him  as  the 
best  Greek  pupil  he  had  ever  had.  Under 
the  terms  of  his  scholarship  Brailsford 
studied  at  Balliol  and  Berlin  where  he 
learnt  to  speak  fluent  German  and  formed 
a  high  opinion  of  German  culture  at  that 
period.  After  taking  his  degree  in  1894 
with  first  class  honours  in  logic  and  moral 
philosophy  and  a  second  class  in  Greek 
and  Latin,  he  taught  philosophy  for  a  year 
as  assistant  to  Robert  Adamson  [q.v.]. 
(He  received  an  honorary  LL.D.  from  the 
university  in  1944.)  In  1897  he  joined  as 
a  volunteer  to  fight  in  the  Greek  war  of 
independence.  He  came  away  with  a  loath*- 
ing  of  war  and  a  poor  opinion  of  Greek 
truthfulness.  The  novel  which  he  wrote 
on  his  return.  The  Broom  of  the  War-God 
(1898),  attracted  the  attention  of  C.  P. 
Scott  [q.v.]  who  engaged  him  as  special 
correspondent  to  i-eport  for  the  Manchester 
Guardian  in  Crete  and  the  Balkans.  He 
spent  the  winter  of  1903-4,  after  the  Bul- 
garian rising,  working  for  the  British  relief 
fund  in  the  Balkans,  and  served  afterwards 
on  a  commission  of  inquiry  into  Balkan 
atrocities. 

Brailsford  was  convinced  by  the  thesis 
of  his  friend,  J.  A.  Hobson  [q.v.],  that  war 
in  this  epoch  is  the  result  of  the  economic 
rivalry  of  the  great  Powers — a  thesis 
which  was  accepted  and  developed  by 
Lenin  whom  Brailsford  met  in  England 
early  in  the  century.  Two  later  books, 
Olives  of  Endless  Age  (1928)  and  Property 
or  Peace?  (1934)  further  expanded  his  view 
of  the  relation  of  capitalism  and  war.  The 
most  important  of  his  books  on  this  topic 
was  The  War  of  Steel  and  Gold  (1914) 
which  at  once  became  a  socialist  classic. 
Early  in  the  war  he  was  closely  associated 
with  the  founders  of  the  Union  of  Demo- 
cratic Control;  they  included  Arthur 
Ponsonby  (later  Lord  Ponsonby  of  Shul- 
brede),  G.  Lowes  Dickinson,  Ramsay 
MacDonald,  Philip  (later  Viscount)  Snow- 
den  [qq.v.],  (Sir)  Norman  Angell,  and 
Bertrand  (later  Earl)  Russell,  and  others 
who  played  leading  roles  in  the  socialist 
and  peace  movements.  From  the  begin- 
ning of  the  war  they  attacked  'secret 
diplomacy'  and  worked  for  a  negotiated 
peace  and  a  permanent  organization  to 
end  the  'international  anarchy'.  One  of 
Brailsford' s  pamphlets  Belgium  and  'The 
Scrap  of  Paper'  (1915)  was  confiscated  by 
the  War  Office.  His  A  League  of  Nations 
(1917)  long  lay  on  Woodrow  Wilson's  desk. 


137 


Brailsford 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


He  stood  unsuccessfully  as  a  Labour 
candidate  for  Montrose  Burghs  in  1918. 

Immediately  after  the  war  Brailsford 
travelled  through  devastated  Europe; 
he  wrote  bitterly  attacking  the  hunger 
blockade  whose  effects  in  Hungary, 
Austria,  and  Germany  he  described,  and 
he  became  one  of  the  foremost  critics  of 
the  Versailles  Treaty.  He  was  one  of  the 
first  western  journalists  to  visit  Soviet 
Russia.  He  learnt  Russian  before  he  went 
and  in  two  books  described  his  experiences : 
The  Russian  Workers^  Republic  (1921)  and 
How  the  Soviets  Work  (New  York,  1928). 
He  found  as  much  reason  for  hope  in  this 
early  phase  of  socialist  enthusiasm  as  he 
later  found  to  lament  and  attack  under 
StaUnism.  Amongst  other  causes  which 
won  his  ardent  support  were  the  women's 
suffrage  movement,  in  which  he  played 
a  leading  role  as  founder  and  secretary 
of  the  Conciliation  Committee,  and  the 
struggle  for  colonial  independence,  es- 
pecially in  India.  Indian  freedom  became 
one  of  his  life's  passions.  He  became  a 
trusted  friend  of  M.  K.  Gandhi  [q.v.]  and 
Jawaharlal  Nehru,  and  after  visiting  the 
country  wrote  Rebel  India  (1931)  and 
twelve  years  later  Subject  India  (1943). 

Brailsford  wrote  regularly  for  the  Radi- 
cal Nation  from  its  foundation  in  1907  un- 
til 1923  when  the  paper  passed  out  of  the 
hands  of  his  friend  H.  W.  Massingham 
[q.v.].  From  1922  to  1926  he  edited  the 
New  Leader,  the  organ  of  the  Independent 
Labour  Party  which  he  had  joined  in 
1907.  He  made  it  the  most  distinguished 
socialist  paper  in  England  and  it  had  an 
immense  effect  on  the  thought  of  the  post- 
war generation.  His  writing  team  in- 
cluded G.  B.  Shaw,  H.  G.  Wells  [qq.v.], 
E.  M.  Forster,  and  indeed  many  of  the 
Uterary  pundits  of  that  period.  The  paper 
dealt  with  books  and  the  arts  as  well  as 
with  politics,  and  it  was  in  collaborating 
with  Clare  Leighton,  the  artist,  that  he 
formed  the  most  important  friendship  of 
his  life.  The  owners  thought  that  he  ap- 
pealed too  little  to  'the  masses'  and 
complained  of  the  deficit  although  he  had 
reduced  it  to  small  dimensions  by  cutting 
his  own  salary  to  a  bare  living  wage  and 
writing  most  of  the  paper  himself.  In  this 
period  he  summarized  his  left-wing,  but 
anti-communist,  socialism  in  a  book 
Socialism  for  To-day  (1925).  In  the  thirties 
he  joined  the  staff  of  the  New  Statesman 
and  Nation  where  he  remained  as  chief 
leader-writer  until  1946.  In  the  twenties 
he  had  denounced  Versailles  and  supported 
the  case  for  German  equality,  but  after 


Hitler's  accession  to  power  his  talents  were 
devoted  to  informing  public  opinion  about 
the  menace  of  fascism  in  Germany,  Italy, 
and  Spain.  He  was  no  less  a  critic  of 
Stalinism  and  was  denounced  by  the 
Communists.  When  he  retired  from 
journalism  in  1946  he  returned  to  his  his- 
torical interests.  His  two  books  in  the 
Home  University  Library,  Shelley,  God- 
win, and  their  Circle  (1913)  and  Voltaire 
(1935),  were  both  accepted  as  minor 
classics.  After  several  years  of  research  at 
the  British  Museum  he  spent  the  last 
period  of  his  life  writing  a  history  of  The 
Levellers  which,  completed  by  another 
hand,  was  published  posthumously  in 
1961. 

Brailsford  must  rank  as  one  of  the  most 
eminent  of  British  journalists.  His  style 
broke  through  his  anonymity.  He  was  of 
all  men  the  most  disinterested.  He  never 
asked,  or  received,  a  wage  which  would 
have  satisfied  a  run-of-the-road  reporter 
in  Fleet  Street,  and  when  a  rich  admirer 
offered  to  settle  on  him  a  sum  of  money 
which  would  have  made  him  financially 
independent  for  life,  he  refused  on  the 
ground  that  it  might  sap  his  intellectual 
integrity.  With  H.  W.  Nevinson  (whose 
notice  he  contributed  to  this  Dictionary) 
he  threw  up  his  post  on  the  Daily  News 
for  which  he  was  a  leader-writer,  in  1909, 
in  protest  against  the  Liberal  Govern- 
ment's harsh  treatment  of  suffragettes 
in  prison  for  their  activities.  In  his 
personal  relations  he  suffered  from  a 
proud  reserve  which  repelled  advances 
from  all  but  a  very  few  friends.  He  was 
animated  by  a  passionate  love  of  freedom. 
He  might  have  been  writing  of  himself 
when  he  said  that  Edmund  Burke  had  'a 
nerve  that  beat  with  maddening  sensitivity 
at  the  sight  of  human  suffering'.  He  had 
an  intimate  relation  with  birds  and  ani- 
mals which,  in  the  case  of  cats,  included  an 
apparently  magnetic  power  of  calling  them 
to  him  from  a  considerable  distance  with- 
out any  audible  summons.  His  greatest 
personal  pleasure  was  in  classical  music. 
Perhaps  the  most  mature  and  perfect 
expression  of  his  philosophy  is  to  be  found 
in  a  pamphlet  All  Souls'  Day  reprinted 
from  the  New  Statesman  and  Nation  dur- 
ing the  worst  days  of  the  second  war. 
Inspired  by  Brahms's  Requiem,  he  wrote, 
in  language  which  none  who  read  it 
would  forget,  of  the  meaning  of  the  Com- 
munion of  Saints  to  those  who,  like  him- 
self, could  not  accept  any  of  the  orthodox 
tenets  of  Christianity. 

In  1898  Brailsford  married  Jane  Mal- 


138 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Brangwyn 


loch,  of  Paisley  (died  1937).  In  1943  he 
married  Eva  Maria  Perlmann.  He  had  no 
children.  He  died  in  London  23  March 
1958.  A  portrait  by  Clare  Leighton  is  in 
the  possession  of  the  family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
KiNGSLEY  Martin. 

BRAIN,  DENNIS  (1921-1957),  virtuoso 
horn-player,  was  born  in  London  17  May 
1921.  Educated  at  St.  Paul's  School  and 
the  Royal  Academy  of  Music,  he  was  the 
younger  son  of  Aubrey  Harold  Brain 
(1893-1955),  who  was  the  principal  horn 
of  the  B.B.C.  Symphony  Orchestra  from 
its  foundation  until  1945.  His  mother, 
Marion  Beeley,  was  at  one  time  a  Covent 
Garden  singer. 

Dennis  Brain  was  the  third  generation 
of  a  distinguished  family  of  horn-players, 
his  grandfather  and  uncle  (Alfred  Brain) 
having  also  made  notable  careers,  the 
latter  in  the  United  States.  His  brother 
Leonard  became  one  of  the  most  promi- 
nent oboe  and  cor  anglais  players  in 
London  of  his  day. 

Dennis  Brain's  career  began  during  the 
war  which  he  spent  as  principal  horn  in 
the  Royal  Air  Force  Central  Band  and 
Orchestra,  and  he  became  widely  known 
as  a  soloist  immediately  upon  demobiliza- 
tion in  1946.  A  number  of  important  works 
were  composed  especially  for  him,  notably 
by  Benjamin  Britten  and  Paul  Hindemith. 

Brain's  playing  was  characterized  by  a 
remarkably  natural  facility  and  unthink- 
ing assurance.  It  seemed  as  if  the  pitfalls 
of  this  notoriously  unreliable  instrument 
simply  never  occurred  to  him,  and  he 
executed  perfectly  passages  of  hair-raising 
difficulty  in  the  manner  born.  He  was,  to 
use  his  own  phrase,  'game  for  anything', 
while  his  infectious  grin  and  abrupt  bellow- 
ing laugh  typified  a  character  which  never 
lost  an  endearing  schoolboy  ingenuousness 
and  enthusiasm.  He  was  entirely  unspoilt 
by  the  success  which  came  to  him  during 
his  latter  years  and  he  was  as  much  uni- 
versally loved  in  the  profession  as  admired 
by  the  musical  world. 

He  was  short,  and  somewhat  stocky  in 
appearance,  but  with  great  energy  and 
agility.  He  became  very  fond  of  contract 
bridge,  but  his  abiding  interest  was  in 
motor-cars  of  which  he  had  a  considerable 
knowledge  and  experience.  He  was  in  the 
habit  of  driving  to  and  from  engagements 
in  a  single  journey,  no  matter  what  dis- 
tance, and  it  was  this  which  cost  him  his 
life.  He  met  with  a  fatal  accident  returning 
to  London  in  the  small  hours  from  an 


Edinburgh  Festival  concert,  1  September 
1957. 

His  death  came  at  a  time  of  gradually 
increasing  restlessness.  A  musician  of 
broad  interests  and  culture  (he  was  also 
an  accomplished  organist),  his  profound 
artistry  needed  a  greater  outlet  than  the 
limited  repertoire  of  the  horn  could  sup- 
ply. He  had  begun  a  number  of  ambitious 
ventures  to  supplement  his  normal  activi- 
ties as  soloist  and  orchestral  musician, 
such  as  a  wind  ensemble  and  even  a  small 
chamber  orchestra  which  he  was  beginning 
to  conduct,  although  he  had  previously 
been  doubtful  of  his  potential  in  this 
direction. 

He  was  an  inveterate  lover  of  the 
country  and  even  entertained  wistful 
dreams  of  an  eventual  retirement,  perhaps 
as  a  chicken  farmer.  This  basic  simplicity 
of  outlook  may  indeed  hold  the  key  to  his 
entire  character  and  to  the  charm  and 
humility  of  his  essentially  natural  per- 
sonality. 

He  married  in  1945  Yvonne,  a  pianist, 
whom  he  met  at  the  Royal  Academy  of 
Music,  daughter  of  Edward  Ralph  Coles, 
bank  accountant,  of  Petersfield,  Hamp- 
shire ;  they  had  a  son  and  daughter. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Norman  Del  Mar. 

BRANGWYN,  Sir  FRANK  (FRANCOIS 
GUILLAUME)  (1867-1956),  artist,  was 
born  in  Bruges  13  May  1867,  of  Welsh 
Roman  Catholic  parentage.  His  mother 
was  Eleanor  Griffiths,  of  Brecon.  His 
father,  William  Curtis  Brangwyn,  was  a 
church  architect  who  had  moved  to 
Bruges  for  economy  and  there  ran  a  work- 
shop for  ecclesiastical  furnishings.  Brang- 
wyn was  their  third  child  and  eldest  of 
four  sons.  The  family  returned  to  London 
in  1875. 

Brangwyn  received  little  formal  educa- 
tion. He  was  taken  up  by  A.  H.  Mack- 
murdo  and  Harold  Rathbone,  who  set  him 
to  draw  in  the  South  Kensington  Museum, 
and  was  employed  for  about  two  years  (c. 
1882-4)  in  the  workshop  of  William  Morris 
[q.v.].  Mackmurdo's  interest  and  friend- 
ship were  lifelong.  Other  early  supporters 
were  Selwyn  Image  [q.v.]  and  Harriet 
Barnett. 

Leaving  Morris,  Brangwyn  spent  his 
time  in  precarious  independence  in 
London,  and  in  roaming  the  country  and 
seaports  sketching.  His  first  Academy  pic- 
ture, 'A  bit  on  the  Esk,  near  Whitby',  was 
shown  in  1885.  In  1888  a  backer,  Frederick 
Mills,  financed  a  trip  to  Cornwall,  and  in 


139 


Brangwyn 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


the  following  years  Brangwyn  travelled 
extensively  on  commission,  in  Europe,  the 
Near  East,  and  South  Africa.  These  were 
his  Wanderjahre,  during  which  he  stored 
up  impressions  which  were  to  last  a  Ufe- 
time.  Meanwhile  his  work  was  beginning 
to  attract  attention.  In  1894  he  won  a 
medal  at  the  Chicago  exhibition ;  the  next 
year  the  French  Government  bought  one 
of  his  pictures ;  and  by  1896  he  was  earn- 
ing over  £400  a  year.  In  this  year  he 
married  Lucy  Ray,  a  nurse,  settled  in 
Hammersmith,  and,  as  he  said,  began  to 
'paint  big'.  A  temporary  move  to  Ditch- 
ling  during  the  war  of  1914-18  was  fol- 
lowed after  the  death  of  his  wife  in  1924 
by  permanent  residence  there. 

Brangwyn  had  grown  up  into  a  world  of 
artistic  ferment:  he  was  a  near-contem- 
porary of  Lautrec,  Ensor,  Aubrey  Beards- 
ley  [q.v.],  and  KUmt.  His  tutelage  to 
Morris  and  his  friendship  with  Mack- 
murdo  launched  him  into  the  international 
style  of  art  nouveau,  and  commissions 
from  the  Parisian  dealer  S.  Bing  brought 
him  to  the  very  centre  of  that  movement. 
True  to  the  ideals  of  its  adherents,  he 
designed  all  kinds  of  decorative  arts,  in- 
cluding complete  rooms.  An  exhibition  of 
objects  made  to  his  designs,  held  in  Lon- 
don in  1930,  included  furniture,  textiles, 
ceramics,  metalwork,  jewellery,  and  glass. 

From  the  start,  Brangwyn's  pictures 
were  marked  by  their  freshness  and 
virility.  His  earliest  works  were  painted 
in  the  low  tones  of  J.  A.  McN.  Whistler 
[q.v.].  A  sketching- journey  to  Spain  with 
Arthur  Melville  [q.v.]  in  1891  produced  an 
explosion  of  colour  which  announced  the 
maturity  of  his  style.  Bright  colour  and 
bravura  in  handling  of  the  medium  were 
typical  of  the  revolutionary  artists  of  the 
time,  and  to  these  elements  Brangwyn 
added  sheer  largeness.  Another  lifelong 
characteristic,  due  to  natural  sympathy 
and  the  circumstances  of  his  upbringing, 
was  his  preoccupation  with  the  working 
classes  and  their  labours.  Brangwyn  was  a 
prohfic  worker,  in  etching  and  lithography 
as  well  as  in  oils  and  water-colours.  His 
great  gifts  of  draughtsmanship  and  com- 
position were  used  with  a  prodigality 
which  sometimes  amounted  to  reckless- 
ness: but  he  was  always  capable  of  pro- 
ducing work  which  was  sensitive  and 
deeply  felt,  as  his  etching  'The  Afflicted' 
(1931)  and  his  drawings  of  the  hfe  of 
St.  Francis  (1947,  Ashmolean  Museum, 
Oxford)  reveal. 

For  thirty  years  of  his  hfe  Brangwyn 
was  mainly  occupied,  however,  with  the 


execution  of  large  murals,  the  activity  in 
which  he  particularly  excelled  and  for 
which  he  became  best  known.  In  England 
the  most  accessible  of  these  are  in  Skin- 
ners' Hall,  London.  The  panels  there  are, 
as  it  happens,  the  eariiest  and  the  latest 
of  his  surviving  works  on  this  scale  (1902 
and  1937).  They  show  that  he  moved  from 
a  three-dimensional  style  of  Venetian 
richness  to  one  which  was  flatter  and 
placed  greater  reliance  on  vivid  local 
colour.  Other  notable  commissions  were 
for  the  chapel  of  Christ's  Hospital, 
Horsham  (1913-23),  the  Panama  Pacific 
International  Exposition,  San  Francisco 
(1914),  the  Missouri  State  Capitol  (1915), 
the  Empress  of  Britain  (1930),  and  the 
Rockefeller  Center,  New  York  (1930-34). 
Brangwyn's  maximum  opus  in  mural 
decoration  was  the  series  of  'British  Em- 
pire' panels  which  were  commissioned  in 
1925  by  Lord  Iveagh  [q.v.]  as  a  war 
memorial  for  the  House  of  Lords.  The 
rejection  of  the  work  by  the  Lords  became 
something  of  a  cause  cdebre,  and  the  panels 
finally  went  to  Swansea  where  the  new 
Guildhall  was  specially  adapted  to  accom- 
modate them. 

Brangwyn  was  an  active  member  of  the 
Society  of  British  Artists  and  many  other 
academies  and  art  societies  at  home  and 
abroad.  He  was  elected  A.R.A.  in  1904 
and  R.A.  in  1919.  In  1924  a  large  exhibi- 
tion of  his  work  was  opened  by  the  prime 
minister,  Ramsay  MacDonald.  He  was 
knighted  in  1941  and  in  1952  the  Royal 
Academy  paid  him  the  unprecedented 
honour  of  a  retrospective  exhibition  with- 
in his  own  lifetime. 

Brangwyn  enjoyed  wide  fame  abroad, 
where  he  was  for  long  considered  the  out- 
standing British  artist  of  his  day.  He 
received  high  honours  in  France,  Holland, 
and  Italy,  including  the  commission  for  a 
self-portrait  for  the  Uffizi.  Bruges  made 
him  an  honorary  citizen,  in  return  for  the 
gift  of  a  large  collection  of  his  work  which 
is  housed  in  a  special  Brangwyn  Museum 
(1936).  Similar  gifts  were  made  to  Orange 
(with  the  work  of  his  friend  Albert  de 
Belleroche,  1947),  and  to  the  William 
Morris  house,  Walthamstow  (1936),  and 
his  work  is  represented  in  virtually  every 
major  art  gallery  and  print  room  in  the 
world. 

At  home  the  panache  of  his  work  cast 
its  spell  over  many,  who  did  not  hesitate 
to  compare  him  with  the  greatest  decora- 
tive artists  of  the  past ;  nor  was  the  artist 
unwilling  to  assume  the  mantle  of  an  Old 
Master.  Other  critics  convicted  his  work 


140 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bressey 


of  empty  rhetoric.  But  Brangwyn's  latter 
neglect  in  some  quarters  seems  as  mis- 
taken as  his  excessive  praise  in  others.  His 
was  a  majestic  and  insubordinate  nature. 
He  was  of  stocky  build ;  from  middle  age 
he  inclined  to  ill  health  and  finally  became 
something  of  a  recluse.  He  died  at  Ditch- 
ling  11  June  1956.  He  had  no  children. 

There  are  portraits  of  Brangwyn  at  the 
National  Portrait  Gallery  (by  Phil  May 
and  A.  H.  Knighton-Hammond),  the 
National  Museum  of  Wales  (by  Augustus 
John,  Powys  Evans,  and  Albert  Toft),  the 
William  Morris  Museum,  Walthamstow 
(by  John  and  Toft),  and  the  Ferens  Art 
Gallery,  Hull  (by  J.  Kerr-Lawson  and  A. 
Sava  Botzaris).  The  artist  made  numerous 
slight  self-portraits  in  pen  and  ink  of  an 
illustrational  character,  and  a  self-portrait 
in  oils  was  in  the  collection  of  Count  W.  de 
Belleroche. 

[The  Times,  13  June  1956;  W.  Shaw- 
Sparrow,  Frank  Brangwyn  and  his  work, 
1910;  P.  Macer- Wright,  Brangwyn,  A  Study 
of  Genius  at  Close  Quarters,  1940;  W.  de 
Belleroche,  Brangwyn  Talks,  1944 ;  C.  G.  E. 
Bunt,  The  Water-Colours  of  Sir  Frank  Brang- 
wyn, 1958 ;  V.  Galloway,  The  Oils  db  Murals  of 
Sir  Frank  Brangwyn,  1962.]    R.  L.  Charles. 


BRESSEY,  Sir  CHARLES  HERBERT 

(1874-1951),  civil  engineer,  was  born  at 
Wanstead,  Essex,  3  January  1874,  the 
son  of  John  Thomas  Bressey,  architect, 
and  his  wife,  Mary  Elizabeth  Farrow.  He 
was  educated  at  Forest  School,  Waltham- 
stow, also  in  Bremen  and  Rouen,  and  then 
practised  as  an  architect.  During  the  war 
of  1914-18  he  served  in  France  and  Flan- 
ders as  lieutenant-colonel  in  the  Royal 
Engineers,  was  appointed  O.B.E.,  and 
made  a  chevalier  of  the  Legion  of  Honour. 
In  the  war  of  1939-45  he  was  a  battalion 
commander  in  the  Essex  Home  Guard  and 
an  army  welfare  officer. 

After  the  war  of  1914-18  he  served  for  a 
short  time  as  a  member  of  the  Inter-Allied 
Commission,  Rhine  Province  Communica- 
tions. On  the  formation  of  the  Ministry  of 
Transport  in  1919  he  became  the  first 
divisional  road  engineer  (London).  Sir 
Henry  Maybury  [q.v.]  was  director- 
general  with  J.  S.  Killick  as  deputy 
director-general  and  chief  engineer.  On 
Killick's  retirement  in  1921  Bressey  suc- 
ceeded as  chief  engineer,  the  post  of 
deputy  director-general  being  abolished. 
When  Maybury  retired  at  the  end  of  1928 
he  was  in  turn  succeeded  by  Bressey.  The 
post  of  director-general  was  abolished  and 
Bressey  retained  the  title  of  chief  engineer. 


In  this  post  he  remained  until  he  retired  in 
January  1935. 

A  sound  practical  engineer,  Bressey  had 
the  misfortune,  perhaps,  to  be  over- 
shadowed by  Maybury's  brilliance.  He  is 
probably  best  remembered  for  his  work 
on  the  Highway  Development  Survey  of 
Greater  London,  of  which  he  was  engineer 
in  charge  in  1935-8,  following  his  retire- 
ment from  the  Ministry.  The  Survey, 
intended  to  determine  highway  require- 
ments for  the  next  thirty  years,  was 
ordered  by  Leslie  (later  Lord)  Hore-Belisha 
[q.v.],  the  minister  of  transport.  Sir  Edwin 
Lutyens  [q.v.]  was  appointed  as  consul- 
tant to  help  Bressey  in  his  task.  Bressey's 
first  step  was  to  tour  the  Continent, 
visiting  in  particular  Dresden,  Prague, 
Budapest,  Copenhagen,  and  Oslo.  The  re- 
port of  his  Survey  was  issued  in  1938  and 
novel  features  were  the  techniques  used  in 
its  preparation — aerial  surveys  and  aerial 
photography  to  bring  maps  up  to  date 
quickly,  journey  time-studies  to  measure 
delays,  and  an  origin  and  destination  sur- 
vey of  traffic  to  the  docks.  The  report  was 
well  received  but,  owing  to  the  outbreak 
of  war  in  the  following  year,  no  action  was 
taken  to  implement  its  recommendations. 
The  report  included  references  to  such 
schemes  as  the  duplication  of  the  Thames 
tunnels,  the  north  and  south  orbital 
roads,  the  City  loop  way,  the  improve- 
ment to  the  dock  approaches,  and  major 
motorways  radiating  from  the  metropolis. 
Towards  the  end  of  the  thirty-year  period 
which  the  Survey  was  to  serve,  many  of 
the  schemes  had  only  recently  been  com- 
pleted or  were  still  under  construction, 
and  it  is  interesting  to  recall  Bressey's 
closing  paragraph:  'So  imperative,  how- 
ever, is  the  need  of  prompt  action  that 
Londoners  would  be  better  advised  to 
embark  immediately  upon  useful  schemes, 
admittedly  imperfect,  rather  than  wait 
for  the  emergence  of'  some  faultless  ideal 
which  will  have  ceased  to  be  attainable 
long  before  it  has  received  approval.' 

During  a  very  active  life  Bressey  was 
a  president  of  the  Chartered  Surveyors* 
Institution  and  of  the  Junior  Institution 
of  Engineers  by  whom  he  was  specially  re- 
membered as  the  president  who  main- 
tained his  active  interest  in  the  Institution 
long  after  his  retirement.  He  was  chair- 
man of  the  Road  Engineering  Industry 
Committee  and  of  the  British  Standards 
Institution  and  an  honorary  member  of 
the  Institution  of  Royal  Engineers.  He 
was  also  a  member  of  the  Town  Planning 
Institute  and  the  Institutions- of  Municipal 


1-tt 


Bressey 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


and  of  Highway  Engineers.  He  was  ap- 
pointed C.B.E.  (1924),  C.B.  (1930),  and 
knighted  in  1935.  He  was  awarded  the 
honorary  degree  of  D.Sc.  (Eng.)  by  Lon- 
don University  in  1938. 

In  1902  Bressey  married  Lily  Margaret 
Francis,  daughter  of  Francis  Charles  Hill, 
merchant,  of  Wanstead;  they  had  two 
sons.  He  died  in  Sawbridge worth  14  April 
1951. 

[Journal  of  the  Institution  of  Highway 
Engineers,  July  1951 ;  official  records ; 
private  information.]  Alex  Samuels. 

BRIDIE,  JAMES  (pseudonym),  play- 
wright. [See  Mavor,  Osborne  Henry.] 

BRIERLY,  JAMES  LESLIE  (1881- 
1955),  international  lawyer,  was  born  in 
Huddersfield  9  September  1881,  the  eldest 
son  of  Sydney  Herbert  Brierly,  woollen 
manufacturer,  by  his  wife,  Emily  Sykes. 
He  was  educated  at  Charterhouse ;  then  as 
a  scholar  of  Brasenose  College,  Oxford, 
where  he  gained  a  first  in  classical  modera- 
tions (1902),  a  second  in  liter ae  humaniores 
(1904),  and  a  first  in  jurisprudence  (1905), 
and  won  a  senior  Hulme  scholarship.  In 
1906  he  gained  a  certificate  of  honour  in 
the  final  examinations  for  the  bar  and  a 
prize  fellowship  at  All  Souls  College.  The 
following  year  he  was  called  to  the  bar  at 
Lincoln's  Inn,  and  entered  the  chambers 
of  F.  H.  (later  Viscount)  Maugham  [q.v.]. 
In  1913  he  was  elected  to  a  fellowship  in 
law  at  Trinity  College,  Oxford,  but  in 
1914  he  joined  the  Wiltshire  Regiment  as 
a  second  lieutenant.  He  served  in  the 
adjutant-general's  department  in  the  War 
Office,  then  as  D.A.A.G.  with  the  Army  of 
the  Black  Sea,  reached  the  rank  of  brevet 
major,  and  was  appointed  O.B.E.  (1919). 

In  1920  Brierly  was  appointed  profes- 
sor of  law  at  Manchester  where  he  played 
a  valuable  part  in  restarting  the  law 
faculty.  In  1922,  on  the  death  of  Sir  Erie 
Richards,  he  was  elected  Chichele  pro- 
fessor of  international  law  and  diplomacy 
at  Oxford,  and  returned  to  All  Souls. 
His  inaugural  lecture,  published  in  the 
British  Year  Book  of  International  Law  for 
1924,  was  devoted  to  'The  shortcomings 
of  international  law'.  In  this  lecture, 
characteristic  of  his  whole  approach  to 
international  law,  he  examined  the  stresses 
to  which  the  legal  system  is  subject  in  the 
international  community  by  reason  of 
the  absence  of  adequate  procedures  for 
bringing  about  peaceful  change. 

Brierly' s  best-known  work.  The  Law 
of  Nations,  was  written  for  'students  and 


for  laymen  anxious  to  learn  something  of 
the  part  played  by  law  in  the  relations 
between  States'.  First  published  in  1928, 
it  set  out  with  admirable  clarity  and  pre- 
cision the  main  principles  of  the  law  of 
peace.  In  its  own  genre  it  was  a  master- 
piece, which  won  wide  popularity,  being 
translated  into  four  foreign  languages.  It 
showed  that  Brierly  possessed  in  high 
degree  the  qualities  of  judgement,  vision, 
and  scholarship  which  would  have  enabled 
him  to  write  a  work  of  major  importance. 
But  this  was  not  forthcoming,  for,  first- 
rate  technician  though  he  was,  the  absorb- 
ing interest  of  international  law  for  him 
was  the  role  which  it  could  play  in  pro- 
moting international  peace  and  human 
welfare  rather  than  its  detailed  rules.  The 
lectures  given  by  him  at  the  Hague 
Academy  in  the  same  year,  and  published 
in  volume  23  of  the  Recueil  des  cours  un- 
der the  title  'Le  fondement  du  caractere 
obligatoire  du  droit  international',  con- 
tain a  brilliantly  clear  study  of  the  dif- 
ferent theories  concerning  the  basis  of  the 
obligatory  force  of  international  law.  He 
pointed  out  the  damaging  effect  of  some 
traditional  postulates  such  as  the  doctrine 
of  the  fundamental  rights  of  States, 
questioning  their  absolute  validity  and 
advocating  that  reUef  from  them  should 
be  sought  in  a  resurgence  of  natural  law. 
A  second  course  of  lectures,  given  in  1936 
and  published  in  volume  58  of  the  Recueil 
des  cours  under  the  title  'Regies  generates 
du  droit  de  la  paix',  was  based  on  his  Law 
of  Nations  but  was  more  critical  and 
reflective.  His  last  book.  The  Outlook  for 
International  Law,  written  in  1944,  when 
people  tended  to  regard  international  law 
as  a  bankrupt  system,  seeks  to  draw  up  a 
balance  sheet  of  the  values  and  limitations 
of  law  in  the  relations  between  sovereign 
States,  and  contains  a  penetrating  analy- 
sis of  the  problems  arising  from  the  so- 
called  'vital  interests'  of  States.  Brierly 
also  published  numerous  articles  in 
learned  journals,  several  appearing  in  the 
British  Year  Book  of  International  Law,  of 
which  he  was  editor  from  1929  to  1936. 
Twenty-eight  of  these  articles,  covering 
a  large  variety  of  topics,  were  reprinted, 
together  with  his  first  Hague  lectures,  in 
a  posthumous  volume  entitled  The  Basis 
of  Obligation  in  International  Law  (1958). 
In  addition,  he  was  responsible  for  the 
scholarly  translation  of  Zouche's  Juris  et 
Judicii  Fecialis  Explicatio,  published  in 
the  Carnegie  series  of  Classics  of  Inter- 
national Law.  And  he  joined  with  Sir  John 
Miles  in  editing  several  editions  of  Anson 


142 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


on  Contract,  and  in  compiling  a  case-book 
on  that  branch  of  EngUsh  law. 

After  retiring  from  his  Oxford  chair  in 
1947  Brierly  was  Montague  Burton  pro- 
fessor of  international  relations  at  Edin- 
burgh (1948-51).  His  contribution  was  not 
confined  to  the  academic  field.  He  was  a 
member  of  the  League  of  Nations  commit- 
tees on  the  codification  of  international 
law  and  on  the  port  of  Danzig.  During  the 
Italo-Abyssinian  dispute  he  acted  as  legal 
adviser  to  the  Emperor  of  Abyssinia, 
accompanying  him  in  1938  to  the  critical 
session  of  the  League  Assembly.  In  1948 
he  was  elected  an  original  member  of  the 
United  Nations  International  Law  Com- 
mission, being  its  rapporteur  for  the  law  of 
treaties  in  1949-50  and  chairman  of  the 
commission  in  1951. 

Brierly  also  had  a  high  sense  of  social 
obligation  which  led  him  to  undertake 
many  pubhc  duties  in  his  own  country.  At 
Oxford  he  served  on  the  university's  coun- 
cil and  chest  and  in  1923-50  was  a  dele- 
gate of  the  University  Press.  Taking  a 
keen  interest  in  the  emancipation  of 
women,  he  served  on  the  councils  of 
Somerville  and  St.  Hilda's  colleges.  A 
justice  of  the  peace  for  the  city  from  1932 
to  1955  he  discharged  his  duties  with 
ability  and  humanity.  He  was  chairman 
of  the  Oxford  court  of  referees,  of  the 
national  service  hardship  committee,  and 
of  four  local  trade  boards,  and  a  member 
of  the  Agricultural  Wages  Board.  He 
served  on  a  number  of  government  com- 
mittees, including,  during  the  war  of 
1939-^5,  the  advisory  committee  estab- 
lished under  Defence  Regulation  18B. 
He  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1946.  His 
deep  humanity  also  led  him  to  many  acts 
of  kindness  to  those  in  misfortune.  Many 
a  refugee  from  the  two  world  wars,  from 
the  Spanish  civil  war,  and  from  Hitler, 
found  in  him  an  unselfish  friend  ready  to 
give  them  personal  help  and  to  work  in 
their  interest. 

Brierly  was  a  D.C.L.  of  Oxford  (1931), 
and  honorary  doctorates  were  conferred 
upon  him  by  the  universities  of  Oslo  (1946), 
Chicago  (1948),  and  Manchester  (1953).  In 
1929  he  was  elected  an  associate  of  the 
Institute  of  International  Law  and  in  1937 
a  full  member. 

In  1920  he  married  Ada  Ellen  (died 
1966),  who  was  the  daughter  of  John 
Christopher  Foreman,  merchant,  and  was 
twice  mentioned  in  dispatches  when  serv- 
ing as  a  nurse  with  the  Army  of  the  Black 
Sea  in  1919.  They  had  one  son.  Brierly 
died  in  Oxford  20  December  1955. 


Brodetsky 

[The  Times,  Manchester  Guardian,  and 
Oxford  Mail,  22  December  1955  ;  British  Year 
Book  of  International  Law,  vol.  xxxii,  1955-6 ; 
private  information.]    Humphrey  Waldock. 

BRODETSKY,  SELIG  (1888-1954), 
mathematician  and  Zionist  leader,  was 
born  10  February  1888  at  Olviopol,  a 
small  town  in  the  Ukraine  a  hundred 
miles  north  of  Odessa,  the  second  son 
among  the  fifteen  children  of  Akiva 
Brodetsky  by  his  wife,  Ada  Prober.  The 
family  emigrated  in  1893  and  settled  in  the 
east  end  of  London.  Brodetsky  received 
the  normal  education  of  a  poor  Russian- 
Jewish  immigrant,  for  his  father's  only 
employment  was  as  beadle  of  a  small  east- 
end  synagogue.  At  a  time  when  this 
immigration  was  being  seriously  criticized 
and  had,  in  fact,  been  limited  by  recent 
parliamentary  action,  the  boy  caused  an 
almost  national  sensation  by  being  placed 
first  of  all  England  in  the  Cambridge 
junior  local  examinations  in  1905,  and  by 
winning  a  mathematical  scholarship  to 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge.  In  1908  he 
was  bracketed  as  senior  wrangler.  From 
Cambridge  he  went  with  the  Isaac  Newton 
studentship  to  Leipzig  and  took  his  Ph.D. 
in  mathematical  astronomy.  In  1914  he 
became  lecturer  in  applied  mathematics  at 
Bristol  University. 

He  had  already  established  the  pattern 
of  dividing  his  time  between  serious  aca- 
demic work  and  equally  serious  work  for 
the  Jewish  community  and  especially  for 
the  Zionist  movement.  At  Cambridge  he 
had  been  warden  of  the  synagogue  main- 
tained by  Jewish  undergraduates,  and 
secretary  of  the  Zionist  Society.  At  Leip- 
zig he  had  been  president  of  the  Zionist 
Student  Union.  At  Bristol  he  gave  every 
week-end  to  travelling  and  speaking  for 
the  Zionist  cause.  In  spite  of  this  addi- 
tional interest,  and  of  a  heavy  academic 
schedule,  he  found  time  to  do  war  work  in 
the  field  of  optical  research. 

In  1919  Brodetsky  moved  from  Bristol 
to  Leeds,  becoming  professor  in  1924  and 
in  1946  head  of  the  mathematics  depart- 
ment. He  continued  to  give  his  week-ends 
to  his  Jewish  interests,  but  was  still  able 
in  1927  to  pubhsh  a  life  of  Sir  Isaac  New- 
ton, and  to  take  a  prominent  part  in  the 
foundation  of  the  Association  of  Univer- 
sity Teachers,  of  which  he  was  the  second 
president.  In  1928  he  became  a  member 
of  the  World  Zionist  Executive  and  head 
of  its  political  department  in  London.  In 
1940  he  also  became  president  of  the 
Board  of  Deputies  of  British  Jews,  the  lay 


143 


Brodetsky 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


head  of  Anglo-Jewry.  The  position  had 
hitherto  been  confined  to  old-established 
families,  and  the  Board  had  resisted 
any  close  association  with  Zionism.  His 
election  was  the  outcome  of  organized 
pressure  which  resulted  in  a  Zionist 
majority  among  its  members.  But  he  pre- 
sided over  a  divided  community,  some  of 
whose  breaches  he  could  not  heal,  pos- 
sibly because  he  lived  his  life  and  formed 
his  judgements  at  a  speed  which  left  little 
opportunity  for  the  slow  workings  of 
negotiation  and  diplomacy.  During  the 
war  of  1939-45  he  undertook  research  in 
aeronautics,  and  was  concerned  with  the 
establishment  of  the  corps  of  air  cadets. 

In  1948  he  retired  with  the  title  of 
emeritus  professor  and  in  the  same  year 
followed  Chaim  Weizmann  [q.v.]  as  presi- 
dent of  the  Zionist  Federation  of  Great 
Britain  and  Ireland.  In  May  1949  he  was 
elected  president  of  the  Hebrew  Univer- 
sity at  Jerusalem.  It  had  been  going 
through  a  difficult  period  and  the  emer- 
gence of  the  State  of  Israel  had  added  to 
its  problems.  The  presidency  had  become 
semi-honorific  under  his  predecessor,  but 
Brodetsky  had  no  use  for  honorary  offices. 
The  reform  of  the  university  administra- 
tion, however,  involved  controversies 
which  sapped  his  strength,  and  he  was 
compelled  by  ill  health  to  resign  in  1952. 
He  never  fully  recovered  his  health  and 
died  in  London  18  May  1954. 

In  1919  Brodetsky  married  Mania, 
daughter  of  Paul  Berenblum,  and  had  one 
son  and  one  daughter.  There  is  an  oil- 
painting  by  Jacob  Kramer  in  the  posses- 
sion of  the  family  who  also  have  a  copy 
of  a  bust  by  Mrs.  L.  Kagan-Rustchuk. 
A  bronze  bust  by  Sir  Jacob  Epstein  was 
to  go  eventually  to  the  Hebrew  University 
at  Jerusalem. 

[Jewish  Chronicle,  21  May  1954;  personal 
knowledge.]  James  Parkes. 

BROOKE-POPHAM,  Sir  (HENRY) 
ROBERT  (MOORE)  (1878-1953),  air 
chief  marshal,  was  bom  at  Mendlesham, 
Hartismere,  Suffolk,  18  September  1878, 
son  of  Henry  Brooke,  a  country  gentle- 
man of  Wetheringsett  Manor,  Suffolk, 
and  his  wife,  Dulcibella,  daughter  of  the 
Rev.  Robert  Moore.  From  Haileybury  he 
entered  the  Royal  Military  College,  Sand- 
hurst, graduated  in  May  1898,  and  was 
gazetted  to  the  Oxfordshire  Light  In- 
fantry as  a  second  lieutenant.  At  first  he 
showed  no  special  vocation  for  the  pro- 
fession of  arms,  but  after  a  year  or  two  of 
regimental  duty  discovered  a  lively  ability 


and  a  natural  bent  for  soldiering,  and  his 
promotion  to  captain  in  1904,  and  entry 
to  the  Staff  College  in  1910,  both  demon- 
strated a  mental  standard  well  above 
average.  His  other  advantages  were  a  tall 
sparse  figure  with  a  strong  physique, 
somewhat  austere  good  looks,  and  an  out- 
standing capacity  for  application  and 
hard  work.  In  1904  by  royal  warrant  he 
assumed  the  additional  surname  of  Pop- 
ham,  the  name  of  an  ancestor  whom  he 
greatly  admired. 

Only  two  years  after  the  first  air  cross- 
ing of  the  Channel,  Brooke-Popham 
learned  to  fly  at  the  Bristol  School  at 
Brooklands,  under  the  system  by  which 
the  army  repaid  the  cost  of  private  tuition. 
His  certificate  was  No.  108,  dated  July 
1911.  His  early  start  made  him  a  pioneer 
of  Service  aviation,  and  his  first  flight  pre- 
ceded by  a  year  that  of  the  future  Lord 
Trenchard  [q.v.].  For  a  few  months  Brooke- 
Popham  soldiered  on  with  hisregiment,but 
in  1912  he  transferred  to  the  Air  Battalion, 
Royal  Engineers,  which  had  an  aeroplane 
and  a  balloon  company.  He  commanded  the 
former  and  when  the  Air  BattaUon  became 
the  Royal  Flying  Corps  in  May  1912  had 
command  of  No.  3  Squadron,  which  had 
seven  different  types  of  aircraft,  and  began 
training  reconnaissance  crews. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  Brooke- 
Popham  went  to  France  as  a  staff  officer 
in  the  H.Q.  of  the  British  Expeditionary 
Force.  Appointed  deputy  assistant  adju- 
tant and  quartermaster-general,  he  was 
responsible  for  the  administrative  and 
technical  support  of  the  Royal  Flying 
Corps  squadrons  in  France.  He  quickly 
came  to  understand  the  importance  of  the 
new  air  weapon  to  armies  in  the  field,  and 
so  to  criticize  the  lack  of  adequate  air 
support  to  the  B.E.F.  In  1915  he  formed 
No.  3  Wing  (1  and  4  Squadrons)  at  St. 
Omer,  and  controlled  its  operations  at  the 
battle  of  Neuve  Chapelle.  For  this  he  was 
appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  He  was  already  too 
senior  an  officer  to  take  part  in  serious 
operational  flying,  and  he  had  little  active 
experience  of  air  fighting.  He  compensated 
for  this  with  a  ferocious  energy  and  in- 
dustry, and  had  no  hesitation  in  taking 
short  cuts  and  unorthodox  steps  to 
achieve  his  ends.  He  became  deputy 
adjutant  and  quartermaster-general  in 
March  1916  with  the  temporary  rank  of 
brigadier-general . 

After  seeing  the  Royal  Flying  Corps 
through  their  worst  battles,  to  a  final 
position  where  they  dominated  the  western 
front,  he  was  summoned  in  April  1918 


144 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Brooke-Popham 


to  the  air  staff  of  the  newly  created  Air 
Ministry.  In  addition  to  French  and 
Russian  awards  he  received  the  C.M.G. 
and  A.F.C.  (1918)  and  C.B.  (1919). 
Brooke-Popham  had  by  now  a  consider- 
able reputation  for  administration  and 
procurement  of  equipment  and  he  was 
consequently  made  controller  of  aircraft 
production,  and  in  1919  transferred  per- 
manently to  the  new  Royal  Air  Force, 
with  the  rank  of  air  commodore.  After  a 
spell  as  director  of  research  (1920-21)  he 
became,  in  1921,  the  first  commandant  of 
the  newly  created  R. A.F.  Staff  College.  He 
grasped  the  opportunity,  during  the  Ave 
years  in  which  he  was  commandant,  to 
pioneer  thinking  in  another  element  of 
war.  Despite  his  reputation,  he  had  no 
dramatic  background  of  air  fighting  to 
lend  him  prestige  with  his  pupils,  and  his 
dour  public  manner  did  not  bring  him  easy 
popularity.  His  universal  nickname  was 
'Brookham',  no  more  than  a  convenient, 
if  later  an  affectionate,  contraction.  But 
if  his  manner  was  sober,  his  results  were 
excellent.  He  was  promoted  air  vice- 
marshal  in  1924. 

In  1926,  in  the  formation  of  the  Air 
Defence  of  Great  Britain,  he  became  air 
officer  commanding  Fighting  Area,  creat- 
ing the  acoustic  listening  chain  of  huge 
concrete  mirrors  which  antedated  radar. 
He  was  promoted  K.C.B.  in  1927  and  in 
1928  became  air  officer  commanding  in 
Iraq ;  when  no  high  commissioner  was  in 
office  he  filled  that  post  also. 

In  1931  he  was  promoted  to  air  marshal 
and  became  the  first  Royal  Air  Force 
officer  to  be  appointed  commandant  of  the 
Imperial  Defence  College,  and  followed 
this  by  two  years  as  commander-in-chief 
of  Air  Defence  of  Great  Britain.  In  1935  he 
became  inspector-general,  was  appointed 
G.C.V.O.,  and  promoted  to  air  chief 
marshal.  With  the  onset  of  the  Italo- 
Abyssinian  crisis,  he  was  sent  to  Cairo  as 
air  commander-in-chief  Middle  East.  His 
immediate  concern  was  the  danger  of  air 
attack  from  the  Regia  Aeronautica,  but 
when  this  threat  abated  he  returned  to 
England.  In  1937  he  retired  to  become 
governor  and  conmiander-in-chief  Kenya, 
to  which  he  brought  first-class  qualities  of 
administration  and  diplomacy.  But  when 
war  broke  out  in  1939  he  rejoined  the 
Royal  Air  Force,  becoming  head  of  the 
training  mission  which  went  first  to 
Canada  to  lay  the  foundations  of  the 
Commonwealth  Air  Training  Scheme  for 
aircrew,  and  then  to  South  Africa. 

Up  to  this  time  Brooke-Popham's  life 


and  career  had  been  that  of  a  successful 
and  distinguished  officer  and  a  devoted 
public  servant,  whose  performance  of 
duty,  though  seldom  newsworthy,  had 
been  conducted  according  to  the  highest 
professional  traditions.  With  his  appoint- 
ment in  October  1940  as  commander-in- 
chief  Far  East  he  was  suddenly,  at  the  age 
of  sixty-two,  thrust  upon  the  stage  of 
history. 

It  was  a  daunting  prospect  for  a  man 
of  any  age.  He  was  appointed  to  a  joint 
command,  the  first  R.A.F.  officer  ever 
to  hold  such  a  post,  in  an  increasingly 
dangerous  situation.  The  command  or- 
ganization he  was  called  upon  to  operate 
was  new  and  basically  unsound.  Although 
he  was  nominally  responsible  for  defence 
matters  in  Singapore,  Malaya,  Burma, 
and  Hong  Kong,  the  naval  units  in  these 
waters  were  not  under  his  command  but 
controlled  by  their  own  naval  commander- 
in-chief,  reporting  directly  to  London.  The 
civil  officials  in  his  area  continued  to  serve 
their  own  ministers  in  Whitehall,  and  that 
with  little  sense  of  urgency.  They  co- 
operated reluctantly  with  the  military 
authority  of  the  commander-in-chief. 

Brooke-Popham  knew  that  time  was 
short.  In  fact  he  had  only  thirteen  months 
before  Japan  was  to  strike.  The  defences 
of  Singapore  had  been  built  against  a 
threat  expected  to  come  from  the  sea. 
Thus  the  plan  itself  was  faulty,  but  due  to 
Middle  East  priorities,  even  the  minimum 
defence  forces  planned  were  lacking.  He 
was  particularly  weak  in  the  air.  For  a 
year  he  struggled  to  improve  the  defences, 
to  make  his  command  system  work 
properly,  to  win  his  reinforcements  from 
a  home  government  hard  pressed  and 
beset  by  conflicting  priorities.  In  such  a 
situation  he  was  bound  to  make  enemies. 

As  the  scene  darkened  around  him,  and 
Japan  estabUshed  sea  and  air  bases  in 
southern  Indo-China,  he  faced  the  first 
important  decision  of  the  subsequent 
campaign:  whether  or  not  to  push  his 
units  forward  into  Thailand  where  the 
Japanese  were  expected  to  land,  so  violat- 
ing a  neutral  country,  but  gaining  a  far 
better  defensive  position.  Duff  Cooper 
(later  Viscount  Norwich,  q.v.)  had  arrived 
in  September  1941  as  a  special  cabinet 
envoy,  further  eroding  the  position  of 
the  commander-in-chief.  Brooke-Popham 
urged  that  he  should  move  into  Thailand, 
but  he  received  permission  from  London 
only  at  the  eleventh  hour,  hedged  with 
many  conditions.  It  came  too  late  for  for- 
ward defence,  and  the  disastrous  war  with 


145 


Brooke-Popham 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Japan  began  in  December  1941  with  this 
among  many  other  handicaps.  The  second 
fatal  blow  to  British  hopes  was  the  sinking 
of  the  Prince  of  Wales  and  Repulse  by 
Japanese  aircraft.  It  was  the  direct  con- 
sequence of  the  shortage  of  aircraft,  parti- 
cularly modern  fighters,  against  which 
Brooke-Popham  had  railed  for  thirteen 
long  months. 

All  the  ingredients  of  complete  disaster 
were  present,  and  he  had  been  able  to  do 
little  to  change  the  course  of  events.  His 
replacement  with  a  younger  man  had  been 
agreed  in  London  before  the  Japanese  war 
began,  but  Whitehall  decided  that  it  was 
unwise  to  make  a  change  at  so  critical  a 
time.  At  this  point,  however,  he  fell  victim 
to  the  stresses  of  the  previous  twelve 
months,  in  which  land,  sea,  and  civil  chiefs 
had  aU  played  their  part.  Duff  Cooper 
pressed  for  his  replacement.  The  Cabinet 
agreed,  and  he  handed  over  to  Sir  Henry 
Pownall  on  27  December  1941 ,  at  the  height 
of  the  battle  for  Malaya. 

His  return  to  England,  closely  fol- 
lowed by  the  collapse  of  the  Allies  in  the 
Far  East  and  the  surrender  of  Singapore, 
could  not  fail  to  be  connected  in  the  pubUc 
mind.  He  left  the  active  list  once  more 
in  May  1942,  suffering  some  hasty  public 
attacks  as  the  chief  architect  of  the  British 
defeats  in  South  East  Asia.  He  continued 
to  give  service  where  he  could,  as  president 
of  N.A.A.F.I.  and  inspector-general  of  the 
Air  Training  Corps,  until  1945,  living 
afterwards  in  retirement. 

Brooke-Popham  was  a  fine  administra- 
tor, and  therein  lay  his  greatest  value  to 
the  Royal  Air  Force.  While  having  no  pro- 
found understanding  of  flying  itself,  he 
foresaw  the  importance  of  aviation  in  war. 
His  cautious,  reserved,  dreamy  though 
somewhat  cold  personality  made  him  an 
intellectual  rather  than  an  inspirational 
leader.  An  able  and  sometimes  brilliant 
professional  officer,  and  a  talented  ama- 
teur diplomat,  it  was  tragic  for  him  that 
after  his  active  career  should  have  ended 
his  reputation  became  closely  Unked  with 
the  greatest  calamity  ever  to  strike  British 
arms.  This  was  evidently  unjust,  since 
he  was  allowed  neither  the  time  nor  the 
power  to  solve  a  problem  already  beyond 
solution. 

In  1926  he  married  Opal  Mary,  second 
daughter  of  Edgar  Hugonin ;  they  had  a 
son  and  a  daughter.  He  died  in  Halton 
Hospital  20  October  1953.  There  is  a  por- 
trait by  T.  C.  Dugdale  in  the  Imperial  War 
Museum. 

[S.    Woodburn  Kirby,   (Official    History) 


The  War  Against  Japan,  vol.  i,  1957;  Sir 
Walter  Raleigh  and  H.  A.  Jones,  (Official 
History)  The  War  in  the  Air,  6  vols., 
1922-37;  The  Times,  21  October  1953; 
Aeroplane,  30  October  1953;  private  in- 
formation.] Peter  Wykeham. 


BROOM,  ROBERT  (1866-1951), 
palaeontologist,  was  born  in  Paisley, 
Scotland,  30  November  1866,  the  third 
child  of  John  Broom,  designer  of  caUco 
prints  and  shawls,  and  his  wife,  Agnes 
Hunter  Shearer.  Educated  at  Hutcheson's 
Grammar  School,  Glasgow,  he  became  lab- 
oratory assistant  to  John  Ferguson,  profes- 
sor of  chemistry,  while  also  attending  classes 
at  the  university.  He  qualified  M.B.,  CM. 
in  1889,  having  taken  his  B.Sc.  in  1887.  In 
1892  he  went  to  Australia  where  he  prac- 
tised medicine  and  wrote  a  series  of  papers 
on  marsupial  anatomy.  In  1897  he  moved 
to  South  Africa  and  set  up  in  practice, 
first  in  Port  Nolloth,  then  Port  Elizabeth, 
then  Pearston,  a  fossihferous  but  poor  dis- 
trict where  he  first  collected  Karroo  fossils, 
making  several  important  finds  which 
he  immediately  described.  Finding  that 
medicine  interfered  with  palaeontology  he 
accepted  in  1903  the  professorship  of 
zoology  and  geology  in  Victoria  College, 
Stellenbosch,  where  he  was  a  brilliant  lec- 
turer and  attracted  large  classes. 

In  1910,  having  resigned  his  chair,  he 
visited  London  to  see  fossil  material  in  the 
British  Museum  and  went  on  to  New  York 
to  see  comparable  material  from  Texas; 
he  then  published  *A  comparison  of  the 
Permian  Reptiles  of  North  America  with 
those  of  South  Africa'  {Bull.  Amer.  Mus. 
Nat.  Hist.,  28,  197-234).  He  resumed 
medical  practice  in  South  Africa  but  re- 
turned to  London  early  in  1914  and  when 
war  broke  out  was  working  in  the  Ear, 
Nose,  and  Throat  Hospital.  In  1915  he 
joined  the  Royal  Army  Medical  Corps 
but  his  age  prevented  him  from  serving 
abroad.  He  therefore  retired  after  a  year 
and  returned  to  South  Africa,  eventually 
settling  in  practice  at  Douglas  in  the 
Transvaal.  There  he  turned  his  attention 
to  anthropology,  especially  to  the  rela- 
tionships of  the  men  who  lived  in  South 
Africa  before  the  incoming  of  whites  and 
kaffirs. 

In  1928  Broom  sold  his  practice  and 
visited  England  and  the  United  States 
but  eventually  once  more  resumed  medi- 
cal practice  in  South  Africa.  In  1934 
J.  C.  Smuts  [q.v.]  appointed  him  curator 
of  fossil  vertebrates  in  the  Transvaal 
Museum.  He  was  then  eight  years  beyond 


146 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Brown,  D.  C. 


the  normal  age  of  retirement.  In  two 
years  he  increased  the  collection  of  fossil 
reptiles,  adding  twenty-six  new  genera 
and  forty-six  new  species,  mainly  found 
by  himself. 

The  discovery  and  description  by  Pro- 
fessor Raymond  Dart  of  the  Taungs  skull 
had  much  interested  Broom  who  in  1936 
decided  to  explore  caves  at  Sterkfontein. 
There  he  found  a  cave  commercially 
exploited  which  contained  fossil  bones, 
including  the  second  skull  of  an  Australo- 
pithecine.  This  find  was  followed  by 
others,  all  recorded  in  short  notes,  largely 
letters  to  Nature,  but  in  1946,  with 
G.  W.  H.  Schepers,  Broom  described  the 
mode  of  occurrence  and  the  structure  of 
the  Australopithecines  in  a  special  volume 
{The  South  African  Fossil  Ape-Men.  Part 
1.  Transv.  Mus.  Mem.  No.  2,  pp.  7-144). 
In  1950  he  published  Finding  the  Missing 
Link.  He  continued  to  work  on  Australo- 
pithecines until  his  death,  usually  in 
association  with  J.  T.  Robinson,  but  he 
still  retained  his  interest  in  the  Karroo 
fauna,  publishing  with  M.  George  two 
papers  in  1950. 

In  all,  Broom  published  over  400  papers. 
His  work  was  revolutionary  in  that  it 
gave  the  first  intelligible  and  accurate 
accounts  of  the  structure  of  Permian  rep- 
tiles from  America  as  well  as  South  Africa, 
and  discussion  of  their  relationships.  The 
work  on  the  manlike  apes  was  of  similar 
quality.  It  covered  the  field  of  fact  by 
accurate  descriptions,  and  it  established 
the  zoological  position  of  the  animals  in 
relation  to  the  known,  hving  great  apes 
and  to  man,  represented  not  only  by 
living  races  but  also  by  fossil  forms  such 
as  Neanderthal  man  and  Pithecanthropus. 

All  Broom's  scientific  work  was  intensely 
personal;  in  method,  in  outlook,  in  its 
general  character,  and  in  the  form  of  its 
publication  it  can  be  recognized  im- 
mediately and  is  unlike  that  of  anyone 
else.  Broom's  work  depended  on  certain 
personal  qualities.  He  was  an  extra- 
ordinarily accurate  observer  and  very 
quick,  both  mentally  and  physically. 
He  also  had  a  truly  remarkable  memory. 
He  himself  said  that  he  was  always 
an  evolutionist  but  not  a  Darwinian. 
He  never  accepted  natural  selection  as 
an  effective  mechanism,  preferring  some 
Lamarckian  explanation. 

Broom  had  other  interests  than  science ; 
he  played  his  part  in  public  affairs  and 
was  several  times  mayor  of  Douglas.  As  a 
medical  man  he  was  successful,  'devoted 
to  keeping  his  patients  in  good  health 


rather  than  making  a  great  fortune  by  un- 
necessary operations'.  He  experimented 
not  very  successfully  with  both  water  and 
oil  painting  and  always  drew  the  illustra- 
tions to  his  papers  himself,  using  a  pencil 
with  the  greatest  ease  and  accuracy.  He 
collected  Old  Masters  and  spent  much 
time  hunting  for  Dutch  pictures  in  the 
small  auction  rooms  in  London. 

Broom  was  appointed  Croonian  lec- 
turer to  the  Royal  Society  in  1913,  elected 
F.R.S.  in  1920,  and  awarded  a  Royal 
medal  in  1928.  He  received  a  number  of 
honorary  doctorates  and  was  a  foreign 
member  of  the  Royal  Academy  of  Science 
of  Sweden  and  of  many  other  societies 
throughout  the  world.  The  National 
Academy  of  Sciences,  Washington, 
awarded  him  the  Elhot  medal  and  the 
Geological  Society  of  London  its  WoUaston 
medal.  A  volume  of  essays  by  his  friends 
was  published  in  commemoration  of  his 
eightieth  birthday  and  a  bronze  bust  of 
Broom  by  Elsa  Djomba  was  placed  by  the 
South  African  Government  in  the  entrance 
hall  of  the  National  Museum  in  Pretoria 
and  unveiled  in  Broom's  presence  by  Smuts 
on  31  October  1941. 

In  1893  Broom  married  Mary  Braid 
Baillie ;  they  had  three  adopted  children. 
He  died  at  Pretoria  6  April  1951. 

[D.  M.  S.  Watson  in  Obituary  Notices  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  No.  21,  November 
1952 ;  personal  knowledge.]    D.  M.  S.  Watson. 

BROWN,  DOUGLAS  CLIFTON,  Vis- 
count RuFFSiDE  (1879-1958),  Speaker  of 
the  House  of  Commons,  was  born  16 
August  1879  at  Holmbush,  Horsham,  the 
fourth  surviving  son  of  Colonel  James 
Clifton  Brown,  member  ofParUament  for 
Horsham,  and  his  wife,  Amelia,  daughter 
of  Charles  Rowe,  of  Elm  House,  Liverpool. 
Educated  at  Eton  and  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge,  where  he  graduated  in  1901, 
he  was  commissioned  into  the  Lancashire 
Royal  Garrison  Artillery  (Militia)  (1900), 
transferred  to  the  1st  King's  Dragoon 
Guards  (1902),  became  captain  (1908), 
transferred  to  the  special  reserve  (1910), 
served  in  France  and  Belgium  (1914-18), 
and  was  promoted  major  (1919).  In 
December  1910  Clifton  Brown  had  unsuc- 
cessfully contested  St.  George-in-the-East 
and  in  the  general  election  of  1918  he  was 
returned  as  a  Coalition  Unionist  for  the 
Hexham  division  of  Northumberland. 
With  the  exception  of  the  period  Novem- 
ber 1923  to  October  1924,  he  held  this  seat 
as  a  Unionist  or  as  Speaker  until  he  retired 
from  the  House  of  Conmions  in  1951.  He 


147 


Brown,  D.  C. 


'BJ^.B.  1951-1060 


continued  in  the  Yeomanry,  commanding 
the  Northumberland  Hussars  in  1925-9. 
In  1920-22  he  was  parliamentary  private 
secretary  to  Ian  Macpherson  (later  Lord 
Strathcarron,  q.v.),  then  minister  of  pen- 
sions. 

In  1937  he  was  nominated  a  member  of 
the  chairmen's  panel,  presiding  over  stand- 
ing committees  and  serving  from  time  to 
time  as  temporary  chairman  of  commit- 
tees of  the  whole  House.  On  9  November 
1938  he  was  elected  deputy  chairman  of 
ways  and  means.  In  1941  he  was  sworn  of 
the  Privy  Council  and  in  January  1943 
was  elected  chairman  of  ways  and  means. 
Following  the  death,  in  office,  of  the 
Speaker,  E.  A.  FitzRoy  [q.v.],  Chfton 
Brown  was  elected  Speaker  on  9  March 
1943.  The  House  of  Commons  had  then 
been  in  existence  for  nearly  eight  years 
under  Mr.  Speaker  FitzRoy's  somewhat 
authoritarian  sway  and  as,  so  long  as  the 
war  continued,  domestic  politics  were  in 
abeyance,  procedural  problems  did  not 
trouble  the  new  Speaker.  The  assault  by 
V.l  and  V.2  bombs  raised  fresh  questions 
of  safety  with  which  Clifton  Brown  was 
well  fitted  to  deal,  for  since  1941  he  had 
been  chairman  of  the  defence  committee  of 
the  Palace  of  Westminster. 

With  the  war  in  Europe  over,  party 
politics  were  resumed  and  in  the  general 
election  of  1945  the  Labour  Party  was 
returned  with  a  huge  majority.  Follow- 
ing the  precedents  of  1895  and  1906 
Cltfton  Brown  was  xmanimously  re-elected 
Speaker  on  1  August  1945.  Conditions 
were  very  different  from  those  in  the  pre- 
vious House :  there  were  many  new  mem- 
bers, party  political  warfare  had  been 
resumed  with  great  bitterness  and,  smart- 
ing from  an  imexpected  defeat,  the 
Opposition  were  in  no  mood  to  accept  in 
silence  rulings  contrary  to  their  views.  To 
reimpose  the  sort  of  discipline  which  had 
existed  under  FitzRoy  would  have  meant 
a  struggle  in  which  it  was  by  no  means  cer- 
tain that  the  Speaker  would  have  com- 
manded the  support  of  the  House  and 
which  would  have  been  quite  contrary  to 
Chfton  Brown's  temperament.  So,  where 
his  predecessors  had  rehed  upon  authority, 
Brown  reUed  on  good  humour,  patience, 
and  his  patent  wish  to  help  members  to 
the  utmost  of  his  ability.  Although  suc- 
cessful to  a  point,  the  Speaker's  wilUng- 
ness  to  hsten  to  representations  on  his 
ruUngs  was  often  much  abused  and  the 
time  of  the  House  wasted.  Still,  that  he 
was  unanimously  elected  for  the  third  time 
in  the  ParUament  which  met  on  1  March 


1950  was  a  tribute  to  his  popularity. 
With  the  Government's  majority  of  only 
six,  the  political  struggle  was  sterner  than 
at  any  time  since  1914.  Inevitably  these 
conditions  imposed  a  heavy  burden  on  the 
Speaker  with  long  hours  of  sitting  and 
perpetual  procedural  wrangles.  Although 
Clifton  Brown  continued  to  act  with  the 
most  conscientious  impartiality,  the  cir- 
cumstances were  peculiarly  distasteful  to 
a  man  of  his  peace-loving  temperament  and 
moderate  views,  and  it  was  no  surprise 
when  in  1951  he  announced  that  he  would 
not  seek  re-election  at  the  coming  general 
election.  The  House  had  been  fortunate  in 
having  a  Speaker  of  so  equable  a  tempera- 
ment to  guide  it  through  the  post-war 
years  with  their  almost  revolutionary 
changes  in  the  economic  and  social  condi- 
tions of  the  country.  It  was  even  more 
fortunate  in  having  a  Speaker  whose 
modest  but  dignified  demeanour  com- 
bined with  a  charming  personality  made 
him  an  outstanding  representative  of  the 
House  of  Commons  at  a  time  when  it  was 
universally  regarded  as  a  symbol  of  ordered 
freedom  and  when  its  Speaker  was  called 
upon  to  represent  it  at  many  diverse  func- 
tions in  this  country  and  overseas. 

CUfton  Brown  paid  formal  visits  abroad : 
to  Caen  on  the  anniversary  of  D-Day ;  to 
Nuremberg  during  the  war  criminals  trial ; 
to  Paris  as  the  guest  of  M.  Herriot,  then 
president  of  the  French  National  As- 
sembly, who  had  previously  been  officially 
entertained  at  Westminster;  to  Rome, 
and  to  Copenhagen;  in  this  country  he 
visited  the  General  Assembly  in  Edin- 
burgh. There  were  also  occasions  of  more 
domestic  interest.  No  one  who  heard  the 
simple  but  most  moving  speech  when  he 
relit  the  lantern  in  Big  Ben  could  doubt  his 
intense  love  for  the  House  of  Commons 
and  its  traditions,  while  the  two  proudest 
moments  of  his  Ufe  were  when  he  led 
the  Commons  to  St.  Margaret's  to  return 
thanks  for  victory  in  Europe,  and  when  he 
first  took  his  seat  in  the  Chair  of  the  re- 
built House  of  Commons  and  subse- 
quently led  a  procession  of  the  Speakers 
of  the  Commonwealth  into  Westminster 
Hall  to  present  an  address  to  the  King. 
He  held  honorary  degrees  from  Durham, 
Cambridge,  and  Caen,  received  the  grand 
cross  of  the  Legion  of  Honour,  and  was 
created  Viscount  Ruffside  in  1951. 

Clifton  Brown  married  in  1907  Violet 
Cicely  Kathleen,  daughter  of  Frederick 
Eustace  Arbuthnott  WoUaston,  of  Shenton 
Hall,  Nuneaton.  They  had  one  daughter 
who  married  Sir  Harry  Hylton-Foster, 


148 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Brown,  J, 


Speaker  of  the  House  of  Commons  from 
1959  until  his  death  in  1965,  and  who  was 
created  a  Ufe  peeress  in  the  same  year 
(1965).  Ruffside  died  at  Northwood, 
Middlesex,  5  May  1958.  A  portrait  by  Sir 
William  Hutchison  is  in  Speaker's  House, 
Palace  of  Westminster. 

[Journals  of  the  House  of  Commons; 
Philip  Laundy,  The  Office  of  Speaker,  1964; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

E.  Fellowes. 

BROWN,  Sir  JOHN  (1880-1958), 
lieutenant-general.  Territorial  Army,  was 
born  in  Northampton  10  February  1880, 
the  elder  son  of  John  Brown,  a  clicker, 
later  a  licensed  victualler  and  an  alder- 
man, and  his  wife,  Kate  Davis  Allen.  He 
was  educated  at  Magdalen  College  School, 
Brackley.  Entering  the  architectural  pro- 
fession, he  qualified  as  an  associate  of 
the  Royal  Institute  of  British  Architects 
in  1921  and  became  a  fellow  in  1930. 
For  many  years  he  was  in  practice  in 
Northampton  and  London  in  partnership 
with  A.  E.  Henson.  But  the  distinction  he 
gained  as  an  architect  was  much  exceeded 
by  his  career  as  a  citizen  soldier. 

Entering  the  1st  Volunteer  battalion, 
the  Northamptonshire  Regiment,  in  1901, 
he  continued  in  it  when  it  became  the  4th 
(Territorial  Force)  battalion  of  that  regi- 
ment, and  with  it  went  out  to  the  Dar- 
danelles in  1915  where  he  took  part  in  the 
August  landing  at  Suvla  Bay.  He  served 
with  the  battalion  in  the  Palestine  cam- 
paign and  subsequently  rose  to  command 
it.  He  made  such  a  mark  that  in  1924  he 
was  given  command  of  the  162nd  (East 
Midland)  Infantry  brigade  which  soon 
became  the  best-known  formation  in  the 
Territorial  Army.  In  the  army  manoeuvres 
of  1925  it  represented  the  citizen  force 
with  distinction.  Brown  became  the  fore- 
most figure  and  most  dynamic  leader  in 
the  Territorial  Army  during  years  when 
its  strength  and  efficiency  were  declining, 
and  by  his  power  of  generating  en- 
thusiasm he  created  a  local  revival  which 
had  a  far-reaching  effect.  It  was  a  period 
when  even  the  nominal  strength  of  many 
battaUons  barely  exceeded  400,  of  whom 
only  about  half  could  be  induced  to  attend 
the  annual  camp,  despite  describing  it  as 
largely  a  'free  seaside  holiday'.  But  'John 
Brown's  Brigade'  brought  85  per  cent 
to  camp.  Its  outstanding  battalion  was 
the  4th  Northamptons  which  repeatedly 
brought  more  than  600  (90  per  cent). 
Brown  promised  them  no  easy  time  but 
plenty  of  real  training  for  war  and  he  took 


care  to  make  it  continually  interesting 
and  exciting. 

Prior  to  the  annual  camp  many  of  the 
officers  and  N.C.O.s  attended  as  many  as 
thirty  week-end  tactical  exercises  in  the 
year.  In  camp,  petty  restrictions,  'bull', 
and  fatigues  were  cut  to  a  minimum.  But 
the  men  were  kept  so  active  during  the 
day  and  so  well  entertained  in  the  even- 
ings that  few  wanted  to  go  out  of  camp. 
The  standard  of  tactical  training  was 
higher  than  in  most  regular  battalions  and 
some  discerning  regular  officers  brought 
their  N.C.O.s  to  watch.  Brown  created  the 
feeling  that  service  in  such  an  ^lite  was  a 
distinction  to  be  sought,  so  that  there  was 
a  waiting  list  to  join  and  local  pride  was 
such  that  crowds  in  Northampton  turned 
out  to  cheer  when  the  local  battalion  set 
out  for  camp. 

The  divisional  commander,  Sir  John 
Duncan,  a  regular  soldier  and  tactical 
enthusiast,  recommended  Brown  as  his 
successor.  This  would  have  fulfilled  the 
promise  made  when  the  Territorial  Force 
was  created  in  1907  that  citizen  soldiers 
should  be  eligible  for  general  officers' 
appointments.  But  the  recommendation 
was  turned  down  on  the  score  that  it 
would  diminish,  if  only  by  one,  the  num- 
ber of  major-generals'  jobs  available  for 
regulars.  So  Brown's  services  were  lost  to 
the  army  in  1928  when  he  was  in  the  prime 
of  life. 

But  in  1980  he  was  elected  chairman  of 
the  British  Legion  and  held  that  position 
for  four  years,  during  which  he  carried 
out  several  needed  reforms  and  dealt  with 
a  number  of  awkward  internal  problems 
effectively  and  tactfully,  in  his  inimitable 
manner.  He  had  a  way  of  talking  bluntly 
as  plain  John  Brown,  with  frequent  drop- 
ping of  aitches,  but  he  was  shrewdly 
skilled  in  handling  all  kinds  and  degrees 
of  men. 

In  1937  Leslie  (later  Lord)  Hore-Belisha 
[q.v.]  became  secretary  of  state  for  war 
and  his  programme  of  reforms  included 
the  long-overdue  fulfilment  of  the  promise 
made  by  Lord  Haldane  [q.v.].  John 
Brown,  now  too  old  for  active  conunand, 
was  made  deputy  director-general  of  the 
Territorial  Army.  He  thus  became  the 
first  Territorial  to  become  a  major- 
general  as  well  as  the  first  to  be  given  a 
high  position  in  the  War  Office  and  the 
chance  to  guide  the  treatment  of  the 
Territorial  Army's  special  problems. 

He  got  on  so  well  with  the  higher  regu- 
lar soldiers  that  two  years  later,  after  the 
outbreak  of  war,   he  was  promoted  to 


149 


Brown,  J. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


lieutenant-general  and  made  deputy  adju- 
tant-general (T),  while  in  1940  he  became 
director-general  of  the  Territorial  Army 
and  inspector-general  welfare  and  educa- 
tion in  the  War  Office,  dual  posts  which  he 
held  until  retirement  in  1941. 

Brown  was  appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  in 
1918;  he  was  appointed  C.B.E.  (1923), 
C.B.  (1926),  and  K.C.B.  (1934).  He  was 
twice  master  of  the  worshipful  company  of 
Pattenmakers. 

In  1904  Brown  married  Annie  Maria, 
daughter  of  Francis  Tonsley,  confec- 
tioner and  alderman,  of  Northampton; 
they  had  two  sons.  Brown  died  in 
Northampton  4  April  1958. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
B.  H.  LiDDELL  Hart. 

BROWN,  WILLIAM  FRANCIS  (1862- 
1951),  Roman  Catholic  bishop,  was  born  in 
Park  Place  House,  Dundee,  3  May  1862, 
the  third  of  the  four  sons  and  six  children 
of  Andrew  Brown  of  Lochton  House, 
Inchture,  Perthshire,  who  was  the  grand- 
son of  James  Brown  of  Cononsyth, 
pioneer  of  the  flax-spinning  industry  in 
Dundee.  His  mother  was  Fanny  Mary, 
daughter  of  Major  James  Wemyss  of 
Carriston,  of  the  Royal  Scots  Greys,  who 
is  the  central  figm-e  in  the  famous  painting 
'Scotland  for  Ever!'  by  Lady  Butler  [q.v.]. 
Brown  attended  the  High  School,  Dun- 
dee, Trinity  College,  Glenalmond,  and 
University  College  School,  London.  His 
parents  were  EpiscopaUans  but  within 
eight  years  of  his  mother's  becoming  a 
Roman  CathoUc  in  1873  the  entire  family 
was  of  the  same  faith.  Brown's  own  recep- 
tion in  1880  turned  his  thoughts  from  the 
forestry  service  in  India  to  the  priesthood. 
He  went  to  the  short-lived  Catholic  Uni- 
versity established  in  Kensington  by 
Cardinal  Manning  [q.v.],  entered  St. 
Thomas's  Seminary,  Hammersmith,  as  a 
student  for  the  diocese  of  Westminster  in 
1882,  and,  having  changed  to  the  diocese 
of  Southwark,  was  ordained  priest  in  1886. 
He  was  appointed  curate  to  the  Sacred 
Heart  church,  Camberwell,  until  in  1892 
he  became  priest-in-charge  of  a  new  dis- 
trict formed  by  detaching  part  of  the  area 
between  Lambeth  Bridge  and  Battersea, 
Clapham  and  Camberwell,  until  then 
served  from  St.  (ieorge's  Cathedral.  This 
was  to  become  the  parish  of  St.  Anne's, 
Vauxhall,  where  Brown  spent  the  rest  of 
his  life  as  parish  priest,  and  from  which 
the  prospect  of  high  ecclesiastical  office  in 
his  native  Scotland  and  still  less  the  inten- 
sive bombing  of  the  war  years  could  not 


separate  him.  That  was  where  his  heart 
lay,  and  his  unceasing  perambulation  of 
his  parish  made  him  one  of  the  best-known 
personalities  in  South  London,  and  in- 
spired his  zeal  for  social  reform  long  before 
such  a  tendency  ceased  to  be  regarded  as 
dangerous  or  at  least  eccentric. 

To  a  parish  priest  whose  children  were 
the  apple  of  his  eye,  education  became 
an  all-consuming  interest.  In  1896  Brown 
became  secretary  of  the  diocesan  associa- 
tion set  up  in  Southwark  to  administer 
the  grants  to  voluntary  schools.  He  had  al- 
ready stood  unsuccessfully  in  1894  as  a 
Catholic  candidate  for  the  London  School 
Board  to  which  he  was  elected  in  1897. 
Two  years  later  his  motion  that  the 
Board  should  seek  powers  to  feed  under- 
nourished children  was  defeated,  but  in 
the  end  the  necessary  legislation  was  pro- 
moted and  a  start  was  made  with  what  has 
become  an  accepted  part  of  the  school 
system.  By  the  time  the  Board  came  to 
an  end  in  1904  Brown  was  recognized  as 
an  expert  on  educational  questions  who 
was  frequently  consulted  by  (Sir)  Robert 
Morant  [q.v.]  over  the  Act  of  1902  and  its 
implementation  as  well  as  the  subsequent 
Liberal  attempts  to  amend  it.  In  recog- 
nition of  his  work  he  was  appointed 
protonotary  apostolic  in  1907. 

Ten  years  later  he  was  the  obvious 
choice  of  the  Holy  See  as  apostolic  visitor 
to  Scotland  at  a  critical  period  in  the 
history  of  the  Catholic  Church  in  that 
country.  The  phenomenal  growth  of  the 
Catholic  population  in  the  industrial 
areas  had  thrown  an  impossible  burden 
on  the  financial  resources  of  a  Church 
faced  with  the  responsibility  of  providing 
both  schools  and  teachers.  A  new  educa- 
tion bill  was  mooted.  One  solution  was 
to  absorb  Catholics  into  a  national 
system  of  education  without  prejudice 
to  their  principles.  The  times  were  pro- 
pitious. The  Catholic  population  had 
done  its  bit  in  the  war  effort.  The 
Irish  Nationalist  Party,  from  its  peculiar 
point  of  vantage,  came  to  the  aid  of  its 
Catholic  brethren,  themselves  mostly  of 
Irish  origin.  By  the  exercise  of  Brown's 
consummate  skill  in  controlling  a  team 
which  at  times  made  heavy  demands  on 
his  reserves  of  patience  and  tact,  and 
indeed  his  physical  endurance,  the  bill  be- 
came the  historic  Education  (Scotland) 
Act,  1918.  Brown  refused  the  offer  of  a 
Scottish  archbishopric,  but  it  gave  him 
enormous  pleasure  that,  by  a  remarkably 
apt  coincidence,  the  very  house  in  which 
he  was  born  eventually  became  part  of  the 


150 


D.N.B.  1951-1.960 


Brown,  W.  J. 


first  Catholic  junior  secondary  school  in 
Dundee.  In  the  diocese  of  Southwark  he 
was  consecrated  auxiliary  bishop  (with 
the  titular  see  of  Pella)  in  1924.  He  had 
been  vicar-general  since  1904  and  provost 
of  the  chapter  since  1916. 

Brown  was  a  stocky,  virile  figure  with 
a  rugged  beetle-browed  face.  Tough,  but 
by  no  means  rough,  he  was  very  far  from 
being  the  proud  prelate  so  dear  to  the 
imagination  of  some  of  his  fellow  country- 
men. Like  so  many  of  them,  too,  he  was 
austere  in  his  habits,  and  knew  the  value 
of  money,  especially  when  it  was  not  his 
own.  The  fine  church  of  St.  Anne  which 
he  built  was  cleared  of  debt  in  time  to  be 
consecrated  in  1911  on  the  twenty-fifth 
anniversary  of  his  ordination.  He  never 
lost  his  Scots  accent  and  retained  to  his 
dying  day  the  liveliest  interest  in  men  and 
affairs.  He  could  have  escaped  notice  at  a 
meeting  of  the  General  Assembly.  Church 
House,  the  Law  Courts,  and  even  the  Old 
Bailey  were  not  unknown  to  him.  His 
sole  publication  was  a  long-contemplated 
volume  of  reminiscences.  Through  Win- 
dows  of  Memory  (1946).  This  slim  volume, 
introduced  by  Sir  Shane  Leslie,  gives  a 
rapid  sketch  of  his  life  with  its  cathohc 
interests  and  varied  contacts.  The  photo- 
graph which  provides  the  frontispiece  does 
not  belie  its  subject.  Brown  died  in  South- 
wark 16  December  1951. 

[W.  F.  Brown,  Through  Windows  of  Memory, 
1946 ;  Burke's  Landed  Gentry,  1952 ;  Tablet,  22 
December  1951 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.  D.  SCANLAN. 

BROWN,  WILLIAM  JOHN  (1894-1960), 
union  leader  and  member  of  Parliament, 
was  born  in  Battersea  13  September  1894, 
the  second  son  of  Joseph  Morris  Brown, 
plumber,  and  his  wife,  Rosina  Spicer. 
He  was  educated  at  an  elementary  school 
in  Margate  and  for  three  years,  with 
a  scholarship,  at  Sir  Roger  Manwood's 
Grammar  School,  Sandwich.  After  a  few 
months  in  the  City  he  became  in  1910  a  boy 
clerk  in  the  Civil  Service ;  in  June  1912  he 
passed  the  assistant  clerk's  examination 
and  transferred  from  the  Savings  Bank  to 
the  Office  of  Works.  In  November  1912  he 
caused  a  sensation  by  giving  evidence  on 
behalf  of  the  boy  clerks  before  the  royal 
commission  on  the  Civil  Service.  His  com- 
plaint was  that  boy  clerks  were  liable  to 
discharge  at  eighteen  and  he  created  such  an 
impression  that  the  commission  accepted 
his  views  and  successfully  recommended 
the  abolition  of  the  boy  clerk  system. 
In  1919  Brown  left  the  Civil  Service  to 


become  general  secretary  of  what  became, 
largely  through  his  efforts,  the  Civil  Ser- 
vice Clerical  Association.  The  notion  of  a 
unionized  Civil  Service  was  at  that  time 
by  no  means  universally  accepted  in 
Conservative  circles,  and  Brown  fought  a 
continuing  fight  with  the  Government, 
especially  the  Conservative  Government 
of  1922-3. 

Defeated  as  a  Labour  candidate  at 
Uxbridge  in  1922  and  at  West  Wolver- 
hampton in  1923  and  1924,  Brown  was 
elected  for  the  latter  constituency  in  1929. 
He  soon  found  himself  at  odds  with  his 
party,  criticizing  it  in  particular  for  the 
alleged  ineffectiveness  of  its  attack  on 
unemployment;  for  a  time  he  was  in 
sympathy  with  Sir  Oswald  Mosley  who 
resigned  from  the  Government  in  May 
1930.  Brown  refused  the  Labour  whip  in 
March  1931  but  decided  not  to  align  him- 
self with  Mosley' s  New  Party  and  at  the 
election  in  October  stood  independently  as 
a  Labour  candidate.  He  lost  his  seat ;  was 
defeated  again  in  1935;  but  returned  in 
1942  at  a  by-election  as  independent 
member  for  Rugby.  Owing  to  the  wartime 
party  truce  the  official  parties  did  not  run 
candidates  against  one  another.  Rugby 
had  been  a  Conservative  seat  and  Labour 
therefore  did  not  oppose.  The  National 
Labour  organization  made  it  markedly 
clear  that  they  gave  Brown  no  support, 
for  over  the  years  he  had  been  increasingly 
outspoken  in  his  criticism  of  the  alleged 
tyranny  of  trade  unions  and  excesses  of 
socialist  discipline.  On  the  other  hand  the 
local  Labour  Party  supported  him.  At  the 
general  election  of  1945  both  the  Con- 
servative and  the  Socialist  parties  ran 
candidates  against  him.  Brown  headed  the 
poll  with  a  majority  of  over  a  thousand 
over  the  Conservative.  In  the  Parliament 
of  1945  independent  members  were  few 
and  far  between  and  with  the  passing 
of  the  death  sentence  on  the  university 
constituencies  an  independent  member 
who  could  win  a  normal  constituency  be- 
came something  of  a  marked  man.  There 
was  a  natural  interest  in  the  speeches  of 
one  whose  opinions  did  not  fall  into  either 
of  the  regular  party  patterns,  and  Brown 
was  never  diffident  about  giving  his. 
He  was  a  speaker  to  whom  words 
came  easily  and  who  emphasized  them 
with  an  almost  acrobatic  abundance 
of  gesture  and  grimace.  When  he  spoke 
on  Civil  Service  matters  he  spoke  with 
authority.  He  applied  to  all  problems 
healthy  moral  terms  of  reference  and  was 
always  the  defender  of  liberty  against  its 


151 


Brown,  W.  J. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


attackers  and  a  vigorous  battler  against 
Communists  whether  in  Russia  or  in  Eng- 
land. On  such  topics  he  was  always  worth 
hearing.  But  sometimes  he  embarked  upon 
historical  disquisitions  where  it  was  not 
very  clear  that  he  knew  enough  of  his  sub- 
ject to  justify  him  in  so  confidently  giving 
his  opinion. 

After  1942  Brown  resigned  the  general 
secretaryship  of  the  Civil  Service  Clerical 
Association  and  became  its  parliamentary 
secretary.  But  his  vigorous  criticism  of  the 
Labour  Government  after  1945  was  not  to 
the  liking  of  some  of  the  members  of  the 
Association  who  attempted,  as  he  alleged, 
to  control  his  activities.  He  raised  the 
matter  in  1947  as  a  breach  of  privilege  but 
his  complaint  was  not  upheld  by  the  Com- 
mittee of  Privileges. 

Independent  of  both  the  main  parties. 
Brown  in  the  1945-50  Parliament  directed 
the  main  volume  of  his  attack  upon  the 
SociaUsts — if  only  because  it  was  they  who 
were  in  power.  As  a  result  there  were  many 
Conservatives  who  thought  it  foolish  to 
run  a  Conservative  candidate  against  him 
in  his  Rugby  constituency  in  the  1950 
election.  However,  in  defiance  of  advice 
from  the  Central  Office  the  local  Con- 
servatives insisted  on  doing  so.  The  result 
was  that  on  a  split  vote  the  Labour  candi- 
date won  the  seat.  At  the  election  of  1951 
at  West  Fulham  Brown  came  second  to 
Dr.  (later  Baroness)  Sununerskill  in  a 
three-cornered  fight. 

Although  he  was  never  a  man  who  took 
kindly  to  party  discipline,  Brown  had 
always  a  great  love  for  the  House  of 
Commons  and  believed  firmly  in  the 
virtues  of  an  idealized  somewhat  less 
disciplined  House  of  Commons  whose 
pattern  was  laid  up  in  heaven  and  which 
differed  somewhat  from  the  House  which 
he  actually  knew.  He  made  himself  a  con- 
siderable master  of  procedure  and  wrote 
an  interesting  handbook,  called  Every- 
body''s  Guide  to  Parliament  (1945).  He  was 
as  fluent  with  the  pen  as  with  the  tongue 
and  wrote  a  number  of  books,  mostly 
of  a  semi-autobiographical,  semi-didactic 
nature.  For  his  habit  was  to  put  his  argu- 
ments in  a  personal  form  and  there  was 
something  of  the  preacher  in  his  make  up. 
He  was  hostile  to  any  challenge  to  funda- 
mental moral  values  and  he  was  an 
eloquent  and  edifying  advocate  of  the 
copybook  maxims.  For  a  time  he  wrote 
frequently  for  the  Beaverbrook  press  and 
later  contributed  a  weekly  column  of 
pungent  meditations  on  the  passing  scene 
to  Time  and  Tide  under  the  pen-name  of 


Diogenes.  But  during  the  last  decade  of 
his  life  he  became  known  principally  as 
a  broadcaster  and  television  performer, 
appearing  frequently  on  the  programme 
'Free  Speech'.  He  died  at  his  home  in 
Belsize  Park  3  October  1960. 

In  1917  Brown  married  Mabel,  daugh- 
ter of  Harry  Prickett,  solicitors'  clerk,  of 
Anerley;  they  had  two  sons  and  one 
daughter. 

[W.  J.  Brown,  So  Far  .  .  .,  1943 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Christopher  Hollis.        i 

'■'4 

BRUCE,  CLARENCE  NAPIER,  third 
Baron  Aberdare  (1885-1957),  athlete, 
was  born  in  London  2  August  1885.  He 
was  the  second  son  of  Henry  Campbell 
Bruce,  later  second  baron,  and  grandson  of 
Henry  Austin  Bruce,  home  secretary  and 
first  baron  [q.v.].  His  mother,  Constance 
Mary  Beckett,  was  a  granddaughter  of 
J.  S.  Copley,  Lord  Lyndhurst  [q.v.]. 
Bruce  was  educated  at  Winchester,  where 
he  was  in  the  cricket  eleven  and  was 
captain  of  rackets  in  1903  and  1904,  and 
at  New  College.  At  Oxford  he  represented 
the  university  at  cricket  in  1907  and  1908 
(when  he  scored  46  for  the  winning  side) 
and  also  at  golf,  rackets,  and  tennis,  at 
which  he  won  the  silver  racket  in  1907. 
He  gained  third  class  honours  in  modern 
history  in  1908.  In  1911  he  was  called 
to  the  bar  by  the  Inner  Temple,  and 
in  the  following  year  married  Margaret 
Bethune,  only  daughter  of  Adam  Black, 
By  her,  who  died  in  1950,  he  had  two  sons 
and  two  daughters.  Bruce  was  already  a 
notable  player  of  games,  but  the  full  ex- 
tent of  his  talents  did  not  become  apparent 
until  after  the  war.  Between  1914  and 
1919  he  served  with  the  Glamorgan  Yeo- 
manry, with  the  2nd  Life  Guards,  on  the 
staff  of  the  61st  division,  and  with  the 
Guards  Machine  Gun  Regiment.  He  retired 
with  the  rank  of  captain ;  the  death  in  action 
of  his  elder  brother  in  1914  left  him  heir 
to  the  title. 

From  1919  he  began  to  play  cricket  for 
Middlesex,  which  he  had  represented  twice 
in  1908.  One  of  his  best  years  was  1925 
when  he  scored  527  runs  in  nineteen 
appearances.  On  23  June,  at  Nottingham^ 
his  county  were  set  502  runs  to  win  in  the 
fourth  innings,  and  achieved  that  total. 
Hendren  and  Bruce  added  154  together  in 
95  minutes,  and  Bruce  finished  with  103  to 
his  name ;  Wisden  justly  describes  this  as 
one  of  the  great  matches  in  the  history  of 
Middlesex  cricket.  His  last  game  for  the 
county  was  in  1929. 


152 


iD.N.B.  1951-1960 


Buchan 


Bruce  was  a  good  golfer  and  competent 
at  all  ball  games,  but  he  excelled  at  the 
two  great  indoor  court  games,  rackets  and 
tennis.  At  rackets  he  was  the  amateur 
champion  in  1922  and  1931  and  was  ten 
times  winner  of  the  doubles  with  different 
partners.  His  finest  achievement  was  to 
become  open  champion  of  the  British 
Isles  in  1932  by  defeating  J.  C.  F.  Simp- 
son. Although  the  loser  was  the  best 
receiver  of  service  playing,  Aberdare's  ser- 
vice was  devastating  and  his  court  craft 
superb.  He  was  the  singles  champion  of 
Canada  in  1928  and  1930  and  won  the 
doubles  in  Canada  and  the  United  States 
(with  H.  W.  Leatham)  in  the  latter  year. 

He  was  tennis  champion  of  the  United 
States  in  1930,  and  of  England  in  1932  and 
1938 ;  he  also  won  the  M.C.C.  gold  or  silver 
prize  every  year  from  1930  to  1937.  Here 
too  his  superb  fitness  assisted  him  and 
he  was  a  master  tactician.  In  1938  he  de- 
feated L.  Lees,  champion  for  five  years 
and  a  younger  man,  in  the  semi-final  3-2, 
after  being  two  sets  down.  His  service  was 
always  accurate  (although  he  eschewed 
the  American  variety)  and  his  attack  on 
the  dedans  deadly.  In  the  final  he  won 
easily,  finishing  with  a  spectacular  winning 
gallery  shot.  In  France  he  won  the  Coupe 
de  Paris  six  times.  At  doubles  he  had  a 
happy  knack  of  bringing  out  the  best  in  his 
partners. 

After  his  succession  to  the  barony  in  1929 
he  played  an  increasing  part  in  public  life. 
From  1931  to  1946  he  was  a  member  of  the 
Miners'  Welfare  Committee,  an  appoint- 
ment reflecting  the  long  connection  be- 
tween his  family  and  the  South  Wales  coal 
field.  He  took  a  great  interest  in  youth 
welfare  and  was  treasurer  of  the  National 
Association  of  Boys'  Clubs  in  1935  and 
chairman  from  1943  until  his  death.  An- 
other Ufelong  interest  was  the  Queen's 
Institute  of  District  Nursing  of  which  he 
became  chairman  in  1944.  In  February 
1937  Oliver  Stanley  [q.v.]  announced  the 
creation  of  a  new  National  Advisory 
Council  on  Physical  Training  of  which 
Aberdare  was  chairman  until  1939.  Aber- 
dare  was  an  admirable  choice ;  he  was 
good  in  the  chair,  unruffled  and  modest, 
while  his  reputation  brought  in  money 
and  support.  In  a  speech  in  1938  he 
declared  that  his  great  ideal  was  to  give 
everyone  'a  chance  of  making  the  human 
body  a  fit  instrument  for  the  human  soul'. 
In  that  year  he  himself  was  amateur  tennis 
champion,  and  in  1939,  at  the  age  of 
fifty-three  and  partnered  by  his  son,  he 
attained  the  final  of  the  doubles  at  rackets. 


In  Wales  he  continued  the  family  in- 
terest in  the  university  (of  which  his 
grandfather  was  the  first  chancellor)  as 
president  of  the  Welsh  National  School  of 
Medicine ;  he  received  an  honorary  LL.D. 
in  1953.  In  1948  he  became  prior  of  the 
Welsh  Priory  of  St.  John  of  Jerusalem, 
and  was  a  knight  of  the  order  which  he 
had  long  aided.  He  spoke  in  the  House  of 
Lords  on  the  subjects  dear  to  his  heart ;  in 
1944  he  twice  voiced  the  claims  of  youth 
in  the  debates  on  the  education  bill,  and 
at  the  end  of  the  same  year  urged  that 
youth  club  leaders  be  not  forgotten  in  the 
demobilization  programme.  During  the 
war  of  1939-45  he  served  in  the  Home 
Guard;  he  was  honorary  colonel  of  the 
77th  (later  renumbered  282nd)  (Welsh) 
Heavy  A.A.  brigade.  He  was  appointed 
C.B.E.  in  1949  and  promoted  G.B.E.  in 
1954. 

In  1931  Aberdare  had  joined  the  execu- 
tive committee  of  the  International  Olym- 
pics. He  attended  the  games  at  Los  Angeles 
in  1932,  Berlin  in  1936,  and  after  the  war 
in  London  (1948),  Helsinki  (1952),  and 
Melbourne  (1956).  In  September  1957  he 
married,  secondly,  Grizelda  Harriet  Violet 
Finetta  Georgiana,  daughter  of  Dudley 
Francis  Amelius  Hervey,  C.M.G. ;  return- 
ing with  her  from  an  Olympic  meeting  in 
Sofia,  he  was  killed  in  a  car  accident  in 
Yugoslavia  4  October  1957.  He  was  suc- 
ceeded by  his  elder  son,  Morys  George 
Lyndhurst  (born  1919). 

With  E.  B.  Noel,  he  was  the  author 
of  an  admirable  work  on  First  Steps  to 
Rackets  (1926)  and  he  edited  the  Lonsdale 
Library  volume  on  Rackets,  Squash 
Rackets,  Tennis,  Fives  and  Badminton 
(1933).  He  contributed  the  notice  of 
Peter  Latham  to  this  Supplement. 

There  is  a  portrait  by  Flora  Lion  in  the 
National  Museum  of  Wales,  Cardiff. 

[The  Times,  5,  10,  11,  and  14  October  1957 ; 
private  information.]       Michael  Maclagan. 

BUCHAN,  CHARLES  MURRAY  (1891- 
1960),  footballer  and  journalist,  was  born 
22  September  1891  at  Plumstead,  the  son 
of  William  Buchan,  blacksmith  at  the 
Royal  Arsenal,  and  his  wife,  Jane  Murray. 
When  playing  football  as  a  boy  for  Wool- 
wich Polytechnic,  and  later  for  Plumstead, 
he  was  noticed  by  Arsenal,  a  first  division 
club,  and  in  1909  he  signed  for  them  as  an 
amateur.  But  after  four  games  with  the 
reserve  side  he  left  them  because  they 
would  not  meet  a  modest  claim  for  lis. 
expenses,  and  for  the  rest  of  that  season  he 
played  for  Northfleet  in  the  Kent  League. 


153 


Buchan 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Buchan  was  then  studying  to  be  a 
teacher  and  had  no  intention  of  becoming 
a  professional  footballer.  In  1910,  how- 
ever, he  was  persuaded  to  join  Leyton,  a 
club  in  the  Southern  League,  at  £3  a  week. 
He  was  quickly  seen  to  be  an  inside- 
forward  of  unusual  promise  and  in  March 
1911  he  was  transferred  to  Sunderland, 
which  that  year  finished  third  in  the  first 
division.  The  transfer  fee  was  £1,200,  at 
that  time  a  large  sum  for  an  unproved 
player  of  only  nineteen.  Buchan  re- 
mained with  Sunderland  until  1925.  With- 
in a  year  of  joining  them  he  played  for 
the  Football  League  against  the  Scottish 
League,  and  he  was  an  English  reserve  in 
the  international  at  Hampden  Park.  In 
1912-13,  playing  mostly  at  inside-right, 
he  scored  31  goals  for  Sunderland  when 
they  came  very  close  to  the  'double' 
event  of  League  and  Cup.  They  won  the 
League  by  four  points  but  were  beaten  1-0 
by  Aston  Villa  in  the  Cup  final  at  Crystal 
Palace.  In  this  season  Buchan  won  his 
first  international  cap,  scoring  England's 
goal  in  a  2-1  defeat  by  Ireland. 

In  the  first  post-war  season  he  combined 
teaching  with  football,  and  in  1920  he 
started  a  business  in  Sunderland  as  a 
sports  outfitter.  He  was  by  now  captain  of 
the  club,  and  in  1922-3,  when  they  came 
second,  his  total  of  30  goals  was  the  highest 
in  the  first  division.  In  1924  he  received 
the  last  of  his  six  English  caps  when  he 
played  against  Scotland  in  the  first  inter- 
national at  Wembley. 

At  the  end  of  the  1924--5  season  Buchan 
moved  to  Arsenal,  where  Herbert  Chap- 
man was  just  starting  a  triumphant  reign 
as  manager.  The  transfer  arrangement  was 
an  unusual  one,  Sunderland  being  paid 
£2,000  plus  a  further  £100  for  each  goal 
Buchan  scored  in  his  first  season.  He 
scored  21.  He  was  captain  of  Arsenal  for 
three  years,  scoring  49  goals  in  102  League 
games.  His  transfer  was  something  of  a 
gamble  since  he  was  nearly  thirty-four, 
but  Chapman  needed  a  man  of  personality 
and  experience  as  a  foundation  for  the 
team  he  was  determined  to  build.  In  their 
many  tactical  discussions  they  evolved 
the  Arsenal  system  of  'defence  in  depth', 
with  a  midfield  link  to  collect  the  ball  out 
of  defence  and  initiate  an  attack  in  a 
couple  of  direct  moves.  In  Buchan's  first 
season  Arsenal  rose  to  second  in  the 
League,  so  far  the  highest  position  attained 
by  any  southern  club.  The  next  year  (1927) 
they  were  in  the  final  of  the  Cup,  losing 
1-0  to  Cardiff  City,  and  they  reached  the 
semi-final  in  the  year  after  that.  When 


Buchan  retired  in  1928  the  foundations 
had  been  truly  laid  for  Arsenal's  remark- 
able success  in  the  following  decade. 

Buchan  himself  started  a  new  career  as 
a  journalist.  For  some  years  he  had  been 
contributing  articles  to  newspapers,  and 
he  now  became  leading  sports  writer  on 
the  Daily  News,  later  the  Neivs  Chronicle, 
In  1951  he  founded  his  own  magazine, 
Charles  Buchan's  Football  Monthly.  He 
was  also  a  radio  commentator,  and  he 
continued  to  write  and  to  broadcast  un- 
til his  sudden  death  while  on  holiday 
with  his  wife  near  Monte  Carlo,  25  June 
1960. 

On  and  off  the  field  Buchan  was  the 
ideal  professional  footballer.  Technically 
he  was  a  player  of  outstanding  gifts.  He 
stood  over  six  feet,  and  his  long  legs  and 
willowy  frame  gave  him  an  awkward,  even 
clumsy  appearance.  But  he  was  so  fit  that 
he  never  missed  more  than  an  occasional 
week's  football  through  injury.  He  was 
unsurpassable  in  the  air,  and  on  the  ground 
his  close  dribbling  and  superb  control  were 
matched  by  a  powerful  and  accurate  shot. 
He  would  have  played  for  England  more 
often  had  the  selectors  not  thought  him 
too  clever  for  the  rest  of  the  team.  He 
thought  deeply  about  the  rights  and  status 
of  the  player,  and  by  his  own  modest  and 
sportsmanlike  demeanour  he  brought  dig- 
nity to  his  profession. 

As  a  writer  his  comments  were  informed 
and  kindly.  Although  he  could  be  forth- 
right when  occasion  demanded,  he  disliked 
sensationalism  of  any  kind,  and  his  readers 
could  depend  on  him  for  expert  analysis 
untouched  by  personalities  or  gossip. 
Over  the  air  his  informal  approach  and 
homely  voice  won  him  thousands  of 
friends  among  a  generation  which  had 
never  seen  him  play. 

In  the  war  of  1914-18  Buchan  enlisted 
in  the  Coldstream  Guards.  He  served  in 
France  as  a  sergeant  from  1916  to  1918, 
coming  unharmed  through  the  Somme, 
Cambrai,  and  Passchendaele,  and  winning 
the  M.M.  He  was  then  commissioned  in 
the  Sherwood  Foresters,  but  the  war 
ended  before  he  could  return  to  the  front. 

As  a  cricketer  he  played  in  a  few 
matches  for  Durham,  and  he  was  a  good 
enough  golfer  to  take  part  in  the  amateur 
championship. 

In  1914  Buchan  married  Ellen  Robson 
by  whom  he  had  a  son  and  a  daughter. 

[Charles  Buchan,  A  Lifetime  in  Football, 
1955 ;  Bernard  Joy,  Forward,  Arsenal!,  A 
History  of  the  Arsenal  Football  Club,  1952.] 

M.  M.  Rc£SE. 


154 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Buchanan,  G. 


BUCHANAN,  GEORGE  (1890-1955), 
politician,  was  born  30  November  1890  in 
Naburn  Street,  Gorbals,  then  a  residential 
suburb  but  later  the  most  drab  and  im- 
poverished district  of  Glasgow.  His  own 
experience  of  poverty  and  the  influence  of 
his  parents  led  him  to  dedicate  his  life  to 
the  service  of  the  poor.  His  father,  George 
Buchanan,  came  from  Kilberry,  Argyll- 
shire, a  joiner  by  trade,  a  Radical  in  poli- 
tics. His  mother,  Ann  MacKay,  was  born 
in  Creich,  Sutherlandshire,  in  a  poor  croft 
to  which  her  family  had  been  driven  at  the 
'clearances'  from  'Bonnie  Strath  Naver'. 
With  this  background  it  was  not  surpris- 
ing that  they  should  turn  to  the  Indepen- 
dent Labour  Party  after  settling  in 
Gorbals. 

Buchanan  was  educated  at  near-by 
Camden  Street  school  and  afterwards  at 
evening  classes.  His  parents  somehow  con- 
trived to  send  a  brother  and  sister  to  the 
university,  but  savings  for  this  purpose 
were  not  available  for  George.  He  played 
a  percussion  instrument  in  the  local  Boys' 
Brigade  band,  joined  the  Rechabites, 
played  junior  football,  and  danced.  During 
school  holidays  he  helped  the  family 
exchequer  by  taking  jobs  as  a  boy  mes- 
senger, for  a  time  with  the  Scotsman  in 
Edinburgh.  His  parents  apprenticed  him 
for  five  years  as  an  engineers'  pattern- 
maker. At  sixteen  he  joined  both  his  trade 
union  and  the  Independent  Labour  Party. 
Before  he  was  twenty  he  had  made  a 
reputation  as  a  street-corner  speaker.  His 
big  frame,  shock  of  red  hair,  and  his 
rugged,  passionate  oratory,  linked  closely 
to  the  daily  life  of  the  people,  dominated 
ever-growing  crowds.  In  1918  he  was 
elected  to  the  Glasgow  city  council.  Out- 
side his  working  hours  all  his  time  was 
devoted  to  championship  of  the  poorest 
among  his  fellow  workers.  He  made  him- 
self a  master  of  the  regulations  relating  to 
pensions  and  benefits,  and  morning  after 
morning  at  tribunals  represented  the  dis- 
abled, the  unemployed,  and  the  sick.  He 
was  active  in  the  United  Patternmakers' 
Union,  of  which  he  was  destined  to  be 
president  in  1932-48. 

In  1922  Buchanan  became  member  of 
Parliament  for  Gorbals.  He  was  one  of  the 
group  of  Clydeside  rebels,  led  by  James 
Maxton  [q.v.]  who  impressed  but  often 
shocked  Parliament  by  the  manner  in 
which  they  urged  the  claims  of  their  im- 
poverished constituents.  Buchanan  was 
bitter  in  language;  he  cared  little  for 
parliamentary  etiquette;  he  was  several 
times  suspended.  His  style  of  speech  broke 


all  the  traditions  of  the  House;  it  was 
almost  a  personal  conversation  with  the 
Speaker,  so  Scottish  that  many  members 
could  not  follow  him.  'Whom  do  you  think 
I  met  on  the  road  from  Kilmarnock  last 
nicht  ?',  he  would  ask.  'Archie  Henderson. 
Ye  dinna  ken  Archie,  Mr.  Speaker,  but  all 
Gorbals  ken  him.'  He  would  then  tell  Mr. 
Speaker  how  Archie  Henderson  had  walked 
all  the  way  from  Glasgow  to  Kilmarnock 
and  back  again  in  the  vain  search  for 
work. 

In  1924  Buchanan  married  a  Glasgow 
girl,  Annie  McNee.  They  made  their  home 
in  Gorbals,  among  the  people  they  knew, 
not  in  London  where  Buchanan  always 
felt  an  alien.  He  would  travel  north  each 
Friday,  returning  to  Westminster  on 
Monday.  In  London  he  shared  lodgings 
with  Maxton  and  the  Rev.  Campbell 
Stephen,  another  outspoken  member  of 
the  Clydeside  group.  Stephen  did  the 
cooking,  Maxton  made  the  beds,  and 
Buchanan  swept  the  floors. 

During  the  Labour  Government  of 
1929-31  Buchanan  was  a  fierce  critic  of 
Ramsay  MacDonald's  policy.  He  was 
incensed  by  the  Anomalies  Act  which 
imposed  restriction  on  unemployment 
benefits  and  by  the  appointment  of  the 
commission  under  Sir  George  (later  Lord) 
May  [q.v.]  whose  recommendations  of  cuts 
brought  about  the  end  of  the  Government 
and  MacDonald's  decision  to  head  a  coali- 
tion 'national'  Government.  The  following 
year  the  I.L.P.  disaffiliated  from  the 
Labour  Party  and,  with  Maxton,  Stephen, 
and  John  McGovern,  Buchanan  formed  an 
independent  socialist  group  in  Parliament. 
But  he  was  never  happy  about  this  de- 
cision. Almost  simultaneously  he  was 
elected  chairman  of  his  trade  union  which 
was  affiliated  to  the  Labour  Party.  He 
believed  in  the  unity  of  the  working-class 
movement  and  hoped  that  the  split  would 
be  temporary.  When  under  Maxton' s  in- 
fluence the  I.L.P.  moved  towards  further 
isolation,  he  rejoined  the  Labour  Party 
just  before  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939. 

As  the  Labour  Party  emerged  from 
opposition  to  the  responsibility  of  the 
prospects  of  renewed  government, 
Buchanan  adjusted  himself  increasingly 
to  the  temper  of  the  House.  He  won  re- 
spect by  his  knowledge  of  pension  prob- 
lems. In  1934  he  had  been  offered  a  post 
as  a  member  of  the  statutory  committee 
established  by  the  new  Unemployment 
Act.  The  salary  was  £2,000  a  year  and  he 
was  a  poor  man ;  but  he  had  refused  the 
offer  because  he  did  not  wish  to  desert  the 


155 


Buchanan,  G. 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


people  of  Gorbals  or  his  trade-union 
and  political  activities.  Ehiring  the  war 
he  concentrated  on  what  he  termed 
*the  home  front',  claiming  the  status 
for  workers  which  he  felt  their  con- 
tribution to  the  national  effort  deserved. 
With  the  Labour  victory  at  the  end  of  the 
war  came  the  first  invitations  to  accept 
office.  C.  R.  (later  Earl)  Attlee  was  as- 
tonished when  Buchanan  preferred  the 
post  of  joint  under-secretary  for  Scotland 
to  that  of  minister  of  national  insurance. 
Buchanan  had  proved  himself  a  master 
of  the  complexities  and  anomahes  of  in- 
surance benefits,  but  his  impelling  thought 
now  was  the  need  to  sweep  away  the 
appaUing  slum  conditions  of  Gorbals,  and 
he  initiated  rehousing  whilst  at  the 
Scottish  Office.  Two  years  later  (1947)  he 
became  minister  of  pensions  and  won 
general  recognition  for  the  kindliness  and 
wisdom  with  which  he  directed  adminis- 
tration. He  brought  to  the  problem  of 
cases  of  hardship  among  ex-servicemen 
and  women  all  the  sympathy  which  he  had 
shown  for  the  destitute  of  Gorbals. 

In  1948  the  'rebel'  of  Gorbals  was  sworn 
of  the  Privy  Council,  but  his  first  concern 
was  still  for  the  poor  and  a  few  months 
later  he  was  appointed  chairman  of  the 
newly  created  National  Assistance  Board. 
This  necessitated  his  resignation  from  the 
House  of  Commons;  he  did  so  to  serve 
those  to  whom  he  had  dedicated  all  his 
endeavours :  the  poorest  of  the  population. 
During  the  five  years'  term  of  his  chair- 
manship he  initiated  the  Board  in  the 
spirit  of  human  sjonpathy  which  set  the 
tradition  of  its  later  administration.  When 
his  period  of  office  ended  in  1953  he  con- 
tinued to  serve  as  a  member  of  the  Board. 
He  died  in  Glasgow  28  June  1955.  He 
had  no  children.  What  his  successor,  Sir 
Geoffrey  Hutchinson,  said  of  him  may  be 
accepted  as  a  portrait  of  his  life :  'He  has 
left  behind  him  at  the  National  Assistance 
Board  an  immense  tribute  to  his  public 
service,  kindliness,  and  generosity  of  tem- 
perament, which  have  made  him  loved 
by  aU.' 

f Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Brockway. 

BUCHANAN,  WALTER  JOHN  (JACK) 
(1890-1957),  actor  and  theatre  manager, 
was  born  2  April  1890  at  Helensburgh, 
near  Glasgow,  the  son  of  Walter  John 
Buchanan,  auctioneer,  and  his  wife, 
Patricia  Purves  McWatt.  Educated  at 
Glasgow  Academy,  he  spoke  of  becoming 
a  barrister,  but  his  heart  was  set  on  the 


stage  from  the  first,  and  particularly  he 
saw  himself  as  a  comedian,  although  he 
feared  his  height  might  miUtate  against 
this  ambition. 

After  a  brief  spell  in  the  family  business, 
Buchanan  appeared  first  on  the  profes- 
sional stage  at  the  Edinburgh  Empire  in 
1911,  billed  as  'Chump  Buchanan,  patter 
comedian',  'Chump'  being  a  sobriquet 
from  his  schooldays.  Northern  provincial 
music-halls  at  this  period  were  a  tough 
training-ground  for  the  stage  aspirant, 
and  in  his  later  years  of  prosperity 
Buchanan  would  relate  his  hard  ex- 
periences 'on  the  halls'  when  his  efforts  to 
entertain  were  vociferously  rejected.  But, 
in  his  own  words,  something  personal  came 
through  at  last  when  he  obtained  material 
which  suited  him. 

On  7  September  1912  he  made  his  first 
appearance  in  London,  at  the  Apollo 
Theatre,  in  a  comic  opera  called  The  Grass 
Widows,  and  during  1913  and  1914  he  ap- 
peared and  understudied  in  revues  at  the 
Empire  Theatre,  Leicester  Square.  Re- 
jected by  the  army — at  no  time  in  his  life 
was  his  health  robust — during  1915  and 
1916  he  came  into  prominence  playing  the 
George  Grossmith  [q.v.]  part  on  tour  in 
To-nighVs  the  Night;  and  in  1917  he  suc- 
ceeded Jack  Hulbert,  acting,  singing,  and 
dancing  in  the  revue  Bubbly  presented  by 
Andre  Chariot  [q.v.]  at  the  Comedy 
Theatre.  Other  wartime  revues  followed 
and  Jack  Buchanan  soon  established  him- 
self on  the  west-end  light  musical  stage  as 
a  comedian  of  talent  and  promise. 

In  October  1921  he  enhanced  his  reputa- 
tion in  another  Chariot  revue,  A  to  Z,  in 
which  he  played  the  lead,  produced  the 
sketches,  and  staged  the  musical  numbers. 
In  December  1922  he  appeared  for  the 
first  time  under  his  own  management  in 
Battling  Butler  at  the  New  Oxford  Theatre, 
and  at  the  end  of  the  following  year  went 
to  America,  opening  in  New  York  at  the 
Times  Square  Theatre  (with  Gertrude 
Lawrence  [q.v.]  and  Beatrice  Lillie)  in 
Andre  Chariot's  Revue  of  1924  in  which  he 
scored  a  great  personal  success.  This  was 
the  first  of  many  visits  to  New  York,  and 
he  remained  throughout  his  subsequent 
career  as  acceptable  to  audiences  there  as 
in  Great  Britain. 

In  May  1924  came  Toni  at  the  Shaftes- 
bury Theatre,  London,  and  thenceforth  at 
regularly  long  intervals  until  1943  he  was 
to  present,  produce,  and  play  the  leading 
part  in  a  succession  of  musical  comedies, 
through  all  of  which  he  sang  and  danced 
and  joked   his   nonchalant  way  with  a 


156 


D.N.Bi  1951-1960 


Buck 


seemingly  lazy  but  most  accomplished 
grace.  Everything  he  did  on  the  stage  bore 
the  stamp  of  his  personality  and  was  done 
with  an  effect  of  consummate  ease,  yet 
without  casualness.  The  hunched  shoul- 
ders, the  sidelong  smile,  the  husky  audible 
diseur's  voice,  the  quick  light  step  across 
the  stage  on  the  ball  of  his  feet,  and  the 
loose  lithe  limbs  weaving  themselves  into 
easy  rhythmical  patterns  in  his  step- 
dances,  all  were  characteristic.  Of  the  long 
series  mention  may  be  made  of  Sunny 
(1926),  That's  a  Good  Girl  (1928),  and 
Stand  up  and  Sing  (of  which  he  was  part- 
author,  1931),  all  at  the  Hippodrome. 

There  was  some  truth  in  the  statement 
made  after  his  death  that  Buchanan  was 
the  last  of  the  'Knuts'.  With  dark  wavy 
hair,  fine  eyes,  and  a  tip-tilted  nose,  he 
was  attractive  rather  than  good-looking, 
but  his  very  tall  slim  figure  well  set  off  the 
faultless  cut  of  his  clothes,  and  he  was  re- 
garded as  something  of  an  arbiter  elegan- 
tiarum  by  a  generation  which  admired,  if 
it  could  not  emulate,  the  sartorial  perfec- 
tion of  the  white  tie,  white  waistcoat,  and 
tails  which  were  his  stage  emblem.  (He 
was  the  first  to  adopt,  circa  1924,  the  later 
prevailing  fashion  of  a  double-breasted 
dinner  jacket.)  But  if  he  remained  the 
dandy,  his  innate  modesty  and  humour 
steadfastly  resisted  his  becoming  at  any 
time  a  matinee  idol,  a  role  which  some 
of  his  more  fervent  admirers  would  have 
assigned  him.  He  was  first  billed  as  a 
comedian,  and  as  a  comedian  he  himself 
would  have  preferred  to  remain  and  be 
remembered.  He  used  to  say  that  nature 
gave  him  long  legs  and  a  croak,  but  the 
long  legs  enhanced  the  pleasure  of  watch- 
ing the  timing  and  gymnastic  of  his  tap- 
dancing,  and  the  croak  was  curiously  tune- 
ful. With  his  quiet  unforced  technique,  no 
one  knew  better  how  to  put  across  the 
words  and  music  of  a  song  with  charm  and 
effect. 

In  June  1944  at  the  Savoy  Theatre 
Buchanan  broke  new  ground  when  he 
appeared  in  a  straight  part,  that  of  Lord 
Billing  in  an  Edwardian  version  of  The 
Last  of  Mrs.  Cheyney  by  Frederick  Lons- 
dale [q.v.].  The  light  charm  of  Buchanan's 
Billing  bore  Kttle  relation  to  the  amoral 
character  which  Lonsdale  drew  and  Sir 
Gerald  du  Maurier  [q.v.]  had  portrayed  in 
1925,  but  the  performance  confirmed  what 
many  had  long  suspected,  that  Buchanan 
was  a  comedy  actor  of  the  first  rank,  with 
a  split-second  sense  in  the  handling  of 
lines,  and  an  unaffected  ease  of  manner. 
These  qualities  were  borne  out  in  subse- 


quent straight  parts  which  he  played  dur- 
ing the  last  years  of  his  career. 

In  1951  on  the  sudden  death  of  Ivor 
Novello  [q.v.]  Buchanan  succeeded  to  the 
part  of  Nikki,  written  by  Novello  for  his 
own  production  of  King's  Rhapsody  at  the 
Palace  Theatre.  This  was  a  courageous 
and  as  it  proved  fully  justified  venture, 
but  the  role  of  romantic  hero  was  not  per- 
haps entirely  congenial  to  his  personality. 

Buchanan  acted  fairly  regularly  in  films 
after  1925,  many  of  them  rather  makeshift 
versions  of  his  musical  comedy  successes. 
Special  mention  should  be  made  of  Monte 
Carlo  (1931)  directed  by  Ernst  Lubitsch; 
Good  Night,  Vienna  (1932) ;  Break  the  News 
(1938),  directed  by  Rene  Clair,  in  which 
he  appeared  with  Maurice  Chevalier ;  The 
Band  Waggon  (1954),  in  which,  besides 
singing  and  dancing  with  Fred  Astaire,  he 
caricatured  the  actor-manager-producer 
in  the  grand  manner  of  a  former  day ;  and 
finally.  The  Diary  of  Major  Thompson,  re- 
leased after  his  death,  a  film  adaptation  of 
Pierre  Baninos's  best-seller,  in  which  he 
acceptably  portrayed  the  French  concep- 
tion of  the  conventional  Englishman. 

Among  his  fellow  players  Buchanan's 
encouragement  of  talent,  his  quixotic 
generosity,  and  his  loyalty  became  some- 
thing of  a  theatrical  legend.  Throughout 
most  of  his  career  he  had  extensive  theatre 
business  interests.  He  financed  the  build- 
ing of  the  Leicester  Square  Theatre,  and 
at  the  time  of  his  death  had  control  of  the 
Garrick  Theatre  and  the  King's  Theatre, 
Hammersmith.  He  was  also  an  early 
speculator  in  television. 

In  1915  Buchanan  married  an  actress 
vocalist,  Brageva,  daughter  of  the  late 
Brago  Bragev  Sava,  merchant.  The  mar- 
riage was  dissolved.  In  1949  he  married 
Susan  Bassett,  of  Maryland  and  New  York. 
There  were  no  children.  He  died  in  London 
20  October  1957. 

There  were  drawings  of  Buchanan  in 
Punch  by  W.  K.  Haselden  (21  May  1924), 
J.  H.  Bowd  (1  June  1938),  and  G.  L. 
Stampa  (24  October  1945).  ^ 

[The  Times,  21  October  1957;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

B.  PePYS  WniTELEYi 

BUCK,  Sir  PETER  HENRY  (1880- 
1951),  ethnologist  and  politician,  often 
known  by  his  Maori  name,  Te  Rangi 
Hiroa,  was  born  at  Urenui  in  the  province 
of  Taranaki,  New  Zealand,  15  August 
1880.  He  was  the  son  of  an  Irish  father, 
William  Henry  Buck,  of  Galway,  and  a 
Maori   mother,   Rina.   His   mother   died 


157 


Buck 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


when  he  was  very  young  and  he  was 
brought  up  by  Ngarongo-ki-tua,  a  chief- 
tainess  of  the  Ngati-Mutunga  tribe  of 
North  Taranaki.  Educated  at  Urenui 
School,  Te  Aute  College,  and  Otago  Medi- 
cal School,  he  was  both  university  and 
amateur  long  jump  champion  of  New 
Zealand  in  1904.  His  first  post  after 
qualifying  in  that  year  was  as  house 
surgeon  at  Dunedin  Hospital.  In  the  fol- 
lowing year  he  was  appointed  a  medical 
officer  of  health  to  the  Maoris  and  so  began 
his  attachment  in  a  direct  capacity  to  the 
Maori  people  which  was  to  last  until  1927. 
In  1909  he  was  elected  to  Parliament  and 
in  1912  for  a  brief  period  he  was  the  re- 
presentative of  the  Maori  race  in  the  New 
Zealand  Cabinet. 

In  1914  Buck  joined  the  New  Zealand 
expeditionary  force  as  a  medical  officer; 
he  served  in  Egypt,  France,  Belgium, 
Malta,  and  at  Gallipoli;  commanded  a 
Maori  battalion;  was  appointed  to  the 
D.S.O.  (1917),  and  twice  mentioned  in  dis- 
patches. From  1919  to  1927  he  was  direc- 
tor of  Maori  hygiene,  his  last  medical  post 
and  his  last  real  connection  with  the  people 
among  whom  he  had  been  brought  up. 
With  his  professional  reputation  at  its 
highest  peak  in  his  own  country,  he  looked 
away  from  it  and  outside  New  Zealand, 
but  at  the  time  with  the  intention  of  re- 
turning. Apart  from  one  or  two  short 
visits  he  never  did  return.  From  1927 
until  the  end  of  his  life  he  was  first  a 
lecturer  at  the  Bernice  Pouahi  Bishop 
Museum  in  Hawaii  which  contains  the 
finest  collection  of  Pacific  material  in  the 
world;  from  1932  visiting  professor  of 
anthropology  at  Yale  University;  and 
from  1936  until  his  death  director  of  the 
Bishop  Museum. 

In  the  last  twenty  years  of  his  life  Buck 
became  known  the  world  over  as  the 
authority  on  Polynesian  material  culture, 
a  very  wide  and  diversified  subject  spread 
over  thousands  of  sea  miles.  His  interest 
had  been  stimulated  by  early  associations 
with  two  other  eminent  Maori  politicians, 
Sir  Apirana  Ngata  and  Sir  Maui  Pomare. 
The  three  of  them  had  felt  that  it  was  time 
for  Maoris  to  contribute  to  the  scientific 
work  on  their  own  race,  to  which  pre- 
viously only  Europeans  had  devoted  time 
and  energy.  Pomare  adopted  mythology, 
Ngata  poetry,  and  Buck  the  physical 
and  material  culture  of  his  people.  It  was 
as  a  result  of  their  consortium  that  Buck's 
first  ethnological  paper,  'The  Maori  Art 
of  Weaving'  (Dominion  Museum,  1908), 
was  published.  This  was  later  elaborated 


in  Evolution  of  Maori  Clothing  (Polynesian 
Society,  1926),  by  which  time  Buck  had 
begun  to  orientate  his  research  outside  his 
own  people,  the  better  to  trace  their 
origins  in,  or  connections  with,  the  Poly- 
nesia beyond  the  horizon.  In  1927  he 
brought  out  The  Material  Culture  of  the 
Cook  Islands  (Aitutaki)  (Board  of  Maori 
Ethnological  Research). 

Once  he  had  left  New  Zealand  there  fol- 
lowed in  rapid  succession  works  of  the 
highest  scientific  value.  Under  the  auspices 
of  the  Bishop  Museum  he  published  works 
on  Samoan  (1930)  and  Kapingamarangi 
(1947)  material  culture ;  on  the  ethnology 
of  Tongareva  (1932),  of  Manihiki  and 
Rakahanga  (1932),  and  of  Mangareva 
(1938) ;  on  the  arts  and  crafts  of  the  Cook 
Islands  (1944)  and  of  Hawaii  (1957) ;  on 
Mangaian  Society  (1934)  and  on  Explorers 
of  the  Pacific  (1953).  Other  works  included 
Regional  Diversity  in  the  Elaboration  of 
Sorcery  in  Polynesia  (Yale,  1936),  Vikings 
of  the  Sunrise  (U.S.A.,  1938),  Anthropology 
and  Religion  (Yale,  1939),  Introduction  to 
Polynesian  Anthropology  (1945),  The  Com- 
ing of  the  Maori  (New  Zealand  Department 
of  Internal  Affairs,  1949),  and  also  many 
papers  to  learned  societies. 

In  all  these  the  keen,  analytical  quality 
of  mind  was  conspicuous.  Buck  eschewed 
conjecture  which  he  could  not  support  at 
least  most  of  the  way  with  positive  fact. 
But  he  was  not  rigid  and  unimaginative. 
As  the  first  ethnologist  to  have  the  oppor- 
tunity to  survey  the  whole  of  Polynesia 
with  thoroughness  and  skilled  assistance, 
he  was  able  to  draw  conclusions  on  a 
broad  scale.  Nobody  had  a  wider  know- 
ledge in  so  much  detail  of  the  scattered 
pockets  of  Polynesian  culture;  the  only 
areas  in  which  he  had  not  carried  out  field 
research  were  the  Tongan  and  Lau  groups. 
It  enabled  him,  as  in  Vikings  of  the  Sun- 
rise, to  communicate  in  popular  form  an 
unparalleled  collation  of  facts  and  findings 
on  Polynesian  voyages,  customs,  and  the 
peopling  of  the  island  groups.  The  very 
range  of  his  profound  studies,  the  sweep  of 
vision,  covered  thousands  of  Pacific  miles 
as  far  north  as  Hawaii  and  as  far  south  as 
New  Zealand.  As  he  himself  said,  he  was 
born  in  South  Polynesia,  lived  much  of 
the  time  in  North  Polynesia,  and  did  the 
bulk  of  his  field  work  in  West  and  East 
Polynesia,  an  unrivalled  breadth  of  scien- 
tific experience  of  that  part  of  Oceania. 
Further,  as  he  himself  freely  stated,  his 
mixed  blood,  far  from  retarding  him, 
afforded  perspective,  breadth  of  contact, 
energy,  and  ambition.  Even  so,  as  a  half- 


158 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Burnett 


caste  child,  Buck  had  to  study  intensively 
to  know  Maori  custom  so  well  and  to  be- 
come so  rich  in  expressing  the  language. 
Binominal  and  bilingual,  he  readily 
claimed  that  his  mother's  blood  enabled 
him  to  appreciate  the  Polynesian  culture 
while  his  father's  speech  enabled  him  to 
interpret  it  to  the  world. 

There  was  widespread  recognition  of 
his  outstanding  ethnological  talent.  His 
honorary  degrees  included  the  D.Sc.  (New 
Zealand,  Yale,  and  Rochester)  and  D.Litt. 
(Hawaii).  The  Royal  Anthropological  In- 
stitute awarded  him  the  Rivers  memorial 
medal  for  his  cultural  and  physical  anthro- 
pological work.  He  was  the  first  Maori  to 
be  a  fellow  of  the  Royal  Society  of  New 
Zealand.  In  1946  he  was  appointed 
K.C.M.G.  on  the  nomination  of  the  New 
Zealand  Government ;  and  from  the  King 
of  Sweden  he  received  the  Royal  Order  of 
the  North  Star. 

With  all  his  distinction  Buck  was  reflec- 
tive, modest,  and  genial.  Like  most  of  his 
race,  he  was  a  powerful  orator  and  physi- 
cally sturdy.  He  had  a  considerable  capa- 
city for  work  and  application.  The  Bishop 
Museum's  fame  had  been  long  established 
before  his  directorship,  but  in  guiding  its 
distinguished  research  he  enriched  it  with 
his  own  indigenous  stature  and  produc- 
tivity, his  prolific  and  clearly  reasoned 
probings  into  the  problems  of  Polynesia. 
At  first  doubtful  about  leaving  the  Maori 
people,  he  ultimately  acknowledged  that 
he  could  have  made  his  contribution  to 
their  history  only  by  leaving  them. 

In  1905  Buck  married  Margaret  Wilson 
of  Milton,  a  chief tainess  of  the  Ngapuhi 
tribe  and  widow  of  a  political  colleague. 
They  had  no  children.  He  died  in  Honolulu 
1  December  1951.  A  painting  by  Madge 
Tennant  and  a  drawing  by  Eleanor  Beck- 
man  are  in  the  Bishop  Museum. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Philip  Snow. 

BURNETT,    Sir   ROBERT   LINDSAY 

(1887-1959),  admiral,  was  born  at  Old 
Deer,  Aberdeenshire,  22  July  1887,  the 
fourth  son  of  John  Alexander  Burnett, 
of  Kemnay,  Aberdeenshire,  by  his  wife, 
Charlotte  Susan,  daughter  of  Arthur 
Forbes  Gordon,  of  Rayne,  Aberdeenshire. 
Sir  Charles  Burnett  [q.v.]  was  an  elder 
brother.  At  the  early  age  of  seven  he 
announced  his  intention  of  joining  the 
navy,  and  after  education  at  Bedford 
School  and  Eastman's  he  entered  the 
Britannia  in  1903.  His  academic  progress 
was  undistinguished,  but  he  showed  great 


promise  as  an  all-round  athlete,  and  after 
reaching  the  rank  of  lieutenant  in  1910  he 
qualified  as  a  physical  training  instructor. 
In  the  ensuing  eight  years  he  served 
mainly  in  small  ships,  saw  action  in  the 
Heligoland  Bight  and  at  the  Dogger  Bank 
engagement,  gained  his  first  command  (a 
torpedo  boat)  in  1915,  and  subsequently 
went  on  to  command  destroyers  with  the 
Grand  Fleet  until  1918. 

With  subsequently  only  one  break  of 
two  years  in  command  of  a  sloop  on  the 
South  Africa  station,  Burnett  was  con- 
tinually employed  until  1928  in  physical 
training  appointments,  being  promoted 
commander  in  1923  while  acting  as  secre- 
tary to  the  sports  control  board.  He  did 
much  in  this  period  towards  reorganizing 
the  physical  training  branch  of  the  navy. 
He  himself  also  won  the  sabre  champion- 
ship at  the  Royal  Tournament  and  became 
a  qualified  referee  for  association  and 
rugby  football,,  hockey,  water  polo,  and 
boxing.  In  addition,  he  developed  his 
admirable  bent  as  a  producer  of  amateur 
theatricals. 

Burnett  gained  his  second  selective  pro- 
motion, to  captain,  in  December  1930  at 
the  conclusion  of  a  successful  commission 
as  executive  officer  of  the  Rodney.  In  the 
ensuing  eleven  years  in  that  rank  he 
commanded  a  destroyer  flotilla  on  the 
China  station,  did  two  years  as  the  direc- 
tor of  physical  training  and  sports,  com- 
manded the  cruiser  flagship  of  the  South 
African  squadron,  and  finally  was  ap- 
pointed commodore  of  the  Royal  Naval 
Barracks  at  Chatham  in  1939,  where  he 
had  the  arduous  task  of  mobilizing  the 
personnel  of  the  east  country  manning 
port  for  war. 

Although  Burnett  himself  had  more 
than  once  in  his  time  as  a  captain  ex- 
pressed surprise  at  his  progressive  promo- 
tions, his  superiors  fully  appreciated  his 
zeal,  energy,  and  ability,  and  after  only 
eighteen  months  at  Chatham  he  was 
specially  promoted  to  the  acting  rank  of 
rear-admiral  in  November  1940  (con- 
firmed two  months  later)  on  appointment 
as  flag  officer  of  the  Home  Fleet  mine- 
laying  squadron  engaged  on  the  hazardous 
task  of  laying  the  deep  minefield  in 
northern  waters.  On  completion  of  this 
task  in  1942  he  became  flag  officer.  Home 
Fleet  destroyer  flotillas,  and  a  year  later 
flag  officer,  tenth  cruiser  squadron,  con- 
tinuing in  this  appointment  on  promo- 
tion to  vice-admiral  (1943)  until  he  left 
the  Fleet  in  mid -1944  to  become  the 
commander-in-chief,       South      Atlantic, 


159 


Burnett 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


responsible  for  the  security  of  the  sea  route 
round  the  Cape. 

It  was  especially  during  those  fateful 
years  1941  to  1944  when  a  hard-pressed 
Royal  Navy  faced  its  greatest  challenge 
tliat  Burnett  rendered  outstanding  ser- 
vice and  played  a  leading  part  in  the  saga 
of  the  Arctic  convoys,  when  the  enemy 
could  choose  its  own  time  and  place  at 
which  to  bring  superior  force  to  bear  upon 
the  lifeUne  to  Russia.  These  circumstances 
called  for  the  physical  endurance,  capable 
leadership,  and  readiness  to  fight  back 
whatever  the  odds  which  Burnett  notably 
possessed.  His  indomitable  spirit  and 
simple  philosophy  of  immediate  aggres- 
sive tactics  inspired  others  and  gained  for 
him  the  trust  and  loyalty  of  those  who 
served  under  him  in  the  course  of  these 
exhausting  operations  to  reach  North 
Russia  and  return. 

There  were  occasions  on  which  his  de- 
termination was  particularly  put  to  the 
test.  In  September  1942  he  fought  a  con- 
voy of  forty  ships  through  in  the  face  of 
four  days  of  sustained  submarine  and 
massed  air  attack  for  a  loss  of  thirteen 
merchantmen,  and  then  saw  the  returning 
empty  convoy  back.  On  New  Year's  Eve 
1942,  in  the  Barents  Sea,  his  covering  force 
of  two  cruisers  finally  managed  to  reach 
another  convoy  with  such  an  offensive 
impact  that  the  greatly  superior  enemy 
surface  force  retired  in  disorder  and  the 
merchant  ships  reached  port  unscathed. 
On  Boxing  Day  a  year  later,  off  North 
Cape,  again  in  midwinter,  he  so  skilfully 
handled  his  covering  force  of  three 
cruisers  that  the  Scharnhorst  was  twice 
forced  to  turn  back  from  the  convoy  with- 
out achieving  any  success,  and  was  finally 
delivered  up  to  destruction  by  the  com- 
mander-in-chief's flagship. 

Burnett  was  promoted  admiral  in  1946 
and  in  the  following  year  took  up  his  last 
appointment,  the  Plymouth  command, 
wWch  he  held  for  three  years,  being  placed 
on  the  retired  hst  in  May  1950.  He  was 
subsequently  chairman  of  the  White 
Fish  Authority  for  four  years. 

Throughout  his  service  Burnett  was  sus- 
tained by  a  firm  reUgious  belief  from  which 
he  got  much  help  and  comfort,  and  he 
expected  others  to  try  and  measure  up  to 
his  own  high  moral  standards  and  example 
of  officer-like  behaviovur  and  appearance. 
He  loved  the  navy,  was  easily  moved  to 
emotion,  and  was  a  first-class  speaker  in 
a  manner  which  carried  conviction. 

He  died  suddenly  in  London  2  July 
1959,  his  wife,  Ethel  Constance,  the  daugh- 


ter of  R.  H.  Shaw,  whom  he  married 
in  1915,  surviving  him.  They  had  no 
children. 

During  his  career  he  was  successively 
appointed  O.B.E.  (1925),  C.B.  (1942),  to 
the  D.S.O.  (1943),  K.B.E.  (1944),  K.C.B. 
and  C.  St.  J.  (1945),  and  G.B.E.  (1950). 
He  received  an  honorary  LL.D.  from 
Aberdeen  (1944)  and  high  orders  from  the 
Soviet  Union,  Greece,  and  the  Nether- 
lands. 

His  portrait  in  oils  by  Edward  Roworth 
is  in  the  possession  of  the  National  Mari- 
time Museum,  Greenwich,  and  there  is  a 
pastel  by  William  Dring  in  the  Imperial 
War  Museum. 

[S.  W.  Roskill,  (Official  History)  The  War 
at  Sea,  1939-45,  3  vols.,  1954-61;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

A.  W.  Clabke. 

BURNETT-STUART,  Sir  JOHN  THEO- 
DOSIUS  (1875-1958),  general,  was  born 
in  Cirencester  14  March  1875,  the  eldest  of 
four  sons  of  Eustace  Robertson  Burnett- 
Stuart,  of  Dens  and  Crichie,  county 
Aberdeen,  and  his  wife,  Carlotta  Jane, 
daughter  of  J.  Lambert,  of  Cottingham, 
Yorkshire.  Educated  at  Repton  and  the 
Royal  Military  College,  Sandhurst,  he  re- 
ceived his  commission  in  the  Rifle  Brigade 
in  1895  and  served  with  the  Tochi  Field 
Force  on  the  North-West  Frontier  of 
India  (1897-8)  and  then  in  the  South 
African  war  (1899-1902),  where  he  earned 
a  mention  in  dispatches  and  was  appointed 
to  the  D.S.O.  Subsequently,  as  a  captain, 
he  served  with  the  4th  battalion  of  his 
regiment  in  Egypt,  and  graduated  at  the 
Staff  College  in  1904.  He  was  then  posted 
to  the  War  Office  in  the  directorate  of 
military  operations,  and  in  1910  was 
seconded  to  the  New  Zealand  military 
forces  as  director  of  organization.  Return- 
ing home  in  1912  he  was  appointed  instruc- 
tor G.S.0. 2  at  the  Staff  College,  Camberley, 
from  September  1913  to  4  August  1914, 
the  last  course  before  war  broke  out. 

After  holding  several  staff  appointments 
in  France  he  was  promoted  brigadier- 
general  and  made  B.G.G.S.  of  VII  Corps 
under  Sir  Thomas  Snow  [q.v.]  in  February 
1916.  In  the  Cambrai  battle  of  November 
1917  the  VII  Corps  was  on  the  flank  of  the 
main  attack  and  played  no  part  in  the 
assault.  But  Burnett-Stuart  gave  repeated 
warnings  that  a  German  counter-offensive 
was  being  mounted — ^warnings  which  were 
unfortunately  disregarded  by  the  higher 
command.  Thus  the  German  counter- 
stroke  attained  a  great  initial  surprise  and 


160 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Burrell 


success,  penetrating  deeply  into  the  sector 
held  by  the  VII  Corps,  but  was  eventually 
brought  to  a  halt  by  the  well-directed 
defence. 

In  December  1917  Burnett-Stuart  was 
promoted  major-general  and  made  deputy 
adjutant-general  at  G.H.Q.,  a  post  which 
he  held  until  the  end  of  the  war.  In  1920 
he  was  sent  to  India  to  command  the 
Madras  district,  and  thus  had  to  deal  with 
the  Malabar  rising  of  1921,  but  in  1922  he 
was  brought  back  to  fill  the  key  post  of 
director  of  military  operations  and  in- 
telUgence  in  the  War  Office. 

In  1926  he  was  given  command  of  the 
3rd  division  in  the  Southern  Command,  and 
A.  P.  (later  Earl)  Wavell  [q.v.]  was  selected 
as  his  G.S.O.  1.  In  1927  the  first  Experi- 
mental Mechanized  Force  was  assembled 
on  Salisbury  Plain  and  placed  under  the 
higher  direction  of  Burnett-Stuart.  He 
criticized  the  motley  components  of  the 
force  and  pointed  out  that  the  infantry 
would  not  be  capable  of  keeping  pace  with 
the  rest  of  the  force  in  battle  unless  they 
were  mounted  in  armoured  cross-country 
vehicles.  He  also  urged  that  'enthusiastic 
experts  and  visionaries'  should  be  brought 
in  to  aid  in  the  new  experiments,  saying: 
'it  doesn't  matter  how  wild  their  views  are 
if  only  they  have  a  touch  of  the  divine  fire. 
I  will  supply  the  common  sense  of  advanced 
middle  age.' 

Unfortunately  he  did  not  fill  his  own  pre- 
scription, and  had  an  early  disagreement 
with  Colonel  (later  Major-General)  J.  F.  C. 
Fuller  who  had  been  chosen  to  command  the 
new  force.  This  led  to  the  appointment  of  a 
new  commander  who  was  much  less  pro- 
gressive, and  Burnett-Stuart  himself  came 
to  be  increasingly  disappointed  with  the 
methods  by  which  the  force  was  trained. 

When  on  the  staff  in  France  he  had  been 
very  sceptical  about  the  value  of  tanks, 
but  in  the  post-war  years  he  changed  his 
views,  although  still  incUned  to  be  exces- 
sively critical  of  their  defects  and  variable 
in  his  views.  On  the  other  hand  he  also 
failed  to  see  eye  to  eye  with  his  comman- 
der-in-chief, Sir  Archibald  Montgomery- 
Massingberd  [q.v.],  who  was  much  more 
conservative. 

From  1931  to  1934  Burnett-Stuart 
commanded  the  British  troops  in  Egypt 
and  there  became  a  supporter  and  advo- 
cate of  the  possibilities  of  using  mechanized 
forces  in  desert  warfare.  He  was  promoted 
general  in  1934  and  in  that  year  he  re- 
turned home  to  the  Southern  Command, 
holding  that  post  until  April  1938  when 
he  was   succeeded  by  his   former   staff 


officer,  Wavell.  That  was  Burnett-Stuart's 
last  appointment  before  retirement,  but  he 
had  been  very  near  to  the  highest  appoint- 
ment in  the  army.  When  Montgomery- 
Massingberd  retired  in  April  1936  Burnett- 
Stuart  was  a  leading  and  certainly  the 
most  brilliant  candidate  for  the  suc- 
cession. But  he  had  clashed  too  often 
with  Montgomery-Massingberd  to  have  a 
chance  of  being  reconMnended  as  his  suc- 
cessor by  the  outgoing  chief  of  the  imperial 
general  staff. 

'Jock'  Stuart,  as  he  was  generally  known 
in  the  army,  was  a  man  of  sparkling  mind, 
lively  imagination,  and  long  if  variable 
vision.  He  had  an  impish  turn  of  humour, 
which  handicapped  his  progress  but 
together  with  his  informality  of  manner 
made  him  much  beloved  by  his  subor- 
dinates. Although  he  could  be  devastating 
in  criticism  and  witticism,  he  was  re- 
markably free  from  malice.  He  was 
appointed  C.B.  (1917),  K.C.B.  (1932),  and 
G.C.B.  (1937),  C.M.G.  (1916),  and  K.B.E. 
(1923). 

In  1904  he  married  Nina,  only  daughter 
of  Major  A.  A.  C.  Hibbert  Nelson ;  they 
had  one  son  and  two  daughters.  He  died  at 
Avington  Park  near  Winchester  6  October 
1958.  A  portrait  by  Dennis  Styles  is  in  the 
possession  of  the  family.  .  ^Jf  >fil 

[B.  H.  Liddell  Hart,  The  Tanks,  i^ol.% 
1959 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

B.  H.  Liddell  Hart. 

BURRELL,  Sir  WILLIAM  (1861-1958), 
art  collector,  was  born  in  Glasgow  9  July 
1861,  the  third  son  of  WiUiam  Burrell,  a 
shipowner,  and  his  wife,  Isabella  Duncan 
Guthrie,  and  grandson  of  George  Burrell, 
the  founder  of  the  shipping  firm  later 
known  as  Burrell  &  Son  which  Burrell 
joined  at  the  age  of  fifteen.  In  1877  one 
of  the  firm's  ships  salvaged  Cleopatra's 
Needle  which  had  been  lost  in  the  Bay  of 
Biscay  on  its  passage  to  England.  For 
many  years  Burrell  managed  the  family 
business  in  conjunction  with  his  eldest 
brother,  and  the  firm  greatly  prospered 
under  his  vigorous  direction,  reaching  its 
peak  activity  in  1915  when  it  owned 
thirty  ships  all  of  over  four  thousand  gross 
tonnage.  Burrell,  however,  determined  to 
devote  the  remainder  of  his  long  Ufe  to  art 
and  by  1917,  when  he  was  fifty-six,  almost 
the  entire  fleet  had  been  sold. 

Burrell's  interest  in  art  had  shown  itself, 
he  used  to  recall,  as  a  boy  when,  to  his 
father's  annoyance,  he  had  used  his 
pocket  money  to  buy  not  a  cricket  bat  but 
a  picture.  Realizing  that  it  was  not  very 


8652062 


161 


Burrell 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


good  he  had  later  sold  it  to  buy  a  better 
one.  By  1901  he  was  already  the  owner 
of  a  considerable  collection,  not  only  of 
pictures  (including  works  by  Gericault, 
Daumier,  and  Manet),  but  of  tapestries, 
stained-glass,  Iranian  carpets,  furniture, 
metalwork,  and  carvings  in  wood  and 
ivory.  In  that  year  he  lent  over  160  works 
of  art  to  the  International  Exliibition  in 
Glasgow  for  which  he  was  an  active  com- 
mittee member. 

At  this  time  his  interests  were  by  no 
means  confined  to  shipping  and  art.  He 
served  in  the  corporation  of  Glasgow  as 
a  representative  of  the  tenth  ward  (1899- 
1906)  and  became  convener  of  a  sub- 
committee on  uninhabitable  houses,  back 
lands,  and  underground  dwellings,  retir- 
ing, it  is  said,  because  the  policy  of  slum 
clearance  he  advocated  was  not  con- 
sidered acceptable.  Until  1906  he  also 
acted  as  consul  at  Glasgow  for  Austria- 
Hungary. 

In  1916  Burrell  acquired  Hutton  Castle 
near  Berwick-on-Tweed,  previously  the 
home  of  Lord  Tweedmouth  who  had 
largely  rebuilt  and  added  to  the  ancient 
castle.  Burrell  made  further  additions  to 
the  structure  and  entirely  remodelled  the 
interior.  He  and  his  wife  went  to  reside 
there  about  ten  years  later,  by  which  time 
the  castle  was  sumptuously  furnished 
throughout  with  works  of  art,  many  of 
which  were  built  into  the  fabric  of  the 
rooms.  As  the  collection  continued  to 
grow  it  soon  outstripped  the  accommoda- 
tion available  in  the  castle  and  for  many 
years  much  of  it  was  widely  dispersed 
on  loan  to  many  different  art  galleries, 
museums,  and  cathedrals,  including  the 
national  galleries  of  Scotland,  England, 
and  Wales.  In  1925  Burrell  presented  over 
sixty  paintings  and  drawings  to  the 
Glasgow  Art  Gallery,  and  for  several 
years  a  large  number  of  his  pictures  were 
on  loan  to  the  Tate  Gallery.  Donations 
were  also  made  to  other  galleries. 

The  great  collection  which  Burrell  pre- 
sented to  the  city  of  Glasgow  in  1944,  and 
to  which  he  added  lavishly  every  year  un- 
til the  end  of  his  life,  may  be  summarized 
under  the  following  heads:  (1)  the  art  of 
ancient  civilizations,  including  Sumerian, 
Egyptian,  Greek,  and  Roman  antiquities ; 
(2)  oriental  art  of  the  Far  and  Near  East 
including  Chinese  pottery,  bronzes,  and 
jades,  and  Iranian  carpets,  pottery,  and 
metalwork;  (3)  European  art  of  the 
medieval  and  post-medieval  periods  in- 
cluding tapestries,  stained-glass,  furni- 
ture, stone,  wood,   and  ivory  carvings, 


embroideries  and  lace,  pottery,  arms  and 
armour,  glassware,  treen,  silver  and  metal- 
ware;  (4)  between  seven  and  eight 
hundred  paintings,  drawings,  and  engrav- 
ings, chiefly  by  European  artists  of  the 
fifteenth  to  the  nineteenth  centuries ;  the 
collection  also  includes  the  largest  single 
assemblage  of  works  (132)  by  Joseph 
Crawhall  (1861-1913),  a  large  number  of 
drawings  by  Phil  May  [q.v.],  and  a  quan- 
tity of  Japanese  prints. 

Burrell's  most  abiding  interest  was 
probably  centred  in  the  art  of  the  later 
Middle  Ages  and  Renaissance,  and  the 
collection  of  Franco-Flemish,  German, 
Swiss,  and  English  tapestries  of  the  four- 
teenth to  sixteenth  centuries  has  been 
considered  the  finest  of  its  kind,  while  that 
of  English,  French,  German,  Dutch,  and 
Swiss  stained  and  painted  glass  of  the 
twelfth  to  seventeenth  centuries  is  even 
more  extensive  and  hardly  less  remark- 
able. Largest  of  all  is  the  collection  of 
Chinese  pottery  and  porcelain  which  com- 
prises a  magnificent  range  of  wares  dating 
from  the  earliest  known  neolithic  vessels 
to  the  brilliantly  enamelled  vessels  and 
figures  of  the  reign  of  K'ang  Hsi  (1662- 
1722).  The  furniture,  silver,  and  needle- 
work is  chiefly  English  of  the  sixteenth 
and  seventeenth  centuries. 

Beginning  in  1911  the  twenty-eight 
notebooks  in  which  Burrell  recorded  his 
acquisitions  and  payments  continue  in 
unbroken  sequence  until  a  few  months 
prior  to  his  death.  They  show  that  for 
almost  half  a  century  he  was  spending  on 
an  average  at  least  £20,000  a  year  on 
acquiring  works  of  art.  After  6  April  1944 
when  the  collection  as  it  then  stood  be- 
came the  property  of  Glasgow,  he  con- 
tinued to  acquire  on  an  equally  grand  or 
even  grander  scale.  The  year  1948,  when 
he  spent  over  £60,000,  probably  represents 
his  highest  expenditure  in  any  one  year, 
with  the  exception  of  1936  when  he  spent 
almost  £80,000. 

To  his  great  gift  to  Glasgow  Burrell 
added  the  sum  of  £450,000  to  build  a  new 
museum  to  house  the  collection  in  an  area 
of  the  Scottish  countryside  not  less  than 
sixteen  miles  from  the  centre  of  the  city 
and  within  four  miles  of  Killearn.  This 
condition  proved  difficult  to  honour,  and 
apart  from  the  selections  on  permanent 
or  changing  display  in  the  municipal  art 
gallery  and  museum  at  Kelvingrove,  the 
collection  remained  in  store.  The  exhibi- 
tion of  the  tapestries  and  other  textiles  in 
Glasgow  is  precluded  by  their  suscepti- 
bility to  damage  in  polluted  air.  But  in 


162 


,D.N,B.  1951-1960 


Burrows 


1966  PoUok  House  and  Estate  on  the 
southern  outskirts  of  the  city  were  pre- 
sented to  Glasgow,  and  it  was  proposed  to 
erect  a  museum  for  the  Burrell  Collection 
on  the  estate. 

Like  many  wealthy  men,  Burrell  was  of 
reserved  character,  and  in  the  midst  of  the 
beautiful  objects  which  filled  his  home, 
he  led  a  comparatively  frugal  existence. 
Starting  as  a  private  collector,  he  became, 
during  thirty  or  more  years,  a  collector  for 
posterity  rather  than  for  himself,  but  in 
spite  of  its  size  he  always  preserved  a  keen 
intellectual  and  artistic  interest  in  his  col- 
lection, about  which  he  had  read  widely 
and  for  the  details  of  which  he  had  an 
excellent  memory.  By  nature  he  was 
clearly  attracted  by  vigour  of  form  and 
colour  rather  than  by  elegance,  and  as  a 
consequence  the  collection  is  rich  in  works 
of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  cen- 
turies, but  deficient  in  those  of  the  eigh- 
teenth. Numbering  about  eight  thousand 
objects  and  valued  at  almost  two  million 
pounds,  the  collection  was  probably  one  of 
the  largest  ever  assembled  by  one  man, 
and  certainly  the  largest  given  to  a 
municipality. 

For  many  years  Burrell  was  a  trustee  of 
the  Tate  Gallery  and  from  1923  to  1946  of 
the  National  Gallery  of  Scotland.  He  was 
knighted  in  1927  for  his  services  to  art ; 
received  the  freedom  of  the  city  of  Glas- 
gow in  1944,  and  the  St.  Mungo  prize  in 
1946. 

In  1901  Burrell  married  Constance  Mary 
Lockhart  (died  1961),  daughter  of  James 
Lockhart  Mitchell,  merchant;  they  had 
one  daughter.  He  died  at  Hutton  Castle  29 
March  1958. 

[The  Times  and  Glasgow  Herald,  31  March 
1958 ;  D.  S.  Leslie,  Notes  on  Hutton  Parish, 
1934;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] W.  Wells. 

BURROWS,  CHRISTINE  MARY 
ELIZABETH  (1872-1959),  principal  suc- 
cessively of  St.  Hilda's  Hall  (later  College) 
and  the  Oxford  Home-Students  (later  St. 
Anne's  College),  was  born  in  Chipping 
Norton,  Oxfordshire,  4  January  1872,  the 
only  and  posthumous  child  of  Henry 
Parker  Burrows,  a  partner  in  the  firm  of 
Langton's  Breweries,  Maidenhead,  and  of 
his  wife,  Esther  Elizabeth  Bliss.  Her  child- 
hood was  spent  among  her  Bliss  relations 
— a  family  long  connected  with  the  wool- 
len industry  of  Chipping  Norton.  Educated 
first  at  Cheltenham  Ladies'  College,  under 
its  redoubtable  foundress,  Dorothea  Beale 
[q.v.],   she  proceeded  in   1891   to  Lady 


Margaret  Hall,  Oxford,  to  read  modern 
history.  At  the  end  of  her  second  year  she 
was  summoned  to  assist  her  mother,  just 
appointed  principal  of  St.  Hilda's  Hall,  a 
new  foundation  conceived  by  Miss  Beale 
as  an  Oxford  extension  of  Cheltenham 
College. 

Though  Miss  Burrows  always  preserved 
a  warm  affection  for  the  first  of  her  three 
Oxford  'colleges'  and  for  its  briUiant  head. 
Dame  Elizabeth  Wordsworth  [q.v.],  it  was 
to  St.  Hilda's  that,  from  the  date  of  her 
migration,  she  gave  her  fullest  devotion. 
As  'senior  student',  despite  the  claims  of 
her  own  studies,  she  was  of  the  greatest 
service  to  her  mother,  who  was  new  to 
Oxford  traditions.  In  1894  she  obtained  a 
second  class  and  was  appointed  tutor  in 
modern  history  and  in  1896  she  became 
vice -principal  of  the  Hall.  It  was  due  to 
her  ability,  as  both  teacher  and  adminis- 
trator, that  St.  Hilda's — for  some  time 
small  in  numbers — was  before  long  ac- 
cepted on  equal  terms  among  the  other 
women's  foundations.  In  1910  she  suc- 
ceeded her  mother  as  principal,  and 
directed  the  fortunes  of  St.  Hilda's 
through  a  period  of  steady  growth  and 
distinction — set  back  by  the  war  of  1914-  « 
18  but  sharing  in  the  general  'enfranchise^ 
ment'  of  women  which  followed.  At  school 
and  college  she  had  come  under  the 
influence  of  pioneers  in  women's  educa- 
tion and  of  notable  men  teachers  who  gave 
time  to  set  the  new  movement  on  its  way. 
Her  generation  produced  many  of  the 
tutors  and  administrators  who  guided 
women's  education  until  the  final  granting 
of  Oxford  degrees  to  women  in  1920. 

In  July  1919,  however,  she  retired  from 
St.  Hilda's  in  order  to  live  with  her 
mother,  whose  health  was  failing.  But  in 
1921  she  resumed  academic  work  as  princi- 
pal of  the  Oxford  Home-Students — a  post 
which  could  be  combined  with  residence  in 
her  own  home  with  Mrs.  Burrows.  To  this 
new  and  exacting  work  she  gave  the  ut- 
most of  her  mature  powers.  The  Society  of 
Oxford  Home-Students  had  been  fostered 
from  small  beginnings  by  its  first  principal, 
Mrs.  Bertha  Johnson.  It  was  large  in 
numbers,  vital  in  spirit,  proud  of,  if  some- 
what sensitive  about,  its  own  peculiarities. 
It  had  no  real  constitution,  and  no  real 
buildings — the  students  living  mainly  in 
their  own  homes  or  in  other  private 
houses.  It  was  poor  financially,  and  had 
no  regular  system  of  payment  for  its 
tutors.  Shortly  after  the  admission  of 
women  to  the  university,  a  delegacy  for 
home-students  was  set  up,  including  ex 


163 


Burrows 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


officio  the  vice-chancellor,  the  proctors, 
and  the  principal,  who  thus  acquired  full 
university  status.  (The  degree  of  M.A.  was 
also  conferred  upon  her  by  decree.)  Thanks 
to  prolonged  effort  on  the  part  of  this 
delegacy,  both  the  financial  and  the  educa- 
tional sides  of  the  Society  were  placed  on 
a  more  secure  basis.  The  building-up  of  a 
strong  tutorial  staff  with  definite  powers 
and  duties  owed  much  to  Miss  Burrows's 
personal  experience  and  initiative. 

Perhaps  the  most  striking  features  of 
her  principalship  were  her  strong  interest 
in  study  and  teaching  and  her  pastoral 
care  for  individuals.  Skill,  humour,  and 
patience  were  required  to  handle  the  new 
relation  of  girl  undergraduates  to  the 
discipline  of  the  proctors — ^the  latter  al- 
most nervously  vigilant  over  the  women 
whose  quiet  'coexistence'  had  been  ig- 
nored by  the  university  until  it  admitted 
them  to  full  membership.  If  this  discipline 
was  sometimes  irksome  to  high-spirited 
post-war  young  women,  its  acceptance  was 
assured  by  the  kindness  and  good  sense 
with  which  it  was  administered  by  Miss 
Burrows;  while  every  year  brought  out 
more  clearly  her  own  high  standard  of  life 
and  her  grasp  of  the  principles  which 
should  govern  women  in  the  new  careers 
opening  before  them. 

The  eight  years  of  her  second  principal- 
ship  were  thus  not  as  creative  as  those  at 
St.  Hilda's.  It  was  not  pioneer  work  which 
was  needed,  but  the  capacity  to  adapt  and 
consoHdate.  The  whole  was  quiet  and 
unspectacular,  with  one  notable  excep- 
tion. In  1928  came  the  offer  of  the  bene- 
faction which  has  since  contributed  to  the 
emergence  of  the  Society  into  St.  Anne's 
College.  Made  at  first  rather  fumblingly 
by  a  generous  but  inexperienced  bene- 
factress (Mrs.  Amy  Hartland),  the  offer 
called  for  tact  and  courtesy  on  the  part  of 
the  beneficiaries.  In  this  Miss  Burrows 
played  a  valuable  part,  although  the 
moment  for  action  had  not  arrived  when 
the  increasing  pull  of  family  duty  caused 
her  to  tender  her  resignation  in  1929. 

Notable  as  having  twice  been  a  college 
principal  and  having  twice  resigned  for 
purely  unselfish  reasons,  Christine  Bur- 
rows was  even  more  notable  to  her  friends 
for  her  tireless  kindness  and  courtesy  and 
for  her  life  of  humility,  faith,  and  sheer 
goodness.  She  continued  to  live  in  Oxford 
for  the  last  thirty  years  of  her  life,  quietly 
devoting  herself  to  movements  for  the 
development  of  women's  powers  and  use- 
fulness. A  member  of  the  Archbishops' 
commission  on  the  place  of  women  in  the 


Church,  she  signed  the  report  but  never 
wavered  in  the  hope  that  the  ordination  of 
women  would  come  in  due  time.  She  was 
an  active  member  of  the  English-Speaking 
Union  and  of  the  Oxford  branch  of  the 
British  Federation  of  University  Women, 
and  was  an  incomparable  guide  to  Oxford, 
delighting  to  explain  its  history  and 
treasures  to  visitors  from  overseas  and 
especially  to  soldiers  in  wartime.  She  was 
an  honorary  fellow  of  both  St.  Hilda's  and 
St.  Anne's,  and  gave  faithful  service  to  the 
senior  members'  associations  of  St.  Hilda's 
and  Cheltenham  colleges,  besides  keeping 
in  touch  personally  with  large  numbers  of 
ex-pupils  and  students.  She  contributed 
a  full  and  careful  article  on  St.  Hilda's 
College  to  the  Victoria  County  History  of 
Oxfordshire  (vol.  iii,  1954). 

Christine  Burrows  died  in  Oxford  10 
September  1959.  A  crayon  drawing  by 
Leslie  Brooke  (1919)  and  an  oil-portrait 
by  Catherine  Ouless  (1928)  are  possessed 
by  St.  Hilda's  and  St.  Anne's  owns  a 
chalk  portrait  by  Jane  de  Glehn  (1929). 

[The  Times,  11  September  1959 ;  St.  Hilda's 
College  Chronicle,  1959-60;  The  Ship  (Year 
Book  of  St.  Anne's  College),  1959;  R.  F. 
Butler,  History  of  St.  Anne's  College,  1958 ; 
personal  knowledge.]  Ruth  F.  Butler. 

BURTON,  Sir  MONTAGUE  MAURICE 

(1885-1952),  multiple  tailor,  was  born  of 
Jewish  parentage,  15  August  1885,  at 
Kurkel,  Lithuania,  the  only  son  of  Charles 
Judah  Burton,  bookseller,  by  his  wife, 
Rachel  Edith  Ashe.  Having  received  his 
early  education  in  the  country  of  his  birth, 
he  came  alone  to  England  in  1900,  the 
proud  possessor  of  £100,  given  to  him  by 
a  wealthy  aunt.  Soon  after  his  arrival  he 
took  to  the  road  as  a  commercial  traveller. 
He  was  later  employed  as  a  salesman  in 
a  tailor's  shop  and,  in  1903,  at  the 
early  age  of  eighteen,  he  commenced 
business  on  his  own  account  as  a  general 
outfitter  in  Chesterfield  where  he  traded 
as  the  Castle  Clothing  Co.  in  the  sale  of 
men's,  women's,  and  children's  wear. 

Burton  was  a  man  of  immense  energy 
and  great  imagination  which  he  soon 
turned  to  the  creation  of  what  was  to  be- 
come the  largest  men's  clothing  organiza- 
tion in  the  world.  His  primary  aim  was 
to  attract  the  masses  by  offering  them 
well-made  clothes  of  good  quality  at  the 
cheapest  possible  prices  and  he  caused 
something  of  a  sensation  by  opening  a 
number  of  men's  tailor  shops  in  the  north 
of  England — ^there  were  five  by  1913 — 
where  suits  or  overcoats  made  to  measure 


164 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Burton 


were  all  sold  at  the  fixed  price  of  30s.  His 
headquarters  were  in  Sheffield,  to  which 
orders  from  the  other  four  shops  were 
posted;  every  Sunday  Burton  took  the 
orders  to  Leeds  where  he  bought  the  cloth 
and  linings  and  arranged  for  one  of  the 
many  master  tailors  there  to  make  up  the 
garments.  In  order  to  reduce  the  cost  of 
making  the  clothes  he  decided  to  become 
his  own  master  tailor  and  in  1913  ac- 
quired his  first  factory  where  he  employed 
approximately  fifty  workers.  In  the  next 
two  years  he  made  enormous  strides  and 
by  1915  he  had  opened  a  new  factory  in 
Leeds  where  he  employed  five  hundred 
people. 

The  war  years  saw  most  of  the  pro- 
duction harnessed  to  the  manufacture  of 
uniforms  but  by  1920  Burton  had  so  re- 
established his  business  that  he  had 
opened  four  additional  factories  making 
clothes  for  his  retail  shops  which  by  this 
time  numbered  no  fewer  than  two  hun- 
dred. He  decided  that  the  time  had  come 
to  eliminate  the  middle  man  and  buy  yarn 
direct  from  the  spinner  and  make  his 
own  arrangements  to  have  it  woven  to  his 
designs.  Some  years  later  his  mills  not 
only  made  a  great  deal  of  cloth,  but  linings, 
facings,  and  buttons  were  also  manufac- 
tured on  his  own  premises.  When  the 
business  became  a  public  company  in  1929 
with  a  capital  of  four  million  pounds,  the 
niunber  of  shops  had  grown  to  four  hun- 
dred. By  1939  the  company  was  employ- 
ing some  twenty  thousand  men  and  women 
in  the  factories  and  an  additional  four 
thousand  in  the  retail  shops.  At  the  time 
of  his  death  the  number  of  shops  had 
grown  to  over  six  hundred  and  he  was 
well  on  the  way  to  his  life's  ambition  of 
having  a  thousand  Burton  shops  in  Great 
Britain.  A  quarter  of  all  the  uniforms  pro- 
vided in  this  country  in  the  war  of  1939- 
45  were  made  by  his  company,  as  were  a 
third  of  the  clothes  issued  on  demobiliza- 
tion. 

Although  Burton  constantly  sought  new 
ways  of  reducing  expenses  he  always 
maintained  that  low  wages  were  a  false 
economy  and  from  1921  he  was  able  to 
claim  that  he  paid  the  highest  wages  in 
the  tailoring  trade  in  Europe.  He  insisted 
on  working  conditions  of  the  highest 
possible  standard.  When  he  entered  the 
industry  conditions  were  appalling:  long 
hours,  pitifully  low  wages,  and  workrooms 
which  defied  description.  Burton  may  be 
numbered  among  the  great  pioneers  in  the 
field  of  industrial  welfare.  In  the  twenties 
he  equipped  his  factories  with  canteens 


— ^the  principal  factory  in  Leeds  can 
accommodate  eight  thousand  at  one 
sitting — the  services  of  doctors,  dentists, 
opticians,  and  even  chiropodists,  sports 
fields,  and  indeed,  a  savings  bank  which 
paid  interest  at  five  per  cent.  In  addition 
he  encouraged  the  foundation  of  dramatic 
and  operatic  societies. 

Throughout  his  life  Burton  had  a  pas- 
sion for  peace — peace  in  industry  and 
peace  between  nations.  He  believed  that 
all  industrial  disputes  should  be  the  sub- 
ject of  compulsory  arbitration.  He  was  a 
firm  supporter  of  organized  labour  and 
very  much  in  favour  of  collective  bargain- 
ing. During  the  fifty  years  in  which  he  was 
in  business  he  experienced  only  two  strikes 
in  his  factory — the  first  in  1927  and  the 
second  in  1936  whilst  he  was  in  the 
Philippines.  The  latter,  which  lasted  three 
weeks,  was  in  respect  of  a  claim  for  an  in- 
crease of  one  halfpenny  per  garment  by  a 
group  of  twenty  employees  out  of  a  total 
of  ten  thousand  in  the  factory,  and  there 
is  little  doubt  that  had  Burton  been  in 
England  it  would  never  have  taken  place. 

Burton  endowed  a  number  of  chairs  and 
lectureships  in  industrial  relations  in  the 
universities,  and  not  unnaturally  his  first 
choice  was  Leeds,  where  a  chair  was 
established  in  1929.  It  was  followed  by  one 
at  Cardiff  in  the  same  year  and  another 
at  Cambridge  in  1930.  He  also  endowed 
chairs  in  international  relations  in  Jerusa- 
lem (1929),  Oxford  (1930),  and  Edinburgh 
(1948),  and  public  lectureships  at  Notting- 
ham (1930)  and  Leeds  (1942).  In  1936  he 
gave  financial  support  to  a  chair  in  inter- 
national relations  at  London  University 
which  was  named  after  him.  It  had 
originally  been  established  in  1923  by 
means  of  five-year  grants  renewed  by  the 
trustees  of  Sir  Ernest  Cassel  [q.v.].  Burton 
was  immensely  interested  in  the  League  of 
Nations  and  unsuccessfully  tried  to  ensure 
that  the  appointment  of  this  professor 
should  be  made  in  consultation  with  the 
president  and  chairman  of  the  League.  In 
1922  he  had  founded  a  branch  of  the 
League  of  Nations  Union  for  his  em- 
ployees in  Leeds  and  regular  monthly 
luncheon  meetings  were  held  at  which 
members  of  both  Houses  of  Parliament 
and  other  prominent  persons  were  invited 
to  speak.  This  branch,  which  in  1945  was 
absorbed  by  the  United  Nations  Associa- 
tion, was  and  remained  thfe  largest  in  the 
country. 

Deeply  interested  in  peoples  and  coun- 
tries. Burton  had  an  insatiable  thirst  for 
travel.   In   1930   he   was  invited  to  be 


165 


Burton 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


the  chairman  of  the  Industrial  Welfare 
Society  delegation  to  the  United  States 
and  Canada  and  in  1936  he  was  the  dele- 
gate of  the  Leeds  Incorporated  Chamber  of 
Commerce  at  the  Federation  of  Common- 
wealth and  British  Empire  Chambers  of 
Commerce  at  Wellington,  New  Zealand. 
He  went  round  the  world  four  times  and 
was  immensely  impressed  by  much  that  he 
saw.  Not  unnaturally  he  was  attracted  in 
1943  to  the  concept  of  a  world  federation 
of  nations  initiated  by  the  British  Com- 
monwealth and  the  United  States.  He  was 
a  Liberal  and  envisaged  a  world  state 
where  there  would  be  free  trade,  one 
language,  and  one  currency,  compulsory 
industrial  arbitration,  and  a  tribunal  to 
decide  inter-federal  disputes  whose  de- 
cisions could  if  necessary  be  implemented 
by  a  federal  force. 

He  published  two  volumes  of  diaries,  in 
the  form  of  letters  written  to  his  daughter 
whilst  he  was  travelling,  entitled  Globe 
Girdling  (1936-8),  and  was  delighted  when 
he  was  elected  a  member  of  the  P.E.N. 
Club  in  1944.  He  was  a  voracious  reader, 
particularly  of  the  classics;  another 
relaxation  was  family  bridge.  A  man 
of  simple  tastes,  he  was  almost  a  tee- 
totaller and  a  non-smoker,  with  an  intense 
dislike  of  all  forms  of  gambling.  He  had  a 
passion  for  fresh  air  and  exercise  and  every 
morning  at  half-past  eight  he  played  nine 
holes  of  golf  before  he  started  a  long  day's 
work  which  often  ended  in  the  early  hours 
of  the  following  morning.  When  he  was  at 
sea  he  would  walk  three  miles  round  the 
ship  twice  a  day.  For  very  many  years  he 
conducted  his  business  from  the  library 
in  his  house,  keeping  in  touch  with  the 
departments  by  private  Une.  In  order  to 
spend  the  maximum  time  in  the  open  air 
he  had  telephone  points  on  the  roof  so  that 
he  and  his  secretaries  might  work  there  in 
reasonably  fine  weather. 

Burton  was  a  member  of  the  council  of 
the  university  of  Leeds  from  1929  and  re- 
ceived the  honorary  degree  of  LL.D.  in 
1944,  the  year  in  which  he  endowed  there 
a  lectureship  in  modern  and  medieval 
Hebrew.  Although  he  sat  regularly  as  a 
justice  of  the  peace  for  the  city  of  Leeds 
from  1924  he  took  little  or  no  part  in  pub- 
lic life.  None  the  less  in  1930  he  received 
an  invitation  from  representatives  of  all  the 
political  parties  to  be  lord  mayor  of  Leeds, 
although  he  was  not  even  a  member  of  the 
city  council.  In  1931  he  was  knighted  for 
his  services  to  industrial  relationships. 

A  humble  and  self-effacing  man  Burton 
disliked  any  kind  of  ostentation  or  per- 


sonal publicity.  Although  in  fifty  years  he 
had  seen  his  business  grow  from  one  shop 
to  over  six  hundred,  he  never  seemed  to 
learn  the  lesson  of  delegation.  The  result 
was  that  he  carried  the  whole  burden  of 
his  vast  organization  on  his  own  shoulders 
until  the  very  moment  of  his  death,  which 
took  place  in  Leeds,  21  September  1952, 
while  he  was  addressing  a  gathering  of  his 
staff. 

In  1909  Burton  married  Sophia  Amelia 
(died  1957),  daughter  of  Maurice  Marks, 
dealer  in  antiques  and  furniture  in  Work- 
sop. They  had  one  daughter  and  three 
sons.  A  portrait  by  Reginald  G.  Lewis 
hangs  in  the  board-room  at  Leeds. 

[Private  information.]         David  Karmel. 

BUTLER,  Sir  HAROLD  BERESFORD 

(1883-1951),  public  servant,  was  born  in 
Oxford  6  October  1883,  the  elder  son  of 
Alfred  Joshua  Butler,  the  Coptic  scholar, 
by  his  wife,  Constance  Mary  Heywood,  a 
granddaughter  of  Marcus  G.  Beresford 
[q.v.],  archbishop  of  Armagh.  The  aca- 
demic atmosphere  in  which  Butler  was 
brought  up  profoundly  influenced  both 
his  personality  and  his  career.  He  was  a 
scholar  of  Eton  and  a  Brackenbury 
scholar  and  Jenkyns  exhibitioner  of 
Balliol  College,  Oxford.  After  obtaining  a 
first  class  in  literae  humaniores  he  was 
elected  a  fellow  of  AH  Souls  in  1905. 

Butler's  early  ambition  was  to  enter  the 
Foreign  Office  and  after  a  year  at  All 
Souls  he  went  to  Germany  and  France 
where  he  obtained  a  knowledge  of  the 
languages  and  an  insight  into  the  charac- 
teristics of  the  peoples  which  later  proved 
of  great  value  to  him.  There  were,  how- 
ever, no  vacancies  in  the  Foreign  Office 
and  Butler  entered  the  Local  Government 
Board  in  1907,  transferring  to  the  Home 
Office  in  the  following  year.  In  1910  he  had 
his  first  experience  of  international  work 
as  secretary  to  the  British  delegation  to 
the  conference  on  aerial  navigation.  Al- 
though he  was  a  captain  in  the  Inns  of 
Court  O.T.C.,  Butler  was  refused  per- 
mission to  join  the  forces  on  the  outbreak 
of  war.  His  section  of  the  Home  Office, 
concerned  with  blockade  measures,  was 
ultimately  merged  with  the  corresponding 
section  of  the  Foreign  Office  as  the  Foreign 
Trade  Department,  of  which  he  became 
secretary  in  1916.  A  year  later  he  was 
transferred  to  the  newly  created  Ministry 
of  Labour.  While  still  keeping  in  touch 
with  his  old  chief  (Sir)  Malcolm  Dele- 
vingne  [q.v.]  at  the  Home  Office,  he 
prepared  with  the  help  of  Edward  Phelan, 


166 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Butler,  H.  B. 


who  later  like  Butler  became  director  of 
the  International  Labour  Office,  a  pro- 
gramme for  the  labour  section  of  the  peace 
conference  which  with  little  change  of  sub- 
stance became  the  constitution  of  the 
International  Labour  Organization. 

After  the  adoption  by  the  conference 
of  the  labour  section  of  the  treaty,  Butler 
was  appointed  secretary  of  the  organizing 
committee  of  the  first  Labour  Conference 
and  later  secretary-general  of  the  Con- 
ference. The  first  of  these  two  positions 
involved  the  elaboration  of  the  principles 
on  which  a  conference  including  repre- 
sentatives of  governments,  employers,  and 
workers  should  be  conducted,  a  task  for 
which  there  were  no  precedents.  The  pro- 
posals submitted  to  the  Conference  have 
in  the  main  been  applied  ever  since. 

The  Conference  met  in  difficult  circum- 
stances as  not  only  had  the  Organization 
neither  funds  nor  staff,  but  the  American 
Government,  on  whose  invitation  it  took 
place  in  Washington,  failed  to  ratify  the 
peace  treaty  and  was  luiable  to  send  an 
official  delegation.  It  was  largely  owing 
to  Butler's  diplomatic  and  administrative 
skill  that  the  Conference  not  only  achieved 
its  purpose  but  also  laid  the  foundations 
for  all  subsequent  conferences.  Although 
there  were  obvious  objections  to  men  of 
the  same  nationality  holding  the  senior 
posts  in  both  the  League  of  Nations  (of 
which  Sir  Eric  Drummond,  later  the  Earl 
of  Perth  [q.v.],  was  the  first  secretary- 
general)  and  the  International  Labour 
Office,  Butler  missed  being  elected  pro- 
visional director  of  the  Office  by  a  narrow 
margin;  he  was  subsequently  appointed 
deputy  director  by  Albert  Thomas,  under 
whom  he  served  with  devoted  loyalty. 
As  deputy  he  was  responsible  for  admini- 
stration and  finance  and  was  able  to 
build  up  an  efficient  international  staff 
and  to  counteract  any  tendency  to 
over-centralization. 

Butler  succeeded  Thomas  as  director 
in  1932  in  the  depths  of  the  depression 
which  made  international  co-operation  in- 
creasingly difficult.  Nevertheless,  during 
his  six  years  as  director  he  developed  the 
Office  along  lines  which  later  proved  to 
have  been  well  chosen.  His  first  concern 
was  to  induce  America  to  join  the 
Organization,  which  she  did  in  1934. 
Believing  that  the  centre  of  gravity  in  the 
world  was  shifting  away  from  Europe, 
Butler  travelled  widely  himself,  sent  his 
staff  to  give  technical  advice  to  overseas 
governments,  established  an  overseas 
section  of  the  Office  and  in  1934  induced 


the  Conference  to  enlarge  the  governing 
body  so  that  seven  non-European  coun- 
tries were  among  the  sixteen  governments 
represented.  He  also  initiated  regional 
conferences  in  the  belief  that  many  of  the 
problems  with  which  the  Office  had  to 
deal  were  of  regional  rather  than  universal 
significance.  He  made  one  other  major 
contribution  to  the  policy  of  the  Office  by 
insisting  that  it  should  pay  attention  to 
the  economic  conditions  which  lay  behind 
the  social  problems  with  which  it  was 
immediately  concerned. 

In  1938  Butler  resigned  and  shortly 
afterwards  accepted  the  post  of  first  warden 
of  Nuffield  College,  Oxford.  Although  he 
seemed  eminently  qualified  for  this  posi- 
tion owing  to  his  academic  training,  his 
exceptional  knowledge  of  social  problems 
throughout  the  world,  and  his  wide 
acquaintance  with  leaders  of  industry  and 
labour,  he  never  had  any  real  opportunity 
to  put  his  qualifications  to  the  test.  He 
only  assumed  his  functions  at  the  begin- 
ning of  1939  and  immediately  on  the 
outbreak  of  war  was  appointed  southern 
regional  commissioner  for  civil  defence. 
He  could  do  little  more  during  his  short 
period  at  Nuffield  than  think  out  plans  for 
the  future. 

While  engaged  on  his  war  work  he 
found  time  to  write  the  first  of  his  three 
books,  The  Lost  Peace  (1941).  This  was 
followed  in  1947  by  Peace  or  Power  and 
in  1950  by  Confident  Morning,  the  first 
volume  of  an  uncompleted  autobiography. 

In  1942  Butler  went  to  Washington  to 
take  charge  of  the  British  Information 
Service  with  the  diplomatic  rank  of  minis- 
ter, a  position  in  which  his  capacity  to 
write,  his  objectivity,  and  wide  Imowledge 
of  the  political  world  stood  him  in  good 
stead.  After  his  retirement  in  1946  he  took 
an  active  part  in  the  movement  for  closer 
European  co-operation. 

Butler  had  an  ardent  belief  in  the  Inter- 
national Labour  Organization  and  in  the 
need  for  international  co-operation,  and 
it  was  in  endeavouring  to  give  reality  to 
this  belief  that  he  found  his  greatest  satis- 
faction. He  had,  however,  few  illusions 
about  the  pace  at  which  the  world  would 
evolve  towards  a  world  society.  He  was  a 
man  of  vision,  but  not  a  visionary;  a  con- 
servative with  strong  labour  sympathies 
and  a  man  of  deep-rooted  principles. 

In  1910  Butler  married  Olive,  daughter 
of  Samuel  Abraham  Walker  Waters,  assis- 
tant inspector-general  of  the  Royal  Irish 
Constabulary,  of  Stillorgan,  county  Dub- 
lin. His  wife  aided  him  greatly  in  the 


167 


Butler,  H.  B. 


D.N.B.  1931-1960 


social  side  of  his  official  duties.  They  had 
oiie  daughter  and  two  sons ;  the  younger, 
R.  D'O.  Butler,  also  became  a  fellow  of 
AH  Souls,  and  editor  of  Documents  on 
British  Foreign  Policy.  Butler  was  ap- 
pointed C.B.  in  1919  and  K.C.M.G.  in 
1946.  There  is  a  portrait  of  him  by  Frank 
Eastman  in  Nuffield  College  which  is  an 
exceptionally  good  likeness.  He  died  in 
Reading  26  March  1951. 

[International  Labour  Review,  April  1931 ; 
Sir  Harold  Butler,  Confident  Morning,  1950 ; 
The  Times,  28  March  1951 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.]  A.  Loveday. 

BUTLER,  Sir  MONTAGU  SHERARD 
DAWES  (1878-1952),  Indian  administra- 
tor and  master  of  Pembroke  College,  Cam- 
bridge, born  in  Harrow  19  May  1873,  was 
the  third  son  of  Spencer  Perceval  Butler, 
barrister,  of  Lincoln's  Inn,  later  con- 
veyancing counsel  to  the  High  Court  of 
Justice  and  the  Office  of  Works,  by  his 
wife,  Mary,  only  child  of  the  Rev.  Nicholas 
Kendall,  of  Bodmin.  He  belonged  to  a 
family  famous  in  the  annals  of  Cambridge 
scholarship.  His  grandfather,  George  But- 
ler [q.v.],  had  been  senior  wrangler  in  1794 
and  afterwards  headmaster  of  Harrow  and 
dean  of  Peterborough;  his  uncle,  Henry 
Montagu  Butler  [q.v.],  was  senior  classic 
in  1855  and  afterwards  headmaster  of 
Harrow  and  master  of  Trinity.  A.  G. 
Butler  and  George  Butler  (died  1890) 
[qq.v.]  were  also  uncles ;  Sir  S.  H.  Butler 
and  Sir  G.  -G.  G.  Butler  [qq.v.]  were 
brothers. 

Montagu  Butler  was  at  school  at  Hailey- 
bury  and  was  admitted  to  Pembroke 
College,  Cambridge,  in  1891.  There  he  lived 
a  full  life:  he  gained  first  classes  in  both 
parts  of  the  classical  tripos  (1894-5)  with 
distinction  in  the  second  part;  he  was 
president  of  the  Union,  coxswain  of  the 
college  boat,  and  one  of  the  founders  of 
the  May  week  ball.  Elected  into  a  fellow- 
ship in  1895,  he  nevertheless  decided,  after 
long  talks  with  his  tutor,  Leonard  Whib- 
ley  [q.v.],  to  enter  the  public  service  and 
in  the  following  year  he  was  awarded  the 
Bhaunagar  medal,  given  to  the  candidate 
standing  highest  on  the  examination  list 
for  the  Indian  Civil  Service. 

Late  in  1896  he  was  sent  out  to  the 
Punjab,  where  his  administrative  ability 
was  quickly  recognized.  He  was  settle- 
ment officer  of  the  Kotah  State  in  1904-9 
and  in  1912-15  was  joint  secretary  of  the 
royal  commission  on  the  public  services  in 
India.  During  the  war  of  1914-18,  when 
he  was  deputy  conmiissioner  of  Attock,  he 


was  active  in  the  recruitment  drive  for  the 
Indian  Army  in  the  Punjab.  In  1921,  the 
period  of  the  Montagu-Chelmsford  re- 
forms, he  became  president  of  the  legisla- 
tive council  of  the  province.  In  the  next 
year  he  was  appointed  secretary  to  the 
Government  of  India  in  the  department  of 
education,  health,  and  lands,  and  in  1924 
he  was  made  president  of  the  Council  of 
State. 

In  the  following  year  he  was  transferred 
to  Nagpur  as  governor  of  the  Central 
Provinces  and  had  to  face  the  many 
problems  created  by  the  non-co-operation 
movement.  Throughout  his  career,  and 
whatever  his  job,  Butler  aimed  always 
at  government  by  agreement  and  would 
exercise  infinite  patience  in  the  reconcilia- 
tion of  opposing  views.  He  drove  a  wedge 
into  the  phalanx  of  non-co-operation  by 
appointing  a  Swarajist  leader  as  home 
member  and  succeeded  in  bringing  other 
non-co-operators  into  responsible  posts. 
During  his  second  term  of  office  as  gover- 
nor he  was  confronted  by  a  revival  of  civil 
disobedience  and  endeavoured,  wherever 
possible,  to  deal  with  offenders  under  the 
ordinary  law,  without  invoking  the  aid  of 
the  special  powers  given  by  the  Govern- 
ment of  India. 

Butler's  consistent  record  of  work  for 
the  welfare  of  India  was  recognized  by  the 
award  of  the  CLE.  (1909),  C.V.O.  (1911), 
C.B.  (1916),  C.B.E.  (1919),  and  a  knight- 
hood and  the  K.C.S.I.  (1924).  In  1938  he 
resigned  to  become  lieutenant-governor  of 
the  Isle  of  Man.  To  the  problems  of  the 
island  he  applied,  without  delay,  the  same 
energy,  thoroughness,  and  tact  that  he  had 
displayed  in  the  Central  Provinces.  His 
insistence  on  a  balanced  budget  provoked 
some  preliminary  opposition,  but  it  was 
not  long  before  his  measures  of  reform 
were  accepted  as  sound  and  beneficent.  He 
was  happy  enough  during  his  four  years 
at  Douglas,  but  of  his  many  appointments 
none  gave  him  such  intense  pleasure  as  his 
election  to  the  mastership  of  Pembroke  in 
1937.  Through  all  his  time  in  India  his 
love  of  the  college  had  remained  constant. 
He  had  been  made  an  honorary  fellow  in 
1925  and  had  sent  both  his  sons  there. 
When  he  returned  himself,  he  was  far 
from  regarding  the  mastership  as  a  pro- 
vision of  leisure  for  a  retired  public  ser- 
vant. Pembroke  was  only  just  beginning 
to  recover  from  a  series  of  disastrous  losses 
in  1935,  and,  in  particular,  Butler  set  about 
reorganizing  its  finances  con  amore.  He 
was  too  wise,  after  an  absence  of  forty 
years,  to  interfere  unduly  in  matters  of 


168 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Buxton 


purely  scholastic  policy;  but  the  univer- 
sity and  the  borough  (as  it  then  was)  were 
quick  to  utilize  his  administrative  capaci- 
ties and  experience  and  he  willingly  ac- 
cepted invitations  to  serve  on  the  borough 
council  as  well  as  on  the  council  of  the 
senate  and  the  financial  board  of  the 
university. 

The  outbreak  of  war  upset  many  of  his 
plans  for  the  college,  but  it  served  to 
intensify  rather  than  to  diminish  his 
activity.  Shortly  after  his  election  to  the 
mayoralty  of  Cambridge  in  November 
1941,  he  insisted  on  making  a  tour  of 
A.R.P.  posts  in  the  blackout  and  was 
knocked  over  by  an  ambulance.  His  in- 
juries were  severe ;  but  when  he  recovered 
he  had  no  hesitation  in  accepting  the  pro- 
longation of  his  mayoralty  for  another 
year.  Similarly,  he  was  delighted  when  the 
college  extended  his  tenure  of  the  master- 
ship to  the  statutory  limit.  He  retired  in 
1948,  but  even  then  retained  his  seat  on 
the  borough  council  as  an  alderman,  for 
public  service  was  not  only  his  occupation, 
but  his  hobby.  He  died  suddenly  in  Cam- 
bridge 7  November  1952. 

In  all  his  varied  work,  Butler  was 
greatly  fortified  by  his  marriage  in  1901  to 
Anne  Gertrude  (died  1953),  daughter  of 
George  Smith,  C.I.E.,  and  sister  of  Sir 
George  Adam  Smith  [q.v.].  She  was  a 
woman  of  great  charm  and  a  hostess  of 
exceptional  grace  and  skill.  There  were 
two  sons  and  two  daughters  of  the  mar- 
riage, the  elder  son  being  R.  A.  Butler 
(later  Lord  Butler  of  Saffron  Walden),  in 
whose  achievements  his  parents,  who  lived 
to  see  him  become  chancellor  of  the 
Exchequer,  took  great  pride.  He  became 
master  of  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  in 
1965.  The  younger  son,  J.  P.  (Jock) 
Butler,  who  had  entered  upon  a  career  of 
public  service  in  the  Home  Office,  was 
killed  in  1943,  almost  immediately  after 
being  commissioned  in  the  Royal  Air 
Force. 

A  drawing  of  Montagu  Butler  by 
Francis  Dodd  hangs  in  the  parlour  of 
Pembroke  College. 

[The  Times,  8  November  1952;  personal 
knowledge.]  S.  C.  Roberts. 

BUXTON,  PATRICK  ALFRED  (1892- 
1955),  medical  entomologist,  was  born  in 
London  24  March  1892,  the  eldest  of  three 
children  of  Alfred  Fowell  Buxton,  banker 
and  chairman  (1916-17)  of  the  London 
County  Council,  by  his  wife,  Violet,  daugh- 
ter of  the  Very  Rev.  Thomas  William 
Jex-Blake  [q.v.].  His  forebears  had  been 


prominent  in  business,  philanthropy,  and 
social  reform,  among  them  his  great- 
grandfather Sir  Thomas  Fowell  Buxton, 
the  philanthropist,  and  Sydney  Charles, 
Earl  Buxton  [qq.v.]. 

After  undistinguished  and  somewhat 
unhappy  schooldays  at  Rugby,  lightened 
only  by  his  consuming  interest  in  natural 
history,  Buxton  entered  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge,  graduated  with  first  class 
honours  in  both  parts  of  the  natural 
sciences  tripos  (1914^-15),  and  in  1916  was 
elected  into  a  college  fellowship  on  a  piece 
of  undergraduate  research  completed  in 
difficult  wartime  conditions.  He  qualified 
in  medicine  from  St.  George's  Hospital  in 
1917,  took  up  a  commission  in  the  Royal 
Army  Medical  Corps,  and  was  posted 
to  Mesopotamia  and  north-west  Persia, 
where  he  devoted  as  much  time  as  possible 
to  natural  history.  In  1921  he  was  ap- 
pointed entomologist  to  the  medical  de- 
partment in  Palestine;  then  from  1923 
to  1926  he  led  a  research  expedition,  on 
filariasis  in  Samoa,  on  behalf  of  the  Lon* 
don  School  of  Tropical  Medicine.  On  his 
return  to  London  in  1926,  Buxton  was 
appointed  head  of  the  department  of 
entomology  in  the  new  London  School  of 
Hygiene  and  Tropical  Medicine,  becoming 
professor  in  the  university  of  London  in 
1933,  where  he  remained  until  his  death. 

Buxton  was  one  of  the  most  widely 
travelled  biologists  of  his  time.  He  was  by 
profession  a  medical  entomologist,  but  as 
soon  as  he  attained  a  position  of  influence 
at  the  London  School  of  Hygiene  and 
Tropical  Medicine  he  gave  a  new  direction 
to  his  subject  by  insisting  on  the  necessity 
for  basing  applied  entomology  on  a 
scientific  understanding  of  the  physiology 
of  insects.  By  his  own  researches  in  this 
field,  and  by  his  example  and  the  appoint- 
ments and  opportunities  which  he  secured 
for  others,  he  did  much  to  spread  these 
ideas.  In  his  own  hands  they  made  their 
impact  on  the  study  of  mosquitoes  and 
filariasis  in  the  South  Pacific,  of  plague 
fleas  in  Palestine,  of  the  tsetse  fly  in 
Nigeria,  of  the  human  louse  in  many  parts 
of  the  world.  On  the  outbreak  of  war  in 
1939  Buxton  concentrated  all  his  energies 
on  the  improvement  of  insect  control  in 
the  armed  forces  and  in  civilian  life  under 
wartime  conditions.  He  established  close 
relations  with  the  Service  medical  depart- 
ments and  organized  series  of  lectures  to 
nurses  and  shelter  marshals.  He  played  an 
influential  part  on  the  many  official  com- 
mittees dealing  with  insecticide  research 
and    development.    His    own    work    on 


160 


Buxton 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


improved  methods  for  dealing  with  the 
louse  problem  prepared  the  way  for  the 
early  exploitation  of  the  new  insecticide 
DDT. 

Although  his  scientific  publications 
covered  a  wide  field  of  anthropology,  ap- 
plied (medical)  entomology,  and  insect 
physiology,  his  real  flair  and  his  chief 
distinction  lay  in  his  contributions  to 
natural  history.  His  experiences  in  north- 
west Persia  and  in  Palestine  during  and 
after  the  first  war  led  to  the  publication 
of  what  he  himself  called  that  Vigorous 
young  man's  book'  on  Animal  Life  in 
Deserts  (1923).  This  attractive  work  has 
become  a  classic ;  reprinted  in  1955  it  has 
been  continuously  in  demand  for  half  a 
century.  During  the  expedition  to  Samoa 
he  and  his  colleague  G.  H.  E.  Hopkins 
made  exhaustive  collections  of  the  insect 
fauna  of  the  island,  which  formed  the 
basis  of  the  Insects  of  Samoa  published  by 
the  British  Museum  in  1927-35.  During 
the  thirties  Buxton  was  working  on  a  text- 
book of  medical  entomology,  one  chapter 
of  which  developed  into  a  very  useful  war- 
time book  on  The  Louse  (1939).  The  sec- 
tion on  the  tsetse  flies  grew  until  it  formed 
Buxton's  magnum  opus,  The  Natural  His- 
tory of  Tsetse  Flies  (1955). 

Buxton  had  a  strong  and  distinctive 
personality.  Completely  honest,  con- 
siderate, and  helpful  to  others,  and  with  a 
quick  wit  and  a  lively  sense  of  humour,  he 
yet  had  an  ironic  and  somewhat  sarcastic 
manner  which  could  strongly  antagonize 
those  who  did  not  see  beyond  it.  His 
interests  were  at  once  broad  and  narrow. 
He  was  intensely  interested  in  all  sides  of 
the  natural  history  of  plants  and  animals, 
in  geography,  meteorology,  and  in  the  life 
of  primitive  peoples  and  their  languages, 
and  he  was  an  enthusiastic  and  esoteric 
gardener.  All  this  was  combined  with  a 
dislike  of  music,  of  poetry  and  philosophy, 
and  a  curious  lack  of  interest  in  scientific 
generalizations.  He  had  a  fine  command  of 
EngUsh  and  wrote  in  a  lucid  unaffected 
style;  and  he  was  equally  effective  as  a 
speaker,  with  a  vivid  descriptive  power 
and  a  way  of  presenting  even  familiar 
matters  in  a  new  light. 

Buxton  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1943 ;  was 
twice  president  of  the  Royal  Entomologi- 
cal Society  of  London  (1942-3  and  1953- 
5) ;  was  awarded  the  Mary  Kingsley  medal 
of  the  Liverpool  School  of  Tropical  Medi- 
cine in  1949  and  the  gold  medal  of  the 
Linnean  Society  in  1953.  He  was  appointed 
C.M.G.  in  1947. 

In  1917  he  married  Muryell  Gladys, 


daughter  of  the  Rev.  William  Talbot 
Rice,  vicar  of  St.  Paul's,  Onslow  Square 
(1919-35).  They  had  two  sons  and  four 
daughters.  The  second  son,  Andrew,  who 
bore  a  strong  resemblance  to  his  father, 
alone  took  up  a  career  in  science  and  was 
making  a  promising  start  as  a  medical 
entomologist  in  Central  Africa  when  he 
was  struck  down  by  poliomyelitis  and  died 
three  years  before  the  death  of  his  father 
which  took  place  at  Gerrards  Cross  13 
December  1955. 

[V.  B.  Wigglesworth  in  Biographical 
Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ii, 
1956;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] V.  B.  Wigglesworth. 

CABLE,  (ALICE)  MILDRED  (1878- 
1952),  missionary,  was  born  in  Guildford 
21  February  1878,  the  daughter  of  John 
Cable,  master  draper,  and  his  wife,  Eliza 
Kindred.  Educated  at  Guildford  High 
School,  from  her  early  days  she  felt  a  mis- 
sionary vocation,  and  with  a  view  to  join- 
ing the  China  Inland  Mission  she  followed 
a  course  of  medical  studies  in  London. 
Learning  that  China  might  be  closed  fol- 
lowing the  Boxer  rising  of  1900  she  left 
England  to  work  in  Shansi  province  where 
in  1902  she  joined  Evangeline  French 
[q.v.],  already  a  seasoned  missionary  who 
had  almost  lost  her  life  in  the  rising.  At 
Hwochow  they  were  engaged  in  educa- 
tional work  for  girls  and  were  later  joined 
by  Francesca  French  [q.v.].  The  lives  of 
the  'trio'  were  henceforth  so  closely  re- 
lated that  it  is  almost  impossible  to 
separate  their  individual  stories.  Their 
venture  at  Hwochow  prospered  and  the 
school  of  a  dozen  illiterate  girls  became  a 
large  institution  graded  from  kindergarten 
to  teacher  training. 

In  1923,  however,  the  trio  at  their  own 
request  were  permitted  by  the  China  In- 
land Mission  to  obey  a  call  which  over  the 
years  had  become  increasingly  insistent. 
Henceforth  they  were  together  to  follow 
the  desert  trade  routes  in  order  to  take  the 
Gospel  to  the  scattered  oases  of  the  Gobi. 
To  and  fro  they  trekked  by  cart,  by  camel, 
and  on  foot  across  the  desert,  visiting  the 
bazaars  and  oases  of  Central  Asia,  meet- 
ing people  of  many  races  and  different 
tongues.  The  trio  themselves  spoke  Chinese 
and  Turki  languages,  and  for  fifteen  years 
they  travelled,  considering  it  a  primary 
duty  that  'if  no  more  could  be  done  for 
these  people,  certainly  no  less  was  owed 
to  them  than  to  place  a  Gospel  in  each 
man's- hand  written  in  his  mother-tongue'. 
Local  people  learned  to  love  them.  Mos- 


170 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Caird 


lems  respected  them  for  what  Mildred 
Cable  once  called  'the  combination  of  our 
grey  hairs,  celibate  state,  and  pilgrim  life'. 

They  were  not  only  missionaries  but 
explorers.  Each  time  they  returned  to 
England  on  leave,  scientific  societies  and 
universities  invited  them  to  lecture,  for 
they  had  gathered  a  great  deal  of  unique 
interest  to  the  geographer,  the  archaeolo- 
gist, and  the  philologist.  They  were  jointly 
awarded  the  Livingstone  medal  of  the 
Royal  Scottish  Geographical  Society  in 
1943  and  Mildred  Cable  was  awarded  the 
Lawrence  memorial  medal  for  1942  by  the 
Royal  Central  Asian  Society.  Moreover,  in 
the  unsettled  state  of  China  at  that  time 
there  was  peril  and  danger  for  the  travel- 
ler. But  the  trio  was  a  unique  partnership 
in  faith  and  achievement,  in  courage  and 
endurance,  and  their  names  became  known 
throughout  the  Christian  world.  From 
their  experiences  they  reported  amongst 
other  things  that  'the  Bible  Society  took 
on  an  importance  which  we  could  never 
have  realized  so  long  as  we  lived  amongst 
a  people  all  of  whom  spoke  one  language'. 

With  further  political  changes  taking 
place  in  Central  Asia,  they  had  to  leave 
their  pioneering  work  and  they  returned 
home  shortly  before  the  outbreak  of  war  in 
1939.  Mildred  Cable  and  Francesca  French 
joined  the  Bible  Society  Committee  and 
did  extensive  voluntary  deputation  work 
in  Britain.  For  the  next  twelve  years  they 
toured  the  towns  and  cities  of  Britain, 
speaking  at  conferences,  public  meetings, 
eventually  building  up  the  women's  work 
of  the  Bible  Society.  By  their  broadcasts, 
but  principally  by  their  books  and  meet- 
ings, they  touched  the  imagination  of  post- 
war Britain.  They  travelled  also  to  India, 
Australia,  New  Zealand,  and  later  South 
America,  visiting  and  advocating  the 
claims  of  the  spread  of  the  Christian  gos- 
pel. In  all  this  Ufetime  of  activity  Mildred 
Cable  manifested  great  gifts  of  leadership 
and  keen  insight  into  missionary  strategy. 
She  was  a  forceful  speaker  and  shared  both 
platform  and  authorship  with  Francesca 
French.  Together  they  published  some 
twenty  books,  amongst  which  the  best 
known  are  Through  Jade  Gate  and  Central 
Asia  (1927),  Something  Happened  (1933), 
A  Desert  Journal  (1934),  The  Gobi  Desert 
(1942),  China:  Her  Life  and  Her  People 
(1946),  and  Journey  with  a  Purpose 
(1950). 

Mildred  Cable  died  in  London  30  April 
1952.  A  portrait  by  E.  O.  Fearnley- 
Whittingstall  is  at  the  headquarters  of  the 
British  and  Foreign  Bible  Society. 


[VV.  J.  Piatt,  Three  Women,  1964;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

W.  J.  Platt. 

CAIRD,  Sir  JAMES,  baronet,  of  Glen- 
farquhar,  county  Kincardine  (1864-1954), 
shipowner  and  a  founder  of  the  National 
Maritime  Museum,  was  born  in  Glasgow 
2  January  1864,  the  elder  son  in  a  family 
of  six  of  James  Caird,  lawyer,  by  his  wife, 
Mary  Ann  Hutcheson.  Educated  at  Glas- 
gow Academy,  he  joined  the  firm  of 
William  Graham  &  Co.,  East  India  mer- 
chants, in  1878.  Eleven  years  later  he  went 
to  London  and  in  1890  joined  Turnbull, 
Martin  &  Co.,  managers  of  the  Scottish 
Shire  Line  of  steamships.  By  hard  work 
and  enterprise  he  prospered,  and  in  twelve 
months  was  made  manager.  By  1903  he 
was  sole  partner  and  owner  of  the  Scottish 
Shire  Line,  and  in  co-operation  with  the 
Houlder  and  Federal  lines  he  opened  up 
the  trade  between  the  west  coast  of  Eng- 
land and  the  Antipodes.  Early  in  1916  he 
started  a  new  shipyard  at  Chepstow  to 
build  standard  ships  quickly  where  enemy 
attacks  could  not  interfere  with  produc- 
tion. Overcoming  immense  difficulties,  the 
venture  succeeded  so  well  that  in  1917  the 
Government  stepped  in  and  bought  out 
Caird  and  his  associates.  Foreseeing  the 
slump  in  shipping  which  would  follow  the 
end  of  the  war  Caird  in  the  same  year  sold 
to  the  Clan  Line  his  interest  in  the  Shire 
Line  and  Turnbull,  Martin  &  Co.  He  re- 
mained a  director  of  some  twenty-five 
companies  connected  with  shipping,  ship- 
building, ship  repairing  and  allied  in- 
dustries, as  well  as  being  chairman  of  the 
Smithfield  and  Argentine  Meat  Company, 
in  which  he  held  a  large  block  of  founders' 
shares. 

By  now  Caird  was  a  comparatively  rich 
man  and  from  the  early  twenties  he  de- 
voted a  large  part  of  his  fortune  to  pre- 
serving British  naval  and  shipping 
memorials,  to  which  he  became  pas- 
sionately devoted.  It  was  he  who  provided 
most  of  the  money  needed  to  repair  and 
restore  H.M.S.  Victory  with  an  initial  sum 
of  £50,000  to  start  the  work  and  a  further 
£15,000  to  enable  it  to  continue.  In  1927 
steps  were  being  taken  to  found  a  national 
museum  of  the  sea,  a  venture  to  which 
Caird  gave  his  wholehearted  and  energetic 
support.  Under  the  chairmanship  of  the 
seventh  Earl  Stanhope,  and  in  association 
with  the  Society  for  Nautical  Research, 
with  its  honorary  secretary  (Sir)  Geoffrey 
Callender  [q.v.],  a  board  of  trustees,  of 
whom  Caird  was  one,  was  set  up  to  found 
the  new  museum.  The  realization  of  this 


171 


Caird 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


project  became  possible  when  the  Royal 
Hospital  School  moved  to  Holbrook  and 
the  old  school  buildings  at  Greenwich,  in- 
cluding the  Queen's  House,  became  vacant. 
Caird  then  guaranteed  to  meet  the  whole 
cost  (amounting  eventually  to  over 
£80,000)  of  converting  the  buildings.  In 
addition,  he  began  purchasing  every 
available  collection  or  individual  item  of 
maritime  historical  interest.  Thus  the 
Macpherson  collection  of  sea  pictures  and 
the  Mercury  collection  of  ships'  models 
were  secured,  and  to  these  he  added  his 
own  collections.  During  the  second  reading 
of  the  national  maritime  museum  bill  in 
the  House  of  Commons  in  June  1934  it 
was  stated  that  the  collections  Caird  had 
already  offered  to  the  nation  were  worth 
more  than  £300,000. 

The  new  museum  was  opened  by  King 
George  VI  in  April  1937  and  Caird  con- 
tinued his  never-flagging  interest  and 
support.  In  all,  including  the  Caird  Fund 
which  he  set  up  to  provide  an  endowment 
income  to  finance  purchases,  he  gave  more 
than  a  million  and  a  quarter  poimds  to  the 
museum.  To  the  last,  when  he  became  too 
ill  to  take  an  active  part,  he  continued 
to  shower  his  gifts  upon  it,  fiUing  with 
treasures  the  spacious  galleries  which  bear 
his  name.  Nor  were  the  museum  and 
H.M.S.  Victory  alone  in  benefiting  from  his 
generosity.  The  historic  74-gun  ship-of- 
the-line  H.M.S.  Implacable  was  also  saved 
by  him  in  the  years  between  the  wars.  To 
museums  and  art  galleries  in  his  native 
Scotland  he  was  a  generous  benefactor; 
and  in  the  war  of  1939-45  he  provided  the 
cost  of  a  complete  ambulance  unit.  To  his 
parish  church,  St.  Mary's,  Wimbledon, 
his  gifts  included  a  house  for  the  curate 
and  money  for  the  new  church  spire. 

Caird  was  stocky  in  stature,  tough  and 
wiry,  with  immense  energy,  a  shrewd  ex- 
pression, a  merry  twinkle  in  his  eye,  and  a 
delightful  Scots  voice.  He  was  the  kindliest 
of  men,  generous  almost  to  a  fault,  but 
never  making  a  show  of  his  benefactions, 
shrouding  his  greatest  gifts  in  secrecy,  and 
never  seeking  any  reward.  He  neverthe- 
less loved  to  drive  a  hard  bargain  and 
could  not  bear  to  be  'had';  but  he  was 
always  scrupulously  fair  and  often  gave 
more  than  was  asked  when  he  thought 
the  seller  might  be  in  need,  or  even  that 
a  dealer  was  not  taking  sufficient  profit. 

Until  his  illness  in  1949  Caird  continued 
to  attend  his  office  in  the  City  daily.  He 
was  extremely  alert  and  had  an  excellent 
memory.  He  celebrated  his  eightieth  birth- 
day at  his  home  in  Scotland  by  bringing 


down  a  'royal'  after  a  long  day's  stalk 
which  many  a  younger  man  would  have 
given  up.  It  was  this  wonderful  vitahty 
and  his  simple  way  of  living  which  en- 
deared him  so  much  to  all  around  him 
at  Glenfarquhar,  Fordoun,  where  he  dis- 
pensed quiet  yet  generous  hospitality  in 
which  gillies,  keepers,  shepherds,  and 
guests  shared  alike. 

In  1928  Caird  was  created  a  baronet; 
and  after  the  opening  of  the  new  museum 
in  1937  Neville  Chamberlain  wanted  to 
submit  his  name  for  a  peerage,  but  Caird 
refused,  saying  that  he  did  not  want 
reward  for  what  he  had  done  for  and  given 
to  the  nation. 

Caird  married  in  1894  Henrietta  Anna 
(died  1953),  daughter  of  William  Henry 
Stephens,  architect,  of  Ardshane,  Holy- 
wood,  county  Down.  They  had  one  daugh- 
ter but  no  son  and  on  Caird's  death  at  his 
home  in  Wimbledon,  27  September  1954, 
the  baronetcy  became  extinct.  A  bust  by 
Sir  William  Reid  Dick  is  in  the  National 
Maritime  Museum. 

James  Caird  is  not  to  be  confused  with 
another  philanthropist.  Sir  James  Key 
Caird  (1837-1916),  who  helped  to  finance 
the  Shackleton  expedition  of  1914-16. 

[Syren  and  Shipping,  4  September  1946  and 
6  October  1954 ;  private  information ;  personal 
knowledge,]  Frank  G.  G.  Carr. 

CAIRNS,  Sir  HUGH  WILLIAM  BELL 

(1896-1952),  neurosurgeon,  was  born  at 
Port  Pirie,  South  Australia,  26  June  1896, 
the  only  son  of  William  Cairns,  a  Scots- 
man who  worked  in  the  timber  industry, 
and  his  wife.  Amy  Florence  Bell.  He  was 
educated  at  Adelaide  High  School  and 
University  where,  returning  from  military 
service,  he  qualified  M.B.,  B.S.  in  1917 ;  he 
became  a  captain  in  the  Australian  Army 
Medical  Corps  and  served  in  France. 
Elected  a  Rhodes  scholar  in  1917,  he  went 
into  residence  at  Balliol  in  1919,  studied 
physiology,  demonstrated  anatomy,  and 
rowed,  getting  his  blue  in  the  Oxford  crew 
of  1920.  He  then  trained  in  the  London 
Hospital  as  a  house-surgeon  and  house- 
physician  and  remained  as  a  surgeon  assis- 
tant. He  was  elected  F.R.C.S.  in  1921  and 
was  Hunterian  professor  in  1926.  A  Rocke- 
feller travelling  fellowship  took  him  in 
1926-7  to  Boston  to  work  with  Harvey 
Cushing,  and  he  then  made  the  courageous 
decision  to  seek  a  career  in  neurosurgery  in 
London. 

Returning  to  the  London  Hospital, 
Cairns  by  1932  had  established  the  neuro- 
surgical   unit    which    was     his     special 


172 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Caldecott 


ambition,  and  here  he  had  some  valuable 
colleagues  in  George  Riddoch,  Russell 
(later  Lord)  Brain,  H.  M.  Turnbull  [q.v.], 
and  Dorothy  Russell.  He  was  one  of  a  hand- 
ful of  British  surgeons  who  brought  a  new 
surgical  technique  to  Britain  from  Gushing 
in  Boston,  and  his  special  report  on 
Cushing's  cases  was  published  by  the 
Medical  Research  Coiuicil  in  1929;  his 
further  report  in  1936  was  outstanding. 
With  Sir  Geoffrey  Jefferson  at  Manchester 
and  Professor  N.  M.  Dott  at  Edinburgh, 
Cairns  helped  to  form  a  school  of  British 
neurological  surgery  which  became  second 
to  none. 

By  1930  Cairns  was  beginning  to  think 
of  a  special  medical  centre  for  cUnicians 
where  there  were  good  opportunities  for 
research,  and  he  felt  that  it  should  be 
in  Oxford.  After  six  years  of  planning 
Lord  Nuffield  endowed  a  medical  research 
school  there  and  in  1937  Cairns  became  the 
first  professor  of  surgery  and  a  fellow  of 
BalUol.  But  the  war  came  in  1939  and 
Cairns  directed  nearly  all  his  efforts  to- 
wards establishing  a  really  good  neuro- 
surgical service  for  the  army,  to  which 
he  was  consultant  neurosurgeon  with  the 
rank  of  brigadier.  With  (Sir)  Charles 
Symonds  he  organized  a  special  hospital 
for  head  injuries  which  from  1940  to  1945 
occupied  the  premises  of  St.  Hugh's  Col- 
lege, Oxford.  He  was  involved  in  such 
developments  as  the  establishment  of 
well-equipped  mobile  surgical  units,  the 
introduction  of  the  compulsory  wearing  of 
helmets  by  army  motor-cychsts,  and  the 
first  trials  of  peniciUin  in  the  field. 

After  the  war  Cairns  returned  with 
enthusiasm  to  the  task  of  developing  the 
cUnical  side  of  the  Oxford  medical  school. 
Many  new  developments  arose  from  his 
far-sighted  ideas  and  his  vigorous  initia- 
tive. His  early  death  at  the  height  of  his 
powers  was  a  disaster  to  Oxford  medicine 
for  it  happened  at  a  particularly  sensitive 
stage  of  post-war  planning  for  which  his 
leadership  would  have  been  invaluable. 
He  was  a  stimulating  companion,  and  was 
always  searching  for  new  ideas.  Although 
not  particularly  original,  he  was  an  en- 
thusiastic supporter  of  research  and  an 
excellent  judge  of  men;  many  of  the 
world's  leading  neurosurgeons  were  trained 
by  him.  He  himself  had  been  the  first 
surgeon  in  England  to  remove  a  pineal 
txunour ;  and  towards  the  end  of  his  Ufe  he 
was  greatly  interested  in  the  alleviation  of 
mental  disease  by  surgery.  He  wrote  over 
a  hundred  papers  for  medical  and  neuro- 
logical journals,  a  list  of  which  appears  in 


Sir  Geoffrey  Jefferson's  memoir.  Cairns  was 
Sims  Commonwealth  professor  (1947-8) ; 
president  of  the  Society  of  Neurological 
Surgeons  (1946-8) ;  Victor  Horsley  lecturer 
(1949) ;  and  was  appointed  K.B.E.  in  1946. 

'Hugo'  Cairns  was  tall  and  handsome 
with  a  keen  but  engaging  and  friendly 
manner.  He  applied  intense  concentration 
to  all  he  did  and  even  played  tennis  as 
though  his  life  depended  on  it.  Yet  he  pre- 
ferred his  household  and  his  amusements 
to  remain  entirely  simple;  many  of  his 
juniors  will  remember  visits  to  Wytham 
Woods  with  enormous  saws  and  axes.  Here 
his  fine  physique  dominated  the  scene  and 
he  soon  exhausted  his  companions.  He  was 
devoted  to  music  and  was  often  obliged  to 
restrain  his  inclination  to  become  ab- 
sorbed in  it. 

In  1921  Cairns  married  Barbara  Forster, 
youngest  daughter  of  A.  L.  Smith  [q.v.], 
master  of  Balliol ;  they  had  two  sons  and 
two  daughters.  Cairns  died  in  Oxford  18 
July  1952. 

[Sir  Geoffrey  Jefferson,  'Memories  of  Hugh 
Cairns',  Journal  of  Neurology,  Neurosurgery 
and  Psychiatry,  vol.  xxii,  No.  3,  August  1959 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

W.  RiTCHiK  Russell. 

CALDECOTT,  Sir  ANDREW  (1884- 
1951),  colonial  governor,  was  born  at 
Boxley,  Kent,  26  October  1884,  the  eldest 
son  of  the  Rev.  Andrew  Caldecott  by  his 
wife,  Isobel,  daughter  of  the  Rev.  Sten- 
ning  Johnson.  He  was  educated  at  Upping- 
ham and  at  Exeter  College,  Oxford,  of 
which  he  was  a  scholar  and  later  (1948)  an 
honorary  fellow.  He  was  awarded  a  third 
class  in  classical  honour  moderations  and, 
in  1907,  a  second  class  in  literae  humaniores. 
In  that  year  he  joined  the  Malayan  Civil 
Service;  after  holding  various  posts  he 
was  appointed  in  1923  Malayan  commis- 
sioner for  the  Wembley  exhibition  of  the 
following  year.  After  serving  successively 
as  resident  in  Negri  Sembilan,  Perak,  and 
Selangor,  he  was  promoted  to  be  chief 
secretary,  Federated  Malay  States,  in 
1931,  and  in  1933  colonial  secretary  of  the 
Straits  Settlements.  In  1934  he  acted  as 
officer  administering  the  government, 
Straits  Settlements,  and  high  conunis- 
sioner  for  the  Malay  States.  The  sympathy 
and  understanding  which  accompanied  his 
great  administrative  abihty,  and  his  wise 
and  tactful  handling  of  racial  issues,  earned 
him  a  respect  and  popularity  rarely 
equalled. 

In  1935  Caldecott  was  ap|)ointed  gover- 
nor of  Hong  Kong  where  be  was  equally 


173 


Caldecott 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


popular,  and  strong  representations  were 
made  for  him  to  remain  when  in  1937  he 
was  offered  the  governorship  of  Ceylon. 
Caldecott  was  clearly  sent  to  Ceylon  to 
smooth  the  way  for  further  advance  at 
a  time  when  agitation  for  constitutional 
reform  was  intense.  In  November  1937  he 
was  instructed  to  sound  opinion  and  to 
recommend  amendments  to  the  constitu- 
tion. His  'Reforms  Despatch'  of  June  1938 
was  written  with  a  vigour  and  directness 
unusual  in  official  documents:  it  led  to 
prolonged  discussion  in  the  State  Council, 
but  to  no  general  agreement,  the  basic 
difficulty,  as  always,  being  the  question  of 
minority  representation.  The  outbreak  of 
war  halted  consideration  of  constitutional 
advance,  but  Caldecott  was  convinced 
that  if  Ceylon's  war  effort  were  to  be  main- 
tained a  positive  approach  was  required. 
On  his  recommendation  the  British 
Government  in  1941,  and  again  in  1943, 
promised  a  commission  on  constitutional 
reform  as  soon  as  the  war  ended;  and  a 
commission  was  in  fact  appointed  in  1944, 
the  year  in  which  Caldecott  retired. 

In  the  meantime  he  set  himself  out  to  be 
a  constitutional  governor,  an  objective 
misunderstood  by  certain  sections  of  the 
European  community  which  failed  to  see, 
with  his  clarity,  that  early  self-government 
was  inevitable.  His  aims  were  more 
clearly  appreciated  by  the  local  politicians, 
such  as  D.  S.  Senanayake  [q.v.],  and  he 
soon  earned  their  respect  and  confidence. 
That  Ceylon  remained  stable  during  the 
critical  war  years  was  largely  due  to  his 
leadership.  The  sudden  appointment, 
after  the  fall  of  Malaya,  of  Admiral  Sir 
Geoffrey  Layton  as  commander-in-chief 
in  place  of  the  governor  nearly  led  to 
Caldecott's  resignation;  happily  this 
step  was  not  taken  and  the  two  men, 
temperamentally  so  different,  worked 
harmoniously  together  to  the  great 
benefit  of  Ceylon. 

A  brilliant,  far-sighted  administrator, 
but  withal  warm-hearted  and  with  a  quick 
intelligence  tempered  by  a  human  sym- 
pathy and  understanding,  Caldecott  was 
ideally  suited  for  the  task  of  helping  to 
transform  empire  into  commonwealth. 
Ceylon  owed  to  him  much  of  her  trouble- 
free  progress  towards  the  independence 
which  she  attained  in  1948.  Artistically 
gifted,  Caldecott  painted,  was  a  skilled 
pianist,  had  a  happy  talent  for  light  verse, 
and  in  his  Malayan  days  wrote  several 
witty  burlesques ;  he  published  two  books 
of  uneasy  stories:  Not  Exactly  Ghosts 
(1947)  and  Fire*  Burn  Blue  (1948). 


Caldecott  was  appointed  C.B.E.  (1926), 
C.M.G.  (1932),  was  knighted  in  1935,  and 
appointed  K.C.M.G.  (1937)  and  G.C.M.G. 
(1941).  He  was  made  a  knight  of  grace  of 
St.  John  of  Jerusalem  in  1936  and  was 
awarded  the  Silver  Wolf  in  1943  for  his 
services  to  scouting.  He  was  twice  mar- 
ried: first,  in  1918,  to  Olive  Mary  (died 
1943),  daughter  of  John  Robert  Innes,  of 
the  Malayan  Civil  Service,  by  whom  he 
had  a  daughter  and  a  son;  secondly,  in 
1946,  to  Evelyn  May,  widow  of  Dr.  J, 
Robertson  and  daughter  of  Canon  H. 
Palmer. 

Caldecott  died  1 4  July  1 95 1  at  his  home  at 
Itchenor,  Sussex.  An  unconventional  por- 
trait by  David  Paynter,  the  Ceylon  artist, 
was  presented  by  Caldecott  to  Queen's 
House,  Colombo;  a  portrait  by  John 
Napper  is  in  the  possession  of  his  son. 
A  memorial  window,  commissioned  by 
his  widow,  is  in  Itchenor  church. 

[The  Times,  16  July  1951;  Ceylon  Daily 
News,  16  July  1951 ;  British  Malaya,  August 
1951;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] John  O'Regan. 

CALMAN,  WILLIAM  THOMAS  (1871- 
1952),  zoologist,  was  born  in  Dundee  29 
December  1871,  the  only  son  and  elder 
child  of  Thomas  Caiman,  music  teacher, 
and  his  wife,  Agnes  Beatts  Maclean.  His 
father's  people  were  chiefly  ship  masters 
or  shipbuilders  who  a  generation  or  two 
back  came  from  the  Anstruther  district  of 
Fife.  Thomas  Caiman  was  blind  from 
childhood  and  died  when  his  son  was  six 
years  old.  A  timid  lad  with  no  aptitude 
for  games,  Caiman  became  an  ardent 
amateur  microscopist  and  student  of  pond 
life  while  still  at  high  school,  where  his 
scientific  interests,  like  those  of  Alex 
McKenzie  [q.v.],  were  encouraged  by 
Frank  Young.  At  sixteen  Caiman  was 
apprenticed  to  an  insurance  company  but 
was  advised  four  years  later  that  his 
stammer  unfitted  him  for  the  work. 
Meanwhile  he  had  become  an  active  mem- 
ber of  the  Dundee  Working  Men's  Field 
Club  and  joined  the  Dundee  Naturalists' 
Society  over  which  he  was  to  preside  in 
1944.  There  he  met  the  young  professor  of 
natural  history  at  Dundee,  (Sir)  D'Arcy 
Wentworth  Thompson  (whose  notice  he 
was  subsequently  to  contribute  to  this 
Dictionary),  whose  timely  offer  of  a  job  as 
laboratory  assistant  was  eagerly  accepted 
since  it  enabled  Caiman  to  attend  classes 
without  payment  of  fees.  He  graduated 
B.Sc.  with  distinction  in  botany,  physio- 
logy, and  zoology  in  1895.  He  also  found 


174 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cambridge 


time  to  learn  several  foreign  languages  and 
assisted  with  the  classification  of  a  large 
and  varied  assortment  of  animals  obtained 
from  all  parts  of  the  world  for  the  depart- 
mental museum.  He  became  interested 
chiefly,  though  by  no  means  exclusively, 
in  the  crustaceans  and  published  several 
scientific  papers.  One  of  these,  which  was 
soon  to  become  a  classic,  was  read  before 
the  Royal  Society  of  Edinburgh  just  before 
he  graduated.  He  was  next  appointed 
assistant  lecturer  and  demonstrator  in  the 
natural  history  department,  a  post  he  held 
until  1903,  obtaining  his  D.Sc.  in  1900. 
He  was  an  excellent  teacher  and  during 
Thompson's  absences  abroad  was  re- 
sponsible for  all  the  work  of  the  depart- 
ment. In  later  years  he  served  as  external 
examiner  to  many  universities. 

An  invitation  in  1901  to  write  the  Crus- 
tacea volume  for  A  Treatise  on  Zoology 
edited  by  (Sir)  Ray  Lankester  [q.v.] 
marked  another  turning-point  in  his 
career.  In  1903  he  accepted  a  temporary 
post  at  the  British  Museum  (Natural  His- 
tory) and  the  following  year  he  was 
placed  in  charge  of  the  Crustacea  and 
Pycnogonida.  In  addition  to  his  official 
duties  he  compiled  the  Arachnida  and 
Crustacea  parts  of  the  Zoological  Record 
for  many  years.  In  1921,  the  year  in  which 
he  was  elected  F.R.S.,  he  became  deputy 
keeper  of  the  department  of  zoology,  and 
in  1927  he  succeeded  Tate  Regan  [q.v.]  as 
keeper,  a  post  which  he  held  until  his  re- 
tirement in  1936. 

As  a  museum  curator  Caiman  kept  the 
collections  under  his  care  in  excellent 
order  with  the  minimum  of  cataloguing 
and  indexing.  From  1904  onwards,  until 
administrative  duties  claimed  most  of  his 
time,  he  produced  a  steady  stream  of 
scientific  papers  of  the  highest  order  and 
became  the  leading  carcinologist  of  his 
time.  To  a  remarkably  retentive  memory 
was  added  a  gift  for  winnowing  the  signifi- 
cant from  masses  of  detail.  The  Treatise 
volume,  which  specialists  regard  as  his 
masterpiece,  was  published  in  1909  and  is 
still  the  best  introduction  to  the  subject. 
Much  of  interest  which  was  unsuited  to  a 
textbook  was  included  in  his  more  popular 
book.  The  Life  of  Crustacea  (1911).  In 
1920  he  prepared  a  report  on  marine  bor- 
ing animals  injurious  to  submerged  struc- 
tures for  a  committee  of  the  Institution  of 
Civil  Engineers. 

Caiman  took  a  prominent  part  in 
scientific  activities  outside  the  museum. 
He  was  a  member  of  the  board  of  studies 
of  London  University  and  served  on  the 


council  of  the  Royal  Society  from  1933  to 
1935.  He  was  president  of  the  Quekett 
Microscopical  Club  (1927-9)  and  of  the 
zoology  section  at  the  Bristol  meeting  of 
the  British  Association  in  1930.  As  secre- 
tary of  the  Ray  Society  (1919-46)  he 
edited  the  Monographs.  He  was  zoological 
secretary  of  the  Linnean  Society  (1923-8), 
president  (1934-7),  and  received  its  gold 
medal  (1949).  He  was  appointed  C.B.  in 
1935  and  received  an  honorary  LL.D.  of 
St.  Andrews  and  an  honorary  F.R.S. 
Edinburgh  in  1937. 

In  1906  Caiman  married  Alice  Jean, 
daughter  of  James  Donaldson,  timber 
merchant,  of  Tayport,  Fife.  She  was  one  of 
the  first  women  graduates  in  medicine  of 
St.  Andrews  and  in  due  course  their  son 
and  daughter  both  entered  the  medical 
profession. 

Somewhat  below  average  height.  Cai- 
man was  a  rather  sedate,  modest,  kind, 
and  sociable  man,  with  a  delightful  sense 
of  humour.  His  early  appreciation  of 
EngUsh  literature  gave  him  an  unusual 
command  of  words  and  purity  of  style 
which  were  enhanced  by  the  slight  hesi- 
tancy of  speech  which  replaced  his  stam- 
mer. He  was  impatient  with  inaccuracy  in 
any  form  and  as  editor  and  administrator 
he  set  a  very  high  standard.  But  this  was 
no  more  than  he  always  demanded  of  him- 
self and  his  strictness  was  tempered  by  his 
kindly  conmion  sense.  If  he  sometimes 
treated  his  younger  colleagues  with  be- 
nign ferocity  he  taught  them  many  things 
besides  zoology. 

Three  years  after  his  retirement  Caiman 
moved  to  Tayport  and  during  the  war 
years  he  was  a  part-time  lecturer  in 
zoology  at  St.  Andrews  and  Dundee.  A 
series  of  lectures  delivered  to  his  students 
on  The  Classification  of  Animals  was  pub- 
lished in  1949.  Following  a  serious  illness 
he  returned  to  London  and  died  at  Couls- 
don,  Surrey,  29  September  1952.  A  por- 
trait by  (Sir)  W.  T.  Monnington  is  in  the 
possession  of  the  fanaily. 

[H.  Graham  Cannon  in  Obituary  Notices  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  No.  22,  November 
1953;  Proceedings  of  the  Linnean  Society, 
Session  165,  June  1954 ;  Nature,  8  November 
1952;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Isabella  Gordon. 

CAMBRIDGE,  ALEXANDER  AUGUS- 
TUS FREDERICK  WILLIAM  ALFRED 
GEORGE,  Earl  of  Athlone  (1874- 
1957),  was  born  at  Kensington  Palace  14 
April  1874,  the  third  son  of  Princess  Mary 
Adelaide   and   the   Duke   of  Teek,   and 


175 


Cambridge 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


brother  of  the  future  Queen  Mary,  a  notice 
of  whom  appears  in  this  Supplement. 
Originally  styled  His  Serene  Highness, 
Prince  Alexander  of  Teck,  he  was  known 
to  his  family  as  'Alge'.  In  1917  in  accord- 
ance with  policy  he  relinquished  his  titles 
and  the  name  of  Teck  and  took  the  family 
name  of  Cambridge  and  the  title  of  Earl 
of  Athlone.  Although  his  new  name  and 
titles  had  hereditary  associations  he  and 
many  others  regarded  these  changes  as 
unnecessary  and  even  undignified. 

The  Prince  was  educated  at  Eton  and 
Sandhurst,  was  commissioned  second 
lieutenant  in  the  7th  Hussars  in  1894, 
joined  his  regiment  in  India,  and  there- 
after received  his  promotion  in  the  normal 
way.  He  served  in  the  Matabele  war  of 
1896-7  and  was  mentioned  in  dispatches. 
He  transferred  to  the  Inniskilling  Dragoons 
in  order  to  be  able  to  serve  in  the  South 
African  war  during  which  he  was  men- 
tioned again  in  dispatches  and  appointed  to 
the  D.S.O.  He  was  spoken  of  as  a  capable 
and  enterprising  officer  and  a  cheerful 
comrade,  ever  willing  to  endure  and  to 
share  with  his  troopers  the  discomforts  of 
a  nomad  campaign. 

In  1904  the  Prince  married  Princess 
Alice  Mary  Victoria  Augusta  Pauline, 
daughter  of  Queen  Victoria's  fourth  son, 
the  Duke  of  Albany  [q.v.].  On  this  oc- 
casion he  was  appointed  G.C.V.O.  Their 
first  child,  May  Helen  Enwna,  was  born  in 
1906 ;  in  the  following  year  they  had  a  son, 
Rupert  Alexander  George  Augustus,  later 
Viscount  Trematon.  A  second  son,  Maurice 
Francis  George,  died  in  1910  before  he  was 
six  months  old. 

The  Prince  joined  the  Royal  Horse 
Guards  in  1904.  In  1911,  at  the  request  of 
King  George  V,  he  transferred  to  the  2nd 
Life  Guards  with  the  rank  of  major.  At 
the  coronation  he  was  appointed  G.C.B.  In 
1914  he  was  nominated  governor-general 
of  Canada  but  did  not  take  up  the  appoint- 
ment owing  to  the  outbreak  of  war  in 
which  he  served  as  lieutenant-colonel  in 
the  Life  Guards.  Later  he  joined  the  staff 
as  G.S.O.  2  and  was  attached  to  the 
British  mihtary  mission  to  the  Belgian 
Army.  He  was  promoted  G.S.O.  1  with 
the  rank  of  brigadier-general  in  1915  and 
received  Belgian,  French,  and  Russian 
decorations.  He  was  twice  mentioned  in 
dispatches  and  in  1918  he  joined  the 
general  headquarters  staff. 

After  the  war  Athlone  retired  from  the 
army  and  took  an  active  interest  in 
national  and  social  work.  A  man  of  com- 
passion, he  was  especially  attracted  to  the 


work  of  institutions  connected  with  the 
relief  of  human  suffering.  He  had  been 
chairman  of  the  Middlesex  Hospital  since 
1910  and  in  1921  the  minister  of  health 
appointed  him  chairman  of  a  committee 
composed  of  the  foremost  doctors  and 
surgeons  of  the  day  to  investigate  the 
needs  of  medical  practitioners.  Under  his 
enthusiastic  guidance  the  'Athlone  com- 
mittee' produced  a  comprehensive  report 
which  recommended  the  appropriation  of 
substantial  sums  from  public  funds  to 
finance  the  establishment  of  a  post- 
graduate medical  school  (to  be  associated 
with  the  university  of  London  and  existing 
medical  institutions)  to  promote  post- 
graduate instruction  and  medical  research. 
The  work  thus  initiated  by  the  Athlone 
committee  was  carried  on  by  committees 
presided  over  by  Neville  Chamberlain  and 
Arthur  Greenwood  [qq.v.].  The  Post- 
graduate School,  subsequently  attached 
to  the  Hammersmith  Hospital,  became 
one  of  the  most  famous  institutions  of  its 
kind.  Athlone  took  a  special  interest  and 
pride  in  the  school  which  he  frequently 
visited  in  later  years. 

Athlone  was  closely  identified  also  with 
the  promotion  of  education.  He  was  chan- 
cellor of  the  university  of  London  (1932- 
55),  taking  office  at  a  difficult  time  in  the 
development  of  the  university  under  its 
new  statutes.  He  was  an  honorary  bencher 
of  the  Middle  Temple,  a  fellow  of  the 
Royal  Society,  vice-president  of  the  Royal 
Academy  of  Music,  an  honorary  fellow  of 
the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons,  and  a 
knight  grand  cross  of  the  Order  of  St.  John 
of  Jerusalem. 

In  1923  Athlone  was  appointed 
governor-general  of  the  Union  and  high 
commissioner  for  South  Africa,  being  ap- 
pointed G.C.M.G.  and  promoted  to  the 
rank  of  major-general.  He  arrived  in 
South  Africa  in  time  to  open  Parliament  in 
January  1924.  Shortly  afterwards  J.  B.  M. 
Hertzog  [q.v.]  succeeded  J.  C.  Smuts 
[q.v.]  as  prime  minister.  A  difficult  period 
followed.  Racial  feeling  between  British 
and  Afrikaners  was  inflamed  by  a 
Nationalist  proposal  to  adopt  a  new  flag 
for  the  Union  omitting  anything  symbolic 
of  the  British  connection.  Athlone  worked 
quietly  behind  the  scenes  to  secure  the 
inclusion  of  a  Union  Jack  in  the  white 
central  panel.  His  speech  at  the  unveiling 
of  this  compromise  flag  in  Cape  Town  did 
much  to  soothe  and  reconcile  animosities. 
His  frequent  tours  in  the  provinces  en- 
hanced his  prestige  and  popularity  among 
all  sections  of  the  community  and  did 


176 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cambridge 


much  to  bring  the  two  white  races  closer 
together.  His  patience,  courtesy,  and  tact 
won  the  trust  and  esteem  of  the  poUtical 
leaders  of  all  parties.  He  was  appointed 
K.G.  in  1928  in  recognition  of  his  services 
and  his  term  of  office  was  extended  at  the 
request  of  the  Government.  The  death  of 
their  son.  Viscount  Trematon,  as  the  re- 
sult of  a  motor  accident  in  France  in  April 
1928  was  a  cruel  and  shattering  blow  to 
the  Athlones.  The  expressions  of  sym- 
pathy they  received  from  all  over  Southern 
Africa  revealed  a  depth  of  affectionate 
sympathy  and  personal  regard  which  must 
have  robbed  their  sorrow  of  some  of  its 
bitterness. 

At  the  conclusion  of  his  very  successful 
term  of  office,  Athlone  was  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council  in  1931  and  appointed 
governor  and  constable  of  Windsor  Castle. 
He  and  Princess  Alice  took  up  residence  at 
Brantridge  Park  and  afterwards  trans- 
ferred to  Kensington  Palace  which  they 
decorated  with  trophies  of  their  big-game 
hunting  expeditions  and  paintings  of 
African  landscapes  by  local  artists  whom 
they  had  patronized  and  encouraged  dur- 
ing their  tour  of  duty.  They  continued 
their  interest  in  South  African  affairs  and 
personalities  and  resumed  their  social  ac- 
tivities in  England.  Queen  Mary  and  her 
brother  had  always  been  close  companions 
and  regular  correspondents.  After  the 
King  recovered  from  his  serious  illness  he 
expressed  the  wish  that  Lord  Athlone 
should,  for  family  reasons,  remain  in 
England. 

In  1940,  King  George  VI  showed  his 
uncle  a  telegram  from  W.  L.  Mackenzie 
King  [q.v.]  asking  if  he  might  submit 
Athlone' s  name  for  the  governor-general- 
ship of  Canada.  Greatly  as  he  appreciated 
the  compliment,  Athlone  thought  a 
younger  man  should  be  appointed,  but  the 
King  persuaded  him  to  accept  for  a  period 
of  two  years.  In  the  event  he  served  the 
full  term  of  five  years.  He  entered  upon  his 
new  duties  with  his  usual  enthusiasm  and 
took  a  keen  interest  in  efforts  to  establish 
in  the  dominion  various  military  training 
schemes  and  factories  for  the  production 
of  war  materials.  He  travelled  extensively 
at  all  seasons  of  the  year  to  attend  troop 
reviews  and  encourage  munition  workers. 
In  addition  he  and  Princess  Alice  were 
always  ready  to  entertain  members  of 
official  missions,  including  those  of  Presi- 
dent Roosevelt  and  (Sir)  Winston  Chur- 
chill, and  they  offered  open  hospitality  to 
royalties  and  other  distinguished  exiles 
from  allied  countries  imder  German  oc- 


cupation. Although  Athlone  had  occasional 
differences  with  Mackenzie  King,  he  had  a 
natural  gift  for  getting  on  with  people  and 
their  personal  relations  always  remained 
very  friendly.  His  unsuccessful  efforts  to 
reconcile  differences  between  the  prime 
minister  and  his  defence  minister,  J.  L. 
Ralston  [q.v.],  were  a  disappointment  to 
him. 

In  August  1944,  on  the  twenty-fifth 
anniversary  of  his  leadership  of  his  party, 
Mackenzie  King  wrote  to  the  governor- 
general  that  he  was  'particularly  happy 
that  the  last  four  years,  the  most  eventful 
of  all,  should  have  been  shared  with  Your 
Excellency  in  the  administration  of 
Canada's  war  effort,  and  that  throughout 
every  day  of  that  time  I  should  have  had 
the  constant  and  helpful  co-operation  of 
Your  Excellency  and  Princess  Alice.' 
Later  the  prime  minister  wrote:  'Your 
years  here,  as  Representative  of  the  King, 
have  strengthened  the  country's  attach- 
ment to  the  Crown.  I  doubt  if  that 
attachment  were  ever  stronger  than  it 
is  today.' 

Those  who  knew  Athlone  intimately 
and  worked  with  him  would  agree  that 
kindness  was  his  outstanding  charac- 
teristic. Yet,  like  many  kind  people,  he 
had  a  quick  temper  which  subsided  as 
rapidly  as  it  flared  up.  His  military  train- 
ing had  endowed  him  with  an  eye  for 
detail  and  a  keen  perception  of  the  man- 
ners and  peculiarities  of  others  upon  which 
he  liked  to  exercise  his  quizzical  sense  of 
humour.  He  gave  the  impression  that  he 
modelled  his  conduct  on  the  precepts  of 
Polonius — especially  those  relating  to 
manners  and  deportment.  His  dress  was 
meticulous  but  never  'expressed  in  fancy'. 
He  had  an  exact  sense  of  symmetry  and 
tidiness  and  would  often  adjust  ornaments 
and  pictures.  His  memory  for  names  and 
faces  was  quite  extraordinary  and  he  was 
a  good  judge  of  character.  In  public  affairs 
he  was  tolerant  and  strove  to  induce 
others  to  modify  fixed  or  extreme  opinions 
before  giving  expression  to  his  own.  His 
natural  tact  and  intellectual  modesty 
enabled  him  to  impress  his  counsel  upon 
ministers  without  provoking  opposition  or 
appearing  to  intrude  upon  their  constitu- 
tional prerogatives.  His  command  over 
the  loyalty  and  affection  of  his  staff  was 
exceptional  and  he  delighted  in  renewing 
friendships  with  them  in  after  years.  At 
the  conclusion  of  his  term  of  office  in 
Canada  in  1946  he  and  Princess  Alice 
made  time  to  stay  in  Trinidad  with  their 
former  secretary  in.  South  Africa.  On  his 


177 


Cambridge 


return  to  England  Athlone  resumed  his 
interest  in  national  affairs.  In  1936  he  had 
been  appointed  grand  master  of  the  Order 
of  St.  Michael  and  St.  George,  an  order 
associated  especially  with  the  dominions, 
colonial,  and  foreign  services.  In  that  office 
he  presided  over  the  last  tributes  paid  to 
many  of  Britain's  most  distinguished 
sons.  On  his  death  at  Kensington  Palace, 
16  January  1957,  he  received  in  his  turn 
the  homage  of  members  of  the  order  who, 
like  himself,  had  faithfully  and  diligently 
served  their  country.  The  peerage  became 
extinct. 

At  Kensington  Palace  there  is  a  por- 
trait of  Athlone  by  H.  de  T.  Glazebrook 
and  a  conversation  piece  with  Princess 
Alice  by  Norman  Hepple.  At  Government 
House,  Ottawa,  there  is  a  portrait  by 
Henry  Carr ;  the  university  of  London  has 
a  portrait  by  Augustus  John  and  the 
Middlesex  Hospital  (at  Athlone  House, 
Kenwood,  Hampstead  Lane)  one  by  Fran- 
cis Hodge.  At  the  Vintners'  Hall  there  is  a 
portrait  by  (Sir)  James  Gunn. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge ; 
For  My  Grandchildren,  Some  reminiscences  of 
Her  Royal  Highness  Princess  Alice,  Countess 
of  Athlone,  1966.]  Bede  Clifford. 

CAIMPBELL,  GORDON  (1886-1953), 
vice-admiral,  was  born  at  Upper  Norwood, 
London,  6  January  1886,  ninth  son  and 
thirteenth  of  the  sixteen  children  of 
Colonel  Frederick  CampbeU,  C.B.,  V.D., 
J.P.,  by  his  wife,  Emilie,  daughter  of 
Donald  Maclaine  of  Lochbuie.  Educated 
at  Dulwich  College,  he  passed  into  the 
Britannia  as  a  naval  cadet  in  1900.  He  was 
promoted  lieutenant  in  1907  and  at  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1914  he  was  command- 
ing a  destroyer  on  Channel  escort  duties. 
Early  in  1915  as  part  of  the  anti- 
submarine measures  a  number  of  tramp 
steamers  were  converted  into  decoy  ships 
with  naval  crews  and  concealed  guns. 
Campbell  volunteered  for  these  'mystery' 
or  Q-ships,  and  became  the  most  brilliant 
exponent  of  this  hazardous  form  of  war- 
fare. To  outward  appearance  harmless 
merchantmen,  the  Q-ships  offered  them- 
selves as  targets  in  U-boat  infested  waters. 
After  their  existence  became  known  and 
enemy  submarine  captains  more  wary, 
Campbell  deliberately  allowed  his  vessel 
to  be  torpedoed,  remaining  on  board  with 
his  hidden  gunners,  after  part  of  the  crew 
had  'abandoned  ship',  waiting  for  the  sub- 
marine to  close  her  victim.  Using  these 
tactics  he  sank  three  of  the  eleven  German 
submarines    destroyed    by    Q-ships,    for 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


which  actions  he  won  the  V.C.,  was  ap- 
pointed to  the  D.S.O.  with  two  bars,  and 
attained  promotion  to  captain  in  1917  at 
the  early  age  of  thirty-one.  He  also  re- 
ceived the  thanks  of  the  War  Cabinet,  was 
awarded  the  croix  de  guerre,  and  appointed 
officer  of  the  Legion  of  Honour.  More  than 
seventy  decorations,  including  four  Vic- 
toria Crosses,  were  awarded  to  officers  and 
men  of  the  three  Q-ships  he  commanded. 

His  last  Q-ship  action  typified  the  out- 
standing courage  of  Campbell  and  the 
crews  he  inspired.  On  8  August  1917  his 
decoy  ship  Dunraven  was  attacked  with 
gunfire  by  a  surfaced  U-boat  which  started 
a  fierce  fire  on  board.  After  torpedoing  the 
Dunraven  the  submarine  continued  to 
shell  her  while  Campbell  and  his  gunners 
remained  at  their  posts  in  the  burning 
vessel,  with  ammunition  exploding  about 
them,  waiting  for  the  U-boat  to  come 
within  range,  but  she  finally  made  off 
without  doing  so.  Later  the  Dunraven  sank 
while  in  tow. 

After  the  loss  of  the  Dunraven  Campbell 
served  as  flag  captain  to  the  commander- 
in-chief.  Coast  of  Ireland  Patrol,  in  charge 
of  all  anti-submarine  operations  in  the 
Irish  Sea. 

After  the  war  Campbell  commanded 
successively  the  cadet  training  cruiser 
Cumberland,  the  boys'  training  establish- 
ment Impregnable,  and  subsequently 
served  as  captain  in  charge  of  Simonstown 
dockyard.  In  1920  in  recognition  of  his 
distinguished  war  service  he  was  elected  a 
younger  brother  of  Trinity  House.  His 
last  seagoing  appointment  was  in  com- 
mand of  the  battle  cruiser  Tiger  from  1925 
to  1927.  In  April  1928  he  was  retired  as 
rear-admiral,  his  indifferent  medical  record 
since  the  end  of  the  war  undoubtedly  con- 
tributing to  this  early  retirement.  He  was 
promoted  vice-admiral  on  the  retired  list 
in  1932. 

Campbell  then  turned  to  writing  and 
lecturing.  His  first  book  My  Mystery  Ships 
(1928)  told  the  story  of  his  exploits  in 
Q-ships,  and  he  deUvered  many  lectm-es 
on  the  subject  in  this  country,  Canada, 
and  the  United  States,  proving  a  fluent 
and  popular  speaker.  His  autobiography 
Number  Thirteen  appeared  in  1932; 
between  1933  and  1938  he  produced  a 
number  of  other  works,  mostly  short  his- 
torical accounts  of  various  sea  actions, 
also  adventure  stories  for  boys ;  and  (with 
I.  O.  Evans)  he  published  a  textbook  on 
flags  (1950). 

When  the  'national'  Government  was 
formed  to  deal  with  the  economic  crisis  in 


178 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Campbell,  I.  R.  D. 


1931,  Campbell,  although  not  politically 
minded,  decided  to  stand  as  a  National 
candidate  for  Burnley  where  he  sensa- 
tionally defeated  the  Labour  member 
Arthur  Henderson  [q.v.],  former  foreign 
secretary.  A  staunch  supporter  of  Baldwin 
and  the  League  of  Nations,  he  was  popular 
with  his  constituents  and  spoke  often  in 
the  House.  In  the  general  election  of  1935 
he  stood  again  as  Liberal-National  candi- 
date but  was  defeated  by  the  Labour 
contender. 

At  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  Camp- 
bell was  specially  commissioned  by  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill  to  requisition  and  fit 
out  a  number  of  decoy  merchantmen  with 
the  object  of  repeating  the  earlier  ruse  de 
guerre  of  the  Q-ships.  Although  under  his 
direction  the  vessels  were  well  armed  and 
brilliantly  disguised  they  met  with  no 
success,  and  after  a  few  months  the  scheme 
was  abandoned.  Campbell  was  then  ap- 
pointed resident  naval  officer,  Padstow, 
responsible  for  naval  defences  in  that  area. 
In  appearance  the  traditional  bluff,  ruddy- 
faced  sailor,  he  nevertheless  continued 
to  be  dogged  by  ill  health  aggravated 
by  the  strain  of  his  Q-ship  experiences, 
and  was  finally  forced  to  retire  from  active 
naval  service  in  1943. 

In  1911  he  married  Mary  Jeanne, 
daughter  of  Henry  V.  S.  Davids,  of  Hillier 
House,  Guildford ;  they  had  one  son  and 
one  daughter.  Campbell  died  at  Isleworth, 
Middlesex,  3  October  1953.  A  charcoal 
and  water-colour  by  Francis  Dodd  is  in 
the  Imperial  War  Museum. 

[Gordon  Campbell,  Number  Thirteen,  1932 ; 
private  information.]     A.  Cecil,  Hampshire. 

CAMPBELL,  (IGNATIUS)  ROYSTON 
DUNNACHIE  (1901-1957),  poet  and 
translator,  known  as  Roy  Campbell,  was 
born  in  Durban,  Natal,  2  October  1901, 
the  grandson  of  a  Scots  settler  and  the 
fourth  child  of  Dr.  Samuel  George  Camp- 
bell by  his  wife,  Margaret,  daughter  of 
James  Dunnachie,  of  Glenboig,  Lanark- 
shire, who  had  married  Jean  Hendry  of 
Eaglesham.  Educated  at  Durban  High 
School,  and  in  a  family  of  soldiers,  farmers 
administrators,  naturalists,  hunters, 
athletes,  and  verse- writers,  Campbell 
acquired  early  that  lifelong  passion  for 
wild  animals,  poetry,  physical  prowess, 
and  a  blunt  outspokenness  which  gave 
colour  and  verve  to  all  his  writings. 

At  fifteen  he  ran  away  from  school  to 
join  his  brothers  in  the  war,  but  was 
stopped  and  brought  back  to  his  lessons. 
Sent  to  Oxford  in  1919,  he  failed  to  master 


Greek  for  university  entrance :  'university 
lectures',  he  told  his  father,  'interfere  very 
much  with  my  work' — ^which  was  verse- 
writing  stimulated  by  avid  readings  in 
Nietzsche,  Darwin,  and  the  English 
Elizabethan  and  Romantic  poets.  Holi- 
days spent  in  wandering  through  France 
and  along  the  Mediterranean  coast  in 
search  of  the  sun,  odd  jobs,  and  adventure 
alternated  with  periods  in  bohemian  Lon- 
don. Among  his  early  fruitful  contacts 
were  (Sir)  William  Walton,  the  Sitwells, 
Wyndham  Lewis  [q.v.]  (many  of  whose 
'blasting  and  bombardiering'  attitudes  he 
adopted),  and  T.  W.  Earp,  who  deserves 
credit  for  weaning  Campbell  from  Tenny- 
sonian  pastiche  and  arousing  his  en- 
thusiasm for  the  French  Symbolist  poets. 
In  1922  he  married  without  parental  con- 
sent and  forfeited,  for  a  time,  the  generous 
parental  allowance. 

While  living  in  a  small  converted  stable 
on  the  coast  of  North  Wales,  Campbell 
completed  his  first  long  poem,  The  Flam- 
ing Terrapin  (1924),  a  humanistic  allegory 
on  the  rejuvenation  of  man,  projected  in 
episodes  and  images  of  such  flamboyant 
splendour  that  the  work  justly  made  him 
famous.  Returning  to  Natal,  he  started, 
with  William  Plomer  and  Laurens  van  der 
Post,  a  monthly  review  called  Voorslag 
(Whiplash),  but  after  two  numbers  he  re- 
signed and  returned  to  England.  Beneath 
the  romantic  ideaUsm  of  the  Terrapin  was 
a  promising  vein  of  Byronic  satire.  This 
was  now  opened  up  with  skill  and  malice 
in  The  Wayzgoose  (1928),  a  hilarious  lam- 
poon, in  rhyming  couplets,  on  the  cul- 
tural limitations  of  South  Africa.  But  he 
soon  found  that  the  cults  and  coteries  of 
Uterary  Bloomsbury  were  as  Uttle  to  his 
taste  as  the  'shop-keeping  mentality'  of 
Durban ;  so  off  he  trekked  again  with  his 
family,  this  time,  in  1928,  to  the  genial 
warmth  of  Martigues  in  maritime  Pro- 
vence. There  he  lived  strenuously  as  a  poet, 
bon-vivant,  casual  fisherman,  and  ama- 
teur athlete.  The  physical  activities  for 
which  he  achieved  some  local  reputation 
were  the  dangerous  sports  of  water- 
jousting,  steer-throwing,  and  snatching 
the  cocarde  from  between  the  horns  of 
cows  and  young  bulls  in  the  small  arenas 
of  Istres  and  Fos  sur  Mer. 

Both  South  Africa  and  the  Midi  con- 
tributed motives  to  the  passion  and 
luminosity  of  his  first  book  of  lyrics,  Ada- 
mastor  (1930),  and  to  the  less  important 
Poems  (Paris)  of  the  same  year.  Such 
pieces  as  'Tristan  da  Cunha',  'The 
Albatross',   'The  Zulu  Girl',   'The   Serf, 


179 


CampbeU,  I.  R.  D. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


*The  Palm*,  *To  a  Pet  Cobra*,  and  *Horses 
on  the  Camargue'  went  far  beyond  Camp- 
bell's modest  claim  to  have  *added  a  few 
solar  colours  to  English  poetry'.  Borrow- 
ings from  Kulilemann,  Mistral,  Val^ry, 
and  Baudelaire  were  transmuted  into  a 
wholly  individual  style  characterized  by 
firmness  of  outhne,  copiousness  of  images, 
resonance  of  tone,  symbolic  overtones, 
wit,  irony,  and  a  superb  mastery  of 
rhyme  and  versification.  This  success  was 
quickly  followed  by  his  best  satire,  The 
Georgiad  (1931),  a  comic  fantasy  which 
pilloried  brilliantly,  if  somewhat  vindic- 
tively, the  moral  and  aesthetic  follies  of 
Georgian  'Bloomsburies' ;  it  also  set  deep 
the  foundations  of  an  unpopularity  which 
was  exacerbated  by  the  reactionary 
opinions,  and  the  bark-if-not-bite  of 
fascist  attitudes,  in  his  first  autobiography, 
Broken  Record  (1934).  Yet  in  this  book  he 
writes  with  such  charm  and  panache  on 
the  wild  Ufe  of  Africa  and  the  carefree  life 
of  a  'useless  poet'  that  one  forgives  or 
accepts  his  gasconading  and  swashbuck- 
ling and  enjoys  (with  reservations)  his 
confessedly  Miinchausen-like  anecdotes. 

Before  leaving  France  for  Spain  in  1933, 
Campbell,  always  a  great  aficionado  and 
frequenter  of  the  manades,  published 
Taurine  Provence  (1932),  a  book  on  bull- 
fighting, and  a  third  book  of  lyrics. 
Flowering  Reeds  (1933),  which  contains 
the  well  faiown  'Choosing  a  Mast'  and  'The 
Gum  Trees'  and  reveals  a  new  classical 
restraint  and  brooding  tenderness. 

In  1935  the  Campbells  were  received 
into  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  and 
shortly  afterwards  settled  in  Toledo.  By 
temperament  the  poet  was  aristocratic 
and  traditionalist,  and  although  always  a 
good  mixer  with  peasants,  gipsies,  fisher- 
men, and  door-keepers,  he  had  little 
sympathy  with  popular  humanitarian 
movements;  hence  he  watched  with  dis- 
taste the  growing  revolutionary  forces  in 
Spain.  At  considerable  risk  he  sheltered 
priests  and  hid  the  Carmelite  archives  in 
his  own  house ;  but  on  being  caught  in  the 
bombardment  of  Toledo  he  and  his 
family  were  evacuated  to  England,  where 
he  saw  the  publication  and  virtual  boy- 
cotting of  his  most  rehgious,  subtle,  and 
intensely  Spanish  book  of  original  poems, 
Mithraic  Emblems  (1936).  Early  in  1937 
he  returned  to  Spain  as  war  correspondent 
of  the  Tablet,  saw  some  fighting  on  the 
Madrid  front,  sustained  an  injury  to  his 
left  hip,  and  soon  retired  to  Portugal, 
where  he  wrote  his  longest  and  least 
disciplined  poem,  the  virulent  anti-Red, 


pro-Franco  Flowering  Rifle  (1939)  which 
horrified  the  English  liberal  press. 

On  returning  from  Italy  to  Spain  at  the 
end  of  the  civil  war,  Campbell  revised  his 
opinion  of  the  Axis  powers.  Pulled  by  old 
loyalties,  and  now  eager  to  fight  for  the 
democratic  principles  which  he  never 
ceased  to  criticize,  he  returned  to  Eng- 
land, and  after  launching  a  popular  selec- 
tion of  his  best  poems,  Sons  of  the  Mistral 
(1941),  he  enlisted  as  a  private  in  the 
Intelligence  Corps.  Later,  as  a  sergeant, 
he  commanded  Askari  coast-watchers  in 
East  Africa ;  but  owing  to  chronic  osteo- 
arthritis in  his  injured  left  hip  he  was 
discharged  as  unfit  in  1944.  Back  in  Lon- 
don, he  was  a  talks  producer  in  the  B.B.C 
from  1946  to  1949,  and  in  the  former  year 
published  Talking  Bronco,  a  piquant  mix- 
ture of  piu*e  poems,  like  'Dreaming  Spires* 
and  'The  Skull  in  the  Desert',  and  witty 
near-libellous  attacks  on  the  left-wing 
poets. 

His  three  years  as  joint-editor  of  Cata- 
comb, a  right-wing  periodical,  initiated  his 
last  productive  period:  Collected  Poems 
(1949;  vol.  ii,  1957);  Light  on  a  Dark 
Horse  (1951),  his  racy  and  at  times  ben 
trovato  recension  of  his  life-story  and 
legend  up  to  1935 ;  Lorca  (1952),  a  critical 
study  with  translations;  The  Mamba's 
Precipice  (1953),  a  boy's  tale  of  adventures 
in  Natal.  His  masterly  translations  from 
Spanish,  French,  and  Portuguese  include : 
Poems  of  St.  John  of  the  Cross  (1951), 
awarded  the  Foyle  poetry  prize;  Baude- 
laire's Les  Fleurs  du  Mai  (1952);  Six 
Spanish  Plays  (ed.  Bentley,  New  York, 
1959),  the  five  translated  by  Campbell, 
having  been  produced  on  the  Third  Pro- 
gramme ;  Calder6n's  The  Surgeon  of  His 
Honour  (University  of  Wisconsin,  1960) ; 
two  Portuguese  novels  by  E9a  de  Queiroz 
— Cousin  Bazilio  (1953)  and  The  City  and 
the  Mountains  (1955) ;  Poemas  Imperfeitos 
by  J.  Pago  d'Arcos,  englished  as  Nostalgia 
(1960).  In  the  third  volume  of  his  Collected 
Poems  (1960)  there  are  fine  renderings 
of  CamSes,  Lorca,  Horace,  etc.  Although 
not  an  exact  scholar  Campbell  was  a 
born  poet.  'He  was  an  amazing  linguist', 
said  T.  S.  Eliot,  'and  certainly  no  one 
can  have  equalled  his  translations  of  St. 
John  of  the  Cross  and  Rimbaud's  Bateau 
IvreJ* 

In  1952  Campbell  made  his  last  move — 
to  Portugal.  In  the  many  lectures  which 
he  gave  in  England,  Spain,  and  on  two 
visits  to  America,  he  read  and  discussed 
his  poems  in  his  unpohshed  accent,  and 
gaily  attacked  the  obsciure,  'cross-word- 


1«0 


D^N.B.  1951-1960 


Campbell,  J.  M. 


happy*  poets  (some  of  whom  he  had  actually 
punched)  and  the  'parasitical  growths'  of 
modern  analytical  criticism.  The  climax 
of  his  career  came  in  1954,  when  he  flew  to 
the  university  of  Natal  to  receive  the 
honorary  degree  of  D.Litt.  On  his  return 
to  Sintra  he  wrote  his  last  prose  work, 
Portugal  (1957).  There  again  we  find  the 
great  zest  for  life,  the  fighting  spirit,  the 
passion  for  heroism  and  dynamic  beauty, 
the  extrovert  impatience  with  doubts  and 
hesitations  and  the  fundamentally  pious 
man's  love  of  earth  and  of  simple  agrarian 
or  equestrian  peoples ;  there  are  also  the 
occasional  exaggerations,  credulities,  pre- 
judices, and  tall  stories  given  as  fact, 
which  mar  the  literary  quality  but  not 
necessarily  the  readability  of  his  prose. 
Fortunately  his  best  poetry  is  quite  free 
from  these  blemishes. 

On  23  April  1957  Campbell  was  killed 
outright  in  a  car-crash  near  Setubal, 
Portugal,  and  was  buried  in  the  San 
Pedro  cemetery  near  Sintra.  His  marriage 
to  Mary  Margaret,  daughter  of  Walter 
Chancellor  Garman,  a  Wednesbury  doctor, 
and  sister  of  the  second  wife  of  Sir  Jacob 
Epstein  [q.v.],  was  a  very  happy  one.  He 
was  unswervingly  devoted  to  his  'Mary' 
and  their  two  daughters,  and  often  said 
that  but  for  his  wife's  faith  in  him  and 
her  loyal  support  he  would  never  have 
achieved  success  as  a  writer. 

Six  foot  two,  handsome,  with  remark- 
able eyes  and  every  inch  a  poet,  the  young 
South  African  in  a  typical  broad-brimmed 
hat  was  painted  by  Augustus  John  (c. 
1924)  and  the  portrait  now  hangs  in  the 
Pittsburgh  Art  Gallery. 

[Campbell's  autobiographies  and  unpub- 
lished remains ;  private  information ;  personal 
knowledge.]  W.  H.  Gardner. 

CAMPBELL,  Dame  JANET  MARY 
(1877-1954),  medical  officer,  was  born  in 
Brighton  5  March  1877,  the  daughter  of 
George  Campbell,  bank  manager,  and  his 
wife,  Mary  Letitia  Rowe.  She  attended 
Brighton  High  School  and  later  went  to 
Germany  for  some  months  where  she 
acquired  a  good  knowledge  of  the  language 
which  served  her  when  she  attended  a 
postgraduate  course  in  Vienna. 

After  graduating  M.B.  London  in  1901 
at  the  London  School  of  Medicine  for 
Women,  she  took  her  M.D.  and  M.S. 
degrees  in  1904  and  1905,  a  remarkable 
achievement.  There  followed  house  ap- 
pointments at  the  Royal  Free  Hospital 
followed  by  the  position  of  senior  medical 
officer  at  the  Belgrave  Hospital  for  Chil- 


dren, a  post  eagerly  sought  by  women 
graduates,  since  at  that  time  it  was 
one  of  the  few  London  hospitals  to  employ 
them. 

Janet  Campbell  was  a  member  of  the 
Medical  Women's  Federation,  eventually 
becoming  its  president.  At  one  time  she  was 
closely  associated  with  Dartford  Physical 
Training  College,  first  as  honorary  secre- 
tary and  afterwards  for  a  time  as  chairman. 

As  a  result  of  the  South  African  war 
pubhc  interest  in  the  problem  of  national 
physique  had  been  aroused  and  under  the 
Education  Act  of  1902  school  medical 
officers  were  appointed  by  some  education 
authorities.  An  interdepartmental  com- 
mittee appointed  in  1903  recommended, 
after  extensive  inquiries,  among  other 
measures  the  introduction  of  systematic 
medical  inspection  of  children  in  elemen- 
tary schools  which  now  forms  an  integral 
part  of  every  modern  system  of  education. 

In  1904  Janet  Campbell  became  an 
assistant  school  medical  officer  in  the 
London  School  Medical  Service  where  she 
came  under  the  stimulating  influence  of 
James  Kerr,  the  'father'  of  school  hygiene 
and  the  author  of  The  Fundamentals  of 
School  Health  (1926).  From  there  in  1907 
she  joined  the  Board  of  Education  as  its 
first  full-time  woman  medical  officer. 

The  high  rate  of  infant  mortahty  was 
giving  concern  to  the  pubhc  and  to  local 
authorities,  and  in  1919,  when  the 
Ministry  of  Health  made  its  appearance 
with  Sir  George  Newman  [q.v.]  as  chief 
medical  officer,  Janet  Campbell  was  ap- 
pointed senior  medical  officer  in  charge  of 
maternity  and  child  welfare.  At  the  same 
time  she  retained  her  connection  with  the 
Board  of  Education  as  chief  woman  ad- 
viser. She  gave  her  time  and  her  energies 
wholeheartedly  to  the  organization  of  a 
vigorous  and  progressive  scheme  for  the 
welfare  of  mothers  and  children. 

During  the  war  of  1914-18  in  addition 
to  her  speciahzed  work  her  services  were 
at  the  disposal  of  government  and  inter- 
national committees.  She  was  a  medical 
member  of  the  War  Cabinet  committee  on 
women  in  industry  and  afterwards  served 
on  the  health  committee  of  the  League  of 
Nations. 

In  1917  she  wrote  a  valuable  and  in- 
fluential report  for  the  Carnegie  United 
Kingdom  Trust  on  physical  welfare  of 
mothers  and  children.  She  also  produced 
official  reports  on  the  recruitment  and 
training  of  midwives  and  on  the  teaching 
of  obstetrics  and  gjmaecology  in  medical 
schools.  ...    ^        .     ,,.■'■■■  — 


181 


Campbell,  J.  M. 

In  1924  her  well-known  report  on 
maternal  mortality  was  published.  She 
was  appointed  D.B.E.  and  Dm-ham  Uni- 
versity made  her  an  honorary  doctor  of 
hygiene  in  the  same  year.  Her  reports 
from  1923  to  1932  on  the  protection  of 
motherhood,  on  neonatal  and  infant  mor- 
tality, and  on  the  maternity  services  have 
all  of  them  had  an  important  influence  on 
administrative  reforms  and  have  helped  in 
large  part  to  reduce  the  mortality  and 
morbidity  rate  of  women  and  children. 

In  1934  she  married  Michael  Heseltine 
(died  1952),  registrar  of  the  General  Medi- 
cal Council,  and  under  Civil  Service  rules 
she  had  to  give  up  her  office. 

Her  influence  on  the  public  health  ser- 
vices of  the  whole  coimtry  as  they  affected 
women  and  children  was  profound.  She 
was  the  great  pioneer  of  maternity  and 
child  welfare  services  and  as  such  was 
universally  acknowledged.  It  was  not  only 
the  charming  and  rather  diffident  manner 
of  this  tall  good-looking,  well-dressed 
woman  which  attracted  the  admiration 
and  respect  of  those  who  came  into  con- 
tact with  her.  Her  clear-thinking  brain 
and  her  sound  knowledge  of  her  subject 
enabled  her  to  grasp  essentials  quickly 
so  that  her  wise,  considered  opinion  and 
advice  were  sought  by  local  authorities, 
medical  officers,  and  hospitals  throughout 
the  country  and  by  organizations  far 
beyond  the  confines  of  the  United 
Kingdom. 

Dame  Janet  was  a  very  good  horse- 
woman and  riding  gave  her  special  pleasure 
as  did  walking  and  physical  exercise  which 
probably  accounted  for  her  upright  car- 
riage. Gardening  was  a  favourite  hobby 
and  when  she  lived  outside  London  she 
grew  a  wonderful  display  of  roses.  She  had 
always  taken  a  keen  interest  in  current 
affairs  and  in  politics  of  the  day  and  was  a 
justice  of  the  peace  for  Surrey  and  also  for 
Gloucestershire.  She  loved  a  good  play  and 
up  to  the  end  she  kept  her  interest  in 
modern  literature  and  the  world  around 
her.  She  died  27  September  1954  in 
Chelsea  where  she  lived  with  her  two 
cousins  after  a  long  and  painful  illness 
spent  in  a  nursing-home  in  London. 

[British  Medical  Journal  and  Lancet,  9 
October  1954;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  Margaret  Hogarth. 

CAMPBELL,  Sir  RONALD  HUGH 

(1883-1953),  diplomatist,  was  born  in 
London  27  September  1883,  the  eldest  son 
of  Sir  Francis  Alexander  Campbell,  assis- 
tant imder-secretary  of  state  for  foreign 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


affairs  from  1902  to  1911,  and  his  wife, 
Dora  Edith,  daughter  of  Hugh  Hammers- 
ley,  banker.  Campbell  was  educated  at 
Haileybury  and  in  1907  passed  a  com- 
petitive examination  and  was  appointed 
a  clerk  in  the  Foreign  Office.  In  1910  he 
accompanied  Sir  Arthur  Paget  on  a  special 
embassy  to  the  courts  of  Munich,  Stutt- 
gart, and  Sofia  to  announce  the  accession  ;! 
of  King  George  V.  In  the  following  year  he  ' 
was  in  attendance  on  the  representative  of 
Venezuela  at  the  coronation.  From  1913 
to  1919  he  was  private  secretary  to  the 
permanent  under-secretary  and  in  1919- 
20  to  Lord  Curzon  [q.v.],  then  acting 
secretary  of  state.  He  was  appointed 
C.M.G.  in  1917.  Having  risen  by  1928  to 
be  a  counsellor  in  the  Foreign  office,  he  was 
in  1929  appointed  envoy  extraordinary 
and  minister  plenipotentiary  in  Paris 
where  he  often  acted  as  charge  d'affaires. 
Speaking  French  to  perfection,  he  made 
many  friends  in  official  circles  and  proved 
himself  a  shrewd  observer  and  an  able 
negotiator.  He  was  appointed  minister  to 
Belgrade  in  1935  and  K.C.M.G.  in  1936. 
His  lucid  and  well-baianced  dispatches 
revealed  an  exceptional  insight  into  the 
shifting  pattern  of  Yugoslavia's  foreign 
policy,  subjected  as  it  then  was  to  mount- 
ing Nazi-Fascist  pressures. 

In  July  1939  Campbell  was  promoted  to 
be  ambassador  at  Paris  as  successor  to  Sir 
Eric  Phipps  [q.v.].  He  was  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council  and  took  up  his  new  ap-        ^ 
pointment  in  early  November.  Calm,  un-        ' 
ruffled,    as    impeccable    in    his    skill    at 
unravelling   knotty   problems   as   in   his 
personal  appearance,  endowed  with  the 
sturdiest     common     sense,     an     infinite 
capacity  for  taking  pains,  and  a  pawky 
sense  of  hiunour,   this  unassuming  and 
gently  persuasive   Scot   soon  found   his 
qualities    as   a   diplomatist   put   to   the 
severest  test.  When  the  Germans  invaded 
France,  he  took  part  on  11  June  1940  in 
the  exodus  of  her  government  from  Paris ; 
first  to  Tours  and  three  days  later  to        | 
Bordeaux.  In  intensely  trying  conditions        j 
he  exerted  himself  without  intermission  to        I 
prevail  on  the  French  political  leaders  to       | 
transfer  at  least  the  nucleus  of  a  govern-        ^ 
ment  overseas  and  to  place  their  fleet 
beyond  the  range  of  Axis  interference. 
After  the  signature  of  an  armistice  be- 
tween the  Petain  government  and  the 
Germans  had  made  it  useless  for  him  to 
remain  at  Bordeaux,   he   embarked  for 
England    on   the    evening   of  22   June. 
On  his  return  home  his  zeal  and  courage        i 
were   recognized   by  the    award   of  the 


182 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Campion 


G.C.M.G.  In  November  1940  he  was  ap- 
pointed ambassador  to  Lisbon. 

In  mid-December  1941  Anglo-Portu- 
guese relations  came  near  to  breaking-point 
as  a  result  of  the  unannounced  entry  of 
Australian  and  Dutch  troops  into  Portu- 
guese Timor  to  protect  the  defenceless 
colony  from  invasion  by  the  Japanese. 
Campbell's  dogged  resourcefulness  pre- 
vented the  crisis  from  adverse  develop- 
ment: his  masterly  telegrams  reinforced 
by  a  visit  to  London  brought  about  an 
agreement  that  the  troops  would  be  with- 
drawn as  soon  as  Portuguese  arrived  to 
replace  them.  Although  the  Japanese 
seized  the  island  before  this  arrangement 
could  be  completed,  Dr.  Salazar  paid 
warm  tribute  to  the  British  Government 
for  its  helpful  attitude.  In  the  summer  of 
1943  Campbell  received  the  emissaries  of 
Marshal  Badoglio  when  they  arrived  in 
Lisbon  to  sue  for  an  armistice.  In  the 
same  year  he  presided  over  the  delicate 
negotiations  which  led  to  the  grant  of 
facilities  in  the  Azores  to  the  allied  forces. 
His  unremitting  efforts  were  successful  in 
securing  for  Britain  the  lion's  share  of 
Portugal's  vital  supplies  of  wolfram.  In 
1945  his  superbly  handled  mission  in 
Portugal  came  to  an  end  and  he  went  into 
retirement.  "^He  died  at  Lymington  15 
November  1953. 

It  was  appropriate  that  a  man  of 
Campbell's  exemplary  patience  should 
have  been  an  expert  angler  and  that,  with 
his  keen  eye  for  precise  detail,  he  also 
excelled  as  a  skilled  cabinet-maker.  The 
last  years  of  his  life  were  clouded  by  the 
death  in  1949  of  his  charming  and 
vivacious  wife,  Helen,  daughter  of  Richard 
Graham,  whom  he  had  married  in  1908. 
He  was  also  predeceased  by  his  only 
daughter.  His  only  son,  Robin,  who  sur- 
vived him,  had  been  severely  wounded  in 
the  attempt  to  kidnap  Rommel  during  the 
North  Africa  campaign. 

[The  Times,  17  November  1953;  personal 
knowledge.]  John  Balfour. 

CAMPION,  GILBERT  FRANCIS  MON- 
TRIOU,  Baron  Campion  (1882-1958), 
clerk  of  the  House  of  Commons,  was  born 
at  Simla  11  May  1882,  the  eldest  son  of 
John  Montriou  Campion,  later  chief 
engineer,  Punjab,  in  the  public  works 
department  of  India,  by  his  wife,  Grace 
Hannah,  daughter  of  Abraham  CoUis 
Anderson,  of  county  Kilkenny.  He  was 
educated  at  Bedford  School  and  won  a 
classical  scholarship  to  Hertford  College, 
Oxford,    where    he    gained    first    class 


honours  in  both  classical  moderations 
(1903)  and  literae  humaniores  (1905).  In 
1906  he  took  the  Civil  Service  examina- 
tion but  decided  to  accept  the  nomination 
of  Sir  Courtenay  Ilbert  [q.v.]  for  a  clerk- 
ship in  the  House  of  Conmions. 

Campion's  interest  in  comparative  pro- 
cedure was  early  shown  when  he  and  his 
colleague,  W.  P.  Johnston,  suggested  to 
Ilbert  that  they  should  visit  the  principal 
countries  in  Europe  and  gather  informa- 
tion about  their  parliamentary  systems. 
The  results  of  their  investigations  were 
placed  at  the  disposal  of  the  select  com- 
mittee on  procedure,  1914,  and  appended 
to  their  minutes  of  evidence.  On  the  out- 
break of  war  Campion  joined  the  army 
and  became  a  captain  in  the  Army  Service 
Corps.  He  was  invalided  home  from 
France  and  in  1917  was  appointed  secre- 
tary to  the  conference  on  the  reform  of  the 
second  chamber  presided  over  by  Lord 
Bryce  [q.v.]  who  warmly  commended 
Campion's  wide  knowledge  of  parliamen- 
tary institutions  at  home  and  abroad.  In 
1919  Campion  was  appointed  secretary  to 
the  conference  on  devolution  presided 
over  by  Speaker  Lowther  [q.v.].  The 
scheme  of  regional  grand  councils  pro- 
posed by  Lowther  is  believed  to  have  been 
substantially  Campion's  work. 

In  1921  Campion  became  second  clerk 
assistant,  and  in  1929,  the  year  before  his 
promotion  to  clerk  assistant,  he  published 
An  Introduction  to  the  Procedure  of  the 
House  of  Commons,  which  was  conceived 
originally  as  a  manual  of  first-aid  for  mem- 
bers but  was  in  fact  a  complete  account  of 
the  procedure  of  the  House.  In  1937  he 
succeeded  Sir  Horace  Dawkins  as  clerk  of 
the  House  and  when  war  broke  out  in  1939 
he  was  responsible  for  administering  the 
arrangements  for  meeting  in  Church 
House  and  the  procedural  innovations  re- 
quired by  security. 

The  publication  in  1946  of  the  four- 
teenth edition  of  Sir  T.  Erskine  May  [q.v.] 
on  Parliamentary  Practice  marked  the  end 
of  twelve  years'  labour  and  established 
Campion's  reputation  as  a  master  of  par- 
liamentary procedure.  This  massive  work 
was  rearranged  and  largely  rewritten 
under  his  editorship.  New  sections  on  the 
use  and  control  of  parliamentary  time,  on 
financial  procedure,  and  on  privilege  bore 
the  mark  of  Campion's  powers  of  analysis 
and  exposition.  An  historical  introduction 
which  he  had  hoped  to  expand  into  a 
separate  volume  outlined  briefly  the  re- 
sults of  modern  research. 

In  1945  Campion  was  invited  to  submit 


183 


Campion 

a  comprehensive  scheme  of  reform  to  the 
select  committee  on  procedure.  Although 
his  more  radical  proposals  for  relieving  the 
House  of  legislative  detail  and  for  im- 
proving its  control  of  expenditure  and 
delegated  legislation  were  rejected,  his 
suggestions  for  reorganizing  the  business 
of  supply  were  adopted.  These  changes 
with  others  made  on  the  initiative  of  the 
Government  were  incorporated  in  the 
fifteenth  edition  of  Erskine  May  (1950), 
edited  by  Campion  with  the  assistance  of 
(Sir)  T.  G.  B.  Cocks. 

After  the  war  the  movement  towards 
self-government  in  the  colonies  stimulated 
the  demand  for  information  and  guidance 
from  the  mother  Parliament.  Although 
Campion's  plan  for  the  regular  interchange 
of  clerks  was  never  put  into  operation,  he 
authorized  the  first  official  visits  of  a  clerk 
to  Commonwealth  legislatures. 

In  July  1948  Campion  retired,  and  his 
outstanding  services  to  the  Commons  were 
recognized  in  tributes  from  Herbert  Mor- 
rison (later  Lord  Morrison  of  Lambeth), 
the  leader  of  the  House,  and  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  on  behalf  of  the  Opposition.  The 
following  month  he  set  out  on  an  official 
tour  of  Commonwealth  Parliaments  in 
the  course  of  which  he  visited  Ceylon, 
Australia,  New  Zealand,  South  Africa, 
Rhodesia,  Nyasaland,  Kenya,  and  the 
Sudan.  In  1949  he  made  a  similar  visit  to 
the  legislatures  of  Canada.  Owing  to  ill 
health  he  was  never  able  to  write  the 
book  which  would  have  contained  the 
results  of  these  investigations,  but  some 
impressions  of  the  earlier  tour  were  con- 
tributed at  intervals  to  the  Sunday  Times. 

On  his  return  from  these  travels  Cam- 
pion was  appointed  the  first  clerk  of  the 
Consultative  Assembly  of  the  Council  of 
Europe,  which  met  at  Strasbourg.  The 
difficulties  and  weaknesses  of  this  novel 
experiment  in  European  co-operation  were 
discussed  by  Campion  in  articles  contri- 
buted to  the  Sunday  Times  (30  July  1950) 
and  The  Times  (13  November  1950).  His 
early  interest  in  comparative  procedure 
had  come  to  fruition  in  1946  when  he  was 
elected  president  of  the  autonomous  sec- 
tion of  secretaries-general  of  the  Inter- 
Parliamentary  Union.  On  his  initiative 
the  material  was  collected  for  the  hand- 
book of  European  Parliamentary  Pro- 
cedure, which  he  compiled  jointly  with 
D.  W.  S.  Lidderdale  and  published  in 
1953. 

Campion  ranks  with  the  greatest  of  his 
predecessors  at  the  Table  of  the  House. 
By  temperament  a  scholar  and  somewhat 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


shy  in  his  dealings  with  people,  he  had  a 
humanity  and  sense  of  humour  which  made 
him  much  more  than  the  pre-eminent  prac- 
titioner of  his  profession.  His  power  of 
analysis  and  lucid  expression  made  him 
the  ideal  expositor  of  the  intricacies  of 
procedure;  his  grasp  of  principle  com- 
bined with  his  wide  knowledge  of  histori- 
cal precedent  and  contemporary  parallel 
gave  to  his  views  on  the  British  parlia- 
mentary system  a  unique  authority. 

He  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1932,  K.C.B. 
in  1938,  G.C.B.  in  1948,  and  was  raised  to 
the  peerage  in  1950.  Hertford  College 
made  him  an  honorary  fellow  in  1946  and 
the  university  of  Oxford  conferred  on  him 
an  honorary  D.C.L.  in  1950.  He  was  a 
keen  golfer  and  in  1948  won  the  parlia- 
mentary golf  handicap. 

In  1920  Campion  married  Hilda  Mary, 
daughter  of  the  late  William  Alfred 
Spafford,  principal  of  the  Darlington 
training  college  for  women  teachers.  There 
were  no  children.  Campion  died  at  his 
home  at  Abinger  Hammer,  near  Dorking, 
6  April  1958. 

[The  Times,  7  April  1958 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.] 

K.  R.  Mackenzie. 

CAMROSE,  first  Viscount  (1879-1954), 
newspaper  proprietor.  [See  Berry,  Wil- 
liam EWERT.] 

CAPE,  HERBERT  JONATHAN  (1879- 
1960),  publisher,  was  born  in  London  15 
November  1879,  the  youngest  of  the  seven 
children  of  Jonathan  Cape,  builder's  clerk 
of  Cumbrian  origin,  and  his  wife,  Caro- 
line Page.  He  received  little  formal 
education,  and  at  the  age  of  sixteen  he 
started  his  career  as  an  errand-boy  for 
Hatchard's  bookshop  in  Piccadilly,  at  a 
wage  of  twelve  shillings  a  week.  Four 
years  later,  in  1899,  he  joined  the  English 
house  of  the  American  publishers  Harper 
&  Brothers,  where  he  worked  as  a  travel- 
ling salesman,  first  in  the  provinces  and 
later  in  London.  In  1904  he  moved  to 
the  English  publisher  Gerald  Duckworth 
as  London  traveller,  and  later  became 
manager. 

In  the  war  of  1914-18  Cape  served  in 
the  Royal  Army  Ordnance  Corps,  where 
he  reached  the  rank  of  captain.  After  the 
war  he  returned  to  Duckworth,  but  early 
in  1920  he  went  as  manager  to  the  Medici 
Society:  its  chief  products  were  coloured 
reproductions  of  paintings,  with  some 
book-publishing  on  the  side.  There  he  met 
George  Wren  Howard,  fourteen  years  his 


ISA 


^D;N.B.  1051-1960 


Cape 


junior,  who  after  taking  a  degree  at  Cam- 
bridge had  fought  in  the  war  and  was  now 
learning  the  business.  Cape  quickly  saw 
that  Howard  had  a  fine  sense  of  design  in 
book-production,  as  well  as  a  good  busi- 
ness head;  the  two  became  friends  and 
allies.  After  some  months  they  decided 
that  there  was  no  future  for  them  where 
they  were,  and  that  they  had  better  start 
a  new  firm  of  their  own.  Howard  managed 
to  borrow  his  share  of  their  exiguous 
starting-capital  from  his  father;  Cape 
with  no  such  resource  was  compelled  to 
look  elsewhere.  All  the  time  he  had  been 
with  Duckworth  the  firm's  most  profitable 
author  had  been  Elinor  Glyn  [q.v.],  and 
Cape  had  always  advocated  cheap  editions 
of  her  books,  which  Duckworth  had  stead- 
fastly refused  to  issue.  Cape  persuaded 
Duckworth  to  lease  him  the  'shilling 
rights'  of  Elinor  Glyn's  books,  which  he 
republished  under  the  imprint  of  Page  & 
Co. :  the  profits  of  this  venture  helped  to 
provide  Cape  with  his  share  of  the  neces- 
sary capital. 

One  thing  more  was  needful :  a  literary 
adviser,  and  for  this  they  engaged  Edward 
Garnett  (husband  of  Constance  Garnett, 
q.v.),  the  ablest  and  most  influential  pub- 
lisher's reader  of  recent  time,  whom  Cape 
had  known  at  Duckworth's.  He  stayed 
with  Cape  until  his  death  in  1937,  and  it 
was  largely  his  literary  judgement,  coupled 
with  Howard's  production,  which  gained 
the  new  firm  its  outstanding  reputation 
for  quality  during  the  next  two  decades. 

The  firm  of  Jonathan  Cape  opened  its 
doors  at  11  Gower  Street,  Bloomsbury,  on 
1  January  1921,  and  its  first  publication 
was  a  reissue  of  Travels  in  Arabia  Deserta 
by  C.  M.  Doughty  [q.v.],  originally  issued 
in  1888  with  no  success.  This  new  edition, 
in  two  volumes  at  the  huge  price  of  nine 
guineas,  seemed  so  risky  that  it  was 
initially  issued  jointly  with  the  Medici 
Society.  But  its  success  was  prompt  and 
substantial,  and  long  before  its  appearance 
it  had  won  the  new  firm  one  of  its  strongest 
supporters.  Knowing  that  T.  E.  Lawrence 
[q.v.]  was  interested  in  the  book,  they 
persuaded  him  to  write  a  long  introduc- 
tion for  nothing.  This  eventually  led  to 
the  firm's  publishing  Lawrence's  Revolt  in 
the  Desert  (1927),  Seven  Pillars  of  Wisdom 
(1935),  and  The  Mint  (1955). 

The  firm  quickly  came  to  the  fore.  In 
1922  Cape  purchased  the  business  of  A.  C. 
Fifield,  a  small  publisher  of  independence 
and  judgement,  thus  adding  the  works  of 
Samuel  Butler  and  W.  H.  Davies  [qq.v.] 
to  his  growing  list. 


Cape  was  almost  the  first  English  pub- 
hsher  to  visit  the  United  States  in  search 
of  books  and  authors :  hitherto  the  traific 
had  been  mostly  in  the  opposite  direction : 
and  very  soon  he  was  the  English  pub- 
lisher of  three  future  Nobel  prize-winners 
(Sinclair  Lewis,  Ernest  Hemingway,  and 
Eugene  O'Neill),  as  well  as  H.  L.  Mencken, 
Sherwood  Anderson,  Louis  Bromfield,  and 
Dorothy  Canfield.  Later  Robert  Frost  was 
added  to  the  list. 

In  1925  the  firm  moved  to  its  lasting 
home  at  30  Bedford  Square,  from  which  in 
due  course  appeared  the  first,  and  most  of 
the  subsequent,  works  of  H.  E.  Bates,  Duff 
Cooper  [q.v.],  Ian  and  Peter  Fleming, 
Eric  Linklater,  J.  E.  Neale,  (Dame)  C.  V. 
Wedgwood,  and  many  others.  The  chil- 
dren's books  of  Hugh  Lofting  and  Arthur 
Ransome  were  perennially  successful,  and 
when  Cape  heard  that  Stanley  Baldwin 
was  planning  to  speak  at  the  Royal 
Literary  Fund  dinner  about  Precious  Bane 
by  Mary  Webb  [q.v.],  which  Cape  had 
published,  he  speedily  bought  the  rights  of 
her  earlier  books  from  their  original  pub- 
lishers and  reissued  them  in  an  immensely 
popular  collected  edition.  Cape's  many 
cheap  series,  of  which  the  Travellers'  Lib- 
rary was  the  most  prominent,  set  a  new 
standard  of  quality  and  appearance,  and 
held  the  field  until  the  arrival  of  paper- 
backs. 

Cape  knew  his  own  limitations  and 
stuck  to  what  he  knew :  general  publishing 
and  high  quahty  books  (never  attempting 
to  enter  the  educational,  technical,  or 
specialist  markets,  of  which  he  was 
ignorant),  and  his  standard  remained  un- 
usually high.  In  this  he  was  helped,  first 
by  Edward  Garnett,  and  later  by  the 
diverse  talents  of  Hamish  Miles,  David 
Garnett,  Guy  Chapman,  J.  E.  Neale, 
(Dame)  C.  V.  Wedgwood,  Daniel  George, 
and  William  Plomer. 

Cape  was  a  tall,  handsome  man  of  com- 
manding stature.  He  was  an  extremely 
hard  worker,  always  keeping  the  same 
hours  as  the  most  junior  member  of  his 
staff.  By  some  he  was  considered  a  hard 
man,  and  he  was  certainly  a  shrewd  one, 
but  he  had  a  humorous  as  well  as  a  senti- 
mental side  and  could  sometimes  be  pre- 
vailed upon.  He  seldom  became  close 
personal  friends  with  his  authors,  but  they 
respected  his  integrity  and  admired  his 
thorough  knowledge  of  publishing,  realiz- 
ing also  that  he  undoubtedly  possessed 
that  mysterious  'flair'  which  is  worth 
more  to  a  publisher  than  an  expensive 
education.  Except  for  reading,  and  the 


185 


Cape 

governorship  of  Frensham  Heights,  the 
co-educational  school,  he  had  no  other 
interests.  Publishing  was  his  life,  and  he 
worked  at  it  until  his  dying  day. 

Cape  was  three  times  married  and  three 
times  a  widower.  In  1907  he  married 
Edith  Louisa  Creak  (died  1919),  by  whom 
he  had  two  daughters.  Secondly,  he  mar- 
ried in  1927  Olive  Vida  James  (died  1931), 
daughter  of  Maurice  George  Blackmon; 
they  had  a  son  and  a  daughter.  Thirdly,  in 
1941  he  married  Kathleen  Webb  (died 
1953),  daughter  of  Philip  Wilson;  they 
had  one  son.  Cape  died  suddenly  in  his 
London  flat  10  February  1960.  An  oil- 
painting  of  him  by  Colin  Colahan  hangs  in 
the  firm's  office  in  Bedford  Square. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Rupert  Hart-Davis. 

CARLING,  Sir  ERNEST  ROCK  (1877- 
1960),  surgeon  and  pioneer  in  radio- 
therapy, was  bom  in  Guildford,  Surrey,  6 
March  1877,  the  third  son  of  Francis  Rees 
Carling,  master  ironmonger,  and  his  wife, 
Lydia  Colebrook.  He  was  educated  at  the 
Royal  Grammar  School,  Guildford,  and 
King's  College,  London,  and  received  his 
medical  education  at  the  Westminster 
Hospital  medical  school  which  he  joined  at 
the  age  of  eighteen  and  of  which  in  due 
course  he  became  dean.  His  medical  train- 
ing was  interrupted  by  service  in  the 
South  African  war  with  the  Imperial 
Yeomanry  Field  Hospital  as  a  surgical 
dresser  to  his  chief,  Charles  Stonham, 
Westminster's  senior  surgeon. 

Carling  quaUfled  M.R.C.S.,  L.R.C.P.  in 
1901.  Early  in  his  university  studies  he 
showed  both  brilliance  and  versatility  by 
being  awarded  a  gold  medal  and  exhibi- 
tion in  pharmacology  and  therapeutics, 
and  a  further  gold  medal  and  scholarship 
in  obstetrics  and  gynaecology  in  the  final 
M.B.  which  he  took  in  1902,  followed  by 
his  B.S.  in  1903  and  F.R.C.S.  in  1904. 
After  graduation  he  held  appointments  at 
his  own  hospital,  first  in  the  pathology 
department,  then  as  surgical  registrar,  to 
be  followed  by  his  appointment  to  the 
honorary  consulting  staff  as  assistant  sur- 
geon (1906),  surgeon  (1919),  and  honorary 
consulting  surgeon  on  his  retirement  from 
the  active  staff  in  1942. 

Carling  was  a  general  surgeon  of  more 
than  average  ability  and  before  the  days 
of  specialization  an  orthopaedic  sm*geon 
of  considerable  skill.  In  addition  to  the 
Westminster  he  served  the  Seamen's 
Hospital,  Greenwich,  the  Peace  Memorial 
Hospital,  Watford,  the  Chislehiu'st  Hospi- 


<D.N.B.  1951-1960 


tal,  and  the  King  Edward  VII  Convales- 
cent Home  for  Officers  at  Osborne.  As  a 
member  of  the  Territorial  Army  he  was 
mobilized  on  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914 
and  served  as  captain  in  the  Royal  Army 
Medical  Corps  with  the  4th  London  Hospi- 
tal and  later  in  France  and  Flanders. 

In  many  aspects  of  medical  thinking 
and  practice  Carling  was  ahead  of  his  time. 
The  planning  in  almost  every  detail  of  the 
new  Westminster  Hospital,  medical  school, 
and  nurses  home  in  St.  John's  Gardens 
was  as  much  his  as  the  architect's  and  he 
spent  almost  five  years  to  see  the  com- 
pletion of  the  building  in  the  spring  of 
1939.  As  a  teacher  'Rocky'  Carling  was 
best  at  the  bedside  and  in  the  operating 
theatre — gentle,  careful,  logical,  coura- 
geous and  determined  despite  the  frailty  of 
his  appearance.  But  his  interest  in  and  ser- 
vice to  medical  education  were  much  more 
widespread :  he  remained  a  member  of  the 
academic  council  of  the  Westminster 
medical  school  until  the  end  of  his  days. 
For  many  years  he  was  a  member  of  the 
faculty  of  medicine  and  of  the  board  of 
advanced  medical  studies  of  the  univer- 
sity of  London,  and  a  member,  for  a  time 
chairman,  of  the  court  of  examiners  at  the 
Royal  College  of  Surgeons.  He  was  in 
demand  as  an  examiner  in  the  universities 
of  London,  Edinburgh,  and  Sheffield,  and 
in  the  Faculty  of  Radiology.  He  took  a 
genuine  and  wide  interest  in  benevolent 
activities  related  to  his  profession:  as  a 
member  of  council  of  the  Royal  Medical 
Benevolent  Fund,  treasurer  of  the  Society 
for  the  Relief  of  Widows  and  Orphans 
of  Medical  Men,  a  trustee,  and  chairman 
of  the  medical  advisory  committee,  of 
the  Nuffield  Provincial  Hospitals  Trust, 
and  president  of  the  Medical  Protection 
Society. 

Carling's  interest  in  the  use  of  radium  in 
the  treatment  of  cancer  dated  from  1920 
when  in  company  with  some  of  his  junior 
colleagues  he  visited  the  Fondation  Curie 
in  Paris  and  the  radium  institutes  in 
Brussels  and  Stockholm.  It  was  Carling's 
foresight  which  enabled  the  hospital  to 
open  the  Radiimi  Annex  in  Fitz John's 
Avenue,  Hampstead,  later  to  be  the 
foundation  of  the  well-equipped  and 
modern  radiotherapy  department  in  the 
new  hospital.  He  designed,  and  with  the 
help  of  physicists  built,  the  first  early 
models  of  mass  radium  units.  His  interest 
in  radiation  was  modern  in  its  outlook  and 
he  recognized  from  the  early  years  that 
the  application  of  the  use  of  X-rays  and 
radium  in  medicine  needed  the  special 


186 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Carlyle 


knowledge  of  physicists  to  achieve  pre- 
cision, accuracy,  and  safety. 

This  scientific  approach  opened  for  him 
the  door  to  a  second  profession  which  he 
embraced  with  enthusiasm  and  which 
occupied  most  of  his  time  after  his  retire- 
ment from  active  surgical  practice.  It 
shows  the  character  of  his  intellect  which 
led  him  to  the  membership  of  the  National 
Radium  Commission  and  the  Atomic 
Energy  Commission,  the  chairmanship  of 
the  International  Commission  of  Radio- 
logical Protection;  the  membership  and 
for  a  time  chairmanship  of  the  standing 
advisory  committee  on  cancer  and  radio- 
therapy of  the  Ministry  of  Health.  This 
second  career  was  to  him  more  rewarding 
and  to  the  country  of  greater  benefit  than 
even  his  earlier  surgical  achievements. 
His  specialized  knowledge  resulted  in  his 
appointment  as  consultant  adviser  to  the 
Home  Office  and  to  the  Ministry  of 
Labour,  as  expert  adviser  to  the  World 
Health  Organization,  and  member  of  the 
Medical  Research  Council.  His  ever  young 
and  unbiased  attitude  to  scientific  pro- 
gress and  the  changes  in  the  times  he  lived 
in  made  him  the  obvious 'choice  as  chair- 
man of  the  advisory  committee  on  medical 
nomenclature. 

Carling  was  knighted  in  1944,  made  an 
honorary  fellow  of  the  Faculty  of  Radio- 
logy, received  an  honorary  LL.D.  from 
Queen's  University,  Belfast,  and  was 
elected  a  fellow  of  the  Royal  College  of 
Physicians. 

His  chief  recreation  in  his  early  years 
was  travel  and  visiting  art  museums, 
especially  in  Italy  where  for  a  time  he  had 
a  small  house  which  he  used  as  a  retreat 
from  his  many  commitments.  He  was  a 
great  conversationalist  and  a  lover  of 
books,  mostly  on  scientific  subjects. 

In  1901  Carling  married  Edith  Petra 
(died  1959),  daughter  of  the  Rev.  Edward 
Dennis  Rock,  vicar  of  Sutton,  Wood- 
bridge,  Suffolk,  and  had  two  sons.  He  died 
at  his  home  in  London  15  July  1960. 

The  Nuffield  Provincial  Hospitals  Trust 
founded  a  Sir  Ernest  Rock  Cariing 
memorial  in  the  form  of  an  annual  fellow- 
ship. There  is  a  portrait  by  A.  C.  Davidson- 
Houston  in  the  offices  of  the  Medical 
Protection  Society  and  in  the  Westminster 
Hospital ;  also  a  bust  outside  one  of  the 
hospital  wards  named  after  him. 

[British  Medical  Journal,  23  July  and  6 
August  1960 ;  Lancet,  23  July  1960 ;  The  Times, 
16  July  1960;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.] 

Stanford  Cade. 


CARLYLE,  BENJAMIN  FEARNLEY, 
DoM  AELRED  (1874-1955),  founder  of 
the  Benedictine  community  of  Prinknash 
Abbey,  Gloucestershire,  was  born  in 
Sheffield  7  February  1874,  the  elder  son 
and  first  of  the  six  children  of  James 
Fearnley  Carlyle  and  his  wife,  Anna 
Maria  Champion  Kelly,  of  Yealmpton, 
Devon.  He  was  named  after  his  grand- 
father, the  Rev.  Benjamin  Fearnley 
Carlyle,  who  had  been  vicar  of  Badge- 
worth,  Gloucestershire.  In  1885  his  father, 
a  civil  engineer,  was  appointed  locomotive 
superintendent  of  the  Buenos  Aires  and 
Rosario  Railway,  and  the  family  moved  to 
the  Argentine.  Carlyle  with  his  younger 
brother  was  sent  back  to  England  to 
school,  and  was  at  Blundell's  until  his 
father's  death  in  1890.  The  family  then 
settled  at  Newton  Abbot  where  Carlyle 
attended  the  College  until  he  passed  his 
pre-medical  examinations.  He  next  spent 
four  years  as  a  medical  student  at  St. 
Bartholomew's  Hospital.  During  that 
time  he  was  clothed  as  a  Benedictine  ob- 
late (1893),  taking  the  name  of  Aelred, 
and,  encouraged  by  Archbishop  Frederick 
Temple  [q.v.],  began  the  work  of  founding 
a  religious  community  of  men  to  revive 
in  the  Church  of  England  the  ancient 
Benedictine  rule.  In  1896  he  abandoned 
his  medical  studies  and  went  to  live  in 
the  Isle  of  Dogs  where  the  Priory  soon 
became  the  centre  both  of  a  monastic  life 
and  of  work  among  the  poor  of  London's 
east  end. 

In  May  1902,  when  the  young  com- 
munity was  eventually  established  at 
Painsthorpe  Hall  in  Yorkshire,  lent  them 
by  Lord  Halifax  [q.v.],  Aelred's  election  as 
abbot  waS'  approved  by  the  same  arch- 
bishop; and  in  November  1904,  with 
letters  of  authorization  from  W.  D. 
Maclagan  [q.v.],  archbishop  of  York,  he 
received  Anglican  orders  in  America  from 
Dr.  Grafton,  bishop  of  Fond-du-Lac, 
Wisconsin. 

On  18  October  1906  abbot  and  com- 
munity took  possession  of  the  island  of 
Caldey  off  Tenby,  on  the  Pembrokeshire 
coast.  With  its  ancient  buildings,  natural 
beauty,  and  long  monastic  history,  Caldey 
became  increasingly  a  focus  of  interest 
for  Anglo-Catholics ;  but  although  contro- 
versy had  no  part  in  the  life  of  the  com- 
munity, developments  in  the  Church  of 
England  were  watched  with  some  mis- 
givings, and  by  1912  doubts  had  arisen 
upon  the  relation  of  the  community  to  the 
Anglican  Church  and  of'  that  Church  to 
the  rest  of  the  Catholic  world.  It  became 


187 


Carlylfe 


'D.N.B.  1951-W60 


clear  to  the  abbot  and  most  of  the  com- 
munity that  they  must  make  their  submis- 
sion to  the  'Church  that  is  in  communion 
with  Peter',  and  on  6  March  1913  they 
were  received  into  the  Roman  Catholic 
Church.  The  next  day  they  were  given 
canonical  status  as  oblates  of  the  Benedic- 
tine Abbey  of  Maredsous,  in  Belgium, 
where  Aelred  went  to  serve  his  novitiate. 
He  made  his  solemn  profession  there  be- 
fore Abbot  Columba  Marmion  on  29  June 
1914,  and  on  5  July  was  ordained  priest  by 
the  bishop  of  Namur.  On  10  August  he  was 
installed  at  Caldey  by  the  bishop  of 
Menevia,  from  whom  he  received  the  ab- 
batial  blessing  on  18  October  1914. 

The  war  years  were  difficult  for  a  com- 
munity already  deeply  in  debt  through 
the  abbot's  grandiose  building  schemes. 
He  made  'begging  tours'  of  the  United 
States  and  Jamaica  in  1917-18  and  of 
Brazil,  the  Argentine,  and  Chile  in  1920- 
21.  His  health,  however,  had  begun  to 
cause  some  disquiet.  In  1921  he  resigned 
his  abbacy  and,  accompanied  by  one  of 
the  older  members  of  the  community, 
sailed  for  British  Columbia  whence  he  had 
received  an  urgent  appeal  for  men  to  work 
in  the  mission  fields.  He  was  invited  by 
the  archbishop  of  Vancouver  to  make  his 
headquarters  on  the  shores  of  the  Okana- 
gan  Lake  where,  during  the  next  nine 
years,  he  gained  valuable  experience  in 
the  ways  of  Western  Canada.  In  1930  he 
was  given  care  of  souls  in  the  mining  dis- 
trict of  Princeton,  but  in  1933  he  jour- 
neyed to  Spain  to  test  his  possible  vocation 
at  the  Carthusian  monastery  of  Miraflores, 
near  Burgos.  Before  long  it  was  agreed 
that  the  greater  usefulness  of  this  dynamic 
but  restless  and  erratic  priest  lay  in  the 
West  where  the  clergy  were  so  few ;  so  he 
returned  to  his  former  territories  and  to 
the  missions  along  the  Pacific  coast. 

Incardinated  into  the  diocese  of  Van- 
couver in  1936  he  now  entered  upon  what 
was  probably  the  most  fruitful  period  of 
his  Ufe.  To  the  chaplaincy  of  St.  Vincent's 
Home  in  Vancouver  and  to  the  Apostle- 
ship  of  the  Sea  was  added  the  care  of  the 
prisoners  in  Oakalla,  the  provincial  jail. 
It  was  there  above  all  that  his  wide  ex- 
perience and  deep,  compassionate  know- 
ledge of  human  nature,  salted  with  his 
quiet  wisdom  and  swift  humour,  enabled 
him  to  bring  hope  and  courage  to  those 
who  most  needed  help  on  the  road  to  re- 
habilitation. His  after-care  of  prisoners,  as 
friend  of  the  friendless,  won  the  highest 
regard  from  the  bench  and  bar  of  British 
Colimibia.  It  was  in  recognition  of  this 


work  especially  that  he  was  presented 
with  the  freedom  of  the  city  of  Vancouver 
at  the  public  farewell  ceremony  before  he 
left  for  home  in  May  1951  to  pass  the  late 
evening  of  his  life  with  his  brethren.  He 
renewed  his  solemn  vows  as  a  Benedictine 
monk  in  1953 ;  died  14  October  1955  at 
Corston,  near  Bath ;  and  was  buried  in  the 
abbey  of  Prinknash  whither  the  com- 
munity had  moved  in  1928. 

Carlyle's  principal  writings  appeared 
for  many  years  in  'The  Abbot's  Letter'  in 
Pax,  the  community  quarterly;  his  ex- 
position of  'Our  Purpose  and  Method', 
written  in  Anglican  days,  was  considered 
by  the  abbot  primate  of  the  order  one  of 
the  best  things  written  on  the  Benedictine 
ideal.  Voluminous  diaries  and  a  vast 
number  of  letters  remained  to  be  edited. 

[Peter  F.  Anson,  Abbot  Extraordinary  (in 
which  is  reproduced  a  drawing  by  Gregory 
Brown),  1958 ;  community  archives ;  personal 
knowledge.]  Aidan  Angle. 

CARPENTER,  ALFRED  FRANCIS 
BLAKENEY  (1881-1955),  vice-admiral, 
was  born  at  Barnes,  Surrey,  17  September 
1881,  the  only  son  of  Lieutenant  (later 
Captain)  Alfred  Carpenter,  R.N.,  by  his 
first  wife,  Henrietta,  daughter  of  G.  A.  F. 
Shadwell.  His  father  in  1876  received  the 
Albert  medal  and  the  Royal  Humane 
Society  bronze  medal  for  rescuing  a  man 
overboard  while  serving  in  the  Challenger, 
and  while  in  command  of  the  Marine  Sur- 
vey of  India,  at  the  time  of  the  Burmese 
war,  was  among  the  first  naval  officers  to 
be  appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  His  grand- 
father, Commander  Charles  Carpenter,  in 
1814  assisted  in  the  capture  after  a  long 
chase  of  the  American  privateer  Rattle- 
snake. His  uncle  was  the  writer  Edward 
Carpenter  [q.v.]. 

On  leaving  his  preparatory  school  Car- 
penter entered  the  Royal  Navy  as  a  cadet 
in  1897.  The  following  year  as  a  midship- 
man he  saw  service  in  Crete  during  the 
massacres,  and  in  1900  he  was  with  the 
naval  brigade  landed  during  the  Boxer 
rising  in  China.  After  promotion  in  1903 
to  lieutenant  he  specialized  in  navigation, 
becoming  a  lieutenant-commander  in  1911. 
In  the  year  preceding  the  war  he  gained 
experience  in  staff  duties  on  a  war  staff 
course  and  received  the  thanks  of  the 
Admiralty  for  various  inventions  of  a 
specialized  nature.  In  the  same  year  he 
was  awarded  the  silver  medal  of  the 
Royal  Humane  Society  for  saving  Ufe 
at  sea. 

The  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  foimd  him 


188 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Carpenter 


in  the  Iron  Duke  on  the  staff  of  Sir  John 
(later  Earl)  Jellicoe  [q.v.],  but  in  Novem- 
ber 1915,  after  his  promotion  to  com- 
mander, he  was  appointed  navigating 
commander  in  the  Emperor  of  India.  In 
1917  Roger  (later  Lord)  Keyes  [q.v.]  was 
appointed  director  of  plans  at  the  Ad- 
miralty and  Carpenter,  who  had  been 
Keyes's  navigating  lieutenant  in  the 
Vemis,  successfully  begged  to  be  taken  on 
his  staff.  There  he  was  engaged  in  the  secret 
plans  for  attacking  Zeebrugge  and  Ostend 
with  the  purpose  of  blocking  the  exits 
from  the  submarine  and  destroyer  bases. 
Keyes  in  his  Naval  Memoirs  writes: 
'Commander  Carpenter's  gift  for  going 
into  the  minutest  details  with  the  most 
meticulous  care,  greatly  assisted  me  in 
preparing  a  detailed  plan,  and  orders, 
which  embodied  the  work  of  several 
officers.' 

In  selecting  Carpenter  for  the  command 
of  the  Vindictive  Keyes  knew  he  was 
choosing  a  man  familiar  with  all  the  main 
phases  of  the  operation.  The  whole  con- 
ception of  the  attack  on  Zeebrugge  and 
Ostend  had  the  spirit  and  elements  of  the 
cut-and-thrust  raids  of  Drake  and  Haw- 
kins. The  chance  of  favouring  winds  and 
currents  coinciding  with  the  eve  of  St. 
George's  day  1918  gave  the  expedition  an 
additional  romantic  appeal.  To  Keyes's 
signal  'St.  George  for  England'  Carpenter 
replied  'May  we  give  the  Dragon's  tail  a 
damned  good  twist'. 

Carpenter  had  been  promoted  to  acting 
captain  for  the  expedition  but  his  duties 
were  confined  to  the  command  of  the  ship 
and  Acting-Captain  H.  C.  Halahan,  who 
was  senior  to  him,  was  in  conmiand  of  the 
landing  force  designed  for  attacking  the 
Mole  at  Zeebrugge,  partly  to  divert  atten- 
tion from  the  block  ships  and  partly  to 
destroy  enemy  armament.  Carpenter's 
part  in  bringing  the  Vindictive  alongside 
the  Mole  was  vital  to  the  success  of  the 
operation  and  his  achievement  in  doing 
so  is  not  to  be  underrated  even  though  he 
brought  her  340  yards  beyond  her  planned 
position  and  thus  out  of  reach  of  her 
primary  object:  the  guns  which  com- 
manded the  approach  to  the  harbour.  It 
was  characteristic  that  Carpenter  freely 
admitted  this  error  was  entirely  his,  ex- 
plaining that  it  was  due  to  the  great  diffi- 
culty in  recognizing  the  objects  on  the 
Mole  amidst  the  shell  and  smoke  flare. 
Keyes,  in  his  first  dispatch,  paid  tribute 
to  Carpenter's  personal  share  in  the  at- 
tack, pointing  out  that,  from  all  reports 
he  had,  Carpenter's  'calm  composure  when 


navigating  mined  waters  and  bringing  his 
ship  alongside  the  Mole  in  darkness,  and 
his  great  bravery  when  the  ship  came  un- 
der heavy  fire,  did  much  to  encourage 
similar  behaviour  on  the  part  of  the  crew, 
and  thereby  contributed  greatly  to  the 
success  of  the  operation'.  His  skill  in 
bringing  his  ship  away  after  the  action 
was  also  highly  praiseworthy. 

Carpenter,  as  the  senior  surviving 
officer,  was  asked  by  Keyes  to  make  re- 
commendations for  conspicuous  gallantry, 
but  he  replied  that  he  felt  it  would  be 
invidious  to  select  individuals  where 
everyone  had  acted  so  splendidly.  Nor 
would  he  take  part  in  the  ballot  which 
was  then  arranged  for  an  officer  and  rating 
for  the  V.C.  in  accordance  with  Rule  13. 
In  this  ballot,  in  which  officers  could  only 
be  elected  by  officers.  Carpenter  received 
one  more  vote  than  Commander  (Sir) 
Harold  Campbell  of  the  Daffodil  and  was 
thus  awarded  the  cross.He  was  immediately 
confirmed  in  his  promotion  to  captain  and 
later  received  the  croix  de  guerre  with 
palm  and  was  made  an  officer  of  the 
Legion  of  Honour.  His  detailed  account  of 
The  Blocking  of  Zeebrugge  was  published 
in  1921. 

After  Zeebrugge  Carpenter  was  sent  on 
a  lecture  tour  of  Canada  and  th^  United 
States  (1918-19)  and  on  his  return,  after  a 
brief  time  in  the  naval  intelligence  depart- 
ment, on  1  October  1919  he  was  given 
command  of  a  war  course  at  Cambridge 
for  naval  officers.  In  1921  he  took  over  the 
command  of  the  fight  cruiser  Carysfort 
and  in  October  1923  was  given  charge  of 
the  senior  officers  technical  course  at 
Portsmouth.  From  February  1924  to 
September  1926  he  held  the  triple  post  of 
captain  of  the  dockyard,  deputy  super- 
intendent, and  King's  harbour  master  at 
Chatham.  After  a  period  on  special  duty 
at  the  Admiralty  he  was  given  command 
of  the  Beribow  in  August  1927,  transferring 
to  the  Marlborough  the  following  May.  He 
was  promoted  rear-admiral  in  August 
1929,  at  a  time  when  opportunities  for 
employment  in  flag  rank  were  limited,  and 
placed  on  the  retired  list,  on  which  he  was 
promoted  vice-admiral  in  1934. 

During  his  retirement  Carpenter  in- 
terested himself  in  the  Merchant  Navy, 
particularly  in  the  training  of  its  junior 
officers  and  cadets.  He  introduced  the  idea 
of  a  training  ship,  the  St.  Briavels,  in 
which  they  could  have  practical  experience 
in  handling,  manoeuvring,  and  mooring 
ships,  which  was  necessarily  in  the  hands 
of  senior  officers  on  actual  voyages.  During 


1«9 


Carpenter 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


the  war  he  commanded  the  17th  Glou- 
cestershire battaUon  of  the  Home  Guard 
from  1940  to  1944.  He  was  appointed  a 
deputy-lieutenant  for  Gloucestershire  in 
1946.  He  died  at  his  home  in  St.  Briavels, 
Gloucestershire,  27  December  1955. 

Lean  and  ascetic  in  appearance,  Car- 
penter, brought  up  in  the  traditions  of  the 
navy,  although  somewhat  conventional 
in  his  outlook,  embodied  many  of  the 
highest  qualities  of  the  best  type  of  naval 
officer.  Disciplined  in  mind,  courageous 
and  calm  in  action,  energetic  and  inspiring 
as  a  leader  and  generous  in  his  praise  for 
subordinates,  he  also  possessed  an  unusual 
gift  for  the  mastery  of  detail  and  exact- 
ness in  planning. 

He  married  in  1903  Maud  (died  1923), 
daughter  of  the  Rev.  Stafford  Tordiffe, 
rector  of  Staplegrove,  Somerset,  by  whom 
he  had  a  daughter.  He  married  secondly, 
in  1927,  Hilda  Margaret  Alison,  daughter 
of  Dr.  W.  Chearnley  Smith. 

His  portrait,  painted  in  1918  by  Sir 
A.  S.  Cope,  is  in  the  National  Portrait 
Gallery. 

[The  Times,  28  December  1955  and  4 
January  1956 ;  A.  F.  B.  Carpenter,  The  Block- 
ing of  Zeebrugge,  1921 ;  Sir  Roger  Keyes, 
Naval  Memoirs,  1916-18,  1935;  Ostend  and 
Zeebrugge,  ApHl  23;  May  10,  1918.  The  Dis- 
patches of  Vice-Admiral  Sir  Roger  Keyes  .  .  . 
and  other  narratives  of  the  operations,  ed.  C. 
Sanford  Terry,  1919;  Sir  Henry  Newbolt, 
(Official)  History  of  the  Great  War.  Naval 
Operations,  vol.  v,  1931 ;  private  information.] 
r>  G.  K.  S.  Hamilton-Edwards. 

i\- 

CARTER,  Sir  EDGAR  BONHAM- 
(1870-1956),  jurist  and  administrator. 
[See  Bonham-Carter.] 

CARY,  ARTHUR  JOYCE  LUNEL 

(1888-1957),  author,  was  born  in  London- 
derry, Ireland,  7  December  1888,  the  elder 
son  of  Arthur  Pitt  Chambers  Cary  and  his 
first  wife,  Charlotte  Louisa,  daughter  of 
James  Joyce,  bank  manager,  of  London- 
derry. The  Ulster  branch  of  the  Cary 
family  was  founded  by  a  grandson  of  Sir 
Robert  Cary  of  Clovelly  Court,  Devon- 
shire, George  Cary,  who  went  to  Ireland  in 
Chichester's  administration,  became  re- 
corder of  Derry  in  1613,  married  a  sister  of 
Sir  Tristram  Beresford,  bart.,  built  him- 
self a  handsome  house,  Redcastle  near 
Derry,  and  estabUshed  a  family  which 
was  to  live  the  life  of  Ascendancy  land- 
owners in  beautiful  Inishowen  between 
Lough  Swilly  and  Lough  Foyle  for  300 
years.  Joyce  Gary's  grandfather,  Arthur 
Lunel  Cary  of  Castlecary,  lost  his  estate  as 


an  indirect  result  of  the  Land  Act  of  1881. 
But  already  the  pattern  of  life  had 
changed :  some  of  the  family  had  acquired 
professions,  some  had  emigrated — to  Illi- 
nois, to  Canada,  to  Australia — and  one, 
Dr.  Tristram  Cary,  had  established  him- 
self in  London.  This  pattern  repeated  itself 
in  the  next  generation :  one  son  to  Canada, 
one  to  the  United  States,  while  two  sons — 
of  whom  one  was  Joyce  Gary's  father — 
and  four  of  their  sisters  lived  mainly  in  or 
near  London. 

Joyce  Cary's  father  trained  and  prac- 
tised as  an  engineer  in  England.  He  lived 
in  London  with  his  wife  and  two  sons, 
first  at  Nunhead  and  later  in  the  Kitto 
Road.  Charlotte  Cary  died  in  1898  when 
Joyce  was  nine.  Shortly  afterwards  the 
family  moved  to  Gunnersbury,  Middlesex, 
where  Dr.  Tristram  Cary's  home  was  a 
centre  of  intense,  affectionate  family  life 
for  his  nephews  and  nieces  and  their 
children,  described  by  Joyce  Cary  in  a 
piece  called  'Cromwell  House'  {New 
Yorker,  3  November  1956).  There  was 
still  a  close  bond  with  Ireland,  endless 
talk  of  the  past,  and  frequent  visits: 
the  boys  went  every  summer  for  their 
long  holidays.  When  Joyce  went  to  his 
Cary  grandmother  he  would  read  omni- 
vorously  and  dream  of  the  past  evoked 
for  him  by  family  portraits  and  by  the 
stories  the  country  people  loved  to  tell 
him  of  his  people.  But  when  his  grand- 
mother Joyce  took  a  holiday  house  for  all 
her  grandchildren,  he  with  his  many 
cousins  would  range  about  the  country- 
side and  picnic  and  bathe  and  sail.  His 
autobiographical  novel  A  House  of  Chil- 
dren (1941)  is  a  radiant  evocation  of  such 
a  summer.  He  gained  from  his  Irish  ex- 
perience not  only  the  setting  and  charac- 
ters for  this  novel  and  for  Castle  Corner 
(1938)  but  also  a  sense  of  history  and 
tradition  alive  with  the  conflicts  of  religion 
and  politics ;  a  realization  of  the  random 
injustice  of  life,  from  his  family  vicissi- 
tudes; and  a  deep  affection  for  simple 
people  together  with  an  awareness  that 
dignity  is  not  a  class  prerogative. 

He  went  to  Hurstleigh  preparatory 
school  in  Tunbridge  Wells,  then  to 
Clifton  College.  Fifty  years  later  he  re- 
called, with  not  uncritical  gratitude,  two 
CUfton  masters :  one,  who  could  communi- 
cate his  profound  love  of  Shakespeare, 
another  who  gave  Cary  the  run  of  his 
library  and  encouraged  him  to  write.  At 
CUfton,  Cary  met  (Sir)  William  Heneage 
Ogilvie  who  was  to  become  not  only  a  life- 
long friend  but  also  his  brother-in-law. 


190 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Gary 


(Sir  Frederick  Wolff  Ogilvie  [q.v.]  was  a 
younger  brother.) 

A  talent  for  drawing  and  painting  ran 
through  the  Cary  family — there  are 
several  sketches  of  Joyce  as  child  and 
adolescent  by  his  father  and  by  his 
father's  sister,  Hessie.  Cary  resolved  to 
become  a  painter,  and  at  seventeen,  hav- 
ing inherited  from  his  grandmother  Helen 
Joyce  property  which  provided  him  with 
about  £300  a  year,  he  studied  art  at 
Edinburgh,  where  he  spent  1907-9,  with 
occasional  visits  to  Paris.  His  Edinburgh 
teacher,  devoted  to  classical  art,  laid  great 
emphasis  on  the  study  of  anatomy  and 
drawing;  the  young  Cary  accepted  that 
formal  skills  could  be  acquired  in  Edin- 
burgh, but  Paris  of  the  Post-Impressionists 
provided  the  excitement  of  creative  art. 

During  his  last  year  at  Edinburgh,  dis- 
satisfied with  his  painting,  and  feeling 
that  this  was  not  the  medium  in  which  he 
could  best  express  himself,  Cary  turned 
his  thoughts  to  ^vriting.  (A  volume  of  his 
juveniUa,  entitled  Verse  by  Arthur  Cary, 
was  printed  by  Robert  Grant  in  Edin- 
burgh in  1908.)  But  all  his  life  the  visual 
arts  remained  a  constant  source  of 
interest  and  pleasure.  Moreover,  when  he 
came  to  write  his  novels  he  worked  like  a 
painter  in  that  he  planned  out  a  rough 
design  for  the  whole  and  then  lavished 
his  days  on  any  parts  of  it,  not  in  se- 
quence, but  turning  happily  at  will  from 
work  on  section  10  to  section  3,  and  so  on. 
He  came,  too,  to  value  his  careful  training 
in  anatomy  and  drawing  not  only  for 
having  strengthened  his  sense  of  structure 
and  form  but  also  for  having  made  him 
aware  of  the  sheer  hard  work  involved  in 
acquiring  skill  in  any  art. 

He  next  went  up  to  Trinity  College, 
Oxford,  ostensibly  to  read  law  (in  which 
he  got  a  fourth  in  1912)  but  in  practice  to 
spend  his  time  reading  widely,  writing, 
arguing  and  discussing,  forming  friend- 
ships and  intellectual  interests.  Religion 
and  philosophy  now  assumed  an  impor- 
tance for  him  which  they  never  lost.  Dur- 
ing his  third  year  he  shared  digs  in 
Holywell  with  Middleton  Murry  [q.v.], 
who  has  described  Joyce  as  carpeting  the 
floor  with  poems  in  the  making.  Paris 
during  the  vacations  for  talk  and  friend- 
ship was  an  extension  of  Oxford,  but  for 
visual  and  artistic  excitement  unique  as 
always.  During  his  final  year  he  met  his 
friend's  sister,  Gertrude  Margaret  Ogilvie, 
who  was  to  become  his  wife  in  1916  and  his 
devoted  love  until  her  death  in  1949. 

After  Oxford,  years  of  varied  and  active 


experience  followed.  During  the  Balkan 
wars  (1912-13)  he  served  as  a  medical 
orderly  in  the  British  Red  Cross  attached 
to  the  Montenegrin  army  during  two 
campaigns,  an  experience  recorded  and 
illustrated  in  his  posthumously  published 
Memoir  of  the  Bohotes  (1964).  Dr.  Martin 
Leake,  V.C,  has  attested  that  Cary  'went 
into  a  burning  magazine  at  Antivari  at 
great  risk  to  his  own  life  and  helped  to 
rescue  two  men'.  Cary  then  spent  a  few 
months  working  with  Sir  Horace  Plunkett 
[q.v.]  for  the  Irish  Agricultural  Organiza- 
tion Society  before  joining  the  Nigerian 
political  service  in  late  1913.  Apart  from 
home  leaves,  he  remained  in  West  Africa 
from  May  1914  until  1920;  but  part  of 
1915-17  was  spent  in  military  service  with 
the  Nigerian  Regiment  in  the  Cameroons 
campaign  during  which  he  received  a 
slight  wound  in  an  engagement  on  Mount 
Mora.  After  his  marriage  a  long  sequence 
of  letters  to  his  wife  in  England  records 
his  daily  life  in  Borgu  in  vivid  detail.  The 
Nigerian  experience  was  to  provide  the 
themes  and  settings  for  his  four  African 
novels:  Aissa  Saved  (1932) ;  An  American 
Visitor  (1933) ;  The  African  Witch  (1936) ; 
Mister  Johnson  (1939) ;  for  an  unpublished 
play.  The  King  is  Dead,  Long  Live  the 
King;  and  for  several  short  stories.  It  is 
also  the  basis  of  two  of  his  political 
treatises,  The  Case  for  African  Freedom 
(1941)  and  Britain  and  West  Africa  (1946). 
In  1920  Cary  left  the  Nigerian  service, 
and  he  and  his  wife  settled  in  Oxford  at  12 
Parks  Road,  where  they  continued  for  the 
rest  of  their  lives.  Family  life  with  his  wife 
and  four  sons  provided  him  with  joy  and 
anxiety — ^joy  particularly  in  his  wife's 
love  and  loyal  encouragement,  anxiety 
mainly  about  his  work.  His  wife's  devo- 
tion to  music  gave  her  an  understanding  of 
his  stubborn  pursuit  of  his  own  art,  writ- 
ing. This  she  needed,  for  although  he  had 
pubUshed  (under  the  pseudonym  Thomas 
Joyce)  several  short  stories  during  and 
shortly  after  his  African  sojourn,  he  now 
found  himself  unable  to  write  the  novel 
he  wanted  to.  He  later  said  that  at  this 
time  he  had  not  yet  arrived  at  a  coherent 
view  of  reality  and  therefore  the  novel  he 
was  engaged  on  had  no  form.  'I  simply  lost 
control  of  it.'  Ten  years  were  to  pass  in 
intensive  reading  and  writing,  formulating 
questions  and  seeking  answers  to  them, 
before  his  creative  energies  were  freed. 
From  then  on  he  wrote  easily  and  quickly, 
producing  after  1932  sixteen  novels, 
many  short  stories  {Spring  Song  and 
other  stories,  1960),  and  two  long  poems, 


191 


Gary 

Marching  Soldier  (1945)  and  The  Drunken 
SaUm  (1947),  as  well  as  treatises,  auto- 
biographical pieces,  and  essays. 

The  African  novels  were  succeeded  by 
Charley  is  my  Darling  (1940),  whose 
characters  are  wartime  evacuee  children 
from  London.  After  this  sympathetic  study 
of  the  have-nots,  he  wrote  the  novel  based 
on  his  own  childhood,  A  Home  of  Children 
(James  Tait  Black  memorial  prize).  The 
two  childhood  novels  are  in  some  sense 
paralleled  by  two  novels  in  which  the 
theme  is  the  nature  of  woman,  constant 
in  changing  circumstances :  The  Moonlight 
(1946)  and  A  Fearful  Joy  (1949). 

The  overriding  theme  of  the  novels  is 
man's  freedom  to  shape  his  idea  of  the 
world  and  so  to  create  his  own  hfe :  'from 
chaos  man  makes  his  world'.  The  main 
opposition  is  between  the  traditional  and 
conserving  on  the  one  hand  and  the 
dynamic  and  creative  on  the  other.  All  the 
novels  are  set  within  the  same  period, 
roughly  from  the  end  of  the  nineteenth 
century  up  to  the  second  world  war  years, 
a  period  which  Cary  described  as  a  pro- 
gress into  liberty ;  he  measured  freedom  of 
the  mind  by  its  ability  to  accept  new  truth, 
and  the  liberty  a  society  affords  not  merely 
by  absence  of  restraint  but  also  by  the 
positive  opportunities  for  freedom  it 
offers  in  terms  of  standards  of  living  and 
education.  Each  novel  is  set  firmly  in  its 
social  and  historical  context  of  rapidly 
changing  events,  of  societies  in  confronta- 
tion. All  are  suffused  with  the  joy  of 
living  and  all  embody  Gary's  belief  that 
beauty,  art,  loyalty  are  as  indestructible  as 
life  itself.  Few  twentieth-century  noveUsts 
have  presented  such  a  range  of  characters 
— ^politicians  and  preachers,  artists  and 
witches,  lawyers  and  delinquent  children. 
The  novels  focus  on  those  areas  of  life 
where  the  creative  impulse  has  most  range 
and  potential:  art,  politics,  and  religion. 

Thus  the  most  complex  works,  the  two 
trilogies,  are  concerned,  the  one  with  art 
{Herself  Surprised,  To  Be  a  Pilgriniy  The 
Horse's  Mouth,  1941-4)  and  the  other  with 
politics  (Prisoner  of  Grace,  Except  the  Lord, 
Not  Honour  More,  1952-5).  A  third 
trilogy  was  projected,  with  religion  as  its 
centre,  but  when  in  1956  Joyce  Cary 
realized  that  he  could  not  live  long  enough 
to  write  it,  he  settled  for  treating  the 
theme  in  a  single  volume,  the  unfinished, 
posthumously  published  novel,  The  Cap- 
tive and  the  Free  (1959). 

Cary  was  technically  inventive  and  in- 
genious, and  nowhere  more  than  in  his 
trilogies.  He  said  that  he  devised  this  form 


DJ4.B.  1951-1900 


'to  show  three  characters,  not  only  in 
themselves,  but  as  seen  by  others.  The 
object  was  to  get  a  three-dimensional 
depth  and  force  of  character.  One  charac- 
ter was  to  speak  in  each  book  and  describe 
the  other  two  as  seen  by  that  person'.  The 
form  affords  rich  opportunity  for  irony  in 
the  divergence  between  objective  truth 
and  the  subjective  view;  between  official 
record  and  actual  event ;  and  most 
notably  between  how  a  character  sees 
himself  and  [how  others  see  him.  By  the 
way  in  which  he  selects  and  interprets 
events,  each  narrator  reveals  his  own  view 
of  reality.  It  is  no  accident  that  the 
writer  who  devised  this  subtle  form  en- 
titled his  aesthetic  credo  Art  and  Reality 
(Clark  lectures,  1956). 

The  novels  express  his  own  idea  of  life 
and  its  joyful  variety.  Art  and  Reality 
derived  inextricably  both  from  his  ex- 
perience as  novelist  and  from  his  percep- 
tion of  hfe's  meaning  as  he  conveyed  it  in 
his  novels  and  in  his  own  gay,  courageous 
Uving  until  the  day  of  his  death,  in 
Oxford,  29  March  1957. 

A  portrait  in  oils  by  Eric  Kennington 
is  in  the  possession  of  the  family;  a 
self-portrait  (etching)  is  in  the  National 
Portrait  Gallery.  Joyce  Gary's  manuscripts 
and  papers  are  in  the  Gary  Collection 
presented  to  the  Bodleian  Library, 
Oxford,  by  James  M.  Osborn. 

[Andrew  Wright,  Joyce  Cary,  1958 ;  M.  M. 
Mahood,  Joyce  Cary's  Africa,  1964;  Lionel 
Stevenson,  'Joyce  Cary  and  the  Anglo-Irish 
Tradition',  in  Modem  Fiction  Studies  (Purdue 
University,  Lafayette,  Indiana),  vol.  ix.  No.  3, 
Autumn  1963 ;  unpublished  letters  and  papers ; 
personal  knowledge.]  Winifred  Davin. 

CASEY,  WILLIAM  FRANCIS  (1884- 
1957),  editor  of  The  Times,  was  born  in 
Cape  Town  2  May  1884,  the  son  of  Patrick 
Joseph  Casey,  theatre  proprietor,  of 
Glenageary,  county  Dublin.  He  was  edu- 
cated in  Ireland  at  Castleknock  College 
and  Trinity  College,  Dublin,  of  which  in 
later  life  he  was  an  honorary  LL.D.  Of  a 
restless  disposition,  he  found  it  difficult  to 
decide  upon  a  career  and  spent  two  years 
reading  medicine  before  turning  to  law ;  he 
was  called  to  the  Irish  bar  in  1909.  His 
thoughts,  however,  were  drawn  towards 
the  theatre  and,  while  reading  for  the  bar, 
he  became  interested  in  the  work  of  the 
Abbey  Theatre  when  the  directors  in- 
cluded W.  B.  Yeats  and  Lady  Gregory 
[qq.v.].  He  worked  for  a  time  on  the 
business  side  and  he  would  sum  up  this 
period  as  'One  year,  one  brief,  one  guinea*. 


102 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cassels 


In  1908  two  of  his  plays,  The  Suburban 
Groove  and  The  Man  Who  Missed  the  Tide^ 
were  produced  at  the  Abbey  Theatre  and 
since  they  had  a  fair  measure  of  success  he 
decided  to  try  his  luck  in  London.  He 
brought  with  him  a  letter  to  (Sir)  Bruce 
Richmond,  editor  of  The  Times  Literary 
Supplement.  They  took  to  each  other  at 
once  and  it  was  agreed  that  Casey  should 
review  for  the  Supplement. 

Shortly  before  the  outbreak  of  war  in 
1914  Casey  was  offered  a  post  as  a  sub- 
editor in  the  sporting  department  of  The 
Times  and  thereafter  until  his  retirement 
he  was  a  permanent  member  of  the  staff. 
He  served  as  a  foreign  sub-editor  and  his 
lively  interest  led  to  his  posting  to  Wash- 
ington in  1919,  then  to  Paris  in  the  fol- 
lowing year.  A  valuable  asset  was  his 
abihty  to  make  friends  quickly  wherever 
he  might  be.  To  colleagues  who  visited 
him  overseas  he  proved  an  ideal  host  and 
he  would  provide  a  mine  of  local  informa- 
tion otherwise  unobtainable  in  a  short 
visit.  A  witty  talker  and  an  eager  listener, 
he  always  managed,  although  a  tremen- 
dously hard  worker  for  his  paper,  to  find 
time  to  analyse  the  international  situation 
for  a  friend. 

Casey  returned  to  London  in  1923  as 
chief  foreign  sub-editor,  one  of  the  most 
arduous  and  anxious  positions  on  the 
paper.  He  held  it  until  1928  and  revealed 
his  versatility  in  the  general  strike  of  1926 
when  both  the  proprietors  and  the  edi- 
torial staff  of  The  Times  were  determined 
that  the  motto  of  the  paper  should  be 
^Business  as  usual'.  Afterwards  a  souvenir 
volume.  Strike  Nights  in  Printing  House 
Square,  was  printed  for  private  record. 
One  of  its  pictures  bore  the  caption 
^Amateurs  in  the  foundry'  and  showed 
Casey  and  Captain  Shaw,  the  chairman's 
secretary,  hard  at  work  on  a  mechanical 
process,  as  'the  champion  pair  of  matrix 
moulders'. 

In  1928  Casey  was  promoted  to  the 
foreign  leader-writing  staff.  He  attended 
many  of  the  Geneva  sessions  of  the 
League  of  Nations,  following  events  with 
a  sympathy  towards  French  rather  than 
German  aspirations.  The  History  of  ''The 
Times''  asserts  that  Casey  was  a  francophil 
who  'knew  that  his  judgement  on  foreign 
matters  carried  Uttle  weight'.  On  the 
retirement  of  Geoffrey  Dawson  [q.v.]  in 
1941,  the  new  editor,  R.  M.  Barrington- 
Ward  [q.v.],  appointed  Casey  his  deputy ; 
a  selection  welcomed  by  the  staff,  partly 
because  of  his  determination  not  to  be 
quite  such  a  prisoner  of  Printing  House 


Square  as  many  of  his  predecessors.  He 
was  a  member  of  many  clubs  and  he 
would  declare  that  if  he  could  squeeze  in  a 
game  of  billiards  in  his  dinner  break,  work 
went  much  more  easily  on  his  return. 
Barrington-Ward's  health  was  deteriorat- 
ing and  his  death  in  1948  threw  the  burden 
of  the  editorship  on  to  Casey's  shoulders 
sooner  than  he  had  expected.  He  did  not 
flinch,  although  his  colleagues  realized 
that  the  strain  was  too  heavy.  He  had  a 
streak  of  obstinacy  difficult  to  break  down 
and,  a  decision  taken,  it  was  well-nigh  im- 
possible to  move  him.  Yet  most  of  the 
decisions  which  he  took  proved  sound  in 
the  long  run  and  no  member  of  his  staff 
ever  felt  that  he  had  not  had  a  fair  chance 
to  put  his  views.  No  editor  was  better  loved. 

Until  his  retirement  in  1952  Casey 
continued  to  keep  in  touch  with  national 
and  international  affairs,  to  study  the  wel- 
fare of  his  staff,  and  to  distribute  necessary 
praise  or  blame. 

Casey  died  in  London  20  April  1957.  He 
married  in  1914  Amy  Gertrude  Pearson- 
Gee,  a  widow,  daughter  of  the  late  Henry 
Willmott ;  they  had  no  children. 

There  is  a  drawing  of  Casey  by  Cuth- 
bert  Orde  in  the  possession  of  The  Times, 

[History  of  ''The  Times\  vol.  iv,  part  ii, 
1921  to  1948,  1952 ;  Strike  Nights  in  Printing 
House  Square,  printed  for  private  record, 
1926 ;  personal  knowledge.]     A.  P.  Robbins^ 

CASSELS,  Sm  ROBERT  ARCHIBALD 

(1876-1959),  general,  was  born  at  Ban- 
dora,  near  Bombay,  15  March  1876,  the 
son  of  John  Andrew  Cassels,  merchant, 
and  his  wife,  Helen,  daughter  of  Thomas 
White.  He  was  educated  at  Sedbergh  and 
the  Royal  Military  College,  Sandhurst, 
was  commissioned  in  1896  and  went  out 
to  India  in  the  following  year,  eventually 
joining  the  32nd  Lancers  in  1901.  He 
acted  as  aide-de-camp  to  his  divisional 
commander  (1906-7),  was  brigade-major 
(1909-11),  and  G.S.O.  2  (1911-13).  In  1915 
he  became  deputy  adjutant-general  at  the 
headquarters  of  the  force,  the  nucleus  of 
which  had  landed  in  Mesopotamia  late  in 
1914.  Before  the  end  of  1915,  however,  he 
went  to  the  appointment  of  G.S.O.  1  with 
the  3rd  Indian  Army  Corps,  moving  to  the 
14th  division  in  May  1916.  By  August 
1917  he  had  served  in  the  same  capacity 
with  the  small  Cavalry  division  and  as 
brigadier-general,  general  staff,  of  the 
expeditionary  force.  When  in  early  April 
1917  Sir  Stanley  Maude  [q.v.]  advanced 
north  astride  the  Tigris,  Cassels  man- 
oeuvred with  masterly  skill  on  the  left 


8652002 


193 


Cassels 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


flank,  and  on  22  April  at  Istabulat  was 
sharply  engaged. 

By  now  regarded  as  a  coming  man, 
Cassels  took  command  of  the  11th  Cavalry 
brigade    in   November    1917.    When   his 
great  opportunity  came  in  the  final  offen- 
sive of  1918  he  revealed  himself  as  an  even 
more  outstanding  cavalry  leader  than  his 
promise  had  foretold.  His  orders  were  to 
reach   with  his   brigade   the   Little   Zab 
twenty-five  miles  above  its  junction  with 
the  Tigris.  He  marched  77  miles  in  39 
hours,  but  unexpectedly  found  the  Turks 
holding  the  ford  for  which  he  was  making 
in  a  strength  of  about  a  thousand.  None 
the  less,  he  decided  to  cross,  managing  to 
do  so  by  another  ford  about  a  mile  down- 
stream. Ismael  Hakki,  his  flank  turned, 
skilfully  crossed  to  the  right  bank  of  the 
Tigris  and  broke  up  his  floating  bridge.  On 
25  October  the  brigade  received  orders  to 
cross  the  river  next  day  above  Sharqat 
and  cut  off  the  enemy.  Cassels  decided  he 
must  find  a  ford  near  Huwaish,  but  had  to 
go  farther  north  before  one  was  discovered, 
all  three  channels  of  which  were  highly 
dangerous.   Most   of  the   horses   had  to 
swim;  Cassels  led  the  way  and  rode  at  a 
gallop  to  Huwaish.  He  had  ordered  an- 
other regiment  to  join  him,  but  the  ford 
could  not  be  crossed  in  darkness,  so  that 
he    was    isolated    and    in    considerable 
danger.  He  estimated  the  Turkish  force 
nearest  to  him,  two  and  a  half  miles  south 
of  Huwaish,  at  four  hundred  or  more. 
Early  on  the  27th  he  took  the  bold  de- 
cision to  attack,  mainly  to  disguise  his 
weakness.  The  action  disclosed  the  Turkish 
strength  to  be  between  eight  hundred  and 
a  thousand.  Cassels  therefore  drew  back 
and  dug  in.  The  Turkish  main  body  facing 
the  infantry  under  Sir  A.  S.  Cobbe  [q.v.] 
was  doing  the  same  thing  at  Sharqat.  In 
the  early  hours  of  28  October  Cassels  was 
reinforced  by  an  infantry  brigade  which 
had  marched  33  miles  to  join  him,  and  he 
felt  emboldened  to  try  a  bluff.  A  con- 
siderable force  of  the  enemy  was  moving 
towards  him  from  the  south  and  he  sent 
the  7th  Hussars,  less  two  squadrons,  to 
meet  it.  A  brilliant  dismounted  attack 
drove  the  enemy  back,  and  though  they 
came  on  again  and  forced  the  Hussars  to 
retire,  they  showed  no  further  signs  of 
attacking.  The  brigade  suffered  about  a 
hundred  casualties  and  lost  many  more 
horses.  In  the  course  of  the  action  the  7th 
Cavalry  brigade  arrived,  and  a  few  more 
reinforcements  came  up  later.  On  the  29th 
the  13th  Hussars  carried  out  a  dashing 
attack,  first  galloping  into  dead  ground 


unscathed,  then  dismounting,  swarming 
up  a  height  known  as  Cemetery  Hill, 
driving  off  the  Turks,  and  taking  730 
prisoners.  The  29th  October  was  the  day 
of  the  battle  of  Sharqat.  How  great  was 
the  part  played  by  Cassels  is  made  clear 
by  the  fact  that,  although  the  British 
infantry  attack  was  repulsed,  nevertheless 
next  morning  white  flags  fluttered  all 
down  the  Turkish  line. 

Cassels  next  led  his  forces  north  to 
occupy  Mosul,  but  could  not  induce  the 
Turks  to  abandon  the  place  until  they 
received  the  terms  of  the  armistice.  He 
was  appointed  C.B.  and  to  the  D.S.O.  in 
1918  and  promoted  major-general  in  1919. 
In  June  of  that  year  serious  unrest  in 
southern  Kurdistan  disturbed  the  tribes 
north  and  north-east  of  the  Mosul  vilayet. 
His  commander,  Sir  Theodore  Fraser, 
being  absent,  Cassels  took  immediate 
steps  to  prevent  the  spread  of  the  rebel- 
lion. He  acted  with  his  usual  vigour,  with 
the  consequence  that  after  some  months 
of  fighting  the  Kurds  had  been  so  handled 
that  they  scarcely  stirred  in  the  subse- 
quent general  Arab  revolt. 

Cassels  was  cavalry  adviser  in  India 
(1920-23),  commandant  of  the  Peshawar 
district  (1923-7),  and  adjutant-general 
in  India  (1928-30),  being  promoted 
lieutenant-general  in  1927  and  general  in 
1929.  He  next  held  the  Indian  Northern 
Command  (1930-34)  in  the  course  of 
which  he  became  colonel  of  the  7th  Light 
Cavalry.  (He  was  appointed  colonel  of 
his  regiment,  which  had  become  the  13th 
(D.C.O.)  Lancers,  in  1939.)  In  1935  came 
his  final  promotion  to  commander-in-chief 
of  the  Army  of  India  and  member  of  the 
executive  council  of  the  governor-general, 
an  appointment  lasting  until  1941  when 
he  went  on  retired  pay.  Within  a  few 
weeks  of  taking  over  Cassels  had  to  face 
one  of  the  familiar  troubles  on  the  North- 
west Frontier.  Afridi  bands,  set  in  motion 
by  the  'Red  Shirt'  movement,  which  in 
its  turn  was  coached  by  Russian  agents, 
penetrated  to  Peshawar,  and  one  Indian 
battalion  refused  duty.  Cassels  speedily 
restored  order.  Later  he  undertook  the  build- 
ing of  a  series  of  blockhouses  across  a  plain 
which  actually  lay  outside  the  administra- 
tive borders  of  India.  The  creation  of  these 
defences  brought  another  threat  of  frontier 
war  but  this  he  succeeded  in  averting. 

The  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  brought  a 
host  of  problems,  foremost  among  them 
the  expansion  of  the  Indian  Army,  which 
grew  with  a  rapidity  so  great  that  it  far 
outstripped  the  available  equipment.  One 


194 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cathcart 


of  the  strategic  factors  he  had  already 
anticipated  when  in  May  1936  he  had 
been  directed  to  examine  road  and  rail 
facilities  for  moving  a  division  to  the 
Burma  frontier  and  its  maintenance  there. 
He  estimated  that  the  programme  would 
take  eight  years,  or  five  if  sole  reliance 
were  placed  in  a  road  from  Manipur.  He 
was  eager  to  go  ahead  at  once,  but  this 
project  was  not  accepted.  Many  officers  of 
promise  served  under  Cassels,  but  the 
protege  who  seemed  to  excel  them  all  was 
(Sir)  Claude  Auchinleck,  a  close  friend  to 
whom  he  acted  to  some  extent  as  mentor 
and  who  served  with  him  in  Mesopotamia 
and  on  his  staff  in  India.  Auchinleck,  who 
was  to  succeed  him  as  commander-in-chief, 
for  his  part  thought  Cassels  had  certain  of 
the  characteristics  of  Rommel. 

Cassels  was  appointed  K.C.B.  in  1927, 
G.C.B.  in  1933,  and  G.C.S.I.  in  1940. 
After  his  retirement  he  went  to  live  at 
Copthorne,  in  Sussex,  where  he  took  a 
prominent  and  useful  part  in  local  affairs. 
There  he  died  23  December  1959.  By  his 
marriage  in  1904  to  Florence  Emily, 
daughter  of  Lieutenant- Colonel  Halkett 
Jackson,  he  left  one  son.  General  Sir  (A.) 
James  (H.)  Cassels,  chief  of  the  general 
staff.  Ministry  of  Defence,  1965-8.  Cassels 
was  always  very  uncommunicative  about 
his  military  experiences  and  never  spoke 
of  them  even  to  his  son.  His  greatest  assets 
were  his  determination  and  his  coup 
d'ceil  on  the  battlefield.  He  was  prepared 
to  gamble,  as  he  did  at  Sharqat,  and 
gambling  boldly  and  skilfully  is  prover- 
bially a  necessity  for  the  successful  leader, 
but  he  did  not  make  a  single  mistake  in 
that  campaign  and  was  never  abandoned 
by  fortune.  His  sense  of  duty  and  probity 
equalled  his  extreme  modesty. 

[F.  J.  Moberly,  (Official  History)  The 
Campaign  in  Mesopotamia,  1914-18,  vols,  iii 
and  iv,  1925-7 ;  E.  W.  C.  Sandes,  The  Indian 
Sappers  and  Miners,  1948 ;  Compton  Mac- 
kenzie, Eastern  Epic,  vol.  i,  1951 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Cyril  Falls. 

CATHCART,       EDWARD       PROVAN 

(1877-1954),  physiologist,  was  born  18 
July  1877  in  Ayr,  Scotland,  the  son  of 
Edward  Moore  Cathcart,  merchant,  and 
his  wife,  Margaret  Miller.  His  father  died 
at  an  early  age,  leaving  the  mother  with 
three  small  children  of  whom  Edward,  the 
eldest,  was  only  nine.  He  was  on  the  classi- 
cal side  in  Ayr  Academy  and  graduated 
M.B.  from  the  university  of  Glasgow  in 
1900  with  the  intention  of  specializing  in 


gynaecology.  In  the  next  year,  however, 
he  went  to  Munich  to  study  bacteriology, 
but,  instead,  fell  under  the  spell  of  Carl 
Voit,  the  foremost  authority  on  human 
metabolism;  he  also  studied  chemical 
pathology  with  E.  L.  Salkowski  in  Berlin. 

Returning  to  Britain,  Cathcart  spent 
three  years  (1902-5)  in  the  Lister  Insti- 
tute as  assistant  to  S.  G.  Hedin.  For  his 
work  on  enzyme  activity  and  in  bac- 
teriology Cathcart  received  the  M.D.  of 
Glasgow  (1904)  with  honours  and  a 
Bellahouston  gold  medal.  In  1906  he  was 
appointed  to  the  Grieve  lectureship  in 
physiological  chemistry  in  Glasgow  which 
he  held  until  1915.  These  years  in  Glasgow 
were  fruitful.  He  received  the  degree  of 
D.Sc.  (1908)  for  a  classical  study  of 
human  starvation  and  in  1912  published 
his  Physiology  of  Protein  Metabolism.  In 
1908  he  spent  five  months  in  Ivan  Pavlov's 
laboratory  in  St.  Petersburg  and  in  1912 
a  year  with  F.  G., Benedict  at  the  Carnegie 
Institution  in  Boston.  With  Benedict 
Cathcart  embarked  on  his  second  major 
scientific  preoccupation,  the  factors  which 
affect  the  expenditure  of  energy  by  human 
beings.  This  interest  he  turned  to  good 
account  in  the  war  of  1914-18  and  later  in 
the  industrial  field.  The  studies  on  the 
expenditure  of  energy  in  marching  and  in 
the  carrying  of  loads  laid  the  foundation 
of  much  of  modern  applied  physiology. 

In  1915  Cathcart  became  professor  of 
physiology  in  the  London  Hospital  medi- 
cal school  but  gave  much  of  his  time  to  war 
service,  first  in  anti-gas  duties,  then  as 
lieutenant-colonel.  Army  Medical  Services, 
engaged  on  special  work  in  connection 
with  the  feeding  of  the  army.  In  1919  he 
returned  finally  to  Glasgow  to  the  new 
Gardiner  chair  of  physiological  chemistry ; 
in  1928  he  transferred  to  the  regius  chair 
of  physiology,  a  transfer  which  did  no 
violence  to  his  interests  which  continued 
to  be  centred  on  the  human  scene.  Indeed, 
in  his  later  years  he  was  out  of  sympathy 
with  much  conventional  physiological 
experimentation  on  animals. 

Cathcart  became  increasingly  interested 
in  the  dietary  habits  of  people.  Between 
1924  and  1940  he  sponsored  the  publica- 
tion by  the  Medical  Research  Council,  on 
which  he  served,  of  no  fewer  than  five 
reports  based  on  dietary  studies  in  dif- 
ferent parts  of  Great  Britain.  He  served 
also  on  the  Agricultural  Research  Council. 
A  more  intimate  relationship  with  agricul- 
ture was  established  when  he  fostered  the 
early  development  of  the  Hannah  Dairy 
Research  Institute  close  to  Ayr.  From  his 


193 


Cathcart 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


appointment  to  the  Industrial  Fatigue 
(later  Health)  Research  Board  came  two 
major  studies,  on  the  physique  of  women 
(1928)  and  men  (1935)  in  industry.  Cath- 
cart spoke  with  authority  on  industrial 
problems.  He  had  no  sympathy  with  the 
sentimental  attitudes  of  the  political  Left ; 
nor  did  he  approve  the  growing  managerial 
tendency  to  regard  human  beings  as 
robots.  He  published  The  Human  Factor  in 
Industry  in  1928;  and  he  would  have 
viewed  critically  the  development  of  auto- 
mation. He  had  no  use  for  leisure:  the 
prime  need  for  man,  in  his  view,  was  work 
which  furnished  creative  satisfaction. 

In  1933  Cathcart  was  appointed  to  the 
Scottish  health  services  committee.  This 
'Cathcart  committee'  published  one  of  the 
most  complete  official  surveys  of  the 
country's  health  services  and  gave  in- 
formation of  value  in  the  framing  of  the 
National  Health  Service.  From  1933  to 
1945  Cathcart  represented  his  university 
on  the  General  Medical  Council;  and  he 
served  as  assessor  of  the  senate  on  the 
court  of  the  university.  Tasks  such  as 
these  inevitably  weaned  him  from  the 
teaching  and  research  laboratories;  yet, 
to  the  day  when  he  retired,  in  1947,  he 
shouldered,  in  traditional  Scots  fashion, 
with  satisfaction  and  even  with  enjoy- 
ment, the  responsibility  for  the  majority 
of  the  lectures  to  the  elementary  medical 
class  in  physiology. 

Cathcart  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1920  and 
F.R.S.E.  in  1932.  In  1924  he  was  appointed 
C.B.E.  He  received  the  honorary  degree  of 
LL.D.  from  St.  Andrews  in  1928  and 
Glasgow  in  1948. 

Cathcart  could  have  come  from  nowhere 
save  the  south-west  of  Scotland.  He  was 
tall,  dark-haired,  and  swarthy,  yet  with 
light  steel-grey  eyes.  A  portrait  in  oils 
'Study  in  Scarlet'  by  Norah  N.  Gray 
shows  him  as  his  pupils  remember  him  in 
his  active  heyday  and  hangs  in  the  Insti- 
tute of  Physiology  of  the  university  of 
Glasgow.  His  voice  was  deep  and  resonant 
and  made  no  concession  to  his  sojourns  in 
England.  He  was  far  from  glib  but  on 
occasion  aroused  deep  emotion  and  en- 
thusiasm in  his  undergraduate  audiences. 
Physically  he  was  remarkably  fit  until 
struck  down  with  coronary  thrombosis  at 
the  age  of  seventy.  Yet  he  played  no 
games  and  had  little  interest  in  sport ;  by 
contrast,  he  had  a  most  sincere  apprecia- 
tion of  the  arts,  above  all  of  literature  and 
of  the  theatre ;  he  loved  good  talk,  some- 
times physiological  'shop',  more  often  not. 
He  attended  the  university  chapel  regu- 


larly ;  he  was  a  friend  and  admirer  of  J.  S. 
Haldane  [q.v.]  with  whose  philosophical 
outlook  he  had  sympathy. 

In  1913  Cathcart  married  Gertrude 
Dorman,  daughter  of  Henry  Bostock,  a 
boot  and  shoe  manufacturer  in  Stafford. 
She  graduated  in  science,  then  in  medi- 
cine, at  Glasgow ;  and  their  three  daugh- 
ters all  graduated  in  medicine  from  the 
same  university.  Cathcart  died  in  Glasgow 
18  February  1954. 

[G.  M.  Wishart  in  Obituary  Notices  of 
Fellows  of  the  R&yal  Society,  vol.  ix,  1954; 
personal  knowledge.]  R.  C.  Garry. 

CATTO,  THOMAS  SIVEWRIGHT,  first 
Baron  Catto  (1879-1959),  governor  of 
the  Bank  of  England,  was  the  fifth  son 
and  seventh  child  of  William  Catto, 
shipwright,  of  Peterhead,  and  his  wife, 
Isabella,  daughter  of  William  Yule,  sea 
captain.  He  was  born  15  March  1879  at 
Newcastle  upon  Tyne,  whither  his  father 
had  moved  with  his  young  family  in 
search  of  more  steady  employment ;  but 
within  a  year  his  father  died,  and  the 
family  returned  to  Peterhead.  Catto  went 
to  Peterhead  Academy,  but  after  a  move 
back  to  Newcastle  he  won  a  scholarship  to 
Heaton  School  (Rutherford  College),  and 
at  the  age  of  fifteen  entered  the  office  of 
the  Gordon  Steam  Shipping  Co.  In  the 
evenings  he  taught  himself  shorthand; 
and  when  the  office  acquired  a  type- 
writer, he  learned  to  pick  the  lock  on  it 
and  practised  when  others  had  gone  home. 

Although  by  1898  his  wages  had  risen 
from  4s.  to  10s.  a  week,  Catto  sought 
wider  opportunities ;  through  a  newspaper 
advertisement  he  obtained  the  post  of 
secretary  to  W.  H.  Stuart,  managing 
partner  of  F.  A.  Mattievich  &  Co.  of 
Batoum,  at  a  salary  of  £8  a  month.  He 
sailed  from  Cardiff,  barely  nineteen,  with 
a  small  trunk,  a  bicycle,  £3  in  cash,  and 
the  full  support  of  his  mother,  to  whom  he 
owed  so  much.  For  six  years  he  worked  in 
Batoiun  and  Baku,  learned  to  speak  Rus- 
sian, and  on  his  twenty-first  birthday  was 
made  office  manager.  While  working  for 
Stuart  he  met  Vivian  Hugh  Smith,  the 
banker,  who  later  became  Lord  Bicester 
[q.v.],  a  connection  of  the  utmost  impor- 
tance in  later  years. 

Among  other  friends  made  in  Baku  was 
David  Forbes,  junior,  a  Scottish  merchant, 
whose  business  was  soon  to  be  absorbed  in 
MacAndrews  &  Forbes,  Russian  and  Near- 
Eastern  merchants  with  headquarters  in 
the  United  States.  In  1904  Catto  was 
offered   the    management    of  their   new 


196 


D.N^.  1951-1960 


Catto 


European  selling  agency  and,  with  Stuart's 
goodwill,  found  himself  at  the  age  of 
twenty-four  organizing  an  office  in  Lon- 
don. He  became  a  member  of  the  Baltic 
Exchange  and  learnt  London  ways  of 
merchanting  and  the  chartering  of  ships ; 
but  after  two  years  he  returned  to  the 
Near  East  as  second-in-command  to 
Forbes  in  Smyrna,  a  post  entailing  much 
travel  in  the  Near  and  Middle  East.  In 
1909  he  was  transferred  to  the  New  York 
office,  becoming  a  vice-president.  America 
was  to  be  his  home  for  the  next  eleven  years. 

When  war  broke  out  in  August  1914, 
Catto  happened  to  be  in  England.  His  lack 
of  inches  prevented  military  service,  and 
on  the  introduction  of  Vivian  Smith  he 
was  soon  employed  in  the  organization  of 
transporting  supplies  to  Russia.  From 
1915  to  1917  he  was  British  Admiralty 
representative  on  the  Russian  commission 
to  the  United  States.  When  Russia  col- 
lapsed he  transferred  to  the  British  food 
mission  in  the  United  States,  and  in  1918 
he  became  chairman  of  the  allied  pro- 
visions commission  and  head  of  the 
British  Ministry  of  Food  in  the  U.S.A.  and 
Canada.  In  1918  he  was  appointed  C.B.E. ; 
in  1919  a  commander  of  the  Order  of 
Leopold  of  Belgium ;  and  in  1921  a  baronet 
'for  public  services  particularly  in  connec- 
tion with  the  transport  of  food  and 
munitions  from  the  United  States  to 
Great  Britain  and  alUed  countries'. 

Catto  never  returned,  as  he  had  in- 
tended, to  MacAndrews  &  Forbes.  In  1917 
Vivian  Smith's  firm,  Morgan,  Grenfell  & 
Co.,  had  acquired  a  predominating  share 
in  Andrew  Yule  &  Co.,  of  Calcutta,  and  its 
associated  business,  George  Yule  &  Co., 
of  London,  the  great  Indian  commercial 
empire  built  by  Sir  David  Yule  whom 
Catto  was  invited  to  succeed.  He  had 
married  in  1910  and  with  a  young  family 
he  had  no  mind  to  take  up  residence  in 
India ;  but  what  decided  him  was  that  his 
mother's  name  was  Yule,  although  no 
relationship  was  ever  established.  The 
position  of  head  of  Andrew  Yule  &  Co. 
which  he  assumed  in  1919  gave  Catto 
abundant  opportunities  for  playing  an 
active  part  in  financial  and  economic 
affairs  in  India,  although  he  did  not  seek 
formal  appointments  such  as  the  presi- 
dency of  the  Bengal  Chamber  of  Com- 
merce. He  served  as  a  member  of  the 
Indian  Government  (Inchcape)  retrench 
ment  committee  in  1922-3,  and  of  the 
United  Kingdom  committee  on  coal- 
selling  in  1926.  In  1928  he  became  a  part- 
ner in  Morgan,  Grenfell  &  Co.  and  retired 


from  India,  although  retaining  a  keen 
interest  in  its  problems.  He  remained 
chairman  of  Andrew  Yule  &  Co.  and  of 
the  London  business,  which  became  Yule, 
Catto  &  Co.,  until  1940. 

Established  in  London,  Catto  became 
a  director  of  the  Royal  Exchange  As- 
surance Corporation,  the  Mercantile  Bank 
of  India,  and  other  companies ;  one  of  his 
important  tasks  was  to  act  with  Sir 
Ernest  Harvey  in  reordering  the  affairs  of 
the  Royal  Mail  and  Elder  Dempster  ship- 
ping companies,  an  unpaid  post  to  which 
he  was  drafted  by  Montagu  (later  Lord) 
Norman  [q.v.],  the  governor  of  the  Bank 
of  England.  In  1936  he  was  created  a 
baron,  taking  his  territorial  title  from 
Cairncatto,  a  farm  which  he  had  pur- 
chased in  Buchan  whence  his  forebears 
had  come. 

In  April  1940  Catto  was  elected  a  direc- 
tor of  the  Bank  of  England,  but  a  fort- 
night later  succeeded  Lord  Woolton  as 
director-general  of  equipment  and  stores 
at  the  Ministry  of  Supply.  In  the  following 
July  he  moved  to  the  newly  created  post 
of  financial  adviser  to  the  Treasury,  full- 
time  and  unpaid,  and  resigned  his  direc- 
torship of  the  Bank.  The  title  had  no 
precise  significance.  The  expert  team  of 
civil  servants  at  the  Treasury  was  being 
augmented  by  a  wealth  of  outside  talent, 
economists  and  others,  among  whom  the 
outstanding  personality  was  J.  M.  (later 
Lord)  Keynes  [q.v.].  In  this  galaxy  Catto 
represented  commercial  and  banking 
experience ;  he  and  Keynes,  hitherto 
strangers,  saw  things  from  a  very  dif- 
ferent standpoint,  made  great  friends,  and 
became  the  'Catto  and  Doggo'  of  the 
popular  press. 

By  the  close  of  1943  it  was  evident  that 
illness  had  ended  Montagu  Norman's  long 
reign  at  the  Bank  of  England;  in  April 
1944  Catto  was  elected  to  succeed  him  and 
released  from  his  position  at  the  Treasury. 
Although  he  was  singularly  well  equipped 
by  his  merchant  banking  knowledge  and 
by  his  recent  experience  in  Whitehall  to 
occupy  the  middle  position  which  the 
Bank  holds  between  Government  and 
City,  this  was  a  considerable  burden  to 
assume  at  the  age  of  sixty-five.  Moreover 
the  job  was  not  at  all  defined:  his  pre- 
decessor had  been  in  office  for  twenty-four 
years,  during  which  he  had  transformed 
the  organization  and  outlook  of  the  Bank ; 
so  that  even  in  normal  times  to  succeed 
him  would  have  been  difficult  enough. 

Catto  relied  on  the  team  which  he 
inherited    and    did    not    seek    to    make 


197 


Catto 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


substantial  changes.  He  occupied  himself 
with  the  main  questions  likely  to  arise  in 
the  post-war  period,  notably  in  the  field 
of  industrial  finance,  where  he  was  much 
concerned  with  the  establishment  of  the 
Finance  Corporation  for  Industry  and  the 
Industrial  and  Commercial  Finance  Cor- 
poration. But  he  had  been  in  office  little 
more  than  a  year  when  a  Labour  Govern- 
ment was  returned,  pledged  to  an  early 
nationalization  of  the  Bank  of  England 
and  ready  to  introduce  new  measures  of 
control  over  the  banking  system  as  a 
whole ;  and  it  is  with  the  working  out  of 
these  ideas  that  his  name,  as  governor, 
will  be  principally  associated.  He  ac- 
cepted that  the  Bank  had  already  been 
converted  de  facto  into  a  public  institu- 
tion, aligning  its  monetary  policy  with  the 
general  economic  policy  of  the  govern- 
ment of  the  day  and  no  longer  seeking  to 
provide  for  its  private  stockholders  more 
than  a  constant  dividend.  Accordingly 
there  was  nothing  in  the  proposal  for 
public  ownership  which  need  diminish  the 
utility  or  standing  of  the  Bank  provided 
its  independence  in  thought  and  work  was 
fully  safeguarded.  Similarly,  he  did  not 
oppose  the  provision  of  a  new  measure  of 
control  over  the  banking  system,  provided 
that  it  was  general  in  character  and 
operated  on  the  initiative  of  the  Bank. 

He  judged  correctly  the  strength  of  his 
position  if  he  did  not  come  out  in  active 
opposition  to  the  general  policy.  As  a 
result  the  Bank  was  taken  into  public 
ownership  with  the  minimum  public  con- 
troversy and  the  maximum  retention  of 
operational  independence.  Catto  came 
under  criticism  at  the  time,  but  his  judge- 
ment was  later  vindicated.  He  accepted 
appointment  as  the  first  governor  under 
the  new  regime  in  March  1946,  and  served 
until  February  1949  on  the  eve  of  his 
seventieth  birthday.  He  received  the 
honorary  degree  of  LL.D.  from  Manches- 
ter in  1945  and  was  sworn  of  the  Privy 
Council  in  1947. 

In  retirement  Catto  served  as  chairman 
in  1950-52  of  a  committee  to  report  on  the 
practicability  of  determining  the  financial 
and  economic  relations  between  Scotland 
and  the  rest  of  the  United  Kingdom. 
Scottish  matters  indeed,  and  particularly 
those  of  the  county  of  Aberdeen,  were  a 
lifelong  concern.  In  addition  to  the  farm  of 
Cairncatto  he  bought  the  House  of  Schivas 
not  far  away;  and  after  his  return  from 
India  devoted  much  care  to  restoring  its 
ancient  fabric  and  filling  it  with  beautiful 
things.  No  honour  pleased  him  more  than 


to  become  in  August  1957  the  first  free- 
man of  Peterhead. 

In  appearance  Catto  was  very  short  of 
stature,  with  a  fresh  complexion  and  clear 
blue  eyes.  His  open  countenance  and 
quiet  manner  perhaps  tended  to  conceal 
his  shrewdness  and  skill  as  a  negotiator,  so 
well  displayed  while  he  was  governor  of 
the  Bank  of  England.  He  not  only  took  his 
opportunities  as  they  offered  but  pre- 
pared himself  in  advance  for  what  might 
present  itself.  If  there  was  occasion  for 
controversy  he  avoided  a  head-on  collision 
and  used  his  nimble  mind  and  good  judge- 
ment of  personality  to  carry  his  objective 
without  sacrificing  any  point  of  impor- 
tance. As  the  head  of  a  large  organization 
he  imposed  his  will  with  courtesy  and  with 
a  considerable  feeling  for  the  welfare  of 
those  under  him. 

By  the  course  of  his  career  Catto  formed 
a  unique  bridge  between  the  pre- 191 4 
world  in  which  British  merchants  were 
responsible  for  the  commerce  of  strange 
parts  of  the  world  and  the  post-1945  world 
of  international  economic  and  financial 
problems  of  the  utmost  complexity.  He 
was  in  the  neighbourhood  when  the 
Baghdad  railway  was  projected  and  when 
oil  was  discovered  in  Persia ;  he  was  still 
actively  interested  in  economic  develop- 
ment, although  from  a  very  different 
viewpoint,  when  the  International  Bank 
for  Reconstruction  and  Development  was 
getting  under  way.  He  was  also  a  leading 
example  of  the  Scottish  boy  of  compara- 
tively humble  origin  who  rose  to  the  top 
rank  in  the  City  of  London  through  a 
combination  of  innate  qualities  and  of 
grasping  opportunities  whenever  they 
offered. 

Catto  married  in  1910,  at  Smyrna, 
Gladys  Forbes,  daughter  of  Stephen  Gor- 
don, a  partner  in  MacAndrews  &  Forbes 
there  and  a  native  of  Elgin  in  Morayshire. 
They  had  one  son,  Stephen  Gordon  (born 
1923),  a  partner  in  Morgan,  Grenfell  & 
Co.,  who  succeeded  to  the  title  ;  and  three 
daughters,  the  eldest  of  whom,  Isabel,  was 
elected  in  1955  president  of  the  World 
Y.W.C.A.  Catto  died  at  his  house  in  Holm- 
bury  St.  Mary,  Surrey,  23  August  1959. 

A  portrait  by  David  Alison,  painted 
during  Catto's  governorship,  is  at  the 
Bank  of  England;  another,  painted  in 
1952  by  (Sir)  James  Gunn,  is  with  Morgan, 
Grenfell  &  Co.  Portraits  by  each  of  these 
artists  and  also  by  Arthur  Pan  are  in  the 
possession  of  the  family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
H.  C.  B.  Mynors. 


198 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cecil,  E.  A.  R.  G, 


CECIL,  EDGAR  ALGERNON  ROBERT 
GASCOYNE-,  Viscount  Cecil  of  Chel- 
wooD  (1864-1958),  a  creator  of  the  League 
of  Nations,  was  born  in  London  14  Sep- 
tember 1864.  He  was  the  third  son  of  Lord 
Robert  Arthur  Talbot  Gascoyne- Cecil, 
later  third  Marquess  of  Salisbury  [q.v.], 
and  one  of  five  distinguished  brothers; 
a  notice  of  the  youngest  appears  below. 

His  upbringing,  mainly  at  Hatfield,  was 
happy  and  religious,  among  a  united 
family  in  which  the  affection  and  authority 
of  his  parents  were  unquestioned.  Owing 
to  his  father's  view  that  children  should 
not  leave  home  until  they  had  been  con- 
firmed, he  was  taught  by  tutors  until  he 
went  as  an  Oppidan  to  Eton  where  he 
became  known  for  progressive  views, 
passed  the  necessary  examinations,  and 
was  head  of  his  house.  At  University  Col- 
lege, Oxford,  he  obtained  a  second  class 
in  law  (1886),  played  real  tennis  for  the 
university,  but  found  his  main  activities 
among  friends,  the  Canning  Club,  and  the 
presidency  of  the  Union.  He  was  called  to 
the  bar  by  the  Inner  Temple  in  1887  and 
until  his  election  to  the  House  of  Commons 
practised  mostly  at  the  parliamentary  bar. 
He  took  silk  in  1899,  became  a  bencher  in 
1910,  and  was  chairman  of  the  Hertford- 
shire quarter-sessions  (1911-20). 

In  1906  Lord  Robert  Cecil  was  elected 
Conservative  member  of  Parliament  for 
East  Marylebone.  A  moderate  free  trader 
and  a  keen  supporter  of  women's  suffrage, 
he  had  doubts  even  at  this  time  whether 
he  would  not  be  happier  on  the  'other  side'. 
He  broke  with  his  party  in  1910  and  in 
that  year  unsuccessfully  contested  Black- 
burn and  North  Cambridgeshire  as  an 
independent  Conservative.  In  1911  he  was 
elected  for  the  Hitchin  division  of  Hert- 
fordshire which  he  represented  until  1923 
when  he  was  created  Viscount  Cecil  of 
Chelwood. 

After  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914,  being 
over  military  age,  he  worked  at  first  with 
the  Red  Cross,  organizing  the  wounded 
and  missing  department.  But  he  was  soon 
called  to  government  office  as  parliamen- 
tary under-secretary  for  foreign  affairs 
(1915-18)  and  minister  of  blockade  (1916- 
18).  He  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council  in 
1915  and  in  1918-19  was  assistant  secre- 
tary of  state  for  foreign  affairs.  Balfour, 
the  foreign  secretary,  was  often  away, 
leaving  Cecil  in  charge  of  the  Foreign  Office 
and  its  spokesman  in  the  Cabinet. 

Lord  Robert  Cecil  was  not  only  shocked 
by  the  bloodshed  and  horror  of  the  war 
but  felt  that  'the  worst  part  of  it  is  that  it 


seems  to  herald  an  era  of  destruction.  No 
one  can  yet  estimate  the  moral  injury  that 
it  has  wrought'.  He  turned  his  thoughts  to 
what  was  to  become  his  life  work,  the 
creation  of  opinion  in  favour  of  the  aboli- 
tion of  war  and  armaments.  In  September 
1916  he  circulated  a  memorandum  to  the 
Cabinet  making  proposals  for  the  avoid- 
ance of  future  wars,  in  which  the  broad 
principle  was  that  no  country  should 
resort  to  arms  until  its  grievance  had  been 
submitted  to  an  international  conference 
or  tribunal ;  if  this  obligation  came  to  be 
violated,  sanctions  were  to  follow,  first  by 
blockade,  then,  if  necessary,  by  military 
force.  This  paper  was  criticized  in  the 
Foreign  Office ;  nevertheless,  owing  to  his 
persistence,  it  led  to  the  appointment  of 
a  committee  under  Sir  W.  G.  F.  (later 
Lord)  Phillimore  [q.v.]  which,  with  Lord 
Robert  Cecil's  memorandum  as  the  basis 
of  its  work,  produced  the  first  draft  of 
what  became  the,  Covenant  of  the  League 
of  Nations. 

From  this  time  forward,  the  main- 
tenance of  peace  through  the  League  of 
Nations,  collective  security,  and  disarma- 
ment absorbed  all  his  time  and  thoughts. 
In  1919  he  went  to  Paris  where  he  domi- 
nated the  debates  of  the  conference  com- 
mission on  the  League  presided  over  by 
President  Wilson.  No  one  who  was  present 
in  the  commission  could  doubt  that  but 
for  the  patient  and  inspired  persuasion 
of  Lord  Robert  Cecil  there  might  have 
been  no  Covenant  at  all.  With  the  help 
of  Dr.  Nansen  of  Norway,  he  persuaded 
the  'neutral'  nations  to  join  the  League ; 
without  them  it  must  have  failed. 

In  the  first  three  Assemblies  of  the 
League  (1920-22)  Lord  Robert  Cecil,  who 
had  resigned  from  the  Government  over 
the  Welsh  Church  disestablishment,  was 
appointed  by  J.  C.  Smuts  [q.v.]  as  a 
delegate  for  South  Africa.  With  Nansen, 
Newton  Rowell  of  Canada,  Branting  of 
Sweden,  Hymans  of  Belgium,  Motta  of 
Switzerland,  and  others,  he  transformed 
what  might  have  been  a  disordered  diplo- 
matic gathering  into  a  well-organized 
parliamentary  institution  which  grew 
rapidly  in  strength.  He  persuaded  his  col- 
leagues that  all  the  meetings  of  the  As- 
sembly and  of  its  committees  and  of  the 
Council  should  be  held  in  public.  He  was  a 
firm  believer  in  the  value  of  public  inter- 
national debate,  saying  that  'publicity  is 
the  life-blood  of  the  League' ;  and  he  set  a 
standard  of  courtesy  and  candour  which 
made  this  new  practice  a  decided  success. 
It  was  proved  time  after  time  that  when 


199 


Cecil,  E.  A.  R.  G. 


DJ^.B.  1951-1060 


private  negotiations  had  failed,  public  dis- 
cussion brought  a  settlement.  A  notable 
example  was  the  admission  of  Germany  to 
the  League  in  1926.  Sir  Austen  Chamber- 
lain [q.v.]  did  serious  harm  in  a  promising 
situation  by  trying  to  reverie  to  power- 
politics  and  to  what  Geneva  called  *hotel 
bedroom  diplomacy'.  Cecil  was  left  to 
clear  up  the  mess,  which  he  did  success- 
fully— and  in  public. 

In  1923  Baldwin  became  prime  minis- 
ter, Lord  Curzon  [q.v.]  his  foreign  secre- 
tary, and  Lord  Robert  Cecil,  as  lord  privy 
seal,  was  put  in  charge  of  League  affairs. 
He  was  thus  able  to  do  excellent  work  in 
the  League  Council.  He  had  already  played 
a  leading  part  in  drafting  the  statute  of 
the  Permanent  Court  of  International 
Justice ;  he  now  secured  agreement  on  the 
reference  to  that  court  of  important 
minority  questions,  a  valuable  precedent 
which  led  to  the  effective  application  of 
the  whole  minority  protection  system; 
in  many  contentious  matters — ^the  Saar, 
Danzig,  mandates,  the  traffic  in  drugs, 
Nansen's  refugee  work — he  successfully 
brought  the  principles  of  the  Covenant  to 
life. 

His  first  major  crisis,  and  his  first  major 
conflict  with  Curzon  and  his  other  cabinet 
colleagues,  arose  out  of  the  seizure  by 
Mussolini,  31  August  1923,  of  the  Greek 
island  of  Corfu  in  reprisal  for  the  murder 
of  Italian  officers  on  Greek  territory.  The 
Greek  Government  unfortunately  tele- 
graphed both  to  the  League  Council  and 
to  the  Allied  Conference  of  Ambassadors 
in  Paris,  promising  both  bodies  to  accept 
their  decision.  Cecil,  Nansen,  and  Brant- 
ing  rallied  the  Assembly  in  support  of 
Greece,  and  the  Coxmcil  drew  up  a  pro- 
posed settlement,  providing  for  the  evacua- 
tion of  Corfu  by  the  Italians  and  reference 
to  the  Permanent  Court  of  the  question  of 
compensation  by  Greece.  The  ambassa- 
dors at  first  agreed,  but  later  decided  that 
Greece  must  pay  the  full  indemnity 
demanded  by  Mussolini. 

Baldwin,  when  he  formed  his  second 
Government  in  1924,  at  first  proposed  to 
leave  Cecil  out.  It  was  only  imder  the 
urgent  persuasion  of  Sir  Eric  Dnunmond 
(later  the  Earl  of  Perth,  q.v.),  the 
secretary-general  of  the  League,  that 
Baldwin  changed  his  mind  and  made 
Cecil  chancellor  of  the  Duchy  of  Lancas- 
ter, in  charge  of  League  affairs.  Cecil  was 
soon  again  at  variance  with  his  colleagues, 
this  time  over  the  Geneva  Protocol  which 
had  been  prepared  by  the  delegates  of  the 
Labour  Government  and  which  Baldwin's 


Cabinet  opposed.  The  Protocol  would 
have  given  the  Permanent  Court  compul- 
sory jurisdiction  in  cases  which  could  be 
settled  by  law ;  it  would  have  organized 
collective  security  under  the  League,  and 
brought  an  early  conference  on  disarma- 
ment. Although  Cecil  proposed  amend- 
ments which  he  hoped  would  make  it 
acceptable,  the  Cabinet  finally  rejected 
the  Protocol.  This  was  a  grave  shock  to 
League  supporters  all  over  the  world  and 
in  the  light  of  subsequent  events  a  tragic 
mistake. 

Cecil  himself  believed  that  'the  nations 
must  either  learn  to  disarm  or  perish'.  In 

1926  he  was  sent  as  delegate  to  the  pre- 
paratory disarmament  commission  and  in 

1927  to  the  Coolidge  conference  in  Geneva 
on  naval  disarmament.  President  Coolidge 
was  proposing  large  reductions  of  cruiser, 
destroyer,  and  submarine  strength,  with 
a  ratio  of  5:5:3  for  Britain,  the  United 
States,  and  Japan.  Cecil  and  W.  C.  (later 
Viscount)  Bridgeman,  the  first  lord  of  the 
Admiralty,  who  was  with  him,  favoured 
acceptance ;  the  Cabinet  would  not  agree 
to  parity  with  America;  Cecil  resigned, 
broke  with  his  party,  and  never  again  held 
government  office. 

He  did  not  regret  his  resignation.  When 
in  1928  the  Baldwin  government  made  a 
strong  attack  on  the  League  budget,  the 
purpose  being  to  save  Britain  £6,000,  it 
seemed  to  him  the  final  proof  that  his 
former  colleagues  would  never  understand 
the  importance  of  the  League,  or  its 
chance  of  success. 

Fortunately  this  was  not  the  end  of  his 
work  for  the  League.  When  the  second 
Labour  Government  came  into  power  in 
1929  Arthur  Henderson  [q.v.]  gave  Cecil  a 
room  and  a  staff  in  the  Foreign  Office  and 
made  him  chairman  of  a  departmental 
committee  on  League  affairs,  deputy 
leader  of  the  Assembly  delegations,  and 
once  again  British  representative  on  the 
preparatory  disarmament  conunission. 
The  two  men  worked  in  great  harmony 
and  achieved  excellent  results,  including 
the  adhesion  of  all  the  Commonwealth 
countries  to  the  Optional  Clause  (accept- 
ing compulsory  jurisdiction)  of  the  statute 
of  the  Permanent  Court,  the  preparation 
of  a  draft  disarmament  convention,  and 
the  fixing  of  a  date  for  the  general  dis- 
armament conference.  Before  the  con- 
ference met  the  Labour  Government  had 
resigned,  but  Henderson  remained  presi- 
dent and  in  that  capacity  arranged  for 
Cecil  and  others  to  address  the  conference 
on  behalf  of  various  private  organizations. 


200 


D.N.B.  1931-1960 


Cecil,  H.  R.  H.  G.J 


Cecil  spoke  on  behalf  of  the  International 
Federation  of  League  of  Nations  Societies 
of  which  he  was  president ;  he  put  forward 
the  doctrine  of  'qualitative  disarmament', 
i.e.  the  abolition  of  weapons  which  assist 
aggressive  attack,  a  principle  ultimately 
accepted  by  almost  every  government 
represented  in  the  conference.  In  June 
1932  President  Hoover  based  upon  it  a 
bold  and  comprehensive  plan  which  was 
welcomed  with  enthusiasm  by  Germany, 
Italy,  Russia,  and  all  the  smaller  and 
middle  powers.  Many  of  the  British 
Cabinet,  including  Baldwin  and  Sir  John 
(later  Viscount)  Simon  fq.v.],  the  foreign 
secretary,  wanted  to  accept  it;  but  by  a 
small  majority  they  were  defeated  and  the 
British  delegation  played  the  principal 
role  in  kilUng  the  Hoover  Plan.  The 
disarmament  conference  failed  and  the 
League  disintegrated. 

Cecil  hoped  to  save  the  League  by  orga- 
nizing public  opinion  which,  thanks  to  his 
efforts,  amongst  others,  overwhelmingly 
supported  the  League  in  Britain  and  in 
many  other  countries.  He  was  president 
of  the  League  of  Nations  Union  from 
1923  to  1945  and  in  1934-5  organized  the 
peace  ballot.  In  spite  of  bitter  attacks 
the  ballot  became  a  massive  demonstra- 
tion of  deep-rooted  public  feeling.  In  a  vote 
of  over  eleven  and  a  half  million  over  90 
per  cent  were  in  favour  of  the  League, 
disarmament,  and  the  abolition  of  private 
manufacture  of  armaments ;  over  80  per 
cent  for  the  abolition  of  national  air 
forces;  over  85  per  cent  for  economic 
sanctions,  and  74  per  cent  of  those  who 
answered  the  question  for  military  sanc- 
tions. This  result  had  a  profound  effect  on 
both  the  Government  and  the  pubUc.  At 
one  time  during  the  Abyssinian  crisis  it 
seemed  possible  that  the  League  might  yet 
be  saved;  when  eventually  the  Covenant 
pledges  were  betrayed  and  Mussolini  was 
allowed  to  occupy  Addis  Ababa,  there  was 
no  doubt  that  the  outcome  was  deeply 
repugnant  to  British  feeling.  It  is  now 
generally  recognized  that  Cecil  was  right : 
that  only  strong  international  institutions 
founded  on  world  law  could  save  man- 
kind. 

After  the  second  war  Cecil  went  as  British 
delegate  to  Geneva  for  the  closing  session  of 
the  League.  'The  League  is  dead',  he  said, 
'long  live  the  UN.'  Even  in  the  crisis 
of  1941  when  Britain  stood  alone,  he 
wrote  on  the  title-page  of  a  copy  of  his 
book  about  the  League  'Le  jour  viendra'. 
He  was  never  personally  embittered  and  it 
was  this  faith  in  the  ultimate  triumph  of 


his  cause  which  sustained  him  through  so 
many  years  of  disappointment  and  frustra- 
tion. 

Cecil  was  chancellor  of  the  university 
of  Birmingham  (1918-44)  and  rector  of 
Aberdeen  (1924-7)  and  received  a  number 
of  honorary  degrees.  He  was  visitor  of 
St.  Hugh's  College,  Oxford,  and  honorary 
fellow  of  University  College.  He  was 
awarded  the  Woodrow  Wilson  peace  prize 
in  1924  and  the  Nobel  peace  prize  in  1937, 
and  was  appointed  C.H.  in  1956. 

In  1889  he  married  Lady  Eleanor 
Lambton,  daughter  of  the  second  Earl  of 
Durham.  It  was  a  long  and  happy,  though 
childless,  marriage.  Lady  Cecil  was  a 
woman  of  great  intellectual  power  who 
ardently  shared  her  husband's  views  and 
was  a  tower  of  strength  to  him,  particu- 
larly at  the  crises  of  his  career.  In  1900 
they  built  a  house,  Gale,  at  Chelwood 
Gate  in  Sussex,  which  was  their  home  for 
the  rest  of  theij*  lives.  He  died  in  Tun- 
bridge  Wells,  24  November  1958,  survived 
for  only  a  few  months  by  his  widow. 

Cecil  was  very  tall,  and  the  impression 
of  his  height  was  undiminished  by  a  pro- 
nounced stoop.  His  mobile  features,  noble 
forehead,  and  fearless  searching  eyes 
conveyed  a  feeling  of  great  intellectual 
penetration  and  moral  power.  He  could 
draw  immense  audiences  in  any  country 
which  he  visited,  and  they  always  found 
his  wide  knowledge  and  complete  candour 
most  persuasive.  He  cared  nothing  for  the 
honours  and  trappings  of  public  life,  and 
was  modest  to  a  fault  about  his  own 
position  and  achievements.  He  was  an 
insatiable  reader,  who  knew  the  works  of 
Jane  Austen  almost  by  heart.  A  portrait 
by  P.  A.  de  Laszlo  is  at  London  Univer- 
sity Hall  and  a  smaller  version  at  Hatfield ; 
others  by  John  Mansbridge  and  Sir 
William  Orpen  are  in  the  National  Portrait 
Gallery.  The  Royal  Institute  of  Inter- 
national Affairs  has  a  bust  by  Siegfried 
Charoux. 

[Viscount  Cecil  of  Chelwood,  A  Great 
Experiment,  1941,  and  All  the  Way,  1949; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Philip  Noel-Baker. 

CECIL,  HUGH  RICHARD  HEATH- 
COTE  GASCOYNE-,  Baron  Quickswood 
(1869-1956),  politician  and  provost  of 
Eton,  was  born  at  Hatfield  14  October 
1869,  the  fifth  and  youngest  son  of  the 
third  Marquess  of  Salisbury  [q.v.].  Edu- 
cated at  Eton  and  University  College, 
Oxford,  he  laid  the  foundation  of  a 
life  devoted  to  Anglican  principles  and 


201 


Cecil,  H.  R.  H.  G.- 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Conservative  politics  in  a  family  circle  and 
historic  house  consecrated  to  both.  Tradi- 
tion has  it  that  before  he  was  seven  he 
had  indicted  his  nurse  as  a  Socinian  and 
admitted  that  for  long  he  himself  had 
not  been  quite  orthodox. 

Equipped  with  a  first  class  in  modern 
history  and  a  prize  fellowship  at  Hertford 
(1891),  he  prepared  to  take  holy  orders 
like  his  brother  William,  later  bishop 
of  Exeter.  Instead  he  was  persuaded  to 
become  assistant  private  secretary  to 
his  father,  who  simultaneously  held  the 
offices  of  prime  minister  and  foreign  secre- 
tary. This  apprenticeship  led  in  1895  to  his 
election  as  Conservative  member  of  Par- 
liament for  Greenwich,  a  seat  he  held  until 
his  advocacy  of  free  trade  helped  to  ensure 
his  defeat  in  the  general  election  of  1906. 
Religion,  nevertheless,  remained  the  main- 
spring of  his  Hfe;  and  even  had  the 
tenacity  of  his  Conservative  beliefs  not 
deterred  him  from  crossing  the  floor  of  the 
House  in  the  wake  of  his  lifelong  friend 
(Sir)  Winston  Churchill,  the  strength  of 
nonconformity  in  the  Liberal  Party  would 
no  less  surely  have  repelled  him  from  so 
drastic  a  change  of  political  faith.  So  his 
allegiance  rested  with  the  Tories  and  in 
1910  he  secured  a  congenial  seat  as  burgess 
for  the  university  of  Oxford  which  he  re- 
tained until  1937.  He  received  an  honorary 
D.C.L.  (1924)  and  was  an  honorary  fellow 
of  Hertford,  Keble,  and  New  colleges. 

Cecil  was  perhaps  the  most  accomplished 
classical  orator  of  his  generation.  He  was 
handicapped  by  a  frail  physique,  restless 
mannerisms,  and  a  voice  pitched  too  high 
for  sonority.  But  Lord  Curzon  [q.v.],  him- 
self a  majestic  exponent  of  the  art  of 
eloquence,  was  not  alone  in  holding  that 
Cecil's  words  combined  'the  charm  of 
music  with  the  rapture  of  the  seer'.  His 
most  memorable  speeches  were  delivered 
during  debates  on  the  education  bill  in 
1902  and  on  the  Welsh  Church  bill  in  1913. 
The  intensity  of  his  beliefs  sometimes  pro- 
voked him  to  less  edifying  interventions 
and  the  hysterical  animosity  which  he  and 
his  friends  bore  against  Asquith  for  daring 
to  lay  hands  on  the  constitution  in  the 
Parliament  bill  of  1911  earned  them  the 
style  of  'Hughligans'. 

Although  well  past  the  age  of  forty  and 
never  in  robust  health,  Cecil  joined  the 
Royal  Flying  Corps  in  1915.  His  intrepid 
mancEuvres  while  learning  to  fiy  even- 
tually brought  him  his  pilot's  wings — 
on  condition  that  he  never  again  made 
a  solo  flight.  In  1918  he  was  sworn  of 
the  Privy  Council,  an  exceptional  honour 


for  a  back-bench  parliamentarian  whose 
independence  of  mind  and  reverence  for 
individual  liberty  unfitted  him  for  the 
discipline  of  office. 

During  the  years  between  the  wars  his 
interest  was  captured  increasingly  by  the 
Church  Assembly,  which  he  had  helped  to 
create.  As  in  the  Commons,  he  relished  an 
arena  where  Christian  principles  as  he  saw 
them  could  be  defended  by  forensic  logic 
and  an  artful  grasp  of  procedure.  In  1927, 
however,  and  again  in  1928  he  unexpec- 
tedly failed  to  persuade  the  Commons  to 
accept  the  revised  Prayer  Book.  Too  often 
in  controversy  he  spoke  with  the  tongue  of 
an  ecclesiastical  lawyer,  not  of  an  angel. 
The  subtle  magic  of  his  eloquence  fasci- 
nated as  of  old  but  did  not  convince ;  and 
many  who  thought  themselves  no  less  loyal 
churchmen  than  Cecil  found  his  interpre- 
tation of  Christian  doctrine  so  rigid  as 
almost  to  exclude  the  charity  of  Christ. 
In  1933-4  he  exercised  his  authority  in 
Anglican  affairs  by  successfully  challeng- 
ing the  right  of  a  bishop  (A.  A.  David, 
q.v.)  to  admit  Unitarian  ministers  to  the 
pulpit  of  a  cathedral.  A  later  demand  that 
the  Church  Assembly  should  pass  a  measure 
prohibiting  the  use  of  the  marriage  service 
to  all  divorced  persons  was  overwhelmingly 
rejected. 

In  1936  he  was  appointed  provost  of 
Eton  in  succession  to  M.  R.  James  [q.v.]. 
He  delighted  in  the  services  in  college 
chapel  and  as  its  ordinary  would  preface 
his  sermons  with  the  words,  'I  speak  as  a 
layman  to  laymen  without  the  authority 
of  the  priesthood',  then  go  on  to  be  very 
authoritative  indeed.  His  tall  swaying 
figure  surmounted  by  a  green  eyeshade, 
his  incisive  and  often  provocative  com- 
mentary on  biblical  texts,  and  his  oblique 
anti-clericalism  will  all  be  remembered.  So  ] 
too  will  his  destructive  obiter  dicta  on  talks 
to  the  boys  by  distinguished  visitors. 
'I  hope  I  am  not  boring  you',  one  of  them 
said  nervously  in  the  middle  of  an  ad- 
dress. 'Not  yet',  the  provost  replied  with 
a  tigerish  smile.  He  regarded  the  war  as 
a  vulgar  intrusion  on  well-established 
routine  and  scorned  to  abandon  his  habit 
of  dining  in  knee-breeches.  As  chairman  of 
the  governing  body  he  amused  some  of  his 
colleagues  and  exasperated  others  by  in- 
sisting that  under  its  statutes  Eton  was 
responsible  only  for  educating  the  boys, 
not  for  providing  air-raid  shelters  for  their 
protection.  The  relentless  analysis  of  a 
medieval  schoolman  to  which  he  subjected 
human  problems  was  not  always  ap- 
preciated. But  fellows,  masters,  and  boys 


202 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


.Chambers,  D.  K. 


alike  loved  him  for  the  ingenuity  of  his 
fancy  and  the  felicity  of  his  phrase. 

'Linky'  Cecil,  who  had  been  best  man 
at  Churchill's  wedding  in  1908,  was 
touched  when  in  1941  the  prime  minister 
recommended  him  for  a  peerage.  He  took 
the  title  Baron  Quickswood  but  did  not 
often  speak  in  the  Lords.  Three  years  later 
he  retired  from  Eton.  'I  go  to  Bourne- 
mouth in  lieu  of  Paradise',  he  told  the 
assembled  school,  and  there  he  bore  the 
growing  infirmities  of  age  with  cheerful 
courage.  His  last  act  before  he  died  there, 
10  December  1956,  was  to  dictate  a 
characteristic  letter  in  support  of  the  local 
Conservative  member  of  Parliament  whose 
political  opinions  he  had  not  always 
shared  but  whose  freedom  of  action  he 
felt  to  be  intolerably  threatened  by  pres- 
sure from  the  constituency  association. 

Although  Cecil  never  married  and  had 
no  house  of  his  own  until  appointed  to 
Eton,  he  enjoyed  unbroken  domestic 
happiness.  For  most  of  his  life  he  lived  at 
Hatfield  in  rooms  set  aside  for  his  private 
use.  He  took  his  meals,  however,  with  the 
rest  of  the  family,  who  readily  forgave  his 
unpunctuality  in  return  for  the  sustained 
conviviality  of  his  talk.  At  night  he  would 
retire  early  to  read  and  to  meditate. 
Unhappily  he  conmiitted  little  to  print 
except  a  small  volume  entitled  Conserva- 
tism, published  in  the  Home  University 
Library  in  1912  and  embodying  a  per- 
sonal creed  which  remained  unchanged  to 
the  end  of  his  days.  Pageantry  and  cere- 
monial appealed  to  him  as  reminders  of 
the  past.  To  aesthetic  experience,  how- 
ever, he  was  immune  and  when  a  friend 
once  drew  his  attention  to  a  glorious  sun- 
set he  replied,  'Yes,  extremely  tasteful'. 
Until  well  into  middle  age  he  was  an 
occasional  but  adventurous  rider  to 
hounds.  A  portrait  by  Sargent  is  at  Hat- 
field and  another  by  P.  A.  de  Laszlo  at 
Church  House,  Westminster. 

[Eton  College  Chronicle,  7  February  1957; 
private  information.]  Kenneth  Rose. 

CHAMBERS,  DOROTHEA  KATHA- 
RINE (1878-1960),  lawn  tennis  champion, 
was  born  in  Ealing  3  September  1878, 
the  second  daughter  of  the  Rev.  Henry 
Charles  Douglass,  vicar  of  St.  Matthew's 
church,  Ealing  Common,  and  his  wife, 
Clara  CoUick.  In  1907  she  married  Robert 
Lambert  Chambers,  merchant,  of  Ealing, 
by  whom  she  had  two  sons.  She  learnt  her 
lawn  tennis  at  Princess  Helena  College, 
Ealing,  and  at  the  Ealing  Lawn  Tennis 
Club  and  became  a  most  formidable  and 


determined  player,  generally  considered 
to  be  one  of  the  top  half-dozen  women  in 
the  history  of  the  game.  Tall,  lean,  and 
always  superbly  fit,  she  was  indeed  very 
hard  to  beat.  Her  game,  based  on  steady 
and  accurate  driving  on  either  wing,  was 
utterly  sound  and  was  backed  by  general- 
ship and  tactics  of  a  high  order.  Few 
players  have  been  able  to  induce  such  a 
feeling  of  hopelessness  in  their  opponents 
as  she  did;  she  had  a  long  string  of 
victories  in  many  tournaments,  and  won 
the  Olympic  ladies  gold  medal  in  1908. 
Between  1903  and  1914  she  won  the 
Wimbledon  singles  title  seven  times  and 
lost  only  once  to  a  British  player,  in  1908 
to  Mrs.  Sterry  who  herself  won  Wimbledon 
five  times.  It  must  be  remembered,  how- 
ever, that  prior  to  1922  the  holder  did  not 
have  to  play  through  the  championships 
but  only  to  defend  the  title  in  the  chal- 
lenge round.  Winning  in  1903,  1904,  and 
1906,  Miss  Douglass  lost  in  1905  and  1907 
to  the  young  American  girl.  Miss  May 
Sutton.  In  1909  she  did  not  compete  as 
she  was  having  a  baby.  But  in  1910  and 
1911  she  was  back  again  and  won  both 
times  with  the  utmost  ease.  In  the  latter 
year  the  winner  of  the  All  Comers  could 
not  win  one  game  from  her  in  the  chal- 
lenge round.  By  this  time  she  was  prob- 
ably at  her  peak ;  her  game  contained  no 
weak  point  at  all ;  and  she  was  acknow- 
ledged to  be  the  best  woman  player  in  the 
world.  In  1912  she  did  not  defend  her 
title  as  she  was  having  her  second  child. 
In  1913  she  won  her  sixth  Wimbledon 
singles  title  without  losing  a  set.  The 
holder,  Mrs.  Larcombe,  was  compelled  to 
withdraw  as  she  was  hit  in  the  eye  by  a 
ball  in  the  final  of  the  mixed  doubles  and 
put  out  of  action  for  several  weeks.  In 
1914  Mrs.  Larcombe  challenged  Mrs.  Lam- 
bert Chambers.  The  centre  court  at  the 
old  Wimbledon  in  Worple  Road  was  like 
a  furnace.  Both  players  were  completely 
exhausted  after  two  very  hard-fought 
sets,  each  of  which  was  won  by  Mrs. 
Lambert  Chambers  to  give  her  her  seventh 
and  last  Wimbledon  singles  title.  This 
stood  as  a  record  until  it  was  beaten  by 
Mrs.  Helen  Wills-Moody  in  1938. 

The  real  drama  in  Mrs.  Lambert  Cham- 
bers's career  came  in  1919  when  she 
defended  her  title  against  the  challenge 
of  the  twenty-year-old  Suzanne  Lenglen. 
From  the  moment  the  French  girl  ap- 
peared at  Wimbledon  crowds  flocked  to 
see  her  play.  Mrs.  Larcombe,  the  1912 
champion,  could  only  get  three  games 
from    her,    and  Miss   K.   McKane   (later 


203 


Chambers,  D.  K. 


D»N.B.  1951-1960 


Mrs.  Godfree),  the  most  promising  young 
British  player,  only  one.  Only  Miss  Eliza- 
beth Ryan  really  tested  her.  A  huge  crowd 
assembled  to  see  her  meet  Mrs.  Lambert 
Chambers  on  the  second  Friday  of 
Wimbledon.  But  it  rained  heavily  all  day 
and  no  play  was  possible.  When  the 
players  came  on  to  court  next  day  King 
George  V,  Queen  Mary,  and  Princess  Mary 
were  in  the  royal  box.  It  was  very  hot  and 
the  playing  conditions  were  perfect.  Mile 
Lenglen's  wonderful  play  throughout  the 
tournament,  together  with  her  twenty 
years'  advantage  in  age,  had  made  her  a 
firm  favourite.  The  only  concession  Mrs. 
Lambert  Chambers  had  made  to  the  pas- 
sing of  time  since  1903  was  that  her  long- 
sleeved  blouse  was  open  at  the  neck  and 
her  long  skirt  just  a  trifle  shorter. 

Although  the  French  girl  eventually  won 
the  first  set  10-8,  the  older  player  counter- 
attacked strongly  and  won  the  second  set 
ft-4.  In  the  final  set  Mile  Lenglen  led 
4-1,  but  Mrs.  Chambers,  playing  with  the 
utmost  determination,  caught  up  and  led 
6-5  and  40-15 — and  had  two  points  for 
the  match.  Keeping  her  nerves  under 
wonderful  control  Mile  Lenglen  launched 
a  do-or-die  attack  at  the  net  and  went  out 
at  9-7  to  win  a  brilliant  and  memorable 
victory  in  one  of  the  finest  women's 
matches  ever  seen  at  Wimbledon. 

The  indomitable  Mrs.  Lambert  Cham- 
bers came  back  again  next  year  to  gain  her 
revenge.  She  beat  Mrs.  Mallory,  the  new 
American  champion,  for  the  loss  of  only 
three  games,  and  easily  defeated  the 
formidable  Miss  Elizabeth  Ryan  in  the 
final  of  the  All  Comers.  But  Mile  Lenglen, 
now  almost  invincible,  overwhelmed  her 
challenger  6-3,  6-0.  This  was  the  last 
singles  match  Mrs.  Lambert  Chambers 
ever  played  at  Wimbledon.  In  December 
1922  she  was  the  first  woman  to  be  elected 
a  councillor  of  the  Lawn  Tennis  Associa- 
tion. 

Although  the  Wightman  Cup  series 
between  the  women  of  America  and  the 
women  of  Britain  only  started  in  1923, 
twenty  years  after  Mrs.  Lambert  Cham- 
bers had  won  her  first  singles  title  at 
Wimbledon,  she  was  invited  to  captain 
Britain's  team  in  the  1925  match,  which 
was  played  at  Forest  Hills,  New  York. 
She  won  her  single  against  Miss  E.  Goss 
7-5,  3-6,  6-1,  and,  partnered  by  Miss 
Harvey,  also  won  her  double  against  Mrs. 
Mallory  and  Mrs.  Bimdy.  These  two  vic- 
tories enabled  Britain  to  win  the  tie  by 
four  matches  to  three.  Bearing  in  mind 
that   she   was   then   forty-six,   this   was 


one  of  Mrs.  Lambert  Chambers's  finest 
achievements.  She  made  her  last  ap- 
pearance in  the  Wightman  Cup  in  1926. 
In  1928  she  turned  professional  and  ceased 
to  be  a  member  of  the  All  England  Lawn 
Tennis  Club.  But  after  the  war  she  was 
re-elected  and  thenceforward  every  year, 
until  her  death  in  London,  7  January 
1960,  she  was  always  to  be  seen  in, the 
members'  stand  at  the  championships. 
She  published  a  book  on  Lawn  Tennis  f(yr 
Ladies  in  1910. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.  G.  Smyth. 

CHAMBERS,  Sir  EDMUND  KER- 
CHEVER  (1866-1954),  historian  of  the 
English  stage  and  civil  servant,  born  at 
West  Ilsley,  Berkshire,  16  March  1866, 
was  the  son  of  the  Rev.  William  Chambers, 
curate,  and  sometime  fellow  of  Worcester 
College,  Oxford,  and  his  wife,  Anna 
Heathcote,  daughter  of  the  late  Thomas 
Kerchever  Arnold  [q.v.],  fellow  of  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge.  From  Marlborough 
he  proceeded  to  Corpus  Christi  College, 
Oxford,  as  a  classical  scholar,  took  firsts 
in  honour  moderations  (1887)  and  literae 
humaniores  (1889),  and  in  1891  won  the 
Chancellor's  English  essay  prize  with  an 
essay  on  literary  forgeries.  He  was  dis- 
appointed of  a  fellowship,  but  before  he 
left  Oxford  in  1892  for  the  Education 
Department  he  had  already  acquired  a 
bent  for  English  studies  and  produced  an 
edition  of  Richard  II  (1891 ).  Henceforth  he 
became  a  notable  example  of  a  man  who 
followed  two  careers,  both  with  distinction. 
His  duties  in  the  Education  Department 
were  not  at  first  onerous,  but  from  1903  he 
became  a  valued  lieutenant  of  (Sir)  Robert 
Morant  [q.v.],  permanent  secretary  to  the 
newly  constituted  Board  of  Education; 
Anonymity  is  the  principle  of  the  British 
Civil  Service,  yet  it  is  clear  that  in  a  period 
when  the  whole  educational  system  was 
being  transformed  Chambers's  contribu- 
tion was  important,  especially  as  it  related 
to  day  continuation  schools  and  adult 
education.  The  day  continuation  schools 
were  victims  of  the  economies  associated 
with  the  name  of  Sir  Eric  Geddes  [q.v.], 
but  the  Workers'  Educational  Association 
and  other  promoters  of  adult  education 
were  well  aware  of  the  debt  of  gratitude 
they  owed  to  Chambers.  He  rose  to  be 
second  secretary  (1921),  but  perhaps  by 
reason  of  his  unaccommodating  manner 
with  deputations  he  was  not  offered  the 
post  of  permanent  secretary,  and  he  re- 
signed in  1926. 


204 


D.N.B.  1951 -1960 


Chambers,  E.  K. 


During  his  years  as  a  civil  servant  he 
did  much  higher  journaUsm  and  edited 
many  editions  of  the  English  classics, 
especially  Shakespeare.  He  was  first  presi- 
dent of  the  Malone  Society  (1906-39) 
and  contributed  to  its  Collections  valuable 
papers  on  dramatic  records.  Among  the 
best  of  his  many  opuscula  is  the  anthology 
of  Early  English  Lyrics  (1907),  chosen  by 
him  and  Frank  Sidgwick,  which  has  intro- 
duced many  readers  to  the  beauties  of 
medieval  lyric.  Also  compiled  with  taste 
and  learning  is  The  Oxford  Book  of  Six- 
teenth Century  Verse  (1932).  His  interest  in 
Arthurian  studies  dated  from  his  under- 
graduate days.  More  than  once  he  wrote 
about  Malory  (e.g.  an  English  Associa- 
tion pamphlet,  1922),  and  his  Arthur  of 
Britain  (1927)  is  a  synthesis  and  re- 
assessment solidly  based  on  the  available 
evidence. 

From  the  time  Chambers  left  Oxford 
he  was  working  at  'a  little  book  about 
Shakespeare  and  the  conditions,  literary 
and  dramatic,  under  which  he  wrote'. 
This  'little  book'  grew  into  the  two  volumes 
on  The  Mediaeval  Stage  (1903),  the  four 
volumes  on  The  Elizabethan  Stage  (1923), 
and  the  two  volumes  on  Shakespeare 
(1930),  the  works  by  which  he  will  be 
chiefly  remembered.  That  a  busy  civil 
servant  should  have  been  able  to  com- 
plete such  substantial  works  of  scholar- 
ship points  to  great  powers  of  application, 
exceptional  quickness  of  mind  and  pen, 
and  a  natural  gift  for  organization. 

A  master  of  dramatic  history,  he  made 
no  attempt  in  these  works  to  evaluate 
plays  as  literature.  He  was  convinced  that 
any  history  of  drama  which  does  not  con- 
fine itself  solely  to  the  analysis  of  genius 
must  start  from  a  study  of  the  social  and 
economic  facts  upon  which  the  drama 
rested,  and  these  facts  he  presented  with 
a  fullness  and  accuracy  not  approached 
before.  In  The  Mediaeval  Stage  the  only 
well-trodden  ground  was  the  Interlude; 
on  minstrelsy  and  folk-drama  and  to  some 
extent  on  the  liturgical  and  miracle  plays, 
his  is  pioneer  work.  The  Elizabethan  Stage 
is  more  a  work  of  consolidation  than  dis- 
covery, for  he  had  little  time  to  search  for 
the  information  which  lay  dormant  in  the 
Public  Record  Office  and  elsewhere,  but 
even  so  his  originality  appears  again  and 
again  in  the  acuteness  with  which  he 
balances  complicated  evidence.  In  weigh- 
ing evidence  he  was  as  much  a  master  as  in 
assembUng  and  ordering  it.  The  measure 
of  his  achievement  is  estimated  if  we 
compare  this  work  with  the   only   two 


extensive  chronicles  of  the  stage  before  his 
— those  of  Collier  and  Fleay  [qq.v.]. 

His  Shakespeare,  completed  in  his  days 
of  leisure,  is  carefully  composed  and  de- 
signed to  scale.  While  aesthetic  judge- 
ments must  enter  into  a  discussion  of 
authorship,  chronology,  and  so  on,  they 
are  subordinated  to  the  main  purpose,  a 
consideration  of  all  the  material  facts  and 
problems.  Here  is  the  same  grasp  of  all 
relevant  evidence,  the  same  lucidity  in  a 
prose  that  achieves  a  good  expository 
level  and  sometimes  rises  into  a  controlled 
eloquence,  and  a  caution  which  Sir  Walter 
Greg  [q.v.]  described  as  'monumental'.  He 
never  forgot  the  distinction  between  a 
demonstrated  truth  and  a  plausible  sup- 
position, and  his  sardonic  wit  made  short 
work  of  implausible  suppositions. 

After  his  Shakespeare  he  did  not  aban- 
don Elizabethan  studies  (Sir  Thomas 
Wyatt  and  Some  Collected  Studies,  1933, 
and  Shakespearean  Gleanings,  1944)  but  in 
his  biographies  of  Coleridge  (1938)  and 
Matthew  Arnold  (1947)  he  turned  also  to 
the  romantic  poetry  which  persisted  down 
to  his  own  day  and  of  which  his  own  verses 
are  late  examples  (Carmina  Argentea, 
privately  printed,  1918).  To  the  merits 
of  eighteenth-century  and  contemporary 
poetry  he  was  blind :  he  called  himself  'an 
impenitent  Victorian'.  After  his  retirement 
he  lived  at  Eynsham  near  Oxford,  and 
there  wrote  a  life  of  Sir  Henry  Lee  (1936), 
the  ranger  of  Woodstock,  and  Eynsham 
under  the  Monks  (Oxfordshire  Record 
Society,  1936),  his  one  work  on  medieval 
local  history.  In  his  English  Literature  at 
the  Close  of  the  Middle  Ages  (1945),  a  con- 
tribution to  the  Oxford  History  of  English 
Literature,  he  returned,  not  wholly  suc- 
cessfully, to  subjects  which  he  had  once 
adorned:  medieval  drama  and  lyric,  the 
ballad  and  folk-poetry,  Malory.  In  1938 
he  moved  from  Eynsham  to  Beer  in 
Devonshire,  where  he  died  21  January 
1954. 

Chambers's  services  to  education  and 
scholarship  earned  him  many  honours :  he 
received  the  honorary  degree  of  D.Litt. 
from  Durham  (1922)  and  Oxford  (1939), 
and  his  election  to  an  honorary  fellowship 
at  Corpus  (1934)  gave  him  great  pleasure. 
He  was  elected  F.B.A.  in  1924  and  ap- 
pointed C.B.  in  1912  and  K.B.E.  in 
1925. 

In  1893  Chambers  married  Eleanor 
Christabel  (Nora),  daughter  of  John 
Davison  Bowman,  late  of  the  Exchequer 
and  Audit  Office.  To  her  he  dedicated  his 
three  major  works.  There  were  no  children. 


Chambers,  E.  K. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


A  drawing  by  Sir  William  Rothenstein  is 
in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery. 

[F.  P.  and  J.  Dover  Wilson  in  Proceedings 
of  the  British  Academy,  vol.  xlii,  1956; 
private  papers  now  in  the  Bodleian  Library ; 
personal  knowledge.]  F.  P.  Wilson. 

CHANCELLOR,  Sir  JOHN  ROBERT 
(1870-1952),  soldier  and  administrator, 
was  born  in  Edinburgh  20  October  1870, 
the  second  son  of  Edward  Chancellor, 
writer  to  the  signet,  and  his  wife,  Anne 
Helen,  daughter  of  John  Robert  Todd, 
also  a  writer  to  the  signet.  He  was  educated 
at  Blair  Lodge,  Polmont,  and  the  Royal 
Military  Academy,  Woolwich,  and  was 
commissioned  in  the  Royal  Engineers  in 
1890.  After  a  period  of  duty  at  home  he 
served  in  India  with  the  Dongola  (1896) 
and  the  Tirah  (1897-8)  expeditions,  and 
in  the  latter  his  courage  and  initiative 
earned  him  a  mention  in  dispatches  and 
appointment  to  the  D.S.O.  (1898).  Back 
in  England,  Chancellor  attended  the  Staff 
College  and  in  1904  was  appointed  assis- 
tant military  secretary  to  the  Committee 
of  Imperial  Defence.  He  showed  such  ad- 
ministrative ability  and  sound  judgement 
that  in  1906  he  was  made  secretary  of  the 
Colonial  Defence  Committee.  He  was  pro- 
moted major  in  1910.  It  was  a  tribute  to 
Chancellor's  qualities  that,  at  the  age  of 
forty,  a  soldier  with  no  experience  of 
colonial  administration,  he  was  appointed 
to  the  important  governorship  of  Mauri- 
tius where  his  term  of  office  (1911-16)  was 
still  recalled,  with  admiration,  more  than 
thirty  years  later,  by  some  who  by  then 
were  leading  personalities  in  the  island. 
His  success  was  rewarded  by  appointment 
to  the  governorship  of  Trinidad  and 
Tobago  (1916-21)  and  thereafter  to  the 
first  governorship  of  Southern  Rhodesia. 
This  had  to  wait  until  1923,  when  the 
territory  was  taken  over  from  the  Char- 
tered Company,  and  during  the  interval 
he  served  as  a  principal  assistant  secretary 
to  the  Conmiittee  of  Imperial  Defence.  He 
had  been  promoted  lieutenant-colonel  in 
1918. 

Chancellor's  term  in  Southern  Rhodesia 
(1923-8)  more  than  justified  his  reputa- 
tion as  a  capable  and  progressive  ad- 
ministrator. The  constitution  which  he 
helped  to  establish  proved  more  durable 
than  many  such  instruments  and  he  op- 
posed firmly  any  suggestion  for  the  intro- 
duction of  extreme  forms  of  segregation. 
The  ability  which  he  showed  in  handling 
local  politicians  and  in  guiding  the  manage- 
ment of  affairs  led  to  his  selection  for  the 


difficult  appointment  of  high  commissioner 
for  Palestine  and  Trans- Jordan  (1928-31) 
where  he  succeeded  Lord  Plumer  [q.v.] 
whose  term  of  office  had  been  noteworthy 
for  its  freedom  from  those  serious  dis- 
turbances so  unhappily  frequent  during 
the  British  administration  of  Palestine. 
This  tranquillity  and  reasons  of  economy 
led  to  the  withdrawal  of  the  British  mili- 
tary garrison  from  Palestine  and  to  the 
reduction  and  reorganization  of  the  police 
force.  In  consequence  the  civil  power  was 
without  military  aid  when  in  August  1929, 
following  incidents  at,  and  in  connection 
with,  the  Wailing  Wall  at  Jerusalem, 
Arab  attacks  were  made  on  Jews  in 
several  large  towns  in  Palestine.  Chancel- 
lor was  then  on  leave  and,  although 
the  parliamentary  commission  of  inquiry 
under  Sir  Walter  Shaw,  reporting  in  March 
1930,  found  no  serious  fault  with  the 
governmental  handling  of  the  riots,  there 
were  some  in  Palestine  who  felt  that  events 
might  have  taken  a  very  different  course 
had  Chancellor  been  in  the  country.  The 
principal  recommendation  of  the  Shaw 
commission  was  that  the  British  Govern- 
ment should  issue  a  statement  of  policy 
defining  clearly  and  positively  the  mean- 
ing which  they  attached  to  certain  pas- 
sages in  the  mandate  and  should  make 
it  plain  that  they  intended  to  give  full 
effect  to  the  policy  thus  defined.  That 
recommendation  was,  almost  certainly, 
influenced  by  Chancellor's  views  and  he 
must  have  been  well  satisfied  when,  after 
further  investigations,  including  land  and 
immigration  problems  by  Sir  John  Hope 
Simpson,  the  Government  issued  a  state- 
ment on  policy  in  October  1930  which 
went  to  what  Chancellor  undoubtedly  re- 
garded as  the  root  of  the  Palestine  prob- 
lem. When  in  February  1931  the  white 
paper  was  in  effect  reinterpreted  by  Ram- 
say MacDonald  in  a  statement  to  Chaim 
Weizmann  [q.v.],  Chancellor's  faith  in 
government  policy  in  Palestine  was  badly 
shaken  and  his  disappointment  was  made 
evident  in  his  speech  at  a  farewell  banquet 
in  Jerusalem  when  he  said :  'I  came  hoping 
to  increase  the  country's  prosperity  and 
happiness.  I  am  leaving  with  my  ambition 
unfulfilled.  Conditions  were  against  me.' 

Chancellor,  though  over  sixty,  now  em- 
barked on  a  third  career,  serving  as  chair- 
man or  member  of  a  number  of  govern- 
mental committees ;  on  bodies  such  as  the 
Royal  Geographical,  Royal  Empire,  and 
Royal  African  societies ;  and  as  a  director 
of  various  companies. 

Although  not  tall,  he  was  impressive 


206 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Chapman,  D.  L. 


alike  in  appearance,  in  his  carriage,  and 
in  the  good  taste  with  which  he  always 
dressed.  He*  did  not  make  friends  quickly 
or  easily  but  to  his  subordinates  he 
showed  a  courtesy  which  commanded  their 
devotion  and,  once  his  confidence  had 
been  won,  his  charm  and  sympathy  made 
him  excellent  company.  He  held  strong 
views  on  many  issues  of  policy  but  after 
his  retirement  from  Palestine  he  scrupu- 
lously avoided  public  controversy. 

Chancellor  was  appointed  C.M.G. 
(1909),  K.C.M.G.  (1913),  G.C.M.G.  (1922), 
G.C.V.O.  (1925),  and  G.B.E.  (1947).  In 
1903  he  married  Elsie,  daughter  of  George 
Rodie  Thompson,  a  barrister,  of  Lynwood, 
Ascot.  He  had  one  daughter  (the  wife  of 
Air  Chief  Marshal  Sir  William  Elliot)  and 
two  sons,  the  elder  of  whom.  Sir  Christo- 
pher Chancellor,  was  for  seventeen  years 
head  of  Reuters  and  in  1962  became  the 
chairman  of  the  Bowater  Paper  Corpora- 
tion and  its  associated  companies. 

Chancellor  died  31  July  1952  at  Shield- 
hill,  Lanarkshire,  an  estate  which  his 
family  had  owned  for  nearly  eight  hundred 
years.  A  portrait  of  him  by  a  South 
African  painter,  Frank  Wiles,  was  hung 
in  the  Legislative  Assembly  Building  in 
Salisbury,  Rhodesia. 

[The  Times,  2  August  1952 ;  Royal  Engineers 
Journal,  December  1952 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.]     T.  I.  K.  Lloyd. 

CHAPMAN,  DAVID  LEONARD  (1869- 
1958),  chemist,  the  eldest  son  of  David 
Chapman,  merchant,  who  later  became  a 
builder  in  Manchester, -and  his  wife,  Maria 
Wells,  was  born  in  Wells,  Norfolk,  6 
December  1869.  Sir  Sydney  Chapman 
(a  notice  of  whom  appears  below)  was  his 
younger  brother.  From  Manchester  Gram- 
mar School  he  won  an  open  exhibition 
to  Christ  Church,  Oxford,  and  took  the 
final  honour  school  of  natural  science 
in  chemistry  (first  class,  1893),  then  in 
physics  (second  class,  1894).  After  a  short 
period  as  science  master  at  Giggleswick 
School  he  was  appointed  (1897)  to  the 
chemistry  staff  at  Manchester  University. 
In  1907  Jesus  College,  Oxford,  which  had 
just  equipped  itself  with  a  large  college 
laboratory,  elected  him  fellow  and  tutor  to 
take  charge  of  the  science  teaching.  This 
laboratory,  the  last  to  be  run  by  an  Oxford 
college,  remained  open  until  Chapman's 
retirement  in  1944.  He  was  elected  F.R.S. 
in  1913 ;  acted  as  senior  proctor,  served 
on  university  boards  and  committees,  and 
was  vice-principal  of  his  college  in  1926-44. 
As  a  tutor  Chapman  was  devoted  to  his 


pupils,  as  they  were  to  him.  Research, 
however,  was  his  real  interest,  and  this  he 
pursued  over  a  long  period  of  years,  as- 
sisted by  his  wife  and  his  young  chemistry 
graduates.  His  approach  to  research  prob- 
lems was  cautious,  critical,  thorough,  and 
penetrating,  relying  for  inspiration  and 
technique  very  little  on  the  work  of  others. 
Because  his  standards  of  proof  were  very 
high  he  was  not  disposed  to  accept  readily 
fresh  outlooks  put  forward  by  newcomers 
to  his  subject,  although  he  never  rejected 
them  outright.  The  problem  which  occu- 
pied him  for  the  longest  period  was  the 
mechanism  of  the  photochemical  combi- 
nation of  hydrogen  and  chlorine,  which 
turned  out  to  be  an  extraordinarily  diffi- 
cult one  to  handle.  Chapman  established 
that  minute  traces  of  impurities  were  the 
cause  of  the  apparently  capricious  be- 
haviour of  the  reaction.  He  also  found  that 
under  certain  conditions  the  reaction  rate 
was  proportional  to  the  square  root  of  the 
light  intensity,  as  in  the  allied  reaction 
between  hydrogen  and  bromine.  In  such 
reactions,  if  the  light  is  interrupted  by  a 
rotating  sector,  the  measured  rate  varies 
with  the  sector  frequency,  and  Chapman 
was  the  first  to  work  out  and  use  the 
theory  of  this  effect  to  measure  the  'mean 
life'  of  a  reaction  intermediate.  The 
method  has  since  been  much  used  by 
others. 

Chapman's  most  recognized  contribu- 
tion to  science  was  embodied  in  his  first 
paper,  published  in  1899,  which  was  the 
earhest  sound  theoretical  treatment  of 
detonation.  Applying  an  equation  derived 
by  Riemann  relating  the  movement  of  gas 
to  the  pressures  and  densities  in  front  of 
and  behind  the  detonation  wave  front,  he 
made  the  assumption  that  the  limiting 
velocity  is  that  corresponding  to  the  con- 
dition of  maximum  entropy,  and  was 
thereby  enabled  to  calculate  detonation 
velocities  in  gas  mixtures  in  a  most  suc- 
cessful manner.  His  name  is  now  attached 
to  his  theoretical  method,  which  is  basic 
in  detonation  studies. 

Although  reserved  in  manner,  and  some- 
what of  a  recluse  in  his  scientific  work, 
Chapman  could  demonstrate  an  informal 
but  effective  administrative  ability  when 
he  so  wished.  When  estates  bursar  of  the 
college  for  some  years,  his  way  of  visit- 
ing tenant  farmers  in  Yorkshire  on  his 
bicycle,  calling  at  the  back  door,  rather 
roughly  dressed,  sometimes  led  to  momen- 
tary misunderstandings,  but  matters  were 
soon  put  right.  His  outdoor  hobbies  were 
golf  and  cycling ;  when  he  gave  these  up  he 


207 


Chapman,  D.  L. 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


continued  to  be  an  active  walker  until  the 
age  of  eighty-two. 

Chapman  married  in  1918  Muriel 
Catherine  Canning,  eldest  daughter  of  the 
Rev.  Samuel  Holmes,  rector  of  Braunston, 
Northamptonshire ;  they  had  one  daugh- 
ter. He  died  in  Oxford  17  January  1958. 

[E.  J.  Bowen  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iv,  1958; 
personal  knowledge.]  E.  J.  Bowen. 

CHAPMAN,  ROBERT  WILLIAM  (1881- 
1960),  scholar  and  university  publisher, 
was  born  at  Eskbank  near  Dalkeith, 
Perthshire,  5  October  1881,  the  youngest 
of  the  six  children  of  the  Rev.  Edward 
Whitaker  Chapman,  Episcopalian  vicar 
of  Birnam,  Dunkeld,  Perthshire  (1871-7), 
and  secretary  and  treasurer  of  the  Repre- 
sentative Church  Council  of  the  Scottish 
Episcopal  Church,  Edinburgh,  and  his 
wife,  Hannah  Margaret  Cannon,  of  a 
Yorkshire  family,  who  settled  near  Dun- 
dee after  her  husband's  death  in  1884. 
Chapman  attended  the  High  School, 
Dundee,  then  went  with  a  bursary  to  St. 
Andrews,  where  he  obtained  first  class 
honours  in  classics.  With  the  Guthrie  and 
Adam  de  Brome  scholarships  he  pro- 
ceeded to  Oriel  College,  Oxford,  where  he 
won  the  Gaisford  prize  for  Greek  prose 
(1903)  and  was  awarded  a  first  class  in 
classical  moderations  (1904)  and  in  literae 
humaniores  (1906). 

In  1906  Chapman  was  appointed  assis- 
tant secretary  to  the  secretary  to  the 
delegates  of  the  Clarendon  Press,  Charles 
Caiman  (whose  notice  he  contributed  to 
this  Dictionary).  On  the  outbreak  of  war 
in  1914  he  was  given  a  commission  in  the 
Royal  Garrison  Artillery  and  served  in 
Salonica.  Returning  to  Oxford  he  suc- 
ceeded to  the  secretaryship  in  January 
1920  after  Cannan's  death.  He  followed 
Cannan's  Catalogue  of  the  Oxford  Univer- 
sity Press  (1916)  with  the  complementary 
Account  of  the  Oxford  University  Press 
1468-1921  (1922;  2nd  ed.  1926)  in  which 
he  described  the  more  important  books 
published  by  the  Press,  some  in  progress, 
in  wliich  he  had  a  share,  especially  the 
Oxford  English  Texts  and  the  Oxford 
English  Dictionary  (completed  in  1928) 
and  its  Supplement  (1933),  to  which  he 
freely  contributed.  His  early  interest  in 
lexicography,  which  was  also  shown  in 
the  revised  edition  of  Liddell  and  Scott, 
finally  published  in  1940,  remained 
throughout  his  life. 

When  on  active  service  Chapman  wrote 
a  series  of  essays,  Portrait  of  a  Scholar 


(1920),  among  them  one  on  *The  textual 
criticism  of  English  classics'  which  con* 
tains  the  injunction  'To  restore,  and 
maintain  in  its  integrity  the  text  of  our 
great  writers  is  a  pious  duty' ;  this  duty 
he  observed  throughout  his  life  and  he 
demanded  its  observance  by  others  in 
editions  promoted  or  controlled  by  him. 
The  English  authors  he  loved  and  studied 
most  were  Jane  Austen  and  Samuel  John- 
son and  it  is  on  his  editions  of  their  works 
that  his  fame  will  rest.  As  early  as  1912  he 
had  planned  with  Katharine  Marion  Met- 
calfe an  edition  of  Jane  Austen's  novels 
and  this  was  completed  by  himself,  with 
her  assistance,  in  five  volumes  in  1923.  Of 
the  text  it  was  authoritatively  stated  that 
'AH  the  persons  and  events  of  her  novels 
were  present  to  him  with  such  distinctness 
and  precision  that  he  could  detect  the 
small  misprints  which  had  long  passed 
muster,  and  the  bigger  blunders  which 
had  been  dismissed  or  ignored  as  beyond 
cure.'  This  edition  was  judiciously  anno- 
tated and  accompanied  by  numerous 
appendixes  of  great  importance.  It  was 
followed  by  six  volumes  of  juvenilia  and 
minor  works  and  two  editions  of  letters, 
The  Five  Letters  of  Jane  Austen  to  her  Niece 
(1924)  and  Jane  Austen's  Letters  to  her 
Sister  Cassandra  and  Others  (2  vols.,  1932), 
the  only  complete  edition  of  her  letters, 
lavishly  illustrated.  Chapman  completed 
his  work  on  Jane  Austen  with  his  edition 
of  J.  E.  Austen-Leigh's  Memoir  (1926), 
Jane  Austen:  Facts  and  Problems,  the 
Clark  lectures  given  in  1948  at  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge  (Oxford,  1948),  and 
Jane  Austen:  a  Critical  Bibliography 
(1953  ;  corrected  ed.  1955). 

Very  early  in  his  career  Chapman  laid 
the  foundations  of  his  belief  that  Johnson 
was  one  of  the  first  writers  of  modern  times 
and  one  of  the  greatest  of  Englishmen.  He 
read  and  studied  in  Macedonia  Boswell's 
Life  of  Johnson  and  planned  and  in  a  great 
part  executed  there  an  edition  of  Boswell's 
Tour  to  the  Hebrides  and  Johnson's  Jour- 
ney  to  the  Western  Islands  which  were  pub- 
Ushed  together  in  1924  in  an  edition  in 
which  the  texts  were,  for  the  first  time, 
established  by  scholarly  collation  and 
emendation.  Chapman  had  already  come 
to  the  conclusion  that  the  editions  of 
Boswell's  Life  and  Johnson's  Letters  by 
Birkbeck  Hill  [q.v.]  should  be  revised  and 
re-edited.  The  great  edition  of  Boswell's 
Life  and  Tour  to  the  Hebrides  (1887)  was 
found  on  examination  to  be  textually 
inaccurate  and  factually  inadequate.  L.  F. 
Powell  was  commissioned  to  undertake 


fm 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Chapman,  R.  W. 


the  revision:  Chapman,  in  addition  to 
reading  the  proofs,  assisted  materially 
by  editing  Boswell's  Note  Book  1776-77 
(1925),  Johnson  and  Boswell  Revised  by 
Themselves  and  Others  (1928),  and  Papers 
Written  by  Dr.  Johnson  and  Dr.  Dodd,  1777 
(1926).  Chapman  himself  undertook  the 
new  edition  of  the  letters.  He  made  un- 
usual efforts  to  obtain  new  letters  and  was 
remarkably  successful.  His  prime  aim  was 
to  furnish  an  accurate  text  and  therefore 
he  made  a  close  study  of  Johnson's  dilh- 
cult  handwriting.  The  indexes,  of  which 
there  are  seven,  are  very  full  and  are 
arranged  with  great  skill.  This  edition, 
The  Letters  of  Samuel  Johnson  with  Mrs. 
ThraWs  Genuine  Letters  to  Him,  was  pub- 
lished in  three  volumes  in  1952  and  is 
Chapman's  greatest  contribution  to  John- 
sonian scholarship.  In  Johnson,  Boswell 
and  Mrs.  Piozzi:  a  Suppressed  Passage 
Restored  (1929)  Chapman  exposed  Mrs. 
Thrale's  editorial  malpractices.  He  also, 
still  in  the  Birkbeck  Hill  tradition,  pro- 
duced in  1927  an  edition  of  Rasselas  of 
which  the  text  does  not  need  to  be  re- 
collated. 

Chapman  was  well  aware  of  the  need  for 
a  systematic  study  of  the  canon  of  John- 
son's writings.  The  pioneer  Bibliography 
by  W.  P.  Courtney,  seen  through  the  press 
by  D.  Nichol  Smith  in  1915,  was  reissued 
with  the  support  of  Chapman  in  1925 ;  it 
added  and  described  numerous  facsimiles, 
but  made  no  addition  to  the  canon.  This 
was  done  when  'Johnsonian  Bibhography : 
A  Supplement  to  Courtney'  by  Chapman 
with  the  collaboration  of  Allen  T.  Hazen 
was  published  by  the  Oxford  Biblio- 
graphical Society  (vol.  v,  1940).  This  pro- 
visional supplement  added  twenty-two 
pieces  to  the  canon,  some  of  the  rarer  of 
which  were  published  by  Chapman  as  soon 
as  they  were  found.  Chapman  was  an 
ardent  bibUographer.  He  wrote  one  impor- 
tant book.  Cancels  (1930),  and  many 
articles  on  bibhography  and  kindred  sub- 
jects such  as  typography,  binding,  the 
book-trade  (including  the  long  article 
'Authors  and  Booksellers'  in  vol.  ii  of  A.  S. 
Turberville's  Johnson's  England,  1933), 
and  contributed  to  its  terminology.  He 
freely  shared  his  knowledge  with  R.  B. 
McKerrow  [q.v.],  whose  Introduction  to 
Bibliography,  a  standard  manual,  was 
published  by  the  Clarendon  Press  in  1927. 

Chapman  was  taken  seriously  ill  in  1942 
and  compelled  to  resign  the  secretaryship 
of  the  Press.  He  retired  to  Barton  near 
Oxford  and  devoted  himself  mainly  to 
the  completion  of  his  edition  of  Johnson's 


letters.  An  essayist  and  reviewer  of  rare 
distinction,  he  had  an  innate  feeling  for 
language  and  always  wrote  with  gracious 
learning  and  wit.  As  a  reviewer  he  was 
generally  kindly  but  could  be  severe  when 
occasion  required.  Johnsonian  and  Other 
Essays  and  Reviews  (1953),  written  over 
the  years  1921-49,  includes  such  notable 
writings  as  the  James  Bryce  lecture  on 
lexicography  and  the  last  of  his  S.P.E. 
tracts.  Retrospect,  the  obituary  notice  of 
a  famous  society.  The  reprint  of  the 
Oxford  Standard  Authors  edition  of  Bos- 
well's Life  of  Johnson  (1953)  was  not 
edited  by  him,  but  he  added  very  greatly 
to  its  value  and  importance  by  supplying 
translations  of  the  numerous  Latin  and 
Greek  quotations.  The  last  work  to  be 
edited  by  him  was  Selections  from  Samuel 
Johnson  (1955),  an  anthology  designed  to 
do  justice  to  Johnson's  thought. 

In  person  Chapman  was  tall  and  lean, 
with  a  distinct  stoop  when  walking,  and 
he  was  a  tireless  walker.  He  never  rode  a 
horse,  drove  a  car,  or  rode  a  motor-cycle, 
but  was  seldom  parted  from  his  bicycle 
clips.  His  bicycle  was  famous  and  he  in- 
dicated to  other  road-users  with  unmis- 
takable elaboration  the  way  he  intended 
to  go.  He  never  used  a  typewriter  or  wrote 
with  a  fountain-pen.  He  wrote  rapidly: 
what  he  wrote  was  not  always  legible, 
even  to  his  secretaries,  his  close  friends,  or 
the  printer:  on  one  occasion  at  least  it 
caused  serious  error.  But  if  his  writing  was 
sometimes  a  torment,  his  voice  was  always 
a  joy.  He  deplored  slovenly  speech;  his 
own  was  clear,  with  every  syllable  dis- 
tinctly and  naturally  uttered;  it  bore  no 
trace  of  his  northern  origin.  He  believed  in 
reading  aloud:  'Our  noblest  prose,  Uke 
Shakespeare's  verse,  demands  the  tribute 
of  utterance.'  In  addition  to  a  small  but 
notable  collection  of  books,  he  collected 
silver  spoons,  and,  as  a  minor  hobby,  ab- 
breviations. He  had  in  1910  collaborated 
with  his  friend  George  Gordon  (whose 
notice  he  contributed  to  this  Dictionary) 
in  collecting  examples  of  modern  jargon 
which  were  pilloried  in  the  Oxford  Maga- 
zine. His  tracts  for  the  Society  of  Pure 
English,  Names,  Designations  and  Appella- 
tions (1936)  and  Adjectives  from  Proper 
Names  (1939),  could  only  have  been  com- 
piled from  hundreds  of  examples  collected 
over  a  period  of  years.  He  was  aided  by  a 
very  good  memory.  He  was  remarkable 
for  the  ingenuity  of  devices  not  only  in  the 
making  of  a  book  but  in  affairs  of  life.  His 
efforts  to  roll  a  cigarette  were  persistent 
but  unsuccessfuL      ■       ; iji^i n 


Chapman,  R.  W. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


The  honorary  degree  of  D.Litt.  was  con- 
ferred on  Chapman  by  Oxford  in  1928  for 
his  part  in  the  production  of  the  Oxford 
English  Dicti(mary  and  St.  Andrews  con- 
ferred the  honorary  LL.D.  on  him  in  1933 ; 
he  was  elected  a  fellow  of  Magdalen  Col- 
lege, Oxford,  in  1931,  and  F.B.A.  in  1949, 
and  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1955. 

Chapman  married  in  1913  Katharine 
Marion,  daughter  of  Arthur  Wharton  Met- 
calfe, a  Somerset  engineer.  After  obtaining 
a  first  class  in  the  honour  school  of  Eng- 
Ush  language  and  literature  (1910)  she 
had  moved  from  Lady  Margaret  Hall  to 
Somerville  as  assistant  EngUsh  tutor.  They 
had  three  sons  and  one  daughter.  Chap- 
man died  in  Oxford  20  April  1960. 

[The  Times,  22  April  1960 ;  Margaret  Lane 
in  The  Times  Literary  Supplement,  6  August 
1954 ;  Sir  S.  C.  Roberts  in  Essays  and  Studies, 
1961 ;  Mary  Lascelles  in  Proceedings  of  the 
British  Academy,  vol.  xlvii,  1961 ;  private 
inforiuation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

L.  F.  Powell. 


CHAPMAN,  Sir  SYDNEY  JOHN  (1871- 
1951),  economist  and  civil  servant,  was 
born  at  Wells,  Norfolk,  20  April  1871,  the 
second  son  of  David  Chapman,  merchant, 
and  his  wife,  Maria  Wells.  A  notice  of  his 
elder  brother,  D.  L.  Chapman,  appears 
above.  The  family  moved  to  Manchester 
where  Chapman  was  educated  at  the 
Grammar  School  and  the  Owens  College. 
He  graduated  B.A.  (London)  in  1891  and 
after  a  spell  as  a  schoolmaster  went  to 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  turning  first 
to  philosophy  and  then  to  economics, 
abandoning  about  this  time  his  earlier 
idea  of  taking  holy  orders.  Alfred  Marshall 
[q.v.],  especially,  inspired  him  to  choose 
economics  as  his  future  field.  Chapman  ob- 
tained first  classes  in  both  parts  of  the 
moral  sciences  tripos  (1897-8),  and  the 
Cobden  and  Adam  Smith  prizes.  He  then 
became  Jevons  research  student  at  the 
Owens  College,  Manchester,  before  being 
appointed  as  a  lecturer  to  University  Col- 
lege, Cardiff,  to  inaugurate  the  teaching  of 
economics  there. 

Within  two  years  (1901)  Chapman  was 
back  in  Manchester  as  Stanley  Jevons 
professor  of  political  economy  at  Victoria 
University.  His  youth,  brilliance,  and  per- 
suasive charm  combined  to  make  impor- 
tant impressions.  A  paper  read  to  the 
Manchester  Statistical  Society  'On  Educa- 
tion for  Business  and  Public  Life'  in  1902 
foreshadowed  his  success  a  year  or  two 
later  in  securing  the  institution  of  a 
faculty  of  commerce  and  administration  in 


the  university.  In  1904  his  Lancashire 
Cotton  Industry  demonstrated  his  knack 
for  getting  access  to  detailed  information 
from  business  men  as  much  as  his  talents 
as  an  economic  historian.  His  honours 
school  of  economics  and  political  science 
soon  began  to  register  successes,  and 
among  the  many  brilliant  postgraduate 
students  he  attracted  were  F.  J.  Marquis 
(subsequently  the  Earl  of  Woolton)  and 
T.  S.  Ashton,  later  professor  at  the  London 
School  of  Economics.  Chapman's  vitality 
and  charm  exerted  a  powerful  influence 
on  his  students:  his  gifts  were  probably 
never  more  evident  than  in  his  verbal 
teaching  to  small  groups.  In  1904-14  he 
published  three  volumes  on  Work  and 
Wages  as  a  continuation  of  the  inquiry  by 
Lord  Brassey  [q.v.]  whose  collaboration 
and  friendship  he  greatly  valued.  His  Out- 
lines of  Political  Economy  appeared  in  1911 
and  he  was  a  frequent  contributor  to  the 
Economic  Journal  and  the  proceedings  of 
the  Royal  and  the  Manchester  statistical 
societies.  His  writing  was  elegant  but 
compressed  with  deep  thought  and,  in 
contrast  with  the  more  ready  compre- 
hensibility  of  his  verbal  communications 
in  lectures  and  seminars,  it  proved  heavy 
going  for  the  uninitiated. 

Chapman  was  the  youngest  of  a  bril- 
liant group  in  Manchester  which  included 
Rutherford,  Samuel  Alexander,  Tout, 
Tait,  and  Elliot  Smith  [qq.v.].  His  own 
view  was  that  Manchester  must  become 
an  independent  instead  of  a  federal  uni- 
versity and  in  due  course  Liverpool, 
Leeds,  and  Sheffield  left  the  parent  federa- 
tion. There  were  those  elsewhere  who  said 
that  Manchester  itself  at  that  time  was 
'mad  on  research',  thereby  intending 
disparagement,  but  Chapman  saw  no 
reason  to  heed  such  criticism  and  himself 
initiated  research  work  in  industry  by  his 
advanced  students,  relying  on  his  aptitude 
for  personal  contacts  to  secure  oppor- 
tunities for  them.  In  1909,  still  under 
forty,  he  was  president  of  the  economics 
section  of  the  British  Association  at  its 
meeting  in  Canada.  Four  years  later  he 
accepted  an  invitation  to  act  as  chairman 
of  a  commission  set  up  by  the  South 
African  Government  to  investigate  eco- 
nomic and  labour  problems. 

The  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  found 
Chapman  at  the  height  of  his  powers  as  an 
economist  and  at  the  head  of  an  ever  more 
flourishing  faculty  in  Manchester.  But  in 
the  spring  of  1915  the  Board  of  Trade 
secured  him,  first  for  four  days  a  week  but 
soon  full  time,  to  have  charge  of  investiga- 


210 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Chapman,  S.  J. 


tions  into  industry  as  a  basis  for  the 
measures  necessary  to  mobilize  production 
for  the  war  effort.  Whitehall  soon  formed 
the  highest  opinion  not  only  of  his 
analytical  powers  and  his  resourcefulness 
in  ideas  but  also  of  his  ability  to  get  along 
with  all  manner  of  people,  not  least  with 
men  of  business.  Early  in  1918  he  was 
invited  to  join  the  Civil  Service  to  fill  a 
new  post  at  the  Board  of  Trade,  and  with 
the  encouragement  of  Sir  Albert  Stanley 
(later  Lord  Ashfield,  q.v.),  the  president 
of  the  Board  of  Trade,  and  after  some 
heartache  he  severed  his  connection  with 
the  university  of  Manchester.  By  August 
1919  he  was  joint  permanent  secretary  of 
the  Board;  and  by  1  March  1920  the 
single  head  of  the  department.  He  re- 
mained in  this  post  for  seven  years, 
serving  four  markedly  dissimilar  presi- 
dents :  Sir  Robert  (later  Viscount)  Home, 
Stanley  Baldwin  [qq.v.],  Sir  Philip  Lloyd- 
Greame  (afterwards  the  Earl  of  Swinton), 
and  Sidney  Webb  (later  Lord  Passfield, 
q.v.),  and  enjoying  particularly  happy 
personal  relations  with  them  all. 

Chapman  was  involved  in  all  the  post- 
war difficulties  of  the  Board.  Outwardly 
serene  and  unflurried,  nevertheless  he  had 
to  carry  an  immense  load  of  work.  Recon- 
struction involved  many  controversial 
measures,  notably  the  Safeguarding  of 
Industries  Act.  Lloyd  George  chose  to 
commit  himself  and  the  country  to  ad- 
vocating a  world  economic  conference 
at  Genoa.  Chapman  was  responsible  for 
preparing  the  economic  section  and  par- 
ticipated at  the  highest  official  levels  in 
complicated  and,  in  the  result,  unfruitful 
negotiations  at  Genoa  and  The  Hague, 
especially  with  the  Russians,  before  they 
surprised  the  world  by  their  separate 
agreement  with  Germany. 

Chapman  had  followed  Sir  Hubert 
Llewellyn  Smith  [q.v.]  as  permanent  secre- 
tary to  the  Board  of  Trade  and  in  1927  he 
followed  him  again  in  the  post  of  chief 
economic  adviser  to  the  Government.  The 
holder  of  this  appointment  was  expected 
to  occupy  himself  largely  in  acting  as 
British  representative  at  various  con- 
ferences and  committees  of  the  League  of 
Nations.  At  that  time  it  still  seemed 
legitimate  to  hope  that  patient  and  persis- 
tent work  by  the  economic  section  of  the 
League  might  lead  to  international  agree- 
ments which  would  release  a  wave  of 
progress  and  expansion  in  international 
trade.  As  an  outstanding  negotiator  and 
draftsman  Chapman  was  a  prominent 
member  of  the  team  of  internationally 


minded  politicians  and  civil  servants  who 
maintained  their  patient  efforts  through 
many  frustrations.  The  work  appealed  to 
his  idealism  and  to  his  fondness  for  intel- 
lectual challenge  and  contact  with  sharp 
minds. 

In  1932  the  British  Government  reacted 
to  the  economic  crisis  with  a  resort  to 
tariff  protection,  and  by  a  dramatic  re- 
versal of  functions  Chapman  was  called 
upon  to  devote  his  talents  to  making  a 
pattern  of  import  duties  which  would 
serve  the  true  interests  of  an  economy  still 
primarily  dependent  on  export  trade.  Sir 
George  (later  Lord)  May  [q.v.]  was  made 
chairman  of  the  Import  Duties  Advisory 
Committee,  with  Chapman  and  Sir  Allan 
Powell  [q.v.]  as  the  other  two  members. 
Chapman's  understanding  of  theoretical 
economics  was  now  coupled  with  much 
knowledge  of  industry,  wide  trust  and 
respect  from  business  men,  and  much 
experience  of  the  administrative  machine 
and  of  foreign  tariffs  and  tariff  negotia- 
tion, and  he  made  major  contributions  to 
the  work  of  the  committee. 

Chapman  had  just  retired  at  the  age  of 
sixty-eight  when  war  broke  out  in  1939. 
He  returned  to  administrative  work  as 
chairman  of  the  arc  lamp  carbon  pool  and 
as  controller  of  matches  and  was  able  to 
make  some  reassuring  comparisons  be- 
tween the  efficacy  of  the  organization  of 
economic  controls  in  the  two  wars.  He  was 
also  vice-chairman  of  the  Central  Price 
Regulation  Committee. 

Simple  and  natural  in  manner,  im- 
mensely attractive  in  a  quiet  way  in  con- 
versation, always  encouraging  to  younger 
men,  learned  but  athletic  and  companion- 
able. Chapman  continued  in  governmental 
circles  to  draw  to  himself  the  affection 
and  respect  which  students  and  colleagues 
had  given  him  at  Manchester.  A  rather 
cautious  common  sense  in  detail  markedly 
tempered  both  his  idealism  and  the  pro- 
gressiveness  of  his  abstract  thought.  He 
had  a  flair  for  seeing  practicable  ways 
through  difficult  situations,  though  at 
times  his  endless  patience  and  smoothness 
may  have  slightly  exasperated  the  more 
thrustful  among  his  colleagues.  He  was 
appointed  C.B.E.  (1917),  C.B.  (1919),  and 
promoted  K.C.B.  (1920). 

Chapman  married  in  1903  Mabel 
Gwendoline  (died  1958),  daughter  of 
Thomas  Henry  Mordey,  shipowner,  of 
Newport,  Monmouthshire;  they  had  two 
sons  and  a  daughter.  He  died  29  August 
1951  at  his  home  in  Ware,  Hertfordshire. 

[The  Times  and  Manchester  Guardian,  31 


211 


Chapman,  S.  J. 


D.N.B.  1951-lOeO 


August  1951 ;  private  information ;  personal 
knowledge.]  E.  Raymond  Streat. 

CHARLOT,  ANDRfi  EUGENE 

MAURICE  (1882-1956),  showman,  was 
born  in  Paris  26  July  1882,  the  son  of 
Jules  Charles  Maurice  Chariot  and  his 
wife,  Jeanne  Sargine  Battu.  His  father, 
the  director  of  several  Parisian  theatres, 
among  them  the  Athenee,  Palais  Royal, 
and  Com^die  Roy  ale,  was  the  son  of 
Auguste  Chariot,  winner  in  1850  of  the 
first  grand  prix  de  Rome  to  have  been 
awarded  for  music.  Andre  Chariot  was 
educated  at  the  Lycee  Condorcet  and  then 
entered  the  Conservatoire  de  Paris  (class 
of  musical  composition)  which  he  soon  left 
to  become  secretary  to  the  manager  of  the 
Palais  Royal.  After  acting  as  administra- 
tor of  the  Theatre  des  Ambassadeurs, 
Femina,  FoUes-Bergere,  Alcazar,  and  other 
houses,  he  opened  in  1910  a  theatrical 
agency  of  his  own,  from  which  he  came 
to  London  in  July  1912  as  joint  manager 
of  the  Alhambra. 

For  twenty  years  Chariot's  name  was 
associated  with  revue,  a  form  of  enter- 
tainment which  he  was  one  of  the  first  to 
introduce  from  France,  in  rivalry  with 
(Sir)  C.  B.  Cochran  [q.v.].  Endowed  with 
an  almost  feminine  artistic  taste  and  a 
shrewd  eye  for  theatrical  talent  on  the 
performing  side,  he  produced  between 
1915  and  1935  thirty-six  revues  in  the  west 
end  of  London,  the  most  memorable  being 
5064  Gerrard  (1915),  Some  (1916),  Buzz- 
Buzz  (1918),  Jumble  Sale  (1920),  Pot  Luck 
and  AtoZ  (1921),  CharloVs  Revue,  1924-5, 
Chariot's  Shaw  of  1926,  CharloVs  Mas- 
querade (1930),  and  CharloVs  Char-a-Bang! 
(1935).  His  London  Calling  (1923)  was 
noteworthy  as  marking  the  debut  as  a 
revue  writer  of  (Sir)  Noel  Coward  who  as 
the  result  of  personal  encouragement  by 
Chariot  went  on  to  make  his  name  as 
playwright  and  performer  in  the  London 
theatre. 

Apart  from  revue  Chariot  interested 
himself  in  light  comedy,  farce,  and  the 
musical  play,  most  notably  perhaps  the 
production  in  1930  of  Wonder  Bar  in 
which  the  theatre  audience  was  embodied 
in  the  action  of  the  story.  In  1922  he  was 
the  London  pioneer  of  the  restaurant 
'floor-show'  with  his  presentation  of  *The 
Midnight  Follies'  at  the  Hotel  Metropole. 
He  was  the  first  magnate  of  the  London 
theatre  to  recognize  the  potentialities  of 
broadcasting,  associating  himself  actively 
with  the  production  of  almost  fifty 
'Chariot's  Hour'  programmes  for  the  B.B.C. 


In  1937  London  saw  virtually  the  last  of 
Andre  Chariot ;  he  left  for  California  in  the 
behef  that  his  futiu-e  lay  with  talking  pic- 
tures rather  than  with  the  living  theatre. 
His  decision  was  not  a  particularly  happy 
one;  after  a  period  as  technical  adviser 
to  the  Paramount  Picture  Corporation  he 
more  or  less  vanished  from  the  Hollywood 
scene,  apart  from  some  personal  ap- 
pearances as  a  screen  actor  and  his  produc- 
tion at  the  El  Capitan  Theatre  of  The 
Chariot  Revue  of  1940  in  aid  of  British  war 
relief. 

Tall,  slim,  and  spectacled,  Andr6  Char- 
lot  was  one  of  the  personalities  of  his  time. 
Usually  with  a  topcoat  slung  over  his 
shoulders,  he  moved  through  his  little 
empire  with  the  assurance  of  a  Caesar  who 
expected  the  impossible  to  happen  at  his 
command.  When  things  went  wrong,  he 
had  the  habit  of  taking  to  his  bed  and  re- 
maining there,  unshaven,  until  they  were 
put  right  for  him.  For  this  he  had  the 
excuse  of  being  a  diabetic,  although  not  to 
any  serious  degree.  The  financial  ability 
which  had  distinguished  him  as  a  manager 
of  theatres  seemed  to  desert  him  when  he 
turned  producer;  his  fine  taste  and  per- 
fectionism often  landed  him  in  money 
troubles.  It  was  difficult,  however,  for  the 
most  hard-faced  of  creditors  not  to  suc- 
ciunb  to  the  siren  song  of  his  beguiling 
personality. 

Chariot  was  naturalized  a  British  sub- 
ject in  1922.  He  married  Florence  Glad- 
man  and  had  one  son  and  one  daughter. 
He  died  in  Hollywood  20  May  1956. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Eric  Maschwitz. 

CHATTERJEE,  Sir  ATUL  CHANDRA 

(1874-1955),  Indian  civil  servant,  was 
born  at  Malda  in  Lower  Bengal  24  Novem- 
ber 1874.  He  was  the  fourth  son  and  sixth 
child  of  Rai  Saheb  Hem  Chandra  Chatter- 
jee  of  Santipur,  an  engineer  employed  in 
the  Bengal  Public  Works  Department, 
and  his  wife,  Srimati  Nistarini  Debi. 
After  early  attendance  at  various  primary 
schools  in  the  province  he  was  sent  to  Hare 
School,  Calcutta,  and  at  the  age  of  four- 
teen passed  the  matriculation  examina- 
tion of  the  Presidency  College,  Calcutta, 
obtaining  a  small  entrance  scholarship. 
After  graduating  B.A.  in  1892  Chatterjee 
received  an  enhanced  government  scholar- 
ship, and  the  following  year  was  selected 
for  a  Government  of  India  scholarship 
tenable  in  England  and  entered  King's 
College,  Cambridge,  in  October  1893.  He 
was  awarded  an  exhibition  in  1894.  After 


212 


D.N.B.  1931-1960 


Chatter  jee 


obtaining  a  second  class  in  the  history 
tripos  of  1895,  Chatterjee  sat  for  the 
Indian  Civil  Service  open  examination  of 
1896  and  headed  the  list  of  successful 
candidates.  During  his  probationary  year 
at  Cambridge  he  won  the  Bhaunagar 
medal.  In  India  he  was  posted  to  the 
United  Provinces  and  for  the  next  nine 
years  was  employed  in  district  administra- 
tion in  the  successive  grades  of  assistant, 
joint,  and  district  magistrate.  A  period  of 
special  duty,  during  which  he  conducted  a 
comprehensive  survey  and  produced  a  re- 
portvon  the  industries  of  his  province,  was 
followed  in  1912  by  his  appointment  as 
registrar  of  Co-operative  Credit  Societies. 
In  1917  Sir  James  (later  Lord)  Meston 
[q.v.]  selected  him  for  the  post  of  revenue 
secretary  in  his  government  and  this  was 
followed  in  1919  by  his  appointment  to 
the  highly  responsible  post  of  chief 
secretary  under  Sir  Harcourt  Butler 
[q.v.]. 

Chatterjee's  first  appearance  as  a  re- 
presentative of  his  country  abroad  also 
marked  the  beginning  of  his  work  in  a  field 
in  which  he  was  subsequently  to  render 
conspicuous  service.  In  1919  he  was  sent 
to  Washington  as  representative  of  India 
at  the  first  International  Labour  Con- 
ference, and  attendance  at  the  Geneva 
Conference  of  1921  was  followed  by  his 
appointment  as  secretary  to  the  Govern- 
ment of  India  in  the  newly  constituted 
Department  of  Industries,  then  in  the 
charge  of  Sir  Thomas  Holland  [q.v.]. 
Later,  in  1923,  Chatterjee  himself  became 
the  member  of  the  viceroy's  council  re- 
sponsible for  the  department,  and  to  his 
untiring  efforts  in  this  field  were  largely 
due  the  initiation  and  progress  of  labour 
legislation  from  1922  onwards  remarked  in 
the  report  (Cmd.  3883,  1931)  of  the  royal 
commission  on  labour  in  India.  When  the 
office  of  high  conmiissioner  for  India  in 
London  fell  vacant  towards  the  end  of 
1924  Chatterjee  was  offered  the  appoint- 
ment by  the  viceroy.  Lord  Reading  [q.v.], 
and  accepted  it,  not  without  considerable 
regret  at  the  severance  which  it  involved 
from  his  chosen  work  in  India.  He  was 
appointed  K.C.I.E.  (1925).  His  wide  ad- 
ministrative experience  and  intellectual 
gifts  combined  with  ready  adaptability  to 
new  demands  and  surroundings  made  him 
an  admirable  choice  for  the  post  at  a  diffi- 
cult point  in  its  history. 

After  taking  up  office  in  London, 
Chatterjee  was  soon  faced  with  the 
necessity  to  provide  more  spacious  and 
dignified  accommodation  for  the  Indian 


Government's  representative  in  London, 
and  on  his  own  initiative  India  House  in 
Aldwych  was  built  to  the  design  of  Sir 
Herbert  Baker  [q.v.]  and  formally  opened 
by  King  George  V  in  the  summer  of  1930. 
Chatterjee,  the  first  high  commissioner 
to  occupy  the  building,  was  appointed 
K.C.S.I.  With  location  in  London  came 
enlarged  and  extended  facihties  in  the 
international  field.  Chatterjee  represented 
India  for  six  consecutive  annual  sessions 
of  the  International  Labour  Conference 
from  1924  and  again  in  1933.  He  was  a 
member  of'  the  governing  body  of  the 
International  Labour  Office  for  five  years 
(1926-31),  was  vice-president  in  1932,  and 
president  the  following  year.  In  1927  he 
was  accorded  the  signal  honour  of  election 
by  a  unanimous  vote  as  president  of  the 
tenth  International  Labour  Conference. 
At  the  conclusion  Albert  Thomas,  the 
director  of  the  International  Labour 
Office,  paid  a  notable  tribute  to  'his  per- 
fect impartiality,  his  great  authority,  his 
serenity  and  the  wonderful  quickness  he 
had  shown  in  imparting  and  explaining  the 
decisions  of  the  Conference'.  Chatterjee 
also  served  from  1925  to  1931  as  a  member 
of  the  Imperial  Economic  Committee.  He 
was  a  representative  of  India  at  the  League 
of  Nations  Assembly  in  1925  and  led  the 
International  Labour  Office  delegation  to 
the  abortive  world  economic  conference 
of  1933.  He  served  the  League  as  vice- 
president  of  the  consultative  economic 
committee,  and  as  a  member  of  the  per- 
manent central  opium  board  and  of  the 
allocations  committee.  He  was  Indian 
delegate  to  the  London  naval  conference 
of  1930.  In  the  inter-imperial  field  confi- 
dence in  his  diplomatic  gifts  was  marked 
by  his  appointment  to  lead  the  Indian 
delegation  to  the  Ottawa  conference  of 
1932.  In  the  following  year  Chatterjee  was 
promoted  G.C.I.E.  In  the  meantime  his 
term  of  office  as  high  commissioner  having 
ended  in  1931  he  was  offered  by  the  secre- 
tary of  state  for  India,  and  accepted, 
appointment  to  the  India  Council  for  the 
statutory  period  of  five  years.  His  last 
appointment,  in  1942,  was  as  adviser  to 
the  secretary  of  state,  which  he  held  until 
1947  when  India  became  independent. 

Chatterjee  served  on  the  council  of  the 
Royal  Society  of  Arts  for  twenty  years 
and  was  its  chairman  in  1939-40,  the  first 
Indian  to  hold  this  position.  He  was  for 
many  years  vice-chairman  of  the  council 
of  the  East  India  Association  and  was  also 
a  member  of  the  council  of  the  Royal 
Asiatic  Society.  His  intellectual  interests 


213 


Chatterjee 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


covered  a  wide  range  with  a  predominat- 
ing historical  bent  exemplified  by  his 
authorship,  jointly  with  his  Indian  Civil 
Service  colleague,  W.  H.  Moreland,  of  A 
Short  History  of  India  pubHshed  in  1936 
and  brought  up  to  date  in  three  subse- 
quent editions.  He  was  also  the  author  of 
The  New  India  (1948).  He  was  a  fellow  of 
the  university  of  Allahabad  (1908)  and  an 
honorary  LL.D.  of  Edinburgh  (1931). 

Chatterjee  was  a  great  servant  of  India, 
who,  while  avoiding  pohtical  controversy, 
lost  no  opportunity  of  advancing  his 
coimtry's  interests  in  the  international 
field.  In  his  pubUc  appearances  he 
eschewed  rhetoric,  impressing  his  audience 
by  his  sincerity  and  obvious  mastery  of 
his  subject.  In  private  a  man  of  simple 
tastes  and  abstemious  habit  he  had  a 
great  capacity  for  friendship  and,  while 
shrewd  in  his  estimation  of  character,  was 
never  harsh  in  his  judgements.  He  died  8 
September  1955  at  Bexhill-on-Sea. 

Chatterjee  married  first,  in  1897,  Vina 
Mookerjee  (died  1905),  by  whom  he  had 
two  daughters.  Secondly,  in  1924  he 
married  Gladys  Mary  Broughton,  formerly 
of  the  Indian  Educational  Service  and 
adviser  to  the  Government  of  India  on 
questions  affecting  the  welfare  of  women 
and  children.  She  was  the  daughter  of 
Captain  William  Barnard  Broughton, 
Dorsetshire  Regiment.  She  was  called  to 
the  bar  in  1933  and  died  in  1969. 

[The  Times,  9  September  1955 ;  Record  of 
Proceedings:  Tenth  Session,  International 
Labour  Conference,  1927;  Journal  of  the 
Royal  Society  of  Arts,  29  November  1940; 
family  records ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.  C.  B.  Drake. 

CHERRY -GARRARD,  APSLEY 
GEORGE  BENET  (1886-1959),  polar 
explorer,  the  only  son  of  Major-General 
Apsley  Cherry-Garrard,  C.B.,  was  born  in 
Bedford  2  January  1886.  His  father  was 
said  by  Lord  Wolseley  [q.v.]  to  be  'the 
bravest  man  I  have  ever  seen'.  Soon  after 
marriage  late  in  life  to  Evelyn  Edith, 
daughter  of  Henry  Wilson  Sharpin,  this 
distinguished  soldier  inherited  from  his 
elder  brother  the  Cherry  estate  of  Den- 
ford  Park,  Berkshire,  and  in  1892  that  of 
his  mother's  family  also.  Lamer  Park, 
Hertfordshire,  with  the  added  name  and 
arms  of  Garrard.  He  leased  Denford  and 
made  Lamer  his  residence;  it  became  to 
his  son  the  dearest  place  on  earth.  Short- 
sightedness handicapped  the  boy  in  games 
at  his  preparatory  school  and  at  Win- 
chester,   where    he   was   lonely.    But  at 


Oxford  he  found  congenial  friends  and 
interests  as  well  as  a  sport  to  which  bad 
eyesight  was  no  bar :  he  helped  the  Christ 
Church  eight  to  win  the  Grand  Challenge 
Cup  at  Henley  in  1908 ;  in  the  same  year 
he  obtained  a  third  class  in  modern 
history. 

On  his  father's  death  in  1907  he  found 
himself  the  heir  to  a  double  fortune,  and 
two  years  later  went  for  a  cruise  round  the 
world  on  cargo  boats.  Hearing  when  at 
Brisbane  that  Captain  R.  F.  Scott  [q.v.] 
proposed  a  second  expedition  to  the 
Antarctic  in  1910,  he  wrote  to  Dr.  E.  A. 
Wilson  [q.v.],  whom  he  had  met  previously 
at  a  shooting  party  in  Scotland,  volun- 
teering his  services.  In  an  expedition  every 
member  of  which  was  a  specialist  he  was 
accepted  by  Scott  on  Wilson's  recom- 
mendation alone  and  duly  enlisted  as 
'assistant  zoologist'.  Yet  from  the  outset 
despite  his  youth  and  inexperience  he 
won  the  affectionate  regard  of  his  more 
seasoned  comrades,  and  before  the  close 
of  the  expedition  had  more  major  sledge- 
journeys  to  his  credit  than  any  other 
siu*viving  member. 

On  the  Depot  Journey  to  lay  stores  at 
stages  along  the  southern  route,  as  far  as 
to  One  Ton  Depot  140  miles  from  base, 
Cherry-Garrard  was  warmly  commended 
by  Scott  for  his  efficiency  and  unselfish- 
ness as  a  sledger  and  tent-mate.  In  the 
comparative  comfort  of  life  at  the  base  he 
edited  the  South  Polar  Times,  a  unique 
periodical  afterwards  reproduced  in  fac- 
simile. Wilson  chose  Bowers  and  Cherry- 
Garrard — 'the  pick  of  the  sledging  element' 
(Scott) — as  his  companions  for  a  Winter 
Journey  in  1911  to  the  Emperor  Penguin 
rookery  at  Cape  Crozier,  an  exploit  which 
is  still  without  parallel  in  the  annals  of 
polar  exploration.  On  their  return  five 
weeks  later  Scott  described  their  journey 
as  'the  hardest  that  has  ever  been  made' 
— a  phrase  which  later  suggested  to 
Cherry-Garrard  the  title  of  his  narrative  of 
the  fortunes  of  the  whole  expedition :  The 
Worst  Journey  in  the  World  (1922).  But 
the  Winter  Journey  was  the  climacteric 
of  it  for  him,  so  much  so  that  even  the 
outward  marches  of  the  great  Southern 
Journey,  despite  their  gruelling  nature, 
were  a  picnic  by  comparison.  He  accom- 
panied the  polar  party  as  far  as  the  sum- 
mit of  the  Beardmore  Glacier  whence  he 
was  sent  back,  because  of  his  youth,  with 
the  first  of  the  two  supporting  parties. 
Early  in  March  1912  he  set  out  alone 
with  dog-teams  and  a  Russian  dog-driver 
to  speed  the  return  of  the  polar  party. 


214 


D^^.  1951-1960 


Chifley 


Having  reached  One  Ton  Depot  on  the 
night  of  the  3rd,  the  date  approximately 
timed  for  their  arrival,  he  was  beset  by 
a  four  days'  blizzard  which  prevented 
movement,  but  stayed  on  until  there  re- 
mained only  just  enough  dog-food  for 
return.  Although  his  decision  to  return  was 
the  only  possible  one,  he  never  ceased  to 
reproach  himself  afterwards  for  not  having 
attempted  the  impossible.  He  was  a  mem- 
ber of  the  search  party  eight  months  later 
which  found  the  bodies  of  Scott,  Wilson, 
and  Bowers,  who  had  died  within  only 
eleven  miles  of  One  Ton  Depot;  and 
learned  of  the  heroic  self-sacrifice  of 
L.  E.  G.  Oates  [q.v.]  a  few  marches  behind, 
and  of  Petty  Officer  Evans's  earlier  col- 
lapse below  the  Beardmore  Glacier.  It  was 
at  Cherry-Garrard's  suggestion  that  the 
last  line  of  Tennyson's  Ulysses  was  in- 
scribed on  the  cross  surmounting  the  cairn 
of  snow  which  covered  them,  as  well  as  the 
epitaph  commemorating  Oates. 

The  rest  of  Cherry-Garrard's  life  was 
anticlimax.  He  commanded  a  squadron  of 
armoured  cars  in  Flanders  from  1914  until 
invalided  out  two  years  later,  and  during 
long  convalescence  wrote  The  Worst 
Journey f  a  classic  of  Antarctic  literature. 
Years  later  he  also  wrote  introductions  to 
biographies  of  Wilson  and  Bowers.  He 
cultivated  friendships  with  men  of  letters, 
including  Shaw,  Wells,  and  Bennett ;  and 
with  men  of  action,  especially  Mallory  of 
Everest  and  Lawrence  of  Arabia.  To  the 
latter  he  paid  tribute  in  the  symposium 
T.  E.  Lawrence  by  his  Friends  (1937). 

In  1939  Cherry-Garrard  married  Angela, 
daughter  of  Kenneth  Turner,  of  Ipswich. 
In  1947  income-tax  demands  and  ill  health 
obhged  him  to  sell  Lamer,  which  was 
demolished,  and  he  exchanged  its  spacious 
demesne  for  the  confines  of  a  London  flat. 
Many  years  of  intermittent  illness  ter- 
minated with  his  death  in  London  18  May 
1959.  A  Ufelike  statuette  of  him  in  polar 
clothing,  executed  by  Ivor  Roberts-Jones 
and  erected  by  his  widow,  stands  in  the 
north  transept  of  Wheathampstead  parish 
church  among  other  Garrard  memorials. 

[The  Times,  19  May  1959;  ScotVs  Last 
Expedition,  ed.  L.  Huxley,  1913;  Introduc- 
tion to  the  1965  edition  of  The  Worst  Journey 
in  the  World ;  personal  knowledge.] 

George  Seaver. 

CHERWELL,  Viscount  (1886-1957), 
scientist  and  politician.  [See  Lindemann, 
Frederick  Alexander.] 

CHIFLEY,  JOSEPH  BENEDICT  (1885- 
1951),    Australian    prime    minister,    was 


born  at  Bathurst,  New  South  Wales,  22 
September  1885,  the  eldest  of  three  sons 
of  Irish-Australian  and  Irish  immigrant 
parents,  Patrick  Chifley,  a  blacksmith, 
and  his  wife,  Mary  Anne  Corrigan.  He  had 
scanty  formal  schooling  but,  before  and 
after  joining  the  New  South  Wales  rail- 
ways as  a  shop-boy  in  1903,  educated  him- 
self assiduously  for  years  at  night-school, 
and  through  the  Workers'  Educational 
Association  and  the  Railways  Institute. 
He  rose  to  fuU  driver's  rank  in  1914  and 
subsequently  also  gave  instruction  in  his 
craft.  A  local  and  state  trade-union  officer 
(while  still  working  as  a  driver),  he  appeared 
repeatedly  as  expert  witness  or  advocate 
in  industrial  arbitration  proceedings.  In 
1917,  as  a  prominent  leader  of  his  union, 
he  was  dismissed  from  the  railway  service 
foUowing  the  failure  of  a  bitter  and  far- 
reaching  strike  in  New  South  Wales  in- 
dustry. On  appeal,  he  was  reinstated  to  a 
junior  rating,  with  loss  of  superannuation 
and  seniority  rights.  His  union  had  been 
decimated,  and  was  deregistered  by  the 
State  Industrial  Court.  He  was  one  of  a 
handful  of  men  who  worked  unrelentingly 
for  years  to  rebuild  the  union  and  restore 
the  strikers'  former  positions.  In  1920  he 
was  one  of  the  founders  of  the  nation- 
wide Australian  Federated  Union  of  Loco- 
motive Enginemen,  with  access  to  the 
Commonwealth  Arbitration  Court.  But 
not  until  the  return  of  a  Labour  govern- 
ment in  New  South  Wales  in  1925  were 
the  pre-1917  seniority  and  other  rights  of 
the  strikers  regained. 

In  1922  Chifley  followed  his  father  as  a 
director  of  the  Bathurst  District  Hospital 
and  of  a  local  daily  newspaper  the  Bathurst 
National  Advocate.  Amongst  many  other 
local  public  activities,  he  was  from  1933  to 
1947  a  member  (and  for  several  years 
president)  of  the  Abercrombie  Shire 
Council. 

In  1922  and  again  in  1924  Chifley  failed 
to  win  selection  as  Labour  candidate  for 
the  local  seat  in  the  New  South  Wales 
legislative  assembly.  In  1925,  as  Labour 
candidate  for  the  federal  seat  of  Mac- 
quarie  (which  included  Bathurst),  Chifley 
ran  the  sitting  government  member  to 
within  903  votes.  In  1928  he  won  Mac- 
quarie  by  3,578  votes.  In  1929  he  held 
it  by  12,078  votes  when  the  House  of 
Representatives  was  dissolved  and  a 
Labour  Government  under  J.  H.  Scullin 
was  swept  into  office.  With  only  7  of  the  36 
seats  in  the  Senate  and  confronted  by  the 
mounting  misery  and  turmoil  of  the  de- 
pression, the  Labour  Party  was  soon  split 


215 


Chifley 


by  frustration  and  dissension  inside  and 
outside  Parliament.  Early  in  1931  the 
Cabinet  suffered  defections  to  right  and 
left.  On  2  March  Chifley  was  elected  to  one 
of  the  vacancies  and  served  as  minister 
for  defence  and  minister  assisting  the 
treasurer,  E.  G.  Theodore.  At  the  end  of 
March  the  New  South  Wales  state  branch 
under  J.  T.  Lang  who  had  been  at  logger- 
heads with  Scullin  was  expelled  from  the 
Australian  Labour  Party  but  retained 
considerable  popular  support*  In  Novem- 
ber the  Government  was  defeated  by 
the  defection  of  Lang  sympathizers  in 
the  House  of  Representatives.  Theodore, 
Chifley,  and  most  other  New  South  Wales 
members  who  had  remained  loyal  to  the 
federal  Labour  Party  lost  their  seats  at 
the  December  elections  (Chifley  by  only 
456  votes)  which  resulted  in  a  landslide 
against  Labour. 

From  1931  until  1940,  Chifley's  bids  to 
re-enter  parliamentary  life  failed.  He  gave 
years  of  leadership  to  the  struggle  in 
New  South  Wales  to  reunite  the  Labour 
factions  and  to  oust  Lang  (which  was 
achieved  in  1939-40).  In  1936-7  Chifley 
served  on  the  royal  commission  on  bank- 
ing, recommending  bank  nationalization 
in  a  minority  report.  Following  the  out- 
break of  war  in  1939  the  non-Labour 
Government  of  (Sir)  R.  G.  Menzies  ap- 
pointed Chifley  a  member  of  the  Capital 
Issues  Advisory  Board,  director  of  labour 
supply  in  the  Department  of  Munitions, 
and  a  member  of  other  wartime  bodies. 
In  September  1940,  however,  Chifley  re- 
gained the  Macquarie  seat  and  was  elected 
to  the  Opposition  front  bench,  although 
by  arrangement  between  the  parties  he 
continued  in  some  of  his  advisory  posts. 

In  October  1941  when  Labour  under 
John  Curtin  [q.v.]  took  over  the  govern- 
ment, Chifley  took  office  as  third-ranking 
minister,  with  the  Treasury  portfolio 
(which  he  held  continuously  until  Decem- 
ber 1949),  membership  of  the  War 
Cabinet  and  the  production  executive 
of  Cabinet,  and  also  (December  1942- 
February  1945)  the  additional  portfolio 
of  minister  for  post-war  reconstruction. 
Curtin  increasingly  relied  on  Chifley  as  his 
*home  front*  and  House  of  Representatives 
aide  and  as  his  closest  confidant. 

As  treasurer,  Chifley  pushed  taxation  to 
new  levels,  while  filling  loans  of  unprece- 
dented proportions  several  times  a  year. 
He  imposed  stringent  controls  on  credit, 
prices,  and  consumption,  achieving  by 
1943  comprehensive  stabilization  and 
rationing  schemes  which   afforded   'fair 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


shares'  while  releasing  a  maximum  of  food 
and  supplies  to  Britain  and  her  allies  and 
holding  cost-of-living  figures  stationary 
until  the  war  was  won.  With  the  'uniform 
taxation'  legislation  of  1942  he  per- 
manently reinforced  Commonwealth  finan- 
cial ascendancy  by  establishing  a  federal 
monopoly  of  direct  taxation.  By  wartime 
regulation,  followed  by  legislation  in  1945, 
he  expanded  the  central-banking  and 
other  functions  of  the  Commonwealth 
Bank,  reformed  its  direction,  and  brought 
other  banks  under  stricter  central  bank 
and  governmental  control. 

Despite  the  Government's  failure  in  the 
years  1942-4  to  win  approval  for  wider 
constitutional  powers  for  the  federal 
Parliament,  Chifley  prepared  a  wide 
range  of  measures  for  demobilization  and 
re-establishment  of  ex-servicemen  and 
women  and  war-workers,  land  settlement, 
housing,  social  security  and  health  service 
extensions  upon  an  entirely  new  financial 
basis,  grants  to  universities  and  scholar- 
ships for  their  students,  disposal  of  wool 
and  other  surplus  stocks,  national  de- 
velopment works,  and  the  use  or  disposal 
of  government  munition  factories  and 
surplus  construction  equipment.  These 
were  applied  with  a  high  degree  of  time- 
liness and  success.  In  his  dual  wartime 
ministerial  capacities  he  was  also  the  key 
man  behind  Australian  participation  in 
international  planning  of  mutual  aid, 
relief,  food  and  agriculture,  monetary 
stabilization,  full  employment,  and  in- 
creased world  trade. 

On  30  April  1945  Chifley  became  acting 
prime  minister  and  on  12  July,  following 
Curtin's  death,  prime  minister.  It  thus 
fell  to  his  lot  to  represent  Australia  at 
two  historic  prime  ministers'  conferences 
in  London — ^that  of  1946  which  made 
a  crucial  review  of  the  British  Common- 
wealth's changed  strategic  and  economic 
requirements  and  that  of  1949  which 
thrashed  out  a  basis  for  retaining  republi- 
can India  as  a  fuU  partner.  He  was  an 
unvarnished,  practical  British  Common- 
wealth man.  Between  1945  and  1949, 
during  the  absence  of  colleagues  overseas, 
he  acted  as  minister  for  external  affairs  for 
a  total  of  some  seventeen  months  and 
minister  for  defence  for  a  shorter  period. 
Chifley  displayed  a  high  order  of  states- 
manship in  leading  the  nation  and,  not 
least,  his  own  party  to  the  acceptance  of 
new  and  uncomfortable  facts  of  inter- 
national life  facing  Australia  in  the  fields 
of  collective  security,  world  economic 
arrangements,  and  the  emergent  Asia.  In 


216 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Chifley 


all  this  his  hand  was  strengthened  by  the 
convincing  vote  of  confidence  his  Govern- 
ment was  given  in  the  general  elections  of 
1946. 

At  home,  as  treasurer  as  well  as  prime 
minister,  Chifley  carried  on  his  battle  for 
economic  stability  with  high  success  until 
his  failure  in  May  1948  to  carry  a  constitu- 
tional amendment  allowing  the  federal 
ParUament  to  maintain  essential  economic 
controls  beyond  the  life  of  the  wartime 
defence  powers ;  but  even  then  he  did  not 
give  up  the  struggle.  He  was  also  a  firm 
believer  in  a  large  public  sector  of  the 
economy.  He  was  the  leading  spirit  behind 
the  measures  for  nationalizing  internal  and 
external  airlines,  banking,  stevedoring, 
telecommunications,  for  the  close  public 
control  of  coal-mining  and  broadcasting, 
for  the  public  development  of  hydro- 
electric power,  atomic  energy,  coastal 
shipping,  aluminiimi  production,  whaling, 
and  television,  for  the  advance  planning  of 
massive  national  development  works  by 
the  Austrahan  National  Works  Council 
(which  he  created  in  1943),  and  for  the 
reorganization  and  expansion  of  the 
Conmionwealth's  scientific  and  industrial 
research  organizations.  His  was  the 
decisive  role  in  the  founding  of  the 
Australian  National  University  and  the  in- 
auguration of  the  huge  Snowy  Mountains 
Hydro-Electricity  Scheme.  Although  the 
courts  ruled  nationalization  of  internal 
airlines  and  banking  unconstitutional,  the 
Chifley  government  created  a  public  airline 
(Trans- Australia  Airlines)  to  compete  with 
private  lines  and  expanded  the  Common- 
wealth Bank. 

Opposed  by  the  British  Medical  Associa- 
tion in  Australia,  Chifley  failed  to  complete 
his  design  for  non-contributory  national 
health  services.  In  the  field  of  industrial 
arbitration  and  conciliation,  however,  he 
was  successful  in  reforming  the  existing 
institutions  on  a  basis  better  adapted  to 
cope  with  the  industrial  unrest  during  the 
post-war  transition,  unrest  greatly  aggra- 
vated by  Communist  leadership  of  some  of 
the  largest  industrial  unions.  Chifley  in- 
sisted on  sustaining  civil  liberties  in  the 
industrial  field  but  he  provided  pro- 
cedures enabling  unionists  to  overcome 
Communist  'rigging'  of  union  ballots.  His 
Government  enlarged  the  membership  of 
both  houses  of  the  national  Parliament  in 
1948  to  represent  more  adequately  the 
growing  electorate. 

After  the  1947  bank  nationalization 
attempt,  Chifley's  opponents  redoubled 
their  efforts  to  overthrow  his  Government. 


All  sectional  grievances  were  vigorously 
exploited;  the  Opposition  attacked  par- 
ticularly Chifley's  economic  controls,  re- 
tained in  the  post-war  years  to  sustain 
stability  at  home  and  the  hard-pressed 
British  food  standards  and  sterling  area 
balances  abroad.  A  severe  coalminers' 
strike  in  the  summer  of  1949  made  for 
temporary  public  hardships.  In  the 
December  general  elections,  Opposition 
promises  to  end  petrol-rationing  and  ex- 
tend child  endowment  (with  which  Chifley 
refused  to  compete)  probably  proved 
decisive.  A  Liberal-Country  Party  com- 
posite Government  took  office  under 
Menzies.  Labour, however,  held  a  majority 
in  the  Senate. 

As  leader  of  the  Opposition  (1950-51), 
Chifley  determinedly  fought  some  of  the 
methods  provided  for  in  a  bill  for  the 
suppression  of  Communism  in  the  trade 
unions  and  elsewhere.  After  he  had  gained 
some  important  concessions  from  Menzies, 
the  federal  executive  of  the  Labour  Party, 
against  his  advice,  called  a  halt  to  further 
opposition  which  might  bring  about  an 
early  double-dissolution  of  Parliament 
on  the  Communist  issue.  But  Chifley's 
deputy,  H.  V.  Evatt,  on  behalf  of  some  of 
the  unions,  fought  the  Communist  Party 
Dissolution  Act  in  the  High  Court  and 
succeeded  in  having  it  declared  unconsti- 
tutional. A  deadlock  at  that  time  (March 
1951)  between  House  and  Senate  over  a 
bill  to  undo  parts*  of  Chifley's  1945  bank- 
ing reforms  provided  the  Government 
with  the  opportunity  to  dissolve  both 
houses  and  fight  an  election  mainly  on  the 
Communist  issue.  At  the  end  of  November 
1950  Chifley  had  suffered  a  heart  seizure 
which  had  required  three  months'  rest. 
But  he  now  campaigned  doggedly  through- 
out Australia  to  the  limit  of  his  strength. 
In  April  1951  the  Menzies  government  was 
returned  with  a  majority  in  the  Senate 
and  a  reduced  majority  in  the  House. 
Chifley  was  re-elected  unopposed  as 
leader  of  the  Labour  opposition.  But  on  13 
June,  while  working  in  his  hotel  room  in 
Canberra,  he  suffered  a  second  stroke  and 
died  without  regaining  consciousness. 

Chifley  was  a  man  of  fine  presence, 
naturally  shy,  yet  warm,  outgoing,  and 
quietly  humorous.  He  was  a  most  capable 
and  successful  negotiator  and  a  tremen- 
dous desk-worker  for  whom  his  Civil 
Service  officers  had  unstinted  admiration. 
A  much-loved  party  colleague,  with  the 
confidence  also  of  his  opponents,  he  was  a 
very  successful  parUamentary  manager. 
He  was  not  an  orator  and  a  chronic  throat 


217 


Chifley 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


condition  over  the  last  twenty  years  of  his 
Hfe  detracted  from  the  attractiveness  of 
his  otherwise  persuasive  debating  powers. 
He  had  (except  over  Menzies'  anti- 
Communist  measures)  an  extraordinarily 
complete  command  of  his  party  inside  and 
outside  Parliament — no  Labour  prime 
minister  has  rivalled  his  sustained  com- 
mand of  his  followers.  He  was  a  typical 
Australian  Labour  amalgam  of  radical, 
socialist,  and  conservative. 

In  1914  Chifley,  a  Roman  Catholic, 
married,  in  the  Presbyterian  Church, 
Elizabeth  Gibson  (died  1962),  daughter  of 
George  McKenzie,  a  fellow  engine-driver. 
Although  this  affected  Chifley's  standing 
in  his  own  Church,  he  never  ceased  to 
attend  its  services  regularly.  There  were 
no  children  of  the  marriage. 

Chifley  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council 
in  1946.  He  was  accorded  a  state  funeral 
and  was  buried  in  the  Bathurst  cemetery, 
"v^ere  a  memorial  has  been  raised  over  his 
grave  by  the  Labour  Party.  He  could 
never  take  seriously  the  making  of  time 
for  an  official  portrait  painter.  A  disap- 
pointing portrait,  posthumously  painted 
from  photographs,  by  A.  D.  Colquhoun 
hangs  in  the  King's  Hall  of  Parliament 
House,  Canberra,  and  another  by  R. 
Campbell  in  the  Council  Chamber  at 
Bathing. 

[L.  F.  Crisp,  Ben  Chifley,  1961;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

L.  F.  Crisp. 

CHILDE,  VERB  GORDON  (1892-1957), 
prehistorian,  was  born  in  Sydney,  New 
South  Wales,  14  April  1892,  the  son  of  the 
Rev.  Stephen  Henry  Childe,  rector  of  St. 
Thomas's,  and  his  wife,  Harriet  Eliza, 
daughter  of  Alexander  Gordon,  barrister 
at  law,  of  England.  He  was  educated  at 
the  Church  of  England  Grammar  School 
and  the  university  of  Sydney  where  he 
obtained  the  Cooper  graduate  scholarship 
in  classics  in  1914.  At  the  Queen's  College, 
Oxford,  he  obtained  a  B.Litt.  (1916)  under 
the  supervision  of  Sir  Arthur  Evans  and 
(Sir)  J.  L.  Myres  [qq.v.]  and  a  first  class  in 
litercie  humaniores  (1917).  In  1920-21  he 
was  private  secretary  to  the  premier  of 
New  South  Wales,  but  he  left  this  post 
for  a  period  of  travel  in  Eastern  and 
Central  Europe  to  study  at  first  hand  the 
prehistoric  archaeology  of  these  areas. 
He  returned  to  England  in  1922,  was 
librarian  to  the  Royal  Anthropological 
Institute  in  London  (1925-7),  and  in  1925 
published  his  first  major  book.  The  Dawn 
of  European  Civilization,  In  1927  he  was 


appointed  to  the  newly  founded  Aber- 
cromby  chair  of  prehistoric  archaeology 
in  the  university  of  Edinburgh,  remaining 
until  1946,  when  he  took  over  the  dual 
post  of  professor  of  prehistoric  European 
archaeology  and  director  of  the  Institute  of 
Archaeology  in  the  university  of  London, 
from  which  he  retired  in  1956. 

During  his  tenure  of  these  two  chairs 
Childe  established  himself  as  a  prehis- 
torian of  international  status,  receiving 
honorary  degrees  from  American  and 
European  universities  and  (posthumously) 
from  the  university  of  Edinburgh.  He  was 
elected  F.B.A.  in  1940.  His  first  book  was 
issued  in  successive  revised  editions  up  to 
a  sixth  edition  in  1957 ;  The  Aryans  (1926), 
The  Danube  in  Prehistory  (1929),  The  Pre- 
history of  Scotland  (1935),  New  Light  on 
the  Most  Ancient  East  (final  ed.  1952), 
Prehistoric  Communities  of  the  British 
Isles  (1940),  and  Prehistoric  Migrations  in 
Europe  (1950)  were  all  major  landmarks  in 
the  technical  literature  of  prehistory.  In  a 
series  of  publications  addressed  to  a  more 
general  public,  notably  Man  Makes  Him' 
self  (1936)  and  What  Happened  in  History 
(1942),  he  was  instrumental  in  spreading 
to  a  wide  circle  of  readers  a  knowledge  of 
the  evidence  of  archaeology  for  social  and 
technological  evolution. 

Childe,  as  became  apparent  in  his  final 
publications,  pursued  a  consistent  intel- 
lectual course  throughout  his  studies. 
Beginning  as  a  classic,  he  had  started  by 
investigating  the  possible  archaeological 
contexts  for  the  dispersal  of  languages 
within  the  Indo-European  group.  This 
necessitated  an  assessment  of  the  relations 
between  Europe  and  the  Orient  in  pre- 
history, and  in  such  an  assessment  an 
assured  chronological  scheme  for  all  the 
areas  under  review  was  obviously  of  para- 
mount importance.  Side  by  side  with  this 
came  the  recognition  that  archaeological 
sites  and  objects  were  to  be  interpreted  as 
the  fossil  remains  of  human  behaviour, 
and  that  through  them  the  prehistorian 
should  be  able  to  perceive  the  nameless 
communities  and  societies  which  were 
responsible  for  these  surviving  elements  of 
material  culture.  To  define  these  societies 
in  time  and  space,  and  to  study  their  inter- 
action and  succession,  both  in  the  non- 
literate  context  of  prehistory  and  in  their 
relationships  with  the  ancient  historical 
civilizations,  was  then  the  task  of  the 
prehistorian. 

Following  on  this,  Childe  sought  to 
investigate  what  had  appeared  to  him 
from  the  beginning  a  challenging  pheno- 


218 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Clark 


menon — 'the  foundation  of  European 
Civilization  as  a  peculiar  and  individual 
manifestation  of  the  human  spirit'.  From 
the  twenties  onward  his  main  work  was 
directed  to  the  elucidation  of  this  problem, 
and  in  his  quest  he  found  it  necessary  to 
establish  a  series  of  postulates  and  to  pro- 
vide the  technical  evidence  upon  which 
they  were  based.  The  latter  was  presented 
in  his  successive  works  of  magisterial  syn- 
thesis which  for  his  fellow  scholars  formed 
the  main  content  of  his  unique  achieve- 
ment, and  the  question  of  relative  and 
absolute  chronology  so  essential  for  his 
thesis  was  argued  and  reargued  here  and  in 
papers  in  technical  journals.  Interpreta- 
tion of  this  mass  of  material  in  terms  of 
prehistory  could  be  obtained  only  within 
the  framework  of  a  conceptual  model  of 
the  past  within  which  archaeological 
evidence  could  play  a  significant  part,  and 
in  search  of  a  valid  model  Childe  not 
unnaturally  experimented  with  Marxist 
theories  of  social  evolution  among  others. 
Concerned  essentially  with  material  cul- 
ture, he  necessarily  devised  schemes  based 
on  materialistic  philosophies  and  con- 
structed an  evolutionary-technological 
model  of  the  past  within  which  to  order 
his  observations.  It  was  the  past  as  viewed 
in  terms  of  this  model  which  he  presented 
to  the  readers  of  his  more  popular  books  ; 
and  in  his  posthumous  Prehistory  of 
European  Society  (1958)  the  essential 
character  of  prehistoric  Europe,  so  long 
sought,  is  presented  largely  in  terms  of  the 
freedom  of  the  technologist  in  contrast  to 
his  bondage  within  an  oriental  autocracy. 
Childe  was  a  lonely  figure,  a  dedicated 
scholar  difficult  to  know  and  by  his  own 
awkward  shyness  rendered  almost  un- 
approachable save  on  the  most  formal 
terms.  Tall,  ungainly,  and  ugly,  eccentric 
in  dress  and  often  abrupt  in  manner,  the 
generous,  kindly,  rather  naive  person 
hidden  behind  the  curious  and  often 
alarming  persona  was  known  to  few.  He 
was  not  a  good  teacher,  and  undergradu- 
ate audiences  could  make  little  of  the 
mass  of  recondite  learning  which  was  pre- 
sented to  them ;  but  with  senior  students 
or  junior  fellow  scholars  he  was  unspar- 
ingly generous  of  his  immense  intellectual 
stores.  He  founded  no  school  by  direct 
tuition  in  either  of  the  two  universities  in 
which  he  taught,  but  his  indirect  influence 
on  the  study  of  British  and  indeed  Euro- 
pean prehistory  was  enormous.  He  demon- 
strated that  the  prehistory  of  the  British 
Isles  was  meaningless  unless  considered  as 
a  part  of  that  of  Europe,  and  indeed  of  the 


Old  World ;  he  taught  the  lesson  of  the 
irrelevance  of  local  studies  everywhere 
unless  seen  within  the  context  of  a  greater 
whole.  His  own  range  of  knowledge  and 
his  linguistic  ability  enabled  him  to 
master  Old  World  prehistory  from  the 
beginnings  of  agriculture  to  the  early  first 
millennium  B.C.  in  a  manner  incredible  in 
one  individual,  and  perhaps,  with  the  in- 
creasing complexity  of  the  subject,  hardly 
possible  again.  Nevertheless  the  approach 
he  advocated  and  practised,  even  if  the 
theoretical  models  within  which  he  saw 
fit  to  interpret  his  material  may  be  found 
unacceptable,  will  continue  to  provide 
future  scholars  with  the  essential  bases  for 
a  sound  discipline. 

Childe,  who  was  unmarried,  met  his 
death  accidentally  while  walking  in  the 
Blue  Mountains  during  a  visit  to  his  native 
Australia,  19  October  1957. 

[Stuart  Piggott  in  Proceedings  of  the  British 
Academy,  vol.  xliv,  1958 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Stuart  Piggott. 


CILCENNIN,  Viscount  (1903-1960), 
politician.  [See  Thomas,  James  Purdon 
Lewes.] 

CLARENDON,  sixth  Earl  of  (187T- 
1955),  public  servant.  [See  Villiers, 
George  Herbert  Hyde.] 

CLARK,  Sir  WILLIAM  HENRY  (1876- 
1952),  civil  servant,  was  born  1  January 
1876  in  Cambridge  where  his  father,  John 
Willis  Clark  [q.v.],  was  superintendent  of 
the  museum  of  zoology  and  later  registrary 
of  the  university.  He  won  a  scholarship  to 
Eton  and  later  at  Trinity  College,  Cam- 
bridge, where  in  1897  he  achieved  a  good 
first  class  in  part  i  of  the  classical  tripos. 
In  the  following  year  he  sat  for  the  Civil 
Service  and  taking  a  high  position  was 
appointed  in  1899  to  the  Board  of  Trade. 
He  made  his  mark  early  in  the  public 
service  as  secretary  to  the  special  mission 
which  went  in  1901-2  to  negotiate  a  com- 
mercial treaty  with  China  after  the  Boxer 
rising.  In  1903  he  was  appointed  C.M.G., 
an  unprecedented  honour  for  so  young  a 
civil  servant.  In  that  year  he  was  made 
secretary  to  the  royal  commission  which, 
because  of  unfortunate  happenings  during 
the  South  African  war,  was  set  up  to 
consider  the  supply  of  food  and  raw 
material  in  time  of  war.  The  commission's 
work  lasted  until  1905.  From  1906  to  1908 


219 


Clark 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Clark  served  as  private  secretary  to  the 
president  of  the  Board  of  Trade,  Lloyd 
George,  and  for  a  short  time  to  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill,  until  in  1908  Lloyd 
George,  who  had  become  chancellor  of  the 
Exchequer,  arranged  for  Clark's  transfer 
to  the  Treasury  to  serve  him  again  as 
private  secretary. 

Considerable  criticism  greeted  Clark's 
appointment  in  1910  as  member  for 
commerce  and  industry  in  the  executive 
council  of  the  viceroy  of  India,  criticism 
grounded  on  his  youth  and  inexperience 
of  India.  But  from  the  outset  Clark  dis- 
played unusual  mastery  of  his  task,  and  he 
was  appointed  C.S.I,  in  1911  and  K.C.S.I. 
in  1915. 

In  1916  Clark  returned  to  England,  re- 
verted to  the  Board  of  Trade,  and  was 
made  head  of  the  commercial  intelligence 
department  which  needed  invigoration 
and  increased  staff.  Clark's  recommenda- 
tions were  taken  into  full  consideration  by 
the  Government  in  its  planning  both  to 
restore  the  channels  of  export  trade,  still 
disrupted  by  war,  and  to  help  British 
exporters  against  increasing  overseas  com- 
petition. The  outcome  was  the  establish- 
ment in  1917  of  the  Department  of 
Overseas  Trade  of  which  Clark  was  the 
obvious  choice  for  comptroller-general. 

For  the  selection  of  staff  for  head- 
quarters and  for  many  newly  created  posts 
overseas,  in  Commonwealth  and  foreign 
countries,  Clark  was  largely  responsible; 
greatly  to  his  credit,  this  new  department 
soon  won  wide  acceptance  among  British 
exporters  as  one  which  could  give  them 
valued  help.  Among  activities  which  he 
initiated  were  the  British  Industries  Fair 
which  became  an  annual  event;  British 
participation  in  important  international 
exhibitions ;  and  the  occasional  organiza- 
tion overseas  of  a  purely  United  Kingdom 
trade  fair.  He  instituted  the  systematic 
publication  of  economic  and  commercial 
reports  about  numerous  overseas  markets 
and  arranged  for  the  department's  over- 
seas representatives  to  be  available,  when 
on  home  leave,  to  interview  and  advise 
exporters.  The  department  was  also 
largely  responsible  for  organizing  the 
British  Empire  exhibition  at  Wembley  in 
1924-5. 

Clark  remained  comptroller-general  un- 
til 1928.  As  an  outcome  of  the  definition  of 
dominion  status  accepted  at  the  imperial 
conference  of  1926  it  was  decided  that  the 
United  Kingdom  should  be  represented  by 
a  high  commissioner  in  each  dominion 
which,  in  turn,   should  appoint  a  high 


commissioner  in  London.  Clark  was  the 
first  high  commissioner  to  be  appointed  to 
Canada,  in  1928 ;  one  of  his  first  actions 
was  to  appoint  the  Department  of  Over- 
seas Trade's  senior  trade  commissioner  in 
Canada  as  economic  adviser  on  his  staff. 
This  gave  the  high  commissioner  the 
opportunity  of  maintaining  close  touch 
with  economic  and  commercial  conditions 
in  Canada  involving  any  Anglo-Canadian 
problem.  At  the  same  time,  and  of  equal 
importance,  it  invested  the  trade  com- 
missioner with  a  quasi-diplomatic  recogni- 
tion not  previously  enjoyed  which  made 
it  easier  for  him  to  contact  Canadian 
government  departments  as  well  as  official 
and  semi-official  organizations.  This  pre- 
cedent was  shortly  followed  by  all  other 
United  Kingdom  high  commissioners. 

Appointed  K.C.M.G.  in  1930,  Clark 
remained  in  Canada  until  1934  when  he 
was  appointed  high  commissioner  in  the 
Union  of  South  Africa  and  simultaneously 
high  commissioner  for  Basutoland,  the 
Bechuanaland  Protectorate,  and  Swazi- 
land, a  post  calling  for  the  exercise  of 
considerable  diplomatic  skill.  Throughout 
his  service  in  the  Union  he  remained  a 
popular  and  much  respected  representa- 
tive. The  year  1937  saw  him  promoted 
G.C.M.G.  and  his  return  to  England  fol- 
lowed in  1939  when  he  became  chairman 
of  the  Imperial  Shipping  Committee.  He 
retired  from  public  service  in  1940,  but  in 
1946  readily  accepted  an  invitation  from 
the  Dominions  Office  to  visit  its  overseas 
posts  and  to  make  such  recommendations 
in  their  respect  as  his  experience  might 
suggest.  He  continued  in  retirement  his 
great  interest  in  the  Royal  Empire  (later 
Commonwealth)  Society  of  which  at  one 
time  he  was  chairman  of  the  council.  Here 
and  with  many  other  bodies  he  was  in 
great  demand  as  a  very  amusing  speaker. 

Tall  and  spare  of  build,  Clark  had  a  dis- 
tinguished bearing.  His  blue  eyes  were 
ever  ready  to  sparkle  with  fun.  He  com- 
bined with  an  unfailing  sense  of  humour 
and  an  old-world  charm  great  tact,  im- 
perturbability and,  in  important  issues, 
determination.  These  qualities  and  his 
patent  integrity  served  him  well  through- 
out his  public  life.  No  contemporary,  and 
certainly  no  civil  servant,  did  more  than 
he  for  his  country's  export  trade,  the 
importance  of  which  was,  for  many  years, 
never  far  from  his  thoughts. 

In  1909  Clark  married  Anne  Elizabeth 
(died  1946),  daughter  of  William  Thomas 
Monsell  and  widow  of  William  Bennett 
Pike,  barrister.  They  had  one  son  and  two 


220 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Clark  Kerr 


daughters.  Clark  died  in  Cambridge  22 
November  1952. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
J.  A.  P.  Edgcumbe. 

CLARK  KERR,  ARCHIBALD  JOHN 
KERR,  Baron  Inverchapel  (1882- 
1951),  diplomatist,  was  born  17  March 
1882  near  Sydney,  Australia,  the  fifth 
son  of  John  Kerr  Clark  of  Crossbasket, 
Hamilton,  Lanarkshire,  and  his  wife,  Kate 
Louisa,  daughter  of  Sir  John  Struan 
Robertson.  Both  sides  of  his  family  were 
linked  with  the  west  of  Scotland  and,  after 
acquiring  family  property  at  Inverchapel 
on  the  shores  of  Loch  Eck  in  Argyll,  he 
later  took  the  additional  surname  of  Kerr. 
He  was  educated  at  Bath  College  and 
Heidelberg  University  before  becoming  an 
attache  in  the  diplomatic  service  in  1905. 
After  filling  various  posts  overseas,  he  was 
transferred  to  the  Foreign  Office  in  1916. 
Two  years  later  his  request  to  be  released 
for  active  service  was  finally  granted  and 
he  enlisted  as  a  private  in  the  Scots 
Guards.  He  returned  to  diplomacy  after 
the  war  and  in  1925  became  minister  to 
Guatemala.  Three  years  later  he  was  trans- 
ferred to  Santiago,  where  he  met  and  in 
1929  married  a  beautiful  Chilean  girl  of 
nineteen,  Maria  Teresa  Diaz  Salas.  The 
marriage  was  childless.  There  followed 
nearly  four  years  (1931-5)  in  Stockholm, 
at  the  end  of  which  he  was  promoted 
ambassador,  appointed  K.C.M.G.,  and 
assigned  to  Baghdad  (1935). 

There  had  so  far  been  nothing  remark- 
able about  his  career;  but  his  appoint- 
ment in  1938  to  be  ambassador  in  China 
and  the  distinction  with  which  he  dis- 
charged his  duties  there  placed  him  at 
one  stride  among  the  leading  diplomatists 
of  his  day.  The  post  required  not  only 
negotiating  skill  but  physical  courage; 
his  predecessor,  Sir  Hughe  Knatchbull- 
Hugessen,  had  been  seriously  injured  in 
an  attack  on  his  car  by  low-flying  Japanese 
aircraft.  Clark  Kerr  and  his  Soviet  col- 
league were  the  only  members  of  the 
diplomatic  corps  to  remain  in  Chungking 
in  spite  of  the  bombing  and  so  earn  the 
respect  of  the  Chinese.  He  needed  every 
asset  he  had;  whilst  British  sympathies 
were  with  Generalissimo  Chiang  Kai-shek, 
it  was  not  possible  to  help  him  openly  for 
fear  of  provoking  Japan  into  declaring 
war.  Even  after  Pearl  Harbour  (December 
1941)  resources  were  so  stretched  that 
little  could  be  done  beyond  providing 
loans.  Clark  Kerr  did  much  by  his  bearing 
and  fortitude  to  convince  the  Chinese  of 


Britain's  ultimate  intention  and  capacity 
to  aid  them.  He  established  a  close  per- 
sonal relationship  with  Chiang  Kai-shek, 
whilst  observing  without  illusion  the 
corruption  of  the  regime  and  the  growing 
estrangement  between  Kuomintang  and 
the  Chinese  Communists.  Shortly  before 
he  left  Chungking  in  February  1942  he 
was  promoted  G.C.M.G.,  and  awarded  the 
Order  of  the  Brilliant  Jade  by  Chiang 
Kai-shek. 

Clark  Kerr  had  been  selected  for  an 
equally  exacting  post,  attached  to  an  ally 
whose  sufferings  were  also  terrible  and 
whose  faith  that  these  were  being  loyally 
shared  on  other  fronts  needed  constant 
reassurance.  When  he  succeeded  Sir 
Stafford  Cripps  [q.v.]  in  Moscow  in  March 
1942,  he  went  with  a  warm  recommenda- 
tion to  Stalin  from  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill, 
who  described  him  as  'a  personal  friend  of 
mine  of  many  years'  standing'.  In  August, 
when  the  diplomatic  corps  was  still  at 
Kuibyshev,  he  joined  Churchill  in  Moscow 
for  the  first  of  the  prime  minister's  con- 
frontations with  Stalin.  In  addition  to 
subsequent  conferences  in  Moscow,  Clark 
Kerr  took  part  in  the  tripartite  con- 
ferences with  Roosevelt  at  Tehran  (1943) 
and  Yalta  (February  1945)  and  also  in  the 
last  of  the  great  wartime  meetings  at 
Potsdam  (July  1945).  He  was  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council  in  1944.  Shortly  before 
Clark  Kerr  left  in  January  1946  the  new 
foreign  secretary,  Ernest  Bevin  [q.v.], 
visited  Moscow  and  the  two  men  took  an 
instant  liking  to  one  another. 

Clark  Kerr's  ability  to  work  with  Stalin 
stood  him  in  good  stead  in  the  early  part 
of  his  mission,  when  the  Russians  were 
waiting  with  increasing  impatience  for 
the  western  Allies  to  open  a  second  front 
in  France.  Later  he  was  much  preoccupied 
with  the  hostile  attitude  of  Stalin  and 
Molotov  towards  the  London  Poles.  These 
difficult  and  often  acrimonious  negotia- 
tions came  to  nothing ;  but  mutual  respect 
remained.  When  Clark  Kerr  finally  left 
Moscow,  Stalin  gave  him  lavish  presents 
and  also  showed  his  esteem  in  a  more 
unusual  way  by  yielding  to  Clark  Kerr's 
request  for  an  exit  visa  for  a  young 
Russian,  a  former  employee  at  the  British 
embassy,  who  was  in  serious  trouble  with 
the  Soviet  authorities. 

In  January  1946  Clark  Kerr  went  for 
four  months  as  special  ambassador  to  the 
Netherlands  East  Indies,  where  the  Indo- 
nesian nationalists  were  exploiting  the 
aftermath  of  war  to  achieve  their  indepen- 
dence. He  could  accomplish  little  in  so 


221 


Clark  Kerr 


©.N.B.  1951-1960 


short  a  time,  beyond  providing  a  first- 
hand account  of  a  confused  situation, 
before  taking  up  his  new  post  at  Washing- 
ton in  May  1946.  He  had  in  the  meantime 
been  raised  to  the  peerage  as  Baron 
Inverchapel,  of  Loch  Eck  in  the  county  of 
Argyll. 

Inverchapel' s  last  diplomatic  appoint- 
ment proved  something  of  an  anticlimax. 
The  grand  alliance  against  Germany  and 
Japan,  to  which  he  had  made  a  significant 
contribution,  was  rapidly  disintegrating. 
The  note  of  the  coming  decade  had  been 
struck  by  Churchill's  speech  at  Fulton  two 
months  before  Inverchapel  arrived  at  his 
new  post.  Peace  had  also  transformed  the 
content  of  the  diplomacy  to  which  the 
war  had  accustomed  him.  He  was  no  ora- 
tor and  was  wearied  by  the  round  of  public 
appearance  to  which  a  British  ambassa- 
dor at  Washington  is  exposed.  Britain's 
first  Labour  Government  for  fourteen 
years,  of  which  he  was  a  firm  supporter, 
was  viewed  with  some  suspicion  in  Ameri- 
can financial  circles;  he  was  much  con- 
cerned with  problems  arising  from  the 
weakness  of  sterling.  Confidence  was 
gradually  restored,  however,  and  in  June 
1947  his  good  friend  Secretary  of  State 
George  Marshall  delivered  at  Harvard  the 
historic  speech  which  launched  the  Euro- 
pean recovery  programme. 

Inverchapel's  life  in  Washington  was 
gladdened  by  reunion  with  his  wife,  who 
had  left  him  during  his  service  in  Chung- 
king. He  was  suffering,  however,  from  an 
enlarged  heart  and  in  March  1948  re- 
signed his  post.  He  was  happy  to  retire  to 
Scotland  and,  describing  himself  simply 
as  a  farmer,  spent  his  last  years  at  Inver- 
chapel. He  died  at  Greenock  5  July  1951. 
His  executors  were  astonished  to  find 
among  his  possessions  an  unlicensed 
tonmiy-gun  which  had  been  presented  to 
him  by  Stalin. 

Inverchapel  was  never  a  diplomatist  in 
the  tradition  made  familiar  by  comic 
dramatists;  he  throve  upon  the  unusual 
stresses  of  war  and  much  preferred  the 
company  of  unconventional  people  to  that 
of  diplomatic  colleagues.  At  the  height  of 
his  powers  he  showed  exceptional  ability 
to  win  the  confidence  of  the  wartime 
leaders  and  this  enabled  him  in  posts  of 
high  importance  to  give  good  service  to 
his  country.  A  portrait  of  Inverchapel  in 
middle  life,  painted  by  Glyn  Philpot,  is  in 
the  possession  of  the  family. 

[The  Times,  6  and  14  July  1951 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

R.  Cecil. 


CLARKE,  Sir  FRED  (1880-1952),  educa- 
tionist, the  son  of  William  Clark,  a  farm 
bailiff,  and  his  wife,  Annie  Figg,  was  born 
at  High  Coggs,  Witney,  2  August  1880. 
Educated  at  an  Oxford  elementary  school, 
where  he  became  a  pupil  teacher,  he 
attended  classes  at  Oxford  Technical 
College.  His  ability  earned  him  a  Queen's 
scholarship  which  enabled  him  to  study 
at  Oxford  under  the  delegacy  of  non- 
collegiate  students.  He  obtained  a  first  in 
modern  history  in  1903.  This,  together 
with  his  experience  of  elementary  teach- 
ing, led  to  his  appointment  as  senior 
master  of  method  at  the  Diocesan  Training 
College,  York:  he  remained  a  devout 
practising  member  of  the  Church  of 
England  all  his  life.  In  1906  he  became 
the  first  professor  of  education  at  Hartley 
University  College,  Southampton,  and 
composed  a  very  original  School  History  of 
Hampshire  (1909).  In  it  can  be  discerned 
many  of  the  ideas  which  underlie  his  theory 
of  education :  that  a  society  is  an  historical 
process  and  that  the  lives  of  the  common 
people  are  its  substance ;  that  education  is 
the  socialization  of  the  young  by  active 
participation  in  cultural  activity;  that 
education  is  one  aspect  of  society;  that 
politics  are  inseparable  from  education. 

The  growth  of  his  political  and  philo- 
sophical ideas  tempted  him,  in  1911,  to 
accept  the  professorship  of  education  at 
the  South  African  College,  afterwards  the 
university  of  Cape  Town:  the  situation 
there  was  a  challenge  and  an  opportunity. 
Among  his  friends  was  J.  C.  Smuts  [q.v.], 
many  of  whose  ideas  he  shared  although 
he  had  reservations,  especially  about 
Holism.  His  own  philosophy,  although 
influenced  by  Dewey,  Hoernle,  and  Hock- 
ing, was  chiefly  derived  from  Bernard 
Bosanquet  [q.v.] :  he  went  so  far  as  to  say 
he  would  like  to  work  out  the  implications 
for  education  of  the  general  idealist  posi- 
tion expounded  by  Bosanquet.  This  is 
the  position  taken  in  his  Foundations  of 
History-Teaching  (1929). 

In  South  Africa  his  influence  went  far 
beyond  the  university.  He  played  a 
prominent  part  in  teachers'  organizations 
and  worked  too  for  the  Department  of 
Labour,  helping  to  establish  Juvenile 
Affairs  Boards  which  dealt  with  ap- 
prenticeships and  education  for  industry. 
He  led  the  South  African  delegation  to 
the  Geneva  International  Labour  Con- 
ference in  1925.  In  1923  he  collected  some 
of  his  writings  for  the  Cape  Times  and  the 
educational  press  and  published  them 
under  the  title  of  Essays  in  the  Politics  of 


222 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Clarke,  L.  C.  G. 


Education.  Frequent  visits  to  Britain  and 
membership  of  the  Round  Table  led  to  a 
friendship  with  John  Dove  [q.v.]  and  to 
contacts  with  Lord  Lothian  and  Lord 
Eustace  Percy  [qq.v.]  as  well  as  with 
educationists  like  (Sir)  Percy  Nunn  and 
L.  P.  Jacks  [qq.v.].  In  1929  he  accepted 
the  chair  of  education  at  McGill  Univer- 
sity, Montreal.  In  part  the  reason  for  the 
change  was  his  interest  in  Quebec,  a  plural 
society  like  Cape  Province;  but  it  was 
mainly  his  deep  disillusionment  with 
South  African  politics.  In  1935,  after  an 
extensive  tour  of  universities  in  Canada, 
New  Zealand,  and  Australia,  he  came  to 
London  as  adviser  to  overseas  students 
in  the  Institute  of  Education  where  he 
succeeded  Nunn  as  director  in  1936.  His 
intense  activity  led  to  a  breakdown  and 
he  spent  a  whole  year  in  a  nursing  home. 
Recovery  was  complete  and  he  resumed 
full  activity  in  the  autumn  of  1938.  He 
saw  the  coming  war  as  a  period  of  trial  for 
free  democratic  nations  and  pinned  his 
faith  to  education.  He  defended  this  view 
at  an  international  conference,  August 
1939,  at  Columbia  University,  when  he 
was  awarded  an  honorary  degree. 

The  war  excited  and  stimulated  Clarke 
immensely.  The  Institute  of  Education 
was  evacuated  to  Nottingham  and  from 
there  he  led  a  campaign  to  promote 
fundamental  reforms.  His  Education  and 
Social  Change  (1940)  expressed  his  con- 
viction that  sociology  could  give  valu- 
able insights  into  what  was  needed.  It 
strengthened  his  close  friendship  with 
Karl  Mannheim,  whom  he  persuaded  to 
join  his  staff  at  the  Institute.  As  in  South 
Africa,  his  public  work  grew  in  importance. 
He  was  a  member  of  the  McNair  com- 
mittee on  the  supply,  recruitment,  and 
training  of  teachers  and  youth  leaders 
whose  report  gives  clear  evidence  of  his 
influence,  especially  in  its  insistence  that 
teacher  training  is  properly  a  concern 
of  universities.  Clarke  also  served  on 
numerous  British  Council  and  Colonial 
Office  committees  concerned  with  educa- 
tion. A  long  pamphlet  on  The  Study  of 
Education  in  England  (1943)  stressed  the 
imperative  need  for  research  and  led  to 
the  organization  of  the  National  Founda- 
tion for  Educational  Research.  His  many 
services  were  recognized  by  the  award  of  a 
knighthood  in  1943. 

Clarke  retired  from  the  directorship  of 
the  Institute  of  Education  in  1945  and 
after  a  visit  to  Basutoland  became  educa- 
tional adviser  and  research  officer  to  the 
National  Union  of  Teachers.  In  addition 


he  took  up  his  old  post  as  adviser  to 
overseas  students  in  the  Institute,  many 
of  them  senior  officials  and  university 
teachers.  In  1948  he  published  his  Free- 
dom in  the  Educative  Society  which  sums 
up  his  philosophy  and  his  experience.  He 
did  not  write  many  books.  His  influence 
was  exercised  chiefly  through  papers  and 
talks,  often  at  a  personal  level.  He  com- 
manded respect  by  his  unequalled  sensi- 
tiveness to  the  nature  of  educational 
problems  and  by  his  flair  for  formulating 
principles.  He  evoked  affection  by  his 
sincerity  and  simplicity.  He  gave  a  new 
sociological  orientation  to  educational 
theory  and  promoted  the  development  of 
comparative  education. 

In  1907  Clarke  married  Edith  Annie, 
daughter  of  William  Gillams,  of  Oxford. 
He  was  always  deeply  attached  to  his 
family  and  to  his  five  daughters ;  his  home 
was  a  perennial  source  of  refreshment  and 
happiness.  He  died  suddenly,  but  peace- 
fully, in  the  midst  of  what  was  perhaps  the 
most  fruitful  and  happy  time  of  his  life, 
in  London,  6  January  1952.  The  Institute 
of  Education  has  a  portrait  by  Raymond 
Coxon. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
J.  A.  Lauwerys. 

CLARKE,    LOUIS    COLVILLE    GRAY 

(1881-1960),  connoisseur,  collector,  and 
museum  director,  was  born  in  Croydon 
2  May  1881,  the  tenth  son  and  youngest 
of  the  fourteen  children  of  Stephenson 
Clarke,  coal  factor,  by  his  wife,  Agnes 
Maria  Bridger.  He  was  educated  privately 
and  at  Trinity  Hall,  Cambridge,  where  he 
read  history  and  graduated  in  1903.  The 
family  fortune,  assisted  by  a  long  minority 
and  his  wise  sense  of  money  values,  suf- 
ficed to  provide  a  large  income  even  for  its 
youngest  member.  While  still  an  under- 
graduate Clarke  travelled  widely  in 
Europe,  forming  the  taste  and  developing 
the  interests,  both  aesthetic  and  scientific, 
which  were  to  distinguish  his  Ufe.  A  con- 
firmed bachelor  with  a  zest  for  travel  and 
an  initial  bias  towards  anthropological 
and  archaeological  studies,  he  made  a  long 
journey  to  Central  America,  Mexico,  Chile, 
and  Peru  in  1906,  and  in  1910  the  first 
of  two  visits  to  Ethiopia,  where  he  spent 
some  months  in  Addis  Ababa. 

At  home  in  London,  where  he  had  al- 
ready begun  to  collect  works  of  art,  he 
formed  an  enduring  friendship  with 
Augustus  John,  of  whose  slighter  oil- 
paintings  he  bought  a  few  and  of  whose 
best   drawings  he  gradually  acquired    a 


Clarke,  L.  C.  Gl 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


considerable  collection.  A  pencil  portrait  of 
Clarke  by  John,  drawn  in  1915  at  Berkeley 
House,  Hay  Hill,  Mayfair,  is  in  the  Fitz- 
william  Museum,  and  a  somewhat  later 
portrait  in  oils,  also  by  John,  is  at  Trinity 
Hall.  Clarke  saw  front-line  service  in  the 
war  of  1914-18,  but  his  physical  strength 
being  unequal  to  the  rigours  of  military 
life,  he  was  before  long  invalided  out.  In 
1919  he  matriculated  as  a  candidate  for 
the  diploma  in  anthropology  at  Exeter 
College,  Oxford,  attracted  by  the  oppor- 
tunity of  studying  imder  R.  R.  Marett, 
Arthur  Thomson,  and  Henry  Balfour 
[qq.v.].  Balfour  was  his  tutor  in  archaeo- 
logy and  technology ;  under  his  guidance 
Clarke  did  valuable  work  as  a  volunteer 
in  the  Pitt  Rivers  Museum,  of  which  he 
remained  a  benefactor  throughout  his  life. 

In  1922  Clarke  was  elected  to  succeed 
Baron  Anatole  von  Hiigel  as  curator  of 
the  University  Museum  of  Archaeology 
and  Ethnology  at  Cambridge.  The  ap- 
pointment, made  it  is  believed  at  the 
instance  of  Sir  William  Ridgeway  [q.v.], 
then  Disney  professor  of  archaeology, 
if  somewhat  unexpected,  was  soon  fully 
justified  by  the  quality  of  Clarke's  work 
both  in  Cambridge  and  abroad.  In  1923 
he  took  part  in  important  excavations  at 
Kechipaun,  New  Mexico.  Endowed  with 
winning  social  gifts  and  a  prodigious 
memory,  manifested  for  example  in  a  mass 
of  information  about  genealogy,  Clarke 
was  able  in  the  years  between  the  two  wars 
to  renew  the  friendships  he  had  made 
in  his  youth  with  members  of  the  great 
Austro-Hungarian  famihes,  when  he  took 
part  in  excavations  at  Toszeg  and  else- 
where in  Hungary  on  several  occasions  in 
the  twenties.  To  the  growth  of  what  has 
become  the  faculty  of  archaeology  and 
anthropology,  Clarke  made  a  notable  con- 
tribution by  methodically  building  up  and 
rearranging  the  collections  of  his  museum, 
by  reconciling  conflicting  academic  in- 
terests, and  by  financing  out  of  his  own 
resoiu'ces  much  excavation  abroad  and 
other  work  in  Cambridge.  A  portrait  of 
Clarke  in  coloured  chalks  by  P.  A.  de 
Laszlo,  1927,  is  in  the  Museum  of  Archaeo- 
logy and  Ethnology.  He  was  elected  a  fel- 
low of  Trinity  Hall  in  1929,  and  was  a 
much-loved  member  of  that  high  table  for 
the  rest  of  his  hfe.  His  easy  manners  and 
hospitable  nature  endeared  him  to  a  wide 
circle  of  friends  of  every  age  and  of  many 
nationaUties. 

In  1937,  when  Sir  Sydney  Cockerell  re- 
tired after  thirty  years  as  director  of  the 
Fitzwilliam  Museum,  Clarke  was  chosen 


to  succeed  him.  It  was  a  measure  of  his 
gifts  and  trained  experience  in  dealing 
with  every  kind  of  antiquity  and  work  of 
art  that  he  was  able  at  once  to  make 
himself  at  home  in  his  new  post.  Under 
Cockerell  the  collections  and  buildings 
had  alike  been  greatly  extended,  and  the 
Fitzwilliam  had  acquired,  through  his 
energetic  and  skilful  direction,  much  of 
the  atmosphere  of  a  private  mansion 
which,  as  a  public  building,  is  its  dis- 
tinguishing characteristic.  Clarke  unfor- 
tunately had  only  a  short  time  to  impress 
his  particular  personal  taste,  which  was 
more  distinguished  than  CockerelFs,  upon 
the  museum  and  its  collections,  before  the 
onset  of  war  in  1939  compelled  him  to 
remove  its  contents  to  places  of  safety, 
some  far  from  Cambridge.  With  what 
remained,  supplemented  by  loans,  he 
kept  interest  in  the  arts  in  Cambridge 
aUve  during  the  war  by  arranging  more 
than  forty  temporary  exhibitions  in  the 
museum.  Himself  the  owner  of  a  precious 
collection  of  maiolica,  porcelain,  furniture, 
silver,  objects  of  vertu,  paintings  and 
drawings  (some  of  the  latter  collected 
by  his  brother,  Charles  Clarke,  who  be- 
queathed them  to  him  in  1935),  he  used 
the  Fitzwilliam's  negligible  purchase  funds 
most  advantageously  during  these  years, 
when  prices  were  low,  to  add  to  its  collec- 
tions. These  purchases  were  notably 
supplemented  by  his  own  generosity  as  a 
donor,  and  by  the  benefactions  he  ob- 
tained for  the  museum.  Between  1937  and 
1960  he  presented  more  than  2,700  works 
of  art,  including  nearly  2,000  engravings 
of  various  kinds.  When  he  retired  in  1946 
he  was  appointed  honorary  keeper  of  the 
prints,  an  appointment  which,  like  his 
honorary  keepership  of  the  American  col- 
lections in  the  Museum  of  Archaeology,  he 
retained  until  his  death  in  Cambridge  13 
December  1960.  The  university  conferred 
upon  him  the  honorary  degree  of  LL.D. 
in  1959.  He  bequeathed  the  bulk  of  his 
collections  to  the  university,  mainly  for 
the  benefit  of  the  Fitzwilliam. 

A  man  of  slight  build,  and  birdlike 
rapidity  of  mind  and  utterance  as  well  as 
of  bodily  movement,  Clarke  possessed  to 
a  quite  extraordinary  degree  an  intuitive 
understanding,  fortified  by  extensive 
knowledge,  of  every  kind  of  art.  He  had 
neither  the  patience  nor  the  methodical 
habit  of  thought,  nor  did  he  feel  the  need, 
to  submit  himself  to  the  drudgery  of 
serious  writing.  He  produced  only  a  few 
short  articles.  His  bust  in  bronze  by  (Sir) 
Jacob    Epstein    was    presented    to    the 


224 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Clarke,  T. 


museum  by  the  Friends  of  the  Fitzwilliam 
in  1951.  He  was  a  member  of  the  Order  of 
Merit  of  Hungary,  and  an  honorary  fellow 
of  the  Society  of  Archaeological  and 
Historical  Arts  of  Hungar3^ 

[The  Times,  15  December  1960  and  2 
January  1961 ;  Cambridge  Review,  29  April 
1961;  Man,  1961,  article  220;  Fitzwilliam 
Museum  Annual  Report,  1961 ;  Apollo,  July 
1962;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Carl  Winter. 

CLARKE,  THOMAS  (1884-1957),  jour- 
nalist, author,  and  broadcaster,  was  born 
at  Bolton  6  June  1884,  the  youngest  child 
of  five  sons  and  three  daughters  of  Joseph 
Clarke,  who  worked  for  an  insurance 
company,  by  his  wife,  Martha  Marsh. 
Tom  Clarke  went  to  Clarence  Street  higher 
grade  school,  forerunner  of  the  Bolton 
County  Grammar  School.  After  contribut- 
ing to  the  Northern  Weekly,  a  Bolton 
paper,  he  won  a  year's  scholarship  at 
Ruskin  Hall,  where  Dennis  Hird  guided 
and  sharpened  his  intellectual  zest. 
Clarke's  second  venture  in  journalism  was 
on  the  Lewisham  Journal,  at  £1  a  week. 
He  learned  quickly  and  in  1903  he  went  at 
the  age  of  nineteen  to  the  South  China 
Morning  Post,  Hong  Kong,  to  find  him- 
self close  to  world-shaking  events.  He 
acted  as  correspondent  of  the  Daily  Mail 
and  Chicago  Tribune  in  French  Indo- 
China,  and,  always  eager  to  see  as  much 
of  the  world  as  he  could,  visited  China, 
Japan,  Korea,  and  Russia,  including 
Siberia.  When  the  Russo-Japanese  war 
ended  he  returned  home  and  became  a 
special  writer  for  the  Daily  Dispatch  and 
Manchester  Evening  Chronicle.  An  article 
on  the  flying  meeting  at  Blackpool  in  1909 
helped  to  win  for  him  promotion  to  the 
London  news  editorship  of  the  Daily 
Sketch. 

In  1911  Clarke  joined  the  foreign  staff  of 
the  Daily  Mail.  This  was  followed  by  ser- 
vice as  night  news  editor  from  1914  until 
the  end  of  1916.  On  his  return  from  mili- 
tary service  he  was  made  news  editor  by 
Lord  Northchffe  [q.v.]  who  presently  sent 
him  to  the  United  States  and  Canada  to 
study  newspaper  methods.  Clarke  studied 
his  chief's  methods  and  character  just 
as  keenly.  Northchffe  said,  'What  I  want 
every  morning  in  the  paper,  Tom,  is 
something  new  and  strange.'  Clarke  de- 
vised many  talking-points  (Northchffe's 
expression)  for  a  mass  pubUc,  obtained 
much  exclusive  news,  and  excelled  in 
featuring  the  element  of' surprise.  In  the 
words  of  a  colleague,  F.  G,  Prmce-WTiite, 


he  was  the  spirit  of  news-editorial  effi- 
ciency personified. 

After  Northchffe's  death  Clarke,  on  the 
invitation  of  (Sir)  Keith  Murdoch,  went  to 
Australia  and  became  assistant  editor  of 
the  Melbourne  Herald  from  1923  to  1926. 
Some  of  his  experiences  were  related  in 
Marriage  at  6  a.m.  (1934).  He  returned  to 
London  to  be  managing  editor  of  the 
Daily  News  in  1926  and,  on  its  merging 
with  a  rival,  editor  and  director  of  the 
News  Chronicle  imtil  1933.  Then,  owing  to 
a  divergence  of  views  from  colleagues  on 
the  board,  whose  different  sections  of 
Liberalism  he  found  it  hard  to  reconcile, 
he  resigned.  He  turned  to  freelance  work, 
in  the  course  of  which  he  visited  Finland. 
A  spell  as  adviser  to  Berlingske  TidendCy 
Copenhagen,  in  1934,  was  followed  by  a 
tour  with  the  Australian  cricket  team  in 
England  for  the  Daily  Mail.  In  1935  he 
became  a  stimulating  director  of  practical 
journalism  at  London  University.  When 
war  broke  out  in  1939  he  became  deputy 
director  of  the  news  division  of  the 
Ministry  of  Information,  but  gave  up  this 
work  in  1940  because  of  his  wife's  ill 
health  which  called  for  rest  in  the  deep 
countryside. 

Next  he  joined  (Sir)  Edward  Hulton  in 
the  development  of  a  chain  of  specialized 
news  agencies  set  up  with  a  parent  com- 
pany under  the  title  of  Britanova.  Part  of 
his  work  was  to  establish  in  South  America, 
with  headquarters  at  Buenos  Aires,  a  news 
service  for  many  influential  papers  south 
of  Panama.  He  returned  to  London  to 
assume  editorial  direction  and  broadcast 
a  weekly  newsletter  from  London  in  the 
B.B.C.  Latin-American  service  from  1942 
to  1948.  One  product  of  his  South  Ameri- 
can experiences  was  The  Word  of  an 
Englishman  (1943). 

Clarke,  who  often  worked  almost  to 
the  point  of  exhaustion,  collapsed  while 
broadcasting  in  the  final  stage  of  the  war. 
He  told  the  story  of  his  illness  and  tem- 
porary recovery  in  Living  Happily  with  a 
^Hearf  (1954),  in  which  he  strongly  re- 
commended what  he  called  Doctor  Country 
as  the  best  physician  for  coronary  throm- 
bosis. He  died  at  Colchester  18  June  1957. 

With  his  brisk  manner,  friendly  brown 
eyes,  very  dark  hair,  which  he  kept  all 
his  life,  and  what  a  friend  described  as 
a  Lancashire-Irish  glow,  Clarke  was  not 
only  handsome  but  had  a  confident,  con- 
fidence-inspiring personaUty.  His  reputa- 
tion in  journalism  as  one  of  Northcliffe's 
young  men  spread  to  wider  circles  when 
he   wrote   My  Northcliffe  Diary  (1981). 


225 


Clarke,  T. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


He  addressed  himself  to  a  more  ambitious 
theme,  what  he  termed  an  intimate  study 
of  press  power,  in  Northcliffe  in  History 
(1950).  This  did  justice  to  NorthcHffe's 
journalistic  acumen,  but  some  critics  held 
that  its  analysis  of  Northcliffe's  political 
influence  showed  too  much  hero-worship. 
Other  books  Clarke  wrote  were  Brian 
(1936),  the  story  of  his  much-loved  younger 
son  who  died  of  meningitis  at  the  age  of 
nine;  Round  the  World  with  Tom  Clarke 
(1937);  My  Lloyd  George  Diary  (1939); 
and  The  Devonshire  Club  (1944),  the  his- 
tory of  one  of  his  favourite  London  resorts 
for  meeting  friends. 

Clarke  was  twice  married,  first  in  1910 
to  Elizabeth  Naylor,  only  daughter  of 
Richard  Waddington,  J.P.,  of  Bolton, 
schoolmaster  and  educational  publisher 
and  for  a  time  member  of  the  Bolton  town 
council.  There  were  two  sons  and  one 
daughter  of  this  marriage,  which  was 
dissolved.  In  1952  Clarke  married  Sheila 
Irene  Emily,  former  wife  of  Edward 
Cyril  Castle  and  daughter  of  the  late 
Harry  Samuel  Green,  who  had  been  a 
coastguard  officer. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Linton  Andrews. 

CLAXTON,  BROOKE  (1898-1960), 
Canadian  politician,  was  born  at  Montreal, 
Canada,  23  August  1898,  the  only  child  of 
Albert  George  Brooke  Claxton,  barrister, 
by  his  wife,  Blanche  Lovat  Simpson.  He 
was  educated  at  Lower  Canada  College 
and  McGill  University.  Although  his 
education  was  interrupted  by  war  service 
he  was  a  brilUant  student  who  received  a 
B.C.L.  with  honours  before  his  twenty- 
third  birthday  and  was  called  to  the 
Quebec  bar  in  the  same  year  (1921).  Later 
in  life,  when  minister  of  national  defence, 
Claxton  recalled  with  pride  that  he  had 
served  in  the  ranks  of  the  Royal  Canadian 
Artillery  and  had  won  the  D.C.M.  while  a 
battery  sergeant-major. 

Claxton  entered  his  father's  firm  in 
1921  and  specialized  in  insurance  law.  He 
was  active  in  community  life,  a  generous 
and  discerning  patron  of  the  arts,  and 
an  active  and  influential  member  of 
the  Canadian  Institute  of  International 
Affairs,  the  Canadian  Radio  League,  and 
many  other  national  organizations.  He 
served  as  associate  professor  of  commercial 
law  at  McGill  University  from  1930  to 
1944. 

Claxton  was  first  elected  to  Parliament 
for  the  St.  Lawrence-St.  George  riding  of 
Montreal  in  the  wartime  election  of  1940. 


He  was  re-elected  in  1945,  1949,  and  1953, 
as  a  Liberal.  In  1943  he  was  appointed 
parliamentary  assistant  to  the  prime 
minister,  W.  L.  Mackenzie  King  [q.v.],  in 
his  capacity  as  president  of  the  Privy 
Council.  Late  in  1944  he  became  minister 
of  the  newly  created  Department  of 
National  Health  and  Welfare  in  the 
Mackenzie  King  Cabinet,  and  he  was 
closely  associated  with  the  establishment 
of  family  allowances.  From  1946  to  1954 
he  was  minister  of  national  defence  in  the 
Cabinets  of  Mackenzie  King  and  Louis  S. 
St.  Laurent  and  was  thus  primarily  re- 
sponsible for  building  up  the  military 
strength  of  Canada  to  meet  commitments 
to  N.A.T.O.  and  in  the  Korean  war. 
He  travelled  widely  inside  and  outside 
Canada  and  took  a  deep  personal  interest 
in  the  welfare  of  the  men  and  women  in  the 
Services. 

Claxton  was  one  of  the  Canadian  signa- 
tories in  1948  of  the  terms  of  union  of 
Canada  with  Newfoundland;  and  in 
1943-54  he  represented  Canada  abroad  at 
many  conferences  including  U.N.R.R.A. ; 
the  peace  conference  in  Paris  (1946) ;  the 
International  Labour  Conference  in  Aust- 
ralia ;  the  United  Nations ;  and  the  North 
Atlantic  Council. 

He  was  a  prodigious  worker  and  in 
addition  to  his  heavy  duties  as  a  parlia- 
mentarian and  a  cabinet  minister  with  an 
exceptionally  exacting  portfolio,  he  found 
time  to  supervise  the  activities  of  the 
National  Liberal  Federation  and  to  take  a 
detailed  interest  in  the  organization  of 
the  Liberal  Party  throughout  the  country. 
As  parliamentary  assistant  to  Mackenzie 
King,  he  provided  many  of  the  ideas,  and 
did  most  of  the  preparatory  work  on 
the  post-war  programme  of  the  Liberal 
Government  which  helped  to  ensure  his 
party  twenty-two  unbroken  years  in 
office.  His  original  and  inventive  mind 
developed  more  political  and  social  initia- 
tives than  any  other  Canadian  of  his 
generation  and  his  unflagging  energy 
carried  most  of  them  to  fruition.  His 
voluntary  retirement  from  the  St.  Laurent 
government  in  1954  left  a  great  gap  in 
Canadian  public  life  and  coincided  with  a 
decline  in  the  momentum  of  political 
action  of  the  Government  which  was  not 
entirely  accidental. 

On  his  retirement  from  public  life, 
Claxton  became  vice-president  and  head 
in  Canada  of  the  Metropolitan  Life  In- 
surance Company  of  New  York,  a  com- 
pany with  which  he  and  his  father  had 
been  associated  as  legal  counsel  for  many 


226 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Clay 


years  before  1940.  He  threw  himself  into 
business  with  his  customary  energy  and 
effectiveness,  but,  by  1957,  he  clearly 
needed  more  than  business  to  occupy  him 
fully.  In  that  year  the  Government  estab- 
lished the  Canada  Council,  a  munificent 
public  foundation  for  the  promotion  of 
the  arts  and  the  encouragement  of  higher 
education,  of  which  Claxton  became  the 
first  chairman.  To  this  spare-time  activity 
he  gave  a  degree  of  time  and  attention 
which  few  men  can  give  to  their  priEcipal 
occupation.  The  outstanding  success  of 
the  work  of  the  Council  and  its  public 
acceptance  both  owe  a  great  deal  to  his 
indefatigable  efforts. 

In  1959  Claxton,  who  had  always  en- 
joyed good  and  apparently  indestructible 
health,  was  stricken  by  an  illness  which 
was  prolonged  and  very  painful,  but  which 
he  bore  with  great  patience  and  fortitude. 
He  died  in  Ottawa  13  June  1960. 

During  his  lifetime  Claxton  had  many 
honours  conferred  upon  him,  including  a 
special  commemoratory  medal  (1946)  and 
an  air  medal  (1954)  from  the  French 
Government;  the  highest  award  of  the 
Greek  Red  Cross;  the  Western  Hemi- 
sphere Commercial  Arbitration  Award; 
and  honorary  degrees  from  many  univer- 
sities, of  which  the  first  came  in  1950  from 
his  own  university,  McGill.  He  was  the 
author  of  many  pamphlets,  articles,  and 
reviews. 

Claxton  married  in  1925  Helen  Gait, 
daughter  of  John  G.  Savage,  of  West- 
mount,  Quebec,  and  had  two  sons  and  one 
daughter.  A  portrait  by  Lilias  T.  Newton 
is  in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.  W.  PiCKERSGILL. 

CLAY,  Sir  HENRY  (1883-1954),  econo- 
mist, was  the  third  son  and  fourth  child  of 
James  Henry  Clay  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth 
Bulmer,  of  Bradford.  He  was  born,  9  May 
1883,  in  Germany  where  his  father,  a 
woollen  manufacturer,  had  formed  the 
firm  of  Goetz,  Clay,  &  Co.,  near  Miinchen- 
Gladbach,  a  partnership  lasting  for  eight 
years  before  the  parents  returned  to  York- 
shire with  their  two  girls  and  four  boys. 
Henry  Clay  went  to  Bradford  Grammar 
School  which  he  left  as  head  boy  to  go  as  a 
scholar  to  University  College,  Oxford,  in 
1902. 

Disappointed  of  his  immediate  hopes  of 
an  academic  career  because  of  his  second 
class  in  liter ae  humaniores  (1906),  Clay 
became,  first,  secretary  to  a  London 
charity  organization,  then,  for  two  years, 


warden  of  a  settlement  in  Sheffield.  Be- 
tween 1909  and  1917  he  lectured  for  the 
Workers'  Educational  Association  under 
the  university  extension  scheme,  an  ex- 
perience leading  to  the  writing  of  Eco- 
nomics: An  Introduction  for  the  General 
Reader  (1916 ;  2nd  ed.  1942),  a  book  which 
had  great  success,  especially  in  Great 
Britain  and  the  United  States,  and  which, 
by  reason  of  its  lucidity  and  the  homeliness 
of  its  examples,  broadened  public  interest 
in  economic  matters. 

During  the  latter  part  of  the  war  Clay 
worked  in  the  Ministry  of  Labour.  From 
1919  to  1921  he  was  a  fellow  of  New  Col- 
lege, Oxford,  and  a  special  correspondent 
on  industrial  relations  to  the  New  York 
Evening  Post.  During  his  first  visit  to 
America  in  1921  he  made  close  friend- 
ships with  some  outstanding  young 
economists,  especially  Lewis  Douglas  and 
Walter  Stewart,  which  he  maintained 
throughout  his  life.  In  1922  he  became 
the  Stanley  Jevons  professor  of  political 
economy  and  it  has  been  said  that  the  best 
crop  of  students  ever  produced  by  the 
economics  department  of  the  university  of 
Manchester  was  during  Clay's  tenure  of 
the  chair.  In  1925  he  went  to  South  Africa 
as  a  member  of  the  economic  and  wage 
commission  and  was  largely  responsible 
for  the  subsequent  report.  In  1927  he 
asked  to  exchange  his  chair  for  the  new 
professorship  of  social  economics  estab- 
lished through  the  munificence  of  E.  D. 
Simon  (later  Lord  Simon  of  Wythenshawe, 
q.v.) :  a  post  relieving  Clay  of  administra- 
tive duties  which  did  not  interest  him.  He 
was  never  happy  with  large  groups  or  in 
the  public  lecture.  He  perceived  that  ap- 
plied economics  could  be  strengthened  by 
closer  regular  contacts  between  economists 
and  business  men  and  he  instituted  his 
Manchester  Thursday  lunches  as  a  success- 
ful pioneering  effort.  Meanwhile  he  was 
able  to  give  fuller  play  to  his  'itch  to 
write'.  His  capacity  for  the  swift  but 
polished  production  of  a  balanced  treat- 
ment of  the  economic  issues  of  the  day  was 
something  of  a  marvel  even  to  the  seasoned 
staff  of  the  Manchester  Guardian  for  which 
Clay  wrote  regularly.  There  was  also  a 
steady  stream  of  reviews  and  longer 
articles  in  the  learned  journals.  Clay  was 
not  a  foremost  economic  theorist ;  indeed, 
he  often  expressed  doubts  about  the  value 
of  much  of  the  theorizing  then  in  fashion. 
He  was  a  tool-user  rather  than  a  tool- 
designer — and  frequently  impatient  of  the 
tools  provided.  Representative  of  this 
phase  are  The  Post-War  Unemployment 


227 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Glay 

Problem  (1029)  and  The  Problem  of  In- 
dustrial  Relations  (1929). 

In  1930  Clay  resigned  his  chair  to  join 
the  Bank  of  England :  in  the  first  instance 
as    adviser    to    the    newly    established 
Securities  Management  Trust.  In  1930-31 
he  was  a  member  of  the  royal  commission 
on  unemployment  insurance.  In  1933  he 
went   with    Sir    Otto   Niemeyer   to   the 
Argentine  to  advise  on  the  organization  of 
its  banking  system.  Henry  Clay's  shrewd 
advice  and  his  knack  of  getting  on  with 
people,   especially   with   Montagu   (later 
Lord)  Norman  (whose  notice  he  contri- 
buted   to  this  Dictionary),    led    to    his 
appointment  in  the  same  year  as  economic 
adviser  to  the  governor  of  the  Bank  of 
England.  Temperamentally  Clay  and  Nor- 
man were  poles  apart:  the  governor  a 
prima  donna,  Clay  gentle,  scholarly,  sensi- 
tive, and  undogmatic.  Yet  in  many  ways 
their  views  ran  parallel  and  Clay's  prag- 
matic capacity  for  swift  and  clear  drafts- 
manship must  have  been  a  godsend  to 
Norman  whose  inadequacy  in  expression 
was  in  sharp  contrast  to  his  considerable 
powers   of  thought   and   decision.   They 
shared  the  opinion  that,  necessary  as  was 
a  proper  financial  and  monetary  frame- 
work, financial  ingenuity  by  Governments 
could  do  little  to  raise  standards  of  living 
which    would    be    determined    by    good 
organization,    hard   thinking,    and   hard 
work.  If  both  men  underestimated  the 
value  of  the  ideas  which  J.  M.  (later  Lord) 
Keynes    [q.v.]   was   then   disseminating, 
they  shared  the  anxiety  that  policies  of 
full  employment  carried  with  them  the 
constant  dangers  of  inflation.  Clay  pleaded 
for  a  reduction  in  governmtent  expendi- 
ture, the  balancing  of  budgets,  and  the 
retention  of  the  gold  standard.  He  believed 
with  Norman  that  a  stable  exchange  was 
possible  only  if  British  export  industries 
could  be  made  more  efficient;  that  the 
best  way  of  salvaging  them  was  by  drastic 
rationalization ;  and  that  the  Bank  should 
support  by  financing,  as  well  as  investigat- 
ing and  sponsoring,  schemes  of  amalgama- 
tion and  re-equipment. 

With  Lord  Stamp  [q.v.].  Clay  was  one 
of  the  most  active  in  the  establishment 
(1938)  of  the  National  Institute  of  Eco- 
nomic and  Social  Research  and  he  guided 
its  research  as  chairman  of  its  council 
(1940-49)  and  later  president  (1949-52). 
On  the  outbreak  of  war  Stamp  was  called 
upon  by  the  Government  to  produce  a 
broad  survey  of  national  economic  re- 
sources and  Clay  and  (Sir)  Hubert  Hender- 
son [q.v,]  were  his  chief  assistants  in  an 


organization  which  became  the  forerunner 
of  the  economic  section  and  the  Central 
Statistical  Office  in  the  Cabinet  Secretariat. 
After  Stamp  was  killed  in  an  air-raid  in 
1941,  Clay  went  to  the  Board  of  Trade  as 
economic  adviser  and  later  to  the  Ministry 
of  War  Transport. 

In  1944  Clay  left  Whitehall  to  become 
the  second  warden  of  Nuffield  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  took  particular  pleasure 
in  the  appointment  of  visiting  fellows 
chosen  for  their  practical  experience  in  the 
professions,  industry,  or  commerce.  Clay 
was  successful  in  gaining  the  confidence  of 
Lord  Nuffield  who  was  not  at  that  stage 
entirely  happy  about  the  development  of 
his  benefaction.  The  foundation-stone  of 
the  permanent  building  was  not  laid  imtil 
1949  just  before  Clay  retired;  his  suc- 
cess as  warden,  especially  with  those  small 
groups  with  which  he  was  always  happiest, 
was  despite  the  temporary  and  limited 
premises  in  which  the  college  was  forced 
to  operate. 

Clay  had  been  knighted  in  1946  and  on 
his  retirement  from  the  wardenship  of 
Nuffield  he  continued  to  enjoy  a  busy  life. 
He  became  part-time  economic  adviser 
to  Unilever;  he  pursued  his  work  on  a 
biography  of  Lord  Norman  and  he  was 
actively  engaged  in  the  collection  and 
editing  of  Sir  Hubert  Henderson's  papers. 
Clay's  writings  from  his  first  and 
famous  book  in  1916  to  the  papers  un- 
finished at  his  death  show  the  main  line  of 
his  thinking  unbroken.  Private  enterprise 
he  believed  was  the  most  efficient  method 
of  producing  goods.  He  was  a  Gladstonian 
Liberal  who,  whilst  recognizing  that  he 
was  Uving  in  the  twentieth  century,  felt 
that  the  liberty  of  the  individual  would 
be  endangered  by  the  continued  growth 
of  government  economic  activities.  Clay's 
friendliness  and  the  complete  absence  of 
stridency  in  whatever  he  said  or  wrote 
tended  to  conceal  the  strength  of  his  con- 
victions. His  views  diverged  from  the 
main  stream  of  contemporary  Liberal 
economic  thought  in  at  least  two  ways :  in 
his  doubts  about  the  practical  results  of 
Keynes's  views  on  full  employment  or 
more  especially  of  the  views  of  some  of 
Keynes's  disciples;  secondly,  concerning 
industrial  monopoly.  Clay  was  not  pre- 
pared to  agree  that  a  competitive  system 
would  inevitably  degenerate  into  mono- 
poly unless  safeguarded  by  the  State: 
anti-monopoly  legislation  in  his  view  was 
unnecessary,  inexpedient,  and  inequitable. 
Clay's  greatest  joys  were  found  in  his 
family  circle.  In  1910  he  had  married 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Clerk 


Gladys,  the  eldest  daughter  of  Arthur 
Priestman,  a  worsted  manufacturer,  of 
Bradford,  by  whom  he  had  three  sons  and 
a  daughter.  Clay  had  a  passion  for  sailing 
and  the  whole  family  would  be  taken, 
first  on  the  Broads;  later,  on  more  ven- 
turesome journeys  on  the  high  seas.  Out- 
side this  intimate  family  group  was  a  vast 
circle  of  friends  drawn  by  the  charm  of  his 
wife  and  by  Henry  Clay's  own  kindness, 
modesty,  and  most  entertaining  conversa- 
tional gifts.  Although  in  later  years  he 
became  something  of  a  man  of  affairs,  he 
retained  the  habits  and  enthusiasms  of  the 
scholar ;  nor  might  he  be  mistaken  for  any- 
thing else.  Outside  economics,  Clay  was 
especially  interested  in  architecture,  paint- 
ing, and  music.  He  could  never  resist  a 
second-hand  bookshelf  and  he  collected  a 
large  library  which  included  many  bar- 
gains. His  personal  needs  reflected  his  solid 
Yorkshire  upbringing  and  Henry  Clay  was 
the  most  economical  of  men.  His  first  wife 
died  in  1941.  In  1951  he  married  Rosalind, 
widow  of  E.  Murray  Wrong  (the  son  of 
G.  M.  Wrong,  q.v.)  and  daughter  of  A.  L. 
Smith  [q.v.],  sometime  master  of  Balliol. 
They  spent  three  extremely  happy  years 
together  before  his  death,  30  July  1954,  as 
a  result  of  a  street  accident  in  Holland 
where  he  had  gone  to  join  his  children  for 
a  North  Sea  trip  in  the  family  yacht. 

There  is  a  drawing  at  Nuffield  College 
by  Kenneth  Knowles. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

John  Jewkes. 

Sylvia  Jewkes. 

CLERK,  Sir  GEORGE  RUSSELL  (1874- 
1951),  diplomatist,  was  born  in  India  29 
November  1874,  the  only  child  of  (General 
Sir)  Godfrey  Clerk,  later  commandant  of 
the  Rifle  Brigade  and  groom-in-waiting 
to  Queen  Victoria  and  King  Edward  VII, 
and  his  wife,  Alice  Mary,  daughter  of 
William  Edward  Frere,  of  the  Bombay 
Civil  Service.  He  was  educated  at  Eton 
and  New  College,  Oxford,  where  he  ob- 
tained a  third  class  in  literae  humani- 
ores  (1897),  and  after  studying  foreign 
languages  abroad  passed  into  the  Foreign 
Office  in  1898.  In  1903-7  he  served  at  his 
own  request  as  assistant  in  the  British 
Agency  in  Abyssinia,  where  he  gained 
much  useful  experience,  and  a  knowledge 
of  Amharic,  while  in  charge  of  the  mission 
for  long  periods.  His  next  post  abroad  was 
in  1910  when  he  went  as  first  secretary  to 
the  embassy  in  Constantinople  where  in 
his  spare  time  he  learnt  Turkish.  He  re- 
joined the  Foreign  Office  in  1912  and  in 


the  next  year  attended  the  fifth  inter- 
national congress  for  the  suppression  of 
the  white  slave  traffic.  In  October  1913  he 
was  promoted  to  be  a  senior  clerk. 

Appointed  head  of  the  new  war  depart- 
ment of  the  Foreign  Office  in  1914,  Clerk 
had  in  a  measure  greatness  thrust  upon 
him  and  was  enabled  to  get  to  know  count- 
less foreigners  who  in  normal  times  would 
have  dealt  with  under-secretaries.  In 
January  1917  he  attended  the  Rome  con- 
ference where  the  principal  Allies  examined 
the  military  situation  in  Salonica  and 
Macedonia  and  planned  the  military  and 
naval  campaigns  for  1917.  Thence  he  went 
with  Lord  Milner  [q.v.]  on  his  mission  to 
Russia  on  the  eve  of  the  revolution.  In 
1919  he  was  private  secretary  to  Lord 
Curzon  [q.v.],  but  with  three  senior  under- 
secretaries absent  in  Paris  he  was  in  prac- 
tice under-secretary.  In  September  of  that 
year  he  was  appointed  the  first  British 
minister  to  the  newly  created  Czecho- 
slovak republic.  But  before  going  to 
Prague  he  was  sent  as  representative  of 
the  Supreme  Council  at  the  Paris  peace 
conference  to  Bucharest  where  the  out- 
look was  menacing  since  the  Romanians 
by  invading  Hungary  and  occupying 
Budapest  were  in  head-on  collision  with 
the  Council.  Clerk's  immediate  task  was 
to  secure  Romania's  evacuation  of  Hun- 
gary, the  immediate  cessation  of  all 
requisitioning  there,  the  jettisoning  of  her 
claim  to  the  whole  of  the  Banat,  and  co- 
operation with  the  Allies  in  restoring 
order  and  responsible  government.  M. 
Bratiano,  the  Romanian  negotiator,  while 
agreeable  in  his  talks  with  Clerk,  gave  vent 
to  his  anger  with  the  Allies  over  parti- 
tioning the  Banat  and  any  treaty  about 
minority  rights  in  Romania.  Clerk  re- 
turned to  Paris  where  he  expressed  his 
opinion  that  the  Romanian  evacuation  of 
Budapest  might  well  endanger  public 
order.  After  new  elections  in  Romania, 
however,  and  an  ultimatum  by  the 
Supreme  Council,  the  rejection  of  which 
would  have  isolated  their  country,  the 
Romanians  capitulated  and  signed  the 
minorities  treaty.  Clerk's  mission  to  Buda- ' 
pest  in  October-December  of  the  same 
year  was  far  more  fruitful.  His  objective 
was  to  secure  order  in  the  Hungarian 
chaos  after  months  of  Bolshevism  and 
Romanian  occupation,  and  to  induce  the 
Hungarians  to  form  a  government  which 
the  Entente  could  recognize  so  that  peace 
negotiations  might  continue.  All  this 
Clerk  obtained  by  a  display  of  tact, 
sympathy,  firmness,  and  patience  which 


229 


Clerk 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


entitled  him  to  the  gratitude  not  only  of 
Hungary  but  of  Europe  itself,  and  earned 
him  the  expression  of  M.  Clemenceau's 
'entire  satisfaction  with  the  remarkable 
success  of  your  mission'. 

In  1926  Clerk  succeeded  Sir  Ronald 
Lindsay  [q.v.]  as  ambassador  to  Turkey 
and  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council.  Rela- 
tions with  Britain  were  far  from  good 
since  the  Nationalist  Party  had  not  for- 
gotten Britain's  moral  support  of  the 
Greek  invasion  of  Anatolia  in  1919.  But 
Clerk  soon  established  personal  friendship 
with  Mustapha  Kemal  and  was  not  long 
in  allaying  all  suspicion  and  gaining  the 
confidence  of  the  Turkish  Government. 
His  appointment  to  Brussels  in  October 
1933  caused  much  disappointment  to 
Turkish  officialdom  and  the  British 
colony.  In  April  1934,  to  Clerk's  amaze- 
ment and  delight,  he  was  transferred  to 
Paris.  To  follow  Lord  Tyrrell  [q.v.]  was 
far  from  easy ;  but  he  rose  to  the  occasion. 
The  Italo-Abyssinian  war,  the  Spanish 
civil  war,  violation  of  the  Treaty  of  Ver- 
sailles, all  called  for  exceptional  qualities, 
and  Clerk's  ability  and  tact  responded 
admirably.  His  obvious  affection  for 
France  and  his  well-known  conviction  that 
Anglo-French  ties  of  cordial  friendship 
were  vital  made  his  departure  on  his  re- 
tirement in  1937  a  matter  of  keen  regret. 
He  was  intensely  pleased  by  a  farewell 
message  from  the  secretary  of  state, 
Anthony  Eden  (later  the  Earl  of  Avon), 
which  paid  tribute  to  the  success  of  his 
mission  in  Paris  and  to  his  long  years  of 
meritorious  service. 

Clerk  must  have  seemed  to  any  writer 
or  caricaturist  the  beau  id^al  of  diploma- 
tists. Tall,  thin,  with  a  good  figure,  always 
faultlessly  dressed,  with  his  eye-glass  so 
much  a  part  of  him  that  it  needed  no 
ribbon,  he  would  be  noticeable  ia  any 
gathering,  and  if  addressed  would  at  once 
put  the  stranger  at  ease  by  his  welcoming 
smile.  Tactful  and  sympathetic,  he  was  an 
able  negotiator.  Always  adhering  to  his 
own  carefully  considered  opinion,  he  was 
yet  able  to  settle  many  difficult  and 
dangerous  questions  by  his  understanding 
nature  which  was  neither  grasping  nor 
hectoring.  His  main  relaxations  were 
stalking  and  shooting,  fly-fishing  and 
yachting;  he  also  played  bridge.  These 
pastimes  were  never  allowed  to  interfere 
with  his  official  duties;  but  he  set  great 
store  by  them,  being  convinced  that  they 
enabled  him  to  have  unusually  close  rela- 
tions with  the  local  authorities  and  diplo- 
matic colleagues. 


Clerk  was  appointed  C.M.G.  (1908), 
K.C.M.G.  (1917),  G.C.M.G.  (1929),  and 
C.B.  (1914).  He  was  a  vice-president  of 
the  Royal  Geographical  Society,  an 
honorary  fellow  of  New  College,  and  re- 
ceived a  number  of  foreign  decorations. 

In  1908  he  married  Janet  Muriel,  daugh- 
ter of  Edward  Robson  Whitwell,  of  Yarm- 
on-Tees,  Yorkshire ;  they  had  no  children. 
He  died  in  London  18  June  1951. 

[The  Times,  20  June  1951 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Lancelot  Oliphant. 

CLOSE,  Sir  CHARLES  FREDERICK 
ARDEN-  (1865-1952),  geographer.  [See 
Arden-Close.] 

CLUNIES  ROSS,  Sir  IAN  (1899-1959), 
veterinary  scientist  and  scientific  ad- 
ministrator. [See  Ross.] 

CLYDESMUIR,  first  Baron  (1894-1954), 
public  servant.  [See  Colville,  David 
John.] 

COATES,  ERIC  (1886-1957),  composer, 
was  born  27  August  1886  in  Hucknall, 
Nottinghamshire,  the  younger  son  and 
youngest  of  the  five  children  of  William 
Harrison  Coates,  a  skilled  surgeon  and  a 
notable  personality  greatly  loved  by  the 
mainly  mining  community.  From  him 
Eric  inherited  his  lifelong  interest  in 
photography  and  his  aesthetic  apprecia- 
tion. His  mother,  Mary  Jane  Gwyn 
Blower,  herself  an  artistic  amateur  singer 
and  pianist,  contributed  the  Welsh  strain 
responsible  largely  for  the  musicality 
which  showed  itself  at  an  early  age.  He 
demanded  his  first  violin  when  only  six; 
by  the  age  of  thirteen  his  attainments 
warranted  lessons  from  Georg  Ellen- 
berger  in  Nottingham.  Later,  to  complete 
an  amateur  ensemble,  he  took  up  the 
viola.  He  had  been  intended  for  a  com- 
mercial career  but  in  1906  his  parents 
reluctantly  allowed  him  to  enter  the 
Royal  Academy  of  Music  where  Sir 
Alexander  Mackenzie  [q.v.],  on  hearing 
his  settings  of  poems  by  Robert  Burns, 
assigned  him  to  Frederick  Corder  for 
composition  as  his  first  study  and  to 
Lionel  Tertis  for  viola.  Many  evenings 
became  occupied  in  playing  in  various 
London  theatres  where  he  gained  ex- 
perience of  practical  orchestration  and 
skilful  arranging  which  later  stood  him  in 
good  stead  as  a  composer.  This  led  to 
engagements  to  play  under  (Sir)  Thomas 
Beecham ;  and  from  1910  for  nine  years  he 


230 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cobb 


was  successively  sub-principal,  then  princi- 
pal, viola  in  the  Queen's  Hall  Orchestra 
under  Sir  Henry  Wood  [q.v.].  While  still 
a  student  he  had  toured  South  Africa  as 
viola  in  the  Hambourg  String  Quartet 
which  added  much  chamber  music  to 
his  repertoire  while  releasing  him  from 
the  drudgery  of  the  theatre  pit  which 
aggravated  the  neuritis  increasingly 
troubling  his  left  arm. 

Coates's  first  real  song  hit,  'Stone- 
cracker  John',  appeared  in  1909  and  the 
orchestral  Miniature  Suite  was  launched 
by  Wood  at  the  promenade  concerts  in 
1911.  In  1919,  having  established  himself 
as  a  successful  composer  of  songs  and  of 
excellent  light  music  in  the  line  of  Sir 
Arthur  Sullivan  and  (Sir)  Edward  German 
[qq.v.],  he  gave  up  playing ;  but  he  often 
conducted  his  works  in  Scarborough, 
Hastings,  and  other  resorts  which  then 
boasted  orchestras  of  considerable  size,  as 
well  as  in  London  and  Bournemouth. 
Attractive  and  popular  though  his  music 
was  proving,  it  was  the  selection  by 
the  British  Broadcasting  Corporation  of 
'Knightsbridge  March'  from  the  London 
Suite  to  usher  in  'In  Town  Tonight'  in 
1933  which  suddenly  made  people  con- 
scious of  Coates  as  a  composer  of  exhila- 
rating marches.  His  wartime  'Calling 
all  Workers'  had  a  similar  and  lasting 
success.  The  romantic  serenade  'By  the 
Sleepy  Lagoon'  written  in  1930  achieved 
widespread  popularity  in  the  United 
States  in  the  late  thirties  and  subse- 
quently in  Britain  and  all  over  the 
world. 

Although  a  lover  of  the  peace  and  quiet 
of  the  country,  Eric  Coates  found  London 
with  its  ceaseless  bustle  of  activity  a  more 
congenial  place  in  which  to  compose.  He 
was  a  first-class  craftsman.  Characteristic 
of  his  music  are  its  freshness,  melodious- 
ness, gaiety,  charm,  and  infectious  rhythm. 
While  it  has  an  English  flavour  its 
language  is  so  universal  that  it  is  popular 
in  every  country  where  western  music  is 
heard.  He  introduced  the  syncopation  of 
modern  jazz  into  many  works  which  are 
thus  very  effective  when  played  by  large 
dance-type  orchestras.  His  personal  charm 
and  humour  were  known  to  a  vast  public 
before  whom,  in  concerts  or  on  radio  or 
television,  he  conducted  his  music  in  many 
countries  in  Europe  and  the  Americas. 
That  he  received  no  official  recognition 
would  not  have  worried  him  for  he  was 
too  busy  encouraging  and  helping  younger 
talent.  He  was  a  founder-member  and 
director  of  the  Performing  Right  Society 


of  which  in  post-war  years  he  proved  to 
be  an  able  and  diplomatic  delegate  at 
international  conferences  as  well  as  a 
conscientious  member  of  its  board. 

In  his  autobiography.  Suite  in  Four 
Movements  (1953),  Coates  tells  his  per- 
sonal love  story:  in  1911  he  met  a  young 
fellow  student,  Phyllis,  daughter  of 
Francis  Black,  R.B.A.,  who  was  later  to 
become  a  successful  actress ;  it  was  a  case 
of  love  at  first  sight.  Two  years  later, 
parental  objections  overcome,  they  mar- 
ried and  so  began  a  partnership  which 
lasted  until  he  died  in  London  21  Decem- 
ber 1957.  Their  only  child,  Austin,  for 
whom  the  'Three  Bears'  fantasy  was 
written,  became  a  successful  writer. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Kenneth  Wright. 

COBB,  JOHN  RHODES  (1899-1952), 
racing  motorist,  was  born  at  Hackbridge, 
Surrey,  2  December  1899,  the  youngest 
son  of  Rhodes  Cobb,  fur  broker,  and  his 
wife,  Florence  Goad.  He  was  educated  at 
Eton  and  Trinity  Hall,  Cambridge,  and 
went  into  his  father's  business  with  the 
fur  trade  which  took  him  at  intervals  to 
Russia.  Since  his  home  was  at  Esher,  no 
great  distance  from  Brooklands,  his  in- 
terest in  car  racing  began  at  a  very  early 
age  and  developed  gradually  into  a  de- 
termination to  drive  the  fastest  cars 
available.  When  the  opportunity  occurred 
it  was  typical  that  he  drove  a  monstrous 
pre-war  Fiat,  which  was  not  only  very 
fast  but  none  too  easy  to  handle,  instead 
of  the  smaller  cars  with  which  most 
drivers  begin.  John  Cobb  was  a  big  man 
and  it  was  in  keeping  that  he  was  at  his 
best  with  very  large  cars. 

After  his  first  race  in  1925  Cobb  pro- 
gressed rapidly,  and  having  acquired  an- 
other big  car,  built  by  Delage,  he  achieved 
part  of  his  ambition  by  breaking  the  outer 
circuit  lap  record  at  Brooklands  in  1929 
with  an  average  of  13211  m.p.h.  To  this 
record  he  clung  with  admirable  tenacity. 
Time  after  time  a  rival  bettered  the 
figures;  time  after  time  Cobb  did  better 
still.  When  the  Delage  could  go  no  faster 
Reid  A.  Railton  designed  the  even 
larger  Napier-Railton  and  with  this  Cobb 
achieved  the  lap  records  of  139-71  m.p.h. 
and  140-93  m.p.h.,  both  in  1934,  and,  in 
1935,  143-44  m.p.h.  He  also  broke  many 
world  records  including  those  for  twelve 
and  twenty-four  hours  and  crowned  his 
success  by  winning  the  500-mile  race  at 
Brooklands  in  1935  and  1937  with  the 
same  car. 


231 


Cobb 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


The  summit  of  Cobb's  ambition  was 
reached  when,  with  a  twin-engined  car 
specially  designed  by  Railton,  he  broke 
the  world's  land-speed  record  at  Bonne- 
ville salt  flats  in  1938  at  350-2  m.p.h., 
in  1939  at  369-74  m.p.h.,  and  in  1947 
at  394-2  m.p.h.  During  the  two  runs 
necessary  for  the  last  record  one  was 
timed  at  over  400  m.p.h.  For  his  achieve- 
ments Cobb  was  awarded  the  Segrave 
Trophy  for  1947  and  the  British  Racing 
Drivers'  Club  gold  star  in  1935  and  1937. 

Cobb  had  always  taken  an  interest  in 
flying  and  during  the  war  of  1939-45  he 
served  in  the  Royal  Air  Force  and  Air 
Transport  Auxiliary.  He  later  turned  to 
high-speed  motor  boats  and  attempted  to 
raise  the  water-speed  record  to  200  m.p.h. 
On  29  September  1952  he  had  reached 
that  speed  on  Loch  Ness  when  his  boat 
submerged  and  disintegrated  and  he  was 
killed.  Possessed  of  courage  and  skill 
beyond  the  ordinary,  he  had  never  allowed 
his  success  and  its  attendant  publicity  to 
spoil  a  friendly  and  lovable  character. 

Cobb  married  first,  in  1947,  Elizabeth 
Mitchell-Smith  (died  1948);  secondly,  in 
1950,  Vera  Henderson.  There  were  no 
children. 

[S.  C.  H.  Davis,  The  John  Cobb  Story,  1953 ; 
personal  knowledge.]  S.  C.  H.  Davis. 

COCHRAN,     Sm    CHARLES    BLAKE 

(1872-1951),  showman,  was  born  25 
September  1872  in  Brighton.  It  was 
probably  his  sense  of  showmanship  which 
caused  him  to  claim  Lindfield,  Sussex, 
where  he  spent  many  early  holidays  with 
his  grandfather,  as  his  birthplace.  His 
father,  James  Elphinstone  Cochran,  was  a 
tea  merchant  and  a  keen  theatre-  and  race- 
goer. His  mother,  Matilda  Walton,  daugh- 
ter of  a  Merchant  Navy  officer,  was  the 
widow  of  a  Mr.  Arnold  by  the  time  she  was 
twenty-one.  She  lived  to  be  ninety.  By  her 
first  marriage  she  had  one  son,  and  by  her 
second  nine  children,  of  whom  Charles  was 
the  fourth. 

Cochran  was  educated  at  Brighton 
Grammar  School  where,  on  his  first  day,  he 
met  Aubrey  Beardsley  [q.v.],  with  whom 
he  came  to  share  a  study.  Later,  through 
Aubrey's  sister,  Mabel,  Cochran  met  the 
Yellmv  Book  circle  including  Walter 
Sickert,  (Sir)  Max  Beerbohm,  (Sir)  Wil- 
liam Rothenstein  [qq.v.],  Ernest  Dowson, 
and  others.  But  all  this  was  after  a  lapse 
of  years.  In  1891  he  went  to  New  York. 
Cochran  had  always  been  a  worshipper  of 
the  stars  of  the  stage  and  circus.  Money 
meant  nothing  to  him — then  or  at  any 


other  time.  It  was  as  an  actor  that  he 
hoped  to  make  his  name.  In  this  he  was 
unsuccessful,  so  much  so  that  the  Chicago 
World  Fair  found  him  selling  fountain- 
pens.  Eventually,  he  managed  to  secure 
a  part  with  the  actor-manager  Richard 
Mansfield,  who  told  him  that  he  would 
never  be  a  good  actor,  but,  sensing  his 
managerial  ability,  made  Cochran  his 
private  secretary.  Through  this  associa- 
tion came  much  experience  and  many 
stage  contacts. 

After  some  time  Cochran  quarrelled 
with  Mansfield  and  in  partnership  with 
E.  J.  Henley  opened  a  school  of  acting  in 
New  York.  In  1897  he  made  his  first 
production,  Ibsen's  John  Gabriel  Bork- 
man.  In  the  same  year  Cochran  returned 
to  London,  working  as  a  journalist  and 
developing  his  natural  flair  for  publicity. 
But  the  theatre  won,  as  always,  and  seeing 
a  production  of  Cyrano  de  Bergerac  in 
Paris,  he  conceived  the  idea  of  Mansfield's 
playing  it  in  New  York.  This  was  one  of 
the  earliest  instances  of  Cochran's  ability 
to  star  an  actor  in  the  right  vehicle.  The 
quarrel  was  quickly  made  up,  and 
Cochran  returned  to  the  States  as  Mans- 
field's manager. 

Yet  again  Cochran  preferred  to  stand 
on  his  own  feet.  Returning  once  more  to 
London,  he  set  up  as  a  theatrical  agent, 
earning  gradual   success   as   a  promoter 
of  boxing    and   wrestling   matches    and 
outstanding     music-hall     acts    such     as 
Houdini    the    escapist    and    the    great 
wrestler  Georges  Hackenschmidt,  whom 
he  matched  at  Olympia  in  1904  against 
Ahmed  Madrali,  the  'Terrible  Turk'.  His 
first  London  production,  a  farce  called 
Sporting  Simpson  at  the  Royalty  Theatre  i 
in  1902,  was  a  failure ;  so  was  his  second 
attempt  at  the  same  theatre.  Lyre  and 
Lancet.    By    1903    he    had    been    made 
bankrupt  for  the  first  time,  from  which 
position   he   was    quickly  extricated  by 
Hackenschmidt.    Cochran's    instinct    for 
entertainment  now  induced  him  to  pro- 
mote all  kinds  of  ventures,  from  pygmies 
to  roller-skating  (which  became  a  craze  i 
from  1909  imtil  the  outbreak  of  war),  aj 
well    as    circuses    at   Earl's    Court    anc 
Olympia  in  1912-13.  His  greatest  produc 
tion  of  those  years  was  Max  Reinhardt' 
The  Miracle  which  opened  at  Olympia  oi 
Christmas   Eve,    1911.   This   tremendou 
spectacle  was  not  the  immediate  success  i, 
should  have  been  until  Lord  Northcliff 
[q.v.]  hammered  it  home  every  day  i 
the  Daily  Mail.  From  that  time  on  thj 
eulogies  Cochran  received  from  the  Nortl 


232 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cochran 


cliffe  press  were  offset  by  his  more  critical 
reception  by  other  popular  newspapers. 

From  boxing,  roller-skating,  and  spec- 
tacle, Cochran  turned  to  revue,  still  a 
novelty  during  the  war  years.  Beginning 
in  a  small  way  with  Odds  and  Ends  (1914) 
at  the  Ambassadors  Theatre,  which  intro- 
duced Alice  Delysia  to  London  audiences, 
he  continued  at  the  Empire  with  Irving 
BerUn's  Watch  Your  Step  (1915).  As  an 
antidote,  he  produced  two  sociological 
plays  by  Brieux,  Damaged  Goods  (1917) 
and  The  Three  Daughters  of  M.  Dupont 
(1917).  In  1917,  at  the  Oxford  Theatre, 
he  put  on  The  Better  'Ole,  the  farce  by 
Bruce  Bairnsfather  [q.v.],  which  attained 
the  run  of  811  performances,  exceeded 
only  by  Bless  the  Bride  in  1947-9,  Coch- 
ran's longest  run.  Both  shows  started 
slowly  and  built  up.  In  1918  Cochran 
redecorated  and  reopened  the  London 
Pavilion,  with  As  You  Were,  followed 
during  the  ensuing  decade  by  a  whole 
string  of  successful  revues,  including 
London,  Paris  and  New  York  (1920) ;  Fun 
of  the  Fayre  (1921);  Dover  Street  to  Dixie 
(1923),  featuring  the  American  singer 
Florence  Mills;  One  Dam  Thing  After 
Another  (1927),  with  a  score  by  Rodgers 
and  Hart ;  and  Cochran's  1930  Revue,  with 
many  members  of  the  lately  defunct 
Diaghilev  ballet.  Between  these  activities, 
Cochran  presented  The  League  of  Notions, 
a  revue  introducing  the  Dolly  Sisters  at 
the  New  Oxford  Theatre  in  1921.  The 
redecorating  of  the  theatre  alone  cost 
£80,000  of  his  own  money.  The  sump- 
tuous Mayfair  and  Montmartre  (1922),  a 
revue  containing  a  sketch  debunking  the 
dramatic  critics,  who  resented  it,  showed 
losses  amounting  to  £20,000.  In  order  to 
recoup,  he  put  on  six  successful  American 
productions  in  1923 — including  Eugene 
O'Neill's  Anna  Christie — none  of  which 
was  particularly  successful  in  London.  In 
1925  Cochran  was  made  bankrupt  for  the 
second  time.  Such  was  his  personal  mag- 
netism that  both  Alice  Delysia  and  the 
Dolly  Sisters  offered  to  sell  their  jewels  in 
order  to  save  him. 

Prior  to  this  Cochran  had  given  London 
Sarah  Bernhardt's  last  season,  at  the 
Prince's  Theatre;  Eleanora  Duse  at 
matinees  and  Sacha  Guitry  in  the  even- 
ings at  the  New  Oxford;  two  Chaliapin 
appearances  at  the  Albert  Hall;  the 
Chauve  Souris  company  at  the  Pavilion, 
and  a  season  of  Diaghilev  ballet  at  the 
Prince's,  in  which  Stravinsky's  music  met 
with  much  critical  disapproval.  In  boxing, 
he  promoted  the  Wells-Beckett  and  the 


Beckett-Carpentier  fights  at  the  Holbom 
Stadium  (1919),  and  preliminary  negotia- 
tions for  the  famous  Carpentier-Dempsey 
fight  (1921).  Disgusted  by  the  crookedness 
of  boxing  promotion  and  after  an  unfor- 
tunate rodeo  season  at  Wembley  (1924), 
and  an  equally  unprofitable  presentation 
of  Suzanne  Lenglen  in  tennis  exhibitions 
all  over  the  country,  Cochran  in  future 
confined  himself,  more  or  less,  to  the  stage. 
His  enthusiasms  were  easily  aroused,  but 
once  damped,  nothing  could  rekindle 
them. 

Discharged  from  bankruptcy,  penniless 
but  ebullient,  Cochran  wrote  his  first  book 
of  memoirs.  The  Secrets  of  a  Showman 
(1925).  With  the  proceeds,  a  cabaret  at 
the  Trocadero,  and  backing  which  was 
never  lacking,  Cochran  began  his  asso- 
ciation with  (Sir)  Noel  Coward  with  On 
With  The  Dance  (1925)  at  the  London 
Pavilion  (the  first  show  to  feature  *Mr. 
Cochran's  Young  Ladies').  Then  came 
their  brilliant  partiiership  in  This  Year 
of  Grace  (1928)  and  Bitter  Sweet  (1929). 
In  1930  came  Private  Lives,  with  Noel 
Coward  and  Gertrude  Lawrence  [q.v.]  in 
the  leads,  and  in  the  same  year  New  York 
saw  all  three  shows.  The  climax  of  this 
association  was  reached  in  1931  with 
Cavalcade  at  Drury  Lane.  Meanwhile 
Cochran  had  presented  a  Pirandello 
season ;  Sean  O'Casey's  The  Silver  Tassie 
(1929) ;  the  Lunts  in  a  play  called  Caprice 
(1929)  at  the  St.  James's ;  the  revue  Wake 
up  and  Dream  (1929)  which  also  went 
to  America;  and  Evergreen  (1930),  with 
Jessie  Matthews,  and  the  first  use  of  a  re- 
volving stage  in  London. 

Next  came  Cochran's  association  and 
friendship  with  (Sir)  A.  P.  Herbert,  begin- 
ning in  1932  with  the  production  of  Helen 
at  the  Adelphi,  with  Evelyn  Laye  in  the 
title  role,  (Sir)  George  Robey  [q.v.],  and 
superb  decor  by  Oliver  Messel.  Five  other 
shows  in  that  season  alone  were  Dinner  at 
Eight,  The  Cat  and  the  Fiddle,  Words  and 
Music,  the  Sacha  Guitry  season,  and  a 
revival  of  The  Miracle,  with  Lady  Diana 
Cooper  as  the  Madonna.  The  year  1933  saw 
EUsabeth  Bergner  in  Escape  Me  Never 
and  Cole  Porter's  Nymph  Errant;  1934, 
Coward's  Conversation  Piece,  the  revue 
Streamline,  the  end  of  the  London  Pavilion 
as  a  theatre  and  the  break  with  Coward, 
both  bitter  blows. 

Then  came  the  lean  years.  The  Boy 
David  (1936),  Barrie's  last  play,  with 
Elisabeth  Bergner,  was  not  a  success.  Nor, 
in  1937,  were  the  coronation  revue.  Home 
and  Beauty,  and  Lehar's  Paganini,  with 


Cochran 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Richard  Tauber.  A  trip  to  America  proved 
financially  abortive.  His  wartime  shows 
did  not  fare  well.  Frank  Collins,  his  stage 
director  for  twenty-eight  years,  took  a  job 
with  E.N.S.A.  Cochran  wrote  more  books 
of  reminiscence :  his  usual  practice  when 
things  were  at  a  low  ebb.  He  and  his  wife 
faced  the  London  blitz  from  a  furnished 
flat  in  St.  James's  Court.  Crippled  by 
arthritis,  he  was  full  of  plans  for  the 
future.  Gone  were  the  house  in  Montagu 
Street,  the  crowds  of  hangers-on,  the 
Impressionist  pictures  (bought  long  before 
Impressionism  was  fashionable),  the  butler 
and  the  exquisite  china ;  but  he  remained 
the  grand  seigneur,  investing  a  sugarless 
bun  with  jam  while  his  wife  apologized  for 
the  tea  cups. 

After  the  war  Cochran  staged  his  last 
great  come-back.  In  1946,  with  some 
money  for  a  film  of  his  life  which,  charac- 
teristically, was  never  made,  he  com- 
missioned Sir  A.  P.  Herbert  and  Vivian 
Ellis  to  write  the  Ught  opera  Big  Ben. 
The  opening  night  at  the  Adelphi  was 
attended  by  the  Princess  Elizabeth,  the 
prime  minister  and  half  the  Cabinet,  in 
fact  by  everyone  except  the  inspiration  of 
it  all  who  lay  desperately  ill  at  his  flat. 
A  fortnight  after  the  removal  of  a  kidney, 
stiU  in  bed,  weak  but  ever  courageous,  he 
commissioned  Bless  the  Bride  by  the  same 
team  for  the  same  theatre.  By  1947  he 
had  a  partner,  Lord  Vivian.  'My  en- 
thusiasm over  Bless  the  Bride  mounts 
hourly — I  have  a  terrific  hunch',  wrote 
Cochran,  after  a  famous  actress  and  an 
equally  well-known  producer  had  utterly 
condemned  it.  That  is  a  measure  of  the 
man's  dogged  enthusiasm  at  the  age  of 
seventy-four.  His  faith  was  rewarded  by 
a  run  of  886  performances  which  would 
have  been  even  longer  had  not  Cochran, 
always  impatient  to  produce  something 
new,  withdrawn  Bless  the  Bride  to  make 
way  for  Tough  at  the  Top  in  1949.  This,  the 
last  of  his  big  spectacular  shows,  was  a 
failure. 

Cochran  was  at  various  times  the  chair- 
man and  managing  director  of  the  Palace 
Theatre,  manager  of  the  Royal  Albert 
Hall,  president  of  the  Actors'  Benevolent 
Fund,  and  a  governor  of  the  Shakespeare 
Memorial  theatre.  He  was  knighted  in 
1948  and  appointed  a  chevalier  of  the 
Legion  of  Honour  in  1950.  In  appearance 
rubicund  but  urbane,  he  was  always 
inmiaculately  dressed.  He  usually  wore 
a  trilby  hat  at  an  angle.  In  later  years 
he  sported  a  monocle  and,  of  necessity, 
a  walking-stick.  Somewhat  awesome  to 


meet,  he  disarmed  the  timid  by  his  cour- 
teous manner.  He  always  answered  letters. 
He  was  calm  in  a  crisis  and  seldom  raised 
his  voice.  He  was  nothing  if  not  generous, 
and  like  most  of  his  friends  a  bon  viveur. 
When  things  were  good,  he  resembled  a 
rooster ;  when  bad,  a  benign  bishop.  At  one 
time  he  used  a  rooster  as  a  monogram.  His 
friends  called  him  'Cockie',  his  enemies  a 
snob,  but  he  himself  preferred  to  be  known 
as  'C.B.'  He  was  an  authority  on  art  and 
all  things  beautiful,  including  the  femi- 
nine. Without  any  great  musical  training, 
he  possessed  a  natural  musical  apprecia- 
tion ;  but  he  had  a  limited  sense  of  humour 
and  his  productions,  always  appealing  to 
the  eye  and  ear,  were  somewhat  weak  in 
comedy.  By  contrast,  Lady  Cochran  was  a 
well-known  wit.  In  a  runaway  marriage  in 
1903  Cochran  married  Evelyn  Alice  (died 
1960),  daughter  of  the  late  Charles  Robert 
Dade,  captain  in  the  Merchant  Service. 
There  were  no  children. 

Unable,  owing  to  his  crippled  condition, 
to  turn  off  the  hot  tap,  Cochran  was 
scalded  in  his  bath  and  died  in  London  a 
week  later,  31  January  1951.  His  vitality, 
in  spite  of  his  arthritis,  was  so  great,  his 
personality  so  vivid,  that  it  seemed  im- 
possible he  could  be  dead.  The  press,  the 
B.B.C.,  and  all  the  celebrities  of  the  stage 
paid  him  tremendous  tributes.  He  ex- 
pressly asked  that  there  should  be  no 
memorial  service.  'Everything',  he  would 
say,  'is  a  nine  days'  wonder'.  But  in  the 
words  of  W.  Macqueen-Pope  [q.v.]  'the 
last  link  with  the  golden  Edwardian  era 
has  been  snapped'.  With  the  passing  of 
Cochran,  the  English  theatre  lost  much  of 
its  taste  and  most  of  its  willingness  to 
elevate  as  well  as  entertain  the  public. 
The  things  he  created  were  of  their 
nature  transient — a  roller-skating  craze ; 
the  golden  age  of  boxing  and  wrestling; 
seasons  of  acting  and  ballet  which  brought 
the  London  stage  into  touch  with  the  best 
of  European  art ;  but  the  sponsorship  of 
talent  in  authorship,  acting,  singing,  and 
dancing  added  lustre  to  the  theatrical 
scene,  even  if  it  did  not  always  profit  the 
managerial   pocket. 

A  bust  of  Cochran  by  Peter  Lambda 
was  placed  in  the  foyer  of  the  Adelphi 
Theatre  and  there  is  a  memorial  panel  in 
St.  Paul's  church,  Covent  Garden.  The 
National  Portrait  Gallery  has  a  drawing 
by  Powys  Evans,  and  a  drawing  by 
Wyndham  Lewis  is  included  in  his  Thirty 
Personalities  and  a  Self-Portrait,  1932. 

[Charles  B.  Cochran,  The  Secrets  of  a  Show- 
man, 1925,  /  Had  Almost  Forgotten  .  .  .,  1932, 


234 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Codner 


Cock-a-Doodle-Do,  1941,  Showman  Looks  On, 
1945;  Charles  Graves,  The  Cochran  Story, 
1951 ;  Vivian  Ellis,  Fm  (m  a  See-Saw,  1953 ; 
personal  knowledge.]  Vivian  Ellis. 

CODNER,     MAURICE     FREDERICK 

(1888-1958),  painter,  w^as  born  in  Stoke 
Newington  27  September  1888,  the  son  of 
William  Squires  Codner,  iron  merchant, 
and  his  wife,  Ada  Mary  Payne.  Educated 
at  the  Stationers'  Company  School  and 
the  Colchester  School  of  Art,  Codner  be- 
came widely  known  for  his  portraits  in 
oils  of  distinguished  men  and  women. 
These  were  exhibited  principally  at  the 
Royal  Society  of  Portrait  Painters,  of 
which  he  was  a  member  and  the  honorary 
secretary,  but  also  at  the  Royal  Academy 
and  many  galleries  at  home  and  abroad. 
His  work  was  always  notable  for  its  sin- 
cerity. He  was  singularly  modest  about  its 
merits  and  in  occasional  moods  of  depres- 
sion would  regard  his  portraits  merely  as 
a  way  of  making  a  living ;  but  at  the  same 
time  he  always  threw  himself  whole- 
heartedly into  his  painting  and  took  his 
work  in  every  field  very  seriously. 

Codner  had  many  successes.  His  por- 
trait of  King  George  VI  in  field-marshal's 
uniform  and  Garter  robes  as  captain- 
general  of  the  Honourable  Artillery 
Company  (Armoury  House),  executed  in 
1951,  was  notable  and  was  the  last  por- 
trait painted  of  the  King.  His  portrait  of 
Queen  Elizabeth  the  Queen  Mother  (1952) 
won  the  silver  medal  of  the  Paris  Salon 
(1954)  where  his  portrait  of  Sir  George 
Broadbridge  in  his  coronation  robes  had 
received  an  honourable  mention  in  1938. 

Codner  was>  not  a  great  draughtsman ; 
indeed,  he  appeared  to  take  little  pleasure 
in  the  use  of  pencil  or  pen.  Like  most 
fashionable  portrait  painters,  he  was  beset 
by  the  need  to  produce  a  result  which 
should  be,  in  a  measure,  flattering,  with 
that  quality  of  'swagger'  achieved  by  Van 
Dyck,  Reynolds,  Gainsborough,  and  the 
eighteenth-century  portrait  painters,  and 
furthermore  satisfying  to  the  require- 
ments of  his  patrons,  their  friends,  and  the 
more  critical  judges  of  art,  including  him- 
self. Thus  official  robes,  ceremonial  uni- 
form, and  theatrical  costumes  were  of  the 
greatest  assistance  to  him,  for  he  enjoyed 
depicting  decorative  dress.  His  portraits 
were  pre-eminently  what  are  called  good 
likenesses,  a  superficial  representation  of 
features  being  more  in  demand  than  a 
penetrating  analysis  of  character.  In  this 
he  was  extremely  successful  and  his  work 
was  especially  in  demand  for  the  board- 


rooms   of   business    men    and    company 
directors. 

Others  among  his  sitters  were  Gwilym 
Lloyd-George  (afterwards  Viscount  Ten- 
by) (1955),  Sir  Albert  Richardson  (1956), 
and  among  theatrical  personalities  Sir 
Seymour  Hicks  [q.v.],  Athene  Seyler, 
Evelyn  Laye,  and  Leslie  Henson  [q.v.] 
in  the  character  of  Samuel  Pepys. 

It  was,  however,  with  his  landscapes 
that  Codner  felt  that  he  had  more  freedom 
and  expressed  himself  more  happily.  These 
were  the  productions  of  his  holidays  and 
leisure  hours,  and  they  were  exhibited 
regularly  at  the  Royal  Society  of  Painters 
in  Oils,  the  Royal  Institute,  the  New 
English  Art  Club,  and  elsewhere.  He  had  a 
special  delight  in  subjects  which  included 
trees  and  moving  water  and  he  liked  to 
depict  snow  scenes,  his  work  being  con- 
siderably influenced  by  the  example  of 
his  friend  Sir  Alfred  Munnings  [q.v.].  This 
open-air  sketching  was  his  great  relaxa- 
tion, as  was  the  pleasure  he  took  in  riding 
and  his  love  of  horses.  During  the  war  of 
1914-18  he  served  in  France  in  the  Royal 
North  Devon  Hussars,  but  life  in  the  army 
did  not  greatly  appeal  to  him. 

In  appearance  Codner  was,  on  formal 
occasions,  extremely  well  groomed;  tall, 
slim,  with  a  neatly  trimmed  beard  and 
moustache,  closely  cut  hair,  and  a  rather 
pronounced  nose,  he  had  the  distinguished 
air  of  the  prosperous  and  successful  artist. 
In  his  studio,  at  his  ease,  he  often  pre- 
ferred an  old  cardigan  carelessly  worn  over 
a  pair  of  shabby  trousers.  His  manners 
were  gentle  and  he  had  considerable  charm 
to  which  was  added  a  streak  of  melan- 
choly. This  is  not  to  say  that  he  was  un- 
able to  enjoy  laughter  and  broad  jokes  on 
occasion.  He  read  much  in  Shakespeare 
and  was  devoted  to  Surtees,  but  he  was 
not  otherwise  a  great  reader.  He  enjoyed 
the  company  of  his  fellow  men  and 
women,  being  essentially  warm-hearted, 
but  a  certain  reserve  or  perhaps  shyness 
prevented  him  from  having  many  inti- 
mates. He  was  a  member  of  the  Arts  Club 
and  of  the  Garrick  Club.  His  portrait  by 
R.  G.  Eves  (in  the  possession  of  Codner's 
family)  shows  a  man  of  somewhat  pic- 
turesque appearance  and  something  about 
the  pose  reveals  his  love  of  the  theatre. 

Codner's  studio,  which  adjoined  his 
small  house  in  the  Hampstead  Garden 
Suburb,  was  a  comfortable  and  workman- 
like place,  well  adapted  to  his  various 
sitters.  In  the  latter  years  of  his  life  he 
added  an  ante-room  in  which  was  hung  a 
selection  of  his  paintings.  This  and  his 


235 


Godner 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


little  garden  full  of  roses  and  trees  were  his 
pride  and  an  interest  which  he  did  not  long 
enjoy,  for  he  died  in  London  10  March 
1958.  He  was  buried  at  Dedham,  Essex,  in 
his  much-beloved  Constable  country. 

In  1913  Codner  married  Eleanor  Marion, 
daughter  of  Thomas  Fairfield,  a  captain  in 
the  mercantile  marine.  They  had  one  son, 
John  Whitlock  Codner,  who  also  became 
an  artist. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Ernest  Blaikley. 

COHEN,  Sir  ROBERT  WALEY  (1877- 
1952),  industrialist,  was  born  in  London 
8  September  1877,  the  second  son  of 
Nathaniel  Louis  Cohen,  a  leading  figure  in 
the  City,  and  his  wife,  Julia,  daughter 
of  Jacob  Waley  [q.v.].  The  family,  long 
leaders  of  the  Anglo-Jewish  community 
with  connections  extending  from  Sir 
Moses  Montefiore  [q.v.]  to  the  Rothschilds, 
traced  itself  back  to  seventeenth-century 
Holland.  A  sister,  Dorothea,  married 
Charles  Singer  [q.v.].  In  the  Jewish 
House  at  Chfton,  Cohen  early  showed  his 
interest  in  chemistry  and  mathematics. 
With  a  science  scholarship  he  proceeded 
to  Emmanuel  College,  Cambridge,  where 
he  obtained  second  classes  in  both  parts  of 
the  natural  sciences  tripos  (1898-1900), 
with  an  interlude  of  a  year  for  a  trip  round 
the  world.  A  period  in  Berlin,  between 
school  and  imiversity,  confirmed  his  at- 
tachment to  music  and  science.  As  one  of 
the  leading  amateur  cellists  in  the  country 
he  played  in  the  same  quartet  for  forty 
years. 

Although  wealthy,  his  family  believed 
that  all  should  be  profitably  engaged. 
After  Cambridge,  Waley  Cohen  worked  on 
unpaid  research  in  the  Meteorological 
Office.  Aroused  by  family  reproaches  and 
helped  by  his  future  wife  he  drafted  an 
advertisement  seeking  industrial  employ- 
ment. Henri  Deterding  of  the  Royal  Dutch 
oil  company  sent  the  sole  reply,  but 
meanwhile  his  father  had  spoken  to  Sir 
Marcus  Samuel  (later  Viscoimt  Bearsted, 
q.v.)  of  the  rival  Shell  company. 

When  Waley  Cohen  joined  Shell  in  1901 
the  company  was  scarcely  five  years  old. 
At  first  he  was  unpaid  but  by  1904, 
aged  twenty-six,  his  salary  was  £2,000. 
His  independence  established,  he  married 
his  kinswoman,  Alice  Violet,  daughter  of 
Henry  Edward  Beddington,  in  that  year 
and  went  on  a  long  working  tour  in  India 
and  the  East,  challenging  the  dominance 
of  Rockefeller  interests,  particularly  in 
oriental  markets.  He  was  given  massive 


authority  and  operated  with  marked 
success. 

Two  years  later  as  the  sole  Shell  dele- 
gate, he  negotiated  the  merger  with  the 
redoubtable  Royal  Dutch  group  of  com- 
panies, tackling  the  whole  force  of  the 
Dutch  leaders:  in  the  upshot  Deterding 
became  managing  director  with  Waley 
Cohen  as  his  chief  assistant.  Out  of  the 
combine  grew  one  of  the  world's  greatest 
industrial  groups,  but  the  union  was  not 
easy.  Shell  played  from  a  position  of 
weakness  and  legal  complexities  were 
innumerable.  Only  Waley  Cohen's  coura- 
geous suggestion  that  both  sides  should 
employ  the  same  lawyers  made  progress 
possible.  So  respected  were  his  powers 
and  integrity  that  his  nomination  to  the 
board  of  the  joint  operating  companies 
came  not  from  Shell  but  from  the  Royal 
Dutch. 

In  dealing  with  Borneo  oil,  for  the  first 
time  in  the  oil  industry  Waley  Cohen  had 
petroleum  subjected  to  scientific  analysis, 
with  the  discovery  that  what  was  con- 
sidered an  inferior  product  had  350 
chemical  compounds  in  a  single  distillate, 
including  toluol,  the  essential  element  in 
T.N.T.  The  Admiralty  rejected  the  process 
and  a  factory  was  consequently  erected  in 
Rotterdam.  When  the  explosives  position 
presented  perilous  shortages  during  the 
war  of  1914-18,  Waley  Cohen  organized 
the  transport  of  the  complete  factory  to 
the  United  Kingdom.  Samuel  had  early 
attempted  to  persuade  conservative  naval 
experts  to  transfer  from  coal  to  oil.  When 
war  came,  Waley  Cohen,  under  his  leader- 
ship, saw  that  notwithstanding  damage  to 
the  company's  prosperity,  their  great  and 
widely  distributed  oil  resources  were  at 
the  country's  disposal;  Cohen  himself 
became  petroleum  adviser  to  the  Army 
Council.  He  was  appointed  K.B.E.  in  1920, 
but  the  significance  of  his  services  has  per- 
haps not  been  generally  recognized. 

Whereas  Waley  Cohen's  main  energies 
lay  in  the  oil  companies,  he  had  many 
other  interests.  In  1928  he  purchased  the 
Exmoor  estate  of  Honeymead,  and  at  the 
age  of  fifty-two  gave  up  his  direction  of 
Shell,  though  remaining  on  various  boards. 
In  the  early  years  a  country  pleasance, 
Honeymead  became  a  centre  of  experi- 
mental agriculture  during  the  war  of 
1939-45,  showing  that  the  derelict  and 
difficult  acres  of  Exmoor  could  yield 
vastly  increased  food  supplies. 

When  his  life  seemed  to  be  moving 
towards  semi-retirement,  there  came  a 
challenging  opportunity.  In  1929  Waley 


236 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cole 


Cohen  accepted  the  chairmanship  of 
African  and  Eastern,  an  independent  con- 
cern operating  in  West  Africa  with  heavy 
losses.  The  rival  Niger  Company,  bought 
by  Lord  Leverhulme  [q.v.]  in  1920  and 
reorganized  by  (Sir)  D'Arcy  Cooper  [q.v.], 
was  also  operating  at  a  huge  loss.  Walev 
Cohen  from  the  first  worked  for  amalga- 
mation and  the  United  Africa  Company 
was  formed  in  1929.  But  he  had  entered 
unfamiliar  territories  in  which  business 
methods  differed  widely  from  that  per- 
sonal control  which  he  had  maintained  in 
his  association  with  Samuel.  The  depres- 
sion was  approaching  and  many  unpopu- 
lar decisions  had  to  be  made,  while  the 
pressure  of  work  led  him  to  appear  remote 
and  domineering.  He  failed  to  achieve  the 
success  which  he  had  attained  in  the  oil 
world,  and  he  resigned  in  1931.  Yet  the 
principles  on  which  he  worked  (as  distinct 
from  individual  decisions  in  which  he  may 
have  been  at  fault)  were  sound,  and 
ultimately  the  companies  combined  suc- 
cessfully to  become  the  leading  trading 
group  in  West  Africa. 

Once  he  had  established  himself  and  his 
family  as  he  thought  fit,  he  lost  interest  in 
the  mere  accumulation  of  wealth.  Other 
activities,  voluntary  and  charitable,  occu- 
pied a  considerable  part  of  his  Ufe.  His 
impact  on  the  popular  imagination  might 
have  been  greater  had  they  been  less 
diverse.  He  was  the  acknowledged  head 
of  Anglo- Jewry  in  a  way  that  no  successor 
could  be,  and  as  such  played  the  leading 
role  in  almost  every  aspect  of  the  affairs 
of  the  Jewish  community  in  Britain.  He 
was  for  nearly  forty  years  the  chief  figure 
of  the  United  Synagogue  and  died  in  office 
as  its  president.  Zionism  he  opposed  as 
conflicting  with  his  conception  of  the 
Anglo-Jewish  conmiunity  as  Englishmen 
of  Jewish  faith.  Yet  through  the  Palestine 
Corporation,  largely  his  personal  creation, 
he  strove  for  the  greatest  economic  de- 
velopment of  the  country,  and  its 
achievements  were  a  major  practical  con- 
tribution to  the  establishment  of  Israel  as 
a  prosperous  modern  State. 

His  old  school,  Clifton,  owed  much  to 
him,  as  also  did  University  College,  Lon- 
don, especially  in  the  war  years  when  the 
college  was  nearly  destroyed  by  enemy 
attack:  in  these  difficult  times  he  always 
kept  in  view  the  possibiUties  of  post-war 
development.  In  Cambridge  his  father  had 
been  the  prime  mover  in  establishing  the 
Appointments  Board  and  he  carried  on 
this  conception  as  the  pioneer  in  bringing 
university  men  into  industry.  The  con- 


tinuing relationship  between  Cambridge 
and  Shell  was  largely  his  creation. 

Waley  Cohen's  large  stature,  massive 
proportions,  and  strong  features  consti- 
tuted him  a  formidable  person.  Those  who 
knew  him  in  his  prime  speak  of  a  dominat- 
ing personality  with  a  tendency  to  sweep 
aside  all  objections  to  his  plans.  Yet  on 
the  rare  occasions  when  opposition  was 
successful  he  bore  no  malice.  His  com- 
manding authority  was  coupled  in  due 
time  with  an  unaffected  kindliness  to  the 
benefit  of  his  fellow  men  and  of  his 
country. 

Waley  Cohen  had  two  sons  and  one 
daughter.  His  elder  son,  Sir  Bernard 
Waley-Cohen,  followed  the  tradition  of 
social  service  and  at  an  early  age  became 
lord  mayor  of  London.  An  unusually  happy 
marriage  ended  when  Waley  Cohen's  wife 
died  as  a  result  of  a  motor  accident  in 
Palestine  in  1935  when  Waley  Cohen  him- 
self was  seriously  injured.  He  continued 
his  activities  to  the  last  few  months  of 
life  with  an  increasing  emphasis  on  his 
charitable  and  educational  attachments, 
notably  in  the  Sir  William  Ramsay  cen- 
tenary appeal  at  University  CoUege, 
London,  and  in  the  work  of  the  Council 
of  Christians  and  Jews,  one  of  the  many 
bodies  which  he  had  played  a  prominent 
part  in  founding.  He  died  in  London  27 
November  1952.  A  portrait  by  Joseph 
Oppenheimer  is  in  the  possession  of  th# 
family.  rj 

[Robert  Henriques,  Sir  Robert  Waley 
Cohen,  1966;  private  information.] 

COLE,  GEORGE  DOUGLAS  HOWARD 

(1889-1959),  university  teacher,  writer, 
and  socialist,  was  born  in  Cambridge  25 
September  1889,  the  son  of  George  Cole,  a 
jeweller  who  later  moved  to  Ealing  and 
became  a  surveyor,  and  his  wife,  Jessie 
Knowles.  He  was  educated  at  St.  Paul's 
School  and  Balliol  College,  Oxford,  and 
proceeded  by  way  of  firsts  in  honour 
moderations  (1910)  and  literae  humaniores 
(1912)  to  a  prize  fellowship  at  Magdalen  in 
the  latter  year.  Even  as  an  imdergraduate, 
when  contemporaries  noted  his  'dark, 
dynamic  presence',  he  was  keenly  in- 
terested in  socialism,  which  he  had 
accepted  as  a  'way  of  Ufe'  in  1906.  In  1908 
he  joined  the  Oxford  Fabian  Society  and 
went  on  to  edit  a  red-covered  magazine, 
the  Oxford  Reformer.  The  Fabian  Society 
and  the  Independent  Labour  Party  were 
the  two  sociaUst  bodies  which  drew  him 
into  active  agitation  outside  the  imiver- 
sities,  although  he  worked  closely  for  a 


287 


Cole 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


time  with  the  Social  Democratic  Federa- 
tion while  living  in  Newcastle  upon  Tyne 
in  1913-14.  During  the  years  of  bitter 
industrial  unrest  between  1911  and  1914 
Cole  was  strongly  critical  of  the  infant 
Labour  Party  for  its  'close  entanglement' 
with  the  Liberals  and  became  a  vigorous 
and  persuasive  advocate  of  guild  socialism : 
the  establishment  of  'workers'  control'  in 
industry  through  self-governing  guilds 
based  on  industrial  trade  unions.  His  lucid 
mind  and  his  skill  in  amassing  and 
interpreting  facts  were  as  important  as  his 
passionate  convictions  and  his  strong  sense 
of  social  purpose  in  ensuring  that  even 
during  his  twenties  he  was  a  prominent 
intellectual  figure  in  what  he  and  his 
friends  thought  of  as  'the  movement'. 
Indeed,  by  the  time  he  first  published  his 
widely  read  book  The  World  of  Labour  in 
1913  he  had  introduced  a  new  note  of 
rebellion  and  independence  into  the  affairs 
of  the  Fabian  Society,  to  the  executive 
of  which  he  was  elected  in  April  1914. 
'Socialism',  he  wrote  in  1913,  'will  triumph 
over  Social  Reform  only  as  its  exponents 
learn  both  to  think  and  to  feel — and  to  do 
both  at  once.'  Critical  of  the  'bureau- 
cratic' approach  of  Sidney  and  Beatrice 
Webb  [qq.v.]  and  quite  uninterested  in 
the  company  of  either  professional  politi- 
cians or  civil  servants,  Cole  turned  to 
trade-unionists,  emphasizing  the  impor- 
tance of  ideas  in  'the  movement'  and  of 
the  necessity  to  unleash  creative  energies 
'from  below'. 

After  quarrelling  with  the  Fabian  'old 
guard',  he  resigned  from  the  society  and 
the  executive  in  June  1915,  while  retain- 
ing his  connection  through  the  Fabian 
Research  Department  which  he  had  joined 
in  May  1913  and  of  which  he  became 
honorary  secretary  in  1916.  This  body 
accumulated  and  diffused  a  vast  quantity 
of  information  about  labour  and  industry. 
It  also  brought  together  a  remarkable 
group  of  young  socialists  in  an  atmosphere 
of  lively  and  enthusiastic  conmiitment.  In 
August  1918  Cole  married  one  of  the  team, 
Margaret  Isabel,  daughter  of  J.  P.  Post- 
gate  [q.v.];  they  had  one  son  and  two 
daughters.  The  Coles  were  to  be  associated 
in  many  socialist  causes,  although,  as  they 
both  stressed,  they  did  not  constitute  in 
any  sense  a  new  'partnership'  on  Webbian 
lines.  In  1915  Cole  had  become  unpaid 
research  adviser  to  the  Amalgamated 
Society  of  Engineers,  a  post  of  influence 
which  was  without  precedent  in  the 
history  of  British  trade-unionism :  advice 
on  wages,  prices,  and  'dilution'  of  labour 


under  the  existing  wartime  Treasury 
Agreements  and  Munitions  of  War  Acts 
brought  Cole  into  touch  not  only  with 
trade-union  leaders  but  with  shop  stewards 
and  union  rank-and-file.  He  was  to  refer 
to  his  experience  in  his  book  Trade 
Unionism  and  Munitions  (1923)  which, 
along  with  his  Self-Government  in  Industry 
(1917),  Guild  Socialism  Re-stated  (1920), 
and  Workshop  Organization  (1923),  gives  a 
clear  idea  of  his  thinking  at  this  time, 
expressed,  too,  in  the  National  Guilds 
League,  founded  in  1915.  In  1918  the 
name  Fabian  Research  Department  was 
changed  to  Labour  Research  Department, 
and  a  year  later  the  Labour  Party,  with  a 
new  constitution,  appointed  Cole  its  first 
secretary  for  research.  He  was  also  secre- 
tary of  the  workers'  side  of  the  National 
Industrial  Conference  which  first  met  in 
February  1919.  In  March  he  and  his 
chairman,  Arthur  Henderson  [q.v.], 
drafted  a  'Memorandum  on  the  Causes 
and  Remedies  for  Labour  Unrest'  which 
referred  to  the  'desire  to  substitute  a 
democratic  system  of  public  ownership 
and  production  for  use  with  an  increasing 
element  of  control  by  the  organized 
workers  themselves  for  the  existing  capi- 
talist organization  of  industry'. 

As  an  organized  movement,  however, 
guild  socialism  did  not  survive  the  Rus- 
sian Revolution  of  1917  and  the  emer- 
gence of  the  British  Communist  Party 
after  1920.  Cole  was  never  tempted  to  join 
the  Communist  Party,  although  he  always 
insisted  that  his  loyalty  to  socialism  took 
precedence  over  his  loyalty  to  the  Labour 
Party.  He  did  his  best  to  bring  different 
kinds  of  socialism  together,  and  supported 
international  efforts  to  build  bridges 
between  communist  and  social  democratic 
movements.  He  wrote  later,  in  his  auto- 
biographical introduction  to  volume  iv 
(1958)  of  his  massive  history  of  Socialist 
Thought,  that  'my  attitude  was  basically 
pluralistic  and  libertarian  and  I  was  re- 
pelled by  the  Bolsheviks'  conception  of  a 
social  philosophy  based  on  rigidly  deter- 
minist  principles  and  involving  the  un- 
questionable class-correctness  of  a  single, 
unified  body  of  doctrine,  regardless  of 
considerations  of  time  and  place.'  While 
writing  and  lecturing  sjnmpathetically 
about  the  Russian  Revolution  and  its 
consequences — directing  attention  par- 
ticularly to  the  'lessons'  of  Russian  plan- 
ning after  the  British  economic  and 
political  crisis  of  1931  (see  his  Practical 
Economics,  1937) — he  was  never  willing 
to    suspend    his    own    independence    of 


238 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cole 


judgement.  In  1924  he  resigned  from 
his  honorary  secretaryship  of  the  Labour 
Research  Department  which  passed  under 
full  Communist  control.  Margaret,  a  paid 
official,  resigned  a  year  later,  when  Cole 
became  university  reader  in  economics  at 
Oxford  and  a  fellow  of  University  College. 
He  was  to  remain  closely  connected  with 
Oxford  for  the  rest  of  his  life,  although 
after  1929  the  Coles  maintained  a  house  in 
London. 

In  the  meantime,  however,  he  had 
worked  since  1921  as  the  first  full-time 
tutorial  class  tutor  in  the  university  of 
London,  a  strategic  position  in  the  adult 
education  movement.  He  made  a  valuable 
contribution  to  the  organization  and  life 
of  the  Workers'  Educational  Association 
and  founded  the  professional  Tutors' 
Association.  When  he  took  up  his  new  post 
in  Oxford,  he  continued  and  extended  his 
adult  education  work  while  helping  to 
shape  Oxford  University's  own  activities 
in  this  field.  He  was,  indeed,  a  conscien- 
tious and  inspiring  teacher,  both  in  the 
class-room  and  through  his  books,  and  he 
never  wavered  in  his  belief  that  adult  edu- 
cation was  a  necessary  instrument  both  of 
working-class  emancipation  and  of  social 
change.  It  was  characteristic,  again,  of  his 
distaste  for  indoctrination  that  he  chose 
to  work  through  the  'non-party  political' 
W.E.A.  His  wide  range  of  intellectual  and 
cultural  interests — he  published  a  life  of 
Cobbett  in  1924  and  of  Owen  a  year  later 
— found  expression  in  this  context,  al- 
though the  move  to  Oxford  in  no  sense 
imphed,  as  Beatrice  Webb  feared,  an 
abandonment  of  his  more  immediate 
socialist  interests.  Almost  immediately 
after  his  arrival  there  he  began  to  invite 
undergraduates  of  radical  and  socialist 
leanings  to  his  house  for  informal  weekly 
discussions.  The  'Cole  Group',  as  it  was 
eventually  called,  became  something  of  an 
Oxford  institution  for  the  rest  of  Cole's 
life  and  had  a  considerable  influence  on 
men  of  different  gifts  and  philosophies 
who  subsequently  played  an  active  part 
in  national  life :  it  attracted  such  men  as 
Colin  Clark,  (Sir)  John  Betjeman,  W.  H. 
Auden,  Hugh  Gaitskell,  John  Parker,  Evan 
Durbin,  and  Michael  Stewart.  There  was 
ample  room  in  the  'Group'  for  the  most 
free  and  comprehensive  discussion,  with 
Cole  himself  stimulating  and  inspiring  the 
best  in  its  members.  Some  of  them  were 
drawn  very  early  in  the  life  of  the  'Group' 
into  helping  trade-unionists  in  the  general 
strike  of  1926  through  a  university  strike 
committee. 


Cole's  Oxford  readership  was  in  eco- 
nomics, although  he  often  used  to  say  and 
write  that  orthodox  economists  did  not 
regard  him  as  one  of  their  number.  He 
owed  much  to  J.  A.  Hobson  [q.v.]  and 
something  to  Marx  (he  published  What 
Marx  Really  Meant  in  1934),  but  his 
strength  lay  not  in  theory  but  in  his 
willingness,  always  within  a  socialist 
framework,  to  devote  vast  energy  to  the 
current  problems  of  economic  organiza- 
tion. In  1929  he  published  The  Next  Ten 
Years  in  British  Social  and  Economic 
Policy y  in  which  he  argued,  in  a  year  when 
the  Labour  Party  came  back  into  power, 
that  'Pre-war  Socialism  could  afford  to 
seek  after  perfection  because  it  was  not  in 
a  hurry :  post-war  Socialism  needs  practi- 
cal results.'  In  his  preface  he  thanked  the 
Webbs  for  'suggestions  for  its  improve- 
ment' while  the  work  was  in  progress.  By 
this  time  his  differences  with  the  Webbs 
had  been  smoothed  over,  and  he  had  re- 
joined the  Fabian  Society  in  1928.  He 
became  a  member  of  the  Economic  Ad- 
visory Council  set  up  by  Ramsay  Mac- 
Donald  in  January  1930,  and  in  the  same 
year  became  prospective  Labour  candi- 
date for  the  King's  Norton  division  of 
Birmingham.  He  was  also  a  founder  in 

1930  of  the  Society  for  Socialist  Inquiry 
and  Propaganda,  with  initials  pronounced 
'zip'  and  Ernest  Bevin  [q.v.]  as  chairman, 
which  grew  out  of  a  number  of  week-end 
meetings  at  Easton  Lodge,  a  property 
belonging  to  the  Countess  of  Warwick 
[q.v.] ;  and  a  few  months  later  in  March 
and  April  1931  of  the  New  Fabian  Re- 
search Bureau,  with  C.  R.  (later  Earl) 
Attlee  as  chairman.  Cole  as  secretary,  and 
Gaitskell  as  assistant  secretary.  These 
bodies  survived  the  fall  of  the  Labour 
Government,  although  the  former — ^to 
Bevin's  anger — ^was  subsumed  in  the 
Socialist  League  in  1932.  Although  there- 
after Bevin  complained  of  socialist  intel- 
lectuals, Cole's  own  intellectual  position 
was  stronger  after  August  1931  than  it  had 
been  before.  He  was  secretary  of  the  New 
Fabian  Research  Bureau  until  1935  and 
chairman  from  1937  to  1939.  In  the  latter 
year  it  amalgamated  with  the  Fabian 
Society  with  a  revised  constitution.  Of  the 
revived  Fabian  Society  Cole  was  chair- 
man in  1939-46  and  1948-50  and  presi- 
dent from  1952  until  his  death. 

The  collapse  of  the  Labour  Party  in 

1931  led  to  a  long  period  of  rethinking 
about  politics  and  economics  in  which 
Cole,  mainly  through  his  writings,  played 
a  prominent  part.  By  now,  indeed,  he 


239 


Cole 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


had  established  his  reputation  as  the 
most  prolific  of  all  British  writers  on 
sociahsm.  The  hst  of  his  publications  con- 
tinued to  grow  until  it  filled  more  than  a 
column  of  Who's  Who,  and  alongside  his 
economic  writings  there  was  a  regular 
flow  of  books  on  social  theory  and  labour 
history,  on  both  of  which  subjects  and 
also  on  a  course  called  'labour  movements' 
he  lectured  at  Oxford.  The  Common 
People,  which  he  wrote  with  R.  W.  Post- 
gate  in  1938,  was  outstanding  amongst  his 
pubUcations  on  popular  social  history — 
to  be  followed  by  British  Working  Class 
Politics,  1832-1914  (1941),  Chartist  Por- 
traits (1941),  and  Attempts  at  General 
Union  (1958),  the  last  two  of  which  were 
more  scholarly  in  context  and  tone.  The 
Condition  of  Britain,  which  he  wrote  with 
his  wife  and  which  appeared  in  1937,  is 
a  valuable  example  of  the  kind  of  tidily 
organized  and  socially  pointed  survey 
which  he  liked  to  produce  and  which  he 
knew  would  be  very  widely  used.  Indeed, 
the  survey  method  was  to  appeal  to  him 
more  and  more  in  the  next  phase  of  his 
Ufe. 

During  the  thirties  Cole  was  reaching  a 
wide  audience,  not  only  through  his  books 
— among  which  The  Intelligent  Man's 
Guide  Through  World  Chaos  (1932)  and 
The  Intelligent  Man's  Review  of  Europe 
To-day  (1933,  with  Margaret)  were  part  of 
a  characteristic  pattern  of  the  thirties — 
but  through  his  articles,  particularly,  but 
far  from  exclusively,  those  in  the  New 
Statesman.  He  had  written  for  the  Nation 
before  1914  and  for  the  New  Statesman 
from  1918  onwards— being  considered  for 
the  editorship  of  the  latter  in  1930.  He 
became  a  director  in  1947  and  chairman 
of  the  board  in  1956.  It  was  in  the  pages 
of  the  New  Statesman,  and  on  the  lecture 
platform,  that  he  attacked  the  inability 
of  the  Government  to  cope  with  imem- 
ployment — he  had  demanded  a  'national 
labour  corps'  in  1930 — claimed  that  capi- 
talism was  'on  trial',  pressed  for  more 
planning,  questioned  the  prospects  of  the 
Labour  Party  as  it  was  then  constituted, 
welcomed — without  fully  appreciating — 
the  significance  of  the  General  Theory  of 
J.  M.  (later  Lord)  Keynes  [q.v.]  ('Mr. 
Keynes  Beats  the  Band'),  and  welcoming 
— ^without  fully  supporting — the  objects  of 
Roosevelt's  New  Deal.  He  was  opposed 
to  Fascism  and  Nazism  from  the  start, 
but  extremely  suspicious  of  a  'capitaUst 
government'  rearming  in  order  to  wage 
what  in  fact  might  be  an  'imperialist  war'. 
This  approach  led  him  into  a  number  of 


attempts,  none  of  them  very  hopeful,  to 
secure  a  'Popular  Front'  in  Britain,  and 
he  was  even  prepared  to  push  into  the 
background  some  of  his  basic  distaste  for 
British  Liberalism  and  Liberals  in  the 
process. 

The  volume  of  Cole's  Writing  was  in- 
fluenced not  only  by  the  state  of  his 
opinions  but  by  the  state  of  his  health.  In 
1931  he  was  found  to  be  suffering  from 
diabetes,  a  complaint  which  often  pre- 
vented him  from  living  as  he  would  have 
liked.  When  his  physical  activities  were 
necessarily  curtailed,  'he  began',  as  his 
wife  put  it,  'to  write  faster  and  faster, 
and  longer  and  more  complicated  books'. 
He  also  took  to  writing  detective  novels 
with  his  wife  and  between  1923  and  1942 
published  twenty-nine  of  them  along  with 
four  volumes  of  short  detective  stories.  Ill 
health  dogged  him  also  during  the  war 
when  he  was  compelled,  at  a  critical 
moment  of  its  history,  to  be  away  from 
the  recently  founded  Nuffield  College,  of 
which  he  had  become  one  of  the  first 
faculty  fellows  in  May  1939. 

He  was  asked  in  June  1940  to  assist  Sir 
William  (later  Lord)  Beveridge  at  the 
Ministry  of  Labour  in  a  rapid  inquiry  into 
manpower  and  war  production,  and  this 
led  directly  to  his  becoming  chairman  and 
director,  early  in  1941,  of  the  Nuffield  Col- 
lege Social  Reconstruction  Survey,  which 
was  launched  in  November  1940.  During 
the  next  three  years  the  Survey  did  much 
useful  work — with  a  small  Treasury  sub- 
sidy— in  producing  local  and  national 
surveys  on  demographic,  economic,  and 
social  problems,  some  of  which  were  of 
direct  use  to  government  departments, 
most  of  which  remained  unpublished.  In 
June  1942  Cole  was  appointed  sub-warden 
of  the  still  embryonic  Nuffield  College, 
and  he  was  mainly  responsible  for  the  war- 
time Nuffield  Conferences  which  brought 
together  academics,  politicians,  civil  ser- 
vants, trade-unionists,  and  others.  The 
withdrawal  of  government  financial  sup- 
port for  the  Survey  was  one  of  a  number  of 
difficulties  the  college  faced  at  this  time, 
and  after  a  period  of  illness  Cole  resigned 
his  sub-wardenship  in  September  1943,  his 
directorship  of  the  Survey  in  January 
1944,  and  his  faculty  fellowship  in  the  fol- 
lowing March.  'I  can  only  say  most  sin- 
cerely', one  of  his  ex-colleagues  wrote  to 
him  in  May  1944,  'that  as  a  believer  in  the 
purposes  of  Nuffield  College  I  greatly  regret 
you  will  no  longer  be  there  to  provide 
your  drive,  inspiration,  sense  of  reality 
and  unique  power  of  pulling  together  a 


240 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Collins 


ragged  discussion.  This  is  not  meant  to 
be  an  exhaustive  list  of  your  virtues.' 

Cole  nevertheless  remained  as  active  in 
Oxford  as  he  had  been  before  1939,  and  in 
1944  he  was  appointed  Chichele  professor 
of  social  and  political  theory,  which  car- 
ried with  it  a  fellowship  in  All  Souls.  He 
later  resumed  his  connection  with  Nuffield 
and  was  made  an  honorary  fellow  both  of 
University  College  and  of  Balliol.  He  was 
also  a  member  of  the  standing  committee 
of  the  Institute  of  Statistics,  an  academic 
adviser  to  Ruskin  College,  and  an  inde- 
fatigable spokesman  of  the  Delegacy  for 
Social  Training.  During  the  last  years  of 
his  Oxford  life  he  became  doyen  of  P.P.E., 
being  one  of  the  few  remaining  Oxford 
dons  to  concern  himself  with  the  full 
trinity  of  poUtics,  economics,  and  philo- 
sophy, not  to  speak  of  history  and  litera- 
ture. He  also  encouraged  the  development 
of  the  study  of  sociology  and  of  industrial 
relations.  His  writings  continued  to  record 
the  diversity  of  his  interests.  In  1946  he 
published  A  Century  of  Co-operation;  in 
the  next  year  both  a  little  book  on  Samuel 
Butler  and  The  Intelligent  Man's  Guide  to 
the  Post-War  World;  and  in  1956  his  Post- 
war Condition  of  Britain.  In  1953  the  first 
volume  of  his  history  of  Socialist  Thought 
appeared.  His  lectures  covered  as  wide  a 
variety  of  themes  as  his  books,  and  for  a 
time  (see  his  Local  and  Regional  Govern- 
ment, 1947)  he  took  particular  interest  in 
local  and  regional  government  and  schemes 
for  future  reform  which  would  foster  the 
sense  of  local  community.  His  attitude  to 
'community'  was  somewhat  similar  to  his 
attitude  to  'workers'  control'.  He  de- 
manded a  sense  of  spontaneous  involve- 
ment and  the  energy  which  he  believed 
went  with  it  to  make  any  kind  of  formal 
machinery  work.  'If  socialization  is  to 
advance  much  further',  he  wrote  in  1958, 
'it  is  necessary  ...  to  give  the  workers  an 
increased  sense  of  participation.'  The  same 
need,  he  believed,  existed  in  pohtics, 
where  neither  organizational  reforms  nor 
the  extension  of  'ameliorative'  social  ser- 
vices went  far  enough  to  satisfy  him. 
'Self-government'  had  to  be  applied  to 
every  aspect  of  social  organization  and 
at  every  level,  with  'face-to-face  groups' 
vitally  important  if  'Socialist  planning' 
was  to  be  reconciled  with  'personal  free- 
dom' and  democracy  was  to  be  made  'real 
in  face  of  the  need  for  large-scale  organiza- 
tion and  control'. 

Cole  stood  unsuccessfully  as  a  candidate 
for  one  of  the  two  Oxford  University  seats 
in  1945 — ^he  did  not  seek  official  Labour 


Party  endorsement — and  polled  3,414 
votes.  The  'Cole  Group'  thrived  during 
the  post-war  period,  with  the  domestic 
problems  of  the  Labour  Government  and 
the  causes  and  remedies  of  international 
tension  receiving  equal  attention.  Cole's 
freedom  from  'Lib-Lab'  attitudes  made 
him  interested  in  much  that  was  happen- 
ing outside  Britain  in  very  different  kinds 
of  societies  and  sympathetic  to  different 
approaches  to  socialism.  In  his  public 
writings  and  lectures  he  objected  to  the 
Anglo-American  loan,  argued  strongly 
after  1945  in  favour  of  a  'third  force'  in 
Europe,  was  opposed  to  the  Korean  war, 
and  dissatisfied  with  the  British  foreign 
policy  both  before  and  after  the  Labour 
Government  fell  from  power.  At  the  same 
time,  he  recognized  realistically  that  'sub- 
stantial gains  in  real  wages  and  very  great 
developments  of  the  social  services  can  be 
achieved  within  a  predominantly  capitalist 
order'.  Any  rethinking  about  socialism 
had  to  begin  there.  In  'An  Open  Letter  to 
Members  from  the  chairman'  in  the  first 
number  of  the  Fabian  Journal  (May  1950) 
he  stressed  that  'we  do  our  best  to  prevent 
them  [dogmas]  from  becoming  our  masters 
by  questioning  them  constantly  and  re- 
fusing to  write  more  than  the  barest 
minimum  of  them  into  om*  constitution. . . . 
We  duly  revere  our  founders ;  but  we  by 
no  means  take  what  they  said  as  gos- 
pel .  .  .'. 

When  Cole  retired  from  his  chair  in 
Oxford  in  1957 — ^he  accepted  a  research 
fellowship  at  Nuffield  College — a  number 
of  Cole's  colleagues  and  friends  prepared  a 
volume  of  essays  in  his  honour  which  it 
was  designed  to  present  to  him  on  his 
seventieth  birthday.  He  died,  however,  14 
January  1959,  in  London,  before  the  book 
appeared.  His  colleagues  and  friends  paid 
particular  tribute  to  his  exceptional  quali- 
ties as  a  teacher,  and  this  is  perhaps  how 
he  would  most  like  to  have  been  remem- 
bered— cool  and  lucid  in  his  exposition, 
warm,  passionate,  even  volcanic,  in  his 
feelings — not  believing  in  God  but  believ- 
ing in  goodness,  drawn  to  satire  as  much 
as  to  exposition,  and,  as  Margaret  Cole 
wrote,  by  inclination  'a  strong  Tory  in 
everything  but  polities'.  j 

[Margaret  Cole,  Growing  Up  Into  Revolu- 
tion, 1949,  and  The  Story  o/  Fabian  Socialism, 
1961 ;  Recollections  in  Essays  in  Labour 
History,  ed.  A.  Briggs  and  J.  Saville,  1960; 
personal  knowledge.]  Asa  Briggs. 

COLLINS,  JOSEPHINE  (JOS^)  (1887- 
1958),  actress  and  singer,  was  born  23 


r241 


Collins 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


May  1887  at  Whitechapel,  London,  the 
illegitimate  daughter  of  Joseph  Van  den 
Berg,  professor  of  music,  and  Lottie  Col- 
lins, actress,  singer,  and  dancer.  Lottie 
Collins,  whose  parents  died  in  her  early 
childhood,  was  a  flamboyantly  successful 
music-hall  artist  who  popularized  the  song, 
'Ta-ra-ra  Boom -de-ay',  which  she  had 
heard  first  in  America  and  then  intro- 
duced to  London  at  the  Tivoli  music-hall 
in  the  Strand  during  October  1891,  accom- 
panied by  her  own  dance.  One  of  Jose 
CoUins's  earliest  remembrances  was  of 
imitating  this  at  a  tea-party  at  home.  The 
girl  had  successively  two  stepfathers,  the 
first  Stephen  Patrick  Cooney,  the  second 
James  W.  Tate  (died  1922),  a  fluent  com- 
poser of  light  music.  In  the  haphazard 
early  chapters  of  her  autobiography,  a 
good-natured  book  not  very  helpful  to  the 
researcher,  Jose  Collins  put  forward  the 
date  of  her  bui;h  to  May  1893  as  'Jose- 
phine Charlotte  Cooney',  and  the  place  to 
Salford. 

The  facts  of  her  life  become  clearer  once 
she  has  made  her  professional  stage  debut. 
She  appeared  at  a  Glasgow  music-hall 
with  (Sir)  Harry  Lauder  [q.v.],  illustrat- 
ing his  song,  'I  love  a  lassie',  by  doing  'a 
toe-dance  in  a  tartan  frock  and  glengarry' 
as  the  'httle  Scottish  bluebell'.  Soon  after 
this,  at  the  age  of  seventeen,  then  with  a 
contralto  voice  and  already  with  a  strik- 
ingly confident  stage  presence,  she  was 
engaged  in  a  touring  company  of  A 
Chinese  Honeymoon  and  later  took  the 
leading  part  of  Mrs.  Pineapple:  in  her 
book  she  speaks  of  herself  as  'fourteen  and 
a  half  and  the  baby  of  the  company'.  At 
Christmas  1905  she  was  back  with  Lauder 
in  a  Glasgow  pantomime  Aladdin.  Some 
highly  variegated  years  followed,  on  the 
music-halls,  in  touring  companies,  and  in 
pantomime;  and  in  1911,  not  long  after 
her  first  marriage  to  an  actor,  Leslie 
Chatfield,  she  went  out  boldly  to  the 
United  States  without  a  contract.  There 
she  established  herself  so  firmly  in  New 
York  as  a  singer  in  operetta  and  in  revue 
(she  was  in  the  Ziegfeld  Follies  for  some 
time)  that  she  did  not  return  to  London 
until  1916.  She  was  then  summoned  back 
to  appear  at  Daly's  in  a  musical  comedy. 
The  Happy  Day,  written  by  (Sir)  Seymour 
Hicks  [q.v.]  with  music  by  Sidney  Jones 
[q.v.]  and  Paul  A.  Rubens.  Although  -she 
had  not  the  leading  part  in  The  Happy 
Day,  within  a  year  (1917)  she  was  Teresa 
in  The  Maid  of  the  Mountains,  an  operetta 
with  book  by  Frederick  Lonsdale  [q.v.] 
and  music  by  Harold  Fraser-Simson  and 


her  stepfather  J.  W.  Tate,  which  ran  at 
Daly's  for  more  than  three  years:  in  all, 
1,352  performances.  It  grew  quickly  into 
one  of  the  favourite  London  plays  of  the 
war :  soldiers  on  leave  crowded  to  see  Jose 
Collins,  and  her  song,  'Love  will  find  a  way', 
was  heard  everywhere.  Towards  the  end  of 
her  life,  when  she  had  realized  she  could 
never  be  a  leading  player  again,  somebody 
at  a  film  studio  asked  her  to  telephone. 
When  she  did  so,  hoping  for  work,  she 
was  told  that  they  were  filming  a  story  of 
the  war  of  1914-18,  with  one  scene  laid 
in  a  star's  dressing-room.  'Can  you  pos- 
sibly lend  us  one  of  your  pictures  to  hang 
on  the  wall  ?' 

For  the  next  decade  Jos^  Collins  would 
be,  in  effect,  upon  the  wall  of  every  lover 
of  musical  comedy.  Invariably  an  attack- 
ing actress,  she  took  the  stage  with  the 
spirit  and  confidence  which  her  mother 
had  used  on  the  music-halls.  Her  strong 
bravura  performances,  her  sleek  black 
hair,  her  Spanish-Jewish  aspect,  her  tem- 
pestuous personality,  and  the  clear,  true 
warmth  of  her  voice  which  had  developed 
into  a  soprano,  were  famous  far  beyond 
the  circle  of  the  west  end.  Unluckily  her 
success  as  Teresa  limited  her  to  the  same 
kind  of  good-hearted  romantic  flourish, 
and  such  parts  could  not  go  on  indefinitely. 

She  followed  The  Maid  of  the  Mountains 
by  a  similar  part,  Dolores  in  The  Southern 
Maid  (1920).  Thence,  still  at  Daly's,  she 
went  on  (1921)  to  Sybil  Renaud  in  Sybil. 
Ultimately  she  left  Daly's  after  a  quarrel 
with  James  White,  the  financier  from 
Rochdale  who  had  bought  the  theatre, 
and  who  had  entered  her  dressing-room 
uninvited,  with  a  party  of  friends.  Hot- 
tempered,  she  was  the  first  to  resent 
any  slight  or  any  attempt  to  lessen 
her  privileges.  She  moved  across,  under 
Robert  Evett's  management,  to  the 
Gaiety  Theatre  where  for  a  time  she  con- 
tinued her  successes  in  such  different  parts 
(all  with  the  Collins  family  Ukeness)  as 
Vera  in  The  Last  Waltz  (1922),  the  name- 
part  in  Catherine  (1923),  and  Nell  Gwynne 
in  Our  Nell  (1924),  the  last  of  these  a 
typically  generous  portrait  in  an  undis- 
tinguished piece  by  L.  N.  Parker  [q.v.] 
and  Reginald  Arkell  to  music  by  Harold 
Fraser-Simson  and  Ivor  Novello  [q.v.]. 

At  length,  with  the  rapid  failure  of 
Frasquita  (1925)  at  the  Prince's  Theatre, 
a  piece,  to  music  by  Franz  Lehar,  in  which 
she  had  invested  much  capital,  she  met 
professional  tragedy.  Though  she  toured 
various  variety  theatres  in  Britain  and  the 
United  States,  and  took  part  in  the  brief 


242 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Colville 


and  stormy  run  of  the  revue  Whitebirds  at 
His  Majesty's  (1927),  she  dechned  to  plays 
and  characters  unworthy  of  her  once 
dominant  position.  Eventually  her  inter- 
mittent stage  work  ceased  altogether.  Her 
second  marriage  which,  like  her  first,  was 
dissolved,  had  been  in  1920  to  Lord 
Robert  Edward  Innes-Ker ;  she  married  in 
1935,  as  her  third  husband.  Dr.  Gerald 
Baeyertz  Kirkland.  During  the  war  of 
1939-45,  when  her  husband  served  as  a 
major  in  the  Royal  Army  Medical  Corps, 
she  trained  as  a  nurse  in  order  to  work 
voluntarily  at  the  hospitals  where  he 
was  stationed.  During  her  later  years  of 
happy  marriage  she  mellowed  into  a  calm, 
philosophic  woman  who  accepted  with 
equanimity  the  change  in  her  career  from 
a  public  figure  to  quiet  domestic  life  in 
suburban  Essex.  She  died  in  an  Epping 
hospital  6  December  1958.  She  had  no 
children. 

[The  Times,  8  December  1958  ;  Jos^  Collins, 
The  Maid  of  the  Mountains:  Her  Story,  1932 ; 
Who's  Who  in  the  Theatre;  personal  know- 
ledge.] J.  C.  Trewin. 

COLVILLE,  DAVID  JOHN,  first  Baron 
Clydesmuir  (1894-1954),  public  servant, 
was  born  at  Motherwell  House,  Lanark- 
shire, 13  February  1894,  the  only  son  of 
John  Colville,  of  Cleland,  M.P.  for  North- 
East  Lanark  (1895-1901),  and  his  wife, 
Christian  Downie.  He  was  the  grandson  of 
David  Colville,  founder  of  the  great  steel 
enterprise  which  became  Colvilles,  Ltd, 
His  only  sister.  Christian,  married  (Sir) 
Alexander  Erskine-Hill,  who  became  first 
baronet  and  was  M.P.  for  North  Edin- 
burgh (1935-45). 

Cohille  was  educated  at  Charterhouse 
and  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  where  he 
obtained  a  third  class  in  part  i  of  the  his- 
torical tripos  in  1914.  At  the  outbreak  of 
war  in  1914  he  was  mobilized  with  the 
6th  battalion,  the  Cameronians  (Scottish 
Rifles),  and  served  as  captain  in  France, 
where  he  was  thrice  wounded.  When  the 
Territorial  Army  was  re-formed  after  the 
war  he  rejoined  his  old  battalion  which  he 
eventually  commanded,  retiring  in  1936. 
He  was  honorary  colonel  from  1941  until 
1946.  From  the  date  when  he  received 
his  commission  before  the  first  war  John 
Colville  took  the  deepest  interest  in  the 
Territorial  Army.  At  the  time  of  his  death 
he  was  chairman  of  the  council  of  the 
Territorial  and  Auxiliary  Forces  Associa- 
tions. He  was  also  an  officer  in  the  Royal 
Company  of  Archers. 

In  1919  Colville  became  a  member  of 


Lanarkshire  County  Council  on  which  he 
served  until  1925.  He  was  unsuccessful  in 
contesting  for  Parliament  the  Motherwell 
division  in  the  National  Liberal  interest  in 
1922  and  North  Midlothian  for  the  Con- 
servatives in  January  1929  but  was  re- 
turned for  that  constituency  at  the  general 
election  a  few  months  later,  a  notable  vic- 
tory when  the  tide  was  running  against  his 
party.  He  was  secretary  to  the  Depart- 
ment of  Overseas  Trade  (1931-5)  when 
he  took  a  special  interest  in  the  British 
Industries  Fair  and  led  several  trade 
missions  overseas;  parliamentary  under- 
secretary of  state  for  Scotland  (1935-6); 
financial  secretary  to  the  Treasury  (1936- 
8) ;  and  in  1938-40  secretary  of  state  for 
Scotland  when  he  was  very  much  con- 
cerned in  all  the  work  involved  in  placing 
Scotland  on  a  war  footing.  In  1940  on  the 
creation  of  the  coalition  Government,  he 
was  one  of  those  who  had  to  make  way. 
He  inmiediately  undertook  other  war 
work  and  was  colonel  on  the  staff  at  Low- 
land District  and  Scottish  Command,  as 
G.S.O.  1,  Home  Guard,  1940^2. 

In  1943  he  was  appointed  governor  of 
Bombay  where  he  remained  until  1948. 
The  great  ability  and  success  with  which 
he  discharged  the  very  exacting  duties  of 
governor  in  time  of  war  may  be  judged  by 
the  fact  that  at  four  periods  in  1945-7 
he  acted  as  viceroy.  By  his  personality, 
shrewdness,  humanity,  and  human  in- 
terest, he  won  the  confidence  and  indeed 
the  affection  of  all  races  and  types  of 
people  with  whom  he  had  to  deal.  He 
could  be  firm  when  necessary,  but  he  was 
always  fair.  He  was  appointed  G.C.I.E.  in 
1943  and  later  his  wife  received  the  Order 
of  the  Crown  of  India  and  the  Kaisar-i- 
Hind  gold  medal.  The  position  he  had  won 
was  demonstrated  when  he  and  his  wife 
returned  on  a  visit  to  Bombay  as  private 
citizens  a  few  years  before  his  death. 

In  1936  Colville  was  sworn  of  the  Privy 
Council  and  in  1948  he  was  created  a 
baron  and  took  the  title  Lord  Clydesmuir, 
of  Braidwood.  He  attended  the  House  of 
Lords  regularly,  speaking  particularly  on 
Scottish  and  Commonwealth  affairs,  and 
was  vice-chairman  of  the  Commonwealth 
Parliamentary  Association.  In  the  same 
year  he  joined  the  board  of  Colvilles,  Ltd., 
with  which  he  had  been  associated  since 
his  return  from  the  first  war.  In  1952  he 
was  appointed  lord-lieutenant  of  Lanark- 
shire. He  was  for  some  years  (1950-54)  a 
governor  of  the  B.B.C.  and  was  chairman 
of  the  national  broadcasting  council  for 
Scotland  in  1953-4. 


243 


Colville 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Clydesmuir's  recreations  were  shooting, 
deerstalking,  fishing,  and  yachting.  In  his 
yacht  lolanthe  he  spent  many  hoUdays 
with  his  family  and  friends  around  the 
Western  Isles  of  Scotland.  He  was  very 
musical  and  it  was  a  dehght  to  hear  him 
play  the  organ  in  the  music-room  at 
Braidwood.  He  had  great  charm  of  man- 
ner, an  abounding  sense  of  humour,  and 
a  gift  for  friendship. 

In  1915  Colville  married  Agnes  Anne, 
elder  daughter  of  Sir  William  Bilsland, 
baronet ;  they  had  two  daughters  and  one 
son,  Ronald  John  Bilsland  (born  1917), 
who  succeeded  him  when  he  died  at 
Braidwood  31  October  1954.  A  post- 
humous portrait,  by  Stanley  Cursiter,  is 
at  Braidwood. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Bilsland. 

COMPER,  Sir  (JOHN)  NINIAN  (1864- 
1960),  church  architect,  was  born  in 
Aberdeen  10  June  1864,  the  eldest  of  the 
five  children  of  the  Rev.  John  Comper, 
rector  of  St.  John's  episcopal  church,  and 
his  wife,  Ellen,  daughter  of  John  Taylor, 
merchant,  of  Hull.  His  father  was  one  of 
the  most  advanced  priests  in  the  Anglo- 
Catholic  revival  in  Scotland.  A  friend  of 
Bishop  A.  P.  Forbes  of  Brechin  and  of 
John  Mason  Neale  [qq.v.],  he  invited  the 
latter  to  become  the  godfather  of  his 
eldest  son.  It  was  natural  therefore  that  a 
fervent  and  advanced  Anglo-Catholicism 
should  be  the  dominant  influence  in  Com- 
per's  life.  In  later  years  the  'Anglo-'  came 
to  mean  less  and  less  to  him,  and  he 
would  affect  not  to  recognize  any  differ- 
ence between  the  Anghcan  and  Roman 
Churches,  maintaining  that  through  the 
work  of  St.  Pius  X,  to  whom  he  had 
a  special  devotion,  the  two  communions 
were  already,  if  secretly,  united..  After 
rather  unhappy  schooldays  at  Glenal- 
mond,  Comper  spent  a  year  at  Ruskin's 
art  school  in  Oxford,  before  going  to 
London  where  he  was  articled  to  C.  E. 
Kempe,  and  later  to  G.  F.  Bodley  and 
T.  Garner  [qq.v.].  Bodley  he  always  re- 
garded as  his  master,  and  like  him  always 
steadfastly  opposed  the  system  of  quaUfy- 
ing  examinations  for  architects  and 
architectural  schools;  in  Who's  Who  he 
described  himself  as  'architect  (not 
registered)'. 

With  the  exception  of  the  Welsh  war 
memorial  in  Cardiff  (1928),  all  Comper's 
work  was  ecclesiastical.  His  first  indepen- 
dent building  was  a  chapel  added  to  his 
father's  church  of  St.  Margaret  of  Scot- 


land, Aberdeen,  in  1889.  This  was  followed 
two  years  later  by  conventual  buildings 
near  by  in  the  same  city,  which  set  the 
fashion,  destined  to  become  the  sine  qua 
non  of  successful  Anglican  convents,  of  a 
Comper  chapel.  One  of  his  last  works  was 
the  great  window  in  Westminster  Hall 
(1952).  In  the  course  of  seventy  years 
he  built  fifteen  churches,  restored  and 
decorated  scores,  and  designed  vestments, 
banners,  and  windows  in  places  as  far 
apart  as  China,  North  America,  France, 
India,  and  South  Africa ;  in  England  there 
can  hardly  be  a  rural  deanery  without 
some  example  of  his  sensitive,  expensive, 
and  unmistakable  workmanship,  which 
is  to  be  found  also  in  churches  of  the 
Roman  communion,  among  them  Down- 
side Abbey. 

The  last  rose  of  the  summer  of  the 
Gothic  revival,  Comper  was  no  mere 
revivahst.  His  understanding  of  the  pur- 
pose of  a  church  was  far  in  advance  of  any 
other  architect  in  that  tradition.  He  has 
been  claimed  as  the  greatest  church 
furnisher  since  Wren.  But  if  he  was 
primarily  a  decorator  rather  than  an 
architect,  his  decorative  art  was  never  for 
art's  sake,  but  for  the  sake  of  the  function 
for  which  he  held  a  church  exists,  as  a  roof 
over  an  altar.  Believing  this,  he  built 
from  the  altar  outwards,  personally  de- 
signing every  detail  of  the  furnishings, 
leaving  nothing — not  even  the  candles — 
to  the  repository.  While  bitterly  opposed 
to  'modernism',  he  nevertheless  antici- 
pated by  many  years  the  aims  of  the 
avant-garde :  for  example  in  his  use  of  free- 
standing altars,  of  pure  white  interiors  and 
strong  clear  colours — especially  the  typi- 
cal Comper  rose  and  green,  and  the 
combination  of  gilding,  blue,  and  white. 

His  early  work  was  strictly  medieval  in 
inspiration.  Long  hours  of  poring  over 
illuminations  in  the  British  Museum  re- 
sulted in  a  paper  on  'The  English  Altar 
and  its  Surroundings'  read  to  the  Society 
of  St.  Osmund  in  1893  and  later  to  the  St. 
Paul's  Ecclesiological  Society.  It  was  in- 
cluded in  Some  Principles  and  Services  of 
the  Prayer  Book  Historically  Considered 
(1899)  edited  by  John  Wickham  Legg 
[q.v.]  and  marked  the  first  time  in  the 
history  of  the  Gothic  revival  that  the 
altar  was  taken  seriously  and  not  treated 
as  'a  sideboard  or  a  mantelpiece'  as  he 
described  Bodley's  series  of  ledges  and;  V 
gradines. 

At  St.  Wilfrid's,  Cantley,  in  1893  Com- 
per erected  an  altar  with  riddel  posts, 
the  first  of  that  succession  of  'box-bed' 


\ 


24A 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Connard 


English  altars  whose  use  by  inferior  artists 
he  came  to  deplore.  In  1892  he  installed 
a  hanging  pyx  in  St.  Matthew's,  West- 
minster (since  removed),  thus  leading  to 
a  development  in  the  practice  of  reserva- 
tion in  the  Church.  St.  Matthew's  was  the 
first  of  many  examples  of  the  hanging  pyx, 
of  which  the  most  elaborate  was  the  nine- 
foot  silver  turris  at  All  Saints',  Margaret 
Street,  and  the  most  successful  that  in  the 
Grosvenor  Chapel. 

The  finest  example  of  Comper's  first 
medieval  manner  is  the  chiu-ch  of  St. 
Cyprian,  Clarence  Gate  (1903).  His  second 
style  dated  from  about  1904.  Visits  to  the 
Mediterranean  revealed  to  him,  with  all 
the  force  of  a  conversion,  the  debt  owed 
by  all  Christian  art  to  Greece.  Thereafter 
he  avoided  the  medieval  Christ  typified  by 
the  crucifix  in  favom*  of  the  beardless, 
virile  Christ  in  Glory  of  the  Majestas; 
where  before  he  had  sought  for  'unity  in 
beauty  by  exclusion'  of  all  not  in  period  he 
now  found  a  deeper  'unity  by  inclusion'. 
This  was  expressed  in  an  uninhibited 
mingling  of  classical,  gothic,  baroque,  and 
even  saracenic  motifs.  This  eclecticism 
can  be  seen  at  Wimborne  St.  Giles,  where 
in  1910  he  restored  a  classical  church  with 
perpendicular  decorations  and  a  man- 
nerist Jacobean  screen ;  or — most  notably 
— at  his  chef  d'ceuvre,  St.  Mary's,  Welling- 
borough (1904-40),  where  a  perpendicular 
nave,  middle-gothic  side  chapel,  Spanish 
screens,  and  classical  baldachino,  com- 
bine brilliantly  in  one  harmonious  riot  of 
colour  and  gilding.  In  his  last  period  he 
grew  more  and  more  to  see  the  importance 
of  a  free-standing  altar,  usually  covered 
by  a  ciborium,  as  in  the  All  Saints'  Con- 
vent chapel  at  London  Colney,  at  Pusey 
House,  Oxford,  or  St.  Philip's,  Cosham, 
and  by  an  uncumbered,  translucent  back- 
ground to  his  windows. 

Comper's  few  writings  are  important 
monuments  of  ecclesiology.  Besides  his 
essay  on  the  English  altar  which  was 
reissued  in  a  revised  form  in  1933,  he 
wrote  only  three  pamphlets,:  The  Reason- 
ableness of  the  Ornaments  Rubric  (1897),  Of 
the  Atmosphere  of  a  Church  (1947),  and  Of 
the  Christian  Altar  and  the  Buildings  Which 
Contain  It  (1950).  They  reveal  an  under- 
standing of  the  function  of  the  church 
wliich  puts  Comper  in  a  different  class 
from  any  of  his  predecessors  since  Pugin. 

Holding  (and  expressing)  his  strong 
views  with  an  airy  disregard  for  whatever 
did  not  agree  with  them,  possessing  a  per- 
fectionist sensibility  and  a  disconcertingly 
teasing  sense  of  humour,  Comper  in  his 


prime  was  a  somewhat  formidable  figure. 
The  only  portrait  of  him  (which  he  dis- 
liked) was  painted  at  this  time  by  his 
cousin  Beatrice  Bright  and  is  in  the  pos- 
session of  the  family.  But  in  his  later 
years  he  mellowed  into  a  youthful  and 
upright  nonagenarian,  with  a  perfectly 
trimmed  goatee  and  gold-rimmed  spec- 
tacles, courtly  manners,  and  a  voice  whose 
exquisite  modulations  carried  with  it  over- 
tones of  the  distant  days,  of  which  he 
would  talk  with  relish,  when  he  dined  with 
Beardsley,  heard  the  news  of  Rossetti's 
death  at  Alfred  Gurney's  table,  or  engaged 
in  sympathetic  discourse  with  Swinburne's 
sister,  Isabel. 

In  1890  Comper  married  Grace  Buck- 
nail  (died  1933) ;  they  had  four  sons,  the 
eldest  of  whom  became  an  architect,  and 
two  daughters.  In  1891  he  entered  into 
partnership  with  his  brother-in-law,  Wil- 
liam Bucknall,  and  afterwardssuccessively 
with  the  latter^s  son  and  grandson.  He 
was  knighted  in  1950. 

In  1912  Comper  moved  into  The  Priory, 
Beulah  Hill,  a  stuccoed  'gothick'  house 
near  Sydenham,  where  he  lived  until  his 
death  22  December  1960.  His  ashes  were 
buried  beneath  the  windows  of  his  design 
in  Westminster  Abbey  where  he  had  been 
responsible  also  for  the  Warriors*  chapel. 

[The  Times,  23  December  1960;  Times 
Literary  Supplement,  27  April  1951 ;  Church 
Times,  13  January  1950;  Pax,  November 
1937 ;  John  Betjeman  in  Architectural  Review, 
February  1939 ;  Peter  F.  Anson,  Fashions  in 
Church  Furnishings,  1960;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.]     Gebakd  Irvine, 

CONNARD,  PHILIP  (1875-1958),  pain- 
ter, was  born  at  Southport  24  March  1875, 
the  son  of  David  Connard,  house-painter, 
by  his  wife,  Ellen  Lunt.  After  a  modicum 
of  elementary  schooling  he  went  into  his 
father's  trade.  But,  having  wider  ambi- 
tions, he  attended  evening  classes  and 
eventually  w  on  a  National  School  scholar- 
ship in  textile  designing  which  took  him  to 
South  Kensington.  With  a  prize  of  £100 
he  went  next  to  Paris  where  he-  hoped  for 
a  two-year  training  as  a  painter.  His  funds 
proving  insufficient  he  returned  after  a 
few  months  to  London  where  he  suc- 
ceeded in  finding  some  jobs  as  an  illustra- 
tor and  soon  afterwards  became  a  master 
at  the  Lambeth  School  of  Art. 

Meanwhile  he  had  begun  to  submit  work 
to  open  exhibitions.  Some  contributions 
to  the  New  English  Art  Club  caught  the 
eyes  of  Henry  Tonks  and  P.  Wilson  Steer 
[qq.v.]    who    supported    his    application 


245 


Connard 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


for  club  membership  which  was  duly 
accorded.  For  a  while  he  retained  his 
Lambeth  post,  but  he  gradually  produced 
more  and  more  of  his  own  work,  chiefly  as 
a  decorative  painter,  and  before  long  he 
was  able  to  abandon  teaching  and  live  by 
independent  practice.  His  next  line  of 
work  was  portraiture,  and  he  joined  the 
National  Portrait  Society.  His  portraits, 
though  sound,  were  not  especially  dis- 
tinguished; until  the  thirties  his  chief 
reputation  derived  from  romantic  and 
decorative  landscapes  in  oils.  In  his  early 
decorative  period  Connard  produced 
highly  stylized  compositions  which  might 
contain  Harlequins,  pierrettes,  and  the 
like,  or  very  often  birds,  which  he  loved 
dearly.  These,  though  often  adapted  to 
decorative  uses,  were  based  on  careful 
naturalistic  sketches  which  he  made  at 
the  Zoo. 

As  time  went  on,  Connard  was  asked  to 
carry  out  sundry  important  decorative 
commissions,  which  included  admirable 
miu-als  in  the  royal  Doll's  House  room  at 
Windsor.  He  painted  two  panels  for  the 
main  ballroom  at  Delhi,  and  for  the  liner 
Queen  Mary  he  executed  a  decorative 
panel  26  feet  by  14  feet  on  the  subject  of 
'England'.  Public  authorities  began  to 
take  notice  of  him  and  his  work  is  to  be 
seen  at  the  Tate  Gallery,  the  Luxembourg, 
and  many  other  public  galleries.  There  are 
also  more  than  forty  of  his  works  in  the 
Imperial  War  Museum.  During  the  war 
of  1914-18  he  served  in  the  Royal  Field 
Artillery  as  a  captain,  but  was  invalided 
out  and  became  an  official  artist  to  the 
Royal  Navy. 

As  he  approached  his  middle  years, 
Connard  began  to  use  water-colours,  in 
which  he  may  be  thought  to  have  attained 
his  highest  distinction,  for  a  natural  good 
taste  and  a  delicacy  of  touch  and  feeling 
made  his  work  highly  ethereal  with  a 
subtle  apprehension  of  atmosphere.  He 
became  an  associate  member  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Painters  in  Water  Colours  and 
was  quickly  promoted  to  full  membership 
(1934).  His  dealings  with  the  Royal 
Academy  were  imusual  in  that  he  sub- 
mitted no  work  there  imtil  he  was  ad- 
mitted as  an  associate  in  1918.  Thereafter 
he  showed  regularly  every  year  and  was 
promoted  R.A.  in  1925. 

In  later  Ufe  Connard  went  to  live  at 
Richmond,  where  he  had  a  house  over- 
looking the  Thames,  and  there  he  painted 
many  riverside  scenes  which  were  unlike 
his  earlier  works,  being  far  more  reaUstic 
in  style.  Connard  never  allowed  himself 


to  become  set  in  any  artistic  rut,  nor  was 
he  a  disciple  of  Post-Impressionism  or 
kindred  theories.  He  was  most  versatile 
and  all  his  work  had  a  characteristic 
'handwriting'.  He  was  appointed  C.V.O. 
in  1950. 

Connard  was  a  man  of  equable  and 
pleasant  disposition  though  on  certain 
issues  his  friends  were  apt  to  find  him 
obstinate  and  pig-headed.  He  was  a  faith- 
ful member  of  the  Arts  Club,  where  he 
often  forgathered  with  such  special  cronies 
as  Sir  William  Orpen  and  F.  Derwent 
Wood  [qq.v.].  An  excellent  raconteur,  he 
could  set  the  table  in  a  roar  with  his 
Lancashire  stories. 

He  was  twice  married:  first,  in  1904,  to 
Mary  (died  1927),  daughter  of  Archdeacon 
Daniel  CoUyer,  by  whom  he  had  two 
daughters ;  secondly,  in  1933,  to  Georgina 
Yorke,  of  Twickenham,  who  figured  in 
many  of  his  later  interior  paintings.  He 
died  at  Twickenham  8  December  1958. 
A  pencil  drawing  by  George  Lambert  be- 
came the  property  of  a  daughter. 

[Studio,  June  1923 ;  The  Times,  9  December 
1958 ;  private  information.] 

Herbert  B.  Grimsditch. 

CONYNGHAM,  Sir  GERALD  PON- 
SONBY  LENOX-  (1866-1956),  geodesist. 
[See  Lenox-Conyngham.] 

COOK,  ARTHUR  BERNARD  (1868- 
1952),  classical  scholar  and  archaeologist, 
was  born  in  Hampstead  22  October  1868, 
the  son  of  William  Henry  Cook,  M.D.,  and 
his  wife,  Harriet  Bickersteth,  of  a  family 
which  produced  several  noted  evangelical 
figures,  including  her  brother,  Edward 
Henry  Bickersteth  [q.v.],  who  became 
bishop  of  Exeter.  Cook's  younger  brothers, 
(Sir)  Albert  Ruskin  Cook  and  John 
Howard  Cook,  both  became  medical 
missionaries  in  Uganda.  A  scholar  of  St. 
Paul's  School  in  a  brilliant  period  and 
of  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  Cook  ob- 
tained first  classes  in  both  parts  of  the 
classical  tripos  (1889-91),  won  the  Craven 
scholarship  and  the  Chancellor's  medal  for 
English  verse  in  1889,  the  Chancellor's 
first  medal  for  classics  (1891),  and  the 
Members'  prize  for  Latin  essay  (1892). 
From  1893  to  1899  he  was  a  fellow  of 
Trinity ;  Queens'  College  then  elected  him 
lecturer  in  classics  in  1900,  a  fellow  three 
years  later,  and  in  1935  vice-president. 
From  1893  he  was  professor  of  Greek  at 
Bedford  College,  London,  until  in  1907  he 
became  reader  in  classical  archaeology  in 


246 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cook 


Cambridge.  He  proceeded  Litt.D.  in  1926 
and  in  1931  became  the  first  holder  of  the 
Lam-ence  chair  of  classical  archaeology 
from  which  he  retired  in  1934.  He  was 
elected  F.B.A.  in  194-1,  and  he  was  a 
foreign  member  of  the  American  Philo- 
sophical Society  and  the  German  Archaeo- 
logical Institute. 

On  men  reading  classics  in  Trinity  in 
Cook's  time  Henry  Jackson  [q.v.]  exer- 
cised a  remarkable  and  richly  merited 
influence,  and  it  was  no  accident  that 
Cook's  first  book  was  The  Metaphysical 
Basis  of  Plato's  Ethics  (1895).  But  there 
were  other  forces  to  influence  him  in  his 
formative  years.  There  was  the  archaeo- 
logical teaching  of  J.  H.  Middleton  [q.v.] 
and  Charles  Waldstein  (later  Sir  Charles 
Walston)  to  whom  Cook  did  justice  in  his 
wise  and  delightful  inaugural  lecture,  'The 
Rise  and  Progress  of  Classical  Archaeology' 
(1931):  Middleton  clearly  meant  much  to 
him.  There  was  comparative  philology, 
then  obligatory  for  all  who  took  the 
classical  tripos.  There  was  also  (Sir)  James 
Frazer  [q.v.],  not  teaching  but  present 
and  working  in  the  full  enthusiasm  of 
the  movement  of  thought  to  which  (Sir) 
E.  B.  Tylor  and  William  Robertson  Smith 
[qq.v.]  had  given  so  powerful  an  impulse. 
In  England  as  elsewhere  the  history  of 
religion  then  excited  interest  as  perhaps 
never  before  or  since.  Cook's  deep  and 
continuing  evangelical  piety  predisposed 
him  towards  thought  on  these  things, 
without  alienating  him  from  those  who 
shared  his  interest  but  not  his  beliefs. 

As  early  as  1894  Cook  published  his 
*Animal  Worship  in  the  Mycenaean  Age' 
{Journal  of  Hellenic  Studies),  soon  fol- 
lowed by  'The  Bee  in  Greek  Mythology' 
(ibid.,  1895)  and  other  papers,  among 
which  that  on  'Greek  Votive  Offerings' 
{Folk-Lore,  1903)  is  notable.  Cook  did  not 
restrict  his  range  of  interests.  As  a  young 
man  he  planned  to  edit  Theocritus  and 
with  his  friend  Peter  Giles  [q.v.]  did 
a  considerable  amount  of  preliminary 
work  now  lodged  in  the  university 
library.  The  Classical  Review  contains  his 
highly  original  and  stimulating  papers  on 
'Associated  Reminiscences'  (1901)  and 
'Unconscious  Iterations'  (1902) ;  a  quarter 
of  a  century  later  he  served  as  general 
editor  for  Methuen's  Handbooks  of 
Archaeology.  But  Cook's  real  vocation 
was  the  study  of  ancient  religion  and  in 
particular  of  the  sky-god  Zeus.  A  series  of 
papers  in  the  Classical  Review  between 
1902  and  1906  and  another  in  Folk-Lore 
between  1903  and  1907  were  the  fore- 


runners of  his  monumental  Zeus,  A  Study 
in  Ancient  Religion  (3  vols.,  1914,  1925, 
and  1940).  This  shows  a  fabulous  com- 
mand of  every  kind  of  material  which 
could  be  brought  to  bear  on  the  subject — 
ancient  literature,  monumental  evidence, 
the  Near  Eastern  background,  and  folk- 
lore and  folk- ways  from  all  parts,  all 
presented  with  supreme  accuracy  and  so 
indexed  as  to  be  instantly  available.  Zeus 
would  be  indispensable  to  students  in 
many  fields  even  if  every  single  conclusion 
of  its  author  were  rejected.  Perhaps  no 
one  has  equalled  Cook  in  his  ability  to 
present  the  views  of  others  with  generous 
fairness  and  to  state  objections  to  his  own ; 
no  one  has  surpassed  him  in  awareness  of 
the  fact  that  the  ancients  took  their  gods 
seriously.  He  constantly  brought  forth 
new  data  and  parallels  and  suggestive 
ideas,  and  his  sheer  knowledge  of  the 
works  of  ancient  art  was  so  wide  and 
thorough  that  his  lack  of  aesthetic  taste 
hardly  affected  his  powers  of  interpreting 
and  illustrating  them.  On  the  other  hand, 
his  sense  of  historical  criticism  and  chrono- 
logical stratification  was  weak:  he  drew 
confident  inferences  for  early  times  from 
very  late  writers,  and  he  never  appreciated 
Wissowa's  fundamental  discovery  of  the 
contrast  between  the  religious  heritages  of 
Rome  and  Greece. 

Cook  could  not,  like  his  friend  Frazer, 
live  a  life  of  pm*e  research,  and  he  prob- 
ably would  not  have  wished  to  do  so. 
He  was  an  admirable  lecturer,  always 
clear,  thorough,  and  entertaining,  and  he 
was  supremely  helpful  to  younger  men, 
whether  undergraduates  or  colleagues. 
Anyone  who  came  to  consult  him  was  sure 
to  go  away  with  'a  pocket  of  references' 
and  a  sense  of  encouragement.  His  weight 
of  learning  was  never  oppressive  and  was 
accompanied  by  a  warm  friendliness,  a  joy 
in  living,  and  a  puckish  humour  which 
went  with  the  twinkle  of  his  keen  eyes.  He 
had  a  superb  assemblage  of  books  and 
coins  and  other  objects  of  art,  nearly  all 
put  together  to  serve  the  studies  to  which 
he  gave  his  life.  His  natural  instinct  for 
collecting  extended  to  the  maintenance  of 
a  scrapbook  for  tales  of  the  uncanny  and 
of  extrasensory  perception.  He  never 
seemed  pressed  for  time  and  knew  how  to 
relax  in  talk  or  tennis  or  travel ;  his  spare, 
wiry  physique  appeared  to  sustain  with 
ease  his  long  labours.  He  bore  ill  health 
in  his  closing  years  with  serene  courage 
and  without  losing  his  old  gaiety.  Almost 
his  last  words  before  his  death,  as  the 
opening  verses  of  the  121st  psalm  were 


247 


Cook 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


read  to  him,  were  that  is  a  mistranslation'. 
He  died  in  Cambridge  26  April  1952. 

In  1894  Cook  married  Emily  (died 
1948),  daughter  of  George  Thomas  Mad- 
dox,  of  Hampstead.  They  had  one  daugh- 
ter, and  a  son  who  died  in  infancy. 

A  portrait  of  Cook  by  Trevor  Haddon  is 
at  Queens'  College. 

[Tfie  Times,  28  April  1952 ;  Charles  Seltman 
in  Proceedings  of  the  British  Academy,  vol. 
xxxviii,  1952 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

A.  D.  Nock. 

COOPER,  ALFRED  DUFF,  first  Vis- 
count Norwich  (1890-1954),  politician, 
diplomatist,  and  author,  was  born  at  9 
Henrietta  Street,  Cavendish  Square,  Lon- 
don, 22  February  1890,  the  fourth  child 
and  only  son  of  (Sir)  Alfred  Cooper  by  his 
wife.  Lady  Agnes  Cecil  Emmeline  Duff, 
sister  of  the  first  Duke  of  Fife.  His  father, 
who  came  of  a  family  long  established  in 
Norwich,  was  a  popular  and  successful 
London  surgeon.  His  mother  had  been 
twice  previously  married.  While  still  a 
child  he  acquired  from  his  sisters  a  love  of 
poetry,  a  gift  for  memorizing,  and  the 
habit  of  declamation.  He  was  educated  at 
Eton  where  he  achieved  no  special  pro- 
minence and  after  a  year  abroad  went  up 
in  1908  to  New  College,  Oxford. 

His  mother  by  then  had  retired  into 
secluded  widowhood  and  his  three  sisters 
had  married.  His  Eton  friend,  John  Man- 
ners, introduced  him  to  Clovelly  Court, 
near  Bideford,  where  he  stayed  every 
summer  from  1908  to  1914,  and  where  he 
met  the  more  gifted  and  vigorous  of  his 
contemporaries.  They  cured  him  of  a  ten- 
dency to  dilettantism  and  aroused  in  him 
the  ambition  to  secure  the  richest  prizes 
which  hfe  had  to  offer.  This  ambition  was 
not,  it  is  true,  very  apparent  during  his 
first  two  years  at  Oxford.  He  made  a  few 
pugnacious  speeches  in  the  Union,  profited 
much  from  the  guidance  of  his  tutor, 
H.  A.  L.  Fisher  [q.v.],  but  in  the  end  ob- 
tained only  second  class  honours  in  history 
(1911). 

After  two  years  spent  mainly  in 
Hanover  and  Paris  he  passed  into  the 
Foreign  Office  in  October  1913.  Many  of 
his  dearest  friends,  including  John  Man- 
ners, were  killed  during  the  early  stages  of 
the  war  and  it  irked  him  to  be  tied  to  a 
civilian  job.  In  July  1917  he  obtained  his 
release  from  the  Foreign  Office  and,  after 
a  period  of  training,  joined  the  3rd  bat- 
talion of  the  Grenadier  Guards  in  time  for 
the  offensive.  On  21  August  1918,  in  the 
Battle  of  Albert,  known  as  *the  battle  of 


the  mist',  he  led  his  platoon  with  such  skill 
and  gallantry  that  he  was  cited  in  dis- 
patches for  'splendid  leading'  and  was 
appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  On  demobiliza- 
tion he  returned  to  the  Foreign  Office. 

In  1919  he  married  Lady  Diana  Olivia 
Winifred  Maud  Manners,  daughter  of  the 
eighth  Duke  of  Rutland,  and  one  of  the 
most  beautiful  women  of  her  time.  In 
her  he  found  a  dazzling  and  valiant  com- 
panion, who  watched  over  him  with 
intelligent  devotion  until  his  death.  At 
their  house  at  90  Gower  Street,  where  they 
lived  for  seventeen  years,  they  would 
entertain  the  survivors  of  his  own  genera- 
tion together  with  some  of  their  older 
friends,  such  as  Augustine  Birrell,  Edwin 
Montagu,  Maurice  Baring,  Hilaire  Belloc 
[qq.v.].  Lord  Beaverbrook,  and  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill.  Duff  Cooper's  ambi- 
tion to  enter  Parliament  was  stimulated 
by  these  associations  and  by  the  fact 
that,  on  being  appointed  private  secretary 
to  the  parliamentary  under-secretary  in 
February  1922,  he  was  regularly  attending 
debates  in  the  House  of  Commons.  The 
difficulty  was  finance.  In  1923,  however. 
Lady  Diana  obtained  a  rewarding  con- 
tract to  play  the  leading  part  in  The 
Miracle  in  New  York.  On  31  July  1924 
Duff  Cooper,  who  had  never  been  a 
natural  civil  servant,  resigned  from  the 
Foreign  Office  and  in  October  of  that  year 
he  was  elected  Conservative  member  of 
Parliament  for  Oldham.  On  15  December 
he  delivered  an  impressive  maiden  speech 
which  immediately  placed  him  in  the 
forefront  of  the  back-benchers.  In  January 
1928  he  was  appointed  financial  secretary 
to  the  War  Office,  but  lost  his  seat  in  the 
general  election  of  1929.  He  was  consoled 
by  the  birth  of  his  son,  John  Julius,  on  15 
September  1929.  He  devoted  the  leisure 
to  working  on  his  biography  of  Talleyrand 
which,  when  published  in  1932,  earned 
universal  acclaim. 

In  March  1931  a  by-election  occurred  in 
the  St.  George's  division  of  Westminster. 
Certain  Conservatives,  with  the  encour- 
agement and  support  of  Lord  Rothermere 
[q.v.]  and  Lord  Beaverbrook,  decided 
to  put  up  an  independent  candidate  as 
a  protest  against  Baldwin's  leadership  of 
the  party.  Duff  Cooper  volunteered  to 
stand  as  the  official  Conservative.  After  a 
spirited  campaign,  which  attracted  much 
pubHc  attention,  he  won  by  5,710  votes 
and  retained  the  seat  until  he  resigned  it  in 
1945.  In  September  1931  he  resumed  his 
former  post  as  financial  secretary  to  the 
War  Office ;  in  June  1934  he  was  promoted 


248 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cooper,  A.  D. 


to  financial  secretarj'^  to  the  Treasury ;  in 
November  1935  he  became  secretary  of 
state  for  war  and  a  privy  counsellor. 

During  the  abdication  crisis  in  1936 
Duff  Cooper  was  one  of  the  two  cabinet 
ministers  whom,  with  Baldwin's  approval, 
King  Edward  VIII  consulted.  Realizing 
that  His  Majesty's  resolve  could  not  be 
shaken,  Duff  Cooper  begged  him  to  post- 
pone his  marriage  for  a  year  and  mean- 
while to  be  crowned.  The  King  felt  it 
would  be  wrong  to  go  through  so  solemn  a 
ceremony  as  the  coronation  without  letting 
his  ultimate  intentions  be  known:  this 
advice  he  therefore  rejected. 

In  May  1937,  when  Chamberlain  suc- 
ceeded Baldwin  as  prime  minister.  Duff 
Cooper  was,  to  his  sm-prise  and  pleasure, 
offered  the  post  of  first  lord  of  the 
Admiralty.  Meanwhile  he  had  been  able 
to  complete  his  life  of  Haig,  undertaken 
at  the  request  of  the  executors,  in  two 
volumes  (1935-6).  Duff  Cooper  enjoyed 
being  first  lord.  He  got  on  well  with  the 
naval  staff,  he  grappled  with  the  problem 
of  the  Fleet  Air  Arm,  and  he  strove  to  put 
the  navy  in  readiness  for  a  war  which  he 
saw  to  be  inevitable.  Chamberlain,  with 
whom  he  was  never  on  terms  of  ease 
or  confidence,  did  not  support  these  en- 
deavours. Duff  Cooper,  having  abandoned 
his  initial  trust  in  the  League  of  Nations, 
had  fallen  back  on  the  two  classic  prin- 
ciples that  Great  Britain  must  be  the 
*natm*ar  enemy  of  any  power  seeking  to 
dominate  the  Continent,  and  that  it  was 
a  mistake  to  have  more  than  one  major 
enemy  at  a  time.  Thus,  although  he  was 
not  opposed  to  an  agreement  with  Italy, 
he  was  convinced  that  any  compromise 
with  Hitler  would  prove  unworkable. 
When,  therefore,  the  Czechoslovak  crisis 
arose  in  the  autumn  of  1938,  he  found 
himself  at  variance  with  Chamberlain  and 
the  majority  of  his  colleagues.  It  was  with 
difficulty  that  he  obtained  their  approval 
to  the  mobilization  of  the  Fleet  which 
took  place  on  28  September.  When  two 
days  later  Chamberlain  returned  from 
Munich,  bringing  with  him  the  terms  of 
his  agreement  with  Hitler,  Duff  Cooper 
was  unable  to  share  the  general  relief  and 
jubilation.  On  3  October,  in  a  speech 
which  shocked  the  country  and  profoundly 
impressed  the  House  of  Commons,  he 
demonstrated  that  the  Munich  agreement 
was  meaningless  and  dishonourable.  Even 
among  those  who  were  most  pained  by 
this  opinion  there  was  admiration  for  his 
moral  courage. 

Immediately    on    his    resignation    he 


accepted  an  offer  from  Lord  Beaverbrook 
to  write  a  weekly  article  for  the  Evening 
Standard.  Although  he  did  not  always 
share  the  political  views  of  Lord  Beaver- 
brook, he  was  accorded  complete  indepen- 
dence on  the  condition  that  the  editor 
need  not  publish,  although  he  must  pay 
for,  any  article  of  which  he  disapproved. 
The  winter  of  1939-40  was  devoted  to 
an  extended  lecture  tour  in  the  United 
States.  When  in  May  1940  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  succeeded  Chamberlain,  Duff 
Cooper  was  given  the  post  of  minister  of 
information.  On  26  June  1940  after  the 
fall  of  France,  he  flew  with  Lord  Gort 
[q.v.]  on  a  forlorn  hope  to  Rabat  with 
the  intention  of  establishing  contact  with 
those  French  ministers,  such  as  Georges 
Mandel,  who  were  credited  with  the  wish 
to  continue  resistance  in  North  Africa. 
The  French  authorities  had  orders  to 
prevent  any  such  meeting,  if  necessary 
by  force :  Duff  Cooper  returned  to  London 
with  his  mission  unaccomplished.  In  July 

1941  he  left  the  Ministry  of  Information 
with  a  sigh  of  relief  and  became  chan- 
cellor of  the  Duchy  of  Lancaster.  In 
August  he  left  for  the  Far  East  on  behalf 
of  the  War  Cabinet  to  examine  and  report 
on  the  arrangements  for  consultation  and 
co-ordination  between  the  various  British 
authorities,  military,  administrative  and 
political,  in  those  regions.  After  Pearl 
Harbour  he  was  appointed  resident 
cabinet  minister  at  Singapore  and 
authorized  to  form  a  War  Council,  but  the 
appointment  of'  Sir  A.  P.  (later  Earl) 
Wavell  [q.v.]  as  supreme  commander  very 
shortly  afterwards  made  his  post  redun- 
dant. He  arrived  in  England  in  February 

1942  to  find  that  his  name  had  been 
associated  with  responsibihty  for  the 
Singapore  collapse.  He  consoled  himself 
for  this  unfairness  by  working  hard  as 
chairman,  from  June,  of  the  cabinet 
committee  on  security  and  by  writing  a 
romantic  study  of  King  David  (1943). 

In  January  1944  he  arrived  at  Algiers 
as  British  representative  with  the  French 
Committee  of  National  Liberation  estab- 
lished in  North  Africa  under  General  de 
Gaulle.  In  September  1944  his  mission 
moved  to  Paris  and  on  18  November  he 
presented  his  letters  of  credence  as  British 
ambassador.  During  their  three  years' 
residence  at  the  embassy  Duff  Cooper  and 
Lady  Diana  sought  by  their  tact  and 
hospitality  to  heal  the  wounds  left  by  the 
war  and  the  aftermath  of  Vichy.  Duff 
Cooper's  aim  had  always  been  to  secure  a 
treaty  of  alliance :  at  first  his  efforts  were 


249 


Cooper,  A.  D. 

hampered  by  the  incompatibiUty  existing 
between  de  Gaulle  and  Churchill:  it  was 
not  until  March  1947  that  the  treaty  was 
finally  signed  by  Bidault  and  Ernest 
Bevin  [q.v.]  at  Dunkirk.  When,  at  the  end 
of  1947,  he  lost  his  post  as  ambassador  he 
had  the  satisfaction  of  knowing  that  the 
main  purposes  of  his  mission  had  been 
achieved.  He  was  appointed  G.C.M.G.  in 
1948  and  raised  to  the  peerage  as  Viscount 
Norwich,  of  Aldwick,  in  1952. 

The  remainder  of  his  life  after  his  retire- 
ment was  devoted  to  literature  and  to 
entertaining  his  friends  at  his  house  at 
Vineuil  near  Chantilly.  His  ingenious  fan- 
tasy Sergeant  Shakespeare  as  well  as  a 
selection  from  his  poems  were  published  in 
1949.  In  1950  came  his  novel  Operation 
Heartbreak.  His  remarkable  autobiography 
Old  Men  Forget  appeared  in  1953.  A  few 
weeks  later,  on  1  January  1954,  he  died 
when  on  a  voyage  to  the  West  Indies.  His 
body  was  landed  at  Vigo  and  buried  at 
Belvoir  Castle,  the  home  of  his  wife's 
family. 

Duff  Cooper  possessed  a  striking  per- 
sonality. Although  too  reserved  to  win 
popularity,  and  too  proud  to  court  it, 
he  influenced  his  contemporaries  by  the 
force  of  his  courage,  the  vigour  of  his 
principles,  and  the  distinction  of  his  mind, 
his  manners,  and  his  discourses.  He  was 
choleric  in  argument  and  pugnacious  in 
debate ;  yet  in  his  later  manhood  he  was 
never,  as  some  imagined,  a  fanatical  con- 
servative, since  he  regarded  as  'barbarians' 
all  extremists,  whether  of  the  Right  or 
the  Left.  Although  his  political  ambitions 
waned  in  middle  life,  he  never  lost  his  zest 
for  Uterature,  travel,  conversation,  shoot- 
ing, wine,  and  the  society  of  gifted  and 
beautiful  women.  'Life  has  been  good  to 
me',  he  wrote  in  the  last  paragraph  of  his 
autobiography,  'and  I  am  grateful.' 

He  was  succeeded  by  his  son  John 
Julius  (born  1929)  who  entered  the  Foreign 
Service  and  resigned  in  1964.  A  portrait  of 
Duff  Cooper  by  Sir  John  Lavery,  painted 
in  1919,  is  at  the  Chateau  de  St.  Firmin, 
Vineuil,  Oise.  There  is  a  memorial  tablet 
in  the  crypt  of  St.  Paul's  Cathedral. 

[Duff  Cooper,  Old  Men  Fm-get,  1953 ;  Diana 
Cooper,  The  Rainbow  Comes  and  Goes,  1958, 
The  Light  of  Common  Day,  1959,  and  Trum- 
pets from  the  Steep,  1960 ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]         Habold  Nicolson. 

COOPER,  THOMAS  MACKAY,  Baron 
Cooper  of  Culross  (1892-1955),  lord 
justice-general  of  Scotland,  was  born  in 
Edinburgh  24  September  1892,  the  elder 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


son  by  a  second  marriage  of  John  Aitken 
Cooper,  burgh  engineer  of  Edinburgh, 
with  Margaret  Mackay,  from  Dunnet.  His 
father,  who  came  from  Culross,  died  when 
Tom  Cooper  was  eight.  At  nine  he  entered 
George  Watson's  College  and  left  at 
sixteen,  dux  of  the  school,  medallist  in 
English,  Latin,  and  Greek,  with  second 
place  in  mathematics  and  winner  of  the 
North  American  prize  for  dynamics  and 
chemistry.  He  passed  to  Edinburgh 
University,  taking  first  place  in  its  open 
bursary  list,  and  graduated  M.A.  with  first 
class  honours  in  classics  (1912)  and  LL.B. 
with  distinction  (1914).  For  a  time  during 
the  war  he  worked  in  the  War  Trade  De- 
partment in  London  and  for  his  services 
was  appointed  O.B.E.  in  1920. 

Cooper  had  passed  advocate  in  1915 
and  returning  to  the  bar  in  1919  made 
rapid  progress.  He  had  the  advantage, 
through  a  maternal  uncle,  of  valuable 
legal  connections,  but  he  had  also  gifts  of 
advocacy  and  a  knowledge  of  many  techni- 
cal subjects  which  pointed  to  an  assured 
forensic  career.  He  took  silk  in  1927. 
After  eight  years  of  large  senior  practice 
he  was  elected  Conservative  member  for 
West  Edinburgh  in  May  1935  and  ap- 
pointed solicitor-general  for  Scotland.  In 
October  of  the  same  year  he  became  lord 
advocate  and  was  sworn  of  the  Privy 
Council.  He  proved  himself  to  be  one  of 
the  most  efficient  and  popular  lord  advo- 
cates, it  is  said,  that  Scotland  had  ever 
had.  In  June  1941  he  succeeded  Lord 
Aitchison  [q.v.]  as  lord  justice-clerk  with 
the  judicial  title  of  Lord  Cooper,  and  in 
January  1947  he  became  lord  justice- 
general  and  lord  president  of  the  Court  of 
Session.  Serious  illness  overtook  him  in 
the  late  summer  of  1954  and  he  resigned 
office  in  December.  He  had  received  his 
barony  in  June  1954,  but,  because  of  ill- 
ness, he  was  never  able  to  take  part  in  the 
business  of  the  Upper  House,  his  sole 
appearance  there  being  the  occasion  of  his 
introduction  undertaken  with  great  diffi- 
culty in  March  1955. 

Cooper  had  a  well-equipped  legal  mind. 
His  judgements  were  vigorous,  penetrat- 
ing, and  lucid.  As  a  lawyer  he  will  stand 
favourable  comparison  with  the  most 
eminent  of  his  predecessors.  He  was  a 
steadfast  supporter  of  the  principles  of 
Scots  law,  frequently  commenting  on  the 
unfortunate  intrusion  into  these  principles 
of  English  legal  conceptions  and  pre- 
cedents. Perhaps  the  most  publicized  of 
his  judgements  was  that,  given  shortly 
before  he  retired,  in  an  action  challenging 


250 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cope 


the  adoption  for  Scotland  of  the  numeral 
II  in  the  title  of  Queen  Elizabeth  (Mac- 
Cormick  v.  H.M.  Advocate,  1953  S.C.  396). 
Though  the  action  failed  on  certain  pre- 
liminary pleas,  Lord  Cooper  took  occasion 
to  criticize  the  English  principle  of  the 
sovereignty  of  Parliament  in  relation  to 
the  Treaty  of  Union  between  Scotland  and 
England. 

He  was  active  in  the  formation  in  1934 
of  the  Stair  Society  to  study  and  advance 
the  history  of  Scots  law,  and  made  a  num- 
ber of  contributions  to  its  publications, 
the  chief  being  Regiam  Majestatem  (1947). 
Independently  of  the  society  he  published 
in  1944  Select  Scottish  Cases  of  the  Thir- 
teenth Century.  A  member  of  the  Scottish 
History  Society  from  1934,  he  gave,  as  its 
president  (1946-9),  four  addresses  which 
he  published  under  the  title  of  Supra 
Crepidam  (1951),  claiming  them  to  be 
merely  addresses  by  an  amateur  to 
specialists  on  their  own  subject.  It  has 
been  said  that  his  keen  perception  as  an 
historian  is  best  seen  in  these  addresses. 
Numerous  other  addresses  and  contribu- 
tions to  periodicals,  collected  in  Selected 
Papers,  1922-1954,  published  by  his 
brother  in  1957  after  his  death,  show  his 
breadth  of  view  and  width  of  learning,  as 
also  the  spirit  of  a  reformer.  He  was  an 
original  member  of  the  Scottish  commit- 
tee on  the  History  of  Parliament  and 
latterly  chairman  of  its  executive  com- 
mittee until  his  death.  When  a  judge  he 
was  called  on  to  be  chairman  of  a  number 
of  government  committees  on  Scottish 
problems ;  the  most  important,  on  hydro- 
electric development  in  Scotland  (1941- 
2),  resulted  in  the  setting  up  of  the  North 
of  Scotland  Hydro-Electric  Board.  He  was 
a  trustee  of  the  National  Galleries  of  Scot- 
land from  1947,  for  a  short  time  (1946-9) 
chairman  of  the  Ancient  Monuments 
Board  for  Scotland,  and,  as  lord  president, 
a  trustee  ex  officio  of  the  National  Library 
of  Scotland. 

Cooper  was  a  man  of  restless  energy, 
great  industry,  keen  intellect,  and  a  rapid 
worker.  He  had  a  scientific  bent  of  mind, 
with  the  genius  for  the  practical  applica- 
tion of  his  knowledge.  He  was  a  fellow  of 
the  Royal  Society  of  Edinburgh  and  its 
vice-president  (1945-8),  a  fellow  of  the 
Society  of  Antiquaries  (Scotland),  a  fel- 
low of  the  Royal  Astronomical  Society,  and 
a  member  of  the  Astronomical  Society  of 
Edinburgh  which  lent  him  a  telescope 
which  he  had  erected  in  his  garden. 
Essentially  a  friendly  man.  Cooper  was 
nevertheless  shy,  not  a  man  of  the  world 


or  socially  inclined,  although  drawn  to 
men  with  whom  he  could  converse  on  a 
basis  of  common  understanding.  He  was 
happy  with  very  young  children,  whom 
he  would  amuse  with  drawings  and 
stories,  but  his  interest  in  them  evaporated 
when  they  left  childhood.  He  loved  ani- 
mals and  never  failed  to  hold  converse 
with  a  cat.  He  had  some  interest  in  music 
and  art,  taught  himself  to  play  the  piano 
and  organ,  and  engaged  in  sketching.  He 
was^  devoted  to  his  mother  with  whom  he 
made  his  home  for  substantially  the  whole 
of  his  life,  surviving  her  by  less  than  four 
years.  He  died  in  Edinburgh,  unmarried, 
15  July  1955. 

Cooper  was  an  honorary  LL.D.  of 
Edinburgh,  Glasgow,  and  St.  Andrews, 
and  received  an  honorary  doctorate  of 
Paris  University,  a  signal  honour  for  a 
Scottish  judge.  He  was  an  honorary  mas- 
ter of  the  bench  of  the  Middle  Temple  and 
honorary  member  of  the  Society  of  Public 
Teachers  of  Law,  of  the  Institution  of 
Municipal  Engineers,  and  of  the  Edin- 
burgh Merchant  Company. 

A  posthumous  portrait  of  Cooper  in 
his  robes  as  lord  justice-general,  by  Sir 
William  Hutchison,  hangs  in  Parliament 
House,  Edinburgh. 

[Lord  Cooper  of  Culross,  Selected  Papers, 
1922-1954,  ed.  James  M.  Cooper,  1957; 
Scotsman,  16  July  1955 ;  Scots  Law  Times, 
30  July  1955 ;  private  information ;  personal 
knowledge.]  Keith  of  Avonholm. 

COPE,  Sir  ALFRED  WILLIAM  (1877- 
1954),  civil  servant,  was  born  near  Ken- 
nington  Oval  14  January  1877,  the  eldest 
of  the  eleven  children  of  Alfred  Cope, 
bottle  merchant,  and  his  wife,  Margaret 
Elizabeth  Dallimore.  Familiar  friends 
called  him  Andy.  He  entered  government 
service  as  a  boy  clerk;  joined  the  detec- 
tive branch  of  the  department  of  customs 
and  excise  in  1896 ;  and  was  made  a  pre- 
ventive inspector  in  1908.  His  energy  and 
inteUigence  soon  made  him  head  of  the 
branch  in  London,  and  he  spent  ten  ad- 
venturous years  pursuing  smugglers  and 
illicit  distillers,  especially  in  dockland.  In 
1919  he  was  transferred  to  the  Ministry  of 
Pensions  as  second  secretary.  The  Ministry 
was  paralysed  by  overwork  when  he 
arrived.  He  effected  a  substantial  office 
reorganization,  chiefly  by  drastic  cuts 
in  the  staff,  and  thus  attracted  Lloyd 
George's  attention. 

In  the  summer  of  1920  Cope  went  to 
Dublin  as  one  of  the  two  new  assistant 
under-secretaries  under  Sir  John  Anderson 


251 


Cope 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


(later  Viscount  Waverley,  q.v.),  the  other 
being  (Sir)  Mark  (Grant-)  Sturgis.  Cope 
was  also  the  last  clerk  of  the  Irish 
Privy  Council.  Ostensibly  his  task  was  to 
preserve  civil  order  through  the  Royal 
Irish  Constabulary ;  in  fact  he  had  already 
been  charged  by  Lloyd  George  with  the 
task  of  sounding  out  Sinn  Fein  opinion 
about  the  possibilities  of  a  truce  in 
the  Anglo-Irish  war.  He  was  thoroughly 
used  to  irregular  negotiations,  unavow- 
able  activities,  and  unconventional  ap- 
proaches; his  social  origins  made  him 
uncomfortable  in  the  official  round  trod- 
den by  his  predecessors  and  contem- 
poraries in  Dublin  Castle,  and  helped  him 
to  move  easily  far  outside  it.  Moreover  he 
was  as  brave  as  he  was  quick-witted.  His 
courage  never  failed  him,  although  he 
sometimes  appeared  irritable  or  despon- 
dent. After  several  false  starts,  he  secured 
the  confidence  of  the  principal  Irish  revo- 
lutionary leaders,  Michael  Collins,  Arthur 
Griffith  [qq.v.]  and  Eamon  de  Valera,  in 
his  own  good  faith,  while  remaining  per- 
fectly loyal  to  the  Crown.  It  was  he  who 
brought  de  Valera  and  Sir  James  Craig 
(later  Viscount  Craigavon,  q.v.)  into  touch, 
and  he  played  a  major  part  in  securing  the 
truce  of  11  July  1921.  After  the  signature 
of  the  treaty  in  December  he  remained  in 
Dublin  until  October  1922  to  supervise 
the  disbanding  of  the  Royal  Irish  Con- 
stabulary and  generally  to  wind  up 
British  administration.  His  relations  with 
the  Irish  leaders  continued  to  provide 
useful  intelligence  for  Downing  Street. 
He  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1920  and  pro- 
moted K.C.B.  in  October  1922. 

For  two  years  Cope  was  secretary  of  the 
National  Liberal  Party,  but  he  found 
close  co-operation  with  Lloyd  George 
impossible,  and  abandoned  politics  alto- 
gether. From  1925  to  1935  he  was,  at  the 
nomination  of  Sir  Alfred  Mond  (later  Lord 
Melchett,  q.v.),  managing  director  of 
Amalgamated  Anthracite  Collieries,  Ltd., 
a  post  which  made  further  demands  on 
his  courage  and  diplomatic  skill ;  in  it  he 
welded  several  small  pits  into  an  economi- 
cally viable  whole.  Li  1935  he  retired  to 
Seaford  on  the  Sussex  coast,  where  he 
played  some  part  in  local  politics.  He  re- 
joined Anderson  for  a  few  months  at  the 
beginning  of  the  war  of  1939-45,  but  was 
persuaded  again  to  retire.  He  died  at 
Seaford  13  May  1954. 

[Sir  John  W.  Wheeler-Bennett,  John  Ander- 
son, Viscount  Waverley,  1962 ;  The  Times,  14 
May  and  8  June  1954 ;  private  information.] 
M.  R.  D.  Foot. 


COPISAROW,  MAURICE  (1889-1959), 
chemist,  was  born  at  Biruch  in  Russia,  16 
August  1889,  the  son  of  Conan  and  Sarah 
Copisarow.  His  father  was  a  military 
secretary.  After  emigrating  to  England 
Copisarow  was  taken  under  the  wing  of 
Chaim  Weizmann  [q.v.],  later  first  presi- 
dent of  Israel  and  then  a  lecturer  in 
chemistry  at  the  university  of  Manchester. 
Copisarow  obtained  his  M.Sc.  in  1914  and 
was  trained  in  research  methods  by 
Weizmann.  A  joint  paper  published  in 
1915  dealt  with  new  phthalides  of  the 
benzene,  naphthalene,  and  carbazole 
series.  He  was  naturalized  in  that  year. 

Copisarow's  originality  was  early 
evinced;  even  from  1914  he  published 
papers  mostly  without  collaborators,  very 
occasionally  with  a  junior  colleague.  At 
first  his  work  was  in  the  field  of  synthetic 
organic  chemistry,  for  example  on  new 
applications  of  the  Friedel  Craft  reaction, 
but  even  in  the  early  years  he  developed 
wider  interests  and  these  gradually  ab- 
sorbed his  whole  attention.  In  1914  he 
^vrote  on  the  structure  and  mode  of  oxida- 
tion of  carbon,  and  this  led  to  a  series  of 
memoirs  on  the  subject  of  allotropy. 

He  was  Dalton  research  scholar  (1914- 
16),  honorary  research  fellow  (1916-19), 
and  in  1925  obtained  his  D.Sc.  The  neces- 
sity to  eke  out  meagre  resources  com- 
pelled him  to  accept  a  variety  of  tasks 
which  interfered  with  the  smooth  course 
of  his  scientific  development.  He  worked 
as  temporary  demonstrator  in  the 
chemistry  department,  and  on  behalf  of 
the  research  committee  of  the  Royal 
Society,  and  for  the  Department  of 
Scientific  and  Industrial  Research  and 
the  Ministry  of  Munitions.  In  the  summer 
of  1915  he  was  sent  by  Professor  H.  B. 
Dixon,  certainly  on  the  nomination  of 
Weizmann,  to  organize  the  analytical 
section  of  the  newly  installed  trinitro- 
toluene plant  at  the  government  factory  at 
Gorton.  He  soon  found  the  Woolwich 
Arsenal  specifications  to  be  quite  in- 
adequate, limited  as  they  were  to  the 
conditions  of  nitration  and  a  few  tests  of 
the  product.  New  problems  were  the 
purification  of  T.N.T. ;  the  action  of 
alkalis  thereon;  the  related  question  of 
inherent  acidity ;  the  utilization  of  rapidly 
accumulating  residues.  These  led  to  ex- 
tensive research,  partly  published  in 
Chemical  News,  but  the  most  significant 
paper  was  held  back  until  after  the 
armistice,  at  the  express  wish  of  Lord 
Moulton  [q.v.].  This  work  was  instru- 
mental in  substituting  steam  treatment  of 


252 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Coppard 


crude  T.N.T.  for  the  very  dangerous  alkali 
wash.  Copisarow  also  showed  how  to 
utilize  the  waste  products,  a  great  hazard 
on  account  of  their  instability,  by  con- 
version into  gelatinous  dynamite,  chloro- 
picrin,  and  khaki  dyes. 

During  three  years'  work  with  the 
Ministry  of  Munitions,  Copisarow  was  on 
the  so-called  coaltar  chemical  testing 
staff,  stationed  at  Manchester  University, 
In  1919-22  he  was  on  the  research  staff  of 
British  Dyestuffs  Corporation.  One  sub- 
ject of  a  patent  in  the  dyestuff  field  was 
on  the  industrial  production  of  carbazole 
as  a  base  for  Hydron  Blue.  This  was 
acquired  by  Levinstein,  Ltd.  He  also 
developed  a  continuous  process  for  the 
conversion  of  toluene  and  the  xylenes  to 
benzene. 

As  early  as  1917  Copisarow's  eyesight 
began  to  fail  and  the  deterioration  was 
doubtless  accelerated  by  contact  with 
such  toxic  materials  as  phosgene,  chloro- 
picrin,  and  T.N.T.  He  had  eight  unsuccess- 
ful eye  operations;  and  lost  the  sight  of 
both  eyes  shortly  after  1925.  Owing  to  this 
and  general  bad  health  he  had  no  employ- 
ment after  1922.  Between  1925  and  1927 
he  had  several  major  operations  for 
gastric  and  duodenal  troubles  and  was 
artificially  fed  for  a  period  of  six  months. 
His  indomitable  character  was  clearly  dis- 
played in  these  extremely  adverse  circum- 
stances. Never  disposing  of  ample  means, 
even  in  the  war,  he  first  of  all  set  to  work 
with  his  wife  to  establish  a  successful 
business  connected  with  furs ;  then  set  up 
a  laboratory  in  his  attic  and  wrote  a 
series  of  papers  on  the  most  varied  topics, 
all  of  which  are  characterized  by  the 
highest  originality  and  many  of  which 
could  be  profitably  reread.  After  1932  the 
effect  of  the  slump  in  trade  compelled  the 
Copisarows  to  realize  and  utilize  all  their 
small  means,  to  resort  to  mortgages  and 
borrowing  on  life  policies.  Nevertheless 
they  managed  to  bring  up  and  educate 
their  two  children. 

Among  the  more  important  topics  which 
engaged  Copisarow's  interest  in  his  later 
years  was,  first,  the  mode  of  synthesis  of 
marble  and  alabaster.  He  provided  evi- 
dence which  justified  the  replacement  of 
the  igneous  theory  of  Sir  James  Hall 
[q.v.]  by  a  new  hydrothermal  conception 
of  the  formation  of  marble.  He  also 
developed  his  ideas  on  rock  formation 
in  other  directions.  He  wrote  on  the 
'Opalescence  of  Silicic  Acid  Gels',  'Silica 
and  the  Liesegang  Phenomenon',  and  'The 
Structure  of  Hyalite  and  Opal'.  Secondly, 


he  wrote  on  the  fundamentals  of  periodi- 
city and  the  co-ordination  of  physical  and 
chemical  periodic  structures;  thirdly,  on 
mineral  arborial  growth:  its  range  and 
bearing  on  the  form  of  organic  structures. 
Fourthly,  he  studied  the  biochemical 
causes  of  malignant  growth  and  possible 
control  of  carcinoma.  Much  of  this  activity 
was  of  a  theoretical  nature  and  was  pub- 
lished in  the  Edinburgh  Medical  Journal. 
After  reading  one  of  his  reviews  Lord 
Webb- Johnson  [q.v.]  commented;  'The 
production  of  such  a  comprehensive  re- 
view and  the  sound  judgment  that  per- 
vades the  whole  presentation  is  really  a 
most  remarkable  piece  of  work.  I  am 
astounded  that  an  unsighted  man  has 
been  able  to  accomplish  it.'  Copisarow 
was  very  interested  in  enzymes  and  wrote 
about  their  action  in  relation  to  malignant 
growth  and  also  in  relation  to  radiation 
and  to  influenza  and  other  viruses. 

Among  many  agricultural  topics  which 
he  studied  were  the  preservation  of  fruit 
and  vegetables,  natural  and  artificial 
fertilizers,  destruction  of  bracken ;  and  a 
method  for  making  new  materials  from 
woody  and  other  cellulosic  starting- 
points.  Finally,  an  essay  on  the  ancient 
Egyptian,  Greek,  and  Hebrew  concepts 
of  the  Red  Sea,  published  in  Vetus  Testa- 
mentuniy  showed  that  Copisarow's  erudi- 
tion was  not  entirely  confined  to  scientific 
matters. 

In  the  tragic  circumstances  of  his  later 
life  it  was  impossible  to  bring  much  of  this 
work  to  full  fruition,  but  his  papers  teem 
with  original  ideas.  Physical  infirmity 
deprived  the  world  of  the  full  develop- 
ment of  his  undoubted  genius. 

In  1919  Copisarow  married  Eda  Cohen, 
of  Manchester.  They  had  a  daughter  and 
a  son,  Alcon  Charles  Copisarow,  who  in 
1964-6  was  chief  scientific  officer  of  the 
Ministry  of  Technology.  Copisarow  died  in 
Manchester  13  April  1959. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
H.  Robinson. 

COPPARD,  ALFRED  EDGAR  (1878- 
1957),  story-writer  and  poet,  was  born 
at  Folkestone  4  January  1878,  the  eldest 
of  a  family  of  four,  the  others  being  sisters. 
His  father,  George  Coppard,  was  a  jour- 
neyman tailor,  and  his  mother,  Emily 
Alma  Southwell,  had  been  a  housemaid. 
They  were  'shockingly  poor',  although  as 
Coppard  was  to  recall  in  his  unfinished 
autobiography,  published  posthumously, 
the  two  rooms  comprising  their  home  were 
'snug  enough'.  The  father  was  a  lover  of 


253 


Coppard 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


flowers,  birds,  and  the  open  air:  some- 
times on  Sundays  'he  would  hoist  me  on 
to  his  shoulders  and  take  me  for  a  bit  of  a 
ramble'.  But  it  was  not  until  they  moved 
to  Brighton,  when  the  boy  was  five,  that 
their  fortunes  improved  sufficiently  for 
them  to  hve  for  the  first  time  as  sole 
tenants  of  a  house.  Ill  health  terminated 
the  boy's  schooUng  at  nine,  but  it  was  his 
father's  death  which  then  made  it  neces- 
sary for  him  to  go  out  to  work.  A  vendor 
of  paraffin  and  firewood  employed  him  to 
call  'oil,  oil'  in  his  shrill  voice  along  street 
after  shabby  street.  By  the  time  he  was 
twenty  he  had  worked  for  an  auctioneer, 
a  cheesemonger,  a  soap-agent,  and  a 
carrier.  He  next  spent  several  years  in  the 
office  of  an  engineering  firm,  and  then  in 
1907  moved  to  Oxford  as  confidential 
clerk  in  the  Eagle  Ironworks. 

It  was  on  the  first  of  April  1919  that 
Coppard  gave  up  his  business  occupation 
and  began  full-time  as  a  professional 
writer.  '  "All  Fools"  Day  was  truly  the 
congenital  date  of  it',  he  recalled,  for  he 
had  saved  only  fifty  pounds  and,  more- 
over, he  was  married.  Indeed,  his  office 
colleagues  thought  he  was  'daft'.  Never- 
theless, many  years  later  he  was  honoured 
by  his  old  firm,  which  showed  great  pride 
in  his  literary  achievement. 

His  early  enthusiasm  for  reading  and 
study  had  not  lessened  while  he  was  still 
a  clerk,  and  he  gained  sufficient  success  as 
a  spare-time  athlete  to  use  the  prize- 
money  to  buy  books  and  shape  himself  for 
his  hterary  vocation.  He  appreciated  the 
atmosphere  of  Oxford  where  he  'was  fired, 
though  not  by  any  more  worthy  muse  than 
the  spirit  of  rivaby'.  He  had  tried  himself 
out  in  writing  and  received  some  editorial 
encouragement  here  and  there.  The  deep 
impression  made  on  his  creative  mind  by 
Chekhov,  Maupassant,  Thomas  Hardy, 
and  Katherine  Mansfield — also  Henry 
James  as  a  short-story-writer — had  al- 
ready determined  him  to  concentrate  on 
their  particular  literary  form.  But  in  his 
first  three  months  as  a  free  lance  he  sold 
only  'one  little  tale,  one  little  poem,  and 
received  twenty  rejections'.  It  was  there- 
fore a  timely  relief  and  encouragement 
when  an  American  periodical  paid  him 
fifty  pounds  for  a  story  of  a  few  thousand 
words. 

In  1921  his  first  collection,  Adam  and 
Eve  and  Pinch  Me,  was  published  by  the 
young  owner  of  the  Golden  Cockerel  Press 
who  had  been  impressed  by  Coppard' s 
early  efforts.  This  volume  was  the  fore- 
runner of  a  lengthy  series  of  collected  short 


stories.  The  characteristic  and  wholly 
individual  level  was  maintained  through- 
out his  career,  and  the  praise  bestowed  on 
him  at  the  beginning  by  Ford  Madox  Ford 
[q.v.]  might  have  been  applied  to  each 
volume,  for  it  was  only  rarely  and  briefly 
that  his  work  fell  from  its  high  standard: 
'He  is  almost  the  first  English  prose- 
writer  to  get  into  English  prose  the 
peculiar  quality  of  English  lyric  poetry — 
the  fancy,  the  turn  of  the  imagination,  the 
wisdom  .  .  .  and  the  beauty  of  the  great 
lyricists.'  Apparent  in  everything  Coppard 
wrote  was  a  deep  love  of  all  human  life, 
but  his  unique  creations  revealed  a 
whimsical  preference  for  the  misfit  and 
the  underdog.  His  detestation  of  injustice 
and  cruelty  caused  him  dismay,  notably 
when  a  friend  planned  to  attend  a  bull- 
fight while  visiting  Spain ;  and  he  became 
prominent  in  the  peace  movement. 

Coppard  ranks  with  Katherine  Mans- 
field [q.v.]  in  contemporary  literature, 
although  his  simplicity  and  utter  lack  of 
sophistication  recall  an  older  poet  of  his 
time,  W.  H.  Davies  [q.v.].  Indeed,  poetry 
as  well  as  prose  occupied  him  from  the  out- 
set, and  Hips  and  Haws,  the  first  of  five 
volumes  of  lyrics,  came  out  in  the  same 
year  as  his  second  book  of  stories,  Clorinda 
Walks  in  Heaven  (1922).  Between  1921 
and  1951  hardly  a  year  passed  without  a 
publication  bearing  the  imprint  A.  E. 
Coppard:  Fishmonger's  Fiddle  (1925), 
Silver  Circus  (1928),  Nixey's  Harlequin 
(1931),  Crotty  Shinkwin  (1932),  and  Dunky 
Fitlow  (1933)  are  examples  of  the  titles 
he  invented  for  what  proved  to  be  his 
best  successes.  You  Never  Know  Do  You? 
(1939)  renewed  an  old  literary  fashion  in 
exclamatory  titles,  and  later  Ifs  Me,  O 
Lord!  was  the  title  given  to  the  first  part  of 
his  autobiography,  published  a  few  months 
after  his  death  in  London  13  January  1957. 

His  closing  years  were  heartened  by  the 
Book  of  the  Month  Club  of  America, 
which  issued  his  Selected  Tales  (1946)  to  its 
vast  membership,  the  first  occasion  on 
which  it  had  made  a  work  of  this  kind  its 
leading  choice.  The  undergraduates  of 
Oxford  paid  him  tribute  with  a  celebra- 
tion of  his  seventy -fifth  birthday,  attended 
by  many  distinguished  personages,  in- 
cluding Sir  Maurice  Bowra  the  vice- 
chancellor. 

Coppard  married  first,  in  1905,  Lily 
Annie,  daughter  of  Albert  Richardson, 
plumber,  of  Brighton.  After  her  death  he 
married  Winifred  May,  daughter  of  the 
late  Dirk  de  Kok,  solicitor,  of  South 
Africa ;  they  had  a  son  and  a  daughter. 


254 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Corbett 


His  many  friends  remember  best  his 
twinkling  eyes  and  a  face  suggesting  the 
kindest  laughter.  His  last  home,  at  Duton 
Hill,  Dunmow,  Essex,  delighted  him,  with 
its  encircling  trees,  and  the  birds  so  tame 
that  he  would  pretend  to  be  cross  with 
them  whenever  they  became  too  obtrusive. 
He  was  a  football  follower,  and  when  his 
favourite  soccer  club  went  through  a  bad 
spell  his  friends  were  amused  to  receive 
plaintive  postcards  asking  'What's  the 
matter  with  Chelsea  ?'  He  spent  a  term  on 
a  rural  council,  and  shared  his  wife's 
enthusiasm  when  she  was  appointed  assis- 
tant county  medical  officer  in  mid-Essex. 
She  died  in  1969,  having  become  popular 
on  television  in  frank  discussions  of  family 
problems. 

A  portrait  in  oils  of  Coppard,  painted  in 
Walberswick  by  Tom  Van  Oss,  is  in  the 
possession  of  the  family.  There  is  also  a 
woodcut  by  Robert  Gibbings. 

[A.  E.  Coppard,  IVs  Me,  O  Lord!,  1957; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Thomas  Moult. 

CORBETT,  EDWARD  JAMES  (JIM) 
(1875-1955),  destroyer  of  man-eating 
tigers,  naturalist,  and  author,  was  born  at 
Naini  Tal,  India,  25  July  1875,  the  eighth 
child  of  Christopher  William  Corbett,  a 
soldier,  and  his  wife,  Mary  Jane,  widow  of 
Charles  Doyle.  Blessed  with  exceptional 
eyesight,  hearing,  and  powers  of  observa- 
tion, at  the  age  of  four  or  five  he  was 
spending  nights  alone  in  the  jungle  learn- 
ing the  cries,  calls,  and  songs  of  beasts  and 
birds  and  observing  their  movements  and 
habits.  His  early  schooling  was  given  him 
by  his  mother  and  half-sister  Mary,  both 
women  of  sterling  character.  Religious 
and  intelligent,  they  pervaded  the  family 
life  with  a  spirit  of  service,  courage,  and 
cheerfulness,  qualities  which  Jim  richly 
inherited.  Later  at  a  preparatory  school 
and  at  St.  Joseph's  College,  Naini  Tal,  he 
excelled  in  games  and  popularity  if  not  in 
scholarship.  In  1895  he  entered  the  service 
of  the  Bengal  and  North  Western  Railway 
as  inspector  of  fuel  at  Mankapur  and  his 
success  led  to  his  transfer,  as  trans- 
shipment inspector,  to  take  over  the  con- 
tract for  the  supply  and  employment  of 
the  large  labour  force  at  Mokameh  Ghat, 
Bengal,  at  the  crossing  of  the  Ganges 
river.  In  a  recruiting  campaign  in  the  war 
of  1914-18  he  helped  to  raise  from 
Kumaon  a  force  of  over  5,000  and  himself 
as  captain  took  500  to  France  in  1917.  He 
brought  499  back  the  next  year  and  re- 
settled them  in  their  Kumaon  villages. 


With  characteristic  generosity  he  gave  the 
whole  of  his  war  bonus  to  the  building  of  a 
soldiers'  canteen.  He  served  as  a  major  in 
the  Waziristan  campaign  from  1919  to 
1921. 

A  legacy  of  house  property  at  Naini  Tal 
enabled  Corbett  to  give  up  his  railway 
contract  and  devote  his  time  to  the  wel- 
fare of  the  people  of  Kumaon.  He  and  his 
sisters  had  a  surgery  at  their  house  where 
sick  and  injured  could  be  treated.  Adjoin- 
ing their  winter  home  at  Kaladhungi  in 
the  foothills  was  the  dilapidated  and 
almost  forsaken  village  of  Choti  Haldwani. 
This  Corbett  bought  and  resettled,  pay- 
ing all  the  villagers'  taxes  up  to  1960. 

Corbett  was  a  deadly  shot  and  an  expert 
fisherman.  In  his  later  life  he  preferred  to 
photograph  rather  than  shoot  big  game. 
Many  thousand  feet  of  film  bear  witness 
to  his  courage  and  patience.  For  example, 
for  four  months  he  daily  called  up  tiger, 
finally  succeeding  in  obtaining  a  long 
sequence  of  six  superb  specimens,  of  which 
the  nearest  was  eight  and  the  farthest 
thirty  feet  from  his  camera.  No  more 
remarkable  records  of  wild  life  in  India 
exist  and  these  are  deposited  in  the 
British  Museum  (Natural  History).  In 
1907  Corbett  was  called  on  to  shoot  his 
first  two  man-eaters,  the  Champawat 
tiger  and  the  Panar  leopard.  He  shot  his 
last  of  ten  man-eaters  in  1988.  He  main- 
tained that  no  tiger  or  leopard  was  by 
nature  a  man-eater  but  that  the  animal 
became  one  through  an  injury's  prevent- 
ing it  from  pursuing  its  normal  prey.  The 
thrilling  accounts  of  the  destruction  of 
these  man-eaters  which  had  taken  the 
lives  of  nearly  1,500  Indians  have  been 
beautifully  and  modestly  given  in  his 
three  books :  The  Man-Eaters  of  Kumaon 
(1946),  The  Man-Eating  Leopard  of 
Rudraprayag  (1948),  and  The  Temple 
Tiger  (1954).  Wiry  and  fit,  Corbett  was 
able  to  endure  the  terrific  hardships  which 
these  errands  of  mercy  imposed :  consecu- 
tive days  without  sleep  and  food  and  many 
long  nights  sitting  cramped  over  a  kill  and 
always  in  danger.  His  courage  and  deter- 
mination became  proverbial  and  brought 
him  the  deepest  affection  and  even 
worship  of  the  people.  Tall,  slim,  and 
blue-eyed,  he  was  an  extremely  attractive 
man,  notable  for  his  modesty,  kindness, 
and  generosity,  and  beloved  by  all  from 
viceroys  to  the  humblest  peasant. 

Although  sixty-four,  Corbett  begged  to 
serve  in  the  war,  and  from  1940  to  1942 
he  was  deputy  military  vice-president  of 
district  soldiers  boards.  He  recruited  1,400 


255 


Corbett 


13.N.B.  1951-1960 


men  from  Kumaon  for  a  civil  pioneer 
corps.  Despite  a  serious  illness  in  1944  he 
was  made  lieutenant-colonel  and  trained 
men  for  jungle  warfare  in  Burma. 

In  1947  Corbett,  who  was  unmarried, 
and  his  devoted  sister  Margaret  (who  died 
in  1963)  decided  to  leave  India  and  settle 
at  Nyeri,  Kenya,  in  the  house  built  by 
Lord  Baden-Powell  [q.v.]  and  where  he 
had  died.  Corbett  was  made  an  honorary 
game  warden  and  devoted  much  time  to 
filming  wild  life  and  to  writing.  In  addi- 
tion to  the  works  already  mentioned  he 
published  My  India  (1952),  largely  auto- 
biographical;  Jungle  Lore  (1953);  and 
Tree  Tops  (1955),  an  account  of  the  visit  of 
the  Princess  EUzabeth  and  the  Duke  of 
Edinburgh  to  the  hotel  in  the  tree  tops 
near  Nyeri.  Of  his  books  in  English  well 
over  a  million  had  been  sold  by  1957  and 
translations  in  eighteen  languages  had 
been  published. 

Corbett  received  the  Volunteer  decora- 
tion (1920),  the  Kaisar-i-Hind  gold  medal 
(1928),  the  O.B.E,  (1942),  and  the  CLE. 
(1946).  He  was  granted  in  India  the  free- 
dom of  the  forests,  a  privilege  only  given 
once  previously;  and  in  1957  the  Indian 
(Government  decided  that  a  game  sanc- 
tuary estabUshed  in  Garhwal  in  1935 
should  henceforth  be  known  as  the  Cor- 
bett National  Park  4n  memory  of  one  who 
had  dedicated  his  life  to  the  service  of  the 
simple  hill  folks  of  Kimiaon'.  Corbett  died 
at  Nyeri  19  April  1955,  and  Ues  in  the 
same  cemetery  as  Baden-Powell.  A  minia- 
ture by  Violet  Butler  is  in  the  possession  of 
Corbett's  family. 

*^  [Corbett's  own  writings ;  private  informa- 
tton ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Geoffrey  Cumberlege. 

CORNFORD,       FRANCES       CROFTS 

(1886-1960),  poet,  was  born  in  Cambridge 
80  March  1886,  the  only  child  of  (Sir) 
Francis  Darwin  [q.v.]  by  his  second  wife, 
EUen  Wordsworth  Crofts,  a  great-niece  of 
the  poet  and  a  lecturer  at  Newnham  Col- 
lege. Her  father,  then  lecturer  in  botany, 
was  the  third  son  of  Charles  Darwin  [q.v.], 
whom  he  had  helped  with  his  biological 
researches.  Frances  was  half-sister  to  the 
writer  and  golfing  expert,  Bernard  Darwin, 
the  only  child  of  her  father's  first  mar- 
riage. Her  education  was  private,  and 
during  her  childhood  her  chief  associates 
were  her  cousins,  the  children  of  George 
and  Horace  Darwin  [qq.v.].  Her  mother 
died  when  she  was  seventeen;  her  father 
then  moved  their  home  for  a  short  time  to 
London,  but  soon  returned  to  Cambridge 


where  Frances  passed  most  of  the  rest  of 
her  fife. 

In  the  summer  of  1908  members  of 
the  Cambridge  Marlowe  Dramatic  Society 
were  arranging  a  performance  of  Camus  as 
part  of  a  Milton  tercentenary  celebration 
at  Christ's  College.  Francis  Macdonald 
Cornford  [q.v.],  a  fellow  of  Trinity  and 
afterwards  professor  of  ancient  philosophy 
in  the  university,  had  been  cast  for  the 
part  of  Comus.  Frances  Darwin  was 
brought  in  to  help  with  the  production  and 
one  direct  consequence  was  that  she  and 
Francis  Cornford  were  married  in  1909. 
Their  home  at  Conduit  Head  off  the 
Madingley  Road  soon  became  a  meeting- 
place  for  artists  and  men  of  letters  such  as 
Will  Rothenstein,  Eric  Gill,  Lowes  Dickin- 
son [qq.v.],  Bertrand  Russell,  and  oc- 
casional visitors  such  as  Rabindranath 
Tagore  [q.v.].  The  Cornfords  had  five 
children.  The  eldest  son,  John,  showed 
great  promise  but  having  joined  the 
International  Brigade  in  the  Spanish  civil 
war  was  killed  in  battle.  Their  second  son, 
Christopher,  became  an  artist  and  in  1963 
was  appointed  the  first  dean  of  the  Royal 
College  of  Art  in  London. 

Frances  Darwin,  with  intellect  and 
artistic  sensibility  strongly  represented  in 
her  forebears,  started  writing  poetry  at 
sixteen  and  subsequently  published  a 
sufficient  body  of  poetry  to  entitle  her  to 
a  distinguished  place  among  the  minor 
poets  of  the  'Georgian'  period  and  later 
years.  Rupert  Brooke  [q.v.]  was  one 
of  her  closest  friends  and  she  was  always 
eager  to  profit  by  criticism  from  him  and 
others.  She  acknowledged  much  help  in 
her  later  years  from  another  poet,  Christo- 
pher Hassall,  and  from  Sir  Edward  Marsh 
[q.v.] ;  she  was  herself  always  ready  to  give 
help  of  the  same  kind  to  younger  writers. 
One  of  her  early  books  was  a  'morality' 
play.  Death  and  the  Princess  (1912).  In 
1954  her  volimae  of  Collected  Poems  was 
the  official  'choice'  of  the  Poetry  Book 
Society  and  in  1959  she  was  awarded  the 
Queen's  medal  for  poetry.  Her  work  owed 
little  to  the  new  fashions  set  by  Eliot  and 
Pound  and  was  unpretentious,  the  poems 
usually  being  short,  often  scarcely  more 
than  epigrams.  Her  aim  was  to  express 
only  what  she  truly  felt,  and  she  was  able 
to  catch  and  fix  with  economy  of  words 
her  passing  emotions  or  moments  of 
experience  realized  with  visual  acuity  and 
often  with  quiet  humour.  She  also  tried 
her  hand  with  some  success  at  verse 
translations,  publishing  Poems  from  the 
Busman  (1943,  helped  by  Esther  Sala- 


256 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cornwallis 


man),  and  'a  selection  from  the  French  of 
Aragon  (1950).  Her  first  book,  Poems,  pub- 
hshed  in  1910,  already  exhibited  her  chief 
characteristics  as  a  poet,  though  she 
acquired  later  more  skill  in  versification 
and  a  wider  range  of  subject.  Three  of  her 
books  were  decorated  with  woodcuts  by 
her  cousin,  Gwen  Raverat  [q.v.],  and  one 
had  cuts  by  Eric  Gill. 

Frances  Cornford  was  of  medium  height 
and  of  brown  complexion  with  dark  hair 
and  eyes.  Her  appearance  was  striking 
and  attractive  rather  than  beautiful,  her 
attractions  being  increased  by  her  gentle 
friendliness,  her  amusing  conversation, 
and  her  wish  to  enter  with  warmth  and 
imagination  into  the  feelings  and  emotions 
of  her  many  friends.  In  the  ordinary  affairs 
of  life  she  was  endearingly  vague  and 
unpractical,  with  an  extraordinary  capa- 
city for  mislaying  her  possessions.  Her 
sensitive  nature  led  to  her  suffering  from 
several  periods  of  deep  depression,  the 
first  one  following  the  shock  of  her 
mother's  death.  Each  time,  however,  she 
made  a  good,  though  slow,  recovery  and 
she  lived  to  the  age  of  seventy-four,  dying 
of  heart  failure  in  Cambridge  19  August 
1960.  She  had  not  been  christened  as  a 
child  and  was  brought  up  without  religion. 
As  Gwen  Raverat  related  in  Period  Piece 
(1952),  Frances  began  to  suffer  at  an  early 
age  from  doubts,  and  long  before  her 
death  had  accepted  with  deep  conviction 
the  faith  of  the  Church  of  England. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Geoffrey  Keynes. 

CORNWALLIS,  Sir  KINAHAN  (1883- 
1959),  administrator  and  diplomat,  was 
born  in  New  York  19  February  1883, 
the  son  of  Kinahan  Cornwallis,  journalist 
and  writer,  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth  Chap- 
man, of  Hartford,  Connecticut.  Educated 
at  Haileybury  and  University  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  studied  jurisprudence 
(obtaining  a  second  class  in  1905)  and 
Arabic,  he  first  became  known  to  a 
wider  public  as  an  athlete,  representing 
Oxford  against  Cambridge  at  athletics 
for  four  consecutive  years,  and  was  presi- 
dent (1904-6).  On  leaving  Oxford  he  joined 
the  Sudan  Civil  Service  in  1906.  After 
service  in  Khartoum  and  Kassala,  his 
exceptional  abiUty  was  recognized  by  the 
Egyptian  Government  who  first  borrowed 
him  in  1912  for  service  in  the  Ministry  of 
Finance,  and  then  made  him  a  permanent 
member  of  their  Civil  Service  to  which  he 
belonged  for  the  whole  of  his  career,  being 
seconded  at  different  times  to  the  Army, 


the  Foreign  Office,  and  the  Iraq  Govern- 
ment. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  (Sir) 
Gilbert  Clayton  [q.v.]  at  G.H.Q.  IntelU- 
gence  had  Cornwallis  commissioned  in 
the  Egyptian  Army  and  took  him  into  his 
own  office  ;  in  1915  he  became  a  member  of 
the  Arab  Bureau  where  D.  G.  Hogarth 
[q.v.]  was  then  the  director.  A  year  later 
he  was  sent  by  Clayton  with  Hogarth  and 
(Sir)  Ronald  Storrs  [q.v.]  to  Jedda  in 
order  to  obtain  King  Husain's  approval  of 
the  Arab  revolt  in  which  T.  E.  Lawrence 
[q.v.]  played  a  famous  part. 

During  1916-18  Cornwallis's  service  was 
almost  entirely  with  the  army,  as  assistant 
chief  political  officer  to  the  expeditionary 
force.  He  succeeded  Hogarth  as  director 
of  the  Arab  Bureau  (1916),  became  a 
lieutenant-colonel,  was  appointed  to  the 
D.S.O.  (1917),  and  C.B.E.  (1919),  before 
proceeding  to  Syria  with  the  Emir  Feisal, 
who  had  served  closely  with  him  in  mat- 
ters concerning  the  Arab  revolt  from  1917 
onwards. 

Cornwallis  returned  to  Cairo  in  the 
autumn  of  1919,  and  actively  continued 
the  direction  of  the  Arab  Bureau  until  the 
winter  of  1920  when  he  was  seconded  to 
the  Middle  East  department  of  the  Foreign 
Office  in  London. 

Lawrence  described  Cornwallis  in  his 
Seven  Pillars  of  Wisdom  as  being  at  this 
stage  of  his  career  'a  man  rude  to  look 
upon,  but  apparently  forged  from  one  of 
those  incredible  metals  with  a  melting 
point  of  thousands  of  degrees.  So  he  could 
remain  for  months  hotter  than  other 
men's  white-heat,  and  yet  look  cold  and 
hard.'  Indeed,  as  many  others  have  said 
of  him,  his  Olympian  height,  big  nose, 
piercing  blue  eyes,  and  slow  gruff  voice 
allied  to  a  quiet  manner,  were  most  im- 
pressive. With  it  all,  he  inspired  trust  and 
confidence  at  all  levels,  among  all  classes, 
and  with  all  colours,  while  his  kindness, 
courteousness,  and  innate  leadership 
evoked  the  loyalty  of  all  those  who  served 
him. 

May  1921  saw  Cornwallis  attached  once 
more  to  the  Emir  Feisal  who,  after  the 
Syrian  province  was  placed  under  French 
military  mandate,  was  offered  and  ac- 
cepted the  newly  created  throne  of  Iraq 
at  Baghdad,  and  especially  asked  for 
Cornwallis  to  accompany  him  on  his  jour- 
ney by  sea  from  Jedda  to  Basra. 

This  attachment  of  Cornwallis  was 
originally  suggested  by  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  (then  at  the  Colonial  Office)  to 
be  for  at  least  three  months ;  it  lasted  for 


8652062 


257 


Cornwallis 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


fourteen  years,  during  which  he  remained 
permanently  in  Baghdad  at  the  Ministry 
of  Interior  and  as  personal  adviser  to 
King  Feisal.  While  the  British  mandate 
operated  he  worked  mitiringly  to  bring 
about  the  conclusion  of  the  treaty  of  1930, 
which  gave  independence  to  Iraq  with 
strong  conditions  about  the  continuing 
alliance  with  England.  Cornwallis's  great 
influence  with  the  tribes  and  ruling  mem- 
bers of  the  Iraq  Government  enabled  him 
to  carry  on  the  Iraqi  Civil  Service 
originated  by  Sir  Arnold  Wilson  [q.v.], 
assisted  by  a  core  of  the  specially  selected 
British  political  officers  combined  to  train 
the  Iraqis  themselves  for  their  duties 
when  independence  became  possible. 

Gertrude  Bell  [q.v.]  wrote  of  Cornwallis 
then  as  a  'tower  of  strength  and  wisdom' ; 
others,  as  one  of  the  makers  of  the  Iraq 
nation.  Perhaps  no  other  Englishman 
could  have  maintained  the  precarious 
balance  at  that  period  between  the  Iraqi 
Government  and  the  British  authorities, 
besides  retaining  throughout  the  un- 
swerving confidence  of  King  Feisal. 

After  the  signing  of  the  treaty,  Corn- 
wallis continued  at  Baghdad  to  supervise 
the  workings  of  the  new  State,  but  King 
Feisal  died  in  1933  and  was  succeeded  by 
his  young  and  inexperienced  son,  Ghazi. 
He  and  his  rather  wilder  counsellors 
decided  that  they  could  do  without  an 
'elder  statesman',  so  Cornwallis  was  asked 
in  May  1935  to  retire,  the  offer  being 
softened  by  the  conferment  of  the  Order 
of  Rafidain  (first  class)  as  a  special  mark  of 
the  country's  appreciation  of  his  long  and 
devoted  service.  The  amazing  demonstra- 
tion at  the  airport  when  he  was  leaving  for 
England  provided  a  proof  (if  proof  were 
needed)  of  his  unchallenged  prestige,  and 
of  the  affection  and  esteem  in  which  he 
was  held  by  all  classes.  During  these 
years  a  C.M.G.  in  1926,  a  knighthood  in 
1929,  and  a  K.C.M.G.  in  1933  under- 
lined the  recognition  he  received  from 
Britain. 

The  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  found 
Cornwallis  in  the  Middle  East  division  of 
the  Ministry  of  Information.  In  February 
1941  he  was  nominated  ambassador  in 
Baghdad  where  it  was  felt  that  his  in- 
fluence might  help  in  a  country  whose 
attitude  was  becoming  increasingly  pro- 
Axis.  On  2  April  a  rebel  'national  govern- 
ment of  defence'  took  over;  Rashid  Ali, 
a  former  prime  minister  anxious  to  co- 
operate with  the  Axis,  was  reinstated ;  the 
regent  had  fled  the  country.  Cornwallis 
arrived  in  Baghdad  absolutely  opposed  to 


recognizing  Rashid  Ali  to  whom  on  the 
16th  he  conveyed  the  information  that, 
under  the  terms  of  the  treaty,  troops  from 
India  would  be  arriving  in  Basra  on  the 
18th  en  route  for  Palestine.  The  rebel 
government's  hostility  to  the  presence  of 
these  troops  and  the  prospect  of  more 
culminated  in  a  threat  to  the  R.A.F. 
aerodrome  at  Habbaniya  and  the  in- 
vestment of  the  embassy  itself.  Before 
communication  was  cut  off  Cornwallis 
approved  an  R.A.F.  attack  on  the  Iraqis 
at  Habbaniya  which  was  successfully 
begun  on  2  May.  Freya  Stark,  one  of  the 
beleaguered  staff,  in  her  book  East  is  West 
(1945),  brilliantly  describes  the  ensuing 
month,  during  which  Cornwallis  stood  out 
as  the  guiding  influence.  Fortunately  the 
Germans  afforded  the  rebels  little  help  and 
the  news  of  the  slowly  advancing  relief 
force  put  renewed  courage  into  the  British 
in  their  unpleasant  vigil  in  the  embassy. 
On  31  May  an  armistice  was  signed ;  the 
regent  was  reinstated  and  a  new  govern- 
ment took  office.  When  the  mayor  and 
two  officers  had  come  to  surrender  the 
city,  they  asked  that  the  independence  of 
the  country  might  still  be  respected. 
Cornwallis,  towering  down  on  them  from 
his  great  height,  replied :  'Many  years  ago 
I  fought,  together  with  King  Feisal  the 
lamented  who  was  my  friend,  for  the 
freeing  of  the  Arabs,  and  together  we 
built  up  the  Kingdom  of  Iraq.  And  do  you 
think  that  I  would  willingly  see  destroyed 
what  I  have  helped  to  build  ?' 

Iraq  thereafter  observed  the  terms  of 
the  treaty  with  Britain  and  gave  con- 
siderable help  to  the  Allies.  Cornwallis, 
who  was  advanced  to  G. C.M.G.  in  1943, 
remained  as  ambassador  until  1945, 
generating  confidence,  a  tower  of  strength 
amidst  the  many  wartime  problems. 
Returning  to  England  he  continued  at  the 
Foreign  Office  for  some  time  as  chairman 
of  the  Middle  East  committee,  and  then  in 
1946  went  with  Lord  Stansgate  [q.v.]  to 
Cairo  on  the  commission  to  discuss  a 
new  Egyptian  treaty ;  but  ill  health  beset 
him,  and  he  retired  altogether  in  that 
year. 

In  1911  he  married  Gertrude  Dorothy, 
daughter  of  (Sir)  Albert  Edward  Bowen, 
later  first  baronet ;  they  had  two  sons  and 
one  daughter.  The  marriage  was  dissolved 
and  in  1937  he  married  Madge,  daughter 
of  Harry  Ralph  Clark,  of  Lymington.  He 
died  at  his  home  in  North  Warnborough, 
Hampshire,  3  June  1959. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
David  Boyle. 


258 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Coupland 


COUPLAND,  Sir  REGINALD  (1884- 
1952),  historian  of  the  British  Empire  and 
Commonwealth,  was  born  in  London  2 
August  1884,  the  second  son  of  Sidney 
Coupland,  physician,  and  his  wife,  Bessie 
Potter.  He  was  educated  at  Winchester 
and  New  College,  Oxford,  where  he  ob- 
tained a  second  class  in  classical  honour 
moderations  in  1905  and  a  first  class  in 
liter ae  humaniores  in  1907.  In  the  same 
year  he  was  elected  to  a  fellowship  and 
lectureship  in  ancient  history  at  Trinity 
College,  Oxford,  and  seemed  destined  to 
pursue  a  career  as  a  college  tutor  in  the 
subject.  His  future  was  changed,  however, 
by  his  coming  under  the  strong  influence 
of  Lionel  Curtis  [q.v.]  who  persuaded  him 
that  his  duty  lay  in  the  study  not  of 
ancient  empires  but  of  the  modern  British 
Empire.  Coupland  was  elected  to  succeed 
him  as  Beit  lecturer  in  colonial  history  at 
Oxford  in  1913,  and  set  about  learning 
his  new  subject.  He  resigned  his  fellow- 
ship at  Trinity  in  1914.  ^Vhen  the  Beit 
professorship  of  colonial  history  at  Oxford 
became  vacant  in  1920  by  the  resignation 
of  H.  E.  Egerton  (whose  notice  he  con- 
tributed to  this  Dictionary),  Coupland 
was  elected  to  it  and  held  it  until  his 
resignation  in  1948. 

His  tenure  of  the  chair  was  marked  by 
a  steady  output  of  books,  beginning  in 
1923  with  Wilberforce,  a  biography  of 
distinction,  which  was  followed  in  fairly 
quick  succession  by  The  Quebec  Act  (1925), 
Raffles  (1926,  a  short  biographical  sketch 
of  Sir  Stamford  Raffles,  q.v.),  and  The 
American  Revolution  and  the  British 
Empire  (1930),  a  book  criticized  by  some 
Canadian  and  American  scholars  for  its 
interpretation  of  the  consequences  upon 
imperial  policy  of  the  loss  of  the  American 
colonies.  Meanwhile  in  1928  with  Kirk  on 
the  Zambesi  he  had  published  a  first  book 
in  a  field  in  which  it  may  be  said  that  his 
most  original  work  in  imperial  history  was 
undertaken:  the  history  of  East  Africa. 
It  was  followed  by  East  Africa  and  its 
Invaders  (1938),  The  Exploitation  of  East 
Africa  (1939),  and  Livingstone's  Last  Jour- 
ney (1945). 

Along  with  his  historical  studies  of  the 
Empire,  Coupland  maintained  a  keen  in- 
terest in  its  current  political  problems, 
particularly  in  regard  to  India  in  which 
his  interest  was  first  given  opportunity  for 
practical  expression  when  he  was  ap- 
pointed in  1923  a  member  of  the  royal 
commission  on  the  superior  civil  services 
in  India  which  visited  the  country  under 
the  chairmanship  of  Lord  Lee  of  Fareham 


[q.v.].  Coupland  devoted  most  of  the 
years  of  the  war  of  1939-45  to  the  study 
of  India,  visiting  the  country  twice,  and 
having  the  fortune  to  be  attached  in 
1942  to  the  mission  to  India  of  Sir 
Stafford  Cripps  [q.v.],  concerning  which 
he  published  a  short  and  interesting 
sketch.  The  Cripps  Mission  (1942).  His 
major  contributions  to  the  study  of  Indian 
politics  were  published  at  this  time:  The 
Indian  Problem  1833-1935  (1942),  Indian 
Politics  1936-1942  (1943)  in  which  there  is 
to  be  found  the  first  serious  treatment  in 
English  of  the  idea  of  Pakistan,  The 
Future  of  India  (1943),  and  India,  a 
Re-statement  (1945).  His  other  principal 
excursion  into  current  politics  was  his 
appointment  to  membership  of  the  royal 
commission  on  Palestine  of  1936-7,  set  up 
under  the  chairmanship  of  Lord  Peel 
[q.v.]  which  recommended  the  partition  of 
the  country.  Coupland  had  considerable 
influence  upon  the  deliberations  of  the 
commission  and  its  report  owed  much,  in 
substance  and  in  style,  to  his  mind  and 
pen. 

No  account  of  Coupland's  Ufe  and  work 
at  Oxford  in  the  years  between  1919  and 
1939  would  be  complete  without  a  re- 
ference to  his  part  in  fostering  and  in 
effect  running  the  Ralegh  Club,  an  under- 
graduate society  whose  members  were 
chosen  from  the  United  Kingdom  and 
other  countries  of  the  Commonwealth  and 
which  met  on  Sunday  evenings  in  Rhodes 
House  to  hear  and  to  discuss  talks  on 
imperial  problems  by  visiting  speakers. 
That  the  Ralegh  Club  could  command 
such  a  galaxy  of  distinguished  speakers 
from  all  over  the  world  and  that  it  could 
attract  to  its  membership  so  many  of  the 
lively  and  influential  undergraduates  of 
the  time  was  due  almost  entirely  to  Coup- 
land's  enthusiasm  and  energy,  and,  not 
least,  to  the  high  regard  in  which  he  was 
held  in  imperial  circles  both  at  home  and 
overseas. 

In  the  years  after  1945  Coupland  found 
himself  drawn  strongly  to  the  study  of 
nationalism  in  the  Commonwealth,  a  sub- 
ject which  had  necessarily  engaged  his 
attention  to  some  extent  in  his  early 
studies  of  the  Quebec  Act  and  of  thje 
American  revolution  and  in  his  later 
studies  of  India.  He  projected  a  series  of 
volumes  on  this  theme,  but  failing  health 
prevented  him  from  completing  (and  then 
only  with  difficulty)  more  than  one 
volume,  Welsh  and  Scottish  Nationalism, 
the  text  of  which  he  handed  to  his  pub- 
lisher on  the  day  before  he  died.  The  book, 


259 


Coupland 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


which  deals  with  much  little-known 
material,  was  published  posthumously  in 
1954. 

Coupland  was  an  eloquent  lecturer;  he 
wrote  good  English,  so  good  indeed  that 
many  scholars  of  duller  style  failed  to 
realize  the  depth  and  soUdity  of  his  learn- 
ing. Though  he  was  not  active  in  univer- 
sity politics,  he  played  his  full  part  in  the 
work  of  the  faculty  boards  of  modern  his- 
tory and  of  social  studies.  He  was  one  of 
the  original  founders  of  the  honour  school 
of  philosophy,  politics,  and  economics  at 
Oxford  in  the  years  after  the  first  world 
war,  and  he  was  associated  also  with  the 
early  years  of  Nuffield  College,  of  which  he 
was  a  professorial  fellow  from  1939  to 
1950.  His  chair  carried  with  it  a  profes- 
sorial fellowship  at  All  Souls  College  which 
he  valued  highly.  He  was  in  many  ways 
an  old-fashioned  hberal  imperialist,  an 
idealist  about  the  Empire,  which  was  in- 
deed the  ruling  passion  and  interest  of  his 
Ufe.  He  was  a  most  friendly  and  generous 
teacher ;  a  lively  and  amusing  talker ;  and 
a  man  of  integrity.  For  his  services  on  the 
Lee  conmiission  he  was  appointed  CLE. 
in  1928.  In  1944  he  was  appointed 
K.C.M.G.  His  distinction  as  an  historian 
was  recognized  by  an  honorary  D.Litt. 
from  Durham  (1938),  and  by  election  to 
a  fellowship  of  the  British  Academy  in 
1948.  He  died  suddenly  on  6  November 
1952,  as  he  embarked  at  Southampton  on 
a  voyage  to  South  Africa.  He  was  un- 
married. A  drawing  of  him  by  Miss  F.  A. 
de  Biden  Footner  hangs  in  the  community 
centre  at  Wootton,  the  Berkshire  village  in 
which  he  lived  for  over  thirty  years, 
occupying  a  house  named  Wootton  Ridge, 
on  the  southern  slopes  of  Boar's  Hill,  with 
a  splendid  view  to  the  Berkshire  Downs 
and  the  Vale  of  White  Horse. 

[The  Times,  7  November  1952 ;  Jack  Sim- 
mons in  Proceedings  of  the  British  Academy, 
vol.  xlv,  1959 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

K.  C.  Wheare. 

COURTAULD,  AUGUSTINE  (1904- 
1959),  Arctic  explorer,  was  born  26 
August  1904  at  Bocking,  Braintree,  Essex, 
the  eldest  child  of  Samuel  Augustine 
Courtauld,  a  director  of  the  family  firm, 
and  his  wife,  Edith  Anne  (Edian),  daugh- 
ter of  Walter  Venning  Lister.  He  was  a 
cousin  of  Samuel  Courtauld  [q.v.].  He  was 
educated  at  Charterhouse  and  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge,  where  he  read 
engineering  and  geography  and  graduated 
in  1926.  In  that  year  he  joined  (Sir)  James 
Wordie's    summer    expedition    to    East 


Greenland,  and  the  next  ten  years  of  his 
life  were  closely  connected  with  this  aus- 
tere and  beautiful  country. 

In  1927  he  visited  the  Sahara  with 
Francis  Rodd  (later  Lord  Rennell)  and 
Peter  Rodd,  but  he  returned  to  Greenland 
to  accompany  Wordie  again  in  the  sum- 
mer of  1929  when  he  was  one  of  the  party 
which  reached  the  summit  of  Petermann 
Peak,  9,300  feet,  then  the  highest  known 
point  in  the  Arctic.  In  1930-31  'August' 
Courtauld  was  a  member  of  the  British 
Arctic  Air  Route  Expedition  led  by  'Gino' 
Watkins  [q.v.]  which  spent  a  year  in  East 
Greenland  investigating  the  possibility  of 
an  air  route  across  the  ice-cap  to  Canada. 
An  essential  part  of  the  meteorological 
programme  was  the  establisliment  of  the 
ice-cap  station  some  140  miles  north- 
west of  the  base  camp  and  8,500  feet 
above  sea  level,  and  its  maintenance 
throughout  the  year  by  two  men  who 
would  be  relieved  at  approximately 
monthly  intervals  by  dog  sledge  or  air- 
craft. As  winter  approached,  weather  con- 
ditions were  so  severe  that  a  party, 
including  Courtauld,  took  six  weeks  to 
reach  the  ice-cap  station  from  the  base 
camp,  and  it  became  clear  that  it  would  be 
many  months  before  it  could  be  relieved 
again.  All  present,  including  the  expedi- 
tion doctor,  strongly  advised  abandoning 
the  station  as  there  was  not  enough  food 
for  two  men  to  be  left  in  safety;  but 
Courtauld,  who  had  already  achieved  a 
reputation  for  self-sufficiency,  persuaded 
the  others  to  allow  him  to  man  the  station 
alone,  and  he  was  left  there  on  5  Decem- 
ber 1930.  A  relief  party  reached  the 
vicinity  of  the  station  late  in  March  1931 
but,  owing  to  appalling  weather  condi-, 
tions,  they  were  unable  to  find  it.  On  the 
return  of  the  party  with  this  alarming 
news,  Watkins,  with  two  companions,  left 
the  base  camp  and  on  5  May  located  the 
ice-cap  station  although  it  was  completely 
submerged  in  snow.  Courtauld,  who 
had  spent  five  months  alone,  part  of 
the  time  imprisoned  beneath  the  snow 
and  in  darkness,  was  sane,  unperturbed, 
and  cheerful.  He  characteristically  wrote 
of  this  episode  that  his  main  aim  had  been 
'to  dispel  the  strange  ideas  of  danger  and 
risk  in  leaving  a  man  in  such  a  situation'. 
In  1932  he  was  awarded  the  Polar  medal 
by  King  George  V. 

In  the  summer  of  1935  Courtauld 
organized  an  expedition  to  East  Green- 
land to  map  and  climb  a  range  of  moun- 
tains which  had  been  distantly  sighted  and 
photographed  from  an  aircraft  by  Gino 


260 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cowan 


Watkins.  These  proved  to  be  the  highest 
in  the  Arctic  and  were  named  the  Watkins 
Range. 

In  1932  Courtauld  bought  a  22-ton 
gaffrigged  yawl  which  he  named  Duet. 
During  his  ice-cap  vigil  he  had  designed  a 
yacht  and  Duet  most  closely  resembled 
the  boat  of  his  dreams.  Between  1932  and 
1955  he  made  twenty-five  passages  of  over 
200  miles  including  several  ocean  races. 
As  a  seaman  he  was  fearless  and  un- 
defeated; and  frequently  frightened  his 
friends. 

Courtauld  served  through  the  war  of 
1939-45  in  the  Royal  Naval  Volunteer 
Reserve,  first  in  naval  intelligence,  later 
in  M.T.B.s  and  other  craft.  It  is  sur- 
prising that  such  an  experienced  yachts- 
man and  a  man  of  such  proved  resource 
should  not  have  risen  beyond  the  rank  of 
lieutenant,  but  he  was  too  self-effacing 
and  too  much  of  an  individualist  to  take 
kindly  to  what  he  considered  to  be  un- 
necessary regulations  and  restrictions,  and 
he  frequently  found  himself  at  logger- 
heads with  authority. 

After  the  war  he  devoted  his  unusual 
gifts  to  local  government  and  community 
service,  particularly  those  concerned  with 
young  people  and  the  sea.  He  served  on 
Essex  County  Council  in  1945-55,  became 
a  J.P.  and  D.L.  in  1946  and  high  sheriff 
of  Essex  in  1953.  He  was  a  governor  of 
Felsted  School,  chairman  of  Essex  Asso- 
ciation of  Boys'  Clubs,  president  of  the 
Cruising  Association,  and  vice-president 
of  the  Royal  National  Life-boat  Institu- 
tion. He  served  three  times  on  the  council 
of  the  Royal  Geographical  Society  and 
was  honorary  secretary  in  1948-51. 

In  1953  he  was  found  to  be  suffering 
from  disseminated  sclerosis  and  from  then 
until  he  died  in  hospital  in  London  3 
March  1959  he  became  increasingly  an 
invalid,  but  with  characteristic  fortitude 
he  continued  to  attend  official  and  social 
occasions,  even  when  confined  to  an  in- 
valid chair.  Because  of  his  illness  his 
autobiography  Man  the  Ropes  (1957)  is 
disappointing,  but  his  polar  anthology 
From  the  Ends  of  the  Earth  (1958)  was  the 
result  of  a  lifetime's  discriminating  and 
recondite  reading.  He  had  the  rare 
courage  and  single-mindedness  to  ignore 
the  trammels  of  inherited  wealth  and  the 
pressures  of  social  life  among  those  who 
did  not  measure  up  to  his  own  standards 
of  integrity.  His  disregard  of  the  normal 
pressures  of  society  sometimes  gave  the 
impression  almost  of  perversity  until  one 
realized  it' was  the  element  of  intellectual 


honesty  ,  combined  with  extraordinary 
modesty  and  boyish  enthusiasm  which 
endeared  him  to  aU  his  friends. 

In  1932  Courtauld  married  Mollie,  elder 
daughter  of  Frank  Douglas  Montgomerie, 
land  agent;  they  had  four  sons  and  two 
daughters.  In  October  1959  his  widow 
married  R.  A.  Butler  (later  Lord  Butler  of 
Saffron  Walden). 

[F.  Spencer  Chapman,  Northern  Lights, 
1932 ;  Augustine  Courtauld,  Man  the  Ropes, 
1957 ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] F.  Spencer  Chapman. 

COWAN,      Sir      WALTER      HENRY, 

baronet,  of  the  Baltic  and  of  Bilton  (1871- 
1956),  admiral,  was  born  11  June  1871  at 
Crickhowell,  Breconshire,  the  eldest  son 
of  Walter  Frederick  James  Cowan  who 
settled  after- retirement  from  the  Royal 
Welch  Fusiliers  with  the  rank  of  major 
at  Alveston,  Warwickshire.  His  mother 
was  Frances  Anne,  daughter  of  Henry 
John  Lucas,  physician,  of  Crickhowell. 
Although  he  had  never  been  to  school, 
Cowan  passed  into  the  navy  in  1884,  in 
the  same  term  as  David  (later  Earl) 
Beatty  [q.v.],  with  whom,  two  years 
later,  he  joined  the  Alexandra,  flagship  in 
the  Mediterranean  of  the  Duke  of  Edin- 
burgh [q.v.].  Invalided  after  less  than  a 
year,  he  returned  home,  but  eventually 
rejoined  the  Alexandra.  She  came  home  in 
1889,  and  Cowan  was  appointed  to  the 
Volage  in  the  training  squadron  where  he 
was  promoted  sub -lieutenant  in  1890. 
Appointed  to  the  Boadicea,  flagship  on 
the  East  Indies  station,  he  took  passage  in 
the  Plassy,  a  gunboat  which  was  being 
delivered  to  the  Royal  Indian  Marine. 
The  Plassy  took  four  months  to  reach 
Bombay,  being  nearly  lost  in  a  Bay  of 
Biscay  storm.  Promoted  lieutenant  in 
1892,  Cowan  was  appointed  first  lieu- 
tenant of  the  gunboat  Redbreast  whence, 
after  about  a  year,  he  was  invalided  again, 
this  time  with  dysentery.  On  recovery,  he 
applied  for  the  west  coast  of  Africa,  then 
a  very  unhealthy  station  but  with  the 
attraction  for  Cowan  that  it  offered  a  bet- 
ter chance  of  active  service  in  one  or  other 
of  the  many  punitive  expeditions. 

He  was  appointed  (1894)  to  the  small 
cruiser  Barrosa,  in  which  he  was  to  serve 
for  three  and  a  half  years.  He  assisted  in 
refloating  the  French  gunboat  Ardent 
which  had  grounded  170  miles  up  the  Niger 
river  and  soon  afterwards  was  landed  with 
the  punitive  expedition  against  Nimbi. 
After  three  months  at  the  Cape  the  Bar- 
rosa was  due  for  a  turn  of  duty  on  the  east 


261 


Cowan 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


coast  where  Cowan  at  once  came  in  for  the 
Mwele  expedition,  followed  by  a  number 
of  smaller  expeditions  from  individual 
ships.  The  Barrosa's  next  visit  to  the  west 
coast  was  just  in  time  for  the  Benin 
expedition  (1897)  in  which  Cowan  had 
control  of  the  carriers.  For  the  third  time 
he  was  awarded  the  general  Africa  medal, 
this  time  with  the  Benin  clasp. 

His  next  appointment  was  to  the  Boxer, 
destroyer,  in  the  Mediterranean,  which  he 
commanded  for  a  bare  six  months  before 
being  transferred  to  'Nile  Service',  in 
which  he  commanded  the  river  gunboat 
Sultan.  In  her  he  took  part  in  the  battle  of 
Omdurman  (1898),  after  which  all  the 
gunboats  were  ordered  to  Fashoda,  where 
a  French  force  under  Marchand  had 
arrived  via  Central  Africa.  The  task  of 
dealing  with  the  French  devolved 
almost  completely  upon  Cowan  who  had 
the  satisfaction  of  seeing  them  depart  for 
home  via  Abyssinia.  Cowan  was  left  in 
command  of  all  the  gunboats,  all  the  other 
naval  officers  returning  to  England.  He 
had  over  a  year  more  in  Egypt  and  was 
aide-de-camp  to  Sir  Reginald  Wingate 
[q.v.]  in  the  pursuit  of  the  Khalifa  in  1899. 
When  Lord  Kitchener  [q.v.]  left  for  South 
Africa  Cowan  gained  his  permission  to 
accompany  him.  His  status  was  after- 
wards regularized  by  his  appointment  as 
Kitchener's  aide-de-camp  and  the  whole 
of  1900  was  spent  in  the  field.  He  returned 
to  England  with  Lord  Roberts  [q.v.],  to 
whose  staff  he  had  just  transferred,  to  be 
greeted  coldly  at  the  Admiralty  for  having 
gone  to  South  Africa  without  their  lord- 
ships' permission  and  for  having  been  over 
two  years  away  from  sea  service.  Yet  he 
was  appointed  to  the  Prince  George  as  first 
lieutenant  and,  in  June  1901,  promoted 
commander  at  the  age  of  thirty,  with  only 
8^  years'  service  as  lieutenant. 

He  was  then  appointed  to  command  the 
Falcon,  destroyer,  as  second-in-command 
of  the  Devonport  destroyers  under  Roger 
(later  Lord)  Keyes  [q.v.].  He  had  several 
different  ships  in  the  next  two  years,  at 
the  end  of  which,  having  built  up  a  great 
reputation  as  a  destroyer  officer,  he  moved 
up  to  succeed  Keyes  in  command,  trans- 
ferring in  1905,  at  the  end  of  his  time,  to 
the  scout  Skirmisher,  in  which  he  was 
promoted  captain  (1906).  He  was  then 
appointed  to  the  Sapphire  (1907)  and  in 
1908  took  command  of  the  destroyers 
attached  to  the  Channel  Fleet.  Then,  after 
a  year  in  the  Reserve  Fleet,  he  took  com- 
mand of  a  new  light  cruiser,  the  Gloucester 
(1910),  for  two  years,  taking  no  leave  at 


all  in  the  first  so  that  he  might  have 
plenty  in  the  second — for  hunting,  always 
a  passion  with  him.  He  got  plenty  of  it  in 
his  next  job,  two  years  as  chief  of  staff  to 
(Sir)  John  De  Robeck  [q.v.],  the  admiral 
of  patrols,  who  was  just  as  keen. 

When  war  broke  out  in  1914  Cowan  was 
in  command  of  the  Zealandia,  but  he  was 
not  happy  in  a  slow  ship.  In  less  than  six 
months,  however,  he  went  to  the  Princess 
Royal  as  flag  captain  to  (Sir)  Osmond 
Brock  [q.v.],  an  appointment  after  his 
own  heart,  for  the  battle  cruisers  were  cer- 
tain to  be  in  the  forefront  of  any  action. 
Yet  he  had  to  wait  for  almost  eighteen 
months  before  it  came.  In  the  battle  of 
Jutland  (31  May  1916),  the  Princess 
Royal  was  severely  damaged  and  had  over 
a  hundred  casualties.  It  took  some  two 
months  to  repair  her,  during  which  Cowan 
paid  a  visit  to  the  British  front  in  France. 
In  June  1917  he  was  made  commodore  of 
the  first  light  cruiser  squadron.  His  ships 
were  constantly  at  sea  and  Cowan  with 
them,  to  his  great  delight,  for  if  one  were 
damaged  and  out  of  action  he  could  al- 
ways shift  his  flag  to  another.  On  one 
occasion  they  went  right  into  the  Heligo- 
land Bight  in  the  attempt  to  join  action 
with  a  German  light  cruiser  squadron, 
chasing  it  to  within  sight  of  Heligoland. 
In  1918  he  was  promoted  rear-admiral  and 
remained  in  his  command,  but  there  was 
little  more  activity  for  the  remainder  of 
the  war. 

In  January  1919  Cowan  and  his  squad- 
ron were  sent  to  the  Baltic,  where  the 
situation  was  extraordinarily  involved. 
His  task,  as  soon  appeared,  was  to  hold 
the  ring  for  Finland  and  the  Baltic  States 
against  the  Bolsheviks,  while  keeping  the 
Germans,  still  armed,  to  the  terms  of  the 
armistice.  In  this  he  was  ably  assisted  on 
shore  by  (Sir)  Stephen  Tallents  [q.v.].  His 
command  lasted  until  the  end  of  1919  and 
he  left  only  when  the  Russians  were 
sealed  up  in  Kronstadt  by  ice.  Six  months 
later  he  returned  for  the  plebiscite  in  Dan- 
zig and  then  relinquished  his  command. 

In  1921  he  was  appointed  to  command 
the  battle  cruiser  squadron,  consisting 
only  of  the  Hood  and  Repulse.  The  high- 
light of  the  period  was  a  visit  to  Brazil  in 
1922  during  the  international  exhibition, 
where  they  created  a  great  impression,  for 
the  battle  cruisers  had  never  been  smarter 
or  more  efficient.  Two  years'  unemploy- 
ment followed,  in  the  course  of  which  he 
was  promoted  vice-admiral  (1923),  after 
which  he  held  the  Scottish  command 
(1925-6).  Before  this  was  over  he  accepted 


262 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cox 


with  alacrity  the  America  and  West 
Indies  command  (1926-8).  It  was  a  peace- 
time cruise,  with  his  flag  first  in  the 
Calcutta,  then  in  the  Despatch;  but  it 
concluded  with  a  characteristic  success, 
the  salving  of  the  Dauntless  which  had 
grounded  in  the  entrance  to  Halifax 
harbour.  Cowan  was  promoted  admiral  in 
1927,  appointed  first  and  principal  naval 
aide-de-camp  to  the  King  in  1930,  and 
retired  from  the  active  list  in  1931. 

He  then  became  assistant  secretary  to 
the  Warwickshire  Hounds ;  but  on  the  out- 
break of  war  in  1939  it  was  more  than  he 
could  bear  not  to  be  in  it.  Eventually 
he  was  allowed  to  serve  in  the  rank  of 
commander  and  was  appointed  to  the 
Commandos  under  his  old  friend  and  chief, 
Roger  Keyes.  In  due  course  he  found 
himself  in  Egypt  and  served  with  the 
Commandos  in  their  various  activities  in 
North  Africa.  Finally,  when  his  unit  was 
disbanded,  he  attached  himself  to  the  18th 
King  Edward  VII's  Own  Cavalry,  an 
Indian  regiment.  He  served  with  them  in 
all  their  operations  in  the  Western  Desert 
until  he  was  taken  prisoner  on  27  May 
1942  at  Bir  Hacheim,  fighting  an  Italian 
tank  crew  single-handed,  armed  only  with 
a  revolver.  He  was  repatriated  in  1943 
and,  reappointed  to  the  Commandos, 
headed  for  Italy,  where  he  took  part  in 
many  operations  against  the  Dalmatian 
Islands.  For  these  services  in  1944  he  was 
awarded  a  bar  to  the  D.S.O.  which  he  had 
won  in  1898.  By  this  time  he  was  seventy- 
three  and  beginning  to  feel  the  strain.  He 
returned  to  England,  where  an  inspection 
of  a  Royal  Marine  Commando  about  to  go 
overseas  was  his  last  service.  In  1945  he 
reverted  to  the  retired  list.  One  more  dis- 
tinction, a  very  welcome  one,  was  his :  on 
22  November  1946  he  was  appointed 
honorary  colonel,  the  18th  King  Edward 
VII's  Own  Cavalry,  whom  he  visited  in 
India  in  1947.  He  retired  once  more  to 
Kineton,  and  died  in  hospital  in  Leaming- 
ton, 14  February  1956.  In  spite  of  his 
unequalled  record  of  active  service  he 
had  never  even  been  wounded.  He  was 
appointed  M.V.O.  in  1904,  C.B.  in  1916, 
K.C.B.  in  1919,  and  created  a  baronet  in 
1921. 

Cowan  married  in  1901  Catherine 
Eleanor  Millicent  (died  1934),  daughter  of 
Digby  Cayley,  of  Brompton-by-Sawdon, 
Yorkshire ;  they  had  one  daughter. 

Portraits  by  L.  Campbell  Taylor  and 
Rodrigo  Moynihan  are  in  the  Imperial 
War  Museum.  Cowan  is  also  included  in 
the  group  'Some  Sea  Officers  of  the  War  of 


1914-18'  by  Sir  A.  S.  Cope  in  the  National 
Portrait  Gallery. 

[Lionel  Dawson,  Sound  of  the  Guns,  1949 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

H.  G.  Thursfield. 

COX,  ALFRED  (1866-1954),  general 
practitioner  and  medical  secretary  of  the 
British  Medical  Association,  was  born  5 
May  1866  at  Middlesbrough,  the  second 
son  in  the  family  of  eight  children  of 
Thomas  Benjamin  Cox,  a  boilersmith, 
and  his  wife,  Dinah  Sanderson  Skilbeck, 
a  blacksmith's  daughter.  Shortly  after 
Alfred's  birth  they  moved  to  Darlington, 
where  at  the  age  of  fourteen  he  was  made 
a  monitor  of  his  board-school  as  a  step  to 
becoming  a  pupil-teacher.  This  was  not  a 
success,  and  at  the  age  of  seventeen  he 
began  to  study  for  the  Civil  Service  lower 
division,  work  he'  continued  while  staying 
in  Carlisle  as  assistant  to  an  insurance 
agent.  It  was  there  that  a  doctor  visiting 
the  house  persuaded  him  to  become  a 
dispenser-assistant,  a  mode  of  entry  to 
the  medical  profession  later  forbidden 
by  the  General  Medical  Council.  Cox 
gained  a  good  deal  of  experience  in  mid- 
wifery, moved  to  Stockton-on-Tees,  later 
to  Hay  don  Bridge,  where  he  had  more 
time  for  study,  and  finally  to  Newcastle 
upon  Tyne,  where  he  received  free  board 
and  lodging  and  £1  a  month  from  the 
general  practitioner  for  whom  he  worked. 
In  this  somewhat  precarious  life  Cox 
managed  to  matriculate  at  Edinburgh  and 
on  his  twenty-first  birthday  entered  the 
university  of  Durham  College  of  Medicine 
at  Newcastle — still  earning  his  keep  as  a 
dispenser-assistant.  He  qualified  M.B., 
B.S.  in  1891  and  immediately  entered 
general  practice  in  Gateshead. 

Cox's  long  years  of  penurious  drudgery 
probably  stimulated  his  interest  in  medi- 
cal politics  and  the  reform  of  his  profes- 
sion. He  played  an  active  part  in  municipal 
politics  in  Gateshead,  and  was  elected  to 
its  council.  With  the  rector  of  Gateshead 
he  joined  forces  in  a  campaign  for  slum 
clearance.  Cox  formed  the  Gateshead  Medi- 
cal Association,  and  tried  to  reform  club 
practice  and  the  methods  used  by  Friendly 
Societies  in  appointing  doctors  for  their 
members.  He  was  active  in  forming  in 
other  towns  in  the  north  various  medical 
societies  for  discussing  medico-political 
and  medico-ethical  matters,  an  expression 
of  dissatisfaction  with  the  British  Medical 
Association.  A  conference  held  by  the 
Medical  Guild  of  Manchester  in  May  1900 
brought  this  dissatisfaction  into  the  open, 


263 


Cox 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


and  the  possibility  of  forming  a  new 
organization  was  debated.  It  was  Cox  who 
carried  the  day  with  a  motion  which  gave 
the  B.M.A.  a  chance  to  reform  itself,  and 
the  result  of  this  was  the  setting  up  in  the 
same  year  of  the  committee  which  brought 
in  the  new  constitution  of  the  B.M.A., 
which  to  all  intents  and  purposes  re- 
mained unchanged  until  the  reforms 
adopted  in  1966. 

Sidney  and  Beatrice  Webb  [qq.v.] 
described  the  constitution  of  1903  as  a 
model  of  democratic  organization.  The  cul- 
minating structure  of  this  was  the  Repre- 
sentative Body,  which  at  the  annual 
representative  meeting  laid  down  the 
policy  of  the  B.M.A.  Cox  was  a  representa- 
tive from  the  beginning  and  the  first 
honorary  secretary  of  the  Gateshead 
Division,  which  replaced  the  Gateshead 
Medical  Association  he  had  formed.  Four 
years  after  qualification  he  had  been 
elected  a  member  of  the  B.M.A.'s  Central 
Council.  When  the  appointment  of  medical 
secretary  to  the  B.M.A.  was  being  con- 
sidered Cox  was  canvassed  as  a  likely 
candidate,  but  he  withdrew  in  favour  of 
(Sir)  James  Smith  Whitaker,  who  was 
appointed  in  1902.  In  1908  Cox  became 
deputy  secretary  and  gave  up  practice. 
When  Smith  Whitaker  took  office  as 
deputy  chairman  of  the  National  Health 
Insurance  Commission  in  1911,  Cox  suc- 
ceeded him,  being  formally  appointed 
medical  secretary  of  the  B.M.A.  in  1912, 
retiring  in  1932,  the  year  of  the  Associa- 
tion's centenary.  The  introduction  of 
National  Health  Insurance  by  Lloyd 
George  was  accompanied  by  a  bitter 
struggle  between  the  B.M.A.  and  the 
Government,  and  Smith  Whitaker' s  de- 
cision to  leave  the  B.M.A.  at  the  height  of 
this  was  the  subject  of  much  criticism. 
But  Cox  at  the  time,  and  in  the  years  to 
come,  never  ceased  to  defend  his  action. 

During  the  war  of  1914-18  Cox  acted 
as  secretary  of  the  Central  Medical  War 
Conmiittee  set  up  to  organize  the  supply 
of  doctors  to  the  armed  forces.  For  this  he 
was  appointed  O.B.E.  The  war  over,  much 
of  his  work  as  secretary  of  the  B.M.A.  was 
concerned  with  negotiations  between  the 
medical  profession  and  the  Ministry  of 
Health,  and  with  the  administration  of  a 
professional  organization  which  over  the 
years  grew  in  numbers  and  strength.  As 
ambassador  for  the  B.M.A.  he  was  suc- 
cessful in  securing  the  allegiance  to  the 
home  organization  of  doctors  in  Canada 
and  South  Africa.  In  both  countries  there 
had  been  branches  of  the  B.M.A.  and  sepa- 


rate medical  associations  as  well.  When 
he  died  the  Canadian  Medical  Association 
and  the  South  African  Medical  Associa- 
tion had  become  affiliated  to  the  B.M.A. 
Another  successful  attempt  to  cement 
friendship  among  doctors  of  different 
countries  was  the  formation  in  1925  of  the 
Association  Professionnelle  Internationale 
des  Medecins  (A.P.I.M.),  Cox  being  one  of 
the  founders  and  also  one  of  its  most 
enthusiastic  supporters.  After  the  end  of 
the  war  of  1939-45  the  A.P.I.M.  was 
merged  into  a  bigger  organization,  the 
World  Medical  Association. 

Cox  devoted  the  whole  of  his  life  to  the 
welfare  and  interests  of  his  profession  and 
in  the  British  Medical  Association  found  a 
powerful  instrument  to  that  end.  Early  in 
his  career  he  had  been  a  member  of  the 
Independent  Labour  Party,  being  greatly 
influenced  by  Keir  Hardie  [q.v.].  But  in 
the  end  he  became  disillusioned  with 
socialism  and  socialist  policy.  'The  end  of 
it  air,  he  wrote  in  his  autobiography, 
'seems  inevitably  to  be  the  authoritarian 
State.' 

Under  a  rather  stern  exterior  Cox  had  a 
warm  and  generous  heart  which  kept  him 
free  from  the  envies  and  jealousies  which 
so  often  beset  professional  life.  He  was 
incapable  of  meanness,  and  never  missed 
an  opportunity  of  encouraging  younger 
colleagues  with  a  friendly  word  in  season. 
He  was  a  man  of  great  integrity,  and  up 
to  the  end  of  his  long  life  kept  his  friend- 
ships in  constant  repair  and  his  interests 
undinmied.  His  one  great  sorrow  was  the 
death  of  his  wife  in  1927.  She  was  Florence 
Amelia,  daughter  of  Thomas  Cheesman, 
iron  merchant,  of  Newcastle  upon  Tyne, 
and  they  were  married  in  1894.  There 
were  no  children. 

Cox  received  the  honorary  LL.D.  of 
the  university  of  Manitoba  in  1930  and  the 
honorary  M.A.  of  Durham  in  1921.  The 
B.M.A.  awarded  him  its  gold  medal  in 
1931.  He  died  in  Brighton  31  August  1954. 

A  portrait  by  Sir  A.  S.  Cope  is  in  B.M.A. 
House,  Tavistock  Square,  London. 

[British  Medical  Journal,  4  and  11  Sep- 
tember 1954;  Lancet,  11  September  1954; 
'General  Practice  Fifty  Years  Ago'  by  Alfred 
Cox  in  British  Medical  Journal,  7  January 
1950;  Alfred  Cox,  Among  the  Doctors,  1950; 
Ernest  Muirhead  Little,  History  of  the  British 
Medical  Association,  1932;  personal' know- 
ledge.] H.  A.  Clegg. 

CRAIG,  Sir  JOHN  (1874-1957),  steel- 
master,  was  born  at  Clydesdale,  New 
Stevenston,  11  December  1874,  the  fourth 


264 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Craig 


son  of  Thomas  Graig,  a  heater  at  David 
Colville's  Dalzell  ironworks,  Motherwell, 
by  his  wife,  Elizabeth  Wilson.  He  was 
educated  at  Dalziel  public  school,  Mother- 
well, and  in  1888  went  to  work  as  an 
office  boy  with  his  father's  employers. 
From  the  start  he  showed  the  qualities 
which  eventually  took  him  to  the  head  of 
the  company,  in  which  he  spent  his  whole 
life.  He  was  industrious,  shrewd,  willing 
to  accept  responsibility,  not  afraid  of  the 
calculated  risk,  and  completely  single- 
minded  in  his  devotion  to  Colvilles. 

Promotion  came  to  Craig  regularly 
within  what  was,  for  the  first  twenty-eight 
years  of  his  career,  simply  a  good,  well- 
run,  medium-sized  business  producing 
open-hearth  steel.  He  became  Colvilles's 
representative  at  the  Royal  Exchange, 
Glasgow,  in  1895.  His  responsibilities 
within  the  firm  were  much  increased  on 
the  death  of  John  Colville,  the  chairman, 
in  1899 ;  he  became  a  director  in  1910  and 
chairman  and  managing  director  in  1916. 
The  year  1916  was  the  turning-point  in 
the  history  of  the  firm.  The  expansion 
which  was  then  gathering  momentum  was 
to  a  great  extent  due  to  war  demands  for 
steel  and  to  governmental  pressure  for  the 
consolidation  of  the  Scottish  steel  in- 
dustry into  larger  and  more  efficient  units. 
But  Craig  had  made  up  his  own  mind  that 
expansion  was  the  right  policy.  He  had 
played  a  leading  part  in  the  acquisition  of 
a  controlling  interest  in  the  Fullwood 
Foundry  Co.,  Ltd.,  in  1915,  and  the  pur- 
chase of  the  Clydebridge  and  Glengarnock 
works  was  being  negotiated  when  he  took 
over  as  chairman  in  1916,  on  the  death  of 
both  David  and  Archibald  Colville,  the 
sons  of  the  founder. 

Craig's  energy,  his  foresight,  and  his 
skill  as  a  negotiator  were  exercised  in  an 
industry  which  both  exacted  and  gave 
scope  for  them.  A  major  movement 
towards  integration  in  British  industry 
was  in  progress  at  the  point  of  time  at 
which  full  power  came  into  his  hands.  He 
thus  went  straight  forward  at  the  head  of 
a  vigorously  expanding  business.  Having 
reorganized  Colvilles's  recent  acquisitions 
of  Clydebridge  and  Glengarnock  and  set 
on  foot  two  new  steelworks,  he  turned 
his  attention  to  the  question  of  coal  sup- 
phes  for  the  growing  enterprise,  com- 
pleting in  1917  the  purchase  of  the  colliery 
undertakings  of  Archibald  Russell.  The 
structure  of  integration  was  further  ex- 
tended, forward  in  1919  into  sheet  making, 
alloy  steel  and  steel  castings,  and  back- 
ward in  1920  into  limestone  quarrying. 


The  strong  financial  link  between  Colvilles 
and  the  Belfast  shipbuilding  company  of 
Harland  and  Wolff,  Ltd.,  was  made  by 
Craig  in  1919-20. 

When  the  post-war  boom  broke  in  1921 
Craig  had  to  deploy  still  further  powers  of 
industrial  leadership — tenacity,  long  fore- 
sight, and  conservative  finance.  During 
the  depression  in  the  steel  industry  which 
continued  until  the  thirties  he  kept  his 
works  efficient,  even  though  production 
never  came  near  their  capacity  of  over 
800,000  ingot  tons  per  annum.  A  saying  of 
his,  revealing  of  his  habitual  optimism  and 
willingness  to  take  calculated  risks,  was — 
'If  you  go  down  in  a  slump,  make  sure  you 
go  down  with  first-class  equipment.'  On 
the  financial  side  he  avoided  the  writing 
down  of  capital  to  which  many  other  steel 
companies  had  to  resort.  Consequently 
Colvilles  found  itself  poised  for  a  second 
phase  of  expansion  in  the  thirties.  In  1930 
a  long  series  of  mergers  and  acquisitions 
began;  the  public  company  of  Colvilles, 
Ltd.,  was  formed  in  1934 ;  and  a  new  point 
of  balance  was  reached  in  1937,  by  which 
time  the  group  had  a  capacity  of  over 
1,100,000  tons  of  ingots.  Craig  took  the 
crucial  decision  to  build  an  integrated 
steelworks  on  the  Clyde.  Clyde  Ironworks 
was  completely  reconstructed,  and  the 
link  was  made  with  the  Clydebridge  steel 
furnaces  by  a  bridge  carrying  molten  iron 
across  the  Clyde  itself.  Thus  Craig  took 
still  farther  in  the  war  of  1939-45  the 
movement  of  consolidation  and  expansion 
which  he  had  begun  in  the  first  war.  The 
enlargement  and  modernization  of  Col- 
villes's equipment  continued  during  and 
after  the  war.  In  1956  he  retired  from  the 
office  of  chairman  and  was  then  appointed 
honorary  president  of  the  company. 

The  life  of  John  Craig  and  the  develop- 
ment of  the  steel  enterprise  of  Colvilles  are 
inseparable.  His  entire  working  life  of 
nearly  seventy  years  was  spent  in  that  one 
business,  forty  of  them  as  its  chairman. 
He  played  a  leading  part  in  the  affairs  of 
the  steel  industry  as  a  whole.  He  was  a 
member  of  the  original  council  of  the 
National  Federation  of  Iron  and  Steel 
Manufacturers,  founded  in  1918,  and  be- 
came its  third  president  in  1922.  He  was 
president  of  the  Iron  and  Steel  Institute 
in  1940-42,  a  member  of  the  executive 
committee  of  the  British  Iron  and  Steel 
Federation,  and  a  director  of  the  British 
Iron  and  Steel  Corporation.  Virtually  his 
only  outside  interests  were  his  family,  the 
Church  of  Scotland,  and  the  Y.M.C.A., 
with  which  he  had  been  actively  associated 


265 


Craig 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


at  Motherwell  since  1897,  being  the  chair- 
man of  the  Scottish  National  Council  in 
1927  and  president  in  1944. 

Craig  married  in  1901  Jessie,  daughter 
of  John  Sommerville,  shovel  plater ;  they 
had  three  daughters  and  two  sons,  the 
elder  of  whom  became  a  director  of  Col- 
villes,  Ltd.,  and  the  younger  secretary  of 
the  company.  Craig  was  appointed  C.B.E. 
in  1918  and  knighted  in  1943.  He  became 
a  justice  of  the  peace  in  the  county  of 
Lanarkshire  in  1919  and  deputy-lieutenant 
of  the  county  in  1934.  The  honorary  degree 
of  LL.D.  was  conferred  upon  him  by 
Glasgow  University  in  1951.  He  died  at 
his  home,  Cambusnethan  Priory,  Wishaw, 

1  February  1957.  There  is  a  bronze  por- 
trait bust  by  Sir  Jacob  Epstein  at  the 
Craig  Home,  Skelmorlie,  Ayrshire. 

[Glasgow  Herald,  Scotsman,  and  The  Times, 

2  February  1957 ;  Engineer,  8  February  1957 ; 
J.  C.  Carr  and  W.  Taplin,  History  of  the  British 
Steel  Industry,  1962 ;  private  information.] 

Walter  Taplin. 

CRAIGIE,  Sir  ROBERT  LESLIE  (1883- 
1959),  diplomatist,  was  born  in  Southsea 
6  December  1883,  the  only  son  of  Com- 
mander (later  Admiral)  Robert  William 
Craigie  and  his  wife,  Henrietta  Isabella 
Dinnis.  He  was  educated  at  Heidelberg, 
passed  into  the  Foreign  Office  in  1907,  and 
served  in  Berne,  Sofia,  and  Washington 
as  well  as  on  international  conferences 
in  London  and  abroad  before  resuming 
duties  in  the  Foreign  Office  in  1924.  Pro- 
moted counsellor  in  1928  and  an  assistant 
imder-secretary  in  1935,  he  took  part  in 
the  negotiation  of  the  London  naval 
treaty  of  1930  and  the  Anglo-German 
agreement  of  1935. 

Discontent  at  the  limitations  of 
Japanese  naval  strength,  enforced  under 
the  treaty  of  1930,  gave  those  in  Japan 
who  advocated  a  forward  expansionist 
policy  the  opportunity  to  regain  power. 
The  following  year  saw  the  start  of 
Japanese  aggression  in  Manchuria  and 
China.  From  then  onwards,  from  time  to 
time  for  the  next  ten  years,  the  problem 
for  successive  British  Governments  and  for 
their  representatives  in  the  Far  East  was, 
whether,  how,  and  when  to  stop  Japan. 

In  September  1937  Craigie,  appoin- 
ted by  Neville  Chamberlain,  arrived  in 
Japan  as  ambassador  in  succession  to  Sir 
Robert  Clive  [q.v.]  who  had  maintained 
a  firm  front  in  the  face  of  Japanese 
aggression  and  anti-British  tactics  in 
China.  But  with  Chamberlain  as  prime 
minister  British  foreign  policy  began  to 


change  in  the  Far  East  as  in  Europe. 
Craigie  reached  Tokyo  shortly  after  Japa- 
nese aircraft  had  attacked  and  wounded 
the  British  ambassador  to  China,  Sir 
Hughe  KnatchbuU-Hugessen,  while  he  was 
travelling  in  a  motor-car  from  Nanking  to 
Shanghai.  This  was  not  an  auspicious 
beginning  to  Craigie's  embassy,  as  the 
Japanese  Government  apologized  only 
after  considerable  pressure,  and  Anglo- 
Japanese  relations  continued  to  de- 
teriorate. Craigie  was  convinced  that  the 
only  hope  of  peace  lay  through  timely 
concessions  to  Japanese  pressure.  This 
view,  which  was  based  on  the  presence  of 
moderate  elements  in  Japan,  was  not 
shared  by  Eden,  Roosevelt,  or  Churchill. 
Temporarily  Craigie's  efforts  to  improve 
Anglo-Japanese  relations  were  successful, 
but  the  sympathy  of  British  opinion  with 
China  in  its  defence  against  Japanese 
aggression  and  the  consequent  anti-British 
propaganda  spread  by  the  young  officers 
in  the  Japanese  naval  and  military  ser- 
vices were  too  strong  for  the  moderate 
civilian  elements  whom  he  had  so  assi- 
duously cultivated. 

In  July  1940  the  British  Government 
approved  the  temporary  cessation  of  sup- 
plies through  Burma  to  China.  Neverthe- 
less, the  Japanese  continued  the  aggressive 
anti-British  and  anti-American  policy 
which  led  finally  in  December  1941  to  the 
attack  on  Pearl  Harbour,  the  crippling  of 
the  United  States  Pacific  Fleet,  and  the 
declaration  of  war  on  Britain.  Craigie  had 
no  doubts  about  Japan's  willingness  and 
ability  to  fight,  but  his  warnings  were 
ignored  in  London  and  Singapore,  where 
those  with  long  experience  of  Japan  were 
regarded,  in  general,  as  too  pro-Japanese 
to  be  taken  seriously.  It  has  been  sug- 
gested that  war  with  Japan  might  have 
been  avoided  had  the  British  and  United 
States  Governments  not  been  con- 
vinced, in  spite  of  the  warnings  of  their 
representatives  in  Tokyo,  that  Japan 
would  never  dare  to  attack  them.  But 
some  at  least  among  British  professional 
diplomatists  and  historians  agree  that  in 
view  of  British  military  weakness  in  1937 
and  1938,  of  the  collapse  of  France  in 
1940,  and  of  the  conclusion  of  the  Tripar- 
tite Pact  between  Germany,  Italy,  and 
Japan  in  September  of  the  same  year, 
a  policy  of  concessions  to  Japan  in  the 
hope  of  strengthening  the  moderates  and 
liberals  who  undoubtedly  existed  there,  as 
against  the  extremists  in  the  Services,  was 
the  only  one  which  offered  any  prospect  of 
success. 


266 


D.N.B.  1931-1960 


Craigie,  W.  A, 


After  seven  months  of  internment 
Craigie  and  his  staff  were  allowed  to  return 
to  the  United  Kingdom.  From  1945  to 
1948  he  was  British  representative  on  the 
United  Nations  war  crimes  commission 
and  in  1949  on  the  Geneva  conference  for 
the  protection  of  the  victims  of  war.  He 
was  appointed  C.M.G.  (1929),  K.C.M.G. 
(1936),  G.C.M.G.  (1941),  C.B.  (1930),  and 
was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council  in  1937. 

He  married  in  1918  Pleasant  (died 
1956),  daughter  of  Pleasant  A.  Stovall  of 
Savannah,  Georgia,  then  United  States 
minister  at  Berne;  they  had  one  son. 
Craigie  died  at  Winchester  16  May  1959. 

[Sir  Robert  Craigie,  Behind  the  Japatiese 
Mask,  1946;  S.  Woodburn  Kirby,  (Official 
History)  The  War  Against  Japan,  vol.  i,  1957 ; 
The  Earl  of  Avon,  Facing  the  Dictators,  1962 ; 
The  Times,  18  May  1959 ;  Joseph  Grew,  Turbu- 
lent Era,  2  vols.,  1953 ;  F.  C.  Jones,  Japan'sNeiv 
Order  in  East  Asia,  1954  ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.  L.  DODDS. 


CRAIGIE,  Sir  WILLIAM  ALEXAN- 
DER (1867-1957),  lexicographer  and 
philologist,  was  born  in  Dundee  13  August 
1867,  the  youngest  son  of  James  Craigie, 
jobbing  gardener,  and  his  wife,  Christina 
Gow.  His  native  speech  was  thus  the 
Lowland  Scots  of  Angus,  and  during  his 
childhood  he  learned  some  Gaelic  from  his 
maternal  grandfather  and  later  his  eldest 
brother.  About  the  age  of  twelve  he  began 
reading  the  early  Scottish  writers.  From 
the  headmaster  of  his  school,  the  West 
End  Academy,  Dundee,  he  gained  a  know- 
ledge of  phonetics.  While  attending  St. 
Andrews  University,  where  he  graduated 
with  honours  in  classics  and  philosophy  in 
1888,  he  also  found  time  to  learn  German 
and  French  and  began  studying  Danish 
and  Icelandic.  In  his  final  session  he 
carried  out  the  research  on  the  university 
library's  manuscript  of  the  early  Scots 
Wyntoun's  Chronicle  which  enabled  him 
to  demonstrate  conclusively  the  relation- 
ships of  the  several  versions  of  this  work. 
With  a  Guthrie  scholarship  he  pro- 
ceeded to  Balliol  College,  Oxford,  and 
thence,  after  one  term,  to  Oriel  as  a  bible 
clerk.  Apart  from  the  work  of  his  regular 
curriculum  which  led  to  firsts  in  both 
honour  moderations  (1890)  and  literae 
humaniores  (1892),  he  continued  his 
private  study  of  Scandinavian,  attended 
lectures  on  Celtic,  and  began  producing 
articles  on  these  subjects  for  Scottish 
journals.  The  winter  of  1892-3  he  spent  in 
Copenhagen,  where  he  studied  Icelandic 
manuscripts    and    learned    modern    Ice- 


landic from  Icelandic  friends.  From  1893 
to  1897  he  was  assistant  to  the  professor  of 
Latin  at  St.  Andrews.  In  his  spare  time  he 
continued  his  writing  of  articles,  produced 
his  valuable  Primer  of  Burns  (1896),  and 
contributed  translations  from  Icelandic 
and  Danish  to  the  Fairy  Books  and  Dreams 
and  Ghosts  of  Andrew  Lang  [q.v.]  as  well 
as  his  own  Scandinavian  Folk-lore  (1896). 

In  1897  Craigie  accepted  an  unexpected 
invitation  to  join  the  staff  of  the  Philo- 
logical Society's  New  English  Dictionary 
in  Oxford.  In  1901  he  was  appointed  co- 
editor  with  (Sir)  James  A.  H.  Murray  and 
Henry  Bradley  [qq.v.].  Thereafter  he  con- 
tinued to  work  on  the  Dictionary  until  the 
completion  of  its  Supplement  in  1933, 
producing  the  letters  N,  Q,  R,  U,  and  V, 
Si-Sq,  and  Wo-Wy,  amounting  to  nearly  a 
fifth  of  the  main  work,  and  about  a  third 
of  the  Supplement. 

Along  with  his  daily  stint  of  seven  and  a 
half  hours  of  lexicography,  which  was  far 
from  using  up  all  his  energy  or  exhausting 
his  zest  for  work,  Craigie  kept  alive  all  his 
old  interests.  In  1904  he  was  appointed 
Taylorian  lecturer  in  the  Scandinavian 
languages  at  Oxford  and  in  1916  he 
became  Rawlinson  and  Bosworth  pro- 
fessor of  Anglo-Saxon.  In  1921  he  began 
seriously  to  collect  material  for  his  pro- 
jected dictionary  of  Older  Scottish,  and 
when  in  1925  he  removed  to  the  university 
of  Chicago,  as  professor  of  Enghsh,  in 
order  that  he  might  edit  a  Dictionary  of 
American  English,  he  was  for  some  years 
occupied  simultaneously  with  three  major 
dictionaries,  yet  still  turning  out  a  steady 
flow  of  other  writings. 

In  1936  Craigie  resigned  his  Chicago 
chair  and  settled  at  Christmas  Common, 
Watlington,  on  the  Chiltern  Hills.  He  now 
gave  most  of  his  time  to  the  Dictionary  of 
the  Older  Scottish  Tongue,  which  he  carried 
to  the  end  of  the  letter  I  in  1955,  when  he 
was  eighty-seven,  before  handing  over  to 
his  successor.  He  had  also  continued  to 
contribute  to  the  American  dictionary 
until  its  completion  in  1944.  After  the  war 
he  produced  his  Specimens  of  Icelandic 
Rimur  (3  vols.,  1952),  a  masterly  survey 
of  a  field  of  Icelandic  literature  in  which 
his  erudition  and  discernment  were  un- 
rivalled, and  a  supplement  (1957)  to  the 
Icelandic  Dictionary  of  G.  Vigf lisson  [q.v.]. 

Craigie's  remarkable  knowledge  of  many 
languages  was  perfected,  and  friendships 
with  the  scholars  of  other  countries 
cemented,  in  the  course  of  the  travels  on 
which  he  and  his  wife  spent  all  their  vaca- 
tions, visiting  all  the  countries  of  northern 


267 


Craigie,  W.  A. 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Europe  and  in  1921  going  round  the  world. 
In  this  way  he  became  one  of  the  most 
widely  known  of  the  scholars  of  his 
generation;  and  the  quietly  dignified, 
rather  reserved,  yet  unfailingly  kindly  and 
companionable  personality  of  this  tiny 
Scotsman,  with  his  modest  tastes  and  tidy 
habits,  and  his  fellow-feeling  for  simple 
folk  and  small  nations,  made  him  one  of 
the  best  loved.  These  travels  included 
four  visits  to  Iceland  where  he  was 
revered  by  the  whole  nation. 

Craigie  was  the  ablest  and  most  produc- 
tive lexicographer  of  his  time  and  was 
universally  recognized  as  the  supreme 
master  of  the  art  and  techniques  of  dic- 
tionary making.  Yet  in  addition  to  his 
major  works  he  contrived  also  to  produce, 
almost  entirely  in  his  spare  time,  an 
astonishing  number  of  other,  smaller- 
scale  but  authoritative  writings  over  a 
wide  range  of  provinces  of  specialist 
philology,  notably  on  Older  Scottish  and 
on  English  philology  of  every  period. 
Over  the  whole  extent  of  Icelandic  litera- 
ture, .ancient  and  modern,  he  gained  a 
greater  mastery  than  perhaps  any  non- 
Icelander  had  ever  done,  and  wrote 
valuably  on  scaldic  verse  and  on  the  sagas 
as  well  as  on  his  beloved  rimur.  These 
writings  and  others  on  Frisian  and  on 
Gaelic  display  his  characteristic  virtues 
of  clarity,  brevity,  and  directness,  and 
his  acute  and  perceptive  observation  of 
philological  facts  and  details. 

His  published  work  was  only  part  of  the 
vast  service  he  rendered  to  scholarship. 
He  gave  a  new  impetus  to  Old  Norse  and 
Anglo-Saxon  studies  in  Oxford  and  later  in 
Chicago.  Throughout  his  career  he  was 
active  in  initiating  and  encouraging  new 
scholarly  enterprises.  Out  of  his  plan  for 
'completing  the  record  of  English'  by 
means  of  the  'period  dictionaries',  which 
he  launched  in  1919,  were  born  the  great 
historical  dictionaries  which  followed  the 
New  English,  among  them  his  own  Ameri- 
can and  Scottish  dictionaries.  His  lifelong 
interest  in  Frisian  and  the  enthusiastic 
support  which  he  gave  to  the  Frisian 
scholars  in  their  attempt  to  re-establish 
their  language,  they  recognized  by  making 
him  one  of  the  two  original  honorary 
members  of  the  Frisian  Academy  on  its 
foimdation  in  1938.  His  sponsorship,  and 
the  active  leadership  which  he  provided  in 
partnership  with  Professor  M.  K.  Pope, 
brought  about  the  foundation  in  1938  of 
the  Anglo-Norman  Text  Society  and  as  its 
president  he  fostered  this  society's  project 
(initiated  in  1947)  for  an  Anglo-Norman 


dictionary.  His  suggestion  and  encourage- 
ment led  likewise  to  the  founding  of  the 
Icelandic  Rimur  Society  in  1947.  He 
served  for  long  periods  as  president  or 
council-member  of  a  number  of  other 
famous  learned  societies  in  England  and  in 
Scotland.  All  his  great  academic  prestige 
and  his  extensive  range  of  contacts  he 
placed  at  the  service  of  these  and  other 
good  causes  of  learning. 

Craigie  possessed  an  amazingly  reten- 
tive memory  and  an  ability  to  grasp  at 
sight  the  essence  of  a  problem  and  to 
marshal  facts  and  arguments  with  great 
speed.  Even  so,  his  erudition,  and  his 
prodigious  output,  he  achieved  only  by 
utilizing  his  time  to  the  utmost,  working 
methodically  for  most  of  each  day  and 
evening  throughout  his  long  life.  Yet  he 
was  always  accessible  and  ungrudging  of 
his  time  to  others.  To  the  numerous 
authors  of  scholarly  works  who  sought  it 
he  gave  encouragement,  fruitful  advice, 
and  abundant  practical  help. 

The  many  honours  awarded  Craigie  in- 
cluded honorary  degrees  from  St.  Andrews 
(1907),  Calcutta  (1921),  Oxford  (1928), 
Cambridge  (1928),  Michigan  (1929),  Wis- 
consin (1932),  and  Iceland  (1946);  a 
knighthood  in  1928  on  completion  of  the 
New  English  Dictionary,  an  honorary 
fellowship  of  Oriel  in  the  same  year,  and  a 
fellowship  of  the  British  Academy  in  1931. 
The  Icelanders'  appreciation  of  his  friend- 
ship and  his  service  to  their  literature  was 
shown  in  many  different  ways,  including 
a  knighthood  (1925)  and  a  knight- 
commandership  (1930)  of  the  Order  of  the 
Icelandic  Falcon.  In  1952  his  eighty-fifth 
birthday  was  honoured  by  a  gathering 
held  at  Oriel  College,  Oxford,  when  he  was 
presented  with. a  commemorative  memoir 
and  list  of  his  publications  and  his  por- 
trait by  Harold  Speed  which  now  hangs  in 
the  college. 

In  1897  Craigie  married  Jessie  Kinmond 
(died  1947),  daughter  of  William  Hutchen, 
tailor  and  clothier,  of  Dundee,  on  whose 
loving  care  and  companionship  he  de- 
pended greatly.  They  had  no  children. 
He  died  at  WatUngton  2  September  1957. 

[J.  M.  Wyllie  in  Proceedings  of  the  British 
Academy,  vol.  xlvii,  1961 ;  A  Memoir  and  a 
List  of  the  Published  Writings  of  Sir  William 
A.  Craigie,  1952 ;  Scottish  Historical  Review, 
vol.  xxxii,  1953 ;  The  Times,  3  and  9  Septem- 
ber 1957;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  A.  J.  Aitken. 

CRAWFORD,  OSBERT  GUY  STAN- 
HOPE   (1886-1957),    archaeologist,    was 


268 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Crawford 


born  28  October  1886  at  Breech  Candy, 
Bombay,  where  his  father,  Charles  Ed- 
ward Gordon  Crawford,  was  an  Indian 
Civil  Servant ;  he  was  later  a  judge  at 
Ratnagiri.  His  mother,  Alice  Luscombe 
Mackenzie,  died  a  few  days  after  his 
birth;  his  father  in  1894.  He  was  brought 
up  by  two  of  his  father's  unmarried  sisters, 
first  in  London,  then  in  Hampshire,  near 
Newbury.  He  went  to  school  at  Park 
House,  Reading,  then  Marlborough,  where 
he  did  not  enjoy  himself,  on  one  occasion 
running  away.  He  wrote  of  his  school- 
days; 'I  was  far  less  unhappy  in  the 
prison-camp  at  Holzminden  than  I  was 
at  Marlborough.'  Despite  this,  it  was  his 
membership  of  the  Marlborough  natural 
history  society  and  its  archaeological  sec- 
tion which  first  encouraged  his  interest  in 
the  countryside  and  its  antiquities. 

Crawford  went  up  to  Keble  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  obtained  a  third  class  in 
honour  moderations  (1907),  began  reading 
for  literae  humaniores,  but  changed  to  the 
diploma  in  geography.  'Going  from  Greats 
to  Geography',  he  wrote,  'was  like  leaving 
the  parlour  for  the  basement;  one  lost 
caste  but  one  did  see  life.'  He  rowed  for 
his  college  and  was  captain  of  boats  in  his 
last  year.  He  graduated  in  1910  and  was 
offered  by  A.  J.  Herbertson  the  post  of 
junior  demonstrator  in  the  school  of 
geography  which  he  held  until  the  end  of 
1911.  At  Oxford  (Sir)  J.  L.  Myres,  R.  R. 
Marett,  (Sir)  Arthur  Evans  [qq.v.],  and 
Herbertson  were  the  main  formative  in- 
fluences; outside,  H.  J.  E.  Peake  [q.v.] 
and  J.  P.  Williams-Freeman  (whose  notice 
Crawford  later  contributed  to  this  Dic- 
tionary). In  1913  he  set  out  on  a  three- 
year  expedition  to  Easter  Island  led  by 
Mr.  and  Mrs.  Scoresby  Routledge,  but 
quarrelled  with  them  and  left  the  ship  at 
St.  Vincent.  In  the  same  year  he  joined  the 
excavation  staff  of  (Sir)  Henry  Wellcome 
[q.v.]  in  the  Sudan,  working  at  Jebel  Moya 
and  Abu  Geili.  Crawford  always  retained 
an  interest  in  the  Sudan,  and  particularly 
the  Fungs,  publishing  in  1951  The  Fung 
Kingdom  of  Sennar. 

In  1914  he  excavated  (with  E.  A. 
Hooton)  an  unchambered  long  barrow  on 
Wexcombe  Down,  and  was  digging  when 
war  broke  out.  He  enlisted  in  the  London 
Scottish,  went  to  France  in  November 
1914,  transferred  in  1915  to  Maps,  Third 
Army,  and  in  1917  to  the  Royal  Flying 
Corps  as  an  observer.  He  was  taken 
prisoner  in  February  1918.  In  October 
1920  Sir  Charles  (Arden-)  Close  [q.v.] 
appointed  him  the  first  holder  of  the  post 


of  archaeology  officer  in  the  Ordnance 
Survey  which  he  held  until  his  retirement 
in  1946.  His  job  was  the  revision  and  com- 
pilation of  the  Ordnance  Survey  maps 
from  the  point  of  view  of  archaeological 
information ;  but,  in  addition  to  this  work 
on  the  standard  topographical  maps,  he 
started  a  special  survey  of  megalithic 
monuments,  and  a  series  of  period  maps 
beginning  with  the  Map  of  Roman  Britain 
(1924).  His  megalithic  surveys  led  him  to 
write  Tlie  Long  Barrows  of  the  Cotswolds 
(1925).  One  of  his  many  ideas  was  to 
publish  geographical  memoirs  for  the 
Ordnance  Survey  sheets,  but  this  did  not 
get  beyond  the  first  memoir.  The  Andover 
District  (1922),  which  he  wrote  himself. 

In  and  out  of  his  professional  occupa- 
tion and  throughout  his  life  he  was  a  field 
archaeologist  par  excellence  in  the  sense 
defined  by  Williams-Freeman  in  his  Field 
Archaeology  as  Illustrated  by  Hampshire 
(1915):  his  prime  interest  was  the  face 
of  the  countryside  in  its  archaeological 
aspects.  He  summarized  his  ideas  on  this 
subject  in  Field  Archaeology  (1932)  and 
Archaeology  in  the  Field  (1953).  A  keen 
and  very  gifted  photographer,  he  took 
panorama  photographs  in  the  war  of 
1914-18,  and  soon  realized  the  value  of  air 
photography  to  archaeologists  and  his- 
torians. After  the  war  he  was  a  pioneer 
in  the  development  of  the  civilian  use  of 
air  photography,  writing  Air  Survey  and 
Archaeology  (1924),  Air  Photography  for 
Archaeologists  (1929),  and,  with  Alexander 
Keiller,  Wessex  from  the  Air  (1928). 

Crawford  was  particularly  anxious  to 
interest  others  in  man's  remote  past  and 
his  archaeological  remains,  and  to  relate 
these  studies  to  the  whole  general  study  of 
mankind.  Man  and  his  Past  (1921)  sets 
out  his  credo  in  these  matters.  In  1927  he 
founded  Antiquity :  a  Quarterly  Review  of 
Archaeology  which  he  edited  for  thirty 
years  until  his  death.  It  was,  and  re- 
mained, the  only  independent  archaeologi- 
cal journal  in  the  world.  In  Antiquity  he 
was  able  to  publish  many  air  photographs, 
articles  on  archaeology  from  all  parts  of 
the  world,  and  examples  of  modern  folk- 
culture  and  the  culture  of  modern  primitive 
peoples  to  illumine  the  mute  documents 
of  the  past.  A  man  of  strong  character, 
likes  and  dislikes,  prejudices  and  enthusi- 
asms, he  found  in  the  editorial  columns 
of  his  journal  a  place  to  vent  his  views  to 
the  delight  and  fury  of  a  wide  circle  of 
readers. 

He  was  elected  F.B.A.  in  1947;  ap- 
pointed   C.B.E.    in    1950;    received   the 


269 


Crawford 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Victoria  medal  of  the  Royal  Geographi- 
cal Society  in  1940  and  honorary  degrees 
from  Cambridge  (1952)  and  Southampton 
(1955).  He  was  president  of  the  Prehistoric 
Society  in  1938,  and  a  member  of  the 
Royal  Commission  on  Ancient  and  His- 
torical Monuments  in  England  from  1939 
to  1946.  He  was  an  enthusiastic  and  un- 
tiring traveller;  his  last  two  books, 
Castles  and  Churches  in  the  Middle  Nile 
Region  (1953)  and  The  Eye  Goddess  (1957), 
reflect  the  width  of  his  interests.  He  was 
presented  with  a  Festschrift  in  1951 ; 
edited  by  W.  F.  Grimes  it  was  entitled 
Aspects  of  Archaeology  in  Britain  and 
Beyond,  and  contained  an  account  of  his 
career  by  his  former  teacher,  Sir  J.  L. 
Myres,  entitled  'The  Man  and  his  Past'. 
The  foreword  to  this  volume  opens  with 
the  sentence  'No  single  scholar  has  done 
more  than  O.  G.  S.  Crawford  to  place  the 
study  of  the  remoter  past,  and  of  the  past 
of  Britain  in  particular,  on  the  secure  and 
sound  basis  upon  which  it  now  rests.' 
Crawford  was  one  of  the  handful  of  British 
archaeologists — Sir  Cyril  Fox,  Sir  Morti- 
mer Wheeler,  Sir  Thomas  Kendrick — 
who  revolutionized  and  revivified  British 
archaeology  in  the  decade  after  1918. 

In  1955  Crawford  published  Said  and 
Done,  a  vivacious  and  amusing  auto- 
biography in  which  the  man's  character 
comes  clearly  through.  A  bachelor,  he 
lived  with  a  housekeeper  and  his  cats  at 
Nursling ;  one  of  his  last  acts  was  to  give  a 
broadcast  on  'The  Language  of  Cats'.  He 
died  in  his  sleep  at  Nursling  on  the  night 
of  28-29  November  1957.  He  did  not  suffer 
fools  gladly  but  had  a  great  capacity  for 
friendship,  a  genuine  delight  in  encourag- 
ing and  helping  young  archaeologists,  and 
an  infectious  enthusiasm  for  anyone  who 
shared  his  interest  in  air  photographs 
and  field  archaeology  or  his  belief  that 
archaeology,  properly  studied  as  a  branch 
of  world  history  and  anthropology,  was 
one  of  the  most  important  subjects.  To  old 
and  young  alike,  friends  and  foes,  he  was 
known  as  Ogs  or  Uncle  Ogs. 

His  large  collection  of  photographs  is  at 
the  Ashmolean  Museum,  Oxford,  and  his 
papers  are  in  the  Bodleian  Library. 

[O.  G.  S.  Crawford,  Said  and  Dme,  1955 ; 
Antiquity,  March  1958;  Grahame  Clark  in 
Proceedings  of  the  British  Academy,  vol.  xliv, 
1958;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] G.  E.  Daniel. 

CRIPPS,  Sir  (RICHARD)  STAFFORD 
(1889-1952),  statesman  and  lawyer,  was 
born  at  Elm  Park  Gardens,  London,  24 


April  1889,  the  fifth  child  and  fourth  son 
of  Charles  Alfred  Cripps  (later  first  Lord 
Parmoor,  q.v.),  and  his  wife,  Theresa 
Potter.  His  mother,  whose  sister  Beatrice 
became  Mrs.  Sidney  Webb  [q.v.],  died 
when  Stafford  Cripps  was  four.  Yet  her 
influence  remained  with  him  all  his  life. 
In  a  remarkable  letter  left  for  her  husband 
when  she  realized  death  was  imminent 
she  wrote,  'I  should  like  the  children 
brought  up  as  much  as  possible  in  the 
country,  and  to  be  educated  much  in  the 
same  style  as  their  father  was.  I  should 
like  their  living  to  be  of  the  simplest, 
without  reference  to  show  or  other  follies. 
I  should  like  them  trained  to  be  undog- 
matic  and  unsectarian  Christians,  charit- 
able to  all  churches  and  sects  studying  the 
precepts  and  actions  of  Christ  as  their 
example,  taking  their  religious  inspiration 
directly  from  the  spirit  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment.' 

This  charge  the  father  faithfully  carried 
out  as  well  as  the  further  precept,  'You 
will  teach  my  children  to  love  only  what  is 
true,  and  ever  to  seek  further  truth,  and 
make  it  known  to  others,  whatever  career 
they  may  choose.'  All  his  life  Stafford 
Cripps  was  never  consciously  to  depart 
from  these  standards.  From  his  father's 
side  came  a  bent  towards  public  service 
for  its  own  sake.  It  was  always  strongly 
reinforced  by  powerful  but  simple  reU- 
gious  beliefs.  The  combination  of  Potter 
and  Cripps  blood  merged  in  Stafford 
Cripps  to  produce  the  highest  possible 
ideals  in  personal  and  public  life. 

Cripps  showed  early  brilliance.  The 
papers  which  won  him  from  Winchester  a 
natural  science  scholarship  to  New  Col- 
lege, Oxford,  in  1907  were  so  remarkable 
that  the  professor  of  chemistry  at  Univer- 
sity College,  London,  Sir  William  Ramsay 
[q.v.],  who  had  been  asked  to  scrutinize, 
persuaded  Cripps  to  prefer  the  better 
equipped  laboratories  at  University  Col- 
lege. This  resulted  in  Cripps  being  part 
author  of  a  paper  on  the  properties  of  the 
inert  gas  xenon  which  was  read  before  the 
Royal  Society  when  he  was  twenty-two. 
Undoubtedly  he  could  have  become  an 
eminent  chemist.  But  the  legal  and  politi- 
cal pulls  in  his  family,  which  echoed  his 
own  inclinations,  drew  him  to  the  bar,  to 
which  he  was  called  by  the  Middle  Temple 
in  1913. 

Medically  unfit  for  the  army,  for  which 
he  volunteered  after  the  outbreak  of  war 
in  1914,  Cripps  worked  as  a  lorry  driver  in 
the  Red  Cross.  After  a  year,  because  of  his 
knowledge  of  chemistry,  he  was  recalled 


270 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cripps 


from  France  to  work  in  munitions.  As 
assistant  superintendent  of  the  explosives 
factory  at  Queensferry  he  learned  and 
contributed  much.  Through  his  gift  for 
administration  and  capacity  to  work  long 
hours  and  master  intricate  problems  he 
made  Queensferry  the  most  efficient  of  all 
the  munitions  factories.  It  was  largely 
because  of  the  reputation  he  won  there 
that  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill  appointed 
him  minister  of  aircraft  production  in  the 
war  of  1939-45. 

The  work  at  Queensferry  was  hard.  It 
was  made  harder  by  Cripps's  zeal  and 
energy.  His  inherent  ill  health  grew  far 
worse  and  he  was  never  again  to  be  fully 
fit.  By  the  end  of  the  war  the  doctors  had 
despaired  of  conventional  remedies.  This 
prompted  Cripps  to  turn  to  nature  cures, 
vegetarianism,  teetotalism,  and  the  like. 
By  such  means  he  effected  a  considerable 
improvement  in  his  health.  What  others 
often  put  down  to  crankiness  was  the 
product  of  trial  and  error  in  an  attempt  to 
ease  his  chronic  physical  disabilities.  He 
went  to  bed  early  and  was  usually  at  work 
by  six  in  the  morning  or  before.  This  gave 
him  half  a  day's  advantage  over  his  rivals 
and  colleagues  in  any  field  throughout  his 
life :  one  of  the  reasons  for  his  rapid  pro- 
gress at  the  bar.  But  his  successes  did  not 
come  from  energy  and  long  hours  alone ; 
he  had  one  of  the  most  acute  minds  of  his 
generation.  He  could  rapidly  comprehend 
complicated  matters  so  that  within  a  few 
hours  he  would  understand  almost  as 
much  of  them  as  the  experts.  His  clarity 
of  thought  enabled  him  to  set  out  any 
proposition  with  striking  lucidity  and 
logic. 

Four  years  after  his  return  to  the  bar  in 
1919  Cripps  appeared  for  the  Duff  De- 
velopment Company  against  the  Colonial 
Office.  His  mastery  of  constitutional  law, 
his  ability  to  confound  expert  witnesses 
from  their  own  writings,  and  his  success  in 
making  the  Colonial  Office  pay  £387,000 
established  him  in  the  legal  profession  as 
almost  unbeatable  when  it  came  to  digest- 
ing masses  of  complicated  documents  and 
evidence.  Not  only  the  defeated  Colonial 
Office,  but  other  important  authorities 
and  institutions,  began  to  seek  his  aid ; 
and  his  reputation  advanced  rapidly  par- 
ticularly in  patent  and  compensation 
cases.  When  he  appeared  for  the  London 
County  Council  before  the  Railway  Rates 
Tribunal  in  a  matter  which  lasted  from 
May  1924  to  October  1926,  his  comprehen- 
sive understanding  of  the  39,000  questions 
put  to  expert  witnesses  on  highly  techni- 


cal matters  enormously  impressed  Her- 
bert Morrison  (later  Lord  Morrison  of 
Lambeth)  and  formed  in  his  mind  the  aim 
to  persuade  Cripps  to  join  the  Labour 
Party.  In  1927  Cripps  became  the 
youngest  K.C.  But  his  enthusiasms  out- 
side his  practice  were  not  yet  attracted  to 
politics.  Instead  he  spent  much  time  on 
'the  World  Alliance  to  promote  inter- 
national friendship  through  the  Churches', 
of  which  he  was  for  six  years  treasurer. 
By  1929  Cripps  with  his  characteristic 
impatience  had  become  bored  by  the  lack 
of  results  achieved. 

In  that  year  his  father  and  Sidney 
Webb  [q.v.],  his  uncle  by  marriage,  were 
both  members  of  Ramsay  MacDonald's 
Cabinet  but  it  was  as  much  due  to  Morri- 
son's influence  as  to  his  family's  that 
Cripps  joined  the  Labour  Party.  In  1930 
he  became  solicitor-general  and  was 
knighted,  and  in  January  1931  he  was 
elected  Labour  member  for  East  Bristol. 
When  the  'national'  Government  was 
formed  in  1931  MacDonald  asked  him  to 
continue  as  solicitor-general.  Cripps  at  the 
time  was  in  a  sanatorium  at  Baden.  His 
delay  in  replying  led  to  speculation  that 
he  was  going  to  accept  and  there  may 
have  been  some  hesitation  in  Cripps's 
mind.  In  the  event  he  declined  and 
rapidly  hurled  himself  with  the  same  mis- 
sionary enthusiasm  that  he  had  devoted 
to  the  World  Alliance  into  propagating 
socialism.  From  being  not  even  a  member 
of  the  Labour  Party  a  few  years  earlier,  he 
shot  right  through  it  in  terms  of  ideals  and 
policies  and  almost  out  the  other  side. 
Morrison  was  astonished  by  the  extremism 
of  his  protege.  Always  irritated  by  delays, 
Cripps's  logical  mind  concluded  that  if 
socialism  were  the  right  answer  to 
economic  and  social  problems  it  had  better 
be  brought  in  at  once,  lock,  stock,  and 
barrel,  with  barely  a  transitional  period. 
He  was  a  leading  member  of  the  Socialist 
League,  a  militant  group  within  the 
Labour  Party.  Among  other  things  he 
proposed  the  abolition  of  the  House  of 
Lords,  the  introduction  of  a  dictatorial 
Emergency  Powers  Act  to  forestall  sabo- 
tage by  financial  interests  in  the  event 
of  another  Labour  Government  and,  in 
1934,  he  remarked  'there  is  no  doubt  we 
shall  have  to  overcome  opposition  from 
Buckingham  Palace'.  This  last  observa- 
tion produced  alarmed  disclaimers  from 
the  Labour  leaders  but  in  the  public  mind 
Cripps  was  confirmed  as  an  out-and-out 
revolutionary  while  becoming  a  hero  to 
Labour  Party  militants  of  the  left  wing. 


271 


Cripps 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


It  was  not  surprising  that  with  his 
temperament  he  found  the  Labour  Party 
in  Parliament  and  outside  an  ineffectual 
organization.  In  1936  he  was  a  prime 
mover  of  the  United  Front  designed  to 
combine  the  Labour  Party,  the  Com- 
munists, and  the  Independent  Labour 
Party,  and  radicals  in  the  Liberal  Party 
into  one  organization.  A  new  journal. 
Tribune,  was  launched  in  1937  to  further 
the  cause.  Shocked  at  his  willingness  to 
work  with  Communists  the  Labour  Party 
executive  declared  that  any  member  who 
appeared  on  the  same  platform  as  a  Com- 
munist or  a  member  of  the  I.L.P.  would 
be  automatically  expelled.  Despite  various 
protests  from  Cripps  this  decision  was 
upheld  by  the  1937  annual  conference 
which  at  the  same  time  re-elected  Cripps 
to  the  national  executive. 

In  the  autumn  of  1938  Cripps  began  to 
advocate  an  even  wider  grouping  to  re- 
move Neville  Chamberlain's  government 
from  office.  This  was  a  Popular  Front 
which  was  to  include  Conservatives  as 
well.  When  he  proclaimed  his  programme 
for  a  Popular  Front  campaign  and  refused 
to  withdraw  it  at  the  request  of  the 
national  executive  he  was  expelled  from 
the  Labour  Party  in  January  1939.  He 
was  not  readmitted  until  1945.  During  this 
period  considerable  criticism  was  levelled 
at  him  by  trade-unionists  and  other  sober 
Labour  Party  stalwarts  on  the  grounds 
that  he  abused  his  privilege  of  a  rich  man 
by  spending  considerable  sums  on  internal 
propaganda  in  the  Labour  Party  which 
were  denied  to  the  ordinary  person.  There 
was  also  complaint  that  he  professed 
extreme  socialism  to  assuage  his  own 
feelings  of  guilt  at  being  richer  than  others, 
to  the  detriment  of  the  Labour  Party.  At 
the  same  time  Cripps  was  winning  many 
friends.  His  handUng  of  the  inquiry  into 
the  Gresford  Colliery  disaster  of  1934,  in 
which  he  appeared  without  fee  for  the 
North  Wales  Miners'  Federation,  en- 
deared him  for  ever  to  the  miners,  who 
were  prepared  to  forgive  what  they  re- 
garded as  his  eccentricities.  He  had,  too, 
a  peculiar  gift  for  inspiring  loyalty  in  those 
younger  than  himself.  The  public  picture 
of  a  Robespierre  was  belied  by  the  private 
charm  and  kindliness.  Nor,  apart  from  his 
enforced  carefulness  in  diet,  did  he  live  in 
any  particular  discomfort.  He  had  an 
agreeable  country  house  and  farm  and  did 
not  wear  a  hair  shirt.  Nor  was  he  a  non- 
smoker. 

Just  after  the  war  broke  out  in  1939 
Cripps  embarked  on  a  world  tour  with 


some  assistance  from  Lord  Halifax  [q.v.], 
then  foreign  secretary,  who  admired  his 
honesty  of  purpose.  This  journey  was  of 
great  importance  to  his  future  career.  He 
visited  India  for  the  first  time  and  was 
attracted  by  its  people  and  leaders  and 
infused  with  a  desire  to  promote  Indian 
independence  and  to  help  solve  India's 
problems.  He  also  visited  Moscow  and 
formed  the  view  that  it  was  possible  to 
prevent  Germany  and  the  Soviet  Union 
actually  becoming  major  allies  despite  the 
non-aggression  pact  of  August  1939.  On 
his  return  to  England  he  urged  on  all  and 
sundry  the  need  to  try  and  draw  Russia 
away  from  Germany.  Churchill,  who  had 
just  taken  over  as  prime  minister,  was  so 
taken  by  his  arguments  that  he  promptly 
sent  him  as  ambassador  to  Moscow  where 
Cripps  arrived  in  June  1940. 

He  remained  for  nearly  two  years  in 
Russia  where  he  suffered  considerable 
disillusion;  in  this  he  was  not  alone. 
Whatever  outbursts  he  had  allowed  him- 
self he  was  always  a  firm  believer  in  the 
democratic  processes  and  it  was  a  surprise 
to  him  to  find  that  the  Soviet  leaders  paid 
no  more  regard  to  a  socialist  believer  in 
democracy  than  to  a  capitalist.  It  was  im- 
possible for  him  to  form  any  special  re- 
lationship and  he  was  often  not  only 
frustrated  but  irritated  by  the  long  months 
of  idle  helplessness.  He  could  not  claim  to 
have  advanced  Anglo-Russian  friendship 
at  all  up  to  the  time  of  the  German  in- 
vasion of  Russia  on  22  June  1941 — ^when 
Cripps  happened  to  be  in  London,  where 
he  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council.  He 
immediately  went  back  to  Moscow  and 
organized  the  pact  of  mutual  assistance 
signed  on  12  July  1941.  When  he  returned 
to  Britain  in  the  following  January  he 
found  that  he  had  acquired  an  unexpected 
and  barely  deserved  aura  of  success :  the 
public  enthusiasm  for  the  new  Russian 
ally  had  washed  over  on  to  Cripps.  The  re- 
markable broadcast  which  he  made  when  he 
finally  returned  from  Moscow  confirmed 
this  feeling  and  made  him  such  a  popular 
figure  that  there  was  even  some  talk  of  his 
being  a  potential  replacement  for  the  prime 
minister. 

Churchill  made  him  leader  of  the  House  of 
Commons  as  well  as  giving  him  a  seat  in  the 
War  Cabinet  as  lord  privy  seal  in  the  month 
after  he  returned  from  Russia.  Perhaps 
for  the  same  reason  Churchill  allowed  him 
to  go  on  a  one-man  mission  to  India  in  an 
attempt  to  secure  Indian  support  for  the 
war  with  a  promise  of  full  self-government 
after  it  ended.  L.  S.  Amery  [q.v.],  secre- 


272 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cripps 


tary  of  state  for  India,  subsequently 
remarked  that  it  was  thought  better  that 
Cripps  should  fail  than  that  he  should. 
Cripps  very  nearly  succeeded  and  re- 
mained always  convinced  that  it  was 
M.  K.  Gandlii  [q.v.],  who  sabotaged  the 
hopes  of  success,  after  taking  no  part 
in  the  official  discussions  himself.  Con- 
sequently Cripps  put  the  utmost  emphasis 
on  Gandhi's  being  completely  involved 
in  any  future  discussions. 

The  failure  in  India  produced  a  fall  in 
popular  esteem,  and  there  were  dif- 
ferences of  opinion  with  Churchill  which 
brought  Cripps  near  to  resignation.  He 
relinquished  the  leadership  of  the  House 
and  left  the  War  Cabinet  in  November 
1942,  to  become  minister  of  aircraft 
production,  a  post  in  which  he  was 
extremely  successful,  until  the  German 
war  ended  in  1945.  That  probably 
prompted  C.  R.  (later  Earl)  Attlee  to 
make  him  president  of  the  Board  of  Trade 
in  the  post-war  Labour  Government. 
With  his  usual  long  working  days  and 
grasp  of  detail  Cripps  crashed  into  Britain's 
economic  problems.  He  saw  clearly  what 
would  have  to  be  done  and  that  it  would 
be  unpopular.  He  endeavoured  to  alleviate 
the  unpopularity  by  making  regular  and 
clear  expositions  of  the  country's  need  to 
increase  exports  and  production.  Nobody 
at  that  time  could  compare  with  him  in 
his  abiUty  to  force  the  House  of  Commons 
and  the  nation  to  listen  to  dry  unpalatable 
economic  facts  and  to  be  moved  by  his 
presentation  of  them,  although  he  never 
had  any  gift  for  literary  phraseology  or 
oratorical  language. 

Cripps  went  with  two  other  cabinet 
ministers  on  the  cabinet  mission  to  India 
in  1946.  He  was  the  mission's  directing 
force,  working  with  all  his  powers  of 
persuasion  and  energy  to  bring  Congress 
and  the  Moslem  League  to  agreement. 
The  cabinet  mission  plan,  with  all  its 
complicated  essentials  drafted  by  Cripps 
himself  in  one  morning  before  breakfast, 
was  the  basis  of  all  subsequent  political 
discussion.  That  it  failed  was  due  to 
Congress  withdrawing  its  initial  accep- 
tance although  the  Moslem  League  had 
agreed  to  it.  Yet  Cripps's  knowledge  of  the 
situation  and  perseverance  did  much  to 
bring  both  sides  to  a  realization  of  Britain's 
determination  to  withdraw  and  to  the 
necessity  which  lay  upon  them  of 
coming  to  terms. 

In  October  1947  Cripps,  who  had  begun 
to  dominate  the  home  economic  front,  was 
appointed  minister  for  economic  affairs. 


When,  in  a  few  weeks'  time,  Hugh  (later 
Lord)  Dalton  was  forced  to  resign  as  the 
result  of  a  budget  indiscretion,  Cripps  was 
the  natural  successor  as  chancellor  of  the 
Exchequer.  With  things  going  from  bad  to 
worse  as  a  backwash  of  the  war,  Cripps 
instituted  in  the  beginning  of  1948  a 
voluntary  wage  freeze.  Without  legislation 
to  back  him,  by  his  mental,  almost 
spiritual,  force  and  the  strength  of  his 
moral  integrity,  he  compelled  the  trade- 
union  leaders  to  comply.  He  promised 
them  that  he  would  likewise  make  private 
industry  accept  a  dividend  limitation 
and  in  1949  he  was  able  to  announce 
that  93  per  cent  of  business  firms  had  not 
only  agreed  to  hold  their  dividends  but 
were  in  fact  doing  so.  Cripps  held  the 
front  for  two  years  with  no  better  weapon 
than  the  strength  .of  his  personality. 
During  this  period  he  probably  had  more 
power  over  the  economy  than  any  other 
single  minister  before.  Despite  his  efforts, 
in  September  1949  he  was  obliged  to 
announce  the  devaluation  of  the  pound. 
When  he  explained  his  reasons  to  Chur- 
chill, then  leader  of  the  Opposition, 
immediately  before  the  announcement, 
the  wartime  leader  complimented  him  on 
his  courage  and  congratulated  him  for 
doing  exactly  the  right  thing.  Cripps  was 
the  more  distressed,  therefore,  when 
Churchill  in  the  House  of  Commons  and 
elsewhere  pointed  to  Cripps's  earlier  state- 
ments that  there  was  no  intention  to  de- 
value the  pound  and  said  that  he  could  no 
longer  be  trusted  as  chancellor  and  should 
resign.  To  Churchill  this  was  the  small 
change  of  politics.  To  Cripps,  who  believed 
passionately  in  truth,  it  was  grievous  abuse 
and  later  that  year  he  declined  to  accept 
an  honorary  degree  from  the  hands  of 
Churchill  as  chancellor  of  Bristol  Univer- 
sity. Cripps  was  able  to  demonstrate  that 
there  was  no  intention  to  devalue  at  the 
time  he  had  made  his  various  disclaiming 
statements.  It  was  only  the  suddenly 
worsening  dollar  crisis  that  had  forced  the 
measure  on  him. 

Cripps's  frail  constitution  was  now  let- 
ting him  down  more  and  more  frequently. 
In  the  summer  of  1950  he  was  compelled  to 
go  for  medical  treatment  to  Switzerland. 
On  20  October  1950  he  resigned  in  a  state 
of  almost  complete  exhaustion.  Held  so 
high  in  the  world's  regard  it  was  strange, 
though  touching,  that  he  was  hurt  by  the 
omission  of  King  George  VI  to  offer  him 
one  word  of  thanks  for  the  work  he  had 
done  when  he  tendered  his  resignation. 
But  Cripps  had  established  a  firm  place  in 


273 


Cripps 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


the  regard  of  his  countrymen  who  trusted 
him  because  they  believed  that  his  clearly 
expressed  Christian  principles  were  not  a 
sham  but  a  reality  which  moved  into  every 
action  and  word.  Although  he  acquired  the 
sobriquet  'Austerity  Cripps',  because  he 
was  obliged  to  make  the  nation  tighten  its 
belt  in  order  to  survive  the  arduous  post- 
war years,  it  was  soon  realized  that  he 
never  believed  in  austerity  for  austerity's 
sake  and  that  his  toughness  had  been  right 
and  justified. 

In  October  1951  Cripps  returned  from 
Switzerland  to  his  home  in  the  Cotswolds 
but  at  the  beginning  of  1952  he  had  once 
more  to  go  back  to  Switzerland  where 
there  was  a  recurrence  of  the  spinal  infec- 
tion which  finally  killed  him  on  21  April 
1952,  three  days  before  his  sixty-third 
birthday.  His  ashes  were  buried  in  the 
Cotswold  village  of  Sapperton. 

For  the  whole  of  his  public  life  Cripps 
leant  heavily  on  his  wife,  Isobel,  daughter 
of  Commander  Harold  William  Swithin- 
bank,  of  Denham  Court,  Bucks.,  whom 
he  married  in  1911.  She  was  appointed 
G.B.E.  in  1946.  She  shared  with  Cripps  the 
same  simple  Christian  faith  and  was  al- 
ways at  his  side  wherever  he  went.  With- 
out her  help  his  health  would  have  been 
even  worse  than  it  was  throughout  his  life 
and  undoubtedly  he  would  have  done  far 
less  work.  Her  creation  of  a  happy  home 
atmosphere  was  more  important  to  him, 
in  constant  need  of  rest  from  the  exac- 
tions he  placed  upon  himself,  than  for 
most  men  in  public  life.  They  had  three 
daughters  and  one  son,  John  Cripps,  who 
contributes  two  notices  to  this  Supple- 
ment. 

Cripps  was  a  fellow  of  University  Col- 
lege, London  (1930),  rector  of  Aberdeen 
University  (1942-5),  and  was  elected 
F.R.S.  in  1948.  He  was  appointed  C.H.  in 
1951. 

A  bust  by  Siegfried  Charoux  is  in  the 
possession  of  the  family ;  another  by  (Sir) 
Jacob  Epstein  is  in  St.  Paul's  Cathedral. 

[Colin  Cooke,  The  Life  of  Richard  Stafford 
Cripps,  1957 ;  Eric  Estorick,  Staff (xrd  Cripps, 
1949;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] WooDRow  Wyatt. 

CROMER,  second  Earl  of  (1877-1953), 
lord  chamberlain  to  the  household.  [See 
Baring,  Rowland  Thomas.] 

CROWE,  Sir  EDWARD  THOMAS 
FREDERICK  (1877-1960),  public  ser- 
vant, was  born  at  Zante  in  the  Ionian 
Islands    20    August    1877,    the    son    of 


Alfred  Louis  Crowe,  who  later  became  vice- 
consul  for  the  island,  and  his  wife,  Matilda 
Fortunata  Barff.  He  was  sent  to  Eng- 
land for  his  education  at  Bedford  Gram- 
mar School  and  in  1897  was  appointed 
a  student  interpreter  in  Japan.  During  the 
Russo-Japanese  war  he  was  in  charge  of 
the  consulate  at  Tamsui,  Taipeh,  then  a 
Japanese  possession,  where  his  ability 
attracted  attention  at  Tokyo,  and  in  1906 
he  was  appointed  to  the  legation  as  com- 
mercial attache.  In  1918,  after  the  creation 
in  London  of  the  Department  of  Over- 
seas Trade  and  the  commercial  diplomatic 
service,  he  was  confirmed  as  the  first 
commercial  counsellor  to  the  new  embassy 
at  Tokyo,  and  he  held  that  post  until  1924 
when  he  was  recalled  to  London  to  serve 
in  the  department  as  director  of  the 
foreign  division.  Four  years  later  he  was 
promoted  head  of  the  department  as 
comptroller-general.  He  never  returned  to 
the  Far  East,  but  his  admiration  and 
affection  for  the  Japanese  people  remained 
a  feature  of  his  life.  For  seven  years  he  was 
vice-president  of  the  Japan  Society  in 
London,  the  Japanese  ambassador  being 
traditionally  its  president,  and  he  took  an 
active  part  in  its  work,  on  the  council  and 
at  its  lectures.  After  the  war  of  1939-45  he 
led  a  movement  for  the  submission  of  a 
petition  for  clemency  to  the  war  crimes 
tribunal  at  Tokyo  for  Mamoru  Shigemitsu, 
the  former  ambassador  in  London.  Crowe 
was  later  decorated  with  the  Japanese 
Order  (first  class)  of  the  Sacred  Treasure. 
Crowe's  nine  years  as  comptroller- 
general  in  London  marked  the  period  of 
widest  influence  for  the  short-lived  De- 
partment of  Overseas  Trade.  He  brought 
to  the  post  a  practical  and  sympa- 
thetic experience  of  the  problems  facing 
exporters  to  overseas  markets  and  he 
was  endowed  with  a  boundless  energy, 
an  inquisitive  mind,  and  a  remarkable 
capacity  for  holding  men  and  winning 
their  confidence.  Not  content  with  the 
current  administrative  duties  of  his  office, 
he  had  to  know  intimately  each  member 
of  his  staff,  at  home  or  overseas ;  he  was  in 
personal  contact  with  the  leaders  in  bank- 
ing, industry,  and  commerce  in  London, 
and  he  was  repeatedly  taking  the  initia- 
tive to  visit  the  great  centres  of  industry 
in  the  provinces  and  to  address  the 
chambers  of  commerce.  The  legend  of 
the  apathy  or  indifference  of  government 
departments  to  the  difficulties  of  exporters 
was  exploded.  Above  all,  he  strove  for  the 
expansion  of  the  annual  British  Industries 
Fair  which  reached  its  international  pres- 


274 


'D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cruikshank 


tige  mainly  through  his  exertions.  For 
nine  years  he  was  vice-president  of  the 
International  Exhibitions  Bureau  at  Paris, 
and  vice-president  of  the  board  of  gover- 
nors of  the  Imperial  Institute. 

In  1937,  although  at  the  height  of  his 
mental  vigour,  Crowe  reached  retiring 
age.  He  was  elected  to  the  boards  of  a 
number  of  companies  and  became  an 
ardent  supporter  of  the  Royal  Society  of 
Arts,  serving  as  vice-president  (1937-60), 
president  (1942-3),  and  chairman  of  the 
council  (1941-3).  He  identified  himself 
particularly  with  the  society's  work  for 
the  education  of  young  people  and  for 
sixteen  years  was  chairman  of  its  examina- 
tion committee.  Among  the  government 
committees  on  which  he  served  was  that 
under  Lord  Fleming  [q.v.]  on  public 
schools  (1942-4). 

Crowe  was  one  whose  character  found 
its  happier  development  only  after  his  re- 
lease from  the  ties  of  official  life.  He  was 
not  a  scholar  and  he  disliked  being  alone ; 
his  delight  was  in  the  human  touch,  in 
meeting  men  and  women  and  drawing 
them  to  him.  He  had  an  easy  and  graceful 
facility  for  public  speaking,  enjoyed  abun- 
dant health  and  appeared  to  be  incapable 
of  fatigue.  At  the  launching  of  a  Mansion 
House  appeal,  at  the  inauguration  of  some 
social  movement,  as  a  platform  speaker, 
he  was  always  ready  to  play  his  part,  with 
his  infective  zest  for  Ufe.  In  his  old  age, 
with  his  mass  of  white  hair,  his  monocle, 
and  his  blue  beret,  he  was  a  familiar  and 
popular  figure.  He  was  appointed  C.M.G. 
in  1911,  knighted  in  1922,  and  advanced 
to  K.C.M.G.  in  1930. 

In  1901  Crowe  married  Eleanor  (died 
1947),  daughter  of  William  Hyde  Lay, 
who  had  been  British  consul  at  Chefoo. 
They  had  one  daughter  and  two  sons,  one 
of  whom.  Sir  Colin  Crowe,  became  chief  of 
administration  of  the  diplomatic  service  in 
1965  and  British  high  commissioner  in 
Canada  in  1968.  Crowe  died  8  March  1960 
at  his  son's  house  in  Cairo  where  he  was 
then  charge  d'affaires. 

[Foreign  Office  records;  Journal  of  the 
Royal  Society  of  Arts,  April  1960;  personal 
knowledge.]  R.  L.  Nosworthy. 

CRUIKSHANK,       ROBERT      JAMES 

(1898-1956),  journahst,  the  son  of  Robert 
James  Cruikshank,  a  coffee-house  keeper, 
and  his  wife,  Ellen  Batcheldor,  was  born 
in  Kensington  19  April  1898.  Although  his 
father  was  an  Ulsterman,  'Robin'  Cruik- 
shank, who  had  little  formal  education, 
started  his  journalistic  life  as  a  reporter 


on  the  Bournemouth  Guardian^  whence  he 
rapidly  graduated  to  London.  After  ser- 
vice in  the  war  of  1914-18,  he  joined  the 
staff  of  the  Daily  News  in  1919  and  re- 
mained with  that  organization  for  the  rest 
of  his  life.  With  his  gifted  and  fluent  style 
he  quickly  made  his  mark  and  started  to 
move  up  the  ladder.  In  1919  he  was  sent 
to  Prague  to  report  the  founding  of  the 
Czechoslovak  republic;  his  dispatches  at 
once  established  him  as  a  foreign  corre- 
spondent of  singular  promise.  There- 
after it  was  in  this  field  that  his  most 
sustained  and  notable  journalistic  achieve- 
ments were  to  he.  By  1924  he  had  risen  to 
the  post  of  diplomatic  correspondent  of 
the  Daily  News  and  four  years  later  he  was 
given  the  important  and  responsible  as- 
signment of  representing  the  paper  (which 
by  then  had  absorbed  the  Westminster 
Gazette)  in  New  York. 

In  this  position,  which  he  held  for 
the  next  eight  years,  Cruikshank  made 
a  reputation  as  one  of  the  top-ranking 
British  correspondents  in  America,  both 
by  the  knowledge  and  sympathetic  under- 
standing of  America  and  Americans  which 
he  soon  acquired  and  by  the  vividness  and 
dependability  of  his  reporting.  It  was  once 
said  of  him  by  an  American  that  he  'came 
to  know  Americans  better  than  they  knew 
themselves'.  This  may  have  been  so,  but 
in  the  course  of  his  life  he  was  to  have 
the  opportunity  of  doing  as  much  as  any 
journahst  of  his  generation  in  making  Eng- 
land and  the  English  known  and  under- 
stood by  Americans.  He  loved  England, 
and  was  widely  and  sometimes  unexpec- 
tedly read  in  its  literature,  with  a  special 
bias  in  favour  of  the  Victorians. 

In  1936  when  the  post  of  managing 
editor  of  the  Star  became  vacant  Cruik- 
shank was  invited  to  return  to  England  to 
take  it  up.  He  was  appointed  a  director  of 
the  Star,  the  evening  stable  companion  of 
the  Daily  News  which  in  the  interval  had 
become  the  News  Chronicle.  The  same  year 
marked  the  publication  of  his  novel  The 
Double  Quest  in  which  he  wittily  exploited 
his  knowledge  of  the  contrasts  and  com- 
parisons between  the  British  and  American 
cultures. 

It  was  not  surprising  that  after  the  out- 
break of  war  Cruikshank's  wide  know- 
ledge of  the  American  press  and  pressmen, 
combined  with  his  general  journalistic 
talent  and  his  gift  for  getting  on  with  all 
manner  of  people,  should  have  resulted  in 
his  being  appointed  in  1941  director  of 
the  American  division  at  the  Ministry  of 
Information.   This   entailed   his   absence 


I 


275 


Cruikshank 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


from  the  editorial  chair  of  the  Star  for  the 
rest  of  the  war.  He  was  also  in  1941-2 
deputy  director-general  of  the  British 
Information  Services  in  the  United  States. 
This  second  Anglo-American  period,  with 
its  combination  of  journalism  and  diplo- 
macy, probably  marked  the  peak  of  his 
professional  achievement.  He  was  ap- 
pointed C.M.G.  in  1945  and,  the  war  over, 
returned  to  become,  as  it  were,  one  of 
the  senior  statesmen  of  the  Daily  News 
organization,  being  appointed  a  director 
of  Daily  News,  Ltd.  (the  parent  company), 
and  of  the  News  Chronicle,  Ltd. 

Cruikshank  was  now  taking  an  active 
part  in  the  editorial  and  general  direction 
of  both  newspapers  and  seemed  destined 
for  the  highest  positions.  It  was  thus  a 
natural  move,  when  (Sir)  Gerald  Barry 
resigned  from  the  editorship  of  the  News 
Chronicle  at  the  end  of  1947,  that  Cruik- 
shank should  succeed  him.  It  is  question- 
able whether  his  talent  lay  chiefly  in  the 
direction  of  editorship — he  was  happier 
and  more  at  ease  writing  himself  than 
directing  others  to  write — and  it  seemed 
that  the  burdens  of  editorship  lay  rather 
heavily  upon  him.  By  1954  his  health  had 
begun  to  show  signs  of  deterioration  which 
affected  his  grip  on  day-to-day  control 
and  by  the  end  of  the  year  he  found  it 
necessary  to  resign.  His  death  in  London 
14  May  1956  at  the  comparatively  early 
age  of  fifty-eight  cut  short  a  career  which 
held  promise  of  even  greater  achievement, 
in  which  the  writing  of  more  books  would 
surely  have  played  a  part. 

Cruikshank  loved  writing  and  seemed 
to  have  been  born  with  an  easy  and  ebul- 
lient style.  His  book  Roaring  Century, 
written  in  1946  to  mark  the  centenary  of 
the  News  Chronicle,  gave  a  good  example 
of  his  rich  appreciation  of  Victorian 
Britain.  Characteristically  he  waived  his 
royalties  in  it  in  favour  of  the  Printers' 
Pension  Fund.  Shortly  afterwards  he 
wrote  Charles  Dickens  and  Early  Victorian 
England  (1949)  and  in  1951  The  Moods  of 
London.  As  a  man,  he  was  gay,  gentle,  and 
generous,  and  the  fluency  and  wit  of  his 
conversation  made  him  a  delightful  and 
stimulating  companion  in  any  company. 
Success  and  popularity  did  nothing  to 
spoil  a  character  which  was  essentially 
sensitive,  modest,  and  understanding  of 
others.  His  other  great  loves  besides 
journalism  and  Uterature  were  music  and 
the  theatre:  from  1947  to  1955  he  was  a 
governor  of  the  Old  Vic,  and  at  one  time 
he  was  among  the  sponsors  of  the  London 
Philharmonic  Orchestra. 


In  1939  Cruikshank  married  Margaret 
Adele  MacKnight,  herself  a  gifted  jour- 
nalist, whom  he  had  met  in  New  York.  It 
was  a  particularly  happy  marriage  which 
gave  him  much  strength  and  support. 
They  had  two  daughters.  A  portrait  by 
William  Evans  was  exhibited  at  the  Royal 
Society  of  Portrait  Painters  in  1964. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Gerald  Barry. 

CULLIS,  WINIFRED  CLARA  (1875- 
1956),  physiologist,  younger  daughter  and 
fifth  of  the  six  children  of  Frederick  John 
Cullis,  surveyor  and  civil  engineer  to  the 
Gloucester  Dock  Company,  by  his  wife, 
Louisa,  daughter  of  John  Corbett,  was 
born  2  June  1875  in  Tuffiey,  South  Ham- 
let, Gloucester.  Despite  three  centuries  in 
the  county,  the  family  moved  to  Birming- 
ham in  1880  for  better  educational  facili- 
ties. Winifred  Cullis  was  a  lively,  con- 
siderate, and  generous  child  who  learnt  so 
quickly  that  her  older  brother  Cuthbert 
lost  half  his  fee  for  teaching  her  to  read. 
At  the  King  Edward  VI  High  School  for 
Girls  she  was  outstanding  academically, 
athletic,  musical,  popular,  and  known 
for  her  beautiful  speaking  voice.  She 
specialized  in  science,  attending  Mason 
College  for  practical  classes  in  physics  and 
physiology. 

She  entered  Newnham  College,  Cam- 
bridge, as  Sidgwick  scholar  in  1896,  taking 
a  second  in  both  parts  of  the  natural 
sciences  tripos  (1899-1900).  She  took  her 
M.A.  in  1927.  As  an  undergraduate  she 
worked  under  J.  N.  Langley  and  (Sir) 
F.  G.  Hopkins  [qq.v.]  whom  she  held  in 
affectionate  regard.  She  was  elected  an 
associate  of  Newnham  College  (1919-33) 
and  president  of  the  College  Roll  (1952-5). 

In  1901  she  assisted  T.  G.  Brodie  in  the 
research  laboratories  of  the  Royal  Col- 
leges of  Surgeons  and  Physicians  and 
gained  teaching  experience  as  a  part-time 
instructor  in  elementary  science  in  a 
private  school  for  girls.  Later  that  year 
she  was  appointed  demonstrator  in 
physiology  at  the  London  (Royal  Free 
Hospital)  School  of  Medicine  for  Women. 
Langley  had  supported  her  application, 
writing  of  her  sound  qualifications,  hard 
and  judicious  work,  independent  thought, 
accuracy,  and  skill.  She  was  appointed  co- 
lecturer  with  Brodie,  1903-8;  part-time 
lecturer  and  head  of  department,  1908; 
whole-time  lecturer  and  head  of  depart- 
ment, 1912,  loyally  serving  the  school  and 
hospital  until  her  death. 

Amongst  those  with  whom  she  pub- 


276 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Cullis 


lished  papers  were  W.  E.  Dixon  and  W.  D. 
Halliburton  [qq.v.],  and  she  also  wrote 
The  Body  and  Its  Health  (with  M.  Bond, 
1935)  and  Your  Body  and  the  Way  It  Works 
(1949).  The  university  of  London  in  1908 
awarded  her  the  degree  of  D.Sc.  for  her 
work  on  the  isolated  mammalian  heart 
and  frog  kidney,  and  conferred  the  titles  of 
reader  (1912)  and  professor  of  physiology 
(1920)  upon  her.  In  1926  she  became 
the  first  holder  of  the  Jex-Blake  chair 
of  physiology,  retiring  with  the  title  of 
professor  emeritus  in  1941.  She  taught 
some  1,600  medical  students  with  lucidity 
and  disarming  simplicity  of  exposition,  a 
robust  sense  of  humour  and  endearing 
enthusiasm.  Her  integrity,  warmth,  and 
charm  made  her  teaching  memorable. 
Always  nervous  beforehand,  she  sounded 
at  ease  whether  lecturing  to  students, 
broadcasting,  or  addressing  an  audience 
in  the  Albert  Hall.  These  gifts  lost  her 
a  very  promising  career  in  research  but 
extended  her  influence  to  national  and 
international  affairs. 

On  the  death  of  Brodie  in  1916  Winifred 
Cullis  was  invited  to  replace  him  at 
Toronto  until  a  successor  was  appointed. 
In  1919  she  lectured  to  troops  in  Gibraltar 
and  Malta  for  the  Colonial  Office  and  was 
appointed  O.B.E.,  being  promoted  C.B.E. 
in  1929.  In  1940-41  she  travelled  over 
10,000  miles  lecturing  on  wartime  Britain 
in  the  Far  East,  Antipodes,  and  the  United 
States.  In  1941-3  she  was  head  of  the 
women's  section  of  the  British  Informa- 
tion Services  in  New  York ;  and  she  lec- 
tured, mainly  to  the  Royal  Air  Force,  in 
the  Middle  East  in  1944-5. 

This  intense  activity  after  retirement 
reflected  lifelong  interests  in  promoting 
international  understanding  and  general 
and  health  education  for  adults  and 
children  by  lecturing,  broadcasting,  use  of 
films,  and  serving  on  committees  respon- 
sible for  curricula.  She  was  a  co-founder  of 
the  British  and  International  Federations 
of  University  Women,  being  president  of 
each  successively  (1925-9,  1929-32).  She 
was  deputy  chairman  of  the  English- 
Speaking  Union  and  chairman  of  its  edu- 
cational and  universities  sections.  In  these 
and  the  scholarship  selection  committees 
her  judgement,  humanity,  and  breadth  of 
outlook  were  invaluable. 

She  was  never  a  militant  feminist  but 
sought  the  emancipation  of  both  sexes. 
She  derived  kindly  amusement  from  the 
threatened  resignation  of  demonstrators 
at  Mason  College  who  declared  biology 
unfit  study  for  a  girl ;  and  from  her  relega- 


tion to  the  galleries  of  Cambridge  lecture 
theatres  and  her  subjection  to  much  pas- 
sive and  some  active  professional  resis- 
tance from  male  colleagues.  She  received 
several  honorary  degrees  and  was  proud 
of  being  the  first  woman  member  of  the 
Physiological  Society;  the  second  to  be 
appointed  to  a  British  university  chair 
and  the  first  in  a  medical  school ;  the  guest 
of  the  South  Australian  Government  at 
the  centenary  celebrations  (1936) ;  and  the 
only  woman  delegate  to  the  silver  jubilee 
of  the  Indian  Science  Congress  in  Calcutta 
(1937-8). 

Her  tact,  regard  for  others,  persuasive 
common  sense,  good  humour  and  wit, 
made  her  an  admirable  committee  woman 
and  a  formidable  opponent.  Apart  from 
university,  hospital,  and  medical  school 
committees,  she  served  on  the  council  of 
the  National  Institute  of  Industrial  Psy- 
chology, the  Fatigue  Research  Board  of 
the  Medical  Research  Council,  the  Home 
Office  committee  on  the  two-shift  system 
for  women  and  young  persons,  the  British 
Association  and  Trades  Union  Congress 
committee  on  scientific  planning  of  in- 
dustry, the  Central  Council  of  Recreative 
Physical  Training,  the-  governing  body  of 
the  Royal  Academy  of  Dancing ;  and  she 
was  chairman  of  the  governing  body  of 
Chelsea  Polytechnic  and  a  director  of 
Time  and  Tide.  To  all  these  she  gave 
unstinting  support  and  yet  found  time,  as 
she  recorded,  for  recreation  by  reading  and 
cross-stitch. 

Winifred  Cullis  was  handsome,  well 
built,  and  well  dressed.  Although  lacking 
classical  beauty,  her  features  were  noble, 
her  blue  eyes  kindly  and  shrewd.  She 
was  high  principled  but  tolerant.  The  gift 
of  setting  children  and  adults  at  ease 
stemmed  from  serenity,  warmth,  gaiety, 
and  a  regal  memory  for  names.  Apparently 
tireless,  her  health  was  indifferent  and  she 
slept'  little.  But,  as  Dr.  Edith  Batho  re- 
corded, '^  wide  generosity  of  temper  and 
unusual  mental  and  physical  vigour  car- 
ried her  to  an  enviable  old  age  and  neither 
she  nor  her  friends  had  to  lament  any 
diminution  in  her  magnificent  personality'. 
Like  her  brothers.  Professors  Cuthbert  and 
Charles  Cullis,  she  was  a  beloved  teacher. 
She  was  active  to  the  day  of  her  death  in 
London  13  November  1956. 

A  portrait  by  Alice  Burton  is  in  Crosby 
Hall,  Chelsea,  London,  and  one  by  P. 
Dodd  is  in  the  Royal  Free  Hospital  School 
of  Medicine. 

{The  Times,  15  November  1956;  British 
Medical  Journal  and  Lancet,  24  November 


277 


CuUis 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


1956 ;  University  Women^s  Review,  vol.  xlvii, 
1957;  Journal  of  the  Medical  Women's 
Federation,  vol.  xxxix,  1957;  Newsletter  of 
the  International  Federation  of  University 
Women,  vol.  xiii,  1957 ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]    Ruth  E.  M.  Bowden. 

CUMMINGS,  ARTHUR  JOHN  (1882- 
1957),  journalist  and  author,  was  born  at 
Barnstaple  22  May  1882,  the  third  child 
and  eldest  of  three  sons  of  John  Cummings, 
North  Devon  representative  of  the  Devon 
and  Exeter  Gazette,  by  his  wife,  Maria 
Elizabeth  Richards.  B.  F.  Cummings 
[q.v.]  was  his  youngest  brother.  Arthur 
Cummings  went  to  Rock  Park  School, 
Barnstaple,  and  at  his  closing  speech  day 
was  described  by  his  headmaster  as  facile 
princeps.  As  a  schoolboy  he  came  under 
the  long-lasting  influence  of  PhiUp  Ernest 
Richards,  then  an  Oxford  undergraduate, 
who  after  some  years  in  the  Unitarian 
ministry  became  professor  of  English  in 
Lahore  where  he  died  in  1920 ;  he  helped 
to  mould  Cummings's  judgement  of  men, 
books,  and  ethics.  Cmrnnings  hoped  to 
study  law  at  Oxford,  but  this  ambition 
met  with  disappointment  when  his  father, 
a  Tory  journaUst  of  high  reputation, 
especially  as  a  columnist,  who  presided 
over  a  stimulating  family  life  and  trained  his 
sons  well,  broke  down  in  health.  Cummings 
then  joined  the  Devon  and  Exeter  Gazette  and 
was  entrusted  with  more  than  a  beginner's 
routine  tasks.  He  wrote  musical  notices 
(he  played  the  violin),  leading  articles, 
and  even  stock  market  comments.  From 
Devon  he  moved  to  the  Rochdale  Observer 
and  thence  to  the  reporting  staff  of  the 
Sheffield  Telegraph,  for  which  he  not  only 
did  vivid  descriptive  work  but  also  wrote 
essays  in  the  manner  of  his  lifelong  hero, 
Hazlitt.  He  moved  from  Sheffield  to  the 
Yorkshire  Post  at  Leeds  not  long  before  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1914.  He  served  in  many 
actions  on  the  western  front  in  the  4th  West 
Riding  (Howitzer)  brigade,  R.F.A.,  W.R. 
Territorials,  and  became  a  captain.  After 
the  war  he  became  an  assistant  editor  of 
the  Yorkshire  Post  but  although  he  did  first- 
rate  work  for  that  sturdy  Conservative 
organ  his  heart  was  not  in  its  more  Con- 
servative politics. 

In  1920  Cummings  eagerly  accepted  an 
invitation  to  be  an  assistant  editor  of  the 
Daily  News  (later  the  News  Chronicle),  the 
start  of  what  proved  to  be  thirty-five 
years'  service  for  that  paper.  There  a 
trenchant  radicalism  and  campaigning 
zest  found  the  scope  he  longed  for.  He 
became  deputy  editor  and  then  political 


editor.  In  the  thirties  his  reputation  be- 
came international.  He  sent  penetratingly 
interpretative  reports  from  the  economic 
conference  at  Ottawa  in  1932  and  severely 
criticized  the  Government  for  the  economic 
arrangements  which  were  made  at  the 
conference.  In  1933  he  described  the 
Reichstag  fire  trial  in  dispatches  imbued 
with  a  burning  hatred  of  injustice.  He 
made  an  even  deeper  impression  by  the 
convictions  he  expressed  when  reporting 
in  the  paper  and  in  a  book  the  trial  at 
Moscow  of  the  British  engineers  in  1933. 
The  book  was  hailed  as  a  masterpiece  in 
the  literature  of  great  trials.  In  depicting 
the  Russian  political  background  Cum- 
mings deplored  the  narrow-mindedness 
and  cruelty  of  dictatorship.  He  abominated 
Communism  as  an  ideology. 

His  foreign  correspondence  in  1933  won 
Cummings  a  Selfridge  award.  More  impor- 
tant was  the  close,  compulsive,  and  often 
hostile  attention  which  politicians  of  more 
than  the  Left  now  paid  to  all  that  he 
wrote.  By  the  late  thirties  he  had  become 
perhaps  the  best-read  political  commenta- 
tor in  Britain.  His  twice  weekly  'Spotlight 
on  Politics'  achieved  a  success  like  that  of 
leading  American  columnists,  but  unlike 
their  work  it  appeared  in  one  newspaper 
alone. 

Cummings  had  his  intimates  in  political 
life,  among  them  Lloyd  George  and  Lord 
Beaverbrook ;  but  he  was  more  of  a  desk 
man  and  a  thinker  and  far  less  of  a  peri- 
patetic Autolycus  than  most  journalists 
who  concentrate  on  political  trends.  He 
could  have  joined  the  Beaverbrook  press 
on  more  generous  terms  than  the  News 
Chronicle  afforded,  but  his  loyalty  to  the 
Liberal  paper  matched  and  indeed  arose 
from  his  devotion  to  its  uncompromising 
creed.  He  crusaded  with  heart  and  soul  for 
radicalism.  Opposition  steeled  his  nerves 
and  made  his  phrases  more  deadly.  He 
despised  any  truckling  to  dictatorship, 
saw  the  perils  in  Hitlerism,  accused  the 
British  Government  of  failure  to  con- 
struct adequate  defences  at  home  and 
adequate  alliances  abroad  (such  as  an 
alliance  with  Russia),  and  was  among  the 
foremost  in  rallying  the  Left  against  both 
appeasement  and  tyranny. 

The  Institute  of  Journalists  elected 
Cummings  president  for  1952-3.  In  his 
presidential  address  (1953)  he  gave  stout 
encouragement  to  the  Press  Council  which 
had  started  work  that  year.  The  press, 
he  said,  'has  now  an  authoritative  voice 
which  cannot  with  impunity  be  dis- 
regarded'.   He    deplored    the    increasing 


278 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Curtis 


parliamentary  tendency  to  raise  questions 
of  privilege  and  foresaw  growing  difficul- 
ties for  legitimate  press  criticism.  He  re- 
tired from  the  News  Chronicle  in  1955. 

Cunmiings's  lucid,  analytical  mind 
found  expression  in  eager  conversation, 
never  mere  gossip,  with  intimate  friends, 
and  a  literary  style  sometimes  grace- 
ful and  persuasive,  more  often  stern 
and  constructively  argumentative,  never 
clamorous.  A  man  of  strong  moral  and  in- 
tellectual fibre,  who  enjoyed  life  and  said 
he  wanted  to  live  for  ever,  he  might  have 
been  described  as  a  cheerful  Puritan.  His 
books  included  The  Moscow  Trial  (1933), 
The  Press  and  a  Changing  Civilisation 
(1936),  and  This  England  (1945). 

In  1908  Cummings  married  Lilian, 
daughter  of  John  Boreham,  of  Sheffield, 
who  died  seven  months  later  of  peritonitis. 
In  1915  he  married  an  artist,  Nora,  daugh- 
ter of  Arthur  Suddards,  bank  inspector,  of 
Leeds.  They  had  a  son,  Michael,  a  political 
cartoonist,  and  a  daughter,  Jean,  a 
journalist.  He  died  in  London  4  July  1957. 

A  hfesize  portrait  in  oils  of  Cummings 
by  Nora  Cummings  is  in  the  possession  of 
the  family. 

[The  Times  and  News  Chronicle,  6  July 
1957;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Linton  Andrews. 

CURTIS,  LIONEL  GEORGE  (1872- 
1955),  public  servant,  was  born  at  Cod- 
dington,  Ledbury,  7  March  1872,  the 
youngest  of  the  four  children  of  the  rector, 
the  Rev.  George  James  Curtis,  and  his 
wife,  Frances  Carr.  He  was  educated  at 
the  Wells  House,  Malvern  Wells,  at  Hailey- 
bury,  and  at  New  College,  Oxford,  where 
he  obtained  third  classes  in  classical 
honour  moderations  (1893)  and  literae 
humaniores  (1895).  On  leaving  Oxford  he 
became  secretary  first  to  L.  H.  Courtney 
(later  Lord  Courtney  of  Penwith,  q.v.), 
then  to  Lord  Welby  [q.v.]  who  was  mainly 
engaged  in  work  on  the  London  County 
Council.  Twice  during  this  time  Curtis  set 
himself  to  gain  practical  experience  of  the 
working  of  the  Poor  Law  by  assuming  the 
character  of  a  tramp,  begging  his  bread 
along  the  high  roads,  and  sleeping  at  night 
in  workhouses.  During  these  years  he  also 
studied  law  and  was  later  (1902)  called  to 
the  bar  by  the  Inner  Temple. 

In  1899  he  and  his  New  College  friend, 
Lionel  Hichens  [q.v.],  enlisted  as  privates 
in  the  City  Imperial  Volunteers,  and  went 
off  to  the  South  African  war.  In  1900  he 
acted  as  secretary  to  Sir  Alfred  (later  Vis- 
count) Milner  [q.v.]  who  in  the  next  year 


set  him  to  work  on  a  plan  for  the  new 
Johannesburg  municipality  and  shortly 
afterwards  appointed  him  town  clerk. 
Curtis  gave  an  account  of  his  experiences 
in  his  book  With  Milner  in  South  Africa 
(1951).  In  1903  he  left  Johannesburg  for 
Pretoria  to  become  an  assistant  colonial 
secretary  in  order  to  organize  municipal 
government  throughout  the  Transvaal. 

After  the  departure  of  Milner  in  1905 
and  the  arrival  of  Lord  Selborne  [q.v.]  as 
high  commissioner  and  governor,  'Milner's 
kindergarten',  headed  by  Curtis,  set  them- 
selves to  prepare  a  formal  memorandum 
showing  the  imperative  need  for  uniting 
the  four  South  African  colonies.  This 
memorandum,  written  mainly  by  Curtis, 
was  adopted  Iby  Selborne  and  submitted 
by  him  formally  in  1907  to  all  the  South 
African  governments,  including  the  new 
responsible  governments  of  the  Transvaal 
and  Orange  River  Colony.  It  was  accepted 
by  them  as  the  basis  for  discussion  at  a 
national  convention.  Curtis  then  resigned 
from  government  service  in  order  to  create 
'closer  union'  societies  throughout  South 
Africa. 

In  1909  the  Union  constitution  was 
completed  and  Curtis  returned  to  England 
together  with  some  others  of  the  *kinder- 
garten'.  With  his  friends  he  founded  the 
Round  Table,  a  quarterly  review,  of  which 
Philip  Kerr  (later  the  Marquess  of  Lothian, 
q.v.)  became  the  first  editor,  to  advocate  the 
federation  of  the  self-governing  countries 
of  the  'British  Commonwealth',  thus  in- 
troducing this  name  for  the  first  time. 
For  a  short  time  in  1912  Curtis  was  Beit 
lecturer  on  colonial  history  at  Oxford 
but  between  the  years  1911  and  1916  he 
devoted  himself  mainly  to  a  study  of  the 
closer  union  of  the  British  Commonwealth, 
travelling  extensively  through  the  Com- 
monwealth and  forming  Round  Table 
groups.  In  1916  he  published  two  reports: 
The  Problem  of  the  Commonwealth  and  The 
Commonwealth  of  Nations. 

In  1916  and  1917  he  took  a  prominent 
part  in  India  in  discussions  relating  to 
the  progress  of  that  country  towards  -self- 
government.  His  activities  and  the 
Montagu-Chelmsford  reforms  led  him  to 
publish  a  book  entitled  Dyarchy  (1920) 
which  also  contained  his  'Letters  to  the 
People  of  India'.  In  1918  Lord  Robert 
Cecil  (later  Viscount  Cecil  of  Chelwood, 
q.v.)  appointed  Curtis  a  member  of  the 
League  of  Nations  section  of  the  British 
delegation  at  the  Paris  peace  conference. 
During  this  work  Curtis  initiated  plans 
for    the    creation    of    an    Institute    of 


279 


Curtis 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


International  Affairs,  and  it  was  through 
his  efforts  in  1920-21  that  the  (Royal) 
Institute  of  International  Affairs  in 
London  (Chatham  House)  was  foimded 
and  endowed. 

Curtis  was  appointed  a  research  fellow 
of  All  Souls  College,  Oxford,  in  1921.  In 
the  same  year  he  was  invited  by  Lloyd 
George  to  take  part  in  the  negotiations  for 
an  Irish  treaty,  acting  as  his  adviser  and 
as  a  secretary,  with  Thomas  Jones  [q.v.], 
to  the  British  delegation  at  the  Irish  con- 
ference. He  assisted  in  framing  the  Irish 
constitution  and  remained,  until  October 
1924,  'adviser  to  the  Colonial  Office  on 
Irish  affairs'. 

In  the  ten  years  between  1924  and  1934 
Curtis  was  engaged  mainly  in  writing  his 
book,  Civitas  Dei,  which  was  published  in 
three  volumes  over  the  years  1934-7,  and 
in  which  he  set  forth  his  gospel  of  Com- 
monwealth, and  indeed  world,  unity  under 
free  and  democratic  institutions.  During 
the  war  of  1939-45  Curtis,  who  was  then 
living  at  Kidlington,  took  an  active  part 
in  the  foreign  research  and  press  service 
housed  at  BaUiol  College,  in  writing 
nimierous  pamphlets,  and  forming  study 
groups  of  men  and  women  in  the  armed 
Services  at  Oxford.  To  the  end  of  his  life, 
as  he  showed  during  this  period,  he  had 
the  power  to  exercise  decisive  and  lasting 
influence  on  the  young.  Among  those  who 
admired  him,  and  whom  he  greatly  ad- 
mired, were  T.  E.  Lawrence  [q.v.]  and 
Helmuth  von  Moltke,  the  young  German 
patriot  done  to  death  by  Hitler.  Curtis 
continued  publication  of  further  pamph- 
lets after  the  war.  Among  other  causes 
which  in  his  time  he  helped  to  bring  to 
fruition  by  his  energy  were  the  founding  of 
the  Oxford  Society  and  of  the  Oxford  Pre- 
servation Trust,  as  well  as  the  preservation 
of  the  Wytham  estate  for  the  university. 

It  was  as  a  man  of  action  and  an 
enthusiast  who  exercised  a  compelling 
influence  over  others  that  Curtis  was 
remarkable,  rather  than  as  a  professional 
historian — ^which  he  never  claimed  to  be. 
He  held  no  important  position  and  was 
not  well  known  to  the  general  pubhc,  yet 
his  influence  was  great :  in  the  creation  of 
the  Union  of  South  Africa,  in  the  progress 
of  India  towards  self-government,  and  in 
the  Irish  treaty.  'Possessed  by  a  bm-n- 
ing  zeal  for  causes  which  he  thought 
worthy,  he  would  throw  himself  into  them 
with  complete  self-abandonment,  with  a 
commanding  vigour  which  pressed  into 
the  service  the  best  energies  of  his  friends 
whether  they  would  or  no,  and  without 


thought  of  recognition  either  of  his  efforts 
or  of  theirs.  In  the  result  his  objects  were 
apt  to  be  achieved,  while  the  prime  motive 
force  which  had  produced  their  achieve- 
ment remained  unknown  to  the  world.' 
{Round  Table,  March  1956).  It  was  be- 
cause of  his  burning  zeal  for  the  causes  on 
which  he  set  his  heart  that  his  'kinder- 
garten' friends  likened  him  to  Isaiah  and 
nicknamed  him  'the  prophet'.  At  times 
some  of  his  colleagues  wilted  under  the 
strain,  but  whether  they  agreed  with  him 
or  not  they  remained  his  devoted  friends. 
Curtis  received  honorary  degrees  from 
the  universities  of  Melbourne  and  Cologne, 
and  was  made  a  C.H.  in  1949.  He  married 
in  1920  Gladys  Edna  (Pat),  youngest 
daughter  of  the  late  Prebendary  Percy 
Richard  Scott,  of  Tiverton.  They  had  no 
children.  He  died  at  Kidlington,  Oxford, 
24  November  1955.  A  portrait  by  Sir 
Oswald  Birley  is  at  the  Royal  Institute  of 
International  Affairs ;  another,  by  Maurice 
Greiffenhagen,  is  at  Prior  Croft,  Camber- 
ley.  A  drawing  by  Augustus  John  is  in  the 
possession  of  the  family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Brand. 
[Arnold  J.  Toynbee,  Acquaintances,  1967.] 

DADABHOY,  Sir  MANECKJI 
BYRAMJI  (1865-1953),  Indian  lawyer, 
industriaUst,  and  parliamentarian,  was 
born  in  Bombay  30  July  1865.  He  came  of 
a  much  respected  Parsi  family,  the  second 
son  of  Khan  Bahadur  Byramji  Dadabhoy, 
J.P.,  registrar  of  joint  stock  companies 
and  assurances.  He  was  educated  in 
Bombay  at  the  Fort  and  Proprietary 
High  School,  a  well-known  institution 
of  its  time,  then  at  St.  Xavier's  College, 
from  which  he  graduated.  In  1884  he 
went  to  England,  was  admitted  to  the 
Middle  Temple,  and  in  1887  called  to  the 
bar.  On  his  return  to  India  he  began  to 
practise  at  the  Bombay  high  court  and  at 
an  unusually  early  age  was  elected  a  mem- 
ber of  the  Bombay  municipal  corporation. 
In  1888  he  was  made  a  justice  of  the  peace. 
In  1890  he  moved  to  Nagpur  and  enrolled 
as  an  advocate  at  the  court  of  the  judicial 
commissioner  of  the  Central  Provinces.  He 
was  appointed  manager  of  Raja  Bahadur 
Laxman  Rao  Bhonsle's  estate  in  Nagpiu", 
and  negotiated  the  partition  of  that  estate 
between  the  Raja  Bahadur  and  his 
brother.  For  this  he  received  a  fee  which  in 
those  days  was  regarded  as  a  record  and 
the  case  brought  him  prominence  in  his 
profession.  He  was  elected  to  the  Nagpur 
municipal   corporation   and   served  that 


280 


D.N^.  1951-1960 


Dakin 


body  for  forty  years  (1890-1930).  In  1896 
he  was  appointed  government  advocate. 
He  found  time  to  write  conmaentaries  on 
the  Central  Provinces  Tenancy  Acts  of 
1888  and  1898  which  became  standard 
works.  He  was  retained  by  the  G.I.P. 
Railway  in  connection  with  the  develop- 
ment of  their  conmiunications  in  the 
Central  Provinces,  and  was  also  associated 
with  the  activities  of  a  wealthy  Marwari 
business  house  in  Ahmedabad. 

So  Dadabhoy  moved  more  and  more 
into  the  industrial  and  public  life  of  his 
province.  Through  partnership  in  a  mining 
syndicate,  he  had  a  share  in  the  develop- 
ment of  the  considerable  mineral  resources 
of  the  Central  Provinces.  He  was  director 
of  a  number  of  textile  mills,  founded  and 
was  managing  director  of  the  Nagpur  Elec- 
tric Light  and  Power  Company,  and  was 
managing  proprietor  of  several  collieries 
and  other  industrial  concerns.  His  in- 
terests and  ability  brought  him  leadership 
in  the  Indian  industrial  community  as  a 
whole.  In  1907  he  presided  at  the  Central 
Provinces  and  Berar  industrial  conference, 
and  in  1911  he  was  elected  president  of  the 
All-India  industrial  conference  in  Calcutta. 
Throughout  his  public  career  he  took  a 
keen  practical,  and  urgent  interest  in  the 
industrialization  of  India.  He  was  recog- 
nized as  an  authority  on  the  economic 
life  of  the  country  and  served  on  a  num- 
ber of  commissions  deaUng  with  finance 
and  economics,  including  the  Indian 
fiscal  commission  (1921-2)  and  the  royal 
commission  on  Indian  currency  and 
finance  (1925-6).  From  1920  to  1932  he 
was  a  governor  of  the  Imperial  Bank  of 
India. 

Dadabhoy' s  long  experience  of  munici- 
pal poUtics  served  him  well  when  he 
entered  the  wider  parhamentary  field  in 
1908,  on  his  nomination  to  the  governor- 
general's  legislative  council  of  which  he 
was  subsequently  an  elected  member.  He 
soon  established  a  prominent  position  as 
a  forceful,  independent,  and  constructive 
critic  of  the  Government  of  India.  In  1921 
he  was  elected  to  the  Council  of  State  to 
which  he  was  subsequently  nominated  in 
1926,  1931,  and  1937,  and  of  which  he 
became  president  in  1932.  He  filled  this 
post  with  distinction  and  general  accep- 
tance until  1946,  when  the  Constituent 
Assembly  was  established  to  draw  up 
a  constitution  for  the  independent  India 
which  was  to  come  into  being  in  1947. 

Dadabhoy  was  short  of  stature,  and  this 
often  left  the  members  of  the  Council  of 
State  in  some  doubt  whether  their  presi- 


dent was  standing  up  or  sitting  down — 
a  dilemma  which  gave  him  much  amuse- 
ment. If  short,  he  was  sturdy  and  robust, 
and  gave  the  impression  of  great  physical 
strength.  He  had  an  agile  mind,  shrewd 
judgement,  great  tact,  and  a  rare  capacity 
for  making  friends.  Although  a  strong 
nationalist  and  a  frequent  and  candid 
critic  of  the  Government,  he  was  a  pro- 
found believer  in  the  value  of  Indo- 
British  partnership  and  friendship  to  the 
Commonwealth  and  to  the  world.  This 
conviction  was  the  keynote  of  his  public 
and  parliamentary  career  and  the  theme 
of  his  outspoken  and  constructive  contri- 
butioi^  to  the  second  session  of  the  Round 
Table  conference  in  London  in  1931  which 
he  attended  as  a  delegate.  It  was  also  the 
basis  of  his  conduct  during  his  years  as 
president  of  the  Council  of  State  where, 
throughout  some  of  the  stormiest  periods 
in  India's  political  history,  he  succeeded  in 
exercising  his  authority  and  influence  with 
the  general  support-  of  all  parties  in  the 
house. 

Dadabhoy  was  gregarious,  cosmopoli- 
tan, and  hospitable.  He  was  an  expert  in 
the  arts  of  'winning  friends  and  influencing 
people'  of  all  communities  and  races. 
In  the  United  Kingdom  he  entertained 
lavishly  at  Kingsnympton  Hall,  on  King- 
ston Hill,  Surrey.  He  was  a  generous  host 
at  his  spacious  house  in  Nagpur,  and  at 
the  many  social  clubs  of  which  he  was 
a  member,  in  Bombay,  Delhi,  Simla,  and 
Calcutta.  Sometimes  his  hospitality  had  a 
political  purpose ;  often  there  was  no  other 
aim  than  the  enjoyment  of  entertaining 
friends.  Whatever  the  occasion,  his 
generosity  was  overflowing. 

For  his  services  in  India  Dadabhoy  was 
appointed  CLE.  (1911),  K.C.I.E.  (1925), 
K.C.S.I.  (1936),  and  knighted  (1921).  In 
1884  he  married  Bai  Jerbanoo,  second 
daughter  of  Khan  Bahadur  Dadabhoy 
Pallonji,  by  whom  he  had  two  daughters.^. 
He  died  in  Nagpur  14  December  1953.     ^ 

[The  Times  and  Times  of  India,  15  Decem- 
ber 1953 ;  Hitavada  of  Nagpur,  16  December 
1953;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Frederick  James. 

DAKIN,  HENRY  DRYSDALE  (1880- 
1952),  biochemist,  was  born  in  Hampstead 
12  March  1880,  the  youngest  of  a  family  of 
five  sons  and  three  daughters.  His  father, 
Thomas  Burns  Dakin,  was  then  the  owner 
of  a  sugar  refinery  in  London,  but  later 
acquired  an  iron  and  steel  business  in 
Leeds,  and  moved  there  with  his  family  in 
1893.   His  mother  was   Sophia  Stevens. 


281 


Dakin 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Dakin,  after  a  brief  period  at  the  Merchant 
Taylors'  School,  then  in  London,  was, 
therefore,  removed  at  the  age  of  thirteen 
to  the  Leeds  Modern  School.  When,  later, 
the  school  moved  and  was  organized  in 
four  houses,  each  named  after  a  dis- 
tinguished former  pupil,  one  of  these  was 
named  *Dakin  House'.  It  would  appear, 
however,  that  Dakin  left  school  before  the 
age  for  a  university  course;  for  he  had 
served  as  an  apprentice  to  the  Leeds 
city  analyst,  T.  Fairley,  before  he  entered, 
in  1898,  what  was  then  the  Yorkshire 
College,  Leeds.  In  later  years  he  recalled 
this  early  and  strict  scientific  discipline  of 
an  analyst's  laboratory  as  valuable  train- 
ing for  his  lifelong  devotion  to  the  then 
newly  emergent  science  of  biochemistry. 

Dakin's  course  for  the  B.Sc.  brought 
him  at  once  into  contact  with  Julius  B. 
Cohen,  then  the  lecturer  in  organic 
chemistry  at  the  Yorkshire  College.  It  was 
with  Cohen  that  Dakin  began  to  acquire 
his  lasting  interest  in  the  optical  activity 
of  organic  compounds,  its  influence  on 
their  biological  activities,  or  on  their 
acceptability  as  nutrients.  His  specially 
vivid  interest  in  the  selective  action  of 
a  natural  enzyme,  on  one  component  of  a 
racemic  compound,  led  Cohen  to  give  him 
the  nickname  'Zyme',  which  his  friends 
were  to  use  as  a  familiar  mode  of  address 
for  the  rest  of  his  life. 

After  obtaining  his  B.Sc.  in  1901  from 
the  Victoria  University  of  Manchester,  and 
a  further  year  with  Cohen  as  his  personal 
assistant  and  demonstrator,  Dakin  was 
awarded  a  research  exhibition  by  the  1851 
Commissioners,  and  worked  with  it  at  the 
Jenner  (later  the  Lister)  Institute,  under 
S.  G.  Hedin;  at  Heidelberg,  with  A. 
Kossel ;  and  for  a  final  period  again  at  the 
Lister  Institute.  These  researches  covered 
enzymatic  actions  on  proteins  and,  selec- 
tively, on  racemic  esters  of  mandelic  acid ; 
on  arginase  and  protamines;  and  on  the 
synthesis  of  the  hormone  adrenaline  and 
related  active  bases. 

At  that  juncture  Christian  A.  Herter  of 
New  York  was  inquiring  in  London  for 
somebody  with  suitable  scientific  and 
personal  qualifications  for  an  appointment 
with  him,  in  a  private  laboratory  for  bio- 
chemical researches  which  he  had  installed, 
and  fully  equipped,  on  two  upper  floors 
of  his  Madison  Avenue  mansion.  Dakin 
accepted  this  unusual  opportunity,  for 
which,  indeed,  he  had  unique  qualifica- 
tions ;  and,  in  the  event,  he  was  to  spend 
the  rest  of  his  working  life  in  developing 
its  special  possibilities.  Its  conditions  ac- 


centuated in  him  an  inborn  shrinking  from 
any  kind  of  publicity,  which  prevented 
him  from  taking  part  in  any  open  meeting, 
discussion,  or  ceremony.  He  was  elected 
F.R.S.  in  1917  but  an  invitation  to  deliver 
the  Croonian  lecture  was  met  by  a  peni- 
tent refusal ;  and  the  award  to  him  of  its 
Davy  medal  (1941)  was  accepted  only 
because,  in  wartime  conditions,  it  could 
be  presented  in  his  own  library.  Congenial 
colleagues,  however,  were  always  wel- 
comed to  free  and  lively  discussions  of 
researches,  in  private.  Dakin  had,  indeed, 
a  genius  for  quietly  intimate  friendships. 
Meanwhile  publications  of  his  own  im- 
portant researches  in  biochemistry  were 
issuing  in  a  steady  stream  from  the  Herter 
Laboratory. 

After  Herter  died  in  1910  his  widow, 
Mrs.  Susan  Dows  Herter,  was  eager  to 
maintain  the  laboratory,  with  Dakin 
thenceforward  in  sole  charge  of  its  uses.  In 
1916  their  personal  devotion  was  con- 
firmed by  their  marriage.  Dakin,  though 
chronically  unfit  for  active  service,  had 
hastened  to  Britain  to  offer  his  services 
for  any  national  purpose.  He  eventually 
found  opportunity  for  researches  on  the 
antiseptic  treatment  of  wounds,  and  be- 
came an  active  advocate  and  exponent  of 
the  use  of  a  buffered  hypochlorite  solution. 
This  he  used  to  great  purpose  in  the 
Aquitania  (then  serving  as  a  hospital  ship 
for  the  Dardanelles)  after  having  arranged 
for  the  installation  of  an  electrolytic  tank, 
with  which  an  unlimited  supply  of  the 
hypochlorite  solution — 'Dakin's  Solution' 
— could  be  made  from  sea  water. 

The  Dakins  moved  later  from  Madi- 
son Avenue  to  a  house  and  estate 
at  Scarborough-on-Hudson,  some  thirty 
miles  up-river  from  New  York.  There  the 
laboratory  was  reinstated  in  a  special 
building,  and  Dakin  continued  his  re- 
searches, with  their  characteristic,  un- 
hurried perfection,  almost  until  his  death 
10  February  1952,  a  year  after  that  of  his 
wife.  They  had  no  children.  He  had  re- 
ceived honorary  doctorates  from  Leeds, 
Yale,  and  Heidelberg. 

[Sir  Percival  Hartley  in  Obituary  Notices  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  No.  21,  November 
1952 ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] H.  H.  Dale. 

DAMPIER,  Sir  WILLIAM  CECIL  DAM- 
PIER  (1867-1952),  formerly  Whetham, 
scientist  and  agriculturist,  was  born  in 
South  Hampstead,  London,  27  December 
1867,  the  only  son  (he  had  one  sister)  of 
Charles  Langley  Whetham,  manufacturer, 


282 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Davidson 


and  his  wife,  Mary  Ann,  daughter  of 
Thomas  Dampier,  glove  manufacturer,  of 
Yeovil.  A  shy  boy,  of  indifferent  health,  he 
was  educated  for  the  most  part  privately. 
Becoming  interested  in  science,  he 
entered  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  where 
he  was  awarded  an  exliibition  and  a 
scholarship  in  his  second  and  third  years. 
He  obtained  first  classes  in  both  parts  of 
the  natural  sciences  tripos  (1888-9),  was 
Coutts  Trotter  student  (1889),  and  Clerk 
Maxwell  scholar  (1893).  Influenced  by 
(Sir)  J.  J.  Thomson  [q.v.]  he  undertook 
research  at  the  Cavendish  Laboratory 
which  earned  him  a  college  fellowship  in 
1891.  He  was  a  college  lecturer  (1895- 
1922),  tutor  (1907-13),  senior  tutor  (1913- 
17),  and  remained  a  fellow  for  the  rest  of 
his  life,  an  active  member  of  the  finance 
and  estates  committees  and  an  ardent 
supporter  of  the  Cambridge  Preservation 
Society.  He  represented  the  university  on 
the  governing  body  of  Winchester  College 
(1917-47)  but  an  attempt  in  1918  to 
represent  Cambridge  University  in  Parlia- 
ment as  an  independent  Conservative 
proved  unsuccessful. 

In  1901  Whetham  was  elected  F.R.S. 
for  his  electrolytic  experiments  and  in  the 
following  year  he  published  a  treatise  on 
the  Theory  of  Solution  which  was  for  some 
time  the  standard  textbook.  College  duties 
and  other  pursuits,  however,  gradually 
diverted  him  from  research;  but  he  re- 
tained an  interest  in  the  work  of  other 
scientists,  contributing  several  notices  to 
this  Dictionary  and  publishing  The  Recent 
Development  of  Physical  Science  (1904)  and 
a  History  of  Science  (1929),  both  of  which 
went  into  a  number  of  editions. 

In  1897  Whetham  married  Catherine 
Burning,  daughter  of  Robert  Burning 
Holt,  shipowner,  of  Liverpool.  They 
had  one  son  and  five  daughters,  two  of 
whom  became  scientific  research  workers. 
Whetham  and  his  wife  meantime  had 
become  absorbed  in  the  history  of  his 
forebears,  among  whom  were  Thomas  and 
William  Bampier  [qq.v.],  bishop  and 
buccaneer  respectively;  they  published 
a  biography  of  the  Roundhead  Colonel 
Nathaniel  Whetham  in  1907.  Led  on  to  a 
general  study  of  heredity  and  its  influence 
on  society,  they  wrote  next  The  Family 
and  the  Nation  (1909)  and  Heredity  and 
Society  (1912). 

After  inheriting  the  Bampier  family 
property  in  1916  Whetham  farmed  the 
land  on  the  Hilfield  estate  in  Borset 
between  1918  and  1926.  He  specialized  in 
the  making  of  cheese  and  took  part  in  the 


investigation  of  the  possibilities  of  extract- 
ing lactose  from  whey.  So  he  came  to  his 
last  and  abiding  interest  in  agricultural 
economics.  He  was>  co-opted  a  member  of 
council  of  the  Royal  Agricultural  Society 
in  1921 ,  received  its  gold  medal  in  1936,  and 
became  a  vice-president  in  1948.  In  1925- 
42  he  was  a  member  of  the  Agricultural 
Wages  Board ;  in  1933-51  a  development 
commissioner;  and  in  1938-9  chairman 
of  the  land  settlement  committee.  He 
was  chairman  of  the  Ministry  of  Agricul- 
ture machinery  testing  committee  (1925- 
33)  and  of  the  committee  for  the  pre- 
servation of  grass  and  other  fodder  crops 
(1933-9),  and  acting  chairman  of  the 
Rural  Industries  Bureau  (1939-45).  In 
1931  he  was  knighted  for  his  services  to 
agriculture,  and  changed  his  name  to 
Bampier.  In  the  same  year  he  became  first 
secretary  of  the  Agricultural  Research 
Council  which  he  was  able  to  establish 
on  sound  lines  with  freedom  to  engage 
directly  in  research  before  resigning  in 
1935  when  he  felt  the  technical  side  of  the 
work  had  gone  beyond  his  range  of  know- 
ledge. He  remained  a  member  of  the 
Council  until  1945  and  served  on  many  of 
its  committees.  A  shrewd  and  kindly  man 
who  found  his  long  life  'interesting  and 
amusing',  he  was  always  willing  to  give 
his  services  in  the  public  welfare.  He  died 
in  Cambridge  11  Becember  1952,  a  few 
months  after  his  wife.  A  portrait  by 
George  J.  Coates  is  reproduced  in  Bam- 
pier's  autobiography. 

[The  Times,  12  and  18  December  1952,  and 
23  January  1953;  Sir  William  Dampier, 
Cambridge  and  Elsewhere,  1950 ;  Sir  Geoffrey 
Taylor  and  E.  H.  E.  Havelock  in  Obituary 
Notices  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ix, 
1954 ;  private  information.] 

Helen  M.  Palmer. 

DAVIDSON,   Sir  JOHN  HUMPHREY 

(1876-1954),  major-general,  was  born  in 
Mauritius  24  July  1876,  the  son  of  George 
Walter  Davidson,  merchant,  and  his  wife, 
Johanna  Smith  Humphrey.  Educated  at 
Harrow  and  the  Royal  Military  College, 
Sandhurst,  he  joined  the  King's  Royal 
Rifle  Corps  and  spent  the  first  three  years 
of  his  career  (1896-9)  in  Mauritius  with 
the  1st  battalion.  Moving  to  South 
Africa,  the  battalion  was  badly  mauled  at 
Talana  in  the  action  in  which  Sir  William 
Penn  Symons  [q.v.]  was  killed,  as  well  as 
Davidson's  colonel  and  four  other  officers 
of  his  battalion.  He  went  on  to  see  action 
at  the  relief  of  Ladysmith  and  in  the 
Transvaal  with  Sir  Redvers  Buller  [q.v.]. 


283 


Davidson 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


He  later  took  part  in  various  sweeps  after 
elusive  Boers.  He  was  appointed  to  the 
D.S.O.  (1900),  mentioned  in  dispatches, 
and  promoted  captain  (1901). 

After  service  in  Malta  and  with  the 
International  Force  in  Crete,  Davidson 
entered  the  Staff  College  by  nomination  at 
the  end  of  1905.  It  was  the  time  of  the 
reforms  of  R.  B.  (later  Viscount)  Haldane 
[q.v.]  when  the  British  Army  began  to 
prepare  itself  for  modern  continental  war 
amid  an  organizational  and  intellectual 
renaissance  which  gave  Davidson  an 
opportunity  of  displaying  talents  as  a 
staff  officer.  In  1908-10  he  was  G.S.O.  3 
to  the  military  training  directorate  of  the 
new  general  staff;  he  returned  to  field 
duties  as  brigade-major  in  the  5th  Infantry 
brigade  at  Aldershot  (1910-12).  From 
1912  to  1914  he  was  instructor  at  the 
Staff  College  in  training  and  tactics  and 
also  in  general  staff  duties;  but  he  had 
little  experience  of  staff  work  with  large 
formations  in  the  field. 

In  1914,  now  a  major,  Davidson  became 
G.S.O.  2  (Intelligence)  to  the  III  Corps  on 
mobilization,  and  took  part  in  the  retreat 
from  Mons,  the  battles  of  the  Marne  and 
Aisne,  and  round  Armentieres.  War 
brought  unlooked-for  opportunities  and 
responsibilities:  in  December  1914  David- 
son was  lent  to  I  Corps  for  special  duties  in 
connection  with  the  delicate  operation  of 
relieving  the  exhausted  Indian  Corps  in 
the  water-logged  valley  of  the  Lys  in  the 
face  of  very  active  and  aggressive  German 
forces.  During  the  relief,  which  lasted  ten 
days,  Davidson  had  to  report  every  night 
to  Sir  Douglas  (later  Earl)  Haig  [q.v.]  who 
asked  for  him  as  operations  officer  when 
First  Army  was  formed  under  his  com- 
mand. In  this  capacity,  as  temporary 
colonel,  Davidson  took  part  in  the  battle 
of  Neuve  Chapelle  (March  1915),  the 
British  Army's  first  set-piece  offensive  on 
the  western  front. 

When  Haig  became  commander-in- 
chief  in  December  1915,  Davidson  at  the 
age  of  thirty-nine  took  over  the  key  post 
of  director  of  military  operations  to  the 
British  Armies  in  France.  Thereafter  he 
was  associated  with  all  Haig's  tragedies 
and  triumphs  until  the  end  of  the  war. 
With  Sir  Laimcelot  Kiggell  [q.v.],  chief 
of  the  general  staff,  and  John  Charteris, 
director  of  military  intelligence,  Davidson 
formed  Haig's  intimate  entourage,  and 
shared  in  and  helped  to  form  the  mental 
climate  in  which  Haig  lived.  No  more 
than  Kiggell  had  Davidson  the  weight  of 
seniority  and  experience  to  enable  him 


strongly  to  question  Haig's  ideas  and 
assumptions,  or  counterbalance  Charteris's 
optimism.  To  a  degree  that  it  is  not  now 
possible  to  estimate,  Davidson  must  be 
accorded  responsibility  for  the  tactical  and 
organizational  decisions  which  led  to  the 
British  failure  and  heavy  loss  at  the 
opening  of  the  battle  of  the  Somme. 

In  the  spring  and  summer  of  1917 
Davidson  had  his  part  in  the  confused  con- 
ceptions which  underlay  British  planning 
for  the  Passchendaele  offensive.  He  ac- 
cepted the  offensive's  distant  objectives, 
including  clearing  the  Belgian  coast,  but 
his  mind  had  not  moved  forward  to  the 
idea  of  deep,  fluid  penetration  by  groups  of 
all  arms  already  adopted  by  the  German 
Army.  Tanks  he  thought  had  no  place  in 
the  first  assault  on  the  enemy's  line,  but 
only  in  the  later  stages  of  the  battle. 
Neither  Davidson  nor  his  chief  appeared 
to  see  the  discrepancy  between  the  am- 
bitious objectives  of  the  offensive  and  the 
limited  nature  of  the  tactical  system  and 
of  the  human  and  material  resources. 
Davidson  also  shared  the  responsibility  for 
the  instructions  given  to  Sir  Hubert 
Gough,  in  command  of  the  Fifth  Army, 
before  the  German  offensive  in  March 
1918.  He  recommended  the  preparation 
of  strong  rearward  positions  on  the  Somme 
and  before  Peronne,  although  he  should 
have  known  that  Gough  had  been  given 
no  labour  for  the  task.  Nor  did  he  visit 
Gough  during  the  battle. 

It  was  not  really  until  the  summer  of 
1918  after  the  successes  of  the  German 
spring  offensives  that  the  British  Army 
abandoned  the  conception  of  the  limited 
advance  in  line  to  a  fixed  linear  objective 
after  long  preparatory  bombardment. 
Nevertheless  Davidson  escaped  the  mount- 
ing outside  criticism  of  G.H.Q.  which  cost 
Kiggell  and  Charteris  their  posts  at  the 
end  of  1917  and  he  remained  with  Haig 
during  the  succession  of  British  victories 
which  followed  8  August  1918  to  the  end 
of  the  war.  He  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1917, 
K.C.M.G.  in  1919,  and  promoted  major- 
general  in  1918. 

In  that  year  he  was  elected  to  Parliament 
as  Conservative  member  for  the  Fareham 
division  of  Hampshire  which  he  repre- 
sented until  1931.  He  retired  from  the  army 
in  1922.  He  was  a  member  of  the  army 
committee  of  the  House  of  Commons 
and  took  a  continued  and  far-sighted 
interest  in  defence  questions.  Yet  his 
eulogy,  Haig:  Master  of  the  Field  (1953), 
revealed  no  great  change  in  his  apprecia- 
tion of  G.H.Q.'s  conduct  of  the  battles 


284 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Davie 


in  France.  He  was  chairman  of  the  select 
committee  on  the  training  and  employ- 
ment of  ex-servicemen  and  of  the  King's 
Roll  National  Council,  and  president  of 
the  Union  Jack  Club.  He  also  held  a  num- 
ber of  directorships,  including  Vickers, 
and  was  chairman  of  the  Bank  of  Australia 
(1937-49). 

In  1905  Davidson  married  Margaret, 
daughter  of  John  Peter  Grant,  of  Rothie- 
murchus,  Inverness-shire;  they  had  one 
daughter.  He  died  at  Glack,  Daviot, 
Aberdeenshire,  11  December  1954. 

[John  Terraine,  Douglas  Haig,  the  Educated 
Soldier,  1963 ;  The  Private  Papers  of  Douglas 
Haig,  1914-1919,  ed.  Robert  Blake,  1952.] 

CORRELLI  BaRNETT. 

DAVIE,  THOMAS  BENJAMIN  (1895- 
1955),  pathologist,  teacher,  vice-chancel- 
lor, was  born  at  Prieska,  Cape  Colony,  23 
November  1895,  the  fifth  child  and  third 
son  of  Thomas  Benjamin  Davie,  law  agent, 
who  came  from  Inverness  in  Scotland,  and 
his  wife,  Carohne  Charlotte  Halliday.  He 
was  educated  at  government  schools  and 
at  the  university  of  Stellenbosch  where  he 
graduated  with  honours  in  science  (1914) 
and  took  a  teachers'  diploma  (1916).  He 
taught  in  a  secondary  school  for  a  short 
period  before  joining  the  Royal  Flying 
Corps  in  which  he  became  a  lieutenant  in 
1918.  He  returned  to  South  Africa  in  1919 
and  taught  science  at  various  boys'  schools 
in  the  Transvaal.  In  1921  he  married  Vera 
Catherine,  daughter  of  the  Rev.  Thomas 
Roper,  a  Wesleyan  minister,  by  whom  he 
had  one  daughter  who  died  in  infancy. 

Tom  Davie  had,  to  all  appearances, 
settled  down  to  a  career  of  schoolmaster- 
ing  for  which  he  had  exceptional  gifts ;  but 
the  course  of  his  career  was  altered  by  the 
outbreak  of  the  so-called  Rand  revolution 
in  1922.  When  the  Government  appealed 
for  volunteers  to  restore  order,  he  joined 
the  Transvaal  Scottish  Regiment  and, 
during  the  course  of  the  disturbances,  was 
wounded  in  the  thigh.  It  was  while  con- 
valescing in  hospital  that  he  decided  to 
take  up  medicine,  and  in  1924  he  and  his 
wife  went  to  the  university  of  Liverpool 
where  he  had  an  academic  career  of  un- 
usual brilliance.  As  an  undergraduate  he 
won  the  Banks,  Torr,  Holt,  and  Kanthack 
medals,  the  Holt  fellowship,  the  gold 
medal  in  public  health,  the  silver  medal 
in  forensic  medicine,  a  university  scholar- 
ship in  medicine,  an  exhibition  in  surgery, 
and,  in  his  final  year,  the  Owen  T.  Wil- 
liams prize.  He  qualified  in  1928  with  first 
class  honours  and  in  the  following  year 


was  appointed  to  a  junior  lectureship  in 
pathology.  In  1931  he  took  the  M.R.C.P. 
(London),  and  the  M.D.  (Liverpool)  with 
a  thesis  on  the  production  of  antibodies. 
He  became  pathologist  to  Walton  Hospi- 
tal in  the  same  year  and  in  1933  returned 
to  the  university  of  Liverpool  as  senior 
lecturer  in  pathology,  a  position  which  he 
held  until  1935  when  he  was  appointed  to 
the  chair  of  pathology  at  the  university  of 
Bristol.  In  1938  he  succeeded  his  former 
chief.  Professor  J.  H.  Dible,  in  the  George 
Holt  chair  of  pathology  at  Liverpool  and 
collaborated  with  him  in  writing  a  Text- 
book of  Pathology  (1939). 

Until  the  outbreak  of  war  Davie's 
abilities  were  concentrated  on  the  teach- 
ing of  medicine,  at  which  he  excelled. 
The  war  brought  out  latent  organizing 
and  administrative  qualities.  He  was  re- 
sponsible for  establishing  the  first  blood- 
bank  in  Liverpool  and  played  a  large 
part  in  organizing  the  blood-transfusion 
services  under  the  Ministry  of  Health.  He 
was  elected  F.R.C.P.  (London)  in  1940, 
and  was  awarded  the  United  States  medal 
of  freedom  (1947)  for  services  to  American 
hospitals  in  Great  Britain.  In  1945  he  was 
appointed  professor  of  applied  pathology 
and  became  the  first  full-time  dean  of  the 
medical  faculty  at  Liverpool. 

Three  years  later  (1948)  Davie  became 
principal  and  vice-chancellor  of  the  univer- 
sity of  Cape  Town.  South  Africa  was  in 
the  throes  of  post-war  reconstruction,  her 
problems  of  readjustment  aggravated  by 
political  and  racial  tensions  which  per- 
vaded all  aspects  of  national  life,  includ- 
ing the  universities.  The  Nationalist  Party 
which  was  returned  to  power  in  the  general 
election  of  1948  had  actively  opposed 
South  Africa's  participation  in  the  war; 
it  was  avowedly  republican;  and  it  had 
been  elected  on  the  platform  of  apartheid 
between  white  and  non-white  South 
Africans.  With  none  of  these  policies  was 
Davie  in  sympathy ;  but  it  was  in  regard 
to  the  last  that  he  came  into  conflict  with 
government  policy  as  head  of  a  university 
which — like  all  South  African  universities 
— drew  a  large  portion  of  its  revenue  from 
the  State.  Already  in  1948  there  were 
indications  that  the  new  Government  was 
determined  to  compel  universities  to  fol- 
low the  official  apartheid  policy  and  to 
accept  dictation  from  the  State  in  what 
had  traditionally  been  matters  for  the 
universities  to  decide  for  themselves.  The 
university  of  Cape  Town,  whose  policy 
had  always  been  to  admit  all  races,  was 
particularly  affected. 


Davie 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Davie  was  admirably  equipped  for  the 
task  which  lay  before  him.  He  had  an 
established  reputation  as  a  scientist  and 
one  of  the  foremost  teachers  of  medicine 
in  Britain,  a  member  of  learned  societies 
devoted  to  the  advancement  of  knowledge, 
and  imbued  with  the  great  traditions  of 
university  education.  Moreover,  as  a 
South  African  who  spoke  English  and 
Afrikaans  with  equal  ease,  he  had  a  deep 
knowledge  of  the  problems  of  his  country. 
To  great  intellectual  qualities  was  added 
a  personality  which  impressed  itself  on  all 
who  worked  with  him.  He  was  a  large 
man  with  big  features  which  radiated 
friendliness  and  confidence.  He  had  a  gift 
for  lucid  and  rational  exposition;  he  ex- 
pressed his  opinions  forcefully  and  with 
an  enthusiasm  which  lit  up  his  face ;  and  it 
was  clear  to  all  who  heard  him  that  his 
opinions  and  enthusiasm  were  backed  by 
intimate  knowledge  and  great  experience. 
Whether  he  was  conducting  post-mortems 
at  Liverpool,  or  explaining  the  intricate 
details  of  a  staffing  or  financial  matter  to 
his  council  at  Cape  Town,  or  addressing 
undergraduates  on  the  ideals  of  a  univer- 
sity, or  leading  a  deputation  to  a  minister 
of  state — there  was  always  the  same  dis- 
passionate search  for  truth  and  forthright 
statement  of  principle  which  commanded 
deep  respect.  His  immense  vitality  in- 
fected all  with  whom  he  came  in  contact, 
and  not  even  the  rheumatoid  arthritis 
which  he  contracted  soon  after  his  return 
to  South  Africa  and  which  grew  pro- 
gressively worse  could  subdue  his  spirit. 

Davie  was  a  great  university  principal. 
His  first  duty  was  to  the  university  of 
Cape  Town,  and  the  development  of  that 
university  under  his  wise  and  energetic 
leadership  bears  witness  to  his  remarkable 
abilities.  But  his  influence  was  felt  far 
beyond  its  confines.  At  a  critical  time  in 
the  history  of  his  country  he  led  and 
inspired  those  who  believed  in  the  freedom 
of  the  university  to  determine  for  itself, 
on  academic  grounds,  'who  may  teach, 
what  may  be  taught,  how  it  shall  be 
taught,  and  who  may  be  admitted  to 
study'. 

In  1948  Cambridge  conferred  on  Davie 
the  honorary  degree  of  LL.D. ;  and  in  1955 
the  universities  of  Oxford,  Liverpool,  and 
Natal  offered  him  honorary  degrees  which 
his  death  in  London,  14  December  1955, 
prevented  him  from  receiving.  A  bronze 
head  by  I.  Mitford-Barberton  is  in  the 
university  of  Cape  Town. 

[British  Medical  Journal,  24  December 
1935 ;  Journal  of  Pathology  and  Bacteriology, 


vol.  Ixxii,  No.  2,  1956 ;  University  of  Liver- 
pool Recorder,  No.  10,  January  1956 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

L.  Marquard, 


DAVIES,  Sir  WILLIAM  (LLEWELYN) 

(1887-1952),  librarian,  was  born  at  Plas 
Gwyn  schoolhouse,  near  Pwllheli,  11 
October  1887,  the  third  child  and  younger 
son  of  William  Davies  by  his  wife,  Jane 
Evans,  both  natives  of  Llanafan,  Cardi- 
ganshire. His  father,  formerly  the  Earl  of 
Lisburne's  gamekeeper,  was  then  similarly 
employed  at  Broom  Hall,  near  Pwllheli, 
but  entered  the  service  of  (Sir  Arthur) 
Osmond  Williams,  of  Castell  Deudraeth, 
when  his  son  was  five  years  old.  Davies 
was  educated  at  Portmadoc  County  School 
and  the  University  College  of  Wales, 
Aberystwyth,  graduating  B.A.  (1909)  with 
honours  in  Welsh  and  M.A.  (1912)  by 
virtue  of  a  dissertation  on  a  group  of 
sixteenth-  and  seventeenth -century  Ar- 
dudwy  poets.  He  held  various  teaching 
appointments  until  the  beginning  of  1917, 
after  which  he  served  in  the  Royal  Garri- 
son Artillery  and  later  as  a  commissioned 
officer  in  the  Army  Education  Service. 

In  1919  Davies  was  appointed  first 
assistant  librarian  under  (Sir)  John  Bal- 
linger  at  the  young  National  Library  of 
Wales  at  Aberystwyth.  When  Ballinger 
retired  in  1930  Davies  succeeded  him  as 
chief  librarian,  a  position  which  he  held 
until  his  death.  He  continued  the  work, 
so  siccessfully  begun,  of  building  up  in 
Wabs  a  national  library  which  would 
rank  among  the  great  libraries  of  the 
world.  His  experience  as  Ballinger's 
deputy,  his  interest  in  Welsh  history  and 
literature,  his  bilingualism,  his  zeal  and 
enthusiasm,  together  served  him  in  good 
stead.  Endowed  with  exceptional  organiz- 
ing ability,  he  was  a  hard  and  conscientious 
worker  who  was  never  satisfied  with  in- 
ferior standards. 

Davies  was  convinced  from  the  outset 
that  one  of  the  library's  most  important 
functions  was  to  collect  and  preserve  the 
mass  of  manuscript  and  documentary 
material  relating  to  Wales  which  was 
scattered  (often  in  a  state  of  neglect) 
throughout  the  Principality  and  farther 
afield — the  raw  material  needed  by  his- 
torians. His  task  was  made  easier  by  the 
changing  economic  conditions  which 
brought  about  the  disintegration  of  large 
estates  and  the  vacating  of  old  country 
houses.  The  list  of  individual  owners, 
institutions,  and  official  bodies  who 
responded  to  his  diplomatic  persuasion  to 


2m 


D.N.B.  1951-19G0 


Dawkins 


transfer  their  records  to  the  library,  either 
absolutely  or  on  permanent  loan,  is  a 
notable  one.  Of  the  approximately  three 
and  a  half  million  documents  housed  in  the 
library  when  Davies  died  all  but  200,000 
or  so  were  acquired  during  his  period  of 
administration.  Collection  and  preserva- 
tion, however,  were  not  enough ;  adequate 
steps  had  to  be  taken  to  make  the  records 
available  to  researchers  without  undue 
delay.  This  was  achieved  by  substituting 
handy,  typewritten,  brief-entry  schedules 
and  handlists  for  printed  detailed  calen- 
dars, and  by  the  compilation  of  subject- 
indexes.  Equally  anxious  to  persuade 
other  authorities  to  preserve  the  records  in 
their  custody,  he  urged  the  various  county 
councils  of  Wales  to  establish  records 
committees  and  he  gave  to  municipal, 
ecclesiastical,  and  other  bodies  and  to 
individuals  valuable  advice  and  practical 
assistance.  He  kept  the  library  in  close 
touch  with  other  institutions  with  similar 
aims  through  his  membership  of  the 
Historical  Manuscripts  Commission,  the 
Society  of  Antiquaries,  the  executive 
committee  of  the  Council  for  the  Preserva- 
tion of  Business  Archives,  and  the  British 
Records  Association,  of  which  he  was  a 
vice-president  representing  the  interests  of 
Wales. 

The  preservation  of  records  was  only 
part  of  Davies's  conspicuous  service  to 
Welsh  culture.  He  was  responsible  for 
organizing  the  lending  of  books  to  adult 
study  classes  throughout  Wales,  for 
operating  in  eleven  counties  the  Regional 
Libraries  Scheme  for  Wales  and  Mon- 
mouthshire, and  for  the  selection,  acquisi- 
tion, and  distribution  of  books  for  patients 
in  the  sanatoria  of  Wales.  During  the  war 
of  1939-45  he  established  a  national  com- 
mittee to  provide  Welsh  books  for  men 
and  w^omen  serving  in  the  forces.  He 
missed  no  opportunity,  through  lectures, 
broadcast  talks,  and  publications,  of 
bringing  the  library  into  closer  contact 
with  the  Welsh  people.  In  1937  he  pub- 
lished The  National  Library  of  Wales: 
A  Survey  of  its  History,  its  Contents,  and 
its  Activities,  whilst  two  years  later  he 
launched  The  National  Library  of  Wales 
Journal  which  he  edited  for  fourteen 
years.  For  varying  periods  he  was  honorary 
editor  of  the  journals  of  the  Welsh 
Bibliographical  Society,  the  Cardigan- 
shire Antiquarian  Society,  and  the 
Merioneth  Historical  and  Record  Society ; 
he  was  also  associate  editor  of  Y  Byw- 
graffiadur  Cymreig,  the  Welsh  biographical 
dictionary    published    in    1953    by    the 


Honourable  Society  of  Cymmrodorion. 
A  member  of  numerous  academic  and 
other  cultural  bodies,  he  was  a  leading 
spirit  in  every  organization  promoting 
the  intellectual  life  of  the  Principality. 
He  was  knighted  in  1944  and  received  the 
honorary  degree  of  LL.D.  from  the  univer- 
sity of  Wales  in  1951.  In  the  year  of  his 
death  he  was  high  sheriff  of  Merioneth. 

Davies  married  in  1914  Gwen,  daughter 
of  Dewi  Llewelyn,  grocer  and  baker,  of 
Pontypridd,  and  afterwards  adopted  the 
additional  name  of  Llewelyn.  There  was 
one  daughter.  He  died  at  Aberystwj^h, 
11  November  1952,  and  his  ashes  were 
scattered  in  the  grounds  of  the  library. 

[The  Times,  12  November  1952;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

GiLDAS  TiBBOTT. 

DAWKINS,  RICHARD  McGILLIVRAY 

(1871-1955),  scholar,  was  born  24  October 
1871  at  Surbiton,  Surrey,  the  eldest  child 
of  Richard  Dawkins,  captain  in  the  Royal 
Navy,  and  his  wife,  Mary  Louisa,  daugh- 
ter of  Simon  McGillivray  and  grand- 
daughter of  Sir  John  Easthope  [q.v.].  In 
1878  his  father  retired  with  the  rank  of 
rear-admiral  and  made  his  home  at  Stoke 
Gabriel  near  Totnes.  Dawkins  received  his 
schooling  at  Totnes  Grammar  School  and 
Marlborough  College.  He  was  an  awkward, 
ungainly  and  short-sighted  boy  with  a 
dislike  for  all  forms  of  organized  games 
which  he  retained  throughout  his  life :  his 
schooldays  were  unhappy,  nor  did  he 
achieve  any  distinction  in  the  classroom. 
He  did,  however,  acquire  a  taste  for 
botany  which  enriched  his  later  life.  From 
school  he  went  to  King's  College,  London, 
to  train  as  an  electrical  engineer.  In  1892, 
before  completing  his  course,  he  became 
apprenticed  to  a  firm  of  electrical  en- 
gineers at  Chelmsford.  He  did  not  find 
engineering  congenial  and  these  years  in 
lonely  lodgings  were  not  happy.  As  the 
result  of  a  temporary  interest  in  theo- 
sophy,  he  characteristically  determined  to 
teach  himself  Sanskrit;  he  continued  to 
read  Greek  and  Latin  classics,  learned  a 
good  deal  of  Italian  and  some  German 
and  even  started  upon  Icelandic,  Irish, 
and  Finnish.  After  the  death  of  his  father 
in  1896  and  that  of  his  mother  in  the  fol- 
lowing year  a  small  legacy  enabled  him  to 
forsake  his  profession  and  enter  Emmanuel 
College,  Cambridge,  in  1898  at  the  age  of 
twenty-six.  He  was  a  self-taught  scholar 
without  the  customary  grooming  in  Latin 
and  Greek,  but  he  was  fortunate  to  find 
himself  in  the  hands  of  Peter  Giles  (whose 


287 


Dawkins 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


notice  he  subsequently  contributed  to  this 
Dictionary)  and  James  Adam  [q.v.].  In 
1899  the  college  gave  him  a  scholarship,  in 
1901  he  was  placed  in  the  third  division 
of  the  first  class  of  part  i  of  the  classical 
tripos,  in  1902  he  obtained  a  first  class 
with  distinction  in  part  ii,  and  an  honour- 
able mention  in  the  examination  for  the 
Chancellor's  medals,  and  a  Craven  student- 
ship. In  1904  he  became  a  fellow  (and  in 
1922  an  honorary  fellow)  of  Emmanuel 
College. 

As  Craven  student  he  entered  the 
British  School  of  Archaeology  at  Athens 
of  which  he  became  director  in  1906.  His 
personal  interests  were  primarily  philo- 
logical and  any  time  which  could  be 
spared  from  other  duties  was  spent  in 
travel  and  the  study  of  Greek  dialects. 
Of  this  period  of  his  life  there  were  two 
outstanding  achievements.  The  first  was 
the  excavation  of  the  shrine  of  Artemis 
Orthia  at  Sparta,  which,  apart  from  its 
exciting  results,  set  a  new  standard  in 
methods  of  excavation.  The  second  was 
the  book  Modem  Greek  in  Asia  Minor 
(1916),  a  study  of  the  curious  dialects  of 
Greek  spoken  by  the  inhabitants  of  the 
Cappadocian  plateau.  In  1914  Dawkins 
resigned  the  directorship  of  the  British 
School  at  Athens;  a  very  substantial 
legacy  from  his  mother's  cousin,  J.  A. 
Doyle  [q.v.]  who  died  in  1907,  had  given 
him  financial  independence.  From  1916  to 
1919  he  served  in  Crete  as  an  intelligence 
officer,  with  the  rank  of  temporary 
lieutenant,  R.N.V.R. 

In  1920  Dawkins  was  appointed  to  the 
Bywater  and  Sotheby  chair  of  Byzantine 
and  modern  Greek  in  the  university  of 
Oxford  and  in  1922  Exeter  College  made 
him  a  fellow.  His  major  work  during  his 
tenure  of  the  chair  was  a  translation  with 
commentary  of  the  medieval  Cypriot 
Chronicle  of  Makhairas  (2  vols.,  1932) 
which  records  the  history  of  the  Lusignan 
dynasty  between  1359  and  1432.  In  1939 
when  he  retired  under  the  age  limit  Exeter 
College  made  him  an  honorary  fellow  with 
rooms  in  college.  To  the  end  of  his  Ufe  he 
kept  his  zest  and  interest  in  young  people 
and  he  was  to  generations  of  Oxford  under- 
graduates a  source  of  real  education. 
Except  for  music,  for  which  he  had  no  ear, 
his  tastes  were  catholic:  he  knew  about 
plants,  pictures,  and  European  literature. 
As  a  critic,  whether  of  books  or  men,  he 
was  positive  and  to  the  end  of  his  long 
life,  though  always  intolerant  of  humbug, 
enviably  receptive  to  new  ideas.  He  had  a 
wide  linguistic  knowledge  and  could  talk 


French,  Italian,  and  modern  Greek  as 
rapidly  as  natives.  He  knew  most  parts  of 
the  Mediterranean  including  North  Africa 
and  had  an  unrivalled  knowledge  at  first 
hand  of  the  Greek-speaking  peoples  from 
Pontus  in  the  east  to  Calabria  in  the  west. 
In  this  last  period  of  his  life  he  turned  his 
attention  to  the  subject  matter  of  folk- 
tales which  he  had  earlier  taken  down  as 
texts  for  philological  purposes.  In  1950 
he  published  Forty-five  Stories  from  the 
Dodekanese  from  manuscripts  which  had 
been  presented  by  W.  H.  D.  Rouse  [q.v.] 
to  the  university  of  Cambridge.  This  was 
followed  by  Modern  Greek  Folktales  (1953) 
and  More  Greek  Folktales  (1955),  the  impor- 
tance of  which  was  due  to  the  examina- 
tion of  the  relative  popularity  of  and  the 
changes  undergone  by  types  of  Indo- 
European  folktales  in  a  definite  and 
exceptionally  well-recorded  area.  In  1947 
he  broke  his  thigh ;  this  did  not  diminish 
his  incessant  industry.  Articles  and  re- 
views continued  to  pour  out  from  his 
somewhat  erratic  typewriter  and  his 
rooms  remained  a  focus  of  hospitality 
for  promising  young  men  and  congenial 
seniors.  Himself  an  original  he  liked 
originals.  His  taste  in  men  as  in  books  was 
catholic.  By  no  means  all  his  friends  were 
academical  and  his  range  of  acquaintance 
extended  from  Norman  Douglas  [q.v.],  of 
whom  in  1933  he  published  a  perceptive 
study,  to  the  egregious  Baron  Corvo. 
Dawkins  fell  down  dead  in  an  Oxford 
street  on  4  May  1955.  He  never  married. 
He  was  elected  F.B.A.  in  1933,  proceeded 
D.Litt.  at  Oxford  in  1942,  and  was  an 
honorary  D.Phil,  of  the  universities  of 
Athens  (1937)  and  Thessalonica  (1951).  A 
pencil  drawing  of  him  by  Henry  Lamb  is 
at  Exeter  College,  Oxford ;  an  oil-painting 
by  WiUiam  Roberts  is  the  property  of 
Professor  Nevill  Coghill.  Autobiographical 
notes  by  Dawkins  have  been  deposited 
in  the  Taylor  Institution.  A  lively  account 
of  Dawkins  appears  in  Osbert  Lancaster's 
With  an  Eye  to  the  Future  (1967). 

[R.  J.  H.  Jenkins  in  Proceedings  of  the 
British  Academy,  vol.  xli,  1955;  personal 
knowledge.]  W.  R.  Haixiday. 

DEAKIN,  ARTHUR  (1890-1955),  trade- 
union  leader,  was  born  at  Sutton  Coldfield, 
Warwickshire,  11  November  1890,.  the  son 
of  a  domestic  servant,  Annie  Deakin.  At 
the  age  of  ten  he  moved  with  his  mother 
and  stepfather  to  Dowlais  in  South  Wales 
where  he  started  to  work  for  the  steel 
firm.  Guest,  Keen,  and  Nettlefolds,  at  the 
age  of  thirteen,  for  four  shillings  a  week. 


288 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Deakin 


He  joined  the  National  Union  of  Gas 
Workers  and  came  under  the  influence 
of  Keir  Hardie  [q.v.],  then  member  of 
Parliament  for  Merthyr  Tydfil  of  which 
Dowlais  was  a  part.  In  1910  Deakin  moved 
to  Shotton  in  North  Wales  and  took  a  job 
with  another  steel  firm  as  a  roll  turner. 
For  a  brief  spell  he  was  a  member  of  the 
Amalgamated  Society  of  Engineers  but  in 
1911  he  moved  over  to  the  expanding, 
heterogeneous  Dock,  Wharf,  Riverside, 
and  General  Workers'  Union  which  gave 
ample  scope  to  his  incipient  qualities  of 
leadership.  Within  three  years  he  was  an 
active  lay  member  and  in  1919  he  became 
a  full-time  official  of  the  union.  Until  that 
year  he  belonged  also  to  the  small  British 
Roll  Turners'  Society  of  which  for  a  brief 
period  he  was  general  secretary.  When 
in  1922  the  Dockers'  Union  became  part 
of  the  Transport  and  General  Workers' 
Union,  Deakin  became  assistant  district 
secretary  for  the  North  Wales  area  where 
the  high  unemployment  of  the  next  ten 
years  strongly  conditioned  his  subsequent 
attitudes  and  responses.  In  1919  he  be- 
came an  alderman  of  the  Flintshire 
County  Council  and  in  1932  its  chair- 
man. 

In  1932  Deakin  moved  to  London  where 
until  1935  he  was  national  secretary  of 
the  General  Workers'  trade  group  of  the 
Transport  and  General  Workers'  Union. 
He  toured  the  country  examining  the 
problems  of  his  group  and  so  impressed 
Ernest  Bevin  [q.v.],  the  general  secretary 
of  the  union,  with  his  organizing  ability 
that  in  1935  he  was  appointed  assistant 
general  secretary.  He  worked  closely  with 
Bevin  through  a  difficult  time  for  the 
union,  for  in  1938  some  of  its  members 
seceded  to  form  a  union  for  busmen ;  and 
Bevin  himself  was  showing  signs  of  strain 
from  overwork. 

When  in  1940  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill 
invited  Bevin  to  become  minister  of 
labour  in  the  wartime  coalition  Govern- 
ment, Deakin  took  Bevin's  place  in  the 
union  and  continued  as  acting  general 
secretary  until  Bevin  retired  from  union 
office  in  March  1946,  when  Deakin  was 
elected  general  secretary  in  his  place,  with 
a  majority  of  59,105  votes  over  the  com- 
bined votes  of  the  other  five  candidates. 

Although  from  1940  until  1946  Deakin 
was  the  formal  head  of  his  union,  the 
largest  in  Britain  and  one  of  the  largest  in 
the  world,  his  work  was  done  in  the  shadow 
of  Bevin  whose  reputation  among  the 
ordinary  members  was  almost  legendary 
and  who  never  effectively  relinquished  his 


control  of  union  activities.  Deakin  him- 
self was  essentially  a  Bevin  creation  and 
perhaps  the  most  loyal  supporter  of  a  man 
upon  whom  he  modelled  himself  to  the 
extent  of  copying  some  of  his  public 
mannerisms.  On  the  General  Council  of 
the  Trades  Union  Congress  where  he  took 
Bevin's  place,  he  was  a  useful  but  not  an 
influential  member.  The  Council  had  been 
dominated  by  Bevin  and  its  general  secre- 
tary, Sir  Walter  (later  Lord)  Citrine ;  with 
Bevin's  departure  Citrine  remained  firmly 
in  control,  unaffected  by  Deakin's  pre- 
sence. Deakin  became  a  member  of  the 
Government's  War  Transport  Council  and 
of  the  committee  established  to  advise  the 
Production  Executive.  In  one  respect  he 
achieved  notoriety  during  the  war.  When 
he  visited  Sweden  in  1943  as  a  fraternal 
delegate  to  the  Congress  of  the  Swedish 
Transport  Workers'  Union  he  conferred 
with  a  Finnish  trade-union  leader  on  the 
possibilities  of  negotiating  a  peace  treaty ; 
for  this  he  received  much  adverse  pub- 
licity. 

A  new  phase  in  Deakin's  career  began  in 
1946  when  he  became  leader  of  his  union 
in  his  own  right.  After  the  resignation  of 
Citrine  from  the  Trades  Union  Congress 
and  a  period  of  uncertainty  in  the  leader- 
ship of  the  movement,  the  position 
gradually  clarified  and  settled  and  by  1948 
Deakin  had  emerged  as  the  most  dominant 
figure  in  British  trade-unionism  and  an 
influential  one  also  in  the  international 
movement.  He  retained  his  trade-union 
and  political  influence  until  his  death 
which  took  place  on  1  May  1955  while 
he  was  addressing  a  May  Day  rally  in 
Leicester. 

Like  so  many  men  who  find  themselves 
thrust  into  positions  of  power  and  re- 
sponsibility, Deakin  developed  to  meet  the 
situation.  People  who  knew  him  under 
Bevin  could  never  have  imagined  his 
filling  the  role  which  he  subsequently 
attained  in  post-war  Britain.  A  Labour 
Government  was  in  office  and  the  country 
faced  extreme  economic  difficulties.  Both 
factors  demanded  that  trade  unions  break 
with  their  traditional  attitudes.  They  re- 
quired a  close  collaboration  with  the 
Government  and  the  acceptance  of  atti- 
tudes about  productivity  and  profits  which 
unions  had  traditionally  rejected.  After  an 
initial  hesitation,  Deakin  gave  the  Govern- 
ment his  unconditional  support.  He  urged 
unions  to  try  to  increase  productivity  and 
advocated  a  policy  of  wage  restraint.  He 
possessed  a  deep  loyalty  to  the-  labour 
movement    which    was    epitomized    for 


8652062 


Deakin 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


him  by  the  Labour  Government.  In  his 
eagerness  to  support  the  Government  he 
stifled  much  useful  criticism  of  its  activi- 
ties, for  he  dishked  anything  which  could 
be  misconstrued  by  the  general  public  or 
used  for  political  purposes.  He  was  more 
than  an  advocate.  As  far  as  he  could  he  ap- 
plied the  policy  of  wage  restraint  in  his 
own  union  and  incurred  the  displeasure 
of  some  of  his  more  militant  members. 
But  if  he  thought  his  policy  was  right 
no  amount  of  criticism  would  deter  him. 
At  times  he  risked  the  unity  of  his  organi- 
zation and  faced  large-scale  unofficial 
strikes  rather  than  make  expedient  con- 
cessions. No  Government  could  have  had 
a  more  loyal  supporter. 

Deakin  travelled  widely  as  a  member  of 
the  international  committee  of  the  Trades 
Union  Congress  and  as  the  most  prominent 
representative  of  his  own  union.  He  was 
a  member  of  the  executive  board  of  the 
World  Federation  of  Trade  Unions  and 
did  much  to  heal  the  breach  between  its 
Communist  and  non-Communist  members. 
During  his  tenure  as  chairman  of  the 
board,  however,  he  led  a  walkout  of  the 
non-Communist  delegates  and  helped  to 
form  the  International  Confederation  of 
Free  Trade  Unions  in  1949.  Thereafter 
he  became  uncompromisingly  anti- 
Communist  in  his  attitude  towards 
foreign  affairs,  national  domestic  affairs, 
and  the  running  of  his  own  union  which 
in  1949  he  persuaded  to  ban  Communists 
from  holding  office. 

The  attitude  of  Deakin  towards  Com- 
munists was  in  part  a  reflection  of  his 
attitude  towards  opposition.  He  believed 
in  the  sanctity  of  majority  decisions  and 
was  intolerant  of  those  who  opposed  them. 
He  attacked  minorities  in  his  union  and 
in  the  Labour  Party  with  invective  and 
organizational  measures.  He  would  defy 
procedures  and  conventions  to  get  his  own 
way  and  was  often  accused  by  his  an- 
tagonists of  being  a  dictator.  By  his  public 
manner,  outspoken,  brusque,  and  in- 
tolerant, and  by  his  manner  of  handling 
internal  union  affairs,  he  lent  support  to 
the  accusation.  The  administrative  prob- 
lems of  his  union  increased  as  it  expanded 
from  743,349  members  in  1940  to  1,805,456 
in  1955  and  by  and  large  Deakin  coped 
with  them.  But  he  possessed  a  vital  reluc- 
tance to  delegate  authority  and  main- 
tained a  strict  control  over  even  the 
smallest  administrative  detail  in  his 
union's  head  office.  He  would  sometimes 
speak  on  behalf  of  his  union  without 
consulting  the  general  executive  council 


which  constitutionally  controlled  him. 
Deakin  believed  in  positive  leadership.  'I 
cannot  and  will  not  be  a  cipher',  he  told 
his  members.  Yet  all  the  time  he  was 
aware  of  the  source  of  his  power  and  al- 
ways made  sure  that  on  the  major  issues 
he  had  the  majority  of  his  ordinary  mem- 
bers behind  him.  He  was  sentimental 
about  his  relations  with  the  lay  members 
of  his  union.  Nothing  hurt  him  more  than 
the  suggestion  that  he  was  out  of  touch 
with  them.  A  cartoon  which  depicted  him 
with  his  head  in  the  clouds  caused  him 
considerable  anger.  He  did  much  to  im- 
prove contacts  between  officials  and  lay 
members  and  saw  the  development  of 
educational  provisions  within  the  union  as 
a  means  to  this  end.  His  union  introduced 
pioneering  training  schemes  for  shop 
stewards  and  branch  officials  and  under 
his  guidance  the  education  department 
became  large  and  influential. 

The  public  image  of  Deakin  lent  itself 
to  caricature.  He  dressed  flamboyantly, 
smoked  large  cigars,  and  courted  publicity. 
But  in  essential  ways  both  the  public 
image  and  the  caricatures  gave  a  mis- 
leading impression.  Deakin  was  modest  , 
and  shy.  He  lived  quietly  and  modestly 
in  a  small  semi-detached  house  in  a  north 
London  suburb  where  his  evenings,  when 
free  from  union  business,  were  spent  at 
home  with  his  wife.  He  did  not  drink 
alcohol  and  was  a  member  of  the  Primi- 
tive Methodist  Church.  He  did  not  make 
friends  easily  and  found  communication 
on  an  individual  level  difficult.  But  those 
with  whom  he  had  a  close  relationship 
came  from  various  walks  of  life  and  dif- 
ferent political  affiliations.  In  this  respect 
he  was  paradoxical.  He  tended  to  be  dis- 
trustful of  Labour  Party  politicians  and 
his  personal  relations  with  them  were 
uneasy,  whereas  he  could  get  on  very  well 
with  self-made  employers  and  with  Con- 
servative politicians.  Thus  he  found  it 
easy  to  make  the  transition  from  a  Labour 
to  a  Conservative  Government  in  1951. 
But  he  never  transferred  his  distrust  of 
Labour  politicians  to  the  party  itself  and 
he  disapproved  of  those  trade-union 
leaders  who  moved  into  industrial  manage- 
ment. 

Deakin  was  often  accused  of  seeking 
honours,  yet  he  twice  refused  a  knight- 
hood. He  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1943 
and  C.H.  in  1949,  and  was  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council  in  1954 ;  these  he  regarded 
as  honours  to  the  labour  movement  rather 
than  to  himself. 

In  1914  Deakin  married  Annie,  daugh- 


290 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


De  Chair 


ter  of  Robert  George,  of  Connah's  Quay, 
Flintshire ;  they  had  two  sons. 

[Tfie  Times,  2  May  1955  ;  V.  L.  Allen,  Trade 
Union  Leadership,  1957  ;  personal  knowledge.] 

V.  L.  Allen. 
DE  CHAIR,  Sir  DUDLEY  RAWSON 
STRATFORD  (1864-1958),  admiral,  was 
born  at  Lennoxville,  Canada,  30  August 
1864,  eldest  son  of  Dudley  Raikes  de 
Chair,  of  French  Huguenot  descent,  by 
his  wife,  Frances  Emily,  eldest  daughter 
of  Christopher  Rawson,  of  The  Hurst, 
Walton-on-Thames,  Surrey.  His  parents 
returned  to  England  in  1870  and  in  1878 
he  joined  the  Britannia  where  Prince 
Edward  and  Prince  George  were  also 
cadets. 

As  a  midshipman  de  Chair  attracted 
national  attention  through  being  captured 
by  some  of  the  Egyptian  cavalry  of  Arabi 
Pasha  when  alone  on  a  special  mission.  He 
was  released  after  six  weeks  when  Cairo 
was  taken  and  was  later  selected  by  Sir 
Garnet  (later  Viscount)  Wolseley  [q.v.] 
to  take  the  dispatches  to  Alexandria. 

With  the  exception  of  a  short  period  as 
torpedo  lieutenant  in  the  flagship  Royal 
Sovereign  (1893-4),  he  served  as  an  in- 
structor in  the  Vernon,  the  torpedo  school 
at  Portsmouth,  from  1892  until  his  pro- 
motion to  commander  in  1897.  In  that 
year  he  was  appointed  commander  in  the 
flagship  of  his  uncle.  Sir  Harry  H.  Rawson 
[q.v.],  at  the  Cape  station.  In  1899  he  be- 
came commander  in  the  Majestic,  in  which 
ship  he  remained  until  his  promotion  to 
captain  in  1902. 

In  that  year  he  was  appointed  naval 
attache  at  Washington,  where  his  next 
three  years  were  spent.  Returning  to  sea- 
going duties,  he  next  commanded  succes- 
sively the  cruisers  Bacchante  and  Cochrane. 
In  1908  he  was  brought  into  contact  with 
Sir  John  (later  Earl)  Jellicoe  [q.v.],  then 
controller  of  the  navy,  serving  as  his  assis- 
tant controller  until  1911.  After  a  further 
spell  of  sea  time  as  captain  of  the  Colossus 
he  returned  to  the  Admiralty  on  promo- 
tion to  flag  rank  in  1912  and  on  1  March 
1913  he  succeeded  David  (later  Earl) 
Beatty  [q.v.]  as  naval  secretary  to  the 
first  lord,  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill.  He  had 
met  Churchill  previously  and  had  been 
impressed  with  his  charm  of  manner  and 
keen  interest  in  naval  affairs.  But  al- 
though Churchill  had  selected  de  Chair  for 
this  appointment,  the  latter  was  not  as 
happy  in  it  as  Beatty  had  been.  He  found 
Churchill's  ebullient  zest  and  headstrong, 
sometimes  impetuous,  methods  disturbing 
and    had    not   the    great   wealth   which 


Beatty  had  enjoyed  to  live  fully  in  the 
circles  which  his  chief  frequented.  In  June 
1914  he  became  admiral  of  the  training 
squadron  and  at  the  outbreak  of  war  he 
was  moved  to  the  cruiser  Crescent  in  com- 
mand of  the  tenth  cruiser  squadron. 

The  particular  task  of  this  squadron  was 
the  patrol  of  the  North  Sea  from  the  Shet- 
lands  to  the  Norwegian  coast  as  a  blockade 
to  Germany,  and  in  his  command  of  this 
task  force  until  March  1916  de  Chair  made 
an  important  contribution  towards  the 
winning  of  the  war.  Due  to  his  efficient 
organization  the  number  of  ships  which 
slipped  through  was  negligible  and  as  the 
war  progressed  the  effect  of  the  blockade 
became  more  apparent.  For  his  services  de 
Chair  was  appointed  K.C.B.  in  1916. 

De  Chair  relinquished  his  command  to 
take  up  a  post  under  the  Foreign  Office  as 
naval  adviser  to  the  Ministry  of  Blockade. 
His  experience  made  him  eminently  suit- 
able for  this  work,  as  A.  J.  Balfour 
explained  to  him,  but  de  Chair,  as  he  re- 
vealed in  his  autobiography,  was  'almost 
heartbroken'  at  giving  up  his  command 
and  active  naval  service.  However  he 
found  the  minister,  Lord  Robert  Cecil 
(later  Viscount  Cecil  of  Chelwood,  q.v.), 
sympathetic  and  understanding. 

De  Chair's  valuable  work  in  this  ap- 
pointment continued  until  September 
1917,  when  he  was  given  command  of 
the  third  battle  squadron,  stationed  in  the 
Channel,  with  the  task  of  attacking  the 
German  High  Seas  Fleet,  should  it  come 
out.  That  it  never  did  was  frustrating  and 
disappointing  to  him,  and  he  was  further 
dismayed  to  learn  of  the  dismissal  of 
Jellicoe  as  first  sea  lord  in  December.  When 
his  successor.  Sir  R.  E.  (later  Lord  Wester) 
Wemyss  [q.v.],  asked  de  Chair  to  accept  a 
post  on  the  Board  of  Admiralty,  he  refused 
outright,  telling  Wemyss  that  he  could  not 
do  so  as  he  'felt  so  keenly  the  disgrace- 
ful manner  in  which  Jellicoe  had  been 
treated'.  This  outspokenness  did  de  Chair 
no  good  and  shortly  afterwards  he  was 
relieved  of  his  command  and  placed  on 
half  pay.  He  had  been  promoted  vice- 
admiral  in  1917.  In  July  1918  he  was 
appointed  admiral  commanding  Coast- 
guard and  Reserves ;  in  1920  he  was  pro- 
moted admiral;  and  in  1921-3  he  was 
president  of  the  inter-allied  commission  on 
enemy  warships,  and  was  then  placed  on 
the  retired  list. 

The  same  year  he  was  appointed 
governor  of  New  South  Wales,  where  he 
remained  until  1930.  During  his  term  his 
determination  and  strength  of  character 


291 


De  Chair 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


were  fully  tested  in  the  political  crisis  of 
1926,  when  the  Labour  premier,  J.  T. 
Lang,  introduced  a  bill  to  abolish  the 
legislative  council,  the  state's  second 
chamber.  De  Chair  agreed  to  appoint  25 
new  Labour  members  to  the  council,  but 
when  the  bill  was  defeated  by  47  votes  to 
41  he  refused  to  appoint  more.  This  led  to 
strong  attacks  on  his  action  by  the  Labour 
Party  and  to  an  examination  of  the  powers 
of  the  state  governors  in  Australia. 

After  his  retirement  de  Chair  lived 
mainly  in  London.  He  served  in  the  Home 
Guard  from  1940  to  1942.  He  died  at  his 
home  in  Rottingdean  17  August  1958  and, 
after  cremation,  his  ashes  were  scattered, 
in  accordance  with  his  wishes,  in  the 
English  Channel  from  the  Hardy. 

In  addition  to  the  K.C.B.,  de  Chair  was 
appointed  K.C.M.G.  (1933),  received  the 
D.S.M.  (U.S.A.),  and  was  a  commander  of 
the  Legion  of  Honour.  McGill  University 
conferred  on  him  an  honorary  LL.D. 

Possessing  much  personal  charm,  de 
Chair  was  a  man  of  great  loyalty  and 
integrity,  direct  in  his  manner  and  at 
times  somewhat  inflexible.  As  a  leader 
some  found  him  uninspiring,  but  Jellicoe 
termed  him  'a  very  first-rate  sea  officer 
suited  to  any  command  afloat'.  De  Chair 
followed  a  code  of  ethics  which  frequently 
worked  to  his  personal  disadvantage  and 
like  Jellicoe,  whom  he  greatly  admired, 
he  never  allowed  his  judgement  to  be 
affected  by  personal  considerations  and 
never  corniced  publicity. 

He  married  in  1903  Enid  (died  1966), 
third  daughter  of  Henry  William  Struben, 
of  Transvaal,  South  Africa,  by  whom  he 
had  two  sons  and  a  daughter.  The  elder 
son,  Henry  Graham  Dudley  de  Chair,  be- 
came a  commander  in  the  Royal  Navy; 
the  younger,  Somerset  Struben  de  Chair, 
author  of  The  Golden  Carpet  and  other 
works,  was  for  twelve  years  a  member  of 
Parliament. 

An  oil-painting  of  de  Chair  as  a  rear- 
admiral  by  Marshall  Sprink  is  in  the  family 
possession,  and  a  drawing  by  Francis 
Dodd  is  in  the  Imperial  War  Museum. 

[The  Times,  19  August  1958 ;  Sir  Julian  S. 
Corbett,  (Official)  History  of  the  Great  War. 
Naval  Operations,  vols,  i  and  iii,  1920-23; 
Viscount  Jellicoe,  The  Grand  Fleet  1914-1916, 
1919 ;  Sir  Dudley  de  Chair,  The  Sea  is  Strong, 
1961;  Arthur  J.  Marder,  From  the  Dread- 
nought to  Scapa  Flow,  vol.  ii,  1965;  Burke's 
Landed  Gentry,  1965 ;  private  information.] 

G.  K.  S.  Hamilton-Edwards. 

DEEDES,    Sir    WYNDHAM    HENRY 

(1883-1956),  soldier  and  social  worker,  was 


born  in  London  10  March  1883,  the 
younger  son  of  Colonel  Herbert  George 
Deedes,  of  Sandling  Park  and  Saltwood 
Castle,  then  serving  as  assistant  under- 
secretary at  the  War  Office,  and  his  wife, 
Rose  Eleanor,  daughter  of  Major-General 
Lousada  Barrow,  of  the  Madras  Staff 
Corps.  Educated  at  Eton,  he  was  commis- 
sioned in  the  King's  Royal  Rifle  Corps  in 
1901,  served  in  the  South  African  war, 
then  in  Bermuda,  and  in  Ireland  where  he 
was  aide-de-camp  to  the  general  com- 
manding. In  1908  he  went  with  his 
battalion  to  Malta  and  served  as  an 
aide-de-camp  to  the  governor,  Sir  Harry 
Grant. 

Deedes  was  a  remarkable  man  whose 
army  career  was  unusual.  Most  of  his  time 
in  South  Africa  had  been  spent  on  garrison 
duty  of  a  small  blockhouse  where  he  had 
time  for  much  reading  and  to  teach  him- 
self German.  He  found  peace-time  soldier- 
ing unsatisfactory,  for  while  he  had  no 
personal  ambition,  he  was  hungry  for  work 
which  would  more  fully  tax  his  mental 
and  physical  energy.  In  Malta  he  learnt 
Turkish  and  in  1910  he  was  seconded  for 
employment  with  the  Turkish  gendarmerie 
which  because  of  Turkish  misgovernment 
was  at  that  time  under  a  measure  of 
supervision  by  European  powers.  Deedes 
was  put  in  sole  charge  of  an  area  of  North 
Africa  four  times  the  size  of  France  and 
he  set  to  work  with  astonishing  energy — 
training  recruits,  establishing  additional 
posts,  and  improving  discipline  by  frequent 
visits  of  inspection.  His  quiet  assurance, 
sense  of  justice,  obvious  integrity,  and 
untiring  energy,  won  the  admiration  and 
respect  of  his  district  and  of  the  remote 
government  he  represented.  After  two 
years  he  was  moved  to  Smyrna  where  he 
was  largely  responsible  for  the  relief  and 
resettlement  of  refugees  and  displaced 
population  resulting  from  the  dismember- 
ment of  the  Turkish  empire.  He  had  been 
made  inspector  under  the  Turkish  Ministry 
of  the  Interior  in  1914  when  he  was  recalled 
to  England  on  the  outbreak  of  war  with 
Germany. 

Promoted  lieutenant  in  1906,  captain  in 
1914,  major  in  1916,  brevet  lieutenant- 
colonel  in  1917,  and  temporary  brigadier- 
general  in  1918,  Deedes  served  throughout 
the  war,  first  on  Turkish  intelligence  at 
the  War  Office,  next  on  the  intelligence 
staff  of  the  Gallipoli  campaign,  then  in 
charge  of  Eastern  Mediterranean  intelli- 
gence in  Cairo.  In  1918-19  he  was  military 
attach^  at  Constantinople.  He  was  ap- 
pointed to  the  D.S.O.  in  1916  and  C.M.G. 


i 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


De  la  Mare 


in  1919.  In  1919  he  was  seconded  to  the 
Foreign  Office  for  work  in  Egypt ;  in  1920 
to  the  Colonial  Office  for  service  in  Pales- 
tine. Sir  Herbert  (later  Viscount)  Samuel, 
appointed  to  administer  the  British  man- 
date, records  in  his  memoirs  that  he  had 
asked  for  Deedes  as  his  civil  secretary  not 
only  because  he  was  by  profession  a  soldier 
of  great  administrative  capacity,  but 
because  'there  was  in  him  a  strong  strain 
of  idealism  which  drew  him  powerfully 
to  the  Holy  Land'.  Nevertheless  Deedes 
accepted  the  appointment  reluctantly  and 
on  the  understanding  that  it  would  be  for 
only  a  few  years,  for  he  was  now  thirty- 
seven  and  had  been  away  from  England 
since  he  was  eighteen.  He  longed  to  escape 
from  foreign  intrigue  and  power  rivalry 
and  to  take  up  social  service  at  home. 
But  he  was  deeply  interested  in  both  the 
Arab  desire  for  freedom  from  foreign  rule 
and  the  Jewish  claim  on  Palestine  as  a 
national  home.  The  establishment  of  an 
administration  acceptable  alike  to  Jew 
and  Arab  was  an  appealing  but  difficult 
task.  Deedes' s  personal  contribution  to  its 
realization  was  thus  expressed  in  a  leading 
Arab  newspaper:  'Every  element  in  the 
country,  as  far  as  we  can  observe,  seems 
to  think  that  he  is  their  friend.  Perhaps 
this  is  the  secret  of  the  matter.  For  in 
truth  he  sincerely  loves  and  works  for  all.' 
After  he  had  served  for  three  years  in 
Jerusalem  and  had  been  knighted  in  1921 
Deedes  suddenly  resigned  in  seeming 
contradiction  to  the  selfless  ideal  which  he 
had  exemplified.  But  he  was  troubled  by 
the  gulf  which  separated  him  as  chief 
secretary  from  humble  people ;  he  had  no 
interest  in  material  advantages,  and  the 
trappings  of  office  and  authority  seemed 
only  a  hindrance  to  spiritual  life.  He  had 
always  practised  stern  self-denial  and 
cultivated  the  great  grace  of  humility  and 
he  argued  that  there  were  plenty  of  abler 
men  to  replace  him.  He  transferred  to  the 
Highland  IJght  Infantry  in  1923  and  in 
the  same  year  retired  with  the  rank  of 
colonel  and  honorary  rank  of  brigadier- 
general.  He  never  married,  and  putting 
off  his  uniform,  he  went  to  live  in  the 
east  end  of  London  where  he  was  soon 
recognized  as  the  friend  of  everyone 
working  for  a  good  cause.  His  humility 
and  sympathy  with  others  in  need  were 
reflected  in  charming  manners  and 
invariable  courtesy.  He  had  three  other 
interests  outside  Bethnal  Green:  the 
Zionist  movement  for  which  he  spoke 
at  meetings  throughout  England  and  in 
many  other  countries;  a  Turkish  Centre 


in  London  which  he  helped  to  found,  the 
translation  of  Turkish  novels  and,  for 
twenty-five  years,  regular  broadcasts  to 
the  Turkish ;  and  the  National  Council  of 
Social  Service  whose  aim,  the  develop- 
ment of  co-operative  service  for  the 
development  of  'the  good  life',  matched 
his  own.  He  was  Labour  member  of  the 
London  County  Council  for  North-East 
Bethnal  Green  from  1941  until  1946  and 
a  member  of  the  education  committee.  As 
chief  air  raid  warden  of  Bethnal  Green  in 
the  war  he  visited  all  his  posts  every  night 
and  it  was  then  that  his  health  began  to 
give  way.  After  several  major  operations 
he  was  obliged  to  retire  from  London  in 
1950  and  by  his  own  choice  lived  at 
Hythe  near  his  old  home  in  the  single  bed- 
sitting  room  of  a  humble  lodging,  writing 
in  the  morning  and  visiting  the  old  or 
sick  each  afternoon.  He  died  in  London 
2  September  1956. 

[John  Presland,  Deedes  Bey,  1942 ;  Viscount 
Samuel,  Memoirs,  1945 ;  Memories  of  Sir 
Wyndham  Deedes,  ed.  E.  Elath,  N.  Bentwich, 
and  Doris  May,  1958 ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]  L.  F.  Ellis. 

DE  LA  MARE,  WALTER  JOHN  (1873^ 
1956),  poet,  novelist,  and  anthologist,  was 
born  25  April  1873  at  Charlton,  Kent,  the 
sixth  child  of  James  Edward  de  la  Mare, 
an  official  in  the  Bank  of  England,  and 
his  wife,  Lucy  Sophia  Browning.  He  was 
educated  at  St.  Paul's  Cathedral  Choris- 
ters' School,  where  he  edited  the  school 
magazine,  and  then  entered  the  service 
of  the  Anglo-American  Oil  Company  for 
which  he  worked  until  1908.  He  began  his 
literary  career  with  Songs  of  Childhood 
(1902),  followed  by  the  vast  opus  of  poems, 
stories,  novels,  books  for  children,  and 
anthologies,  all  marked  by  an  individual 
genius  which  was  quickly  recognized. 

His  first  prose  book,  Henry  Brocken 
(1904),  is  a  romance  using  famous  figures 
from  the  literatures  of  Europe.  It  sets  the 
perspective  line  of  all  his  subsequent  work. 
The  background  of  his  view  of  life-  was  to 
remain  fixed  in  the  world  of  books.  If 
incongruity  threatened,  then  life  had  to 
be  refashioned  by  fantasy  to  fit  that  back- 
ground, whether  it  was  the  life  of  children 
or  adults.  Thus,  the  strange  adaptations 
of  fact  in  The  Return  (1910),  The  Three 
Mulla-Mulgars  (1910),  and  Memoirs  of  a 
Midget  (1921). 

The  book  which  carried  his  poetry  to 
a  wide  public  was  The  Listeners  (1912). 
Even  more  popular,  perhaps,  was  the 
book  of  poems  for  children  Peacock  Pie 


293 


De  la  Mare 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


(1913).  Came  Hither^  an  anthology  (1923), 
finally  established  his  fame  as  a  writer 
for  children.  His  two  most  characteristic 
anthologies,  both  enriched  by  long  intro- 
ductions, are  Behold,  This  Dreamer  (1939) 
and  Love  (1943).  His  most  sustained  poem, 
a  synopsis  of  his  philosophy  of  life,  and  a 
final  revelation  of  his  temperament,  is  The 
Traveller  (1946). 

Within  his  own  universe  de  la  Mare 
was  a  highly  complicated  organism,  com- 
pounded of  subtly  articulated  nervous 
tensions  which  made  his  contacts  with 
the  outside  world  oblique,  tentative, 
sometimes  even  bizarre.  His  first  book. 
Songs  of  Childhood,  was  published  under 
the  pseudonym  of  Walter  Ramal,  an 
adaptation  of  de  la  Mare  read  in  a  mirror. 
Again,  in  one  of  his  most  characteristic 
prose  books.  The  Return,  the  central  figure 
looks  at  himself  in  the  mirror,  about  to 
shave,  and  there  sees  a  face  only  dimly, 
historically,  resembUng  his  own.  This 
horrifying  experience  was  not  horrifying 
to  de  la  Mare ;  his  natiu'e  accepted  it  wel- 
comingly.  It  was  as  though  he  were  en- 
dowed with  several  extra  sets  of  eyes, 
which  he  was  able  to  set  out  in  strategic 
positions  to  get  a  many-intelligenced  view 
of  any  given  situation,  mood,  fear,  or 
passion,  person,  or  place.  And  it  was  his 
multiplied  curiosity  which  did  the  work  in 
the  making  of  a  story  or  a  poem,  just  as  it 
controlled  his  conversations  with  fellow 
mortals. 

In  his  conversation,  the  climate  of  dis- 
cussion began  to  resemble  that  of  his 
poetry.  Obhque  lights  shot  across  the 
familiar  scene,  and  what  was  normally 
visible  became  an  obscured  form  gradually 
filling  up  with  horror,  while  the  vacant 
lots  of  the  commonplace  became  peopled 
with  dancing  shadows  which  grew  more 
and  more  concrete  and  plausible.  Size, 
form,  time,  and  place  intervolved,  and  the 
de  la  Marian  universe  was  all  around  the 
visitor:  strange,  thwart,  more  yet  less 
than  human,  full  of  contradictions  that 
resolved  with  lightning  speed  into  a  weird 
symbolism  of  desperate  faith.  For  that  is 
what  he  moved  towards,  all  his  life.  He  was 
beset  by  these  damaging  queries ;  he  could 
not  refrain  from  the  destructive  question- 
ing. But  out  of  the  breakages  resulting 
from  this  passionate,  devout  scepticism, 
he  contrived  (and  with  a  childlike  sim- 
plicity) to  build  up  the  poetry  which 
irradiated  all  his  work. 

The  nature  and  texture  of  that  poetry 
are  as  interwoven  as  are  the  meaning  and 
the  strange  phrasing  in  the  most  charac- 


teristic of  Shakespeare's  dialogue;  com- 
pletely a  unit  as  organism,  yet  more  and 
more  miraculous  and  incredible  the  more 
it  is  analysed.  De  la  Mare's  use  of  poetic 
inversion,  for  example,  is  in  itself  a  study 
which  baffles  the  critic.  It  was  partly 
involuntary,  because  he  could  not  keep 
himself  from  this  ingrained  gesture  of 
turning  to  the  mirror  to  look  out  on  life 
in  reflection,  in  opposites,  and  above 
all  in  that  weird  silence  which  pervades 
all  reflection.  Although  he  wrote  vastly, 
and  usually  anonymously,  as  a  critic, 
he  never  hesitated  to  say  that  he  could 
not  be  certain  how  his  own  work  was 
done,  how  the  moonlight  (another  reflec- 
tion) became  the  chief  illuminant  of  his 
field  of  vision.  He  knew  the  craft  of  the 
poet,  and  was  jealous  in  the  care  and  use 
of  the  medium,  the  unruly  flock  of  words. 
In  a  letter  in  1945,  he  said:  'I  often  won- 
der how  many  people  really  understand 
the  language.  Not  a  great  number,  I 
fancy.  There  are  many  good  reasons  for 
liking  and  delighting  in  poetry,  if  reasons 
they  can  be  called;  but  the  reason — one 
could  not  define  it — but  that  once  realized, 
all  else  is  only  addendas.' 

His  was  a  mind,  a  personality,  which 
loved  dangerous  living.  He  would  not  be 
content  to  bask  by  the  fireside  of  accepted 
values.  The  certainties  of  life  must  always 
be  opened,  disrupted  by  him  in  his  almost 
irresponsible  inquisitiveness.  In  the  most 
ordinary  and  innocuous  of  things  and 
events  he  saw  a  force  which  was  always  a 
threat.  Atomic  fission  was  his  daily  prac- 
tice. He  drew  again  and  again  towards  this 
brink  of  the  abyss  which  most  people 
ignored  or  denied,  and  there  he  stood, 
fascinated,  wondering  what  might  be  the 
result  if  a  mortal  defied  this  pervasive 
latency. 

Any  old  object  would  serve  towards  this 
perilous  adventure :  a  candle-end,  a  scare- 
crow, a  snatch  of  mist,  a  trail  of  bindweed. 
The  smallest  thing  was  a  key  into  the 
humming  power-house  of  the  Mystery.  In 
the  poem  called  'The  Bottle'  he  sums  up 
this  attitude,  as  he  describes  it, 

Of  green  and  hexagonal  glass, 

With  sharp,  fluted  sides — 
Vaguely  transparent  these  walls. 

Wherein  motionless  hides 
A  simple  so  potent  it  can 

To  oblivion  lull 
The  weary,  the  racked,  the  bereaved. 

The  miserable. 

And  he  applies  to  himself,  and  the  ever- 
questing  consciousness  within  him,   the 


294 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Denman 


efficacy  of  the  drug  in  that  bottle  to  reveal 
the  answer, 

Wicket  out  into  the  dark 

That  swings  but  one  way ; 
Infinite  hush  in  an  ocean  of  silence 

Aeons  away — 
Thou  forsaken ! — even  thou ! — 

The  dread  good-bye ; 
The  abandoned,  the  thronged,  the  watched, 
the  unshared — 

Awaiting  me — I! 

That  may  be  the  way  into  a  fuller  un- 
derstanding of  this  poet  and  his  work; 
the  realization  that  always  he  dallied  with 
danger,  was  obsessed  with  the  curiosity  of 
what  might  happen  if  he  should  dissociate 
this  material  world  from  its  physical 
coherence  and  set  free  the  forces  which  so 
restrained  it. 

De  la  Mare  received  honorary  degrees 
from  the  universities  of  Oxford,  Cam- 
bridge, London,  St.  Andrews,  and  Bristol, 
and  was  an  honorary  fellow  of  Keble  Col- 
lege, Oxford.  In  1948  he  was  appointed 
C.H.  and  in  1953  O.M. 

In  1899  he  married  Constance  Elfrida 
(died  1943),  daughter  of  Alfred  William 
Ingpen  and  sister  of  Roger  Ingpen  who 
married  Walter  de  la  Mare's  sister.  He  had 
two  daughters  and  two  sons,  the  elder 
of  whom,  Richard,  became  chairman  of 
Faber  &  Faber,  Ltd.,  the  publishers  of  the 
definitive  edition  of  his  father's  works. 

A  drawing  of  de  la  Mare  by  Augustus 
John  was  first  in  the  possession  of  Lady 
Cynthia  Asquith.  Of  several  drawings  by 
Sir  William  Rothenstein,  one  is  repro- 
duced in  Twenty-Four  Portraits  (second 
series,  1923)  and  another  in  Twelve  Por- 
traits (1929).  A  chalk  drawing  of  Walter 
de  la  Mare  in  bed  by  H.  A.  Freeth  was 
exhibited  at  the  Royal  Academy  in  1958 ; 
and  a  death  mask  was  made  by  his  family 
for  presentation  to  the  National  Por- 
trait Gallery  which  also  has  a  drawing 
by  Rothenstein  and  another  by  Augustus 
John. 

Walter  de  la  Mare  died  at  Twickenham, 
Middlesex,  22  June  1956.  His  ashes  are 
buried  in  the  crypt  of  St.  Paul's  Cathedral 
where  there  is  a  memorial  plaque. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Richard  Church. 

DENMAN,  GERTRUDE  MARY,  Lady 
Denman  (1884-1954),  public  servant,  was 
born  in  London  7  November  1884,  the 
second  of  the  four  children  and  only 
daughter  of  W.  D.  Pearson  (afterwards 
first  Viscount  Cowdray,  q.v.).  Her  parents 
travelled  extensively,  leaving  her  for  long 


periods  in  the  care  of  often  uncongenial 
governesses  with  only  the  company  of 
her  brothers  in  the  holidays.  She  always 
maintained  that  she  educated  herself  by 
wide  reading,  especially  of  books  on  eco- 
nomics and  philosophy  in  her  father's 
library.  The  independence  of  mind  fostered 
by  her  somewhat  isolated  childhood  gave 
her  a  detachment  of  outlook  which  re- 
mained a  characteristic  throughout  life. 
These  formative  years  also  developed  a 
natural  shyness  which  i^e  never  allowed 
to  limit  her  activities  and  which  she  nearly 
always  overcame  by  sheer  hard  work, 
enthusiasm,  and  concentration.  Born  to 
great  wealth,  she  believed  from  an  early 
age  that  the  only  justification  of  such  an 
inheritance  was  service  to,  and  thought 
for,  the  community.  Her  father's  vitahty 
in  his  engineering  work  and  the  courage 
and  equanimity  with  which  he  approached 
heavy  tasks  and  responsibilities  made  a 
deep  impression,  on  her.  When  she  was 
quite  young  her  letters  to  him  showed  a 
mature  grasp  of  his  many  undertakings. 

In  1903  she  married  the  third  Baron 
Denman  and  the  one  son  and  one  daugh- 
ter of  the  marriage  were  born  before  she 
was  twenty-three.  She  acquitted  herself 
with  distinction  as  the  very  young  wife  of 
a  governor-general  when  her  husband  took 
up  that  appointment  in  Australia  in  1911. 
She  had  already  been  a  member  of  the 
executive  committee  of  the  Women's 
National  Liberal  Federation  (1909-10) 
and  later  became  director  of  S.  Pearson 
&  Son,  Ltd.,  and  of  the  Westminster 
Press,  Ltd. 

In  the  autumn  of  1916  Lady  Denman 
became  chairman  of  the  sub -committee 
of  the  Agricultural  Organization  Society 
which,  on  the  suggestion  of  Mrs.  Alfred 
Watt  (M.  R.  Watt,  q.v.),  had  undertaken 
to  found  Women's  Institutes  of  which 
there  were  by  this  time  twenty-four. 
When  the  institutes  (then  137)  transferred 
to  the  Board  of  Agriculture  in  1917  she 
became  assistant  director  of  the  women's 
branch  of  the  food  production  depart- 
ment. She  insisted  that  the  institutes 
must  be  self-governing  and  on  the  forma- 
tion at  the  same  time  of  the  National 
Federation  of  Women's  Institutes  she  was 
elected  chairman.  She  held  that  office 
until  1946,  retiring  at  her  own  wish  to 
make  way  for  a  younger  chairman.  Per- 
sonally without  ambition,  she  was  eager 
for  the  success  of  the  movement,  seeing 
in  it  a  great  opportunity  for  democratic 
training  in  citizenship  for  countrywomen, 
for   widening   their   knowledge    and   for 


295 


Denman 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


improving  their  standards  of  life.  The 
institutes  and  their  remarkable  achieve- 
ments are  the  fruit  of  her  talent  for 
administration,  her  foresight,  and  the 
principles  of  good  procedure  on  which  she 
based  their  early  organization.  When  she 
died  there  were  over  8,000  institutes  with 
a  membership  of  450,000.  The  Women's 
Institute  residential  college,  founded  in 
1948  at  Marcham,  near  Abingdon,  Berk- 
shire, was  called  Denman  College  in 
recognition  of  her  services. 

In  1930  Lady  Denman  helped  to  found 
and  became  chairman  of  the  National 
Birth  Control  (later  Family  Planning) 
Association,  an  office  which  she  still  held 
at  the  time  of  her  death.  That  parents 
should  be  given  the  means  to  plan  their 
families  so  that  all  children  of  a  marriage 
would  be  wanted  and  welcomed  seemed  to 
her  right  and  natural.  Her  acute  sympathy 
for  overburdened  mothers  spurred  her  to 
champion  a  cause  which  needed  great 
courage  and  forthrightness. 

Lady  Denman  was  chairman  of  the 
Cowdray  Club  for  Nurses  and  Profes- 
sional Women  (1932-53).  Always  an 
enthusiastic  games  player,  she  was  presi- 
dent of  the  Ladies'  Golf  Union  (1932-8). 
She  was  a  member  of  the  executive  com- 
mittee of  the  Land  Settlement  Association 
(1934-9),  and  in  1938  became  a  trustee  of 
the  Carnegie  United  Kingdom  Trust. 

In  1939  Lady  Denman  became  director 
of  the  Women's  Land  Army.  From  the 
first  she  realized  that  there  would  be  many 
obstacles  to  be  overcome  and  her  powers 
of  leadership  were  greatly  needed  to  recon- 
cile conflicting  demands.  She  brought  to 
the  task  initiative,  resource,  and  good 
sense,  always  seeing  the  work  of  the  Land 
Army  in  relation  to  the  needs  of  the 
nation  at  war.  Nevertheless,  she  waged  her 
own  battles  on  its  behalf  with  the  various 
Ministries  concerned,  holding  out  for  con- 
ditions of  employment  which  have  been  of 
lasting  benefit  to  agricultural  workers  as 
a  whole.  When  in  1945  the  Government 
failed  to  award  the  Land  Army  grants, 
gratuities,  and  other  benefits  which  it 
accorded  to  women  in  the  civil  defence  and 
armed  services,  she  resigned  in  protest. 

Lady  Denman's  public  work  carries  its 
own  memorial  in  thousands  of  villages  and 
homes  throughout  the  land.  As  a  chair- 
man she  excelled,  her  impartiality,  quick 
understanding,  and  sense  of  humour 
enabling  her  to  handle  with  success  any 
meeting,  however  large  or  difficult.  She 
could  be  formidable  in  opposition — which 
she  enjoyed — ^but  was  fair  and  generous 


to  those  who  differed  from  her.  Her  own 
transparent  honesty  banished  pretence, 
pomposity,  or  meanness.  Underlying  the 
outstanding  ability  for  organization,  the 
penetrating  eye  in  committee,  the  often 
gloriously  caustic  comment,  the  in- 
tolerance of  self-seeking,  moral  cowardice, 
or  foolishness,  there  was  deep  affection 
for  those  whose  cause  she  championed,  for 
succeeding  generations  of  her  own  family, 
for  her  many  friends  whom  she  delighted 
to  welcome  at  her  home  in  Sussex,  and 
especially  for  young  people.  She  was 
greatly  loved  both  by  her  family  and 
friends  for  her  courageous  and  generous 
spirit,  her  unfailing  kindness  to  them,  and 
the  humour  and  joy  of  life  which  made 
everything  done  in  her  company  a  delight. 

In  1920  Lady  Denman  was  appointed 
C.B.E.,  in  1933  D.B.E.,  and  in  1951 
G.B.E.  Her  death  in  London,  2  June  1954, 
was  followed  within  the  month  by  that  of 
her  husband. 

A  portrait  (1933)  of  Lady  Denman  by 
E.  Hodgkin  is  at  Knepp  Castle  and  an- 
other (1951)  by  Anthony  Devas  is  at 
Denman  College.  A  third  by  (Sir)  William' 
Nicholson  (1909)  is  privately  owned. 

[The  Times,  3,  4,  8,  and  14  Jun€  1954; 
Inez  Jenkins,  The  History  of  the  Women's  In- 
stitute Movement  of  England  and  Wales,  1953; 
Gervas  Huxley,  Lady  Denman,  G.B.E. ,  1961 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

ElilZABETH  BbUNNER. 

DENNY,    Sir    MAURICE    EDWARD, 

second  baronet,  of  Dumbarton  (1886- 
1955),  engineer  and  shipbuilder,  was  born 
at  Dumbarton  11  February  1886,  the 
eldest  son  of  (Sir)  Archibald  Denny,  later 
first  baronet,  a  notice  of  whom  he  con- 
tributed to  this  Dictionary  and  whom  he 
succeeded  in  1936.  He  was  educated  at 
Tonbridge  School  and  spent  two  years  in 
Switzerland  and  one  in  Germany  at  the 
universities  of  Lausanne  and  Heidelberg 
before  proceeding  to  America  where  he 
spent  four  years  at  the  Massachusetts 
Institute  of  Technology  where  he 
graduated  with  a  first  class  in  naval 
architecture. 

On  returning  home  he  entered  the  firm 
of  William  Denny  &  Brothers,  ship- 
builders, of  Dumbarton,  of  which  his 
grandfather  Peter  Denny  was  one  of  the 
founders.  Later  he  spent  a  year  in  the 
drawing  office  of  William  Doxford  & 
Sons,  Ltd.,  Sunderland.  On  returning  to 
Dumbarton  he  joined  the  staff  at  the 
Denny  yard,  becoming  a  partner  in  1911. 
When    the    family    business    became    a 


296 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Dent 


Kmited  company  in  1918  Denny  was 
appointed  a  director.  He  was  elected  vice- 
chairman  in  1920,  and  in  1922  he  suc- 
ceeded his  uncle,  Colonel  John  M.  Denny, 
as  chairman.  He  held  that  office  imtil  1952 
when  he  retired  and  became  president. 

In  the  war  of  1914^-18  Denny  was  an 
officer  in  the  Machine  Gun  Corps  and 
served  in  France ;  but,  on  account  of  the 
pressure  on  shipbuilding  and  the  position 
he  had  attained  in  the  industry,  he  was 
recalled.  He  became  deputy  director  of 
design  under  the  controller-general  for 
merchant  shipbuilding  at  the  Admiralty 
and  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1918. 

After  the  war  Denny  was  keen  to  apply 
his  scientific  brain  and  well-trained  mind 
to  the  many  shipbuilding  problems.  But 
there  was  a  deep  depression  in  world  trade 
and  his  technical  interests  had  to  some 
extent  to  take  second  place  because  of  the 
need  for  rigid  economies.  He  piloted  his 
company  successfully  through  these  diffi- 
cult years  and  enhanced  its  great  reputa- 
tion, particularly  in  the  construction  of 
fast  cross-Channel  ships  with  turbine 
propulsion.  He  made  a  lasting  contribution 
to  the  progress  of  the  industry,  particularly 
in  promoting  research.  In  his  approach  to 
all  problems,  technical  and  commercial,  he 
was  actuated  by  a  meticulous  integrity, 
which  was  the  outstanding  quality  of  his 
character. 

Denny  was  chairman  of  the  Shipbuilding 
Conference  in  1940.  He  was  instrumen- 
tal in  the  foundation  of  the  British  Ship- 
building Research  Association  in  which  he 
was  chairman  of  the  research  board  from 
its  inception  until  his  death.  It  was  largely 
due  to  his  driving  force  that  the  Lucy 
Ashton  trials  to  measure  the  power  and 
speed  of  ships  were  carried  through  with 
such  rapidity  and  success.  The  modifica- 
tion of  this  ship,  fitted  with  four  jet 
engines,  permitted  full-scale  self-propelled 
experiments  from  which  useful  hydro- 
dynamic  data  resulted. 

The  firm  had  one  of  the  earHest  experi- 
ment tanks  in  their  yard,  and  Denny 
carried  out  many  experiments,  inter  alia 
in  two  types  of  torsion  meters  which  were 
known  as  the  Denny-Johnstone  and 
Denny-Edgcumbe.  With  (Sir)  William 
Wallace  of  Brown  Brothers  he  collaborated 
in  the  design  of  the  Denny-Brown  stabi- 
lizer, used  in  ships  all  over  the  world. 

Among  many  appointments,  Denny  was 
chairman  of  the  technical  committee  of 
the  British  Corporation  Register  of  Ship- 
ping and  Aircraft  for  many  years  before 
its  amalgamation  with  Lloyd's  Register; 


president  of  the  Clyde  Shipbuilders' 
Association;  and  president  of  the  Ship- 
building Employers'  Federation.  He  was 
a  valued  supporter  of  many  of  the  profes- 
sional institutions  and  notably  president 
in  1935  of  the  Institute  of  Marine  En- 
gineers, as  his  father  and  grandfather  had 
been.  He  was  a  director  of  the  Union 
Bank  of  Scotland,  of  Guest,  Keen,  and 
Nettlefolds,  of  several  shipping  companies, 
and  of  Lloyds  British  Testing  Company, 
For  many  years  he  was  chairman  of  the 
Air  Registration  Board  which  he  helped 
to  found. 

Denny  was  appointed  K.B.E.  in  1946 
for  his  work  in  the  war  of  1939^5,  during 
which  his  firm  launched  12  destroyers,  10 
sloops,  2  merchant  aircraft  carriers,  and  10 
other  vessels  for  the  Royal  Navy.  He  re- 
ceived an  honorary  LL.D.  from  Glasgow 
in  1949. 

Denny  found  his  recreation  in  country 
life — he  was  a  golfer,  a  keen  gardener,  an 
ornithologist  of  wide  knowledge  with  an 
almost  complete  egg  collection  of  birds  of 
the  British  Isles.  In  ship  model-making  he 
was  a  skilled  craftsman  and  he  presented 
to  the  Science  Museum,  South  Kensington, 
a  perfect  model  of  the  Cutty  Sark  made 
by  his  own  hands — a  model  of  a  famous 
Denny  ship.  He  had  a  strong  personality 
and  his  wit  and  friendship  were  enjoyed 
by  a  host  of  friends. 

In  1916  Denny  married  Marjorie, 
daughter  of  WilUam  Royse  Lysaght, 
steelmaker,  of  Castleford,  Chepstow,  Mon- 
mouthshire; they  had  two  sons  and  two 
daughters.  The  elder  son,  Alistair  Maurice 
Archibald  (born  1922),  succeeded  to  the 
baronetcy  when  Denny  died  at  Drymen, 
Stirlingshire,  2  February  1955.  A  portrait 
by  David  Ewart  is  in  the  Denny  collection 
at  the  National  Maritime  Museum  and  a 
copy  is  in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

BlIiSLAND. 

DENT,  EDWARD  JOSEPH  (1876- 
1957),  musical  scholar,  was  born  at  Rib- 
ston  Hall,  Yorkshire,  16  July  1876,  the 
fourth  and  youngest  son  of  John  Dent  Dent, 
barrister  and  for  many  years  a  member  of 
Parliament,  and  his  wife,  Mary  Hebden, 
daughter  of  John  Woodall,  of  Scar- 
borough. A  scholar  of  Eton  and  King's 
College,  Cambridge,  Dent  obtained  a  third 
class  in  part  i  of  the  classical  tripos  in 
1898.  He  had  studied  music  at  Eton  under 
C.  H.  Lloyd,  and  at  Cambridge,  where  he 
was  a  pupil  of  Charles  Wood  and  (Sir) 
Charles  Stanford  [qq-v.],  he  obtained  liia 


297 


Dent 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Mus.B.  in  1899.  In  1902-8  he  was  a  fellow 
of  King's  College  and  lectured  on  the 
history  of  music,  also  teaching  harmony, 
counterpoint,  and  composition.  In  1926 
he  was  appointed  to  the  professorship  of 
music  in  the  university,  a  post  which  he 
held  until  1941.  During  this  period  he 
reorganized  the  teaching  of  music  on  a 
broader  basis,  as  not  only  the  prerogative 
of  organists  and  organ  scholars  but  of 
those  who  were  interested  in  all  branches 
of  music.  His  interests  were  numerous: 
at  first  he  made  a  number  of  researches 
into  seventeenth-  and  eighteenth-century 
Italian  opera,  a  subject  considerably  neg- 
lected at  that  time,  and  published  articles 
on  it  in  the  Encyclopcedia  Britannica,  the 
second  edition  of  Grove's  Dictionary  of 
Music  and  Musicians,  and  the  Riemann- 
Festschrift  of  1909.  He  also  published 
a  book  on  Alessandro  Scarlatti  in  1905 
and  another  on  Mozart's  operas  in  1913 
(2nd,  revised,  edition  1947).  He  made 
new  translations  of  Mozart's  Figaro,  Don 
Giovanni,  and  The  Magic  Flute  and  super- 
vised a  celebrated  student  production  of 
the  last-named  at  Cambridge  in  1911. 
His  later  translations  included  several 
of  Verdi's  operas,  Berlioz's  Les  Troyens, 
Beethoven's  Fidelio,  and  other  works. 
He  also  edited  and  produced  many  works 
of  Purcell  at  Cambridge,  the  Old  Vic, 
the  Glastonbury  Festival,  and  elsewhere, 
and  made  a  new  edition  of  his  Dido  and 
Aeneas  for  Hamburg  in  1924  which  was 
also  produced  at  Miinster  in  1926  and 
Stuttgart  in  1927. 

In  1919  Dent  became  the  music  critic  of 
the  Athenaeum  and  he  was  also  active  in 
the  formation  of  the  British  Music  Society. 
But  he  remained  essentially  international 
in  outlook  and  it  was  due  to  him  that  the 
International  Festival  of  Contemporary 
Chamber  Music,  held  in  1922  at  Salzburg, 
developed  into  the  International  Society 
for  Contemporary  Music,  a  body  which  has 
branches  in  many  countries  and  gives 
annual  festivals  of  modern  music.  He  be- 
came its  first  president,  a  post  he  held  until 
1938  and  again  in  1945-7.  He  also  served 
on  the  board  of  directors  of  Sadler's  Wells 
Theatre,  of  which  he  became  a  governor. 
When  the  Covent  Garden  Opera  Trust  was 
set  up  in  1946  he  became  one  of  the  direc- 
tors and  showed  a  very  active  interest  in 
the  presentation  of  opera  of  all  kinds  in 
English. 

Dent  wrote  articles  on  modern  English 
music  for  Adler's  Handbuch  der  Musik- 
geschichte  and  on  'Social  Aspects  of  Music 
in  the  Middle  Ages'  for  the  1929  edition 


of  the  Oxford  History  of  Music.  Later  he 
served  on  the  editorial  board  of  the  New 
Oxford  History  of  MuMc.  He  was  an 
honorary  doctor  of  music  of 'Oxford  (1932), 
Harvard  (1936),  and  Cambridge  (1947). 
He  was  also,  in  1953,  one  of  the  first  two 
musicians  to  be  elected  F.B.A.  His  other 
books  included  Foundations  of  English 
Opera  (1928)  and  a  masterly  biography 
of  Ferruccio  Busoni  (1933),  a  composer 
whom  he  knew  well  as  a  personal  friend. 
His  writings  included  many  articles,  fore- 
words to  books,  and  programme  notes. 

Dent  composed  a  small  number  of 
original  works,  of  which  the  most  impor- 
tant are  a  set  of  polyphonic  motets.  He 
also  made  an  arrangement  of  the  Beggafs 
Opera  which  is  much  more  faithful  to  the 
original  than  the  well-known  version  by 
Frederic  Austin — in  fact  Dent  removed 
the  preludes  and  codas  to  the  songs  which 
Austin  had  added  unnecessarily.  He  also 
made  a  practical  version  of  one  of  the 
earliest  oratorios,  the  sacred  drama  La 
Rappresentazione  di  Anima  e  di  Corpo  of 
Cavalieri,  c.  1550-1602.  The  first  per- 
formance of  this  work  was  given  in  1600 
in  Rome ;  the  next  recorded  stage  perfor- 
mance took  place  in  1949,  given  by  the 
Girton  Musical  Society  of  Cambridge  from 
Dent's  edition.  In  1950  Dent  became  the 
first  president  of  the  newly  formed  Liszt 
Society. 

Dent  was  a  man  of  immense  knowledge 
and  wide  interests,  but  his  personality  was 
not  in  the  least  academic  in  the  conven- 
tional sense.  He  inspired  his  pupils  and 
widened  their  range  of  vision,  and  he  also 
possessed  a  mordant  (but  never  cruel) 
sense  of  hiunour  which  enabled  him  to 
puncture  many  inflated  reputations.  As 
president  of  the  International  Society  for 
Contemporary  Music  his  good  sense  en- 
abled him  to  prevent  the  society  being 
split  apart  by  warring  factions.  (His  ac- 
count of  the  early  days  of  the  society, 
'Looking  Backward',  published  in  Music 
Today,  1949,  is  a  comic  masterpiece.)  His 
scholarship  was  always  a  living  activity; 
he  was  always  interested  in  promoting  live 
performances  of  the  music  he  was  inter- 
ested in,  not  merely  writing  articles  about 
it  in  learned  journals.  He  revived  a  great 
deal  of  early  music  at  a  time  when  the 
vogue  for  it  was  not  nearly  as  marked  as 
it  later  became,  because  he  felt  that  this 
music  was  worth  performing  in  the  modern 
age  for  its  own  sake,  not  merely  as  a  mat- 
ter of  academic  interest.  At  the  same  time 
he  kept  a  keen  interest  in  modern  develop- 
ments, and  if  he  did  not  always  relish  the 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Dick-Read 


more  extreme  experiments  of  the  avant- 
garde,  he  was  always  willing  to  let  young 
musicians  have  their  say  and  to  judge  them 
by  results.  Thus  he  became  a  universally 
loved  and  respected  figure,  because  it  was 
felt  that  his  judgements  were  entirely 
objective  and  based  on  knowledge  and 
experience :  even  his  best  friends  could  be 
the  target  of  his  witty  but  sarcastic  tongue 
if  he  felt  that  their  work  was  below  what 
they  should  have  been  able  to  achieve.  He 
left  his  mark  behind  in  many  fields  of  music, 
not  only  in  Cambridge,  but  in  the  whole 
international  scene. 

Dent,  who  was  unmarried,  died  in 
London  22  August  1957.  A  portrait  by 
Lawrence  Gowing  is  at  King's  College, 
Cambridge,  and  the  Fitzwilliam  Museum 
has  drawings  by  Sydney  Waterlow  and 
Edmond  Kapp. 

{Grove's  Dictionary  of  Music  and  Musicians ; 
personal  knowledge.]        Humphrey  Searle. 

D'EYNCOURT,  Sir  EUSTACE  HENRY 
WILLIAM  TENNYSON-,  first  baronet 
(1868-1951),  naval  architect.  [See  Tenny- 
son-d'Eyncourt.] 

DICK-READ,  GRANTLY  (1890-1959), 
obstetrician  and  advocate  of  natural 
childbirth,  was  born  at  Beccles,  Suffolk, 
26  January  1890,  the  son  of  Robert  John 
Read,  a  flour  miller  of  Norwich,  and  his 
wife,  Frances  Maria  Sayer,  of  the  White 
House,  Thurlton,  Norfolk,  which  had  been 
in  the  family  since  1704.  Dick  Read  (the 
hyphen  was  not  assumed  until  towards  the 
end  of  his  life)  was  the  sixth  of  seven 
children  and  the  second  of  three  brothers. 
He  went  from  Bishop's  Stortford  College 
to  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge,  where  he 
was  a  sufficiently  good  soccer  player  to  be 
considered  for  the  university  team,  but 
did  not  gain  a  blue.  After  obtaining  a 
third  class  in  part  i  of  the  natural  sciences 
tripos  in  1911  he  became  a  clinical  medical 
student  at  the  London  Hospital  where  he 
came  under  the  influence  of  (Sir)  Eardley 
Holland,  one  of  the  outstanding  obstetri- 
cians and  gynaecologists  of  his  day.  He 
became  Holland's  house-officer  and  in 
dealing  with  problems  of  safe  operative 
delivery  of  women  must  have  witnessed 
obstetric  events  which  a  later  generation 
would  consider  appalling. 

Dick  Read  qualified  in  1914,  and  after 
war  service  in  Gallipoli  and  France  and  a 
spell  as  resident  accoucheur  at  the  London 
Hospital  went  into  practice,  first  at  East- 
bourne, then  in  Woking,  with  consulting 
rooms  in  Harley  Street.  It  was  in  Woking 


that  he  first  began  the  writings  which  were 
ultimately  to  bring  him  fame,  the  best 
known  being  Natural  Childbirth  (1933) 
and  Revelation  of  Childbirth  (1942),  in  later 
editions  entitled  Childbirth  Without  Fear. 

A  big  man  with  a  commanding  presence 
and  handsome  appearance,  Dick  Read 
had  a  voice  of  resonant,  sonorous  quality 
which  made  it  almost  hypnotic,  and  his 
vivid  and  compelling  personality  was  used 
to  good  effect  for  the  benefit  of  his  patients 
and  to  convey  his  ideas  to  audiences  to 
whom  he  lectured  with  consummate  ease 
and  skill.  His  passionate  interest  and 
enthusiasm  for  his  main  subject  were 
always  in  evidence  and  he  travelled  far 
and  wide,  especially  in  Africa  (he  prac- 
tised in  Johannesburg  in  1949-53), 
gathering  material  relevant  to  his  beliefs. 

Over  the  years  his  opinions  about 
natural  childbirth  developed,  but  by  1955 
may  perhaps  be  crystallized  in  his  own 
words  {British  Obstetric  and  Gynaecological 
Practice,  ed.  Sir  Eardley  Holland):  'The 
psychosomatic  approach  to  childbirth  is 
not  new,  inasmuch  as  many  of  the  writers 
of  the  past  drew  attention  to  the  influence 
of  the  mind  of  a  woman  upon  the  course  of 
her  labour.  .  .  .  This  approach  to  child- 
birth and  the  belief  that  healthy  natural 
functions  should  not  be  attended  by  pain 
or  danger  became  firmly  established  in  my 
mind  over  forty  years  ago.'  His  ideas 
might  be  summed  up  in  his  phrase:  the 
'fear-tension-pain'  syndrome.  This  implies 
that  fear  of  childbirth,  and  especially  fear 
in  labour,  causes  general  muscular  tension 
and  also  tension  in  the  uterine  cervix, 
both  of  which  increase  the  sensation  of 
pain.  To  diminish  the  pain  of  labour  it  is 
therefore  essential  to  cast  out  fear.  This 
may  be  done  by  educating  women  about 
all  that  childbirth  entails  during  preg- 
nancy, labour,  the  puerperium  and  after. 
This  can  be  aided  by  teaching  women 
during  pregnancy  how  to  control  their 
voluntary  muscles  at  will,  especially  by 
relaxing  them,  and  by  teaching  them  how 
to  co-operate  with  the  uterine  contrac- 
tions of  labour,  which  cannot  be  fully 
controlled  voluntarily. 

Thousands  of  women  have  benefited 
from  the  teachings  of  Dick  Read  and  he 
has  influenced  the  practice  of  obstetrics  in 
all  countries  where  it  has  been  possible  to 
apply  his  methods  or  some  modification 
of  them,  although  his  disciples  have  been 
unable  to  maintain  the  original  purity  of 
the  doctrine.  In  his  time  Dick  Read  was 
disappointed  that  his  ideas  did  not 
immediately   gain    recognition    in    more 


299 


Dick-Read 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


conservative  medical  practice,  but  since 
his  time  there  has  been  an  increasing 
awareness  of  the  importance  of  psycho- 
logical factors  in  childbearing  women  and 
for  this  he  Is  still  in  large  measure  respon- 
sible. This  is  a  fine  and  enduring  monu- 
ment although  the  arguments  will  continue 
about  how  psychosomatic  methods  in 
childbirth  should  be  used,  how  intensively 
they  should  be  applied,  and  exactly  how 
they  affect  the  physiology  of  body-mind 
relationships. 

In  1921  Dick  Read  married  Dorothea, 
daughter  of  Neville  Cannon,  flour  miller, 
of  Bexley,  Kent;  there  were  two  sons 
and  two  daughters.  The  marriage  was  dis- 
solved in  1952  and  he  married  in  that  year 
Mrs.  Jessica  Bennett,  daughter  of  Leigh 
Cosart  Winters,  a  business  man  of  world- 
wide interests.  There  were  no  children. 
Dick-Read  died  11  June  1959  at  Wrox- 
ham,  near  Norwich. 

[Private  information.]         Philip  Rhodes. 

DICKINSON,  HENRY  WINRAM  (1870- 
1952),  historian  of  engineering  and  tech- 
nology, was  born  at  Ulverston,  Lanca- 
shire, 28  August  1870,  the  eldest  son  of 
John  Dickinson,  general  manager  and 
secretary  of  the  North  Lonsdale  Iron  and 
Steel  Co.,  Ltd.,  by  his  wife,  Margaret 
Anne  Winram.  From  Ulverston  Victoria 
Grammar  School  he  went  to  Manches- 
ter Grammar  School  with  a  foundation 
scholarship.  After  a  two  years'  engineering 
course  at  the  Owens  College,  Manchester, 
and  four  years'  apprenticeship  (1888-92) 
at  the  Parkhead  Steel  Works  of  William 
Beardmore  &  Co.,  Ltd.,  Glasgow,  he  be- 
came a  draughtsman  at  the  Glasgow  Iron 
and  Steel  Company's  Wishaw  works  and 
then  assistant  engineer  at  the  Frodingham 
Iron  and  Steel  Company. 

Dickinson's  career  was  settled  at 
twenty-five  when  in  1895  he  was  appointed 
by  open  competition  junior  assistant  in 
the  Science  Department,  South  Kensing- 
ton Museum,  London,  which  became  the 
Science  Museum  in  1909.  Promoted  assis- 
tant keeper  in  the  machinery  division  in 
1900  he  was,  in  addition,  made  secretary 
to  the  advisory  council  in  1914.  From  1915 
to  1918  he  was  secretary  of  the  munitions 
inventions  panel  at  the  Ministry  of  Muni- 
tions. Returning  to  the  Science  Museum, 
he  was  promoted  in  1924  keeper  of 
mechanical  engineering,  taking  charge  of 
numerous  industrial  collections,  including 
motive  power.  He  supervised  the  erection 
of  the  original  Newcomen  type  and  Watt 
beam  engines  and  many  other  historical 


exhibits  in  the  museum's  new  eastern 
block,  opened  by  King  George  V  in  1928, 
and  was  responsible  for  the  transfer,  from 
Handsworth  to  South  Kensington,  and 
arrangement  of  the  contents  of  Watt's 
garret  workshop. 

Dickinson  represented  the  Board  of 
Education  in  1919  on  the  memorial  com- 
mittee to  commemorate  at  Birmingham 
the  centenary  of  the  death  of  James  Watt 
[q.v.].  Resulting  from  this,  Dickinson  and 
other  engineers  founded  in  1920  the  New- 
comen Society  for  the  Study  of  the  His- 
tory of  Engineering  and  Technology, 
named  after  Thomas  Newcomen  (1663- 
1729,  q.v.)  of  Dartmouth,  maker  of  the 
first  successful  steam  engine  using  a  piston 
in  a  cylinder.  Dickinson  was  honorary 
secretary  until  1951,  except  for  two  years 
(1932-4)  when  he  was  president.  As  sole 
editor  of  the  Transactions  until  1950,  he 
set  a  very  high  standard  and  the  first 
twenty-five  volumes  are  a  lasting  memorial 
of  his  devoted  work.  He  was  made  secre- 
tary emeritus  in  1951  for  his  very  dis^ 
tinguished  services  in  guiding  the  society 
for  over  thirty  years,  including  the  critical 
war  period.  Having  retired  from  the 
Science  Museum  in  1930,  his  n  an  interest 
during  his  remaining  years  was  the  New- 
comen Society.  During  his  career  he  pre- 
sented twenty-three  papers  to  it,  and  two 
to  the  Institution  of  Mechanical  Engineers, 
of  which  he  was  a  member  for  over  fifty 
years. 

He  was  the  British  Government's  re- 
presentative at  the  opening  of  the 
Deutsches  Museum,  Munich,  1925;  he 
served  as  president  of  the  Croydon  and 
Purley  natural  history  and  scientific 
societies,  besides  being  a  vice-president  of 
the  Cornish  Engines  Preservation  Society. 
He  made  two  lecture  tours  in  the  United 
States,  in  1923  and  1938,  and  received  the 
honorary  degree  of  Eng.D.  from  Lehigh 
University,  Pennsylvania. 

Dickinson  was  the  author  of  definitive 
books  on  his  favourite  subjects:  bio- 
graphies of  Robert  Fulton  (1913),  John 
Wilkinson  (1914),  James  Watt  (1936),  and 
Matthew  Boulton  (1937) ;  the  two  memorial 
volumes  James  Watt  and  the  Steam  Engine 
(with  Rhys  Jenkins,  1927)  and  Richard 
Trevithick  (with  Arthur  Titley,  1934) ;  also 
A  Short  History  of  the  Steam  Engine  (1939). 
His  series  of  articles  in  the  Engineer  during 
1948  was  republished  after  his  death  as  a 
memorial  volume  entitled  Water  Supply  of 
Greater  London  (1954). 

By  his  industrious  researches  and  en- 
thusiasm, tempered  with  sound  judgement, 


300 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Dix 


Dickinson  made  a  valuable  contribution 
to  establishing  the  history  of  technology 
on  a  firm  basis  and  was  one  of  the 
leading  authorities  on  the  evolution  and 
application  of  steam  power  in  the  in- 
dustrial revolution.  He  inspired  others 
by  his  example  and  advice  to  undertake 
similar  research.  He  lived  modestly  and 
was  a  lucid  author  and  speaker,  his  know- 
ledge being  based  on  observation,  sys- 
tematic reading,  travel,  and  the  material 
in  the  Science  Museum  for  which  he  wrote 
several  official  catalogues.  To  perpetuate 
his  memory,  the  Newcomen  Society 
founded  in  1954  the  Dickinson  biennial 
memorial  lecture;  the  series  was  in- 
augurated by  Charles  Singer  [q.v.]  who 
received  the  first  Dickinson  memorial 
medal.  In  1956  the  Newcomen  Society  in 
North  America,  inspired  by  Dr.  Charles 
Penrose,  senior  vice-president,  erected  a 
memorial  tablet  to  Dickinson  at  the 
Thomas  Newcomen  Library,  West  Ches- 
ter, Pennsylvania. 

Dickinson  married  first,  in  1897,  Edith 
(died  1937),  youngest  daughter  of  Richard 
Emerson,  schoolmaster,  of  Dunsforth, 
Yorkshire.  They  had  one  son,  Henry 
Douglas  Dickinson,  professor  of  economics 
at  Bristol,  1951-64,  who  died  in  1969. 
Secondly,  Dickinson  married  in  1939  Elsa 
Lees,  eldest  daughter  of  Frank  Walker 
Burgan,  railway  traffic  agent,  of  Saltburn- 
by-the-Sea,  Yorkshire.  He  died  at  his  home 
in  Purley,  Surrey,  21  February  1952. 

[Engineer  and  Engineering,  29  February 
1952 ;  Newcomen  Society's  Transactions,  vol. 
xxviii,  1956,  and  vol.  xxix,  1958 ;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Arthur  Stoweks. 

DIX,  GEORGE  EGLINGTON  ALSTON, 
DoM  GREGORY  (1901-1952),  monk  of 
Nashdom  Abbey,  was  born  at  Woolwich 
4  October  1901,  the  elder  son  of  George 
Henry  Dix  who  later  took  orders  and 
became  first  principal  of  the  College  of  St. 
Mark  and  St.  John,  Chelsea,  by  his  wife, 
Mary  Jane,  daughter  of  James  Eteson 
Walker,  of  Preston.  As  a  King's  scholar  of 
Westminster  School,  Dix  already  showed 
an  interest,  inherited  from  his  father,  in 
both  English  Uterature  and  theology,  and 
displayed  such  remarkable  talent  as  an 
actor  that  at  one  time  he  thought  seriously 
of  making  his  career  upon  the  stage.  As  an 
exhibitioner  of  Merton  College,  Oxford,  he 
coxed  the  college  eight,  and  cut  a  well- 
known  figure  in  a  somewhat  flamboyant 
period  of  university  life.  In  1923  he  ob- 
tained a  second  class  in  modern  history 


and  Avas  appointed  lecturer  at  Keble 
College. 

After  a  year  at  Wells  Theological  Col- 
lege he  was  ordained  deacon  in  1924  and 
priest  in  1925.  In  1926  he  left  Keble  and 
joined  the  Anglican  Benedictine  com- 
munity at  Pershore,  taking  the  name  of 
Gregory.  He  was  sent  to  West  Africa,  but 
in  1929  was  invalided  home,  and  thought 
to  be  incapable  of  further  active  work.  He 
spent  the  next  seven  years  at  Nashdom, 
laying  the  foundation  of  his  later  scholar- 
ship by  continuous  reading.  His  health 
improved,  he  re-entered  the  novitiate  in 
1936,  took  solemn  vows  in  1940,  became 
prior  of  Nashdom  Abbey  in  1948  and  held 
office  until  his  death.  In  1946  he  was 
elected  proctor  in  convocation  by  the 
clergy  of  the  diocese  of  Oxford,  and  main- 
tained in  the  lower  house  the  same  stand 
in  connection  with  the  South  India  scheme 
as  maintained  in  the  upper  house  by 
K.  E.  Kirk  [q.y.],  bishop  of  Oxford.  Dom 
Gregory  was  not  only  an  ally  in  ecclesias- 
tical matters,  but  also  a  close  personal 
friend  of  Kirk's,  and  greatly  influenced  his 
thought  in  certain  fields.  He  received  the 
degrees  of  B.D.  and  D.D.  from  the  univer- 
sity of  Oxford  in  1949.  He  was  taken  ill 
while  lecturing  in  America  in  1950,  and 
after  a  brief  recovery  returned  to  England 
and  died  at  Nashdom  11  May  1952. 

Although  primarily  an  historian,  Dom 
Gregory's  main  contribution  to  scholar- 
ship lay  in  the  field  of  liturgy.  His  edition 
of  The  Apostolic  Tradition  of  St.  Hippoly- 
tus  (1937)  provided  the  scholar  with  easy 
access  to  an  indispensable  text.  His  largest 
work,  The  Shape  of  the  Liturgy  (1945), 
gave  to  the  general  reader  the  results  of 
two  generations  of  specialist  work,  and 
set  out  Dom  Gregory's  own  contribution 
to  liturgical  study.  Written  in  a  Uvely  and 
imaginative  style,  and  often  from  a  pro- 
vocative point  of  view,  it  has  been  re- 
sponsible for  arousing  widespread  interest 
in  liturgy  both  at  home  and  abroad. 

Dom  Gregory  was  always  interested  in 
people,  and  took  immense  pains  with 
them.  One  of  his  friends  wrote:  'I  have 
never  known  anyone  who  gave  himself  so 
wholeheartedly  to  every  relationship  of 
heart  and  mind,  or  who  remained  so  much 
himself  in  such  bewildering  variety :  we've 
seldom  seen  him  the  same  for  an  hour  at 
once,  and  yet  each  manifestation  couldn't 
have  been  anyone  but  him.'  He  was  an 
acute  ecclesiastical  politician,  a  brilliant 
pamphleteer,  a  superb  raconteur.  Possess- 
ing a  great  gift  of  self-dramatization  he 
could  act  himself  into  any  part  he  chose ; 


301 


Dix 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


but  underneath  he  remained  a  spiritual 
jjerson. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

A.  H.  COURATIN. 

DIXON,  HENRY  HORATIO  (1869- 
1953),  professor  of  botany,  was  born  in 
Dublin  19  May  1869,  the  son  of  George 
Dixon,  the  owner  of  a  soap  works  who 
had  scientific  interests  and  whose  brother, 
Robert  Vickers  Dixon,  had  been  Erasmus 
Smith's  professor  of  natural  philosophy 
in  Trinity  College,  Dublin,  and  became 
archdeacon  of  Armagh.  Two  years  later 
George  Dixon  died  and  his  nine  children 
were  brought  up  by  their  mother,  Rebecca, 
daughter  of  George  Yeates,  of  Dublin, 
whose  family  were  scientific  instrument 
makers.  Of  Dixon's  six  brothers,  one 
became  a  chief  inspector  of  technical 
schools,  one  a  barrister,  and  two  held 
university  chairs:  in  engineering  and 
anatomy.  Dixon  followed  his  brothers  to 
Rathmines  School  and  entered  Trinity 
College  with  an  exhibition.  He  obtained  a 
classical  scholarship  in  1890  but  changed 
to  natural  science  in  which  he  obtained  a 
senior  moderatorship  in  1891.  After  work- 
ing in  Bonn  under  Eduard  Strasburger 
he  returned  in  1894  to  Trinity  College  as 
assistant  to  E.  P.  Wright  [q.v.]  whom  he 
succeeded  in  the  university  chair  of  botany 
in  1904.  In  1906  he  became  director  of 
the  botanic  garden ;  in  1910  keeper  of  the 
herbarium ;  and  in  1922  professor  of  plant 
biology  in  Trinity  College. 

Two  of  the  major  fields  of  work  at  Bonn 
were  the  studies,  then  in  their  infancy,  of 
nuclear  division  and  of  transpiration  and 
ascent  of  sap.  The  significance  of  reduc- 
tion division  (meiosis)  was  just  being 
recognized  in  the  Strasburger  school. 
Dixon  himself  in  a  paper  communicated 
to  the  Royal  Irish  Academy  in  189^  gave 
probably  the  first  expression  of  the  view 
that  bivalents  owed  their  appearance  to 
the  approach  together  of  chromosomes 
rather  than  splitting  of  some  structure. 
Dixon  often  spoke  of  conditions  in  Stras- 
burger's  laboratory  where  a  great  part  of 
the  cytological  studies  was  based  on  hand 
sections.  He  maintained  his  interests  in 
cytology  and  a  collection  of  his  sections  of 
endosperm  made  in  Bonn  were  in  good 
condition  in  the  School  of  Botany  in  1926. 
These  had  suggested  the  idea  of  a  mitotic 
hormone  to  Dixon  as  they  appeared  to 
show  waves  of  nuclear  division.  Sections 
showed  a  zone  of  prophases,  followed 
by  zones  of  metaphases,  anaphases,  and 
telophases.  This  must  have  been  one  of  the 


first  demonstrations  of  synchronous  cell 
divisions  and  the  importance  of  their 
synchronous  nature  was  fully  recognized. 
Photographs  of  these  sections  made  about 
1892  were  published  by  the  Royal  DubUn 
Society  in  1946. 

More  important,  however,  was  Dixon's 
work  on  transpiration  and  water  relations 
of  plants.  This  also  stemmed  from  his 
association  with  Strasburger  who  in  1890- 
93  published  work  on  channels  of  trans- 
port of  sap.  Dixon,  however,  made  the 
striking  advances  in  association  with  his 
great  friend  John  Joly  (whose  notice 
he  subsequently  contributed  to  this 
Dictionary),  a  physicist  of  very  wide  in- 
terests and  distinction.  Dixon's  obser- 
vations of  Strasburger' s  experiments 
demonstrating  ascent  of  sap  up  killed  sec- 
tions of  trees  posed  the  problem  of  possible 
physical  mechanisms.  Dixon  and  Joly 
provided  the  solution  in  their  classic  paper 
published  by  the  Royal  Society  of  London 
in  1895  in  which  they  established  the  role 
of  cohesion  of  water  as  an  essential  factor 
in  plant  water  relations.  This  first  paper 
was  followed  by  many  studies  by  Dixon  on 
tensile  strength  of  water  and  of  sap  con- 
taining gases  in  solution.  Then  followed  a 
series  of  studies  by  Dixon  with  W.  R.  G. 
Atkins  on  osmotic  pressures  in  plant  cells. 
Further  studies  concerned  the  resistance 
to  flow  of  sap  presented  by  the  channels 
of  transport  and  its  relation  to  the  de- 
tailed structure  of  wood. 

In  his  presidential  address  to  the  botany 
section  of  the  British  Association  (1922) 
he  put  forward  the  view  that  rates  of 
transport  of  sugar  were  such  that  the 
channel  of  transport  could  not  possibly  be 
the  phloem  but  must  be  the  xylem.  But 
Dixon's  former  student,  T.  G.  Mason, 
working  on  the  subject  of  transport  of 
sugar  in  yams  and  later  in  cotton,  showed 
that  the  phloem  was  responsible  for  the 
transport  and  that  what  Dixon  regarded 
as  an  impossibly  fast  rate  of  movement 
did  occur.  The  mechanism  remained  to  be 
elucidated. 

Dixon  was  full  of  ideas,  some  of  them 
terrifying,  as  when  he  measured  hydro- 
static pressures  in  leaf  cells  by  compress- 
ing leafy  shoots  in  glass  containers  which 
occasionally  blew  up.  He  grew  seedlings  in 
sterile  culture  in  1892,  some  thirty  years 
before  this  became  a  fashionable  research 
procedure.  He  published  in  1902  the  com- 
pensated manometric  technique  for  study 
of  respiration  and  photosynthesis  in  plants 
which  was  subsequently  much  extended 
by  others.  In  the  very  different  field  of 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Dodgson 


taxonomy,  he  developed  'keys'  for  the 
recognition  of  timbers,  especially  maho- 
gany, and  worked  on  the  experimental 
taxonomy  of  some  of  the  saxifrages  of 
county  Kerry.  His  publications  included 
Transpiration  and  the  Ascent  of  Sap  in 
Plants  (1914)  and  Practical  Plant  Biology 
(1922). 

The  School  of  Botany  in  Trinity  College, 
Dublin,  was  Dixon's  creation.  Provided  by 
the  generosity  of  Viscount  (later  the  Earl 
of)  Iveagh  [q.v.],  the  building  and  labora- 
tory, opened  in  1907,  were  Dixon's  design 
and  the  School  and  the  activities  within  it 
were  an  expression  of  his  orderly  and  very 
active  nature.  His  critical  and  at  the  same 
time  cordial  and  delightful  personality 
pervaded  it.  Visitors  came  from  all  over 
the  world  and  left  enriched  with  many  an 
idea  from  Dixon's  fertile  mind  and  with 
an  enhanced  opinion  of  the  scientific 
contributions  made  in  Dublin. 

Dixon,  who  retired  from  his  chair  in 
1949,  served  in  many  public  capacities. 
He  was  a  commissioner  of  Irish  Lights ; 
a  trustee  of  the  National  Library  of  Ire- 
land ;  and  a  member  of  the  council  of  the 
International  Institute  of  Agriculture. 
He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1908  and  was 
Croonian  lecturer  in  1937;  was  awarded 
the  Boyle  medal  (1916)  of  the  Royal  Dub- 
lin Society  over  which  he  later  presided; 
and  was  an  honorary  fellow  of  Trinity 
College.  He  was  a  visiting  professor  to  the 
university  of  California  in  1927  and  was 
an  honorary  life  member  of  the  American 
Society  of  Plant  Physiologists. 

In  1907  Dixon  married  Dorothea  Mary, 
daughter  of  Sir  John  Franks,  secretary  of 
the  Irish  Land  Commission.  They  had 
three  sons  all  of  whom  maintained  the 
tradition  of  academic  distinction,  one  as  a 
neurologist,  and  two  as  biochemists  and 
fellows  of  King's  College,  Cambridge. 

Dixon  died  in  Dublin  20  December 
1953. 

[W.  R.  G.  Atkins  in  Obituary  Notices  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ix,  1954; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

T.  A.  Bennet-Clark. 

DODGSON,    FRANCES    CATHARINE 

(1883-1954),  artist,  was  born  15  December 
1883  at  Oxford,  the  eldest  daughter  of 
the  Rev.  W.  A.  Spooner  [q.v.],  afterwards 
warden  of  New  College,  Oxford,  by  his 
wife,  Frances  Wycliffe,  daughter  of  Har- 
vey Goodwin  [q.v.],  bishop  of  Carlisle.  At 
the  age  of  fifteen  she  studied  drawing  at 
the  Ruskin  School  at  Oxford,  and  later 
attended   the    Royal    Academy    Schools 


and  (for  a  short  period)  the  Slade  School. 
In  1913  she  married  Campbell  Dodgson 
[q.v.],  keeper  of  prints  and  drawings  in  the 
British  Museum,  and  from  that  time  until 
her  husband's  retirement  in  1932  she  was 
chiefly  occupied  with  social  and  domestic 
duties  in  her  house  in  Montagu  Square, 
and  found  little  time  for  drawing  or 
painting.  An  oil-painting  by  her,  a  por- 
trait of  Dean  Inge  (q.v.,  whose  wife  was 
her  first  cousin),  was  exhibited  at  the 
Royal  Academy  in  1923;  but  it  was  not 
until  the  middle  of  the  thirties  that 
Catharine  Dodgson  began  again  to  indulge 
her  artistic  inclinations,  and  it  was  from 
then  onwards  that  most  of  her  surviving 
work  was  produced.  She  then  abandoned 
painting  in  oils,  and  her  favourite  medium, 
in  which  she  achieved  considerable  suc- 
cess, was  drawing  in  pen  or  black  or  red 
chalk,  with  transparent  washes  of  pale 
brown,  often  on  coloured  paper  and 
heightened  with  white. 

Between  1933  and  1945  she  exhibited 
about  a  dozen  portrait-drawings  at  the 
Royal  Academy,  including  those  of  her 
husband  (1983,  now  in  the  British 
Museum),  of  Dean  Inge  (1984,  the  property 
of  Mr.  Craufurd  Inge),  and  of  Sir  Thomas 
Barlow  (q.v.,  1936,  the  property  of  Miss 
Helen  Barlow).  She  had  a  real  flair  for 
catching  a  likeness,  her  portrait-drawings 
were  in  great  demand,  and  she  could  have 
had  many  more  commissions  than  she  had 
time  or  inclination  to  carry  out.  She  re- 
mained in  the  best  sense  an  amateur ;  she 
was  too  conscientious  to  enjoy  a  commis- 
sion for  its  own  sake,  and  she  lacked  the 
self-confidence  which  enables  a  profes- 
sional portrait  painter  to  impose  his 
personahty  on  a  subject  in  which  he  is  not 
particularly  interested.  Her  best  portraits, 
therefore,  were  those  of  her  own  family,  of 
intimate  friends,  or  of  children. 

A  visit  with  her  husband  to  Wiirzburg, 
and  the  charming  gardens  of  Veitshoch- 
heim,  provided  a  new  source  of  inspira- 
tion, with  equally  successful  results ;  and 
excellent  examples  of  her  elegant  draw- 
ings of  German  rococo  sculpture,  made  on 
this  occasion,  are  now  in  the  Ashmolean 
Museum  at  Oxford  and  in  various  private 
collections.  In  the  same  vein  she  drew  the 
busts  of  Sir  Christopher  Wren  by  Edward 
Pierce  (Ashmolean)  and  Charles  II  by 
Honore  Pelle  in  the  Victoria  and  Albert 
Museum.  She  also  produced  some  draw- 
ings of  dancers  in  the  Covent  Garden 
Opera  in  the  same  medium,  and,  towards 
the  end  of  the  war  of  1939-45,  some 
sketches  of  Regent's  Park,  rather  more 


Dodgson 


ID.N.B.  1951-1960 


elaborate  in  colour,  and  remarkable  for 
their  lightness  and  deftness  of  touch. 

Her  husband's  illness  a  year  or  two 
before  his  death  in  1948  affected  her  own 
health  very  seriously,  and  she  hardly  drew 
again;  she  died  in  London  30  April  1954. 
Two  exhibitions  of  her  drawings  were  held 
at  Colnaghi's  in  Bond  Street,  in  the  autumn 
of  1936  and  in  the  spring  of  1939,  and  both 
were  warmly  praised  by  the  critics.  She 
was  modest  to  a  fault,  and  was  inclined 
to  attribute  this  success  to  the  writers' 
friendship  with  her  husband,  who  was  of 
course  widely  known  and  respected  in 
artistic  circles.  But  few  seemed  to  share 
this  view,  least  of  all  Campbell  Dodgson 
himself,  who  was  genuinely  proud  of  her 
achievements.  A  loan  exhibition  in  her 
memory  was  held  in  the  same  gallery  after 
her  death,  October-November  1954. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
J.  Byam  Shaw. 

DONAT,      (FRIEDERICH)     ROBERT 

(1905-1958),  actor,  the  fourth  and  youngest 
son  of  Ernst  Emil  Donat,  civil  engineer 
of  Polish  origin,  and  his  wife.  Rose 
Ahce  Green,  was  born  at  Withington, 
Manchester,  18  March  1905.  He  went  to 
the  Central  School,  Manchester,  and  later 
took  a  stage-training  under  James  Ber- 
nard of  the  same  city.  In  1924  he  joined 
Sir  Frank  Benson  [q.v.]  whose  company 
was  not  then  so  constantly  on  tour  as  it 
had  been;  thus  Donat  could  alternate 
continuing  membership  with  seasons  in 
provincial  repertory.  This  was  well-varied 
and  helpful  schooling:  the  Shakespearian 
apprenticeship  was  valuable,  for  among 
Donat's  enduring  distinctions  was  the 
purity  of  his  diction  and  the  beauty  of  his 
voice.  He  worked  for  a  while  with  Alfred 
Wareing  whose  repertory  seasons  at  the 
Theatre  Royal,  Huddersfield,  had  un- 
usual ambition  and  quality.  In  1928  he 
began  a  year  at  the  Playhouse  in  Liver- 
pool and  this  was  followed  by  important 
work  at  Terence  Gray's  Festival  Theatre 
in  Cambridge  where  plays  by  Euripides, 
Pirandello,  Sheridan,  and  Shakespeare 
gave  him  opportunities  to  experiment  in  a 
range  of  widely  different  and  challenging 
leading  roles. 

He  made  his  mark  decisively  in  Lon- 
don in  1931  when  he  created  the  part 
of  Gideon  Sam  in  a  dramatization  of 
Precious  Bane  by  Mary  Webb  [q.v.].  His 
handsome  features  and  beautifxil  delivery, 
together  with  the  equipment  of  technique 
acquired  in  his  repertory  years,  promised 
promotion  to  the  front  rank  and  there  was 


confirmation  of  his  powers  in  the  Malvern 
Festival  of  1931.  Again  at  Malvern,  in 
1933,  he  played  the  two  Camerons  in 
A  Sleeping  Clergyman  by  James  Bridie 
[q.v.] ;  the  piece  was  transferred  to  Lon- 
don and  had  a  long  run  at  the  "Piccadilly 
Theatre.  Donat's  performance  of  the  two 
roles,  the  dying  consumptive  and  his  son 
the  brilliant  doctor,  was  memorable  and 
repeated  in  a  revival  of  1947.  To  the 
simulation  of  a  man  with  lung-trouble  he 
brought  his  own  knowledge  of  pain,  for  he 
was  himself  a  sufferer  from  asthma  and  his 
later  career  was  much  impeded  by  illness. 

His  success  carried  him  to  important 
film  work,  especially  with  (Sir)  Alexander 
Korda  [q.v.]  who  was  then  recruiting  re- 
markable casts  from  the  leading  players 
of  the  living  stage.  His  notable  appearances 
were  in  The  Private  Life  of  Henry  VIII 
(in  which  Charles  Laughton  played  the 
king),  The  Ghost  Goes  West,  and  as  another 
Scottish  doctor,  Andrew  Manson,  in  a 
screen-version  of  A.  J.  Cronin's  The 
Citadel.  Perhaps  his  most  widely  ap- 
preciated film-role  was  that  of  Mr.  Chips, 
the  ageing  schoolmaster  well  known  to 
readers  of  the  novel  by  James  Hilton  [q.v.]. 

Donat  continued  to  mingle  screen-work 
with  important  returns  to  the  stage,  tak- 
ing on  the  cares  and  risks  of  management 
at  the  Queen's  Theatre  in  1936  when  he 
presented  J.  L.  Hodson's  Red  Night. 
During  the  war  he  gave  vigour  and  volume 
to  the  eloquence  of  Captain  Shotover  in 
a  revival  of  Shaw's  Heartbreak  House 
(1943).  At  the  Westminster  Theatre  in 

1945  he  was  much  liked  in  a  plebeian 
comedy  part  in  The  Cure  for  Love  by 
Walter  Greenwood.  His  last  venture  as  a 
manager  was  at  the  Aldwych  Theatre  in 

1946  when  he  staged  Much  Ado  About 
Nothing  with  himself  as  Benedick.  His 
spirited  rendering  of  the  wordy  warfare 
with  Beatrice  was  exemplary  at  a  time 
when  the  speaking  on  the  British  stage  was 
much  criticized.  He  gave  another  lesson  in 
delivery  when  he  joined  the  Old  Vic  com- 
pany in  1953  to  play  Becket  in  a  produc- 
tion of  T.  S.  Eliot's  Murder  in  the  Cathedral. 
Directed  by  (Sir)  Robert  Helpmann,  this 
was  one  of  the  most  effective  renderings  of 
a  play  frequently  revived.  Donat  was  far 
from  being  a  player  attached  to  one  type 
of  character.  He  was,  however,  seen  at  his 
best  in  parts  which  asked  for  splendour 
of  voice  and  dignity  of  bearing  and  his 
Becket  was  held  by  those  who  knew  the 
scope  of  his  work  to  have  a  singular 
beauty.  Asceticism  was  a  quality  which 
came  naturally  to  his  delicacy  of  feature. 


804 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Donnan 


but  he  had  learned  in  his  repertory  years 
to  be  richly  versatile.  In  naming  his 
favourite  roles  he  included  the  two  gusty, 
outspoken  Camerons  of  A  Sleeping  Clergy- 
man. Here,  and  in  Murder  in  the  Cathedral, 
were  perhaps  the  summits  of  his  achieve- 
ment on  the  living  stage. 

During  the  last  five  years  of  his  life 
Donat  was  a  constant  invalid.  He  did  not 
mind  the  seclusion  since  he  was  of  a  shy 
and  retiring  disposition  and  had  never 
sought  the  bright  lights  of  publicity.  But 
the  frustration  was  galling  for  an  actor 
who  was  only  just  entering  his  fifties  and 
should  have  been  at  the  height  of  his 
powers.  He  died  in  London  9  June  1958. 

In  1929  Donat  married  Ella  Annesley 
Voysey,  by  whom  he  had  two  sons  and 
one  daughter,  but  the  marriage  was  subse- 
quently dissolved.  In  1953  he  married  the 
actress  Dorothy  Renee  Ascherson. 

[J.  C.  Trewin,  Robert  Donat,  1968;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Ivor  Brown. 

DONNAN,   FREDERICK   GEORGE 

(1870-1956),  physical  chemist,  was  born 
in  Colombo  6  September  1870,  the  second 
of  the  six  children  of  William  Donnan, 
a  merchant  of  Belfast,  and  his  wife,  Jane 
Rose  Turnley  Liggate,  also  a  native  of 
Northern  Ireland.  All  Donnan' s  early  life 
was  spent  in  Ulster  whither  he  returned  at 
the  age  of  three,  retaining  no  recollection 
of  Ceylon.  In  1879  an  accident  caused  the 
loss  of  his  left  eye,  a  disability  which  did 
not  prevent  him  from  playing  a  quite 
remarkable  game  of  lawn  tennis ;  he  was 
also  a  first-class  swimmer  and  a  notable 
high  diver.  He  attended  the  Belfast  Royal 
Academy  where  he  acquired  a  good  know- 
ledge of  English  literature  and  history.  His 
chief  interest  was  mathematics  and  physi- 
cal science ;  there  being  no  laboratories  in 
the  Academy  he  did  some  practical  work 
externally.  At  the  Queen's  College,  Bel- 
fast, he  was  remarkably  successful  in  his 
studies,  made  quite  a  good  income  from 
scholarships  and  fellowships,  and  obtained 
his  B.A.  (1892)  and  M.A.  (1894)  from  the 
Royal  University  of  Ireland. 

He  went  next  to  the  university  of  Leip- 
zig where  he  did  a  year's  chemistry  under 
Wislicenus  and  then  joined  Ostwald  to 
devote  himself  to  the  younger  and  rising 
discipline  of  physical  chemistry.  He  ob- 
tained his  Ph.D.  summa  cum  laude  in  1896. 
He  finished  his  European  tour  with  a 
year  in  the  laboratory  of  J.  H.  van't  Hofl 
in  Berlin  where  he  studied  experimentally 
the  hydrates  of  calcium  sulphate  and  the 


vapour  pressures  of  a  number  of  saturated 
aqueous  solutions  of  single  and  double 
salts  occurring  in  van't  Hoff' s  investiga- 
tions on  oceanic  salt  deposits. 

In  1897  Donnan  settled  down  quietly 
for  a  year's  hard  work  at  home  *to  read 
more  deeply  in  the  literature  of  physical 
chemistry'.  In  1898  he  went  to  University 
College,  London,  as  a  senior  research 
student  in  the  laboratory  of  (Sir)  William 
Ramsay  (whose  notice  he  subsequently 
contributed  to  this  Dictionary).  It  was  not 
until  1901  that  he  took  his  first  paid 
post,  as  an  assistant  lecturer  in  Ramsay's 
laboratory;  in  1902-3  he  was  assistant 
professor  in  University  College;  and  in 
1903-4  lecturer  in  organic  chemistry  in 
the  Royal  College  of  Science,  Dublin.  In 
1904,  however,  a  new  chair  of  physical 
chemistry  was  founded  in  the  university  of 
Liverpool  by  Sir  John  Brunner  and  Don- 
nan was  invited  to  be  its  first  occupant. 
He  supervised  the  building  of  the  Mus- 
pratt  laboratory  of  physical  chemistry 
and  was  its  director  from  1906  to  1913. 
He  then  succeeded  Ramsay  at  University 
College,  London,  where  he  remained  until 
his  retirement  in  1937. 

In  the  war  of  1914-18  Donnan  was  a 
member  of  a  number  of  committees  in- 
cluding those  on  chemical  warfare  and 
nitrogen  products.  He  played  an  impor- 
tant part  in  the  early  stages  of  the  re- 
search work  at  University  College  on 
synthetic  ammonia  and  nitric  acid  and  he 
assisted  K.  B.  Quinan  in  the  designs  of 
plant  for  the  fixation  of  nitrogen  and  for 
the  production  of  mustard  *gas'.  He  was 
appointed  C.B.E.  in  1920.  His  connections 
with  the  chemical  industry  continued 
after  the  war :  he  was  research  consultant 
to  Brunner  Mond  &  Co.  from  1920  to  1926 
and  a  member  of  the  research  council  of 
Imperial  Chemical  Industries  from  1926  to 
1939.  He  was  particularly  successful  in 
raising  money  from  industry  and  other 
sources  to  assist  scientific  research. 

Although  pre-eminently  a  teacher, 
Donnan  was  internationally  known  as  a 
colloid  chemist  and  in  particular  for  his 
theory  of  membrane  equilibrimn.  He  was 
elected  F.R.S.  in  1911  and  awarded  the 
Davy  medal  in  1928.  He  received  the 
Longstaff  medal  (1924)  of  the  Chemical 
Society  over  which  he  presided  in  1937-9, 
had  no  fewer  than  eleven  honorary  degrees, 
and  was  an  honorary  member  of  numerous 
academies  and  learned  societies.  His  range 
of  interests  was  extraordinarily  wide ;  his 
early  appreciation  of  the  necessity  of  a 
imited  Europe  led  him  to  the  study  of 


805 


Donnan 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


artificial  languages,  whilst  in  his  old  age 
he  was  much  preoccupied  with  cosmic 
problems. 

Donnan  was  tall,  good  looking,  well 
built  and  of  great  physical  strength  and 
endurance.  Until  he  smiled  his  face  in 
repose  was  often  stern  and  rather  sad. 
When  he  began  to  talk  he  radiated  charm 
and  sympathy.  A  tremendous  worker,  he 
kept  odd  hours:  to  retire  at  1  a.m.  was 
early  for  him  and  2,  3,  or  even  4  a.m.  were 
not  infrequent.  He  was  devoted  to  his 
friends  and  had  his  likes  and  disUkes.  To 
accompany  him  abroad  was  to  take  part 
in  a  royal  progress. 

After  his  retirement  Donnan  remained 
in  his  home  in  Woburn  Square  until  1940 
when  he  left  only  twelve  hours  before  it 
was  destroyed  by  a  bomb.  He  went  to  live 
at  Sittingbourne,  and  died  at  Canterbury 
16  December  1956.  He  never  married  and 
owed  much  to  two  sisters  who  played  an 
unobtrusive  but  important  part  in  his  life 
and  both  of  whom  died  in  the  same  year. 

[F.  A.  Freeth  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iii,  1957; 
personal  knowledge.]  F.  A.  Freeth. 

DOUGLAS,  CLIFFORD  (HUGH)  (1879- 
1952),  originator  of  the  theory  of  Social 
Credit,  was  born  in  Stockport,  Cheshire, 
20  January  1879,  the  youngest  son  of 
Hugh  Douglas,  draper,  by  his  wife,  Louisa 
Hordern.  Educated  at  Stockport  Gram- 
mar School,  he  entered  on  an  engineering 
and  managerial  career  which  took  him  to 
India  as  chief  engineer  and  manager  of  the 
British  Westinghouse  Company.  In  1910 
he  spent  two  terms  at  Pembroke  College, 
Cambridge.  During  the  war  of  1914-18,  in 
which  he  reached  the  rank  of  major  in  the 
Royal  Flying  Corps  and  the  Royal  Air 
Force,  he  was  sent  to  the  Royal  Aircraft 
Factory  at  Famborough  to  reorganize 
production  and  cost  accounting.  He  had 
already  been  reflecting  on  society's  failure 
to  utilize  the  full  possibihties  of  modern 
technology;  his  work  at  Farnborough 
suggested  an  explanation  of  this,  which 
in  turn  led  to  the  theory  of  Social  Credit. 
In  every  productive  establishment  the 
amount  of  money  issued  in  a  given  period 
as  wages,  salaries,  and  dividends,  which  he 
took  to  be  the  amount  available  to  pur- 
chase the  goods  produced  in  that  period, 
was  less  than  the  collective  price  of  those 
products.  To  remedy  the  supposed  chronic 
deficiency  of  purchasing  power  he  advo- 
cated the  issuance  of  additional  money  to 
consmners,  or  of  subsidies  to  producers  to 
enable  them  to  set  prices  below  costs.  By 


these  devices,  which  came  to  be  known 
as  Social  Credit,  production  was  to  be 
liberated  from  the  price  system,  inaugu- 
rating an  era  of  plenty,  freedom,  leisure, 
and  human  dignity,  without  altering  the 
system  of  private  ownership,  profit,  and 
enterprise. 

Convinced  that  his  analysis  was  the  sole 
key  to  the  understanding  and  remedying 
of  the  world's  ills,  Douglas  devoted  himself 
to  developing  its  implications  and  pressing 
its  claims.  He  found  a  platform  in  1919  in 
the  New  Age,  edited  by  A.  R.  Orage  [q.v.], 
whose  critique  of  society  had  anticipated 
Douglas's,  and  who  became  an  enthusias- 
tic convert  to  Douglas's  economic  theory, 
publishing  Douglas's  first  book,  Economic 
Democracy  (1920),  serially  in  the  New  Age 
(June- August  1919)  and  collaborating  in 
his  second,  Credit-Power  and  Democracy 
(1920).  In  1921  and  1922  Douglas's  ideas 
attracted  considerable  public  attention 
and  earned  the  opposition  of  socialist 
writers  and  of  the  Labour  Party,  which 
formally  rejected  his  doctrine  in  1922.  In 
1923  Douglas  was  brought  to  Ottawa  by 
some  Canadian  admirers  to  expound  his 
views  to  the  Canadian  House  of  Commons 
committee  on  banking  and  commerce. 

Public  discussion  of  Social  Credit  de- 
clined in  England  after  1922,  but  with 
the  depression  of  the  thirties  it  revived 
in  greater  volume,  supported  now  by 
the  New  Age,  the  New  English  Weekly, 
Douglas's  own  weekly  Social  Credit,  and 
various  pamphlets  and  books,  some  of 
which  went  through  several  editions. 
Douglas  testified  to  the  Macmillan  com- 
mittee on  finance  and  industry  (1930)  and 
lectured  as  far  afield  as  New  Zealand  and 
Canada  in  1934. 

By  the  late  thirties  the  EngUsh  Social 
Credit  movement  under  Douglas's  rather 
autocratic  leadership  had  dwindled  into 
an  esoteric  sect.  But  it  had  struck  roots  in 
Western  Canada,  where  Douglas  had  had 
a  following  from  the  early  twenties.  When 
he  visited  Alberta  in  1934  he  won  such 
wide  support  that  the  ageing  United 
Farmers'  government,  in  spite  of  their 
scepticism  of  Social  Credit,  appointed  him 
(early  in  1935)  principal  reconstruction 
adviser  to  the  government  of  Alberta, 
with  a  two-year  contract.  However,  they 
were  swept  out  of  office  by  the  more 
zealous  Social  Credit  League  in  the  elec- 
tions of  August  1935.  Relations  between 
Douglas  and  the  new  government  soon 
became  strained.  He  resigned  as  adviser  in 
1936,  publishing  his  account  of  the  matter 
in  The  Alberta  Experiment  (1937).  A  back- 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Douglas,  G.  N. 


benchers*  revolt  in  1937  compelled  the 
government  to  ask  Douglas's  further  help. 
He  sent  two  of  his  staff,  who  prepared 
legislation  which,  when  enacted,  was 
invalidated  by  federal  authorities.  The 
provincial  government  remained  Social 
Credit  in  name  but  virtually  abandoned 
Douglas's  principles. 

Douglas's  earlier  writings  were  remark- 
able for  their  reasoned  protest  against 
the  frustration  of  individuality  by  business 
civilization.  But  his  economic  theory  never 
surmounted  his  initial  fallacy  of  reasoning 
from  one  firm  to  the  whole  economy.  And 
his  social  and  political  theory  were  vitiated 
by  his  engineering  concepts.  He  was  driven 
to  attribute  the  thwarting  of  technology, 
and  hence  of  human  freedom,  to  a  con- 
spiracy of  world  Jewry,  freemasonry, 
international  finance,  Bolshevism,  and 
Nazism;  and  finally  to  denigrate  demo- 
cracy and  denounce  the  secret  ballot. 

Douglas  was  married  twice:  first  to 
Constance  Mary,  daughter  of  Edward 
Phillips,  of  Royston  House,  Hertford- 
shire; secondly  to  Edith  Mary,  daughter 
of  George  Desborough  Dale,  of  the  Indian 
Civil  Service.  He  had  one  daughter  by 
his  second  wife.  He  was  a  fisherman  and 
yachtsman,  and  for  a  time  ran  a  yacht- 
building  shipyard  at  Swanwick,  Southamp- 
ton. He  died  in  Dundee  29  September  1952. 
A  painting  by  Augustus  John  was  in  the 
Royal  Academy  exhibition  of  1934. 

[C.  B.  Maepherson,  Democracy  in  Alberta, 
1953.]  C.  B.  Macpherson. 

DOUGLAS,  (GEORGE)  NORMAN 
(1868-1952),  writer,  was  born  at  Thurin- 
gen,  Vorarlberg,  8  December  1868,  the 
third  son  of  John  Sholto  Douglass,  and  his 
wife,  Vanda,  daughter  of  Baron  Ernst  von 
Poelnitz.  Her  mother  was  a  daughter  of 
James  Ochoncar,  seventeenth  Lord  Forbes 
[q.v.].  Douglas's  father  managed  some 
cotton  mills  in  Vorarlberg  for  his  father 
John  Douglass,  fourteenth  laird  of  Til- 
quhillie,  near  Banchory.  Douglas's  first 
language  was  German  and  he  lived  at 
Thiiringen  until  his  sixth  year.  His  father 
was  killed  in  an  accident  in  1874;  his 
mother  soon  married  again ;  and  the  child 
was  brought  up  by  his  relatives  in  Scot- 
land and  England. 

In  1881  he  was  sent  to  Uppingham  un- 
der Edward  Thring  [q.v.].  His  reaction 
against  this  regime  led  to  his  being  sent 
in  1883  to  Karlsruhe  Gymnasium  where 
he  remained  until  1889.  In  addition  to  a 
thorough  classical  course,  he  learnt  Itahan, 
began  Russian,  and  became  an  accom- 


plished pianist.  An  early  passion  for 
natural  history  was  further  developed  and 
in  1886  he  made  some  contributions  to  the 
Zoologist.  In  1888  during  a  tour  of  Italy  he 
first  visited  Capri. 

At  twenty-one  Douglas  had  a  good  in- 
come, lived  a  full  social  life,  and  prepared 
for  the  Foreign  Office  which  he  entered  in 
1893.  A  year  later  he  was  posted  to  St. 
Petersburg  and  in  due  course  became 
third  secretary.  He  resigned  this  post  in 
1896,  bought  a  villa  at  Posilipo,  and 
devoted  himself  to  a  wide  range  of  studies 
and  further  travel.  Until  the  end  of  his 
Russian  period  he  had  made  more  contri- 
butions to  English  and  German  zoological 
journals  and  written  an  official  report  on 
The  Pumice  Stone  Industry  of  the  Lipari 
Islands  (1895)  which  he  claimed  later  led 
to  the  abolition  of  child-labour  there. 

In  1898  Douglas  married  a  cousin 
(connected  through  the  Poelnitz  family), 
Elizabeth  (Elsa)  Theobaldina,  daughter 
of  Augustus  FitzGibbon.  They  lived  at 
Posilipo,  travelled  in  India  and  Tunisia 
(1902)  and  collaborated  in  Unprofessional 
Tales  (1901)  with  the  joint  pseudonym  of 
Normyx.  The  book  made  no  mark,  but 
Douglas  used  some  of  the  contents  in 
Experiments  (1925)  and  Nerinda  (1929). 
He  obtained  a  divorce  in  1904.  He  now 
moved  to  Capri,  cultivated  property  there 
and  wrote  eight  monographs  on  the  is- 
land privately  printed  (limited  ed.  1930). 
Hitherto  he  had  signed  his  name  'G.  Nor- 
man Douglass'.  About  1908  he  adopted 
'Norman  Douglas'  for  all  purposes. 

Substantial  loss  of  income  about  1907 
compelled  him  to  sell  his  property  on  Capri 
and  turn  to  writing.  An  essay  on  Poe 
(1909)  was  his  first  serious  contribution 
to  literature.  From  1910  to  1916  he  was 
mainly  in  London  and  wrote  a  number  of 
articles  later  embodied  in  his  travel  books. 
Siren  Land  (1911)  about  the  Sorrentino 
peninsula,  Fountains  in  the  Sand  (1912) 
about  Tunisia,  and  Old  Calabria  (1915). 
Though  not  financially  successful  these 
books  gained  him  recognition  and  from 
1912  to  1915  he  was  assistant  editor  of  the 
English  Review.  This  post  brought  him 
acquaintance  with  D.  H.  Lawrence,  Ed- 
ward Thomas  [qq.v.],  and  others.  An  older 
friend  was  Joseph  Conrad  [q.v.]. 

Douglas  had  been  working  for  some  time 
on  South  Wind.  Meanwhile  there  appeared 
London  Street  Games  (1916),  'a  breathless 
catalogue'  reveaUng  an  intimate  know- 
ledge of  children.  In  the  same  year  he  left 
England,  not  to  return  for  twenty-four 
years.  He  went  first  to  Italy  where  he 


307 


Douglas,  G.  N. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


finished  South  Wind  on  Capri.  From  1917 
to  1918  he  was  in  France,  mainly  in  Paris, 
in  a  state  of  extreme  poveri^y.  South  Wind 
was  published  in  1917  and  was  an  im- 
mediate success,  appealing,  with  its  ironi- 
cal treatment  of  conventional  morality 
and  its  gay  setting,  to  a  war-weary 
generation.  Nevertheless  he  was  unable  to 
continue  his  next  novel,  begun  at  St. 
Malo  in  1918,  for  want  of  food.  He  finished 
it  at  Menton  where  he  was  'feeling  com- 
fortable again'.  This  book  was  They  Went 
(1920),  and  in  the  next  three  years  he 
achieved  the  mellow  quality  of  Alone 
(1921),  his  favourite  book,  and  Together 
(1923),  largely  recollections  of  his  child- 
hood in  Vorarlberg.  By  this  time  Douglas 
had  settled  in  Florence  where,  with  inter- 
ludes of  travel,  he  remained  until  1937. 
This  was  the  most  serene  epoch  of  his  life. 
He  was  now  famous  and  fairly  well-off  and 
much  visited  by  post-war  writers  on  whom 
his  influence  was  great.  Renewed  acquain- 
tance with  D.  H.  Lawrence  led  to  a  literary 
quarrel,  the  fruit  of  which  was  the  bril- 
liant invective  of  D.  H.  Lawrence  and 
Maurice  Magnus  (1924).  Throughout  these 
years  his  almost  inseparable  companion 
was  Giuseppe  (Pino)  Orioli  who  also 
helped  him  to  pubUsh  several  limited 
editions  most  of  which  were  later  repub- 
lished commercially  in  London.  Meanwhile 
he  had  written  Looking  Back  (1933),  a  dis- 
cursive autobiography. 

In  1937  Douglas  left  Florence  and  was 
chiefly  in  France  until  1940  when  he  re- 
treated to  Lisbon,  and  finally  retimied  to 
England.  An  Almanac  (1945),  a  calendar 
of  quotations,  revealed  the  gnomic  quality 
of  his  thought,  and  Late  Harvest  (1946) 
was  a  retrospective  commentary  with 
much  autobiographical  information.  He 
returned  to  Capri  in  1946  and  remained 
there  until  his  death,  9  February  1952. 

While  South  Wind  will  remain  the  most 
popular  and  influential  of  Douglas's  books, 
the  three  works  on  Southern  Italy  and 
Tunisia  are  generally  recognized  as  his 
finest  achievement.  To  them  he  brought  a 
trained  scientific  mind,  profound  learning, 
and  an  intimate  knowledge  born  of  re- 
peated visits.  The  same  qualities  appear 
in  all  his  works  together  with  his  unique 
personality  of  which  the  keynote  is  anti- 
asceticism  and  a  ruthless  denunciation  of 
'crooked  thinking'.  His  flexible  style, 
equal  to  every  mood,  ranging  over 
exuberant  gaiety,  sustained  argument, 
and  mellow  retrospection,  was  carefully 
developed  and  often  echoed  his  own  voice. 

Douglas  was  a  tall  man  of  distinguished 


presence  in  the  care  of  which  he  was 
scrupulous  and  even  conventional,  and  the 
fine  manners  of  his  breeding  never  failed 
him.  He  was  'pagan  to  the  core',  yet 
though  an  epicurean  he  was  no  sybarite ; 
his  habits  were  almost  austerely  methodi- 
cal. He  was,  at  different  times  of  his  life, 
an  ardent  lover  of  both  sexes.  His  adven- 
tures involved  exile  and  sudden  depar- 
tures, but  he  avoided  serious  trouble,  and 
the  evidence,  such  as  it  is,  comes  mainly 
from  his  own  writings.  His  great  humanity 
made  him  a  foe  to  all  cruelty  and  stupidity, 
and  he  won  the  friendship  of  the  moi^ 
diverse  types  of  people. 

Douglas  had  two  sons  by  his  marriage, 
the  younger  of  whom,  Robin  Douglas, 
was  the  author  of  Well,  LeVs  Eat  (1933), 
a  guide  to  London  restaurants,  to  which 
his  father  contributed  some  comments. 

A  bust  of  Douglas  by  George  Havard 
Thomas  was  exhibited  at  the  Royal 
Academy  in  1931  and  is  owned  by  his 
family.  A  drawing  by  Michael  Ayrton  is  in 
the  National  Portrait  Gallery. 

[Douglas's  own  works,  especially  Together^ 
1923,  Looking  Back,  1933,  and  Late  Harvest, 
1946;  Muriel  Draper,  Music  at  Midnight, 
1929;  G.  Orioli,  Moving  Along,  1934;  John 
Davenport  in  The  Twentieth  Century,  April 
1952,  and  Introduction  to  Old  Calabria,  1955 ; 
H.  M.  Tomlinson,  Norman  Douglas,  1952; 
R.  M.  Dawkins,  Norman  Douglas,  1952 ;  Con- 
stantino FitzGibbon,  Norman  Douglas,  1953; 
Nancy  Cunard,  Grand  Man,  1954;  Cecil 
Woolf,  A  Bibliography  of  Norman  Douglas, 
1954;  Robin  Douglas  in  The  Cornhill,  Sum- 
mer 1955;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  D.  M.  Low. 

DOUGLAS,  Sir  WILLIAM  SCOTT 
(1890-1953),  civil  servant,  was  born  in 
Edinburgh  20  August  1890,  the  elder 
child  and  only  son  of  Daniel  Douglas, 
solicitor,  and  his  wife,  Margaret  DougaK 
The  Douglases  were  an  old  Edinburgh 
family,  burghers  of  the  city.  William  Scott 
Douglas  (1815-83,  q.v.)  was  his  grand- 
father. Douglas  went  to  George  Heriot's 
School  and  Edinburgh  University  where 
he  won  the  Lanfine  bursary  in  economics 
(1911)  and  graduated  with  second  class 
honours  in  history  (1912).  In  1914  he 
passed  into  the  first  division  of  the  Civil 
Service  in  which  his  career  was  astonish- 
ingly varied.  He  had  a  natural  talent  for 
administration  and  could  turn  his  hand  to 
any  administrative  task  without  becoming 
deeply  involved  with  the  subject.  What 
fascinated  him  was  negotiation  and  man- 
agement, of  both  people  and  things;  at 
these  he  was  superbly  good. 


808 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Downey 


He  started  in  the  Customs  and  Excise 
department ;  but  in  1920  he  was  appointed 
financial  adviser  to  the  Allenstein  plebis- 
cite commission  which  dealt  with  adjust- 
ments to  the  frontiers  between  East 
Prussia  and  Poland.  There  he  attracted 
the  notice  of  Sir  John  (later  Lord)  Brad- 
bury [q.v.],  principal  British  delegate  to 
the  Reparation  Commission  in  Paris, 
whose  private  secretary  Douglas  became 
on  first  joining  the  delegation.  Like  many 
Scots  he  was  completely  at  home  in 
Paris,  learning  to  speak  French — and  not 
only  classical  French— almost  like  a 
native.  Gaiety  was  one  of  his  especial 
characteristics  and  his  six  years  in  Paris 
were  for  him  a  time  of  great  enjoyment. 
Customs  and  Excise,  to  which  he  returned 
in  1926,  was  never  his  spiritual  home,  but 
in  those  days  civil  servants  were  seldom 
consulted  about  their  wishes.  However,  in 
1929  he  transferred  to  the  Ministry  of 
Labour  to  face  the  tremendous  problem  of 
unemployment,  as  divisional  controller 
for  the  Midlands  (1931-3),  for  Scotland 
(1933-5),  and  as  an  assistant  secretary 
(1935-7).  In  1937  he  became  secretary  of 
the  Department  of  Health  for  Scotland 
where  he  was  a  popular  chief  and  did  a 
great  deal  to  bring  the  department  into 
the  administrative  structure  of  the  Ser- 
vice and  to  lay  the  foundations  of  its 
future. 

In  1939  Douglas  moved  to  the  Treasury 
as  third  secretary  in  charge  of  the  estab- 
lishment division,  succeeding  the  greatly 
loved  Sir  James  (Jimmy)  Rae  who  had 
done  so  much  to  make  the  Service  one  Ser- 
vice and  so  enable  it  to  take  the  strain 
of  war.  Douglas  was  probably  not  at  his 
happiest  without  his  own  machine  to 
manage ;  the  endless  struggle  to  keep  the 
fast-expanding  departments  amenable  to 
some  kind  of  financial  discipline  in  pay 
and  complements  hardly  suited  his  style. 
The  story  goes  that  he  settled  one  battle 
with  his  old  Scottish  department  by  play- 
ing for  it  at  golf ;  probably  the  Treasiuy 
came  off  best  since  he  was  a  scratch  per- 
former. His  major  contribution  in  the 
Treasury  lay  in  the  planning  and  manning 
of  the  new  departments  needed  for  war ;  in 
starting  the  'exchange  and  mart'  by  which 
the  Treasury  sought  to  place  experienced 
men  where  they  were  most  needed. 

In  1942  Sir  Andrew  Duncan  [q.v.]  re- 
turned to  the  Ministry  of  Supply  and 
picked  Douglas  to  replace  the  permanent 
secretary  who  was  in  ill  health.  The  two 
made  an  excellent  team.  Douglas  was  both 
adviser  and  friend  to  the  minister  and 


under  the  two  of  them  the  department 
worked  both  hard  and  effectively.  It  was  a 
difficult  Ministry  with  a  number  of  prima 
donnas  whom  Douglas  managed  with  an 
unfailing  s^ll  largely  concealed  by  his 
charm. 

In  1945  came  Douglas's  last^and  longest 
job,  with  his  transfer  to  the  Ministry  of 
Health  where  Aneurin  Bevan  [q.v.]  was 
setting  up  the  National  Health  Service. 
There  his  gift  for  negotiation  proved  in- 
valuable. It  was  not  the  detail,  even 
the  purpose,  of  the  health  service  which 
absorbed  him,  but  getting  it  across.  It  was 
an  immense  help  that  he  got  on  extremely 
well  with  the,  to  him,  new  world  of  the 
medical  profession  and  all  its  auxiliaries. 
Less  personally  involved  than  either  the 
minister  or  the  departmental  officers  who 
were  closest  to  the  operation,  he  could 
often  smooth  over  difficulties  or  suggest  a 
solution  to  an  impasse.  With  his  minister 
he  had  a  happy  and  easy  relationship 
founded  on  mutual  respect  although  the 
two  men  could  hardly  have  been  more 
different.  On  the  housing  side  he  took  a 
great  interest  in  the  production  of  non- 
traditional  houses. 

When  in  1951  the  housing  and  local 
government  side  of  the  Ministry  joined 
with  the  Ministry  of  Town  and  Country 
Planning  and  the  health  side  became  a 
separate  Ministry,  Douglas  stayed  with 
the  health  work  but  retired  later  in  the 
same  year.  He  acquired  several  director- 
ships and  particularly  enjoyed  one  at 
Slazengers,  for  golf  was  always  a  ruling 
passion.  He  was  chairman  of  the  Civil 
Service  preparatory  commission  which  in- 
vestigated the  form  the  public  service 
should  take  under  the  proposed  federation 
of  Central  Africa  and  his  retirement 
promised  to  be  as  varied  and  active  as 
his  Civil  Service  career,  but  he  died  at 
Bishop's  Stortford  17  February  1953.  He 
was  appointed  C.B.  (1938),  K.C.B.  (1943), 
G.C.B.  (1950),  and  K.B.E.  (1941). 

In  1919  Douglas  married  Vera  Paterson, 
daughter  of  George  Macpherson  Duffes, 
chief  assistant  keeper  of  the  Sasines  in 
Edinburgh,  whom  he  had  met  while  she 
was  still  at  school.  They  had  two  daugh- 
ters and  took  care  that  both  should  be 
born  in  Scotland:  both  went  to  St. 
Andrews. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Sharp. 

DOWNEY,  RICHARD  JOSEPH  (1881- 
1953),  Roman  Catholic  archbishop,  was 
born  at  Kilkenny,  Ireland,  5  May  1881, 


809 


Downey 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


the  eldest  of  three  children  and  only  son 
of  Thomas  Downey,  chemist,  by  his  wife, 
Minnie  Casey.  Educated  at  Enniscorthy 
by  the  Irish  Christian  Brothers  and,  after 
the  family  moved  to  Liverpool,  at  Our 
Lady  Immaculate  elementary  school, 
Everton,  he  entered  St.  Edward's  Col- 
lege, the  junior  diocesan  seminary,  in 
1894.  In  1901  he  went  to  St.  Joseph's  Col- 
lege, UphoUand,  near  Wigan,  for  profes- 
sional studies  in  philosophy  and  divinity, 
and  was  ordained  priest  in  1907.  He  failed 
by  half  a  mark  to  achieve  an  all-time 
record  by  being  top  in  every  subject  in 
the  curriculum.  Selected  for  postgraduate 
studies,  he  went  to  Rome  and  took  a  doc- 
torate of  divinity  with  distinction  at  the 
Gregorian  University  in  1911. 

Returning  to  England,  Downey  joined 
the  Catholic  Missionary  Society  in  Lon- 
don and  for  the  next  fifteen  years  was 
principally  engaged  in  preaching  and 
lecturing,  frequently  to  non-CathoUcs  and 
often  from  outdoor  platforms,  in  all  parts 
of  the  British  Isles.  He  preached  the  Len- 
ten course  at  Our  Lady  of  Lourdes  church, 
New  York,  in  1922  and  the  Advent  course 
in  1925,  on  each  occasion  carrying  out 
extensive  lecture  tours.  He  was  co-founder 
and  first  editor  of  the  Catholic  Gazette^ 
the  monthly  pubUcation  of  the  Missionary 
Society,  and  a  regular  contributor  to  con- 
temporary theological  and  philosophical 
reviews.  His  scholarship  earned  for  him 
membership  of  the  British  Psychological 
and  Aristotelian  societies  and  an  honorary 
fellowship  of  the  Philosophical  Society. 
During  his  last  six  years  in  London 
Downey  taught  theology  to  the  students 
of  three  religious  orders  and  became  pro- 
fessor of  philosophy  and  psychology  at 
the  Sacred  Heart  College,  Hammersmith. 
He  was  for  some  years  external  examiner 
in  philosophy  at  the  National  University 
of  Ireland.  In  1926  he  returned  to  St. 
Joseph's  College,  Upholland,  as  professor 
of  dogmatic  theology  and  dean  of  the 
departments  of  philosophy  and  theology, 
becoming  vice-rector  the  following  year. 

The  Holy  See  nominated  Downey  arch- 
bishop of  Liverpool  and  metropolitan  in 
1928  and  at  forty-seven  he  became  the 
youngest  Roman  Catholic  archbishop  in 
the  world.  He  also  provided  the  first 
instance  since  the  Reformation  of  a  priest 
in  Britain  being  elevated  to  the  archiepisco- 
pal  rank  without  previously  holding  some 
intermediate  dignity.  The  consecration  by 
the  cardinal  archbishop  of  Westminster 
took  place  at  the  Liverpool  pro-cathedral 
of  St.  Nicholas  on  21  September,  and  the 


pallium  was  bestowed  by  Pope  Pius  XI 
in  Rome  on  17  December.  At  a  great 
welcome-home  demonstration  in  Liver- 
pool shortly  afterwards  the  archbishop 
announced  his  dual  intention  of  com- 
pleting the  extension  of  the  seminary  then 
in  progress  and  of  building  a  cathedral 
worthy  of  the  city  and  the  archdiocese. 

He  set  himself  to  these  tasks  with 
vigour  and  vision,  and  in  1930  saw  the 
completion  of  the  seminary  at  a  cost  of 
£250,000.  In  the  same  year  he  purchased 
the  derelict  Brownlow  Hill  workhouse  and 
nine-acre  site  in  the  centre  of  Liverpool 
for  £100,000,  and  shortly  afterwards 
appointed  Sir  Edwin  Lutyens  [q.v.]  as 
architect  of  the  proposed  cathedral.  The 
foundation  stone  was  laid  at  Whitsuntide 
1933  in  the  presence  of  a  papal  legate. 
Only  the  crypt  was  finished  when  work 
came  to  a  halt  in  1941  and  in  post-war 
conditions  the  Lutyens  design  proved 
impracticable  to  complete. 

Early  in  his  episcopate  the  new  arch- 
bishop established  himself  as  a  champion 
of  the  voluntary  schools  and  although  the 
youngest  member  of  the  bench  of  bishops 
was  soon  elected  its  spokesman  on  educa- 
tional matters.  In  1929,  to  celebrate  the 
centenary  of  the  Catholic  Emancipation 
Act,  no  fewer  than  400,000  people  as- 
sembled at  his  invitation  in  the  Liverpool 
suburban  Thingwall  Park,  in  what  was 
described  as  the  greatest  gathering  of 
Catholics  in  this  country  since  the  Pil- 
grimage of  Grace.  In  the  following  year, 
when  the  Labour  Government  introduced 
education  legislation  unacceptable  to 
Catholics,  Downey  called  for  a  demonstra- 
tion in  the  city,  which  drew  150,000 
sympathizers  and  sealed  the  doom  of  the 
bill.  He  continued  the  struggle  for  de- 
nominational education  and  in  1937 
proposed  a  £750,000  scheme  for  the  re- 
organization of  all  Catholic  schools  in  his 
archdiocese.  The  Liverpool  Conservative 
council  disapproved  and  for  several 
months  the  Board  of  Education  withdrew 
its  educational  grants  to  the  city. 

Downey  was  only  five  feet  four  inches  in 
height  and  his  natural  obesity  gave  cause 
for  alarm  when  he  reached  eighteen  stone 
in  weight  in  1932.  In  August  of  that  year 
by  a  system  of  dieting  and  exercise  he  re- 
duced by  four  stone  and  continued  his 
efforts  until  he  had  halved  his  weight  to 
nine  stone  in  1939.  He  was  inundated  with 
letters  from  all  parts  of  the  world  asking 
for  the  secret  of  his  achievement. 

Downey  visited  Australia  in  1934-5  and 
Canada  in  1951,  but  the  war  years  of 


81Q 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Dreyer 


1939-45  found  him  in  his  episcopal  see 
denouncing  Hitlerism,  urging  the  war 
effort,  and  bringing  solace  to  the  afflicted. 
He  saw  the  destruction  of-  many  of  his 
churches,  convents,  and  schools,  and 
several  times  officiated  at  communal 
funerals  and  gave  broadcast  addresses. 

His  genial  personality  endeared  him  to 
all  sections  of  the  community  and  his 
natural  wit  and  eloquence  put  him  in  great 
demand  at  all  manner  of  sacred  and 
secular  functions.  He  was  adamant  on 
principle  and  those  who  attempted  com- 
promise found  in  him  an  accomplished 
controversialist.  By  appealing  to  the  best 
instincts  of  the  public  at  large  no  one  did 
more  to  eradicate  from  Liverpool  the 
religious  strife  which  had  besmirched  its 
name  in  the  first  two  decades  of  the 
century  and  lingered  on  into  the  thirties. 

Downey's  valued  services  as  a  member 
of  the  council  of  the  university  of  Liver- 
pool (1944-50)  were  acknowledged  by  the 
award  of  an  honorary  doctorate  in  1953, 
but  he  died  before  the  degree  ceremony 
took  place.  Three  other  universities  gave 
him  honorary  doctorates:  the  Gregorian, 
the  National  University  of  Ireland,  and 
Toronto.  The  Royal  Institute  of  British 
Architects  elected  him  an  honorary  fellow 
(1946)  and  the  Holy  See  appointed  him 
as  assistant  at  the  pontifical  throne  in 
the  silver  jubilee  year  of  his  episcopate. 
He  was  elected  a  freeman  of  Kilkenny, 
Limerick,  Sligo,  Wexford,  and  Clonmel  in 
his  native  Ireland,  but  he  always  described 
himself  as  'a  Lancashire  lad  from  Kil- 
kenny'. 

The  sixth  to  occupy  the  see  of  Liverpool 
since  the  restoration  of  the  hierarchy  in 
1850,  Downey  was  the  first  to  have  passed 
the  age  of  seventy.  He  died  in  a  nursing 
home  in  Woolton  16  June  1953,  and  was 
bm*ied  in  the  tomb  designed  by  Lutyens 
twenty  years  before  in  the  crypt  of  the 
future  cathedral,  after  the  largest  funeral 
Liverpool  had  ever  seen. 

A  portrait  of  Downey  by  Stanley  Reed 
was  hung  in  St.  Joseph's  College,  Up- 
hoUand,  and  belongs  to  the  archdiocese  of 
Liverpool. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Cyril  Taylor. 

DREYER,  Sir  FREDERIC  CHARLES 

(1878-1956),  admiral,  was  born  8  January 
1878  at  Parsonstown,  King's  County,  Ire- 
land, the  second  son  of  John  Louis  Emil 
Dreyer,  then  astronomer  with  the  fourth 
Earl  of  Rosse  [q.v.],  later  director  of 
Armagh    Observatory    (1882-1916),    and 


his  wife,  Katherine  Hannah,  daughter  of 
John  Tuthill,  of  Kilmore,  county  Limerick. 
His  elder  brother,  John  Tuthill  Dreyer 
(1876-1959),  entered  the  Royal  Artillery 
and  reached  the  rank  of  major-general. 
From  the  Royal  School,  Armagh,  Dreyer 
entered  the  Britannia  in  1891  where  he 
gained  maximum  promotion  time ;  he  ob- 
tained first  class  certificates  in  all  his  sub- 
lieutenants' courses,  and  was  promoted 
lieutenant  in  1898.  The  following  year  he 
joined  the  Excellent  gunnery  school  and 
passed  the  advance  course  with  honours 
to  become  a  fully  quahfied  gunnery 
specialist.  His  first  appointment  as  a  gun- 
nery lieutenant  was  to  the  instructional 
school  at  Sheerness. 

In  ]  903  Dreyer  became  gunnery  officer 
in  the  Exmouth  which  in  the  next  year 
became  flagship  of  Sir  Arthur  Wilson 
[q.v.],  commander-in-chief  of  the  Home, 
later  Channel,  Fleet.  In  the  fleet  com- 
petition for  the  best  battleship  in  gunnery 
firing,  the  Exmouth  was  easily  first.  In 
January  1907  he  was  appointed  for  gun- 
nery duties  to  the  Dreadnought,  the  first 
all-big-gun  battleship  built  for  the  navy. 
In  April  1907  he  was  posted  to  the  naval 
ordnance  department  in  the  Admiralty 
and  in  the  same  year  he  collaborated  with 
Arthur  Joseph  Hungerford  Pollen  in  the 
production  of  an  aim  corrector  to  improve 
the  control  of  gunfire  from  ships.  He  was 
promoted  commander  at  the  end  of  the 
year,  having  been  very  highly  recom- 
mended for  early  promotion  by  the  ad- 
mirals and  captains  of  the  ships  in  which 
he  had  served.  By  this  time  he  was  widely 
recognized  in  the  navy  as  the  most  ac- 
complished gunnery  officer  of  his  time. 

At  the  end  of- 1909  he  returned  to  sea 
in  the  Vanguard',  then  in  December  1910 
became  flag  commander  to  Sir  John  (later 
Earl)  Jellicoe  [q.v.],  commander-in-chief 
Atlantic  Fleet,  in  the  Prince  of  Wales. 
Jellicoe  was  himself  a  notable  gunnery 
officer  and  the  two  men  became  close 
friends.  Dreyer  had  done  brilliant  work  in 
improving  the  control  of  naval  gunfire, 
not  only  with  Pollen  but  also  on  his 
own  account,  being  responsible  for  an 
improved  method  of  rangefinding,  the 
invention  of  a  plotting  table  to  provide 
automatic  control  of  range  and  deflection 
in  relation  to  the  movement  through  the 
water  of  the  firing  ship  and  her  target,  and 
the  design  of  a  torpedo  director  for  under- 
water firings.  He  was  eventually  awarded 
£5,000  in  recognition  of' his  various  inven- 
tions. Jellicoe  very  strongly  recomended 
Dreyer  for  promotion  to  captain,  and  this 


311 


Dreyer 


came  in  1913  at  the  relatively  early  age  of 
thirty-five.  Dreyer  was  by  then  command- 
ing the  cruiser  Amphion.  Later  that  year 
he  was  appointed  to  the  new  battleship 
Orion  as  flag  captain  to  Sir  Robert 
Arbuthnot  [q.v.]. 

Dreyer  still  held  this  appointment  at 
the  outbreak  of  war,  but  in  1915  JelUcoe 
obtained  his  transfer  to  the  Iron  Duke, 
flagship  of  the  Grand  Fleet,  and  he  served 
as  Jellicoe's  flag  captain  until  the  end  of 
1916,  when  Jellicoe  went  to  the  Admiralty 
as  first  sea  lord.  Dreyer  was  present  at  the 
battle  of  Jutland  (31  May  1916)  and  was 
highly  praised  by  the  commander-in-chief 
in  his  official  dispatch.  Dreyer,  who  had 
been  awarded  the  C.B.  (civil)  in  1914 
for  his  services  to  naval  gunnery,  was 
appointed  C.B.  (military). 

The  battle  had  indicated  a  failm-e  on  the 
part  of  British  naval  shells  which  broke 
up  on  oblique  impact  on  armour  instead  of 
penetrating  and  bursting  inside.  Jellicoe 
formed  several  expert  committees  of 
serving  officers  in  the  fleet  to  inquire  into 
the  various  shortcomings  of  British 
materiel,  and  Dreyer  was  a  natural  selec- 
tion to  head  a  gunnery  inquiry.  As  a 
result,  a  new  design  of  heavy  armom:- 
piercing  shell  with  a  new  type  of  burster 
and  a  redesigned  fuse  was  put  into 
production. 

Dreyer  accompanied  JelUcoe  to  the 
Admiralty  to  take  over  the  duty  of  direc- 
tor of  naval  ordnance.  He  was  thus  able  to 
oversee  and  press  forward  the  manufac- 
ture of  these  new  shells  which,  according 
to  Jellicoe,  certainly  doubled  the  offensive 
power  of  heavy  naval  guns.  Dreyer  re- 
mained at  the  Admiralty  until  1919 — • 
from  1918  as  director  of  naval  artillery 
and  torpedoes — and  was  appointed  C.B.E. 
in  1919. 

In  February  of  that  year  Dreyer  was 
appointed  conunodore  and  chief  of  staff  to 
JelUcoe  for  his  mission  to  India  and  the 
dominions  to  advise  on  their  naval  re- 
quirements. He  returned  to  the  Admiralty 
in  1920  as  director  of  the  gunnery  division 
and  in  1922  was  appointed  to  command 
the  battle  cruiser  Repulse.  He  was  pro- 
moted rear-admiral  in  December  1923  and 
in  October  1924  was  made  a  lord  com- 
missioner of  the  Admiralty  and  assistant 
chief  of  naval  staff.  He  went  to  sea  again 
in  1927  as  rear-admiral  commanding  the 
battle  cruiser  squadron,  flying  his  flag  in 
the  Hood,  and  was  promoted  vice-admiral 
in  March  1929.  He  returned  to  the 
Admiralty  in  1930  as  deputy  chief  of 
naval  staff  and  thus  had  to  accept  coUec- 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


tive  responsibility  at  the  time  of  the 
Invergordon  mutiny.  From  1931  he 
served  in  addition  as  Admiralty  repre- 
sentative on  the  League  of  Nations 
permanent  advisory  commission. 

Dreyer  was  promoted  admiral  in  1932 
and  in  the  same  year  was  promoted 
K.C.B.  He  was  commander-in-chief  of  the 
China  station  in  1933-6  and  promoted 
G.B.E.  in  1937.  He  held  a  number  of 
foreign  decorations. 

Dreyer  was  placed  on  the  retired  list  in 
1939  but  on  the  outbreak  of  war  was 
brought  back  into  active  service.  He 
served  as  commodore  of  convoys  in  1939 
and  1940,  and  in  1941  was  made  inspector 
of  merchant  ship  gunnery.  He  served  also 
as  chairman  of  the  U-boat  assessment 
committee  and  in  1942  was  appointed 
chief  of  naval  air  services  and,  later, 
deputy  chief  of  naval  air  equipment.  He 
reverted  to  the  retired  list  in  1943. 

Throughout  his  Service  life  Dreyer  was 
a  completely  dedicated  man,  supremely 
efficient  in  all  he  undertook  and  sparing 
no  pains  to  equip  himself  professionally  to 
the  highest  pitch  of  knowledge  and  skiU. 
He  was  an  austere  man  in  his  personal  life 
and  a  stern  discipUnarian,  with  little  sense 
of  humour.  He  was  the  author  of  two 
books :  How  to  get  a  First  Class  in  Seaman* 
ship  (1900)  and  The  Sea  Heritage,  a  study 
of  maritime  warfare  (1955). 

In  1901  Dreyer  married  Una  Maria, 
daughter  of  the  Rev.  John  Thomas 
HaUett,  vicar  of  Bishop's  Tachbrook, 
Leamington,  and  had  three  sons  and  two 
daughters.  He  died  at  Winchester  11 
December  1956. 

[Admiralty  records ;  The  Times,  12  Decem- 
ber 1956 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

P.  K.  Kemp. 

DRUMMOND,  Sir  JACK  CECIL  (1891^ 
1952),  nutritional  biochemist,  was  born  at 
Leicester  12  January  1891,  the  only  child 
of  John  Drummond,  a  retired  major  of 
the  Royal  Horse  ArtiUery  who  died  the 
following  June.  He  was  brought  up  by  his 
aunt  and  her  husband,  Captain  George 
Spinks,  a  Crimean  veteran  and  keen  ama- 
teur gardener  from  whom  Drummond 
probably  derived  his  interest  in  wild 
flowers  and  birds.  An  early  talent  for 
drawing  led  him  on  to  photography  and 
thence  to  chemistry.  After  attending  Roan 
School,  Greenwich,  and  King's  College 
School  in  the  Strand,  he  entered  East 
London  (later  Queen  Mary)  College  and 
graduated  in  1912  with  first  class  honours 
in  chemistry.  In  1913  he  became  a  re- 


312 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Drummond,  J.  C. 


search  assistant  in  the  department  of 
physiology  at  King's  College,  London,  a 
significant  choice  since  the  professor  was 
W.  D.  Halliburton  [q.v.]  and  his  im- 
mediatcvsupervisor  Otto  Rosenheim  [q.v.], 
both  of  whom  exerted  a  profound  and 
lasting  impression  upon  him.  HaUiburton 
was  responsible  for  his  appointment  in 
March  1914  as  assistant  at  the  Cancer 
Hospital  Research  Institute  where  he 
joined  Dr.  Casimir  Funk  who  had  already 
coined  the  word  'vitamine'.  Drummond's 
collaboration  with  Funk  started  his  in- 
terest in  nutrition. 

In  1917  Halliburton,  as  a  member  of 
the  food  (war)  committee  of  the  Royal 
Society,  invited  Drummond  to  join  him 
in  experimental  work  on  substitutes  for 
butter  and  margarine  which  introduced 
Drummond  to  fat-soluble  vitamins,  one 
of  his  major  fields  of  experimental  work. 
More  important,  it  led  him  to  practical 
problems  of  human  nutrition  in  which  he 
took  an  immediate  interest,  as  is  shown  by 
a  paper  on  infant  feeding  published  in  the 
Lancet  in  1918,  the  year  in  which  he  re- 
ceived the  degree  of  D.Sc.  of  the  university 
of  London  and  succeeded  Funk  as  bio- 
chemist at  the  Cancer  Hospital.  In  the 
following  year  he  was  invited  by  E.  H. 
Starling  [q.v.]  to  University  College,  Lon- 
don, as  research  assistant  in  physiological 
chemistry.  In  1920  he  was  appointed 
reader  and  in  1922,  at  the  early  age  of 
thirty-one,  to  the  newly  created  professor- 
ship of  biochemistry. 

His  department  was  small  and  never 
autonomous,  and  inadequate  financial 
resources  were  not  helped  by  the  negligible 
support  of  two  successive  secretaries  of  the 
Medical  Research  Council.  A  variety  of 
lines  of  research  was  pursued,  too  various 
for  errors  to  be  avoided  or  major  contribu- 
tions made;  Drummond's  artistic  tem- 
perament was  better  suited  to  the  broad 
sweep  of  the  canvas  than  to  dull  attention 
to  detail.  But  his  energy  and  enthusiasm 
inspired  his  colleagues  and  students,  and 
his  department  was  among  the  most 
important  in  the  country  for  training  bio- 
chemists ;  at  the  time  of  his  death  no  fewer 
than  nine  of  his  colleagues  or  pupils  were 
holding  or  had  held  chairs.  The  breadth 
of  his  interests  and  his  approachability 
caused  him  to  be  much  in  demand  as  a 
lecturer  and  as  a  consultant  to  industry  to 
which  he  devoted  much  time. 

In  the  early  thirties  the  need  to  apply 
the  new  knowledge  of  nutrition  was  be- 
coming increasingly  clear,  largely  from  the 
work  of  Sir  Robert  McCarrison  [q.v.]  and 


Sir  John  (later  Lord)  Boyd  Orr.  This 
realization,  together  with  Drummond's 
interest  in  gastronomy  and  in  the  pleasure 
of  good  wine  and  food,  led  him  to  study 
the  dietary  habits  of  the  Enghsh  over  the 
previous  500  years.  This  unique  survey, 
published  in  1939  as  The  Englishman's 
Food  (jointly  with  his  secretary,  Anne 
Wilbraham),  would  probably  have  been 
remembered  as  Drummond's  most  im- 
portant contribution  but  for  the  important 
task  which  now  lay  ahead. 

When  war  broke  out  Drummond  was 
consulted  by  the  Ministry  of  Food  on  gas 
contamination  of  food,  and  on  16  October 
1989  he  was  appointed  'chief  adviser  on 
food  contamination'  to  the  Ministry.  Once 
there  he  interested  himself  in  its  various 
scientific  aspects  and  in  December  sub- 
mitted a  'memorandum  on  co-ordination 
in  investigation  and  development  of  new 
processes'  in  which  he  urged  the  creation 
of  a  co-ordinating  unit  in  the  Ministry 
with  a  scientific  liaison  officer  in  charge. 
When  on  31  January  1940  a  meeting  was 
arranged  by  the  parliamentary  and 
scientific  conunittee  to  discuss  wartime 
bread,  the  Ministry  of  Health  was  repre- 
sented by  its  nutritional  expert,  but 
Drummond  stressed  that  he  himself  was 
speaking  in  a  private  capacity.  The  same 
day  he  submitted  to  his  Ministry  a 
memorandum  'on  certain  nutritional 
aspects  of  the  food  position'.  Next  day  he 
was-  officially  appointed  scientific  adviser 
to  the  Ministry  of  Food. 

With  the  advent  of  Lord  Woolton  in 
April  1940  as  minister  of  food,  policy 
became  a  blend  of  scientific  theory  and 
practical  possibilities,  for  the  minister 
believed  that  his  scientific  experts  should 
have  a  hand  in  framing  policy.  Lord 
Woolton,  Drummond,  and  their  colleague 
Sir  Wilson  Jameson  in  the  Ministry  of 
Health  took  the  opportunity  to  combat 
nutritional  ignorance  and  to  improve- — 
rather  than  merely  to  maintain — the 
nutriture  of  the  population.  The  result 
was  described  by  the  Lasker  Awards 
committee  of  the  American  Public  Health 
Association  as  'one  of  the  greatest  demon- 
strations in  pubUc  health  administration 
that  the  world  has  ever  seen'  and  named 
Lord  Woolton,  Sir  Jack  Drummond,  Sir 
Wilson  Jameson,  and  Sir  John  Boyd  Orr 
as  'the  four  great  leaders  in  this  historic 
enterprise'. 

In  1944  Drummond  became  an  adviser 
on  nutrition  to  S.H.A.E.F.  and  the  follow- 
ing  year  to  the  Control  Commission  for 
Germany  and  Austria  (British  element). 


813 


Drummond,  J.  C. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


That  year,  1945,  he  resigned  his  professor- 
ship on  appointment  as  director  of  research 
to  Boots  Pure  Drug  Company,  but  he 
was  seconded  to  the  Ministry  until  1946. 

In  1915  Drummond  had  married  a  for- 
mer fellow  student,  Mabel  Helen,  daughter 
of  Philip  Straw,  schoolmaster.  In  1939 
this  marriage  was  broken  up  and  in  the 
following  year  he  married  his  co-author, 
Anne,  daughter  of  Roger  Wilbraham.  On 
the  evening  of  4  August  1952  he,  his  wife, 
and  their  ten-year-old  daughter  were 
murdered,  when  camping  in  the  French 
Alps.  Two  years  later  a  77-year-old 
farmer,  Gaston  Dominici,  was  convicted 
of  the  crime.  The  French  newspapers, 
before  identity  was  established,  described 
Drummond's  body  as  that  of  a  man  of 
forty,  whereas  he  was  sixty-one.  He  was 
small,  neat,  sprightly,  and  gay,  abounding 
with  energy  and  enjoying  the  company  of 
others  as  well  as  the  delights  of  good  food 
and  wine. 

Drummond  was  knighted  in  1944  and 
elected  F.R.S.  in  the  same  year.  He  re- 
ceived the  United  States  medal  of  freedom 
with  silver  palms,  was  a  commander  of  the 
Order  of  Orange  Nassau,  and  an  honorary 
doctor  of  the  university  of  Paris.  Over 
£30,000  was  contributed  to  a  memorial 
fund  for  the  foundation  of  a  research 
fellowship  in  nutrition. 

[F.  G.  Young  in  Obituary  Notices  of  Fellows 
of  the  Royal  Society^  vol.  ix,  1954;  British 
Journal  of  Nutrition,  vol.  viii,  1954 ;  Journal 
of  the  Chemical  Society,  1953,  vol.  i ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

H.  M.  Sinclair. 

DRUMMOND,  JAMES  ERIC,  sixteenth 
Earl  of  Perth  (1876-1951),  first  secre- 
tary-general of  the  League  of  Nations,  was 
bom  in  York  17  August  1876,  the  son  of 
James  David  Drummond,  later  Viscount 
Strathallan,  by  his  second  wife,  Margaret, 
daughter  of  William  Smythe,  of  Methven 
Castle.  He  succeeded  to  the  earldom  on 
the  death  of  his  half-brother  in  1937. 

Educated  at  Eton,  Drummond  entered 
the  Foreign  Office  in  1900.  He  was  private 
secretary  to  the  under-secretaries  Lord 
Fitzmaurice  (1906-8)  and  T.  McKinnon 
Wood  (1908-10),  to  the  prime  minister, 
Asquith  (1912-15),  and  to  the  foreign 
secretaries  Sir  Edward  Grey  (later  Vis- 
count Grey  of  Fallodon)  (1915-16)  and 
Balfour  (1916-18)  [qq.v.J.He  accompanied 
Balfour  to  the  United  States  in  1917  and 
in  1918-19  was  attached  to  the  British 
delegation  to  the  peace  conference  where 
his  knowledge  of  procedure  and  grasp  of 


detail,  with  a  certain  detachment  and 
sincerity  evident  to  all,  won  him  a  high 
reputation.  It  was  recognized  that  the 
choice  of  the  first  secretary-general  of  the 
new  League  of  Nations  was  of  exceptional 
importance.  After  tentative  proposals  of 
political  personalities  such  as  M.  Venizelos 
or  Lord  Robert  Cecil  (later  Viscount  Cecil 
of  Chelwood,  q.v.)  had  been  dropped,  Bal- 
four suggested  Drummond  to  Clemenceau 
and  President  Wilson  and  the  appoint- 
ment was  agreed. 

The  new  secretary-general  needed  quali- 
ties which  would  enable  him  to  acquire  the 
confidence  of  the  ministers  of  the  member 
States  and  be  available  to  them  for  con- 
sultation and  advice.  He  needed  also 
to  be  exceptionally  qualified  for  his 
primary  task  of  building  up  and  directing 
the  new  secretariat,  conceived  as  an  expert 
organization  for  drawing  up  objective 
statements  on  issues  confronting  the 
League.  This  responsibility  was  the  more 
important  because  the  major  member 
States  would  have  no  resident  representa- 
tives in  Geneva  and  would  only  have 
direct  control  over  the  League's  current 
activities  through  ministers  meeting  in  the 
Council  for  a  week  three  or  four  times 
a  year  and  in  the  Assembly  meeting  an- 
nually for  about  a  month.  In  the  remain- 
ing ten  months  the  task  of  securing  the 
execution  of  policy  decisions  and  prepar- 
ing the  presentation  of  issues  for  future 
decisions  would  fall  primarily  on  the  new 
secretariat,  with  such  contact  as  might  be 
necessary  with  the  different  Governments 
in  their  respective  capitals. 

In  selecting  and  directing  the  members 
of  the  new  secretariat  Drummond  had  a 
rarely  equalled  opportunity.  The  war  had 
discovered,  developed,  and  tested  special 
talent  in  many  men  in  many  countries. 
With  the  end  of  hostilities  the  ardent 
and  general  hopes  in  the  new  League 
of  Nations  made  an  appointment  to  its 
secretariat  attractive.  From  a  wide  and 
promising  field  he  chose  carefully  and 
personally,  each  being  acceptable  to  the 
Government  of  his  own  country  but  not 
selected  by  it.  His  first  team  of  principal 
officers  was  one  in  which  all  were  soon 
proud  to  be  serving.  He  was  no  less  suc- 
cessful in  making  the  best  use  of  talent. 
He  rode  with  a  light  rein,  delegating 
generously  to  those  he  trusted.  Within  the 
secretariat  he  was  the  ultimate  authority 
on  the  policy  which  must  guide  detailed 
executive  action,  and  he  was  ready  to 
intervene  where  controversial  political 
issues  were  involved.  But,  subject  to  that, 


814 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Drummond,  J.  E. 


he  left  the  greatest  possible  initiative  to 
the  principal  specialized  heads  of  the 
various  departments.  He  was  always 
available  for  consultation  and  ready  to 
give  his  guidance  when  sought,  but  he 
preferred  to  leave  to  them  the  primary 
responsibility  of  deciding  whether  his 
assent  was  required.  This  had  the  double 
advantage  of  bringing  out  the  best  in  his 
officers  and  making  his  own  influence 
more  effective  than  if  it  had  been  imposed 
by  more  authoritative  methods. 

The  secretariat  was  brought  to  its  full 
development  and  established  in  its  new 
headquarters  in  Geneva  by  1920.  The 
limits  to  the  action  of  an  inter- State  (not 
supra-national)  institution  such  as  the 
League  are,  of  course,  set  by  the  nature 
of  its  governing  political  authority.  These 
limits  were  necessarily  narrowed  by  the 
absence,  throughout  its  existence,  of 
the  United  States,  and  during  its  early 
period  also  of  Germany  and  Russia.  After 
a  few  years,  however,  the  rather  inimical 
abstention  of  post-war  America  was  re- 
placed, particularly  while  Mr.  Stimson 
was  secretary  of  state,  by  friendly  con- 
sultation and  a  substantial  measure  of 
co-operation;  and  the  membership  was 
afterwards  enlarged  by  the  entry  as  full 
members  of  both  Germany  and  Russia. 
With  the  later  advent  of  Hitler,  the 
gradual  alienation  of  Italy  after  the  Stresa 
period,  and  the  League's  inability,  in  the 
absence  of  the  United  States,  to  restrain 
Japan's  aggression  in  China,  followed  by 
her  resignation,  the  League  became  im- 
potent to  avert  the  second  world  war.  Its 
ultimate  failure  should  not,  however,  be 
allowed  to  obscure  its  achievements  in 
its  earlier  period,  especially  in  the  later 
twenties  when  it  had  the  requisite  poUtical 
authority  for  its  European  tasks.  For 
several  years  the  ministers  at  every 
Council  meeting  included  the  foreign 
ministers  of  Great  Britain,  France,  and 
Germany ;  and  Geneva  during  this  period 
was  the  principal  political  centre  for 
negotiations  on  European  problems.  The 
League  was  instrumental  in  settling  some 
dangerous  political  conflicts.  It  quickly 
stopped  a  war  between  Bulgaria  and 
Greece,  reconstructed  Austria  and  Hun- 
gary, re-established  a  mass  of  refugees  in 
Greece  and  Bulgaria,  directed  the  mandate 
system  in  former  German  colonies,  and 
carried  through  a  vast  mass  of  technical 
tasks.  That  it  was  so  far  successful  was 
in  no  small  measure  due  to  Drummond' s 
guidance  of  this  first  great  international 
institution  of  its  kind.  He  acquired  the 


confidence  of  the  many  countries  he 
served  by  the  detachment  and  impartiality 
which  he  had  shown  in  his  work  in  Paris. 
At  (ieneva  his  real  influence  with  the 
member  States  was  the  greater  because 
he  seemed  always  more  concerned  to  help 
the  Governments  to  find  an  agreed  solu- 
tion than  to  push  any  specific  policy  of 
his  own. 

In  1933  Drummond  resigned  from  the 
League  and  became  British  ambassador 
in  Rome.  In  spite  of  the  gradually  in- 
creasing alienation  of  Mussolini  from  the 
League  and  all  that  was  associated  with  it, 
he  established  a  good  personal  relation- 
ship both  with  him  and  with  his  foreign 
minister  Grandi ;  and  he  was  probably  as 
successful  as  an  ambassador  could  be  in 
discerning  and  reporting  the  changing 
political  attitude  of  Italy  and  in  making 
his  own  Government's  policy  clear.  The 
course  of  events,  after  the  Stresa  period 
of  rapprochement  had  been  followed  by 
the  Italian  Abyssinia  venture,  was  deter- 
mined by  developments  outside  the  power 
of  a  British  ambassador  to  influence. 

Perth  retired  in  1939  and  in  1941  en- 
tered the  House  of  Lords  as  a  represent- 
ative peer  of  Scotland ;  in  1946  he  became 
deputy  leader  of  the  Liberal  Party  there, 
and  adequately  discharged  the  not  very 
exacting  duties  involved. 

Of  medium  stature,  Drummond  had  a 
presence  and  manner  which  reflected  his 
personal  qualities.  With  a  wide  acquain- 
tance only  rarely  extending  to  intimacy, 
he  took  pleasure  in  such  sociable  relaxa- 
tions as  bridge  and  golf  (as  well  as,  more 
rarely  in  his  active  period,  the  less  social 
sport  of  fishing).  He  had  a  pleasant  sense 
of  quiet  humour,  reflecting  the  general 
poise  of  his  temperament.  But  he  had  no 
temptation  to  the  dangers  of  the  witty 
and  memorable  epigram.  Nor  had  he  the 
kind  of  uncompromising  precision  of 
thought  and  language  which  sometimes 
handicaps  a  chairman  or  a  negotiator 
who  is  seeking  a  solution  through  com- 
promise. 

Himself  a  convert  to  the  Roman  Catho- 
lic faith,  Drummond  married  in  1904  into 
a  Catholic  family,  his  wife  being  Angela 
Mary  Constable  Maxwell  (died  1965),  the 
youngest  daughter  of*  the  eleventh  Baron 
Herries.  He  had  one  son,  John  David 
(born  1907),  who  succeeded  him  in  his 
titles  when  he  died  at  Rogate,  Sussex, 
15  December  1951,  and  three  daughters. 
Apart  from  his  inherited  titles  he  was 
appointed  C.B.  (1914),  K.C.M.G.  (1916), 
G.C.M.G.  (1934),  and  was  sworn  of  the 


315 


Drummond,  J.  E. 


Privy  Council  in  1938.  He  was  an  honorary 
D.C.L.  of  Oxford  and  LL.D.  of  Liverpool, 
and  was  awarded  the  Wateler  peace  prize 
in  1981. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Salter. 

DUCKWORTH,  W^NFRID  LAUR- 
ENCE HENRY  (1870-1956),  anatomist, 
was  born  at  Toxteth  Park,  Liverpool, 
5  June  1870,  the  eldest  child  of  Henry 
Duckwori;h,  J.P.,  F.R.G.S.,  by  his  wife, 
Mary  J.  Bennett.  An  uncle  was  Sir  Dyce 
Duckworth  [q.v.],  a  well-known  consult- 
ing physician  on  the  staff  at  St.  Bartho- 
lomew's Hospital.  A  younger  brother, 
F.  R.  G.  Duckworth  (1881-1964),  became 
senior  chief  inspector  at  the  Ministry  of 
Education. 

Educated  at  Birkenhead  School  and  the 
^cole  libre  des  Corddiers  in  Dinan,  Brit- 
tany, Duckworth  became  an  exhibitioner 
of  Jesus  College,  Cambridge,  in  1889,  was 
elected  a  scholar  in  1890,  and  obtained  a 
double  first  in  the  natural  sciences  tripos 
(1892-3).  He  was  elected  in  1893  into  a 
college  fellowship  which  he  retained  until 
his  death ;  he  was  rarely  out  of  office  in 
the  college,  serving  as  its  steward  for  over 
thirty  years  and  as  its  bursar  for  some  ten 
years.  In  the  war  years  1940-45  he  was 
master  of  the  college,  and  after  superan- 
nuation from  that  post  he  continued  to 
live  in  a  fellow's  set  of  rooms  until  his 
final  illness. 

Duckworth  proceeded  to  his  M.A.  in 
1896,  completed  his  medical  studies  at 
St.  Bartholomew's  Hospital,  took  his  M.D. 
in  1905  (winning  the  Raymond  Horton 
Smith  prize),  and  his  Sc.D.  in  1906.  He 
was  senior  proctor  (1904) ;  university 
lecturer  in  physical  anthropology  (1898- 
1920) ;  additional  demonstrator  of  human 
anatomy  (1898-1907);  senior  demonstra- 
tor of  anatomy  (1907-20) ;  and  reader  in 
human  anatomy  (1920-40).  He  repre- 
sented his  university  on  the  General 
Medical  Council  from  1923  to  1926.  During 
the  war  of  1914-18  he  was  commissioned 
as  a  captain  in  the  Royal  Army  Medical 
Corps ;  owing  to  severe  injuries  sustained 
in  a  riding  accident,  however,  he  never 
saw  active  service.  He  was  president  of 
the  Anatomical  Society  of  Great  Britain 
and  Ireland  in  1941-3. 

Duckworth's  scientific  interests  covered 
a  very  wide  field  extending,  as  they  did, 
far  beyond  the  confines  of  human  ana- 
tomy into  those  of  many  of  the  related 
disciplines.  The  breadth  of  his  biological 
knowledge  was  reflected  in  his  publica- 


X).N.B.  1051-1960 


tions,  which  included  a  large  number  of 
contributions  to  physical  anthropology, 
archaeology,  primatology,  embryology, 
teratology,  and  general  natural  history. 
He  was  a  field  as  well  as  a  laboratory 
anthropologist  and  in  the  furtherance  of 
his  investigations  in  archaeology  and 
physical  anthropology  he  travelled  widely 
and  studied  peoples  and  prehistoric  sites 
in  the  Balkans,  Greece,  Crete,  and  the 
Iberian  peninsula.  Much  of  Duckworth's 
earlier  work  was  collected  and  published 
in  1904,  by  the  Cambridge  University 
Press,  in  a  volume  called  Studies  from 
the  Anthropological  Laboratory^  Anatomy 
School.  In  the  same  year  there  appeared 
his  Morphology  and  Anthropology,  the 
aim  and  scope  of  which  was  to  provide 
for  students  a  combined  presentation 
of  physical  anthropology  and  human 
anatomy.  A  second  edition  of  this  work 
was  called  for  later,  but  only  a  part  of 
it,  as  volume  i,  was  published,  in  1915. 
Although  the  field  covered  by  Duckworth 
in  this  volume  was  largely  limited  to 
structural  studies,  the  book  has  a  distinct 
place  in  the  history  of  preclinical  educa- 
tion, for  it  was  an  early,  albeit  tentative, 
attempt  to  present  the  medical  student 
with  a  wider  view  of  anatomy  than  the 
purely  vocational;  the  volume  was,  in 
fact,  an  excursion  into  what  has  come  to 
be  called  human  biology.  Another  publica- 
tion which  had  a  wide  sale  and  consider* 
able  popular  success  was  his  little  volume, 
published  in  1912,  in  the  Cambridge 
Manuals  of  Science  and  Literature  series, 
on  Prehistoric  Man. 

A  devoted  student  of  the  history  of 
biology,  Duckworth  possessed  a  detailed 
and  first-hand  acquaintance  with  most  of 
the  major  historical  works  on  anatomy 
and  embryology.  A  good  classical  scholar, 
he  was  widely  read  in  the  contributions 
to  biological  literature  of  the  sixteenth 
and  seventeenth  centuries.  Moreover,  ex- 
ploitation of  his  excellent  knowledge  of 
a  number  of  modern  European  languages 
enabled  him  to  be  well  orientated  in  the 
historical  and  critical  studies  relating  to 
these  contributions.  An  interest  in  plagiar- 
ism led  him  backwards  to  Galen,  of  whose 
works  Duckworth  became  a  most  assiduous 
student.  He  devoted  his  Linacre  lecture 
(1948)  to  aspects  of  Galen's  anatomy,  and 
after  his  death  his  rendering  into  English  of 
Simon's  German  version  of  the  Arabic 
translation  of  the  later  books  of  On 
Anatomical  Procedures  was  published  in 
1962,  edited  by  M.  C.  Lyons  and  B. 
Towers. 


di6 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Du  Cros 


Duckworth  always  took  his  teaching 
duties,  both  in  the  Anatomy  School  and 
in  college,  very  seriously.  In  his  years  of 
maturity  his  formal  teaching  was  most 
impressive:  a  complete  command  of  the 
facts;  a  finicky,  indeed  pedantic,  pre- 
cision in  description;  consummate,  and 
ambidextrous,  skill  with  chalk  on  black- 
board ;  an  elegance  in  manners  which  gave 
an  eighteenth-century  air  to  his  presenta- 
tion :  these  all  combined  to  give  an  unfor- 
gettable character  to  his  lectures.  In  more 
intimate  teaching  he  was  less  successful, 
for  his  eager  attempt  to  impart  knowledge 
tended  to  swamp  the  recipients.  His  atten- 
tion to  his  college  students,  however,  was 
much  appreciated ;  his  affection  for  them 
was  shown  by  his  bequest,  after  a  life 
interest,  of  a  considerable  fortune  to  for- 
ward medical  studies  in  Jesus  College. 

Duckworth  was  an  insatiable  collector. 
The  museum  in  the  Cambridge  Anatomy 
School  owes  much  to  him  and  to  his 
world-wide  contacts.  Much  of  his  anthro- 
pological collection  is  housed  in  the 
University  Museum  of  Archaeology  and 
Anthropology,  in  which  the  portion  de- 
voted to  physical  anthropology  is  named 
the  Duckworth  Laboratory. 

In  1902  Duckworth  married  Eva  Alice, 
widow  of  Charles  Cheyne,  Indian  Staff 
Corps,  and  daughter  of  Frederick  Wheeler ; 
she  predeceased  him  by  exactly  one  year. 
There  were  no  children  of  the  marriage; 
a  stepdaughter,  Mariot  Ysobel  Cheyne, 
married  the  future  Lord  Ironside  [q.v.]. 
Duckworth  died  at  Cambridge  14  February 
1956.  Jesus  College  has  a  portrait  of  him 
by  James  Wood. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.  D.  Boyd. 

DU  CROS,  Sir  ARTHUR  PHILIP,  first 
baronet  (1871-1955),  pioneer  of  the  pneu- 
matic tyre  industry,  was  born  in  Dublin 
26  January  1871,  the  third  of  seven  sons 
of  William  Harvey  du  Cros  by  his  first 
wife,  Annie  Jane,  daughter  of  James  Roy, 
a  small  landowner  and  farmer  of  Diu'row, 
Queen's  County,  Ireland.  The  family  was 
of  Huguenot  origin,  an  ancestor,  Jean 
Peter  du  Cros,  having  settled  in  DubUn  at 
the  beginning  of  the  eighteenth  century  as 
a  refugee  from  rehgious  persecution. 

Du  Cros  was  brought  up  in  a  home  by 
no  means  affluent,  for  his  father,  at  that 
time  a  book-keeper,  had  an  income  of  only 
£170  a  year,  but  the  family  was  a  happy 
one.  Harvey  du  Cros  was  a  man  of  great 
enthusiasm  and  energy,  intolerant  of  in- 
justice, and  a  champion  of  the  underdog. 


He  was  a  noted  athlete,  and  captain  of  the 
Bective  Rangers  Football  Club,  which  he 
founded,  and  which  won  the  Irish  Rugby 
Championship.  He  was  also  president  of 
the  Irish  Cyclists  Association  and  it  was 
this  intimate  connection  with  the  sport 
which  led  him  to  appreciate  the  potentials 
of  the  pneumatic  tyre.  All  the  sons  were 
brought  up  in  a  spartan  manner  to  be  keen 
athletes,  particularly  cyclists. 

In  1888  John  Boyd  Dunlop  [q.v.]  ob- 
tained acceptance  of  his  patent  for  pneu- 
matic tyres.  Later  he  made  over  his  rights 
verbally  to  William  Bowden,  a  DubUn 
cycle  agent,  who,  with  Dunlop's  consent, 
brought  in  J.  M.  Gillies,  manager  of  a 
leading  Dublin  newspaper,  to  share  his 
responsibilities.  Both  men  felt  Harvey  du 
Cros  was  the  very  man  to  organize  and 
develop  the  pneumatic  tyre.  He  agreed, 
with  the  stipulation  that  he  should  assume 
complete  control.  The  company,  originally 
called  the  Pneumatic  Tyre  and  Booth's 
Cycle  Agency  (changed  in  1893  to  the 
Pneumatic  Tyre  Company)  was  thus 
founded  in  1889  under  Harvey  du  Cros's 
chairmanship. 

In  1890  it  was  discovered  that  Dunlop's 
patent  had  been  anticipated  in  1845  by 
that  of  Robert  Wilham  Thomson,  which 
had  remained  largely  undeveloped.  How- 
ever, the  company  were  able  to  obtain 
patents  for  various  subsidiary  inventions 
and  in  1891  purchased  Charles  Kingston 
Welch's  patent  of  the  year  before  for  using 
endless  wires  for  attaching  the  covers  to 
the  tyres.  In  the  early  years  of  difficulty 
and  struggle  Harvey  du  Cros  showed  com- 
plete faith  in  the  future  of  the  pneumatic 
tyre,  imbued  the  shareholders  with  confi- 
dence in  its  ultimate  success,  and  by  his 
energy  and  ability  converted  this  small 
modest  company  into  an  industry  which 
was  to  revolutionize  motor  transport. 

Meanwhile  Arthur  du  Cros  had  attended 
a  national  school  in  Dubhn  and  then,  at 
the  age  of  fifteen,  entered  the  Civil  Service 
in  the  lowest  grade  at  12s.  6d.  per  week. 
In  1892,  however,  he  joined  his  father  and 
brothers  in  the  newly  formed  company, 
becoming  general  manager  and  in  1896 
joint  managing  director.  Du  Cros  laid  the 
foundations  of  the  industry  in  England  at 
Coventry,  while  his  five  surviving  brothers 
directed  its  development  abroad:  Alfred, 
Harvey,  and  George  in  America  and 
Canada,  and  William  and  Frederick  in 
Belgium  and  France. 

In  1901  Arthur  du  Cros  foimded  the 
Dunlop  Rubber  Company,  subsequently 
developing  the  400  acres  at  Fort  Dunlop 


81T 


Du  Cros 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


for  the  complete  process  of  the  manufac- 
ture of  tyres.  In  1912  he  obtained  the 
consent  of  the  shareholders  of  the  original 
company  to  the  sale  of  all  the  goodwill 
and  trading  rights  to  the  Dunlop  Rubber 
Company,  thus  making  the  latter  entirely 
independent.  Following  the  founding  of 
the  Dunlop  company  du  Cros  devoted  the 
next  twenty-five  years  to  its  development. 
He  became  an  expert  on  motor  transport 
and  continually  pressed  upon  the  Govern- 
ment its  value  to  the  army;  in  1909,  to 
demonstrate  this,  he  assisted  the  Auto- 
mobile Association  in  the  successful 
transportation  from  London  to  Hastings 
in  motor  vehicles  of  a  composite  battalion 
of  the  Brigade  of  Guards. 

In  1906  he  had  entered  the  political 
field,  contesting  unsuccessfully  as  a  Con- 
servative the  Bow  and  Bromley  con- 
stituency, for  which  his  eldest  brother 
Alfred  was  elected  in  1910.  In  1908,  how- 
ever, du  Cros  was  elected  member  for 
Hastings  in  succession  to  his  father.  In 
1909  he  formed,  and  became  honorary 
secretary  of,  the  parliamentary  aerial 
defence  committee,  to  try  to  ensure  the 
inclusion  of  funds  for  aeronautical  de- 
velopment in  the  army.  He  and  his  father 
were  strong  advocates  of  the  military  uses 
of  aviation  and  they  jointly  gave  to  the 
army  its  first  airship. 

During  the  war  of  1914^18  du  Cros 
worked  in  an  honorary  capacity  for  the 
Ministry  of  Munitions  and  he  financed,  at 
a  cost  of  £50,000,  three  motor  ambulance 
convoys,  which  he  maintained  at  his  own 
expense  throughout  the  war.  He  also 
raised  an  infantry  battalion  and  was  for 
some  years  honorary  colonel  of  the  8th 
battalion  of  the  Warwickshire  Regiment. 

Du  Cros  was  created  a  baronet  in  1916. 
He  continued  to  represent  Hastings  until 
1918,  but  in  that  year  he  was  elected 
as  a  Coalition  Unionist  for  the  Clapham 
division  of  Wandsworth,  resigning  four 
years  later.  He  was  a  founder  and  the 
first  chairman  of  the  Junior  Imperial 
League. 

At  one  time  du  Cros  was  a  man  of  great 
wealth,  which  he  used  with  generous  dis- 
cretion, supporting  many  causes  in  which 
he  was  interested.  Apart  from  his  great 
public  benefactions  he  was  privately  a 
very  generous  man.  He  is  said  to  have  lent 
Frances,  Countess  of  Warwick  [q.v.],  who 
was  in  financial  difficulties,  over  £60,000, 
a  debt  which  he  eventually  agreed  to  over- 
look. When  he  learnt  that  she  was  con- 
sidering the  publication  of  intimate  letters 
written  to  her  by  King  Edward  VII  he 


warned  court  officials  of  this  possibility, 
the  latter  promptly  taking  steps  which 
prevented  publication.  In  his  public 
benevolence  he  patronized  particularly 
art  and  architecture  and  at  Craigweil 
House,  his  home  near  Bognor  (Regis),  he 
had  the  rooms  in  which  he  displayed  his 
pictures  designed  to  take  advantage  of  the 
clean  pure  air  of  that  part  of  the  coast. 
It  was  this  house  which  he  put  at  the 
disposal  of  King  George  V  for  his  con- 
valescence in  1929.  He  had  a  great  love  of 
beautiful  things  and,  like  his  father,  who 
had  been  known  as  the  best-dressed  man 
in  the  House  of  Commons,  was  always 
immaculate  in  his  personal  appearance. 
This  is  reflected  in  the  character  portrait 
of  him  by  'H.  CO.'  which  appeared  in 
Vanity  Fair  in  1910. 

Du  Cros  was  a  man  of  great  foresight 
and  energy  and  this,  combined  with  his 
business  acumen,  his  thoroughness  for 
detail  and  his  hard  work,  was  a  major 
contribution  in  bringing  the  name  of  Dun- 
lop into  world-wide  renown.  It  was  a  sad 
misfortune  for  him  personally  that  the 
Dunlop  Rubber  Company,  of  which  he  was 
a  founder  and  for  many  years  chairman 
and  managing  director  and  later  president, 
failed  to  weather  the  economic  storms  of 
the  late  twenties,  and  much  of  his  per- 
sonal fortune  was  involved  in  its  failure. 
Du  Cros  recorded  the  history  of  the  pneu- 
matic tyre  industry  in  Wheels  of  Fortune: 
a  Salute  to  Pioneers  (1938),  a  work  he  re- 
garded as  the  discharge  of  a  duty  laid 
upon  him  by  his  father,  who  had  died  in 
1918. 

He  married  first,  in  1895,  Maude  (died 
1938),  daughter  of  William  Gooding,  of 
Coventry,  Warwickshire,  by  whom  he  had 
two  sons  and  two  daughters.  This  mar- 
riage was  dissolved  in  1923;  he  married 
secondly,  in  Paris  in  1929,  Florence  May 
Walton,  daughter  of  James  Walton  King, 
of  Walton,  Buckinghamshire.  She  died  in 
1951  and  he  married  later  in  that  year 
Mary  Louise  Joan  (died  1956),  daughter 
of  Wilhelm  Biihmann,  a  railway  official  of 
Hanover,  Germany,  who  on  her  natural- 
ization in  1934  assumed  the  surname  of 
Beaumont.  Du  Cros  died  at  his  home  at 
Oxhey,  Hertfordshire,  28  October  1955. 
His  portrait  by  Sir  William  Orpen  is  in  the 
possession  of  his  elder  son,  Philip  Harvey 
(born  1898),  who  succeeded  as  second 
baronet. 

[The  Times,  31  October  1955  ;  Sir  Arthur  du 
Cros,  Wheels  of  Fortune,  1938  ;  Theo  Lang,  My 
Darling  Daisy,  1966  ;  private  information.] 

G.  K.  S.  Hamilton-Edwards. 


318 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Duff 


DUFF,  Sir  LYMAN  POORE  (1865- 
1955),  chief  justice  of  Canada,  was  born 
7  January  1865  at  Meaford,  Ontario,  the 
younger  son  of  the  Rev.  Charles  Duff, 
a  Congregationalist  minister,  by  his  wife, 
Isabella,  daughter  of  James  Johnson.  He 
was  educated  at  various  village  schools 
in  Ontario  and  Nova  Scotia  and  the 
university  of  Toronto,  where  he  was 
outstanding  in  mathematics  and  philo- 
sophy. He  obtained  his  B.A.  aegrotat,  with 
honours,  in  1887  and,  two  years  later,  his 
LL.B.  with  first  class  honours. 

In  order  to  finance  his  legal  education, 
both  at  university  and  at  Osgoode  Hall, 
Duff  taught  at  Barrie  Collegiate.  He  was 
called  to  the  Ontario  bar  in  1893.  After 
practising  briefly  in  Fergus,  he  went  out  to 
British  Columbia,  where  he  was  called  to 
the  bar  in  1895,  to  join  a  university  friend, 
Gordon  Hunter  (later  provincial  chief 
justice),  in  partnership  at  Victoria.  The 
next  year  he  became  a  partner  of  Ernest 
V.  Bodwell,  who  had  a  thriving  com- 
mercial practice.  Duff  handled  the  firm's 
litigation  and  within  a  few  years  estab- 
lished himself  as  one  of  the  province's 
leading  counsel.  He  took  silk  in  1900. 

Although  he  never  ran  for  public  office. 
Duff  was  an  active  Liberal  and  developed 
a  close  relationship  with  Senator  William 
Templeman,  the  publisher  of  the  Victoria 
Times,  who  was  in  the  Cabinet  of  Sir 
Wilfrid  Laurier  [q.v.]  and  responsible  for 
federal  affairs  in  British  Columbia.  In 
1903  Duff  was  appointed  junior  counsel 
for  Canada  at  the  Alaska  boundary  com- 
mission hearing  in  London.  The  following 
year,  at  the  age  of  thirty-nine,  he  was 
made  a  judge  of  the  British  Columbia 
Supreme  Court  and,  in  1906,  when  there 
was  a  vacancy  for  a  westerner  on  the 
Supreme  Court  of  Canada  he  received  the 
post. 

Duff  became  Canada's  most  distin- 
guished judge.  Combining  an  exceptional 
memory  with  tremendous  intellectual 
force  and  a  rare  capacity  for  legal  ana- 
lysis, he  dominated  the  Supreme  Court 
throughout  his  thirty-eight-year  term. 
Such  a  striking  impression  was  made  by 
him  in  Ottawa  that  the  prime  minister, 
Sir  Robert  Borden  [q.v.],  when  in  diffi- 
culty over  conscription  in  1917  and 
thinking  of  resigning  in  favour  qf  some 
non-partisan  figure  under  whom  a  coali- 
tion would  be  possible,  gave  more  serious 
consideration  to  Duff  than  to  anyone  else. 
After  he  finally  decided  to  remain  in 
office  Borden  asked  Duff  to  enter  his 
Cabinet  and  was  extremely  disappointed 


when  Duff  declined.  In  1933  R.  B.  (later 
Viscount)  Bennett  [q.v.]  appointed  Duff 
chief  justice.  He  retired  from  the  bench  in 
1944,  his  term  having  been  twice  extended 
beyond  the  compulsory  retirement  age  of 
seventy-five  by  special  Acts  of  Parlia- 
ment. 

Duff's  contribution  to  Canadian  juris- 
prudence was  chiefly  in  the  constitutional 
field.  Throughout  his  term  of  office  the 
Supreme  Court  carried  on  under  the 
shadow  of  the  Privy  Council  and  Duff 
conceived  it  his  duty  strictly  to  follow 
Privy  Council  views;  nevertheless  he 
exerted  a  profound  influence.  The  Judicial 
Committee  treated  his  judgements  with 
great  respect  and  on  several  occasions 
extensively  quoted  from  them,  one  of  the 
last  of  these  being  in  A.-G.  for  Ontario  v. 
A.-G.  for  Canada,  [1947]  A.C.  127,  where 
the  Committee  expressly  approved  Duff's 
finding  that  a  federal  statute  abolishing 
appeals,  both  from  federal  and  provincial 
courts,  to  the  Privy  Council  was  valid. 

Perhaps  his  most  memorable  judgement 
was  in  the  Reference  re  Alberta  Statutes, 
[1938]  S.C.R.  100,  where  the  Supreme 
Court  held  ultra  vires  three  Alberta  Acts 
which  were  an  essential  part  of  the  Social 
Credit  scheme  to  bring  about  a  new  eco- 
nomic order.  One  of  these  statutes  in- 
volved a  substantial  interference  with  the 
press.  Although  property  and  civil  rights 
were  a  provincial  matter,  Duff  took  the 
position  that  the  Canadian  constitution 
contemplated  a  federal  Parliament  work- 
ing under  the  influence  of  public  opinion 
and  public  discussion  and  that  any  at- 
tempt by  a  province  to  suppress  the  tradi- 
tional forms  of  public  debate  would  be 
beyond  its  competence. 

Duff  engaged  in  considerable  extra- 
judicial work.  In  1916,  with  Sir  William 
Meredith  [q.v.],  he  was  appointed  to 
investigate  contracts  for  shells.  He  was  the 
central  appeal  judge  under  the  Military 
Service  Act  in  1917-18 ;  chairman  of  the 
1931-2  roj^al  commission  on  transporta- 
tion ;  and  co-commissioner  with  Associate 
Justice  Van  Devanter  of  the  United  States 
in  the  1935  inquiry  into  the  sinking  of 
the  Canadian  rum-runner  Fm  Alone  by  an 
American  coastguard  cutter.  FinaUy,  he 
was  the  sole  commissioner  appointed  by 
the  Government  of  W.  L.  Mackenzie  King 
[q.v.]  to  investigate  the  dispatch  in 
October  1941  of  the  Canadian  expedi- 
tionary force  to  Hong  Kong. 

Duff  acted  as  administrator  of  Canada 
in  the  absence  of  governors-general  and 
twice  opened  sessions  of  Parliament,  in 


319 


Duff 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


1931  and  1940,  the  first  Canadian  to  per- 
form this  function. 

In  1919  Duff  became  a  member  of  the 
Judicial  Committee  of  the  Privy  Council 
on  which  he  served  until  1946.  He  derived 
a  great  deal  of  satisfaction  and  pleasure 
from  his  transatlantic  visits  and  his 
associations  with  such  men  as  Birkenhead, 
Haldane,  and  Simon  [qq.v.].  In  1924  he 
came  to  England  for  a  special  sitting  of 
the  Judicial  Committee  to  advise  on  the 
constitutional  position  arising  out  of 
Ulster's  refusal  to  appoint  a  boundary 
commissioner. 

Nine  universities  conferred  honorary 
degrees  on  Duff  who  was  elected  a  bencher 
of  Gray's  Inn  in  1924  and  appointed 
G.C.M.G.  in  1934  when  Bennett  revived 
the  honours  list. 

In  1898  Duff  married  Elizabeth  Eleanor 
(died  1926),  daughter  of  Henry  Bird,  of 
Barrie,  Ontario;  they  had  no  children. 
Duff  died  in  Ottawa  26  April  1955.  In  the 
Supreme  Court  of  Canada  Building  there 
is  a  portrait  by  Ernest  Fosbery  and  a  bust 
by  Orson  Wheeler. 

[Winnipeg  Free  Press,  20  March  1933; 
Toronto  Globe  and  Mail,  27  April  1955; 
Canadian  Bar  Review,  vol.  xxxiii,  1955; 
private  information.]  Richard  Gosse. 

DUKES,  ASHLEY  (1885-1959),  drama- 
tist, critic,  and  theatre  manager,  was  born 
29  May  1885  at  Bridgwater,  the  son  of  the 
Rev.  Edwin  Joshua  Dukes,  Independent 
minister,  and  his  wife,  Edith  Mary  Pope. 
Educated  at  Silcoates  School,  he  graduated 
in  science  at  Manchester  University  in 
1905  and  went  to  London  to  lecture  in 
science,  though  also  (as  he  put  it  later)  as 
*an  aspirant  to  the  humanities'.  In  London 
he  became  interested  in  the  modern 
drama.  The  naturalistic  methods — ^the 
staging  rather  than  the  acting — of  the 
famous  Edwardian  productions  of  Harley 
Granville-Barker  [q.v.]  at  the  Court 
Theatre  dissatisfied  him,  and  when  in  the 
early  autimin  of  1907  he  had  the  oppor- 
tunity of  combining  a  postgraduate  course 
at  Mimich  University  with  private  tutor- 
ing, he  began  eagerly  to  study  the  pro- 
gressive German  theatre  on  its  own 
groimd.  He  was  abroad  for  two  years, 
based  first  at  Munich,  then  at  Zurich. 

On  his  return  to  England  in  1909  he  was 
glad  to  become  a  full-time  professional 
writer,  <and  to  act  as  drama  critic  for  A.  R. 
Orage  [q.v.]  on  the  New  Age  (for  this  he 
received  only  ten  shillings  a  week),  with 
freedom — as  he  said — 'to  train  the  bat- 
teries of  Continental  criticism'  upon  such 


writers  as  Barrie,  Galsworthy  [qq.v.],  and 
Maugham.  During  1910  the  Stage  Society 
put  on  the  first  of  his  plays,  a  comedy, 
Civil  War;  in  1911  he  published  his  New 
Age  essays  on  Modern  Dramatists.  In 
1912-14  he  was  drama  critic  for  Vanity 
Fair;  in  1913-14  for  the  Star;  he  also 
wrote  short  essays,  known  as  'turnovers', 
for  the  Globe. 

In  1914  he  adapted  for  the  Stage 
Society  (Haymarket  Theatre)  Anatole 
France's  Comedy  of  a  Man  Who  Married 
A  Dumb  Wife.  Dukes  was  thoroughly 
cosmopolitan.  He  loved  the  European 
scene,  and  he  read  widely  in  German  and 
French.  These  early  days  indicated  a 
future  which  was  interrupted  during  the 
war  of  1914-18  by  western-front  service  in 
the  Machine  Gun  Corps  from  which  he  re- 
tired with  the  rank  of  major,  after  holding 
every  rank — except  that  of  sergeant — 
between  private  and  company  comman- 
der. In  1918  he  married  the  dancer  Cyvia 
Myriam  Ramberg  (Marie  Rambert), 
daughter  of  a  Polish  publisher.  She  had 
studied  with  Dalcroze  and  later  with 
Diaghilev ;  after  leaving  his  company  she 
came  to  London  where  she  met  Ashley 
Dukes. 

During  1920-24  he  wrote  drama  criti- 
cism for  the  Illustrated  Sporting  and 
Dramatic  News  as  well  as  contributing  to 
the  New  Statesman  and  other  journals. 
From  the  German  he  adapted  Georg 
Kaiser's  From  Morn  to  Midnight  (1920) 
and  Ernst  Toller's  The  Machine  Wreckers 
(1923).  But  it  was  his  own  The  Man  With 
a  Load  of  Mischief  which  established  his 
name.  This,  produced  at  the  New  Theatre 
by  the  Stage  Society  in  December  1924, 
ran  for  261  performances  at  the  Hay- 
market  from  June  1925,  and  in  later  years 
had  revivals  at  three  London  theatres.  It 
was  a  Regency  fable  by  a  man  who  had 
always  cared  for  the  spoken  word  in  the 
theatre,  and  whose  poetic  sense  showed 
in  his  prose  rhythms.  The  play  excited 
people  whose  ears  had  been  dulled  by  the 
period's  fashionably  curt  dialogue  which 
had  reminded  Mrs.  Patrick  Campbell 
[q.v.]  of  typewriters  tapping  away  into 
the  night.  If  nothing  much  happened  in 
The  Man  With  a  Load  of  Mischief — an  inn 
where  a  valet,  a  Jacobin,  wooed  a  lady, 
and  a  lord  was  left  in  helpless  anger — 
what  counted  were  the  felicity  of  the  prose, 
Dukes's  judgement  and  balance ;  his  play, 
lighting  candle  after  candle  in  the  imagi- 
nation, was  an  enchantment  from  a  time 
hardly  prodigal  in  them. 

The  success  of  this  comedy  gave  Dukes 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Dulac 


his  independence.  He  made  many  other 
adaptations  and  dramatizations,  notably 
two  for  Matheson  Lang  [q.v.] — Siich  Men 
Are  Dangerous  (Duke  of  York's,  1928) 
from  the  German  of  Alfred  Neumann's 
Der  Patriot,  and  Jew  Silss  (Duke  of 
York's,  1929)  from  Feuchtwanger's  novel 
— and  Elizabeth  of  England,  from  the  Ger- 
man of  Ferdinand  Bruckner,  in  which 
Lang  also  appeared  (with  Phyllis  Neilson- 
Terry)  at  the  Cambridge  Theatre  in  1931. 
Further,  he  wrote  a  good  deal  of  original 
work,  including  the  'heroic  comedy'  of 
The  Song  of  Drums,  or  Ulenspiegel,  per- 
formed at  the  Royal  Flemish  Theatre, 
Brussels,  but  not  in  London;  The 
Fountain-Head,  and  Matchmaker's  Arms. 

His  main  task,  however,  was  in  his  own 
theatre,  the  Mercury,  which  he  opened 
to  the  public  during  1933  in  a  converted 
church  hall  in  Ladbroke  Road,  close  to  his 
Campden  Hill  home.  He  turned  it  even- 
tually into  a  workshop  for  poets'  drama 
and  for  his  wife's  Ballet  Rambert,  the 
senior  English  ballet  company.  There  was 
much  else  to  do.  He  travelled  abroad ;  he 
acted  as  British  delegate  from  the  Critics' 
Circle  at  the  International  Congress  of 
Critics  in  Paris  (1926)  and  Salzburg  (1927) ; 
he  wrote  on  Drama  (1926)  for  the  Home 
University  Library ;  he  became  one  of  the 
editors  of  the  international  Theatre  Arts 
Monthly.  But  from  the  early  thirties  the 
Mercury  Theatre  preoccupied  him,  and  its 
great  day  came  in  November  1935  when 
he  brought  T.  S.  Eliot's  Murder  in  the 
Cathedral  from  the  chapter-house  at 
Canterbury  for  a  run  of  225  nights  (it 
was  transferred  later  to  the  west  end). 
Various  other  poets'  plays — among  them 
7'he  Ascent  of  F.6  by  W.  H.  Auden 
and  Christopher  Isherwood — followed  on 
Dukes's  small  stage;  and  the  Mercury, 
governed  by  its  owner's  taste  and  ur- 
banity, moved  safely  into  the  history  of 
the  theatre.  Simultaneously,  Dukes  still 
worked  for  the  west  end,  as  in  The  Mask 
of  Virtue  (Ambassadors,  1935),  a  very  free 
rendering  of  Sternheim's  Die  Marquise  von 
Arcis,  in  itself  a  dramatic  version  of  a  play 
by  Diderot:  it  was  this  which  brought 
Vivien  Leigh  to  the  west-end  stage. 

In  1945-9  Dukes  held  the  kind  of  post 
for  which  no  man  was  better  fitted,  despite 
its  cumbrous  title:  theatre  and  music 
adviser,  main  headquarters  Control  Com- 
mission for  Germany  (British  element). 
Later  in  London,  though  he  had  to  pause 
in  his  work  at  the  Mercury,  he  continued 
his  series  of  adaptations.  Sir  Donald 
Wolflt  toured  during  1958  in  Dukes's  ver- 


sions of  two  German  plays,  Kleist's  The 
Broken  Jug  and  Wedekind's  The  Maestro, 
Dukes  died  in  London  4  May  1959;  his 
wife  (who  was  appointed  D.B.E.  in  1962) 
and  two  daughters  survived  him. 

Ashley  Dukes,  a  man  of  great  charm 
and  unobtrusive  common  sense,  with  the 
means  to  back  his  judgement,  had  much 
influence  on  the  intellectual  theatre  of  his 
time.  Smilingly,  he  rejected  any  form  of 
insularity:  he  was  a  European  with  a 
taste  in  wine  as  sure  as  his  taste  in  the 
theatre  and  the  fastidious  cadences  of  his 
prose.  The  Man  With  a  Load  of  Mischief 
and  his  one  not  very  factual  venture  into 
autobiography.  The  Scene  is  Changed 
(1942),  are  likely  to  live  when  much  else  in 
the  theatrical  record  of  the  period  is  lost. 

A  portrait  of  Ashley  Dukes  by  Kostia 
(Constantine  Irinski)  became  the  pro- 
perty of  Dame  Marie  Rambert. 

[The  Times,  5  May  1959;  Ashley  Dukes, 
The  Scene  is  Changed,  1942 ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] J.  C.  Trewin. 

DULAC,  EDMUND  (1882-1953),  artist, 
was  born  in  Toulouse  22  October  1882,  the 
son  of  Pierre  Aristide  Henri  Dulac,  a  cloth 
merchant,  and  his  wife,  Marie  Catherine 
Pauline  Rieu.  After  graduation  in  science 
and  philosophy  at  Toulouse  University, 
three  years'  study  at  Toulouse  Art  School, 
and  a  short  visit  to  Paris,  he  settled  at  the 
age  of  twenty-three  in  London  where  he 
soon  had  success  with  coloured  illustra- 
tions for  The  Arabian  Nights  (1907),  The 
Tempest  (1908),  The  Rubdiydt  of  Omar 
Khayyam  (1909),  and  books  of  fairy  tales. 
He  was  naturalized  in  1912. 

During  the  war  of  1914-18  his  work  in- 
cluded Edmund  Dulac' s:  Picture-Book^  for 
the  French  Red  Cross  (1915) ;  masks  worn 
by  Henry  Ainley  [q.v.]  and  the  Japanese 
actor  Michio  Ito  in  a  private  charity  per- 
formance in  April  1916  of  At  the  Hawk's 
Well  by  W.  B.  Yeats  [q.v.] ;  caricatures  of 
personalities  in  the  news,  such  as  'Lord 
Kitchener  showing  emotion  at  the  break- 
ing of  a  rare  piece  in  his  collection  of 
Chinese  porcelain'  and  'Mr.  Winston 
ChurchiU  looking  for  more  trouble  by  sub- 
mitting a  painting  to  the  International 
Society  of  Sculptors,  Painters  and  Gravers' 
(1915);  Edmund  Dulac' s  Fairy -Book 
(1916);  and  illustrations  to  Nathaniel 
Hawthorne's  Tanglewood  Tales  (1918). 

Between  1919  and  1929  Dulac  designed 
costumes  for  very  diverse  theatrical  pro- 
ductions including  Robert  Loraine's 
Cyrano  de  Bergerac  (1919),  a  Beecham 
performance  of  Bach's  Phoebus  and  Pan 


Dulac 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


(1919),  and  Phi-Phi,  a  revue  at  the 
London  Pavilion  (1922) ;  he  provided  the 
Outlook  with  caricature  cartoons,  made 
witty  caricature-dolls,  e.g.  George  Moore 
(privately  owned)  and  Sir  Thomas 
Beecham  (London  Museum),  and  he 
painted  some  straight  portraits  such  as 
that  of  Mrs.  Wellington  Koo  (1921).  He 
continued  to  produce  his  illustrated  books ; 
and  from  about  1926  he  drew  coloured 
decorative  covers  for  the  American 
Weekly,  a  profitable  branch  of  his  activi- 
ties which  lasted,  with  short  intervals,  for 
twenty-five  years. 

In  the  next  decade  he  designed  furni- 
ture and  fittings  for  a  Cathay  smoking 
lounge  in  the  Etnpress  of  Britain  (1930- 
31)  and  costumes  and  scenery  for  the 
Camargo  Society's  ballet  Fete  Polonaise, 
first  performed  at  the  Savoy  Theatre  13 
June  1932,  with  Glinka's  music  arranged 
by  Constant  Lambert  [q.v.].  He  supplied 
the  Mint  with  a  model  for  the  King's 
poetry  prize  medal  (first  awarded  in  1935), 
and  the  Post  Office  with  the  unusual 
double-portrait  coronation  stamp  (1937). 
He  also  modelled  for  the  Post  Office  the 
King's  profile  which  was  used  (within 
designs  by  Eric  Gill  [q.v.]  for  the  lower 
values  and  within  designs  of  his  own  for 
denominations  above  sixpence)  on  all 
stamps  of  George  VI's  reign. 

During  the  war  of  1939-45  Dulac  left 
London  for  Dorset.  There  he  designed  the 
Free  French  colonial  stamps  (much  sought 
after  by  philatelists),  banknotes  for  the 
Caisse  Centrale  de  la  France  Libre,  and  the 
first  French  Uberation  stamp,  known  in 
France  as  the  Marianne  de  Londres.  From 
1946,  in  a  new  London  studio,  he  was 
chiefly  occupied  with  the  illustration  of 
three  books  for  publication  in  the  United 
States:  Pushkin's  Golden  Cockerel  (1950), 
Pater's  version  of  The  Marriage  of  Cupid 
and  Psyche  (1951),  and  Milton's  Comus 
(1955). 

Dulac  died  in  London  25  May  1953 ;  his 
Queen  Elizabeth  II  coronation  stamp 
appeared  in  June ;  and  a  memorial  exhibi- 
tion was  arranged  in  December  by  the 
directors  of  the  Leicester  Galleries  who 
had  exhibited  and  sold  the  original  draw- 
ings for  all  his  early  books. 

Dulac  was  able  to  absorb  the  decorative 
character  of  any  European  or  Oriental 
style  and  adapt  it  with  delicate,  meticu- 
lous, and  infinitely  patient  craftsmanship 
to  the  task  in  hand.  When  engaged  upon  a 
design  or  composition  he  would  draw  and 
redraw  the  details  on  tracing  paper  until 
all  were  perfect  by  his  standards ;  and  if 


any  flaw  occurred  in  the  final  version  on 
the  Bristol  board  he  always  began  again 
even  though  he  had  already  worked  on  it 
for  days.  In  his  later  book  illustrations  and 
contributions  to  the  American  Weekly  he 
used  clear,  bright,  opaque  colours  without 
shadows ;  and  the  effect  was  often  in  the 
nature  of  those  moments  in  the  theatre 
when  the  rising  curtain  shows  gaily  cos- 
tumed static  figures  radiant  in  limelight 
and  united  in  pattern  with  the  scenic 
background — moments  which  vanish  in 
the  theatre  when  the  figures  begin  to 
move  and  speak  and  thus  become  dis- 
cordant three-dimensional  humans  in  a 
two-dimensional  cardboard  world. 

The  variety  of  his  professional  output 
was  matched  by  the  variety  of  his  relaxa- 
tions. He  was  a  student  of  Far  Eastern 
music,  a  collector  of  Japanese  and  Chinese 
paintings,  a  first-class  cook,  and  a  crack 
revolver  shot.  Everything  in  his  studio 
was  made  from  his  designs ;  and  a  visitor 
might  find  him  constructing  a  bamboo 
nose -flute,  or  binding  a  book,  or  cutting 
an  intricate  stencil  for  a  textile,  or  model- 
ling a  gesso  rose  within  a  tiny  locket  as  a 
present  to  a  friend. 

Dulac's  first  marriage,  in  1903,  to  Alice 
May  de  Marini,  was  dissolved ;  his  second 
marriage,  in  1911,  to  Elsa  Arpalice  Maria, 
daughter  of  the  late  Pietro  Bignardi,  pro- 
fessor of  singing,  ended  in  separation.  He 
had  no  children. 

[The  Times,  28  May  1953 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.] 

R.  H.  WiLENSKI. 

DUNCAN,  Sir  ANDREW  RAE  (1884- 
1952),  public  servant,  was  born  at  Bower 
Lodge,  Waterside,  Irvine,  Ayrshire,  3  June 
1884,  the  second  of  the  three  sons  of 
George  Duncan,  a  social  worker,  and  his 
wife,  Jessie  Rae.  There  were  also  five 
daughters.  He  was  educated  at  Irvine 
Royal  Academy  and  Glasgow  University 
where  he  graduated  M.A.  two  months 
before  reaching  his  nineteenth  birthday. 
He  first  taught  English  at  Ayr  Academy 
but  having  decided  against  teaching  as 
a  career,  he  entered  the  office  of  Biggart, 
Lumsden  &  Co.,  solicitors  of  Glasgow,  and 
studied  law  at  the  university,  graduating 
LL.B.  in  1911.  Before  he  was  thirty  he  was 
made  a  partner,  specializing  on  the  in- 
dustrial side,  and  through  his  senior, 
Thomas  Biggart,  honorary  secretary  of 
the  Shipbuilding  Employers'  Federation, 
he  was  introduced  to  many  of  the  prob- 
lems and  personalities  of  the  shipbuilding 
and  engineering  industries. 


322 


D.N.B.   1951-1960 


Duncan 


The  Shipbuilding  Employers'  Federa- 
tion moved  to  London  during  the  war  of 
1914-18:  in  becoming  its  full-time  secre- 
tary Duncan  took  one  of  the  decisive  steps 
of  his  career.  Soon  afterwards  (1916)  he 
was  appointed  secretary  of  the  merchant 
shipbuilding  advisory  committee  by  the 
shipping  controller,  Sir  Joseph  (later  Lord) 
Maclay  [q.v.],  and  later  joint  secretary  of 
the  Admiralty  shipbuilding  council  by  Sir 
Eric  Geddes  [q.v.],  then  first  lord  of  the 
Admiralty.  Lloyd  George,  Bonar  Law, 
and  Birkenhead  all  saw  Duncan  as  a  man 
of  uncommon  ability,  and  his  career  was 
thereafter  assured  although  its  pattern 
remained  for  some  time  in  doubt,  for  after 
the  war  he  twice  unsuccessfully  contested 
parliamentary  elections  in  the  Liberal 
interest,  at  Cathcart  (1922)  and  Dundee 
(1924).  In  1919  he  was  appointed  coal  con- 
troller charged  with  the  task  of  super- 
vising the  return  of  the  coal  mines  from 
public  to  private  control.  This  task  was 
completed  in  1921  and  in  that  year  he  was 
knighted. 

From  that  point  the  pattern  emerged 
with  growing  clearness.  In  the  early 
twenties  he  built  up  a  reputation  as  an 
arbitrator  and  chairman  of  commissions. 
But  the  next  decisive  step  was  his  ap- 
pointment in  1927  as  chairman  of  the 
Central  Electricity  Board.  The  twofold 
task  of  organizing  a  large  number  of  pro- 
ductive units  on  a  national  basis  and  of 
bringing  about  an  interconnection  be- 
tween these  units  by  the  introduction  of 
a  high  voltage  grid  called  for  the  drive,  the 
experience  of  industrial  affairs,  and  the 
diplomatic  gifts  which  Duncan  possessed 
to  a  high  degree.  This  was  the  first  large- 
scale  piece  of  creative  work  through  which 
he  left  a  permanent  mark  on  the  industrial 
history  of  his  times.  Other  offices  and 
directorships  (the  Bank  of  England, 
1929-40)  came  to  him.  But  the  next  major 
step  was  the  chairmanship,  assumed  in 
January  1935,  of  the  British  Iron  and 
Steel  Federation.  He  held  this  post  until 
1940,  when  he  joined  the  Government, 
and  again  after  the  war  when  he  returned 
to  industry.  Once  more  he  was  concerned 
with  the  efficient  organization  of  a  basic 
industry  central  to  the  economic  develop- 
ment of  the  nation.  His  experience  was 
further  widened  by  his  service  on  the 
boards  of  Imperial  Chemical  Industries, 
Dunlop  Rubber,  and  the  North  British 
Locomotive  Company. 

The  climax  of  Duncan's  career  was  his 
contribution  to  the  organization  of  the 
nation's    industrial    life    in    the    war    of 


1939-45.  He  had  taken  an  important  part 
in  the  plans  drawn  up  against  the  con- 
tingency of  war.  On  its  outbreak  he  be- 
came iron  and  steel  controller.  His  liberal 
convictions,  his  natural  combativeness,  his 
love  of  his  country  all  combined  to  make 
him  throw  himself  wholeheartedly  into 
the  ministerial  tasks  he  was  given.  In 
January  1940  he  was  made  president  of 
the  Board  of  Trade  by  Neville  Chamber- 
lain ;  and  shortly  afterwards  he  was  elected 
to  Parliament  as  a  member  for  the  City  of 
London.  In  October  he  became  minister  of 
supply  under  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill.  The 
responsibilities  of  his  new  Ministry  ex- 
tended far  beyond  the  familiar  region  of 
iron  and  steel :  his  jurisdiction  included  the 
manufacture  of  explosives,  guns,  tanks — 
the  whole  range  of  industrial  supplies  for 
Britain  at  war.  All  his  previous  experience 
had  equipped  him  with  the  necessary 
skills,  the  knowledge  of  industry's  ways 
and  industry's  leaders,  the  diplomacy  and 
the  power  to  persuade.  After  less  than  a 
year  he  was  moved  back  to  the  Board  of 
Trade.  The  work  of  that  Ministry  in  the 
war — apart  from  its  responsibility  for  coal 
production — seemed  to  Duncan  more 
restrictive  than  creative,  negative  rather 
than  positive,  so  it  was  with  some  sense 
of  relief  that  he  returned  in  1942  to  the 
Ministry  of  Supply.  There  he  remained 
until  the  end  of  the  war  and  the  defeat 
of  the  Government  in  1945  set  him  free 
to  return  to  the  British  Iron  and  Steel 
Federation.  He  kept  his  seat  in  Parliament 
until  1950  and  conducted  a  vigorous  op- 
position to  the  nationalization  of  the  iron 
and  steel  industry. 

Had  Duncan's  convictions  been  other 
than  they  were  he  might  have  become 
a  distinguished  head  of  one  of  the 
nationalized  industries.  But  although  he 
was  sympathetic  to  the  idea  of  nationalized 
services  he  remained  to  the  end  uncon- 
vinced that  the  running  of  industries 
could  be  subject  to  political  or  Treasury 
control  and  yet  be  sufficiently  flexible  to 
answer  the  challenge  of  events  at  home 
or  of  competition  from  abroad.  Thus  he 
ended  his  career  where  he  began,  in  the 
private  sector.  He  was  a  pioneer  in  large- 
scale  industrial  management  practised 
with  professional  responsibility.  He 
wanted  for  himself,  in  the  exercise  of  that 
responsibility,  and  for  those  who  would  fol- 
low him  freedom  from  political  or  bureau- 
cratic control  on  the  one  hand  and  from 
that  of  the  shareholder  on  the  other.  Yet 
this  was  no  mere  wilful  chafing  against 
all  restraint  or  accountability.  He  knew 


323 


Duncan 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


that  the  price  of  a  proper  measure  of 
managerial  freedom  was,  in  the  iron  and 
steel  industry,  a  willing  adherence  by  the 
industry  to  a  national  economic  policy 
nationally  determined.  Thus  his  efforts 
were  directed  to  the  twin  aims  of  increas- 
ing the  industry's  efficiency  and  of  guiding 
it  towards  acceptance  of  its  social  and 
national  responsibilities.  His  suggestions 
for  machinery  to  realize  these  aims  were 
broadly  accepted  by  the  Conservative 
Government  which  came  to  power  in  1951. 

Duncan  was  an  administrator  of  great 
distinction.  His  native  Scottish  thorough- 
ness, the  philosophical  basis  of  his  early 
studies,  the  rigour  of  his  training  in  the 
law,  his  independent  cast  of  mind  com- 
bined to  establish  him  as  a  professional 
in  fields  in  which  the  conception  of  the 
amateur  still  had  great  influence.  Whether 
as  industrial  executive  or  as  minister  he 
dominated  the  area  of  his  jurisdiction  by 
his  mastery  of  its  detail  and  by  a  breadth 
of  view  which  embraced  the  inter-relation 
of  its  parts.  Though  he  was  not  naturally 
at  home  in  the  Commons  he  won  both  its 
admiration  and  its  ear  by  his  complete 
knowledge  of  his  subject  and  by  his  deep 
and  manifest  respect  for  the  House  itself. 

Duncan  presided  in  1925  and  in  1926 
over  two  royal  conmiissions  in  Canada. 
W.  L.  Mackenzie  King  [q.v.]  paid  a  warm 
tribute  to  his  work  and  he  was  given 
an  honorary  degree  by  Dalhousie  Univer- 
sity. In  the  United  Kingdom  he  was  a 
member  in  1924  of  the  royal  commission 
on  national  health  insurance ;  in  the  same 
year  he  served  on  the  dock  strike  inquiry. 
He  was  appointed  G.B.E.  (1938);  sworn 
of  the  Privy  Council  (1940);  was  high 
sheriff  of  the  county  of  London  (1939^0) ; 
a  lieutenant  for  the  city  of  London;  a 
bencher  of  Gray's  Inn;  and  honorary 
LL.D.  of  Glasgow  (1939). 

He  married  in  1916  Annie,  daughter  of 
Andrew  Jordan;  they  had  two  sons,  of 
whom  the  elder  was  killed  in  action  in 
1940.  Duncan  died  in  London  30  March 
1952. 

A  portrait,  painted  by  Frank  Eastman 
in  1954  from  a  photograph,  belongs  to  the 
British  Iron  and  Steel  Federation. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Fulton. 

DUNHILL,  Sir  THOMAS  PEEL  (1876- 
1957),  surgeon,  was  born  3  December 
1876,  at  Tragowel,  Victoria,  Australia,  the 
elder  of  two  sons  of  John  Webster  Dun- 
hill,  overseer  on  a  cattle  station,  and  his 
wife,  Mary  EUzabeth,  daughter  of  George 


Peel,  stonemason,  of  Inverleigh,  Victoria. 
Dunhill's  father  died  of  typhoid  fever  at 
the  age  of  twenty-six  when  the  boy  was 
only  sixteen  months  old  and  before  the 
birth  of  his  brother  at  his  mother's  home 
at  Inverleigh  where  the  children  grew  up 
and  went  to  school.  When  he  was  twelve 
his  mother  married  again  and  the  family 
moved  to  Daylesford,  near  Ballarat, 
where  his  stepfather,  William  Laury,  was 
manager  of  a  gold  mine,  and  where  he 
completed  his  education  at  the  grammar 
school.  He  was  apprenticed  to  a  chemist 
there  and  then  opened  a  chemist's  shop 
at  Rochester  in  Northern  Victoria.  It  was 
then  that  he  decided  to  take  up  medicine 
and  as  soon  as  he  had  saved  enough  money 
he  became  a  medical  student  at  the  uni- 
versity of  Melbourne,  where  he  won  a 
scholarship  and  obtained  first  class 
honours  in  several  subjects.  He  took  his 
M.B.  in  1903,  was  appointed  house- 
physician  to  (Sir)  Henry  Maudsley  at  the 
Royal  Melbourne  Hospital,  and  obtained 
his  M.D.  in  1906.  In  1908  he  was  appointed 
to  the  surgical  staff  of  St.  Vincent's 
Hospital,  Melbourne,  and  so  was  enabled 
to  develop  his  special  interest  in  exoph- 
thalmic goitre  and  the  surgical  treatment 
of  thyroid  disease,  for  which  he  established 
an  international  reputation. 

While  in  Melbourne  his  contributions  to 
surgery  were  twofold.  By  operating  under 
local  anaesthetic  instead  of  chloroform 
and  by  removing  sufficient  of  the  thyroid 
gland  by  gentle  dissection  he  was  able  to 
operate  safely  on  the  most  severe  cases 
of  exophthalmic  goitre,  even  those  with 
heart  failure,  and  restore  them  to  useful 
active  lives.  At  that  time  the  mortality 
rate  for  cases  treated  without  surgery  was 
25%  ;  Dunhill  recorded  a  post-operative 
mortahty  rate  of  1-5%  in  contrast  with 
rates  of  4-5%  and  8  1  %  claimed  by  famous 
surgeons  in  Europe  and  America.  His 
other  contribution  was  to  stress  the  im- 
portance of  the  surgeon's  gaining  the  con- 
fidence of  the  patient  before  operation, 
especially  if  frightened  and  emotionally 
upset,  by  himself  undertaking  the  pre- 
operative treatment  and  control.  The 
distinction  which  he  attained  was  due  not 
only  to  his  surgical  skill  but  to  the  thought, 
time,  and  human  sympathy  expended  in 
his  care  for  each  patient. 

In  1914  he  joined  the  Australian  Army 
Medical  Corps  and  served  mainly  in 
France,  where  he  became  known  to  and 
appreciated  by  his  medical  colleagues 
from  the  United  Kingdom.  He  was  three 
times  mentioned  in  dispatches,  became 


324 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


East 


consulting  surgeon  to  the  British  Expedi- 
tionary Force  in  1918  with  the  rank  of 
colonel,  and  was  appointed  C.M.G.  in 
1919.  His  return  to  Austraha  lasted  a  few 
months  only,  for  in  1920  he  accepted  the 
invitation  of  George  Gask  [q.v.]  to  become 
assistant  surgeon  and  assistant  director 
of  the  newly  formed  surgical  professorial 
unit  at  St.  Bartholomew's  Hospital  medi- 
cal college.  He  quickly  impressed  his 
colleagues  in  London  by  his  skill  and 
energy  and  his  determination  to  overcome 
difficulties  and  neglect  no  precaution 
which  could  benefit  his  patients.  He  was 
essentially  a  modest,  humble  man,  who 
never  hesitated  to  seek  advice  from  any- 
one who  might  be  helpful.  His  reputation 
spread  quickly  and  colleagues  from  all 
parts  of  Britain  and  from  abroad  visited 
him  to  see  him  operate  and  to  study  his 
methods.  Although  the  surgical  treatment 
of  thyroid  disease  remained  his  special 
interest  he  was  a  general  surgeon,  with  a 
large  private  practice. 

He  did  not  enjoy  formal  teaching  and 
found  difficulty  in  publishing  his  results, 
but  by  his  example  he  had  a  powerful 
effect  on  the  education  of  young  surgeons 
and  physicians  in  the  inter-war  period. 
His  appointment  as  surgeon  to  the  house- 
hold of  King  George  V  in  1928  was 
warmly  approved  and  followed  by  his  pro- 
motion as  surgeon  to  the  King  in  1930.  In 
1939  he  became  sergeant-surgeon;  and  in 
1952  extra-surgeon.  He  was  appointed 
K.C.V.O.  in  1933  and  G.C.V.O.  in  1949. 

At  the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons  of 
England  he  was  Arris  and  Gale  lecturer  in 
1931  when  he  chose  as  his  subject  carci- 
noma of  the  thyroid  gland,  and  again  in 
1934  when  he  lectured  on  diaphragmatic 
hernia.  In  1950  he  was  awarded  the  Cecil 
JoU  prize  and  in  1951  he  delivered  the 
Cecil  JoU  memorial  lecture  on  the  recent 
history  of  the  surgical  treatment  of 
exophthalmic  goitre.  In  1935  the  univer- 
sity of  Adelaide  awarded  him  the  honorary 
degree  of  M.D.  and  in  1939  the  Royal  Col- 
lege of  Surgeons  of  England  elected  him 
an  honorary  fellow. 

Dunhill  was  a  short  slim  man  who  gave 
the  impression  of  nervous  tension  and  of 
mental  and  physical  energy.  An  Australian 
colleague  described  him  as  made  of  'stain- 
less steel'.  He  had  a  charming  smile,  made 
friends  easily,  and  saw  quickly  the  good 
in  each  acquaintance,  no  matter  of  what 
social  standing.  For  himself  his  standards 
were  high  and  it  was  not  only  in  his  pro- 
fessional work  that  he  sought  expert 
advice   wherever  he   cotdd.   Although  a 


keen  and  successful  salmon  and  trout 
fisherman  he  took  instruction  in  order  to 
improve  his  style  and  methods;  and  his 
appreciation  of  antique  furniture,  of  pic- 
tures, and  of  architecture  was  based  on  the 
best  advice  obtainable. 

In  1914  he  married  Edith  Florence  (died 
1942),  daughter  of  James  Affleck  and 
widow  of  D.  G.  McKellar.  They  had  no 
children.  He  bequeathed  his  portrait  by 
(Sir)  James  Gunn  to  the  Royal  Australa- 
sian College  of  Surgeons  in  Melbourne  of 
which  he  was  an  honorary  fellow.  He  died 
in  Hampstead  22  December  1957. 

[The  Times,  24  December  1957;  St.  Baifi- 
tholomew^s  Hospital  Journal,  November  1960 ; 
Medical  Journal  of  Australia,  22  March  1958 ; 
British  Medical  Journal,  4  January  1958; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Francis  Fbaseb. 


DUNSANY,  eighteenth  Baron  of  (1878- 
1957),  writer.  [See  Plunkett,  Edward 
John  Moreton  Drax.] 


EAST,     Sir    (WILLIAM)    NORWOOD 

(1872-1953),  criminal  psychologist,  was 
born  in  London  24  December  1872,  the 
tenth  in  the  family  of  twelve  of  William 
Quartermaine  East  and  his  wife,  Char- 
lotte Bateman.  His  father  was  proprietor 
of  the  Queen's  Hotel,  St.  Martin-le-Grand, 
and  was  at  one  time  sheriff  of  the  City  of 
London  and  deputy-lieutenant  for  London 
and  Middlesex.  The  family  home  was  at 
Epsom. 

East  was  educated  at  King's  College 
School  and  studied  medicine  at  Guy's 
Hospital.  He  qualified  in  1897,  taking  his 
M.R.C.S.  and  L.R.C.P. ;  and  his  M.B. 
(1898)  and  M.D.  (1901)  of  London  Uni- 
versity. After  various  appointments  on 
the  house  staff  at  Guy's  and  experience 
as  a  resident  medical  officer  in  mental 
hospitals,  East  joined  the  Prison  Medical 
Service  in  1899.  He  was  posted  to  Port- 
land as  deputy  medical  officer,  moving 
subsequently  to  Brixton,  Liverpool,  and 
Manchester  prisons,  finally  returning  to 
Brixton  as  senior  medical  officer.  This 
involved  many  days  spent  in  court  pre- 
pared to  give  evidence  if  called  upon; 
consequently  much  of  the  day-to-day  work 
at  the  prison  had  to  be  done  in  the  even- 
ing, and  in  this  East  never  spared  himself. 

In  1924  East  was  appointed  medical 
inspector  of  prisons  and  in  1930  a  com- 
missioner of  prisons  and  director  of  con- 
vict prisons.  He  was  also  appointed 
inspector  of  retreats  under  the  Inebriates 


825 


East 


't).N.B.  1951-1960 


Acts.  During  his  period  of  office  at  the 
Prison  Commission  he  recommended  the 
provision  of  an  up-to-date  operating 
theatre  at  Wormwood  Scrubs  so  that 
major  surgical  operations  could  be  car- 
ried out  within  the  Prison  Service.  He  also 
established  a  nursing  service  with  state 
registered  nurses  to  deal  with  women 
prisoners.  Subsequently  this  scheme  was 
extended  to  include  ceri:ain  men's  prisons 
where  there  was  a  large  hospital  section. 

With  Dr.  W.  H.  de  B.  Huberi:,  East 
carried  out  an  investigation  into  the 
psychological  treatment  of  criminals  and 
in  1939  they  recommended  the  establish- 
ment of  a  special  institution  under  the 
Prison  Commission  to  deal  with  psychi- 
atric cases.  It  was  to  be  a  dual-purpose 
institution,  primarily  for  research,  but  to 
include  facilities  for  the  treatment  of 
suitable  cases.  Owing  to  the  delay  of  the 
war  years  East  did  not  live  to  see  such  an 
institution  opened  in  1962  at  Grendon  in 
Buckinghamshire.  East  was  also  one  of  the 
doctors  appointed  by  the  home  secretary 
to  inquire  into  the  mental  state  of  prisoners 
upon  whom  capital  sentence  had  been 
passed,  an  exacting  and  responsible  duty 
which  he  carried  out  until  a  few  months 
before  he  died. 

After  his  retirement  in  1938  East  con- 
tinued with  his  lectures  in  forensic  psy- 
chiatry at  the  Maudsley  Hospital.  He  was 
an  excellent  and  lucid  speaker  and  his  lec- 
tures were  invaluable  to  those  studying 
for  the  diploma  in  psychological  medicine. 
He  was  the  author  of  several  books  on 
his  speciality :  An  Introduction  to  Forensic 
Psychiatry  in  the  Criminal  Courts  (1927) 
and  Medical  Aspects  of  Crime  (1936)  were 
particularly  useful.  His  last  book,  Society 
and  the  Criminal^  in  which  he  discussed 
many  medico- sociological  subjects,  was 
pubHshed  in  1949.  He  worked  tremen- 
dously hard  up  to  the  end  of  his  life. 
A  great  reader  with  a  keen  and  retentive 
memory,  East,  with  his  wide  experience  in 
forensic  psychiatry,  was  a  formidable  wit- 
ness, well  able  to  sustain  any  opinion  he 
had  formed  about  a  case  under  the  most 
rigorous  cross-examination.  He  presided 
in  turn  over  the  Medico-Legal  Society 
(1945-7),  and  the  Society  for  the  Study 
of  Inebriety  (1940-45),  and  was  chairman 
of  the  psychiatric  section  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Medicine  in  1943. 

Those  who  worked  with  East  found  him 
strict  but  fair  and  they  learned  much 
from  him.  It  was  not  only  his  colleagues 
whom  he  helped ;  many  prisoners  were  in- 
debted to  him,  for  he  was  blessed  with  a 


sympathetic  understanding  of  their  weak- 
nesses and  difficulties  which  he  was  able 
to  help  some  of  them  to  overcome.  For  re- 
laxation his  pursuits  were  contemplative 
rather  than  competitive.  He  enjoyed 
nothing  more  than  fishing  and  after  a  day's 
work  in  Dartmoor,  interrupted  by  only 
a  sandwich  lunch,  if  time  and  season 
allowed,  would  set  off  with  the  medical 
officer  for  a  short  spell  with  his  rod  and 
line.  He  was  a  keen  gardener,  and  made 
a  point  of  walking  a  few  miles  every  day. 
In  1900  East  married  Selina,  only 
daughter  of  Alfred  Triggs ;  they  had  one 
daughter.  He  was  knighted  in  1947  and 
died  at  his  home  at  Crowthorne,  Berk- 
shire, 30  October  1953. 

{Lancet,  7  November  1953;  private  infor- 
mation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.  C.  W.  Methven. 

ECKERSLEY,    THOMAS    LYDWELL 

(1886-1959),  theoretical  physicist  and 
engineer,  was  born  in  London  27  Decem- 
ber 1886,  the  second  son  of  William  Alfred 
Eckersley,  a  civil  engineer  who  built  a 
railway  across  Mexico.  His  mother  was 
Rachel,  a  daughter  of  T.  H.  Huxley  [q.v.] 
in  whose  house  Eckersley  was  born.  He 
was  educated  at  Bedales  School  between 
the  ages  of  eleven  and  fifteen,  after  which 
he  went,  rather  younger  than  most  under- 
graduates, to  University  College,  London, 
where  he  obtained  third  class  honours  in 
engineering  (1908).  He  then  worked  at  the 
National  Physical  Laboratory  until  1910 
when  he  went  to  Trinity  College,  Cam- 
bridge, to  read  mathematics.  In  1911  he 
was  listed  as  being  successful  in  part  ii  of 
the  tripos,  but  as  an  'advanced  student'  he 
was  not  eligible  for  the  award  of  a  class. 
In  1912  after  the  statutory  lapse  of  one 
year  he  took  his  B.A.  He  then  spent  some 
time  in  the  Cavendish  Laboratory  but, 
after  an  unsuccessful  attempt  to  gain  a 
Trinity  fellowship,  he  left  Cambridge  and 
joined  the  Egyptian  Government  Survey 
as  an  inspector  (1913-14).  When  war 
started  he  took  a  commission  in  the  Royal 
Engineers  and  worked  on  problems  of 
wireless  telegraphy.  By  the  time  the  war 
ended  he  had  acquired  a  deep  interest  in 
problems  of  radio  wave  propagation  and 
in  1919  he  joined  Marconi's  Wireless  Tele- 
graph Company,  Ltd.,  as  a  theoretical 
research  engineer.  The  remainder  of  his 
career  was  spent  with  this  company. 

Although  Eckersley  studied  engineer- 
ing at  London  University  and  worked  on 
experimental  problems  at  the  National 
Physical  Laboratory  and  in  the  Cavendish 


326 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Edmonds 


Laboratory,  he  came  to  realize  that  his 
real  interest  was  in  theoretical  work,  and 
this  is  where  he  found  he  could  make 
original  contributions,  first  during  the 
war  and  later  with  the  Marconi  Company. 
While  serving  with  the  wireless  intelli- 
gence branch  of  the  Royal  Engineers  in 
Egypt  and  Salonika  he  was  concerned 
with  the  problem  of  locating  enemy  radio 
stations  by  measuring  the  direction  of 
arrival  of  the  waves  which  they  radiated. 
In  this  work  he  came  to  realize  that  waves 
reflected  downwards  from  the  Heaviside 
layer  could  interfere  with  the  proper  be- 
haviour of  the  direction-finding  equipment 
and  he  started  to  consider  the  mechanism 
of  these  reflections.  It  was  problems  of  this 
kind  which  occupied  most  of  his  attention 
for  the  rest  of  his  life. 

He  developed  his  ideas  in  a  number  of 
well-known  papers  mainly  presented  to 
the  Institution  of  Electrical  Engineers. 
In  particular  he  showed  how  to  evaluate 
the  details  of  the  reflection  by  a  'phase 
integral'  method,  and  he  emphasized 
the  importance  of  waves  scattered  by 
irregularities  in  the  ionosphere.  He  read 
widely  in  many  branches  of  mathematical 
physics  and  much  of  his  work  on  radio 
waves  was  closely  parallel  to  similar  work 
being  done  in  a  rapidly  developing  field. 
The  title  of  one  of  his  papers  'On  the  con- 
nection between  the  ray  theory  of  electric 
waves  and  dynamics'  shows  how  he  drew 
on  his  wide  knowledge  of  physical  theory 
to  discuss  wave  propagation  in  terms  of 
other  concepts. 

Although  Eckersley  was  predominantly 
a  theoretician,  he  led  and  inspired  a  small 
team  of  experimental  workers  and  he  was 
delighted  to  take  part  in  observations  with 
them  at  all  times  of  day  or  night.  If  a  line 
of  research  was  not  going  well  it  was  his 
habit  to  say  'Let's  try  a  damn  fool  experi- 
ment' and  he  was  frequently  rewarded 
with  some  new  insight  into  the  mechanism 
of  radio  wave  propagation. 

Eckersley' s  ability  was  widely  recog- 
nized. He  was  a  much  valued  member 
of  the  Union  Radio  Scientifique  Inter- 
nationale and  of  the  Comite  Consultative 
Internationale  de  Radio,  whose  assemblies 
he  attended  regularly.  He  was  elected 
F.R.S.  in  1988  and  was  awarded  the  Fara- 
day medal  of  the  Institution  of  Electrical 
Engineers  in  1951.  For  each  of  his  major 
papers  in  the  Proceedings  of  the  Institu- 
tion he  received  a  premium.  His  advice 
was  of  importance  to  the  Marconi  Com- 
pany particularly  in  the  development  of 
their  direction-finding  apparatus  and  their 


long-distance  short-wave  communication 
links. 

Eckersley  had  such  originality  that  he 
tended  to  see  his  theories,  in  his  own  way 
and  never  troubled  to  relate  them  to  other 
people's  ways  of  thought.  In  this  respect 
he  was  somewhat  like  Oliver  Heaviside 
[q.v.].  If  one  looks  back  at  Eckersley 's 
work  it  is  a  matter  of  surprise  that  some 
of  it,  particularly  that  concerned  with 
direction-finding  errors  and  with  the  scat- 
tering of  radio  waves  from  the  ionosphere, 
should  have  been  so  little  appreciated 
when  it  was  written.  If  he  had  taken  more 
pains  to  make  his  Avork  readable  by  others 
who  were  thinking  about  the  same  prob- 
lems, it  is  probable  that  it  would  have  been 
better  appreciated  during  his  lifetime. 

In  1920  Eckersley  married  Eva  Amelia, 
daughter  of  Barry  Pain  [q.v.] ;  they  had 
one  son  and  two  daughters.  When  he  re- 
tired from  the  Marconi  Company  in  1946 
he  was  already  suffering  from  multiple 
sclerosis  and,  although  he  continued  to 
do  theoretical  work  at  home  as  a  consul- 
tant to  the  company,  the  disease  pursued 
its  inevitable  course  and  in  his  later  years 
he  was  almost  completely  helpless.  He 
died  at  Danbury,  Essex,  15  February 
1959.  His  elder  brother,  Roger  Huxley 
Eckersley,  who  was  director  of  pro- 
grammes (1924-30),  assistant  controller 
(1930-39),  and  chief  censor  (1939-45)  of 
the  B.B.C.,  had  died  in  1955.  His  younger 
brother,  Peter  Pendleton  Eckersley,  who 
died  in  1963,  was  chief  engineer  to  the 
B.B.C.  from  1923  to  1929. 

[J.  A.  Ratcliffe  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  v,  1959 ; 
Nature,  18  July  1959;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  J.  A.  Ratcliffe. 

EDMONDS,     Sir     JAMES     EDWARD 

(1861-1956),  military  historian,  was  born 
in  Baker  Street,  London,  25  December 
1861,  the  son  of  James  Edmonds,  master 
jeweller,  and  his  wife,  Frances  Amelia 
Bowler.  He  went  as  a  day  boy  to  King's 
College  School,  then  still  in  the  east  wing 
of  Somerset  House,  and  astonished  masters 
by  the  extent,  maturity,  and  exactitude  of 
his  knowledge.  He  was  wont  to  relate  that 
he  learnt  languages  at  the  breakfast  table 
at  home.  In  after  life  he  could  extract 
what  he  wanted  from  any  European 
language  and  a  number  of  Eastern,  al- 
though he  could  not  write  an  idiomatic 
letter  in  any  language  save  German. 
He  passed  first  into  the  Royal  Military 
Academy,  Woolwich,  the  most  experienced 
examiners  being  unable  to  recall  any  year 


327 


Edmonds 


D.N.B.  Ifi51-19fl0 


in  which  he  would  not  have  done  so.  As  a 
matter  of  course  he  passed  out  first  after 
winning  the  sword  awarded  for  the  best 
gentleman  cadet,  the  Pollock  medal,  and 
other  prizes.  In  1881  he  was  gazetted  to 
the  Royal  Engineers,  specializing  in  sub- 
marine mining,  then  treated  as  a  task 
which  the  Royal  Navy  could  not  be 
expected  to  undertake. 

In  1885,  after  long  anxiety  about  the 
possibility  that  Russia  might  walk  into 
Hong  Kong  without  warning,  it  was  de- 
cided to  reinforce  the  colony  with  two 
companies  of  engineers  of  which  one,  the 
33rd,  was  Edmonds's.  His  criticism  of 
the  situation  was  blistering.  The  reinforce- 
ment of  two  companies  reached  the  scene 
in  one  case  eight  strong,  in  the  other  about 
thirty.  The  non-starters  were  either  sick, 
permanent  invalids,  or  on  attachment 
from  which  they  had  not  been  liberated  in 
time  to  catch  the  boat.  Edmonds  found 
that  the  numerous  rock  pillars  just  below 
the  surface  in  Hong  Kong  harbour  were 
uncharted  and  consequently  often  grazed 
by  ships,  once  in  a  while  causing  a  serious 
accident.  He  set  about  demolition  by 
trailing  a  rail  between  two  longboats  and 
lowering  a  diver  to  fix  a  gun-cotton  neck- 
lace on  the  peak. 

Three  months'  sick  leave  in  Japan  was 
followed  by  a  leisurely  return  home  in  1888 
by  way  of  the  United  States.  In  1890  he 
became  instructor  in  fortification  at  the 
Royal  Mihtary  Academy,  where  he  spent 
six  happy  years  and  made  use  of  the 
long  vacations  to  travel  and  learn  more 
languages,  including  Russian.  In  1895  he 
entered  the  Staff  College,  once  again  first. 
His  conversation  became  more  stimulat- 
ing and  impressive  than  ever.  Among 
those  who  enjoyed  it  were  Douglas  (later 
Earl)  Haig  [q.v.],  of  whom  he  heard  an 
instructor  predict  that  he  could  become 
commander-in-chief,  (Sir)  Aylmer  Hal- 
dane,  and  E.  H.  H.  (later  Viscount) 
Allenby  [q.v.].  His  verdict  on  Allenby  was 
that  it  was  impossible  to  hammer  any- 
thing into  his  head,  an  error  typical  of 
Edmonds's  worst  side. 

In  1899  Edmonds  was  appointed  to 
the  intelligence  division  under  Sir  John 
Ardagh  [q.v.]  with  whom  in  1901  he  went 
to  South  Africa,  at  the  request  of  the 
Foreign  Office,  to  advise  Lord  Kitchener 
[q.v.]  on  questions  of  international  law. 
Lord  Milner  [q.v.]  next  borrowed  him 
(1902-4)  in  the  task  of  establishing  peace. 
Back  at  home  in  1904,  Edmonds  resumed 
work  at  the  War  Office  in  the  intelligence 
division  and  was  put  in  charge  of  a  sec- 


tion formed  to  follow  the  Russo-Japanese 
war.  He  was  promoted  in  1907  to  take 
charge  of  M.0.5  (counter-espionage,  later 
known  as  M.I. 5).  It  was  Edmonds  who  in 
1908  definitely  convinced  the  secretary 
of  state  for  war,  R.  B.  (later  Viscount) 
Haldane  [q.v.],  of  the  size,  efficiency, 
and  complexity  of  the  German  espionage 
network  in  Britain. 

In  1911  Edmonds,  who  had  reached  the 
rank  of  colonel  in  1909,  was  appointed 
G.S.O.  1  of  the  4th  division.  His  divisional 
commander,  (Sir)  Thomas  Snow  [q.v.], 
a  formidable  and  irascible  man,  gave  him 
his  complete  confidence  and  at  an  early 
stage  said  to  him  'I  provide  the  ginger  and 
you  provide  the  brains'.  This  was  very 
much  to  Edmonds's  taste,  and  if  ever 
he  spoke  with  excessive  pride  it  was  of 
his  achievement  in  the  training  of  the 
4th  division  for  the  war,  the  summit  of 
his  career,  although  fatal  to  his  personal 
ambitions.  During  the  retreat  from  Mons 
he  broke  down  from  insufficient  food,  lack 
of  sleep,  and  strain.  The  engineer-in-chief 
stretched  out  an  arm  to  him  from  G.H.Q. 
where  he  remained  for  the  rest  of  the  war, 
in  the  latter  part  of  it  as  deputy  engineer- 
in-chief.  He  was  regularly  consulted  by 
Haig  and  regarded  as  a  mentor  on  the 
general  staff  side  and  every  branch  of  his 
own  corps,  which  in  its  turn  could  afford 
him  greater  knowledge  of  transportation 
problems  than  those  who  had  to  undertake 
the  tasks. 

In  1919  Edmonds  retired  with  the 
honorary  rank  of  brigadier-general  and 
was  appointed  director  of  the  historical 
section,  military  branch,  Committee  of 
Imperial  Defence.  His  task  was  to  direct ; 
all  narratives  were  to  be  written  by  his- 
torians; but  finding  the  first  choice  un- 
satisfactory, Edmonds  himself  took  over 
the  main  field,  the  western  front,  and 
sowed  and  reaped  it  to  the  end.  He  was 
altogether  too  patient  with  failures,  al- 
though delighted  to  be  able  to  say  that  he 
sacked  three  lieutenant-generals  in  quick 
succession.  He  has  been  blamed  for 
tardiness  in  producing  the  history,  but  his 
resources  were  minimal  by  comparison 
with  those  accorded  to  the  historians  of 
the  second  world  war.  The  first  virtue  of 
his  style  was  compression,  the  second 
lucidity;  but  it  was  attractive  to  a 
minority  only  and  came  to  be  regarded  as 
dull.  A  feature  of  the  method,  not  new, 
but  brought  to  perfection,  was  the  com- 
bination of  material  from  British  records 
with  those  of  foes  and  allies  with  equal 
care,  whereas  many  famous  predecessors 


328 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Edridge-Green 


had  left  the  second  and  third  as  pale  as 
ghosts.  He  was  allowed  to  establish  liaison 
with  his  German  opposite  number  and 
treated  him  with  complete  candour.  He 
found  Berlin  equally  reliable  and  dis- 
inclined to  make  propaganda ;  a  practice 
which  only  began  after  Hitler's  ascent  to 
power.  It  may  indeed  be  said  that  Ed- 
monds revolutionized  the  very  principles 
on  which  the  history  of  campaigns  and 
battles  had  hitherto  been  compiled  in  this 
country.  His  humour  as  chief  was  mor- 
dant, but  when  he  denounced  one  man  as 
a  crook,  another  as  a  drunkard,  and  a 
third  as  utterly  incompetent,  he  was  nine- 
tenths  of  the  time  playing  an  elaborate 
game.  Part  of  the  vast  stock  of  boutades 
took  the  form  of  letters  which  were 
treasured  by  recipients.  Some  turned  up 
finally  as  evidence  for  theories  which  he 
would  have  repudiated:  for  instance,  the 
beUttlement  of  Haig. 

Edmonds  was  gifted  with  a  prodigious 
memory.  He  never  forgot  the  sciences 
learnt  in  youth  and  kept  up  with  them 
throughout  his  Ufe.  The  originaUty  of  his 
reflections  and  his  skill  in  engineering 
earned  for  him  the  sobriquet  of  'Archi- 
medes', which  amused  him  and  with 
which  he  frequently  signed  letters  to  the 
press.  Between  the  two  wars  he  made 
further  contributions  to  knowledge  in 
innumerable  book  reviews ;  and  he  wrote 
several  notices  for  this  Dictionary.  A  his- 
tory of  the  American  civil  war  (1905), 
in  collaboration  with  his  brother-in-law, 
W.  B.  Wood,  ran  through  a  number  of 
editions  and  became  an  official  textbook 
in  the  United  States.  He  collaborated  also 
with  L.  F.  L.  Oppenheim  [q.v.]  in  the 
official  manual  Land  Warfare  (1912),  an 
exposition  of  the  laws  and  usages  of  war 
on  land.  After  his  retirement  in  1949  he 
wrote  A  Short  History  of  World  War  I 
(1951).  Coming  from  an  author  almost 
ninety  years  of  age  it  naturally  showed 
signs  of  wear  and  tear,  but  it  is  none  the 
less  a  highly  useful  and  creditable  vade- 
mecum. 

Edmonds  was  the  happiest  of  men  and 
never  felt  the  slightest  regret  that  he  had 
not  risen  to  a  rank  befitting  his  talents. 
As  a  soldier  he  was  intellectually  brilliant 
and  in  both  theory  and  technical  know- 
ledge the  outstanding  figure  of  his  genera- 
tion; yet  he  could  not  be  regarded  as 
complete  master  of  his  profession  or  as 
having  to  reproach  fortune  for  failure  in 
attaining  that  status.  He  was  over- 
sensitive, shy,  inclined  to  be  uncertain  in 
emergency,  and  lacking  in  that  sustained 


energy,  carried  almost  to  the  point  of 
harshness  and  sometimes  beyond  it,  which 
has  marked  great  soldiers  and  without 
which  powers  of  command  are  generally 
limited. 

Edmonds  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1911, 
C.M.G.  in  1916,  and  knighted  in  1928.  He 
received  the  honorary  degree  of  D.Litt. 
from  the  university  of  Oxford  in  1935. 
In  1895  he  married  Hilda  Margaret  Ion 
(died  1921),  daughter  of  the  Rev.  Matthew 
Wood ;  they  had  one  daughter.  He  died  at 
Sherborne,  Dorset,  2  August  1956. 

[Royal  Engineers  Journal,  December  1956 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Cyril  Falls. 

EDRIDGE-GREEN,  FREDERICK 

WILLIAM  (1863-1953),  authority  on 
colour  perception,  was  born  in  London  14 
December  1863,  the  son  of  Thomas  Allen 
Green,  whose  family  were  well  known  in 
the  potteries  as  makers  of  Crown  Stafford- 
shire ware,  and  his  wife,  Maria  Smith. 
After  studying  at  St.  Bartholomew's 
Hospital  and  at  the  university  of  Durham, 
he  qualified  L.R.C.P.  in  1887  and  in  the 
same  year  obtained  the  M.B.  (Durham) 
with  first  class  honours.  He  was  awarded 
the  M.D.  with  gold  medal  two  years  later 
for  a  thesis  which  dealt  with  colour  vision 
and  contained  his  first  criticism  of  the 
Holmgren  wool  test  for  colour  defect.  He 
passed  the  examination  for  fellowship  of 
the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons  of  England 
in  1892.  After  serving  as  resident  surgical 
assistant  at  Newcastle  upon  Tyne  In- 
firmary, he  became  assistant  medical 
officer  of  Northumberland  House  Asylum, 
and  subsequently  medical  superintendent 
of  Hendon  Grove  Asylum.  The  two  domi- 
nant interests  of  his  life  thus  asserted 
themselves  early  in  his  career. 

Edridge-Green's  professional  work  in 
mental  disease  in  the  earlier  part  of  his 
life  is  reflected  in  his  studies  on  memory  on 
which  he  wrote  whilst  still  a  student  and 
more  extensively  in  a  substantial  volume, 
Memory  (1888).  Memory  and  its  Cultiva- 
tion appeared  in  the  International  Scien- 
tific Series  in  1897.  Phenomena  of  vision 
were,  however,  his  main  interest:  his 
Colour-blindness  and  Colour  Perception  was 
first  pubUshed  in  1891  and  had  a  second 
edition  in  1909.  His  contention  that  the 
Holmgren  wool  test,  based  on  matching 
coloured  wools,  ignored  the  factor  of 
saturation  and  in  practice  did  not  pick 
up  the  dangerously  colour-blind,  attracted 
immediate  attention  but  little  support, 
even  after  he  was  appointed  a  member  of 


329 


Edridge-Green 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


the  International  Code  of  Signallers'  com- 
mittee. In  1892  a  committee  of  the  Royal 
Society  unanimously  recommended  the 
continued  use  of  the  Holmgren  test  on 
railways  and  ships,  but  over  the  years  an 
increasing  number  of  observers,  such  as 
Doyne  and  Gotch  at  Oxford,  recognized 
the  validity  of  Edridge-Green's  work.  In 
his  test  for  colour-blindness  the  examinee 
had  to  recognize  and  name  a  range  of 
colours  seen  in  normal  conditions  of 
lighting  and  through  filters  which  produced 
anomalous  conditions  simulating  low 
illumination,  mist,  or  fog.  After  much 
controversy,  and  only  after  questions 
were  asked  in  Parliament,  the  inadequate 
wool  test  was  finally  abandoned  in  1915 
by  the  Board  of  Trade  and  a  lantern 
test,  based  on  Edridge-Green's  principles, 
adopted  for  testing  pilots  and  other  per- 
sonnel. He  was  appointed  ophthalmic 
adviser  to  the  Board  in  1920,  the  year  in 
which  he  was  appointed  C.B.E.  and  pub- 
lished his  Physiology  of  Vision  which 
summarized  in  considerable  detail  his 
theoretical  work  on  colour  vision  and  other 
visual  phenomena.  A  succinct  statement 
of  his  mature  views  on  colour  vision  was 
contained  in  his  article  for  the  Encyclo- 
pcedia  Britannica  in  1922.  The  consider- 
able opposition  which  his  theoretical  and 
practical  work  met  is  detailed  in  his  book- 
let Science  and  Pseudo-Science  (1933).  In 
the  later  years  of  his  life  Edridge-Green 
devoted  himself  exclusively  to  ophthal- 
mology, acting  as  adviser  to  the  London 
Pensions  Board  and  the  Ministry  of 
Transport  as  well  as  the  Board  of  Trade. 
In  the  war  of  1914-18  he  had  been  chair- 
man of  the  ophthalmic  board  of  the 
Central  London  recruiting  boards  for 
national  service. 

Edridge-Green's  colour  perception  lan- 
tern remained  widely  used,  by  the  Royal 
Navy  and  British  Railways  amongst 
others,  and  his  bead  test  by  the  national 
service  boards.  His  practical  tests  have 
done  much  by  eliminating  the  dangerously 
colour-blind  from  occupations  where  good 
colour  vision  is  essential.  They  stimulated 
much  work  on  the  theoretical  aspects  of 
colour  vision  but  his  own  academic 
contributions  were  unremarkable,  being 
based  less  on  laboratory  investigations 
than  on  a  pseudo-evolutionary  theory  of 
colour  vision. 

In  1893  Edridge-Green  married  Minnie 
Jane  (died  1901),  daughter  of  Henry 
Hicks,  the  geologist  [q.v.].  There  were  two 
sons  one  of  whom  died  in  childhood  and 
the  other  shortly  after  the  end  of  the 


war  of  1914-18.  Rather  slight  in  build, 
Edridge-Green  found  relaxation  in  travel- 
ling, golfing,  chess,  and  bridge;  he  was 
a  member  of  the  Savage  Club.  He  died 
at  Worthing  17  April  1953.  A  named 
memorial  lecture  at  the  Royal  College  of 
Surgeons  was  established  under  his  be- 
quest and  is  devoted  to  the  physiology  of 
vision.  The  College  possesses  an  oil  canvas 
by  F.  Walenn  (1895)  and  a  later  carica- 
ture by  George  Belcher  showing  Edridge- 
Green  in  an  excellent  likeness  rejecting 
a  candidate  at  a  test  for  colour  vision. 

[British    Medical   Journal,    2    May    1953; 
Lancet,  25  April  1953 ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Arnold  Sorsby. 

EGERTON,  Sir  ALFRED  CHARLES 
GLYN  (1886-1959),  scientist,  was  born  11 
October  1886  at  Glyn,  Talsarnau,  North 
Wales,  the  fourth  son  of  (Sir)  Alfred 
Mordaunt  Egerton,  comptroller  to  the 
Duke  of  Connaught  [q.v.],  and  his  wife, 
Mary  Georgina  Ormsby-Gore,  elder  daugh- 
ter of  the  second  Baron  Harlech.  His  family 
traces  its  descent  from  Sir  Thomas  Eger- 
ton [q.v.]  who  was  lord  keeper  to  Queen 
Elizabeth  and  later  lord  chancellor  to 
James  I.  Alfred  Egerton  was  a  direct 
descendant  of  a  cadet  of  the  family  of 
the  second  Earl  of  Bridgewater.  He  was 
educated  at  Eton  and  University  College, 
London,  where  he  worked  under  Sir  Wil- 
liam Ramsay  [q.v.]  and  graduated  in 
chemistry  with  first  class  honours  in  1908. 
The  following  year  he  was  appointed  in- 
structor at  the  Royal  Military  Academy, 
Woolwich,  where  he  stayed  until  1913. 
After  a  short  period  of  study  in  Nernst's 
laboratory  in  Berlin  he  returned  to  Eng- 
land on  the  outbreak  of  war  and  was  soon 
directed  to  the  department  of  explosives 
supply  of  the  Ministry  of  Munitions.  Later 
he  took  part  in  the  design  and  erection 
of  the  great  national  explosives  factories 
built  to  meet  the  munitions  crisis  of  the 
mid-war  years. 

After  the  war  Egerton  accepted  an 
invitation  to  work  in  the  Clarendon 
Laboratory  at  Oxford  and  there  he  stayed 
for  some  seventeen  years  becoming  reader 
in  thermodynamics  in  1921.  He  devoted 
himself  largely  to  research  and  carried  out 
an  extensive  investigation  into  the  vapour 
pressures,  latent  heats  of  vaporization, 
and  temperature  coefficients  of  the  specific 
heats  of  a  number  of  metals  and  alloys.  He 
also  began  the  long  series  of  researches 
into  problems  of  combustion  which  consti- 
tute his  main  contribution  to  science.  In 
1936  he  was  appointed  to  the  chair  of 


330 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Elkan 


chemical  technology  at  the  Imperial  Col- 
lege of  Science  where  he  remained  until 
1952. 

Egerton's  principal  contribution  to 
science  lay  in  the  field  of  gaseous  combus- 
tion and  began  with  an  extensive  in- 
vestigation into  the  causes  of  'knock'  in 
the  internal  combustion  engine.  This  led 
him  by  logical  steps  to  a  more  general 
study  of  the  mechanism  of  hydrocarbon 
oxidation.  As  the  result  of  this  work  he 
was  able  to  establish  the  important  role 
played  by  peroxides  in  the  early  stages  of 
slow  combustion.  The  advent  of  the  turbo- 
jet engine  in  which  large  quantities  of  fuel 
have  to  be  burnt  completely  and  rapidly 
in  as  small  a  space  as  possible  led  Egerton 
to  consider  the  possibility  of  using  pro- 
moters or  inhibitors  to  change  the  limits 
of  inflammability  of  the  fuel.  He  studied 
experimentally  the  propagation  of  flame 
in  limit  mixtures  and  developed  a  special 
type  of  burner  by  means  of  which  a 
stationary  plane  flame  front  could  be 
formed  and  its  properties  examined.  He 
also  carried  out  a  detailed  investigation 
into  the  oxidation  of  methane  and  was 
a  pioneer  in  the  use  of  liquid  methane  as 
a  fuel  in  internal  combustion  engines. 

In  addition  to  his  scientific  researches 
and  academic  duties  Egerton  gave  much 
of  his  time  to  public  service.  He  was  a 
member  of  the  Advisory  Council  of  the 
Department  of  Scientific  and  Industrial 
Research,  of  the  Fuel  Research  Board,  and 
the  Water  Pollution  Board,  and  chairman 
of  the  scientific  advisory  council  of  the 
Ministry  of  Fuel  and  Power.  During  the 
war  of  1939-45  he  carried  out  much 
scientific  work  on  behalf  of  the  three  Ser- 
vices, was  a  member  of  the  War  Cabinet 
scientific  advisory  committee,  and  in  1942 
was  given  the  task  of  reorganizing  the 
British  Central  Scientific  Office  in  Wash- 
ington. He  was  knighted  in  1943.  Elected 
F.R.S.  in  1926,  he  served  on  the  council 
(1931-3),  was  physical  secretary  (1938- 
48),  received  the  Rumford  medal  (1946), 
and  was  an  ex  officio  member  of  innumer- 
able committees  connected  with  the  work 
of  the  society.  He  served  for  many  years 
on  the  governing  bodies  of  Charterhouse 
and  Winchester  College,  and  in  1949-59 
was  director  of  the  Salters'  Institute  of 
Industrial  Chemistry. 

Egerton  was  a  man  of  wide  and  varied 
interests,  a  talented  artist,  a  lover  of 
music,  a  skilful  and  enthusiastic  angler, 
and  an  experienced  skier.  He  travelled 
widely  and  after  his  retirement  visited 
many  of  the  under-developed  territories 


of  the  Commonwealth  with  a  view  to 
studying  at  first  hand  their  problems 
and  needs.  But  none  of  these  interests 
diminished  in  any  way  his  love  of  scientific 
research,  and  throughout  a  long  life  he 
was  never  happier  than  when  working 
in  his  laboratory  or  discussing  scientific 
matters  with  his  colleagues  and  students. 
Among  the  many  distinctions  which  he 
received  were  honorary  degrees  from  the 
universities  of  Birmingham,  Cairo,  Nancy, 
and  Helsinki  and  the  fellowship  of  Univer- 
sity College,  London,  the  Imperial  College 
of  Science,  and  the  City  and  Guilds 
College. 

In  1912  Egerton  married  Ruth  Julia, 
daughter  of  Sir  C.  A.  Cripps,  afterwards 
Lord  Parmoor  [q.v.].  They  had  no  chil- 
dren but  adopted  a  nephew.  Egerton  died 
at  Mouans-Sartoux,  France,  7  September 
1959.  A  portrait  by  P.  Annigoni  is  in  the 
possession  of  the  family. 

[D.  M.  Newitt  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  vi,  1960  ;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  D.  M.  Newitt. 

ELKAN,  BENNO  (1877-1960),  sculptor, 
was  born  at  Dortmund,  Westphalia,  2 
December  1877,  the  son  of  Jewish  parents, 
S.  Elkan  and  his  wife,  Rosa  Oppenheimer, 
and  educated  at  the  Dortmund  Gym- 
nasium, the  Chateau  du  Rosey,  RoUe, 
Lausanne,  the  Royal  Academy,  Munich, 
and  at  Karlsruhe.  Thus  far  a  painter,  he 
reached  Paris  at  the  age  of  twenty-eight 
and  at  once  fell  under  the  influence  of  the 
sculptors  Rodin  and  Bartholome.  Moving 
on  to  Rome  he  there  married  Hedwig 
Einstein  (died  1959)  in  1907.  They  had 
one  son  and  one  daughter. 

Elkan  caused  something  of  a  sensation 
in  1908  with  his  controversial  polychrome 
'Persephone'  in  Carrara  marble,  gold, 
bronze,  jasper,  and  agate — the  figure 
being  partly  draped  with  head  bent  over 
a  posy  of  roses  held  in  hands  crossed  on 
her  breast,  the  dominating  colours  being 
violet,  green,  and  yellow.  This  extremely 
elaborate  tour-de-force  certainly  revealed 
an  astonishing  technical  virtuosity,  if  no 
more. 

In  1911  Elkan  returned  to  Germany 
where  he  executed  three  bronze  panels 
of  'The  Sermon  on  the  Mount',  a  'Flute 
Player',  and  various  plaques  and  medals, 
also  a  few  public  monuments  in  stone  later 
destroyed  by  the  Nazis.  His  granite  figure 
of  a  sorrowing  woman  which  he  completed 
at  such  fever  heat  in  1913-14  that  it  sent 
him  to  hospital,  exhibited  at  the  Cologne 
exposition  in  that  year  with  the  prophetic 


331 


Elkan 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


title  'Germany  Mourns  Her  Heroes',  was 
erected  as  Frankfurt's  memorial  after  the 
war  of  1914-18.  In  1933,  however,  it  was 
damned  by  the  Nazis  and  ceremoniously 
removed ;  but  replaced  in  1946. 

It  was  in  1933  that  Elkan  came  to 
England ;  in  the  next  year  he  exhibited  a 
bronze  head  of  John  D.  Rockefeller  at  the 
Royal  Academy  where  he  was  thereafter 
regularly  represented  by  portrait  heads 
and  medals,  mostly  in  bronze.  His  sub- 
jects included  the  King  of  Siam,  Lords 
Beveridge,  Lee  of  Fareham,  Samuel, 
Kejoies,  Salisbury,  also  Prince  Edward, 
Samuel  Courtauld,  James  de  Rothschild, 
Dr.  Weizmann,  John  Spedan  Lewis, 
Yehudi  Menuhin,  Toscanini,  and  Sir 
Winston  Churchill.  To  Elkan  is  owed  the 
first  statue  of  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  in 
Britain — a  vigorous  debonair  figure  bear- 
ing a  sheaf  of  tobacco  leaves  which  sur- 
mounts the  portal  of  a  factory  which  it 
greatly  dignifies. 

But  Elkan  will  remain  best  known  for 
his  wonderful  succession  of  great  many- 
branched  bronze  candelabra  intricately 
scrolled  and  foliated  Uke  styHzed  espalier 
trees  supporting  numbers  of  small  but 
strongly  detailed  biblical  or  symbolic 
figures.  The  most  impressive  examples  are 
in  Westminster  Abbey  where,  7  feet  high 
and  6  feet  wide,  each  of  the  two  candelabra 
carries  33  candles  to  illuminate  some  30 
figures.  Lesser  ones  adorn  Buckfast 
Abbey,  Devon,  King's  College  chapel, 
Cambridge,  New  College  chapel,  Oxford, 
and  Israel's  Parliament  House — ^the  last 
the  gift  of  British  members  of  Parliament 
and  others.  In  these  highly  individual 
pieces,  with  Gothic  as  well  as  Renaissance 
references,  and  German  as  well  as  Italian 
influence,  Elkan  seemed  to  find  the  most 
apt  expression  of  his  own  wide-ranging 
and  complex  creative  urge. 

Other  works  in  this  country  include  an 
orang-outang  group  for  Edinburgh  Zoo, 
a  gold  medal  for  the  Hospital  for  Sick 
Children,  Great  Ormond  Street,  a  silver- 
gilt  fighting  cock  for  the  Arsenal  Football 
Club,  Mowgli's  jungle  friends,  a  plaque  in 
lead  on  the  memorial  building  for  Rud- 
yard  Kipling  [q.v.]  at  Windsor,  and  Abbot 
Vomer's  tomb  in  Buckfast  Abbey.  Elkan 
is  represented  also  in  many  museums  in 
European  countries  where  his  works  were 
shown  at  international  exhibitions.  Im- 
pressive as  was  anything  from  his  hand 
these  relatively  small  pieces  seemed  to 
promise  still  greater  fulfilment  in  works 
on  a  heroic  scale  which,  however,  he  was 
denied  the  chance  to  execute. 


He  had  a  rare  faculty  for  translating 
sensitive  allegory  into  vigorous  plastic 
form,  as  in  his  great  project  for  a  1914-18 
national  war  memorial  in  Germany.  It 
was  to  have  taken  the  shape  of  a  vast 
monolithic  column  with  its  surface  en- 
riched with  scenes  and  figures  emblematic 
of  the  results  of  war.  Although  the  scheme 
had  received  official  sanction  and  its  cost 
had  been  guaranteed,  the  new  regime 
came  to  power  before  it  could  be  realized. 

In  the  man  himself  there  was  an  earnest 
forcefulness,  a  prophetic  intensity  which, 
with  his  humane  sincerity,  deep  voice, 
and  piercing  eyes,  made  up  an  impressive 
personality  not  easily  forgotten. 

Elkan,  who  was  naturalized  in  1946, 
was  appointed  O.B.E.  in  1957,  and  died  in 
London  10  January  1960. 

{Country  Life,    26   November   1938;    The 

Times,  12  January  1960 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Clough  Williams-Ellis. 

ELLIOT,  WALTER  ELLIOT  (1888- 
1958),  politician,  was  born  in  Lanark  19 
September  1888,  the  elder  son  of  William 
Elliot  and  his  wife,  Ellen  Elizabeth  Shiels. 
From  his  father,  a  prominent  agricultur- 
ist and  livestock  auctioneer,  he  inherited 
a  vivid  personality  and  an  unflagging 
capacity  to  express  it.  In  appearance  he 
was  too  rugged,  not  to  say  gawky,  to  be 
better  than  a  beau  laid,  but  his  mind  was 
a  lovely  thing,  sensitive,  attuned,  and 
informed  by  a  phenomenal  memory. 
Educated  at  Glasgow  Academy  and 
University  he  had  his  fair  share  of  the  gay 
brilliant  life  of  pre-war  undergraduates. 
Among  his  friends  were  James  Bridie 
(O.  H.  Mavor,  q.v.),  (Sir)  John  Boyd,  (Sir) 
Hector  Hetherington,  and  James  Maxton 
[q.v.].  The  first  class  honours  which  he 
obtained  in  both  science  (1910)  and  medi- 
cine (1913)  gave  him  his  taste  and  capacity 
for  research ;  non-academic  activities,  such 
as  Union  debates,  gave  him  his  grounding 
in  politics  which  were  his  other  love.  In 
1914-18  he  served  in  France  as  medical 
officer  to  the  Royal  Scots  Greys ;  his  M.C. 
and  bar  were  no  'ration'  decorations. 

His  political  horizon  in  1918  was  still  so 
wide  that  when  he  received  a  cable  asking 
him  to  stand  for  Lanark  he  is  said  to  have 
replied  'Yes,  which  side?'  This  story  is 
certainly  ben  trovato  for  throughout  his 
career,  although  far  from  uncombative  or 
unzestful,  he  was  at  his  best  as  an  assessor 
of  arguments  and  of  men  without  regard 
to  their  labels.  His  happened  to  be  'Con- 
servative', which  was  perhaps  lucky  for 
him  and  certainly  lucky  for  the  Conserva- 


332 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Elliot 


tive  Party.  He  sat  for  Lanark  until  he  was 
defeated  in  1923;  for  Kelvingrove,  Glas- 
gow, the  toughest  of  Clydeside  seats,  which 
only  he  could  have  held,  from  May  1924 
until  his  defeat  in  1945,  and  from  1950 
until  his  death;  and  for  the  Scottish 
Universities  from  November  1946  until 
1950. 

On  his  election  in  1918,  the  vast  size 
of  the  coalition  majority  did  not  prevent 
his  making  his  mark.  He  became  private 
secretary  to  the  under-secretary  for  health 
for  Scotland  in  July  1919.  Although  he 
voted  against  the  anti- Coalitionists  at  the 
Carlton  Club  meeting  in  October  1922  he 
was  appointed  under-secretary  for  health 
for  Scotland  in  January  1923.  He  returned 
to  the  Scottish  Office  in  November  1924 
after  the  Labour  interlude  and  remained 
there  (as  under-secretary  of  state  from 
1926)  until  1929.  As  a  member  of  the  Em- 
pire Marketing  Board  from  its  inception  in 
1926  Elliot  had  an  opportunity  to  further 
the  kinds  of  speculative  and  often  practi- 
cal research  which  had  been  his  delight. 

For  a  time  he  himself  had  managed  to 
combine  politics  with  research,  notably 
into  nutritional  problems,  in  alliance  with 
John  (later  Lord)  Boyd  Orr  and  Professor 
T.  B.  Wood,  at  the  Rowett  Research 
Institute  in  Aberdeen.  But  soon  the 
House  of  Commons  was  so  firmly  in  his 
blood  that  pohtics  were  his  pulse.  After 
the  Labour  collapse  in  1931  he  became 
financial  secretary  to  the  Treasury  and  in 
1932  he  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council 
and  began  four  useful  years  at  the  Ministry 
of  Agriculture.  Few  people  then  recog- 
nized that  the  economics  of  glut  must 
differ  from  those  of  scarcity.  But  Elliot 
did,  and  his  marketing  boards  enshrined  an 
idea  which  has  never  been  wholly  dropped. 

He  seemed  to  be  sailing  straight  for  10 
Downing  Street  via  the  secretaryship  of 
state  for  Scotland  (1936-8)  and  the 
Ministry  of  Health  (1938-40),  his  next 
posts  in  the  Cabinet.  But  in  1938  he  made 
his  great  tactical  mistake.  Nobody  by 
instinct  or  conviction  was  more  utterly 
opposed  to  the  appeasement  of  Hitler. 
Yet  he  stayed  in  the  Government,  hoping, 
as  so  many  have  vainly  hoped,  to  exercise 
more  influence  from  within.  When  Cham- 
berlain fell  in  1940  Elliot  was  excluded 
from  the  forgiveness  extended  to  many 
far  more  deluded  by  appeasement.  He 
never  held  cabinet  office  again,  although 
various  minor  posts  were  offered  him,  and 
the  award  of  a  C.H.  in  1952  was  perhaps 
one  slight  recognition  of  the  injustice  of 
this  exclusion. 


There  were,  of  course,  compensations. 
Loss  of  office  enabled  him,  as  he  used  to 
say,  to  'wear  the  King's  coat  a  second 
time'  and  become  director  of  public  rela- 
tions at  the  War  Office  (1941-2).  Later  he 
became  a  brilliant  freelance  journalist  and 
a  highly  popular  broadcaster.  In  1942-3  he 
was  chairman  of  the  public  accounts  com- 
mittee of  the  House  of  Commons  and  in 
1943-4  of  a  commission  on  higher  educa- 
tion in  West  Africa  which  led  to  the 
estabhshment  of  separate  University 
Colleges  in  Ghana,  Sierra  Leone,  and 
Nigeria.  He  believed  firmly  in  the  future  of 
the  West  African  nations,  and  in  the  pos- 
sibility of  a  multi-racial  State  in  Central 
Africa.  In  1956  he  headed  the  parliamen- 
tary mission  which  presented  a  mace  to 
the  Nigerian  parliament.  Throughout  his 
life  he  was  one  of  the  most  resolute  sup- 
porters of  the  State  of  Israel.  With  other 
members  of  Parliament  of  all  parties  he 
worked  to  establish  better  relationships 
with  the  Germans  after  the  defeat  of 
Nazism  and  also,  through  the  establish- 
ment of  a  N.A.T.O.  parliamentary  con- 
ference, to  forward  the  interests  of  the 
N.A.T.O.  alliance.  In  politics  he  easily 
acquired  the  status  of  an  'elder  statesman' 
to  whom  the  House  listens  more  atten- 
tively and  often  with  more  common  con- 
sent than  to  ministers. 

In  Scotland  Elliot  was  a  beloved 
national  figure,  unchallenged  in  his  life- 
time. He  was  rector  of  the  universities  of 
Aberdeen  (1933-6)  and  Glasgow  (1947- 
50)  and  received  honorary  degrees  from 
all  four  Scottish  universities.  He  was  made 
a  freeman  of  Edinburgh  in  1938  and  in 
1956  and  1957  was  appointed  lord  high 
conmiissioner  to  the  General  Assembly  of 
the  Church  of  Scotland.  He  received 
honorary  degrees  also  from  Leeds,  Man- 
chester, and  South  Africa,  and  was  elected 
F.R.S.  in  1935  and  F.R.C.P.  in  1940. 

In  1919  Elliot  married  Helen,  daughter 
of  Lieutenant-Colonel  David  Livingston 
Hamilton,  R.A.M.C.T.  Her  death  in  a 
mountaineering  accident  on  their  honey- 
moon was  a  tragedy  which  saddened  but 
never  soured  him.  In  1934  he  married 
Katharine,  daughter,  by  his  second  wife, 
of  Sir  Charles  Tennant  [q.v.]  and  half- 
sister  of  Margot  Asquith  [q.v.].  Her  stead- 
fastness and  loyalty  greatly  helped  him 
to  face  unruffied  both  problems  in,  and 
frustrations  out  of,  office.  In  1958  she  was 
created  a  life  peeress  as  Baroness  Elliot  of 
Harwood.  There  were  no  children.  Elliot 
died  at  Harwood,  Bonchester  Bridge, 
Hawick,  8  January  1958.  A  library  has 


333 


Elliot 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


been  endowed  in  his  meraory  at  Glasgow 
University. 

[Sir  Colin  Coote,  A  Companion  of  Honour, 
1965;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Colin  Coote. 

ELVIN,  Sir  (JAMES)  ARTHUR  (1899- 
1957),  founder  of  Wembley  Stadium,  was 
born  in  Norwich  5  July  1899,  the  son  of 
John  Elvin,  a  police  officer  who  died  while 
his  son  was  still  at  school,  and  his  wife, 
Charlotte  Elizabeth  HoUey.  Educated  at 
a  local  elementary  school,  Elvin  joined  the 
Royal  Flying  Corps  soon  after  the  out- 
break of  war,  became  an  observer,  and 
was  taken  prisoner  after  being  shot  down. 
He  escaped,  possibly  on  two  occasions, 
but  was  recaptured  because  he  knew 
neither  French  nor  German  and  could  not 
swim.  This,  he  said,  gave  him  the  deter- 
mination to  build  a  public  swimming  pool. 

After  the  war  he  was  employed  by  the 
concern  which  purchased  the  whole  of  the 
surplus  war  stores  in  northern  France  and 
this  gave  him  a  knowledge  of  metals  by 
scratching  them  which  later  stood  him  in 
good  stead.  He  returned  to  London  at  a 
time  of  depression  and  obtained  a  job 
which  took  him  as  a  cigarette  salesman  to 
the  British  Empire  exhibition  at  Wembley 
in  1924.  Scratching  thte  window  frames  of 
the  cigarette  kiosk  he  found  to  his  sur- 
prise that  they  were  real  bronze ;  this 
encouraged  him  later  to  make  an  offer 
for  the  demolition  of  the  buildings  when 
offered  to  tender.  Other  contractors  asked 
to  be  paid  for  the  task;  Elvin  made  an 
offer  to  pay,  retaining  the  demolished 
materials,  and  got  the  contract. 

While  occupied  in  the  demolition,  Elvin 
became  interested  in  greyhound  racing, 
already  successfully  established  at  Man- 
chester and  the  White  City,  and  was 
advised  by  Sir  Owen  Williams  that  it 
would  be  possible  to  adapt  the  Wembley 
stadium  which  was  then  being  used  for 
football  once  a  year  and  was  consequently 
rapidly  deteriorating.  Elvin  purchased  the 
stadium,  floated  it  as  a  private  company, 
became  managing  director,  and  the  first 
greyhound  meeting  was  held  in  December 
1927. 

Elvin  was  not  basically  a  money  maker 
for  himself,  but  he  liked  money  because  he 
liked  to  spend  it,  and  he  had  moreover  an 
ambition  to  make  Wembley  more  than  a 
racing  track.  Attached  to  the  stadium  was 
a  considerable  area  of  land  and  a  lake  and 
he  first  had  ideas  of  a  great  amusement 
park,  but  finally  decided  to  realize  his 
early    ambition    and    built    the    Empire 


Pool.  Indoor  swimming  pools  are  not 
financially  very  successful  so  the  bath  was 
covered  over  with  a  removable  floor  in 
order  to  stage  skating,  ice  hockey,  ice 
spectacles,  and  boxing.  This,  together 
with  greyhound  racing  and  dirt-track 
cycle  racing,  involved  Elvin  in  attending 
every  day  and  night  except  Sundays.  He 
was  a  great  party  giver  and  he  had  a 
restaurant  for  his  parties  on  the  balcony  of 
the  Empire  Pool.  Only  too  obviously  this 
could  only  result  in  a  great  strain  on  his 
health  for  he  was  inclined  to  asthma  and 
the  smoky  atmosphere  of  these  entertain- 
ments was  an  aggravation. 

During  the  war  of  1939-45  he  carried 
on  as  best  he  could  at  Wembley  where  he 
generously  entertained  Service  men  and 
women.  The  Pool  was  at  this  time  occu- 
pied as  a  hostel  for  Gibraltarians.  As  far 
back  as  1936  and  earlier  he  yearned  to 
have  the  Olympic  Games  in  Wembley  and 
he  had  visited  the  Games  when  they  were 
opened  in  Berlin  by  Hitler.  The  war  over, 
he  returned  to  his  ambition  which  he 
achieved  in  1948,  believed  to  be  the  only 
occasion  when  the  Olympic  Games,  with- 
out a  government  subsidy,  made  a  small 
surplus.  This,  of  course,  increased  his 
entertaining  and  his  work.  He  was  hardly 
ever  out  of  Wembley  where  he  was  a  stern 
disciplinarian,  sometimes  almost  to  un- 
kindness  as  people  thought  until  they 
went  sick  or  were  in  trouble,  when  he 
proved  their  greatest  friend.  His  health 
deteriorated  and  he  took  a  sea  voyage  to 
South  Africa  to  recuperate  but  died  and 
was  buried  at  sea  4  February  1957.  He 
was  made  an  honorary  freeman  of  the 
borough  of  Wembley  in  1945,  appointed 
M.B.E.  in  the  same  year,  and  knighted 
in  1946. 

In  1925  Elvin  married  Jean,  daughter  of 
William  Charles  Harding  and  widow  of 
William  Heathcote  Dolphin.  It  was  a 
great  sorrow  to  them  that  they  had  no 
children,  who  might  have  been  a  stabilizer 
in  the  hectic  life  in  which  they  were 
involved.  A  bronze  bust  by  A.  J.  Banks  is 
at  Wembley  Stadium. 

[Personal  knowledge.]       Owen  Williams. 

ENSOR,  Sir  ROBERT  CHARLES 
KIRKWOOD  (1877-1958),  journalist  and 
historian,  was  born  16  October  1877  at 
Milborne  Port,  Somerset,  the  third  child 
and  only  son  to  survive  infancy  of  Robert 
Henry  Ensor  and  his  wife,  Olivia  Priscilla, 
daughter  of  Charles  Curme,  banker,  of 
Dorchester.  A  scholar  of  Winchester  and 
of  Balliol  College,   Oxford,  he  obtained 


334 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Ensor 


firsts  in  classical  moderations  (1898)  and 
liter ae  humaniores  (1900)  and  in  1899  the 
Chancellor's  Latin  verse  prize  and  a 
Craven  scholarship.  He  was  elected  presi- 
dent of  the  Union  for  Hilary  term  1900 
a  few  weeks  before  winning  his  Craven. 

He  was  urged  by  his  Oxford  tutors  and 
by  M.  J.  Rendall  [q.v.]  of  Winchester 
towards  the  bar  and  public  life.  'You  have 
too  much  vigour  and  force  to  be  a  don', 
Rendall  wrote  in  August  1900,  'although 
I  think  you  would  make  a  good  one.'  This 
was  perilous  advice.  As  a  result  of 
disastrous  speculation  by  his  father  some 
years  earlier  Ensor  was  short  of  money. 
His  family  was  kept  going  by  a  finishing 
school  which  his  mother  and  sisters  ran  in 
Brussels.  He  was  not  elected  to  the  Oxford 
prize  fellowships  which  would  have  given 
him  some  financial  security.  To  overcome 
the  drawback  of  poverty  and  succeed  at 
the  bar  he  would  have  needed  a  fine 
physique,  patient  devotion  to  the  main 
chance,  and  acceptable  views.  He  pos- 
sessed none  of  these  attributes.  He  was 
a  small  man,  not  notably  robust,  who 
blinked  constantly.  He  was  apt  to  dis- 
perse his  energies:  he  might  have  had 
a  fellowship  of  Merton  or  St.  John's  in 
September  1900  had  he  not  been  helping 
C.  P.  Scott  [q.v.]  in  the  election  campaign 
at  Leigh  until  just  before  the  examination. 
He  was  not  willing  to  wait  indefinitely  for 
an  income :  he  married  within  five  years  of 
leaving  Oxford.  He  had  become  an  ardent 
socialist  and  was  soon  editing  the  collec- 
tion of  speeches  and  writings  published  in 
1904  as  Modern  Socialisni. 

Ensor  joined  the  Manchester  Guardian 
at  the  end  of  1901,  succeeding  L.  T.  Hob- 
house  [q.v.]  as  a  leader-writer.  Three  years 
later  he  moved  to  London;  and  in  1905 
he  was  called  to  the  bar  by  the  Inner 
Temple.  He  contributed  to  a  number  of 
journals  at  this  time,  notably  the  Speaker, 
the  Nation,  and  the  short-lived  daily 
Tribune.  He  lived  in  Poplar  and  was  soon 
active  in  Labour  politics.  In  1909  he 
served  on  the  national  administrative 
council  of  the  Independent  Labour  Party. 
He  was  on  the  executive  committee  of  the 
Fabian  Society  in  1907-11  and  1912-19 
and  a  member  of  the  London  County 
Council  from  1910  to  1913. 

In  1909  Ensor  abandoned  the  bar  and 
became  a  leader-writer  on  the  Daily  News. 
He  lost  this  post  two  years  later  when  the 
paper  was  planning  to  amalgamate  with 
the  Morning  Leader.  In  February  1912  he 
was  appointed  by  (Sir)  Robert  Donald 
[q.v.]   to   a   similar   post   on   the   Daily 


Chronicle  and  he  remained  there  as  chief 
leader-writer  until  the  paper  was  amalga- 
mated in  1930  with  the  Daily  Neivs  to 
become  the  News  Chronicle.  During  En- 
sor's  early  years  on  it  the  Daily  Chronicle 
was  a  powerful  paper.  Most  of  its  pro- 
nouncements came  from  his  pen;  and 
Liberal  politicians  treated  them  with 
respect.  He  wrote,  for  instance,  the 
leader  of  29  November  1916  which  called 
for  an  improved  prime  minister's  secre- 
tariat, and  for  a  War  Council  reduced  to 
four  members  and  given  'the  widest  powers 
of  prompt  action'. 

Although  Ensor  had  moved  in  1910  to 
High  Wycombe  where  he  was  able  to 
indulge  his  hobbies  of  gardening  and  bird 
watching,  he  remained  for  some  years  near 
the  centre  of  affairs.  He  was  the  secretary 
of  the  foreign  policy  committee  which 
a  group  of  Liberals  established  early  in 
1912,  in  the  hope  of  checking  Sir  Edward 
Grey  (later  Viscount  Grey  of  Fallodon, 
q.v.)  and  promoting  'a  friendly  approach 
to  the  German  government'.  Ensor  now 
became  the  leading  Fabian  authority  on 
foreign  policy.  He  was  far  more  realistic 
about  it  than  were  most  of  his  fellow  social- 
ists. He  argued,  for  instance,  that  objec- 
tions to  Tsarist  despotism  should  not  affect 
British  statesmen:  there  was  'a  strong 
case  for  the  entente  with  Russia'  (New 
Statesman,  25  April  1914).  He  knew, 
according  to  his  own  later  statements 
{England,  1870-1914),  more  about  Ger- 
man war  preparations  than  he  was  al- 
lowed to  write  in  the  Daily  Chronicle. 

None  the  less  the  German  invasion  of 
Belgium  seems  to  have  surprised  him. 
He  had  long  been  at  home  in  that  country : 
the  assault  on  it  affected  him  deeply  and 
drove  him  politically  to  the  Right.  On 
1  August  1914  the  Daily  Chronicle  was 
still  taking  the  traditional  Liberal  view: 
a  leader  warned  that  Russia  should  not 
be  supported  'so  far  as  to  win  for  her  an 
unbalanced  hegemony'.  A  leader  by 
Ensor  on  4  August  announced  a  complete 
change;  and  to  the  Chronicle  three  days 
later  the  German  invasion  of  Belgium 
represented  'a  survival  of  immoral  and 
barbarous  forces  which  in  the  long  run 
Europe  must  inevitably  have  had  to 
subdue'.  On  3  May  1915  Beatrice  Webb 
[q.v.]  recorded  in  her  diary  in  a  survey 
of  Fabian  views  on  the  war:  'Ensor,  one 
of  the  most  accomplished  of  the  middle- 
aged  members,  is  complacently  convinced 
of  the  imperative  need  not  only  of  beating 
Germany  but  of  dismembering  the  Ger- 
man Empire.'  iwdi*4i 


335 


Ensor 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Writing  for  the  Daily  Chronicle  suited 
Ensor.  He  refused  a  proposal  that  he 
should  become  Berlin  correspondent  of 
The  Times.  But  he  suffered  by  the  sale  of 
the  Chronicle  to  the  Lloyd  George  group 
and  by  the  Liberal  decline  in  the  twenties. 
When  the  amalgamation  of  1930  brought 
his  retirement  he  seemed  a  brilliant 
failure.  He  had  attracted  the  attention, 
however,  of  (Sir)  George  Clark,  the  editor 
of  the  Oxford  History  of  England ;  and  in 
November  1930,  although  he  had  written 
nothing  substantial  except  a  short  book 
on  Belgium  in  the  Home  University  Lib- 
rary (1915),  he  was  chosen  to  write  the 
most  recent  volume  of  the  History.  This 
bold  choice  proved  to  be  inspired.  Ensor's 
gifts  and  experience  gave  him  a  unique 
equipment  as  the  historian  of  his  own 
times.  The  range  of  his  information  was 
formidable  and  he  had  a  wide  acquain- 
tance among  public  men.  He  was  used 
to  working  quickly  through  masses  of 
material.  He  had  preserved  in  a  career  of 
journalism  high  standards  of  scholarship. 
He  had  himself  published  several  volumes 
of  verse  and  wrote  with  discernment  on 
literature,  music,  and  the  other  arts. 
England,  1870-1914  appeared  in  1936  and 
was  acclaimed  at  once  as  a  masterpiece. 
Authoritative  and  just  in  judgement,  it 
was  never  heavy.  A  crisp  style  and  de- 
lightful touches  of  idiosyncrasy  made 
every  chapter  marvellously  readable.  His 
account  of  the  events  leading  up  to  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1914  was  particularly 
notable.  He  had  already  guessed  when  he 
wrote  it  that  German  policy  would  pro- 
duce a  crisis  in  1938.  In  an  article  in  the 
Spectator  (7  October  1938)  he  explained 
that  to  someone  who  had  studied  Mein 
Kampf  German  methods,  in  both  con- 
scription and  the  purchase  of  raw 
materials,  had  pointed  to  this  date. 

Ensor  had  maintained  his  income 
meanwhile  by  freelance  journalism  and 
by  some  university  work.  He  lectured 
at  the  London  School  of  Economics  in 
1931-2  and  was  deputy  for  the  Gladstone 
professor  of  political  theory  and  insti- 
tutions at  Oxford  in  1933.  He  even  found 
time  to  write  a  comparison  of  the  British, 
French,  and  German  judicial  systems 
(Courts  and  Judges,  1933).  Once  the 
History  was  published  recognition  from 
his  imiversity  came  quickly.  He  was  a 
senior  research  fellow  of  Corpus  Christi 
CoUege,  Oxford,  from  1937  to  1946.  He 
was  made  a  faculty  fellow  of  Nuffield 
College  in  1939  and  deputized  again  for 
the  Gladstone  professor  from  1940  to  1944. 


In  Oxford  as  elsewhere  he  was  handi- 
capped by  his  inability  ever  to  admit  that 
he  was  wrong.  But  he  became  a  renowned 
common-room  conversationalist  and  an 
influential  figure  in  the  faculty  of  social 
studies  where  he  joined  in  devising  the 
degree  of  bachelor  of  philosophy.  The 
first  in  his  long  series  of  'Scrutator' 
articles  in  the  Sunday  Times  appeared  on 
9  February  1941  and  he  contributed  a 
number  of  notices  to  this  Dictionary.  He 
served  on  the  royal  conunissions  on  popu- 
lation (1944-9)  and  the  press  (1947-9). 
He  became  an  honorary  fellow  of  Balliol 
and  Corpus  Christi  colleges  in  1953  and 
was  knighted  in  1955. 

Ensor  was  happy  in  his  private  life. 
He  married  in  1906  Helen  (died  1960), 
daughter  of  William  Henry  Fisher,  of 
Manchester;  they  had  two  sons  and 
three  daughters.  He  died  in  Beaconsfield 
4  December  1958. 

[Ensor's  papers  in  Corpus  Christi  College, 
Oxford ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] M.  G.  Brock. 

ENTWISTLE,  WILLIAM  JAMES  (1895- 
1952),  scholar,  was  born  7  December  1895 
at  Cheng  Yang  Kuan,  the  eldest  of  the 
four  children  of  William  Edmund  Ent- 
wistle  and  his  wife,  Jessie  Ann  Buchan, 
both  missionaries  in  China.  Entwistle  was 
taught  by  his  father  and  at  the  China 
Inland  Mission's  school  at  Chefoo  until 
1910,  and  acquired  a  working  knowledge 
of  Chinese  which  he  never  lost.  To  the 
circumstances  of  his  boyhood  he  must 
have  owed  something  of  his  sobriety  of 
taste  and  manner,  and  his  marked  inclina- 
tion, as  a  scholar,  to  walk  alone.  After  a 
year  at  Robert  Gordon's  College,  Aber- 
deen, he  entered  the  university  with  a 
bursary  and  in  1916  obtained  a  first  class 
in  classics,  with  distinctions  in  Greek  his- 
tory and  comparative  philology  and  was 
awarded  the  Simpson  and  Jenkyns  prizes 
and  the  Seafield  and  the  Town's  gold 
medals.  He  then  joined  the  Royal  Field 
Artillery,  later  transferring  to  the  Scottish 
Rifles,  and  was  seriously  wounded  in  1917. 
In  the  following  year  he  was  awarded 
the  FuUerton  classical  scholarship  at 
Aberdeen  and  an  academic  career  in 
classics  seemed  the  natural  sequel.  Al- 
ready, however,  the  natural  sweep  of  his 
mind,  his  voracious  curiosity  and  his 
restless  explorer's  instinct  urged  him  to 
seek  less  well-mapped  territory,  and  he 
turned  to  Spanish.  In  1920,  with  a  Car- 
negie grant,  he  went  for  a  year  to  Madrid. 
His   prodigious   assimilative   powers   en- 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Entwistle 


abled  him,  in  that  time,  to  acquaint 
himself  with  most  aspects  of  the  subject 
and  also  to  accumulate  a  quantity  of  re- 
search material  which  kept  him  supplied 
for  years.  He  learnt  Spanish  thoroughly, 
also  Catalan  and  Portuguese,  although  he 
always  spoke  his  languages  with  a  pro- 
nounced Scots  accent.  Either  then,  or 
soon  afterwards,  he  acquired  some  know- 
ledge of  Arabic  and  Basque.  He  formed 
no  emotional  attachment  to  Spain  and  his 
subsequent  visits  to  the  country  were  rare. 

In  1921  Entwistle  became  lecturer  in 
charge  of  Spanish  at  Manchester  where  he 
wrote  his  first  book,  The  Arthurian  Legend 
in  the  Literatures  of  the  Spanish  Peninsula 
(1925),  a  pioneer  effort  which  showed  his 
flair  for  ordering  and  relating  a  mass  of 
facts,  and  some  of  those  suggestive  intui- 
tions, at  times  bold  to  the  point  of  rash- 
ness, which  prevented  his  works  from 
becoming  mere  tools  for  purveying  erudi- 
tion. In  this  year  he  became  first  Stevenson 
professor  of  Spanish  at  Glasgow,  where,  as 
always,  he  eagerly  undertook  whatever 
administrative  duties  came  his  way.  He 
now  embarked  on  the  immense  scholarly 
output  which  characterized  his  academic 
career.  When  in  1932  he  became  King 
Alfonso  XIII  professor  of  Spanish  studies 
at  Oxford,  with  a  fellowship  at  Exeter 
College,  at  the  early  age  of  thirty-six  he 
had  two  major  works  and  thirty  learned 
articles  to  his  credit.  His  edition  of  the 
second  part  of  the  Chronicle  of  John  I  of 
Portugal  was,  however,  never  published. 
The  proofs  were  deposited  in  the  Taylor 
Institution. 

Entwistle 's  previous  experience  and 
avowed  belief  in  the  professoriate  as  'a 
sacred  priesthood'  did  not  make  it  easy 
for  him  to  accept  the  marginal,  undepart- 
mentalized  status  of  an  Oxford  arts 
professor,  or  many  other  Oxford  attitudes 
to  learning  and  teaching.  For  a  time  he 
seemed  more  anxious  to  introduce  into 
Oxford  the  ways  of  the  universities  he 
knew  than  to  adapt  himself.  There  was 
in  him,  however,  nothing  intolerant  or 
fanatical ;  while  he  always  practised  what 
he  preached,  he  gradually  reconciled 
himself  with  wry  good  humour  to  the 
fact  that  many  of  his  opinions  were  not 
acceptable  in  Oxford.  By  dint  of  contin- 
uous pressure,  he  did  succeed  in  getting  an 
honour  school  of  Portuguese  established 
and  himself  became  director  of  Portuguese 
studies  (1933).  He  also  succeeded  in  get- 
ting Catalan  and  Spanish-American  litera- 
ture put  on  the  syllabus.  Some  felt  this 
to  be  an  empire-building  gesture,  but  it 


would  seem  to  have  been  justified  by  the 
increase  in  numbers  reading  Spanish  to 
about  a  hundred  by  the  end  of  his  career. 

Entwistle's  first  major  work  at  Oxford 
was  The  Spanish  Language  (1936),  a 
descriptive  account  of  the  languages  of 
the  Iberian  peninsula  which  broke  en- 
tirely new  ground  by  the  weight  it  gave 
to  historical  and  social  interpretations  of 
linguistic  fact.  European  Balladry  (1939), 
his  most  important  work  on  a  literary 
subject,  went  for  the  first  time  beyond 
Iberian  themes.  He  studied  about  a  dozen 
more  European  languages,  remarking 
apologetically  in  his  preface  that  he  had 
not  read  with  his  own  eyes  the  Finnish  and 
Esthonian  ballads.  The  book  marked  an 
epoch  in  ballad  criticism  and  despite  the 
density  of  its  material  and  the  rigour  of 
his  method  is  humane  and  readable.  In 
1949  Entwistle  published,  in  collaboration 
with  W.  A.  Morison,  Russian  and  the 
Slavonic  Languages  which  he  approached 
in  the  pioneer  manner  of  his  book  on 
Spanish.  Although  he  had  only  taken  up 
Slavonic  a  few  years  previously,  this  book, 
and  several  articles,  established  him  as  an 
authority. 

While  preparing  his  major  works  Ent- 
wistle wrote,  or  collaborated  in,  various 
other  books,  including  an  attempt  at  a 
new  assessment  of  Cervantes  as  a  literary 
craftsman  (1940)  and  a  history  of  English 
literature  (1943).  His  output  of  learned 
articles  while  at  Oxford  seems  to  have 
exceeded  sixty,  to  say  nothing  of  endless 
reviews.  His  articles  deal  with  a  great 
variety  of  Spanish,  Portuguese,  and  South 
American  literary,  linguistic,  and  histori- 
cal themes,  with  Slavonic  language  and 
literature,  with  Scandinavian  material, 
with  general  linguistics,  and  much  else 
besides.  His  attitude  to  his  articles  was 
peculiar.  Whenever  new  ideas  occurred  to 
him,  as  they  ceaselessly  did,  he  at  once 
worked  them  out  in  article  form,  but 
after  they  had  been  proof-corrected  he 
often  seemed  to  have  no  further  interest 
in  them.  Sometimes  they  were  so  rapidly 
composed  that  his  meaning  is  not  easy  to 
follow,  but  all  contain  a  new  point  of  view 
or  a  new  contribution  to  knowledge.  On 
the  other  hand,  with  his  books  he  took 
endless  pains,  sometimes  rewriting  them 
as  many  as  ten  times  before  sending  to 
the  pubhshers  a  manuscript  bare  of  any 
corrections. 

His  other  activities  were  immense.  He 
was  joint-editor  of  the  Modern  Language 
Review  (1934-48),  general  editor  of  the 
Year's  Work  in  Modem  Language  Studies 


887 


Entwistle 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


(1931-7)  and  of  the  Great  Languages 
Series  (1940-52).  He  was  also  general 
editor  of  the  hnguistic  contributions  to  the 
new  edition  of  Chambers's  Encyclopcedia, 
to  which  he  himself  contributed  an  impor- 
tant article  on  Language.  He  served  on 
several  editorial  boards  including  Medium 
jEvum,  the  Bulletin  of  Hispanic  Studies, 
and  the  Romanistisches  Jahrbuch.  He  was 
always  ready  to  attend  congresses  or 
lecture  abroad,  visiting  South  America, 
Spain  and  Portugal,  and  Scandinavia.  In 
1942-3  he  was  educational  director  of  the 
British  Council.  Outside  Oxford,  academic 
honours,  which  he  received  with  an  un- 
expected degree  of  satisfaction,  were 
frequent.  He  was  an  honorary  LL.D.  of 
Aberdeen  (1940)  and  Glasgow  (1951), 
Litt.D.  of  Coimbra  and  Pennsylvania,  as 
well  as  a  corresponding  member  of  the 
Spanish  and  Portuguese  Academies  of 
History,  the  Norwegian  Academy,  and 
other  foreign  learned  societies.  In  1950  he 
was  elected  F.B.A.  and  in  1952  he  was 
president  of  the  Modern  Humanities 
Research  Association. 

A  major  operation,  coupled  with  his 
extreme  conscientiousness  while  visiting 
professor  at  Philadelphia  and  California  in 
1948-9,  overstrained  Entwistle  beyond 
repair.  Soon  after  his  return  home  he  was 
taken  seriously  ill  and,  until  his  death, 
which  occurred  suddenly  at  Oxford  13 
June  1952,  he  was  stricken  but  undaunted. 
His  daemon  seemed  to  drive  him  harder 
than  ever.  He  began  to  write  two  new 
books.  One,  on  Calderon,  was  never 
finished.  The  other.  Aspects  of  Language 
(1953),  a  synthesis,  is  his  greatest  book 
and  contains  the  fruits  of  his  thinking 
based  on  a  knowledge  of  many  of  the 
languages  of  the  world.  Its  exploration  of 
the  non-Indo-Eiu'opean  linguistic  world 
is  remarkable.  Empirical,  eschewing  tech- 
niques and  doctrines,  and  characterized 
by  an  optimism  and  dry  humour  difficult 
to  associate  with  the  circumstances  in 
which  it  was  written,  it  is  largely  free 
from  the  disconcerting  whimsicalities  of 
vocabulary  and  style  which,  in  his  deter- 
mination not  to  be  dull,  he  had  sometimes 
used  in  earlier  books. 

The  two  men  to  whom  Entwistle  most 
wished  to  be  compared  were  Wilhelm  von 
Hiunboldt  and  Gaston  Paris.  The  choice 
was  characteristic,  for  he  regarded  much 
contemporary  scholarship  as  narrow,  and 
both  arrogant  and  timid;  his  own  work 
had  the  quality  of  genius.  In  private  he 
was  not  formidable,  conducting  himself 
with  a  courtesy,  loyalty,  good  humour, 


and  absence  of  showmanship  which  caused 
the  sophisticated  to  underestimate  him. 
On  the  surface  it  seemed  he  possessed 
a  natural  orderliness  of  habit  and  mind, 
probably  the  result  of  the  rigid  disciplin- 
ing of  a  naturally  romantic  temperament. 
Even  in  his  later  work  his  emotions  were 
so  implacably  controlled  that  only  some  of 
the  warmth  which  was  in  the  man  emerged. 
In  1921  Entwistle  married  Jeanie 
Drysdale,  daughter  of  John  Buchanan,  a 
Kirkcaldy  business  man,  by  whom  he  had 
one  son,  and  who  provided  him  with  the 
happy  unpretentious  and  secure  home  life 
which  his  highly  strung  temperament 
needed.  Although  he  had  the  speech  and 
religion  of  Scotland,  and  his  dark  hair, 
high  cheek-bones,  and  slight  physical  un- 
gainliness  suggested  a  characteristic  Scots 
type,  his  parents  in  fact  came  from  Man- 
chester and  Sheffield.  But  his  marriage 
completed  the  process  of  making  him  a 
Scot  by  adoption. 

[A.  Ewert  in  Proceedings  of  the  British 
Academy,  vol.  xxxviii,  1952 ;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

P.  E.  Russell. 

EPSTEIN,  Sir  JACOB  (1880-1959), 
sculptor,  was  born  10  November  1880  in 
Hester  Street,  New  York  City,  in  the 
Jewish  quarter  near  the  Bowery,  the  third 
son  of  Max  and  Mary  Salomon  Epstein,  a 
well-to-do  merchant  family  of  orthodox 
Jews,  immigrants  to  America  as  a  result  of 
the  persecutions  and  pogroms  in  Tsarist 
Russia  and  Poland.  Epstein  was  interested 
in  drawing  as  a  boy  and  made  many 
studies  of  life  in  the  streets  around  his 
home,  crowded  by  Russians,  Poles, 
Italians,  Greeks,  and  Chinese.  Attracted 
in  time  to  the  practice  of  sculpture,  he 
learned  bronze  casting  in  a  foundry  and 
studied  modelling  at  evening  classes  for 
professional  sculptors'  assistants  con- 
ducted by  George  Grey  Barnard. 

He  continued  to  draw  and  was  invited 
by  Hutchins  Hapgood  to  illustrate  a  book 
on  the  life  of  the  East  Side  of  New  York, 
called  The  Spirit  of  the  Ghetto,  which  was 
published  in  1902.  With  the  fees  from  this 
work  he  paid  for  a  passage  to  Paris  in 
search  of  European  influences  and  the 
inspirations  he  had  failed  to  discover  in 
the  sculpture  of  America.  He  studied  the 
sculpture  in  the  Parisian  museums  and  art 
galleries;  notably  the  early  Greek  work, 
Cycladic  carvings,  the  limestone  bust  of 
Akenaton,  and  also  the  primitive  sculp- 
ture at  the  Trocadero  and  the  Chinese 
collection  at  the   Musee   Cernuschi.   He 


338 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Epstein 


shared  a  studio  with  a  New  York  friend, 
Bernard  Gussow,  in  the  rue  Belloni  behind 
the  Gare  Montparnasse.  At  the  Beaux- 
Arts  School  he  studied  modeUing  from  the 
nude ;  but  he  left  through  the  animosity  of 
the  French  students  when  he  refused  to 
'fag'  for  the  entrants  for  the  Prix  de  Rome 
Concours,  and  transferred  to  the  Julian 
Academy  where  he  studied  until  he  left 
Paris. 

In  1905  he  moved  to  London  and  took 
a  studio  in  Camden  Town.  A  visit  as  a 
steerage  passenger  to  America  failed  to 
attract  him  to  stay ;  he  returned  to  Lon- 
don, settled  in  a  studio  in  Fulham,  and 
was  naturalized  in  1911.  Meantime  he 
met  Francis  Dodd,  (Sir)  Muirhead  Bone 
[qq.v.],  Augustus  John,  and  the  artists 
of  the  New  Enghsh  Art  Club  circle ;  and 
studied  at  the  British  Museum :  especially 
the  Elgin  Marbles  and  the  other  Greek 
sculpture,  the  Egyptian  rooms,  and  the 
collections  of  Polynesian  and  African  art. 

Francis  Dodd  introduced  Epstein  to 
Charles  Holden  [q.v.],  the  architect,  who 
invited  him  to  decorate  his  new  British 
Medical  Association  building  in  the  Strand. 
For  this  commission  Epstein  carved  eigh- 
teen over-Ufe-size  nude  figures  symboliz- 
ing the  stages  of  human  life  from  birth 
to  death,  well  proportioned  and  simple  in 
movement.  These  very  orthodox  sculp- 
tures became  a  music-hall  joke  through 
a  phihstine  outcry  against  their  nudity, 
started  by  a  front-page  article  by  an 
anonymous  journalist  in  the  Evening 
Standard  and  St.  James's  Gazette  19  June 
1908.  Correspondence  in  various  journals, 
also  petitions  and  parUamentary  questions 
followed  this  essay.  The  statues  were 
examined  by  a  pohce  officer  who  noted 
them  as  'rude'.  The  bishop  of  Stepney, 
Cosmo  Gordon  Lang  [q.v.],  later  arch- 
bishop of  Canterbury,  climbed  the  scaffold- 
ing to  examine  them  and  declared  them 
innocent  of  any  offence.  They  were  also 
defended  in  the  columns  of  The  Times. 
Nevertheless  the  sculptor  suffered  the 
ordeal  of  a  summons  before  a  committee  of 
the  British  Medical  Association,  reminis- 
cent of  the  appearance  of  Veronese  before 
the  Inquisition  in  1573.  The  officials  of 
the  Southern  Rhodesian  Government  who 
later  owned  the  building  procured  the 
mutilation  and  virtual  destruction  of  the 
sculptures  after  twenty-nine  years,  against 
the  protests  of  many  of  London's  citizens. 

Epstein's  sculpture  drew  further  puri- 
tan attacks  in  later  years ;  notably  in  1912 
over  his  carving  for  the  tomb  of  Oscar 
Wilde  [q.v.]  in  the  Pere  Lachaise  Cemetery 


in  Paris ;  and  also  his  first  figure  of  Christ 
in  bronze  made  during  the  war  and  ex- 
hibited at  the  Leicester  Galleries,  London, 
in  1920  (it  was  bought  by  Apsley  Cherry- 
Garrard,  q.v.) ;  and  his  memorial  to  W.  H. 
Hudson  [q.v.],  wliich  was  commissioned 
by  the  Royal  Society  for  the  Protection  of 
Birds  for  a  site  in  Hyde  Park  where  it  was 
unveiled  by  Stanley  Baldwin  in  1925. 
Epstein  was  particularly  attacked  by 
Roger  Fry  [q.v.],  a  critic  who  assailed 
many  contemporary  artists;  and  also  by 
John  Galsworthy  [q.v.].  His  supporters  in 
the  different  artistic  crises  were  Muirhead 
Bone,  Augustus  John,  Francis  Dodd,  and 
(Sir)  Matthew  Smith  [q.v.];  Walter 
Sickert  [q.v.]  resigned  from  the  Royal 
Academy  in  1935  in  protest  at  the 
Academy's  equivocal  attitude  regarding 
the  Strand  statues. 

An  original  member  of  the  London 
Group,  Epstein  was  rejected  as  a  candi- 
date for  membership  of  the  Royal  Society 
of  British  Sculptors  circa  1910,  when  pro- 
posed by  Havard  Thomas;  and  later  by 
the  Royal  Academy  when  proposed  by 
Sir  John  Lavery  [q.v.].  The  National 
Portrait  Gallery  refused  his  original  cast- 
ing of  his  bust  of  Joseph  Conrad  (though 
a  slightly  damaged  casting  was  later  ac- 
cepted). His  Lucifer  (1943-5)  was  refused 
as  a  gift  by  the  Fitzwllliam  Musemn,  Cam- 
bridge, and  also  by  the  Victoria  and  Al- 
bert Museum  and  the  Tate  Gallery.  Several 
provincial  art  galleries  requested  it  and  it 
went  to  the  Birmingham  City  Art  Gallery. 

Epstein's  stone  carving  was  more  diffi- 
cult for  the  pubUc  to  assimilate  than  his 
modelled  bronzes.  Whilst  the  former  were 
rooted  in  early  or  primitive  sculpture,  his 
modelling  was  in  the  baroque  tradition 
deriving  from  the  Renaissance  or  was  at 
the  earliest  from  the  Byzantine,  as  with 
the  Madonna  and  Child  (1927). 

Epstein's  career  falls  into  clearly 
marked  phases.  He  was  drawing  and 
illustrating  in  New  York  until  1902  and 
studied  in  Paris  from  1902  to  1905.  His 
early  struggles  in  London  from  1905  to 
1912,  and  his  essays  in  cubism  and  the 
Vorticist  movement  from  1913  to  1915, 
were  followed  by  a  wide  acceptance  of  him 
as  a  modeller  of  portrait  bronzes  from 
1916  to  1929.  During  the  latter  period, 
however,  his  sitters  were  usually  friends  or 
professional  models,  and  Rima  (1925)  was 
his  only  public  commission  between  1912 
(the  Wilde  memorial)  and  1929  (the  Lon- 
don Underground  Headquarters'  build- 
ing, again  for  Charles  Holden).  In  1938 
he    received   an   honorary   LL.D.    from 


339 


Epstein 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Aberdeen.  Apart  from  this,  his  large  stone 
carvings— Genesis  (1931),  Sun  God  (1933), 
Ecce  Homo  (1935),  Consummatum  Est 
(1937),  and  Adam  (1939) — did  not  obtain 
for  him  the  official  recognition  he  desired. 

During  the  war  of  1939-45  he  had 
several  official  war  commissions  for  the 
Ministry  of  Information  to  make  portrait 
bronzes  of  Service  chiefs  and  also,  just 
after  the  war,  of  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill. 
Although  his  next  big  venture  Lazarus 
(1948)  was  not  well  received,  it  was 
officially  invited  to  the  Battersea  Park 
exhibition  for  the  Festival  of  Britain 
(1951);  and  in  1952  it  was  bought  for 
New  College,  Oxford  ('one  of  the  happiest 
issues  of  my  working  life').  From  this 
time  onwards  he  received  more  important 
official  conmiissions  than  he  could  execute 
for  large  sculptures  in  prominent  public 
positions  in  London  and  elsewhere;  in- 
cluding the  Madonna  and  Child,  for  the 
Holy  Child  Convent,  Cavendish  Square; 
Liverpool  Giant,  for  Lewis's  of  Liverpool ; 
Christ  in  Majesty,  for  Llandaff  Cathedral ; 
the  T.U.C.  war  memorial;  Saint  Michael 
and  the  Devil,  for  Coventry  Cathedral; 
and  the  Bowater  House  Group. 

In  1953  he  received  an  honorary  D.C.L. 
at  Oxford  and  the  following  year  was 
appointed  K.B.E.  The  Royal  College  of 
Art,  in  1954,  placed  a  studio  at  his  dis- 
posal in  which  he  worked  daily  on  the 
figure  and  bas  reliefs  for  Lewis's  building, 
Liverpool,  and  on  the  Christ  for  Llandaff 
Cathedral.  In  his  autobiography  Epstein 
expressed  regret  that  he  had  never  been 
asked  to  teach  by  any  college. 

Epstein  possessed  a  gracious  and  cour- 
teous manner.  His  conversation  was 
cultivated  and,  on  the  subject  of  art, 
very  learned.  He  never  lost  his  American 
accent.  Despite  his  many  frustrations  and 
the  attacks  he  had  suffered  he  was  of 
a  kindly  and  compassionate  disposition 
though  impatient  of  anyone  lacking 
humility  concerning  art.  He  might  well 
have  succeeded  as  a  painter.  His  picture 
exhibitions  were  usually  sold  out:  Paint- 
ings of  Epping  Forest  (1933),  Flower 
Paintings  (1936  and  1940).  As  an  illustra- 
tor he  was  less  successful;  neither  his 
series  of  drawings  for  The  Old  Testament 
(1929-31)  nor  those  for  Baudelaire's 
Fleurs  du  Mai  (1938)  was  well  received. 
On  19  August  1959,  although  he  was  ill, 
he  worked  at  his  studio  at  Hyde  Park 
Gate,  London,  on  the  Bowater  Group, 
discussed  the  casting  of  it  with  his  bronze 
moulder,  and  died  the  same  night. 

In    1906    Epstein    married    Margaret 


Gilmour  Dunlop  (died  1947),  by  whom  he 
had  one  son  and  one  daughter.  In  1955  he 
married  Kathleen  Esther,  daughter  of  the 
late  Walter  Chancellor  Garman,  surgeon. 
The  National  Portrait  Gallery  has  a 
bronze  of  Epstein  modelled  by  himself  and 
drawings  by  Augustus  John  and  Powys 
Evans. 

[Bernard  Van  Dieren,  Epstein,  1920 ;  Jacob 
Epstein  to  Arnold  Haskell,  The  Sculptor 
Speaks,  1931 ;  Jacob  Epstein,  Let  There  Be 
Sculpture,  1940,  and  Autobiography,  1955 ; 
Richard  Buckle,  Jacob  Epstein,  Sculptor, 
1963;  Epstein  Drawings,  1962;  Catalogue  of 
the  Epstein  retrospective  exhibition  at  the 
Tate  Gallery,  1952 ;  Catalogue  of  the  Epstein 
memorial  exhibition  at  the  Edinburgh  Festi- 
val, 1961 ;  Catalogues  of  sixteen  Epstein 
exhibitions  at  the  Leicester  Galleries,  London ; 
private  information.]  Richard  Seddon. 

EVANS,  EDWARD  RATCLIFFE 
GARTH  RUSSELL,  first  Baron 
MouNTEVANS  (1880-1957),  admiral,  was 
born  in  London  28  October  1880,  the 
second  of  the  three  sons  and  the  third 
child  of  Frank  Evans,  barrister,  and  his 
wife,  Eliza  Frances  Garth.  From  the  first 
he  was  of  an  adventurous  disposition  and 
more  than  once  ran  away  from  home; 
although  not  the  eldest  son,  he  was  always 
the  ringleader.  He  and  his  elder  brother 
went  in  due  course  to  Merchant  Taylors' 
School,  whence  they  were  soon  expelled 
for  repeatedly  playing  truant.  Evans  was 
then  sent  to  a  school  for  'troublesome 
boys'  at  Kenley  where  he  was  very  happy. 
He  went  on  to  Warwick  House  School, 
Maida  Vale,  whence  he  passed  into  the 
Worcester,  mercantile  marine  training 
ship.  Two  years  later  he  obtained  a  naval 
cadetship. 

His  first  ship  in  the  Royal  Navy  was 
the  Hawke,  in  the  Mediterranean  Fleet,  a 
good  ship  for  one  who  loved  'clean,  well- 
run  ships  and  well-dressed,  smart  men-at- 
arms',  for  she  was  famous  for  those 
qualities.  He  was  later  appointed  to  the 
training  sloop  Dolphin,  where  the  ex- 
perience of  handling  a  ship  under  sail 
alone  was  later  of  inestimable  value  to 
him.  In  1900  he  was  promoted  sub- 
lieutenant and  in  1902  he  was  selected, 
chiefly  on  account  of  his  superb  physical 
fitness,  to  be  second  officer  of  the  Morning, 
the  relief  ship  sent  out  by  the  Royal 
Geographical  Society  to  the  first  Antarctic 
expedition  of  R.  F.  Scott  [q.v.].  The 
Morning  located  the  Discovery  fast  in 
the  ice;  but  after  revictualling  her  was 
obliged  to  leave  her  there  for  a  second 
winter.  In  January  1904  the  Morning  re- 


840 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Evans,  E.  R.  G.  R. 


turned,  accompanied  by  the  Terra  Nova ; 
the  Discovery  broke  out  of  the  ice  in 
February,  and  the  three  ships  came  home. 

Evans,  who  had  been  promoted  lieu- 
tenant in  1902,  returned  to  naval  duty  and 
qualified  as  a  navigating  officer.  In  1909 
he  was  selected  by  Scott  himself  as  second- 
in-command  of  his  second  expedition  and 
captain  of  the  Terra  Nova  which  left 
England  in  June  1910.  He  accompanied 
Scott  in  January  1912  to  within  150  miles 
of  the  Pole  where  he  turned  back.  Struck 
down  by  scurvy  he  was  saved  only  by  the 
devotion  of  his  two  companions.  Chief 
Stoker  Lashley  and  Petty  Officer  Crean. 
After  a  brief  period  of  convalescence  in 
England,  which  he  devoted  to  raising 
money  for  the  expedition,  he  returned  to 
take  command  of  the  Terra  Nova  in  New 
Zealand  and  sailed  south,  only  to  find  on 
arrival  at  Cape  Evans  in  January  1913 
that  Scott  had  succumbed  in  an  un- 
paralleled period  of  bad  weather  when 
returning  from  the  Pole  in  March  of  the 
previous  year.  After  bringing  home  the 
expedition  and  clearing  up  its  affairs 
Evans  went  on  half  pay  and  spent  some 
time  lecturing  in  Canada  and  the  United 
States.  He  had  been  promoted  commander 
in  1912. 

In  the  summer  of  1914  he  resumed 
naval  service  in  command  of  the  Mohawk^ 
destroyer,  in  the  Dover  Patrol.  He  went 
on  to  command  various  ships  in  the 
Patrol,  the  one  for  which  he  was  best 
known  being  the  Broke.  In  April  1917  the 
Swift,  under  Commander  Ambrose  Peck, 
and  the  Broke  were  sent  out  to  counter- 
attack six  German  destroyers  which  had 
just  bombarded  Dover  harbour.  They 
met  the  enemy  on  opposite  courses  and  at 
once  fired  torpedoes  and  turned  to  ram. 
The  Swift  was  unsuccessful,  passing 
through  the  enemy  line,  but  the  Broke 
rammed  the  G.42  and  sustained  forty 
casualties  while  the  ships  were  locked 
together.  There  were  no  more  German 
raids  on  Dover.  This  action  struck  the 
public  imagination  as  the  first  in  which 
ships  came  to  close  quarters  in  the  old 
style,  and  he  was  always  thereafter  known 
as  'Evans  of  the  Broke'.  Peck  and  he  were 
both  appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  and  pro- 
moted captain.  He  became  chief  of  staff 
to  the  admiral  of  the  Dover  Patrol,  Sir 
Reginald  Bacon  [q.v.].  When  Roger  (later 
Lord)  Keyes  [q.v.]  took  over  the  com- 
mand Evans  was  eventually  relieved,  and 
until  the  end  of  the  war,  in  the  scout 
Active,  was  employed  on  escorting  coj^- 
voys  to  and  from  Gibraltar.     ,   «arf;>i£!«^i?«j7 


He  paid  off  the  Active,  without  orders, 
after  the  armistice,  and  following  a  period 
on  half  pay  which  he  spent  in  Norway,  he 
was  for  some  months  senior  naval  officer 
at  Ostend,  leaving  only  when  all  the  mines 
had  been  swept  up  and  the  scars  of  war 
removed.  He  went  next  (1920-22)  to 
the  small  cruiser  Carlisle  on  the  China 
station  where  he  distinguished  himself  by 
swinmiing  with  a  line  to  rescue  the  sur- 
vivors on  the  steamer  Hong  Moh,  ashore 
near  Swatow,  an  exploit  which  again 
brought  him  before  the  public.  After  an- 
other leave  in  Norway  he  became  in  1923 
captain  of  the  auxiliary  patrol,  later 
renamed  the  fishery  and  minesweeping 
flotilla,  in  the  sloop  Harebell.  It  was  an 
appointment  after  his  own  heart,  for  he 
was  his  own  master  and  was  able  to 
visit  many  out-of-the-way  places,  a  rare 
privilege  at  that  period.  In  1926  he  re- 
ceived one  of  the  plums  for  a  captain,  the 
command  of  the  battle  cruiser  Repulse 
which  he  held  until  shortly  before  his 
promotion  to  rear-admiral  in  February 
1928. 

His  first  flag  command  was  the  Aus- 
tralian squadron  (1929),  with  his  flag  in 
the  cruiser  Australia.  He  was  immensely 
popular  in  the  Commonwealth,  where  his 
unconventional  ways  were  fully  ap- 
preciated. When  he  left  in  1931,  instead  cf 
inspecting  each  ship  'in  all  the  dingle- 
dangle  of  braid',  he  entertained  some 
2,000  ratings  and  their  wives  at  a  cinema. 
He  was  promoted  vice-admiral  in  1932 
and  in  the  following  year  became  com- 
mander-in-chief on  the  Africa  station, 
where  again  he  was  immensely  popular. 
But  he  was  much  criticized  when  acting  in 
1933  as  high  commissioner  in  the  absence 
of  Sir  Herbert  Stanley  [q.v.],  for  his 
handling  of  the  case  of  Tshekedi  [q.v.], 
the  regent  of  the  Bamangwato  tribe  in 
Bechuanaland,  who  had  ordered  the 
flogging  of  a  European  accused  of  assault 
and  known  to  be  seducing  African  women 
in  tribal  territory.  Evans  travelled  to 
Bechuanaland  in  state,  accompanied  by 
a  strong  force  of  armed  sailors,  suspended 
Tshekedi,  and  expelled  the  European. 
Tshekedi  was  recognized  as,  on  the  whole, 
an  enlightened  and  capable  chieftain  and 
after  a  few  weeks  Evans  reinstated  him.  It 
was  thought  that  the  case  would  have 
been  better  handled  with  less  ostentation ; 
but  that  was  not  Evans's  way.  While  on 
the  Africa  station  he  attempted  to  renew 
his  acquaintance  with  the  Antarctic, 
shifting  his  flag  in  1934  to  the  sloop  Mil- 
ford  and  visiting  Bouvet  Island  to  check 


341 


Evans,  E.  R.  G.  R. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


its  position  on  the  charts ;  but  he  was  un- 
able to  continue  to  the  south  as  the 
Milford's  coal  supply  had  been  depleted 
by  heavy  weather. 

Evans  next  served  as  commander-in- 
chief  at  the  Nore  (1935-9),  an  appoint- 
ment which  provided  little  scope  for  his 
special  talents;  but  during  his  tenure  he 
was  promoted  admiral  (1936)  and  received 
the  freedom  of  Dover  (1938)  and  Chatham 
(1939),  and  many  other  distinctions.  In 
the  spring  of  1939  he  was  made  a  regional 
commissioner  for  London  under  the  civil 
defence  scheme.  After  the  German  in- 
vasion of  Norway  in  1940  he  was  sent 
there  to  establish  liaison  with  the  King. 
On  his  return  he  was  at  first  employed 
in  organizing  the  defence  of  aircraft  fac- 
tories and  only  when  that  was  completed 
did  he  resume  his  duties  as  regional  com- 
missioner. His  energy  and  fearlessness 
through  the  blitz  on  London  were  an 
inspiration  to  all  who  served  under  him. 
He  retired  from  the  navy  in  1941  but 
continued  to  hold  his  post  in  civil  defence 
until  the  end  of  the  war.  In  1945  he  was 
one  of  the  seven  selected  for  peerages, 
ostensibly  to  strengthen  the  Labour 
Party  in  the  House  of  Lords,  taking  the 
title  of  Baron  Mountevans.  He  had  been 
appointed  C.B.  (civil,  1913,  military, 
1932)  and  K.C.B.  (1935). 

Evans  was  not  a  typical  naval  officer, 
except  in  his  skill  as  a  seaman.  He  revelled 
in  publicity  and  was  never  happier  than 
when  in  the  public  eye.  That  trait,  which 
in  a  lesser  man  would  have  provoked 
severe  criticism,  was  recognized  as  being 
part  of  his  make-up  and  excused ;  for  he 
was  as  universally  popular  with  those 
brother  officers  who  knew  him  personally 
as  he  was  with  the  lower  deck. 

Evans  was  elected  rector  of  Aberdeen 
University  in  1936,  a  very  unusual  dis- 
tinction for  a  serving  officer ;  and  he  was 
re-elected  in  1939.  He  wrote  a  number  of 
books,  one  of  the  first  being  South  with 
Scott  (1921)  which  he  wrote  to  beguile  the 
tedium  of  his  voyage  to  China  to  take 
command  of  the  Carlisle.  Exploration  was 
the  theme  of  most  of  his  books,  but  he 
also  had  a  flair  for  writing  for  boys.  He 
was  twice  married:  first,  in  1904,  to  Hilda 
Beatrice  (died  1913),  daughter  of  Thomas 
Gregory  Russell,  barrister,  of  Christ- 
church,  New  Zealand.  There  were  no 
children.  Secondly,  in  1916,  to  Elsa  (died 
1963),  daughter  of  Richard  Andvord, 
statshauptman  of  Oslo,  by  whom  he  had 
two  sons. 

Mountevans  died  at  Golaa  in  his  be- 


loved Norway  20  August  1957,  and  was 
succeeded  by  his  elder  son,  Richard  And- 
vord (born  1918).  There  are  two  portraits 
of  Mountevans  in  the  possession  of  the 
family,  by  W.  A.  Bowring  and  Mario 
Grixoni ;  one  by  S.  Morse  Brown  is  in  the 
National  Museum  of  Wales,  Cardiff. 

[Lord  Mountevans,  Adventurous  Life,  1946, 
and  Happy  Adventurer,  1951 ;  Reginald 
Pound,  Evans  of  the  Broke,  1963;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

H.  G.  Thursfield. 

EVANS,  MEREDITH  GWYNNE  (1904- 
1952),  physical  chemist,  was  born  in 
Atherton,  Lancashire,  2  December  1904, 
the  son  of  Frederick  George  Evans,  an 
elementary  schoolmaster,  and  his  wife, 
Margaretta  Eleanora  Williams.  From  his 
father's  school  Evans  won  a  county 
scholarship  which  enabled  him  to  go  to 
Leigh  Grammar  School,  then  to  Man- 
chester University.  He  evidently  dis- 
played an  early  interest  in  chemistry  and 
both  his  younger  brothers  became  scien- 
tists— one,  A.  G.  Evans,  professor  of 
chemistry  at  University  College,  Cardiff, 
and  the  other,  D.  G.  Evans,  professor  of 
bacteriology  and  immunology  in  the 
London  School  of  Hygiene  and  Tropical 
Medicine.  Evans's  other  interests  in  life 
included  wide  tastes  in  reading,  and  his 
residence  in  Manchester  resulted  in  an 
interest  in  the  Halle  Orchestra. 

Evans  graduated  B.Sc.  in  1926  with 
first  class  honours  in  chemistry.  His 
academic  ability  was  soon  recognized  and 
from  1926  until  1934  he  was  successively 
research  scholar,  assistant  lecturer,  and 
Sir  Clement  Royds  scholar  at  Manchester. 
A  turning-point  in  his  researches  came 
when  he  was  awarded  a  Rockefeller 
fellowship  in  1934  to  work  with  Professor 
(Sir)  Hugh  S.  Taylor  at  the  Frick  chemical 
laboratory  in  Princeton  University.  A 
year  later  he  returned  to  a  full  lectureship 
at  Manchester  where  he  found  Michael 
Polanyi  installed  as  professor  of  physical 
chemistry.  Similarity  of  chemical  interests 
brought  the  two  men  closely  together  and 
led  to  a  most  fruitful  period  of  collabora- 
tion which  made  a  wide  and  profound 
influence  on  the  development  of  the 
Manchester  school  of  physical  chemistry. 

Evans's  reputation  grew  quickly  and  in 
1939  he  was  appointed  professor  of  physi- 
cal chemistry  at  Leeds.  The  outbreak  of 
war  interrupted  his  plans  for  academic 
research,  but  R.  W.  Whytlaw-Gray,  the 
professor  of  chemistry,  was  engaged  in 
researches  in  connection  with  chemical 


342 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Evershed 


warfare  problems  particularly  in  the  be- 
haviour of  smokes.  Evans  joined  the 
team,  turning  his  attention  to  matters 
new  to  him.  University  administration 
had  to  be  attended  to  during  a  difficult 
period  and  his  health  suffered  severely  as 
a  result  of  overwork.  Fortunately  he  re- 
covered and  after  the  war  was  able  to  set 
about  the  development  of  the  Leeds  school 
with  great  effect.  In  January  1949  he  re- 
turned to  succeed  Polanyi  in  the  chair  of 
physical  chemistry  at  Manchester  where 
he  continued  the  work  he  started  at  Leeds. 
The  school  became  one  of  the  foremost 
centres  of  physical  chemistry  research  in 
the  country,  combining  theoretical  and 
practical  work  in  a  most  effective  manner. 

Evans  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1947  and 
served  for  a  period  on  the  council.  He 
was  also  a  vice-president  of  the  Faraday 
Society.  He  served  the  Ministry  of  Supply 
on  its  advisory  council  of  research  and 
development  and  the  Government's  ad- 
visory council  on  scientific  policy.  He  paid 
numerous  visits  overseas  as  guest  lecturer 
to  many  universities. 

Evans's  scientific  work  lay  in  the  field 
of  the  mechanisms  of  chemical  reactions 
that  go  to  make  up  a  complex  reaction 
which  overall  is  chemically  very  simple. 
His  close  collaboration  with  Polanyi  on 
the  theoretical  side  enabled  him  to  begin 
to  apply  the  principle  of  quantimi 
mechanics  to  systems  which  could  not  be 
tackled  rigorously.  His  skill  lay  in  seeing 
how  theory  could  bring  some  degree  of 
rationality  into  the  explanation  of  the 
absolute  velocity  and  activation  energy  of 
the  simpler  gas  and  liquid  phase  reactions. 
At  a  later  stage  he  tiu'ned  his  attention  to 
polymerization  reactions  and  brought  the 
same  penetrating  methods  of  approach  to 
this  much  more  complex  process. 

In  1981  Evans  married  Millicent, 
daughter  of  Walter  Trafford;  they  had 
one  son  and  one  daughter.  He  died  in 
Manchester  25  December  1952. 

[H.  W.  Melville  in  Obituary  Notices  of  Fel- 
lows of  the  Royal  Society,  No.  22,  November 
1953;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] H.  W.  Melville. 

EVERSHED,  JOHN  (1864^1956),  astro- 
nomer, was  born  at  Gomshall,  Surrey, 
26  February  1864.  He  was  the  seventh  of 
eight  children  (four  boys  and  four  girls) 
of  John  Evershed,  a  yeoman  farmer,  and 
his  wife,  Sophia  Price.  His  brother  Sydney 
(died  1989)  invented  electrical  measuring 
instruments  and  was  a  founder  of  the  firm 
of  Evershed  and  Vignoles. 


Evershed  became  interested  in  astro- 
nomy while  still  a  pupil  at  a  private 
school  in  Kenley,  Surrey.  His  first  employ- 
ment was  with  a  firm  of  chemical  manu- 
facturers whose  products  he  analysed  and 
tested.  A  friend  gave  him  an  18-inch 
reflecting  telescope  and  a  small  spectro- 
helioscope  which  he  installed  at  Kenley, 
and  with  these,  the  latter  of  which  he 
modified  and  greatly  improved,  he  syste- 
matically observed  solar  prominences 
and  obtained  monochromatic  photographs 
of  the  sun. 

He  was  the  first  to  demonstrate  (in 
1895)  that  the  emission  of  the  charac- 
teristic spectra  of  gases  and  vapours  was 
caused  by  heat  alone,  in  the  absence  of 
electrical  and  other  influences  which  were 
thought  at  that  time  to  be  essential. 

His  employers  granted  him  leave  of 
absence  to  take  part  in  solar  eclipse 
expeditions.  The  first  of  these  (to  Varaur 
ger  Fjord,  Norway,  1896)  was  unfruitful 
owing  to  clouds ;  but  it  was  there  that  he 
met  Mary  Acworth,  daughter  of  Major 
Andrew  Orr,  R.A.,  whom  he  married  in 
1906  and  who  collaborated  with  him  for 
many  years.  They  observed  other  eclipses 
at  Talni  (India)  in  1898,  Maelma  (Algeria) 
in  1900,  Pineda  de  la  Sierra  (Spain)  in 
1905,  Yorkshire  in  1927,  and  a  few  miles 
south  of  Athens  in  1936  from  the  deck  of 
the  P.  &  O.  liner  Strathaird. 

In  the  eclipse  of  1898  he  obtained  with 
his  spectroheliograph  the  first  obser- 
vational verification  of  the  Balmer 
continuum  in  the  far  ultraviolet  and 
discovered  a  new  coronal  line  at  A3388. 

Evershed  became  a  fellow  of  the  Royal 
Astronomical  Society  in  1894.  In  1906  he 
was  appointed  assistant  director  of  Kodai- 
kanal  Observatory  in  India,  and  became 
director  in  1911.  He  overhauled  and 
greatly  improved  the  instruments  and 
constructed  a  large  spectrograph  with  a 
diffraction  grating  made  by  A.  A.  Michel- 
son.  There  he  discovered  the  'Evershed 
effect' — a  radial  circulation  of  gases  in 
sun-spots,  which  flow  outwards  at  a  low 
level  and  inwards  at  a  higher  level.  In 
recognition  of  this  and  other  solar  dis- 
coveries he  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1915  and 
was  awarded  the  gold  medal  of  the  Royal 
Astronomical  Society  in  1918. 

When  Evershed  retired  from  Kodai- 
kanal  in  1923  he  was  appointed  CLE. 
He  returned  to  England  and  constructed 
a  solar  observatory  at  Ewhurst,  Surrey, 
furnished  with  a  coelostat  and  spectro- 
graphic  equipment  in  an  underground 
chamber.  He  used  hollow  box-like  prisms 


343 


Evershed 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


filled  with  liquid  having  a  very  high  dis- 
persive power,  together  with  an  ingenious 
arrangement  of  plane  mirrors  which 
enabled  him  to  pass  the  solar  beam  back 
and  forth  through  the  prisms  as  many  as 
eight  times.  In  this  way  very  high  disper- 
sions were  obtained.  For  example,  the  two 
sodium  lines  (A5890  and  A5896)  were  as 
much  as  f  inch  apart,  corresponding  to 
a  length  of  about  35  feet  for  the  whole 
visible  spectrum. 

For  detecting  and  measuring  Doppler 
shifts  he  devised  an  ingenious  method 
consisting  in  superimposing  a  positive 
made  from  one  negative  spectrogram 
upon  another  negative  taken  in  different 
conditions.  For  example  an  east-limb 
positive  would  be  superimposed  on  a 
west-limb  negative  with  the  comparison- 
spectrum  (iron-arc)  Unes  in  register.  The 
relative  displacement  of  the  solar  lines 
would  be  immediately  apparent  and  could 
be  measured  directly,  a  micrometer  screw 
enabling  one  spectrogram  to  be  moved 
relative  to  the  other  to  bring  any  pair  of 
lines  (positive  and  negative)  into  coinci- 
dence. 

He  also  measured  solar  spectrograms 
made  at  Mount  Wilson,  California,  by 
G.  E.  Hale,  which  were  thought  to  show  a 
general  magnetic  field,  and  he  satisfied 
himself  (and  Hale)  that  they  gave  no 
evidence  of  such  a  field. 

Evershed  was  the  first  to  supply  the 
explanation  of  the  'stationary'  calcium 
lines  in  stellar  spectra  in  which  other  lines 
showed  large  Doppler  shifts.  In  a  letter 
published  in  the  Observatory  (1924),  he 
stated  that  this  could  only  be  due  to 
calcium  atoms  in  space. 

He  closed  his  observatory  in  1953  and 
presented  many  of  his  instruments  to  the 
Royal  Greenwich  Observatory. 

Evershed's  first  wife  died  in  1949;  in 
1950  he  married  Margaret  Randall.  He 
had  no  children.  He  died  at  Ewhurst  17 
November  1956.  A  portrait  by  Victor 
Coverley-Price  remained  the  property  of 
the  artist. 
•    [Personal  knowledge.]    F.  J.  Hargreaves. 

EWINS,  ARTHUR  JAMES  (1882-1957), 
chemist,  was  born  3  February  1882,  in 
Norwood,  south-east  London,  the  elder 
son  of  Joseph  Ewins,  a  railway  platelayer 
on  what  was  then  the  South  Eastern  Rail- 
way, and  his  wife,  Sophia  Wickham.  He 
won  a  scholarship  to  the  AUeyn's  School 
where  he  received  a  better  grounding  in 
the  basic  natural  sciences  than  was  then 
available  to  most  schoolboys.   In  1899, 


with  others  of  his  standing  from  the  same 
school,  he  entered  the  service  of  the  Well- 
come Physiological  Research  Laboratories 
as  a  research  apprentice.  These  labora- 
tories had  recently  been  established  by 
(Sir)  Henry  Wellcome  [q.v.]  whose  aim 
was  to  ensure  that  the  production  of  such 
remedies  as  the  antitoxic  sera  could  be 
associated  with  the  researches  necessary 
for  their  proper  control  and  development, 
and  to  provide  opportunities  for  researches 
in  a  wider  range  of  the  sciences  contribu- 
tory to  a  progressive  therapeutics,  includ- 
ing biochemistry  and  pharmacology. 

Ewins  worked  in  these  Wellcome 
Laboratories  as  assistant  to  John  Mel- 
lanby  [q.v.],  then,  for  a  further  and  longer 
period,  as  assistant  to  George  Barger 
[q.v.].  He  thus  had  the  opportunity  of 
co-operating  intimately  in  a  wide  variety 
of  researches  dealing  with  problems  in 
biological,  organic,  and  pharmaceutical 
chemistry.  Most  of  the  publications 
between  1905  and  1911  which  bore  the 
name  of  Ewins  were  made  jointly  with 
Barger ;  and  their  close  association  in  this 
period  extended  to  other  researches,  of 
which  the  results  were  published  by  Bar- 
ger alone,  or  by  Barger  and  (Sir)  H.  H. 
Dale  who  had  joined  the  staff  of  the  Well- 
come Laboratories  in  1904  and  was  later 
to  become  their  director.  When  Barger 
left  for  an  academic  appointment  in  1909, 
Ewins,  who  had  graduated  B.Sc.  in  1906 
at  the  university  of  London,  was  appointed 
to  succeed  to  the  charge  of  the  chemical 
division;  and  thereafter  his  researches 
were  largely  associated  with  those  of  Dale 
and  (Sir)  P.  P.  Laidlaw  [q.v.].  The  work 
with  Barger  had  been  largely  concerned 
with  the  activities  and  chemistry  of  the 
curious  drug,  ergot  of  rye — its  specific 
alkaloids,  and  the  series  of  putrefactive, 
proteinogenous  amines  found  in  the  con- 
ventional, pharmacopoeial,  and  other  ex- 
tracts from  it.  In  co-operation  with 
Laidlaw,  Ewins  found  and  synthesized 
another  member  of  this  series  of  amines, 
3-/S-aminoethylindole,  from  tryptophane 
— a  close  relative  of  the  now  widely  in- 
vestigated 'serotonine'  (5-hydroxy-trypta- 
mine).  Then  in  1914,  from  an  extract  of 
ergot  in  which  a  peculiar  and  intense 
activity  had  been  observed,  Ewins  isolated 
the  constituent  responsible  for  this,  and 
it  was  found  to  be  acetylcholine — a  sub- 
stance which,  in  more  recent  years,  has 
acquired  a  widely  ranging  physiological 
interest,  through  the  recognition  of  its 
transmitter  function,  at  a  large  propor- 
tion of  the  synaptic  and  neuro-effector 


344 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Faber 


junctions  in  the  peripheral  nervous  sys- 
tem. Study  of  the  distribution  of  the 
actions  of  acetylchoUne  furnished  a  further 
clue,  which  enabled  Ewins  to  remove  a 
long-standing  puzzle  from  pharmacology, 
by  showing  that  the  so-called  'artificial 
muscarine',  produced  by  the  supposed 
oxidation  of  choline  with  strong  nitric 
acid,  was,  in  fact,  a  nitrous-acid  ester  of 
choline. 

In  1914  Ewins  moved  with  Dale  from 
the  Wellcome  Laboratories  as  a  member  of 
the  new  staff  of  the  National  Institute  for 
Medical  Research.  Almost  immediately 
the  outbreak  of  war  diverted  them  from 
all  normal  research  plans ;  Ewins  thus 
became  Dale's  principal  colleague  in  the 
creation  and  application  of  new  standards 
for  the  safety  and  efficacy  of  the  supplies 
of  such  essential  remedies  as  salvarsan,  as 
prepared  on  an  emergency  basis  by  manu- 
facturers in  Britain  and  allied  countries, 
in  replacement  of  those  from  Germany. 
This  responsible  work  brought  Ewins  into 
contact  with  the  directorate  of  Messrs. 
May  and  Baker  who  in  1917  offered  him  a 
research  opportunity  of  such  a  kind  that, 
even  from  the  national  point  of  view,  it 
seemed  proper  for  him  to  accept  it. 

The  rest  of  Ewins' s  working  life  thus 
came  to  be  spent  in  their  service,  as  the 
director  of  their  research  department.  Un- 
til his  retirement  in  1952  there  were  few 
scientific  publications  bearing  his  name, 
among  those  issued  from  the  laboratories 
he  directed.  His  own  essential  part,  how- 
ever, in  the  initiative  and  enterprise  which 
they  represented,  was  explicitly  recog- 
nized by  the  members  of  his  scientific 
staff,  and  was  well  known  to  the  many 
others  with  whom  he  shared  interests  and 
retained  friendly  contacts.  He  never  had 
the  urge  of  the  academic  scientist  to 
penetrate  to  the  theoretical  roots  of  a 
problem,  or  into  essentially  new  territory. 
On  the  other  hand  he  showed,  in  this 
major  part  of  his  career,  a  remarkable 
promptitude  in  recognizing  and  exploiting 
the  practical  possibilities  of  therapeutic 
developments,  from  discoveries  which 
others  had  made.  He  and  his  team 
were  the  first,  for  example,  to  develop 
the  chemotherapeutic  possibilities  of  the 
diamidines,  which  Harold  King  and 
Warrington  Yorke  [qq.v.]  had  discovered. 
And  when,  from  1935  onwards,  the  anti- 
streptococcal  action  of  'Prontosil'  had 
been  discovered  by  Domagk,  and  that  of 
its  sulphanilamide  moiety  by  Trefouel, 
Bovet,  and  Nitti,  and  the  possibilities  of 
a    more    general    and    effective    chemo- 


therapy of  the  bacterial  infections  had 
thus  been  brought  into  view,  it  was  Ewins 
and  his  collaborators,  again,  who  pro- 
duced the  first  derivative  with  a  more 
potent  and  specific  action,  in  Sulphapyri- 
dine  (first  issued  as  'M  &  B  693'),  the  agent 
which  so  radically  improved  the  prospect 
of  sufferers  from  the  ordinary  pneumo- 
coccal pneumonia — among  them  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill  during  the  war.  Ewins' s 
most  important  service,  indeed,  to  the 
progress  of  medicinal  chemistry,  in  this 
country  and  in  the  world  at  large,  was 
in  the  practical  development  of  such  re- 
searches on  the  chemotherapy  of  infec- 
tions. He  became  a  D.Sc.  in  the  university 
of  London  (1914)  and  was  elected  F.R.S. 
in  1943. 

Ewins  married  in  1905  Ada  Amelia, 
daughter  of  James  Webb,  an  inspector  of 
weights  and  measures ;  they  had  one  son 
and  one  daughter.  He  died  in  Bedford  24 
December  1957.  ; 

[Chemistry  and  Industry,  22  February  1958 ; 
Sir  Henry  H.  Dale  in  Biographical  Memoirs 
of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iv,  1958 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

H.  H.  Dale. 

FABER,  OSCAR  (1886-1956),  consulting 
engineer,  was  born  in  London  5  July  1886, 
the  eldest  son  of  Harald  Faber,  Danish 
commissioner  of  agriculture  in  London, 
and  his  wife,  CeciUe  Sophie  Bentzien.  He 
was  educated  at  St.  Dunstan's  College, 
Catford,  and  the  Central  Technical  (later 
City  and  Guilds)  College  where  he  held 
the  Clothworkers'  scholarship,  and  of 
which,  in  1906,  he  became  an  associate, 
and,  in  1929,  a  fellow.  After  his  graduation 
in  1907  he  worked  as  an  assistant  engineer 
with  the  Associated  Portland  Cement 
Manufacturers,  and  in  1909  took  up  a 
similar  position  with  the  Indented  Bar  and 
Concrete  Engineering  Company.  His  great 
interest  in  structural  engineering  prob- 
lems, and  his  realization  of  the  potentiali- 
ties of  reinforced  concrete  at  a  time  when 
its  use  in  this  country  was  limited,  led  him 
to  carry  out  many  theoretical  and  experi- 
mental investigations ;  and  in  1915  he  was 
awarded  the  degree  of  D.Sc.  (London)  for 
original  research  work  on  reinforced  con- 
crete beams  in  bending  and  shear.  In 
1912  he  was  appointed  chief  engineer  of 
TroUope  and  Colls,  and  was  responsible 
for  the  structural  design  of  many  large 
London  buildings.  During  the  war  his 
department  built  factories  for  war  work, 
and  he  himself  advised  the  Admiralty  on 
explosive  anti-submarine  devices  made  of 


345 


Faber 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


reinforced  concrete  with  non-ferrous  re- 
inforcement: for  which  in  1919  he  was 
awarded  the  O.B.E. 

In  1921  Faber  set  up  in  practice  as  a 
consulting  engineer.  He  was  one  of  the 
first  to  appreciate  the  growing  importance 
of  the  mechanical  and  electrical  services 
in  large  buildings,  and  almost  from  the 
beginning  his  office  dealt  with  those  ser- 
vices as  well  as  with  the  foundations  and 
structural  design.  He  was  responsible  for 
the  engineering  of  numerous  large  in- 
dustrial and  commercial  projects,  in  the 
aesthetic  problems  of  which  he  took  a 
lively  interest;  and  for  many  important 
buildings  in  London,  above  all  the  new 
Bank  of  England,  burrowing  deep  beneath 
Soane's  original  wall  (which  Faber  bril- 
liantly underpinned)  and  rising  symboli- 
cally solid  above  it.  In  other  fields,  his 
office  was  responsible  for  such  widely 
differing  projects  as  the  installations  for 
the  Earl's  Court  exhibition  buildings,  and 
the  underpinning  of  Durham  Castle ;  for 
which,  in  1935,  he  was  awarded  the 
honorary  degree  of  D.C.L.  by  Durham 
University.  In  the  course  of  his  work  he 
travelled  very  widely,  visiting  at  different 
times  all  five  continents  and  indeed  most 
countries  of  the  world.  He  yet  found 
time  to  lecture  to  another  generation  of 
engineers  at  the  City  and  Guilds  College ; 
to  continue  his  researches,  particularly 
into  the  long-term  plastic  yield  of  re- 
inforced concrete  under  load,  the  results  of 
which  he  published  in  1936 ;  and  to  take 
an  active  part  in  the  affairs  of  the  Institu- 
tion of  Structural  Engineers  which,  as  the 
Concrete  Institute,  he  had  joined  in  1911 
and  of  which  he  was  president  in  1935-6. 
He  was  also  a  member  of  the  Institu- 
tions of  Civil,  Mechanical,  and  Electrical 
Engineers. 

With  the  advent  of  war  in  1939,  his 
office  was  fully  engaged  on  the  design  of 
munitions  factories,  ordnance  depots,  and 
other  essential  installations,  and  Faber 
himself  flew  to  America  to  advise  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill  on  aspects  of  the 
Mulberry  harbour  project,  which  he  later 
helped  to  translate  into  its  bold  reality. 
The  war  was  scarcely  over  when  he  was 
appointed  consulting  engineer  for  the 
rebuilding  of  the  House  of  Commons, 
destroyed  by  German  bombs  in  1940,  and 
ordained  by  Churchill  to  be  rebuilt  in  the 
same  style  as  it  was  before;  but  incor- 
porating more  accommodation  and  better 
facilities.  Faber' s  brief  covered  the  whole 
of  the  engineering  work  including  the 
complicated   services,  and  his   approach 


to  the  problem  of  air-conditioning  was 
typical:  'We  shall  never  please  six  hun- 
dred members,  so  we  will  do  it  properly 
and  please  ourselves.'  At  the  conclusion  of 
the  rebuilding,  in  1951,  he  was  appointed 
C.B.E. 

In  1912  Faber  put  order  and  coherence 
into  structural  design  with  his  book  (with 
P.  G.  Bowie)  Reinforced  Concrete  Design; 
and  in  1936,  with  J.  R.  Kell,  wrote 
Heating  and  Air-Conditioning  of  Buildings  ^ 
which  in  succeeding  editions  became  the 
standard  work.  He  was  also  the  author 
of  Reinforced  Concrete  Simply  Explained 
(1922)  and  Constructional  Steelwork  Simply 
Explained  (1927),  and  of  numerous  papers 
to  the  engineering  institutions,  including 
the  Institution  of  Heating  and  Ventilating 
Engineers,  of  which  he  was  president 
during  the  difficult  years  1944-5. 

The  post-war  period  saw  the  continued 
expansion  of  his  already  large  practice.  In 
1948  he  took  into  partnership  five  of  his 
senior  assistants,  but  far  from  taking  the 
opportunity  to  transfer  the  burden  he 
continued  to  work  at  full  pressure  until  his 
death. 

Notwithstanding  his  professional  pre- 
occupations Faber  found  time  for  relaxa- 
tion in  music  and  painting.  He  was  an 
excellent  water-colour  artist,  and  would 
seldom  return  from  even  the  most 
strenuous  business  trip  abroad  without  a 
handful  of  paintings  of  great  boldness  and 
skill.  He  was  passionately  fond  of  music, 
and  a  sympathetic  player  of  the  clarinet, 
the  organ,  and  the  piano,  for  which  he 
composed  several  delightful  works. 

Faber  was  intensely  interested  in  prob- 
lems of  every  kind,  and  spared  no  trouble 
to  arrive  at  a  satisfying  and  elegant  solu- 
tion. His  technical  mastery  of  his  subjects 
was  impeccable,  but  his  approach  was 
characteristically  simple  and  direct,  in- 
volving clear  thinking  supported  but 
never  obscured  by  technicalities.  To  his 
fellow  engineers  he  was  sometimes  an 
enigma  and  always  a  challenge.  To  his 
staff  he  was  a  stimulating  if  exacting 
master ;  impatient  of  inexact  thinking  or 
tardy  action ;  often  critical  of  a  proposal, 
but  always  willing  to  spend  much  time 
in  putting  it  right.  To  himself  he  was  un- 
sparing of  physical  as  well  as  mental 
effort,  and  to  everything  he  brought  an 
apparently  inexhaustible  fund  of  energy. 
The  distinction  and  success  he  achieved 
did  not  divert  him  from  being  himself,  and 
while  properly  conscious  of  his  own  im- 
portance, he  scorned  the  trappings  and 
conventions  of  importance. 


346 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Fairey 


He  married  in  1913  Helen  Joan,  daugh- 
ter of  John  Gordon  Mainwaring,  doctor,  of 
London.  They  had  two  daughters  and 
a  son  who  became  one  of  his  partners. 
Faber  died  in  Harpenden  7  May  1956. 
There  is  a  bronze  bust  by  Sir  Charies 
Wheeler  at  the  Bank  of  England. 

[Journal  of  Institution  of  Heating  and 
Ventilating  Engineers,  vol.  xii,  March  1944; 
Strtictural  Engineer,  August  1956;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.  R.  Harrison. 

FAIREY,   Sir  (CHARLES)  RICHARD 

(1887-1956),  aircraft  manufacturer,  was 
born  in  Hendon,  London,  5  May  1887,  the 
son  of  Richard  Fairey,  mercantile  clerk, 
and  his  wife,  Frances  Jackson.  His  father 
died  in  1898  leaving  his  family  almost 
penniless.  Both  his  mother  and  father 
could  trace  their  histories  back  to 
Elizabethan  times,  and  both  families  were 
famous  as  carriage  builders  in  the  old 
coaching  days,  rich  in  historical  memories 
which  made  a  deep  impression  on  Richard 
Fairey.  He  was  educated  at  Merchant 
Taylors'  School  and  Finsbury  Technical 
College,  where  he  was  trained  under  the 
great  Silvanus  Thompson  [q.v.]. 

At  the  age  of  fifteen  Fairey  started 
working  with  an  electric  company  in 
Holloway,  while  still  being  trained.  At 
eighteen  he  had  passed  his  examinations 
and  progressed  so  well  with  his  firm  that 
he  was  placed  in  charge  of  the  installing  of 
electric  lighting  of  the  docks  and  ware- 
houses at  Heysham  harbour.  Shortly 
afterwards  he  was  given  a  post  in  the 
power-station  of  the  Finchley  Council  and 
added  to  his  earnings  by  lecturing  on 
engineering  subjects. 

From  his  schooldays  he  had  designed 
and  built  aeroplane  models,  but  it  was  not 
until  1910  that  he  was  persuaded  to  enter 
an  aeroplane  model  competition  at  the 
Crystal  Palace,  which  he  won  easily.  He 
was  a  great  craftsman,  skilled  with  his 
hands,  and  won  not  only  the  challenge 
cup,  but  gold  medals  for  steering,  long 
distance,  and  stability,  and  a  silver  cup 
for  the  best  model.  Inadvertently  he  had 
infringed  an  early  patent  of  J.  W.  Dunne, 
the  pioneer  of  the  stable  aeroplane,  which 
led  to  a  meeting  with  Dunne  in  the  follow- 
ing year.  They  joined  forces  and  Fairey 
thus  entered  aviation.  In  1913  he  joined 
Short  Brothers,  the  aircraft  pioneers,  and 
in  1915,  at  the  age  of  twenty-eight,  he 
formed  his  own  aircraft  company.  Short 
Brothers  gave  him  his  first  contract  to 
build  a  dozen  of  their  aeroplanes. 


Fairey's  ability  quickly  became  known 
in  the  stress  of  war.  Orders  came  in  so  fast 
that  the  firm  was  in  the  throes  of  constant 
expansion.  Fairey  learnt  everything  from 
aircraft  design  and  construction  to  works 
organization,  government  contracts,  and 
the  business  of  selling  the  aircraft  he 
designed.  He  was  then  more  often  than 
most  managing  directors  in  and  out  of  the 
drawing  and  production  offices,  helping 
and  planning. 

For  over  forty  years  he  played  a  leading 
and  dominating  part  in  all  the  affairs  of 
his  company.  Over  a  hundred  different 
types  of  aircraft  were  produced,  largely 
inspired  by  Fairey,  ranging  from  small 
single-seaters  to  four-engined  flying 
bombers,  from  fast  flying  helicopters  to 
supersonic  aircraft.  He  played  a  vital  part 
in  negotiating  their  details  of  performance 
and  their  sales  to  the  air  forces  of  many 
countries.  By  1925  more  than  half  of  all 
British  military,  aircraft  were  Fairey  types 
and  Fairey  himself  became  the  leading 
aircraft  designer  who  saw  ahead,  even  of 
governments.  In  1925  he  had  submitted 
a  new  design  for  a  fighter  bomber  which 
was  turned  down  by  the  Air  Ministry.  He 
built  one  at  his  own  expense,  known  as 
the  Fairey  Fox,  the  fastest  bomber  of  its 
time,  an  aeroplane  which  will  always  be 
remembered  in  any  reference  made  to  him. 
The  Fox  was  demonstrated  before  the 
chief  of  the  air  staff.  Sir  Hugh  (later 
Viscount)  Trenchard  [q.v.],  at  Andover, 
where  No.  12  Bombing  Squadron  was 
stationed.  It  made  a  tremendous  impres- 
sion on  the  watchers  and  Trenchard  im- 
mediately ordered  a  dozen  of  the  machines 
for  the  squadron.  Its  aerodynamic  design 
enabled  it  to  fly  fifty  miles  an  hour  faster 
than  any  other  aeroplane  of  its  type  in  the 
Royal  Air  Force.  It  was  clear  that  the  Fox 
had  set  a  new  standard.  In  1931  Fairey 
founded  the  Avions  Fairey  Company  in 
Belgium,  which  sold  many  aircraft  deriv- 
ing from  the  Fox  on  which  the  Belgian  Air 
Force  was  based. 

In  the  year  1928  came  the  first  edition 
of  the  aeroplane  known  as  the  Long 
Range  Monoplane  which  in  1933  fiew  the 
world's  long-distance  non-stop  record  of 
5,309  miles,  from  Cranwell  in  England  to 
Walvis  Bay  in  South  Africa.  Later  came 
the  Swordfish,  which  fought  throughout 
the  war  of  1939-45  and  helped  cripple  the 
Italian  fleet  at  Taranto. 

Fairey  had  been  overworking  during 
those  early  years  and  in  1927,  warned  by 
his  doctors  to  rest,  he  turned  to  yacht- 
ing.   He    became    a   superb   yachtsman, 


347 


Fairey 


D.N:B.  1951-1960 


improving  the  design  of  racing  yachts  to 
such  an  extent  in  sails  and  hull  that  in  the 
years  1931-3  he  was  top  of  the  12-metre 
class.  He  became  the  commodore  of  the 
Royal  London  Yacht  Club  in  1935,  served 
on  the  council  of  the  Royal  Yachting 
Association,  and  began  to  make  prepara- 
tions to  challenge  the  United  States  for 
the  America's  Cup,  stopped  by  the  out- 
break of  war. 

Lord  Beaverbrook,  appointed  to  the 
Ministry  of  Aircraft  Production,  called  in 
Fairey  to  help  in  the  organization  of  the 
industry  to  increase  the  output  of  air- 
craft, both  at  home  and  abroad.  Fairey 
was  asked  in  1940  to  go  to  the  United 
States  to  act  as  deputy  to  Sir  Henry  Self, 
director  of  the  British  air  mission.  Fairey 
was  the  ideal  deputy,  for  he  knew  the 
American  designers  and  the  leaders  of  the 
aircraft  industry,  and  was  well  aware  of 
the  tremendous  help  they  could  give.  He 
visited  the  chief  American  factories  and 
research  centres  and  entered  into  technical 
discussions  of  vital  importance.  A  power- 
ful and  appealing  speaker  at  gatherings  of 
the  leaders  and  to  the  press,  he  proved  to 
be  a  great  ambassador  for  Anglo-American 
friendship  and  help.  In  1942  he  became  the 
director  of  the  British  mission  and  in  the 
same  year  he  was  knighted. 

Following  the  end  of  the  war  the 
tremendous  responsibility  and  unceasing 
work  took  its  toll.  In  April  1945  he  re- 
signed from  his  mission  in  America  and 
for  the  next  three  months  he  was  in 
hospital  in  Boston.  In  1947  the  American 
Government  awarded  him  the  medal  of 
freedom  with  silver  palm  for  'exceptional 
meritorious  service  in  the  field  of  scientific 
research  and  development'. 

On  his  return  to  England  he  encouraged 
new  ideas  on  research  and  turned  his 
attention  to  the  development  of  heli- 
copters. In  1948  the  Fairey  Gyrodyne 
gained  the  international  speed  record  for 
hehcopters  at  124  m.p.h.  and  work  went 
ahead  in  the  design  of  passenger-carrying 
hehcopters.  Fairey  also  pushed  forward 
on  problems  of  supersonic  flight  and  the 
Fairey  Delta,  on  10  March  1956,  flew  at 
a  speed  of  1,132  m.p.h.,  the  first  plane 
officially  to  exceed  1,000  m.p.h. 

In  1922  Fairey  was  elected  chairman  of 
the  Society  of  British  Aircraft  Construc- 
tors, a  position  he  held  for  two  years.  He 
was  twice  president  of  the  Royal  Aero- 
nautical Society  (1930-31,  1932-3).  In 
1931,  at  the  suggestion  of  Lord  Amulree 
[q.v.],  secretary  of  state  for  air,  he 
founded    the    British    gold    and    silver 


medals  of  the  Royal  Aeronautical  Society, 
for  important  achievements  leading  to 
advancement  in  aeronautics.  Fairey  him- 
self was  awarded  the  Wakefield  gold 
medal  of  the  society  in  1936  for  his  design 
of  the  variable  camber  wing.  He  was  a 
member  of  many  important  committees 
including  the  Aeronautical  Research  Com- 
mittee (1923-6). 

Fairey  was  a  man  of  singular  courage, 
of  solid  English  stock,  who  was  deeply  in- 
terested in  everything,  from  aeronautical 
research  to  chess;  from  sailing  to  shoot- 
ing, in  both  of  which  he  was  highly  skilled ; 
and  from  the  guidance  of  men  who  served 
him  to  the  service  he  gave  his  country. 
Enthusiasm,  concentration,  independence, 
and  originality  were  his,  whatever  he 
was  doing.  A  pioneer  in  the  early  days 
he  was  a  pioneer  right  to  the  end.  There 
was  nothing  he  touched  which  he  did 
not  adorn  and  embellish.  Underneath  his 
serious  appearance  he  was  basically  shy, 
but  he  had  the  charm  of  the  eternal  boy. 

In  1915  he  married  Queenie  Henrietta 
Markey,  by  whom  he  had  a  son.  The  mar- 
riage was  dissolved  and  in  1934  he  married 
Esther  Sarah,  daughter  of  Francis  Stephen 
Whitmey,  bank  manager,  by  whom  he  had 
a  son  and  a  daughter.  He  died  in  London 
30  September  1956.  His  elder  son,  Richard, 
born  in  1916,  who  also  devoted  himself  to 
aviation,  died  in  1960.  A  portrait  of  Fairey 
by  Cuthbert  Orde  belongs  to  the  Royal 
Aeronautical  Society.  ; 

[Journal  of  the  Royal  Aeronautical  Society, 
December  1956 ;  private  information ;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]    J.  Laurence  Pkitchard. 

FARNOL,  (JOHN)  JEFFERY  (1878- 
1952),  novelist,  was  born  in  Aston  Manor, 
Birmingham,  10  February  1878,  the  eldest 
son  of  Henry  John  Farnol,  brass  founder, 
and  his  wife,  Katherine  Jeffery.  Ten  years 
lat^r  the  family  moved  to  south  London ; 
and  from  Lee  and  Blackheath  the  boy 
explored  the  unspoilt  green  fields  and 
white  roads  of  Kent  which  were  to  form 
the  background  of  many  of  his  romances. 
He  was  educated  privately;  and  his  first 
job  with  a  Birmingham  firm  of  brass 
founders  ended  when  he  knocked  down 
a  works  foreman  for  calling  him  a  liar — 
showing  a  taste  for  fisticuffs  which  found 
its  way  into  his  books.  He  then  attended 
the  Westminster  School  of  Art;  and 
though  he  decided  that  he  would  never 
be  a  good  artist,  the  training  was  useful ; 
when  he  found  himself  in  New  York, 
where  he  went  in  1902,  and  newly  married, 
he  was   able  to  earn  a  living  painting 


348 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Fay 


scenery  for  the  Astor  Theatre.  Meanwhile, 
he  began  to  write  and  sell  stories ;  and  all 
his  feeling  for  romance,  all  his  homesick- 
ness for  the  fields  and  woods  of  England 
were  poured  into  a  long  novel  of  the  open 
road,  The  Broad  Highway,  set  in  Kent  in 
the  days  of  the  Regency.  American  pub- 
lishers found  it  much  too  long  and  'too 
English'.  After  it  had  vainly  gone  the 
rounds  it  was  sent  home  to  England, 
whither  Farnol  followed  it  when  it  was 
eventually  published  in  1910.  It  was  a 
great  success,  and  was  his  freshest  and 
probably  his  best  book. 

The  hero,  Peter  Vibart,  a  scholarly  young 
aristocrat  who  can  use  his  fists,  takes  to 
the  road,  in  the  manner  of  Borrow,  and 
has  a  great  many  adventures  with  other 
wayfarers,  highwaymen,  tinkers,  and 
ladies  in  distress,  before  settling  to  earn 
his  bread  as  a  village  blacksmith.  To  his 
woodland  cottage  comes  a  superb  beauty 
named  Charmian,  in  flight  from  a  smoothly 
villainous  baronet,  who  is  the  hero's 
cousin  and  counterpart ;  there  is  plenty  of 
love  and  fighting  before  all  ends  well. 

In  Farnol' s  next  most  popular  novel. 
The  Amateur  Gentleman  (1913),  he  re- 
versed the  story :  a  hero  from  hmnble  life 
inherits  a  fortune  and  cuts  a  figure  in 
the  fashionable  world  as  a  Regency  buck, 
winning  a  spirited  and  lovely  lady.  The 
formula  was  established  and  varied  little, 
whatever  the  period,  in  the  romances 
which  Farnol  turned  out  regularly  for  the 
next  forty  years.  The  hero  was  brave  and 
honourable,  the  heroine  innocent  and 
beautiful,  the  villain  properly  villainous: 
nor  was  the  reader  ever  invited  to  sympa- 
thize with  the  base  rather  than  with  the 
honest  characters.  It  was  the  stuff  of 
dreams  and  archetypal  romance:  with 
enough  magic  in  it  to  capture  generations 
of  young  people,  and  do  them  no  harm. 
Older  readers  would  cherish  their  taste  for 
these  tales  through  all  changes  of  fictional 
fashion,  reread  their  favourites,  and  re- 
member the  days  when  every  green  wood 
or  winding  lane  seemed  to  them  likely  to 
produce  a  gallant  adventure  or  a  glorious 
beauty. 

There  was  thus  an  appreciative  welcome 
over  the  years  for  all  Jeffery  Farnol' s 
overlarge  output,  even  though  many  of 
his  later  books  were  hurried  and  inferior. 
Among  his  best  and  most  popular  were 
The  Money  Moon  (1911),  The  Chronicles 
of  the  Imp  (1915),  Our  Admirable  Betty 
(1918),  The  Geste  of  Duke  Jocelyn  (1919), 
Black  Bartlemy's  Treasure  (1920),  and 
Peregrine's  Progress  (1922).  ..  «iu44»tj 


As  it  must  be  one  of  the  happier  lots 
in  life  to  give  a  great  deal  of  pleasure  to 
a  great  many  people  for  a  great  many 
years,  'Jack'  Farnol  had  a  right  to  a  happy 
disposition:  and  is  recorded  to  have  been 
exceptionally  gentle,  generous,  and  hospit- 
able. His  chief  hobby  was  the  collection 
of  swords  and  armour  belonging  to  the 
picturesque  past  of  which  he  wrote. 

He  had  one  daughter  by  his  first  wife, 
Blanche,  daughter  of  F.  Hughson  Hawley, 
of  New  York.  This  marriage  was  dissolved 
in  1938  in  which  year  he  married  Phyllis 
Clarke.  He  died  at  Eastbourne  9  August 
1952. 

[The  Times,  11  and  19  August  1952 ;  private 
information.]  M.  Bellasis. 

FAY,  Sir  SAM  (1856-1953),  railway 
general  manager,  was  born  at  Hamble- 
le-Rice,  Hampshire,  30  December  1856. 
Of  Huguenot  origin,  Samuel  Fay  was  the 
second  son  of  Jojshua  Fay,  farmer,  and  his 
wife,  Ann  Philpot.  He  was  educated  at 
Blenheim  House  School,  Fareham,  and 
entered  the  service  of  the  London  and 
South  Western  Railway  in  1872  as  a 
junior  clerk  at  Itchen  Abbas.  After  spells 
at  Stockbridge  and  on  the  relief  staff 
at  various  stations,  he  settled  down  at 
Kingston  upon  Thames.  There,  in  1881, 
in  collaboration  with  two  colleagues.  Fay 
launched  the  South  Western  Gazette,  the 
profits  of  which  went  to  the  L.S.W.R. 
Orphanage  Fund.  Two  years  later,  thanks 
to  a  friendship  formed  with  William 
Drewett,  one-time  editor  of  the  Surrey 
Comet,  he  had  published  his  first  book, 
A  Royal  Road,  a  brief  history  of  the 
L.S.W.R. 

Fay's  incursions  into  editorship  and 
authorship  brought  him  under  the  eyes  of 
the  management,  besides  giving  him  an 
early  insight  into  the  value  and  power  of 
publicity.  In  1884  he  was  appointed  chief 
clerk  to  the  traffic  superintendent  at 
Waterloo  and  in  1891  he  became  assistant 
storekeeper  at  Nine  Elms.  In  the  same 
year  he  was  elected  to  the  Kingston  coun- 
cil, but  his  experience  was  short  lived; 
early  in  1892  he  was  appointed  secretary 
and  general  manager  of  the  Midland  and 
South  Western  Junction  Railway,  then  in 
receivership,  and  had  to  move  his  home  to 
Cirencester.  Fay  restored  his  charge  to 
solvency  (a  Cheltenham  editor  said  he 
had  made  an  empty  sack  stand  upright), 
winning  his  spurs  in  parliamentary  railway 
warfare  on  the  Marlborough  and  Grafton 
Railway  bill,  and  in  1899  he  returned  to 
Waterloo  as  superintendent  of  the  line.  ^ 


Fav 


D.N.B.   1951-1960 


fJn  1902  Fay  left  the  L.S.W.R.  to  be- 
come general  manager  of  the  Great  Central 
which  under  his  aegis  became  noted  for  its 
through  services,  its  leadership  in  signal- 
ling, and  as  the  birthplace  of  effective 
railway  publicity.  One  of  his  greatest 
achievements  was  the  development  of 
Immingham  dock,  at  the  opening  of 
which,  22  July  1912,  he  was  knighted  by 
King  George  V  on  the  dockside.  He  was 
director  of  movements  at  the  War  Office 
from  January  1917  to  March  1918,  then 
director-general  of  movements  and  rail- 
ways, and  a  member  of  the  Army  Council 
until  1919,  when  he  returned  to  the  Great 
Central,  remaining  its  general  manager 
until  it  became  part  of  the  London  and 
North  Eastern  Railway  on  1  January 
1923.  Fay  continued  to  lead  a  full  and 
active  life  after  leaving  the  hurly-burly  of 
railway  management.  He  became  chair- 
man of  Beyer,  Peacock  &  Co.,  Ltd.,  loco- 
motive builders,  a  post  which  he  held  for 
ten  years,  and  his  directorships  included 
the  Buenos  Aires  Great  Southern  and 
Buenos  Aires  Western  Railways.  In  1937 
he  published  his  book  The  War  Office  at 
War. 

One  of  the  most  characteristic  illustra- 
tions of  Fay  was  a  cartoon  published  in 
Vanity  Fair,  30  October  1907,  when  he 
was  approaching  the  zenith  of  his  railway 
career.  This  aptly  portrays  his  dis- 
tinguished and  impeccable  appearance, 
which  gave  one  the  impression  that  he  had 
just  stepped  out  of  a  bandbox.  Added  to 
this  was  his  magnetic  personality.  Pos- 
sessing great  fertility  of  mind  and  pro- 
nounced literary  tastes,  he  was  decisive  to 
the  point  of  martinetcy,  yet  he  was  re- 
garded with  affection  as  'Sam'  by  his  staff 
of  all  ranks  for  his  overall  interest  in  their 
welfare. 

In  1883  Fay  married  Frances  Ann  (died 
1946),  daughter  of  C.  H.  Farbrother,  of 
Kingston  upon  Thames ;  they  had  two  sons 
and  four  daughters.  He  died  at  Awbridge 
30  May  1953,  having  outlived  all  his 
contemporary  railway  general  managers. 

[Great  Central  Railway  records ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

George  Dow. 

FELLOWES,       EDMUND       HORACE 

(1870-1951),  clergyman  and  musical 
scholar,  was  born  in  Paddington,  London, 
11  November  1870,  the  second  son  and 
fifth  child  of  Horace  Decimus  Fellowes,  of 
the  family  of  Fellowes  of  Shotesham  Park, 
Norfolk,  assistant  director  of  the  Royal 
Army  clothing  depot,  and  his  wife,  Louisa 


Emily,  daughter  of  Captain  Edmund 
Packe,  Royal  Horse  Guards,  of  Prestwold 
Hall,  Leicestershire.  Fellowes  showed 
musical  gifts  at  an  early  age  and  in  1878  he 
received  an  offer  from  Joachim  to  be  his 
pupil  on  the  violin.  Instead,  he  proceeded 
in  due  course  to  Winchester  and  Oriel 
College,  Oxford,  taking  a  fourth  class  in 
theology  (1892)  and  becoming  B.Mus.  and 
M.A.  in  1896.  He  was  ordained  deacon 
(1894)  and  priest  (1895)  and  after  a  short 
curacy  in  Wandsworth  became  precentor 
of  Bristol  Cathedral  in  1897.  In  1900  he 
was  appointed  minor  canon  of  St.  George's 
chapel,  Windsor  Castle,  where  he  remained 
until  his  death  and  where  his  rendering  of 
the  priest's  part  in  the  services  was  of 
exceptional  dignity  and  beauty.  From 
1924  until  1927  he  was  in  charge  of  the 
choir  between  the  death  of  Sir  Walter 
Parratt  and  the  appointment  of  Sir  Wal- 
ford  Davies  [qq.v.].  In  this  capacity  he 
toured  Canada  with  the  lay  clerks  in 
company  with  (Sir)  Sydney  Nicholson 
[q.v.]  and  boys  from  Westminster  Abbey. 
As  a  minor  canon  of  Windsor  he  was  ap- 
pointed M.V.O.  in  1931 ;  later  he  contri- 
buted five  volumes  to  a  series  of  historical 
monographs  relating  to  the  chapel. 

While  a  young  clergyman  Fellowes  ac- 
quired considerable  knowledge  of  heraldry. 
But  in  1911  his  attention  was  drawn  to  the 
work  of  the  English  madrigal  composers, 
and  this  proved  decisive.  Thenceforward 
he  applied  himself  to  studying  and  editing 
English  music  of  the  period  c.  1545-1645 
on  which  he  became  the  leading  authority. 
Single-handed  he  edited  36  volumes  of 
madrigals,  32  volumes  of  lute  songs,  and 
20  volumes  of  Byrd's  music ;  he  was  also 
the  most  pertinacious  of  the  editors  of 
Tudor  Church  Music.  This  work  was  sup- 
ported by  important  biographical  and 
critical  writings,  notably  The  English 
Madrigal  Composers  (1921)  and  William 
Byrd  (1936),  breaking  much  new  ground. 
Meanwhile,  as  honorary  librarian  of  St. 
Michael's  College,  Tenbury  Wells,  Worces- 
tershire (1918-48),  he  arranged  and  cata- 
logued the  extensive  musical  library  left 
by  Sir  Frederick  Ouseley  [q.v.]. 

By  his  investigation  of  original  sources, 
Fellowes  shed  fresh  light  on  the  idiom  of 
this  music  and  mapped  out  a  considerable 
area,  making  it  common  property.  For, 
scholar  though  he  was,  he  was  a  perform- 
ing musician  even  more,  and  his  aim  was 
to  be  not  only  accurate  and  informative 
but  comprehensive  and  practical.  His 
editions  were  intended  to  get  the  music 
performed,  not  to  rest  on  a  scholar's  desk ; 


350 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Ferguson 


but  they  were  not  to  be  mere  selections. 
This  conception  was  then  a  novelty;  it 
has  been  amply  justified  by  the  natural 
familiarity  of  later  generations  with  the 
field  he  tilled  almost  as  a  pioneer.  When 
estimating  his  technical  achievement  as 
editor,  as  distinct  from  his  range,  dis- 
coveries, and  fruitful  practical  impact,  it 
must  be  remembered  that  in  Fellowes's 
day  there  was  no  organized  training  for 
musical  research  in  England.  He  had  to 
find  his  own  way,  and  thereby  contributed 
largely  to  the  standards  by  which  he  will 
be  judged.  On  his  critical  writings,  whose 
contributions  to  knowledge  are  plain  for 
all  to  see,  it  is  a  just  comment  that  he 
viewed  his  subject  in  too  insular -a  light. 

Parallel  to  his  researches  ran  his  lifelong 
efforts  to  improve  church  (and  particu- 
larly cathedral)  music.  He  was  president 
of  the  Church  Music  Society  (1946-51) 
in  succession  to  Archbishop  Lang  [q.v.]. 
When  president  of  the  Musical  Association 
(1942-7)  he  was  instrumental  in  securing 
for  that  body  the  appellation  'Royal'. 

Disappointed  by  failure  to  attain  a 
canonry  (though  he  was  offered  a  non- 
stipendiary  Wiccamical  prebend  of 
Chichester  whfch  he  was  precluded  from 
accepting),  Fellowes  did  not  lack  honours 
of  another  sort.  He  received  the  honorary 
doctorate  in  music  from  Dublin  (1917), 
Oxford  (1939),  and  Cambridge  (1950),  and 
was  made  an  honorary  fellow  of  Oriel  in 
1937.  In  1944  he  was  appointed  C.H. 

All  his  life  he  was  an  accomplished 
player  of  chamber  music,  and,  in  his 
earlier  days,  of  tennis  also.  His  interest 
in  cricket  led  him  to  write  a  History  of 
Winchester  Cricket  (1930).  Rightly  jealous 
for  the  things  he  had  struggled  for,  Fel- 
lowes perhaps  seemed  forbidding  to  those 
who  took  things  for  granted ;  but  he  was 
the  most  loyal  of  men,  kind  to  many  a 
younger  scholar.  The  essentials  of  his  work 
and  personality  were  thoroughness  and 
tenacity. 

In  1899  he  married  Lilian  Louisa, 
youngest  daughter  of  Admiral  Sir  Richard 
Vesey  Hamilton  [q.v.],  by  whom  he  had 
three  sons  and  one  daughter.  He  died  at 
Windsor  21  December  1951. 

[E.  H.  Fellowes,  Memoirs  of  an  Amateur 
Musician,  1946;  The  Times,  22  December 
1951 ;  Musical  Times,  February  1952 ;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  Watkins  Shaw. 

FERGUSON,  HARRY  GEORGE  (1884- 
1960),  engineer  and  inventor,  was  born 
4  November  1884  at  Growell,  Hillsboro', 
county  Down.  He  was  the  third  son  and 


fourth  of  eleven  children  born  to  James 
Ferguson,  a  farmer,  and  his  wife,  Mary 
Bell.  He  left  his  father's  farm  at  the  age  of 
sixteen  to  start  a  garage  business  in  Bel- 
fast with  one  of  his  brothers,  financed 
by  their  father.  He  at  once  showed  great 
aptitude  in  getting  the  most  out  of  the 
crude  motor-cars  and  motor-cycles  then 
being  made  and,  in  common  with  Henry 
Ford,  who  was  to  become  his  great  friend 
and  partner,  he  raced  successfully  with 
machines  whose  engines  he  himself  tuned. 
He  then  became  interested  in  the  infant 
aircraft  industry  and  in  1909  became  the 
first  man  to  fly  in  Ireland,  using  a  mono- 
plane which  he  himself  had  designed  and 
built.  This  aircraft  was  the  first  to  have 
a  tricycle  under-carriage,  used  fifty  years 
later  by  most  big  air-liners. 

In  1913  Ferguson  married  Mary  Ade- 
laide, daughter  of  Adam  Watson,  of 
Dromore,  and,  after  he  had  had  several 
narrow  escapes  in  flying  accidents,  she 
persuaded  him  to  give  up  this  venture. 
By  this  time  his  motor  business,  Harry 
Ferguson  Motors,  Ltd.,  of  Belfast,  had 
prospered  and  his  own  high  reputation  in 
mechanical  matters  had  been  established. 
In  1916  he  was  asked  by  the  Government 
to  take  responsibility  for  farm  machinery 
in  the  wartime  'Grow  More  Food'  cam- 
paign in  Ireland.  Remembering  from  his 
childhood  the  time-  and  land-consuming 
burden  of  using  horses i  for  farm  work, 
he  quickly  came  to  the  conclusion  that 
thorough  mechanization  was  the  only 
solution.  He  became  known  as  'that 
Ferguson  fellow  who  has  it  in  for  horses'. 
In  1917  he  met  Charles  E.  Sorensen,  of 
the  Ford  Motor  Company,  which  was  pro- 
ducing tractors  for  the  allied  war  effort, 
and  explained  his  ideas  to  him,  including 
one  of  mounting  the  plough  on  the  tractor, 
instead  of  trailing  it  behind.  This  was  the 
first  step  in  his  eventual  development  of 
light  manoeuvrable  tractors,  cheap  to  buy 
and  economical  to  run,  which  secured  their 
necessary  tractive  power  through  trans- 
ference of  the  weight  of  the  plough  and  the 
suck  of  the  soil  to  the  tractor's  rear  wheels 
instead  of  from  weight  built  into  the 
tractor — 'making  natural  forces  work  with 
you  instead  of  against  you'. 

In  1919  Sorensen  invited  Ferguson  to 
take  his  first  rather  primitive  mounted 
plough  to  Dearborn  to  show  it  to  Henry 
Ford.  Ford  looked  at  it  and  said  to  Soren- 
sen 'hire  him' ;  but  Ferguson  was  not  for 
hire.  He  returned  to  Ireland  and  for  six 
years  worked  on  improvements  to  his 
plough.  He  then  went  into  business  with 


351 


Ferguson 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


George  and  Ebor  Sherman,  Ford's  largest 
distributors,  in  Evansville,  Indiana,  mak- 
ing ploughs  for  Ford  tractors  until  pro- 
duction of  these  was  stopped  in  1928. 
Returning  again  to  Belfast,  he  began  to 
design  his  own  tractor,  a  truly  revolu- 
tionary machine,  with  which  the  mounted 
implements  were  integrated  through  a  3- 
point  linkage,  and  their  working  depth  was 
hydraulically  controlled.  This  system  has 
since  been  universally  adopted.  In  1935 
the  first  prototype  was  built  in  Belfast 
and  a  year  later  he  made  an  agreement 
with  David  Brown  for  manufacture,  but 
he  could  not  under  this  arrangement 
achieve  the  big  volume  and,  therefore,  the 
low  price  which  he  regarded  as  essential. 
So,  in  1939,  he  again  went  to  see  Henry 
Ford  and  demonstrated  to  him  *The 
Ferguson  System  of  complete  Farm 
Mechanization'.  This  resulted  at  once  in 
the  famous  'handshake  agreement'  by 
which  Ferguson  became  Ford's  only 
partner,  selling  tractors  made  by  the  Ford 
Motor  Company  to  his  design,  and  imple- 
ments, also  to  his  design,  manufactured  by 
a  nimiber  of  suppliers.  Between  1940  and 
mid- 1947,  in  spite  of  steel  rationing,  which 
at  times  cut  production  to  two-thirds  of 
potential  sales,  306,000  Ford-Ferguson 
tractors  and  944,000  Ferguson  implements 
were  sold  in  the  United  States,  for  a  total 
sum  of  $312  million. 

In  July  1947,  Henry  Ford  and  his  son 
Edsel  having  both  died  and  the  Dearborn 
empire  having  passed  to  the  grandson, 
Henry  Ford  II,  the  unwritten  contract  of 
partnership  was  repudiated  by  the  Ford 
Motor  Company.  Deprived  of  a  tractor 
manufactiu-ing  source  and  most  of  his 
distributors,  Ferguson's  earnings  dropped 
from  $59  million  in  the  first  half  of  the 
year  to  $11  million  in  the  second  half.  His 
reaction  was  swift.  He  raised  the  finance 
to  build  his  own  plant  on  Ford's  doorstep 
in  Detroit  and  supplied  his  American 
customers,  while  it  was  being  built,  with 
tractors  made  for  a  new  Ferguson  com- 
pany formed  in  Britain  by  the  Standard 
Motor  Company  of  Coventry.  Within 
eighteen  months  his  sales  in  the  United 
States  had  jimiped  back  to  $33  million  a 
year.  In  1948  he  filed  a  suit  against  Ford 
for  conspiracy  to  ruin  his  business  and 
non-payment  of  royalties  on  his  inven- 
tions. One  of  the  biggest  civil  lawsuits  of 
all  time,  the  case  lasted  over  four  years 
and  cost  $3  million.  Ferguson  himself 
answered  60,000  questions  in  the  witness- 
box.  Eventually,  Ford  agreed  in  1952 
to  pay  $9-25  million  compensation — ^the 


largest  amount  ever  won  by  a  plaintiff  in 
a  patent  action.  Ferguson's  comment  was : 
'This  is  a  victory  for  the  small  inventor. 
I  didn't  sue  Ford  and  his  colossal  empire 
for  the  money  but  for  the  principle.'  In 
1953  he  merged  his  companies  with  the 
Canadian  Massey-Harris  farm  machinery 
concern,  receiving  $15  million  in  stock 
and  becoming  chairman  of  the  new  com- 
pany. A  year  later,  disagreeing  with  the 
costing  procedures  of  his  new  associates 
and  with  engineering  changes  planned  for 
the  Ferguson  line  of  products,  he  with- 
drew. Thereafter  he  devoted  himself  to 
a  series  of  inventions  designed  to  make 
road  vehicles  of  all  kinds  a  great  deal  safer 
by  eliminating  skidding  due  to  spinning  or 
locking  of  the  driving  wheels. 

He  died  suddenly,  25  October  1960,  at 
his  home  at  Stow-on-the-Wold,  Glouces- 
tershire, leaving  a  widow  and  a  married 
daughter,  in  the  knowledge  that  his 
pioneer  work  had  revolutionized  farm 
mechanization  and  that  his  similar  work 
for  road  vehicles  was  well  advanced  and, 
with  the  financial  provision  which  he  had 
made  for  it  to  be  carried  on,  would  be 
completed. 

Harry  Ferguson,  a  small,  spare,  ener- 
getic, and  neat  man,  considerably  re- 
sembling Henry  Ford  I  with  his  high 
forehead,  lean  face,  and  alert  blue  eyes, 
was  even  more  than  Ford's  description  of 
him :  'an  inventive  genius  whose  name  will 
go  down  in  history  with  those  of  Alexander 
Graham  Bell,  the  Wright  Brothers,  and 
Thomas  Edison' ;  and  much  more  than 
James  Duncan's  (former  chairman  of 
Massey-Harris) :  'the  most  fantastic  sales- 
man I  have  ever  seen'.  He  was  a  man 
with  a  vision  and  a  mission  based  on  a 
profound  yet  simple  political-economic 
philosophy  summed  up  in  his  statement 
to  Franklin  D.  Roosevelt:  'The  New 
Deal  is  economic  nonsense ;  the  right  way 
to  get  rid  of  poverty  and  to  raise  the 
standard  of  living  everywhere  is  not  to 
spread  more  money  about  but  to  produce 
more  real  wealth  by  cost-reducing  methods 
and  so  bring  down  prices.'  For  twenty 
years  he  exhorted  every  British  prime 
minister  to  lead  the  country  and  the 
world  with  a  policy  of  combined  incomes 
restraint  and  price  reduction  to  end  the 
inflation  which  was  robbing  mankind  of 
the  rewards  of  scientific  and  technical 
advance.  Although  the  poHcy  for  which 
he  appealed  was  not  to  be  accepted  until 
after  his  death,  and  during  his  lifetime 
aroused  no  enthusiasm  among  politicians 
and  economists,  he  inspired  among  those 


852 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


Fergusson 


who  worked  with  him  and  knew  him  per- 
sonally profound  respect  for  his  judge- 
ment, strong  admiration  for  his  tenacity, 
fervent  enthusiasm  for  his  philosophic 
vision,  and  deep  affection  for  him  as 
a  man.  As  one  of  his  staff  said :  'We  were 
not  employees :  we  were  converts.  Joining 
the  Ferguson  organization  was  like  joining 
the  Church.' 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
N.  F.  Newsome. 

FERGUSSON,  Sir  CHARLES,  seventh 
baronet,  of  Kilkerran  (1865-1951),  soldier 
and  administrator,  was  born  in  Edinburgh 
17  January  1865,  the  elder  son  of  Sir 
James  Fergusson  of  Kilkerran,  sixth 
baronet  [q.v.],  by  his  first  wife,  Lady 
Edith  Christian  Ramsay,  second  daughter 
of  James,  first  Marquess  of  Dalhousie 
[q.v.].  His  early  childhood  was  spent  in 
South  Australia,  where  his  mother  died  in 
1871,  and  in  New  Zealand  of  which  his 
father  was  then  governor.  He  was  edu- 
cated at  Eton  and  the  Royal  Military 
College,  Sandhurst,  where  he  passed  out 
With  honours,  and  was  conmiissioned  7 
November  1883  in  the  1st  battalion. 
Grenadier  Guards,  becoming  adjutant  in 
1890. 

In  1896  Fergusson  joined  the  Egyptian 
Army  and  soon  received  command  of  the 
10th  Sudanese  battalion  with  which  he 
served  throughout  the  campaigns  of  1896- 
8,  being  badly  wounded  at  the  battle  of 
Rosaires  26  December  1898.  He  then 
raised  and  commanded  the  15th  Sudanese ; 
received  a  brevet  of  colonel  in  1900 ;  and 
from  1901  to  1903  was  adjutant-general  of 
the  Egyptian  Army. 

Fergusson  commanded  the  3rd  Grena- 
dier Guards  in  1904-7,  served  as  brigadier- 
general,  general  staff,  Irish  Conmiand,  in 
1907-8,  and  was  promoted  major-general 
in  1908  although  he  had  not  been  through 
the  Staff  College.  He  succeeded  to  the 
baronetcy  in  1907  when  his  father  was 
killed  in  the  Jamaica  earthquake.  In  1909 
he  was  appointed  to  the  new  post  of 
inspector  of  infantry  in  which  he  remained 
until  December  1912.  In  February  1913 
he  received  command  of  the  5th  division, 
stationed  in  Ireland.  A  year  later  Fergus- 
son  succeeded  by  courageous  and  ener- 
getic leadership — and  no  little  diplomatic 
skill — in  holding  its  officers  to  their  duty 
through  the  course  of  the  'Curragh  inci- 
dent'. His  attitude,  however,  was  not 
appreciated  by  everybody  in  the  army. 

He  took  the  division  to  France  in 
August  1914,  was  promoted  lieutenant- 


general,  and  led  it  through  very  hard 
fighting  in  the  battles  of  Mons,  Le  Cateau, 
the  Marne,  and  the  Aisne.  At  Le  Cateau 
he  held  a  vital  position  tenaciously  and 
extricated  his  command  from  it  at  the  last 
possible  moment  with  great  coolness  and 
skill.  In  October  he  was  suddenly  ordered 
home.  For  two  months  he  commanded 
and  trained  the  9th  division,  then  at  the 
end  of  the  year  returned  to  France  to  take 
command  of  II  Corps.  In  May  1916  he  was 
given  XVII  Corps  which  he  commanded 
until  after  the  end  of  hostiUties. 

The  XVII  Corps'  attack  in  the  battle  of 
Arras  (9  April  1917)  Fergusson  called  his 
'revenge  for  Le  Cateau'.  His  three  divisions 
took  3,522  prisoners  and  86  guns  on  that 
day.  Fergusson  set  himself  to  hold  the 
line  reached  and  spent  many  months 
strengthening  it  at  Monchy-le-Preux 
which  commanded  a  superb  field  of  ob- 
servation. He  was  bitterly  disappointed 
when  he  had  to  withdraw  without  a  fight 
from  Monchy  on  22  March  1918  when  the 
neighbouring  VI  Corps  was  pressed  back 
by  the  German  attack.  He  held  his  own 
retracted  front,  although  on  28  March  he 
had  to  commit  to  it  every  available  man 
'down  to  cyclists  and  details  from  wagon 
lines'.  This  defence  saved  Arras  and 
formed  the  hinge  of  the  British  Army,  on 
which  five  months  later  it  swung  forward 
to  the  final  victorious  advance.  The  XVII 
Corps  attacked  on  26  August,  penetrated 
the  Drocourt-Qu^ant  switch,  and  on  2 
September  broke  the  main  Hindenburg 
Line  at  its  strongest  point.  Fergusson's 
plan  of  attack  involved  an  audacious 
change  of  direction.  His  casualties,  how- 
ever, were  light,  and  he  went  on  to  capture 
Cambrai,  after  further  hard  fighting,  a 
month  later. 

In  December  1918  Fergusson  was  ap- 
pointed military  governor  of  Cologne.  The 
work  was  exacting  and  uncongenial,  but 
Fergusson  succeeded  in  maintaining  order 
and  minimizing  industrial  unrest.  On 
leaving  in  August  1919  he  was  warmly 
thanked  by  Konrad  Adenauer,  then  its 
burgomaster,  for  his  fairness  and  courtesy. 
He  had  resigned  after  a  disagreement  with 
Sir  William  Robertson  [q.v.],  conmiander- 
in-chief  of  the  Rhine  Army.  All  home 
commands  were  now  filled  and  Fergusson 
remained  unemployed.  He  was  promoted 
full  general  in  1921  but  when  new  appoint- 
ments were  announced  in  January  1922  he 
was  again  passed  over.  He  therefore  sent 
in  his  papers.  He  continued  to  devote  him- 
self to  his  family  estate  in  Ayrshire  and  to 
work  for  the  Church  of  Scotland,  of  which 


8652062 


85S 


Fergusson 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


he  was  an  elder,  both  in  his  own  parish  and 
presbytery  and  in  the  General  Assembly. 

In  the  general  election  of  1923  Fergus- 
son  stood  for  South  Ayrshire  in  the 
Conservative  interest  but  failed  to  unseat 
the  Labour  member.  Before  the  next 
election  he  followed  his  father  and  father- 
in-law  by  accepting  the  post  of  governor- 
general  of  New  Zealand  and  arrived  in 
Wellington  in  December  1924.  During 
over  five  years  of  office  he  and  his  wife 
visited  every  part  of  New  Zealand  and  in 
1926  its  island  dependencies.  They  were 
hosts  to  the  Duke  and  Duchess  of  York 
(afterwards  King  George  VI  and  Queen 
Ehzabeth)  who  visited  the  dominion  in 
1927.  Fergusson  became  a  fluent  and  win- 
ning speaker,  emphasizing  in  simple  words 
the  themes  of  loyalty  and  public  service. 
He  became  a  freemason  and  was  grand 
master  of  New  Zealand.  His  term  of  office 
ended  in  February  1930  and  he  returned 
to  Great  Britain,  living  until  1947  at 
Kilkerran,  active  even  in  old  age  in  public 
and  charitable  work.  At  the  end  of  1932 
he  toured  the  West  Indies  as  chairman  of 
the  closer  union  commission.  He  was  for 
some  years  on  Ayr  County  Council  and 
was  lord-heutenant  of  Ayrshire  in  1937-50. 
His  last  years  were  passed  at  Ladyburn, 
near  Kilkerran,  where  he  died  20  February 
1951. 

In  person  Fergusson  was  tall,  erect,  and 
handsome ;  robust  and  athletic,  and  a  tire- 
less walker.  Portraits  by  F.  M.  Lutyens 
and  Glyn  Philpot  are  at  Kilkerran  and  a 
drawing  by  Francis  Dodd  is  in  the  Imperial 
War  Museum.  His  character  was  strict  and 
uncompromising,  dominated  by  an  unfail- 
ing sense  of  duty.  He  set  both  for  himself 
and  for  others  the  highest  possible  stan- 
dards but  was  never  satisfied  with  his  own 
performance.  First  and  last  he  was  a  pro- 
fessional soldier  and  a  Grenadier  with, 
according  to  Lord  Byng  [q.v.],  'the 
highest  ideals  of  soldiering'.  He  had  con- 
siderable personal  charm  and  got  on  well 
with  French  officers,  whose  language  he 
spoke  fluently,  and  with  the  Americans. 
Although  never  at  ease  with  Haig  and 
finding  AUenby  unsympathetic,  he  had 
close  and  cordial  relations  with  Plumer, 
whom  he  greatly  admired,  and  with  Byng. 
His  courage,  based  on  a  simple  and  deep 
religious  faith,  was  serene.  Both  in  defence 
and  attack  he  was  meticulous  in  prepara- 
tion and  attention  to  detail.  He  always 
insisted  on  an  aggressive  rather  than 
defensive  attitude  in  trench  warfare ;  but, 
despite  the  boldness  of  his  attack  on  the 
Hindenburg  Line,  he  had  a  reputation  for 


caution  which  perhaps  partly  accounts  for 
his  failure  to  reach  higher  command. 

In  1901  Fergusson  married  Lady  Alice 
Mary  Boyle  (died  1958),  second  daughter 
of  the  seventh  Earl  of  Glasgow.  They  had 
three  sons:  James  (born  1904),  eighth 
baronet,  author,  and  member  of  the 
Queen's  Bodyguard  for  Scotland  and 
keeper  of  the  records  of  Scotland ;  Simon, 
who,  having  served  in  the  Argyll  and 
Sutherland  Highlanders,  was  ordained  a 
minister  in  1957  ;  and  Sir  Bernard  Fergus- 
son  who  followed  his  father  in  his  career  as 
a  successful  soldier  and  also  as  governor- 
general  of  New  Zealand  (1962-7).  There 
was  also  a  son  who  died  in  infancy  and  one 
daughter. 

Fergusson  was  appointed  C.B.  (1911), 
K.C.B.  (1915),  and  G.C.B.  (1932); 
K.C.M.G.  (1918)  and  G.C.M.G.  (1924). 

[Lord  Ernest  Hamilton,  The  First  Seven 
Divisions,  1916 ;  Sir  Horace  Smith-Dorrien, 
Memories  of  Forty-Eight  Years'  Service,  1925 ; 
Sir  J.  E.  Edmonds  and  others,  (Official  History) 
Military  Operations,  France  and  Belgium,  1918, 
5  vols.,  1935-47;  Sir  James  Fergusson,  The 
Curragh  Incident,  1964 ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.] 

John  Wheeler-Bennett. 


FERMOR,  Sir  LEWIS  LEIGH  (1880- 
1954),  geologist,  was  born  in  London  18 
September  1880,  the  eldest  of  six  children 
of  Lewis  Fermor  and  his  wife,  Maria 
James.  Due  to  illness  his  father  retired 
prematurely  from  the  London  Joint  Stock 
Bank,  thereby  involving  his  family  in 
educational  difficulties.  From  Goodrich 
Road  board  school  Fermor  went  with  a 
scholarship  to  Wilson's  Grammar  School, 
Camberwell;  thence  with  a  national 
scholarship  to  the  Royal  School  of  Mines 
in  1898.  He  gained  a  first  class  in  each 
year's  course,  won  the  Murchison  medal 
for  geology,  and  obtained  an  associateship 
in  metallurgy.  Not  content,  he  worked 
for  the  London  University  matriculation, 
coming  second  out  of  1,500  candidates  and 
winning  an  exhibition. 

Fermor  now  applied  for,  and  obtained, 
a  post  as  assistant  superintendent  under 
(Sir)  Thomas  Holland  (whose  notice  he 
later  contributed  to  this  Dictionary)  in  the 
Geological  Survey  of  India  where  he 
landed  in  October  1902.  During  his  very 
distinguished  service  in  India  Fermor  pub- 
lished numerous  papers.  His  best  known 
was  the  Manganese  Memoir  (1909)  which 
greatly  advanced  the  scientific  knowledge 
of  the  world's  manganese  ores,  and  has 
been    a    major    contribution    to    their 


354 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Fermor 


mineralogy  and  petrology.  It  has  been 
most  useful  to  miners,  and  it  gave  the 
Government  of  India  a  description  of 
manganese  deposits  on  which  a  rational 
policy  for  their  extraction  could  be  based. 
For  his  work  he  obtained  the  London 
B.Sc.  (1907)  and  D.Sc.  (1909). 

His  paper  on  the  infraplutonic  zone  in 
the  earth's  crust  (1913),  which  gained  for 
him  the  Bigsby  medal  of  the  Geological 
Society,  followed  naturally  from  his  field- 
work  on  the  manganese  deposits  and  his 
study  of  meteorites.  In  this  he  showed 
that  at  high  pressures  many  rock-forming 
minerals  are  converted  into  garnet  with  a 
consequent  reduction  in  volume  of  20  per 
cent.  Reasoning  from  this  observation  he 
built  up  a  picture  of  the  earth  consisting  of 
a  series  of  shells  of  increasing  density.  His 
last  scientific  work  in  India  consisted  of 
memoirs  covering  all  the  Archaean  rocks 
there.  He  described  these  in  Mysore, 
Bihar  and  Orissa,  and  Bastar  regarding 
them  as  one  great  sedimentary  system.  He 
also  gave  a  detailed  account  of  the  cal- 
careous Sausar  series  which  he  considered 
an  exceptional  facies  of  the  same  system. 
Unfortunately  he  was  never  able  to  finish 
this  series. 

Fermor's  mapping  of  the  Sausar  Tahsil, 
published  after  thirteen  years  of  pains- 
taking field-work,  displayed  the  Indian 
Archaeans  in  detail  comparable  to  the 
classic  researches  in  Canada,  Finland,  and 
Scotland.  It  also  showed  that  the  Deccan 
Trap  had  been  both  folded  and  faulted. 
This  and  his  subsequent  paper  on  the 
Bhusaval  boring  are  of  world-wide  interest 
to  geologists. 

After  manganese,  Fermor's  most  im- 
portant economic  work  was  done  on  coal. 
As  the  result  of  his  map  and  report 
the  formerly  tiger-infested  Korea  State 
became  a  fiourishing  and  important 
coal-field.  He  also  mapped  the  Kargali 
coal-seam  with  750  million  tons  of  coal  in 
an  area  of  10  square  miles,  and  he  was  able 
to  show  that  rocks  mapped  in  Korea  and 
Bokaro  were  in  fact  the  burnt  outcrops  of 
coal-seams  which  were  undamaged  below 
water  level. 

During  the  war  of  1914-18  Fermor 
worked  first  for  the  Indian  Railway  Board, 
then  for  the  Munitions  Board.  He  was 
appointed  O.B.E.  for  his  services.  On  his 
advice  the  Government  of  India  passed 
very  important  legislation  encouraging 
sand  stowing  and  reducing  the  unneces- 
sary UEe  of  scarce  coking  coal  needed  for 
iron  smelting. 

Fermor  acted  as  curator  of  the  geologi- 


cal galleries  of  the  Indian  Museum  in 
1905-7.  In  recognition  of  his  work  on 
manganese  he  was  promoted  superinten- 
dent in  1910.  He  officiated  as  director  of 
the  Geological  Survey  of  India  in  1921, 
1925,  and  1928,  and  finally  served  as 
director  in  1930-35.  During  his  director- 
ship he  had  the  unpleasant  task  of 
defending  his  department  against  pro- 
posed cuts  in  the  geological  staff  from  thirty 
to  eight  and  finally  by  his  able  advocacy 
succeeded  in  keeping  twenty. 

In  1934  Fermor  was  elected  F.R.S.  and 
in  1935  he  was  knighted.  He  retired  from 
his  directorship  in  that  year  but  stayed 
in  Calcutta  working  on  his  Archaean 
memoirs.  After  six  months  he  visited 
Kenya,  Natal,  and  South  Africa,  widening 
and  enriching  his  geological  experience. 
His  last  major  report  was  written  for  the 
Colonial  Office  on  the  mining  industry  of 
Malaya.  After  investigating  every  aspect 
of  mining  there,  he  concluded  that  pros- 
pecting of  all  minerals  should  be  pushed 
ahead  both  by  Government  and  by  private 
enterprise,  and  that  a  proportion  of  the 
revenue  from  mining  should  be  put  into 
a  sinking  fund  for  use  when  the  more 
easily  mined  deposits  were  exhausted.  War 
broke  out  before  action  on  his  recom- 
mendations could  be  taken.  The  Japanese 
printed  a  special  edition  of  this  report, 
indicating  their  high  appreciation. 

Later,  as  consulting  geologist  for  various 
firms,  Fermor  visited  Egypt,  Rhodesia, 
Angola,  Lisbon,  India,  and  Malaya. 

Fermor  took  an  active  part  in  many 
scientific  societies.  He  represented  the 
Government  of  India  at  four  International 
Geological  Congresses.  He  was  a  founder- 
member  of  the  Mining  and  Geological 
Institute  of  India,  contributing  many 
papers  to  its  transactions,  one  of  which 
was  awarded  the  Government  prize  and 
medal.  For  many  years  he  was  editor  and 
honorary  secretary,  and  in  1922  president. 
In  1906  he  became  a  fellow  of  the  Asiatic 
Society  of  Bengal,  and  was  its  president 
in  1933.  By  his  patience  and  good  temper 
he  managed  to  restrain  the  rival  factions 
threatening  to  wreck  that  ancient  society. 
He  took  a  leading  part  in  founding  the 
National  Institute  of  Sciences  in  India 
which  corresponds  to  the  Royal  Society  in 
England,  and  became  its  first  president  in 
1933,  the  year  in  which  he  presided  over 
the  Indian  Science  Congress.  He  gave  his 
services  also  to  many  professional  bodies 
in  this  country. 

Fermor's  interests  were  wide,  and  in- 
cluded philately,  Persian  rugs,  and  old 


355 


Fermor 


(D.N.B.  1951-1960 


English  glass,  as  well  as  all  branches  of 
natural  history.  He  played  no  games,  but 
he  liked  the  races,  and  his  tall  straight 
figure  might  often  be  seen  dancing  in 
Calcutta. 

In  1909  he  married  Muriel  Aileen, 
daughter  of  Charles  Ambler,  of  Dharhara, 
by  whom  he  had  a  son  and  a  daughter ;  the 
former,  Patrick  Leigh  Fermor,  became  a 
well-known  author.  He  married  secondly, 
in  1933,  Frances  Mary,  daughter  of  the 
late  Edward  Robert  Case,  of  Fiddington, 
Somerset.  Fermor  died  at  his  home  near 
Woking  24  May  1954. 

[H.  Crookshank  and  J.  B.  Auden  in  Bio- 
graphical Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal 
Society,  vol.  ii,  1956;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  H.  Crookshank. 

FERRIER,  KATHLEEN  MARY  (1912- 
1953),  singer,  was  born  22  April  1912  at 
Higher  Walton,  near  Preston,  Lancashire, 
the  third  surviving  child  of  William 
Ferrier  and  his  wife,  Alice,  daughter  of 
James  Murray.  Her  parents  endowed  her 
with  a  mixture  of  English,  Welsh,  Scot- 
tish, and  Irish  blood.  Appointed  head- 
master of  St.  Paul's  School,  Blackburn, 
WiUiam  Ferrier  sent  Kathleen  to  the  high 
school  which  she  left  at  fourteen  to  be- 
come a  Post  Office  telephonist.  Born  into 
a  musical  family,  she  showed  signs  of 
ability  on  the  piano  at  an  early  age  and 
became  a  pupil  of  Miss  Frances  Walker 
when  she  was  nine.  At  eighteen  she  had 
passed  her  A.R.C.M.  and  L.R.A.M. 
examinations  for  piano,  had  developed 
into  a  useful  accompanist,  and  was  win- 
ning prizes  in  local  festivals.  A  move  to 
Silloth  near  Carlisle  after  her  marriage  in 
1935  brought  a  life  of  teaching  the  piano 
and  many  musical  evenings  with  friends. 
As  yet  singing  was  for  her  own  amusement. 
For  a  shilling  wager  she  entered  the  Car- 
lisle musical  festival  in  1937  for  singing  as 
well  as  pianoforte  and  won  the  Rose  Bowl. 
Maurice  Jacobson,  the  adjudicator,  en- 
couraged her  to  take  singing  lessons.  From 
the  autumn  of  1939  until  1942  she  studied 
with  Dr.  Hutchinson  of  Newcastle  and 
gradually  gained  a  solid  local  reputation 
which  was  extended  when  she  was  offered 
concerts  with  the  Council  for  the  En- 
couragement of  Music  and  the  Arts 
(C.E.M.A.)  which  became  the  Arts 
Council. 

Valuable  introductions  followed.  (Sir) 
Malcolm  Sargent  heard  her  sing  and  intro- 
duced her  to  John  and  Emmie  Tillett,  the 
London  concert  agents,  who  advised  her 
to  move  to  London.  A  flat  was  foimd  in 


Hampstead  into  which  she  and  her  sister 
Winifred  moved  on  Christmas  Eve  1942, 
joined  later  by  their  widowed  father.  From 
February  1943  Kathleen  Ferrier  put  her- 
self in  the  hands  of  Roy  Henderson  with 
whom  she  had  recently  sung  in  Elijah.  He 
became  her  'Prof,  an  association  which 
lasted  for  the  rest  of  her  life.  Intensive 
training  followed  for  the  next  three  or 
foiu"  years,  during  which  time  she  built  up 
a  national  reputation,  chiefly  with  choral 
societies.  Joint  recitals  with  her  professor 
gave  her  experience  in  Lieder  and  art 
songs.  Broadcasts  and  recording,  chiefly 
for  Decca,  followed. 

Benjamin  Britten  wrote  the  name  part 
of  his  opera  The  Rape  of  Lucretia  for  her 
which  she  performed  in  1946  at  Glynde- 
bourne  where  in  the  following  year  she 
made  a  profound  impression  in  Gluck's 
Orpheo.  The  Glyndebourne  manager, 
Rudolf  Bing,  asked  Bruno  Walter  to  hear 
her ;  the  result  was  world  fame.  Here  was 
the  ideal  Mahler  singer  Walter  was  seek- 
ing. Concert  tours,  the  operas  Lucretia  and 
Orpheo,  and  choral  works  followed  in  many 
European  countries ;  Salzburg,  Edinburgh, 
and  the  English  festivals,  as  well  as  tours 
in  the  United  States  and  Canada.  Brimo 
Walter  accompanied  her  at  a  few  recitals, 
a  rare  mark  of  respect ;  but  her  favourite 
accompanist,  who  helped  her  throughout 
her  career,  was  Gerald  Moore  who,  in  his 
turn,  recorded  that  without  her  his  life 
would  have  been  'immeasurably  poorer' 
{Am  I  too  Loud?,  1962). 

Early  in  1951  Kathleen  Ferrier  had  a 
serious  operation.  Despite  regular  visits  to 
hospital  for  deep  X-ray  treatment,  she 
was  singing  as  well  as  ever  within  three 
months.  But  the  disease  could  not  be 
arrested.  Her  last  triumph  was  in  1953 
at  Covent  Garden  in  Orpheo  conducted 
by  her  great  friend  Sir  John  BarbiroUi. 
Although  she  was  in  great  pain  her 
glorious  voice  was  in  no  way  impaired.  It 
was  a  superb  end  to  a  meteoric  career.  She 
died  in  London  8  October  1953,  having 
been  appointed  C.B.E.  and  awarded  the 
Royal  Philharmonic  Society's  gold  medal 
earlier  in  the  year.  The  impact  of  her  death 
on  the  musical  world  and  her  vast  public 
was  immense.  Many  were  unable  to  obtain 
admission  to  the  memorial  service  at  a 
crowded  Southwark  Cathedral.  Friends 
raised  money  for  cancer  research  at  Uni- 
versity College  Hospital  where  she  had 
been  a  patient.  The  proceeds  of  a  Memoir 
and  choral  societies  provided  money  for 
Kathleen  Ferrier  scholarships  for  young 
singers. 


856 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Finzi 


The  noble  quality  of  Kathleen  Ferrier's 
splendid  voice,  the  great  warmth  of  her 
heart,  her  gaiety,  sense  of  humour,  and 
the  radiance  of  her  personality,  her  fine 
musicianship,  and  above  all  her  deep 
sincerity,  all  contributed  to  her  success. 

Her  many  hobbies  included  golf, 
photography,  and,  in  later  years,  painting. 
It  was,  however,  in  her  many  friends 
that  she  found  her  greatest  pleasure.  To 
audiences  and  those  who  knew  her  best 
she  was  the  most  beloved  singer  of  her 
time. 

Her  marriage  in  1935  to  Albert  Wilson, 
bank  clerk,  was  annulled  in  1947.  There 
were  no  children. 

There  are  busts  by  Julian  Allan  at  the 
Free  Trade  Hall,  Manchester,  and  the 
Usher  Hall,  Edinburgh.  Another,  by  A.  J. 
Fleischmann,  is  in  the  Blackburn  Art 
Gallery.  A  portrait  by  Maurice  Codner  is 
owned  by  Miss  Winifred  Ferrier. 

[Kathleen  Ferrier,  a  Memoir,  ed.  Neville 
Cardus,  1954;  Winifred  Ferrier,  The  Life  of 
Kathleen  Ferrier ^  1955 ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Roy  Henderson. 

FIFE,  Duchess  of  (1891-1959).  [See 
Alexandra  Victoria  Alberta  Edwina 
Louise  Duff,  Princess  Arthur  of 
connaught.] 

FINZI,  GERALD  RAPHAEL  (1901- 
1956),  composer,  was  born  in  London  14 
July  1901,  the  son  of  John  Abraham  Finzi, 
ship  broker,  and  his  wife,  Eliza  Emma 
Leverson.  His  general  education  was  under- 
taken privately  but  from  1918  to  1922  he 
studied  music  under  (Sir)  Edward  Bairstow 
[q.v.],  organist  of  York  Minster.  Later,  in 
1925,  he  became  a  private  pupil  of  R.  O. 
Morris,  a  leading  British  authority  on  the 
aesthetics  and  technique  of  sixteenth- 
century  polyphony,  but  this  formal 
tuition  lasted  only  a  few  months.  For 
three  years  (1930-33)  Finzi  was  a  profes- 
sor of  composition  at  the  Royal  Academy 
of  Music,  but  London  was  uncongenial  to 
him  and  he  held  no  other  post  save  during 
the  war  of  1939-45  when  he  was  employed 
in  the  Ministry  of  War  Transport. 

Finzi's  art  is  rooted  in  English  music,  in 
English  letters,  and  in  the  English  country- 
side. As  to  music,  composers  so  diverse 
as  Parry,  Elgar,  and  Vaughan  Williams 
[qq.v.]  all  had  a  traceable  influence  on  his 
thought.  Finzi  was,  however,  a  wide  reader 
and  a  real  scholar.  No  composer  so  in- 
veterately  polyphonic  as  he  could  remain 
unaffected  by  the  textures,  and  occasion- 
ally the  forms,  of  J.  S.  Bach.  Thus  Finzi's 


counterpoint  is  often  a  concealed  source 
of  vitality  and  clarity  in  passages  which, 
in  clumsier  hands,  would  have  sounded 
thick  and  muddy.  Its  unobtrusiveness 
may  be  compared  with  those  beautiful 
details  of  medieval  architecture  which  do 
not  show  unless  specially  looked  for. 

He  was  devoted  to  Enghsh  poetry  for 
its  own  sake  and  his  knowledge  of  the 
English  masters  was  profound.  It  is  in  his 
settings  of  such  intractable  verses  as  those 
of  Thomas  Hardy  [q.v.]  that  Finzi  shows 
his  special  spark  of  genius.  His  ear  for  the 
music  of  words,  alike  as  to  sound  and 
sense,  was  so  acute  that  he  was  able,  at  his 
best,  to  create,  within  the  orbit  of  pure 
melody  and  true  musical  inflexion,  an 
integrated  result  akin  to  stylized  or  even 
idealized  reading  aloud ;  for  him  Voice  and 
Verse  were,  in  a  special  way,  harmonious 
sisters.  His  love  of  the  Wessex  country- 
side and  its  history,  his  interest  in  rural 
pursuits  such  as,  apple-growing  (at  which 
he  was  expert),  and  not  least  his  happy 
countrified  family  life  all  contributed  to 
the  personahty  which  lay  behind  his 
music.  He  was  musician  first  and  foremost 
but  his  music  was  evoked  and  nourished 
by  the  wealth  and  warmth  of  his  other 
enthusiasms. 

Sir  Donald  Tovey  [q.v.]  said  of  Schubert 
that  all  his  works  were  early  works.  In 
a  sense  this  was  true  of  Finzi  who  died  in 
1956  just  when  opportunity,  largely 
through  the  West  Country  Festivals,  was 
bringing  him  experience  and  confidence  in 
the  handling  of  big  designs.  He  responded, 
notably  in  matters  of  dynamic  energy,  to 
the  scale  and  scope  of  work  on  a  broader 
canvas,  but  his  style  did  not  undergo  a 
radical  change.  It  is  not  that  his  imagina- 
tion or  his  technique  were  unequal  to  the 
handling  of  large  resources  but  rather  that 
his  very  genius  in  lyric  forms  precluded 
mastery  in  those  matters  of  sustained 
development  which  are  of  the  essence  of 
extended  movements.  His  large  choral 
works  amply  justify  themselves  on  their 
own  merits  and  they  are  highly  individual. 
His  Intimations  of  Immortality  (Words- 
worth), Op.  29  (1950),  could  not  have  been 
written  by  anybody  else  and  his  short 
Christmas  Scene  In  Terra  Pax,  Op.  39 
(1954),  was  surely  a  presage  of  things  to 
come.  In  this,  which  in  the  event  proved 
to  be  his  last  choral  work,  he  had  returned 
to  Robert  Bridges  [q.v.],  a  poet  with 
whom  he  was  specially  in  sympathy  and 
from  whose  verses  he  had  already  made 
'Seven  part-songs'.  Op.  17,  in  the  thirties. 
Nevertheless  it  is  doubtful  whether  Finzi's 


357 


Finzi 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


delicate  art  could  ever  have  produced,  in 
large  forms,  works  more  significant  than 
the  best  of  his  songs  with  piano  or  his 
'Dies  Natalis'  (Traherne),  Op.  8  (1939),  for 
solo  voice  and  string  orchestra.  Indeed 
the  short  'Intrada'  to  this  work  is  among 
his  most  beautiful  instrumental  pieces. 

Thus  it  is  essentially  as  a  composer  of 
vocal  music  that  Finzi  has  left  his  mark, 
and  his  finest  writing  is  undoubtedly  to  be 
found  in  his  songs  for  solo  voice.  There  are 
three  books  of  Hardy  settings:  Op.  14 
(1933),  Op.  15  (1936),  and  Op.  16  (1949). 
The  collection  of  five  Shakespeare  songs 
Op.  18  (1942)  called  'Let  us  garlands 
bring'  is  not  a  cycle  but,  in  Finzi's  words, 
'put  together  as  the  only  thing  I  can  offer 
at  present'  (owing  to  his  war  work)  as 
a  greeting  for  Vaughan  Williams  on  his 
seventieth  birthday.  It  includes  a  specially 
sensitive  setting  of  the  Dirge  from  Cym- 
beline  ('Fear  no  more')  and  in  this  song, 
for  all  its  originality,  he  pays  a  subtle 
tribute  to  an  earlier  setting  by  Vaughan 
Williams  himself. 

Finzi's  instrumental  works  are,  how- 
ever, by  no  means  insignificant.  Yet  they 
derive  from  a  vocal  standpoint  and  from 
invention  which  is  naturally  melodic  and 
declamatory.  His  orchestral  output  is 
comprised  in  five  works  including  a 
Clarinet  Concerto,  Op.  31  (1949),  and  a 
Violoncello  Concerto,  Op.  40  (1956),  with 
an  especially  beautiful  slow  movement. 
There  are  two  chamber  works,  Op.  21 
(1936),  Op.  24  (1942),  and  a  set  of  'Baga- 
telles for  Clarinet  and  Pianoforte',  Op.  23 
(1945). 

The  works  which  Finzi  acknowledged 
are  embodied  in  some  thirty  compositions 
or  collections.  His  method  of  writing 
makes  chronological  reference  a  baffling 
business.  He  generally  had  several  works 
'on  the  stocks'  at  the  same  time  and  he 
allocated  the  opus  numbers  at  the  time  of 
their  inception.  His  meticulous  criticism 
often  meant  that  he  withheld  a  work, 
already  numbered,  until  after  later  ones 
had  been  completed  and  published.  (Thus 
his  Op.  5  and  21  are  both  of  1936,  whereas 
Op.  9  is  dated  1945.)  It  sometimes  took 
years  of  intermittent  sketching  and  patch- 
ing before  a  piece  reached  what  Finzi 
regarded  as  its  definitive  form.  He  did,  in 
fact,  withdraw  altogether  the  early  work 
('A  Severn  Rhapsody',  1924)  which  had 
been  published  by  the  Carnegie  Trust  and 
which  had  first  brought  him  to  the  notice 
of  musicians.  During  the  war  his  original 
work  was  in  abeyance,  but  he  founded 
a  string  orchestra  at  Newbury  for  which 


he  edited  works  of  eighteenth-century 
composers,  notably  of  John  Stanley  [q.v.]. 
Those  which  have  been  published  show  his 
practical  musicianship  as  well  as  his  care- 
ful scholarship. 

Finzi  made  no  bid  for  personal  recogni- 
tion, much  less  for  popular  appeal,  but 
he  was  vigorous  in  bringing  good  music 
to  the  people  around  him.  He  kept  his 
orchestra  going  after  the  war  and  took  it 
about  the  countryside  playing  in  churches 
and  village  halls.  The  pains  he  took  over 
finding,  preparing,  and  rehearsing  this 
music  is  typical  of  his  deep  interest  in  all 
things  old  and  odd.  It  also  indicates  the 
warmth  of  his  feeling  for  friends  and 
neighbours  and  not  less  his  constant 
willingness  to  place  his  musical  gifts  at  the 
service  of  the  community.  It  is  primarily 
owing  to  Finzi's  sympathy,  initiative,  and 
persistence  that  the  songs  of  Ivor  Gurney 
have  been  preserved. 

Finzi's  music  is  of  a  restrained  and  con- 
templative order;  sometimes  withdrawn 
in  its  very  eloquence,  and  often  foreboding. 
Paradoxically,  his  most  buoyant  and  least 
foreboding  works  were  produced  during 
his  last  few  years  when  he  knew  his  days 
were  numbered;  such  is  the  nature  of 
courage,  and  courage  was  of  the  essence  of 
Finzi.  He  died  in  Oxford  27  September 
1956. 

In  1933  he  had  married  Joyce  Black; 
there  were  two  sons. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Henry  Havergal. 

FIRTH,  JOHN  RUPERT  (1890-1960), 
professor  of  general  linguistics,  was  bom 
17  June  1890  at  Keighley,  Yorkshire,  the 
elder  son  of  William  Firth,  book-keeper, 
by  his  wife,  Frances  Elizabeth  Waller. 
He  was  educated  at  Keighley  Grammar 
School  and  the  university  of  Leeds  where 
he  obtained  first  class  honours  in  history 
(1911)  and  took  his  M.A.  in  1913.  After 
a  brief  appointment  in  the  Leeds  Training 
College  he  joined  the  Indian  Education 
Service  in  1915.  In  1916-19  he  saw  mili- 
tary service  in  India,  Afghanistan,  and 
Africa.  From  1919  to  1928  he  was  pro- 
fessor of  English  in  the  university  of  the 
Punjab  at  Lahore. 

Firth  enjoyed  his  time  in  India,  a 
country  for  which  he  retained  a  great 
affection.  But  he  was  glad  to  return  to 
England  in  1928  to  a  senior  lectureship  in 
phonetics  at  University  College,  London, 
which  he  held  until  1938.  He  also  had  part- 
time  appointments  elsewhere,  as  assistant 
in  the  sociology  of  languages  at  the  Lon- 


358 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Firth,  J.  R. 


don  School  of  Economics  and  Political 
Science,  as  special  lecturer  in  the  phonetics 
of  Indian  languages  at  the  Indian  Insti- 
tute at  Oxford,  and  as  lecturer  in  linguistics 
at  the  School  of  Oriental  Studies  in 
London. 

In  1967  Firth  revisited  India  with  a 
Leverhulme  fellowship  and  worked  prin- 
cipally on  the  Gujarati  and  Telugu 
languages.  On  his  return  in  1938  he  became 
a  senior  lecturer  at  what  was  by  now  the 
School  of  Oriental  and  African  Studies 
and  a  full-time  member  of  its  staff  until 
his  retirement  in  1956.  In  1940  the  univer- 
sity gave  him  the  title  of  reader  in 
linguistics  and  Indian  phonetics,  and  in 
1941  he  succeeded  A.  Lloyd  James  [q.v.] 
as  head  of  the  department  of  phonetics 
and  linguistics  in  the  School.  In  1944  he 
was  appointed  to  the  newly  created  chair 
of  general  linguistics  in  the  university  of 
London,  the  first  such  chair  in  Great 
Britain. 

From  1941  to  1945  Firth's  depart- 
ment was  almost  wholly  occupied  with 
specialized  Service  courses  in  Japanese, 
tasks  in  which  he  found  great  satisfaction 
in  applying  his  linguistic  insight.  He  was 
appointed  O.B.E.  in  1946. 

A  member  of  the  Scarbrough  commis- 
sion on  the  study  of  Oriental,  Slavonic, 
East  European,  and  African  languages 
which  reported  in  1947,  Firth  played  a 
full  part  in  the  expansion  of  the  School 
in  the  post-war  years.  He  devoted  all  his 
energies  and  authority  to  the  development 
of  teaching  and  research  in  general 
linguistics,  both  in  the  university  of 
London  and  in  other  universities  in  this 
country  where  the  subject  had  been 
largely  unknown. 

In  1947  Firth  spent  three  months  as 
visiting  professor  at  the  university  in 
Alexandria,  and  in  1948  he  taught  at 
Michigan  in  the  Linguistic  Institute  of  the 
Linguistic  Society  of  America  (of  which 
he  was  a  member  from  that  year).  He 
was  active  in  attending  international  con- 
gresses on  his  subject  and  served  on 
linguistic  committees  of  the  Colonial 
Social  Science  Research  Council  and  of  the 
British  Council.  He  was  a  member  of  the 
Philological  Society  of  Great  Britain  from 
1933  and  in  1954-7  was  its  president,  an 
honour  he  greatly  appreciated. 

On  his  retirement  Firth  became  pro- 
fessor emeritus  and  an  honorary  fellow  of 
the  School  of  Oriental  and  African  Studies. 
With  few  hobbies  or  outside  interests,  he 
was  irked  by  retirement  and  despite  in- 
creasing ill  health  he  gladly  undertook 


further  appointments.  In  1957  he  visited 
Pakistan  to  advise  on  the  practical  appli- 
cations of  linguistics ;  and  in  1958  he  much 
enjoyed  two  terms  as  special  lecturer  in 
the  university  of  Edinburgh  where  he 
received  an  honorary  LL.D. 

Firth  had  abundant  energy  and  an 
eager,  original  mind,  almost  wholly  de- 
voted to  the  furtherance  of  his  subject, 
general  linguistics,  as  he  saw  it.  In  associa- 
tion with  him  one  felt  how  deeply  and 
personally  he  involved  himself  in  it.  This, 
combined  with  a  certain  irascibility  and 
Yorkshire  bluntness  (on  which  he  prided 
himself)  and  an  occasional  impatience  of 
criticism,  made  him  at  times  difficult  to 
work  with.  But  he  was  obviously  a  friendly 
and  loyal  person,  and  he  loved  good  com- 
pany, in  which  he  displayed  his  powers 
as  a  conversationalist,  being  wonderfully 
able  to  interest  all  comers  with  his  subject 
which  he  never  allowed  to  become  dry  or 
remote  from  daily  life,  however  abstruse 
his  theorizing. 

His  most  enduring  achievement  was  the 
establishment  of  general  linguistics  as  a 
recognized  subject  in  British  universities. 
In  the  subject  itself  he  is  most  remembered 
for  two  developments:  the  contextual 
theory  of  language  and  of  linguistic  analy- 
sis, and  prosodic  phonology.  In  his  teach- 
ing, despite  his  innovations  in  theory,  he 
insisted,  more  than  most  of  his  contem- 
poraries, on  the  recognition  of  the  roots 
that  the  subject  had  in  the  history  of  both 
European  and  Indian  scholarship. 

Firth  wrote  many  articles,  the  most  im- 
portant of  which  have  been  republished  as 
Papers  in  Linguistics  1934-1951  (1957). 
His  only  two  books.  Speech  (1930)  and  The 
Tongues  of  Men  (1937),  were  written  as 
deliberately  popular  works.  In  retirement 
he  planned  but  never  completed  a  book 
setting  out  his  theoretical  position  in  de- 
tail. A  summary  of  his  views  may  be 
found  in  his  'Synopsis  of  Linguistic 
Theory,  1930-55',  a  chapter  in  Studies  in 
Linguistic  Analysis  (Philological  Society, 
1957). 

Firth's  written  style  was  distinctive, 
readable,  and  compelling,  always  stimu- 
lating but  often  allusive  and  obscure  in 
places.  This  partly  accounts  for  his  failure 
to  reach  a  wider  scholarly  public  through 
his  writings.  He  was  best  understood  and 
most  influential  in  tutorials,  seminars,  and 
private  discussions.  It  was  a  source  of 
great  pleasure  to  him  to  see  his  theories 
and  methods  carried  forward  and  applied 
by  several  of  his  former  postgraduate 
pupils  from  different'  parts  of  the  world. 


359 


Firth,  J.  R. 


X).N.B.  1951-1060 


over  whom  he  exercised  a  strong  and 
abiding  influence. 

In  1915  Firth  married  Annie  Lister, 
daughter  of  WilUam  Clough,  treasurer  to 
Barrow-in-Furness  local  authority;  they 
had  one  son  and  one  daughter.  He  died  at 
Lindfield,  Sussex,  14  December  1960. 

[Language,  vol.  xxxvii,  No.  2, 1961 ;  Bulletin 
of  the  School  of  Oriental  and  African  Studies, 
vol.  xxiv,  part  2, 1961 ;  The  Times,  16  Decem- 
ber 1960;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  R.  H.  Robins. 

FIRTH,  Sir  WILLIAM  JOHN  (1881- 
1957),  industrialist,  was  born  in  London 
21  July  1881,  the  elder  son  of  Richard 
Firth,  sea  captain,  of  Forest  Gate,  Essex, 
by  his  wife,  Katie  Ayton.  He  began  work 
as  an  office  boy  earning  ten  shillings  a 
week  and  soon  became  a  salesman.  In  1901 
he  entered  the  tinplate  trade  as  an  agent 
and  merchant  in  London.  Firth  was 
closely  associated  with  Henry  FoUand, 
who  was  appointed  managing  director  of 
the  Grovesend  Steel  and  Tinplate  Com- 
pany in  1908,  and  by  1923  they  had  trans- 
formed this  small  and  not  very  prosperous 
firm  into  the  second-largest  tinplate  manu- 
facturing business  in  the  country. 

Although  highly  individualistic,  Firth 
was  an  advocate  of  central  selling  arrange- 
ments for  tinplate,  an  industry  of  many 
smaU  units  mainly  located  in  South  Wales. 
In  1919  he  proposed  the  setting  up  of 
a  central  selling  agency,  but  the  scheme 
made  no  progress  owing  to  the  non- 
co-operation  of  the  largest  tinplate 
manufacturer,  Richard  Thomas  &  Co., 
Grovesend' s  most  powerful  competitor. 
Firth  persisted  in  his  efforts  for  greater 
centralization  in  the  tinplate  business,  and 
in  1923  he  achieved  the  amalgamation  of 
Grovesend  and  Richard  Thomas,  himself 
becoming  a  member  of  the  Richard 
Thomas  board.  In  the  same  year  a  tinplate 
selling  agency  was  established.  His  energy 
and  enterprise  foimd  increasing  scope  at 
the  head  of  a  great  steel  company  now 
owning  6  steelworks,  159  tinplate  mills, 
and  28  sheet  mills.  Richard  Thomas's 
domination  of  the  tinplate  industry  was 
now  more  marked  than  ever;  they  con- 
trolled one-third  of  its  capacity.  Firth 
became  chairman  of  the  company  in  1931. 
He  was  knighted  in  1932. 

Firth  became  the  centre  of  a  major 
controversy  in  the  steel  industry  through 
his  determination  to  set  up  in  Britain  a 
continuous  wide  strip  mill,  of  the  kind 
already  in  successful  operation  for  some 
years  in  the  United  States,  to  meet  the 


growing  demand  for  steel  sheets,  in  par- 
ticular for  motor-cars.  He  received  little 
encouragement  for  this  project,  and  some 
opposition  from  Baldwins,  Ltd.,  the 
other  major  South  Wales  producer  of 
sheets  and  tinplates.  Firth  persisted,  at 
first  considering  the  possibility  of  building 
the  new  works  at  Redbourn,  Scunthorpe, 
near  the  source  of  East  Midland  ore,  but 
later  acquiring,  in  1935,  the  Ebbw  Vale 
Steel,  Iron  and  Coal  Company,  with  its 
site  in  an  area  of  severe  unemployment.  It 
has  been  argued  that  Ebbw  Vale  was,  on 
technical  and  economic  grounds,  a  less 
suitable  site  than  Redbourn  for  a  con- 
tinuous hot-strip  mill,  but  social  and 
political  considerations  helped,  though 
they  did  not  entirely  determine,  the  final 
decision  in  favour  of  Ebbw  Vale.  The 
difficulties  of  the  site,  rising  prices,  and 
delays  in  deliveries  of  plant  due  to  rearma- 
ment, led  in  1938  to  an  arrangement 
whereby  the  Bank  of  England  provided 
new  capital  in  return  for  the  setting  up 
of  a  special  controlling  committee.  This 
arrangement  was  always  irksome  to  Firth 
and  led  to  a  series  of  disputes,  ending  with 
his  retirement  from  the  chairmanship  of 
Richard  Thomas  in  1940.  By  that  time 
the  value  of  the  works  in  bringing  about 
the  industrial  and  social  revival  of  Ebbw 
Vale  had  been  demonstrated,  and  they  were 
beginning  to  play  their  vital  part  in  securing 
supplies  of  sheet  and  tinplate  in  the  war. 

Objecting  strongly  to  the  cessation  of 
his  control  over  the  works  which  his  vision 
and  determination  had  brought  into  exist- 
ence, and  still  holding  a  very  large  share 
in  Richard  Thomas  &  Co.,  Firth  frequently 
disagreed  with  the  policy  of  the  board 
after  his  retirement,  and  opposed  the 
amalgamation  with  Baldwins  which  took 
place  in  1945.  In  1947  he  went  to  South 
Africa,  where  he  died  at  his  home  at 
Kloof,  Natal,  11  November  1957. 

Firth  was  a  man  of  driving  energy,  with 
a  brilliant  and  very  quick-moving  mind. 
Although  he  had  a  somewhat  exaggerated 
reputation  of  being  a  difficult  man  to  deal 
with,  he  had  great  charm  and  was  much 
liked  by  his  workpeople.  In  Ebbw  Vale, 
which  he  brought  back  to  hope  and  pros- 
perity from  the  depths  of  poverty  and 
depression,  he  is  commemorated  by  the 
town  welfare  ground,  the  memorial  gates 
of  which  were  opened  in  1959  by  Aneurin 
Bevan  [q.v.],  whom  Firth  had  first  met  in 
the  early  days  of  the  project  for  the  strip 
mill. 

Firth  was  vice-president  of  the  British 
Iron  and  Steel  Federation,  chairman  of 


360 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Fleming,  A. 


the  International  Tinplate  Cartel  and  of 
the  Welsh  Plate  and  Sheet  Manufacturers' 
Association,  and  president  of  the  Royal 
Metal  Trades  Benevolent  Society. 

In  1909  Firth  married  Helena  Adelaide, 
eldest  daughter  of  Joseph  Garrett ;  they 
had  two  sons.  A  portrait  by  Howard 
Somerville  was  presented  to  Firth  in  1981 
and  is  in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[The  Times,  Manchester  Guardian,  and 
South  Wales  Evening  Post,  12  November 
1957  ;  South  Wales  Argus,  26  November  1957 ; 
Ingot  News  (newspaper  of  Richard  Thomas 
and  Baldwins,  Ltd.),  June  1959 ;  J.  C.  Carr  and 
W.  Taplin,  History  of  the  British  Steel  Industry, 
1962 ;  private  information.] 

Walter  Taplin. 


FLEMING,  Sir  ALEXANDER  (1881- 
1955),  bacteriologist,  was  born  6  August 
1881,  the  third  of  the  four  children  of 
Hugh  Fleming,  farmer  of  Lochfield  in 
Ayrshire,  by  his  second  marriage,  to 
Grace  Morton,  the  daughter  of  a  neigh- 
bouring farmer.  Hugh  Fleming,  whose 
ancestors  probably  came  from  the  Low 
Countries,  had  four  surviving  children  by 
his  first  marriage,  was  sixty  at  the  time  of 
his  second  marriage,  and  died  when  Alec 
was  seven.  Fleming  was  born  at  Lochfield, 
an  upland  sheep  farm  with  some  arable 
land,  near  Darvel.  He  had  his  early 
schooling  in  a  small  country  school  at 
Loudoun  Moor,  then  at  Darvel  (four  miles 
distant),  and  for  eighteen  months  at  Kil- 
marnock Academy.  At  fourteen  he  and  his 
two  brothers  of  the  second  marriage  went 
to  live  with  a  doctor  brother  in  London, 
where  he  continued  his  education  for  two 
years  at  the  Polytechnic  Institute  in 
Regent  Street.  The  next  four  years  were 
spent  as  a  clerk  in  a  shipping  office  in  the 
City,  but  on  the  advice  of  his  brother  and 
with  the  help  of  a  small  legacy  Fleming,  in 
1901,  became  a  student  at  St.  Mary's 
Hospital  medical  school,  where,  besides 
the  senior  entrance  scholarship  in  natural 
science,  he  won  virtually  every  class  prize 
and  scholarship  during  his  student  career. 
He  took  the  conjoint  qualification  in  1906 
and  the  M.B.,  B.S.  of  London  University 
in  1908  with  honours  in  five  subjects  and 
a  university  gold  medal.  A  year  later 
he  became  F.R.C.S.,  having  taken  the 
primary  examination  as  a  student.  As  Sir 
Zachary  Cope  has  said,  'Surgery  might 
have  gained  what  bacteriology  would  have 
lost.  Yet  surgery  gained  infinitely  more, 
as  things  fell  out.'  Fleming  had  a  very 
good  memory  and  learning  was  never 
a  burden  to  him.  But  he  was  no  book- 


worm ;  both  as  undergraduate  and  as  post- 
graduate he  was  an  active  and  proficient 
member  of  the  swimming,  shooting,  and 
golf  clubs  and  even  took  some  part  in  the 
students'  theatrical  entertainments. 

Immediately  after  quahfication  Flem- 
ing began  his  association  with  (Sir) 
Almroth  Wright  [q.v.]  as  an  assistant  bac- 
teriologist in  the  inoculation  department 
at  St.  Mary's  Hospital.  He  also  held  for 
some  years  the  post  of  pathologist  to  the 
London  Lock  Hospital.  He  was  appointed 
lecturer  in  bacteriology  in  St.  Mary's 
medical  school  in  1920  and  eight  years 
later  he  was  given  the  title  of  professor  of 
bacteriology  in  the  university  of  London. 
He  retired  from  the  chair  with  the  title 
emeritus  in  1948,  but  continued  until  the 
end  of  1954  as  principal  of  the  Wright- 
Fleming  Institute  of  Microbiology  in 
which  he  had  succeeded  Almroth  Wright 
in  1946. 

During  his  early  postgraduate  years  at 
St.  Mary's  medical  school  Fleming  was  to 
a  considerable  extent  the  apprentice  of 
Almroth  Wright,  whose  dominant  charac- 
ter and  fertile  brain  directed  the  general 
research  of  the  inoculation  department 
(later  the  Wright-Fleming  Institute)  for 
many  years.  But  from  the  beginning  of  his 
career  Fleming  showed  his  ingenuity  and 
originality  in  devising  simple  apparatus 
and  techniques  for  tackling  laboratory 
problems,  for  example,  in  his  work  on 
the  opsonic  index,  recently  introduced  by 
Wright  as  a  method  for  assessing  the 
effect  of  vaccine  therapy,  and  in  a  brilliant 
essay  on  'Acute  Bacterial  Infections', 
published  in  St.  Mary's  Hospital  Gazette, 
which  won  him  the  Cheadle  gold  medal. 
His  capacity  for  original  and  accurate 
observation  was  also  demonstrated  in 
1909  by  a  well- written  article  in  the 
Lancet  on  the  aetiology  and  treatment, 
with  autogenous  vaccines,  of  acne.  About 
this  time,  Ehrlich  had  introduced  salvar- 
san  for  the  treatment  of  syphilis  and 
Fleming  made  a  typical  contribution  by 
devising  a  simple  micro-method  for  the 
serological  diagnosis  of  this  disease. 

Soon  after  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914, 
Almroth  Wright  was  invited  by  the 
Medical  Research  Committee  to  establish 
a  research  laboratory  in  Boulogne  to  study 
the  treatment  of  war  wounds.  Fleming, 
who  had  joined  the  Royal  Army  Medical 
Corps  as  lieutenant  (and  later  became 
captain),  was  a  member  of  the  team  and 
although  much  of  the  work  done  during 
this  period  was  published  jointly  with 
Wright  and  others,  Fleming  himself  made 


361 


Fleming,  A. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


some  outstanding  contributions  to  know- 
ledge of  the  bacteriology  and  treatment  of 
septic  wounds.  In  a  paper  published  in  the 
Lancet  a  year  after  the  outbreak  of  war,  he 
noted  the  evil  significance  of  Streptococcus 
pyogenes,  which  was  also  demonstrated  in 
the  blood  of  about  a  quarter  of  the  more 
severe  cases.  He  believed  that  the  severity 
of  wound  infection  was  related  to  the  pre- 
sence of  necrotic  tissue  in  the  wound  and 
advocated  early  removal  of  this  dead 
tissue  at  the  same  time  as  another  Scots- 
man, Sir  Henry  Gray,  had  independently 
introduced  surgical  debridement  to  obtain 
healing  by  first  intention.  Later,  with 
A.  B.  Porteous,  Fleming  showed  that 
most  streptococcal  infections  occurred 
after  the  patient  was  admitted  to  the  base 
hospital,  thus  giving  forewarning  of  the 
dangers  of  hospital  cross-infection  with 
this  organism.  He  also  made  a  significant 
contribution  to  knowledge  of  gas  gan- 
grene, and  helped  Almroth  Wright  in  his 
advocacy  of  physiological  principles  rather 
than  the  use  of  antiseptics  for  the  treat- 
ment of  war  wounds  by  devising  numerous 
ingenious  experiments. 

In  1922  came  the  discovery  of  lyso- 
zyme,  an  anti-microbial  substance  pro- 
duced by  many  tissues  and  secretions  of 
the  body,  particularly  in  leucocytes,  tears, 
saliva,  mucus,  and  cartilage.  Fleming 
probalDly  regarded  lysozyme,  which  he 
later  called  the  body's  natural  antibiotic, 
as  his  most  important  discovery  and,  with 
V.  D.  Allison,  he  showed  its  wide  distribu- 
tion in  nature,  its  enzymic  quality  and 
remarkable  stability,  and  the  interest- 
ing phenomenon  of  the  development  of 
bacterial  resistance  to  its  action.  He  also 
developed  new  techniques  to  demonstrate 
the  diffusibility  of  lysozyme,  techniques 
later  to  prove  useful  in  his  studies  of 
penicillin. 

In  September  1928,  Fleming  made  the 
world-famous  observation  which  was  to 
lead  in  time  to  the  new  antibiotic  era.  He 
was  studying  colony  variation  in  the 
staphylococcus  in  relation  to  the  chapter 
he  was  writing  on  that  organism  for  the 
System  of  Bacteriology.  This  necessitated 
frequent  examination  of  plate  cultures  of 
the  organism  over  a  period  of  days  when 
'It  was  noticed  that  around  a  large  colony 
of  a  contaminating  mould  the  staphylococ- 
cus colonies  became  transparent  and  were 
obviously  undergoing  lysis.' 

As  he  himself  often  said,  it  was  a  chance 
observation  which  he  followed  up  as  a  bac- 
teriologist, and  his  previous  experience 
with  lysozyme  which  turned  his  alert  mind 


aside  from  study  of  the  staphylococcus 
instead  of  'casting  out  the  contaminated 
culture  with  appropriate  language'.  Flem- 
ing in  his  original  paper,  published  in  the 
British  Journal  of  Experimental  Pathology 
(June  1929),  described  most  of  the  proper- 
ties of  penicillin  which  became  universally 
known.  Some  of  the  conclusions  of  that 
historic  paper  are  worth  quoting  to 
illustrate  the  appreciation  of  the  poten- 
tialities of  this  new  'antiseptic'  by  a  man 
who  had  been  an  active  antagonist  of 
antiseptics  generally.  'The  active  agent  is 
readily  filterable  and  the  name  "penicillin" 
has  been  given  to  filtrates  of  broth  cul- 
tures of  the  mould.'  'The  action  is  very 
marked  on  the  pyogenic  cocci  and  the 
diphtheria  group  of  bacilli.'  'Penicillin  is 
non-toxic  to  animals  in  enormous  doses 
and  is  non-irritant.  It  does  not  interfere 
with  leucocytic  function  to  a  greater 
degree  than  does  ordinary  broth.'  'It  is 
suggested  that  it  may  be  an  effective  anti- 
septic for  application  to,  or  injection  into, 
areas  infected  with  penicillin-sensitive 
microbes.' 

Fleming  noted  particularly,  as  advan- 
tages over  the  known  antiseptics,  its 
diffusibility,  its  activity  in  dilutions  up 
to  1  in  1,000  against  the  pyogenic  cocci, 
and  its  complete  absence  of  toxicity  on 
phagocytes.  He  mentioned  that  'Experi- 
ments in  connection  with  its  value  in  the 
treatment  of  pyogenic  infections  are  in 
progress'  and  a  few  years  later  he  noted 
that  penicillin  'has  been  used  in  a  number 
of  indolent  septic  wounds  and  has  cer- 
tainly appeared  to  be  superior  to  dressings 
containing  potent  chemicals'. 

Fleming  undoubtedly  had  some  ap- 
preciation of  the  potentiahty  of  penicillin 
as  a  systemic  chemotherapeutic  substance 
before  the  Oxford  team  demonstrated  it, 
for  he  suggested  its  injection  into  infected 
areas  and  predicted  that  it  could  be  used 
in  the  treatment  of  venereal  diseases. 
Some  attempt  was  made  to  concentrate 
penicillin,  but  as  Fleming  said  in  his  Nobel 
lecture,  'We  are  bacteriologists — not 
chemists — and  our  relatively  simple  pro- 
cedures were  unavailing.'  Besides,  as  Sir 
Henry  Dale  has  written,  'neither  the  time 
when  the  discovery  was  made  nor,  perhaps, 
the  scientific  atmosphere  of  the  laboratory 
in  which  he  worked,  was  propitious  to 
such  further  enterprise  as  its  development 
would  have  needed'. 

Meanwhile  Fleming  turned  his  atten- 
tion to  the  new  sulphonamides  and  having 
shown  that  these  drugs  were  bacterio- 
static   and    not    bactericidal    and    were 


362 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Fleming,  A. 


inhibited  by  large  numbers  of  living  or 
dead  bacteria,  he  believed,  prophetically, 
that  they  would  not  be  effective  in  the 
local  treatment  of  septic  wounds.  Here 
again  and  later  when  penicillin  became 
available  for  clinical  use,  he  demonstrated 
his  technical  skill  and  ingenuity  in  de- 
vising micro-methods  for  measuring  the 
concentration  of  these  drugs  in  the 
patients'  blood.  Indeed,  he  was  generally 
acclaimed  as  the  most  skilled  technician 
among  Almroth  Wright's  numerous  col- 
leagues and  followers.  He  was  his  own 
technician  to  the  end  and  it  was  always 
a  joy  to  watch  his  deft  and  neat  handling 
of  glass  slide  and  capillary  pipette.  But 
technical  inventiveness  is  worth  much 
more  to  the  research  worker  than  techni- 
cal skill  and  Fleming  was  equally  well 
endowed  with  both.  He  was  keenly 
interested  in  staining  methods  and  when 
India  ink  became  unavailable  after  1918 
it  was  Fleming  who  introduced  nigrosin  as 
a  negative  method  of  staining  and  showed 
how  it  could  be  used  for  demonstrating 
spores  and  capsules.  He  was  probably  the 
first  to  grow  bacteria  and  moulds  on  paper 
or  cellophane  placed  on  top  of  nutrient 
agar  and  he  demonstrated  the  suitability 
of  paper  for  bringing  out  the  pigment  of 
chromogenic  bacteria.  He  left  an  interest- 
ing collection  of  'coloured  pictures'  com- 
posed entirely  of- bacterial  cultures  which 
he  was  fond  of  showing  to  royalty  and 
other  visitors  to  the  Institute. 

The  catalogue  of  Fleming's  published 
work  leaves  little  room  for  doubt  that 
he  had  to  an  unusual  degree  the  almost 
intuitive  faculty  for  original  observation 
coupled  with  a  high  degree  of  technical 
inventiveness  and  skill.  He  had  in  fact 
most  of  the  qualities  which  make  a  great 
scientist:  an  innate  curiosity  and  per- 
ceptiveness  regarding  natural  phenomena, 
insight  into  the  heart  of  a  problem, 
technical  ingenuity,  persistence  in  seeing 
the  job  through,  and  that  physical  and 
mental  toughness  which  is  essential  to 
the  top-class  investigator.  He  was  a 
natural  biologist,  keenly  interested  in  and 
very  knowledgeable  about  birds,  flowers, 
and  trees.  He  appreciated  the  healthy 
atmosphere  of  his  early  upbringing  in  the 
country :  tramping  the  upland  moors  and 
learning  the  shorter  catechism,  he  once 
told  a  reporter,  had  been  powerful  in- 
fluences in  shaping  his  life. 

Physically,  Fleming  was  short  and 
stockily  built  with  powerful  square 
shoulders  and  a  deep  chest,  a  fresh  com- 
plexioned  face  with  a  fine  broad  forehead, 


intensely  light-blue  expressive  eyes  and 
for  many  years  a  good  crop  of  snowy 
white  hair.  He  had  great  powers  of  physi- 
cal endurance  and  in  the  days  when 
burning  the  midnight  oil  was  a  regular 
performance  in  the  inoculation  depart- 
ment, Fleming  was  always  the  first  to 
appear,  fresh  and  fit,  the  following  morn- 
ing. Later  he  seemed  to  stand  up  astonish- 
ingly well  to  the  heavy  journey ings  and 
junketings  he  had  to  undergo,  and  he  kept 
his  freshness  and  jaunty  step  to  the  end. 
He  was  sensitive  and  sympathetic,  en- 
joyed the  simple  things  in  life,  and  was 
not  impressed  with  the  grandiose.  A  col- 
lection of  schoolchildren's  signatures  or 
a  letter  from  a  child  or  from  some  poor 
person  who  had  benefited  from  penicillin 
gave  him  as  much  joy  as  the  gold  medals 
and  honorary  degrees.  But,  like  most 
Scots,  he  had  a  'guid  conceit'  of  himself 
and  readily  conmianded  respect  from  his 
colleagues  inside,  and  outside  the  Institute. 
He  was  essentially  a  humble,  simple  man 
who  to  the  end  remained  remarkably 
unspoiled  and  unchanged  despite  all 
the  honours  which  were  showered  upon 
him. 

Fleming  had  a  natural  combativeness 
and  urge  to  win  which  was  very  apparent 
in  the  games  he  played.  This  determina- 
tion to  succeed  was  evident  in  his  tackling 
of  laboratory  problems  when  he  took 
delight  in  using  his  technical  skill  and 
inventiveness  to  overcome  difficulties.  On 
the  other  hand,  Fleming  never  took  kindly 
to  administrative  responsibility  and  shied 
away  from  problems,  preferring  to  'wait 
and  see'  rather  than  take  immediate 
decisions.  He  had  tremendous  constancy 
and  loyalty — ^to  his  friends  and  col- 
leagues, to  the  inoculation  department,  to 
St.  Mary's  and  to  its  staff  and  students, 
and  this  quality  of  steadfastness  inspired 
the  confidence  of  his  companions  which 
was  never  misplaced.  He  had  a  quiet 
unruffled  wisdom  which  made  him  a 
shrewd  judge  of  men,  but  tolerant  of 
weaknesses  in  his  friends  and  colleagues. 
He  was  not  heard  to  speak  ill  of  anyone 
although  he  had  decided  likes  and  dislikes. 
He  was  not  an  easy  man  to  know  well, 
partly  because  of  his  natural  reluctance  to 
talk  and  express  his  feelings.  He  was 
not  a  conversationalist  and  awkward 
silences  were  sometimes  broken  by  awk- 
ward remarks:  as  one  visitor  put  it — 
talking  with  him  was  Uke  playing  tennis 
with  a  man  who,  whenever  you  knocked 
the  ball  over  to  his  side,  put  it  in  his 
pocket.     But     this     was     shyness,     not 


363 


Fleming,  A. 


D.N.B.  1951>1960 


intentional  rudeness,  for  he  liked  company 
and  had  many  friends  in  various  walks  of 
life  before  he  became  famous.  His  associa- 
tion with  the  Chelsea  Arts  Club  and  some 
of  its  members  gave  him  particular  satis- 
faction and  an  outlet  for  his  artistic  sense, 
for  he  enjoyed  beauty  wherever  he  saw  it. 

Innumerable  honours  were  conferred 
upon  Fleming  in  the  last  ten  years  of  his 
life.  He  was  knighted  in  1944,  and  was 
awarded  the  Nobel  prize  for  medicine, 
jointly  with  Sir  Howard  (later  Lord) 
Florey  and  (Sir)  E.  B.  Chain,  in  1945.  He 
became  a  fellow  of  the  Royal  Society  in 
1943,  of  the  Royal  College  of  Physicians  of 
London  in  1944,  of  the  Royal  College  of 
Physicians  of  Edinburgh  in  1946,  and  an 
honorary  fellow  of  the  Royal  Society  of 
Edinburgh  in  1947.  Doctorates  of  medi- 
cine, science,  and  law  were  conferred  on 
him  by  many  British,  European,  and 
American  universities.  He  was  commander 
of  the  Legion  of  Honour  in  France,  mem- 
ber of  the  Pontifical  Academy  of  Sciences, 
fellow  of  important  societies  and  academies 
in  many  countries,  and  the  recipient  of 
many  medals  and  honorary  lectureships. 
He  was  elected  rector  of  the  university  of 
Edinburgh  (1951-4),  was  a  convocation 
member  of  the  senate  of  the  university  of 
London  from  1950,  a  member  of  the 
Medical  Research  Council  (1945-9),  and 
president  of  the  Society  for  General  Micro- 
biology (1945-7).  Besides  becoming  an 
honorary  citizen  of  numerous  cities  in 
Europe,  he  was  a  freeman  of  the  burgh  of 
Darvel  where  he  was  born,  of  Chelsea 
where  he  lived,  and  of  Paddington  where 
his  work  was  done. 

There  are  several  portraits  of  Fleming, 
of  which  perhaps  the  best  known  are  those 
by  T.  C.  Dugdale  in  the  library  of  the 
Wright-Fleming  Institute  and  by  Anna 
Zinkeisen  in  the  board-room  of  St.  Mary's 
Hospital.  The  Imperial  War  Museum  has 
one  by  Ethel  Gabain.  There  is  also  a  num- 
ber of  busts — those  by  E.  R.  Bevan  and 
E.  J.  Clack  are  in  the  Wright-Fleming 
Institute,  another  by  E.  R.  Bevan  stands 
in  the  square  of  Darvel,  Ayrshire,  and  one 
in  bronze  by  F.  Kovacs  is  in  the  Chelsea 
Town  Hall.  There  is  a  memorial  stone  at 
Lochfleld  Farm,  a  plaque  in  the  crypt  of 
St.  Paul's  Cathedral  and  there  are  several 
monuments  abroad.  The  Ministry  of 
Health  building  at  the  Elephant  and 
Castle  is  called  Alexander  Fleming  House, 
and  streets  and  squares  in  several  countries 
have  been  named  after  him. 

He  died  suddenly  from  a  heart  attack  at 
his  home,  in  Chelsea,  London,  11  March 


1955.  He  was  buried  in  St.  Paul's  Cathe- 
dral. Fleming  was  twice  married :  first,  in 
1915,  to  Sarah  (Sareen)  Marion,  daughter 
of  a  farmer,  Bernard  McElroy,  county 
Mayo,  Ireland,  and  herself  a  trained 
nurse,  who  died  in  1949 ;  secondly,  in  1953, 
to  Amalia  Voureka  Coutsouris,  daughter 
of  a  Greek  doctor,  and  herself  a  medically 
qualified  bacteriologist.  There  was  one 
son  of  the  first  marriage,  who  qualified  in 
medicine  and  entered  general  practice. 

[L.  Colebrook  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ii,  1956; 
Robert  Cruickshank  in  Journal  of  Pathology 
and  Bacteriology,  vol.  Ixxii,  No.  2,  October 
1956;  British  Medical  Journal,  19  and  26 
March  1955 ;  Andr^  Maurois,  The  Life  of  Sir 
Alexander  Fleming,  1959;  personal  know- 
ledge.] R.  Cruickshank. 

FLEMING,  Sm  ARTHUR  PERCY 
MORRIS  (1881-1960),  engineer,  was  born 
16  January  1881  in  Newport,  Isle  of  Wight, 
the  youngest  of  the  three  sons  of  Frank 
Fleming  and  his  wife,  Fanny  Morris,  a 
farming  family  of  that  locality.  On  com- 
pletion of  his  education  at  the  Portland 
House  Academy,  Newport,  Fleming  en- 
tered the  Finsbury  Technical  College, 
London,  as  a  student  of  electrical  engineer- 
ing. Following  short  periods  with  the 
London  Electric  Supply  Corporation  and 
a  firm  of  electrical  instrument  manufac- 
turers, Elliott  Brothers,  he  was  selected 
in  1900  by  the  newly  established  British 
Westinghouse  Company  (later  Metro- 
politan-Vickers)  as  one  of  the  'holy  forty' 
to  undergo  a  course  of  training  with  the 
American  firm  at  its  East  Pittsburgh 
works.  When  he  arrived  at  Manchester 
in  1902  he  was  engaged  as  a  specialist 
on  electrical  insulation  in  the  transformer 
department  of  which  he  soon  became  chief 
engineer  and,  in  1913,  superintendent. 

Into  his  department  Fleming  soon  began 
to  introduce  arrangements  for  the  further 
education  and  systematic  training  of  its 
schoolboy  recruits.  By  1908  he  had  ex- 
tended these  arrangements  throughout 
the  company;  in  1914  he  established  a 
trade  apprentice  school;  and  in  1917  he 
became  manager  of  the  company's  educa- 
tion department.  He  used  often  to  say 
that  the  most  important  raw  material  of 
industry  is  its  young  people,  and  he  took 
steps  to  ensure  that  his  own  young  people, 
from  the  embryo  craftsman  to  the  univer- 
sity graduate,  were  recognized  and  treated 
as  such.  They  came  not  only  from  the 
schools  and  universities  of  Britain  but 
from  all  over  the  world,  for  in  the  sphere 


864 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Fletcher,  B.  F. 


of  industrial  training  the  name  of  Fleming 
and  Metropolitan- Vickers  became  known 
internationally.  Fleming's  influence  and 
inspiration  penetrated  widely  into  the 
electrical  industry  as  a  whole  and  the 
benefits  have  been  profound. 

His  views  on  engineering  education 
were  matched  by  his  realization  of  the 
need  for  research  within  industry, 
especially  research  not  bounded  by  the 
short-term  problems  of  existing  products. 
His  plans  were  delayed  by  the  war  of 
1914-18  in  which  he  and  a  few  colleagues 
made  important  contributions  to  sub- 
marine detection,  for  which  he  was  ap- 
pointed C.B.E.  in  1920.  In  that  year  the 
first  buildings  of  his  research  department 
began  to  appear,  and  it  was  typical  of  his 
foresight  and  vigour  that  he  arranged  for 
these  buildings  to  be  used  as  the  site  for 
the  transmitter  and  studios  of  the  British 
Broadcasting  Company's  initial  Manches- 
ter station — 2  ZY — ^which  began  to  broad- 
cast within  a  day  of  the  opening  of  2  LO  in 
London.  By  1929  the  department  con- 
tained one  of  the  largest  high  voltage 
laboratories  in  the  world,  and  there  were 
attracted  to  it  a  succession  of  men  of 
ability  who  made  many  notable  contribu- 
tions to  both  pure  and  applied  science. 
Particularly  important  was  the  develop- 
ment of  demountable  high-power  ther- 
mionic valves  which  helped  to  make 
possible  the  installation  just  prior  to  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1939  of  the  first  radar 
stations.  In  1931  Fleming  became  the 
company's  director  of  research  and  educa- 
tion and  so  continued  vmtil  his  retirement 
in  1954. 

Fleming's  achievement  was  due  to  an 
exceptional  foresight,  single-minded  in- 
dustry and  tenacity,  an  extremely  good 
memory,  unlimited  enthusiasm  and 
vitality,  and  an  ability  to  inspire  and 
stimulate  others.  He  was  big  enough  to 
surround  himself  with  men  intellectually, 
perhaps,  more  gifted  than  himself,  and 
to  secure  their  willing  co-operation  and 
loyalty.  He  had  the  strength  to  ignore 
opposition  as  if  it  did  not  exist  and  to 
persevere  until  eventually,  on  many 
things,  others  came  to  think  his  way.  He 
liked  to  quote  with  approval  Drake's 
reflection  that  'There  must  be  a  beginning 
of  any  great  matter,  but  the  continuing 
unto  the  end  until  it  be  thoroughly  finished 
yields  the  true  glory.' 

Fleming's  outside  activities  were  mani- 
fold. He  was  a  member  of  the  council  of 
the  university  of  Manchester,  of  the 
governing  body  of  the  Imperial  College  of 


Science  and  Technology,  of  the  delegacy 
of  the  City  and  Guilds  of  London  Insti- 
tute, of  the  Ministry  of  Education  com- 
mittee on  the  training  of  teachers  and 
youth  leaders,  and  of  the  War  Cabinet 
engineering  advisory  committee;  chair- 
man of  the  electrical  engineering  com- 
mittee of  the  central  register  of  the 
Ministry  of  Labour,  of  the  Athlone  Fellow- 
ship committee,  and  of  the  Federation 
of  British  Industries  overseas  scholarships 
committee;  and  president  of  both  the 
education  (1939)  and  engineering  (1949) 
sections  of  the  British  Association,  and  of 
the  British  Association  for  Commercial 
and  Industrial  Education.  He  also  played 
an  important  part  in  the  establishment  of 
the  Department  of  Scientific  and  Indus- 
trial Research  and  of  the  Electrical 
Research  Association. 

Within  all  these  interests,  the  Institu- 
tion of  Electrical  Engineers  occupied  a 
place  of  special  importance;  he  became 
a  member  of  its  council  (1932),  a  vice- 
president  (1935),  president  (1938),  an 
honorary  member  (1952),  and  was  awarded 
the  Faraday  medal  (1941).  He  received 
honorary  degrees  from  Liverpool  and 
Manchester  and  was  awarded  the  Hawks- 
ley  medal  of  the  Institution  of  Mechanical 
Engineers.  He  was  knighted  in  1945. 

Throughout  his  career  Fleming  lectured 
frequently,  both  at  home  and  abroad, 
about  industrial  research  and  training, 
and  wrote  many  papers,  the  value  of  which 
lay  in  the  widespread  practices  they  did 
so  much  to  stimulate.  He  was  joint- 
author  of  several  books:  The  Insulation 
and  Design  of  Electrical  Windings  (with 
R.  Johnson,  1913) ;  Engineering  as  a  Pro- 
fession (with  R.  W.  Bailey,  1913);  The 
Principles  of  Apprentice  Training  (with 
J.  G.  Pearce,  1916);  An  Introduction  to 
the  Principles  of  Industrial  Administration 
(with  H.  J.  Brocklehurst,  1922) ;  Research 
in  Industry  (with  J.  G.  Pearce,  1922) ;  and 
A  History  of  Engineering  (with  H.  J4 
Brocklehurst,  1925).  ; 

In  1904  Fleming  married  Rose  Mary 
(died  1948),  daughter  of  William  Ash, 
merchant,  of  Newport ;  they  had  two  sons 
and  one  daughter.  He  died  at  his  home  at 
Bonchurch,  Isle  of  Wight,  14  September 
1960. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Jackson  of  Burnley. 

FLETCHER,  Sm  BANISTER  FLIGHT 
(1866-1953),  architect  and  architectm-al 
historian,  was  born  in  Bloomsbury,  Lon- 
don, 15  February  1866,  the  eldest  son  of 


865 


Fletcher,  B.  F. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


the  architect  Banister  Fletcher  [q.v.].  He 
was  educated  at  the  Norfolk  County 
School,  King's  College  and  University 
College,  London,  and  entered  his  father's 
office  in  1884,  studying  architecture  also 
at  the  Royal  Academy  Schools  and  the 
Architectural  Association.  He  became  an 
associate  of  the  Royal  Institute  of  British 
Architects  in  1889  and  a  fellow  in  1904. 
He  was  made  a  partner  in  his  father's  firm 
in  1889  and  succeeded  with  his  brother  to 
the  practice  in  1899.  In  earlier  life  he  may 
be  regarded  as  one  of  the  moderately 
original  men  of  the  'early  modern'  move- 
ment ;  though  little  of  his  work  was  impor- 
tant, it  did  not  lack  character.  It  included 
buildings  such  as  banks  (as  at  Hythe) ; 
a  church  (at  Stratford,  E.) ;  flats  (in  Har- 
ley  and  Wimpole  streets) ;  King's  College 
School,  Wimbledon  Common  (1899); 
shops,  memorials,  and  houses ;  and  an  old 
building  extended  was  Morden  College, 
Blackheath  (1933).  The  firm  continued 
under  the  style  of  Banister  Fletcher  & 
Sons  after  the  death  in  1916  of  his  brother 
H.  Phillips  Fletcher.  Two  large  works 
done  in  later  years  were  the  Roan  School, 
Greenwich  (with  Percy  B.  Dannatt,  c. 
1926-8)  and  the  Gillette  factory,  Osterley 
(c.  1936).  Fletcher  was  for  many  years 
surveyor  to  the  Worshipful  Company  of 
Carpenters,  its  master  in  1936,  and  direc- 
tor of  its  Building  Crafts  Training  School, 
St.  Marylebone. 

Fletcher  was  much  better  known,  how- 
ever, as  the  author  (originally  jointly  with 
his  father,  1896)  of  A  History  of  Architec- 
ture on  the  Comparative  Method;  his  wide 
travels  provided  material  and  his  know- 
ledge of  London  in  particular  was  exten- 
sive. A  definitive  edition  was  the  sixth 
(1921)  with  the  text  largely  rewritten  by 
Fletcher  and  his  first  wife  and  new  plates 
brilliantly  drawn  by  George  G.  Woodward 
and  others;  subsequently  only  minor 
revisions  and  enlargements  were  made 
until  a  major  revision,  within  the  old 
framework,  was  carried  out  by  R.  A. 
Cordingley  for  the  seventeenth  edition  in 
1961.  The  book  was  translated  into  several 
languages.  An  early  book  was  the  criti- 
cized Andrea  Palladio  (1902)  and  he  wrote 
several  slighter  studies.  With  his  brother 
he  produced  two  handbooks :  Architectural 
Hygiene^  or  Sanitary  Science  as  Applied  to 
Building  (1899)  and  Carpentry  and  Joinery 
(1898)  illustrated  by  his  charming  sketches. 
Other  such  sketches,  in  pencil  and  ink, 
are  reproduced  in  the  publication  on  his 
Architectural  Work  (1934). 

Fletcher  was  president  of  the  Royal 


Institute  of  British  Architects  (1929-31) 
and  bore  part  of  the  cost  of  its  library 
catalogue  (2  vols.,  1937-8).  As  a  lecturer 
in  his  youth  at  King's  College,  following  his 
father,  and  later  on  London  University 
extension  courses  (1901-38),  latterly  given 
at  the  Central  School  of  Arts  and  Crafts, 
he  did  much  to  make  the  subject  vivid 
and  stimulating.  Fletcher  was  called  to 
the  bar  by  the  Inner  Temple  in  1908  and 
conducted  arbitrations  and  advised  on 
London  Building  Act  disputes.  He  was  for 
many  years  (1907-53)  a  common  coun- 
cillor of  the  City  of  London  and  the  chair- 
man at  different  times  of  the  schools  and 
library  committees.  In  1918-19  he  was 
senior  sheriff,  receiving  a  knighthood  in 
1919  and  various  foreign  honours. 

Fletcher  was  a  man  of  great  intellectual 
ability  in  certain  fields,  with  a  capacity 
for  hard  work  and  organizing  acumen,  but 
he  was  happier  in  his  more  historical 
activities.  An  autocrat,  and  patronizing 
even  to  his  peers,  he  expected  much  of 
his  staff  and  scenes  were  common,  but 
he  had,  beneath,  a  kindly  concern  for 
their  physical  welfare.  The  stress  of  the 
shrievalty  campaign  and  the  sheriff's 
duties  seem  to  have  affected  his  nerve  and 
his  impending  encounters  became  a  strain. 
In  manner  and  appearance  he  was  'some- 
times genial,  sometimes  austere,  but 
always  dignified'.  A  portrait  by  Glyn 
Philpot  for  his  presidency  hangs  in  the 
R.I.B.A.  library.  He  bequeathed  much  of 
his  property  (slides,  lecture  diagrams,  and 
so  on)  and  money  to  the  university  of 
London  and  the  R.I.B.A.  library  with 
the  stipulation  that  the  latter  should  be 
named  the  'Sir  Banister  Fletcher  Library'. 

Fletcher  married  in  1914  Alice  Maud 
Mary  (died  1932),  daughter  of  Edward 
Bretherton  and  widow  of  Sir  John 
Bamford-Slack ;  secondly,  in  1933,  Mrs. 
Howard  Hazell  (died  1949).  There  were  no 
children.  He  died  in  London  17  August 
1953. 

[Who's  Who  in  Architecture,  1926;  J.  A. 
Gotch,  Growth  and  Work  of  the  Royal  Institute 
of  British  Architects,  1934;  W.  Hanneford- 
Smith,  The  Architectural  Wm-k  of  Sir  Banister 
Fletcher,  1934,  2nd  ed.  1937 ;  Journal  of  the 
Royal  Institute  of  British  Architects,  Septem- 
ber 1953;  Builder,  28  August  1953;  M.  S. 
Briggs,  first  Sir  Banister  Fletcher  memorial 
lecture  in  Journal  of  the  London  Society, 
May  1954 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

H.  V.  MOLESWORTH  ROBERTS. 

FLETCHER,  Sir  FRANK  (1870-1954), 
headmaster,  was  born  3  May  1870  at 
Atherton,  near  Manchester,  the  eldest  son 


366 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Foot 


of  Ralph  Fletcher  and  his  wife,  Fanny 
Smith.  The  family  were  colliery  owners 
known  for  the  care  of  their  employees 
and  among  the  first  to  install  life-saving 
apparatus  and  pit-head  baths.  Frank  was 
brought  up  to  a  simplicity  of  life  and  a 
sense  of  responsibility.  At  twelve  he  won 
a  scholarship  at  Rossall  School,  then  under 
H.  A.  James  and  afterwards  C.  C.  Tan- 
cock.  From  Rossall  (Sir)  Henry  Stuart- 
Jones  and  R.  W.  Lee  [qq.v.]  won 
scholarships  at  Balliol  and  Fletcher  fol- 
lowed them  in  1889.  He  became  the  pupil 
of  W.  R.  Hardie  [q.v.]  and  won  first 
classes  in  classical  moderations  (1891)  and 
liter ae  humaniores  (1893)  as  well  as  the 
Craven  (1890),  Ireland  (1891),  and  Derby 
(1894)  scholarships.  In  his  last  year  he 
played  in  the  university  hockey  team 
against  Cambridge ;  trained  on  the  sands 
of  Rossall  as  an  individualist  he  twice  took 
the  ball  down  the  wing  and  scored  a  goal. 
He  also  acquired  a  passion  for  moun- 
taineering, first  in  the  Engadine  and  later 
in  the  southern  Alps,  becoming  a  member 
of  the  Alpine  Club. 

In  Fletcher's  day  the  classics  were 
supreme  in  Oxford  and  with  his  record  he 
might  well  have  chosen  to  become  a  don. 
His  interest  lay,  however,  in  the  teaching 
of  boys  and  after  two  terms  tutoring  at 
Balliol  he  accepted  (1894)  an  offer  from 
John  Percival  [q.v.]  of  a  mastership  at 
Rugby.  There  he  taught  the  classical 
sixth,  among  whom  were  R.  H.  Tawney 
and  later  William  Temple  [q.v.],  and  also 
had  the  invaluable  experience  of  teaching 
a  low  form. 

Fletcher  was  ambitious  and  stood  for 
several  headmasterships  before  he  was 
elected  in  1903  to  be  master  of  Marl- 
borough, the  first  lay  headmaster  of  a 
great  public  school.  He  loved  the  place, 
his  life,  and  his  teaching.  Plato,  St.  Paul, 
and  Browning  were  his  favourite  subjects. 
He  gained  confidence  in  his  capacity  to 
rule.  There  were  difficulties  at  first  and  no 
doubt  mistakes ;  he  was  sometimes  hasty, 
and  rough  places  were  not  infrequently 
made  plain  by  his  wife's  tact.  But  there 
was  never  ill  will  in  his  actions  and  the 
justice  of  his  intentions  was  always  after- 
wards recognized. 

In  1911  a  call  came  to  him  from  Charter- 
house which  he  felt  bound  to  accept.  It 
did  not  take  him  long  to  realize  the  prob- 
lems or  to  start  to  deal  with  them  and  in 
consequence  he  was  not  at  first  popular. 
But  masters  and  boys  soon  came  to  under- 
stand his  aims  and  to  recognize  his  funda- 
mental kindliness  and  long  before  the  end 


of  his  reign  he  was  revered  and  loved.  His 
chief  visible  contribution  to  Charterhouse 
was  the  war  memorial  chapel  which  added 
to  the  dignity  of  the  whole  life  of  the 
school.  It  was  less  tangible  things  which  he 
most  constantly  gave.  During  his  head- 
mastership  the  academic  successes  and  the 
general  vigour  of  the  school  life  were 
greatly  increased.  He  chose  his  assistant 
masters  wisely  and  let  them  develop  on 
their  own  lines.  He  was  himself  a  man  of 
high  ideals  which  he  felt  that  he  could 
reach.  The  result  was  a  kind  of  unconscious 
conceit  which  deceived  those  who  did  not 
know  him  well.  Beneath  it  was  a  true 
humility  arising  from  a  naturally  religious 
life  which  showed  itself  in  his  sermons  and 
speeches. 

Fletcher  took  a  keen  interest  in  the  con- 
cerns of  the  public  schools  in  general  and 
was  many  times  chairman  of  the  Head- 
masters' Conference.  In  1924  he  was  made 
an  honorary  fellow  of  Balliol ;  and  in  1937 
he  was  knighted.  In  1935  he  retired  and 
went  to  live  near  Dartmouth  where  he  did 
great  service  on  the  Devonshire  education 
committee  and  on  the  governing  bodies  of 
several  schools.  Returning  to  his  classical 
interests  he  published  an  edition  of  the 
sixth  book  of  the  Aeneid  (1941)  and  Notes 
to  the  Agamemnon  of  Aeschylus  (1949), 
both  admirable  examples  of  the  best 
sixth-form  classical  teaching.  He  was 
president  of  the  Classical  Association  in 
1946.  In  1948  the  Fletchers  moved  to 
Eashing  near  Godalming  where  they  could 
revisit  Charterhouse  and  their  many 
friends.  Fletcher  died  in  a  nursing-home 
at  Hindhead  17  November  1954. 

In  1902  he  married  Dorothy  (died  1958), 
daughter  of  William  Pope,  of  Crediton; 
there  were  no  children. 

A  bust  of' Fletcher  by  Sir  Jacob  Epstein 
is  at  Charterhouse  and  a  copy  at  Rossall 
School.  Marlborough  College  has  a  portrait 
by  George  Harcourt. 

[Sir  Frank  Fletcher,  After  Many  Days, 
1937;  The  Times,  18  November  1954;  The 
Carthusian,  March  1955 ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]  Cyril  Bailey. 

FOOT,  ISAAC  (1880-1960),  politician, 
was  born  in  Plymouth  23  February  1880, 
the  fourth  son  of  Isaac  Foot,  builder  and 
undertaker,  by  his  wife,  Eliza  Ryder.  He 
was  educated  at  the  Plymouth  Public 
School  (where,  he  recorded,  rather  reluc- 
tantly he  paid  twopence  a  week  for  the 
privilege)  and  then  at  the  Hoe  Grammar 
School.  Articled  for  five  years  to  a  Ply- 
mouth solicitor,  Frederick  Skardon,   he 


867 


Foot 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


was  admitted  as  a  solicitor  in  1902  and 
shortly  afterwards  founded  the  enduring 
legal  partnership  of  Foot  and  Bowden. 

Foot  entered  politics  as,  and  always 
remained,  a  Liberal.  After  two  unsuccess- 
ful contests  in  ward  elections  in  Plymouth 
he  became  a  Liberal  councillor  for  the 
Greenbank  ward  in  1907  and  remained 
a  member  of  the  city  council  for  some 
twenty  years.  The  focus  of  his  ambitions 
and  the  field  of  his  talents  was,  however, 
to  be  the  House  of  Commons.  Remarkable 
about  his  Commons  career  was  that  it  was 
all  over  in  eight  years,  but  in  that  short 
time  he  had  won  and  preserved  a  national 
fame;  one  of  the  minor  tragedies  of 
English  history  between  the  wars  was  that 
Isaac  Foot  was  not,  except  for  these  few 
years,  in  the  Commons  to  shape  it. 

He  fought  the  Totnes  division  in 
January  1910  and  was  beaten  by  the 
Conservative  candidate,  F.  B.  Mildmay 
(later  Lord  Mildmay  of  Flete).  In  Decem- 
ber 1910  he  fought  the  South-East  Corn- 
wall (Bodmin)  division  and  was  defeated 
by  only  41  votes  by  Sir  Reginald  Pole 
Carew.  In  1919  in  the  Sutton  division  of 
Plymouth  he  was  beaten  by  Lady  Astor — 
with  whom  thereafter  he  had  a  lifetime's 
fast  friendship.  He  was  first  elected  in 
1922  for  the  Bodmin  division  at  a  by- 
election,  was  returned  again  in  1922  and 
1923,  but  defeated  in  1924  when  the 
Labour  Government  fell.  After  a  period  in 
the  wilderness  he  returned  as  member  for 
the  same  division  in  1929,  was  returned 
unopposed  in  the  national  crisis  election 
of  1931,  and  defeated  in  1935  when  the 
division  again  returned  a  Conservative. 
He  was  subsequently  defeated  at  St.  Ives 
(1937)  and  Tavistock  (1945). 

On  the  formation  of  the  'national' 
Government  in  1931,  Foot  was  appointed 
parliamentary  secretary  for  mines,  where 
he  made  a  great  impression.  But  when  he 
was  faced  with  the  Government's  protec- 
tion measures  brought  about  by  the 
Ottawa  conference  of  1932  he  resigned 
instantly.  The  decision  cost  him  the  whole 
of  his  political  future,  as  he  must  have 
known  it  would,  but  it  was  a  decision 
which  he  made  without  hesitation  and 
which  he  never  regretted.  He  remained  in 
the  main  stream  of  traditional  Liberalism 
and  refused  to  contemplate  the  prospects 
of  continued  office  as  a  National  or 
Simonite  Liberal.  He  was  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council  in  1937. 

Foot  had  been  chosen  as  deputy  mayor 
of  Plymouth  in  1920  and  during  his  year 
of  office  he  spent  some  time  in  the  United 


States  as  Plymouth's  representative  at 
the  Mayflower  tercentenary.  His  gift  for 
memorable  oratory  was  by  this  time  so 
well  developed  as  to  produce  an  indelible 
impression  upon  all  those  who  heard  him. 
In  1945  he  was  chosen  by  unanimous  vote 
to  be  lord  mayor  of  the  city  of  Plymouth, 
an  honour  very  rarely  accorded  to  one  not 
at  the  time  a  member  of  the  city  council. 
During  his  mayoralty  his  acute  sense  of 
history  lent  unusual  distinction  to  the 
office.  He  made  a  point  of  visiting  every 
school  in  the  city  in  full  robes  to  bring 
local  history  and  civic  pride  to  life  in  the 
minds  of  the  children. 

Out  of  office  and  out  of  the  House  of 
Commons,  he  devoted  himself  to  the  two 
other  great  enthusiasms  of  his  life,  the 
collection  and  reading  of  thousands  of 
books  and  the  study  and  practice  of  public 
speech.  In  1904  he  had  married  Eva  (died 
1946),  daughter  of  Angus  Mackintosh, 
M.D.,  a  granddaughter  of  William  Dingle, 
of  Callington  in  Cornwall,  and  it  was  to 
that  district  that  he  later  went  to  live. 
There  they  brought  up  a  remarkable  family 
in  a  house  called  Pencrebar  some  three 
miles  out  of  Callington.  There  were  two 
daughters,  and  five  sons :  Dingle,  who  be- 
came solicitor-general,  with  a  knighthood, 
in  the  Labour  Government  of  1964 ;  Hugh, 
who  became  Lord  Caradon,  and  as  Sir 
Hugh  Foot  was  the  last  governor  of 
Cyprus;  Michael,  the  left-wing  rebel, 
former  editor  of  Tribune^  and  member  of 
Parliament  for  Ebbw  Vale  in  succession 
to  his  friend  Aneurin  Bevan  [q.v.] ;  John 
(who  received  a  life  peerage  in  1967) ;  and 
Christopher  who  carried  on  the  family  law 
practice  in  Plymouth.  His  sons  have  all  in 
their  own  way  put  on  record  their  testi- 
mony to  the  fact  that  it  was  their  father 
who  had  largely  made  them  what  they 
were.  Another  formative  influence  was 
undoubtedly  the  merciless  cut  and  thrust 
of  political  and  literary  debate  in  that 
lively  household. 

In  the  manor  house  where  these  sons 
grew  up  under  the  eye  of  their  father, 
there  came  into  being  also  over  the  years 
a  famous  Ubrary  of  more  than  seventy 
thousand  books  which  formed  the  base- 
work  of  the  remarkable  photographic 
memory  of  Isaac  Foot  which  so  astounded 
his  contemporaries  and  obliterated  his 
opponents.  He  could  remember  for  years 
not  only  the  page  but  the  location  on  the 
page  of  any  one  of  thousands  of  passages, 
each  to  be  called  to  mind  and  used  with 
devastating  precision  on  some  exactly 
apposite  occasion.  All  his  life  he  was  a 


86d 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Forbes 


voracious  reader,  waking  at  five  or  earlier 
every  morning  for  the  purpose.  He  taught 
himself  Greek  at  an  advanced  age  in  order 
to  read  his  New  Testament  in  the  original. 
A  fervent  and  convinced  Methodist  from 
youth,  he  was  a  lifelong  local  preacher.  His 
sermons,  like  his  speeches,  were  famous  and 
remembered  for  years  by  his  hearers.  They 
were  framed  and  composed  with  admirable 
clarity  and  lapped  round  and  incensed 
with  that  rich  Devon  i^eech  which  he 
never  lost  and  which  nobody  in  the  west 
country  will  ever  forget.  Fortunately  for 
posterity  there  exists  in  the  archives  of 
the  public  library  service  in  Pljrmouth  the 
tape-recording  of  three  broadcast  talks 
Foot  gave  in  1951  about  the  west  country 
of  his  youth.  In  1940  he  broadcast  about 
Drake's  Drum ;  and  on  the  escape  of  the 
Amethyst  down  the  Yangtse,  Foot  was 
the  inevitable  choice  to  put  the  event  on 
record.  Of  his  oratorical  gifts,  his  son 
Hugh  says  in  his  book,  A  Start  in  Freedom, 
that  'He  was  the  finest  speaker  and 
preacher  I  have  ever  heard.' 

One  of  Oliver  Cromwell's  greatest  dis- 
ciples in  this  century,  Isaac  Foot  was 
president  of  the  Cromwell  Association  for 
many  years  until  his  death.  Cromwell  and 
Lincoln  were  his  great  sources  of  inspira- 
tion. The  Methodist  Church  made  Foot  its 
vice-president  in  1937-8,  and  the  Liberal 
Party  its  president  in  1947.  He  held  many 
other  presidencies  in  many  different  move- 
ments. Each  office  became  charged  with 
further  meaning  and  purpose  by  his 
tenure,  as  all  his  successors  have  acknow- 
ledged. In  1959  he  was  given  the  honorary 
degree  of  D.Litt.  by  Exeter  University. 

In  1945  Foot  was  appointed  deputy 
chairman  of  Cornwall  quarter-sessions, 
and  in  1953  he  was  appointed  chairman, 
serving  until  1955.  The  appointment  of 
a  soUcitor  as  chairman  of  such  sessions  is 
very  rare. 

When  Foot  came  to  die  at  Callington, 
13  December  1960,  at  the  age  of  eighty  his 
powers  had  hardly  begun  to  fade.  In  the 
west  coimtry  the  Foot  name  has  a  magic 
about  it  which  is  easily  understood  by 
his  countrymen  but  difficult  to  describe. 
Isaac  Foot  was  the  last  of  the  great 
orators,  and  Lord  Samuel  said  of  him: 
'He  was  a  natural  orator,  drawing  fresh 
inspiration  from  Milton  and  Cromwell, 
and  many  of  his  speeches  in  Parliament 
and  in  his  own  county  touched  rare 
heights  of  eloquence.'  The  Western  Morn- 
ing News,  itself  an  old  antagonist  of  Isaac 
Foot,  said  of  him:  'Each  of  his  major 
characteristics  would  have  made  a  man 


outstanding  in  his  time.  All  of  them 
together  combined  to  earn  the  respect  or 
even  veneration  of  millions  of  many 
nations.'  This  was  a  reference  to  his  work 
for  India  as  a  member  of  the  Round  Table 
conference  and  the  joint  select  committee 
which  earned  for  him  the  title  of  'The 
member  for  the  Depressed  Classes'. 

Foot  was  survived  by  his  second  wife, 
Catherine  Ehzabeth  Taylor,  whom  he 
married  in  1951,  and  by  his  seven 
children. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Stanley  Goodman. 

FORBES,  Sir  CHARLES  MORTON 

(1880-1960),  admiral  of  the  fleet,  was  born 
at  Colombo  22  November  1880,  the  second 
son  of  James  Forbes,  broker,  and  his  wife, 
Caroline  Delmege.  Educated  at  Dollar 
Academy  and  Eastman's,  Southsea,  he 
joined  the  Royal  Navy  as  a  cadet  in  the 
Britannia  in  1894.  On  passing  out  two  years 
later  he  obtained  five  first  class  certificates 
and  gained  twelve  months'  seniority. 
After  serving  in  the  flagships  of  the 
Channel  and  Pacific  fleets  he  was  pro- 
moted lieutenant  in  1901  and  in  the  fol- 
lowing year  became  a  specialist  in  gunnery. 
For  the  next  eleven  years  he  served  as 
gunnery  officer  in  various  cruisers  and 
battleships,  and  at  the  gunnery  schools, 
until  his  promotion  to  commander  in  1912, 
at  which  time  he  was  serving  as  first 
lieutenant  and  gunnery  officer  of  the 
battleship  Superb  in  the  Home  Fleet. 

Soon  after  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914 
Forbes  was  appointed  to  the  newly  com- 
missioned battleship  Queen  Elizahpth 
which  bombarded  the  Gallipoli  forts  in  the 
initial  attack  on  the  Dardanelles  in  1915. 
Later  in  the  same  year  he  joined  the  staff 
of  Sir  John  (later  Earl)  Jellicoe  [q.v.], 
commander-in-chief  of  the  Grand  Fleet, 
as  flag  conmiander  in  the  Iron  Duke.  He 
was  present  at  the  battle  of  Jutland  and 
was  appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  After  Sir 
David  (later  Earl)  Beatty  [q.v.]  succeeded 
to  the  command  of  the  fleet  in  1916 
Forbes  was  appointed  to  the  staff  of  the 
second-in-conamand.  Sir  Charles  Madden 
[q.v.],  where  he  continued  in  the  same 
duties  until  his  promotion  to  captain  in 
1917.  He  was  then  appointed  to  the  com- 
mand of  the  cruiser  Galatea,  in  which  he 
was  present  at  the  surrender  of  the  Ger- 
man High  Seas  Fleet  in  November  1918. 
He  thus  served  afloat  throughout  the 
whole  war  and  shortly  before  its  end  he 
was  awarded  the  Russian  Order  of  St, 
Stanislaus.     -.oMi^l^  ■i^^^^  -^'^  ■-"-■^  kij^::i 


Forbes 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Thereafter,  Forbes's  Service  life  alter- 
nated between  appointments  at  the 
Admiralty  and  Naval  Staff  College  and 
in  one  of  the  two  main  fleets — Home  or 
Mediterranean.  His  first  Admiralty  ap- 
pointment was  as  naval  member  of  the 
Ordnance  Committee  in  1919,  to  which 
duty  he  returned  in  1925-8  as  director  of 
naval  ordnance.  On  the  staff  side,  he  was 
deputy  director  of  the  Naval  Staff  College 
at  Greenwich  from  1921  to  1923.  The 
remainder  of  his  service  in  the  rank  of 
captain  was  spent  in  sea-going  appoint- 
ments, first  as  flag  captain  to  the  com- 
mander-in-chief, Atlantic  Fleet,  Sir  John 
De  Robeck  [q.v.],  in  the  Queen  Elizabeth, 
and  secondly  as  flag  captain  to  the  second- 
in-command,  Mediterranean  Fleet,  (Sir) 
H.  D.  R.  Watson,  in  the  Iron  Duke. 

Forbes  was  promoted  rear-admiral  in 
1928  and  in  1930-31  commanded  the 
destroyer  flotillas  of  the  Mediterranean 
Fleet.  He  then  returned  to  the  Admiralty 
as  third  sea  lord  and  controller — an  ap- 
pointment generally  recognized  as  one 
calling  for  exceptional  qualities  of  technical 
knowledge  and  ability  in  committee.  He 
was  promoted  vice-admiral  in  1933. 

In  1934  Forbes  was  again  appointed  to 
the  Mediterranean,  as  vice-admiral  com- 
manding the  first  battle  squadron,  and 
second-in-command,  Mediterranean  Fleet ; 
it  was  during  this  period  of  his  service  that 
the  Abyssinian  crisis  occurred  and  a  period 
of  such  strained  relations  with  Italy  that 
in  preparation  for  hostilities  the  fleet 
transferred  from  Malta  to  Alexandria.  In 

1935  Forbes  was  appointed  K.C.B.  and  in 

1936  promoted  admiral. 

In  April  1938  he  was  appointed  com- 
mander-in-chief, Home  Fleet,  with  his  flag 
in  Nelson,  at  a  time  of  increasing  inter- 
national tension  culminating  in  the  out- 
break of  war  in  September  1939.  The  fleet 
was  ready  but  the  bases  were  not,  and 
Forbes  had  the  anxiety  and  responsibility 
of  maintaining  constant  vigil  and  readi- 
ness for  action  with  bases  lacking  anti- 
aircraft defence  or  anti-submarine  pro- 
tection. Their  vulnerabiUty  was  quickly 
demonstrated  by  a  German  air  attack  on 
Rosyth  on  16  October,  the  sinking  of  the 
Royal  Oak  by  a  U-boat  which  penetrated 
Scapa  Flow  on  14  October,  and  the 
damage  sustained  by  the  flagship  Nelson 
herself  in  December  from  a  mine  laid 
by  a  U-boat  in  Loch  Ewe.  Nevertheless, 
under  Forbes's  capable  command,  the 
fleet  carried  out  its  duty  successfully  dur- 
ing those  testing  months  of  1939  and  1940 
when  the  fuU  effects  of  mass  air  power  in 


modern  war  were  being  learnt  the  hard 
way.  Opportunities  for  offensive  action 
were  few,  but  they  came  with  the  German 
invasion  of  Norway  in  April  1940,  and 
with  it  the  successful  destroyer  battles  of 
Narvik.  But  this  campaign  also  included 
the  ill-fated  military  expedition  for  the 
defence  of  Norway,  which  started  too  late 
to  be  effective,  and  after  only  two  months 
had  to  be  withdrawn,  after  considerable 
loss.  During  these  operations,  Forbes's 
temporary  flagship,  Rodney,  was  damaged 
by  air  attack.  The  fleet  suffered  a  number 
of  losses,  the  principal  ones  being  the  air- 
craft carrier  Glorious  and  nine  destroyers ; 
the  German  losses  and  damage  were  very 
much  greater.  It  was  this  fact  which 
rightly  convinced  Forbes  that  they  would 
not  attempt  a  seaborne  invasion  of 
England  that  year  in  the  face  of  the  over- 
whelming superiority  of  the  British 
Fleet  and  the  failure  of  the  German  air 
force  to  defeat  the  R.A.F. 

In  December  1940,  seven  months  after 
being  promoted  admiral  of  the  fleet  and 
G.C.B.,  Forbes  was  succeeded  in  the  com- 
mand of  the  Home  Fleet  by  Sir  John  (later 
Lord)  Tovey,  and  in  May  1941  he  was 
appointed  commander-in-chief,  Plymouth, 
which  the  enemy  was  then  making  a  tar- 
get for  most  savage  air  attacks.  Neverthe- 
less, the  operational  work  of  the  command 
was  prosecuted  with  vigour  by  the  cruisers, 
light  forces,  and  coastal  craft  under 
Forbes's  orders.  Chief  among  these  were 
the  many  successful  attacks  in  co-opera- 
tion with  Coastal  Command  on  U-boats 
leaving  and  returning  to  their  base  at 
Brest;  the  interception  of  enemy  armed 
merchant  vessel  raiders  trjdng  to  get  back 
to  Germany;  and  raids  on  the  enemy 
destroyers  and  shipping  passing  along  the 
French  coast.  The  gallant  and  successful 
attack  on  St.  Nazaire  was  also  mounted. 

During  the  final  months  of  his  com- 
mand preparation  for  the  reception  and 
disposition  of  the  American  naval  and 
military  forces  who  would  take  part  in  the 
invasion  of  France  in  1944  was  well  ad- 
vanced, but  Forbes's  period  of  command 
terminated  before  their  arrival.  His  flag 
was  hauled  down  for  the  last  time  24 
August  1943. 

An  officer  of  great  experience  of  the 
world  and  of  men,  Forbes  was  a  master 
of  his  profession  and  had  the  very  great 
faculty  of  recognizing  instantly  all  the 
factors  in  any  problem  with  which  he  was 
faced,  and  in  grappling  competently  with 
all  difficulties.  No  man  ever  saw  him 
rattled:  he  had  full  confidence  in  himself 


370 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Foss 


and  he  inspired  it  in  those  under  him. 
His  reserves  of  power,  clear  vision,  sound 
judgement,  and  strong  sense  of  propor- 
tion were  a  tower  of  strength  to  those  who, 
working  under  him,  shared  his  burdens 
though  not  his  responsibihties.  Modest 
and  unassuming  in  demeanour,  and  with 
an  attractive,  dry  sense  of  humour,  he 
never  feared  to  speak  his  mind,  even 
though  in  conflict  with  the  views  of  his 
superiors. 

In  his  younger  days  he  was  fond  of 
horses  and  hunting.  He  was  also  a  keen 
golfer  and  played  on  several  occasions  in 
the  'Admirals  v.  Generals'  match.  He  was 
most  generous  in  his  hospitality,  and 
never  failed  to  impress  by  the  courtly 
grace  and  charm  with  which  he  habitually 
welcomed  his  guests. 

After  relinquishing  his  last  appointment 
he  returned  to  live  at  his  home,  Cawsand 
Place,  Wentworth,  Surrey.  From  1946 
until  shortly  before  his  death  Forbes  was 
a  member  of  the  councils  of  the  Associa- 
tion of  Retired  Naval  Officers  and  the 
National  Association  for  the  Employment 
of  Regular  Sailors,  Soldiers,  and  Airmen, 
in  whose  work  he  was  keenly  interested. 
He  died  in  London  28  August  1960. 

He  was  twice  married:  first,  in  1909,  to 
Agnes  Millicent  (died  1915),  younger 
daughter  of  J.  A.  Ewen,  J.P.,  of  Potters 
Bar,  by  whom  he  had  one  daughter  and 
one  son;  and  secondly,  in  1921,  to  Marie 
Louise,  daughter  of  Axel  Berndtson,  of 
Stockholm,  by  whom  he  had  one  daughter. 

His  portrait,  by  Sir  Oswald  Birley,  is  in 
the  Greenwich  Collection. 

[The  Times,  30  August  1960;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Clifford  Caslon. 

FOSS,  HUBERT  JAMES  (1899-1953), 
musician  and  writer,  was  born  at  Croydon, 
Surrey,  2  May  1899,  the  thirteenth  and 
youngest  child  of  Frederick  Foss,  solici- 
tor, mayor  of  Croydon  (1892-3),  and  his 
wife,  Anne  Penny  Bartrmn.  His  grand- 
father was  Edward  Foss  [q.v.].  An  uncle, 
H.  J.  Foss,  was  bishop  of  Osaka,  Japan ; 
a  first  cousin  was  Brigadier  C.  C.  Foss, 
V.C.  (1885-1953).  As  a  child  Hubert  Foss 
learnt  to  read  exceptionally  quickly  and 
had  a  great  feeling  for  words.  Music 
attracted  him  intensely  and  obviously  he 
possessed  unusual  talent.  Soon  he  was  put 
under  Stanley  Roper,  sometime  organist 
at  the  Chapel  Royal,  St.  James's,  who, 
impressed  by  his  natural  aptitudes  and 
already  marked  talent  for  composition, 
undertook   his   musical   education.    This 


influence  ripened  into  a  friendship  which 
lasted  until  his  death. 

His  father  having  died  when  the  boy 
was  nine,  his  mother  sent  him  to  St. 
Anselm's  School,  Croydon.  From  there 
he  won  a  senior  classical  foundation 
scholarship  to  Bradfield  College,  where 
he  remained  until  1917,  leaving  with  a 
Stevens  senior  classical  scholarship.  At 
Bradfield,  F.  H.  Shera  andB.  Luard  Selby 
exercised  a  beneficent  and  widening  in- 
fluence on  Foss,  who  contributed  much 
to  the  musical  life  of  the  school. 

He  then  served  in  the  5th  Middlesex 
Regiment  as  a  second  Keutenant  and  was 
discharged  early  in  1919.  Later  that  year 
he  took  a  post  in  a  preparatory  school, 
leaving  to  become  assistant  editor  of  Land 
and  Water,  whilst  also  contributing  music 
and  art  criticism  to  many  prominent 
journals. 

In  1921  he  joined  the  Oxford  University 
Press  as  senior  assistant  to  the  educa- 
tional manager  in  London.  There  his 
intense  interest  in  music  soon  made  itself 
evident.  With  youthful  drive  and  vision 
Foss  envisaged  a  new  music  department 
organized  on  music  trade  lines,  as  dis- 
tinct from  the  book  trade.  This  project 
was  favourably  received  by  (Sir)  Humph- 
rey Milford  [q.v.],  who  appointed  Foss  its 
head  and  musical  editor.  Thus,  at  the 
age  of  twenty-five  Foss  began  what  was 
probably  the  most  notable  achievement  of 
a  brilliant  but  short  life.  Within  a  few 
years  the  Oxford  University  Press  music 
department  reached  a  world  status  second 
to  none. 

To  the  task  of  building  up  an  inter- 
national catalogue  of  music  and  books 
on  music  he  brought  an  almost  infallible 
instinct  for  what  was  vital  and  genuine  in 
the  work  of  young  composers  and  writers. 
He  published  the  first  important  works  of 
(Sir)  William  Walton,  from  the  famous 
Fagade  (1922)  and  Belshazzafs  Feast 
(1931)  to  the  later  works.  He  also  launched 
Constant  Lambert  [q.v.]  whose  vivid  The 
Rio  Grande  achieved  immediate  success. 
Amongst  other  young  composers  Peter 
Warlock,  E.  J.  Moeran  [qq.v.],  van 
Dieren,  Rubbra,  Rawsthorne,  Britten,  and 
John  Gardner  mostly  owed  their  real 
start  to  Foss.  The  more  established  com- 
posers: Hoist,  Ethel  Smythe  [qq.v.], 
Ireland,  Dyson,  were  glad  to  appear  in  the 
Oxford  fist.  Above  all  Ralph  Vaughan 
WiUiams  [q.v.]  became  identified  with  the 
new  department,  and  from  1925  onward 
many  important  works  of  his  were  issued 
under  Foss's  editorship. 


871 


Foss 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


A  flow  of  important  books  on  music  was 
a  natural  development — ^^amongst  them 
the  Oxford  Companion  to  Music  (1938)  of 
Percy  Scholes  [q.v.].  And  it  was  owing 
solely  to  Foss's  patience  and  pertinacity 
that  there  appeared  in  permanent  form 
as  Essays  in  Musical  Analysis  (6  vols., 
1935-9),  the  fruits  of  the  encyclopedic 
learning  of  Sir  Donald  Tovey  (whose 
notice,  among  others,  Foss  contributed  to 
this  Dictionary). 

Towards  the  end  of  1941,  for  personal 
reasons  Foss  felt  impelled  to  resign  his 
work,  and  when  it  was  announced 
Vaughan  Williams  wrote :  'I  did  not  know 
how  much  I  counted  on  you.  I  know  that 
I  owe  any  success  I  have  had  more  to  you 
(except  H.  P.  Allen)  than  to  anyone  else.' 
From  1942  a  new  phase  began  as  freelance 
musician,  author,  and  broadcaster.  During 
the  war  he  lectured  for  C.E.M.A.  and  for 
a  period  was  music  adviser  to  Eastern 
Command  E.N.S.A.  He  was  also  an  excel- 
lent and  sympathetic  broadcaster,  and 
spoke  on  a  wide  variety  of  subjects  on 
both  the  Home  and  Overseas  services.  In 
addition  he  wrote  many  excellent  pro- 
gramme notes  for  the  promenade  con- 
certs and  others.  As  author  and  critic  by 
Music  In  My  Time  (1933)  he  made  his 
mark,  and  later  came  Ralph  Vaughan 
Williams— A  Study  (1950).  In  1947  he 
edited  The  Music  Lover  and  in  1952 
reissued  Warlock's  book  of  1923  on  Delius 
with  additional  valuable  chapters  from 
his  own  pen. 

His  early  'Seven  Poems  by  Thomas 
Hardy'  (1925)  for  baritone  solo  and  male 
voice  choir  had  revealed  him  as  a  sensitive 
composer,  and  much  important  music 
followed.  And  his  acknowledged  expertise 
as  typographer  and  printer  led  to  the 
founding  of  the  Double  Crown  Club  in 
conjunction  with  Oliver  Simon  [q.v.]. 
Thus  he  contributed  notably  to  almost 
every  form  of  musical  and  literary  ac- 
tivity, and  achieved  in  his  fifty-four  years 
more  than  many  enjoying  a  far  longer  life. 

Early  in  1952  he  underwent  a  major 
operation  but  continued  his  work  for 
another  year.  Then  his  appointment  as 
editor  of  the  Musical  Times  was  an- 
nounced. But  he  did  not  live  to  take  up 
this  post  for  he  died  unexpectedly  in 
London  27  May  1953. 

Foss  talked  well,  had  a  rare  sense  of 
humour,  and  could  be  an  entertaining 
mimic.  Certainly  he  had  a  genius  for 
friendship,  his  friends  coming  from  every 
walk  of  life,  and  he  was  loyal,  generous, 
and  considerate  to  them  all.  His  humility 


in  face  of  criticism  and  his  ready  accep- 
tance of  it  ended  by  making  his  critics 
admire  the  totality  of  the  man. 

In  1920  Foss  married  Kate  Frances, 
daughter  of  Charles  Carter  Page,  seed 
merchant ;  there  were  two  daughters.  The 
marriage  was  dissolved.  His  second  mar- 
riage in  1927  was  to  a  gifted  singer  Dora 
Maria,  daughter  of  Alfred  Stevens,  manag- 
ing director;  they  had  a  son  and  a 
daughter. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Norman  Peterkin. 

FOX,  Dame  EVELYN  EMILY  MARIAN 

(1874-1955),  pioneer  worker  in  the  field 
of  mental  health,  was  born  at  Morges, 
Switzerland,  15  August  1874.  She  was  one 
of  four  children,  of  whom  two  died  in 
childhood,  born  to  Richard  Edward  Fox, 
of  Fox  Hall,  Edgeworthstown,  county 
Longford  (and  related  to  Charles  James 
Fox  and  Maria  Edgeworth,  qq.v.),  by 
his  wife,  Emily,  daughter  of  Lieutenant- 
Colonel  William  Godley,  H.E.I.C.S.  After 
her  father's  death  in  1885  Evelyn  and  her 
elder  sister  Adeline  were  brought  up  by 
their  mother  in  Ireland  and  England  and 
educated  at  the  high  school  in  Morges. 
At  Somerville  College,  Oxford,  she  took 
second  class  honours  in  modern  history  in 
1898.  It  was  not  until  she  was  thirty-two 
that  she  decided  to  devote  herself  to  the 
cause  of  the  mentally  handicapped.  In 
the.intervening  years  she  qualified  for  her 
future  career  by  training  at  the  Women's 
University  Settlement  in  Southwark  and 
by  undertaking  work  which  brought  her 
into  personal  touch  with  mentally  defec- 
tive children  and  their  families. 

In  1908  the  royal  commission  on  the 
care  and  control  of  the  feebleminded 
issued  a  report  which  resulted  in  the  Mental 
Deficiency  Act  of  1913.  Evidence  had 
been  pouring  in  touching  on  the  medical, 
social,  educational,  economic,  eugenic, 
and  legal  aspects.  Public  opinion  had  been 
roused  and  the  time  was  ripe  for  action. 
Evelyn  Fox  was  quick  to  realize  the  ex- 
tent of  the  work  which  lay  ahead.  A  volun- 
tary co-ordinating  body  appeared  to  be 
the  first  need,  to  stimulate  effort  and  to 
prepare  the  way,  in  co-operation  with  the 
new  statutory  authorities,  for  the  imple- 
mentation of  the  Act.  The  Central 
Association  for  the  Mentally  Defective 
was  accordingly  founded  in  1913  under 
the  chairmanship  of  (Sir)  Leslie  Scott 
[q.v.]  with  Evelyn  Fox  its  honorary 
secretary  and  its  material  assets  a  bor- 
rowed typewriter  and  the  promise  of  ten 


372 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Fox-  S  trangway  s 


pounds.  In  response  to  widening  demands 
and  under  her  direct  inspiration,  the 
scope  of  the  work  grew  rapidly  and  in  1922 
the  name  of  the  Association  was  changed 
to  the  Central  Association  for  Mental  Wel- 
fare, later  again  (1946)  in  its  turn  to  extend 
and,  in  amalgamation  with  other  bodies, 
to  form  the  National  Association  for 
Mental  Health.  By  1951  when  Evelyn  Fox 
retired  the  Association,  as  its  title  imphed, 
had  attained  a  national  status,  covering 
the  whole  field,  administering  some 
£100,000  yearly  and  employing  a  numerous 
paid  staff  including  a  medical  director  and 
a  general  secretary. 

During  these  years  of  expansion  Evelyn 
Fox  was  the  guiding  spirit.  The  uphill 
struggle,  with  set-backs  including  two 
world  wars,  called  forth  her  fighting  quali- 
ties ;  many  pioneer  schemes  then  initiated 
have  since  become  an  integral  part  of  the 
national  health  services,  for  example 
community  care,  occupation  centres, 
voluntary  associations,  and  training 
courses  for  professional  mental  health 
workers.  Although  her  work  centred 
round  the  Association's  London  office,  she 
had  occasion  to  travel  to  all  parts  of  the 
country,  forming  personal  contacts  and 
initiating  local  schemes.  She  took  an 
active  part  also  in  wider  movements  of 
mental  health;  she  became  honorary 
secretary  of  the  Child  Guidance  Council 
when  it  was  first  formed  in  England  with 
the  help  of  the  Commonwealth  Fund  of 
America  in  1927 ;  she  served  on  the  Wood 
committee  on  mental  deficiency  which 
reported  in  1929;  and  on  the  London 
County  Council  mental  hospitals'  commit- 
tee from  1914  to  1924 ;  she  gave  evidence 
before  royal  commissions  and  read  papers 
at  many  conferences  at  home  and  abroad. 
In  recognition  of  her  services  she  was 
appointed  C.B.E.  in  1937  and  D.B.E.  in 
1947. 

Evelyn  Fox's  home  life  was  full  of 
human  ties  and  many  interests:  art, 
music,  books,  young  people,  the  garden, 
and  her  dog.  She  remained  always  a 
country  woman  at  heart,  facing  a  long 
daily  journey  to  London  from  Aldbourne 
near  Marlborough  for  the  sake  of  the 
downs  she  loved.  In  1945  she  and  her  sister 
moved  to  Laughton  in  Sussex,  accom- 
panied by  friends  who  looked  after  both 
sisters  until  they  died.  In  appearance 
Evelyn  Fox  was  short,  round-faced,  with 
rough,  curly  hair,  white  in  later  life.  Her 
voice  was  strident,  the  result  perhaps  of 
her  own  and  her  sister's  deafness.  Her 
downright  manner  was  tempered  by  the 


merriment  and  devilment  in  her  eyes.  She 
had  a  fundamental  concern  for  humanity, 
clearness  of  vision  and  directness  of  aim, 
ceaseless  and  resilient  energy,  thorough- 
ness, hatred  of  shams  and  sloppiness,  and 
a  very  practical  administrative  ability. 
She  died  at  her  Sussex  home  1  June  1955. 
A  pastel  portrait,  executed  by  James 
Grant  after  her  death,  hangs  in  the  coun- 
cil room  of  the  National  Association  for 
Mental  Health  at  39  Queen  Anne  Street, 
London,  W.  1. 

[Burke's  Landed  Gentry  of  Ireland,  1912; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Ruth  Rees  Thomas. 

FOX-STRANGWAYS,  GILES 

STEPHEN  HOLLAND,  sixth  Earl  of 
Ilchester  (1874-1959),  landowner  and 
historian,  was  born  31  May  1874  at  his 
father's  town  house  in  Belgrave  Square. 
The  elder  son  of  the  fifth  earl  and  his  wife, 
Mary  Eleanor  Anne,  daughter  of  the  first 
Earl  of  Dartrey,  he  was  descended  from 
Stephen  Fox,  first  Earl  of  Ilchester  (1704- 
76),  who  added  the  name  of  Strangways 
and  whose  younger  brother,  Henry,  first 
Baron  Holland  [q.v.],  was  the  father  of  the 
statesman  Charles  James  Fox  [q.v.].  As  a 
boy,  the  heir  to  considerable  estates  in  the 
west  country  and  to  Holland  House, 
Kensington,  he  combined  personal  charm, 
aristocratic  bearing,  and  an  addiction  to 
outdoor  activities  with  a  wilfulness  which 
prevented  him  from  distinguishing  him- 
self in  his  studies  at  Eton  and  led  to  his 
leaving  Christ  Church,  Oxford,  without 
proceeding  to  a  degree.  His  latent  scholarly 
instincts  came  into  play  only  after  brief 
service  as  an  officer  in  the  Coldstream 
Guards,  service  which  he  resumed,  as  a 
king's  messenger,  in  the  war  of  1914-18. 
He  was  awarded  the  Legion  of  Honour 
in  1918  and  appointed  O.B.E.  in  1919. 
Meanwhile  he  had  succeeded  to  the  earl- 
dom in  1905. 

The  greater  part  of  Ilchester' s  middle 
life,  except  during  the  war,  was  devoted 
to  the  management  of  his  estates  at 
Melbury  and  Abbotsbury,  in  Dorset,  to 
breeding  racehorses  (he  was  a  pillar  of  the 
Jockey  Club)  and  other  country  pursuits, 
and  to  the  study  of  the  history  of  his 
family.  The  last  of  these  interests  cul- 
minated in  the  publication  in  1937  of  his 
two  most  important  works.  The  Home  of 
the  Hollands,  1605-1820  and  Chronicles  of 
Holland  House,  1820-1900.  Holland  House, 
so  named  after  Henry  Rich,  the  weather- 
cock first  Earl  of  Holland  and  Baron 
Kensington  [q.v.],  had  been  acquired  by 


878 


Fox-Strangways 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Henry  Fox  in  the  mid-eighteenth  century 
and  for  a  hundred  years  was  a  political, 
social,  and  literary  focus  of  the  Whig 
aristocracy.  Ilchester's  narrative  of  its 
fortunes,  derived  from  extensive  family 
archives,  is  in  some  measure  also  a  narra- 
tive of  those  of  the  Whigs.  With  its  fifty- 
four  acres  of  park,  Holland  House  was 
the  last  of  the  great  country  estates  in 
London.  The  building  was  in  large  part 
destroyed  in  an  air  raid  in  1940,  but  its 
valuable  collection  of  documents,  pic- 
tures, and  objets  d'art  had  been  removed 
to  safety.  In  1951  the  estate  passed  from 
the  possession  of  the  Fox  family  into  that 
of  the  London  County  Council. 

The  other  books  written  or  edited  by 
Lord  Ilchester,  the  first  two  over  his 
courtesy  title  of  Baron  Stavordale,  were 
all  also  based  on  Holland  House  papers. 
They  were  (i)  in  collaboration  with  his 
mother.  The  Life  and  Letters  of  Lady  Sarah 
Lennox  (2  vols.,  1901);  (ii)  Further 
Memoirs  of  the  Whig  Party  by  the  third 
Lord  Holland  (1905) ;  (iii)  Elizabeth  Lady 
Holland's  Journal  (2  vols.,  1908)  and  her 
Spanish  Journal  (1910);  (iv)  Letters  to 
Henry  Fox^  Lord  Holland  (Roxburghe 
Club,  1915);  (v)  Henry  Fox,  first  Lord 
Holland,  his  family  and  relations  (2  vols., 
1920) ;  (vi)  The  Journal  of  Henry  Edward 
Fox,  fourth  Lord  Holland  (1923) ;  (vii)  in 
collaboration  with  Elizabeth  Langford- 
Brooke,  Correspondence  of  Catherine  the 
Great  with  Sir  Charles  H anbury-Williams 
and  a  hfe  of  Hanbury-Williams  (1928) ; 
(viii)  Elizabeth  Lady  Holland  to  her  Son 
(1946) ;  and  (ix)  Lord  Hervey  and  his 
Friends  (1950).  Ilchester  also  did  notable 
work  for  the  Walpole  Society  on  the  note- 
books of  the  eighteenth-century  antiquary 
George  Vertue  [q.v.].  His  distinction  as  an 
historian  was  recognized  by  his  university 
with  the  conferment  of  an  honorary 
doctorate  of  letters  in  1949.  He  was  pro- 
moted G.B.E.  in  1950. 

Only  comparatively  late  in  life  did 
Ilchester  become  a  public  figvu'e.  He  de- 
layed his  maiden  speech  in  the  House  of 
Lords  for  more  than  a  quarter  of  a  cen- 
tm-y:  speaking  on  behalf  of  the  British 
Museum  of  which  he  had  become  a  trustee 
in  1931,  he  moved  for  papers  on  the 
extermination  of  musk-rat  and  nutria. 
Most  of  his  rare  interventions  in  debates, 
all  well  informed  and  plainly  argued,  were 
inspired  either  by  the  museum  or  by  the 
National  Portrait  Gallery  (of  which  he  was 
a  trustee  from  1922,  chairman  from  1940), 
or  by  bodies  such  as  the  British  Field 
Sports  Society:  the  subjects  included  the 


protection  of  wild  birds  (a  matter  of  close 
concern  to  the  owner  of  the  swannery  at 
Abbotsbury),  the  necessity  for  gin-traps 
('I  have  lived  all  my  life  in  a  rabbit 
country'),  and  the  pollution  of  the  sea  by 
waste  oil.  In  his  last  speech  in  his  eighty- 
fourth  year  he  urged  the  appointment  to 
the  Portrait  Gallery  of  elderly,  rather  than 
youthful,  trustees. 

Ilchester  owed  his  position  as  a  trustee 
of  national  institutions,  and  as  chairman 
or  president  of  the  Royal  Commission 
on  Historical  Monuments,  Royal  Literary 
Fund,  London  Library,  Walpole  Society, 
Roxburghe  Club,  and  other  bodies,  in  part 
to  his  unobtrusive  scholarship,  but  also  to 
integrity,  assiduity,  and  tact.  As  a  com- 
mitteeman he  could  on  occasion  carry 
tenacity  of  principle  to  the  point  of 
obstinacy ;  but  he  earned  the  gratitude  of 
the  officers  of  the  institutions  over  which 
he  presided  by  the  firmness  with  which  he 
fought  their  battles,  and  he  was  noted  for 
his  courtesy  to  junior  staff.  The  same 
courtesy,  grave  and  somewhat  aloof, 
marked  his  relations  with  his  tenantry.  He 
took  an  active  interest  in  the  local  affairs 
of  his  county,  of  which  he  was  a  deputy- 
lieutenant,  then  vice-lieutenant.  He  is 
credited  with  having  countered  a  move  to 
grass  over  parts  of  the  Cerne  Giant  with 
a  proposal  to  form  a  society  for  the  pre- 
servation of  ancient  erections.  Over  six- 
foot  tall  and  of  massive  build,  he  was  quiet 
in  both  movement  and  speech.  Although 
reserved  in  manner  in  public,  he  was 
essentially  clubbable  and  displayed  an 
engaging  frivolity  among  his  chosen 
friends  in  the  Society  of  Antiquaries. 

He  married  in  1902  Helen  Mary 
Theresa  Vane-Tempest-Stewart  (died 
1956),  daughter  of  the  sixth  Marquess  of 
Londonderry  [q.v.].  They  had  two  sons 
and  two  daughters.  He  died  in  London -29 
October  1959  and  was  succeeded  by  his 
elder  son,  Edward  Henry  Charles  James 
(1905-64),  who  had  lost  both  his  sons 
during  his  father's  lifetime.  Ilchester's 
younger  son  died  unmarried  in  1961,  and 
on  the  death  of  the  elder  the  earldom 
passed  to  a  cousin,  Walter  Angelo  Fox- 
Strangways.  A  painting  by  Glyn  Philpot 
and  a  drawing  by  Francis  Dodd  are  in  the 
possession  of  the  family. 

[The  Times,  30  October  and  3  and  16 
November  1959 ;  private  information ;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]         Simon  Nowell-Smith. 

FRANKAU,  GILBERT  (1884-1952), 
novelist,  was  born  21  April  1884  in 
Gloucester  Terrace,  London,  the  eldest  of 


874 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Frankau 


three  sons  and  one  daughter  of  Arthur 
Frankau,  a  principal  partner  of  the  firm  of 
J.  Frankau  &  Co.,  wholesale  cigar  mer- 
chants, founded  originally  in  1837  to  im- 
port leeches  from  France.  His  mother, 
Julia,  daughter  of  Hyman  Davis,  wrote 
novels  under  the  pen-name  of  'Frank 
Danby'  and  achieved  a  considerable  suc- 
cess as  early  as  1887  with  Dr.  Phillips,  a 
Maida  Vale  Idyll-,  her  best-known  book 
was  Pigs  in  Clover  (1903).  Her  sister  Mrs. 
EUza  Aria  was  also  a  writer  and  for  many 
years  contributed  a  weekly  colxmin  to 
Truth  entitled  'Mrs.  A's  diary'. 

Frankau  won  a  scholarship  to  Harrow, 
but  did  not  take  it,  then  another  to  Eton 
and  went  there,  though  not  as  a  scholar. 
He  took  his  first  step  towards  becoming 
a  writer  while  still  a  schoolboy  when  he 
launched  and  edited  The  X  magazine, 
with  Lord  Turnour  (later  Earl  Winterton) 
as  his  assistant  editor.  The  magazine,  too 
outspoken  about  the  masters,  was  sup- 
pressed by  the  headmaster  after  only  four 
numbers.  Frankau  immediately  found 
a  fresh  outlet  for  his  talent  with  a  volume 
of  satiric  verse  entitled  Eton  Echoes  (1901). 

He  decided,  however,  to  go  into  the 
family  business  and  left  school  shortly 
afterwards  to  become  a  cigar  merchant. 
He  went  to  Hamburg  to  learn  German. 
His  aptitude  for  learning  languages  was 
remarkable;  in  time  he  had  an  equal 
fluency  in  French,  Italian,  and  Spanish, 
then  turned  to  learning  Turkish.  With 
concentrated  application  he  quickly  ac- 
quired a  thorough  knowledge  of  the  cigar 
business  and  became  managing  director  of 
the  family  firm  at  the  age  of  twenty-one. 
His  activities  took  him  to  Havana,  then 
on  a  two-year  world  tour. 

Writing  was  not  altogether  neglected. 
In  1912  he  published  One  of  Us,  a  novel  in 
ottava  rima  as  used  by  Byron  in  Don  Juan, 
followed  it  up  with  a  dramatic  poem 
Tid'apa  (1915)  reprinted  from  the  English 
Review,  and  two  further  books  of  poems — 
The  Guns  (1916)  and  The  City  of  Fear 
(1917). 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  he  had 
joined  up  at  once,  was  commissioned  in  the 
9th  battalion  of  the  East  Surrey  Regiment 
in  October,  but  transferred  to  the  Royal 
Field  Artillery  five  months  later  and 
served  at  Loos,  Ypres,  and  the  Somme.  In 
October  1916  he  was  sent  to  Italy  as  a 
staff  captain  to  undertake  special  duties 
to  counter  German  propaganda  against 
Britain.  His  activities  involved  a  press 
and  film  campaign  which  he  handled  most 
effectively.    But    delayed    symptoms    of 


shell-shock  led  to  his  being  invalided 
out  of  the  army  in  February  1918.  The 
family  cigar  business  had  already  been 
disposed  of  and  Frankau,  with  a  wife 
and  two  daughters  to  provide  for,  de- 
cided to  seek  an  income  from  writing. 
He  embarked  on  his  new  career  with  the 
same  concentration,  zest,  and  efficiency 
which  he  had  brought  to  the  conduct  of 
his  business.  Each  book  was  planned  with 
the  utmost  care,  and  regular  hours  were 
assigned  to  its  writing.  His  study  was  his 
office  and  he  would  brook  no  interruption : 
no  telephone  calls  were  accepted,  crises, 
no  matter  how  grave  and  pressing,  had  to 
wait  until  he  emerged.  Strict  routine  now 
governed  his  whole  life.  Always  something 
of  an  exhibitionist,  he  adopted  an  aristo- 
cratic air,  engaged  in  hunting  (although, 
as  he  admitted  later,  he  was  terrified  of 
riding),  joined  the  Cavalry  Club  where  he 
played  bridge,  and  took  up  fencing.  Many 
found  his  arrogance  insufferable,  but  he 
prided  himself  oh  being  like  the  heroes  in 
his  books — dashing  and  tough:  such  was 
his  outward  pose,  but  to  his  more  intimate 
friends  he  confessed  that  he  was  haunted 
by  the  doubt  that  underneath  it  all  he 
was  really  a  coward.  Kindness  he  pro- 
fessed to  regard  as  'sloppy',  but  all  through 
his  life  his  deeds  were  far  kinder  than  his 
words. 

His  first  prose  novel,  The  Woman  of  the 
Horizon,  was  published  in  1917.  With 
Peter  Jackson,  Cigar  Merchant  (1920)  he 
attained  both  popular  acclaim  and  pros- 
perity. Doors  instantly  began  to  open: 
magazines  begged  for  short  stories,  news- 
papers for  articles ;  he  was  invited  to  make 
speeches  at  literary  gatherings.  Books  now 
appeared  with  clockwork  regularity:  in 
1921  The  Seeds  of  Enchantment,  in  which 
he  attacked  indiscipline  and  proclaimed 
the  superiority  of  the  white  above  the 
black  and  yellow  races ;  in  1922  The  Love- 
Story  of  Aliette  Brunton  making  a  dramatic 
plea  for  divorce  law  reform.  In  1924  his 
speeches  took  a  political  turn.  His  sym- 
pathies were  with  the  extreme  Right  and 
one  could  not  fail  to  discern  the  influence 
of  ItaUan  fascism. 

A  number  of  his  novels  were  filmed,  and 
in  1926,  with  the  publication  of  Masterson, 
he  undertook  a  long  and  strenuous  tour 
of  the  United  States,  which  he  described 
vividly  and  entertainingly  in  My  Unsenti- 
mental Journey  (1926).  An  unhappy  ven- 
ture into  journalism,  his  first  since  he  was 
at  Eton,  came  in  1928  when  he  launched 
and  edited  Britannia,  a  sixpenny  weekly 
with  a  strongly  emphasized  imperialist 


375 


Frankau 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


note.  It  was  not  a  success.  The  fees  paid 
to  contributors  made  even  the  recipients 
gasp.  Advertisers  held  aloof  and  after  ten 
issues  Frankau  returned  to  novel  writing. 

As  a  story-teller  he  had  considerable 
talent.  His  narrative  style  was  compelling, 
his  characters  often  larger  than  life,  his 
imagery  inclined  to  be  lavish ;  but,  pains- 
taking in  his  research  and  meticulous  in 
detail,  he  commanded  a  vast  public  both 
in  Britain  and  in  the  United  States.  Of 
his  later  novels  Christopher  Strong  (1932), 
Three  Englishmen  (1935),  and  Son  of 
Morning  (1949)  may  be  singled  out.  His 
last  book,  considered  by  some  as  being 
among  his  best,  was  Unborn  Tomorrow 
(1953),  a  vision  of  the  future.  Although 
aware  that  death  was  near,  his  iron  resolve 
and  self -discipline  enabled  him  to  finish  it 
just  before  he  died  at  his  home  at  Hove 
4  November  1952. 

Frankau  was  thrice  married:  in  1905  to 
Dorothea  Frances  Markham,  daughter  of 
Charles  Edward  Driunmond  Black,  by 
whom  he  had  two  daughters,  one  of  whom, 
Pamela  Frankau  (died  1967),  won  fame  as 
a  novelist.  The  marriage  ended  in  divorce 
and  in  1922  Frankau  married  the  actress 
Aimee,  daughter  of  Robert  de  Burgh  and 
formerly  wife  of  Leon  Quartermaine.  This 
marriage  also  ended  in  divorce.  In  1932  he 
married  Susan  Lorna,  daughter  of  Walter 
Henry  Harris.  A  portrait  of  Frankau  by 
Flora  Lion  is  in  the  possession  of  the 
family. 

[The  Times,  5  November  1952;  Gilbert 
Frankau,  Self -Portrait,  1939;  Pamela  Fran- 
kau, Pen  to  Paper,  1961 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

R.  J.  MiNNEY. 

FREEDMAN,  BARNETT  (1901-1958), 
artist,  was  bom  in  the  east  end  of  London 
19  May  1901,  the  son  of  Jewish  immigrants 
from  Russia,  Luis  Friedman,  journeyman 
tailor,  and  his  wife,  Reiza  Ruk.  Owing  to 
persistent  ill  health,  against  which  he 
fought  intermittently  throughout  his  life, 
the  only  formal  education  Freedman  re- 
ceived was  as  a  small  child  at  an  L.C.C. 
board  school.  From  the  age  of  nine  until 
he  was  fourteen  his  time  was  spent  in 
hospital  where  he  read  voraciously  and 
also  taught  himself  to  draw  and  paint  and 
play  the  violin.  By  the  time  he  was  fifteen 
his  health  had  sufficiently  improved  to 
enable  him  to  start  work  and  for  a  short 
time  he  was  an  office  boy.  He  then 
managed  to  secure  employment  as  a 
drauightsman,  first  in  the  workshop  of 
a  monumental  mason,  then  in  an  archi- 
tect's office.  It  was  during  this  period  that 


he  developed  an  interest  in  lettering  which 
was  to  lead  to  his  becoming  one  of  the 
most  distinguished  letterers  and  typo- 
graphers of  his  era.  For  five  years  while  he 
was  thus  employed  he  went  to  evening 
classes  at  St.  Martin's  School  of  Art. 
After  three  unsuccessful  attempts  to  win 
an  L.C.C.  senior  scholarship  in  art,  he 
sought  an  interview  with  (Sir)  William 
Rothenstein  [q.v.],  principal  of  the  Royal 
College  of  Art,  who  was  sufficiently  im- 
pressed by  the  work  Freedman  showed 
him  to  use  his  influence  in  getting  the 
L.C.C.  to  reconsider  its  decision,  and  in 
1922  Freedman  became  a  student  at  the 
Royal  College. 

He  left  the  College  in  1925  and  spent 
the  next  few  years  in  extreme  poverty, 
trying  to  earn  his  living  as  a  painter,  but 
with  little  success.  Gradually,  however, 
his  work  became  better  known,  largely 
through  the  private  patronage  of  dis- 
criminating collectors,  and  he  began  to 
expand  his  artistic  activities,  notably  into 
the  field  of  auto-lithography.  Meanwhile, 
he  had  returned  to  the  Royal  College  as  an 
instructor  in  still-life ;  a  post  he  combined 
with  teaching  at  the  Ruskin  School  of 
Drawing  at  Oxford. 

Although  Freedman's  ambition  was  to 
live  by  his  painting,  examples  of  which 
hang  in  numerous  public  collections,  in- 
cluding the  Tate  Gallery,  the  Victoria 
and  Albert  Museum,  and  the  Fitzwilliam 
Museum  at  Cambridge,  he  was  never  quite 
as  successful  in  this  sphere  as  in  that  of 
commercial  design,  in  which  his  output 
extended  over  a  vast  field  of  printed 
ephemera,  ranging  from  cotton-reel  labels 
to  the  design  for  the  silver  jubilee  postage 
stamp  in  1935.  Much  of  his  best  work  was 
in  the  form  of  book  design  and  illustration 
and  book  jackets.  Among  the  novels  he 
illustrated  with  conspicuous  success  were 
War  and  Peace,  Anna  Karenina,  Oliver 
Twist,  Jane  Eyre,  and  Wuthering  Heights. 

From  1941  to  1946  Freedman  was  an 
official  war  artist,  first  with  the  army  in 
France,  then  with  the  Royal  Navy  in  the 
battleship  Repulse,  on  Arctic  convoys  to 
Russia,  and  in  submarines.  His  painting 
of  the  beach  at  Arromanches  on  D-Day 
plus  20  (26  June  1944)  and  a  number  of 
other  works,  mainly  water-colours,  are  in 
the  Imperial  War  Museum. 

Freedman's  skill  in  lithography  and  his 
immense  knowledge  of  the  craft  did  much 
to  stimulate  among  other  artists  a  revival 
of  interest  in  this  medium.  He  allowed  no 
one  but  himself  to  put  his  designs  on  to  the 
lithographic  stone  and  personally  super- 


876 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Freeman 


vised  every  move  in  the  preparation  of  the 
designs  for  reproduction.  It  was  this  first- 
hand experience  of  the  Hthographic  pro- 
cess which  enabled  him  not  only  to  perfect 
his  technique,  but  to  experiment  with  new 
forms  and  uses  of  lithography.  Although 
his  draughtsmanship  was  erratic,  his  skill 
and  sensitivity  as  a  craftsman  were  re- 
markable and  it  is  upon  these  qualities 
rather  than  on  his  paintings  that  his 
reputation  rests.  His  personality  was  that 
of  a  true  original,  showing  marked  in- 
dependence of  mind,  coupled  with  a  keen 
enjoyment  of  dialectic,  eccentric  humour, 
and  a  degree  of  intellectual  curiosity  and 
natural  taste  rarely  found  in  someone 
emerging  from  such  a  background.  It  was 
one  of  the  chief  satisfactions  of  his  life 
that  he,  a  cockney  from  the  east  end, 
should  have  been  elected  in  1945  to 
membership  of  the  Athenaeum  Club.  In 
1946  he  was  appointed  C.B.E.  and  in  1949 
he  received  the  Royal  Society  of  Arts' 
highest  award,  that  of  a  royal  designer  for 
industry. 

In  1930  Freedman  married  Beatrice 
Claudia  Guercio,  a  Sicilian,  with  whom  he 
had  been  a  student  at  the  Royal  College  of 
Art.  His  portrait  by  Sir  William  Rothen- 
stein  is  in  the  Tate  Gallery.  He  died  in 
London  4  January  1958,  leaving  one  son. 

[The  Times,  6,  8,  9,  10,  and  17  January 
1958 ;  Introduction  by  Sir  Stephen  Tallents 
to  memorial  exhibition  at  the  Arts  Council, 
1958 ;  Jonathan  Mayne,  Barneit  Freedman, 
1948 ;  James  Laver,  'Two  Drawings'  in  Signa- 
ture, March  1936 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Nicolas  Bentley. 

FREEMAN,  Sir  WILFRID  RHODES, 

first  baronet  (1888-1953),  air  chief 
marshal,  was  born  in  London  18  July 
1888,  the  third  son  of  William  Robert 
Freeman,  stone  merchant,  and  his  wife, 
Annie  Farquharson  Carr  Dunn.  Educated 
at  Rugby  and  the  Royal  Military  College, 
Sandhurst,  he  was  gazetted  to  the  Man- 
chester Regiment  in  February  1908,  in 
which  he  became  captain  and  brevet- 
major.  He  learned  to  fly,  privately,  in 
France,  and  so  was  able  in  1913  to  obtain 
his  licence  as  a  pilot.  In  January  1914  he 
joined  the  Central  Flying  School  and  in 
April  was  transferred  to  the  Royal  Flying 
Corps  to  become  one  of  the  pioneers  of 
military  aviation. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  August  1914, 
Freeman  proceeded  to  France  with  the 
first  of  the  squadrons  of  the  Royal  Flying 
Corps  to  leave  England:  a  pilot  in  No.  2 
Squadron.  Only  a  month  later  he  barely 


escaped  capture  by  the  Germans  when  his 
aircraft,  a  B.E.2,  had  to  make  a  forced 
landing  through  structural  failure  behind 
the  enemy  positions.  After  two  days  of 
hiding  and  carefully  working  his  way 
through  what  were  later  to  become  the 
front  lines,  he  returned  safely  to  his 
squadron.  In  this  exploit  alone  he  set  an 
example  right  at  the  beginning  of  wartime 
flying  which  was  to  be  followed  by  many 
thousands  of  other  air  crews. 

Shortly  afterwards  Freeman  became 
a  flight  commander  in  No.  2  Squadron, 
and  for  his  flying  during  the  battle  of 
Neuve  Chapelle  in  March  1915  he  was 
awarded  the  M.C.,  one  of  the  first  of  those 
awarded  to  the  Royal  Flying  Corps.  Even 
then  he  was  showing  a  keen  interest  in 
the  uses  to  which  the  air  could  be  put 
in  a  more  technical  aspect  than  that  of 
merely  flying.  His  flight  in  No.  2  Squadron 
was  equipped  with  some  of  the  first  of 
the  wireless  equipment  used  in  the  air  on 
the  western  front.  He  was  also  beginning 
to  make  an  impression  on  all  those  with 
whom  he  worked  as  a  man  who  had  a 
charm  peculiarly  his  own.  He  was  devoted 
to  the  new  air  service,  and  in  it  he  found 
expression  for  the  pointed  and  shrewd 
sense  of  humour  for  which  he  later  became 
noted,  a  humour  which  could  strike  with 
vigour  but  which  was  never  misused. 

After  a  period  as  an  instructor  in 
England,  Freeman  was  sent  to  the  Middle 
East  to  command  a  squadron;  but  in 
December  1916  he  returned  to  France 
and  operations  on  the  western  front.  As  a 
lieutenant-colonel  he  was  in  command  of 
the  Tenth  (Army)  Wing  during  the  battle 
of  Arras  in  the  early  spring  of  1917  and  the 
third  battle  of  Ypres  later  that  year ;  and 
of  the  Ninth  (H.Q.)  Wing  during  the  battle 
of  Cambrai  and  the  March  retreat  of  1918. 
At  the  end  of  the  war  in  1918  he  was  in 
command  of  No.  2  (Training)  Group.  He 
was  appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  (1916), 
awarded  the  Legion  of  Honour,  and 
thrice  mentioned  in  dispatches.  He  was 
gazetted  to  the  Royal  Air  Force  on  its 
formation  on  1  April  1918  with  the  rank  of 
lieutenant-colonel  and  was  granted  a  per- 
manent commission  on  1  August  1919. 

When  the  R.A.F.  Staff  College  was 
established  in  1922  Freeman  was  ap- 
pointed an  instructor  with  the  rank  of 
group  captain,  and  later  he  became  assis- 
tant commandant.  In  1925-7  he  was  in 
command  of  the  Central  Flying  School  at 
Upavon,  and  in  1927  he  became  deputy 
director  of  operations  and  intelligence  at 
the  Air  Ministry.  In  1928-9  he  was  the 


377 


Freeman 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


commanding  officer  of  the  R.A.F.  Train- 
ing Base  at  Leuchars,  after  which  he  was 
chief  staff  officer,  Inland  Area  (1929-30). 
In  1930  he  went  back  to  the  Middle  East 
as  chief  staff  officer  of  the  Iraq  Command. 
For  three  years  (1930-33)  he  was  air 
officer  commanding,  Trans-Jordan  and 
Palestine,  after  which  he  returned  to 
England  and  from  1934  to  1936  was 
commandant  of  the  R.A.F.  Staff  College. 

In  1936  Freeman  embarked  upon  what 
was  to  become  the  most  successful  period 
of  his  Service  career,  and  during  it  he  made 
a  unique  contribution  to  the  history  of  the 
Royal  Air  Force  and  at  the  same  time 
rendered  the  greatest  service  to  his 
country.  He  became  in  that  year,  when 
the  long-delayed  expansion  of  the  Royal 
Air  Force  finally  got  under  way,  the 
member  of  the  Air  Council  responsible  for 
research  and  development  and  from  1938 
to  1940  for  production.  He  was  in  office 
during  the  whole  period  when  the  Royal 
Air  Force  developed  and  brought  into  use 
radar  and  the  eight-gun  fighters  which 
were  to  contribute  so  notably  to  the 
winning  of  the  Battle  of  Britain.  He  was 
promoted  to  the  rank  of  air  chief  marshal 
in  1940. 

Of  Freeman's  contribution  during  those 
critical  years,  it  was  said  by  Marshal  of 
the  Royal  Air  Force  Sir  John  Slessor  that 
'It  was  to  him,  more  than  any  other  man, 
that  the  nation  and  the  R.A.F.  owed  the 
fact  that  the  pilots  of  Fighter  Command 
never  ran  short  of  those  aircraft  whose 
names — Hurricane  and  Spitfire — are  now 
...  a  part  of  British  history  . . .'.  From  the 
manufacturers'  point  of  view  Lord  Hives 
of  Rolls-Royce  recorded  that  'It  was  the 
expansion  which  was  carried  out  under 
Wilfrid's  direction  in  1937-9  which 
enabled  the  Battle  of  Britain  to  be  won. 
Without  that  foresight  and  imagination, 
no  efforts  in  1940  would  have  yielded  any 
results.' 

In  addition  Freeman  nursed  along  the 
early  planning  for  the  production  of  the 
four-engined  bombers ;  and  he  was  directly 
responsible  for  the  acceptance  by  the 
Royal  Air  Force  of  the  famous  twin- 
engined  Mosquito  and  the  encouragement 
given  to  (Sir)  Frank  Whittle  in  the  early 
stages  of  the  production  of  his  jet  engine. 
Freeman  was  vice-chief  of  the  air  staff 
from  1940  to  1942,  after  which  he  retired 
from  the  Royal  Air  Force  and  became 
chief  executive  of  the  Ministry  of  Aircraft 
Production,  in  which  office  he  served  until 
the  end  of  the  war.  Appointed  C.B.  in 
1932,  he  was  promoted  K.C.B.  in  1937  and 


G.C.B.  in  1942,  and  created  a  baronet  in 
1945.  He  was  a  fellow  of  the  Royal  Aero- 
nautical Society. 

To  the  public  the  name  of  Wilfrid  Free- 
man was  little  known.  Personal  publicity 
he  shunned  like  the  plague.  But  in  the 
annals  of  the  Royal  Air  Force  his  name 
stands  alongside  those  of  Lord  Trenchard 
[q.v.]  and  Lord  Portal  as  one  of  the  great 
men  in  British  military  aviation.  He  was 
a  cultured,  civilized  man  with  a  warm  and 
human  understanding  leavened  with  a  re- 
markably alert  mind  and  an  insistence 
upon  quality  in  all  endeavour. 

He  married  in  1915  Gladys,  daughter  of 
John  Mews,  barrister,  by  whom  he  had 
a  daughter  and  a  son,  John  Keith  Noel 
(born  1923),  who  succeeded  his  father. 
The  marriage  was  dissolved  and  in  1985 
Freeman  married  Elizabeth,  daughter  of 
Ernest  Tatham  Richmond,  director  of 
antiquities  in  Palestine  (1927-37),  by 
whom  he  had  two  daughters.  He  died  in 
London  15  May  1953.  A  portrait  by  T.  C. 
Dugdale  is  in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Douglas  of  Kirtleside. 

FRENCH,  EVANGELINE  FRANCES 

(1869-1960),  missionary,  was  born  at 
Medea,  Algeria,  27  May  1869 ;  her  younger 
sister  FRANCESCA  LAW  FRENCH 
(1871-1960),  missionary,  was  born  at 
Bruges,  Belgium,  12  December  1871.  They 
were  the  daughters  of  first  cousins,  John 
Erington  and  Elizabeth  French.  Both  girls 
were  educated  at  the  secondary  school  in 
Geneva.  In  1893  after  two  years  of  training 
Evangeline  French  left  for  the  mission 
field  in  China,  where  some  years  later, 
after  the  death  of  their  mother,  Francesca 
joined  her.  Henceforth  their  lives  were 
inseparable  from  that  of  the  third  member 
of  the  trio,  Mildred  Cable,  in  whose  notice 
in  this  volume  will  be  found  details  of 
their  joint  career.  Evangeline  French  died 
8  July  1960  at  Shaftesbury,  Dorset,  and 
Francesca  French  on  2  August  1960  in 
London.  W.  J.  Platt. 

FRITSCH,  FELIX  EUGEN  (1879-1954), 
algologist,  was  born  26  April  1879  in 
Camden  Town,  London,  the  second  child 
of  Ernst  Theodor  Hermann  Fritsch,  head- 
master of  a  private  school  at  145  King 
Henry's  Road,  Hampstead,  and  his  wife, 
Josephine  Guignon.  He  was  educated  at 
Warwick  House  School,  Maida  Vale,  and 
graduated  B.Sc.  of  London  University  in 
1898.  Immediately  afterwards  he  went  for 
health  reasons  to  Munich  where  he  became 


378 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Fritsch 


an  assistant  under  Ludwig  Radlkofer  and 
obtained  his  D.Phil.  (1899).  He  was  much 
impressed  by  the  change  in  outlook  from 
the  morphology  and  stelar  anatomy 
dominating  botanical  thought  in  England 
to  the  awakening  ecological  and  physio- 
logical interests  on  the  Continent.  Return- 
ing to  this  country  in  1901  he  worked  for 
fifteen  months  in  the  Jodrell  Laboratory  at 
Kew  where  began  an  association  with  L.  A. 
Boodle  with  whom  he  translated  Sole- 
reder's  Systematic  Anatomy  of  Dicotyledons 
(1908).  Towards  the  end  of  1902  he  was 
appointed  to  an  assistant  lectureship  at 
University  College,  London,  where  F.  W. 
Oliver  and  his  assistant  (Sir)  A.  G.  Tansley 
[qq.v.]  did  much  to  further  Fritsch's 
developing  interest  in  ecology.  As  early  as 
1902  he  began  to  pubhsh  on  phytoplank- 
ton  and  periodicity  problems  which  re- 
mained special  interests  in  later  years. 

In  1905  Fritsch  took  up  further  lectur- 
ing work  at  Birkbeck  College,  obtained 
his  London  D.Sc,  and  began  his  long  col- 
laboration with  Florence  Rich.  In  1906  he 
became  assistant  professor  at  University 
College  and  in  the  next  year  took  charge 
also  of  the  newly  formed  botany  depart- 
ment at  East  London  (later  Queen  Mary) 
College  which  he  arduously  equipped 
single-handed  until  1911  when  he  obtained 
one  assistant  and  gave  up  his  work  at 
University  College. 

The  appointment  of  (Sir)  Edward 
Salisbury  as  his  assistant  lecturer  (1912- 
19)  led  to  a  collaboration  which  resulted  in 
five  widely  used  textbooks :  An  Introduc- 
tion to  the  Study  of  Plants  (1914),  Elemen- 
tary Studies  in  Plant  Life  (1915),  An 
Introduction  to  the  Structure  and  Reproduc- 
tion of  Plants  (1920),  Botany  for  Medical 
Students  (1921),  and  Plant  Form  and 
Function  (1928). 

In  1924  Fritsch  received  the  title  of 
university  professor.  In  1927  appeared  his 
revised  and  rewritten  edition  of  G.  S. 
West's  Treatise  of  the  British  Freshwater 
Algae.  In  the  same  year,  as  president  of 
the  botany  section  at  the  Leeds  meeting 
of  the  British  Association,  he  was  first  to 
emphasize  the  necessity  for  a  British 
freshwater  biological  station.  His  vigorous 
campaign  led  to  the  formation  of  the 
Freshwater  Biological  Association  (1929), 
of  the  council  of  which  he  was  chairman 
until  his  death,  and  to  the  foundation  of  his 
greatest  monument,  the  biological  station 
at  Wray  Castle.  He  was  elected  F.R.S. 
in  1932,  served  on  the  council  in  1938-9 
and  1944-6,  and  received  the  Darwin 
medal  in  1950.  In  1932  he  held  a  visit- 


ing professorship  to  Stanford  University, 
California;  in  1938  he  visited  India  and 
paid  a  second  visit  to  Ceylon  which  he  had 
first  visited  in  1903.  The  first  volume  of 
his  monumental  work  The  Structure  and 
Reproduction  of  the  Algae  appeared  in 
1935;  the  second  in  1945.  On  his  retire- 
ment from  his  chair  in  1948  he  was 
elected  a  fellow  of  Queen  Mary  College 
and  professor  emeritus  of  the  university, 
on  the  senate  of  which  he  served  in  1944-8 
and  from  which  he  received  an  honorary 
LL.D.  in  1952. 

Fritsch  owed  his  enormous  output, 
doubly  astonishing  in  one  of  such  small 
stature  and  frail  constitution,  to  con- 
tinuous industry  applied  with  a  perfec- 
tionist's sense  of  care  and  thoroughness 
and  born  of  a  conviction  of  the  absolute 
value  of  knowledge  and  work.  The  com- 
plete clarity  of  his  teaching  arose  also 
from  perfect  preparation  and  ponderously 
careful  formulation.  His  personality  was 
full  of  humour,  lovable,  genial,  friendly, 
and  unassuming  and  he  gave  its  fruits 
liberally  to  all.  In  consequence  of  his 
genius  for  committee  work  and  in  particu- 
lar for  chairmanship  much  of  his  time  was 
spent  at  meetings,  where  his  grasp,  sound 
judgement,  fairness,  unity  of  purpose,  and 
perhaps  above  all  his  diplomacy  were 
invaluable  and  unfailing. 

Apart  from  walking  and  gardening, 
Fritsch's  main  recreation  was  music.  His 
father  a  singer,  his  wife  a  pianist,  his  son 
a  cellist,  he  was  himself  a  violinist  and 
experienced  ensemble  player;  musical 
week-ends  were  a  regular  feature  at  his 
homes  near  Dorking  before  the  outbreak 
of  war  in  1939.  Thereafter  he  lived  in 
Cambridge  where  after  his  retirement,  as 
during  the  war  years,  he  was  given 
facilities  for  his  work  at  the  Botany  School 
where  he  had  initiated  the  national  type 
culture  collection  of  algae  and  protozoa. 
Here  and  on  numerous  committees  in 
London  and  elsewhere  he  remained  active 
and  even  contemplating  further  books  and 
advanced  lectures  right  up  to  his  last  ill- 
ness. He  was  president  of  the  Linnean 
Society  in  1949-52,  and  of  the  Inter- 
national Association  of  Limnology  and  the 
Institute  of  Biology  in  1953.  In  1954  he 
was  awarded  the  Linnean  gold  medal  but 
died  at  his  home  in  Cambridge  23  May, 
the  day  before  the  medal  was  to  have  been 
presented. 

In  1905  he  married  Hedwig,  daughter 
of  Max  Lasker,  a  German  business  man, 
and  had  one  son. 

A  portrait  by  F.  M.  Haines  is  in  the 


379 


Fritsch 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


possession  of  the  botany  department  at 
Queen  Mary  College. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
F.  Merlin  Haines. 

FRY,  CHARLES  BURGESS  (1872- 
1956),  sportsman,  was  born  at  Croydon, 
Surrey,  25  April  1872,  the  eldest  child  of 
Lewis  John  Fry,  a  civil  servant  who  be- 
came clerk  of  accounts  at  New  Scotland 
Yard,  and  his  wife,  Constance  Isabella 
White.  He  entered  Repton  School  as  an 
exhibitioner  in  September  1885  and  in  his 
six  years  there  his  remarkable  endowment 
of  body,  mind,  and  personality  dominated 
his  generation.  He  was  four  years  in  the 
cricket  eleven,  being  captain  in  his  last 
two;  he  also  captained  the  school  in  his 
third  year  in  the  football  team,  and  twice 
won  the  individual  athletic  prize.  Before 
he  left  Repton  he  had  been  selected  to 
play  for  the  Casuals  in  the  F.A.  Cup  and  in 
the  August  after  leaving  school  in  1891  he 
played  one  match  for  Surrey.  Yet  there 
was  never  any  question  of  games  mono- 
polizing his  interest;  he  enjoyed  the 
classics,  worked  hard,  and  had  his  reward 
in  being  placed  first  on  the  scholarship  roll 
at  Wadham  College,  Oxford,  in  December 
1890,  senior  to  F.  E.  Smith  (later  the  Earl 
of  Birkenhead,  q.v.).  At  Oxford  he  more 
than  fulfilled  the  promise  of  his  Repton 
days;  few  men  can  more  quickly  or  de- 
cisively have  established  themselves  as  an 
outstanding  figure  in  university  life.  In  his 
first  term  he  won  his  blue  for  association 
football,  and  that  winter  gained  a  full 
international  cap  for  England  against 
a  touring  side  from  Canada.  In  April  1892 
he  won  the  long  jump  against  Cambridge 
with  23  feet  5  inches,  an  English  amateur 
record.  Two  centuries  in  trial  games  and 
another  against  Somerset  secured  him  his 
third  blue  as  a  freshman. 

For  three  more  years  he  represented 
Oxford  at  cricket,  football,  and  athletics, 
and  was  captain  of  all  three  in  1894  when 
he  made  a  century  against  Cambridge.  In 
1893  he  finished  equal  first  in  the  hundred 
yards  and  won  the  long  jump  against 
Cambridge;  earUer  in  the  month  he  had 
tied  the  world's  record  long  jump  of  C.  S. 
Reber  of  America  with  23  feet  6|  inches. 
In  association  football  he  continued  for 
some  years  to  be  an  automatic  choice  for 
the  great  Corinthian  sides  of  that  period 
and  in  1901  he  won  another  full  inter- 
national cap  against  Ireland.  A  year  later 
he  achieved  the  astonishing  double  of 
playing  for  Southampton  in  the  final  of 
the  F.A.  Cup  on  a  Saturday  and  making 


82  for  London  Coimty  against  Surrey  at 
the  Oval  on  the  following  Monday.  Only 
an  injury  in  the  last  trial  fixture  had  pre- 
vented him  from  gaining  a  fourth  blue  as 
a  wing  three-quarter  in  rugby  football. 

After  obtaining  a  first  class  in  classical 
honour  moderations  (1893)  and  a  fourth 
class  in  liter ae  humaniores  (1895),  Fry  was 
for  a  time  (1896-8)  on  the  staff  at  Charter- 
house School.  But  he  soon  found  in  sport- 
ing journalism  a  field  in  which  he  could 
enjoy  writing  and  at  the  same  time  have 
more  leisure  to  play  first-class  cricket.  He 
first  played  for  Sussex  in  1894  but  it  was 
not  until  he  left  Charterhouse  that  he  was 
able  to  play  throughout  the  summer, 
when  he  at  once  established  himself  as 
one  of  the  most  resolute  and  effective 
batsmen  in  the  country.  In  1899  he  was 
picked  to  open  the  innings  for  England 
against  the  Australians  at  Nottingham; 
two  years  later  he  had  his  greatest  season 
with  the  bat,  scoring  3,147  runs  with  an 
average  of  78  and  making  13  centuries,  6 
of  them  in  succession.  In  four  other  years 
he  headed  the  English  batting  averages, 
the  last  time  in  1912,  when  he  was  playing 
for  Hampshire,  to  which  county  he  had 
migrated  in  1909.  His  aggregate  in  first- 
class  cricket  was  30,886  runs  with  an 
average  of  over  50,  and  he  made  in  all 
94  centuries.  Of  these,  two  were  in  test 
matches:  144  against  the  Australians  in 
1905;  and  129  on  a  difficult,  turning 
wicket  against  the  great  South  African 
googly  bowlers  in  1907.  Perhaps  the  most 
memorable  of  all  his  innings  was  his  232 
not  out,  when  in  a  wonderful  partnership 
with  A.  C.  MacLaren  [q.v.]  he  rescued  the 
Gentlemen  from  an  apparently  hopeless 
position  against  the  Players  at  Lord's  in 
1903.  In  1912  he  captained  the  English 
team  which  defeated  both  Australia 
and  South  Africa  in  the  only  triangular 
tournament  which  has  ever  been  played. 
Even  as  late  as  1921,  when  in  his  fiftieth 
year,  he  was  playing  so  well  in  occasional 
matches  for  Hampshire  as  to  be  invited 
again  to  represent  England  against 
Australia;  but  an  injury  to  a  finger  pre- 
vented his  accepting.  Nor  was  he  ever  able 
to  visit  Australia  as  a  cricketer. 

In  his  school  and  university  days  Fry 
appeared  a  batsman  of  studied,  even 
slightly  laboured,  technique,  although 
noteworthy  already  for  his  mastery  of 
back-play,  rare  among  amateurs  of  that 
generation.  By  the  turn  of  the  century 
he  had  reinforced  his  always  vigilant  and 
resourceful  defence  by  an  increasing  reper- 
toire of  strokes,  above  all  of  the  drives, 


380 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Fry,  S.  M. 


and  had  become  a  player  of  commanding 
personality  and  stature.  The  certainty  of 
his  driving,  especially  past  or  over  the 
bowler  and  mid-on,  was  only  equalled  by 
its  power ;  his  concentration  never  relaxed, 
his  physical  stamina  never  weakened.  He 
played  always  and  rigorously  within  self- 
imposed  limitations  but  these  were  wide 
enough  to  dominate  or  at  least  to  defy  the 
best  of  a  great  generation  of  bowlers.  His 
great  friend  and  partner  in  so  many 
Sussex  triumphs,  Prince  Ranjitsinhji 
[q.v.],  gave  it  as  his  considered  opinion 
that  on  all  wickets  he  was  the  greatest 
batsman  of  his  time.  Certainly  no  better 
mind  has  ever  or  more  assiduously  applied 
itself  to  the  game,  and  his  studies  of  its 
technique  in  Great  Batsmen  (with  George 
W.  Beldam,  1905),  Great  Bowlers  and 
Fielders  (with  George  W.  Beldam,  1906), 
and  Batsmanship  (1912)  are  still  unrivalled 
in  authoritative  analysis.  A  fine  out- 
fielder, he  was  in  the  nineties  a  good 
enough  bowler  to  take  wickets  for  the 
Gentlemen,  although  his  action  at  times 
came  under  suspicion,  and  indeed  censure. 
As  a  captain,  he  knew  his  own  mind,  was 
a  shrewd  tactician,  and  never  left  any 
doubt  who  was  in  conmiand. 

Fry  was  very  much  more  than  an 
exceptionally  gifted  all-round  athlete.  He 
was  a  great  personality  in  his  own  right: 
handsome  in  an  Olympian  mould,  with 
a  well-stocked,  active,  and  original  mind, 
and  the  instinctive  authority  in  any  com- 
pany of  one  who  always  knew  where  he 
was  going  and  why  it  was  worth  while  to 
go  there.  In  all  that  he  wrote,  whether  as 
a  sporting  journalist  in  the  daily  press,  as 
athletic  editor  of  the  boys'  monthly  maga- 
zine the  Captain,  or  in  a  wider  field  as 
editor  and  director  of  Fry's  Magazine^  the 
freshness  of  his  approach  and  his  lively 
style  challenged  attention. 

In  1920  Fry  went  with  Ranjitsinhji  as 
a  substitute  delegate  on  the  Indian  delega- 
tion to  the  League  of  Nations  at  Geneva, 
and  he  later  spent  some  months  as  a  mem- 
ber of  the  prince's  secretariat  at  Nawana- 
gar.  In  1928  he  was  in  India  again  as 
assistant  to  Sir  Leslie  Scott  [q.v.]  who  had 
been  briefed  for  the  Indian  princes  to 
prepare  their  case  before  the  statutory 
commission.  In  the  meantime  he  had 
stood  three  times  (1921-4)  without  suc- 
cess as  a  Liberal  candidate  for  Parliament. 
It  was,  however,  as  the  director  (1908- 
50)  of  the  training-ship  Mercury  on  the 
Hamble  river  that  he  found  the  central 
interest  of  his  fife  and  made  his  greatest 
coatribution  to  the  lives  of  others.  There, 


with  the  able  and  tireless  help  of  his  wife, 
he  devoted  himself  to  turning  out  genera- 
tion after  generation  of  boys  destined  for 
the  Royal  and  Merchant  navies ;  in  recog- 
nition of  this  service  he  was  made  an 
honorary  captain  in  the  Royal  Naval 
Reserve.  His  autobiography.  Life  Worth 
Living  (1939),  vividly  reflects  not  only  his 
own  outlook  on  life  and  the  values  for 
which  he  stood,  but  assesses  with  authority 
the  personalities  and  standards  of  the 
contemporary  athletic  world. 

In  1898  Fry  married  Beatrice  Holme 
(died  1946),  daughter  of  Arthur  Sumner ; 
they  had  one  son  and  two  daughters. 
Fry  died  in  London  7  September  1956. 
A  lithograph  by  (Sir)  William  Rothen- 
stein  was  reproduced  in  Oxford  Characters 
(1896). 

[C.  B.  Fry,  Life  Worth  Liiring,  1939; 
Wisden's  Cricketers'  Almanack,  1957;  A. 
Wallis  Myers,  C.  B.  Fry,  1912  ;  Sir  C.  M.  Bowra, 
Memories,  1966;  private  information;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  H.  S.  Altham. 

FRY,  SARA  MARGERY  (1874-1958), 
reformer,  eighth  child  and  sixth  daughter 
of  (Sir)  Edward  Fry  [q.v.]  and  his  wife, 
Mariabella,  daughter  of  John  Hodgkin 
[q.v.],  was  born  at  Highgate  11  March 
1874.  Educated  at  home  until  she  was 
seventeen,  she  then  spent  a  year  at  Miss 
Lawrence's  boarding  school  (later  Roe- 
dean)  at  Brighton.  In  1892  Fry  retired 
from  the  bench  and  the  family  moved  to 
Failand  in  Somerset.  Encouraged  by  her 
brother,  Roger  Fry  [q.v.],  Margery  hoped 
initially  to  go  to  Newnham,  but  her 
Quaker  parents  regarded  Cambridge  with 
suspicion  as  a  breeding-ground  of  agnos- 
tics. (So,  though  she  later  came  to  accept 
an  agnostic  position,  she  reached  it  by 
another  route.)  Eventually  she  succeeded 
in  obtaining  permission  to  sit  the  entrance 
examination  for  Somerville  College,  Ox- 
ford, and  went  up  to  read  mathematics  in 
1894,  staying  until  1897,  but  taking  no 
examinations.  Somerville  friendships,  with 
Eleanor  Rathbone  [q.v.]  and  Dorothea 
Scott  among  others,  remained  important 
through  her  life.  For  the  next  eighteen 
months  she  returned  to  the  duties  of  a 
daughter  at  home.  The  opportunity  for  an 
active  and  independent  life  came  with  the 
unexpected  offer  of  the  librarianship  at 
Somerville.  There  she  spent  five  years  from 
1899,  combining  the  development  and  re- 
housing of  the  college  library  with  that 
understanding  concern  for  the  young  and 
their  problems  which  remained  one  of  her 
outstanding  qualities.  >-^—i-U.  *;  M  ^^^  -'-^ 


881 


Fry,  S.  M. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Her  next  post  gave  her  scope  to  extend 
this  interest  in  a  new  setting.  Birmingham 
University  had  been  granted  its  charter  in 
1900,  and  in  1904  she  was  appointed  to 
the  wardenship  of  a  hall  of  residence  for 
women  students  in  Hagley  Road,  Edg- 
baston.  Her  functions  were  'the  super- 
intendence of  housekeeping  and  the 
maintenance  of  discipline' :  the  latter  she 
interpreted  with  her  customary  liberalism, 
reducing  rules  to  a  minimum  and  allowing 
students  to  invite  their  men  friends  to 
dances.  In  1908  the  hostel  moved  into  new 
quarters  at  University  House,  for  which 
she  had  worked  hard,  and  where  she  used 
all  the  resources  available  to  her — pic- 
tures, furnishings,  music,  play-acting,  wit, 
and  friendship — to  create  a  living  com- 
munity. On  the  initiative  of  Charles 
Beale,  the  vice-chancellor,  she  was  made 
a  member  of  the  university  council. 
During  this  period  the  range  of  causes  in 
which  she  was  interested,  and  of  com- 
mittees on  which  she  served,  became 
increasingly  wide — the  Staffordshire  edu- 
cation committee,  the  county  insurance 
committee  (set  up  under  the  National 
Insurance  Act),  the  county  sub-committee 
on  mental  deficiency.  Practical  experience 
of  the  problems  of  social  reform  sharpened 
her  tendency  towards  radicalism.  'Brum- 
magem', she  wrote,  'is  making  a  first-rate 
democrat  of  me.'  Shortly  before  the  out- 
break of  war  in  1914  she  became  financially 
independent  through  a  legacy  from  her 
uncle,  Joseph  Storrs  Fry  [q.v.],  and  in  the 
simimer  of  1914  she  resigned  her  post.  Her 
Quaker  background  and  conscience  com- 
bined with  her  experience  of  social  work 
made  it  natural  that  early  in  the  war  she 
should  be  drawn,  with  her  younger  sister 
Ruth,  into  work  with  the  Friends'  War 
Victims  Relief  Committee,  first  in  the 
Marne  and  Meuse  area,  later  in  the  whole 
of  France.  From  early  1915  until  the  end 
of  1917  she  remained  based  on  Sermaize, 
with  periodic  journeys  to  other  parts  of 
France,  dealing  with  the  whole  range  of 
problems  of  those  whose  lives  had  been 
disrupted  by  the  war,  from  the  reconstruc- 
tion of  agriculture  to  the  teaching  of 
embroidery. 

Back  in  England  in  1918  Margery  Fry 
was  in  some  uncertainty  where  her  next 
work  should  lie,  although  with  a  sense  of 
continuing  commitment  to  education  in 
the  widest  sense.  Three  events  particu- 
larly determined  the  subsequent  direction 
of  her  life  and  activities.  At  the  beginning 
of  1919  she  moved  to  London  and  set  up 
house  at  7  Dalmeny  Avenue,  overlooking 


HoUoway  Prison,  with  her  brother  Roger 
and  his  children.  She  thus  became  more 
deeply  involved  in  his  world,  his  relation- 
ships with  artists  and  writers  in  parti- 
cular. In  May  1919  she  was  invited  to 
become  a  member  of  the  newly  established 
University  Grants  Committee,  on  which 
she  continued  to  serve  until  1948,  devoting 
much  of  her  time  and  energies  to  visiting 
universities  and  gaining  first-hand  know- 
ledge of  their  problems.  At  the  end  of  1918 
she  had  been  persuaded  by  Stephen  and 
Rosa  Hobhouse  to  accept  the  secretary- 
ship of  the  Penal  Reform  League  which 
in  1921  amalgamated  with  the  Howard 
Association  to  form  the  Howard  League 
for  Penal  Reform,  housed  at  this  period  in 
the  Frys'  front  sitting-room.  From  then  on 
the  Howard  League,  which  she  served  as 
secretary  until  1926  and  later  as  chairman 
and  vice-chairman,  remained  the  most 
important  focus  of  her  work.  Her  under- 
standing of  the  problems  of  penal  reform 
was  increased  by  her  appointment  in  1921 
as  one  of  the  first  women  magistrates  and 
in  1922  as  the  first  education  adviser  to 
Holloway.  In  her  efforts  to  improve  prison 
conditions  one  of  the  many  developments 
which  she  initiated  was  to  bring  Marion 
Richardson  in  to  teach  painting  to  young 
prisoners.  In  practice  her  two  main  pre- 
occupations became  closely  related :  visits 
to  universities  were  combined  with  visits 
to  prisons;  it  was  sometimes  difficult  to 
remember,  she  once  remarked,  whether 
students  were  in  for  crimes  or  prisoners  in 
for  examinations. 

In  1926,  on  the  retirement  of  (Dame) 
Emily  Penrose  [q.v.],  Margery  Fry  some- 
what reluctantly  accepted  the  principal- 
ship  of  Somerville.  In  spite  of  her  strong 
continuing  affection  for  the  college,  on 
whose  council  she  had  served  since  1904, 
she  was  genuinely  doubtful  about  her 
suitabihty,  as  a  'non-academic'  woman, 
for  the  post  and  the  limitations  on  her 
independence  which  it  would  involve.  But, 
though  finding  Oxford  in  many  ways 
uncongenial  and  obscurantist,  she  enjoyed 
this  new  opportunity  for  exercising  her 
remarkable  talent  for  understanding,  and 
unobtrusively  advising,  the  young  and 
opening  their  minds  to  her  whole  wide 
range  of  interests,  from  penal  reform  to 
birdwatching.  Although  never  deeply 
involved  in  university  politics,  she  made 
occasional  notable  incursions  which  left 
their  mark,  as  when  in  1927  she  spoke  in 
Congregation  with  Cyril  Bailey  [q.v.]  in 
an  xmsuccessful  effort  to  resist  the  imposi- 
tion of  a  numerus  clausus  on  the  women's 


382 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Fry,  S.  M. 


colleges.  Students  who  came  in  contact 
with  her  were  especially  impressed  by  the 
fact  that  'she  knew  so  much  about  wicked- 
ness, and  yet  could  make  one  believe  and 
work  for  happy  and  rational  solutions  of 
the  most  tangled  moral  and  political 
problems'.  She  continued  to  work  on  these 
problems — as  a  member  of  the  Street 
Offences  Committee  (concerned  with 
prostitution  and  soliciting,  but  doomed  by 
its  composition)  and  the  Young  Offenders' 
Committee  through  which  she  tried  to 
secure  an  adequate  probation  service  and 
to  get  probation  extended  to  cover  a  much 
wider  range  of  offences.  But  above  all  she 
was  deeply  involved,  in  association  with 
Roy  Calvert,  D.  N.  Pritt,  and  others,  in  the 
campaign  for  the  abolition  of  capital 
punishment,  presenting  evidence  on  be- 
half of  the  Howard  League  to  the  abortive 
select  committee  set  up  by  J.  R.  Clynes 
[q.v.]  as  home  secretary  in  1929. 

Margery  Fry  had  never  intended  to 
spend  more  than  about  five  years  at 
Somerville.  Soon  after  her  retirement  in 
1931  she  established  a  new  base  in  Lon- 
don, at  48  Clarendon  Road,  Holland  Park, 
'absolutely  on  the  borderline  of  slum  and 
respectability',  and  filled  it  with  paintings 
and  objects  of  beauty  collected  over  the 
years.  For  the  remainder  of  her  life  this 
was  her  home,  and  a  home  for  the  home- 
less and  wanderers  of  many  countries,  as 
well  as  a  meeting-place  for  radicals  and 
reformers  with  different  interests  and 
shades  of  opinion.  In  the  thirties  the 
worsening  world  situation  and  her  own 
growing  international  reputation  involved 
her  in  a  new  range  of  activities,  supple- 
menting but  not  displacing  the  old.  In 
1983,  shortly  after  the  Japanese  invasion 
of  Manchuria,  the  Universities  China  Com- 
mittee invited  her  to  make  a  lecture  tour 
of  Chinese  universities.  Her  interest  in 
the  great  transformations  taking  place  in 
Chinese  society,  as  well  as  in  its  ancient 
civilization,  remained  intense,  expressed 
both  through  her  friendships  with  Chinese 
teachers  and  students  and  her  work  with 
the  China  Campaign  Committee,  for  which 
she  lectured  and  spoke  at  meetings 
throughout  Britain.  Her  understanding  of 
Chinese  politics  made  her  particularly  con- 
cerned to  ensure  that  aid  from  Britain 
reached  the  Chinese  Communists  and  was 
not  directed  solely  to  the  Kuomintang 
Government.  During  this  period  also  she 
became  increasingly  occupied  with  the 
problems  of  penal  reform  in  an  international 
setting,  particularly  in  societies  where  con- 
ditions were  worst  and  factual  information 


most  defective.  She  visited  Geneva  in  1935 
to  try  to  induce  the  League  of  Nations  to 
adopt  a  Convention  which  would  lay  down 
minimum  standard  rules  for  the  treat- 
ment of  prisoners.  In  1936  she  became 
a  member  of  the  Colonial  Office's  newly 
established  advisory  committee  on  penal 
reform,  and  in  1987  she  took  part  in 
a  Howard  League  mission  to  study  the 
prisons  and  penal  systems  of  South- 
Eastern  Europe.  In  Britain  during  the  late 
thirties  her  political  sympathies  were  with 
those  of  the  non-Communist  Left  who 
were  working  for  some  form  of  Popular 
Front.  She  consequently  resigned  her 
membership  of  the  Labour  Party  (which 
she  had  joined  in  1918)  when  early  in 
1989  its  executive  expelled  Sir  Stafford 
Cripps  [q.v.]  for  advocating  such  a  policy. 
One  specific  contribution  which  she  made 
at  this  time  to  the  effort  to  increase 
the  effectiveness  of  radical  intellectuals 
was  her  sponsorship  of  the  serious  but 
short-Uved  organization,  For  Intellectual 
Liberty. 

When  war  began  in  1939  Margery  Fry 
was  already  sixty-five,  no  longer  able,  as 
in  1914,  to  move  into  some  entirely  dif- 
ferent field  of  work.  She  carried  on  with 
her  existing  activities  as  far  as  practicable, 
and  took  on  new  commitments  where  this 
seemed  likely  to  be  useful.  She  continued 
to  serve  as  a  magistrate;  worked  on  her 
Clarke  Hall  lecture.  The  Ancestral  Child 
(never  dehvered,  but  published  in  1940) ; 
visited  France  early  in  1940  to  investigate 
the  problem  of  intellectual  refugees; 
experienced  the  blitz;  took  part  in  a 
study  of  evacuation  and  evacuees ;  served, 
unwillingly,  on  the  government  commit- 
tee on  non-enemy  interned  aliens  (those 
imprisoned  under  '18B');  wrote  with 
Champion  B.  Russell  an  'A.B.C.  for 
Juvenile  Magistrates'  (published  in  1942 
as  A  Note  Book  for  the  Children's  Court), 
regarding  'rational  occupation',  for  her- 
self as  for  prisoners,  as  the  best  remedy 
for  misery.  During  the  thirties  she  had 
discovered  that  she  enjoyed  broadcasting 
and  was  good  at  it,  and  had  served  for 
a  time  as  a  governor  of  the  B.B.C.  She 
took  part  in  the  earliest  series  of  'Any 
Questions  ?'  and  in  1942  became  a  member 
of  the  Brains  Trust.  Although  much  dis- 
tressed by  the  prospect  of  leaving  her  sis- 
ters for  so  long  a  period,  she  spent  the 
year  1942-3  in  the  United  States,  speaking 
on  penal  questions,  visiting  universities 
and  prisons. 

During  the  dozen  years  of  life  which 
remained    after   the    war    Margery    Fry 


383 


Fry,  S.  M. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


retained  a  vigorous  interest  in  the  causes 
with  which  she  had  become  identified, 
withdrawing  somewhat  from  active  cam- 
paigning, but  continuing  to  talk,  write, 
and  educate  with  all  her  old  wit  and 
understanding.  Her  central  ideas  on  penal 
reform  were  set  out  in  the  pamphlet.  The 
Future  Treatment  of  the  Adult  Offender 
(1944).  These  were  further  developed  in 
her  one  full-length  book,  Arms  of  the  Law 
(1951),  in  which  she  put  together  the 
material  which  she  had  collected  over  the 
years  on  the  development  of  crime  and 
punishment  in  human  society  and  her 
proposals  for  futiu^e  advance.  Some  of  the 
many  objectives  for  which  she  had  worked, 
notably  the  aboUtion  of  the  death  penalty, 
were  partially  realized  in  her  Hfetime. 
But  half-measures,  where  she  knew  what 
ought  to  be  done,  left  her  unsatisfied.  And 
at  eighty  she  still  had  the  freshness  of 
mind  to  move  into  new  fields  and  confront 
new  problems :  the  importance  of  develop- 
ing criminology  and  penology  as  academic 
studies ;  the  need  to  work  out  a  national 
scheme  of  compensation  for  the  victims  of 
violence ;  the  problems  of  the  aged,  dis- 
cussed in  her  address,  'Old  Age  Looks  at 
Itself  (1955),  to  the  International  Associa- 
tion of  Gerontology.  But,  though  any 
account  of  Margery  Fry's  life  is  bound  to 
pay  attention  to  causes,  persons  mattered 
a  great  deal  more  to  her  than  causes — 
or  rather,  causes  were  important  because 
they  were  ways  of  trying  to  increase  the 
happiness  and  diminish  the  misery  of 
individual  people.  Deeply  disliking  all 
forms  of  dogmatism,  in  ethics  and  poUtics 
as  well  as  religion,  she  believed  in  working 
for  a  world  in  which  the  sort  of  pleasures 
she  valued  most — splaying  the  flute,  paint- 
ing pictures,  walking  in  the  woods  of 
Provence,  enjoying  the  conversation  of 
friends — could  be  made  as  widely  avail- 
able as  possible.  She  died  at  her  home  in 
Clarendon  Road,  where  she  could  watch 
the  birds  in  the  trees  at  the  back,  21 
April  1958. 

A  portrait  by  Roger  Fry  is  at  Somer- 
ville  College,  Oxford. 

[Enid  Huws  Jones,  Margery  Fry,  1966 ;  The 
Times,  22,  23,  24,  25,  26,  and  30  April  1958 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Thomas  Hodgkin. 

FURSE,  Dame  KATHARINE  (1875- 
1952),  pioneer  Service  woman,  was  born 
at  Chfton,  Bristol,  23  November  1875, 
the  fourth  daughter  of  John  Addington 
Symonds  [q.v.]  and  his  wife,  Janet 
Catherine,  sister  of  Marianne  North  [q.v.] 


and  daughter  of  Frederick  North,  squire 
of  Rougham,  Norfolk,  and  Liberal  mem- 
ber of  Parliament  for  Hastings.  Owing  to 
her  father's  ill  health  Katharine  spent 
most  of  her  youth  at  Davos,  Switzerland, 
with  frequent  visits  to  Italy.  She  grew  up 
the  youngest  of  a  loving  and  gifted  family, 
in  surroundings  ideally  suited  to  her 
enterprising  and  energetic  nature,  and  in 
close  contact  with  many  famous  literary 
and  artistic  figures.  Her  father's  sister 
had  married  T.  H.  Green  [q.v.],  the  Henry 
Sidgwicks  and  Benjamin  Jowett  [qq.v.] 
were  regular  summer  visitors,  and  her  two 
surviving  sisters  were  later  to  marry 
Walter  Leaf  and  W.  W.  Vaughan  [qq.v.]. 
Educated  by  governesses,  with  somewhat 
spasmodic  additions  by  her  father,  she 
owed  to  her  mother  her  intimate  know- 
ledge of  flowers  and  she  developed  natural 
artistic  gifts  in  various  forms  of  handi- 
craft, including  exquisite  embroidery 
and  wood  carving.  Her  dynamic  charac- 
ter was  evident  even  from  babyhood 
and  she  grew  tall  and  strong,  with  a 
beauty  of  the  Venus  de  Milo  type.  While 
still  a  child  she  was  winning  'Ladies* 
tobogganing  events  in  competition  with 
adults. 

An  inherited  tradition  of  social  service 
showed  itself  early  and  she  was  a  frequent 
visitor  of  the  sick  in  Davos.  A  few  months 
at  a  school  in  Lausanne,  abruptly  ter- 
minated by  the  death  of  her  father,  gave 
her  lessons  in  first  aid  and  home  nursing 
which  she  afterwards  followed  up  by 
studying  massage  in  London.  She  had 
decided  to  train  as  a  hospital  nurse  when 
she  met  C.  W.  Furse  [q.v.],  the  painter. 
They  were  married  in  1900  but  he  died 
four  years  later,  leaving  her  with  two  sons, 
both  of  whom  entered  the  navy. 

Soon  after  the  first  Red  Cross  Voluntary 
Aid  Detachments  attached  to  the  Terri* 
torial  Army  were  formed  in  1909  Katharine 
Furse  enrolled,  and  she  joined  enthusiasti- 
caUy  in  training,  camps,  and  studies.  In 
September  1914  she  was  sent  to  France 
by  (Sir)  Arthiu*  Stanley  [q.v.]  with  other 
representatives  for  preUminary  discus- 
sions, and  the  following  month  she  headed 
the  first  official  V.A.D.  unit  (twenty  in 
number)  to  be  sent  abroad.  They  were 
instructed  to  install  rest  stations  on  the 
lines  of  communication,  first  at  Boulogne. 
Many  thousands  of  wounded  meii  were 
ministered  to  before  the  end  of  1914  when 
Katharine  Furse  was  recalled  to  London 
to  start  a  V.A.D.  Department.  The 
organization  was  gradually  built  up  into 
an  enormous  service  whose  members  were 


884 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Fyfe 


invaluable  assistants  in  hospitals  at  home 
and  abroad.  In  1916  Katharine  Furse  was 
decorated  with  the  Royal  Red  Cross ;  a 
joint  committee  was  set  up  to  co-ordinate 
the  V.A.D.  work  of  the  British  Red  Cross 
Society  and  the  Order  of  St.  John  of 
Jerusalem  and  Katharine  Furse  was  ap- 
pointed commandant-in-chief,  becoming 
a  lady  of  grace  of  the  Order.  In  1917  she 
was  one  of  five  women  appointed  Dame 
Grand  Cross  in  the  newly  created  Order  of 
the  British  Empire. 

But  Dame  Katharine  had  not  for  some 
time  been  happy  in  her  work.  She  had 
not  the  power  to  institute  various  reforms 
which  she  felt  necessary,  both  in  ad- 
ministration and  in  conditions  of  work.  In 
November  1917  she  and  a  number  of  her 
colleagues  resigned.  Several  posts  were 
immediately  offered  to  her,  and  in  the 
same  month  she  became  director,  with 
the  equivalent  rank  of  rear-admiral,  of  a 
new  organization,  the  Women's  Royal 
Naval  Service.  Although  the  new  Service 
saw  only  one  year  of  war  and  never  ex- 
ceeded some  seven  thousand  in  number 
her  creation  earned  a  fine  reputation  and 
before  it  was  disbanded  had  established 
a  tradition — of  which  the  officers'  tricorn 
hat  was  not  the  least  important  detail — 
for  the  vast  Service  which  was  to  be 
formed  twenty  years  later.  . 

After  the  war  Dame  Katharine  joined 
the  travel  agency  of  Sir  Henry  Lunn 
[q.v.],  working  mainly  in  Switzerland 
where  in  winter  she  was  a  ski-ing  repre- 
sentative of  the  Ski  Club  of  Great  Britain. 
Although  in  her  youth  she  had  been  one  of 
the  first  to  experiment  with  ski,  in  com- 
pany with  Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle  [q.v.], 
it  was  not  until  after  the  war  that  she  took 
it  up  seriously.  She  was  the  second  British 
woman  to  be  awarded  the  gold  badge  for 
passing  the  first-class  ski-running  test  and 
the  second  president  of  the  Ladies'  Ski 
Club.  She  also  took  up  Girl  Guide  work 
and  at  her  suggestion  the  Association  of 
Wrens,  of  which  she  was  president, 
affiliated  to  the  Girl  Guides  Association, 
Dame  Katharine  becoming  head  of  the 
Sea  Guides,  later  known  as  Sea  Rangers. 
She  was  also  for  ten  years  director  of  the 
World  Association  of  Girl  Guides  and  Girl 
Scouts.  She  died  in  London  25  November 
1952.  A  portrait  by  her  husband,  'Diana 
of  the  Uplands',  is  in  the  Tate  Gallery. 
A  portrait  in  W.R.N.S.  uniform  by 
Marcelle  Morley  hangs  in  Furse  House, 
W.R.N.S.  quarters  in  London;  another 
by  Glyn  Philpot  is  in  the  Imperial  War 
Museum. 


[The  Times,  26  November  1952;  Dame 
Katharine  Furse,  Hearts  and  Pomegranates, 
1940;  Dame  Vera  Laughton  Mathews,  Blue 
Tapestry,  1948;  British  SH  Year  Book,  1953; 
personal  knowledge.] 

Vera  Laughton  Mathews. 


FYFE,  HENRY  HAMILTON  (1869- 
1951),  writer,  was  born  in  London  28 
September  1869,  the  eldest  son  of  James 
Hamilton  Fyfe,  barrister,  by  his  wife, 
Mary  Elizabeth  Jonas.  His  father  had  at 
one  time  been  parliamentary  correspon- 
dent of  The  Times,  and  after  education  at 
Fettes  Hamilton  Fyfe  followed  his  father 
on  its  staff.  From  reporting  he  passed  to 
sub-editing,  and  in  due  course  was  made 
secretary  to  the  editor,  G.  E.  Buckle 
[q.v.].  In  1902  he  moved  to  the  Morning 
Advertiser,  the  old-established  journal  of 
the  Licensed  Victuallers'  Association,  with 
the  task  of  editing  and  refashioning  the 
paper. 

Alfred  Harmsworth  [q.v.],  later  to  be- 
come Lord  Northcliffe,  was  so  much  im- 
pressed by  Fyfe's  innovations  that  he 
invited  him  to  join  his  staff.  From  1903  to 
1907  Fyfe  edited  the  Daily  Mirror;  then 
moved  as  special  correspondent  (1907-18) 
to  the  Daily  Mail,  where  he  became  one  of 
a  very  able  group.  He  reported  Bleriot's 
Channel  flight  in  1909  and  the  exciting  air 
race  from  London  to  Manchester  between 
Claude  Grahame-White  [q.v.]  and  Louis 
Paulhan  in  1910.  He  covered  the  events  of 
1911  in  Russia,  and  in  1913  went  out  to 
Mexico  for  The  Times  (then  under  North- 
cUffe's  control),  to  report  the  Carranza 
revolution.  Meanwhile  trouble  was  brew- 
ing in  Ulster  and  Fyfe  moved  there  direct 
from  Mexico,  then  straight  out  to  France 
on  the  outbreak  of  war  in  August  1914. 
His  telegram  to  the  Daily  Mail,  reprinted 
in  The  Times  alongside  a  dispatch  from 
their  own  correspondent  (30  August  1914), 
on  the  retreat  from  Mons  was  a  high  point 
in  joiu'nalistic  history.  There  had  been 
a  good  deal  of  undue  optimism,  with  loose 
talk  about  the  war  being  over  by  Christ- 
mas. Here,  with  brutal  frankness,  was  the 
plain  truth  of  a  terrible  and  bitter  set- 
back, of  bad  leadership,  shortage  of  men 
and  shells,  and  of  tragic  horror. 

In  1915  Fyfe  was  transferred  to  Russia^ 
moving  down  from  Petrograd,  through 
Galicia,  to  Bucharest.  Back  in  Russia  in 
1916  he  was  able  to  retail  the  career  and 
murder  of  Rasputin.  In  1917  he  was 
sent,  successively,  to  Spain,  Portugal,  and 
Italy;  then  to  the  United  States  as 
honorary  attach^  to  Northcliffe's  British 


8652062 


885 


Fyfe 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


war  mission.  In  1918  he  played  a  notable 
part  in  Northcliffe's  organization  at 
Crewe  House  for  propaganda  in  enemy 
countries. 

Fyfe's  political  affiliations  had  always 
tended  towards  the  Left  and  in  1922 
Arthur  Henderson  [q.v.]  offered  him  the 
editorship  of  the  Daily  Herald.  In  four 
years  he  achieved  a  sizeable  increase  in 
circulation;  but  there  was  always  diffi- 
culty in  reconciling  the  aims  of  a  national 
newspaper  with  those  of  the  Trades 
Union  Congress  editorial  board  which 
then  controlled  it,  and  in  1926  Fyfe  re- 
signed. He  moved  to  the  Liberal  Daily 
Chronicle  but  left  it  on  its  amalgamation 
with  the  Daily  News  in  1930.  From  then 
onward  he  did  valuable  work  for  Reynolds' 
News  but  became  increasingly  devoted  to 
independent  authorship  and  to  political 
work  in  the  Labour  cause.  He  stood  un- 
successfully for  Parliament  at  Sevenoaks 
in  1929  and  at  Yeovil  in  1931,  both  hope- 
less constituencies  for  a  socialist  candi- 
date. 

Fyfe  was  a  versatile  miscellaneous 
writer,  whose  output  included  novels, 
plays,  biographies,  and  sociological  and 
topographical  works.  He  wrote,  among 
other  biographies,  lives  of  Northcliffe 
(1930)  and  of  T.  P.  O'Connor  (1934),  and 
the  notices  of  Lord  Rothermere  and 
others  for  this  Dictionary.  His  play,  A 
Modern  Aspasia,  produced  by  the  Stage 
Society  in  1909  and  later  in  Prague,  was 
praised  by  G.  B.  Shaw  [q.v.]  and  other 
good  judges. 

In  a  long  career  Hamilton  Fyfe  de- 
veloped high  skill  in  many  editorial  tasks. 
He  had  a  very  keen  and  critical  sense  of 
news  values ;  his  work  on  numerous  special 
assignments  was  well  informed,  fearless, 
frank,  and  thoughtful,  and  much  of  it  may 
rank  as  raw  material  of  history.  He  was  an 
even-tempered  man,  though  he  could  be 
roused  to  impatience  by  inefficiency  and 
pomposity.  So  deep  was  his  dislike  of  this 
that  he  insisted  on  being  'Harry'  rather 
than  'Henry'  which  he  found  pretentious. 
In  his  period  of  political  activity  he  re- 
signed from  various  'protest'  societies  he 
had  joined,  on  the  same  grounds.  After 
his  association  with  Northcliffe  (whom  he 
liked  personally  but  deplored  as  a  pheno- 
menon) he  became  more  and  more  inimical 
to  established  authority  and  looked  upon 
himself  as  a  rebel  on  the  left  fringe  of 
Labour. 

Fyfe  had  a  passion  for  gardening  and  his 
enthusiasm  for  garden  design  even  led  him 
to  move  house  several  times  for  the  sheer 


pleasure  of  making  a  fresh  start  on  new 
territory.  With  his  youngest  brother.  Sir 
William  Hamilton  Fyfe,  principal  and 
vice-chancellor  of  the  university  of  Aber- 
deen (1936-48),  he  was  a  warm  friend,  and 
the  two  spent  many  continental  hohdays 
together  in  youth. 

In  1907  Fyfe  married  Eleanor,  daughter 
of  William  Kelly,  of  the  W' ar  Office ;  they 
had  no  children.  He  died  at  Eastbourne 
15  June  1951. 

[The  Times,  19  June  1951 ;  private  informa- 
tion.] Herbert  B.  Grimsditch. 

FYLEMAN,  ROSE  AMY  (1877-1957), 
writer  for  children,  was  born  at  Basford 
on  the  outskirts  of  Nottingham  6  March 
1877,  the  third  child  of  John  Feilmann,  by 
his  wife,  Emilie  Loewenstein  who  was  of 
Russian  extraction.  Her  father  was  in 
the  lace  trade,  and  the  family  were  free- 
thinking  Jews  who  had  come  from  Jever 
in  Oldenburg  some  seventeen  years  pre- 
viously. She  was  educated  at  a  private 
school,  and  first  got  into  print  at  the  age 
of  nine  when  one  of  her  school  composi- 
tions was  published  in  a  local  paper.  She 
entered  University  College,  Nottingham, 
but  failed  in  the  Intermediate,  thus 
frustrating  her  ambition  to  become  a 
schoolteacher.  She  had,  however,  a  fine 
voice,  and  her  paternal  aunt  gave  her 
£200  to  study  singing.  She  studied  in 
Paris,  then  in  Berlin  under  Etelka  Gerster, 
and  finished  at  the  Royal  College  of  Music 
in  London  where  she  took  her  diploma 
as  A.R.C.M.  She  received  encouragement 
from  (Sir)  Henry  Wood  [q.v.]  and  made 
h6r  first  public  appearance  in  London  at 
the  Queen's  Hall  in  1903.  Subsequently 
she  returned  to  Nottingham,  teaching 
singing  and  helping  in  her  sister's  school. 
With  other  members  of  her  family  she 
anglicized  her  name  at  the  outbreak  of 
war  in  1914. 

She  was  forty  when  it  was  suggested 
to  her  that  she  send  some  of  the  verses 
she  had  been  writing  to  Punch.  Her  first 
contribution  'There  are  fairies  at  the 
bottom  of  our  garden!'  appeared  23  May 
1917.  This  evoked  immediate  response  and 
five  publishers  wrote  to  her  within  a  week. 
It  was  followed  by  'The  best  game  the 
fairies  play'  (13  June)  and  a  succession  of 
other  fairy  poems.  Readers  of  Punch  were 
soon  looking  for  the  initials  'R.F.',  and 
she  became  a  regular  contributor.  Her 
verses  enjoyed  a  similar  success  in  book 
form,  the  first  collection  Fairies  and 
Chimneys  (1918)  being  reprinted  more 
than  twenty  times  during  the  next  ten 


386 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Garbett 


years.  It  was  followed  by  The  Fairy  Green 
(1919),  The  Fairy  Flute  (1921),  and  Fairies 
and  Friends  (1925).  These  verses  were 
eventually  gathered  together  in  A  Garland 
of  Rose's  (1928).  During  the  twenties  and 
early  thirties  she  held  a  firm  place  in 
nursery  affection  throughout  the  English- 
speaking  world,  and  she  kept  her  name 
alive  with  a  flow  of  new  publications  of 
which  Forty  Good-Night  Tales  (1923)  and 
Twenty  Teatime  Tales  (1929)  were  particu- 
larly successful.  She  founded  (1923),  and 
for  two  years  edited,  a  children's  maga- 
zine The  Merry-Go-Round,  and  as  time 
went  on  devoted  an  increasing  amount 
of  attention  to  juvenile  drama,  writing 
amongst  others  Eight  Little  Plays  for 
Children  (1924),  Nine  New  Plays  for 
Children  (1934),  and  Six  Longer  Plays  for 
Children  (1936).  She  had  a  Christmas  play 
produced  at  the  Old  Vic  in  1926,  and  with 
Thomas  Dunhill  [q.v.]  a  children's  opera 
at  Guildford  in  November  1933.  She  was 
also  a  linguist  who  translated  books  from 
French,  German,  and  Itahan;  and  an 
inveterate  traveller  visiting  most  Euro- 
pean countries,  and  making  two  lecture 
tours  in  the  United  States,  1929-30  and 
1931-2.  She  never  married,  and  died  in 
London  1  August  1957. 

Like  other  successful  writers  for  children. 
Rose  Fyleman  had  not  much  time  for  them. 
Of  medium  height,  with  dark  hair,  large 
brown  eyes,  and  strong  features,  she  was 
outwardly  a  somewhat  formidable  char- 
acter, and  not  the  type  of  person  likely  'to 
see  fairies  everywhere'.  In  fact  she  admit- 
ted that  she  did  not  believe  in  them.  She 
was  none  the  less  a  kindly  person  who 
could  arouse  affection,  a  cultivated  and 
amusing  conversationalist,  and  one  who 
had  a  professional  attitude  to  her  work  and 
was  vitally  interested  in  her  craft.  Her 
verse  has  a  clear  lyrical  quality  which 
makes  each  of  her  poems  memorable,  and 
ideal  for  recitation.  Although  she  main- 
tained herself  with  her  pen  for  forty  years, 
and  hved  to  hear  lines  of  her  poetry 
become  proverbial,  she  had  to  contend 
with  the  knowledge  that  her  best  work  was 
her  first,  and  that  it  was  becoming  dated. 
She  rarely  repeated  the  simple  magic  of  her 
early  fairy  poetry. 

[Twentieth  Century  Authors,  1942,  and  re- 
ferences there  quoted;  The  Times,  2  August 
1957  ;  private  information.]  Iona  Opie. 

GARBETT,  CYRIL  FORSTER  (1875- 
1955),  archbishop  of  York,  was  born  6 
February  1875  at  Tongham,  Surrey,  the 
son  of  the  vicar,  the  Rev.  Charles  Garbett, 


who  was  a  brother  of  Edward  and  James 
Garbett  [qq.v.].  His  mother,  Susan  Char- 
lotte Bowes,  daughter  of  Lieutenant- 
General  Bowes  Forster  and  granddaughter 
of  Sir  Peregrine  Maitland  [q.v.],  was 
Charles  Garbett's  second  wife,  and  thirty 
years  younger  than  her  husband.  In  an 
ideally  happy  marriage  she  bore  him  five 
children,  four  boys  and  a  girl,  of  whom  the 
future  archbishop  was  the  eldest.  Tong- 
ham was  a  small  village,  and  his  early 
life  there  gave  Garbett  a  deep  sympathy 
and  understanding  of  village  life  and  of 
the  loneliness  and  other  problems  of  the 
country  clergy,  which  was  to  stand  him 
in  good  stead  in  his  years  of  episcopal 
ministry  at  Winchester  and  York.  He  was 
educated  as  a  day  boy  at  Farnham  Gram- 
mar School,  then  as  a  boarder  from  the  age 
of  eleven  at  Portsmouth  Grammar  School. 
In  1895  he  entered  Keble  College,  Oxford, 
with  a  Gomm  close  scholarship  for  which 
he  was  eligible  on  account  of  his  distant 
descent  from  the  fourth  Marquess  of 
Lothian  [q.v.].  While  Garbett  was  at 
Oxford  his  father  died  suddenly  and  it  was 
only  by  the  sacrificial  contrivance  of  his 
mother  that  he  was  able  to  remain  and 
take  a  second  in  modern  history  (1898). 
His  educational  career  had  been  entirely 
undistinguished,  but  his  steady  and 
already  well-informed  interest  in  social 
questions,  and  his  sedulous  practising  of 
the  arts  of  pubUc  speech,  carried  him  into 
the  president's  chair  at  the  Union  (1898) ; 
and  in  achieving  this  ambition  he  won  the 
self-confidence  which  had  hitherto  eluded 
him. 

He  had  learned  too  to  form  his  own 
judgements  and  to  walk  in  his  own  paths, 
and  this  self-mastery  he  exhibited  when  he 
went  to  Cuddesdon,  where  he  took  what 
he  wanted  of  the  regime  and  the  curri- 
culum, and  withdrew  himself  with  quiet 
firmness  from  the  rest.  Cuddesdon  was 
never  to  him  the  'holy  mount'  that  it  was 
to  his  predecessor,  Cosmo  Gordon  Lang 
[q.v.],  but  he  formed  there  his  lifelong 
habits  of  fidelity  to  a  rule  of  life  in  which 
the  times  for  prayer,  theological  reading, 
correspondence,  interviews,  newspaper 
study,  and  recreation  were  all  laid  down 
with  a  precise  rigidity  which  left  very  little 
room  for  the  pleasant  indulgence  of  a 
friendly  gossip ;  it  did  much  to  knock  the 
element  of  spontaneity  out  of  his  life  for 
many  years. 

Garbett  was  ordained  deacon  in  1899 
and  priest  in  1901.  Both  at  St.  Mary's, 
Portsea,  where  he  was  curate  (1899-1909) 
and    vicar    (1909-19),    and    in    his    first 


387 


Garbett 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


diocese  of  Southwark,  he  made  the 
reputation  he  was  never  to  lose  of  a  firm, 
even  an  alarming,  disciplinarian.  The 
disciplines,  always  awe-inspiring  and 
sometimes  ruthless,  to  which  he  subjected 
his  curates  at  Portsea  and  his  clergy  at 
Southwark  were  silken  as  compared  with 
the  iron  bands  with  which  he  bound  him- 
self. St.  Mary's  was  a  parish  with  great 
traditions,  particularly  for  the  faithful 
work  of  its  clergy.  This  tradition  he 
strengthened  by  the  zeal  which  both  he 
and  his  curates  brought  to  it.  He  carried 
the  burden  of  that  vast  naval  parish 
through  the  dark  days  of  the  war  of  1914r- 
18;  but  perhaps  a  greater  contribution 
in  those  years  was  to  furnish  the  Church 
with  a  copious  stream  of  young  curates, 
all  of  whom  were  very  highly  trained  to 
know  their  job  through  and  through,  and 
had  learned  the  art  and  cost  of  self- 
discipline.  By  the  time  they  left  Garbett 
most  of  them  were  ready  for  positions  of 
considerable  importance. 

In  1919  Garbett  became  bishop  of 
Southwark,  notoriously  the  most  exacting 
of  all  English  dioceses.  He  was  then  forty- 
four  and  he  stayed  there  for  thirteen  years, 
working  from  early  morning  until  late  at 
night.  As  well  as  all  the  normal  routines 
of  a  diocesan  bishop,  he  had  many  other 
tasks.  South  London  had  to  cope  with 
a  sudden  and  dramatic  influx  of  popula- 
tion. In  every  part  of  the  diocese  vast  new 
housing  estates  were  appearing  for  most 
of  which  there  were  no  churches.  When  he 
had  been  in  Southwark  for  six  full  years 
Garbett  complained  that  he  had  yet  to 
consecrate  a  new  church,  and  he  therefore 
launched  an  appeal  for  £100,000  to  build 
twenty-five  churches.  Thanks  largely  to 
his  own  efforts,  this  sum  was  given  in 
less  than  three  years.  It  was  an  immense 
achievement  and,  quite  apart  from  pro- 
viding the  necessary  churches,  gave  the 
diocese  a  pride  in  itself  which  it  urgently 
needed.  It  is  primarily  for  this  that  his 
Southwark  episcopate  will  be  remem- 
bered ;  but  his  incessant  visiting  of  clergy 
and  people  in  those  weary  acres  of  mean 
streets  gave  him  much  else  which  was  to 
be  of  great  value  to  the  Church.  Always 
interested  in  social  problems,  at  Portsea 
he  had  experienced  them  at  close  quarters ; 
but  it  was  at  Southwark  that  the  wretched 
dilemmas  of  the  poor  began  to  press  daily 
upon  him  as  a  sore  burden.  He  knew  that 
many  lived  on  the  edges  of  despair  caused 
by  bad  housing  and  malnutrition,  subjects 
in  which  he  made  the  time  to  become 
expert.  He  set  himself  to  gather  all  the 


relevant  information,  since  neither  then 
nor  at  any  time  was  it  his  way  to  speak 
publicly  on  any  subject  on  which  he  was 
ill  informed.  In  the  rural  section  of  his 
diocese  he  made  pilgrimages  on  foot, 
carrying  his  pastoral  staff  in  the  shape 
of  a  shepherd's  crook,  a  form  of  visitation 
which  brought  him  considerable  publi- 
city in  the  press.  To  all  this  work  at 
Southwark  he  added  the  chairmanship 
(1923-45)  of  the  new  religious  advisory 
committee  of  the  British  Broadcasting 
Corporation. 

Whereas  Garbett  himself  did  not  at 
the  time  feel  the  strain  of  the  pace  which 
he  set  himself  at  Southwark,  others  saw 
signs  of  it ;  the  authorities  of  Church  and 
State  were  hoping  that  in  due  course  he 
would  succeed  A.  F.  Winnington-Ingram 
[q.v.]  on  his  retirement  from  the  diocese  of 
London  which  they  mistakenly  supposed 
could  not  be  long  delayed.  They  therefore 
judged  the  time  had  come  to  transfer 
Garbett  for  a  while  to  a  less  exacting  see. 
In  1932  he  was  offered  Winchester  which, 
although  by  no  means  the  'bishopric  of 
ease'  which  the  authorities  and  indeed 
Garbett  himself  supposed,  was  less  wear- 
ing than  Southwark.  At  first  he  refused, 
but  when  the  archbishop  of  Canterbury  let 
him  know  it  was  intended  to  be  but  an 
interlude  of  comparative  rest,  he  agreed. 
He  was  enthroned  on  21  June  1932  in  the 
cathedral  in  which  he  had  been  ordained 
deacon  by  Randall  Davidson  [q.v.]. 

Living  now  in  the  house  he  loved  best  of 
all,  the  surviving  wing  of  Wren's  palace  of 
Wolvesey  with  its  beautiful  but  manage- 
able garden,  Garbett  found  real  peace  for 
perhaps  the  first  and  certainly  the  last 
period  in  his  long  life.  He  revelled  in  the 
countryside  of  Hampshire,  and  for  the 
Channel  Islands  he  developed  a  deep 
affection.  A  new  mellowness  of  spirit  came 
to  him,  and  at  Winchester  he  was  seldom 
regarded  as  the  formidable  disciplinarian, 
but  much  more  as  the  inwardly  affec- 
tionate father-in-God  who  was  always 
struggling  to  find  the  way  to  allow  his 
affection  to  break  down  the  barriers 
caused  by  his  almost  paralysing  shyness 
and  fear  of  emotion.  Nevertheless,  to  the 
end  of  his  days  there,  it  was  never  possible 
to  talk  to  him  without  first  being  involved 
in  the  struggle  to  break  the  ice  of  his 
reserve.  Among  all  his  clergy  and  even  his 
suffragan  bishops,  only  his  domestic  chap- 
lains, whom  he  treated  as  his  sons,  knew 
his  full  mind.  They  shared  all  his  life,  and 
with  them  he  was  completely  at  his  ease 
and  fully  himself.   From  the  first  who 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Garbett 


served  him  at  Southwark  to  the  last  of  the 
notable  succession  at  York,  all  of  them 
loved  him  as  deeply  as  they  admired  him, 
and  they  alone  among  human  beings  saw 
what  was  really  there. 

His  peace  of  mind  at  Winchester  stayed 
with  him  until  the  war  involved  him 
deeply  in  the  two  great  agonies  through 
which  the  diocese  passed  in  those  years: 
the  occupation  of  the  Channel  Islands  and 
the  bombing  of  Southampton.  His  conduct 
in  these  two  crises  showed  that  there  were 
occasions  when  he  could  put  away  all 
reserves,  comfort  the  afflicted,  strengthen 
the  weary  hands,  and  weep  with  those 
who  mourn.  His  personal  diary,  which  his 
biographer.  Canon  Charles  Smyth,  used 
with  such  skill  and  discretion,  revealed, 
rather  to  the  surprise  of  those  who  knew 
him  at  the  time,  that  in  the  first  two 
winters  of  the  war  he  passed  through  a 
very  weary  period  of  unhappiness  and 
frustration  which  showed  itself  in  pro- 
longed periods  of  insomnia. 

Deliverance  was  soon  to  come  un- 
expectedly. In  January  1942  Archbishop 
Lang  announced  his  resignation  from 
Canterbury  and  in  February  Archbishop 
Temple  [q.v.]  was  chosen  to  succeed  him. 
Garbett  knew  it  was  very  likely  and 
dreaded  that  he  would  be  asked  to  take 
Temple's  place  at  York,  but  after  a  short 
but  grim  struggle  of  conscience  he  ac- 
cepted the  charge.  Thereafter,  until  his 
last  illness,  no  more  is  heard  in  his 
biography  of  his  insomnia,  or  of  the 
note  of  self-distrust  or  the  conviction  of 
failure. 

He  was  enthroned  in  York  Minster  on 
11  June  1942.  He  was  to  serve  there  for 
thirteen  years — exactly  the  same  period 
he  had  given  to  Southwark — and  to  make 
it  one  of  the  most  notable  ministries  in 
the  long  history  of  the  Palace  of  Bishop- 
thorpe.  Its  special  distinction  lay  not  in 
his  serving  of  his  own  diocese,  faithful, 
painstaking,  and  exact  though  that  was, 
but  in  what  he  made  of  the  function  of 
an  archbishop,  as  distinct  from  that  of 
diocesan  bishop  with  which  in  England 
it  has  to  be  combined.  The  care  of  his 
diocese  was  familiar  ground,  but  the  care 
of  his  province  was  a  novelty  which  at 
first  made  him  uneasy.  There  seems  to 
be  no  written  trace  left  of  his  attempt  to 
think  out  what  his  work  as  archbishop 
must  be.  Very  soon  after  his  enthrone- 
ment, however,  a  recognizable  pattern 
began  to  evolve.  Presently  it  was  complete 
and  consistent,  and  it  so  exactly  expressed 
all  his  native  strengths  that  it  is  impos- 


sible not  to  believe  that  he  thought  out 
a  function  for  his  unique  office,  then 
deliberately  set  himself  to  achieve  it. 

Here  was  a  man  of  the  highest  distinc- 
tion, whose  love  for  and  loyalty  to  the 
Church  of  England  was  beyond  all  ques- 
tion, a  senior  member  of  the  House  of 
Lords  and  an  assiduous  attender  of  its 
debates,  whose  feet  were  known  (as  it  was 
suspected  Temple's  were  not)  to  be  planted 
firmly  on  this  soUd  earth,  and  who  had 
laboriously  amassed  a  fund  of  wide  know- 
ledge of  most  of  the  problems  with  which 
his  fellow  countrymen  were  struggling. 
He  was  known  to  be  the  personification 
of  common  sense  tempered  by  sanctity ; 
all  kinds  of  people  who,  though  admiring 
Temple's  mind  and  entranced  by  his  per- 
sonality, were  yet  distrustful  of  his  judge- 
ment, felt  that  with  Garbett  they  were 
safe,  and  that  his  opinions  and  judgements 
were  their  own.  He  knew  the  layman's 
mind,  and  he  could  always  guess  what 
the  average  layman  was  thinking  about 
the  problems  of  the  day.  His  insight  was 
hardly  ever  at  fault.  He  spoke  to  the  laity 
in  their  own  language,  giving  back  to 
them  their  own  thoughts.  Thus  he  was 
better  known  to,  and  more  fully  trusted 
by,  the  laity  than  any  other  ecclesiastic  of 
his  time.  As  archbishop  of  York  he  had  a 
large,  respectful  audience,  yet  he  enjoyed 
a  greater  degree  of  freedom  of  speech  than 
his  brother  of  Canterbury.  Both  Ebor  and 
Cantuar  may  say  the  same  thing  on  the 
same  issue,  but  Cantuar  cannot  help  but 
speak  for  the  Church,  whereas  up  to  a 
point  Ebor  can  speak  for  himself.  To  this 
may  be  added  that  Garbett  was  a  syn- 
thesist  of  much  talent  who  could  weave 
into  a  pattern  all  sorts  of  unrelated  facts 
and  ideas  which  he  had  gathered  from  his 
exceedingly  catholic  reading.  He  had  and 
needed  no  originality.  One  of  his  deepest 
admirers  said  of  him,  'Garbett  never  had 
a  single  original  idea  in  his  life.'  This  he 
himself  knew,  making  this  very  lack  a 
primary  condition  of  the  new  and  creative 
task  he  set  himself.  His  purpose  was  to 
use  his  office  to  build  a  bridge  between  the 
sacred  and  secular  views  of  life  which  had 
become  dangerously  sundered.  If  he  was 
to  do  this  successfully  he  must  interpret 
the  English  Church  to  the  English  people, 
and  to  Christians  of  other  Churches  in  the 
British  Isles  and  overseas.  He  therefore 
set  himself  to  practise  more  fully  than 
before  the  ministries  of  print  and  of 
travel. 

He  had  already  written  several  small 
books  and  pamphlets.  In  1947  he  turned 


889 


Garbett 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


to  something  bigger  and  more  ambitious, 
with  The  Claims  of  the  Church  of  England. 
Partly  autobiographical,  partly  historical, 
partly  descriptive,  it  is  by  common  con- 
sent the  best  book  he  ever  wrote :  a  practi- 
cal, personal  statement  of  what  the  Church 
of  England  stands  for,  with  what  special 
gifts  God  has  equipped  it,  and  a  descrip- 
tion of  its  work  in  the  past  and  present, 
and  its  function  in  the  future.  In  it  is 
a  particularly  good  section  on  'The  Work 
and  Office  of  a  Bishop'  which  did  much 
to  lay  to  rest  the  parochial  clergy's  deep 
suspicion  for  the  episcopate  which  was 
then  a  sad  feature  in  the  life  of  the  Church 
of  England. 

In  Church  and  State  in  England  (1950) 
Garbett  put  forward  his  argun^ents  for 
*some  readjustment  in  the  existing  rela- 
tionship between  Church  and  State'.  He 
was  convinced  that  the  State  in  England, 
as  elsewhere,  was  moving  in  the  totali- 
tarian direction,  and  that  its  course  could 
not  be  stayed.  He  wanted  therefore  to 
see  the  Church  shaken  loose  from  it,  but 
without  disestablishment.  His  thesis  was 
persuasively  argued,  but  it  did  not  con- 
vince, and  much  to  his  disappointment  the 
book  in  a  reforming  sense  was  stillborn. 

Having  described  the  Church  of  his 
baptism  and  its  possible  reform  he  then 
turned  to  the  world  in  which  he  must  live 
and  work  and  published  In  an  Age  of 
Revolution  (1952).  Writing  in  the  convic- 
tion that  the  world  was  passing  through 
the  greatest  crisis  in  history,  he  set  him- 
self to  give  a  Christian  explanation  of  its 
meaning.  The  current  secular  remedies  for 
man's  unsatisfied  spiritual  hunger  had 
catastrophically  failed,  but  there  were  the 
Christian  remedies  which  would  become 
operative  in  proportion  as  the  world 
learned  how  to  apply  Christian  principles 
to  the  regulation  of  man's  daily  life  and 
work.  The  book  was  a  very  comprehensive 
and  exceptionally  widely  documented  sur- 
vey of  the  world  crisis  as  seen  by  an 
experienced  observer.  These  three  books 
inevitably  exhibited  a  personal  portrait  of 
their  author,  showing  his  depth  of  loyalty 
to  the  Church  of  England  in  which  he 
served  as  a  convinced  catholic  and  a 
definite  high  churchman,  who  yet  valued 
and  even  reverenced  the  more  evangelical 
traditions  which  are  embedded  in  its  life. 

The  writing  of  such  books  constituted 
an  impressive  literary  testimony,  for  by 
the  time  the  third  was  published  Garbett 
had  passed  his  seventy-fifth  year.  More- 
over he  found  writing  slow  and  painful: 
it  never  came  naturally  to  him.  Most  of 


it  was  done  very  late  at  night.  Of  the 
ministry  of  print,  however,  he  had  made 
the  fullest  proof  possible  to  him,  but  he 
realized  that  books  were  not  nearly 
enough  to  interpret  the  Church  to  the 
nation,  the  nation  to  itself,  and  the  sacred 
to  the  secular.  He  whose  natural  shyness 
made  him  shrink  from  all  publicity  seemed 
suddenly,  from  his  first  days  at  York,  to 
court  it.  Realizing  that  he  could  not  fulfil 
his  purpose  without  the  full  help  of  the 
press,  he  set  himself  to  learn  how  to  use 
both  it,  and  the  newer  art  of  broadcast- 
ing. More  successfully  than  any  other 
ecclesiastic  of  the  day  he  used  the  press 
to  the  full  without  ever  allowing  it  to  use 
him;  handicapped  as  he  was  from  ever 
entering  this  difficult  field  at  all,  his  suc- 
cess was  not  short  of  a  triumph.  There 
came  to  be  a  vast  audience  for  every  pro- 
nouncement of  his  on  the  issues  of  the  day. 
Many  indeed  were  painfully  obvious.  He 
often  said  no  more  than  almost  all  men 
of  goodwill  must  think,  but  to  have  their 
thoughts  reflected  by  a  man  of  Garbett's 
eminence  and  sound  judgement  fortified 
them.  He  was  not  always  obvious.  One  of 
the  best  and  most  courageous  speeches  of 
his  life  was  made  in  the  House  of  Lords 
on  the  day  when,  after  tremendous  search- 
ing of  heart  and  conscience,  he  gave  his 
reluctant  support  to  the  manufacture  of 
atomic  weapons  of  war  on  the  ground  that 
he  believed  them  to  be  essential  to  the 
keeping  of  such  peace  as  there  was. 

At  the  same  time  Garbett  made  himself 
a  great  ecclesiastical  travelling  ambassa- 
dor. He  was  tireless  in  planning  his 
journeys,  but  desperately  fatigued  when 
he  came  to  the  end  of  each  one  of  them. 
Yet  his  pleasure  in  them  was  childlike. 
Riding  the  world  in  aeroplanes  always 
thrilled  him,  and  it  never  staled.  The  first 
great  journey  was  in  1943  when  he  went 
to  Moscow,  flying  by  way  of  Tehran.  The 
Metropolitan  of  Moscow  had  asked  that 
a  delegation  from  the  Church  of  England 
should  visit  the  Russian  Orthodox  Church. 
Garbett  eagerly  volunteered,  and  set  out 
with  two  chaplains.  He  arrived  in  Moscow 
on  19  September  and  left  on  the  28th, 
reaching  home  again  on  9  October  after 
a  week  in  Cairo.  Within  those  three  weeks 
he  fulfilled  a  list  of  engagements  which 
would  have  exhausted  any  man,  yet  it  had 
all  been  more  than  worth  while,  for  he 
had  done  much  to  create  good  relations 
between  the  separated  Churches.  He  went 
also  to  the  United  States  and  Canada,  to 
Greece  and  the  Near  East,  to  Malaya, 
Australia,  and  the  Pacific  Islands,  to  many 


390 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Garner 


European  countries,  and  last  of  all,  made 
a  final  visit  to  the  Holy  Land.  All  this 
he  accomplished  between  1943  and  1955, 
between  his  sixty-eighth  and  eightieth 
years.  He  interpreted  the  Church  wherever 
he  went,  and  he  strengthened  every  church 
to  which  he  came,  giving  its  hard  pressed 
and  often  lonely  priests  and  people  new 
encouragement  and  new  heart. 

Garbett's  life  was  already  long,  but  the 
excessive  rigours  of  the  last  journey  to 
Palestine  undoubtedly  shortened  it.  On 
his  return  to  York  he  was  immediately 
taken  ill  and  after  a  severe  operation  no 
serious  work  was  any  longer  possible  for 
him.  Yet  he  hoped  against  hope  that  it 
might  be,  and  it  was  only  after  a  tremen- 
dous struggle  that  he  was  at  last  able  to 
bring  himself  to  the  decision  to  resign  his 
archbishopric.  But  he  was  allowed  to  die 
while  still  in  harness  as  he  had  always 
wished,  for  the  end  came  quietly  and 
quickly,  at  Bishopthorpe  31  December 
1955.  No  man  had  ever  worked  harder, 
and  but  few  more  effectively.  He  was 
buried  at  York  4  January  1956.  He  had 
been  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council  in  1942 
and  was  to  have  been  created  a  baron  in 
the  New  Year  honours.  His  portrait  by 
David  Jagger  hangs  at  Bishopthorpe. 

[Charles  Smyth,  Cyril  Forster  Garbett,  1959 ; 
personal  knowledge.]  Roger  Lloyd. 

GARNER,  WILLIAM  EDWARD  (1889- 
1960),  chemist,  was  born  at  Hugglescote, 
Leicestershire,  12  May  1889,  the  eldest  son 
of  William  Garner,  baker,  and  his  wife, 
Ann  Gadsby.  Sir  Harry  Garner  and  Pro- 
fessor F.  H.  Garner  were  younger  brothers. 
He  was  educated  at  Market  Bosworth 
Grammar  School  and  the  university  of 
Birmingham  where  he  studied  under  P.  F. 
Frankland  (whose  notice  he  subsequently 
contributed  to  this  Dictionary)  and  ob- 
tained honours  in  chemistry  in  1912.  He 
was  awarded  an  1851  Exhibition  in  1913 
to  work  with  Gustav  Tammann  at  the 
university  of  Gottingen  and  returned  to 
England  only  just  before  the  outbreak  of 
war  in  the  following  year.  He  joined  the 
scientific  staff  of  Woolwich  Arsenal  (1915- 
18)  where  he  carried  out  some  outstanding 
research  work  with  (Sir)  Robert  Robert- 
son [q.v.]  on  the  calorimetry  of  high 
explosives. 

In  January  1919  Garner  was  appointed 
assistant  lecturer  at  Birmingham  but  in 
October  moved  to  University  College, 
London,  where  he  enjoyed  a  close  and 
happy  association  with  F.  G.  Donnan 
[q.v.]  and  a  fruitful  period  of  research ;  he 


became  reader  in  physical  chemistry  in 
1924.  Three  years  later  he  was  appointed 
to  the  Leverhulme  chair  of  physical  and 
inorganic  chemistry  at  Bristol  and  until 
his  retirement  in  1954,  except  for  the  war 
period,  carried  out  a  series  of  experi- 
mental studies  of  far-reaching  practical 
and  theoretical  importance.  In  particular 
he  made  a  systematic  study  of  the  kinetics 
of  solid  reactions  and  of  heterogeneous 
catalysis  and  the  mechanism  of  interface 
reactions  and  nucleation  processes;  as 
with  much  of  his  other  work  on  the  solid 
state  he  was  a  pioneer  in  applying  the 
newer  ideas  of  quantum  physics. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  Garner 
established  an  extra-mural  research  team 
in  the  university  of  Bristol  to  assist  the 
government  ordnance  factories  in  explo- 
sives and  munitions  research.  Although 
never  losing  contact  with  the  work  of 
this  group,  he  moved  to  Fort  Halstead  in 
Kent  in  1943  to  become  superintendent 
of  chemical  and  explosives  research  for 
the  Ministry  of  Supply ;  he  later  became 
deputy  chief,  then  chief  superintendent  of 
armament  research.  His  enthusiasm,  wise 
guidance,  and  inspiration  were  of  para- 
mount importance.  He  served  on  many 
high-level  committees  and  was  associated 
with  notable  developments  in  new  arma- 
ments and  munitions.  He  was  appointed 
C.B.E.  in  1946. 

On  the  cessation  of  hostilities  Garner 
returned  to  his  university  work,  although 
until  his  retirement  he  was  actively 
engaged  in  the  work  of  the  scientific  ad- 
visory council  of  the  Ministry  of  Supply 
with  which  he  had  been  associated  since 
its  inception.  During  this  period  he  built 
around  him  in  Bristol  one  of  the  strongest 
research  groups  in  the  country.  He  con- 
tinued with  increasing  vigour  his  studies 
of  heterogeneous  catalysis.  After  his  re- 
tirement he  organized  a  symposium  on 
Chemisorption  at  the  university  college 
of  North  Staffordshire  which  was  pub- 
lished by  the  Chemical  Society  (1957),  and 
edited  a  large  volume  on  the  Chemistry  of 
the  Solid  State  (1955). 

Garner  was  a  man  of  charm  and  kind- 
ness who  won  the  affectionate  admiration 
of  all  who  came  into  contact  with  him. 
He  was  quiet,  unobtrusive,  and  entirely 
devoid  of  personal  ambition ;  devoted  to 
his  work  whether  in  the  laboratory  or  the 
councils  of  the  university.  These  qualities 
did  not  obscure  the  greatness  of  the  man. 
He  was  an  enthusiastic  and  inspiring 
leader  of  research,  conscientious  in  the 
discharge  of  his  duties,  and  an  adherent  of 


391 


Garner 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


the  best  traditions  of  science.  His  interests 
were  wide ;  he  was  a  collector  of  paintings 
and  china;  had  a  critical  appreciation  of 
art ;  and  was  an  enthusiastic  gardener.  He 
was  a  man  of  great  tenacity  and  courage. 
This  characterized  his  scientific  work  and 
everything  else  he  tackled;  no  problem 
ever  daunted  him.  He  was  a  well-known 
figure  at  scientific  gatherings  and  scien- 
tific societies  and  government  conunittees 
made  great  calls  upon  his  time.  He  served 
on  the  council  of  the  Royal  Society,  hav- 
ing been  elected  F.R.S.  in  1937,  and  of  the 
Faraday  Society  over  which  he  presided  in 
1945-7.  He  was  senior  scientific  adviser 
for  civil  defence  in  the  south-west  region ; 
and  in  1948  a  member  of  the  joint  Ser- 
vices mission  to  the  United  States  and 
Canada.  He  was  a  fellow  of  University 
College,  London,  an  honorary  member  of 
the  Polish  Chemical  Society,  and  a  corre- 
spondent councillor  of  the  Patronato 
*Alfonso  el  Sabio',  Madrid  (1959).  He  died 
unmarried  at  Bristol  4  March  1960.  A  chalk 
drawing  of  Gamer  by  (Sir)  W.  T.  Mon- 
nington  belongs  to  the  university  of 
Bristol. 

{Proceedings  of  the  Chemical  Society,  June 
1960 ;  C.  E.  H.  Bawn  in  Biographical  Memoirs 
of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  vii,  1961 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

C.  E.  H.  Bawn. 

GARNETT,  JAMES  CLERK  MAXWELL 

(1880-1958),  educationist  and  secretary  of 
the  League  of  Nations  Union,  was  born 
in  Cambridge  13  October  1880,  the  eldest 
son  of  William  Gamett,  first  demonstrator 
of  physics  in  the  Cavendish  Laboratory 
under  James  Clerk  Maxwell  [q.v.],  and 
later  educational  adviser  to  the  London 
County  Council,  and  his  wife,  Rebecca, 
daughter  of  John  Samways,  of  Southsea. 
Maxwell  Gamett  was  a  scholar  of  St. 
Paul's  School  and  of  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge,  where  in  1902  he  was  six- 
teenth, and  his  younger  brother  Stuart 
ninth,  wrangler.  He  went  on  to  take  a 
first  in  part  ii  of  the  mathematical  tripos 
(1903),  was  a  Smith's  prizeman  (1904), 
and  a  fellow  of  his  college  (1905).  He 
rowed  in  the  university  trial  eight.  From 
1904  to  1912  he  was  an  examiner  at  the 
Board  of  Education  and  he  was  called  to 
the  bar  by  the  Inner  Temple  in  1908.  In 
1912  he  became  principal  of  the  College  of 
Technology,  Manchester,  where  his  con- 
cern was  with  the  expansion  of  work  at 
university  level.  In  1920  he  resigned  as 
a  result  of  a  difference  of  opinion  with  the 
education  committee  over  the  number  of 


degree  students  to  be  admitted  to  the 
college. 

In  the  same  year  he  was  appointed 
secretary  of  the  League  of  Nations  Union, 
to  which  he  devoted  the  best  years  of  his 
life.  The  Union's  object  was  to  organize 
and  educate  public  opinion  in  favour  of 
the  League  of  Nations.  Working  closely 
with  Lord  Cecil  of  Chelwood  and  later 
with  Gilbert  Murray  [qq.v.]  who  suc- 
ceeded Cecil  as  chairman  of  the  executive 
committee,  Gamett  collected  round  him 
an  able  staff  and  was  instrumental  in 
enlisting  many  of  the  best  minds  in  the 
country  to  serve  on  the  Union's  numerous 
conmtiittees  and  to  speak  on  its  platforms. 
Largely  owing  to  his  efforts  the  Union 
grew  in  membership  and  influence. 

Garnett,  who  was  a  tall  commanding 
figure,  was  a  devout  Christian,  and  saw  in 
his  advocacy  of  a  new  way  of  life  for  the 
nations  of  the  world  a  means  of  giving 
practical  expression  to  his  religious  beliefs. 
He  belonged  to  a  generation  so  many  of 
whom  were  killed  in  the  war  of  1914-18, 
including  his  rowing  blue  brother,  Ken- 
neth, his  brother  Stuart  who  founded  the 
Sea  Scouts,  and  his  Oxford  rugger  blue 
brother-in-law  Ronald  Poulton-Palmer. 
Garnett's  consciousness  of  the  debt  to 
the  fallen,  as  well  as  his  own  strong  sense 
of  Christian  service,  supplied  much  of 
the  driving  power  for  his  championship  of 
the  League's  cause. 

His  resignation  from  the  secretaryship 
of  the  Union  in  1938  was  a  sad  affair. 
In  the  turbulent  years  immediately  pre- 
ceding the  second  war  political  passions  in 
the  international  field  were  running  high. 
In  a  letter  to  Lord  Lytton  [q.v.],  the 
chairman  of  the  executive  committee, 
Garnett  wrote  that  he  beheved  he  had 
'come  to  be  regarded  by  some  ...  as  the 
principal  obstacle  to  the  Union's  being 
used  as  an  instrument  of  poHtical  propa- 
ganda'. To  this  use  of  the  Union  he  could 
not  agree.  Whatever  the  rights  and  wrongs 
of  the  argument,  there  is  no  doubt  that 
Garnett,  always  something  of  a  contro- 
versial figure,  had  become  increasingly  so 
with  the  passing  of  the  years. 

Like  many  prophets  and  idealists  he 
was  not  free  from  the  disadvantages  of  his 
own  strong  qualities.  He  was  not  an  easy 
man  to  work  with.  His  singleness  of 
purpose  sometimes  prevented  him  from 
making  the  kind  of  allowances  which  less 
high-principled  men  are  usually  capable  of 
making  for  the  vagaries  and  weaknesses 
of  human  nature;  nor  did  he  appreciate 
to  the  full  the  subtleties  and  deviousness 


392 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Garrod 


which  so  often  characterize  human  action 
in  the  sphere  of  international  and  domes- 
tic politics.  His  approach  to  the  problems 
of  the  day  was  greatly  conditioned  by 
his  academic  background,  and  his  method 
of  expounding  his  views  would,  some  felt, 
have  been  more  effective  if  less  didactic. 
His  strength,  on  the  other  hand,  lay  in  his 
breadth  of  vision,  in  the  need  he  saw  for 
developing  a  sense  of  loyalty  beyond  mere 
national  feeling,  and  in  his  profound  con- 
viction that  with  God's  help  the  Kingdom 
of  Heaven  could  be  established  on  earth. 
That  Maxwell  Garnett  rendered  con- 
spicuous service  to  a  great  cause  few  who 
knew  him  would  dispute. 

In  addition  to  papers  on  mathematical 
and  physical  subjects,  which  appeared  in 
transactions  and  proceedings  of  the  Royal 
Society  and  elsewhere,  his  publications 
included:  Education  and  World  Citizen- 
ship (1921);  World  Loyalty  (1928);  The 
Dawn  of  World-Order  (with  N.  C.  Smith, 
1932);  Knowledge  and  Character  (1939); 
A  Lasting  Peace  (1940);  and  The  World 
We  Mean  to  Make  (1943). 

Garnett  was  a  keen  climber,  and  he 
enjoyed  saiUng  at  Seaview,  Isle  of  Wight, 
where  he  died  19  March  1958.  In  1910  he 
married  Margaret  Lucy,  second  daughter 
of  (Sir)  Edward  Poulton  [q.v.],  by  whom 
he  had  three  sons  and  three  daughters,  the 
eldest  of  whom  married  Douglas  Jay, 
president  of  the  Board  of  Trade,  1964-7. 
Garnett  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1919. 

[Personal  knowledge.]  Alan  Thomas. 

GARRARD,  APSLEY  GEORGE 
BENET  CHERRY-  (1886-1959),  polar 
explorer.  [See  Cherry-Garrard.] 

GARROD,     HEATHCOTE     WILLIAM 

(1878-1960),  scholar,  was  born  at  Wells 
21  January  1878,  the  fifth  of  six  children 
of  Charles  William  Garrod,  solicitor,  and 
his  wife,  Louisa  Ashby.  From  Bath  Col- 
lege he  went  with  an  exhibition  to  Balliol 
College,  Oxford,  where  in  1899  he  gained 
a  first  class  in  honour  moderations  and 
won  the  Hertford  and  a  Craven  scholar- 
ship ;  in  1900  he  won  a  Gaisford  prize  and 
in  1901  a  first  class  in  literae  humaniores, 
the  Newdigate  prize,  and  a  prize  fellow- 
ship at  Merton.  He  did  some  classical 
teaching  at  Corpus  Christi  College  (1902-4) 
until  he  was  elected  to  a  tutorial  fellow- 
ship at  Merton.  With  a  few  short  breaks  he 
lived  in  Merton  from  1904  until  his  death. 
Until  1922  he  concerned  himself  in  the 
main  with  classical  scholarship.  He  pub- 


lished an  edition  of  Statins  (1906)  and  of 
the  second  book  of  Manilius'  Astronomicon 
(1911),  and  the  Oxford  Book  of  Latin  Verse 
(1912),  together  with  many  contributions 
to  learned  periodicals.  During  the  war 
he  served  with  distinction,  first  in  the 
Ministry  of  Munitions  (1915-18),  then  for 
the  last  few  months  in  the  Ministry  of 
Reconstruction,  where  this  exact  classical 
scholar,  described  by  his  superiors  in  the 
Civil  Service  as  'a  man  of  quite  excep- 
tional abihty  and  of  more  than  academic 
distinction',  dealt  with  'the  general  eco- 
nomic problems  created  by  a  world  short- 
age of  capital,  supply,  tonnage,  etc.  .  .  .'. 
He  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1918. 

On  his  return  to  Merton,  although  he 
continued  his  teaching  for  classical  honour 
moderations,  he  became  more  and  more 
interested  in  English  literature  and  in 
1925  resigned  his  tutorship  for  a  research 
fellowship  in  English.  His  Wordsworth: 
Lectures  and  Essays  (1923)  won  him  much 
esteem  in  wider  circles  and  led  directly  to 
his  election  to  the  professorship  of  poetry 
(1923-8)  which  fell  vacant  on  the  death  of 
W.  P.  Ker  [q.v.].  Thereafter  he  published 
several  critical  studies  and  collections  of 
essays  and  lectures  on  various  English 
authors — The  Profession  of  Poetry  (1929, 
lectures  delivered  during  his  Oxford  pro- 
fessorship); Poetry  and  the  Criticism  of 
Life  (1931,  lectures  delivered  at  Harvard 
while  he  was  Charles  Eliot  Norton  pro- 
fessor); Keats — A  Critical  Appreciation 
(1926) ;  and  Collins  (1928).  His  chief  con- 
tribution to  English  scholarship  came  in 
1939  with  the  publication  of  his  edition  of 
Keats  in  the  Oxford  Enghsh  Texts;  the 
second  edition  of  this  work  in  1958  re- 
mains an  indispensable  book  for  Keats 
scholars. 

Apart  from  this  critical  output  is  his 
original  work — Oxford  Poems  (1912); 
Worms  and  Epitaphs  (1919) ;  Poems  from 
the  French  (1925) ;  Epigrams  (1946) ;  and 
in  1950  a  slim  volume  of  belles-lettres 
entitled  Genitis  Loci.  His  learned  interest 
in  Renaissance  scholarship  enabled  him 
to  do  valuable  work  on  the  muniments, 
the  library  regulations,  and  the  ancient 
painted  glass  of  Merton.  It  culminated  in 
his  completion,  with  Mrs.  Allen,  of  the 
edition  of  the  Letters  of  Erasmus  of  P.  S. 
Allen  (whose  notice  Garrod  contributed  to 
this  Dictionary).  The  three  volumes,  ix,  x, 
and  xi,  for  which  Garrod  was  mainly 
responsible,  appeared  in  1938,  1941,  and 
1947. 

In  his  early  years  Garrod  delighted  in 
daring    and    ingenious    emendations    of 


393 


Garrod 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


classical  texts  which  did  not  always  win 
acceptance.  The  solid  worth  of  his  scholar- 
ship shows  itself  in  his  editions  of  Statins 
and  Manilius,  the  latter  of  which  was 
severely  criticized  by  A.  E.  Housman 
[q.v.]  in  volume  v  of  his  own  edition  of 
Manilius  in  1930.  The  Oxford  Book  of  Latin 
Verse  brought  Garrod  wide  acclaim.  His 
subsequent  editing  of  the  Letters  of  Erasmus 
brought  into  play  his  qualities  of  sus- 
tained scholarship  and  his  profound  learn- 
ing and  in  the  opinion  of  good  judges  is 
likely  to  last  longer  than  his  classical  work. 

Garrod,  who  remained  through  his  life 
a  devoted  disciple  of  Wordsworth  and 
Matthew  Arnold,  brought  to  his  literary 
criticism  a  high  seriousness  of  judgement. 
He  could  not  be  deceived  by  the  artificial 
and  the  pretentious;  and  poetry  which 
made  no  claims  on  the  deepest  human 
feelings  had  no  appeal  for  him.  Yet  the 
strong  moral  influence  of  Wordsworth  and 
Arnold,  which  runs  through  all  his  work,  is 
tempered  by  an  irresistible  tendency  to 
mischief  and  impish  witticisms.  The  conse- 
quence is  that  Garrod  is  never  dull.  His 
style,  which  perhaps  owes  something  to 
Hazlitt,  a  critic  whom  he  held  in  high 
esteem,  is  lively  and  alert.  It  is  full  of 
idiosyncrasies  and  tricks,  inversions, 
daring  colloquialisms,  obtrusive  paren- 
theses, but  it  is  never  flat.  His  chief 
passion  is  good  poetry  and  he  likes  to 
praise  it,  but  his  admiration  always  has 
what  he  called  'bone  and  gristle'.  It  never 
sprawls.  He  can  moreover  aim  critical 
shafts  of  original  force  at  work  which 
seems  to  him  to  be  based  on  falseness  of 
feeling  or  shallowness  of  thought.  A  not- 
able example  of  this  is  his  lecture  on  A.  E. 
Housman,  included  in  The  Profession  of 
Poetry,  where  he  effectively  points  a  finger 
of  scorn  at  what  he  calls  'the  false 
pastoralism'  of  the  Shropshire  Lad:  In  his 
own  poetry  there  is  the  same  mixture  of 
moods ;  his  epigrams  are  neat  and  witty ; 
his  lyrics  romantic  and  emotional ;  in  both 
he  achieved  considerable  technical  skill. 
The  variety  of  his  learning  and  the  liveli- 
ness of  his  manner  are  well  illustrated  in 
a  collection  of  essays  brought  together 
after  his  death  by  John  Jones  and  pub- 
lished in  1963  under  the  title  The  Study  of 
Good  Letters.  In  this  judicious  selection  the 
severity  of  Garrod's  scholarship  is  tem- 
pered by  his  wit  and  humanity,  while 
beneath  the  bantering  cleverness  of  his 
lighthearted  essays  are  persistent  under- 
tones of  his  moral  sensibility. 

The  differing  elements  in  Garrod's  per- 
sonality, the  cleverness,  the  caustic  wit. 


the  profoundly  romantic  and  moral  feel- 
ing, the  respect  for  exact  scholarship — 
sometimes  it  seemed  at  war  with  each 
other — achieved  a  true  harmony  in  his 
edition  of  Keats.  Here  all  his  powers  are 
at  work  together ;  the  scholarship  is  exact ; 
the  depth  of  feeling  for  his  subject  informs 
the  whole  work.  The  style  of  the  introduc- 
tion and  notes  is  as  lively  as  ever  but  it  is 
firm  and  authoritative;  the  mannerisms 
of  some  of  his  earlier  writing  have  been 
left  behind. 

For  more  than  fifty  years  Garrod  lived 
the  life  of  an  unmarried  Oxford  don  and 
was  never  long  away  from  Merton.  But  he 
took  great  delight  in  holidays  with  his 
Merton  friends,  young  and  old,  mainly  in 
the  Lakes,  in  Devonshire,  and  in  Dorset. 
In  Oxford,  the  meadows  saw  him  on  most 
days  exercising  a  succession  of  much- 
loved  and  much-spoiled  dogs.  Otherwise 
he  rarely  moved  farther  than  Blackwell's 
bookshop  where  his  figure  was  well  known 
— standing  firm  upon  small  pointed  feet, 
of  medium  stature,  a  slight  tendency  to 
obesity,  his  impressive  head  crowned  with 
a  trilby  hat  worn  back  to  front,  cigar  held 
between  the  first  two  fingers  of  his  right 
hand,  intent  upon  a  book.  Yet  more  than 
most  Oxford  dons  he  seemed  at  home  in 
any  kind  of  company  and  understood  what 
went  on  in  the  world.  In  his  own  college  he 
was  a  presiding  genius,  and  in  friendship 
he  was  generous  and  unselfish,  asking 
nothing  in  return.  Other  dons,  under- 
graduates, Merton  men  of  all  generations, 
and  friends  from  wider  circles  were  drawn 
irresistibly  to  his  rooms  as  to  the  centre  of 
the  college.  They  sought  his  company, 
sometimes  for  the  fun  of  it,  the  light- 
hearted  bridge,  the  chess,  and  other  more 
trivial  games,  all  played  to  the  high 
quavering  accompaniment  of  his  provoca- 
tive wit  and  deliberate  absurdities,  and 
sometimes  to  console  themselves  with  his 
ready  sympathy  in  some  private  per- 
plexity, and  at  other  times,  if  he  were  in 
the  mood,  to  sit  at  his  feet,  to  draw  upon 
his  stores  of  learning,  to  profit  from  his 
fine  exacting  taste  and  to  treasure  his  wise 
and  witty  obiter  dicta.  'In  the  back  of  my 
mind',  he  once  wrote,  'there  lies  always 
the  suspicion  that  the  love  of  literature, 
like  that  of  virtue,  is  probably  best  taught 
in  asides' ;  certainly  in  that  way  one 
learnt  a  lot  from  Garrod.  He  was  one  of 
those  rich,  uncommon  personalities  who 
have  added  an  imperishable  part  to  the 
Oxford  heritage.  In  words  which  he  him- 
self used  about  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  [q.v.] — 
'Their  advent  is  rare  and  their  sojourn 


394 


I 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Garstaiig 


brief,  but  the  memory  of  them  is  sweet  in 
the  dust.' 

Garrod  received  an  honorary  D.Litt. 
from  Durham  (1930)  and  an  honorary 
LL.D.  from  Edinburgh  (1953).  He  was 
elected  F.B.A.  in  1931  and  an  honorary 
fellow  of  Merton  in  1955.  He  died  in 
Oxford  25  December  1960.  A  portrait 
painted  for  his  seventieth  birthday  by 
Rodrigo  Moynihan  is  in  the  senior  com- 
mon-room at  Merton  and  he  figures  in  Sir 
Muirhead  Bone's  painting  of  the  interior 
of  Blackwell's. 

[The  Times,  28  December  1960;  List  of  the 
Writings  of  H.  W.  Garrod,  1947;  G.  R.  G. 
Mure  in  Postmaster,  1961 ;  John  Jones  in 
Proceedings  of  the  British  Academy,  vol.  xlviii, 
1962;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] George  Mallaby. 

GARSTANG,  JOHN  (1876-1956), 
archaeologist,  was  born  in  Blackburn  5 
May  1876,  the  sixth  child  of  Walter  Gar- 
stang,  consulting  physician,  and  his  wife, 
Matilda  Mary  Wardley.  His  eldest  brother, 
Walter,  was  from  1907  to  1933  professor  of 
zoology  at  Leeds.  Educated  at  Blackburn 
Granunar  School,  Garstang's  early  in- 
terests lay  in  the  classics  and  in  astronomy ; 
but  circumstances  forced  him  to  specialize 
in  mathematics  in  which  in  1895  he  ob- 
tained a  scholarship  at  Jesus  College, 
Oxford.  While  at  school  he  often  paid 
nocturnal  visits  to  the  observatory  at 
Stonyhurst  College,  and  as  he  passed  the 
ruins  of  the  Roman  camp,  Bremetenna- 
cum,  at  Ribchester,  his  interest  in 
archaeology  was  aroused.  He  conducted 
excavations  there,  publishing  the  results  in 
1898.  This  came  to  the  notice  of  F.  J. 
Haverfield  [q.v.]  who  encouraged  Gar- 
stang  to  take  up  archaeology.  He  devoted 
his  vacations  as  an  undergraduate  to 
excavating,  first  at  Melandra  in  Derby- 
shire, then  near  by  at  Brough,  and  lastly 
at  Richborough  on  the  south  coast  of 
England. 

After  taking  a  third  class  in  mathe- 
matics (1899),  Garstang  joined  (Sir)  Flin- 
ders Petrie  [q.v.]  at  Abydos  in  Egypt. 
Here  he  had  leisure  to  explore  the 
vicinity,  and  having  discovered  the  great 
tomb  at  Beyt  Khallaf,  he  was  provided 
with  funds  for  its  excavation.  A  visit  from 
A.  H.  Sayce  [q.v.]  was  the  beginning  of 
a  lifelong  friendship. 

Appointed  reader  in  Egyptian 
archaeology  at  Liverpool  in  1902,  Gar- 
stang led  expeditions  during  the  next  few 
years  to  the  Egyptian  sites  of  Negadeh, 
Hierakonpolis,  Esneh,  and  Beni  Hassan. 


Through  his  friendship  with  Sayce  he 
became  interested  in  the  Hittites,  and  in 
1904  he  undertook  a  journey  of  archaeo- 
logical exploration  in  Asia  Minor.  In  1907 
a  permit  was  secured  for  the  excavation 
of  the  Hittite  capital  of  Boghaz-Keui  by 
a  British  expedition  under  Garstang's 
leadership;  but  on  arrival  at  Constan- 
tinople he  was  disappointed  to  learn  that 
the  permit  had  been  transferred  to  Hugo 
Winckler  at  the  personal  request  of  the 
German  Emperor.  He  therefore  made  a 
second  exploratory  journey  through  Asia 
Minor,  visiting  Winckler  at  Boghaz-Keui, 
and  in  the  following  year  he  selected  the 
late  Hittite  site  of  Sakje-Geuzi  for 
excavation,  while  in  the  winter  months  he 
continued  his  explorations  of  the  tombs  at 
Abydos.  He  published  a  valuable  topo- 
graphical study  of  the  Hittite  monuments 
in  1910  under  the  title  The  Land  of  the 
Hittites. 

In  1907  he  was  appointed  to  the  newly 
founded  professorship  of  the  methods  and 
practice  of  archaeology  at  Liverpool, 
a  post  which  he  held  until  1941.  There  he 
took  a  leading  part  in  organizing  the 
Institute  of  Archaeology  and  a  new  jour- 
nal, the  Annals  of  Archaeology  and  Anthro- 
pology. 

Largely  at  the  instigation  of  Sayce, 
Garstang  transferred  his  activities  in  1909 
to  Meroe  in  the  Sudan,  and  there  con- 
ducted excavations  every  winter  until  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1914.  The  finds  in- 
cluded a  bronze  head  of  Augustus,  now 
in  the  British  Museum.  Of  particular 
interest  to  Garstang  was  a  graffito  showing 
a  primitive  astronomical  apparatus. 

After  serving  during  1914-18  with  the 
Red  Cross  in  France,  Garstang  took 
charge  of  the  newly  created  School  of 
Archaeology  in  Jerusalem  (1919-26) ;  and 
as  director  (1920-26)  also  of  the  Depart- 
ment of  Antiquities  in  Palestine  found 
time  for  much  archaeological  exploration 
of  the  country.  His  discovery  of  the  site  of 
Hazor  was  a  notable  achievement.  Subse- 
quent research  on  the  topography  of 
Palestine  resulted  in  the  publication  of 
Joshua  Judges  (1931)  and  The  Heritage  of 
Solomon  (1934).  His  most  important 
archaeological  work  in  Palestine,  however, 
was  the  excavation  of  Jericho  where, 
under  the  patronage  of  Sir  Charles 
Marston,  he  worked  from  1930  until  1936 
when  political  conditions  obliged  him  to 
transfer  his  activities  to  another  country. 

It  was  to  Turkey  that  he  returned  in 
the  autumn  of  1936  with  an  expedition 
sponsored  by   Francis   Neilson.    After  a 


395 


Garstang 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


survey  and  soundings  in  the  Cilician  plain 
he  selected  Yumiik  Tepe  hear  Mersin  for 
a  full-scale  excavation ;  but  only  two  win- 
ter seasons  were  possible  before  war  broke 
out.  In  the  early  months  of  the  war, 
however,  he  was  again  in  Turkey  in 
charge  of  the  administration  of  earthquake 
relief.  Returning  in  1946,  Garstang  com- 
pleted his  interrupted  work  at  Yiimiik 
Tepe  and  the  results  were  published  in 
Prehistoric  Mersin  (1953).  While  at  Mersin 
he  conceived  the  idea  of  a  British  Institute 
of  Archaeology  at  Ankara,  and  in  1948, 
with  the  full  support  of  the  Turkish 
Government,  the  Institute  was  formally 
opened,  with  Garstang  as  its  first  director ; 
he  retired  the  following  year,  to  assume 
the  presidency  of  the  Institute. 

Garstang  was  appointed  a  chevalier  of 
the  Legion  of  Honour  (1920),  received  the 
honorary  degree  of  LL.D.  from  Aberdeen 
(1931),  was  made  a  corresponding  member 
of  the  Institut  de  France  (1947),  and 
C.B.E.  (1949).  His  death  occurred  on 
a  cruise,  at  Beirut,  12  September  1956. 
His  study  of  the  geography  of  the  Hittite 
Empire,  on  which  he  had  spent  many  of 
the  later  years  of  his  life,  was  published 
posthumously  in  1959. 

With  his  trim  beard,  his  deep  musical 
voice,  slow  speech,  and  air  of  abstraction, 
Garstang,  especially  after  middle  age, 
gave  an  impression  of  great  learning. 
Yet  his  effective  training  was  as  a  field 
archaeologist,  and  it  is  in  this  essentially 
practical  field,  as  well  as  in  that  of 
organization  for  which  he  had  a  natural 
gift,  that  his  permanent  achievements  are 
to  be  found.  He  was  a  sensitive,  lovable 
character,  with  a  boyish  enthusiasm 
which  never  failed  to  infect  those  who 
worked  with  him. 

He  married  in  1907  Marie  Louise  (died 
1949),  daughter  of  Etienne  Berges,  of 
Toulouse;  they  had  one  son  and  one 
daughter.  A  portrait  by  G.  Hall  Neale 
(1906)  is  at  Blackburn  Grammar  School ; 
a  bust  (c.  1950)  by  Howard  E.  D.  Bate  is 
in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[Reports  of  excavations;  A.  H.  Sayce, 
Reminiscences,  1923 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

O.  R.  GURNEY. 

GASK,  GEORGE  ERNEST  (1875-1951), 
surgeon,  was  descended  from  a  family 
of  Lincolnshire  smallholders.  His  father 
Henry  walked  to  London  to  seek  his  for- 
tune, in  which  he  and  his  brother  succeeded 
by  establishing  a  drapery  business  in 
Oxford  Street.  Henry  married  Elizabeth 
Styles    and    settled    in    Dulwich    where 


George,  the  youngest  of  four  sons,  was 
born  1  August  1875.  He  went  to  Dulwich 
College  and  also  studied  at  Lausanne, 
Freiburg,  and  Baden  before  entering  the 
medical  school  of  St.  Bartholomew's 
Hospital  in  1893 ;  he  thus  gained  a  work*- 
ing  knowledge  of  German  and  French, 
some  experience  of  continental  methods  of 
education,  and  a  realization  of  the  bene- 
fits of  foreign  travel  which  had  a  lasting 
effect  upon  his  subsequent  career. 

He  qualified  L.R.C.P.  and  M.R.C.S.  in 
1898  and  became  house-surgeon  to  John 
Langton,  proceeding  to  the  fellowship  of 
the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons  of  England 
in  1901.  A  period  of  training  as  a  demon- 
strator of  pathology  and  as  surgical 
registrar  led  to  his  appointment  in  1907  as 
assistant  surgeon  to  (Sir)  D'Arcy  Power 
[q.v.],  whose  researches  into  the  history  of 
medicine  were  at  once  a  stimulus  and  an 
example  to  Gask  who  ultimately  became 
expert  in  the  history  of  military  surgery. 
He  thus  embarked  on  the  life  of  a  surgical 
consultant  and  teacher,  and  for  five  years 
was  warden  of  the  Bart's  residential 
college. 

In  1912  the  younger  surgeons  at  St. 
Bartholomew's  formed  a  study  group 
which  they  called  the  Paget  Club,  and  in 
the  light  of  subsequent  events  it  is 
significant  that  at  their  second  meeting 
Gask  read  a  paper  on  the  methods  of 
teaching  surgery  in  England,  Germany, 
and  America.  In  the  previous  year  he  had 
visited  several  of  the  university  medical 
schools  in  the  United  States  and  advocated 
the  incorporation  of  certain  features  of 
the  foreign  systems  into  British  schools, 
but  concluded  that  such  innovations  were 
hindered  by  the  burden  of  routine  work  in 
the  hospitals.  Clearly  he  had  the  advan- 
tages of  'whole-time'  academic  units  in 
mind,  but  had  to  wait  until  after  the  war 
of  1914-18  for  a  chance  to  translate  his 
ideas  into  practice.  During  the  war  he 
distinguished  himself  in  the  surgery  of 
chest  wounds,  being  appointed  to  the 
D.S.O.  in  1917  and  C.M.G.  in  1919  for  his 
services  as  consulting  surgeon  to  the 
Fourth  Army. 

As  soon  as  he  returned  from  France, 
Gask  set  about  forming  the  surgical  pro- 
fessorial unit  at  St.  Bartholomew's,  mani- 
festing from  the  outset  an  important 
attribute  of  a  professor,  good  judgement 
in  the  choice  of  his  assistants.  He  brought 
(Sir)  Thomas  Dunhill  [q.v.]  from  Mel- 
bourne as  his  deputy.  The  unit  gradually 
gained  the  confidence  of  the  rest  of  the 
hospital    staff   who    appreciated    Gask's 


396 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Gatenby 


unselfish  idealism  and  trusted  him  not  to 
interfere  with  their  work.  A  further 
evidence  of  his  good  judgement  was  his 
selection  of  subjects  for  research,  and  in 
due  course  significant  contributions  were 
made  to  thyroid  surgery,  to  the  use  of 
radium  for  breast  cancer,  and  to  the 
surgery  of  the  sympathetic  nervous  sys- 
tem. Gask  was  quick  to  appreciate  the 
help  he  could  obtain  from  his  scientific 
colleagues,  and  the  collaboration  of  Hop- 
wood  in  physics,  WooUard  in  anatomy, 
and  Mervyn  Gordon  [q.v.]  in  virology  was 
invaluable.  He  was  a  model  director,  pro- 
viding the  ideas  and  encouraging  younger 
men  to  do  the  work.  Even  when  teaching 
he  tried  to  make  the  students  find  out 
things  for  themselves  instead  of  telling 
them  the  answers;  the  undiscerning 
thought  'Uncle  George'  was  merely  lazy. 
Although  not  a  brilliant  operator  his 
technique  was  gentle  and  based  on  sound 
principles.  He  organized  the  Pilgrim 
Surgeons  who  travelled  widely  to  see  the 
great  masters  at  work,  and  he  also  ar- 
ranged that  in  alternate  years  a  leading 
surgeon  should  become  temporary  director 
of  the  surgical  unit. 

Gask,  who  retired  in  1935,  was  called 
upon  to  serve  on  several  bodies  outside  his 
own  medical  school.  At  the  Royal  College 
of  Surgeons  he  was  on  the  council  from 
1923  until  1939,  he  gave  the  Vicary  and 
Bradshaw  lectures,  and  was  twice  a  Hun- 
terian  professor.  He  was  an  original 
member  of  the  Radium  Trust,  and  served 
on  the  Medical  Research  Council  from 
1937  to  1941.  He  took  a  leading  part  in 
planning  the  Postgraduate  Medical  School 
at  Hammersmith  and  was  an  active  mem- 
ber of  its  governing  body.  He  succeeded 
Lord  Moynihan  [q.v.]  as  chairman  of  the 
editorial  committee  of  the  British  Journal 
of  Surgery.  His  own  writings  included 
a  pioneer  study  of  The  Surgery  of  the 
Sympathetic  Nervous  System  (with  J. 
Paterson  Ross,  1934)  and  Essays  in  the 
History  of  Medicine  (1950).  During  the 
war  of  1939-45  he  acted  as  a  temporary 
surgeon  to  the  Radcliffe  Infirmary,  and 
greatly  appreciated  the  consequent  as- 
sociations with  the  university  of  Oxford 
and  the  medical  services  in  the  Oxford 
Region. 

In  1913  Gask  married  Ada  Alexandra, 
daughter  of  Lieutenant- Colonel  Alexander 
Crombie,  of  the  Indian  Medical  Service ; 
they  had  one  son. 

A  likeable  and  even-tempered  person  of 
fine  physique,  in  his  younger  days  a  dis- 
tinguished   mountaineer,    Gask    suffered 


latterly  from  coronary  disease  and  died  at 
his  home  near  Henley  16  January  1951. 
There  are  two  portraits ;  one,  a  study  for 
the  group  of  the  council  of  the  Royal 
College  of  Surgeons  painted  in  1928  by 
Moussa  Ayoub,  is  in  the  possession  of  his 
son,  John,  a  medical  graduate  of  Oxford 
who  settled  in  practice  at  Market  Drayton. 
[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
J.  Paterson  Ross. 

GATENBY,  JAMES  BRONTE  (1892- 
1960),  zoologist,  was  born  at  Wanganui, 
New  Zealand,  10  October  1892,  the 
younger  son  of  Robert  McKenzie  Gatenby, 
pharmacist,  by  his  wife,  Catherine  Jane 
Bronte,  a  granddaughter  of  John  Bronte, 
of  county  Down.  He  was  educated  at 
Wanganui  Collegiate  School,  St.  Patrick's 
College,  Wellington,  New  Zealand,  and 
Jesus  College,  Oxford,  of  which  he  was  an 
exhibitioner.  He  graduated  with  first  class 
honours  in  zoology  (1916),  was  demon- 
strator in  forest  zoology  and  human 
embryology  (1916-19),  lecturer  in  his- 
tology (1917),  and  senior  demy  of  Mag- 
dalen (1918).  At  University  College, 
London,  he  was  senior  assistant  in  zoology 
and  comparative  anatomy  (1919)  and 
lecturer  in  cytology  (1920);  and  at 
Trinity  College,  Dublin,  professor  of 
zoology  and  comparative  anatomy  (1921- 
59),  and  professor  of  cytology,  a  research 
chair  specially  created  (1959-60).  He  was 
M.A.,  Ph.D.  (Dublin),  D.Phil.  (Oxford), 
and  D.Sc.  (London). 

As  a  boy  Gatenby  was  fascinated  by 
insects  and  collected  butterflies.  As  a  re- 
search worker  he  soon  became  interested 
in  the  structure  of  cells.  The  germ-cells 
and  early  development  of  parasitic 
hymenopterans  attracted  him  first  and 
subsequently  he  reverted  at  intervals  to 
the  study  of  insectan  cytology.  He  was 
a  cytologist  in  the  classical  descriptive 
style  and  his  technique  was  superlative. 
He  concentrated  on  the  Golgi  bodies, 
mitochondria  and  other  cytoplasmic  struc- 
tures, and  studied  these  in  many  animals, 
from  protozoans  to  man.  His  description 
of  the  processes  involved  in  fertilization  of 
sponges  is  a  classic,  and  so  is  his  joint 
work  with  J.  P.  Hill  on  the  corpus  luteum 
of  the  platypus.  Always  distrustful  of  the 
newer  cytochemical  techniques  until  they 
were  proven,  he  was  outspoken  in  his 
criticism  and  was  involved  in  many  con- 
troversies which,  nevertheless,  served  to 
focus  interest  on  the  cytoplasm.  Much  of 
his  work  on  the  structure  of  the  germ-cells, 
using  classical  methods,  has  proved,  in  the 


397 


Gatenby 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


light  of  modern  findings  with  phase- 
contrast  and  with  electron  microscopy  to 
be  nearer  the  mark  than  that  of  some  of 
his  rivals.  Yet  he  was  never  slow  to  avail 
himself  of  modern  methods  when  oppor- 
tunity offered  and  he  was  convinced  of 
their  value,  as  witnessed  by  the  en- 
thusiasm with  wliich  he  turned  to  the 
electron  microscope  in  his  later  years. 

Gatenby  took  over  a  department  in 
Dublin  which  was  moribund.  He  laboured 
to  build  it  up,  but  it  was  only  after  the  war 
of  1939-45  that  even  the  essentials  of 
staff  and  equipment  were  forthcoming. 
As  a  teacher  he  had  the  supreme  gift  of 
inspiring  interest,  enthusiasm,  and  the 
ardour  of  exploration ;  the  knowledge  he 
could  impart  was  limited  by  his  facilities 
but  the  inspiration  was  lasting.  Several  of 
his  pupils  occupied  university  chairs  of 
zoology,  among  them  his  successor  in 
Trinity  College. 

Generous  and  warm-hearted,  an  original 
and  witty  conversationalist  with  decided 
views  on  many  subjects,  he  loved  social 
contacts  and  was  a  delightful  companion 
at  home  or  in  the  field.  As  a  friend  he  was 
loyal  almost  to  a  fault  and  vigorous  in 
defence  of  those  whom  he  liked.  He  was 
apt  to  like,  or  dislike,  a  person  almost  at 
first  sight,  and  liking  soon  developed  into 
warm  and  lasting  friendship.  Unsparing  in 
his  denunciation  of  what  he  considered  to 
be  insincerity  or  unfairness,  he  was  some- 
times inclined  to  attribute  to  imagined 
intrigue  honest  actions  of  which  he  did  not 
approve.  He  enjoyed  travel ;  was  visiting 
professor  at  Alexandria  and  visiting  lec- 
turer at  Louvain ;  and  went  twice  to  the 
United  States :  as  Theresa  Seessel  fellow  of 
Yale  (1930-31)  and  as  visiting  research 
fellow  to  the  Argonne  National  Labora- 
tory (1958).  Shortly  before  his  death  he 
visited  both  his  daughters,  the  one  in 
Australia  and  the  other  in  New  Zealand, 
and  seized  the  occasion  to  resume  his 
studies  of  some  New  Zealand  insects.  But 
long  residence  had  made  Gatenby  as  Irish 
in  outlook  as  any  native  and  he  was  glad 
to  return  to  fly-fishing  its  rivers  and  lakes, 
in  which  art  he  was  skilled.  He  was  an 
honorary  fellow  of  the  Royal  Microscopi- 
cal Society  and  of  the  Academy  of 
Zoology  of  India  and  an  honorary  member 
of  the  Royal  Society  of  New  Zealand  and 
of  the  International  Society  for  Cell 
Biology. 

Gatenby  married  in  1922  Enid  Kath- 
leen Mary  (Molly)  (died  1950),  daughter 
of  C.  H.  B.  Meade,  barrister,  of  Dubhn. 
They  had  two  daughters  and  two  sons,  of 


whom  the  elder,  Dr.  P.  B.  B.  Gatenby, 
became  professor  of  clinical  medicine  at 
Trinity  College.  He  married  secondly,  in 
1951,  Constance  Harris,  daughter  of 
Captain  W.  W.  Rossiter,  of  county 
Wicklow.  He  died  while  on  a  fishing 
holiday  in  Galway,  20  July  1960.  A  por- 
trait by  H.  W.  Addison  is  at  Trinity 
College. 

[The  Times  and  Irish  Times,  22  July  1960; 
Nature,  17  September  1960 ;  Trinity,  No.  12, 
Michaelmas,  1960;  Journal  of  the  Royal 
Microscopical  Society,  vol.  Ixxx,  Part  I,  1961 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

F.  W.  Rogers  Brambell. 

GEDDES,  AUCKLAND  CAMPBELL, 
first  Baron  Geddes  (1879-1954),  public 
servant,  was  born  in  London  21  June 
1879,  the  second  son  of  Auckland  (origin- 
ally Acland)  Campbell  Geddes,  civil 
engineer,  and  his  wife,  Christina  Helen 
Macleod  Anderson.  His  two  brothers  were 
Sir  Eric  Campbell  Geddes  [q.v.]  and 
Irvine  Campbell  Geddes,  for  many  years 
chairman  of  the  Orient  Steam  Navigation 
Company.  One  of  his  two  sisters  who 
survived  infancy.  Dr.  Mona  Chalmers- 
Watson,  was  the  first  woman  awarded  an 
M.D.  by  Edinburgh  University.  Sir  Alan 
Anderson  [q.v.]  was  a  first  cousin. 

Geddes  was  educated  at  George  Wat- 
son's College,  Edinburgh,  where  he  shared 
with  his  contemporaries  a  great  ambition 
to  serve  his  country :  five  of  them  were  in 
the  Cabinet  at  the  end  of  1919.  Meantime 
Geddes  studied  medicine  at  and  played 
rugby  football  for  Edinburgh  University. 
In  1898  he  joined  the  University  Rifle 
Volunteers,  thereby  beginning  a  lifelong 
interest  in  military  matters.  Defective 
eyesight  delayed  but  did  not  prevent  his 
enlisting  as  a  second  lieutenant  in  the  3rd 
battalion  of  the  Highland  Infantry  with 
which  he  saw  active  service  in  South 
Africa  in  1901-2. 

On  returning  home  he  resumed  his 
medical  training  and  qualified  in  1903, 
proceeding  to  his  M.D.  with  gold  medal  in 
1908.  Shortly  afterwards  he  was  elected 
F.R.S.E.  In  1906  he  married  Isabella 
Gamble  (died  1962),  daughter  of  W.  A. 
Ross,  originally  of  Belfast,  who  had  estab- 
lished himself  in  New  York;  there  were 
four  sons  and  one  daughter.  After  mar- 
riage, whilst  a  university  assistant  in 
anatomy  at  Edinburgh,  Geddes  con- 
tinued his  voluntary  military  service,  an 
interest  which  flourished  through  contact 
with  a  distant  relative,  R.  B.  (later  Vis- 
count) Haldane   [q.v.],  the  minister  for 


398 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Geddes 


•war.  Geddes  contributed  some  original 
thought  to  the  development  of  the  Terri- 
torial Army  and  sketched  plans  for 
national  service  in  time  of  war. 

The  Scottish  climate  did  not  suit  his 
wife  and  in  1909  Geddes  was  appointed 
professor  of  anatomy  at  the  Royal  College 
of  Surgeons  in  Dublin ;  in  1913  he  moved 
to  the  chair  of  anatomy  at  McGill  Univer- 
sity, Montreal,  where  he  organized  the 
expansion  of  the  Officers'  Training  Corps. 
On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  he  was 
called  up  and  posted  as  a  major  to  the  17th 
Northumberland  Fusiliers  in  Hull  where 
he  sustained  severe  injuries  in  a  riding 
accident.  He  was  next  posted  to  the  staff 
of  G.H.Q.  in  France  where  he  became 
assistant  adjutant-general  until  early  in 
1916  when  he  was  appointed  director  of 
recruiting  at  the  War  Office  with  the 
rank  of  brigadier-general.  He  entirely  re- 
organized the  procedure  for  recruitment, 
divided  the  country  into  regions,  and 
rearranged  out-stations  for  recruiting  pur- 
poses. For  the  handling  of  recruits  on  such 
a  scale  there  were  no  precedents.  Geddes 
was  appointed  C.B.  and  K.C.B.  and  sworn 
of  the  Privy  Council  in  1917.  By  the  spring 
of  that  year  it  was  decided  that  an  inde- 
pendent Ministry  should  be  responsible 
for  the  total  allocation  of  labour  for  all 
purposes  and  Geddes,  taking  over  from 
Neville  Chamberlain  an  embryo  national 
service  organization,  was  in  August  ap- 
pointed director-general  and  minister  of 
national  service.  He  resumed  civilian 
status  and  sat  in  the  House  of  Commons 
until  1920  as  member  for  the  Basingstoke 
division. 

In  November  1918  Geddes  became  in 
addition  president  of  the  Local  Govern- 
ment Board  as  the  preliminary  to  the 
establishment  of  a  new  Ministry  of  Health. 
But  the  post  of  first  minister  of  health 
went  to  Dr.  Christopher  (later  Viscount) 
Addison  [q.v.]  because  Lloyd  George  had 
proposed  to  make  Geddes  chancellor  of  the 
Exchequer  after  the  election  of  1918.  Ill 
health  frustrated  this  project,  and  after  re- 
covering Geddes  spent  a  few  months  wind- 
ing up  the  Ministries  of  Reconstruction  and 
National  Service  before  being  appointed 
president  of  the  Board  of  Trade  in  May 
1919.  He  joined  the  Cabinet  in  October 
and  held  office  until  March  1920.  It  was 
during  this  period  that  the  foundations 
were  laid  for  the  system  of  export  credit 
guarantees  which  was  later  to  be  greatly 
developed. 

In  February  1919  Geddes  was  elected 
principal   of  McGill   University,   a   post 


which  he  intended  to  take  up  in  1920. 
But  Lloyd  George  prevailed  upon  him  to 
become  instead  British  ambassador  in 
Washington.  The  high  point  in  his  public 
career  came  when  he  joined  A.  J.  Balfour 
and  Lord  Lee  of  Fareham  [qq.v.]  as  dele- 
gate to  the  Washington  conference  on  the 
limitation  of  naval  armaments  in  1921. 
Geddes  was  much  concerned  with  the 
negotiations  for  the  dismantling,  whilst 
still  on  the  stocks,  of  the  large  American 
fleet  which  had  been  ordered  at  the  end 
of  the  war.  He  later  took  part  in  the 
successful  negotiations  in  1922-3  for 
the  settlement  of  the  British  war  debt 
to  America.  He  was  appointed  G.C.M.G. 
in  1922. 

Owing  to  an  accident  leading  to  the  loss 
of  sight  in  one  eye,  Geddes  resigned  in 
1924  and  on  returning  to  England  was 
appointed  chairman  of  the  royal  commis- 
sion on  food  prices.  Later  he  became  chair- 
man of  the  Rio  Tinto  Company,  a  position 
which  he  held  for  twenty-two  years,  and 
was  the  founding  chairman  of  the  Rho- 
kana  Corporation.  The  great  development 
of  the  Northern  Rhodesian  copper-belt 
under  British  control  owed  much  to  his 
efforts. 

From  1939  to  1941  Geddes  was  com- 
missioner for  civil  defence  in  the  south- 
eastern region  (Kent,  Sussex,  and  Surrey), 
above  which  the  greater  part  of  the  Battle 
of  Britain  was  fought.  In  1941-2  he  was 
commissioner  for  the  north-western  region. 
He  was  created  a  baron  in  the  New  Year 
honours  of  1942  and  from  this  date  he  had 
recurrent  trouble  with  his  vision  resulting 
in  his  going  totally  blind  in  1947.  Whilst 
blind  he  wrote  and  dictated  the  book  The 
Forging  of  a  Family  (1952)  which  describes 
many  phases  of  his  family  history  and 
personal  activities. 

Geddes  had  both  an  impressive  grasp  of 
facts  and  a  wide  ranging  mind.  He  was 
very  knowledgeable  in  the  natural  sciences 
and  his  powerful  imagination  enabled  him 
vividly  to  illuminate  any  subject  which 
held  his  attention.  He  was  consequently 
an  exceptional  teacher  and  it  was  in  that 
role  that  his  charm  and  power  lay.  Like 
many  Victorians  he  had  a  deep  interest  in 
death  and  extra-sensory  perception.  Some 
of  his  thoughts  he  expressed  in  plays,  and 
he  financed  the  production  of  one  in  which 
he  had  collaborated.  His  appreciation  of 
art  and  music  was  conservative  but  he 
wrote  the  music  for  a  score  or  so  of 
student  and  military  songs,  some  of  which 
retained  a  place  in  popular  esteem. 

In  politics   Geddes  was   a  perceptive 


399 


Geddes 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


supporter  of  the  Commonwealth.  When  a 
delegate  at  the  Washington  naval  con- 
ference he  was  aware,  as  few  then  were, 
that  this  was  an  act  marking  the  peak  and 
that  the  dissolution  of  the  British  Empire 
was  already  beginning.  This  he  accepted 
as  desirable  provided  it  was  properly 
timed. 

Geddes  died  in  Chichester  8  January 
1954  and  was  succeeded  by  his  eldest  son, 
Ross  Campbell  (born  1907).  A  bust  of 
Geddes  by  P.  Bryant  Baker  is  in  the 
possession  of  the  family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

David  Geddes. 

Sidney  G.  Davis. 

GEORGE  VI  (1895-1952),  King  of  Great 
Britain,  Ireland,  and  the  British  Dominions 
beyond  the  seas,  was  born  at  York  Cottage, 
Sandringham,  14  December  1895,  the 
second  of  the  five  sons  of  the  Duke  and 
Duchess  of  York,  afterwards  King  George 
V  and  Queen  Mary.  A  notice  of  the  latter 
appears  in  this  Supplement.  His  birth  on 
the  anniversary  of  the  deaths  of  the  Prince 
Consort  (1861)  and  Princess  Alice  (1878) 
was  an  occasion  for  apprehensive  apology, 
but  Queen  Victoria  was  gratified  to  be- 
come the  child's  godmother  and  presented 
him  with  a  bust  of  the  Prince  Consort  as 
a  christening  present.  He  was  baptized 
at  Sandringham  17  February  1896,  receiv- 
ing the  names  Albert  Frederick  Arthur 
George,  and  was  known  thereafter  to  the 
family  as  Bertie. 

A  shy  and  sensitive  child.  Prince  Albert 
tended  to  be  overshadowed  by  his  elder 
brother.  Prince  Edward,  and  his  younger 
sister  Princess  Mary.  A  stammer,  de- 
veloped in  his  seventh  or  eighth  year, 
inhibited  him  still  further,  and  of  all  the 
children  it  was  probably  he  who  found  it 
least  easy  to  withstand  his  father's  bluff 
chaffing  or  irascibility.  The  boy  withdrew 
into  himself,  compensating  with  outbursts 
of  high  spirits  or  weeping. 

Nevertheless  life  passed  evenly  enough 
in  the  'glum  little  villa'  of  York  Cottage 
and  in  the  other  residences  to  which  the 
migrations  of  the  court  took  them,  inter- 
rupted by  such  events  as  the  funeral  of 
Queen  Victoria  or  the  coronation  of  King 
Edward  VII.  By  1902  Prince  Albert  and 
his  elder  brother  had  graduated  to  the 
schoolroom  vmder  the  care  of  Henry  Peter 
Hansell,  an  Oxford  graduate,  formerly 
tutor  to  Prince  Arthur  of  Connaught 
[q.v.].  Although  he  gained  the  affection  of 
his  pupils,  Hansell  was  not  the  man  to 
inspire    small    boys    with    a    desire    for 


learning.  He  himself  thought  they  should 
have  been  at  school;  but  his  earnest 
attempt  to  create  the  illusion  that  they 
were  was  not  convincing.  In  the  spring  of 
1907  Prince  Edward  departed  for  Osborne 
and  Prince  Albert,  now  'head  boy'  with 
Prince  Henry  in  second  place,  was  left 
to  struggle  with  the  mathematics  which 
seemed  likely  to  prevent  him  from  fol- 
lowing suit.  But  here  he  showed  that 
ability  to  face  up  to  and  overcome  diffi- 
culties which  was  to  be  the  marked 
characteristic  of  his  career.  When  he 
passed  into  Osborne  his  oral  French, 
despite  his  stammer,  was  almost  perfect, 
and  his  mathematics  'very  fair  indeed'. 

At  Osborne  and  Dartmouth  (1909-12), 
years  which  saw  his  father's  accession  to 
the  throne.  Prince  Albert  was  never  very 
far  from  the  bottom  of  the  class ;  but  he 
was  popular  as  a  'trier'  and  a  good  com- 
rade, and  there  was  a  steady  development 
of  both  character  and  ability.  He  was  con- 
firmed at  Sandringham  on  18  April  1912, 
a  day  he  remembered  as  one  on  which  he 
'took  a  great  step  in  life'. 

After  a  training  cruise  in  the  Cumber- 
land, during  which  he  visited  the  West 
Indies  and  Canada,  Prince  Albert  was 
posted  in  September  1913  as  a  midship- 
man to  the  Collingwood  in  the  Home 
Fleet.  To  his  great  satisfaction  he  was 
able  to  see  active  service  in  her  as  a  sub- 
lieutenant at  the  battle  of  Jutland,  31 
May  1916.  But  the  war  years  were  in  the 
main  frustrating.  Always  a  poor  sailor, 
he  was  now  suffering  almost  continuously 
from  gastric  trouble.  An  operation  for 
appendicitis,  performed  in  Aberdeen  9 
September  1914,  brought  only  temporary 
rehef  and  there  followed  three  years  of 
misery  before  on  29  November  1917  an 
operation  for  duodenal  ulcer  proved  more 
successful.  The  subsequent  great  improve- 
ment in  the  Prince's  health  was  marked  in 
1920  by  his  winning  the  Royal  Air  Force 
tennis  doubles  with  his  comptroller,  who 
had  long  been  his  mentor  and  friend,  (Sir) 
Louis  Greig.  That  he  lost  to  Greig  in  the 
semi-finals  of  the  singles  did  not  smprise 
him. 

Meantime  the  Prince  had  been  forced  to 
admit  that  life  at  sea  was  too  much  for 
him  and  in  November  1917  he  transferred 
to  the  Royal  Naval  Air  Service  and  on  1 
April  1918  was  gazetted  flight  lieutenant 
in  the  new  Royal  Air  Force.  It  was  now 
that  his  interest  in  physical  fitness  was 
aroused  through  his  work  in  the  training 
of  boys  and  cadets.  He  was  in  France 
when  the  war  ended  and  was  asked  by  his 


400 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


George  VI 


father  to  represent  him  when  the  King  of 
the  Belgians  made  his  official  entry  into 
Brussels  on  22  November:  the  first  state 
occasion  on  which  he  acted  for  the  King. 

Returning  to  England  in  the  following 
February,  Prince  Albert,  disregarding  his 
dislike  of  flying,  became  a  fully  qualified 
pilot,  31  July  1919,  and  received  his  com- 
mission as  a  squadron  leader  on  the  follow- 
ing day.  But  the  time  had  come  for  him  to 
leave  Service  life  and  take  his  share  of  the 
burden  of  public  duties  which  falls  to  a 
royal  family.  As  further  preparation,  in 
company  with  Prince  Henry,  he  spent  a 
year  at  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  which 
might  have  been  more  fruitful  had  they 
lived  in  college.  He  studied  history,  econ- 
omics, and  civics,  and  in  particular  the 
development  of  the  Constitution;  and 
tackled  an  increasing  number  of  public  en- 
gagements, each  one  an  ordeal  by  reason  of 
the  stammer  for  which  he  had  so  far  found 
no  cure.  He  became  president  of  the  In- 
dustrial Welfare  Society  and  thereafter 
until  he  came  to  the  throne  made  it  his 
special  interest  to  visit  industrial  areas 
and  seek  to  make  contact  with  the  people 
as  informally  as  possible.  His  own  per- 
sonal contribution  towards  better  rela- 
tions between  management  and  workers 
took  the  form  of  what  became  the  famous 
Duke  of  York's  camps  for  boys  from  public 
schools  and  industry  which  were  held 
annually,  with  one  exception,  from  1921 
until  1939.  He  remained  keenly  interested 
in  them  to  the  end  and  delighted  in  the 
informality  of  his  visits  to  the  camps  when 
he  always  joined  vigorously  in  singing  the 
camp  song  'Under  the  Spreading  Chestnut 
Tree'. 

In  the  birthday  honours  of  June  1920 
the  King  created  his  second  son  Baron 
Killarney,  Earl  of  Inverness,  and  Duke 
of  York.  He  had  already  conferred  the 
Garter  upon  him  in  1916  on  the  occasion 
of  his  twenty-first  birthday  and  was  to 
confer  the  Order  of  the  Thistle  on  him  on 
his  wedding  day.  The  Duke  went  on  his 
father's  behalf  to  Brussels  in  1921  and 
twice  in  1922  to  the  Balkans  where  his 
bearing  during  elaborate  state  occasions 
earned  the  highest  praise. 

On  26  April  1923  in  Westminster  Abbey 
the  Duke  married  Lady  Elizabeth  Angela 
Marguerite  Bowes-Lyon,  youngest  daugh- 
ter of  the  fourteenth  Earl  of  Strathmore 
and  Kinghorne  [q.v.],  and  together  they 
entered  upon  that  path  of  domestic  happi- 
ness and  devotion  to  public  duty  which 
was  to  earn  them  the  nation's  gratitude. 
They  made   their  home   first   at  White 


Lodge  in  Richmond  Park  which  had  been 
Queen  Mary's  childhood  home ;  then  from 
1927  at  145  Piccadilly,  with,  later,  the 
Royal  Lodge,  Windsor  Great  Park,  as 
their  country  residence.  Two  daughters 
were  born  to  them:  Princess  Elizabeth 
Alexandra  Mary  (21  April  1926)  and 
Princess  Margaret  Rose  (21  August  1930). 

Official  visits  to  the  Balkans  (1923)  and 
Northern  Ireland  (1924)  and  many  public 
engagements  at  home  were  followed  by 
a  tour  of  East  Africa  and  the  Sudan  in  the 
winter  of  1924-5  which  gave  the  Duke  and 
Duchess  a  welcome  holiday  and  the  oppor- 
tunity for  big-game  hunting.  On  his  return 
the  Duke  presided  over  the  second  year 
of  the  British  Empire  exhibition  at 
Wembley.  Public  speaking  was  still  an 
ordeal  for  him  but  in  1926  he  first  con- 
sulted the  speech  therapist,  Lionel  Logue, 
who  over  the  years  was  able  to  help  him 
to  overcome  his  stammer  so  that  speech 
came  much  more  easily  to  him  and  the 
listener  was  aware  of  little  more  than 
an  occasional  hesitation.  It  was  therefore 
with  a  hghter  heart  that  he  left  with  the 
Duchess  in  1927  for  a  strenuous  tour  of 
New  Zealand  and  Australia,  the  highlight 
of  which  was  the  opening  on  9  May  of  the 
first  meeting  of  Parliament  at  the  new 
capital  city  of  Canberra.  The  natural 
sincerity  of  the  Duke  and  the  radiance 
of  the  Duchess  evoked  an  enthusiastic 
response  throughout  the  tour.  On  their 
return  to  London  they  were  met  at  Vic- 
toria Station  by  the  King  and  Queen,  the 
Duke  having  been  forewarned  by  his 
father :  'We  will  not  embrace  at  the  station 
before  so  many  people.  When  you  kiss 
Mama  take  yr.  hat  off':  attention  to 
detail  inherited  by  the  Duke  who  was  in 
many  ways  his  father's  son. 

During  the  King's  illness  of  1928-9  the 
Duke,  who  had  been  introduced  into 
the  Privy  Council  in  1925,  was  one  of  the 
counsellors  of  State.  In  May  1929  he  was 
lord  high  commissioner  to  the  General 
Assembly  of  the  Church  of  Scotland,  and, 
as  his  father  was  not  sufficiently  recovered 
to  visit  Scotland,  he  returned  to  Edin- 
burgh in  October  to  represent  the  King 
as  lord  high  commissioner  of  the  historic 
first  Assembly  of  the  two  reunited  Scot- 
tish Churches. 

These  were  quiet  years  of  home-making 
and  of  public  duties  faithfully  performed, 
overshadowed  perhaps  by  the  King's 
failing  health  but  with  no  realization  of 
what  was  to  come.  With  the  death  of  King 
George  V  on  20  January  1936  and  the 
abdication  of  his  successor  in  the  following 


401 


George  YI 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


December  all  this  was  changed.  The  Duke 
and  his  elder  brother  had  always  been  on 
good  terms,  but  after  the  latter's  acces- 
sion the  Duke  found  himself  increasingly 
excluded  from  the  new  King's  confidence. 
It  was  with  the  utmost  reluctance  that  he 
finally  brought  himself  to  accept  the  fact 
that  the  King  was  determined  to  marry 
Mrs.  Simpson  even  at  the  cost  of  the 
throne.  Of  this  resolve  the  King  informed 
him  on  17  November.  The  days  which 
followed  were  filled  with  *the  awful  & 
ghastly  suspense  of  waiting'  until  on  7 
December  the  King  told  the  Duke  of  his 
decision  to  abdicate.  Two  days  later  the 
Duke  had  a  long  talk  with  his  brother  but 
could  do  nothing  to  alter  his  decision  and 
so  informing  his  mother  later  in  the  day 
'broke  down  &  sobbed  like  a  child'.  On  12 
December  1936  he  was  proclaimed  King, 
choosing  George  VI  as  his  style  and  title. 
His  brother  he  created  H.R.H.  the  Duke 
of  Windsor. 

Thus  there  came  to  the  throne  a  man 
who  had  'never  even  seen  a  State  Paper', 
at  a  time  when  the  monarchy  had  suffered 
the  successive  blows  of  death  and  abdica- 
tion. 'I  am  new  to  the  job',  the  King  wrote 
to  Stanley  Baldwin  at  the  end  of  the  year, 
'but  I  hope  that  time  will  be  allowed  to  me 
to  make  amends  for  what  has  happened.' 
To  this  task  he  brought  his  own  innate 
good  sense  and  courage  in  adversity, 
disciplined  by  his  naval  training  and  sus- 
tained by  the  strength  which  he  drew 
from  his  marriage,  the  sterling  qualities  of 
his  mother,  and  the  goodwill  of  the  nation. 
The  King  had  the  same  simple  religious 
faith  as  his  father  and  the  coronation 
which  took  place  in  Westminster  Abbey 
on  12  May  1937  was  a  genuine  act  of 
dedication  on  the  part  of  the  new  King 
and  Queen.  It  was  shared  by  millions  of 
their  people,  for  the  service  was  broadcast 
by  the  B.B.C.,  an  arrangement  which  had 
the  full  support  of  the  King  against  con- 
siderable opposition. 

The  brilliance  of  a  state  visit  to  France 
in  July  1938  brought  a  momentary  gleam 
of  light  in  a  darkening  international  situa- 
tion. The  King  had  full  confidence  in  his 
prime  minister  and  like  Neville  Chamber- 
lain believed  that  every  effort  must  be 
made  to  avoid  a  war.  Final  disillusion- 
ment came  in  March  1939  when  the 
Munich  agreement  was  swept  aside  and 
the  Germans  finally  destroyed  Czecho- 
slovakia. Shortly  after  the  return  visit 
to  Great  Britain  by  President  and  Mme 
Lebrun  later  in  the  month  there  was 
announced  the  Anglo-French  guarantee  of 


Polish  independence  against  aggression. 
Two  months  later  came  the  first  occasion 
on  which  a  reigning  British  monarch  had 
entered  the  United  States.  The  visit  of  the 
King  and  Queen  to  North  America  in  May- 
June  1939  was  a  resounding  success  and 
gave  them  an  increase  of  confidence.  In 
Canada  the  King  addressed  the  members 
of  the  Senate  and  the  House  of  Commons 
and  gave  the  royal  assent  to  bills  passed 
by  the  Canadian  Parliament.  At  Hyde 
Park  he  was  able  to  discuss  with  President 
Roosevelt  the  help  which  might  be 
expected  from  the  United  States  in  the 
event  of  a  European  war.  The  warm 
regard  which  the  two  men  felt  for  one 
another  was  thereafter  maintained  by 
correspondence.  Nevertheless  the  King 
chafed  in  these  years  at  his  inability  to 
influence  the  course  of  events.  His  succes- 
sive suggestions  of  personal  communica- 
tions to  Hitler,  to  King  Victor  Emmanuel, 
to  the  Emperor  of  Japan,  were  felt  to  be 
inadvisable  by  a  Government  which  did 
not  share  his  belief  in  communications 
between  heads  of  State. 

When,  inevitably,  war  with  Germany 
came,  the  King  broadcast  to  the  Empire 
on  the  evening  of  Sunday,  3  September 
1939,  a  simple  call  to  his  people  to  fight 
for  the  freedom  of  the  world.  Of  the  issue 
he  was  never  in  doubt  and  it  was  no  small 
part  of  his  contribution  in  the  years  to 
come  that  he  was  able  to  transmit  this 
unclouded  confidence  to  more  complex 
and  fearful  minds. 

In  October  the  King  visited  the  Fleet 
at  Invergordon  and  Scapa  Flow  and  in 
December  he  spent  some  days  with  the 
British  Expeditionary  Force  in  France. 
At  Christmas  he  resumed  his  father's 
tradition  of  broadcasting  a  personal  mes- 
sage to  the  Empire,  a  custom  maintained 
for  the  rest  of  his  life  despite  his  dislike 
of  the  microphone.  When  Chamberlain  re- 
signed the  premiership  in  May  1940  the 
King  was  distressed  to  see  him  go  and 
would  have  liked  Lord  Halifax  [q.v.]  to 
succeed  him.  But  Chamberlain  informed 
him  that  Halifax,  being  in  the  Lords,  was 
'not  enthusiastic'  and  the  King  accord- 
ingly accepted  the  advice  to  send  for  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill.  By  September  formal 
audiences  had  given  way  to  a  weekly 
informal  luncheon  and  a  somewhat 
guarded  relationship  had  warmed  into 
genuine  friendship. 

Throughout  the  war  the  King  and 
Queen  remained  in  London,  sleeping  at 
Windsor  during  the  bombing.  Bucking- 
ham Palace  was  hit  nine  times :  in  Septem- 


402 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


George  VI 


ber  1940  it  was  bombed  twice  within 
three  days.  On  the  second  occasion  six 
bombs  were  dropped  over  the  Palace  by 
day  and  the  King  and  Queen  had  a  narrow 
escape — even  the  prime  minister  was  not 
told  how  narrow.  'A  magnificent  piece  of 
bombing',  remarked  a  police  constable  to 
the  Queen;  but  a  tactical  error.  Prompt 
and  indefatigable  in  their  visits  to  bombed 
areas  throughout  the  country  the  royal 
pair  knew  that  it  was  realized  that  they 
too  had  suffered;  it  was  now  that  they 
entered  into  the  hearts  of  their  people  in 
a  very  personal  way.  It  was  the  King's 
idea  in  1940  to  create  the  George  Cross  and 
Medal,  primarily  for  civilian  gallantry; 
and  his  idea  two  years  later  to  award  the 
Cross  to  Malta  for  heroism  under  siege. 
In  that  year  of  successive  disasters  to  the 
Allies  the  tragedy  of  war  touched  the  King 
more  closely  when  his  younger  brother 
the  Duke  of  Kent  [q.v.]  was  killed  on  25 
August  1942  in  a  flying  accident  while  on 
active  service. 

By  1943  the  tide  of  the  war  had  turned 
and  in  June  the  King  visited  his  troops  in 
North  Africa  where  the  Axis  forces  had 
surrendered.  In  two  weeks  he  covered 
some  6,700  miles  and  although  it  involved 
some  risk  the  tour  included  a  visit  to 
Malta,  on  which  he  was  determined  in 
recognition  of  the  island's  gallantry. 
After  the  surrender  of  Italy  in  September 
1943  the  King  shared  with  J.  C.  Smuts 
[q.v.]  some  doubts  about  the  wisdom  of 
opening  up  a  second  front  in  France ;  they 
communicated  their  misgivings  to  Chur- 
chill who  made  it  clear,  however,  that  it 
was  too  late  to  change  plans  which  were 
already  well  advanced.  On  15  May  1944 
the  King  attended  the  conference  at  St. 
Paul's  School  at  which  the  preparations 
for  invasion  were  expounded.  Before 
D-Day  (6  June)  he  had  visited  all  the 
forces  bound  for  Normandy.  Both  he  and 
Churchill  wanted  to  witness  the  assault 
from  one  of  the  ships  taking  part.  The 
King,  on  reflection,  was  able  with  his 
usual  common  sense  to  see  the  unwisdom 
of  this  course ;  it  was  not  without  diffi- 
culty that  he  prevailed  upon  Churchill  to 
abandon  the  idea  on  his  own  count.  Only 
ten  days  after  D-Day  the  King  had  the 
satisfaction  of  visiting  General  Mont- 
gomery's headquarters  in  Normandy.  For 
eleven  days  in  July-August  he  was  with 
his  armies  in  Italy,  and  in  October  he 
again  visited  the  21st  Army  Group.  When 
the  European  war  ended  on  8  May  1945, 
Londoners  crowded  towards  Buckingham 
Palace  in  their  rejoicing  as  they  had  done 


on  11  November  1918.  In  the  evening  the 
King  broadcast  a  call  to  thanksgiving  and 
to  work  towards  a  better  world.  There 
followed  an  exhausting  fortnight  of  cele- 
bration which  left  the  popularity  of  the 
monarchy  in  no  doubt.  There  were  state 
drives  through  London  and  services  of 
thanksgiving  at  St.  Paul's  Cathedral  (13 
May)  and  at  St.  Giles'  Cathedral,  Edin- 
burgh (16  May).  On  the  17th  the  King 
received  addresses  from  both  Houses  of 
Parliament  in  the  Great  Hall  of  West- 
minster. Labour  having  withdrawn  from 
the  coalition,  Churchill  formed  his  'care- 
taker' government  and  in  July  came  the 
first  general  election  of  the  King's  reign. 
It  proved  a  victory  for  Labour  and, 
accepting  Churchill's  resignation,  the  King 
invited  C.  R.  (later  Earl)  Attlee  to  form 
a  government.  When  Attlee  replied  to 
the  King's  inquiry  that  he  was  thinking 
of  Hugh  (later  Lord)  Dalton  as  foreign 
secretary  the  King  suggested  that  Ernest 
Bevin  [q.v.]  might  be  a  better  choice. 
This  had  indeed  been  Attlee' s  first  thought 
but  he  had  allowed  himself  to  be  in- 
fluenced by  Bevin's  own  desire  for  the 
Treasury.  In  the  event  it  was  Bevin  who 
went  to  the  Foreign  Office. 

The  King  opened  Parliament  on  15 
August  1945,  the  day  of  the  Japanese 
surrender,  and  ten  days  later  he  and 
the  Queen  left  for  Balmoral  for  a  much 
needed  rest.  On  his  return  to  London  in 
October  he  found  that  the  advent  of 
peace  had  done  little  to  lighten  his,  or  the 
nation's,  burden.  Great  Britain,  although 
still  beset  by  austerity,  was  moving  for- 
ward into  the  welfare  State;  the  British 
Empire  was  evolving  into  the  British 
Commonwealth  of  Nations ;  and  Russian 
imperialism  was  on  the  march.  Some  of 
the  new  ministers  lacked  experience; 
while  not  out  of  sympathy  with  Labour 
there  were  occasions  when  the  King  felt 
that  they  were  going  ahead  too  fast  and 
that  he  should  exercise  the  right  of  the 
monarch  to  advise  and  even  to  warn.  This 
he  was  able  to  do  the  more  easily  in  that 
he  now  had  a  width  of  experience  and 
a  maturity  of  judgement  which  made  it 
natural  for  people  to  turn  to  him  for 
guidance. 

In  1947  the  King  and  Queen  and  the 
two  princesses  paid  an  extensive  visit  to 
Southern  Africa  where  the  King  opened 
Parliament  at  Cape  Town  21  February, 
and  in  Salisbury,  Southern  Rhodesia,  7 
April,  and  where,  also  at  Cape  Town,  the 
Princess  Elizabeth  celebrated  her  twenty- 
first  birthday.  It  was  always  a  matter 


403 


George  VI 


D.N.B.  1951-lft60 


of  regret  to  the  King  that  he  was  never 
able  to  visit  India.  The  dissolution  of 
the  Indian  Empire  and  the  emergence  of 
India  as  a  sovereign  independent  repubUc 
within  the  British  Commonwealth  brought 
problems  in  the  relation  of  the  Sovereign 
to  the  Commonwealth  in  which  he  took 
great  interest;  but  the  necessary  legisla- 
tion had  not  been  completed  before  he 
died. 

On  20  November  1947  the  Princess 
Ehzabeth  married  Lieutenant  PhiUp 
Moimtbatten,  R.N.,  son  of  the  late  Prince 
Andrew  of  Greece,  whose  elevation  to  the 
peerage  as  Duke  of  Edinburgh  was  an- 
noimced  on  that  day.  Five  months  later, 
26  April  1948,  the  King  and  Queen 
celebrated  their  silver  wedding  and  drove 
in  state  to  St.  Paul's  Cathedral  for  a 
service  of  thanksgiving.  In  the  following 
October,  for  the  first  time  since  the  war, 
the  King  opened  Parliament  in  full  state. 
He  had,  as  usual,  a  heavy  programme 
of  engagements  which  included  a  visit  to 
Austraha  and  New  Zealand  in  the  spring 
of  1949.  But  symptoms  of  early  arterio- 
sclerosis had  been  apparent  for  some  time 
and  it  now  seemed  that  his  right  leg 
might  have  to  be  amputated.  The  first 
announcement  of  his  condition  was  made 
on  23  November  1948  when  the  Australian 
tour  was  cancelled.  A  right  limabar 
sympathectomy  operation  was  performed 
at  Buckingham  Palace  12  March  1949, 
from  which  the  King  made  a  good  re- 
covery although  he  was  not  restored  to 
complete  activity. 

At  the  general  election  of  February  1950 
Labour  was  returned  with  but  a  narrow 
majority,  and  to  anxiety  at  home  over 
the  uncertainty  of  government  and  a  pre- 
carious economic  situation  was  added 
anxiety  over  the  outbreak  of  the  Korean 
war.  Both  continued  into  the  following 
year  and  even  the  Festival  of  Britain, 
opened  by  the  King  from  the  steps  of  St. 
Paul's  on  3  May  1951,  could  not  dispel  the 
gloom.  Towards  the  end  of  the  month  the 
King  succvunbed  to  influenza.  There  fol- 
lowed convalescence  at  Sandringham  and 
Balmoral;  but  he  was  found  to  have 
a  malignant  growth  and  on  23  September 
underwent  an  operation  for  the  removal 
of  his  left  lung.  Attlee  had  already  asked 
for  a  dissolution  of  ParUament  and  on  5 
October  the  King  was  able  to  give  his 
approval  to  the  act  of  dissolution.  With 
the  return  of  the  Conservatives  with 
a  small  majority  Churchill  once  more 
became  his  prime  minister.  From  the  list 
of  government  appointments  the  post  of 


deputy  prime  minister,  which  had  crept 
in  during  the  war,  was  deleted  on  the 
King's  instructions  as  being  unconstitu- 
tional. As  he  did  not  fail  to  observe,  it 
would  nave  restricted  his  freedom  of 
choice  in  the  event  of  the  death  or 
resignation  of  the  prime  minister. 

A  day  of  national  thanksgiving  for 
the  King's  recovery  was  observed  on  2 
December  and  there  followed  a  family 
Christmas  at  his  beloved  Sandringham. 
On  the  last  day  of  January  1952  the  King 
went  to  London  Airport  to  see  the 
Princess  Elizabeth  and  the  Duke  of  Edin- 
burgh off  on  a  visit  to  East  Africa, 
Australia,  and  New  Zealand.  But  their 
tour  was  perforce  curtailed  for  after  a 
happy  day's  shooting  the  King  died  in  his 
sleep  at  Sandringham  early  on  the  morn- 
ing of  6  February  1952.  After  lying  in  state 
in  Westminster  Hall  he  was  buried  on  the 
15th  in  St.  George's  Chapel,  Windsor, 
where  a  memorial  chapel  was  built  and 
dedicated  in  1969. 

Trained  to  service,  although  not  to  the 
throne,  the  King  had  served  to  the  limits 
of  his  strength  and  of  the  confines  of 
monarchy.  Scrupulous  in  observing  his 
constitutional  position,  he  was  neverthe- 
less determined  to  exercise  the  role  of 
monarch  to  the  full  in  the  service  of  his 
people.  It  was  always  an  underlying 
frustration  that  he  could  not  do  more ;  and 
a  mark  of  his  modest  diffidence  that  he 
failed  to  appreciate  how  much  he  did  by 
being  what  he  was.  The  whole  of  his  reign 
was  overshadowed  by  war  and  the  fears 
and  changes  brought  about  by  war.  At 
such  a  time  a  nation  needs  not  only  the 
warrior  leader  which  it  found  in  Churchill 
but  also  the  image  of  the  way  of  life  for 
which  it  fights,  and  this  it  found  in  the 
King.  Lithe  and  handsome,  good  at 
sports,  an  excellent  shot  and  a  skilled 
horseman,  he  was  the  country  squire,  the 
racehorse  owner,  the  freemason,  and 
above  all  the  family  man.  His  approach  to 
life  was  one  of  common  sense  and  humoin". 
He  made  no  claims  to  brilliance  of  intel- 
lect yet  had  a  questing  mind  for  which  the 
twentieth  century  held  no  fears ;  his  keen- 
ness of  observation  and  determination  to 
get  to  the  heart  of  the  matter  could  open 
up  new  lines  of  thought  in  others.  He  had 
few  hobbies  but  was  well  versed  in  all  that 
concerned  his  metier  as  monarch.  He  was 
the  King  malgr^  lui  whom  the  nation  had 
watched  grow  into  kingship  with  a  stead- 
fast courage  which  had  earned  him  their 
respect,  their  gratitude,  and  their  affec- 
tion. 


404 


DJ^.B.  1951-1960 


Gibb,  A. 


The  King  was  painted  by  many  of  the 
leading  artists  of  the  day,  the  state  por- 
trait of  him  in  his  coronation  robes  being 
by  Sir  Gerald  Kelly  in  1938.  There  was,  in 
addition,  the  statue  in  the  Mall  by  Wilham 
McMillan  which  was  unveiled  by  the 
Queen  on  21  October  1955. 

[John  W.  Wheeler-Bennett,  King  Getnge  VI, 
1958.]  Helen  M.  Palmer. 

GERE,  CHARLES  MARCH  (1869-1957), 
artist,  was  born  5  June  1869  in  Gloucester. 
His  father,  Edward  Williams  (Jere,  a  mem- 
ber of  an  American  family  long  settled  in 
Massachusetts,  was  a  partner  in  the  firm 
of  Hayden,  Gere  &  Co.,  brassfounders  of 
Haydensville.  After  the  death  of  his  first 
wife  he  sold  his  share  of  the  business  and 
came  to  England  where  in  1868  he  married 
Emma  March,  of  Gloucester.  Charles  was 
their  only  child. 

Educated  at  a  school  in  Windsor,  Gere 
received  his  first  artistic  training  at  the 
Gloucester  School  of  Arts  and  Crafts.  He 
continued  his  training  at  the  Birmingham 
School  of  Art  and  taught  there  under 
E.  R.  Taylor,  who  kept  the  arts  and  crafts 
movement  very  much  alive.  Gere  practised 
portrait  painting,  designing  for  stained 
glass,  and  embroidery.  He  went  to  Italy 
to  study  tempera  painting  and  learnt  to 
speak  Italian  fluently.  For  a  time  asso- 
ciated with  William  Morris  [q.v.],  among 
the  books  he  illustrated  for  the  Kelmscott 
Press  were  the  Fioretti  of  St.  Francis, 
Dante,  and  the  Morte  d' Arthur.  Later  he 
worked  with  St.  John  Hornby  [q.v.]  at  the 
Ashendene  Press. 

At  his  studio  at  Bridge  End,  Warwick, 
Gere  gradually  became  known  as  a  painter 
of  landscapes  with  figures  in  oil,  tempera, 
and  water-colour.  He  was  a  member  of 
both  the  New  English  Art  Club  and  the 
Royal  Water  Colour  Society.  He  also 
exhibited  with  the  Royal  Academy.  In 
1904,  with  his  half-sister  Margeret  Gere, 
herself  a  distinguished  artist,  he  settled 
at  Painswick,  then  a  quiet  village  in  the 
unspoilt  Cotswolds  between  Stroud  and 
Gloucester.  He  became  a  member  of  the 
Cheltenham  Group  of  Artists  and  was  its 
president  in  1945 ;  and  a  member  of  the 
Gloucester  diocesan  advisory  committee. 
He  was  elected  A.R.A.  in  1934  and  R.A.  in 
1939.  In  1941  he  exhibited  at  the  Academy 
a  striking  battle  scene  'The  last  stand  at 
Calais'. 

His  early  figure  paintings  were  in  the 
manner  of  the  early  Italian  painters. 
An  extraordinarily  accurate  and  careful 
draughtsman,  he  trained  his  memory  for 


landscape  by  making  methodical  notes  of 
the  subject  on  the  spot,  afterwards  com- 
pleting the  work  in  the  studio  in  oil  or 
tempera  on  silk  or  thin  canvas. 

The  best  period  of  his  art  was  when  the 
Cotswold  countryside  inspired  him.  The 
small  landscapes  he  then  painted  show 
that  he  was  deeply  conscious  of  the  charm 
of  the  simple  life  and  the  sacramental 
significance  of  everyday  actions ;  his  holi- 
days in  Northern  Italy  and  Wales  pro- 
vided him  with  rich  and  glowing  subjects. 
These  have  a  freshness  of  colour,  and 
innocence  of  feeling  and  vein  of  lyricism, 
which,  though  gentler  and  more  subdued, 
stand  in  the  direct  line  of  descent  from 
the  ecstatic  poetic  landscapes  of  Calvert 
and  Palmer.  His  productions  of  land- 
scapes in  oil  on  a  larger  scale  for  the 
Academy  were  not  always  so  successful. 
Although  the  structure  of  the  hilly 
escarpments  and  broad  sketches  of  the 
Severn  Valley  bathed  in  sunlight  were 
realized  with  great  fidelity,  as  in  'Tidal 
Severn'  and  'Mouth  of  Severn',  his  pic- 
tures were  in  fact  open  windows  with  the 
subject  cut  by  the  frame,  instead  of  being 
composed  in  relation  to  it.  His  paintings 
are  to  be  seen  at  the  Walker  Art  Gallery, 
Liverpool,  the  Birmingham  Art  Gallery, 
and  in  the  Tate  Gallery.  Throughout  his 
long  life  he  painted  exquisite  water-colour 
portraits  of  children. 

He  was  a  man  of  great  personal  charm 
and  urbanity,  whose  New  England 
ancestry  gave  an  austerity  to  his  per- 
sonality which  strengthened  the  weight  of 
his  opinions.  His  level-headed  kindliness 
of  manner  made  him  an  excellent  commit- 
tee man  and  his  advice  was  often  sought 
by  students  and  his  many  friends.  He  died, 
unmarried,  in  Gloucester  3  August  1957. 
There  is  a  self-portrait  in  Cheltenham  Art 
Gallery. 

[Personal  knowledge.] 

Edward  R.  Payne. 

GIBB,  Sir  ALEXANDER  (1872-1958), 
engineer,  was  born  at  Broughty  Ferry  12 
February  1872,  the  eldest  son  and  fourth 
of  the  eleven  children  of  Alexander  Easton 
Gibb  and  his  wife,  Hope  Brown  Paton. 
For  four  generations  his  forebears  had 
been  civil  engineers:  his  great-great- 
grandfather, William  Gibb,  was  a  con- 
temporary of  James  Brindley  and  John 
Smeaton  [qq.v.] ;  his  great-grandfather, 
John  Gibb  [q.v.],  an  apprentice  of  John 
Rennie  [q.v.],  became  a  deputy  to 
Thomas  Telford  [q.v.]  and  a  founder- 
member     of    the     Institution     of    Civil 


405 


Gibb,  A. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Engineers;  his  grandfather,  Alexander, 
was  a  pupil  of  Telford;  and  his  father 
founded  the  contracting  firm  which  be- 
came Easton  Gibb  &  Son. 

Gibb  was  educated  at  Rugby  School 
and  after  a  year  at  University  College, 
London,  was  articled  to  (Sir)  John  Wolfe- 
Barry  [q.v.]  and  Henry  Marc  Brunei.  Two 
years  in  their  office  were  followed  by 
works  experience  on  the  Caledonian  Rail- 
way and  the  new  Barry  dock.  His  pupilage 
completed,  Gibb  became  Barry's  resident 
engineer  on  the  Metropolitan  Railway 
extension  between  Whitechapel  and  Bow, 
but  after  two  years  he  joined  his  father 
who  was  building  the  King  Edward  VII 
bridge  at  Kew.  For  sixteen  years  he  re- 
mained with  Easton  Gibb  &  Son,  his 
greatest  and  last  contract  being  the  con- 
struction of  Rosyth  naval  base,  which  his 
energetic  acceleration  of  the  original  pro- 
gramme brought  into  use  during  the  war. 

In  1916  Gibb  was  appointed  chief 
engineer,  ports  construction,  to  the  British 
armies  in  France  with  responsibility  for 
organizing  the  reconstruction  of  Belgian 
ports  and  railway  junctions  which  it  was 
expected  the  Germans  would  demolish  in 
their  retreat  before  a  British  offensive.  In 
1918  he  became  civil  engineer-in-chief  to 
the  Admiralty  where  to  counter  the  sub- 
marine menace  he  developed  the  'mystery 
towers'  to  be  sunk  in  the  English  Channel, 
but  the  war  ended  before  they  could  be 
used.  In  1919  he  became  director-general 
of  civil  engineering  in  the  newly  created 
Ministry  of  Transport  where  the  two  pro- 
jects which  particularly  engaged  his  atten- 
tion were  the  Channel  Tunnel  and  the 
Severn  Barrage.  He  always  maintained 
that  the  latter,  a  scheme  for  harnessing 
the  tidal  rise  and  fall  of  the  river  to  pro- 
duce electric  power,  would  ultimately  be 
built. 

In  1921  Gibb  left  government  service 
and  entered  upon  a  career  as  a  consulting 
engineer,  establishing  in  1922  the  firm  of 
Sir  Alexander  Gibb  &  Partners  at  Queen 
Anne's  Lodge,  Westminster.  During  the 
first  few  months  the  firm  undertook  the 
design  and  erection  of  the  aquarium  for 
the  Zoological  Society  and  the  first  designs 
for  Barking  power-station.  Gibb  had  great 
faith  in  the  future  of  hydro-electric 
development  and  in  collaboration  with 
C.  H.  Merz  [q.v.]  and  William  McLellan 
was  responsible  for  the  Galloway  scheme, 
which,  completed  in  1936,  was  the  first 
major  work  of  this  kind.  Among  his  other 
notable  achievements  were  the  Kincar- 
dine bridge,  the  Guinness  brewery  at  Park 


Royal,  the  Captain  Cook  graving  dock  at 
Sydney,  the  Singapore  naval  base,  and, 
in  wartime  collaboration,  the  designs  for 
Mulberry  harbour  and  an  underground 
factory  for  aeroplane  engines  at  Corsham. 
Resolved  to  make  his  firm  the  largest  of  its 
kind  in  the  country,  Gibb  was  interested  in 
projects  all  over  the  world  and  by  1939 
had  travelled  280,000  miles  and  visited 
sixty  countries. 

Of  particular  interest  was  the  study 
Gibb  made  of  the  port  of  Rangoon.  From 
1910  the  navigable  channel  to  the  port 
had  been  progressively  obstructed  by 
a  silt  bar  about  7  miles  long  forming  at  the 
mouth  of  Rangoon  River.  Gibb  was  con- 
sulted in  1929 ;  in  1931,  when  the  depth 
of  the  channel  had  become  seriously  re- 
duced, he  decided  to  build  a  hydraulic 
model  to  elucidate  the  problem.  This 
model,  installed  at  University  College, 
London,  reproduced  a  year's  tidal  move- 
ments in  fifteen  hours.  The  river  and  sea 
beds  were  initially  moulded  to  represent 
conditions  as  they  existed  in  1875  and  the 
model  was  then  run  continuously  to  bring 
its  state  to  1932.  The  agreement  between 
the  observed  conditions  at  Rangoon  and 
those  given  by  the  model  was  good ;  the 
model  was  then  used  to  predict  probable 
future  conditions.  The  indications  were 
that  after  a  few  more  years  the  bar  would 
begin  to  disappear  and  Gibb  therefore 
recommended  that  no  expensive  remedial 
works  were  necessary.  In  1936  the  silting 
reached  its  maximum  and  thereafter  con- 
ditions steadily  improved. 

Gibb  was  appointed  C.B.  and  K.B.E.  in 
1918  and  G.B.E.  in  1920.  For  his  services 
to  Belgium  in  the  war  of  1914-18  he  was 
made  a  commander  of  the  Order  of  the 
Crown  of  Belgium.  He  was  elected  F.R.S. 
in  1936,  was  president  of  the  Institution  of 
Civil  Engineers  (1936-7)  and  of  numerous 
other  professional  bodies,  received  an 
honorary  LL.D.  from  Edinburgh  Univer- 
sity, and  was  a  member  of  the  Queen's 
Bodyguard  for  Scotland  (Royal  Company 
of  Archers)  and  of  the  Royal  Fine  Art 
Commission. 

Gibb  delighted  in  his  work  and  in  out- 
door activities ;  shooting  and  fishing  were 
his  recreations.  In  1937  his  health  began  to 
fail  but  this  interfered  little  with  his  work 
until  1940.  From  then  onwards  he  was 
obliged  to  ease  off,  but  until  1945  he  paid 
at  least  two  weekly  visits  to  his  office.  He 
died  at  Hartley  Wintney  21  January  1958. 

In  1900  he  married  Norah  Isobel  (died 
1940),  daughter  of  Fleet- Surgeon  John 
Lowry  Monteith,   R.N.,   and  had  three 


406 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Gibb,  C.  D. 


sons.  The  eldest,  Alistair,  succeeded  as 
head  of  the  firm  after  the  war  of  1939-45 
but  died  after  an  accident  in  1955. 

Two  portraits  of  Gibb  by  L.  Campbell 
Taylor,  one  of  them  in  full-length  aca- 
demic dress,  are  at  Queen  Anne's  Lodge ; 
a  third,  by  Sir  William  Rothenstein,  is  in 
the  collection  of  presidential  portraits  at 
the  Institution  of  Civil  Engineers. 

[G.  P.  Harrison  and  A.  J.  S.  Pippard  in 
Biographical  Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal 
Society,  vol.  v,  1959;  Godfrey  Harrison, 
Alexander  Gibb,  1950;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.] 

A.  J.  Sutton  Pippard. 

GIBB,  Sir  CLAUDE  DIXON  (1898-1959), 
engineer,  was  born  at  Alberton,  South 
Australia,  29  June  1898,  the  third  child  of 
John  Gilbert  Gibb,  carrier,  of  Port  Ade- 
laide, and  his  wife,  Caroline  EHzabeth 
Dixon.  He  went  to  Alberton  Primary 
School  and  Lefevre  High  School  and  thence 
by  scholarship  to  the  South  Australian 
School  of  Mines  where  he  studied  mechani- 
cal and  electrical  engineering.  He  joined 
the  Adelaide  Cement  Company  as  an 
electrician  and  in  1917-19  was  a  pilot  in 
the  Australian  Flying  Corps,  serving  in 
France. 

After  the  war  Gibb  obtained  a  post  as 
senior  research  assistant  to  (Sir)  Robert 
Chapman  at  the  university  of  Adelaide 
where  he  took  his  degree  in  engineering 
and  the  diploma  in  applied  science  in  1923 
and  in  1924  won  an  Angas  engineering 
research  scholarship.  Deciding  to  get 
experience  in  England  he  joined  Messrs. 
C  A.  Parsons  in  1924  as  a  student  appren- 
tice. He  progressed  to  the  drawing  office 
and  thence  to  the  outside  erection  staff 
where  his  work  attracted  the  attention 
of  Sir  Charles  Parsons  (whose  notice  he 
subsequently  contributed  to  this  Dic- 
tionary) who  made  him  manager  first  of 
the  steam  test  house  and  later  of  the 
design  and  drawing  offices  at  the  Heaton 
works.  In  1929  he  became  a  director  and 
chief  engineer;  in  1937  general  manager; 
and  in  1943  joint  managing  director. 

The  firm's  work  for  the  navy  brought 
Gibb  into  touch  with  Engineer  Vice- 
Admiral  Sir  Harold  Brown  who  became 
director-general  of  munitions  production 
at  the  Ministry  of  Supply  and  who  in 
October  1940  asked  Gibb  to  join  him  as 
his  assistant.  Gibb  became  director-general 
:  of  weapons  and  instruments  production 
(1941)  and  his  engineering  common  sense, 
organizing  ability,  firmness,  and  decisive- 
ness won  him  a  great  reputation.  In  1943 


he  became  director-general  of  armoured 
fighting  vehicles  and  in  1944  chairman  of 
the  Tank  Board,  still  in  the  Ministry  of 
Supply.  At  that  time  British  tanks  were 
in  trouble:  design  was  dispersed  in  the 
offices  of  a  number  of  manufacturers 
without  effective  co-ordination  and  out- 
put was  unsatisfactory.  Gibb  immediately 
decided  that  his  department  would  take 
full  responsibility  for  design  and  re- 
organized production.  The  Centurion  and 
all  the  special  tank  developments  for 
infantry  support  were  the  result. 

At  the  end  of  the  war,  despite  offers 
from  various  large  engineering  concerns, 
Gibb  returned  to  Parsons  where  he  became 
chairman  and  managing  director  in 
September  1945.  His  pride  in  the  Parsons 
organization  was  unbounded  and  he 
wished  for  nothing  more  than  to  make  the 
firm  outstanding.  In  this  he  succeeded. 
Surmounting  post-war  difficulties  of 
licences  and  priorities  he  re-equipped  first 
the  machine  shops,  then  the  foundry  and 
erecting  shops  at  Heaton;  his  vision  in 
forecasting  the  post-war  trend  of  size  and 
design  in  turbo-alternators  enabled  Par- 
sons successfully  to  expand  their  output. 
Gibb  was  also  chairman  of  Grubb,  Parsons 
&  Co.,  and  took  a  close  interest  in  their 
speciaUzed  optical  work.  In  1944  he  joined 
the  ReyroUe  board,  becoming  deputy 
chairman  in  1945  and  chairman  in  1949- 
58.  During  this  period  ReyroUes  expanded 
at  a  greater  rate  than  ever  before  and 
largely  re-equipped  their  factory. 

Alone  among  the  heads  of  the  great 
British  electrical  firms,  Gibb  reaUzed  the 
importance  of  the  new  developments  in 
atomic  energy  and  in  1947-8  he  col- 
laborated with  Risley  in  preparing  the 
first  designs  for  a  graphite-moderated  gas- 
cooled  nuclear  power  plant.  Although  the 
scheme  evolved  was  clumsy  it  proved  the 
conception  to  be  practical  and  formed 
the  foundation  for  the  design  study  at 
Harwell  in  1952,  which  in  turn  provided 
the  framework  for  the  Calder  Hall  design. 
Gibb's  engineers  formed  part  of  the  Har- 
well team  and  later  of  the  Calder  Hall 
team  at  Risley.  The  turbo-alternators  and 
the  gas  circulating  blowers  at  Calder  Hall 
were  supplied  by  C.  A.  Parsons. 

When  it  was  decided  that  the  responsi- 
bility for  the  design  and  construction  of 
nuclear  power  plants  should  be  given  to 
industrial  engineering  firms,  Parsons  were 
one  of  the  four  electrical  firms  which  were 
asked  to  form  consortia.  Gibb  brought 
together  eight  companies  already  skilled 
in  nuclear  engineering  and  formed  them 


407 


Gibb,  C.  D, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


into  the  Nuclear  Power  Plant  Company 
which  received  one  of  the  first  two  orders 
for  industrial  nuclear  power  plants.  He 
also  formed  a  joint  company  with  the 
Great  Lakes  Carbon  Corporation  of 
America  and  built  a  factory  in  Newcastle 
for  the  manufacture  of  graphite  for  use  in 
nuclear  reactors. 

Gibb  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1946,  was 
a  member  of  the  council  in  1955-7,  and 
vice-president  in  1956-7.  He  was  vice- 
president  of  the  Institution  of  Mechanical 
Engineers  (1945-51)  and  received  its 
Hawksley  medal  (twice),  the  Parsons 
memorial  medal,  and  the  James  Watt 
medal.  He  was  president  of  the  engineer- 
ing section  of  the  British  Association  in 
1951 ;  chairman  of  the  council  of  the 
International  Electrical  Association,  of 
the  Athlone  Fellowship  committee,  and 
of  the  committee  on  the  organization  and 
control  of  government  research  expendi- 
ture ;  and  member  of  the  Ridley  commit- 
tee on  the  use  of  coal,  gas,  and  electricity, 
of  the  Board  of  Trade's  informal  advisory 
group  on  exports,  and  of  the  council  of 
King's  College,  Newcastle  upon  Tyne.  He 
received  honorary  degrees  from  London 
and  Diurham,  was  knighted  in  1945,  and 
appointed  K.B.E.  in  1956. 

Gibb  loved  speed  both  in  business  and 
in  movement.  He  was  a  good  lecturer  and 
speaker  who  never  hesitated  to  state  his 
opinions  quite  regardless  of  whether  they 
would  be  unpalatable  to  his  hearers  or 
embarrassing  to  other  people.  As  an 
organizer  he  was  clear,  firm,  and  methodi- 
cal, but  hke  many  men  who  are  full  of 
energy  and  supremely  confident  he  found 
it  difficult,  until  his  last  years,  to  delegate 
responsibility.  As  a  business  man  he  was 
astute  and  far-sighted.  He  was  an  engineer 
of  a  type  which  is  unfortunately  rare :  at 
home  in  the  design  office,  proud  to  use 
workshop  tools  and  machines  as  a  crafts- 
man, yet  having  a  thorough  grasp  of  the 
scientific  theory  on  which  the  art  of 
engineering  rests.  Although  at  times  he 
could  be  quite  infuriating  to  his  friends, 
he  won  not  merely  respect  but  also  deep 
affection  from  all  those  who  worked  for  or 
with  him. 

In  1925  Gibb  married  Margaret  Bate 
(died  1969),  daughter  of  William  Harris,  of 
Totnes ;  they  had  no  children.  In  1948  he 
made  a  complete  recovery  from  a  severe 
coronary  thrombosis,  as  he  did  five  years 
later  from  a  second  and  a  third;  but  he 
collapsed  and  died  at  Newark,  New 
Jersey,  airport,  15  January  1959. 

[Sir   Christopher   Hinton   in   Biographical 


Memmrs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  v, 
1959;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Hinton  of  Bankside. 

GIBBINGS,  ROBERT  JOHN  (1889- 
1958),  wood-engraver,  author,  and  book 
designer,  born  in  Cork  23  March  1889,  was 
the  second  son  of  the  Rev.  Edward  Gibb- 
ings,  later  canon  of  Cork  Cathedral,  and 
his  wife,  Caroline  Rouviere,  daughter  of 
Robert  Day,  a  business  man  of  Cork. 
He  was  educated  at  local  schools  and  at 
eighteen  matriculated  at  University  Col- 
lege, Cork,  where  for  two  years  he  studied 
medicine.  In  1911  he  went  to  London  to 
study  art  at  the  Slade  School.  In  1912  he 
attended  the  Central  School  of  Arts  and 
Crafts  where  he  was  taught  the  technique 
of  wood-engraving  by  Noel  Rooke. 

In  August  1914  Gibbings  was  com- 
missioned in  the  4th  Royal  Munster 
Fusiliers.  In  1915  he  served  in  Gallipoli, 
where  he  was  shot  through  the  throat.  In 
March  1918  he  was  invalided  out  of  the 
army  with  the  rank  of  captain.  He  then 
helped  to  form  the  Society  of  Wood 
Engravers,  of  which  he  was  the  first 
honorary  secretary.  To  the  first  exhibition 
of  this  society,  in  1920,  Gibbings  contri- 
buted twelve  prints.  As  a  result  he  was 
commissioned  to  engrave  a  number  of 
designs  for  advertisements.  In  1921  he 
produced  his  first  book,  Twelve  Wood 
Engravings.  He  exhibited  eight  engravings 
in  the  second  exhibition  (1921),  five  in  the 
third  (1922),  and  six  in  the  fourth  (1923). 
In  1923  he  was  commissioned  to  illustrate 
Samuel  Butler's  Erewhon,  and  the  next 
year,  by  Harold  Taylor,  the  founder  of  the 
Golden  Cockerel  Press,  to  illustrate  Bran- 
tome's  Lives  of  Gallant  Ladies.  Whilst 
Gibbings  was  working  on  these  blocks 
Taylor  fell  ill,  and  the  Golden  Cockerel 
Press  would  have  closed  down  if  Gibbings 
had  not  been  enabled  to  buy  it  by  financial 
support  from  a  friend. 

The  Press  was  at  Waltham  St. 
Lawrence,  in  Berkshire.  With  Gibbings  as 
its  director  and  book  designer  it  produced 
72  books  between  1924  and  1933,  of  which 
19  were  illustrated  by  Gibbings  himself. 
Forty-eight  of  its  productions  were  illus- 
trated with  wood-engravings.  Among  the 
engravers  whom  Gibbings  employed — 
giving  several  of  them  their  first  commis- 
sions— were  John  Nash,  David  Jones, 
Eric  Ravilious  [q.v.],  Blair  Hughes- 
Stanton,  John  Farleigh,  and,  most 
notably,  Eric  Gill  [q.v.],  whose  editions 
of  the  Canterbury  Tales  (1929-31)  and  the 
Four  Gospels  (1931)  were  probably  the 


408 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Gibson 


most  significant  achievements  of  the  Press. 
For  several  years  it  enjoyed  commercial 
success,  but  it  was  severely  hit  by  the 
international  slump  and  in  1933  Gibbings 
sold  his  financial  interest  in  it. 

He  had,  in  the  previous  years,  under- 
taken a  few  commissions  for  other  pub- 
lishers, including  illustrations  for  The 
Charm  of  Birds  (1927)  by  Lord  Grey  of 
Fallodon  [q.v.].  In  1929  he  had  spent  four 
months  in  Tahiti,  having  been  com- 
missioned to  illustrate  a  book  that  James 
Norman  Hall  was  to  write.  Instead  of 
this,  his  visit  resulted  in  two  books,  The 
Seventh  Man  (1930)  and  lorana  (1932), 
both  written  and  illustrated  by  himself. 
He  now  illustrated  books  for  several 
British  publishers.  For  the  Limited  Edi- 
tions Club  of  New  York  he  illustrated  Le 
Morte  d' Arthur  (1936).  In  that  year  he  was 
appointed  lecturer  in  book  production  in 
the  university  of  Reading,  a  post  which 
he  held  until  1942.  He  visited  the  West 
Indies  and  the  Red  Sea  to  make  under- 
water drawings  of  fish  and  coral  for  his 
book  Blue  Angels  and  Whales  (1938).  In 
1938  the  National  University  of  Ireland 
conferred  an  honorary  M.A.  upon  him. 

In  1939  Gibbings  undertook  a  book 
about  his  exploration  of  the  River 
Thames  in  a  punt,  and  this  enjoyed  a  great 
success  when  published  as  Sweet  Thames 
Run  Softly  (1940).  It  was  the  first  of 
a  series  combining  topographical  impres- 
sions, personal  anecdote,  and  observa- 
tions of  nature,  illustrated  with  the 
author's  engravings.  For  many  months  in 
1941  he  lived  in  a  remote  cottage  at 
Llangurig,  close  to  Plynlimmon,  writing 
and  illustrating  Coming  Down  the  Wye 
(1942).  He  then  returned  to  Ireland  to 
produce  Lovely  is  the  Lee  (1945)  which 
became  a  Book-of-the-Month  choice  in 
the  United  States.  Over  the  Reefs  (1948) 
was  the  fruit  of  a  long  visit  to  the  South 
Seas,  and  Sweet  Cork  of  Thee  (1951)  cele- 
brated another  return  to  Ireland.  Coming 
Down  the  Seine  (1953)  and  Trumpets  from 
Montparnasse  (1955)  recorded  visits  to 
France  and  Italy,  during  the  second  of 
which  he  resumed  the  painting  in  oils 
which  he  had  abandoned  after  his  student 
days.  On  his  return  to  England  he  bought 
a  cottage  at  Long  Wittenham  in  Berk- 
shire. Prophetically  entitled  Till  I  End 
My  Song,  his  last  book,  again  about 
the  Thames,  was  completed  there  despite 
increasing  ill  health.  He  died  in  Oxford,  19 
January  1958,  three  months  after  its 
publication. 

A    tall,    massively    built    man,    with 


twinkUng  eyes,  aquihne  features,  and 
a  beard,  Gibbings  had  great  natural 
charm,  a  fund  of  Irish  humour,  and  an 
exceptional  store  of  miscellaneous  know- 
ledge of  birds,  fishes,  plants,  geology,  and 
archaeology. 

His  work  as  a  book  designer  at  the 
Golden  Cockerel  Press  was  rivalled  only 
by  that  of  Francis  Meynell  at  the  None- 
such Press.  As  a  wood-engraver  he  was 
one  of  the  leaders  of  the  revival  of  this  art. 
His  own  work  was  at  first  characterized 
by  bold  contrasts  and  organization  of 
masses,  with  a  skilful  use  of  the  'vanishing 
line'.  Later  his  technique  became  more 
subtle,  with  greater  emphasis  on  grada- 
tion of  texture.  The  eight  *river  books', 
containing  altogether  nearly  500  engrav- 
ings, all  closely  integrated  with  his  own 
text,  represent  a  remarkable  combination 
of  the  talents  of  author,  illustrator,  and 
book  designer. 

Gibbings  married  twice:  first,  Mary, 
daughter  of  Colonel  Edward  G.  Penne- 
father,  by  whom  he  had  three  sons  and 
a  daughter;  and  secondly,  Elisabeth, 
daughter  of  Arthur  Herbert  Empson,  by 
whom  he  had  one  son  and  two  daughters. 
A  head  by  Marshall  C.  Hutson  was 
exhibited  at  the  Royal  Academy  in  1948. 

[Thomas  Balston,  The  Wood-Engravings  of 
Robert  Gibbings,  1949 ;  The  Wood  Engravings 
of  Robert  Gibbings,  with  Some  Recollections 
by  the  Artist,  ed.  Patience  Empson,  1959; 
A.  Mary  Kirkus,  Patience  Empson,  and  John 
Harris,  Robert  Gibbings,  a  Bibliography,  1962 ; 
personal  knowledge.]         J.  C.  H.  Hadfield. 

GIBSON,      WILLIAM      PETTIGREW 

(1902-1960),  keeper  of  the  National  Gal- 
lery, was  born  in  Glasgow  3  January  1902, 
the  elder  son  of  Edwin  Arthur  Gibson, 
Scottish  physician,  by  his  wife,  Ellen 
Shaw  Pettigrew.  He  was  educated  at 
Wilkinson's  in  Orme  Square,  at  West- 
minster, and  at  Christ  Church,  Oxford ;  at 
all  three  he  was  the  exact  contemporary 
and  close  friend  of  Humfry  Payne  [q.v.], 
later  to  become  director  of  the  British 
School  at  Athens,  and  his  future  career 
certainly  owed  something  to  the  influence 
of  Payne's  artistic  interests.  He  read  medi- 
cine, and  took  a  second  in  physiology  at 
Oxford  in  1924;  but  soon  after  he  went 
down  he  abandoned  his  medical  studies, 
much  to  his  father's  disappointment  and 
at  considerable  sacrifice  to  himself,  and 
devoted  himself  to  the  history  of  art.  In 
1927,  after  two  difficult  years  during 
which  he  worked  with  great  determina- 
tion to  fit  himself  for  a  new  career,  he  was 


409 


Gibson 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


appointed  to  the  staff  of  the  Wallace  Col- 
lection as  lecturer  and  assistant  keeper, 
and  remained  there  until  1936,  when  he 
became  reader  in  the  history  of  art  in  the 
university  of  London  and  deputy  director 
of  the  Courtauld  Institute  of  Art.  In  1939 
he  was  appointed  keeper  of  the  National 
Gallery  under  Sir  Kenneth  Clark  (later  a 
life  peer)  and  he  remained  in  that  appoint- 
ment for  the  rest  of  his  life.  He  married 
in  1940  Christina,  youngest  daughter  of 
Francis  Ogilvy,  whose  eldest  sister  had 
married  (Sir)  Philip  Hendy,  Gibson's  con- 
temporary at  Westminster  and  Christ 
Church,  his  predecessor  at  the  Wallace 
Collection,  and  afterwards  his  director  at 
the  National  Gallery.  The  Gibsons  settled 
soon  after  the  war  at  Wyddiall  Hall 
in  North  Hertfordshire,  where  Gibson, 
though  brought  up  as  a  Londoner,  came  to 
take  great  interest  in  country  pursuits, 
farming,  and  riding  in  company  with  his 
charming  and  talented  wife.  They  had  no 
children. 

Gibson  was  a  sympathetic  lecturer  in 
his  days  at  the  Wallace  Collection,  and 
three  of  his  lectures  on  French  painting 
were  published  in  1930.  Apart  from  these, 
however,  he  published  only  an  occasional 
article,  usually  on  French  art,  in  the 
learned  art  periodicals.  For  this  reason, 
perhaps,  he  was  less  well  known  to  the  art 
world  in  general  than  were  some  of  his  col- 
leagues; but  his  abilities  were  sincerely 
respected  by  a  long  succession  of  trustees 
of  the  Gallery  during  the  twenty-one 
years  of  his  keepership.  Throughout  the 
war  he  spent  longer  periods  on  duty,  day 
and  night,  than  any  other  member  of  the 
staff ;  and  it  was  largely  due  to  his  devo- 
tion and  imperturbabiUty  that  the  build- 
ings did  not  suffer  more  from  incendiary 
bombs.  In  later  years,  under  a  new  direc- 
tor, his  experience  was  equally  valuable ; 
he  was  conscientious  and  exact  in  keeping 
before  the  board  the  rules  of  the  Gallery 
and  the  terms  of  the  trusteeship,  and  his 
good  manners,  independence  of  judge- 
ment, and  robust  common  sense  lent 
weight  to  his  advice.  On  what  he  con- 
sidered a  matter  of  principle  he  was 
determined,  and  could  be  obstinate. 

Gibson  was  a  tall,  bulky  man,  of  dis- 
tinguished appearance,  not  athletic  but 
physically  very  strong,  having  been  an 
oarsman  at  Westminster  and  Christ 
Church.  In  personal  relationships  he  was 
uncompromising,  but  most  loyal  to  those 
who  enjoyed  his  confidence  and  affection. 
When  Sir  Charles  Prescott,  one  of  his 
greatest   friends,    died   in    1955,    Gibson 


collaborated  with  others  in  producing 
a  memoir  of  him,  which  was  privately 
printed;  and  the  essay  which  he  himself 
contributed  to  that  book  not  only  affords 
a  good  example  of  his  elegant  style  as  a 
writer,  but  also  reveals  something  of  his 
affectionate  nature  and  of  his  own  charac- 
teristic tastes.  A  devout  member  of  the 
Roman  Catholic  Church,  he  died  in 
London  22  April  1960. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
J.  Byam  Shaw. 

GILLIATT,  Sir  WILLIAM  (1884-1956), 
obstetrician,  was  born  7  June  1884  at 
Boston,  Lincolnshire.  His  father,  also 
William  Gilliatt,  came  of  farming  stock, 
married  Alice  Rose,  and  later  abandoned 
the  land  in  favour  of  a  chemist  shop 
which  he  owned  and  administered  in 
Boston.  William,  fourth  in  a  family  of 
five,  was  educated  at  Kirton  village 
school  and  Wellingborough  College.  His 
headmaster,  impressed  by  his  ability, 
persuaded  him  to  give  up  his  original  idea 
of  farming  in  favour  of  medicine.  In  1902 
he  entered  University  College  Hospital, 
but  after  a  year  transferred  to  the  Middle- 
sex, where  he  had  a  distinguished  career, 
winning  a  number  of  scholarships.  After 
qualifying  in  the  London  M.B.,  B.S.  in 
1908,  he  was  awarded  the  Lyell  gold 
medal  in  1909  and  went  on  to  hold  various 
resident  house  appointments,  taking  the 
London  M.D.  in  1910  and  winning  the  gold 
medal  in  obstetrics  and  gynaecology.  Two 
years  later  he  took  the  F.R.C.S.  (England) 
and  the  M.S.  (London)  while  still  holding 
the  post  of  registrar  and  tutor  in  obstetrics 
and  gynaecology  at  the  Middlesex  Hospi- 
tal. In  1912  he  was  appointed  first  assis- 
tant resident  medical  officer  at  Queen 
Charlotte's  Maternity  Hospital,  and  later 
pathologist  and  registrar. 

In  1916  Gilliatt  was  appointed  to  the 
honorary  staff  of  King's  College  Hospital, 
as  assistant  obstetric  and  gynaecological 
surgeon  and  lecturer  in  the  medical 
school.  In  the  same  year  he  was  elected 
physician  to  outpatients  at  Queen  Char- 
lotte's Hospital  and  in  1919  obstetric 
surgeon  to  inpatients.  But  in  1920  he  re- 
signed from  Queen  Charlotte's  because  he 
felt  it  impossible  properly  to  fulfil  the 
responsibilities  of  working  in  two  large 
obstetrical  departments  at  the  same  time. 
He  was  thereby  able  to  give  more  time 
and  attention  to  the  obstetric  department 
at  King's  College  Hospital,  where  his 
teaching  abilities  were  given  every  oppor- 
tunity and  where  he  was  senior  obstetric 


410 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Gillies 


and  gynaecological  surgeon  from  1925  to 
1946.  In  1926  Gilliatt  was  appointed  to  the 
honorary  staff  of  the  Samaritan  Hospital 
for  Women.  His  association  with  this 
hospital  continued  without  interruption 
until  1946.  Other  hospitals  where  he 
worked  as  an  honorary  member  of  the 
staff  were  Bromley,  the  Maudsley,  and 
St.  Saviour's. 

In  his  professional  and  academic  life 
Gilliatt  will  be  remembered  as  a  notable 
teacher  with  a  clear  and  concise  method. 
He  was  a  skilful  and  dexterous  obstetri- 
cian, a  painstaking  but  not  spectacular 
surgeon.  Above  all,  he  excelled  as  an 
astute  diagnostician  and  as  a  clinician 
with  a  remarkably  good  judgement  and 
common  sense.  He  wrote  relatively  little, 
but  made  valuable  contributions  on  the 
subject  of  maternal  mortality  and  mor- 
bidity. He  contributed  to  the  Historical 
Review  of  British  Obstetrics  and  Gynaecology 
published  in  1954  and  was  a  regular  con- 
tributor to  successive  editions  of  the  'Ten 
Teachers'  series  in  obstetrics  and  gynae- 
cology. 

When  the  British  (later  Royal)  College 
of  Obstetricians  and  Gynaecologists  was 
founded  in  1929,  Gilliatt,  as  a  member  of 
a  teaching  hospital  staff,  automatically 
became  a  foundation  fellow.  From  the 
very  earliest  days  of  the  College  he  played 
an  important  role,  being  elected  to  the 
council  in  1932,  serving  as  president 
(1946—9),  and  remaining  almost  without 
interruption  active  in  College  affairs  until 
the  day  of  his  death.  Gilliatt's  capacity  for 
clear  and  logical  thought  and  argument 
made  him  an  ideal  committee  man,  and  he 
excelled  as  chairman  of  many  committees 
both  in  the  College  and  at  King's  College 
Hospital. 

In  spite  of  a  very  full  academic  pro- 
fessional life,  Gilliatt  developed  a  con- 
siderable private  practice  especially  in 
obstetrics.  Although  devoted  to  his 
patients,  he  never  allowed  his  private 
practice  to  become  numerically  large 
enough  to  interfere  with  his  other  re- 
sponsibilities. He  attended  Princess 
Marina,  Duchess  of  Kent,  when  all  her 
children  were  born  and  he  also  attended 
Princess  Elizabeth  when  Prince  Charles 
and  Princess  Anne  were  born  in  1948 
and  1950.  After  Princess  Elizabeth 
succeeded  to  the  throne  Gilliatt  was 
appointed  surgeon-gynaecologist  to  the 
Queen.  He  was  appointed  C.V.O.  in 
1936,  knighted  in  1948,  and  promoted 
K.C.V.O.  in  1949.  In  1947  he  was  elected 
F.R.C.P.    and    in    1953    was    made    an 


honorary  master  of  midwifery  of  the 
Society  of  Apothecaries.  In  1954-6  he  was 
president  of  the  Royal  Society  of  Medicine. 

In  his  younger  days  Gilliatt  played  foot- 
ball for  the  Casuals,  and  later  became 
a  keen  and  very  good  golfer.  In  later  years, 
however,  his  main  recreation  was  on  the 
racecourse,  for  he  was  a  member  of  many 
racing  clubs  including  Ascot  and  Kempton 
Park,  where  he  was  a  very  regular  visitor. 
Although  not  a  great  clubman,  he  was 
a  keen  freemason.  Essentially  of  a  shy  dis- 
position, Gilliatt  built  his  success  on  the 
foundation-stone  of  a  strong  character 
combined  with  an  inbred  sense  of  duty 
and  responsibility.  He  was  possessed  of 
a  stern  self-discipline  and  a  single-minded 
determination  which  at  times  gave  the 
impression  of  austerity  and  even  ruthless- 
ness.  He  thought  carefully  before  speaking 
and  did  not  waste  words,  but  was  always 
approachable  and  willing  to  give  advice 
and  encouragenjent  to  the  younger  man. 
As  a  public  speaker  he  did  not  excel,  but 
his  quiet  dignity,  courtesy,  and  sincerity 
more  than  compensated.  In  his  later  years 
he  became  a  very  successful  elder  states- 
man, guiding  the  affairs  of  those  institu- 
tions which  had  absorbed  the  best  years 
of  his  life.  There  is  a  portrait  in  the  Royal 
College  of  Obstetricians  and  Gynae- 
cologists, painted  during  his  lifetime  by 
David  Alison;  and  another  painted  from 
a  photograph  after  his  death  by  Edward 
I.  Halliday  hangs  in  the  Royal  Society  of 
Medicine. 

In  1914  Gilliatt  married  Anne  Louise 
Jane,  daughter  of  John  Kann,  stock- 
broker. She  herself  was  a  doctor  and  prac- 
tised for  several  years  as  an  anaesthetist. 
They  had  one  daughter,  and  a  son,  Roger 
William,  who  became  professor  of  neuro- 
logy at  the  National  Hospital  for  Nervous 
Diseases.  Gilliatt  died  in  a  motor  accident 
at  Chertsey  27  September  1956. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

John  Peel. 

GILLIES,  Sir  HAROLD  DELF  (1882- 
1960),  plastic  surgeon,  was  born  in  Dune- 
din,  New  Zealand,  17  June  1882,  the 
youngest  of  the  six  sons  of  Robert  Gillies, 
a  contractor  and  a  noted  amateur 
astronomer,  and  his  wife,  Emily  Street. 
His  great-uncle  was  Edward  Lear  [q.v.], 
author  of  the  Book  of  Nonsense.  He  was 
educated  at  Wanganui  College  where  he 
was  captain  of  cricket,  and  at  Gonville  and 
Caius  College,  Cambridge,  where  he  played 
golf  (1903-5)  and  rowed  (1904)  for  the 
university  and  obtained  a  second  class  in 


411 


Gillies 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


part  i  of  the  natural  sciences  tripos  in 
1904.  From  Cambridge  he  moved  for  his 
clinical  studies  to  St.  Bartholomew's 
Hospital,  qualifying  in  1908  and  obtaining 
his  F.R.C.S.  in  1910.  After  a  minimal 
experience  of  general  surgery  he  became 
interested  in  otorhinolaryngology  and 
worked  with  (Sir)  Milsom  Rees. 

Gillies's  great  opportunity  came  with 
the  war  of  1914-18.  He  joined  the  Royal 
Army  Medical  Corps  in  1915,  went  to 
France,  and  was  enormously  impressed  by 
the  work  of  French  and  German  surgeons 
in  the  field  of  reconstructive  surgery  in 
facial  injuries.  Such  was  his  enthusiasm 
that  a  centre  for  the  treatment  of  these 
patients  was  started  at  Aldershot  later  in 
the  same  year,  and  he  was  placed  in 
charge  of  it  under  Sir  Arbuthnot  Lane 
[q.v.].  In  1918  the  centre  moved  to  Queen 
Mary's  Hospital,  Sidcup,  and  eventually 
was  administered  by  the  Ministry  of  Pen- 
sions to  which  Gillies  became  honorary 
consultant.  The  experiences  gained  in  the 
reconstruction  of  facial  wounds  were 
rapidly  expanded  to  cover  the  whole  field 
of  reconstructive  surgery:  burns,  limb 
injuries,  congenital  malformations,  and 
so  on. 

Many  of  the  surgeons  trained  by  Gillies 
returned  after  the  war  to  their  native 
lands.  (Sir)  William  Kelsey  Fry  remained 
at  Guy's  Hospital  to  continue  as  the  great 
dental  collaborator  and  (Sir)  Ivan  Magill 
at  the  Westminster  Hospital  as  the  pioneer 
of  intra -tracheal  anaesthesia.  Gillies  found 
himself  alone,  with  T.  P.  Kilner,  who  had 
joined  him  in  1918,  as  his  assistant,  and 
took  the  plunge  into  private  practice  as 
a  specialist  in  plastic  surgery.  Things  were 
difficult  at  first,  but  improved.  Gillies 
became  plastic  surgeon  to  St.  Bartholo- 
mew's and  other  hospitals,  to  the  London 
County  Council,  and  to  the  Royal  Air 
Force.  In  1924  he  treated  a  number  of 
Danish  casualties  in  Copenhagen  following 
the  prematiu'c  explosion  of  a  phosphorous 
bomb  and  was  subsequently  made  a  com- 
mander of  the  Order  of  Dannebrog.  He 
had  been  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1920  and 
was  knighted  in  1930. 

When  war  broke  out  in  1939  most  of 
Gillies's  trainees  were  abroad.  There  were 
in  the  United  Kingdom  only  foxu*  plastic 
surgeons  of  experience.  His  cousin,  (Sir) 
Archibald  Mclndoe  [q.v.],  and  another 
New  Zealander,  Rainsford  Mowlem,  were 
in  partnership  with  him;  Kilner  was 
now  working  independently.  It  fell  to 
these  four  men  to  train  a  multiplicity  of 
surgeons  in  the  field  of  plastic  surgery, 


whilst  dealing  with  the  many  thousands  of 
patients  pouring  into  their  units.  Gillies's 
team  worked  in  Rooksdown  House,  near 
Basingstoke,  and  the  centre  became  a 
famous  one  in  plastic  surgery,  although 
not  receiving  the  publicity  which  perhaps 
it  deserved. 

In  1946  GiUies  became  the  first  presi- 
dent of  the  newly  formed  British  Associa- 
tion of  Plastic  Surgeons  and  in  1948  he 
was  awarded  the  honorary  fellowship  of 
the  American  College  of  Surgeons.  In  1955 
he  was  elected  the  first  president  of  the 
International  Plastic  Society  at  Stock- 
holm. In  1948  he  was  made  a  commander 
of  the  Order  of  St.  Olaf  for  training 
Norwegian  surgeons  during  the  war.  He 
received  honorary  degrees  from  Ljubljana 
(1957)  and  Colombia  (1959),  and  in  1960 
the  special  honorary  citation  of  the  Ameri- 
can Society  of  Plastic  and  Reconstructive 
Surgery.  In  their  journal  (January  1961) 
Dr.  Jerome  P.  Webster  wrote:  'He  was 
a  giant  pre-eminent  in  his  chosen  field  of 
endeavor.  The  ideas  engendered  by  his 
fertile  brain  have  spread  and  are  being 
spread  afar,  and  generations  of  plastic 
surgeons  will  be  affected  by  what  he  gave 
forth  to  the  world.  His  memory  may  perish 
but  his  influence  is  immortal.' 

An  indefatigable  worker,  Gillies  wrote 
many  papers  and  was  in  great  demand 
as  a  lecturer.  He  published  two  notable 
books :  Plastic  Surgery  of  the  Face  (1920), 
which  recorded  his  experiences  in  the 
war,  and  The  Principles  and  Art  of  Plastic 
Surgery  (with  D.  Ralph  Millard,  2  vols., 
1957)  which  will  remain  a  classic. 

In  versatility  Gillies  was  a  Renaissance 
figure.  He  was  a  noted  athlete  in  his 
younger  days,  an  excellent  artist,  and  one 
of  the  best  dry  fly  fishermen  in  England. 
He  played  golf  for  England  against  Scot- 
land in  1908,  1925,  and  1926,  and  won  the 
St.  George's  Grand  Challenge  Cup  in  1913. 
He  thoroughly  and  unashamedly  enjoyed 
being  in  the  limelight  and  his  famous  high 
golf  tee  was  typical.  Finally  he  was  re- 
quested not  to  use  it  by  the  St.  Andrews 
Golf  Club  but  it  afforded  him  enormous 
pleasure  and  not  a  little  publicity  as  an 
eccentric.  Until  the  end  of  his  days  he 
retained  a  'Peter  Pan'  streak,  enjoyed 
practical  joking,  and  could  on  occasions 
such  as  formal  dinners  behave  .in  such 
a  way  as  to  upset  the  more  dignified  and 
often  much  younger  members  of  his  pro- 
fession. His  zest  for  painting  and  his 
proficiency  in  oils  were  exemplified  in  1959 
by  a  second  one-man  show  at  Foyles  of 
132  paintings  of  which  at  least  a  third 


412 


D.N.B.  1&51-1960 


Ginner 


were  sold.  His  first  exhibition  was  in  1947 
and  a  posthumous  one  was  held  at 
Walker's  Galleries  in  1961. 

In  1911  Gillies  married  Kathleen 
Margaret  (died  1957),  daughter  of  Josiah 
Jackson,  a  brick  manufacturer ;  they  had 
two  sons  and  two  daughters.  In  1957  he 
married  Marjorie,  daughter  of  John  T. 
Clayton,  a  jeweller ;  she  had  worked  with 
him  in  the  operating  theatre  for  many 
years. 

Gillies  died  in  London  10  September 
1960.  A  portrait  by  Bernard  Adams, 
'Fishing  the  Test',  is  in  the  possession  of 
the  family  and  another  by  the  same  artist 
is  in  Queen  Mary's  Hospital,  Roehampton. 
A  third  portrait,  by  Howard  Barron,  was 
presented  in  1963  by  the  British  Associa- 
tion of  Plastic  Surgeons  to  the  Royal 
College  of  Surgeons. 

[Reginald  Pound,  Gillies,  Surgeon  Extra- 
ordinary, 1964 ;  private  information ;  personal 
knowledge.]  Richard  Battle. 

GINNER,  ISAAC  CHARLES  (1878- 
1952),  artist,  was  born  4  March  1878  in 
Cannes,  the  second  son  of  Isaac  Benjamin 
Ginner  who  kept  a  chemist  shop  there  and 
had  married  a  Miss  Wightman,  a  woman 
of  Scottish  descent.  Of  his  two  brothers 
one  died  in  infancy  and  one  became  a 
doctor;  his  sister  became  an  actress  who 
concentrated  on  reviving  Greek  dancing. 
Perhaps  the  most  important  member  of 
the  family,  and  certainly  the  most  useful, 
was  a  Charles  Harrison,  the  husband  of  his 
mother's  sister,  who  appears  to  have  been 
a  financial  prop  to  the  Ginners  in  general 
and,  in  emergencies,  to  Charles  in  par- 
ticular. 

Ginner  left  the  College  Stanislas  at 
sixteen  after  a  serious  illness  and  sailed  in 
a  tramp  steamer  belonging  to  liis  uncle 
which  pUed  around  the  Mediterranean  and 
in  the  south  Atlantic.  His  health  restored, 
he  returned  to  Cannes  and  was  employed 
for  a  short  time  and  without  enthusiasm  in 
an  engineer's  office.  His  growing  interest  in 
art  met  with  family  opposition  but  after 
his  father's  death  he  was  allowed  to  go 
to  Paris,  and  at  the  age  of  twenty-one 
entered  an  architect's  office  where  he 
remained  for  some  years. 

In  1904,  his  family  recognizing  the 
futiUty  of  further  argument  about  art, 
reconciled  themselves  to  his  studying 
painting  at  the  Academic  Vitti.  His  master 
was  Gervais  who  dishked  Ginner's  bril- 
liant palette  so  much  that  his  pupil  was 
more  or  less  forced  to  leave.  He  went  to 
the  l^cole  des  Beaux- Arts  but  returned  to 


the  Vitti  when  Gervais  left.  He  was,  how- 
ever, again  unlucky  in  finding  a  master 
partially  unsympathetic  to  his  ideas  since 
he  ridiculed  the  artists  Ginner  admired. 
Anglada  y  Camarasa  who  taught  him  had 
no  opinion  at  all  of  Van  Gogh,  who  had 
by  this  time  become  the  most  powerful 
influence  on  Ginner  and  one  who  was  to 
inspire  him  throughout  his  painting  career. 
This  sharp  split  of  opinion  decided  Ginner 
to  leave  the  Vitti  and  work  on  his  own. 
There  is  no  record  of  any  sales  during  this 
period  in  Paris,  but  in  1908  he  sent  work 
to  be  exhibited  at  the  Allied  Artists'  first 
show  in  London  and  in  1909  he  held  a  one- 
man  exhibition  in  Buenos  Aires. 

The  year  1910  in  which  Roger  Fry  [q.v.] 
organized  the  first  Post-Impressionist 
exhibition  in  London  marked  the  moment 
of  revolution  in  England  against  Impres- 
sionism which  was  being  carried  to  the 
point  of  pastiche.  Of  the  English  artists 
potentially  distinguished  at  this  period 
few  were  more  than  dimly  aware  of  the 
new  movements  in  art  on  the  Continent. 
The  importance  of  Ginner  was  that  with 
his  knowledge  of  France,  and  after  his 
discovery  in  London  of  a  group  with  whom 
he  was  instantly  en  rapport,  he  was  able  to 
introduce  to  this  country  the  ideals  of  Van 
Gogh,  Cezanne,  Gauguin,  Matisse,  and  so 
on.  Until  then,  only  W.  R.  Sickert  [q.v.] 
(who  always  remained  faithful  to  Impres- 
sionism), Spencer  Gore,  who  annually 
visited  Dieppe,  and  Robert  Bevan,  who 
had  worked  at  Pont  Aven  with  Gauguin, 
had  any  first-hand  knowledge  of  the 
fundamental  change  taking  place  in 
French  painting.  In  this  same  year  Ginner 
settled  in  London  in  Chesterfield  Street, 
King's  Cross.  He  attended  regularly 
Sickert's  'Saturdays'  in  Fitzroy  Street, 
and  helped  in  the  formation  of  the  Cam- 
den Town  Group  in  1911,  showing  at  all 
the  group's  exhibitions  at  the  Carfax  Gal- 
lery. Later  he  became  a  founder-member 
of  the  Cumberland  Market  Group  and 
exhibited  with  the  London  Group  which 
rose  out  of  the  ashes  of  the  Camden  Town. 

In  1916  he  was  called  up  and  joined 
as  a  private  the  Ordnance  Corps,  being 
transferred  later  as  a  sergeant  in  the 
Intelligence  Corps  and  stationed  at  Mar- 
seilles. He  was  recalled  to  England  and 
worked  for  the  Canadian  War  Records  as 
lieutenant  making  drawings  of  a  munitions 
factory  in  Hereford.  Of  his  war  paintings 
perhaps  the  most  notable  is  'Roberts  8, 
East  Leeds  1916'  which  was  in  the  posses- 
sion of  Edward  Le  Bas  who  owned  also  a 
self-portrait.  In  the  years  after  the  war 


413 


Ginner 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Ginner  became  a  member  of  the  New 
English  Art  Club.  He  lived  variously  in 
Hampstead,  Claverton  Street,  and  in  the 
country.  He  became  an  A.R.A.  in  1942  and 
was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1950.  His  main 
explanation  in  print  of  his  beliefs  as  a 
painter  was  published  under  the  title  'Neo- 
Realism'  in  the  New  Age  (1  January  1914), 
in  which  he  maintained  that  his  aim  in 
painting  was  a  direct  and  complete  trans- 
position of  nature  and  that  this  could  only 
be  achieved  by  working  en  plein  air  and 
never  in  the  studio.  The  excess  of  detail 
and  impasto  in  some  of  his  landscapes  or  of 
Hampstead  streets  resulted  occasionally  in 
canvases  like  embossed  wallpaper.  But  at 
his  best  his  craftsmanship,  control,  and 
sensitive  tonality  set  him  so  far  apart 
from  his  contemporaries  that  he  is  in- 
stantly recognizable  in  any  mixed  ex- 
hibition. His  influence  on  succeeding 
generations  of  artists  was  small.  He  died, 
unmarried,  in  London  6  January  1952. 
His  work  is  to  be  found  in  a  number  of 
public  collections  including  the  Victoria 
and  Albert  Museum,  and  the  Tate  Gallery 
where  a  retrospective  exhibition  was 
held  in  1954. 

[Private  information.]     J.  Wood  Palmer. 

GODLEY,  Sir  ALEXANDER  JOHN 

(1867-1957),  general,  the  eldest  of  the 
three  sons  of  Colonel  William  Alexander 
Godley,  56th  Essex  Regiment,  and  his 
wife,  Laura,  daughter  of  the  Rev.  Godfrey 
Bird,  rector  of  Great  Wigborough,  Essex, 
was  born  4  February  1867.  His  auto- 
biography opens  in  characteristic  vein: 
*The  year  Hermit  won  the  Derby  in  a 
snowstorm,  1867,  was  that  in  which  I  saw 
the  light — at  Chatham,  where  my  father 
was  Superintendent  of  Gymnasia.'  J.  R. 
Godley  [q.v.]  was  his  uncle  and  A.  D. 
Godley  and  Lord  Kilbracken  [qq.y.]  first 
cousins.  Godley  went  first  to  the  Royal 
Naval  School  at  New  Cross,  but  family 
tradition  in  favour  of  the  army  resulted  in 
his  going  to  Haileybury.  On  his  father's 
death  straitened  circumstances  meant  his 
transfer  to  the  United  Services  College, 
whence  he  secured  entry  to  the  Royal 
Military  College,  Sandhurst.  In  1886  he 
was  gazetted  Ueutenant  in  the  Royal 
Dublin  Fusiliers  and  joined  the  1st  bat- 
talion at  Mullingar.  During  'seven  delight- 
ful years  of  soldiering  in  Ireland'  he 
developed  his  taste  for  riding,  hunting, 
polo,  and  horse-racing.  After  a  tour  of 
duty  at  Sheffield  and  a  Mounted  Infantry 
course,  he  became  in  1895  adjutant  of  the 
Mounted  Infantry  at  Aldershot  and  was 


promoted  captain.  In  1896  he  went  in  the 
same  capacity  with  a  special  service  unit 
to  South  Africa,  saw  his  first  active  service 
in  the  Mashonaland  campaign,  and  was 
awarded  his  brevet  majority.  Back  in 
England  in  June  1897  he  had  command 
of  a  battalion  of  Mounted  Infantry  before 
entering  the  Staff  College,  Camberley, 
whence  he  proceeded  to  South  Africa 
when  war  became  imminent.  After  service 
as  adjutant  of  a  mounted  regiment,  as 
commander  of  the  western  defences  in  the 
siege  of  Mafeking,  and  as  a  staff  officer  to 
Baden-Powell  and  Plumer  [qq.v.],  Godley 
commanded  a  Rhodesian  brigade  with  the 
brevet  rank  of  lieutenant-colonel.  After 
transfer  to  the  Irish  Guards  in  1900  he 
returned  to  England  in  the  next  year. 
Following  a  term  on  the  staff  at  Aider- 
shot,  he  was  commandant  of  the  Mounted 
Infantry  School  at  Longmoor  Camp  from 
1903  to  1906.  In  that  year  he  became 
G.S.O.  1  of  the  2nd  division  at  Aldershot. 
Visits  to  India  and  South  America  widened 
his  experience  and  helped  to  prepare  him 
for  his  appointment  in  1910  as  general 
officer  commanding  the  New  Zealand  Mili- 
tary Forces  with  the  temporary  rank  of 
major-general. 

In  New  Zealand  the  Defence  Act,  1909, 
provided  for  the  introduction  of  compul- 
sory military  service  in  1911.  Acting  on 
advice  given  by  Lord  Kitchener  [q.v.]  who 
had  visited  New  Zealand  in  1910,  Godley 
arranged  for  the  organization  of  a  mounted 
brigade  and  an  infantry  brigade  in  each 
military  district.  He  himself  toured  the 
country  and  stimulated  a  fiercely  com- 
petitive spirit  in  the  brigade  camps  which 
were  held  in  1913.  The  new  territorial 
units,  based  on  earlier  volunteer  bat- 
talions, had  reached  a  high  standard  of 
efficiency  and  training  by  early  1914  when 
inspected  by  Sir  Ian  Hamilton  [q.v.], 
inspector-general  of  overseas  forces.  Much 
of  the  credit  was  due  to  Godley  who  was 
appointed  K.C.M.G.  in  that  year. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  New 
Zealand  offered  to  send  an  expeditionary 
force  of  all  arms,  and  Godley  was  ap- 
pointed to  the  command  which  he  retained 
throughout  the  war.  In  the  Gallipoli  cam- 
paign he  commanded  the  New  Zealand 
and  Australian  division  and  in  June  1916 
he  went  to  France  as  commander  of  II 
Anzac  Corps.  Until  1919  he  retained  com- 
mand of  this  corps  which  in  1918,  after  the 
collection  of  all  the  Australian  divisions 
into  an  Australian  Corps,  became  the 
XXII  Corps,  retaining  the  New  Zealand 
division.    He    was   promoted   temporary 


414 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Gogarty 


lieutenant-general  in  November  1915  and 
at  Messines  in  1917  had  under  his  com- 
mand about  120,000  men,  'twice  as  many 
as  Wellington  commanded  at  Waterloo'. 
He  was  appointed  K.C.B.  in  1916  and 
received  eleven  mentions  in  dispatches. 

From  1920  until  1922  Godley  was  mili- 
tary secretary  to  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill, 
secretary  of  state  for  war.  He  was  com- 
mander-in-chief of  the  British  Army  of 
the  Rhine  in  1922-4  and  then  (1924-8) 
held  the  appointment  of  G.O.C.  Southern 
Command,  England.  From  1928  to  1933 
he  was  governor  of  Gibraltar  where  he  did 
much  to  stimulate  interest  in  its  past  his- 
tory. He  was  promoted  general  in  1923 
and  G.C.B.  in  1928.  For  fifteen  years  he 
was  colonel  of  the  Royal  Ulster  Rifles  in 
which  capacity  he  visited  the  two  regular 
battalions  of  that  regiment  in  England, 
Ireland,  Germany,  Palestine,  and  Hong 
Kong. 

'Alick'  Godley  was  tall  and  handsome. 
Striking  in  appearance,  he  was  very  proud 
of  his  military  bearing  and  turn-out.  He 
exerted  every  effort  to  make  the  forces 
under  him  as  efficient  as  possible.  Naturally 
strict  and  somewhat  aloof,  he  was  not 
a  popular  commander,  and  many  stories 
were  told  against  him  by  the  New 
Zealanders.  Nevertheless,  by  his  own 
dedicated  service,  he  undoubtedly  laid  the 
foundations  for  the  New  Zealand  division's 
successes  and  as  a  corps  commander  in 
France  he  won  a  very  high  reputation. 
When  selecting  supporters  for  his  coat  of 
arms  he  chose,  dexter,  an  Irish  Mounted 
Infantry  soldier  and,  sinister,  a  New 
Zealand  infantry  soldier. 

In  1898  Godley  married  Louisa  Marion 
(died  1939),  eldest  daughter  of  Robert 
Fowler,  of  Rahinston,  county  Meath, 
reputed  to  be  'the  best  woman  across 
country'  in  all  Ireland.  She  was  men- 
tioned in  dispatches  for  her  social  and  wel- 
fare work  for  New  Zealand  soldiers.  There 
were  no  children.  Godley  died  in  Oxford 
6  March  1957. 

The  Imperial  War  Museum  has  a  char- 
coal and  water-colour  portrait  by  Francis 
Dodd  and  an  oil  by  Sir  Walter  Russell. 

[Sir  Alexander  Godley,  Life  of  an  Irish 
Soldier,  1939;  H.  Stewart,  (Official  History) 
The  New  Zealand  Division  1916-1919,  1921.] 

Angus  Ross. 

GOGARTY,  OLIVER  JOSEPH  ST. 
JOHN  (1878-1957),  surgeon,  man  of 
letters,  and  wit,  was  born  in  Dublin  17 
August  1878,  the  eldest  child  and  elder 
son  of  Henry  Gogarty,  a  physician  and 


son  and  grandson  of  physicians,  who  died 
when  Oliver  was  still  a  boy,  and  his  wife, 
Margaret  Oliver,  of  a  family  of  millers  in 
Galway.  Educated  first  at  Stonyhurst, 
Gogarty  spent  his  last  year  at  Clongowes 
Wood,  the  Jesuit  college  in  Kildare.  In 
England  he  had  played  professional  foot- 
ball; at  Clongowes  he  exhibited  a  pre- 
cocious talent  for  Rabelaisian  verse.  He 
studied  medicine  for  two  years  at  the 
Royal  University,  then  at  Trinity  College, 
Dubhn,  and  quahfied  in  1907.  Sir  Robert 
Woods,  the  leading  nose  and  throat 
surgeon  of  his  time  in  Dublin,  secured 
Gogarty' s  succession  to  him  in  the  Rich- 
mond Hospital ;  later  he  was  attached  to 
the  Meath  Hospital,  and  he  built  up  a  large 
practice  in  his  speciality. 

Often  distracted  from  his  medical 
studies  by  literary  pursuits,  bicycle- 
racing,  at  which  he  was  of  championship 
class,  politics  and  conviviality,  Gogarty 
had  made  many  important  friendships. 
From  James  Joyce  [q.v.]  he  was  for  a 
space  of  two  years  almost  inseparable. 
They  continued  to  correspond  but  Gogarty 
resented  his  portrait  in  Ulysses  as  'stately 
plump  Buck  Mulligan'  and  complained 
that  'James  Joyce  was  not  a  gentleman'. 
Gogarty's  mocking  irreverent  manner,  en- 
thusiasm for  the  classics,  with  quotations 
always  on  his  lips,  his  quips,  parodies, 
and  talent  for  occasional  (and  improper) 
verse,  endeared  him  to  some  of  the  fel- 
lows in  Trinity  who  encouraged  and  were 
amused  by  him:  (Sir)  J.  P.  Mahaffy, 
R.  Y.  Tyrrell,  Edward  Dowden  [qq.v.], 
and  H.  S.  Macran.  Twice,  successively, 
Dowden  awarded  him  the  vice-chancel- 
lor's prize  for  English  verse.  With  the 
desire  to  emulate  Oscar  Wilde  [q.v.], 
Gogarty  contrived  to  go  for  two  terms 
to  Worcester  College,  Oxford,  to  compete 
for  the  Newdigate  prize.  In  this  he  was 
unsuccessful,  being  defeated  by  a  friend, 
G.  K.  A.  Bell  [q.v.],  afterwards  bishop 
of  Chichester.  Gogarty  had  the  success 
accorded  to  witty  Irishmen  at  Oxford  but 
suffered  some  diminution  in  popularity  by 
an  ill-timed  irreverence. 

Back  in  Dublin,  Gogarty  forwarded 
a  chance  acquaintance  with  Arthur 
Griffith  [q.v.]  and  spoke  on  28  November 
1905  at  the  first  convention  of  Sinn  Fein. 
Griffith,  George  Russell  (AE)  [q.v.],  and 
Tom  Kettle  were  the  only  three  of 
Gogarty's  friends  against  whom  he  never 
directed  his  wit.  He  formed  one  of  the 
coterie  which  met  in  the  Bailey  restaurant, 
in  a  room  specially  provided,  over  which 
Griffith   silently  presided.   (Sir)   William 


415 


Gogarty 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Orpen  [q.v.],  the  painter,  Seumas  O'Sulli- 
van,  the  poet,  James  Montgomery,  wit, 
and  afterwards  film  censor,  were  among 
the  habitues  of  Dublin's  equivalent  to 
the  Caf6  Royal.  There  the  legend  of 
Gogarty's  wit  was  established  and  the 
connections  which,  with  the  coming  of  the 
Free  State,  launched  him  on  a  political 
career.  Gogarty  was  nominated  to  the 
first  Senate  and  took  a  prominent  part  in 
the  early  days  of  the  Free  State,  organiz- 
ing the  Tailteann  Games.  At  the  first  of 
these  he  was  awarded  a  gold  medal  for  his 
book  of  verse.  An  Offering  of  Swans  (1923). 
The  title  was  suggested  by  a  pair  of  swans 
he  had  vowed  to  present  to  the  River 
Liffey  when  swimming  for  safety  after 
eluding  his  Republican  captors  during  the 
civil  war.  He  removed  for  a  while  in 
1923-4  to  London  where  he  continued  to 
practise  as  a  nose  and  throat  specialist.  He 
returned  there  in  1937  but  after  the  out- 
break of  war  in  1939  moved  to  America 
where  he  wrote  and  lectured  between 
occasional  trips  to  Dublin  and  where  he 
remained  until  his  death. 

The  occasion  of  Gogarty's  final  depar- 
ture from  Dublin  was  a  successful  action 
taken  against  him  by  Henry  Morris 
Sinclair  for  libel  in  As  I  was  Going  Down 
Sackville  Street,  a  book  of  reminiscences 
published  in  1937.  But  it  may  be  assumed 
that  chagrin  on  this  account  was  only  the 
proximate  reason  for  his  departure.  He 
had  become  increasingly  a  literary  and 
political  personality  with  inevitable  reper- 
cussions in  his  medical  practice.  His  house 
at  Renvyle  in  county  Galway,  burned 
down  in  the  civil  war,  had  been  rebuilt  as 
an  hotel  to  which  he  liked  to  invite  Augus- 
tus John  and  other  friends.  W.  B.  Yeats 
[q.v.]  had  become  an  admirer  and  de- 
scribed him  as  'one  of  the  great  lyric  poets 
of  our  age'  in  his  preface  to  his  Oxford  Book 
of  Modem  Verse  (1936)  in  which  he  in- 
cluded seventeen  of  his  poems.  Yeats  did 
not,  however,  succeed  in  setting  a  fashion 
for  Gogarty's  poetry  and  in  subsequent 
anthologies  he  does  not  appear.  His  fame 
rests  on  his  reputation  as  one  of  the  great 
Irish  wits  in  the  tradition  of  John  Philpot 
Curran  [q.v.].  The  vigour  and  spontaneity 
which  was  so  much  of  his  attraction  may 
have  militated  against  his  success  as  an 
artist.  He  did  not  labour.  Kindly  and 
unaffected,  he  yet  cultivated  to  excess  the 
Dublin  talent  for  denigration.  Too  much 
of  his  wit  was  directed  at  persons,  and  his 
loathing  for  Eamon  de  Valera  became 
an  obsession.  A  capacity  for  detecting 
flaws  without  a  compensating  restraint  in 


publishing  them  made  Gogarty  a  formid- 
able opponent  and  an  unnerving  friend. 
His  athletic  prowess  and  physical  courage 
— he  was  a  pioneer  aviator  in  Dublin — 
were  the  admiration  of  his  sedentary 
literary  friends  as  much  as  his  unabashed 
showmanship — fur  coat  and  yellow  Rolls- 
Royce — ^were  looked  at  askance  by  the 
conservative  professional  classes  of  Dub- 
lin. He  was  out  of  place  in  a  bourgeois 
community  indifferent  to  his  talent;  but 
he  never  lacked  admirers.  He  published 
further  volumes  of  reminiscence :  Tumbling 
in  the  Hay  (1939)  and  It  Isn't  This  Time  of 
Year  at  All  (1934),  several  novels,  and  his 
Collected  Poems  (1951).  He  contributed  to 
this  Dictionary  the  notices  of  Stephen 
Gwynn  and  James  Stephens. 

About  five  feet  nine  inches  in  height, 
brown  haired,  pale  faced,  with  dark  blue 
eyes  under  pince-nez,  Gogarty  altered  very 
little  in  appearance.  He  walked  briskly, 
head  up,  lips  pursed,  with  laughter  in  his 
eyes.  Orpen  painted  his  portrait  once  and 
John  twice. 

In  1906  Gogarty  married  Martha, 
daughter  of  Bernard  Duane,  of  Moyard, 
county  Galway;  they  had  two  sons  and 
one  daughter.  Gogarty  died  in  New  York 
22  September  1957. 

[Ulick  O'Connor,  Oliver  St.  John  Gogarty^ 
1963 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Terence  de  Vere  White. 

GOLD,  Sm  HARCOURT  GILBEY  (1876- 
1952),  oarsman,  was  born  at  Wooburn 
Green,  Buckinghamshire,  3  May  1876,  the 
ninth  and  youngest  child  of  Henry  Gold, 
of  Hedsor,  Buckinghamshire,  and  His 
wife,  Charlotte  Anne,  daughter  of  Henry 
Gilbey,  of  Bishop's  Stortford,  Hertford- 
shire. He  went  to  Eton  where  his  genius 
as  an  oarsman  first  became  evident  in 
1893  when  he  stroked  Eton  to  victory  in 
the  Ladies'  Plate  at  Henley  Regatta; 
a  triumph  he  was  to  repeat  in  1894  and 
1895.  In  the  autumn  of  that  year  he  went 
up  to  Magdalen  College,  Oxford,  and  with 
such  a  record  behind  him  it  was  not  sur- 
prising that  he  was  picked  as  a  freshman 
to  stroke  the  Oxford  crew  of  1896.  This 
race  turned  out  to  be  one  of  the  classic 
struggles,  proving  beyond  doubt  that 
his  earlier  Henley  successes  were  founded 
on  an  innate  and  mature  racing,  sense 
which  in  no  way  depended  on  any 
juvenile  precocity.  Cambridge,  starting  at 
three  to  one  on  favourites,  led  at  one  time 
by  as  much  as  a  length  and  a  half.  With 
the  station  conditions  against  him,  Gold 
bided  his  time,  nursing  his  crew  to  Barnes 


416 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Goodenough 


bridge  where,  in  calmer  water,  he  made 
a  dashing  and  spectacular  spurt,  gaining 
a  hard-fought  victory  by  the  narrow 
margin  of  two-fifths  of  a  length.  With 
Gold  at  stroke,  Oxford  won  the  next  two 
boat  races.  In  1897  they  produced  what 
was  probably  the  fastest  Oxford  crew  up 
to  that  time,  winning  as  they  liked  in 
a  time  only  two  seconds  outside  the 
existing  record.  In  the  following  year  Gold 
was  elected  president  of  the  O.U.B.C. 

During  his  time  at  Oxford,  Gold  on 
three  occasions  stroked  Leander  to  vic- 
tory in  the  Grand  Challenge  Cup,  whilst 
in  1898  and  1899  he  recorded  wins  in 
Stewards'  Fours,  once  for  Leander  and 
once  for  Magdalen.  This  latter  year  was 
the  last  season  Gold  enjoyed  as  an  active 
oarsman,  although  he  went  on  to  prove 
himself  an  extremely  successful  finishing 
coach  to  a  number  of  Oxford  crews  as 
well  as  to  the  two  victorious  Olympic 
eight  oars  of  1908  and  1912. 

Gold  became  a  steward  of  Henley 
Regatta  in  1909  and  a  member  of  the 
committee  of  management  in  1919.  It  was 
at  this  time  that  the  stewards'  enclosure 
came  into  being.  This  was  his,  both  in 
conception  and  design,  and  proved  the 
means  of  putting  the  regatta  on  a  sound 
financial  basis,  reUeving  it  of  its  recurrent 
financial  strains  of  the  Edwardian  era. 
He  was  made  chairman  of  the  committee 
in  1945  and  its  first  president  in  1952. 
For  many  years  he  had  represented 
the  O.U.B.C.  on  the  committee  of  the 
Amateur  Rowing  Association  of  which  he 
was  chairman  from  1948.  In  1949  he  was 
knighted  for  his  services  to  rowing. 

'Tarka',  as  he  was  invariably  known  to 
his  friends,  was  a  man  of  medium  build, 
inmiaculate  attire  and  charming  manner. 
Blessed  with  a  buoyancy  of  spirit  and 
a  light  and  carefree  wit,  he  was  one  of 
the  most  lovable  and  endearing  of  com- 
panions. With  a  genuine  interest  in  his 
fellow  men  his  conversation  hinged  on 
their  enthusiasms,  their  hopes,  and  their 
fears  rather  than  on  his  own.  Particularly 
was  this  so  in  his  contacts  with  the  young 
who  invariably  responded  wholeheartedly 
to  his  youthful  and  Uvely  approach.  His 
zest  for  life  was  infectious.  An  excellent 
shot  with  an  extensive  knowledge  born  of 
first-hand  experience  of  all  that  pertained 
to  game  birds,  many  of  his  happier  days 
were  spent  in  the  coverts  of  the  south  or 
on  the  grouse  moors  of  the  north.  He  had 
no  use  for  the  speciahzed  one-sport  men- 
tality, and  whether  it  was  in  the  hunting 
field,  on  the  tennis  court,  or  golf  course, 


his  supreme  enjoyment  of  so  many  and 
varied  pursuits  made  the  doing  of  them  so 
much  more  worth  while  to  all  those  who 
were  lucky  enough  to  share  them.  He 
would  give  as  much  care  and  attention  to 
the  arrangements  for  a  day's  shooting,  or 
the  organization  of  a  local  point-to-point, 
as  he  would  to  the  myriad  details  and 
complications  connected  with  the  smooth 
running  of  his  beloved  Henley  Regatta. 

In  the  war  of  1914-18  Gold  served  with 
the  Royal  Flying  Corps  and  Royal  Air 
Force  and  was  appointed  O.B.E.  in  1918. 
He  married  in  1902  Helen  Beatrice, 
daughter  of  Dr.  Thomas  John  Maclagan, 
of  Cadogan  Place,  London,  and  had  one 
son  and  two  daughters.  He  died  in 
London  27  July  1952.  A  cartoon  by  'Spy' 
appeared  in  Vanity  Fair  23  March  1899. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

G.  O.  NiCKAIXS. 

GOODEN,     STEPHEN     FREDERICit 

(1892-1955),  engraver,  was  born  9  Octo- 
ber 1892  in  Tulse  Hill,  the  only  son  of 
Stephen  Thomas  Gooden,  publisher,  and 
his  wife,  Edith  Camille  EUzabeth  Epps. 
He  was  educated  at  Rugby  and  the  Slade 
School  of  Art.  During  the  war  of  1914-18 
he  served  in  the  19th  Hussars  and  later  as 
a  sapper.  He  began  engraving  in  1923  at 
a  time  when  burin  work  was  less  regarded 
than  etching,  and  soon  proved  that  line- 
engraving,  based  on  the  technique  of  the 
great  seventeenth-  and  eighteenth-century 
craftsmen,  was  still  capable  of  exquisite 
refinement  and  expressiveness. 

He  made  a  series  of  illustrations  in  line- 
engraving,  chiefly  for  the  Nonesuch  Press. 
The  Nonesuch  Bible  (5  vols.,  1925-7)  was 
perhaps  his  masterpiece,  but  he  also 
illustrated  books  for  Heinemann  and 
Harrap.  His  work  may  be  seen  at  the 
British  Museum,  the  Victoria  and  Albert 
Museum,  the  Fitzwilliam  Museum,  Cam- 
bridge, and  the  Ashmolean  Museum. 
Oxford. 

He  was  elected  A.R.A.  in  1937  ahd  R.A'. 
in  1946.  In  1942  he  was  appointed  C.B.E. 
In  1925  he  married  Mona,  daughter  of 
George  Price,  LL.D.,  of  the  Board  of 
Public  Works,  Dublin.  He  died  at 
Chesham  Bois  21  September  1955. 

[James  Laver,  'The  Line-engravings  of 
Stephen  Gooden',  Colophon,  part  2,  1930 ;  An 
Iconography  of  the  Engravings  of  Stephen 
Gooden,  preface  and  introduction  by  Campbell 
Dodgson,  1944 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

James  Laveb. 

GOODENOUGH,  Sm  WILLIAM 
MACNAMARA,     first     baronet     (1899- 


8652062 


417 


Goodenough 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


1951),  banker,  was  born  in  London  10 
March  1899,  the  eldest  son  of  Frederick 
Craufurd  Goodenough  [q.v.]  by  his  wife, 
Maive,  fifth  daughter  of  Nottidge  Charles 
Macnamara,  F.R.C.S.,  of  Calcutta  and 
London.  He  was  educated  at  Wellington 
College,  where  he  was  captain  of  cricket 
and  rackets  and  head  of  the  school.  In 
January  1918  he  obtained  a  commission 
in  the  Coldstream  Guards  with  whom  he 
saw  active  service  with  the  2nd  battalion. 
After  demobilization  he  went  as  a  history 
scholar  to  Christ  Church,  Oxford,  where 
he  obtained  a  second  class  in  the  final 
honour  school  in  1922.  In  his  last  year 
at  Oxford  he  was  master  of  the  Christ 
Church  beagles,  and  further  developed  an 
already  great  interest  in  hounds,  their 
breeding  and  their  work,  which  remained 
with  him  throughout  his  life.  In  later 
years  he  became  a  joint  master  of  the  Vale 
of  White  Horse  (Cricklade)  Hunt. 

Immediately  on  going  down  from 
Oxford  he  joined  the  staff  of  Barclays 
Bank,  Ltd.,  of  which  his  father  had  been 
chairman  since  1917.  After  a  short  period 
in  London  he  was  appointed  in  1923  a  local 
director  at  Oxford;  in  1929  he  became 
a  director  of  the  Bank,  in  1934  a  vice- 
chairman,  and  in  1936  deputy  chairman. 

In  1925  his  father  had  brought  into 
being  the  great  enterprise  of  Barclays 
Bank  D.C.O.,  the  overseas  complement 
of  the  parent  bank.  Of  this  bank  Good- 
enough  became  a  director  in  1933,  a  year 
before  his  father's  death.  In  1937  he  be- 
came deputy  chairman  and  in  1943  was 
elected  to  the  chair.  About  this  time  he 
also  became  chairman  of  the  Export 
Guarantees  Advisory  Council  and  of  the 
executive  committee  of  the  Export 
Credit  Guarantee  Department. 

In  1947,  on  the  death  of  Edwin  Fisher, 
he  was  elected  chairman  of  the  board  of 
Barclays  Bank,  Ltd.,  and  reUnquished  his 
post  as  chairman  of  Barclays  D.C.O.  In 
1951,  however,  ill  health  forced  him  to 
retire,  thereby  bringing  prematurely  to  an 
end  a  career  which  had  already  been  one  of 
fulfilment  judged  by  any  standard.  But 
although  the  Bank  in  all  its  diverse 
activities  was  always  Goodenough's  first 
concern,  as  it  had  been  with  his  father,  his 
considerable  powers  for  administration, 
coupled  with  an  exceptional  gift  for  leader- 
ship, particularly  in  handUng  teams  with 
widely  divergent  views,  led  him  into 
activities  in  many  other  fields. 

The  years  at  the  Bank  in  Oxford  from 
1923  to  1934  in  which  latter  year  he  moved 
to  London,  gave  Goodenough  ample  scope 


to  develop  his  powers  not  only  as  a  banker, 
but  also  in  other  lines.  In  1927  he  was 
elected  to  the  Oxfordshire  County  Coun- 
cil, and  in  1934,  at  the  early  age  of  thirty- 
five,  he  became  chairman.  His  greatest 
achievements,  however,  came  from  his 
association  with  the  finances  of  the  uni- 
versity of  Oxford,  which  at  that  time  was 
in  the  throes  of  administrative  reforms 
prompted  partly  by  the  report  in  1922  of 
the  royal  commission  but  mainly  by  pres- 
sures from  within.  In  1931  Lord  Grey  of 
Fallodon  [q.v.],  chancellor  of  the  univer- 
sity, appointed  Goodenough  a  curator  of 
the  University  Chest,  where  he  brought 
his  powerful  influence  to  bear  on  the  side 
of  reform,  particularly  in  the  financial 
administration,  including  investment 
policy.  But  he  also  looked  outward  and 
was  one  of  the  moving  spirits  in  the 
foundation  of  the  Oxford  Society,  a  pro- 
ject which  might  well  have  foundered 
without  him. 

It  was  this  quality  of  outward  looking, 
in  addition  to  his  financial  skill,  which 
made  Lord  Nuffield  see  in  'Will'  Good- 
enough  an  ideal  chairman  for  the  trusts 
which  he  founded  to  widen  the  scope  of 
the  Oxford  medical  school,  and  in  1937 
to  establish  Nuffield  College.  There  was 
a  congruity  in  the  purposes  of  these 
foundations  in  that  they  were  both  in- 
tended to  promote  the  interaction  of  the 
academic  and  the  practical.  The  medical 
bias  of  many  of  these  undertakings  and 
the  ability  with  which  Goodenough  had 
played  his  part  caused  him  to  be  invited  in 
1942  to  be  chairman  of  the  inter-depart- 
mental committee  on  medical  schools,  the 
report  of  which,  published  in  1944,  proved 
a  landmark  in  medical  education.  He  was 
also  appointed  chairman  of  the  Nuffield 
Provincial  Hospitals  Trust  which  exer- 
cised a  strong  influence  on  the  eventual 
reorganization  of  the  national  hospital 
service.  Yet  another  important  connec- 
tion with  the  Nuffield  benefactions  was  his 
chairmanship  of  the  Nuffield  Fund  for  the 
Forces  of  the  Crown.  In  1943  the  associa- 
tion of  Nuffield  and  Goodenough  reached 
its  ultimate  fulfilment  in  the  formation  of 
the  Nuffield  Foundation  of  which  Good- 
enough  became  the  first  chairman. 

In  1930  Goodenough's  father  founded 
the  Dominion  Students'  Hall  Trust 
responsible  for  a  hall  of  residence  for  post- 
graduate male  students  in  London  from 
the  dominions  and  colonies  and  known  as 
London  House;  this  work  Goodenough 
carried  on  as  chairman  of  the  governors. 
Following  the  war  he  also  founded  a  sister 


418 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Goodey 


trust  designed  to  provide  similar  facilities 
for  women  and  married  students,  includ- 
ing students  from  the  United  States.  The 
new  hall  of  residence  was  named  William 
Goodenough  House. 

With  all  these  preoccupations  with  mat- 
ters and  undertakings  of  far-reaching  im- 
portance, Goodenough  remained  primarily 
a  countryman  and  his  love  of  the  land  was 
never  far  from  his  mind.  His  interest  in 
his  own  extensive  and  successful  farming 
operations  at  his  home  at  Filkins  in 
Oxfordshire  and  his  close  association  with 
the  National  Farmers'  Union  represented, 
perhaps,  his  happiest  hours.  He  served  as 
a  member  of  the  departmental  committee 
on  post-war  agricultural  education  set  up 
in  1941  by  the  Ministry  of  Agriculture  and 
Fisheries. 

Goodenough  had  a  particular  flair  for 
choosing  those  who  were  to  carry  out  his 
plans,  and  it  was  this  quality  which 
enabled  him  to  surround  himself  with 
teams  of  loyal  and  eager  workers.  It  was 
one  of  his  greatest  talents  that,  in  his 
many  positions  as  chairman,  his  sudden 
flashes  of  humour  would  frequently  turn 
a  difficult  situation  into  one  of  good- 
humoured  agreement. 

Goodenough  was  created  a  baronet  in 
1943,  and  his  work  for  the  university  of 
Oxford  was  recognized  by  the  offer  of  an 
honorary  D.C.L.  which  his  untimely  death 
prevented  him  from  receiving.  He  had 
been  elected  an  honorary  student  of 
Christ  Church  in  1947,  was  for  many  years 
a  governor  of  Wellington,  and  received  an 
honorary  LL.D.  from  Manchester  in  1949. 

He  married  in  1924  Dorothea  Louisa, 
eldest  daughter  of  Ven.  the  Hon.  Kenneth 
Francis  Gibbs,  archdeacon  of  St.  Alban's, 
by  whom  he  had  four  sons,  of  whom  one 
died  in  infancy,  and  one  daughter.  Good- 
enough  died  at  his  home  at  Filkins  Hall, 
Oxfordshire,  23  May  1951,  and  was  suc- 
ceeded by  his  eldest  son,  Richard  Edmund 
(born  1925). 

A  portrait  of  Goodenough  by  (Sir)  James 
Gunn  is  in  the  board -room  of  Barclays 
Bank  D.C.O. ;  copies  are  at  Barclays  Bank, 
Ltd.,  and  at  London  House,  and  another 
portrait  by  the  same  artist  is  at  Filkins. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Douglas  Veale. 

cuthbert  fitzherbert. 

GOODEY,  TOM  (1885-1953),  nema- 
tologist,  the  ninth  and  last  child  of 
Thomas  Goodey,  boot  manufacturer,  and 
his  wife,  Hannah  Clayson,  was  born  28 
July  1885,  at  Wellingborough,  Northamp- 


tonshire. He  won  a  scholarship  to  the 
Northampton  Grammar  School,  which  he 
left  in  1904  to  become  a  pupil  teacher.  He 
did  not  enjoy  school  teaching  and  at  the 
teachers'  training  college  of  Birmingham 
University  he  studied  botany  and  zoology, 
in  which  he  took  the  B.Sc.  degree  with 
honours  in  1908.  In  the  final  examination, 
he  was  bracketed  top  with  two  other 
students;  two  scholarships  each  of  £50 
were  shared  between  the  three  of  them, 
and  Goodey  began  his  career  as  a  scientist 
with  a  year's  income  of  £33.  6s.  8d.  A  dis- 
covery about  the  gastric  pouches  of  the 
jellyfish,  made  while  he  was  still  an  under- 
graduate, provided  his  first  research  prob- 
lem, and  he  next  studied  the  anatomy  of 
the  frilled  shark.  He  obtained  the  M.Sc. 
degree  in  1909  and  gained  a  further  re- 
search scholarship  of  £50  for  one  year, 
with  which  he  went  in  1910  to  Rotham- 
sted  Experimental  Station,  where  he  was 
soon  awarded  the  Mackinnon  studentship 
of  the  Royal  Society  of  £150  a  year. 

The  move  to  Rothamsted  also  meant 
changing  to  a  subject  new  to  him  and  to 
one  full  of  controversy:  whether  soil 
contains  protozoa  that  limit  bacterial 
populations.  Goodey  showed  that  Colpoda 
cucullus,  then  assumed  to  be  the  chief  pro- 
tozoan in  soil,  was  normally  encysted  and 
inactive  there,  and  he  doubted  that  proto- 
zoa were  important  predators  of  bacteria, 
but  could  not  settle  the  controversy  for 
his  studentship  expired  before  he  could 
study  other  species.  He  returned  to  the 
zoology  department  at  Birmingham  Uni- 
versity, where  he  worked  on  protozoa 
from  various  sources,  and  during  the  war 
of  1914-18  was  protozoologist  at  the  2nd 
Southern  General  Hospital  at  Birmingham. 

A  return  to  Rothamsted  in  1920  started 
Goodey  on  the  work  with  helminths  which 
was  to  occupy  him  for  the  rest  of  his  life. 
He  began  with  a  study  of  clover  stem 
eelworm,  but  this  spell  as  a  plant  hel- 
minthologist  was  brief  for  in  1921  he 
joined  the  London  School  of  Tropical 
Medicine  and  for  the  next  five  years 
worked  mainly  on  parasites  of  vertebrates. 
When  the  Institute  of  Agricultural 
Parasitology  was  set  up  at  St.  Albans, 
Goodey  became  the  senior  member  of 
staff  there,  a  post  he  held  until  the 
Institute  closed  in  1947.  There  he 
specialized  in  studying  plant-parasitic  and 
free-living  eelworms,  the  subject  which 
came  to  be  known  as  nematology  and  in 
which  he  was  the  acknowledged  authority. 
He  published  many  taxonomic  papers  in 
the  Journal  of  Helminthology  and  in  1933 


419 


Goodey 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


his  first  textbook  Plant  Parasitic  Nema- 
todes and  the  Diseases  they  Cause,  which 
became  the  standard  work.  So,  too,  did 
his  second  textbook,  Soil  and  Freshwater 
Nematodes,  pubUshed  in  1951,  which 
described  the  morphology,  biology,  and 
behaviour  of  190  genera,  and  was  revised 
by  his  son  Basil  in  1963.  When  the  book 
appeared,  Goodey  was  again  at  Rotham- 
sted,  for  when  the  Institute  at  St.  Albans 
closed  the  members  of  its  staff  engaged 
in  studying  plant  nematodes  became  the 
department  of  nematology  of  Rothamsted, 
with  Goodey  as  its  head.  He  retired  from 
this  post  in  1952,  but  was  still  actively 
engaged  in  research  when  he  died. 

Goodey  had  an  excellent  voice  and  was 
also  a  skilled  actor.  Until  1916,  when 
he  was  the  paid  tenor  soloist  in  a  per- 
formance of  the  Messiah  at  Dudley,  he 
sang  only  as  an  amateur,  but  as  his  family 
responsibiUties  grew  he  increasingly  ac- 
cepted professional  engagements,  in  ora- 
torio, opera,  and  in  the  concert  hall  where 
as  in  many  broadcast  recitals  he  speciaUzed 
in  Lieder  by  Schubert  and  Hugo  Wolf 
and  in  English  songs.  He  was  for  long 
associated  with  the  music  of  Rutland 
Boughton  [q.v.]  and  the  part  of  Angus 
in  The  Ever  Young  was  written  mainly 
for  him.  As  the  publicity  from  his  per- 
formances embarrassed  him  as  a  scientist, 
from  1927  he  used  the  stage  name  of 
Roger  Clayson.  His  association  on  equal 
terms  with  the  principal  vocalists  of  the 
time  did  not  detract  from  his  willingness 
to  sing  with  amateurs  in  modest  sur- 
roimdings  or  to  mix  fooling  with  his  fine 
singing,  as  he  did  so  memorably  in  many 
Christmas  parties  at  Rothamsted. 

A  man  of  high  ideals  and  standards, 
scrupulous  in  all  his  dealings,  Goodey 
found  a  spiritual  home  in  the  Society  of 
Friends,  which  he  joined  in  1933,  follow- 
ing the  lead  set  by  his  wife.  His  abiUty  to 
speak  powerfully  and  lucidly  contributed 
to  the  prominence  he  gained  in  the  Society, 
and  he  served  as  clerk  of  the  Bedfordshire 
Quarterly  Meeting  from  1942  to  1946  and 
was  an  elder  at  the  time  of  his  death. 
Although  deeply  religious,  he  was  no 
prude;  indeed,  his  great  sense  of  fun, 
youthful  enthusiasm,  and  unfailing  UveH- 
ness  made  him  excellent  company. 

Goodey  had  many  successes,  both  as 
scientist  and  artist,  and  these  brought  him 
great  pleasure,  especially  his  election  as 
a  fellow  of  the  Royal  Society  in  1947.  He 
was  appointed  O.B.E.  in  1950  and  was 
president  of  the  Association  of  Applied 
Biologists  in  1935-6. 


In  1912  he  married  Constance,  daughter 
of  William  Henry  Lewis,  a  representative 
of  a  colour  merchant,  whom  he  had  met 
while  both  were  students  at  Birmingham. 
They  had  one  son  and  four  daughters. 
Goodey  died  in  Harpenden,  Hertfordshire,  ? 
7  July  1953,  while  walking  home  from  ^ 
a  meeting  of  the  Society  of  Friends. 

[F.  C.  Bawden  in  Obituary  Notices  of  Fellows 
of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ix,  1954 ;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

F.  C.  Bawden. 
GOODHART-RENDEL,  HARRY 
STUART  (1887-1959),  architect,  was 
born  in  Cambridge  29  May  1887,  the  only 
child  of  Harry  Chester  Goodhart,  a  lec- 
turer in  classics  in  the  university,  and  his 
wife.  Rose  Ellen,  daughter  of  Stuart  (later 
Lord)  Rendel,  brother  of  Sir  A.  M.  and 
G.  W.  Rendel  [qq.v.].  In  1890  his  father 
became  professor  of  humanity  at  Edin- 
burgh but  he  died  in  1895,  whereupon  his 
widow  went  south  with  her  son  and,  as 
Goodhart-Rendel  expressed  it  later,  'shut 
herself  up  with  her  grief  and  me'.  The 
boy  had  by  then  shown  marked  signs  of 
musical  talent,  inherited  from  the  Good- 
harts,  and  a  strong  aptitude  for  construc- 
tion, inherited  no  less  evidently  from  the 
Rendels.  In  1899  his  mother  took  Chint- 
hurst  Hill,  near  Guildford,  a  house  re- 
cently completed  by  (Sir)  Edwin  Lutyens 
[q.v.]  which,  with  its  artful  whimsi- 
caUty,  appealed  to  young  Goodhart  as 
'a  symbol  of  life  and  adventm-e'.  After  less 
than  a  year  at  Eton  he  was  brought  home 
with  a  badly  poisoned  foot  and  did  not 
return.  At  home  he  cultivated  music  and 
architecture  in  his  own  way,  discovering 
Gibbs  and  Hawksmoor  (a  lasting  loyalty) 
and  reading,  among  modern  authors,  (Sir) 
Reginald  Blomfield  [q.v.]  and  Heathcote 
Statham.  Lessons  from  Claude  Hayes  at 
this  time  were  the  only  instruction  in 
drawing  he  ever  received.  He  went  next  to 
Mulgrave  Castle,  Yorkshire,  a  school  con- 
ducted by  the  Rev.  Lord  Normanby  in 
whose  Ubrary  he  discovered  the  works  of 
Chambers  and  Soane.  In  1902  his  mother 
married  Wilbraham  Cooper,  who  had  been 
Goodhart's  tutor  at  Chinthurst.  She  re- 
mained, however,  an  important  factor  in 
her  son's  development  and  his  subsequent 
life.  Between  1902  and  1905  he  spent  much 
time  with  her  not  only  at  Chinthurst  but 
also  at  Cannes  (where  Lord  Rendel  had 
a  villa)  and  at  Valescure  where  he  be- 
came the  francophil  EngUshman  which 
he  always  remained.  In  1902,  at  Lord 
Rendel's  instance,  he  added  the  name  of 
Rendel  to  his  own. 


420 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Goodhart-^Rendel 


With  unlimited  leisure  to  develop  his 
abilities  in  the  spheres  which  fascinated 
him — music  and  architecture — Goodhart- 
Rendel  composed  music  in  the  manner  of 
Delibes  and  Messager,  and  at  the  same 
time  devoured  the  pages  of  the  Builder 
and  the  Building  News.  Of  his  two  pur- 
suits, music  seemed  the  more  promising 
and  it  was  arranged  for  him  to  study  with 
(Sir)  Donald  Tovey  [q.v.].  There  was, 
however,  a  hopeless  antagonism  of  tastes, 
Goodhart -Render  s  love  of  French  light 
opera  seeming  to  Tovey  as  incompre- 
hensible as  did  Tovey' s  obsession  with 
Brahms  to  Goodhart-Rendel.  'It  was 
Tovey' s  efforts  to  make  me  a  good  musician 
that  determined  me  to  become  an  archi- 
tect instead.' 

In  1905  Goodhart-Rendel  went  up  to 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  graduating 
Mus.B.  in  1909.  While  at  Cambridge  he 
provided  designs  for  a  commercial  build- 
ing in  Calcutta  and  from  1909  onwards 
began  to  engage  in  architectural  practice, 
his  most  important  work  from  this  period 
being  'The  Pantiles',  Englefield  Green, 
Surrey  (1911),  for  Miss  Sophie  Weisse  and 
Donald  Tovey,  a  house  reflecting — partly 
through  the  clients'  influence — the  pro- 
gressive German  ideas  of  the  period. 

In  1913  Lord  Rendel  died,  leaving  his 
grandson  a  life  interest  in  the  bulk  of  his 
fortune,  including  the  estate  of  Hatch- 
lands,  Surrey.  In  1915  Goodhart-Rendel 
was  commissioned  in  the  Special  Reserve, 
Grenadier  Guards.  This  precipitated  and 
in  due  course  resolved  an  emotional  crisis 
with  his  mother  and  at  the  same  time 
brought  him  into  a  world  of  rigorous 
discipline  and  action  where  he  soon  came 
to  beheve  what  he  had  already  suspected, 
that  soldiering  was  his  true  vocation. 
Although  ill  health  prevented  his  reaching 
the  front  (though  he  spent  four  months  in 
France  in  1917)  this  was  probably  the 
happiest  time  of  his  life.  A  company 
drill  primer  of  which  he  was  the  author 
was  issued  in  about  1917. 

Demobilized,  much  against  his  inclina- 
tion, in  1919,  he  resinned  architectural 
practice  at  the  office  he  had  designed  for 
himself  (1912-13)  at  60  Tufton  Street, 
London,  and  in  the  course  of  the  next 
twenty  years  became  one  of  the  most 
prominent  and  interesting  figures  in  the 
profession.  This  was  due  less  to  his 
buildings,  which  were  not,  as  a  rule, 
kindly  received  by  critics  or  by  the  pro- 
fession at  large,  than  to  his  personality, 
his  scholarship,  his  eloquence,  his  wit, 
and    his    willingness   to    devote    himself 


assiduously  and  sympathetically  to  pro- 
fessional affairs.  He  was  president  of  the 
Architectural  Association  in  1924-5,  aiid 
of  the  Royal  Institute  of  British  Architects 
in  1937-9  when  he  aroused  some  con- 
troversy by  his  strictures  on  the  quality  of 
'official'  architecture  at  a  time  when  the 
salaried  element  in  the  profession  was  in 
a  sensitive  mood.  In  1933-6  he  was  Slade 
professor  of  fine  art  in  Oxford.  In  1936  he 
accepted  the  directorship  of  the  Architec- 
tural Association  school  of  architecture, 
but  failed  to  attract  the  loyalty  of  the 
'left-wing'  youth  of  the  thirties  and  re- 
signed in  1938. 

In  the  war  of  1939-45  Goodhart- 
Rendel  rejoined  his  regiment,  returning 
afterwards  to  active  practice  with  H. 
Lewis  Curtis,  his  partner  since  1930,  and 
F.  G.  Broadbent  who  joined  the  partner- 
ship in  1945.  He  was  president  of  the 
Design  and  Industries  Association  in 
1948-50.  In  1955  he  was  appointed 
C.B.E.  for  services  to  architectural  criti- 
cism. 

Goodhart-Rendel' s  architecture  was  a 
vigorous  and  original  development  of 
certain  late  Victorian  tendencies.  In  his 
early  years  he  was  much  influenced  by 
Sir  Charles  Nicholson  [q.v.],  A.  Beresford 
Pite,  and  Halsey  Ricardo,  the  eclectic 
outlook  of  the  last  two  being  strongly 
reflected  in  his  own  work.  His  most 
important  buildings  between  the  wars 
were  Broad  Oak  End,  Bramfleld,  Herts, 
(for  R.  Abel  Smith,  1921-3),  influenced  by 
Lutyens ;  additions  to  Tetton  House, 
Taunton  (for  the  Hon.  Mervyn  Herbert, 
1924-6),  somewhat  in  the  style  of  Soane ; 
Hay's  Wharf  (1929-31),  a  challenging 
attempt  to  interpret  the  modern  move- 
ment in  the  'rational'  spirit  of  VioUet-le- 
Duc ;  St.  Wilfrid's,  Elm  Grove,  Brighton 
(1932-4),  a  modern  church  with  a  hard 
vigour  recalling  Butterfield ;  and  Prince's 
House,  North  Street,  Brighton  (1934-5), 
introducing  a  novel  decorative  treatment 
for  a  frame  building.  He  also  built  several 
villas  in  the  south  of  France. 

After  1945  Goodhart-Rendel  was  con- 
cerned mainly  with  churches,  in  some  of 
which  he  was  able  to  develop  the  ideas 
originated  at  St.  Wilfrid's,  Brighton.  He 
built  St.  John  the  Evangelist,  St.  Leonards 
(1946-58),  Our  Lady  of  the  Seven  Sorrows, 
Liverpool  (1951-4),  and  the  Sacred  Heart, 
Cobham,  Surrey  (1955-8).  Holy  Trinity, 
Dockhead,  and  Our  Lady  of  the  Rosary, 
Marylebone,  were  in  progress  at  the  time 
of  his  death.  The  Household  Brigade  war 
memorial   cloister,   Wellington   Barracks 


421 


Goodhart-Rendel 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


(1954-5),  is  a  study  in  Roman  Doric. 
A  very  large  and  detailed  project  for  the 
Benedictine  Abbey  of  Prinknash,  in  a 
modern  equivalent  of  Romanesque,  occu- 
pied much  of  his  last  years.  Some  founda- 
tions were  laid  and  the  architect  is  buried 
there.  His  designs,  however,  have  been 
laid  aside. 

Although  not  in  any  strict  sense  an 
historian,  Goodhart-Rendel  possessed  the 
most  complete  and  detailed  knowledge  of 
English  nineteenth-century  architecture 
of  anyone  of  his  time  and  his  annotated 
card-index  of  English  churches  (of  which 
the  master-copy  is  in  the  National  Build- 
ings Record)  is  a  work  of  great  authority. 
His  familiarity  with  Victorian  architects 
and  their  works,  at  a  time  when  such 
things  had  begun  to  arouse  an  amused 
interest,  gave  him  material  for  lectures  of 
a  peculiarly  brilliant  and  entertaining 
kind.  On  broader  architectural  issues  he 
spoke  with  insight  and  charm  but  with- 
out making  any  significant  contribution. 
Nearly  all  his  writing  was  in  the  form  of 
essays,  intended  to  be  read  as  lectures. 
Vitruvian  Nights  (1932)  and  English 
Architecture  since  the  Regency  (1953)  are 
collections  of  such  essays.  Of  essays  or 
lectures  published  singly  the  sensitive 
appreciation  of  Nicholas  Hawksmoor 
(1924)  is  the  most  memorable. 

In  early  life  a  devout  Anglican, 
Goodhart-Rendel  entered  the  Roman 
Church  in  middle  age,  his  faith  thereafter 
becoming  the  core  and  mainstay  of  his 
life.  He  never  married.  Music  remained 
important  to  him.  He  was  a  pianist  with 
a  somewhat  brittle  touch  and  a  pheno- 
menal capacity  for  accurate  sight-reading. 
As  a  composer  he  was  not  lacking  in 
invention.  Two  of  his  piano  pieces  were 
published.  He  was  vice-president  of  the 
Royal  Academy  of  Music  from  1953 
(honorary  F.R.A.M.,  1958)  and  a  governor 
of  Sadler's  Wells  from  1934. 

In  appearance  Goodhart-Rendel  was 
tall,  dark,  and  spare,  with  a  narrow  head, 
prominent  nose,  and  olive  complexion.  He 
is  well  characterized  in  Augustus  John's 
portrait  at  the  R.I.B.A.,  where  there  is 
also  a  head  by  Dora  Gordine.  In  society 
and  in  the  committee -room  he  was  dis- 
tinguished by  a  patrician  elegance,  an 
ironic  and  slightly  plaintive  manner  of 
speech,  and  by  the  sparkle  of  a  wit  issuing 
from  a  combination  of  logical  thought  and 
a  profound  love  of  paradox. 

He  died  in  London  21  June  1959. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
John  Summerson. 


GORDON,  MERVYN  HENRY  (1872- 
1953),  medical  bacteriologist,  was  born  at 
Harting,  Sussex,  22  June  1872,  the  sixth 
of  ten  children  of  the  vicar,  the  Rev. 
Henry  Doddridge  Gordon.  His  mother  was 
Ehzabeth  Oke,  daughter  of  William  Buck- 
land  [q.v.],  the  first  professor  of  mineralogy 
and  of  geology  at  Oxford  and  later  dean  of 
Westminster.  He  was  educated  at  Marl- 
borough and  Keble  College,  Oxford, 
where  he  obtained  a  second  class  in 
physiology  (1894),  proceeding  thence  to 
St.  Bartholomew's  Hospital,  London,  to 
study  clinical  medicine.  After  obtaining 
his  B.M.,  Oxford,  in  1898  (B.Sc,  1901, 
D.M.,  1903),  he  began  work  in  the 
pathology  department  at  St.  Bartholo- 
mew's under  Emmanuel  Klein,  whose 
long-standing  friendship  with  the  Gordon 
family  may  have  accounted  for  the  choice 
both  of  the  hospital  and  of  the  department 
in  which  Gordon  was  to  spend  the  whole 
of  his  working  life. 

He  remained  on  the  regular  staff  of  this 
department  until  1923,  and  during  this 
time  engaged  in  three  major  research 
projects  for  which  his  name  will  be  best 
remembered.  One  was  a  study  with  (Sir) 
F.  W.  Andrewes  and  T.  J.  (later  Lord) 
Horder  [qq.v.]  of  the  characters  of 
streptococci,  leading  to  a  classification 
into  three  species  which  gained  universal 
recognition.  An  extension  of  this  work  was 
an  attempt  which  he  made  much  later  to 
subdivide  one  of  these  species  {Strepto- 
coccus pyogenes,  or  the  haemolytic 
streptococcus)  which  had  long  been  sus- 
pected of  heterogeneity,  because  of  the 
great  variety  and  varying  severity  of  the 
infections  caused  by  it.  Although  he  and 
Andrewes  both  made  some  progress  in  this 
direction,  the  final  subdivision  of  this 
species  into  over  thirty  types  by  F. 
Griffith,  using  the  same  methods,  was  not 
to  be  achieved  until  over  ten  years  later. 

His  second  main  interest  was  in  the 
transmission  of  bacteria  through  the  air. 
At  a  time  when  Fliigge  had  recently 
shown  that  coughing,  sneezing,  and  even 
speaking  cause  the  expulsion  into  the 
atmosphere  of  'droplets'  of  secretion  from 
the  mouth  and  throat,  Gordon  was  given 
a  remarkable  opportunity  of  studying  this 
phenomenon  in  no  less  a  place  than  the 
House  of  Commons.  Members  had  com- 
plained of  the  ventilation,  and  the  Office 
of  Works  entrusted  Gordon  among  others 
with  an  inquiry  into  it.  He  used  bacteria 
as  indicators  both  of  pollution  and  of  air 
movement,  studying  the  distribution  of 
streptococci  from  the  mouths  of  speakers 


422 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Gordon-Taylor 


during  sittings  of  the  House,  and  of 
a  characteristic  harmless  organism  intro- 
duced into  his  own  mouth  when  he  had 
the  debating  chamber  to  himself,  and  was 
able  to  recite  passages  from  Shakespeare 
in  a  loud  voice  from  the  Treasury  bench 
to  an  audience  of  culture  plates.  The 
results  of  this  work  were  published  in 
a  blue  book  of  212  pages  in  1906:  a  land- 
mark in  the  study  of  this  subject,  which 
was  not  to  be  advanced  much  farther  until 
the  discovery  of  the  'droplet  nucleus' 
twenty  years  later,  and  proof  of  immense 
industry  and  ingenuity. 

Gordon's  third  and  perhaps  greatest 
achievement  was  his  study  of  cerebro- 
spinal fever  (meningococcal  meningitis) 
during  the  war  of  1914-18  when  he  was 
commissioned  in  the  Royal  Army  Medical 
Corps,  worked  at  the  headquarters  of  the 
Corps  at  Millbank,  and  was  given  execu- 
tive authority  in  all  matters  connected 
with  the  diagnosis  and  treatment  of  this 
disease.  He  was  largely  responsible  for 
showing  that  it  results  from  a  rise  in 
the  carrier-rate  in  overcrowded  and  ill- 
ventilated  quarters — a  fact  which  ac- 
counts for  its  frequent  occurrence  in  army 
barracks  in  war  conditions.  He  showed 
that  the  meningococcus  is  divisible  into 
four  serological  types,  studied  methods 
for  producing  more  effective  therapeutic 
serum,  organized  the  treatment  of  car- 
riers, and  defined  methods  for  better 
bacteriological  diagnosis.  He  was  cer- 
tainly the  leading  authority  on  the  disease 
in  this  country,  and  possibly  in  the  world. 

In  1923  Gordon  resigned  his  position  on 
the  staff  of  St.  Bartholomew's,  but  re- 
mained there  as  an  external  member  of  the 
staff  of  the  Medical  Research  Council,  and 
determined  to  devote  himself  entirely  to 
the  study  of  filtrable  viruses.  His  early 
systematic  studies  of  the  viruses  of  variola 
and  vaccinia  are  classical,  and  he  made 
some  observations  also  on  miunps  and 
psittacosis.  An  opportunity  then  occurred 
for  engaging  a  team  of  workers  to  study 
lymphadenoma  (Hodgkin's  disease) :  Gor- 
don undertook  the  direction  of  this  team, 
and  after  discarding  other  hypotheses, 
reached  the  conclusion  that  this  too  was 
a  virus  disease.  He  devised  a  new  animal 
test  for  its  diagnosis,  the  basis  of  which 
was  called  in  question,  and  even  an 
immunological  method  for  its  treatment 
which  other  workers  found  even  more 
difficult  to  accept.  In  his  later  years  he 
was  much  inclined  to  attribute  a  virus 
origin  to  other  diseases,  including  rheuma- 
tism and  cancer,  on  grounds  unacceptable 


to  those  who  were  then  advancing  the 
study  of  virology  by  more  modern 
methods. 

Gordon  was  an  original  member  (1909) 
of  the  Army  Pathology  Advisory  Com- 
mittee, and  for  many  years  thereafter 
consulting  bacteriologist  to  the  army.  He 
was  appointed  C.M.G.  in  1917  and  C.B.E. 
in  1919.  He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1924  and 
received  the  honorary  LL.D.  of  Edin- 
burgh in  1936.  He  never  sought  fame  and 
was  almost  completely  absorbed  in  his 
work,  his  only  other  interest  known  to  his 
friends  being  in  archaeology.  A  passion  for 
research  and  a  delight  in  any  original 
discovery,  even  if  unimportant,  were 
his  outstanding  characteristics.  His  en- 
thusiasm for  his  own  work  extended  to 
that  of  his  colleagues,  however  junior,  and 
the  encouragement  he  gave  them  by  his 
interest,  praise,  and  unstinted  help  was  an 
important  factor  in  many  careers. 

He  married  in  1916  Mildred  Olive  (died 
1953),  daughter  of  Sir  William  Power 
[q.v.].  She  continued  her  work  as  an 
inspector  for  the  Local  Government 
Board ;  they  had  no  children.  He  died  at 
his  home  at  Molesey  26  July  1953. 

[L.  P.  Garrod  in  Obituary  Notices  of  Fellows 
of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ix,  1954;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Lawkence  p.  Garbod. 

GORDON-TAYLOR,      Sir      GORDON 

(1878-1960),  surgeon,  was  born  at  Streat- 
ham  Hill,  London,  18  March  1878,  the 
elder  of  two  children  of  John  Taylor, 
wine  merchant,  and  his  wife,  Alice  Miller, 
daughter  of  William  Gordon,  stockbroker, 
of  Aberdeen.  In  1885  John  Taylor  died 
and  his  widow  moved  with  her  son  and 
daughter  to  Aberdeen  where  Gordon 
Taylor  gained  a  scholarship  at  Robert 
Gordon's  College.  He  was  happy  at  school, 
a  hard  worker,  fond  of  walking  and 
climbing,  and  played  a  good  deal  of 
cricket;  summer  holidays  were  spent  at 
Ballater  on  Deeside.  He  was  brought  up  in 
the  Presbyterian  Church. 

William  Gordon  Taylor,  his  name  until 
he  changed  it  in  1920  to  Gordon  Gordon- 
Taylor,  held  a  bursary  at  Aberdeen  Uni- 
versity where  in  1898  he  obtained  third 
class  honours  in  classics;  his  constant 
pocket  book  through  life  was  a  voliune  of 
Horace.  He  entered  the  Middlesex  Hospi- 
tal with  a  scholarship  and  qualified  in 
1903.  An  intensive  course  of  anatomical 
study  was  rewarded  with  first  class 
honours  (1904)  in  the  newly  instituted 
B.Sc.   in  anatomy  of  the  university  of 


423 


Gordon-Taylor 


'D.N.B.  1951-1960 


London.  He  obtained  his  F.R.C.S.  in  1906 
and  a  year  later  at  the  early  age  of  twenty- 
nine  was  appointed  assistant  surgeon  to 
the  Middlesex  Hospital.  He  was  consult- 
ing surgeon  to  the  Fourth  Army  in  France 
during  the  war  of  1914-18,  after  making 
a  name  for  himself  as  a  casualty  clearing 
surgeon.  He  became  full  surgeon  to  the 
Middlesex  Hospital  in  1920  and  in  the 
next  twenty  years  built  up  a  great 
reputation  for  skill  and  courage  in  tackling 
new  surgical  problems,  with  unwearying 
ardour  to  prolong  life  and  effect  complete 
cure.  A  fine  operator  and  an  excellent 
clinician  he  became  the  doyen  of  British 
surgery.  He  was  consultant  to  the  Royal 
Navy  in  the  war  of  1939-45  with  the  rank 
of  surgeon  rear-admiral,  travelUng  to 
Russia,  America,  and  India  in  the  course  of 
his  duties.  He  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1942, 
K.B.E.  in  1946,  and  was  a  commander  of 
the  United  States  Legion  of  Merit. 

At  the  Royal  College  of  Sm-geons  of 
England  he  served  on  the  council  (1932- 
48)  and  was  vice-president  (1941-3).  He 
was  a  Hunterian  professor  on  several 
occasions ;  dehvered  the  Bradshaw  lecture 
in  1942  on  the  abdominal  injuries  of 
modem  warfare,  and  twice  gave  the 
Thomas  Vicary  lecture.  In  this  he  demon- 
strated both  his  knowledge  of  surgical 
history  and  his  abiding  Scottish  patriot- 
ism, speaking  in  1945  about  the  medical 
and  surgical  aspects  of  the  1745  rising,  and 
recounting  in  1954  the  life  and  work  of  the 
great  London-Scottish  surgeon  and  anato- 
mist, Sir  Charles  Bell  [q.v.].  He  enlarged 
the  lectm*e  on  Bell  into  a  full-length 
biography  (1958,  with  E.  W.  Walls). 

Gordon-Taylor  played  a  leading  part  in 
the  affairs  of  many  societies  and  colleges ; 
was  an  honorary  fellow  of  the  Irish, 
Australasian,  Canadian,  and  American 
Colleges  of  Surgeons ;  an  honorary  foreign 
member  of  the  Academic  de  Chiriu'gie  in 
Paris;  and  received  honorary  degrees 
from  Cambridge,  Toronto,  Melbourne,  and 
Athens.  He  was  president  of  the  Associa- 
tion of  Surgeons  of  Great  Britain  and 
Ireland,  of  the  Medical  Society  of  London 
(1941-2),  and  of  the  Royal  Society  of 
Medicine  (1944-6),  which  also  awarded 
him  in  1956  its  coveted  and  rarely  be- 
stowed gold  medal.  Among  the  many 
ceremonial  addresses  which  he  was  in- 
vited to  deliver  were  the  Moseley  lecture, 
Toronto  1988,  the  first  Moynihan  lecture, 
Leeds  1940,  the  Syme  oration,  Melbourne 
1947,  the  Sheen  memorial  lecture,  Cardiff 
1949,  and  the  John  Fraser  memorial  lec- 
ture, Edinburgh  1957.  He  was  a  frequent 


contributor  to  medical  and  surgical 
journals  and  published  a  book  on  The 
Dramatic  in  Surgery  (1930)  and  another  on 
The  Abdominal  Injuries  of  Warfare  (1939). 

Gordon-Taylor  married  in  1920  Florence 
Mary  (died  1949),  daughter  of  John 
Pegrume ;  there  were  no  children.  He  died 
in  London,  3  September  1960,  as  the 
result  of  a  road  accident.  He  left  his  for- 
tune, after  the  cessation  of  his  sister's  life- 
interest  and  legacies  to  certain  societies, 
between  the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons  for 
its  library  and  the  Middlesex  Hospital  for 
its  nurses. 

His  portrait  by  Anna  Zinkeisen  was 
reproduced  in  the  special  number  of  the 
British  Journal  of  Surgery  dedicated  to 
him  on  his  eightieth  birthday  in  1958.  The 
original  hangs  in  the  board-room  at  the 
Middlesex  Hospital  in  London.  A  portrait 
by  (Sir)  James  Gunn  is  in  the  Royal 
Australasian  College  of  Surgeons  in  Mel- 
bourne and  a  sketch  in  oils  by  the  same 
artist  is  at  the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons  in 
London. 

[The  Times,  5  September  1960;  British 
Journal  of  Surgery,  vol.  xlviii,  November 
1960;  Gordon-Taylor  In  Memoriam,  by  his 
colleagues  at  the  Middlesex  Hospital,  with  a 
bibliography  of  his  writings,  1961 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Cecil  Wakeley. 

GOWER,  Sir  HENRY  DUDLEY 
GRESHAM  LEVESON  (1873-1954), 
cricketer,  was  born  8  May  1873  at  Titsey 
Place,  Limpsfield,  Surrey,  the  seventh  of 
the  twelve  sons  of  Granville  WiUiam 
Gresham  Leveson  Gower  and  his  wife, 
Sophia,  daughter  of  Chandos,  first  Baron 
Leigh  [q.v.]  and  sister  of  Sir  Edward 
Chandos  Leigh,  Q.C.,  who  was  president 
of  the  Marylebone  Cricket  Club  in  1887. 
Leveson  Gower  was  educated  at  Win- 
chester where  he  was  in  the  eleven  for 
three  years  and  captain  in  the  last  (1892). 
Playing  against  Eton  in  that  year  he 
and  J.  R.  Mason  together  dominated  the 
match  with  both  bat  and  ball  and  easily 
won  for  the  second  year  in  succession. 

So  successful  was  Leveson  Gower  that 
on  going  up  to  Magdalen  College  he  was 
awarded  his  blue  as  a  freshman.  He  played 
for  Oxford  for  four  years  and  in  his  last 
year  was  elected  captain.  The.  match 
against  Cambridge  in  this  year  (1896)  was 
perhaps  his  greatest  triumph.  Cambridge 
again  adopted  tactics,  which  afterwards 
gave  rise  to  some  controversy,  to  avoid  a 
compulsory  follow-on  (by  Oxford)  which 
the  laws  of  cricket  then  stipulated  in  cer- 


424 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Grahame-White 


tain  circumstances.  Nevertheless  Oxford 
reversed  their  defeat  of  the  previous  year, 
although  they  were  set  to  make  380  to 
win  in  the  last  innings.  By  obtaining  these 
with  four  wickets  to  spare,  largely  through 
a  splendid  132  by  G.  O.  Smith,  the  last 
choice,  and  a  sturdy  41  by  Leveson  Gower, 
they  performed  a  feat  never  before  ap- 
proached in  the  university  match. 

Leveson  Gower,  who  became  a  stock- 
broker by  profession,  played  for  Surrey, 
which  he  captained  from  1908  to  1910,  but 
thereafter  played  little  coimty  cricket.  He 
was  one  of  the  team  taken  by  Lord  Hawke 
[q.v.]  to  the  West  Indies  in  1897  and  later 
in  the  year  went  with  (Sir)  Pelham  Warner 
to  North  America.  In  the  winter  of  1909- 
10  he  captained  the  M.C.C.  team  in  South 
Africa,  a  country  which  he  had  already 
visited  with  the  team  of  1905-6.  Later  he 
took  teams  to  Malta  (1929),  Gibraltar 
(1932),  and  Portugal  (1934).  At  home 
he  devoted  much  energy  to  organizing 
teams  such  as  those  to  meet  Oxford  and 
Cambridge  at  Eastbourne,  and  he  was 
associated  for  over  fifty  years  with  the 
Scarborough  Cricket  Festival,  receiving 
the  freedom  of  the  borough  in  1930.  For 
many  years  he  served  on  the  M.C.C. 
committee  and  from  1929  to  1940  he  was 
president  of  the  Surrey  County  Cricket 
Club.  He  was  a  frequent  test  match  selec- 
tor and  several  times  chairman.  His  love 
for  Oxford  cricket  was  enduring  and  he 
retained  a  hfelong  connection  with  the 
Harlequins  and  the  Authentics,  over  both 
of  which  he  presided  in  later  years. 

Leveson  Gower  was  small,  almost 
impish  in  his  humorous  ways,  and  full  of 
vitality.  He  was  known  for  the  rest  of 
his  life  by  his  apt  schoolboy  nickname 
'Shrimp'.  It  was  his  energy  and  willing- 
ness to  field  anywhere  which  made  him 
welcome  as  a  member  of  a  side;  as  a 
batsman,  he  was  by  no  means  classic,  but 
rather  an  efficient  run-getter  who  could 
improvise  with  such  strokes  as  'the  cut'. 
A  man  of  kindliness  and  humour,  he  had 
an  exceptional  number  of  friends  to  whom 
he  gave  a  loyalty  only  equalled  by  that 
which  he  gave  to  cricket.  He  was  knighted 
in  1958  for  his  services  to  the  game. 

In  1908  Leveson  Gower  married  Enid 
Mary,  daughter  of  the  late  R.  S.  B. 
Hammond-Chambers,  K.C. ;  they  had  no 
children.  He  died  in  London  1  February 
1954. 

[The  Times,  2  February,  1954;  Wisden's 
Cricketers^  Almanack,  1955 ;  Sir  Henry  Leve- 
son Gower,  Off  and  On  the  Field,  1953; 
personal  knowledge.]  R.  H.  Hill. 


GOWRIE,  first  Earl  of  (1872-1955), 
soldier  and  governor-general  of  Australia. 
[See  HoRE-RuTHVEN,  Alexander  Gore 
Arkwright.] 

GRAHAME-WHITE,  CLAUDE  (1879- 
1959),  pioneer  aviator  and  aircraft  manu- 
facturer, was  born  at  Bursledon  Towers, 
Bursledon,  Hampshire,  21  August  1879, 
second  son  and  youngest  of  the  three 
children  of  John  White,  a  man  of  indepen- 
dent means  and  a  keen  yachtsman,  and 
his  wife,  Ada  Beatrice,  daughter  of  the 
late  Frederick  Chinnock,  property  agent  of 
London  and  Dinorbin  Court,  Hampshire. 
He  was  educated  at  Bedford  Grammar 
School  and  subsequently  apprenticed  to 
an  engineering  firm  in  the  town.  His  first 
job  in  life  was  with  an  uncle,  Francis 
Willey,  later  Lord  Barnby,  a  Yorkshire 
wool  magnate.  Wool  itself  did  not  interest 
him,  but  the  engineering  side  of  the 
business  did,  and  he  introduced  motor 
lorries  to  replace  the  horse  vans.  His  first 
independent  venture  was  to  start  a  motor 
vehicle  service  at  Bradford  in  competition 
with  the  steam  trams.  From  Yorkshire 
he  moved  to  Sussex  where  he  spent  three 
years  as  agent  of  a  large  estate.  Then, 
after  a  lengthy  visit  to  South  Africa  and 
a  big-game  hunting  trip  up  the  Zambezi, 
he  set  up  as  a  dealer  in  motor-cars  in 
London. 

Bleriot's  Channel  flight  and  a  meeting 
with  Wilbur  Wright  in  1909  very  strongly 
impressed  Grahame-White  with  the  possi- 
bilities of  aviation.  He  spent  a  highly 
instructive  two  months  in  Bleriot's  Pariis 
factory,  watching  the  construction  of 
a  machine  for  his  use,  and  when  it  was 
ready  he  flew  it  solo  without  instruction. 
On  4  January  1910  he  became  the  first 
Englishman  to  receive  the  pilot's  certifi- 
cate of  the  French  Aero  Club.  He  started 
a  British  flying  school  at  Pau  and  himself 
did  much  flying.  In  the  same  year  he  made 
two  attempts  to  win  the  Daily  Mail  prize 
of  £10,000  for  a  flight  from  London  to 
Manchester  but  was  beaten  by  Louis 
Paulhan.  His  gallant  fight  and  his  persis- 
tence in  covering  part  of  the  distance  in 
darkness  brought  his  name  into  world- 
wide renown.  This  year,  1910,  was 
crowded  with  events  and  triumphs;  he 
won  valuable  prizes  at  Wolverhampton 
and  Bournemouth ;  flew  over  the  Fleet  at 
Penzance  and  the  tower  at  Blackpool ;  and 
staged  a  demonstration  of  the  military 
use  of  aircraft  in  carrying  dispatches.  In 
September  he  continued  his  triumphant 
career  in  the  United  States.  After  winning 


425 


Grahame-White 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


£2,000  for  a  33-mile  flight  round  the 
Boston  Light,  and  a  number  of  other 
contests,  he  made  a  landing  in  Executive 
Avenue,  Washington,  and  in  New  York 
won  the  international  Gordon  Bennett 
Cup  and,  after  prolonged  dispute,  the 
Aero  Club  of  America's  £2,000  prize  for 
a  flight  round  the  Statue  of  Liberty.  He 
returned  to  England  in  December  and  was 
presented  by  Lord  Roberts  [q.v.]  with 
a  special  gold  medal  of  the  Aerial  League 
of  the  British  Empire.  In  August  of  the 
following  year  he  again  carried  all  before 
him  in  America. 

Early  in  1911  Grahame-White  set  up 
the  London  Aerodrome  at  Hendon,  and 
founded  there  the  Grahame-White  Avia- 
tion Company  which  trained  many  pilots. 
In  September  of  that  year  he  organized  the 
first  English  official  delivery  of  mail  by 
air,  from  Hendon  to  Windsor.  This  astute 
observer  and  strong  believer  in  the  future 
of  flying  quickly  sensed  great  possibilities 
for  the  miUtary  use  of  aircraft.  He  gave 
a  demonstration  for  the  parliamentary 
aerial  defence  committee  at  Hendon  on 
12  May  1911 ;  and  on  the  formation  of  the 
Royal  Flying  Corps  in  1912  he  wired  to 
Lord  Haldane  [q.v.]  offering  his  services 
in  any  capacity.  In  April  he  inaugurated 
weekly  flying  meetings  at  Hendon  and 
at  these  carried  hundreds  of  passengers 
without  mishap.  The  aerial  Derbys  held 
there  in  1912-14  aroused  great  public  in- 
terest ;  moreover,  the  meetings  were  made 
to  pay.  In  the  workshops  ceaseless  im- 
provement and  experimentation  produced 
sundry  prize-winning  models. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  Grahame-White 
was  commissioned  as  a  flight  commander 
in  the  Royal  Naval  Air  Service.  In  1915  he 
came  down  in  the  sea  off  Belgium  and  was 
rescued  by  a  minesweeper.  But  discipline 
and  routine  irked  him;  the  Government 
came  to  feel  that  he  had  a  more  valuable 
contribution  to  make  in  design  and  manu- 
facture. He  therefore  resigned  from  the 
Service  in  August  1915  and  for  the  rest  of 
the  war  worked  on  construction  at  Hen- 
don. After  the  war  he  was  unable  to  regain 
possession  of  his  aerodrome  which  after 
prolonged  controversy  was  purchased 
by  the  Government  with  all  the  com- 
pany's factories.  Grahame-White  had  now 
reached  the  end  of  his  effective  career,  but 
he  continued  to  watch  with  keen  interest 
the  development  of  aviation.  An  extremely 
prescient  man,  he  had  been  talking  as  far 
back  as  1919  of  speeds  from  200  to  300 
miles  an  hour  and  earlier  still  had  fore- 
seen   the    development    of   the    aircraft 


passenger  carrier.  His  genius  as  a  designer 
and  his  valour  and  skill  as  an  aviator 
place  him  among  the  greatest  names  in 
the  history  of  flight.  He  himself  wrote 
many  books  on  flying,  a  number  of  them 
in  collaboration  with  Harry  Harper,  air 
correspondent  of  the  Daily  Mail.  Grahame- 
White  died  19  August  1959  in  hospital  at 
Nice. 

He  married  first,  in  1912,  Dorothy, 
daughter  of  Bertrand  Le  Roy  Taylor,  of 
New  York ;  the  marriage  was  dissolved  in 
1916,  in  which  year  he  married  Ethel 
(Grace)  Levey,  an  actress;  this  marriage 
was  dissolved  in  1939  and  in  that  year  he 
married  Phoebe  Lee.  He  had  no  children. 

[Aeronautics,    16   October   1919;    Graham 

Wallace,  Claude  Grahame-White,  1960;  The 

Times,  20  August  1959 ;  private  information.] 

Herbert  B.  Grimsditch. 

GREEN,  FREDERICK  WILLIAM 
EDRIDGE-  (1863-1953),  authority  on 
colour  perception.  [See  Edridge-Green.] 

GREEN,  WILLIAM  CURTIS  (1875- 
1960),  architect,  was  born  at  Alton,  Hamp- 
shire, 16  July  1875,  the  second  son  of 
Frederic  Green,  barrister,  by  his  wife, 
Maria  Heath  Curtis.  Educated  at  Newton 
College,  he  was  articled  to  John  Belcher 
[q.v.]  and  trained  at  the  Royal  Academy 
Schools  under  Phene  Spiers  [q.v.]  where 
he  learned  a  sure  grip  of  the  orders  and 
a  superb  architectural  draughtsmanship. 
He  first  made  his  name  as  a  draughtsman 
in  pen-and-ink,  in  which  he  showed  an 
unerring  hand  and  a  grasp  of  perspective. 
For  some  years  he  contributed  illustra- 
tions to  the  Builder  in  the  days  when 
photographic  reproduction  was  not  what 
it  later  became.  For  this  purpose  he 
travelled  far,  at  home  and  abroad,  and 
the  fruits  of  these  and  later  journeys  are 
embodied  in  a  book,  published  in  1949, 
which  places  his  skill  on  permanent 
record. 

Curtis  Green  commenced  practice  in 
1898  and  mastered  the  design  of  the  smaU 
house.  He  was  elected  F.R.I.B.A.  in  1909. 
When  (Sir)  Edwin  Lutyens  [q.v.]  first 
went  to  New  Delhi,  he  asked  Green  to 
take  charge  of  his  office  while  he  was  away. 
This  greatly  influenced  him  and  enlarged 
his  understanding  of  monumental  work 
in  the  grand  manner.  Opportunity  came 
to  him  when  in  1912  he  was  taken  into 
partnership  by  Dunn  and  Watson  who  had 
a  large  city  practice,  and  soon  he  was  left  in 
sole  charge  of  a  going  concern.  As  a  result 
of  this  he  made  a  lasting  mark  on  Picca- 


426 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Green,  W.  C. 


dilly.  From  1919  to  1927  he  practised  on 
his  own  and  then  took  into  happy  partner- 
ship his  son,  Christopher,  and  his  son-in- 
law,  Antony  Lloyd. 

Curtis  Green's  first  large  building  was 
Wolseley  House,  later  Barclays  Bank,  in 
Piccadilly,  which  made  a  great  impact  in 
its  day  and  in  1922  received  the  first 
R.I.B.A.  medal  for  the  best  building  of 
the  preceding  three  years.  This  was  fol- 
lowed by  the  Westminster  Bank  on  the 
other  side  of  Piccadilly,  not  quite  so 
successful ;  and  later  Stratton  House  next 
to  Devonshire  House,  with  a  fine  elevation. 
Six  Duke  Street,  adjacent  to  Piccadilly, 
and  the  London  Life  Association  building 
in  King  William  Street  belong  to  the  same 
group  of  buildings  of  similar  character. 
The  sometimes  austere,  but  finely  detailed, 
masonry  of  his  banks  and  insurance 
offices,  with,  in  the  earlier  phase,  a  use  of 
the  classical  orders  that  is  a  little  over- 
done, is  often  relieved  by  the  rich  flow 
of  his  beautifully  designed  wrought-iron- 
work,  in  grilles  and  balconies,  and  by  the 
scarlet,  gold,  and  black  of  his  colour 
schemes,  particularly  in  the  interior  of 
Wolseley  House.  In  one  of  his  latest 
works,  the  charming  little  Barclays  Bank, 
161  New  Bond  Street,  there  is  a  gay 
'chinoiserie'.  His  last  phavse,  in  which  he 
had  the  association  of  his  son-in-law  and 
son,  shows  a  quiet  maturity,  with  elimina- 
tion of  the  orders  that  was  in  keeping 
with  the  times. 

The  new  building  for  Scotland  Yard  on 
the  Embankment,  and  the  exterior  of  the 
Equity  and  Law  Life  Assurance  Society, 
in  Lincoln's  Inn  Fields,  have  serene  Port- 
land stone  elevations,  with  fine  fenestra- 
tion and  a  sense  of  scale  that  is  urbane 
and  satisfying.  The  small  building  for  the 
Cambridge  University  Press,  in  the  Euston 
Road,  has  similar  qualities. 

The  Dorchester  Hotel  in  Park  Lane  is 
perhaps  Green's  most  familiar  building. 
It  is  not  his  happiest  creation,  but  he  came 
to  design  it  in  unusual  and  difficult  cir- 
cumstances. Sir  Owen  Williams  and  three 
architects  in  succession  had  worked  on  the 
scheme  and  brought  it  up  to  ground  level. 
The  sponsors  then  asked  Curtis  Green  to 
take  it  on.  His  hand  was  tied  with  existing 
foundations  and  a  defined  outline,  but 
with  energy  and  skill  he  tackled  this  com- 
plex problem,  and  the  hotel  was  opened  on 
the  advertised  date,  thirteen  months  later : 
including  the  architectural  design,  intri- 
cate plan  requirements,  complex  construc- 
tion, decor,  and  furnishing.  The  builder 
told  how  in  this  hectic  twelve  months. 


Green  never  lost  his  patience,  unflagging 
enthusiasm,  and  sense  of  humour.  The 
Queen's  Hotel  at  Leeds,  in  collaboration 
with  his  partners  and  W.  H.  Hamlyn,  also 
shows  his  skill  in  hotel  planning. 

Of  his  large  amount  of  domestic  work, 
most  of  which  was  small  in  scale,  special 
mention  should  be  made  of  Stockgrove 
Park  near  Leighton  Buzzard,  Bedford- 
shire. It  was  one  of  the  largest  houses 
built  between  the  two  wars,  and  in  addi- 
tion to  the  mansion,  on  its  commanding 
site,  with  covered  swimming  bath,  rackets 
court,  and  gardens,  there  is  a  detached 
stable  court,  with  a  water  tower,  a  guest 
house,  an  agent's  house,  entrance  lodges, 
gates,  and  cottages,  and  a  delightful 
thatched  boathouse  on  the  lake.  The 
main  house  is  planned  round  a  forecourt, 
and  expresses  a  sumptuous  way  of  life  now 
past.  It  is  a  fine  example  of  the  second 
phase  of  Georgian  architecture,  humane, 
English,  and  satisfying,  with  its  multi- 
coloured brickwork,  its  white  sash  win- 
dows, its  green  shutters  and  tiled  roofs. 
House  and  garden  are  in  excellent  har- 
mony. It  was  completed  in  1939.  Stanmore 
village,  Winchester,  and  the  housing 
estate  at  Chepstow,  in  collaboration  with 
William  Dunn,  show  his  skill  in  planning 
layout  and  designing  the  small  house. 

His  churches  (the  Good  Shepherd, 
Dockenfield,  Surrey;  St.  Christopher, 
Cove ;  St.  George's,  Waddon ;  St.  Francis, 
Rough  Close,  Stoke-on-Trent;  and  All 
Saints',  Shirley,  Croydon)  are  quiet  and 
satisfying  examples.  Curtis  Green  should 
be  judged  by  the  standards  of  his  genera- 
tion ;  and  by  that  standard  of  scholarly, 
personal  design,  fine  building,  and  good 
craftsmanship  he  stands  high.  His  work 
has  a  lasting  Enghsh  quality,  for  he  paid 
no  heed  to  ephemeral  fashions.  In  his  long 
working  life  his  never-failing  enthusiasm 
and  artistic  integrity  produced  a  remark- 
able output,  and  he  was  equally  happy  in 
town  and  country. 

From  his  days  as  a  student  at  the 
Schools,  Curtis  Green  was  a  staunch  sup- 
porter of  the  Royal  Academy,  to  which 
he  was  elected  as  an  associate  in  1923, 
becoming  a  full  academician  ten  years 
later.  He  was  a  Royal  gold  medallist  of 
the  R.I.B.A.  in  1942  and  was  chairman  of 
its  board  of  architectural  education.  He 
was  president  of  the  Architectural  Asso- 
ciation, a  member  of  the  Royal  Fine 
Art  Commission,  and  officier  d' Academic 
Fran9aise.  For  thirty-eight  years  he  gave 
devoted  service  to  the  Artists'  General 
Benevolent     Institution,      as     honorary 


427 


Green,  W.C. 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


secretary,  chairman  of  council,  and  vice- 
president. 

Curtis  Green  was  twice  married:  first, 
in  1899,  to  Cicely  Dillworth  (died  1934), 
daughter  of  Francis  Henry  Lloyd;  and 
secondly,  in  1935,  to  Laura  Gwenllian 
(died  1952),  widow  of  the  third  Lord 
Northboume  and  daughter  of  Admiral 
Sir  Ernest  Rice.  By  his  first  marriage  he 
had  one  son  and  four  daughters.  He  died  in 
London  26  March  1960. 

[The  Times,  28  March  1960 ;  Journal  of  the 
Royal  Institute  of  British  Architects,  June 
1960 ;  The  Drawings  of  W.  Curtis  Green,  R.A., 
1949;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Hubert  Worthington. 

GREENE,  Wn^FRID  ARTHUR,  Baron 

Greene  (1883-1952),  judge,  was  born  in 
Beckenham  30  December  1883,  son  of 
Arthur  Weguelin  Greene,  a  solicitor,  by 
his  wife,  Kathleen  Agnes,  daughter  of 
Octavius  Fooke.  Although  a  Roman 
Catholic,  he  was  educated  at  Westminster 
School  and  Christ  Church,  Oxford,  where 
he  was  a  scholar.  He  won  the  Craven 
scholarship  in  1903  and  the  Hertford 
scholarship  in  1904.  In  the  same  year  he 
took  a  first  in  classical  moderations.  He 
won  the  Chancellor's  prize  for  Latin  verse 
in  1905,  taking  as  his  subject  Artes  Magi- 
ciae.  He  took  a  first  in  literae  humaniores 
in  1906  and  was  elected  a  fellow  of  All 
Souls  in  1907.  He  won  the  Vinerian 
scholarship  in  1908.  He  was  called  to  the 
bar  by  the  Inner  Temple  in  1908,  winning 
a  studentship  in  the  same  year,  and  he 
went  into  the  chambers  of  Philip  Stokes, 
one  of  the  busiest  and  most  esteemed 
equity  practitioners.  Two  years  later  he 
moved  to  the  chambers  of  F.  H.  (later 
Viscount)  Maugham  [q.v.].  He  had  already 
created  a  profound  impression  as  a  junior, 
when  war  broke  out  in  1914.  Within  six 
weeks  he  was  gazetted  a  second  lieutenant 
in  the  Oxfordshire  and  Buckinghamshire 
Light  Infantry  in  which  he  rose  to  be 
captain.  He  served  in  France,  Flanders, 
and  Italy,  and  with  the  rank  of  major  was 
successively  employed  as  G.S.O.  3  on  the 
staff  of  the  Fifth  Army,  G.S.O.  2  on  the 
G.H.Q.  staff  in  Italy,  and  G.S.O.  2  on 
the  British  Supreme  War  Council.  His 
services  were  recognized  by  the  award  of 
the  O.B.E.,  the  M.C.,  the  croix  de  guerre 
of  France,  and  the  Order  of  the  Crown 
of  Italy. 

In  1919  Greene  returned  to  the  bar, 
taking  silk  in  1922,  and  in  1925  became 
a  bencher  of  his  inn.  While  carrying  on 
one  of  the  largest  Chancery  practices  of 


his  day,  he  found  time  to  perform  a  great 
deal  of  unpaid  public  work.  In  1925  he 
was  chairman  of  the  committee  on  com- 
pany law,  which  laid  the  foundation  of  the 
Companies  Act,  1929.  In  1930  he  became 
chairman  of  the  committee  on  trade  prac- 
tices. In  1931  he  was  chairman  of  the 
advisory  committee  to  inquire  into  the 
position  of  Imperial  and  International 
Communications,  Ltd.,  in  connection 
with  a  cable  merger.  In  1934  he  was  chair- 
man of  the  committee  on  the  beet  sugar 
industry.  Towards  the  end  of  his  career  at 
the  bar  he  confined  himself  to  appearing 
in  the  House  of  Lords  and  the  Judicial 
Committee  of  the  Privy  Council  but,  even 
so,  by  1935  he  was  utterly  exhausted  by 
a  practice  of  legendary  proportions  and, 
after  arguing  a  case  in  the  Judicial  Com- 
mittee in  July,  he  confessed  that  he  was 
'really  done'.  Though  he  had  extra- 
ordinary mental  stamina,  his  small,  slight 
build  did  not  suggest  a  robust  constitu- 
tion. 

The  time  had  come  for  him  to  leave  the 
bar  and  in  October  1935,  when  Maugham 
became  a  lord  of  appeal  in  ordinary, 
Greene  succeeded  him  in  the  Court  of 
Appeal,  was  knighted,  and  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council.  In  1937  Greene  was  ap- 
pointed master  of  the  Rolls.  He  was 
created  a  baron  in  1941.  By  virtue  of  his 
new  office  Greene  also  became  head  of  the 
Record  Office  and  to  the  duties  which  this 
imposed  he  devoted  much  energy.  He  was 
chairman  of  the  Royal  Commission  on 
Historical  Manuscripts  and  president  of 
the  British  Records  Association  from  1937. 
During  the  war  his  zealous  initiative 
saved  from  destruction  innumerable  docu- 
ments of  historic  importance,  especially 
local  records.  He  worked  with  enthusiasm 
and  energy  as  chairman  of  the  National 
Buildings  Record  Office  (1941-5),  formed 
at  the  start  of  the  war  in  1939  to  preserve 
by  drawings  and  photographs  the  details 
of  buildings  imperilled  by  the  hostilities. 
In  June  1942  Greene  also  served  as  chair- 
man of  the  board  of  investigation  of  the 
coalminers'  wages  claim. 

The  tenure  of  the  office  of  master  of 
the  Rolls  for  any  considerable  time  is 
notoriously  exhausting.  Greene  held  it  for 
twelve  years  and  at  the  end  he  was 
visibly  worn  out.  When,  in  1949,.  he  was 
appointed  a  lord  of  appeal  in  ordinary  it 
was  hoped  that  less  exacting  duties  would 
restore  him,  but  the  hope  was  vain  and  in 
May  the  following  year  he  resigned  on  the 
ground  of  ill  health.  On  16  April  1952  he 
died  in  Dorking.  His  home  had  been  for 


428 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Greenwood 


many  years  at  Holmbury  St.  Mary,  near 
Guildford. 

Greene  was  a  man  of  singular  charm, 
sensitiveness,  and  modesty  who  brought 
to  the  practice  of  the  law  the  mind  of 
a  scholar,  as  well  as  the  highest  sense  of 
honour.  To  a  natural  lucidity  of  thought, 
he  joined  feUcity  and  elegance  of  expres- 
sion and,  on  occasion,  a  whimsical  wit, 
which  lent  his  arguments  at  the  bar 
a  quality  all  their  own.  It  was  written  of 
him  that  'he  was  great  without  pride, 
a  genius  without  arrogance,  one  aureoled 
with  success  yet  never  world-hardened, 
never  inviting  or  incurring  either  enmity 
or  envy,  a  man  who  walked  through  life 
clothed  with  courtesy,  consideration  and 
amenity.' 

In  a  speech  which  he  delivered  in  1947 
as  president  of  the  Classical  Association 
he  affirmed  his  faith  that  the  humanities 
alone  'can  deepen  the  spirit  of  a  man  and 
teach  him  the  eternal  worth  of  beauty,  of 
honest  thought,  and  provide  him  with  eyes 
to  see  the  inmunerable  interests  that 
surround  him'.  For  him  the  legacy  of 
Greece  and  Rome  was  'integrity  of  mind, 
.  .  .  accuracy  of  thought  and  expression, 
and  the  impulse  to  reject  what  is  slovenly 
or  superficial;  distrust  of  the  catchword 
.  .  .  the  habit  and  method  of  reasoned 
criticism  which  forbids  us  to  accept  or 
reject  a  proposition  merely  because  it  is 
pleasant  to  do  so,  or  because  it  saves  the 
trouble  of  thought;  the  power  to  recog- 
nise and  enjoy  beauty  in  all  its  forms'. 
All  these  were  certainly  characteristics  of 
Greene  himself. 

Greene  received  a  number  of  honorary 
degrees  including  the  D.C.L.  of  Oxford,  of 
which  he  was  standing  counsel  in  1926-35. 
He  was  an  honorary  student  of  Christ 
Church,  an  honorary  F.R.I.B.A.,  a  trustee 
of  the  Pilgrim  Trust,  the  British  Museum, 
and  the  Chantrey  Bequest,  and  principal, 
in  1936-44,  of  the  Working  Men's  Col- 
lege, St.  Pancras. 

In  1909  Greene  married  Nancy,  eldest 
daughter  of  Francis  Wright,  of  AUerton, 
Yorkshire;  there  were  no  children.  The 
fine  portrait  of  him  in  the  Inner  Temple 
by  Miss  H.  Gluck,  is  a  remarkably  ac- 
curate likeness. 

[Law  Times  and  Law  Journal,  25  April 
1952 ;  The  Times,  18  April  and  1  May  1952.] 

F.  H.  COWPER. 

GREENWOOD,  ARTHUR  (1880-1954), 
politician,  was  born  at  Hunslet,  Leeds,  8 
February  1880,  the  eldest  son  of  William 
Greenwood,   painter   and   decorator,   by 


his  wife,  Margaret  Nunns,  of  Dewsbury. 
From  a  board  school  he  won  a  scholarship 
to  Bewerley  Street  higher  grade  school. 
As  the  only  means  of  continuing  his 
studies,  he  became  a  pupil  teacher  and 
won  a  scholarship  to  the  Yorkshire  Col- 
lege, then  a  constituent  of  Victoria  (and 
later  to  become  Leeds)  University.  He 
obtained  his  B.Sc.  (1905)  and  his  Board  of 
Education  certificate,  remaining  another 
year  to  read  economics  and  history.  After 
a  few  years'  teaching  in  various  schools  he 
became  head  of  the  department  of  eco- 
nomics and  law  at  Huddersfield  Technical 
College,  and  in  1913  lecturer  in  economics 
at  the  university  of  Leeds.  He  was  active 
in  the  Workers'  Educational  Association, 
helped  to  create  the  Yorkshire  (North) 
District  of  which  he  remained  chairman 
until  1945,  and  devoted  all  his  spare  time 
to  adult  education  and  to  work  for  the 
local  Labour  Party.  Shortly  before  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1914  he  went  to  Lon- 
don as  general  secretary  of  the  Council  for 
the  Study  of  International  Relations.  By 
1916  he  had  written  many  articles  and 
extended  pamphlets  on  child  labour  and 
juvenile  unemployment,  and  on  inter- 
national problems.  Prophecies  of  an  out- 
put as  prolific  as  that  of  Sidney  and 
Beatrice  Webb  [qq.v.],  of  whom  he  was 
a  protege,  and  of  a  successful  academic 
career  were,  however,  belied. 

In  1916  he  became  a  wartime  civil  ser- 
vant in  Lloyd  George's  'secretariat'.  At 
first  as  assistant  secretary  to  the  Recon- 
struction Conmiittee,  then  from  1917  to 
1919  at  the  Ministry  of  Reconstruction, 
Greenwood  impressed  his  minister, 
Christopher  (later  Viscount)  Addison 
[q.v.],  with  his  mastery  of  detail,  his 
capacity  to  suggest  general  deductions, 
and  his  energy.  He  played  a  large  part, 
with  R.  H.  Tawney,  in  producing  the 
report  on  adult  education,  and  in  the 
setting-up  of  Whitley  Councils.  When  he 
unsuccessfully  fought  Southport  in  1918 
as  Labour  candidate  he  was  reappointed 
to  the  Civil  Service  the  day  after  his 
defeat.  He  was,  however,  already  in  touch 
with  a  group  under  the  guidance  of  the 
Webbs  and  G.  D.  H.  Cole  [q.v.]  which  was 
seeking  to  formulate  policy  for  the  Labour 
Party.  In  1920  Greenwood  became  secre- 
tary of  the  Labour  Party  research  depart- 
ment and  there  he  remained  until  1943. 
Although  only  four  Labour  Party  pamph- 
lets during  this  period  were  attributed  to 
him  by  name,  his  contribution  to  the  draft- 
ing of  all  of  them,  to  the  formulation  of 
poUcy  and  to  the  preparation  of  legislative 


429 


Greenwood 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


proposals,  was  immense.  Much  of  the 
credit  for  constructive  thought  in  the 
party  after  1931  was  due  to  Arthur 
Greenwood.  In  those  days,  his  post  might 
be  held  in  conjunction  with  membership 
of  the  House  of  Commons  and  in  1922  he 
was  elected  for  Nelson  and  Colne,  which 
he  represented  until  1931.  In  the  following 
year  he  won  at  Wakefield  by  a  majority  of 
just  over  300  in  a  poll  of  nearly  27,000, 
and  he  continued  to  represent  the  city 
until  his  death. 

Although  many,  including  Beatrice 
Welib,  expected  Greenwood  to  have 
a  Ministry  in  the  Labour  Government  of 
1924,  he  modestly  accepted  the  post  of 
parliamentary  secretary  to  the  Ministry 
of  Health.  But  in  1929  he  became  minister 
of  health,  a  post  which,  with  his  combina- 
tion of  economic  training  and  human 
sympathy,  was  ideal  for  him.  Major 
measures  for  which  he  was  responsible 
included  the  Widows',  Orphans'  and  Old 
Age  Contributory  Pensions  Act,  1929 ;  the 
Housing  Act,  1930 ;  the  town  and  country 
planning  bill  which  was  accepted  with 
little  change  by  his  successor.  But  he  dis- 
liked the  frustration  of  minority  govern- 
ment and  in  one  way  felt  relief  when 
Ramsay  MacDonald's  ministry  fell.  He 
unfalteringly  opposed  the  prime  minis- 
ter's policy  as  the  ministry  came  to  an 
end,  refused  to  accept  a  means  test  or 
cuts  in  benefit  for  the  unemployed,  and 
was  among  the  defeated  ex-ministers  in 
1931. 

From  1932,  when  he  returned  to  the 
House,  until  1939,  he  played  a  prominent 
part  not  only  in  domestic  affairs — Neville 
Chamberlain  paid  tribute  to  his  contribu- 
tions to  long  and  complicated  debates  on 
rating  and  local  government — but  also  in 
attacking  the  Government's  foreign  policy 
on  Manchuria,  Abyssinia,  and  Spain.  In 
1938  he  earned  the  tribute  of  a  personal 
onslaught  by  Hitler  in  his  speech  at 
Weimar.  Many  thought  of  him  as  succes- 
sor to  George  Lansbury  [q.v.]  as  early  as 
1932.  When,  in  fact,  C.  R.  (later  Earl) 
Attlee  succeeded  to  the  leadership  in  1935, 
Greenwood,  who  was  unanimously  elected 
deputy  leader,  gave  him  'most  loyal  sup- 
port and  good  counsel'.  He  spoke  for  the 
Labour  Party  during  Attlee' s  illness  in 
the  critical  days  of  1939  and  achieved  his 
'finest  hour'  in  the  House  of  Commons  on 
Saturday,  2  September.  Urged  to  'speak 
for  England',  quietly  and  without  rhetori- 
cal flourish  but  with  firmness  and  sin- 
cerity, Greenwood  insisted  on  England's 
duty  to  resist  aggression. 


In  May  1940  he  entered  the  War 
Cabinet  as  minister  without  portfolio  in 
charge  of  economic  affairs.  In  January 
1941,  however,  changes  to  meet  criticism 
of  weakness  in  organization  brought  him 
into  control  of  reconstruction.  Before  his 
retirement  from  the  Cabinet  in  February 
1942  he  was  responsible  for  the  memorable 
appointment  of  the  Beveridge  committee. 
Thereafter  until  the  end  of  the  war  he 
devoted  himself  to  maintaining  Labour 
support  for  the  war  effort  while  at  the 
same  time  preparing  his  party  for  electoral 
battle  whenever  peace  came. 

After  the  general  election  in  1945  he 
became  lord  privy  seal  and  chairman  of 
various  cabinet  committees,  and  from 
July  1946  to  March  1947  paymaster- 
general  as  well.  In  April  1947  he  became 
minister  without  portfolio.  Within  six 
months  he  was  dropped  from  the  Govern- 
ment. Despite  the  rather  thin  excuse  that 
younger  members  had  to  be  given  their 
chance,  and  the  hints  that  he  might  retire 
from  politics.  Greenwood  showed  no  ran- 
cour. Although  frequently  incapacitated 
by  ill  health  he  continued  to  work  faith- 
fully and  without  stint  for  his  party.  He 
had  been  elected  treasurer  in  1943  and 
became  chairman  of  the  national  execu- 
tive in  1952.  Although  frail  and  tired,  he 
was  regarded,  not  inaccurately,  as  a  power- 
ful force  for  unity  when  factional  disputes 
raged  in  the  party.  Relief  was  great  when 
in  1953  Herbert  Morrison  (later  Lord 
Morrison  of  Lambeth)  withdrew  his  chal- 
lenge for  the  treasurership.  Greenwood 
remained  a  member  of  the  national 
executive  until  his  death. 

During  the  Leeds  municipal  strike  in 
1913,  Greenwood  had  annoyed  both  the 
university  authorities  and  the  city  fathers 
by  his  outspoken  support  for  the  strikers. 
Yet  in  1930  his  university  conferred  upon 
him  the  honorary  degree  of  LL.D.,  and  he 
became  an  honoured  freeman  of  the  city. 
He  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council  in 
1929,  and  made  a  C.H.  in  1945,  but 
refused  a  viscountcy  on  his  retirement 
from  office. 

Greenwood,  or  'A.G.'  as  he  was  popu- 
larly known  to  his  friends,  had  the  happy 
knack  of  being  able  to  understand  and  to 
keep  together  both  wings  of  the  Labour 
Party.  His  education,  if  not  his  origin, 
made  him  an  'intellectual'.  He  was  an 
early  Fabian  and  a  founder  of  the  Univer- 
sity Labour  Federation  whose  president 
he  remained  until  1940.  Yet  it  was  Arthur 
Henderson  [q.v.]  who  gave  him  his  chance 
and  prophesied  his  success.  The  National 


430 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Greg 


Union  of  Railwaymen  used  him  as  propa- 
gandist during  the  1919  strike  ;  the  miners 
asked  him  to  give  evidence  before  the 
Sankey  commission  on  the  coal  mines  ;  the 
Trades  Union  Congress  made  him  a  spokes- 
man before  the  Blanesburgh  committee 
on  imemployment  insurance  ;  trade-union 
support  made  him  deputy  leader.  Loyalty 
to  his  party  dominated  his  life  and  he 
had  httle  use  for  rebels.  His  love  of 
humanity,  his  gift  for  friendship,  his 
sincerity,  and  his  high  standards  of  public 
service  won  for  him  the  respect  of  all  who 
knew  him.  To  his  contemporaries  who 
worked  with  him,  to  younger  men  who 
learned  much  of  their  socialism  from  him, 
he  was  'the  best-loved  man  in  the  Labour 
Party'.  When  he  returned  after  a  long 
illness  he  was  cheered  as  though  he  were 
the  'father  of  the  House'.  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  described  him  as  'a  wise  counsel- 
lor of  high  courage  and  a  good  and  helpful 
friend'.  Yet  Greenwood  never  fulfilled  the 
highest  hopes  of  those  who  in  the  early 
days  foresaw  a  future  of  unlimited  possi- 
bilities. He  was  not  made  of  stuff  quite 
stern  enough  to  reach  the  highest  position. 
Sometimes  his  very  strength  became  a 
source  of  weakness,  as  in  his  infinite  socia- 
bility and  his  inability  to  relax  from  too 
much  conviviality.  But  he  made  a  very 
real  contribution  to  British  political  life: 
one  of  the  first  generation  of  pioneers, 
he  was  also  one  of  those  who  created  a 
party  not  merely  of  opposition  but  of 
office. 

In  1904  Greenwood  married  Catherine 
Ainsworth,  daughter  of  John  James 
Brown,  clerk,  of  Leeds.  They  had  one 
daughter  and  one  son,  Anthony  Green- 
wood, who  entered  Parliament  as  a  Labour 
member  in  1946,  was  chairman  of  the 
national  executive  (1963-4),  and  held 
a  succession  of  offices  after  Labour  came 
into  power  in  1964.  Arthur  Greenwood 
died  at  his  home  in  London  9  June 
1954. 

[The  Times  and  Manchester  Guardian,  10 
June  1954 ;  private  information ;  personal 
knowledge.]  H.  V.  Wiseman. 

GREG,  Sir  WALTER  WILSON  (1875- 
1959),  scholar  and  bibliographer,  was 
born  9  July  1875  at  Park  Lodge,  Wimble- 
don Common,  the  only  son  of  William 
Rathbone  Greg  [q.v.]  by  his  second  wife, 
Julia,  second  daughter  of  James  Wilson 
[q.v.].  He  was  named  after  his  grandfather 
and  after  Walter  Bagehot  [q.v.]  who 
married  Wilson's  eldest  daughter.  The 
Economist,  founded  by  Wilson  and  bril- 


liantly edited  by  Bagehot,  was  a  family 
paper,  and  from  infancy  W.  W.  Greg  was 
intended  some  day  to  be  its  editor.  His 
father  died  in  1881,  and  with  his  mother 
he  spent  some  years  travelling  in  Europe, 
acquiring  a  knowledge  of  French  and  Ger- 
man and  a  passion  for  mountains  and 
mountaineering.  He  did  not  distinguish 
himself  at  Harrow,  and  at  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge,  his  work  for  the  modern  and 
medieval  languages  tripos  was  so  desul- 
tory that  he  was  allowed  only  the  pass 
degree  (1897).  But  at  Trinity  he  met  R.  B. 
McKerrow  (whose  notice  he  contributed 
to  this  Dictionary),  who  was  by  far  the 
most  formative  influence  on  his  life.  All 
thoughts  of  a  career  in  financial  journalism 
were  soon  abandoned,  and  when  he  should 
have  been  writing  essays  on  monetary 
theory  he  was  collecting  material  for 
a  bibliography  of  the  English  drama  and 
discussing  with  McKerrow  projects  for 
editing  Elizabethan  drama  and  the  textual 
methods  to  be  used.  In  1898  he  joined  the 
Bibliographical  Society,  a  momentous 
year  for  him  and  for  the  society,  and  so 
began  a  forty  years'  friendship  with  its 
secretary,  A.  W.  Pollard  (whose  notice  he 
also  contributed  to  this  Dictionary).  His 
first  publication  of  importance  was  a  find-  I 
ing-list  of  English  plays  written  before 
1643  and  pubhshed  before  1700  (1900).  It 
was  the  beginning  of  that  descriptive 
bibliography  of  the  EngUsh  drama  of 
which  the  first  volume  was  published  in 
1939  and  the  fourth  and  last  in  1959. 
He  had  been  'sixty  years  on  the  job'. 

He  was  fortunate  in  being  able  to  fol- 
low his  bent  without  the  distraction  of 
earning  a  living.  From  his  Wimbledon 
home  he  was  a  constant  visitor  to  the  . , 
British  Museum  and  in  almost  daily  touch  /^ 
with  Pollard  and  McKerrow.  Near  by  was 
the  publishing  house  of  A.  H.  Bullen  [q.v.], 
and  it  was  Bullen  who  suggested  and 
pubhshed  McKerrow's  great  edition  of 
Thomas  Nashe  and  Greg's  edition  of  the 
Henslowe  Diary  and  Papers  (1904-8). 
Greg's  work  on  this  edition  laid  the 
foundations  of  his  expert  knowledge  of 
Elizabethan  theatrical  companies  and 
Elizabethan  handwriting.  Bullen  also  pub- 
lished his  one  book  on  literary  history, 
Pastoral  Poetry  and  Pastoral  Drama  (1906), 
still  the  best  survey  of  the  theme  down  to 
1650.  At  the  same  time  in  numerous 
articles  he  was  establishing  new  standards 
of  bibhographical  and  textual  criticism  in 
relation  to  Elizabethan  texts.  Almost  as  in- 
fluential as  his  books  and  articles  in  raising 
the    standards    of    English    scholarship 


431 


Greg 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


were  his  reviews,  for  he  wrote  more  than 
two  hundred  and  never  one  that  did  not 
contribute  something  to  the  subject  in 
hand.  He  could  be  extremely  severe,  as 
in  his  review  in  the  Modem  Language 
Remew  for  April  1906  of  the  edition  of 
Robert  Greene  by  Churton  Collins  [q.v.], 
but  even  so  he  was  constructive  while 
being  destructive.  His  most  brilliant  work 
in  these  early  years,  and  one  which  called 
widespread  attention  to  the  usefulness  of 
the  bibliographical  tools  which  he  and  his 
friends  Pollard  and  McKerrow  were  using, 
was  the  proof  that  ten  early  quartos  of 
Shakespearian  interest  purporting  to  be 
published  at  varying  dates  from  1600  to 
1619  were  all  printed  by  William  Jaggard 
in  1619. 

From  1907  until  his  resignation  in  1918 
Greg  was  Ubrarian  of  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge,  his  one  salaried  academic  post. 
The  treasures  of  that  library  might  have 
led  him  to  become  a  medievalist,  and  he 
published  much  work  on  medieval  manu- 
scripts of  dramatic  interest:  but  he  was 
already  committed  to  his  dramatic  biblio- 
graphy and  to  the  Malone  Society.  Of  this 
society,  founded  at  Pollard's  suggestion 
for  the  exact  reproduction  of  English  plays 
and  dramatic  documents  before  1640, 
Greg  was  the  Atlas,  and  during  his  general 
editorship  (1906-39)  and  presidency 
(1939-59)  there  were  very  few  of  its 
hundred-odd  volumes  which  did  not  profit 
from  his  scrutiny.  For  many  he  was  solely 
responsible.  Pollard  had  insisted  that  the 
bibliographer  must  have  continually  in  his 
mind's  eye  the  actual  material  manuscript 
from  wMch  the  compositor  was  working, 
and  both  Greg  and  McKerrow  reaUzed 
that  before  this  was  possible  they  must 
know  much  more  than  was  known  to  older 
scholars  Uke  Sir  Sidney  Lee  [q.v.]:  more 
about  the  relations  between  pubUshers, 
printers,  and  booksellers ;  about  the  prac- 
tices of  Elizabethan  printers  in  matters 
hke  casting-off  and  proof  correction ;  about 
dramatic  companies  and  their  relations 
with  dramatists  and  censors;  about  the 
different  types  of  dramatic  manuscripts 
and  the  handwritings  of  dramatists  and 
playhouse  scriveners.  More  than  any  man 
Greg  made  this  evidence  available, 
whether  in  the  pubUcations  of  the  Malone 
Society  or  elsewhere.  His  editions  and 
studies  of  Greene's  Orlando  Furioso  and 
Peek's  Battle  of  Alcazar ^  two  'bad  quartos' 
marred  by  memorial  transmission,  put  the 
problem  of  the  origins  of  quartos  like 
Romeo  and  Juliet  (1597)  and  Hamlet  (1603) 
in  a  new  light.  His  great  gifts  as  a  textual 


critic  and  palaeographer  found  most  scope 
in  his  editions  of  manuscript  plays,  and  of 
these  the  most  famous  was  Sir  Thomas 
More  (1911),  three  pages  of  which  are 
believed  to  be  in  Shakespeare's  hand. 
Other  valuable  works  are  his  Dramatic 
Documents  from  the  Elizabethan  Play- 
houses (1931)  with  facsimiles  and  discus- 
sion of  surviving  theatrical  and  dramatic 
documents  and  English  Literary  Auto- 
graphs, 1550-1650  (1925-32)  which  gives 
facsimiles  and  transcription  with  comment 
on  the  hands  of  dramatists  and  other 
writers.  Thanks  in  part  to  these  works, 
attempts  to  identify  hands  of  dramatists 
and  playhouse  scriveners  have  met  with 
striking  successes. 

On  the  function  of  bibliography  and  its 
relations  to  textual  criticism  he  had  much 
to  say,  and  although  he  hardly  ever  pro- 
duced an  edition  with  established  text  and 
commentary  he  profoundly  altered  edi- 
torial procedure.  Like  McKerrow  he  main- 
tained that  bibliography  is  the  study  of 
books,  irrespective  of  their  contents,  with 
the  purpose  of  ascertaining  the  exact 
circumstances  and  conditions  in  which 
they  were  produced ;  but  unlike  McKerrow 
he  extended  its  boundaries  by  insisting 
that  manuscripts  and  the  investigation  of 
textual  transmission  fell  within  its  pro- 
vince. The  duty  of  the  editor  of  a  printed 
text  was  not  only  to  estabUsh  the  relation- 
ship between  the  different  editions  of 
a  work  but  to  attempt  to  discover  what 
sort  of  copy  a  printer  worked  from  and 
how  far  he  may  have  departed  from  his 
copy-text.  The  boundary  between  bibUo- 
graphy  and  textual  criticism  may  have 
become  a  little  obscure  sometimes,  but 
thanks  mainly  to  Greg's  writings  it  came 
to  be  recognized  that  analytical  bibUo- 
graphy  was  an  essential  preliminary  to 
textual  criticism.  A  corollary  of  his  view 
was  that  no  emendation  ought  to  be 
considered  in  vacuo  without  reference  to 
what  we  know  or  may  surmise  of  the 
history  of  the  text.  At  the  same  time  he 
was  far  from  supposing  that  textual 
criticism  could  be  reduced  to  a  set  of 
mechanical  rules  or  that  the  critic  could 
be  relieved  of  the  responsibility  of  indi- 
vidual judgement.  The  finest  practical 
example  of  his  doctrine  is  his  edition  of 
the  two  substantive  texts  of  Marlowe's 
'Doctor  Faustus'  1604^^1616  (1950).  At- 
tacking the  problem  without  parti  pris  he 
combined  a  minute  vision  for  significant 
detail  with  a  power  of  erecting  hypotheses 
which  fit  and  interpret  the  available 
evidence.  In  whatever  he  did  he  was  by 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Gregory 


no  means  timid,  but  his  daring  never 
passed  into  temerity. 

After  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  Greg 
sold  his  Wimbledon  house  and  settled  at 
River  in  Sussex.  There  he  spent  the  hap- 
piest and  most  fruitful  years  of  his  life. 
There  he  saw  through  the  press  his  great 
bibliography  and  his  Doctor  Faustus,  and 
in  works  like  The  Editorial  Problem  in 
Shakespeare  (3rd  ed.  1954),  The  Shake- 
speare First  Folio:  Its  Bibliographical  and 
Textual  History  (1955),  and  his  Lyell  lec- 
tures on  Some  Aspects  and  Problems  of 
London  Publishing  1550-1650  (1956)  the 
old  master  gave  his  ripest  thoughts  on 
matters  he  had  long  studied.  In  youth  he 
was  unusually  handsome  and  in  old  age 
still  an  impressive  figure.  Redoubtable  in 
print  he  was  sometimes  so  in  person  if 
angered  by  pretence  or  arrogance  or  slip- 
shod writing.  But  he  had  many  friends, 
old  and  young,  and  he  took  extraordinary 
pains  to  help  younger  generations.  He 
never  crossed  the  Atlantic,  much  to  the 
regret  of  American  scholars,  but  he  was 
accessible  at  his  hospitable  house  and 
always  a  punctual  correspondent.  Books 
and  letters  alike  were  written  in  a  hand 
which  was  beautifully  neat  and  elegant.  In 
style  he  aimed  at  exactness  and  lucidity, 
but  in  the  prose  of  criticism  as  in  mathe- 
matics held  that  there  should  be  a  quality 
of  elegance  beyond  mere  comprehensibiUty 
and  correctness.  All  his  Ufe  he  loved  the 
theatre,  live  if  possible,  but  failing  that 
the  radio.  He  had  no  dogmatic  views  on 
religion  but  thought  of  this  life  as  a  time 
of  service.  He  died  at  River  4  March 
1959. 

In  1913  Greg  married  his  cousin 
EUzabeth  Gaskell,  youngest  daughter  of 
Walter  Greg,  of  Lee  Hall,  Prestbury, 
Cheshire;  they  had  two  sons  and  one 
daughter.  Greg's  many  honours  included 
the  honorary  D.Litt.,  Oxford  (1932),  and 
LL.D.,  Edinburgh  (1945),  a  fellowship  of 
the  British  Academy  (1928),  and  foreign 
membership  of  the  American  Philo- 
sophical Society  (1945).  He  became  gold 
medaUist  of  the  BibUographical  Society  in 
1935  and  (the  honour  which  pleased  him 
most)  honorary  fellow  of  Trinity  in  1941. 
In  1950  he  was  knighted  *for  services  to 
the  study  of  EngUsh  literature'. 

A  chronological  list  of  Greg's  writings 
down  to  June  1945  by  F.  C.  Francis  is 
printed  in  the  Library  of  that  date  in 
a  nimniber  presented  to  Greg  on  his 
seventieth  birthday.  A  supplement  in  the 
Library  for  March  1960  completes  the  tale 
of  his  works  except  for  his  biographical 


index  to  Licensers  for  the  Press,  dbc.  to  1640 
(Oxford  Bibliographical  Society,  1961) 
and  his  Companion  to  Arber  (2  vols.,  1967) 
edited  by  C.  P.  Blagden  and  I.  G.  Philip. 
His  Collected  Papers,  edited  by  J.  C.  Max- 
well, were  published  in  1966. 

[W.  W.  Greg,  Biographical  Notes  1877-1947, 
privately  printed,  1960;  Library,  Sep- 
tember 1959;  F.  P.  Wilson  in  Proceedings 
of  the  British  Academy,  vol.  xlv,  1959 ;  private 
papers ;  personal  knowledge.]   F.  P.  Wilson. 

GREGORY,    Sir   RICHARD   ARMAN, 

baronet  (1864-1952),  author,  scientific 
journalist,  and  editor  of  Nature,  was  born 
in  Bristol  29  January  1864,  the  son  of 
John  Gregory,  the  poet  cobbler,  an  active 
and  devoted  Wesleyan  and  social  re- 
former, by  his  wife,  Ann,  daughter  of 
Richard  Arman,  farm  overseer,  of  Chisel- 
don.  Gregory  was  educated  first  at 
a  Wesleyan  day  school,  then  for  a  short 
time  at  Queen  Elizabeth's  Hospital 
School  where  his  interest  in  science  began, 
finally  at  an  elementary  school.  At  the  age 
of  twelve  he  began  life — like  Faraday — as 
a  newspaper  boy.  In  1879  he  was  appren- 
ticed to  a  boot  and  shoe  factory  as  a 
clicker,  to  cut  out  the  uppers.  Unhappy  in 
his  work,  he  spent  his  spare  time  at  even- 
ing classes  at  the  Bristol  Trade  and 
Mining  Schools  (later  the  Merchant 
Venturers'  College),  where  he  won  a  prize 
for  Latin.  He  was  encouraged  by  J.  M. 
Wilson  [q.v.],  the  headmaster  of  CUfton, 
who  offered  him  the  post  of  laboratory 
assistant  which  included  the  care  of  an 
8-inch  telescope.  He  was  then  seventeen. 
Three  years  later  he  won  a  student- 
teacher  scholarship  at  the  Normal  School 
of  Science,  South  Kensington,  where  he 
was  a  fellow  student  of  H.  G.  Wells  [q.v.] 
who  became  his  lifelong  friend  and  asso- 
ciate. 

In  place  of  formal  instruction  Gregory 
and  another  student  helped  (Sir)  C.  V. 
Boys  [q.v,]  in  his  experiments  with  fine 
wires  and  fibres  and  their  'Note  on  the 
Tenacity  of  Spun  Glass'  was  commimi- 
cated  by  Boys  to  the  Physical  Society  and 
praised  by  him.  In  1887  Gregory  gained 
first  classes  in  astronomy  and  physics  and 
for  the  next  two  years  was  science  demon- 
strator at  Portsmouth  dockyard  school. 
He  returned  to  South  Kensington  in  1889 
as  computor  to  the  Solar  Physics  Commit- 
tee and  assistant  to  (Sir)  Norman  Lockyer 
[q.v.].  His  work  was  of  a  routine  nature: 
measuring  the  areas  and  positions  of  sun- 
spots,  comparison  of  solar  spectrum  lines 
with   those   of  the    elements,    and    the 


483 


Gregory 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


photography  of  flame  spectra.  Lockyer's 
work  on  the  orientation  of  temples  in 
Greece  and  Egypt  appealed  to  Gregory 
and  started  his  lifelong  interest  in  the 
relations  of  astronomy  and  religion. 

Soon  after  he  joined  Lockyer,  Gregory's 
articles  and  reviews  on  astronomical  sub- 
jects began  to  appear  in  Nature  and  in 
1890  he  became  an  Oxford  university 
extension  lecturer  in  astronomy  and  phy- 
sics. Two  years  later  he  left  South  Kensing- 
ton to  become  a  freelance  lecturer  and 
journalist.  His  first  book,  Elementary 
Physical  and  Astronomical  Geography,  was 
published  in  1891.  In  1893  came  his 
Honours  Physiography  with  H.  G.  Wells  as 
joint-author  and  in  the  same  year  The 
Vault  of  Heaven  and  next  year  The  Planet 
Earth.  In  1893  Lockyer  made  him  assis- 
tant editor  of  Nature,  which  brought  him 
into  touch  with  its  publishers,  Macmillans, 
who  in  1905  made  him  their  scientific 
editor,  a  position  which  he  held  until  1939. 
Under  his  editorship  over  200  textbooks 
were  published,  many  of  which  he  had 
inspired,  and  of  some  of  which  he  was  a 
co-author. 

Gregory  remained  a  university  exten- 
sion lectm*er  until  1895  and  from  1898  to 
1917  he  was  professor  of  astronomy  at 
Queen's  College,  Harley  Street.  In  1899 
he  was  joint-founder  of  the  School  World 
which  was  incorporated  in  the  Journal  of 
Education  in  1918.  He  remained  joint- 
editor  until  1939.  He  was  keenly  interested 
in  the  technique  of  teaching  and  in 
securing  the  proper  place  for  science  in  the 
school  curriculum.  He  took  an  active  part 
in  the  formation  in  1901  of  Section  L 
of  the  British  Association,  dealing  with 
educational  science.  He  was  its  first 
secretary,  later  its  recorder,  and  its  presi- 
dent in  1922  when  it  came  of  age.  In  his 
presidential  address  he  maintained  that 
the  purpose  of  school  science  teaching  was 
not  'to  prepare  for  vocations,  but  to 
equip  pupils  for  life  as  it  is  and  as  it  soon 
may  be'.  Science  had  become  'a  kingdom 
potent  with  possibilities  for  good  or  evil — 
an  inheritance  which  cannot  be  renounced'. 
In  his  book  Discovery  or  the  Spirit  and 
Service  of  Science,  he  gave  a  vivid  picture 
of  the  different  aspects  of  the  advance  of 
knowledge.  First  pubUshed  in  1916  it  ran 
through  many  editions  until  in  1949 
Gregory  revised  and  shortened  it  for 
Penguin  Books.  He  had  in  his  mind  the 
whole  story  of  discovery  through  the  ages, 
he  knew  the  personalities  of  the  great  men 
and  their  writings :  writing  with  freshness 
and  vitality  and  carrying  his  learning 


lightly  with  the  touch  of  the  journalist  at 
his  best,  he  produced  the  most  lasting  of 
all  his  works. 

Possessed  of  lucid  style,  a  gift  of  phrase, 
wide  interests,  and  a  sense  of  the  signifi- 
cant, Gregory  was  the  greatest  scientific 
journalist  of  his  day.  More  and  more  work 
fell  to  him  as  assistant  editor  of  Nature 
and  he  was  virtually  the  editor  for  at  least 
twelve  years  before  Lockyer  resigned  the 
office  to  him  in  1919.  Gregory  had  his  own 
ideas  and  many  new  features  were  intro- 
duced. Nature  became  an  institution  in 
both  the  international  and  the  national 
field,  for  he  made  it  a  clearing-house  for 
new  ideas.  A  letter  to  Nature  became  the 
accepted  channel  of  rapid  communication 
to  the  scientific  world  of  a  preliminary 
note  of  some  new  technique  or  discovery. 
But  this  was  only  one  of  its  functions. 
Under  Gregory's  skilful  editorship  Nature 
kept  pace  with  developments  all  over 
the  world  despite  the  rapid  growth  of 
specialization,  the  increasing  complexity 
of  the  problems,  and  the  extension  of 
industrial  research.  He  was  always  in- 
terested in  the  international  contacts  of 
science  and  gave  generous  space  to  such 
activities.  One  of  the  new  features  of 
Nature  was  the  leading  article,  the  first 
of  which  appeared  in  October  1915,  on 
'Science  in  National  Affairs'.  From 
November  1919  when  he  became  editor, 
they  appeared  every  week,  many  from  his 
own  pen,  emphasizing  the  importance  of 
scientific  developments  in  national  policy. 

By  this  time  Gregory  had  become  the 
moving  spirit  of  the  British  Science  Guild 
and  many  articles  were  in  support  of  its 
objects.  It  had  been  founded  in  1905  by 
Lockyer  after  he  had  failed  to  persuade 
the  British  Association  to  take  a  more 
active  part  in  arousing  awareness  of  the 
danger  of  neglecting  science  and  in  bring- 
ing to  the  notice  of  Parliament  the 
scientific  aspects  of  matters  affecting 
national  welfare.  Gregory  was  at  first 
doubtful  of  the  breakaway  from  the 
Association,  but  he  soon  saw  the  advan- 
tages of  the  Guild  as  an  agency  for  propa- 
ganda backed  by  men  of  influence  like 
Lord  Haldane  and  Lord  Melchett  [qq.v.]. 
The  Guild  did  in  fact  make  a  major 
contribution  to  a  number  of  important 
developments  such  as  the  establishment 
of  the  National  Physical  Laboratory. 
Gregory  organized  the  exhibitions  of 
British  scientific  products  in  1918  and 
1919,  for  which  he  received  the  recogni- 
tion of  a  knighthood  (1919).  In  1922  he 
became  chairman  of  the  executive  com- 


434 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Grey 


mittee  of  the  Guild  and  he  was  largely 
responsible  for  merging  the  Guild  with 
the  British  Association  in  1936  when  its 
main  work  had  been  done. 

After  1919  Gregory  became  steadily 
more  and  more  a  public  figure.  With  his 
boundless  energy  and  curiosity  and  his 
optimism  about  new  causes  he  was  a  mem- 
ber of  seventy  organizations  and  served  as 
president  of  twenty-five.  In  December 
1938,  just  as  he  was  leaving  the  editorial 
chair  of  Nature,  he  was  invited  to  give 
a  series  of  lectures  at  Harvard,  Johns 
Hopkins,  the  Carnegie  Institution,  and 
elsewhere.  The  tour  was  a  great  success. 
Gregory  in  his  seventy-fifth  year  was  at 
his  peak  as  an  eloquent  exponent  of  the 
doctrine  of  science.  His  addresses  were 
a  declaration  of  faith  in  what  science  could 
contribute  to  a  disordered  world  if  it  were 
not  perverted  to  destructive  uses  by  the 
lust  for  power.  On  his  return  he  embodied 
the  materials  for  his  lectures  in  his 
Religion  in  Science  and  Civilization  (1940). 
Most  of  the  copies  were  destroyed  in  an 
air  raid  and  he  recast  it  with  the  title  Gods 
and  Men  (1949). 

Of  the  many  attachments  Gregory 
formed  during  his  life  the  longest  and  most 
intimate  was  his  membership  of  the  British 
Association  which  he  joined  in  1896.  He 
threw  himself  into  the  work  of  the 
Association  with  energy  and  devotion,  not 
only  in  Section  L  but  on  endless  commit- 
tees and  as  a  member  of  council  for  many 
years.  He  took  an  active  part  in  the 
formation  of  the  new  Division  for  the 
Social  and  International  Relations  of 
Science  in  1938  after  the  merger  with  the 
British  Science  Guild.  It  was  given  powers 
to  hold  meetings  apart  from  the  annual 
meeting  of  the  Association.  Gregory  was 
elected  president  of  the  British  Associa- 
tion at  Dundee  in  1939  the  day  before  war 
broke  out  and  it  fell  to  him  to  keep  the 
Association  in  action  during  the  war  by 
a  series  of  conferences  to  discuss  post-war 
problems.  In  July  1946  he  dehvered  his 
presidential  address  at  the  first  short  post- 
war meeting.  His  subject  was  'Civilization 
and  the  Pursuit  of  Knowledge',  and  in  it 
he  recurred  to  his  favourite  topic,  the 
gradual  emergence  of  civilization.  Love  of 
science  and  an  imaginative  sense  of  the 
part  it  was  destined  to  play  in  human 
affairs  were  the  mainsprings  of  Gregory's 
life.  He  had,  too,  shrewdness  and  practical 
judgement,  which  had  been  sharpened  by 
his  early  struggles  and  adversity.  He  was 
no  specialist  nor,  in  that  sense,  a  profound 
thinker.  He  saw  the  broad  picture  and  its 


human  bearings  for  he  was  essentially 
a  humanist.  He  was  elected  into  the  Royal 
Society  in  1933  under  a  special  section  of 
the  statutes  for  'conspicuous  services  to 
the  cause  of  science'.  He  was  created 
a  baronet  in  1931 ;  and  received  honorary 
degrees  from  Bristol,  Leeds,  and  St. 
Andrews. 

He  married  first,  in  1888,  Kate  Florence 
(died  1926),  daughter  of  Charles  Napier 
Pearn  and  widow  of  Frederick  George 
Dugan;  secondly,  in  1931,  Dorothy  Mary, 
daughter  of  William  Page  [q.v.].  He  had 
one  son  and  one  daughter  by  the  first 
marriage,  both  of  whom  predeceased  him. 
The  baronetcy  became  extinct  when  he 
died  at  Middleton-on-Sea  15  September 
1952.  A  portrait  by  Raeburn  Dobson  is  in 
the  possession  of  the  family. 

[The  Times,  16  September  1952 ;  Nature,  27 
September  1952  ;  F.  J.  M.  Stratton  in  Obituary 
Notices  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  No.  22, 
November  1953 ;  The  Advancement  of  Science, 
vol.  X,  No.  39,  December  1953;  W.  H.  G. 
Armytage,  Sir  Richard  Gregory,  1957 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Harold  Hartley. 

GREY,  CHARLES  GREY  (1875-1953), 
writer  on  aviation,  was  born  in  Sussex 
Place,  Regent's  Park,  London,  13  March 
1875,  the  third  son  of  Charles  Grey  Grey, 
of  Dilston  Hall,  Northumberland,  and  his 
wife,  Emily  Mary  Bolton.  He  was  a  grand- 
son of  John  Grey  and  nephew  of  Josephine 
Butler  [qq.v.].  His  father  was  a  member  of 
the  Irish  Land  Commission  and  thus  it 
came  about  that  the  thoroughly  English 
Charles  Grey  was  educated  at  the  Erasmus 
Smith  School  in  Dublin  and  acquired 
a  deep  and  humorous  insight  into  the 
Irish  character.  He  went  next  to  the 
Crystal  Palace  School  of  Engineering  and 
later  became  a  draughtsman  with  the 
Swift  Cycle  Company  in  Coventry  at  thirty 
shillings  a  week.  By  1904,  C.G.G.,  as  he 
became  known  in  the  aviation  world,  had 
moved  to  journalism  and  joined  the  Cycle 
&  Motor  Trades  Review.  A  year  later  he 
transferred  to  another  paper  owned  by 
E.  M.  (later  Lord)  Iliffe  [q.v.],  the  Autocar, 
and  began  to  specialize  on  powered  flight. 
He  reported  the  first  Paris  aero  show  in 
December  1908.  As  a  result  he  was  made 
joint-editor  of  a  new  penny  weekly 
named  the  Aero  and  attended  the  first 
international  aviation  meeting  at  Reims 
which  marked  the  first  real  start  to 
European  flying. 

In  1911  Grey  started  his  own  paper,  the 
AeroplanCy  backed  by  (Sir)  Victor  Sassoon 


435 


Grey 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


with  £1,000.  Three  years  later  the  paper 
was  paying  its  way  and  beginning  to  be 
a  power  in  aeronautical  affairs.  During  the 
war  of  1914-18  the  Aeroplane  grew,  with 
the  air  services,  to  substantial  size.  Grey 
battled  on  behalf  of  better  equipment  for 
the  Royal  Flying  Corps,  and  against  the 
government-run  Royal  Aircraft  Factory 
at  Farnborough.  He  made  many  friends — 
and  enemies.  He  built  up  a  lasting  friend- 
ship with  the  future  Marshal  of  the  Royal 
Air  Force  Lord  Trenchard  [q.v.],  with 
whom  he  campaigned  strenuously  for  the 
preservation  of  an  independent  Air  Force 
when,  after  the  war,  the  two  senior  Ser- 
vices plotted  its  break-up.  For  a  time  the 
Aeroplane  was  banned  from  the  ward- 
rooms of  ships  of  the  Royal  Navy. 

In  the  early  post-war  years  C.G.G. 
fought  wordy  battles  with  invective  and 
ardoiu*  on  behalf  of  the  small  British  air- 
craft industry  and  against  'bumbledom'  in 
every  form.  He  also  conducted  an  enorm- 
ous correspondence  with  people  interested 
in  aviation  all  over  the  world,  often  sitting 
at  a  dictaphone  long  into  the  night.  His 
writings  built  up  the  Aeroplane  on  a  solid 
basis  during  the  lean  times  between  the 
wars.  He  forged  a  climate  of  opinion  which 
was  extensive  and  effective  in  the  small 
world  of  aviation.  Not  only  did  he  support 
Trenchard  in  the  stabilizing  of  the  Royal 
Air  Force,  but  he  also  backed  G.  E.  Woods 
Humphery's  efforts  to  build  Imperial 
Airways,  Sir  Sefton  Brancker  [q.v.]  and 
(Sir)  Geoffrey  de  Havilland  in  the  promo- 
tion of  British  light  aviation,  and  (Sir) 
Richard  Fairey  [q.v.]  in  introducing  new 
ideas  from  the  United  States  which  Grey 
visited  in  1923.  His  influential  friends  in- 
cluded Sir  Samuel  Hoare  (later  Viscount 
Templewood)  and  Lord  Londonderry 
[qq.v.],  air  ministers  in  their  day.  Among 
those  he  attacked  consistently  were  Lloyd 
George,  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill,  and  all 
things  from  Farnborough. 

Unfortunately  Grey  became  susceptible 
to  flattery,  especially  flattery  from  abroad. 
He  was  made  much  of  in  Italy  and  Ger- 
many during  visits  to  aeronautical  events 
in  those  countries  and  the  result  was 
a  gradual  build-up  of  bias  in  the  Aeroplane 
in  favour  of  ItaUan  and  German  ways  of 
life.  As  war  loomed  nearer  his  views  be- 
came increasingly  unpopular.  He  retired 
from  his  editorship  in  June  1939,  five 
years  after  he  had  disposed  of  his  interest 
in  the  paper  to  the  Temple  Press.  There- 
after he  wrote  as  air  correspondent  for 
northern  newspapers. 

The    Aeroplane,    indeed,    reached    its 


zenith  of  influence  and  popularity  around 
the  year  1935,  when  Grey,  with  his  ardent 
team — Leonard  Bridgman,  Mrs.  McAlery, 
Thurstan  James,  F.  D.  Bradbrooke,  and 
Geoffrey  Dorman — were  at  the  peak  of 
their  dedication  to  things  aeronautical  and 
before  international  right-wing  politics 
had  seriously  crept  into  the  paper.  Sup- 
ported by  this  team — especially  Leonard 
Bridgman — Grey  also  edited  until  1941 
Jane's  All  the  World's  Aircraft  which  he 
took  over  when  Fred  Jane  died  in  1916. 

Grey  was  one  of  the  half-dozen  writers 
on  aviation  who  left  a  significant  impres- 
sion upon  the  first  generation  of  powered 
flight.  He  was  a  character — a  'card'  in  the 
terms  of  his  heyday — and  the  most  contro- 
versial figiu:e  in  aeronautical  journaUsm 
in  the  early  years  of  aviation.  He  was 
a  crusader  who  sometimes  wrote  unfairly, 
often  inaccurately,  but  never  dully.  He 
could  infuriate,  but  he  never  bored.  He 
made  the  Aeroplane  the  most  widely  read 
and  the  most  quoted  aviation  newspaper 
in  the  narrow  circle  of  aeronautical  intelli- 
gentsia during  the  quarter-century  be- 
tween 1912  and  1937.  He  boasted  that  for 
some  twenty  years  he  never  missed  a 
leader  on  'Matters  of  Moment'  in  which  he 
conunented  pungently  on  all  aspects  of 
aeronautical  affairs — from  the  beginnings 
of  air  power  and  air  transport,  through 
aircraft  manufacture  and  private  flying, 
to  all  aspects  of  the  political  and  economic 
scene.  He  contributed  much  to  the  exist- 
ence of  the  Royal  Air  Force ;  gave  zest  to 
aeronautical  thinking  during  and  after  the 
war  of  1914-18;  came  near  to  ruining 
a  fine  reputation  before  the  second  war  by 
his  absorption  of  foreign  right-wing  propa- 
ganda ;  but  regained  all  his  old  popularity 
among  the  aviation  fraternity  during  the 
last  mellow  years  before  his  death,  when 
he  again  contributed  periodic  articles  to 
his  old  paper. 

He  died  9  December  1953  in  a  way 
which  would  have  given  him  sardonic 
amusement — in  the  arms  of  an  Air 
Marshal  in  a  cloakroom,  at  the  Admiralty 
where  he  had  gone  for  a  press  reception. 

In  1899  Grey  married  Beatrice  Lilla, 
daughter  of  Richard  Thorneloe,  watch- 
maker, of  Coventry.  The  marriage  was 
dissolved  and  in  1929  he  married  Margaret 
Sumner,  daughter  of  John  Sumner  Mar- 
riner,  solicitor.  They  had  a  son  and 
a  daughter.  The  Royal  Aero  Club  has 
a  portrait  by  Frank  Eastman. 

[Aeroplane,  18  December  1953 ;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Peter  G.  Masefuxd^ 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Grierson 


GRIERSON,  Sir  HERBERT  JOHN 
CLIFFORD  (1866-1960),  scholar,  was 
born  16  January  1866  in  Lerwick,  Shet- 
land, the  second  son  of  Andrew  John 
Grierson  and  his  wife,  Alice  Geraldine 
Clifford.  The  Griersons  had  been  lairds  in 
Shetland  since  the  mid-eighteenth  century, 
owning  the  estate  of  Quendale,  consisting 
of  the  south-west  corner  of  the  mainland, 
where  Herbert  Grierson  spent  his  child- 
hood summers.  He  was  educated  for 
a  short  period  at  the  Anderson  Institute, 
Lerwick,  then  spent  two  years  at  a  school 
in  Cheltenham  run  by  two  of  his  mother's 
sisters.  In  1877  he  went  to  the  Gymnasium 
at  Aberdeen  (a  school  on  the  German 
model)  and  in  1883  entered  King's  Col- 
lege, Aberdeen,  to  take  the  standard  arts 
degree  which  involved  the  study  of 
Latin,  Greek,  mathematics,  and  physics, 
with  some  logic,  rhetoric,  and  metaphysics. 
At  the  prompting  of  a  friend,  Grierson 
tried  for  the  optional  'philosophy  honours', 
which  involved  reading  Plato  and  Kant 
on  his  own.  In  1886  he  obtained  a  tem- 
porary position  as  second  housemaster  at 
the  Gymnasium,  but  this  left  him  time  to 
continue  with  his  university  work  and  he 
graduated  in  1887  with  the  Bain  gold 
medal  in  philosophy  and  the  Seafield 
medal  in  English. 

Two  unsettled  years  followed,  during 
which  he  taught  for  a  while  at  a  girls' 
school,  tutored,  and  marked  essays  for 
WiUiam  Minto  [q.v.],  professor  of  logic 
at  Aberdeen.  Learning  that  the  Holford 
exhibition  at  Christ  Church,  generally 
confined  to  candidates  from  Charter- 
house, would  be  open  pro  hac  vice,  Grier- 
son went  to  Oxford  and  won  it  on  the 
strength  of  an  essay  on  'Fanaticism'  which 
greatly  impressed  D.  B.  Monro  [q.v.].  At 
Oxford,  where  he  made  a  greater  reputa- 
tion as  a  talker  than  as  a  scholar  among 
his  contemporaries,  he  got  a  second  in 
classical  moderations  (1891)  and  a  first  in 
literae  humaniores  (1893).  Just  at  this  time 
changes  in  the  structure  of  Scottish  uni- 
versities had  introduced  English  language 
and  literature  as  a  full  degree  subject. 
John  Gray  Chalmers  had  given  money  to 
establish  a  chair  of  English  at  Aberdeen 
and  the  university  proposed  to  appoint 
a  lecturer  until  the  ordinance  founding  the 
chair  had  been  passed.  With  influential 
backing  from  Sidgwick  in  Oxford  and 
Principal  Sir  W.  D.  Geddes  [q.v.]  of 
Aberdeen  University,  Grierson  obtained 
the  lectureship.  He  had  at  this  time 
no  professional  qualifications  in  English, 
though  he  was  fairly  well  read  in  English 


poetry,  which  had  always  been  a  passion 
with  him. 

Grierson  spent  a  year  as  lecturer,  de- 
veloping a  course  in  rhetoric  and  reading 
hard  in  order  to  work  up  an  historical 
course  on  English  Hterature  from  Anglo- 
Saxon  times.  In  1894,  with  the  support  of 
local  members  of  Parliament  and  of  some 
influential  Oxford  voices,  he  became  the 
first  professor  of  English  at  Aberdeen.  He 
set  himself  with  great  energy  to  master 
the  whole  field  of  English  literature  in 
order  to  justify  not  only  his  appointment 
but  the  full-dress  academic  study  of 
English.  George  Saintsbury  [q.v.]  enhsted 
him  to  write  a  book  on  the  seventeenth 
century  in  the  series  'Periods  of  European 
Literature'  which  he  was  editing,  and  to 
do  this  Grierson  learned  Dutch  so  that  he 
could  do  justice  to  the  important  Dutch 
literature  of  the  period.  The  First  Half  of 
the  Seventeenth  Century  (vol.  vii  of  the 
series)  appeared  in  1906.  A  friendship 
formed  with  William  Macneile  Dixon, 
professor  of  English  at  Glasgow,  resulted 
in  the  publication  in  1909,  under  their 
joint  editorship,  of  The  English  Parnasstis, 
an  Anthology  of  Longer  Poems.  Meanwhile 
Grierson  had  become  engaged  in  a  serious 
study  of  John  Donne,  as  a  result  of  his 
work  on  the  seventeenth  century.  This  led 
to  his  being  asked  to  write  the  chapter  on 
Donne  in  the  Cambridge  History  of  English 
Literature,  which  in  turn  led  to  his  monu- 
mental two-volume  edition  of  Donne's 
poems  for  the  Clarendon  Press  (1912).  His 
task  in  this  great  edition  was  not  only  to 
settle  the  text  and  the  canon  but  also 
to  provide  a  detailed  explanatory  com- 
mentary on  this  notoriously  difficult  poet. 
In  1921  he  followed  this  up  with  an 
important  and  influential  anthology  of 
Metaphysical  Lyrics  and  Poems  of  the 
Seventeenth  Century,  and  in  1934  with 
G.  BuUough  he  edited  The  Oxford  Book 
of  Seventeenth  Century  Verse. 

Having  established  English  studies  at 
Aberdeen  on  a  sound  footing  Grierson 
succeeded  Saintsbury  in  the  regius  chair 
of  rhetoric  and  English  literature  at 
Edinburgh  in  1915  and  held  this  position 
until  his  retirement  in  1935.  There  he  per- 
formed with  great  distinction  the  usual 
duties  of  a  Scottish  professor,  giving  to 
the  first  ordinary  class  the  magisterial 
survey  of  English  literature  from  its 
beginnings  as  well  as  lecturing  on  more 
detailed  aspects  of  English  literature  to 
the  honours  students.  He  was  now  estab- 
lished as  one  of  the  major  academic  literary 
figures  in  the  country.  Among  the  many 


437 


Grierson 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


books  and  articles  he  wrote  during  his 
tenure  of  the  Edinburgh  chair  were  'Milton' 
(article  in  the  Encyclopcedia  of  Religion 
and  Ethics),  The  Background  of  English 
Literature  and  Other  Collected  Essays  and 
Addresses  (1925),  Lyrical  Poetry  from 
Blake  to  Hardy  (1928),  and,  one  of  his 
finest  works,  Cross  Currents  in  English 
Literature  of  the  XVII  Century  (the 
Messenger  lectures  delivered  at  Cornell 
University,  1926-7,  published  in  1929). 
He  also  edited  the  poems  of  Byron  (1923) 
and  Milton  (1925)  and  produced  a  one- 
volume  version  of  his  edition  of  Donne 
with  a  new  introduction  and  new  and 
shorter  notes.  He  had  begun  working  on 
Sir  Walter  Scott  about  1930,  and  between 
1932  and  1937,  in  collaboration  with 
Davidson  Cook,  W.  M.  Parker,  and  others, 
produced  a  great  twelve-volume  edition  of 
Scott's  letters.  The  new  knowledge  he 
thus  gained  about  Scott  led  to  his  pub- 
lishing in  1938  Sir  Walter  Scott,  Bart, 
a  biography  which  supplemented  and  cor- 
rected Lockhart.  He  was  elected  rector  by 
the  students  of  Edinburgh  University  in 
1936  and  served  until  1939.  He  was 
knighted  in  1936. 

Grierson  lectured  abroad  many  times, 
visiting  America  on  a  number  of  occasions, 
and  giving  a  course  of  lectures  at  Heidel- 
berg in  1929.  He  received  honorary  degrees 
from  twelve  universities  and  was  elected 
F.B.A.  in  1923. 

In  1896  he  married  Mary  Letitia  (died 
1937),  daughter  of  (Sir)  Alexander  Ogston, 
professor  of  surgery  at  Aberdeen;  they 
had  five  daughters.  In  his  later  years 
Grierson  became  increasingly  crippled  by 
arthritis  and  moved  to  Cambridge,  where 
a  daughter  was  married  to  Professor 
Bruce  Dickins.  He  died  there  19  February 
1960.  Edinburgh  University  has  portraits 
of  Grierson  by  Kenneth  Green  and  David 
Foggie. 

[David  Daiches  in  Proceedings  of  the  British 
Academy,  vol.  xlvi,  1960 ;  Seventeenth  Century 
Studies,  presented  to  Sir  Herbert  Grierson, 
1938,  contains  a  full  bibliography,  1906-37; 
personal  knowledge.]  David  Daiches. 

GRIFFIN,  BERNARD  WILLIAM 
(1899-1956),  cardinal,  was  born  in  Bir- 
mingham 21  February  1899,  the  twin  son 
of  William  Bernard  Griffin,  a  cycle  manu- 
facturer's manager,  by  his  wife,  Helen 
Swadkins.  One  of  five  children,  he  was 
brought  up  in  the  happy  atmosphere  of 
Catholic  family  life,  his  parents  being 
active  in  the  civic  affairs  of  Birmingham 
and  the  pillars  around  which  the  new 


parish  of  Sparkhill  was  formed.  Encour- 
aged by  his  parish  priest,  Bernard  Griffin 
began  his  studies  for  the  priesthood  at 
Cotton  College,  Staffordshire,  in  1913, 
shortly  after  his  twin  brother,  Walter 
(who  died  in  1963),  had  entered  the 
Benedictine  order  at  Douai. 

In  1917  their  studies  came  to  a  halt 
when  both  brothers  joined  the  Royal 
Naval  Air  Service  from  which  they  ulti- 
mately transferred  to  the  Royal  Air  Force. 
Bernard  Griffin's  military  service  was 
distinguished  only  by  his  contracting 
rhexunatic  fever  but  this  proved  a  con- 
siderable factor  in  his  later  illness.  With 
characteristic  determination,  he  refused 
medical  discharge  lest  it  should  jeopardize 
his  vocation.  After  demobilization  in  1919 
he  entered  Oscott  College,  Birmingham, 
where  the  rector,  Monsignor  Parkinson, 
did  much  to  inspire  in  his  pupil  an  abiding 
interest  in  social  justice.  In  1921  he  was 
sent  to  the  Venerable  English  College  in 
Rome,  the  rector  this  time  being  Mon- 
signor Hinsley  [q.v.],  later  Griffin's  pre- 
decessor at  Westminster. 

Ordained  on  1  November  1924,  Griffin 
remained  in  Rome  until  1927,  adding  to 
his  doctorate  in  theology  one  in  canon  law. 
When  he  returned  to  his  native  Birming- 
ham he  was  appointed  to  curial  duties, 
serving  as  secretary  to  two  successive 
archbishops,  the  second  being  Dr.  Thomas 
Williams,  a  courageous  and  forthright 
man  who  played  a  great  part  in  the 
development  of  Griffin's  character.  Ten 
years  later  Griffin  was  made  parish  priest 
of  Coleshill  and  administrator  of  the 
children's  homes  there.  In  1938  he  was 
appointed  auxiliary  to  Archbishop  Wil- 
liams. At  the  time  of  his  consecration  he 
was  the  youngest  bishop  in  the  country 
and  the  energy  and  efficiency  which  he 
brought  to  his  multiple  duties  rapidly  won 
him  a  reputation  throughout  the  Midlands. 
He  became  vicar-general  of  the  diocese, 
organized  the  youth  movement  and  other 
social  welfare  works,  built  a  church  at 
Coleshill,  and  even  found  time  to  serve  as 
an  air-raid  warden.  Nevertheless  he  was 
comparatively  unknown  to  the  nation  as 
a  whole  when,  in  December  1943,  he  was 
appointed  to  Westminster  as  successor  to 
Cardinal  Hinsley. 

The  new  archbishop  rapidly  won  wide- 
spread renown  by  his  public  utterances 
and  personal  endeavours  for  international 
peace.  At  first  he  was  subject  to  some 
criticism  for  his  warnings  about  Soviet 
intentions  in  Eastern  Europe,  particularly 
in  Poland,  but  subsequent  events  proved 


488 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Grigg 


him  correct.  He  was  a  great  believer  in 
strengthening  by  personal  contact  the 
bonds  of  understanding  between  nations 
and,  as  soon  as  the  war  was  over,  he 
visited  Italy,  Germany,  and  the  occupied 
countries  to  re-establish  contact  with  the 
bishops.  Later  he  was  to  undertake 
immense  journeys  throughout  Europe  and 
North  America.  His  emphasis  on  the  uni- 
versal nature  of  the  Catholic  Church  was 
made  at  the  direct  request  of  Pope  Pius 
XII  who  created  him  a  cardinal  on  his 
forty-seventh  birthday:  his  'beloved 
Benjamin  of  the  Sacred  College'. 

At  home,  the  post-war  legislation  of  the 
Labour  Government  called  forth  the 
archbishop's  expert  knowledge  of  social 
justice.  Although  opposed  to  the  suppres- 
sion of  the  voluntary  spirit,  he  sought 
wherever  possible  to  secure  for  his  Church 
a  place  within  the  social  systems  of  the 
welfare  State.  Several  of  the  amendments 
he  suggested  were  incorporated  in  subse- 
quent legislation,  but  he  remained  an 
opponent  of  the  Education  Act  of  1944, 
claiming  that  it  placed  an  intolerable 
financial  burden  on  his  people.  He  also 
persuaded  Aneurin  Bevan  [q.v.]  to  dis- 
claim CathoUc  hospitals  from  the  National 
Health  Service.  It  was  a  tribute  to  his 
personaUty  and  negotiating  skill  that  he 
enjoyed  the  abiding  friendship  of  both 
Labour  and  Conservative  leaders. 

The  cardinal  attached  much  importance 
to  the  role  of  the  layman  in  the  Church. 
Encouraging  Catholics  to  enter  public  life, 
he  fostered  the  development  of  vocational 
guilds  to  fit  them  for  their  professional 
tasks.  He  championed  the  cause  of  the 
persecuted  and  of  refugees  from  Com- 
munist countries  and  showed  special 
concern  for  the  welfare  of  the  Irish  immi- 
grants. During  his  archiepiscopate  the 
Catholic  population  of  England  and  Wales 
increased  by  over  one-third  and  in  spite 
of  building  restrictions  he  succeeded  in 
opening  many  new  churches  and  schools. 
He  was  papal  legate  to  the  hierarchy  cen- 
tenary congress  in  1950. 

Behind  this  bare  record  of  achievement 
lies  a  story  of  great  courage  in  the  face  of 
ill  health.  Largely  as  a  result  of  prolonged 
overwork,  the  cardinal  suffered  a  severe 
illness  in  1949  which  left  him  partially 
paralysed.  Unable  to  resign  his  office,  he 
continued  to  carry  out  his  duties  sparing 
himself  not  at  all  and  exercising  the  full 
measure  of  his  jurisdiction.  He  suffered 
a  series  of  heart  attacks  from  which  he 
eventually  died  at  Polzeath  in  Cornwall 
on  the  feast  of  his  patron,  Saint  Bernard, 


20  August  1956.  His  body  was  buried  in  the 
crypt  of  Westminster  Cathedral. 

In  the  intervening  years.  Cardinal 
Griffin  had  won  the  deep  affection  of  his 
priests  and  people  for  his  cheerful  courage 
and  smiling  simphcity.  A  great  patriot, 
yet  with  an  international  outlook,  in  him 
was  blended  the  learning  of  his  high  estate 
with  the  humble  approachability  of  a 
father  deeply  concerned  with  the  care  of 
his  spiritual  children.  He  attached  great 
importance  to  family  life,  his  pastoral 
letters  often  dealing  with  such  matters 
as  the  care  of  old  people,  housing,  and 
child  welfare,  and  he  himself  was  always 
radiantly  happy  when  he  was  with  chil- 
dren. He  made  his  own  the  teaching  of 
Saint  Therese  of  Lisieux  for  whom  he  had 
a  great  devotion,  emphasizing  the  equality 
of  human  creatures  in  the  eyes  of  God. 
Of  him,  Monsignor  Knox  [q.v.]  wrote: 
'He  never  failed  in  the  performance  of  his 
pastoral  duties.  Undeterred  by  ill-health, 
he  went  on  ruling  his  diocese,  as  if  he 
were  determined  to  throw  away  his  Ufe 
rather  than  fail  in  his  duties  to  others.' 
A  portrait  by  Allan  Gwyime-Jones  is  at 
Archbishop's  House  where  there  is  also 
a  bronze  by  Miss  Fiore  de  Henriques. 

[The  Times,  21  August  1956 ;  Michael  de  la 
Bedoyere,  Cardinal  Bernard  Griffin,  1955 ; 
Tribute  to  Cardinal  Griffin,  a  symposium, 
1956 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Derek  Worlock. 

GRIGG,  EDWARD  WILLIAM  MAC- 
LEA  Y,  first  Baron  Altrincham  (1879- 
1955),  administrator  and  politician,  was 
born  8  September  1879  in  Madras,  the 
only  son  of  Henry  Bidewell  Grigg,  of  the 
Indian  Civil  Service,  by  his  wife,  Elizabeth 
Louisa,  eldest  daughter  of  Sir  Edward 
Deas  Thomson  [q.v.],  colonial  secretary  of 
New  South  Wales  (1837-56).  A  scholar  of 
both  Winchester  and  New  College,  Oxford, 
he  obtained  a  second  class  in  classical 
moderations  (1900)  and  a  third  in  literae 
humaniores  (1902).  In  1902  he  won  the 
Gaisford  Greek  verse  prize. 

Journalism  was  his  first  calling.  In 
1903  he  joined  the  staff  of  The  Times  as 
secretary  to  G.  E.  Buckle  [q.v.],  the  editor ; 
then  moved  to  the  Outlook  as  assistant 
editor  (1905-6)  to  J.  L.  Garvin  [q.v.].  In 
1908,  after  two  years  of  widespread  and 
intensive  travel,  he  returned  to  The  Times 
as  head  of  its  colonial  department.  His 
family  background,  his  personal  know- 
ledge of  imperial  affairs,  and  his  reverence 
for  Joseph  Chamberlain  and  Lord  Milner 
[qq.v.]  well  fitted  him  for  this  post.  At  no 


Grigg 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


time  in  its  history,  he  was  later  proud  to 
recall,  did  that  newspaper  exercise  a  more 
salutary  and  decisive  influence  upon 
national  policy  than  in  the  years  imme- 
diately before  the  war.  He  resigned  in 
1913  to  become  joint-editor  of  the  Round 
Table. 

Grigg  was  thirty-four  at  the  outbreak  of 
war  in  1914.  Scorning  the  posts  of  digni- 
fied safety  which  could  have  been  his  for 
the  asking,  he  joined  the  Grenadier 
Guards  as  an  ensign  and  was  sent  out  to 
the  2nd  battalion  in  France.  'The  Scribe', 
as  he  was  affectionately  called  in  the 
Brigade,  showed  outstanding  qualities  of 
gallantry  and  leadership  throughout  the 
heavy  fighting  in  which  the  Guards  divi- 
sion was  engaged.  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill, 
then  a  major  in  the  Oxfordshire  Yeomanry, 
was  for  a  short  time  attached  to  his  com- 
pany to  gain  experience  of  trench  warfare. 
Early  in  1916  Grigg  was  transferred  to  the 
staff.  By  the  end  of  the  war  he  had  risen  to 
be  a  lieutenant-colonel  and  G.S.0. 1  of  the 
Guards  division.  He  was  awarded  the 
M.C.  in  1917,  appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  in 
1918,  C.M.G.  in  1919,  and  mentioned  in 
dispatches. 

It  was  during  his  years  in  the  Grenadiers 
that  Grigg  first  met  the  Prince  of  Wales, 
whom  he  accompanied  on  tours  of  Canada 
in  1919  and  of  Australia  and  New  Zealand 
in  1920  as  military  secretary  and  special 
adviser.  For  these  services,  not  always 
free  from  anxiety,  he  was  appointed 
successively  C.V.O.  (1919)  and  K.C.V.O. 
(1920).  On  his  return  he  joined  the  staff 
of  the  prime  minister,  Lloyd  George,  as 
a  private  secretary.  To  the  traditional 
loyalties  of  the  post  he  added  an  intense 
personal  admiration  for  his  merciurial  chief 
which  blinded  him  to  all  criticism,  how- 
ever well  founded.  He  served  his  master 
with  memorable  fideUty  throughout  some 
difficult  political  situations.  At  Cannes  in 
January  1922  he  took  part  in  the  historic 
game  of  golf  which  caused  the  downfall  of 
M.  Briand.  When  the  prime  minister  him- 
self fell  from  power  later  that  year  Grigg 
was  offered  a  choice  of  senior  appoint- 
ments in  the  Civil  Service.  He  preferred 
instead  to  enter  the  House  of  Commons 
for  Oldham  (1922-5)  as  a  Lloyd  George 
Liberal.  As  secretary  to  the  Rhodes  Trust 
(1923-5)  he  was  also  able  to  maintain 
a  close  interest  in  imperial  affairs. 

In  1925  Grigg  was  appointed  governor 
of  Kenya.  Two  years  before,  he  had 
married  Joan  Alice  Katherine  Dickson- 
Poynder,  only  child  of  Lord  Islington 
(whose  notice  he  was  later  to  contribute 


to  this  Dictionary).  Her  Instinctive  sym- 
pathy for  all  races,  expressed  particularly 
in  her  patronage  of  nursing  and  maternity 
services,  enhanced  the  distinction  of  her 
husband's  administration.  The  task  with 
which  Grigg  had  been  charged  was  to 
unite  the  three  East  African  territories  of 
Kenya,  Uganda,  and  Tanganyika.  Largely 
owing  to  the  opposition  of  Sir  Donald 
Cameron  [q.v.],  governor  of  Tanganyika, 
and  to  lukewarm  support  from  the  home 
Government,  this  mission  failed.  But  there 
was  much  else  in  his  programme  which 
brought  lasting  economic  benefit  to  the 
colony  and  created  stable  conditions  most 
Ukely  to  attract  European  capital.  Agri- 
culture and  forestry,  communications  and 
schools,  town  planning  and  security  of 
land  tenure  were  aU  improved  during  his 
energetic  and  sometimes  exacting  rule. 
Believing  that  the  civilization  of  an  age  is 
reflected  in  its  buildings,  he  dignified 
Kenya  with  two  splendid  Government 
Houses,  at  Nairobi  and  Mombasa,  designed 
by  Sir  Herbert  Baker  [q.v.],  but  was  un- 
able to  realize  an  ambitious  project  for 
central  government  offices.  He  was  ap- 
pointed K.C.M.G.  in  1928. 

Appreciation  of  his  governorship  has 
since  been  tempered  by  belittlement  of  his 
trust  in  tribal  self-government  and  pro- 
vincial autonomy.  Grigg  rejected  the  later 
fashion  of  thought  that  Kenya  should 
progress  through  the  multi-racial  state 
towards  a  common  citizenship.  This,  he 
believed,  could  lead  only  to  the  ultimate 
extinction  of  the  white  settler  and  to  an 
overwhelming  African  ascendancy :  a  pros- 
pect he  deplored,  not  because  he  felt  that 
Africans  as  such  were  unfitted  to  govern 
themselves,  but  because  he  feared  that 
they  would  be  required  to  administer  an 
aUen  system  of  western  government  with- 
out the  necessary  education  and  ex- 
perience. To  the  end  of  his  days  he  set  his 
face  against  so  abrupt  an  abdication  of 
what  he  held  to  be  Great  Britain's  im- 
perial mission. 

On  returning  to  England  in  1930  Grigg 
was  offered  a  choice  of  Indian  governor- 
ships. Neither  he  nor  his  wife,  however, 
was  in  robust  health  and  he  refused  them 
all.  It  was  the  fatal  turning-point  of  his 
life.  Whatever  his  opinion  of  African  in- 
capacity for  self-rule,  it  did  not  extend  to 
the  peoples  of  India.  As  a  boy  he  had  seen 
his  parents'  house  thronged  with  Indian 
visitors  and  developed  a  sympathetic 
understanding  of  their  aspirations.  He 
might  have  been  one  of  the  greatest 
of    Indian    administrators;    instead    he 


4m 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Grimble 


determined  to  remain  at  home  and  to 
plunge  once  more  into  the  world  of 
politics.  Without  the  instincts  of  poli- 
tical manoeuvre  and  self-advancement, 
and  further  handicapped  by  his  known 
allegiance  to  Lloyd  George,  his  venture 
was  doomed  to  fail. 

In  the  general  election  of  1931,  although 
already  adopted  as  Conservative  candi- 
date for  Leeds  Central,  he  stood  down 
with  characteristic  unselfishness  in  favour 
of  the  former  Labour  member  who  pro- 
posed to  stand  as  a  'national'  candidate. 
Two  years  later,  having  in  the  meantime 
served  as  chairman  of  the  milk  reorganiza- 
tion commission,  he  returned  to  the 
House  of  Commons  as  member  for 
Altrincham.  It  is  to  his  credit  that  he 
recognized  the  menace  of  Nazi  Germany 
before  most  of  his  colleagues.  In  two 
eloquent  works,  The  Faith  of  an  English- 
man (1936)  and  Britain  Looks  at  Germany 
(1938),  he  pleaded  for  a  stern  policy  of 
defence.  Yet  he  continued  to  believe  that 
such  a  course  of  action  was  not  incom- 
patible with  wholehearted  support  for  the 
administrations  of  Stanley  Baldwin  and 
Neville  Chamberlain.  Too  loyal  to  be 
a  rebel,  he  would  plead  with  his  leaders  in 
private  but  recoiled  from  criticizing  them 
in  public.  His  name  is  not  to  be  found 
among  those  who  voted  against  'Munich'. 

Denied  office  until  the  outbreak  of  war, 
he  was  appointed  parliamentary  secretary 
to  the  Ministry  of  Information  in  its 
opening  days.  In  April  1940  he  became 
financial  secretary,  and  in  May  joint 
parliamentary  under-secretary,  at  the 
War  Office.  He  held  the  latter  post  until 
March  1942,  having  earlier  refused  Chur- 
chill's offer  of  promotion  as  first  com- 
missioner of  works  since  it  depended  upon 
his  acceptance  of  a  peerage.  Thereafter  he 
was  inadequately  employed  for  a  man  of 
his  talents,  but  in  November  1944  re- 
turned to  office  as  minister  resident  in  the 
Middle  East  in  succession  to  Lord  Moyne 
[q.v.]  and  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council. 
The  defeat  of  the  Churchill  government  in 
July  1945  put  an  end  to  both  his  political 
ambitions  and  his  active  political  life, 
although  he  was  to  assume  the  editorship 
of  the  National  Review  in  1948.  He  was 
created  Baron  Altrincham  in  1945  and 
died  at  Tormarton,  his  house  in  Glouces- 
tershire, 1  December  1955,  after  a  long 
illness.  His  last  reserves  of  strength  were 
drained  in  the  completion  of  Kenyans 
Opportunity  (1955),  a  final  tribute  to  the 
land  which  was  so  much  a  part  of  his  life. 
He  had  one  daughter  and  two  sons,  the 


elder  of  whom,  John  Edward  Poynder 
(born  1924),  succeeded  to  the  title,  but 
disclaimed  it  in  1963. 

'Ned'  Grigg  was  a  handsome  man,  well 
above  middle  height  and  with  the  com- 
plexion of  a  countryman.  Yet  his  soldierly 
bearing  concealed  a  nervous  system  ill 
suited  to  the  hubbub  of  politics.  Opposi- 
tion to  his  impulsive  enthusiasms  evoked 
bursts  of  impatience,  even  of  rage.  Then 
the  clouds  would  lift :  in  his  family  circle  or 
when  entertaining  a  few  close  friends 
drawn  mostly  from  the  Milner  'kinder- 
garten' he  would  both  show  and  inspire 
deep  affection.  He  was  half  a  poet.  Few 
other  colonial  governors  would  have  writ- 
ten: 'The  very  thought  of  Kenya  is  like 
sunlight  to  me,  sunlight  crisp  as  mountain 
air  in  the  high  places  of  the  earth.'  He 
found  perennial  solace  in  the  plays  of 
Shakespeare  and  in  listening  to  music. 

There  is  a  pencil  drawing  of  him  by  Ray 
Nestor  at  Tormarton. 

[Grigg's  own  writings ;  National  and  English 
Review,  January  1956;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  Kenneth  Rose. 

GRIMBLE,    Sir    ARTHUR    FRANCIS 

(1888-1956),  colonial  administrator, 
broadcaster,  and  writer,  was  born  in 
Hong  Kong  11  June  1888,  the  son  of 
Frank  Grimble  who  had  business  interests 
there,  and  his  wife,  Blanche  Ann  Arthur. 
He  went  to  Chigwell  School,  Magdalene 
College,  Cambridge,  and  continued  his 
education  in  France  and  Germany.  In 
1914  he  entered  the  Colonial  Service  as 
a  cadet  in  the  administration  of  the 
Gilbert  and  Ellice  Islands,  reaching  the 
Central  Pacific  three  months  before  the 
outbreak  of  war.  Less  than  nine  months 
after  his  arrival  he  was  officer  in  charge  of 
Ocean  Island.  After  holding  posts  as 
lands  commissioner  and  district  officer  he 
was  appointed  resident  commissioner  of 
the  colony  in  1926.  In  1933  he  transferred 
to  St.  Vincent  in  the  Windward  Islands  as 
administrator  and  colonial  secretary  and 
in  1936  to  the  Seychelles  as  governor  and 
commander-in-chief  where  he  remained 
until  1942.  In  that  year,  a  firm  believer  in 
West  Indian  federation,  he  was  appointed 
back  to  the  Windward  Islands  as  governor 
and  commander-in-chief.  He  retired  in 
1948. 

From  early  in  his  career  Grimble  had 
published  occasional  verse  for  periodicals 
and  serious  ethnological  papers  for  the 
Journals  of  the  Royal  Anthropological 
Institute  and  the  Polynesian  Society — 
'From   Birth   to   Death   in   the   Gilbert 


441 


Grimble 


'D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Islands'  {J.R.A.I.,  1921),  'Canoes  in  the 
Gilbert  Islands'  {J.R.A.I.,  1924),  'Gilber- 
tese  Astronomy  and  Astronomical  Ob- 
servances' {J.P.S.,  1931),  and  'Migrations 
of  a  Pandanus  People'  (J.P.S.y  1933).  At 
ease  with  languages,  Grimble  was  a  Gilber- 
tese  scholar  and  his  pubhshed  papers 
reflect  an  insight  into  the  people  unbarred 
by  language.  They  represent  also  original 
research  in  a  field  scarcely  touched  upon. 
Of  first-class  anthropological  importance, 
their  sphere  is  necessarily  limited.  Yet 
shortly  after  his  retirement  Grimble  was 
to  become  almost  a  household  name  in 
Britain.  Submitting  some  of  his  Pacific 
experiences  in  random  form  to  the  British 
Broadcasting  Corporation  he  was  sur- 
prised not  that  they  were  accepted  but 
that  he  was  invited  to  recount  them 
himself.  The  classic  and,  of  course,  some- 
what exaggerated  octopus  story  was 
bound  to  be  a  success  by  reason  of  its 
content,  but  the  manner  of  telling  and  the 
timbre  of  voice  made  him  the  envy  of 
professionals  and  guaranteed  wide  popu- 
larity for  the  series. 

In  1952  Grimble  polished  up  the  stories 
for  publication  under  the  title  A  Pattern 
of  Islands.  Immediately  acclaimed,  the 
book  has  since  been  published  in  many 
languages.  Its  charm  lies  in  an  apparently 
effortless  simplicity  of  style,  an  uncoy 
modesty,  and  an  endearing  impression  of 
life  in  a  part  of  the  Pacific  not  previously 
described  except  by  R.  L.  Stevenson 
[q.v.]  in  a  quite  different  manner.  Writing 
of  the  minutest  specks  of  coral  twelve 
thousand  miles  away  and  of  a  period 
(1914-20)  as  long  ago  as  almost  forty 
years,  Grimble  brought  to  his  war-weary 
readers  the  ultimate  in  escapism.  It  was 
pardonable  for  a  degree  of  hyperbole  to 
tinge  the  tales.  To  this  was  added  less 
consciously  a  Gulliver-in-Lilliput  aura: 
Grimble  was  a  lean  giant  among  the  square 
stocky  islanders.  The  tales  are  of  uneven 
quaUty  and  are  at  their  best  when  dealing 
with  human  frailties  and  peccadilloes,  not 
least  those  of  the  author.  The  misfortunes 
and  accidents  of  his  earUest  days,  when  he 
was  acclimatizing  himself  to  the  customs 
of  the  kindly  but  critical  Micronesians  of 
the  Gilbert  Islands  or  the  Polynesians  of 
the  Ellice  Islands,  are  described  with 
warmth,  delicacy,  and  wit,  and  with  that 
absence  of  embarrassment  which  a  success- 
ful career  assures.  It  is  mostly  comedy  of 
a  rich  order.  The  fascination  which 
Micronesian  mythology  held  for  him  is 
evident  from  its  domination  of  some  of  the 
stories,  but  it  is  less  successfully  trans- 


mitted than  his  affection  for  cricket  arid 
fishing.  Part  of  the  charm  of  the  book,  as 
of  the  broadcast  tales,  was  that,  however 
local,  simple,  and  narrow  the  setting  and 
theme,  there  was  a  cultivated,  almost 
cosmopolitan  air  to  the  style  of  narrative. 
A  slender  work,  it  is  neatly  fined  down. 
Nor  did  Grimble's  elegance  of  writing 
flow  smoothly  from  his  pen.  That  he 
should  produce  the  stories  at  all  was  the 
result  of  the  utmost  persuasion  upon  him, 
for  he  set  himself  high  standards  of  taking 
pains  and  doubted  whether  he  could  sup- 
ply the  intense  concentration  without 
which  he  would  not  offer  his  work  publicly. 
Consequently  A  Pattern  of  Islands^  which 
was  filmed  in  1956  under  the  title  Pacific 
Destiny,  was  virtually  an  isolated  success. 
Return  to  the  Islands,  posthumously  pro- 
duced in  1957,  covers  the  period  1921  to 
1932;  perhaps  because  it  deals  with 
periods  of  office  in  more  senior  and 
responsible  posts  it  lacks  much  of  the 
appeal  of  its  forerunner.  The  stories  have 
not  the  same  joie  de  vivre ;  but  they  give 
the  same  impression  of  benevolence,  jus- 
tice, omniscience,  and  never-failing  good 
temper — a  commentary  perhaps  on  the 
careers  of  proconsuls  in  the  imperial 
twilight. 

Grimble  was  appointed  C.M.G.  in  1930 
and  K.C.M.G.  in  1938.  Governed  through- 
out his  successes  by  modesty,  he  knew  his 
limitations,  and  avoided  public  speaking 
appearances. 

In  1914  Grimble  married  Olivia  Mary, 
daughter  of  Lewis  Jarvis,  of  Sharnbrook, 
Bedfordshire;  they  had  four  daughters. 
He  died  in  London  12  December  1956. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Philip  Snow. 

GURNEY,  Sir  HENRY  LOVELL 
GOLDSWORTHY  (1898-1951),  colonial 
civil  servant,  was  born  at  Poughill,  Bude, 
Cornwall,  27  June  1898,  the  only  son  of 
Gregory  Goldsworthy  Henry  Gurney, 
solicitor,  and  his  wife,  Florence  Mary 
Lovell,  daughter  of  Edwin  Francis 
Chamier.  From  Winchester  he  was  com- 
missioned in  1917  in  the  King's  Royal 
Rifle  Corps  and  was  wounded  shortly 
before  the  armistice.  He  then  went  as 
a  scholar  to  University  College,  Oxford, 
where  he  played  golf  for  the  university 
against  Cambridge.  In  1921  he  was  ap- 
pointed an  assistant  district  commis- 
sioner in  Kenya  where,  showing  no  par- 
ticular flair  for  native  administration  in 
the  different  districts  in  which  he  served, 
he  was  to  find  his  metier  in  the  secretariat. 


442 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


^.There  he  did  well,  and  in  1935  he  was 
promoted  to  Jamaica  as  assistant  colonial 
secretary,  but  resigned  after  a  few  months. 
After  a  spell  in  the  Colonial  Office  he  re- 
turned to  Kenya  in  1936  and  two  years 
later  was  appointed  secretary  to  the  East 
African  Governors  Conference  and  secre- 
tary to  the  high  commissioner  for  trans- 
port. After  Italy's  entry  into  the  war  in 
1940  the  Governors  Conference  became  an 
instrument  of  considerable  importance  in 
co-ordinating  the  defence  and  supply 
problems  of  the  territories ;  the  governor 
of  Kenya  became  its  permanent  chairman ; 
and  in  1941  in  recognition  of  his  increased 
responsibilities  Gurney's  post  was  up- 
graded to  that  of  chief  secretary:  a  post 
calling  for  tact,  administrative  ability, 
and  sound  judgement  of  a  high  order. 
Despite  the  sometimes  conflicting  de- 
mands from  the  governments  and  military 
authorities  concerned,  Gurney  usually 
obtained  his  objectives  without  loss  of 
goodwill  and  with  an  imperturbability 
which  his  somewhat  diffident  and  unim- 
pressive demeanour  belied.  He  relieved 
the  chairman  of  detail,  and  thanks  to  his 
excellent  relations  with  the  military 
authorities  had  the  knack  of  settling  many 
problems  with  his  opposite  numbers 
without  recourse  to  higher  authority.  His 
recreation  was  golf  and  through  it  he  had 
his  own  circle  of  friends.  In  social  activi- 
ties he  played  no  important  part.  He  was 
appointed  C.M.G.  in  1942. 

In  1944  Gurney  was  promoted  to  be 
colonial  secretary  of  the  Gold  Coast  where 
during  his  short  service  he  won  the  con- 
fidence of  the  local  population  and  was 
interested  in  the  development  of  a  minis- 
terial system.  Sir  Alan  Burns  was  very 
sorry  to  lose  a  wise  counsellor  when  in 
1946  Gurney  received  further  promotion 
to  the  exacting  post  of  chief  secretary  to 
the  Palestine  Government.  He  arrived 
there  in  the  final  days  of  the  mandate, 
when  terrorist  outrages  were  increasing 
and  passions  at  boiling-point.  The  role  of 
both  the  civil  and  military  authorities  in 
maintaining  law  and  order  was  the  sub- 
ject of  much  emotional  criticism  by  the 
supporters  of  Jews  or  Arabs  alike,  both  at 
home  and  abroad.  In  1947  Gurney  was 
knighted  and  when  Sir  Alan  Cunningham, 
the  high  commissioner,  went  to  London 
for  consultation  Gurney  was  left  in 
charge  of  the  administration.  Thereafter 
in  the  difficult  months  which  followed  he 
and  the  other  members  of  the  civil  ad- 
ministration worked  untiringly  in  face  of 
much  calumny  and  imputations  of  par- 


Gurney 


tiality  in  support  of  the  policy  of  main- 
taining British  impartiality  between  Jew 
and  Arab,  even  when  Jewish  outrages  on 
British  troops  raised  clamour  for  reprisals. 
Sir  Alan  Cunningham,  a  general  himself, 
although  not  in  command  of  the  troops  in 
Palestine,  paid  tribute  to  the  manner  in 
which  Gurney  always  remained  on  the 
best  of  terms  with  the  general  officers 
commanding  the  army,  despite  the  neces- 
sity at  times  of  restraining  them  from 
taking  military  reprisals  for  terrorist 
outrages.  Whatever  his  personal  feelings 
Gurney  never  allowed  them  to  sway  his 
judgement  and  he  gave  the  high  commis- 
sioner his  loyal  and  unwavering  support  in 
carrying  out  what  must  have  been  at 
times  a  most  distasteful  and  thankless 
task.  He  won  the  loyalty  and  confidence  of 
his  subordinates  by  his  approachability 
and  clear  and  firm  decisions  once  his  mind 
was  made  up;  his  imperturbability  was 
proverbial  in  moments  of  recurring  crises, 
which  was  one  of  the  reasons  why  he 
earned  the  hatred  of  some  of  the  Jews. 

On  the  termination  of  the  British  man- 
date in  May  1948,  C.  R.  (later  Earl)  Attlee 
sent  Sir  Alan  Cunningham  and  the 
Palestine  administration  a  message  of 
gratitude  for  the  way  in  which  they  had 
carried  out  their  duties.  The  manner  in 
which  Gurney  had  acquitted  himself 
resulted  in  his  selection  to  succeed  Sir 
Edward  Gent  whose  death  in  an  aeroplane 
accident  had  left  Malaya  without  a  high 
commissioner  at  a  time  when  the  terrorist 
threats  to  internal  security  were  creating 
a  critical  situation.  He  accepted  the 
appointment  only  after  some  hesitation 
since  he  was  attracted  by  the  prospect 
of  returning  to  Oxford  to  superintend 
courses  for  colonial  service  probationers. 
It  was  arguable  even  at  that  stage  that 
the  local  situation  would  be  better  handled 
by  a  military  rather  than  a  civilian 
high  commissioner.  Lord  Chandos  in  his 
Memoirs  (1962)  has  trenchantly  recorded 
his  impressions  of  the  administrative  tangle 
which  confronted  him  on  his  arrival  after 
Gurney's  death,  when  the  situation  had 
still  further  deteriorated.  Its  roots  were 
deep-seated  in  past  history,  but  its  off- 
shoots derived  in  part  at  least  from  the 
complicated  terms  of  the  federal  consti- 
tution which  contained  many  features 
making  it  an  ineffective  instrument  for 
dealing  with  the  emergency.  Gurney  in- 
herited this  constitution  when  he  was 
appointed  high  commissioner  in  Septem- 
ber 1948  and  promoted  K.C.M.G.  Despite 
the  tangles  and  the  ill-defined  boundaries 


443 


Gumey 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


between  civil  and  military  responsibilities 
he  and  General  Sir  Harold  Briggs  worked 
in  the  closest  co-operation  on  what  came 
to  be  called  the  Briggs  Plan  for  concen- 
trating the  scattered  Chinese  population 
into  defended  villages.  On  the  political 
side,  by  the  grouping  of  departments 
Gurney  strove  to  enlist  the  support  of 
Malays,  Chinese,  and  Tamils  in  fighting 
banditry.  How  far  and  how  soon  his 
efforts  would  have  been  successful  it  is 
idle  to  speculate  for  on  6  October  1951  he 
was  ambushed  and  shot  down  in  a  gallant 
attempt  to  protect  his  wife  who  was  with 
him;  nevertheless  he  and  Briggs  had  set 
the  pattern  and  won  local  support  for  the 
pursuit  of  a  more  determined  policy 
which  was  able  to  set  Malaya  on  its  feet 
again. 

In  1924  Gurney  married  Isabel  Low- 
ther,  daughter  of  T.  Hamilton  Weir,  of 
Bude ;  they  had  two  sons.  A  portrait  by 
Harold  Speed  was  hung  in  the  Legisla- 
tive Council  Chamber  at  Kuala  Lumpur 
and  a  copy  is  in  the  possession  of  the 
family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Henry  Moore. 

GUTTERIDGE,      HAROLD      COOKE 

(1876-1953),  barrister  and  professor,  was 
born  at  Naples  16  July  1876,  the  second 
son  of  Michael  Gutteridge,  a  pioneer  of 
departmental  stores  in  Southern  Italy,  by 
his  wife,  Ada,  daughter  of  Samuel  Cooke, 
of  Liversedge,  Yorkshire.  Until  the  age  of 
twelve  he  was  at  a  Swiss  school  in  Naples 
where,  in  addition  to  Italian  which  was 
almost  one  of  his  native  languages,  he 
acquired  much  French  and  German.  He 
then  went  to  the  Leys  School  and  to 
King's  College,  Cambridge,  where  he  took 
first  class  honours  in  the  historical  (1898) 
and  law  (part  i,  1899)  triposes.  He  was 
called  to  the  bar  in  1900  by  the  Middle 
Temple  (ultimately  becoming  a  bencher) 
and  took  silk  in  1930.  He  practised  mainly 
in  commercial  matters  until  the  outbreak 
of  war  in  1914  when  he  joined  the  Terri- 
torial Force.  He  served  in  the  Army 
Ordnance  Corps  with  the  British  Salonika 
Force  from  1916  to  1919,  was  mentioned  in 
dispatches,  and  retired  with  the  rank  of 
captain. 

In  1919  he  was  elected  Sir  Ernest 
Cassel  professor  of  industrial  and  com- 
mercial law  in  the  university  of  London. 
This  post  he  held  for  eleven  years  (while 
maintaining  a  consultant  practice)  and 
played  a  very  considerable  part  in  develop- 
ing the  faculty  of  law  from  a  body  of  part- 


time  teachers  into  a  mainly  full-time 
faculty. 

Although  he  was  typically  English  in 
most  respects,  Gutteridge's  knowledge  of 
languages  made  him  very  popular  with 
foreign  colleagues  and  pupils.  Possessing 
this  equipment  and  the  large  knowledge  of 
commercial  and  maritime  law  which  he 
had  acquired  both  in  practice  and  as 
a  teacher,  he  found  his  interests  becoming 
more  and  more  directed  towards  conflict 
of  laws  and  comparative  law.  In  1930  the 
university  of  Cambridge  created  for  him 
a  readership  in  comparative  law,  which 
enabled  him  to  concentrate  upon  his 
chosen  field.  It  was  later  converted  into 
a  chair,  which  he  held  until  1941.  He  was 
a  fellow  of  Trinity  Hall.  His  reputation 
attracted  many  foreign  research  students 
to  Cambridge,  and  in  some  western 
European  countries  he  was  regarded  as 
'the  apostle  of  the  common  law'. 

He  was  a  member  of  many  government 
commissions  and  committees — the  royal 
commission  on  the  manufacture  of  and 
traffic  in  arms,  the  Law  Revision  Com- 
mittee, the  Enforcement  of  Foreign 
Judgments  Committee,  the  Legal  Educa- 
tion Committee  (1932),  the  Shipping 
Claims  Tribunal,  the  Geneva  conference 
on  the  unification  of  the  law  of  bills  of 
exchange  and  cheques,  and  the  Hague 
conference  on  private  international  law. 
He  was  doctor  of  laws  in  the  universities 
of  London  and  Cambridge  and  received 
honorary  doctorates  from  the  universities 
of  Lyon,  Grenoble,  Paris,  and  Salonika. 

Gutteridge's  principal  publications  were 
a  notable  thirteenth  edition  of  Smith's 
Mercantile  Law  (1931),  Bankers'  Com- 
mercial Credits  (1932,  a  book  on  a  subject 
little  known  outside  the  circle  of  mer- 
chants and  bankers  and  their  legal 
advisers),  and  Comparative  Law  published 
in  1946,  followed  by  a  second  edition  in 
1949  and  editions  in  French,  Japanese, 
and  Spanish.  A  bibliography  of  his  pub- 
lications, comprising  more  than  fifty 
contributions  to  periodicals  and  joint 
works,  was  compiled  by  his  successor  at 
Cambridge,  Professor  C.  J.  Hamson, 
and  printed  in  the  July  1954  issue  of 
the  International  and  Comparative  Law 
Quarterly,  together  with  three  obituary 
notices.  His  first  book  was  Nelson  and 
the  Neapolitan  Jacobins  (Navy  Records 
Society,  1903)  which  is  marked  by  'his 
great  admiration  of  Nelson  and  his  endur- 
ing affection  for  Naples'  and  for  the  sea. 

Although  comparative  law  had  already 
occupied    the    attention    of    some    dis- 


444 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Guy 


tinguished  lawyers  in  Great  Britain  and 
the  Society  of  Comparative  Legislation 
and  its  Journal  had  existed  for  half  a  cen- 
tury, Gutteridge's  Comparative  Law  was 
the  first  systematic  attempt  to  state  the 
case  for  the  recognition  of  what  was 
almost  a  new  subject  in  this  country  both 
as  a  branch  of  legal  studies  and  as  a  practi- 
cal instriuiient  of  legal  progress.  Moreover, 
it  is  clear  throughout  the  book  that  he 
regarded  one  of  the  main  functions  of 
comparative  law  to  be  the  promotion 
of  a  reciprocal  basis  of  understanding 
amongst  lawyers  practising  or  teaching  in 
widely  differing  legal  systems,  particu- 
larly the  common  law  and  the  modern 
civil  law  of  continental  Europe.  His 
achievement  in  this  respect  needed  more 
than  sound  learning  and  good  judgement ; 
it  was  largely  due  to  the  influence  of  his 
personality  and  to  his  evident  intellectual 
integrity. 

In  appearance  Gutteridge  was  short, 
portly  and  rubicund,  suggesting,  perhaps, 
a  distinguished  naval  officer  rather  than 
a  scholar.  He  had  a  most  lovable  character 
which  won  for  him  a  host  of  friends. 

In  1905  he  married  Mary  Louisa, 
daughter  of  Joseph  Jackson.  There  were 
three  children:  Joyce  Ada  Cooke  Gut- 
teridge, who  became  one  of  the  legal 
advisers  to  the  Foreign  Office;  Michael, 
Ueutenant  in  the  Royal  Tank  Corps  who 
died  in  India  in  1935;  and  Richard,  a  chap- 
lain in  the  Royal  Air  Force. 

Gutteridge  died  in  Cambridge  30 
December  1953. 

[International  and  Comparative  Law  Quar- 
terly, 1954;  Revue  Internationale  de  Droit 
Campari,  1954;  Cambridge  Law  Journal, 
1954 ;  American  Journal  of  Comparative  Law, 
1954 ;  personal  knowledge.]  McNair. 

GUY,  Sir  HENRY  LEWIS  (1887-1956), 
chartered  mechanical  engineer,  was  born 
at  Penarth  15  June  1887,  the  second  son 
of  Richard  Guy,  wholesale  meat  supplier, 
and  his  wife,  Letitia  Lewis.  Railways 
intrigued  him,  and  after  education  at  the 
County  (later  Grammar)  School,  Penarth, 
he  became  a  pupil  to  the  Taff  Vale  Rail- 
way. He  studied  at  the  University  Col- 
lege, South  Wales,  gaining  in  1909  the 
college  diploma  in  both  mechanical  and 
electrical  engineering,  winning  the  Bayliss 
prize  of  the  Institution  of  Civil  Engineers, 
a  national  scholarship,  and  a  Whitworth 
exhibition.  He  then  joined  the  British 
Westinghouse  Company  and  in  1915 
became  centrifugal  pump  and  turbo- 
compressor  engineer.  Appointment  as  chief 


engineer  of  the  mechanical  department  of 
the  Metropolitan-Vickers  Electrical  Com- 
pany followed  in  1918,  a  post  which  he 
retained  until  1941,  when  he  resigned  to 
become  secretary  of  the  Institution  of 
Mechanical  Engineers,  of  which  he  was 
then  a  vice-president.  He  retired  from 
professional  work  in  1951. 

During  his  years  in  industry  Guy  was 
responsible  for  inventions  and  researches 
directed  to  the  improvement  of  steam 
power  plant  and  he  regularly  published 
the  results  of  his  work,  mostly  in  the 
proceedings  of  the  Institution  of  Mechani- 
cal Engineers.  Among  them  was  his  paper 
on  'The  Economic  Value  of  Increased 
Steam  Pressure'  which  gained  the  Hawks- 
ley  gold  medal  in  1927;  in  1939  he  de- 
livered the  Parsons  memorial  lecture  and 
was  awarded  the  Parsons  memorial  medal. 

His  ten  years'  work  as  secretary  of  the 
Institution  of  Mechanical  Engineers  was 
pursued  with  characteristic  vigour  through 
the  difficult  war  and  post-war  years. 
During  this  period  the  Institution  not 
only  increased  considerably  in  size  but 
in  national  and  international  prestige. 
He  made  significant  contributions  to  the 
formation  of  the  Royal  Corps  of  Electrical 
and  Mechanical  Engineers,  and  also  to  the 
method  of  distribution  of  Institution 
Proceedings,  by  selection,  to  a  materially 
increasing  membership.  After  his  retire- 
ment the  honorary  membership  of  the 
Institution  was  conferred  upon  him. 

Elected  a  fellow  of  the  Royal  Society  in 
1936,  Guy  served  on  its  council  in  1938-9, 
was  appointed  chairman  of  the  engineer- 
ing sciences  sectional  committee  in  1940, 
and  in  1941  joined  the  executive  com- 
mittee of  the  National  Physical  Labora- 
tory. Later  he  became  chairman  of  the 
committee  of  the  British  Electrical  and 
Allied  Industries  Research  Association 
which  organized  the  research  work  on  the 
properties  of  steam,  subsequently  being 
appointed  chairman  of  its  power  plant 
section,  and  member  and  chairman  of 
several  committees  of  the  British  Stan? 
dards  Institution. 

Guy  was  a  member  of  the  scientific 
advisory  council  of  the  Ministry  of 
Supply  from  1939  and  during  the  war  was 
chairman  of  various  committees  dealing 
with  such  national  issues  as  gun  design, 
armament  development,  static  detona- 
tion, the  work  and  staffing  of  the  Royal 
Aircraft  Establishment,  the  organization 
of  aircraft  armament  research  and  de- 
velopment, and  the  technical  organiza- 
tion of  the  army;  and  in  194(5-7  of  the 


445 


Guy 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


armaments  development  board.  He  served 
also  from  1944  on  the  Advisory  Council  of 
the  Department  of  Scientific  and  Indus- 
trial Research,  was  chairmanfrom  1947  of 
the  Department's  mechanical  engineering 
research  board,  and  served  also  on  its 
fuel  research  board  and  scientific  grants 
committee.  He  was  a  member  from  1942 
of  the  mechanical  engineering  advisory 
committee  of  the  Ministry  of  Labour  and 
a  trustee  (1946-8)  of  the  Imperial  War 
Museum. 

Guy  received  in  1939  the  honorary  D.Sc. 
of  Wales  and  the  honorary  associateship  of 
the  Manchester  College  of  Technology.  He 
was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1943  and  knighted 
in  1949. 

Broad-shouldered  and  stocky,  Guy  was 
endowed  with  great  physical  strength. 
A  tireless  personal  worker,  he  quested 
unceasingly  for  plans  which  would  en- 
hance the  future  of  engineering  and  of 
engineers.  He  could  not  suffer  fools  gladly 
but  took  endless  care  to  explain  the  details 
of  his  plans  to  those  who  were  prepared 
to  help.  He  had  forthright  respect  for 
straight  dealing,  was  completely  unmoved 
by  officialdom,  and  would  tenaciously 
pursue  a  decided  course  even  in  the  face  of 
enlightened  opposition.  Unfortunately  he 
overtaxed  himself  in  later  life  by  main- 
taining the  pace  and  drive  of  his  youth, 
and  would  have  accomplished  more,  with 
less  personal  strain,  had  he  learned  to 
make  full  use  of  the  initiative  of  those 
around  him.  He  was  devoted  to  graphs  as 
aids  to  deductive  planning.  Once  when 
a  colleague  asked  him  if  he  even  graphed 
the  trends  of  his  household  expenses,  he 
smiled  and  said  revealingly,  'No,  that 
would  take  all  the  fun  out  of  it.'  In  1914 
he  married  Margaret  Paton,  daughter  of 
Samuel  Benion  Williams,  coal  merchant, 
of  Holyhead.  They  had  two  daughters, 
both  of  whom  married  chartered  mechani- 
cal engineers.  When  ill  health  forced  Guy 
to  retire  he  moved  to  Canford  Cliffs, 
Dorset,  spending  much  time  painting  in 
oils  and  listening  to  good  music.  He  died 
there  20  July  1956. 

[Journal  of  the  Institution  of  Mechanical 
Engineers,  February  1951 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Brian  G.  Robbins. 

GWYER,    Sir    MAURICE    LINFORD 

(1878-1952),  lawyer  and  civil  servant,  was 
born  in  London  25  April  1878,  the  eldest 
son  of  John  Edward  Gwyer,  public  audi- 
tor and  secretary  of  the  Provident  Clerks' 
Life  Assurance  Association,  and  his  wife, 


Edith  Linford.  His  sister,  Barbara  Eliza- 
beth Gwyer,  was  principal  of  St.  Hugh's 
College,  Oxford,  1924-46.  Educated  at 
Highgate  and  Westminster,  and  elected 
to  a  Westminster  exhibition  at  Christ 
Church,  Oxford,  after  a  first  in  classical 
moderations  (1899)  and  a  second  in  literae 
humaniores  (1901),  Gwyer  took  the  B.C.L., 
having  in  the  meantime  become  in  1902 
a  fellow  of  All  Souls.  Although  only  one 
fellowship  had  been  offered,  he  and  Ray- 
mond Asquith  so  distinguished  themselves 
that  both  were  elected.  Called  to  the  bar  in 
1903  by  the  Inner  Temple  after  a  first  in 
bar  finals  and  the  prizes  of  the  Council  of 
Legal  Education  for  constitutional  and 
criminal  law,  evidence  and  procedure, 
Gwyer  entered  the  chambers  of  (Sir) 
Frank  MacKinnon  [q.v.].  To  supplement 
his  income,  in  1910  he  took  off  the  hands 
of  Sir  William  Anson  [q.v.]  the  later 
editions  of  the  Law  of  Contract,  and  after 
Anson's  death  in  1914  he  emerged  as  the 
natural  editor  of  his  Law  and  Custom  of  the 
Constitution. 

In  1912  (Sir)  Warren  Fisher  [q.v.],  after 
an  intensive  search  for  the  right  man, 
invited  Gwyer  to  join  the  legal  staff  of  the 
National  Health  Insurance  Commission. 
From  1913  to  1915  Gwyer  was  also  lec- 
turer in  private  international  law  at 
Oxford.  In  1917  he  was  transferred  to  the 
Ministry  of  Shipping.  After  the  war  he 
returned  to  the  bar,  but  in  1919,  with  some 
reluctance  and  mainly  to  ensure  the 
financial  security  of  his  family  (his  wife 
had  become  an  invalid),  he  accepted 
appointment  as  legal  adviser  and  solicitor 
to  the  Ministry  of  Health.  He  served  under 
five  different  ministers  (one  of  them 
twice)  and  dealt  with  a  stream  of  conten- 
tious legislation  which  covered  the  am- 
bitious but  ill-starred  housing  scheme 
of  Christopher  (later  Viscount)  Addison 
[q.v.]  and  the  remedial  measures  of  suc- 
ceeding ministers,  rent  restriction,  rating 
and  valuation,  and  contributory  pensions, 
as  well  as  three  consolidation  Acts  and 
some  highly  technical  routine  Acts. 
Although  Gwyer  made  little  visible  im- 
pact on  policy,  his  clear  reasoning  and 
drafting  skill  had  a  notable  effect  upon  its 
presentation.  He  was  also  at  work  on  the 
revision  of  Anson's  Law  and  Custom  (5th 
ed.  vol.  i  only,  1922). 

In  1926  Gwyer  became  Treasury  solici- 
tor and  King's  proctor  and  in  1929  he  was 
a  British  representative  at  the  conference 
on  the  operation  of  dominion  legislation 
which  drafted  what  became  the  Statute  of 
Westminster,  a  title  which  he  suggested. 


446 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hadley 


The  conference  described  the  proposed 
legislation  in  words  characteristic  of 
Gwyer  as  an  'association  of  constitutional 
conventions  with  law  .  .  .  [which]  has 
provided  a  means  of  harmonizing  relations 
where  a  purely  legal  solution  of  practical 
problems  was  impossible,  would  have 
impaired  free  development,  or  would  have 
failed  to  catch  the  spirit  which  gives  life  to 
institutions'. 

Gwyer  took  silk  in  1930  and  in  1934 
became  first  parliamentary  counsel  to  the 
Treasury.  Almost  at  once  he  had  to  apply 
his  accumulated  experience  to  the  drafting 
of  the  government  of  India  bill  to  estab- 
lish responsible  government  for  both  the 
provinces  and  the  All-India  Federation. 
The  constitutions  thus  imposed  did  not 
furnish  the  freedom  given  to  the  existing 
dominions  to  legislate  in  terms  repugnant 
to  Acts  of  Parliament  of  the  United 
Kingdom.  Hence  the  need  for  a  court  to 
interpret  the  constitution  in  justiciable 
disputes  between  governments  within  the 
new  federation.  Gwyer's  appointment  in 
1937  as  chief  justice  of  India,  although  he 
had  had  little  forensic  and  no  judicial 
experience,  provoked  no  adverse  com- 
ment, despite  the  prima-facie  objection  to 
a  draftsman's  becoming  the  judicial  inter- 
preter of  his  own  draft.  In  the  first  twenty 
months  of  its  existence  his  court  dealt 
with  three  appeals  only,  although  before 
his  retirement  in  1943  it  had  come  to 
examine  thirty-five  more  cases.  Some  of 
his  judgements  have  been  thought  to  have 
been  unduly  influenced  by  Gwyer's  recol- 
lection of  what  the  Act  had  been  intended 
to  mean. 

Having  at  first  little  judicial  work  the 
chief  justice  was  encouraged  by  the  vice- 
roy to  take  in  hand  the  reform  of  the 
imiversity  of  Delhi  of  which  Gwyer  was 
appointed  vice-chancellor  in  1938.  Despite 
ill  health  he  continued  in  that  office  until 
1950.  Almost  from  the  first  his  house  in 
Delhi  became  a  place  of  meeting  for 
British  officials  and  political  Indians.  He 
also  travelled  widely  and  some  of  his  visits 
to  native  States  with  which  the  Govern- 
ment was  having  difficulties  caused 
embarrassment. 

Gwyer,  it  was  remarked  as  early  as 
1914,  'had  something  of  the  big  man  in 
him' ;  yet  his  was  no  originating  mind. 
What  he  excelled  in  was  polish:  in  man- 
ners as  in  craftsmanship.  He  wrote  for  his 
own  amusement  admirable  translations  of 
Catullus  but  no  original  poetry ;  he  edited 
Anson  but  wrote  no  book  of  his  own ;  he 
rescued  the  university  of  Delhi  from  neg- 


lect and  obscurity  but  was  at  pains  that  it 
should  be  run  on  conventional  lines. 

Gwyer  was  dark,  sallow,  very  tall,  and 
slow  in  his  movements.  He  dressed  well 
and  looked  distinguished  in  any  company. 
Good  living  he  enjoyed — and  good  com- 
pany ;  Maurice  Gwyer  would  have  been  at 
ease  in  Dr.  Johnson's  circle.  He  was  by 
nature  tolerant,  ready  to  see  redeeming 
features,  but  drawing  a  rigid  line  between 
frailty  and  vice.  As  King's  proctor  he  wel- 
comed the  reduction  of  the  vote  which 
ended  the  routine  rummaging  into  squalid 
details  of  undefended  divorce  suits.  In 
1928,  with  Sir  Warren  Fisher  and  Sir 
Malcolm  Ramsay,  he  was  called  upon  to 
investigate  complaints  about  gambling  in 
'francs'  by  certain  civil  servants.  The 
report  (Cmd.  3037),  mainly  Gwyer's  work, 
was  uncompromising:  'Practical  rules  for 
the  guidance  of  social  conduct  depend  as 
much  upon  the  instinct  and  perception  of 
the  individual  as  upon  cast-iron  formulas 
.  .  .  and  a  standard  .  .  .  not  only  inflexible 
but  fastidious.'  The  high  value  which  he 
set  upon  honourable  conduct  made  him 
generous  to  and  therefore  popular  with 
subordinates. 

Gwyer  was  appointed  C.B.  (1921), 
K.C.B.  (1928),  K.C.S.I.  (1935),  and 
G.C.I.E.  (1948).  He  became  an  honorary 
student  of  Christ  Church  (1937),  an 
honorary  D.C.L.  of  Oxford  (1939),  LL.D. 
of  Travancore  (1943)  and  Patna  (1944), 
and  D.Litt.  of  Delhi  (1950). 

In  1906  he  married  Alsina  Helen  Marion, 
daughter  of  Sir  Henry  Burdett ;  they  had 
one  son  and  two  daughters.  Gwyer  died 
at  Eastbourne  12  October  1952. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Douglas  Veale. 

HADLEY,  WILLIAM  WAITE  (1866- 
1960),  editor  of  the  Sunday  Times,  was 
born  at  East  Haddon,  Northamptonshire, 
18  January  1866,  one  of  the  ten  children 
of  Joseph  Hadley  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth 
Waite.  Joseph  Hadley,  a  head  gardener, 
was  a  great  reader  and  a  stalwart  Con- 
gregationalist,  and  as  a  boy  his  son  also 
read  widely,  while  attending  the  village 
school.  Early  in  his  teens  he  began  to  work 
for  a  career  in  journalism:  he  went  to 
night  school  in  Northampton  and  a  part- 
time  master  at  Rugby  School  taught  him 
shorthand,  essential  to  a  reporter  in  the 
days  of  verbatim  note-taking  and  long 
printed  reports.  At  the  age  of  fifteen  he 
was  apprenticed  to  the  Northampton 
Mercury,  where  he  learnt  the  craft  of 
journalism  from  the  lowest  rungs  of  the 


447 


Hadley 


D.N.B.  1951->1960 


ladder.  Soon,  however,  his  reporting 
assignments  became  more  responsible  and 
took  him  all  over  the  county.  Charles 
Bradlaugh  and  Henry  Labouchere  [qq.v.] 
were  then  members  of  Parliament  for 
Northampton,  a  Radical  borough,  and  in 
later  life  Hadley  used  often  to  recount 
how  as  a  junior  reporter  he  was  present 
at  the  hustings  at  the  famous  by-elections 
caused  by  Bradlaugh's  refusal  to  take  the 
oath. 

In  1887  Hadley  joined  the  editorial  staff 
of  the  Rochdale  Observer,  and  in  1893 
became  its  editor,  returning  to  Rochdale 
after  an  eight-months'  editorship  of  the 
Merthyr  Times — an  interlude  which,  brief 
as  it  was,  had  a  crucial  effect  upon  his  later 
career ;  it  was  in  Merthyr  Tydfil  that  he 
made  friends  with  the  family  of  John 
Mathias  Berry,  two  of  whose  sons  were 
destined  to  become  national  newspaper 
proprietors,  one  of  them,  William,  later 
Viscount  Camrose  [q.v.],  being  given  by 
Hadley  his  first  employment  on  the  local 
paper. 

After  editing  the  Rochdale  Observer  for 
fifteen  years,  while  taking  an  active  part 
in  local  government  and  education,  and 
in  Liberal  politics  in  Yorkshire,  Hadley 
returned  in  1908  to  Northampton  as 
managing  editor  of  the  Mercury  group  of 
papers,  of  which  he  soon  became  a  direc- 
tor. Now  a  highly  respected  provincial 
newspaper  editor  and  leader  of  his  native 
community,  he  might  have  been  thought 
to  have  fulfilled  his  main  career;  but  in 

1923  he  was  pressed  by  Liberal  Party 
leaders  to  go  to  London,  and  in  January 

1924  he  became  parliamentary  correspon- 
dent of  the  Daily  Chrmiicle.  When  in  1930 
the  Chronicle  was  merged  with  the  Daily 
News,  he  found  himself  at  large,  at  the 
age  of  sixty-four,  competing  with  much 
younger  men  who  had  spent  most  of  their 
lives  in  Fleet  Street.  However,  Lord  Cam- 
rose,  then  chairman  and  editor-in-chief  of 
the  Sunday  Times,  offered  him  the  assis- 
tant editorship,  which  he  took  up  in  1931. 
A  year  later,  in  1932,  the  editor,  Leonard 
Rees,  died,  and  Hadley  was  his  natural 
successor.  He  remained  editor  of  the 
Sunday  Times  (of  which  Lord  Kemsley 
became  chairman  and  editor-in-chief  after 
he  and  his  brother  divided  their  press 
interests  in  1937)  until  his  retirement  in 
1950  at  the  age  of  eighty-four.  He  be- 
lieved strongly  in  the  close  partnership  of 
editor  and  proprietor  in  the  conduct  of 
a  newspaper,  and  while  Lord  Kemsley 
greatly  respected  his  wisdom  and  ex- 
perience Hadley  for  his  part  admired  and 


accepted  Lord  Kemsley's  strong  control  of 
commercial  and  general  policy. 

Hadley' s  political  guidance  of  an  in- 
dependent but  Conservative  newspaper 
was  steady  and  moderate  rather  than 
dynamic.  He  became  a  friend  and  sup- 
porter of  Neville  Chamberlain,  whose 
international  policies  he  defended  in  his 
book,  Munich:  Before  and  After,  pub- 
lished in  1944.  The  decline  of  the  Liberal 
Party  and  his  dislike  of  socialist  ideas 
eased  his  political  transition  to  the  Right. 
Although,  however,  until  his  last  few 
years  as  editor  he  was  his  own  chief 
leader-writer,  his  greatest  editorial  contri- 
bution to  the  growing  success  of  the 
Sunday  Times  was  not  in  political  per- 
suasion but  in  his  calm  and  wise  guidance 
of  a  small  but  devoted  editorial  staff  and 
his  handling  of  a  gifted  team  of  regular 
contributors,  including  Ernest  Newman, 
James  Agate,  (Sir)  Desmond  MacCarthy, 
(Sir)  R.  C,  K.  Ensor  [qq.v.]  and  others.  An 
essentially  modest  and  friendly  man,  he 
was  as  unruffled  by  problems  of  personal 
relations  as  he  was  by  sudden  shifts  in  the 
news  or  by  the  difficulties  of  maintaining 
the  character  of  the  paper  and  the  good- 
will of  its  writers  when  wartime  exigencies 
drastically  cut  its  size. 

In  1920  Hadley  had  written  a  short 
history  of  the  Northampton  Mercury  to 
mark  its  bicentenary,  and  even  in  his  last 
years  he  never  lost  touch  with  his  native 
county,  contributing  articles  in  1957, 1958* 
and  1959  to  the  journal  of  the  Northamp- 
tonshire Record  Society. 

In  1889  he  married  Emma  (died  1952), 
daughter  of  Joseph  Chater,  shoe  manu^ 
facturer,  of  Northampton ;  they  had  three 
daughters.  He  died  at  Hindhead  16 
December  1960. 

[The  Times,  17  December  1960;  Sunday 
Times,  18  December  1960 ;  Haslemere  Herald, 
23  December  1960;  Northamptonshire  Past 
and  Present  (Journal  of  the  Northamptonshire 
Record  Society),  vol.  iii,  No.  2,  1961 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

H.  V.  HODSON* 

HALCROW,  Sir  WILLIAM  THOMSON 

(1883-1958),  civil  engineer,  was  born  4 
July  1883  in  Sunderland,  the  only  son  of 
John  Andrew  Halcrow,  master  seaman  in 
the  Merchant  Service,  and  his  wife,  Jane 
Halcrow.  After  education  at  George  Wat- 
son's College,  Edinburgh,  and  Edinburgh 
University,  he  began  his  engineering 
career  as  a  pupil  to  P.  W.  Meik,  the  senior 
partner  of  Thomas  Meik  «fe  Sons,  a  leading 
firm  of  consulting  engineers  in  London. 


D.N.R  1951-1960 


Halford 


Early  in  his  training  he  became  an  assis- 
tant on  the  Kinlochleven  hydro-electric 
works,  thus  beginning  his  connection  with 
a  branch  of  the  engineering  profession  to 
which  he  was  destined  to  make  consider- 
able contributions.  In  1905  he  became 
resident  engineer  at  Pozzuoli,  Italy,  for 
the  reconstruction  in  reinforced  concrete 
of  a  deep-water  pier,  following  which  he 
was  engaged  as  an  assistant  engineer  on 
the  construction  of  the  Loch  Leven  water- 
power  works,  Scotland,  before  gaining 
further  experience  abroad  in  Italy,  Portu- 
gal, and  the  Argentine. 

In  1910  Halcrow  became  chief  engineer 
to  the  contracting  firm  of  Topham,  Jones, 
and  Railton,  his  major  work  being  the 
construction  of  the  King  George  V  graving 
dock  at  Singapore,  and  in  1913  survey 
work  for  the  dredging  of  the  approach 
channel  to  the  Rosyth  dockyard  then 
under  construction.  During  the  war  he  was 
engaged  on  several  Admiralty  projects  in 
the  Orkneys  and  Shetlands.  Afterwards  he 
worked  on  the  construction  of  the  Johore 
Causeway  which  joined  Singapore  Island 
to  the  mainland  of  Malaya,  and  on  the 
design  and  construction  of  the  Port  of 
Beira.  In  1921  he  resumed  his  connection 
with  consultant  engineering,  becoming 
a  partner  with  C.  S.  Meik  in  the  firm  known 
as  C.  S.  Meik  and  Halcrow  until  1944  when 
after  his  knighthood  the  firm  was  renamed 
Sir  William  Halcrow  &  Partners. 

Throughout  his  career  as  a  consultant, 
Halcrow's  work  was  widespread.  He  was 
joint  consulting  engineer  with  Sir  Harley 
Dalrymple-Hay  [q.v.]  for  the  London 
Passenger  Transport  Board's  tube  rail- 
ways, and  he  carried  out  the  extensions  of 
the  Bakerloo  Line  to  Finchley  Road  and 
the  Northern  Line  as  far  as  East  Finchley. 
As  a  consultant  under  the  Reservoirs 
(Safety  Provisions)  Act  he  inspected  many 
dams  for  water-power  companies  and 
advised  on  canal  reservoirs  for  the  Rail- 
ways and  Birmingham  Canal  Navigations. 
During  the  war  of  1939-45  he  designed 
and  constructed  deep-level  tunnel  shelters 
in  London  for  the  Ministry  of  Home 
Security.  He  also  acted  as  head  of  a  group 
of  consulting  engineers  who  designed  and 
constructed  ordnance  factories  and  storage 
depots.  He  was  associated  with  the  War 
Office  also,  on  the  design  and  construction 
of  the  'Phoenix'  units  which  formed  part 
of  Mulberry  harbours  for  the  invasion  of 
Europe.  In  1944  he  was  chairman  of  a 
panel  of  engineers  appointed  to  report  on 
the  Severn  Barrage  tidal  power  scheme.  In 
1950  he  advised  the  New  Zealand  Govern- 


ment on  traffic  problems  in  the  city  of 
Auckland.  In  1951  he  was  chairman  of 
a  panel  of  engineers  reporting  on  the 
Kariba  Gorge  and  Kafue  River  hydro- 
electric projects  in  Rhodesia. 

He  was  president  of  the  engineering 
section  of  the  British  Association  in 
1947 ;  president  of  the  Smeatonian  Society 
(1953) ;  vice-president  of  the  commission 
on  large  dams  of  the  World  Power  Con- 
ference (1955).  He  held  many  other 
appointments,  amongst  which  were 
colonel-commandant  (Engineer  and  Rail- 
way Staff  Corps)  Royal  Engineers  (T.A.>; 
member  of  the  Advisory  Council  of  the 
Department  of  Scientific  and  Industrial 
Research;  chairman  of  the  Hydraulics 
Research  Board;  and  member  of  the 
executive  of  the  National  Physical  Labora- 
tory and  of  the  Royal  Fine  Art  Commis- 
sion. He  contributed  a  notice  of  Sir 
Clement  Hindley  to  this  Dictionary. 

Halcrow  became  a  member  of  council  of 
the  Institution  of  Civil  Engineers  in  1934, 
a  vice-president  in  1943,  and  was  president 
in  1946-7 ;  in  1930  he  received  the  Telford 
gold  medal  for  his  paper  on  the  Lochaber 
(water-power)  scheme.  In  1937-9  he  was 
president  of  the  British  section  of  the 
Soci^t^  Ing^nieurs  Civils  de  France,  whose 
gold  medal  he  was  awarded  in  1939.  He 
was  a  chevalier  of  the  Legion  of  Honour 
and  an  officer  of  the  Order  of  the  Black 
Star. 

In  1921  he  married  Phoebe  Mary, 
daughter  of  Alfred  Henry  Roberts,  civil 
engineer,  by  whom  he  had  one  son.  He 
died  at  his  home  in  Folkestone  31  August 
1958.  His  portrait  by  (Sir)  James  Gunn  is 
at  the  Institution  of  Civil  Engineers. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

■■'■■'  .»i' •-■■'•  1'' ■<••■- ^'--  F.  A.  Whitaker. 

HALFORD,  FRANK  BERNARD  (1894- 
1955),  aircraft  engine  designer,  was  born 
in  Nottingham  7  March  1894,  the  son  of 
Harry  Baker  Halford,  estate  agent  and 
surveyor,  and  his  wife,  Ethel  Grundy. 
He  was  educated  at  Felsted  School 
and  Nottingham  University  College,  but 
secured  no  academic  qualifications.  Yet 
for  forty  years  he  was  one  of  the  world's 
great  aircraft  engine  designers.  At  the  age 
of  nineteen  he  learnt  to  fly  at  Brooklands 
and  became  an  instructor  at  the  Bristol 
School  of  Flying.  In  1914  he  entered 
the  aeronautical  inspection  directorate  of 
the  War  Office  as  an  engine  examiner 
where  he  was  able  to  study  aero  engines, 
which  became  his  lifelong  interest. 

Joining  the  Royal  Flying  Corps  on  the 


8662062 


449 


Halford 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


outbreak  of  war  in  1914  he  was  recalled 
from  France  to  redesign  the  Beardmore 
Company's  Austro-Daimler  engine  to  give 
greater  power.  It  was  used  extensively  in 
the  D  .H  .4  aeroplane,  one  of  the  outstanding 
bombers  of  the  time.  Later,  in  production 
form  known  as  the  Puma,  it  became  a  sig- 
nificant contribution  to  engine  progress  by 
a  young  man  still  in  his  early  twenties. 

In  1916  he  met  (Sir)  Harry  Ricardo, 
a  brilliant  engine  designer,  from  whom 
Halford  gained  much  experience.  At  the 
close  of  the  war  he  joined  Ricardo  and 
spent  two  and  a  half  years  in  the  United 
States  negotiating  the  licensing  agree- 
ments for  Ricardo's  patents,  returning  to 
England  to  help  in  the  development  of 
the  Ricardo-Triumph  motor-cycle  engine, 
which  won  many  racing  records  in  1921-2. 
He  designed  the  Halford  engine  which 
raced  at  Brooklands  about  this  time,  at 
108  m.p.h.  Halford  also  raced  in  the  Isle  of 
Man,  riding  his  own  machine. 

In  1923  Halford  became  his  own  de- 
signer with  one  assistant,  J.  L.  P.  Brodie, 
who  was  to  remain  with  him  all  Halford' s 
life.  In  1924-7  Halford  worked  for  the 
Aircraft  Disposal  Company  to  modernize 
the  large  number  of  wartime  aero  engines. 
Halford' s  foresight  was  quite  exceptional. 
From  the  company's  engine,  the  Airdisco, 
he  produced  the  Cirrus  engine  for  the 
de  Havilland  light  aeroplane,  the  Moth. 
Flown  in  February  1925,  the  Moth  was  the 
first  practical  private  aeroplane,  and  in 
various  forms  proved  to  be  a  turning- 
point  in  Halford' s  career  and  a  memorable 
date  in  British  aircraft  and  engine  pro- 
gress. Halford  had  seized  his  opportunities 
brilliantly,  making  full  use  of  obsolete  war 
material.  It  was  rightly  declared  that  he 
had  a  feeling  for  engines  comparable  with 
that  of  a  stock  farmer  for  animals,  bring- 
ing to  his  aid  an  intuitive  talent  which 
years  of  engineering  training  might  not 
have  provided.  The  Cirrus  engine  was 
remarkable  for  its  silence;  it  was  one  of 
the  quietest  aircraft  in  flight.  Both  the 
engine  and  the  plane  heralded  a  revolu- 
tion in  flying,  and  became  in  demand  all 
over  the  world.  Halford  had  that  genius 
for  basic  engine  design  which  enabled 
increasing  power  to  be  obtained  with  little 
modification. 

In  1928  he  produced  the  Gipsy  engine, 
following  the  demand  for  still  more  power 
for  light  aircraft ;  in  various  modifications 
it  reached  such  power  that  light  aero- 
planes made  aeronautical  history  on  the 
long  air  routes:  England  to  Australia,  to 
South  Africa,   and   the   crossing  of  the 


North  and  South  Atlantic,  remarkable 
tributes  to  the  reliability  of  the  Halford 
engines.  In  its  inverted  form  the  Gipsy 
powered  the  de  Havilland  Comet  aero- 
plane in  1934  to  win  the  England-Australia 
race,  for  which,  in  the  following  year, 
Halford  was  awarded  the  silver  medal  of 
the  Royal  Aeronautical  Society.  A  Gipsy 
engine  energized  a  fifty-foot  diameter 
alternator  coil  which  was  fitted  under  the 
fuselage  of  the  Wellington  bomber  to 
destroy  the  magnetic  bombs  sown  round 
the  British  coasts  by  Germany  in  the  war 
of  1939-45.  The  Gipsy  was  still  in  use  in 
the  sixties  and  the  Cirrus  in  the  fifties. 

Halford  became  responsible  for  the 
designs  of  the  Rapier  and  Sabre  series  of 
engines  for  the  Napier  Company.  The 
Rapier,  a  16-cy Under  engine  of  400  horse- 
power, was  fitted  to  a  number  of  aircraft, 
including  the  Mayo  Composite,  the  first 
aeroplane  to  fly  the  Atlantic  from  east  to 
west  carrying  a  commercial  load.  The 
Sabre,  with  24  cylinders,  at  the  time  the 
most  powerful  piston  engine  in  operation 
in  the  air,  developing  3,000  horsepower, 
was  fitted  to  the  Hawker  aeroplane. 

In  1941,  at  the  request  of  the  British 
Government,  Halford  entered  the  field  of 
jet  propulsion.  He  followed  closely  (Sir) 
Frank  Whittle's  pioneer  work  and  de- 
signed the  Goblin,  with  a  3,000-lb.  thrust, 
for  the  Gloster  Meteor  aeroplane,  the  first 
British  jet  propulsion  aircraft  to  fly. 
A  more  powerful  version  of  the  Goblin, 
the  Ghost,  was  designed  in  1945  and  fitted 
to  the  Vampire  aeroplane  to  fly  at  the 
then  record  height  of  59,446  feet  in  1948. 
From  1941  Halford  also  served  on  the 
then  highly  secret  committee  advising  the 
ministers  of  aircraft  production  on  engine, 
aircraft,  and  other  aviation  problems. 

In  1935  Halford  had  become  the 
technical  director  of  the  Napier  engine 
company,  a  position  he  relinquished  in 
1944  to  become  the  technical  director  of 
the  newly  formed  de  Havilland  Engine 
Company.  In  the  following  year  he  was 
appointed  a  director  of  the  de  Havilland 
Aircraft  Company. 

The  end  of  the  war  saw  Halford  leading 
a  powerful  engine  design  team.  He  never 
hesitated  to  give  those  he  led  full  credit 
for  their  share  in  engine  developments  and 
his  team  led  the  way  in  developing  the 
ever-increasing  jet  propulsion  power.  In 
1953  appeared  the  Gyron,  giving  a  thrust 
of  15,000  lb.,  doubled  a  few  years  later. 
Much  of  the  development  carried  out  after 
his  death  was  due  to  his  guidance  for 
supersonic    aircraft    flight.    The    Sprite 


450 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


HaD 


i  rocket  motor  and  the  larger  Spectre  only 
I  became  known  a  few  days  after  his  death, 
^        when  the  veil  of  secrecy  was  raised. 

In  1927  Halford  was  elected  a  fellow  of 
the  Royal  Aeronautical  Society;  he  was 
its  president  in  1951-2,  and  in  addition  to 
its  silver  medal,  received  its  gold  medal  in 
1950.  In  1946  he  read  a  paper  on  jet  pro- 
pulsion before  the  Royal  Society  of  Arts, 
for  which  he  was  awarded  its  silver  medal. 
In  1948  he  was  appointed  C.B.E. 

In  1920  he  married  Monica  Bevan,  of 
Hove,  by  whom  he  had  a  daughter.  The 
marriage  was  dissolved  in  1932.  In  1939 
he  married  Marjorie  Moore.  He  died  16 
April  1955  at  his  home  at  Northwood, 
Middlesex. 

[Journal  of  the  Royal  Aeronautical  Society, 
April  1959;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  J.  Laurence  Pritchard. 

HALIFAX,  first  Earl  of  (1881-1959), 
statesman.  [See  Wood,  Edward 
Frederick  Lindley.I 


HALL,  Sir  ARTHUR  JOHN  (1866- 
1951),  physician,  was  born  in  Sheffield  27 
July  1866,  the  second  son  and  youngest  of 
the  three  children  of  Jghn  Hall,  a  well- 
known  medical  practitioner  in  Sheffield, 
who  had  married  his  cousin,  Elizabeth 
Hall.  From  Rugby,  Hall  was  first  sent  to 
the  Sheffield  Medical  School  which  was 
then  a  primitive  place  where  some  unpaid 
practitioners  in  their  spare  time  gave  dull 
and  formal  instruction  in  anatomy  to 
a  few  students  apprenticed  to  doctors  in 
the  town.  Fortunately  Hall's  father  was 
persuaded  to  send  him  to  Caius  College, 
Cambridge,  and  St.  Bartholomew's.  After 
qualifying  in  1889  Hall  spent  a  year 
assisting  his  father,  but  the  practice  was 
small  and  exclusive  and  finding  himself 
inadequately  employed  he  decided  on  a 
career  as  a  physician.  In  1890  therefore 
he  became  assistant  physician  to  the 
Sheffield  Royal  Hospital  (then  called 
the  Public  Hospital  and  Dispensary)  on 
the  staff  of  which  he  spent  the  rest  of  his 
professional  life. 

Meanwhile  the  Medical  School,  having 
surprisingly  survived  its  worst  period,  had 
been  transferred  to  new  premises  close  to 
Firth  College  and  the  Technical  School. 
Hall  was  appointed  assistant  demonstra- 
tor in  physiology  there  in  1889  and  from 
that  time  onwards  his  great  resources  of 
energy,  intellect,  personality,  and  tact 
were  largely  devoted  to  building  up  the 
School,  first  so  that  it  was  a  worthy  place 


to  amalgamate  with  Firth  College  and  the 
Technical  School  into  what  became  in 
1897  the  University  College  of  Sheffield, 
and  later  so  that  it  might  grow  into  the 
faculty  of  medicine  in  the  university  of 
Sheffield  on  its  formation  in  1905.  Fifteen 
years  later  the  faculty  was  to  be  regarded 
as  one  of  the  most  advanced  in  Britain. 

Although  it  is  unquestionably  right  to 
look  upon  Hall  as  the  very  creator  of  the 
modern  school  of  medicine  in  Sheffield,  he 
had  from  the  first  the  wisdom  to  realize 
that  this  was  not  a  job  for  one  man  work- 
ing single-handed,  and  it  was  his  great 
endeavour  to  bring  to  Sheffield  some  of 
the  most  talented  men  he  could  find: 
among  the  first  was  Christopher  (later 
Viscount)  Addison  [q.v.] ;  a  later  appoint- 
ment was  (Sir)  Edward  Mellanby  [q.v.]. 

For  a  time  Hall  himself  was  responsible 
for  the  teaching  in  physiology,  first  as 
demonstrator  and  later  as  professor,  in 
a  part-time  capacity,  but  as  soon  as  the 
school  was  ready  and  able  to  finance  a  full- 
time  chair  Hall  resigned  to  allow  such  an 
appointment  to  be  made.  He  then  turned 
his  interests  to  pathology  where  he  was 
first  demonstrator  and  curator  of  the 
museum  (which  was  largely  of  his  own 
creation)  and  later  professor  in  1899, 
resigning  in  1905  when  a  full-time  chair  of 
pathology  was  established. 

Until  his  retirement  in  1931,  Hall  was 
in  consulting  practice  as  a  physician,  on 
the  medical  staff  of  the  Sheffield  Royal 
Hospital,  and  actively  teaching  clinical 
medicine  in  the  wards.  He  was  dean  of  the 
medical  faculty  from  1911  to  1916  and 
professor  of  medicine  from  1915  to  1931. 
Physicians  and  teachers  of  medicine  of  his 
day  were  not  expected  to  make  their  name 
in  research,  but  Hall's  careful  and  meticu- 
lous observations  of  the  two  epidemics  of 
encephalitis  lethargica  which  visited  Shef- 
field in  1917-18  and  in  1924  contributed 
very  greatly  to  knowledge  of  this  disease  in 
which  he  became  an  authority  of  inter- 
national standing.  His  book  on  the  sub- 
ject was  published  in  1924. 

Hall  was  of  commanding  appearance 
and  personality,  a  man  to  whom  one 
would  listen  in  any  company,  who  took 
himself  seriously  but  was  saved  from  being 
pompous  by  a  brilliant  wit  and  a  delight- 
ful sense  of  humour.  Although  he  had  his 
critics  he  nevertheless  had  the  talent  of 
bringing  men  together  and  getting  them 
to  work  smoothly  with  one  another.  He 
was  a  good  physician  and  a  good  teacher 
at  a  time  when  both  were  rare,  but  his 
great  talent  was  in  administration.  To  his 


451 


Hall 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


students  he  was  friendly  and  approach- 
able, but  his  nickname  of  'Lord  Arthur' 
showed  that  he  had  their  respect  as  well 
as  their  affection  and  that,  although 
approachable,  he  was  not  to  be  treated  as 
an  equal.  As  a  young  man  he  had  con- 
siderable gifts  as  an  actor  and  traces  of 
this  remained  discernible  throughout  his 
life;  but  his  main  interest  outside  the 
medical  school  was  music.  He  was  a 
talented  cellist  who  regularly  played 
chamber  music  and  it  was  one  of  his  great 
regrets  that  after  his  retirement,  when  he 
would  have  had  more  time,  he  was  unable 
to  enjoy  it  because  of  increasing  deafness. 

Hall  was  elected  F.R.C.P.  in  1904  and 
served  the  College  as  examiner,  councillor, 
Lumleian  lecturer,  and  finally  as  senior 
censor.  He  was  examiner  in  medicine  to 
Oxford  and  Cambridge  and  several  other 
universities  and  was  a  member  of  the 
Radium  Commission  and  of  the  Industrial 
Health  Research  Board.  During  the  war 
of  1914-18  he  was  in  charge  of  the  medical 
division  of  the  3rd  Northern  General 
Hospital.  He  received  an  honorary  D.Sc. 
from  Sheffield  in  1928,  was  president  of 
the  Association  of  Physicians  of  Great 
Britain  and  Ireland  in  1931,  and  was 
knighted  in  1935.  His  portrait  by  Ernest 
Moore  hangs  in  the  Firth  Hall  of  Sheffield 
University,  with  a  copy  at  the  Sheffield 
Royal  Hospital. 

In  1900  Hall  married  Hilda  Mary  (died 
1945),  daughter  of  Charles  E.  Vickers, 
solicitor,  of  Sheffield ;  they  had  two  sons 
and  one  daughter.  He  died  in  Sheffield 
8  January  1951. 

[Lancet,  13  January  1951 ;  British  Medical 
Journal,  20  January  1951 ;  Sheffield  Univer- 
sity records ;  personal  knowledge.]        Platt. 

HAMBOURG,  MARK  (1879-1960), 
pianist,  was  born  in  Boguchar,  Southern 
Russia,  31  May  1879,  the  eldest  son  of 
Michael  Hambourg,  a  professor  of  music 
and  head  of  the  conservatoire  at  Voronezh, 
by  his  wife,  Catherine  Herzovna,  a  pro- 
fessional singer.  Two  younger  sons  were 
musical:  Jan,  a  violinist,  and  Boris, 
a  cellist.  Mark  received  his  first  piano 
lessons  from  a  devoted  aunt ;  when  on  his 
fifth  birthday  he  played  some  of  Czerny's 
exercises  his  father  was  so  delighted  he 
decided  that  the  boy's  musical  education 
should  begin  in  a  systematic  way.  A  public 
appearance  at  the  age  of  seven  so  im- 
pressed his  father  that  he  felt  his  son 
should  have  the  best  tuition  available; 
he  therefore  obtained  an  appointment 
as  a  professor  at  Moscow  Conservatoire, 


uprooting  himself  and  his  family  from 
the  provincial  surroundings  of  Voronezhk 
Mark  proved  such  a  remarkable  pupil  that 
he  learned  the  whole  of  Bach's  Forty- 
eight  Preludes  and  Fugues  before  the  age 
of  eight  and  almost  immediately  after,  in 
1888,  he  appeared  with  the  Philharmonic 
Society  of  Moscow  in  the  Hall  of  the 
Great  Nobles  and  at  another  concert 
before  the  Grand  Duke  Constantine. 

Persuaded  to  try  his  fortunes  in  Eng- 
land, and  being  by  nature  an  adventurer. 
Professor  Hambourg  arrived  in  London 
with  Mark  in  1889.  Unable  to  speak  a 
word  of  English,  father  and  son  had  some 
initial  struggles,  but  eventually  a  Russian 
friend  introduced  them  to  Daniel  Mayer, 
a  concert  agent  who  had  just  presented 
Paderewski  to  the  British  public.  Paderew- 
ski  was  so  eulogistic  of  Mark's  playing 
that  Mayer  decided  to  present  him  as  an 
infant  prodigy.  His  debut  persuaded 
another  agent,  Nathaniel  Vert,  to  offer 
him  a  three-year  contract.  After  the  first 
of  his  recitals,  at  the  age  of  eleven,  he  was 
booked  to  appear  in  almost  every  pro- 
vincial concert  hall.  The  professor  now 
sent  for  his  family  to  join  him  in  London 
and  as  he  had  established  himself  as  a 
teacher  of  the  piano  it  was  Mark's  mother 
who  chaperoned  her  son  on  his  tours. 
Mark  played  to  many  famous  people  at 
this  time,  including  Hans  Richter  who  was 
particularly  impressed.  Eventually  with 
the  generous  financial  help  of  Paderewski 
and  Felix  Moscheles,  a  son  of  Ignatz 
Moscheles,  a  celebrated  pianist,  Mark  was 
sent  to  Vienna  at  the  age  of  twelve  and 
a  half,  for  a  three  years'  period  of  study 
under  Professor  Leschetizky.  One  of 
Mark's  fellow  students  was  Artur  Schna- 
bel,  who  said  that  it  was  always  Mark 
whom  the  master  selected  to  demonstrate 
to  the  class  in  the  weekly  exhibitions. 
Schnabel  envied  him  as  the  master's 
favourite  pupil  but  admitted  his  rival's 
precocity. 

At  the  age  of  fifteen  Hambourg  played 
at  a  Berlin  Philharmonic  concert  con- 
ducted by  Weingartner.  In  1894  he 
received  his  first  paid  engagement  in 
Vienna  and  won  the  Liszt  scholarship  of 
five  hundred  marks ;  in  1895  he  made  his 
debut  as  a  full-grown  pianist  at  the 
Vienna  Philharmonic  Symphony  Concert 
under  the  conductorship  of  Richter,  who 
had  continued  to  be  a  great  friend.  Other 
engagements  followed  and  he  returned  to 
London  to  embark,  at  the  age  of  sixteen, 
on  the  first  of  his  many  world  tours.  He 
made  his  American  debut  with  the  Boston 


452 


D.N^.  1951-1960 


Hardie 


Symphony  Orchestra  and  then  toured  the 
United  States  to  California.  When  Ham- 
bourg,  who  had  been  naturaUzed  in  1896, 
arrived  back  in  England  the  South 
African  war  was  at  its  height  and  the 
musical  world  somewhat  disorganized/He 
deputized  for  Busoni,  with  whom  he  was 
on  terms  of  intimate  friendship ;  he  gave 
a  series  of  concerts  with  Ysaye;  and 
played  pianoforte  concertos  at  the  newly 
organized  Queen's  Hall  promenade  con- 
certs with  (Sir)  Henry  Wood  [q.v.]  then  at 
the  outset  of  his  career. 

Tour  after  tour  followed:  the  United 
States,  Australia,  New  Zealand,  South 
Africa,  the  Middle  East,  Poland,  Russia, 
engagements  in  Brussels,  Berlin,  and 
Salzburg,  where  he  played  with  Jacques 
Thibaud.  Hambourg's  concert  activities 
easily  out-distanced  in  number  those  of 
any  of  his  contemporary  colleagues. 

In  1909  Hambourg  made  the  first  of 
a  long  series  of  gramophone  records  for 
the  Gramophone  Company,  Ltd.  (H.M.V.). 
The  Moonlight  Sonata  was  the  first  title 
issued  and  might  almost  be  called  his 
signature  tune  since  it  was  a  best-seller 
and  usually  found  a  place  in  the  hundreds 
of  recitals  he  gave  up  and  down  the 
country.  This  and  a  certain  likeness  to  the 
Beethoven  of  our  imagination,  coupled 
with  a  platform  manner  which  endeared 
him  to  the  masses,  made  him  one  of 
England's  most  popular  recitalists. 

Although  Mark  Hambourg  had  a  life- 
long love  of  chamber  music,  which  he 
played  with  his  brothers  in  his  earlier  days, 
and  in  middle  age  was  a  concerto  player 
of  authority  and  distinction,  he  will  be 
remembered  chiefly  as  a  recitalist,  and  in 
that  capacity  he  appealed  to  a  wider  sec- 
tion of  the  public  than  did  anyone  of  his 
own  day  and  age.  Short  in  height,  with 
a  leonine  head,  a  powerful  frame,  a  pheno- 
menal technique,  and  a  genial  personality, 
he  commanded  the  attention  of  any 
audience.  As  a  pianist  he  had  the  power  to 
astonish ;  as  a  man  his  dynamic  and 
lovable  personaHty  won  for  him  the  ad- 
miration of  a  wide  section  of  the  general 
public.  He  was  the  last  of  a  long  line  of 
virtuoso  pianists  who  might  not  so  readily 
have  pleased  the  pundits  of  a  later  age 
more  concerned  with  the  literal  treatment 
of  music  than  with  its  individual  and 
personal  artistic  conception.  He  played 
for  the  last  time  in  public  on  2  March  1955 
for  a  Henry  Wood  birthday  memorial 
concert  at  the  Royal  Albert  Hall,  when  he 
performed  Tchaikowsky's  Piano  Concerto 
No.  1.  His  highly  individualistic  playing 


in  the  grand  virtuoso  manner  was  both  a 
thrilling  and  an  affectionate  memory. 

Hambourg's  musical  publications  in- 
clude 'Variations  on  a  Theme  by  Paganini', 
'Volkslied',  and  'Espieglerie'. 

In  1907  he  married  Dorothea  Frances, 
daughter  of  Sir  K.  A.  (later  Lord)  Muir 
Mackenzie,  by  whom  he  had  four  daugh- 
ters, one  of  whom,  Michal,  became  an 
accomplished  pianist.  Mark  Hambourg 
died  in  Cambridge  26  August  1960. 

A  portrait  by  Sir  Oswald  Birley  is  in  the 
possession  of  the  family. 

[Mark  Hambourg,  From  Piano  to  Forte, 
1931,  and  The  Eighth  Octave,  1951;  F.  W. 
Gaisberg,  Music  on  Record,  1946;  personal 
knowledge.]  George  Baker. 

HAMIDULLAH,  Nawab  of  Bhopal 
(1894-1960).  [See  Bhopal.] 

HARDIE,  MARTIN  (1875-1952),  artist 
and  museum  official,  was  born  in  London 
15  December  1875,  the  son  of  James 
Hardie,  of  East  Linton,  near  Dunbar,  by 
his  wife,  Marion  Pettie.  There  was  a  strong 
artistic  tradition  in  the  family :  two  of  his 
uncles  were  professional  artists:  Charles 
Martin  Hardie  and  John  Pettie  [q.v.],  and 
a  great-uncle  was  Robert  Frier,  the  well- 
known  Edinburgh  drawing  master.  James 
Hardie  was  the  founder  and  headmaster 
of  Linton  House,  a  private  preparatory 
school  in  London,  whence  his  son  passed 
first  to  St.  Paul's  School  as  a  foundationer, 
then  as  an  exhibitioner  to  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge.  He  obtained  a  second  class  in 
part  i  of  the  classical  tripos  in  1898  and 
was  successful  in  obtaining  a  post  in  the 
library  of  the  Victoria  and  Albert  Museum ; 
in  which  institution  he  remained  until  his 
retirement  in  1935. 

Housed  in  the  same  building  was  the 
Royal  College  of  Art,  and  at  the  head  of 
the  engraving  department  was  (Sir)  Frank 
Short  (whose  notice  Hardie  subsequently 
contributed  to  this  Dictionary).  Studying 
under  Short  in  his  spare  time,  Hardie 
acquired  the  art  of  etching  and  soon 
became  an  accomplished  craftsman.  He 
also  perfected  his  technique  of  water- 
colour  painting,  and  these  two  modes  of 
expression  were  practised  by  him  with 
enormous  assiduity  and  increasing  success 
for  the  rest  of  his  life.  He  began  to  exhibit 
at  the  Royal  Academy  in  1908  and  con- 
tinued to  do  so  regularly.  His  work  was 
also  seen  at  the  Royal  Society  of  Painter- 
Etchers  and  at  the  Royal  Institute  of 
Painters  in  Water  Colours.  Both  these 
bodies  elected  him  a  member.  He  became 


453 


Hardie 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


A.R.E.  in  1907  and  R.E.  and  member  of 
council  in  1920.  He  was  also  for  many 
years  its  active  honorary  secretary  as  well 
as  honorary  secretary  of  its  subsidiary 
body  the  Print  Collectors'  Club. 

After  war  service  in  which  he  reached 
the  rank  of  captain,  Hardie  returned  to  the 
museum  and  was  put  in  charge,  as  keeper 
from  1921,  of  the  newly  created  depart- 
ment of  engraving,  illustration,  and 
design,  and  soon  began  to  expand  its  scope 
to  include  subjects  like  the  art  of  the 
theatre.  By  the  end  of  his  keepership  it 
had  become  one  of  the  most  important 
collections  of  prints  and  drawings  in  the 
world.  Hardie  was  also  in  charge  of  the 
department  of  paintings. 

His  main  interest,  however,  was  in 
water-colour  and  etching  and  his  own 
skill  in  both  gave  him  a  special  advantage 
in  writing  about  the  work  of  other  artists 
in  these  media.  In  addition  to  editing 
many  museum  and  other  publications  he 
catalogued  the  work  of  W.  Lee-Hankey, 
James  McBey  [q.v.],  and  Short,  and  pub- 
lished works  on  these  artists  as  well  as  on 
John  Pettie  (1908),  Frederick  Goulding 
(1910),  Samuel  Palmer  (1928),  Peter  De 
Wint  (1929),  J.  S.  Sargent  (1930),  and 
Charles  Meryon  (1931).  Perhaps  his  major 
achievement  was  the  rediscovery  of 
Samuel  Palmer  [q.v.],  an  exhibition  of 
whose  work  was  staged  in  Hardie's  de- 
partment and  did  much  to  start  the 
enthusiasm  for  Palmer  which  was  later 
taken  for  granted. 

Meanwhile  Hardie  continued  his  own 
work  as  an  artist,  publishing  in  all  189 
prints.  He  painted  in  many  parts  of 
western  Europe  and  in  Morocco  in  the 
best  tradition  of  the  British  School  but 
with  wide  varieties  of  style ;  but  his  real 
preference  was  for  quiet  water-meadows 
and  estuaries,  the  becalmed  vessel, 
evanescent  effects  of  weather,  and  the 
fleeting  shapes  of  clouds.  A  number  of 
one-man  shows  were  held  in  his  lifetime 
and  his  work  is  represented  in  many  public 
collections,  notably  that  of  the  Ash- 
molean  Museum  at  Oxford,  which  pos- 
sesses almost  all  his  prints  and  twenty-five 
of  his  sketch-books. 

Among  Hardie's  other  publications 
were  English  Coloured  Books  (1906); 
Engraving  and  Etching  (translated  from 
the  German  of  Dr.  Lippmann,  1906); 
Boulogne:  A  Base  in  France  (1918);  Our 
Italian  Front  (with  text  by  H.  Warner 
Allen,  1920);  War  Posters  (with  A.  K. 
Sabin,  1920);  and  The  British  School  of 
Etching  (1921).  His  magnum  opus,  almost 


completed  at  the  time  of  his  death,  was 
a  history  of  British  water-colour  painting 
of  which  the  three  volumes  were  published 
in  1966-8. 

On  his  retirement  Hardie  was  appointed 
C.B.E.  He  was  active  in  the  local  affairs  of 
Tonbridge  and  served  as  an  air-raid  war- 
den in  the  war  of  1939-45.  He  became 
honorary  R.W.S.  in  1943  and  vice- 
president  of  the  Artists'  General  Benevo- 
lent Institution  in  1946,  having  previously 
served  as  secretary  and  treasurer.  He  was 
also  vice-president  of  the  Imperial  Arts 
League. 

Hardie  married  in  1903  Agnes  Made- 
line, daughter  of  Admiral  John  Robert 
Ebenezer  Pattisson,  and  had  three  sons. 
He  died  at  Tonbridge  20  January  1952. 

Hardie's  portrait  was  both  painted  and 
etched  by  James  McBey ;  the  portrait  is  in 
Aberdeen  Art  Gallery.  He  is  also  depicted 
in  a  cartoon  by  Sir  Max  Beerbohm, 
together  with  Gordon  Craig  and  his  son, 
now  in  the  Victoria  and  Albert  Musemn. 

[The  Times,  22  January  1952;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

James  Laver. 

HARDING,  Sir  EDWARD  JOHN  (1880- 
1954),  civil  servant,  was  born  in  St. 
Osyth,  Clacton-on-Sea,  22  March  1880, 
the  son  of  the  Rev.  John  Harding,  rector 
of  W^eeley,  Essex,  and  his  wife,  Laura, 
daughter  of  William  Hewlett.  He  was 
educated  at  Dulwich  College  and  at  Hert- 
ford College,  Oxford,  of  which  he  was 
a  scholar  and,  later,  an  honorary  fellow. 
He  took  a  prominent  part  in  the  life  of  the 
college,  rowed  in  the  college  eight,  and 
gained  a  first  in  honour  moderations 
(1901)  and  a  second  in  liter ae  humaniores 
(1903).  He  took  a  high  place  in  the  Civil 
Service  examination  of  1903  and  entered 
the  Board  of  Trade,  transferring  to  the 
Colonial  Office  in  1904  where  he  quickly 
made  his  mark.  In  1912  he  became  assis- 
tant private  secretary  to  Lewis  (later  Vis- 
count) Harcourt  [q.v.],  then  secretary  of 
state.  In  the  same  year  he  was  called  to 
the  bar  by  Lincoln's  Inn.  From  1912  to 
1917  Harding  was  secretary  of  the 
dominions  royal  commission  which  was 
established  as  a  result  of  a  resolution  of 
the  Imperial  Conference  of  1911  to  in- 
vestigate the  resources  of  the  Empire.  The 
commission  produced  a  voluminous  final 
report  in  the  drafting  of  which  Harding 
took  his  full  share,  and  the  first-hand 
knowledge  which  he  gained  in  visiting  the 
various  dominions  later  stood  him  in  good 
stead.  He  was  appointed  C.M.G.  in  1917 


454 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Harding,  G.  C. 


and  made  a  junior  assistant  secretary  of 
the  Imperial  War  Conference;  he  held 
a  similar  position  in  the  succeeding  con- 
ference of  1918.  After  this  conference  he 
was  given  permission  to  enlist  and  ob- 
tained a  commission  in  the  Royal  Garri- 
son Artillery.  In  1916  he  had  been 
promoted  to  the  rank  of  first  class  clerk ; 
in  1920  he  was  appointed  a  principal ;  and 
in  1921  an  assistant  secretary. 

After  the  war  Harding  was  engaged 
almost  entirely  on  political  and  constitu- 
tional work.  He  was  deputy  secretary  to 
the  Imperial  Conference  of  1923  and  to 
the  historic  Imperial  Conference  of  1926. 
In  1925  he  had  been  appointed  assistant 
under-secretary  of  state  in  the  newly 
constituted  Dominions  Office  and  with 
this  appointment  he  held  that  of  registrar 
of  the  Order  of  St.  Michael  and  St.  George. 
Throughout  the  conference  of  1926  he  was 
the  right-hand  man  of  L.  S.  Amery  [q.v.], 
then  secretary  of  state,  and  was  closely 
concerned  with  all  the  discussions  leading 
to  the  famous  Balfour  declaration  on 
dominion  status.  He  was  appointed  C.B. 
in  1926  and  in  1928  promoted  K.C.M.G. 

In  1930  Harding  became  permanent 
under-secretary  of  state  for  dominion 
affairs.  His  ten-year  tenure  of  this  office 
was  perhaps  the  most  distinguished  period 
of  his  career.  As  the  trusted  adviser  of 
successive  secretaries  of  state  he  took  a 
vital  part  in  the  discussions  culminating  in 
the  Statute  of  Westminster  of  1931  and  in 
the  important  consultations  with  the 
dominions  on  foreign  affairs  and  economic 
issues  during  the  troublous  years  which 
preceded  the  war.  His  aim  and  purpose, 
indeed  his  inspiration,  was  the  attain- 
ment of  the  unity  of  the  Commonwealth 
combined  with  recognition  of  the  indepen- 
dent and  international  status  of  the 
dominions.  No  state  servant  played 
a  greater  part  in  bringing  about  these 
epoch-making  and  far-reaching  develop- 
ments which  proved  an  essential  contribu- 
tion to  achieving  Commonwealth  unity 
and  co-operation  in  the  war  which  fol- 
lowed. He  was  appointed  K.C.B.  in  1935 
and  G.C.M.G.  in  1939. 

In  January  1940  Harding  became  high 
commissioner  for  the  United  Kingdom  in 
South  Africa.  His  tenure  of  office  covered 
some  of  the  darkest  days  of  the  war  when 
Britain's  resources  were  strained  to  the 
utmost.  It  was  a  difficult  time  politically 
in  South  Africa,  and  the  close  relations 
which  Harding  was  able  to  establish  with 
J.  C.  Smuts  [q.v.],  the  prime  minister,  and 
with  his  ministers  were  of  the  utmost  value 


in  furthering  co-operative  measures.  As 
high  commissioner  also  for  Basutoland, 
the  Bechuanaland  Protectorate,and  Swazi- 
land he  closely  supervised  the  affairs  of 
these  territories  and  it  was  in  his  term  of 
office  that  the  recruitment  there  of  the 
Pioneer  Corps  for  service  in  the  field  was 
successfully  undertaken. 

Towards  the  end  of  1940  Harding  had 
a  severe  breakdown  in  health  which  com- 
pelled him  to  retire  from  the  Service  in 
February  of  the  following  year.  In  1942  he 
was  sufficiently  recovered  to  be  able  to 
represent  the  high  commissioner  in  Cape 
Town  when  the  latter  was  resident  in 
Pretoria.  This  temporary  service  con- 
cluded in  1944. 

As  a  civil  servant  Harding  combined 
tenacity  of  purpose  with  a  quiet  and  effec- 
tive manner.  He  never  spared  himself  and 
was  something  of  a  perfectionist  in  the 
great  importance  which  he  attached  to  the 
quality  of  the  work  which  passed  through 
his  hands  and  to  accuracy  and  clarity  in 
thought  and  expression.  Though  ruled  by 
his  head,  he  had  a  generous  and  kindly 
side  to  his  character  which  he  showed  by 
many  acts  of  personal  kindness. 

In  addition  to  his  official  appointments 
he  was  for  some  years  a  governor  of  Dul- 
wich  College,  a  member  of  the  Royal 
Commission  for  the  1851  Exhibition,  and 
a  member  of  the  council  of  the  Royal 
College  of  Music. 

In  1929  Harding  married  Marjorie, 
daughter  of  the  late  Henry  Huxley,  of 
Boar's  Hill,  Oxford ;  they  had  no  children. 
She  was  an  ideal  wife  and  helpmate  and 
her  sudden  death  in  1950  was  a  terrible 
blow  to  him.  He  died  at  Guildford  4 
October  1954. 

[The  Times,  5  October  1954;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Eric  Machtig. 

HARDING,       GILBERT       CHARLES 

(1907-1960),  broadcasting  and  television 
star,  was  born  at  Hereford  5  June  1907. 
His  parents,  Gilbert  and  May  Harding, 
were  workhouse  officials,  and  he  used  to 
boast  that  he  was  born  in  a  workhouse.  He 
was  educated  at  the  Royal  Orphanage, 
Wolverhampton,  and  Queens'  College, 
Cambridge,  where  he  obtained  third 
classes  in  both  parts  of  the  historical 
tripos  (1927-8).  A  man  of  very  deep 
rehgious  feeling  he  became  a  strong  Anglo- 
Catholic  at  Cambridge  and  went  to  Mir- 
field  to  train  for  the  Anglican  priesthood. 
He  left  when  in  1929  he  became  a  convert 
to,  and  a  devoted  member  of,  the  Roman 


455 


Hai^ding,  G.  C. 


D.N.B.  1051-1060 


Church,  but  he  remained  sympathetic  to 
Anglicanism  from  the  emotional  point  of 
view  and  never  spoke  of  Mirfield  with 
anything  but  the  warmest  affection  and 
admiration.  After  some  years  as  a  school- 
master, and  a  professorship  in  English 
at  St.  Francis  Xavier  University,  Antigon- 
ish,  in  Nova  Scotia,  he  joined  the  Bradford 
city  police.  An  accident  forced  his  re- 
tirement and  he  returned  to  teaching 
in  Cyprus  where  he  also  acted  as  The 
Times  correspondent.  He  took  a  very 
strong  dislike  to  British  rule  in  Cyprus  and 
was  regarded  with  a  great  deal  of  hostility 
by  the  administration.  Returning  to 
London,  he  read  for  the  bar  at  Gray's  Inn, 
but  when  war  broke  out  in  1939  he  joined 
the  B.B.C.  monitoring  service.  His  health 
prevented  him  from  serving  actively  in 
a  war  to  which  he  was  very  much  dedi- 
cated because  of  his  detestation  of 
fascism.  After  two  years  in  the  outside 
broadcasting  department  he  was  sent  in 
1944  to  Canada  where  he  carried  out 
extremely  useful  propaganda  work.  Back 
once  more  in  London  in  1947  he  got  his 
first  personal  show  in  broadcasting  as 
quiz  master  in  'Round  Britain  Quiz'. 

From  that  point  on,  in  radio  pro- 
grammes such  as  the  Brains  Trust  and 
'Twenty  Questions',  and  the  television 
'What's  My  Line  ?',  Harding  became 
a  great  popular  figure,  especially  of  tele- 
vision in  which  he  was  probably  the 
best-known  performer  in  the  country.  He 
was  a  man  under  great  emotional  pressure. 
He  disliked  'the  Establishment'  and  con- 
tinually involved  himself  in  rows  with 
authority.  He  was  often  the  victim  of 
alleged  martyrs,  many  of  whom  were 
bogus.  The  apparent  rudeness,  which 
brought  him  much  notoriety,  was  not 
an  act,  as  was  widely  believed;  he  never 
suffered  fools  gladly,  and  he  'loved  justice 
and  hated  iniquity'  in  no  uncertain  terms. 
'I  just  behave  as  I  am  and  talk  as  I  think, 
which  for  some  reason  appears  to  be 
remarkably  novel',  was  his  comment.  It 
was  for  this  refreshing  novelty  and  his 
genuine  humanity  that  the  public  loved 
him ;  yet  he  thought  it  quite  absurd  that 
he  should  be  so  highly  paid  for  being 
himself  and,  being  fully  aware  of  his 
difficulties  of  character  and  temperament, 
wanted  desperately  to  be  somebody  dif- 
ferent and  better.  His  public  perfor- 
mances often  concealed  the  fact  that  he 
was  in  many  ways  a  learned  man.  He  had 
a  wonderful  memory  for  English  poetry, 
Which  he  loved.  He  was  frustrated, 
amongst  other  things,  by  what  he  felt  to 


be  the  waste  of  his  talents,  and  looked 
upon  himself  as  a  don  manqu^.  In  this  he 
was  almost  certainly  deceived  but  quite 
sincere.  Despite  the  frustrations,  he  wa^ 
candidly  enough  capable  of  enjoying, 
somewhat  to  excess,  the  luxuries  which 
his  large  income  made  possible.  He  had 
known  very  hard  times  and  did  not  pre- 
tend not  to  enjoy  the  easier  times.  He  was 
lavishly  generous  of  time  and  money,  and 
the  people  who  knew  him  best  liked  him 
most.  His  political  views  were  always  very 
much  to  the  Left,  and  he  continued  in  his 
prosperity  to  believe  in  the  Labour  Party 
and  in  the  need  for  more  equal  distribu- 
tion of  wealth. 

For  most  of  his  adult  life  Harding  was  in 
bad  health,  above  all  from  asthma.  He 
expected  death  to  come  at  any  moment 
and  in  fact  dropped  dead  in  Portland 
Place,  16  November  1960,  as  he  was  leav- 
ing the  studio  after  a  performance  in 
'Round  Britain  Quiz'.  'But  I  do  wish  that 
the  future  were  over',  had  been  the  con- 
cluding words  of  his  autobiography  Along 
My  Line  (1953),  a  book  which  does  not  do 
justice  to  his  remarkable  intelligence  and 
warmth  of  character.  He  never  married. 
The  Requiem  Mass  in  Westminster 
Cathedral,  at  which  Cardinal  Godfrey 
presided,  was  crowded. 

A  portrait  by  Michael  Noakes  was 
acquired  by  Hereford  Art  Gallery. 

[The  Times,  17  November  1960 ;  Guardian^ 
18  November  1960 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

D.  W.  Brogan. 

HARDINGE,  ALEXANDER  HENRY 
LOUIS,  second  Baron  Hardinge  of 
Penshurst  (1894-1960),  private  secre- 
tary to  King  Edward  VIII  and  King 
George  VI,  was  born  in  Paris  17  May  1894, 
the  younger  son  of  Charles  Hardinge,  later 
first  Baron  Hardinge  of  Penshurst  [q.v.]. 
He  was  educated  at  Harrow  and  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge,  and  in  1915-16  was 
aide-de-camp  to  his  father,  then  viceroy  of 
India,  who  had  recently  sustained  the  loss 
of  both  his  wife  and  his  elder  son.  He 
served  in  France  and  Belgium  in  1916-18 
with  the  Grenadier  Guards,  was  wounded 
and  awarded  the  M.C.,  and  in  1919-20  was 
adjutant  of  his  regiment. 

In  1920  Hardinge  became  assistant 
private  secretary  to  King  George  V,  being 
trained  in  his  duties  by  Lord  Stamford- 
ham  and  Clive  (later  Lord)  Wigram 
[qq.v.].  In  1985  he  became  in  addition 
assistant  keeper  of  the  privy  purse.  In 
May  1936  King  Edward  VIII  appointed 
him  principal  private   secretary.   At  no 


456 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Harris,  H.W. 


time  did  the  new  King  take  hira  into  his 
confidence  over  his  personal  dilemma 
arising  from  his  wish  to  marry  Mrs.  Simp- 
son, but  as  early  as  August  Hardinge 
began  to  warn  him,  as  was  his  duty,  of  the 
constitutional  difficulties  he  was  likely  to 
encounter.  When  Mrs.  Simpson's  divorce 
proceedings  became  imminent  in  October, 
Hardinge  urged  Stanley  Baldwin,  the 
prime  minister,  to  see  the  King ;  and  later 
himself  saw  to  it  that  the  King  was  aware 
of  the  open  expression  of  opinion  coming 
in  from  overseas  whilst  the  press  in  this 
country  still  kept  silent. 

Finally,  on  13  November  1936,  after 
Baldwin  had  informed  Hardinge  that  he 
had  arranged  a  meeting  of  senior  ministers 
to  discuss  the  matter,  Hardinge  warned 
the  King  by  letter  that  the  silence  might 
break  at  any  moment;  informed  him  of 
the  meeting  which  was  to  take  place ;  and 
advised  him  that  in  the  event  of  the 
Government's  resigning  it  was  'hardly 
within  the  bounds  of  possibility'  that 
anyone  else  would  be  found  capable  of 
forming  a  government;  the  alternative 
would  be  a  general  election  'in  which 
Your  Majesty's  personal  affairs  would  be 
the  chief  issue — and  I  cannot  help  feeling 
that  even  those  who  would  sympathize 
with  Your  Majesty  as  an  individual  would 
deeply  resent  the  damage  which  would 
inevitably  be  done  to  the  Crown  .  .  .'.  He 
ended  by  begging  the  King  to  consider 
the  desirabihty  of  Mrs.  Simpson's  leaving 
the  country  without  delay. 

To  a  man  of  Hardinge's  courage  and 
integrity  and  with  his  wide  knowledge  and 
balanced  judgement  of  men  and  affairs 
there  could  be  no  doubt  where  his  duty 
lay  in  warning  the  King  of  the  gravity  of 
the  situation.  Nor  did  the  King  deny  this 
(although  he  later  claimed  to  having  been 
'shocked  and  angry') ;  but  while  continuing 
to  conduct  normal  business  with  Hardinge, 
thereafter  he  made  no  reference  to  the  sub- 
ject and  no  use  of  him  in  the  negotiations 
which  culminated  in  the  abdication. 

On  29  November  1955  Hardinge  in- 
cluded the  text  of  his  letter  to  the  King  in 
an  article  in  The  Times  in  which  he  refuted 
allegations  that  there  had  been  a  con- 
spiracy to  bring  about  the  abdication  and 
recalled  that  'the  one  thing  that  every- 
body was  trying  to  do  was  to  keep  the 
King  on  the  throne'.  Before  dispatching 
his  letter,  he  recorded,  he  had  shown  it  to 
Geoffrey  Dawson  [q.v.],  feeling  that  he 
'desperately  needed  an  outside  opinion  as 
to  the  general  wisdom  and  propriety'  of 
his  letter ;  and  he  had  shown  it  to  a  mem- 


ber of  Baldwin's  staff  so  that  the  prime 
minister  might  be  aware  of  its  contents. 
But  'both  in  conception  and  execution  the 
idea  was  entirely  my  own'. 

Exliausted  by  the  strain,  Hardinge 
went  on  three  months'  sick  leave  from 
which  he  returned  to  serve  King  George 
VI  with  unassuming  devotion  and  effi- 
ciency through  the  difficult  early  years 
of  his  reign,  then  of  the  war,  until  in  1943 
ill  health  compelled  his  resignation.  In  the 
following  year  he  succeeded  his  father  as 
second  baron.  He  had  been  appointed 
M.V.O.  (1925),  C.V.O.  (1931),  C.B.  (1934), 
G.C.V.O.  and  K.C.B.  (1937),  and  G.C.B. 
(1943),  and  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Coun- 
cil in  1936.  He  was  a  governor  of  St. 
Bartholomew's  Hospital  and  of  the  King's 
School,  Canterbury,  where  his  genuine  and 
lively  interest  in  the  boys  made  him  many 
friends. 

In  1921  Hardinge  married  Helen  Mary, 
only  daughter  of  the  late  Lord  Edward 
Cecil  and  his  wife,  who  in  that  year  became 
the  Viscountess  Milner  [qq.v.].  They  had 
two  daughters  and  one  son,  George  Ed- 
ward Charles  (born  1921),  who  succeeded 
as  third  baron  when  Hardinge  died  at 
Penshurst  29  May  1960. 

[John  W.  Wheeler-Bennett,  King  George  VI, 
1958  ;  Helen  Hardinge,  Loyal  to  Three  Kings, 
1967;  The  Times,  29  November  1955  and  30 
May  1960 ;  private  information.] 

,,  Helen  M.  Palmer. 

HARRIS,  (HENRY)  WILSON  (1883- 
1955),  journalist  and  author,  was  born  21 
September  1883  in  Plymouth,  the  elder 
son  of  Henry  Vigurs  Harris,  who  carried 
on  a  family  business  as  a  house-decorator, 
and  his  wife,  Fanny  Wilson.  The  theo- 
logian James  Rendel  Harris  [q.v.]  was 
his  uncle.  Harris's  parents  being  devout 
Quakers,  their  son  was  brought  up  in  that 
persuasion.  He  was  educated  at  Plymouth 
College  and  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge, 
where  he  was  a  foundation  scholar.  In 
1905  he  was  elected  president  of  the  Union 
and  obtained  a  second  class  in  part  i  of  the 
classical  tripos.  After  leaving  Cambridge 
he  contemplated  being  called  to  the  bar, 
and  also  thought  of  making  teaching  his 
career ;  but  in  1908  his  literary  gift  and  his 
sympathy  for  Liberal  principles  brought 
him  to  the  staff  of  the  Daily  News,  edited 
by  A.  G.  Gardiner  [q.v.].  He  served  on 
that  paper  successively  as  news  editor, 
leader-writer,  and  diplomatic  correspon- 
dent, his  work  in  the  last  capacity  estab- 
lishing his  reputation  as  a  writer  of  trust. 
On  behalf  of  the  Daily  News,  Harris 


457 


Harris,  H.  W. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


attended  many  international  gatherings 
from  the  peace  conference  in  1919  onwards, 
acquiring  a  considerable  knowledge  of 
foreign  affairs.  He  made  his  name  as  an 
author  with  President  Wilson:  His  Prob- 
lems and  His  Policy  (1917)  and  The  Peace 
in  the  Making  (1919).  From  the  start  he 
was  a  convinced  supp)orter  of  the  League 
of  Nations  movement  and  soon  decided 
to  devote  himself  to  the  cause  of  peace 
and  international  friendship.  In  1923  he 
joined  the  staff  of  the  League  of  Nations 
Union,  editing  its  journal  Headway,  and 
speaking  at  meetings  up  and  down  the 
country.  His  eager  advocacy  and  his  book 
What  the  League  of  Nations  Is  (1925)  did 
much  to  clarify  public  understanding  of 
the  aims  of  the  League. 

Harris  was,  however,  always  a  journa- 
list at  heart — and  for  him  journalism 
was  a  serious  calling.  His  staunch  patriot- 
ism, active  curiosity,  and  remarkable,  if 
somewhat  restless,  energy  were  alUed  to 
a  Quaker  'concern'  to  find  Christian  solu- 
tions for  the  world's  political  and  social 
problems.  It  is  not  surprising  that  when  in 
1932  Sir  Evelyn  Wrench  offered  him  the 
editorship  of  the  Spectator  he  should  have 
accepted  with  alacrity.  For  the  next 
twenty-one  years  he  devoted  himself  to 
that  paper  with  unsparing  diligence. 
A  selection  of  his  articles  published  under 
the  title  Ninety -Nine  Gower  Street  (1943) 
indicates  the  high  standard  which  he  set 
himself;  his  reasoned  and  moderate  ap- 
proach and  his  talent  for  writing  lucid 
character  sketches  of  the  public  men  of  his 
time  may  alike  have  their  relevance  for 
future  historians.  Harris  found  an  ideal 
outlet  for  his  abiUties  in  the  conduct  of 
a  weekly  review.  Politically  of  the  'Left 
Centre',  moving  to  the  Right  as  time  went 
on,  he  was  able  with  his  firm  Noncon- 
formist principles  to  give  the  Spectator 
a  moral  authority  which  was  admired 
even  by  those  of  different  opinions.  The 
paper  reflected  his  personality  to  an  un- 
usual degree:  his  hand  could  be  detected 
not  only  in  editorial  comment  but  also  in 
book  reviews,  while  he  made  his  pseud- 
onjTii  'Janus'  well  known  as  that  of  a  witty 
and  incisive  commentator  on  public  affairs. 

During  the  war  years  of  1939-45  Harris 
found  time  to  return  to  authorship  and 
published  an  informative  little  book  on 
The  Daily  Press  (1943),  a  sensible  survey 
of  the  Problems  of  the  Peace  (1944),  and 
useful  biographies  of  Carohne  Fox  (1944) 
and  J.  A.  Spender  (1946).  In  1945  he 
accepted  an  invitation  to  stand  as  an 
independent  parliamentary  candidate  for 


Cambridge  University  and  was  elected 
after  a  close  contest  with  J.  B.  Priestley 
for  the  second  seat.  No  honour  could  have 
pleased  him  more.  He  rose  to  his  oppor- 
tunity and,  being  an  excellent  speaker, 
proved  an  acquisition  to  the  debating 
strength  of  the  House  of  Commons,  where 
his  independent  views  were  always  heard 
with  respect.  The  abolition  of  the  univer- 
sity seats  brought  his  parliamentary 
career  to  a  close  in  1950 ;  his  editorship  of 
the  Spectator  came  to  an  end  in  1953. 
Harris  regretted  the  curtailment  of  his 
activities,  as  he  showed  in  a  characteristic 
autobiography  Life  So  Far  (1954).  In  the 
last  two  years  of  his  life  he  wrote  under  his 
pseudonym  'Janus'  in  the  columns  of 
Time  and  Tide. 

Tall,  upright,  spare  of  figure,  with 
clear-cut  features,  genial  and  brisk  in 
manner,  Harris  worked  rapidly,  and  in  his 
leisure  hours  was  a  voracious  reader  and 
a  keen  traveller  and  motorist.  The  reputa- 
tion and  the  circulation  of  the  Spectator 
were  both  enhanced  during  his  long  editor- 
ship. If  the  counterpart  of  his  many  great 
qualities  was  a  certain  stubbornness  and 
narrowness  of  outlook,  he  deserves  to  be 
remembered  as  a  journalist  of  deep 
integrity  active  for  the  common  good,  as 
an  understanding  colleague,  and  as  a  loyal 
friend.  He  was  a  member  of  the  council 
of  the  Royal  Institute  of  International 
Affairs,  a  governor  of  the  Leys  School,  and 
in  1953  received  the  honorary  degree  of 
LL.D.  from  the  university  of  St.  Andrews. 

In  1910  Harris  married  Florence, 
daughter  of  Alfred  Midgley  Cash,  medical 
practitioner,  of  Torquay;  they  had  one 
daughter.  He  died  in  a  nursing-home  at 
Hove  11  January  1955. 

[Wilson  Harris,  Life  so  Far,  1954;  The 
Times,  13  January  1955  ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]  Derek  Hudson. 

HARRIS,  Sir  PERCY  ALFRED,  first 
baronet  (1876-1952),  politician,  was  born 
in  London  6  March  1876,  the  younger  son 
of  Wolf  Harris  by  his  wife,  Elizabeth, 
daughter  of  David  Nathan,  general  dealer, 
of  Auckland,  New  Zealand.  He  was 
educated  at  Harrow  (where  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  was  a  slightly  older  contem- 
porary) and  at  Trinity  Hall,  Cambridge, 
where  he  obtained  a  third  class  in  the 
historical  tripos  in  1897.  Two  years  later 
he  was  called  to  the  bar  by  the  Middle 
Temple,  but  never  practised.  He  was  then 
for  some  years  engaged  in  the  prosperous 
wholesale  and  manufacturing  firm  of  Bing, 
Harris,  which  his  father  had  founded  in 


458 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Harrison 


New  Zealand.  Harris  first  helped  to  look 
after  the  London  office,  then  spent  three 
years  in  New  Zealand.  His  lifelong  in- 
terest in  that  country  found  expression  in 
his  book  New  Zealand  and  its  Politics 
(1909). 

Harris  returned  to  England  in  1903. 
Thenceforward  his  main  interest  was  in 
politics,  where  he  took  his  stand  firmly  on 
the  Liberal  side.  These  were  the  years 
leading  up  to  the  great  Liberal  triumph  of 
1906  when  Harris  contested  Ashford ;  but 
this  was  a  Conservative  stronghold  and  he 
was  narrowly  defeated.  In  1907  he  was 
elected  a  Progressiva  (Liberal)  member  of 
the  London  County  Council  for  South- 
West  Bethnal  Green,  thus  beginning 
a  close  association  with  the  borough  which 
lasted  until  the  end  of  his  life.  His  success 
coincided  with  his  party's  loss  of  the  con- 
trol over  London's  government  which  it 
had  held  since  the  Council's  establishment 
in  1889  but  was  never  to  enjoy  again. 
Nevertheless  he  played  an  important  part 
in  the  work  of  the  Council,  becoming  chief 
Progressive  whip  in  1912  and  deputy 
chairman  in  1915-16.  His  book  London 
and  its  Government  (1913,  rewritten  1931) 
was  considered  a  standard  work  of  its 
kind.  His  special  interest  and  knowledge 
was  in  those  matters  which  particularly 
concerned  his  constituents,  although  some 
of  these  problems,  such  as  education, 
housing,  and  unemployment,  were  of 
nation-wide  as  well  as  local  significance. 

After  a  predictable  defeat  at  Harrow  in 
January  1910  Harris  entered  Parliament 
at  a  by-election  at  Market  Harborough  in 
1916.  His  main  work  in  the  short  remain- 
der of  the  wartime  Parliament  was  as 
a  member  of  the  select  committee  on 
national  expenditure.  In  the  election 
which  followed  the  armistice  in  1918  he 
suffered  for  his  loyalty  to  Asquith,  and  the 
refusal  of  the  'coupon'  by  the  coalition 
leaders  was  sufficient  to  ensure  his  defeat. 

In  1922  Harris  returned  to  Parliament 
as  member  for  South- West  Bethnal  Green. 
Amid  the  rising  and  more  often  falling 
hopes  of  a  Liberal  revival  he  won  affection 
and  respect  as  an  industrious,  know- 
ledgeable, and  independent-minded  mem- 
ber. He  was  created  a  baronet  in  1932  ;  was 
chief  Liberal  whip  in  1935-45;  and  in 
1940,  on  Churchill's  recommendation,  was 
sworn  of  the  Privy  Council.  Perhaps  his 
most  remarkable  feat  was  to  hold  Bethnal 
Green  against  all  comers  in  six  successive 
general  elections;  for  years  his  con- 
stituency was  the  only  Liberal  seat  in  or 
within  a  hundred  miles  of  London. 


His  defeat  in  1945  was  not  the  end  of  his 
association  with  Bethnal  Green,  for  in  the 
next  year  he  won  back  the  seat  on  the 
London  County  Council  which  he  had  lost 
in  1934.  In  1949  he  was  the  only  Liberal 
returned  to  that  body  in  an  election  which 
resulted  in  the  two  main  parties  having  an 
equal  number  of  supporters.  (Sir)  David 
Low  produced  a  cartoon  depicting  him  as 
the  dictator  of  London,  but  any  hopes  or 
fears  in  this  respect  were  quickly  dissi- 
pated when  the  allocation  of  aldermanic 
seats  took  place. 

Percy  Harris  was  a  big,  rubicund,  extro- 
verted man,  who  seemed  to  meet  most 
people  and  situations  with  a  beaming 
smile.  It  could  not  be  claimed  that  he  was 
either  an  orator  or  an  original  political 
thinker.  The  guiding  principles  of  his 
career  were  an  unfailing  sympathy  for 
the  oppressed  and  the  unlucky,  and  an 
inflexible  loyalty  to  the  Liberal  cause. 
During  his  party's  long  decline  many 
members  of  its  radical  wing  found  their 
way  into  the  Labour  camp,  but  he  showed 
no  inclination  to  follow.  He  remained 
a  sturdy  individualist  valuing  his  in- 
dependence more  than  anything  else 
which  politics  could  offer  him,  and  deplor- 
ing the  growing  power  of  the  party 
caucus,  especially  in  local  government. 

In  1901  Harris  married  Marguerite 
Frieda  (died  1962),  younger  daughter  of 
John  Astley  Bloxam,  a  well-known  London 
surgeon.  She  was  an  artist  of  merit.  They 
had  two  sons,  the  elder  of  whom.  Jack 
Wolfred  Ashford  (born  1906),  succeeded 
Harris  when  he  died  in  London  28  June 
1952. 

[Sir  Percy  Harris,  Forty  Years  In  and  Out  of 
Parliament,  1947;  private  information;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  Frank  Milton. 

HARRISON,  HENRY  (1867-1954),  Irish 
nationalist  and  writer,  was  born  at  Holy- 
wood,  county  Down,  17  December  1867, 
the  son  of  Henry  Harrison,  J.P.,  D.L.,  by 
his  wife,  Letitia  Tennent,  who  afterwards 
married  Hartley  Withers  [q.v.].  Harrison 
was  educated  at  Westminster  School  of 
which  he  became  a  Queen's  scholar,  and  at 
Balliol  College,  Oxford,  where  he  obtained 
a  third  class  in  classical  honour  modera- 
tions (1888)  and  captained  the  cricket  and 
football  elevens.  While  still  an  under- 
graduate he  developed  what  was  to  be 
a  lifelong  interest  in  Irish  politics.  He  was 
secretary  of  the  Oxford  University  Home 
Rule  group,  and  in  1889,  while  witnessing 
a  Donegal  eviction,  had  the  first  of  several 
clashes  with  the  police.  'The  stripUng',  as 


459 


Harrison 


iD.N.B.  1051-1960 


he  was  immediately  nicknamed — a  cm*ious 
misnomer  for  a  very  large  and  powerful 
young  man  who  generally  gave  as  good  as 
he  got — became  a  nationalist'  celebrity 
overnight  and  the  next  year  was  elected  to 
ParUament  as  member  for  mid-Tipperary. 

He  joined  the  Irish  parliamentary  party 
just  as  it  was  about  to  be  torn  asunder  by 
the  petition  of  W.  H.  O'Shea  [q.v.]  for 
a  divorce  from  his  wife  on  the  grounds  of 
her  adultery  with  the  Irish  leader  C.  S. 
Pamell  [q.v.].  In  the  famous  *split' 
Harrison  was  a  devoted  and  uncom- 
promising Parnelhte,  partly  because  of 
his  instinctive  faith  in  Parnell's  honour 
as  a  gentleman  and  partly  because 
he  genuinely  believed  that  for  Irish 
nationalists  to  throw  over  their  leader 
under  pressure  from  Gladstone  and  the 
British  Liberal  Party  was  both  disloyal 
and  imprudent.  After  the  party  broke  in 
two  in  December  1890,  he  campaigned 
with  his  chief  in  Ireland,  constituting 
himself  a  bodyguard  and  aide-de-camp 
until  Parnell's  death  in  October  1891. 
Harrison,  young  though  he  was,  hastened 
to  Brighton  to  put  his  services  at  the 
disposal  of  Parnell's  widow,  and  it  was 
then  that  he  heard  from  her  a  very  dif- 
ferent account  from  that  given  in  the 
divorce  court.  This  indicated  that  O' Shea's 
evidence  in  court  had  been  completely 
untrustworthy,  that  he  had  apparently 
connived  for  a  long  period  at  Parnell's 
relations  with  his  wife  from  whom  he 
himself  had  virtually  separated,  and  that 
his  motives  had  been  a  mixture  of  political 
ambition  and  financial  greed. 

Harrison  felt  unable  to  pubUsh  this 
story  until  those  most  hkely  to  be  affected 
were  dead,  and  he  himself,  having  lost  his 
seat  in  1892,  disappeared  into  obscurity. 
He  re-emerged  on  the  outbreak  of  war  in 
1914  and,  although  nearly  fifty  years  of 
age,  was  commissioned  in  the  Royal  Irish 
Regiment  in  1915.  He  fought  with  con- 
spicuous gallantry  and  dash  and  was 
awarded  the  M.C.  and  bar  and  the  O.B.E. 

When  the  war  was  over  'Captain  Harri- 
son', as  he  was  always  to  be  known  there- 
after, threw  himself  eagerly  into  the 
affairs  of  the  newly  established  Irish  Free 
State.  For  a  short  period  (1920-21)  he  was 
secretary  of  the  Irish  Dominion  League 
and  was  closely  associated  with  Sir 
Horace  Plunkett  [q.v.].  Then,  from  1922 
to  1927  he  was  Irish  correspondent  of  The 
Economist,  combining  this  between  1924 
and  1927  with  the  editorship  of  a  Dublin 
weekly,  Irish  Truth. 

He  next  turned  to  what  was  to  be  the 


major  work  of  his  liffe^ — ^the  rehabilitation 
of  his  beloved  Parnell.  In  1931  he  pub- 
lished Parnell  Vindicated:  the  Lifting  of  the 
Veil,  which  not  only  embodied  the  account 
Mrs.  Parnell  had  given  to  him,  but  was 
also  based  on  intensive  and  original  re- 
search. It  may  fairly  be  said  that,  although 
not  all  of  Harrison's  conclusions  are  ac- 
cepted by  scholars,  his  work  deeply  and 
permanently  changed  the  attitude  of  his- 
torians towards  the  cause  cdlehre.  A  notable 
exception  was  J.  L.  Garvin  [q.v.],  the  early 
volumes  of  whose  biography  of  Joseph 
Chamberlain  [q.v.]  ignored  Harrison's 
findings.  Harrison  retS,liated  with  a  second 
book,  Parnell,  Joseph  Chamberlain  and 
Mr.  Garvin  (1938),  which  had  the  double 
aim  of  exposing  the  deficiencies  of  Gar- 
vin's biography  and  of  implicating  Cham- 
berlain in  a  'conspiracy'  to  bring  about 
Parnell's  downfall.  The  first  object  was 
easily  enough  achieved,  but  Chamberlain's 
complicity,  despite  some  plausible  evi- 
dence, was  never  conclusively  proved. 
Harrison  continued  his  defence  of  Par- 
nell's reputation  to  the  end  of  his  life,  for 
when  in  1947  the  third  volume  of  the 
History  of  'The  Times'  appeared,  giving 
a  distorted  account  of  the  Richard  Pigott 
[q.v.]  forgeries  which  had  involved  that 
newspaper  with  Parnell  in  1887-9,  Harri- 
son at  once  challenged  The  Times,  gained 
access  to  its  records,  and  five  years  later 
had  his  reward  when  the  fourth  volume  of 
the  History  acknowledged  his  intervention 
and  included  an  appendix  of  corrigenda 
supplied  by  Harrison  himself.  Charac- 
teristically, he  celebrated  his  victory  with 
a  pamphlet,  Parnell,  Joseph  Chamberlain 
and  'The  Times'  (1953). 

In  that  same  year  he  made  his  last  public 
appearance  when  he  received  an  honorary 
LL.D.  from  Dublin  University.  A  few 
months  later  he  died  in  Dublin  20  Feb- 
ruary 1954,  leaving  to  those  who  knew 
him  the  recollection  of  a  warm  and  vital 
personality,  an  acute  intelligence,  vigorous 
and  uninhibited  conversation,  and  a 
memory  for  long  past  events  so  copious 
and  exact  as  to  make  the  man  himself 
almost  as  valuable  an  historical  source  as 
his  books.  In  addition  to  the  works  already 
mentioned  his  principal  publications  were : 
Ireland  and  the  British  Empire,  1937,  con- 
flict or  collaboration?  (1937) ;  Ulster  and  the 
British  Empire,  1939,  help  or  hindrance? 
(1939) ;  The  Neutrality  of  Ireland  (1942). 

In  1895  he  married  Male,  daughter  of 
J.  C.  Byrne,  of  New  York.  Their  only 
child,  a  son,  was  seriously  wounded  at 
Gallipoli  and  died  soon  after  the  war. 


460 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hart 


The  National  Gallery  of  Ireland  has  a 
portrait  by  S.  C.  Harrison. 

[The  Times,  22,  23,  and  25  February  1954 ; 
Henry  Harrison,  Parnell  Vindicated,  1931 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

F.  S.  L.  Lyons. 

HART,  Sir  RAYMUND  GEORGE  (1899- 

1960),  air  marshal,  was  born  28  February 
1899,  at  Merton,  Surrey,  the  son  of  Ernest 
Joseph  Hart,  commercial  traveller,  and 
his  wife,  Emily  CaroUne  Simmons.  He  was 
educated  at  the  Simon  Langton  School, 
Canterbury,  and  enlisting  in  the  Royal 
Flying  Corps  in  1916  was  commissioned  in 
1917  and  posted  to  a  flying  training  unit. 
He  had  a  short  but  distinguished  period  of 
service  in  France,  being  awarded  the  M.C. 
for  his  part  in  an  historic  air  battle  in 
which  his  R.E.8-type  two-seater  army  co- 
operation aircraft  destroyed  three  out  of 
four  attacking  German  aircraft.  Hart  was 
wounded  and  returned  to  England;  on 
recovery  he  joined  the  school  of  technical 
training  and  was  demobilized  early  in 
1919. 

Hart  then  joined  the  Imperial  College  of 
Science  and  obtained  his  A.R.C.S.  with 
a  second  class  in  physics  in  1921.  In  1924 
he  was  appointed  a  flying  officer  in  the 
Royal  Air  Force  on  the  reserve  and  in  1926 
transferred  to  the  active  list.  He  qualified 
as  a  flying  instructor  and  as  a  signals 
officer  and  with  another  British  officer 
was  sent  to  study  at  the  Ecole  Superieur 
d'Electricite  in  Paris  where  the  pair  of 
them  passed  out  at  the  head  of  their 
group.  Hart  was  a  qualified  French  inter- 
preter. 

Between  1929  and  1933  Hart  served  on 
signals  and  flying  duties  at  home  and  in 
India,  being  promoted  flight  lieutenant  in 
1930.  After  qualifying  at  the  Royal  Air 
Force  Staff  College  he  served  in  Nos.  9  and 
12  Squadrons  on  flying  duties  until  1935. 
In  1936  he  was  promoted  squadron  leader 
and  posted  to  Fighter  Command  for  staff 
signals  duties.  He  was  attached  to  the 
team  of  scientists  engaged  on  the  develop- 
ment of  what  became  known  as  radar  to 
ensure  the  incorporation  of  Service  re- 
quirements in  the  systems.  He  worked  in 
close  co-operation  with  Sir  Henry  Tizard 
[q.v.]  and  (Sir)  Robert  Watson- Watt  in 
the  establishment  set  up  at  Bawdsey  for 
the  purpose  of  applying  the  radar  poten- 
tial to  the  air  defence  of  Great  Britain. 
Hart  continued  in  this  work  until  the  out- 
break of  war  in  1939  and  his  contribution 
played  a  large  part  in  ensuring  that  the 
defence    system    based    on    the    radar 


development  was  by  then  available  to  the 
Royal  Air  Force.  Shortly  after  the  out- 
break of  war  Hart  was  posted  for  special 
duties  to  Fighter  Command  headquarters, 
where  he  organized  the  systems  for  the 
operational  use  of  the  information  ob- 
tained by  radar.  He  was  promoted  wing 
commander  in  1940. 

In  1941  Hart  was  posted  to  the  Ministry 
air  staff  as  deputy  director  of  signals  and 
later  deputy  director  of  radar;  in  this 
capacity  he  played  a  leading  part  in  the 
development  of  airborne  radar,  then 
a  vital  requirement  for  the  defence  against 
the  enemy  night  bomber  offensive. 

In  1943  Hart  was  appointed  chief  sig- 
nals officer  at  Fighter  Command  head- 
quarters and  later  that  year  to  the  same 
appointment  on  the  headquarters  of  the 
Allied  Expeditionary  Air  Force.  He  went 
to  France  with  that  headquarters  in  1944 
and  remained  until  the  end  of  the  war.  He 
served  in  Germany  as  chief  signals  officer, 
British  Air  Force,  until  early  1946,  when 
he  was  appointed  air  officer  commanding 
No.  27  Group  in  the  United  Kingdom.  In 
1947  he  served  in  the  Air  Ministry  as  head 
of  technical  service  plans ;  in  1949  he  was 
appointed  air  officer  commanding  No.  90 
(Signals)  Group.  In  1951  he  returned  to 
the  Air  Ministry  as  director-general  of 
engineering.  In  1955  he  served  as  air 
officer  commanding  No.  41  Group  and  in 
1956  he  returned  to  the  Air  Ministry  as 
controller  of  engineering  and  equipment 
until  January  1959.  He  was  gazetted  air 
vice-marshal  in  1953,  air  marshal  in  1957, 
and  placed  on  the  retired  list  in  1960.  In 
the  meantime,  in  February  1959  he  had 
been  appointed  director  of  the  Radio 
Industry  Council  where  he  applied  himself 
to  co-ordinating  the  work  of  the  industry 
to  develop  internationally  accepted  stan- 
dards. 

Hart  was  technically  and  operationally 
qualified  by  his  early  training,  as  an 
engineer  and  an  experienced  pilot,  to 
contribute  a  major  part  in  the  develop- 
ment and  application  of  radar  to  the  needs 
of  the  Royal  Air  Force,  first  in  the  air 
defence  of  this  country  and  later  in  the 
bombing  of  Germany  and  the  anti- 
submarine offensive.  His  knowledge  of 
the  practical  requirements  of  the  Royal 
Air  Force  was  understood  by  the  scientists 
developing  radar  and  they  were  spurred 
on  by  his  enthusiasm  and  encouragement. 
His  approach  to  the  many  problems  was 
blunt  and  direct  but  his  friendly  per- 
sonality enabled  him  to  obtain  the  results 
he  was  striving  for  without  undue  friction. 


461 


Hart 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


'^-fHart  was  appointed  O.B.E.  in  1940, 
C.B.E.  in  1944,  K.B.E.  in  1957,  and  C.B. 
in  1946.  He  was  thrice  mentioned  in  dis- 
patches and  was  a  commander  of  the 
United  States  Legion  of  Merit  and  a 
chevalier  of  the  French  Legion  of  Honour. 

In  1927  he  married  Katherine  Gwenl- 
lian,  daughter  of  Charles  Penman 
Wiltshier,  of  Canterbury;  they  had 
one  son. 

Hart  died  16  July  1960  as  the  result  of 
an  accident  while  using  an  electric  lawn- 
mower  at  his  home  at  Aston  Rowant, 
Oxfordshire. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Victor  Tait. 

HARTLEY,      ARTHUR      CLIFFORD 

(1889-1960),  engineer  and  inventor,  was 
born  at  Springbank,  Hull,  7  January 
1889,  the  elder  son  of  George  Thomas 
Hartley,  surgeon,  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth 
Briggs.  From  Hymers  College,  Hull,  and 
after  a  brief  period  of  engineering  studies 
at  Hull  Technical  College,  Hartley  went  to 
the  City  and  Guilds  College,  the  engineer- 
ing school  of  the  Imperial  College  of 
Science  and  Technology  at  South  Kensing- 
ton. He  passed  out  in  1910  with  the  college 
diploma  and  a  B.Sc.  (Eng.),  London,  with 
third  class  honours.  Then  came  practical 
work,  first  as  a  pupil  at  Hull  docks ;  then 
as  assistant  engineer  with  a  Hull  firm,  and 
on  to  a  London  firm  as  works  superinten- 
dent, following  the  usual  pattern  of  post- 
graduate engineer  training.  In  the  war  of 
1914-18  Hartley  was  commissioned  in  the 
Royal  Flying  Corps,  qualified  as  a  pilot, 
earned  the  O.B.E.  (1918)  and  the  sub- 
stantive rank  of  major.  His  forte,  how- 
ever, was  invention  and  particularly  the 
practical  development  of  engineering  con- 
cepts and  he  joined  the  armaments  section 
of  the  Air  Board  where  he  worked  under 
Bertram  Hopkinson  [q.v.].  Hartley  was 
responsible  for  the  development  of  the 
Constantinescu  gear  which  enabled  a 
Vickers  machine-gun  to  be  synchronized 
so  that  the  pilot  could  fire  straight  ahead 
through  the  propeller  blades. 

After  the  war  Hartley  spent  five  years 
as  a  partner  of  a  firm  of  consulting 
engineers  until  in  1924  he  joined  the 
Anglo-Persian  Oil  Company  as  assistant 
manager  of  its  rapidly  expanding  engineer- 
ing division,  becoming  chief  engineer  in 
1934.  During  his  twenty-seven  years  with 
the  company  he  was  a  contemporary  of 
G,  M.  Lees  [q.v.].  Hartley  ultimately 
heading  the  engineering  and  Lees  the 
geological  division. 


At  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  Hartley 
was  lent  by  the  company  to  the  Ministry 
of  Aircraft  Production  to  develop  inter 
alia  the  stabilized  automatic  bomb  sight 
which  Bomber  Command  used  to  sink  the 
Tirpitz.  Next  came  FIDO  (Fog  Investiga- 
tion Dispersal  Operations).  Air  Marshal 
Sir  Arthur  Harris,  in  September  1942, 
demanded  fog-clear  airfield  runways  of 
1,000  yards  long  by  100  feet  high  to 
reduce  the  devastating  losses  by  bomber 
squadrons  returning  from  raids  to  fog- 
bound England.  The  problem  went  to 
Hartley  who  was  by  then  technical 
director  of  the  petroleum  warfare  depart- 
ment. With  A.  O.  Rankine,  E.  G.  Walker, 
and  a  team  of  experts,  he  produced  and 
installed  fog  dispersal  equipment  on 
fifteen  airfields  in  the  United  Kingdom, 
as  well  as  one  in  France  and  two  in  the 
United  States.  More  than  2,500  aircraft 
made  Fido-assisted  landings  in  fog  and 
mist.  Hartley  also  helped  in  the  develop- 
ment of  flame  weapons;  but  his  most 
significant  contribution  was  his  idea 
which  led  to  the  construction  of  PLUTO 
(Pipeline  under  the  Ocean).  Admiral 
Mountbatten  in  April  1942  proposed  the 
problem  of  laying  across  the  Channel, 
sufficiently  fast  and  secretly  to  avoid 
destruction  by  the  enemy,  pipelines  to 
provide  vital  supplies  of  petrol  after  the 
allied  landings.  Conventional  methods 
were  doomed  to  failure  in  war  conditions. 
Hartley's  idea  was  to  leave  the  copper 
out  of  a  submarine  electric  cable  and  turn 
it  into  a  high-pressure  petrol  pipeline. 
There  were  countless  difficulties  and  many 
to  say  the  idea  was  impossible,  but  Hart-  ■■ 
ley's  g^^enius  was  to  be  the  leader  of  the 
team  which  overcame  the  difficulties. 
Several  hundred  miles  of  HAIS  (Hartley, 
Anglo-Iranian,  Siemens)  were  made  for 
PLUTO  as  weU  as  HAMEL  (Hammick, 
ElHs)  pipe.  Two  HAIS  and  two  HAMEL  | 
pipelines  were  laid  from  the  Isle  of  Wight  | 
to  Cherbourg,  followed  by  nineteen  HAIS  j 
submarine  pipelines  from  Dungeness  to 
Calais  from  October  1944  onwards,  as  well 
as  land  lines  to  the  advancing  armies 
through  Ghent  and  Antwerp  and  across 
the  Rhine  to  Eindhoven.  Petrol  was 
pumped  through  this  system  at  the  rate 
of  a  million  gallons  per  day  during  the 
advance  of  the  allied  armies  into  Germany. 
In  1944  Hartley  was  appointed  C.B.E. 
and  in  1946  he  received  the  United  States 
medal  of  freedom  for  his  war  services. 

When  Hartley  retired  from  the  Anglo- 
Iranian  Oil  Company  in  1951  it  was  to 
devote    himself    to    further    engineering 


462 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hartree 


problems  as  a  consultant  in  private  prac- 
tice. His  inventive  capacity  was  with  him 
to  the  end  and  his  most  notable  achieve- 
ment at  this  time  was  the  Hartley  bolster, 
a  device  for  loading  into  tankers  where 
no  berthing  facilities  were  available  and 
where  oil  pipelines  on  the  sea  bed  running 
from  the  installation  ashore  had  to  be 
connected  to  a  tanker  half  a  mile  or  more 
off-shore.  The  Hartley  bolster  raised  its 
head  like  a  sea  monster  from  the  sea  bed 
and  returned  to  the  depths  when  the 
tanker  was  loaded.  The  first  bolster  was 
installed  by  the  Kuwait  Oil  Company  at 
Mina-al-Ahmadi  and  successfully  loaded 
the  32,000-ton  British  Courage  in  January 
1959.  A  further  bolster  began  operating 
successfully  in  Bataan  in  the  Philippines 
at  the  beginning  of  1963. 

In  1951  Hartley  became  president  of 
the  Institution  of  Mechanical  Engineers. 
He  was  always  prepared  to  give  his  time 
to  such  voluntary  but  onerous  work.  He 
had  been  president  of  the  Old  Centralians 
(former  students  of  the  City  and  Guilds 
College)  in  1948.  He  was  an  honorary 
fellow  of  the  City  and  Guilds  Institute 
and  of  the  Imperial  College  and  in  1959 
received  the  Redwood  medal  of  the 
Institute  of  Petroleum.  He  served  as 
a  member  of  council  of  the  Royal  Society 
of  Arts  and  was  a  manager  of  the  Royal 
Institution.  He  was  elected  president  of 
the  Institution  of  Civil  Engineers  (where 
there  is  a  portrait  by  John  Codner)  in  1959 
but  died  in  London,  28  January  1960,  less 
than  three  months  afterwards. 

In  1920  Hartley  married  Dorothy 
Elizabeth  (died  1923),  daughter  of  Gavin 
Wallace,  marine  engineer,  of  Shanghai,  by 
whom  he  had  two  sons.  In  1927  he  mar- 
ried, secondly,  Florence  Nina,  daughter  of 
William  Egerton  Hodgson,  merchant,  of 
Doncaster,  by  whom  he  also  had  two  sons. 

[The  Central,  vol.  xliii,  No.  97,  June  1948 ; 
Proceedings  of  the  Institution  of  Civil 
Engineers,  vol.  xv,  April  1960;  The  Civil 
Engineer  in  War,  I.C.E.,  1948;  personal 
knowledge.]  A.  C.  Vivian. 

HARTREE,   DOUGLAS   RAYNER 

(1897-1958),  scientist,  was  born  27  March 
1897  in  Cambridge  where  his  father 
William  Hartree,  a  grandson  of  Samuel 
Smiles  [q.v.],  was  a  member  of  the  teach- 
ing staff  of  the  engineering  laboratory ;  he 
retired  in  1913,  but  thereafter  continued 
to  do  scientific  work,  much  of  it  as  assis- 
tant to  his  own  son.  Hartree's  mother, 
Eva  Rayner,  was  the  daughter  of  a 
prominent  Stockport  physician,  and  sister 


of  E.  H.  Rayner  who  for  many  years  was 
superintendent  of  the  electricity  division 
of  the  National  Physical  Laboratory.  She 
was  herself  active  in  public  affairs,  serving 
as  president  of  the  National  Council  of 
Women  and  as  mayor  of  Cambridge. 

Douglas  Hartree  was  the  eldest  of  three 
sons,  but  alone  survived  to  manhood.  He 
was  educated  at  Bedales  School  where  the 
excellent  teaching  of  mathematics  gave 
the  trend  for  his  chief  interests  in  later 
life.  In  1915  he  entered  St.  John's  College, 
Cambridge,  as  a  scholar,  but  after  a  year 
abandoned  his  studies  for  work  in  a  team 
developing  the  new  science  of  anti-aircraft 
gunnery.  After  the  war  he  completed  his 
university  courses  and  was  awarded  a 
Ph.D.  in  1926.  He  was  elected  fellow  of  St. 
John's  (1924-7)  and  of  Christ's  (1928-9). 
He  was  next  appointed  to  the  chair  of 
applied  mathematics  (1929-37)  and  of 
theoretical  physics  (1937-45)  in  the  uni- 
versity of  Manchester.  In  1946  he  became 
Plummer  professor  of  mathematical 
physics  at  Cambridge,  a  chair  which  he 
held  until  his  death,  and  was  again  a 
fellow  of  Christ's.  He  was  elected  F.R.S. 
in  1932. 

The  main  scope  of  Hartree's  work  was 
largely  determined  by  his  early  ex- 
periences in  anti-aircraft  gunnery.  The 
calculation  of  trajectories  involves  much 
numerical  work  with  pencil  and  paper, 
a  type  of  mathematics  in  which  he  became 
expert;  already  at  the  age  of  twenty 
he  introduced  outstanding  improvements 
into  the  calculation  of  trajectories.  He 
continued  to  develop  this  kind  of  work  all 
through  his  life,  and  he  came  to  be  re- 
garded as  one  of  the  world's  chief  leaders 
in  the  science  of  computation,  called  in  as 
consultant  in  many  countries. 

In  the  twenties  Hartree  applied  his 
methods  to  the  solution  of  problems 
associated  with  the  new  theories  of  the 
structure  of  the  atom.  In  this  field  his  most 
conspicuous  work  was  the  invention  of  the 
method  of  the  'self -consistent  field'.  This 
made  possible  the  practical  solution  of 
a  problem  which,  if  exactly  treated,  would 
have  a  quite  impossible  degree  of  com- 
plexity. Ten  years  later  numerical  methods 
were  much  improved  by  the  invention 
of  the  differential  analyser  by  Vannevar 
Bush  in  America.  Hartree  visited  him  to 
study  it  and  on  return  to  Manchester  him- 
self made  an  analyser  which  came  to  be 
very  widely  used.  He  had  intended  its 
main  purpose  to  be  for  the  solution  of 
atomic  problems  but  with  characteristic 
generosity  gave  its  services  for  many  other 


463 


Hartree 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


uses.  In  particular  he  thus  became  a 
leader  in  developing  methods  of  auto- 
matic control  for  many  complicated  pro- 
cesses of  manufacture.  He  could  claim  to 
be  one  of  the  fathers  of  the  new  techniques 
of  automation. 

Yet  another  revolution  occurred  in  1945 
with  the  invention  of  the  electronic  digital 
computing  machines.  The  first  successful 
one  was  designed  for  anti-aircraft  trajec- 
tories in  America.  Hartree's  advice  was 
sought  and  it  was  largely  he  who  showed 
how  its  extreme  rapidity  of  action  could 
be  exploited.  A  process  which  previously 
took  a  team  of  workers  several  days  could 
now,  by  his  ingenuity,  be  done  in  thirty 
seconds. 

Hartree's  distinction  as  a  scientist  was 
not  so  much  in  the  depth  of  his  researches 
as  in  their  breadth.  With  the  new  methods 
it  became  possible  to  attack  many  prob- 
lems in  a  great  variety  of  subjects  which 
had  before  been  insoluble,  and  it  was  he 
who  largely  led  the  way  in  this  new  attack. 
His  book,  Numerical  Analysis  (1952), 
became  a  classic  of  the  subject.  He  was 
a  good  lecturer  and  brilliant  at  clarifying 
a  subject  by  an  intuitive  knowledge  of  the 
level  of  understanding  of  his  listener. 

From  boyhood  Hartree  had  a  strong 
interest  in  railways  and  their  signalling 
methods,  and  in  later  life  this  proved  use- 
ful to  the  railway  companies  in  relation  to 
their  complicated  traffic  problems.  He 
served  on  a  committee  of  the  British 
Transport  Commission  and  showed  how  to 
use  the  high-speed  computing  machines 
to  solve  traffic  problems  which  had  pre- 
viously taken  months  of  calculation. 
Music  was  among  his  other  interests;  he 
played  the  piano  and  other  instruments 
and  also  conducted  an  amateur  orchestra. 

In  1923  Hartree  married  Elaine,  daugh- 
ter of  Eustace  Charlton,  of  Keswick.  They 
had  one  daughter  and  two  sons,  all  of 
whom  inherited  their  father's  scientific 
tastes.  He  died  in  Cambridge  12  February 
1958. 

[Sir  Charles  Darwin  in  Biographical  Memoirs 
of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iv,  1958 ; 
personal  knowledge.]  C.  G.  Darwin. 

HASLETT,  Dame  CAROLINE  HAR- 
RIET (1895-1957),  electrical  engineer, 
was  born  at  Worth,  Sussex,  17  August 
1895,  the  eldest  daughter  of  Robert 
Haslett,  a  railway  signal  fitter  and  a 
pioneer  of  the  Co-operative  movement, 
and  his  wife,  Caroline  Sarah  Holmes.  She 
was  educated  at  Haywards  Heath  High 
School  and  then  took  a  post  as  secretary 


with  the  Cochran  Boiler  Company.  Cleri- 
cal work  did  not  particularly  attract  her 
and  she  asked  to  be  transferred  to  the 
works  where  she  qualified  in  general  and 
later  in  electrical  engineering.  For  a  period 
she  was  associated  with  Sir  Charles  Par- 
sons [q.v.],  the  inventor  of  the  Parsons 
turbine,  and  his  wife,  in  the  promotion  of 
a  journal  devoted  especially  to  women  in 
the  engineering  industry.  She  was  the  first 
secretary  of  the  Women's  Engineering 
Society  established  in  1919  of  which  Lady 
Parsons  was  the  founder,  and  was  later 
for  two  years  its  president.  She  was  also 
for  many  years  the  editor  of  the  society's 
journal  the  Woman  Engineer.  She  was 
never  an  ardent  feminist  but  perceived  the 
possibilities  of  engineering  to  raise  the 
whole  social  status  of  women.  She  did 
valuable  work  in  persuading  engineering 
institutes  to  admit  women  to  their 
examinations  and  not  least  in  inducing 
employers  to  engage  female  labour.  She 
founded  the  Electrical  Association  for 
Women  in  1924  and  remained  its  director 
until  1956  when  she  withdrew  owing  to 
ill  health  but  continued  as  an  honorary 
adviser.  Through  this  organization  she 
exercised  a  powerful  influence  on  the 
development  of  the  domestic  use  of 
electricity  and  with  the  encouragement  of 
progressively  minded  people  in  the  electri- 
cal industry  achieved  a  remarkable  measure 
of  co-operation.  A  strong  personality,  she 
yet  had  the  capacity  for  self -elimination 
at  public  functions,  almost  invariably 
preferring  to  delegate  to  other  women 
such  activities  as  would  bring  them  into 
prominence.  She  aroused  enthusiasm 
amongst  her  intimate  colleagues  who  be- 
came devoted  to  her  and  to  their  work  in 
the  Electrical  Association  for  Women. 

Ever  an  ardent  champion  of  the  causes 
she  advocated.  Dame  Caroline  spoke  and 
wrote  frequently  on  the  subjects  which 
she  had  at  heart,  and  the  pages  of  the 
Electrical  Age,  the  organ  of  the  Electrical 
Association  for  Women,  which  she  also 
edited,  reflect  her  tireless  energy  in  secur- 
ing the  development  of  electricity  for 
domestic  purposes.  At  the  time  of  her 
withdrawal  from  active  work  the  E.A.W. 
had  14,000  members,  most  of  them  house- 
wives, domestic  science  teachers,  and 
educationists,  organized  in  160  branches. 
Her  solicitude  for  the  well-being  of  women 
in  their  homes  was  only  rivalled  by  her 
enthusiasm  for  the  development  of  elec- 
tricity as  an  agent  in  reducing  domestic 
chores.  She  early  reahzed  the  need  for 
ensuring  the  safety  of  these  devices  and 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hastings 


devoted  much  of  her  attention  to  pro- 
moting this  in  association  with  the 
manufacturers. 

Dame  Caroline  was  the  first  and  only 
woman  to  be  appointed  a  member  of  the 
British  Electricity  Authority  on  its  incep- 
tion in  1947  and  to  serve  on  its  successors 
until  the  time  of  her  death.  Her  keen 
mind  and  refreshing  zest  were  a  valuable 
asset  to  the  newly  integrated  industry. 
Her  practical  wisdom  and  Uvely  sense  of 
humour  did  much  to  lessen  the  stresses 
and  tensions  of  the  early  years  when 
organization  and  human  problems  of  some 
complexity  had  to  be  resolved.  A  motor 
vessel,  of  the  Authority's  collier  fleet,  was 
named  Dame  Caroline  Haslett;  and  the 
E.A.W.  founded  the  Caroline  Haslett 
Trust  to  provide  scholarships  and 
traveUing  fellowships  and  exhibitions  for 
its  members. 

Dame  Caroline  served  on  numerous 
pubhc  bodies  including  the  British  Insti- 
tute of  Management,  the  Industrial  Wel- 
fare Society,  the  National  Industrial 
Alliance,  the  British  Electrical  Develop- 
ment Association,  the  Royal  Society  of 
Arts,  Bedford  College  for  Women,  the 
London  School  of  Economics,  Queen 
Elizabeth  College,  the  Administrative 
Staff  College,  and  King's  College  of  House- 
hold and  Social  Science,  and  the  Crawley 
Development  Corporation.  She  travelled 
widely,  and  on  government  missions  to  the 
United  States,  Canada,  Sweden,  and  Fin- 
land. She  attended  the  World  Power  Con- 
ference several  times  as  a  British  delegate 
and  was  the  author  of  papers  on  home 
management  to  international  Scientific 
Management  Congresses  in  Europe.  In 
1950  she  became  the  president  of  the 
International  Federation  of  Business  and 
Professional  Women.  After  the  war  of 
1939-45  she  took  a  leading  part  in  con- 
ferences organized  for  women  in  Germany 
by  the  British  and  American  authorities 
and  at  the  invitation  of  the  United  States 
Government  visited  the  American  zone  of 
Germany  to  address  conferences  there. 

Appointed  C.B.E.  in  1931  and  D.B.E.  in 
1947,  Caroline  Haslett  was  a  justice  of  the 
peace  for  the  county  of  London  and  in 
1932  was  made  a  companion  member  of 
the  Institution  of  Electrical  Engineers. 
She  never  swerved  from  her  high  purpose 
of  raising  the  social  status  of  women,  and 
her  flair  for  organization  and  administra- 
tion, her  integrity  of  mind,  healthy  com- 
mon sense,  and  love  of  simple  things 
endeared  her  to  those  who  had  the  good 
fortune  to  work  with  her. 


She  died  4  January  1957  at  Bungay, 
Suffolk.  A  portrait  by  Sir  Gerald  Kelly 
belongs  to  the  Royal  Society  of  Arts  and 
another  by  Dorothy  Vicaji  to  the  Electri- 
cal Association  for  Women.  The  Imperial 
War  Museum  has  a  lithograph  by  Ethel 
Gabain. 

[The  Times,  5  January  1957;  Woman 
Engineer,  Spring  1957 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Citrine. 
HASTINGS,  Sir  PATRICK  GARDINER 
(1880-1952),  lawyer,  was  born  in  London 
17  March  1880  and  was  consequently  given 
the  name  of  Ireland's  patron  saint,  there 
being  Irish  blood  on  both  sides  of  the 
family.  He  was  the  younger  son  of  Alfred 
Gardiner  Hastings  and  his  wife,  Kate 
Comyns  Carr,  a  pre-Raphaelite  painter  of 
some  ability.  The  elder  Hastings,  although 
originally  a  solicitor,  can  hardly  have  been 
long  in  practice  and  seems  to  have  been  an 
unreliable  parent.  His  son's  early  memories 
were  of  alternating  penury  and  affluence. 
'Bankruptcy  in  iny  family',  he  wrote,  'was 
not  a  misfortune,  it  was  a  habit.'  His 
recollections  of  childhood  included  hours 
spent  in  his  mother's  studio  where  he  was 
allowed  to  play  with  the  paints  on  her 
palette,  and  of  late  nights  spent  in  com- 
pany with  his  father  and  his  father's 
'business  friends',  which  frequently  ended 
with  himself  falling  asleep  across  the  table. 
At  the  age  of  ten  he  was  sent  to  a  pre- 
paratory boarding-school  which  he  hated, 
and  the  two  years  spent  at  Charterhouse 
were  no  improvement.  He  resented  both 
the  discipline  and  the  classical  regimen 
which  taught  him,  he  claimed,  none  of 
the  practical  things  he  required  to  know. 
He  left  Charterhouse  at  sixteen,  undis- 
tinguished in  work  or  games  and  a  victim 
of  chronic  asthma. 

Family  fortunes  at  this  time  were  at 
a  low  ebb  and  after  eighteen  months  of 
precarious  living  in  Corsica,  France,  and 
Belgium  with  his  mother  and  elder 
brother,  Hastings  took  a  subordinate  post 
as  a  mining  engineer  in  North  Wales.  The 
mine  proved  unproductive  and  with  his 
brother  he  joined  the  Suffolk  Imperial 
Yeomanry  and  saw  two  years  of  active 
service  in  the  South  African  war.  On  his 
return  he  found  his  parents  in  no  position 
to  help  him  towards  a  career.  From  quite 
early  years,  however,  he  had  wanted  to 
be  a  barrister  and  with  scarcely  a  penny 
in  his  pocket  he  was  admitted  as  a  student 
to  the  Middle  Temple  where  he  did  all  his 
reading  since  he  could  not  afford  to  buy 
books.  From  Putney  where  living  was 
cheap  he  walked  to  work  each  day,  went 


465 


Hastings 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


without  lunch,  but  treated  himself  to 
dinner  at  a  Soho  restaurant  for  the  price  of 
Is.  6d.  He  earned  a  few  pounds  weekly 
by  writing  theatre  reviews  wid  gossip  for 
several  newspapers.  With  no  dress  clothes 
for  attending  the  theatre,  he  wore  a  great- 
coat tactically  fastened  over  a  white  shirt 
and  white  tie.  By  such  expedients  he 
saved  the  £100  to  pay  for  his  call  in  1904. 

He  contrived  almost  immediately  to 
obtain  some  devilling  work  from  (Sir) 
Charles  Gill,  a  busy  lawyer  with  a  large 
criminal  practice;  some  two  years  later 
he  found  a  seat  in  the  chambers  of  (Sir) 
Horace  Avory  [q.v.].  When  Avory  went 
to  the  bench  Hastings  boldly  took  on  the 
chambers.  He  always  declared  that  his 
debt  to  Avory  was  enormous.  From  him 
he  learned  never  to  make  notes  but  to 
read  a  brief  thoroughly  and  commit  it  to 
memory;  then,  as  soon  as  the  case  was 
over,  dismiss  the  whole  thing  from  his 
mind. 

In  1906  Hastings  married  Mary 
Ellenore,  daughter  of  Lieutenant-Colonel 
Frederick  Leigh  Grundy;  they  had  two 
sons  and  three  daughters.  At  the  time  of 
his  marriage  he  and  his  wife  possessed  no 
more  than  £20  between  them;  but  this 
state  of  affairs  was  not  to  obtain  for  long, 
for  during  the  next  few  years  he  became 
one  of  the  busiest  juniors  at  the  common 
law  bar.  When  in  1919  he  took  silk,  having 
been  rejected  during  the  war  as  medically 
unfit  for  service,  his  reputation  as  an 
advocate  was  firmly  established. 

He  was  no  less  successful  as  a  silk  and 
at  the  age  of  forty  found  himself  with  'all 
the  cases  that  I  wanted  and  perhaps  more 
than  I  could  do'.  Politically  his  interests 
were  always  to  the  Left,  although  his 
opinions  mellowed  in  later  years.  In  1922 
he  was  elected  member  of  Parliament  for 
Wallsend.  Experienced  lawyers  were  rare 
in  the  Labour  ranks  and  Hastings  was  the 
natural  choice  for  attorney-general  when 
Ramsay  MacDonald  formed  his  govern- 
ment in  January  1924;  the  post  carried 
with  it  the  traditional  knighthood.  The  fall 
of  the  Government  later  in  the  year  was 
precipitated  by  the  so-called  Campbell 
case.  Hastings  skilfully  defended  his  action 
in  withdrawing  the  prosecution  for  sedi- 
tion when  he  learned  that  Campbell  was  a 
man  with  an  excellent  war  record  who  was 
only  acting  as  a  temporary  substitute  for 
the  Communist  editor  of  the  Workers^ 
Weekly;  many  members  of  all  parties 
thought  Hastings's  treatment  by  the 
prime  minister  less  than  generous,  a  view 
substantiated  by  the  publication  of  the 


Whitehall  Diary  of  Thomas  Jones  [q.v.]  in 
1969.  In  the  subsequent  election  Hastings 
was  again  returned  for  Wallsend ;  but  he 
found  the  combination  of  parliamentary 
work  with  a  heavy  law  practice  too  much 
for  his  health  and  he  resigned  his  seat  in 
1926. 

From  this  date  began  his  rapid  climb 
to  leadership  of  the  conmion  law  bar,  an 
eminence  which  he  shared  for  many  years 
with  his  friend  and  frequent  opponent, 
Norman  (later  Lord)  Birkett.  Spectacular 
cases,  such  as  that  of  the  'Talking  Mon- 
goose', the  actions  between  Dr.  Stopes  and 
Dr.  Sutherland  [qq.v.],  and  the  Savidge 
tribunal,  brought  him  much  publicity,  but 
most  of  what  became  a  very  large  income 
inevitably  derived  from  less  exciting 
commercial  work.  He  had  a  great  gift  for 
simplification  and  could  make  a  com- 
mercial case  so  easy  to  follow  that  what 
might  otherwise  have  taken  weeks  was 
completed  in  a  few  days.  Although  he 
often  appeared  in  the  criminal  courts,  he 
had  a  deep  dislike  of  murder  cases.  But 
his  closing  speech  in  defence  of  Mrs. 
Barney  (1932),  charged  with  the  murder 
of  her  lover,  was  described  by  Mr.  Justice 
Humphreys  [q.v.]  as  'one  of  the  finest 
speeches  I  have  ever  heard  at  the  bar'. 

In  the  war  of  1939-45  Hastings  served 
for  a  time  as  an  intelligence  officer  at 
Fighter  Command  headquarters,  but  his 
health  proved  unequal  to  the  strain  and 
he  returned  to  a  law  practice  in  which 
most  cases  were  heard  without  a  jury  and 
the  importance  of  an  advocate's  role  had 
greatly  diminished.  The  death  in  action  of 
his  younger  son,  David,  hit  him  hard.  His 
last  great  success,  in  1946,  the  defence 
against  an  action  for  libel  brought  by 
H.  J.  Laski  [q.v.],  took  a  heavy  toll  from 
him;  in  1948  he  decided  to  retire. 
He  occupied  himself  by  writing,  and 
achieved  considerable  success  with  his 
Autobiography  (1948),  Cases  in  Court 
(1949),  and  Famous  and  Infamous  Cases 
(1950),  and  a  play  about  the  law  courts. 
The  Blind  Goddess,  which  was  also  made 
into  a  film.  The  theatrical  sense  was  very 
strong  in  him  and  he  tried  his  hand  at  half 
a  dozen  plays,  of  which  only  The  River 
(1925),  Scotch  Mist  (1926),  and  The  Blind 
Goddess  (1947)  achieved  any  real  success. 
He  had  not  the  temper  of  an  intellectual 
and  his  reading  was  largely  confined  to 
law  reports  and  thrillers  such  as  those  of 
his  friend  Edgar  Wallace  [q.v.].  He  was 
a  devoted  husband  and  father,  enjoying 
nothing  better  than  an  open-air  country 
life  spent  with  his  family  and  intimate 


466 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hawthorn 


friends.  He  was  a  good  horseman,  a  first- 
class  shot,  and  a  passionately  keen  fisher- 
man. Tall,  thin,  dark-haired,  with  blue 
eyes  and  a  very  straight  carriage,  his 
personality  was  forceful  and  somewhat 
intolerant;  he  was  a  master  of  simple, 
unadorned  language.  Above  all,  he  was 
a  man  of  tremendous  enthusiasms  and 
great  courage.  His  stature  as  an  advocate 
was  the  result  primarily  of  his  brilhance 
in  cross-examination.  He  neither  bullied 
nor  abused,  but  had  learned  from  one  of 
his  early  mentors.  Sir  Edward  (later  Lord) 
Carson  [q.v.],  the  art  of  getting  under 
a  witness's  skin  with  the  first  question.  He 
was  a  dangerous,  but  always  honourable, 
opponent,  at  his  best  when  speaking 
directly  to  a  jury.  He  earned  headlines 
with  his  wit,  not  with  histrionics.  For  the 
thundering  emotional  appeals  which  used 
to  be  the  fashion  he  substituted  an  incisive 
appeal  to  intelligence.  He  is  said  by  his 
family  to  have  been  incapable  of  dissimula- 
tion, but  Birkett  watching  him  in  court 
was  fascinated  by  the  play  of  expressions 
on  his  face — 'anger,  surprise,  incredulity, 
disdain  .  .  .  They  were  meant  for  the  jury 
and  were  indeed  more  eloquent  than 
words.' 

In  1950  Hastings  visited  his  son  Nicho- 
las who  was  farming  in  Kenya  and  there 
suffered  a  slight  stroke  from  which  he 
never  fully  recovered.  He  died  in  his 
London  home  26  February  1952.  The 
National  Portrait  Gallery  has  a  drawing 
by  Nicolas  Bentley. 

[Hastings's  own  writings ;  H.  Montgomery 
Hyde,  Sir  Patrick  Hastings,  His  Life  and 
Cases,  1960;  Patricia  Hastings,  The  Life  of 
Patrick  Hastings,  1959 ;  The  Times,  27  Feb- 
ruary 1952 ;  private  information.] 

Anthony  Lejeune. 

HAWTHORN,  JOHN  MICHAEL  (1929- 
1959),  racing  motorist,  was  born  in 
Mexborough,  Yorkshire,  10  April  1929, 
the  only  son  of  Leslie  Hawthorn,  motor 
engineer  and  racing  motor-cyclist,  by  his 
wife,  Winifred  Mary  Symonds.  Educated 
at  Ardingly,  he  achieved  no  great  success 
as  a  sportsman,  being  'indolent  by  nature'. 
His  parents  moved  to  Farnham  in 
Surrey  when  his  father  became  involved 
in  motor-cycle  racing  at  Brooklands, 
and  when  'Mike'  left  school  in  1946  he 
was  apprenticed  to  Dennis  Brothers,  the 
commercial  vehicle  builders,  in  Guildford. 
Following  the  wish  to  join  his  father 
in  business  and  become  an  automobile 
engineer,  he  went  on  from  his  apprentice- 
ship to  Kingston  Technical  College  and 


then  the  College  of  Automobile  Engineer- 
ing at  Chelsea.  The  result  of  his  efforts  in 
this  direction  only  made  him  certain  that 
he  would  find  his  metier  in  the  driving-seat 
rather  than  at  the  drawing-board. 

Not  unnaturally,  his  first  interest  as 
a  young  man  was  motor-cycles  and  it  was 
in  the  field  of  motor-cycle  sport  that  the 
name  of  Mike  Hawthorn  first  came  to 
the  public  notice — it  was  always  'Mike', 
a  diminutive  which  fitted  his  character 
absolutely ;  but  despite  his  modest  success 
as  a  motor-cyclist,  his  parents  were  natur- 
ally anxious  to  get  him  on  to  four  wheels, 
and  as  soon  as  was  practicable  his  father 
provided  him  with  a  small  car. 

For  a  young  man  to  break  into  motor- 
racing — as  a  professional — has  always 
been  difficult  and  the  least  easily  satisfied 
of  dreams,  but  Mike  had  a  great  ally  in 
his  father  who  was  not  only  willing  to  see 
him  do  it,  but  anxious  to  help  him  toward 
this  end.  During  1951  he  had  his  first 
racing  season  and  achieved  some  success 
in  a  number  of  club  races  with  a  pre-war 
Riley.  His  first  big  chance  came  early  in 
1952  when  an  old  friend  of  the  family 
purchased  one  of  the  new  Cooper-Bristols 
with  a  view  to  entering  it  in  international 
races.  He  invited  Hawthorn  to  be  the 
driver.  Hawthorn's  first  appearance  with 
this  car  was  at  Goodwood  on  Easter 
Monday  1952,  when,  in  a  series  of  short 
races  in  which  many  world-famous 
drivers  were  competing,  he  did  so  well  that 
before  sundown  his  reputation  was  made 
and  a  new  name  was  upon  everyone's  hps. 
No  one  seemed  more  surprised  than  the 
Hawthorns.  His  continued  success  in  that 
year  was  rewarded  by  an  invitation  from 
Enzo  Ferrari  to  drive  for  him  in  the  fol- 
lowing season.  It  was  during  1953,  while 
he  was  still  a  comparatively  new  boy,  that 
he  won  the  French  Grand  Prix  from 
Fangio,  the  then  reigning  champion,  by 
a  matter  of  seconds  only.  The  sheer  dash 
and  courage  he  displayed  on  this  occasion 
endeared  him  to  everyone  for,  despite  his 
debonair  nature,  he  was  certainly  not 
without  knowledge  of  fear.  At  the  end  of 
the  race,  perhaps  his  greatest  moment  of 
triumph,  he  found  his  lower  lip  seriously 
injured — he  had  bitten  very  nearly 
through  it.  At  the  end  of  the  year  he 
found  his  successes  had  brought  him  the 
coveted  gold  star  of  the  British  Racing 
Drivers'  Club. 

The  year  1954  was  an  ill-fated  one  for 
him.  He  was  the  centre  of  a  most  unfor- 
tunate controversy  over  his  call-up  for 
national  service.  He  next  crashed  in  the 


467 


Hawthorn 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Syracuse  Grand  Prix  and  was  very  badly 
burned,  and  would  probably  have  lost  his 
legs  but  for  the  devoted  nursing  of  some 
nuns  in  Sicily.  He  was  moved  to  hospital 
in  Rome,  where  he  was  to  remain  for  some 
time,  and  where  his  condition  so  severely 
shocked  his  mother  that  she  herself  became 
ill.  When  he  had  recovered  and  was  on  the 
way  to  Le  Mans  to  take  part  in  the  24-hour 
race,  he  learned  that  his  father  had  had 
a  serious  motor  accident,  but  when  he 
telephoned  home  to  say  that  he  hoped  to 
arrive  that  night  he  was  told  that  his 
father  had  died.  Nevertheless  he  ended 
the  year  by  winning  the  Spanish  Grand 
Prix. 

In  1955  he  drove  briefly  for  Tony 
Vandervell,  but  there  were  temperamental 
difficulties  and  he  won  the  Le  Mans  race 
that  year  for  Jaguar,  beating  Fangio  in 
a  Mercedes-Benz  and  setting  up  a  fan- 
tastic lap  record  of  122  miles  an  hour. 
This  was  the  race  in  which  some  eighty 
spectators  were  killed  by  a  German  car, 
and  once  more  Hawthorn  was  the  centre 
of  controversy.  Despite  his  normally  happy 
disposition  he  was  unfortunately  capable 
of  reacting  very  badly  to  press  comment, 
particularly  when  he  felt  it  to  be  unin- 
formed, and  in  these  circumstances  he  was 
usually  his  own  worst  enemy.  For  a  man 
leading  so  sophisticated  a  life  he  was  in 
some  ways  quite  naive,  and  deeply  hurt 
when  he  thought,  to  use  his  own  words, 
that  he  was  'being  got  at'.  Nevertheless, 
he  brought  to  motor  sport  a  sense  of 
chivalry  and  good  fun,  and  his  close 
friendship  with  Peter  Collins  and  their 
constant  references  to  each  other  as  'mon 
ami,  mate'  gave  even  those  outside  the 
sport  some  insight  into  his  ebullient 
nature. 

He  had  a  reasonably  successful  season 
in  1956  and  returned  in  1957  to  Ferrari, 
showing  that  he  had  lost  none  of  his  early 
abiUty  and  gained  much  in  experience  and 
determination.  In  1958  he  again  won  the 
French  Grand  Prix  and  at  Casablanca  on 
19  October  he  achieved  his  highest  honour 
and  became  the  first  British  driver  to  be 
world  champion. 

He  was  awarded  the  British  Automobile 
Racing  Club's  gold  medal  and  two  months 
later  he  confirmed  that  he  was  to  retire 
from  motor  racing.  It  was  common  know- 
ledge  that  he  had  hoped  to  get  married,  to 
settle  down  to  build  up  the  business  he  had 
taken  over  on  his  father's  death,  and  to 
care  for  his  mother  in  her  declining  years. 
It  is  an  irony  of  fate  that  on  his  way  to 
London  from  his  home  in  Surrey  he  was 


killed  22  January  1959  in  a  motor  accident 
on  a  public  road  near  Guildford,  in  circum- 
stances not  so  very  different  from  those  in 
which  his  father  had  died. 

[The  Times,  23  January  1959 ;  Mike  Haw- 
thorn, Challenge  Me  the  Race,  1958,  and 
Champion  Year,  1959 ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]        Michael  Frostick. 

HAY,  IAN  (pseudonym),  writer.  [See 
Beith,  John  Hay.] 

HEAL,  Sir  AMBROSE  (1872-1959), 
furniture  designer  and  dealer,  was  born  at 
Crouch  End,  London,  8  September  1872, 
the  eldest  son  of  Ambrose  Heal,  furnisher, 
by  his  wife,  Emily  Maria,  daughter  of 
Thomas  Stephenson,  of  Finchley.  He  was 
the  great-grandson  of  John  Harris  Heal, 
who  in  1810  had  started  business  as 
a  feather  dresser  at  Rathbone  Place, 
Oxford  Street,  London.  In  1840  the 
business  was  moved  to  Tottenham  Court 
Road.  It  became  known  chiefly  as  a  pro- 
vider of  bedding ;  bedsteads  were  added  in 
1850 ;  eventually  the  firm's  interests  were 
enlarged  to  include  general  furniture, 
a  wide  expansion  taking  place  after  1875. 
Educated  at  Marlborough,  Heal  spent 
some  time  recuperating  from  a  football 
injury  in  the  house  of  a  private  tutor, 
where  he  met  his  cousin,  Cecil  Brewer, 
who  was  in  similar  case.  The  boys  became 
fast  friends.  They  had  common  interests  in 
the  arts  of  design,  and  Brewer  was  soon 
to  show  great  promise  in  architecture, 
only  to  be  cut  off  by  his  early  death  in 
1918.  Leaving  school  in  1887  Heal  was 
sent  by  his  father  to  France  for  six  months 
and  then  apprenticed  to  a  cabinet-maker 
at  Warwick,  starting  at  the  bench  and 
afterwards  spending  some  time  in  the 
drawing-office.  When  he  joined  the  family 
firm  in  1893  he  had  the  root  of  the  matter 
in  him.  At  that  time  furniture  styles 
tended  to  a  vulgar  over-elaboration,  but 
salutary  influences  were  at  work,  including 
William  Morris  [q.v.]  andthe  Art  Workers' 
Guild.  Through  Brewer,  Heal  met  men 
like  W.  R.  Lethaby,  Selwyn  Image,  and 
C.  F.  Annesley  Voysey  [qq.v.].  The 
aesthetic  climate  in  which  he  moved  was 
thus  a  healthy  one.  He  had  developed  a 
real  appreciation  of  wood  as  a  medium, 
and  from  the  first  revolted  against  the 
current  fussiness  of  design  and  ornament. 
His  furniture  combined  functional  utility 
with  a  simplicity  of  line  which  left  the 
chief  aesthetic  impact  to  be  made  by 
the  marking  and  texture  of  the  wood.  It 
was  a  hard  task  to  introduce  what  then 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


Heilbron 


seemed  revolutionary  ideas.  HeaPs  sales- 
men asked  how  they  could  be  expected 
to  sell  'prison  furniture',  and  the  very 
cabinet-makers  were- in  revolt.  But  Heal 
persisted;  he  won  a  silver  medal  at  the 
Paris  Exhibition  of  1900  for  a  bedroom 
suite  in  oak,  inlaid  with  ebony  and  pewter. 
The  number  of  enlightened  patrons  gradu- 
ally increased.  He  was  a  co-founder  of  the 
Design  and  Industries  Association  in  1915. 

Meanwhile  in  1913,  following  his 
father's  death,  he  had  become  chairman 
of  Heal  &  Son.  Before  long  he  greatly 
broadened  the  basis  of  the  business  and 
added  general  and  office  furniture  and 
even  kitchen  and  bathroom  furnishings. 
He  chose  his  buyers  with  care,  but  by  no 
means  gave  them  carte  blanche.  Heal  was 
not  only  a  craftsman  but  a  business  man 
with  an  eye  for  profit  and  he  insisted  on 
concerning  himself  closely  with  all  the 
lines  of  goods  it  was  proposed  to  sell. 

Although  for  many  years  beds  re- 
mained the  mainstay  of  the  business 
(a  fourposter  was  still  the  trademark  in 
the  second  half  of  the  twentieth  century), 
the  'Scope  of  Heal's  was  progressively 
widened.  An  antique  furniture  depart- 
ment was  followed  by  the  pottery,  carpets, 
textiles,  and  curtains  sections,  each  and 
all  notable  for  the  originality  and  quiet 
good  taste  displayed.  In  the  thirties  the 
Mansard  art  gallery  was  added  at  the  top 
of  the  buildings.  In  the  war  of  1939^5 
mattresses  were  produced  for  the  Ser- 
vices and  the  building  survived  hits  by 
incendiary  bombs.  In  1941  a  subsidiary 
wholesale  and  export  department  was 
formed ;  in  1944  a. small  building  company 
was  acquired;  these  were  the  first  of 
a  number  of  offshoots  dealing  with  all 
aspects  of  the  home.  In  January  1953 
Heal  resigned  the  chairmanship  to  his 
elder  son  but  remained  a  director  for  life. 

Heal  was  knighted  in  1933.  In  1939  he 
was  appointed  a  royal  designer  for  in- 
dustry ;  in  1954  he  was  awarded  the  Albert 
medal  by  the  Royal  Society  of  Arts  for 
services  to  industrial  design.  He  will  be 
remembered  as  one  of  the  major  crafts- 
men of  his  day.  His  most  important 
service  to  furniture-making  was  to  get 
rid  of  otiose  decoration  and  to  produce 
chastely  designed  and  comfortable  pieces 
which  were  an  adornment  to  the  home 
and  not  so  expensive  as  to  be  obtainable 
only  by  the  wealthy.  Although  fundamen- 
tally a  pleasant  character.  Heal  was  rather 
a  terrifying  figure  to  his  staff.  He  was 
a  Victorian  by  temperament  and  pre- 
served a  certain  aloofness  even  from  his 


fellow  directors.  His  private  interests 
included  the  trade  cards,  billheads,  and 
signboards  of  London  shops,  the  work  of 
the  London  goldsmiths  and  furniture 
makers,  and  calligraphy,  subjects  in  which 
he  made  valuable  collections  and  on  which 
he  himself  wrote  a  number  of  works.  His 
book  The  English  Writing-Masters  and 
their  Copy-Books,  1570-1800  (1931)  is 
authoritative.  He  was  a  fellow  of  the 
Society  of  Antiquaries  and  a  member  of 
the  advisory  council  of  the  Victoria  and 
Albert  Museum. 

In  1895  Heal  married  Alice  Rose  (died 
1901),  daughter  of  Alexander  Rippingille. 
They  had  one  son  who  died  at  the  age  of 
nineteen.  In  1904  he  married  Edith 
Florence  Digby  (died  1946),  daughter 
of  Dr.  John  Todhunter.  They  had  a 
daughter  and  two  sons,  the  elder  of  whom 
took  over  the  business  and  the  younger 
followed  his  father  as  a  designer.  Heal 
died  at  Beaconsfield  15  November  1959. 
There  is  a  portrait  of  him  by  Edward 
I.  Halliday  in  the  board-room  of  the  firm. 

[The  Times,  17  November  1959 ;  The  His- 
tory of  HeaVs  (leaflet),  1962 ;  private  informa- 
tion.] Herbert  B.  Grimsditch. 

HEILBRON,  Sir  IAN  MORRIS  (1886- 
1959),  chemist,  was  born  6  November 
1886  in  Glasgow,  the  younger  son  of 
David  Heilbron,  wine  merchant,  and  his 
wife,  Fanny  Jessel.  Originally  named 
Isidor,  he  eventually  adopted  the  name 
of  Ian  by  which  he  had  been  known  for 
many  years.  He  was  educated  at  Glasgow 
High  School,  the  Royal  Technical  College, 
Glasgow,  and  the  university  of  Leipzig. 
Having  come  under  the  influence  of 
G.  G.  Henderson  [q.v.]  and  A.  Hantzsch 
with  particular  respect  to  chemical  re- 
search, Heilbron  became  a  lecturer  at  the 
Royal  Technical  College,  Glasgow,  in 
1909.  After  an  interruption  due  to  the  war 
and  a  brief  period  with  the  newly  formed 
British  Dyestuffs  Corporation,  he  became 
professor  of  organic  chemistry  there  in 
1919-20.  He  subsequently  held  the 
chairs  of  organic  chemistry  in  Liverpool 
(1920-33),  Manchester  (1933-5,  in  1935-8 
Sir  Samuel  Hall  professor  of  chemistry), 
and  the  Imperial  College  of  Science 
and  Technology,  London  (1938-49).  He 
vacated  the  last  chair  to  become  director 
in  1949  of  the  newly  formed  Brewing 
Industry  Research  Foundation,  Nutfield, 
Surrey,  where  he  was  mainly  responsible 
for  creating  a  centre  of  fundamental 
research  into  fermentation  chemistry  and 
biology.  He  retired  in  195S*rtfo€i  iBoktim^ 


Heilbron 


t).N.B.  1951-1960 


Heilbron  gained  a  world-wide  reputa- 
tion for  his  organizational  skill  and  for 
his  imagination  in  designing  laboratories 
specifically  fashioned  to  take  advantage 
of  new,  especially  physical,  techniques  in 
organic  chemical  research.  He  was  himself 
largely  responsible  for  the  general  intro- 
duction of  many  of  these  into  research 
work  in  Britain,  notably  the  use  of  various 
forms  of  spectrometry,  molecular  distilla- 
tion, microanalysis,  and  chromatography. 
He  was  a  most  inspiring  teacher  and 
a  remarkable  nimiber  of  his  students 
achieved  eminence  in  either  the  academic 
or  the  industrial  spheres  at  home  or 
abroad.  Especially  in  his  later  years  he 
was  widely  sought  as  a  consultant  of 
scientific  industrial  problems. 

Heilbron's  scientific  work  began  with 
a  few  years  devoted  mostly  to  questions 
of  the  detailed  structures  of  various  syn- 
thetic coloured  substances.  From  1919 
onwards  he  was  increasingly  interested 
in  miscellaneous  naturally  occurring 
materials,  especially  ones  of  pronounced 
biological  activity.  He  thus  pioneered 
investigations  on  vitamins  A  and  D  as 
well  as  related  carotenoid  pigments  and 
steroids,  and  over  approximately  thirty 
years  became  recognized  as  a  world 
authority  on  the  chemistry  of  these  fields. 
This  interest  led  to  his  opening  up  the 
broad  topic  of  the  general  chemistry  of 
acetylenic  derivatives  of  diverse  types  to 
provide  the  foundation  of  much  industrial 
development.  Heilbron  was  in  turn  con- 
cerned with  numerous  other  substances  of 
actual  or  potential  therapeutic  interest 
and  made  important  contributions  to  the 
chemistry  of  the  penicillins,  particularly 
during  the  war  of  1939-45  when  the  sub- 
ject was  of  major  national  importance  but 
one  of  probably  unsurpassed  practical 
difficulty.  He  wrote  extensively  in  the 
scientific  field  as  the  author  or  part-author 
of  about  300  publications  dealing  with 
original  work.  He  also  brought  into  being 
the  Dictionary  of  Organic  Compounds 
associated  with  his  name  and  played  an 
important  part  as  chairman  of  the  edi- 
torial board  responsible  at  one  time  for 
Thorpe's  Dictionary  of  Pure  and  Applied 
Chemistry — the  main  reference  work  of  its 
kind  in  English. 

Heilbron  received  many  academic 
honours  including  the  fellowship  (1931) 
and  the  Davy  (1943)  and  Royal  (1951) 
medals  of  the  Royal  Society,  honorary 
degrees  from  Glasgow  and  Edinburgh, 
and  membership  and  lectureships  of  the 
Chemical  Society  of  London  of  which  he 


was  president  (1948-50),  the  American 
Chemical  Society,  the  French  Chemical 
Society,  and  the  Royal  Netherlands 
Academy  of  Sciences. 

He  saw  active  service  in  the  first  war  as 
lieutenant,  later  lieutenant-colonel,  in  the 
Army  Service  Corps,  as  assistant  director 
of  supplies  in  Salonika,  and  was  appointed 
to  the  D.S.O.  He  was  a  scientific  adviser 
successively  to  the  Ministries  of  Supply 
(1939-42)  and  Production  (1942-5)  and 
played  a  forceful  part  in  the  introduction 
of  D.D.T.  as  an  insecticide  which  mitigated 
the  difficulties  of  the  war,  especially  in  the 
South  European  and  Far  East  regions. 
Both  before  and  after  the  war  he  was 
active  in  other  departments  of  public 
service,  for  over  eventually  fifty  years  his 
experience  of  the  growth  of  science  and  its 
increasing  penetration  into  industry  and 
the  public  service  was  probably  unrivalled. 
Thus  he  took  over  many  years  a  leading 
part,  especially  after  1945,  in  the  organiza- 
tion of  the  International  Union  of  Pure 
and  Applied  Chemistry  and  acted  as 
chairman  of  various  government  commit- 
tees and  of  the  advisory  councils  of  the 
Department  of  Scientific  and  Industrial 
Research  (1950-54)  and  the  Royal  Mifi- 
tary  College  of  Science  (1953-5).  He  was 
knighted  in  1946. 

In  a  private  capacity  he  was  a  man  of 
fastidious  taste,  meticulous  precision,  and 
wide  artistic  interests.  He  died  in  London, 
14  September  1959,  five  years  after  the 
death  of  his  wife,  Elda  Marguerite,  daugh- 
ter of  Herbert  J.  Davis,  of  Liverpool, 
whom  he  married  in  1924.  They  had  two 
sons. 

[A.  H.  Cook  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  vi,  1960; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

A.  H.  Cook. 

HENDERSON,  Sir  HUBERT  DOUGLAS 

(1890-1952),  economist,  was  born  at 
Beckenham,  Kent,  20  October  1890,  the 
third  son  and  sixth  and  youngest  child  of 
John  Henderson,  then  London  manager  of 
the  Clydesdale  Bank,  by  his  wife,  Sarah, 
daughter  of  William  Thomson,  of  an 
Edinburgh  shipping  family.  The  Hender- 
sons soon  moved  to  Aberdeen  where  John 
Henderson  was  manager  of  the  North  of 
Scotland  Bank,  and  later  to  Kelvinside, 
in  Glasgow,  where  he  was  general  manager 
of  the  Clydesdale  Bank,  and  lived  in 
prosperous  circumstances. 

Hubert  Henderson  was  educated  at 
Aberdeen  Grammar  School,  at  Rugby 
School  and  at  Emmanuel  College,  Cam- 


470 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Henderson 


bridge,  to  which  he  went  in  October  1909 
with  a  mathematical  exhibition.  An  ex- 
ceptional teacher  at  Aberdeen  Grammar 
School  had  aroused  his  interest  in  mathe- 
matics. At  Cambridge  this  first  enthusiasm 
was  on  the  wane — he  secured  only  a  third 
in  the  first  part  of  the  mathematical 
tripos  (1910) — being  supplanted  by  a  more 
enduring  interest  in  debate.  Debate  led  to 
politics,  and  politics,  in  the  heyday  of 
Liberal  reform,  to  economics.  He  ob- 
tained a  first  in  the  second  part  of  the 
economics  tripos  in  1912,  in  which  year 
he  was  also  president  of  the  Union.  He 
acquired  Liberal  and  reforming  views,  at 
variance  with  those  in  which  he  had  been 
reared ;  and  he  came  under  the  influence  of 
(Sir)  Norman  Angell. 

While  reading  for  the  bar,  his  intended 
career,  he  supported  himself  by  taking 
economics  pupils  for  his  college  which 
gave  him  a  small  bursary.  When  war 
broke  out  his  friend  Walter  (later  Lord) 
Layton  took  him  into  a  statistical  section 
of  the  Board  of  Trade.  He  volunteered  for 
military  service  but  was  rejected  on  medi- 
cal grounds ;  and  in  1917  he  was  sent  to 
Manchester  as  secretary  of  the  Cotton 
Control  Board  which  he  has  described  in 
a  volume  of  the  Carnegie  Endowment's 
economic  and  social  history  of  the  war 
(1922). 

After  the  war,  although  offered  an 
established  position  at  the  Board  of 
Trade,  and  although  his  father  was  willing 
to  support  his  family — he  had  married  in 
1915 — ^while  he  resumed  his  career  at  the 
bar,  he  accepted  a  fellowship  at  Clare 
College,  Cambridge,  and  a  university 
lectureship  in  economics.  He  wrote  his 
book  Supply  and  Demand  in  the  long 
vacation  of  1922 ;  it  was  the  first  and  one 
of  the  most  successful  of  the  Cambridge 
Economic  Handbooks.  Clear  and  down  to 
earth,  it  is  notably  sceptical  about  the 
influence  of  price  on  the  total  supply  of 
factors  of  production. 

In  1923  J.  M.  (later  Lord)  Keynes 
[q.v.]  and  some  friends  bought  the  Nation 
and  Athenaeum,  a  weekly,  as  a  mouth- 
piece for  the  Liberals  who  had  organized 
the  summer  school  of  1922.  Keynes  per- 
suaded Henderson,  once  his  pupil,  now 
a  sympathetic  colleague,  to  become  editor. 
A  newcomer  to  journalism  Henderson 
made  the  Nation  a  formidable  and  re- 
spected organ  of  reformist  opinion.  He 
opposed  the  return  to  gold  in  1925,  sup- 
ported a  programme  of  national  develop- 
ment, supported  in  1924  and  opposed  in 
1930  the  repeal  of  the  McKenna  duties  on 


imported  motors,  noticed  in  1926  the 
contrasting  fortunes  of  the  depressed 
north  and  west  and  the  expanding  in- 
dustries of  south-east  England,  opposed 
proportional  representation,  but  hoped 
none  the  less  that  the  Labour  Party  would 
share  political  power  with  the  Liberals. 

Henderson  contributed  both  in  discus- 
sion and  with  his  pen  to  the  preparation  of 
Britain's  Industrial  Future  in  which  the 
same  group  of  Liberals  set  out  their  pro- 
gramme in  1928.  For  the  1929  election  he 
and  Keynes  together  prepared  a  pamphlet 
Can  Lloyd  George  Do  It?  supporting  the 
Liberal  leader's  claim  that  he  could 
conquer  unemployment.  Henderson  stood 
as  a  Liberal  candidate  for  Cambridge 
University,  but  was  unsuccessful. 

In  January  1930  Ramsay  MacDonald 
set  up  the  Economic  Advisory  Council 
consisting  of  ministers  and  eminent  in- 
dividuals with  academic  and  practical 
knowledge  of  economics.  Henderson, 
leaving  the  Nation,  became,  first,  the 
council's  assistant  secretary,  and,  when 
Thomas  Jones  [q.v.]  retired,  its  joint 
secretary  until  1934.  Whitehall  and  the 
great  depression  brought  a  sobering 
awareness  of  practical  and  political  diffi- 
culties; but  the  optimism  of  his  Nation 
days  occasionally  found  an  outlet,  as 
when  in  1932  he  made  an  abortive  pro- 
posal for  an  international  note  issue. 

In  1934  Henderson  left  Whitehall 
Gardens  for  Oxford,  on  being  appointed 
to  a  research  fellowship  at  All  Souls.  In- 
terested in  population  he  traced  a  possible 
connection  between  a  declining  birth-rate 
and  a  lack  of  adaptability  to  economic 
change.  Interviews  with  business  men, 
conducted  by  a  group  of  Oxford  econo- 
mists, under  his  chairmanship  and  at  his 
instigation,  led  him  and  others  to  rather 
sceptical  conclusions  on  the  efficacy  of  the 
price  mechanism  and  on  accepted  theories 
of  the  modus  operandi  of  interest  rates.  He 
took  an  active  part  in  the  establishment  of 
the  Oxford  Institute  of  Statistics.  A  stage 
in  his  own  development  is  marked  by 
his  separation  from  Keynes's  intellectual 
influence — although  not  his  friendship.  In 
1936  he  read  a  very  critical  paper  on 
Keynes's  General  Theory  of  Employment, 
Interest  and  Money  to  the  Marshall  Society 
at  Cambridge. 

Henderson  continued  to  play  a  part  in 
pubhc  affairs.  He  remained  an  active 
member  of  the  committee  on  economic 
information,  all  of  the  Economic  Advisory 
Council  that  survived  the  change  of 
government  in  1931.  He  took  part  in  an 


471 


Henderson 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


inquiry  organized  by  Lord  Astor  and  B. 
Seebohm  Rowntree  [qq.v.]  into  agricul- 
tural policy  and  wrote  the  report,  'The 
Agricultural  Dilemma'  (1935),  which  des- 
cribes its  conclusions.  In  1938-9  he  was  a 
member  of  the  royal  commission  on  the 
West  Indies  and  enjoyed  the  visit  the 
commission  and  its  chairman  Lord  Moyne 
[q.v.]  paid  to  those  islands. 

Returning  to  England  not  long  before 
the  outbreak  of  war,  with  (Sir)  Henry 
Clay  [q.v.]  he  assisted  in  the  survey  of 
economic  and  financial  plans  for  war  Lord 
Stamp  [q.v.]  had  been  called  upon  to 
make.  This  little  committee  continued  in 
existence  until  Stamp  died  in  an  air  raid  in 
1941,  and  during  its  vigorous  early  days 
Henderson  dealt  comprehensively  with 
many  of  the  practical  issues  raised  in  the 
conversion  of  a  peaceful  economy  to  a  war 
footing.  By  the  summer  of  1940  he  was 
already  dividing  his  time  between  the  sur- 
vey and  the  Treasury  where  he  acted  in 
a  vaguely  defined  advisory  capacity  to 
successive  chancellors  of  the  Exchequer 
and  their  permanent  officials.  His  critical 
powers,  which  were  acute,  found  material 
in  the  projects  for  post-war  Utopias  which 
then  absorbed  the  energies  of  many  able 
men  on  either  side  of  the  Atlantic. 
Especially  he  opposed  acquiescence  in 
American  proposals  to  implement  our 
Lend-Lease  agreement  to  liberalize  world 
trade,  which  seemed  to  him  to  underesti- 
mate our  task  in  making  ends  meet  after 
the  war.  For  this  purpose  he  completed 
a  controversial  survey  of  international 
economic  history  between  the  wars  which 
he  had  begun  at  All  Souls  before  the  war. 
He  had  had  a  coronary  thrombosis  in  1942 
from  which  he  recovered  rapidly,  but  he 
had  to  end  his  work  at  the  Treasury  in 
December  1944. 

Chosen  in  1944  Drummond  professor 
of  political  economy  at  Oxford,  a  chair 
attached  to  All  Souls,  he  began  his  duties 
in  October  1945.  Appointed  to  the  royal 
commission  on  population  in  1944,  he  suc- 
ceeded Lord  Simon  [q.v.]  as  its  chairman 
in  1946.  From  1945  to  1948  he  was  chair- 
man of  the  statutory  committee  on  unem- 
ployment insurance ;  at  Oxford  he  became 
chairman  of  the  Institute  of  Statistics, 
a  member  and  for  some  time  chairman  of 
the  board  of  the  faculty  of  social  studies, 
and  a  delegate  of  the  University  Press. 
Knighted  in  1942,  elected  F.B.A.  in  1948 
when  he  was  also  president  of  the  eco- 
nomic section  of  the  British  Association, 
he  was  elected  president  of  the  Royal 
Economic  Society  in  1950. 


Although  he  took  seriously  the  duties 
these  appointments  involved,  Henderson 
could  stUl  make  characteristic  contribu- 
tions to  controversies  of  the  day.  His  Rede 
lecture  (1947)  deals  severely  with  some 
aspects  of  planning;  his  address  to  the 
British  Association  on  the  price  system 
is  equally  severe  on  the  proponents  of 
laissez-faire.  Perhaps  his  most  substantial 
article  at  this  time  was  that  on  'The 
Fimction  of  Exchange  Rates'  {Oxford 
Economic  Papers,  vol.  i,  January  1949) 
where  he  restated  an  earlier  conclusion 
that  international  financial  equilibrium 
cannot  be  painlessly  achieved  by  exchange 
rate  variations. 

In  1951  his  college  of  All  Souls  did  him 
the  rare  honour  of  electing  him,  a  Cam- 
bridge man,  as  its  warden.  He  lived  only  a 
short  time  to  enjoy  a  position  to  which  his 
talents  and  temperament  were  admirably 
adapted.  Towards  the  end  of  that  year  he 
had  a  third  coronary  thrombosis  and  he 
died  in  Oxford  22  February  1952. 

After  Henderson's  death  a  selection  of 
his  papers  made  by  Sir  Henry  Clay  was 
published  under  the  title  The  Inter-War 
Years  (1955).  Approaching  economics  in 
the  spirit  of  a  public  man  seeking  answers 
to  practical  questions,  Henderson  was  im- 
patient of  the  building  of  formal  systems 
and  of  the  over-refinement  of  theoretical 
analysis.  He  stretched  the  boundaries  of 
his  subject  to  touch  the  political  condi- 
tions which  limit  the  actions  of  statesmen, 
on  which  his  judgement  was  always 
acute.  His  contemporary  influence  was 
very  considerable,  and  that  of  the  written 
word  was  supplemented  by  indefatigable 
attendance  at  meetings  of  such  bodies  as 
the  Tuesday  Club,  the  Political  Economy 
Club,  and  Chatham  House,  where  his 
interventions  could  be  relied  on  to  produce 
an  effect. 

He  married  in  1915  a  student  of  econo- 
mics, Faith,  daughter  of  Philip  H.  Bagenal, 
a  political  editor,  of  Dubhn.  They  had  two 
daughters  and  one  son  and  a  singularly 
happy  family  Kfe. 

[Supplement  to  Oxford  Economic  Papers, 
vol.  V,  1953;  Sir  Dennis  Robertson  in  Eco- 
nomic Journal,  December  1953;  Sir  Henry 
Clay's  introduction  to  The  Inter-War  Years, 
1955;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] PiEBS  Debenham. 

HENSON,  LESLIE  LINCOLN  (1891- 
1957),  actor-manager,  was  born  in  Notting 
Hill,  London,  3  August  1891,  the  eldest  of 
the  three  children  of  Joseph  Lincoln  Hen- 
son,  tallow  chandler,  of  Smithfield,  and  hia 


47» 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Henson 


wife,  Alice  Mary,  daughter  of  William 
Squire,  of  Glastonbury.  He  was  educated 
at  Cliftonville  College  and  Emanuel  School, 
Wandsworth.  His  parents,  realizing  where 
his  talents  lay,  wisely  swallowed  their 
disappointment  at  his  reluctance  to  stay  in 
the  family  business  and  sent  him  to  study 
acting  under  Cairns  James.  Beginning  his 
professional  career  in  1910  as  a  member  of 
a  concert  party  called  'The  Tatlers',  he 
continued  for  the  next  five  years  to  be  en- 
gaged in  concert-party  work,  alternating 
this  with  touring  in  musical  comedy. 
He  made  his  first  London  success  at  the 
Gaiety  Theatre,  28  April  1915,  as  Henry  in 
To'NighVs  the  Night.  It  was  appropriate 
that  his  success,  which  was  instantaneous, 
should  have  been  made  at  a  theatre  so 
closely  identified  with  the  reputations  of 
many  famous  comedians. 

All  actors  reflect,  with  varying  degrees 
of  distortion,  the  times  in  which  they 
live.  Henson  was  no  exception.  His 
cockney  alertness,  his  bubbling  humour, 
and  his  india-rubber  face  which  never 
ceased  to  underline  or  embroider  the  lines 
he  was  speaking,  exploded  like  a  Catherine 
wheel,  in  a  theatre  grown  accustomed  to 
the  heavier  humours  of  Edmund  Payne 
and  his  contemporaries.  Here  was  a  dif- 
ferent, a  livelier  talent. 

Henson's  emergence  as  a  star  of  musical 
comedy  was  put  into  temporary  eclipse  by 
the  war  of  1914-18.  Before  joining  the 
army,  he  flung  himself  into  the  work  of 
entertaining  the  troops.  Early  in  1916  he 
appeared  in  a  revue  of  his  own  contriving 
in  the  new  garrison  theatre  at  Park  Hall 
Camp,  Oswestry,  one  of  the  first  of  the 
new  hutted  camps  soon  to  be  dotted  over 
the  countryside.  The  building  of  this 
theatre  out  of  the  soldiers'  regimental 
funds  was  the  genesis  of  the  system  of 
government-sponsored  entertainment  in 
wartime  which  reached  its  full  develop- 
ment in  the  war  of  1939-45  under  the 
aegis  of  E.N.S.A.  The  company,  which 
included  Melville  Gideon,  Stanley  Hollo- 
way,  and  Davy  Burnaby,  and  six  girls 
from  the  Gaiety  chorus,  all  of  them 
destined  to  achieve  success  in  one  direction 
or  another,  left  the  Gaiety  Theatre  after 
the  Saturday  night  performance,  wrote 
the  revue  on  the  night  mail  to  Chester, 
rehearsed  it  on  the  garrison  theatre  stage 
on  the  Sunday  morning,  and  performed  it 
twice  that  same  evening:  the  kind  of  gay, 
chaotic  improvisation  in  which  Henson 
delighted.  Later,  he  joined  the  Royal 
Flying  Corps,  was  sent  to  France,  com- 
missioned, and  put  to  work  organizing 


entertainment  for  the  Fifth  Army.  The 
little  company  of  actors  which  he  gathered 
round  him,  some  professional,  some  ama- 
teur, soon  became  famous  as  The  Gaieties, 
making  their  headquarters  at  the  muni- 
cipal theatre  in  Lille. 

Following  demobilization  Henson 
achieved  a  series  of  outstanding  successes 
in  musical  comedy  at  the  Winter  Garden, 
of  which  Sally  (1921)  and  Kid  Boots  (1926), 
both  American  importations,  were  best 
remembered.  In  1935  he  returned  to  the 
Gaiety  to  appear  in  a  series  of  musical 
plays  containing  parts  specially  written 
for  him,  and  to  share  in  the  management. 
He  was  also  associated  in  management 
with  Tom  Walls  [q.v.].  Together  they 
were  responsible  for  the  production  of  the 
farce  Tons  of  Money  (1922),  followed  by 
the  series  of  plays  known  as  the  Aldwych 
farces,  a  generic  title  acquired  from  the 
theatre  in  which  they  were  presented. 
Henson  also  made  a  number  of  films.  His 
star  was  now  at  its  zenith  and  he  was  fully 
occupied  until  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939. 

Henson's  sense  of  obligation  towards 
the  audiences  who  had  welcomed  him 
with  such  acclaim  found  its  full  expression 
in  his  untiring  efforts  throughout  the  war, 
when  he  worked  almost  continually  for 
E.N.S.A.,  first  in  France,  and  later  in 
North  Africa,  the  Middle  East,  Italy,  and 
India.  Welcomed  in  every  mess  and 
canteen,  raising  uproarious  laughter  like 
clouds  of  desert  dust  wherever  he  went, 
this  was  Leslie  Henson  at  his  most  ful- 
filled. He  was  a  droll,  a  cockney  clown,  of 
unmistakable  genius.  Representing  the 
art  of  the  ridiculous  in  the  theatre,  he  was 
at  his  best  when  pursuing  the  golden 
thread  of  absurdity  through  a  maze  of 
commonplace  situations.  His  humour  was 
as  characteristic  of  the  years  in  which  he 
flourished  as  many  of  the  gritty  jokes  of 
the  television  artists  reflect  the  nervous 
hilarity  of  a  later  day.  One  of  the  best 
ways  of  remembering  him  is  by  the  widely 
published  photograph  of  King  George  VI 
roaring  with  laughter  at  a  Henson  joke 
during  a  performance  for  the  Fleet  at 
Scapa  Flow. 

The  time  came,  after  the  war  and  co- 
inciding with  the  natural  decline  in  his  own 
powers,  when  his  brand  of  humour  began 
to  stale.  The  last  production  in  which  he 
may  be  said  to  have  appeared  in  a  charac- 
teristic part,  largely  of  his  own  fashioning, 
was  Bob's  Your  Uncle,  at  the  Saville 
Theatre  in  1948.  Thereafter,  he  was  forced 
to  abandon  the  musical-comedy  eccen- 
tricities in  which  he  had  made  his  name 


473 


Henson 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


and  to  appear  in  plays  where  his  inability 
to  create  a  part  otherwise  than  in  terms  of 
his  own  drollery  became  a  serious  handi- 
cap. His  performances  in  the  revivals  of 
such  plays  as  1066  and  All  That  (1947),  in 
Harvey  (1950),  and  in  the  musical  play 
about  Samuel  Pepys  called  And  So  To  Bed 
(1951)  had  only  equivocal  success. 

Like  all  great  comic  actors  Henson  took 
his  work  seriously,  and  he  cheerfully 
accepted  the  responsibilities  which  success 
brought  him.  He  was  president  of  the 
Royal  General  Theatrical  Fund  from  1938 
and  remained  to  the  last  indefatigable  in 
charitable  causes. 

Henson  married  in  1919  Madge  Saun- 
ders, actress ;  the  marriage  was  dissolved 
in  1925.  His  subsequent  marriage  to 
Gladys  Gunn  was  also  dissolved;  and  in 
1944  he  married  Mrs.  Harriet  Martha  Day, 
by  whom  he  had  two  sons.  He  died  at 
Harrow  Weald  2  December  1957.  A  por- 
trait by  Frank  O.  Salisbury  is  in  the  pos- 
session of  the  family,  and  one  of  the 
actor  as  Mr.  Pepys  by  Maurice  Codner  is  in 
the  hands  of  the  artist's  son. 

[The  Times,  3  and  9  December  1957 ;  Leslie 
Henson,  My  Laugh  Story,  1926,  and  Yours 
Faithfully,  1948 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Basil  Dean. 

HICKS,  GEORGE  ERNEST  (1879- 
1954),  trade-unionist,  was  born  at  Vern- 
ham  Dean,  Hampshire,  13  May  1879,  the 
fourth  of  the  nine  children  of  William 
Hicks,  bricklayer,  and  his  wife,  Laura 
Beckingham  Clarke.  Hicks  attended  the 
village  school  but  left  at  the  age  of  eleven 
to  work  with  his  father.  He  went  to  Lon- 
don in  1896  and  joined  the  Pimlico  branch 
of  the  Operative  Bricklayers'  Society. 
Appointed  national  organizer  in  1912,  he 
succeeded  in  recruiting  many  new  mem- 
bers for  his  union  which  elected  him 
general  secretary  in  1919,  in  which  year 
he  also  became  president  of  the  newly 
formed  National  Federation  of  Building 
Trades  Operatives.  Hicks  now  took  up 
proposals  long  delayed  by  apathy  and 
prejudice  to  amalgamate  the  building 
trade  unions.  Adopting  the  slogan  'More 
unity  and  fewer  unions'  he  succeeded  in 
uniting  the  bricklayers'  two  unions  and 
the  Operative  Stonemasons'  Society  in  the 
Amalgamated  Union  of  Building  Trade 
Workers  of  which  he  was  first  general 
secretary  from  1921  to  1940.  Over  the 
same  p>eriod  he  sat  upon  the  General 
Council  of  the  Trades  Union  Congress.  As 
a  young  man  Hicks  had  been  attracted  to 
industrial  unionism,  akin  to  syndicalism, 


and  he  continued  to  hold  militant  left- 
wing  views ;  but  in  his  capacity  of  chair- 
man of  the  Trades  Union  Congress  in 
1926-7,  after  the  failure  of  the  general 
strike,  he  spoke  with  restraint  of  the  need 
to  maintain  industrial  peace. 

A  ready  and  humorous  speaker  for 
whom  his  own  early  struggles  provided  a 
background  of  conviction  and  experience. 
Hicks  was  an  effective  propagandist  for 
trade-unionism  and  for  his  party  which 
made  much  use  of  him  on  the  platform 
and  over  a  wide  field  of  committee  work, 
international  delegation,  and  working- 
class  education.  He  was  elected  Labour 
member  of  Parliament  for  East  Woolwich 
in  1931  and  retained  his  seat  until  his 
retirement  in  1950.  He  was  parliamentary 
secretary  to  the  Ministry  of  Works  from 
November  1940  until  May  1945.  He  was 
not  invited  to  serve  in  the  Labour  admini- 
stration formed  in  July  1945.  He  was 
appointed  C.B.E.  in  1946,  having  declined 
in  1945  the  prime  minister's  offer  to  sub- 
mit his  name  for  a  knighthood. 

There  was  a  Rabelaisian  flavour  about 
Hicks :  fat  and  red-faced  in  middle  age,  he 
indulged,  not  always  wisely,  a  fondness 
for  eating  and  drinking  and  the  broad 
joke.  He  was  twice  married:  first,  in  1897, 
to  Kate  Louisa  (died  1934),  daughter  of 
William  Bennett,  carpenter,  by  whom  he 
had  one  son  and  two  daughters ;  secondly, 
in  1938,  to  Emma  Ellen,  daughter  of 
James  William  Arden,  stevedore,  and 
widow  of  Alfred  Ellis.  He  died  at  Surbiton 
19  July  1954.  A  portrait  by  Marck  Zulauski 
became  the  possession  of  the  Amalgamated 
Union  of  Building  Trade  Workers. 

[R.  W.  Postgate,  The  Builders'  History, 
1923;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] E.  DE  NORMANN. 

HILL,  Sir  LEONARD  ERSKINE  (1866- 
1952),  physiologist,  third  son  of  G.  B.  N. 
Hill  [q.v.],  editor  of  Boswell,  was  born  in 
Tottenham  2  June  1866.  His  two  elder 
brothers  were  Sir  Maurice  Hill,  the  judge 
[q.v.],  and  Sir  Arthur  Norman  Hill,  an 
authority  on  shipping  problems.  His 
great-grandfather  was  T.  W.  Hill  [q.v.] 
and  great-uncles  were  Sir  Rowland  and 
Matthew  Davenport  Hill  [qq.v.].  Hill  was 
educated  at  Haileybury,  where  his  studies 
were  centred  on  the  classics  and  general 
literature,  with  little  in  mathematics  and 
nothing  in  experimental  science;  but  he 
appears  to  have  had  some  success  at 
rugby  football. 

Leonard's  own  wish  was  to  be  a  farme^l 
but  he  accepted  his  parents'  choice  of 


474 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hill,  L.  E. 


medicine,  entering  University  College, 
London,  for  the  preliminary  science  stage 
of  its  curriculum.  Zoology  gave  him 
stimulating  contact  there  with  (Sir)  Ray 
Lankester  [q.v.] ;  but  he  thought  that, 
even  then,  he  was  given  too  little  physics 
and  chemistry  for  his  later  needs  as 
a  physiologist.  He  duly  qualified  in 
medicine  in  1889,  became  M.B.  (London) 
in  1890,  and  was  house-surgeon  for  a  year 
at  University  College  Hospital.  Then  he 
decided  in  favour  of  an  academic  career  in 
physiology,  and  returned  with  a  Sharpey 
scholarship  to  University  College,  where 
(Sir)  E.  A.  (Sharpey-)  Schafer  [q.v.]  was 
then  professor.  Hill  found  co-operative 
opportunity  there,  with  such  investigators 
as  (Sir)  John  Rose  Bradford  and  (Sir) 
William  Bayliss  [qq.v.].  His  own  initia- 
tive led  to  important  studies  of  intra- 
cranial pressure,  blood  flow  in  the  brain, 
and  the  effects  of  gravity  on  the  general 
circulation.  Hill  began  these  at  University 
College,  partly  with  Bayliss,  and  con- 
tinued them  with  H.  L.  Barnard  and 
others  at  the  London  Hospital,  where  he 
was  appointed  lecturer  on  physiology  in 
1895,  and  was  to  become  professor  when 
the  chair  was  instituted,  but  not  until 
1912.  These  researches  on  problems  of  the 
circulation  provided  the  theme  of  his 
book  on  The  Physiology  and  Pathology  of 
the  Cerebral  Circulation  (1896),  based  on 
his  Hunterian  lectures;  and  in  1900  he 
contributed  the  section  on  the  circulation 
of  the  blood  to  a  comprehensive  Text  Book 
of  Physiology,  edited  by  Schafer. 

In  the  early  1900s  Hill  became  engaged, 
with  J.  J.  R.  Macleod  [q.v.]  and  M.  Green- 
wood, in  an  investigation  of  the  measures 
required  for  the  safe  decompression  of 
deep  divers  and  others  who  had  been  ex- 
posed to  high  air-pressures.  Another  study 
of  the  same  problem  was  being  undertaken 
for  the  Admiralty  by  J.  S.  Haldane  [q.v.], 
with  J.  G.  Priestley  at  Oxford  and  A.  E. 
Boycott  [q.v.]  at  the  Lister  Institute. 
There  was  agreement  in  confirming  the 
earlier  suggestion  of  Paul  Bert,  who  had 
attributed  the  dangerous  symptoms  of 
sudden  or  rapid  decompression  to  the 
release  of  bubbles  of  nitrogen  in  the  blood- 
vessels and  the  tissues.  A  rather  long 
controversy  ensued,  however,  concerning 
the  best  method  of  avoiding  this — the 
slow,  continuous  decompression  favoured 
by  Hill's  team,  or  the  less  tedious, 
stage-wise  procedure  of  Haldane  and 
his  associates.  The  principle  of  Haldane's 
method  proved,  in  the  end,  to  be  the 
better;  but  its  application  was  improved 


in  important  detail  by  data  provided  by 
Hill  and  his  team. 

Hill  accepted  in  1914  the  offer  of  ap- 
pointment as  head  of  a  department  of 
applied  physiology,  in  the  then  projected 
National  Institute  for  Medical  Research; 
and  he  took  office  early  in  July  of  that 
year.  The  aims  of  such  a  department  were 
obviously  congenial  to  one  who  combined 
such  ability  in  the  design  of  simple  but 
adequate  methods  for  obtaining  sound 
physiological  data  with  so  conspicuous 
an  interest  in  the  application  of  these 
to  medical  uses,  and  especially  to  the 
maintenance  of  the  conditions  of  normal 
health.  The  almost  immediate  outbreak  of 
war  gave  an  unusual  scope  and  direction 
to  research  enterprises  of  this  kind.  After 
the  war,  until  his  retirement  in  1930,  Hill 
and  his  department  were  engaged  in  a 
range  of  researches,  largely  designed  to 
determine  the  significance  and  the  modes 
of  action  of  fresh  air  and  sunshine  in 
promoting  the  general  health  of  man- 
kind. His  'Katathermometer'  embodied 
a  characteristically  simple  but  effective 
device  for  measuring  efficiency  of  ventila- 
tion; and  his  colleague,  T.  A.  Webster, 
made  an  important  contribution  to  the 
discovery,  then  in  progress  at  the  Insti- 
tute, of  the  vitamin  D,  as  a  product  of  the 
ultraviolet  irradiation  of  ergosterol.  In 
general,  this  final  period,  of  sixteen  years, 
gave  Hill  the  opportunity  of  designing, 
advocating,  and  supervising  practical 
applications  of  knowledge  which  he  had 
gathered  and  interpreted  during  the  pre- 
ceding twenty-two  years  of  active  experi- 
mental research,  largely  concerned  with 
the  physiology  of  the  circulatory  and 
respiratory  systems. 

Hill's  interests  and  abilities  extended  to 
more  than  one  of  the  arts.  He  wrote  two 
story-books  for  children  which  were  pub- 
lished and  well  received;  and,  among 
those  who  knew  them,  his  paintings  in  oils, 
water-colour  and  pastel,  including  land- 
scapes, portraits,  and  studies  of  animals, 
were  highly  esteemed  and  were  shown  at 
a  private  exhibition.  For  some  reason  they 
were  specially  admired  by  Japanese  visi- 
tors, who  came  to  know  them  through  his 
friendship  with  a  Japanese  artist ;  with  the 
result  that  there  were  three  successful 
exhibitions  of  his  paintings  in  Japan.  In 
Britain  he  became  the  first  president  of 
a  Medical  Art  Society. 

Hill  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1900  and  was 
knighted  in  1930.  He  was  an  honorary 
LL.D.  of  Aberdeen,  a  fellow  of  University 
College,     London,     and     an     honorary 


475 


Hill,L.  E. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


A.R.I.B.A.  He  received  the  gold  medal  of 
the  Institution  of  Mining  Engineers,  in 
recognition  of  the  value  of  his  work  for  the 
ventilation  of  mines,  the  Harben  medal  of 
the  Royal  Institute  of  Public  Health  and 
Hygiene,  and  the  Sidey  medal  of  the 
Royal  Society  of  New  Zealand  for  his  work 
on  the  significance  of  solar  radiation  for 
human  health  and  comfort.  He  acted  as  an 
adviser  to  the  medical  organizations  of  all 
three  armed  services. 

In  1891  Hill  married  Janet  (died  1956), 
daughter  of  Frederick  Alexander,  a 
banker;  they  had  four  sons  and  two 
daughters.  The  third  son,  Sir  Austin 
Bradford  Hill,  F.R.S.,  became  honorary 
director  of  the  statistical  research  unit  of 
the  Medical  Research  Council  and  profes- 
sor of  medical  statistics  in  the  university 
of  London.  The  younger  daughter,  Nan- 
nette,  married  Dr.  W.  A.  R.  Thomson, 
editor  of  the  Practitioner.  Hill  died  at 
Corton,  near  Lowestoft,  30  March  1952. 

[C.  G.  Douglas  in  Obituary  Notices  of  Fellows 
of  the  Royal  Society,  No.  22,  November  1953 ; 
personal  knowledge.]  H.  H.  Dale. 

HILL,  Sir  RODERIC  MAXWELL 
(1894-1954),  air  chief  marshal,  was  born 
in  Hampstead  1  March  1894,  the  eldest  of 
the  three  children  of  Micaiah  John  MuUer 
Hill,  professor  of  mathematics  at  Univer- 
sity College,  London,  and  his  wife,  Minna, 
daughter  of  Marriot  Ogle  Tarbotton, 
borough  engineer  of  Nottingham.  Sir 
George  Francis  Hill  [q.v.]  was  his  uncle. 
His  obvious  scientific  and  artistic  talent 
was  encouraged  from  an  early  age.  From 
Bradfield  College  he  went  in  1912  to  the 
fine  arts  department  of  University  College, 
London,  with  the  intention  of  becoming 
an  architect.  From  1909  onwards,  how- 
ever, he  and  his  younger  brother  Geoffrey 
were  becoming  increasingly  absorbed  in 
flying.  With  money  earned  by  Rbderic 
from  drawings  published  in  the  Sphere 
they  built  during  1913,  and  successfully 
flew,  a  glider  of  their  own  design.  The  fol- 
lowing year,  two  months  after  the  out- 
break of  war,  Hill  enlisted  in  the  ranks. 

Commissioned  in  the  12th  Northumber- 
land Fusiliers  in  December  1914,  Hill  was 
in  France  by  the  second  half  of  1915  and 
first  saw  intensive  action  in  the  battle  of 
Loos,  where  he  earned  a  mention  in  dis- 
patches and  suffered  a  wound  in  the  side. 
While  recovering,  he  successfully  applied 
to  join  the  Royal  Flying  Corps.  By  July 
1916  he  had  earned  his  wings,  shown 
sufficient  ability  to  be  put  on  the  tricky 
Moranes,  and  joined  No.  60  Squadron,  at 


that  time  co-operating  in  the  Sorame 
offensive.  Hill  quickly  made  his  mark  as 
a  skilled  airman:  from  repeated  patrols 
and  engagements  over  the  German  lines  he 
returned  unharmed,  including  'the  first 
big  air  battle  in  history'  of  9  November 
1916.  Shortly  after  this  he  was  again  men- 
tioned in  dispatches,  and  awarded  the 
M.C.  In  December  1916  he  became  flight 
commander  of  No.  60  Squadron  and  was 
promoted  captain.  His  growing  reputa- 
tion as  a  highly  intelligent  pilot  capable  of 
every  acrobatic  manoeuvre  then  led  to  his 
posting  in  February  1917  to  take  over  the 
experimental  flying  department  of  the 
Royal  Aircraft  Factory  (later  Establish- 
ment) at  Farnborough.  There  his  energy, 
enthusiasm,  and  skill  and  calculated 
daring  as  a  pilot  made  a  deep  impression, 
and  his  test-flying  contributed  greatly  to 
the  eventual  success  of  such  aircraft  as 
the  S.E.5,  the  R.E.8,  and  the  D.H.9  with 
Napier  Lion  engine.  In  1918  he  became  a 
squadron  leader  on  the  formation  of  the 
Royal  Air  Force,  and  in  the  same  year 
was  awarded  the  A.F.C.  after  flying  into  a 
balloon  cable  to  test  the  efficacy  of  a  newly 
invented  protective  device. 

Hill  remained  at  Farnborough  until 
1923,  concerned  among  other  matters  with 
test-flying  the  new  larger  machines  and 
the  development  of  aids  such  as  wireless 
direction  finding.  He  was  awarded  a  bar 
to  his  A.F.C,  the  R.  M.  Groves  aero- 
nautical research  prize  (1922),  and  elected 
a  fellow  of  University  College,  London 
(1924).  After  attending  the  R.A.F.  Staff 
College  at  Andover,  Hill  was  sent  out  to 
command  No.  45  (Bomber)  Squadron  at 
Hinaidi  (1924-6)  where  he  played  an  im- 
portant part  in  the  running  of  the  new 
Baghdad-Cairo  air  mail  and  the  preserva- 
tion of  the  internal  and  external  security 
of  Iraq.  He  went  next  to  the  technical 
staff  of  R.A.F.  Middle  East  headquarters 
at  Cairo,  but  in  1927  was  recalled  to 
England  to  join  the  directing  staff  of  the 
R.A.F.  Staff  College.  In  1930-32  he  was 
chief  instructor  to  the  Oxford  University 
Air  Squadron,  receiving  an  M.A.  by  decree 
in  1931.  Posted  in  1932  to  the  Air  Ministry 
as  head  of  the  newly  formed  deputy  direc- 
torate of  repair  and  maintenance,  with  the 
rank  of  group  captain,  he  did  much  to 
improve  the  rudimentary  aircraft  repair 
facilities  of  the  time,  although  his  pro- 
posal for  big  civil  repair  centres  to  deal 
with  work  beyond  the  capacity  of  the 
Service  depots  was  not  adopted  until  later. 

In  1936  Hill  received  his  first  senior 
command:    as    air    officer    commanding 


476 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hill,  R.  M. 


Palestine  and  Trans- Jordan.  His  two 
years  there  were  marked  by  the  great 
Arab  strike  of  1936  and  by  repeated 
disturbances  and  Hill  co-operated  closely 
and  cordially  with  the  army  under 
Generals  Dill  and  Wavell  [qq.v.]  succes- 
sively, in  the  task  of  maintaining  order. 
He  was  twice  mentioned  in  dispatches. 
Back  in  England  by  1938,  Hill  was  ap- 
pointed to  the  newly  formed  directorate 
of  technical  development  within  the  Air 
Ministry;  it  was  typical  of  him  that 
although  by  1939  an  air  vice-marshal  he 
soon  created  an  opportunity  to  fly  the 
new  advanced  fighters :  the  Hurricane  and 
the  Spitfire.  On  the  outbreak  of  war  he  was 
sent  to  Canada  and  the  United  States  as 
the  R.A.F.  representative  on  the  British 
Purchasing  Mission,  but  by  December 
1939  he  was  back  in  the  Air  Ministry.  In 
May  1940  his  department  transferred  to 
the  newly  created  Ministry  of  Aircraft 
Production.  Although  in  temperament 
and  character  he  had  little  in  common 
with  Lord  Beaverbrook,  he  was  able  to 
remain  on  terms  with  his  exacting  chief, 
and  later  in  1940  he  became  director- 
general  of  research  and  development  with 
the  acting  rank  of  air  marshal.  Among 
other  valuable  decisions  in  this  post  he 
insisted,  against  his  chief's  opinion,  on 
persevering  with  cannon  as  the  weapon  to 
supersede  machine-guns  in  Spitfires,  and 
finally  saw  the  initial  problems  of  mount- 
ing and  jamming  successfully  overcome. 

In  1941  Hill  was  selected,  to  his  dis- 
appointment, to  be  controller  of  technical 
services  with  the  British  Air  Commission 
in  the  United  States.  He  found,  however, 
that  he  greatly  enjoyed  his  American  con- 
tacts and  he  did  much  useful  work  in 
ensuring  that  American  aircraft  arrived 
in  Britain  with  equipment  consonant  to 
R.A.F.  requirements.  He  was  also  an  ideal 
vehicle  for  the  exchange  of  technical 
information  over  a  wide  field,  and  among 
his  achievements  must  be  counted  his 
part  in  persuading  the  Americans  to  make 
far  greater  provision  for  armament, 
including  gun-turrets,  in  their  heavy 
bombers  than  they  had  originally  in- 
tended. He  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1941, 
and  when  the  problems  of  the  commission 
greatly  eased  after  America's  entry  into 
the  war.  Hill  asked  to  return  home.  He 
reluctantly  accepted  the  post  of  comman- 
dant of  the  R.A.F.  Staff  College  (1942-3), 
for  which  he  was  an  ideal  choice.  But  he 
was  now  clearly  moving  far  away  from 
the  senior  operational  conunand  he  greatly 
desired.    Retirement,    indeed,    was    sug- 


gested to  him ;  but  such  powerful  per- 
sonalities as  Sir  Guy  Garrod  and  Sir 
Trafford  Leigh-Mallory  [q.v.]  intervened. 
Although  he  had  no  direct  experience  of 
wartime  operations,  and  was  generally 
regarded  as  perhaps  too  quiet,  too  un- 
aggressive, and  too  long  habituated  to 
technical  posts  to  make  an  outstanding 
commander.  Hill  was  given  his  chance 
with  the  command  of  No.  12  (Fighter) 
Group  covering  the  eastern  counties  and 
the  Midlands  (July  1943). 

So  successful  was  he  that  only  four 
months  later  he  became  air  marshal  com- 
manding, Air  Defence  of  Great  Britain, 
with  the  main  task  of  defending  Britain 
from  German  air  attack  whilst  the  allied 
invasion  of  the  continent  was  being  pre- 
pared and  launched.  During  the  prepara- 
tory period  he  was  entirely  successful :  the 
only  sustained  German  air  attack  by 
night,  the  'little  blitz'  on  London  in 
January-March  1944,  achieved  negligible 
results  and  German  reconnaissance  by 
day  was  consistently  restricted.  Meantime 
attack  by  flying  bombs  had  been  foreseen 
for  some  months  and  in  December  1943 
Hill  had  submitted  a  plan  which  basically 
envisaged  defence  in  three  successive 
zones :  by  the  British  fighters  in  the  coastal 
areas,  by  the  anti-aircraft  guns  in  the 
folds  of  the  North  Downs  (where  their 
radar  would  be  reasonably  immune  from 
jamming),  and  by  a  balloon  barrage 
behind  the  guns.  There  would  also,  how- 
ever, be  guns  at  some  vital  points  on  the 
coast,  and  the  fighters  could  enter  the  gun- 
belt  either  in  good  weather  (when  they 
would  have  priority)  or  when  in  actual 
pursuit  of  a  bomb. 

The  first  flying  bombs  were  launched  on 
13  June  1944  and  within  a  few  days  Hill's 
forces  were  deployed.  Although  results 
were  not  discreditable,  far  too  many 
flying  bombs  were  getting  through.  Only 
Hill's  most  modern  fighters  were  fast 
enough  to  overtake  the  bombs;  and 
misunderstandings  were  frequent  between 
the  guns  and  the  fighters,  with  the  result 
that  the  latter  were  sometimes  coming 
under  British  fire.  On  16  July  Hill  took 
a  most  courageous  decision.  Convinced 
by  his  own  leading  staff  officers  and  by 
Sir  Robert  Watson-Watt,  he  ordered, 
without  reference  to  the  Air  Ministry  or 
to  his  superior,  Leigh-Mallory,  who  was 
in  France,  a  complete  redeployment  and 
segregation  of  the  defences:  the  guns 
would  take  over  the  coastal  belt,  and  the 
fighters  operate  in  advance  of  them  out  to 
sea  and  behind  them  in  the  North  Downs 


477 


Hill,  R.  M, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


area.  A  few  hours  later,  some  23,000  men 
and  women  were  on  the  move,  just  before 
they  had  become  so  firmly  rooted  in  the 
original  dispositions  as  to-  make  such 
a  switch  impracticable.  The  move,  which 
gave  much  greater  freedom  of  action  to 
the  guns  and  enabled  them  to  take  full 
advantage  of  the  new  proximity  fuses, 
was  of  course  very  acceptable  to  Sir 
Frederick  Pile,  the  commander-in-chief 
Anti-Aircraft  Command;  but  the  Air 
Ministry  disapproved  and  intimated  to 
Hill  that  he  had  exceeded  his  powers  and 
that  his  professional  reputation  would 
stand  or  fall  by  the  outcome.  For  a  few 
days,  as  the  move  proceeded,  the  casual- 
ties inflicted  on  the  enemy  declined ;  but 
thereafter  they  mounted  steadily,  with 
the  guns  beginning  to  claim  the  lion's 
share,  and  by  6  September  it  was  clear 
that  the  main  threat  was  defeated,  even  if 
individual  flying  bombs  continued  to  get 
through.  On  that  day  the  Air  Council  sent 
Hill  their  warm  congratulations  on  the 
'imaginative  deployment  of  the  defences 
to  meet  each  phase  of  the  attack  as  it 
developed'.  The  redeployment,  one  of  the 
most  dramatic  and  effective  moves  of  the 
war,  and  one  which  saved  London  from 
a  far  worse  bombardment  than  it  received, 
was  not  Hill's  own  idea;  but  it  was  his 
decision,  undertaken  on  his  responsibility, 
and  its  successful  outcome  was  accord- 
ingly his  victory.  He  was  appointed  K.C.B. 
in  1944. 

Throughout  1944  Hill  was  much  con- 
cerned with  plans  for  setting  up  the  new 
Central  Fighter  Establishment.  Towards 
the  end  of  the  year  his  command  reverted 
to  its  old  name  of  Fighter  Command  and 
Hill  remained  in  charge  until  the  final 
surrender  of  Germany.  In  May  1945  he 
became  Air  Council  member  for  training, 
and  the  following  year  was  appointed 
principal  air  aide-de-camp  to  the  King. 
Meantime  he  was  also  acting  as  chairman 
of  a  committee  on  the  future  of  the 
Technical  Branch  of  the  R.A.F.  Among  its 
recommendations,  accepted  in  1946,  was 
the  establishment  of  an  expanded  and 
distinctive  Technical  Branch  as  part  of 
a  three-pronged  organization  on  the  same 
footing  as  the  existing  Operational  and 
Administrative  branches.  The  new  branch 
was  to  be  headed  and  represented  on  the 
Air  Council  by  an  air  member  for  technical 
services  and  this  position  Hill,  though  he 
was  not  and  never  had  been  a  technical 
officer,  was  pressed  to  accept  so  strongly 
that  he  could  hardly  refuse.  He  took  up 
this  new  post  in  January  1947  with  the 


rank  of  air  chief  marshal  and  retained  it 
until  July  1948  when  he  retired  from  the 
Service  to  become  rector  of  the  Imperial 
College  of  Science  and  Technology.  To  the 
last  he  had  continued  to  fly — he  had 
opened  fire  on  a  flying  bomb  from  his 
Tempest — and  the  final  entries  in  his 
pilot's  log-book  reveal  that  his  appetite 
for  flying  was  still  as  ardent  as  ever. 

Although  Hill  was  not  a  scientist  and 
had  never  occupied  an  academic  post,  his 
links  with  distinguished  scientists  were 
close  and  he  brought  to  his  new  post 
a  determination  to  understand  the  prob- 
lems of  every  department  of  the  College 
and  the  desire  to  serve  it  to  the  full.  His 
open-mindedness  and  intelligence  made 
him  an  immediate  success  and  he  was  able 
to  give  powerful  help  to  the  College  in  at 
least  two  directions — in  its  expansion  and 
in  a  fruitful  scheme  to  widen  the  interests 
of  the  students  by  the  provision  of  lunch- 
hour  concerts,  illustrated  lectures  on  the 
arts,  and  week-end  study  groups.  In  1953 
he  was  nominated  vice-chancellor  of  Lon- 
don University,  but  ill  health  obliged  him 
to  resign  in  the  following  year  before  he 
had  completed  his  term  of  office.  He  died 
in  London  6  October  1954. 

In  1917  Hill  married  Mabel  Helen 
Catherine,  daughter  of  Lieutenant-Colonel 
Edward  Ross  Morton,  Indian  Army ;  they 
had  a  son,  killed  in  action  in  1944,  and 
two  daughters.  As  a  personality  Hill  was 
notable  for  his  modesty,  his  rather  shy  and 
self-conscious  air,  and  his  quiet  charm.  He 
was  above  medium  height,  spare  and  very 
active.  His  alertness  of  mind,  breadth  of 
knowledge,  interests  and  sympathy,  and 
absence  of  any  kind  of  pompousness  or 
'side'  made  an  immediately  favourable 
impression  on  nearly  everyone  who  met 
him. 

A  portrait  by  Rodrigo  Moynihan  is  in 
the  Imperial  War  Museum. 

[Sir  Walter  Raleigh  and  H.  A.  Jones, 
(OHicial  History)  The  War  in  the  Air,  6  vols., 
1922-37;  Denis  Richards  and  Hilary  St. 
George  Saunders,  Royal  Air  Force  1939-45,  3 
vols.,  1953-4;  Basil  Collier,  (Official)  History 
of  the  Second  World  War.  The  Defence  of  the 
United  Kingdom,  1957 ;  Prudence  Hill,  To 
Know  the  Sky,  1962;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  Denis  Richards. 


HILTON,  JAMES  (1900-1954),  novelist, 
the  only  child  of  John  Hilton  and  his  wife, 
Elizabeth  Burch,  was  born  9  September 
1900  at  Leigh,  Lancashire,  where  his 
mother,  before  her  marriage,  had  been 
a  schoolmistress.  John  Hilton  was  at  that 


478 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hind 


time  assistant  master  at  the  Forest  Road 
elementary  school,  Walthamstow,  and  in 
1902  became  the  first  headmaster  of  the 
Chapel  End  elementary  school,  Waltham- 
stow, where  he  remained  until  he  retired 
at  the  age  of  sixty.  He  died  in  1955.  James 
Hilton  was  educated  in  Walthamstow  at 
the  Maynard  Road  elementary  school  and 
the  Sir  George  Monoux  Grammar  School. 
He  went  on  to  the  Leys  School  and  Christ's 
College,  Cambridge,  where  he  obtained 
a  second  class  in  part  i  of  the  history  tripos 
(1920)  and  a  first  class  in  the  English 
tripos  (1921). 

While  still  at  Cambridge  he  dis- 
tinguished himself  by  publishing  his  first 
novel,  Catherine  Herself  (1920),  and  by 
occasional  contributions  to  the  Manchester 
Guardian.  Fortified  by  these  achievements 
he  spent  the  ten  years  after  his  graduation 
at  home,  turning  out  with  great  industry 
a  number  of  novels  which  do  not  now 
survive  in  print  and  which  he  did  not 
acknowledge  when  he  came  to  fame.  Never- 
theless, they  served  as  a  whetstone  to  the 
mechanics  of  his  writing,  and  two  of  the 
novels  of  this  period.  Contango  (1932) 
and  Knight  Without  Armour  (1933),  repay 
rereading. 

Lost  Horizon,  James  Hilton's  first 
world-wide  success,  was  published  in  1933, 
and  in  the  following  year  was  awarded 
the  Hawthornden  prize.  Its  success  led 
indirectly  to  his  second  great  triumph. 
Commissioned  by  the  British  Weekly  in 
1933  to  write  a  story  for  their  Christmas 
number,  he  wrote  in  the  short  space  of 
four  days  the  18,000  words  of  Good-Bye 
Mr.  Chips.  Its  success  when  it  was  pub- 
lished in  book  form  in  1934  was  im- 
mediate. In  this  'old-boy's-eye-view'  of 
masters  and  boys  at  an  English  school  the 
tender  portrait  of  his  father  which  he 
paints  is  not  more  exact  than  the  reflec- 
tion which  he  unconsciously  gives  of 
himself.  This  peculiarly  English  story 
might  be  thought  to  have  had  a  limited 
appeal  in  the  United  States  where  it  was 
published  in  the  same  year,  but  that  would 
be  to  overlook  the  vein  of  sentiment, 
wholly  admirable,  which  informs  the 
story,  and  the  wholeheartedness  always  of 
American  response  to  this  vein.  Alexander 
WooUcott,  then  of  great  influence  as  a 
critic,  eulogized  the  book,  and  soon 
America  was  devouring  it. 

James  Hilton's  talent — so  amply 
demonstrated  in  Good-Bye  Mr.  Chips, 
though  observable  in  Chang  in  Lost 
Horizon,  and  elsewhere — a  talent  for 
evoking  the  finer  feelings  in  his  readers. 


for  making  people  feel  better  about  other 
people,  for  underscoring  the  praiseworthy 
virtues,  was  not  overlooked  in  Hollywood. 
He  was  invited  there  to  assist  in  the  film- 
ing of  his  own  books ;  he  remained  to  write 
other  scenarios ;  and  when  he  was  awarded 
the  Hollywood  Motion  Picture  Academy 
writing  award  for  his  script  of  Mrs. 
Miniver,  he  was  said  to  be  the  highest- 
paid  scenario  writer  in  Hollywood. 

Although  actively  engaged  in  this  and 
radio  work,  he  continued  to  publish 
novels  at  regular  intervals,  among  them 
Random  Harvest  (1941),  The  Story  of  Dr. 
Wassell  (1944),  So  Well  Remembered  (1947), 
Nothing  So  Strange  (1948),  Morning  Jour- 
ney (1951),  and  Time  and  Time  Again 
(1953).  While  excellent  by  the  standards 
of  contemporary  fiction,  they  showed  in 
increasing  degree  the  result  of  too  close 
a  contact  with  Hollywood,  and  too  long 
an  absence  from  England,  which  was  the 
background  of  every  story  except  one. 
They  were  suited  to  the  popular  taste  and 
had  an  immense  success  on  both  sides  of 
the  Atlantic;  but  of  his  work  only  Lost 
Horizon,  which  has  given  the  word 
Shangri-La  to  the  English  language,  and 
Good-Bye  Mr.  Chips  are  likely  to  remain 
of  interest. 

James  Hilton  was  a  good-looking  man 
with  dark  intelligent  eyes,  a  warm, 
pleasant  voice,  and  a  charm  of  manner 
which  won  him  considerable  success  in  the 
last  years  of  his  life  in  a  weekly  pro- 
gramme on  the  American  radio.  He  mar- 
ried twice ;  both  marriages  were  dissolved ; 
and  he  had  no  children.  He  died  at  Long 
Beach,  California,  20  December  1954. 

[Private  information  ;  personal  knowledge.] 
LovAT  Dickson. 

HIND,  ARTHUR  MAYGER  (1880- 
1957),  historian  of  engraving,  was  born  at 
Horninglow,  Burton-on-Trent,  26  August 
1880,  the  second  son  of  Henry  Robert 
Hind,  schoolmaster,  by  his  wife,  Sarah 
Mayger.  He  was  educated  at  the  City  of 
London  School  and  Emmanuel  College, 
Cambridge,  where  he  obtained  first  class 
honours  in  part  i  of  the  classical  tripos  of 
1902.  In  the  following  year,  after  studying 
at  Dresden  under  Max  Lehrs,  the  dis- 
tinguished authority  on  early  German 
engraving,  he  entered  the  department  of 
prints  and  drawings  of  the  British  Museum 
as  an  assistant,  the  equivalent  of  the  later 
assistant  keeper.  His  first  important 
employment  there  was  to  help  (Sir) 
Sidney  Colvin  [q.v.]  in  the  preparation 
of   a    volume    on    native    and    foreign 


479 


Hind 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


line-engravers  in  England  from  the  time 
of  Henry  VIII  to  the  Commonwealth,  to 
which  he  contributed  the  Usts  of  the  works 
of  the  engravers.  This  was  published  by 
the  trustees  of  the  British  Museum  in 
1905.  Of  greater  intrinsic  importance  was 
the  Catalogue  of  Early  Italian  Engravings 
in  the  British  Museum  issued  in  1910  under 
the  editorship  of  Colvin,  but  virtually  the 
work  of  Hind.  Many  years  later  he  re- 
turned to  this  subject  to  compile  a  com- 
plete illustrated  corpus  of  all  existing 
Italian  engravings  of  the  fifteenth  cen- 
tury, which  is  certain  to  endure  as  the 
standard  work  in  this  field.  The  first  part 
appeared  in  1938  in  four  massive  and 
finely  produced  volumes,  but  the  second 
part  (3  vols.,  1948)  was  delayed  by  the 
war. 

Although  this  corpus  of  Italian  en- 
graving was  Hind's  most  impressive  con- 
tribution to  the  material  for  the  study  of 
art,  it  was  by  no  means  the  only  one. 
Already  by  1908  he  had  produced  the  use- 
ful Short  History  of  Engraving  and  Etching, 
which  went  into  a  third  edition  (1923).  He 
also  compiled  what  on  the  whole  remains 
the  most  satisfactory  catalogue  of  Rem- 
brandt's etchings.  This  first  appeared  in 
1912  and  was  revised  and  reissued  in  1923. 
His  Introduction  to  a  History  of  Woodcut, 
originally  intended  as  a  companion  volume 
to  the  History  of  Engraving  and  Etching, 
did  not  appear  until  1935  and  then  in  two 
bulky  volumes  covered  only  the  fifteenth 
century. 

In  the  meantime  Hind  had  turned  his 
attention  to  the  study  of  drawings  and 
had  projected  a  complete  catalogue  of  the 
extensive  series  of  those  by  Dutch  and 
Flemish  artists  in  the  British  Museum. 
The  first  volume  dealt  with  the  drawings 
of  Rembrandt  and  his  school  and  ap- 
peared in  1915.  There  followed  a  second 
on  Rubens  and  his  school  in  1923  and 
finally  in  1926  and  1931  two  volumes  of 
the  Dutch  drawings  of  the  seventeenth 
century  arranged  in  an  alphabetical 
sequence.  Although  many  of  the  con- 
clusions reached  in  these  volumes  have 
been  modified,  they  formed  the  basis  and 
provided  the  data  for  such  modifications. 
Indeed,  it  was  characteristic  of  Hind  that 
he  was  content  to  provide  the  material 
for  further  research  and  never  resented, 
indeed  welcomed,  the  rectification  of  any 
errors  he  might  have  committed.  He  was 
also  a  pioneer  in  the  study  of  the  drawings 
of  Claude  Lorrain,  producing  an  ad- 
mirable official  handlist  of  the  incom- 
parable  series   of  his    drawings   in   the 


British  Museum  (1926)  and  a  book  of 
plates  a  year  earlier. 

In  1933  he  succeeded  Laurence  Binyon 
[q.v.]  as  keeper  of  the  department  of 
prints  and  drawings  and  retired  in  1945. 
Realizing  after  his  retirement  that  oppor- 
tunities for  travel  and  research  would  be 
lacking,  Hind  decided  to  devote  his  time 
to  a  more  elaborate  study  of  early  English 
engraving.  With  undiminished  energy  he 
accordingly  embarked  on  Engraving  in 
England  in  the  Sixteenth  and  Seventeenth 
Centuries,  the  first  volume  of  which  ap- 
peared in  1952,  a  second  in  1955,  while 
a  third  which  had  not  been  completed  at 
his  death  in  1957  was  published  in  1964. 
This  laborious  undertaking,  useful  as  it  is, 
is  valuable  rather  to  the  historian  and 
bibliographer  than  to  the  student  of  art 
history. 

Hind  served  from  1915  to  1918  in  the 
Army  Service  Corps,  being  three  times 
mentioned  in  dispatches,  reaching  the 
rank  of  major,  and  being  appointed  O.B.E. 
in  1918.  He  was  an  honorary  LL.D.  of 
Glasgow  (1945),  Slade  professor  of  fine  art 
at  Oxford  (1921-7),  Charles  Eliot  Norton 
professor  at  Harvard  (1930-31),  and 
a  Leverhulme  research  fellow  (1945).  His 
Harvard  lectures  on  landscape  design 
with  special  reference  to  Rembrandt, 
expanded  into  a  book  under  the  title  of 
Rembrandt,  were  published  in  1932,  and 
contained  in  the  final  chapter  a  statement 
of  his  own  artistic  beliefs.  In  spite  of  his 
numerous  accomplishments  Hind  was 
aware  of  his  own  limitations.  He  never 
professed  to  be  infallible,  even  on  the  sub- 
ject of  early  Italian  engraving,  and  was 
always  ready,  perhaps  too  ready,  to  rely 
on  the  judgement  of  other  ^experts'  which 
may  have  been  less  sound  than  his  own. 

Two  enthusiasms  engrossed  Hind's 
leisure,  drawing  and  music.  It  was  in  fact 
uncertain  at  the  beginning  of  his  career 
whether  he  should  devote  himself  pro- 
fessionally to  the  latter ;  and  he  liked  to 
describe  himself  as  a  landscape  painter 
rather  than  as  a  museum  official.  Com- 
petent, delicate,  and  sensitive  as  was  much 
of  his  work  as  a  landscape  draughtsman, 
it  lacked  that  spark  of  inspiration  and 
originality  which  could  raise  it  above  the 
level  of  gifted  amateurism.  As  a  musician 
he  was  an  extremely  accomplished  per- 
former on  the  viola  and  violin.  The  con* 
certs  which  he  and  his  wife  and  daughters 
were  in  the  habit  of  giving  in  their  home 
were  a  source  of  great  pleasure  to  himself 
and  satisfaction  to  his  audience. 

He    married   in    1912    Dorothy   Alice 


480 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hirst,  F.  W, 


Pakington,  third  daughter  of  the  third 
Lord  Hampton,  by  whom  he  had  three 
daughters,  all  of  whom  became  profes- 
sional musicians.  He  died  at  Henley-on- 
Thames  22  May  1957. 

A  portrait  drawing  by  Francis  Dodd  is 
in  the  print  room  of  the  British  Museum 
and  one  by  Leonid  Pasternak  is  in  the 
possession  of  the  family. 

[The  Times,  23  May  1957 ;  Burlington  Maga- 
zine, vol.  xcix,  July  1957;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.]       A.  E.  Popham. 

HIRST,  FRANCIS  WRIGLEY  (1873- 
1953),  economist  and  Liberal  writer,  was 
born  10  June  1873  at  Huddersfield,  the 
third  child  in  a  family  of  five  born  to 
a  prosperous  wool-stapler,  Alfred  Hirst, 
and  his  wife,  Mary  Wrigley.  He  was 
brought  up  in  one  of  those  rectory-style 
houses,  with  the  appurtenances  of  glebe 
and  livestock,  which  were  in  those  days 
freely  sprinkled  among  the  industrial 
towns  of  the  north.  Through  his  mother  he 
was  a  second  cousin  of  H.  H.  Asquith.  He 
was  proud  of  his  Yorkshire  origins,  and 
through  life  he  showed  the  world  the  intel- 
lectual justification  for  the  sturdy  York- 
shire quality  of  thrift.  He  was  educated 
at  Clifton,  when  J.  M.  Wilson  [q.v.]  was 
headmaster,  and  was  sent  to  the  house  of 
W.  W.  Asquith,  elder  brother  of  the  future 
prime  minister.  The  teaching  of  classics  at 
the  school  was  at  that  time  deservedly 
renowned,  and  in  1891  Hirst  was  awarded 
an  open  scholarship  in  classics  to  Wadham 
College,  Oxford.  He  took  firsts  in  honour 
moderations  (1894)  and  liter ae  humaniores 
(1896)  and  in  the  latter  year  was  elected 
president  of  the  Union.  He  was  awarded 
the  Cobden  prize  in  1899.  With  C.  B.  Fry, 
J.  A.  (later  Viscount)  Simon,  and  F.  E. 
Smith  (later  the  Earl  of  Birkenhead) 
[qq.v.].  Hirst  made  a  quaternity  varied  in 
accomplishments  but  uniform  in  distinc- 
tion which  stood  out  the  more  clearly  from 
the  comparative  smallness  of  Wadham. 

In  1896  Hirst  entered  the  London 
School  of  Economics  and  in  1899  he  was 
called  to  the  bar  by  the  Inner  Temple.  He 
did  not  prosper  and  perhaps  his  essentially 
reflective  mind,  which  in  private  life 
enjoyed  refining  issues  and  conceding 
points  to  those  with  whom  he  disputed, 
was  not  the  true  weapon  for  the  courts. 
More  certain  and  conspicuous  was  his 
talent  for  writing.  He  was  fond  of  saying 
that  as  a  writer  he  was  only  an  amateur 
but  that  he  had  been  enormously  helped 
by  his  constant  companions — ^the  great 
writers  of  Greece  and  Rome.  He  was  no 


doubt  also  helped  by  a  dictum  of  Lord 
Morley  [q.v.]  which  he  was  fond  of 
quoting — 'The  first  business  of  a  writer  is 
to  make  his  meaning  plain.  Style  without 
lucidity  is  an  offence.'  He  had  himself  a 
brisk  and  lively  style  of  writing,  was  en- 
dowed with  a  great  inquisitiveness  about  a 
great  variety  of  subjects,  and  consequently 
had  curious  pockets  of  information.  He 
wisely  decided  not  to  neglect  these  talents 
for  the  long  drudgery  and  an  uncertain 
career  at  the  bar. 

At  the  end  of  his  time  at  Oxford  Hirst 
had  contributed  the  chapter  'Liberalism 
and  Wealth'  to  Essays  in  Liberalism  by 
Six  Oxford  Men  (1897)  of  which  he  was 
also  joint-editor.  The  book  was  noticed 
by  the  Liberal  leaders,  and  partly  for 
that  reason  and  partly  because  Hirst  had 
contributed  to  a  popular  life  of  Gladstone, 
he  was  asked  by  Morley,  who  was  just 
starting  the  official  biography  of  Glad- 
stone, to  help  him  in  going  through  the 
papers  at  Hawarden.  Perhaps  the  most 
important  aspect  of  this  task  was  that  it 
brought  him  under  the  influence  of  Mor- 
ley, whom  he  understood  and  intensely 
admired.  He  was  a  faithful  disciple  of  that 
enigmatic  character  all  his  life,  and,  like 
him,  showed  the  same  unswerving  attach- 
ment to  principles  fashioned  in  youth  but 
fortified  by  reason.  Some  words  which  he 
himself  once  used  of  Morley  could  cer- 
tainly be  used  of  Hirst:  'Beneath  a  fine 
tolerance  and  affability  in  the  society  of 
friends  from  whom  he  differed,  lay  a  stern 
fidelity  to  unfashionable  principles,  a  grim 
loyalty  to  desperate  causes.' 

The  outbreak  of  the  South  African  war 
and  the  anti-imperial  feelings  which 
accompanied  it  gave  Hirst  a  fair  wind 
favourable  to  his  opinions.  He  took  an 
active  part  in  forming  the  League  against 
Imperialism  and  MiUtarism.  At  the  same 
time  he  wrote  regularly  for  the  Speaker 
which,  with  the  august  approval  of  Morley 
in  the  background  and  with  J.  L.  Ham- 
mond [q.v.]  as  editor,  enjoyed  remarkable 
influence  though  not  complete  solvency. 
The  youthful  editor  and  Hirst  delighted  in 
pricking  the  sensitive  skins  of  such  diverse 
supporters  of  the  war  as  Milner,  Rosebery , 
Beatrice  Webb,  and  G.  B.  Shaw  [qq.v.]. 
When  Hammond  gave  up  the  editorship 
in  1907  the  company  owning  the  paper 
went  into  liquidation,  but  from  its  ashes 
emerged  the  Nation  under  the  editorship 
of  H.  W.  Massingham  [q.v.],  and  in  these 
negotiations  Hirst  played  some  part.  He 
was  always  a  welcome  guest  at  those 
luncheons  held  in  the  National  Liberal 


8652062 


481 


Hirst,  F.  W. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Club  where  radical  opinions  were  launched 
to  sail  far  beyond  the  shining  walls  of  that 
club.  The  controversies  of  the  war  had  no 
sooner  died  down  than  the  emergence  of 
tariff  reform  gave  Hirst  another  topic 
uppermost  in  political  minds  which  he 
was  peculiarly  equipped  to  meet.  He  was 
largely  responsible  for  Fact  versus  Fiction 
(1904)  which  was  the  answer  of  the  Cob- 
den  Club  to  the  *raging,  tearing  campaign' 
of  Joseph  Chamberlain  [q.v.].  In  1904 
Hirst  contributed  a  biography  of  Adam 
Smith  to  the  'English  Men  of  Letters' 
series,  and  appropriately  it  was  the  last 
volume  under  the  editorship  of  Morley.  In 
1906  he  published  anonymously  Arbiter  in 
Council,  an  analysis  of  the  follies  of  war 
principally  from  the  economic  aspect ;  this 
was  in  dialogue  form  and  perhaps  owed 
a  Uttle  to  Landor's  Imaginary  Conversa- 
tions. His  book  on  the  Stock  Exchange  in 
the  Home  University  Library  was  pub- 
lished in  1911. 

In  1907  Hirst  was  appointed  editor  of 
The  Economist.  When  he  succeeded  to  the 
chair  a  great  part  of  the  writing  of  the 
paper  was  done  by  divers  hands  outside. 
He  made  the  decision  to  write  all  the  policy 
leaders  himself,  and  on  foreign  affairs 
these  were  highly  critical  of  Sir  Edward 
Grey  (later  Viscount  Grey  of  Fallodon, 
q.v.),  as  was  perhaps  only  to  be  expected 
from  such  a  doughty  opponent  of  the 
Liberal  League.  He  also  recruited  a  com- 
petent staff,  and  among  others  he  gathered 
round  him  were  Hilton  Young  (later  Lord 
Kennet,  q.v.),  Mary  Agnes  Hamilton, 
Walter  (later  Lord)  Layton,  Joseph  Red- 
lich  (afterwards  the  Austrian  minister  of 
education),  Luigi  Einaudi  (afterwards 
president  of  the  Italian  Republic),  and 
Dudley  Ward.  The  influence  of  the  paper 
decidedly  increased  under  his  editorship, 
but  in  a  changing  world  he  allowed  no 
deviation  from  the  traditional  principles  of 
peace,  economy,  and  individual  liberty. 
Adherence  to  such  views  made  his  tenure 
of  office  difficult  after  1914,  and  he  re- 
signed in  the  summer  of  1916.  Hirst  seems 
to  have  believed — and  he  was  probably 
right — ^that  some  pressure  from  outside 
brought  about  the  end  of  his  editorship. 
His  valedictory  leading  article  said :  'Since 
the  war  began,  the  function  of  an  editor 
who  believes  that  truth  and  patriotism 
ought  to  be  reconciled  has  been  difficult 
and  even  hazardous.'  His  fall  in  1916  has 
tended  to  obscure  his  important  reforms 
and  innovations  in  the  conduct  of  the 
paper.  Moreover  his  resignation  marks  the 
close  of  what  the  world — with  a  charac- 


teristic surface  judgement — might  call  his 
success.  For  the  remainder  of  his  life  he 
was  a  critic  not  a  performer,  a  cautionary 
voice  crying  in  the  political  wilderness. 
But  the  bitterness  which  tends  to  afflict 
mankind  in  this  position  he  never  showed ; 
he  was  always  good-humoured,  always 
unruffled. 

In  this  period  Hirst  wrote  several 
books ;  the  most  successful  were  a  bio- 
graphy of  Thomas  Jefferson  (1926),  the 
Early  Life  and  Letters  of  John  Morley 
(2  vols.,  1927)  and  the  introduction  to 
Morley' s  Memorandum  on  Resignation^ 
pubhshed  in  1928,  Gladstone  as  Financier 
and  Economist  ( 1931 ),  Wall  Street  and  Lom- 
bard Street  (1931),  Liberty  and  Tyranny 
(1935),  and  Economic  Freedom  and  Private 
Property  (1935).  He  also  maintained  a 
remarkable  output  of  articles  including 
many  effective  letters  to  The  Times;  he 
was  a  governor  of  the  London  School  of 
Economics ;  he  paid  a  number  of  visits  to 
the  United  States  where  his  writings  were 
always  read  with  respect  and  where  his 
sister  Beatrice  was  professor  of  classics 
in  Barnard  College,  Columbia  University. 
His  views  were  of  course  completely  at 
variance  with  the  then  fashionable  school 
of  economists  emerging  from  Cambridge 
under  J.  M.  (later  Lord)  Keynes  [q.v.]. 
Sir  Roy  Harrod,  espousing,  perhaps  a  little 
brusquely,  the  cause  of  those  attacked  by 
Hirst,  has  said  that  Hirst's  criticisms  were 
quite  shallow  although  delightfully  pre- 
sented. No  doubt  that  should  be  stated 
and  was  the  opinion  of  several  of  the 
younger  men.  But  Hirst  was  not  disturbed 
by  being  thought  outmoded. 

In  January  1910  he  had  stood  for  South 
Suffolk  and  in  1929  he  stood  for  Shipley, 
polling  the  sizeable  vote  for  a  Liberal  of 
11,712.  But  after  1929  he  moved  away 
from  the  official  leadership  of  the  party 
and  sharpened  his  difference  by  support- 
ing the  Mimich  agreement.  Later  he  used 
to  refer  to  the  welfare  State  as  the 
Beveridge  hoax.  He  was  for  a  period  con- 
nected with  Sir  Ernest  Benn  [q.v.]  and 
the  Individualists,  but  he  found  this  body 
more  conservative  than  he  had  supposed 
and  withdrew  to  his  old  position  of  isola- 
tion towards  the  end  of  the  war  of  1939- 
45.  With  a  character  which  was  in  some 
particulars  old-fashioned  but  was  dis- 
played by  a  personality  of  great  originality 
Hirst,  in  maturity,  won  the  respect  of 
younger  generations.  He  was  made  an 
honorary  fellow  of  his  old  college,  under 
the  genial  sway  of  Sir  Maurice  Bowra, 
after  the  second  war,  and  delighted  the 


482 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hirst,  G.  H. 


common-room  on  one  occasion  by  inter- 
rupting an  anecdote  of  Lord  Simon  with 
the  remark  'Oh  yes,  he  was  the  man  who 
kept  his  secretary  in  a  grandfather  clock.' 
On  another  occasion  he  brought  a  discus- 
sion of  Morley's  wife  to  an  end  with  the 
information  that  'she  was  a  good  walker'. 
He  was  a  keen,  if  unorthodox,  fisherman 
using  his  own  fly,  known  as  Hirst's  fancy. 
His  personal  affinities  with  the  great  days 
of  Liberalism  were  strong  as  he  married 
Cobden's  great-niece,  Helena  Cobden,  in 
1903,  and  latterly  lived  in  Cobden's  old 
home,  Dunford  House,  in  Sussex.  He  had 
no  children. 

Although  Hirst's  career  may  seem  some- 
what disappointing — a  falling  off  from  the 
spirited  start — he  had  the  compensations 
which  consistency  can  give  and  the  know- 
ledge that  he  possessed  the  warm  attach- 
ment of  a  wide  circle  of  friends  and 
admirers.  He  was  a  delightful  companion 
— attentive  to  what  was  said  to  him  and 
in  return  generally  arresting  and  always 
sympathetic.  His  friend,  E.  C.  Bentley 
[q.v.],  said  that  in  youth  Hirst  'looked 
like  a  very  able,  good-humoured,  hard- 
headed  man  of  about  thirty'.  He  looked 
exactly  the  same  almost  all  his  life.  He 
died  at  Singleton  in  Sussex  22  February 
1953. 

[F.  W.  Hirst,  By  His  Friends,  1958 ;  F.  W. 
Hirst,  In  the  Golden  Days,  1947 ;  The  Economist 
1843-1943,  A  Centenary  Volume,  1943 ;  J.  W. 
Robertson  Scott,  Life  and  Death  of  a  News- 
paper, 1952  ;  E.  C.  Bentley,  Those  Days,  1940 ; 
Sir  C.  M.  Bowra,  Memories,  1966;  private 
information.]  Roger  Fulford. 

HIRST,  GEORGE  HERBERT  (1871- 
1954),  cricketer,  was  born  at  Kirkheaton, 
near  Huddersfleld,  7  September  1871,  the 
son  of  Mary  Elizabeth  Woolhouse.  He  left 
school  at  the  age  of  ten  and  worked  first  as 
a  hand-loom  weaver  and  then  at  a  neigh- 
bouring dye-works.  By  the  time  he  was 
fifteen  he  was  in  the  village  eleven  and 
frequently  winning  the  prizes  offered  by 
a  Sunday  newspaper  for  outstanding  feats 
in  local  cricket. 

His  subsequent  performances  for 
stronger  clubs  like  Elland,  Mirfield,  and 
Huddersfield  came  to  official  notice  and  he 
had  his  first  trial  for  the  county  in  1889. 
After  a  few  games  in  1892  he  established 
himself  in  the  Yorkshire  side  in  1893  by 
taking  99  wickets  for  14-39,  an  average 
he  bettered  only  once  in  his  long  career. 
So  far  he  had  been  a  tail-end  batsman 
notable  for  defiance  in  a  crisis,  but  in 
1894  he  made  his  first  century,  115  not 


out  against  Gloucestershire,  and  with  98 
wickets  was  again  unlucky  to  miss  the 
bowler's  'century'  by  a  small  margin. 
Next  year  he  made  sure  of  it  with  150 
wickets,  and  in  1896  he  achieved  the 
'double'  of  over  1,000  runs  and  100  wickets 
for  the  first  time. 

A  stocky,  powerfully-built  man.  Hirst 
bowled  left-arm  at  above  medium  pace. 
At  this  time  he  was  a  useful  rather  than 
a  great  bowler,  and  with  an  average  of 
only  60  wickets  a  season  between  1898 
and  1900,  his  bowling  seemed  to  be  de- 
clining as  his  batting  steadily  advanced. 
But  while  practising  for  the  1901  season 
he  discovered  the  swerve  which  made  him 
in  English  conditions  one  of  the  most 
dangerous  bowlers  in  the  game's  history. 
He  was  able  to  make  the  ball  dip  into  the 
batsman  so  sharply  that  one  of  his  victims 
felt  that  'it  came  at  you  like  a  hard  throw 
from  cover'.  Many  times  he  broke  the 
back  of  an  innings  by  removing  the  open- 
ing batsmen  almost  before  they  reached 
the  crease,  and  H.  S.  Altham  has  written 
that  his  bowling  had  'a  resiliency,  vigour, 
and  optimism  which  from  the  very  outset 
claimed  from  the  batsmen  the  moral 
supremacy;  and  with  all  his  pace  and 
peculiarity  of  flight,  his  length  was  singu- 
larly accurate'. 

He  batted  right-handed,  and  was  so 
quick  of  foot  and  eye  that  it  was  difficult 
to  find  a  length  to  inhibit  his  favourite 
strokes,  the  hook  and  the  pull.  Naturally 
pugnacious,  he  revelled  in  crisis ;  and  when 
for  a  time  he  was  obliged  by  the  gravity 
of  an  occasion  to  restrain  his  aggressive 
instincts,  he  would  finally  break  loose  into 
a  frenzy  of  hitting  which  rapidly  turned 
an  unpromising  into  a  winning  position. 

The  hard  facts  of  his  career  tell  a  re- 
markable story  of  all-round  accompUsh- 
ment.  Altogether  he  made  36,203  runs  for 
an  average  of  3405  and  took  2,727  wickets 
for  18-77.  He  also  made  601  catches, 
mostly  at  mid-off ;  and  he  probably  caught 
more  catches  in  front  of  the  wicket  than 
any  other  player. 

He  did  the  'double'  14  times,  a  figure 
beaten  only  by  his  Yorkshire  colleague 
Wilfred  Rhodes  (16).  He  made  1,000  runs 
19  times,  including  totals  of  over  2,000  in 
consecutive  seasons,  1904-6 ;  he  scored  60 
centuries,  of  which  the  highest  was  341 
against  Leicestershire  in  1905  (it  con- 
tained a  six  and  53  fours  and  is  still 
a  Yorkshire  record);  he  played  three 
other  innings  of  over  200,  and  apart  from 
his  centuries  had  two  hundred  other  scores 
over  50 ;  against  Somerset  in  1906  he  made 


483 


Hirst,  G.  H. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


a  century  in  each  innings  and  also  took 
eleven  wickets  in  the  match. 

As  a  bowler  he  had  nine  wickets  in  an 
innings  on  four  occasions,  the  best  being 
9-23  (eight  bowled)  against  Lancashire  in 
1910.  His  two  hat-tricks  were  both  against 
Leicestershire  (1895  and  1907),  against 
whom  he  took  12-66  in  1906  and  15-63 
(his  largest  total)  in  1907. 

Hirst's  supreme  achievement  was  in 
1906,  when  he  made  2,385  runs  (average 
45-86)  and  took  208  wickets  for  16-50. 
This  has  never  been,  and  in  an  age  of 
increasing  specialization  it  is  unlikely  that 
it  ever  will  be,  equalled.  When  asked  him- 
self whether  he  thought  that  his  record 
would  be  surpassed.  Hirst  replied:  'I  don't 
know,  but  whoever  does  it  will  be  very 
tired.'  During  a  summer  in  which  he 
reached  his  thirty-fifth  birthday  he  had 
played  58  innings  and  bowled  7,837  balls. 

For  such  a  remarkable  county  cricketer 
Hirst's  performance  in  test  cricket  was 
surprisingly  modest.  He  toured  Australia 
in  1897-8  and  again  in  1903-4,  and 
although  he  played  in  nine  tests  he 
achieved  little.  The  conditions  did  not  suit 
his  bowling  and  on  Australian  pitches  his 
fondness  for  the  hook  was  often  his  un- 
doing. At  home  he  played  in  each  series 
between  1899  and  1909,  and  his  two  best 
performances  were  against  J.  Darling's 
1902  team.  At  Birmingham  he  took  3-15 
when  Australia  were  dismissed  for  36, 
their  lowest  score  against  England  (and 
in  their  next  match,  at  Leeds,  Yorkshire 
put  them  out  for  23,  Hirst  taking  5-9). 
He  was  omitted  at  Manchester,  where 
Australia  won  the  match  and  the  rubber 
by  3  runs,  but  he  was  restored  at  the  Oval, 
where  the  finish  was  equally  dramatic.  His 
first  innings  of  43  helped  to  save  the 
follow-on,  and  then  after  an  astonishing 
innings  of  104  by  G.  L.  Jessop  [q.v.]  he 
made  58  not  out  to  win  the  match  by 
one  wicket.  When  his  Yorkshire  partner 
Rhodes  came  in  at  number  eleven,  15  runs 
were  needed.  Legend  has  it  that  Hirst 
said,  'Wilfred,  we'll  get  them  in  ones' :  as, 
after  a  hair-raising  45  minutes,  they  did. 

When  cricket  was  resumed  after  the  war 
Hirst  was  nearly  forty-eight,  but  in  1919 
he  made  the  first  century  of  the  season  at 
Lord's:  180  not  out  after  M.C.C.  had  led 
Yorkshire  by  368.  He  followed  this  with 
80  against  Cambridge  University  and  120 
off  both  Essex  and  Warwickshire,  but  he 
could  not  sustain  this  prolific  rate  of 
scoring  and  he  was  no  longer  an  effective 
bowler.  During  the  summer  he  accepted 
an  invitation  to  become  chief  coach  at 


Eton.  He  continued  to  play  for  Yorkshire 
during  his  vacations  in  1920-21,  but  on  his 
fiftieth  birthday  he  retired  from  first-class 
cricket  (apart  from  an  ill-advised  ap- 
pearance during  the  Scarborough  Festival 
in  1929)  after  leading  the  Players  to 
victory  against  the  Gentlemen.  In  acknow- 
ledging a  warm-hearted  ovation  he 
merely  hoped  that  those  who  followed  him 
in  the  game  would  get  as  much  pleasure 
from  it  as  he  had ;  adding  that  if  they  were 
all-rounders  they  would  enjoy  themselves 
twice  as  much. 

During  his  eighteen  years  at  Eton  the 
school  was  never  defeated  at  Lord's ;  and 
during  the  holidays  he  also  coached  the 
up-and-coming  players  of  his  old  county. 

All  the  captains  under  whom  he  served 
regarded  Hirst  as  the  ideal  professional 
cricketer,  disciplined,  good-tempered,  and 
unfailingly  loyal.  The  public's  regard  for 
him  was  shown  at  his  benefit  match  in 
1904,  from  which  he  received  £3,703: 
a  very  large  sum  in  the  money  values  of 
the  time,  and  it  was  exceeded  only  once 
before  1947.  When  in  1949  twenty-six 
former  professionals  were  nominated  to 
honorary  membership  of  the  M.C.C,  Hirst 
was  deservedly  of  their  number. 

In  1896  Hirst  married  Emma,  daughter 
of  George  Kilner,  a  miner ;  they  had  one 
son  and  two  daughters.  He  died  at  his 
home  in  Huddersfield  10  May  1954. 

[Wisden's  Cricketers'  Almanack,  1955 ;  A.  A. 
Thomson,  Hirst  and  Rhodes,  1959 ;  Roy  Web- 
ber, Cricket  Records,  1961;  H.  S.  Altham, 
A  History  of  Cricket,  vol.  i,  1962.] 

M.  M.  Reese. 
HITCHCOCK,  Sir  ELDRED 
FREDERICK  (1887-1959),  man  of 
business,  was  born  in  Islington,  London, 
9  December,  1887,  the  eldest,  with  his 
twin  sister  Effie,  of  seven  children  of 
Eldred  Hitchcock,  superintendent  of  Dr. 
Barnardo's  Home,  Epsom,  by  his  wife, 
Louisa  Naomi  Orchard.  He  was  educated 
at  Burford  Grammar  School  and  in  1910 
obtained  a  diploma  in  economics  from  the 
university  of  Oxford.  He  had  become 
attracted  to  Fabian  socialism  and  shortly 
afterwards  became  secretary  of  Toynbee 
Hall,  being  appointed  warden  in  1917. 
During  the  war  of  1914-18  he  served  as  a 
government  wool  statistician  in  the  War 
Office  and  became  deputy  director  of  wool 
textile  production.  In  the  course  of  this 
work  he  had  to  visit  a  number  of  countries, 
including  Russia,  and  received  from  the 
Tsarist  Government  the  Order  of  St. 
Stanislas.  He  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in 
1920. 


484 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


•1^  Hitchcock 


In  1919  Hitchcock  resigned  the  warden- 
ship  of  Toynbee  Hall  and  went  into  busi- 
ness on  his  own  account,  engaging  (with 
varying  degrees  of  success)  in  a  multi- 
plicity of  activities,  including  a  travel 
agency  which  brought  him  to  the  brink 
of  disaster.  In  1926  he  acquired  £t  block 
of  shares  in  the  sisal  company  which  later 
became  known  as  Bird  &  Co  (Africa),  Ltd. 
This  gradually  became  his  major  interest, 
and  after  a  few  years  he  was  elected  to  the 
board.  He  went  to  Tanganyika  in  1937,  and 
in  1939  took  over  the  managing  director- 
ship of  the  company's  sisal  estates  there, 
becoming  also  chairman  of  the  company 
in  1950.  He  was  appointed  chairman  of 
the  Tanganyika  Sisal  Growers  Association 
in  1946,  and  from  that  year  until  his 
death  he  was  never  out  of  office,  either 
as  chairman  or  vice-chairman;  he  was 
throughout  this  period  unquestionably 
the  most  dominating  personality  in  the 
industry.  Late  in  life  he  turned  his  atten- 
tion also  to  tea,  and  started  a  tea  estate 
3,000  feet  up  in  the  Usambara  Mountains ; 
this  could  not  be  counted  among  the  more 
successful  of  his  ventures. 

During  most  of  the  war  of  1939-45  and 
the  early  post-war  period  ending  in  1948, 
when  all  Tanganyika  sisal  was  bought  by 
the  British  Government,  Hitchcock  acted 
as  negotiator  on  behalf  of  the  sisal  indus- 
try with  the  various  government  depart- 
ments concerned  (the  Treasury,  Board  of 
Trade,  and  Colonial  Office) ;  and  by  using 
all  his  qualities  of  skill  in  marshalling 
statistical  data  and  argument,  and  by 
his  pertinacity,  he  undoubtedly  secured  a 
much  better  deal  for  the  sisal  growers  than 
would  otherwise  have  fallen  to  their  lot. 
In  1949  he  established  the  voluntary  sell- 
ing organization  known  as  the  Tangan- 
yika Sisal  Marketing  Association,  which 
at  the  time  of  his  death  was  marketing 
a  little  over  half  the  sisal  production  of 
Tanganyika.  Many  of  the  smaller  estates 
enrolled  in  it,  and  it  has  served  them 
well. 

Always  an  important  figure  in  public 
affairs  in  Tanganyika,  with  the  advent 
of  Sir  Edward  (later  Lord)  Twining  as 
governor,  Hitchcock  placed  himself  whole- 
heartedly behind  the  new  policy  of 
political  evolution  based  on  racial  parity. 
In  1955  he  accepted  nomination  to 
membership  of  the  legislative  council; 
but  he  was  neither  happy  nor  effective 
in  that  capacity  and  took  the  first 
opportunity  of  resigning. 

Hitchcock  was  short  in  stature,  pugna- 
cious and  rather  aggressive  by  disposition, 


and  he  had  a  highly  dynamic  personality ; 
when  roused  to  anger  he  was  often 
outrageously  rude.  In  a  number  of  ways 
he  was  a  strange  mixture.  He  could  be 
extremely  ruthless  in  achieving  his  ends ; 
and  there  was  a  streak  of  vulgarity  in  his 
make-up  which  was  apt  to  alienate  those 
who  did  not  know  him  well.  On  the  other 
hand,  he  was  conspicuously  loyal  to  his 
friends  and  subordinates,  and  most  warm- 
hearted and  generous ;  on  many  occasions 
in  the  course  of  his  life  he  came  to  the 
rescue  of  persons  who  had  suffered 
injustice  or  unmerited  misfortune.  He 
took  great  pains  after  1945  to  track  down 
Dr.  Richard  Hindorff,  a  German  who  had 
introduced  agave  sisalana  into  Tanganyika 
in  1892,  whom  he  found  eventually, 
living  in  Berlin  in  dire  poverty;  he 
arranged  for  him  to  receive  a  pension 
for  his  remaining  years  from  the 
Tanganyika  Sisal  Growers  Association. 

Hitchcock  had  a  deep  instinctive  feeling 
for  the  visual  arts,  and  his  collection  of 
medieval  Islamic  pottery  was  probably 
the  best  in  private  hands.  He  took  an 
especial  interest  in  the  archaeology  of 
Tanganyika;  and  it  was  owing  to  his 
influence  that  a  department  of  antiquities 
was  established  and  that  the  interest  of 
leading  authorities  such  as  Sir  Mortimer 
Wheeler  was  aroused.  His  election  as 
a  fellow  of  the  Society  of  Antiquaries 
in  1957  was  an  honour  which  gave  him 
immense  pleasure. 

Amongst  his  other  activities  Hitchcock 
founded  a  business  called  Sculptures  and 
Memorials,  not  primarily  for  profit,  but 
in  order  to  raise  the  standard  of  memorials 
in  English  churchyards,  partly  by  replac- 
ing Italian  marble  by  English  stones  and 
by  improving  the  lettering.  A  further 
motive  was  the  desire  (which  proved 
successful)  to  secure  more  commissions 
for  British  sculptors,  amongst  whom  he 
had  some  close  friends,  notably  Eric  Gill 
and  Gilbert  Ledward  [qq.v.]. 

Hitchcock  was  knighted  in  1955. 
He  married  in  1915  Ethel  May  ('Pat') 
Cooper  (died  1956),  daughter  of  Adolphus 
Frederick  William  Lorie,  a  New  Zealand 
sheep  farmer,  and  had  a  daughter  and  a 
son.  He  died  in  Tanga  6  April  1959  and 
his  ashes  were  strewn  in  the  churchyard 
of  Burford  church  in  which  at  his  own 
expense  he  had  a  chapel  admirably 
restored. 

A  portrait  of  Hitchcock  by  Harold 
Knight  remained  in  Tanganyika. 

{The  Times,  7  April  1959 ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] C.  W.  GUILLEBAUD. 


485 


Hoare,  R.  H. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


HOARE,    Sir    REGINALD    HERVEY 

(1882-1954),  diplomatist,  the  fourth  and 
youngest  son  of  Charles  Hoare,  senior 
partner  of  Hoare's  Bank,  and  his  wife, 
Katharine  Patience  Georgiana,  daughter 
of  Lord  Arthur  Hervey,  bishop  of  Bath  and 
Wells  [q.v.],  was  born  at  Minley  Manor, 
Hampshire,  19  July  1882.  He  was  educated 
at  Eton  where  he  was  in  the  eleven  in  1901 , 
and  entered  the  diplomatic  service  in  1905. 

Between  1909  and  1918  he  served 
successively  in  Rome,  Peking,  and 
Petrograd,  returning  to  Russia  in  1918 
as  secretary  to  the  special  mission  to 
Archangel  headed  by  (Sir)  Francis  Lindley 
[q.v.].  After  short  spells  of  service  in  the 
Foreign  Office,  Warsaw,  and  Peking,  he 
was  in  1924  appointed  counsellor  to  the 
embassy  in  Turkey  where  he  remained 
for  four  years.  The  period  was  one  of 
turmoil  and  crisis  in  Turkish  interior 
affairs  as  Mustapha  Kemal  consolidated 
his  authority  in  the  opening  years  of  the 
republic,  but  in  foreign  relations  the  years 
1924-8  were  ones  of  relative  calm,  with 
the  exception  of  the  Mosul  crisis.  Following 
the  Kurdish  revolt  of  1925,  the  Turkish 
Government  asserted  its  claim  to  this 
former  Ottoman  possession.  The  dispute 
was  referred  to  the  League  of  Nations 
which  in  December  1925  upheld  the 
British  contention  that  the  Mosul  province 
should  form  part  of  Iraq,  a  decision  in 
which  Mustapha  Kemal  acquiesced  in 
June  1926.  To  Hoare,  who  frequently 
acted  as  charge  d'affaires,  some  of  the 
credit  for  this  is  due;  he  was  appointed 
C.M.G.  in  the  same  year. 

After  three  years  in  Egypt  where  he 
served  under  Lord  Lloyd  [q.v.]  and  Sir 
Percy  Loraine,  Hoare  was  appointed 
minister  to  Tehran  in  1931.  He  came  to  a 
difficult  task.  During  the  war  of  1914-18 
and  especially  after  the  Russian  revolu- 
tion British  influence  in  Persia  had  in- 
creased, by  force  of  circumstances,  to  an 
extent  which  was  resented  by  the  Persians 
and  wholly  unwelcome  to  successive 
British  Governments.  The  British  aim  was 
to  be  in  treaty  relations  with  a  self-reliant 
and  friendly  Persia  which  would  safeguard 
the  rapidly  expanding  interests  of  the 
Anglo-Persian  Oil  Company.  No  privilege 
was  asked  beyond  a  guarantee  of  the 
company's  contract  and  the  right  of  ships 
of  the  Royal  Navy  to  call  at  the  Gulf 
port  of'Bushire.  Hoare's  predecessors  had 
already  abdicated  the  major  part  of  the 
quasi-imperial  British  position,  but  in 
spite  of  the  strong  British  support  given 
at  the  time  of  his  rise  to  power  to  the 


maker  of  modern  Persia,  Reza  Shah 
Pahlevi,  the  latter  and  his  Government 
remained  suspicious  of  British  intentions. 
No  treaty  had  been  signed  when  Hoare 
arrived  in  Tehran  and  he  made  it  quite 
plain  that  he  was  in  no  hurry.  His  aim  was 
to  restore  calm  to  a  situation  which  had 
grown  feverish.  In  1932  the  Persian 
Government  attempted  a  final  show-down 
with  the  British  and  cancelled  the  oil 
concession.  Hoare,  influenced  perhaps  by 
his  Turkish  experiences,  advised  his 
Government  to  refer  the  matter  imme- 
diately to  the  League  of  Nations.  This  was 
done,  resulting  in  a  new  contract  between 
the  company  and  the  Persian  Government 
being  signed  the  next  year.  To  the  chagrin 
of  the  extremists  the  show-down  ended 
quietly,  without  a  breach  in  relations  or 
serious  loss.  The  treaty,  however,  remained 
unsigned.  In  1933  Hoare  was  promoted 
to  K.C.M.G.  and  in  February  1935  he  was 
transferred  to  Bucharest. 

In  Romania  Hoare's  task  was  to  en- 
courage the  'Little  Entente'  interest,  but 
after  the  defeat  of  all  Romania's  conti- 
nental aUies  between  1938  and  1940, 
pro-German  elements  inevitably  gained 
control.  The  German  army  began  to  move 
in  during  early  1941.  During  this  period 
and  often  on  his  own  initiative,  Hoare 
maintained  protest  against  the  atrocities 
of  the  Nazi-style  regime  which  had 
followed  King  Carol's  abdication  in 
September  1940.  In  February  1941  the 
British  Government  decided  to  extend 
economic  warfare  to  Romania,  and  Hoare's 
mission  was  withdrawn  on  the  10th.  The 
evacuation  of  the  British  community, 
consulates,  and  legation  was  supervised 
by  Hoare  with  his  accustomed  calm,  earn- 
ing him  much  personal  gratitude.  In  1942 
he  retired  from  the  service,  with  great 
reluctance,  but  remained  in  government 
employ  until  1944.  He  then  joined  the 
family  bank  in  Fleet  Street  as  a  managing 
partner.  He  died  12  August  1954  in 
London  after  a  short  illness. 

Hoare  was  a  remarkably  talented 
diplomat  whose  abilities  were  easily 
underestimated  since  at  the  height  of  his 
career  they  were  used  in  holding  opera- 
tions and  not  in  posts  where  their  effects 
could  be  positive  and  spectacular.  He 
was  aware  of  misfortune  in  this  respect 
but  was  incapable  of  embitterment. 
He  was  of  genial  temper,  with  a  strong  and 
somewhat  fantastical  sense  of  humour, 
enjoying  wide  private  interests  from  sport 
to  economics  of  which  he  was  a  gifted 
student. 


486 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


Hoare,  S.  J.  G. 


In  1922  Hoare  married  Lucy  Joan, 
daughter  of  William  George  Frederick 
Cavendish  Bentinck,  J.P. ;  they  had  one 
son.  A  portrait  of  Hoare  by  Simon  Elwes 
is  in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[The  Times,  13  August  1954;  personal 
knowledge.]  Christopher  Sykes. 

HOARE,  Sir  SAMUEL  JOHN 
GURNEY,  second  baronet,  and  Vis- 
count Temple  WOOD  (1880-1959),  states- 
man, was  born  in  London  24  February  1 880, 
the  elder  son  of  (Sir)  Samuel  Hoare,  later 
first  baronet,  member  of  Parliament  for 
Norwich  (1886-1906),  of  Sidestrand  Hall, 
Norfolk,  by  his  wife,  Katharin  Louisa 
Hart,  daughter  of  Richard  Vaughan 
Davis,  commissioner  of  audit.  Educated 
at  Harrow  and  New  College,  Oxford,  he 
obtained  first  classes  in  classical  honour 
moderations  (1901)  and  modern  history 
(1903)  and  represented  the  university  at 
rackets  and  lawn  tennis.  A  member  of  an 
old  Norfolk  banking  family  he  unsuccess- 
fully contested  Ipswich  in  1906  and  first 
entered  Parliament  as  Conservative 
member  for  Chelsea  in  January  1910, 
retaining  the  constituency  until  1944. 
He  was  assistant  private  secretary  to 
Alfred  Lyttelton  [q.v.],  colonial  secretary, 
in  1905;  served  on  the  London  County 
Council  from  1907  to  1910 ;  and  succeeded 
to  the  baronetcy  in  1915. 

During  the  war  of  1914-18  Hoare 
served  as  a  general  staff  officer  with  the 
rank  of  lieutenant-colonel  in  the  military 
mission  to  Russia,  1916-17,  and  later  to 
Italy,  1917-18.  He  was  mentioned  in 
dispatches  and  appointed  C.M.G.  in  1917. 
In  The  Fourth  Seal  (1930)  he  gave  an 
account  of  his  experiences  in  Russia. 

Hoare  was  prominent  amongst  the 
group  of  Conservative  members  who 
brought  about  the  break-up  of  the  Lloyd 
George  coalition  in  October  1922  and  he 
became  secretary  of  state  for  air  in  Bonar 
Law's  Conservative  administration,  a 
post  he  was  to  hold  no  fewer  than  four 
times  in  the  course  of  his  political  career. 
He  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council  in 
November  1922.  It  fell  to  him,  therefore, 
between  1922  and  1929,  with  the  exception 
of  the  Labour  interlude  of  1924,  to  build  up 
a  new  Service  department  in  Whitehall 
and  to  shape  the  pattern  of  the  Royal  Air 
Force  in  the  post-war  period.  His  close 
association  in  this  task  with  that  formid- 
able protagonist  of  an  independent  air 
force.  Sir  Hugh  (later  Viscount)  Trenchard 
[q.v.],  is  fully  told  in  Hoare's  book  Empire 
of  the  Air  (1957).  Hoare  saw  very  clearly 


the  immense  possibilities  of  air  communi- 
cations within  the  Empire,  for  both 
civilian  and  military  purposes.  He  did 
much  to  persuade  the  public  to  be  air- 
minded  and  was  the  first  secretary  of 
state  for  air  to  use  aircraft  as  a  normal 
method  of  travel.  His  arrival  by  air  at 
Gothenburg  in  1923  to  attend  the  first 
International  Aero  Exhibition  was  con- 
sidered to  be  something  of  an  innovation. 
On  Boxing  Day  1926  he  and  his  wife  set 
off  in  an  Imperial  Airways  de  Havilland 
aeroplane  on  the  first  civil  air  flight  to 
India,  arriving  in  Delhi  on  8  January 
1927.  In  February  his  wife  was  appointed 
D.B.E.  and  in  June  he  was  appointed 
G.B.E.  He  published  a  short  account  of 
the  flight,  India  by  Air  (1927). 

With  the  formation  of  the  'national' 
Government  in  1931  Hoare,  who  had  been 
a  member  of  the  first  Round  Table 
conference,  became  secretary  of  state  for 
India.  He  made  a  real  effort  during  the 
second  Round  Table  conference  to  find 
common  ground  with  M.  K.  Gandhi 
[q.v.].  This  met  with  a  degree  of  recipro- 
city on  Gandhi's  part  but  the  result  fell 
a  good  deal  short  of  what  was  needed  for 
agreement  on  policy.  For  the  next  four 
years  Hoare  was  occupied  in  the  immense 
task  of  preparing  the  new  Indian  consti- 
tution. In  1933  a  joint  select  committee 
of  both  Houses  was  set  up  to  consider  the 
white  paper  published  as  a  result  of  the 
Round  Table  conference's  proposals.  It 
sat  from  April  1933  to  November  1934, 
holding  159  meetings  during  which  over 
120  witnesses  were  examined;  Hoare 
himself,  as  one  of  the  principal  witnesses, 
answered  more  than  10,000  questions 
in  the  course  of  his  evidence  in  cross- 
examination.  Lord  Halifax  [q.v.]  recalled 
in  his  Fulness  of  Days  that  this  was  done 
'with  a  grasp  of  his  subject  that  in  compar- 
able circumstances  can  never  have  been 
surpassed  and  seldom  equalled  by  any 
previous  minister  of  the  Crown'.  There 
was  a  dramatic  interlude  in  April  1934 
when  Churchill  alleged  that  Hoare  as 
secretary  of  state  had  exercised  undue 
influence  in  persuading  the  Manchester 
Chamber  of  Commerce  to  alter  its 
original  evidence  tendered  to  the  joint 
select  committee  in  respect  of  the  Indian 
tariff  duty  on  Lancashire  cotton  goods, 
which  was  thought  likely  to  be  increased 
in  the  context  of  the  proposed  new 
constitution  for  India.  Churchill  further 
alleged  that  the  incident,  which  gave  rise  to 
his  accusation  of  breach  of  parliamentary 
privilege,  occurred  at  a  dinner  given  by 


487 


Hoare,  S.  J.  G, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lord  Derby  [q.v.],  himself  a  member  of 
the  joint  select  committee,  to  members  of 
the  Manchester  Chamber  of  Commerce, 
at  which  Hoare  was  present.  The  commit- 
tee of  privileges,  however,  arrived  at  the 
unanimous  verdict  that  there  had  been  no 
breach  of  privilege. 

The  government  of  India  bill  which 
eventually  received  the  royal  assent  in 
August  1935  contained  478  clauses  and  16 
schedules  and  was  piloted  through  the 
House  of  Commons  by  Hoare  in  the  face 
of  bitter  opposition  from  Churchill  and 
the  right  wing  of  the  Conservative  Party. 
Hoare  himself  made  a  substantial  propor- 
tion of  the  speeches  which  were  over 
1,900  in  number.  In  1934  he  was  appointed 
G.C.S.I. 

When  Baldwin  succeeded  MacDonald 
as  prime  minister  in  June  1935  he  was 
in  two  minds  whether  to  make  Hoare 
viceroy  of  India  or  foreign  secretary. 
Hoare  expressed  his  preference  for  the 
former,  but  Baldwin  finally  decided  to 
send  him  to  the  Foreign  Office  where  he 
succeeded  Sir  John  (later  Viscount) 
Simon  [q.v.]  at  a  difficult  period.  Britain's 
defence  forces  had  been  cut  to  the  bone  by 
successive  chancellors  of  the  Exchequer 
and  disarmament  discussions  at  Geneva 
dominated  the  League  of  Nations.  Mean- 
time Germany,  Italy,  and  Japan  were 
flouting  the  Covenant  and  beginning  to 
form  a  hostile  and  threatening  bloc.  The 
Manchurian  crisis  of  1931  had  demon- 
strated that  there  was  no  military  help 
forthcoming  from  the  United  States.  In 
Britain  the  pacifist  movement  was  at  its 
height.  Collective  security,  the  popular 
panacea,  in  practice  depended  upon 
collective  action  by  Britain  and  France. 
Since  Britain  was  clearly  too  weak  to 
risk  becoming  involved  simultaneously 
with  Germany  and  Japan,  Hoare's  policy 
was  based  upon  gaining  time  to  build  up 
Britain's  military  strength  and  on  keeping 
Italy  isolated  from  Germany.  His  first 
step  was  to  sign  the  Anglo-German 
naval  agreement,  designed  to  limit  the 
German  fleet  to  a  ratio  of  35  per  cent  of 
Britain's.  His  next  problem  was  the 
Abyssinian  crisis.  The  French  repeatedly 
made  it  clear  that  they  would  not  contem- 
plate military  action  against  Italy  over 
Abyssinia.  In  a  speech  at  the  League 
Assembly  on  11  September  1935  Hoare 
attempted  to  rally  the  League  by  empha- 
sizing that  collective  security  to  be  effec- 
tive must  be  comprehensive.  'If  the  burden 
is  to  be  borne,  it  must  be  borne  collectively. 
If  risks  for  peace  are  to  be  run,  they  must 


be  run  by  all.'  He  gave  a  pledge  that 
Britain  would  be  'second  to  none  to  fulfil' 
her  obligations  and  he  repeated  again  that 
the  League  and  Britain  with  it  stood 
for  'the  collective  maintenance  of  the 
Covenant'. 

Although  similar  phrases  used  previously 
both  in  the  House  of  Commons  and  outside 
had  made  no  particular  impression,  this 
speech  stirred  the  audience  at  Geneva  and 
achieved  wide  publicity  on  the  Continent 
and  elsewhere.  The  effect,  however,  was 
short-lived,  for  Britain  alone  had  taken 
any  military  precautions  and  it  became 
abundantly  clear  that  any  temporary 
enthusiasm  for  further  'collective  action' 
by  other  members  of  the  League  was 
confined  to  words.  Later  in  September 
'the  committee  of  five'  appointed  by  the 
League  to  mediate  put  forward  proposals 
which  were  rejected  by  Mussolini  who  in 
October  finally  embarked  upon  the 
invasion  of  Abyssinia.  After  limited 
sanctions  had  been  imposed  against  Italy 
by  the  League,  the  British  and  French 
Governments  were  deputed  to  seek  some 
basis  of  agreement  acceptable  to  both 
Italy  and  Abyssinia.  (Sir)  Maurice 
Peterson  [q.v.]  was  sent  to  Paris  where 
officials  from  both  Foreign  Offices  set  to 
work  upon  a  plan.  It  was  clear  that  any 
such  agreement  would  have  to  be  nego- 
tiated, not  dictated,  unless  the  League, 
which  for  all  practical  purposes  meant 
Great  Britain  and  France,  were  prepared 
to  go  to  war  with  Italy.  The  French 
Government  again  reaffirmed  that  they 
would  not  take  military  action  and  Laval 
himself  expressed  the  view  that  an  oil 
embargo,  if  imposed,  might  well  drive 
Mussolini  to  an  act  of  war.  It  was  under- 
stood that  the  two  Governments  were 
acting  on  behalf  of  the  League  to  which 
any  plan  produced  would  be  referred  for 
approval.  In  December  1935  Hoare  who 
had  been  ill,  was  persuaded  to  break  his 
journey  in  Paris  on  his  way  to  Switzerland 
for  a  short  holiday,  in  order  to  put  the 
finishing  touches  to  proposals  which  had 
been  worked  out.  The  ill-fated  Hoare- 
Laval  plan,  as  it  subsequently  became 
known,  provided — first  an  effective 
outlet  to  the  sea,  with  full  sovereign 
rights  for  Abyssinia ;  secondly,  the  conces- 
sion to  Italy  of  some,  but  not  all,  of  the 
territory  in  Tigre  occupied  by  Italian 
forces  together  with  other  minor  frontier 
rectifications ;  thirdly,  a  large  zone  in  the 
south  and  south-west  in  which  Italy, 
acting  under  the  League,  would  have 
the  monopoly  of  economic  development; 


488 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hoare,  S.  J.  G: 


fourthly,  the  maintenance  of  Abyssinian 
sovereignty  over  all  but  the  districts 
actually  ceded  to  Italy;  fifthly,  the 
reference  of  the  plan  to  the  League  for 
approval,  or  otherwise. 

These  proposals  were  considerably  less 
than  Mussohni's  earlier  demands.  Hoare 
recommended  them  to  the  Cabinet  for 
submission  to  the  League  and  began  his 
Swiss  holiday.  The  plan  'leaked'  into  the 
French  press  on  the  following  morning  and 
when  the  details  became  known  the 
reactions  of  the  British  press  and  of  the 
rank  and  file  of  the  Conservative  Party 
were  very  violent,  since  the  plan  was 
considered  to  be  a  complete  volte-face  from 
the  Geneva  speech.  The  British  Cabinet, 
having  first  agreed  to  accept  the  proposals, 
had  second  thoughts  when  they  doubted 
the  capacity  of  the  Government  to  ride 
the  storm.  Baldwin  asked  Hoare  to 
withdraw  his  approval  of  the  plan  but 
Hoare  refused  to  do  so  and  resigned.  He 
held  strongly  that  unless  Britain  was 
prepared  without  French  support  to 
declare  war  on  Italy  unilaterally,  nothing 
short  of  these  proposals  would  prevent 
the  Itahan  occupation  of  the  whole 
of  Abyssinia,  or  satisfy  Mussolini. 

This  was  the  turning-point  of  Hoare's 
political  career.  His  reputation  was  much 
damaged  in  the  eyes  of  the  British  public, 
who  expected  their  foreign  secretary  to 
stop  Mussolini  in  Abyssinia  without 
involving  Britain  in  the  sUghtest  risk  of 
war,  although  no  other  member  of  the 
League  of  Nations  was  prepared  to  lift 
a  finger  against  Italy,  least  of  all  France 
which  was  far  more  concerned  with  the 
growing  menace  of  Germany. 

Baldwin  took  Hoare  back  into  the 
Government  as  first  lord  of  the  Admiralty 
in  June  1936  and  in  the  following 
May  Hoare  succeeded  Simon  as  home 
secretary  under  Neville  Chamberlain. 
Penal  reform  had  been  a  tradition  in  his 
family  since  Samuel  Hoare,  his  great- 
grandfather, and  Elizabeth  Fry  [q.v.], 
his  great-great-aunt,  together  formed  the 
first  committee  for  supporting  it.  He  took 
immense  pains  in  preparing  the  criminal 
justice  bill  which  obtained  its  second 
reading  in  December  1938.  The  bill 
introduced  two  new  types  of  prison 
sentence:  corrective  training  and  preven- 
tive detention;  it  dealt  with  alternative 
punishment  for  juvenile  offenders;  and 
abolished  judicial  flogging.  Its  final 
stages  were  almost  completed  when  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  September  1939 
intervened.   Nine   years   were   to   elapse 


before  another  home  secretary  piloted  an 
essentially  similar  bill  through  the  House 
of  Commons. 

As  one  of  Chamberlain's  senior  cabinet 
ministers  and  closest  associates  Hoare 
was  invited  by  Chamberlain  to  join  an 
inner  group  of  four  ministers  in  September 

1938  during  the  events  which  led  to  the 
Munich  agreement.  Throughout  all  the 
contemporary  and  subsequent  contro- 
versy, Hoare  stoutly  defended  the  agree- 
ment, holding  that  without  support  from 
the  French  or  from  the  Commonwealth, 
and  with  the  Labour  Party  and  public 
opinion  at  home  bitterly  opposed  to 
military  action  over  the  Sudetenland, 
Britain  was  not  in  a  position  to  declare 
war  on  her  own  against  Germany  until 
further  progress  had  been  made  with 
rearmament.  At  the  Home  Office  in  the 
meantime  he  was  recruiting  for  the  A.R.P. 
services  and  for  the  W.V.S.,  an  organiza- 
tion which  owed  much  to  his  inspira- 
tion. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  September 

1939  Hoare  left  the  Home  Office  to  become 
lord  privy  seal  and  a  member  of  the  War 
Cabinet.  He  was  appointed  for  the 
fourth  time  secretary  of  state  for  air  in 
April  1940.  It  was  his  last  ministerial 
post  and  when  Chamberlain  resigned  in 
May  1940  it  was  the  end  of  Hoare's 
parliamentary  career  as  a  minister  of  the 
Crown  but  not  the  end  of  his  career  of 
public  service.  In  the  same  month  he  was 
appointed  ambassador  to  Spain,  a  post 
which  he  filled  until  December  1 944,  in  criti- 
cal circumstances  in  which  he  showed  con- 
siderable skill  and  subtlety  in  dealing' 
with  the  Spanish  Government.  Madrid' 
was  a  great  centre  of  both  allied  and 
enemy  activity  and  Hoare  and  his  staff' 
succeeded  in  establishing  a  good  enough^ 
relationship  with  the  authorities  to- 
secure  the  release  from  Spanish  prisons' 
of  some  30,000  allied  prisoners  of  war  and' 
refugees  from  across  the  frontier. 

Some  months  before  his  retirement' 
Hoare  was  created  Viscount  Templewood. 
His  Spanish  mission  marked  the  end  of  an 
exceptionally  varied  career,  during  which 
he  had  held  more  high  offices  of  state 
than  any  other  contemporary  minister, 
with  the  exception  of  Churchill.  He 
retired  altogether  from  pubhc  life  and, 
apart  from  making  a  few  speeches  in  the 
House  of  Lords,  lived  quietly  on  his* 
Norfolk  estate.  He  had  sold  Sidestrand' 
Hall  a  few  years  before  the  outbreak  of 
war  but  retained  the  rest  of  the  property. 
He  built  Templewood,  a  small  classical^ 


489 


Hoare,  S.  J.  G. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


villa  in  the  Palladian  style,  on  a  beautiful 
site  surrounded  by  his  woods,  three  miles 
inland  from  the  coast,  to  the  design  of  his 
architect  nephew,  Paul  Paget,  a  temple 
in  a  wood.  It  was  typical  of  his  tidiness  of 
mind  that  the  avenues  were  laid  out  and 
flowering  shrubs  planted  long  before  work 
on  the  house  itself  was  begun.  All  his  hfe  he 
had  been  a  first-class  shot  and  he  continued 
to  shoot  with  astonishing  accuracy  until 
a  year  before  his  death.  He  was  immensely 
proud  of  his  woods  and  shrubs  of  which 
he  had  a  great  knowledge.  He  was  no 
mean  naturaUst.  In  his  retirement  he  was 
a  prolific  writer.  Ambassador  on  Special 
Mission  (1946)  described  his  time  in 
Spain.  The  Unbroken  Thread  (1949)  told 
family  history  of  his  forebears  against  a 
setting  of  sport  and  the  Norfolk  country- 
side. In  The  Shadow  of  the  Gallows  (1951) 
he  set  out  his  objections  to  capital  punish- 
ment. Nine  Troubled  Years  (1954)  com- 
prised his  political  memoirs  between  1931 
and  1940. 

Hoare  was  chairman  of  the  council 
of  the  Magistrates'  Association,  1947-52 ; 
president  of  the  Howard  League  for 
Penal  Reform  from  1947  until  his  death ; 
president  of  the  Lawn  Tennis  Association, 
1932-56 ;  and  an  elder  brother  of  Trinity 
House.  He  received  honorary  degrees  from 
Oxford,  Cambridge,  Reading,  and  Notting- 
ham, and  was  chancellor  of  Reading 
University  from  1937  until  his  death.  He 
received  a  number  of  foreign  decorations, 
was  deputy-lieutenant  and  J.P.  for  Nor- 
folk ;  and  was  awarded  the  silver  medal  for 
skating.  His  precise  manner  of  speech, 
his  extreme  neatness  of  appearance,  and 
his  meticulous  care  for  detail  sometimes 
conveyed  the  impression  of  a  certain  lack 
of  warmth  and  humour  to  those  who  did 
not  know  him  well.  In  fact  they  were  no 
more  than  superficial  trappings  which 
covered  a  kindness  and  understanding 
born  of  deep  religious  convictions.  Al- 
though of  Quaker  ancestry  he  was  brought 
up  and  remained  in  the  Anglo-Catholic 
tradition.  Throughout  fifty  years  of  happy 
married  life  he  was  sustained  and  en- 
couraged by  his  wife.  Lady  Maud  Lygon 
(died  1962),  fifth  daughter  of  the  sixth 
Earl  Beauchamp  [q.v.],  whom  he  married 
in  1909.  There  were  no  children  and,  his 
younger  brother  having  predeceased  him, 
both  the  viscountcy  and  the  baronetcy 
became  extinct  when  Templewood  died 
in  London  7  May  1959. 

A  portrait  of  him  in  the  uniform  of  an 
elder  brother  of  Trinity  House  by  A.  C. 
Davidson-Houston  was  presented  to  him 


in  1956  by  the  Lawn  Tennis  Association 
and  hangs  at  Templewood. 

[Lord  Templewood' s  own  writings ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Charles  Mott-Radclyffe. 

HOBART,  Sir  PERCY  CLEGHORN 
STANLEY  (1885-1957),  major-general, 
was  born  at  Naini  Tal,  India,  14  June 
1885,  the  third  son  of  Robert  Thomson 
Hobart,  Indian  Civil  Service,  of 
Dungannon,  county  Tyrone,  and  his 
wife,  Janetta,  daughter  of  C.  Stanley,  of 
Roughan  Park,  Tyrone.  His  sister  married 
the  future  Viscount  Montgomery  of 
Alamein.  A  scholar  of  Clifton  College,  he 
was  in  the  first  fifteen.  At  the  Royal 
Military  Academy,  Woolwich,  he  captained 
the  second  fifteen  and  passed  out  in  1904 
high  enough  to  gain  one  of  the  few  vacan- 
cies in  the  Royal  Engineers.  In  1906  he 
was  posted  to  the  1st  (later  King  George 
V's  Own)  Sappers  and  Miners  in  India  and 
two  years  later  saw  his  first  active  service 
in  the  Mohmand  campaign.  While  serving 
on  the  Delhi  durbar  military  staff  (1911- 
12)  his  initiative  and  courage  in  dealing 
with  a  fire  earned  him  the  personal  thanks 
of  the  King  and  official  thanks  of  the 
Government  of  India.  His  recreations  at 
this  time  were  typical  of  his  boundless 
energy — ^polo,  pigsticking,  and  shooting. 

In  January  1915  Hobart  (pronounced 
Hubbert)  went  to  France  with  the  first 
Indian  Expeditionary  Force.  He  won  the 
M.C.  at  Neuve  Chapelle  and  in  September 
was  appointed  to  the  general  staff  of  the 
3rd  (Lahore)  division  with  which  he  went 
to  Mesopotamia  in  January  1916.  By  now 
he  had  obtained  a  special  qualification  in 
aerial  reconnaissance  and  in  that  role  he 
was  wounded  in  April  1916  and  appointed 
to  the  D.S.O.  He  was  soon  back  on 
active  service  in  Mesopotamia  as  brigade- 
major  of  an  infantry  brigade,  an  appoint- 
ment of  which  he  was  relieved  when  he 
not  only  refused  to  make  a  last-minute 
change  in  orders  for  a  battle  but  by 
retaining  physical  possession  of  the  field 
telephone  prevented  anyone  else  from 
doing  so.  The  battle  was  won,  but  not  for 
the  last  time  Hobart  sacrificed  his  job 
rather  than  carry  out  orders  he  was 
certain  were  wrong.  He  ended  the  war 
in  Egypt,  having  received  six  mentions 
in  dispatches,  and  was  appointed  O.B.E. 
in  1919. 

After  passing  through  the  Staff  College, 
Camberley,  and  a  short  spell  at  the  War 
Office,  Hobart  returned  in  1921  to  active 
service  on  the  Indian  North- West  frontier 


490 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hobart 


where  he  again  distinguished  himself.  In 

1922  he  was  posted  as  G.S.O.  2  at  head- 
quarters, Eastern  Command,  then  at 
Naini  Tal,  where  he  entered  into  the  life 
of  an  Indian  hill  station  with  charac- 
teristic zest.  A  brilliant  conversationalist, 
he  could  speak  interestingly  on  a  wide 
range  of  subjects.  His  views  were  always 
interesting  or  provocative  but  could  not 
be  ignored.  He  remarked  one  day  that  the 
next  war  would  be  won  by  the  tank  and  in 

1923  he  joined  the  Royal  Tank  Corps. 

In  1923-7  Hobart  was  an  instructor 
at  the  Staff  College,  Quetta,  where  he 
showed  that  his  ability  as  a  trainer  was  on 
a  level  with  the  brilliance,-of  his  war 
record.  He  received  brevet/of  lieutenant- 
colonel  (1922)  and  colonel  11928).  He  was 
second-in-command  of  the  4th  battalion 
of  the  Tank  Corps  at  Catterick  (1927-30) 
and  commanding  officer  of  the  2nd 
battalion  at  Farnborough  (1931-3).  In 
1933  he  became  inspector,  the  head  of  the 
Corps,  and  in  addition  from  1934  he 
raised  and  commanded  the  1st  Tank 
brigade.  In  his  four  years  of  command  he 
evolved  new  tactical  methods  based  on 
the  fundamental  principles  of  mobility, 
flexibility,  and  speed,  and  new  techniques 
of  command  and  control;  developments 
far-reaching  in  their  consequences.  Train- 
ing was  relentless,  for  he  was  a  stern 
taskmaster,  but  'Old  Hobo's'  enthusiasm 
and  imagination  were  the  inspiration  of  a 
keen  and  happy  formation. 

In  1937  Hobart  became  deputy  director 
of  staff  duties  at  the  War  Office  for  a  very 
short  spell  before  being  promoted  major- 
general  and  appointed  director  of  military 
training.  In  1938  he  was  sent  to  Egypt  in 
the  kind  of  role  to  which  he  had  long  as- 
pired, to  raise  what  was  to  become  the  7th 
Armoured  division,  much  of  the  subse- 
quent fame  of  which  was  undoubtedly 
due  to  his  initial  training  and  vision.  But 
his  advanced  views  on  the  employment 
of  armour  independently  of  the  close 
support  of  unarmoured  troops  were  not 
acceptable  and  from  1939  he  was  un- 
employed until  recalled  to  active  duty  in 
1941  by  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill  who  in  the 
following  year  wrote  to  the  secretary  of 
state  for  war:  'General  Hobart  bears  a 
very  high  reputation,  not  only  in  the 
Service,  but  in  wide  circles  outside.  He 
is  a  man  of  quite  exceptional  mental 
attainments,  with  great  strength  of 
character,  and  although  he  does  not  work 
easily  with  others  it  is  a  great  pity  we 
have  not  more  of  his  like  in  the  Service. 
I  have  been  shocked  at  the  persecution 


to  which  he  has  been  subjected.  I  am 
quite  sure  that  if,  when  I  had  him  trans- 
ferred from  a  corporal  in  the  Home  Guard 
to  the  command  of  one  of  the  new 
armoured  divisions,  I  had  instead  insis- 
ted upon  his  controlling  the  whole  of  the 
tank  developments,  with  a  seat  on  the 
Army  Council,  many  of  the  grievous 
errors  from  which  we  have  suffered 
would  not  have  been  committed.' 

Command  of  the  11th  Armoured 
division  (1941-2)  in  England  was  followed 
by  that  of  the  specialized  79th  Armoured 
division  which  Hobart,  perceiving  the 
lessons  of  Dieppe,  organized  and  trained 
for  the  invasion  of  the  continent.  In  his 
diary  on  27  January  1944  Sir  Alan  Brooke 
(later  Viscount  Alanbrooke)  wrote: 
'Hobart .  .  .  showed  us  his  models  and  his 
proposed  assault  organization.  We  then 
went  on  to  see  various  exhibits  such  as  the 
Sherman  tank  for  destroying  tank  mines 
with  chains  on  a  drum  driven  by  the 
engine,  various  methods  of  climbing  walls 
with  tanks,  blowing  up  of  minefields  and 
walls,  flame-throwing  Churchill  tanks, 
wall-destroying  engineer  parties,  floating 
tanks,  teaching  men  how  to  escape  from 
sunken  tanks,  etc.  A  most  interesting  day, 
and  one  which  Eisenhower  seemed  to 
enjoy  thoroughly.  Hobart  has  been  doing 
wonders  in  his  present  job  and  I  am 
delighted  we  put  him  into  it.' 

The  79th  division,  with  Hobart  in 
charge,  went  on  to  play  a  vital  part  in  the 
Normandy  landings  in  21st  Army  Group 
which  his  brother-in-law  was  commanding 
and  to  become  'the  tactical  key  to  victory' 
in  the  final  stages  of  the  war. 

Hobart  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1939  and 
K.B.E.  in  1943.  He  retired  in  1946 ;  was 
lieutenant-governor  of  the  Royal  Hospital, 
Chelsea  (1948-53) ;  and  died  at  Farnham, 
Surrey,  19  February  1957.  He  was  a 
commander  of  the  United  States  Legion 
of  Merit  and  colonel  commandant  of  the 
Royal  Tank  Regiment. 

In  1928  Hobart  married  Dorothea 
Florence,  daughter  of  Colonel  Cyril  Field, 
Royal  Marines,  and  former  wife  of  Major 
A.  F.  Chater,  R.E.  He  had  one  daughter. 

A  pastel  by  Eric  Kennington  is  at  Royal 
Tank  Regiment  headquarters  and  another 
is  in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[The  Times,  21, 25, 28  February,  and  4  March 
1957;  Winston  S.  Churchill,  The  Hinge  of 
Fate,  1951 ;  Sir  Arthur  Bryant,  Triumph  in 
the  West,  1959 ;  Kenneth  Macksey,  Armoured 
Crusader,  1967;  The  Tank,  March  1957;  His- 
tory  of  the  79th  Armoured  Division,  Hamburg, 
1945.]  M.  R.  Roberts. 


491 


Hodgson 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


HODGSON,    Sir   ROBERT   MacLEOD 

(1874-1956),  diplomatist,  was  born  in 
West  Bromwich  25  February  1874,  the 
eldest  son  of  the  Rev.  Robert  Hodgson, 
vicar  of  Christ  Church,  a  founder  of  the 
West  Bromwich  Albion  football  club, 
later  prebendary  of  Lichfield  and  arch- 
deacon of  Stafford,  by  his  first  wife, 
Katharine  Gamlen.  He  was  educated  at 
Radley  and  Trinity  College,  Oxford, 
where  he  captained  the  university  hockey 
team  (1896)  and  graduated  in  1897.  He 
began  his  connection  with  the  Foreign 
Office  by  working  in  a  subordinate  position 
in  the  consulate-general  at  Algiers  and 
later  (1901-6)  at  Marseilles  where  he 
became  a  paid  vice-consul  in  1904.  He  had 
always  taken  a  great  interest  in  the 
commercial  work  of  these  posts  and  in 
1906  he  was  sent  by  the  Foreign  Office 
to  Vladivostok  as  commercial  agent,  being 
given  the  rank  of  vice-consul  in  1908  and 
of  consul  in  1911.  He  remained  there  until 
1919,  acquiring  that  knowledge  of  the 
Russian  language  and  character  which 
was  to  determine  the  course  of  so  much  of 
his  future  career.  During  that  strange 
and  unhappy  chapter  of  British  diplo- 
matic history  when,  after  the  Bolshevik 
revolution,  the  Allies  intervened  in 
Russia,  he  was  moved  as  acting  high 
commissioner  to  Omsk  where  an  anti- 
Bolshevik  government  had  been  set  up. 
When  Omsk  was  evacuated  by  the  Allies 
in  November  1919  he  was  appointed 
commercial  counsellor  in  Russia. 

After  the  signature  of  an  Anglo-Russian 
trade  agreement  in  1921  Hodgson  was 
appointed  official  agent  on  the  British 
commercial  mission  to  Russia.  His  posi- 
tion was  a  difficult  one,  in  view  of  the 
two  governments'  attitude  of  mutual 
suspicion,  but  Hodgson  was  a  man  of 
transparent  integrity,  and  so  far  as  it  was 
possible  for  any  British  representative  at 
that  time  to  do  so  he  gained  the  goodwill 
of  the  Russians  with  whom  he  carried  out 
a  succession  of  prolonged  and  tedious 
negotiations.  His  clear  and  objective 
reports  helped  a  not  always  receptive 
British  Government  to  an  understanding 
of  the  motives  underlying  the  workings 
of  the  official  Russian  mind.  With  the 
diplomatic  recognition  of  Russia  by  the 
Labour  Government  in  1924  Hodgson 
became  charge  d'affaires ;  he  remained  in 
Moscow  until  1927  when  the  diplomatic 
mission  was  recalled  and  the  trade  agree- 
ment ended. 

In  1928  his  appointment  as  minister  to 
Albania  was' a  disappointment  to  Hodgson 


after  his  successful  and  arduous  time  in 
Russia,  especially  as  he  had  been  led  to 
expect  promotion  to  a  more  important 
post.  But  he  was  the  last  man  to  nurse 
a  grievance  and  threw  himself  with  his 
wonted  vigour  into  his  new  work  and 
could  soon  boast  with  every  justification 
that  nothing  of  interest  to  the  British 
Government  could  happen  in  Albania 
without  his  knowing  of  it.  He  retired  in 
August  1936,  having  been  kept  on  for 
more  than  two  years  beyond  the  nornial 
age.  In  December  1937  he  was  brought 
back  as  British  agent  to  General  Franco's 
administration  in  Burgos.  In  February 
1939  he  was^credited  as  charge  d'affaires 
to  the  Spanish  Government  and  it  was  a 
surprise  to  many  that  he  was  not  chosen 
as  ambassador  in  April  on  the  establish- 
ment of  full  diplomatic  relations  with 
General  Franco.  In  1944-5  he  again 
emerged  from  retirement  to  serve  in  the 
Foreign  Office  as  adviser  to  the  censorship. 

Hodgson  was  a  man  of  dynamic  energy. 
His  speech  matched  his  mental  processes 
in  speed  and  his  powerful  frame,  like  his 
mind,  rebelled  against  inactivity.  Retire- 
ment was  for  him  an  irksome  experience. 
For  some  years  he  was  chairman  of  the 
council  of  the  School  of  Slavonic  Studies 
and  in  1953  he  turned  to  authorship  with 
Spain  Resurgent.  Carpentry,  which  had 
always  been  one  of  his  hobbies,  occupied 
much  of  his  spare  time,  but  he  always 
wanted  more  to  do. 

Lovable  and  of  strong  sensibilities, 
Hodgson  had  a  multitude  of  friends  and 
was  deeply  affected  by  the  purges  in  Russia 
when  so  many  of  the  people  he  had  known 
were  liquidated,  often  apparently  for  no 
other  reason  than  having  been  his  visitors 
at  the  embassy.  His  skill  in  negotiation  was 
remarkable.  It  derived  from  clarity  of 
vision,  tenacity,  and  an  unmistakable 
uprightness  and  generosity  of  mind  which 
won  the  confidence  and  respect  of  his 
opponent.  Possessing  so  varied  and 
formidable  a  diplomatic  armoury  he  might 
ordinarily  have  been  expected  to  have 
been  chosen  to  fill  posts  of  greater 
responsibility,  but  he  inevitably  suffered 
from  not  having  started  his  career  in  the 
regular  diplomatic  service.  He  was  appoin- 
ted C.M.G.  (1920),  K.C.M.G.  (1939),  and 
K.B.E.  (1925). 

In  1920  Hodgson  married  a  Russian, 
Olga,  daughter  of  Paul  Bellavin ;  they  had 
one  son.  Hodgson  died  in  London  18 
October  1956. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
David  Scott. 


492 


D.N.B.  1951^1960 


Holden 


HOLDEN,  CHARLES  HENRY  (1875- 
1960),  architect,  was  born  12  May  1875 
at  Great  Lever,  Bolton,  Lancashire,  the 
youngest  of  five  children  of  Joseph 
Holden  and  his  wife,  Ellen  Bolton. 
Following  bankruptcy  of  his  drapery 
business  his  father  left  home  to  seek  work 
elsewhere.  His  mother  died  soon  after- 
wards when  Charles  was  eight  and  his 
eldest  sister,  then  a  girl  of  eighteen, 
opened  a  shop  and  managed  to  provide 
for  the  family.  Charles  attended  the 
village  school  until  his  father  found 
regular  work  in  St.  Helens  where  he 
remarried.  Charles  then  rejoined  him  and 
after  attending  local  schools  he  found 
work  first  as  a  clerk  in  the  railway  stores, 
then  as  a  laboratory  assistant  in  a  chemi- 
cal works  before  returning  to  Bolton  to 
help  his  brother-in-law,  Frederick  Green, 
a  land  surveyor  who  also  drew  plans  for 
speculative  builders.  Green  arranged  for 
the  boy  to  be  apprenticed  to  E.  W.  Leeson, 
a  Manchester  architect,  and  he  attended 
classes  at  the  School  of  Art  and  Manchester 
Technical  College.  There  he  made  rapid 
progress  and  after  gaining  first  place  in 
the  honours  examination  in  construction 
and  design,  he  was  put  in  charge  of  the 
class  on  this  subject.  At  the  same  time, 
working  at  night,  he  prepared  a  regular 
entry  under  the  nom  de  plume  of 
'The  Owl',  for  the  monthly  student 
competitions  organized  by  the  Building 
News,  until  in  one  year  he  had  an  un^ 
broken  record  of  first  and  second 
places. 

Joseph  Knight,  an  art  student  with 
whom  he  travelled  daily  to  Manchester, 
lent  him  a  copy  of  Leaves  of  Grass,  and 
learning  that  J.  W.  Wallace,  a  personal 
friend  of  Walt  Whitman,  lived  in  Bolton, 
Holden  made  his  aquaintance.  Wallace 
drew  his  attention  to  Whitman's  cryptic 
'Laws  for  Creations'  and  to  the  works  of 
Thoreau  and  Edward  Carpenter  [q.v.]. 
Greatly  impressed,  Holden  began  to  think 
of  similar  ideas  in  architectural  terms. 
Knight  introduced  him  to  the  painter 
Francis  Dodd  [q.v.]  whose  sister,  Gertrude, 
was  engaged  to  (Sir)  Muirhead  Bone 
[q.v.] ;  the  two  brothers,  James  and  Muir- 
head Bone,  became  Holden's  closest  and 
lifelong  friends. 

Leaving  Manchester,  he  worked  for  a 
short  time  with  Jonathan  Simpson  in 
Bolton  before  going  to  London  at  the  age 
of  twenty-two  to  work  with  C.  R.  Ashbee 
[q.v.].  The  aesthetic  atmosphere  of 
Ashbee's  studio  did  not  accord  with  his 
views  and  after  a  short  break  in  Devon- 


shire he  joined  Percy  Adams  in  1899  as 
chief  assistant.  A  brilliant  planner  with 
competitive  spirit,  Adams  had  just  won 
the  Newcastle  Infirmary  competition. 
He  gave  his  young  assistant  full  scope  and 
a  series  of  buildings  justifying  this  confi- 
dence followed  in  rapid  succession,  among 
them  Belgrave  Hospital,  Kennington; 
the  Law  Society  in  Chancery  Lane;  the 
Seamen's  Hospital,  Constantinople;  the 
Women's  Hospital,  Soho ;  Tunbridge  Wells 
Hospital;  and  the  King  Edward  VII 
Sanatorium  at  Midhurst.  The  Bristol 
Public  Library  (1906)  was  the  outcome  of 
a  competition  won  with  a  set  of  drawings 
prepared  in  a  fortnight  by  Holden  in  his 
spare  time.  Its  happy  relationship  with 
the  cathedral  and  the  adjoining  eleventh- 
century  gateway,  its  dramatically  simple 
rear  elevation,  and  its  freedom  from  any 
structural  defect  over  a  period  of  sixty 
years  were  remarkable  achievements  for 
one  so  young. 

In  1907  he  entered  into  partnership 
with  Adams  and  among  the  works  which 
followed  were  the  British  Medical 
Association  (later  Rhodesia  House),  the 
Bristol  Royal  Infirmary,  the  Institution 
of  Electrical  Engineers,  and  the  Royal 
Northern  Hospital.  Lionel  Pearson  be- 
came a  partner  in  1913  and  after  the 
war,  when  Holden  was  one  of  the  four 
chief  architects  of  the  Imperial  War 
Graves  Commission,  the  practice  in- 
creased to  such  an  extent  that  the  responsi- 
bilities had  to  be  divided  between  the 
partners. 

Uncommitted  to  a  particular  style, 
Holden  had  used  Gothic  or  classic  forms 
with  equal  facility  and  understanding. 
In  his  design  for  the  Law  Society  with  its 
splendid  library  he  acknowledged  being 
influenced  by  Alfred  Stevens  [q.v.]. 
King's  College  for  Women,  Campden 
Hill  (which  became  Queen  Elizabeth 
College),  shows  his  love  for  Wren.  Belgrave 
Hospital,  Sutton  Valence  School,  and 
Midhurst  Sanatorium  might  be  personal 
tributes  to  Philip  Webb  [q.v.]  and  C.  R. 
Ashbee.  With  an  unerring  sense  of 
composition  based  on  tradition  and  natural 
form,  a  sympathy  for  material,  and  an 
instinctive  sense  of  construction,  he 
continued  to  simplify  his  work  until  it 
achieved  the  clearest  expression  of  pur- 
pose. He  said,  in  character:  'When  in 
doubt,  leave  it  out.' 

His  powers  were  noted  at  meetings  of 
the  Design  and  Industries  Association  by 
Frank  Pick  [q.v.]  who  commissioned 
Holden  to   design  the  fa^de  of  Bond 


493 


Holden 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Street  tube  station  (1924).  This  was  the 
beginning  of  fifteen  years  of  happy 
collaboration  with  Pick  during  which 
Holden's  influence  extended  into  every 
part  of  the  London  Transport  system: 
street  signs,  bus  shelters,  platforms, 
train  sheds,  cable  posts,  lamp  stan- 
dards. Everything  he  touched  he  im- 
proved. Designing  more  than  fifty 
stations,  free  of  all  stylistic  features,  he 
established  unsurpassed  standards  of 
transport  architecture.  This  work  was 
crowned  by  55  Broadway  where  the 
difficulties  of  a  diamond-shaped  site  were 
brilliantly  overcome  with  a  cruciform 
plan  and  a  sculptural  form  which  he 
described  as  'a  man  on  horseback  with 
panniers'.  For  this  steel-framed  building 
which  rises  with  easier  grace  than 
any  of  its  contemporaries  he  was 
awarded  the  London  Architecture  medal 
(1929). 

Commissioned  in  1931  to  design  the 
new  buildings  for  the  university  of 
London,  Holden  discarded  the  quad- 
rangular plan  in  favour  of  a  spine  with 
ribs  or,  in  his  own  words,  'a  lion  with 
cubs'.  Based  on  a  strictly  rational  assess- 
ment of  his  programme,  the  building  has 
an  elemental  quality  which  expresses  the 
austerity  and  simplicity  to  which  his 
life  was  dedicated.  His  personal  account 
of  it  is  recorded  in  the  Journal  of  the 
Royal  Institute  of  British  Architects  of 
9  May  1938.  The  building  still  lacks  the 
sculpture  for  which  he  made  provision  in 
his  design  and  which  he  regarded  as  a 
necessary  complement  to  his  abstract 
architectural  composition. 

His  buildings  display  the  work  of  many 
notable  sculptors  including  Eric  Gill 
[q.v.]  and  Henry  Moore,  but  he  is  chiefly 
associated  with  the  controversial  figure 
of  Sir  Jacob  Epstein  [q.v.],  early  colla- 
boration with  whom  convinced  him  of 
Epstein's  artistic  integrity  and  ability 
to  infuse  his  work  with  life.  Despite  the 
reluctance  of  clients  and  public  outcry 
following  his  sculptures  for  the  British 
Medical  Association,  he  continued  to 
provide  him  with  opportunities.  Opening 
an  exhibition  of  Epstein's  work  in  Bolton 
in  1954,  Holden  said:  'Today  we  have  his 
Virgin  and  Child  in  Cavendish  Square  in 
cast  lead  but  floating  in  the  air  like  a 
heavenly  vision.  How  proud  I  would  hav^ 
been  to  see  such  a  work  on  the  base  of  my 
university  tower  in  London.' 

During  the  war  of  1939-45  Holden 
turned  his  attention  to  town  planning, 
advising  the   dean   and   chapter   of  St. 


Paul's,  the  university  of  Edinburgh,  and 
the  London  County  Council.  He  prepared 
a  plan  for  Canterbury  and  with  (Sir) 
William  (later  Lord)  Holford  the  plan  for 
the  City  of  London  which  was  incorpora- 
ted in  the  County  of  London  Development 
Plan  (1951).  It  may  be  true  that  this 
modest  and  retiring  man  left  a  more 
enduring  mark  on  London  than  any 
architect  of  his  generation. 

Elected  A.R.I.B.A.  in  1906,  winning 
the  Godwin  bursary  in  1913,  he  became 
F.R.I.B.A.  in  1921,  vice-president  in 
1935-7,  and  in  1936  was  awarded  the 
Royal  gold  medal  for  architecture. 
He  was  a  member  of  the  faculty  of  royal 
designers  for  industry  and  served  on  the 
Royal  Fine  Art  Commission  from  1933 
to  1937.  The  universities  of  London  and 
Manchester  conferred  honorary  doctor- 
ates upon  him. 

Holden  had  an  endearing  sense  of 
humour  and  a  gentle  manner  which 
belied  the  incisiveness  of  his  views. 
Children  loved  him  and  he  kept  tit-bits 
in  his  pockets  for  the  wild  birds  in 
his  garden  which  came  at  his  call.  Playing 
the  cello  and  later  the  piano,  he  loved 
music,  finding  affinities  to  architecture 
in  the  works  of  Bach.  Clarity  and  economy, 
characteristic  of  his  designs,  are  also  to  be 
found  in  his  superb  drawings,  in  his 
correspondence,  and  his  rare  public 
addresses.  Generous  to  weakness  in 
others,  he  was  a  man  of  great  strength 
of  character  who  found  much  happiness 
in  exercising  his  skill  on  the  tasks  en- 
trusted to  him. 

For  fifty  years  his  life  was  shared  with 
Margaret,  daughter  of  J.  C.  Macdonald. 
After  her  death  in  1954  he  gradually 
withdrew  from  active  practice  to  live 
quietly  at  his  home  at  Harmer  Green 
where  he  died  1  May  1960. 

A  portrait  of  him  as  a  young  man  by 
Francis  Dodd  hangs  in  the  hall  of  the 
Art  Workers'  Guild  of  which  he  was  a 
member.  An  etching  also  by  Dodd  and  a 
study  for  it  are  in  the  National  Portrait 
Gallery.  A  portrait  medallion  by  Paul 
Vincze  is  in  the  Bristol  Public  Library. 

[The  Times  and  Guardian,  2  May  1960; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Charles  Hutton. 

HOLMES,  Sir  VALENTINE  (1888- 
1956),  lawyer,  was  born  in  Blackrock, 
county  DubKn,  24  July  1888,  the  third 
son  of  Hugh  Holmes,  who  was  successively 
solicitor  and  attorney-general,  judge,  lord 
justice     and    privy    counsellor,     all    in 


494 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Holmes 


Ireland,  and  who  died  in  1916,  by  his 
wife,  Olivia  Moule.  Holmes's  early  years 
were  mainly  spent  at  the  family  home  in 
Dublin.  He  was  educated  at  Charterhouse 
and  Trinity  College,  Dubhn,  where  he 
obtained  a  senior  moderatorship  in 
classics  with  gold  medal  in  1911.  After  a 
pupillage  with  A.  Neilson  of  the  common 
law  bar  Holmes  was  called  to  the  bar 
by  the  Inner  Temple  in  1913  and  then 
devilled  for  (Sir)  Leslie  Scott  [q.v.]. 
During  the  war  Holmes  served  as  an 
officer  in  the  Royal  Artillery  and  then 
returned  to  Scott's  chambers.  Solicitors 
who  briefed  Scott,  perceiving  the  quality 
of  Holmes's  work,  soon  began  to  bring 
junior  work  to  him  and,  being  well 
content,  to  recommend  him  to  others. 
When  Scott  relinquished  his  law  officer- 
ship  and  returned  to  private  practice  it 
was  natural  that  he  should  lead  Holmes 
in  some  of  the  heavier  cases  which  were 
by  then  coming  Holmes's  way.  Perhaps 
the  heaviest  was  in  1926  when  the 
Graigola  Merthyr  Company  sought  to 
establish  that  the  Swansea  Corporation's 
reservoir  endangered  their  colliery.  Scott 
and  Holmes  were  for  the  defendants  and 
won  after  a  fifty-six  day  hearing.  Holmes 
was  also  associated  with  Scott  during  this 
period  as  adviser  to  certain  of  the  Indian 
princes  in  connection  with  the  consti- 
tutional changes  then  taking  place  in 
India. 

In  1929  Holmes  moved  to  chambers 
of  his  own  with  Frank  Connett  as  head 
clerk  and  this  partnership  (and  friend- 
ship) continued  until  the  end.  It  was 
about  this  time  that  Holmes  gained  his 
repute  in  the  law  of  libel  and  it  was  rare 
for  there  to  be  any  important  libel  case  in 
which  he  did  not  appear.  His  general 
practice  also  grew  and  from  1935  until 
he  took  silk  in  1945  he  had  the  largest 
junior  practice  at  the  bar.  He  was 
elected  a  bencher  of  his  Inn  early  in 
1935  and  later  that  year  was  appointed 
"Treasury  devil':  junior  counsel  to  the 
Treasury  in  common  law  matters.  The 
work  of  this  office  was  not  at  that  time  so 
exacting  as  it  had  been  during  and 
immediately  after  the  war  but  was 
heavy  enough.  Holmes  was,  however,  a 
tremendous  worker  and  discharged  the 
additional  work  without  any  abatement 
of  his  private  practice.  The  second  war 
presented  a  further  challenge  since  there 
was  a  great  increase  in  government  work 
without  any  corresponding  diminution 
in  his  private  practice  and  both  his 
devils  departed  for  war  service.  He  met 


the  challenge  by  working  even  harder. 
By  tradition  the  labours  of  the  'Treasury 
devil'  are  rewarded  by  elevation  to  the 
bench  after  some  five  years'  service,  but 
Holmes's  inclinations  did  not  lie  in  that 
direction  and  he  felt  compelled  to  decline 
the  offer.  He  relinquished  his  post  in  the 
spring  of  1945  after  serving  twice  the 
normal  period.  He  was  appointed  K.C. 
immediately  and  was  knighted  in  1946 
at  the  same  time  as  his  brother,  Hugh 
Oliver  Holmes  (1886-1955),  who  was 
procurator-general  of  the  Mixed  Court  of 
Appeal  in  Egypt  (1929-49). 

There  was  no  period  of  waiting  for 
Holmes — he  stepped  overnight  from  being 
the  leading  junior  to  being  one  of  the  two 
or  three  leading  silks.  He  continued  to 
appear  in  libel  cases,  many  of  which 
attracted  considerable  attention,  and  was 
a  member  of  the  committee  whose  report 
led  to  the  passage  of  the  Defamation 
Act,  1952.  He  was  also  in  great  demand 
in  heavy  commercial  and  common  law 
actions  both  in  the  lower  courts  and  in 
the  House  of  Lords  and  Privy  Council. 
He  was  for  instance  one  of  the  counsel 
for  the  Australian  banks  in  their  success- 
ful appeal  to  the  Privy  Council  on  the  issue 
that  the  legislation  providing  for  their 
nationalization  was  unconstitutional.  By 
1949,  however,  nearly  thirty  years  of 
overwork  began  to  take  their  toll  and 
Holmes  decided  to  retire  whilst  still  at 
the  apex  of  his  career.  In  the  following 
year  he  was  appointed  consultant  in 
legal  matters  to  the  Shell  Oil  group.  He 
quickly  won  the  confidence  of  directors 
and  colleagues  and  continued  to  serve 
in  this  capacity  until  his  death  in  London 
19  November  1956.  Until  his  fatal  illness 
began  earlier  that  year  this  was  a  period 
of  great  happiness. 

Holmes  had  all  the  attributes  necessary 
to  success  as  a  junior :  these  included  the 
capacity  to  extract  the  essentials  from  the 
most  voluminous  set  of  papers  in  a  short 
time,  a  great  facility  for  expressing 
himself  briefly  but  clearly  on  paper, 
and  an  amazing  industry.  Prior  to  the 
second  war  he  would  work  from  9  a.m. 
one  morning  until  1  a.m.  the  next; 
during  and  after  the  second  war  the 
process  was  reversed  and  he  would  work 
from  3  a.m.  until  6  or  7  p.m.,  save  on 
fire-watching  nights  when  it  is  doubtful 
if  he  slept  at  all.  He  had  a  wide  knowledge 
of  the  law  and  the  analytical  mind 
necessary  to  apply  it  to  the  facts  of  the 
case  in  hand.  His  greatest  gift  was, 
however,    his    sound    judgement    which 


405 


Holmes 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


made  him  so  valued  as  a  counsellor. 
His  opinions  (all  written  in  his  own  hand) 
may  have  been  hard  to  decipher  but  long 
or  short  they  were  rarely  wrong.  One  of  his 
most  courageous  was  of  thirteen  words — 
'The  judgment  of  the  Court  of  Appeal 
is  wrong  and  will  be  reversed' — and  it 
was.  As  an  advocate  Holmes  had  a  slightly 
hesitant  manner  which  at  first  went 
with  an  actual  diffidence.  However,  as 
pressure  of  work  grew  the  diffidence  went 
and  the  hesitance  of  manner  merely 
seemed  to  accentuate  the  force  of  his 
submissions  and  he  became  as  successful 
an  advocate  in  court  as  he  had  been  with 
his  paper  work  in  chambers. 

In  his  early  years  Holmes  shot  and 
played  a  good  game  of  golf;  but  after 
1935  he  had  httle  opportunities  for  these 
although  he  retained  an  interest  in 
racing  and  shared  with  his  clerk  a  fond- 
ness for  'the  dogs'. 

Holmes  married  in  1915  Gwen,  daughter 
of  Andrew  Armstrong,  of  Dublin;  they 
had  one  son  and  one  daughter. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
T.  G.  Roche. 

HOLMYARD,  ERIC  JOHN  (1891-1959), 
teacher,  historian,  and  interpreter  of 
science,  was  born  at  Midsomer  Norton, 
Somerset,  11  July  1891,  the  son  of  Isaac 
Berrow  Holmyard,  a  national  school- 
master, by  his  wife,  Alice  Cheshire.  His 
early  life  was  spent  in  Somerset — a 
county  for  which  he  had  a  deep  affection 
and  to  which  he  returned  in  his  retirement 
— and  he  was  educated  at  Sexey's  School, 
Bruton.  From  there  he  went  to  Sidney 
Sussex  College,  Cambridge,  reading 
history  and  science,  for  both  of  which  he 
had  displayed  an  aptitude  at  an  early 
age  and  which  were  to  remain  his  lifelong 
interests.  He  obtained  a  first  class  in 
both  parts  of  the  natural  sciences  tripos 
(1910-12)  and  a  second  in  part  ii  of  the 
history  tripos  (1911). 

He  next  spent  a  year  at  Rothamsted 
Experimental  Station,  where  he  was  one 
of  the  Board  of  Agriculture's  first  research 
scholars.  He  quickly  decided,  however, 
that  his  real  vocation  was  teaching  and 
after  a  brief  appointment  at  Bristol 
Grammar  School  and  at  Marlborough 
(1918-19)  he  became  head  of  the  science 
department  at  Clifton  College  in  1919, 
in  which  post  he  remained  for  some 
twenty  years.  Under  his  guidance  CUfton 
established  a  reputation  for  science 
teaching  probably  unequalled,  and 
certainly   not    surpassed,  by  any  other 


British  school.  In  1926  he  was  chairman 
of  the  Science  Masters  Association.  His 
influence  extended  far  beyond  Clifton, 
for  during  his  time  there  he  wrote  a  series 
of  school  textbooks,  especially  of  chemistry, 
which  were  widely  used  throughout  the 
English-speaking  world.  An  important 
factor  in  the  success  of  these  books  was 
that  through  them  he  gave  expression  to 
his  profound  knowledge  of  the  history 
of  science,  especially  of  alchemy.  In  order 
to  be  able  to  read  original  Islamic 
manuscripts,  from  which  much  alchemical 
lore  derives,  he  taught  himself  Arabic; 
he  also  had  a  fair  knowledge  of  Hebrew. 
He  edited  several  Arabic  alchemical 
texts,  including  (1928)  Richard  Russell's 
translation  (1678)  of  the  works  of  Geber 
(Jabir  ibn  Hayyan).  In  1928  his  important 
contributions  to  this  field  of  scholarship 
were  recognized  by  Bristol  University  by 
the  award  of  the  D.Litt.  Subsequently 
he  held  office  as  chairman  of  the  Society 
for  the  Study  of  Alchemy  and  Early 
Chemistry  and  was  a  corresponding 
member  of  the  Academic  Internationale 
d'Histoire  des  Sciences.  His  Alchemy 
(1957)  is  recognized  as  an  important 
addition  to  the  literature. 

The  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  launched 
Holmyard  on  a  new  career.  The  severe 
air  raids  on  Bristol  compelled  Clifton  to 
evacuate  to  Bude  in  1940.  Preferring  not 
to  move,  Holmyard  resigned  just  at  the 
time  when  Imperial  Chemical  Industries 
conceived  the  idea  of  Endeavour  as  a  new 
multilingual  journal  which  would  tell  the 
story  of  Britain's  contribution  to  the 
progress  of  science.  He  became  the  first 
editor,  and  established  its  reputation  so 
firmly  that  when  the  war  ended  it  was 
decided  to  continue  its  publication  in- 
definitely; Holmyard  remained  as  editor 
until  1954.  Meanwhile,  however,  Imperial 
Chemical  Industries  had  given  him 
further  opportunity  to  contribute  to 
international  scholarship.  In  1950  the 
company  luidertook  to  sponsor  the 
preparation  of  a  comprehensive  History 
of  Technology,  to  be  published  by  the 
Clarendon  Press,  Oxford,  under  the 
joint  editorship  of  Holmyard  and  Charles 
Singer  [q.v.].  The  first  volume  appeared 
in  1954  and  the  fifth  and  final  volume  of 
this  work,  to  which  some  150  scholars 
of  international  reputation  contributed,  in 
1958,  only  a  year  before  Holmyard's  death. 
The  success  of  the  venture  owed  much  to 
his  meticulously  careful  editorial  work 
and  his  remarkably  far-ranging  historical 
knowledge. 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


Hone 


!  Despite  his  gifts,  Holmyard  was  of  an 
unassuming  and  retiring  disposition  and 
his  influence  on  the  world  of  learning  was 
made  far  more  through  his  extensive 
writing  than  through  personal  contact. 
Although  he  rarely  sought  the  company 
of  his  fellow  men,  those  who  came  to  him 
for  information  or  advice  unfailingly 
received  it  in  full  measure.  Throughout  his 
life,  his  greatest  joy  was  in  the  simple 
pleasures  of  the  countryside ;  in  particular 
he  was  fond  of  horses  and  was  a  good 
judge  of  them  and  was  a  founder,  and 
member  of  council,  of  the  Somerset  Horse 
Association.  Gardening  and  walking  were 
among  his  other  leisure  pursuits. 

In  1916  Holmyard  married  Ethel 
Elizabeth  Britten,  a  schoolmistress,  by 
whom  he  had  two  sons.  She  died  in  1941. 
No  portrait  of  Holmyard  exists,  but  a 
good  photograph  of  him  hangs  in  the  room 
he  formerly  occupied  in  the  Science 
School  at  Clifton  College.  He  died  at 
Clevedon,  Somerset,  13  October  1959. 

[The  Times,  15  and  23  October  1959; 
Endeavour,  January  1960 ;  Nature,  31  October 
1959;  Chemistry  and  Industry,  2  January 
1960;  I.C.I.  Magazine,  December  1959; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

T.  I.  Williams. 

HONE,  EVIE  (1894-1955),  artist,  was 
born  in  Dublin  22  April  1894,  the  daughter 
of  Joseph  Hone,  maltster,  and  his  wife, 
Eva  Robinson.  The  Hone  family  is  the 
most  continuously  distinguished  in  the 
history  of  Irish  art  in  modern  times. 
Evie  Hone  was  a  direct  descendant  of  the 
brother  of  Nathaniel  Hone  [q.v.],  a 
foundation  member  of  the  Royal  Academy, 
and  was  always  dedicated  to  the  idea  of 
being  an  artist.  She  was  a  deeply  religious 
woman  and  once  entered  a  convent  with 
the  idea  of  becoming  a  nun.  Later  she 
joined  the  Roman  Catholic  faith  to  which 
she  belonged  at  the  time  of  her  death.  Her 
lifelong  friend  and  fellow  artist,  Mainie 
Jellett,  although  not  a  Catholic,  con- 
sidered this  an  absolutely  essential  step, 
since  Evie  Hone's  warm  and  passionate 
nature  demanded  the  mysticism  which 
Catholicism  provided.  The  second  factor 
which  played  a  large  part  in  her  life  was 
her  continued  ill  health  due  to  early 
infantile  paralysis.  In  her  youth  she  could 
not  travel  or  move  about  without  a  maid 
but  later  because  of  the  devotion  of 
Mainie  Jellett  and  her  own  indomitable 
courage  she  was  able  to  overcome  her 
physical  disability  and  Uve  abroad. 

In  1915  she  studied  at  the  Byam  Shaw 


School  of  Art  in  London.  In  1918  she 
attended  the  Westminster  School  of  Art 
where  she  worked  under  Walter  Bayes 
and  the  Central  School  under  Bernard 
Meninsky.  In  1920  she  and  Mainie  Jellett 
became  pupils  of  Andre  Lhote  in  his 
studio  in  Paris.  During  the  following  year 
the  two  artists  persuaded  Albert  Gleizes 
to  accept  them  as  his  first  pupils  and 
until  1931  they  worked  for  a  period  with 
him  each  year.  They  were  elected  to  the 
group  Abstraction-Creation  and  their 
work  was  published  in  the  journals  of 
that  society.  Their  work  was  also  accepted 
in  the  exhibitions  in  Paris  of  the  Indepen- 
dants,  the  Surrlndependants,  and  the 
Salon  d'Automne. 

Her  first  exhibition  was  a  joint  affair 
with  Mainie  Jellett  at  the  Dublin  Painters' 
Gallery  in  1924  and  she  subsequently 
exhibited  there  and  at  the  Contemporary 
Painters  Gallery.  From  1944  onwards 
her  work  was  exhibited  in  various  one- 
man  shows  a-t  the  Dawson  Gallery, 
Dublin.  Her  style  was  closely  allied  to 
that  of  Gleizes  and  she  liked  to  take  the 
forms  of  nature  or  of  existing  Old  Masters 
and  to  translate  them  into  basic  patterns 
of  colour  in  order  to  exemplify  an  essential 
harmony  without  depending  on  the  exact 
relationship  of  the  recognizable  or  visible 
object.  Thus  her  work  while  totally 
abstract  was  nevertheless  carefully  related 
to  the  rhythms  of  life.  Later  she  indulged 
herself  in  figurative  or  naturalistic  scenes 
but  she  was  invariably  more  concerned 
with  the  underlying  rhythm  than  with 
description. 

She  had  become  more  and  more 
interested  in  stained  glass,  largely  perhaps 
through  her  intense  interest  in  the  work 
of  Rouault  and  in  1933  she  produced  her 
first  window,  three  small  panels  in  the 
Church  of  Ireland  church  in  Dundrum. 
Her  stained-glass  work  was  soon  recog- 
nized as  being  unique  and  original  and 
during  the  remaining  years  of  her  life  she 
carried  out  some  66  commissions  for 
churches  and  public  places.  This  work 
can  be  divided  into  three  main  phases. 
The  first  was  that  inspired  by  the  rich 
colours  and  expressionist  technique  of 
Rouault  culminating  in  the  large  'My 
Four  Green  Fields'  of  1939  (CLE.  office, 
Dublin).  The  second  phase  was  that  in 
which  her  approach  to  the  human  figure 
was  bolder,  the  colour  more  splendidly 
contrasted,  and  the  sense  of  dependence 
on  her  cubist  painting  less  obvious.  This 
period  ended  with  the  series  for  the  Jesuit 
Fathers,    Tullabeg,    one    of   the    unique 


497 


Hone 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


shrines  of  stained  glass  in  which  no  light 
enters  the  chapel  except  through  her 
five  windows.  Her  last  phase  was  that  in 
which  the  large  window  (504  x  360  feet) 
for  Eton  College  was  the  central  feature. 
This  work  depicts  the  Crucifixion  and  the 
Last  Supper  as  main  subjects  and  reflects 
the  broad  treatment  of  glass  she  adopted 
in  her  last  years.  By  painting  each 
interior  piece  of  glass  with  loving  care 
she  sought  to  make  it  glow  and  give  out 
the  richness  of  colour  which  attracted  her 
so  much.  As  a  result  her  last  windows 
were  not  only  moving  designs  in  them- 
selves but  were  enhanced  by  her 
reverence  for  the  nature  of  glass  as  a 
medium  quite  separate  from  its  descrip- 
tive aspects. 

Evie  Hone  also  produced  over  150 
small  stained-glass  panels  for  domestic 
use  and  continued  to  paint  oils,  gouaches, 
and  water-colours  and  even  ventured 
into  such  fields  as  tapestry  and  applique. 
She  was  so  totally  absorbed  by  her 
occupation  as  an  artist  that  she  hardly 
seemed  aware  of  the  fact  that  she  was 
burning  up  her  waning  strength.  She  died 
in  Dublin  13  March  1955.  A  head  in 
bronze  by  Oisin  Kelly  remained  in  the 
collection  of  the  artist. 

[Mainie  Jellett,  The  Artist's  Vision,  ed. 
Eileen  MacCarvill,  1958 ;  James  White  and 
Michael  Wynne,  Irish  Stained  Glass,  1963; 
personal  knowledge.]  James  White. 

HOPE,  VICTOR  ALEXANDER  JOHN, 

second  Marquess  of  Linlithgow  (1887- 
1952),  viceroy  of  India,  was  born  at 
Hopetoun  House,  South  Queensferry, 
West  Lothian,  24  September  1887,  the 
elder  son  of  the  seventh  Earl  of  Hopetoun, 
afterwards  first  Marquess  of  Linlithgow 
and  first  governor-general  of  Australia 
[q.v.].  He  was  educated  at  Eton  and 
succeeded  his  father  as  second  marquess 
in  1908.  An  active  Territorial,  he  served 
throughout  the  war  of  1914-18,  ending 
with  the  rank  of  colonel,  with  the  Lothians 
and  Border  Horse,  and  in  command  of  a 
battalion  of  the  Royal  Scots.  After  the 
war  he  became  civil  lord  of  the  Admiralty 
in  the  Conservative  Government  (1922-4) ; 
deputy  chairman  of  the  Unionist  Party 
Organization  (1924-6) ;  and  president  of 
the  Navy  League  (1924-31).  He  was 
chairman  of  the  Medical  Research  Council 
and  of  the  governing  body  of  the  Imperial 
College  of  Science  and  Technology  (1934- 
6).  Closely  interested  in  agriculture,  he 
was  chairman  of  the  committee  on  the 
distribution    and    prices    of   agricultural 


produce  (1923) ;  president  of  the  Edinburgh 
and  East  of  Scotland  College  of  Agri- 
culture (1924-33) ;  and  chairman  (1926-8) 
of  the  royal  commission  on  agriculture  in 
India,  which  completed  a  masterly  survey 
in  1928.  Already  a  K.T.  (1928),  he  was 
appointed  G.C.I.E.  in  1929. 

Although  Linlithgow  had  in  1924  refused 
the  governorship  of  Madras,  his  interest 
in  India  remained  keen;  and  during  his 
very  important  chairmanship  (1933—4)  of 
the  joint  select  committee  on  Indian 
constitutional  reform,  on  whose  report 
was  based  the  Government  of  India  Act 
of  1935,  he  acquired  a  profound  and 
specialized  knowledge  of  India's  political 
problems.  His  wide  general  experience  and 
sound  judgement  made  him  an  obvious 
successor  to  Lord  Willingdon  [q.v.]  as 
viceroy  in  1936.  Sworn  of  the  Privy 
Council  in  1935,  he  was  now  appointed 
G.C.S.I. 

Linlithgow's  viceroyalty,  the  longest 
since  1856,  covered  a  period  of  exceptional 
stress  and  difficulty.  It  fell  to  him,  under 
the  Act  of  1935,  to  introduce  provincial 
autonomy ;  to  prepare  for  a  federation  of 
India;  to  superintend  the  separation  of 
Burma  from  India;  and  to  be  the  first 
crown  representative  in  dealing  with  the 
Indian  princely  States.  It  was  largely  his 
personal  reassurances  which  led  the 
Congress  Party  in  July  1937  to  accept 
office  in  the  six  provinces  in  which  it  had 
a  majority.  In  August  1937  he  established 
personal  contact  with  M.  K.  Gandhi 
[q.v.]  and  he  was  throughout  in  close  touch 
with  M.  A.  Jinnah  [q.v.],  with  the  leaders 
of  the  small  minorities,  and  with  the 
princes. 

WTien  war  broke  out  in  1939  plans  for 
federation  were  suspended  and  Linlithgow 
made  an  earnest  appeal  for  unity  and 
support  of  the  war  effort.  Congress, 
however,  refused  to  be  associated  with  the 
war  save  on  its  own  terms,  and  soon 
afterwards  withdrew  its  ministries  in  the 
provinces.  The  Moslem  League  complained 
of  Congress  oppression  in  the  provinces 
and  demanded  that  no  declaration  on  the 
future  of  India  should  be  made  without 
its  approval  and  consent.  There  followed 
a  period  of  intense  activity,  in  which 
Linlithgow  sought  to  induce  the  various 
political  groups  to  sink  their  differences 
and  to  join  his  Council  for  the  prosecution 
of  the  war.  In  a  series  of  statements 
between  1939  and  1943,  issued  with  the 
approval  of  the  home  Government,  he 
outlined  the  steps  by  which  India  might 
attain  full  dominion  status  after  the  war 


498 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hope 


under  an  agreed  constitution.  All  were  of 
no  avail.  In  1940  Congress  initiated  a 
civil  disobedience  movement  directed 
against  the  war  effort ;  the  Moslem  League 
advanced  the  doctrine  of  Pakistan,  destined 
ultimately  to  lead  to  the  division  of  India. 

The  rejection  in  1942  by  Congress, 
folljwed  in  varying  degrees  by  the  other 
parties,  of  far-reaching  constitutional  pro- 
posals brought  to  India  by  Sir  Stafford 
Cripps  [q.v.]  on  the  War  Cabinet's 
behalf  vividly  emphasized  how  intract- 
able was  the  constitutional  problem. 
Congress  opposition  to  the  war  effort 
thereafter  intensified  and  in  August  1942 
led  to  the  arrest  of  Gandhi  and  the 
Congress  Working  Committee  which  con- 
tinued under  restraint  until  near  the  end 
of  the  war. 

Linlithgow's  term  of  office  was  marked 
by  the  expansion,  during  the  war,  of  the 
governor-general's  Council  from  a  pre- 
dominantly official  and  European  body 
of  seven  into  a  body  of  fifteen,  of  whom, 
excluding  the  viceroy  and  the  commander- 
in-chief,  ten  were  Indians,  and  three 
Europeans,  only  two  of  them  oflftcials; 
and  by  an  enhancement  of  India's 
international  stature  consequent  on  her 
representation  at  the  War  Cabinet,  in 
Washington,  Chungking,  and  on  the 
Middle  East  Council  in  Cairo. 

Outside  the  constitutional  field, 
Linlithgow's  great  work  was  in  organizing 
India  to  play  her  full  part  in  the  war.  At 
the  outset  of  his  term,  in  1936,  he  had  urged 
on  the  defence  authorities  the  importance 
of  India's  north-eastern  frontier,  and  the 
case  for  an  overland  reinforcement  route 
to  Burma  in  emergency;  but  without 
carrying  conviction.  Equally  he  was 
throughout  insistent  on  the  importance 
of  the  area  west  of  the  McMahon  line. 
Major  and  successful  miUtary  operations 
on  the  north-west  frontier  (1936-8), 
engaging  the  largest  forces  ever  employed 
there,  helped  India  to  reach  a  position  of 
equilibrium  on  this  frontier  before  war 
broke  out. 

Although  Congress  refused  support  for 
the  war  effort,  the  rest  of  the  Hindu 
community,  the  Moslems,  the  Sikhs,  the 
other  minorities,  and  the  princes  gave 
generously  in  men,  money,  and  supplies. 
After  Dunkirk,  it  was  clear  that  India 
must  face  East  rather  than  West,  and 
must  co-operate  with  the  other  Common- 
wealth territories  east  of  Suez  in  meeting 
both  civil  and  military  needs.  Linlithgow 
established  and  rapidly  expanded  the 
India    department    of   supply,    and    his 


initiative  in  calling  a  regional  conference 
which  founded  the  Eastern  Group  Supply 
Council  made  a  major  contribution  to  the 
general  war  effort.  In  October  1941  a 
National  Defence  Council  was  set  up 
which  brought  together  British  India  and 
the  princes ;  by  the  end  of  his  term  over 
two  miUion  men  had  been  recruited  for 
the  army  alone.  His  close  and  cordial  rela- 
tions with  successive  commanders-in-chief 
greatly  contributed  to  the  smooth  working 
of  the  machine. 

It  was  an  outstanding  achievement  to 
maintain  pubhc  morale  from  1939  to  1943 
in  the  face  of  Congress  hostility  and  acute 
internal  political  difficulties;  of  an  un- 
broken series  of  military  reverses  approach- 
ing ever  nearer  to  the  sub-continent ;  and, 
in  the  concluding  months  of  his  term, 
of  a  disastrous  famine  in  Eastern  India. 
Linlithgow  carried  a  heavier  bvu-den  than 
any  of  his  predecessors.  The  viceroy  at  all 
times  represented  the  sovereign  and  was 
also  the  working  head  of  the  administra- 
tion. But  from  1937,  under  the  Act  of 
1985,  Linlithgow  in  addition  became 
personally  responsible  for  supervising  all 
provincial  governors  in  the  discharge  of 
their  special  responsibilities  and,  after  the 
Congress  ministries  resigned  in  1939,  for 
guiding  the  governors  in  running  their 
provinces  under  the  Act's  emergency 
provisions. 

In  domestic  and  foreign  affairs  alike, 
Linlithgow  was  faced  with  the  need  for 
some  decisions  of  unique  perplexity  and 
urgency.  The  former  included  his  refusal 
to  be  deflected  by  Gandhi's  fast  of 
February  1943 ;  the  latter,  the  question  of 
sending  troops  to  Iraq  in  1941,  in  which 
he  played  an  important  part.  Throughout, 
Linlithgow  showed  a  rocklike  stability, 
a  cool  judgement,  and  a  resolution, 
unshaken  by  adverse  fortunes,  the  tonic 
effect  of  which  on  all  who  came  in  touch 
with  him,  and  on  morale,  was  great, 
particularly  in  wartime.  He  handed  over 
to  his  successor  a  country  organized  for 
war  and  a  political  situation  which,  if 
uneasy,  was  under  control. 

In  the  civil  field  Linlithgow  took  a 
closer  interest  than  any  viceroy  since 
Lord  Curzon  [q.v.]  in  internal  administra- 
tion in  all  its  aspects :  among  innumerable 
other  issues,  rural  uplift,  the  problems 
of  the  district  officer,  archaeology,  the 
improvement  of  the  imperial  capital,  and 
publicity. 

On  his  retirement  in  October  1943 
Linlithgow  was  appointed  K.G.  In  1944 
he    accepted    the    chairmanship    of   the 


409 


Hope 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Midland  Bank  which  he  held  until  his 
death,  in  addition  to  other  important 
business  appointments.  A  sincere  Presby- 
terian, he  was  lord  high  commissioner  of 
the  Church  of  Scotland  in  1944  and  1945 ; 
chancellor  of  Edinburgh  University  from 
1944  until  his  death;  and  chairman 
(1944-52)  of  the  board  of  trustees  of  the 
National  Gallery  of  Scotland. 

Dignified  and  imposing,  Linlithgow  was 
an  impressive  figure  in  ceremonial  and 
public  appearances  as  viceroy.  In  private 
life,  and  in  personal  contacts  with  Indians 
and  Europeans,  he  was  interested,  easy, 
with  a  sense  of  humour  of  his  own,  always 
prepared  to  recognize  the  sincerity  of  those 
who  differed  from  him.  His  kindness, 
courtesy,  and  consideration,  his  capacity 
for  hard  work;  his  courage,  fairness, 
readiness  to  take  decisions,  and  skill  in 
handhng  difficult  political  situations, 
early  earned  and  kept  for  him  the  respect 
admiration,  and  lUdng  of  those  who 
came  in  close  touch  with  him.  A  keen 
sportsman,  a  bird  shot  of  unusual  skill, 
and  a  good  golfer,  he  was  a  prominent 
figure  in  Scottish  life,  had  been  vice- 
lieutenant  of  West  Lothian  from  1927  and 
lord-lieutenant  from  1929,  and  took  an 
active  interest  in  the  development  of  his 
extensive  estates  in  the  Lowlands.  He  died 
suddenly,  5  January  1952,  while  out 
shooting  at  Hopetoun. 

In  1911  LinUthgow  married  Doreen 
Maud,  daughter  of  Sir  Frederick  George 
Milner,  seventh  baronet.  They  had  twin 
sons  and  three  daughters.  The  elder  twin, 
Charles  William  Frederick  (born  1912), 
succeeded  to  the  family  honours.  The 
younger.  Lord  John  Hope,  became  a 
Conservative  member  of  Parliament  in 
1945,  was  minister  of  works  in  1959-62, 
and  was  created  Baron  Glendevon  in 
1964.  Linlithgow  was  survived  by  his 
widow  who  had  throughout  given  him 
unfailing  help.  She  received  the  C.I.  and 
the  Kaisar-i-Hind  gold  medal  and  will 
long  be  remembered  in  India  for  her 
interest  in  women's  education  and  more 
especially  for  her  campaign  against 
tuberculosis.  She  died  after  a  car  accident 
in  1965.  A  portrait  of  Linlithgow  by  Sir 
Oswald  Birley  hangs  in  the  former 
viceroy's  house,  now  Rashtrapati  Bhawan, 
in  New  Delhi ;  there  is  a  copy  at  Hopetoun. 

[V.  P.  Menon,  The  Transfer  of  Power  in 
India,  1957 ;  John  Connell,  Auchinleck,  1959 ; 
personal  knowledge.]    Gilbert  Laithwaite. 

HOPKINS,  Sir  RICHARD  VALENTINE 
NIND    (1880-1955),    civil   servant,    was 


born  in  Edgbaston  13  February  1880,  the 
son  of  Alfred  Nind  Hopkins,  a  business 
man,  and  his  wife,  Eliza  Mary  Castle. 
He  was  educated  at  King  Edward's 
School,  Birmingham,  and  at  Emmanuel 
College,  Cambridge,  where  he  was  a  scholar, 
played  rugby  and  cricket,  and  obtained  a 
first  class  in  part  i  of  the  classical  tripos 
(1901)  and  in  part  ii  of  the  history  tripos 
(1902).  At  all  times  it  was  the  classics 
which  supported  him,  for  he  considered 
that  they  had  summed  up  the  world  as  it 
was. 

He  entered  the  Inland  Revenue  Depart- 
ment as  a  first  division  clerk  in  1902  and 
in  that  relatively  restful  period  in  public 
finance  gave  his  leisure  to  the  Bermondsey 
Mission.  He  worked  on  Lloyd  George's 
land  values  duties  (which  were  repealed 
in  1920) ;  and  after  war  broke  out  in  1914 
he  and  Josiah  (later  Lord)  Stamp  [q.v.] 
carried  out  and  worked  the  excess  profits 
duty.  Hopkins  became  a  member  of  the 
Board  in  1916  and  chairman  in  1922, 
having  been  appointed  C.B.  in  1919  and 
K.C.B.  in  1920.  He  gave  valuable  evidence 
before  the  royal  commission  on  the 
income-tax  (1919-20) ;  was  chairman  of  a 
departmental  committee  asked  to  devise 
a  scheme  for  a  levy  on  war  wealth  which, 
in  the  event,  as  a  matter  of  policy,  was 
not  imposed ;  and  advised  on  methods  of 
dealing  with  the  avoidance  of  super-tax. 

In  1927  'Hoppy'  transferred  to  the 
Treasury  where  the  two  branches  of 
finance  and  supply  services  were  combined 
under  his  control.  He  became  second 
secretary  in  1932  and  permanent  secretary 
in  1942.  He  was  thus  the  chief  Treasury 
adviser  during  a  period  which  covered 
negotiations  on  reparations  and  war 
debts,  the  financial  crisis  of  the  early 
thirties,  rearmament,  and  finally  a  second 
war;  a  period  in  which  the  scale  of 
national  finances  and  their  attribution 
largely  changed.  The  chancellors  of  the 
Exchequer  whom  he  served,  although 
differing  widely  in  their  politics  and  their 
personalities,  each  in  their  individual  turn 
listened  to  Hopkins  who,  like  the  great 
Elizabethan  servants  of  the  State,  inclined 
to  his  master's  views,  but  held  him 
clearly  to  the  basic  national  traditions. 
His  work  at  the  Board  of  Inland  Revenue 
had  taught  him  that  taxation  was  not  a 
fantasy  but  a  practical  affair  and  he 
knew  the  two  great  secrets  of  his  old 
department :  what  could  be  managed,  and 
how  far  the  taxpayers  could  be  pushed. 
A  great  wealth  of  experience  combined 
with    his    marked    intellectual   capacity 


500 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Horder 


and  integrity  to  make  him  a  counsellor 
whose  opinion  was  rarely  set  aside. 
With  Montagu  (later  Lord)  Norman  [q.v.], 
the  governor  of  the  Bank  of  England, 
Hopkirfs  worked  closely  and  as  friends. 
Together  they  hammered  out  policies  on 
foreign  exchange  and  unemployment; 
and  it  became  a  feature  of  London  life  to 
see  the  governor's  car  outside  the  Treasury 
shortly  before  six  o'clock  each  evening. 

The  Treasury  in  these  years  of  financial 
difficulties  could  not  avoid  publicity  and 
Hopkins  as  an  official  witness  gained  a 
reputation  as  one  who  was  honest  and 
loyal  to  his  Government;  mild  and  clear 
in  his  statements.  When  he  saw  a 
chancellor  or  a  commission  able  to  swallow 
a  text  but  not  to  absorb  it,  he  would  go 
away,  by  himself,  and  seek  out'  the  full 
meaning  until  it  was  soluble.  He  came  most 
notably — and,  as  always,  reluctantly — 
before  the  public  eye  in  1931  while  giving 
evidence  before  the  royal  commission  on 
unemployment  and  insurance.  Rather 
less  publicity  had  attached  to  the  meetings 
of  the  Macmillan  committee  on  finance 
and  industry  in  1930  when  Hopkins 
became  locked  in  battle  with  J.  M. 
(later  Lord)  Keynes  [q.v.]  who  was 
challenging  the  precepts  of  Treasury 
finance.  The  issue  of  this  conflict  was 
characterized  by  Lord  Macmillan  [q.v.]  as 
*a  drawn  battle'.  Although  their  views 
were  at  this  time  widely  divergent, 
Keynes  was  wont  to  exclude  Hopkins 
from  his  comminations,  admitting  that  he 
did  really  understand  public  finance.  The 
respect  was  mutual  and  after  the  out- 
break of  war  Hopkins  provided  Keynes 
with  a  room  at  the  Treasury  where 
Keynes  would  exert  himself  to  ensure 
that  his  point  was  properly  put  so  that  he 
might  win  Hopkins  to  his  views. 

Neither  politician,  banker,  nor  econom- 
ist himself,  Hopkins  was  able  to  work  in 
harmony  with  all  three,  and  he  skilfully 
led  the  Treasury  through  eighteen  years 
of  changing  problems  and  personalities. 
In  his  last  three  years  he  did  not  manage 
the  Civil  Service  as  his  predecessors. 
Sir  Warren  Fisher  [q.v.]  and  Sir  Horace 
Wilson,  had  done.  In  the  atmosphere  of 
controversy  which  had  marked  their 
tenure  he  had  had  no  share.  Nor  was  it 
in  his  unassuming,  friendly  nature  to 
dictate.  Wise  in  his  subject,  humble  and 
kind  to  his  subordinates,  who  were  in 
fact  his  colleagues,  gifted  with  a  quiet 
humour,  he  created  a  great  warmth 
around  him  and  impressed  the  stamp  of 
his  own  personality  upon  the  office  of 


permanent  secretary.  He  retired  in  1945 
and  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council ;  he 
had  been  promoted  G.C.B.  in  1941. 

After  his  retirement  Hopkins  quietly 
indicated  that  he  would  like  to  serve  the 
Church  of  England  and  was  appointed  to 
the  central  board  of  finance  of  which,  in 
June  1947,  he  became  chairman.  He  was 
seen  going  with  delight  to  its  conferences, 
and  said :  'I  have  guided  or  tried  to  guide 
eighteen  budgets  in  my  time,  but  this 
afternoon  I  shall  introduce  my  own 
budget.'  He  was  also  a  crown  member  of 
the  court  of  the  university  of  London,  a 
member  of  the  Port  of  London  Authority, 
of  the  Imperial  War  Graves  Commission, 
and  of  a  number  of  government  commit- 
tees, and  a  director  of  several  companies. 
He  was  elected  an  honorary  fellow  of 
Emmanuel  College,  Cambridge,  in  1946 
and  was  Alfred  Marshall  lecturer  in 
1946-7. 

Hopkins  married  in  1923  Lucy  Davis, 
M.B.,  Ch.B.  (died  1960),  daughter  of  the 
late  Francis  Cripps;  they  had  one  son. 
Hopkins  died  in  London  30  March  1955. 

[Public  Administration,  vol.  xxxiv.  Summer 
1956 ;  R.  F.  Harrod,  Tfie  Life  of  J.  M.  Keynes, 
1951 ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Wilfrid  Eady. 

HORDER,  THOMAS  JEEVES,  first 
Baron  Horder  (1871-1955),  physician, 
was  born  7  January  1871,  in  Shaftesbury, 
Dorset,  the  fourth  and  youngest  child 
of  Albert  Horder,  a  successful  draper  and 
business  man  who  had  married  one  of 
his  own  assistants,  Ellen  Jeeves.  Two 
years  after  his  birth  the  family  moved  to 
Swindon  where  he  was  educated  at  the 
high  school  and  quickly  showed  himself 
an  exceptional  pupil.  At  the  age  of  fifteen 
he  was  thought  to  have  chest  trouble  and 
spent  two  years  working  on  his  uncles' 
farms  among  the  Wiltshire  downs. 
Returning  home,  he  passed  the  matricu- 
lation examination  of  London  University. 
He  had  still  no  idea  what  he  wanted  to  do 
in  life,  except  that  he  did  not  wish  to 
enter  the- drapery  business,  and  it  was  the 
family  doctor  who  suggested  medicine. 

Horder  took  a  correspondence  course 
in  biology  with  a  tutorial  college  in  Red 
Lion  Square  where  his  papers  were 
corrected  by  H.  G.  Wells  [q.v.],  who  is 
said  to  have  noted  on  them  that  Horder 
was  not  cut  out  for  research.  Wells  was 
later  to  be  one  of  his  patients.  In  1891 
Horder  obtained  an  entrance  scholar- 
ship to  St.  Bartholomew's  Hospital,  and 
he  was  awarded  the  junior  and  senior 


501 


Horder 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


scholarships  in  anatomy  and  physiology 
in  1892  and  1893.  He  graduated  B.Sc., 
London,  in  1893  with  second  class  honours 
in  physiology  and  qualified  in  medicine 
in  1896.  He  obtained  the  degree  of  M.B., 
B.S.  (London)  with  first  class  honours  and 
gold  medals  in  medicine,  midwifery,  and 
forensic  medicine  in  1898  and  the  M.D. 
in  1899.  He  became  a  member  of  the  Royal 
College  of  Physicians  of  London  in  1899 
and  a  fellow  in  1906. 

His  resident  hospital  experience  began 
with  his  appointment  as  a  house-physician 
to  Samuel  Gee  [q.v.]  at  St.  Bartholomew's 
Hospital.  Gee  was  a  gifted  physician 
whose  teaching  was  founded  on  observa- 
tion and  deduction  at  the  bedside  and 
regular  attendance  at  the  post-mortem 
room.  He  made  a  great  impression  on 
Horder  who  published  a  collection  of 
*Clinical  Aphorisms  from  Dr.  Gee's  Wards 
(1895-6)'  in  St.  Bartholomew's  Hospital 
Reports  in  1896.  Up  to  this  time  Horder 
had  been  uncertain  whether  his  future 
lay  in  biology,  physiology,  or  medicine, 
and  it  was  from  Gee  that  he  learned  the 
fascination  of  the  art  of  medical  diagnosis 
which  was  to  be  the  mainspring  of  his 
career.  Horder  subsequently  held  a 
number  of  junior  appointments  at 
St.  Bartholomew's  Hospital  and  the 
Hospital  for  Sick  Children,  Great  Ormond 
Street;  was  demonstrator  of  practical 
pathology  at  Bart's  in  1903  and  medical 
registrar  and  demonstrator  of  morbid 
anatomy  in  1904-11 ;  he  also  became  a 
member  of  the  staff  of  the  Royal  Northern 
Hospital. 

In  later  life  he  said  that  the  three  great 
advances  of  medicine  in  his  lifetime  were 
the  integration  of  morbid  anatomy  with 
clinical  medicine,  the  development  of 
laboratory  methods  bringing  about  the 
birth  of  clinical  pathology,  and  the  arrival 
of  X-rays.  The  combination  of  observation 
at  the  bedside  with  special  investigations 
in  the  laboratory  was  the  foundation  of 
Horder's  success.  When  accused  of  for- 
saking the  bench  for  the  bedside,  he 
replied :  'No,  I  took  the  bench  to  the  bed- 
side.' This  was  true,  and  people  soon  began 
to  talk  about  Horder's  box,  with  its 
syringes  and  needles  for  venous  and 
lumbar  puncture,  its  tubes  of  broth  and 
agar  for  preparing  cultures  at  the  bedside, 
its  stains,  cover-glasses,  and  folding 
microscope.  In  much  of  his  work  he  was 
closely  associated  with  Mervyn  Gordon 
[q.v.]  who  was  a  brilliant  pathologist  and 
scientist ;  and  while  Horder  himself  never 
became  a  research  worker,  they  together 


greatly  advanced  knowledge  of  cerebro- 
spinal fever,  acute  rheumatism,  and 
infective  endocarditis. 

Horder  began  making  a  name  for  himself 
in  the  early  years  of  the  twentieth  century 
and  while  stiU  a  registrar  at  Bart's  he  was 
able  to  afford  a  Rolls-Royce  which  he 
discreetly  parked  a  few  streets  away  from 
the  hospital.  His  success  was  not  alto- 
gether palatable  to  some  of  his  senior 
colleagues  who  did  not  like  his  background 
or  his  new  outlook  on  medicine  and  at 
times  writhed  under  his  criticism.  His 
chance  came  when  he  was  called  in  consul- 
tation to  see  King  Edward  VII  and  by  a 
brilliant  bit  of  observation  was  able  to 
make  the  correct  diagnosis.  'They  can 
hardly  fail  to  take  me  now',  he  said  to  a 
friend.  In  1912  he  was  appointed  assistant 
physician  to  St.  Bartholomew's  Hospital. 
He  became  a  senior  physician  in  1921  and 
retired  under  the  age  limit  in  1936.  He 
was  made  honorary  consultant  physician 
to  the  Ministry  of  Pensions  (1939)  and 
medical  adviser  to  London  Transport 
(1940-55).  He  was  the  outstanding  clini- 
cian of  his  time  and  one  of  the  personalities 
in  medicine  best  known  to  the  British 
public.  His  patients  included  King  George 
V,  King  George  VI,  Queen  Elizabeth  II, 
Bonar  Law,  and  Ramsay  MacDonald. 

Horder  was  short  and  compact  in  build 
and  his  chief  qualities  have  been  described 
as  sagacity,  audacity,  and  humanity. 
The  impression  he  gave  in  consultation  or 
in  committee  was  of  organized  common 
sense.  He  had  the  faculty  of  seeing  the 
relevant  facts  in  a  clinical  situation, 
arranging  them  in  perspective,  and 
comparing  them  with  the  previous  data 
in  his  well-stored  memory  so  as  to  arrive 
at  the  correct  diagnosis.  His  help  was  much 
sought  in  committee  work  and  he  was 
chairman  of  the  Ministry  of  Health 
advisory  committee  (1935-9),  chairman 
of  the  committee  on  the  use  of  public  air- 
raid shelters  (1940),  and  medical  adviser 
to  Lord  Woolton  at  the  Ministry  of  Food 
(1941).  He  was  chairman  of  the  scientific 
advisory  committee  of  the  British  Empire 
Cancer  Campaign  for  approximately 
thirty  years  and  chairman  of  its  grand 
council  (1950-55).  He  was  chairman  of  the 
Empire  Rheumatism  Council  from  its 
beginning  in  1936  until  1953.  Others  of 
his  nimierous  interests  were  the  Noise 
Abatement  League,  the  Family  Planning 
Association,  the  Cremation  Society,  and 
the  National  Book  League. 

In  his  teaching  he  emphasized  observa- 
tion, precision,  and  logic.  He  used  to  say 


502 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hore-Belisha 


that  the  best  book  to  read  in  medicine 
was  the  Primer  of  Logic  by  W.  S.  Jevons 
[q.v.].  Most  of  what  he  wrote  was  the 
current  coin  of  medical  literature  but 
his  book  Fifty  Years  of  Medicine  (1953), 
which  was  an  expanded  version  of  his 
Harben  lectures  delivered  in  1952,  may 
still  be  read  with  pleasure,  as  may  his  oc- 
casional addresses,  Health  and  a  Day  ( 1 937). 
Horder  was  a  rationalist  who  believed  in 
the  possibility  of  solving  human  problems 
by  science,  education,  and  reform  and  was 
not  afraid  to  do  battle  for  his  beliefs. 
Characteristically,  the  subject  he  chose  for 
his  Conway  memorial  lecture  in  1938  was 
'Obscurantism'.  He  was  an  individualist 
who  disliked  many  of  the  features  of  the 
National  Health  Service  and  he  organized 
the  Fellowship  for  Freedom  in  Medicine, 
becoming  its  first  chairman  in  1948.  His 
main  interests  outside  medicine  and 
public  life  were  literature  and  gardening. 
Horder  was  knighted  in  1918,  created  a 
baronet  in  1923,  and  a  baron  in  1933.  He 
was  appointed  K.C.V.O.  in  1925  and 
G.C.V.O.  in  1938;  among  his  honorary 
degrees  were  the  D.C.L.  of  Durham  and 
the  M.D.  of  Melbourne  and  Adelaide.  He 
married  in  1902  Geraldine  Rose  (died 
1954),  only  daughter  of  Arthur  Doggett, 
of  Newnham  Manor,  Baldock,  Hert- 
fordshire. They  had  two  daughters  and 
one  son,  Thomas  Mervyn  (born  1910), 
who  succeeded  him  when  he  died  suddenly 
at  Ashford  Chase,  Petersfield,  13  August 
1955,  having  been  blessed  with  abundant 
health  and  vitality  to  the  end.  A  portrait 
by  Sir  William  Nicholson  hangs  in  the 
Great  Hall  at  St.  Bartholomew's  Hospital 
and  there  is  a  bust  by  Olaff  de  Wet  in  the 
Royal  College  of  Physicians,  London.  A 
bust  by  Donald  Gilbert  was  exhibited  at 
the  Royal  Academy  in  1941  and  a  painting 
by  Bernard  Adams  at  the  Royal  Society 
of  Portrait  Painters  in  1942. 

[The  Times,  15  August  1955 ;  British  Medi- 
cal Journal  and  Lancet,  20  August  1955; 
Mervyn  Horder,  The  Little  Genius,  1966; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

L.  J.  Witts. 

HORE-BELISHA,  (ISAAC)  LESLIE, 
Baron  Hore-Belisha  (1893-1957), 
politician,  was  born  in  London  7 
September  1893,  the  only  son  of  Jacob 
Isaac  Belisha,  an  insurance  company 
manager,  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth  Miriam, 
daughter  of  John  Leslie  Miers.  His 
father's  family  were  Sephardic  Jews  who 
were  driven  out  of  Spain  under  the 
Inquisition    and    eventually    settled    in 


Manchester  where  they  built  up  a  cotton 
import  firm.  His  grandfather,  David 
Belisha,  was  one  of  the  leading  backers  of 
the  Ship  Canal  project,  using  up  most  of 
his  fortune  before  it  was  finally  carried 
through. 

His  father  died  when  Hore-Belisha  was 
less  than  a  year  old,  and  in  1912  his  mother 
married  (Sir)  (Charles  Eraser)  Adair  Hore 
who  later  became  permanent  secretary 
to  the  Ministry  of  Pensions.  At  his  mother's 
desire  he  coupled  his  stepfather's  surname 
to  his  own.  She  had  devoted  her  life  to  him 
(long  refusing  to  remarry  for  that  reason) 
and  continued  to  have  a  profound 
influence  on  him  throughout  his  career. 
She  made  sacrifices  in  order  to  send  him 
to  Clifton  College,  for  short  periods  to  the 
Sorbonne  and  Heidelberg,  and  then  to 
St.  John's  College,  Oxford.  At  CUfton  he 
made  a  mark  in  school  debates,  wrote 
vivid  essays  and  also  political  verse  which 
gained  acceptance  by  the  London  press, 
attended  the  law  courts  in  the  holidays, 
and  dreamed  of  becoming  another  Disraeli. 
At  Oxford  he  quickly  distinguished  him- 
self in  Union  debates,  speaking  on  the 
Liberal  side  and  as  a  Radical  supporter  of 
Lloyd  George's  social  reforms.  At  the  end 
of  his  first  year  war  broke  out.  Enlisting  in 
the  Public  Schools  battalion  of  the  Royal 
Fusiliers  he  soon  gained  a  commission,  in 
the  Army  Service  Corps,  and  went  to 
France  early  in  November  1914,  being 
attached  to  an  infantry  brigade  in  the 
5th  division.  The  skill  and  energy  which  he 
showed  in  developing  local  sources  of 
supply  led  a  year  later  to  his  appointment 
to  the  staff  of  the  Third  Army  for  that 
purpose  and  subsequently,  with  the  rank 
of  major,  to  army  headquarters  in 
Salonika.  Early  in  1918  he  was  invalided 
home  with  malaria. 

Returning  to  Oxford  he  became  a 
prominent  figure  and  the  first  post-war 
president  of  the  Union.  On  going  down  he 
read  law,  gaining  the  means  to  do  so  by  a 
brilliantly  quick  success  in  journalism. 
Besides  being  a  leader-writer  on  the 
Daily  Express^  he  became  a  social  and 
political  diarist  on  the  Sunday  Express^ 
starting  'The  Londoner's  Log'  and  then, 
under  the  signature  'Cross-Bencher',  the 
commentary  on  'Politics  and  Politicians'. 
He  also  wrote  for  the  Evening  Standard  and 
the  Weekly  Review.  Having  made  enough 
money  for  his  purpose,  he  gave  up 
journalism  for  a  while  to  concentrate  on 
his  law  studies.  He  was  called  to  the  bar 
by  the  Inner  Temple  in  1923.  In  the 
meantime    he     had    been    adopted    as 


Hore-Belisha 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Liberal  candidate  for  the  Devonport 
division  of  Plymouth  and  in  the  general 
election  in  the  autumn  of  1922  had  made 
a  promisingly  strong  challenge  to  the 
Conservative  member.  In  1923  he  won 
the  seat,  which  he  held  until  1945.  To  meet 
his  expenses  he  found  it  necessary  to  return 
to  journalism  and  also,  with  less  successful 
results,  to  accept  directorships  in  sundry 
companies.  He  had  too  little  time  to 
study  their  affairs  and  was  only  interested 
in  money  as  a  means  to  greater  ends. 
Their  failure  was  remembered  against 
him  later  in  his  career. 

In  contrast,  he  made  an  intensive  study 
of  the  many  aspects  of  national  life  which 
came  under  discussion  in  Parliament,  and 
frequently  took  a  different  line  from  the 
majority  of  his  party.  In  particular  he 
argued  against  cuts  in  social  and  defence 
expenditure.  When  the  general  election  of 
1924  swept  away  most  of  the  Liberal 
Party,  he  was  the  only  member  in  the 
south  of  England  who  survived,  and  in 
1929  he  was  returned  by  a  much  increased 
margin.  During  these  years  he  advocated 
bold  measures  of  reform,  particularly  in  the 
relief  of  unemployment.  He  criticized  the 
second  Labour  Government  for  doing 
too  little  rather  than  too  much  and  his 
own  leaders  for  giving  it  continued 
support.  At  a  party  conference  in  the 
spring  of  1931  he  led  an  unsuccessful  revolt 
and  when  the  financial  crisis  came  he 
quickly  took  the  lead  in  organizing  a  new 
Liberal  National  Party  to  support  the 
'national'  Government  formed  by  Ramsay 
MacDonald  and  Baldwin.  After  the  general 
election,  in  which  he  trebled  his  majority, 
Hore-Belisha  was  made  parliamentary 
secretary  to  the  Board  of  Trade;  he 
succeeded  so  well  that  in  1932  he  was 
appointed  financial  secretary  to  the 
Treasury  at  the  special  request  of  Neville 
Chamberlain  who  had  found  him  of  great 
help  in  working  out  tariff  arrangements 
and  now  wanted  his  closer  co-operation 
in  steering  the  Ottawa  agreements  through 
the  Commons.  Hore-Belisha's  grasp  of 
the  matter  and  his  skiU  in  debate  and 
at  subsequent  international  conferences 
rapidly  increased  his  reputation  for 
successfully  tackling  tough  problems. 

In  1934  when  the  road  traffic  bill  had 
passed  its  third  reading  Hore-Belisha 
moved  to  the  Ministry  of  Transport 
where  he  developed  its  provisions  in 
fresh  and  impressive  ways  towards 
checking  the  rising  toll  of  accidents.  He 
extended  the  use  of  pedestrian  crossings 
and   introduced   the   illuminated   amber 


globes  mounted  on  black  and  white  posts 
which  were  promptly  christened  *Belisha 
beacons'.  He  put  into  force  the  provision 
for  driving  tests  for  new  motorists;  a 
revised  highway  code  was  brought  out; 
and  by  these  and  other  measures,  and  not 
least  by  the  publicity  which  they  received, 
he  brought  about  a  notable  reduction  in 
accidents.  Looking  to  the  future  he 
sponsored  extensive  plans  of  new  arterial 
road  building,  and  as  a  preliminary 
transferred  the  care  of  the  existing 
trunk  roads  from  the  county  councils  to 
the  State.  In  1935  he  was  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council  and  in  1936  raised  to 
cabinet  rank.  In  May  1937  Chamberlain, 
on  becoming  prime  minister,  transferred 
him  to  the  War  Office  'on  the  express 
ground',  says  his  biographer,  'that  he 
wished  to  see  "drastic  changes",  writing 
"the  obstinacy  of  some  of  the  Army 
heads  in  sticking  to  obsolete  methods  is 
incredible" '. 

Within  a  few  months  Hore-Belisha 
embarked  on  an  extensive  programme  of 
reforms.  He  stimulated  recruiting  by 
increasing  rates  of  pay  and  allowances, 
raising  the  standard  of  catering,  modern- 
izing barracks  and  building  better  ones, 
abolishing  outworn  restrictions  upon  the 
soldiers'  freedom  off  duty,  shortening 
the  extent  of  service  abroad,  and  provid- 
ing more  opportunity  of  training  for  a 
civilian  trade.  For  officers  up  to  the  rank 
of  major  inclusive  a  time-scale  was 
introduced  which  brought  quicker  promo- 
tion ;  the  half -pay  system  was  abolished ; 
and  the  age  limit  of  retirement  for 
generals  and  colonels  lowered.  The  cadet 
colleges  were  amalgamated,  new  tactical 
schools  and  courses  provided,  and  facili- 
ties for  staff  training  increased.  Other 
reforms  included  the  simplification  of 
infantry  drill,  the  introduction  of  battle- 
dress,  and  the  fusion  of  the  Cavalry  and 
Royal  Tank  Corps  in  the  Royal  Armoured 
Corps.  Much  was  done  also  to  raise  the 
status  and  standard  of  the  Territorial 
Army. 

At  the  same  time  Hore-Belisha  sought 
to  hasten  the  re-equipment  and  mechan- 
ization of  the  army  and  its  tactical 
reorganization,  and  to  develop  its  capacity 
for  defence  against  air  attack.  The  roles  of 
the  army  were  for  the  first  time  defined 
in  order  of  priority,  and  the  principle 
was  adopted  of  regional  strategic  reserves 
in  the  Middle  and  Far  East.  Both  the 
Middle  East  force  and  the  larger  strategic 
reserve  maintained  at  home  for  the 
expeditionary  force  were  intended  to  be 


504 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hore-Belisha 


primarily  of  a  mobile  armoured  type 
likely  to  be  more  effective  than  infantry  in 
a  desert  campaign  and  a  more  potent  aid 
to  European  allies.  These  measures  were 
not  carried  out  as  fast  as  Hore-Belisha 
desired  or  the  situation  demanded.  After 
six  months  in  office  he  sought,  with 
Chamberlain's  backing,  to  quicken  the 
pace  by  appointing  younger  generals  to 
the  Army  Council.  The  new  men  proved 
helpful  in  carrying  out  the  lesser  reforms 
which  most  soldiers  had  long  desired ;  but 
they  had  been  trained  in  the  old  school 
and  when  Hore-Belisha  pressed  measures 
of  wider  scope  he  soon  found  their 
hesitant  acquiescence  as  frustrating  as  the 
direct  resistance  of  their  predecessors. 
Friction  developed  between  him  and  his 
chosen  official  advisers  who  in  their 
resentment  at  being  pressed  took  little 
account  of  the  frequent  concessions  to 
their  point  of  view  which  he  made, 
sometimes  to  the  impairment  of  his 
plans.  Nor  were  they  mollified  by  his 
bigger  change  of  course  in  April  1939 
when  he  urged  the  Cabinet  to  introduce 
conscription  in  order  to  provide,  as  his 
official  advisers  and  the  French  desired,  a 
large  army  on  the  1914f-18  lines  instead 
of  the  mechanized  expeditionary  force 
of  high  quality  but  smaller  scale  which 
had  originally  been  envisaged. 

Appreciation  of  his  concessions  was 
submerged  by  accumulated  irritation 
over  the  way  he  prodded  the  generals, 
summoned  them  to  meetings  at  short 
notice  and  inconvenient  times,  kept  them 
waiting,  expected  them  to  be  ready  with 
detailed  information  and  advice,  and 
sometimes  took  quick  decisions  or  made 
public  announcements  which  committed 
them  to  steps  for  which  they  were  not 
prepared.  Such  was  the  substance  of  their 
complaints,  aggravated  by  dislike  of 
forms  of  appeal  to  the  public  which 
they  considered  showmanship  and  self- 
advertisement.  The  habit  of  deference  to 
superior  authority  prevented  them  from 
making  their  sentiments  plain  to  Hore- 
Belisha,  but  their  complaints  were  expres- 
sed very  freely  to  influential  circles 
outside  the  War  Office  and  received  a 
ready  hearing  among  his  political  critics 
and  rivals.  Like  most  vivid  personalities 
Hore-Belisha  could  arouse  strong  feelings. 

By  the  time  war  came  Lord  Gort  [q.v.], 
Hore-Belisha' s  own  choice  as  chief  of  the 
imperial  general  staff,  had  reached  a 
state  of  acute  irritation  which  was  but 
temporarily  allayed  when  he  went  to 
France    as    commander-in-chief    of    the 


Expeditionary  Force.  Even  during  the 
first  month  of  war  moves  were  being 
made  for  the  ejection  of  the  war  minister, 
and  the  conflict  was  brought  nearer  the 
surface  in  November  by  Gort's  explosive 
reaction  to  some  critical  remarks  of 
Hore-Belisha's  about  the  slow  progress  of 
the  defences  in  France,  following  similar 
but  sharper  criticisms  which  the  Cabinet 
had  received  from  two  war-experienced 
dominion  ministers,  R.  G.  (later  Lord) 
Casey  of  Australia  and  Deneys  Reitz 
[q.v.]  of  South  Africa,  who  had  visited 
the  front.  Gort's  complaints  were  taken 
up  with  the  prime  minister  by  the  King 
and  other  very  influential  persons  at 
home,  while  the  French  commander-in- 
chief  signified  his  solidarity  with  Gort 
over  the  defences.  Chamberlain  asked 
Hore-Belisha  whether  he  wished  to  change 
the  commander-in  chief  or  the  chief  of 
the  imperial  general  staff.  Hore-Belisha, 
however,  did  not  wish  to  take  advantage 
of  this  opportunity  and  hoped  that 
relations  would  improve.  The  prime 
minister  himself  went  to  France  in  an 
attempt  to  allay  friction;  but  the  storm 
did  not  abate  and  eventually,  in  the 
interest  of  harmony,  he  reluctantly 
decided  to  transfer  Hore-Belisha.  On  4 
January  1940,  telling  him  that  'there 
existed  a  strong  prejudice  against  him  for 
which  I  could  not  hold  him  altogether 
blameless'.  Chamberlain  offered  him  the 
Board  of  Trade.  Hore-Belisha  preferred 
to  resign,  and  in  a  letter  to  Chamberlain 
that  evening  wrote :  *you  have  been  cate- 
gorically assured  that  there  is  no  reason 
whatever  for  anxiety  about  a  German 
break-through.  Yet  my  visits  to  France 
have  convinced  me  that  unless  we  utilize 
the  time  that  is  still  available  to  us  with 
far  more  vision  and  energy,  the  Germans 
will  attack  us  on  our  weak  spot  somewhere 
in  the  gap  between  the  Maginot  Line  and 
the  sea.'  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill  records 
in  his  memoirs  that  Hore-Belisha  had  on 
several  occasions  drawn  the  attention  of 
the  Cabinet  to  the  weakness  of  the 
Ardennes  sector  south  of  the  British 
line  where  the  Germans  in  fact  pierced 
the  front  four  months  later.  Hore-Belisha 
ended  '.  .  .  if  I  explain,  as  is  usual  with 
retiring  Ministers,  the  reason  for  my 
departure,  I  shall  be  giving  to  the  enemy 
information  about  the  weakness  of  our 
defences  and,  if  I  do  not,  I  lay  the  reason 
open  to  conjecture  and  perhaps  to  mis- 
representation .  .  .  this  wiU  be  the  real 
measure  of  the  sacrifice  which  I  am  called 
on  to  make.?^^^''^  ii.:r,u  jmi  l^m^J^  :,mf 


505 


Hore-Belisha 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


The  news  of  his  resignation  came  as  a 
shock  to  the  nation  and  it  became  very 
evident  that  most  of  the  press  and  many 
of  the  pubUc  were  strongly  in  favour  of 
Hore-Belisha  who  was  considered  to  have 
been  one  of  the  ablest  members  of 
Chamberlain's  administration;  but  by 
abstaining  from  explanation  he  gave 
them  no  grounds  upon  which  to  support 
him.  He  resigned  in  March  from  the 
chairmanship  of  the  National  Liberal 
parUamentary  party  which  he  had  held 
since  its  inception,  and  it  was  not  until 
1945  that  he  returned  to  office,  when 
Churchill  included  him  in  his  'caretaker' 
Government  as  minister  of  national 
insurance,  in  an  effort  to  provide  an 
alternative  to  the  Labour  Party's  social 
poUcy.  But  Labour  won  the  election 
and  Hore-Belisha  himself  lost  his  seat. 
He  was  then  persuaded  to  join  the 
Conservative  Party,  but  nothing  was 
done  to  provide  him  with  a  likely  seat, 
and  although  he  fought  Coventry  South  in 
1950  he  was  not  successful.  The  prolonged 
absence  from  the  House  was  fatal  to  his 
political  prospects.  In  1954  he  accepted  a 
peerage,  and  began  to  exert  a  renewed 
influence  by  his  speeches  in  the  House 
of  Lords  and  chairmanship  of  committees, 
but  this  was  cut  short  by  his  sudden 
death  at  Reims,  16  February  1957,  when 
leading  a  parliamentary  delegation  on  a 
visit  to  France. 

Hore-Belisha' s  career  reached  its  peak 
when  he  was  only  forty-three  and  virtually 
ended  when  he  was  forty-six.  Its  untimely 
end  was  due  more  to  'natural  causes'  than 
to  the  faults  attributed  to  him.  Urgent 
action  was  essential  in  1937  in  view  of  the 
impending  danger  of  war.  But  it  was 
natural  that  each  particular  change  was 
repugnant  to  some  section  of  miUtary 
opinion,  even  though  welcome  to  most, 
and  the  cumulative  effect  tended  to 
produce  an  atmosphere  of  hostility.  It 
was  increased  by  the  pace  at  which  the 
changes  had  to  be  pushed  through. 
Chamberlain  recorded  that  he  sent  him 
to  the  War  Office  because  he  had  'very 
exceptional  quaUties  of  courage,  imagina- 
tion, and  drive  ...  he  has  done  more  for 
the  Army  than  anyone  since  Haldane'. 
But  he  added :  'Unfortunately,  he  has  the 
defects  of  his  qualities — ^partly  from  his 
impatience  and  eagerness,  partly  from  a 
self-centredness  which  makes  him  careless 
of  other  people's  feelings.'  Anyone  who 
worked  closely  with  Hore-Belisha  often 
felt  exasperation,  but  there  were  those 
who  found  that  with  deepening  associa- 


tion it  gave  way  to  a  growing  blend  of 
admiration  and  affection.  The  lack  of 
patience  and  understanding  shown  by 
Gort  and  his  fellows  was  the  more 
regrettable  since  it  is  clear  that  more 
overdue  and  beneficial  reforms  were 
achieved  in  Hore-Belisha's  years  of  office 
than  in  the  previous  twenty  years. 

Hore-Belisha  married  in  1944  Cynthia, 
daughter  of  the  late  Gilbert  Elliot,  of 
Hull  Place,  Sholden,  Kent.  There  were  no 
children  and  the  peerage  became  extinct. 

A  portrait  by  Clarence  White  was 
exhibited  at  the  Royal  Academy  in  1936. 

[Keith  Feiling,  The  Life  of  Neville  Chamber- 
lain, 1946 ;  Sir  Francis  de  Guingand,  Operation 
Victory,  1947 ;  Sir  John  Kennedy,  The 
Business  of  War,  ed.  Bernard  Fergusson, 
1957 ;  John  W.  Wheeler-Bennett,  King  George 
VI,  1958 ;  R.  J.  Minney,  The  Private  Papers  of 
Hore-Belisha,  1960 ;  private  information ;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  B.  H.  Liddell  Hart. 

HORE-RUTHVEN,  ALEXANDER 
GORE  ARKWRIGHT,  first  Earl 
OF  GowRiE  (1872-1955),  soldier  and 
governor-general  of  Australia,  was  born 
at  Windsor  6  July  1872,  the  second  son 
of  Walter  James  Hore-Ruthven,  eighth 
Baron  Ruthven  in  the  peerage  of  Scotland 
and  later  first  baron  in  the  peerage  of  the 
United  Kingdom,  and  his  wife.  Lady 
Caroline  Annesley  Gore,  daughter  of  the 
fourth  Earl  of  Arran.  After  education 
at  Eton  he  joined  the  militia  and  served 
in  the  Nile  expeditions  of  1898  and  1899, 
winning  the  V.C.  for  rescuing  a  wounded 
officer  in  the  face  of  fire  from  advancing 
dervishes.  He  was  commissioned  in  the 
Cameron  Highlanders  in  1899  but  until 
1903  was  employed  with  the  Egyptian 
Army.  In  1903-4  he  took  part  in  operations 
in  Somaliland  and  from  1905  to  1908  he 
was  military  secretary  and  aide-de-camp 
to  Lord  Dudley  [q.v.]  and  his  successor 
as  lord-lieutenant  of  Ireland.  In  1908  he 
married  Zara  Eileen,  daughter  of  John 
PoUok,  of  Lismany,  county  Galway,  and 
achieved  his  substantive  captaincy  in 
the  1st  (King's)  Dragoon  Guards.  His 
friendship  with  Dudley  resulted  in  the 
latter's  choosing  him  for  his  military 
secretary,  and  incidentally  providing  a 
honeymoon  journey,  when  Dudley  was 
appointed  governor-general  of  the  Com- 
monwealth of  Australia.  He  held  the  jpost 
until  1910  and  also  served  on  the  staff  of 
Lord  Kitchener  [q.v.]  during  his  investiga- 
tion of  Australian  defences  in  1909-10. 

During  the  war  Hore-Ruthven  served 
as     a     brigade-major    in     France;     was 


506 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hore-Ruthven 


G.S.O.  2  in  the  Welsh  Guards  at  GalHpoli 
in  1915  and  was  severely  wounded; 
became  G.S.O.  1  to  the  62nd  division, 
1916-17,  and  to  the  Guards'  division, 
September-December  1917 ;  was  brigadier- 
general  on  the  general  staff  of  the  7th 
Army  Corps  until  July  1918  when  he  took 
command  of  an  infantry  brigade.  He  was 
appointed  to  the  D.S.O.,  with  bar,  C.B. 
and  C.M.G.,  and  was  five  times  mentioned 
in  dispatches.  He  commanded  the  Welsh 
Guards  from  1920  to  1924  and  the  1st 
Infantry  brigade  at  Aldershot  from  1924 
to  1928. 

In  1928  he  was  appointed  K.C.M.G., 
retired  from  the  army,  and  assumed 
office  as  governor  of  South  Australia. 
The  state  was  then  prospering  under  the 
Conservative  leadership  of  (Sir)  R.  L. 
Butler,  but  almost  immediately  entered 
the  world  depression,  and  at  a  general 
election  in  1930  a  Labour  Party  govern- 
ment was  returned  under  L.  L.  Hill. 
The  Labour  Party  soon  split  in  South 
Australia,  as  in  most  parts  of  Australia, 
on  questions  of  depression  policy,  but 
Hill  struggled  on  as  premier,  supported 
largely  by  the  Opposition,  until  1933  when 
a  general  election  again  returned  Butler 
to  power.  Through  these  anxious  times  the 
governor  was  drawn  into  some  contro- 
versy and  expressed  views  more  congenial 
to  the  political  centre  and  Right  than  to 
the  socialist  Left,  which  gave  additional 
force  to  current  demands  on  the  Left 
for  the  abolition  of  the  governorship. 
Probably  if  the  Left  had  won  in  1933  the 
governor's  position  would  have  become 
impossible.  However,  he  had  throughout 
excellent  personal  relations  with  the 
parliamentary  Labour  Party  leaders  as 
well  as  with  the  non-Labour  parliamen- 
tarians, and  the  popularity  of  both  himself 
and  his  wife  steadily  increased  because 
of  their  active  work  on  behalf  of  the  poor 
and  unemployed.  Hence  the  extension  of 
his  term  of  office  to  1934  was  generally 
applauded,  and  on  his  departure  an 
Adelaide  crowd  estimated  at  100,000 
bade  him  farewell. 

Almost  immediately  he  accepted  the 
governorship  of  New  South  Wales,  whose 
political  history  through  the  depression 
years  had  been  even  more  violent  than 
that  of  South  Australia.  The  appointment 
indicated  a  confidence  that  he  could  now 
handle  with  the  requisite  tact  and  firmness 
any  Australian  political  situation.  How- 
ever, no  such  need  arose,  because  after 
holding  the  Sydney  post  from  21  February 
1935  until  22  January  1936,  a  period  of 


political  calm,  he  was  appointed  governor- 
general  at  the  urgent  request  of  the 
prime  minister,  J.  A.  Lyons  [q.v.],  and 
took  up  a  residence  in  Canberra  which 
lasted  until  1944.  He  had  been  ad- 
vanced to  G.C.M.G.  and  created  a 
baron  (as  Lord  Gowrie)  in  1935  and  was 
sworn  of  the  Privy  Council  in  1937.  Five 
prime  ministers  served  under  him,  and 
he  was  concerned  with  the  abdication 
problems  in  1936,  the  war  administration 
from  1939,  the  political  instability  of  the 
Menzies  and  Fadden  governments  in  1941, 
the  formation  of  the  Curtin  Labour  Party 
administration  in  that  year,  and  the 
imminent  peril  of  Japanese  invasion. 
His  term  of  office  was  repeatedly  extended 
because  he  and  his  wife  were  widely 
popular,  his  political  and  military  experi- 
ence was  highly  valued  by  the  leaders  of 
all  parties,  and  when  arrangements  for 
his  replacement — which  for  health  reasons 
he  several  times  desired — broke  down 
he  was  prevailed  on  to  continue.  He 
owed  his  record  term  of  office  to  his 
imperturbable  good  will,  his  common- 
sense  approach  to  political  problems,  his 
dignity,  and  the  energy  and  enthusiasm 
which  Lady  Gowrie  brought  to  a  variety 
of  good  works.  Together  they  shared  the 
life  of  the  Australian  people,  from  the 
sorrows  of  the  war  in  which  they  lost 
their  only  surviving  child.  Captain 
Patrick  Hore-Ruthven,  to  the  growth 
of  the  Australian  national  capital  at 
Canberra  in  whose  planning  Lady  Gowrie 
took  a  close  interest.  Their  personal 
relations  with  John  Curtin  [q.v.]  were 
particularly  warm;  governor-general  and 
prime  minister  met  more  frequently  and 
on  more  intimate  terms  than  is  known 
to  have  occurred  in  any  other  case. 

The  Gowrie  name  will  live  long  in 
Australia,  both  because  of  its  association 
with  a  critical  period  in  national  history 
and  because  that  name  now  graces 
several  Australian  institutions  and  places. 
In  1938  Lady  Gowrie  persuaded  the 
Commonwealth  Department  of  Health 
to  accept  responsibility  for  co-ordinating 
work  throughout  Australia  on  the  health 
and  education  of  pre-school  children, 
previously  a  purely  state  matter,  and  as  a 
result  there  is  now  a  Lady  Gowrie  Pre- 
School  Child  Centre  in  each  capital  city. 
When  Gowrie's  retirement  was  first 
contemplated  in  1943,  the  chief  justice, 
Sir  John  Latham,  and  others,  organized 
a  Gowrie  Scholarship  Trust  Fund,  to 
which  the  public  subscribed  nearly 
£150,000,  as  a  memorial  to  his  Australian 


507 


Hore-Ruthven 


D.N.B.  1931-1960 


services;  the  income  is  used  to  provide 
scholarships  at  secondary,  university,  and 
postgraduate  levels  for  ex-Service  person- 
nel and  their  children.  One  of  the  largest 
government  hostels  in  Canberra  is  called 
Gowrie  House. 

On  relinquishing  office  Gowrie  was 
created  an  earl  and  in  1945  was  appointed 
deputy  constable  and  lieutenant-governor 
of  Windsor  Castle,  a  position  he  retained 
until  final  retirement  from  public  life 
in  1958;  during  that  time  he  and 
Lady  Gowrie  entertained  thousands  of 
Australian  visitors.  He  also  became 
president  of  the  Marylebone  Cricket  Club 
(1948),  and  was  often  host  to  Australian 
test  teams.  He  died  at  his  home  in 
Gloucestershire  2  May  1955,  his  titles 
descending  to  his  grandson,  Alexander 
Patric  Greysteil  (born  1939).  Lady  Gowrie 
survived  until  1965. 

A  portrait  by  (Sir)  Charles  Wheeler 
is  in  King's  Hall,  Parliament  House, 
Canberra. 

[The  Times,  4  May  1955  and  30  July  1965 ; 
Sydney  Morning  Herald,  18  January  1945  and 
4  May  1955 ;  Commonwealth  Parliamentary 
Debates,  3  May  1955 ;  private  information.] 

Gkoffrey  Sawer. 

HORTON,  Sir  MAX  KENNEDY 
(1883-1951),  admiral,  was  born  at  the 
Maelog  Lake  Hotel,  Anglesey,  29 
November  1883,  the  second  son  of  the 
family  of  four  of  Robert  Joseph  Angel 
Horton,  a  member  of  the  London  Stock 
Exchange,  and  his  wife  Esther  Maud, 
daughter  of  William  Goldsmid,  also  a 
stockbroker.  In  1898  Max  Horton  joined 
the  training  ship  Britannia  where  he 
played  for  the  first  eleven  at  football  and 
won  the  middle-weight  boxing  prize.  The 
technical  side  of  the  navy  appealed  to  him 
strongly  and  while  a  senior  midshipman  his 
thoughts  turned  to  the  new  submarine 
branch,  where  in  addition  to  the  attrac- 
tion of  intricate  machinery  there  would 
be  plenty  of  adventure  and  scope  for 
initiative.  At  the  age  of  twenty- two  he 
was  given  command  of  A.l,  a  submarine 
of  200  tons  used  for  experimental  work. 
He  later  commanded  C.8,  and  in  1910 
returned  to  general  service  for  two  years 
in  the  cruiser  Duke  of  Edinburgh  where  he 
was  awarded  the  Board  of  Trade  silver 
medal  for  heroism  in  saving  life  when  the 
P.  &  O.  liner  Delhi  was  wrecked  in  a  gale 
off  Cape  Spartel. 

In  the  mancEUvres  of  1912  Horton, 
while  in  command  of  D.6,  penetrated  the 
Firth  of  Forth  at  periscope  depth  and 


torpedoed  two  'hostile'  warships  which 
were  above  the  bridge,  an  operation  which 
placed  him  in  the  front  rank  of  submarine 
commanders.  On  the  outbreak  of  war  in 
1914  he  was  in  command  of  E.9,  a  new 
ocean-going  submarine ;  he  took  her  into 
the  fortified  harbour  of  Heligoland ;  next, 
while  on  patrol  outside  the  entrance,  he 
sank  the  cruiser  Hela,  the  first  enemy 
warship  to  be  destroyed  by  a  British 
submarine,  and  then  the  destroyer  S.116 
a  few  miles  from  her  own  coast.  For  these 
achievements  in  the  first  two  months  of 
war  he  was  appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  and 
recommended  for  early  promotion. 

In  October  1914  Horton,  who  was 
promoted  commander  at  the  end  of  the 
year,  took  E.9  into  the  dangerous  waters 
of  the  Baltic  where  he  sank  two  destroyers, 
torpedoed  a  large  German  cruiser,  and 
with  other  British  submarines  disrupted 
the  Swedish  iron  ore  supplies  to  Germany. 
In  December  1915,  although  the  British 
ambassador  to  Russia  asked  specifically 
that  he  might  remain  in  the  Baltic,  he 
was  recalled  to  England  to  command  J. 6, 
a  new  submarine  of  1,200  tons.  For  his 
services  to  Russia  he  was  awarded  the 
Order  of  St.  Vladimir  with  swords,  the 
Order  of  St.  Ann  with  swords  and 
diamonds,  and  the  Order  of  St.  George. 
The  French  Government  made  him  a 
chevalier  of  the  Legion  of  Honour  and  in 
1917  he  was  given  a  bar  to  his  D.S.O. 
Always  prominent  in  matters  of  design 
and  experiment,  Horton  was  in  1917 
given  command  of  M.l,  a  large  submarine 
carrying  a  twelve-inch  gun.  Her  trials 
were  successful  and  she  was  used  opera- 
tionally, but  never  fully  tested  in  war. 

In  the  spring  of  1920,  after  another  yea^^ 
in  the  Baltic,  this  time  in  command  of  a 
submarine  flotilla  with  the  delicate  task 
of  assisting  the  small  States  against 
Bolshevik  aggression,  he  received  a 
second  bar  to  his  D.S.O.  and  in  June  was 
promoted  to  captain  at  the  age  of  thirty- 
six.  As  a  young  submarine  commander 
Horton  had  the  reputation  of  being  'a  bit 
of  a  pirate'  and  also  a  gambler  who  played 
high  hands  at  bridge  and  poker,  but  he 
now  seemed  to  withdraw  from  his 
companions.  He  loved  power  and  used  it 
mercilessly,  although  he  was  tolerant 
when  people  were  prepared  to  admit  their 
mistakes  as  he  admitted  his  own.  Influenced 
possibly  by  what  he  had  seen  in  Russia 
he  feared  that  industrial  unrest  might 
spread  to  the  navy  and,  since  the  in- 
centive of  war  had  gone,  he  demanded 
the  highest  standard  of  discipline  from 


508 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Horton 


officers  and  men.  In  1922  he  was  appointed 
to  command  a  flotilla  of  large,  fast,  steam- 
driven  submarines  of  the  K  class.  They 
were  clumsy  and  dangerous,  and  great 
skill  was  required  when  diving  under  a 
screen  of  destroyers  to  attack  battleships 
moving  at  high  speed.  Horton,  having  no 
sympathy  with  the  idea  that  wartime 
risks  were  not  justified  in  peace,  constantly 
practised  his  flotilla  in  this  form  of  attack, 
impressing  upon  his  commanders  that 
sheer  efficiency  was  the  true  safeguard 
against  accidents,  and  that  tolerance  of 
inefficiency  was  dangerous . '  In  submarines' , 
he  said,  'there  is  no  margin  for  mistakes, 
you  are  either  alive  or  dead.' 

After  four  years  of  shore  service,  at  the 
Admiralty  as  assistant  director  of  mobili- 
zation and  at  Portsmouth  as  chief  of 
staff  to  Sir  Roger  (later  Lord)  Keyes 
[q.v.],  he  went  to  the  Mediterranean  for 
two  years  in  command  of  the  battleship 
Resolution.  In  October  1932  he  was 
promoted  rear-admiral  and  he  flew  his 
flag  in  the  battleship  Barham  (1934-5) 
as  second-in-command  of  the  Home  Fleet 
where  his  duties  were  mainly  administra- 
tive. He  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1934  and 
in  1935  returned  to  the  Mediterranean  in 
conmiand  of  the  first  cruiser  squadron, 
a  powerful  force  of  eight  fast  heavily 
armed  cruisers.  In  a  period  which  included 
the  Abyssinian  crisis  and  the  outbreak 
of  the  Spanish  civil  war  he  brought  his 
squadron  to  a  high  standard  of  efficiency, 
but  his  ruthlessness  and  blunt  manner 
alienated  him  from  some  senior  officers 
who  maintained  that  equally  good  results 
could  have  been  obtained  by  less  rigorous 
methods. 

Horton  was  promoted  vice-admiral 
in  1936  but  when  in  the  following  year  he 
was  appointed  to  command  the  Reserve 
Fleet  many  people  thought  that  it  would 
be  his  last  appointment.  Horton  was  in  no 
way  disappointed:  the  responsibility  for 
bringing  this  heterogeneous  collection  of 
140  ships  to  a  state  of  readiness  for  war 
strongly  appealed  to  him  and  by  mid- 
summer 1939  the  whole  fleet  was  ready  to 
sail.  He  had  been  promoted  K.C.B.  in  the 
New  Year  honours  and  on  the  outbreak 
of  war  took  conunand  of  the  Northern 
Patrol,  responsible  for  intercepting  mer- 
chant ships  of  all  descriptions  between 
Iceland  and  Scotland,  thus  enforcing  a 
distant  blockade  of  Germany.  This  dull 
routine  was  quite  unsuited  to  a  man  of 
Horton' s  energy  and  temperament  and  in 
January  1940  he  took  up  with  alacrity 
the    post    of    flag    officer    submarines, 


establishing  his  headquarters  at  Swiss 
Cottage  where  he  could  be  in  close  touch 
with  the  Admiralty  and  also  the  head- 
quarters of  Coastal  Conunand.  At  the 
end  of  March  Horton  was  convinced, 
contrary  to  official  opinion,  that  the 
Germans  were  about  to  invade  Norway. 
He  concentrated  all  his  submarines  in 
the  southern  approaches  to  the  Norwegian 
coast  with  orders  to  sink  at  sight.  A  week 
later,  when  the  invading  forces  appeared, 
his  dispositions  proved  so  effective  that 
twenty-one  enemy  transports  and  supply 
ships  were  sent  to  the  bottom.  His 
submarines  also  sank  two  cruisers  and 
severely  damaged  a  pocket  battleship. 
The  battle  cruiser  Gneisenau  was  put  out 
of  action  in  June  when  it  was  badly 
needed  for  the  invasion  of  England  and 
at  the  end  of  the  year  the  Admiralty  wrote 
to  Horton  that  'The  high  percentage  of 
successful  submarine  attacks,  and  the  low 
number  of  material  failures,  contributed 
a  remarkable  achievement.'  In  October 
1940  Horton  refused  the  conunand  of  the 
Home  Fleet  mainly  because  he  would 
not  have  control  of  the  various  types  of 
aircraft  which  he  considered  necessary. 
He  knew  that  he  was  throwing  away  his 
chances  of  becoming  an  admiral  of  the 
fleet,  but  felt  that  he  should  use  to  the 
full  his  experience  of  submarine  warfare. 
Later  in  the  Mediterranean  the  sub- 
marines which  he  had  trained  and 
administered  helped  to  bring  Rommel's 
army  to  a  standstill  by  wrecking  trans- 
ports and  disrupting  seaborne  supplies. 
He  also  encouraged  the  development  of 
midget  submarines  and  human  torpedoes. 
As  a  submariner,  Horton  believed  that 
German  U-boats  would  be  used  ruthlessly 
in  large  numbers  to  prevent  supplies  com- 
ing across  the  Atlantic,  and  so  reduce  the 
army  and  air  force  to  a  state  of  impotence. 
He  urged  strongly  that  the  Royal  Air 
Force  should  share  with  the  navy  the 
responsibility  for  anti-submarine  defence 
and  both  Services  be  trained  to  co-operate 
in  the  use  of  the  latest  weapons.  In 
November  1942  when  the  Atlantic  life- 
line was  stretched  to  its  limit  and  the 
U-boats  were  increasing  their  strangle- 
hold, Horton  was  appointed  conunander- 
in-chief  of  the  Western  Approaches  with 
responsibility  for  ensuring  not  only  that 
the  people  of  Britain  should  be  fed,  but 
also  that  a  constant  flow  of  troops  and 
military  supplies  should  be  maintained 
in  safety.  Although  700,000  tons  of  ship- 
ping had  been  sunk  by  U-boats  in 
November,   Horton  was   not   dismayed. 


509 


Horton 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


The  German  submarine  commander-in- 
chief,  Admiral  Doenitz,  had  found  the 
soft  spots  in  the  aUied  defence;  Horton 
knew  where  to  look  for  them  in  the 
U-boat  attack.  Over  a  hundred  U-boats 
were  working  in  packs  in  mid-Atlantic 
where  they  hoped  to  be  out  of  range  of 
allied  aircraft.  He  told  the  Admiralty 
that  the  best  way  to  defend  the  convoys 
was  to  reinforce  their  escorts  with  highly 
trained  and  speedy  Support  Groups 
working  in  co-operation  with  very  long- 
range  aircraft,  and  free  to  take  the 
offensive  against  the  U-boats.  As  a  result 
of  his  representations  sixteen  warships 
were  released  from  close  escort  duty ;  and, 
after  being  augmented  by  a  destroyer 
flotilla  from  the  Home  Fleet  in  March 
1943,  all  were  formed  into  five  Support 
Groups.  Meanwhile,  seven  squadrons  of 
very  long-range  and  long-range  aircraft 
had  been  allocated  to  Coastal  Command 
for  use  against  the  U-boats,  and  in  addi- 
tion aircraft  carriers  (converted  merchant 
ships),  joined  Horton' s  command.  He 
refused  to  rush  his  forces  into  action 
until  they  had  been  fully  trained  to  work 
together,  and  in  addition  to  other 
measures  established  a  school  of  sea-air 
co-operation  in  Northern  Ireland.  In 
April  1943  the  combined  plan  took  shape: 
a  main  offensive  by  naval  and  air  striking 
forces  to  destroy  the  U-boats  in  mid- 
Atlantic,  and  a  subsidiary  offensive  by 
shore-based  air  forces  to  destroy  U-boats 
near  their  bases  in  the  Bay  of  Biscay. 
Surprise  was  achieved  and  success  was 
complete.  The  brunt  of  the  battle  was 
borne  by  British  and  Canadian  sea  and 
air  forces  under  Horton's  command, 
the  destruction  of  U-boats  being  shared 
equally  by  warships  and  aircraft.  The 
spirit  of  the  enemy  was  broken,  and  at 
the  end  of  May  Doenitz  withdrew  his 
U-boats  from  mid-Atlantic.  From  then 
onwards,  Horton  successfully  countered 
all  attempts  by  the  enemy  to  resume  the 
offensive.  Acknowledging  his  request  to 
retire  at  the  end  of  the  war  in  order  to 
facilitate  promotion,  the  Admiralty  wrote 
to  Horton:  'Never  has  this  country 
endured  so  dangerous  a  threat  to  its 
existence,  and  with  the  overcoming  of 
that  danger  your  name  and  that  of  the 
Western  Approaches  Command  will  ever 
be  associated.' 

A  great  admiral  in  the  tradition  of  St. 
Vincent  rather  than  of  Nelson,  Horton 
had  a  technical  knowledge  and  genius  for 
detail  which  never  obscured  his  eye  for  the 
main  issues:  he  could  see  the  wood  and 


the  trees,  and  his  driving  force  saw  to  it 
that  the  policies  he  initiated  were  always 
carried  through.  He  said  himself  that  he 
could  be  as  obstinate  as  two  mules  when  he 
knew  that  he  was  right.  Many  were  thank- 
ful that  some  of  his  energies  were  used  up 
on  the  golf  course  to  which  he  repaired 
every  afternoon,  returning  to  fight  the 
Battle  of  the  Atlantic  at  night.  Ruthless 
and  intolerant  of  inefficiency  he  yet  pos- 
sessed an  understanding  and  kindness  of 
heart  not  always  realized.  He  was  famous 
for  the  accuracy  of  his  hunches,  not  al- 
together attributable  to  knowledge  and 
experience  even  at  the  service  of  a  brilliant 
mind.  He  admitted  that  he  prayed  every 
night  for  guidance  and  foresight,  and  for 
the  safe-keeping  of  his  ships.  Part  Jewish, 
he  was  a  deeply  religious  man  who  had 
leanings  towards,  but  did  not  join,  the 
Roman  Catholic  Church.  He  was  a  per- 
fectionist, completely  repudiating  half- 
measures,  and  this  perhaps  explains  a 
great  devotion  to  Saint  Therese  of  Lisieux 
which  would  have  surprised  his  shipmates 
had  they  known  of  it.  It  was  typical  of 
Horton  that  they  did  not.  He  was  an  indi- 
vidualist who  liked  to  keep  sentiment  away 
from  his  work  and  his  social  life  apart  from 
the  navy.  He  passionately  loved  all  that 
was  beautiful,  travelled  as  often  as  he  could 
in  Europe,  was  a  devotee  of  opera,  and 
had  many  friends  in  the  theatrical  world. 
His  character  was  unusually  complex  and 
earned  for  him  more  admiration  and 
criticism  than  falls  to  the  lot  of  lesser 
men. 

In  June  1945  Horton  was  promoted 
G.C.B.  and  in  1946  appointed  Bath  King 
of  Arms.  The  United  States,  France, 
Holland,  and  Norway  conferred  upon 
him  their  highest  honours  and  he  received 
the  honorary  degree  of  LL.D.  from  the 
Queen's  University,  Belfast  (1947).  But 
apart  from  the  freedom  of  Liverpool 
(1946)  where  he  had  had  the  head- 
quarters of  his  command,  no  other  British 
honour  came  to  him.  He  died  in  London 
30  July  1951,  having  suffered  from  ill 
health  brought  on  by  the  strain  of  the  war 
and  undergone  five  major  operations.  He 
was  accorded  a  state  funeral  in  Liverpool 
Cathedral,  where  a  memorial  to  him  was 
unveiled  in  1957. 

A  portrait  by  John  Worsley  is  at  Fort 
Blockhouse,  Gosport;  another  by  Sir 
Oswald  Birley  is  in  the  Greenwich 
Collection. 

[VV.  S.  Chalmers,  Max  Horton  and  the 
Western  Approaches,  1954 ;  Admiralty  records ; 
His  Majesty's  Sidnnarines,  H.M.S.O.   1945; 


510 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Houldsworth 


The  Battle  of  the  Atlantic,  H.M.S.O.,  1946; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

W.  S.  Chalmers. 


HOULDSWORTH,  Sir  HUBERT 
STANLEY,  first  baronet  (1889-1956), 
chairman  of  the  National  Coal  Board, 
was  born  at  Heckmondwike  20  April 
1889,  the  only  child  of  Albert  Edward 
Houldsworth,  drysalter,  by  his  wife, 
Susannah  Buckley.  He  was  educated  at 
Heckmondwike  Grammar  School  and  at 
Leeds  University  where  he  obtained  his 
B.Sc.  with  first  class  honours  in  physics 
in  1911,  proceeding  M.Sc.  (1912)  and  D.Sc. 
(1925),  and  joined  the  staff  in  1916.  In  the 
meantime  he  was  fulfilling  a  boyhood  ambi- 
tion by  reading  for  the  bar  and  was  called 
by  Lincoln's  Inn  in  1926.  He  was  an  able 
advocate  with  a  strong  sense  of  humour, 
and  his  practice  on  the  North-Eastern 
circuit  steadily  increased.  After  1931  he 
was  occupied  mainly  with  his  brief  as 
standing  counsel  for  the  Midland  District 
executive  board  of  colliery  owners  which, 
under  the  Act  of  1930,  fixed  a  standard 
tonnage  for  each  colliery.  If  an  owner  were 
aggrieved  at  the  output  decided  upon  for 
his  colliery  he  could  appeal  to  independent 
arbitration.  Most  owners  did. 

Control  of  selling  was  introduced 
in  1935  and  from  1936  until  1942 
Houldsworth,  who  took  silk  in  1937,  was 
independent  chairman  of  the  committee 
of  the  Midland  scheme  which  admini- 
stered these  selling  provisions.  On  the 
outbreak  of  war  he  was  appointed  joint 
coal  supplies  officer  for  the  Midland 
(Amalgamated)  District  and  unobtrusively 
exercised  great  influence  on  the  national 
administration  of  the  government  scheme 
of  control  of  coal  supplies.  In  1942  he 
became  regional  controller  for  South  and 
West  Yorkshire  and  in  1944  controller- 
general  of  the  Ministry  of  Fuel  and  Power. 

In  1945  Houldsworth  returned  to  the 
bar  but  on  the  nationalization  of  the 
mines  in  the  following  year  he  became 
chairman  of  the  East  Midland  division 
of  the  National  Coal  Board,  covering 
the  coalfields  of  Nottinghamshire,  Derby, 
and  Leicester,  relatively  low-cost  areas 
with  good  labour  relations.  He  knew  the 
division  intimately  and  threw  himself 
with  energy  and  skill  into  building  up 
its  organization  and  securing  increased 
productivity  and  lower  costs.  He  soon 
realized  the  need  for  increased  mechaniza- 
tion. Successful  though  he  was  in  the 
division,  he  resented  the  control  exer- 
cised by  the  National   Coal   Board.   He 


accepted  a  measure  of  overall  financial 
control ;  but  it  was  his  view,  openly 
expressed,  that  in  other  respects  the 
divisional  boards  should  be  autonomous. 

In  1951  Houldsworth  became  chairman 
of  the  National  Coal  Board.  His  predeces- 
sor. Lord  Hyndley,  had  built  up  an 
organization  for  the  nationalized  industry ; 
a  national  plan  for  the  reconstruction  of 
the  collieries  had  been  prepared.  It  was 
Houldsworth's  task,  tackled  with  his 
customary  zeal,  to  secure  the  rapid 
modernization  of  the  industry.  He  urged 
on  the  divisions  the  urgent  need  for  more 
and  more  mechanization ;  he  appreciated 
the  need  for  irhproved  management; 
he  strove  for  better  labour  relations.  But 
he  still  believed  in  divisional  autonomy 
and  on  22  October  1953  a  general  directive 
was  issued  to  divisional  chairmen  and 
heads  of  headquarters  departments  firmly 
laying  down  the  policy  of  primus  inter  pares. 

Public  comment  on  the  need  to  review 
the  organization  of  the  National  Coal 
Board  caused  the  formation  of  an  inde- 
pendent advisory  committee  in  December 
1953  under  Alexander  (later  Lord)  Fleck. 
In  its  report  published  in  February  1955 
the  committee  approved  the  main  struc- 
ture of  the  Board's  organization  but 
considered  that  it  was  too  half-hearted 
in  seeing  that  the  divisions  carried  out 
the  policies  it  laid  down.  It  recommended 
that  the  general  directive  of  October 
1953  be  withdrawn  and  reissued  empha- 
sizing the  authority  of  the  Board. 

Most  of  the  committee's  recommenda- 
tions were  adopted  but  its  report  was  a 
blow  to  Houldsworth,  criticizing,  as  it  did 
so  strongly,  the  policy  he  had  consistently 
advocated.  Nevertheless,  his  dedication  to 
the  industry  was  unimpaired.  He  continued 
his  travels  throughout  the  length  and 
breadth  of  the  coalfields.  He  ignored  the 
warning  of  a  slight  heart  attack  in  1955, 
and  died  suddenly  in  his  London  flat 
1  February  1956. 

Houldsworth  was  knighted  in  1944 
and  created  a  baronet  in  January  1956. 
From  1949  until  his  death  he  was  pro- 
chancellor  of  Leeds  University  where 
there  is  a  portrait  by  Sir  Gerald  Kelly. 
He  received  an  honorary  LL.D.  from 
Leeds  (1951)  and  from  Nottingham  (1953). 

In  1919  he  married  Hilda  Frances, 
daughter  of  Joseph  Clegg,  of  Heck- 
mondwike. They  had  one  child,  (Harold) 
Basil  (born  1922),  who  succeeded  as 
second  baronet. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
R.  J.  Moffat. 


511 


House 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


HOUSE,  (ARTHUR)  HUMPHRY  (1908- 
1955),  scholar,  was  born  at  Sevenoaks 
22  May  1908,  the  second  son  of  William 
Harold  House,  solicitor,  and  his  wife, 
Eleanor  Clara  Neve.  A  scholar  of  Repton 
and  Hertford  College,  Oxford,  he  took  a 
first  in  liter ae  humaniores  in  1929  and 
in  1930  a  second  in  modern  history. 
After  a  year  of  teaching  at  Repton,  he 
was  ordained  deacon  in  the  Church  of 
England  in  1931  and  elected  fellow, 
lecturer  in  English,  and  chaplain  at 
Wadham  College,  Oxford ;  but  during  1932 
he  felt  unable  to  take  priest's  orders,  so 
resigned  his  fellowship  and  retired  into 
lay  Ufe.  From  October  1933  he  spent  two 
years  as  assistant  lecturer  in  classics  and 
English  at  University  College,  Exeter, 
and  then  sailed  for  Calcutta,  where  he  was 
first  professor  of  English  at  the  Presidency 
College  and  then  lecturer  in  English  at  the 
university. 

In  1938  House  returned  to  England  and 
in  1940  was  elected  a  William  Noble 
fellow  in  the  university  of  Liverpool,  but 
before  long  he  was  called  up  as  a  troop)er 
in  the  Royal  Armoured  Corps  and  served 
in  the  army  until  1945,  when  he  was 
invalided  out  with  the  rank  of  major.  He 
always  said  that  he  had  begun  to  learn  how 
to  organize  paper,  not  in  any  university, 
but  at  the  Staff  College  at  Camberley. 

From  1947  to  1949  he  was  director  of 
English  studies  at  Peterhouse,  Cambridge, 
and  during  those  years  he  gave  many 
talks  on  the  Third  Programme  of  the 
B.B.C.  In  1948  he  was  appointed 
university  lecturer  in  English  literature 
at  Oxford,  and  in  1950  was  elected  to 
a  senior  research  fellowship  at  Wadham. 

From  early  years  House  concentrated  on 
the  EngUsh  nineteenth  century — not  only 
its  literature,  but  its  history,  economics, 
manners,  and  particularly  its  religion — 
believing  that  only  in  a  synthesis  of  all 
these  could  the  truth  be  found.  His 
method  was  to  analyse  a  work  of  litera- 
ture minutely,  as  a  classical  scholar 
would,  but  always  to  interpret  it  in  the  light 
of  the  larger  context.  Despite  the  subtlety 
of  his  approach  he  was  never  afraid  to  be 
simple  and  direct.  The  first  published 
fruits  of  his  method,  and  of  the  breadth  of 
his  learning,  appeared  in  his  edition  of 
The  Note-Books  and  Papers  of  Gerard 
Manley  Hopkins  (1937),  which,  with  its 
massive  organization  and  wide-ranging 
notes,  was  immediately  recognized  as  an 
indispensable  source  for  the  study  of  that 
poet  and  his  work. 

House   then   turned  his   attention   to 


Dickens,  whose  fame  had  hitherto  been 
supported  mainly  by  enthusiastic  ama- 
teurs. Three  was  no  adequate  biography  or 
collection  of  letters,  no  satisfactory  edition 
of  the  novels,  and  few  critical  studies 
based  on  a  thorough  knowledge  of  the 
period.  House  set  about  changing  all  that : 
his  book  The  Dickens  World  (1941)  was 
the  first  serious  attempt  to  examine  the 
novels  in  the  light  of  the  times  in  which 
they  were  written;  he  later  began  to 
collect,  date,  and  annotate  every  Dickens 
letter  that  could  be  traced;  and  he 
helped  in  launching  the  first  critically 
annotated  edition  of  the  novels.  The  two 
last  projects  were  to  be  completed  by 
others,  but  House  was  a  prime  mover. 

In  1953  he  published  Coleridge^  an 
expanded  version  of  the  Clark  lectures, 
given  at  Cambridge  in  1951-2.  Here 
his  power  of  precise  detail,  biographical 
and  literary,  combined  with  humanity 
and  vision  to  analyse  those  aspects 
of  Coleridge's  genius  which  made  him 
inescapably  the  poet  he  was.  In  this  book 
House  was  able  to  make  effective  use  of 
quotations  from  Coleridge's  notebooks 
which  had  not  before  been  printed.  After 
his  death  two  posthumous  books  appeared : 
All  in  Due  Time  (1955),  a  collection  of 
his  essays,  reviews,  and  broadcast  talks; 
and  Aristotle's  Poetics  (1956),  a  course  of 
Oxford  lectures,  revised  and  introduced 
by  Cohn  Hardie,  which  had  had  a  revo- 
lutionary success  in  the  English  school 
when  first  given  in  1952. 

House's  pupils — schoolboys,  under- 
graduates, and  graduates — ^thought  him 
the  most  inspiring  teacher  they  had  ever 
known,  and  it  is  as  a  teacher-critic- 
scholar  that  he  would  have  liked  to  be 
remembered.  Of  all  his  teaching  he  gained 
most  satisfaction  from  the  lectures  on  the 
nineteenth  century  which  he  gave  to 
graduate  students  during  his  final  years  at 
Oxford — the  culmination  and  reward,  he 
felt,  of  twenty  years  of  work  and  reading. 

Like  Matthew  Arnold,  House  knew  a 
great  deal  about  schools  and  universities, 
language  and  literature,  and  from  this 
solid  base  his  critical  and  creative  per- 
ception took  wing.  For  him  scholarship 
involved  discovering  a  writer's  intention, 
which  inevitably  led  to  a  minute  study  of 
the  writer's  life  and  personality  and  of 
the  society  in  which  he  lived.  House  had 
an  unusual  sense  of  the  past,  of  its  re- 
moteness, and  at  the  same  time  of  its 
relevance  to  the  present.  His  work  con- 
tained no  waste-matter,  and  his  criticism 
had  an  absolute  directness  and  serious- 


512 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Housman 


ness  which  brought  it  close  to  its  living 
subject.  He  was  the  most  imaginative  of 
pedants,  the  most  flexible  of  perfectionists. 

At  the  time  of  his  sudden  death  in 
Cambridge,  14  February  1955,  House  was 
deeply  engaged  in  the  editing  of  Dickens's 
letters,  and  his  notes  on  them  might  well 
have  proved  his  greatest  monument,  for 
his  gift  as  a  writer  was  to  apply  the 
severity  of  his  scholarship  to  himself 
and  to  distil  it  into  deceptively  simple 
annotations. 

No  one  could  be  long  in  House's 
presence  without  becoming  aware  of  his 
intellectual  stature  and  deep  integrity. 
To  strangers  he  might  at  first  seem 
formidable — as  in  one  sense  he  was — 
but  closer  knowledge  soon  disclosed  his 
warmth,  humour,  kindliness,  and  genero- 
sity. 

In  1933  House  married  Madeline  Edith, 
daughter  of  Henry  Pitman  Church,  com- 
pany director ;  they  had  two  daughters  and 
one  son. 

[The  Times,  17  February  1955;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Rupert  Hart-Davis. 

HOUSMAN,  LAURENCE  (1865-1959), 
writer,  was  born  18  July  1865  at  Perry 
Hall,  Bromsgrove.  His  father,  Edward 
Housman,  a  solicitor  practising  in 
Bromsgrove,  was  a  whimsical  character, 
not  entirely  successful  as  a  solicitor,  and 
a  strong  Tory  who  liked  to  say  that  he 
had  been  born  in  1832,  the  year  of 
England's  greatest  disaster.  Housman's 
mother,  Sarah  Jane  Williams,  died  when 
he  was  six,  and  he  became  much  attached 
to  the  lady  whom  his  father  subsequently 
married.  She  won  the  affection  of  all  her 
stepchildren  (five  sons  and  two  daugh- 
ters), the  eldest  of  whom  was  A.  E. 
Housman  [q.v.] ;  Laurence  was  the 
youngest  but  one.  He  was  educated  at 
Bromsgrove  School,  but  possibly  owing  to 
the  somewhat  drifting  fortune  of  his 
father,  he  did  not  go  on  to  the  university. 
Narrow  origins,  confined  within  Worcester- 
shire, may  have  circumscribed  his  out- 
look; he  was  perhaps  more  self-assertive 
than  he  would  have  been  had  he  mixed 
in  youth  in  a  wider  circle. 

At  eighteen  he  moved  to  London  and 
studied  art  in  Kennington  and  at  the 
Lambeth  School  of  Art,  and  later  at  South 
Kensington.  During  his  early  years  he 
was  greatly  impoverished  and  was  able 
to  manage  only  by  sharing,  first  lodgings, 
then  a  small  house,  with  his  favourite 
sister   Clemence,    an   author   and  wood- 


engraver  who  died  in  1955.  Her  books  were 
The  Were-Wolf  (1896),  The  Unknown  Sea 
(1898),  and  Sir  Aglovale  de  Galis  (1905). 
Through  A.  W.  Pollard  [q.v.]  Housman 
was  introduced  to  Harry  Quilter  [q.v.]  for 
whose  flamboyant  if  short-lived  Universal 
Review  he  both  wrote  and  drew.  Pollard 
also  introduced  him  to  Kegan  Paul 
[q.v.],  a  man  after  Housman's  own  heart 
who  had  thrown  up  a  conventional 
Church  of  England  incumbency  on 
account  of  curious  religious  opinions  and 
of  extreme  political  views,  and  led  a 
rather  precarious  publishing  existence 
in  London.  Kegan  Paul  encouraged  him 
to  write  and  in  1893  pubHshed  his  edition 
of  a  selection  from  William  Blake. 

In  1900  Housman  published  anony- 
mously An  Englishwoman'' s  Love-Letters 
— to  an  extent  a  psychological  study, 
innocuous  enough  by  later  standards  but 
at  that  time  regarded  as  somewhat 
daring.  Variously  attributed  to  Mrs. 
Meynell,  Marie  Corelli,  and  Oscar  Wilde, 
the  Love-Letters  sold  extremely  well. 
Housman  made  £2,000  out  of  them: 
*a  mighty  windfall  from  the  worst  book 
I  ever  wrote'.  In  1895  Housman  had 
become  art  critic  on  the  Manchester 
Guardian  and  he  used  to  say  that  the 
journal  unwittingly  saved  him  from  Roman 
Catholicism  by  sending  him  on  a  foreign 
assignment  which  opened  his  eyes  to 
the  tawdriness  of  European  Catholicism. 
A  colleague,  James  Bone,  testified  to 
the  force  and  wit  with  which  Housman 
handled  the  many  art  controversies 
which  developed  while  he  was  on  the 
paper,  notably  the  Chantrey  Bequest 
inquiry  and  the  dispute  over  the  statues 
by  (Sir)  Jacob  Epstein  [q.v.]  on  the 
British  Medical  Association  building. 
Housman's  attachment  on  the  Manchester 
Guardian,  which  lasted  for  sixteen  years, 
marks  the  end  of  the  first  stage  of  his 
literary  career.  His  work,  especially  some 
of  his  poems  such  as  Green  Arras  (1896) 
and  Spikenard  (1898),  carried  (as  was 
noticed  in  his  obituary  in  The  Times) 
introspective  glimpses  of  his  own  soul 
of  a  disturbing  oddity'.  If,  in  his  concern 
with  these  matters,  he  was  something  of 
a  revolutionary,  nevertheless,  as  was 
noticed  by  Grant  Richards  at  the  time, 
he  represented  much  that  was  best  in 
the  literary  work  of  his  generation. 

Coincident  with  his  work  for  the 
Manchester  Guardian  he  began  a  career 
as  playwright,  never  completely  success- 
ful but  always  pursued  with  determina- 
tion.   He   elected  to   write   on   subjects 


8652062 


513 


Housman 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


which,  in  the  conventional  feeling  then 
prevailing  and  tightly  held  in  the  lord 
chamberlain's  office,  were  bound  to 
involve  him  with  the  censor.  His  first  play 
Bethlehem  was  banned  for  many  years 
although  it  was  privately  produced  by 
Gordon  Craig  in  1902  at  a  financial  loss 
to  the  author.  His  play  Pains  and  Penal- 
ties (1911),  about  Queen  Caroline,  was 
deplorable  history.  On  the  grounds  that  it 
dealt  with  a  sad  historical  episode  of 
comparatively  recent  date  it  too  was 
banned  by  the  lord  chamberlain  for  many 
years  and  was  then  released  on  the 
excision  of  one  sentence  and  the  single 
word  'adultery'.  In  1906,  in  collaboration 
with  Harley  Granville-Barker  [q.v.],  he 
wrote  Prunella,  or  Love  in  a  Dutch  Garden 
— a  pierrot  play — which  was  tolerably 
successful  and  escaped  the  wrath  of  the 
censor. 

In  the  meantime  Housman's  political 
sympathies,  deriving  in  part  from  his 
antipathy  to  the  Toryism  of  his 
Bromsgrove  home  and  in  part  from  the 
discontent  with  established  things  which 
marked  his  literary  associates  at  the 
turn  of  the  century,  led  him  to  take  up 
with  vigour  the  cause  of  woman's  suffrage. 
In  June  1909  he  was  the  centre  of  a  dis- 
turbance in  the  central  lobby  of  the 
House  of  Commons.  He  was  a  member  of 
the  men's  section  of  the  extremist 
Women's  Social  and  Political  Union, 
leaving  them  in  1912  only  when,  as  he 
put  it,  militancy  became  violent  rather 
than  symbolic.  His  sister  Clemence 
suffered  brief  imprisonment  for  refusing 
to  pay  taxes.  In  the  course  of  the  war 
of  1914f-18  he  gradually  became  a  con- 
vinced pacifist.  He  was  a  courageous 
supporter  of  the  ideals  of  a  League  of 
Nations  and  in  1916  crossed  to  the  United 
States  to  proclaim  his  views  in  a  series  of 
lectures. 

At  the  end  of  the  war  he  published 
Sheepfold  (1918),  a  novel  based  to  some 
extent  on  the  life  of  Mrs.  Girling  [q.v.]. 
Although  this  book  was  favourably 
noticed,  Housman's  most  popular  success 
lay  ahead,  in  The  Little  Plays  of  St» 
Francis  which  were  published  in  1922  and 
had  genuine  charm.  The  year  before  he 
had  published  Angels  and  Ministers, 
scenes  from  the  court  of  Queen  Victoria, 
which  in  part  caught  the  gentle  mockery 
of  the  Queen  prevailing  in  intellectual 
circles.  It  was  true  of  so  much  of  Housman's 
work  that  he  successfully  launched  his 
often  rather  frail  barque  on  the  flood 
tide   of   fashionable   views.    During   the 


twenties  he  attempted  two  satirical 
novels:  The  Life  of  H.R.H.  the  Duke  of 
Flamborough  (1928)  was  based  on  George, 
Duke  of  Cambridge  [q.v.];  Trimblerigg 
(1924)  attacked  a  target  which  was 
more  worth  while  and,  in  the  thin 
disguise  of  a  Nonconformist  minister, 
focused  attention  on  the  embittered 
feelings  about  Lloyd  George  felt  on  the 
Left.  Beatrice  Webb  [q.v.],  always  easily 
shocked  by  true  feeling,  called  it  'savage'. 
Housman  more  correctly  said  that  it  wa? 
'as  useful  and  truthful  a  book  as  I  have 
ever  written'. 

In  the  early  thirties  Housman  published 
further  selections  of  plays  about  Queen 
Victoria  which,  with  Angels  and  Ministers, 
were  collected  in  1934  under  the  title 
Victoria  Regina  with  illustrations  by 
E.  H.  Shepard.  Although  in  historical 
accuracy  they  showed  no  improvement 
they  successfully  caught  the  romantic 
charm  of  the  Queen  and  Prince  Albert. 
They  were  performed  in  1935  at  the  Gate 
Theatre,  and  gained  greatly  from  the 
superb  and  realistic  acting  of  Pamela 
Stanley  as  the  Queen  which  was  repeated 
when  the  censor's  ban  was  lifted  (thanks 
in  part  to  King  Edward  VIII)  and  the 
play  opened  at  the  Lyric  Theatre  on 
21  June  in  the  coronation  summer  of 
1937.  It  was  an  enornious,  deserved,  and 
immediate  success.  After  his  long  years  of 
frustration  with  the  censor,  Housman  had 
this  one  piece  of  crowning  good  fortune 
that  the  ban  was  lifted  at  the  moment 
when  public  interest  in  the  royal  family 
was  at  its  peak.  He  is  believed  to  have 
made  some  £15,000  out  of  this  success. 
With  characteristic  courage  and  indis- 
cretion he  spoke  on  the  opening  night  of 
his  gratitude  to  the  Duke  of  Windsor. 

Housman  published  an  entertaining 
autobiography,  The  Unexpected  Years,  in 
1937.  He  lived  so  long,  was  friendly  with 
so  many  of  the  leaders  of  thought  in 
the  critical  decades  of  his  middle  life, 
and  was  connected  with  such  a  diversity 
of  'progressive'  causes  that  his  writings 
will  always  remain  a  valuable  reflection  of 
opinion  and  feeling  when  the  twentieth 
century  banished  the  nineteenth.  He 
never  achieved  the  substantial  work  of 
which  he  was  perhaps  capable  and, 
inspired  partly  by  causes  and  partly  by 
the  necessity  to  maintain  himself,  wrote 
a  great  deal  which  was  ephemeral.  He 
noticed  in  the  obituary  of  himself  which 
he  wrote  for  the  old  Manchester  Guardian 
that  he  was  charged  with  being  'too 
versatile'.  Also  for  his  permanent  reputa- 


514 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Howe 


tion  he  was  too  imj^etuous,  too  insensi- 
tive to  entrenched  opinion,  and  too 
eager  to  hack  out  what  he  thought  dead. 
He  was  fortunate  perhaps  that  the  times 
were  moving  with  him,  and  as  a  pioneer 
feminist,  pacifist,  and  sociahst  he  Hved 
to  see  if  not  the  triumph  at  least  the 
general  acceptance  of  those  ideals  which 
he  had  certainly  encouraged  by  his 
talents.  Although  many  of  Housman's 
political  and  social  opinions  seemed 
somewhat  silly  and  muddled,  and  not 
only  to  those  who  disapproved  them,  they 
never  obscured  the  width  of  his  interest, 
his  taste,  and  the  persuasive  charm  with 
which  his  opinions  were  held. 

The  relations  between  Housman  and 
his  renowned  brother  were  somewhat 
formal  although  his  admiration  for  A.E. 
was  deep  and  unmixed  with  jealousy. 
Each  enjoyed  recounting  how  the  works 
of  one  had  been  confused  with  those  of  the 
other,  although  A.E.'s  enjoyment  did 
not  conceal  a  certain  irony.  Laurence 
Housman  attempted  a  biography  of  his 
brother  after  his  death,  A.E.H.  (1937), 
but  some  of  his  efforts  to  analyse  A.E.'s 
feelings  were  superficial  suggestions,  bet- 
ter dealt  with  fully  or  left  severely  alone. 
His  handling  of  his  brother's  poetical 
notebooks  was  not  judicious :  having  asked 
(although  he  did  not  follow)  the  advice  of 
three  Cambridge  friends  of  his  brother 
about  the  notebooks,  he  was  distressed  at 
the  end  of  his  life  by  the  use  made  of  this 
material. 

From  1924  Housman,  who  never 
married,  lived  at  Street  in  Somerset  with 
his  sister.  He  used  to  attend  the  Friends 
meetings  for  many  years  and  he  became 
a  Quaker  in  1952.  He  died  20  February 
1959  in  hospital  in  Glastonbury. 

A  drawing  by  (Sir)  William  Rothenstein 
is  reproduced  in  his  Liber  Juniorum. 

[Laurence  Housman,  The  Unexpected  Years, 
1987 ;  The  Times  and  Manchester  Guardian, 
21  February  1959 ;  private  information.] 

Roger  Fulford. 

HOWE,  CLARENCE  DECATUR  (1886- 
1960),  Canadian  minister,  was  born  in 
Waltham,  Massachusetts,  United  States, 
15  January  1886,  the  elder  child  and 
only  son  of  William  Clarence  Howe,  a 
builder,  and  his  wife,  Mary  Emma 
Hastings.  Both  parents  were  of  sturdy 
New  England  stock  and  Howe  inherited 
a  builder's  temperament ;  constructive  in 
all  his  activities,  his  mind  was  competent, 
direct,  unemotional,  and  pragmatic.  After 
graduating  in  civil  engineering  from  the 


Massachusetts  Institute  of  Technology 
in  1906  he  spent  the  years  1908-13  on  the 
staff  of  Dalhousie  University,  Canada.  In 
1913  he  became  a  Canadian  citizen  and 
was  appointed  chief  engineer  of  the  newly 
formed  Board  of  Grain  Commissioners  for 
Canada,  in  charge  of  design  and  con- 
struction of  internal  storage  elevators. 
From  1916  to  1935  he  built  up  a  lucrative 
private  engineering  firm  at  Port  Arthur, 
Ontario,   specializing  in  grain  elevators. 

In  1935  W.  L.  Mackenzie  King  [q.v.] 
persuaded  Howe  to  enter  politics  and  when 
the  Liberals  returned  to  office  in  that  year 
Howe,  as  member  for  Port  Arthur,  but 
with  no  previous  political  experience, 
became  minister  of  railways  and  canals 
and  minister  of  marine.  His  first  task  was 
to  consolidate  these  two  departments  into 
one:  the  Department  of  Transport.  In 
1936,  during  his  first  session  in  the  House, 
Howe  introduced  three  important  and 
controversial  bills.  One  revised  the  capital 
structure  of  the  Canadian  National  Rail- 
ways, replacing  the  board  of  trustees  by 
normal  corporate  management.  Another 
established  the  Canadian  Broadcasting 
Corporation  in  place  of  the  Canadian 
Radio  Commission.  The  third  replaced 
numerous  local  harbour  commissions  by 
a  three-man  National  Harbours  Board  in 
Ottawa.  In  1937  he  introduced  a  bill  to 
set  up  Trans-Canada  Airlines  as  a  public 
corporation  after  it  proved  impossible  to 
do  so  under  joint  railway  ownership.  An 
avowed  proponent  of  private  enterprise, 
Howe  paradoxically  brought  into  being 
more  publicly  controlled  enterprises  than 
has  any  other  Canadian  minister,  but 
always  for  pragmatic  reasons. 

Howe's  war  work  was  an  extension  of 
this  method  of  operating  quasi-commer- 
cial and  industrial  government  institutions 
under  efficient  business  methods.  As 
minister  of  munitions  (1940-46)  he  mobi- 
lized Canada's  entire  industrial  and  eco- 
nomic facilities,  turning  the  country  into 
a  highly  industrialized  State.  He  set  up 
twenty-eight  crown  corporations;  many 
of  the  most  successful  were  disbanded  at 
the  end  of  the  war ;  others  were  retained 
to  serve  particular  needs.  During  the  war 
Howe  administered  the  war  supplies 
agreement  with  the  United  States  under 
the  1941  Hyde  Park  declaration  and  was 
the  Canadian  member  of  the  Combined 
Production  and  Resources  Board  set  up 
in  June  1942  to  integrate  the  require- 
ments and  supply  of  munitions  of  the 
United  States,  United  Kingdom,  and 
Canada.    In    October    1944    Howe    also 


515 


Howe 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


became  minister  of  reconstruction;  in 
January  1946  his  two  departments  merged 
as  the  Department  of  Reconstruction  and 
Supply.  Howe  thus  remained  in  charge 
of  the  country's  economy  through  the 
period  of  liquidation  of  war  programmes, 
termination  of  contracts,  disposal  of  war 
surpluses,  re-employment  of  war  service 
personnel,  and  restoration  of  peacetime 
economy.  This  difficult,  unglamorous  job 
was  completed  efficiently  and  with  a 
minimimi  of  dislocation  and  criticism. 

In  January  1948  Howe  became  minister 
of  trade  and  commerce.  After  the  Korean 
war  broke  out  he  was  again  called  on  to 
head  a  Department  of  Defence  Production 
(1951-7)  but  the  Department  of  Trade  and 
Commerce  continued  to  claim  his  major 
energies.  His  final  year  in  office  was  the 
stormiest  of  his  career.  In  1956  he  pro- 
moted the  idea  of  a  pipeline  to  bring 
natural  gas  from  Alberta  to  the  industrial 
areas  of  the  East.  He  believed  this  would 
be  of  lasting  economic  advantage  to 
Canada  and  provide  an  immediate  stimu- 
lus to  a  lagging  economy.  He  also  believed 
he  could  use  the  same  type  of  authori- 
tarian and  industrial  approach  which  had 
been  so  successful  in  war.  In  this  he  was 
wrong;  alleged  abuse  of  closure  and 
affront  to  parliamentary  rights,  not  econo- 
mics, became  the  issue.  The  immediate 
battle  was  won  in  Parliament  but  in  the 
general  election  of  1957  the  Liberal  Party 
went  down  to  defeat  and  Howe  lost  his 
seat. 

This  rejection  after  twenty-two  years 
of  almost  superhuman  performance  did 
not  embitter  him.  He  withdrew  from 
political  life  to  become  active  in  finance 
and  industry  and  at  the  time  of  his 
death  was  a  director  of  eleven  industrial 
companies  and  seven  financial  institu- 
tions. In  1957  he  became  chancellor  of 
Dalhousie  University  and  later  a  member 
of  'The  Corporation*  of  the  Massachusetts 
Institute  of  Technology.  In  his  last  years 
he  found  these  associations  with  the 
universities  of  his  youth  the  most  re- 
warding of  all  his  multifold  activities. 

Howe  was  a  doer  not  a  philosopher.  He 
was  not  a  natural  'House  of  Commons 
man'.  Procedural  matters  bored  him; 
he  believed  in  action  not  words.  Essen- 
tially a  gregarious  and  friendly  man,  he 
could  be  ruthless  when  crossed  in  what 
he  thought  was  the  proper  course.  A 
superb  administrator,  he  delegated  autho- 
rity and  trusted  his  staff.  At  his  best  in 
emergencies,  he  was  resourceful,  fearless 
but  never  reckless.  He  was  not  a  bookish 


person,  his  interests  were  men  and  their 
actions.  He  wasted  few  hours  but  mixed 
short  periods  of  relaxation  with  his  work 
and  took  a  yearly  fishing  trip.  He  was  a 
casual  but  competent  bridge  player  and 
golf  was  a  continuing  pleasure  throughout 
his  life. 

He  was  nominated  to  the  Privy  Council 
in  1946  and  received  the  American 
medal  for  merit  in  1947.  He  was  awarded 
honorary  doctorates  by  fifteen  universities 
in  Canada  and  elsewhere,  was  an  honorary 
member  of  many  national  professional 
engineering  societies,  and  was  awarded  the 
Hoover  medal  of  the  American  Society 
of  Civil  Engineers  (1952)  and  the  Daniel 
Guggenheim  medal  and  certificate  (1954). 

In  1916  Howe  married  Alice  Martha, 
daughter  of  Joseph  Ruggles  Worcester, 
a  successful  consulting  engineer  in  Boston 
with  whom  he  had  worked  in  1905-8. 
They  had  two  sons  and  three  daughters. 
Howe  died  in  Montreal  31  December 
1960.  A  portrait  by  Robin  Watt  is  the 
property  of  Dalhousie  University. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
C.  J.  Mackenzie. 

HUDSON,  ROBERT  SPEAR,  first 
Viscount  Hudson  (1886-1957),  politi- 
cian, was  born  in  London  15  December 
1886,  the  eldest  son  of  Robert  WiUiam 
Hudson,  who  had  sold  the  family  busi- 
ness of  soap  manufacture  as  soon  as  he 
succeeded  to  it,  and  his  first  wife,  Gerda 
Frances  Marion  Bushell  Johnson,  of  Liver- 
pool. Educated  at  Eton  and  Magdalen 
College,  Oxford,  where  he  obtained  a 
second  class  in  modern  history  in  1909, 
Hudson  entered  the  diplomatic  service 
in  1911  and  was  posted  successively 
to  St.  Petersburg,  Washington,  Athens, 
and  Paris.  He  became  a  first  secre- 
tary in  1920  and  resigned  in  1923  to 
contest  the  Whitehaven  division  of 
Cumberland  as  Conservative  candidate. 
He  was  unsuccessful  in  this  first  attempt, 
but  was  elected  the  following  year  and 
represented  the  constituency  until  1929. 
In  1931  he  again  entered  Parliament  as 
member  for  Southport,  a  seat  which  he 
retained  until  his  elevation  to  a  viscountcy 
in  1952.  In  recognition  of  his  services, 
Southport  conferred  on  him  the  honorary 
freedom  of  the  borough. 

From  1931  to  1935  Hudson  was  parlia- 
mentary secretary  to  the  Ministry  of 
Labour,  from  1935  to  1936  minister  of 
pensions,  and  from  1936  to  1937  parlia- 
mentary secretary  to  the  Ministry  of 
Health.  Then  followed  nearly  four  years 


&16 


D;N3i  1951-1960 


Hudson 


(1937-40)  as  secretary  of  the  Department 
of  Overseas  Trade  and  a  brief  spell 
(April-May  1940)  as  minister  of  shipping. 
In  these  offices  he  established  a  reputa- 
tion for  competence  and  hard  work;  in 
particular  he  threw  himself  wholeheartedly 
into  the  organization  of  the  British  Indus- 
tries Fair  and  other  activities  for  the 
promotion  of  British  overseas  trade — 
activities  which  at  that  time  were  not 
always  considered  sympathetic  to  the 
claims  of  home  agriculture  for  remunera- 
tive prices. 

It  was  with  some  apprehension  there- 
fore that  the  agricultural  world  received 
the  news  of  Hudson's  appointment  in 
1940  by  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill  as 
minister  of  agriculture  and  fisheries, 
particularly  as  he  was  taking  the  place  of 
Sir  Reginald  Dorman- Smith,  who  was  a 
popular  past-president  of  the  National 
Farmers'  Union,  with  first-hand  know- 
ledge of  farming  problems. 

The  choice,  however,  turned  out  to  be 
ideal.  Coming  to  his  task  with  a  fresh 
and  fearless  mind,  Hudson  quickly  mas- 
tered the  intricate  problems  involved  in 
reviving  a  depressed  industry  and  inject- 
ing into  it  the  necessary  finance  and 
confidence.  He  then  proceeded  to  drive 
it  relentlessly  through  all  the  obstacles 
and  difficulties  of  war  to  ever-increasing 
production  and  efficiency.  The  acreage 
in  England  and  Wales  of  wheat,  for 
example,  was  by  1944  increased  by  82%, 
potatoes  by  116%,  sugar-beet  by  24%,  and 
the  total  area  under  tillage  by  nearly 
4f  million  acres  (69%).  He  achieved,  in 
fact,  an  agricultural  revolution,  not  only 
in  cropping,  but  in  the  attitude  of  the 
farming  community  towards  the  changes 
necessary  to  increase  the  output  of  essen- 
tial foods  and  thus  save  valuable  ship- 
ping space.  To  support  his  demands  he 
introduced  a  bold  legislative  programme 
based  on  guaranteed  prices  and  markets 
which  gave  the  farming  community  a 
stability  which  it  had  not  enjoyed  for  a 
century.  Moreover,  he  awoke  the  nation 
to  the  importance  of  home  agriculture  as 
a  balancing  factor  to  industrial  develop- 
ment and  a  permanent  safeguard  in  the 
national  economy. 

These  spectacular  results  Hudson 
achieved  largely  by  his  own  untiring 
efforts,  working  closely  with  the  perma- 
nent secretary,  Sir  Donald  Fergusson.  The 
countrywide  organization  of  county  and 
district  committees  with  their  represen- 
tatives in  every  parish,  in  all  some  five 
thousand    voluntary    workers    recruited 


from  within  the  industry  itself— 
these  were  the  spearhead  of  his  drive. 
In  a  determined  policy  of  decentrali- 
zation they  were  given  wide  powers. 
It  was  a  bold  experiment  in  guiding  and 
policing  an  industry  not  by  officials  but 
from  within  its  own  ranks.  In  war 
conditions  it  succeeded,  for  both  those 
who  gave  orders  and  those  who  received 
them  were  engaged  in  the  same  task  and 
filled  with  the  same  desire  to  contribute 
to  the  war  effort.  Probably  no  minister  of 
the  Crown  has  ever  spent  so  much  of  his 
time  in  personal  contact  with  the  rank 
and  file  of  the  section  of  the  community 
with  which  he  was  particularly  concerned 
as  did  Hudson.  Every  day  he  could  spare 
from  Whitehall,  including  many  Sundays, 
was  spent  in  visiting  the  committees  or 
in  addressing  mass  meetings  of  farmers. 
At  these  meetings  Hudson  never  minced 
his  words,  and  at  first  his  blunt  approach 
sometimes  caused  dismay.  He  would 
brook  no  excuse  or  delay ;  objections  were 
swept  aside.  He  was  too  anxious  to  get 
things  done  to  allow  himself  to  accept  any 
compromise  or  to  waste  time  on  concilia- 
tion. He  deliberately  set  high  and  some- 
times impossible  targets  of  achievement. 
'Don't  you  know',  was  one  of  his  sayings, 
'that  what  is  difficult  must  be  started 
tomorrow,  but  what  is  impossible 
to-day?' 

His  sincerity,  ability,  and  leadership 
soon  won  a  wide  response  from  the 
agricultural  community  which  learnt  to 
respect  his  forthrightness  and  his  readi- 
ness to  take  decisions  and  to  back  up  any 
committee  or  individual,  regardless  of 
precedent  or  red-tape,  when  he  thought 
that  the  right  course  was  being  followed. 
His  gifts  exactly  matched  the  times  and 
the  difficulties  he  had  to  face ;  he  proved 
a  great  administrator  and  was  without 
doubt  a  great  wartime  minister  of 
agriculture.  He  was  sworn  of  the  Privy 
Council  in  1938,  made  a  C.H.  in  1944,  and 
remained  in  office  until  Labour  came  into 
power  in  1945.  In  the  meantime  he  had 
become  keenly  interested  in  the  practical 
problems  of  agriculture  and  purchased  a 
farm  in  Wiltshire  where  he  established  a 
successful  Friesian  herd.  In  1954-5  he  was 
president  of  the  British  Friesian  Society, 
and  he  also  served  on  the  council  of  the 
Royal  Agricultural  Society. 

Hudson  married  in  1918  Hannah  (died 
1969),  daughter  of  Philip  Synge  Physick 
Randolph,  of  Philadelphia,  and  had  one 
son,  Robert  WiUiam  (1924-63),  who  suc- 
ceeded him.  In  his  later  years  Hudson 


517 


Hudson 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


became  chairman  of  the  board  of  govern- 
ors of  the  Imperial  Institute  and  Britain's 
representative  on  the  United  Nations 
trusteeship  committee.  He  also  embarked 
on  farming  in  Southern  Rhodesia  and  it 
was  during  a  visit  there  that  he  died, 
2  February  1957. 

[The  Times,  4  February  1957;  Farmers 
Weekly,  8  February  1957;  Lessons  of  the 
British  War  Economy,  ed.  D.  N.  Chester, 
1951 ;  Sir  Keith  A.  H.  Murray,  Agriculture 
(History  of  the  Second  World  War.  Civil 
Series),  1955  ;  personal  knowledge.] 

William  Gavin. 

HUGHES,  WILLIAM  MORRIS  (1862- 
1952),  Australian  prime  minister,  was 
born  in  London  25  September  1862,  of 
Welsh  parents;  his  father,  William 
Hughes,  was  a  carpenter  of  North  Welsh 
artisan  stock,  and  his  mother,  born 
Jane  Morris,  from  a  Montgomeryshire 
farming  family.  The  mother  died  in 
1869,  and  until  1874  the  child  lived  with 
an  aunt  at  Llandudno,  where  he  attended 
the  grammar  school ;  he  was  then  admit- 
ted to  St.  Stephen's  School,  Westminster, 
where  he  remained  first  as  pupil  then  as 
pupil  teacher  until  1884,  when  he  migrated 
to  Queensland.  For  two  years  he  wandered 
the  back  country  taking  odd  jobs,  until 
employment  on  a  coastal  ship  brought 
him  in  1886  to  Sydney.  After  further 
casual  employment,  including  that  of  a 
stage  extra  in  Henry  V,  Hughes  married 
in  1886  Elizabeth  Cutts,  said  to  have  been 
his  landlady's  daughter,  and  settled  in  a 
small  shop  with  residence  in  Balmain,  a 
dockside  slum  area. 

He  now  became  active  in  the  growing 
Labour  movement,  was  employed  in  1893 
as  an  organizer  for  the  newly  created 
political  organization  of  trade  unions 
and  Labour  electoral  leagues,  and  advo- 
cated the  subjection  of  parliamentary 
Labour  representatives  to  control  by  the 
annual  conference,  the  central  executive, 
and  a  majority  in  the  parliamentary 
caucus:  ironical  having  regard  to  his 
later  quarrel  with  the  Labour  'machine'. 
In  1894  he  was  elected  as  Labour  Party 
member  for  the  Lang  electorate  in 
Sydney,  which  included  his  dockside 
home,  and  rapidly  rose  to  prominence  in 
Parliament  and  in  the  outside  Labour 
organizations ;  he  held  Lang  with  increas- 
ing majorities  at  elections  in  1895  and 
1898.  In  Parliament  he  was  especially 
prominent  in  pushing  through  measures 
for  6  p.m.  closing  of  shops  and  for  old  age 
pensions. 


Hughes  was  disappointed  when  Labour 
failed  to  obtain  election  of  any  of  its 
representatives  to  the  decisive  federal 
conventions  of  1897-8,  and  his  opposition 
to  the  federal  scheme  hardened  when  in 
1899  (Sir)  G.  H.  Reid  [q.v.]  failed  to 
obtain  the  degree  of  modification  of  the 
draft  constitution  which  Labour  wanted, 
especially  on  the  question  of  the  powers  of 
the  Senate.  Hughes  accordingly  became 
one  of  the  main  public  opponents  of 
federalism  at  the  plebiscite  of  1899,  but 
the  required  majority  for  bringing  New 
South  Wales  into  federation  was  even- 
tually obtained.  Hughes  then  transferred 
to  the  federal  sphere ;  at  the  first  election 
for  the  Commonwealth  House  of  Repre- 
sentatives in  1901  he  was  elected  for 
West  Sydney,  which  included  his  old 
state  electorate. 

The  Hughes  who  now  emerged  on  the 
federal  stage,  and  soon  became  and  long 
remained  a  dominating  influence  there, 
had  already  moved  far  in  personal  Hfe 
and  poUtical  views  from  the  poverty- 
stricken  doctrinaire  whom  we  glimpse 
in  the  scanty  records  of  his  life  from 
1884  to  1893.  Payment  of  members  was 
adopted  in  New  South  Wales  in  1888  and 
written  into  the  federal  constitution,  and 
although  the  costs  of  being  a  member, 
and  the  demands  of  a  rapidly  increasing 
family,  left  little  over,  he  never  again 
suffered  the  grinding  poverty  and  in- 
security of  earlier  years.  He  was  short, 
slightly  built,  stooped,  with  an  engagingly 
ugly  face  and  big  ears,  a  gift  to  cartoon- 
ists but  correspondingly  soon  familiar  to 
the  nation  as  'Billy'.  Ill  health  which 
had  contributed  to  his  migration  from 
England  had  been  made  chronic  by  his 
early  hardships  in  Australia;  dyspepsia, 
and  bad  hearing  necessitating  the  use 
of  hearing  aids,  plagued  the  rest  of  his 
life,  although  he  soon  learned  to  use  the 
deaf-aid  as  a  weapon  to  avoid  incon- 
venient questions  or  obtain  time  for  a 
reply.  Immense  energy  and  drive  largely 
overcame  these  handicaps,  although  ill 
health  contributed  to  the  surprising  lapses 
in  political  judgement  which  marred  his 
career  after  1915.  Throughout  the  nineties 
he  both  studied  and  practised  public 
speaking,  read  for  the  bar  (to  which  he 
was  admitted  in  1903),  and  developed  a 
capacity  for  fluent  writing  as  well  as 
speaking.  At  his  best,  Hughes  was  a 
superb  orator,  using  by  turns  a  rollicking 
humour,  satire,  scathing  invective,  and 
emotional  rhetoric,  but  with  great  clarity 
and  directness  where  these  were  required. 


518 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hughes 


His  small  figure  became  transformed  by 
flailing  arms  and  stamping  legs  into  the 
embodiment  of  persuasion  or  domination. 

The  lessons  in  political  realism  learned 
in  the  New  South  Wales  Parliament  were 
reinforced  by  his  experience  of  industrial 
warfare.  In  1899  he  reorganized  and 
became  secretary  of  the  Sydney  Wharf 
Labourers'  Union,  and  held  this  position 
until  1915.  In  1902  he  created  an  Australia- 
wide  Waterside  Workers'  Federation, 
became  its  first  president  and  later 
procured  its  first  award  in  the  newly 
created  Commonwealth  Court  of  Concilia- 
tion and  Arbitration.  Hughes  fought 
vigorously  for  the  interests  of  this  and 
other  trade  unions,  but  did  so  increasingly 
from  the  point  of  view  of  a  tactician  out 
to  secure  optimum  gains  in  wages  and 
conditions  for  a  minimum  loss  through 
strikes  and  the  antagonizing  of  public  and 
even  employer  opinion. 

Until  Alfred  Deakin  [q.v.]  formed  a 
fusion  of  the  non-Labour  parties  in  1909, 
Labour  held  the  balance  of  power,  and 
for  two  short  periods  itself  held  office ; 
Hughes  was  minister  for  external  affairs 
in  the  government  of  J.  C.  Watson 
[q.v.]  in  1904  and  attorney-general  in  the 
first  government  of  Andrew  Fisher  [q.v.] 
in  1908-9.  He  became  a  principal  Labour 
speaker  on  most  subjects,  and  delivered 
masterpieces  of  invective  against  those 
who  incurred  his  party's  wrath,  notably 
in  the  1909  debates  on  Deakin's  final 
decision  to  remove  the  Fisher  government 
and  join  the  Conservatives.  Hughes's 
main  constructive  activities  in  this  period 
concerned  maritime  legislation  and  de- 
fence. In  1904  he  became  chairman  of  a 
royal  commission  investigating  a  proposed 
federal  code  of  navigation  law,  and  in 
1907  he  visited  England  for  a  conference  on 
the  relation  of  such  legislation  to  the 
imperial  Merchant  Shipping  Acts  ;  legisla- 
tion based  on  his  recommendations  was 
ultimately  passed  in  1913.  He  adopted, 
and  persuaded  first  his  party  and  then  the 
Deakin  government  of  1909  to  adopt, 
the  principle  of  compulsory  military 
training  for  male  citizens,  with  obliga- 
tion to  serve  only  within  Australia,  as  the 
foundation  of  Australian  military  defence 
policy. 

Labour  swept  the  polls  in  1910  and 
Hughes  was  attorney-general  in  the 
second  Fisher  government  which  held 
office  until  1913.  Besides  his  heavy 
involvement  in  the  legal  and  constitu- 
tional aspects  of  government,  including 
unsuccessful  attempts  at  procuring  consti- 


tutional amendment  by  referendum  in 
1911  and  1913,  he  became  main  govern- 
ment spokesman  on  nearly  all  matters  of 
difficulty.  The  constructive  achievements 
with  which  he  was  associated  included  the 
creation  of  a  Commonwealth  Bank  and  a 
Commonwealth  note  issue,  the  extension 
of  Commonwealth  social  services,  and  the 
introduction  of  a  federal  land  tax. 

The  Fisher  government  was  defeated 
at  the  election  of  1913  but  so  narrowly 
that  its  opponents  soon  obtained  a 
'deadlock'  double  dissolution.  War  broke 
out  immediately  before  polling  day, 
and  Hughes  vied  with  Fisher  in  pledging 
the  complete  support  of  the  Labour 
Party  for  the  British  wdr  effort.  Hughes 
had  formed  and  led  organizations  inter- 
ested in  Australian  defence  from  1905  on, 
and  during  his  1907  visit  to  England  had 
attracted  attention  by  his  vehement 
support  for  a  strong  defence  policy. 
Without  the  authority  of  his  party,  he 
now  proposed  that  the  election  be  post- 
poned and  a  political  truce  proclaimed 
for  the  duration  of  the  war  so  that  all 
effort  should  be  concentrated  on  its 
conduct.  Constitutional  difficulties  pre- 
vented this,  but  Hughes's  attitude  began 
the  break  between  himself  and  the  left 
wing  of  the  Labour  movement.  At  the 
election.  Labour  was  returned  with  large 
majorities  in  both  houses,  and  Hughes 
again  became  attorney-general  under 
Fisher.  Fisher  retired  from  politics  in 
October  1915  and  Hughes  succeeded  him 
as  party  leader  and  prime  minister,  and 
remained  attorney-general.  While  not 
wholly  inattentive  to  Labour's  social 
aims,  he  concentrated  throughout  this 
period  on  war  problems,  particularly  the 
dissolution  of  German  economic  interests 
and  influences  in  Australia  and  the  vesting 
of  the  relevant  enterprises  in  Australian 
concerns. 

In  March  1916  he  arrived  in  England  to 
consult  with  the  Asquith  administration 
on  military  and  economic  policy  and 
attracted  widespread  attention  in  vigor- 
ous, patriotic  speeches  advocating  a  total 
war  effort  and  a  war  aim  of  completely 
crushing  the  Central  Powers,  militarily 
and  economically.  Asquith  was  compelled 
to  make  him  a  delegate  to  the  Paris 
economic  conference  in  June,  where  his 
fire-eating  policy  pleased  Clemenceau. 
He  visited  the  Australian  troops,  and 
acquired  the  sobriquet  of  'the  little 
Digger'.  He  also  negotiated  contracts  for 
the  sale  of  Australia's  wheat,  wool,  and 
other  primary  products   and  to   ensure 


519 


Hughes 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


their  shipment  founded  the  Australian 
Commonwealth  Shipping  Line  by  purchas- 
ing fifteen  cargo  vessels.  Attempts  were 
made  to  induce  him  to  remain  in  England, 
with  suggestions  that  he  should  be  given 
a  Commons  and  a  cabinet  seat,  but  he 
returned  to  Australia  in  July. 

Hughes  was  now  convinced  that  volun- 
tary recruitment  was  insufficient  and 
conscription  for  overseas  service,  already 
mooted  by  leaders  of  the  opposition 
Liberal  Party,  had  become  necessary. 
However,  he  knew  that  resistance  to  such 
a  policy  was  widespread  in  the  Labour 
movement,  and  accordingly  on  his  return 
to  Australia  he  toured  the  capitals, 
making  patriotic  public  speeches  on  the 
one  hand  and  on  the  other  endeavouring 
in  private  to  persuade  Labour  Party  and 
trade-miion  leaders  to  back  his  judgement 
about  conscription.  The  Labour  Party's 
parliamentary  caucus  in  Melbourne  by 
majority  approved  a  compromise  proposal 
for  putting  the  conscription  issue  to  the 
electors  at  a  plebiscite,  but  even  the 
legislation  for  this  was  opposed  in 
ParUament  by  a  Labour  minority  and 
caused  the  resignation  of  a  senior  minister, 
and  further  resignations  occurred  when 
Hughes  attempted  to  employ  the  plebiscite 
as  a  means  of  checking  on  'draft-dodgers' 
under  a  home  service  call-up.  The  plebiscite 
held  in  October  resulted  in  a  narrow  major- 
ity against  conscription,  and  in  November 
the  caucus  rebelled  against  the  leadership 
of  Hughes ;  anticipating  a  vote  against  him, 
Hughes  on  14  November  led  twenty-four 
followers  out  of  the  Labour  Party  and 
formed  a  government  from  their  number 
depending  upon  the  benevolent  support 
of  the  Liberals. 

Hughes  wished  to  create  a  'National 
Labour'  party  to  support  him,  but  it 
became  evident  that  the  task  of  organi- 
zing a  mass  basis  for  a  new  party  was 
beyond  his  resources,  and  the  Liberal 
Party  leaders  were  not  prepared  in- 
definitely to  support  a  rump  government, 
so  the  National  Labour  group  merged 
with  the  Liberals  to  form  the  Nationalist 
Party,  with  Hughes  as  prime  minister  and 
attorney-general.  At  a  general  election  in 
1917  Hughes  led  the  Nationalists  to 
an  overwhelming  victory  in  both  Houses, 
and  continued  as  prime  minister  until 
1923.  He  himself  was  returned  for  the 
Bendigo  seat  in  Victoria.  In  November 
1917  Hughes  pledged  himself  to  resign  if 
conscription  were  not  approved,  and  did 
so  when  a  second  plebiscite  failed  by  a 
larger   majority,    but   when    it    became 


obvious  that  no  other  leader  could  form 
a  government,  he  again  became  prime 
minister  and  was  able  to  concentrate  on 
the  war  and  its  aftermath. 

He  went  to  England  in  June  1918  and 
remained  until  August  1919,  pressing 
Australia's  claims  in  the  peace  settlement. 
He  was  a  member  of  the  British  delega- 
tion to  the  Paris  conference  in  1919, 
and  was  influential,  with  Sir  Robert 
Borden  and  J.  C.  Smuts  [qq.v.],  in  pro- 
curing the  separate  recognition  of  the 
dominions  in  the  form  of  the  peace 
treaty  and  their  separate  membership 
of  the  League  of  Nations.  Hughes  had  no 
confidence  in  Wilson,  or  his  14  Points,  or 
in  the  League;  he  favoured  a  harsh 
peace  and  wanted  outright  annexation  of 
German  territories  near  Australian  shores, 
and  heavy  reparations.  He  settled  for  the 
C-class  mandate  system  and  the  rejection 
of  Japanese  attempts  to  write  a  racial 
equality  clause  into  the  League  covenant. 
On  his  return,  Hughes  received  a  thunder- 
ous popular  welcome  and  the  Nationalist 
Party  scored  another  triimiph  at  the  1919 
elections.  He  again  visited  England  in 
1921  for  the  imperial  conference  and 
favoured  renewal  of  the  Anglo-Japanese 
Treaty,  but  accepted  the  United  States 
proposals  which  led  to  the  Washington 
naval  conference. 

From  1920  on  Hughes's  position  in  the 
Nationalist  Party  became  increasingly 
precarious  because  the  powerful  con- 
servative wing  of  the  party  and  the  newly 
created  Country  Party  distrusted  him* 
While  Hughes  had  come  to  seem  a 
conservative  to  his  fornKer  Labour  col- 
leagues, he  still  seemed  a  dangerous  social- 
ist to  many  of  his  new  political  colleagues. 
He  regarded  government  enterprise  and 
intervention  in  economic  affairs  as 
natural  and  proper  if  undertaken  in  the 
national  interest,  and  he  had  become 
increasingly  overbearing  and  secretive, 
and  in  the  opinion  of  many  Nationalists 
inefficient  in  the  way  in  which  he  con- 
ducted such  affairs.  He  also  continued  to 
favour — and  did  throughout  his  life — • 
expansion  of  federal  power.  The  farmers 
objected  to  his  handling  of  primary 
produce  marketing,  because  he  sought 
to  stabilize  food  prices  by  government 
controls  when  in  the  post-war  inflation 
a  free  market  would  have  brought  them 
higher  returns,  and  there  was  a  strong 
state-right  element  among  his  followers. 
The  opposition  to  him  reached  a  climax 
when  after  the  election  of  December  1922 
the  Nationalist  majority  was  reduced  to  a 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Hughes 


point  which  compelled  them  to  seek  a 
coalition  with  the  Country  Party;  that 
party,  in  particular  its  leader  (Sir)  Earle 
Page,  declined  to  support  a  government 
led  by  Hughes  and  accordingly  he 
was  induced  to  resign  the  prime  minister- 
ship and  the  Nationalist  leadership  in 
favour  of  S.  M.  Bruce  (later  Viscount 
Bruce  of  Melbourne),  who  became  prime 
minister  on  9  February  1923. 

At  the  1922  election,  Hughes  again 
moved  his  constituency,  from  Bendigo 
to  North  Sydney.  In  1920  admirers  had 
presented  him  with  £25,000  in  recognition 
of  his  war  services,  and  from  now  until  1928 
he  led  a  relatively  quiet  back-bencher's 
existence,  but  through  1928-9  became 
increasingly  critical  of  the  Bruce-Page 
government,  particularly  its  handling  of 
industrial  disputes.  In  1929  he  and  three 
other  Nationalists  voted  with  the  Labour 
Party  to  defeat  the  Government  on  its 
proposal  to  remove  the  Commonwealth 
from  the  greater  part  of  the  field  of  in- 
dustrial arbitration.  Thus  was  Hughes  re- 
venged for  the  shabby  treatment  accorded 
him  in  1923. 

Hughes  tried  to  form  a  new  party 
called  the  Australian  Party  for  the 
ensuing  general  election,  but  his  efforts 
failed.  The  Labour  Party  obtained  a 
majority  in  the  Representatives,  but, 
between  its  own  dissensions  and  a 
hostile  Senate,  it  achieved  Uttle  and  in 
1931  split  into  three,  one  group  combining 
with  the  Nationalists  to  form  the  United 
Australia  Party.  Hughes  played  only  a 
minor  part  in  the  disputes  about  depres- 
sion financial  policy  which  were  the  main 
cause  of  these  crises.  In  1931  he  joined 
the  United  Australia  Party,  which  under 
J.  A.  Lyons  [q.v.]  scored  a  decisive 
electoral  victory;  right-wing  antagonism 
to  Hughes  because  of  his  destructive 
activities  in  1929  prevented  his  immediate 
appointment  as  a  minister,  but  in  1932 
he  represented  Australia  at  a  League  of 
Nations  Assembly  and  in  1934  he  became 
minister  for  repatriation  and  health  in  the 
Lyons  government. 

From  1934  until  1943  Hughes  played 
a  leading  part  in  the  United  Australia 
Party,  and  was  a  minister  almost  con- 
tinuously until  1941.  In  1939  (Sir)  R.  G. 
Menzies  narrowly  defeated  him  for  the 
succession  to  the  U.A.P.  leadership  on 
the  death  of  Lyons;  he  was  deputy 
leader  until  October  1941,  when  Menzies 
resigned  from  leadership  and  Hughes 
succeeded  him,  but  their  roles  were  again 
reversed  in  1943.  In  1944  Menzies  trans- 


formed the  IJ.A.P.  into  the  Liberal 
Party,  of  which  Hughes  became  a  back- 
bench member.  He  was  minister  for 
health  and  repatriation  from  1934  until 
1937,  with  a  brief  break  in  1935-6  when 
he  was  compelled  to  resign  for  a  few 
months  because  he  published  a  book, 
Australia  and  War  Today,  which  con- 
tained views  on  the  Italo- Abyssinian  dis- 
pute at  odds  with  the  policy  of  the  Lyons 
government.  From  1937  until  1939  he 
was  minister  for  external  affairs,  and  from 
1939  until  1941  attorney-general,  and 
minister  for  industry  (1939-40)  and  navy 
(1940-41).  Under  the  Labour  Govern- 
ment of  John  Curtin  [q.v.]  from  1941  until 
1944  he  was  a  member  of  the  War 
Advisory  Council.  Throughout  these  years 
Hughes's  experience  was  highly  valued 
by  Governments,  and  his  manner  of 
imparting  it  much  mellowed.  However, 
he  adhered  uncompromisingly  to  his  dis- 
trust of  international  organization  and 
his  belief  in  a  strong,  independent 
Australian  defence  force.  His  vigorous 
exposition  of  these  views  grated  somewhat 
on  aU  the  major  parties  in  the  period 
after  1935  when  the  public  and  Govern- 
ments were  against  rapid  rearmament 
and  hoped  that  appeasement  policies 
would  succeed,  but  his  insistence  con- 
tributed to  the  important  defence  measures 
which  were  begun,  especially  after  1938. 
As  attorney-general  after  1939  he  was 
responsible  for  ferreting  out  enemy 
agencies,  and  banned  the  Communist 
Party  in  its  anti-war  phase,  but  he  in- 
curred little  of  the  distrust  with  which  he 
had  been  regarded  on  the  political  Left  in 
the  first  war. 

After  1944  Hughes  receded  into  the 
political  background.  At  the  redistri- 
bution in  1949  he  chose  the  Bradfield 
division,  part  of  his  former  seat.  He  had 
now  become  a  legend  in  his  own  lifetime, 
much  sought  after  as  a  raconteur  and 
public  speaker,  and  cheered  by  the 
marchers  on  each  Anzac  Day  as  he  stood 
in  Martin  Place,  Sydney,  as  he  had  done 
since  1920.  He  died  at  Lindfield  28 
October  1952;  still  an  M.H.R.  and  the 
last  sitting  survivor  from  the  first 
Conmionwealth  Parliament.  One  hundred 
thousand  people  attended  his  state  funeral 
iB  Sydney. 

Hughes  had  seven  children  by  his  first 
marriage,  of  whom  three  sons  and  three 
daughters  survived  him;  none  achieved 
special  eminence.  His  first  wife  died  in 
1906;  in  1911  he  married  Mary  Ethel, 
daughter  of  Thomas  Campbell,  a  grazier 


521 


Hughes 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


of  Burrandong,  New  South  Wales.  She 
was  appointed  G.B.E.  in  1922.  The  one 
daughter  of  his  second  marriage  pre- 
deceased him. 

Hughes  had  a  prose  style  almost  as 
lively  as  his  speaking  style  and  his  two 
volumes  of  memoirs,  Crusts  and  Crusades 
(1947)  and  Policies  and  Potentates  (1950), 
while  unreliable  in  detail,  convey  excellent- 
ly the  atmosphere  of  many  episodes  in  his 
earlier  career.  He  also  published  The  Case 
for  Labor  (1910),  a  selection  from  articles 
under  that  title  which  appeared  in  the 
Sydney  Daily  Telegraphy  The  Splendid 
Adventure  (1929),  and  The  Price  of  Peace 
(1934).  He  was  sworn  of  both  the  Canadian 
and  United  Kingdom  Privy  Councils  in 
1916,  took  silk  in  1919,  and  was  made  a 
C.H.  in  1941. 

A  portrait  by  George  Lambert  and 
bronze  bust  by  F.  Derwent  Wood  are  in 
King's  Hall,  Parliament  House,  Canberra ; 
there  is  a  portrait  plaque  in  St.  Paul's 
crypt,  London ;  and  cartoons  in  The  Billy 
Book  by  (Sir)  David  Low  (1918). 

[L.  F.  Fitzhardinge,  William  Morris 
Hughes,  1964 ;  W.  F.  Whyte,  William  Morris 
Hughes,  1957 ;  F.  C.  Browne,  They  Called  Him 
Billy,  1946;  G.  Sawer,  Australian  Federal 
Politics  and  Law,  1901-1949,  2  vols.,  1956-63 ; 
private  information.]  Geoffrey  Sawer. 

HUMPHREY,  HERBERT  ALFRED 

(1868-1951),  engineer,  was  born  at  Hope 
Cottage,  Gospel  Oak,  London,  2  December 
1868,  the  son  of  John  Charles  Humphrey, 
accountant  to  the  Metropolitan  Board 
of  Works,  and  his  wife,  Louise  Frost. 
He  was  the  third  son  and  fifth  child  of  a 
family  of  seven.  He  was  educated  at 
Cowper  Street  Middle  Class  School  before 
attending  Finsbury  Technical  Institute 
under  John  Perry  and  W.  E.  Ayrton  [q.v.]. 
From  there  he  went  in  1885  to  the  City 
and  Guilds  Central  Institution  in  South 
Kensington,  where  he  was  one  of  the  five 
original  students.  There  he  had  the  advan- 
tage of  coming  into  close  personal  contact 
with  those  great  teachers  W.  C.  Unwin 
[q.v.],  Ayrton,  H.  E.  Armstrong  [q.v.], 
and  Henrici.  At  the  end  of  his  college 
career  he  took  a  position  with  Heenan 
and  Froude  of  Manchester  and  Birming- 
ham, before  joining  Brunner  Mond  & 
Co.,  Ltd.,  in  1890,  where  the  founder  of 
the  firm,  Ludwig  Mond  [q.v.],  immediately 
realized  that  he  had  found  an  engineer 
whose  ability  and  freshness  of  outlook 
could  be  of  the  greatest  use  to  the 
chemical  industry  in  developing  its  many 
new  processes.  For  the  next  eleven  years 


Humphrey  worked  at  Winnington  in 
connection   with   Mond   Gas   Producers. 

In  1901  he  went  to  London  where  he 
set  up  as  a  consulting  engineer  and  was 
extremely  successful.  The  experience  he 
had  gained  with  Mond  Power  Gas  and 
with  large  gas  engines  helped  to  give  him 
a  world-wide  reputation  and  he  acquired 
a  large  number  of  clients  and  friends. 
It  was  during  this  period  that  he  invented 
the  Humphrey  gas  pump,  of  which  foiu* 
were  installed  at  the  Chingford  reservoir 
by  the  Metropolitan  Water  Board.  The 
patent  rights  of  the  pump  were  sold  to  the 
United  States  for  the  sum  of  £100,000. 

When  war  broke  out  in  1914 
Humphrey's  wide  experience  and  know- 
ledge were  put  at  the  service  of  his 
country  and  he  became  technical  adviser 
to  the  department  of  explosives  supply 
which  was  part  of  the  Ministry  of  Muni- 
tions. There  he  worked  with  Lord 
Moulton  [q.v.]  in  ensuring  the  supply  of 
ammonium  nitrate  for  the  making  of 
explosives.  Later  with  the  munitions 
inventions  department  his  task  was  to 
investigate  the  various  known  processes 
for  the  fixation  of  nitrogen.  This  led  to  the 
department  of  explosives  beginning  to 
plan  the  construction  of  a  factory  at 
Billingham-on-Tees  where  the  German 
Haber  process  should  be  used.  The  end  of 
the  war  came  before  work  could  be 
started  and  in  April  1919  a  British 
chemical  commission  was  sent  out  to 
Oppau  to  see  the  Synthetic  Ammonia 
Works  there  and  Hmnphrey  was  one  of 
the  five.  The  commission  met  with  a 
determined  resistance  from  the  start. 
The  Germans  were  not  co-operative  and 
the  fact  that  the  works  were  in  the 
French  zone  of  occupation  did  not  help. 
The  Badische  Gemeinschaft,  which 
worked  the  process,  did  all  they  could 
to  obstruct.  They  painted  the  front  of 
gauges,  took  down  lower  rungs  of  ladders, 
disconnected  pipes,  and  chipped  off 
maker's  names  from  machines.  As  soon 
as  the  commission  entered  the  building 
all  work  stopped.  However,  they  were 
not  beaten  and  every  night  for  five  weeks 
went  into  conference  and  finally  evolved 
a  fairly  accurate  layout  of  the  works. 
When  they  returned  home  in  June, 
driving  back  to  France,  Humphrey's 
luggage  containing  their  report  followed 
by  rail  in  a  wagon  under  armed  guard. 
But  they  had  underestimated  the  enemy : 
the  bottom  of  the  wagon  was  removed 
and  the  luggage  stolen.  Fortunately 
the  commission  had  all  their  notes  and 


522 


D-N.B.  1951-1960 


Humphreys 


sketches  and  were  able  to  rewrite  their 
report. 

Later  in  1919  the  Billingham  site  was 
acquired  by  Brunner  Mond  &  Co.,  Ltd., 
who  formed  a  company — Synthetic  Am- 
monia and  Nitrates,  Ltd. — to  develop  the 
Oppau  process.  It  followed  naturally  that 
Humphrey  should  be  offered  the  posts  of 
consulting  engineer  and  director  of  the  new 
firm.  It  was  here  that  his  great  experience 
of  engineers  and  their  training  was  of 
value  to  the  company.  He  was  a  very  good 
engineer.  Up  to  1920  no  other  exceptional 
engineer  had  been  employed  in  the 
chemical  industry  and  he  was  able 
almost  immediately  to  find  others  to  train. 
Within  a  few  years  British  chemical 
engineering  surpassed  that  of  Germany 
and  America. 

For  this  a  great  deal  of  credit  must  go 
to  Humphrey.  He  was  almost  the  ideal 
consulting  engineer — learned,  versatile, 
meticulous,  hardworking,  and  quick  to 
size  up  a  situation  and  find  out  how  to 
deal  with  it.  In  1926  Imperial  Chemical 
Industries  was  formed  and  he  became 
consulting  engineer  to  the  whole  of  the 
combined  company,  which  position  he 
held  until  his  retirement  in  1931.  One  of 
the  most  important  projects  with  which 
he  dealt  during  his  latter  years  with  I.C.I, 
was  the  construction  of  the  40,000  kW. 
electric  power-station  at  Billingham.  It 
was  probably  his  greatest  achievement 
for  it  was  well  in  advance  of  central 
station  design  at  the  time  and  began  to 
supply  power  within  twelve  months  of  the 
first  sod  being  cut. 

Humphrey  was  a  member  of  the 
Institutions  of  Civil,  Mechanical,  and 
Electrical  Engineers  and  a  fellow  and 
vice-president  of  the  Institute  of  Fuel. 
He  was  elected  the  first  fellow  of  the  City 
and  Guilds  Institute  and  also  a  fellow  of 
the  Imperial  College.  He  read  many 
papers  on  large  gas  engines  and  gas 
producer  plants  before  learned  societies 
which  gained  for  him  the  Willans,  the 
Telford,  the  Watt,  and  the  Constantine 
gold  medals.  In  1930  a  joint  paper  with 
J.  W.  Bansall  and  D.  M.  Buist  describing 
the  Billingham  power  plant  was  awarded 
the  Paris  premium  of  the  Institution  of 
Electrical  Engineers  and  in  1989  he  was 
given  the  Melchett  medal  of  the  Institute 
of  Fuel  for  his  lecture  on  the  'Supply  of 
Explosives  during  the  War  and  the  Early 
History  of  Billingham'. 

After  the  end  of  the  war  of  1989-45 
Humphrey  visited  South  Africa  and 
decided    to    settle    at    Hermanus,    C.P. 


There  he  had  no  difficulty  in  acquiring  a 
new  life  and  a  new  circle  of  devoted 
friends.  He  died  there -9  March  1951.  He 
was  married  to  Mary  Elizabeth,  daughter 
of  Frederick  Thomas  Horniblow,  coal 
factor,  of  Reading,  and  had  three  sons 
and  two  daughters.  The  eldest  son, 
John  Herbert  Humphrey,  F.R.S.,  became 
deputy  director  of  the  National  Institute 
for  Medical  Research  in  1961. 

[V.  E.  Parke,  Billingham:  The  First  Ten 
Years,  1957 ;  Proceedings  of  the  Institution  of 
Mechanical  Engineers,  vol.  clxiv,  1951 ;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  R.  E.  Slade. 

HUMPHREYS,  Sir         (RICHARD 

SOMERS)  TRAVERS  (CHRISTMAS) 
(1867-1956),  judge,  was  born  in 
Bloomsbury,  London,  4  August  1867, 
the  fourth  son  and  sixth  child  of  Charles 
Octavius  Humphreys,  a  solicitor  speciali- 
zing in  criminal  cases,  by  his  wife, 
Harriet  Ann  Grain,  sister  of  the  enter- 
tainer, R.  Corney  Grain  [q.v.].  His  father's 
half-sister  was  the  first  wife  of  the  Earl 
of  Halsbury  [q.v.].  He  was  educated  at 
Shrewsbury  School  and  Trinity  Hall, 
Cambridge,  where  he  stroked  a  trial 
university  eight.  He  was  called  to  the  bar 
by  the  Inner  Temple  in  1889  and,  joining 
(Sir)  Archibald  Bodkin  [q.v.]  in  the 
chambers  of  E.  T.  E.  Besley,  soon  concen- 
trated on  practice  in  the  criminal  courts. 
He  was  appointed  counsel  for  the  Crown 
at  the  Middlesex  and  North  London 
sessions  in  1905,  junior  counsel  for  the 
Crown  at  the  Central  Criminal  Court 
in  1908,  and  a  senior  counsel  in  1916.  As  a 
prosecutor  it  was  said  of  him  that  'He's  so 
damned  fair  that  he  leaves  nothing  for 
the  defence  to  say.'  He  was  recorder  of 
Chichester  from  1921  to  1926  when  he 
became  recorder  of  Cambridge.  He  was 
elected  a  bencher  of  his  Inn  in  1922  and 
knighted  in  1925.  There  were  at  this  time 
few  judges  who  were  specialists  in  criminal 
law  and  in  1928  Humphreys  was  appointed 
to  the  King's  Bench  division  to  redress 
the  balance.  In  1946  he  was  sworn  of 
the  Privy  Council  and  when  he  retired 
in  1951  he  was  the  senior  and  oldest  King's 
Bench  judge. 

The  story  of  Humphreys's  life  is  the 
story  of  the  criminal  law  of  his  time.  He 
first  came  into  prominence  in  1895  when, 
led  by  Sir  Edward  Clarke  and  (Sir)  Charles 
Mathews  [qq.v.],  he  appeared  as  junior 
counsel  in  the  cases  linked  with  the 
downfall  of  Oscar  Wilde  [q.v.].  In  1910  he 
was  junior  counsel  in  the  prosecution  of 
H.  H.  Crippen  for  the  murder  of  his  wife. 


523 


Humphreys 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


He  afterwards  wrote  that  he  never 
regarded  Crippen  as  a  great  criminal ;  he 
considered  that  he  was  rightly  convicted, 
but  in  another  country  would  have  been 
given  the  benefit  of  'extenuating  circum- 
stances'. In  1912  he  was  junior  counsel  in 
the  prosecution  of  F.  H.  Seddon  for 
poisoning  Eliza  Barrow  with  arsenic. 
He  always  regarded  the  quality  of 
Seddon's  guilt  as  a  conclusive  justification 
for  the  retention  of  capital  punishment 
for  murder.  In  1915  he  appeared  with 
Bodkin  for  the  prosecution  at  the  trial 
of  G.  J.  Smith,  the  perpetrator  of  the 
'Brides  in  the  Bath'  murders.  In  1916  he 
was  one  of  the  brilliant  team  who  prose- 
cuted Sir  Roger  Casement  [q.v.]  for 
treason.  At  the  Central  Criminal  Court 
in  1922  the  calm  skill  of  his  cross- 
examination  secured  the  conviction  of 
Horatio  Bottomley  [q.v.]  for  fraudulent 
conversion.  In  the  same  year  he  was 
junior  to  the  solicitor-general  in  the 
prosecution  of  Frederick  Bywaters  and 
Edith  Thompson  for  the  murder  of  her 
husband.  In  1925  he  led  for  the  Crown  in 
the  prosecution  of  W.  C.  Hobbs,  the 
blackmailer  of  Sir  Hari  Singh. 

As  a  judge  he  tried  many  criminal 
cases  which  attracted  much  public  atten- 
tion. In  1932  he  presided  at  the  trial  of 
Mrs.  Barney,  a  society  woman  charged 
with  the  murder  of  her  lover  but  acquit- 
ted at  the  Central  Criminal  Court.  In 
the  following  year  he  tried  Leopold  Harris 
and  fifteen  other  persons  on  charges 
arising  out  of  systematic  arson  to  de- 
fraud insiu-ance  companies.  The  case 
lasted  thirty-three  days  and  his  summing- 
up  to  the  jury  took  thirteen  hours.  In 
1935  he  tried  Mrs.  Rattenbury  and  her 
young  lover,  George  Stoner,  for  the 
murder  of  her  husband.  The  man  was 
convicted,  but  did  not  hang ;  the  woman 
was  acquitted  but  committed  suicide. 
At  the  Lewes  assizes  in  1949  Humphreys 
presided  at  the  trial  of  J.  G.  Haigh,  the 
acid  bath  murderer.  The  defence  of 
insanity,  as  presented,  made  the  case 
particularly  difficult,  but,  although  eighty- 
two  years  old,  the  judge  handled  it  with 
conspicuous  efficiency  and  impeccable 
fairness. 

By  the  end  of  his  life  Humphreys  had 
become  in  the  public  mind  the  embodi- 
ment of  English  criminal  justice.  He  was 
vigorous,  spare  of  figure,  and  dry  in  man- 
ner, and  on  the  bench  he  was  quietly 
efficient,  without  either  vanity  or  display. 
Although  without  deep  learning,  he  was  an 
acknowledged  master  of  the  criminal  law. 


He  was  also  a  master  of  the  art  of  summing- 
up  and  approached  every  case  with  a  cool 
good  sense  and  knowledge  of  the  world, 
unimpressed  by  drama,  romance,  or 
'glamour'.  He  was  sociable  and  good 
company,  but  his  keen  sense  of  humour 
was  always  kept  rigorously  under  con- 
trol. This  was  characteristic  of  the  habits 
of  discipline  inherited  from  the  late 
Victorian  middle  class  from  which  he 
sprang.  His  views  on  crime  and  its 
consequences  were  strict  and  traditional 
without  sadism.  He  simply  believed  that 
punishment,  including  capital  and  cor- 
poral punishment,  helped  to  diminish 
crime  and  that  too  much  emphasis  on  the 
comfort  of  prisoners  encouraged  it.  He  also 
had  a  firm  faith  in  the  jury  system  and 
said  that  'a  jury,  rightly  directed,  is 
always  right'. 

In  1946  Humphreys  published  a  book 
of  reminiscences  under  the  title  Criminal 
Days,  which  included  a  vivid  account  of 
his  early  background  and  of  the  courts 
during  his  first  years  at  the  bar.  In  1953 
he  published  A  Book  of  Trials.  He  was  a 
popular  member  of  the  Garrick  Club  and 
also  an  enthusiastic  yachtsman.  He  died 
in  London  20  February  1956.  His  portrait 
by  Harold  Knight  is  at  the  Hall  of  the 
Saddlers'  Company  of  which  he  was 
prime  warden  in  1918. 

In  1896  Humphreys  married  Zoe 
Marguerite  (died  1953),  daughter  of  Henri 
Philippe  Neumans,  the  artist,  of  Antwerp. 
They  had  two  sons,  the  elder  of  whom  was 
killed  in  France  in  1917.  The  younger, 
(Travers)  Christmas  Humphreys,  Q.C., 
who  contributes  to  this  Supplement,  was 
himself  in  his  turn  senior  counsel  for  the 
Crown  at  the  Central  Criminal  Court  for 
many  years  and  appeared  before  his 
father  in  several  of  his  famous  cases ;  he 
was  appointed  an  additional  judge  of  the 
Central  Criminal  Court  in  1968. 

[The  Times,  21  February  1956 ;  Law  Times, 
2  March  1956;  Bechhofer  Roberts,  Sir 
Travers  Humphreys.  His  Career  and  Cases, 
1936 ;  Stanley  Jackson,  The  Life  and  Cases  of 
Mr.  Justice  Humphreys,  1952;  Douglas  G. 
Browne,  Sir  Travers  Humphreys,  I960.] 

F.  H.  COWPER. 


HUNTER,  PHILIP  VASSAR  (1883- 
1956),  electrical  engineer,  was  born  in 
the  Norfolk  village  of  Emneth  Hungate 
3  August  1883,  the  eldest  son  of  Josiah 
Hunter,  a  farmer,  and  his  wife  Sarah, 
daughter  of  Philip  Vassar,  a  neighbouring 
farmer.  He  was  educated  at  Wisbech 
Grammar  School  and  determined  at  an 


524 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Hunter 


early  age,  despite  his  father's  misgivings, 
to  follow  his  boyhood  idol,  Sebastian  de 
Ferranti  [q.v.],  in  the  new  and  exciting 
career  of  an  electrical  engineer.  From 
school  he  went  direct  to  Faraday  House 
where  in  1903  he  gained  his  diploma  with 
first  class  honours  and,  after  a  brief  period 
of  practical  training  under  Robert  Ham- 
mond, a  well-known  consulting  engineer, 
joined  in  1904  the  staff  of  C.  H.  Merz 
[q.v.]  and  William  McLellan  in  New- 
castle. Here  he  made  rapid  progress  and 
in  1909  became  head  of  the  electrical 
department,  specializing  in  high-voltage 
systems  and  inventing  new  types  of 
system  protection  such  as  the  Merz- 
Hunter  and  split-conductor  methods. 

In  1915  he  was  lent  to  the  Admiralty,  as 
the  engineering  director  in  a  special  team 
of  three  formed  within  the  anti-submarine 
division  under  the  eventual  leadership  of 
(Sir)  William  W.  Fisher  [q.v.].  Their  work 
culminated  in  the  evolution  of  the  ASDIC 
system  of  submarine  detection,  and  for  his 
part  in  this  development  Hunter  was  in 
1920  appointed  C.B.E. 

In  1919  he  joined  Callender's  Cable  & 
Construction  Company  where,  as  chief 
engineer  and  joint  manager,  and  later  as  a 
director,  he  devoted  his  energies  to  the 
development  of  high-voltage  power  cables. 
The  scope  of  his  work  during  this  period 
ranged  from  preoccupation,  in  1920,  with 
improving  the  design  of  33,000-volt 
cables  to  the  invention  of  the  buoyant 
cable  used  for  sweeping  magnetic  mines, 
and  to  sponsoring  in  1943  the  world's 
first  three-core  cable  for  132,000  volts. 
In  1934  he  initiated  the  company's 
research  laboratories  at  Wood  Lane,  and 
maintained  the  keenest  interest  in  their 
work  until  his  death.  In  1946,  on  the 
merging  of  the  company  with  British 
Insulated  Cables,  Ltd.,  he  became 
engineer-in-chief  of  British  Insulated 
Callender's  Cables,  and  from  1947  to  1952 
was  joint  deputy  chairman  of  the  new 
company.  He  was  also  chairman  of  nine, 
and  director  of  many  other,  electrical 
companies. 

As  a  sportsman  he  was  in  his  younger 
days  a  keen  skater  and  curler;  and  in 
1935,  after  some  years  as  secretary  and 
treasurer,  became  president  of  the  British 
Ice  Hockey  Association.  He  was  well 
known  as  an  enthusiastic  golfer,  and  was 
chairman  of  Addington  Golf  Club  of 
which  he  was  for  some  years  captain. 

Hunter  had  a  high  reputation,  both  in 
his  own  country  and  internationally, 
not  least  for  his  ability  to  select  the  vital 


and  essential  facts  from  a  complex 
situation;  and  having  done  so,  to  put 
forward  a  solution  with  clarity  and 
decisiveness.  This  gift  of  his  was  almost 
legendary,  and  many  a  harassed  com- 
mittee was  grateful  for  it. 

He  possessed  in  the  highest  degree  the 
quality  of  leadership,  selecting  his  lieu- 
tenants with  care  and  judgement,  trusting 
them  with  a  large  measure  of  individual 
responsibility  and  helping  them,  not  only 
with  wise  advice  but  with  unfailing 
support.  Although  he  was  a  man  of 
compelling  personality,  he  would  never 
use  it  to  beat  down  opposition.  Indeed, 
one  of  his  greatest  pleasures  was  to 
stimulate  discussion;  and  his  junior 
engineers  gratefully  recognized  that  their 
opinions  would  always  be  received  with 
courtesy  and  understanding,  so  long  as 
they  were  to  the  point  and  honestly  held. 
Quick  to  detect  promise  in  his  younger 
staff,  he  took  every  opportunity  of 
fostering  their  ability  and  helping  them 
to  greater  responsibility  in  their  profession. 

His  imperturbability  was  one  of  his 
notable  characteristics.  He  steadfastly 
refused  to  be  diverted  from  the  work  in 
hand,  whether  by  present  danger  or  by 
apprehension  about  the  future,  and  those 
who  remember  him  in  the  dark  days  of 
1940  recall  with  gratitude  the  steadying 
influence  he  exerted  on  all  who  worked 
with  him  then.  This  attitude  of  mind 
informed  all  that  he  did.  He  was  a  man  of 
astonishingly  equable  temper;  courteous, 
tolerant,  and  disdainful  of  provocation 
and  malice.  Few  ever  saw  him  angry. 

He  was  president  (1933-4)  of  the 
Institution  of  Electrical  Engineers,  and 
in  1951  achieved  the  ultimate  distinction 
of  honorary  membership.  He  was  chair- 
man of  many  professional  committees  and 
a  fellow  of  the  American  Institute  of 
Electrical  Engineers. 

He  was  the  author,  in  collaboration 
with  J.  Temple  Hazell,  of  a  comprehensive 
history  of  The  Development  of  Power 
Cables  (1956).  Much  of  the  subject 
matter  was  derived  from  a  collection 
which  he  and  Hazell  had  built  up,  over  a 
period  of  some  twenty  years,  illustrating 
the  development  of  cable-making  from 
1882  onwards;  and  this  was  eventually 
presented  to  the  Science  Museum,  where 
it  is  displayed  as  the  Hunter-Hazell 
collection. 

Hunter  had  three  daughters — ^two  by 
his  first  wife,  Helen  Maud,  daughter  of 
Charles  Colder,  whom  he  married  in  1904, 
and  one  by  his  second  marriage  after  the 


525 


Hunter 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


death  of  his  first  wife,  in  1947,  to  Ruby 

PhyUis  Hudson,  of  Heme  Bay.  He  died  at 

Addington,  Surrey,  22  October  1956. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.  Temple  Hazell. 

HUTCHISON,  Sir  ROBERT,  first 
baronet,  of  Thurle  (1871-1960),  physician 
and  paediatrician,  was  born  at  Carlowrie 
House,  Kirkliston,  West  Lothian,  28  Octo- 
ber 1871,  the  youngest  of  seven  children. 
His  father,  Robert  Hutchison,  was  a  part- 
ner in  the  family  wine  business  in  Leith 
but  in  later  life  played  the  part  of  a 
minor  country  gentleman  with  a  keen 
interest  in  forestry  on  which  he  was  an 
acknowledged  expert  and  the  author  of 
a  number  of  papers.  His  mother  was 
Mary  Jemima,  daughter  of  the  Rev. 
Adam  Duncan  Tait,  minister  of  Kirk- 
liston. His  eldest  brother.  Sir  Thomas 
Hutchison,  first  baronet,  of  Hardiston, 
was  lord  provost  of  Edinburgh  in  1921-3. 

Although  his  parents  were  far  from 
poor  Hutchison's  early  life  was  by  no 
means  pampered.  He  was  educated  at  the 
Collegiate  School  and  at  the  university  of 
Edinburgh  where  he  qualified  with  his 
basic  medical  degrees  with  the  highest 
honours  in  1893.  Of  his  subsequent 
resident  hospital  appointments  the  most 
significant  was  at  the  Sick  Children's 
Hospital  in  Edinburgh.  After  this  he 
paid  visits  to  Strasbourg  and  Paris,  and 
was  appointed  to  a  junior  post  in  the 
department  of  chemical  pathology  in 
Edinburgh.  He  obtained  his  M.D.  in  1896 
and  in  the  same  year  moved  to  London 
when  he  began  as  a  junior  resident  at  the 
Hospital  for  Sick  Children,  Great  Ormond 
Street.  An  appointment  to  the  depart- 
ment of  physiology  at  the  London 
Hospital  medical  school  was  an  interlude 
before  1900  when  he  was  appointed  to  the 
visiting  staff  of  Great  Ormond  Street 
Hospital  and  assistant  physician  to  the 
London  Hospital  where  he  looked  after 
both  adults  and  children.  He  was  elected 
F.R.C.P.  in  1903. 

Hutchison  early  showed  a  talent  for 
teaching,  both  verbally  and  by  the 
written  word.  His  Clinical  Methods  (1897, 
with  H.  Rainy)  was  long  a  standard  work, 
and  in  1900,  the  year  of  his  senior  hospital 
appointments,  he  published  his  famous 
Food  and  the  Principles  of  Dietetics.  In 
1904  he  showed  where  his  main  interest 
lay  when  he  published  his  Lectures  on 
Diseases  of  Children.  His  prowess  as  a 
teacher  and  writer  grew.  At  the  time  of  a 
celebratory  issue  of  the  Archives  of  Disease 


in  Childhood  on  the  occasion  of  his 
eightieth  birthday  in  1951  there  was  a 
list  of  276  references  to  books,  articles, 
lectures,  and  letters  to  the  press.  He 
developed  a  busy  consultant  practice 
in  London  and  received  many  distinc- 
tions including  honorary  degrees  from 
Edinburgh,  Oxford,  Birmingham,  and 
Melbourne.  He  was  president  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Medicine  (1934r-5)  and  of  the 
Royal  College  of  Physicians  of  London 
(1938-41)  and  Harveian  orator  in  1931. 

Those  who  worked  for  Hutchison 
developed  a  devotion  and  admiration  just 
short  of  idolatry.  His  tall,  slim  figure,  his 
retained  Scottish  accent,  his  scathing 
tongue,  all  created  a  distinctive  personality. 
His  academic  and  scientific  position  for  his 
period  was  clearly  paramount.  Even  before 
the  reason  for  its  value  was  clear, 
Hutchison  was  giving  cod-liver-oil  to 
poorly  nourished  children.  He  taught  well 
and  interestingly;  his  judgements  and 
advice  were  sound,  kindly,  and  helpful. 
He  gave  up  his  hospital  appointments  in 
1934  and  was  created  a  baronet  in  1939. 
After  retirement  to  Berkshire  in  1940  he 
held  court  for  his  previous  pupils  and 
successors.  As  a  doting  grandfather  he 
belied  much  of  what  his  attitude  to 
parents  and  children  had  suggested  in 
earlier  days.  His  warm  heart  was  sheltered 
behind  a  keen  intellect  and  defensive 
manner.  His  pupils  all  over  the  world 
readily  acknowledged  his  influence  and 
untold  numbers  of  children  owed  much  to 
his  skill. 

In  1905  Hutchison  married  a  qualified 
practitioner,  Laetitia  Nora  (died  1964), 
daughter  of  the  (Very)  Rev.  William  Moore 
Ede,  dean  of  Worcester  in  1908-34.  They 
had  five  children  of  whom  one  died  at  birth 
and  a  son  died  from  an  infection  sustained 
during  his  anatomical  studies  as  a  medical 
student  at  Oxford.  Two  sons  and  one 
daughter  survived;  the  eldest  son,  Peter 
(born  1907),  succeeded  his  father  when 
he  died  at  Thurle  Grange,  Streatley-on- 
Thames,  12  February  1960. 

A  portrait  by  (Sir)  James  Gunn  was 
presented  to  the  Royal  College  of  Physi- 
cians by  Lady  Hutchison  in  1960. 

[The  Times,  13  February  1960;  British 
Medical  Journal  and  Lancet,  20  February 
1960 ;  Journal  qf  Pediatrics,  January  1961 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Alan  Moncrieff. 

ILCHESTER,  sixth  Earl  of  (1874-1959), 
landowner  and  historian.  [See  fox- 
Strangways,  Giles  Stephen  Holland.] 


526 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Ince 


ILIFFE,  EDWARD  MAUGER,  first 
Baron  Iliffe  (1877-1960),  newspaper 
and  periodical  proprietor,  was  born  in 
Coventry  17  May  1877,  the  younger  son 
of  William  Isaac  Iliffe,  printer  and 
stationer,  and  his  wife,  Annette,  daughter 
of  James  Coker,  of  Guernsey.  The  elder 
Ihffe  turned  his  attention  to  the  production 
of  periodicals  and  newspapers.  He  had  the 
foresight  to  see  a  future  for  the  new 
forms  of  mechanical  transport,  cycling, 
motoring,  and  aviation,  and  the  three 
journals  which  he  founded  to  cover  these 
subjects  remained  authoritative  and  well 
considered:  Cycling  (1891),  the  Autocar 
(1895),  and  Flight  (1909).  Iliffe  also  founded 
the  Coventry  Evening  Telegraph  in  1891 
and  it  was  on  this  daily  journal  that  his 
son  was  first  employed  at  the  age  of 
seventeen.  He  proved  an  able  Ueutenant, 
and  as  the  firm  of  Iliffe  &  Sons  expanded, 
especially  on  the  technical  side,  took  an 
ever  greater  part  in  the  management. 
— oMire  into  t"-^'"  death  the  periodical 
business  was  Vx^'^ved  to  London,  where  it 
continued  to  prosper  and  expand. 

Early  in  the  twenties  Iliffe  became 
associated  with  two  brothers  from  Merthyr 
Tydfil,  William  and  Gomer  Berry,  better 
known  as  Lords  Camrose  [q.v.]  and 
Kemsley,  who  were  moving  on  from 
success  to  success  as  periodical  pro- 
prietors. In  1924  they  formed  Allied 
Newspapers,  Ltd.,  to  take  over  from 
Lord  Rothermere  [q.v.]  a  group  of 
Manchester  and  London  newspapers  which 
he  had  acquired  from  the  first  Sir  Edward 
Hulton  [q.v.]  the  year  before.  The  group, 
with  which  Iliffe  was  associated,  also 
owned  the  Sunday  Times.  In  1927  the 
three  associated  owners  had  perhaps  their 
most  resounding  success,  in  the  shape  of 
an  offer  by  Lord  Burnham  [q.v.]  for 
them  to  take  over  the  Daily  Telegraph. 
The  change  of  proprietorship  took  place 
on  1  January  1928.  The  character  of  the 
paper  remained  unaltered,  but  when  on 
1  December  1930  the  price  of  2d.  was 
halved,  the  sale,  in  Lord  Camrose's 
words,  'practically  doubled  itself  in  one 
day'.  After  nine  years  of  working  together 
the  three  peers  decided,  in  January  1937, 
to  split  their  holdings,  and  Iliffe  took  over 
the  valuable  property  of  Kelly's  Direc- 
tories. In  the  provinces  he  acquired  in 
1943  the  Birmingham  Post  and  the 
Birmingham  Mail. 

Iliffe  had  sundry  interests  outside  the 
journalistic  field.  In  1917-18  he  served 
as  controller  of  the  machine  tool  depart- 
ment of  the  Ministry  of  Munitions.  He  sat 


in  Parliament  as  a  Conservative  for 
Tamworth  from  1923  to  1929.  He  was 
master  of  three  City  livery  companies: 
the  Stationers  and  Newspaper  Makers, 
the  Coachmakers  and  Coach  Harness 
Makers,  and  the  Clockmakers.  He  was 
president  of  the  Association  of  British 
Chambers  of  Commerce  in  1932-3  and  of 
the  Periodical  Proprietors'  Association  in 
1935-8.  He  had  a  considerable  stake  in 
insurance,  being  a  member  of  Lloyd's, 
chairman  of  the  Guildhall  Insurance 
Company,  and  a  director  of  the  London 
Assurance. 

In  1926  Iliffe  acquired  the  estate  of 
Yattendon,  in  Berkshire,  which  he  event- 
ually greatly  expanded.  He  was  appointed 
C.B.E.  in  1918,  knighted  in  1922,  raised 
to  the  peerage  in  1933,  and  appointed 
G.B.E.  in  1946.  In  the  war  of  1939-45  he 
was  chairman  of  the  Duke  of  Gloucester's 
Red  Cross  and  St.  John  Fund  which 
raised  over  £50  million.  He  showed 
cultural  interests  by  benefactions  to 
Coventry  City  School  and  Sherborne 
School,  and  he  served  as  president  of  the 
trustees  of  the  Shakespeare  Memorial 
Theatre  (1933-58).  As  a  young  man  he 
excelled  at  lawn  tennis  and  he  continued 
to  follow  the  game  in  later  life.  He  was 
president  of  the  International  Lawn 
Tennis  Club  of  Great  Britain  from  1945 
to  1959. 

In  1902  Iliffe  married  Charlotte, 
daughter  of  Henry  Gilding,  J.P.,  of  Gate- 
acre,  Liverpool.  They  had  one  daughter 
and  two  sons,  the  elder  of  whom,  Edward 
Langton  (born  1908),  succeeded  to  the 
title  when  Iliffe  died  in  London  25  July 
1960.  A  portrait  by  Frank  O.  Salisbury 
is  in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[The  Times,  26  July  1960;  Bernard  Falk, 
Five  Years  Dead,  1937;  Viscount  Camrose, 
British  Newspapers  and  their  Controllers,  1947 ; 
Repm-t  of  the  Royal  Commission  on  the  Press, 
1947-9,  1949 ;  private  information.] 

Herbert  B.  Grimsditch. 

INCE,  Sir  GODFREYHERBERT(1891- 
1960),  civil  servant,  the  eldest  son  of 
George  Alfred  Reynolds  Ince,  solicitor's 
clerk,  and  his  wife,  Emma  Budgen,  was 
born  at  Redhill  25  September  1801. 
From  Reigate  Grammar  School  he  went 
with  a  county  major  scholarship  to 
University  College,  London,  where  he  had 
a  brilliant  career,  graduating  B.Sc.  in 
1913  with  first  class  honours  in  mathe- 
matics, and  in  successive  years  was  senior 
mathematics  and  senior  physics  prizeman. 
He    was   a   keen   and   proficient   games 


627 


Ince 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


player  and  excelled  at  association  football. 
He  organized  and  captained  the  first 
university  of  London  team  and,  as  he 
never  tired  of  recalling  in  his  later  life, 
took  it  to  Moscow,  returning  triumphant. 

In  the  war  of  1914-18  Ince  held  com- 
missioned rank  in  the  East  Lancashire 
brigade  of  the  Royal  Field  Artillery  and 
was  wounded  in  action  while  attached  to 
the  Royal  Engineers.  In  February  1919 
he  became  a  first  class  clerk  in  the  Ministry 
of  Labour  which  was  to  be  his  official 
home  and  the  centre  of  his  activities  until 
his  retirement  in  1956.  His  early  years 
were  spent  in  what  was  later  known  as 
the  industrial  relations  department,  and 
he  acted  as  secretary  to  a  number  of 
courts  of  inquiry,  notably  that  on  dock 
labour  (1920)  under  the  chairmanship  of 
Lord  Shaw  (later  Lord  Craigmyle,  q.v.). 
In  1928  Ince  was  transferred  to  the 
employment  and  insurance  department 
where  his  phenomenal  memory  and 
mathematical  brain  enabled  him  to  become 
quickly  an  expert  on  unemployment 
insurance.  Two  years  later  he  was  ap- 
pointed principal  private  secretary  to  the 
minister,  Margaret  Bondfield  [q.v.],  and 
acted  in  a  similar  capacity  to  her  im- 
mediate successors.  In  1933  he  was 
appointed  chief  insurance  officer  ^vith  the 
rank  of  assistant  secretary. 

In  1936-7  Ince  was  loaned  to  the 
Commonwealth  Government  of  Australia 
to  advise  on  national  unemployment 
insurance.  He  made  a  thorough  exami- 
nation of  the  conditions  in  the  different 
states  and  produced  a  comprehensive 
report.  This  was  the  type  of  work  in 
which,  with  his  powers  of  concentration 
and  his  delight  in  analjiiical  tables,  he  was 
completely  at  home.  His  efforts  were 
rewarded  with  an  honorarium  of  £400  as 
a  mark  of  the  gratitude  of  the  Australian 
Government. 

After  his  return  to  England  Ince  was 
promoted  principal  assistant  secretary 
(1938)  and  in  May  1939  was  put  in  charge 
of  the  military  recruiting  department, 
where  it  fell  to  him  to  make  arrangements 
for  implementing  the  Military  Training 
Act.  Registrations  were  to  take  place  at 
the  local  offices  of  the  Ministry  of  Labour, 
which  thus  assumed  national  service 
functions  which  it  continued  to  exercise 
in  the  succeeding  years.  At  the  outbreak 
of  war  the  Military  Training  Act  was  super- 
seded by  the  National  Service  (Armed 
Forces)  Act,  and  Ince,  who  was  promoted 
to  be  an  under-secretary  in  January  1940, 
became     closely     associated     with     the 


arrangements  for  call-up.  This  was  work 
for  which  by  temperament  he  was 
admirably  suited.  A  strong-willed  man  of 
action,  in  times  of  crisis  he  was  imper- 
turbable and  indefatigable.  Of  natural 
administrative  gifts  himself,  he  did  not 
make  the  mistake  of  trying  to  keep  every- 
thing in  his  own  hands,  but  delegated 
authority  to  his  staff  with  particular  care 
that  they  understood  clearly  what  they 
had  to  do.  The  success  with  which  he 
handled  this  exacting  task  was  recognized 
by  Ernest  Bevin  [q.v.]  who  in  June  1941 
appointed  him  director-general  of  man- 
power. This  new  post  was  designed  to 
bring  under  a  single  control  the  national 
service,  military  recruiting,  and  labour 
supply  departments  with  their  related 
problems.  Under  the  permanent  secretary 
the  director  was  made  immediately 
responsible  to  the  minister  for  all  matters 
affecting  the  call-up  to  the  forces  and 
the  supply  of  civilian  IjjJ^'^^^-Tiir.?^  vho 
continued  to  hold  this  (itu*?:  and  helpfiily 
the  end  of  the  war,  was  in  close  sympathy 
with  the  aims  and  ideas  of  his  minister, 
nor  was  he  afraid  to  criticize  his  schemes 
when  they  appeared  to  be  inopportune  or 
impracticable.  Bevin  on  his  side  valued 
Ince's  judgement  and  found  it  easy  to 
work  with  a  man  whose  advice  was  plain 
and  direct  and  not  hedged  about  with 
debating  subtleties.  There  thus  grew  up 
between  the  two  men  a  sense  of  mutual 
confidence,  and  the  fruit  of  their  co- 
operative thinking  was  the  successful 
mobilization  of  the  manpower  of  the 
country. 

In  these  three  years  of  constant  strain 
and  ever-expanding  responsibilities  Ince's 
exceptional  gifts  found  their  highest 
fulfilment.  With  a  great  devotion  to  his 
Ministry  he  welcomed  its  transformation 
into  a  major  department  of  state  and  the 
consequent  increasing  authority  which  it 
was  able  to  exercise  in  the  determination 
of  national  policy.  It  would  not  be 
imfair  to  add  that  with  an  innate  streak 
of  vanity  and  personal  ambition  he 
enjoyed  the  power  which  fell  into  his  own 
hands  and  the  wide  appreciation  of  his 
achievements.  Convinced  of  the  soundness 
of  his  own  judgements  he  was  not  always 
an  easy  person  with  whom  to  negotiate. 
He  was  at  times  unwilling,  or  perhaps 
unable,  to  admit  the  honesty  of  opinions 
running  counter  to  his  own,  and  the 
strident  tones  in  which  he  tried  to  dominate 
a  conference  tended  to  exacerbate,  when  a 
little  persuasiveness  might  well  have  recon- 
ciled, his  opponents.  But  these  defects,  if 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Inge 


betraying  a  lack  of  mental  flexibility, 
reflected  the  fearless  determination  which 
was  the  essence  of  his  character. 

In  November  1944  Ince  was  chosen  to 
succeed  Sir  Thomas  Phillips  as  permanent 
secretary  of  the  Ministry,  and  this  post  he 
held  until  his  retirement  on  1  February 
1956.  The  plan  ultimately  approved  for 
the  demobilization  of  the  forces  owed  much 
to  his  methodical  and  practical  approach 
and  to  his  insistence  upon  a  procedure 
which  would  be  simple,  equitable,  and 
intelligible.  He  was  much  involved  in 
plans  for  the  resettlement  of  men  and 
women  from  the  Services  in  civilian  life, 
and  he  was  chairman  of  a  number  of 
committees  on  this  problem.  Another  of 
his  major  interests  was  the  young,  and 
in  particular  the  importance  of  helping 
boys  and  girls  on  leaving  school  to  choose 
and  train  for  worthwhile  jobs  and  careers. 
He  presided  over  a  committee  of  edu- 
cationists and  industrialists  set  up  to 
inquire  into  the  working  of  the  Juvenile 
Employment  Service.  This  report,  which 
bears  his  name,  was  issued  in  1945  and 
has  become  the  foundation  on  which  the 
Youth  Employment  Service  has  been 
developed,  with  vocational  guidance  its 
most  distinctive  feature. 

As  wartime  controls  with  which  the 
Ministry  of  Labour  was  concerned  were 
gradually  relaxed  or  removed,  it  was  not 
surprising  that  there  were  calls  for  re- 
ductions in  its  large  staff.  Ince  did  not 
take  kindly  to  these  suggestions.  He  had 
built  up  a  departmental  empire  and  he 
was  loath  to  accept  any  diminution  of  its 
powers.  There  was  another  and  more 
commendable  reason  for  his  intransigence. 
He  was  always  deeply  interested  in  the 
welfare  of  his  staff  and  encouraged  social 
gatherings  and  athletic  contests,  in  which 
he  liked  to  take  part.  He  was  therefore 
anxious  to  ensure  that  as  far  as  possible 
they  should  continue  in  post  until  reaching 
the  normal  age  of  retirement.  Ironically 
enough  this  human  regard  for  his  staff 
met  with  little  apparent  response.  Apart 
from  his  work  and  sport  Ince  had  few,  if 
any,  outside  interests,  and  he  had  no 
small  talk.  He  was  shy  and  taciturn,  he 
neither  drank  nor  smoked,  and  he  was  a 
little  intimidating  to  a  stranger  or  a 
junior.  His  fairly  frequent  visits  to  local 
offices  tended  to  frighten  rather  than 
stimulate. 

On  his  retirement,  until  his  death  in 
Wimbledon  20  December  1960,  Ince  was 
chairman  of  Cable  and  Wireless  and  its 
associated     overseas     telecommunication 


companies.  He  enjoyed  the  travelling 
which  his  duties  made  possible,  especially 
on  one  occasion  when  his  arrival  in 
Australia  coincided  with  the  opening  of 
the  Olympic  Games.  This  insatiable 
appetite  for  watching  sporting  events — 
he  was  a  familiar  figure  at  White  Hart 
Lane  and  the  Oval — made  him  in  1957 
an  obvious  choice  for  membership  of  the 
Wolfenden  committee  on  sport. 

Ince  was  appointed  C.B.  (1941),  K.B.E. 
(1943),  K.C.B.  (1946),  and  G.C.B.  (1951). 
His  old  college  elected  him  to  a  fellow- 
ship in  1946  and  in  1951  he  received  an 
honorary  LL.D.  from  the  university  of 
London. 

In  1918  Ince  married  Ethel  Doris, 
daughter  of  Charles  Maude,  of  North- 
allerton, by  whom  he  had  three  daughters. 

A  portrait  by  Harold  Knight  is  in  thei 
possession  of  the  family.  • 

[H.  M.  D.  Parker,  Manpower  (History  o^ 
the  Second  World  War.  Civil  Series),  1957; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
.-^^if^ii^vi  .  H.  M.  D.  Parker. 

INGE,  WILLIAM  RALPH  (1860-1954), 
dean  of  St.  Paul's,  was  born  6  June  1860 
at  Crayke,  Yorkshire,  the  elder  son  of 
William  Inge,  then  curate  of  Crayke  and 
later  provost  of  Worcester  College,  Oxford, 
and  his  wife,  Susanna  Mary,  daughter  of 
Edward  Churton  [q.v.],  archdeacon  of 
Cleveland.  His  childhood  was  spent  in 
Crayke,  then  an  isolated  parish  in  the 
North  Riding.  He  was  educated  by  his 
parents  at  home  and,  in  later  life,  re- 
garded this  as  a  great  advantage.  'No 
children',  he  wrote  in  Vale  (1934),  'now 
have  such  a  good  education  as  we  had,  for 
both  our  parents,  who  were  scholarly, 
and  admirable  teachers,  gave  up  a  great 
part  of  every  day  to  their  family,  instead 
of  sending  them  off  to  school.'  He  was 
brought  up  in  the  Tractarian  tradition  of 
Anglican  piety  and,  although  he  after- 
wards became  acutely  critical  of  the 
theology  of  that  school,  he  owed,  no 
doubt,  not  a  little  of  the  bent  of  his  mind 
towards  mysticism  to  the  training  in 
devotion  which  he  received  in  his  early 
years. 

In  1874  he  was  elected,  second  on  the 
list,  to  an  Eton  scholarship.  At  Eton  he 
worked  hard — as  he  came  to  believe  later, 
too  hard — and  in  1879  went  up  to 
Cambridge  as  a  scholar  of  King's  College. 
He  described  his  academic  career  as 
'mainly  a  record  of  scholarships  and 
prizes'.  Among  them  were  the  Bell, 
Porson,  and  Craven  scholarships.  He  took 


529 


Inge 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


a  first  class  in  both  parts  of  the  classical 
tripos  (1882-3)  and  was  senior  Chancellor's 
medallist  (1883).  In  1885  he  was  Hare 
prizeman.  After  leaving  Cajnbridge,  he 
was  for  fom:  years  a  master  at  Eton,  but 
did  not  find  the  work  of  a  schoolmaster 
congenial,  and  indeed  he  was  not  suited  in 
temperament.  In  1888  he  was  elected 
fellow  and  tutor  of  Hertford  College, 
Oxford,  being  concerned  mainly  with 
classical  teaching.  In  the  same  year  he 
was  ordained  deacon,  but  did  not  present 
himself  for  priest's  orders  until  four  years 
later.  There  seems  to  be  httle  doubt  that 
this  delay  was  due  to  some  uncertainty 
about  his  vocation  which  probably  arose 
mainly  from  intellectual  difficulties.  He 
has  left  on  record  the  fact  that  his  interest 
in  philosophy  did  not  begin  until  his  Oxford 
period  and  that  he  was  seeking,  at  that 
time,  for  a  'sound  intellectual  basis'  for 
his  religious  belief.  The  years  during  which 
he  was  a  fellow  of  Hertford  were  the  time 
when  he  thought  out  his  fundamental  ideas. 

From  his  childhood  up  to  his  marriage, 
Inge  was  subject  to  recurrent  fits  of 
melancholia  and,  from  a  comparatively 
early  age,  was  afflicted  by  deafness,  which 
grew  worse  in  later  years.  These  two 
disabihties  affected  his  outlook  on  life  to 
some  extent  and,  perhaps,  were  partly 
responsible  for  a  certain  aloofness  and 
detachment  which  characterized  both  his 
thought  and  his  personality.  Inge  was 
inclined  to  attribute  his  melancholy  fits 
to  overwork  while  he  was  at  school  and  in 
Cambridge,  but  it  appears  that  this  could 
not  have  been  more  than  a  contributory 
cause. 

In  1899  he  was  Bampton  lecturer  and 
it  is  illuminating  to  learn  from  one  who 
was  his  pupil  at  Hertford  that  Inge's 
appointment  surprised  the  undergraduates 
as  'he  had  not  previously  been  thought  to 
be  at  all  interested  in  theological  specula- 
tions'. The  subject  of  his  lectures  was 
'Christian  Mysticism'  and  Inge  chose  it 
because  he  had  become  convinced  of  two 
propositions:  first,  that  the  nature  of 
religious  experience  was  the  most  impor- 
tant problem  for  theology  at  that  time; 
and,  secondly,  that  in  mysticism  we  have 
religious  experience  in  its  most  concen- 
trated and  undiluted  form.  Christian 
Mysticism  (1899)  was  widely  read  and 
Inge  soon  became  known  as  one  of  the 
foremost  writers  on  religion  of  the  day. 
The  book  was,  in  fact,  important  in  that 
it  opened  up  new  ground  and  had  a 
considerable  influence  on  theological  think- 
ing. Interest  in  mysticism,  and  study  of 


the  mystics,  increased  and  other  authors, 
such  as  von  Hiigel  and  Evelyn  Underbill 
[qq.v.],  followed  him  with  notable  contri- 
butions to  the  subject. 

In  1905  Inge  became  vicar  of  All 
Saints',  Ennismore  Gardens,  and  in  the 
same  year  married  Mary  Catharine, 
daughter  of  Henry  Maxwell  Spooner, 
archdeacon  of  Maidstone,  and  niece  of 
W.  A.  Spooner  [q.v.],  warden  of  New 
College.  Inge  always  regarded  his  marriage 
as  the  most  fortunate  event  of  his  life — 
and  with  justice,  for  it  was  the  beginning 
of  a  partnership  which  brought  him  the 
peace  of  an  affectionate  home  life  and  also 
the  cessation  of  his  moods  of  depression. 
Inge's  brief  experience  of  the  life  of  a 
parish  priest  ended  in  1907,  when  he 
was  elected  Lady  Margaret's  professor 
of  divinity  at  Cambridge  and  fellow  of 
Jesus  College.  He  resumed  his  studies  of 
mysticism  and  of  Platonism  in  Christian 
theology.  Plotinus  had  already  attracted 
his  attention  and  he  now  began  the 
collection  of  material  for  a  work  on  that 
philosopher.  The  most  significant  books 
published  in  this  period  were  Personal 
Idealism  and  Mysticism  (1907)  and  Faith 
and  its  Psychology  (1909).  The  latter, 
although  it  did  not  approach  some  of  his 
other  writings  in  f)opularity,  was  always 
regarded  by  Inge  as  one  of  his  best  books. 
In  1911  Speculum  Animae,  four  addresses 
to  university  teachers  and  schoolmasters, 
revealed  something  of  Inge's  personal 
religion. 

In  the  same  year  he  was  appointed 
dean  of  St.  Paul's.  The  choice  of  the 
Crown  came  as  a  surprise  to  the  general 
public  and  to  Inge  himself.  He  had 
looked  forward  to  an  academic  career  and 
accepted  the  nomination  to  St.  Paul's 
with  hesitation.  He  brought  distinction 
to  an  office  which  had  been  held  by  many 
eminent  scholars  and  he  reflected  that  'by 
tradition  the  Deanery  of  St.  Paul's  is  the 
most  literary  appointment  in  the  Church 
of  England'.  His  tenure  of  that  office  was 
not  without  difficulties  and  disagreements. 
The  Chapter  was  not  in  sympathy  with 
his  liberal  type  of  theology,  and  he  found 
it  hard  to  get  co-operation  from  the 
canons.  Towards  the  end  of  his  time  at 
St.  Paul's  he  was  in  a  happier  position, 
but  by  then  his  interests  had  become 
largely  directed  on  other  matters  and  much 
of  his  energy  was  absorbed  in  writing. 
He  was,  however,  a  diligent  attendant  at 
the  cathedral  services  and  loved  Wren's 
great  church.  He  remained  in  the  deanery 
throughout  the  war  of  1914^18  and  took 


530 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Inge 


part  in  the  raising  of  funds  for  the  preser- 
vation of  St.  Paul's  when,  after  the  war, 
it  was  found  that  the  dome  was  in  danger 
of  collapsing.  His  chief  service  to  the 
cathedral  was  his  preaching  which  at- 
tracted increasing  congregations  up  to  the 
date  of  his  retirement.  He  preached  as  he 
had  lectured  with  no  oratorical  art  and 
with  his  eyes  fixed  upon  his  manuscript. 
His  power  lay  in  the  impression  of  his 
personality,  his  originality  of  thought, 
and  his  gift  of  startling  epigram.  Men 
recognized  that  he  was  a  preacher  who  was 
always  thinking  for  himself  and  speaking 
the  truth  that  he  had  found. 

Inge  became  a  great  popular  figure  with 
a  nickname — 'the  gloomy  dean' — largely 
because  of  his  journalistic  activity.  His 
weekly  articles  in  the  Evening  Standard 
(1921-46)  were  one  of  the  best-known 
features  of  the  periodical  press  and  were 
widely  discussed.  He  attacked  what  he 
believed  to  be  superstitions  of  the  day, 
among  them  the  optimism  of  those  who 
thought  that  the  'war  to  end  war'  had 
really  succeeded  in  doing  so  and  the 
conception  of  'progress'  as  an  inevitable 
process ;  nor  did  he  conceal  his  contempt 
for  'democracy'.  The  title,  'gloomy  dean', 
arose  no  doubt  chiefly  from  his  criticism 
of  popular  illusions.  When  war  broke  out 
in  1939  he  remarked  that  he  had  not  fore- 
told anything  as  bad  as  what  actually  hap- 
pened. Two  volumes,  entitled  Outspoken 
Essays  (1919-22),  which  had  a  great 
success  with  the  educated  public,  presented 
clearly  and  forcibly  his  views  on  theo- 
logical and  political  problems  and  included 
in  the  second  volume  a  'Confessio  Fidei' 
which  is  the  most  succinct  statement  in 
existence  of  his  fundamental  religious 
convictions. 

In  1917-18  he  delivered  the  Gifford 
lectures  on  'The  Philosophy  of  Plotinus' 
in  the  university  of  St.  Andrews.  Inge 
regarded  this  (published  in  two  volumes, 
1918)  as  his  magnum  opus,  and  with 
reason.  He  had  long  been  preparing  for 
this  opportunity  and,  in  the  fulfilment  of 
the  task,  he  displayed  his  sound  classical 
scholarship,  his  philosophical  acuteness, 
and  his  knowledge  of  mystical  devotion. 
He  was  criticized  by  some  theologians  as 
being  more  Platonist  than  Christian,  but 
he,  like  St.  Augustine,  was  careful  to 
point  out  where  Plotinus  fell  short  of  the 
Christian  doctrines  of  God,  the  Incarna- 
tion, and  immortality.  At  the  same  time, 
he  did  not  hide  the  fact  that  he  held  the 
philosophy  of  Plotinus  to  be  the  most 
congenial  to  him  of  all  the  great  systems. 


A  small  book,  Personal  Religion  and  the 
Life  of  Devotion  (1924),  had  a  considerable 
influence  and  is  specially  remarkable  for 
a  moving  chapter  on  'Bereavement',  in 
which  he  commemorated  his  daughter, 
Margaret  Paula,  who  died  in  childhood. 
The  book  was  prefaced  by  a  touching 
Latin  poem,  '/n  memoriam  Filiolae 
Dilectissimae\  Christian  Ethics  and  Modern 
Problems  (1930)  was  called  forth  by  Inge's 
feeling  that  one  of  the  most  menacing 
challenges  to  Christian  faith  came  from 
modern  developments  of  moral  ideas  and 
conduct.  God  and  the  Astronomers  (1933) 
dealt  with  scientific  cosmologies  and  their 
relation  to  theology  and  is  probably  the 
most  comprehensive  and  systematic  pre- 
sentation of  his  metaphysical  theories.  This 
was  the  essence  of  the  matter  as  Inge  saw 
it :  'Our  citizenship  is  in  heaven,  that  is  to 
say,  in  a  spaceless  and  timeless  world  in 
which  all  the  intrinsic  or  absolute  values 
are  both  actual  and  active.  In  this  higher 
world  we  find  God  and  our  own  eternity. 
It  is  the  only  completely  real  world.' 

Inge  was  probably  the  last  dean  of 
St.  Paul's  to  be  able  to  make  full  use  of 
the  opportunities  for  hospitality  offered 
by  the  beautiful  but  very  large  house 
assigned  to  the  office.  He  and  his  wife 
made  it  the  centre  of  a  cultivated  social 
life. 

Inge  was  for  some  years  president  of  the 
Modern  Churchmen's  Union  until  he 
ceased  to  be  dean  of  St.  Paul's.  After  his 
retirement  in  1934  he  continued  to  write, 
for  the  most  part  books  of  a  popular 
character,  although  he  reviewed  learned 
books  on  Platonism  and  allied  subjects. 
Among  his  later  writings,  The  Diary  of  a 
Dean  (1949),  A  Rustic  Moralist  (1937), 
and  Talks  in  a  Free  Country  (1942)  may 
be  mentioned.  The  outbreak  of  war  in 
1939  found  Inge  in  much  the  same 
position  as  he  had  held  in  1914 — both 
wars  were,  in  his  opinion,  unnecessary 
and  could  have  been  avoided  by  wiser 
statesmanship.  He  was  not  averse  from 
'doing  a  deal  with  Hitler'.  The  death  of 
his  wife  in  1949  was  a  heavy  blow  to  him, 
but  he  continued  to  preach  and  lecture 
almost  to  the  end  of  his  life.  Almost  his 
last  public  lecture  was  on  the  theology 
of  Origen.  This  was  appropriate  for,  like 
the  Christian  Platonist  of  Alexandria, 
Inge  believed  that  there  is  a  philosophia 
perennis  which  is  in  harmony  with  the 
Christian  faith  properly  understood  and 
his  constant  endeavour  was  to  elucidate 
the  indestructible  truth  in  Christianity 
behind    the    partial    truths    of    popular 


531 


Inge 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


religion.  His  last  public  lecture  was  on  the 
faith  of  St.  Paul  in  Westminster  Abbey 
(1951).  When  Inge  died  at  his  home, 
Brightwell  Manor,  Wallingford,  26 
February  1954,  he  had  to  a  large  extent 
outUved  his  popular  reputation.  The 
journalist  and  controversial  figure  were 
forgotten,  but  his  solid  contributions  to 
religious  thought  remain. 

Inge  was  appointed  C.V.O.  in  1918  and 
K.C.V.O.  m  1930.  He  proceeded  B.D. 
and  D.D.  at  Cambridge  in  1909,  was  the 
recipient  of  a  number  of  honorary  degrees, 
was  an  honorary  fellow  of  Hertford  College, 
Oxford,  and  of  Jesus  and  King's  colleges, 
Cambridge,  and  a  lecturer  on  many 
endowments.  He  was  elected  F.B.A.  in 
1921,  presided  over  the  Aristotelian 
Society  in  1920-21  and  over  the  Classical 
Association  in  1933. 

He  had  three  sons  and  two  daughters. 
The  youngest  son,  Richard  WycUffe 
Spooner,  relinquished  his  curacy  in 
order  to  join  the  Royal  Air  Force  and 
was  killed  on  active  service  in  1941, 
A  portrait  of  Inge  by  his  wife's  cousin, 
Catharine  Dodgson,  is  at  King's  College, 
Cambridge,  by  Arthur  Norris  in  the 
National  Portrait  Gallery,  and  by  P.  A. 
de  Laszlo  at  Brightwell  Manor ;  a  cartoon 
drawn  for  Punch  by  Sir  Bernard  Partridge 
is  at  Eton  College;  of  three  red  chalk 
drawings  by  Catharine  Dodgson,  one  is 
at  Monkton  Combe  School,  one  at 
Brightwell  Manor,  and  the  third  became 
the  possession  of  Sir  John  Sheppard, 
sometime  provost  of  King's  College, 
Cambridge. 

[W.  R.  Inge,  Vale,  1934 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.] 

W.  R.  Matthkws. 

INGLIS,  Sir  CHARLES  EDWARD 
(1875-1952),  professor  of  engineering, 
was  born  at  Worcester  31  July  1875,  the 
second  surviving  son  of  Alexander  Monro 
Inghs,  M.D.,  of  Auchindinny  and  Redhall, 
by  his  first  wife,  Florence,  the  second 
daughter  of  John  Frederick  Feeney, 
proprietor  of  the  Birmingham  Daily  Post. 
His  father  moved  from  Worcester  to 
Cheltenham  and  Inglis  was  educated  at 
Cheltenham  College,  of  which  he  became 
senior  prefect  and  was,  for  more  than 
twenty  years  before  his  death,  a  member 
of  the  College  council.  In  1894  he  went  up 
to  Cambridge  with  a  scholarship  at  King's 
College.  He  nearly  achieved  his  blue  for 
long-distance  running  but  pulled  a  muscle 
and  had  to  retire.  In  1897  he  was  classed 
as  22nd  wrangler  in  the  mathematical 


tripos  and  in  the  following  year  gained 
first  class  honours  in  part  i  of  the  mechani- 
cal sciences  tripos.  He  went  next  as  a  pupil 
of  Sir  John  Wolfe-Barry  [q.v.]  and 
Partners,  consulting  engineers.  After  a 
few  months  in  the  drawing  office  he  was 
transferred  to  the  staff  of  (Sir)  Alexander 
Gibb  [q.v.],  Wolfe-Barry's  resident  engi- 
neer for  the  new  extension  to  the  Metro- 
politan Railway  between  Whitechapel 
and  Bow.  Inglis  was  engaged  in  particular 
on  the  design  and  supervision  of  the  nine 
bridges  crossing  the  railway,  an  experience 
which  was  of  great  value  to  him  later  in 
life  when  he  became  particularly  inter- 
ested in  the  behaviour  of  bridges.  At  this 
time,  however,  he  also  began  a  study, 
which  lasted  throughout  his  life,  on  the 
subject  of  mechanical  vibration,  and  when 
in  1901  he  was  made  a  fellow  of  King's 
College,  Cambridge,  the  subject  of  his 
thesis  was  'The  balancing  of  engines'. 
In  this  year  he  returned  to  Cambridge  as 
assistant  to  (Sir)  Alfred  Ewing  [q.v.]. 
After  two  years  Ewing  left  to  become  the 
first  director  of  naval  education  and  was 
succeeded  by  Bertram  Hopkinson  [q.v.] 
who  held  the  chair  of  mechanism  and 
applied  mechanics,  as  it  was  then  called, 
until  his  death  in  a  flying  accident  in 
1918.  Under  Hopkinson,  Inglis  was 
appointed  to  a  lectureship  in  engineering 
(1908)  and  continued  his  work  on 
vibrations. 

Inglis' s  interests  were  by  no  means 
confined  to  vibrations.  In  1913  he 
published  a  paper  on  the  stresses  in  a 
plate  due  to  the  presence  of  cracks  and 
sharp  corners.  This  may  well  be  Inglis's 
most  far-reaching  contribution,  since 
A.  A.  Griffith's  classic  explanation  of  the 
discrepancy  between  observed  and  calcu- 
lated strengths  of  amorphous  substances, 
such  as  glass  and  silica  fibres,  was  based 
on  it. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914,  Inglis 
was  commissioned  in  the  Royal  Engineers. 
Earlier  he  had  designed  a  light  tubular 
bridge,  readily  transportable  and  easy 
to  erect,  which  the  War  Office  adopted. 
From  1916  to  1918  he  was  in  charge  of  the 
department  responsible  for  the  design 
and  supply  of  military  bridges;  for  this 
work  he  was  appointed  O.B.E.  His 
bridge  came  to  the  fore  when  the  army  was 
faced  in  1917-18  with  the  tank  bridging 
problem.  His  designs  were  very  little  used 
in  the  war  of  1939-45,  a  neglect  which  he 
felt  keenly. 

In  1918  Inglis  returned  to  Cambridge, 
and  was  elected  in  1919  to  the  chair  of 


432 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Ironside 


mechanical  sciences  and  head  of  the 
department  of  engineering,  in  succession 
to  Hopkinson,  a  post  which  he  held  until 
his  retirement  in  1943.  Before  the  war 
the  number  of  undergraduates  reading 
engineering  at  Cambridge  had  risen  to 
the  two  hundred  and  fifty  level,  taxing 
to  their  utmost  the  laboratories  in  Free 
School  Lane.  In  1919  Inglis  was  met  by 
an  overwhelming  entry  of  eight  hundred 
and  it  became  essential  to  move  the 
department  to  an  entirely  new  area. 
The  four-acre  Scroope  House  site  in 
Trumpington  Street  was  acquired.  There, 
between  1920  and  1923,  a  single-storey 
laboratory  building  covering  about  fifty- 
thousand  square  feet  was  erected. 
Although,  after  1945,  large  workshops  and 
a  five-storey  building  were  added,  more 
than  quadrupling  the  floor  area  available, 
the  Inglis  Building  was  so  well  planned 
that  it  accommodated  the  main  teaching 
laboratories  of  the  department  until  the 
end  of  1964. 

Between  the  wars  the  department  be- 
came the  largest  in  the  university  and  one 
of  the  most  important  engineering  schools 
in  the  world.  Having  spent  seventeen 
years  as  a  lecturer,  during  which  time  he 
must  have  played  a  prominent  part  in 
the  development  of  the  school,  it  is  not 
surprising  that  Inglis,  on  his  return,  made 
no  striking  innovations.  He  was  strongly 
opposed  to  premature  specialization; 
about  the  teaching  of  mathematics  and 
the  need  for  the  subject  to  occupy  a 
prominent  position  in  any  university 
engineering  course  he  held  strong  views. 
Later  in  life  he  advocated  the  study  of 
aesthetics  for  engineers  as  much  for  its 
cultural  value  as  for  its  direct  influence  on 
their  designs. 

On  the  position  research  should  occupy 
in  a  university  engineering  department 
he  did  not  seem  so  clear.  He  was  critical 
of  the  Cambridge  Ph.D.  course,  since  he 
felt  that  team  work  was  an  essential 
introduction  for  a  beginner.  Perhaps 
because  of  this  he  did  not,  unfortunately, 
found  or  lead  a  research  team  at 
Cambridge.  However,  his  own  research 
continued  to  be  distinguished.  He  played 
a  most  prominent  part  in  the  work  of  the 
bridge  stress  committee,  set  up  in  1923 
to  determine  the  behaviour  of  railway 
bridges  under  moving  loads.  Throughout 
the  whole  investigation  he  was  inde- 
fatigable, providing  all  the  mathematics 
and  much  of  the  drive  which  kept  the 
experimental  work  going  over  the  years. 
He  contributed  papers  to  the  Institution 


of  Civil  Engineers  describing  this  re- 
search and  also  published  a  book  A  Mathe- 
matical Treatise  on  Vibrations  in  Railway 
Bridges  (1934). 

He  served  on  the  councils  of  the 
Institutions  of  Naval  Architects  and  of 
Civil,  of  Structural,  and  of  Water  Engi- 
neers. He  was  president  of  the  Institution 
of  Civil  Engineers  in  1941-2 ;  received  the 
Telford  and  Parsons  medals ;  and  was  an 
honorary  member  of  the  Institution  of 
Mechanical  Engineers.  He  received  an 
honorary  LL.D.  from  Edinburgh  (1929), 
was  elected  F.R.S.  (1930),  and  was 
knighted  in  1945.  From  1943  to  1946 
he  was  vice-provost  of  King's  College. 
Though  he  made  no  secret  of  his  enjoy- 
ment of  these  honours,  of  his  interest  in 
research  and  other  engineering  activities, 
his  overwhelming  interest  and  pleasure 
was  in  teaching  work  at  Cambridge.  The 
last  year  of  his  life  was  almost  as  active 
as  any  that  had  gone  before.  He  had  the 
satisfaction  of  seeing  the  publication  of 
his  book.  Applied  Mechanics  for  Engineers 
(1951),  and  of  spending  three  months  in 
South  Africa  as  a  visiting  lecturer  con- 
tinuing, what  he  did  so  superlatively  well 
and  loved  so  much,  the  teaching  and 
inspiration  of  the  young  engineer. 

In  1901  Inglis  married  Eleanor  Mary, 
younger  daughter  of  Lieutenant-Colonel 
Herbert  Belasyse  Moffat,  South  Wales 
Borderers.  In  1904  they  built  Balls 
Grove,  Grantchester,  where  they  lived 
until  1925  and  where  their  two  daughters 
were  born.  Inglis  died  at  South  wold  only 
eighteen  days  after  his  wife,  19  April  1952. 

There  are  portraits  by  Henry  Lamb  in 
the  Institution  of  Civil  Engineers  and  in 
King's  College,  Cambridge,  and  a  third 
by  D.  Gordon  Shields  in  the  possession  of 
the  Engineering  Department,  Cambridge. 

[J.  F.  Baker  in  Obituary  Notices  of  Fellows 
of  the  Royal  Society,  No.  22,  November  1953 ; 
personal  knowledge.]  J.  F.*  Baker. 

INVERCHAPEL,  Baron  (1882-1951), 
diplomatist.  [See  Clark  Kerr,  Archibald 
John  Kerr.] 

INVERFORTH,  first  Baron  (1865-1955), 
shipowner.  [See  Weir,  Andrew.]  > 

IRONSIDE,  WILLIAM  EDMUND,  first 
Baron  Ironside  (1880-1959),  field- 
marshal,  was  born  in  Edinburgh  6  May 
1880,  the  second  child  of  Surgeon-Major 
William  Ironside  of  Ironside,  Royal  Horse 
Artillery,  by  his  wife,  Emma  Maria, 
daughter  of  William  Haggett  Richards,  of 


533 


Ironside 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Stapleton  House,  Martock,  Somerset.  His 
father  died  in  January  of  the  following 
year  and  his  mother,  left  badly  off, 
frequently  took  him  and  his  sister  to  the 
Continent  where  living  was  cheaper.  These 
excursions- bore  fruit,  for  Ironside  subse- 
quently became  a  qualified  army  inter- 
preter in  seven  languages.  Educated  at 
a  preparatory  school  at  St.  Andrews,  Ton- 
bridge  School,  and  the  Royal  Military 
Academy,  Woolwich,  Ironside  was  com- 
missioned into  the  Royal  Artillery  in  1899. 
He  served  in  the  South  African  war  and  in 
1902  escorted  J.  C.  Smuts  [q.v.]  to  the 
peace  conference  at  Vereeniging.  Then, 
disguised  as  a  Boer  transport  driver,  he 
accompanied  the  German  military  expedi- 
tion to  South  West  Africa  where  his  ad- 
ventures as  an  inteUigence  agent  suggested 
the  character  of  Richard  Hannay  to  John 
Buchan  (later  Lord  Tweedsmuir,  q.v.). 

After  service  in  I  (Bull's  Troop)  and  Y 
batteries  of  the  Royal  Horse  Artillery, 
Ironside  was  promoted  captain  in  1908 
and  appointed  to  cavalry  and  infantry 
brigade  staffs  in  South  Africa.  He  entered 
the  Staff  College  in  1913  and  in  1914  was 
sent  to  Boulogne  as  staff  captain.  When 
the  6th  division  arrived  in  France  in 
October,  he  joined  its  'G'  staff  and  was 
promoted  major.  He  became  G.S.O.  1  of 
the  4th  Canadian  division  in  1916  as 
a  brevet  lieutenant-colonel,  and  in  1917 
took  part  in  the  battles  of  Vimy  Ridge  and 
Passchendaele.  In  1918  he  was  appointed 
commandant  of  the  Machine  Gun  Corps 
school  at  Camiers  with  the  rank  of  tem- 
porary colonel.  When  the  Germans  broke 
through  on  the  Somme  in  March  he  was 
sent  with  all  its  guns  to  fill  the  gap  and 
forming  a  fine  beat  off  several  attacks. 
He  was  then  given  command  of  the 
99th  Infantry  brigade  in  Haldane's  2nd 
division,  and  directed  its  attacks  at  Albert 
and  Bapaume. 

In  September  1918  Ironside  went  to 
North  Russia  as  chief  of  the  general  staff 
of  the  allied  forces,  and  soon  took  com- 
mand with  the  temporary  rank  of  major- 
general.  He  moulded  a  heterogeneous  army 
of  many  nationalities  into  an  efficient 
fighting  force,  and  in  the  following  March 
he  became  general  officer  commanding-in- 
chief  of  Archangel.  Disaffection  in  Russian 
units  and  increasing  menace  from  the 
Bolshevik  forces  led  to  the  withdrawal  of 
the  expedition  in  the  autumn  of  1919.  For 
his  services  he  was  promoted  substantive 
major-general.  His  account  of  these  opera- 
tions was  published  in  Archangel  1918- 
1919  (1953). 


In  1920  Ironside  went  to  Hungary  as 
chief  of  the  military  mission  to  Admiral 
Horthy's  government;  he  was  subse- 
quently given  command  of  the  Ismid  and 
North  Persian  forces  against  possible 
Turkish  and  Bolshevik  incursions.  In 
1921,  summoned  to  a  conference  at  Cairo 
under  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill,  Ironside 
recommended  that  the  Royal  Air  Force 
should  be  made  responsible  for  the  defence 
of  Iraq.  Flying  there  to  arrange  the  hand- 
over he  crashed,  broke  both  legs,  and  was 
invalided  home.  InJ.922  he  was  appointed 
commandant  of  the  Staff  College  at  Cam- 
berley,  and  in  1926  commander  of  the  2nd 
division  at  Aldershot.  In  1928  he  went  to 
India  to  command  the  Meerut  District 
where  his  training  and  tactical  doctrine 
much  impressed  Sir  Philip  (later  Lord) 
Chetwode  [q.v.].  In  1931  he  was  promoted 
lieutenant-general,  left  India,  went  on 
half  pay,  and  was  appointed  lieutenant  of 
the  Tower  of  London.  In  1933  he  returned 
to  India  as  quartermaster-general  and  in 
1935  was  promoted  general. 

Returning  to  England  in  1936,  Ironside 
took  over  the  Eastern  Command.  Units 
pitifully  under  strength,  obsolete  equip- 
ment, and  the  lack  of  government  policy 
and  tactical  doctrine  perturbed  him.  In 
1937  he  attended  the  German  army 
mancEUvres  and  met  Hitler,  Goering, 
Mussolini,  and  Badoglio.  General 
Reichenau  drank  a  whisky  toast  to 
'brotherhood  with  England',  adding 
drunkenly  'but  only  for  two  years'.  Iron- 
side, like  Churchill,  was  sure  that  war 
would  come  in  two  or  three  years,  but  he 
was  unable  to  convince  the  prime  minister, 
Neville  Chamberlain,  or  the  secretary  of 
state  for  war,  Leslie  (later  Lord)  Hore- 
Belisha  [q.v.]. 

In  the  autumn  of  1938  Ironside  was 
appointed  commander-in-chief  designate 
of  the  Middle  East  and  governor  of 
Gibraltar  where  he  greatly  strengthened 
the  fortress.  By  now  he  had  'little  hope 
of  any  active  command'.  In  May  1989  he 
was  appointed  inspector-general  of  over- 
seas forces  and  made  responsible  for  the 
higher  training  of  the  army  and  liaison 
with  the  dominions  and  India.  But  he  was 
not  allowed  home  until  July,  when  Lord 
Gort  [q.v.],  the  chief  of  the  imperial 
general  staff,  told  him  that  he  was  to  be 
commander-in-chief  of  the  British  expedi- 
tionary force.  In  the  meantime  he  was 
sent  to  Warsaw  to  discover  Poland's  plans 
to  resist  the  imminent  German  invasion. 
On  3  September  Hore-Belisha  asked  Iron- 
side to  become  chief  of  the  imperial  general 


534 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Ironside 


staff.  Ironside  had  never  served  in  the 
War  Office  in  any  capacity  but  felt  it  his 
duty  to  accept.  'I  am  bitterly  disap- 
pointed,' ran  his  diary,  'that  I  am  not  to 
command  the  Army  in  the  field. ...  I  am 
not  suited  in  temperament  to  such  a  job  as 
C.I.G.S.,  nor  have  I  prepared  myself  to 
be  such.' 

He  found  a  singular  lack  of  prepara- 
tion: there  was  no  'imperial'  plan;  the 
only  plan  was  to  send  four  divisions  to 
France.  The  Government,  sheltering  be- 
hind the  Maginot  line  and  the  French 
Army,  expected  a  stalemate  on  the  western 
front,  thought  the  war  could  be  won  by 
bombing  and  blockade,  and  saw  little 
need  for  an  expeditionary  force.  Ironside, 
on  the  contrary,  maintained  that  Hitler 
would  use  his  army  and  air  force  in  co- 
operation to  force  a  decision,  and  that  the 
war  would  not  be  won  until  Hitler  was 
defeated  on  land.  He  accordingly  planned 
for  armies  of  twenty  divisions  in  France, 
twelve  in  the  Middle  East,  and  an  im- 
perial reserve  of  eighteen  divisions  at 
home.  It  would  take  three  years  to  equip 
them.  The  Services  worked  on  separate 
charters  and  there  was  little  co-operation 
between  them.  Ironside  was  burdened  by 
many  committees;  the  machinery  of 
government  was  incapable  of  quick 
decisions  or  even  rapid  improvisation; 
moreover  his  task  was  aggravated  by 
a  minister  for  war  whom  he  found  diffi- 
cult. Ironside  paid  several  visits  to  the 
B.E.F.  and  the  Maginot  line  and  attended 
conferences  with  the  supreme  commander. 
General  Gamelin.  The  latter  was  con- 
vinced that  the  decisive  battle  would  be 
fought  on  the  plains  of  Belgium ;  Ironside 
forecast,  correctly,  that  the  German 
thrust  would  come  through  the  Ardennes. 
Both  agreed  that  the  allied  left  wing 
should  advance  into  Belgium,  Ironside 
with  the  idea  of  attacking  the  German 
penetration  in  flank. 

When  Russia  invaded  Finland  in 
November  1939  Ironside  wanted  to  send 
a  small  force  to  help  the  Finns  and 
a  larger  force  to  seize  the  iron-ore  field  at 
Gallivare.  His  plan  was  delayed  by  Nor- 
wegian and  Swedish  objections  and  was 
cancelled  when  Finland  fell.  In  April  1940 
the  Allies  decided  to  seize  Narvik,  but  the 
Germans  got  there  first.  When  the  convoy 
dispatched  to  take  Narvik  from  the  Ger- 
mans was  at  sea  the  Government  changed 
the  main  objective  to  Trondheim,  and 
Churchill,  in  spite  of  Ironside's  protests, 
ordered  the  rear  half  to  be  diverted  to 
Namsos.   Both   projects   failed   and   the 


result  was  an  improvised,  hasty,  but  suc- 
cessful evacuation. 

In  May  1940  the  German  armoured 
columns  broke  through  the  Ardennes  and 
cut  the  allied  army  in  two.  Ironside  hoped 
to  save  the  B.E.F.  by  thrusting  south- 
wards through  the  gap  between  the 
armour  and  its  supporting  columns,  and 
he  did  his  best  to  persuade  the  French  to 
co-operate.  They  failed  to  attack  and 
Gort's  army  was  evacuated  from  Dunkirk. 
At  the  end  of  May,  Ironside  proposed,  and 
the  Government  agreed,  that  he  should 
become  commander-in-chief  of  the  home 
forces  to  prepare  against  invasion.  Once 
again  he  had  to  build  from  scratch.  In 
July  he  was  succeeded  by  Sir  Alan  Brooke 
(later  Viscount  Alanbrooke),  promoted 
field-marshal,  and  in  1941  raised  to  the 
peerage.  He  retired  in  silence  and  dignity 
to  his  home  at  Hingham  in  Norfolk  where 
he  devoted  himself  to  his  garden  and  the 
affairs  of  the  neighbourhood.  He  became 
president  of  the  South  African  Veterans 
and  the  Old  Contemptibles.  Simple, 
modest,  and  forthright,  his  kindness  and 
friendliness  made  him  universally  liked 
and  respected. 

'Tiny'  Ironside  was  6  feet  4  inches  tall,' 
broad  and  deep-chested.  Forceful,  fear- 
less, and  outspoken  sometimes  to  the 
point  of  indiscretion,  he  was  an  intelli- 
gent, imaginative,  and  unconventional 
soldier,  a  strong  advocate  of  air  co-opera- 
tion and  tank  warfare,  and  essentially 
a  commander.  He  never  intrigued  and 
never  refused  a  job.  He  played  rugby 
football  for  Scotland,  was  an  excellent 
shot,  'plus  two'  at  golf,  and  a  keen  fol- 
lower to  hounds.  He  was  appointed 
C.M.G.  (1918),  K.C.B.  (1919),  and  G.C.B. 
(1938),  was  appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  in 
1915,  and  invested  with  the  grand  cross 
of  the  Legion  of  Honour  in  1940.  He 
received  an  honorary  LL.D.  from  Aberdeen 
in  1936. 

In  1915  Ironside  married  Mariot  Ysobel, 
daughter  of  Charles  Cheyne,  of  the  Indian 
Staff  Corps,  by  whom  he  had  a  daughter 
and  a  son,  Edmund  Oslac  (born  1924),  who 
succeeded  him  when  he  died  in  London  22 
September  1959.  Of  six  portraits,  one  by 
Eric  Kennington  is  in  the  possession  of  the 
family ;  another  by  Kenneth  Hauff  is  at 
Tonbridge  School,  and  a  third,  by  C.  Cor- 
field,  is  in  the  Royal  Artillery  Mess, 
Woolwich.  The  Imperial  War  Museum 
has  a  pastel  by  Eric  Kennington. 

[The  Ironside  Diaries,  1937-1940,  ed.  R/ 
Macleod  and  D.  Kelly,  1962 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.]  R.  Macleod. 


535 


Irvine'fT 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


IRVINE,    Sir    JAMES    COLQUHOUN 

(1877-1952),  chemist  and  educationist, 
was  born  in  Glasgow  9  May  1877,  the 
younger  son  of  John  Irvine  Who  came  of 
yeoman  farmer  stock  but  was  himself 
a  manufacturer  of  light  iron  castings,  and 
his  wife,  Mary  Paton  Colquhoun,  of 
Highland  descent,  whose  forebears  had 
followed  the  sea,  a  love  of  which  Irvine 
inherited  and  transmitted  to  his  son; 
from  his  father,  a  close  friend  of  Henry 
Drummond  [q.v.],  author  of  Natural  Law 
in  the  Spirittial  World,  came  his  interest  in 
science.  He  won  an  open  scholarship 
tenable  at  Allan  Glen's  School,  Glasgow, 
and  at  the  age  of  sixteen  entered  the  Royal 
Technical  College,  becoming  a  pupil  of 
G.  G,  Henderson  (whose  notice  he  later 
contributed  to  this  Dictionary).  In  1895  he 
went  to  the  university  of  St.  Andrews  as 
a  lecture  assistant  to  Thomas  Purdie, 
became  a  matriculated  student,  and 
graduated  B.Sc.  in  1898  with  special 
distinction  in  chemistry  and  natural 
science.  His  career  in  research  began  even 
before  his  graduation;  in  1899  he  was 
awarded  an  1851  Exhibition  scholarship 
and  went  to  work  in  Leipzig  with  Wisli- 
cenus,  studying  also  under  Ostwald  and 
attending  lectures  by  Bechmann,  Stobbe, 
and  Pfeffer.  In  1901  his  thesis  'Ueber 
einige  Derivate  des  Orthomethoxy  Benzal- 
dehydes'  gained  him  a  Ph.D.  summa  cum 
lavde. 

He  returned  to  St.  Andrews  in  1901  as 
a  junior  lecturer  and  to  work  with  Purdie 
on  investigations  of  the  carbohydrates,  in 
which  subject  he  made  his  major  contribu- 
tions to  scientific  discovery.  He  obtained 
his  D.Sc.  in  1903,  becoming  professor  of 
chemistry  in  1909  and  dean  of  the  faculty 
of  science  in  1912,  posts  which  he  held 
until  he  was  appointed  principal  of  St. 
Andrews  in  1921. 

While  still  working  in  Leipzig,  Irvine 
had  the  idea  of  applying  Purdie's  alkyla- 
tion  technique  of  hydroxyl  groups  with 
silver  oxide  and  alkyl  iodide  to  structural 
work  in  all  branches  of  sugar  chemistry 
and  thus  elucidate  the  structure  of  the 
monosaccharides  and  polysaccharides.  His 
work  with  his  colleagues  at  St.  Andrews 
included  studies  of  the  chemistry  of 
inulin,  of  cellulose,  and  of  starch.  During 
the  war  of  1914-18  academic  research 
on  the  carbohydrates  was  interrupted 
but  the  experience  gained  enabled  the  St. 
Andrews  laboratories  to  make  a  significant 
contribution  to  the  war  effort.  This  in- 
cluded the  production  of  bacteriological 
sugars   and   related   substances   for   the 


army  and  navy  medical  services.  Produc- 
tion of  dulcitol,  inuUn,  fructose,  and  man- 
nitol  was  followed  by  the  preparation  of 
novocain  and  orthoform.  In  addition 
many  research  problems  were  undertaken 
at  the  request  of  the  chemical  warfare 
department  and  the  department  of  pro- 
pellant  supplies,  among  them  a  search  for 
large-scale  methods  of  preparing  mus- 
tard gas. 

As  a  teacher  Irvine  was  outstanding, 
his  eloquent  presentation  of  his  subjects 
commanding  the  attention  of  all  his 
students  and  inspiring  many  to  follow 
chemistry  asra  career  in  both  the  academic 
and  industrial  fields.  He  was  a  fine  experi- 
mentaHst  and  manipulator,  laying  con- 
siderable emphasis  on  the  practical  side  of 
his  subject,  and  he  preserved  to  the  end  of 
his  life  his  sureness  and  delicacy  of  tech- 
nique. He  worked  long  hours  and  expected 
the  same  of  his  staff  and  students.  A  strict 
disciplinarian,  he  was  yet  easy  to  approach 
and  always  encouraging  and  helpful  if 
the  case  was  good.  Like  Bishop  James 
Kennedy  [q.v.],  the  founder  of  St.  Salva- 
tor's  College,  he  'believed  in  the  master- 
disciple  relationship  as  the  most  effective^ 
method  of  inculcating  knowledge  and  o^ 
transmitting  knowledge  into  wisdom'.  He 
was  noted  for  his  eloquence  as  a  student 
and  became  internationally  famous  for  it. 
as  a  principal.  '.. 

The  welfare  of  his  students  was  Irvine's 
prime  concern  and  he  succeeded  in  making 
St.  Andrews  largely  a  residential  univer- 
sity as  it  had  been  in  the  past.  He 
revived  old  customs  and  traditions, 
improved  many  buildings,  found  donors 
for  a  graduation  hall  and  for  the  renova- 
tion of  St.  Salvator's  chapel  and  the 
restoration  of  St.  Leonard's  chapel.  He 
widened  the  field  of  recruitment  ofstudents 
and  raised  the  numbers  to  an  economic 
level.  In  Dundee  the  schools  of  medicine, 
engineering,  and  chemistry  were  expanded 
and  he  devised  methods  of  improving  the 
college  finances.  The  hostility  which  arose 
between  the  two  parts  of  the  university 
in  St.  Andrews  and  Dundee,  resulting  in 
a  royal  commission  (1951-2),  was  most 
unfortunate.  Irvine  held  strong  opinions 
and  so  on  occasion  inevitably  had  to  face 
opposition  and  criticism.  The  word  auto- 
cratic was  appUed  to  him;  but  his  was 
always  benevolent  autocracy  and  even 
his  greatest  enemies  could  not  deny  his 
unsparing  devotion  to  his  university. 

Irvine  travelled  extensively  in  the 
interests  of  education.  He  went  to  India 
as  chairman  of  the  viceroy's  committee  on 


536 


P.N^.  1951-1960 


Ismail 


the  Indian  Institute  of  Science  in  1936 ;  to 
the  West  Indies  as  chairman  of  the  com- 
mittee on  higher  education  in  1944  and  in 
subsequent  years  as  the  prime  mover  in 
founding  the  University  College  of  the 
West  Indies.  He  was  chairman  of  the 
Inter-University  Council  for  Higher  Edu- 
cation in  the  Colonies  from  its  formation 
in  1946  until  1951.  The  Carnegie  Trust, 
the  Scottish  Universities  Entrance  Board, 
and  the  prime  minister's  committee  on  the 
training  of  biologists  (1933)  were  among 
the  educational  bodies  on  which  he  served. 
He  was  always  warmly  received  in 
America  where  he  had  many  friends, 
among  them  Edward  Harkness  who  sought 
his  advice  on  the  formation  of  the  Pilgrim 
Trust  on  which  he  served,  as  on  the 
committee  of  the  Commonwealth  Fund. 
Irvine  impressed  such  men  by  his  pene- 
trating judgement  and  clarity  of  expres- 
sion ;  practical  in  outlook,  in  action  he  was 
levelheaded. 

Irvine  had  a  short,  slim,  athletic  figure 
with  a  tanned  skin  and  dark,  bright  eyes. 
In  youth  he  was  a  good  athlete,  a  versa- 
tile runner  (his  speciality  the  100  yards), 
and  a  strong  swimmer.  Until  late  in  life  he 
played  a  good  game  of  golf  and  tennis  and 
maintained  an  interest  in  athletics  and 
sport  which  was  encouraging  to  the 
students.  He  was  a  most  engaging  com- 
panion, of  catholic  tastes  and  with  a  wide 
range  of  experience,  backed  by  an 
astonishing  memory  for  people  and  inci- 
dents. To  scholarship  he  added  wit,  to 
knowledge  wisdom,  to  sympathy  discern- 
ment. Dignified  in  bearing,  he  compelled 
attention.  When  he  was  installed  as  prin- 
cipal the  university  was  small  and  its 
financial  resources  had  dwindled.  By  his 
skill,  enthusiasm,  and  tact  Irvine  found 
the  generous  donors  required  to  carry  out 
his  schemes  for  the  improvement  and 
expansion  of  the  university. 

Many  honours  came  to  Irvine  who  was 
elected  F.R.S.  in  1918,  knighted  in  1925, 
appointed  C.B.E.  in  1920  and  K.B.E.  in 
1948.  He  received  a  number  of  medals 
from  learned  societies  and  honorary 
degrees  from  many  universities,  and  his 
services  to  Polish  and  Norwegian  forces  in 
Scotland  during  the  war  of  1939-45  were 
recognized  by  decorations  from  their 
countries. 

In  1905  Irvine  married  Mabel  Violet, 
daughter  of  John  Williams,  of  Dunmurry 
House,  county  Antrim,  who  was  studying 
music  in  Leipzig  when  he  was  working 
under  Wislicenus.  She  was  a  gifted 
musician  and  did  much  for  music  in  the 


university.  Their  marriage  was  a  never- 
failing  source  of  happiness  and  inspira- 
tion. They  had  two  daughters  and  a  son 
who  was  accidentally  drowned  in  Ceylon 
in  1944  when  serving  as  a  lieutenant  in 
the  R.N.V.R.  Irvine  died  in  St.  Andrews 
12  June  1952.  The  university  has  por- 
traits by  Sir  Oswald  Birley  and  Keith 
Henderson. 

[Alumnus  Chronicle  of  the  University  of 
St.  Andrews,  January  1953;  John  Read  in 
Obituary  Notices  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society, 
No.  22,  November  1953 ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]  DAvm  Toeujll. 

ISMAIL,  Sir  MIRZA  MOHAMMAD 
(1883-1959),  Indian  administrator  and 
statesman,  was  born  in  Bangalore,  My- 
sore, 23  October  1883,  the  son  of  Aga  Jan, 
honorary  A.D.C.  to  Maharaja  Chamara- 
jendra  Wadiyar.  He  was  of  Persian 
descent,  his  grandfather,  Ali  Asker  Shirazi, 
having  left  Shiraz  in  1824  and  settled  as 
an  importer  of  horses  in  Bangalore  where 
he  prospered  exceedingly.  Mirza  grew  up 
with  the  young  Maharaja  of  Mysore  [q.v.], 
Krishnaraja  Wadiyar,  who  was  about  the 
same  age  and  who  succeeded  after  the 
death  of  his  father  in  1894.  Mirza  was 
educated  entirely  in  Bangalore,  first  at 
mission  schools,  then  for  five  years  in  the 
Maharaja's  special  class  under  the  tutors 
ship  of  Sir  Stuart  Eraser  of  the  Indian 
Civil  Service,  finally  at  the  Central  College, 
graduating  in  1905  at  the  Madras  Univer- 
sity. 

His  first  post  was  in  the  Mysore  Police 
but  he  was  quickly  transferred  to  the 
Mysore  Civil  Service.  He  soon  joined  the 
Maharaja's  own  staff  and  becan  e  assis- 
tant secretary,  Huzur  secretary  (1913), 
private  secretary  (1923,  the  first  Indian  to 
hold  that  post),  and  finally  in  1926  dewan. 
There  followed  the  happiest  and  most 
constructive  period  of  his  life  and  he 
remained  in  office  until  1941,  a  year  after 
the  Maharaja's  death.  Mysore  was  his  first 
and  last  love.  As  an  administrator  he  was 
outstanding  and  made  Mysore  one  of  the 
best  administered  states  in  India.  A  lover 
of  beauty,  he  created  the  gardens  of 
Brindavan  and  Bangalore ;  and  thousands 
from  all  parts  of  India  still  visit  the 
illuminated  gardens  planned  by  him  at 
the  Krishnaraj  Sagar  Dam.  He  believed 
it  obligatory  for  the  administration  to 
enable  the  poorer  classes  to  enjoy  them- 
selves without  expense.  A  born  town- 
planner,  he  made  Mysore  and  Bangalore 
famous  for  their  ordered  beauty.  It  was  an. 
experience  to  be  with  him  on  one  of  his 


537 


Ismail 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


weekly  morning  tours  of  Bangalore.  He 
made  them  in  a  large  car,  accompanied  by 
the  municipal  executive  officers.  Nothing 
escaped  his  attention:  a  road  alignment, 
an  uncovered  rubbish  bin,  or  an  ungainly 
corner  in  a  wall.  Anything  unsightly  which 
offended  his  highly  developed  sense  of 
beauty  was  dealt  with  on  the  spot.  But 
Mirza's  ideal  was  to  make  Mysore  not  only 
beautiful,  but  also  a  'truly  Socialist  State'. 
He  started  several  state  industries,  in  the 
face  of  considerable  opposition  from  the 
Government  of  India.  He  believed  that  in 
a  backward  country  some  state  socialism 
was  essential  if  industrialization  was  to 
make  any  substantial  or  rapid  progress. 
In  this,  as  in  so  many  other  matters,  he 
was  a  pioneer,  and  by  the  middle  of  the 
twentieth  century  Mysore  had  a  wide  range 
of  industries,  some  sponsored  by  the  state, 
and  others  by  the  Government  of  India  or 
by  private  enterprise. 

In  all  these  activities  Mirza  owed  every- 
thing to  the  constant  support  and  en- 
couragement of  the  Maharaja  between 
whom  and  his  dewan  there  was  a  perfect 
partnership,  rare  in  Indian  states.  The 
Maharaja  was  the  wisest  and  most  dis- 
tinguished ruler  Mysore  had  ever  known 
and  when  he  died  in  1940  Mirza  wrote  to 
a  friend  that  'life  without  him  can  never 
be  the  same'.  From  1942  to  1946  he  was 
prime  minister  of  Jaipur,  one  of  the 
Rajput  states,  where  he  made  his  en- 
Ughtened  mark  on  the  feudal  administra- 
tive structure  which  he  found.  In  1946  he 
became  president  of  the  Nizam  of  Hydera- 
bad's executive  council,  but  his  tenure  of 
office  was  a  failure  and  he  resigned  after 
only  ten  months.  His  policies  of  modera- 
tion and  compromise  were  thwarted  by 
extremists  within  and  without  the  state 
and  he  was  therefore  a  helpless  witness 
of  the  final  tragedy,  and  the  end  of  an 
ancient  dynasty.  In  1950  he  was  appointed 
representative  of  the  United  Nations 
technical  assistance  for  Indonesia  but  he 
found  the  environment  uncongenial  and 
after  nearly  a  year  was  glad  to  return  to 
his  beloved  home  in  Mysore.  The  remain- 
der of  his  life  was  spent  in  Bangalore, 
carrying  on  a  considerable  correspondence 
with  his  many  friends  and  associates  in 
India  and  abroad  and  writing  his  memoirs, 
pubhshed  in  1954  as  My  Public  Life. 

Mirza  was  of  medium  height,  slim,  erect, 
and  always  most  carefully  dressed.  He  had 
an  aloof  dignity  and  bearing  which  com- 
pelled respect,  if  not  affection.  His  Persian 
origin,  which  showed  itself  clearly  in  his 
profile  and  complexion,  gave  him  a  de- 


tached outlook  on  human  affairs  in  general 
and  on  Indian  politics  in  particular. 
A  devout  and  broadminded  Moslem,  the 
dewan  of  a  predominantly  Hindu  state, 
the  servant  and  friend  of  an  orthodox 
Hindu  ruler,  he  was  a  living  example  of 
communal  moderation  and  harmony.  He 
belonged  to  and  represented  no  political  or 
communal  party  or  group  and  he  believed 
in  the  essential  unity  of  the  Indian  con- 
tinent. For  these  reasons  his  counsel  had 
little  influence  on  the  extreme  and  rapid 
developments  which  led  to  the  final  crea- 
tion of  the  two  independent  states  of 
India  and  Pakistan.  He  had  represented 
Mysore,  and  for  part  of  the  time  the  South 
Indian  States,  and  Jodhpur  and  Jaipur,  at 
the  Round  Table  conferences  in  London 
in  1930-32  and  attended  the  meetings  of 
the  subsequent  joint  parliamentary  select 
committee.  In  1937  he  led  the  Indian 
delegation  to  the  conference  of  Far  Eastern 
countries  on  hygiene  in  Indonesia.  He  was 
appointed  O.B.E.  (1923),  CLE.  (1924), 
K.C.I.E.  (1936),  and  knighted  in  1930. 

In  1906  he  married  Zeebeenda  Begum, 
daughter  of  Mohammad  Mirza  Shiraza, 
by  whom  he  had  one  son  and  two  daugh- 
ters. He  died  in  Bangalore  5  January 
1959. 

{The  Times  and  Times  of  India,  6  January 
1959 ;  Sir  Mirza  Ismail,  My  Public  Life,  1954 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Frederick  James. 

JACKS,       LAWRENCE       PEARSALL 

(1860-1955),  Unitarian  divine,  was  born 
at  Nottingham  9  October  1860,  the  second 
son  of  Jabez  Jacks,  an  ironmonger,  by 
his  wife,  Anne  Steere.  His  father  died 
when  he  was  thirteen  and  the  headmaster 
of  University  School,  Nottingham, 
generously  kept  him  on  without  fee. 
Desiring  no  longer  to  be  a  burden  to  his 
mother,  a  courageous  woman,  he  left 
school  before  he  was  seventeen  and 
taught  in  a  number  of  private  schools, 
most  of  which  he  found  intolerable.  Work- 
ing in  his  spare  time  for  an  external 
London  degree  he  incurred  a  breakdown 
in  health,  but  was  able  to  spend  his  con- 
valescence learning  German  at  Gottingen 
during  part  of  1881.  A  keen  sermon-taster, 
he  was  attracted  by  Richard  Armstrong  at 
Nottingham  and  Stopford  Brooke  [q.v.], 
who  had  recently  renounced  his  Anglican 
orders,  in  London,  and  decided  to  become 
a  preacher  himself.  Still  uncertain  whether 
he  was  an  Anglican  or  a  Nonconformist,  in 
1882  he  entered  Manchester  New  College, 
which  in  theory  at  least  was  completely 


538 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


James,  A.  W. 


undenominational ;  the  college  was  then  in 
London  with  James  Martineau  [q.v.]  as 
principal.  There  he  took  his  London  B.A.  in 
1883  and  his  M.A.  three  years  later. 

On  leaving  college  in  1886  he  proceeded 
as  Hibbert  scholar  to  spend  a  year  at  Har- 
vard, at  the  end  of  which  he  was  appointed 
assistant  to  Stopford  Brooke  at  Bedford 
chapel,  Bloomsbury.  He  returned  to 
England  in  the  same  boat  as  some  of 
Brooke's  family  and  in  the  course  of  the 
voyage  became  unofficially  engaged  to  the 
fourth  daughter,  Olive  Cecilia  (died  1948), 
whom  he  married  in  1889,  and  by  whom 
he  eventually  had  five  sons  and  a  daughter. 

The  year  at  Bedford  chapel  was  a  some- 
what humiliating  experience ;  a  large  pro- 
portion of  the  fashionable  congregation 
would  walk  out  when  they  saw  that  it  was 
only  the  assistant  who  was  to  preach.  Jacks 
was  also  giving  university  extension  lec- 
tures on  political  economy,  and  the  strain 
almost  led  to  another  breakdown.  He 
found  himself,  however,  by  way  of  com- 
pensation, in  contact  with  a  brilliant 
group  including  Burne- Jones,  Oscar  Wilde, 
G.  B.  Shaw,  and  the  Webbs  [qq.v.]. 

In  1888  at  a  remarkably  young  age, 
Jacks,  now  a  Unitarian  minister,  was 
appointed  to  Renshaw  Street  chapel, 
Liverpool,  and  six  years  later  moved  to 
Birmingham  as  minister  of  the  church  of 
the  Messiah.  In  1902  he  was  appointed 
first  editor  of  the  Hibbert  Journal  and  the 
success  of  this  venture  showed  the  need 
for  a  periodical  giving  scope  for  the  free 
debate  of  all  manner  of  religious  and 
kindred  subjects.  It  made  demands  upon 
its  editor  which  could  hardly  be  recon- 
ciled with  the  claims  of  a  busy  ministry 
and  he  was  glad  in  the  following  year  to 
accept  the  post  of  lecturer  in  philosophy 
at  Manchester  College,  by  now  in  Oxford. 
In  1915  he  became  principal,  succeeding 
J.  Estlin  Carpenter  [q.v.],  to  whose  un- 
failing friendship  he  had  owed  much 
since  student  days.  Glasgow,  McGill,  and 
Rochester  conferred  on  him  the  honorary 
LL.D.,  Liverpool  the  D.Litt.,  and  Harvard 
the  D.D.  He  retired  in  1931.  Two  years 
later  he  accepted  an  invitation  to  give 
three  addresses  at  evening  services  in 
Liverpool  Cathedral,  the  result  hieing 
a  storm  which  ended  in  the  Convocation  of 
York  rebuking  the  cathedral  authorities 
for  offering  the  pulpit  to  a  Unitarian. 

Jacks' s  literary  output  was  prodigious : 
many  of  his  books  were  published  lectures, 
delivered  in  Britain  and  in  America  which 
he  visited  several  times,  but  they  included 
The  Alchemy  of  Thought  (1910) ;  full-scale 


lives  of  Stopford  Brooke  and  Charles 
Hargrove;  the  Smokeover  series  of  alle- 
gorical stories;  and  translations  of  the 
New  Testament  writings  of  Loisy.  In  his 
later  years  at  the  college  he  turned  more 
and  more  away  from  institutional  religion 
towards  education  as  the  hope  for  the 
future,  and  this  gave  some  offence  to  both 
students  and  governing  body;  typical  cf 
his  outlook  was  The  Education  of  the 
Whole  Man,  published  in  1931.  He  wrote 
a  charming  and  candid  autobiography, 
The  Confession  of  an  Octogenarian,  in 
1942,  and  ten  years  later  a  final  testament, 
Near  the  Brink.  In  1917  he  was  president 
of  the  Society  for  Psychical  Research, 
a  subject  in  which  he  was  keenly  in- 
terested. As  a  philosopher  he  was  a 
disciple  of  Bergson,  never  greatly  in 
sympathy  with  the  prevailing  trends  of 
academic  philosophy  in  Britain.  His 
chief  memorial  is  the  Hibbert  Journal 
which  he  conducted  brilliantly  until  1947. 
Perhaps  he  is  best  thought  of  as  the  last 
of  the  Victorian  prophets  in  the  line  of 
Thomas  Carlyle  [q.v.],  whom  he  greatly 
venerated. 

Jacks  died  in  Oxford  17  February  1955. 
There  is  a  portrait  by  George  Harcourt  in 
Manchester  College,  Oxford.  Of  his  sons, 
Graham  Vernon  was  director  of  the  Com- 
monwealth Bureau  of  Soils  (1946-66), 
Hector  Beaumont  headmaster  of  Bedales 
School  (1946-62),  and  Maurice  Leonard 
director  of  the  department  of  education, 
Oxford  University  (1938-57). 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
L.  A.  Garrard. 

JAMES,  ALEXANDER  WILSON  (1901- 
1953),  footballer,  was  born  at  Mossend, 
Bellshill,  Lanarkshire,  14  September  1901, 
the  son  of  Charles  James,  railway  yards- 
man,  and  his  wife,  Jane  Ann  Barrie 
Wilson.  On  leaving  school  he  joined  Bells- 
hill  Crusaders,  a  Glasgow  junior  team,  and 
he  later  played  for  Ashfield  before  signing 
for  Raith  Rovers,  a  Scottish  League  club, 
during  the  season  of  1922-3.  He  was  with 
Raith  for  a  couple  of  seasons,  scoring  23 
goals,  and  then  he  crossed  the  border  to 
Preston  North  End.  Preston,  a  club  of 
proud  traditions,  had  just  been  relegated 
from  the  first  division,  and  James  was 
signed  to  help  them  regain  their  former 
status.  In  this  he  was  unsuccessful,  and 
his  four  seasons  with  the  club  were  spent 
in  the  second  division.  But  his  personal 
reputation  as  an  inside-forward  advanced 
rapidly.  While  he  was  a  Preston  player  he 
was  capped  four  times  for  Scotland,  and  in 


539 


James,  A.  W. 


(B.N:B.  X951-1960 


1928  he  scored  two  of  the  goals  when 
Scotland's  'blue  devils'  beat  England  at 
Wembley  by  5-1.  But  at  Preston  he  was 
unfortunate  in  his  colleagues.  The  team 
was  described  as  'Alex  James  and  ten 
others'.  He  was  frustrated  and  discon- 
tented and  in  1929  he  was  put  on  the 
transfer-list. 

Many  well-known  clubs  wanted  to  sign 
him,  and  Herbert  Chapman  brought  him 
to  Arsenal  at  a  fee  of  £9,000,  then  the 
second-highest  sum  ever  paid  for  a  foot- 
baller. Chapman  had  been  manager  of 
Arsenal  for  four  years  and  he  had  not  yet 
realized  his  ambition  to  put  them  on  top 
of  the  football  world.  The  signing  of 
James  as  a  midfleld  forager  and  schemer 
proved  to  be  the  turning-point. 

James  was  with  Arsenal  for  ^ight 
seasons,  during  which  he  received  four 
more  Scottish  caps  and  the  club  won  the 
League  four  times  and  the  Cup  twice.  On 
the  field  James  was  the  mainspring  of  this 
achievement,  but  it  took  him  some  time  to 
fit  into  the  Arsenal  pattern.  At  Preston  he 
had  been  an  individualist  and  a  striker, 
scoring  some  60  goals.  At  Arsenal,  Chap- 
man required  him  to  adapt  his  creative- 
ness  to  a  common  purpose  and  fashion 
goals  for  other  people.  At  first  he  slowed 
down  the  attack  by  holding  the  ball  too 
long  and  by  Christmas  he  had  lost  his 
place  in  the  team.  But  when  the  Cup-ties 
came  Arsenal  were  suddenly  a  different 
side.  James  recovered  his  form  and  confi- 
dence, carried  the  club  into  the  final  and 
at  Wembley  scored  an  early  goal  in  the 
2-0  defeat  of  Huddersfleld  Town. 

In  1930-31  Arsenal,  fourteenth  the 
previous  season,  won  the  League  with  66 
points  out  of  84,  a  record  which  stood  for 
30  years.  A  year  later  they  came  close  to 
achieving  the  'double'  of  League  and  Cup, 
but  an  injury  to  James  at  Easter  ulti- 
mately robbed  them  of  both.  He  could  not 
play  in  the  final,  when  they  lost  to  New- 
castle United  by  a  goal  which  the  photo- 
graphers later  proved  was  not  a  goal  at  all. 
In  the  League  they  were  second  to 
Everton. 

Three  successive  championships  fol- 
lowed in  the  next  three  seasons,  and  in 
1936  Arsenal  again  won  the  Cup.  James 
played  in  the  final  against  Sheffield 
United,  but  at  the  end  of  the  1936-7 
season,  in  which  he  played  only  19  League 
games,  he  retired.  His  delicate  skill  had 
always  made  him  the  object  of  rough 
tactics  and  he  could  no  longer  recover 
from  injury  as  quickly  as  a  younger  man. 
Arsenal  won   the   League   again   in   the 


season  after  his  retirement,  but  it  was  not 
the  emphatic,  runaway  victory  of  earlier 
years,  and  after  that  there  was  a  definite 
decline.  James  was  irreplaceable.  The  club 
could  not  find  another  inside-forward  with 
his  tactical  flair.  He  was  the  team's  uni- 
fying force,  the  supreme  organizer  of  vic- 
tory. With  his  baggy  shorts  and  flapping 
sleeves  he  stamped  his  personality  on 
every  game  in  which  he  played. 

Scoring  goals  was  not  his  job,  and  in  231 
games  for  Arsenal  he  scored  only  26.  So  in 
1935  Sheffield  Wednesday  came  to  High- 
bury with  the  idea  that  if  they  left  James 
with  the  ball  and  marked  everyone  else, 
Arsenal's  attacking  system  would  be  dis- 
rupted. James  quickly  found  the  answer 
to  that :  he  held  the  ball  and  went  through 
to  score  himself.  Arsenal  won  3-0  and 
James  had  them  all.  It  was  characteristic 
of  the  panache  and  improvising  genius 
that  made  him  the  outstanding  footballer 
of  his  time. 

In  the  war  of  1939-45  James  served  in 
the  Maritime  AA  Regiment.  After  the 
war  he  was  an  Arsenal  coach  until  his 
health  broke  down,  and  he  died  in  London 
1  June  1953  after  a  long  illness.  He  left 
a  widow,  two  sons,  and  a  daughter. 

[Bernard  Joy,  Forward,  Arsenal!,  a  History 
of  the  Arsenal  Football  Clvb,  1952.] 

M.  M.  Reese. 

JAMES,    ROLFE    ARNOLD     SCOTT- 

(1878-1959),  journalist,  editor,  and  literary 
critic.  [See  Scott-James.] 

JARDINE,  DOUGLAS  ROBERT  (1900- 
1958),  cricketer,  was  born  at  Bombay  23 
October  1900,  the  only  son  of  Malcolm 
Robert  Jardine  and  his  wife,  Alison, 
daughter  of  Robert  Moir,  M.D.  His  father, 
who  practised  at  the  Bombay  bar,  had 
himself  played  for  Oxford  and  for  Middle- 
sex. Jardine  went  to  Horris  Hill,  a  pre- 
paratory school  renowned  as  a  cradle  of 
cricketers,  and  thence  to  Winchester, 
where  he  was  in  the  eleven  from  1917  to 
1919.  Captain  in  his  last  year,  he  made  997 
runs  in  16  innings  and  played  in  the 
schools'  representative  games  at  Lord's. 

At  New  College,  Oxford,  he  gained  his 
blue  as  a  freshman,  but  in  four  innings 
against  Cambridge  his  highest  score  was  39 
in  Oxford's  overwhelming  victory  in  1923. 
In  1922  a  damaged  knee  not  only  kept 
him  out  of  the  side  but  by  hampering  his 
footwork  retarded  his  development  as 
a  batsman.  At  Oxford  he  played  several 
fine  innings,  notably  his  96  not  out  against 
the  all-conquering  Australians  in   1921, 


em 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Jardine 


but  he  did  not  quite  fulfil  the  exceptional 
promise  of  his  schooldays.  He  also  played 
tennis  for  the  university  in  1921  and  he 
obtained  a  fourth  in  modern  history  in 
1922. 

Jardine  qualified  as  a  solicitor  in  1926 
and  his  professional  commitments  never 
allowed  him  to  play  first-class  cricket 
regularly.  But  when  he  could  spare  the 
time  he  was  always  sure  of  his  place  in 
Surrey's  already  powerful  batting  side, 
and  his  unusual  power  of  concentration 
enabled  him  to  make  consistently  large 
scores  even  when  he  was  short  of  practice. 
More  than  six  feet  tall,  he  had  a  boldly 
upright  stance,  and,  apart  from  a  certain 
restriction  in  his  off-side  play,  he  embodied 
the  classical  principles  of  amateur  bats- 
manship :  men  who  had  played  before  1914 
took  him  to  their  hearts  as  one  of  them- 
selves. What  raised  him  above  his  own 
amateur  contemporaries  was  the  strength 
of  his  back-play,  in  which  he  was  the  equal 
of  the  best  professionals.  His  technical 
gifts  were  reinforced  by  a  combative 
determination  to  succeed,  and  as  he 
matured  he  became  one  of  the  outstanding 
players  of  the  era  between  the  wars. 

In  1927,  although  playing  only  14  in- 
nings, he  made  1002  runs,  including  five 
centuries,  and  headed  the  English  averages 
with  91  09.  Next  year  he  averaged  87*15 
in  17  innings  and  was  again  top  of  the 
averages.  He  made  193  for  the  Gentlemen 
against  the  Players  at  the  Oval  and  played 
in  two  test  matches  against  the  West 
Indies,  scoring  83  at  Manchester.  Invited 
to  go  to  Australia  with  A.  P.  F.  Chapman's 
side  in  1928-9,  he  was  one  of  the  successes 
of  the  tour.  He  made  centuries  in  three 
consecutive  matches  against  state  sides 
and  played  in  all  five  tests,  four  of  which 
were  won.  At  Adelaide  he  scored  98  and 
his  partnership  of  262  with  W.  R.  Ham- 
mond set  up  a  new  record  for  England's 
third  wicket  against  Australia. 

In  the  next  two  seasons  Jardine  was 
unable  to  give  much  time  to  cricket  and 
so  he  did  not  play  against  the  Australian 
side  which  recovered  the  Ashes  in  1930. 
But  in  1931  he  was  appointed  captain  in 
the  three  tests  against  New  Zealand,  and 
next  year,  after  captaining  England  in  the 
first  representative  match  against  India, 
he  was  invited  to  lead  the  side  which 
visited  Australia  in  1932-3. 

Thus  began  the  most  bitterly  contro- 
versial series  that  has  ever  taken  place 
between  the  two  countries.  The  pheno- 
menal batting  of  (Sir)  D.  G.  Bradman 
had  introduced  a  new  and  almost  super- 


human element  into  the  ancient  rivalry, 
and  in  planning  his  strategy  for  the  tour 
Jardine  knew  that  he  must -contain  Brad- 
man  if  he  was  to  win  the  rubber.  Bradman 
was  thought  to  be  unhappy  against 
genuinely  fast  bowling,  and  the  type  of 
attack  which  came  to  be  known  as  'body 
line'  was  born  of  the  English  team's 
determination  to  reduce  him  to  mortal 
stature. 

England  won  the  first  test  at  Sydney! 
lost  the  second  at  Melbourne,  and  went  on 
to  win  the  remaining  three.  With  the  bat 
Jardine  had  only  a  moderate  tour,  but  he 
was  the  architect  of  England's  victory, 
such  as  it  was.  Certainly  no  victory  has 
had  such  bitter  fruits.  Jardine  had  nevei* 
been  personally  popular  with  Australian 
crowds:  on  his  previous  visit  they  has 
found  him  dour  and  unresponsive,  lacking 
the  common  touch,  and  they  had  resented 
his  attachment  to  his  Oxford  Harlequin 
cap,  which  he  even  wore  in  test  matches. 
On  his  second  tour  they  accused  him  of 
winning  the  rubber  by  calculated  intimida- 
tion, and  his  every  appearance  was  greeted 
with  barracking  and  execration  of  quite 
frightening  intensity. 

Jardine  made  no  secret  of  the  fact  that 
as  a  tactical  variation  he  would  sometimes 
instruct  his  bowlers  to  direct  their  attack 
on  the  leg  stump,  so  that  a  cluster  of  short 
legs  might  snap  up  the  unwary  stroke. 
This  was  conventional  'leg  theory',  with 
nothing  new  about  it.  It  had  been  used 
before,  by  the  Australian  W.  W.  Arm- 
strong among  others,  but  it  had  never 
flourished  because  it  was  regarded  as  dull 
and  ineffective.  It  simply  inhibited  stroke 
play  and  spoiled  the  game  as  a  spectacle. 
But  the  difference  now  was  that  Jardine 
had  at  his  command  two  Nottinghamshire 
bowlers,  H.  Larwood  and  W.  Voce,  of 
exceptional  pace  and  accuracy.  When  they 
attacked  the  leg  stump,  they  were  fast 
enough  to  put  the  batsman  in  some 
physical  danger.  There  can  be  little  doubt 
that  at  times  wickets  were  lost  in  defence 
of  the  person  rather  than  the  stumps. 

For  this  type  of  bowling  the  Australians 
coined  the  term  'body  line'.  The  injuries 
suffered  by  two  Australian  batsmen  at 
Adelaide  were  not  caused  by  leg  theory, 
but  in  the  heat  of  the  moment  the  Aus- 
tralian Board  of  Control  sent  a  cable  to 
the  M.C.C.  accusing  the  English  team  of 
'unsportsmanlike'  methods  which  were; 
'making  protection  of  the  body  by  the 
batsmen  the  main  consideration'.  The 
M.C.C.  replied  that  if  things  were  as  bad' 
as  that,   perhaps  the  rest  of  the  tour 


541 


Jardine 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


should  be  cancelled ;  and  this  threat  to  the 
game's  finances  caused  the  Australian 
authorities  to  frame  their  objections  more 
carefully.  The  exchange  of-  cables  con- 
tinued, and  after  an  inquiry  held  at  the 
end  of  the  tour  the  M.C.C.  were  able  to  set 
the  dispute  in  a  clearer  perspective.  They 
agreed  that  a  deliberate  assault  on  the 
batsman  would  be  contrary  to  the  spirit 
of  the  game,  but  they  did  not  believe  that 
any  English  bowler  had  been  guilty  of  it. 
They  considered  that  'the  term  "body- 
line"  bowling  is  misleading  and  improper. 
It  has  led  to  much  inaccuracy  of  thought 
by  confusing  the  short  bumping  ball, 
whether  directed  on  the  off,  middle,  or  leg 
stump,  with  what  is  known  as  "leg- 
theory"  '. 

It  is  significant  that  throughout  a  diffi- 
cult and  unhappy  situation  Jardine  re- 
tained the  loyalty  and  confidence  of  his 
team,  and  even  his  opponents  admired  his 
personal  courage  and  tenacity  of  purpose. 
In  a  book  about  the  series  he  repeated  that 
leg  theory  was  an  accepted  and  legitimate 
tactic  and  he  denied  that  the  English 
bowlers  had  ever  aimed  deliberately  to  hit 
the  batsman.  At  home  in  1933  he  gave 
a  practical  demonstration  of  his  belief  that 
leg  theory,  however  fast,  could  be  sub- 
dued by  a  batsman  with  the  skill  and 
nerve  to  meet  it.  At  Manchester  he  made 
127 — his  only  century  in  a  test — against 
West  Indian  fast  bowlers  who  had  the 
avowed  object  of  giving  him  a  taste  of  his 
own  medicine. 

But  at  the  age  of  thirty-three,  when  he 
should  have  been  in  his  prime,  Jardine  had 
come  to  the  end  of  his  active  cricket  career. 
Partly  for  business  reasons  he  gave  up  the 
captaincy  of  Surrey,  which  he  had  held 
for  only  two  seasons ;  and  although  he  led 
the  M.C.C.  team  to  India  in  1933-4,  when 
the  Australians  came  in  the  following 
summer  they  found  him  in  the  press-box 
instead  of  on  the  field.  Voce  and  Larwood 
did  not  play  either,  and  Bradman's 
average  in  the  tests  was  94-75. 

Jardine's  few  subsequent  app>earances 
were  in  non-competitive  cricket,  although 
he  retained  his  interest  in  the  game 
through  occasional  journalism  and  from 
1955  to  1957  he  was  president  of  the 
Oxford  University  Cricket  Club.  Al- 
together he  made  14,821  runs,  with  an 
average  of  46-90,  the  highest  of  his  35 
centuries  being  214  not  out  against 
Tasmania  in  1928-9.  He  three  times  cap- 
tained the  Gentlemen  against  the  Players 
at  Lord's,  and  in  his  22  tests,  15  as 
England's  captain,  he  made  1,296  runs 


with  an  average  of  48.  In  his  test  career  he 
was  only  twice  on  the  losing  side. 

Jardine  was  chairman  of  the  New  South 
Wales  Land  Agency  and  a  director  of  the 
Scottish  Australian  Company.  In  the  war 
of  1939-45  he  enlisted  in  the  Royal 
Berkshire  Regiment  and  served  in  France, 
Belgium,  and  India. 

In  1934  he  married  Irene  Margaret, 
daughter  of  Sir  William  Henry  Peat ;  they 
had  a  son  and  three  daughters.  He  died  in 
Switzerland,  18  June  1958,  following 
a  fever  contracted  in  Southern  Rhodesia 
the  previous  year.  A  portrait  by  Herbert 
A.  Olivier  is  at  Lord's. 

[D.  R.  Jardine,  In  Quest  of  the  Ashes,  1933, 
and  Cricket,  1936;  Wisden^s  Cricketers^ 
Almanack,  1959;  Roy  Webber,  Tfie  Book  of 
Cricket  Records,  1961 ;  H.  S.  Altham  and 
E.  W.  Swanton,  A  History  of  Cricket,  1938.] 

M.  M.  Reese. 

JARVIS,        CLAUDE       SCUDAMORE 

(1879-1953),  soldier,  administrator,  and 
orientalist,  born  at  Forest  Gate,  London, 
20  July  1879,  was  the  son  of  John  Brad- 
ford Jarvis,  an  insurance  clerk,  and  his 
wife,  Mary  Harvey.  He  does  not  seem  to 
have  been  educated  with  any  profession  in 
mind,  and  at  the  age  of  seventeen  he 
joined  the  Merchant  Navy  as  an  appren- 
tice, sailing  from  Shad  well  to  Sydney  and 
back  by  way  of  Cape  Horn.  But  on  the 
outbreak  of  the  South  African  war  in  1899 
he  enlisted  in  the  Imperial  Yeomanry  as 
a  trooper,  and  on  his  return  to  England  in 
1902  was  gazetted  to  the  3rd  battalion,  the 
Dorsetshire  Regiment  (Special  Reserve). 
In  the  war  of  1914-18  he  served  in  France, 
Egypt,  and  Palestine,  reached  the  rank  of 
major,  and  acquired  a  good  knowledge  of 
Arabic.  Egypt  was  then  a  British  pro- 
tectorate, and  its  desert  borders  had  be- 
come of  considerable  military  importance, 
on  the  east  as  the  main  theatre  of  opera- 
tions against  Turkey,  and  on  the  west 
through  Turkish  subversion  of  the  Senussi 
tribesmen.  It  was  against  the  latter  that 
a  disproportionate  number  of  troops  were 
employed  against  what  proved  to  be 
a  largely  mythical  enemy.  It  was  to  reduce 
this  commitment  that  the  British  high 
commissioner,  Sir  Reginald  Wingate 
[q.v.],  succeeded  in  persuading  the  Egyp- 
tian Government  to  establish  a  Frontiers 
Administration,  and  Jarvis  was  aniongst 
the  first  selected  for  this  service,  subse- 
quently to  be  described  by  him  as  'brought 
into  the  world  by  British  influence  and 
afterwards  treated  with  studied  neglect  by 
Egypt'. 


542 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Jeffery 


Nevertheless  it  was  in  this  unpromising 
atmosphere  that  Jarvis  achieved  remark- 
able success,  gaining  not  only  the  confi- 
dence of  the  tribal  Arabs  whom  he 
governed  but  that  of  the  Egyptian 
Government  who,  if  they  were  niggardly 
in  their  financial  aid,  trusted  him  and  gave 
him  support.  His  first  appointment  was 
to  the  Western  Desert,  followed  by  the 
governorship  of  the  oases  of  the  Libyan 
Desert,  but  he  was  then  transferred  in 
1922  to  the  Eastern  Desert  as  governor  of 
Sinai  where  he  remained  until  he  retired 
voluntarily  in  1936,  when  he  was  appointed 
C.M.G. 

Unfettered  by  bureaucratic  control,  and 
with  what  seemed  to  be  a  hopelessly  in- 
adequate budget,  Jarvis  became  a  legend- 
ary figure.  His  knowledge  of  Arabic,  and 
of  Bedouin  customs  and  law,  enabled 
him  to  settle  tribal  feuds,  not  only 
amongst  the  tribes  under  his  official 
control,  but  their  feuds  with  the  neigh- 
bouring tribes  in  Trans-Jordania  and 
Saudi  Arabia.  He  virtually  obliterated 
banditry,  and  contributed  effectively  to 
Egypt's  efforts  to  suppress  the  drug 
traffic  by  the  desert  routes.  He  made 
a  special  study  of  the  wanderings  of  the 
Israelites  in  the  Exodus,  and  traced  the 
remains  of  what,  before  the  Arab  con- 
quest, must  have  been  a  flourishing  Roman 
and  later  Byzantine  settlement  in  the 
north  of  Sinai.  There,  by  damming  the 
Wadi  Gedeirat  (Kadesh  Barnea  of  the 
Bible),  and  restoring  the  old  stone  chan- 
nels, he  transformed  a  small  swampy 
waterhole  into  several  hundred  acres  of 
olive  and  fruit  trees.  He  was  a  botanist 
and  naturalist  of  considerable  skill,  in 
addition  to  being  a  practical  agriculturist 
and  a  water-colourist  of  some  merit.  He 
was  among  the  last  of  the  Englishmen  in 
the  great  tradition  of  the  early  members  of 
the  Indian  Civil  Service  whose  usually 
single-handed  contribution  to  the  then 
isolated  areas  under  their  charge  will 
probably,  on  the  spot,  not  readily  be 
forgotten. 

Jarvis's  retirement  opened  the  final 
phase  in  his  career.  He  joined  the  staff  of 
Country  Life  where  his  'A  Countryman's 
Notes',  with  their  knowledge  of  agricul- 
ture and  wild  life  and  their  delightful 
anecdotes,  gained  a  wide  and  appreciative 
readership  for  fourteen  years  until  his 
death.  He  lectured  frequently,  and  the 
Royal  Central  Asian  Society  awarded  him 
the  Lawrence  memorial  medal  in  1938.  He 
was  a  proMc  author,  writing  not  only  on 
his  experiences  in  Sinai  and  its  history. 


but  on  Arab  customs  and  agriculture,  and 
sometimes  in  a  lighter  and  satirical  vein 
on  the  British  in  the  Middle  East.  His 
best-known  works  were:  Yesterday  and 
Today  in  Sinai  (1931),  Three  Deserts 
(1936),  Deserts  and  Delta  (1938),  Arab 
Command  (1942),  Heresies  and  Humours 
(1943),  and  his  autobiography,  Half 
a  Life  (1943). 

He  was  small  in  stature,  but  with  great 
charm  and  wit  both  in  speaking  and 
writing,  which  enabled  him  to  invest  the 
animals,  birds,  and  fishes  which  he  knew 
so  well  with  almost  human  characteristics. 
He  died  at  his  home  in  Ringwood  8 
December  1953.  He  had  married  in  1903 
Mabel  Jane,  daughter  of  Charles  Hodson 
of  the  American  Embassy,  London ;  there 
was  one  daughter. 

[The  Times,  10  December  1953;  Country 
Life,  17  December  1953 ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]  Ronald  VVingate. 

JEFFERY,  GEORGE  BARKER  (1891- 
1957),  mathematician  and  educationist, 
was  born  in  Lambeth,  London,  9  May 
1891,  the  son  of  George  Jeffery,  corre- 
sponding clerk,  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth 
McDonald  McKenzie.  He  was  educated  at 
Strand  School,  King's  College,  London, 
and  Wilson's  Grammar  School,  Camber- 
well.  In  1909  he  entered  University 
College,  London,  for  a  two  years'  course, 
followed  by  a  year  at  the  London  Day 
Training  College.  He  then  returned  to 
University  College  as  a  research  student 
and  assistant  to  L.  N.  G.  Filon  (whose 
notice  he  subsequently  contributed  to  this 
Dictionary)  and  obtained  his  B.Sc.  in  1912. 
In  the  same  year  his  first  research  paper 
was  communicated  to  the  Royal  Society. 
In  1914  Filon  went  away  on  war  service 
and  Jeffery,  aged  twenty-three,  was  left  in 
charge  of  the  department.  Jeffery  was 
a  Quaker  and  in  1916  spent  a  short  time  in 
prison  as  a  conscientious  objector  but  was 
later  allowed  to  do  work  of  'national 
importance'.  In  1919  he  returned  to  the 
college,  again  as  an  assistant  to  Filon. 

During  this  time  he  published  a  series  of 
papers  on  the  mathematical  functions 
which  occur  in  the  solution  of  Laplace's 
equation  and  on  the  theory  of  viscous 
flow.  He  was  particularly  interested  in  the 
general  solution  of  Laplace's  equation 
given  by  (Sir)  E.  T.  Whittaker  [q.v.]  in 
1902.  He  used  this  formula  as  a  means  of 
obtaining  relations  between  spherical  har- 
monics, cylindrical  harmonics,  and  other 
such  functions  which  occur  in  the  solution 
of  Laplace's  equation.  In  fluid  motion  his 


m 


Jeffery 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


object  was  to  obtain  exacJt  solutions  of 
the  Navier-Stokes  equation,  and  he  dis- 
covered a  number  of  new  and  interesting 
types  of  flow.  His  point  of  view  was  very 
practical.  He  was  looking  for  exact  solu- 
tions of  definite  physical  problems,  and 
often  gave  at  the  end  of  his  papers  a  little 
table  of  numerical  results. 

In  1921  Jeffery  became  university 
reader  in  mathematics  and  in  1922  pro- 
fessor of  mathematics  at  King's  College, 
London,  but  in  1924  he  returned  to  Uni- 
versity College  as  Astor  professor  of  pure 
mathematics.  His  researches  at  this  time 
were  mainly  inspired  by  Einstein's  theory 
of  relativity,  and  he  published  a  small 
book  Relativity  for  Physics  Students 
(1924).  He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1926.  In 
the  years  following  the  war  he  published 
a  series  of  original  papers  in  rapid  succes- 
sion. They  were  entirely  in  the  field  of 
applied  mathematics  in  which  his  real 
scientific  interest  lay.  He  made  no  further 
original  contribution  to  pure  mathe- 
matics. He  was  becoming  increasingly 
absorbed  in  the  problems  of  college  and 
university  administration  and  even  in 
apphed  mathematics  his  original  work 
came  to  an  early  end.  In  all  he  published 
twenty-one  original  papers,  the  last  in 
1929. 

Jeffery  had  many  activities  outside  the 
work  of  his  own  department.  He  was 
Swarthmore  lecturer  to  the  Society  of 
Friends  (1934) ;  president  of  the  London 
Mathematical  Society  (1935-7),  of  the 
London  Society  for  the  Study  of  ReUgion 
(1937-8),  of  the  Mathematical  Association 
(1947) ;  and  a  vice-president  of  the  Royal 
Society  (1938-40).  He  became  a  member 
of  the  senate  of  London  University  in  1935 
and  in  1939  chairman  of  the  matriculation 
and  school  examination  council  of  the 
university.  In  1948  he  became  chairman 
of  the  South- West  Middlesex  Hospital 
management  committee. 

In  1939  a  section  of  University  College, 
London,  moved  to  Bangor  where  Jeffery 
acted  as  pro-provost.  When  the  war  was 
over  the  coUege  returned  to  London. 
Soon  afterwards  he  resigned  his  chair  to 
become  director  of  the  Institute  of  Educa- 
tion and  entered  upon  what  was  in  some 
ways  the  most  successful  period  of  his  life. 
In  1945  London  University  accepted 
responsibility  for  the  training  of  teachers 
in  more  than  thirty  colleges,  many  in  the 
London  area,  but  others  scattered  over 
the  south-east  of  England.  The  shaping  of 
the  scheme  for  the  whole  area  was  almost 
entirely  due  to  Jeffery  who  produced  a 


plan  in  two  days  of  concentrated  work ;  it 
has  needed  no  substantial  alteration. 

Through  its  colonial  department  the 
Institute  of  Education  had  strong  over- 
seas interests,  especially  among  West 
African  students,  and  Jeffery  became 
interested  in  the  problems  of  West  African 
education.  In  December  1949  he  visited 
West  Africa  to  report  upon  a  proposal  for 
an  examination  council,  spending  eight 
weeks  in  Nigeria,  the  Gold  Coast,  Sierra 
Leone,  and  the  Gambia.  In  his  report 
(March  1950)  he  recommended  the  founda- 
tion of  a  West  African  examination  coun- 
cil to  control  all  the  examinations  in  the 
area.  In  the  next  year  Jeffery  led  a  study 
group  which  visited  West  Africa  for  six 
months,  at  the  same  time  as  another 
group  was  visiting  East  and  Central 
Africa.  Presumably  the  West  African  sec- 
tion of  the  report  African  Education, 
a  Study  of  Educational  Policy  and  Practice 
in  British  Tropical  Africa  (1953)  was 
largely  Jeffery's  work.  Subsequently  he 
paid  an  annual  visit  to  West  Africa  to 
keep  in  touch  with  the  work  of  the 
Examinations  Council  of  which  he  was 
the  founder.  He  also  visited  Russia  with 
a  study  group  and  contributed  to  a  report 
on  the  country's  schools  and  training  of 
teachers. 

Jeffery  was  also  much  interested  in 
craftsmanship.  He  was  descended  from 
a  family  of  wheelwrights  and  was  himself 
an  expert  cabinet  maker:  several  tables 
in  the  staff  common-room  at  University 
College  were  made  by  him.  Late  in  life  he 
took  up  silversmithing  and  registered  his 
own  hall-mark  with  the  Goldsmiths'  Com- 
pany. From  1952  he  was  dean  of  the 
College  of  Handicraft.  It  was  while  driving 
home  from  the  annual  conference  of  this 
college,  on  27  April  1957,  that  he  died 
from  a  sudden  seizure  at  Woolmer  Green, 
Hertfordshire. 

In  1915  Jeffery  married  Elizabeth 
Schofield;  they  had  one  son  and  two 
daughters. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

E.  C.  TiTCHMARSH. 

JESSOP,  GILBERT  LAIRD  (1874- 
1955),  cricketer,  was  born  in  Cheltenham 
19  May  1874,  the  son  of  Henry  Edward 
Jessop,  surgeon,  and  his  wife,  Susannah 
Radford  Hughes.  At  the  age  of  eleven  he 
went  to  the  local  grammar  school,  of 
which  his  father  was  a  governor,  and  in  his 
second  summer  won  his  place  in  the  first 
eleven  as  a  hard-working  long  stop.  But 
his  father's  sudden  death  when  he  was 


544 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Jessop 


fifteen  obliged  him  to  leave  school  and 
earn  his  living ;  for  the  next  six  years  he 
was  an  apprentice  teacher  at  various 
schools.  Masters  were  often  allowed  to 
play  in  the  school  team  in  club  matches, 
and  for  Beccles  College  in  1895  Jessop 
scored  1,058  runs  with  an  average  of  132 
and  in  168  overs  took  100  wickets  for  2-5 
each.  By  this  time  he  had  already  played 
for  Gloucestershire,  making  his  first  ap- 
pearance at  Manchester  in  July  1894,  and 
in  the  following  season  he  was  in  the  team 
at  Lord's  when  W.  G.  Grace  [q.v.]  com- 
pleted his  1,000  runs  in  May. 

Jessop  went  to  Christ's  College,  Cam- 
bridge, in  the  Easter  term  of  1896  and 
played  for  the  university  for  four  years, 
being  captain  in  1899.  Against  Oxford  he 
achieved  little  with  the  bat,  making  only 
two  scores  over  40,  but  he  twice  took  six 
wickets  in  an  innings.  In  1897,  however, 
he  hit  his  first  century,  140  for  Cambridge 
against  the  Philadelphians,  and  later  made 
three  more  for  his  county,  including  101 
(out  of  118)  in  40  minutes  against  York- 
shire. He  played  for  the  Gentlemen  against 
the  Players  at  Lord's,  and  altogether  the 
season  brought  him  1,219  runs  and  116 
wickets. 

He  made  his  first  appearance  for  Eng- 
land two  years  later,  and  in  1900,  after 
Grace's  long  association  with  Gloucester- 
shire had  ended  in  a  quarrel,  Jessop  took 
over  the  captaincy  of  the  county.  He  held 
the  post  for  thirteen  years,  during  which 
they  were  never  higher  than  seventh  in 
the  championship,  their  bowling  being 
too  weak  to  disturb  the  stronger  teams. 
But  Jessop' s  presence  was  a  guarantee 
that  their  cricket  was  never  lacking  in 
colour  and  excitement. 

He  stood  only  5  feet  7  inches,  and  his 
huddled  posture  at  wicket  earned  him  the 
nickname  of  'the  Croucher'.  But  he  was 
exceptionally  strong  in  the  shoulders  and 
arms,  and  once  he  had  sighted  the  ball 
there  was  no  bowler  in  the  world  to  con- 
tain him.  H.  S.  Altham  has  said  that  as 
a  hitter  he  'stands  absolutely  alone': 
others  might  have  driven  the  ball  harder 
and  higher  but  'no  cricketer  that  has  ever 
lived  hit  it  so  often,  so  fast,  and  with  such 
a  bewildering  variety  of  strokes'.  Length 
had  no  meaning  for  him.  With  his  re- 
markable speed  of  foot  he  could  run  to 
meet  even  the  fastest  bowler  and  drive 
him  over  his  head.  Alternatively  he  would 
drop  on  the  right  knee  and  sweep  the  ball 
round  to  leg  with  an  almost  horizontal 
bat ;  and  for  variety's  sake  he  possessed 
a  'wind  and  water'  stroke  with  which  he 


cut  past  third  man  after  he  had  begun  by 
jumping  out  to  drive. 

His  most  astonishing  feat  of  sustained 
scoring  was  at  Hastings  in  1907,  against 
the  Professionals  of  the  South.  He  reached 
60  in  24  minutes,  100  in  42,  150  in  63  ;  and 
altogether  he  made  191,  out  of  234,  in  an 
hour  and  a  half.  Five  times  he  played 
innings  of  over  200,  and  the  largest  of 
them,  286  (out  of  355)  against  Sussex  in 
1903,  occupied  only  175  minutes.  He 
reached  200  in  two  hours,  the  quickest 
double  century  on  record. 

In  1900,  in  a  match  not  regarded  as 
first  class,  he  made  157  against  the  West 
Indies  in  an  hour.  Against  Somerset  in 
1904  he  reached  50  in  twelve  minutes,  and 
other  remarkable  innings  were  66  out  of 
66  against  Sussex  in  1901,  63  out  of  65 
against  Yorkshire  in  1895,  and  171  not 
out  in  an  innings  total  of  246  against 
Yorkshire  in  1899.  Four  times  he  made 
a  century  in  each  innings  of  a  match, 
although  on  no  occasion  did  this  enable 
Gloucestershire  to  gain  a  victory. 

It  has  to  be  remembered  that  it  was  not 
until  1910  that  it  became  a  general  rule 
for  a  stroke  to  count  six  when  the  ball  was 
hit  out  of  the  playing  area.  Before  this 
alteration  to  the  laws  it  usually  had  to  be 
hit  out  of  the  ground.  Nearly  all  Jessop's 
big  innings  were  played  before  this 
amendment,  or  his  scores  would  have  beeii 
even  more  startling. 

In  his  career  he  made  26,058  runs  for  an 
average  of  32 '60.  He  scored  over  1,000 
runs  in  fourteen  seasons,  his  highest 
totals  being  2,210  in  1900  (when  he  also 
took  104  wickets)  and  2,323  the  following 
year.  Altogether  he  made  53  centuries,  six 
of  them  in  less  than  an  hour. 

As  a  fast  bowler  he  was  good  enough  to 
be  selected  for  England  on  at  least  one 
occasion  in  that  capacity  alone.  On  account 
of  injury  he  did  little  bowling  after  1900, 
but  four  times  in  his  career  he  took  eight 
wickets  in  an  innings,  his  best  performance 
being  8-29  against  Essex  in  1900.  His 
complete  figures  were  851  wickets  for 
22-91.  He  was,  moreover,  a  brilliant  fields- 
man at  extra  cover  and  deep  mid-off,  with 
a  swift  and  deadly  throw  that  brought 
many  an  innings  to  a  premature  end. 

Jessop  played  in  eighteen  test  matches 
and  is  best  remembered  for  his  match- 
winning  innings  at  the  Oval  in  1902.  He 
played  in  the  first  three  games  in  the 
series,  and  his  omission  at  Manchester  was 
one  of  several  blunders  which  helped 
Australia  to  win  the  match  and  the  rubber 
by  three  nms.^  Brought  back  at  the  Oval, 


8652062 


545 


Jessop 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


he  went  in  when  England,  who  needed  to 
make  263  on  a  rain-damaged  wicket,  were 
48-5.  Jessop  began  uncertainly,  giving 
a  couple  of  early  chances,  but  then  he 
completely  turned  the  game  with  an 
explosive  innings  of  104,  out  of  139,  in  75 
minutes.  When  he  departed  76  were  still 
needed,  but  the  bowlers  had  lost  their  grip 
on  the  game  and  England  won  by  one 
wicket.  Against  South  Africa  at  Lord's  in 
1907  he  hit  their  formidable  array  of  spin 
bowlers  for  93  runs  off  the  63  balls  sent 
down  to  him.  He  was  also  a  member  of  the 
teams  which  visited  Philadelphia  in  1897 
and  1899,  but  the  opposition  was  too  weak 
to  stimulate  his  highest  effort. 

Jessop  was  not  only  a  cricketer.  At 
Cambridge  he  was  invited  to  play  against 
Oxford  as  a  hockey  goalkeeper  but  missed 
his  blue  because  he  was  taken  ill.  He  would 
also  have  opposed  Oxford  at  billiards  had 
he  not  been  gated  for  falling  short  in  his 
attendances  at  chapel.  He  came  near  to 
getting  a  blue  for  football  and  later  played 
for  the  Casuals,  and  at  rugby  he  played 
wing  three-quarter  for  Gloucester.  He  ran 
the  100  yards  in  little  short  of  even  time 
and  he  was  also  a  scratch  golfer,  serving 
for  some  years  as  secretary  of  the 
Cricketers'  Golfing  Society. 

Although  in  1914  he  was  forty  years  of 
age,  Jessop  enlisted  in  the  Manchester 
Regiment  and  was  a  captain  when  he  was 
invalided  out  with  a  damaged  heart  four 
years  later. 

In  A  Cricketer^ s  Log  (1922)  he  wrote 
engagingly  of  his  career  in  the  game  but 
with  a  modesty  which  prevented  him 
from  indicating  how  much  he  had  himself 
contributed  to  it.  He  also  wrote  some 
schoolboy  fiction  and  a  manual.  Cricket 
and  How  to  Play  It  (1925). 

He  married  in  1902  Millicent  Osborne 
(died  1953),  of  New  South  Wales,  whom 
he  met  while  touring  Australia  with  A,  C. 
MacLaren  [q.v.].  They  had  one  son,  the 
Rev.  G.  L.  O.  Jessop,  who  appeared  in 
two  matches  for  Hampshire  in  1933  and 
later  played  with  some  success  for  Dorset, 
whose  bowling  averages  he  headed  in 
1939.  It  was  at  his  vicarage  at  Fordington, 
near  Dorchester,  that  Jessop  died,  11 
May  1955. 

[G.  L.  Jessop,  A  Cricketer's  Log,  1922; 
C.  J.  Britten,  G.  L.  Jessop,  1935;  Wisden's 
Cricketers'  Almanack,  1956;  Roy  Webber, 
Cricket  Records,  1961 ;  H.  S.  Altham,  A  His- 
ttyry  of  Cricket,  vol.  i,  1962.]       M.  M.  Reese. 

JOAD,  CYRIL  EDWIN  MITCHINSON 
(1891-1953),  writer  and  teacher,  was  born 


12  August  1891  at  Durham,  the  only  child 
of  Edwin  Joad  by  his  wife,  Mary  Smith. 
At  the  time  of  his  son's  birth,  Edwin  Joad 
had  just  completed  an  eight-year  fellow- 
ship at  the  university  of  Durham,  later 
becoming  an  inspector  of  schools  and 
residing  at  Southampton. 

Joad  was  educated  at  the  Dragon 
School,  Oxford,  Blundell's  School,  Tiver- 
ton, and  Balliol  College,  Oxford,  which  he 
entered  as  a  Blundell  scholar  in  1910.  In 
1914  he  was  awarded  the  John  Locke 
scholarship  in  mental  philosophy  and  ob- 
tained a  first  class  in  literae  humaniores. 
On  coming  down  from  Oxford  he  joined 
the  staff  of  the  labour  exchanges  depart- 
ment of  the  Board  of  Trade  which  after- 
wards became  part  of  the  new  Ministry  of 
Labour.  Like  other  civil  servants,  Joad 
took  to  writing,  and  in  the  following  years 
a  stream  of  books  flowed  from  his  pen, 
mainly  on  political  and  philosophical 
subjects.  In  1930  he  left  the  Ministry  of 
Labour  and  became  head  of  the  depart- 
ment of  philosophy  at  Birkbeck  College, 
university  of  London,  an  appointment 
which  he  held  until  his  death.  He  be- 
came D.Lit.  in  1936  and  was  appointed 
reader  in  philosophy  in  the  university  in 
1945. 

Joad  filled  his  life  with  an  immense 
variety  of  activities.  In  the  early  days  he 
took  classes  for  the  Workers'  Educational 
Association,  acted  as  guide  in  rambling 
and  climbing  clubs,  spoke  for  the  Fabian 
Society,  and  worked  for  many  societies 
having  as  their  object  the  preservation 
and  increased  enjoyment  of  the  English 
countryside.  He  rode,  played  hockey  and 
tennis,  derived  much  pleasure  from 
music,  entertained  lavishly  and  enjoyed 
quiet  evenings  of  chess  and  discussion  with 
his  friends.  During  the  war  of  1939-45  he 
helped  organize  and  took  part  in  a  series 
of  open  lunch-time  lectures  held  at  Birk- 
beck College,  speaking  mainly  of  his  two 
great  loves,  Plato  and  Aristotle.  He  also 
made  a  name  as  a  broadcaster,  imparting 
much  of  the  liveliness  and  sparkle  to  the 
first  Brains  Trust.  The  Punch  cartoon 
which  depicted  him  saying  to  a  waiter  'It 
all  depends  what  you  mean  by  (a)  thick 
and  (b)  clear'  commemorated  a  charac- 
teristic phrase  to  which  the  listening  pub- 
lic grew  accustomed.  Many  men  and 
women  were  led  to  a  serious  interest  in 
philosophy  by  hearing  his  talks,  either  as 
adult  students  or  as  members  of  his 
audiences.  But  his  reputation  suffered 
when  he  was  convicted  in  1948  of  travel- 
ling on  the  railway  without  a  ticket. 


546 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


John 


The  genius  of  Joad  lay  largely  in  his 
stimulating  influence  as  a  teacher.  As  an 
expositor  he  was  admirable.  His  introduc- 
tions to  the  various  branches  of  philosophy 
and  his  expositions  of  the  writings  of  the 
great  thinkers  of  the  past  were  remarkable 
for  their  lucidity  and  critical  insight.  By 
ruthless  and  persistent  criticism  he  suc- 
ceeded in  imparting  these  qualities  to  his 
students  and  many  of  the  young  men  and 
women  who  passed  through  his  hands 
were  made  incapable  of  loose  or  vague 
thinking  and  expression. 

As  a  philosopher,  Joad  suffered  from 
being  out  of  sympathy  with  the  current 
methods  of  philosophizing.  He  admired 
the  ingenuity  and  acumen  of  his  younger 
contemporaries,  but  could  not  feel  that 
they  were  working  along  profitable  lines. 
He  fought  valiantly  for  the  losing  causes 
of  his  day:  the  objectivity  of  value  in 
morals  and  art,  the  fruitfulness  of  meta- 
physical speculation,  and  the  legitimate 
employment  of  reason  upon  the  objects  of 
religious  knowledge.  In  Decadence  (1948) 
Joad  traced  the  evil  of  his  times  to  what 
he  called  'the  dropping  of  the  object',  in 
theory  of  knowledge,  aesthetics,  ethics, 
and  political  philosophy,  with  the  result- 
ing emphasis  upon  states  of  mind  in  place 
of  that  upon  which  they  are  directed.  In 
his  philosophical  life,  he  was  thus  forced 
continually  into  polemics  and  was  hin- 
dered in  the  peaceful  development  of  his 
own  philosophical  position. 

In  his  later  years,  Joad  divided  his  time 
between  town  and  country,  and  to  see  him 
arrive  in  London  after  a  long  week-end 
of  work  on  his  Hampshire  farm  was  to 
see  abounding  energy  personified.  Rosy- 
cheeked,  bright-eyed,  with  neat  white 
beard,  his  short  stocky  figure  in  shapeless 
tweed  overcoat  with  hat  to  match,  he 
would  arrive  carrying  a  great  leather  bag, 
in  wliich  would  be  his  lecture  notes,  his 
latest  manuscript,  several  books  for 
review,  and  his  evening  suit.  In  the  last 
he  would  array  himself  after  lectures  were 
over  for  the  evening,  and  go  off  to  dinners 
at  which  he  would  be  a  sparkling  and 
entertaining  guest,  setting  himself  next 
morning  as  usual  to  \sTite  his  daily  quota. 
He  pursued  all  sorts  of  experiences  with 
zest,  entering  sympathetically  into  those 
of  other  people,  interested  to  find  out 
what  it  'felt  like'  to  be  blind,  how  the 
handicaps  might  be  overcome,  and  what 
were  the  compensations.  He  passed 
through  change  and  development  of  his 
views,  from  pacifism  to  the  belief  that 
some  evils  must  be  combated  by  force. 


from  agnosticism  to  Christianity.  The 
constant  element  through  these  changes 
was  his  absolute  abhorrence  of  cruelty  and 
his  feeling  for  the  suffering  of  fellow 
creatures.  He  traced  carefully  and  com- 
pletely the  stages  in  the  development  of 
his  beliefs,  both  for  his  own  satisfaction 
and  for  the  benefit  of  people  struggling 
with  similar  problems.  The  Recovery  of 
Belief  (1952),  the  last  of  his  autobio- 
graphical works,  was  published  when  he 
was  already  suffering  from  the  disease 
from  which  he  died  at  his  home  in  Hamp- 
stead  9  April  1953. 

Joad  married  in  1915  Mary,  daughter  of 
Richard  William  White,  artist,  by  whom 
he  had  one  son  and  two  daughters.  A  por- 
trait by  Patricia  Angadi  remained  in  the 
possession  of  the  artist. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Ruth  L.  Saw. 

JOHN,     Sir     WILLIAM     GOSCOMBE 

(1860-1952),  sculptor  and  medallist,  was 
born  in  Cardiff  21  February  1860,  the 
elder  son  of  Thomas  John  and  his  wife, 
Elizabeth  Smith.  He  assumed  the  name 
Goscombe  when  a  young  man  from  a 
Gloucestershire  village  near  his  mother's 
old  home.  His  father  was  a  woodcarver 
employed  in  the  workshops  set  up  by  Lord 
Bute  [q.v.]  for  the  restoration  of  Cardiff 
Castle.  John  was  trained  in  Cardiff,  and 
later  in  London  with  Thomas  Nicholls 
(1881-6)  and  C.  B.  Birch  [q.v.]  (1886-7), 
at  the  City  and  Guilds  School  in  Kenning- 
ton,  and,  from  1884,  at  the  Royal 
Academy  Schools.  With  the  help  of  money 
subscribed  by  supporters  in  Cardiff,  he 
was  able  to  visit  Italy  and  France  in  1888, 
and  Greece,  Constantinople,  and  Cairo  in 
1889.  The  award  in  1889  of  the  Royal 
Academy's  gold  medal  and  travelling 
scholarship,  for  a  group  'Parting'  (cast  in 
bronze  for  (Sir)  Lawrence  Alma-Tadema, 
q.v.),  enabled  him  to  extend  his  travels  the 
next  year  to  Sicily,  North  Africa,  and 
Spain,  and  to  take  a  studio  in  Paris  for 
a  year. 

John  returned  to  London  in  1891  and 
settled  in  1892  in  St.  John's  Wood,  in 
which  district  he  remained  for  the  res:  or 
his  life.  He  had  first  exhibited  at  the 
Academy  in  1886.  He  was  elected  an 
associate  in  1899  and  an  academician  in 
1909.  He  was  knighted  at  Bangor  in  1911. 

When  living  in  Paris,  John  had  watched 
Rodin  at  work,  and  his  nude  'Morpheus', 
which  received  an  honourable  mention  in 
the  Salon  of  1892,  shows  clearly  ilie  in- 
fluence of  the  latter's  'Age  d'Airain'.  In 


547 


John 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


England  his  teachers  and  contemporaries 
included  Lord  Leighton,  Sir  Thomas 
Brock,  and  Sir  Alfred  Gilbert  [qq.v.]. 
Gilbert's  brilliance,  as  revealed  in  his 
'sentiment',  particularly  impressed  John. 
*Morpheus'  was  followed,  during  the  next 
ten  years,  by  other  academic  nudes :  'Girl 
binding  her  hair'  (1893);  St.  John  the 
Baptist,  a  half-clothed  figure  cast  in  block 
tin  for  Lord  Bute  (1894) ;  'Boy  at  Play' 
(1895);  'The  Elf  (1898),  John's  diploma 
work ;  and  'Joyance'  (1899).  These  are  all 
characterized  by  complete  anatomical 
mastery  and  suave  rhjrthm,  nor  are  they 
lacking  in  sentiment,  which  in  the  St. 
John  is  raised  to  a  restrained  eloquence  of 
some  distinction.  This  figure  was  awarded 
a  gold  medal  at  the  Paris  International 
Exhibition  of  1900.  'Boy  at  Play'  was 
purchased  in  1896  by  the  Chantrey  trus- 
tees. In  1916  John  contributed  a  marble 
figure  of  'St.  David  Blessing  the  People' 
to  a  group  of  ten  figures  commissioned  by 
Lord  Rhondda  [q.v.]  for  Cardiff  City  Hall. 
This  was  the  most  important  subject  of 
the  group,  and  by  far  the  most  suc- 
cessful. 

John's  numerous  pubUc  statues  included 
those  of  the  seventh  Duke  of  Devonshire, 
at  Eastbourne  (awarded  a  gold  medal  in 
the  Paris  Salon  of  1901);  equestrian 
statues  of  King  Edward  VII  (Cape  Town, 
1904),  Lord  Tredegar  (Cardiff,  1909),  Lord 
Minto  (Calcutta,  1913),  and  Sir  Stanley 
Maude  (Baghdad,  1921);  the  SaUsbury 
tomb  in  Westminster  Abbey  (1908),  and 
war  memorials  in  Liverpool,  Newcastle, 
and  many  other  places.  His  portrait  busts 
included  men  of  such  diverse  eminence  as 
Carnegie,  Edmund  Gosse,  and  Kitchener. 
He  designed  the  regaUa  used  at  the 
investiture  of  the  Prince  of  Wales  at 
Caernarvon  in  1911  and  the  commemora- 
tive medal,  the  Jubilee  medal  of  King 
George  V  (1935),  and  the  Great  Seal  of 
King  Edward  VIII  (1936). 

John's  art  may  be  described  as  a  com- 
pound of  realism  and  romanticism:  it  is 
illustrative,  but  inspired  by  fancy  rather 
than  by  imagination.  His  style  underwent 
little  change  throughout  his  long  life, 
apart  from  a  broadening  in  the  treatment 
of  portrait  busts.  Most  of  these  were  in 
bronze,  but  in  bronze  and  marble  alike  he 
was  a  convincing  portrayer  of  character 
and  showed  notable  ability  to  render  the 
soft  surfaces  of  skin  and  hair. 

He  was  an  academic  sculptor  first  and 
last:  quite  out  of  sympathy  with  what  he 
termed  the  'Blaster  Island'  style  of  modern 
sculpture,  which  appeared  when  he  was  in 


his  prime.  Critical  opinion  consequently 
left  him  behind.  Official  honours,  how- 
ever, were  not  lacking,  in  France  and 
Belgium  as  well  as  at  home,  and  in  1942 
he  was  awarded  the  gold  medal  of  the 
Royal  Society  of  British  Sculptors.  He 
exhibited  annually  at  the  Academy  until 
1948,  a  period  of  sixty-three  years,  and 
died  in  London  15  December  1952.  There 
is  a  large  collection  of  his  work  at  the 
National  Museum  of  Wales,  described  in 
a  special  catalogue  issued  by  the  museum 
in  1948.  It  includes  a  self-portrait. 

John  was  a  courteous  and  affable  man, 
proud  of  his  Welsh  nationality  and  of 
his  own  success,  but  somewhat  reserved. 
He  married  in  1890  Marthe  (died  1923), 
daughter  of  Paul  Weiss,  of  Neuchatel.  His 
only  child,  a  daughter,  married  the  son  of 
Sir  Luke  Fildes  [q.v.]. 

[The  Times,  16  and  18  December  1952; 
National  Museum  of  Wales  archives ;  personal 
knowledge.]  R.  L.  Charlks. 

JOHNSON,  ALFRED  EDWARD 
WEBB-,  Baron  Webb- Johnson  (1880- 
1958),  surgeon.  [See  Webb- Johnson.] 

JOHNSON,  JOHN  de  MONINS  (1882- 
1956),  printer  and  scholar,  was  born  17 
May  1882  at  Kirmington,  Lincolnshire, 
the  second  son  and  third  child  of  the  vicar, 
the  Rev.  John  Henry  Johnson,  and  his 
wife,  Anna  Braithwaite  Savory.  He  was 
educated  at  Magdalen  College  School, 
Oxford,  and  in  1900  won  an  open  scholar- 
ship at  Exeter  College.  He  obtained  a  first 
class  in  classical  moderations  (1902)  and 
a  second  class  in  liter ae  humaniores  (1904), 
remaining  in  residence  an  extra  year 
reading  Arabic  in  preparation  for  an 
appointment  in  the  Egyptian  Civil  Ser- 
vice which  he  entered  in  1905  and  left  in 
1907. 

From  1908  to  1911  Johnson  was  a 
senior  demy  of  Magdalen  and  during  this 
period  and  later,  while  a  pupil  of  A.  S. 
Hunt  [q.v.],  he  was  engaged  in  editing 
papyri:  Johnson  was  chiefly  responsible 
for  volume  ii  of  the  Catalogue  of  the  Greek 
Papyri  in  the  John  Rylands  Library  which 
was  published  in  1915.  In  1911,  and  again 
in  1913-14,  he  was  in  Egypt  conducting 
explorations  on  behalf  of  the  Graeco- 
Roman  branch  of  the  Egjrpt  Exploration 
Fund.  During  his  second  expedition  he 
found  at  Antinoe  the  earliest  known  manu- 
script of  Theocritus.  It  was  edited  by 
Hunt  and  Johnson  together,  but  publi- 
cation was  delayed  until  1930  when 
Johnson's    name,    unusually   duplicated. 


648 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Johnson,  J.  de  M, 


appeared  both  on  the  title-page  and  in  the 
printer's  colophon  at  the  end. 

In  1915  he  was  appointed  acting  assist- 
ant secretary  to  the  delegates  of  the  Oxford 
University  Press,  and  later  assistant  secre- 
tary. He  was  discerning  in  the  selection  of 
manuscripts,  enterprising  and  persuasive 
in  his  search  for  authors,  and,  when  there 
was  opportunity,  a  brilliant  innovator  in 
illustration.  For  this,  he  went  back  to 
contemporary  sources,  and  the  archaeo- 
logist in  him  had  an  unerring  instinct  for 
what  would  most  aptly  illustrate  a  text. 

In  1925  the  delegates  appointed  John- 
son to  be  printer  to  the  university,  a 
daring  choice,  for  he  had  no  practical 
knowledge  of  either  printing  or  factory 
management.  Nevertheless  he  possessed 
other  significant  qualifications:  he  was  in 
his  prime,  his  capacity  proved ;  he  was  on 
terms  with  the  delegates  and  apprised  of 
policy ;  and  known  to  the  university  and 
familiar  with  its  governmental  machinery. 

He  was  immediately  plunged  into  the 
less  agreeable  excitement  of  industrial 
management,  for  within  a  year  he  ex- 
perienced, successively,  a  sectional  strike, 
and  the  general  strike  of  1926,  events 
which  made  a  deep  impression  on  him.  He 
then  faced  the  necessary  unpleasantness 
of  disturbing  some  members  of  his  well- 
entrenched  staff,  and  the  introduction  of 
replacements.  In  the  factory  he  found  on 
the  one  hand  a  modern  bindery,  on  the 
other  a  department  in  which  a  hundred 
compositors  still  worked  by  candlelight. 
And  as  he  moved  among  his  intimates 
who  were  also  publishers  and  printers  he 
learned  that  the  reputation  of  Oxford 
printing  had  fallen  very  low.  The  urgent 
need  for  planned  re-equipment  and 
development  was  recognized  and  the 
delegates  gave  Johnson  a  free  hand  in  his 
spending. 

For  the  next  few  years  Johnson  devoted 
those  resources,  and  all  his  time,  to  the 
restoration  of  Oxford  printing;  but  the 
slump  of  the  early  thirties  arrested  expan- 
sion, and  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939 
ended  it.  Eventually  ninety  per  cent  of 
the  Press's  output  was  employed  by  the 
Government  in  the  war  effort.  Johnson 
was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1945  and  retired 
in  the  following  year.  He  had  been  elected 
an  honorary  fellow  of  Exeter  in  1936. 

Many  great  and  beautiful  books  were 
produced  under  the  direction  of  Johnson 
who  was  in  the  van  of  those  responsible 
for  the  renaissance  of  book  printing  in  the 
twenties.  In  1928  he  completed  the  print- 
ing of  the  Oxford  English  Dictionary  and 


received  from  the  university  the  honorary 
degree  of  D.Litt.  Other  works  were  the 
lectern  Bible  designed  by  Bruce  Rogers 
and  completed  in  1935;  the  handsome 
Survey  of  Persian  Art  (1938-9)  in  six  folio 
volumes ;  and  the  two-volume  Old  Spain 
(1936)  printed  for  Macmillan  with  illustra- 
tions by  (Sir)  Muirhead  Bone  [q.v.]  in 
colour  collotype. 

Johnson  was  quick  to  appreciate  the 
importance  of  and  assiduous  in  adding  to 
the  unique  collection  of  printing  material 
preserved  at  the  Press  where  the  typo- 
graphical museum  illustrates  the  history 
of  Oxford  printing.  He  also  duplicated  for 
the  Press  the  collection,  now  at  Princeton, 
which  Falconer  Madan  had  assembled 
when  writing  his  Oxford  Books  (3  vols., 
1895-1931).  With  his  friend  Strickland 
Gibson,  Johnson  edited  The  First  Minute 
Book  of  the  Delegates  of  the  Oxford  Univer- 
sity Press  (1943)  and  together  they  wrote 
Print  and  Privilege  at  Oxford  to  the  Year 
1700(1946). 

His  most  notable  monument,  however, 
may  prove  to  be  the  vast  collection  of 
printed  ephemera  which  he  gathered 
together  and  sorted  throughout  the  years. 
The  germ  of  the  collection  consists  of  pro- 
posals and  prospectuses  for  books,  starting 
early  in  the  seventeenth  century.  To  this 
have  been  added  title-pages,  specimen 
pages,  material  illustrating  the  history  of 
printing,  including  copyright,  spelling, 
and  design,  and  there  are  specialized  col- 
lections of  banknotes,  postage  stamps^ 
political  pamphlets,  Christmas  cards, 
valentines,  and  cigarette  cards:  the 
richest  collection  of  jobbing  printing  in 
existence.  It  has  been  named  the  Con- 
stance Meade  collection  after  a  friend  of 
Johnson's  who  made  over  to  him  a  mass 
of  valuable  material  she  had  inherited. 
Housed  originally  at  the  Press  the  collec- 
tion was  moved  in  1968  to  the  Bodleian 
Library. 

There  is  a  drawing  of  Johnson  at  the 
Press  by  Sir  William  Rothenstein  (1940) ; 
a  water-colour  by  H.  A.  Freeth  (1956)  and 
a  drawing  by  Miss  E.  Plachte  (1938)  are  at 
the  Bodleian.  Johnson  was  a  tall  man  and 
well  proportioned,  slow  and  deliberate 
in  his  movements.  His  nose,  large  and 
pointed,  was  his  most  striking  feature :  his 
hair,  thin  and  combed  over  his  brow, 
completed  an  arresting  head  which  was 
likened  to  that  of  the  bust  of  Julius 
Caesar  in  the  British  Museum.  Indeed, 
he  turned  a  stern  countenance  to  the 
world,  and  showed  an  explosive  temper  to 
those  who  displeased  him ;  but  he  was  a 


549 


Johnson,  J.  de  M. 


P.N.B.  1951-1960 


delightful  conversationalist  and  a  brilliant 
and  voluminous  correspondent.  Ever  a 
busy  controversialist,  he  was  fearless  in  a 
quarrel  but  not  always  wise  in  the  causes 
he  espoused  or  in  his  choice  of  opponent. 
Yet  he  was  always  ready  to  champion  the 
weak  and  many  were  warmed  by  his 
kindness  or  helped  by  his  charity.  He 
devoted  much  time  and  energy  to  com- 
mittees and  public  work,  some  of  which 
he  performed  with  almost  possessive  en- 
thusiasm. In  his  later  years  he  withdrew 
from  all  these  activities  save  the  Oxford 
Preservation  Trust,  spending  most  of  his 
time  in  his  museum  at  the  Press. 

In  1918  Johnson  married  Margaret 
Dorothea,  daughter  of  Charles  Cannan 
[q.v.],  secretary  to  the  delegates.  They 
had  one  daughter,  and  one  son,  Charles 
Cannan  Johnson,  who  became  manager 
of  the  Canadian  branch  of  the  Press  but 
who  died  in  1963.  Johnson  died  in  Oxford 
15  September  1956. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Charles  Batey. 

JOHNSON,  Sir  NELSON  KING  (1892- 
1954),  meteorologist,  was  born  11  March 
1892  at  Barton  Mill  House,  Canterbury, 
the  second  son  of  John  Gilbert  Johnson, 
master  miller,  and  his  wife,  Emily  Alice 
Williams.  From  the  Simon  Langton 
School,  Canterbury,  he  obtained  a  scholar- 
ship to  the  Royal  College  of  Science, 
South  Kensington,  where  he  took  his 
B.Sc.  (1913)  and  A.R.C.S.,  becoming  an 
assistant  demonstrator  in  spectroscopy  in 
1913.  A  year  later  he  began  the  life  of  a 
professional  astronomer  by  joining  Sir 
Norman  Lockyer  [q.v.]  at  Sidmouth 
Observatory,  but  this  career  was  ter- 
minated by  the  war  and  in  1915  he  joined 
the  Royal  Flying  Corps.  His  experiences 
as  a  pilot  undoubtedly  influenced  his 
decision  to  join  the  Meteorological  Office 
in  1919. 

In  1921  Johnson  was  put  in  charge  of 
the  meteorological  section  of  the  Chemical 
Warfare  Experimental  Station  at  Porton, 
Wiltshire,  a  post  he  held  until  1928. 
During  these  seven  years  he  did  the 
scientific  work  for  which  he  is  best  remem- 
bered. He  was  charged  with  investigating 
the  physics  of  the  atmosphere  very  close 
to  the  ground,  especially  in  relation  to 
diffusion,  a  subject  now  known  as  micro- 
meteorology.  WTien  he  began,  relatively 
little  was  known  about  these  matters  and 
few  reliable  systematic  observations  were 
available,  but  within  a  remarkably  short 
space  of  time  he  and  his  team  had  not  only 


devised  apparatus  for  the  routine  record- 
ing of  the  surface  temperature  and  wind 
fields  and  their  variations  with  height  to 
an  accuracy  hitherto  unapproached,  but 
also  laid  the  foundations,  both  experi- 
mental and  theoretical,  of  the  study  of  the 
diffusion  of  gases  and  suspended  matter  by 
the  turbulence  of  the  natural  wind.  For 
reasons  of  national  security  much  of  this 
work  was  withheld  from  open  publication 
until  after  the  war  of  1939-45,  but  the 
claim  may  be  fairly  advanced  that  John- 
son truly  laid  the  foundations  of  micro- 
meteorology,  and  his  contributions  were 
recognized  by  the  award  of  the  D.Sc.  by 
the  university  of  London  in  1939. 

Johnson  became  director  of  experiments 
at  Porton  in  1928  and  afterwards  chief 
superintendent  of  the  chemical  defence 
research  department.  War  Office.  In  1938 
he  succeeded  Sir  George  Simpson  as  direc- 
tor of  the  Meteorological  Office.  Within 
a  year  he  was  faced  with  the  reorganiza- 
tion of  the  service  for  war,  when  the  staff 
rose  from  fewer  than  1,000  to  over  6,000. 
During  this  period  he  undoubtedly  over- 
worked and  damaged  his  health.  Apart 
from  the  successful  organization  of  the 
wartime  service  he  also,  during  this  period, 
began  organized  research  within  the 
Office  and  founded  the  Meteorological 
Research  Committee.  In  1943  he  was 
appointed  K.C.B.  After  the  war  he  turned 
his  attention  to  re-creating  international 
links  and  in  1946  became  president  of  the 
International  Meteorological  Organiza- 
tion. In  this  capacity  he  did  much  to 
bring  into  being  the  World  Meteorological 
Organization,  acting  as  president  for  the 
first  congress  of  the  Organization  in  1951. 
He  retired  from  the  Meteorological  Office 
in  1953. 

Johnson  was  a  far-seeing,  but  not  par- 
ticularly forceful  administrator,  a  charac- 
teristic dictated  by  his  natural  modesty 
and  tendency  to  self-effacement.  As  an 
individual  scientist  his  gifts  inclined  more 
to  the  experimental  than  the  theoretical 
side  and  his  work  in  atmospheric  turbu- 
lence was  distinguished  chiefly  by  the 
excellence  of  the  basic  measurements 
which  he  made  with  simple  but  usually 
ingenious  instruments.  But  for  the  inter- 
vention of  the  war  he  would  undoubtedly 
have  turned  the  Meteorological  Office  into 
a  very  effective  research  institution  as 
well  as  a  public  service ;  but  this  had  to 
wait  for  more  favourable  circumstances. 

In  1927  Johnson  married  Margaret, 
daughter  of  J.  Taylor,  of  Blackburn  ;  they 
had  one  son  and  one  daughter.  He  was 


550 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Jolowicz 


a  keen  mountaineer,  but  during  his  later 
years  contracted  Parkinson's  disease  and 
this  must  have  played  a  part  in  hastening 
his  death,  by  his  own  hand,  in  London, 
23  March  1954.  A  portrait  in  oils,  made 
from  a  photograph,  is  in  the  possession  of 
the  World  Meteorological  Organization  in 
Geneva. 

[The  Times,  24  March  1954;  Quarterly 
Journal  of  the  Royal  Meteorological  Society, 
vol.  Ixxx,  1954 ;  Journal  of  Atmospheric  and 
Terrestrial  Physics,  vol.  v,  1954;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

O.  G.  Sutton. 

JOLOWICZ,  HERBERT  FELIX  (1890- 
1954),  academic  lawyer,  was  born  in 
London  16  July  1890,  the  third  child  and 
second  son  of  Jewish  parents,  his  father 
being  Hermann  Jolowicz,  silk  merchant, 
and  his  mother  Marie  Litthauer.  His  sister 
Marguerite  married  Martin  Wolff  [q.v.]. 
He  was  educated  at  St.  Paul's  School, 
from  which  he  won  a  classical  scholarship 
to  Trinity  College,  Cambridge.  He  was 
placed  in  the  first  class  of  part  i  of  the 
classical  tripos  in  1911  and  in  the  first 
class  of  part  i  of  the  law  tripos  in  1913, 
a  curious  combination  which  committed 
him  to  Roman  law  and  for  the  time  being 
cut  him  off  from  almost  all  the  more 
practical  parts  of  English  law.  He  then 
spent  a  year  in  Germany,  sitting  at  the 
feet  of  two  of  the  greatest  Roman  lawyers 
of  modern  times,  Ludwig  Mitteis  at  Leip- 
zig and  Otto  Lenel  at  Freiburg.  He  escaped 
from  Germany  in  1914  with  three  days  to 
spare  and  served  throughout  the  war,  for 
most,  of  the  time  as  an  officer  in  the  Bed- 
fordshire Regiment,  and  was  in  Gallipoli, 
Egypt,  and  France. 

Called  to  the  bar  by  the  Inner  Temple  in 
1919,  Jolowicz  was  first  a  pupil,  then  a 
member  of  the  chambers,  of  (Sir)  Henry 
Slesser.  His  name  appears  in  the  Law 
Reports  as  counsel  in  the  leading  case 
of  Chester  v.  Bateson  (1920).  His  wide 
linguistic  gifts,  however,  made  him  an 
obvious  choice  as  a  teacher  of  Roman  law 
and  in  1920  he  became  non-resident  All 
Souls  reader  in  Roman  law  at  Oxford. 
From  1924  he  combined  that  post  with 
a  lectureship,  later  readership,  in  Roman 
law  and  jurisprudence  at  University  Col- 
lege, London.  When  in  1931  he  became 
professor  of  Roman  law  at  University 
College,  he  relinquished  his  readership  at 
Oxford.  During  his  London  career  he  took 
his  full  share  of  tutorial  work,  in  addition 
to  lecturing,  and  occupied  several  ad- 
ministrative  posts   in   the   college,   thus 


acquiring  an  intimate  knowledge  of  the 
students.  He  was  also  dean  of  the  faculty 
of  law  in  the  university  in  1937-8.  He 
retained  a  close  connection  with  Univer- 
sity College  until  hrs  death  and  was  from 
1947  until  his  death  chairman  of  the 
library  sub -committee  of  the  Institute  of 
Advanced  Legal  Studies,  a  part  of  the 
university. 

During  the  Nazi  persecutions  he  gave 
much  unobtrusive  help  to  refugees;  on 
the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  he  rejoined 
the  army  and  served  as  an  officer  in  the 
Intelligence  Corps  until  1945.  In  1948  he 
became  regius  professor  of  civil  law  at 
Oxford.  During  the  autumn  of  1953  he  was 
visiting  professor  at  the  Tulane  University 
of  Louisiana  (which  conferred  on  him  the 
honorary  degree  of  D.C.L.)  and  travelled 
extensively  in  the  United  States,  lecturing 
at  such  universities  as  Yale,  Columbia,  and 
Chicago. 

Jolowicz  published  a  number  of  articles 
and  reviews,  biit  only  two  books,  one  of 
which,  his  Historical  Introduction  to  Roman 
Law  (1932,  2nd  ed.  1952),  is  an  essential 
tool  for  both  the  student  and  the  advanced 
worker  and  made  his  reputation  abroad.  It 
is  a  wonderfully  well-balanced  and  soberly 
written  work.  The  other  book  was  a  trans- 
lation, with  descriptive  introduction  and 
commentary,  of  a  singularly  intractable 
title  of  the  Digest  dealing  with  theft 
{Digest  XLVII.  2  (De  Furtis),  1940).  Both 
books  covered,  almost  surreptitiously, 
much  more  ground  than  their  titles 
promised.  He  would  have  written  more 
had  he  not,  as  he  said  himself,  been  started 
off  on  a  wrong  track.  The  current  search 
for  interpolations  in  the  Digest  did  not 
suit  him,  but,  although  he  soon  did 
independent  work  on  very  early  Roman 
law,  he  took  some  time  to  develop  his 
main  interest,  in  the  medieval  and  modern 
history  of  Roman  law,  especially  in 
England.  He  left  behind  him  a  consider- 
able fragment  which  was  published  in 
1957  under  the  title  Roman  Foundations  of 
Modern  Law^  covering  the  Sources,  the 
Law  of  Persons,  and  Family  Law  (with 
the  exception  of  Guardianship).  The  other 
main  field  of  study  which  may  be  singled 
out  from  his  almost  universal  interest  in 
law  was  jurisprudence.  He  did  not  pub- 
lish himself  his  University  College  Lectures 
on  Jurisprudence,  doubtless  because,  as 
they  stood,  they  did  not  come  up  to  his 
very  exacting  standard,  but  they  were 
later  edited  by  his  elder  son,  J.  A.  Jolo- 
wicz, fellow  of  Trinity  College,  Cambridge, 
and  appeared  in  1963.  i 


551 


Jolowicz 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


v  Jolowicz  was,  indeed,  first  and  foremost 
a  lecturer.  He  loved  lecturing,  and  per- 
haps especially  to  young  and  immature 
students.  He  took  immense  pains  over  his 
lectures,  getting  them  into  the  most  per- 
fect form  before  he  dehvered  them.  With 
all  his  breadth  of  interests  he  believed  in 
and  exercised  the  most  accurate  scholar- 
ship. He  expressed  a  profound  scepticism 
where  broad  intellectual  constructions 
were  in  question,  though  he  could  use 
them  as  servants  to  hold  an  immense 
amount  of  knowledge  in  his  capacious 
mind.  He  had  great  natural  sagacity, 
which  he  was  always  ready  to  put  at  the 
disposal  of  his  friends  and  of  any  institu- 
tion he  was  connected  with.  He  was  an 
enthusiastic  member  of  the  Society  of 
Public  Teachers  of  Law,  of  which  he  was 
president  in  1936-7.  His  greatest  service 
to  the  Society  and  indeed  one  of  the 
greatest  services  he  performed  to  law  in 
England  was  his  editorship  of  the  Society's 
Journal  from  its  first  number  in  1924  to 
the  day  of  his  death.  He  did  more  than 
anyone  else  to  set  the  character  and  tone 
of  the  Journal^  which  is  indeed  his 
monument. 

In  spite  of  many  trials  Jolowicz  pre- 
served a  gay  spirit  and  a  puckish  humour. 
He  made  his  house  a  centre  of  hospitality 
and  left  his  friends  with  the  recollection  of 
a  very  lovable  man  when  he  died  in 
Oxford  19  December  1954.  A  bibliography 
of  his  writings  is  to  be  found  in  the  H.  F. 
Jolowicz  memorial  number  of  Butter- 
worth's  South  African  Law  Review,  1956. 

In  1924  Jolowicz  married  Ruby,  daugh- 
ter of  Joseph  Wagner,  by  whom  he  had 
two  sons  and  one  daughter. 

[Journal  of  the  Society  of  Public  Teachers 
of  Law,  June  1955;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  F.  H.  Lawson. 

JONES,  (ALFRED)  ERNEST  (1879- 
1958),  physician  and  psycho-analyst,  was 
bom  at  Gowerton,  Glamorgan,  1  January 
1879,  the  eldest  child  and  only  son  of 
Thomas  Jones,  then  a  colliery  manager, 
by  his  wife,  Mary  Ann  Lewis.  He  was 
educated  at  Swansea  Grammar  School  and 
Llandovery  College,  then  at  University 
College,  Cardiff;  he  completed  his  under- 
graduate medical  studies  at  University 
College  Hospital,  London,  where  he 
qualified  in  1900.  In  the  examination  for 
the  London  M.B.  in  1901  he  obtained  first 
class  honours  in  medicine  and  obstetrics, 
with  gold  medals  in  each  and  a  university 
scholarship  in  obstetrics.  In  1903  he  ob- 
tained  the    degree    of  M.D.    with    gold 


medal,  and  in  1904  his  M.R.C.P.  House 
posts  in  medicine  and  surgery  at  Univer- 
sity College  Hospital  were  followed  by 
posts  at  the  Brompton  Chest  Hospital  and 
at  the  North-Eastern  (later  Queen's) 
Hospital  for  Children.  Jones's  hitherto 
brilliantly  successful  career  was  inter- 
rupted by  a  series  of  undeserved  misfor- 
tunes in  the  next  few  years  which 
prevented  his  obtaining  appointments  in 
London  of  the  kind  that  a  man  of  his 
attainments  had  the  right  to  expect,  and 
so  in  1908  he  secured  an  appointment 
as  director  of  the  psychiatric  clinic  in 
Toronto;  a  year  or  two  later  he  was  ap- 
pointed associate  professor  of  psychiatry 
there  and  remained  until  1912. 

Jones  first  read  one  of  Freud's  writings 
in  1905,  and  at  the  end  of  1906  began  prac- 
tising psycho-analysis  himself.  In  1907  he 
met  Jung  and  with  him  organized  the 
first  psycho-analytical  congress,  held  in 
Salzburg  in  1908,  where  he  met  Freud, 
and  read  his  first  psycho-analytical  paper, 
on  'Rationalization'  (an  original  concept 
and  word).  His  active  interest  and  pioneer- 
ing work  in  spreading  the  knowledge  of 
psycho-analysis  continued  in  Canada  and 
extended  into  the  United  States,  where  he 
was  responsible  for  the  foundation  of  the 
American  Psycho-Pathological  Associa- 
tion in  1910  and  the  American  Psycho- 
Analytical  Association  in  1911.  He  also 
wrote  a  great  deal  during  this  period, 
including  his  well-known  works  On  the 
Nightmare  (English  publication  1931)  and 
on  Hamlet  (English  publication  1947).  His 
Papers  on  Psycho-Analysis  was  published 
in  1913  and  reached  a  fifth  edition  in 
1948. 

Jones  returned  to  London  in  1913  and 
set  up  in  psycho-analytic  and  consulting 
practice;  he  immediately  founded  the 
London  Psycho-Analytical  Society,  which 
was  dissolved  and  replaced  by  him  in  1919 
by  the  foundation  of  the  British  Psycho- 
Analytical  Society,  whose  president  he 
remained  until  his  retirement  in  1944. 
In  1920  Jones  founded  the  International 
Journal  of  Psycho-Analysis  as  an  official 
organ  of  the  International  Psycho- Analyti- 
cal Association  (founded  1910)  and  he 
remained  its  editor  until  1939.  Of  the 
Association  he  was  president  in  1920-24 
and  1932-49,  was  present  at  all  but  one  of 
its  congresses,  and  presided  over  seven 
of  them.  In  1924  he  set  up  the  Institute  of 
Psycho-Analysis;  one  of  its  initial  func- 
tions was  the  publication  (with  the 
Hogarth  Press)  of  the  International 
Psycho-Analytical    Library,    which    re- 


552 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Jones,  B.  M. 


mained  under  Jones's  editorship  up  to 
the  appearance  of  its  fiftieth  volume. 
The  London  Clinic  of  Psycho-Analysis 
was  started  in  1926,  again  largely  on 
his  initiative.  In  the  same  year,  at 
the  invitation  and  with  the  active  en- 
couragement of  Jones,  Melanie  Klein 
[q.v.]  came  to  London  from  Berlin  and 
began  her  very  influential  teaching,  which 
had  far-reaching  effects  on  the  develop- 
ment of  psycho-analysis  in  England.  Jones 
played  the  leading  part  in  presenting  the 
case  for  psycho-analysis  at  a  committee 
set  up  by  the  British  Medical  Association, 
whose  report  in  1929  established  the 
principle  that  'the  term  psycho-analysis 
can  legitimately  be  applied  only  to  the 
method  evolved  by  Freud  and  to  the 
theories  derived  from  the  use  of  this 
method' ;  this  official  pronouncement  has 
done  much  to  discourage  the  misuse  of  the 
term. 

As  Germany  became  increasingly  domi- 
nated by  the  Nazis  from  1983  onwards 
Jones  worked  hard  in  helping  displaced 
German  analysts  to  resettle  in  England 
and  elsewhere.  When  the  Nazis  occupied 
Austria  in  1938  it  was  Jones's  personal 
and  fearless  intervention  in  Vienna  which 
led  to  the  release  of  Freud  and  his  family 
and  their  safe  transfer  to  England,  where 
Freud  died  in  the  following  year.  To  Jones 
is  also  due  the  main  credit  for  securing  the 
release  of  most  of  the  other  Viennese 
analysts,  many  of  whom  settled  in  Eng- 
land or  the  United  States. 

In  1944,  Jones  retired  from  the  office  of 
president  of  the  British  Psycho-Analytical 
Society,  and  thereafter  devoted  much  of 
his  time  to  the  preparation  of  his  three- 
volume  biography,  Sigmund  Freud,  Life 
and  Work  (1953-7) ;  the  last  volume  was 
published  shortly  before  his  death.  This 
has  been  widely  acclaimed  as  a  master- 
piece of  biography;  it  is  extremely  well 
documented  and  scholarly,  and  by  many 
is  regarded  as  the  supreme  achievement  of 
Jones's  career.  As  the  title  indicates,  it  is 
not  only  a  life-history,  but  also  compre- 
hends a  masterly  summary  and  assess- 
ment of  Freud's  extensive  literary  works. 

Jones's  main  characteristics  were  his 
incisive  and  brilliant  intellect,  his  moral 
courage,  his  incredible  capacity  for  hard 
work  of  the  highest  standard,  and  his 
ability  to  combine  an  unswerving  devo- 
tion to  Freud's  work  with  an  independent 
and  critical  spirit.  In  his  hobbies,  too,  he 
was  remarkable;  he  was  a  good  chess 
player,  and  a  proficient  figure  skater  and 
author  of  a  standard  textbook   on   the 


subject.  He  published  twelve  books  and 
three  himdred  papers  on  neurology, 
psychology,  anthropology,  etc.  He  was 
elected  F.R.C.P.  in  1942  and  was  also 
a  fellow  of  the  Royal  Society  of  Medicine, 
the  Royal  Society  of  Arts,  and  the  Royal 
Anthropological  Institute,  honorary  presi- 
dent of  the  International  and  American 
Psycho-Analytical  Associations  and  of  the 
British  Psycho-Analytical  Society,  and 
honorary  member  of  numerous  psycho- 
analytical societies  throughout  the  world. 
He  received  an  honorary  D.Sc.  from  the 
university  of  Wales  (1954). 

In  1917  Jones  married  Morfydd  Owen 
(died  1918),  a  Welsh  musician.  In  1919  he 
married  Katharina  Jokl,  of  Vienna,  by 
whom  he  had  two  sons  and  two  daughters, 
the  elder  of  whom  died  in  childhood. 
Mervyn  Jones,  the  elder  son,  has  made  his 
name  as  a  writer.  Jones  died  in  London  11 
February  1958.  His  portrait,  painted  by 
Rodrigo  Moynihan,  and  presented  to  him 
in  1946,  hangs  iU  the  house  of  the  British 
Psycho- Analytical  Society  in  London. 

[International  Journal  of  Psycho-Analysis, 
vol.  xxxix,  1958 ;  British  Medical  Journal  and 
Lancet,  22  February  1958 ;  Ernest  Jones,  Free 
Associations,  1959 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

W.  H.  Gillespie, 

JONES,  BERNARD  MOUAT  (1882-. 
1953),  chemist,  principal  of  the  Man* 
Chester  College  of  Technology,  and  vice- 
chancellor  of  Leeds  University,  was  born 
in  Streatham  27  November  1882,  the 
fomi;h  son  of  Alexander  Mouat  Jones, 
wine  merchant,  and  his  wife,  Martha 
Eleanor  Brinjes.  He  was  educated  at  Dul- 
wich  College  and  won  a  Brackenbury 
scholarship  at  Balliol  College,  Oxford. 
In  1904  he  gained  first  class  honours 
in  chemistry,  mineralogy,  and  crystallo- 
graphy, and  was  for  a  year  research  assis- 
tant in  mineralogical  chemistry  at  the 
Imperial  Institute  until  in  1906  he  became 
professor  of  chemistry  at  Government 
College,  Lahore.  Seven  years  later  he  re- 
turned to  England  as  assistant  professor  at 
the  Imperial  College  of  Science  and  Tech- 
nology. He  went  to  France  as  a  private  in 
the  London  Scottish  in  1914  and  im- 
mediately after  the  first  German  gas  at- 
tack in  1915  he  joined  the  staff  of  the 
central  laboratory,  G.H.Q.,  formed  to 
organize  defensive  measures.  Most  of  the 
problems  were  chemical,  and  Mouat 
Jones's  sagacity  and  sound  judgement 
were  of  the  utmost  value  to  the  chemical 
advisers  with  the  armies.  He  developed  an 
almost  imcanny  skill  in  identifying  quickly 


553 


Jones,  B.  M. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


any  new  gas  used  by  the  enemy  and  was 
the  first  to  identify  the  chemical  in  mus- 
tard gas.  For  his  services  he  was  appointed 
to  the  D.S.O.  in  1917,  waff  three  times 
mentioned  in  dispatches,  and  in  1918  be- 
came director  of  the  laboratory  with  the 
rank  of  lieutenant-colonel. 

In  1919  Mouat  Jones  returned  to  civil 
life  as  professor  of  chemistry  and  director 
of  the  Edward  Davies  laboratory  in  the 
University  College  of  Wales,  Aberystwyth. 
Facing  the  post-war  bulge  of  students  with 
very  scanty  resources,  he  soon  had  a  most 
lively  department  thanks  to  his  witty  and 
stimulating  lectures  and  his  energetic 
action  to  secure  equipment.  Two  years 
later  he  became  principal  of  the  Man- 
chester College  of  Technology  where  he 
remained  for  seventeen  years.  It  was  not 
an  easy  post  to  fill  for  most  of  the  day 
work  of  the  college  constituted  the  faculty 
of  technology  in  the  university,  whereas 
the  general  administration  and  finances  of 
the  college  came  under  the  Manchester 
education  committee  and  the  city  council. 
There  was  obviously  the  possibility  of 
friction  and  misunderstanding;  Mouat 
Jones,  by  securing  the  trust  and  confi- 
dence of  both  sides,  reduced  it  to  a 
negligible  minimum.  No  doubt  he  was 
fortunate  in  that  Sir  Henry  Miers  [q.v.], 
under  whom  he  had  worked  as  an  under- 
graduate, was  vice-chancellor  of  the 
university  until  1926. 

Although  the  faculty  of  technology  was 
sixteen  years  old  when  he  went  there, 
tradition  dies  hard,  and  to  many  people 
the  college  was  still  the  'night  school'.  By 
sheer  force  of  personality  and  character 
Mouat  Jones  brought  about  a  much  wider 
appreciation  of  the  true  status  of  the 
college;  he  won  the  interest  and  co- 
operation of  industry  which  took  tangible 
shape  in  the  form  of  scholarships  and 
prizes.  They  were  years  of  continuous 
development  in  which  the  influence  of 
Mouat  Jones  was  seen  in  many  ways :  the 
degree  com*se  in  chemical  engineering ;  the 
conferring  of  honorary  associateship  on 
distinguished  scientists  and  technologists ; 
the  new  lecture  hall,  the  Reynolds  Hall, 
which  served  as  a  home  for  the  scientific 
societies  of  the  district  and  brought  them 
into  closer  touch  with  the  college.  Within 
the  college  he  built  up  a  wonderful  spirit 
by  bringing  together  the  stafif  and  students 
through  the  athletic  clubs  and  various 
social  activities.  At  the  same  time  he  took 
an  active  part  in  developing  technical 
education  in  the  district.  He  was  president 
of  a  number  of  bodies  including  (1930)  the 


Manchester  Literary  and  Philosophical 
Society. 

In  1938  Mouat  Jones  became  the  fourth 
vice-chancellor  of  the  university  of  Leeds 
and  the  first  scientist  to  hold  that  office. 
Within  a  year  the  normal  work  of  the 
university  was  interrupted  by  the  out- 
break of  war  and  for  six  months  in  1941 
the  vice-chancellor  was  once  again  direct- 
ing research  in  chemical  warfare,  at  Porton. 
During  the  years  of  reconstruction  after 
the  war  the  university  owed  much  to  his 
wise  leadership.  There  was  nothing  des- 
potic or  quixotic  about  him,  either 
personally  or  as  an  administrator.  His 
outlook  was  essentially  empirical ;  he  was 
more  interested  in  meeting  immediate 
needs  than  in  probing  the  function  and 
purpose  of  a  civic  university  in  mid- 
twentieth-century  England.  The  relations 
between  town  and  gown  had  not  been  of 
the  happiest  and  this  Mouat  Jones  speedily 
remedied ;  the  three  years  1945-8  brought 
a  number  of  endowments  from  industry. 
Under  his  imperturbable  chairmanship  of 
the  senate  and  the  council  and  his  good 
personal  relations  with  the  faculty,  the  uni- 
versity gained  a  sense  of  self-confidence 
and  tranquillity.  When  he  retired  in  1948 
he  left  it  a  happy  society.  Once  again  his 
customary  devotion  to  the  interests  of  the 
students  was  seen — ^in  new  halls  of  resi- 
dence and  the  completion  of  the  Union. 
The  testimonial  fund  raised  on  his  retire- 
ment he  gave  as  an  endowment  for 
bursaries  for  the  foreign  travel  which  he 
considered  an  essential  part  of  a  student's 
education. 

Both  at  Manchester  and  at  Leeds  part 
of  Mouat  Jones's  success  came  from  his 
brilliance  as  a  speaker  and  raconteur.  He 
had  a  remarkable  flair  for  graceful  compli- 
ment and  witty  turns  of  phrase.  He  could 
delight  every  type  of  audience  and  by  his 
ready  wit  could  point  a  lesson  where 
a  homily  would  have  failed.  For  his  ser- 
vices to  education  he  received  honorary 
degrees  from  the  universities  of  Durham, 
Leeds,  and  Wales.  His  early  experience  in 
India  made  him  a  valuable  member  of 
a  number  of  government  committees, 
among  them  the  advisory  committee  on 
education  in  the  colonies,  the  Makerere- 
Khartoum  education  commission  (1937), 
and  the  commission  on  higher  education  in 
West  Africa  (1944-5). 

After  his  retirement  Mouat  Jones  lived 
at  Farnham  where  he  died  11  September 
1953.  He  was  unmarried  and  after  a  num- 
ber of  bequests  he  left  the  residue  of  his 
estate  equally  between  Balliol  College  and 


554 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Jones,  F.  W, 


Leeds  University.  There  is  a  portrait  by 
Henry  Carr  at  Leeds. 

[The  Times,  15  September  1953 ;  Manchester 
Guardian,  16  September  1953;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Harold  Hartley. 

JONES,  (FREDERIC)  WOOD  (1879- 
1954),  anatomist,  was  born  23  January 
1879  at  West  Hackney,  Middlesex,  the 
youngest  of  the  three  children  of  Charles 
Henry  Jones,  an  architect  of  Welsh 
descent,  and  his  wife,  Lucy  AUin.  Wood 
Jones  entered  the  London  Hospital  in 
1897  as  a  medical  student  and  qualified 
M.B.,  B.S.  in  1904.  Even  while  a  student 
he  had  contributed  short  articles  to  the 
Journal  of  Anatomy  and  Physiology,  and 
he  also  won  a  succession  of  prizes  in 
anatomy,  physiology,  and  clinical  medi- 
cine. He  was  throughout  life  a  man  of 
active  and  restless  temperament,  ever  a 
seeker  after  knowledge  in  new  fields,  so 
that  he  did  not  retain  any  of  his  eminent 
academic  posts  for  more  than  a  few  years. 
This  adventurous  spirit  was  shown  at  the 
very  beginning  of  his  career  when  in  1905 
he  took  up  an  appointment  as  medical 
officer  to  the  Eastern  Extension  Telegraph 
Company  in  the  Cocos-Keeling  Islands. 
He  stayed  for  just  over  a  year  and  in  that 
short  time  made  an  intimate  and  impor- 
tant study  of  reef-building  corals,  the 
results  of  which  appeared  in  a  book 
entitled  Coral  and  Atolls  (1910).  In  1907 
he  returned  to  England  but  soon  after- 
wards left  for  Egypt  to  undertake  field 
anthropological  studies  on  behalf  of  the 
Egyptian  Government  Archaeological  Sur- 
vey of  Nubia.  He  returned  to  England 
once  again  in  1909  on  being  appointed 
lecturer  in  anatomy  at  Manchester  Uni- 
versity, and  a  year  later  went  to  St. 
Thomas's  Hospital  medical  school  as 
senior  demonstrator  in  anatomy.  In  this 
year  also,  he  was  awarded  the  D.Sc. 
degree  of  London  University.  In  1912 
he  transferred  to  the  London  School  of 
Medicine  for  Women  as  professor  of 
anatomy.  In  1915  he  delivered  the  Arris 
and  Gale  lectures  at  the  Royal  College  of 
Surgeons  on  'The  influence  of  the  arboreal 
habit  in  the  evolution  of  the  reproductive 
system',  and  it  was  on  this  occasion  that 
he  first  came  to  public  notice  as  a  lecturer 
of  unusual  ability,  with  an  original  ap- 
proach to  the  evidence  of  comparative 
anatomy  in  the  problem  of  human  evolu- 
tion. He  amplified  his  lectures  in  a  book 
Arboreal  Man  (1916).  Later,  he  expounded 
the  view  that  there  is  no  close  relationship 


between  man  on  the  one  hand,  and  apes 
and  monkeys  on  the  other,  but  that  the 
segregation  of  the  evolutionary  line  lead- 
ing to  man  occurred  very  early  in  geo- 
logical time — as  far  back  as  the  Eocene 
period.  This  thesis  met  with  considerable 
criticism  from  other  comparative  anato- 
mists. 

During  the  war  of  1914r-18  W^ood  Jones 
was  a  captain  in  the  Royal  Army  Medical 
Corps,  stationed  at  the  Military  Ortho- 
paedic Hospital  at  Shepherd's  Bush.  He 
made  some  useful  observations  on  the 
effects  of  partial  paralysis  of  limb  move- 
ments in  gunshot  wounds,  and  in  1920 
published  one  of  his  best,  and  most  widely 
read,  books  The  Principles  of  Anatomy  as 
Seen  in  the  Hand;  a  second  edition  ap- 
peared in  1941. 

In  1919  Wood  Jones  went  to  Australia 
as  professor  of  anatomy  at  Adelaide 
University  where  he  remained  for  eight 
years,  and  engaged  largely  in  field  studies, 
taking  part  in  several  expeditions  in 
South  Australia.  On  these  expeditions 
extensive  zoological,  botanical,  and 
anthropological  collections  were  made, 
some  of  which  led  to  the  discovery  of  new 
marsupial  species  as  well  as  many  new 
species  of  invertebrates.  The  results  were 
published  in  the  Records  of  the  South 
Australia  Museum  and  the  Transactions 
of  the  Royal  Society  of  South  Australia. 
Between  1923  and  1925  he  pubHshed 
a  systematic  catalogue  of  the  mammals  of 
South  Australia — probably  his  most  im- 
portant work  on  comparative  anatomy. 
A  notable  feature  of  this  catalogue  is  the 
excellent  series  of  311  illustrations,  all 
drawn  by  the  author  himself. 

In  1927  Wood  Jones  accepted  an  invita- 
tion to  fill  the  Rockefeller  chair  of  anthro- 
pology in  the  university  of  Hawaii  where 
he  remained  for  two  years.  During  this 
time  he  published  a  general  systematic 
account  of  the  comparative  anatomy  of 
the  Primates  in  Man's  Place  among  the 
Mammals  (1929),  and  here  he  expounded 
in  more  detail  his  unorthodox  attitude 
towards  the  commonly  accepted  view  of 
man's  relationship  to  the  higher  Primates. 
In  1930  he  returned  once  more  to  Aus- 
tralia, this  time  to  occupy  the  chair  of 
anatomy  at  Melbourne  University,  and 
during  the  next  few  years  took  part  in 
further  zoological  and  anthropological 
expeditions,  also  finding  time  to  complete 
a  number  of  papers  on  strictly  anan 
tomical  subjects.  At  the  end  of  1937  he 
left  Australia  for  England  where  he 
accepted  the  professorship  of  anatomy  at 


655 


Jones,  F.  W. 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Manchester  University,  and  during  the  next 
few  years  continued  to  publish  a  series  of 
papers  on  a  variety  of  anatomical  subjects, 
as  well  as  editing  the  seventh  edition  of 
Buchanan's  Manual  of  Anatomy  (1946). 
In  1944  appeared  his  stimulating  book 
Structure  and  Function  as  Seen  in  the  Foot, 
a  work  of  considerable  value  for  ortho- 
paedic surgeons.  About  this  time  also  he 
wrote  a  number  of  books  of  biological 
essays,  Design  and  Purpose  (1942),  Habit 
and  Heritage  (1943),  and  Trends  of  Life 
(1953),  and  in  these  he  affirmed  his 
adherence  to  a  somewhat  modified 
Lamarckian  interpretation  of  evolution 
and  at  the  same  time  expressed  strongly 
anti-Darwinian  views. 

In  1945  Wood  Jones  assumed  his  last 
academic  office,  that  of  the  Sir  William  H. 
Collins  professor  of  human  and  compara- 
tive anatomy  at  the  Royal  College  of 
Surgeons,  which  he  held  until  1952.  He 
had  been  elected  to  the  fellowship  of  the 
College  in  1930.  He  died  in  London  29 
September  1954,  leaving  behind  him  an 
abiding  tradition  of  his  vigorous  per- 
sonality. He  was  distinguished  not  only 
for  his  strictly  scientific  contributions  but 
also  for  the  healthy  stimulus  he  gave  to 
controversy  by  the  occasional  unortho- 
doxy  of  his  opinions.  His  reputation  as 
a  lecturer  brought  him  many  requests  to 
deUver  memorial  lectures  and  orations. 
He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1925  and  received 
the  honorary  degree  of  D.Sc.  from  Ade- 
laide (1920)  and  Melbourne  (1934). 

In  1910  Wood  Jones  married  Gertrude, 
daughter  of  George  Clunies-Ross  [q.v.], 
owner  of  the  Cocos-Keeling  Islands.  He 
left  no  issue.  A  portrait  by  W.  S.  Mclnnes 
is  with  the  Australian  College  of  Surgeons 
in  Melbourne ;  a  posthumous  oil-painting 
by  A.  Egerton  Cooper  hangs  in  the  Royal 
College  of  Surgeons  of  England. 

[Sir  W.  E.  Le  Gros  Clark  in  Biographical 
Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  i, 
1955 ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] W.  E.  Le  Gros  Clark. 

JONES,  Sir  HAROLD  SPENCER  (1890- 
1960),  astronomer,  was  born  in  Kensing- 
ton 29  March  1890,  the  third  child  and 
elder  son  of  Henry  Charles  Jones,  an 
accountant  with  the  Great  Western  Rail- 
way Company,  and  his  wife,  Sarah 
Ryland,  a  former  schoolmistress.  Although 
without  formal  training  in  mathematics, 
his  father  acquired  a  considerable  working 
knowledge  of  several  branches  of  the  sub- 
ject, and  gave  active  encouragement  to 
his  son,   who   early  showed  exceptional 


ability  which  was  fostered  at  Latymer 
Upper  School,  Hammersmith,  uiiaer  the 
tutelage  of  G.  M.  Grace.  He  won  a  scholar- 
ship to  Jesus  College,  Cambridge,  where 
after  a  first  in  both  parts  of  the  mathe- 
matical tripos  (1909-11)  he  took  a  first  in 
physics  in  part  ii  of  the  natural  sciences 
tripos  (1912).  He  was  elected  Isaac  New- 
ton student  in  1912  and  in  1913  was 
second  Smith's  prizeman  and  elected  to 
a  research  fellowship  at  his  college. 

In  the  same  year  the  astronomer  royal, 
(Sir)  Frank  Dyson  (whose  notice  he 
subsequently  contributed  to  this  Dic- 
tionary), appointed  him  to  Greenwich  in 
place  of  (Sir)  Arthur  Eddington  [q.v.]  who 
had  been  elected  to  the  Plumian  profes- 
sorship of  astronomy  in  Cambridge.  In 
spite  of  his  work  during  the  war  on  optical 
instrument  design  for  the  Ministry  of 
Munitions,  Spencer  Jones  found  time  to 
do  original  research  on  many  diverse 
branches  of  astronomy,  and  to  prepare 
the  text  for  his  comprehensive  book 
General  Astronomy  which  was  published  in 
1922.  It  was  during  this  active  period  of 
research  that  he  whetted  his  appetite  for 
what  was  to  become  his  major  research 
contribution  to  astronomy — the  rotation 
of  the  earth  and  the  so-called  system  of 
astronomical  constants.  In  1923  he  was 
appointed  astronomer  at  the  Royal  Ob- 
servatory at  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope, 
South  Africa,  to  succeed  S.  S.  Hough  who 
had  died  in  office. 

His  years  at  the  Cape  were  prodigiously 
productive — in  original  research,  in  the 
prosecution  and  inauguration  of  observa- 
tional programmes,  in  leadership  and 
administration,  in  literary  output,  and  in 
social  life.  He  left  behind  him  a  united  and 
vigorous  staff  fully  engaged  on  observa- 
tional programmes  of  the  foremost  impor- 
tance ;  just  as  he  himself  had,  in  the  great 
tradition,  completed  the  programmes 
initiated  by  Sir  David  Gill  [q.v.],  these 
programmes  have  been  brought  to  a 
triumphant  conclusion  by  his  successors. 

In  1933  Spencer  Jones  was  recalled  to 
Greenwich  to  assume  the  office  of  tenth 
astronomer  royal  in  succession  to  Dyson. 
He  was  rapidly  immersed  in  many  ad- 
ministrative and  public  duties,  with  the 
direction  of  the  departmental  work  of  the 
Observatory,  with  the  putting  into  service 
of  two  new  instruments  (the  36-inch 
reflecting  telescope  presented  by  W.  J. 
Yapp,  and  the  new  reversible  transit 
circle  to  replace  the  80-year-old  instru- 
ment designed  by  Sir  George  Airy, 
q.v.),    and    with    the    serious    problems 


556 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Jones,  H.  S. 


arising  from  the  rapidly  increasing 
difficulties  of  conducting  astronomical 
observations  at  Greenwich. 

He  continued  to  make  significant  con- 
tributions to  many  branches  of  astronomy, 
two  of  which,  both  involving  the  meticu- 
lous discussion  of  many  thousands  of 
observations,  will  always  be  associated 
with  his  name.  His  epoch-making  paper 
*The  rotation  of  the  Earth  and  the  secular 
accelerations^  of  the  Sun,  Moon  and 
planets',  published  in  1939,  demon- 
strated conclusively  that  the  observed 
fluctuations  were  due  to  irregularities  in 
the  rate  of  rotation  of  the  earth.  It 
stands  now  as  an  unassailable  landmark 
in  the  subject,  leading  directly  as  it  did 
to  the  adoption,  in  1950,  of  the  concept  of 
Ephemeris  Time.  In  1928  he  had  been 
appointed  president  of  Commission  34  (on 
the  solar  parallax)  of  the  International 
Astronomical  Union,  with  the  gigantic 
task  of  organizing  a  world-wide  pro- 
gramme for  the  observation  of  the  minor 
planet  Eros  at  its  favourable  opposition  in 
1930-31 ;  the  object  of  this  work  was  to 
determine  the  value  of  the  'solar  parallax', 
equivalent  to  the  'astronomical  unit  of 
distance'  from  the  earth  to  the  sun.  With 
typical  thoroughness  he  not  only  made  the 
major  contribution  to  the  observations 
from  the  Royal  Observatory  at  the  Cape, 
but  personally  undertook  the  collection, 
reduction,  and  discussion  of  all  the  ob- 
servations. This  work,  which  took  nearly 
ten  years  to  complete,  culminated  in 
a  discussion,  published  in  1941,  of  extra- 
ordinary thoroughness  and  depth.  For 
this  work  in  1943  he  was  awarded  the 
gold  medal  of  the  Royal  Astronomical 
Society  and  a  Royal  medal  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  which  he  had  been  elected  a  fel- 
low in  1930.  That  the  value  of  the  solar 
parallax  (8'-790)  resulting  from  this  dis- 
cussion has  now  been  shown,  as  a  result  of 
direct  measurements  of  distance  by  radar 
techniques,  to  have  been  affected  by  some 
systematic  errors,  probably  in  the  observa- 
tions, in  no  way  diminishes  the  greatness 
of  the  accomplishment. 

During  this  period  Spencer  Jones  was 
faced  with  making  the  decision  to  recom- 
mend the  removal  of  the  Royal  Observa- 
tory from  its  historic  site  at  Greenwich, 
where  it  was  established  in  1675.  The 
observing  conditions  were  rapidly  worsen- 
ing and  expansion  was  impossible.  Spencer 
Jones  sought  and  obtained  approval  in 
principle  for  removal  to  a  more  favourable 
site  but  it  was  not  until  after  the  war, 
in    1945,   that  it  could  be   undertaken. 


In  a  relatively  short  time  he  was  able 
publicly  to  announce  that  'The  Royal 
Greenwich  Observatory'  would  be  estab- 
lished at  Herstmonceux  Castle  in  Sussex ; 
but  the  actual  move  was  necessarily  slow 
and  was  not  finally  completed  until  after 
his  retirement  on  31  December  1955. 
Astronomy  in  this  country  will  always^  be 
indebted  to  his  great  administrative 
achievement. 

Spencer  Jones  also  played  a  leading 
part  in  the  negotiations  leading  to  the 
initial  approval  for  the  98 -inch  Isaac  New- 
ton Telescope  to  be  erected  at  Herst- 
monceux; he  presented  the  case  for  the 
provision  of  a  large  telescope  in  this 
country,  originally  drawn  up  by  the  coun- 
cils of  the  Royal  Astronomical  Society  and 
the  Royal  Society  for  a  74-inch  telescope, 
so  forcibly  that  the  chancellor  of  the 
Exchequer  was  advised  that  provision 
should  be  made  for  a  telescope  of  100- 
inches  aperture. 

Spencer  Jones's  scientific  activities 
covered  a  wide  field.  In  particular  he  made 
notable  scientific  and  administrative  con- 
tributions to  time-measurement  and  horo- 
logy, and  was  responsible  for  the  great 
expansion  of  the  watch-repair  services 
and  watch-manufacturing  industries.  He 
was  president  of  the  British  Horological 
Institute  from  1939  and  received  its  gold 
medal,  and  played  a  leading  part  in 
founding  the  National  College  of  Horology. 
He  also  made  many  contributions  to  geo- 
magnetism, both  to  the  theory  and  to  the 
practical  application  to  navigation;  he 
was  inaugural  president  of  the  Institute  of 
Navigation  in  1947. 

In  later  years,  and  especially  after  his 
retirement,  he  played  a  large  part  in  the 
organization  of  international  science.  He 
was  president  of  the  International  Astro- 
nomical Union  from  1945  to  1948  and,  as 
such,  began  his  long  service  to  the  Inter- 
national Council  of  Scientific  Unions 
(I.C.S.U.)  as  a  member  of  the  executive 
board.  He  was  secretary-general  from  1956 
to  1958  and  was  one  of  the  most  en- 
thusiastic organizers  and  active  supporters 
of  the  International  Geophysical  Year ;  he 
edited  the  Annals  of  the  I.G.Y,  and  be- 
came director  of  the  I.C.S.U.  Publication 
Office.  He  also  represented  the  I.C.S.U.  at 
meetings  of  UNESCO  and  contributed 
much  to  the  weight  that  is  given  to  the 
part  of  the  UNESCO  programme  devoted 
to  pure  science. 

Spencer  Jones  was  awarded  his  Sc.D. 
from  Cambridge  in  1925  and  made  an 
honorary  fellow  of  Jesus  College  in  1983. 


557 


Jones,  H.  S. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


He  received,  among  others,  the  Janssen, 
Bruce,  Lorimer,  and  Rittenhouse  medals. 
He  was  knighted  in  1943  and  appointed 
K.B.E.  in  1955.  He  was  a  foreign  member 
of  the  principal  academies  of  science  and 
received  honorary  doctorates  from  some 
ten  British  and  foreign  universities. 

Personally,  Spencer  Jones  was  a  tall, 
upright,  dignified  figure  who  brought  an 
air  of  distinction  to  any  gathering.  He  had 
a  fine  presence,  with  a  clear  delivery  and 
a  ready  command  of  language;  he  was 
certainly,  in  appearance,  the  most  digni- 
fied astronomer  of  his  era.  But  he  was 
essentially  a  simple  and  kindly  man,  with 
high  ideals  and  complete  integrity  of  pur- 
pose, which  he  brought  to  all  his  many 
activities.  He  preferred  logical  and  tem- 
j)erate  argument  to  passionate  advocacy ; 
his  beliefs  were  pursued,  and  generally 
achieved,  with  a  quiet  unspectacular  per- 
sistence and  with  a  fitting  dignity.  He  also 
had  a  rare  gift  for  finding  the  right  way  to 
lead,  and  for  choosing  the  right  phrase,  or 
the  right  compromise,  to  obtain  agree- 
ment. His  capacity  was  enormous ;  he  was 
able  to  assimilate  the  sense  of  long  and 
complicated  papers  with  apparently  no 
more  than  a  quick  glance,  and  to  express 
himself  in  writing — he  rarely  dictated — 
with  a  remarkable  speed,  legibility,  and 
fluency.  Although  deeply  immersed  in  so 
many  activities,  he  was  never  hurried  and 
treated  all  with  kindness,  consideration, 
and  unfailing  courtesy. 

In  1918  Spencer  Jones  married  Gladys 
Mary,  daughter  of  Albert  Edward  Owers, 
a  civil  engineer ;  there  were  two  sons.  He 
died  at  his  home  in  Kensington  3  Novem- 
ber 1960. 

[R.  v.  d.  R.  Woolley  in  Biographical 
Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol. 
vii,  1961 ;  Quarterly  Journal  of  the  Royal 
Astronomical  Society,  vol.  iv,  1963 ;  personal 
knowledge.]  D.  H.  Sadler. 

JONES,  Sir  JOHN  EDWARD 
LENNARD-  (1894-1954),  scientist  and 
administrator.  [See  Lennard-Jones.] 

JONES,  THOMAS  (1870-1955),  civil  ser- 
vant, administrator,  and  author,  was  born 
27  September  1870  at  Rhymney,  a  border 
mining  village  in  Monmouthshire,  the 
eldest  of  the  nine  children  of  Dayid 
Benjamin  Jones,  who  worked  in  the  tiruqk 
shop  of  the  Rhymney  Iron  Compariy,  and 
his  wife,  Mary  Ann,  daughter  of  Enoch 
Jones,  a  Rhymney  storekeeper.  His  father 
was  a  Cardiganshire  man,  his  mother  was 
half  Cardiganshire  and  half  Somersetshire. 


After  his  early  education  at  Rhymney 
board-school  and  the  Lewis  School,  Pen- 
gam,  Jones  began  work  as  a  timekeeper- 
clerk  with  the  Rhymney  Iron  Company. 
His  passion  for  reading  had  been  roused 
by  one  of  his  teachers  and  it  was  nurtured 
by  Rhymney's  active  Welsh  literary  Ufe. 
This  was  centred  in  its  churches  and 
chapels,  in  his  case  Brynhyfryd  Welsh 
Calvinistic  Methodist  chapel.  He  was 
Scripture  gold-medallist  and  a  promising 
preacher  when  in  1890  he  entered  the 
University  College  of  Wales,  Aberystwyth, 
where  he  became  outstanding  in  its  cul- 
tural and  social  life.  He  achieved  London 
matriculation  with  difficulty  but  re- 
peatedly failed  in  mathematics  at  the 
Intermediate  level.  In  1895  he  migrated  to 
Glasgow  University,  where  the  professor 
of  moral  philosophy,  (Sir)  Henry  Jones 
[q.v.],  rated  him  'the  best  student  I  have 
ever  had  amongst  my  pupils'.  In  1900 
'Tom'  Jones  graduated,  was  elected  Clark 
scholar,  awarded  a  Bertrand  Russell 
studentship  at  the  London  School  of 
Economics  and  Political  Science,  and 
began  examining  in  economics  at  the 
university  of  St.  Andrews.  He  was  placed 
in  the  first  class  in  the  honour  school  of 
economic  science  at  Glasgow  in  1901. 

By  this  time  Jones  had  given  up 
preaching,  partly  under  the  influence  of 
Henry  Jones,  but  mainly  because  evan- 
gelicalism had  lost  its  appeal  and  the 
prospects  of  an  exclusively  ecclesiastical 
career  repelled  him.  In  1895  he  joined 
the  Independent  Labour  Party  and  the 
Fabian  Society  and  became  a  close  student 
of  the  problems  of  poverty.  For  some  time 
he  lived  and  worked  in  social  settlements 
in  Glasgow  and  Cardiff.  This  interest  in 
social  work  became  lifelong,  but  his  family 
and  not  a  few  Nonconformists  regretted 
the  loss  of  an  outstanding  preacher. 

In  1899  William  Smart,  the  professor  of 
political  economy  at  Glasgow,  made  Jones 
a  part-time  assistant.  In  the  following  year 
he  became  a  university  assistant  in  politi- 
cal economy  and  so  remained  until  1909. 
He  was  Barrington  visiting  lecturer  in 
Ireland  (1904-5)  and  ^  special  investigator 
for  the  royal  commission  on  the  Poor  Law 
(1906-9).  He  became  professor  of  eco- 
nomics in  the  Queen's  University,  Belfast, 
in  1909,  but  on  the  invitation  of  David 
(later  Lord)  Davies  [q.v.]  he  returned  to 
Wales  in  1910  to  become  the  secretary  of 
the  Welsh  campaign  against  tuberculosis 
later  known  as  the  King  Edward  VII 
Welsh  National  Memorial  Association. 
Two  years  later  he  became  the  first  secre- 


&58 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Jones,  T. 


tary  of  the  National  Health  Insurance 
Commission  (Wales). 

Davies  and  his  sisters,  Gwendoline  and 
Margaret,  had  great  wealth,  which  they 
used  with  a  high  sense  of  social  responsi- 
bility. They  found  in  their  fellow  Calvinist 
a  trusted  adviser.  In  the  case  of  the  two 
sisters  this  developed  into  a  close  friend- 
ship which  was  immensely  profitable  to 
the  cultural  life  of  Wales.  Jones  helped  to 
start  the  Welsh  Outlook  and  edited  it  from 
its  beginning  in  1914  until  1916.  During 
these  years  he  was  a  treasurer  of  the 
Welsh  district  of  the  Workers'  Educa- 
tional Association  and  a  governor  of  the 
University  College  of  Wales,  Aberystwyth, 
the  National  Library  of  Wales,  and  the 
National  Museum  of  Wales. 

His  work  in  the  National  Health 
Insurance  Commission  brought  him  to  the 
notice  of  Lloyd  George  who,  when  he 
became  prime  minister  in  December  1916, 
made  Jones  first  assistant  secretary  (later 
deputy  secretary)  of  the  Cabinet.  He  held 
this  office  until  1930.  He  was  a  member  of 
the  cabinet  reconstruction  committee  in 
1917.  In  the  Irish  troubles  his  services  as 
an  official  negotiator  were  acceptable  to 
both  sides,  and  with  Lionel  Curtis  [q.v.]  he 
was  secretary  to  the  British  delegation  at 
the  conference  on  Ireland,  11  October- 
6  December  1921.  Throughout  the  in- 
dustrial unrest  and  economic  depression 
of  the  twenties,  and  during  the  general 
strike,  he  exercised  great  influence  behind 
the  scenes.  His  experience,  academic 
training,  and  wide  range  of  personal 
acquaintances  made  him  one  of  the  best- 
informed  civil  servants  of  his  day.  His 
integrity,  insight,  and  judgement  made 
him  the  trusted  counsellor  of  three  of  the 
four  prime  ministers  whom  he  served — 
Lloyd  George,  Bonar  Law,  and  Stanley 
Baldwin;  his  relations  with  Ramsay 
MacDonald  were  less  happy. 

Jones  refreshed  himself  from  the  bur- 
dens of  a  busy  official  life  with  a  round  of 
good  works  spontaneously  undertaken. 
His  friendship  with  Lord  Astor  [q.v.]  and 
Lady  Astor  introduced  him  to  the  com- 
pany of  eminent  and  distinguished  leaders 
in  many  walks  of  life ;  some  accepted  him 
as  a  guide  to  philanthropy  who  was  ready 
to  ease  opulent  consciences.  In  the  days  of 
post-war  reconstruction  he  was  alert  to 
the  interests  of  the  university  of  Wales 
and  other  cultural  institutions  in  the 
principality.  He  helped  to  establish  the 
Gregynog  Press  which  between  1923  and 
1940  pubhshed  42  limited  editions  of 
finely  printed  books.  He  was  the  principal 


founder  (1927),  chairman,  and  later  presi- 
dent of  Coleg  Harlech  (the  residential  col- 
lege for  adult  education  at  Harlech).  From 
1921  to  1955  he  was  a  commissioner  for  the 
Royal  Commission  for  the  Exhibition  of 
1851. 

In  1930  Jones  became  the  first  secretary 
of  the  Pilgrim  Trust,  serving  until  1945, 
and  thereafter  until  1952  was  a  trustee, 
and  (1952-4)  chairman.  He  was  chairman 
of  the  South  Wales  coalfield  distress  com- 
mittee, and  a  member  (1934-40)  of  the 
Unemployment  Assistance  Board.  In  1933 
he  was  a  member  of  the  unemployment 
committee  of  the  National  Council  of 
Social  Service  which  was  largely  subsidized 
from  public  funds  to  undertake  recrea- 
tional and  rehabilitation  work  in  the 
depressed  areas.  Hundreds  of  clubs  were 
organized  in  these  areas  and  several  social 
settlements,  which  usefully  survived  into 
happier  days,  were  founded.  His  leadership 
of  various  voluntary  movements  in  the 
attack  upon  the  demoralizing  effects  of 
unemployment  was  positive,  humane,  and 
for  a  host  of  people  redeeming.  He  was 
chairman  of^  the  York  Trust  (1934-40) 
and  of  the  Elphin  Lloyd  Jones  Trust 
(1933-45). 

In  May  1936  Jones  was  invited  to  pay 
a  visit  to  Germany  where  he  had  an  inter- 
view with  Hitler.  He  tried  to  bring  about 
a  meeting  between  Baldwin  and  Hitler, 
and  accompanied  Lloyd  George  on  his  visit 
in  September.  In  1939  he  was  the  prime 
mover  in  the  establishment  of  the  Council 
for  the  Encouragement  of  Music  and  the 
Arts  (which  became  they  ArtS'  Council  of 
Great  Britain)  and  was  its  first  deputy 
chairman  (1939-42).  He  was  chairman  of 
the  Royal  Commission  on  Ancient  Monu- 
ments in  Wales  (1944r-8).  When  the 
Observer  Trust  was  founded  in  1946  he 
became  a  founder-trustee. 

In  October  1944  Jones  was  elected 
president  of  the  University  College  of 
Wales,  Aberystwyth,  and  from  1945  to 
1954  he  lived  in  Aberystwyth.  He  strove 
to  develop  the  college  as  a  centre  of  ad- 
vanced learning  and  of  Celtic  studies. 
After  resigning  from  the  presidency  he 
moved  to  Manor  End,  St.  Nicholas-at- 
Wade,  near  Birchington,  Kent,  a  place 
dear  to  him  because  he  had  built  a  cottage 
there  in  the  early  twenties.  He  continued 
to  correspond  with  a  wide  circle  of  friends 
and  busied  himself  with  his  literary 
reliquiae.  His  literary  output  was  con- 
siderable :  some  of  his  occasional  addresses 
appeared  in  pamphlet  form ;  and  he  edited 
a   volume    of  Mazzini's   essays    for   the 


559 


Jones,  T, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Everyman's  Library  (1907),  William 
Smart's  Second  Thoughts  of  an  Economist 
(1916),  and  Sir  Henry  Jones's  Old 
Memories  (1922).  His  othet  works  in- 
cluded A  Theme  with  Variations  (1933), 
the  mainly  autobiographical  Rhymney 
Memories  (1938),  Cerrig  Milltir  (1942), 
Leeks  and  Daffodils  (1942),  Welsh  Broth 
(1951),  and  A  Diary  with  Letters,  1931- 
1950  (1954).  In  1951  he  published  his 
biography  of  Lloyd  George,  the  notice  of 
whom  he  also  wrote  for  this  Dictionary  as 
well  as  those  of  Bonar  Law  and  Baldwin. 
His  political  diaries  (1916-30)  were  edited 
by  Keith  Middlemas  and  pubhshed  in 
two  volumes  under  the  title  Whitehall 
Diary  in  1969,  to  be  followed  by  a  third 
volimie  dealing  with  Irish  affairs. 

Jones  was  appointed  C.H.  in  1929  and 
was  elected  a  member  of  the  Athenaeum 
in  1931.  His  native  village  of  Rhymney 
honoured  him  with  a  public  testimonial 
(1939)  and  he  received  honorary  degrees 
from  the  universities  of  Glasgow  (1922), 
Wales  (1928),  St.  Andrews  (1947),  and 
Birmingham  (1955).  He  was  awarded  the 
medal  of  the  Honourable  Society  of 
Cymmrodorion  in  1945,  and  in  1950,  on 
the  occasion  of  his  eightieth  birthday, 
an  impressive  company  gathered  in  the 
dining-room  of  the  House  of  Lords  to  do 
him  honour. 

In  appearance  Jones  was  firmly  built,  of 
medium  height,  with  a  quick,  alert  gait. 
In  youth  his  hair  was  brown  but  it  turned 
white  somewhat  prematurely.  His  eyes 
were  large,  lively,  and  grey-blue  in  colour. 
He  was  awkward  with  his  hands  and 
played  no  games.  He  was  careless  about 
his  appearance  but  fastidious  in  his 
personal  habits.  He  had  a  musical,  light 
baritone  voice  which  was  pleasant  to  the 
ear.  In  his  later  years  he  avoided  much 
public  speaking.  His  style  was  conversa- 
tional, crisp,  and  whimsical;  his  ad- 
dresses were  prepared  with  nervous  care. 
His  industry  was  inmiense,  his  use  of  time 
remorseless.  His  reading  was  serious  and 
consistent — it  ranged  widely  and  was 
garnered  into  notebooks  for  ready  re- 
ference. His  Welsh  upbringing  never  left 
him.  His  early  Calvinism  rooted  him  in 
Christian  morality;  his  philosophy  made 
the  pursuit  of  the  good,  the  beautiful,  and 
the  true  the  accepted  ends  of  life;  his 
knowledge  of  economics  gave  them  a  con- 
text in  his  day  and  generation.  He  was 
always  on  the  lookout  for  promising  per- 
sons and  he  helped  them  regardless  of 
social  distinctions.  No  conversation  or 
person  was  safe  &om  his  disinterested 


exploitation.  He  turned  many  friendly 
gatherings  into  committees  of  ways  and 
means.  He  acted  swiftly  and  took  short 
cuts.  Occasionally  he  opened  his  ears  to 
the  wrong  people;  he  consistently  culti- 
vated the  right  ones.  His  range  of  friends 
and  acquaintances  was  exceptionally  wide 
— ^to  them  he  was  known  as  'T.J.'  Through- 
out his  life  he  was  a  diligent  letter-writer. 
To  his  friends  everywhere,  notably  in 
Rhymney  and  in  the  United  States  which 
he  visited  several  times,  he  sent  in- 
numerable messages.  Their  quality  may  be 
seen  in  A  Diary  with  Letters  in  which  he 
candidly  admitted  that  he  had  enjoyed 
'the  plutocratic  embrace'. 

In  1902  Jones  married  Eirene  Theodora 
(died  1935),  daughter  of  Richard  John 
Lloyd,  D.Lit.,  reader  in  phonetics  at 
Liverpool.  There  were  three  children:  a 
daughter  and  two  sons.  The  daughter, 
Mrs.  Eirene  Lloyd  White,  became  Labour 
M.P.  for  East  Flint  in  1950,  minister  of 
state  for  foreign  affairs  (1966),  for  the 
Welsh  Office  (1967).  The  elder  son,  Tristan 
Lloyd  Jones,  became  manager  of  the 
Observer,  The  younger  son,  Elphin  Lloyd 
Jones,  was  killed  in  a  motoring  accident 
in  1928.  In  June  1955  Jones  himself  fell 
indoors  at  his  home  and  was  seriously 
injured.  He  died  in  London  15  October 
1955 ;  his  remains  were  cremated. 

The  National  Museum  of  Wales  has 
drawings  of  Jones  by  Paul  Artot  (1914) 
and  S.  Morse  Brown  (1938),  and  a  portrait 
by  Ivor  Williams  (1939).  The  National 
Library  of  Wales  has  a  bust  by  L.  S. 
Merrifield  (1929)  and  the  Newport  (Mon.) 
Museum  and  Art  Gallery  has  one  by  Sieg- 
fried Charoux  (1939).  The  University 
College  of  Wales,  Aberystwyth,  has  a  por- 
trait by  E.  Perry  (1951);  Coleg  Harlech 
has  one  by  Murray  Urquhart  (1944).  Mrs. 
Eirene  White  has  a  drawing  by  (Sir) 
William  Rothenstein  (1923)  and  a  portrait 
by  R.  O.  Dunlop  (1929).  Mr.  Tristan 
Lloyd  Jones  has  a  portrait  by  John  Mer- 
ton  (1937). 

[Thomas  Jones's  own  writings;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

B.  B.  Thomas, 

JORDAN,  (HEINRICH  ERNST)  KARL 
(1861-1959),  entomologist,  was  born  at 
Almstedt  near  Hildesheim  in  Hanover,  7 
December  1861,  the  youngest  of  the  seven 
children  of  a  farmer,  Wilhelm  Jordan,  and 
his  wife,  Johanne  Vosshage.  He  was 
educated  at  Hildesheim  high  school  and 
the  university  of  Gottingen  where  he 
obtained    his    degree    in    botany    and 


500 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Jordan 


zoology,  summa  cum  laude,  and  a  diploma 
in  teaching.  In  1888  he  was  appointed 
a  master  at  Miinden  grammar  school  but 
in  1893  he  came  to  England  to  Tring 
to  take  up  the  post  of  entomologist  at 
the  zoological  museum  which  was  being 
created  by  L.  W.  (later  Lord)  Rothschild 
(whose  notice  Jordan  contributed  to  this 
Dictionary).  He  found  already  accumu- 
lated a  vast  collection  of  beetles,  butter- 
flies, and  moths,  all  in  the  utmost  con- 
fusion. By  working  far  into  the  night, 
a  habit  he  never  lost,  these  were  reduced 
to  order  in  an  incredibly  short  space  of 
time,  and  as  a  result  Jordan  found  himself 
confronted  by  just  such  an  array  of 
material  as  he  needed  for  the  study  of 
variation,  evolution,  and  their  causes 
which  was  his  objective  throughout  hiis 
career.  He  succeeded  E.  J.  O.  Hartert  as 
director  of  the  Tring  Museum  (1980-39), 
was  president  of  the  Royal  Entomological 
Society  of  London  (1929-30),  and  was 
elected  F.R.S.  in  1982. 

Over  the  years,  the  product  of  much 
research  in  entomology  by  amateur  and 
professional  alike  had  been  lost  to  science 
through  lack  of  publication.  No  charge  of 
failure  in  this  respect  lies  against  Jordan. 
By  the  end  of  1903  he  had  published, 
either  alone  or  jointly  with  Rothschild, 
profusely  illustrated  papers  running  to 
over  2,500  pages.  The  best  known  were 
the  Revision  of  the  Papilios  of  the  Eastern 
Hemisphere,  the  Monograph  of  Charaxes, 
and  the  Revision  of  the  Sphingidae,  all  of 
which  remain  standard  works  of  re- 
ference. Side  by  side  with  these  major 
works  and  numerous  descriptive  papers 
on  the  systematics  of  Coleoptera  and 
Lepidoptera,  Jordan  found  time  to  pub- 
lish several  papers  of  a  more  philosophical 
nature  on  such  subjects  as  mechanical 
selection  and  mimicry,  and  a  critique  of 
the  theory  of  orthogenesis  as  applied  to 
Papilionidae  by  Eimer.  A  remarkable 
paper  was  one  on  reproductive  divergence 
which,  as  early  as  1898  and  before  much 
was  known  of  the  laws  of  heredity,  he 
showed  not  to  be  a  factor  in  the  evolution 
of  species.  All  this  was  but  the  result  of  his 
first  ten  years'  work  at  Tring.  Between 
1903  and  1958  he  pubhshed  a  further  420 
papers  which,  though  mainly  systematic, 
were  frequently  interspersed  with  pointed 
reflections  upon  their  bearing  on  the  prob- 
lem of  evolution.  He  deplored  the  amount 
of  time  which  had  to  be  devoted  to 
descriptions  of  new  genera  and  species, 
a  drudgery  which  was  nevertheless  in- 
escapable if  a  sound  classificatory  basis 


was   to   be   provided   for   the   study   of 
evolution. 

About  1900  he  took  up  the  study  of 
fleas  and  in  collaboration  with  Charles 
Rothschild  began  to  publish  on  the 
systematics  of  this  much  neglected  order. 
Their  work  on  the  plague  fleas  of  the  genus 
Xenopsylla  provides  a  perfect  example  of 
the  importance  of  precise  taxonomic  work. 
Gradually  between  them  they  built  up  the 
immensely  valuable  collection  of  fleas 
which  now  belongs  to  the  British  Museum 
and  provided,  through  their  writings,  the 
fund  of  knowledge  of  these  insects  which 
has  proved  of  such  great  value  to  medical 
entomologists  throughout  the  world.  The 
'only  truly  satisfactory  classification  of 
fleas'  is  said  to  be  that  published  by  Jor- 
dan when  he  was  nearly  ninety. 

One  other  group  of  insects  claimed 
a  large  share  of  Jordan's  interest — the 
beetles,  which  had  been  his  'first  love'.  In 
particular,  especially  in  later  life,  he  was 
fascinated  by  the  Anthribidae.  In  spite 
of  describing  150  new  genera  and  nearly 
two-thirds  of  the  known  species  he  never 
completely  extricated  himself  from  the 
drudgery  phase.  He  would  discuss  theit 
infinitely  bewildering  variety  by  the  hour ; 
but  he  never  achieved,  in  this  group,  a 
system  of  classification  which  satisfied  him. 

In  science  Jordan  was  an  inter- 
nationalist. To  him  national  rivalries  in 
this  field,  like  personal  rivalries,  were 
abhorrent,  and  he  deliberately  ignored 
them.  To  help  break  down  the  isolation  of 
entomologists  of  different  nationalities, 
and  even  of  different  interests  in  the  same 
field,  he  founded  in  1910  the  International 
Congress  of  Entomology,  remaining  per- 
manent secretary  until  1948  when  he  was 
elected  honorary  life  president.  In  the 
field  of  zoological  nomenclature  Jordan 
unobtrusively  rendered  great  service. 
Confusion  and  bitter  argument  reigned 
supreme  until  at  the  congress  at  Monaco 
in  1913  he  succeeded  in  reaching  a  com- 
promise which  has  subsequently  proved  of 
the  greatest  benefit.  He  served  until  1950 
as  a  member  of  the  Conmiission  on 
Zoological  Nomenclature,  holding  office  as 
president  for  nineteen  years. 

Many  of  Jordan's  major  contribu- 
tions to  zoological  thought  appeared  in 
scientific  publications  little  consulted  by 
zoologists  not  primarily  concerned  with 
entomology.  His  introductory  note  to  the 
revision  of  the  oriental  swallowtails  (1895) 
sets  out  clearly  the  taxonomic  concepts 
and  general  principles  which  guided  all  his 
work.  How  sound  were  his  concepts  and 


561 


Jordan 


I).N.B.  1951-1960 


how  modern,  has  been  well  shown  by  the 
authors  who  paid  tribute  to  him  in  the 
series  of  essays  published  on  the  occasion 
of  his  ninety-fourth  hivthday  {Transactions 
of  the  Royal  Entomological  Society,  vol. 
cvii,  1955). 

A  naturally  rather  shy  man,  Jordan  was 
inevitably  somewhat  overshadowed  by 
the  panoply  of  his  surroundings  at  Tring. 
To  meet  him  there,  however,  meant  quick 
recognition  of  liis  friendliness,  helpfulness, 
humour,  and  complete  disinterestedness  in 
everything  but  the  pursuit  of  truth  and 
the  advancement  of  knowledge.  His  most 
incisive  criticism  never  hurt. 

In  1891  Jordan  married  Minna  Briinig 
(died  1925),  a  childhood  friend,  by  whom 
he  had  two  daughters.  He  was  naturaUzed 
in  1911  and  died  in  Hemel  Hempstead  12 
January  1959. 

[N.  D.  Riley  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  vi,  1960; 
personal  knowledge.]  N.  D.  Riley. 

JOWITT,  WILLIAM  ALLEN,  Earl 
JowiTT  (1885-1957),  lord  chancellor,  was 
born  15  April  1885  at  Stevenage  rectory, 
the  only  son  of  the  rector,  the  Rev. 
WilUam  Jowitt,  by  his  wife,  Louisa  Mar- 
garet, third  daughter  of  John  Allen,  of 
Oldfield  Hall,  Altrincham.  He  was  edu- 
cated at  Marlborough  and  New  College, 
Oxford,  where  in  1906  he  took  a  first  in 
jurisprudence.  Three  years  later  (1909)  he 
was  called  to  the  bar  by  the  Middle 
Temple  and  rapidly  estabUshed  himself  in 
the  best  class  of  commercial  work,  besides 
acquiring  an  all-round  practice.  When  he 
took  silk  in  1922  he  had  a  high  reputation 
as  a  jury  advocate  and  within  four  years 
he  was  recognized  as  one  of  the  leading 
King's  counsel  at  the  common  law  bar. 

He  entered  poUtics  in  1922  when  he  was 
elected  Liberal  member  of  Parliament  for 
the  Hartlepools.  In  1924  he  was  one  of  the 
few  Liberals  who  supported  the  Labour 
Party  in  the  division  lobby  on  the  occasion 
of  the  defeat  of  the  Labour  Government 
over  the  'Campbell  case'.  In  the  ensuing 
general  election  he  lost  his  seat.  In  1924- 
6  he  was  a  member  of  the  royal  conmiis- 
sion  on  lunacy  and  mental  disorder.  After 
the  general  election  of  1929  the  second 
Labour  Government  took  office  with 
a  notable  lack  of  forensic  talent  which 
mad^  it  hard  for  Ramsay  MacDonald  to 
fill  the  legal  offices.  Jowitt's  acknowledged 
distinction  at  the  bar,  together  with  his 
fluent,  forcible  eloquence,  marked  him  as 
well  qualified,  and  although  he  had  just 
been  returned  to  ParUament  as  Liberal 


member  for  Preston,  MacDonald  invited 
him  to  join  the  Labour  Party  and  become 
attorney-general.  Without  any  apparent 
hesitation,  Jowitt  accepted,  at  the  same 
time  offering  to  resign  his  seat  and  stand 
again  in  his  constituency  as  Labour  candi- 
date. His  change  of  politics  only  a  few 
days  after  the  election  was  the  subject  of 
bitter  controversy.  Indignation  at  the  bar 
was  particularly  strong  and  all  but  one  of 
the  men  in  Jowitt's  chambers  in  the 
Temple  abandoned  them.  Jowitt  was 
knighted  and  on  31  July  1929  was  returned 
as  Labour  member  for  Preston  with 
a  majority  of  6,440.  Thenceforward  his 
political  career  was  characterized  by 
a  see-saw  of  alternating  allegiances.  When 
the  financial  crisis  of  1931  brought  about 
the  formation  of  the  'national'  Govern- 
ment he  rallied  to  its  support,  retaining 
the  office  of  attorney-general.  In  conse- 
quence he  was  expelled  from  the  Labour 
Party.  At  the  general  election  in  October 
he  stood  as  National  Labour  candidate  for 
the  Combined  English  Universities  (al- 
though he  had  previously  advocated  the 
abolition  of  the  university  franchise),  but 
he  was  defeated.  In  January  1932  he 
resigned  his  office  as  attorney -general  and, 
remaining  out  of  Parliament  for  seven 
years,  resumed  his  practice  at  the  bar. 

In  1930,  as  attorney-general,  Jowitt 
prosecuted  Clarence  Hatry  for  fraud  and 
in  the  following  year  he  prosecuted  Lord 
Kylsant  [q.v.],  a  director  of  the  Royal 
Mail  Steam  Packet  Company,  for  pub- 
lishing a  prospectus  which  he  knew  to  be 
false  in  a  material  particular.  Jowitt's 
skilful  handling  of  this  case  was  con- 
sidered a  masterpiece  of  forensic  ability. 
In  1934  he  appeared  for  the  defence  in 
Princess  Yousoupoff' s  famous  libel  action 
against  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer  Pictures, 
Ltd. 

In  1936  he  was  readmitted  to  the 
Labour  Party  and  in  October  1939  he  was 
returned  to  Parliament  unopposed  as 
member  for  Ashton-under-Lyne.  In  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill's  coalition  Government 
in  1940  he  served  as  solicitor-general 
under  his  former  pupil  Sir  Donald  Somer- 
vell (later  Lord  Somervell  of  Harrow, 
q.v.),  who  became  attorney-general.   In 

1942  he  succeeded  Lord  Hankey  as 
paymaster-general,  usually  an  unpaid 
sinecure,  but  for  which  he  received  a  salary 
of  £5,000  in  respect  of  work  in  preparation 
for  post-war  reconstruction.  In  January 

1943  he  became  minister  without  port- 
folio. In  1944  he  was  appointed  minister  of 
national  insurance.  The  government  white 


562 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


.W  .1    Jowitt 


paper  on  this  subject  was  put  to  test  in  the 
House  of  Commons  on  2  November  1944 
when  Jowitt  sought  support  for  it  in  one 
of  his  admirably  lucid  speeches.  However, 
before  legislation  could  be  framed,  the 
general  election  of  1945  resulted  in  the 
formation  of  the  third  Labour  Govern- 
ment with  Jowitt  as  lord  chancellor,  with 
the  title  Baron  Jowitt,  of  Stevenage.  In 
his  first  year  of  office  he  presided  at  the 
dramatic  hearing  of  the  appeal  to  the 
House  of  Lords  of  William  Joyce,  con- 
victed of  treason.  In  1947  a  viscountcy  was 
conferred  on  him.  During  this  year  two 
complex  and  important  bills  were  debated 
in  the  Lords  and  Jowitt  was  mainly  instru- 
mental in  securing  their  safe  passage  into 
law.  One  was  the  much-needed  Companies 
Act  and  the  other  the  revolutionary  Town 
and  Country  Planning  Act  in  which  there 
were  some  400  amendments. 

In  1948  Jowitt  moved  the  second  read- 
ing of  the  criminal  justice  bill.  Although 
he  had  declared  himself  opposed  to  the 
suspension  of  the  death  penalty,  he  acted 
in  accordance  with  the  free  vote  taken  in 
the  House  of  Commons  and  advised  that 
the  experiment  of  suspension  should  be 
tried.  During  his  term  of  office  as  lord 
chancellor  he  bore  the  full  burden  of  an 
overwhelming  weight  of  legislation  and  he 
handled  the  affairs  of  the  House  with 
businesslike  dispatch.  It  was  said  after  his 
death  that  he  was  the  most  overworked 
lord  chancellor  in  history.  In  1951  he 
inaugurated  in  person  the  new  Supreme 
Court  of  Appeal  for  East  Africa  which 
included  Aden,  the  Seychelles,  and  Somali- 
land,  enhancing  the  impressiveness  of  the 
occasion  by  all  the  traditional  splendour 
associated  with  his  office.  After  the  general 
election  of  1951  a  Conservative  Govern- 
ment was  returned  and  on  relinquishing 
the  office  of  lord  chancellor  Jowitt  was 
created  an  earl.  However,  he  remained  an 
active  and  spirited  leader  of  the  Opposi- 
tion in  the  House  of  Lords  from  1952  to 
November  1955.  His  hold  upon  his  fellow 
peers  never  weakened  for  he  never  lost  his 
clarity  of  exposition  and  adroitness  in 
parliamentary  procedure.  Even  after  his 
retirement  at  the  age  of  seventy  he  con- 
tinued to  give  valuable  service  when 
occasionally  he  returned  to  speak  in  the 
House  of  Lords  or  preside  over  the 
Appellate  Committee. 

Lord  Jowitt  was  always  the  embodi- 
ment of  judicial  dignity  and  in  his  splendid 
black  and  gold  robes  he  looked  every  inch 
the  lord  chancellor.  In  voice,  deportment, 
and  person  he  had  most  of  the  qualifica- 


tions for  the  discharge  of  his  high  office, 
yet  it  is  chiefly  as  an  advocate  that  he 
will  be  remembered.  Alternately  comman- 
ding and  persuasive,  his  richly  expressive 
voice  was  once  compared  to  a  violon- 
cello. He  was  tall  and  gracefully  athletic 
with  steely -blue  eyes  and  thin  lips  set  in 
classical  features.  He  was  outstandingly 
handsome  and  his  carriage  was  gravely 
dignified.  He  had  great  charm  and  wit, 
combined  with  an  easy  nonchalant  manner 
which  at  times  disarmed  even  his  most 
scathing  critics.  Probably  his  greatest 
attribute  at  the  bar  was  his  exceptional 
ability  to  reduce  the  most  complex  prob- 
lems to  simple  clear-cut  terms  by  easy 
lucid  exposition.  His  speeches  in  debate, 
like  his  rare  platform  utterances,  were 
moderate  and  calm,  delivered  with  skill 
and  often  with  brilliance. 

Jowitt  travelled  extensively  after  1945 
and  was  very  popular  abroad,  for  he  was 
an  accomplished  lecturer  and  had  a  gift 
for  making  speeches  which  were  both 
short  and  witty.  He  was  a  member  of  the 
Athenaeum  and  was  the  author  of  two 
books.  The  Strange  Case  of  Alger  Hiss 
(1953)  and  Some  Were  Spies  (1954). 

Despite  the  many  public  services  he 
rendered  Jowitt  remained  an  equivocal  and 
controversial  character.  He  had  a  well- 
cultivated  mind,  was  acutely  intelligent, 
and  his  fine  dignified  presence  was  calcu- 
lated to  create  a  profound  impression. 
Nevertheless,  he  may  have  lacked  pro- 
found convictions.  He  was  primarily  an 
advocate  and  probably  for  this  reason  he 
failed  to  grasp  the  impression  his  political 
inconsistencies  would  make  on  others.  To 
him  the  step  from  the  left  of  the  Liberal 
Party  to  the  right  of  the  Labour  Party 
was  a  short  one.  Many  squibs  were  written 
in  comment  on  his  change  of  politics  but 
none  so  ironical  as  the  motto  he  took  for 
his  coat  of  arms  when  he  was  raised  to  the 
peerage :  'Tenax  et  fidelis\ 

In  1913  he  married  Lesley  (died  1970), 
daughter  of  James  Patrick  Mclntyre; 
they  had  one  daughter.  He  died  during  the 
night  of  15-16  August  1957  at  his  home 
at  Bradfield  St.  George,  near  Bury  St. 
Edmunds. 

Although  in  his  lifetime  it  had  been 
generally  assumed  that  Jowitt  was  not 
a  rich  man,  his  estate  amounted  to  over 
£100,000.  A  portrait  by  Sir  Gerald  Kelly 
is  in  the  Middle  Temple  and  one  by 
Ambrose  McEvoy  in  the  Tate  Gallery. 

[Law  Times  and  Law  Journal,  23  August 
1957 ;  The  Times,  17  August  1957.] 

Molina  Fullman. 


563 


Keeble,  F.  W. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


KEEBLE,  Sir  FREDERICK  WILLIAM 

(1870-1952),  botanist,  civU  servant,  and 
industrial  adviser,  was  born  in  London 
2  March  1870,  the  second  son  of  Francis 
Henry  Keeble,  cabinet  maker,  by  his  wife, 
Annie  Eliza  Gamble.  Frederick  was  edu- 
cated at  Alleyn's  School,  Dulwich,  and  as 
a  scholar  of  Caius  College,  Cambridge.  He 
obtained  a  first  class  in  part  i  of  the  natural 
sciences  tripos  in  1891  and  a  second  in  part 
ii  in  1893,  being  appointed  Frank  Smart 
student  in  the  same  year.  He  spent  a  year 
on  plant  physiological  research  in  Ceylon 
and  in  1897-8  was  an  assistant  lecturer  in 
botany  at  Manchester.  In  1902  he  was 
appointed  lecturer  in  botany  and  director 
of  the  horticultural  department  at  Read- 
ing where  he  became  professor  in  1907, 
and  was  dean  of  the  faculty  of  science  for 
the  sessions  1907-8  and  1908-9.  During 
his  years  at  Reading  his  scientific  pubUca- 
tions  were  mainly  in  two  series  of  papers. 
The  first  in  collaboration  with  F.  W. 
Gamble,  the  zoologist,  was  on  certain 
plant-animal  symbioses  and  the  second 
with  E.  F.  Armstrong  and  others  on  the 
formation  and  inheritance  of  floral  pig- 
ments. Together  with  two  papers  on  the 
integration  of  plant  behaviour  pubhshed 
in  1929-30,  also  in  collaboration,  these 
completed  his  original  contributions  to 
science. 

In  1914  Keeble  left  Reading  to  become 
director  of  the  Royal  Horticultural 
Society's  gardens  at  Wisley,  but  almost 
at  once,  on  the  outbreak  of  war,  he  was 
transferred  to  the  Board  of  Agriculture. 
He  became  controller  of  horticulture 
(1917-19)  in  the  food  production  depart- 
ment, and  eventually,  in  1919,  an  assis- 
tant secretary  to  the  Board.  In  this  posi- 
tion he  was  able  to  faciUtate  the  setting  up 
of  the  East  MaUing  Research  Station  as 
an  independent  institute  for  horticultural 
research.  For  his  services  in  the  war  he 
was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1917. 

Keeble  returned  to  academic  life  in  1920 
as  Sherardian  professor  of  botany  at 
Oxford.  In  1915  his  first  wife,  Mathilde 
Marie  Cecile,  daughter  of  Henri  Marechal, 
of  Paris,  whom  he  married  in  1898,  died 
suddenly,  leaving  one  daughter,  Keeble's 
only  child;  in  1920  he  married  Lillah 
McCarthy  [q.v.],  the  actress.  Together 
they  created  the  beautiful  house  and 
gardens  at  Hammels  on  Boar's  Hill  where 
they  entertained  extensively.  Among 
their  guests  was  Sir  Alfred  Mond  (later 
Lord  Melchett,  q.v.),  head  of  the  firm 
which  had  developed  the  process  for  pro- 
ducing nitrogenous   fertilizers   from   the 


nitrogen  of  the  air.  He  persuaded  Keeble 
to  relinquish  his  chair  in  1927  to  become 
agricultural  adviser  to  Imperial  Chemical 
Industries  which  had  taken  over  the  pro- 
cess. Keeble  entered  with  enthusiasm  into 
the  task  of  organizing  research  upon  the 
use  of  nitrogenous  fertilizers.  A  station  was 
set  up  at  Jealott's  Hill  near  Bracknell  in 
Berkshire  and  a  staff  assembled.  The 
programme  was  based  on  the  belief  that 
greatly  increased  use  of  fertilizers  could 
with  proper  management  lead  to  greatly 
increased  jields  both  on  arable  and  on 
grasslands.  The  station  exists,  much 
enlarged,  at  the  present  time  as  a  centre 
of  research  and  demonstration  and,  with 
the  solution  of  the  original  problems,  has 
passed  on  to  others.  When  Keeble's 
association  with  it  ended  in  1932  its 
reputation,  as  a  centre  of  research,  had 
been  established.  After  an  interval  Keeble 
took  up  his  final  appointment  as  Ful- 
lerian  professor  of  the  Royal  Institution 
(1938-41). 

His  interest  in  the  application  of  scienti- 
fic botany  to  practical  ends  was  recognized 
by  his  service  as  editor  (1908-19)  and 
thereafter  as  scientific  adviser  of  the 
Gardeners''  Chronicle,  to  which  he  contri- 
buted over  a  long  period.  He  had  also  the 
unusual  distinction  of  being  successively 
president  of  the  botany  section  (1912)  and 
of  the  agricultural  section  (1920)  of  the 
British  Association.  He  was  elected  F.R.S. 
in  1913  and  knighted  in  1922. 

Besides  his  technical  papers,  Keeble 
published  several  books.  The  first,  pre- 
pared with  the  help  of  Miss  M.  M.  C. 
Rayner  while  he  was  at  Reading,  is 
notable  for  a  lengthy  preface,  almost  in 
the  manner  of  his  later  acquaintance, 
G.  B.  Shaw  [q.v.].  It  assesses  with  per- 
cipience  the  value  of  its  subject,  Practical 
Plant  Physiology  (1911),  as  an  instrument 
of  education.  The  book  itself  was  less 
successful.  The  Life  of  Plants  (1926)  was 
a  short  and  readable  account  of  its  subject 
and  Science  Lends  a  Hand  in  the  Garden 
(1939)  an  assembly  of  his  more  notable 
contributions  to  the  Gardeners^  Chronicle, 
All  his  writing  exhibits  a  command  of 
clear  and  felicitous  English  which  he  was 
apparently  prepared  to  take  great  pains 
to  achieve.  The  Life  of  Plants,  the  pub- 
lishers complained,  was  rewritten  in  proof. 
In  his  sixties  he  wrote  Polly  and  Freddie 
(1936)  which  has  been  described  as  an 
'imaginative  autobiography'  including 
tales  of  biology  told  to  his  grandchildren. 
For  some  readers,  at  least,  it  possesses 
great  charm.  At  this  time  he  was  a  striking 


5M. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Keith 


figure,  well,  if  a  shade  flamboyantly, 
groomed  and  with  an  easy  bearing  devoid 
of  aggressiveness. 

In  Keeble  the  training  of  a  scientist  was 
imposed  upon  the  temperament  of  an 
artist,  and  sometimes  the  two  seem  to 
have  warred  with  one  another.  He  appears 
to  have  convinced  himself  that  biology 
could  afford  to  dispense  with  the  rigour 
of  scientific  discipline  for  the  niceties  of 
which  he  seems  to  have  had  inadequate 
patience.  It  may  be  for  this  reason  that 
his  own  work  has  left  little  mark  on  the 
development  of  scientific  botany.  His  part 
was  that  of  stimulant  and  irritant  to 
others,  and  of  his  Oxford  staff  and 
students  there  were  still  those  who  spoke 
warmly  of  his  skill  in  encouragement.  He 
was  a  noted  and  witty  conversationalist, 
and  if  in  pursuit  of  his  fancy  he  inflicted 
wounds  his  friends  regarded  him  to  the 
last  as  essentially  warm  hearted. 

After  his  retirement  he  and  Lady  Keeble 
lived  for  a  while  at  Fowey  in  Cornwall; 
but  they  returned  eventually  to  London 
where  he  died  19  October  1952. 

[Nature,  10  January  1953 ;  V.  H.  Blackman 
in  Obituary  Notices  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal 
Society,  No.  22,  November  1953 ;  private 
information.]  W.  O.  James. 

KEEBLE,  LILLAH,  Lady  (1875-1960), 
actress.  [See  McCarthy,  Lillah.] 

KEITH,  Sir  ARTHUR  (1866-1955),  con- 
servator of  the  Hunterian  Museum  of  the 
Royal  College  of  Surgeons,  was  born  5 
February  1866  at  Old  Machar,  Aberdeen- 
shire, the  sixth  of  the  ten  children  of  John 
Keith,  a  farmer,  and  his  wife,  Jessie 
Macpherson.  To  prepare  for  a  medical 
education  he  went  to  Gordon's  College, 
Aberdeen,  for  a  grounding  in  Latin  and 
Greek,  and  in  1884  entered  Marischal  Col- 
lege. It  was  here  that  he  came  under  the 
influence  of  James  Trail  the  botanist  and 
(Sir)  John  Struthers  [q.v.],  the  anatomist, 
both  of  whom  inspired  him  with  the 
resolve  ultimately  to  seek  an  academic 
career.  He  qualified  with  highest  honours 
in  1888  and  in  the  next  year  accepted  a 
post  as  medical  officer  to  a  mining  com- 
pany in  Siam,  mainly  with  the  intention 
of  collecting  botanical  specimens ;  his  col- 
lection was  later  used  by  H.  N.  Ridley 
[q.v.]  in  his  comprehensive  work  on  the 
Flora  of  the  Malay  Peninsula.  But  Keith 
himself  became  more  interested  in  field 
and  anatomical  studies  of  the  local 
monkeys  and  gibbons,  and  it  was  these 
activities  which  first  began  to  focus  his 


attention  on  the  comparative  anatomy  of 
the  Primates,  the  evolution  of  man,  and 
physical  anthropology  in  general. 

After  three  years  in  Siam,  Keith  re- 
turned home  and  in  1894  was  awarded  the 
degree  of  M.D.  of  Aberdeen  University  for 
a  thesis  on  the  myology  of  catarrhine 
monkeys,  and  in  the  same  year  passed  the 
examination  for  the  fellowship  of  the 
Royal  College  of  Surgeons.  In  the  follow- 
ing year  he  was  appointed  senior  demon- 
strator in  anatomy  at  the  London  Hospital 
medical  school,  subsequently  becoming 
lecturer.  In  1902  there  appeared  his  well- 
known  book  Human  Embryology  and 
Morphology  which  reached  a  sixth  edition 
in  1948.  Of  his  earlier  research  work,  that 
dealing  with  the  anatomy  of  the  heart 
won  him  the  greatest  distinction,  and  in 
seeking  for  one  of  the  basic  causes  of 
cardiac  arrhythmia,  he  discovered  (with 
his  colleague  Martin  Flack)  the  'sino- 
auricular  node'  of  the  heart,  a  small  con- 
densation of  specialized  tissue  of  immense 
importance  for  the  initiation  and  control 
of  the  normal  rhythmic  contraction  of  the 
heart. 

In  1908  Keith  was  elected  to  the  con- 
servatorship of  the  Royal  College  of 
Surgeons,  and  under  his  inspired  direction 
the  Hunterian  Museum  of  the  College 
came  to  be  recognized  as  one  of  the  finest 
records  of  the  structure  and  history  of  the 
human  body,  with  particular  reference  to 
the  anatomical  and  embryological  basis  of 
the  surgical  disabilities  and  disorders 
which  may  affect  it.  One  of  Keith's  main 
duties  at  the  College  was  to  conduct 
courses  of  lectures,  and  he  rapidly  ac- 
quired a  high  reputation  as  a  gifted  lec- 
turer. Soon  after  assuming  his  new  office, 
he  began  to  give  his  attention  much  more 
actively  to  problems  of  human  evolution 
and  the  diversification  of  the  modern 
races  of  mankind.  There  followed  a  num- 
ber of  palaeo-anthropological  studies  as 
a  result  of  which  Keith  claimed  a  much 
higher  antiquity  for  Homo  sapiens  than 
had  hitherto  been  accepted.  His  conclu- 
sions have  proved  to  be  partly  correct — 
but  not  entirely,  for  some  of  the  fossil 
skeletons  on  which  he  relied  for  his  evi- 
dence were  later  demonstrated  by  modern 
techniques  of  dating  to  be  more  recent 
than  he  had  supposed. 

The  publication  of  the  alleged  discovery 
of  the  Piltdown  skull  in  1912  led  Keith 
into  serious  controversy  with  those  who 
claimed  that  the  skull  (as  well  as  the  jaw) 
displayed  remarkable  simian  characters, 
and  he  was  able  to  show  that,  if  properly 


565 


Keith 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


reconstructed,  the  skull  was  in  fact  quite 
like  that  of  Homo  sapiens.  Nevertheless, 
though  he  expressed  doubts  as  to  the 
interpretation  of  this  'fossil'  (now  known 
to  have  been  fraudulently  fabricated), 
Keith  thought  that  Piltdown  man  was 
indeed  akin  to  a  verj'^  early  ancestor  of 
modern  man. 

In  1915  The  Antiquity  of  Man  was  pub- 
lished— a  widely  read  book  reviewing  all 
the  fossil  remains  of  man  at  that  time 
known.  It  was  brought  up  to  date  in  1931 
by  a  supplementary  volume,  New  Dis- 
coveries Relating  to  the  Antiquity  of  Man, 
During  the  war  of  1914-18  Keith  was 
occupied  with  problems  of  surgical 
anatomy  related  to  war  injuries,  and 
published  a  number  of  lectures  on  the 
anatomical  and  physiological  principles 
underlying  the  treatment  of  woimds 
involving  muscles,  bones,  and  joints. 
Some  of  his  wartime  lectures  appeared  in 
book  form  as  Menders  of  the  Maimed 
(1919).  In  1913  he  was  elected  to  the 
presidency  of  the  Royal  Anthropological 
Institute,  a  position  which  he  held  for 
four  years,  and  in  1916  he  was  invited  to 
give  the  Christmas  juvenile  lectures  at  the 
Royal  Institution;  these  were  later  pub- 
Ushed  in  a  book  entitled  The  Engines  of  the 
Human  Body  (1919),  a  second  edition  of 
which  appeared  in  1925. 

During  the  years  following  the  war, 
Keith's  interests  turned  more  to  general 
themes  of  medical  history  and  to  some- 
what speculative  considerations  of  evolu- 
tionary processes  in  relation  to  the  origin 
of  man ;  at  the  same  time  he  was  always 
busy  revising  some  of  his  books  for  new 
editions.  He  was  elected  F.R.S.  as  early  as 
1913,  in  1921  he  was  knighted,  and  from 
1918  to  1923  he  occupied  the  position  of 
Fullerian  professor  of  physiology  at  the 
Royal  Institution.  He  was  then  at  the 
height  of  his  distinguished  career,  and  his 
election  to  the  presidency  of  the  British 
Association  for  1927  came  as  no  surprise 
to  his  colleagues.  His  presidential  address, 
'Darwin's  theory  of  man's  descent  as  it 
stands  today',  presented  an  affirmation 
of  Darwin's  general  conclusions  on  the 
evolutionary  derivation  of  the  Hominidae 
from  an  ancestry  in  common  with  the 
anthropoid  apes,  amplified  by  references 
to  the  accumulation  of  comparative  ana- 
tomical and  palaeontological  evidence 
since  Darwin's  time.  One  result  of  this 
meeting  of  the  British  Association  was  the 
immediate  response  to  Keith's  appeal  for 
the  preservation  of  Darwin's  home  at 
Downe  in  Kent. 


In  1930  Keith  was  elected  rector  of 
Aberdeen  University  and  in  his  rectorial 
address  he  developed  the  thesis  that  the 
spirit  of  nationalism  is  a  potent  factor  in 
the  evolutionary  differentiation  of  human 
races.  This  thesis,  later  expanded  in  a 
book  entitled  A  New  Theory  of  Human 
Evolution  (1948),  met  with  some  criticism. 
In  1933,  after  a  severe  illness,  he  retired 
from  the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons  and 
went  to  live  at  the  Buckston  Browne 
Research  Institute  in  Downe.  A  year  later 
he  suffered  the  loss  of  his  wife  Cecilia 
Caroline  (daughter  of  Tom  Gray  the 
artist)  whom  he  had  married  in  1899.  They 
had  no  children. 

Except  for  his  Autobiography  (1950) 
which  he  published  at  the  age  of  eighty- 
four,  Keith's  last  work  of  importance  was 
a  comprehensive  study  of  the  skeletal 
remains  of  palaeolithic  man  found  in  the 
caves  of  Mount  Carmel.  The  results  of  this 
work  appeared  in  the  treatise  on  The  Stone 
Age  of  Mount  Carmel  (1939,  with  T.  D. 
McCown). 

Keith  died  suddenly  at  Downe  7 
January  1955.  Apart  from  his  claims  to 
distinction  as  a  scientist,  he  was  a  much- 
loved  man,  kindly  and  gentle  in  manner, 
friendly  and  unassuming,  and  of  a  some- 
what retiring  disposition.  It  seemed 
entirely  fitting  that  this  devoted  student 
of  human  evolution  should  himself  spend 
the  latter  part  of  his  long  life  in  the 
countryside  where  his  great  predecessor 
Charles  Darwin  had  once  lived.  Keith 
received  honorary  degrees  from  Aberdeen, 
Durham,  Manchester,  Birmingham,  and 
Oxford.  He  was  an  honorary  fellow  of  the 
Royal  Societies  of  Edinburgh  and  New 
Zealand,  and  honorary  member  of  the 
United  States  National  Academy  of 
Sciences  and  the  New  York  Academy  of 
Sciences.  At  the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons 
he  is  commemorated  in  an  oil-painting  by 
W.  W.  Ouless,  and  in  a  bronze  bust  by 
Kathleen  Parbury.  The  National  Portrait 
Gallery  has  two  drawings,  one  by  Sir 
William  Rothenstein  and  the  other  by 
Juliet  Pannett. 

[Sir  W.  E.  Le  Gros  Clark  in  Biographical 
Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  i, 
1955 ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] W.  E.  Le  Gros  Clark. 

KELLAWAY,    CHARLES   HALLILEY 

(1889-1952),  scientist,  was  born  16 
January  1889,  in  Melbourne,  Australia, 
the  son  of  the  Rev.  Alfred  Charles  Kella- 
way,  curate  to  the  dean  of  the  pro- 
cathedral  church  of  St.  James,  and  his 


566 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Kelly 


wife,  Anne  Carrick,  daughter  of  Richard 
Roberts,  who  had  married  Frances  Halli- 
ley,  and  who  had  been  a  North  of  England 
manufacturer,  interested  in  chemistry, 
and  a  friend  of  the  great  John  Dalton 
[q.v.]. 

Charles  Kellaway  was  the  eldest  son  and 
second  child  in  a  family  of  three  sons  and 
two  daughters.  He  attended  the  Caulfleld 
Grammar  School  and  then,  with  a  scholar- 
ship, the  Melbourne  Church  of  England 
Grammar  School,  passing  the  senior  public 
examination  with  first  class  honours  in 
physics  and  chemistry,  and  winning  a 
scholarship  to  the  university,  which  he 
attended  as  a  home-boarder,  supplement- 
ing his  resources  by  coaching ;  he  passed 
all  his  examinations  with  high  honours, 
to  qualify  as  M.B.,  B.S.  in  1911.  After 
resident  appointments  at  the  Royal  Mel- 
bourne Hospital,  he  was  acting  as  tutor  in 
physiology  at  Trinity  College  when  war 
came  in  1914.  He  left  Australia  in  1915  as 
a  captain,  A.A.M.C,  to  serve  in  Gallipoli 
and  then,  in  1916,  at  the  laboratory  of 
the  Third  Australian  General  Hospital  at 
Cairo.  This  gave  him  his  first  experience  of 
research,  in  pathology  and  bacteriology, 
under  the  stimulating  guidance  of  (Sir) 
Charles  Martin  [q.v.].  Kellaway  went  with 
Australian  forces  to  the  western  front  in 
Europe,  was  awarded  the  M.C.  in  1917, 
and  later  in  that  year  was  rendered  unfit 
for  further  active  service,  and  acquired 
a  permanent  liability  to  bronchitis, 
through  encountering  a  gas  attack  (phos- 
gene). He  was  sent  to  London  early  in 
1918,  on  duty  which  gave  him  free  time 
for  research  on  the  physiological  effects  of 
anoxaemia,  then  of  new  interest  in  con- 
nection with  high-altitude  aviation. 

During  a  return  to  Australia,  Kellaway 
in  1920  was  appointed  Foulerton  research 
student  of  the  Royal  Society  and  returned 
to  London  to  engage  in  research  there, 
first  with  (Sir)  H.  H.  Dale  at  the 
National  Institute  for  Medical  Research, 
mainly  on  the  nature  of  anaphylaxis,  and 
then  in  T.  R.  Elliott's  medical  unit  at 
University  College  Hospital,  where  his 
chief  work,  with  S.  J.  Cowell,  was  on  the 
resistance  maintained  by  the  suprarenal 
cortex  to  the  effects  of  histamine  and  other 
toxic  products  of  tissue  injury. 

In  1923  Kellaway  received  his  main 
research  opportunity,  through  his  ap- 
pointment as  director  of  the  Walter  and 
Eliza  Hall  Institute  for  Pathological 
Research,  in  Melbourne.  He  was  to  hold 
this  position  for  twenty-one  years,  during 
which,  through  his  effective  appeals  for 


national  support  and  private  generosity, 
the  Institute  was  to  be  greatly  enlarged, 
while  its  scientific  output  won  for  it 
a  leading  position  in  Australia,  and  high 
rank  among  world  centres  of  medical 
research.  Kellaway's  own  researches  in 
this  period,  with  his  immediate  collabora- 
tors, included  important  series  on  the 
physiological  analysis  of  the  effects  of  the 
venoms  of  Australian  snakes  and  other 
indigenous  fauna,  and  of  those  of  the 
toxins  of  pathogenic  bacteria.  In  both 
these  series,  apart  from  more  specific 
actions,  evidence  was  found  of  the  release 
of  histamine  from  tissues  injured  by  dif- 
ferent poisons,  and  a  link  with  the  earlier 
studies  of  anaphylaxis  was  thus  provided. 
When  war  broke  out  again  in  1939, 
Kellaway,  with  the  rank  of  colonel,  be- 
came director  of  pathology  to  the  Aus- 
tralian Army  Medical  Service,  organizing 
his  Institute  to  meet  the  war's  special 
demands.  In  1941  he  toured  the  United 
States  on  his  way  to  London  to  establish 
scientific  liaisons.  News  of  the  Japanese 
attack  on  Pearl  Harbour  in  December 
1941  hurried  him  from  London  back  to 
AustraHa,  which  was  to  become  a  princi- 
pal medical  base  for  the  allied  armies  in 
the  Pacific.  With  the  rank  of  brigadier- 
general,  he  served  as  scientific  liaison 
officer  to  the  director-general  of  the 
A.A.M.S.  Two  years  later,  in  1944,  his 
friend  and  colleague  (Sir)  F.  Macfarlane 
Burnet  succeeded  to  his  directorship  of 
the  Hall  Institute,  which  had  by  then  been 
greatly  enlarged  and  rebuilt  on  a  new  site. 
Kellaway  was  then  free  to  accept  the 
position,  in  London,  of  director-in-chief  to 
the  research  enterprises  of  the  Wellcome 
Foundation,  Ltd. ;  and  he  made  dis- 
tinguished use  of  this  further  opportunity 
for  organizing  researches  in  a  wide  medical 
range  until  he  died  in  London  13  Decem- 
ber 1952.  He  had  made  important  con- 
tributions to  medical  knowledge  by  his 
own  researches,  and  an  even  greater  one 
by  the  energy  and  special  ability  which  he 
devoted  to  the  organization  of  research 
opportunities  for  others.  He  was  elected 
F.R.C.P.  in  1929  and  F.R.S.  in  1940.  He 
married  in  1919  Eileen  Ethel  Scantlebury, 
by  whom  he  had  three  sons. 

[Sir  Henry  H.  Dale  in  Obituary  Notices  of  Fel- 
lows of  the  Royal  Society,  No.  22,  November 
1953;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] H.  H.  Dale. 

KELLY,  Sir  DAVID  VICTOR  (1891- 
1959),  diplomatist,  was  born  14  Septem- 
ber 1891  in  Adelaide,   South  Australia, 


567 


KeUy 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


where  his  father,  David  Frederick  Kelly, 
had  recently  settled  as  professor  of  classics 
in  the  university.  His  father's  family  were 
Londondeny  landowners.  KKs  mother, 
Sophie  Armstrong,  daughter  of  the  late 
Rev.  Ignatius  George  d'Arenberg,  was 
descended  from  a  member  of  the  Rhenish 
ducal  house  of  that  name  who  emigrated 
to  Ireland  after  the  Napoleonic  wars.  On 
his  father's  death  his  mother  returned  to 
Ireland,  thence  to  England  where  Kelly 
went  to  St.  Paul's  School  in  time  for  the 
last  year  of  the  headmastership  of  F.  W. 
Walker  [q.v.],  then  to  Magdalen  College, 
Oxford.  At  St.  Paul's,  Kelly  came  to 
know  Richard  Johnson  Walker,  the  high 
master's  son  and  assistant  master  (later 
Kelly's  stepfather),  s.  brilliant  scholar  and 
a  man  of  wide  but  wayward  genius  who, 
from  being  an  agnostic,  became  an 
AngUcan  clergyman  and  later  joined  the 
Church  of  Rome.  From  him  Kelly  acquired 
an  enthusiasm  for  the  traditions  and 
achievements  of  Eiu'opean  culture  and 
a  lifelong  passion  for  travel.  As  a  demy  of 
Magdalen  he  read  history,  fenced  for  the 
university,  and  settled  down  to  an  ap- 
preciation of  the  douceur  de  vivre  of  the 
pre-war  era  and  to  a  gentle  scepticism 
based  on  'the  limitations  of  humanity  and 
the  essential  conservatism  and  passivity 
and  guUibiUty  of  the  mass  of  mankind'. 

Kelly  obtained  first  class  honours  in 
1913  and  on  the  advice  of  Sir  Herbert 
Warren  [q.v.]  entered  for  the  diplomatic 
service.  His  nomination  was  accepted  just 
before  the  outbreak  of  war,  but  he  volun- 
teered and  was  commissioned  in  the 
Leicester  Regiment.  In  1914  he  finally 
accepted  Christianity  and  became  a  de- 
voted Roman  Catholic.  He  spent  the  war 
years  from  1915  in  France,  chiefly  as 
inteUigence  officer  to  the  110th  Infantry 
brigade,  and  in  1917  he  was  awarded  the 
M.C.  He  later  published  a  record  of  his 
wartime  experiences  in  39  Months  (1930), 
partly  in  protest  against  the  distortions  of 
much  post-war  writing  about  fife  at  the 
front. 

In  1919  Kelly  was  at  last  free  to  begin 
his  diplomatic  career  which  centred 
mainly  round  Latin  America  (twice  in 
Argentina  and  briefly,  1925-7,  in  Mexico), 
the  Levant  (Egypt  and  Turkey),  and 
Russia.  He  was  first  posted  to  Buenos 
Aires  (1919-21),  where  in  1920  he  married 
his  first  wife,  Isabella  Adela,  daughter  of 
the  late  Henry  Maynard  Mills,  who  died  in 
1927,  leaving  a  son  and  daughter.  Later 
(1942-6)  he  returned  to  Argentina  as  am- 
bassador; and  he  twice  (1922-3,  1931-4) 


served  in  the  American  department  of 
the  Foreign  Office,  where  he  was  one  of 
the  architects  of  the  Anglo-Argentine 
trade  agreement  of  1933.  In  handling 
Latin-American  affairs,  both  in  London 
and  overseas,  Kelly  developed  two  of  his 
main  professional  convictions,  less  widely 
accepted  then  than  later:  the  need  for 
close  co-ordination  between  foreign  policy 
and  financial  and  economic  pohcy  and  the 
need  to  cultivate  not  only  governments 
and  ministers  in  office  but  the  financial, 
industrial,  political,  and  social  leaders  who 
wield  power  and  form  opinion  behind  the 
scenes.  He  realized  that  the  rule  of  the 
great  Argentine  landlords  was  ending  and 
that  new  forces  were  emerging.  His  years 
as  ambassador  covered  the  difficult  period 
of  American  endeavours  to  dominate 
Argentina  politically  and  economically 
and  Per  on' s  rise  to  power.  His  attempts 
to  arrange  an  Anglo-Argentine  condomi- 
nium for  the  British-owned  railways 
were  largely  thwarted  by  British  short- 
sightedness. 

Kelly  served  in  Egypt  as  counsellor, 
acting  high  commissioner,  and  charge 
d'affaires  in  Cairo  between  1934  and  1938, 
and  as  head  of  the  Egyptian  department 
in  the  Foreign  Office  in  1938-9.  These 
years  covered  the  last  phase  of  King 
Fuad's  duel  with  the  Wafd,  his  illness  and 
death,  the  treaty  negotiations  for  a  settle- 
ment of  Anglo-Egyptian  relations,  and 
the  threat  from  Italy  culminating  in  the 
Abyssinian  war.  Kelly  was  a  keen  suppor- 
ter of  a  treaty  settlement  and  among  the 
first  to  advocate  the  removal  of  the  British 
garrison  from  Cairo  to  the  Canal  Zone. 

Except  for  Switzerland  and  Russia, 
Kelly's  European  postings  (Lisbon,  1923- 
5,  Brussels,  1927-9,  Stockhobn,  1929-31) 
were  less  important;  but  his  years  in 
Belgium  included  his  marriage  in  1929 
to  Marie-Noele  Renee  Ghislaine  de  Jourda 
de  Vaux,  a  member  of  the  old  Brussels 
aristocracy,  who  shared  both  his  shrewd 
diplomatic  sense  and  his  dehght  in  travel. 
As  a  hostess  and  as  a  writer  and  lecturer 
she  gave  added  brilliance  to  his  later 
career.  There  were  two  sons  of  the 
marriage. 

In  1940-42  Kelly  was  minister  at  Berne, 
a  post  of  central  importance  in  war  time  as 
a  source  of  intelligence  and  one  requiring 
extreme  diplomatic  tact.  It  was  to  him 
that  the  peace  overtures  of  Prince  Hohen- 
lohe  were  addressed.  Appointed  C.M.G. 
in  1935,  Kelly  was  advanced  to  K.C.M.G. 
in  1942  on  his  transfer  to  Buenos  Aires  as 
ambassador ;  from  his  embassy  in  Argen- 


568 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Kennard 


tina,  already  noted,  he  was  transferred  in 
1946  to  Turkey.  With  the  promulgation  of 
the  'Truman  doctrine'  in  1947  Britain 
ceased  to  bear  the  major  responsibility  for 
reinforcing  the  Turkish  economy  and 
Turkish  defence.  Thanks  in  no  small 
degree  to  Kelly's  influence  Britain  never- 
theless remained  a  trusted  adviser  at  a 
critical  time  when  Turkey  was  trying  to 
evolve  a  two-party  parliamentary  system. 
He  was  able  to  gain  the  confidence  of  the 
Turkish  leaders  and  by  extensive  jour- 
neys throughout  the  country  to  form  a 
first-hand  opinion  of  its  political,  social, 
and  economic  problems.  It  was  a  con- 
genial task  and,  apart  from  the  profes- 
sional advancement,  he  much  regretted 
his  transfer,  in  1949,  to  Russia,  where  the 
scope  for  travel  and  for  personal  contact 
with  leading  men  was  very  restricted.  He 
had  known  Tsarist  Russia  from  two  visits 
as  a  young  man  and  they  had  left  him 
fascinated  and  appalled.  In  the  wintry 
climate  of  Stalin's  last  years  there  seemed 
little  a  British  ambassador  could  effect, 
but  Kelly  applied  his  analytic  mind  to  the 
philosophy  and  practice  of  Soviet  govern- 
ment and  even  in  the  sphere  of  travel  he 
and  his  wife  managed  to  secure  unusual 
concessions.  In  1950  he  was  promoted 
G.C.M.G.  and  in  1951  he  retired.  During 
his  embassy  Anglo-Russian  relations  were 
strained  by  the  Korean  war  and  irritated 
by  the  Russian  peace  campaign;  the 
moral  which  Kelly  himself  drew  from  his 
Russian  experiences  was  that  only  a  policy 
combining  rearmament  and  conciliation 
could  maintain  Western  security  and  the 
general  peace. 

An  important  sequel  to  Kelly's  last 
embassy  was  his  work,  after  retirement,  as 
a  public  commentator  on  Soviet  affairs 
(1951-4)  mainly  in  the  Sunday  Times. 
At  a  time  when  Russia  was  the  subject 
of  much  emotion,  conjecture,  and  mis- 
apprehension, Kelly's  clear,  comprehen- 
sive, and  factual  account  was  a  valuable 
corrective.  He  was  one  of  the  first  to 
describe  the  rise  of  the  Russian  managerial 
society  and  its  tendency  to  follow  the 
American  pattern.  In  1954  his  articles 
were  republished  as  a  book,  Beyond  the 
Iron  Curtain. 

In  his  autobiography  The  Ruling  Few 
(1952,  German  translation,  1963)  Kelly 
defined  the  diplomatist's  three  main  duties 
as  stating  the  case  for  his  own  Govern- 
ment, attempting  to  influence  in  his  own 
country's  interest  whatever  social  group 
forms  the  governing  class  of  his  country  of 
residence,  and  keeping  his  own  Govern- 


ment informed  of  leading  personalities 
and  trends  in  that  country  and  of  the 
probable  course  of  events.  His  own  career 
was  highly  successful ;  his  strength  lay  in 
his  quick,  fact-loving  mind,  his  lucid 
reporting,  and  his  ability  to  win  confidence 
as  an  experienced,  discreet,  and  friendly 
observer.  Temperamentally  conservative 
in  outlook  and  aim,  he  was  readily  experi- 
mental in  method,  and  his  last  book.  The 
Hungry  Sheep  (1955,  German  translation, 
1959),  might  be  described  as  a  survey  of  the 
mid-twentieth-century  scene  by  an  acute 
eighteenth-century  mind. 

After  retirement  Kelly  was  chairman  of 
the  Anglo-Turkish  Society  and  also  of  the 
British  Atlantic  Committee.  In  1955  he 
became  a  director  of  the  National  Bank 
and  chairman  of  the  British  Council  and 
remained  in  office  until  his  sudden  death 
four  years  later,  27  March  1959,  at  his 
home  in  county  Wexford,  following  a 
visit  for  the  Council  to  India.  To  his  chair- 
manship of  the  Council  he  brought  not 
only  wide  experience  and  contacts  and  a  de- 
light in  absorbing  problems  on  the  spot,  but 
a  conviction  of  the  importance  of  national 
publicity  in  general  and  a  determination 
to  maintain  British  cultural  connections 
with  Europe  beside  the  necessary  expan- 
sion of  work  in  other  continents. 

In  appearance  Kelly  was  a  tall,  big- 
boned  man,  with  something  of  the 
scholar's  stoop  and,  in  manner,  some- 
thing of  the  scholar's  reserve  combined 
with  the  watchful  affability  of  the 
diplomatist.  He  enjoyed  entertaining  and 
was  a  genial  host  and  a  kindly  chief.  His 
photograph  in  The  Ruling  Few  shows  him 
in  later  life — the  asymmetrical  Irish 
features,  the  narrowed,  slanting,  Eliza- 
bethan eyes,  the  decided,  gently  depressed 
line  of  the  mouth.  A  bronze  bust  by  J.  R. 
Renard-Goulet  is  in  the  possession  of  the 
family. 

{The  Times,  28  March  1959 ;  Sunday  Times, 
29  March  1959  ;  Kelly's  own  writings ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Kenneth  Johnstone* 

KENNARD,  Sm  HOWARD  WILLIAM 

(1878-1955),  diplomatist,  was  born  at 
Hove  22  March  1878,  the  younger  son  of 
Arthur  Challis  Kennard,  landowner,  of  17 
Eaton  Place,  London,  S.W.,  and  his  wife, 
Ann  Homan,  daughter  of  Thomas  Homan 
Mulock.  He  was  educated  at  Eton  which 
he  left  in  1896  and  entered  the  diplomatic 
service  in  1901.  In  1902  he  was  appointed 
attache  and  in  1903  third  secretary  at 
the  British  embassy  in  Rome.  He  was 


669 


Kennard 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


transferred  to  Tehran  in  December  1904 
and  by  July  1905  had  already  been  granted 
an  allowance  for  knowledge  of  Persian. 
He  was  moved  to  Washington  in  1907 
where  he  met  and,  in  1908,  married  Harriet 
(died  1950),  daughter  of  Jonathan  Norris, 
of  New  York.  She  was  his  constant 
companion  in  all  his  service  and  greatly 
appreciated  by  those  who  served  under 
him  for  her  kindness  and  generosity.  They 
had  one  son. 

After  a  short  period  in  1911  in  charge  of 
the  British  legation  in  Havana,  Kennard 
was  moved  in  the  same  year  to  Tangier, 
then  an  important  post  in  view  of  the 
rivalry  between  Germany  and  the  Entente 
powers  for  control  of  North  Africa  and  its 
Atlantic  ports.  Kennard  always  spoke  of 
his  service  there  with  great  delight.  He 
passed  an  examination  in  Arabic  only 
a  year  after  his  arrival  and  found  time 
also  for  hunting  and  shooting  forays  in  the 
hinterland.  He  was  promoted  first  secre- 
tary in  1914  and  transferred  to  the 
Foreign  Office  in  1916. 

In  1919  Kennard  went  back  as  counsel- 
lor to  Rome  where  his  piercing  intellect 
and  quick  understanding  of  people  and 
situations,  as  well  as  his  personal  charm, 
linguistic  ability,  and  cultural  back- 
ground, made  him  particularly  ap- 
preciated. He  was  appointed  C.M.G.  and 
CV.O.  in  1923. 

In  1925  he  became  envoy  extraordinary 
and  minister  plenipotentiary  in  Belgrade. 
The  spirit  of  Rupert  of  Hentzau  was 
always  just  over  the  hill  outside  the 
town  or  even  in  the  parliament  building. 
The  kingdom  of  the  Serbs,  Croats,  and 
Slovenes,  torn  by  ancient  feuds  and  rival- 
ries, was  with  difficulty  being  amalga- 
mated into  Yugoslavia,  while  territorial 
disputes  continued  with  Italy,  Hungary, 
and  especially  Bulgaria.  The  British 
ministers  in  the  various  capitals  were  ever 
trying  to  prevent  dangerous  complications 
arising  and  used  to  assess  and  advocate 
the  claims  and  complaints  of  their  respec- 
tive countries  with  a  rival  eloquence  and 
intellectual  ability  into  which  Kennard 
plunged  with  his  usual  verve  and  vivacity. 
He  also  built  up  a  reputation  in  these 
years  for  insisting  on  his  staff's  preserving 
full  British  standards  in  all  circumstances, 
even  if  it  required  severity.  He  was  ap- 
pointed K.C.M.G.  in  1929  and  in  the  same 
year  made  minister  in  Stockholm,  trans- 
ferring to  Berne  in  1931.  He  became 
a  devotee  of  skiing,  until  an  accident  gave 
him  phlebitis  which  troubled  him  inter- 
mittently for  years. 


In  1935  Kennard  was  appointed  ambas* 
sador  in  Warsaw  where  the  Foreign  Office 
needed  one  of  its  best  diplomats  since  it 
was  already  evident  that  Poland  was 
probably  the  area  where  the  next  war 
might  begin.  There  was  a  clear  German 
claim  to  the  so-called  'Polish  corridor' 
which  cut  off  East  Prussia  from  the  rest  of 
Germany.  There  had  been  constant  inci- 
dents on  the  Polish  frontiers  with  Ger- 
many, East  Prussia,  and  the  Free  City  of 
Danzig,  which  the  British,  as  League  of 
Nations  rapporteur  for  such  questions, 
had  a  certain  responsibility  for  settling. 
Colonel  Beck,  the  Polish  foreign  minister, 
had  temporarily  settled  the  trouble  in 
1934  by  making  an  agreement  with  Hitler, 
for  which  he  was  considered  by  the  French 
and  others  in  the  West  to  have  'betrayed 
Europe'. 

To  this  situation  Kennard  brought  his 
penetrating,  original,  and  objective  mind. 
He  showed  some  understanding  of  Beck's 
agreement  with  Hitler  since  the  Poles 
had  previously  been  blamed  as  disturbers 
of  the  peace.  But  he  insisted  that  the 
Polish  Government  must  not  associate  it- 
self with  Hitler's  territorial  expansionism 
or  racial  policies.  Beck  often  remembered 
the  interview  in  which  Kennard  came  to 
protest  about  the  Polish  seizure  of  Teschen 
(Cieszyn)  in  Czechoslovakia  at  the  time  of 
Munich  in  1938.  After  all  the  political  and 
intellectual  arguments  were  finished,  Ken- 
nard said:  'And  finally  we  think  it  is 
abominable  to  hit  a  man  when  he  is  down.' 
The  conclusion  of  the  British  alliance  with 
Poland  in  the  following  spring  after 
Hitler's  final  rape  of  Czechoslovakia  shows 
with  what  diplomatic  ability  Kennard 
had  been  able  to  redress  the  situation  in 
Anglo-Polish  relations.  His  telegrams  and 
dispatches  to  the  Foreign  Office  at  this 
time  are  important  historical  documents, 
and  show  the  overwhelming  responsibility 
of  Nazi  Germany  for  the  deterioration  in 
German-Polish  relations  until  the  final 
aggression  on  1  September  1939.  He  had 
been  promoted  G.C.M.G.  in  1938  before 
the  Czechoslovak  crisis. 

Kennard  was  famous  for  the  rather 
sardonic  humour  which  he  could  display  in 
many  languages  and  which  greatly  en- 
hanced his  popularity  with  his  colleagues. 
When  the  French  ambassador  had  shown 
him  round  the  new  French  embassy  build- 
ing in  Warsaw  and  when  they  had  com- 
miserated over  the  mixture  of  styles,  the 
French  ambassador  said  'And  shortly  we 
will  ask  you  to  our  housewarming — pour 
pendre  la  cremaillere.'  To  which  Kennard 


570 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Kennaway 


is  said  to  have  replied:  'Et  j'espere  que 
vous  allez  aussi  pendre  I'arehitecte.' 

In  concert  with  his  colleagues  in  other 
European  capitals,  Kennard  took  every 
conceivable  action  to  delay  and  prevent 
the  outbreak  of  war.  When  Hitler  invaded 
Poland  he  followed  the  Polish  Govern- 
ment into  Romania  and  was  later  ac- 
credited to  the  Polish  Government  in 
exile  at  Angers  and  in  London.  He  retired 
in  1941  to  live  in  Somerset  and  died  at 
Bath  12  November  1955. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Hankey. 

KENNAWAY,  Sir  ERNEST  LAUR- 
ENCE (1881-1958),  experimental  and 
chemical  pathologist,  was  born  in  Exeter 
23  May  1881,  the  youngest  of  the  five 
children  of  Laurence  James  Kennaway, 
colonial  farmer,  and  his  wife,  Mary  Louisa 
Galton.  His  grandfather  William  Kenna- 
way had  twice  been  mayor  of  Exeter  and 
had  played  a  leading  part  in  combating 
the  cholera  epidemic  in  that  city  in  1832. 

Although  Kennaway  was  somewhat 
delicate  as  a  boy,  he  soon  evinced  a  re- 
markable interest  in  natural  history,  and 
early  revealed  those  acute  powers  of  per- 
ception which  were  to  mark  his  later 
career.  His  scientific  training  started  at 
University  College,  London,  in  1898, 
whence  he  proceeded  in  the  following 
year  to  New  College,  Oxford,  with  an 
open  scholarship  in  natural  science.  He 
graduated  B.A.  in  1903,  obtaining  a  first 
class  in  the  final  honour  school  in  physio- 
logy; and  qualified  in  medicine  in  1907, 
after  spending  three  years  at  the  Middle- 
sex Hospital  where  he  held  a  university 
scholarship.  In  1909  he  was  Hulme  student 
in  Brasenose  College,  Oxford,  and  during 
the  following  year  studied  in  Heidelberg 
and  Munich  as  Radcliffe  travelling  fellow. 
He  proceeded  D.M.  Oxford  in  1911  and 
D.Sc.  London  (in  physiological  chemistry) 
in  1915. 

Kennaway  held  relatively  few  appoint- 
ments in  his  long  and  active  life.  Demon- 
strator in  physiology  at  Guy's  Hospital 
(1909-14)  and  chemical  pathologist  to  the 
Bland-Sutton  Institute  of  the  Middlesex 
Hospital  (1914-21),  in  1921  he  transferred 
to  the  Research  Institute  of  the  Cancer 
Hospital  (Free),  (now  the  Chester  Beatty 
Research  Institute,  Institute  of  Cancer 
Research:  Royal  Cancer  Hospital).  Ten 
years  later  he  succeeded  Archibald  Leitch 
as  director,  and  was  elected  professor  of 
experimental  pathology  in  the  university 
of  London.  It  was  at  the  Cancer  Hospital 


that  he  was  to  perform  his  greatest  work. 
He  retired  in  1946,  became  professor 
emeritus,  and  thereafter  continued  his 
researches  in  the  pathological  laboratories 
at  St.  Bartholomew's  Hospital.  He  died  in 
London  on  New  Year's  Day  1958. 

Kennaway's  early  investigations  lay  in 
many  fields  of  physiological  chemistry, 
especially  relating  to  the  purines,  and  here 
he  collaborated  at  different  times  with 
Cathcart,  Leathes,  Kossel,  Browning,  and 
J.  S.  and  J.  B.  S.  Haldane.  When  Kenna- 
way began  work  at  the  Cancer  Hospital, 
great  interest  was  being  taken  in  the 
cancer-producing  qualities  of  coal  tar. 
From  the  occurrence  of  cancer  of  the  skin 
as  a  hazard  in  many  occupations  and 
industries  involving  exposure  to  soot, 
coal  tar,  pitch,  shale  oil,  and  mineral  oil, 
it  had  long  been  evident  that  these  com- 
plex mixtures  must  contain  an  agent  or 
agents  capable  of  inducing  the  disease.  Yet 
progress  towards  the  chemical  identifica- 
tion of  such  agents  had  earlier  been 
limited  through  inability  to  reproduce 
cancer  under  experimental  conditions  at 
will.  After  many  failures,  this  essential 
step  was  achieved  when  Yamagiwa  and 
Ichikawa  in  Tokyo  in  1915  succeeded  in 
evoking  cancer  by  the  protracted  applica- 
tion of  coal  tar  to  the  skin  of  the  rabbit 
ear.  Tsutsui  (1918)  later  showed  the 
mouse  to  be  peculiarly  susceptible,  and 
these  two  discoveries  soon  provided  an 
immense  stimulus  to  cancer  research  the 
world  over. 

In  the  early  twenties  there  had  been 
suggestions,  from  the  work  of  Bloch  and 
his  collaborators  in  Zurich,  that  the  carci- 
nogen in  coal  tar  might  well  be  a  cyclic 
hydrocarbon.  Kennaway  very  rapidly 
produced  virtual  proof  by  different 
methods — e.g.  by  the  artificial  fabrication 
of  carcinogenic  tars  which  could  contain 
only  compounds  of  carbon  and  hydrogen, 
from  the  pyrolysis  of  many  natural  pro- 
ducts such  as  skin,  hair,  and  yeast,  or  from 
passing  the  simple  hydrocarbons  acety- 
lene or  isoprene  with  hydrogen  through 
heated  tubes.  A  further  vital  clue  came 
from  the  property  of  carcinogenic  tars  to 
show  brilliant  fluorescence  in  ultraviolet 
light.  W.  V.  Mayneord,  also  at  the  Cancer 
Hospital,  recognized  the  characteristic 
features  of  the  fluorescence  spectrum,  and 
this  proved  to  be,  in  Kennaway's  words, 
the  single  thread  that  led  all  through  the 
labyrinth  in  his  search  for  the  carcinogenic 
molecule.  I.  Hieger  detected  the  character- 
istic spectrum  in  the  known  hydrocarbon 
1 : 2-benzanthracene,  and  very  soon  (1929) 


571 


Kennaway 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Kennaway  demonstrated  pronounced  can- 
cer-producing activity  in  the  related  1:2:5: 
6-dibenzanthracene — ^the  first  chemical 
individual  to  be  recognized  as  endowed 
with  this  biological  property.  With  the  as- 
sistance of  (Sir)  J.  W.  Cook,  C.  L.  Hewett, 
Frank  Goulden,  and  others,  Kennaway 
then  directed  an  extensive  synthetic 
programme  which,  among  other  things, 
soon  led  to  the  identification  of  3:4- 
benzopjnrene  as  the  active  substance  of 
carcinogenic  pitch  and  to  the  discovery  of 
a  great  range  of  polycyclic  aromatic 
carcinogenic  hydrocarbons,  methylcho- 
lanthrene  being  among  the  most  powerful. 
Much  of  this  work  was  embodied  in 
a  classical  series  of  papers  which  appeared 
in  the  Proceedings  of  the  Royal  Society 
between  1932  and  1942.  From  the  re- 
searches which  Kennaway  alone  inspired 
over  some  thirty  years,  there  emerged  an 
elegant  and  satisfjing  series  of  relation- 
ships between  chemical  constitution  and 
biological  action.  And  altogether,  apart 
from  their  fundamental  significance,  they 
had  a  vast  practical  impact  on  cancer 
research  in  almost  every  country,  and  so 
led  to  further  advances.  Kennaway's 
contribution  was  by  no  means  limited  to 
these  fields,  and  he  was  a  pioneer  in  the 
statistics  and  epidemiology  of  cancer, 
especially  for  example  of  the  larynx  and 
the  lung. 

From  his  personal  qualities  Kennaway 
was  a  born  and  devoted  researcher  and 
observer,  solely  concerned  with  the 
establishment  of  fact  and  not  at  all  with 
speculation.  His  services  to  cancer  re- 
search can  hardly  be  over-estimated,  and 
he  was  its  doyen.  He  combined  great 
mental  and  physical  courage,  as  was  seen 
by  his  resistance  to  the  Parkinson's 
disease  from  which  he  suffered  for  many 
years.  A  profound  and  perhaps  intolerant 
sceptic,  in  his  later  days  he  set  forth  his 
position  in  Some  Religious  Illusions  in  Art, 
Literature  and  Experience  (1953). 

Kennaway  was  the  recipient  of  many 
honours  which  he  carried  lightly:  he  was 
William  Julius  Mickle  fellow  of  the 
university  of  London  (1922),  fellow  of  the 
Royal  College  of  Physicians  and  Baly 
medallist  (1937),  Anna  Fuller  prizeman 
(with  others,  1939),  honorary  fellow  of 
New  College,  Oxford  (1942),  Walker  prize- 
man of  the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons  and 
Garton  medallist  of  the  British  Empire 
Cancer  Campaign  (1946),  honorary  mem- 
ber of  the  American  Association  for  Cancer 
Research  (1947),  honorary  fellow  of  the 
New  A''ork  Academy  of  Medicine  and  the 


Royal  Society  of  Medicine,  and  honorary 
foreign  member  (1954)  of  the  Academic 
royale  de  Medecine  de  Belgique ;  and  Osier 
memorial  medallist  (Oxford,  1950)  for  his 
services  to  the  science,  the  art  and  the 
literature  of  medicine.  He  was  elected 
F.R.S.  in  1934  and  awarded  a  Royal 
medal  in  1941.  He  was  knighted  in  1947. 
In  1920  Kennaway  married  Nina  Marion 
(died  1969),  daughter  of  WiUiam  Derry, 
bank  manager,  of  Edgbaston ;  there  were 
no  children.  His  wife  was  not  only  his  help- 
meet and  support,  but  played  a  special 
part  in  assisting  his  scientific  work 
throughout  the  whole  of  their  married 
life. 

[The  Times,  2  and  13  January  1958; 
J.  W.  Cook  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of  Fellows 
of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iv,  1958 ;  British 
Medical  Journal,  24  September  1955  and 
11  January  1958;  Lancet,  11  January  1958; 
Nature,  1  February  1958 ;  Journal  of  Patho- 
logy and  Bacteriology,  October  1959;  Monthly 
Record  (South  Place  Ethical  Society),  vol.  Ixiv, 
1959;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] A.  Haddow. 

KENNET,  first  Baron  (1879-1960), 
politician  and  writer.  [See  Young,  Ed- 
ward Hilton.] 

KENNEY,  ANNIE  (1879-1953),  suffra- 
gette, was  born  13  September  1879  at 
Springhead,  Yorkshire,  the  fifth  of  the 
twelve  children  of  Horatio  Nelson  Kenney, 
cotton  operative,  and  his  wife,  Ann  Wood. 
A  younger  brother,  Rowland  Kenney 
(1882-1961),  after  a  career  in  journalism 
which  included  the  editorship  of  the  Daily 
Herald,  entered  the  Foreign  Office  in 
1920.  He  was  press  attache  in  Oslo 
(1939-40)  and  from  1941  until  the  end  of 
the  war  adviser  to  the  Norwegian  Govern- 
ment in  London.  At  the  age  of  ten  Annie 
Kenney  began  jmrt-time  work  in  the 
mills  and  at  thirteen  became  a  full-time 
card  and  blowing-room  operative.  In  1905 
she  met  and  became  the  lifelong  disciple  of 
(Dame)  Christabel  Pankhurst  and  her 
mother  Emmeline  Pankhurst  [qq.v.],  then 
living  in  Nelson  Street,  Manchester.  Her 
vague  aspirations  inspired  by  the  writings 
of  Robert  Blatchford  [q.v.]  crystallized: 
she  was  at  once  persuaded  of  the  urgency 
of  obtaining  parliamentary  votes  for 
women,  and  in  the  meantime  became  the 
first  woman  in  the  textile  unions  to  be 
elected  to  her  district  committee. 

On  13  October  1905  Annie  Kenney  and 
Christabel  Pankhurst  at  a  Liberal  rally  in 
the  Free  Trade  Hall,  Manchester,  asked 


672 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Kennington 


Sir  Edward  Grey  (later  Viscount  Grey  of 
Fallodon,  q.v.)  and  the  Liberal  candidate 
(Sir)  Winston  Churchill  if  they  would 
*make  woman  suffrage  a  government 
measure'.  Receiving  no  answer  they  stood 
up  on  their  seats,  called  out  'Answer  our 
question'  and  unfurled  banners  inscribed 
*  Votes  for  Women'.  Hustled  out  by 
stewards  they  held  a  meeting  in  the  street 
until  arrested  for  obstruction.  On  refusing 
to  pay  their  fines  Annie  Kenney  was  sen- 
tenced to  three  days'  imprisonment  and 
Christabel  Pankhurst  to  seven :  the  first  of 
many  sentences  in  the  long  campaign  for 
women's  suffrage. 

Two  months  later  Annie  Kenney  inter- 
rupted the  prime  minister,  Campbell- 
Bannerman,  at  a  Liberal  rally  in  the 
Royal  Albert  Hall  and  was  again  ejected. 
She  next  helped  Keir  Hardie  in  his  elec- 
tion campaign  and  was  then  sent  by  the 
Pankhursts  'to  rouse  London'  where  she 
was  befriended  by  Keir  Hardie,  W.  T. 
Stead  [qq.v.],  and  the  Pethick-Lawrences 
and  other  supporters  of  the  Women's 
Social  and  Political  Union.  In  1906  she 
spent  two  months  in  HoUoway  Prison  for 
trying  to  force  Asquith  to  receive  a  depu- 
tation and  by  1912  she  had  been  several 
times  in  gaol.  When  Mrs.  Pankhurst  and 
the  Pethick-Lawrences  went  to  prison  in 
that  year  Annie  Kenney  took  over  the 
organization  of  the  union.  She  was  closely 
directed  by  Christabel  Pankhurst  who  had 
taken  refuge  in  France.  A  campaign  of 
extreme  militancy  was  decided  upon 
which  lost  the  union  the  support  of  the 
Pethick-Lawrences.  In  June  1913  Annie 
Kenney  was  sentenced  to  eighteen  months' 
imprisonment,  went  on  hunger  strike  and 
was  released,  but  under  the  'Cat  and 
Mouse  Act'  was  liable  to  rearrest.  She 
adopted  various  disguises  to  avoid  detec- 
tion and  was  once  smuggled  into  a  meeting 
at  the  London  Pavilion  in  a  hamper 
marked  'Marie  Lloyd'.  She  was  several 
times  imprisoned  and  released,  until  in  the 
autumn  she  became  seriously  ill  as  a 
result  of  the  hunger  and  thirst  strikes 
she  had  undertaken.  She  had  not  long 
recovered  when  Christabel  Pankhurst 
instructed  her  to  claim  the  right  of  sanc- 
tuary in  Lambeth  Palace  which  she  did  on 
22  May  1914  and  there  urged  the  arch- 
bishop, Randall  Davidson  [q.v.],  that  the 
Church  should  support  her  cause.  Removed 
to  Holloway  she  went  on  a  thirst  and 
hunger  strike  which  secured  her  release 
a  few  days  later,  whereupon  she  returned 
to  lie  down  outside  Lambeth  Palace  until 
she  was  removed.   Soon  afterwards  the 


outbreak  of  war  brought  an  end  to  the 
militant  movement.  Annie  Kenney  helped 
the  Pankhursts  in  their  war  work  and 
retired  from  public  life  after  the  granting 
of  votes  to  women  in  February  1918. 

With  her  fair  hair  and  blazing  blue  eyes, 
Annie  Kenney  made  a  vital  and  moving 
figure  on  all  platforms.  Her  eloquence  and 
her  robust  sense  of  humour,  as  well  as  her 
intimate  knowledge  of  working-class  life 
and  her  experiences  in  prison,  made  her 
a  most  effective  speaker.  Her  strength  lay 
in  her  complete  surrender  to  her  cause  and 
its  leader.  Her  unquestioning  obedience 
and  her  forgetfulness  of  self  endowed  her 
with  a  reckless  courage  which  made  her 
remarkable  even  in  a  movement  based 
upon  such  qualities. 

In  1920  Annie  Kenney  married  James 
Taylor,  a  civil  servant ;  they  had  one  son. 
She  died  in  Hitchin  9  July  1953. 

[The  Times,  11  July  1953 ;  Annie  Kenney, 
Memories  of  a  Militant,  1924;  E.  Sylvia 
Pankhurst,  The  Suffragette  Movement,  1931 ; 
Emmeline  Pethick-Lawrence,  My  Part  in  a 
Changing  World,  1938 ;  Roger  Fulford,  Votes 
for  Women,  1957.]  H.  Burton. 

KENNINGTON,  ERIC  HENRI  (1888- 
1960),  artist,  was  born  in  Chelsea  12  March 
1888,  the  younger  son  of  Thomas  Benja-^ 
min  Kennington,  artist,  by  his  Swedish 
wife,  Elise  Nilla  Steveni.  It  seemed 
inevitable  that  he  should  follow  the  calling 
of  his  father  who  was  a  portrait  painter 
and  a  painter  of  genre  subjects,  an  original 
member  and  first  secretary  of  the  New 
English  Art  Club.  Kennington  attended 
St.  Paul's  School  but  failed  to  gain  dis-i 
tinction  in  any  subject  other  than  draw-* 
ing;  he  chiefly  occupied  his  time  carving 
and  drawing  figures  of  navvies  and  costers. 
Art  seeming  his  one  talent,  his  parents 
sent  him  to  the  Lambeth  School  of  Art 
and  to  the  City  and  Guilds  School,  Ken- 
nington. But  his  first  attempts  to  earn 
a  living  as  an  illustrator  came  to  nothing 
and  he  turned  to  portraiture.  In  this  he 
achieved  a  fair  amount  of  success  and 
even  carried  out  some  commissions  in 
Russia  which  he  was  persuaded  to  visit  by 
some  relatives  who  lived  in  St.  Petersburg. 
He  first  attracted  attention  by  his 
paintings  of  cockney  types  and  London 
scenes,  in  a  style  which  owed  much  to  the 
influence  of  the  Italian  primitives  and  of 
Botticelli.  From  1908  he  exhibited  at  the 
Royal  Academy  and  the  Leicester  Gal- 
leries. 'Costermongers',  painted  in  1913, 
was  one  of  the  best-known  examples  of  his 
work  of  this  period.  It  was  purchased  by 


673 


Kennington 


'D.N.B.  1951-1960 


(Sir)  William  Nicholson  [q.v.]  and  pre- 
sented to  the  Musee  de  Luxembourg, 
Paris. 

When  war  broke  out  in  19-14  Kenning- 
ton enlisted  in  the  13th  London  Regiment, 
the  Kensingtons.  He  served  as  a  priv.ite  in 
France  and  Flanders  but  in  June  1915  he 
was  invalided  out  of  the  army.  'The 
Kensingtons  at  Levantie',  one  of  the  most 
outstanding  paintings  developed  from  his 
war  experiences,  was  exliibited  at  the 
Goupil  Gallery  in  1916.  It  depicts  ten 
exhausted  soldiers  in  a  battered  village 
and,  in  spite  of  its  almost  immaculate 
realism,  something  of  the  feeling  of  war's 
drained  energies  is  conveyed  in  the  por- 
traits of  the  individual  men  which  include 
Kennington  himself.  Like  many  of  his 
child  portraits  this  was  painted  on  glass. 
Kennington  returned  to  the  front  as  an 
official  war  artist  and  among  his  drawings 
and  paintings  were  some  of  the  Canadian 
Scottish,  of  the  Arras-Bapaume  road, 
Havrincourt,  La  Neuville,  Menin  Gate, 
the  'Victims'  and  the  'Victors'. 

In  1920,  when  Kennington's  war  pic- 
tures were  exhibited  at  the  Alpine  Club 
Gallery,  T.  E.  Lawrence  [q.v.]  and  the 
artist  became  acquainted  and  a  friendship 
began  which  was  to  continue  until  Law- 
rence's death  in  1935.  They  planned  to 
visit  the  scenes  of  the  campaigns  in  the 
Near  East  together,  but  in  the  event 
Kennington  went  alone.  He  returned 
with  a  collection  of  striking  portraits  of 
the  Arab  leaders  and  exhibited  them  at  the 
Leicester  Galleries  in  1921.  Some  were  also 
used  to  illustrate  the  1926  edition  of 
Lawrence's  Seven  Pillars  of  Wisdom  of 
which  Kennington  was  art  editor. 

Kennington  took  up  sculpture  almost 
by  accident.  His  old  division,  the  24th, 
asked  him  to  recommend  a  sculptor  for 
a  war  memorial  and  he  decided  to  attempt 
the  conunission  himself.  It  resulted  in 
the  stone  carving  of  three  infantrymen 
erected  in  Battersea  Park.  Kennington 
worked  on  it  for  two  years  and  while  its 
composition  restricts  its  effectiveness  to 
one  particular  aspect  it  was  better  than 
the  many  trite  idealizations  of  men  in 
uniform  executed  at  the  time.  This 
memorial  set  Kennington  on  his  path  as 
a  sculptor.  He  created  the  massive  British 
memorial  at  Soissons,  France,  in  1927-8 
from  22  tons  of  stone ;  the  carvings  in  the 
School  of  Hygiene  and  Tropical  Medicine, 
Gower  Street;  the  bronze  memorial  head 
of  Thomas  Hardy  at  Dorchester  (1929) ; 
and  the  unique  carved  decorations  on  the 
brick  fa9ade  of  the  Shakespeare  Memorial 


Theatre,  Stratford  on  Avon  (1930),  the 
Jp.tter  representing  'Love',  'Jollity', 
'Treachery',  'War',  and  'Life  and  Death'. 
Kennington's  friendship  with  Lawrence 
produced  many  portraits  in  drawings  and 
sculpture.  In  1939  he  made  the  recumbent 
effigy  of  Lawrence  for  St.  Martin's, 
Wareham,  of  which  the  Tate  Gallery  and 
the  Aberdeen  Art  Gallery  later  acquired 
versions  in  ciment  fondu.  Also  in  the  Tate 
is  a  bronze  head  of  Lawrence  modelled 
partly  from  life  and  partly  from  drawings ; 
another  cast  is  in  the  crypt  of  St.  Paul's 
Cathedral. 

In  1940-45  Kennington  was  again  an 
official  war  artist.  His  favourite  medium 
was  now  pastel  and  he  made  scores  of 
portraits  of  generals  and  ordinary  soldiers 
of  the  line,  the  Home  Guard,  the  Royal 
Navy,  and  the  Royal  Air  Force.  Swiftness 
and  strong  likeness  were  the  keynote  of 
these  drawings  which  reproduced  very 
well  in  his  books:  Drawing  the  R.A.F. 
(1942)  and  Tanks  and  Tank  Folk  (1943) 
and  his  illustrations  for  John  Brophy's 
Britain's  Home  Guard  (1945). 

Tall,  broad-shouldered,  with  a  cheerful 
friendly  manner,  Kennington  had  a  far 
from  Bohemian  outlook.  His  love  of 
sculpting  out  of  doors  helped  to  give  him 
the  healthy  appearance  of  a  gentleman 
farmer.  His  work  reflects  uncomplicated 
euphoria  coupled  with  an  idealistic 
viewpoint  which  served  to  interpret 
twentieth-century  men  and  themes  in  the 
anachronistic  idiom  of  the  quattrocento. 
He  had  the  constant  wish  to  see  sculpture 
incorporated  into  architecture  as  decora- 
tion and  ornament  even  in  modern 
materials. 

Kennington  was  elected  A.R.A.  in  1951 
and  R.A.  in  1959.  Other  works  of  his  in 
the  Tate  Gallery  include  a  relief  carving 
'Earth  Child'  of  about  1936  (his  daughter 
was  the  model)  and  several  drawings.  The 
Imperial  War  Museum  has  a  large  collec- 
tion of  his  work. 

In  1922  he  married  Edith  Celandine, 
daughter  of  Lord  Francis  Cecil,  naval 
officer ;  they  had  a  son  and  a  daughter.  He 
died  in  Reading  13  April  1960.  He  lived  at 
Ipsden,  Oxfordshire,  and  was  buried  at 
Checkendon  by  the  lovely  Norman  church 
to  which  he  gave  much  time  and  work  in 
restoration. 

A  drawing  of  Kennington  by  Sir'  Wil- 
liam Rothenstein  is  in  the  Manchester 
City  Art  Gallery. 

[The  Times,  16  and  21  April  1960;  Studio, 
September  1927  and  August  1936;  private 
information.]  G.  S.  Whittet. 


574 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


Kenny 


KENNY,  ELIZABETH  (1880-1952), 
nurse,  was  born  at  Kellys  Gully,  near 
Warialda,  New  South  Wales,  20  Septem- 
ber 1880,  the  fifth  child  of  Michael  Kenny, 
a  farmer,  and  his  wife,  Mary  Moore.  When 
she  was  eleven  the  family  moved  to 
Nobby,  Queensland,  where  she  attended 
primary  school.  There  is  no  record  of  her 
undergoing  a  regular  course  in  nursing. 
In  1912  she  established  a  small  cottage 
hospital  at  Clifton  and  in  1915  enlisted  in 
the  Australian  Army  Nursing  Service. 
Most  of  her  time  was  spent  in  the  Sea 
Transport  Service  and  it  was  on  the 
voyages  back  to  Australia  with  troops 
suffering  from  encephalitis  that  she  be- 
came interested  in  the  treatment  of 
paralysis.  She  spent  many  hours  in  pas- 
sively moving  the  paralysed  limbs. 

After  discharge  from  the  army  in  1919 
Sister  Kenny  continued  private  nursing. 
It  was  during  this  time  that  she  nursed  her 
first  case  of  poliomyelitis;  the  patient 
recovered  completely.  In  1933,  with  the 
aid  of  voluntary  subscriptions,  she  opened 
a  clinic  at  Townsville  for  the  treatment  of 
patients  suffering  from  the  various  types 
of  paralysis,  most  giving  a  history  of  long- 
standing poliomyelitis.  The  treatment  of 
many  of  these  had  been  neglected  and 
Sister  Kenny,  by  carrying  out  active 
treatment,  obtained  movement  in  muscles 
which  she  thought  were  paralysed  but 
which  in  fact  were  only  apparently  so,  due 
to  disuse.  Publicity  was  given  to  her 
claims  that  she  had  'cured'  these  patients 
and  public  pressure  forced  the  Govern- 
ment in  1934  to  take  over  her  Townsville 
clinic  and  to  open  clinics  in  three  other 
Queensland  country  centres.  Clinics  were 
opened  at  Carshalton,  England,  in  1937, 
and  Minneapolis,  United  States,  in  1940. 
She  demonstrated  her  technique  in  many 
countries,  including  Russia,  Czecho- 
slovakia, and  Spain. 

In  September  1935,  at  the  request  of 
Sister  Kenny,  the  Queensland  Govern- 
ment appointed  a  committee  which  a 
month  later  was  given  the  status  of 
a  royal  commission  to  investigate  the 
'Kenny' treatment'.  Two  of  its  members 
were  orthopaedic  surgeons  of  the  so-called 
orthodox  or  traditional  school.  The  basic 
differences  between  the  two  methods  were 
that  the  orthodox  school  rigidly  splinted 
their  patients  and  did  not  commence 
movement  until  four  to  eight  weeks  after 
the  onset  of  the  disease,  whereas  Sister 
Kenny  employed  non-rigid  splinting,  such 
as  the  use  of  sandbags,  and  movement  was 
commenced  in  the  first  week. 


The  commission  condemned  the  Kenny 
method  because  it  thought  muscle  injury 
and  deformity  would  result,  but  admitted 
that  this  did  not  occur  as  frequently  as 
expected.  Other  observers  stated  that  the 
method  was  not  productive  of  deformities. 
Sister  Kenny's  fighting  spirit  was  aroused 
by  statements  like  'the  Kenny  method  of 
treating  poliomyelitis  differs  very  little  at 
present  from  orthodox  treatment'  and  the 
faint  praise  of  'she  has  drawn  attention  to 
the  plight  of  the  crippled  child'  and 
'provoked  a  critical  and  in  several  re- 
spects beneficial  review  of  poliomyelitis 
in  general'.  She  used  the  press,  politicians, 
and  the  public  to  have  her  treatment 
accepted.  Today  the  treatment  of  polio- 
myelitis, if  not  strictly  Kenny,  is  basically 
Kenny.  The  result  is  that  stiffness  of  limbs 
is  no  longer  seen,  thus  allowing  maximum 
muscle  power  recovery.  Expected  deformi- 
ties have  not  materialized,  the  nutrition 
of  the  skin  and  muscles  is  better,  and 
patients  are  much  more  comfortable, 
cheerful,  and  easy  to  nurse  in  the  acute 
stage  of  the  disease.  The  Kenny  treat- 
ment is  not  a  cure  for  poliomyelitis.  That 
its  results  were  better  than  those  of 
orthodox  methods  was  never  acknow- 
ledged by  the  medical  profession. 

Sister  Kenny  always  claimed  she  would 
only  treat  patients  in  association  with  the 
patient's  doctor,  but  her  aggressive  man- 
ner made  it  nearly  impossible  for  a  doctor 
to  work  with  her ;  yet  she  sincerely  wanted 
to  co-operate  with  the  medical  profession. 
It  was  to  her  credit  that  she  never  received 
payment  for  treating  a  patient.  All  she 
wanted  was  recognition  of  the  fact  that 
she  had  introduced  a  new  form  of  treat- 
ment which  would  produce  maximimi 
muscle  recovery  and  that  it  should  be. 
acceptable  to  the  medical  profession. 

Sister  Kenny  received  honorary  degrees, 
from  Rutgers  University,  New  Jersey, 
New  York  University,  and  the  university, 
of  Rochester,  New  York,  as  well  as  many 
awards  from  various  organizations.  A 
special  Act  of  Congress  was  passed  in  1950 
to  allow  her  entry  and  exit  of  the  United 
States  without  a  visa  and  she  had  a  motion 
picture  made  of  her  life  during  her  life- 
time. In  the  American  Institute  of  Public 
Opinion's  1951  survey  to  determine  which, 
woman,  living  in  any  part  of  the  world, 
was  held  in  highest  esteem  by  the  Ameri-. 
can  public.  Sister  Kenny  headed  the  poll, 
with  Mrs.  Eleanor  Roosevelt  second. 
Despite  all  the  honours  she  received  in 
the  United  States  she  always  refused  to 
consider  becoming  an  American  citizen.. 


575 


Kenny 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


She  returned  to  Queensland  in  1952 
suffering  from  an  incurable  illness,  died 
at  Toowoomba,  30  November  1952,  and 
was  buried  at  Nobby. 

[Report  of  the  royal  commission  on  the 
investigation  of  infantile  paralysis,  1937; 
W.  R.  Forster  and  E.  E.  Price,  Report  on  an 
investigation  of  23  cases  of  poliomyelitis 
treated  by  the  'Kenny  System',  1938; 
Kenneth  W.  Starr,  A  Report  to  the  Minister 
for  Health,  N.S.W.,  on  Sister  Kenny's  method 
of  the  treatment  of  infantile  paralysis,  1939 ; 
Elizabeth  Kenny,  And  They  Shall  Walk, 
1951;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] A.  Fryberg. 


KENT,  ALBERT  FRANK  STANLEY 
(1863-1958),  scientist,  was  born  26  March 
1863  at  Stratford  Tony,  Wiltshire,  the 
sixth  son  of  the  rector,  the  Rev.  (ieorge 
Davies  Kent,  and  his  wife,  Anne,  daughter 
of  WilUam  Rudgard,  of  Newland  House, 
Lincoln.  He  was  educated  at  Magdalen 
College  School  and  Magdalen  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  obtained  a  second  in 
physiology  in  1886  and  proceeded  to  his 
D.Sc.  in  1915.  He  was  elected  a  member  of 
the  Physiological  Society  in  1887  and 
lived  to  be  its  senior  member.  After 
demonstrating  in  physiology  at  Manches- 
ter (1887-9),  Oxford  (1889-91),  and  St. 
Thomas's  Hospital  (1891-5),  he  became 
professor  of  physiology  at  Bristol  in  1899. 

At  St.  Thomas's  Hospital,  Kent,  who 
was  an  early  worker  on  X-rays,  helped  to 
develop  the  radiological  department ;  but 
it  was  in  Bristol  that  he  found  full  scope 
for  his  enthusiastic  energies  and  organiz- 
ing abiUty.  He  founded  and  for  some  eight 
years  carried  on  a  cUnical  and  bacterio- 
logical research  laboratory  which  later 
became  the  city's  public  health  laboratory 
and  he  was  for  a  time  bacteriologist  to  the 
Royal  Infirmary.  He  was  a  leading  spirit 
in  the  movement  which  led  to  the  forma- 
tion of  the  university  of  Bristol  in  1909 
and  he  designed  the  imiversity's  new 
department  of  physiology. 

In  the  war  of  1914-18  Kent  became 
interested  in  problems  of  industrial 
fatigue  and  was  responsible  for  several 
government  publications  on  the  subject. 
He  became  editor-in-chief  in  Great  Britain 
of  the  Journal  of  Industrial  Hygiene  and  in 
1918  he  edited  a  translation  of  Jules 
Amar's  Physiology  of  Industrial  Organiza- 
tirni.  In  that  year  he  resigned  his  chair 
in  order  to  organize  and  direct  a  depart- 
ment of  industrial  administration  in  the 
Manchester  Municipal  College  of  Tech- 
nology. 


After  his  retirement  in  1922  Kent 
returned  to  the  west  country  and  con- 
verting one  room  in  his  house  into  a 
laboratory  continued  his  work  on  cardiac 
physiology  which  he  had  begun  at  Oxford 
and  for  which  he  is  best  known.  In  a  series 
of  communications  to  the  Physiological 
Society  (1892-3)  he  reported  his  investiga- 
tion of  the  atrioventricular  bundle  and  its 
properties  which  forms  the  basis  of  our 
knowledge  of  the  normal  conduction  of 
the  heart  beat  and  of  the  functional 
dissociation  of  ventricles  from  atria  which 
occurs  in  heart-block.  He  retained  his 
interest  in  physiological  matters  until  ill 
health  overtook  him  a  year  or  so  before  he 
died  in  Bath,  30  March  1958,  and  he  left 
several  thousands  of  sections  representing 
the  work  of  many  years. 

Kent  was  a  man  of  slight  build  who 
worked  to  high  standards  and  drove  him- 
self hard.  This  produced  an  atmosphere  of 
great  intensity  which  made  him  appear  on 
first  acquaintance  as  a  rather  austere 
man,  but  to  those  who  came  to  know  him 
well  he  was  very  friendly.  He  gave  the 
impression  of  enjoying  himself  most  when 
in  the  company  of  one  or  two  friends  with 
whom  he  could  converse  freely  on  some 
topic  of  mutual  interest.  In  his  school  and 
college  days  he  was  active  in  rowing  and 
rifle-shooting  and  he  became  a  keen 
photographer.  He  enjoyed  foreign  travel 
and  frequently  took  his  holidays  on  the 
Continent. 

In  1904  Kent  married  Theodora  (died 
1957),  daughter  of  William  Henry  Hob- 
son,  of  Great  Berkhampstead  and  Upper 
Berkeley  Street,  London.  They  had  a 
daughter  who  died  in  childhood. 

[Nature,  3  May  1958 ;  personal  knowledge.] 
R.  J.  Brocklehurst, 


KENYON,  Sir  FREDERIC  GEORGE 
(1863-1952),  scholar  and  administrator, 
the  seventh  son  of  John  Robert  Kenyon, 
grandson  of  the  first  Baron  Kenyon  [q.v.], 
of  Pradoe,  Shropshire,  fellow  of  All  Souls 
and  Vinerian  professor  of  law  at  Oxford, 
and  his  wife,  Mary  Eliza,  daughter  of 
Edward  Hawkins,  F.R.S.  [q.v.],  keeper  of 
antiquities  in  the  British  Museum,  was 
born  15  January  1863  at  his  maternal 
grandfather's  house,  6  Lower  Berkeley 
Street,  London,  but  from  the  age  of  six 
was  brought  up  at  Pradoe.  From  his  pre- 
paratory school  he  went  as  a  scholar  to 
Winchester,  thence,  again  as  a  scholar,  to 
New  College,  Oxford,  where  he  obtained 
first  classes  in  both  classical  moderations 


676 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Kenyon 


(1888)  and  literae  humaniores  (1886). 
From  schooldays  he  had  shown  an  interest 
in  biblical  study,  winning  prizes  at  each 
school;  and  at  Oxford,  besides  the 
Chancellor's  English  essay  (1889),  he  won 
the  Hall-Houghton  junior  Greek  Testa- 
ment prize  (1885)  for  a  study  of  St. 
Matthew's  gospel. 

Kenyon  obtained  a  fellowship  at  Mag- 
dalen in  1888  and  in  the  next  year  entered 
the  British  Museum  as  an  assistant  in  the 
department  of  manuscripts.  Shortly  after- 
wards he  began  to  catalogue  its  collection 
of  Greek  papyri,  and  while  he  was  thus 
engaged  the  museum  made  the  remark- 
able acquisition  of  papyri  which  included 
Aristotle's  treatise  on  the  Athenian  consti- 
tution, the  mimes  of  Herodas,  part  of  the 
speech  of  Hyperides  against  Philippides,  a 
grammatical  work  by  Tryphon,  and  a  long 
medical  treatise  by  an  unknown  author, 
besides  known  works  of  Demosthenes, 
Isocrates,  and  Homer.  Kenyon's  publica- 
tion of  the  Aristotle  (1891,  3rd  and  revised 
ed.  1892)  brought  him  honorary  doctorates 
at  Durham  and  Halle  and  his  election  in 
1900  as  corresponding  member  of  the 
Berlin  Academy.  In  1891  he  published  an 
English  translation,  and  he  edited  the 
Greek  text  for  the  Berlin  Academy's 
Supplementum  Aristotelicum  (1903)  and 
for  the  Oxford  Classical  Texts  (1920). 
The  translation  appeared  in  the  Oxford 
translation  of  Aristotle's  works  (1920). 
The  other  literary  papyri,  except  the 
medical  treatise  (copied  by  Kenyon, 
edited  by  Diels),  were  published  or  col- 
lated in  Classical  Texts  from  Papyri  in 
the  British  Museum  (1891).  In  1896  the 
museum  acquired  the  lost  epinician  odes 
and  dithyrambs  of  Bacchylides,  which 
Kenyon  edited  in  1897.  An  essay  which 
won  him  the  Conington  prize  at  Oxford  in 
1897  was  expanded  into  a  volume,  The 
PalxBography  of  Greek  Papyri  (1899).  His 
work  on  documentary  papyri  produced 
volumes  i  (1893)  and  ii  (1898)  of  Greek 
Papyri  in  the  British  Museum ;  in  volume 
iii  (1907)  he  was  assisted  by  a  junior  col- 
league. For  the  Oxford  Classical  Texts  he 
edited  all  the  extant  works  of  Hyperides 
(1907). 

Meanwhile  he  did  much  other  work, 
official  and  private,  including  the  cata- 
loguing of  the  Hardwicke  papers  and 
many  manuscripts  of  the  Stowe  and  Royal 
collections.  In  1895  appeared  Our  Bible 
and  the  Ancient  Manuscripts,  a  valuable 
handbook  which  ran  into  several  editions. 
This  led  the  firm  of  Macmiilan  to  commis- 
sion his  Handbook  to  the  Textual  Criticism 


of  the  New  Testament  (1901).  His  Facsimiles 
of  Biblical  Manuscripts  in  the  British 
Museum  appeared  officially  in  1900.  An 
interest  in  the  Brownings  dating  from 
schooldays  inspired  several  volumes,  be- 
ginning with  The  Brownings  for  the  Young 
(1896).  In  1897  appeared  his  editions  of 
Mrs.  Browning's  letters  in  two  volumes 
and  her  poetical  works  in  a  companion 
volume  to  the  two-volume  edition  of 
Browning's  poems  (1896)  in  which  he  had 
written  brief  notes  to  The  Ring  and  the 
Book.  Other  work  on  the  Brownings 
included  the  article  in  the  Times  Literary 
Supplement  for  the  centenary  of  their 
marriage  in  1946. 

In  1898  Kenyon  was  promoted  assis* 
tant  keeper  of  manuscripts  and  in  1909 
succeeded  Sir  Edward  Maunde  Thompson 
(whose  notice  he  contributed  to  this  Dic- 
tionary) as  director  of  the  museum,  an 
office  he  held  until  1930.  He  certainly 
ranks  among  the  greatest  directors.  He 
was  at  once  a  scholar  and  an  able  ad- 
ministrator, possessing  a  legal  mind  which 
gave  him  a  remarkable  grasp  of  essentials 
and  a  judicial  temper  immune  to  personal 
bias;  and,  scholar  though  he  was,  he 
realized  fully  the  need,  in  a  national 
institution,  to  cater  for  a  less  instructed 
public.  The  antithesis  of  the  pedantic 
specialist,  he  did  much,  including  the 
introduction  of  guide  lecturers  and  pic- 
ture postcards,  to  stimulate  popular 
interest  in  the  collections.  His  wide  in* 
terests  made  him  an  ideal  head  of  what  is 
both  a  library  and  a  museum. 

Official  duties  left  little  time  for 
scholarly  work,  but  this  did  not  wholly 
cease,  and  he  was  active  in  many  spheres. 
Not  among  the  original  fellows,  he  had 
a  hand  in  the  foundation  of  the  British 
Academy  in  1901  and  became  a  fellow  in 
1903,  a  member  of  council  in  1906,  presi* 
dent,  1917-21,  and  in  1930  succeeded  Sir 
Israel  Gollancz  [q.v.]  as  secretary,  retiring 
in  1949 ;  he  was  honorary  treasurer,  1940-r 
50,  and  an  honorary  fellow,  1950.  After 
retiring  he  wrote  The  British  Academy: 
The  First  Fifty  Years  (1952).  He  was  an 
active  member  of  the  Territorial  Army, 
joining  in  1899  the  Inns  of  Court  Corps,  in 
which  he  received  a  commission  in  1906 
(captain  1912,  lieutenant-colonel  1917)  i 
he  went  to  France  in  1914  but  was  recalled 
at  the  request  of  the  trustees.  From  1917 
he  served  on  the  Imperial  War  Graves 
Commission,  visiting  cemeteries  in  France 
and  the  Near  East.  He  served  on  the 
Council  for  Humanistic  Studies,  was 
vice-president   of   the   Hellenic    Society 


8652062 


57Z 


Kenyon 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


(president  1919-24),  vice-president  of  the 
Roman  Society,  and  in  1913  president  of 
the  Classical  Association.  After  the  war  he 
was  a  member  of  the  University  Grants 
Committee,  and  was  closely  associated 
from  its  foundation  with  the  National 
Central  Library.  He  was  a  fellow  of 
Winchester  College  from  1904,  and  warden 
1925-30.  In  1926  he  was  nominated  a 
fellow,  honoris  causa,  of  the  Society  of 
Antiquaries  and  was  president,  1934-9. 

His  retirement  in  1930  enabled  Kenyon 
to  return  full  time  to  scholarly  work,  and 
the  opportune  acquisition  by  (Sir)  Chester 
Beatty  of  a  valuable  collection  of  biblical 
papyri,  which  Kenyon  was  asked  to  edit, 
provided  the  material.  Hence  arose  also 
several  other  volumes,  including  Boofcs  and 
Readers  in  Ancient  Greece  and  Rome  (1932), 
Recent  Developments  in  the  Textual  Criti- 
cism of  the  Greek  Bible  (1933),  and  The 
Text  of  the  Greek  Bible:  A  Student's  Hand- 
book (1937). 

Kenyon  married  in  1891  Amy  (died 
1938),  daughter  of  Rowland  Hunt,  of 
Boreatton  Park,  Shropshire.  By  her  he 
had  two  daughters,  the  elder  of  whom, 
Kathleen  Mary,  became  a  well-known 
archaeologist,  and  principal  of  St.  Hugh's 
College,  Oxford,  in  1962.  Kenyon  was 
often  criticized  as  cold  and  remote  from 
human  contacts,  but  this  was  only  in  part 
true.  His  reserved  manner,  due  partly  to 
a  certain  shyness  in  personal  matters, 
partly  to  a  legal  temperament  which 
would  have  made  him  an  ideal  Chancery 
judge,  hid  much  genuine  kindness,  never 
forgotten  by  those  who  benefited  by  it, 
and,  despite  his  reserve,  he  could  expand 
on  occasion.  He  never  allowed  personal 
feeling  to  influence  his  official  conduct  or 
to  interfere  with  his  austere  sense  of  duty, 
and  his  judicial  temper  and  discriminating 
judgement  made  him  an  admirable  chair- 
man of  committees.  A  corresponding  mem- 
ber of  many  foreign  academies  and  the 
recipient  of  numerous  honorary  degrees, 
he  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1911,  K.C.B.  in 
1912  and  in  1925  G.B.E. ;  in  1918  he  was 
appointed  gentleman  usher  of  the  purple 
rod  in  the  latter  order.  He  was«an  honorary 
fellow  of  both  Magdalen  and  New  College. 
He  died  23  August  1952  at  Oxted.  The 
British  Academy  has  a  pencil  drawing  by 
Augustus  John;  a  bronze  bust  by  J.  A. 
Stevenson  stands  in  the  board-room  of 
the  British  Museum. 

[A  manuscript  memoir,  Autobiographical 
Sir  H.  I.  Bell  in  Proceedings  of  the  British 
Academy,  vol.  xxxviii,  1952 ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] H.  I.  Bell. 


KERR,  ARCHIBALD  JOHN  KERR 
CLARK,  Baron  Inverchapel  (1882- 
1951),  diplomatist.  [See  Clark  Kerr.] 

KERR,  Sir  JOHN  GRAHAM  (1869- 
1957),  zoologist,  born  at  Rowley  Lodge, 
Arkley,  Barnet,  18  September  1869,  was 
the  only  son  of  James  Kerr,  a  former 
principal  of  Hoogly  College,  Calcutta,  and 
his  wife,  Sybella  Graham,  of  Hollows, 
Dumfriesshire.  He  was  third  in  a  family 
of  four  but  two  of  his  sisters  died  in 
infancy.  Graham  Kerr,  as  he  was  generally 
known,  went  to  the  Royal  High  School, 
Edinburgh,  and  subsequently  to  the 
university  of  Edinburgh.  He  first  studied 
mathematics  and  philosophy  but  later 
joined  the  medical  faculty.  Whilst  still  a 
medical  student  he  interrupted  his  studies 
to  join  an  Argentine  expedition  for  the 
survey  of  the  Pilcomayo  from  the  Parana 
to  the  frontiers  of  Bolivia,  under  Captain 
Juan  Page.  The  account  of  this  famous 
expedition  (1889-91),  A  Naturalist  in  the 
Gran  Chaco,  was  not  published  until  1950. 
During  this  expedition  he  was  engaged  in 
the  study  of  general  natural  history  and 
especially  ornithology,  and  many  new 
species  were  collected,  but  as  the  result  of 
an  accident  most  of  the  collections  were 
lost.  His  field  notes  showed  that  even  at 
this  early  age  he  was  not  only  an  observer 
and  naturalist  of  exceptional  abihty,  but 
also  a  man  of  resource,  courage,  and 
endurance  above  the  ordinary. 

Returning  to  England  in  1891  he  en- 
tered Christ's  College,  Cambridge,  and 
obtained  first  class  honours  in  both  parts 
of  the  natural  sciences  tripos  (1894-6).  At 
thesame  time  he  was  making  preparations 
for  a  second  expedition  to  Paraguay  with 
the  main  object  of  studying  and  collecting 
the  lung-fish,  Lepidosiren.  He  was  accom- 
panied on  this  second  expedition  (1896-7) 
by  J.  S.  Budgett  and  their  collections  and 
also  those  of  three  subsequent  expeditions 
to  the  Chaco  region  are  preserved  at  the 
university  of  Glasgow.  On  his  return 
Graham  Kerr  was  appointed  demon- 
strator in  animal  morphology  (1897- 
1902)  at  Cambridge  and  was  a  fellow  of 
Christ's  (1898-1904).  In  1902  he  was 
appointed  regius  professor  of  zoology  at 
Glasgow  where  he  remained  until  1935. 
Throughout  his  professorship  he  was 
specially  interested  in  the  teaching  of 
medical  students  and  his  lectures  were 
famous.  The  approach  was  largely  morpho- 
logical and  embryological  and  is  embodied 
in  his  Zoology  for  Medical  Students  (1921) ; 
Evolution  (1926) ;  and  An  Introduction  to 


578 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Kerr,  J.  M.  M. 


Zoology  (1929).  Apart  from  his  heavy 
teaching  and  administrative  duties  he 
carried  on  with  research  and  a  whole 
series  of  papers  on  Dipnoan  embryology 
and  other  subjects  was  published  from 
his  department.  He  also  wrote  volume  ii, 
Vertebrata,  of  the  Textbook  of  Embryology 
with  the  Exception  of  Mammalia  (1919). 

In  university  affairs  Graham  Kerr  took 
a  very  active  part  and  was  a  member 
of  the  court  from  1913  to  1921,  and 
served  on  the  governing  bodies  of  various 
other  institutions.  He  was  particularly  in- 
terested in  marine  biology  and  was  mainly 
responsible  for  the  foundation  of  the  tem- 
porary marine  station  at  Rothesay.  He 
was  president  of  the  Scottish  Marine  Bio- 
logical Association  (1942-9)  and  devoted 
much  time  to  the  development  of  Millport. 
He  was  a  member  of  the  advisory  com- 
mittee on  fishery  research  from  its  foun- 
dation in  1919  and  chairman  in  1942-9. 

He  was  also  concerned  in  the  develop- 
ment of  general  scientific  activities  and 
especially  natural  history  in  Scotland.  He 
was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1909  and  served  on 
the  council  of  the  Society  (1920-22,  1936- 
8),  and  was  vice-president  (1937-8).  He 
was  also  president  of  the  Royal  Physical 
Society  of  Edinburgh  (1906-9);  of  the 
Royal  Philosophical  Society  of  Glasgow 
(1925-8);  and  vice-president  and  Neill 
prizewinner  (1904)  of  the  Royal  Society  of 
Edinburgh.  He  served  for  many  years  on 
the  council  of  the  British  Association  and 
was  president  of  the  zoology  section  at  the 
Oxford  meeting  in  1926.  He  was  knighted 
in  1939  and  other  recognitions  included 
the  honorary  LL.D.  of  Edinburgh  (1935) 
and  St.  Andrews  (1950) ;  honorary  fellow- 
ship of  Christ's  College,  Cambridge  (1935) ; 
the  Linnean  gold  medal  (1955) ;  and 
associate  membership  of  the  Royal 
Academy  of  Belgium  (1946). 

Graham  Kerr's  research  work  was  de- 
termined mainly  by  the  general  atmo- 
sphere of  the  Cambridge  school  of  zoology 
which  at  that  time  was  predominantly 
morphological.  Apart  from  earlier  taxo- 
nomic  work  he  started  with  a  study  of  the 
anatomy  of  Nautilus  which  was  of  impor- 
tance in  assessing  the  relations  of  the 
Cephalopoda  to  other  MoUusca.  His  later 
work  on  the  lower  vertebrates  and 
especially  Lepidosiren  and  other  Dipnoi 
led  him  to  abandon  the  generally  accepted 
view  that  the  legs  of  land  vertebrates  had 
evolved  out  of  the  paired  fins  of  fishes.  He 
considered  that  the  methods  of  move- 
ment of  vertebrates  supported  the  theory 
that  the  simple  styliform  limb  diverged 


along  two  lines,  one  leading  to  the  de- 
velopment of  paired  fins,  the  other  to  the 
development  of  jointed  limbs.  One  subject 
in  which  he  took  a  special  interest  was  the 
application  of  correct  biological  principles 
in  working  out  a  system  of  camouflage 
and  on  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  he 
wrote  to  the  Admiralty  advocating  the  use 
of  obliterative  shading  and  disruption  to 
render  ships  less  conspicuous.  This  sug- 
gestion was  eventually  adopted  and  more 
than  5,000  ships  treated  in  this  way ;  it  was 
used  almost  universally  during  the  war  of 
1939-45. 

Graham  Kerr  h^d  a  high  sense  of  public 
duty  and  was  a  strong  advocate  of  the 
value  of  a  biological  training.  He  gradually 
took  a  more  active  interest  in  politics  and 
in  1935  was  elected  member  of  Parliament 
for  the  Scottish  Universities.  He  then 
resigned  his  chair  and  went  to  live  at 
Barley,  near  Royston  in  Hertfordshire, 
where  he  spent  the  remainder  of  his  life. 
He  was  a  very  regular  attender  at  the 
House  of  Commons,  served  on  various 
committees  and  for  a  time  was  chairman 
of  the  parliamentary  scientific  committee. 
He  remained  a  member  until  1950  when 
university  seats  were  abolished.  He  died 
at  Barley  21  April  1957. 

Graham  Kerr  was  almost  the  last  sur- 
vivor of  the  famous  zoologists  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  for  the  most  part 
widely  travelled,  good  naturalists,  with  an 
almost  encyclopedic  knowledge  of  their 
subject.  His  output  of  zoological  work  was 
very  considerable  but  in  later  years  his 
many  public  duties  restricted  his  scientific 
activities. 

He  married  first,  in  1903,  Elizabeth 
Mary  (died  1934),  a  first  cousin,  daughter 
of  Thomas  Kerr,  writer  to  the  signet,  by 
whom  he  had  two  sons  and  one  daughter ; 
secondly,  in  1936,  Isobel,  daughter  of 
A.  Dunn  Macindoe  and  widow  of  Alan 
Clapperton,  solicitor. 

A  posthumous  portrait  by  Bernard 
Adams  and  a  charcoal  drawing  by  Laura 
Anning  Bell  are  in  the  possession  of  the 
family.  There  is  an  anonymous  oil  por- 
trait in  the  department  of  zoology,  univer- 
sity of  Glasgow. 

[Edward  Kindle  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iv,  1958; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Edward  Kindle. 

KERR,     (JOHN     MARTIN)     MUNRO 

(1868-1960),  obstetrician  and  gynaeco- 
logist, was  born  in  Glasgow  5  December 
1868,   the   son   of  George   Munro   Kerr, 


579 


Kerr,  J.  M.  M. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


a  ship  and  insurance  broker,  and  his  wife, 
Jessie  Elizabeth  Martin.  His  education 
was  at  Glasgow  Academy  and  University 
where  he  graduated  in  1890,  obtaining  the 
degrees  of  M.B.,  CM.  and  (in  1909)  M.D. 
He  later  studied  in  Berlin,  Jena,  and  Dub- 
lin, and  on  his  return  in  1894  was  ap- 
pointed assistant  to  the  regius  professor  of 
midwifery  and  diseases  of  women  in  the 
university  of  Glasgow.  In  1910  he  was 
elected  to  a  professorship  in  the  Ander- 
sonian  College  of  Medicine,  and  the  fol- 
lowing year  was  appointed  to  the  Muir- 
head  chair  of  obstetrics  and  gynaecology 
in  the  university  of  Glasgow.  Later  (1927) 
he  was  translated  to  the  regius  chair  in 
those  subjects,  in  which  he  continued  un- 
til his  retirement  in  1934.  During  this 
period  he  held  many  important  positions 
in  Glasgow  hospitals  and  was  for  a  time 
a  member  of  the  board  of  governors  of  the 
Glasgow  Samaritan  Hospital. 

Munro  Kerr  was  a  foundation  feUow 
and  vice-president  of  the  British  (later 
Royal)  College  of  Obstetricians  and 
Gynaecologists.  Amongst  other  important 
positions  he  was  a  one-time  president  of 
the  Faculty  of  Physicians  and  Surgeons 
of  Glasgow,  and  president  of  the  section  of 
obstetrics  and  gynaecology  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Medicine.  Among  honours 
bestowed  on  him  was  the  honorary  LL.D. 
of  Glasgow  (1935)  and  the  first  Blair-Bell 
medal  to  be  awarded  by  the  Royal  Society 
of  Medicine  (1950).  Many  medical  societies 
in  this  and  other  countries,  including  the 
American  Gynaecological  Society,  elected 
him  to  their  honorary  fellowship. 

Munro  Kerr's  early  training  gave  him 
fluency  in  many  languages,  and  through- 
out his  long  life  he  acquired  an  almost 
encyclopedic  knowledge  of  medical  litera- 
ture. His  natural  charm  of  manner  com- 
bined with  strength  of  character  made  him 
a  most  persuasive  teacher;  and  his  easy, 
conversational  style  gave  his  written 
words  added  interest  and  force.  Chief 
among  his  many  publications  were 
Operative  Midwifery  (1908) ;  Clinical  and 
Operative  Gynaecology  (1922);  Maternal 
Mortality  and  Morbidity  (1933) ;  and,  with 
colleagues  in  Glasgow  and  Edinburgh, 
the  Combined  Textbook  of  Obstetrics  and 
Gynaecology  (1923).  He  was  an  acknow- 
ledged leader  of  British  obstetrics  during 
the  first  half  of  this  century,  bridging  the 
days  when  obstetrical  practice  was  rela- 
tively primitive  to  more  modern  times 
with  a  maternal  mortality  rate  reduced  to 
less  than  one-tenth  of  its  previous  figure. 
He  initiated  or  sponsored  many  of  the 


innovations  during  this  period;  in  par- 
ticular, his  name  is  associated  with  cer- 
tain improvements  in  the  technique  of 
Caesarean  section  whereby  that  operation 
became  decidedly  safer;  in  the  United 
States  it  is  often  referred  to  as  the  Kerr 
operation. 

In  1899  he  married  Emelia  Andrewina 
Ehzabeth  (died  1957),  daughter  of  August 
Johanson  of  Gothenburg,  by  whom  he 
had  one  son  and  three  daughters.  He  died 
in  Canterbxuy  7  October  1960.  An  excel- 
lent portrait  by  Simon  Elwes  hangs  in  the 
Royal  College  of  Obstetricians  and  Gynae- 
cologists in  London. 

[Journal  of  Obstetrics  and  Gynaecology  of 
the  British  Commonwealth,  vol.  Ixviii,  1961; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Chassab  Moir. 

KETfiLBEY,  ALBERT  WILLIAM 
(1875-1959),  composer,  was  born  9 
August  1875  in  Aston  Manor,  Birming- 
ham, the  son  of  George  Henry  Ketelbey, 
engraver,  and  his  wife,  Sarah  Ann  Aston. 
As  a  young  boy  he  showed  a  remarkable 
talent  for  music  and  proficiency  on  the 
piano.  At  the  age  of  eleven  he  composed 
a  piano  sonata  which  he  performed  pub- 
licly at  the  Worcester  town  hall  and 
which  earned  in  later  years  the  praise  of 
Sir  Edward  Elgar  [q.v.].  Realizing  the 
boy's  promise  his  parents  allowed  him, 
after  preliminary  study  in  Birmingham, 
to  compete  for  a  scholarship  at  Trinity 
College,  London.  He  came  out  many 
marks  above  the  other  entrants  and  at  the 
age  of  thirteen  was  installed  at  the  col- 
lege as  Queen  Victoria  scholar  for  com- 
position. At  the  age  of  sixteen  he  was 
appointed  organist  of  St.  John's  church, 
Wimbledon,  and  while  there  continued  his 
composition  studies. 

After  four  years  of  organist's  work, 
carried  on  mostly  while  still  a  student, 
Ketelbey  went  on  tour  as  conductor  of 
a  light  opera  company  and  at  the  age  of 
twenty-two  he  was  appointed  musical 
director  of  the  Vaudeville  Theatre  in  the 
Strand.  Although  Ketelbey's  most  notable 
work  was  in  the  sphere  of  light  music,  he 
also  composed  some  serious  music,  includ- 
ing a  quintet  for  wood-wind  and  piano, 
which  won  the  Sir  Michael  Costa  prize; 
a  string  quartet;  an  overture  for  full 
orchestra;  a  suite  for  orchestra;  and 
a  Concertstiick  for  solo  piano  and 
orchestra ;  all  of  which  had  London  per- 
formances. 

But  it  was  with  the  publication  of 
pieces  hke  'Phantom  Melody'  (which  won 


580 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Khan  Sahib 


a  prize  offered  by  Van  Biene),  *In  a 
Monastery  Garden',  *In  a  Persian  Market', 
*Sanctuary  of  the  Heart',  that  Ketelbey 
came  into  his  own  during  the  twenties  as 
foremost  British  hght  composer  of  his  day. 
To  his  music  he  brought  the  capacity  to 
invent  popular  melodies  with  a  character 
of  their  own.  He  was  well  equipped  to 
write  for  the  orchestra  (he  could  play  the 
cello,  clarinet,  oboe,  and  horn)  and  his 
orchestrations  are  colourful  and  well 
balanced.  In  Ketelbey's  day  light  music 
tended  to  be  picturesque  and  romantic 
and  it  was  performed  principally  in  the 
palm  courts  of  luxury  hotels,  in  cafes  and 
liners,  and  in  the  silent  cinema.  Most  of 
his  pieces  have  a  programme-synopsis. 

He  was  particularly  successful  as  a  com- 
poser of  'atmospheric'  music  specially 
written  to  accompany  silent  films,  a  highly 
profitable  source  of  income  in  the  days 
when  every  cinema  of  pretension  em- 
ployed a  'live'  orchestra.  His  pieces 
appeared  in  the  'Loose  Leaf  Film  Play 
Music  Series'  and  included  such  titles  as 
'Dramatic  Agitato',  'Amaryllis'  (is  suitable 
for  use  in  dainty,  fickle  scenes),  'Mystery' 
(greatly  in  favour  for  uncanny  and  weird 
picturizations),  'Agitato  Furioso'  (famous 
for  its  excellence  in  playing  to  riots, 
storms,  wars,  etc.). 

Other  works  by  Ketelbey  were  the  con- 
cert pieces:  'Suite  Romantique',  'Cockney 
Suite',  and  'Chal  Romano'  overture; 
a  comic  opera,  The  Wonder  Worker ;  and  in 
lighter  vein  'Gallantry',  'Wedgwood  Blue', 
'In  the  Moonlight',  and  'Souvenir  de 
Tendresse'. 

His  highly  successful  compositions 
enabled  Ketelbey,  one  of  whose  pseud- 
onyms was  Anton  Vodorinski,  to  spend 
most  of  his  later  years  in  retirement  in 
the  Isle  of  Wight.  He  died  at  Cowes 
26  November  1959. 

After  the  death  of  his  first  wife,  Char- 
lotte Curzon,  Ketelbey  married,  in  1948, 
Mabel  Maud,  widow  of  L.  S.  Pritchett. 
He  had  no  children. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Mark  H.  Lubbock. 

KHAN  SAHIB  (1883-1958),  Indian  poli- 
tician, was  born  in  1883  in  the  village  of 
Utmanzai  in  the  Peshawar  district  where 
his  father,  Khan  Bahram  Khan,  was 
an  influential  Muhammadzai  landowner. 
With  his  younger  brother.  Khan  Abdul 
Ghaffar  Khan,  who  later  became  known  as 
'the  Frontier  Gandhi',  he  was  educated  at 
the  Peshawar  government  high  school  and 
mission  college;  with  a  very  promising 


academic  record  he  proceeded  to  Britain 
to  study  medicine.  He  qualified  in  1917; 
worked  for  a  time  at  St.  Thomas's  Hos- 
pital; married  as  his  second  wife  an  English 
lady ;  then  sat  successfully  for  the  Indian 
Medical  Service  and  returned  to  India.  In 
1920  he  resigned,  with  the  rank  of  captain, 
and  set  up  in  private  practice  in  Nowshera. 

The  exclusion  of  the  North- West 
Frontier  Province  from  the  benefits  of  the 
constitutional  reforms  of  1920  saw  a  new 
birth  of  political  consciousness  among  the 
Pathans.  Abdul  Ghaffar  Khan,  who  had 
kept  to  the  traditional  ways  of  the  Pathan 
tribesman  and  had  become  the  most  out- 
standing personality  in  the  province, 
became  the  leader  of  the  Khudai  Khidmat- 
gar  'Servants  of  God'  organization,  better 
known  as  the  Red  Shirts.  It  was  not  long 
before  Khan  Sahib,  who  had  made  friends 
with  Jawaharlal  Nehru  in  London  and 
through  him  had  come  under  the  in- 
fluence of  M.  K.  Gandhi  [q.v.],  decided  to 
abandon  medicine  and  join  his  brother. 
The  alliance  between  the  fanatically 
Moslem  Pathans  and  the  Hindu-dominated 
Congress  Party  was  a  development  of  the 
greatest  political  importance  which  only 
the  Khan  brothers  could  have  brought 
about. 

Frequent  clashes  between  the  Red 
Shirts  and  the  Government  led  to  the 
organization's   being   declared   illegal   in 

1931  and  to  the  arrest  and  imprisonment 
of  both  brothers.  They  were  then  externed 
from  the  province  for  some  years.  A  con- 
siderable part  of  his  exile  was  spent  by 
Khan  Sahib  at  Gandhi's  headquarters  in 
the  Central  Provinces.  The  agitation  for 
political  advance  in  the  North-West 
Frontier  was,  however,  successful  and  in 

1932  it  was  raised  to  the  status  of  a  gover- 
nor's province.  It  was  not  until  1937  that 
Congress  agreed  to  accept  office  and  in 
that  year  Khan  Sahib  became  chief 
minister.  His  first  term  of  office  was 
marked  by  some  useful  measures  for  the 
economic  development  of  the  Frontier, 
but  also  by  controversial  legislation  which 
alienated  the  sympathies  of  the  large 
landowners  and  other  conservative 
elements.  Nevertheless  his  worth  as  an 
incorruptible  and  conscientious  adminis- 
trator was  proved  beyond  question. 

On  the  approach  of  war  in  1939  Khan 
Sahib  resigned  office  and  was  again  placed 
under  detention,  with  his  brother.  The 
resignation  was  against  his  own  inclina- 
tion, but  was  dictated  by  Congress.  He 
himself  was  so  intellectually  and  emo- 
tionally committed  against  Hitlerism  and 


581 


Khan  Sahib 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


all  it  stood  for  that  he  would  have  wished 
to  do  everything  in  his  power  to  further 
the  war  effort;  indeed  even  out  of  office 
his  influence  with  the  Pathans  was  so 
powerful  that  the  province  gave  little 
trouble  to  the  Government  during  the 
war. 

Khan  Sahib  returned  to  power  as  chief 
minister  in  1945  after  the  Frontier  Con- 
gress Party  had  obtained  a  clear  electoral 
majority  over  the  Moslem  League.  He 
remained  in  office  until  the  transfer  of 
power  in  1947.  At  this  period,  however,  he 
misjudged  the  political  trend.  The  end  to 
his  hopes  of  maintaining  the  Congress 
alliance  and  the  indivisibility  of  India 
came  with  the  referendum  of  1947,  when 
the  Pathans  opted  for  Pakistan  and  Khan 
Sahib  and  his  brother  were  swept  from 
power.  They  were  regarded  as  hostile  to 
Pakistan  and  were  arrested  by  the  new 
Gk)vernment  of  M.  A.  Jinnah  [q.v.]  in 
1948.  Abdul  Ghaffar  went  to  gaol  for 
a  considerable  period  while  Khan  Sahib 
remained  under  strict  surveillance  for 
three  years.  He  was,  however,  a  big 
enough  man  to  realize  that  he  had  made 
a  mistake.  While  his  brother  remained 
irreconcilable,  he  himself  recognized  that 
Pakistan  had  come  to  stay  and  that  the 
cause  of  Pathan  advancement  would  best 
be  served  by  co-operation.  Even  so  the 
Moslem  League  leaders  were  slow  to  for- 
give him  and  it  was  not  until  1954  that  he 
emerged  from  obscurity.  In  that  year  he 
was  appointed  minister  of  communica- 
tions in  a  new  coalition  Government  at  the 
centre  and  in  the  following  year  he  be- 
came chief  minister  of  the  newly  inte- 
grated West  Pakistan.  The  split  with  his 
brother,  who  bitterly  opposed  the  merger, 
was  now  complete. 

In  the  years  of  political  turmoil  which 
were  to  lead  to  the  revolution  which  put 
President  Ayub  into  power  at  the  end  of 
1958  Khan  Sahib's  stature  steadily  grew. 
When  the  Moslem  League  leaders,  some 
of  whom  remained  inveterate  in  their 
hostility  to  him,  defected  from  his  coali- 
tion, he  formed  a  new  Republican  Party 
which  retained  a  majority,  albeit  a  shaky 
one,  until  president's  rule  was  imposed  in 
West  Pakistan  in  March  1957.  In  Decem- 
ber he  formed  an  anti-Moslem  League 
group  in  the  Central  Assembly,  and  it  was 
a  measure  of  the  general  respect  in  which 
he  was  held  that  the  members  of  all 
parties  in  this  group,  which  outnumbered 
the  League,  pledged  their  support  of  the 
premiership  of  any  person  nominated 
by  him. 


In  Lahore  on  9  May  1958  Khan  Sahib 
was  assassinated  by  a  petty  official  with 
a  grievance.  The  event  had  no  political 
significance  but  was  a  tragedy  for  Pakis- 
tan. Khan  Sahib  was  a  man  of  exceptional 
qualities.  Quiet,  patient,  and  courteous  in 
manner,  incorruptible  and  of  deep  sin- 
cerity, he  had  the  stature  of  a  statesman. 
He  was  loved  for  his  warm-heartedness  and 
integrity  by  his  people  and  indeed  by  per- 
sons of  all  races  with  whom  he  came  into 
contact. 

He  had  two  sons  by  his  first  wife,  the 
elder  of  whom  made  some  mark  in  politics 
and  was  for  a  short  time  a  minister  of  the 
West  Pakistan  Government,  and  a  son  and 
a  daughter  by  his  English  wife. 

[C.  F.  Andrews,  The  Challenge  of  the  North- 
West  Frontier,  1937;  Sir  William  Barton, 
India's  North-West  Frontier,  1939;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

F.  M.  Innes. 

KIGGELL,  Sir  LAUNCELOT 
EDWARD  (1862-1954),  lieutenant- 
general,  was  born  at  Wilton  House, 
Ballingarry,  county  Limerick,  2  October 
1862,  the  son  of  Launcelot  John  Kiggell, 
of  Cahara,  Glin,  who  became  a  justice 
of  the  peace  and  a  major  in  the  South 
Cork  Light  Infantry  Militia,  and  his 
wife,  Meliora  Emily,  daughter  of  Edward 
Brown.  His  background  and  education 
were  that  of  an  Anglo-Irish  family  of 
modest  means  and  he  did  not  go  to  an 
English  public  school.  From  the  Royal 
Military  College,  Sandhurst,  he  joined  the 
Royal  Warwickshire  Regiment  in  1882 
and  was  adjutant  of  the  2nd  battalion 
from  1886  to  1890.  At  a  time  when 
wealth  and  connection  dominated,  Kig- 
gell diligently  made  his  way  as  a  career 
soldier  in  a  line  regiment.  He  passed  out 
from  the  Staff  College  in  1894  and  from 
1895  to  1897  was  an  instructor  at  Sand- 
hurst. He  gained  his  first  staff  experience 
as  deputy-assistant-adjutant-general  to 
South-Eastern  District  in  1897-9  and 
thereafter  his  career  lay  entirely  in  staff 
appointments. 

Kiggell  served  in  South  Africa  through- 
out the  Boer  War,  first  on  the  staff  of  Sir 
Redvers  BuUer  [q.v.],  then  for  six  months 
on  the  staff  of  headquarters  at  Pretoria, 
finally  as  assistant-adjutant-general,  Har- 
rismith  District.  After  the  war  he  held  the 
same  post  in  Natal.  He  was  mentioned  in 
dispatches  and  made  a  brevet  lieutenant- 
colonel. 

For  three  years  from  1904  Kiggell  was 
deputy-assistant-adjutant-general  at  the 


582 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Kiggell 


Staff  College.  It  was  the  beginning  of 
a  long  association  with  military  education 
at  the  key  period  when  R.  B.  (later  Vis- 
count) Haldane  [q.v.]  was  turning  the 
British  Army  into  a  modern  force  with 
a  brain  in  its  new  general  staff.  Kiggell 
now  displayed  the  temper  of  his  mind  and 
personality :  his  military  ideas  were  ortho- 
dox and  plodding.  In  1905  he  read  a  paper 
to  the  Aldershot  Militaiy^  Society  on  the 
future  shape  of  battle  in  which  his  prog- 
nostications were  all  based  on  distant 
historical  examples  from  the  Napoleonic 
wars  or  the  Franco-Prussian  war.  He  saw 
the  battles  of  the  next  war  as  local  affairs, 
with  reserves  within  a  few  hours'  march 
ready  for  the  counter-stroke.  He  rested 
all  his  arguments  on  the  examples  and 
precepts  of  great  conunanders  of  the  past, 
ignoring  the  lessons  of  the  war  in  which  he 
had  just  served  or  of  the  Russo-Japanese 
war  then  in  progress.  He  was  criticized  by 
his  audience  in  this  sense  and  also  for 
underrating  the  effects  of  modern  fire- 
power. 

Further  staff  appointments  followed: 
G.S.O.  1,  army  headquarters,  1907-9; 
brigadier-general  in  charge  of  administra- 
tion, Scottish  Command,  March-October 
1909 ;  director  of  staff  duties.  War  Office, 
1909-13.  In  1913-14  he  was  commandant 
of  the  Staff  College.  He  revised  Operations 
of  War  by  Sir  Edward  Hamley  [q.v.]  for 
a  sixth  edition.  In  1914  he  was  promoted 
major-general. 

In  the  first  two  years  of  the  war  Kiggell 
was  at  the  War  Office,  as  director  of  mili- 
tary training,  then  director  of  home 
defence,  finally,  in  November  1915,  assis- 
tant to  the  chief  of  the  imperial  general 
staff.  In  December  1915  he  became  chief 
of  the  general  staff  to  Sir  Douglas  (later 
Earl)  Haig  [q.v.],  commander-in-chief  of 
the  British  armies  in  France.  Although 
Kiggell  was  his  second  choice  for  the  post 
Haig  recorded  that  he  had  'the  greatest 
confidence  in  him  as  a  soldier  also  as 
a  gentleman'. 

Kiggell,  however,  had  no  experience  of 
large-scale  modern  war  in  the  field  and  his 
career  and  the  tenor  of  his  thought  made 
him  orthodox  and  doctrinaire.  Throughout 
the  campaigns  of  1916  and  1917  it  was 
in  the  intellectual  climate  of  Kiggell's 
acquiescence  and  the  optimism  of  John 
Charteris,  director  of  miUtary  intelligence, 
that  Haig  lived.  It  was  Kiggell  who,  in 
a  fatal  moment  of  independence,  per- 
suaded Haig  to  adopt  the  tactics  of  attack 
by  successive  waves  on  1  July  1916  in- 
stead of  by  small  gioups  as  used  by  the 


Germans  at  Verdun.  At  the  end  of  August 
1917  Kiggell's  hopes  that  the  British 
Army  could  still  clear  the  Belgian  coast 
were  even  higher  than  Haig's.  It  was 
Kiggell  who  on  6  August  1917  per- 
suaded Haig  not  to  launch  a  tank 
offensive  at  Cambrai  on  20  September, 
on  the  invincibly  orthodox  grounds 
that  it  would  divide  the  British  effort 
at  the  expense  of  the  Passchendaele  cam- 
paign. The  Cambrai  attack  was  therefore 
delayed  until  20  November  when  it 
took  place  in  a  strategic  vacuum.  It  was 
Kiggell  who  in  October  1917  was  in 
favour  of  the  British  pushing  on  to 
Passchendaele  despite  the  weather  and 
the  exhaustion  of  the  troops. 

Remote  from  the  reality  of  modem 
war  Kiggell  made  war  on  paper  with 
unimpeachable  orthodoxy  and  lack  of 
imagination.  That  he  was  far  below  the 
requirements  of  his  post  was  well  realized 
by  Haig's  army  commanders.  Sir  Henry 
(later  Lord)  Rawlinson  [q.v.]  had  re- 
marked that  Kiggell  was  'new  to  the 
country'  with  'a  good  deal  to  pick  up'.  Sir 
Hubert  Cough,  many  years  later,  said  that 
Kiggell  was  a  yes-man,  'without  initiative 
or  decision',  'a  clerk,  not  an  executive 
instrument'. 

After  the  failure  of  the  Passchendaele 
campaign  to  produce  the  results  hoped  for 
in  the  summer  of  1917  there  was  great 
political  pressure  on  Haig  to  part  with 
Kiggell  and  Charteris.  Kiggell  himself 
seems  to  have  been  strongly  affected  by 
a  belated  realization  of  the  gulf  between 
his  paper  work  and  the  reality  of  the 
Passchendaele  battlefield.  Two  doctors 
reported  that  he  was  suffering  from 
'nervous  exhaustion  owing  to  the  very 
exacting  nature  of  the  work  he  has  had  to 
perform'.  He  went  home  at  the  beginning 
of  1918.  Haig's  opinion  of  him  was  as 
warm  as  ever :  'I  am  very  loth  to  part  with 
Kigg's  help  and  sound  advice  .  .  .  No  one 
could  possibly  have  discharged  the  duties 
of  C.G.S.  during  the  past  two  years  of 
great  difficulty  better  than  Kiggell  has.* 
To  Lord  Derby  [q.v.]  he  wrote  that  Kig- 
gell 'has  a  fine  brain,  very  sound  and 
practical  as  a  soldier,  very  farseeing  and 
absolutely  honest  and  straightforward'. 

Kiggell,  who  had  been  promoted 
lieutenant-general  in  1917,  was  now  given 
the  post  of  general  officer  commanding 
and  lieutenant-governor  of  Guernsey. 
He  retired  in  1920.  For  some  time  he 
helped  in  the  compilation  of  the  official 
history  of  the  war  but  had  to  give  it  up 
owing  to  poor  health.  ,  ^^^ 


583 


KiggeU 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Kiggell  was  appomted  C.B.  (1908), 
K.C.B.  (1916),  and  K.C.M.G.  (1918).  In 
1888  he  married  Eleanor  Rose  (died  1948), 
daughter  of  Colonel  Spencer  -Field ;  there 
were  three  sons.  He  died  in  Felixstowe 
23  February  1954. 

[Tfie  Private  Papers  of  Douglas  Haig  1914- 
1919,  ed.  Robert  Blake,  1952 ;  Duff  Cooper, 
Haig,  2  vols.,  1935-6 ;  John  Terraine,  Douglas 
Haig,  the  Educated  Soldier,  1963 ;  Sir  Frederick 
Maurice,  The  Life  of  General  Lord  Rawlinson 
of  Trent,  1928 ;  B.  H.  Liddell  Hart,  Memoirs, 
vol.  i,  1965;  Transactions  of  the  Aldershot 
Military  Society,  1905 ;  David  Lloyd  George, 
War  Memoirs,  6  vols.,  1933-6 ;  The  Times,  25 
February  1954.]  Correlli  Barnett. 

KIMMINS,    Dame    GRACE    THYRZA 

(1870-1954),  pioneer  in  work  for  crippled 
children,  was  born  at  Lewes,  Sussex,  6 
May  1870,  the  eldest  of  the  family  of  four 
of  James  Hannam,  cloth  merchant,  by  his 
wife,  Thyrza  Rogers.  Endowed  with  a 
powerful  urge  to  serve  the  poor  and 
suffering  she  started  to  work  in  the  east 
end  of  London  soon  after  leaving  Wilton 
House  School,  Reading,  and  rapidly  dis- 
covered that  her  special  interest  lay  with 
the  crippled  and  the  handicapped.  Under 
the  influence  of  the  famous  book  The  Story 
of  a  Short  Life  by  Mrs.  Ewing  [q.v.],  and 
assisted  by  a  distinguished  band  of  helpers, 
she  formed  in  1894  the  Guild  of  the  Brave 
Poor  Things  with  the  motto  Laetus  Sorte 
Mea.  The  halt  and  the  lame  were  made 
welcome  once  a  week,  first  at  the  West 
London  Mission,  later  at  the  Bermondsey 
Settlement,  finally  at  the  chapter  house  of 
Southwark  Cathedral. 

In  1897  she  married  Charles  William 
Kimmins  (died  1948),  a  scientist,  and  chief 
inspector  of  the  education  department  of 
the  London  County  Council  (1904-23),  to 
whom  she  was  constantly  to  turn  for  help 
and  advice.  She  realized  that  to  improve 
the  health  of  crippled  children  and  give 
them  the  opportunity  of  growing  into  use- 
ful and  happy  citizens,  part  of  the  work 
must  move  to  the  country.  Accordingly,  in 
close  collaboration  with  her  lifelong  friend, 
Alice  Rennie,  she  founded  a  home  at 
Chailey,  Sussex,  in  1903,  while  the  Guild 
continued  in  London  and  spread  to  other 
parts  of  England.  Accommodation  at 
Chailey  was  unsuitable  both  for  the  seven 
boys  who  first  went  there  and  for  the  few 
girls  who  followed  later,  but  for  Grace 
Kimmins  the  dedicated  work  of  a  lifetime 
had  been  launched.  From  such  a  slender 
beginning,  as  yet  unrecognized  and  with 
no  financial  support,  the  great  idea  was 
bom  of  a  public  school  of  crippledom  for 


boys  and  girls  at  which  the  best  of  medical 
treatment  in  a  healthy  atmosphere,  com- 
bined with  education  and  specialized 
training,  would  bring  them  happiness  and 
ensure  their  ability  to  earn  a  living. 

Appeals  for  money  brought  generous 
response  and  willing  helpers.  Under  the 
patronage  of  Princess  Louise,  Duchess  of 
Argyll,  and  the  presidency  of  A.  F. 
Winnington-Ingram,  bishop  of  London 
[qq.v.],  the  Heritage  Craft  Schools  became 
established  and  by  1914  modern  buildings 
had  been  built  for  both  boys  and  girls,  as 
well  as  the  school  chapel  of  St.  Martin. 

At  no  time  in  her  life  was  Grace  Kim- 
mins's  inspired  vision  and  gift  for 
organization  more  apparent  than  during 
the  war  of  1914-18.  Reahzing  that  a  heavy 
demand  would  be  made  on  all  hospital 
accommodation,  she  moved  the  boys  into 
temporary  quarters  and  placed  the  main 
buildings  at  the  disposal  of  the  Govern- 
ment. Before  long  a  stream  of  wounded 
men  arrived,  many  of  them  shattered  at 
the  thought  of  future  life  without  a  limb, 
With  great  psychological  insight  she  placed 
a  crippled  boy  with  a  similar  disability  as 
orderly  to  each  of  them.  The  result  was 
effective  and  immediate.  A  legless  or  arm- 
less soldier  gained  hope  and  courage  with- 
in a  matter  of  days  from  the  sight  of  the 
cheerful  youngsters  around  him.  During 
the  same  period  some  six  hundred  raid- 
shocked  children  were  housed  and  cared 
for. 

By  1919  the  Heritage  Craft  Schools 
were  recognized  as  a  national  asset  and 
crippled  children  were  admitted  from  all 
parts  of  the  United  Kingdom.  With  tire- 
less energy  and  determination  Grace 
Kimmins  appealed  widely  and  successfully 
for  more  funds.  In  1922  an  extension  to 
the  surgical  wing  enabled  the  full  range 
of  orthopaedic  surgery  to  be  performed 
on  the  spot.  In  1924  a  school  and  hospital 
were  opened  at  Tidemills,  near  Newhaven, 
for  crippled  boys  who  would  benefit  from 
sea  air  and  sea-water,  and  flourished  until 
the  dangers  of  invasion  in  1940  closed 
them.  Until  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939 
the  Heritage  Craft  Schools  were  visited  by 
several  members  of  the  royal  family  and 
their  fame  had  spread  to  generous  suppor- 
ters all  over  the  world,  particularly  in 
America.  Further  buildings  were  erected 
for  both  boys  and  girls  and  a  new  block 
was  opened  for  the  admission  of  small 
babies  and  toddlers.  During  the  war 
special  arrangements  were  again  made  for 
the  reception  of  wounded  men  and  bUtzed 
children. 


584 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


King 


After  the  war  conditions  returned  to 
normal  and  the  Heritage  Craft  Schools  by 
1946  had  reached  their  zenith.  The  num- 
ber of  children  in  residence  had  risen  from 
seven  to  over  five  hundred  and  her  ambi- 
tion had  been  realized.  The  brilliant  mind, 
the  drive,  and  the  vision  never  faded,  but 
by  now  Grace  Kimmins  was  too  frail  to 
continue  as  commandant  and  in  1948  her 
great  work  was  handed  over  to  the 
National  Health  Service.  She  continued 
to  live  at  the  Heritage  and  died  at  Hay- 
wards  Heath  3  March  1954.  There  is 
a  portrait  of  her  at  Chailey  by  Helen 
Gluck.  She  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1927 
and  D.B.E.  in  1950,  and  was  also  a  dame 
of  grace  of  the  Order  of  St.  John  of  Jerusa- 
lem. She  had  two  sons:  Lieutenant- 
General  Sir  Brian  Kimmins,  K.B.E., 
C.B.,  and  Captain  Anthony  Kimmins, 
O.B.E.,  R.N.,  playwright,  who  died  in 
1964.  Brian  Kimmins. 

KINDERSLEY,  ROBERT  MOLES- 
WORTH,  first  Baron  Kindersley  (1871- 
1954),  banker  and  president  of  the 
National  Savings  Committee,  was  born  at 
Wanstead  20  November  1871,  the  second 
son  of  Captain  Edward  Nassau  Moles- 
worth  Kindersley  of  the  19th  Regiment  of 
Foot,  and  his  wife,  Ada  Good,  daughter  of 
John  Murray,  solicitor,  of  London.  Sir 
Richard  Torin  Kindersley  [q.v.]  was  his 
great-uncle.  He  was  educated  at  Repton 
School  but  left  in  1887  when  his  father 
could  no  longer  afford  to  keep  him  there 
and  started  work  with  A.  F.  Hills  [q.v.]  at 
the  Thames  Ironworks  at  the  early  age  of 
fifteen.  He  became  a  member  of  the  Stock 
Exchange  in  1901  and  a  partner  in  the 
firm  of  David  A.  Bevan  &  Co.  in  the  fol- 
lowing year.  In  1906  he  joined  the  London 
branch  of  the  international  banking  house 
of  Lazard  Brothers  &  Co.  to  which,  either 
as  a  partner  when  it  was  a  private  firm,  or 
as  its  chairman  when  in  1919  it  became 
a  limited  company,  he  devoted  the  rest  of 
his  working  life  until  he  retired  in  1953. 
He  was  a  member  of  the  Court  of  the 
Bank  of  England  from  1914  until  1946  and 
governor  of  the  Hudson's  Bay  Company 
from  1916  until  1925.  He  served  as  chair- 
man of  the  Trade  Facilities  Act  advisory 
committee  (1921-5),  as  a  member  of  the 
bankers'  committee  on  German  finance  in 
1922,  and  was  senior  British  representa- 
tive on  the  Dawes  committee  in  1924.  For 
many  years  he  produced  and  published  in 
the  Economic  Journal  an  annual  estimate 
of  the  oversea  investments  of  this  country 
which  was  the  forerunner  of  official  statis- 


tics on  the  subject.  In  1946  the  task  was 
taken  over  by  the  Bank  of  England. 

In  1916  Kindersley  became  first  chair- 
man of  the  War  Savings  Committee  and 
from  1920  until  1946  he  presided  over  the 
National  Savings  Committee.  The  re- 
markable success  of  the  movement  in 
these  years,  and  most  notably  during  the 
war  of  1939-45  when  the  country  saved 
over  nine  thousand  million  pounds,  was 
due  largely  to  his  efforts.  He  had  a  strong 
and  forceful  character,  combined  with 
a  penetrating  and  constructive  mind  and 
great  charm.  His  power  of  work  and  his 
imaginative  and  creative  approach  to  it 
made  him  a  born  leader.  No  one  ever  took 
to  him  a  stubborn  problem  without  find- 
ing a  new  light  shed  upon  it.  He  had 
a  great  love  for  family  life  and  liked 
nothing  more  than  to  have  his  house  full 
of  young  people.  The  loyalty  and  devotion 
of  his  staff  both  in  his  office  and  in  the 
National  Savings  Movement  were  the 
reflection  of  his  own  spirit  and  a  solid 
proof  of  his  unfailing  courtesy  and  his 
great  qualities  of  leadership  at  all  times 
and  in  all  spheres. 

Kindersley  was  appointed  K.B.E.  in 
1917,  advanced  to  G.B.E.  in  1920,  and  in 
1941  created  a  baron  in  recognition  of  his 
work  for  national  savings.  He  also  re- 
ceived a  number  of  foreign  decorations 
and  in  1928-9  was  high  sheriff  of  Sussex. 

In  1896  Kindersley  married  Gladys 
Margaret  (died  1968),  daughter  of  Major- 
General  James  Pattle  Beadle,  R.E. ;  there 
were  four  sons  and  two  daughters  of  the 
marriage.  The  eldest  son,  Lionel  Nassau, 
was  killed  in  action  in  1917.  When  Kin- 
dersley died  in  hospital  at  East  Grinstead, 
Sussex,  20  July  1954,  he  was  succeeded 
by  his  second  son,  Hugh  Kenyon  Moles- 
worth  (born  1899),  who  served  in  the 
Scots  Guards  in  both  wars  and  followed 
his  father  as  chairman  of  Lazard  Brothers 
and  as  a  member  of  the  Court  of  the  Bank 
of  England.  Sir  William  Orpen  painted 
two  portraits  of  Kindersley,  one  of  which 
belongs  to  the  Hudson's  Bay  Company, 
the  other  to  the  National  Savings  Associa- 
tion. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

KING,  HAROLD  (1887-1956),  organic 
chemist,  was  born  24  February  1887  at 
Llanengan,  Caernarvonshire,  the  eldest  of 
the  four  children  of  Herbert  King,  and  his 
wife,  Ellen  EKzabeth  Hill.  Both  parents 
came  from  Lancashire  farming  families 
and  were  school  teachers  by  profession ;  in 


585 


King 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


1891  they  moved  to  Bangor  where  Harold 
King  received  his  education,  first  in  St. 
James's  church  school  where  his  parents 
were  head  teachers,  then  in  Friar's  Gram- 
mar School,  finally  in  the  University 
College,  where  he  had  the  good  fortune  to 
be  a  pupil  of  K.  J.  P.  Orton  who  exercised 
a  powerful  and  lasting  influence,  inspiring 
King  with  the  love  of  chemistry  which 
determined  his  choice  of  career. 

After  graduating  with  first  class  honours 
in  1908  and  a  period  of  research,  King  had 
a  brief  experience  of  analytical  work  with 
the  Gas  Light  and  Coke  Company  at 
Beckton  (1911-12)  as  the  holder  of  an 
industrial  bursary  awarded  by  the  Royal 
Commission  for  the  Exhibition  of  1851 ; 
thence  he  moved  in  1912  to  the  Wellcome 
Physiological  Research  Laboratories.  This 
appointment,  although  of  short  duration, 
was  of  vital  importance  to  his  develop- 
ment, since  it  brought  him  into  contact 
with  (Sir)  H.  H.  Dale  and  George  Barger 
[q.v.]  and  taught  him  how  fruitful  true 
collaboration  between  biologists  and 
chemists  could  be  in  furthering  medical 
research.  After  only  six  months  King 
moved  again,  to  the  Wellcome  Chemical 
Works  at  Dartford  where  he  remained 
until  1919.  Here  he  received  further  train- 
ing in  organic  chemical  research  under 
F.  L.  Pyman  and  also  made  several 
important  contributions  to  problems  of 
pharmaceutical  chemistry  which  arose  as 
matter  of  emergency  during  the  war. 

In  1919  King  was  appointed  chemist  on 
the  staff  of  the  Medical  Research  Council 
with  special  responsibility  for  the  study  of 
drugs.  This  post  was  tenable  at  the 
National  Institute  for  Medical  Research, 
Hampstead,  and  thus  brought  King  again 
under  Dale's  direction.  He  served  the 
Medical  Research  Council  until  his  retire- 
ment in  1950,  and  during  this  period  built 
himself  an  international  reputation  as 
a  research  worker  in  organic  chemistry, 
particularly  in  its  applications  to  therapy. 
Apart  from  his  own  experimental  work  he 
did  much  to  keep  the  subject  of  chemo- 
therapy in  the  forefront  of  scientific 
investigation. 

When  King  began  research  in  chemo- 
therapy the  only  chemotherapeutic  agent 
really  established  in  medical  practice  was 
salvarsan;  it  was  natural  therefore  that 
he  should  direct  his  first  effort  to  the  at- 
tempt to  find  other  arsenical  drugs  with 
useful  therapeutic  properties;  in  this  he 
had  no  direct  success ;  however,  he  found 
out  much  about  the  mode  of  action  of 
these   compounds   and   his   observations 


were  a  direct  pointer  to  the  later  dis- 
covery by  others  of  British  Antilewisite 
(BAL),  the  most  successful  known  anti- 
dote to  arsenical  and  heavy  metal 
poisoning.  He  also  attempted  to  produce 
more  effective  antimalarial  drugs  by 
modifications  of  the  structure  of  the 
cinchona  alkaloids ;  here  again  no  imme- 
diate success  was  forthcoming  but  once 
more  the  work  bore  fruit  later  in  the 
influence  exercised  on  the  vast  programme 
of  antimalarial  research  undertaken  in  the 
United  States  during  the  war  of  1939-45. 
A  third  chemotherapeutic  research,  re- 
sulting in  the  discovery  of  antitrypanoso- 
mal activity  in  several  series  of  diamidines 
and  related  compounds  led  to  the  develop- 
ment by  A.  J.  Ewins  [q.v.]  in  an  industrial 
laboratory  of  stilbamidine,  the  most 
effective  drug  for  the  treatment  of 
kala-azar. 

If  King  had  his  full  share  of  the  disap- 
pointments which  are  only  too  common  in 
chemotherapeutic  research,  he  derived 
great  satisfaction  from  work  which  led  to 
the  discovery  of  the  methonium  drugs, 
which  themselves  provided  the  first  effec- 
tive drug  treatment  of  hypertension  and 
which  have  led  to  further  therapeutic 
advances  of  great  importance.  This  work 
was  a  model  of  medical  research ;  it  began 
with  King's  classical  study  of  tube  curare 
from  which  he  isolated  the  active  prin- 
ciple (the  alkaloid  tubocurarine)  and 
determined  its  constitution ;  from  this  he 
deduced  the  chemical  features  responsible 
for  its  muscle-relaxing  properties  and 
planned  the  synthesis  of  a  series  of  simple 
compounds  likely  to  possess  similar 
activity;  he  then  enlisted  the  collabora- 
tion of  his  physiological  colleagues,  who 
confirmed  his  prediction  and  in  addition 
discovered  the  unexpected  properties  of 
some  members  of  the  series  that  gave  them 
their  value  in  the  treatment  of  hyper- 
tension. 

Although  King  was  essentially  an 
experimentalist  it  may  well  be  that  his 
name  will  be  best  remembered  for  a 
purely  theoretical  contribution:  the  re- 
vision by  himself  and  Otto  Rosenheim 
[q.v.]  of  the  formulation  of  cholesterol  and 
related  compounds  which  had  long  been 
accepted  on  the  authority  of  eminent 
German  chemists.  This  brought  clearer 
understanding  of  the  chemistry  of 
many  biologically  important  compounds 
including  sex  hormones,  adrenocortical 
hormones,  and  heart  poisons,  and 
was  a  scientific  achievement  of  the 
first  magnitude. 


586 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Kingdon-Ward 


As  a  member  of  the  staff  of  a  research 
institute  King  was  a  valuable  man. 
Quiet  and  retiring  in  disposition,  and 
unashamedly  insular  in  general  outlook, 
he  enjoyed  the  sheltered  environment 
which  such  an  institute  can  offer  and  in 
which  he  could  spend  his  days  almost 
uninterruptedly  at  the  laboratory  bench ; 
he  had  no  interest  in  teaching  or  ad- 
ministration. By  nature  cool  and  reserved 
in  personal  relationships,  he  was  neverthe- 
less always  ready  to  help  a  colleague  from 
his  own  store  of  knowledge;  he  in  turn 
drew  inspiration  from  his  contacts  with 
others  and  from  his  keen  and  knowledge- 
able interest  in  their  researches,  even  in 
fields  far  removed  from  his  own. 

King  retired  before  he  needed  to,  going 
to  live  near  Wimborne  where  he  spent  the 
last  years  of  his  Ufe  happily  absorbed  in 
his  scientific  hobby  of  amateur  entomo- 
logy. He  died  there  20  February  1956, 
being  survived  by  his  wife,  Elsie  Maud, 
daughter  of  Joseph  Croft,  master  tailor, 
whom  he  had  married  in  1923,  and  their 
only  child,  a  son. 

lOng  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1933  and 
was  awarded  the  Hanbury  medal  of  the 
Pharmaceutical  Society  (1941)  and  the 
Addingham  gold  medal  of  the  William 
Hoffman  Wood  Trust  (1952);  he  was 
appointed  C.B.E.  in  1950. 

[Sir  Charles  Harington  in  Biographical 
Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ii, 
1956 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

C.  R.  Harington. 

KINGDON-WARD,  FRANCIS 

(FRANK)  (1885-1958),  plant  collector, 
explorer,  and  author,  younger  child  and 
only  son  of  Harry  Marshall  Ward  [q.v.], 
botanist,  was  born  6  November  1885  in 
Manchester  where  his  father  was  lecturer 
in  botany  at  the  Owens  College.  His 
mother  was  Selina  Mary  Kingdon.  He 
received  his  early  education  at  St.  Paul's 
School,  went  up  to  Christ's  College,  Cam- 
bridge, as  a  scholar,  and  graduated  with 
second  class  honours  in  part  i  of  the 
natural  sciences  tripos  in  1906.  In  the 
following  year  he  took  a  short-term  ap- 
pointment as  teacher  at  the  Shanghai 
Pubhc  School  and  in  1909  made  his  first 
exploratory  journey  into  the  interior  of 
China.  He  was  accompanied  by  an  Ameri- 
can zoologist,  Malcolm  P.  Anderson,  and 
they  travelled  to  Tatsienlu  in  Szechwan  and 
also  reached  Kansu.  Kingdon-Ward  made 
a  small  collection  of  botanical  specimens 
on  this  expedition  and  this  experience  so 
appealed   to   his   restless   and   inquiring 


nature  that  it  determined  the  future'course 
of  his  life.  He  became  a  professional  plant 
collector  and  was  first  commissioned  in 
1911  on  behalf  of  Bees  of  Liverpool. 

Apart  from  the  periods  of  the  two  world 
wars  he  was  constantly  engaged  over 
nearly  fifty  years  on  botanical  exploration 
under  various  auspices  and  for  various 
patrons.  Before  his  second  marriage  in 
1947  he  preferred  to  travel  alone  and  his 
financial  resources  were  usually  such  that 
he  had  to  live  frugally  and  austerely  on 
the  local  food.  His  prolonged  journeys, 
always  amongst  mountains  where  com- 
munications were  poor,  were  only  possible 
because  of  his  immense  energy  and 
endurance.  He  returned  again  and  again 
to  remote  areas  and  undertook  some 
twenty-five  expeditions  to  the  unexplored 
mountain  regions  where  India,  China, 
and  Burma  meet.  Here  and  in  the  neigh- 
bouring countries  he  amassed  huge  collec- 
tions and  introduced  to  cultivation  in 
Great  Britain  and  America  numerous 
attractive  plants.  The  area  is  excessively 
rich  in  desirable  species  for  gardens 
and  Kingdon-Ward  selected  numbers  of 
Rhododendrons,  Primulas,  Meconopsis, 
Gentians,  and  Lilies,  many  of  which  are 
now  established  in  Britain  and  elsewhere. 
In  the  field  he  took  great  trouble  to  select 
only  the  best  forms  and  by  marking  these 
while  in  flower  he  was  able  later  in  the 
season  to  collect  seeds.  Probably  his  best- 
known  introduction  is  the  blue  poppy, 
Meconopsis  hetonicifolia^  which  is  now  one 
of  the  most  prized  garden  plants.  He  had 
an  excellent  working  knowledge  of  several 
plant  groups  and  in  the  intervals  between 
his  expeditions  he  identified  his  speci- 
mens and,  alone  or  in  collaboration  with 
specialists,  described  a  number  of  new 
species  especially  of  Rhododendron  and 
Primula.  His  fully  documented  material, 
which  is  represented  in  the  national  her- 
baria of  Britain  and  also  in  institutions 
overseas,  revealed  his  keen  observation  of 
botanical  detail  and  his  understanding  of 
plant  ecology. 

The  problems  of  plant  distribution  posed 
by  his  field  experience  intrigued  Kingdon- 
Ward  and  his  published  contributions 
to  the  study  of  plant  geography  were 
noteworthy.  Despite  objections  from 
geologists  and  geographers  he  was  firmly 
convinced  that  the  axis  of  the  Himalayan 
range  extended  eastwards  from  the  loop 
of  the  Tsangpo  across  the  tremendous 
gorge  country  into  South-West  China. 
This  opinion  was  based  on  the  observa- 
tions made  over  many  years  of  travel  in 


587 


Kingdon-Ward 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


the  region,  that  the  rain  screen  formed  by 
the  main  range  does  not  end  at  the 
Tsangpo  Gorge  but  is  traceable  across  the 
terrific  longitudinal  mountain- ranges  into 
North- West  Yunnan.  By  this  theory  the 
rain  screen  acted  as  a  barrier  for  north- 
ward or  southward  dispersal  of  plants  but 
allowed  western  or  eastern  parallel  exten- 
sions north  and  south  of  the  screen.  Thus  a 
plausible  explanation  may  be  given  to 
the  striking  similarities  in  the  flora  and 
fauna  of  the  Himalayas  and  South- West 
China. 

Kingdon-Ward  was  a  prolific  writer  and 
contributed  many  articles  to  magazines, 
periodicals,  and  scientific  journals.  He 
wrote  some  twenty-five  books,  mostly 
descriptive  of  his  expeditions  and  their 
botanical  results,  of  which  the  most 
significant  were:  The  Land  of  the  Blue 
Poppy  (1913),  In  Farthest  Burma  (1921), 
The  Mystery  Rivers  of  Tibet  (1923),  The 
Romance  of  Plant  Hunting  (1924),  From 
China  to  Hkamti  Long  (1924),  The  Riddle 
of  the  Tsangpo  Gorges  (1926),  Plant 
Hunting  on  the  Edge  of  the  World  (1930), 
Plant  Hunting  in  the  Wilds  (1931),  ^  Plant 
Hunter  in  Tibet  (1934),  The  Romance  of 
Gardening  (1935),  Plant  Hunter's  Paradise 
(1937),  Assam  Adventure  (1941),  Burma's 
Icy  Mountains  (1949),  Plant  Hunter  in 
Manipur  (1952),  Return  to  the  Irrawaddy 
(1956).  His  notable  expeditions  which 
contributed  so  much  to  the  geographical 
and  botanical  understanding  of  the  regions 
he  visited  were  as  follows:  West  China, 
1909-10,  1911,  1913,  1921-3;  North 
Burma,  1914,  1919,  1926,  1930-31,  1937, 
1938-9,  1942,  1953;  South-East  Tibet, 
1924,  1933,  1935;  Assam,  1927-8,  1935, 
1938,  1946,  1948,  1949;  French  Indo- 
China,  1929 ;  Thailand,  1941 ;  East  Mani- 
pur, 1948;  Assam-Tibet  frontier,  1950; 
Mount  Victoria,  West  Burma,  1956. 

Kingdon-Ward  received  many  honours. 
The  Royal  Horticultural  Society  awarded 
him  the  Victoria  medal  of  honour  in  1932 
and  in  1934  the  Veitch  memorial  medal 
for  his  explorations  and  introduction  of 
new  plants.  From  the  Royal  Geographical 
Society  in  1930  he  received  its  highest 
honour,  the  Founder's  medal,  and  in  1916 
and  1924  the  society  also  awarded  him  the 
Cuthbert  Peek  grant.  The  Massachusetts 
Horticultural  Society  presented  him  with 
the  George  Robert  White  memorial  medal 
in  1934.  The  Royal  Scottish  Geographical 
Society  recognized  his  achievements  with 
the  award  of  the  Livingstone  medal  in 
1936.  In  1952  for  his  services  to  horti- 
culture he  received  the  O.B.E. 


In  1923  Kingdon-Ward  married 
Florinda  Norman-Thompson,  daughter  of 
a  landed  proprietor  in  Ireland ;  there  were 
two  daughters  of  the  marriage  which  was 
dissolved  in  1937.  In  1947  he  married 
Jean,  daughter  of  Sir  Albert  Sortain 
Romer  Macklin,  formerly  puisne  judge, 
High  Court,  Bombay.  Kingdon-Ward  died 
in  London  8  April  1958.  A  portrait  by 
Miss  E.  M.  Gregson  is  in  the  possession  of 
the  family. 

[The  Times,  10  April  1958 ;  Nature,  31  May 
1958;  Journal  of  the  Royal  Horticultural 
Society,  May  1959;  E.  H.  M.  Cox,  Plant- 
Hunting  in  China,  1945;  Frank  Kingdon- 
Ward,  Pilgrimage  for  Plants,  1960 ;  personal 
knowledge.]  G.  Taylor. 

KINNEAR,  Sir  NORMAN  BOYD  (1882- 
1957),  ornithologist,  was  born  in  Edin- 
burgh 11  August  1882,  the  younger  son  of 
Charles  George  Hood  Kinnear,  of  Drum, 
architect,  and  colonel  of  the  Midlothian 
Volunteer  Artillery,  by  his  wife,  Jessie 
Jane,  daughter  of  Wellwood  Herries  Max- 
well, of  Munches,  formerly  M.P.  for  the 
stewartry  of  Kirkcudbright,  and  a  grand- 
daughter of  Sir  William  Jardine  [q.v.].  He 
was  educated  at  the  Edinburgh  Academy 
and  Trinity  College,  Glenalmond,  and 
subsequently  went  to  the  Duke  of  Rich- 
mond and  Gordon's  estate  office  as 
a  pupil,  and  later  acted  as  assistant  in  an 
estate  office  in  Lanarkshire.  Having  since 
childhood  been  devoted  to  the  study  of 
natural  history,  particularly  birds  and 
mammals,  in  1905  he  became  a  voluntary 
assistant  at  the  Royal  Scottish  Museum 
under  W.  Eagle  Clarke  where  he  was 
engaged  in  identifying  the  skin  collections 
of  birds.  He  accompanied  Clarke  on  his 
expeditions  to  Fair  Isle  to  assist  in  making 
observations  on  bird  migration.  In  the 
spring  of  1907  he  made  a  voyage  on 
a  whaler  to  Greenland  seas  and  collected 
natural  history  specimens,  chiefly  birds, 
which  he  presented  to  the  Royal  Scottish 
Museum. 

In  November  1907  Kinnear  was  ap- 
pointed officer-in-charge  of  the  museum  of 
the  Bombay  Natural  History  Society  and 
shortly  after  became  one  of  the  editors  of 
its  journal.  In  1911  he  organized  and 
directed  a  systematic  survey  of  the  mam- 
mals of  India,  Burma,  and  Ceylon,  to 
provide  material  for  a  comprehensive 
study  of  the  status,  variation,  and  distribu- 
tion of  the  mammals  of  the  'India  region'. 
Kinnear  personally  selected  the  areas  in 
which  the  collectors  should  work  and  also 
assembled  the  large  collections  obtained 


588 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Kirk 


and  provisionally  identified  and  cata- 
logued them  before  dispatch  to  the  British 
Museum  in  London. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  Kinnear  made 
several  attempts  to  join  the  Indian  Army 
in  order  to  go  on  active  service,  but  was 
not  permitted  to  do  so;  but  he  served 
in  the  Bombay  Volunteer  Rifles  and,  in 
addition,  in  1915-19  acted  as  intelligence 
officer  for  the  Bombay  Defended  Port. 
He  was  twice  mentioned  in  dispatches. 

In  1920  Kinnear  returned  to  Britain  to 
become  an  assistant  in  the  department  of 
zoology  of  the  British  Museum  (Natural 
History);  he  was  appointed  assistant 
keeper  in  1928,  deputy  keeper  in  charge 
of  birds  in  1936,  and  keeper  of  zoology  in 
1945.  In  1947,  on  the  day  after  he  had 
reached  the  age  of  retirement,  it  was  an- 
nounced that  he  had  been  appointed 
director  of  the  museum,  an  exceptional 
step,  and  one  which  was  a  great  tribute  to 
his  personal  qualities.  He  was  the  first 
ornithologist  to  assume  this  position 
which  he  held  for  three  years.  He  was 
appointed  C.B.  in  1948  and  knighted  in 
1950. 

Kinnear  joined  the  British  Ornitho- 
logists' Union  at  the  age  of  twenty  and 
for  fifty-five  years  rendered  notable  ser- 
vice both  to  ornithology  in  general  and 
to  the  Union  in  particular.  He  was  its 
president  in  1943-8  and  after  the  war  did 
much  to  re-establish  cordial  relations  with 
ornithologists  in  other  countries.  He  was 
editor  of  the  Bulletin  of  the  British 
Ornithologists'  Club  from  1925  to  1930. 
He  was  also  much  interested  in  bird  pro- 
tection and  was  appointed  a  member  of 
the  British  section  of  the  International 
Coimcil  for  Bird  Preservation  in  1935, 
becoming  chairman  in  1947,  a  position 
which  he  held  until  his  death.  He  also 
served  on  the  Home  Office  advisory  com- 
mittee which  drew  up  the  proposals  for  the 
Protection  of  Birds  Act,  1954. 

An  active  supporter  of  the  National 
Trust,  Kinnear  joined  its  estates  commit- 
tee in  1935  and  the  executive  committee  in 
1942,  remaining  a  member  of  both  until 
his  death.  He  was  a  vice-president  of  the 
Society  for  the  Promotion  of  Nature 
Reserves  and  took  part  in  the  work  of  the 
investigation  committees  organized  by 
the  society  which  led  to  the  formation  of 
the  Nature  Conservancy.  He  was  appointed 
a  member  of  the  Conservancy  on  its 
establishment  in  1949  and  served  his  full 
term  of  office  until  1955  and  also  served  on 
a  number  of  its  conunittees.  He  was  a  fel- 
low of  the  Zoological  Society  of  London, 


for  many  years  served  on  its  council,  and 
was  elected  a  vice-president.  He  was  also 
a  fellow  of  the  Linnean  Society  of  London. 

Most  of  Kinnear's  published  work, 
which  appeared  chiefly  in  the  Ibis  and  the 
Journal  of  the  Bombay  Natural  History 
Society,  dealt  with  birds,  especially  the 
avifauna  of  the  East,  including  central 
and  south  Arabia,  Indo-China,  north-east 
Burma,  and  south-east  Tibet.  He  de- 
scribed a  number  of  new  forms  in  the 
Bulletin  of  the  British  Ornithologists' 
Club  and  was  responsible  for  the  zoolo- 
gical notes  in  the  publications  of  the 
Hakluyt  Society.  He  was  particularly 
interested  in  the  early  ornithologists  and 
did  much  work  on  Cook's  voyages  and  the 
records  made  by  his  naturalists. 

Kinnear's  memory  was  phenomenal  and 
he  could  quote  statements  and  references 
with  the  greatest  accuracy  and  detail,  no 
matter  if  they  dated  back  thirty  years  or 
more.  He  also  made  copious  notes,  mostly 
on  small  pieces  of  paper,  but  writing  did 
not  come  easily  to  him  and  he  was  far 
more  inclined  to  place  his  knowledge  at 
the  disposal  of  others  and  to  help  their 
work  to  reach  publication.  He  always  took 
infinite  trouble  and  showed  great  courtesy 
to  anyone  who  asked  his  help,  no  matter 
how  young  or  unimportant.  His  retiring 
nature  sometimes  resulted  in  an  apparent 
gruffness ;  he  did  not  care  for  committees 
and  certainly  disliked  taking  the  chair, 
but  his  great  sense  of  duty  impelled  him  to 
undertake  these  tasks  where  his  wide 
knowledge  and  experience  were  only 
equalled  by  his  tact,  understanding,  and 
ability  to  smooth  down  ruffled  feelings. 
Although  specializing  in  birds,  Kinnear 
was  a  good  general  naturalist  and  was 
equally  interested  in  mammals,  insects, 
and  plants.  He  enjoyed  shooting  and 
fishing,  but  gardening  was  his  greatest 
hobby. 

In  1913  Kinnear  married  Gwendolin 
Beatrice  Langford,  daughter  of  William 
Wright  Millard,  a  medical  practitioner  in 
Edinburgh,  and  had  two  daughters.  He 
died  at  his  home  in  Wimbledon  on  his 
seventy-fifth  birthday,  11  August  1957. 

[Journal  of  the  Bombay  Natural  History 
Society,  December  1957  ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]         P.  BarcIxAY-Smith. 

KIRK,  KENNETH  ESCOTT  (1886- 
1954),  bishop  of  Oxford,  was  born  21 
February  1886  in  Sheffield,  the  eldest 
child  of  Frank  Herbert  Kirk,  secretary 
and  director  of  Samuel  Osborn  &  Co.  of 
the  Clyde  Steel  and  Iron  Works,  Sheffield; 


589 


Kirk 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


and  his  wife,  Edith  Escott.  His  grand- 
father, John  Kirk,  was  a  well-known 
Wesleyan  Methodist  minister  in  the 
neighbourhood  and  Kirk  was  baptized 
at  the  Wesley  chapel,  Fulwood  Road, 
Sheffield.  When  he  was  about  twelve 
years  old  his  family  joined  the  Church  of 
England  and  he  was  subsequently  brought 
up  as  an  Anglican. 

Kirk  was  educated  at  the  Royal  Gram- 
mar School,  Sheffield,  and  St.  John's  Col- 
lege, Oxford,  where  he  was  a  Casberd 
scholar.  He  took  first  classes  in  honour 
moderations  (1906)  and  in  liter  ae 
humaniores  (1908).  In  1909  he  was  ap- 
pointed secretary  of  the  Student  Union's 
organization  for  looking  after  oriental 
students  in  London.  From  1910  to  1912  he 
was  warden  of  the  University  College  Hall 
at  EaUng,  and  assistant  to  the  professor  of 
philosophy  at  University  College,  London. 
He  was  ordained  deacon  in  1912  and  priest 
in  1913  and  was  curate  of  Denaby  Main, 
Yorkshire,  from  1912  to  1914.  In  1913  he 
was  awarded  the  senior  Denyer  and  John- 
son scholarship  and  in  the  following  year 
made  tutor  of  Keble  College,  Oxford, 
although  the  outbreak  of  war  prevented 
him  from  coming  into  residence  until  1919. 
During  the  war  he  served  as  a  chaplain  to 
the  forces  in  France  and  Flanders,  and  his 
experiences  led  to  the  publication  of  his 
first  book,  A  Study  of  Silent  Minds,  in 
1918  and  directed  his  thoughts  to  the 
subject  of  moral  theology. 

After  the  war  he  returned  to  Oxford, 
and  in  1919  was  elected  a  prize  fellow  of 
Magdalen,  which  office  he  held,  together 
with  his  tutorship  at  Keble,  until  he  was 
appointed  fellow  and  chaplain  of  Trinity 
in  1922.  In  1920  he  published  Some 
Principles  of  Moral  Theology,  to  be  fol- 
lowed in  1925  and  1927  by  its  two  sequels. 
Ignorance,  Faith  and  Conformity,  and 
Conscienx:e  and  its  Problems.  The  study  of 
moral  theology  which  had  flourished  in 
England  in  the  seventeenth  century  had 
in  the  two  succeeding  centuries  been  much 
neglected,  and  Kirk's  three  books  were 
pioneer  works  which  have  done  much  to 
revive  interest  in  the  subject  in  the 
Church  of  England.  He  became  reader  in 
moral  theology  in  1927  and  was  the 
obvious  successor  to  R.  L.  Ottley  as 
regius  professor  of  moral  and  pastoral 
theology  and  canon  of  Christ  Church,  to 
which  he  was  appointed  in  1933. 

In  1928  Kirk  delivered  the  Bampton 
lectures  which  were  published  in  1931 
under  the  title  The  Vision  of  God.  This  is 
generally  considered  his  greatest  book  and 


is  a  work  of  inmiensely  wide  learning  and 
insight.  He  also  contributed  essays  on 
subjects  of  dogmatic  theology  to  the 
volumes  Essays  Catholic  and  Critical  (1926) 
and  Essays  on  the  Trinity  and  the  Incarna- 
tion (1928),  and  in  1935  published  a 
volume  of  highly  characteristic  sermons 
under  the  title  of  The  Fourth  River.  He 
took  the  degrees  of  B.D.  in  1922  and  D.D. 
in  1926. 

In  addition  to  his  academic  distinctions 
Kirk  was  an  active  and  influential  tutor 
and  college  chaplain,  and  also  played  an 
important  part  in  university  administra- 
tion. In  1921  he  was  appointed  controller 
of  lodgings  in  the  university  and  in  the 
course  of  the  next  few  years  he  built  up 
this  office  into  a  system  of  supervising  and 
licensing  lodgings  which  was  of  great 
benefit  to  the  undergraduates. 

Kirk's  distinction  and  many-sided 
abilities  made  him  an  obvious  candidate 
for  a  bishopric,  and  on  the  resignation  of 
T.  B.  Strong  [q.v.]  in  1937  he  was  ap- 
pointed bishop  of  Oxford.  He  was  conse- 
crated in  St.  Paul's  Cathedral  on  30 
November  and  enthroned  at  Christ  Church 
on  8  December.  The  exceptionally  large 
diocese  taxed  his  powers  of  administration 
to  the  full.  He  decided  that  it  ought  to  be 
worked  on  the  basis  of  the  three  counties 
of  Oxfordshire,  Buckinghamshire,  and 
Berkshire  which  composed  it.  Each  of 
these  counties  already  constituted  an  arch- 
deaconry, and  the  archdeacon  of  Bucking- 
ham was  bishop  suffragan  of  Buckingham, 
while  the  archdeacon  of  Oxford  was  also 
in  episcopal  orders.  So  that  permanent 
episcopal  care  might  be  provided  for  each 
of  the  three  counties  Kirk  secured  the 
revival  of  the  suffragan  bishopric  of 
Reading  for  Berkshire  and  the  creation  of  a 
new  suffragan  see  of  Dorchester  for  Oxford- 
shire. Kirk  had  inherited  to  the  full  his 
father's  business  ability  and  he  gave  par- 
ticular attention  to  the  finances  of  the 
diocese.  He  transferred  the  whole  adminis- 
tration of  the  diocese  to  Oxford  from 
Cuddesdon  and  never  himself  took  up 
residence  there. 

As  bishop  of  Oxford  he  managed  to  re- 
tain a  much  closer  touch  with  the  life  of 
the  university  than  had  any  of  his  recent 
predecessors.  He  was  a  delegate  of  the 
University  Press,  honorary  fellow  of  St. 
John's  and  Trinity  colleges,  president  of 
the  Oxford  University  Church  Union  and 
a  much  sought-after  preacher  in  the 
university  church,  college  chapels,  and 
other  churches  frequented  by  under- 
graduates. During  the  latter  part  of  his 


S80 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Kirkwood 


episcopate  he  held  every  term  a  simple 
and  informal  confirmation  service  for 
members  of  the  university,  at  which  his 
characteristically  original  and  carefully 
thought  out  addresses  always  made  a  deep 
impression.  Shortly  before  becoming  a 
bishop  he  published  a  valuable  Commen- 
tary on  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  (1937) ; 
in  1939  he  edited  and  contributed  to  the 
volume  called  The  Study  of  Theology ;  and 
in  1946  he  published  a  small  book  on  the 
Church  Dedications  of  the  Oxford  Diocese. 

As  well  as  being  an  administrator  and 
a  figure  in  academic  life  Kirk  was  very 
much  a  pastoral  bishop.  He  had  a  singular 
gift  for  adapting  his  style  of  preaching  to 
widely  differing  congregations;  at  paro- 
chial gatherings  he  made  a  point  of  speak- 
ing individually  to  as  many  as  he  could, 
and  all  to  whom  he  spoke  felt  that  he  was 
interested  in  them  as  persons.  He  liked  to 
attend  clerical  gatherings  not  as  bishop  of 
.fit  *i^»^^ut  as  Dr.  Kirk  who  had  come  to 
Sfscli^d  common  problems  with  fellow 
priests.  No  bishop  was  more  free  of 
pompousness  and  yet  he  was  never  with- 
out great  personal  dignity.  Throughout 
the  whole  diocese  he  inspired  a  deep 
affection  which  manifested  itself  to  a  re- 
markable degree  after  his  death. 

In  the  Church  at  large  Kirk's  episcopate 
was  remarkable  in  a  number  of  ways.  In 
1938  he  became  chairman  of  the  Advisory 
Council  on  Religious  Communities  in  the 
Church  of  England  which  had  been  set  up 
a  few  years  before  to  help  the  bishops  and 
the  communities  in  a  variety  of  problems 
which  arose  in  their  relationships.  In  addi- 
tion he  was  visitor  of  thirteen  communi- 
ties and  gained  an  intimate  knowledge  of 
their  life.  He  was  trusted  by  the  com- 
munities as  probably  no  bishop  before 
him,  and  he  was  able  to  perform  a  unique 
work  of  quietly  integrating  them  into  the 
general  life  of  the  Church  of  England.  The 
Directory  of  the  Religious  Life  which  was 
first  published  in  1943  was  compiled  under 
his  immediate  supervision. 

Kirk's  connection  with  the  Woodard 
Schools  dated  from  1924,  and  he  had 
shown  his  usefulness  to  such  an  extent 
that  early  in  1937,  before  his  nomination 
as  bishop  of  Oxford,  he  was  elected  pro- 
vost of  the  southern  division.  He  felt 
obliged,  on  account  of  other  work,  to 
resign  this  office  in  1944,  but  two  years  later 
he  became  the  first  president  of  the  entire 
Woodard  Corporation  (the  Corporation 
of  SS.  Mary  and  Nicholas).  His  knowledge 
of  the  schools  was  close  and  intimate 
and  he  did  much  to    place  the  finances 


of  the  corporation  on  a  sound  basis.  In 
1937  he  wrote  The  Story  of  the  Woodard 
Schools  (new  ed.  1952). 

Theologically  Kirk  had  always  been 
associated  with  the  Anglo-Catholic  wing 
of  the  Church  and,  although  his  adminis- 
tration of  the  diocese  was  wholly  free 
from  partisanship  and  he  was  trusted  and 
served  by  Anglo- Catholics  and  Evangeli- 
cals alike,  it  was  inevitable  that  in  the 
Church  at  large  he  should  be  regarded  by 
high  churchmen  as  their  natural  leader. 
Current  schemes  of  reunion  (particularly 
the  South  India  scheme)  led  him  into  the 
position  of  spokesman  for  Anglo- Catholics 
in  Convocation  and  at  the  1948  Lambeth 
Conference.  The  volume  The  Apostolic 
Ministry  edited  and  contributed  to  by  him 
in  1946  was  concerned  very  much  with  this 
subject.  He  took  a  strict  view  in  matters 
relating  to  divorce  and  his  position  was 
expounded  in  a  book  Marriage  and 
Divorce  originally  published  in  1933  but 
completely  revised  in  1948  in  the  light  of 
developments  in  Church  and  State  and  of 
his  own  experience  as  a  bishop. 

In  1921  Kirk  married  Beatrice  Caynton 
Yonge  (died  1934),  daughter  of  Francis 
Reynolds  Yonge  Radcliffe,  county  court 
judge  of  the  Oxfordshire  circuit.  They  had 
three  daughters  and  two  sons.  The  elder 
son,  Peter  Michael,  was  first  elected  a 
Conservative  member  of  Parliament  in 
1955. 

Kirk  died  in  Oxford  8  June  1954.  A  por- 
trait by  Harold  Knight  is  in  the  Diocesan 
Church  House,  North  Hinksey. 

[E.  W.  Kemp,  The  Life  and  Letters  of 
Kenneth  Escott  Kirk,  1959;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.]  Eric  Kemp. 

KIRKWOOD,  DAVID,  first  Baron 
Kirkwood  (1872-1955),  politician,  was 
born  at  Parkhead,  then  a  suburb  of  the 
city  of  Glasgow,  8  July  1872,  the  only 
surviving  son  of  John  Kirkwood  and  his 
wife,  Jean,  daughter  of  William  Brown. 
His  father  was  a  labourer  who  rose  to  be 
winding-master  in  a  weaving  mill  at  a  wage 
of  28s.  a  week  and  was  a  descendant  of  a 
family  of  farm  workers  who  had  migrated 
a  century  earlier  from  the  hamlet  of 
Gartmore  in  Perthshire  on  the  ancestral 
estate  of  R.  B.  Cunninghame  Graham 
[q.v.].  Kirkwood  was  compelled  through 
straitened  family  circumstances  to  leave 
school  (where  his  only  noteworthy  prize 
was  one  for  Bible  knowledge)  at  the  age  of 
twelve  and  take  employment  as  a  message 
boy  at  a  weekly  wage  of  3s.  6flf.  From  his 
first  post  he  was  speedily  dismissed  when 


591 


Kirkwood 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


a  visiting  factory  inspector  discovered  his 
age,  but  he  continued  in  similar  employ- 
ment until  at  the  age  of  fourteen  he  was 
apprenticed  as  an  engineer,  working  from 
6  a.m.  to  5.30  p.m.  for  a  weekly  wage  of  5s. 
At  twenty  he  became  a  member  of  the 
Amalgamated  Society  of  Engineers.  Three 
years  later,  when  working  at  Parkhead 
Forge,  controlled  by  William  Beardmore 
(later  Lord  Invernairn,  q.v.),  he  took  part 
in  a  strike  against  what  was  claimed  to  be 
a  dilution  of  labour  when  unskilled  men, 
paid  at  labourers'  rates,  were  put  on  to 
skilled  engineers'  work.  At  the  conclusion 
of  the  strike,  when  the  engineers  were 
defeated,  Kirkwood  and  one  other  were 
informed  that  they  would  never  again  be 
allowed  inside  the  work  gates.  Neverthe- 
less he  returned  there  in  1910,  having  in 
the  meantime  worked  at  John  Brown's  on 
Clydebank,  at  the  Mount  Vernon  Steel 
Works  where  he  became  engineer  fore- 
man, and  elsewhere.  In  his  spare  time  he 
had  attended  evening  classes,  temperance 
society  meetings,  and  had  read  omni- 
vorously  in  romantic  Scots  history  and 
ballad  literature.  By  1910  he  was  taking 
a  prominent  part  in  trade-union  affairs, 
and  it  was  not  long  before  he  became  con- 
vener of  shop  stewards  at  Parkhead  Forge. 
He  joined  the  Socialist  Labour  Party  but 
at  the  outbreak  of  the  war  of  1914-18  he 
left  it  for  the  Independent  Labour  Party 
and  the  Union  of  Democratic  Control, 
coming  decisively  under  the  influence  of 
Ramsay  MacDonald  and  John  Wheatley 
[qq.v.]. 

In  1915  Kirkwood  led  an  agitation  to 
get  the  Clyde  engineers  an  increase  of  2d. 
per  hour  on  the  weekly  wage  of  38s.  36?., 
although  he  worked  hard  to  avoid  the 
ensuing  strike  on  the  ground  that  the 
nation  was  at  war  and  that  their  brothers 
were  in  the  trenches  and  short  of  guns  and 
at  once  accepted  an  offer  of  Id.  an  hour. 
But  it  was  his  outspoken  antagonism  to 
the  Munitions  Act,  which  outraged  his 
sense  of  personal  freedom,  that  brought 
him  into  national  prominence.  Lloyd 
George  went  to  Glasgow  to  charm  Kirk- 
wood and  his  associates,  without  avail. 
About  that  time  fuel  was  being  added  to 
the  fire  of  the  engineers'  discontent  by 
a  widespread  raising  of  house  rents; 
property  owners  were  taking  advantage 
of  the  competition  for  accommodation 
for  munition  workers,  and  there  were 
dramatic  instances  of  soldiers'  wives  being 
evicted  for  inability  to  pay  the  increased 
rents.  Kirkwood  threw  himself  into  the 
storm  of  protest.  He  always  denied  that  he 


had  ever  urged  a  strike  of  munition 
workers,  but  the  Government  used  its 
powers  under  the  Defence  of  the  Realm 
Act  and  in  March  1916  deported  him  to 
Edinburgh  as  a  trouble  maker ;  there  for 
fourteen  months  he  remained,  persis- 
tently and  indignantly  refusing  to  sign  any 
document  promising  'good  behaviour'  as 
a  condition  of  his  return  to  the  Clyde. 
Finally  the  order  was  revoked  without 
Kirkwood' s  signing  any  document,  and 
through  the  intervention  of  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  Kirkwood  was  employed  as 
a  manager  at  Beardmore's  Mile-End  shell 
factory.  There  he  operated  a  bonus  for 
production  system :  and  doubled  the  out- 
put of  his  department. 

At  the  general  election  of  1918  he  stood 
for  the  Dumbarton  Burghs  constituency 
(Dumbarton  and  Clydebank)  but  was 
defeated.  On  31  January  1919  there  was 
a  massed  demonstration  in  front  of  the 
municipal  buildings  which  culmii^  injlixr^ 
a  riot.  Kirkwood  left  the  builtfcfflgis  to 
appeal  for  order  and  restraint  but  in  the 
melee  he  was  struck  by  a  police  baton  and 
rendered  unconscious ;  a  press  photograph 
of  the  incident  ensured  his  acquittal  of 
complicity  in  a  subsequent  trial  for  sedition. 
Later  in  the  year  he  entered  Glasgow 
corporation  as  a  representative  of  the 
Mile-End  ward,  having  a  majority  of  over 
3,000  on  a  poll  of  7,300.  In  the  corporation 
he  distinguished  himself  chiefly  in  housing 
problems  and  was  a  keen  advocate  of 
municipal  housing  financed  by  interest- 
free  capital  lent  by  the  national  Treasury. 

In  1922,  with  a  majority  of  7,380, 
Kirkwood  was  elected  member  of  Parlia- 
ment for  Dumbarton  Burghs,  a  con- 
stituency which  he  represented  until  an 
electoral  area  rearrangement  in  1950, 
when  he  represented  East  Dunbarton- 
shire. He  was  perhaps  the  most  vehement 
of  all  the  Clydesiders  in  Parliament  and 
twice  he  was  suspended;  in  March  1925, 
when  his  suspension  was  clearly  due 
to  a  misunderstanding  on  the  part  of 
the  chairman  of  committees,  the  entire 
Opposition,  led  by  Ramsay  MacDonald, 
walked  out  in  protest ;  and  a  few  days  later 
the  suspension  was  withdrawn  on  the 
motion  of  Stanley  Baldwin.  In  November 
1937  Kirkwood  asked  a  question  about 
allowances  for  the  unemployed,  and  being 
somewhat  curtly  referred  to  previous 
replies  he  lost  his  temper,  and  in  the 
ensuing  turmoil  insulted  the  Speaker.  He 
was  a  keen  member  of  the  Empire  Parlia- 
mentary Association  and  in  1928  was 
a  member  of  its  delegation  which  toured 


D.N.B.  19Sl-I960t 


Klein 


Canada.  He  promoted  a  bill  in  July  1924 
to  have  the  Stone  of  Destiny  restored  to 
Scotland,  getting  a  first  reading,  after 
a  division,  for  his  bill,  but  that  was  the 
end  of  it. 

Always  the  sentimental  and  romantic 
Scot,  ready  with  quotations  from  the 
Bible,  Robert  Burns,  and  Scots  proverbs, 
and  with  a  great  sense  of  humour,  he 
toured  the  country  as  a  propagandist  for 
socialism.  A  sturdy  fighter,  he  yet  made 
friends  in  all  the  political  parties,  and  the 
supreme  achievement  of  his  public  career 
came  when,  almost  unaided,  he  secured 
a  resumption  of  work  on  the  Cunarder, 
the  Queen  Mary,  which  had  stood  half- 
finished  on  the  stocks,  a  gaunt  reminder 
of  the  great  depression  on  Clydeside.  He 
was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council  in  1948, 
was  given  the  freedom  of  Clydebank  in 
1951,  and  in  the  same  year  was  created 
a  baron.  In  the  House  of  Lords  he  made 
one  forceful  and  noteworthy  plea  (7  May 
1952)  that  the  working  people  should  be 
given  'wise,  enthusiastic  leadership  and, 
above  all,  unselfish  example'  by  their 
employers. 

In  1899  Kirkwood  married  Elizabeth 
(died  1956),  daughter  of  Robert  Smith,  of 
Parkhead;  they  had  four  sons  and  two 
daughters.  He  died  in  Glasgow  16  April 
1955  and  was  succeeded  in  his  title  by  his 
third  and  elder  surviving  son,  David 
(1903-1970). 

[David  Kirkwood,  My  Life  of  Revolt,  1935  ; 
Glasgow  Herald,  18  April  1955 ;  personal 
knowledge.]  Thomas  Johnston. 

KLEIN,  MELANIE  (1882-1960),  psycho- 
analyst, was  born  30  March  1882,  in 
Vienna,  the  youngest  of  four  children.  Her 
father,  Moritz  Reizes,  doctor  of  medicine, 
Jewish  scholar,  and  Unguist,  came  from 
a  rigidly  orthodox  family  of  Polish 
nationality.  Her  mother,  Libusa  Deutsch, 
of  Deutsch-ICreuz  in  the  province  of 
Burgenland  (then  in  Hungary),  came  of 
a  more  liberal-minded  background;  her 
maternal  grandfather  was  a  rabbi  known 
for  his  tolerance  and  his  progressive  views. 
She  determined  to  study  medicine 
while  still  at  the  lycee,  and  in  spite  of 
straitened  circumstances  managed  to 
transfer  to  the  gynmasium  where  her 
aptitude  for  learning  and  her  capacity  for 
enjoying  life  and  friendship  found  full 
scope.  But  her  studies  were  cut  short, 
partly  by  financial  difficulties,  but  chiefly 
because  of  her  early  marriage  to  a  second 
cousin,  Arthur  Stephan  Klein,  a  chemical 
engineer,  of  Ruzomberok  (then  in  Slo- 


vakia). His  father,  Jacob  Klein,  owned 
a  paper  mill  and  a  small  bank. 

They  had  a  daughter  (later  Melitta 
Schmideberg,  an  analyst)  and  two  sons. 
By  the  time  her  younger  son  was  bom 
they  were  living  in  Budapest  where  they 
stayed  until  1919.  Her  husband's  work 
took  them  abroad,  and  for  a  short  time  she 
adopted  Swedish  nationality.  In  1923  their 
marriage  ended  in  divorce. 

While  in  Budapest,  Melanie  Klein, 
through  reading  Freud's  work,  became 
interested  in  psycho-analysis  and  was  her- 
self analysed  by  Sandor  Ferenczi,  who  was 
the  first  to  bring  out  her  gift  for  child 
analysis,  then  an  almost  untried  field.  She 
helped  him  in  his  children's  clinic ;  and  in 
1919  she  read  her  first  paper  to  the 
Hungarian  Psycho-Analytical  Society, 
'The  Development  of  a  Child'  (Inter- 
national Journal  of  Psycho-Analysis,  1921, 
Contributions  to  Psycho- Analysis,  1948), 
on  the  strength  of  which  she  was  made  a 
full  member.  (Iii  those  early  days  there 
was  no  official  training  for  psycho- 
analysts.) 

At  the  suggestion  of  Karl  Abraham, 
from  whom  she  had  more  analysis,  and 
who  was  the  chief  influence  in  her  work, 
she  went  to  Berlin  in  1921  and  began  to 
practise  in  the  Berlin  Psycho- Analytical 
Society.  Although  some  work  had  been 
done  on  children  over  the  age  of  six, 
almost  nothing  was  known  about^  the 
inental  fife  of  younger  children:  Freud's 
conclusions  were  drawn  from  the  analysis 
of  adults.  Her  first  patient  was  under 
three  years  old.  She  had  to  evolve  a  tech- 
nique which  would  give  her  access  to  the 
deeper  layers  of  the  child  mind,  which  she 
did  by  providing  her  patients  with  small 
toys  and  interpreting  their  free  play  and 
spontaneous  associations  in  the  same  way 
that  verbal  associations  are  interpreted  in 
adult  analysis.  Her  play-technique,  in 
a  modified  form,  is  still  standard  practice 
in  a  number  of  child  guidance  cUnics.  Her 
experience  with  children  was  of  great  use 
to  her  when  she  began  analysing  adults. 

In  1925,  at  the  invitation  of  Ernest 
Jones  [q.v.],  she  gave  six  lectures  on  child 
development  to  the  British  Psycho- 
Analytical  Society;  and  in  1926  she 
returned  with  her  younger  son  to  London, 
where  she  spent  the  rest  of  her  long,  hard- 
working, and  immensely  productive  life. 
She  was  naturalized  in  1934. 

Both  her  methods  and  her  findings 
aroused  intense  opposition  and,  among 
her  colleagues,  equally  strong  support. 
Controversy,    arising    in    the    Viennese 


Klein 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Society  but  soon  spreading  throughout 
the  psycho-analytic  world,  centred  round 
her  unmodified  application  of  Freudian 
techniques  to  child  analysis^ — she  would 
give  neither  advice,  reassurance,  nor  any 
educational  guidance;  also  her  findings 
were  found  shocking,  and  therefore 
unbelievable,  even  by  those  who  had  come 
to  accept  Freud's  views  on  child  sexuahty. 
Many  analysts  consider  that  she  attri- 
buted to  the  infant  mind  complicated 
processes  for  which  there  is  insufficient 
evidence.  The  debate  still  continues,  al- 
though without  the  degree  of  personal 
bitterness  with  which  it  was  carried  on 
during  her  lifetime. 

Her  detailed  knowledge  of  early  de- 
velopment enabled  her  to  confirm  directly 
what  Freud  had  inferred  from  adult 
material ;  she  extended  his  work  to  cover 
infant  development,  and  pushed  back  her 
own  observations  and  theories  to  the  first 
weeks  of  life.  Prior  to  her  work  there  was 
no  clinical  evidence  of  the  extent  to  which 
feeUngs  such  as  rage,  satisfaction,  fear, 
grief,  and  loss  are  present  almost  from 
birth,  together  with  the  beginnings  of 
guilt,  concern,  and  love  which  form  the 
basis  of  all  later  patterns  of  behaviour. 
Her  researches  into  the  infant  mind  led 
her  to  the  study  of  the  manic-depressive 
and  paranoid-schizoid  groups  of  mental 
disorder  and  their  roots  in  infancy,  which 
made  possible  the  treatment  of  patients 
hitherto  considered  beyond  the  reach  of 
psychotherapy.  In  addition  to  her  in- 
fluence on  theory  and  technique,  she  was 
to  see  before  her  death  a  fundamentally 
changed  social  attitude  towards  the  care 
and  education  of  children  (for  instance,  the 
realization  that  lasting  harm  can  be 
caused  by  emotional  as  well  as  physical 
deprivation),  which  can  be  traced  to  the 
pervasive  influence  of  her  work. 

To  the  end  of  her  life,  Melanie  Klein  was 
endowed  with  an  extraordinary  vitaUty 
and  a  mobile,  dehcate  beauty.  She  en- 
joyed meeting  people,  good  talk,  parties, 
and  was  an  enthusiastic  theatre-goer.  Her 
devotion  to  and  identification  with  her 
work  made  her  intolerant  of  attacks  and 
misconceptions;  those  who  criticized  her 
theories  could  find  in  her  a  passionate  and 
often  fierce  adversary.  But  her  direct  and 
open  understanding,  expressed  with  an 
unassuming,  rather  astringent  humour, 
made  her  the  most  stimulating  companion ; 
and  her  circle  of  friends,  among  them 
painters,  writers,  philosophers,  and 
musicians,  continued  to  grow  almost  up 
to   the   time   of  her   death   in    London 


22  September  1960.  A  painting  of  her  by 
Mme  Szekely-Kovacs  is  in  the  possession 
of  her  son,  Eric  Clyne.  A  drawing  by 
Feliks  Topolski  belongs  to  the  Melanie 
Klein  Trust,  and  there  are  a  number  of 
copies  in  existence.  The  Trust  was  formed 
in  1955  to  fiu*ther  her  work  and  that  of  her 
colleagues  through  the  publication  of 
books,  the  provision  of  scholarships  for 
the  training  of  analysts,  etc. 

Among  the  most  important  of  her  books 
are:  The  Psycho-Analysis  of  Children 
(1932),  Contributions  to  Psycho-Analysis 
(1948),  Envy  and  Gratitude  (1957),  and 
Narrative  of  a  Child  Analysis  (1961).  For 
a  full  bibliography  of  her  books  and  papers, 
see  the  International  Journal  of  Psycho- 
Analysis  (vol.  xlii,  1961).  New  Directions 
(1955),  a  collection  of  papers  presented  to 
her  on  her  seventieth  birthday,  shows  the 
extent  to  which  Kleinian  theory  and  prac- 
tice had  revolutionized  psycho-analysis  in 
applied  as  well  as  chnical  fields. 

[The  Times  and  Guardian,  23  September 
1960 ;  Melanie  Klein,  Contributions  to  Psycho- 
Analysis,  introduction  by  Ernest  Jones,  1948 ; 
Ernest  Jones,  Sigmund  Freud,  vol.  iii,  1957 ; 
Hanna  Segal,  Introduction  to  the  Work  of 
Melanie  Klein,  1964;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  Jean  MacGibbon. 

KNOX,  Sir  GEOFFREY  GEORGE 

(1884-1958),  diplomatist,  was  born  in 
Double  Bay,  New  South  Wales,  Australia, 
11  March  1884,  the  fourth  child  of  George 
Knox,  barrister,  of  Sydney,  and  his  wife, 
Jane  de  Brixton  Price.  He  was  a  grandson 
of  (Sir)  Edward  Knox,  one  of  the  great 
Australian  pioneers  who  had  gone  to 
Sydney  from  Denmark  in  1839.  Brought 
to  England  as  a  boy  and  educated  at 
Malvern  College,  Knox  maintained  only 
the  most  tenuous  connections  with 
Australia  throughout  the  rest  of  his  life. 
A  natural  linguist,  he  passed  the  searching 
examination  for  the  old  Levant  consular 
service  in  1906  and  after  two  years  (1906- 
8)  at  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  where, 
with  other  successful  candidates  for 
the  Levant  service,  he  studied  oriental 
languages,  he  started  his  career  in  Persia, 
which  was  at  that  time,  owing  to  Russian 
intrigue,  a  danger  spot  in  British  foreign 
affairs.  Here  his  knowledge  of  the  language 
and  his  abihty  to  mix  on  familiar  terms 
with  the  Persians,  the  finer  aspects  of 
whose  civilization  greatly  attracted  him, 
made  him  a  valuable  observer  and  repor- 
ter to  the  legation  in  Tehran.  From 
Persia  he  was  transferred  to  Cairo  in  1912 
and  was  in  Egypt  at  the  outbreak  of  war. 


594, 


DJ»T.B.  1951-1960 


Knox,  R.  A. 


In  1915,  when  British  forces  were  sent  to 
Salonika,  Knox  was  moved  there  to  help 
in  the  consulate -general  whose  work  had 
been  vastly  increased  by  the  demands  of 
the  mihtary.  As  operations  in  that  area 
developed  Knox  was  employed  on  special 
service  and,  much  to  his  amusement,  for 
nobody  was  less  like  a  naval  officer,  given 
an  honorary  commission  as  lieutenant 
R.N.V.R.  (1917),  receiving  eventually 
a  mention  in  dispatches. 

Shortly  before  war  ended  Kjiox  was 
recalled  to  the  Levant  consular  service 
and  sent  in  May  1919  to  Bucharest.  In 
1920  he  was  one  of  the  few  consular 
officers  transferred  to  the  diplomatic  ser- 
vice and  was  posted  to  Constantinople  as 
second  secretary  and  later  (1923)  first 
secretary.  In  1923  he  was  moved  to  Berlin 
where  he  served  for  two  fruitful  years 
under  the  redoubtable  but  inspiring  Lord 
D'Abernon  [q.v.].  From  Berlin  he  re- 
turned to  Constantinople  in  1926  with  the 
acting  rank  of  counsellor  and  remained 
there  until  1928. 

Knox's  health  had  been  affected  by  his 
service  in  the  Middle  East  and  for  some 
time  he  was  unemployed,  but  in  1931  he 
went  to  Madrid  as  counsellor.  In  1932  he 
was  selected  to  be  chairman  of  the  inter- 
national Saar  governing  commission  with 
the  rank  of  minister.  The  post  was  a  diffi- 
cult one,  demanding  the  exercise  of  great 
tact  and  firmness ;  and  at  the  end  of  the 
three  years  allotted  Knox  had  the  satis- 
faction of  bringing  his  work,  unmarred  by 
any  unfortimate  incident,  to  a  successful 
conclusion,  having  coped  with  notable 
vigour,  efficiency,  and  characteristic  in- 
dependence of  judgement  with  the  entirely 
novel  set  of  problems  confronting  him  as 
head  of  a  mixed  international  governing 
organization. 

In  October  1935  Knox  was  promoted 
minister  and  sent  to  Budapest.  After 
three  and  a  half  years  his  health  again 
broke  down  but  by  the  end  of  1939  he  had 
recovered  sufficiently  to  be  able  to  go  as 
ambassador  to  Rio  de  Janeiro,  where  he 
remained  until  his  retirement  in  1942.  He 
then  went  to  live  in  CaUfornia  and  died  in 
Tobago  6  April  1958.  He  was  unmarried. 
He  had  been  appointed  C.M.G.  in  1929 
and  K.C.M.G.  in  1935. 

In  1942  Knox  published  The  Last 
Peace  and  the  Next,  a  searing  and  well- 
documented  indictment  of  Prussian 
militarism  with  suggestions  for  avoiding 
the  mistakes  which  had  led  to  the  war  then 
in  progress,  but  in  the  turmoil  of  events  at 
home  it  passed  almost  unnoticed. 


Knox,  who  will  best  be  remembered  for 
his  work  in  the  Saar,  was  a  man  of  strong 
views,  tenaciously  held,  and  a  pronounced 
realist.  He  had  great  intellectual  powers 
which  he  exercised  somewhat  fitfully. 
With  jutting  chin  and  choleric,  even  pug- 
nacious, aspect,  he  was  no  compromiser 
where  his  own  affairs  were  concerned, 
and,  fully  conscious  of  his  capabilities, 
took  little  pains  to  endear  himself  to  his 
superiors.  But  for  his  friends  he  had 
a  warm  smile  and  an  infectious  laugh; 
was  happy  in  his  relations  with  his  foreign 
diplomatic  colleagues  and  highly  skilful  in 
his  professional  activities.  He  was  fond  of 
the  good  things  of  this  world  and  had  the 
means  to  ensure  their  enjoyment.  As  a 
result  he  sometimes  incurred,  though 
generally  unjustly,  for  he  had  a  great 
sense  of  duty,  accusations  of  neglecting 
those  less  agreeable  tasks  which  fall  to 
be  performed  by  British  representatives 
overseas.  It  is  a  measure  alike  of  his 
professional  abilities  and  his  powers  of 
persistence  that,  in  spite  of  considerable 
opposition  in  the  Foreign  Office,  he  suc- 
ceeded in  making  for  himself  such  a 
successful  career  and  avoided  being  sent 
not  only  to  posts  ruled  out  by  his  frail 
health  but  also  to  those  which  his  fas- 
tidious temperament  regarded  as  uncon- 
genial or  unworthy. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
David  Scott. 

KNOX,       RONALD      ARBUTHNOTT 

(1888-1957),  Roman  Catholic  priest  and 
translator  of  the  Bible,  was  born  17 
February  1888  at  Kibworth,  Leicester- 
shire, the  youngest  of  six  children  of  the 
rector,  the  Rev.  Edmund  Arbuthnott 
Knox  [q.v.],  later  Anglican  bishop  of 
Manchester,  and  his  first  wife,  Ellen 
Penelope,  daughter  of  Thomas  Valpy 
French  [q.v.],  bishop  of  Lahore.  His  eldest 
brother  was  E.  V.  Knox  (Evoe),  editor  of 
Punch  (1932-49).  He  was  educated  at 
Smnmer  Fields,  Oxford,  and  at  Eton, 
where  he  entered  college  as  the  senior 
scholar  of  his  year  and  became  captain  of 
the  school.  By  his  wit  and  felicity  in  the 
composition  of  verses,  alike  in  English, 
Latin,  and  Greek,  which  he  published 
under  the  title  of  Signa  Severa  (1906),  he 
gained  a  nationwide  reputation  such  as 
can  rarely  have  been  attained  by  anyone 
still  in  his  schooldays.  He  carried  that 
reputation  with  him  up  to  Balliol  College, 
Oxford,  whither  he  went  as  a  scholar. 
Although  he  unexpectedly  failed  to  get 
a  first  in  classical  moderations  owing  to 


595 


Knox,  R.  A. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


his  neglect  to  read  the  prescribed  books, 
he  won  the  Hertford  (1907),  Ireland 
(1908),  and  Craven  (1908)  scholarships 
and  the  Gaisford  Greek  verse  (1908)  and 
Chancellor's  Latin  verse  (1910)  prizes. 
He  was  elected  to  the  presidency  of  the 
Union  (1909),  took  his  first  in  literae 
humaniores  (1910),  and  by  epigram  and 
paradox  fully  maintained  his  reputation 
for  briUiance.  Countless  satirical  verses 
and  limericks  were,  not  always  correctly, 
ascribed  to  him. 

Although  his  father  was  a  leader  of  the 
Low  Church  party  in  the  Church  of 
England,  Ronald  Knox  had  from  his 
schooldays  taken  an  extreme  Anglo- 
CathoUc  position.  He  was  ordained  deacon 
(1911)  and  priest  (1912)  and  appointed 
a  fellow  (1910)  and  chaplain  (1912)  of 
Trinity  College,  Oxford.  In  the  few  years 
which  remained  before  the  outbreak  of 
war  he  played  a  leading  part  in  Anglican 
controversies  of  the  times,  championing 
the  claim  of  the  Church  of  England  to  be 
a  branch  of  the  Catholic  Church  and 
vigorously  combating  modernist  trends. 
In  Some  Loose  Stones  (1913)  he  accused 
those  of  that  school  of  thought  of  substi- 
tuting for  the  authority  of  the  Church  as 
the  test  of  truth  the  question  'How  much 
will  Jones  swallow  ?'  He  wrote  two  works 
of  great  brilliance  in  support  of  his  posi- 
tion— Absolute  and  Abitofhell  (1913)  in 
parody  of  Dryden  to  criticize  the  alleged 
disruptionary  theology  of  some  of  his 
fellow  chaplains  as  displayed  in  their 
publication  Foundations,  and  Reunion  All 
Bound  (1914)  in  parody  of  Swift  and  in 
satire  on  those  who  thought  that  religious 
unity  could  be  built  upon  other  than  a 
dogmatic  foundation. 

With  the  outbreak  of  war,  life  at  Oxford 
was  disrupted  and  Knox  taught  for  a  time 
at  Shrewsbury  School,  then  worked  at  the 
War  Office  (1916-18).  He  had  by  this 
time  become  increasingly  dissatisfied  with 
his  position  in  the  Anglican  Church  and  in 
1917  was  received  into  the  Roman  Catho- 
lic Church  at  Farnborough  Abbey,  pub- 
lishing A  Spiritual  Aeneid  in  1918  to 
explain  his  action.  He  received  Roman 
Catholic  orders  in  1919  and  taught  at  St. 
Edmund's  College,  Ware,  from  1918  until 
1926  when  he  was  appointed  chaplain  to 
the  Roman  Catholic  undergraduates  at 
Oxford,  where  he  remained  until  a  few 
months  before  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939. 
Throughout  these  years  he  maintained 
a  literary  output  of  books  of  various  sorts 
from  detective  stories  to  works  of  apolo- 
getics and  during  the  university  vacations 


gave  retreats  and  sermons  in  different 
parts  of  the  country  many  of  which  have 
been  republished  in  book  form.  He  per- 
haps made  himself  most  notorious  by 
a  broadcast  parody  in  January  1926  of  an 
announcement  on  the  B.B.C.  of  a  pre- 
tended outbreak  of  revolutionary  rioting 
in  London  which  was  taken  seriously  by 
some  simple-minded  listeners. 

Increasingly  Knox  found  that  his  duties 
at  Oxford  were  a  distraction  which  pre- 
vented him  from  the  serious  literary  work 
which  he  felt  to  be  his  main  vocation. 
He  had  formed  the  ambition  to  give  to  his 
co-religionists  a  new  English  version  of 
the  Bible,  more  true  to  the  original  and 
in  a  more  contemporary  idiom  than  the 
Douay  version.  The  bishops  encouraged 
him  in  the  hope  that  this  would  be 
accepted  as  an  official  version.  He  there- 
fore resigned  the  Oxford  chaplaincy, 
proposing  to  devote  himself  entirely  to 
his  biblical  work.  In  his  last  months  at 
Oxford  he  published  Let  Dons  Delight 
(1939),  artistically  perhaps  the  most 
triumphant  of  his  books.  It  consists  of 
a  series  of  conversations  in  an  imaginary 
Oxford  common-room  at  intervals  of 
fifty  years  from  the  time  of  Elizabeth  I 
to  1938.  In  each  conversation  the  senior 
fellow  is  the  junior  fellow,  and  the  only 
survivor,  of  the  previous  conversation. 
With  humour  and  subtlety  Knox  brings 
out  the  gradual  erosion  of  a  common  cul- 
ture, so  that  the  dons,  who  in  the  early 
years  all  shared  substantially  the  same 
interests,  by  the  later  years  are  hardly 
able  to  find  a  common  language. 

On  leaving  Oxford,  Knox  had  arranged 
to  live  at  Aldenham  in  Shropshire,  the 
home  of  Lord  and  Lady  Acton,  where  he 
looked  forward  to  a  life  wholly  free  from 
distraction.  No  sooner  was  he  installed, 
however,  than  war  broke  out,  and  a  girls' 
school  was  evacuated  there  from  London 
to  which  Knox  was  compelled  to  under- 
take the  duties  of  chaplain.  Nevertheless 
at  Aldenham  during  the  war  years,  and 
afterwards  at  Mells  in  Somerset  where  he 
went  to  live,  he  persevered  with  his  task  in 
spite  of  the  difficulties  until  it  was  com- 
pleted in  1955. 

After  the  Bible  his  next  great  work  was 
his  Enthusiasm  (1950).  Knox  had  always 
been  interested  in  the  phenomenon  of 
enthusiasm,  in  the  technical  theological 
sense — ^the  claim  of  those  who  assert  that 
they  hold  God  within  them  and  that  they 
are  possessed  of  a  special  revelation  of  His 
will.  Convinced  as  he  was  of  the  divine 
and  necessary  authority  of  the  Church, 


D^.B.  1951^1060 


Komisarjevsky 


he  was  naturally  unsympathetic  to  such 
individualistic  claims  and  believed  that 
they  had  wrought  much  havoc  in  the 
Christian  world,  particularly  in  the  seven- 
teenth and  eighteenth  centuries.  Had  the 
work,  which  he  had  to  some  extent  carried 
in  his  mind  throughout  all  his  adult  years, 
appeared  in  print  when  he  was  still  a 
young  man,  it  might  well  have  been 
deeply  controversial,  for  he  was  in  those 
years  full  of  a  young  man's  zest  for  con- 
troversy. In  middle  age  that  zest  had 
notably  abated  and  he  came  greatly  to 
dislike  religious  argxunent  and  to  doubt 
whether  it  ever  did  very  much  good.  As 
a  result  his  Enthusiasm  when  it  appeared, 
while  maintaining  his  full  religious  posi- 
tion, was  yet  much  more  a  work  of  objec- 
tive record  than  of  controversy.  As  such 
it  is  the  most  considerable  of  his  original 
works.  In  the  last  years  of  his  life  he 
completed  a  translation  of  the  Auto- 
biography of  Saint  Therese  of  Lisieux 
(1958) ;  his  translation  of  the  Imitation  of 
Christ  was  finished  by  another  hand,  and 
the  major  work  of  apologetics  which  he 
was  planning  was  never  written. 

In  1936  Knox  was  created  a  monsignor ; 
in  1951  Pope  Pius  XII  made  him  a  pro- 
tonotary  apostolic;  and  in  1956  he  was 
elected  to  the  Pontifical  Academy.  He  was 
made  an  honorary  fellow  of  Trinity  (1941) 
and  Balliol  (1953)  and  was  invited  to 
deliver  the  Romanes  lecture  at  Oxford  in 
1957.  The  subject  which  he  chose  was 
'English  Translation'  and  he  was  able  to 
fulfil  this  engagement  in  the  university 
to  which  he  had  given  so  many  years 
of  his  life,  although  it  was  known  not 
only  to  himself  but  also  to  his  audience 
that  the  hand  of  death  was  upon  him.  The 
lecture  was  a  brilliant  success  and  a  poig- 
nant occasion  for  all  who  heard  it.  It  was 
his  last  public  appearance.  He  died  at 
Mells  24  August  1957.  A  requiem  Mass 
was  said  for  him  in  Westminster  Cathedral 
at  which  the  panegyric  was  preached  by 
Father  Martin  D'Arcy,  S.J.,  one  of  his 
most  intimate  friends,  and  he  was  buried 
in  the  churchyard  at  Mells. 

Ronald  Knox  was  a  small  man,  of  frail 
drooping  figm*e  with  a  prominent  nose, 
heavy  underlip,  unobtrusive  chin,  and 
large  eyes.  In  his  younger  days  his  wit 
gained  for  him  a  certain  reputation  for 
flippancy,  but  none  who  knew  him  ever 
doubted  at  any  time  in  his  life  the  deep 
sincerity  of  his  religious  faith,  and  in  later 
life,  while  wit  could  never  whoUy  be 
suppressed,  he  came  increasingly  in  his 
writing  to  shy  away  from  the  merely  light- 


hearted  to  the  extent  that  some  almost 
foimd  him  sometimes  melancholy.  Devo- 
tion to  religion  was  overwhelmingly  the 
main  influence  on  his  life.  Shy  and  retir- 
ing, he  seemed  to  some  almost  unduly 
diffident  and  there  were  those  who 
thought  that  he  shunned  too  much  the 
rough  and  tumble  of  life,  but  he  won  and 
retained  a  host  of  friends  such  as  few  can 
command.  The  tributes  at  his  death 
showed  that  he  had  established  for  him- 
self a  national  position  to  an  extent  which 
he  himself  in  his  unaffected  modesty  had 
never  guessed  and  there  were  many  who 
said  that  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  had 
lost  in  England  her  most  distinguished 
convert  since  Newman. 

At  the  Manor  House  at  Mells  there  is 
a  terracotta  by  Arthur  Pollen.  A  bronze 
cast  of  this  head  is  at  Trinity  College, 
Oxford.  A  portrait  of  him  by  Simon  Elwes 
hangs  at  the  Catholic  Chaplaincy  at 
Oxford.  The  National  Portrait  Gallery  has 
a  drawing  by  Pdwys  Evans. 

[Evelyn  Waugh,  Ronald  Knox,  1959; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Christopher  Hollis. 

KOMISARJEVSKY,    THEODORE 

(1882-1954),  theatrical  producer  and  de- 
signer, born  in  Venice  23  May  1882,  was 
the  son  of  Theodore  Komisarjevsky  (who 
was  first  tenor  of  the  St.  Petersburg  Opera 
and  taught  Stanislavsky)  and  his  wife,  the 
Princess  Kourzevich.  Vera  Komisarjev- 
skaya,  the  actress,  was  his  sister. 

Educated  at  a  military  academy  and  the 
Imperial  Institute  of  Architecture  in  St. 
Petersburg,  Komisarjevsky  directed  his 
first  production  in  his  sister's  theatre  in 
1907.  In  1910,  the  year  of  her  death,  he 
founded  his  own  school  of  acting  in 
Moscow,  to  which  in  1914  he  added 
a  studio-theatre  in  her  memory.  From 
1910  to  1913  he  was  producer  at  the 
Nezlobin  Theatre  in  Moscow,  and  after  an 
interlude  with  the  Imperial  Grand  Opera 
House  he  became  producer  at  Ziminne's 
Opera  House,  with  which  he  remained 
when  it  became  the  Soviet  Opera  House. 
After  the  revolution  he  was  also  appointed 
director  of  the  Moscow  State  Theatre  of 
Opera  and  BaUet  (previously  the  Imperial 
Grand  Opera)  and  he  was  aUowed  to  con- 
tinue to  direct  his  own  smaU  theatre.  In 
1919,  believing  that  he  was  about  to  be 
arrested  by  the  Cheka,  he  fled  to  Paris, 
where  Diaghilev  advised  him  to  go  to 
England.  Within  four  weeks  of  his  arrival 
he  was  entrusted  by  Sir  Thomas  Beecham 
with  a  production  of  Prince  Igor  at  Covent 


597 


Komisarjevsky 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Garden,  which  immediately  led  to  further 
opera  productions  in  Paris  and  New  York. 
On  his  return  to  London  he  began,  at 
a  time  when  the  English  theatre  was  in- 
clined to  insularity,  a  series  of  productions 
of  plays  by  Russian  authors  including 
Chekhov,  Gogol,  Andreyev,  Tolstoy,  and 
Dostoevsky. 

In  1925  he  converted  a  small  cinema  at 
Barnes  into  a  theatre  with  its  own  com- 
pany which  included  (Sir)  John  Gielgud, 
Charles  Laughton,  Jean  Forbes-Robert- 
son, Jeanne  de  Casalis,  and  Martita  Hunt. 
The  standard  of  production  in  the  English 
theatre  (to  quote  from  The  Times  of  that 
day)  was  'sloppy  and  slovenly' ;  there  was 
Uttle  attempt  at  ensemble  playing  and  the 
settings  and  lighting  were  duU  and  un- 
imaginative. Komisarjevsky's  productions 
at  Barnes  (1925-6)  had  an  immediate 
effect  on  the  EngUsh  theatre  by  making 
the  critics  aware  of  its  deficiencies.  At 
a  time  when  English  acting  had  a  glossy 
veneer  which  concealed  its  shallowness, 
Komisarjevsky  demanded  from  his  actors 
a  new  intensity  of  feeUng  and  a  deeper 
understanding  of  the  characters  they  were 
playing.  He  introduced  a  method  of  acting 
based  on  the  theories  of  Stanislavsky, 
although  he  never  accepted  them  uncondi- 
tionally and  to  some  of  them  he  was 
strongly  opposed. 

In  1932  Komisarjevsky  became  a  British 
subject.  It  was  the  year  of  the  first  of  his 
productions  at  Stratford  on  Avon;  pro- 
ductions which  were  unorthodox  and 
provocative,  sometimes  brilliant,  some- 
times merely  wayward;  all  of  them 
valuable  as  a  means  of  making  critics  and 
audiences  realize  how  conventional  and 
humdrum  had  been  the  routine  Stratford 
productions  of  Shakespeare.  As  a  Shake- 
spearian producer  Komisarjevsky's  weak- 
ness was  that  he  had  Uttle  respect  for 
the  text  and  small  appreciation  of  the 
rhythms  of  the  verse. 

Komisarjevsky  saw  little  to  attract  him 
to  the  ordinary  west-end  theatre,  although 
Sir  C.  B.  Cochran  [q.v.]  managed  to  per- 
suade him  to  produce  three  plays  there. 
He  preferred  to  spend  his  time  producing 
an  extraordinary  variety  of  plays  in 
London,  in  the  provinces,  and  on  the 
Continent  for  any  theatre  or  society  (such 
as  the  Stage  Society)  which  was  leading 
rather  than  following  theatrical  tastes.  His 
productions  included  The  Pretenders^  in 
Welsh,  in  a  gigantic  marquee  at  Holy- 
head; two  productions  at  Oxford  for  the 
O.U.D.S. ;  The  Cherry  Orchard  at  the 
Leeds  Civic  Playhouse ;  The  Wild  Duck  in 


Riga ;  Peer  Gynt  in  New  York ;  The  Dover 
Road  (in  English)  in  Paris ;  and  Cymbeline 
in  an  open-air  theatre  in  Montreal. 

Besides  being  a  great  producer, 
Komisarjevsky  was  also  a  brilliant  stage 
designer.  Almost  invariably  he  designed 
his  own  sets  and  costimies.  He  had 
nothing  in  common  with  the  photo- 
graphically realistic  English  designers.  His 
settings  reduced  factual  realism  to  a  mini- 
mum, stressing  mood  rather  than  detail. 
The  effectiveness  of  his  settings  was 
enormously  enhanced  by  the  skill  and 
subtlety  of  his  fighting  which  made 
dramatic  use  of  highlights,  shadows,  and 
halftones  to  give  emphasis  to  his  beauti- 
fuUy  composed  groupings. 

Komisarjevsky  was  a  small  man  with 
a  completely  bald  head,  a  beak  nose, 
inscrutable  brown  eyes  set  in  a  pale  face 
which  seemed  aU  the  paler  because  of  the 
small  bright  red  scarf  which  he  invariably 
wore  around  his  throat  at  rehearsals.  His 
rather  melancholy  air  concealed  a  mis- 
chievous sense  of  humour  which  had 
a  streak  of  cruelty  in  it.  At  work  he  was 
the  quietest  of  producers.  He  would  sel- 
dom give  an  actor  an  intonation  or  say 
how  a  fine  should  be  spoken.  He  preferred 
to  discuss  what  a  character  was  thinking 
or  feefing,  and  leave  it  to  the  actor  to 
work  it  out.  Unfortunately,  if  he  decided 
that  an  actor  had  no  particular  talent  he 
would  take  no  trouble  over  his  perfor- 
mance but  concentrate  all  his  attention  on 
the  better  actors,  with  the  result  that 
under  his  direction  good  actors  usuaUy 
surpassed  themselves  while  dull  actors 
seemed  duUer  than  ever. 

In  1939,  when  war  broke  out,  he  was 
working  in  the  United  States.  He  felt 
that  as  he  had  become  a  British  subject  he 
should  return  to  England,  so  he  offered  his 
services  to  E.N.S.A.  But  he  was  unable  to 
get  back  and  spent  the  rest  of  his  life  in 
America,  devoting  his  time  mainly  to 
lecturing  and  teaching.  He  died  at  Darien, 
Connecticut,  17  April  1954. 

In  the  twenty  years  during  which  he 
worked  in  the  Engfish  theatre  he  had 
a  greater  influence  than  any  other  pro- 
ducer on  methods  of  direction,  acting, 
setting,  and  lighting.  On  his  death.  Sir 
John  Gielgud  described  him  in  a  letter  to 
The  Times  as  'a  great  metteur  en  seme,  an 
inspiring  teacher,  and  a  master  of  theatri- 
cal orchestration  .  .  .'. 

Komisarjevsky  was  three  times  mar- 
ried :  first,  to  Elfriede  de  Jarosy ;  secondly, 
in  1934,  to  (Dame)  Peggy  Ashcroft; 
thirdly,  to  Ernestine  StodeUe.  The  first 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Korda 


two  marriages  were  dissolved.  He  had  two 
sons  and  one  daughter. 

[The  Times,  19  April  1954;  Theodore 
Komisarjevsky,  Myself  and  the  Theatre,  1929 ; 
personal  knowledge.]        Norman  Marshall. 

KORDA,  Sir  ALEXANDER  (1893- 
1956),  film  producer,  whose  original  name 
was  Alexander  Laszlo  Kellner,  was  born 
16  September  1893,  at  Pusztaturpaszto, 
Hungary.  He  was  the  eldest  of  the  three 
sons  of  Henry  Kellner,  land  agent  to 
a  large  estate,  and  his  wife,  Ernestine 
Weisz.  He  was  educated  at  Protestant 
gymnasiums  in  Nagykoros  and  Kecskemet 
and  ata  commercial  school  in  Budapest. 
His  father  died  when  he  was  thirteen  and 
to  augment  the  family  income  he  gave 
lessons  in  the  evenings.  Leaving  school  at 
seventeen,  he  became  a  proof-reader  and 
newspaper  reporter  in  Budapest  and  pub- 
lished a  novel  under  the  name  of  Alexan- 
der Korda.  In  1911  he  went  to  Paris 
where  he  became  proficient  in  French  but 
could  find  no  work.  Back  in  Budapest  he 
had  his  first  introduction  to  the  infant 
film  world  by  translating  sub-titles  from 
French  into  Hungarian.  In  1912  he 
founded  a  film  magazine,  the  first  of  its 
kind  to  appear  in  Budapest,  and  in  1913 
with  some  friends  he  started  to  write  and 
direct  short  film  comedies. 

Owing  to  his  eyesight  which  was  always 
weak  Korda  was  not  called  up  after  the 
outbreak  of  war  and  was  able  to  continue 
as  a  film  director.  In  1915,  with  the 
director  of  the  Kolozsvar  National  Theatre 
in  Transylvania,  he  formed  a  plan  to 
make  films  with  that  company,  using  their 
actors,  scenery,  and  costumes.  The  course 
of  the  war  enforced  a  return  to  Budapest 
where  he  took  over  the  company  and 
built  a  studio,  the  Corvin.  His  first  full- 
length  film.  The  Man  of  Gold  (1918),  taken 
from  M.  Jokai's  novel,  was  highly  success- 
ful. 

In  1919  there  was  unrest  in  Hungary 
and  Korda,  together  with  many  other 
citizens,  was  arrested;  by  a  fortunate 
chance  he  shortly  obtained  his  release, 
and  on  returning  home  he  took  a  bath, 
changed  his  clothes,  and  departed  from 
Hungary  for  ever.  In  Vienna  he  joined  the 
Sascha  studios  which  at  that  time  were 
making  advanced  films,  and  there  he 
matured  his  film-craft.  Among  his  films  of 
this  period  were  The  Prince  and  the  Pauper 
(1920)  and  Samson  and  Delilah  (1922).  In 
1923  he  moved  to  BerUn  and  in  1926  to 
Hollywood  where  amongst  the  films  he 
made  was  The  Private  Life  of  Helen  of 


Troy  (1927)  in  which  his  wife,  Maria 
Corda,  played  the  title  role. 

Returning  to  Europe  in  1930  Korda 
found  work  in  Paris  with  the  Paramount 
Film  Company,  for  whom  he  made  the 
classic  film  Marius  (1931)  from  the  play 
by  Marcel  Pagnol,  in  which  Raimu  played 
the  leading  part.  In  1931  he  went  for 
Paramount  to  London  to  direct  Service  for 
Ladies  which  was  an  outstanding  success 
and  proved  the  turning-point  in  Korda's 
career,  for  he  settled  in  London,  formed 
his  own  company,  London  Film  Produc- 
tions, with  Big  Ben  as  trademark,  and 
built  the  Denham  studios  and  laboratories 
which  when  completed  in  1937  were  the 
most  advanced  in  Europe.  In  the  mean- 
time Korda  had  become  one  of  the  most 
notable  personalities  of  the  film  world 
with  a  series  of' pictures  which  obtained 
world-wide  fame.  They  included  The 
Private  Life  of  Henry  VIII  (1933),  The 
Private  Life  of  Don  Juan  (with  a  script 
by  Frederick  Lonsdale,  q.v.,  1934),  The 
Ghost  Goes  West  (1935,  directed  by  Rene 
Clair  and  starring  Robert  Donat,  q.v.), 
The  Scarlet  Pimpernel  (1935,  starring 
Leslie  Howard,  q.v.).  Things  to  Come  and 
The  Man  Who  Could  Work  Miracles 
(scripts  by  H.  G.  Wells,  q.v.,  1936), 
Rembrandt  (1936),  Knight  Without  Armour 
(1936),  Elephant  Boy  (1936-7),  Fire  Over 
England  (Vivien  Leigh's  first  film,  1937), 
and  The  Four  Feathers  (1939). 

No  one  in  this  country  before  or  since 
Korda  has  equalled  his  range  and  bril- 
liance of  faculties  for  film-making.  Build- 
ing studios  and  making  pictures  need 
large  sums  of  money  and  Korda  seemed  at 
this  period  to  conjure  them  out  of  the  air. 
His  sense  of  romance  and  gift  of  story- 
telling produced  excellent  scripts;  his 
knowledge,  direction,  and  camera-work 
brought  to  his  service  the  finest'  tech- 
nicians, among  whom  were  his  two 
younger  brothers,  Zoltan  and  Vincent. 
His  tact  and  talent,  together  with  his 
generosity  and  personal  magnetism,  drew 
to  him  the  best  actors  in  the  world. 

With  the  worsening  international  situa*- 
tion  financial  backing  was  gradually  with- 
drawn and  in  1939  Korda  had  to  give  up 
the  Denham  studios.  But  he  continued  his 
film-making  with  The  Thief  of  Baghdad 
(1939-40)  and,  immediately  after  the  out- 
break of  war,  the  documentary  The  Lion 
has  Wings.  During  the  war  years  he 
moved  between  London  and  Hollywood 
where  he  directed  Lady  Hamilton  (1941) 
and  with  his  brother  Zoltan  produced 
Jungle  Book  (1941);  in  Britain  he  made 


Korda 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Perfect  Strangers  (1944).  After  the  war  he 
revived  London  Films  as  an  independent 
company,  built  studios  at  Shepperton, 
and  once  again  under  his  management 
there  came  forth  fine  films,  including  An 
Ideal  Husband  (1947),  The  Fallen  Idol 
(1948),  The  Third  Man  (1949),  The  Wooden 
Horse  (1950),  Sound  Barrier  (1952),  and 
Richard  III  (1955).  Working  to  the  last, 
Korda  died  in  London  23  January  1956. 

In  1921  Korda  married  Maria  Farkas, 
who  acted  under  the  name  of  Maria 
Corda,  by  whom  he  had  one  son,  Peter. 
The  marriage  was  dissolved  in  1931.  His 
second  marriage  (1939),  to  Merle  Oberon, 
was  dissolved  in  1945.  In  1953  he  married 
a  Canadian,  Alexandra  Irene  Boycun 
(died  1966).  Korda  was  naturalized  in 
1936  and  knighted  in  1942.  He  was  made 
an  officer  of  the  Legion  of  Honour  in  1950. 

[Paul  Tabori,  Alexander  Korda,  1959; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Ralph  Richardson. 

LAMB,  HENRY  TAYLOR  (1883-1960), 
painter,  was  born  in  Adelaide,  Australia, 
21  June  1883,  the  third  son  and  fifth  of 
the  seven  children  of  (Sir)  Horace  Lamb 
[q.v.],  the  mathematician  and  physicist. 
Lamb's  eldest  sister,  Helen,  became  a  don 
at  Newnham  College,  Cambridge;  his 
eldest  brother,  Ernest,  a  professor  of 
engineering,  Queen  Mary  College,  London ; 
and  his  next  eldest  brother,  (Sir)  Walter, 
was  secretary  of  the  Royal  Academy. 
Brought  up  in  Manchester  where  his 
father  was  professor  of  mathematics  at  the 
university,  Lamb  spent  'eight  years  of 
misery'  at  Manchester  Grammar  School 
and,  destined  for  medicine,  four  years  at 
Manchester  University  medical  school, 
obtaining  a  graduate  scholarship  in  1904. 
Despite  this  success  he  abandoned  medi- 
cine for  painting  and  settled  in  London, 
having  already  received  training  and 
encouragement  from  Joseph  Knight,  art 
master  at  Manchester  Grammar  School, 
and  from  Francis  Dodd  [q.v.].  Lamb 
studied  at  the  art  school  run  by  Augustus 
John  and  (Sir)  William  Orpen  [q.v.]  in 
Flood  Street,  Chelsea,  supplementing 
a  small  allowance  from  a  patron  with 
occasional  commissions  from  the  Man- 
chester Guardian  for  drawings  of  famous 
London  buildings.  He  continued  his 
studies  at  La  Palette,  Paris,  under  J.-E. 
Blanche  in  1907-8.  After  returning  to 
London  he  took  a  studio  at  8  Fitzroy 
Street  (1909-11),  while  the  stmimers  of 
1910  and  1911  were  spent  in  Brittany, 
followed    by    some    months    in    Ireland 


(1912-18).  He  had  first  exhibited  at  the 
New  English  Art  Club  in  1909,  and  his 
allegiance  to  the  progressives  in  English 
art  soon  showed  itself  when  he  became 
a  founder-member  of  the  Camden  Town 
Group  in  1911  and  of  the  London  Group  in 
1913.  On  the  outbreak  of  war  he  returned 
to  medicine  and  qualified  at  Guy's  Hospi- 
tal in  1916.  Gazetted  captain,  he  served  as 
battalion  medical  officer  with  the  5th 
Inniskilling  Fusiliers  in  Macedonia,  Pales- 
tine, and  France,  was  gassed  and  invalided 
home.  He  was  awarded  the  M.C.  in  1918. 
Lamb's  early  style  was  strongly  in- 
fluenced by  the  work  of  Augustus  John, 
and  his  fine  drawings  of  Dorelia  John  and 
of  Nina  Euphemia  Lamb  (his  first  wife, 
daughter  of  Arthur  Forrest,  whom  he 
married  in  1906  and  from  whom  he 
separated  a  few  years  later)  executed 
between  1907-10  equal  John's  in  their 
firm  brilliance.  Lamb's  distinctive  artistic 
personality  first  flowered  in  a  series  of 
paintings  of  Breton  subjects,  such  as 
'Death  of  a  Peasant'  (1911)  and  'Lamenta- 
tion' (1911,  both  Tate  Gallery,  London). 
Here,  austere  realism,  a  restrained  palette, 
and  striking,  deceptively  simple  composi- 
tion are  qualities  characteristic  also  of 
much  of  his  later  work.  With  the  excep- 
tion of  'Phantasy'  (1912,  Tate  GaUery), 
a  group  of  male  nude  equestrians  perhaps 
inspired  by  the  circus  scenes  of  Picasso's 
'Pink  period'.  Lamb  seems  to  have  been 
almost  impervious  to  the  revolutionary 
movements  in  contemporary  French  art. 
This  may  account  for  the  antipathy  of 
Roger  Fry  [q.v.]  towards  his  painting ;  nor 
did  Lamb  share  the  pacifist  beliefs  of  some 
of  the  Bloomsbury  group.  Yet  it  was  the 
large  portrait  of  Lytton  Strachey  [q.v.] 
completed  in  1914  (Tate  Gallery)  which 
brought  him  public  notice  and  featured  in 
his  first  one-man  exhibition  at  the  Alpine 
Club  Gallery  in  1922.  Other  writers  who 
sat  to  him  were  Evelyn  Waugh  (1930)  and 
Lord  David  Cecil  (1935).  Strachey,  whom 
he  first  painted  in  1912,  is  shown  seated 
against  a  large  window  in  Lamb's  Vale  of 
Health  studio,  Hampstead,  and  though 
avoiding  caricature,  Lamb  has  relished 
emphasizing  Strachey' s  gaunt,  ungainly 
figure,  and  the  air  of  resigned  intellectual 
superiority  with  which  he  surveys  the 
world  from  that  incredible  slab-like  head. 
The  trees  in  the  vista  seen  through  the 
window  are  painted  in  a  rhythmic,  decora- 
tive manner  which  suggests  that  Lamb  had 
taken  from  the  innovations  of  the  Nabis 
and  Matisse  what  seemed  consistent  with 
his  own  essentially  academic  approach. 


600 


•D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lambe 


Browns,  violets,  and  greens  here  predomi- 
nate, colours  which  were  subtly  woven 
into  many  later  compositions  making 
his  work  easily  distinguishable  in  mixed 
exhibitions. 

Lamb's  wartime  experiences  inspired 
two  large  paintings,  'Palestinian  War 
Picture'  (1919,  Imperial  War  Museum) 
and  'Salonika  War  Picture'  (1920,  Man- 
chester City  Art  Gallery),  the  earlier  of 
which  is  a  remarkably  vivid  bird's-eye 
view  of  moving  wounded  from  an  outpost 
under  fire.  During  the  early  twenties  he 
painted  several  portrait  groups  of  dis- 
tinction, such  as  that  of  the  architect 
'George  Kennedy  and  Family'  (1921,  J.  L. 
Behrend),  some  details  of  which  relate  to 
the  work  of  (Sir)  Stanley  Spencer  [q.v.], 
whom  he  had  given  a  room  in  his  house  at 
Poole  after  the  war.  The  roof  tops,  ware- 
houses, and  narrow  streets  of  the  town 
delighted  him  and  inspired  many  care- 
fully observed  compositions  at  this 
period.  While  good  at  official  portraits, 
he  was  particularly  happy  at  catching 
children's  Ukenesses  and  the  son  and  two 
daughters  of  his  second  marriage  (in  1928, 
to  Lady  Margaret  Pansy  Felicia  Paken- 
ham,  eldest  daughter  of  the  fifth  Earl  of 
Longford)  appear  in  many  family  por- 
traits of  the  thirties  and  forties.  During 
the  war  of  1939-45  he  was  an  official  war 
artist,  attached  to  the  army,  and  painted 
portraits  of  Service  men  and  foreign  mih- 
tary  attaches. 

Failing  health  towards  the  end  of  his 
life  forced  him  to  abandon  landscape,  to 
concentrate  on  still  fife,  and  latterly  to 
rework  earlier  themes  of  Breton  and  Irish 
life.  He  had  lived  at  Coombe  Bissett, 
Salisbury,  after  1928  and  died  there 
8  October  1960. 

Of  medium  height,  slightly  built,  and 
agile.  Lamb  was  fond  of  riding  and  sailing, 
although  his  constitution  was  permanently 
weakened  after  the  war  of  1914-18.  He 
had  wide  intellectual  interests,  was  an 
accomplished  performer  on  the  piano  and 
clavicord  of  the  music  of  Mozart,  Beet- 
hoven, and  Bach,  and  was  impatient  of 
convention.  Elected  A.R.A.  in  1940,  he 
became  R.A.  in  1949.  He  was  a  trustee  of 
the  Tate  Gallery  (1944^51),  and  of  the 
National  Portrait  Gallery  (1942-60)  which 
owns  two  self-portrait  drawings  of  1950- 
51  and  an  earlier  oil  self-portrait,  and 
a  drawing  by  Powys  Evans.  The  Man- 
chester City  Art  Gallery  has  a  portrait  by 
Francis  Dodd.  A  memorial  exhibition  was 
held  at  the  Leicester  Galleries  in  December 
1961.  Portraits  by  him  are  in  many  British 


universities,  and  he  is  widely  represented 
in  the  Tate  Gallery  and  in  provincial 
museums. 

[G.  L.  K[ennedy],  Henry  Lamb,  1924 ;  The 
Times,  10  October  1960;  private  informa- 
tion.] Dennis  Farr. 

LAMBE,  Sir  CHARLES  EDWARD 
(1900-1960),  admiral  of  the  fleet,  was  born 
at  Stalbridge  20  December  1900,  the  only 
son  of  Henry  Edward  Lambe,  of  Grove 
House,  Stalbridge,  and  his  wife,  Lilian, 
daughter  of  John  Bramwell,  of  Edinburgh. 
He  was  descended  from  Rear-Admiral  Sir 
Thomas  Louis  [q.v.]  who  fought  at  the 
battle  of  the  Nile  and  served  with  distinc- 
tion in  the  Napoleonic  wars.  Joining 
Osborne  as  a  naval  cadet  in  1914,  he  was 
a  midshipman  in  the  battleship  Emperor  of 
India  from  1917  until  the  end  of  the  war* 
After  serving  at  home  and  overseas  he 
joined  the  Vernon  at  Portsmouth  in  1925 
to  qualify  as  a  torpedo  speciahst.  A  good 
horseman,  a  keen  shot,  and  skilful  ama- 
teur pilot,  he  showed  also  much  profes- 
sional promise. 

After  service  in  the  Mediterranean  and 
qualifying  at  the  Naval  Staff  College  he 
joined  the  East  Indies  flagship,  the  cruiser 
Hawkins,  in  1982,  being  promoted  to 
commander  in  1933.  He  next  served  on  the 
staff  of  the  Rear-Admiral  A.  B.  Cunning- 
ham (afterwards  Viscount  Cunningham 
of  Hyndhope)  commanding  all  Mediter- 
ranean destroyer  flotillas.  Cunningham 
soon  recognized  Lambe's  exceptional 
talents  at  handUng  men  and  affairs. 
Returning  to  England  in  1985  Lambe 
became  the  commander  of  the  Vernon, 
and  was  later  appointed  equerry  to  King 
Edward  VIII  and  later  to  King  George  VI. 

Promoted  to  captain  in  December  1987, 
shortly  after  his  thirty-seventh  birthday, 
he  commanded  the  cruiser  Dunedin  for 
the  first  year  of  the  war  until  in  October 
1940  he  joined  the  joint  planning  staff  in 
Whitehall  as  naval  assistant  director  of 
plans.  He  soon  became  deputy  director 
and  then  director  of  plans,  serving  as  such 
until  April  1944.  This  covered  the  period 
when  virtually  all  the  major  strategic 
decisions  of  the  war  were  taken.  The  agoni- 
zing military  alternatives  which  faced  the 
Government  in  the  early  part  of  this  period 
together  with  the  tremendous  problems 
arising  from  the  Russian,  Japanese,  and 
American  entries  into  the  war  were  the 
principal  concern  of  the  joint  planning 
staff,  who  advised  the  chiefs  of  staff,  and 
who  in  their  turn  were  presided  over  by 
(Sir)  Winston  Churchill.       ,/;      'V-  P >  < v  J  J 


601 


Lambe 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lambe's  influence  was  far  reaching  with 
his  Service  colleagues,  and  with  the  chiefs 
of  staff.  His  judgement,  his  serenity  of 
outlook,  his  ability  to  explain,  persuade, 
and  listen  to  all  sides,  and  above  all  his 
imagination  and  ability  to  see  the  heart 
of  a  problem  proved  of  exceptional  value 
to  his  country. 

On  leaving  Whitehall  he  commanded 
the  aircraft  carrier  Illustrious  in  the  Indian 
and  Pacific  oceans.  Hit  once  by  a  Japanese 
suicide  aircraft  Illustrious  took  part  in 
many  operations.  Soon  after  the  end  of 
the  Japanese  war  he  returned  to  the 
Admiralty  as  assistant  chief  of  staff  (Air) 
as  an  acting  rear-admiral  and  went  on  to 
appointments  where  his  knowledge  of  air 
problems  both  human  and  technical  were 
of  special  value :  flag  officer  Flying  Train- 
ing (1947-9),  admiral  commanding  third 
aircraft  carrier  squadron  (1949-51),  and 
flag  officer  (Air)  Home  (1951-3).  He 
became  commander-in-chief  Far  East 
station  in  1953  and  served  there  with  par- 
ticular success  in  the  difficult  time  fol- 
lowing the  Korean  war.  Later,  in  1955  as 
second  sea  lord  his  sympathy  for  the  less 
fortunate  was  of  much  value  when  heavy 
reductions  were  being  made  in  naval 
personnel.  Finally  after  being  commander- 
in-chief  Mediterranean  (1957-9)  he  became 
first  sea  lord  in  1959  to  the  delight  of  the 
navy,  who  were  much  saddened  by  his 
illness  which  led  to  his  retirement  in  May, 
and  his  death  on  29  August,  1960,  at  his 
home  in  Newport,  Fife. 

Promoted  to  vice-admiral  in  1950,  ad- 
miral in  1954,  and  admiral  of  the  fleet  in 
1960,  he  was  appointed  C.V.O.  in  1938, 
C.B.  in  1944,  K.C.B.  in  1953,  G.C.B.  in 
1957. 

Lambe  did  many  things  so  well  and 
often  so  much  better  than  other  men,  but 
there  was  something  elusive  about  him. 
Endowed  with  much  personal  charni  and 
greatly  liked,  he  had  a  first-rate  intellect 
which  never  tolerated  insincerity — yet 
there  was  perhaps  an  inner  sanctum  in 
him  which  few  penetrated  but  many 
sensed.  His  clear  well-ordered  mind  saw 
through  most  problems,  and  also  the  most 
practical  ways  of  solving  them.  His  tastes 
were  catholic  and  his  enthusiasm  infec- 
tious. Added  to  a  love  of  outdoor  pursuits 
he  had  a  deep  appreciation  and  under- 
standing of  many  artistic  things.  He 
was  a  pianist  quite  out  of  the  ordinary 
in  performance,  an  accomplished  water- 
colour  painter,  a  lifelong  member  of  the 
Bach  Choir,  and  had  an  abiding  apprecia- 
tion of  Shakespeare  and  Andrew  Marvell's 


sonnets  which  he  enjoyed  quoting.  Yet 
for  all  this,  his  love  of  the  navy  and  sense 
of  service  took  priority  over  all  else. 

He  married  in  1940  Lesbia  Rachel, 
daughter  of  Sir  Walter  Orlando  Corbet, 
fourth  baronet,  formerly  wife  of  V.  I.  H. 
Mylius,  and  had  one  son  and  one  daughter. 
There  is  a  portrait  by  Edward  I.  Halliday 
in  the  Vernon  at  Portsmouth. 

[Personal  knowledge.]         William  Davis. 

LAMBERT,  CONSTANT  (1905-1951), 
musician,  was  born  in  London  23  August 
1905,  the  younger  son  of  the  Australian 
painter  George  Washington  Lambert, 
A.R.A.,  and  his  wife,  Amelia  Beatrice 
Abseil.  He  was  the  brother  of  the  sculptor 
Maurice  Lambert.  He  was  educated  at 
Christ's  Hospital  and  the  Royal  College  of 
Music,  where  he  studied  with  Ralph 
Vaughan  Williams  [q.v.]  and  R.  O.  Morris. 
He  was  introduced  by  Edmund  Dulac 
[q.v.]  to  Diaghilev  who  commissioned  him 
to  write  the  ballet  Romeo  and  Juliet.  At 
this  time  Lambert  was  still  a  student  and 
he  was  the  first  English  composer  to  be 
commissioned  by  Diaghilev.  The  ballet 
which  consists  of  thirteen  short  move- 
ments in  classical  forms  was  first  per- 
formed in  1926  at  Monte  Carlo,  with 
choreography  by  Nijinska. 

Earlier  Lambert  had  become  acquainted 
with  the  Sitwells  and  he  shared  brilliantly 
with  (Dame)  Edith  Sitwell  the  speaking 
part  in  the  1922  and  1923  performances  of 
Fagade,  the  entertainment  with  poems  by 
Edith  Sitwell  and  music  by  (Sir)  William 
Walton.  His  second  ballet,  Pomona,  was 
written  at  the  Sitwell  family  home  at 
Renishaw  in  Yorkshire  in  1926 ;  the  story 
concerns  the  successful  wooing  of  Pomona, 
the  goddess  of  fruit,  by  the  god  Vertum- 
nus.  The  ballet  was  first  produced  in 
Buenos  Aires  in  1927,  again  with  choreo- 
graphy by  Nijinska.  Later  in  1926  he  set 
eight  poems  by  the  Chinese  writer  Li-Po 
for  voice  and  piano,  and  afterwards  made 
an  arrangement  of  them  for  voice  and 
a  small  combination  of  instruments.  In 
1927  came  Music  for  Orchestra,  a  brilliant 
orchestral  work  which  showed  a  masterly 
command  of  the  medium.  An  'Elegiac 
Blues'  in  memory  of  the  negro  singer 
Florence  Mills  showed  Lambert's  interest 
in  jazz  music,  and  this  was  shown  even 
more  strikingly  in  The  Rio  Grande,  a  set- 
ting of  (Sir)  Sacheverell  Sitwell's  poem  for 
piano,  chorus,  and  orchestra,  which  con- 
tains a  number  of  jazz  effects.  This  was 
first  performed  on  12  December  1929  in 


602 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lambert,  C, 


Manchester  by  the  Halle  Orchestra  con- 
ducted by  the  composer;  the  orchestra's 
regular  conductor,  Sir  Hamilton  Harty 
[q.v.],  played  the  difficult  solo  piano 
part.  This  performance  was  repeated  on 
the  following  day  at  the  Queen's  Hall, 
London,  and  The  Rio  Grande  remained 
Lambert's  most  popular  work  during 
his  lifetime. 

Between  1928  and  1931  Lambert  wrote 
two  works  in  classical  forms,  but  also 
showing  some  influences  of  jazz :  these  are 
the  Piano  Sonata  and  the  Concerto  for 
piano  and  nine  instruments  (Lambert  was 
an  expert  pianist  himself).  The  Concerto 
was  dedicated  to  the  memory  of  Lambert's 
close  friend  Philip  Heseltine  (q.v.,  Peter 
Warlock)  and  ends  with  an  elegiac  slow 
movement. 

In  1930  Lambert  became  conductor  of 
the  Camargo  Society,  and  he  conducted 
Vaughan  Williams's  ballet  Job  in  his  own 
version  for  theatre  orchestra  at  the  1931 
festival  of  the  International  Society  for 
Contemporary  Music  in  Oxford.  From  the 
Camargo  Society  grew  the  Vic-Wells 
Ballet  (later  the  Sadler's  Wells  Ballet),  of 
which  Lambert  became  the  first  musical 
director,  holding  this  post  until  1947, 
after  which  he  remained  its  artistic  ad- 
viser. He  was  awarded  the  CoUard  fellow- 
ship of  the  Musicians'  Company  in  1934 
and  this  enabled  him  to  complete  his 
largest  work,  the  choral  masque  Summer^ s 
Last  Will  and  Testament^  to  poems  of 
Thomas  Nashe  [q.v.].  This  was  first  per- 
formed in  January  1936  at  the  Queen's 
Hall,  with  the  composer  conducting. 
Although  Lambert  here  again  makes  use 
of  classical  forms,  the  work  is  not  in  the 
least  archaistic,  and  shows  a  brilliant 
command  of  voices  and  instruments  in 
combination. 

Lambert's  next  ballet,  Horoscope,  was 
first  performed  at  Sadler's  Wells  in  1938, 
with  choreography  by  (Sir)  Frederick 
Ashton;  the  story  concerns  the  love  of 
a  man  born  with  the  sun  in  Leo  and  the 
moon  in  Gemini  and  a  woman  born  with 
the  sun  in  Virgo  and  the  moon  in  Gemini. 
(Lambert's  own  birthday  was  on  the  cusp 
between  Leo  and  Virgo.)  The  ballet 
begins  with  an  extraordinary  palindrome, 
unique  in  Lambert's  work,  which  the 
composer  believed  to  have  been  dictated 
to  him  by  his  friend  and  colleague  Bernard 
van  Dieren,  who  had  died  shortly  before. 

Later  works  of  Lambert  include  a  set- 
ting for  male  voices  and  strings  of  the 
Dirge  from  Shakespeare's  Cymbeline  (1940) 
which  is  one  of  his  most  moving  works ;  it 


is  dedicated  to  Patrick  Hadley,  Lambert's 
fellow  student  and  later  professor  of 
music  at  Cambridge.  In  1940  Lambert  was 
with  the  Sadler's  Wells  Ballet  in  Holland 
and  narrowly  escaped  capture  at  the  time 
of  the  German  invasion.  This  experience 
was  reflected  in  the  Aubade  H^ro'ique  for 
orchestra  (1942)  in  which  pastoral  and 
warlike  elements  are  strikingly  combined ; 
Lambert  dedicated  this  work  to  his 
teacher  Vaughan  Williams  on  his  seven- 
tieth birthday.  His  last  ballet,  Tiresias^ 
was  given  at  Covent  Garden  in  1951, 
shortly  before  his  death,  again  with 
choreography  by  (Sir)  Frederick  Ashton 
and  decor  by  his  wife  Isabel  Lambert. 
The  composer  conducted  the  initial 
performances. 

While  director  of  the  Sadler's  Wells 
Ballet  Lambert  made  many  arrangements 
for  them,  including  music  of  Meyerbeer 
{Les  Patineurs),  Purcell  (Comus),  Auber 
{Les  Rendezvous),  and  Boyce  (The  Prospect 
Before  Us).  He  also  chose  the  late  Liszt 
piano  pieces  used  in  Apparitions'  and 
orchestrated  Liszt's  Dante  Sonata  for  the 
company.  Other  transcriptions  include 
works  by  Boyce,  Handel,  and  Thomas 
Roseingrave,  an  Irish  pupil  of  Domenico 
Scarlatti.  Lambert  did  a  great  deal  of 
conducting,  at  the  promenade  concerts, 
where  he  was  associate  conductor  (1945- 
6),  on  the  B.B.C.  Third  Programme, 
where  he  was  always  willing  to  perform 
unusual  but  interesting  works,  and  at 
Covent  Garden,  where  among  other  works 
he  gave  memorable  performances  of 
Purcell's  Fairy  Queen  and  Puccini's 
Manon  Lescaut  and  Turandot.  His  book 
on  the  music  of  the  twenties.  Music  Ho! 
(1934),  subtitled  'A  Study  of  Music  in 
Decline',  was  brilliantly  written  and 
showed  a  wide  and  erudite  knowledge  of 
the  arts  and  of  life  in  general,  if  some  of 
its  conclusions  have  subsequently  been 
questioned.  Lambert  also  wrote  musical 
criticism  for  the  New  Statesman,  Figaro, 
the  Sunday  Referee,  and  other  papers,  and 
he  contributed  a  number  of  extremely 
witty  articles  on  non-musical  subjects  to 
Lilliput  and  other  magazines.  Apart  from 
his  brilliance  as  a  composer  and  conduc- 
tor, he  was  a  warm  and  generous  per- 
sonality, a  brilliant  conversationalist,  and 
a  man  of  enormous  knowledge  who  made 
a  unique  contribution  to  English  music 
during  the  last  twenty-five  years  of  his 
short  life. 

Lambert  married  in  1931  Florence 
Chuter  and  had  one  son  ;  the  marriage  was 
dissolved  and  in  1947  he  married  Isabel 


603 


Lambert,  C. 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Delmer.  He  died  in  London  21  August 
1951. 

A  portrait  by  Michael  Ayrton  is  in  the 
Tate  Gallery.  Of  two  by-  Christopher 
Wood,  one  is  at  Covent  Garden  and  the 
other  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery. 
The  family  owns  a  sculptured  head  by 
Maurice  Lambert  and  a  pencil  drawing 
by  his  father.  A  portrait  of  him  as  a  boy  at 
Christ's  Hospital  by  his  father  is  at  Christ's 
Hospital. 

[Grove's  Dictionary  of  Music  and  Musicians ; 
personal  knowledge.]        Humphrey  Searle. 

LAMBERT,  GEORGE,  first  Viscount 
Lambert  (1866-1958),  yeoman  farmer  and 
member  of  Parliament,  was  born  at  South 
Tawton  in  the  county  of  Devon  25  June 
1866  and  lived  at  Spreyton  near  by.  He 
was  the  eldest  son  of  George  Lambert  of 
Spreyton  by  his  wife,  Grace,  daughter  of 
Thomas  Howard,  of  South  Tawton.  Like 
his  forebears  for  many  generations  he  was 
a  small  landowner  and  yeoman.  He  was 
educated  at  the  local  grammar  school  and 
at  the  age  of  nineteen  he  was  farming  800 
acres  of  his  own  land.  Public  service 
began  to  attract  him  and  in  1889,  at  the 
age  of  twenty-three,  he  became  a  county 
councillor;  he  was  made  an  alderman  in 
1912  and  did  not  retire  until  1952. 

In  1891,  aged  twenty-five,  he  won  a 
notable  victory  as  a  Gladstonian  Liberal 
at  a  by-election  in  South  Molton  which  he 
represented  in  1891-1924  and  1929-45.  In 
all  he  fought  fourteen  elections,  was  four 
times  unopposed,  and  only  once  beaten 
(1924)  due  to  the  over-confidence  of  his 
supporters.  He  was  civil  lord  of  the 
Admiralty  from  1905  to  1915  and  made 
lasting  friendships  with  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  and  Admiral  Lord  Fisher  [q.v.]. 
His  feelings  for  Fisher  were  akin  to  hero 
worship  and  on  the  latter's  death  Lambert 
became  his  literary  executor.  He  was 
sworn  of  the  Privy  Council  in  1912  and 
after  1915  he  was  twice  invited  to  join 
the  Government,  by  Asquith  and  Lloyd 
George  respectively,  but  he  preferred  to 
remain  a  back-bencher. 

Lambert  was  fond  of  recounting  how 
he  moved  the  Address  in  1893  and  had 
twice  been  called  to  Gladstone's  room  for 
consultation.  At  the  customary  eve-of- 
session  dinner  given  by  the  prime  minister 
to  his  colleagues  Lambert  sat  next  to 
Gladstone  who  resisted  three  attempts 
by  the  butler  to  remove  his  spoon,  which 
he  needed  to  call  the  diners  to  silence 
before  the  saying  of  grace — 'a  good  old 
custom,  Mr.   Lambert',   said   Gladstone, 


*which  I  will  never  forsake  while  breath 
remains  in  my  body'.  Next  day  in  Parlia- 
ment while  Lambert  was  waiting  to  move 
the  Address  the  Irish  members  created 
such  a  disturbance  during  the  prelimin- 
aries that  the  Speaker  'adjourned  the 
House  to  eat  his  chop'.  Returning  early 
from  dinner  he  called  on  Lambert  to  move 
the  Address  when  the  only  members 
present  were  Gladstone,  Balfour,  and  the 
seconder  of  the  Address. 

In  subsequent  sessions  Lambert's  know- 
ledge of  farming  and  of  the  needs  of  rural 
life  stood  him  in  good  stead  and  he  made 
a  reputation  as  an  expert.  He  early  pro- 
moted a  private  bill  by  which  the  farmer 
would  get  fair  compensation  for  dis- 
turbance and  could  grow  what  he  chose, 
provided  that  he  maintained  the  fertility 
of  the  soil.  The  bill  lapsed  with  the  general 
election  of  1895.  He  was,  however,  success- 
ful in  putting  on  the  statute  book  an  Act 
by  which  parish  council  elections  were  to 
be  held  every  three  years  instead  of 
annually. 

Lambert  served  on  the  royal  commission 
on  agriculture  appointed  in  1893.  In 
general  he  was  an  economist  of  the  old 
school — state  action,  he  would  argue, 
involving  controls,  protective  duties, 
subsidies,  doles,  and  such  pernicious 
socialist  nostrums,  paralysed  those  ster- 
ling qualities  of  individual  self-help  and 
initiative  which  were  the  mainspring  of 
Britain's  greatness  in  the  past.  He  once 
likened  the  socialist  State  to  Dartmoor 
prison — planned  lives,  equality  main- 
tained, up  and  to  bed  at  the  same  times, 
no  unemployment,  and  no  waiting  list — 
an  ideal  socialist  institution.  He  was 
resolutely  opposed  to  Lloyd  George's  land 
policy  formulated  in  1924  and  even  con- 
templated leaving  the  Liberal  Party  on 
account  of  it.  In  1919-21  he  had  been 
chairman  of  the  parliamentary  Liberal 
Party  and  he  used  his  influence  to  promote 
Liberal  unity. 

During  1931  when  the  Liberal  Party  led 
by  Lloyd  George  kept  a  Labour  Govern- 
ment under  Ramsay  MacDonald  in 
office,  Lambert  grew  increasingly  restive 
and  was  among  the  first  to  make  over- 
tures for  the  'national'  Government  which 
was  formed  in  August  1931  and  supported 
by  the  majority  of  Liberals  in  Parliament, 
who  constituted  the  newly  formed 
National  Liberal  Party.  Lambert  was 
a  man  of  strong  convictions,  who  knew 
his  own  mind  and  spoke  it.  He  was  not 
given  to  subtlety  of  speech  or  opinion  but 
he  was  downright,  steadfast,  and  incor- 


eo4 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lane 


ruptible:  a  force  to  be  reckoned  with  by 
party  leaders.  When  he  retired  in  1945  he 
was  created  a  viscount. 

Lambert's  name  in  Devonshire  among 
the  farmers  and  labourers  was  one  to  con- 
jure with  and  'Devonshire  Jarge'  never 
lost  the  support  of  the  farming  com- 
munity. Through  his  friendship  with  C.  H. 
Seale-Hayne  [q.v.],  whose  executor  he 
became,  he  was  able  to  devote  substantial 
sums  for  the  building  of  the  Seale-Hayne 
Agricultural  College  at  Newton  Abbot  of 
which  he  became  the  foundation  chairman. 

Lambert  was  a  good  sportsman,  a  good 
shot,  and  a  steady  golfer.  At  the  age  of 
sixty-seven,  on  a  handicap  of  fourteen,  he 
won  the  parliamentary  golf  handicap  in 
a  36-holes  final  at  Coombe  Hill,  beating 
the  Prince  of  Wales  by  five  and  four. 

He  married  in  1904  Barbara  (died 
1963),  daughter  of  George  Stavers,  ship- 
owner, of  Morpeth.  They  had  two  sons 
and  two  daughters.  George,  the  elder  son 
(born  1909),  who  succeeded  to  the  title, 
followed  his  father  as  M.P.  for  South 
Molton,  a  constituency  which  became 
Torrington  after  1950.  Lambert's  younger 
daughter  Margaret  was  from  1951  editor- 
in-chief  for  the  Foreign  Office  of  the 
German  documents  captured  in  1945. 

Lambert  died  at  Spreyton  17  February 
1958  at  the  age  of  ninety-one. 

There  are  two  portraits :  one  by  Arthur 
Hacker  (1913)  in  possession  of  the  family 
and  the  other  by  R.  G.  Eves  (1934)  at  the 
Seale-Hayne  College. 

[The  Times,  18  February  1958;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Geoffrey  Shakespeare. 

LANE,  LUPINO  (1892-1959),  actor  and 
theatre-manager,  was  a  member  of  a 
family  of  acrobats,  dancers,  and  clowns 
whose  record  goes  back  to  the  eighteenth 
century.  He  was  the  elder  son  of  Harry 
Lupino  and  his  wife,  Charlotte  Sarah 
Robinson.  So  many  of  his  cousins  were 
already  on  the  stage  under  the  family  sur- 
name that  there  was  a  danger  that  Henry 
William  George  Lupino  might  go  un- 
remarked. The  'Lane'  half  of  his  stage 
name  was  assumed  in  honour  of  his 
maternal  great-aunt,  Sarah  Lane,  whose 
management  of  the  Britannia  Theatre, 
Hoxton,  had  brought  her  wide  fame  and 
a  great  fortune. 

Born  in  London  16  June  1892,  the  future 
Lupino  Lane  was  bred  to  the  stage  as 
a  matter  of  course,  and  made  his  first 
public  appearance  at  the  age  of  four, 
in  a  benefit  performance  for  Vesta  Tilley 


[q.v.]  at  the  Prince  of  Wales's  Theatre, 
Birmingham.  This  was  no  more  than  a  pre- 
liminary canter;  but  by  1903  he  was  far 
enough  on  in  his  profession  to  make  his 
London  debut,  under  the  name  of  'Nipper* 
Lane,  at  the  London  Pavilion.  From  then 
onwards  he  proved  a  worthy  upholder  of 
his  family  tradition,  and  the  various  skills 
which  he  learned  so  thoroughly  in  those 
early  days  were  invaluable  to  him  when, 
with  the  years,  he  began  to  show  himself 
a  comedian  with  an  endearing  personality 
of  his  own. 

The  name  'Nipper'  had  suggested 
a  creature  small,  quick,  and  neat;  and 
small,  quick,  and  neat  he  remained 
throughout  his  career.  He  was  the  very 
embodiment  of  cockneydom  (it  is  the 
characteristic  of  the  Lupinos  that,  al-* 
though  their  name  betokens  a  foreign 
origin,  they  became  Londoners  in  grain). 
He  had  the  true  clown's  gift  of  pathos, 
while  the  brilhantly  executed  struggles  in 
which  he  could  involve  himself  with  in- 
animate objects — for  instance,  the  peer's 
robe  in  which  he  fell  from  the  stage  into 
the  orchestra  in  Me  and  My  Girl — ^were 
a  tribute  both  to  his  clown's  instinct  and 
his  acrobat's  immaculate  sense  of  timing. 

His  progress  towards  a  leading  position 
in  the  world  of  revue  and  pantomime  was 
not  at  first  spectacular,  but  it  was  steady. 
In  1915  he  appeared  at  the  Empire  in 
a  successful  Watch  Your  Step,  and  he 
remained  there  for  the  next  two  produc- 
tions, and  from  then  onwards  he  was  sel- 
dom out  of  an  engagement,  playing  'funny 
man'  parts  of  increasing  importance  in 
London,  in  New  York,  or  in  Manchester 
and  the  other  principal  cities  in  the 
then  well-established  touring  network. 
Gradually  the  versatility  of  his  talent 
became  more  clearly  manifest.  He  tried 
his  hand  here  at  management  or  direction, 
there  at  authorship.  He  made  a  successful 
New  York  appearance  as  Ko-Ko  in  The 
Mikado  in  1925.  By  the  time  he  was  forty 
he  was  well  established  as  a  leading 
comedian  on  both  sides  of  the  Atlantic. 

It  was  not,  however,  until  the  part  of 
the  cheerful  little  cockney  character,  Bill 
Snibson,  was  written  for  him  that  his 
years  of  triumphant  progress  began.  Snib- 
son made  his  first  appearance  in  Twenty  to 
One,  a  musical  farce  by  L.  Arthur  Rose 
and  Frank  Eyton,  with  music  by  Billy 
Mayerl,  which  opened  at  the  London 
CoHseum  on  12  November  1935,  pre- 
sented jointly  by  Lupino  Lane  and  Sir 
Oswald  StoU  [q.v.].  Lane  as  Snibson  took 
the  public  fancy  at  once,  and  the  piece 


605 


Lane 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


ran  for  nearly  a  year  and  subsequently 
went  on  a  long  tour.  This  was  success  on 
a  considerable  scale,  and  turned  Lane  into 
a  star  performer  as  well  as  into  a  manager 
of  substance ;  but  it  was  swiftly  put  in  the 
shade  by  the  second  Snibson  play,  Me  and 
My  Girl,  in  which  L.  Arthur  Rose  had 
Douglas  Furber  as  collaborator  and  the 
music  was  composed  by  Noel  Gay. 

This  piece,  directed  as  well  as  presented 
by  Lane,  opened  at  the  Victoria  Palace  16 
December  1937  and  had  the  phenomenal 
run  of  1,646  performances,  for  the  first 
1,550  of  which  Snibson,  now  raised  to  the 
peerage  but  still  an  irrepressible  cockney, 
was  played  by  Lane.  Nor  was  this  the  end 
of  it.  The  play  was  several  times  revived ; 
and  in  1942  the  first  Snibson  play,  Twenty 
to  One,  was  revived  at  the  Victoria  Palace 
with  Lane  again  in  the  part,  and  had 
a  longer  run  than  at  first. 

At  the  heart  of  the  triumph  of  Me  and 
My  Girl  lay,  undoubtedly,  the  dance 
which  swept  the  world — 'The  Lambeth 
Walk'.  It  was  created  by  Lane  to  a  happy 
little  tune  by  Gay,  and  was  the  distilled 
essence  of  the  cockney  spirit.  When  the 
play  was  filmed  (Lane  yet  once  again 
playing  Snibson),  'The  Lambeth  Walk' 
was  chosen  as  title. 

The  result  of  all  this  was  to  make  Lane 
a  very  rich  man  and  a  power  in  the  world 
of  the  theatre.  He  was  never  again  to 
enjoy  success  on  the  stage  on  the  grand, 
or  even  on  a  noteworthy,  scale;  but  he 
came  spectacularly  into  the  public  eye  in 
1946  when  he  bought  for  £200,000  the 
Gaiety  Theatre,  with  which  his  family  had 
been  connected  for  a  hundred  years.  He 
failed,  however,  to  find  the  financial  back- 
ing necessary  to  reopen  the  theatre,  and 
he  resold  the  property  in  1950. 

In  1917  Lupino  Lane  married  an 
actress,  Violet,  daughter  of  John  Propert 
Blyth,  sea  captain;  they  had  one  son. 
Lane  died  in  London  10  November  1959. 

[James  Dillon  White,  Born  to  Star,  1957; 
The  Times,  11  November  1959  ;  Who's  Who  in 
the  Theatre ;  personal  knowledge.] 

W.  A.  Darlington. 

LANG,  WILLIAM  HENRY  (1874-1960), 
botanist,  was  born  in  Groombridge,  near 
Tunbridge  WeUs,  12  May  1874,  the  son  of 
Thomas  Bisland  Lang,  medical  practi- 
tioner, and  his  wife,  Emily  Smith.  From 
Dennistoun  public  school,  Glasgow,  he 
entered  the  university,  obtaining  his  B.Sc. 
with  honours  in  botany  and  zoology  in 
1894  and  qualifying  in  medicine,  with  high 
commendation,   in   1895.   But   he   never 


became  an  active  practitioner ;  innate  in- 
terest and  the  enthusiasm  inspired  by  his 
teacher,  F.  O.  Bower  (whose  notice  he 
contributed  to  this  Dictionary),  led  him 
into  professional  botany.  His  first  re- 
searches were  understandably  concerned 
with  development  and  structure  in  the 
ferns,  on  which,  like  his  teacher,  he 
became  an  authority.  Further  impetus  to 
these  interests  was  given  by  a  period  of 
work  in  the  Jodrell  laboratory  at  Kew 
where  Lang  began  his  classical  observa- 
tions on  the  enigmatic  phenomena  of 
apogamy  and  apospory  in  ferns.  He  made 
the  discovery  of  sporangia  on  the  pro- 
thallus  of  a  fern  {Philosophical  Transac- 
tions of  the  Royal  Society,  1898)  which 
was  of  particular  contemporary  interest 
for  biologists  who  were  then  exploring  the 
manifestations  of  alternation  of  genera- 
tions in  plants  and  animals.  All  his  life 
Lang  seemed  to  have  the  knack  of  'getting 
on  to'  interesting  things.  During  the  next 
thirty  years  he  made  further  contribu- 
tions to  the  same  general  theme,  and  he 
was  usually  to  the  fore  when  the  topic  of 
'alternation',  with  its  many  vicissitudes, 
was  under  discussion. 

At  Kew,  Lang  came  under  the  inspira- 
tion of  D.  H.  Scott  [q.v.],  a  leading  ex- 
ponent of  fossil  botany.  Rumination  on 
the  nature  of  plant  life  in  far-off  Devonian 
and  Carboniferous  times,  the  cautious 
assessment  of  such  incomplete  fossil  frag- 
ments as  had  been  preserved,  and,  not 
least,  the  critical  evaluation  of  the  views 
of  others  on  such  materials,  were  occupa- 
tions highly  congenial  to  Lang.  He  had  not 
only  a  scholarly  and  philosophic  mind  but 
unusual  skill  and  patience  in  making  the 
most  of  scanty  and  imperfectly  preserved 
materials.  To  these  were  added  an  almost 
excessive  caution  and  restraint  in  the 
eventual  written  interpretation  of  his 
findings,  an  attitude  of  mind  which  he  was 
later  to  impress,  perhaps  with  some  over- 
emphasis, on  his  students  and  colleagues. 

In  1900  Lang  and  (Sir)  A.  G.  Tansley 
[q.v.]  paid  a  collecting  visit  to  Ceylon  and 
Malaya  which  led  to  subsequent  publica- 
tions on  pteridophytes  and  bryophytes.  In 
1902  he  returned  as  a  lecturer  in  botany  to 
the  staff  at  Glasgow  where  he  had  as  a  col- 
league D.  T.  Gwynne-Vaughan,  a  plant 
anatomist  whose  research  was  charac- 
terized by  exceptional  practical  skill  and 
elegance  of  presentation.  Bower,  Gwynne- 
Vaughan,  and  Lang  worked  together  in 
great  harmony  for  some  twelve  years, 
making  a  famous  trio — they  were  widely 
known    as    the    Triumvirate — of    whom 


606 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lang 


many  good  stories  are  told.  Bower,  a  some- 
what stern  disciplinarian,  firmly  decreed 
that,  as  students  were  forbidden  to  smoke, 
members  of  the  staff  must  also  refrain 
within  official  working  hours,  i.e.  up  till 
5  p.m.  Daily,  as  that  hour  approached, 
Lang  and  Gwynne-Vaughan,  two  sorely 
deprived  men,  were  to  be  seen,  seated  in 
the  room  which  they  shared,  each  with 
a  charged  pipe  in  his  left  hand,  while  in 
the  right  a  match  was  poised.  As  the  great 
university  bell  began  to  toll,  the  soles  of 
two  left  boots  were  simultaneously  raised, 
two  right  hands  swooped  down  in  a  syn- 
chronized movement  to  strike  the  matches, 
and  two  pipes  in  harmony  began  to  dis- 
charge their  consoling,  aromatic  fragrance. 
During  this  period  the  Glasgow  depart- 
ment was  frequently  visited  by  Robert 
Kidston  of  Stirling,  a  notable  investigator 
of  the  Palaeozoic  flora.  Gwynne-Vaughan 
and  he  collaborated  in  the  production  of 
a  notable  series  of  memoirs  on  'The  Fossil 
Osmundaceae'  (1907-10)  and  later,  on  the 
death  of  Gwynne-Vaughan,  Lang  joined 
with  Kidston  in  investigating  the  now 
famous  Rhynie  Chert  from  Aberdeenshire. 
This  was  undoubtedly  a  landmark  not 
only  in  the  history  of  fossil  botany  but  of 
botany.  The  silicified  plant  remains  were 
in  an  excellent  state  of  preservation  and 
the  two  experienced  investigators  did  not 
fail  to  make  the  most  of  them.   Their 
observations,  published  in  detail  in  the 
Transactions   of   the    Royal    Society    of 
Edinburgh  (vol.   hi,   1917-21),  provided 
quite  remarkable  demonstrations  of  the 
form  and  structure  of  a  group  of  simple 
leafless  and  rootless  vascular  plants  of 
early  Devonian  times — now  known  as  the 
Psilophytales.  Psilophyton,  it  is  true,  had 
been  known  since  1858,  but  it  had  been 
rather  neglected  and  its  structural  features 
were  imperfectly  known.   The   precision 
with  which  Kidston  and  Lang  were  able 
to  describe  and  portray  essential  morpho- 
logical features  and  phylogenetic  aspects 
of  the   new  genera   and   species   of  the 
'Rhynie  fossils'  gave  great  impetus  and 
new  direction  to  the  whole  of  this  branch 
of  botany.  These  memoirs  make  a  unique, 
factual     contribution     to     evolutionary 
theory.  At  the  time  of  their  publication 
they  had  a  very  special  interest  for  the 
many  botanists  who  were  then  actively 
interested   in   the   establishment   of  the 
original  flora  of  the  land  in  early  geological 
times.  Other  neglected  fossil  materials,  of 
the  same  general  period  and  affinity  and 
often   of  the    most    tenuous    and    frag- 
mentary   character,    were    subsequently 


investigated  by  Lang.  Later,  in  collabora? 
tion  with  Dr.  Isabel  C.  Cookson,  Lang  was 
able  to  show,  in  a  study  of  materials  from 
the  Australian  Silurian,  that  primitive 
vascular  plants,  not  unlike  a  lycopod  in 
their  general  configuration,  had  flourished 
in  geological  times  much  earlier  than  the 
Devonian.  Other  ancient  materials  in- 
vestigated by  Kidston  and  Lang  (e.g. 
Sporocarpon,  Transactions  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Edinburgh,  vol.  liii,  1925)  pro- 
voked new  interest  because  they  were 
made  at  a  time  when  students  of  phylo- 
geny  were  eagerly  searching  for  evidence 
of  possible  connecting  links  between  the 
algae  and  the  first  primitive  land  plants. 

In  1900  Lang  was  awarded  the  D.Sc. 
degree  of  Glasgow  and  when  the  Barker 
chair  of  cryptogamic  botany  was  estab- 
lished in  the  university  of  Manchester,  he 
was  the  evident  first  choice.  He  took  up 
his  duties  in  1909,  and  though  tempted 
and  urged  by  some  of  his  friends  to  apply 
for  professorships  elsewhere,  he  refused  to 
give  up  the  freedom  of  what  was  virtually 
a  research  chair.  When  he  retired  in  1940 
he  had  already  been  father  of  the  senate 
and  elder  statesman  for  many  years ;  his 
work  for  the  university  and  his  personal 
pre-eminence  were  recognized  by  an 
honorary  LL.D.  in  1942.  He  was  elected 
F.R.S.  in  1911  and  awarded  a  Royal  medal 
in  1931.  In  1932  he  received  an  honorary 
LL.D.  from  Glasgow.  He  was  a  foreign 
member  of  the  Swedish  Royal  Academy  of 
Science  and  in  1956  received  the  gold 
medal  of  the  Linnean  Society  of  London. 

Lang  was  of  tall  stature,  a  keen  walker, 
with  the  air  of  one  who  enjoyed  good 
health.  He  was  a  distinguished  profes- 
sorial figure,  for  from  his  student  days  he 
had  cultivated  a  noble  dark  beard.  An 
amiable  and  stimulating  conversationalist, 
with  an  agreeable,  cynical  pawkiness  and 
jolhty  of  delivery,  the  words  fairly  fizzed 
out  of  him,  enjoyed  no  less  by  himself  than 
his  hearers.  But  he  was  essentially  a  quiet 
and  modest  man,  with  wide  scholarly  and 
artistic  interests  and  a  deep  feeling  for 
philosophy,  especially  for  the  caution  and 
restraint  which  it  could  exercise  on  the 
facile  and  often  superficial  theorizing 
from  which  contemporary  botany  was  by 
no  means  free.  This  attitude  of  mind  per- 
vaded his  memorable  presidential  address 
to  the  botany  section  of  the  British 
Association  in  1915.  His  discourse  on 
'Phyletic  and  Causal  Morphology'  was  not 
only  remarkable  for  its  practical  and 
philosophic  insight  into  major  problems 
of  causation  in  plant  development  and 


607 


Lang 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


evolution,  reflecting  as  it  did  the  best  that 
had  been  thought  and  said  by  Hofmeister, 
Sachs,  and  Goebel,  and  by  Lang  himself, 
but  also  for  his  refreshingly  critical  atti- 
tude to  the  prevailing  comparative 
morphology  of  the  post-Darwinian  period. 

Lang  married  his  cousin,  Elsa  Valen- 
tine, of  Dublin,  in  1910,  but  they  had  no 
family.  On  his  retirement  from  Manches- 
ter his  friends  and  associates  hoped  that 
there  was  still  much  more  to  come  from 
his  pen.  But  this  was  only  to  be  fulfilled 
in  a  small  measure,  largely  because  of 
his  wife's  ill  health.  They  moved  to 
Milnthorpe  in  Westmorland  where,  after 
some  years,  she  died,  to  be  followed  on 
29  August  1960  by  Lang  himself. 

A  complete  set  of  his  published  work  is 
preserved  in  the  university  of  Manchester 
where  a  fund  perpetuates  his  memory. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
*  C.  W.  Wardlaw. 

V 

lARKE,  Sir  WILLIAM  JAMES  (1875- 
1959),  first  director  of  the  British  Iron  and 
Steel  Federation,  was  born  at  Ladywell, 
Kent,  26  April  1875,  the  eldest  son  of 
William  James  Larke,  builder,  by  his  wife, 
Rosa  Barton.  He  was  educated  at  Colfe's 
School,  Lewisham,  and  trained  as  an 
engineer  with  H.  F.  Joel  &  Co.,  Finsbury, 
and  Siemens  Brothers,  Woolwich.  In 
1898  he  joined  the  British  Thomson- 
Houston  Company,  becoming  engineer 
and  manager  of  its  power  and  mining 
department  in  1899  and  executive  en- 
gineer in  1912. 

He  joined  the  newly  established  Ministry 
of  Munitions  in  1915  where  he  was  mainly 
concerned  with  organizational  and  ad- 
ministrative matters,  becoming  director- 
general  of  raw  materials  in  1919.  The 
administrative  skill  which  he  showed  at 
the  Ministry,  added  to  his  industrial 
experience  as  an  engineer,  provided  the 
combination  of  qualities  which  he  further 
exercised  in  the  national  organization  of 
the  steel  industry  after  the  war.  Also  link- 
ing his  war  experience  with  his  later  career 
was  his  service  as  secretary  of  the  sub- 
committee of  post-war  iron  and  steel 
requirements  of  the  Ministry  of  Munitions 
council  committee  on  demobilization  and 
reconstruction.  The  chairman  of  this  group 
was  Walter  (later  Lord)  Layton,  the  first 
director  of  the  National  Federation  of 
Iron  and  Steel  Manufacturers,  whom  Larke 
succeeded  in  that  office  in  1922. 

Taking  over  at  a  time  of  acute  industrial 
depression,  Larke  steadily  advanced  the 
arguments  for  control  of  imports  and  a 


measure  of  protection  for  the  British  iron 
and  steel  industry.  This  policy  was  finally 
accepted  by  the  Government  and  em- 
bodied in  the  Import  Duties  Act  of  1932. 
As  a  result  of  the  Act,  and  of  recom- 
mendations from  the  Import  Duties 
Advisory  Council,  which  it  set  up,  for 
a  stronger  central  organization  for  the 
iron  and  steel  industry,  the  British  Iron 
and  Steel  Federation  came  into  existence 
in  1934  and  the  National  Federation  was 
dissolved.  Larke,  who  had  played  an  im- 
portant part  in  the  transition,  continued 
as  director  of  the  new  and  more  powerful 
organization,  under  its  chairman,  Sir 
Andrew  Rae  Duncan  [q.v.],  until  his 
retirement  in  1946. 

In  1939  Larke  was  made  chairman  of 
the  advisory  committee  of  non-ferrous 
minerals  at  the  Ministry  of  Supply  and  in 
1942  he  became  controller  of  non-ferrous 
mineral  development,  a  post  he  held  until 
the  end  of  the  war. 

Larke  was  continuously  active  in  pro- 
moting research  and  co-operation  directed 
to  technological  efficiency  within  the  iron 
and  steel  industry.  Combining  scientific 
knowledge,  thorough  experience  of  indus- 
trial affairs,  and  a  genial  personality,  he 
fitted  naturally  into  leading  positions  in 
a  large  number  of  industrial  and  profes- 
sional bodies.  In  1924,  early  in  his  associa- 
tion with  the  National  Federation  of  Iron 
and  Steel  Manufacturers,  the  Federation 
undertook  the  organization  of  co-operative 
research.  This  work  was  transferred  in 
1929  to  the  Iron  and  Steel  Industrial 
Research  Council,  of  which  Larke  was 
chairman  from  1938  to  1945.  He  was 
elected  vice-president  of  the  Iron  and 
Steel  Institute  in  1934,  became  honorary 
vice-president  in  1946,  and  was  awarded 
the  Institute's  Bessemer  medal  in  1947. 
He  was  also  in  his  time  president  of  the 
Junior  Institution  of  Engineers,  of  the 
Institute  of  Fuel,  of  the  Institute  of 
Welding,  and  of  the  British  Standards 
Institution. 

He  was  appointed  O.B.E.  in  1917, 
C.B.E.  in  1920,  and  K.B.E.  in  1921.  He 
received  the  honorary  degree  of  D.Sc. 
from  the  university  of  Durham  in  1945. 
He  married  in  1900  Louisa  Jane  (died 
1959),  daughter  of  James  Taylor  Milton, 
chief  engineer  surveyor  of  Lloyd's  Register 
of  Shipping,  of  Blackheath ;  they  had  one 
daughter  and  a  son,  W.  M.  Larke,  who 
became  general  manager  of  Stewart  and 
Lloyds,  Ltd.,  Bilston,  Staffordshire.  Larke 
died  29  April  1959  at  his  home  at  Sidcup, 
Kent. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Last 


[The  Times,  I  May  1959 ;  Engineer^  8  May 
1959  ;  J.  C.  Carr  and  W.  Taplin,  History  ^  the 
British  Steel  Industry,  1962 ;  private  informa- 
tion.] Walter  Taplin. 


LAST,  HUGH  MACILWAIN  (1894- 
1957),  Roman  historian  and  principal  of 
Brasenose  College,  Oxford,  was  born  at 
Putney  8  December  1894,  the  son  of 
William  Isaac  Last,  a  civil  engineer  who 
became  director  of  the  Science  Musemn, 
South  Kensington,  by  his  wife,  Anna 
Maria  Quare,  daughter  of  the  medical 
writer  George  Macilwain  [q.v.].  At  St. 
Paul's  School,  of  which  he  was  a  scholar, 
Last  came  particularly  under  the  in- 
fluence of  T.  Rice  Holmes  [q.v.]  who 
turned  his  attention  towards  the  world  of 
Rome.  In  1914  he  passed  with  an  open 
scholarship  into  Lincoln  College,  Oxford, 
where  he  remained  a  solitary  under- 
graduate throughout  the  war,  his  heart 
having  been  affected  by  attacks  of  bron- 
chitis. He  obtained  first  classes  in  honour 
moderations  (1916)  and  liter ae  humaniores 
(1918),  and  estabhshed  a  very  close 
relationship  with  his  tutor  W.  Warde 
Fowler  [q.v.]  who  revealed  to  him  not 
only  a  comprehensive  conception  of 
Republican  Rome  but  also  that  world 
of  international  scholarship  which  later 
formed  the  background  of  his  life.  Last 
had  begun  his  Oxford  career  late,  and 
undisturbed  by  the  normal  preoccupations 
of  undergraduate  life  he  matured  intel- 
lectually at  an  early  age.  He  was  able  to 
read  deeply  and  widely  in  those  branches 
of  ancient  history,  notably  the  history  of 
the  ancient  Orient,  which  were  not  part  of 
the  normal  curriculum.  This  wide  reading 
bore  valuable  fruit  in  a  sympathetic 
understanding  of  the  needs  of  such  sub- 
jects, particularly  Egyptology,  which  Last 
took  practical  steps  to  promote  within 
and  without  the  university.  It  also  led  to 
a  close  friendship  with  many  leading 
figures  in  these  subjects,  notably  H.  R.  H. 
Hall  [q.v.].  Throughout  his  life  Last 
formed  his  closest  friendships  with  men 
considerably  older  than  himself. 

WTien  in  1919  Last  was  elected  to  an 
official  fellowship  in  ancient  history  at  St. 
John's,  his  future  as  a  Roman  historian 
was  already  clear.  He  quickly  made  his 
mark  in  the  college :  as  a  teacher  who,  not- 
withstanding his  confident  mastery  of  his 
subject  and  Olympian  manner,  took  end- 
less pains  with  the  second  and  third  class 
men  and  won  his  pupils'  affection,  and  in 
other  walks  of  college  life.  He  played  an 
active  part  on  the  governing  body  and 


soon  stood  out  as  an  able  man  of  affairs 
with  a  particular  interest  in  the  agricul- 
tural and  financial  policy  of  the  college. 
In  the  wider  field  of  university  affairs 
Last  was  also  making  a  mark:  he  was 
a  trenchant,  if  slightly  ponderous,  debater 
and  his  frequently  contemptuous  dis- 
missal of  his  opponents  made  him  many 
enemies.  A  colleague  recalls  'how  he  kiUed 
a  proposal  for  an  honour  school  of 
anthropology  with  the  remark  that  "an 
acquaintance  with  the  habits  of  savages 
is  not  an  education"  '.  He  was  already 
consciously  building  the  image  of  himself 
which  he  presented  to  the  world :  the  inter- 
national scholar  who  was  also  a  man  of 
affairs.  To  this  image  Last  imparted 
a  suitable  outward  appearance  :  tall,  dark, 
and  heavily  built,  with  a  deliberate  gait, 
and  always  dressed  with  the  greatest  care, 
his  Homburg  hat,  his  pipe,  his  walking 
stick,  and  the  grey  woollen  scarf  thrown 
back  over  his  shoulder.  There  is  an  ad- 
mirable likeness  of  him  in  Sir  Muirhead 
Bone's  interior  of  Blackwell's  of  which  he 
is  the  central  figure. 

Last's  reputation  as  a  Roman  historian 
was  firmly  established  by  his  contributions 
to  the  Cambridge  Ancient  History  for 
which,  with  (Sir)  Henry  Stuart- Jones 
[q.v.],  he  was  chosen  to  write  on  the 
earliest  history  of  Rome  in  the  seventh 
volume  (1928).  One  of  his  only  two  sus- 
tained pieces  of*  writing,  these  chapters 
reveal  his  historical  position  more  clearly 
than  his  later  account  of  Republican  his- 
tory from  the  Gracchi  to  Sulla  which 
appeared  in  the  ninth  volume  (1932).  His 
account  of  early  Rome  shows  an  unusual 
combination  of  solid  erudition,  developed 
powers  of  close  reasoning,  admirable 
judgement,  and  a  certain  solemn  elo- 
quence, which  (in  spite  of  some  unexpected 
heterodoxies)  gives  that  work  a  lasting 
value  and  sets  it  at  the  head  of  his  writings. 
Throughout  this  reconstruction  he  showed 
his  close  kinship  with  the  two  great  his* 
torians  Gaetano  De  Sanctis  and  Theodor 
Mommsen.  These  greatly  influenced  Last's 
notions  of  the  social  and  political  de- 
velopment of  Rome.  His  admiration  for 
Mommsen  was  an  important  factor  in 
the  development  of  that  truly  astonishing 
capacity  for  constitutional  detail  which 
later  provided  him,  as  Camden  professor, 
with  the  raw  material  for  his  weighty  and 
almost  oracular  lectures  on  the  Roman 
Republican  constitution.  On  the  other 
hand.  Last's  reverence  for  the  achieve- 
ments of  the  nineteenth-century  German 
historians  led  to  some  atrophy  of  his  own 


8662062 


Last 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


wider  interests  (for  instance  in  the  ancient 
history  of  the  Near  East)  and  to  his  adop- 
tion of  a  rather  negative  attitude  towards 
the  discovery  of  new  forms  of  investiga- 
tion within  the  field  of  Roman  history.  To 
the  end  he  was  always  captivated  by  the 
fascination  of  new  evidence,  but  he  re- 
mained unimpressed  by  many  of  the  new 
approaches  to  the  existing  body  of  know- 
ledge. While  wholly  familiar  with  inscrip- 
tions, papyri,  and  coins,  these  were  for 
him  simply  historical  material  for  his 
task  of  interpreting  to  the  common  man, 
and  above  all  to  the  undergraduate,  the 
spirit  quickening  Rome's  history,  and  he 
rarely  attempted  direct  technical  work  on 
them. 

While  developing  into  an  authoritative 
and  influential  figure  in  the  university  and 
in  the  national  field  of  Roman  studies  (he 
was  president  of  the  Roman  Society  in 
1934-7),  Last,  who  never  married,  still 
found  time  for  other  pursuits:  his  main 
recreations  were  nightly  bridge  in  college 
with  Stuart-Jones  and  others,  golf,  and 
occasional  shooting  at  Bagley  Wood, 
while  in  vacation  he  returned  regularly  to 
relax  at  his  family  home  at  Harlow  in 
Essex.  Of  travel  as  an  aid  to  the  study 
of  ancient  history,  he  was  frankly  scep- 
tical ;  apart  from  frequent  visits  to  Italy 
(which  gained  him  a  facetious  reputation 
as  an  admirer  of  Mussolini)  he  travelled 
little. 

In  1936  Last,  who  had  been  university 
lecturer  in  Roman  history  since  1927,  was 
appointed  Camden  professor  and  migrated 
to  Brasenose.  His  influence  in  the  sub- 
faculty  was  perhaps  not  much  greater 
than  it  had  been  when  he  was  a  fellow  of 
St.  John's,  even  if  he  now  became  less 
critical  of  academic  policy.  But  his  in- 
fluence as  a  teacher  increased :  he  was  free 
to  lecture  both  on  the  subject  always 
nearest  to  his  heart,  the  Roman  constitu- 
tion, traditionally  a  lecture  of  the  Camden 
professor,  and  on  some  more  peripheral 
subjects.  He  was  able  to  confirm  and 
extend  his  influence  on  young  graduates 
beginning  the  advanced  study  of  Roman 
history ;  and  he  used  his  weighty  authority 
in  pubhc  debate,  both  in  and  out  of  the 
university,  in  the  defence  of  classical 
studies.  It  was  undoubtedly  as  a  super- 
visor of  young  graduates  that  Last  scored 
his  greatest  success ;  he  possessed  unusual 
patience  and  skill  in  determining  suitable 
subjects  of  research,  and  remained  a  con- 
stant, if  not  infrequently  sardonic,  adviser 
as  the  work  developed.  The  influence 
which  he  exercised  over  young  historians 


extended  far  beyond  Oxford,  and  was 
acknowledged  wherever  Roman  studies 
were  prosecuted:  he  received  honorary 
degrees  from  Edinburgh  (1938)  and  Trinity 
College,  Dublin  (1948),  and  was  elected  an 
honorary  fellow  of  Lincoln  (1939). 

Great  though  his  professional  achieve- 
ment was,  the  passage  of  time  brought 
no  major  work  from  Last's  pen.  With 
his  main  contributions  to  the  Cambridge 
Ancient  History,  the  last  of  which  was  pub- 
lished in  1936,  his  original  work  was 
largely  over.  Certainly  he  wrote  much 
(although  always  with  difficulty,  and  in 
an  involved  and  unattractive  style),  but 
his  published  work  took  increasingly  the 
form  of  learned  and  often  elaborate  reviews 
of  the  works  of  others.  The  intervention  of 
the  war  (during  much  of  which  he  was 
employed  on  government  intelligence 
work)  may  have  been  partly  responsible 
for  this,  but  in  fact  the  trend  was  already 
clear.  Last  had  lost  the  most  important 
qualities  of  an  historian — a  lively  historical 
imagination  and  a  lasting  creative  vein — 
and  his  hyper-developed  critical  sense 
made  this  defect  only  more  marked. 
Nevertheless,  while  in  these  years  he  did 
not  write  the  book  which  many  hoped  for 
on  the  Roman  constitution,  his  interests 
were  developing  in  another  field,  largely 
through  the  influence  of  N.  H.  Baynes. 
Last,  as  if  conscious  of  his  own  deficiency, 
always  had  the  greatest  respect  for  those 
who  possessed  the  gift  of  imaginative 
writing;  nobody  excited  his  admiration 
and  affection  as  much  as  Baynes,  whose 
profound  learning  and  dramatic  eloquence 
had  done  much  to  stimulate  the  study  of 
the  Christian  Empire,  and  in  these  years 
Last's  thoughts  turned  continually  to  the 
problems  connected  with  the  early  history 
of  Christianity.  Another  aspect  of  Roman 
civilization  which  increasingly  occupied 
his  attention  was  the  Roman  legal  system ; 
he  sought  to  bring  home  in  his  later  years 
the  realities  of  the  civil  law  to  the  histori- 
cal student,  and  devoted  several  courses  of 
advanced  lectures  to  various  aspects  of 
this  general  problem. 

In  1948  on  the  sudden  death  of  W.  T.  S. 
Stallybrass  [q.v.]  Last  was  offered  the 
principalship  of  Brasenose  which  he 
accepted  against  medical  advice.  In  the 
years  between  the  wars  the  college  had 
been  an  affluent  and  convivial  society  but 
now  the  main  task  which  faced  Last  was 
the  restoration  of  its  financial  stability. 
In  the  few  years  available  to  him  he 
notably  improved  the  financial  position  of 
the  college  and  left  his  mark  upon  its 


m 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lauterpacht 


intellectual  standards  by  his  full  en- 
couragement of  all  aspects  of  college  life. 
In  1956  ill  health  compelled  him  to  resign 
and  he  was  elected  an  emeritus  fellow. 
He  died  at  Harlow  25  October  1957. 

[The  Times,  30  October  1957;  Manchester 
Guardian,  1  November  1957 ;  The  Brazen 
Nose,  vol.  xi,  Winter  1957-8 ;  Journal  of 
Roman  Studies,  vol.  xlvii,  1957  (volume  of 
papers  presented  to  Last,  with  bibliography) ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

P.  M.  Fraser. 

LATHAM,  PETER  WALKER  (1865- 
1953),  rackets  and  tennis  champion,  was 
born  in  Manchester  10  May  1865,  the  only 
child  of  William  Latham,  engine  fitter, 
and  his  wife,  Sarah  Jane  Hewitt.  Latham 
was  not  a  strong  boy  when,  at  the  age  of 
eleven,  he  started  his  ball-game  life  in  the 
Manchester  Rackets  Club.  However,  he 
developed  well  in  body  and  in  the  art  of 
playing  rackets  until,  in  1887,  when  not 
quite  twenty-two,  he  challenged  Joseph 
Gray  of  Rugby  for  the  world's  champion- 
ship and  won  by  7  games  to  4.  In  1888 
he  was  engaged  as  head  professional  of 
rackets  at  the  Queen's  Club,  West  Ken- 
sington, where,  and  at  Charterhouse,  he 
was  successful  in  defending  his  title  against 
Walter  Gray  of  Charterhouse  by  6  games 
to  3.  During  the  next  eight  years,  except 
for  a  professional  championship  in  1891 
when  Latham  beat  George  Standing,  pro- 
fessional to  Prince's  Club,  Knightsbridge, 
by  5  games  to  0,  he  was  not  challenged, 
and  this  gave  him  a  good  opportunity  to 
devote  his  attention  to  real  tennis.  This 
game  came  easily  to  him,  so  that  in  1895 
he  challenged  Charles  Saunders,  who  had 
for  long  held  an  impregnable  position,  and 
at  Brighton  won  the  British  title  by  7 
sets  to  2. 

Latham  was  at  his  best  at  rackets  in 
1897  when  he  was  challenged  for  the 
world's  championship  by  George  Standing 
who  by  this  time  had  gone  to  America.  In 
London  Latham  won  by  4  games  to  1,  but 
in  America  he  played  what  was  probably 
the  hardest  and  greatest  match  of  his 
career,  at  one  time  coming  within  an  ace 
of  losing,  but  finally  winning  by  4  games 
to  3. 

In  the  next  year  (1898)  Latham  was  at 
his  best  at  tennis  when  he  played  Tom 
Pettitt  of  Boston  and  for  the  first  time 
met  the  'railroad'  service  which  he  was 
only  able  to  counter  by  his  knowledge  of 
rackets.  Nevertheless  he  defeated  Pettitt 
decisively  by  7  sets  to  0.  For  several  years 
Latham  remained  supreme  in  both  games. 


In  1902  he  retained  the  world's  champion- 
ship of  rackets  when  challenged  by  Gilbert 
Browne  of  Prince's  whom  he  easily  de- 
feated by  5  games  to  0.  He  then  resigned 
his  title,  although  until  1909  he  was  rated 
scratch  in  the  professional  handicap  com- 
petitions. 

In  the  meantime  he  had  become  tennis 
professional  to  (Sir)  Charles  Rose  who  in 
1901  built  a  tennis  court  at  Newmarket. 
In  1904  he  was  challenged  at  tennis  by 
C.  (Punch)  Fairs  of  Prince's  and  won  at 
Brighton  by  7  sets  to  5.  In  the  next  year 
he  lost  the  title  to  Fairs  by  5  sets  to  1 — 
his  only  defeat  in  a  championship  match — 
but  regained  it  two  years  later  at  the  age 
of  forty-two  when  he  defeated  Fairs  by  7 
sets  to  3.  He  then  retired  from  champion- 
ship play  and  for  some  years  played 
exhibition  matches  in  America  and  on  the 
Continent. 

In  1916  Latham  returned  to  the  Queen's 
Club,  where  he  did  much  to  revive  tennis 
after  the  war  and  was  greatly  sought  after 
as  a  teacher.  He  was  blessed  with  many 
exceptional  qualities,  which  were  not  fully 
apparent  to  the  spectator  but  were 
quickly  discovered  by  his  opponents.  His 
service  may  not  have  looked  remarkable 
but  it  was  delivered  to  prevent  his 
opponent  from  making  his  favourite  return 
and  to  obtain  the  attack  and  put  his 
adversary  on  the  defensive.  Always  well 
balanced,  he  was  very  quick  to  move  at 
the  critical  moment,  so  that  it  appeared  as 
though  the  ball  was  always  being  hit 
towards  him.  In  the  words  of  an  amateur 
who  had  played  with  Latham  at  his  best  in 
both  games :  'He  was  an  artist  ever  seeking 
perfection.  For  him  it  was  not  enough  that 
a  stroke  should  be  a  winner.  It  had  to  be 
that  and  more,  the  more  being  that  even 
he  could  not  improve  it.' 

Latham  married  in  1888  Annie  Sarah 
Carpenter,  daughter  of  Stephen  Whetham, 
flax  cleaner  for  rope  making,  of  Bridport. 
They  had  one  daughter  and  four  sons,  one 
of  whom,  Emil,  became  a  tennis  profes- 
sional at  Queen's  Club.  Latham  died  in  his 
home  at  Chiswick,  22  November  1953. 
He  appears  in  the  painting  'In  the  Dedans 
at  Queen's  Club'  by  Mrs.  Jean  Clark 
which  became  the  possession  of  Mr.  P.  M. 
Luttman-Johnson. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Aberdark. 

LAUTERPACHT,  Sm  HERSCH  (1897- 
1960),  international  lawyer,  was  born  16 
August  1897  at  Zolkiew,  a  village  near 
Lemberg  (Lwow)  in  Eastern  Galicia.  His 


611 


Lauterpacht 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


father  was  Aaron  Lauterpacht,  a  timber 
merchant  of  fluctuating  fortune.  His 
mother  was  Deborah  Turkenkopf.  There 
were  three  children  of  the  marriage,  he 
being  the  younger  son  of  a  family  deeply 
Jewish  in  sentiment  and  sympathy.  The 
entire  family  in  Poland,  excepting  only  his 
sister's  daughter  who  found  refuge  in  a 
convent,  was  massacred  during  the  war  of 
1939-45. 

In  1910  the  family  moved  to  Lemberg 
to  enable  Hersch  Lauterpacht  to  receive 
a  better  secondary  education.  On  the  out- 
break of  war,  as  an  Austrian  subject,  he 
was  mobiUzed  into  the  Austrian  army  but 
was  required  to  serve  in  his  father's  tim- 
ber factory,  which  was  requisitioned  and 
in  a  territory  occupied  and  reoccupied  by 
the  Russian  and  Austrian  armed  forces. 
After  the  war,  because  of  academic  diffi- 
culties at  Lwow,  he  went  to  the  university 
of  Vienna  where  he  obtained  his  doctorate 
in  law  in  1921  and,  as  a  student  of  Hans 
Kelsen,  a  doctorate  in  political  science  in 
1922. 

Both  at  Lemberg  and  in  Vienna,  he 
took  a  very  prominent  part  in  Jewish  and 
Zionist  affairs,  organizing  schoolchildren 
and  students  not  least  in  order  to  make 
provision  for  their  desperate  human  needs. 
It  was  this  early  experience  which  moulded 
his  intellectual  and  emotional  interest  in 
human  rights  and  their  international  pro- 
tection. He  was  a  founder  and  president  of 
a  World  Federation  of  Jewish  Students. 

In  the  spring  of  1923  Lauterpacht  came 
to  England,  and  although  he  could  barely 
speak  English  he  entered  the  London 
School  of  Economics  as  a  research  student 
under  the  direction  of  A.  D.  (later  Lord) 
McNair,  for  whom  he  always  retained  the 
deepest  respect  and  affection,  regarding 
him  as  the  great  formative  influence  in 
his  life.  He  obtained  his  LL.D.  in  1925 
with  a  dissertation  entitled  'Private  Law 
Sources  and  Analogies  of  International 
Law'  (pubUshed  in  1927),  which  has  been 
described  as  a  'seminal  work  of  contem- 
porary international  law',  and  in  1927  he 
was  appointed  an  assistant  lecturer  at  the 
London  School  of  Economics.  At  that 
point  he  decided  to  attach  himself  per- 
manently to  this  country,  and  he  was 
naturalized  a  British  subject  in  1931. 

His  career  in  his  adopted  country  was 
truly  remarkable.  He  became  reader  in 
pubhc  international  law  in  the  university 
of  London  in  1935.  In  1938-55  he  held  the 
Whewell  chair  of  international  law  in  the 
university  of  Cambridge,  in  succession  to 
McNair.  In  1946  he  became  a  fellow  of 


Trinity  College  and  in  1948  of  the  British 
Academy.  In  1936  he  was  called  to  the 
bar  by  Gray's  Inn  and  he  took  silk  in  1949. 
He  did  much  advisory  work  at  tlie  bar,  and 
was  specially  associated  with  the  'Contin- 
ental Shelf  arbitrations,  appearing  for  the 
Petroleum  Development  Company  in  the 
great  Abu  Dhabi  case.  During  the  war  of 
1939-45,  in  the  critical  period  of  American 
neutrality,  he  was  able  when  visiting  the 
United  States  to  render  very  valuable 
service  to  the  United  Kingdom.  He  was 
a  member  of  the  British  War  Crimes 
Executive  in  1945-6  and  attended  the 
Nuremberg  trials.  He  was  of  counsel 
for  the  United  Kingdom  in  the  Corfu 
Channel  and  the  Anglo-Iranian  Oil  Com- 
pany (Interim  measures)  cases  before  the 
International  Court  of  Justice  at  The 
Hague ;  he  advised  in  other  cases  and  was 
entrusted  with  the  revision  of  the  Manual 
of  Military  Law,  eventually  published  by 
the  War  Office  in  1958.  He  was  a  member 
of  the  Institute  of  International  Law 
(associate  in  1947  and  titular  in  1952) ;  and 
he  was  elected  to  the  United  Nations' 
International  Law  Commission  in  1951, 
discharging  his  heavy  duties  there  with 
great  conscientiousness  during  four  years, 
two  of  them  as  special  rapporteur  on  the 
law  of  treaties.  He  accepted  visiting  pro- 
fessorships at  many  universities,  particu- 
larly at  Geneva  and  in  the  United  States, 
and  he  delivered  courses  of  lectures  at  the 
Hague  Academy  of  International  Law  in 
1930,  1934,  1937,  and  1947. 

His  lectures  at  Geneva  were  published 
in  1934  under  the  title  The  Development  of 
International  Law  by  the  Permanent  Court 
of  International  Justice  (2nd  and  expanded 
ed.  1958). 

Among  his  numerous  other  books  and 
articles — there  is  a  convenient  account  of 
them  by  Dr.  C.  W.  Jenks — four  require 
special  mention :  The  Function  of  Law  in 
the  International  Community  (1933),  Recog- 
nition in  International  Law  (1947),  and 
International  Law  and  Human  Rights 
(1950):  the  first  being  his  most  important 
contribution  to  the  understanding  and 
development  of  international  law,  the 
second  his  most  comprehensive  treatment 
of  a  topic  of  enduring  and  ever-increasing 
practical  importance,  the  third  the  conse- 
cration of  a  lifelong  interest  and.  pre- 
occupation. The  fourth  is  his  long  anni- 
versary article  (vol.  xxiii,  British  Year 
Book  of  International  Law,  1946)  entitled 
'The  Grotian  tradition  in  International 
Law'  which  is  a  typical  illustration  of  his 
own  thinking  and  methods. 


612 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lawrence,  G; 


Concurrently  he  was  fully  occupied  with 
his  other  academic  duties.  He  took  great 
pains  with  the  standard  course  of  lectures 
which  he  delivered  as  Whewell  professor  in 
Cambridge.  The  clarity  of  his  presentation, 
the  width  of  his  learning,  the  skill  of  his 
exposition,  and  his  own  total  commitment 
made  an  almost  prophetical  impression 
upon  a  succession  of  audiences.  The  suc- 
cess of  his  lectm*es  was  an  important  factor 
in  the  development  of  international  studies 
at  Cambridge.  His  reputation  at  home  and 
abroad  gathered  round  him  a  large  num- 
ber of  research  students  who  have  claimed 
it  as  a  special  distinction  that  they  were 
trained  under  his  rigorous  supervision. 

His  capacity  for  work  was  formidable, 
for  in  addition  to  the  occupations  already 
mentioned,  he  was  concerned  continuously 
with  three  major  tasks — the  editing, 
amplifying,  and  renovating  of  the  stan- 
dard two-volume  textbook  by  L.  F.  L. 
Oppenheim  [q.v.]  on  International  Law 
(now  'Oppenheim-Lauterpacht') ;  the  edit- 
ing of  the  British  Year  Book  of  Inter- 
national  Law,  of  exceptional  authority  in 
this  field,  which  was  under  his  exclusive 
direction  between  1944  and  1954 ;  and  the 
truly  monumental  Annual  Digest  of  Public 
International  Cases  (now  the  International 
Law  Reports)  with  which  he  was  con- 
nected from  its  outset  and  for  which  he 
had  sole  responsibility  for  the  twenty- 
eight  years  1929-56. 

His  career  culminated  in  his  election  in 
1954  to  a  judgeship  of  the  International 
Court  of  Justice,  whereupon  he  was 
elected  a  bencher  of  his  Inn  in  1955  and 
was  knighted  in  1956.  It  was  universally 
expected  that  during  his  tenure  of  the 
nine-year  office  (and  its  probable  renewals) 
he  would  add  to  his  achievements  an 
epoch-making  series  of  judgements.  His 
contributions  as  a  judge  were  indeed  not 
negligible — they  have  been  analysed  in 
detail  by  Sir  Gerald  Fitzmaurice — but  he 
suffered  a  severe  heart  attack  in  1959  and 
on  8  May  1960  he  died  in  London  as  the 
result  of  an  operation,  at  the  judicially 
almost  immature  age  of  sixty-two,  to  the 
great  and  untimely  loss  of  international 
legal  science. 

In  his  personal  life,  he  was  most  simple 
and  modest  and  quiet — it  was  very  hard 
to  believe  that  he  had  once  been  an 
active  Zionist.  He  was  exceptionally 
good-humoured  and  good-natured,  dedi- 
cated indeed  and  devoted  to  his  work  and 
to  his  students  but  without  solemnity,  of 
high  but  straightforward  moral  principles, 
deeply  attached  to  his  wife  and  son  and 


profoundly  appreciative  of  the  happiness 
of  his  home,  kindly  and  friendly  and 
cheerful.  He  had  married  in  1923  Rachel, 
the  third  daughter  of  Michael  Steinberg, 
resident  in  Palestine.  Their  only  child, 
Elihu,  himself  attained  distinction  in  the 
international  legal  world. 

There  is  a  bust  by  Madeleine  Winiarska- 
Cotowika  in  the  possession  of  the  family, 
and  a  memorial  room  in  the  Squire  Law 
Library,  Cambridge. 

[Lord  McNair  in  Proceedings  of  the  British 
Academy,  vol.  xlvii,  1961 ;  Dr.  C.  W.  Jenks  in 
vol.  xxxvi  British  Year  Book  of  International 
Law,  1960;  Sir  Gerald  Fitzmaurice  in  vols. 
xxxvii-xxxix  British  Year  Book  of  Inter- 
national Law,  1961-3 ;  Studies  .  .  .  in  memory 
of  Sir  H.  L.  published  by  the  Faculty  of  Law 
of  the  Hebrew  University  of  Jerusalem,  ed. 
N.  Feinberg,  with  bibliography,  1961 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

C.  J.  Hamson; 

LAWRENCE,  GERTRUDE  (1898-1952), 
actress,  was  born  in  London  4  July  1898. 
Her  real  name  was  Gertrud  Alexandra 
Dagma  Lawrence  Klasen,  her  father, 
Arthur  Lawrence  Klasen,  a  music-hall 
singer,  being  Danish,  while  her  mother, 
Alice  Louise  Banks,  was  English.  The 
child's  parents  were  divorced  while  she 
was  still  in  infancy,  and  she  lived  first 
with  her  mother,  a  small-part  actress, 
then  later  with  her  father.  She  was  thus 
brought  up  in  a  theatrical  atmosphere 
from  her  earliest  years. 

She  made  her  first  stage  appearance  in 
a  pantomime  at  Brixton  in  1910.  In  his 
autobiography,  (Sir)  Noel  Coward  tells  how 
he  met  her  as  a  child-performer  in  the 
year  1913:  'Her  face  was  far  from  pretty, 
but  tremendously  alive.  She  was  very 
mondaine,  carried  a  handbag  with  a 
powder-puff  and  frequently  dabbed  her 
generously  turned-up  nose.  She  confided 
to  me  that  her  name  was  Gertrude 
Lawrence,  but  that  I  was  to  call  her  Gert 
because  everybody  did ...  I  loved  her 
from  then  onwards.'  She  became  the 
foremost  of  all  Coward's  leading  ladies, 
a  perennial  feather  in  his  brilliant  cap. 

In  her  early  days  Gertrude  Lawrence 
was  solely  a  revue  and  cabaret  artist. 
Her  first  manager  was  Andre  Chariot 
[q.v.]  and  her  first  really  big  success  was 
in  London  Calling  in  1923,  a  revue  written 
by  Noel  Coward.  The  best  of  his  musical 
plays,  Bitter  Sweet  (1929),  was  written 
with  her  in  mind,  but  it  was  finally 
decided  that  her  voice  was  too  fight  for 
so  heavy  a  singing  part  as  that  of  Sari. 
So  he  wrote  Private  lAves  (1930)  in  which 


613 


Lawrence,  G. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


they  played  together.  The  play's  success 
was  immediate  in  both  London  and  New 
York.  Thereafter  New  York  would  never 
willingly  allow  Gertrude  Lawrence  to 
return  to  her  native  London.  James 
Agate  [q.v.],  seeing  her  in  a  musical 
comedy,  had  already  called  her  a  very 
considerable  artist  who  could  neither 
dance  nor  sing  but  had  an  astonishing 
power  of  mimicry  and  sense  of  fun,  adding 
that  she  gave  a  brilliant  edge  to  every- 
thing she  said  and  did.  George  Jean 
Nathan  in  New  York — another  critic  with 
few  favourites — spent  the  subsequent 
twenty-five  years  praising  her  glitter  and 
effervescence  in  plays  which  included 
Lady  in  the  Dark  and  Pygmalion^  and 
finally  the  excellent  and  evocative  musical 
play,  The  King  and  /,  in  which  Gertrude 
Lawrence  was  triumphantly  appearing  on 
Broadway  when  her  fatal  illness  overtook 
her. 

Noel  Coward  knew  and  understood  her 
better  than  her  critics  or  her  public.  In 
the  last  pages  of  his  Present  Indicative 
he  records  her  personal  qualities  of 
'quick  humour,  insane  generosity,  and  a 
loving  heart',  and  recalls  her  performance 
in  Private  Lives-,  'the  witty  quick-silver 
delivery  of  lines;  the  romantic  quality, 
tender  and  alluring;  the  swift,  brittle 
rages;  even  the  white  Molyneux  dress'. 
She  was  an  actress  of  high  vitality,  keen 
wit,  and  undoubted  style — a  fine  flaunt- 
ing player — with  a  strange  gift  of  muta- 
bility, of  altering  her  appearance  for 
each  part  she  played  or  even  within  the 
same  part. 

(iertrude  Lawrence  was  twice  married: 
first,  in  1917,  to  Francis  Xavier  Howley, 
playwright  and  producer,  by  whom  she 
had  a  daughter.  The  marriage  was 
dissolved.  In  1940  she  married  Richard 
Stoddard  Aldrich,  an  American.  She 
published  her  own  racy  reminiscences, 
A  Star  Danced,  in  1945.  But  she  comes 
more  vividly  and  touchingly  to  life 
in  Noel  Coward's  Present  Indicative  (1937) 
and  Future  Indefinite  (1954) ;  her  art, 
charm,  and  elegance  are  best  epitomized 
in  the  recording  she  made  with  him  of 
scenes  from  his  Private  Lives  culminating 
in  the  haimting  song,  'Some  day  I'll  find 
you'. 

She  died  in  New  York  6  September  1952. 
A  film  of  her  life,  entitled  Star/,  was 
made  in  1968  with  Julie  Andrews  playing 
Gertrude  Lawrence. 

[Gertrude  Lawrence,  A  Star  Danced,  1945 ; 
R.  S.  Aldrich,  Gertrude  Lawrence  as  Mrs.  A., 
1957 ;  private  information.]  Alan  Dent. 


LAWRENCE,  Sm  PAUL  OGDEN  (1861- 
1952),  judge,  was  born  in  Wimbledon, 
Surrey,  8  September  1861,  the  second  son 
of  Philip  Henry  Lawrence,  solicitor,  by 
his  wife,  Margaret  Davies.  His  father 
conducted  the  heavy  litigation  which 
resulted  in  the  preservation  for  the 
public  enjoyment  of  the  commons  in  the 
vicinity  of  London.  He  was  subsequently 
solicitor  to  the  Board  of  Works,  was  called 
to  the  bar  by  Lincoln's  Inn  in  1872,  and 
died  in  1895. 

Lawrence  was  educated  at  Malvern 
College  and  abroad  and  was  called  to  the 
bar  by  Lincoln's  Inn  in  1882.  He  joined 
the  Northern  circuit  and  started  practice 
in  the  Liverpool  chambers  of  (Sir)  Ralph 
Neville,  subsequently  a  Chancery  judge. 
He  practised  in  the  Palatine  Court  until 
1896  when,  on  taking  silk,  he  removed  to 
London,  attaching  himself  to  the  court 
of  Mr.  Justice  Kekewich  [q.v.]  in  the 
Chancery  division.  On  that  judge's  death 
in  1907  he  attached  himself  to  the  court  of 
Mr.  Justice  Eve  [q.v.].  He  acquired  a 
considerable  Chancery  practice  and  often 
appeared  in  the  House  of  Lords  and  the 
Judicial  Committee  of  the  Privy  Council. 
He  was  frequently  engaged  in  Indian 
appeals ;  and  in  1918,  towards  the  close  of 
his  career  at  the  bar,  he  appeared  in  the 
special  reference  to  the  Judicial  Com- 
mittee of  the  claims  to  the  ownership 
of  the  unalienated  lands  in  Southern 
Rhodesia,  representing  the  elected  mem- 
bers of  the  legislative  council.  (See  In  re 
Southern  Rhodesia,  [1919]  A.C.  211.)  At 
the  bar  his  exact  knowledge,  incisive  and 
lucid  argument,  and  attractive  advocacy 
made  him  a  formidable,  but  always  fair 
and  courteous,  opponent. 

On  the  death  of  Neville,  Lawrence  was 
appointed  to  succeed  him  in  1918  as  a 
Chancery  judge  and  was  knighted  (1919). 
He  brought  to  the  judicial  office  the 
qualities  of  an  eminently  practical  man  of 
the  world  and  a  scholarly  lawyer,  shrewd, 
cautious,  and  strong.  In  1926  he  went  to 
the  Coml  of  Appeal  (and  was  sworn  of 
the  Privy  Council)  where  he  sat  for  the 
last  time  on  21  December  1933.  He  died 
at  Wimbledon  26  December  1952. 

In  1885  three  of  Lawrence's  sisters, 
Penelope,  Dorothy,  and  Millicent,  enlisted 
his  financial  help  in  the  foundation  of 
Roedean  School,  and  he  maintained  a 
close  connection  with  it  throughout  his 
life.  In  important  decisions  concerning 
its  development  his  advice  was  always 
sought.  For  many  years  he  was  chairman 
of  the  governing  body,  and  generations  of 


614 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Ledward 


pupils  knew  him  as  *Uncle  Paul'.  His 
portrait,  by  Hugh  Riviere,  hangs  in  the 
main  hall  at  Roedean. 

Lawrence  became  a  conservator  of 
Wimbledon  Common  in  1901.  He  was 
chairman  of  the  General  Council  of  the 
Bar  from  1913  to  1918  and  chairman  of 
the  Incorporated  Council  of  Law  Report- 
ing from  1917  to  1919.  He  served  as 
treasurer  of  Lincoln's  Inn  in  1925. 

In  1887  Lawrence  married  Maude  Mary 
(died  1947),  daughter  of  John  Turner,  of 
Oaklands,  Wimbledon  Park;  there  were 
no  children. 

[Law  Times,  9  January  1953;  The  Times, 
29  December  1952.]  F.  H.  Cowper. 

LEDWARD,  GILBERT  (1888-1960), 
sculptor,  was  born  in  Chelsea  23  January 
1888,  the  third  child  of  Richard  Arthur 
Ledward,  the  sculptor  [q.v.],  and  his  wife, 
Mary  Jane  Wood,  descendent  of  a  long 
line  of  Staffordshire  master  potters  and 
figure  makers.  He  went  to  school  at 
St.  Mark's  College,  Chelsea,  leaving  in 
1901  because  his  widowed  mother  had 
decided  to  take  her  five  children  to  live 
in  Germany.  He  returned  to  England 
alone  after  a  year,  lived  with  relatives  and 
started  full-time  training  as  a  sculptor 
at  the  Royal  College  of  Art,  under  the 
tutelage  of  Edouard  Lanteri.  His  early 
instruction  was  almost  entirely  in  the 
art  of  modelling,  the  general  practice  of 
British  sculptors  at  this  period  being  to 
employ  skilled  professional  carvers,  who 
were  mostly  ItaUan,  to  do  their  stone- 
carving  for  them.  In  1907  he  went  on  to 
the  Royal  Academy  School.  In  1913  he 
completed  his  first  important  commission, 
a  stone  Calvary  at  Bourton-on-the-Water, 
Gloucestershire.  In  the  same  year  he  won 
the  double  honour  of  the  Academy  travell- 
ing studentship  and  gold  medal  and  the 
first  Rome  scholarship  in  sculpture.  He 
spent  valuable  months  closely  studying 
Italian  art,  making  innumerable  sketches 
and  copious  notes. 

The  outbreak  of  war  brought  his 
travels  to  an  end,  but  1917  found  him 
back  in  Italy,  on  the  front,  serving  as 
a  lieutenant  with  the  Royal  Garrison 
Artillery.  He  was  called  home  in  May 
1918  and  seconded  to  the  Ministry  of 
Information  as  an  official  war  artist. 
In  this  capacity  he  produced  reliefs  for  the 
Imperial  War  Museum,  work  which  gave 
full  scope  both  to  his  power  of  composition 
and  to  his  dramatic  vision  of  the  brutality 
and  heroism  of  war.  The  demand  for  memo- 
rials brought  commissions  in  Stockport, 


Abergavenny,  London,  and  many  other 
places.  Of  these  the  best  known  is  probably 
the  Guards  Memorial  in  London.  In  1926- 
9  he  was  professor  of  sculpture  at  the 
Royal  College  of  Art  and  in  each  of  these 
three  years  one  of  his  students  won  the 
Rome  scholarship. 

Never  afraid  to  learn  from  his  students 
it  was  during  this  time  that  Ledward 
began  to  make  bold  experiments  in  his 
own  work.  Hitherto  he  had  been  primarily 
a  maker  of  modelled  monuments  in 
bronze  but  now  he  began  to  awake  to  the 
exciting  possibilities  inherent  in  direct 
stone  carving.  During  the  next  few  years 
he  exhibited  several  groups  at  Burlington 
House  which  were  recognized  to  be 
original  and  exciting  examples  of  direct 
carving.  Among  these  were  'Earth  Rests', 
a  life-size  reclining  figure  in  Roman 
stone,  in  the  diploma  gallery  collection  at 
Burlington  House;  'The  Sunflower',  a 
life-size  mother  and  child,  in  the  Kelvin- 
grove  collection,  Glasgow ;  and  'Monolith', 
purchased  for  the  Tate  Gallery  under  the 
Chantrey  Bequest.  Another  enterprise 
of  this  period  was  the  initiation  of  a 
movement  for  improving  the  design  and 
carving  of  memorials  and  headstones  in 
English  churchyards  and  for  encouraging 
the  use  of  local  stones. 

In  1932  he  was  elected  A.R.A.  and  in 
1937  became  R.A.  He  was  always  un- 
failingly loyal  to  the  aims  and  values  of 
Burlington  House  and  outspoken  in  his 
defence  of  Academic  traditions  although 
he  was  always  alert  to  praise  the  best 
in  modern  experimental  work.  Able  to 
adapt  himself  to  a  wide  variety  of  forms, 
he  obtained  commissions  as  varied  as  they 
were  numerous.  Among  his  many  portrait 
busts  those  of  Bishop  de  Labilliere  (1944), 
Rachel  Gurney  (1945),  and  Admiral  Sir 
Martin  Dunbar-Nasmith,  V.C.  (1948)  were 
especially  praised.  Other  works  that 
excited  considerable  interest  were  his 
memorial  to  the  Submarine  Service,  Com- 
mandos, and  Airborne  Forces  (1948)  in  the 
cloister  of  Westminster  Abbey,  the  bronze 
groups  for  the  Hospital  for  Sick  Children, 
Great  Ormond  Street  (1952),  the  Sloane 
Square  fountain  (1953),  and  the  Great 
Seal  of  the  Realm  (1953).  His  last  work, 
finished  just  before  his  death,  was  a  great 
stone  frieze  above  the  entrance  to 
Barclays  D.C.O.  Bank  in  Old  Broad 
Street,  E.C.2.  Before  starting  this  carving 
he  toured  Africa  extensively,  filling  many 
sketch  books  with  studies  and  using  these 
drawings  to  give  the  work  reality  and 
strength.  .m  mm 


615 


Ledward 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


•n)In  1954-6  Ledward  was  president  of 
the  Royal  Society  of  British  Sculptors, 
in  1956-7  a  trustee  of  the  Royal  Academy. 
In  1956  he  was  appointed  O.B.E.  He 
always  maintained  that  of  all  the  arts 
sculpture  was  the  most  permanent  and 
the  surest  guide  to  the  health  of  a  nation 
— a  barometer  of  civilization — and  he 
never  spared  himself  in  his  efforts  to 
produce  the  best  of  which  he  was  capable : 
a  truly  dedicated  artist.  He  believed  that 
sculpture,  to  be  seen  at  its  best,  must 
stand  in  the  open  air  and  it  is  fitting  that 
an  early  bronze  figure,  *  Awakening',  con- 
sidered by  many  to  be  his  most  inspired 
work,  should  grace  a  small  garden  on  the 
Chelsea  Embankment,  very  near  to  the 
house  where  he  was  born. 

In  1911  Ledward  married  Margery 
Beatrix  Cheesman  (died  1960) ;  they  had 
two  daughters  and  one  son.  He  died  in 
London  21  June  1960.  A  drawing  of 
Ledward  as  a  boy  by  Frederick  Marriott 
is  in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
>    -.       Charles  Wheeler. 

LEE,  ROBERT  WARDEN  (1868-1958), 
lawyer,  was  born  at  Hanmer  14  December 
1868,  the  third  son  of  the  vicar,  the 
Rev.  Matthew  Henry  Lee,  later  canon  of 
St.  Asaph,  and  his  wife,  Louisa,  daughter 
of  Robert  Warden.  A  scholar  of  Rossall 
School  and  Balliol  College,  Oxford,  he 
obtained  a  double  first  in  classics  (1889- 
91).  He  spent  the  years  1891-4  in  the 
Ceylon  Civil  Service,  where  his  experience 
as  a  magistrate  and  commissioner  of 
requests  awoke  in  him  an  interest  in 
Roman-Dutch  law,  the  common  law  of 
Ceylon.  He  resigned  for  reasons  of  health 
and  returned  to  England,  where  he  was 
called  to  the  bar  by  Gray's  Inn  (1896), 
obtained  the  degree  of  B.C.L.  (1898), 
practised  before  the  Privy  Council,  mainly 
in  appeals  from  Ceylon,  and  taught  law 
both  at  Worcester  College,  Oxford,  of 
which  he  became  a  fellow  in  1903,  and  at 
London  University,  where  he  held  the 
chair  of  Roman-Dutch  law  from  1906. 
In  1914  he  went  to  Montreal  as  dean  of 
the  law  faculty  of  McGill  University,  but 
in  1921  Oxford  called  him  back  as  its 
first  and  only  professor  of  Roman-Dutch 
law.  He  occupied  the  chair,  in  conjunction 
with  a  fellowship  of  All  Souls,  for  thirty- 
six  years,  and  only  retired  in  1956  at 
the  age  of  eighty-seven  after  a  serious 
operation. 

Most  of  Lee's  writing  was  done  while  he 
held    the    Oxford    chair,    but    his    most 


famous  work,  the  Introduction  to  Roman- 
Dutch  Law,  of  which  five  editions  had 
appeared  by  1953,  came  out  in  1915. 
Admirably  clear,  attractive,  and  well 
proportioned,  its  concise  and  allusive 
language  is  designed,  as  he  himself 
emphasized,  to  whet  the  appetite.  Several 
generations  of  South  African  and  Ceylon 
lawyers  were  brought  up  on  it  and  as  a 
laconic  and  ironical  introductory  work 
in  the  civil  law  tradition  it  can  stand 
comparison  with  the  Institutes  of  Gains. 
Lee's  two-volume  work  on  Grotius's 
Introduction  to  the  Jurisprudence  of 
Holland  (1926-36)  is  now  of  value  chiefly 
for  the  English  translation  and  com- 
mentary. His  Elements  of  Roman  Law 
(1944),  published  in  his  seventies,  has  been 
very  successful  with  students. 

Lee  was  a  firm  protagonist  of  codifica- 
tion and  attached  great  importance  to 
his  part  in  producing  the  Digest  of  English 
Civil  Law  edited  by  Edward  Jenks 
(whose  notice  Lee  contributed  to  this 
Dictionary)  and  two  similar  volumes  on 
the  law  of  South  Africa  (1950-54)  which  he 
edited  in  collaboration  with  A.  M.  Honore, 
although  they  did  not  give  the  impetus  he 
hoped  to  the  movement  for  codification. 

Lee  was  a  fine  teacher,  whose  pupils 
included  at  least  half  a  dozen  judges. 
All  his  pupils,  distinguished  or  not,  could 
implicitly  rely  on  his  painstaking  care 
and  loyal  support  of  their  interests.  His 
loyalties  were  also  engaged  by  All  Souls 
College  and  by  the  Inns  of  Court,  where 
he  was  for  long  reader  in  Roman  and 
Roman-Dutch  law  to  the  Council  of  Legal 
Education.  He  received  many  honours, 
for  he  was,  inter  alia,  a  K.C.  of  the  Quebec 
bar  (1920),  a  fellow  of  the  British  Academy 
(1933),  a  bencher  of  Gray's  Inn  (1934),  an 
honorary  doctor  of  the  universities  of 
Lyon,  the  Witwatersrand,  and  Ceylon, 
president  of  the  Society  of  Public  Teachers 
of  Law,  and  vice-president  of  the  Inter- 
national Academy  of  Comparative  Law. 

Although  Lee  devoted  a  good  part  of 
his  life  to  the  study  of  Roman-Dutch  law, 
he  looked  upon  it  with  detachment. 
Himself  a  classical  scholar  who  delighted 
in  composing  Latin  verses — his  Series 
Episcoporum  Romanae  Ecclesiae  (1935)  is 
an  elegant  example — he  was  impatient 
of  the  historical  bent  of  some  South 
African  lawyers  and  was  apt  to  say,  with 
a  twinkle,  that  the  old  authorities  should 
be  burned.  This  has  not  happened,  but 
the  modern  legal  systems  of  South  Africa 
and  Ceylon  have  now  come  to  be  re- 
garded as  distinct  from  the  Roman-Dutch 


<n;« 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lees 


law  of  renaissance  Holland,  and  it  has 
been  said  with  some  truth  that  this  sturdy- 
Victorian  individualist  was  the  last  Roman- 
Dutch  lawyer. 

In  1914  Lee  married  Amice,  daughter 
of  Sir  John  Macdonell,  the  jurist,  whose 
notice  Lee  contributed  to  this  Dictionary. 
They  had  one  daughter.  Lee  died  in 
London  6  January  1958.  A  charcoal 
drawing  by  I.  Plaente  and  a  pastel  by 
K.  Lloyd  are  in  the  possession  of  the 
family. 

[H.  G.  Hanbury  in  Proceedings  of  the 
British  Academy,  vol.  xliv,  1958 ;  American 
Journal  of  Comparative  Law,  vol.  vii,  Autumn 
1958 ;  The  Times,  7  January  1958 ;  personal 
knowledge.]  A.  M.  Honorj^. 

LEES,  GEORGE  MARTIN  (1898-1955), 
geologist,  born  at  Dundalk,  county  Louth, 
Ireland,  16  April  1898,  was  the  third 
child  of  George  Murray  Lees,  civil 
engineer,  of  Edinburgh,  and  his  wife, 
Mary  Martin.  From  St.  Andrew's  College, 
Dublin,  he  went  to  the  Royal  Military 
Academy  at  Woolwich.  Commissioned 
at  seventeen  in  the  Royal  Artillery  he 
served  in  France  but  soon  transferred  to 
the  Royal  Flying  Corps  in  which  he  won 
the  M.C.  After  a  tour  of  duty  as  flying 
instructor  in  Egypt  he  went  to  Mesopo- 
tamia for  further  active  service,  winning 
the  D.F.C.  in  air  operations.  He  took  part 
in  the  capture  of  Kirkuk  from  the  Turks, 
making  a  forced  landing  behind  the 
Turkish  lines  in  what  is  now  the  Kirkuk 
oilfield,  regaining  the  British  lines  on  foot 
by  following  geological  outcrops  seen 
from  the  air. 

After  the  war  Lees  joined  the  civil 
administration  in  Iraq  (1919-21),  serving 
as  assistant  political  officer  in  the  moun- 
tainous Halabja  district  close  to  the  Persian 
frontier.  At  the  time  of  the  insurrection  he 
had  an  exciting  escape,  but  later  returned 
to  Kurdistan.  He  resigned  from  the  Iraq 
administration  in  April  1921  and  began  to 
study  geology,  in  which  he  had  become 
interested  in  Km-distan.  After  a  few 
months  at  the  Royal  School  of  Mines  he 
joined  the  Anglo-Persian  Oil  Company 
(later  the  British  Petroleum  Company, 
Ltd.)  in  October  1921,  as  assistant 
geologist,  without  formal  academic  qualifi- 
cations. The  wisdom  of  this  appointment 
was  soon  revealed  by  the  excellence  of 
his  geological  work  and  his  appointment 
in  1930  as  chief  geologist  of  his  company 
at  the  early  age  of  thirty-two,  a  post  held 
with  distinction  until  1953. 

In  1922-5  Lees  was  in  the  Middle  East 


on  geological  surveys.  In  the  winter  of 
1924-5  he  accompanied  an  eminent 
Hungarian  geologist,  Hugo  de  Bockh,  on 
a  geological  reconnaissance  of  south-west 
Persia,  an  experience  which  played  an 
important  part  in  his  further  geological 
education.  In  1925-6  he  made,  with  K. 
Washington  Gray,  a  geological  recon- 
naissance of  Oman.  During  subsequent 
study  leave  in  Vienna  (1926-8)  he  attended 
lectures  by  F.  E.  Suess  and  L.  Kober,  both 
eminent  geologists  with  world-wide  inter- 
ests, and  was  awarded  a  Ph.D.  for  a  thesis 
on  his  Oman  work,  subsequently  published 
by  the  Geological  Society  of  London.  In 
following  years  Lees  examined  oil  pros- 
pects and  oil  company  geological  methods 
in  many  countries,  including  the  United 
States,  Canada,  Egypt,  Germany,  and 
Australia.  Under  his  geological  direction 
his  company  in  the  Middle  East  discovered 
more  oil  for  fewer  wells  drilled  than  the 
world  had  yet  seen.  Over  100,000  square 
miles  of  mountainous  Persia  were  also 
geologically  surveyed  at  appropriate 
scales.  In  1933  he  initiated  a  new  pro- 
gramme of  oil  search  in  England  and 
Scotland  which  resulted  in  the  discovery 
of  the  East  Midland  oilfields  in  1939: 
these  explorations  added  much  new 
information  to  British  geology,  discovering 
the  Yorkshire  potash  deposits  as  a  by- 
product. During  the  war  of  1939-45  Lees 
was  seconded  for  a  period  to  the  petroleum 
division  of  the  Ministry  of  Fuel  and  Power 
and  also  carried  out  a  special  mission  for 
the  prime  minister  in  the  Far  East.  Other 
successful  explorations  which  he  helped 
to  initiate  and  which  came  to  fruition  in 
post-war  years  were  those  in  Nigeria, 
Libya,  and  Abu  Dhabi  (Trucial  Coast). 

In  1943  Lees  was  awarded  the  Bigsby 
medal  of  the  Geological  Society  of  London 
'for  his  important  geological  work  in 
Persia  and  Oman,  and  for  his  share  in  the 
discovery  of  oil  in  England'.  In  1948  he 
was  elected  F.R.S.  During  subsequent 
years  he  was  appointed  a  member  of  the 
Geological  Survey  Board  and  served  on 
the  councils  of  the  Geological  Society  and 
Royal  Society  and  on  other  committees. 
For  the  two  years  1951-2-3  he  was 
president  of  the  Geological  Society,  the 
first  geologist  practising  his  profession  in 
industry  to  achieve  this  distinction.  His 
two  presidential  addresses,  on  'Foreland 
Folding'  and  'The  Evolution  of  a  Shrink- 
ing Earth',  aroused  considerable  interest. 
In  1954  he  was  awarded  the  Sidney 
Powers  memorial  medal  of  the  American 
Association  of  Petroleum  Geologists,  their 


61T 


Lees 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


highest  distinction,  never  previously  given 
to  a  non-American,  for  service  to  Middle 
East  geology.  Lees's  publications,  mostly 
on  the  Middle  East,  number  about  forty. 

Lees  had  all  the  characteristics  of  a 
leader — outstanding  personality ;  quick- 
ness of  apprehension ;  capacity  for  con- 
structive thinking;  abundant  common 
sense;  skill  in  exposition;  good  humour; 
reasonableness;  in  discussion  he  was  a 
catalyst  and  a  listener  rather  than  a 
talker.  His  geological  career  coincided 
with  the  discovery  and  development  on 
scientific  lines  of  the  world's  largest 
oilfields,  to  which  his  contribution  was 
unique.  He  died  in  London  25  January 
1955,  after  two  years'  illness  following  a 
life  of  vigour  and  good  health. 

In  1931  Lees  married  Hilda  Frances, 
writer  and  musicologist,  daughter  of 
Francis  Baugh  Andrews,  architect  and 
antiquary ;  they  had  one  son. 

[W.  J.  Arkell  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  i,  1955 ;  Pro- 
ceedings of  the  Geological  Society  of  London, 
9  March  and  20  September  1955 ;  Journal  of 
the  Central  Asian  Society,  vol.  xv,  part  3, 
1928 ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] N.  L.  Falcon. 

LEESON,  SPENCER  STOTTESBERY 
GWATKIN  (1892-1956),  schoolmaster 
and  bishop,  was  born  in  Twickenham 
9  October  1892,  the  son  of  John  Hudd 
Leeson,  a  surgeon  who  had  worked  with 
Lister,  who  later  became  first  mayor  of 
the  new  borough  of  Twickenham ;  a  man 
of  unbounded  vigour  and  a  free-thinker 
whose  independent  views  contrasted 
strongly  with  the  piety  of  his  wife, 
Caroline,  daughter  of  Frederick  Gwatkin, 
soHcitor,  of  Lincoln's  Inn.  Both  parents 
had  been  married  before  (Leeson  had 
eight  half-brothers  and  sisters)  and  both 
influenced  him  deeply.  He  grew  up  with  a 
respect  for  middle-class  integrity  and  a 
sympathy  for  the  man  in  the  street  which 
gave  him  a  sureness  of  touch  later  to 
prove  one  of  his  most  considerable  assets. 
Leeson  went  from  the  Dragon  School, 
Oxford,  as  a  scholar  to  Winchester  where, 
although  not  a  notable  figure,  he  was 
deeply  affected  by  the  life  which  he  later 
described  in  College  1901-1911  (1955). 
Never  reckoning  himself  an  arbiter  of 
taste,  he  was  peculiarly  impressionable; 
the  buildings  of  Winchester,  with  their 
atmosphere  of  intellectual  activity,  were 
an  inspiration,  as  Chartres  later.  He  was 
similarly  affected  at  both  Winchester  and 
Oxford  by  music  in  which  again,  with  no 


pretence  of  catholic  or  critical  apprecia- 
tion, he  allowed  himself  to  be  'over- 
whelmed'. Already  there  was  to  be 
observed  the  religious  inspiration  which 
derived  from  his  mother. 

He  went  up  to  Oxford  with  a  New  Col- 
lege scholarship  and  in  1913  secured  his 
first  in  classical  honour  moderations,  on 
the  strength  of  which  he  was  awarded  a 
'war  degree'  in  1916.  His  contemporaries 
remember  him  as  a  man  who  seemed  to 
have  the  'gift  of  universal  friendliness'. 
His  characteristic  greeting  had  a  zest  and 
wholehearted  attention  which  won  him 
devoted  followers.  He  developed  an 
eloquence  which,  interrupted  by  a  slight 
stammer  which  did  not  embarrass  him, 
was  used  to  great  effect.  He  would 
apologize  for  speaking  from  notes  and  for 
not  producing  a  paper.  The  notes  were 
three  words  on  half  an  envelope,  but  the 
address  would  have  a  masterly  coherence 
as  well  as  a  striking  extempore  quality 
which  made  him  on  occasion  one  of  the 
most  effective  speakers  of  his  day.  The 
interests  of  Lionel  Curtis  and  L.  S.  Amery 
[qq.v.]  in  imperial  questions  attracted 
him,  as  did  Christian  Socialism  preached 
by  Scott  Holland  [q.v.]  and  John  Carter 
at  Pusey  House. 

In  August  1914  Leeson  enlisted,  was 
commissioned,  and  sent  to  Gibraltar, 
Thence  he  went  to  Flanders  in  March 
1915,  but  was  soon  invalided  home  as  a 
result  of  a  severe  bout  of  influenza  affect- 
ing his  heart.  In  September  he  joined 
naval  intelhgence  in  which  he  worked 
until  the  war  ended.  His  marriage  in  1918 
to  Mary  Cecil,  daughter  of  Dr.  Montagu 
Lomax,  gave  him  not  only  an  unusually 
happy  family  life  (they  had  one  son  and 
three  daughters)  but  also  a  'business 
manager'.  Able  administrator  though  he 
was,  he  could  never  be  bothered  with  his 
own  affairs  and  left  them  to  his  wife. 

In  1919  he  joined  the  Board  of  Educa- 
tion where  he  found  a  cause  on  which  he 
could  lavish  that  passionate  interest  in 
social  conditions  which  he  had  developed 
at  Oxford.  Colleagues  were  impressed  as 
well  as  amused  by  his  seriousness  about 
education — a  seriousness  at  which  Leeson 
could  always  laugh  himself.  In  his  five 
years  at  the  Board  he  came  under  influ- 
ences which  affected  him  permanently,  in 
particular  that  of  Sir  Amherst  Selby- 
Bigge  whom  he  served  as  private  secre- 
tary. In  1922  he  was  called  to  the  bar  by 
the  Inner  Temple. 

When  he  was  offered  a  post  at  Win- 
chester in  1924  it  was  clear  that  the  choice 


6ia 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Leeson 


could  hardly  have  been  better  both  for  the 
school  and  for  Leeson  himself.  He  had  an 
enthusiasm  and  abandon  which,  with  his 
ability,  made  him  the  ideal  teacher  for 
clever  boys.  In  later  years  when  he 
expected  similar  success  in  teaching, 
despite  an  exceptionally  heavy  programme 
of  outside  engagements,  he  was  to  some 
extent  disappointed.  But  at  Winchester 
and  in  his  early  years  at  Merchant  Taylors' 
he  was  one  of  the  most  successful  teachers 
of  his  generation.  He  went  to  Merchant 
Taylors'  as  headmaster  in  1927.  The 
school  had  become  somewhat  dim  in  spite 
of  his  predecessor's  scholarly  distinction ; 
but  particularly  as  a  social  problem  the 
post  appealed  to  Leeson.  He  understood 
the  background  of  boys  and  governors. 
His  personal  energies  were  poured  out: 
in  teaching,  in  the  inspiring  of  his  staff,  in 
securing  the  confidence  of  governors  and 
parents.  When  he  decided  to  move  the 
school  from  the  grim  and  restricted  build- 
ings in  Charterhouse  Square  loyal  support 
was  assured  him.  He  had  chosen  at  Sandy 
Lodge  a  spacious  site  on  the  outskirts 
of  north-west  London,  and  the  task  of 
planning  and  bringing  into  life  what  was 
virtually  a  new  school  gave  a  new  outlet 
for  his  energies. 

His  task  achieved,  Leeson  succeeded 
A.  T.  P.  Williams  at  Winchester  where  he 
remained  eleven  years  (1935-46).  There 
perhaps  he  expected  almost  too  much: 
when  Wykehamists  proved  that  they 
would  also  be  boys,  they  were  fall- 
ing short  of  his  sacred  ideal  for  them. 
Nevertheless  it  was  a  remarkable  head- 
mastership,  and  the  younger  members  of 
his  staff,  in  particular  those  who  left 
Winchester,  as  Leeson  had  done,  to  look 
after  great  day  schools,  owed  him  a 
special  debt.  Some  of  his  most  impor- 
tant work  was  done  as  chairman  of  the 
Headmasters'  Conference  (1939-45,  an 
exceptionally  long  tenure);  Winchester 
colleagues  who  criticized  him  for  absen- 
teeism had  little  notion  of  what  he  was 
doing  for  other  schools.  Ordained  deacon 
(1939)  and  priest  (1940),  his  influence  in 
the  Conference  from  the  first  had  been 
exercised  to  try  to  make  school  religion  a 
reality.  War  may  have  made  his  task 
easier.  He  certainly  inspired  the  Confer- 
ence with  his  own  conception  of  the 
teacher's  vocation,  and  persuaded  it  of 
the  importance  of  religion  and  religious 
observance  as  the  mainspring  of  education 
in  every  school;  of  the  importance  also 
of  opening  the  doors  to  children  from  less 
privileged  families. 


In  1946  Leeson  stepped  aside  serenely 
to  become  rector  of  Southampton, 
characteristically  seeking  a  job  in  what 
he  called  'the  Church's  front  fine'.  His 
gift  for  getting  on  with  parishioners  and 
for  making  his  small  staff  feel  that  they 
were  doing  great  service,  his  interest  in 
Sunday  schools  and  in  the  reconstruction 
of  the  bombed  church,  and  his  contact 
with  the  university,  all  contributed  to  his 
success.  As  at  Winchester  he  was  increas- 
ingly claimed  by  national  causes ;  he  would 
have  thought  it  wrong  ever  to  refuse  the 
chairmanship  of  an  educational  body. 
In  1949  he  was  consecrated  bishop  of 
Peterborough.  There  the  same  themes 
were  repeated:  devotion  to  every  educa- 
tional cause ;  determination  to  know  every 
parish  priest  in  his  diocese;  readiness 
to  undertake  any  job  of  preaching  or 
speaking  in  which  he  reckoned  he  could 
do  God's  work.  During  the  last  fifteen 
years  of  his  life  he  drove  himself  too  hard 
for  there  to  be  enough  time  for  thought. 
His  speeches  and  sermons  were  in  conse- 
quence less  effective,  although  he  could 
still  rise  to  a  great  occasion.  But  his 
complete  devotion  to  his  work  won  the 
deep  affection  of  his  clergy.  A  breakdown 
in  1952  should  have  proved  a  warning ;  by 
1955  it  was  apparent  that  the  appalling 
accumulation  of  tasks  eagerly  accepted 
could  not  be  sustained.  He  died  in  a 
London  hospital  27  January  1956. 

Leeson  published  a  number  of  books, 
the  most  ambitious  being  his  Bampton 
lectures,  Christian  Education,  published 
in  1947.  These  surveyed  the  history  of 
Christian  education — education  with  a 
specifically  Christian  content,  not  simply 
education  in  a  nominally  Christian  society 
— and  sketched  his  own  optimistic  policy 
for  the  Church  in  relation  to  the  Education 
Act  of  1944  and  the  need  for  co-operation 
with  other  denominations.  His  Study  of 
the  Gospel  of  Christ  (1941)  expressed  the 
simple  truths  in  which  he  believed  with 
characteristic  fervour.  There  is  a  small 
devotional  book  on  The  Holy  Communion 
(1943)  and  a  number  of  essays  and 
leaflets  on  educational  topics,  and  on  the 
welfare  State  which  he  accepted  with 
wholehearted  enthusiasm.  His  writings 
were  by  no  means  so  important  as  his  life 
and  the  spoken  word  of  his  early  addresses 
which  made  him  for  years  a  dominating 
figure  in  English  education. 

Leeson's  portrait  was  painted  by 
(Sir)  Oswald  Birley  for  Merchant  Taylors' 
more  sympathetically  than  it  was  by 
Rodrigo  Moynihan,  who  in  his  portrait 


61&« 


Leeson 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


for  Winchester  gave  the  impression  of  a 
scheming  prelate.  Nobody  disliked  more 
heartily  the  trappings  of  power.  But  it  is 
in  photographs  (such  as  thos6  reproduced 
in  Spencer  Leeson,  a  Memoir,  1958)  that 
the  characteristic  looks  of  puzzled  serious- 
ness or  unaffected  delight  may  be  seen, 
ii  [Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
i>>:  W.  F.  Oakeshott. 

LEMON,  Sir  ERNEST  JOHN 
HUTCHINGS  (1884-1954),  mechanical 
and  railway  engineer,  was  born  10 
December  1884  at  Okeford  Fitzpaine  in 
Dorset,  the  son  of  Edward  Lemon, 
agricultural  labourer  and  craftsman,  and 
his  wife,  Martha  Mary  Rose.  He  was 
educated  in  the  local  primary  school  and 
sang  in  the  choir  where  he  attracted  the 
notice  of  the  rector,  who  soon  recognized 
his  promise.  One  of  the  rector's  daughters 
married  the  younger  brother  of  Arthur 
Pillans  Laurie,  principal  of  the  Heriot- 
Watt  College,  Edinburgh  (1900-28),  who 
befriended  him  and  arranged  for  his 
apprenticeship  to  the  North  British 
Locomotive  Company  in  Glasgow,  where 
Lemon  attended  the  Glasgow  Technical 
College.  Lemon  often  spoke  with  gratitude 
for  his  start  in  hfe.  In  1905  he  worked  for 
a  time  in  the  drawing  office  of  Brown 
Brothers  &  Co.  in  Edinburgh  and  attended 
the  Heriot-Watt  College  to  obtain  his 
professional  status  as  a  mechanical 
engineer.  Later  he  worked  for  two  years  in 
the  rimning  department  of  the  Highland 
Railway,  and  in  1907  joined  Hurst, 
Nelson  &  Co.  where  he  was  employed  in 
negotiating  payments  by  the  railways  for 
damage  in  transit  to  privately  owned 
wagons.  The  Midland  Railway  was 
impressed  by  his  efficiency  and  in  1911 
appointed  him  chief  wagon  inspector. 
Later  Lemon  was  transferred  to  the 
Derby  carriage  and  wagon  works  where 
his  flair  for  production  found  its  oppor- 
tunity and  in  1917  he  became  works 
superintendent.  During  the  war  he  was 
responsible  for  building  ambulance  trains 
and  in  1918  he  received  the  O.B.E. 

When  the  railways  were  amalgamated 
in  1923  Lemon  became  divisional  super- 
intendent with  responsibility  for  the 
L.M.S.  railway  carriage  and  wagon  works 
at  Derby,  Earlstown,  and  Newton  Heath, 
where  he  soon  installed  mechanized 
construction  of  rolling  stock.  In  1927  he 
became  carriage  and  wagon  superintendent 
to  the  L.M.S.  Railway  and  in  1930  he  went 
with  his  vice-president  and  a  group  of 
railway  engineers  to  the  United  States  to 


study  the  working  of  their  railways.  On 
his  return  he  was  chairman  of  a  commit- 
tee, called  the  'lightning  committee', 
because  of  its  quick  report,  which  fore- 
shadowed many  of  the  changes  introduced 
into  the  L.M.S.  during  the  thirties  under 
Lemon's  vigorous  leadership.  In  1931  he 
became  chief  mechanical  engineer  and  in 
the  following  year  operating  and  com- 
mercial vice-president.  This  new  position 
gave  Lemon's  fertile  imagination  full 
scope  and  the  net  revenue  of  the  company 
benefited  thereby.  He  reorganized  the 
motive  power  depots  to  get  better  use  of 
the  locomotives,  with  a  reduction  in  their 
number  and  in  the  staff.  At  the  same  time 
he  accelerated  the  train  services.  Freight 
services  were  improved  by  his  schemes 
for  the  modernization  and  mechanization 
of  goods  stations  on  novel  lines.  Lemon 
took  a  special  interest  in  the  recruitment 
and  training  of  staffs  and  the  appointment 
of  traffic  apprentices,  including  men  from 
the  universities.  The  building  of  the 
School  of  Transport  at  Derby  and  the 
making  of  a  travelling  instruction  film 
were  also  due  to  his  initiative. 

In  all  this  Lemon  owed  much  to  the 
backing  and  encouragement  of  Lord 
Stamp  [q.v.]  and  his  wise  discrimination 
between  Lemon's  many  schemes.  It  was  a 
most  happy  combination  of  two  minds, 
poles  apart  in  outlook  and  experience,  but 
with  mutual  trust  and  confidence. 

As  the  result  of  the  reputation  Lemon 
had  made  as  a  planner  of  production,  in 
1938  he  went  to  the  Air  Ministry  as 
director-general  of  aircraft  production, 
with  a  seat  on  the  Air  Council.  He  was 
closely  associated  with  Sir  Wilfrid  Freeman 
[q.v.]  who  soon  assimilated  the  secrets  of 
Lemon's  planning  techniques.  The  Air 
Ministry  had  only  a  small  production 
section  which  Lemon  quickly  enlarged, 
adding  some  half-dozen  directorates  to 
organize  the  work.  He  also  reorientated 
the  central  planning  section  which  became 
so  important  in  the  complex  tasks  ahead 
of  it  which  Lemon  had  foreseen.  In  all  this 
he  had  Freeman's  wholehearted  support 
and  the  organization  remained  unaltered 
after  its  transfer  to  the  Ministry  of  Air- 
craft Production.  Lemon  also  succeeded 
in  persuading  the  aircraft  industry  to 
adopt  the  procedure  of  widespread  sub- 
contracting of  component  parts,  whilst 
his  wide  contacts  with  the  engineering 
industry  were  a  great  help  in  the  rapid 
increase  in  production.  His  vision,  drive, 
and  creative  resourcefulness  provided  the 
transformation  vital  for  the  unprecedented 


620 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lennard-Jones 


expansion  of  aircraft  supply  during  the 
early  critical  war  years. 

In  1940  Lemon  returned  to  the  railway, 
and  in  1941  he  was  knighted  in  recognition 
of  his  great  contribution  to  the  Royal 
Air  Force.  Stamp's  death  later  in  the  year 
was  a  great  blow  to  him  and  he  was  never 
quite  the  same  man  afterwards.  He 
resigned  from  the  L.M.S.  in  1943,  after  a 
short  spell  of  secondment  to  the  Ministry 
of  Production,  and  was  then  made 
chairman  of  a  commission  to  consider  the 
post-war  planning  of  the  railways.  In  1948 
he  was  chairman  of  a  conmiittee  set  up 
by  the  Ministry  of  Supply  to  consider  the 
standardization  of  engineering  products 
and  for  a  time  a  member  of  the  committee 
on  the  organization  of  the  British 
Standards  Institution. 

Lemon  had  a  fertile  imaginative  brain 
always  seeking  to  find  fresh  and  more 
efficient  ways  of  doing  things.  He  had  also 
the  gift  of  inspiring  his  colleagues  with  his 
own  drive  and  sense  of  urgency.  He  was  a 
pioneer  of  mechanized  production  and  one 
of  the  early  presidents  of  the  Institution 
of  Production  Engineers. 

In  1912  Lemon  married  Amy,  daughter 
of  the  late  Thomas  Clayton,  farmer ;  they 
had  two  sons.  Lemon  died  in  Epsom  15 
December  1954. 

[The  Times,  17  and  23  December  1954  and  3 
and  17  January  1955 ;  Engineer,  24  December 
1954;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Harold  Hartley. 

LENNARD-JONES,  Sir  JOHN 
EDWARD  (1894-1954),  scientist  and 
administrator,  was  born  in  Leigh,  Lanca- 
shire, 27  October  1894,  the  eldest  son  of 
Hugh  Jones,  retail  furnisher,  by  his  wife, 
Mary  Ellen  Rigby.  He  was  educated  at 
Leigh  Grammar  School  where  he  special- 
ized in  classics  and  at  Manchester 
University  where  he  changed  to  mathe- 
matics in  which  he  took  first  class  honours 
in  1915.  He  then  joined  the  Royal  Flying 
Corps,  obtained  his  wings,  saw  service  in 
France,  and  later  took  part  in  some 
research  on  aerodynamics.  In  1919  he 
returned  to  university  teaching  and 
research,  first  in  Manchester,  then  in 
Cambridge  where  he  held  a  senior  1851 
Exhibition  at  Trinity  College,  and  then  in 
Bristol  where  he  went  as  a  reader  in  1925 
and  in  1927  was  elected  professor  of 
theoretical  physics. 

At  Cambridge,  under  the  influence  of 
(Sir)  R.  H.  Fowler  [q.v.],  Lennard-Jones 
studied  the  forces  between  atoms  and 
molecules  and  the  possibility  of  deducing 


them  from  the  properties  of  gases.  He 
introduced  an  empirical  form  for  the 
potential  energy  of  two  molecules  when 
they  are  at  a  distance  r  from  each  other, 

A/r"  -  B/r"" 

a  form  known  by  his  name  and  still 
frequently  used,  and  made  use  of  all 
available  experimental  evidence  to  evalu- 
ate the  constants  in  this  formula. 

Then  came  the  discovery  of  quantum 
mechanics;  Lennard-Jones  studied  this 
subject  during  1929  at  Gottingen.  He  was 
mainly  responsible  for  introducing  the 
new  theories  to  the  group  of  physicists  at 
Bristol  which  A.  M.  Tyndall  was  gathering 
together  in  the  newly  built  H.  H.  Wills 
physics  laboratory.  It  was  in  this  period 
that  he  began  his  well-known  work  on  the 
theory  of  molecular  orbitals  in  theoretical 
chemistry,  of  which  he  was  one  of  the 
founders.  In  1929  he  used  the  theory  in  a 
paper  entitled  'The  electronic  structure 
of  diatomic  molecules'  to  give  the  first 
explanation  of  the  paramagnetism  of  the 
oxygen  molecule,  the  starting-point  of 
many  later  developments  carried  through 
in  the  United  States  and  elsewhere. 

In  1932  he  was  elected  to  the  Plummer 
chair  of  theoretical  chemistry  in  the 
university  of  Cambridge,  the  first  chair  of 
this  subject  in  this  country.  He  built  up 
a  very  successful  school  by  applying 
quantum  mechanics  to  the  properties  of 
molecules  and  of  liquids  and  many  of  his 
pupils   became   leaders   in   this   subject. 

Soon  after  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939 
the  university  mathematical  laboratory 
became  closely  allied  to  the  external 
ballistics  department  of  the  Ordnance 
Board  and  Lennard-Jones  worked  with 
his  staff  on  problems  of  ballistics.  In  1942 
he  was  appointed  chief  superintendent 
of  armament  research,  and  undertook 
charge  of  the  old  research  department  at 
Woolwich  in  its  new  role  as  the  armament 
research  department  at  Fort  Halstead  in 
Kent.  His  major  contribution  to  the  war 
effort  was  made  at  this  department, 
particularly  in  the  changes  he  made  in  its 
administrative  machinery,  and  his  en- 
couragement of  personal  responsibility  for 
scientific  work. 

UnUke  many  of  his  academic  colleagues, 
he  stayed  in  government  service  for  some 
time  after  the  war ;  he  was  occupied  with 
the  reorganization  of  the  department 
for  peacetime  conditions  and  became 
director-general  of  scientific  research 
(defence)  in  the  Ministry  of  Supply  in 
August   1945.    In   spite   of  the   offer  of 


621 


Lennard-Jones 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


several  positions  in  government  service, 
however,  he  decided  to  return  to  academic 
Ufe  in  the  autumn  of  1946,  although  he 
kept  his  connection  with  government 
science.  In  the  post-war  years  he  threw 
himself  into  the  task  of  building  up  again 
his  school  of  theoretical  chemistry  at 
Cambridge  and  seldom  had  fewer  than 
fifteen  research  students  working  under 
his  direction.  His  main  work  during  this 
period  was  on  'molecular  orbitals',  and  on 
the  theory  of  liquids.  He  was  also  active  in 
university  policy-making.  With  the  great 
expansion  of  the  number  of  research 
students,  many  of  them  with  only  slight 
connections  with  existing  colleges,  he 
strongly  advocated  the  foundation  of  a 
graduate  college.  He  was  also  most  con- 
cerned to  form  within  the  university  a 
body  competent  to  speak  on  matters  of 
scientific  policy,  such  as  the  desirable 
numbers  of  undergraduates  and  research 
students  in  scientific  subjects  and  the 
organization  of  those  branches  of  research 
which  are  less  closely  related  to  teaching, 

Lennard-Jones  was  elected  F.R.S.  in 
1933.  In  1946  he  was  appointed  K.B.E. 
and  in  the  same  year  he  was  awarded  the 
degree  of  Sc.D.  by  the  university  of 
Cambridge.  In  1948-50  he  was  president 
of  the  Faraday  Society  and  in  1953  he  was 
awarded  the  Davy  medal  of  the  Royal 
Society  and  the  Hopkins  prize  of  the 
Cambridge  Philosophical  Society.  From 
1947  to  1954  he  was  a  member  of  the 
research  panel  of  the  National  Gallery. 
In  1954  he  received  an  honorary  D.Sc. 
from  the  university  of  Oxford. 

Lennard-Jones  had  not  intended  to 
leave  Cambridge  but  when  he  was  invited 
to  succeed  Lord  Lindsay  of  Birker  [q.v.] 
as  principal  of  the  University  College 
of  North  Staffordshire  the  educational 
experiment  aroused  his  enthusiasm  and 
after  some  months  of  hesitation  he  took  up 
office  in  October  1953.  Of  his  work  at 
Keele,  cut  short  after  no  more  than  a  year, 
it  is  probably  true  that  he  had  three  things 
mainly  in  mind :  the  non-specialist  teach- 
ing course  which  is  the  basis  of  the  edu- 
cation there ;  the  financial  position  of  the 
college ;  and  its  relations  with  the  outside 
world.  He  was  responsible  for  setting  up 
a  special  committee  for  improving  the 
lecture  content  of  the  foundation  year  and 
at  his  suggestion  two  weekly  discussion 
groups  under  the  chairmanship  of  tutors 
of  the  college  were  started  for  students 
attending  the  course.  He  also  felt  that 
one  of  the  problems  facing  a  new  col- 
lege was  to  make  itself  known  and  by 


speeches,  by  broadcasting,  and  by  written 
articles,  he  did  what  was  possible  to  bring 
the  work  and  aims  of  the  college  to  the 
public  notice. 

In  1925  Jones  married  Kathleen  Mary, 
daughter  of  Samuel  Lennard,  boot  and 
shoe  manufacturer  of  Leicester,  and  took 
the  name  of  Lennard-Jones.  They  had  a 
son  and  a  daughter.  Lennard-Jones  died 
at  Stoke-on-Trent  1  November  1954. 

[N.  F.  Mott  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  i,  1955; 
personal  knowledge.]  N.  F.  Mott. 

LENOX-CONYNGHAM,  Sir  GERALD 
PONSONBY  (1866-1956),  geodesist,  was 
born  21  August  1866  at  Springhill, 
Moneymore,  Ireland,  the  seventh  of  eleven 
children  of  (Sir)  William  Fitzwilliam 
Lenox-Conyngham  and  his  wife,  Laura 
Calvert,  daughter  of  George  Arbuthnot, 
founder  of  the  firm  of  Arbuthnot  &  Co.  of 
Madras,  India.  When  Lenox-Conyngham 
was  ten  years  old  the  family  moved  to 
Edinburgh,  where  he  attended  the  Edin- 
burgh Academy.  At  seventeen  he  gained 
admission  to  the  Royal  Military  Academy 
at  Woolwich,  and  in  1885  passed  out  first 
in  his  batch  with  the  sword  of  honour  and 
the  Pollock  medal.  As  a  lieutenant  in  the 
Royal  Engineers  he  spent  two  years  at  the 
school  of  military  engineering  at  Chatham 
before  being  posted  to  India.  In  1889  he 
applied  for  a  transfer  to  the  Survey  of 
India  and  joined  the  trigonometrical 
branch,  where  he  entered  on  a  career 
as  a  surveyor  and  geodesist,  the  main 
occupation  and  scientific  interest  of  his 
long  life. 

The  observations  of  the  Survey  included 
an  extensive  series  of  measurements  of 
longitude  along  parallels  of  latitude 
intended  to  determine  the  curvature  of  the 
geoid  in  a  direction  perpendicular  to  that 
given  by  the  older  observations  of  latitude. 
These  longitudes  though  determined  with 
great  care  showed  puzzling  discrepancies. 
In  1889  (Sir)  Sidney  Burrard  set  out  to  find 
the  cause  of  the  discrepancies.  Lenox- 
Conyngham  was  appointed  his  assistant, 
so  beginning  the  long  collaboration  and 
friendship  which  was  one  of  the  main 
influences  of  Lenox-Conyngham's  scien- 
tific interests.  An  explanation  was  found 
for  the  discrepancies  and  satisfactory 
measurements  obtained. 

In  1894  Burrard  and  Lenox-Conyngham 
vmdertook  a  redetermination  of  the  longi- 
tude of  Karachi  relative  to  Greenwich  by 
using  the  land  telegraph  line  across 
Europe  and  Persia.  The  results  were  most 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lenox-Conyngham 


satisfactory:  a  redetermination  thirty- 
years  later  using  wireless  signals  gave  a 
longitude  differing  by  only  0  02  sec. 
from  that  which  Burrard  and  Lenox- 
Conyngham  had  found. 

Burrard  next  began  a  scrutiny  of  the 
substantial  collection  of  observations  of 
latitude  acquired  by  the  Survey  over 
nearly  a  century.  He  concluded  that  the 
deflections  in  North  India  were  arranged 
systematically  in  zones  parallel  to  the 
mountains.  He  ascribed  them  to  the 
attraction  of  a  hidden  range  to  the  south 
of  the  Gangetic  plain.  The  most  direct 
method  of  locating  such  a  hidden  mass  is 
by  measurement  of  acceleration  due  to 
gravity.  This  had  previously  been  done 
using  the  Royal  Society's  pendulum. 
New  methods  of  eliminating  the  error  due 
to  the  effects  of  sway  of  the  support  of  the 
pendulums  had  been  devised  at  the 
Prussian  Geodetic  Institute  at  Potsdam. 
Burrard  and  Lenox-Conyngham  pur- 
chased an  apparatus  with  four  half-second 
pendulums  and  had  it  modified  at 
Potsdam,  and  the  constants  determined 
both  there  and  in  London  at  the  National 
Physical  Laboratory.  So  from  1903  to 
1908  Lenox-Conyngham  was  engaged  in  a 
series  of  gravity  measurements  in  India 
which  was  perhaps  his  most  important 
contribution  to  science. 

In  1931  Lenox-Conyngham  wrote:  'The 
pendulums  do  not  reveal  any  great  excess 
of  mass  where  the  hidden  range  was  sup- 
posed to  be,  but  they  show  that  there  is  a 
great  defect  of  mass  all  along  the  foot  of 
the  Himalayas  and  for  some  distance 
from  them.'  This  strip  of  negative  gravity 
anomalies  and  deficient  density  is  thought 
to  be  the  first  example  of  a  phenomenon 
which  has  subsequently  been  shown  to  be 
of  widespread  occurrence  particularly  on 
the  outer  edges  of  island  arcs.  The  work 
of  Burrard  and  Lenox-Conyngham  on  the 
deflection  of  the  vertical  and  the  gravity 
anomalies  in  India  revived  interest  in  this 
branch  of  geodesy  by  showing  that  its 
results  have  a  wider  interest  than  the 
mere  study  and  reduction  of  errors  in 
surveying.  The  instruments  used  may 
now  be  seen  in  the  Science  Museum, 
London. 

In  1912  Lenox-Conyngham  became 
superintendent  of  the  trigonometrical 
survey  and  in  1914  a  colonel.  In  1918  he 
was  elected  F.R.S.  and  in  1919  he  was 
knighted. 

He  left  India  in  1920  and  a  few  months 
after  his  return  to  England  was  asked  to 
join  a  committee  to  consider  the  promo- 


tion of  the  study  of  geodesy  in  Cambridge. 
The  university  could  provide  no  funds, 
but  Trinity  College  offered  a  praelector- 
ship  in  geodesy.  This  was  offered  to 
Lenox-Conyngham  who  took  up  residence 
in  Cambridge  and  in  1921  was  made  a 
fellow  of  Trinity.  In  the  following  year 
the  university  created  a  readership  in 
geodesy  for  him.  With  almost  no  financial 
support  from  the  university  he  started  to 
teach  the  basics  of  geodesy  to  a  small 
group  of  undergraduates  and  later  also  to 
officers  sent  to  Cambridge  from  many 
colonial  survey  departments.  With  the 
support  of  Sir  Horace  Darwin  [q.v.]  of  the 
Cambridge  Instrument  Company  he  con- 
structed a  pendulum  apparatus  as  an 
improvement  on  the  one  used  in  India. 
This  new  instrument  with  two  invar 
pendulums  swinging  in  opposite  phase  was 
entirely  successful  and  is  still  in  use  for 
the  most  precise  long-distance  gravity 
connections.  Lenox-Conyngham's  one- 
man  school  of  geodesy  eventually  became 
the  department  of  geodesy  and  geophysics. 
The  department  expanded  and  its  work 
extended  into  fields  of  seismology  and 
geothermal  measurements  where  Lenox- 
Conyngham  had  little  previous  knowledge. 
But  his  interest  was  keen  and  his  en- 
couragement indefatigable.  He  used  his 
influence  extensively  in  procuring  funds 
and  apparatus.  He  also  travelled  widely 
visiting  scientific  conferences  all  over  the 
world.  During  the  war  he  continued  his 
lectures  to  rather  depleted  audiences 
although  the  experimental  work  in  the 
department  ceased.  After  the  war  when 
the  department  reopened  great  advantage 
was  taJken  of  the  new  teclmiques,  in  which 
Lenox-Conyngham  took  a  keen  interest 
even  after  his  retirement  in  1947. 

Few  men  can  have  lived  so  full  and 
useful  a  life  as  Lenox-Conyngham  who 
had  two  complete  and  successful  careers, 
one  in  India,  the  other  in  Cambridge.  At 
a  party  to  celebrate  Lenox-Conyngham's 
eightieth  birthday,  the  master  of  Trinity, 
G.  M.  Trevelyan,  said:  'He  is  a  scholar, 
a  soldier,  and  a  great  public  servant,  and 
he  looks  aU  three.'  He  had  a  commanding 
presence  and  as  he  grew  older  became 
even  more  dignified  and  impressive.  He 
had  a  rigid  attitude  to  matters  of  the 
conventions  in  which  he  had  been  brought 
up,  combined  with  an  extraordinary 
openness  of  mind  in  matters  of  science. 
He  was  always  delighted  to  see  new  meth- 
ods of  physics  and  engineering  applied  to 
the  problems  on  which  he  had  worked 
many  years  before.  He  never  pretended 


623 


Lenox-  Conyngham 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


to  understand  details  of  modern  equip- 
ment but  liked  to  be  shown  how  it  worked 
and  was  never  lacking  in  his  encourage- 
ment and  support.  This  com"bination  of 
genuine  interest,  friendliness,  and  lack  of 
pretence,  enabled  him  to  be  remarkably 
successful  as  head  of  a  department  in 
which  most  of  the  staff  were  forty  years 
his  junior. 

In  1890  he  married  Elsie  Margaret, 
daughter  of  Surgeon-General  (Sir) 
Alexander  Frederick  Bradshaw  who  be- 
came head  of  the  army  medical  services 
in  India.  They  had  one  daughter.  Lenox- 
Conyngham  died  in  Cambridge  27  October 
1956  not  long  after  his  ninetieth  birthday. 

There  is  a  chalk  drawing  by  Henry  Lamb 
(1947)  at  Trinity  College,  Cambridge. 

[Sir  Edward  Bullard  in  Biographical 
Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iii, 
1957 ;  The  Times,  29  October  1956,] 

Maky  Munro. 

LESTER,  SEAN  (JOHN  ERNEST) 
(1888-1959),  secretary-general  of  the 
League  of  Nations,  was  born  in  Wood- 
burn,  Carrickfergus,  county  Antrim,  27 
September  1888,  the  son  of  Robert  John 
Lester,  a  business  man,  by  his  wife, 
Henriette  Mary  Ritchie.  He  was  educated 
at  the  Methodist  College,  Belfast,  and 
began  his  career  at  the  age  of  seventeen 
as  a  journalist  on  the  North  Down  Herald. 
At  about  the  same  time,  although  a 
Protestant,  he  became  active  in  the 
movement  for  national  independence. 
After  further  journalistic  experience  in 
Dublin  he  became  news  editor  on  the 
Freeman's  Journal,  then  in  1922  publicity 
officer  in  the  Department  of  External 
Affairs.  In  1929  he  was  appointed  his 
Government's  representative  in  Geneva 
and  after  the  Irish  Free  State  obtained  a 
seat  on  the  Council  he  took  an  active 
part  in  League  affairs.  His  chairmanship 
of  a  committee  which  ultimately  secured 
the  settlement  of  a  dispute  between  Peru 
and  Colombia  attracted  attention,  and  in 
1934  he  became  the  League's  high  com- 
missioner in  Danzig  where  it  was  his 
duty  to  watch  over  the  democratic 
operation  of  the  constitution. 

When  the  Nazis  obtained  a  majority  in 
the  Danzig  parliament  they  embarked  on 
a  brutal  persecution  of  the  minority  and 
particularly  of  its  Jewish  element.  Lester 
made  vigorous  protests  and  efforts  were 
made  to  intimidate  him  but  his  complete 
disregard  of  his  own  safety  in  the  face 
of  anti-League  demonstrations  seriously 
worried  the  Nazi  leaders  who  feared  that 


it  might  not  suit  the  Fiihrer's  book  if 
the  League's  high  commissioner  were 
physically  assaulted  in  the  streets.  Their 
discomfiture  was  a  personal  victory  for 
Lester  but  it  did  nothing  to  alter  the  fact 
that  the  foundation  of  the  League's 
position  had  disappeared,  and  since  he 
had  no  longer  any  real  function  to  fulfil  he 
accepted  the  post  of  deputy  secretary- 
general  of  the  League  and  returned  to 
Geneva  early  in  1937. 

It  was  not  long  before  he  found  himself 
in  direct  conflict  with  Joseph  Avenol,  the 
secretary-general.  In  Lester's  view  any 
compromise  between  Nazi  doctrines  and 
the  principles  of  the  League  was  un- 
thinkable. He  was  therefore  horrified  to 
discover  that,  after  the  collapse  of  France, 
Avenol,  convinced  that  England  must 
suffer  the  same  fate,  was  contemplating 
that  the  palace  of  the  League  in  Geneva 
with  its  small  remaining  staff  might 
become  the  co-ordinating  centre  of  the 
New  Europe  which  he  believed  was 
emerging.  With  a  complete  disregard  of 
his  obligations  as  secretary-general  he 
wrote  to  the  Vichy  government  putting 
himself  at  its  disposal ;  he  endeavoured  to 
get  complete  personal  control  of  the 
League's  funds ;  and  he  made  every  effort 
to  secure  Lester's  resignation.  The  dead- 
lock was  resolved  by  the  arrival  in  Geneva 
of  Adolfo  Costa  du  Rels,  the  president  of 
the  League  Council,  who  sided  with  Lester ; 
Avenol  resigned  and  Costa  du  Rels  in- 
stalled Lester  as  acting  secretary-general. 

From  this  time  (August  1940)  until  the 
end  of  the  war  Lester's  position  was  even 
less  enviable  than  it  had  been  in  Danzig. 
The  economic  section  of  the  secretariat 
had  taken  refuge  in  the  United  States 
where  it  continued  its  work  in  Princeton 
without  any  official  status,  and  the  small 
staff  remaining  in  Geneva  could  do  little 
more  than  preserve  the  League's  records. 
Moreover  Lester  found  that  he  was 
completely  isolated.  Accompanied  by  the 
president  of  the  Hague  Court  of  Inter- 
national Justice  he  attempted  to  attend 
a  meeting  of  the  League's  supervisory 
commission  in  Lisbon,  but  the  party  was 
stopped  at  the  Spanish  frontier  and  after 
two  days  of  fruitless  telephoning  to 
Madrid  had  to  return  to  Geneva.  Con- 
ditions there  became  increasingly  un- 
comfortable. German  irritation  at  the 
presence  of  the  League  headquarters  on 
Swiss  soil  led  to  the  vote  for  Switzerland's 
contribution  to  the  League  budget  being 
defeated  in  the  parliament  at  Berne. 

The  victory  of  the  Allies  came  as  a 


61)4 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Levick 


welcome  relief  but  it  was  followed  by  a 
painful  disillusionment.  The  meeting  in 
1945  at  San  Francisco  to  lay  the  founda- 
tions of  the  new  world  order  deliberately 
ignored  the  League.  Russia  had  never  for- 
given her  expulsion  as  an  aggressor,  and 
the  United  States  felt  no  obligation  to  de- 
fend an  institution  of  which  she  had  never 
been  a  member.  The  adoption  of  the 
Charter  of  the  United  Nations  sounded  the 
death  knell  of  the  League,  and  it  then  be- 
came Lester's  melancholy  duty  to  arrange 
for  its  dissolution  and  the  disposal  of  its 
assets.  This  task  completed,  he  retired  in 
1947  to  the  west  of  Ireland  where  he  could 
enjoy  his  favourite  pastimes  of  fishing  and 
gardening.  The  value  of  his  achievement 
in  setting  a  memorable  standard  of 
courage  and  integrity  in  international 
service  was  recognized  by  the  title  of 
secretary-general  of  the  League  conferred 
on  him  at  the  final  meeting  of  the 
Assembly,  by  honorary  doctorates  from 
Trinity  College,  Dublin,  and  the  National 
University  of  Ireland,  by  the  Woodrow 
Wilson  award,  and  by  his  appointment  as 
president  of  the  Permanent  Norwegian- 
Swiss  Conciliation  Committee. 

He  married  in  1920  Elizabeth  Ruth 
Tyrrell,  by  whom  he  had  three  daughters. 
He  died  in  Galway  13  June  1959.  A 
portrait  by  the  Irish  artist  James  Sleator 
hangs  in  the  library  of  the  Palais  des 
Nations,  Geneva. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Edward  Phelan. 

LEVESON  COWER,  Sm  HENRY 
DUDLEY  GRESHAM  (1873-1954), 
cricketer.  [See  Gower.] 

LEVICK,  GEORGE  MURRAY  (1876- 
1956),  surgeon  and  explorer,  was  born 
at  Newcastle  upon  Tyne  3  July  1876,  the 
son  of  George  Levick,  a  civil  engineer, 
and  his  wife,  Jane  Sowerby.  He  was 
educated  at  St.  Paul's  School  where  he 
developed  that  concern  for  physical  fitness 
and  interest  in  outdoor  activities  which 
remained  with  him  throughout  his  life 
and  which,  combined  with  a  very  real 
interest  in  his  fellow  men,  became  the 
dominant  factor  in  his  life.  He  went  on  to 
St.  Bartholomew's  Hospital  where  he 
qualified  M.R.C.S.,  L.R.C.P.  in  1902  and 
in  the  same  year  he  was  commissioned  as 
a  doctor  in  the  Royal  Navy  where  he 
found  himself  at  once  at  home.  He  was  a 
keen  rugby  player,  a  good  oar,  and  a 
magnificent  gymnast,  and  was  founder 
and  secretary  of  the  Navy  Rugby  Union. 
In  1910  Levick  was  selected  by  Captain 


R.  F.  Scott  [q.v.]  as  surgeon  and  zoologist 
on  his  second  and  last  expedition  to  the 
Antarctic.  His  chief.  Dr.  E.  A.  Wilson 
[q.v.],  veteran  of  Scott's  earlier  expedition 
and  close  personal  friend  of  his  leader,  was 
the  obvious  choice  for  the  medical  care  of 
the  main  party,  and  Levick  was  assigned 
to  what  became  the  northern  party,  six 
men  who,  through  Roald  Amundsen's 
pre-emption  of  their  proposed  field  of 
action — King  Edward  VII  Land — were 
destined  to  put  in  two  years  exploring 
the  Victoria  Land  coast  and,  incidentally, 
to  spend  a  whole  winter  existing  on  what 
they  could  pick  up  locally  while  living  in  a 
hole  dug  out  from  a  snowdrift  seven  feet 
thick ;  an  experience  which  in  its  severity 
and  happy  outcome  is  still  an  outstanding 
example  of  survival  in  the  Antarctic. 
During  that  long-drawn-out  trial,  when 
all  were  extended  to  the  uttermost, 
physically  and  psychologically,  Levick 
was  a  tower  of  strength.  Throughout  the 
two  years  he  played  an  invaluable  part: 
as  a  doctor  he  was  adequate  though,  on 
the  whole,  under-employed;  he  was  a 
keen  observer  and  made  a  thorough  study 
of  the  Adelie  penguin ;  as  a  photographer 
he  kept  a  magnificent  pictorial  record 
which  added  significantly  to  the  value  of 
the  expedition's  scientific  results ;  he  was 
a  chief  contributor  to  the  cultural  life ; 
confidant  of  the  rank  and  file  seamen; 
loyal  and  wise  adviser  of  Lieutenant 
Victor  Campbell  his  leader  and  friend. 

On  his  return  Levick  served  in  the 
war  in  the  Grand  Fleet,  the  North  Sea, 
and  at  Gallipoli  where  he  was  in  the  last 
party  to  leave ;  he  was  promoted  surgeon- 
commander  in  1915  and  retired  in  1917. 

Concentrating  upon  his  first  and  con- 
tinuing interest,  the  fostering  of  physical 
fitness  in  his  fellow  men,  Levick  was  at 
various  times  electrologist  and  medical 
officer  in  charge  at  St.  Thomas's  Hospital ; 
consultant  physiotherapist  at  the  Victoria 
Hospital  for  Children;  and  a  member  of 
the  London  University  advisory  commit- 
tee on  physical  education.  In  1919  he  was 
approached  by  the  National  Institute  for 
the  Blind  about  the.  feasibility  of  teaching 
blind  students  of  massage  some  form  of 
electrical  treatment ;  through  his  untiring 
advocacy  blind  students  were  ultimately 
admitted  to  the  examinations  of  the 
Chartered  Society  of  Physiotherapy  and  a 
clinic  was  opened  for  and  staffed  by  them. 
He  was  for  thirty  years  medical  director 
of  the  Heritage  Craft  School  for  Crippled 
Children  founded  by  Dame  Grace  Kimmins 
[q.v.]. 


Levick 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


His  best  known  and,  in  some  ways,  his 
most  rewarding  and  nationally  important 
work  stemmed  directly  from  his  experi- 
ences with  the  Scott  expedition.  In  1932 
he  was  personally  responsible  for  the 
foundation  of  the  Public  Schools  Explor- 
ing Society,  later  named,  as  its  scope 
broadened,  the  British  Schools  Exploring 
Society.  For  the  remainder  of  his  life  he 
was  the  society's  head,  at  first  chairman 
and  later  president;  and  was  honorary 
chief  leader  of  the  first  nine  expeditions 
to  some  of  the  wilder  parts  of  the  world. 
The  society's  main  objective  has  been  to 
send  boys  to  trackless  country  to  teach 
them  to  fend  for  themselves ;  to  foster  in 
them  the  spirit  of  adventure;  to  test 
their  endurance  and  help  them  acquire 
physical  fitness ;  and  to  give  them  a  taste 
for,  and  elementary  training  in,  explora- 
tion and  field  research.  Levick's  personal 
influence  in  this  particular  field  was  well 
sunmiarized  by  Major  C.  F.  Spooner  who 
was  assistant  leader  of  the  1947  expedition 
and  thereafter  led  several  further  expedi- 
tions. 'What  fun  that  expedition  was. 
Looking  back  on  it  the  actual  enjoyment 
of  it  for  me  came  almost  directly  from 
being  with  Murray  himself.  He  was  always 
so  full  of  life  and  enthusiasm  and  he  made 
everything  such  enormous  fun;  even  a 
setback  became  the  cause  of  greater 
enjoyment  with  him,  as  it  simply  offered 
a  greater  challenge.  Coupled  with  this 
buoyant  love  of  hfe  was  a  quiet  dogged 
persistence  and  a  shrewd  judgement 
which  gave  one  great  confidence.  I  cannot 
remember  ever  seeing  him  nonplussed  and 
he  was  always  the  same  whatever  the 
circumstances,  considerate  and  kindly 
to  us  all — one  of  those  people  whose 
gentleness  emanates  from  their  own 
great  strength.'  In  1942  the  Royal  Geo- 
graphical Society  recognized  his  services 
to  exploration  by  the  award  of  the  Back 
grant. 

During  the  war  of  1939-45  Levick  was 
recalled  to  the  Royal  Navy  to  assist  in  the 
training  of  conmiandos.  In  spite  of  all 
these  activities  he  found  time  for  writing. 
His  medical  publications  were  many  and 
varied  and  his  reports  on  the  Adelie 
penguin  were  major  contributions  in 
their  day. 

In  1918  Levick  married  Audrey,  second 
daughter  of  (Sir)  May  son  M.  Beeton; 
they  had  one  son.  Levick  died  at  Budleigh 
Salterton  30  May  1956. 

[The  Times,  1  June  1956 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Raymond  Priestley. 


LEWIS,  PERCY  WYNDHAM  (1882- 
1957),  writer  and  artist,  was  born  18 
November  1882  on  his  father's  yacht  off 
Amherst,  Nova  Scotia.  His  father.  Captain 
Charles  Edward  Lewis,  came  of  a  prosper- 
ous merchant  and  legal  family  settled  in 
New  York  State;  after  a  year  at  West 
Point,  he  served  under  Sheridan  in  the 
Civil  War  and  later  wrote  his  war  memoirs. 
His  mother  was  Anne  Stuart,  a  British 
girl  of  Scottish  and  Irish  descent.  About 
1893  his  parents  separated  and  he  came 
with  his  mother  to  England  where  they 
existed  precariously  in  the  London  sub- 
urbs. He  was  educated  at  a  succession  of 
private  schools  followed  by  two  years 
(1897-8)  at  Rugby.  He  went  next  to  the 
Slade  School  of  Art  which  he  left  in  1901. 
In  the  following  eight  years  he  was  for 
some  time  in  Munich,  visited  Spain  and 
Holland,  but  was  most  often  in  Brittany 
or  Paris,  where  he  was  associated  with  the 
extreme  right  wing  of  Action  Franyaise 
and  attended  Bergson's  lectures.  His 
early  letters,  mostly  to  his  mother,  are 
filled  with  his  own  affairs:  his  bowels, 
his  pocket,  and  his  loves.  'Never  destroy 
a  single  written  page  of  mine',  he  wrote: 
later  he  kept  drafts  of  his  letters  which 
survive  as  source  material. 

Lewis  returned  to  England  in  1909  and 
in  the  same  year  had  three  stories  accepted 
by  the  English  Review  and  was  welcomed 
into  the  literary  circle  of  its  editor.  Ford 
Madox  Hueffer  (later  Ford,  q.v.).  In  1911 
he  exhibited  drawings  with  the  Camden 
Town  Group  and  in  1912  at  the  Post- 
Impressionist  exhibition  organized  by 
Roger  Fry  [q.v.]  whose  Omega  workshop 
he  joined  in  July  1913.  By  October  he  had 
publicly  broken  with  Fry.  In  the  same 
month  he  exhibited  with  Frank  Butter's 
Post-Impressionist  and  Futurist  exhibi- 
tion and  in  December  with  the  new 
London  Group.  In  the  following  spring 
he  became  director  of  the  Rebel  Art 
Centre,  'the  seat  of  the  Great  London 
Vortex',  and  in  June  1914  and  July  1915 
published  the  only  two  issues  of  Blast,  the 
Vorticist  review  mostly  written  by  him- 
self. His  principal  associates  were  William 
Roberts,  Edward  Wadsworth  [q.v.], 
Gaudier-Brzeska,  Richard  Aldington,  and 
Ezra  Pound.  Pound  had  supplied  the 
word  Vortex  which  he  described  as 
that  'from  which,  and  through  which, 
and  into  which,  ideas  are  consistently 
rushing'.  But  this  was  not  exactly 
Lewis's  idea.  His  Vortex  appears  rather  as 
the  still  centre  of  the  whirlwind,  the 
arrest  of  flux.   In  his  reaction  against 


626 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lewis,  P.  W. 


Bergson  he  became  the  enemy  of  Time  and 
of  the  cult  of  action.  That  is  why  he 
repudiated  Futurism  and,  in  later  years, 
attacked  James  Joyce,  Virginia  Woolf 
[qq.v.],  Hemingway,  and  Proust.  In  1915 
he  organized  the  first  and  only  English 
Vorticist  exhibition,  at  the  Dore  Galleries. 
Twenty  years  later  he  described  'all  this 
organized  disturbance'  as  'Art  behaving 
as  if  it  were  polities'. 

In  March  1916  Lewis  enlisted  in  the 
Garrison  Artillery;  by  August  he  was  a 
bombardier  and  by  Christmas  an  officer. 
He  served  in  France  from  early  June  1917, 
first  as  a  gunner  and  later  as  an  official 
war  artist.  His  first  novel,  Tarr,  was, 
published  serially  in  that  year  and  as  a 
book  in  1918.  In  February  1919  he  held 
his  first  one-man  show  at  the  Goupil 
Gallery  and  later  in  the  year  he  tried  to 
revive  Vorticism  under  the  name  of  X 
Group.  This  held  one  exhibition  (Mansard 
Gallery,  1920)  and  then  died  of  Lewis's 
quarrelsomeness.  It  was  his  last  con- 
nection with  any  group  and  in  the  next 
ten  years  or  so  he  was  hitting  out  in  all 
directions,  not  least  at  his  oldest  sup- 
porters, T.  S.  Eliot  and  Pound;  and  he 
continually  attacked  Joyce,  a  later  friend, 
with  particular  virulence. 

There  are  few  events  to  record  during 
the  inter-war  years  except  his  secret 
marriage  in  1929  to  Gladys  Anne  Hoskyns, 
an  art  student  with  a  German  mother  and 
'a  good  British  farmer'  for  father.  There 
were  occasional  visits  to  France,  Italy, 
Germany,  and  the  Pyrenees,  and,  in  1931, 
to  North  Africa,  where  he  and  his  wife 
rode  'all  over  the  Atlas'  mountains  on 
mules.  But  in  spite  of  persistent  illness  and 
poverty  these  were  frantically  productive 
years.  He  held  several  exhibitions,  pub- 
lished some  twenty  books  and  many 
articles,  and  edited  the  two  issues  of  the 
Tyro  (1921-2)  and  the  three  of  the  Enemy 
(1927-9). 

On  his  visits  to  Germany  in  1930  and 
1931  Lewis  discovered  the  Nazis  as  an 
*aristocracy  of  intellect'.  Hitler  as  'a  man 
of  peace',  and  'the  Hitlerist  dream  ...  as 
full  of-  an  imminent  classical  serenity'. 
He  paraded  this  nonsense  in  a  series  of 
articles  in  Time  and  Tide,  reprinted  as 
Hitler  (1931) ;  his  subsequent  recantation 
in  The  Hitler  Cult  (1939)  failed  to  wipe 
out  the  hostility  he  had  aroused.  In  the 
meantime  the  rejection  of  his  portrait 
of  Eliot  by  the  Royal  Academy  in  1938 
brought  him  a  great  deal  of  pubUcity  and 
provoked  the  resignation  of  Augustus 
John. 


On  the  day  before  war  was  declared, 
Lewis  and  his  wife  left  England.  They 
spent  the  war  years  in  the  United  States 
and  Canada,  where  Lewis  barely  survived 
on  pot-boiling  portraits  and  occasional 
articles  and  lectures.  He  loathed  both 
countries  and  ceaselessly  abused  them  in 
his  letters,  although  he  found  individual 
Americans  kind  and  intelHgent.  His  only 
break  was  an  appointment,  in  1943-4, 
to  the  faculty  of  Assumption  College, 
Windsor,  Ontario,  where  he  was  happy 
and  found  'how  good  the  religious  discip- 
lines are  for  people'.  He  was  perhaps 
always  aware  how  good  they  could  have 
been  for  him.  This  is  generally  revealed  in 
his  tolerance  of  and  interest  in  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church  and  particularly  in  his 
friendship  with  Father  Martin  D'Arcy, 
S.  J.,  and  in  the  tone  of  chapter  xxxii  in  Self 
Condemned.  His  wife  became  a  Catholic 
after  his  death. 

By  September  1945  Lewis  was  back  in 
England  and  was  soon  re-estabhshed. 
In  1946  he  was  appointed  art  critic  to 
the  Listener;  in  1949  he  was  given  a 
retrospective  exhibition  at  the  Redfern 
Gallery,  in  1951  a  Civil  List  pension,  and 
in  1952  an  honorary  Litt.D.  by  Leeds. 
In  1951  the  B.B.C.  presented  his 
Childermass  (1928)  and  subsidized  its 
sequences,  Monstre  Gai  and  Malign 
Fiesta.  The  whole  was  broadcast  and  then 
published  as  The  Human  Age  (1955-6). 
In  1956  the  Tate  Gallery  held  a  large 
retrospective  exhibition  called  'Wyndham 
Lewis  and  Vorticism'. 

Lewis's  reputation  was  now  restored  but 
this  was  little  consolation  for  the  darkne^ 
of  his  last  years.  His  eyes  had  first  troubled 
him  in  1941.  In  May  1951  he  wrote  his 
valediction  in  the  Listener:  'my  articles  on 
contemporary  art  exhibitions  necessarily 
end,  for  I  can  no  longer  see  a  picture.' 
By  1954  he  was  totally  blind.  He  died  in 
London  7  March  1957. 

Michael  Ayrton  drew  him  several  times 
in  these  last  years  and  also  described  him : 
'His  eyes,  no  longer  concentrated  in  their 
regard,  were  shaded  by  a  green  plastic 
peak.  .  .  .  The  forehead  .  .  .  designed  for 
striking  blows,  was  now  bisected  but 
armed  with  a  green  obsidian  cutting  edge 
from  beneath  which  the  nose  reared  like 
a  secret  weapon ;  an  armed  head  indeed.' 
(Golden  Sections,  1957.)  This  is  the  revela- 
tion of  a  personality  which  the  sitter  so 
often  proclaimed  as  The  Enemy,  armed 
with  his  'Lewis  gun'.  Lewis  admitted 
that  the  hero  of  Tarr  was  a  'caricatural 
self-portrait ...  of    the   merely   physical 


627 


Lewis,  P.  W. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


attributes':  his  tallness,  his  'steady,  un- 
amiable,  impatient  expression',  his  'grima- 
cing tumultuous  mask  for  the  face  he  had 
to  cover'.  But  these  descriptions  and  the 
drawing  by  Augustus  John  (1908),  the 
self-portraits,  and  the  numerous  photo- 
graphs do  not  make  a  consistent  image: 
his  appearance  is  almost  as  elusive  as  his 
character. 

In  spite  of  long,  although  often  inter- 
rupted, friendships  and  his  kind  patience 
to  young  writers  and  painters  in  his  later 
years,  the  most  obvious  marks  of  Lewis's 
character  were  quarrelsomeness  and  a 
towering  egotism :  'I  will  side  and  identify 
myself  with  the  powerfullest  Me,  and  in 
its  interests  I  will  work.'  He  could  write 
of  his  'friends,  fiancees,  "colleagues"  '  as 
'livestock'  and  of  most  people  as  simply 
'things',  as  'hallucinated  automata' ;  his 
satires  were  based  on  the  conviction  that 
'the  root  of  the  Comic  is ...  in  the 
sensations  resulting  from  the  observations 
of  a  thing  behaving  like  a  person'. 

Lewis  persistently  and  properly  insisted 
that  he  was  an  artist  and  whatever  his 
character  and  opinions  an  estimate  of  his 
value  must  be  based  on  his  works  of  art. 
These,  in  literature,  are  his  major  novels : 
Tarr,  The  Childermass  and  its  sequels, 
The  Apes  of  God  (1930),  The  Revenge  for 
Love  (1937),  and  Self  Condemned  (1954). 
He  must  be  ranked  high  among  his 
contemporaries  although  we  may  hesitate 
to  accept  Eliot's  estimate  of  him  in  1955 
as  'the  most  distinguished  living  novelist'. 
His  only  of  book  verse  was  One-Way  Song 
(1933),  difficult  to  accept  as  poetry.  Tarr 
and  Self  Condemned  are  partly  auto- 
biographical ;  Blasting  and  Bombardiering 
(1937)  and  Rude  Assignment  (1950)  are 
overtly  so.  His  critical  books,  which 
include  Men  Without  Art  (1934)  and 
The  Writer  and  the  Absolute  (1952),  are 
neither  judicious  nor  balanced ;  but  they 
flash  with  sudden  insights  and  passages  of 
good  writing.  Lewis  never  achieved  sus- 
tained greatness  in  any  work:  he  was  a 
master  of  the  sentence,  the  paragraph, 
even  the  scene;  but  never  of  a  whole 
book.  He  could  rarely  resist  the  temptation 
to  crash  through  his  creative  fabric  with 
long,  repetitious,  and  noisy  assertions  of 
whatever  opinion  he  was  holding  at  the 
moment. 

This  lack  of  discipline  is  most  obvious 
in  his  speculative,  political,  and  polemical 
writings.  They  display  no  coherent  or 
systematic  development  of  thought  and 
constantly  degenerate  into  a  display  of 
prejudices    and    generalizations    unsup- 


ported by  evidence  but  often  brilliantly 
witty,  occasionally  profound,  and  rarely 
dull  for  long.  His  excursions  into  politics 
were  particularly  unfortunate  because 
they  laid  him  open  to  a  reasonable  charge 
of  fascism.  But,  although  he  contributed 
to  Sir  Oswald  Mosley's  journal,  he  did  not 
join  his  party.  He  was  far  too  much  of  an 
individualist  to  toe  any  line  for  long.  He 
could  write :  'Politically  I  stand  nowhere' 
and  also:  'it  is  impossible  to  be  non- 
partisan'. Perhaps  his  political  position 
is  best  described  in  his  own  statement  in 
1931 :  'partly  communist  and  partly  fascist, 
with  a  distinct  streak  of  monarchism 
in  my  marxism,  but  at  bottom  anarchist, 
with  a  healthy  passion  for  order'.  However, 
he  had  his  more  or  less  permanent  and 
respectable  enmities:  he  hated  war, 
managerial  and  mass  values,  the  mass 
media,  vested  interests,  pseudo-revolu- 
tionaries, the  'millionaire  Bohemia'  of 
Bloomsbury,  and  professional  politicians. 

Fundamentally,  all  Lewis's  stresses  and 
strains,  all  his  pursuits  of  hares,  were  due 
to  a  profound  and  unsolved  inner  conflict. 
He  was  utterly  subjective  while  always 
claiming  to  be  objective.  His  paeans  to 
rationality  were  the  emotional  substitute 
for  his  own  lack  of  it.  His  attacks  on 
romantic  intolerance  were  his  most  violent 
displays  of  intolerance.  He  was  a  man  in  a 
mask:  '  "Bombardier"  was  after  all  a 
romantic  incognito.'  His  greatest  enemy 
was  himself:  'It  is  chiefly  myself  I  am 
castigating.' 

This  mask,  in  its  metallic,  tense  rigidity, 
is  fully  evident  in  his  drawings.  He  was 
above  all  a  draughtsman,  even  when  he 
painted.  He  defined  the  object,  the  thing 
seen,  with  the  apparent  detachment  of  a 
Mantegna.  'Deadness',  he  wrote,  'is  the 
first  condition  of  art .  .  .  good  art  must 
have  no  inside' ;  and  again :  'I  am  for  the 
Great  Without,  for  the  method  of  external 
approach,  for  the  wisdom  of  the  eye.' 
At  one  time  he  proclaimed  that  'the  act 
of  creation  is  always  an  act  of  will'  but 
later  that  'it  seems  very  likely  that  the 
artist  uses  and  manipulates  a  supernatural 
power'.  In  his  Vorticist  period  he  exalted 
abstract  art,  but  by  1950  he  could  say:  'No- 
one  but  an  idiot — or  a  Dutchman,  like 
Mondrian — ^would  pass  his  life  in  that 
vacuum.'  He  had  by  then  long  given 
himself  to  a  representational  art :  portraits 
are  among  his  most  notable  works. 

Lewis's  drawings  can  be  most  easily 
studied  in  his  three  pubHcations,  Tirrwn 
of  Athens  (1914),  Fifteen  Drawings  (1920), 
and  Thirty  Personalities  and  a  Self-Portrait 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lewis,  R. 


(1932);  and,  with  his  paintings,  in  many 
galleries  including  in  London  the  Tate, 
Victoria  and  Albert,  British  Museum, 
National  Portrait  Gallery,  and  Imperial 
War  Museum.  His  most  notable  paintings 
are  'Surrender  of  Barcelona'  (1934-7) 
and  his  portraits  of  Pound  (1939)  and 
(Dame)  Edith  Sitwell  (1923-35),  all  in 
the  Tate  Gallery;  'A  Battery  Shelled' 
(Imperial  War  Museum,  1918);  and  his 
portraits  of  Eliot  (1938,  Durban  Art 
Gallery,  and  1949,  Magdalene  College, 
Cambridge)  and  of  his  wife  (1937,  Glasgow 
Art  Gallery  and  Museum). 

The  Tate  Gallery  has  a  painting  by 
William  Roberts  of  the  Vorticists  cele- 
brating at  the  Restaurant  de  la  Tour 
Eiffel  in  which  Lewis  is  the  central  figure. 

[H.  G.  Porteus,  Wyndham  Lewis :  A  Discur- 
sive Exposition,  1932 ;  Charles  Handley-Read 
and  Eric  Newton,  The  Art  of  Wyndham  Lewis, 
1951 ;  Geoffrey  Grigson,  A  Master  of  Our 
Time :  A  Study  of  Wyndham  Lewis,  1951 ; 
H.  Kenner,  Wyndham  Lewis,  1954 ;  E.  W.  F. 
Tomlin,  Wyndham  Lewis,  1955;  Geoffrey 
Wagner,  Wyndham  Lewis:  A  Portrait  of  the 
Artist  as  the  Enemy,  with  an  extensive  biblio- 
graphy, 1957 ;  The  Letters  of  Wyndham  Lewis, 
ed.  W.  K.  Rose,  1963.]    Anthony  Bertram. 

LEWIS,  ROSA  (1867-1952),  hotel  owner, 
was  born  26  September  1867  at  Leyton, 
Essex,  the  fifth  of  the  nine  children  of 
William  Edwin  Ovenden,  watchmaker 
and  later  undertaker,  by  his  wife,  Eliza, 
daughter  of  John  Cannon,  jeweller,  and 
great-niece  of  Richard  Cannon  [q.v.]. 
Rosa  left  the  Leyton  board-school  at  the 
age  of  twelve  to  become  a  general  servant 
for  a  shilling  a  week  and  her  keep.  At 
sixteen  a  fortunate  recommendation  took 
her  to  Sheen  House,  Mortlake,  home  of  the 
exiled  Comte  de  Paris.  No  apprenticeship 
could  have  been  more  valuable.  She 
worked  her  way  up  to  head  kitchenmaid ; 
was  lent  to  the  Due  d'Aumale  at  Chantilly ; 
and  took  charge  of  the  kitchen  of  the 
Due  d' Orleans  at  Sandliurst. 

In  1887  she  started  going  out  to  cook 
in  private  houses.  Her  cooking  was 
basically  French,  as  learnt  in  her  royal 
French  houses,  but  it  was  liked  because 
of  its  simplicity:  even  her  quails  stuffed 
with  foie  gras  were  light  compared  with 
the  interminable  stodgy  com*ses  of  the 
Mrs.  Beeton  school.  First  to  employ  her 
was  Lady  Randolph  Churchill;  then 
followed  the  Saviles,  the  Asquiths,  and 
Captain  Charles  Duff,  a  prominent  member 
of  the  Marlborough  House  set. 

In  gossip,  spoken  and  written,  her  name 
has    often    been    associated    with    King 


Edward  VII.  He  first  saw  her  at  Sheen 
House  when  the  dinner  so  pleased  him 
that  he  asked  his  host  to  send  for  the 
chef:  he  was  no  less  pleased  with  Rosa 
whose  cockney  wit  amused  him.  For  the 
next  twenty  years  tactful  hostesses 
entertaining  him  engaged  the  services  of 
Rosa,  whose  cooking  he  liked  best  and 
who  was  careful  to  study  his  tastes. 

In  1893  Rosa  married — ^without  any 
signs  of  enthusiasm — Excelsior  Tyrel 
Chiney  Lewis,  a  butler.  They  set  up  house 
— or  as  some  said  were  set  up  in  a  house — 
in  Eaton  Terrace  where  they  were  to  take 
in  lodgers.  Little  is  known  of  what  went 
on  there  except  that  Lewis  had  little  to  do 
but  drink.  In  1903  she  divorced  him. 

In  1899  she  briefly  and  not  very  success- 
fully took  on  the  catering  at  White's 
Club,  but  her  popularity  in  private  houses 
grew.  She  now  took  a  team  of  cooks  with 
her  but  she  was  always  prepared  to  do 
anything  herself  which  needed  doing — 
even  scrubbing  the  steps— to  ensure  that 
all  was  as  it  should  be.  She  did  the  market- 
ing and  prepared  much  of  the  food  before- 
hand. She  also  gave  lessons  at  half  a 
guinea  a  time  to  people  such  as  W.  W. 
Astor's  cook. 

In  1902  Rosa  Lewis  bought  the 
Cavendish  in  Jermyn  Street,  already  a 
fashionable  private  hotel.  Such  was  her 
energy  that  this  added  responsibility  did 
not  restrict  her  outside  cooking  activities 
but  merely  gave  scope  to  her  flair  for 
furnishing  and  decoration.  A  tall  and 
elegant  hostess,  she  made  the  Cavendish 
so  much  like  a  private  house  that  there 
seemed  nothing  odd  about  her  favourite 
rebuke:  'You  treat  my  house  like  an 
hotel.'  Lord  Ribblesdale  had  a  permanent 
suite;  Sir  William  Eden  lived  there  for 
many  years.  In  addition  to  distinguished 
English  families — she  preferred  them 
distinguished — she  welcomed  presentable 
American  millionaires. 

Until  the  war  of  1914-18  it  was  the 
height  of  chic  for  London  hostesses  to 
have  Rosa  to  cook  for  them;  and  no 
hotel  was  more  comme  il  faut  than  the 
Cavendish  for  those  who  lived  in  the 
country.  With  the  war  private  entertain- 
ing on  a  grand  scale  ceased  and  Rosa  had 
only  the  Cavendish  to  occupy  her.  Her 
immense  good  nature  caused  her  to  bring 
in  impoverished  young  officers.  They  were 
never  allowed  to  pay  and  Rosa  embarked 
on  the  Robin  Hood  tactics  of  robbing  the 
rich  to  pay  for  the  poor  which  she  con- 
tinued until  her  death. 

Rosa's  tolerance  of  the  behaviour  of 


629 


Lewis,  R, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


others,  her  uninhibited  language,  the 
raffishness  of  some  of  the  parties  at  the 
Cavendish,  and  the  great  names  with  which 
hers  has  been  Unked  gave  her  in  later  life 
a  reputation  which  she  had  not  earned. 
She  accepted  the  legend  with  a  chuckle 
rather  than  a  denial.  As  Evelyn  Waugh, 
who  portrayed  her  in  Vile  Bodies  (1930), 
put  it,  she  was  'a  warm  hearted,  comic, 
and  totally  original  woman'  whose  beauty 
was  still  discernible  even  in  old  age. 
She  maintained  throughout  her  life  an 
affectionate  if  intermittent  connection 
with  the  Church  of  England  and  was 
confirmed  shortly  before  her  death  at  the 
Cavendish  29  November  1952.  Her  sister's 
son,  in  whom  she  took  great  pride,  Hugh 
Hamshaw  Thomas,  the  palaeobotanist 
and  F.R.S.,  has  contributed  to  this 
Supplement. 

A  portrait  of  Rosa  Lewis  painted  in  the 
twenties  by  Chile  Guevara  is  privately 
owned. 

[Michael  Harrison,  Rosa,  1962;  Daphne 
Fielding,  The  Duchess  of  Jermyn  Street,  1964 ; 
personal  knowledge.]  Robin  McDouall. 

LEWIS,  WILLIAM  CUDMORE 
McCULLAGH  (1885-1956),  physical 
chemist,  was  born  in  Belfast  29  June  1885, 
the  only  son  in  a  family  of  five  children, 
of  Edward  Lewis,  linen  merchant,  and 
his  wife,  Frances  Welsh,  daughter  of 
the  Rev.  William  Cudmore  McCullagh  of 
Ballysillan  Presbyterian  Church,  Belfast. 
Lewis  was  educated  at  Bangor  Grammar 
School,  county  Down,  and  at  the  Royal 
University  of  Ireland  which  he  entered  as  a 
medical  student.  Developing  an  interest 
in  the  physical  sciences  he  changed  his 
course  and  proceeded  to  obtain  first  class 
honours  in  experimental  science  (1905).  In 
1906  he  was  awarded  the  M.A.  degree  and 
a  university  studentship  in  experimental 
science.  After  acting  as  demonstrator  in 
chemistry  at  the  university  for  a  year  he 
left  Northern  Ireland  to  continue  research 
at  the  university  of  Liverpool  under 
F.  G.  Donnan  [q.v.] — himself  an  Ulster- 
man  and  a  first  cousin  of  Lewis's  father. 
After  completing,  with  Donnan,  a  highly 
successful  experimental  examination  of 
William  Gibbs's  theory  of  surface  concen- 
tration, Lewis  was  awarded  a  scholarship 
which  took  him  to  Heidelberg  to  work  for 
a  year  with  the  distinguished  colloid 
chemist  Bredig.  In  1909  he  returned  to 
England  and  was  appointed  by  Sir 
William  Ramsay  [q.v.]  to  a  demonstrator- 
ship and  later  a  lectureship  at  University 
CoUege,  London.  Lewis's  contributions  to 


physical  chemistry  had  attracted  con- 
siderable attention  and  in  1913  he  suc- 
ceeded Donnan  in  the  chair  of  physical 
chemistry  in  Liverpool,  a  position  he  held 
until  his  retirement  owing  to  ill  health  in 
1948.  He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1926. 

Lewis  was  a  pioneer  in  research  and 
made  notable  contributions  to  physical 
chemistry.  He  will  best  be  remembered 
for  his  studies  in  the  theory  of  chemical 
change  and  colloid  science.  During  his 
long  association  with  the  university  of 
Liverpool  he  directed  one  of  the  out- 
standing schools  of  chemistry  in  this 
country.  He  was  a  friendly  professor, 
always  ready  to  give  advice,  to  listen 
sympathetically  to  the  difficulties  of  his 
students  and  colleagues  and  to  help  them 
on  the  way  to  a  successful  solution  of 
their  problems.  He  was  a  man  of  wide 
learning  and  considerable  breadth  of 
outlook;  an  ardent  student  of  Samuel 
Johnson  and  also  interested  in,  and 
knowledgeable  about,  early  English  archi- 
tecture. Lewis  was  extremely  retiring  and 
hated  publicity.  He  was  sincere  and  kindly, 
had  a  keen  sense  of  humour,  and  was 
devoted  to  university  ideals  and  especially 
to  research.  Brought  up  in  the  Presbyterian 
tradition,  he  remained  throughout  his  life 
a  loyal  churchman. 

Although  he  always  felt  that  his  work 
was  hampered  by  insufficient  mathe- 
matical training,  much  of  Lewis's  best 
work  was  of  a  theoretical  nature  and  his 
early  studies  on  the  nature  of  chemical 
mechanism  and  catalysis  pointed  the  way 
to  the  use  of  methods  of  statistical  mech- 
anics in  chemistry.  In  1918  he  proposed  a 
theory  of  chemical  change  which  was  to 
form  the  basis  of  subsequent  development 
in  this  subject.  To  physical  chemists 
Lewis  was  widely  known  as  the  author  of 
A  System  of  Physical  Chemistry,  first 
published  in  two  volumes  in  1916,  and  in 
three  volumes  in  1918-19.  The  first  original 
work  in  the  English  language  to  be  de- 
voted to  physical  chemistry  for  senior 
students,  it  was  the  standard  work  for 
students  for  two  decades  and  went  into 
four  editions  in  ten  years.  Written  at  a 
time  when  the  subject  of  physical  chemi- 
stry was  growing  rapidly,  it  exerted 
a  wide  and  lasting  influence  on  the 
subject  in  this  country.  The  task,  of 
preparing  it  was  prodigious  and  revealed 
a  breadth  of  outlook  possible  only  in  a 
man  who  had  the  widest  grasp  of  the 
many  developments  occurring  at  that 
period. 

In  the  years  immediately  following  the 


680 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Leyel 


war  of  1914-18  Lewis  collaborated  in  the 
work  of  the  Liverpool  Cancer  Research 
Organization.  This  body  had  been  formed 
by  Professor  W.  Blair-Bell  who  enlisted 
the  services  of  many  heads  of  departments 
in  the  university  who  were  prepared  to 
apply  their  expert  knowledge  to  various 
aspects  of  this  problem.  These  investi- 
gations influenced  Lewis's  future  work  and 
he  transferred  his  research  interests  to 
the  study  of  biological  and  physiological 
problems.  He  was  interested  in  the 
physico-chemical  processes  which  might 
underlie  malignancy  and  he  studied  such 
properties  as  the  electrical  conductivity 
and  ionic  permeability  of  malignant  tissue. 
He  measured  the  pH  variation  of  the 
blood  of  normal  and  diseased  persons  in 
the  hope  that  significant  differences  might 
be  observed,  but  none  was  found.  From  a 
survey  of  the  literature  he  concluded  that 
glycolysis  was  enhanced  in  cancerous  cells 
and  this  led  him  to  a  study  of  the  mechan- 
ism of  glycolysis  and  in  particular  the  acid 
and  enzymatic  hydrolysis  of  a  number 
of  glucosides.  This  phase  of  his  work 
was  rounded  off  by  a  physico-chemical 
study  of  the  properties  of  proteins, 
especially  denaturation  and  electro- 
phoretic  behaviour. 

Much  of  this  work  was  brilliantly  con- 
ceived and,  although  not  always  successful, 
it  may  be  said  that  some  of  the  projects 
were  undertaken  in  advance  of  their  time 
and  before  techniques  had  been  developed 
for  their  successful  prosecution. 

Lewis  married  in  1914  Jeanie  Waterston 
Darroch,  of  a  Scottish  family  who  had 
settled  in  London;  they  had  one  son, 
Ian,  who  became  lecturer  in  physics  at 
Liverpool  University  before  joining  the 
Atomic  Energy  Research  Establishment 
at  Harwell.  Lewis  died  at  Malvern  11 
February  1956. 

[C.  E.  H.  Bawn  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 

Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iv,  1958; 

Nature,  31  March  1956 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

C.  E.  H.  Bawn. 

LEYEL,  HILDA  WINIFRED  IVY  (Mrs. 
C.  F.  Level)  (1880-1957),  herbalist,  was 
born  in  London  6  December  1880,  the 
daughter  of  Edward  Brenton  Wanton, 
from  1881  an  assistant  master  at 
Uppingham  School,  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth 
Anne  Drewitt.  At  Uppingham  she  de- 
veloped a  precocious  interest  in  flowers 
and  herbs  and  on  leaving  school  she 
studied  medicine.  She  then  worked  for  a 
while  with  (Sir)  Frank  Benson  [q.v.]  and 
in    1900   married   Carl   Frederick   Leyel 


(died  1925),  a  theatrical  manager  of 
Swedish  descent  who  later  worked  with 
Oscar  Asche  [q.v.].  They  had  two  sons* 
As  a  young  society  hostess  in  her  Charles 
II  flat  in  Lincoln's  Inn,  she  proved  herself 
a  connoisseur  of  food  and  wine,  and  made 
a  number  of  influential  friends  who  rallied 
round  her  when  in  1922  she  was  prose- 
cuted for  running  the  Golden  Ballot  which 
raised  a  large  sum  for  the  benefit  of  ex- 
servicemen  and  various  hospitals.  Her 
acquittal  helped  to  estabUsh  the  legahty 
of  such  ballots.  She  was  elected  a  life 
governor  of  St.  Mary's,  the  West  London, 
and  the  Royal  National  Orthopaedic 
hospitals. 

Soon,  however,  Mrs.  Leyel  began  to 
concentrate  on  the  nearly  forgotten  craft 
of  herbalism.  Although  she  lacked  a 
scientific  training  in  botany,  she  acquired 
a  profound  and  detailed  knowledge  of 
the  work  of  the  herbalist  Nicholas 
Culpeper  [q.v.]  and  his  predecessors,  and 
re-presented  this  vast  knowledge  of 
herbs,  culinary,  cosmetic,  and  heaUng, 
for  use  in  the  modern  world.  In  1926  she 
wrote  The  Magic  of  Herbs  and  in  1927  she 
opened  Culpeper  House  in  Baker  Street, 
a  shop  full  of  herbal  medicines,  foods,  and 
cosmetics,  designed  especially  to  appeal 
to  women.  Her  imaginative  and  practical 
talents  ensured  the  success  of  this  and 
similar  shops,  which  were  decorated  by 
Basil  lonides.  Encouraged  to  apply  her 
knowledge  of  herbs  and  their  healing 
properties  to  the  needs  of  patients 
dissatisfied  with  the  drugs  of  orthodox 
medicine,  she  founded  the  Society  of 
Herbalists,  a  non-profit-making  organiza- 
tion for  the  study  and  application  of  the 
herbal  art,  and  made  available  her  own 
magnificent  library,  the  nucleus  of  which 
is  now  housed  with  the  society.  In  1941 
the  society's  life  was  imperilled  by  the 
pharmacy  and  medicines  bill  which,  as 
drafted,  would  have  destroyed  the  work 
of  the  herbalist  in  England.  Again  power- 
ful friends  rallied  to  her  support  and  the 
bill  was  sufficiently  modified  to  enable 
patients  to  obtain  treatment  on  joining 
the  society. 

As  a  herbal  practitioner  Mrs.  Leyel 
stressed  to  her  patients  the  profound 
difference  between  the  effect  of  drugs  and 
herbs  on  the  body ;  the  former  tending  to 
remove  symptoms  but  to  mask  causes, 
the  latter,  working  far  more  slowly, 
removing  in  time  the  actual  causes  of  the 
disease.  Herbs,  she  found,  treat  the  whole 
man,  on  the  physical  and  mental  planes, 
and  on  those  between.  They  are  natural 


631 


Leyel 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


to  the  body  and  produce  no  reaction 
which  may  itself  need  treatment.  Used 
whole,  as  nature  intended,  they  include  the 
factor  which  assists  their  digestion,  yet 
they  can  be  pinpointed  in  application, 
even  to  a  small  part  of  a  single  organ. 
Holding  these  views  Mrs.  Leyel  co- 
operated with  Sir  Albert  Howard  in  his 
campaign  for  compost  versus  artificial 
manure ;  and  with  those  working  for  pure 
water  and  pure  food  of  every  kind. 

In  1931  Mrs.  Leyel  edited  Mrs.  M. 
Grieve's  A  Modem  Herbal  in  two  volumes ; 
she  herself  wrote  a  long  series  of  works  on 
herbs,  perhaps  the  most  complete  extant ; 
they  include  Herbal  Delights  (1937), 
Compassionate  Herbs  (1946),  Elixirs  of 
Life  (1948),  Hearts-Ease  (1949),  Green 
Medicine  (1952),  and  Cinquefoil  (1957); 
as  well  as  others  on  cooking.  She  was 
honoured  with  the  palme  academique  of 
France  in  1924.  She  died  in  London  15 
April  1957. 

[Mrs.  C.  F.  Leyel,  The  Truth  About  Herbs, 
1943;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Christmas  Humphreys. 

LIAQAT  ALI  KHAN  (1895-1951),  first 
prime  minister  of  Pakistan,  was  born 
1  October  1895  at  Karnal  in  the  East 
Punjab,  the  second  son  of  Ruknuddaulah 
Shamsher  Jang  Nawab  Rustam  Ali  Khan, 
who  claimed  descent  from  King 
Nausherwan  of  Iran.  The  family  had  for 
some  generations  been  settled  in  the 
United  Provinces,  where  they  had  re- 
ceived grants  of  land  from  the  Mogul 
emperors.  After  graduating  from  the 
Muhammad  Anglo-Oriental  College  in 
1918,  Liaqat  Ali  Khan  went  to  Exeter 
College,  Oxford,  where  he  took  the 
shortened  honours  course  in  jurisprudence 
in  1921 ;  he  was  called  to  the  bar  by  the 
Inner  Temple  in  1922.  On  his  return  to 
India  in  that  year  he  at  once  began  to  play 
an  active  part  in  politics,  and  in  1926  he 
became  a  member  of  the  legislative 
council  of  the  United  Provinces.  His 
pleasing  personality  and  lucidity  of  ex- 
pression soon  brought  him  into  promi- 
nence and  in  1931  he  became  deputy 
president  of  the  council.  He  quickly 
became  of  importance  in  the  Moslem 
League  and  in  1936  was  elected  general 
secretary  of  the  All-India  Moslem  League. 
In  the  same  year  he  was  appointed  to 
the  League's  parliamentary  board,  the 
body  charged  with  the  supervision  of  the 
League's  legislative  activities,  both  at 
the  centre  and  in  the  provinces,  and  with 
the    choice    of   candidates    for    election. 


These  activities  brought  him  into  close 
touch  with  M.  A.  Jinnah  [q.v.]  who  had 
become  permanent  president  of  the 
League  in  1934.  The  ties  between  these 
two  Moslem  leaders  grew  ever  closer  and 
from  this  time  until  the  death  of  Jinnah 
unqualified  loyalty  to  his  leader  was  the 
keynote  of  Liaqat's  life.  Jinnah  must 
often  have  been  a  difficult  chief  and  on 
one  occasion  early  in  his  tenure  of  office 
Liaqat  resigned  from  the  parliamentary 
board  as  a  result  of  a  disagreement  with 
his  president.  This,  however,  was  the  only 
hitch  and  thereafter  Liaqat's  self-effacing 
modesty  and  his  cool  temperament  made 
him  an  ideal  second-in-command. 

In  1940  Liaqat  was  elected  to  the 
central  Legislative  Assembly  and  became 
the  deputy  leader  of  the  Moslem  League 
Party.  He  soon  made  his  mark  and  unlike 
Jinnah,  the  Quaid-e-Azam,  was  a  regular 
attender,  taking  part  in  most  important 
debates.  He  was  a  hard  hitter  and  his 
closely  reasoned  speeches  often  embar- 
rassed the  Government  of  India.  The 
excellent  teamwork  of  Jinnah  and  Liaqat 
was  an  important  factor  in  building  up 
the  Moslem  League  to  a  position  of  such 
strength  that  it  was  able  to  speak  with 
authority  at  the  time  of  the  mission  under 
Sir  Stafford  Cripps  [q.v.]  in  1942.  In  1945, 
when  the  formation  of  an  interim  govern- 
ment pending  the  final  constitutional 
settlement  was  discussed,  the  talks 
between  Liaqat  and  Bhulabhai  Desai, 
the  leader  of  the  Congress  Party  in  the 
Legislative  Assembly,  as  to  the  proportion 
of  seats  in  the  Cabinet  to  be  held  by 
Hindus  and  Moslems,  came  as  near  to 
success  as  was  possible  in  the  prevailing 
atmosphere.  In  the  same  year  Liaqat  was 
perhaps  the  principal  organizer  of  the 
overwhelming  Moslem  League  victory,  on 
a  partition  ticket,  in  the  elections  for  the 
Moslem  reserved  seats  in  the  central 
legislature.  The  result  left  no  room  for 
doubt  that  the  Moslems  were  solidly 
behind  the  demand  for  partition. 

In  1946  Liaqat  became  finance  minister 
in  the  interim  government  formed  with 
Jawaharlal  Nehru  as  prime  minister.  The 
Congress  and  the  Moslem  League — the 
two  main  elements  in  the  Cabinet — ^were 
poles  apart,  and  in  1947  the  finance 
minister's  budget  proposals,  which  in- 
cluded a  wealth  tax,  a  capital  gains  tax, 
and  an  increase  in  general  taxation,  were 
openly  opposed  by  his  Congress  fellow 
ministers.  The  awkward  situation  which 
resulted  was  terminated  only  by  the 
partition  of  India  in  August  1947. 


Mi 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lidgett 


On  the  inauguration  of  Pakistan, 
Jinnah  became  governor-general  with 
Liaqat  as  prime  minister.  On  the  generally 
accepted  constitutional  theory,  the 
governor-general  would  normally  act  on 
the  advice  of  his  ministers,  but  as  long  as 
Jinnah  was  alive  it  was  clear  that  he 
would  completely  dominate  the  situation. 
On  his  death  in  September  1948  the 
situation  was  completely  changed.  Khwaja 
Nazimuddin  became  governor-general, 
while  Liaqat  remained  prime  minister,  but 
it  was  Liaqat  who  held  the  reins  of  power, 
while  Nazimuddin  became  the  constitu- 
tional governor-general  of  the  textbooks. 

Liaqat  grew  rapidly  in  statiu*e  and 
though  he  never  acquired  the  dominating 
position  of  Jinnah,  for  a  time  he  was  able 
to  provide  the  cohesive  force  which 
Pakistan  so  badly  needed.  He  had 
grown  up  with  the  Moslem  League  and 
the  mantle  of  the  Quaid-e-Azam  had  fallen 
naturally  on  him ;  he  became  universally 
known  in  Pakistan  as  Quaid-e-Millat, 
leader  of  the  people.  In  1949-50  when 
relations  between  India  and  Pakistan 
were  at  their  worst,  and  wild  men  in  both 
countries  talked  of  war,  it  was  Liaqat 
Ali  Khan  in  Pakistan  and  Nehru  in  India 
who  pulled  their  countries  back  from  the 
precipice.  It  was  in  the  same  spirit  that 
the  prime  ministers  of  the  two  countries 
made  a  pact  in  1950  on  the  treatment  of 
minorities. 

A  more  difficult  task  confronted  Liaqat 
when  consideration  was  given  to  the 
future  constitution  of  Pakistan.  He  had 
to  reconcile  the  democracy  in  which  he 
firmly  believed  with  the  view  of  the 
Ulema  that  an  Islamic  constitution  could 
not  be  fully  democratic;  the  practical- 
minded  Liaqat  must  have  been  very  sorely 
harassed  by  the  disputes  of  the  theorists 
as  to  the  validity  of  man-made  law.  Had 
he  Uved,  his  basic  common  sense  might 
have  helped  Pakistan  to  avoid  some  of 
the  pitfalls  lying  ahead,  but  on  16  October 
1951  he  was  assassinated  at  Rawalpindi 
by  one  Said  Akbar,  for  whose  action  it 
proved  impossible  to  ascertain  a  motive. 

Before  he  first  went  to  England  Liaqat 
Ah  Khan  married  a  cousin,  Nawabzadi 
Jehangir  Begum,  by  whom  he  had  a  son. 
In  1933  he  married  Rana  Irene  Pant,  of 
Almorah,  of  Hindu  descent,  whose  family 
had  become  Christians,  and  who  had  been 
educated  at  Lucknow  University.  She 
became  converted  to  Islam  on  her 
marriage.  They  had  two  sons. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
P.  J.  Griffiths. 


LIDGETT,  JOHN  SCOTT  (1854-1958), 
theologian  and  educationist,  was  born  in 
Lewisham  10  August  1854  of  Methodist 
ancestry.  His  father,  John  Jacob  Lidgett, 
who  died  when  his  son  was  fourteen, 
was  a  successful  City  business  man,  and 
his  mother,  Maria  Elizabeth  Scott,  helped 
to  found  what  became  known  as  the 
'Women's  Work'  of  the  Methodist  Mis- 
sionary Society.  Her  father,  John  Scott, 
was  twice  president  of  the  Methodist 
Conference,  first  principal  of  Westminster 
Training  College,  and  a  powerful  influence 
in  his  grandson's  early  days.  After  leaving 
Blackheath  Proprietary  School  Lidgett 
went  into  a  firm  of  insurance  and  shipping 
brokers  but  two  years  later  entered 
University  College,  London,  where  he 
graduated  B.A.  in  1874  and  M.A.  in  logic 
and  philosophy  in  1875.  In  the  following 
year  he  was  accepted  for  the  ministry  of 
the  Wesleyan  Methodist  Church  and  for 
fifteen  years  served  in  a  succession  of 
circuits  in  Tunstall,  Southport,  Cardiff, 
Wolverhampton,  and  Cambridge. 

During  his  Cambridge  ministry,  set  in 
surroundings  so  well  attuned  to  his 
personal  interests,  Lidgett  became  acutely 
mindful  of  the  gulf  between  rich  and  poor, 
and  of  the  evils  of  poverty,  bad  housing, 
and  unemployment  in  different  parts  of 
the  coimtry.  Stimulated  by  the  en- 
couragement of  W.  F.  Moulton  [q.v.]  he 
resolved  to  establish  in  one  of  the  most 
neglected  districts  of  London  a  centre, 
evangehcal  in  spirit  and  therefore,  as  he 
held,  committed  to  ever-widening  social 
and  educational  aims:  a  meeting-place 
for  all  classes  of  society,  to  provide 
facilities  for  the  study  of  literature, 
science,  art,  to  encourage  participation  in 
local  administration  and  philanthropy, 
and  to  be  inspired  throughout  by  non- 
sectarian  motives. 

In  1891  the  Bermondsey  Settlement  wa^ 
founded,  with  Lidgett  as  warden  and  a 
group  of  permanent  residents  who  mainly 
worked  in  London  during  the  day. 
Lidgett  remained  in  Bermondsey  until 
1949,  by  which  time  many  of  his  early 
dreams  had  been  fulfilled.  The  educa- 
tional institute,  the  Alice  Barlow  House 
(the  headquarters  of  a  working  women's 
society),  the  Beatrice  Club  for  girls,  the 
Rydal  Club  for  boys,  and  other  activities 
bear  witness  to  the  social  work  of  the 
settlement,  while  workers  were  furnished 
to  the  School  Board,  the  London  County 
Council,  the  Bermondsey  borough  council, 
and  the  Board  of  Guardians.  Classes  fo* 
Sunday  school  teachers  and  teachers  in 


633 


Lidgett 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


apologetics  were  provided,  and  for  a 
number  of  years  two  Wesleyan  Methodist 
churches  were  maintained  in  Rotherhithe. 

As  early  as  1897  Lidgett  was  elected  a 
member  of  the  London  School  Board  and 
he  represented  the  Free  Churches  in  the 
controversy  provoked  by  the  education 
bill  of  1902.  His  attitude  to  the  bill  was 
somewhat  divided,  for  he  welcomed  the 
impetus  it  gave  to  the  cause  of  higher 
education  while  strongly  criticizing  the 
provisions  which  seemed  to  deny  justice  to 
Nonconformists,  although  he  declined  to 
support  the  passive  resistance  movement. 
It  is  of  interest  that  in  1941  he  led  the 
Nonconformists  in  the  deputation  of 
Anglicans  and  Nonconformists  which 
waited  on  the  president  of  the  Board  of 
Education  and  in  which  the  cordial 
spirit  was  in  marked  contrast  to  the 
religious  bitterness  associated  with  the 
1902  Act  and  the  withdrawal  of  the 
proposed  Birrell  bill  of  1906.  He  played  an 
important  part  in  the  correlation  of  the 
powers  given  to  the  borough  councils  by 
the  1902  Act  which  resulted  in  the  passing 
of  a  separate  Act  for  London  in  1903, 
giving  full  control  to  the  London  County 
Council. 

Lidgett  was  an  alderman  of  the  L.C.C. 
in  1905-10  and  1922-8  and  represented 
Rotherhithe  in  1910-22.  In  1918  he  was 
elected  leader  of  the  Progressives  and 
although  they  were  then  losing  ground  he 
succeeded  in  keeping  the  dwindling  party 
together  for  ten  years,  a  task  which  would 
have  broken  the  spirit  of  a  less  courageous 
man.  His  paramount  interest  on  the  L.C.C. 
was  Christian  education.  He  was  a  member 
(1905-28)  and  deputy  chairman  (1917-19) 
of  the  education  committee. 

Lidgett  served  London  University  with 
unremitting  loyalty  and  affection.  In  1922 
he  was  elected  a  member  of  the  senate, 
becoming  deputy  vice-chancellor  in  1929 
and  vice-chancellor  in  1930-32.  He  con- 
tinued to  represent  the  arts  graduates 
until  he  retired  in  1946  at  the  age  of 
ninety-two.  He  served  on  a  large  number 
of  committees  and  governing  bodies 
including  those  of  women's  colleges  which 
could  always  count  on  his  enthusiastic 
support.  He  was  a  member  of  the  council 
for  external  students  (1922^6)  and  of  the 
university  extension  and  tutorial  classes 
council  (1929-45),  and  he  was  chairman 
of  the  Universities'  China  Conunittee 
(1933-6). 

In  the  affairs  of  his  own  Church,  the 
Free  Churches,  and  the  ecumenical 
movement  Lidgett  took  a  leading  part. 


In  1908  he  was  president  of  the  Wesleyan 
Methodist  Conference  and  also  chairman 
of  the  London  South  District  of  the 
Church.  He  took  a  prominent  part  in  all 
the  negotiations  leading  to  the  union  of 
the  Wesleyan,  Primitive,  and  United 
Methodist  Churches  and  was  elected  the 
first  president  of  the  united  Church  in 
1932.  In  1906  he  was  president  of  the 
National  Council  of  Evangelical  Free 
Churches  and  in  1923-5  moderator  of  the 
Federal  Council  of  the  Evangelical  Free 
Churches.  He  was  concerned  that  in  this 
country  the  Free  Churches  should  advance 
towards  full  unity,  but  he  also  longed  for 
unity  with  the  Church  of  England  and  for 
the  visible  unity  of  the  Church  of  Christ 
which  he  believed  to  be  one  in  its  essential 
nature.  He  was  a  member  of  the  joint 
committee  set  up  by  the  Free  Church 
Federal  Council  in  1920  to  prepare  a  reply 
to  the  Lambeth  Conference  'Appeal  to  all 
Christian  People',  and  a  leading  member 
of  the  committee  of  bishops  and  Free 
Churchmen  which  met  at  Lambeth  in 
1922-5 .  Those  conferences  were  resumed  in 
1930  and  continued  until  1938  with  Lidgett 
still  playing  a  decisive  role.  He  advocated 
the  formation  of  a  Council  of  Churches  in 
Great  Britain  and  was  one  of  the  founder- 
members  of  the  British  Council  of 
Churches  which  came  into  being  in  1942. 
He  was  the  trusted  friend  of  Randall 
Davidson  [q.v.]  and  laboured  until  his 
death  for  the  unity  of  English  Christen- 
dom. While  he  was  sometimes  regarded 
by  Free  Churchmen  as  an  uncertain 
quantity  in  Anglican-Free  Church  con- 
versations, Lidgett  never  ceased  to  affirm 
the  reality  of  Free  Church  ministries  and 
sacraments  and  the  fundamental  princi- 
ples of  Reformed  theology. 

His  own  most  significant  contribution 
to  theological  thought  was  his  first  work, 
The  Spiritual  Principle  of  the  Atonement 
(1897),  in  which  he  contends  that  the 
fatherhood  of  God  is  the  highest  as  well 
as  the  universal  relationship  in  which 
God  stands  to  mankind,  the  divine 
fatherhood  being  pre-eminently  mani- 
fested in  the  unique  obedience  of  Christ 
who  by  the  filial  satisfaction  offered  to 
God  reconstitutes  the  human  race  of 
which  he  is  the  head  into  a  new  unity. 
In  The  Fatherhood  of  God  (1902)  Lidgett 
attempts  to  show  that  from  the  Middle 
Ages  onwards  the  centrality  of  the  doctrine 
of  the  fatherhood  of  God  as  found  in  the 
Bible  has  been  supplanted  by  the  concept 
of  sovereignty.  The  Christian  Religion,  its 
Meaning  and  Proof  (1907)  was  in  its  day 


634 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lindemann 


an  impressive  contribution  to  Christian 
apologetics.  God  in  Christ  Jesus  (1915)  is 
a  profound  exposition  of  the  Epistle  to 
the  Ephesians  which  unfolds  the  relation 
between  the  Father,  the  Son,  and  the  life  of 
Christians  in  the  Church  and  Society.  The 
doctrines  upon  which  the  Epistle  hinges 
constituted  the  unchanging  foundation 
of  Lidgett's  high  churchmanship.  Sonship 
and  Salvation  (1921)  is  a  further  exposi- 
tion of  the  fatherhood  of  God  in  the  Ught 
of  the  sonship  of  Jesus  as  set  forth  in  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.  The  invitation  to 
deliver  the  Maurice  lectures  {The  Victorian 
Transformation  of  Theology ^  1934)  gave 
him  the  opportunity  of  expressing  his 
appreciation  of  F.  D.  Maurice  [q.v.]  whom 
he  regarded  as  the  most  significant 
personality  of  the  previous  century. 
Lidgett's  theological  sympathies  were 
closely  akin  to  those  of  Maurice  in  whose 
writings  he  found  a  combination  of  pro- 
phetic witness,  systematic  thought,  and 
creative  endeavour.  He  wrote  smaller 
books  including  Apostolic  Ministry  (1909), 
God,  Christ  and  the  Church  (1927),  God  and 
the  World  (1943),  and  The  Idea  of  God  and 
Social  Ideals  (1938)  in  which  he  showed 
the  relation  of  his  theology  to  his  public 
work. 

Lidgett  was  editor  of  the  Methodist 
Times  (1907-18)  and  joint-editor,  from  the 
death  of  his  uncle  Sir  Percy  Bunting  [q.v.] 
in  1911,  of  the  Contemporary  Review, 
although  for  the  last  twenty  years  of 
his  life  his  responsibilities  were  largely 
nominal. 

He  had  a  rare  combination  of  gifts — 
a  massive  yet  singularly  alert  mind,  an 
imusual  facility  of  speech  in  conversation, 
preaching,  and  on  the  platform,  an  easy 
command  as  chairman  of  the  most 
complicated  agenda,  and  a  mastery  of  the 
art  of  summing-up  a  discussion.  He  was 
in  many  respects  an  austere  and  exacting 
man  with  few  intimate  friends.  But  there 
were  human  touches  and  he  evoked 
admiration  and  respect  even  among  those 
who  could  not  always  follow  his  leader- 
ship. Of  his  sanctity,  which  was  insepar- 
able from  devotion  to  human  need,  there 
is  no  dispute.  In  1950,  when  he  was  ninety- 
six,  he  virtually  completed  the  painful 
process  of  official  retirement  from  his 
various  offices.  He  ended  his  days  in  Epsom 
where  he  had  accepted  the  chairmanship 
of  the  Quarry  Centre  of  Psychotherapy 
for  which  he  secured  a  substantial  grant 
from  the  Pilgrim  Trust  a  year  before  his 
death,  which  took  place  at  Epsom  16 
June  1953. 


Lidgett  received  honorary  degrees  from 
the  universities  of  Aberdeen,  Oxford,  and 
London;  was  made  a  freeman  of  the 
borough  of  Bermondsey  (1952);  and  in 
1933  became  a  Companion  of  Honour. 

In  1884  he  married  Emmeline  Martha 
(died  1934),  daughter  of  Andrew  Davies, 
physician,  of  Newport,  Monmouthshire; 
they  had  one  son  and  one  daughter. 

A  portrait  of  Lidgett  by  Francis  Dodd 
was  exhibited  at  the  Royal  Academy  in 
1948;  another,  by  Andrew  Burton,  is  at 
the  Bermondsey  Settlement. 

[J.  Scott  Lidgett,  Reminiscences,  1928,  and 
My  Guided  Life,  1936 ;  John  Scott  Lidgett,  a 
symposium,  ed.  Rupert  E.  Davies,  1957 ;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  Harold  Roberts. 

LINDEMANN,  FREDERICK  ALEX- 
ANDER, Viscount  Cherwell  (1886- 
1957),  scientist  and  politician,  was 
born  5  April  1886  at  Baden  Baden  where 
his  mother  was  taking  the  cure.  He 
resented  all  his  life  the  accident  of  his 
birthplace  being  in  Germany.  He  was  the 
second  of  three  sons  of  Adolphus  Frederick 
Lindemann  whose  family  was  of  Catholic 
(not,  as  was  often  stated,  Jewish)  French 
Alsatian  origin,  and  his  wife,  Olga  Noble, 
American  daughter  of  a  successful  British- 
born  engineer  and  widow  of  a  rich  banker 
called  Davidson.  She  was  a  Protestant  and 
insisted  on  her  four  children  being  brought 
up  as  Anglicans.  Lindemann's  father, 
born  in  1846,  emigrated  to  Britain  in  his 
twenties  and  later  became  naturalized. 
He  was  a  wealthy  man,  and  the  combined 
income  of  him  and  his  wife  was  about 
£20,000  a  year.  He  was  also  a  scientist 
and  astronomer  of  distinction,  and  built 
a  private  laboratory  at  his  home  near 
Sidmouth. 

Lindemann  and  his  elder  brother, 
Charles,  were  educated  at  Blair  Lodge, 
Polmont,  in  Scotland,  a  school  now 
extinct,  and  from  1902  first  at  the  Real- 
Gymnasium  then  the  Hochschule  in 
Darmstadt.  They  both  distinguished  them- 
selves sufficiently  in  science  to  be  accepted 
as  Ph.D.  students  by  Professor  Nernst, 
the  celebrated  head  of  the  Physikalisch- 
Chemisches  Institut  in  Berlin.  Lindemann 
gained  his  doctorate,  although  oddly  not 
with  the  highest  honours,  in  1910.  He 
must  have  been  an  unusual  student.  His 
comfortable  allowance  of  £600  a  year 
enabled  him  to  live  in  the  luxury  of  the 
Adlon  Hotel.  Somewhat  incongruously 
he  was  a  vegetarian — a  temporary  fad 
of  his  mother  having  left  a  permanent 
influence  on  him.  Moreover  all  his  life  he 


635 


Lindemann 


JD.N.B.  1951^1960 


neither  smoked  nor  drank  alcohol  except 
upon  the  rare  occasions  when  at  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill's  insistence  he  would 
take  a  carefully  measured  glass  of  brandy. 
He  was  fond  of  music  and  an  excellent 
pianist,  but  he  was  indifferent  to  the 
visual  arts  and  to  the  end  of  his  days  had 
a  'low  brow'  taste  in  literature.  The  two 
brothers  were  first-class  tennis  players, 
winning  many  prizes.  Later  Lindemann 
achieved  the  probably  unique  distinction 
of  competing  at  Wimbledon  after  he  had 
become  a  professor. 

Lindemann's  most  important  personal 
contributions  in  the  field  of  physics  were 
made  between  1910  and  1924.  His  first 
papers  under  Nernst's  influence  were 
concerned  with  low  temperature  physics, 
and  his  doctoral  thesis  on  the  law  of 
Dulong  and  Petit  was  a  criticism  of 
Einstein's  formula  for  explaining  the 
startling  decrease  in  the  specific  heat  of 
diamond  at  the  temperature  of  liquid 
hydrogen.  He  and  Nernst  devised  a  for- 
mula which  gave  a  better  explanation,  but 
it  was  later  caught  up  and  replaced  by 
the  Debye  formula  whose  superiority 
Lindemann  at  once  recognized.  At  the  same 
time  he  was  working  on  the  connection 
between  the  characteristic  frequency  and 
the  melting-point  of  a  solid,  and  produced 
a  theory  relating  melting  to  the  amphtude 
of  oscillation  of  atoms.  He  was  exceedingly 
versatile  while  in  Berlin.  He  invented, 
along  with  his  brother,  a  glass  trans- 
parent to  X-rays  which  he  patented.  He 
endeavoured  to  improve  the  electronic 
theory  of  metallic  conduction.  He  con- 
tributed to  the  theory  of  solids  and  was 
probably  the  first  person  to  notice  the 
paradox  that  their  breaking  stress  is 
nothing  like  as  great  as  theoretical 
considerations  would  suggest.  He  wrote 
papers  on  astronomical  problems  including 
one  in  conjunction  with  his  father  on  the 
use  of  photo-electric  cells  in  astronomical 
photometry.  In  the  same  paper  he  gave 
the  first  account  of  his  'Lindemann  fibre 
electrometer'  which,  with  modification, 
became  a  standard  instrument  and  was  his 
main  contribution  to  experimental  tech- 
niques. In  1919  he  collaborated  with 
F.  W.  Aston  [q.v.]  in  a  paper  on  the 
possibility  of  separating  isotopes.  He  did 
some  valuable  work  on  certain  geophysical 
problems  and  in  1923  with  G.  M.  B. 
Dobson  produced  a  paper  which,  although 
some  of  its  suggestions  are  not  now 
accepted,  was  the  beginning  of  the  modern 
theory  of  meteorites.  In  1920  and  1922 
he  made  important  contributions  to  the 


theory  of  the  mechanism  of  chemical 
reactions. 

Lindemann's  strength  as  a  physicist 
rested  on  his  remarkable  capacity  for 
simplification  of  problems  and  in  his 
very  wide  range.  His  relative  weakness 
was  in  mathematics  and  this  was  reflected 
in  the  limitations  of  his  Physical  Signifi' 
cance  of  the  Quantum  Theory  (1932).  He 
was  a  man  of  intuition  and  flair  in 
widely  diverse  fields,  but  he  never 
pursued  any  one  subject  long  enough  to 
become  its  complete  master.  Much  of  his 
brilliance  was  shown  in  discussion  at 
scientific  conferences  and  has  not  survived 
in  pubHshed  form.  For  this  reason  later 
generations  have  not  found  it  easy  to 
understand  the  high  esteem  in  which  he 
was  held  by  such  persons  as  Einstein, 
Planck,  Born,  Rutherford  [q.v.],  and 
Poincare.  He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1920. 

Lindemann  was  playing  tennis  in 
Germany  just  before  war  broke  out  in 
1914,  but  departed  in  time  to  avoid  being 
interned.  In  March  1915,  after  vainly 
seeking  a  commission,  he  joined  the  Royal 
Aircraft  Factory  at  Farnborough,  the 
chief  centre  of  experimental  aviation  in 
England.  His  most  notable  contribution 
was  his  solution  to  the  problem  of  'spin' 
in  aircraft.  According  to  official  records  he 
learned  to  fly  in  the  autumn  of  1916, 
invariably — to  the  surprise  of  his  col- 
leagues— appearing  at  the  station  with 
the  bowler  hat,  black  Melton  coat,  and 
furled  umbrella  which  was  to  be  his 
characteristic  uniform  all  his  life.  During 
June  and  July  1917  he  tested  empirically 
the  theory  that  he  had  worked  out  to 
explain  the  nature  of  a  spin  and  the  way 
to  get  out  of  it.  He  was  not  the  first 
person  to  extricate  himself  from  a  spin 
but  he  was  the  first  to  establish  the 
correct  scientific  principle — an  achieve- 
ment which  not  only  entailed  great 
courage,  but  the  remarkable  power  of 
memorizing  in  nerve-wracking  conditions 
no  fewer  that  eight  different  sets  of 
simultaneous  instrument  readings.  The 
theory  has  been  advanced  that  he  per- 
formed this  feat  in  June  or  July  of  the 
previous  year,  but  the  weight  of  the 
evidence  is  against  it. 

In  1919,  thanks  partly  to  (Sir)  Henry 
Tizard  [q.v.]  who  was  a  colleague  of  his 
BerUn  days,  Lindemann  was  elected 
Dr.  Lee's  professor  of  experimental 
philosophy  (i.e.  physics)  in  the  university 
of  Oxford.  The  chair  was  attached  to 
Wadham  College  where  he  remained  a 
fellow  until  his  retirement.  But  in  1921 


636 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lindemann 


Lindemann  was  also  elected,  as  was 
legally  possible  in  those  days,  to  a 
'studentship  not  on  the  governing  body' 
at  Christ  Church,  which  had  provided 
the  endowment  for  the  chair.  This  en- 
titled him  to  rooms  more  spacious  than 
Wadham  could  provide,  and  from  1922 
for  the  rest  of  his  life  he  lived  in  Christ 
Church. 

The  chair  gave  him  the  headship  of  the 
Clarendon  Laboratory  whose  prestige  had 
sunk  to  a  very  low  ebb.  It  had  no  re- 
search staff,  and  no  mains  electricity.  Its 
principal  contents  were  packing  cases  full 
of  unused  optical  instruments.  Although 
Lindemann's  career  is  in  many  respects 
controversial,  no  one  has  disputed  his 
massive  achievement  in  turning  this 
museum  piece  into  a  great  laboratory.  He 
was  adept  at  extracting  money  from  the 
university  and  from  outside  sources.  Long 
before  he  retired,  the  new  Clarendon 
which  he  had  persuaded  the  university  to 
build  was  one  of  the  foremost  physics 
departments  in  Britain.  Lindemann  did 
not  concentrate  on  any  one  Une,  although 
there  was  a  slight  bias  towards  the  nucleus. 
Among  the  earlier  research  workers  whom 
he  picked  were  (Sir)  T.  R.  Merton,  (Sir) 
A.  C.  G.  Egerton  [q.v.],  G.  M.  B.  Dobson, 
and  Derek  Jackson.  In  the  thirties  he  was 
active  in  recruiting  to  posts  in  Oxford 
Jewish  refugee  scientists  from  Hitler's 
Germany.  The  most  prominent  of  these 
was  (Sir)  Francis  Simon  [q.v.]  who  became 
one  of  Lindemann's  closest  friends  and  in 
1956  succeeded  him  as  Dr.  Lee's  professor. 

Lindemann's  academic  career  was  not 
without  friction  and  he  had  more  than  one 
clash  with  the  university  authorities.  He 
was  apt  to  make  wounding  and  sarcastic 
remarks.  He  was  both  prickly  and  ag- 
gressive in  the  cause  of  science  which  he 
regarded  with  some  justice  as  a  slighted 
subject  in  Oxford.  He  did  not  readily 
suffer  fools.  His  wealth — ^his  father  who 
died  in  1927  had  handed  on  a  large  sum 
to  each  of  his  sons — allowed  him  to  move 
in  circles  very  different  from  those  of  the 
academic  middle  class.  He  preferred  ducal 
houses  to  North  Oxford.  In  1919  he 
was  introduced  by  (Sir)  J.  C.  Masterman 
to  Lord  Birkenhead  [q.v.] — ^tennis  being 
the  link — and  it  was  at  Birkenhead's 
house  that  he  received  the  nickname  of 
*the  Prof  by  which  he  came  to  be  almost 
universally  known.  In  1921  through  the 
Duke  of  Westminster  he  met  Churchill — 
the  beginning  of  a  lifelong  friendship. 

Lindemann's  political  views  were  well 
to   the   Right.   He  was  an  out-and-out 


inequalitarian  who  believed  in  hierarchy > 
order,  a  ruling  class,  inherited  wealth, 
hereditary  titles,  and  white  supremacy 
(the  passing  of  which  he  regarded  as  the 
most  significant  change  in  the  twentieth 
century).  It  was  fully  in  keeping  with  this 
attitude  that  he  should  have  mobilized 
some  of  the  personnel  (not  wholly  willing) 
of  the  Clarendon  to  assist  the  production 
of  Churchill's  British  Gazette  during  the 
general  strike  of  1926.  Exceptionally  for 
a  p)erson  of  these  views,  Lindemann  was 
one  of  the  first  to  recognize  the  danger  of 
Hitler.  His  pre-war  sojourn  in  Germany 
had  given  him  an  acute  awareness  of 
that  country's  formidable  strength  and 
aggressive  potentiality.  Filled  with  these 
apprehensions  he  became  gravely  per- 
turbed at  the  inadequacy  of  British  air 
defence,  and  the  seeming  fatalism  of  the 
Government. 

In  1934,  both  independently  and 
through  Churchill,  he  pressed  for  the 
creation  of  a  high-level  committee  to 
consider  the  problem  urgently.  In  fact  the 
Air  Ministry  had  decided  towards  the  end 
of  the  year  to  set  up  a  departmental 
committee  of  its  own,  the  committee  for 
the  scientific  survey  of  air  defence  under 
Tizard's  chairmanship,  with  Dr.  A.  V. 
Hill,  H.  E.  Wimperis  [q.v.],  and  P.  M.  S. 
(later  Lord)  Blackett  as  members.  The 
Tizard  committee  was  to  be  responsible  for 
one  of  the  most  important  achievements 
in  British  defence — ^the  effective  applica- 
tion of  radar  to  the  interception  of  enemy 
bombers.  But  Churchill  and  Lindemann 
were  convinced  that  a  mere  advisory 
departmental  committee  would  not  carry 
enough  weight.  In  the  spring  of  1935  the 
Government  partly  gave  way  and  agreed 
to  set  up  the  air  defence  research  sub- 
committee of  the  Committee  of  Imperial 
Defence,  with  Sir  Philip  Cunhffe-Lister 
(later  the  Earl  of  Swinton)  as  chairman. 
Both  Tizard  and  Churchill  were  members, 
but  its  functions  were  limited  and  in  prac- 
tice it  seems  to  have  been  regarded  as  little 
more  than  a  sop  to  Churchill.  There  was, 
however,  one  important  by-product. 
Churchill  insisted  that  Lindemann  should 
be  put  on  the  Tizard  committee. 

Lindemann,  who  joined  it  at  the  end 
of  June  1935,  treated  his  colleagues  from 
the  start  in  a  spirit  of  criticism  bordering 
upon  hostility.  Relations  between  him 
and  Tizard,  which  had  previously  seemed* 
friendly  enough,  anyway  on  the  surface, 
deteriorated  rapidly  to  the  consternation 
of  their  many  mutual  friends,  and  the 
breach  was  never  healed.  A  year  later  the 


687 


Lindemann 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


committee  broke  up  with  the  resignation 
of  Hill,  Blackett,  and  Tizard  in  protest  at 
Lindemann's  tactics.  It  was  promptly 
reconstituted  in  October,  -but  without 
Lindemann. 

The  conflict  has  been  wrongly  presented 
by  Lord  Snow  and  others  as  a  dispute 
about  the  priority  to  be  given  to  radar. 
The  evidence  of  its  inventor,  Sir  Robert 
Watson-Watt,  is  conclusive  that  Linde- 
mann very  strongly  backed  radar,  al- 
though he  was  more  apprehensive  than 
the  others  about  the  possibility  of  enemy 
jamming.  It  is  true  too  that  Lindemann 
favoured  the  simultaneous  exploration  of 
various  other  defence  devices  which 
turned  out  to  be  impracticable,  such  as 
aerial  mines.  But  the  real  conflict  was 
over  the  status  of  the  committee. 
Lindemann  with  his  grand  social  and 
political  contacts  was  prepared  to  go  to 
almost  any  lengths,  including  publicity 
and  political  lobbying,  to  obtain  real 
executive  powers  for  it.  His  objective 
was  sound,  but  his  methods  difficult  to 
defend,  and  Tizard  and  his  colleagues 
found  it  intolerable  that  Lindemann 
should  report  behind  their  backs  to 
Churchill  on  the  air  defence  research 
committee.  With  their  Service  background 
and  orthodox  approach,  they  considered 
that  it  was  not  for  them  to  try  to  change 
the  terms  of  reference  laid  down  by  the 
Air  Ministry. 

Their  doubts  about  Lindemann  cannot 
have  been  allayed  by  his  efforts  to  enter 
Parliament  for  Oxford  University  on  a 
progranmie  of  revitalizing  British  air 
defence.  He  failed  to  secure  the  second 
Conservative  nomination  at  the  general 
election  of  1935,  being  defeated  by 
C.  R.  M.  F.  Cruttwell  [q.v.],  principal  of 
Hertford  College,  who  to  Lindemann's  glee 
subsequently  lost  his  deposit.  In  1937 
there  was  a  by-election.  Lindemann 
resolved  to  fight  with  or  without  the 
ofiicial  nomination  which  in  the  event 
went  to  Sir  Farquhar  Buzzard  [q.v.]. 
They  were  both  easily  beaten  by  Sir 
Arthur  (later  Lord)  Salter  standing  as  an 
independent. 

The  next  few  years  were  a  period  of 
frustration  for  Lindemann,  but  with  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1939  he  moved  at  once 
to  the  centre  of  affairs  as  personal  assis- 
tant to  Churchill  at  the  Admiralty  and 
head  of  his  statistical  section.  He  contin- 
ued the  same  work  when  Churchill  became 
prime  minister  in  May  1940. 

Lindemann  was  made  a  peer  in  1941 
with  the  title  of  Baron  Cherwell,  of  Oxford. 


In  1942  he  became  paymaster-general, 
in  1943  a  privy  counsellor.  Although 
never  a  member  of  the  War  Cabinet  he 
frequently  attended  its  meetings.  His 
loyalty  to  Churchill  was  absolute,  his 
influence  on  him  profound. 

Cherwell  was  a  master  at  the  art  of 
lucidly  presenting  highly  complicated 
matters  with  the  greatest  economy  of 
words.  He  wrote  about  2,000  minutes  to 
Churchill  during  the  war  on  a  vast  range 
of  topics.  The  prime  minister  greatly 
admired  this  gift,  and  would  often  pass  on 
bloated  memoranda  from  other  depart- 
ments with  the  request,  'Prof.  10  lines 
please'.  Cherwell' s  advice  was  by  no  means 
only  scientific.  He  had  a  staff  of  econo- 
mists, headed  by  (Sir)  Donald  MacDougall, 
one  of  whose  tasks  was  to  produce  charts 
and  graphs  for  Churchill  so  that  he 
could  visualize  changes  in  weapon  pro- 
duction, food  imports,  shipping  losses,  etc. 
Another — and  very  unpopular  one — was 
the  critical  scrutiny  of  departmental 
statistics.  For  example,  Lindemann  cor- 
rectly discovered  that  the  German  front- 
line strength  in  bombers  in  1940  was 
grossly  exaggerated,  and  after  an  inquiry 
by  a  high  court  judge  into  the  rival 
statistics  Lindemann's  became  the  basis 
of  policy.  He  also  came  to  the  less 
agreeable — but  no  less  correct — conclusion 
that  British  night  bombing  at  that  time 
was  less  than  one-third  as  accurate  as 
the  Air  Ministry  claimed.  Navigational 
aids  were  at  once  improved.  Another 
result  of  his  quantitative  analysis  was  to 
cut  by  a  factor  of  more  than  two  the 
ships  going  to  the  Middle  East  and 
America  in  the  summer  of  1942. 

Lindemann  was  active  in  the  support 
of  experiments  in  new  weapons  of  every 
sort.  Hollow  charge  bombs  and  proximity 
fuses  were  among  those  whose  develop- 
ment he  pressed.  One  of  his  major  contri- 
butions was  the  'bending'  of  the  wireless 
beam  on  which  in  1940  German  night 
bombers  were  reljdng  for  finding  their 
targets.  R.  V.  Jones,  a  former  pupil  then 
employed  at  the  Air  Ministry,  was  the 
first  to  suspect  that  the  Germans  pos- 
sessed this  device.  Tizard  appears  to  have 
been  sceptical.  If  Lindemann  had  not 
pressed  for  counter-measures  with  all 
his  weight,  the  consequences  might  have 
been  disastrous.  Cherwell  also  strongly 
backed  the  researches  of  his  old  pupil, 
Derek  Jackson,  into  microwave  radar. 
One  of  many  important  results  was  the 
invention  of  HgS,  the  name  of  the  device 
which  gave  a  radar  picture  of  the  country 


638 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lindemann 


to  the  navigators  of  the  Pathfinder  night 
bombers.  It  is  probably  fair  to  say  that 
what  Tizard  did  for  Fighter  Command 
Cherwell  did  for  Bomber  Command. 

His  judgement,  like  that  of  most 
persons  in  high  places  during  the  war, 
sometimes  went  astray.  He  greatly 
overestimated  the  damage  that  could  be 
done  by  the  massive  area  bombing  of 
German  towns,  and  was  rightly  criticized 
by  Tizard  and  Blackett.  But  it  seems 
unlikely  that  his  famous  minute  in  1942 
to  Churchill  on  this  theme  was  the 
determining  factor  in  a  decision  which 
had  its  roots  far  back  in  recommendations 
of  the  chiefs  of  staff  in  1940.  He  was  wrong, 
too,  to  advise  postponing  for  nearly  a 
year  the  use  of  'Window',  the  technique 
of  confusing  enemy  radar  by  dropping 
strips  of  tinfoil.  Although  he  had  en- 
couraged its  development  he  feared  lest 
the  enemy  would  be  alerted  to  use  it  too, 
and  it  should  be  said  in  justice  to  him  that 
many  radar  experts  took  the  same  view. 
Another  error  was  his  excessive  scepticism 
about  the  German  rocket  bomb  or  V2. 
He  was  right  in  ridiculing  the  danger 
of  its  possessing  a  ten-ton  warhead,  but 
he  was  characteristically  extremist  in 
maintaining  that  it  did  not  exist  at  all. 
But  when  all  criticisms  have  been  made, 
the  value  of  his  war  work  must  be 
regarded  as  immense.  Churchill,  and 
through  Churchill  the  whole  country, 
owed  him  a  great  debt  of  gratitude. 

With  the  fall  of  the  Churchill  adminis- 
tration in  1945  Cherwell  returned  to 
Oxford  and  the  Clarendon.  He  was  at  the 
same  time  a  member  of  the  shadow 
Cabinet,  and  principal  Opposition  spokes- 
man in  the  House  of  Lords  on  economic 
affairs.  He  was  also  prominent  in  discus- 
sion of  the  atomic  bomb  and  had  nothing 
but  contempt  for  the  arguments  of  those 
who  wished  to  ban  tests.  In  October  1951 
he  reluctantly  joined  Churchill's  Cabinet, 
again  as  paymaster-general.  His  main 
achievements  were  to  defeat  the  Treasury 
proposals  to  bring  in  immediate  sterling 
convertibility  together  with  a  floating 
rate  of  exchange  and  to  prize  the  control 
of  atomic  energy  out  of  the  Ministry  of 
Supply  and  into  the  hands  of  an  indepen- 
dent authority.  He  had  a  great  dishke  of 
Whitehall  'bureaucracy',  though  happy 
relations  with  many  individual  civil 
servants. 

In  1953  his  leave  of  absence  from 
Oxford  ran  out  and  he  resigned  his  govern- 
ment post.  He  was  made  a  C.H.,  and  three 
years    later    was    created    a    viscount. 


Although  he  possessed  life  tenure  of  his 
chair,  he  retired  in  1956.  But  he  was 
allowed  to  reside  in  college,  for,  whatever 
friction  there  might  have  been  in  the 
past,  he  was  now  regarded  as  the  most 
interesting  and  entertaining  of  com- 
panions. His  last  important  speech  in 
the  House  of  Lords  was  an  acid  analysis 
of  the  United  Nations  in  December  1956. 
For  some  time  his  heart  had  been  giving 
him  trouble,  and  he  died  in  his  sleep  in 
Oxford  on  the  morning  of  3  July  1957. 
His  will  was  proved  at  nearly  a  quarter  of 
a  million  pounds.  After  various  bequests 
and  interests  he  left  the  residue  as  to  two- 
thirds  to  Christ  Church  and  one-third  to 
Wadham.  He  never  married  and  his  titles 
became  extinct. 

Lindemann  was  on  any  view  a  remark- 
able person.  The  combination  of  his 
scientific  expertise,  his  clarity  of  mind, 
and  his  personal  friendship  with  one  of 
the  greatest  statesmen  in  British  history 
enabled  him  to  exercise  more  influence 
in  public  life  than  any  scientist  before 
him.  He  had  a  brilliant  mind — 'one  of  the 
cleverest  men  I  ever  met,  as  clever  as 
Rutherford',  to  quote  Tizard' s  generous 
judgement.  He  was  a  man  of  extremes, 
passionate  loyalty  to  friends,  implacable 
detestation  of  enemies.  And  he  inspired 
correspondingly  extreme  sentiments,  deep 
devotion  on  the  one  hand  and  something 
near  to  hatred  on  the  other.  There  were 
curious  apparent  contradictions  about 
him.  He  was  an  ascetic  who  deeply 
distrusted  asceticism  in  others.  It  came 
as  a  surprise  to  many  to  learn  how 
vigorously  he  campaigned  in  the  war  for 
the  plain  man  against  austerity  and 
meagre  rations.  Yet  he  knew  singularly 
little  about  how  the  vast  majority  of  his 
feUow  countrymen  lived — even  the  middle 
classes,  let  alone  the  masses.  He  believed 
that  most  people  were  stupid  and  needed 
to  be  governed  for  their  own  good  by  an 
ehte.  He  was  a  most  amusing,  indeed 
fascinating,  controversialist,  but  he 
could  utter  sentiments  so  cynical  and 
sardonic  as  to  shock  his  hearers,  especially 
the  young.  Yet  he  was  kind-hearted  and 
secretly  most  generous  to  those  in  need. 
The  sinister  picture  of  him  drawn  by 
Hochhuth  in  his  play.  The  Soldiers,  was  to 
anyone  who  knew  Cherwell  an  absurd 
travesty. 

Lindemann's  voice  was  curiously  frail, 
and  his  rather  mumbling  mode  of  deUvery 
somewhat  marred  his  lectures  and  speeches 
which  read  better  than  they  sounded.  In 
appearance  he  was  a  big  man  with  broad 


639 


Lindemann 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


shoulders,  and  an  aquiline  countenance. 
He  dressed  conventionally  and  immacu- 
lately, but  he  was  a  striking  figure  in  any 
company.  Few  who  met  him 'ever  forgot 
him. 

A  portrait  by  Henry  Can*  is  in  the 
Imperial  War  Museum. 

[Sir  George  Thomson  in  Biographical 
Memairs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iv, 
1958 ;  Sir  Roy  Harrod,  The  Prof,  1959 ;  C.  P. 
Snow,  Science  and  Government,  1961,  and 
A  Postscript  to  Science  and  Government,  1962 ; 
The  Earl  of  Birkenhead,  The  Prof  in  Two 
Worlds :  the  Official  Life  of  Viscount  Cherwell, 
1961 ;  R.  V.  Jones  in  Oxford  Magazine,  9  May 
1963 ;  R.  W.  Clark,  Tizard,  1965 ;  Sir  C.  M. 
Bowra,  Memories,  1966 ;  Lord  Moran,  Winston 
Churchill:  The  Struggle  far  Survival,  1940-65, 
1966 ;  personal  knowledge.]    Robert  Blake. 

LINDRUM,  WALTER  ALBERT  (1898- 
1960),  bilhards  player,  was  bom  at 
Bourke,  near  Kalgoorlie,  the  Western 
Australian  gold  mining  centre,  29  August 
1898,  the  son  of  Frederick  William 
Lindrum  and  his  wife,  Harriett  Atkins. 
Both  Lindrum' s  father  and  grandfather 
had  been  champions  and  the  former  took 
over  a  hotel  billiard-room  when  Walter 
was  seven  years  old  and  set  him  to 
practising  intensively.  As  a  youngster,  an 
accident  with  a  mangle  placed  his  career 
in  jeopardy,  half  his  index  finger  having 
to  be  amputated ;  his  father  was  in 
despair,  but  the  mishap  proved  a  blessing 
in  disguise  as  it  enabled  him  to  make  a 
better  bridge.  After  a  thorough  apprentice- 
ship he  made  a  500-break.  Fred  Lindrum 
junior,  born  in  1889,  was  a  highly  skilled 
player  and  won  the  championship  in  1912. 
Walter,  however,  gradually  overhauled 
him  and  defeated  him  in  1914,  with 
breaks  of  363,  309,  and  248,  his  first 
serious  try-out,  and  a  feat  which  earned 
for  him  the  title  of  'the  fifteen-year-old 
phenomenon'.  Expert  opinion  adjudged 
him  the  *most  skilled  player  of  his  age  the 
world  had  known'.  Meanwhile,  in  England, 
a  young  Australian  red-ball  specialist  had 
created  a  sensation  by  making  23  thou- 
sand breaks  by  the  red-ball  route. 

The  young  Lindrum's  achievements 
continued  to  astonish  the  billiards  world, 
and  in  1922  H.  W.  Stevenson,  the  famous 
English  ex-champion,  visited  Australia, 
but  Lindrum  defeated  him  with  ease  and 
made  a  great  break  of  1,417.  He  was  now 
twenty-three  and  his  fame  had  penetrated 
overseas,  but  English  opinion  was  some- 
what sceptical  and  he  was  regarded  as  a 
billiards  freak  who  would  soon  be  found 
out.   After   his   defeat   of  Stevenson,   a 


visit  to  England  was  broached  but  his 
father  considered  the  proposal  premature. 
However,  in  1924  a  great  English  player, 
Claude  Falkiner,  toured  Australia  and, 
after  games  with  Lindrum,  wrote:  'I  had 
read  of  his  prowess  and  expected  to  find 
the  picture  overcoloured  but  I  was 
mistaken.  He  is  a  truly  wonderful  player : 
he  can  play  nursery  cannons  as  well  as 
anyone,  has  nothing  to  learn  about  the 
top-of-the-table  game,  and,  on  the  red, 
can  be  as  prolific  as  George  Gray:  he 
scores  at  a  tremendous  pace.'  A  break  of 
1,879  against  Falkiner  added  greatly  to 
Lindrum's  fame  and  in  1929  came  his 
greatest  test  when  Willie  Smith  of 
England,  who  had  made  a  wonderful  break 
of  2,743,  without  a  single  nursery  cannon, 
and  was  scoring  prolifically  in  England, 
visited  Australia.  Three  matches  with 
Lindrum  took  place  and  the  Australian 
won  two  of  them.  This  confirmed  his 
genius. 

Lindrum  was  prevailed  upon  by  Smith, 
who  termed  him  'the  most  deadly  oppo- 
nent' he  had  ever  met,  to  embark  on  an 
Enghsh  tour,  and  accordingly,  with 
Clark  McConachy,  a  great  New  Zealand 
player,  he  set  out  for  England,  where  they 
arrived  in  October  1929.  'Walter  Lindrum 
in  England  at  last!'  was  an  English 
newspaper  headline.  Lindrum  beat 
McConachy  by  3,000  points  in  his  first 
match  and  in  the  third  of  his  seven 
matches  against  Smith  he  had  a  winning 
margin  of  21,285,  an  all-time  record.  He 
won  ten  of  his  fourteen  matches  and, 
against  Smith,  made  a  magnificent  break 
of  3,262,  a  world  record  apart  from  breaks 
made  predominantly  by  exploitation  of 
one  type  of  stroke.  He  made  67  thousand- 
odd  breaks  during  his  tour  and  created 
17  world  records.  In  his  second  tour  in 
England  (1930-31)  he  again  made  67 
breaks  of  a  thousand-odd  and  this  time 
made  a  great  break  of  3,905,  a  record. 
Such  had  been  his  superiority  over  his 
rivals  in  his  first  tour  that  he  now  gave 
starts  of  6,000  and  more.  In  February  1931 
he  was  invited  by  King  George  V  to 
Buckingham  Palace  for  an  exhibition  of 
the  game.  He  was  to  make  two  further 
visits  to  England  (1931-2  and  1932-3) 
and  in  the  third  he  eclipsed  all  his  previous 
feats  by  making  a  break  of  4,137  which 
took  2  hours  and  55  minutes  to  compile: 
it  remains  the  world  record.  It  was  made 
against  Joe  Davis  at  Thurston's  Hall  on 
19  and  20  January  1932.  He  made  his 
final  visit  in  October  1932  and  in  1933 
left  England  never  to  return. 


640 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lindsay,  A.  D. 


During  his  career  Lindrum  broke  all 
billiards  records,  including  the  following: 
a  run  of  529  nursery  cannons ;  a  session 
average  of  2,664 ;  a  session  average  of  262 
for  a  fortnight's  match;  an  aggregate  of 
36,256  for  a  fortnight's  game;  eleven 
breaks  of  a  thousand-odd  in  one  match ; 
3,530  points  in  three  consecutive  visits.  He 
entered  twice  for  the  world  championship 
and  beat  Joe  Davis  on  each  occasion  (1933, 
1934).  During  his  career  as  a  whole  he 
made  one  break  of  4,000-odd,  6  of  3,000- 
odd,  29  of  2,000-odd,  and  711  of  1,000-odd. 

It  was  a  matter  of  surmise  why  he 
never  returned  to  England — his  second 
championship  win,  in  1934,  against  Joe 
Davis,  nearest  to  him  in  billiards  genius, 
was  in  Australia — and  the  general  impres- 
sion was  that  he  had  no  further  fields  to 
conquer.  He  made  breaks  of  3,000-odd 
four  times  against  his  brother  (1941, 
1944),  and  retired  at  the  age  of  fifty. 
Thenceforward  he  devoted  his  activities  to 
charitable  work  in  the  course  of  which  he 
raised  over  a  million  pounds.  He  was  ap- 
pointed M.B.E.  in  1951  and  O.B.E.  in  1958. 

In  1929  Lindrum  married  Rose, 
daughter  of  Frederick  Coates,  ganger. 
After  her  death  he  married  in  England 
in  1933  Alicia,  daughter  of  the  late 
Thomas  George  Hoskin,  farmer.  The 
marriage  was  dissolved  and  in  1956  he 
married,  thirdly.  Beryl  Elaine  Russell. 
He  had  no  children.  He  died  while  on  holi- 
day at  Surfers'  Paradise,  near  Brisbane, 
30  July  1960. 

[Private  information.]  Richard  Holt. 

LINDSAY,    ALEXANDER    DUNLOP, 

first  Baron  Lindsay  of  Birker  (1879- 
1952),  educationist,  was  born  in  Glasgow 
14  May  1879,  the  eldest  of  the  three  sons 
of  the  Rev.  Thomas  Martin  Lindsay  [q.v.], 
historian  of  the  Reformation,  and  nephew 
of  W.  M.  Lindsay  the  classical  scholar 
[q.v.].  One  of  his  two  sisters  married  (Sir) 
Frederick  Maurice  Powicke,  the  historian. 
Brought  up  in  a  liberal  Calvinist  family 
with  strong  social  awareness,  Lindsay  was 
educated  at  Glasgow  University,  where 
he  obtained  a  second  in  classics  (1899). 
He  failed  to  win  a  scholarship  at  Balliol 
College,  Oxford,  but  was  successful  at 
University  College.  He  obtained  firsts  in 
classical  moderations  (1900)  and  literae 
humaniores  (1902)  and  in  the  latter  year 
was  president  of  the  Union.  From  1902 
to  1904  he  was  Clark  philosophy  fellow 
at  Glasgow  University  and  from  1904 
to  1909  Shaw  philosophy  fellow  at 
Edinburgh.    He    was    also,    in    1904-6, 


assistant  to  Samuel  Alexander  [q.v.], 
professor  of  philosophy  at  Manchester. 
In  1906  Lindsay  was  elected  fellow  and 
classical  tutor  at  Balliol  where  he  re- 
mained until  1922. 

In  this  period  Lindsay  earned  a  great 
reputation  as  a  tutor  who  forced  even  the 
most  reluctant  to  think  for  themselves. 
His  lectures  lacked  polish  and  formal 
structure,  but  they  were  impressive 
demonstrations  of  an  acute  mind  thinking 
aloud,  meeting  objections  as  they  arose. 
In  1907  he  published  a  translation  of 
Plato's  Republic;  in  1911  a  book  on  The 
Philosophy  of  Bergson.  But  his  interests 
were  already  turning  outwards  from 
Oxford.  Like  R.  H.  Tawney  and  other 
dedicated  spirits  of  his  generation  he  was 
an  enthusiastic  lecturer  for  the  Workers* 
Educational  Association.  He  was  also  a 
resolute  popularizer.  In  1913  he  published 
a  small  volume  on  The  Philosophy  of 
Immanuel  Kant  for  the  People's  Books ; 
his  introduction  to  Hobbes's  Leviathan 
(Everyman's  Library,  1914)  is  an  excellent 
example  of  his  vigorous,  clear-cut,  stimu- 
lating manner.  His  own  translation  of 
Plato  was  published  in  the  same  series 
in  1935. 

During  the  war  of  1914-18  Lindsay 
served  with  labour  battalions,  rising  to  be 
deputy  controller  of  labour  in  France 
(1917-19),  with  the  rank  of  lieutenant- 
colonel.  He  was  several  times  mentioned 
in  dispatches  and  was  appointed  C.B.E. 
After  a  brief  period  as  professor  of  moral 
philosophy  at  Glasgow  (1922-4),  he  re- 
turned to  Balliol  as  master  and  in  the 
next  twenty-five  years  became  a  national 
figure,  more  by  virtue  of  his  moral  fervour 
and  wide-ranging  interests  than  by  his 
contributions  to  scholarship. 

His  election  as  master  was  not  un- 
controversial.  He  had  known  left-wing 
views,  had  not  himself  been  an  under- 
graduate at  the  college,  and  several 
fellows  older  than  himself  and  senior  to 
him  in  college  standing  were  passed  over 
in  his  favour.  In  1926  he  won  some  notori- 
ety as  one  of  the  few  Oxford  teachers 
who  supported  the  appeal  by  Archbishop 
Davidson  [q.v.]  for  a  negotiated  settlement 
of  the  general  strike.  But  it  was  not  long 
before  Lindsay  impressed  his  personality 
on  the  college,  and,  although  he  never 
lacked  enemies,  he  was  held  in  consider- 
able respect  and  indeed  awe.  He  insisted 
on  taking  part  in  the  educational 
activities  of  the  college  and  was  an 
outstanding  tutor  who,  notwithstanding 
his     own     strong     views,     was     always 


8652062 


641 


Lindsay,  A.  D, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


open  to  fresh  ideas.  He  had  a  quite 
exceptional  human  sympathy  which  made 
him  always  ready  to  help  a  colleague  or 
undergraduate  in  trouble.  This  loyalty 
could  be  abused:  he  was  not  good  at 
detecting  plausible  rogues.  But  there  was 
something  grand  and,  some  felt,  even 
saintly  about  his  imaginative  sympathy. 
Oxford  was  ceasing  to  be  the  preserve  of 
the  rich  and  was  being  opened  to  wider 
social  classes:  'Sandy'  Lindsay  approved 
the  change,  more  perhaps  than  did  most 
leading  Oxford  figures,  and  helped  to  get 
it  accepted.  His  social  and  economic 
interests,  and  his  feeling  for  the  underdog, 
also  made  him  a  great  influence  on  the 
socially  conscious  generation  of  under- 
graduates of  the  thirties.  'The  place 
exists',  he  wrote  in  his  last  letter  to  Balliol 
men,  in  1949,  'and  I  hope  always  will 
exist,  for  the  young  men.' 

Lindsay's  outside  interests  extended 
in  many  directions:  the  Oxford  tutorial 
classes  committee,  W.E.A.  and  university 
extension  lectures.  He  was  chairman  of 
the  National  Council  of  Social  Service  and 
connected  with  many  unemployed  clubs, 
including  the  South  Wales  settlement  at 
Maes-yr-haf.  He  was  the  trusted  adviser 
of  the  Labour  Party  and  the  Trades 
Union  Congress  on  educational  matters; 
and  for  five  years  Oxford  correspondent 
for  the  Manchester  Guardian.  In  1930  he 
spent  four  months  in  India  as  chairman 
of  a  mixed  East-West  commission  set  up 
by  the  International  Missionary  Council 
to  survey  the  work  of  Protestant  colleges 
in  India;  and  he  played  a  large  part  in 
drafting  its  report.  He  struck  up  a  friend- 
ship with  M.  K.  Gandhi  [q.v.]  who  came 
to  stay  with  him  in  Balliol  during  his 
visit  to  England  for  the  second  Round 
Table  conference. 

From  1935  to  1938  Lindsay  was  vice- 
chancellor  of  the  university  of  Oxford. 
By  general  agreement  he  was  a  great 
vice-chancellor,  who  did  much  to  stabilize 
Oxford's  finances  and  to  adjust  the  admini- 
strative structure  of  the  university  to  the 
needs  of  the  twentieth  century.  He 
sponsored  an  appeal  for  funds  and  piloted 
through  a  number  of  schemes  for  the 
expansion  of  the  science  departments — 
the  new  Clarendon  Laboratory  and  the 
conversion  of  the  old  one  into  the  Depart- 
ment of  Geology,  the  Physical  Chemistry 
Laboratory,  the  reorganization  of  the 
Forestry  Department,  the  absorption  of 
Lord  Nuffield' s  large  benefactions  for  the 
Institute  for  Medical  Research  and  for 
Nuffield  College.  In  the  creation  of  this 


last,  the  first  of  Oxford's  graduate  colleges 
for  men  and  women,  Lindsay  played  a 
large  part. 

Meanwhile  he  had  become  increasingly 
concerned  about  the  economic  and  politi- 
cal events  of  the  time.  Under  his  influence 
Balliol  gave  a  home  to  a  number  of  distin- 
guished German  and  Austrian  academic 
refugees.  In  October  1938  a  by-election 
occurred  in  the  city  of  Oxford  just  after 
the  Munich  agreement,  which  Lindsay 
abhorred.  He  was  persuaded  to  stand  on 
an  anti-Munich  platform  against  the 
Conservative  candidate,  Quintin  Hogg. 
The  Labour  and  Liberal  candidates 
stood  down  in  Lindsay's  favour  but  he 
was  not  elected  although  his  reduction  of 
the  Conservative  majority  from  6,645  to 
3,434  was  regarded  as  a  significant 
political  gesture.  When  war  broke  out  in 
1939  Lindsay  became  chairman  of  the 
Joint  Recruiting  Board,  with  the  task  of 
allocating  conscientious  objectors  to  work 
of  national  importance  other  than  military 
service.  In  1940  he  took  the  lead  in  organi- 
zing education  for  the  armed  forces. 
After  the  war  he  accepted  a  peerage  from 
the  Labour  Government  and  spoke  from 
time  to  time  on  educational  matters  in 
the  House  of  Lords.  In  1948  he  was 
chairman  of  a  commission  on  the  reform 
of  universities  in  the  British-occupied 
zone  of  Germany  which  produced  an 
interesting  but  ineffective  report. 

Lindsay's  interests  were  turning  in- 
creasingly towards  North  Staffordshire, 
where  Oxford  had  established  the  first  of 
the  original  tutorial  classes.  For  over 
twenty  years  he  played  a  big  part  in  adult 
education  there.  After  the  war  this  work 
culminated  in  negotiations  with  the 
University  Grants  Committee  for  the 
establishment  of  a  university  college  in 
North  Staffordshire  which  finally  opened 
in  1949.  Lindsay,  who  had  ceased  to  be 
master  of  Balliol  in  that  year  on  reaching 
the  age  of  seventy,  was  at  once  appointed 
first  principal.  Balliol  made  him  an 
honorary  fellow ;  he  was  also  an  honorary 
LL.D.  of  Glasgow,  St.  Andrews,  and 
Princeton. 

The  University  College  at  Keele  was  a 
significant  new  academic  experiment  and 
in  one  sense  the  crowning  achievement  of 
Lindsay's  career.  Its  curriculum  marked 
a  decisive  break  with  tradition.  Work  for 
the  first  degree  lasted  for  four  years,  the 
first  of  which  was  spent  on  foundation 
studies  whose  object  was  to  acquaint 
future  arts  and  science  students  with 
each  other's  disciplines  and  to  impress 


642 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lindsay,  A.  D, 


upon  them  the  unity  of  knowledge. 
The  three-year  course  covered  not  less 
than  four  subjects,  two  at  a  consider- 
able level  of  specialization.  This  was  a 
logical  extension  of  the  Modern  Greats 
school  (philosophy,  politics,  and  econo- 
mics) which  Lindsay  had  taken  the  lead  in 
establishing  in  Oxford  in  1922,  and  of  the 
Science  Greats  (combining  philosophy 
with  the  principles  of  natural  science)  for 
which  he  had  failed  to  win  acceptance. 
Keele's  object  was  to  break  down  what 
Lindsay  regarded  as  the  excessive  speciali- 
zation of  the  older  universities.  He  some- 
times expressed  this  hatred  of  narrow 
specialization  as  a  dislike  of  research 
which  he  regarded  as  a  form  of  self- 
indulgence  tolerable  only  if  subordinated 
to  the  requirements  of  teaching.  He 
always  hated  pedantry  and  negative, 
merely  destructive,  criticism.  Keele  ran 
into  many  difficulties  after  Lindsay's  death 
and  its  achievement  fell  short  of  his 
hopes.  Some  of  its  ideas  were  taken  over 
by  universities  founded  later  in  more  pro- 
pitious circumstances.  But  Keele  opened 
the  doors,  by  breaking  away  from  much 
of  the  machinery  of  external  control 
hitherto  imposed  on  new  colleges,  and  by 
using  this  freedom  to  devise  a  new  style 
of  academic  curriculum.  It  was  a  portent 
and  a  turning-point  in  English  educa- 
tional history. 

Lindsay  was  an  academic  politician 
rather  than  a  philosopher.  His  reputation 
and  influence  were  far  greater  than  can 
be  explained  by  his  published  work.  His 
philosophy  was  completely  out  of  touch 
with  fashionable  attitudes  in  Oxford  and 
Cambridge  in  the  thirties  and  forties. 
His  most  ambitious  philosophical  work, 
Kant  (1934),  is  little  read;  although 
The  Essentials  of  Democracy  (1929)  and 
The  Modern  Democratic  State  (of  which 
only  the  first  volume  was  published,  1943) 
were  widely  read,  they  are  unsystematic 
and  incomplete.  Lindsay  never  fully 
stated  his  own  philosophical  position. 
There  are  hints  of  an  historical  theory 
which  would  relate  moral  standards, 
at  once  objective  and  improvable,  to 
social  development:  Lindsay  described 
himself  as  a  'sociologically  minded  person'. 
But  these  are  no  more  than  fragments, 
and  Lindsay  too  often  evaded  difficulties 
by  falling  back  on  Christian  common- 
places. He  owed  to  his  father  a  deeply 
religious  outlook  on  life.  As  master  of 
Balliol  he  preached  once  a  term  in  the 
college  chapel.  He  was  a  close  friend  of 
Archbishop  William  Temple   [q.v.]  who 


shared  his  social  outlook.  Lindsay's 
democratic  theories  were  the  outcome  of 
his  Christian  beliefs,  his  respect  for  ordin- 
ary people.  Goodness,  like  democracy,  he 
thought,  was  learned  in  the  self-govern- 
ment of  small  communities,  especially 
religious  congregations.  He  referred  again 
and  again  in  his  writings  to  the  Putney 
debates  in  Cromwell's  army  in  1647  and  to 
the  practice  of  the  Society  of  Friends.  *As 
though  there  were  any  point  in  freedom', 
he  said,  'if  we  do  not  use  it  to  serve  other 
people,  as  though  any  decent  man  ever 
wanted  to  be  free  except  to  be  able  to  do 
his  job.'  (Religion,  Science,  and  Society  in 
the  Modern  World,  1943.) 

Lindsay's  democratic  theories  were 
closely  related  to  his  educational  theory. 
In  1928  he  spoke  to  the  students  of  Cardiff 
of  'the  great  democratic  commonwealth  of 
learning,  which  transcends  division  of 
class,  religion,  and  nationality,  which 
takes  the  co-operation  of  all  for  granted, 
and  which  has  worked  out  a  wonderful 
technique  of  co-operative  thinking'.  This 
was  the  conviction  which  underlay  the 
Keele  experiment. 

At  Oxford,  Lindsay  was  always  too 
much  of  a  radical  to  be  completely  happy. 
For  all  his  achievements,  he  was  continu- 
ally having  to  compromise,  to  make 
concessions  to  the  politically  possible:  to 
the  extent  even  of  sometimes  convincing 
himself  that  the  politically  possible  was 
also  theoretically  desirable.  There  is 
something  pathetic  in  his  last  letter  to 
Balliol  men.  Jowett's  Balliol,  he  wrote, 
'prepared  the  governing  class  to  play  its 
part  in  a  classless  society'  by  purging  them 
of  the  aristocratic  vices.  Keele  was  not  a 
classless  society  either,  but  it  was  far 
more  like  it  than  Balliol  or  Oxford  had 
been.  Lindsay  was  more  at  home  in  Keele, 
with  his  utter  freedom  from  affectation  and 
self-importance,  his  profound  sense  of  the 
dignity  and  equality  of  all  human  beings, 
or  at  least  of  all  human  beings  who  had 
the  root  of  the  matter  in  them. 

Lindsay  was  a  powerful  personality  who 
could  be  ruthless  with  those  who  opposed 
what  he  believed  to  be  right.  He  did  not 
suffer  gladly  either  the  intellectually 
pretentious  or  those  whose  orthodoxy 
was  conventional  and  not  thought  out. 
His  idea  of  democracy  was  a  vigorous, 
hard-hitting  debate :  he  expected  no  more 
quarter  than  he  gave.  He  could  not 
believe  that  it  was  possible  for  a  man  to 
have  convictions  on  which  he  did  not  act. 
As  he  grew  older,  stories  collected  about 
his   authoritarianism,   his   determination 


643 


Lindsay,  A.  D. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


to  get  his  own  way.  He  could  be  as  wily 
and  circumspect  politically  as  his  hero 
Oliver  Cromwell:  and  as  hypocritical, 
his  enemies  would  have  added.  But  he 
drove  no  one  so  hard  as  he  drove  himself. 
His  influence  on  students  between  the 
two  world  wars  was  incalculable,  and  time 
and  time  again  he  gave  a  lead  where  few 
others  in  university  circles  did — in 
attempting  reconciliation  during  the 
general  strike,  in  doing  something  for  the 
unemployed  during  the  depression,  in 
opposing  Nazism  earlier  than  was  fashion- 
able, helping  German  refugees  and  taking 
a  public  stand  against  Munich,  in  moderni- 
zing and  democratizing  Oxford,  in  the 
Keele  experiment.  In  all  these  ways  his 
influence  prepared  for  the  welfare  State, 
if  not  the  classless  society. 

In  1907  Lindsay  married  Erica  Violet 
(died  1962),  daughter  of  Francis  Storr. 
They  had  a  daughter  and  two  sons,  the 
elder  of  whom,  Michael  Francis  Morris 
(born  1909),  specialist  in  Chinese  econo- 
mics, succeeded  to  the  title  when  Lindsay 
died  at  Keele  18  March  1952. 

At  Balliol  there  is  a  portrait  by 
Lawrence  Gowing  and  a  bust  by  (Sir) 
Jacob  Epstein  in  the  Lindsay  room.  At 
Keele  there  is  a  copy  of  Gowing's  portrait, 
made  by  the  artist ;  and  another  portrait 
painted  after  Lindsay's  death  by  Robin 
Goodwin. 

[W.  B.  Gallie,  A  New  University:  A.  D. 
Lindsay  and  the  Keele  Experiment,  1960; 
H.  W.  C.  Davis,  A  History  of  Balliol  College, 
revised  by  R.  H.  C.  Davis  and  Richard  Hunt, 
1963;  Sir  C.  M.  Bowra,  Memories,  1966; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Christopher  Hill. 


LINDSAY,    GEORGE    MACKINTOSH 

(1880-1956),  major-general,  was  born  in 
Cardiff  3  July  1880,  the  fifth  son  of 
Lieutenant- Colonel  Henry  Gore  Lindsay, 
of  Glasnevin  House,  Dublin,  and  his  wife, 
Ellen  Sarah,  daughter  of  the  first  Baron 
Tredegar.  He  was  educated  at  Sandroyd 
and  Radley.  Shortly  before  his  eighteenth 
birthday  he  received  a  militia  commission 
in  the  Royal  Monmouthshire  Royal 
Engineers,  and  in  1900  a  regular  com- 
mission in  the  Rifle  Brigade,  during  the 
South  African  war — where  he  served  in 
Natal  and  the  Transvaal,  earning  a  men- 
tion in  dispatches. 

In  1906  he  became  adjutant  of  a 
Volunteer  regiment,  and  on  the  formation 
of  the  Territorial  Army  he  became  adju- 
tant (1908-11)  of  the  17th  (County  of 
London)  battalion  of  the  London  Regi- 


ment. In  1913  he  was  appointed  instructor 
at  the  School  of  Musketry,  Hythe,  but 
went  to  France  in  1915  as  a  machine-gun 
officer.  He  was  selected  as  instructor  at 
the  newly  formed  G.H.Q.  Machine-Gun 
School,  and  later  in  the  year  was  brought 
back  to  England  as  G.S.O.  2  of  the 
Machine-Gun  Corps  training  centre  at 
Grantham.  Returning  to  France  in  June 
1916,  he  was  brigade-major  of  the  99th  J 
brigade,  with  which  he  took  part  in  the  | 
battles  of  the  Somme  and  Arras.  He  was 
appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  in  1917.  In  March 
1918  he  became  machine-gun  officer  at 
the  headquarters  of  the  First  Army,  with 
the  rank  of  colonel. 

After  the  war  he  passed  through  the 
Staff  College  and  was  then  given  command, 
in  June  1921,  of  No.  1  Armoured  Car 
Group  of  the  Tank  Corps,  stationed  in 
Iraq,  where  he  carried  out  experiments 
in  the  use  of  a  mechanized  force  in 
combination  with  aircraft,  and  maintained 
entirely  by  air  supply. 

It  was  George  Lindsay's  unique  distinc- 
tion that  he  played  a  leading  part  in  the 
development  of  two  of  the  most  important 
instruments  in  modern  warfare,  the 
machine-gun  and  the  tank,  and  of  the 
corps  which  handled  them.  An  ardent 
advocate  of  the  machine-gun  before  1914, 
when  few  soldiers  recognized  its  potenti- 
alities, he  became  the  moving  spirit  in  the 
formation  of  the  Machine-Gun  Corps,  and 
the  formulation  of  its  tactical  technique, 
in  the  war  of  1914-18.  Then  he  turned, 
with  even  more  far-reaching  vision,  from 
the  instrument  which  had  paralysed 
tactical  mobility  to  one  which  would 
revive  it,  and  became  one  of  the  foremost 
advocates  of  mobile  armoured  warfare. 

When  tanks  were  definitely  accepted  as 
a  permanent  part  of  the  army,  and 
constituted  in  1923  as  the  Royal  Tank 
Corps,  Lindsay  came  back  to  England  to 
guide  its  training  as  chief  instructor  at  the 
Royal  Tank  Corps  Centre  for  two  years, 
then  as  inspector  of  the  Corps  from  1925 
to  1929.  Those  years  were  of  far-reaching 
importance,  not  only  for  the  future  of  the 
Corps  but  also  for  the  future  of  warfare. 
The  history  of  armoured  forces,  not  only 
in  the  land  of  their  birth,  is  a  record  of 
checks  imposed,  and  confusion  caused, 
by  the  way  the  higher  authorities  repeat- 
edly selected  for  the  key  posts  in  this  field 
officers  who  had  no  previous  experience 
of  it,  in  preference  to  those  who  had  both 
knowledge  and  enthusiasm.  Lindsay's 
appointment  at  this  juncture  was  a  happy 
exception. 


644 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lipson 


During  Lindsay's  two  years  at  the 
Central  Schools  the  system  of  instruction 
was  improved,  and  a  number  of  changes 
made  in  the  courses  at  both  the  Driving 
and  Maintenance  School  at  Bovington  and 
the  Gunnery  School  at  Lulworth.  But  the 
most  significant  change  was  the  increased 
emphasis  on  the  tactical  side  of  the 
instruction.  At  the  same  time  increased 
use  was  made  of  the  Schools  for  experi- 
ment with  and  report  on  machines  and 
weapons. 

The  primary  task  of  those  who  had 
grasped  the  new  idea  was  to  spread  it. 
Within  the  Centre  Lindsay  was  the  chief 
instructor;  outside  he  became  the  chief 
evangelist.  His  charter  to  visit  other 
places  gave  him  frequent  opportunities 
of  'preaching  the  gospel',  and  they 
multiplied  when  he  became  inspector.  He 
was  a  good  lecturer  and  a  good  talker, 
with  a  knack  of  arousing  interest  and  a 
manner  which  disarmed  opposition,  and 
he  was  able  to  influence  the  minds  of  many 
soldiers  who  were  not  accustomed  to 
read  military  books  and  journals.  In  that 
way  he  very  effectively  reinforced  the 
prophets  who  used  the  printed  word  to 
propagate  the  idea.  A  lecture  on  'Fire- 
power' which  he  had  given  to  many 
audiences  in  his  Machine-Gun  Corps  days 
was  developed  into  one  which  coupled 
'fire -power  and  mobility'.  He  used  to 
begin  by  reciting  the  story  of  David  and 
Goliath,  as  an  allegory  of  'a  new  idea' 
defeating  'brainless  brute  force',  and 
rubbed  it  in  with  aptly  chosen  examples 
from  subsequent  military  history,  of  which 
he  was  a  keen  student.  As  a  teacher  he 
knew  the  value  of  constant  repetition  of 
the  essential  points,  and  of  keeping  them 
unbefogged,  while  varying  the  exposition 
so  far  as  to  ensiu'e  that  his  theme  did  not 
grow  stale. 

In  1929  Lindsay  became  brigadier 
general  staff  in  Egypt,  where  he  repeatedly 
urged  the  importance  of  creating  an 
armoured  force  such  as  eventually  proved 
the  decisive  instrument  in  repelUng  the 
Axis  invasion  of  Egypt  and,  later,  in 
throwing  the  enemy  out  of  Africa. 

In  1932  he  returned  home,  on  being 
appointed  to  command  the  7th  Infantry 
brigade  at  Tidworth,  one  of  the  two 
experimental  motorized  brigades.  In  the 
final  exercise  of  the  1934  training  season 
he  was  given  an  opportunity  of  command- 
ing an  improvised  armoured  division,  but 
was  so  hampered  by  the  directing  staff 
that  the  opportunity  of  showing  what 
such  a  division  could  achieve  was  largely 


spoiled,  and  the  trial  was  not  renewed 
until  three  more  years  had  passed. 

Meanwhile  Lindsay,  following  his 
promotion  to  major-general  in  1934,  had 
gone  to  Calcutta  in  1935  as  commander  of 
the  Presidency  and  Assam  District,  where 
he  remained  until  his  retirement  in  1939. 
That  he  had  no  further  opportunity  in  the 
field  of  mechanized  warfare  was  a  deplor- 
able loss  in  the  crucial  years  before  1939. 

As  a  leader  he  was  lacking  in  toughness, 
and  almost  too  kindly,  but  he  did  much  to 
increase  efficiency  by  infecting  officers 
and  men  with  his  own  enthusiasm.  He  was 
the  most  sympathetic  of  reformers,  with 
a  geniality  rare  in  dynamic  men.  The 
response  it  evoked  was  exemplified  in  the 
way  all  who  came  in  contact  with  'George 
Lindsay'  found  it  hard  to  use  his  surname 
without  the  affectionate  coupling  of  his 
Christian  name. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  he  was 
recalled  to  command  the  9th  Highland 
division,  and  in  1940  he  was  appointed 
deputy  regional  commissioner  for  civil 
defence  in  the  south-west  of  England, 
where  he  showed  untiring  activity  during 
the  many  air  raids.  In  1944  he  was  ap- 
pointed commissioner  of  the  British  Red 
Cross  and  Order  of  St.  John  in  North- 
West  Europe,  and  held  that  post  for  two 
years.  He  was  colonel-commandant  of  the 
Royal  Tank  Regiment  from  1938  to  1947. 
In  1942  he  gave  the  Lees  Knowles  lectures 
on  military  history  at  Cambridge. 

Lindsay  was  appointed  C.M.G.  (1919), 
C.B.  (1936),  and  C.B.E.  (1946).  In  1907 
he  married  Constance,  daughter  of  George 
Stewart  Hamilton,  by  whom  he  had  two 
daughters,  one  of  whom  died  at  birth. 
He  died  in  Epsom  28  November  1956. 

[B.  H.  Liddell  Hart,  The  Tanks,  vol.  i, 
1959 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

B.  H.  Liddell  Hart. 

LINLITHGOW,  second  Marquess  of 
(1887-1952),  viceroy  of  India.  [See  Hope, 
Victor  Alexander  John.] 

LIPSON,  EPHRAIM  (1888-1960), 
economic  historian,  born  in  Sheffield 
1  September  1888,  was  the  son  of  Hyman 
Lipson,  furniture  dealer,  and  his  wife. 
Eve,  daughter  of  Michael  Jacobs.  His 
elder  brother,  D.  L.  Lipson,  was  indepen- 
dent member  of  Parliament  for  Chelten- 
ham from  1937  until  1950.  A  childhood 
accident  left  Ephraim  Lipson  grievously 
deformed  and  his  health  was  never  robust. 
Scholarships  carried  him  through  Sheffield 
Royal     Grammar     School    and    Trinity 


645 


Lipson 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


College,  Cambridge.  He  obtained  first 
class  honours  in  both  parts  of  the  histori- 
cal tripos  (1909-10)  but  since  Cambridge 
offered  no  opportunity  for  remunerative 
work  he  migrated  to  Oxford  and  became 
a  private  tutor. 

At  that  time  economic  history  was 
advancing  rapidly  in  academic  and  popu- 
lar appeal.  The  first  generation,  repre- 
sented by  Ashley  and  Cunningham,  was 
giving  place  to  the  second,  with  (Sir) 
J.  H.  Clapham  [q.v.],  Lilian  Knowles, 
W.  R.  Scott,  and  George  Unwin  as 
notable  teachers  and  a  growing  company 
of  younger  scholars  entering  the  field. 
The  universities,  in  collaboration  with  the 
Workers'  Educational  Association,  were 
providing  evening  classes  in  which  'indus- 
trial history'  was  a  favourite  subject. 
Meanwhile,  the  rapidly  growing  library 
of  pubhshed  national  and  local  records 
was  rendering  existing  surveys  of  English 
economic  history  out  of  date.  Lipson 
therefore  resolved  to  produce  a  new 
survey  based  on  'both  the  older  sources 
of  evidence  and  the  new  material'.  The 
first  fruits  of  this  herculean  task.  An 
Introduction  to  the  Economic  History  of 
England:  I.  The  Middle  Ages,  appeared  in 
1915,  when  he  was  in  his  twenty-seventh 
year.  Its  welcome  was  enthusiastic. 
Reviewers  lauded  its  'mastery  of  pretty 
well  all  the  abundant  new  material, 
primary  and  secondary',  its  'precision  and 
critical  acumen',  and  its  solid  worth  in 
enriching  the  pictures  of  the  guilds,  the 
woollen  industry,  and  other  topics  on 
which  the  new  sources  threw  the  strongest 
light.  The  book  was  conservative  in  its 
concept  of  the  content  and  questions  of 
economic  history;  it  fitted  the  new  facts 
into  the  old  frame,  wrestled  with  ancient 
controversies,  but  started  no  new  ones. 
Yet  its  merits  outweighed  these  defects 
and  Lipson's  reputation  rose  so  high  that 
in  1922  he  was  appointed  reader  in 
economic  history  at  Oxford  and  fellow  of 
New  College. 

There  followed  a  decade  of  intense 
many-sided  activity.  His  lectures  became 
so  popular  and  his  work  with  research 
students  so  well  known  that  it  could  be 
said  'Lipson  was  economic  history  at 
Oxford'.  He  served  as  external  examiner 
at  other  universities,  including  Cambridge. 
More  than  any  other  individual  he  was  the 
creator  in  1926  of  the  Economic  History 
Society  and  of  the  Economic  History 
Review  which  first  appeared  in  1927.  He 
had  sponsored  the  proposal  to  found  the 
journal;  induced  his  own  publishers  to 


produce  it ;  planned  its  form  and  content ; 
and  for  eight  years  bore  the  main  burden 
of  editorship.  He  secured  articles  from 
virtually  all  the  veteran  distinguished 
scholars,  as  well  as  from  many  who  later 
stepped  into  their  shoes,  in  Europe  and 
North  America ;  he  provided  lists  of  new 
publications  in  many  countries ;  and  wrote 
dozens  of  short  reviews  himself. 

Meanwhile  he  worked  steadily  on  the 
next  instalment  of  his  Economic  History  of 
England.  By  late  1930  he  had  finished 
volumes  ii  and  iii,  ranging  from  the 
Elizabethan  Age  to  the  eve  of  the  Indus- 
trial Revolution  and  sub-titled  'The  Age 
of  Mercantilism'.  On  learning  that  Oxford 
intended  to  establish  a  Chichele  professor- 
ship in  economic  history  he  urged  his 
publishers  to  get  the  volumes  out  before 
the  electors  met  in  June  1931.  Copies 
were  in  the  electors'  hands  by  early  May. 
But  when  the  selection  was  made  it  did 
not  fall  on  Lipson. 

With  this  hard  blow,  Lipson's  formal 
academic  career — and  his  home  life — 
ended.  Hurt  and  angry  he  left  Oxford, 
rarely  to  return;  sold  his  house  and  dis- 
posed of  his  library.  Invitations  to  deliver 
the  Lowell  lectures  in  Boston  (Mass.),  then 
to  lecture  in  a  number  of  North  American 
universities,  led  to  a  leisurely  tour  round 
the  world  in  1932-4.  Thereafter  his  life 
was  divided  between  summer  lodgings  at 
the  National  Liberal  Club  in  London  and 
escape  from  bronchial  troubles  by  winter- 
ing abroad  in  warmer  climates.  The  war 
drove  him  out  of  London  and  restrictions 
on  travel  limited  his  range  of  refuge  to 
south-west  England. 

In  such  circumstances  the  old  life  of 
sustained  research  and  writing  was  no 
longer  possible.  There  could  be  no  volume 
iv,  but  since  the  other  three  were  the  only 
current  substantial  survey,  an  attempt 
had  to  be  made  to  keep  them  up  to  date. 
Volume  i  was  revised  and  enlarged  in 
1937.  Volumes  ii  and  iii  were  expanded 
in  the  third  edition  (1943)  by  appending 
a  hundred  pages  of  new  material  and 
adding  a  long  introduction  in  which 
Lipson  reiterated  the  theme  that  had 
run  throughout  the  first  edition:  'There 
is  no  hiatus  in  economic  development, 
but  always  a  constant  tide  of  progress  and 
change  in  which  the  old  is  blended  almost 
imperceptibly  with  the  new.'  In  particular 
his  study  of  organization  and  ideas  before 
1750  had  convinced  him  there  was  no 
'Industrial  Revolution',  no  violent  breach 
with  the  past,  in  the  eighteenth  century — 
or  in  any  other.  To  that  central  motif  he 


646 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lithgow 


added  another  conviction  that  the  tide 
of  human  affairs  was  governed  by  the  law 
of  ebb  and  flow,  with  pendulum-hke  or 
cycHcal  alternating  periods  of  co-operative 
or  corporate  control  and  of  free  enterprise. 
Medieval  society  was  co-operative  and 
corporate ;  after  a  full  turn  of  the  wheel, 
mercantilism  emerged  as  'England's  first 
Planned  Economy';  and  by  the  1940s 
the  wheel  was  again  coming  full  circle 
'to  the  spirit  of  an  older  regime  based  on 
co-operation'  and  social  control. 

It  was  easier  to  philosophize  than  to 
keep  up  with  the  rapid  advances  on  the 
research  frontier.  Two  minor  works, 
published  in  1950  and  1953  respectively, 
made  no  attempt  to  do  so ;  they  belonged 
to  'the  economic  history  of  yester-year'. 
Lipson  died  in  London  22  April  1960. 
He  had  never  married. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Herbert  Heaton. 

LITHGOW,  Sir  JAMES,  first  baronet, 
of  Ormsary  (1883-1952),  shipbuilder  and 
industrialist,  was  born  at  Port  Glasgow, 
Renfrewshire,  27  January  1883,  the  elder 
son  of  William  Todd  Lithgow,  shipbuilder, 
of  Drums,  Langbank,  Renfrewshire,  and 
of  Ormsary,  Argyllshire,  by  his  wife, 
Agnes,  daughter  of  Henry  Birkmyre,  of 
Springbank,  Port  Glasgow,  partner  in 
the  Gourock  Ropework  Company,  the 
borough's  main  and  oldest  industrial  works. 
Lithgow  on  his  father's  side  came  of  a 
family  which  was  strongly  Presbyterian 
and  church-going  and  of  a  covenanting 
tradition.  He  was  educated  at  Glasgow 
Academy  and  in  Paris.  On  reaching  the 
age  of  sixteen  he  was  offered  by  his  father 
three  possibilities:  to  live  comfortably  as 
a  country  gentleman ;  to  go  to  a  university 
and  enter  some  profession ;  or  to  serve  an 
apprenticeship  in  the  family  shipyard. 
This  choice  was  later  put  to  Lithgow' s 
younger  brother  Henry;  both  sons  chose 
to  enter  the  shipyard.  Lithgow  took  his 
apprenticeship  seriously  and  yardsmen 
recalled  for  many  years  the  red-haired 
long-legged  apprentice  who  did  jobs 
twice  as  quickly  as  other  people,  and 
earned  the  nickname  'the  Scarlet  Runner'. 
His  particular  interest  was  in  plumbing 
and  many  years  afterwards,  during  the 
war  of  1939-45,  when  on  leave  at  Ormsary 
from  his  work  as  controller  of  merchant 
shipbuilding,  he  surprised  a  naval  guest 
by  meeting  him  with  a  bag  of  tools  and 
apologizing  for  his  inability  to  join  him 
at  the  shoot  until  he  had  mended  a  burst 
pipe. 


In  1906  he  became  a  partner  of  Russell 
&  Co.  of  Port  Glasgow,  the  shipbuilding 
firm  of  which  his  father  was  a  co-founder, 
which  later  became  Lithgows,  Ltd.,  and 
won  a  world-wide  reputation  in  the  ship- 
ping world.  In  1908  his  father  died 
a  millionaire  and  left  Lithgow  and  his 
brother  with  the  heavy  responsibility  of 
the  management  of  a  great  industry. 
Their  capability  soon  became  apparent. 
In  1912  Lithgow,  while  still  under  thirty, 
was  elected  president  of  the  Clyde  Ship- 
builders' Association. 

As  a  Territorial  he  was  embodied  on  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1914,  and  commanded 
in  France  a  heavy  battery  of  the  Royal 
Garrison  Artillery  largely  made  up  of  men 
from  his  shipyard.  He  was  wounded, 
received  the  M.C.  and  a  brevet  lieutenant- 
colonelcy.  His  brother  remained  behind 
in  charge  of  the  shipyard  and  its  vital 
war  work.  In  1917  Lithgow  was  himself 
brought  back  from  France  to  become 
director  of  merchant  shipbuilding  at  the 
Admiralty. 

During  the  years  of  depression  following 
the  war  Lithgow  played  an  important 
part  in  stimulating  industrial  revival  in 
Scotland  and  in  rationalizing  shipbuilding 
after  its  abnormal  expansion  during  the 
war.  This  was  effected  by  the  industry 
itself,  in  contrast,  for  instance,  to  that 
carried  out  in  the  cotton  industry  after 
the  war  of  1939-45  at  considerable 
expense  to  the  public.  Lithgow's  efforts  in 
helping  to  salvage  Scottish  industry  were 
disinterested  and  self-sacrificing.  In  1936 
he  was  elected  chairman,  at  the  time  of 
its  worst  crisis,  of  the  great  Scottish  steel 
and  armaments  firm  of  William  Beardmore 
&  Co.  He  rescued  it  from  its  difficulties  at 
some  sacrifice  to  his  own  business  and  to 
his  health.  He  did  the  same  for  the 
Fairfield  Shipbuilding  &  Engineering 
Company,  the  Lithgow  brothers  taking 
over  a  majority  of  the  firm's  ordinary 
shares  and  meeting  the  dishonoured  bills 
on  which  the  firm  seemed  likely  to  founder. 

His  skill  in  handling  industrial  problems 
and  manpower  led  him  to  a  number  of 
influential  appointments.  In  1920  he  was 
elected  president  of  the  Shipbuilding 
Employers'  Federation.  From  1922  to  1925 
and  from  1933  to  1935  he  was  the  British 
employers'  delegate  to  the  International 
Labour  Organization  at  Geneva.  In  1924  he 
was  president  of  the  National  Confedera- 
tion of  Employers'  Organizations  and  from 
1930  to  1932  president  of  the  Federation 
of  British  Industries. 

In    1930    the    National    Shipbuilders' 


647 


Lithgow 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Security,  Ltd.,  was  established,  with 
Lithgow  as  its  first  chairman,  to  help 
rescue  those  shipyards  unable  to  weather 
the  economic  storms  of  the  time  by 
buying  them  out  at  terms  more  favourable 
than  they  could  have  got  in  the  open 
market;  yards  thus  taken  over  were 
guaranteed  not  to  be  used  for  shipbuilding 
for  forty  years.  Lithgow  had  a  thankless 
and  unpopular  task  but  his  efforts  helped 
to  tide  over  the  adverse  times  in  the 
shipyards  and  avoid  the  financial  collapse 
of  the  whole  industry. 

Lithgow  was  in  advance  of  current 
thought  in  many  of  his  ideas  and  this, 
combined  with  his  practical  ability, 
enabled  him  to  establish  methods  for 
organized  co-operation  in  industry.  As 
an  enthusiast  for  the  use  of  electricity  he 
strongly  supported  in  1927  the  formation 
of  the  Central  Electricity  Board  and  Sir 
Andrew  Duncan  [q.v.],  its  first  chairman, 
insisted  on  Lithgow' s  being  a  member  of 
the  board.  Lithgow' s  work  as  chairman  of 
the  executive  committee  of  the  Scottish 
National  Development  Council,  a  non- 
pohtical  body  formed  in  1931  to  work  for 
the  economic  revival  of  Scotland,  was 
particularly  marked.  It  was  part  of 
Lithgow' s  philosophy  that  'those  who 
made  their  money  in  Scotland  have  an 
obligation  to  keep  it  there  and  to  use 
their  best  endeavours  to  develop  and 
keep  healthy  the  industry  to  which  they 
owe  their  own  prosperity'. 

During  the  war  of  1939-45  he  was 
almost  immediately  appointed  controller 
of  merchant  shipbuilding  and  repairs  and 
was  a  member  of  the  Board  of  Admiralty 
from  1940  to  1946.  His  expert  handling  of 
this  key  post,  particularly  in  the  spring 
crisis  of  1941,  was  a  considerable  factor 
in  the  successful  prosecution  of  the  war, 
as  was  his  successful  drive  in  tank 
production,  the  output  of  which  in  this 
same  period  was  dangerously  low.  Lithgow 
was  persuaded  by  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill 
and  Sir  Andrew  Duncan  to  become 
temporary  chairman  of  the  Tank  Board 
and  head  of  the  tank  division  of  the 
Ministry  of  Supply.  When  the  pressure  of 
his  task  in  the  early  war  years  diminished 
a  little,  Lithgow  took  over  the  presidency 
of  the  Iron  and  Steel  Federation  (1943-5) 
and  concerned  himself  mainly  in  plans  for 
the  industry  after  the  war. 

For  his  services  to  his  country  and  to 
industry  Lithgow  was  created  a  baronet 
in  1925  and  in  1945  appointed  G.B.E. ;  in 
1947  he  was  appointed  C.B.  for  his  work 
as  chairman  of  the  County  of  Renfrew 


Territorial  and  Auxiliary  Forces  Associa- 
tion. In  1946  Glasgow  University  conferred 
on  him  an  honorary  LL.D.  and  from  1943 
until  his  death  he  was  vice-lieutenant  of 
Renfrewshire.  But  probably  the  honour 
he  most  appreciated  was  being  made,  on 
7  November  1951,  the  first  honorary  free- 
man of  his  home  town  of  Port  Glasgow,  the 
'dirty  wee  port'  for  which  in  later  years  he 
shyly  confessed  his  deep  affection.  He  was 
already  by  then  a  sick  man  and  the  provost 
and  councillors  had  to  bring  the  casket 
containing  his  burgess  ticket  to  his  home 
at  Gleddoch  House.  It  was  there  that  he 
died  23  February  1952. 

Lithgow  was  a  man  of  great  determi- 
nation and  energy,  with  an  analytical 
and  penetrating  insight  into  problems, 
outspoken  to  a  degree  which  usually 
stimulated,  sometimes  shocked,  and  oc- 
casionally provoked  hostility.  His  partner- 
ship with  his  brother  (who  died  in  1948) 
was  a  well-balanced  one,  for  Henry  Lith- 
gow's  quieter,  more  deliberate  nature 
counterbalanced  his  elder  brother's  more 
dynamic  and  impulsive  personality.  Lith- 
gow was  an  exceedingly  generous  man, 
usually  anonymously.  He  gave  liberally 
to  the  Church  of  Scotland  and  also  to 
the  lona  Community,  telling  Sir  George 
MacLeod  (later  Lord  MacLeod  of  Fuinary) 
that  he  disagreed  with,  but  respected,  his 
pacifist  views.  He  was  a  man  more  at  home 
with  country  than  with  city  men  and 
probably  among  his  happiest  hours  were 
those  spent  shooting  at  Ormsary  or  deer- 
stalking on  his  estate  at  Jura,  when  his 
lifelong  boyish  spirit  and  humour  were 
most  manifest. 

He  married  in  1924  Gwendolyn  Amy, 
who  succeeded  him  as  chairman  of 
Lithgows,  only  daughter  of  John  Robin- 
son Harrison,  shipowner,  of  Scalesceugh, 
Cumberland.  By  her  he  had  a  son  and 
two  daughters.  The  son,  William  James 
(born  1934),  succeeded  as  second  baronet 
and,  in  1958,  as  chairman  of  Lithgows. 

Lithgow's  portrait,  with  his  favourite 
dog  Dazzle,  by  (Sir)  Oswald  Birley,  is  in 
the  family's  possession. 

[The  Times,  25  February  and  15  March 
1952 ;  J.  M.  Held,  James  Lithgow,  Master  of 
Work,  1964;  H.  C.  Whitley,  Laughter  in 
Heaven,  1962 ;  private  information.] 

G.  K.  S.  Hamilton-Edwards. 

LIVINGSTONE,  Sm  RICHARD  WINN 
(1880-1960),  educationist,  was  born  in 
Liverpool  23  January  1880,  the  son  of  the 
Rev.  Richard  John  Livingstone,  vicar  of 
Aigburth  and  later  honorary  canon  of 


Q4» 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Livingstone 


Liverpool,  and  his  Irish  wife,  Millicent 
Julia  AUanson-Winn,  daughter  of  the 
third  Baron  Headley.  A  scholar  of  Win- 
chester and  New  College,  Oxford,  Living- 
stone was  Hertford  scholar  (1900), 
obtained  first  classes  in  honour  modera- 
tions (1901)  and  literae  humaniores  (1903), 
and  won  the  Chancellor's  Latin  verse 
(1901)  and  the  Arnold  historical  essay 
(1905)  prizes.  He  became  fellow,  tutor,  and 
librarian  of  Corpus  Christi  College  where 
he  remained  until  1924,  interrupted  by 
a  year  (1917-18)  as  an  assistant  master  at 
Eton.  He  made  a  deep  and  lasting  impres- 
sion on  many  able  pupils,  for  he  had 
a  power  to  charm  and  a  genuine  interest 
which  brought  out  the  best  in  others. 
Beneath  a  somewhat  dreamy  manner  lay 
a  certainty  of  purpose  which  developed 
with  the  years.  As  a  young  tutor  at 
Oxford  he  was  eager  to  improve  the 
teaching  and  active  with  WilUam  Temple, 
H.  W.  Garrod  [qq.v.],  and  others  in 
a  pressure  for  reform  which  was  to  bear 
fruit  in  the  royal  commission  which  re- 
ported in  1922.  Livingstone  himself  was  a 
member  of  the  prime  minister's  committee 
on  the  classics  in  1920,  the  year  in  which 
he  became  joint-editor  of  the  Classical 
Review,  a  position  which  he  held  until  1922. 

Livingstone's  first  publication.  The 
Greek  Genius  and  its  Meaning  to  Us 
(1912),  showed  that  he  had  learned  well 
from  the  example  of  Gilbert  Murray  [q.v.] 
'to  look  on  Greek  thought  as  a  living 
thing'.  His  scholarship  was  graced  by  the 
elegance  with  which  he  wrote  or  trans- 
lated and  illuminated  with  'the  habitual 
vision  of  greatness'  of  which  he  loved  to 
speak.  The  humanism  of  the  Greeks  he 
saw  as  complementary  to  Judaism:  'And 
so  when  Christianity  comes  she  finds  the 
world  in  a  sense  prepared  for  her.'  In 
A  Defence  of  Classical  Education  (1916) 
he  maintained  that  'We  study  Ancient 
Greece  as  containing,  with  Rome,  the 
history  of  our  origins,  and  explaining 
much  in  our  literature,  language  and 
ideals' ;  Greek  was  'an  introduction  to 
modern  problems :  in  history,  thought  and 
poUtics'.  He  pursued  this  theme  as  editor 
successively  of  The  Legacy  (1921),  The 
Pageant  (1923),  and  The  Mission  (1928) 
of  Greece. 

Meantime  he  had  moved  in  1924  to  Bel- 
fast where  as  vice-chancellor  of  Queen's 
University  he  was  persuasive  in  arousing 
throughout  the  six  counties  a  pride  in  the 
university  and  a  sense  of  responsibility 
towards  it  which  brought  valuable  finan- 
cial support.  He  was  knighted  in  1931. 


Returning  to  Oxford  in  1933  as  presi- 
dent of  Corpus,  Livingstone  was  able  to 
exert  a  wider  influence,  his  interests  now 
extending  to  the  whole  field  of  the  aims 
and  methods  of  education.  He  was  presi- 
dent of  the  educational  section  of  the 
British  Association  in  1936;  Rede  lec- 
turer at  Cambridge  in  1944  when  he  spoke 
on  'Plato  and  Modern  Education'.  In  1937 
and  1938  he  was  an  originator  of  summer 
schools  at  Oxford  for  colonial  administra- 
tors. 'Adult  education  for  the  educated' 
was  a  subject  later  developed  in  The 
Future  in  Education  (1941),  a  book  which 
included  his  views  on  part-time  continued 
education  instead  of  a  general  raising  of 
the  school  age  and  a  suggestion  for  resi- 
dential colleges  for  adults  on  the  Danish 
system  which  aroused  much  interest.  In 
1948  he  had  the  satisfaction  of  opening 
Denman  College,  the  Women's  Institute 
residential  college  at  Marcham  named 
after  Lady  Denman  [q.v.]  which  owed 
much  to  his  inspiration.  He  is  com- 
memorated there  by  a  lecture -room  which 
bears  his  name  and  in  the  garden  by  a  life- 
size  bust  of  him  lecturing,  executed  by 
Kathleen  Parbury. 

Over  his  own  college  (where  there  is 
a  portrait  by  Eric  Kennington)  Living- 
stone presided  with  dignity  and  shrewd- 
ness. It  was  perhaps  unfortunate  that  he 
served  as  vice-chancellor  of  Oxford  at 
a  difficult  time  (1944-7)  to  which  his 
particular  talents  were  not  best  suited. 
He  failed  to  gain  the  full  confidence  of 
the  university. 

In  1950  Livingstone  retired  but  he  con- 
tinued much  in  demand  as  a  lecturer, 
especially  in  the  United  States  where  his 
reputation  was  greater  than  it  was  at 
home.  He  was  a  lucid  and  skilful  speaker, 
and  popular  as  a  broadcaster.  He  had 
remained  active  in  his  own  field :  as  presi- 
dent of  the  Hellenic  Society  in  1938  and  of 
the  Classical  Association  in  1940-41.  His 
translation  of  Plato,  Portrait  of  Socrates, 
appeared  in  1938  and  his  edition  of 
a  translation  of  Thucydides  on  the  Pelo- 
ponnesian  War  in  1943.  He  was  also  the 
originator  and  general  editor  of  the 
Clarendon  Greek  and  Latin  Series  of  texts 
issued  partly  in  the  original  and  partly  in 
translation,  with  introductions,  notes,  and 
vocabularies.  He  never  ceased  to  empha- 
size his  belief  in  the  value  of  a  classical 
education.  The  complete  education,  he 
maintained,  must  give  man  a  philosophy 
of  life  and  'Greece  and  Christianity  are  the 
two  supreme  masters  of  the  ethical,  the 
spiritual   Ufe'.    In    The   Rainbow   Bridge 


649 


Livingstone 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


(1959),  a  collection  of  essays  and  addresses, 
he  was  still  calling  for  university  reform: 
towards  a  more  liberal  education  which 
would  include  some  study  of- religion  or 
philosophy,  or  both. 

Livingstone  received  honorary  degrees 
from  ten  universities  and  was  awarded  the 
King  Haakon  VII  Liberty  Cross.  He  was 
a  commander  of  the  Legion  of  Honour  and 
was  made  a  knight  commander  of  the 
Order  of  King  George  I  of  Greece  shortly 
before  his  death,  which  took  place  in 
Oxford  26  December  1960.  He  married  in 
1913  Cecile  Stephanie  Louise,  daughter  of 
George  Maryon-Wilson,  of  Searles,  Fletch- 
ing,  Sussex.  He  had  two  daughters  and 
two  sons,  one  of  whom  was  killed  in 
action  in  1944. 

[The  Times,  28  December  1960;  Oxford 
Magazine,  16  February  1961.] 

Helen  M.  Palmer. 

LLEWELLIN,  JOHN  JESTYN,  Baron 
Llewellin  (1893-1957),  politician  and 
first  governor-general  of  the  Federation  of 
the  Rhodesias  and  Nyasaland,  was  born 
at  Chevening,  near  Sevenoaks,  6  February 
1893,  the  younger  son  of  William  Llewel- 
lin, later  of  Upton  House,  Poole,  by  his 
first  wife,  Frances  Mary,  daughter  of 
Lewis  Davis  Wigan,  of  Oakwood,  Maid- 
stone. He  was  educated  at  Eton  and 
University  College,  Oxford  (later  being 
elected  to  an  honorary  fellowship  there). 
In  September  1914  he  was  commissioned 
into  the  Dorset  Royal  Garrison  Artillery 
and  served  in  France  (1915-19),  winning 
the  M.C.  in  1917  and  achieving  the  rank  of 
major.  On  his  return  to  England  he  read 
for  the  bar  and  was  called  by  the  Inner 
Temple  in  1921.  His  real  interests,  how- 
ever, lay  in  the  field  of  politics.  In  1929  he 
gained  the  Uxbridge  division  of  Middlesex 
for  the  Conservatives  and  very  soon  made 
his  mark  in  the  House.  He  was  parlia- 
mentary private  secretary  to  the  post- 
master-general (Sept.-Oct.  1931)  and  to 
the  first  commissioner  of  works  (1931-5) ; 
assistant  government  whip  (1935-7) ;  and 
civil  lord  of  the  Admiralty  (1937-9). 

In  July  1939  he  became  parliamentary 
secretary  at  the  Ministry  of  Supply,  a  key 
department  which  had  recently  inherited 
from  the  Board  of  Trade  responsibility 
for  the  whole  of  the  Government's  supplies 
organization,  and  was  thus  engaged  in 
quietly  making  preparation  against  a  war. 
In  May  1940  he  went  as  parliamentary 
secretary  to  the  Ministry  of  Aircraft 
Production  for  which  he  was  spokesman  in 
the  House  of  Commons,  Lord  Beaverbrook 


being  in  the  Upper  House.  Everything 
which  could  be  done  to  produce  the 
quality  and  quantity  of  aircraft  needed 
to  hold  and  defeat  the  Luftwaffe  was 
done  under  Lord  Beaverbrook' s  dynamic 
driving  power,  and  in  this  historic  en- 
deavour Llewellin  ably  assisted  him. 

In  May  1941  Llewellin  became  parlia- 
mentary secretary  to  the  Ministry  of 
Transport  and  was  sworn  of  the  Privy 
Council.  He  was  spokesman  in  the  House 
for  the  departments  of  both  shipping  and 
transport  which  were  in  the  process  of 
being  amalgamated  as  the  Ministry  of  War 
Transport  of  which  he  became  joint- 
parliamentary  secretary  in  June.  In 
February  1942  he  attained  cabinet  rank  as 
president  of  the  Board  of  Trade,  but  in  the 
same  month  was  transferred  back  to  his 
old  department  as  minister  of  aircraft  pro- 
duction. The  need  was  as  urgent  then  as  it 
had  been  before  and  it  was  a  great  moment 
and  a  tribute  to  his  own  endeavours  when 
in  May  he  was  able  in  a  broadcast  speech 
to  assure  the  Commonwealth  that  our  air- 
craft had  improved  'out  of  all  recognition' 
and  were  superior  to  anything  which  the 
enemy  could  put  in  the  air.  In  November 

1942  he  was  appointed  to  Washington  to 
fill  the  new  post  of  minister  resident  for 
supply,  for  which  his  recent  ministerial 
experience  particularly  suited  him  and 
which  he  greatly  enjoyed.  At  the  end  of 

1943  he  returned  to  England  to  succeed 
Lord  Woolton  as  minister  of  food  at  a 
time  when  food  problems  were  becoming 
increasingly  difficult.  Here  he  remained 
until  July  1945  and  again  a  difficult  job 
was  well  done. 

In  the  general  election  of  1945  Llewellin 
lost  his  seat  and  in  the  resignation  honours 
was  created  a  baron.  For  a  few  years  he 
was  able  to  enjoy  a  somewhat  more 
leisured  life,  although  he  was  a  regular 
attendant  at  the  House  of  Lords  and 
active  outside  Parliament  in  his  various 
capacities  as  deputy-lieutenant  for  Dorset, 
chairman  of  Dorset  quarter-sessions, 
president  of  the  Royal  Society  for  the 
Prevention  of  Accidents,  president  of  the 
Chambers  of  Commerce  of  the  British 
Empire,  a  member  of  the  B.B.C.  general 
advisory  council,  and  in  many  other 
interests  such  as  freemasonry  and  the 
British  Legion. 

In  September  1953  he  took  up  his 
appointment  as  first  governor-general  of 
the  newly  created  Federation  of  the 
Rhodesias  and  Nyasaland  in  Central 
Africa.  This  was  an  office  calling  for  the 
greatest  tact  and  skill.  He  had  not  only  to 


650 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lonsdale 


advise  the  federal  prime  minister  on  politi- 
cal matters,  but  also  to  help  establish 
relations  between  the  federal  government 
and  the  territorial  governments,  in  par- 
ticular the  governors  of  the  two  colonial 
territories  of  Northern  Rhodesia  and 
Nyasaland  who  were  answerable  to  the 
Colonial  Office.  The  first  federal  elections 
were  held  in  December  and  resulted  in 
a  sweeping  victory  for  the  Federal  Party 
led  by  Sir  Godfrey  Huggins  (later  Viscount 
Malvern).  Then  followed  the  difficult 
tasks  of  forming  a  federal  administration 
and  civil  service,  an  operation  which 
afforded  plenty  of  play  for  the  part  of 
mediator.  White  Rhodesians  called  for 
'improved  status'  and  discussions  over  the 
federal  franchise  occupied  the  political 
stage  in  Salisbury.  In  this  Llewellin's  inti- 
mate knowledge  of  the  political  tempera- 
ture in  Britain  was  of  especial  value. 

*Jay'  Llewellin  as  he  was  generally 
called  was  a  warm  and  genial  Englishman 
(his  name  was  pronounced  accordingly) 
who  enjoyed  wide  interests  and  activities. 
A  keen  sportsman,  he  was  in  'upper  boats' 
at  Eton  where  he  also  went  in  for  athletics 
and  football,  and  later  rowed  for  the 
University  College  boat  which  ended  up 
head  of  the  river  in  1914.  He  was  a 
countryman  at  heart  and  an  enthusiastic 
gardener,  and  always  went  to  Upton 
whenever  he  could,  even  at  the  busiest 
time  of  his  career.  When  tied  to  London  he 
used  to  enjoy  quick  visits  to  Hurlingham. 
His  sister  ran  Upton  for  him  and  acted  as 
hostess  both  there  and  at  the  governor- 
general's  house  in  Rhodesia  where  his 
facility  for  informal  entertainment  was  of 
particular  value.  Perhaps  because  he  was 
a  bachelor  he  was  a  strong  opponent  of 
women  in  public  life,  particularly  in 
politics.  'They  are  always  inclined  to  be  so 
bossy',  he  used  to  say,  'and  the  ladies  in 
the  House  of  Commons  have  a  tremendous 
amount  of  bees-  in  their  bonnets.'  He 
strongly  opposed  the  admission  of  women 
into  the  House  of  Lords. 

He  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1939  and 
G.B.E.  in  1953.  He  died  in  Sahsbury  24 
January  1957.  One  of  his  last  public  acts 
was  to  open  the  arts  wing,  which  was 
named  after  him,  of  the  then  new  Uni- 
versity College  of  Rhodesia  and  Nyasa- 
land. A  portrait  by  C.  J.  McCall  was 
hung  in  the  Federal  Assembly  building  in 
Salisbury. 

[Manchester  Guardian  and  The  Times,  25 
January  1957;  Dorset  Year  Book,  1957-8; 
Gil  Thomas,  Llewellin,  1961 ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Jonathan  Lewis. 


LONSDALE,  FREDERICK  (1881-1954), 
playwright,  whose  original  name  was 
Lionel  Frederick  Leonard,  was  born  in  St. 
Helier,  Jersey,  5  February  1881,  the  third 
and  youngest  son  of  John  Henry  Leonard, 
seaman,  and  his  wife,  Susan,  daughter  of 
James  Belford,  a  tobacconist.  Lonsdale 
was  educated  locally  and  joined  the  army 
as  a  private.  There  is  a  story,  probably 
apocryphal,  that  he  first  came  to  the 
attention  of  Frank  Curzon,  the  producer, 
while  acting  in  an  army  amateur  per- 
formance, which  he  himself  had  written. 
He  was  discharged  from  the  army  on 
medical  grounds  and  was  employed  for 
a  time  as  a  railway  clerk  in  St.  Helier. 
He  worked  his  passage  to  Canada  as  a 
steward  on  a  liner  and  when  he  returned 
to  England  his  occupations  included 
various  odd  jobs  on  the  Southampton 
docks. 

By  this  time  he  had  already  begun  to 
write  plays  under  the  name  of  Lonsdale 
which  he  adopteid  by  deed  poll  in  1908. 
A  Lonsdale  play  is  always  distinguished 
by  its  notable  conversational  quality  and 
brilliance  of  dialogue,  but  particularly  by 
its  intimate  knowledge  of  the  manners  and 
behaviour  and  jargon  of  a  class  from  which 
Lonsdale  did  not  spring,  but  which  almost 
immediately  received  him  with  interest 
and  enthusiasm.  He  was  an  attractive  and 
entertaining  talker,  verging  occasionally 
on  the  outrageous,  and  with  growing  suc- 
cess and  self-confidence  his  inborn  dislike 
of  the  self-important  might  have  led  him, 
were  it  not  for  his  roguish  sense  of  fun, 
into  occasional  conflict.  Because  he  him- 
self was  the  friend  of  friends,  the  devotion 
of  his  many  friends  easily  and  often  pro- 
tected him. 

Frank  Curzon  produced  his  first  play. 
The  King  of  Cadofiia,  a  musical  comedy 
with  lyrics  by  Adrian  Ross  and  music  by 
Sidney  Jones  [qq.v.],  at  the  Prince  of 
Wales's  Theatre  in  1908,  and  a  farce.  The 
Early  Worm,  at  Wyndham's  in  the  same 
year.  With  Curzon' s  production  of  The 
Best  People  at  Wyndham's  the  following 
year,  and  The  Balkan  Princess,  a  musical 
play,  in  1910  at  the  Prince  of  Wales's, 
Lonsdale's  reputation  was  established. 
The  truly  astonishing  skill  which  enabled 
him  to  produce  a  new  play  almost  every 
year  seemed  to  come  in  cycles.  Thus  it  was 
not  until  1915  that  he  produced  his  next 
batch  of  successes,  namely  Betty  (a  musi- 
cal play,  Daly's,  1915),  High  Jinks 
(a  musical  comedy  adaptation,  Adelphi, 
1916),  and  The  Maid  of  the  Mountains 
(a  musical  play  with  music  by  Harold 


651 


Lonsdale 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Fraser-Simson  and  J.  W.  Tate,  Daly's, 
1917).  This  last  was  a  tremendous  success 
and  ran  for  1,352  performances.  It  was 
produced  by  Oscar  Asche  [q.v.]  with  Jose 
Collins  [q.v.]  as  Teresa.  Monsieur  Beau- 
caire,  a  romantic  opera  (Prince's  Theatre), 
came  in  1919  and  The  Lady  of  the  Rose, 
a  musical  play  adaptation  at  Daly's,  in 
1922. 

The  comedy  Aren't  We  All?  which  Lons- 
dale and  Ms  great  following  considered  to 
be  his  best  play  was  produced  at  the  Globe 
Theatre  in  1923.  Then  Madame  Pompadour 
(musical  play  adaptation  with  Harry  Gra- 
ham, Daly's,  1923),  The  Fake  (Apollo, 
1924),  T?ie  Street  Singer  (musical  play, 
music  by  Fraser-Simson,  Lyric,  1924), 
Spring  Cleaning  (Eltinge  Theatre,  New 
York,  1923,  St.  Martin's  Theatre,  London, 
1925),  Katja  the  Dancer  (musical  play 
adaptation  with  Harry  Graham,  Gaiety, 
1925).  In  1925  was  also  produced  The  Last 
of  Mrs.  Cheyney  at  the  St.  James's  Theatre 
with  the  leading  roles  played  by  (Dame) 
Gladys  Cooper,  Ellis  Jeffreys,  Ronald 
Squire,  and  Sir  Gerald  du  Maurier  [q.v.]. 
This  famous  play  ran  for  514  performances 
and  is  generally  recognized  as  his  best- 
known  play.  The  third  act  was  written  by 
Lonsdale  while  the  piece  was  being  re- 
hearsed and  in  consequence  it  has  some- 
thing of  the  quality  of  a  one -act  play.  His 
inabihty  to  finish  a  play  was  a  curious 
weakness  of  Lonsdale's  which  often  landed 
him  in  difficulties. 

Tom  Walls  [q.v.]  produced  On  Approval 
at  the  Fortune  Theatre  in  1927  and  also 
The  High  Road  at  the  Shaftesbury  Theatre 
in  the  same  year.  Lady  Mary,  a  musical 
comedy  with  John  Hastings  Turner,  at 
Daly's,  followed  in  1928 ;  Canaries  Some- 
times Sing  (Globe,  1929) ;  Never  Come 
Back  (Phoenix,  1932);  Once  is  Enough 
(Henry  Miller  Theatre,  New  York,  1938) ; 
Foreigners  (one  of  his  few  failures,  it  only 
ran  for  a  week,  Belasco  Theatre,  New 
York,  1939) ;  Another  Love  Story  (Fulton 
Theatre,  New  York,  1943,  Phoenix 
Theatre,  London,  1944) ;  But  for  the  Grace 
of  God  (St.  James's,  1946);  and  finally, 
The  Way  Things  Go  (Phoenix,  1950). 

Since  Lonsdale's  plays  dealt  always  with 
the  activities  of  the  worldly  and  the  well- 
bred  they  seemed  to  become  dated  and  the 
last  few  plays  he  wrote  did  not  enjoy  the 
success  to  which  he  was  accustomed.  The 
taste  of  playgoers  was  modified  by  war 
and  its  ensuing  psychological  turbulence, 
and  the  theatre-going  audiences  were  no 
longer  so  willing  to  be  titillated  by  the 
drawing-room  comedy  and  the  problems 


of  the  rich.  Towards  the  end  of  his  life 
Lonsdale  became  acutely  aware  of  and 
much  distressed  by  this  rather  dismal 
trend,  which  carried  none  of  the  variety 
and  colour  of  the  life  which  he  had  en- 
joyed. He  wrote  scripts  for  two  films  for 
M.G.M.,  The  Devil  to  Pay  (1930)  and 
Lovers  Courageous  (1932);  and  for  (Sir) 
Alexander  Korda  [q.v.]  the  scenario  for 
The  Private  Life  of  Don  Juan  (1934). 

In  1938  Lonsdale  decided  to  settle  in 
America  and  remained  there  throughout 
the  war.  After  the  war  he  returned, 
occasionally,  rather  sadly  to  England,  and 
after  1950  hved  mostly  in  France.  On  his 
last  visit  to  London  he  died,  4  April  1954, 
as  he  was  walking  home  after  he  had  dined 
in  his  usual  merry  fashion. 

Freddy  Lonsdale  was  as  naturally 
entertaining  as  anyone  could  be.  He  had 
that  amusing  attribute  of  laughing  through 
his  speech,  which  was  infectious  and  at- 
tractive, and  was  helped  by  his  puckish 
foxy  face.  He  was  gay,  mischievous,  per- 
ceptive, and  funny,  never  anecdotal,  and 
his  appearance  anywhere — white  socks, 
white  muffler,  his  hat  on  the  back  of  his 
head — ^was  always  a  herald  of  delight. 

In  1904  Lonsdale  married  Leslie  Brook, 
daughter  of  Lieutenant-Colonel  William 
Brook  Hoggan,  R.A. ;  there  were  three 
daughters  of  the  marriage,  the  eldest  of 
whom,  Mrs.  John  Donaldson,  wrote  an 
admirable  biography  of  her  father.  Of  two 
portraits  of  Lonsdale  by  Simon  Elwes  one 
became  her  property. 

[Frances  Donaldson,  Freddy  Lonsdale, 
1957 ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Simon  Elwes. 

LORAINE,  VIOLET  MARY  (1886- 
1956),  actress,  was  born  in  Kentish  Town, 
London,  26  July  1886,  the  daughter  of 
Henry  Edmund  Tipton,  commercial  clerk, 
and  his  wife,  Mary  Ann  Eliza  Garrod. 
She  was  educated  at  Trevelyan  House, 
Brighton,  and  went  on  the  stage  at  the  age 
of  sixteen,  as  a  chorus  girl.  Although  her 
status  was  humble  her  surroundings  were 
not,  for  her  first  job  was  in  the  Drury  Lane 
pantomime  of  1902,  Mother  Goose.  Small 
parts  in  musical  plays  followed  at  once 
and  carried  her  through  to  1905,  in  which 
year  she  had  her  first  taste  of  straight 
acting  (in  a  revival  of  the  old  farce.  Our 
Flat,  at  the  Comedy  Theatre)  and  of  the 
variety  stage,  when  she  appeared  in  revue 
at  the  Palace.  By  now  well  launched,  she 
toured  for  George  Edwardes  in  The  Spring 
Chicken  and  The  Girls  of  Gottenhurg ;  made 
her  first  venture  on  to  the  'halls'  as  a 


652 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Lowe 


single  turn  at  the  old  Oxford  Theatre; 
became  a  popular  principal  boy  in  pro- 
vincial pantomimes ;  and  in  1911  returned 
with  glory  to  her  starting-point,  playing 
lead  in  the  Drury  Lane  pantomime  Hop  o' 
My  Thumb. 

When  war  broke  out  in  1914  she  was 
already  a  well-known  performer.  In  1914 
and  1915  she  found  a  place  in  a  series  of 
productions  at  the  London  Hippodrome: 
Hullo,  Tango!,  Business  as  Usual,  and 
Push  and  Go.  Her  big  chance  came  in  April 
1916  when  The  Bing  Boys  are  Here  was  put 
on  at  the  Alhambra  in  Leicester  Square 
and  she  was  given  the  leading  female  part, 
Emma,  with  (Sir)  George  Robey  [q.v.] 
playing  Lucius  Bing.  This  entertainment 
caught  the  special  taste  of  the  troops  on 
leave  and,  with  its  two  sequels,  the  not 
altogether  successful  The  Bing  Girls  are 
There  (1917)  and  the  inunensely  popular 
The  Bing  Boys  on  Broadway  (1918),  made 
the  Alhambra  a  rallying-place  for  uni- 
forms until  long  after  the  fighting  was 
over. 

Violet  Loraine  became  a  figure  of 
national  importance.  With  her  warm, 
friendly  personality,  her  gaiety,  her  rich 
humour,  and  the  sincerity  she  could  bring 
to  such  basically  sentimental  songs  as  'If 
you  were  the  only  girl  in  the  world'  or  'Let 
the  great  big  world  keep  turning',  she  was 
a  symbol  of  deUght.  The  pubUc,  armed 
forces  and  civilians  alike,  took  her  to  its 
heart  and  was  inconsolable  when,  at  the 
very  peak  of  her  success,  she  married  into 
the  Northumbrian  squirearchy  and  left 
the  stage.  As  often  happens  when  a  stage 
artist  makes  a  popular  hit,  the  magnitude 
of  Violet  Loraine's  success  was  due  to  the 
chance  that  she  was  on  a  particular  spot 
with  particular  talents  at  a  particular  time. 
There  was  a  public  need,  and  she  was 
there  to  supply  it.  The  success  itself,  how- 
ever, she  had  earned  for  herself  by  hard 
work.  After  the  war  she  appeared  in 
Eastwood  Ho!  at  the  Alhambra  (1919), 
The  Whirligig  at  the  Palace  (1920),  and 
London,  Paris  and  New  York  at  the  Lon- 
don Pavihon  (1921). 

In  September  1921  she  announced  her 
retirement  from  the  stage  on  her  marriage 
to  Edward  Raylton  Joicey  (died  1955), 
son  of  Colonel  Edward  Joicey,  of  Blenkin- 
sopp  Hall,  Haltwhistle,  Northumberland. 
There  were  two  sons  of  the  marriage. 

In  May  1928  Violet  Loraine  took  part 
in  a  charity  performance  of  The  Scarlet 
Pimpernel  at  the  Palace  and  later  that 
year  she  made  a  return  to  the  professional 
stage,  playing  the  name  part  in   Clara 


Gibbings.  This  was  not  the  kind  of  venture 
to  appeal  to  her  old  public  and  it  seemed — 
like  other  returns  which  she  made  in  1932 
and  1934 — to  be  evidence  of  a  passing 
desire  for  a  glimpse  of  her  old  world  of  the 
theatre  rather  than  a  serious  intention  to 
win  back  her  former  place  in  it.  She  died  in 
Newcastle  upon  Tyne  18  July  1956. 

[Who's  Who  in  the  Theatre ;  Burke's  Landed 
Gentry;  The  Times,  20  July  1956;  private 
information.]  W.  A.  Darlington. 

LOWE,  EVELINE  MARY  (1869-1956), 
first  woman  chairman  of  the  London 
County  Council,  was  born  29  November 
1869  in  Rotherhithe,  the  daughter  of 
the  Rev.  John  Farren,  a  Congregational 
minister,  and  his  wife,  Sarah  Saint  Giles. 
She  was  educated  at  Milton  Mount  College 
and  trained  as  a  teacher  at  Homerton 
College  where  she  became  a  lecturer  in 
1893  and  vice-principal  in  the  following 
year,  when  the,  college  removed  from 
London  to  Cambridge.  She  retired  in  1903 
on  her  marriage  to  George  Carter  Lowe, 
a  veterinary  surgeon  in  Bermondsey  who 
qualified  as  a  doctor  in  1911  and  went  into 
partnership  with  Alfred  Salter  who  was 
later  to  sit  for  many  years  as  Labour 
member  of  ParUament  for  West  Bermond- 
sey. Dr.  Lowe  was  a  quiet  and  modest 
man,  greatly  respected  by  all  who  knew 
him ;  his  death  in  1919  was  deeply  felt  by 
his  widow.  There  were  no  children. 

Early  in  her  married  life  Mrs.  Lowe  was 
elected  to  the  Bermondsey  Board  of 
Guardians  and  entered  upon  a  career  of 
pubUc  service  in  the  borough  in  the  course 
of  which  she  acquired  a  really  informed 
and  personal  knowledge  of  conditions  in 
the  London  home.  She  loved  Bermondsey 
and  lived  among  its  people  as  a  patently 
sincere  person  in  whom  everyone  could 
confide  on  terms  of  friendship.  For  many 
years  she  went  among  the  members  of  the 
Bermondsey  Independent  Labour  Party 
collecting  subscriptions,  delivering  notices, 
and  selling  copies  of  the  Bermondsey 
Labour  magazine.  At  election  times  she 
took  her  share  in  door-to-door  canvassing. 
In  1919  she  was  co-opted  a  member  of 
the  education  committee  of  the  London 
County  Council  on  the  nomination  of  C.  G, 
(later  Lord)  Ammon ;  three  years  later  she 
was  elected  to  the  Council  as  a  Labour 
member  for  West  Bermondsey,  a  con- 
stituency which  she  represented  luitil 
1946,  when  the  borough  showed  its  ap- 
preciation of  her  services  by  making  her 
a  freeman. 

The    Labovu:   Party    in    1922    was    in 


653 


Lowe 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


a  minority  on  the  Council  and  Mrs.  Lowe 
became  leader  of  the  opposition  on  the 
education  committee.  Although  she  took 
part  in  other  work  at  County  Hall  she 
specialized  on  the  work  of  the  education 
department  and  when  the  Labour  Party 
won  its  majority  in  1934  it  was  with  every 
confidence  that  Herbert  Morrison  recom- 
mended that  Mrs.  Lowe  should  be  the 
chairman  of  the  education  committee. 
She  held  this  heavy  post  of  great  responsi- 
bility until  1937.  Mrs.  Lowe  knew  about 
education ;  moreover  she  had  a  keen  and 
incisive  mind  coupled  with  a  rare  patience 
and  kindliness;  she  was  wise  in  her 
recommendations  as  to  the  chairmen  and 
vice-chairmen  of  sub-committees;  she 
handled  her  Labour  colleagues  well  and 
was  courteous  to  the  Conservative  opposi- 
tion, commanding  their  respect,  if  not 
their  agreement,  at  all  times.  She  was  not 
a  keen  party  politician ;  she  thought  more 
of  the  children  and  their  education  than 
she  did  of  party  strategy.  Nor  was  she 
happy  with  newspapermen :  she  was  polite 
but  distant,  rather  cold,  and  obviously 
doubtful  of  them.  Nevertheless,  when  she 
took  the  chair  at  a  press  conference  called 
to  launch  a  three-year  education  plan,  in 
the  preparation  of  which  she  had  played 
a  leading  part,  Mrs.  Lowe  came  through 
the  gruelling  task  of  answering  the  repor- 
ters' questions  with  flying  colours. 

In  1929-30  Mrs.  Lowe  served  as  deputy 
chairman  of  the  Council  and  ten  years 
later  she  was  elected  the  first  woman  chair- 
man. She  discharged  the  responsibilities  of 
this  high  office  with  dignity,  impartiality, 
and  competence.  It  was  the  Council's 
jubilee  year  and  as  its  chairman  Mrs.  Lowe 
attended  many  public  functions  and  cere- 
monies, winning  praise  from  all  parties  for 
her  charm,  intelligence,  and  sincerity.  The 
outbreak  of  war  brought  sterner  duties 
and  new  responsibilities  which  she  met 
with  her  usual  courage  and  calm  resource- 
fulness. In  all  her  public  work  Mrs.  Lowe 
was  a  woman  of  great  integrity.  She 
never  sought  personal  publicity  or  politi- 
cal kudos;  she  was  not  a  careerist  and 
resisted  all  pressure  to  enter  Parliament. 
Her  biggest  mission  in  life  was  to  improve 
and  promote  London  education  and  the 
mental  and  physical  well-being  not  only  of 
London's  children  but  of  the  adolescents 
who  attended  the  polytechnics  and  even- 
ing institutes,  the  young  people  whom  the 
Council  helped  to  get  a  university  educa- 
tion, and  the  teaching  staff.  In  the  course 
of  her  lifetime  public  education  ceased  to 
be  regarded  as  a  concession  and  came  to  be 


accepted  as  the  birthright  of  every  child 
in  a  welfare  State ;  it  was  her  life  work  to 
help  to  bring  about  this  change  in  the 
climate  of  pubUc  opinion. 

After  her  retirement  from  the  Council  in 
1946  Mrs.  Lowe  was  co-opted  for  a  further 
three  years  as  a  member  of  the  education 
committee,  on  which  she  thus  served  in  all 
for  thirty  years.  She  was  at  different  times 
a  member  of  twelve  other  of  the  Coimcil's 
committees  and  chairman  of  three  of 
them.  She  represented  the  Council  on  the 
Burnham  Committee,  the  Child  Guidance 
Council  and  the  London  (Central)  Ad- 
visory Committee  for  Juvenile  Employ- 
ment. She  was  also  closely  connected  with 
the  university  of  London,  representing  the 
Council  on  the  court  and  on  the  councils 
of  Bedford  College  (of  which  she  was 
a  governor)  and  the  Institute  of  Educa- 
tion, and  on  the  training  colleges  delegacy. 
In  1950  the  university  conferred  upon  her 
the  honorary  degree  of  LL.D.  She  died  in 
Dulwich  30  May  1956.  A  portrait  by  A.  K. 
Lawrence  is  in  the  Ayes  Lobby  at  County 
Hall.  A  primary  school  of  advanced 
design  in  the  Old  Kent  Road  district  of 
Southwark  has  been  named  after  her. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Morrison  of  Lambeth. 

LOWKE,  WENMAN  JOSEPH 
BASSETT-  (1877-1953),  model  maker. 
[See  Bassett-Lowke.] 

LOWRY,        CLARENCE       MALCOLM 

(1909-1957),  author,  was  born  at  Liscard, 
Cheshire,  28  July  1909,  the  youngest  son 
of  Arthur  Osborne  Lowry,  cotton  broker, 
by  his  wife,  Evelyn  Boden,  both  Metho- 
dist teetotallers. 

He  was  educated  at  Caldicote  prepara- 
tory school,  Hitchin,  and  the  Leys  School, 
Cambridge.  He  won  the  Junior  Public 
Schools  Golf  Championship,  played  the 
ukelele,  wrote  jazz  music  and  poems. 
Before  going  up  to  St.  Catharine's  College, 
Cambridge,  he  persuaded  his  father  to 
send  him  to  sea  as  'the  quickest  way  out  of 
Liverpool'.  A  voyage  to  the  China  Seas 
(May-October  1927)  provided  material 
for  his  first  novel  Ultramarine.  There  fol- 
lowed a  year  at  the  English  School  in  Bonn 
and  a  visit  to  the  poet  Conrad  Aiken  in 
Cambridge,  Massachusetts,  before  he  went 
to  St.  Catharine's.  Aiken  and  Nordahl 
Grieg  the  novelist  whom  he  visited  in 
Norway  as  an  undergraduate  became  his 
lifelong  literary  fathers.  He  left  Cam- 
bridge in  1932  with  an  undistinguished 
third   class   in   the   English   tripos   and 


654 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lowry 


a  fabulous  reputation  as   a  writer  and 
drinker  of  enormous  capacity. 

Recognizing  both,  his  father  throughout 
his  lifetime  made  an  allowance,  generous 
enough,  he  hoped,  to  allow  him  to  write 
and  insufficient  for  him  to  drink  himself  to 
death. 

In  1933,  after  many  rewritings  and 
a  characteristic  loss  of  the  manuscript, 
Lowry  published  Ultramarine,  distin- 
guished from  other  'before  the  mast' 
novels  by  its  subjectivity  and  symbolic 
undertones. 

In  December  1933  Lowry  married,  in 
Paris,  a  young  New  York  writer,  Jan 
Gabrial,  whom  Aiken  had  introduced  in 
the  hope  that  she  would  solve  Lowry's 
alcoholic  problem.  The  marriage  was 
turbulent  and  in  1935  Lowry  went  to 
New  York  ahead  of  her,  seeking  new 
material  for  his  autobiographical  myth. 
After  an  alcoholic  fugue,  he  was  given 
brief  treatment  in  Bellevue  Hospital.  Out 
of  this  experience  he  wrote  Lunar  Caustic, 
a  novella  frequently  revised,  but  only 
posthumously  published :  in  Paris  Review 
(No.  29)  in  1963  and  in  book  form  in  1968. 

Joined  by  Jan,  Lowry  drifted  first  to 
Los  Angeles,  then  to  Mexico,  where  they 
rented  a  villa  in  Cuernavaca  in  1936. 
Attracted  by  the  Mexican  awareness  of 
death,  Lowry  wrote  a  short  story  about 
the  roadside  death  of  an  Indian.  This 
became  the  central  episode  of  Under  the 
Volcano.  But  before  this  was  published 
much  had  to  happen. 

After  a  period  of  sobriety,  Lowry 
started  drinking  again.  When  his  wife  left 
him  and  went  to  Los  Angeles  in  December 
1937  he  plunged  into  the  alcoholic  abyss, 
seeking  there  his  literary  subject.  He  was 
gaoled  in  Oaxaca  and  in  July  1938  de- 
ported. He  followed  Jan  to  Los  Angeles 
but  she  refused  to  see  him  and  demanded 
a  divorce.  He  met  Margerie  Bonner, 
another  American  aspirant  writer,  and 
after  his  divorce  married  her  in  December 
1940  in  Canada  where  he  lived,  with  inter- 
missions, until  1954. 

Working  for  the  most  part  in  a  seashore 
shack  at  DoUarton,  British  Columbia, 
Lowry  wrote  and  rewrote  Under  the 
Volcano,  descriptive  of  the  Day  of  the  Dead 
in  Mexico,  1938,  the  last  day  in  the 
life  of  the  drunken  consul  Geoffrey  Firmin 
and  his  wife  Yvonne.  Lowry  was  aided  by 
Margerie,  a  simple  life,  and  wartime  scar- 
city of  hard  liquor  and  by  June  1945  the 
fourth  and  final  version  was  finished  and 
dispatched. 

in  the  summer  of  1944  the  DoUarton 


shack  burnt  down  and  the  Lowrys  tried 
to  rebuild  it  themselves.  It  was  not  com- 
pleted by  the  winter  of  1945  and  in 
December  Lowry  took  his  second  wife  to 
Mexico  to  show  her  places  and  people 
described  in  Under  the  Volcano,  hoping 
incidentally  to  find  material  for  a  new 
novel.  Although  their  visit  was  cut  short 
by  the  Mexican  authorities,  he  found 
material  for  two  novels,  never  finished. 
Dark  as  the  Grave  Wherein  my  Friend  is 
Laid,  edited  by  Professor  Douglas  Day 
and  Margerie  Bonner  Lowry  from  Lowry's 
notes  and  drafts,  appeared  in  1968.  La 
Mordida  awaited  similar  editing. 

While  in  Mexico  in  1946  Lowry  learnt  of 
the  acceptance  of  Under  the  Volcano  by 
Reynal  and  Hitchcock  in  the  United 
States  and  of  the  interest  of  Jonathan 
Cape  [q.v.]  provided  the  book  was 
drastically  revised.  In  rebuttal  of  Cape's 
arguments,  Lowry  wrote  an  astonishing 
15,000-word  letter  explaining  the  plan  and 
purpose  of  his  masterpiece  'so  designed, 
counterdesigned  and  interwelded  that  it 
could  be  read  an  indefinite  number  of 
times  and  still  not  have  yielded  all  its 
meanings  or  its  drama  or  its  poetry'.  No 
author  has  ever  written  so  brilliant  a 
defence  and  exposition  of  his  work.  The 
achievement  is  the  more  astonishing  since 
Lowry  was  drinking  heavily  throughout 
and  at  one  point  attempted  suicide. 

A  work  of  genius.  Under  the  Volcano  has 
glaring  faults.  Lowry  partially  distributed 
elements  of  his  personality  and  experience 
among  the  main  male  characters,  but  the 
wife  Yvonne  begins  as  Jan  Gabrial  and 
ends  as  Margerie  Bonner  without  ever 
attaining  substance.  Its  success  after 
publication  in  1947  was  immediate  in  the 
United  States  and  Canada,  not  long 
delayed  in  France,  but  slower  in  Great 
Britain.  American  students  of  Eng.  Lit. 
found  it  a  treasury  of  Ph.D.  theses,  as 
rich  in  literary  allusions  and  cross- 
references  as  Ulysses,  if  not  Finnegans 
Wake.  Lovers  of  literature  cherish  it  for 
the  robustness  of  its  humour,  the  beauty 
of  its  description,  the  resonance  of  its 
imagery,  the  intricacy  of  its  mosaic  pat- 
tern, the  preservation  of  sanity  within 
insanity,  and  the  Faustian  sense  of  the 
spiritual  damnation  in  attempting  through 
alcohol  to  take  a  short  cut  to  mystical 
illumination. 

Lowry  intended  all  his  work  to  be  part 
of  a  vast  corpus  called  The  Voyage  That 
Never  Ends,  of  which  Under  the  Volcano 
was  the  central  novel.  Perhaps  for  that 
reason  the  work  on  the  rest  never  ended  in 


655 


Lowry 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


the  lifetime  which  was  cut  short,  after 
several  attempted  suicides,  by  his  death 
*by  misadventure',  27  June  1957,  at  Ripe, 
Sussex,  where  he  and  his  wife  had  been 
living  since  1955.  Hear  Us  O  Lord  From 
Heaven  Thy  Dwelling  Place,  a  collection  of 
short  stories  and  occasional  pieces  (1962), 
Selected  Poems  (1962),  Lunar  Caustic,  and 
Dark  as  the  Grave,  like  the  undergraduate 
novel  Ultramarine,  are  all  unmistakably 
by  the  author  of  tinder  the  Volcano.  But 
though  they  have  individual  passages  of 
beauty,  wit,  power,  and  strangeness,  their 
main  importance  is  that  they  provide  the 
foothills  by  which  the  more  easily  to  scale 
the  eminence  of  Lowry's  masterpiece. 
Leaving  aside  the  as  yet  unpublished  La 
Mordida,  the  most  important  aid  to  Under 
the  Volcano  (apart  from  the  letter  to  Cape 
printed  in  The  Selected  Letters,  1967),  is 
Dark  as  the  Grave  which  rehearses,  though 
with  deliberate  changes  of  fact,  the  events 
which  went  towards  the  composition  of 
Under  the  Volcano.  The  second  Mexican 
excursion  was  a  deliberate  reliving  of  the 
first,  in  the  conscious  hope  of  finding 
a  happier  end  and  the  unconscious  desire 
by  venturing  once  more  into  Hell  to  dis- 
cover a  self-fulfilment  (or  self-annihilation) 
which  had  not  been  found  in  the  Paradise 
of  DoUarton. 

{The  Selected  Letters  of  Malcolm  Lowry,  ed. 
Harvey  Breit  and  Margerie  Bonner  Lowry, 
1967 ;  'Portrait  of  Malcolm  Lowry',  especially 
Professor  Douglas  Day,  B.B.C.  Third  Pro- 
gramme, 1967;  Conrad  Knickerbocker,  'Mal- 
colm Lowry  in  England',  Paris  Review,  No. 
38,  1966  (an  untrustworthy  source);  personal 
knowledge.]         Arthur  Calder-Marshall. 

LYLE,  CHARLES  ERNEST  LEONARD, 
first  Baron  Lyle  of  Westbourne  (1882- 
1954),  industrialist  and  politician,  was 
born  at  Highgate,  London,  22  July  1882, 
the  only  son  of  Charles  Lyle  and  his  wife, 
Margaret  Brown.  He  was  educated  at 
Harrow,  Trinity  Hall,  Cambridge,  and 
Kahlsruhe  University,  from  which  he 
joined  the  family  sugar  refining  firm  of 
Abram  Lyle  &  Sons. 

Lyle  was  always  a  fine  athlete  with 
a  catholic  taste  in  games.  He  represented 
England  at  lawn  tennis  and  was  a  well- 
known  figure  at  Wimbledon  and  was  thus 
particularly  suited  to  be  chairman  of  the 
Lawn  Tennis  Association  in  1932  and  later 
an  honorary  fife  vice-president.  He  was 
the  first  chairman  of  the  International 
Lawn  Tennis  Club  from  1924  to  1927.  His 
remarkable  eye  also  enabled  him  to  hit 
a  long  ball  on  the  golf  course,  but  he  was 


never  a  championship  player  and  he 
mainly  owed  his  tenure  of  the  presidency 
of  the  Professional  Golfers'  Association 
from  1952  to  1954  to  qualities  of  good 
fellowship.  He  was  also  a  keen  yachtsman 
and  was  elected  a  member  of  the  Royal 
Yacht  Squadron  in  1952. 

Lyle's  political  career  started  when  in 
1918  he  became  the  Coalition  Unionist 
member  of  Parliament  for  the  Stratford 
division  of  West  Ham,  a  part  of  London 
which  he  knew  well  and  with  which  he 
remained  closely  associated  as  chairman 
for  many  years  of  Queen  Mary's  Hospital, 
the  maternity  wing  of  which,  named  after 
his  mother,  owed  much  to  his  personal 
efforts  for  its  endowment.  He  was  defeated 
in  the  1922  general  election  and  did  not 
stand  for  Stratford  again.  In  1923  he  was 
elected  Conservative  member  for  Epping 
which  he  represented  for  only  a  year, 
after  which  he  stood  down  to  be  succeeded 
by  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill.  Lyle  did  not 
stand  again  for  Parliament  until  1940  ^ 
when  he  was  elected  Conservative  member 
for  Bournemouth  where  he  had  gone  to 
live.  He  stood  again  in  1945  when  he 
obtained  the  largest  Conservative  majority 
of  that  election,  and  shortly  afterwards 
went  to  the  House  of  Lords.  He  had  been 
knighted  in  1923  and  created  a  baronet  in 
1932. 

Lyle  was  an  active  and  influential  back- 
bencher who  took  a  special  interest  in 
Commonwealth  affairs  and  the  preserva- 
tion of  the  rights  of  the  individual.  These 
interests  led  him  to  become  the  chairman 
of  the  Empire  Industries  Association,  for 
which  he  spoke  fearlessly  and  powerfully. 
Later  he  became  president  of  the  Aims  of 
Industry,  an  organization  devoted  to  the 
promotion  of  free  enterprise. 

His  interest  in  the  West  Indies,  and  par- 
ticularly in  Jamaica,  was  far  warmer  than 
one  would  have  expected  merely  from  the 
fact  that  he  was  chairman  of  Tate  &>  Lyle's 
subsidiary  company  there.  He  contrived 
to  reach  out  across  what  might  have  been 
formidable  barriers  of  misunderstanding 
and  form  a  deep  personal  friendship  with 
(Sir)  Alexander  Bustamante  who,  in 
addition  to  being  then  chief  minister,  was 
also  leader  of  the  trade  union  with  the 
largest  following  in  the  sugar  industry. 
So  far  from  regarding  Lyle  as  a  wicked 
'Sugar  Baron',  Bustamante  never  ceased 
to  express  his  affection  and  admiration  for 
him  long  after  Lyle  had  died. 

Lyle's  industrial  interests  were  almost 
exclusively  concerned  with  his  family 
firm  of  Abram  Lyle  &  Sons  which  amalga- 


^50 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lynskey 


mated  in  1921  with  Henry  Tate  &  Sons  to 
form  Tate  &  Lyle.  He  was  a  member  of 
the  boards  of  other  companies,  but  these 
never  absorbed  his  full  attention.  He  be- 
came the  chairman  of  Tate  &  Lyle  at  the 
early  age  of  forty  and  continued  in  this 
office  until  he  became  president  of  the 
company  in  1937.  He  will  be  best  remem- 
bered for  his  outspoken  opposition  to 
the  nationalization  of  the  sugar-refining 
industry  as  proposed  by  the  Labour 
administrations  of  1945-50  and  1950-51. 
He  employed  robust  but  never  undigni- 
fied methods  to  put  his  case  against 
nationalization  before  what  he  called  'the 
tribunal  of  the  great  British  public'.  He 
was  deliberately  provocative  and  to  be  so 
employed  the  device  of  an  animated  and 
slightly  grotesque  cartoon  figure  known  as 
'Mr.  Cube',  which  became  the  symbol  of 
anti-nationalization.  Lyle's  forceful  state- 
ments were  always  his  own.  They  were 
uttered  in  a  characteristic  yet  somehow 
unexpectedly  gentle  voice,  which  in  no 
way  robbed  them  of  their  pungency. 

Lyle,  who  acted  with  the  authority  of 
an  overwhelming  majority  of  his  com- 
pany's shareholders,  endured  with  great 
good  humour  many  personal  clashes  with 
Labour  spokesmen.  But  in  spite  of  much 
hard  hitting,  there  was  never  malice,  and 
he  died  as  he  had  lived,  a  man  who  was 
popular  with  all  his  acquaintances  and 
loved  by  his  intimates.  Even  in  his 
seventies  he  gave  the  appearance  of  some- 
one who  had  only  recently  ceased  to  be 
an  active  sportsman,  and  this  no  doubt 
helped  him  to  overcome  occasional  bouts 
of  ill  health,  and  to  stand  the  strain  of  the 
major  political  campaign  which  he  ini- 
tiated, dominated,  and  won  for  his  com- 
pany late  in  life. 

In  1904  Lyle  married  Edith  Louise  (died 
1942),  daughter  of  John  Levy.  They  had 
two  daughters  and  one  son,  Charles  John 
Leonard  (born  1905),  who  succeeded  him 
when  he  died  in  Bournemouth  6  March 
1954.  A  posthumous  portrait  by  Bernard 
Dunstan  hangs  in  the  board-room  of 
Tate  &  Lyle. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Peter  Runge. 

LYNSKEY,     Sir     GEORGE     JUSTIN 

(1888-1957),  judge,  was  born  at  West 
Derby,  Liverpool,  5  February  1888,  the 
son  of  George  Jeremy  Lynskey,  a  pro- 
minent solicitor  in  the  city,  and  his  wife, 
Honora  Mary  Kearney.  He  was  educated 
at  St.  Francis  Xavier's  College  and  the 
university  of  Liverpool  where  he  graduated 


LL.B.  (1907),  LL.M.  (1908),  and  was  later 
proud  to  receive  the  honorary  degree  of 
LL.D.  (1951).  Entering  his  father's  firm  he 
quaUfied  as  a  solicitor  and  was  awarded 
the  Rupert  Bremner  gold  medal  of  the 
Law  Society  in  1910.  In  1920  he  was  called 
to  the  bar  by  the  Inner  Temple,  joined  the 
Northern  circuit,  and  quickly  acquired  one 
of  the  largest  practices  known  at  the 
junior  bar  in  the  present  century  which 
enabled  him  to  take  silk  in  1930.  As 
a  leader  his  practice  continued  to  grow  so 
that  between  1930  and  the  outbreak  of 
war  in  1939  there  were  but  few  cases  at 
the  Liverpool  and  Manchester  assizes  in 
which  he  was  not  briefed  to  appear. 

His  calm,  reasoned,  and  untheatrical 
style  of  advocacy  caused  Lynskey  to 
become  respected  as  a  formidable  op- 
ponent; the  extent  and  quality  of  his 
work  soon  made  him  well  known  also  in 
London  and  it  became  obvious  that  he  was 
destined  to  join  the  long  line  of  Northern 
circuit  advocates  to  receive  judicial  pre- 
ferment. His  first  experience  of  the  bench 
came  in  1937  when  he  was  appointed  to  be 
the  judge  of  the  Salford  Hundred  Court  of 
Record,  a  position  which  he  filled  with 
distinction  and  held  (in  the  early  years  of 
the  war  concurrently  with  the  chairman- 
ship of  the  North- West  Region  advisory 
committee  on  aliens)  until  1944  when  he 
was  elevated  to  the  King's  Bench  division 
with  the  customary  knighthood. 

Meanwhile  in  1938  he  had  been  elected 
a  bencher  of  the  Inner  Temple  where  his 
kindly  convivial  and  genial  nature  won 
him  many  friends  as  it  had  done  already 
among  the  circuiteers  in  the  north.  As 
a  judge  he  rapidly  and  fully  justified  the 
golden  opinions  which  the  legal  profession 
had  formed  of  him  at  the  bar.  In  1948  he 
enhanced  an  already  great  reputation  by 
his  chairmanship  of  the  long  judicial 
inquiry  into  allegations  concerning  activi- 
ties connected  with  the  Board  of  Trade. 

Lynskey  was  regarded  by  his  contem- 
poraries as  possessing  an  immensely  wide 
knowledge  of  the  practice  of  the  law  which 
he  was  at  all  times  ready  to  put  at  the 
disposal  of  the  many  who  were  accustomed 
to  seek  advice  which  invariably  he  seemed 
able  to  give  with  the  authority  of  one  who 
had  encountered  and  dealt  with  the  pre- 
cise question  involved.  His  clear  and 
quick  mind  and  wide  experience  of  the 
practice  of  the  law,  coupled  with  a  quiet 
manner,  always  courteous  and  patient, 
caused  confident  expectation  of  his 
judicial  advancement,  but  he  declined 
promotion  to  the  Court  of  Appeal  when  it 


657 


Lynskey 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


was  proposed  to  him  by  Lord  Jowitt 
[q.v.].  He  died  21  December  1957  while 
presiding  as  the  assize  judge  at  Manchester 
on  the  Northern  circuit  which  he  loved  so 
well ;  it  was  said  of  him  at  that  time  {Law 
Times,  3  January  1958)  that  'by  many 
competent  to  make  the  assessment  he  was 
reckoned  the  soundest  of  the  puisne 
judges,  with  an  especial  talent  for  finding 
a  short  way  to  torpedo  ingenious  but  bad 
points'. 

Lynskey  was  a  devout  Roman  Catholic 
whose  religion  and  home  life  formed  the 
basis  of  his  work.  In  1913  he  married 
Eileen,  daughter  of  John  Edward  Prend- 
wille,  of  Liverpool ;  they  had  two  daugh- 
ters. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Fred  E.  Pritchard. 

MacALISTER,     Sir     (GEORGE)     LVN 

(1878-1957),  secretary  of  the  Royal 
Institute  of  British  Architects,  was  born 
in  Liverpool  1  April  1878,  the  younger  son 
of  (Sir)  John  Young  Walker  MacAlister, 
hbrarian,  later  secretary  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Medicine,  by  his  wife,  Elizabeth 
Batley.  He  was  a  nephew  of  Sir  Donald 
MacAlister  [q.v.],  chancellor  of  Glasgow 
University.  He  was  educated  at  St.  Paul's 
School,  where  he  was  a  foundation  scholar, 
and  as  an  exhibitioner  of  Merton  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  obtained  second  classes 
in  honour  moderations  (1899)  and  literae 
humaniores  (1901).  In  1902-4  he  was 
aide-de-camp  and  secretary  to  the  Earl 
of  Dundonald  [q.v.],  general  officer  com- 
manding the  Canadian  Army.  After  leav- 
ing Canada  and  before  going  to  the  Royal 
Institute  of  British  Architects  in  1908 
MacAlister  was  a  freelance  journalist 
particularly  interested  in  the  Common- 
wealth and  in  naval  and  military  history 
as  well  as  history  and  politics  in  general. 
In  the  war  of  1914-18  he  was  a  lieutenant 
in  the  Royal  Defence  Corps. 

MacAlister's  long  tenure  of  office  until 
his  retirement  in  1943  saw  remarkable 
changes  in  the  Royal  Institute  of  British 
Architects  for  which  he  was  in  a  large 
measure  responsible.  Until  the  early  part 
of  the  century  the  Institute  was  very 
much  a  London  society;  its  members  in 
the  provinces  and  overseas  had  very  little 
influence  in  its  government.  MacAlister 
was  determined  to  alter  this;  he  en- 
couraged and  helped  to  organize  the 
foundation  of  Allied  Societies  in  the 
provinces  and  the  Commonwealth ;  in  1908 
there  were  18  at  home  and  1  abroad ;  in 
1939, 73  and  34.  He  was  particularly  keen 


on  ensuring  closer  links  with  the  members 
in  the  dominions  and  the  Allied  Societies 
overseas.  Similarly  he  was  anxious  to 
secure  friendly  relations  with  the  American 
Institute  of  Architects  of  which  he  was 
elected  an  honorary  member  in  1936. 
Visitors  from  the  Commonwealth  and 
America  always  received  a  warm  and 
friendly  welcome. 

The  membership  of  the  Institute 
increased  greatly  during  MacAlister's 
secretaryship ;  at  the  same  time  standards 
of  qualification  were  raised.  He  worked 
enthusiastically  for  architectural  educa- 
tion especially  in  the  expansion  of  the 
Board  of  Architectural  Education  which 
was  responsible  for  maintaining  standards 
and  encouraging  the  growth  of  the 
recognized  schools  of  architecture.  Perhaps 
his  greatest  triumph  was  in  securing  the 
passing  of  the  Architects  Registration 
Acts  of  1931  and  1938.  He  bore  a  parti- 
cularly heavy  burden  in  advising  his 
council  on  the  policy  to  be  followed  when 
it  was  made  clear  by  the  Government  that 
they  would  not  agree  to  the  Institute's 
being  made  the  registering  authority.  He 
had  to  ensure  that  standards  would  not 
suffer  even  although  the  Institute  was  not 
in  complete  control.  There  were  many 
hard  struggles  but  in  the  end  he  was 
signally  successful  in  achieving  the  aims 
and  objects  which  he  and  the  council  had 
so  much  at  heart — ^the  greater  unity  of  the 
profession  and  the  competence  of  its 
members. 

In  1934,  the  centenary  year  of  the 
Institute,  and  the  year  in  which  he  was 
knighted,  MacAlister  organized  its  move 
from  its  old  home  in  Conduit  Street  to  its 
new  headquarters  in  Portland  Place. 

MacAlister  had  an  attractive  person- 
ality. He  was  good-looking  with  blue  eyes, 
a  high  colour,  an  expressive  mouth,  and 
a  winning  smile  which  added  charm  to  the 
warmth  of  his  greeting.  He  was  also  a 
persuasive  speaker  with  a  scholarly  choice 
of  phrase.  His  letters,  and  he  was  a  tire- 
less writer  of  letters  and  memoranda  on  a 
wide  variety  of  subjects,  professional  and 
otherwise,  were  full  of  shrewd  and  witty 
conmients.  He  always  preferred  to  write 
these  and  used  the  services  of  a  steno- 
grapher only  for  routine  correspondence. 
He  had  a  wholly  admirable  passion  for 
clear  concise  English  and  detested  slop- 
piness  and  the  use  of  commercial  jargon. 

Shortly  after  his  retirement  MacAlister 
was  knocked  down  by  a  motor-cyclist 
dispatch  rider  in  the  City  and  after  many- 
months    in    hospital    remained    a    semi- 


658 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Macaulay 


invalid  for  the  rest  of  his  life.  He 
moved  from  Hampstead  to  Tonbridge 
where  he  enjoyed  coaching  some  of  the 
senior  boys  at  Tonbridge  School  and  when 
his  health  allowed  was  a  regular  spectator 
at  the  school  cricket  and  rugby  matches. 
MacAlister  married  in  1909  Frances 
Dorothy,  elder  daughter  of  Robert  Cooper 
Seaton,  barrister,  and  later  classical 
master  at  St.  Paul's  School.  He  had  four 
daughters  and  three  sons  of  whom  the 
two  elder  lost  their  Uves  while  serving 
with  the  Royal  Air  Force  in  the  early 
part  of  the  war  of  1939-45.  He  died  at 
Tonbridge  10  June  1957.  A  portrait  by 
Harold  Knight  is  in  the  possession  of  the 
Royal  Institute  of  British  Architects. 

[The  Times,  11  June  1957;  Journal  of  the 
Royal  Institute  of  British  Architects,  July 
1957;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Cyril  D.  Spragg. 

MACAULAY,    Dame    (EMILIE)    ROSE 

(1881-1958),  author,  was  born  at  Rugby 
1  August  1881,  the  second  of  the  seven 
children  of  George  Campbell  Macaulay, 
then  assistant  master  at  Rugby  School, 
by  his  wife,  Grace  Mary,  daughter  of  the 
Rev.  William  John  Conybeare  [q.v.]. 
Among  her  Macaulay  antecedents  was 
the  historian.  Lord  Macaulay  [q.v.],  a 
first  cousin  of  her  paternal  grandfather. 
For  eight  years  of  her  childhood  her  family 
lived  at  Varazze  near  Genoa — a  time  of 
great  happiness  for  her — and  her  early 
education  was  mostly  from  her  parents. 
Then,  after  the  Macaulays  returned  to 
England  in  1894,  she  and  two  of  her  sisters 
attended  the  Oxford  High  School.  In  1900, 
thanks  to  the  generosity  of  her  uncle  and 
godfather,  R.  H.  Macaulay,  she  went  to 
Somerville  College,  where  she  read  history 
and  acquired  a  lasting  affection  for  the 
seventeenth  century.  She  was  awarded  an 
aegrotat  in  1903.  University  life  stimulated 
her  independence  and  she  lost  the  intense 
shyness  from  which  she  had  suffered  since 
leaving  Italy. 

Her  earliest  published  writings  were 
poems  entered  for  competitions  in  the 
Westminster  Gazette,  and  her  first  novel, 
Abbots  Verney,  appeared  in  1906.  By  1914 
she  had  written  six  more  novels;  one  of 
them.  The  Lee  Shore,  was  awarded  first 
prize  in  a  Hodder  and  Stoughton  novel 
competition  in  1912.  These  early  novels 
showed  much  promise,  but  her  satire  was 
still  embryonic,  taking  the  form  of  an 
earnest,  sometimes  naive,  questioning  of 
the  more  unreasonable  aspects  of  con- 
temporary society.  Her  books  of  poems, 


The  Two  Blind  Countries  (1914)  and 
Three  Days  (1919),  belong  to  this  early 
period.  Many  of  them  reveal  a  sensitivity 
to  beauty  in  nature  and  an  apprehension 
of  disquieting  unseen  influences. 

During  her  early  years  as  a  writer 
Rose  Macaulay  was  Uving  at  home  with 
her  family,  first  in  Wales  and  then  after 
1906  at  Great  Shelford  near  Cambridge, 
where  her  father  had  become  a  university 
lecturer  in  English.  Increasingly  she 
gravitated  towards  London  and  before 
long  acquired  a  flat  of  her  own  there — - 
again  thanks  to  her  wealthy  godfather — 
eventually  making  her  permanent  home 
in  Marylebone.  She  entered  eagerly  into 
the  literary  world,  which  in  the  years 
immediately  before  the  war  she  found 
both  dazzKng  and  entrancing.  After  1914 
she  took  part  in  various  kinds  of  war 
work,  but  this  did  not  prevent  her  from 
writing  more  novels;  What  Not  (1918) 
was  the  first  with  a  newly  satirical  flavour. 

It  was  in  the  twenties,  the  middle 
period  of  her  fiction,  that  Rose  Macaulay's 
talent  as  a  novelist  flowered.  Her  gentle 
irony,  effervescent  wit,  fastidious  turn 
of  phrase,  and  lightness  of  touch  in 
exposing  the  absurdities  of  the  day  won 
for  her  a  large,  varied,  and  enthusiastic 
pubhc.  Potterism  (1920)  was  the  first  of 
her  novels  in  that  decade ;  then  followed 
Dangerous- Ages  (1921),  which  was  awarded 
the  Femina  Vie  Heureuse  prize.  Her 
popularity  continued  with  Told  by  an  Idiot 
(1923),  Orphan  Island  (1924),  Crewe  Train 
(1926),  and  Keeping  up  Appearances 
(1928),  all  written  in  a  vein  of  detached 
amusement  at  the  follies  of  the  human 
race.  She  was  also,  at  this  time,  writing 
many  hvely  articles  for  the  daily  press,  as 
well  as  books  of  essays  with  a  more 
learned  flavour:  A  Casual  Commentary 
(1925)  was  followed  by  Catchwords 
and  Claptrap  (1926)  which  reflected  the 
pleasure  she  derived  from  the  English 
language  and  her  insistence  on  verbal 
precision. 

They  Were  Defeated  (1932),  her  only 
historical  novel,  centring  upon  Robert 
Herrick,  was  her  own  favourite  among 
her  books.  This  novel  and  her  brief, 
scholarly  study  Some  Religious  Elements 
in  English  Literature  (1931)  initiated  a  new 
stage  in  her  writing,  with  a  decidedly  more 
serious  emphasis.  Her  short  biography  of 
Milton  and  her  anthology  The  Minor 
Pleasures  of  Life  were  published  in  1934, 
as  well  as  her  novel  Going  Abroad.  In  1935 
she  began  writing  the  weekly  column 
'Marginal   Comments'    for   the   Spectator.' 


659 


Macaulay 


D.N.B.  Ift51-19fl0 


and  also  published  her  best  volume  of 
essays,  Personal  Pleasures ;  later  came  her 
book  of  literary  criticism  The  Writings  of 
E.  M.  Forster  (1938). 

During  the  war  of  1939-45  Rose 
Macaulay  wrote  little.  For  nearly  three 
years  she  served  as  a  voluntary  part-time 
ambulance  driver  in  London  and  her  life 
was  disrupted  by  bereavements,  illness, 
and  the  loss  of  all  her  belongings  when  her 
flat  was  bombed.  Her  next  two  books, 
T?iey  Went  to  Portugal  (1946)  and  Fabled 
Shore  (1949),  established  her  as^a  writer 
on  travel  and  travel  history,  a  field  she 
continued  to  explore  in  Pleasure  of  Ruins 
(1953).  Throughout  her  Ufe  she  delighted 
in  foreign  parts,  and  was  especially  fond 
of  the  Mediterranean  countries.  She 
returned  to  fiction  after  ten  years  with 
The  World  my  Wilderness  (1950)  which 
showed  that  new  depths  of  pity  had 
transmuted  her  satirical  approach.  A 
revivified  understanding  of  the  human 
heart  was  even  more  evident  in  her  final 
novel  The  Towers  of  Trehizond  (1956) 
which  was  awarded  the  James  Tait  Black 
memorial  prize.  During  her  last  years  she 
also  wrote  prolifically  for  periodicals  such 
as  the  Times  Literary  Supplement,  the 
Spectator,  the  New  Statesman,  the  Observer, 
and  the  Listener. 

In  1951  Cambridge  University  conferred 
an  honorary  Litt.D.  upon  her  and  in  1958 
she  was  appointed  D.B.E.  She  died 
suddenly  at  her  home  in  London  30 
October  1958. 

Three  volumes  of  her  letters  were  pub- 
lished posthumously.  The  first  two.  Letters 
to  a  Friend  (1961,  with  a  bibliography  of 
her  major  works  and  a  genealogy)  and 
Last  Letters  to  a  Friend  (1962),  contain 
letters  written  to  a  distant  cousin, 
the  Rev.  J.  H.  C.  Johnson,  S.S.J.E.,  dur- 
ing the  last  eight  years  of  her  life,  when 
she  returned  to  the  Anghcan  Chiu"ch  after 
a  long  estrangement.  Letters  to  a  Sister 
(1964)  is  a  selection  of  letters  to  her  sister 
Jean,  accompanied  by  a  fragment  of 
Venice  Besieged,  the  novel  she  was  working 
on  when  she  died. 

As  a  writer  Rose  Macaulay's  especial 
gift  was  the  ability  to  blend  irony  and 
sympathy,  to  express  fluently  the  thinking 
which  owed  as  much  to  an  affectionate 
nature  as  to  a  sparkling  wit.  She  possessed 
a  scholar's  learning  and  integrity  at  the 
same  time  as  the  flair  of  a  journalist :  the 
erudition  of  her  more  serious  works  was 
matched  by  the  brilliant  choice  of 
topical  targets  in  her  many  novels  (she 
wrote  twenty-three  in  all).  Her  character 


was  paradoxical.  A  gay  and  spirited 
conversationalist,  she  was  usually  reticent 
about  her  inmost  feelings  and  beliefs. 
She  was  beloved  by  an  exceptional 
number  and  variety  of  friends:  her 
kindness  and  interest  in  human  beings 
were  remarkable.  Yet  she  could  sometimes 
be  acid,  even  alarming.  Tolerant  in  the 
extreme  where  mere  frailty  was  concerned, 
she  was  severely  intolerant  of  anything 
which  seemed  to  her  stupid  or  vulgar.  In 
physique  she  was  wiry  and  long-limbed, 
with  an  appearance  of  fragility  that 
belied  her  remarkable  stamina — she  de- 
lighted in  strenuous  activities  such  as 
swimming.  She  also  joined  in  an  unceasing 
social  round,  and  habitually  overworked 
herself,  continuing  to  lavish  her  energy 
upon  Kterary  journalism  when  she  had  no 
financial  need.  By  preference  she  lived 
austerely,  although  she  was  very  comfort- 
ably off  towards  the  end  of  her  life. 
Seemingly  ageless,  she  never  lost  her 
eagerness  for  life,  which  gave  her  a 
special  affinity  with  the  young. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Constance  Babington  Smith. 

McBEY,  JAMES  (1883-1959),  etcher  and 
painter,  was  born  at  Newmill,  Foveran, 
near  Aberdeen,  23  December  1883,  the 
son  of  James  McBey,  farmer,  and  Annie 
Gillespie,  a  blacksmith's  daughter.  He  was 
educated  at  the  school  in  the  fishing 
village  of  Newburgh,  leaving  at  the  age  of 
fifteen  to  become  a  clerk  in  the  Aberdeen 
branch  of  the  North  of  Scotland  Bank.  His 
interest  in  etching  was  aroused  by  an 
article  in  the  Bcyy^s  Own  Paper,  and  in  the 
Aberdeen  Public  Library  he  found  a  copy 
of  Maxime  Lalanne's  TraiU  de  la  Gravure 
a  VEaU'Forte,  translated  by  S.  R.  Koehler, 
and  from  this  learned  the  rudiments  of 
etching.  In  1926  he  presented  the  library 
with  a  new  copy,  having  worn  out  the 
old  one.  At  the  age  of  seventeen,  with 
no  more  than  the  book-learning  thus 
acquired,  he  began  his  own  experiments 
with  etching,  using  zinc  plates  instead  of 
copper  because  they  were  cheaper.  His 
first  plate  of  any  note,  'Boys  Fishing', 
etched  in  1902,  already  showed  a  hint  of 
his  later  masterly  handling  of  line  and 
tone.  Two  years  later  he  was  transferred 
to  the  Edinburgh  branch  of  the  bank  and 
etched  *The  Dean  Bridge'  and  other 
local  subjects.  Back  in  Aberdeen  he 
devoted  his  leisure  for  two  years  to  draw- 
ing and  painting,  but  etching  still  re- 
mained his  principal  interest  and  most 
natural  form  of  expression. 


660 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


McCabe 


In  1910  he  took  the  drastic  step  of 
giving  up  the  bank.  He  went  to  Holland, 
determined  to  see  through  his  own  eyes 
the  scenes  which  Rembrandt,  the  greatest 
etcher  of  all  time,  had  depicted  with  so 
much  mastery.  He  was  no  servile  imitator 
of  the  Dutch  master  but  he  certainly 
learned  from  him  that  economy  of  line 
which  became  one  of  the  most  striking 
characteristics  of  his  own  work.  In  that 
summer  he  produced  twenty-one  plates. 
After  a  brief  period  in  Aberdeen  in  1911 
he  visited  Wales  and  Spain  and  had  his 
first  exhibition  at  the  Goupil  Gallery  in 
London.  Malcolm  Salaman,  the  accepted 
etching  critic  of  the  day,  immediately  saw 
the  value  of  the  young  Scotsman's  work. 
So  did  Martin  Hardie  [q.v.]  who  was  him- 
self an  etcher  as  well  as  an  official  of  the 
Victoria  and  Albert  Museum.  The  result 
of  their  praise  was  that  all  available 
prints  were  sold,  and  the  publication  of 
McBey's  future  work  was  taken  up  by 
Gutekunst  in  London  and  Davidson  in 
Glasgow.  McBey  had  now  enough  money 
to  set  out  once  more  on  his  travels. 
He  visited  Holland  again  and  then  went 
to  Morocco,  but  in  1911-14  he  also 
produced  etchings  of  Cornish  scenes.  Sand- 
wich, and  London's  Thames-side.  It  was 
the  last  which  gave  him  the  subjects 
for  two  of  his  most  successful  early  plates, 
*The  Lion  Brewery'  and  'The  Pool'. 
Here  he  was  treading  in  the  footsteps 
of  J.  A.  McN.  Whistler  [q.v.]  whom 
McBey  recognized  as  his  second  master 
after  Rembrandt. 

In  1916  he  went  to  France  and  while 
attached  to  the  Army  Printing  and 
Stationery  Service  in  Boulogne  and  Rouen 
made  some  drawings  of  the  battlefields; 
in  the  following  year  he  was  appointed 
official  artist  to  the  Egyptian  Expedition- 
ary Force.  He  remained  in  the  Near  East 
until  1919.  He  painted  General  AUenby, 
the  Emir  Feisal,  and  Lawrence  of  Arabia 
and  made  hundreds  of  water-colours. 
Much  of  his  work  there,  including  one  of 
his  finest  plates,  'Dawn.  Camel  Patrol 
Setting  Out',  is  now  in  the  Imperial  War 
Museum.  After  the  war  he  revisited 
Holland  and  went  to  Venice  where  he 
strove  to  emulate  Whistler  in  his  later, 
looser  manner,  and  if  his  etchings  of 
Venice  do  not  quite  reach  Whistler's 
standard  of  delicacy  they  are  none  the 
less  very  fine  prints. 

McBey  was  fortunate  in  finding  himself 
at  the  height  of  his  powers  during  the 
'etching  boom'  of  the  twenties.  In  1925 
Martin  Hardie  brought  out  a  catalogue 


raisonni  of  his  etchings  and  prints  and  in 
1929  MalcoUn  Salaman,  who  in  1924  had 
included  him  in  the  Studio  series  'Modern 
Masters  of  Etching',  pubUshed  a  well- 
illustrated  account  of  his  life  and  work. 
Some  of  McBey's  plates  were  sold  at  very 
high  prices,  at  that  time  the  highest  ever 
realized  by  the  work  of  a  living  etcher. 
In  1937  he  had  an  exhibition  of  his 
oil-paintings  at  Colnaghi's.  Examples  of 
his  work  are  preserved  in  the  British 
Museum,  the  Victoria  and  Albert  Museum, 
the  Maritime  Museum  at  Greenwich,  the 
Luxembourg  Gallery  in  Paris,  and  all  the 
principal  print  rooms  of  Great  Britain  and 
America.  There  is  a  James  McBey  Room 
and  Art  Library  in  the  Aberdeen  Art 
Gallery,  where  there  is  a  comprehensive 
collection  of  his  working  drawings,  water- 
colours,  trial  proofs,  and  etchings  (given 
by  an  American  collector,  H.  H.  Kynett). 
A  similar  collection  is  at  the  Boston 
Public  Library  in  Massachusetts  (given 
by  Albert  Wiggin)  and  one  at  the 
National  Gallery  in  Washington  (given  by 
Lessing  Rosenwald).  McBey  received  an 
honorary  LL.D.  from  Aberdeen  University 
in  1934. 

In  1931  McBey  married  Marguerite 
Huntsberry,  daughter  of  Adolf  Loeb,  of 
Philadelphia,  and  in  1942  he  himself 
became  an  American  citizen.  His  last 
years  were  spent  mostly  in  Tangier  and 
he  died  there  1  December  1959.  He  was 
buried  in  a  large  parkland  he  owned 
overlooking  the  Straits  of  Gibraltar. 
There  is  a  self-portrait  in  the  Imperial 
War  Museum,  a  pencil  sketch  by  Martin 
Hardie  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery, 
and  a  water-colour  by  the  same  artist  of 
McBey  sketching  in  the  Aberdeen  Art 
Gallery.  Gerald  Brockhurst  painted  him 
for  the  Boston  Public  Library.  He  also 
made  an  etching.  There  is  a  fine  bronze 
head  by  Benno  Schotz.  This  is  in  the 
Aberdeen  Art  Gallery  as  well  as  in  the 
Cummer  Gallery  of  Art  in  Jacksonville, 
Florida,  which  houses  another  large 
collection  of  McBey's  work. 

[The  Times,  3  December  1959;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

James  Laver. 

McCABE,  JOSEPH  MARTIN  (1867- 
1955),  rationalist,  was  born  at  Macclesfield 
12  November  1867,  the  son  of  William 
McCabe,  draper,  and  his  wife,  Harriet 
Kirk.  His  education  began  in  a  Roman 
Catholic  elementary  school  in  Gorton, 
Manchester,  in  which  district  he  was  later 
employed  in  a  local  warehouse.  Gorton 


661. 


McCabe 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


was  the  scene  of  some  of  the  worst  features 
of  the  industrial  revolution  and  some  of 
his  writings,  such  as  1825-1925:  a  Century 
of  Stupendous  Progress  (1925),  reveal  the 
impact  of  his  environment  upon  his 
thought.  The  Franciscan  fathers  observed 
his  exceptional  abiUty  and  character  and 
made  it  possible  for  him  to  enter  their 
preparatory  college  in  Manchester.  At  the 
end  of  May  1885  he  went  to  the 
Franciscan  Friary  at  Killarney  as  a  novice, 
taking  Antony  as  his  name  in  religion. 
A  year  later,  at  the  age  of  eighteen,  he 
made  his  simple  vows,  followed  three 
years  afterwards  by  his  solemn  profession. 
In  the  meantime  he  had  transferred  to 
Forest  Gate  to  study  for  the  priesthood. 
He  was  ordained  in  1890  and  was  professor 
of  philosophy  and  ecclesiastical  history 
at  Forest  Gate  for  the  next  five  years,  with 
the  exception  of  a  year  at  Louvain 
University  where  he  studied  philosophy 
and  Semitic  languages.  In  1895  he  was 
appointed  rector  of  a  new  foundation, 
St.  Bernadine's  College,  Buckingham ;  but 
from  the  time  of  his  novitiate  he  had 
entertained  doubts  on  the  validity  of  the 
Christian  faith  he  was  professing,  and 
he  now  found  himself  unable  to  continue. 
In  February  1896  he  left  his  order  and  the 
Roman  Catholic  Church  and  immediately 
plunged  into  a  lecturing  and  writing 
campaign  against  all  his  earlier  beliefs. 
Twelve  Years  in  a  Monastery  (1897)  was 
written  with  the  encoiKagement  of  (Sir) 
Leslie  Stephen  [q.v.],  and  in  the  same 
year  he  wrote  Modern  Rationalism  for  a 
group  which  by  1899  had  formed  itself 
into  the  Rationalist  Press  Association, 
Ltd.,  with  George  Jacob  Holyoake  [q.v.] 
as  chairman.  McCabe  was  one  of  the 
original  directors  and  remained  actively 
associated  with  the  Rationalist  Press  until 
a  year  or  so  before  his  death,  when  he 
resigned  because  he  felt  that  the  Associa- 
tion was  not  sufficiently  militant.  He  was 
also  closely  associated  with  the  National 
Secular  Society  and  delivered  many 
lectures  under  its  auspices. 

During  his  long  life  McCabe  worked 
indefatigably  for  rationalism  and  free- 
thought.  It  is  estimated  that  he  wrote 
over  two  hundred  books  and  pamphlets, 
many  of  which  were  first  published  in 
America.  He  translated  over  fifty  scien- 
tific and  free-thought  publications,  in- 
cluding Ernst  Haeckel's  Riddle  of  the 
Universe.  His  energy  seemed  inexhaust- 
ible and,  in  addition  to  his  prolific  literary- 
output,  he  went  on  lecture  tours  in  both 
hemispheres,    taking   part   in   numerous 


debates  with  popular  contemporary 
figures.  Because  of  his  unorthodox  views 
he  made  many  enemies;  in  consequence 
he  had  to  fight  hard  for  a  livelihood  and 
the  financial  necessity  of  writing  popular 
works  meant  that  his  considerable  scholar- 
ship was  at  times  obscured.  But  his  persis- 
tent efforts  gained  him  the  attention  of  the 
public,  mainly  on  account  of  his  fasci- 
nating exposition  of  the  many  aspects  of 
the  theory  of  evolution. 

McCabe  was  a  regular  lecturer  at  a 
number  of  ethical  and  progressive  soci- 
eties, including  for  many  years  the  South 
Place  Ethical  Society  and  the  South 
London  Ethical  Society.  It  was  his  wish 
that  he  should  be  known  as  an  agnostic, 
although,  as  he  stated  in  his  Biographical 
Dictionary  of  Modern  Rationalists  (1920), 
he  had  no  doubt  that  when  man's  know- 
ledge was  complete  materialism  would 
prove  to  be  the  correct  theory  of  reality. 
He  believed  that  the  Church  of  Rome  was 
an  enemy  of  the  people,  science,  and 
progress,  and  he  denounced  it  with  no 
uncertain  voice.  But  he  was  a  great 
humanist  and  believed  profoundly  in  man 
and  championed  many  unpopular  causes 
designed  to  free  man  from  the  tyranny  of 
Church,  squire,  and  industrial  magnate. 
In  his  Life  and  Letters  of  George  Jacob 
Holyoake  (2  vols.,  1908),  in  his  short 
biographies  of  Holyoake  (1922)  and  Robert 
Owen  (1920),  and  in  his  Century  of  Stupen- 
dous Progress,  he  showed  his  under- 
standing of  the  social  revolution  through 
which  Britain  had  passed.  His  facility  for 
biography  was  evident  in  studies  ranging 
from  Augustine  to  Abelard,  Goethe  and 
Edward  Clodd  [q.v.],  the  last  a  devoted 
colleague  and  friend.  Among  other  works 
may  be  mentioned  The  Splendours  of 
Moorish  Spain  (1935),  The  Golden  Ages 
of  History  (1940),  and  The  Testament  of 
Christian  Civilization  (1946),  a  piece  of 
painstaking  scholarship  in  which,  in  the 
role  of  advocatus  diaholi,  he  reproduced, 
mainly  in  his  own  translation,  extracts 
from  documents  reflecting  unfavourably 
upon  the  value  of  Christianity  to  civiliza- 
tion. 

In  1899  McCabe  married  Beatrice, 
daughter  of  William  Lee,  a  foreman  of 
works  at  Leicester,  where  McCabe  spent 
a  year  as  secretary  to  the  Leicester 
Secular  Society.  They  had  two  sons  and 
two  daughters.  McCabe  died  in  London 
10  January  1955. 

[J.  M.  McCabe,  Twelve  Years  in  a  Monas- 
tery, 1897;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  Joseph  Reeves. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


McCarrison 


McCARRISON,  Sir  ROBERT  (1878- 
1960),  medical  scientist,  was  born  in 
Portadown,  Ulster,  15  March  1878.  He 
was  the  second  son  of  Robert  McCarrison, 
of  Lisburn,  county  Antrim,  flax-buyer  for 
the  Island  Spinning  Company,  and  his 
wife,  Agnes  McCuUagh.  After  qualifying 
with  first  class  honours  in  medicine  in 
1900  at  Queen's  College,  Belfast,  and  the 
Richmond  Hospital,  Dublin,  he  entered 
the  Indian  Medical  Service  the  following 
year  and  sailed  for  India  on  his  twenty- 
third  birthday.  He  was  a  regimental 
officer  in  Chitral  (1902-4)  and  later  (1904- 
11)  agency  surgeon  in  Gilgit.  Chitral  is  at 
the  extreme  north-western  boundary  of 
what  was  then  the  Indian  Empire;  and 
in  this  remote  region  (in  his  words) 
*nature  makes  large-scale  experiments 
upon  man'.  In  the  summer  of  1903  his 
garrison  was  afflicted  with  an  apparently 
new  disease,  a  'three-day  fever',  which 
after  careful  investigation  he  correctly 
concluded  was  transmitted  by  the  sand- 
fly (Phlebotomus) ;  but  before  he  could 
prove  this  he  was  posted  to  Gilgit. 

At  the  foot  of  the  Himalayas  in 
Kashmir,  Gilgit  consisted  of  nine  villages. 
There,  as  at  Chitral,  goitre  was  endemic, 
and  was  accompanied  by  cretinism, 
deaf-mutism,  and  idiocy.  But  McCarrison 
noticed  that  one  of  the  villages  was 
spared,  and  this  had  a  water  supply  from 
a  pure  spring  whereas  the  other  eight  used 
a  polluted  surface  stream.  By  adding  the 
suspended  matter  of  the  impure  water 
to  the  pure  spring  water,  McCarrison 
produced  goitre  in  volunteers,  including 
himself,  and  thus  proved  the  presence  of 
a  goitrogenic  substance  which  enhanced 
deficiency  of  iodine.  In  1913  he  was 
assigned  for  special  study  of  goitre  and 
cretinism  in  Kasauli.  Although  inter- 
rupted by  the  war  of  1914-18,  his  re- 
searches spanned  thirty  years  (1905-35) 
and  received  wide  recognition.  Selwyn 
Taylor,  dean  of  the  Postgraduate  Medical 
School  of  London,  wrote  of  McCarrison's 
work  in  1953 :  'I  know  of  no  one  else  alive 
today  who  has  contributed  so  much  that 
is  new  to  so  many  varied  aspects  of  the 
goitre  problem.' 

McCarrison's  studies  of  the  thyroid 
gland  and  its  disorders  included  the 
effects  of  deficient  food  upon  that  organ, 
and  hence  he  was  led  in  1913  to  begin  a 
wider  investigation  into  the  nature  of 
deficiency  diseases.  But  in  October  1914 
he  went  on  active  service,  and  these 
studies  were  delayed  until  March  1918, 
when  he  returned  as  lieutenant-colonel  to 


India  and  was  assigned  an  empty  room  in 
the  Pasteur  Institute  at  Coonor.  There  he 
set  to  work,  his  apparatus  a  microscope 
and  a  microtome,  his  staff  a  clerk  bor- 
rowed from  the  post-office  and  his  wife's 
cook  who  was  released  when  a  Sikh, 
Mula  Singh,  returned  from  the  war.  In 
January  1920  McCarrison  was  invalided 
to  England  and  himself  paid  for  Mula 
Singh  to  accompany  him  to  the  laboratory 
of  (Sir)  Charles  Scott  Sherrington  [q.v.]  in 
Oxford  and  be  trained  in  histological 
methods.  Upon  McCarrison's  return  to 
India  in  1922  he  found  his  apparatus 
dispersed  and  his  room  again  empty.  He 
enlisted  the  support  of  another  Indian 
assistant  to  study  beri-beri,  but  the 
following  year  the  Inchcape  committee 
stopped  his  work  for  reasons  of  economy, 
and  he  resigned.  His  dogged  persistence 
and  Irish  powers  of  persuasion  stood 
him  in  good  stead,  and  in  1925  he  resumed 
his  research.  Lord  Linlithgow  [q.v.]  was 
deeply  impressed  when  in  1926,  as  chair- 
man of  the  royal  commission  on  agri- 
culture, he  insisted  on  seeing  the  work 
at  Coonor ;  a  member  of  his  commission, 
the  Rajah  of  Parlakimedi,  upon  hearing 
McCarrison's  exposition  immediately  gave 
a  lakh  of  rupees  to  assist  his  work.  In  1929 
McCarrison  was  appointed  director  of 
the  Nutrition  Research  Laboratories  at 
Coonor,  and  held  this  position  until  he 
retired  from  the  I.M.S.  as  major-general 
in  1935.  During  this  period,  with  en- 
couragement from  Linlithgow  as  viceroy, 
he  built  up  one  of  the  finest  institutes  for 
nutritional  research  in  the  world. 

McCarrison  then  went  to  live  in  Oxford. 
In  1939-45  he  was  chairman  of  the  local 
medical  war  committee,  and  deputy 
regional  adviser  in  medicine  to  the 
Emergency  Medical  Service.  From  1945 
to  1955  he  was  the  first  director  of  post- 
graduate medical  education  at  Oxford. 
On  his  seventy-fifth  birthday,  in  1953,  he 
was  presented  with  a  Festschrift,  entitled 
The  Work  of  Sir  Robert  McCarrison,  a 
volume  which  arose  from  the  request  of 
certain  Indian  scientists  in  particular  to 
be  able  to  have  ready  access  to  his 
important  papers.  These  were  reprinted, 
together  with  a  complete  bibliography 
and  introductory  assessments  of  the 
importance  of  his  work  by  H.  M.  Sinclair, 
by  W.  R.  Aykroyd  (who  succeeded  him  as 
director  at  Coonor),  and  by  the  great 
American  biochemist  E.  V.  McCoUum. 
What  gave  him  and  his  friends  especial 
pleasure  was  a  warm  tribute  sent  by  the 
Indian    minister    of    health,    Rajkumari 


663 


McCarrison 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Amrit  Kaur,  who  described  the  great 
debt  owed  to  McCarrison  by  India  and 
the  whole  world. 

This  debt  was  appreciated  by  world- 
wide recognition.  As  early  as  1911 
McCarrison  had  been  awarded  the  first 
class  Kaisar-i-Hind  gold  medal  for  public 
service  in  India,  and  in  1914  the  Prix 
Amussat  of  the  Academy  of  Medicine  of 
Paris  for  his  original  researches  on  goitre 
and  cretinism.  He  was  appointed  CLE. 
in  1923,  honorary  physician  to  the  King 
(1928-55),  and  was  knighted  in  1933. 
When  on  leave  in  1921  he  made  a  lecture 
tour  in  the  United  States,  giving  the 
Mellon  lecture  at  Pittsburgh,  the  Mary 
Scott  Newbold  lecture  at  Philadelphia, 
the  Hanna  lecture  at  Cleveland,  the  Mayo 
Foundation  lecture  at  Rochester,  and  the 
De  Lamar  lecture  at  Johns  Hopkins 
University,  Baltimore.  In  Britain  his 
lectures  included  the  Miboy  lectures 
before  the  Royal  CoUege  of  Physicians 
(1913),  the  Cantor  lectures  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Arts  (1936),  the  Lloyd-Roberts 
lecture  at  the  Medical  Society  of  London 
(1936),  and  the  Sanderson- Wells  lecture 
at  the  Middlesex  Hospital  medical  school 
(1939).  He  received  the  honorary  LL.D. 
of  Belfast  in  1919,  was  elected  F.R.C.P. 
in  1914,  and  was  awarded  various 
academic  prizes  and  medals.  A  McCarrison 
Society  has  been  founded  in  London. 

The  great  importance  of  McCarrison*s 
work,  not  properly  appreciated  at  the 
time  (he  was  never  elected  to  the  Royal 
Society),  lay  in  his  combination  of 
laboratory  experimentation  with  observa- 
tions in  the  field.  The  classical  paper  on 
vitamins  of  (Sir)  F.  G.  Hopkins  [q.v.]  was 
pubUshed  in  1912,  and  the  following  year 
McCarrison  began  his  field  work  on 
vitamin  deficiencies.  While  others  were 
studying  pure  deficiencies  of  single  nutri- 
ents in  lower  animals,  McCarrison  observed 
the  different  diseases  of  peoples  subsisting 
on  different  diets,  and  reproduced  these 
in  lower  animals  by  those  diets :  'My  own 
method,  on  the  other  hand,  has  been  to 
observe  the  more  general  symptomatic 
and  pathological  effects  of  faulty  food  on 
the  animal  body  as  a  whole,  and  thereby 
to  ascertain  what  forms  of  human  illness 
might  reasonably  be  attributed  to  it.* 
Despite  the  great  difficulties  in  his  way 
(his  advice  to  his  successor  was :  'Remem- 
ber, things  move  slowly  in  the  East'),  he 
was  a  pioneer  in  a  branch  of  medical 
science  that  has  been  shown  to  be  abun- 
dantly fruitful. 

McCarrison    married    in    1906    Helen 


Stella  (died  1968),  third  daughter  of  John 
Leech  Johnston,  of  the  Indian  Civil  Ser- 
vice. A  girl,  the  only  child,  was  stillborn  in 
Gilgit  in  1910.  McCarrison  died  in  Oxford 
18  May  1960.  A  bust  by  Lady  Kennet  is  in 
the  possession  of  the  family. 

[The  Work  of  Sir  Robert  McCarrison,  ed. 
H.  M.  Sinclair,  1958 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

H.  M.  Sinclair. 

MacCARTHY,  Sir  (CHARLES  OTTO) 
DESMOND  (1877-1952),  literary  and 
dramatic  critic,  the  only  son  of  Charles 
Desmond  MacCarthy  and  his  wife,  Louise 
Joanne  Wilhelmine  von  Chevallerie,  was 
born  20  May  1877  at  Plymouth  where  his 
father  was  sub-agent  to  the  Bank  of 
England.  He  was  educated  at  Eton  and 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  where  he 
graduated  {aegrotat)  in  history  in  1897. 
Desmond  MacCarthy's  mind  developed 
early  and  he  probably  changed  very  little 
in  himself  after  his  Cambridge  days,  for 
his  ability  then  to  choose  lifelong  friends 
was  as  mature  as  his  youthful  criticism 
proved  to  be  years  later:  some  of  the 
early  and  intimate  associations  he  made 
at  that  time  (he  was  an  'Apostle')  were 
with  G.  E.  Moore  [q.v.],  G.  M.  Trevelyan, 
and  the  children  of  (Sir)  Leslie  Stephen 
[q.v.]  and  their  circle.  His  talent  for 
criticism,  and  above  all  for  conversation, 
led  his  friends  to  expect  from  him  an 
important  creative  work  of  his  own :  but 
this  never  materialized  and  he  became 
what  he  himself  described  as  a  literary 
journalist.  He  began  as  a  freelance  and  by 
1903  he  was  writing  reviews  and  dramatic 
criticism  for  the  Speaker:  he  covered  for 
that  journal  the  Vedrenne-Barker  seasons 
at  the  Royal  Court  Theatre  where  he  saw 
many  of  the  plays  of  G.  B.  Shaw  [q.v.] 
for  the  first  time,  and  his  criticisms  of  these 
productions  were  included  in  his  first 
publication  The  Court  Theatre  1904-1907 
(1907).  When  the  Shavian  notices  were 
republished  in  Shaw  (1951),  together 
with  his  criticisms  of  later  productions 
of  the  same  plays,  although  he  had  some 
new  points  to  make,  MacCarthy  had  no 
judgements  to  withdraw. 

From  1907  to  1910  MacCarthy  edited 
the  New  Quarterly  and  he  wrote  regularly 
for  the  Eye-Witness  when  it  was  started 
in  1911  and  after  it  became  the  New 
Witness  the  following  year.  In  1913  he 
joined  the  staff  of  the  newly  formed 
New  Statesman,  as  dramatic  critic,  under 
the  editorship  of  Clifford  Sharp,  and  he 
was  later  (1920-27)  literary  editor,  re- 
viewing regularly  until  1929  over  the  pen- 


«64 


D.N.B.  1951-1960  MacCarthy,  C.  O.  D, 


name  'Affable  Hawk\  This  was  an  apt 
self -description ;  he  had  a  beak-like  nose 
and  friendly  eyes :  while  he  never  allowed 
personal  considerations  to  influence  his 
judgements  he  did  not  enjoy  inflicting 
pain,  preferring  to  ignore  a  bad  book 
unless  he  felt  that  an  attack  was 
demanded.  (His  review  of  a  Tennyson 
anthology  in  the  Sunday  Times  in  1946 
is  a  good  example  of  his  bird-of-prey 
descent  upon  something  which  had  earned 
his  disapproval.)  Soon  after  the  outbreak 
of  war  in  1914  he  joined  the  Red  Cross 
and  he  served  until  1915  with  a  section 
attached  to  the  French  Army:  some  of 
his  impressions  were  later  published  in 
Experience  (1935). 

His  full-time  association  with  the 
New  Statesman  lasted  until  he  succeeded 
Sir  Edmund  Gosse  [q.v.]  in  1928  as  senior 
literary  critic  on  the  Sunday  Times  in 
which  he  continued  to  write  weekly 
articles  until  he  died.  During  this  last 
period  he  also  wrote  occasional  dramatic 
criticism  for  the  New  Statesman-,  and 
Life  and  Letters  was  founded  in  1928 
primarily  to  give  MacCarthy  a  platform 
of  his  own.  He  was  editor  for  five  years 
but  the  experiment  was  not  entirely 
successful:  editing  and  the  meticulous 
organization  and  time-keeping  which  it 
involved  were  not  his  forte.  The  Sunday 
Times  gave  him  a  larger  public  and  the 
financial  security  and  position  which,  as  a 
man  of  the  world,  he  greatly  enjoyed. 
He  was  that  rare  type  of  critic  who  was 
read  and  appreciated  alike  by  the 
ordinary  reading  public  and  by  more 
intellectual  and  academic  readers.  Mac- 
Carthy beUeved  that  literary  appreciation 
and  judgement  must  always  be  based 
on  wide  reading  and  the  widest  possible 
general  knowledge  of  the  conditions  in 
which  books  were  written.  This  was  his 
fast  rule  and  if  necessary  he  would  visit 
the  London  Library  to  fill  in  any  gap  he 
felt  he  had  in  relation  to  a  particular  book. 
His  article  may  sometimes  not  have  been 
completed  until  the  eleventh  hour,  but 
it  was  never  written  without  full  prepara- 
tion and  knowledge  of  the  subject.  There 
was  always  in  his  work  the  precise  thought 
and  element  of  philosophic  interest  which 
he  had  learned  at  Cambridge.  When  he 
gave  the  Leslie  Stephen  lecture  there  in 
1987  he  chose  Stephen  as  his  subject. 
Just  as  he  measured  new  writing  with  the 
old  and  established,  so  he  tended  to 
measure  his  own  work  alongside  Leslie 
Stephen's,  and  on  one  occasion  he  insisted 
on  a  collection  of  his  own  writings  being 


disbanded  because  it  *fell  so  far  below 
the  standard  of  Hours  in  a  Library\ 
Desmond  MacCarthy  believed  that  'criti- 
cism must  be  in  great  part  a  Natural 
History  of  Authors'  and  like  Leslie 
Stephen  he  upheld  that  when  it  comes  to 
judgement  the  test  to  be  appUed  is  the 
relation  of  a  work  to  hfe,  the  extent  to 
which  it  ministers,  in  one  way  or  another, 
to  all  human  good.  He  was  'most  at 
home'.  Lord  David  Cecil  wrote  in  his 
preface  to  Humanities  (1953),  'with  the 
writers  who  do  not  go  in  for  spell-binding ; 
with  Tolstoy  and  Trollope,  Ibsen  and 
Chekhov.  These  last  two  particularly; 
for,  when  Desmond  MacCarthy  wrote 
about  them,  they  were  stiU  relatively 
uncharted  ground  for  the  critic  to  work  on, 
and  he  therefore  got  a  chance  to  display 
his  greatest  gift,  which  was  the  capacity 
to  understand  and  expound  some  new, 
fresh  vision  of  reality.' 

But  it  was  MacCarthy's  readableness 
which  made  hini  a  popular  success,  and 
his  easy  colloquial  style  came  into  its 
own  on  the  air.  After  the  theatre,  this 
was  the  work  he  enjoyed  most :  as  one  of 
the  best  conversationalists  of  his  time, 
broadcasting  was  an  art  he  excelled  in 
and  with  which  he  felt  completely  at  ease. 
His  pleasure  in  a  book  he  had  enjoyed  was 
infectious  and  it  was  increased  in  the 
following  days  if  he  heard  that  people  had 
bought  the  book  as  a  result  of  his 
review.  'I  wanted  to  give  that  author  a 
present',  he  would  say. 

As  a  young  man  he  delighted  in  coming 
to  know  writers  and  famous  people  and 
his  portraits  of  Samuel  Butler,  Meredith, 
Henry  James,  Shaw,  Conrad,  Ruskin,  and 
Asquith  are  among  his  best  pieces.  He  was 
always,  he  once  said,  a  hero-worshipper 
in  temperament,  although  not  on  paper, 
where  a  more  detached  being  took  the 
pen.  Latterly  his  habit  was  to  move  less 
in  purely  literary  circles.  He  had  never 
in  any  case  belonged  to  a  'set',  even  to  the 
Bloomsbury  group  although  its  members 
were  all  his  friends  and  he  saw  them 
frequently.  But  this  detachment  from 
professional  writers  did  not  prevent  him 
from  enjoying  their  company  from  time 
to  time  and  helping  them  by  drawing 
attention  to  their  work  and  giving  them 
encouragement.  He  also  assisted  young 
critics  to  master  their  craft,  and 
Raymond  Mortimer  and  Cyril  Connolly 
have  both  acknowledged  their  indebted- 
ness in  prefaces  to  his  first  posthimious 
book  of  essays  {Memories,  1953). 

Although  Desmond  MacCarthy  produced 


665 


MacCarthy,  C.  O.  D.  d.n.b.  losi-ioeo 


no  major  work,  seven  volumes  of  his 
collected  writings  were  published  during 
his  lifetime  and  of  these  probably 
Portraits  (1931)  and  Shaw  (1951)  will  best 
stand  the  test  of  time.  During  the  two 
years  following  his  death  three  more  new 
volumes  were  published  in  England,  and 
in  America  where  he  was  hitherto 
virtually  unknown,  and  his  reputation 
grew  rather  than  diminished.  An  honorary 
LL.D.  of  Aberdeen  University  (1932)  and 
in  1945  elected  president  of  P.E.N,  in 
England,  he  was  knighted  in  1951.  He 
died  in  Cambridge  7  June  1952,  two  days 
after  the  university  had  conferred  on  him 
the  honorary  degree  of  doctor  of  letters. 
He  married  in  1906  Mary  (died  1953), 
daughter  of  F.  W.  Warre-Cornish  [q.v.], 
the  vice-provost  of  Eton.  There  were  two 
sons  of  the  marriage  and  a  daughter 
who  married  Lord  David  Cecil.  Lady 
MacCarthy  was  herself  a  writer  of  ability 
— A  Nineteenth-Century  Childhood  (1924) 
and  her  novel  A  Pier  and  a  Band  (1918) 
appeared  in  new  editions  many  years 
after  their  first  publication.  MacCarthy 
was  proud  of  his  wife's  talent  and  during 
a  luncheon  party  at  Garrick's  Villa, 
Hampton,  where  they  latterly  lived,  he 
turned  to  her  with  his  infectious  chuckle 
and  said:  'Yes,  Molly,  you  must  go  on 
writing!  I  have  always  wanted  to  be 
Mister  Henry  Wood!'  A  portrait  of 
MacCarthy  by  Henry  Lamb  is  in  the 
National  Museum  of  Wales ;  drawings  by 
Duncan  Grant  and  Robin  Guthrie  are  in 
the  National  Portrait  Gallery. 

[The  Times,  9  and  20  June  1952;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

James  MacGibbon. 

McCarthy,     lillah     (1875-196O), 

actress,  was  born  in  Cheltenham  22 
September  1875,  the  third  daughter  and 
seventh  of  the  eight  children  of  Jonadab 
McCarthy,  furniture  broker,  and  his  wife, 
Emma  Price.  When  she  was  eight  her 
father,  a  handsome  imaginative  Irishman, 
whose  interests  ranged  between  furniture 
and  astronomy  (he  was  a  fellow  of  the 
Royal  Astronomical  Society),  decided  to 
teach  her  himself.  She  studied  with  him  at 
home  until,  on  the  advice  of  the  young 
actor-manager  (Sir)  Frank  Benson  [q.v.] 
whose  company  had  already  begun  to 
achieve  its  status  as  a  'touring  university 
Of  the  theatre',  Jonadab  McCarthy  moved 
to  London  so  that  his  daughter  might  be 
trained  in  elocution  with  Hermann  Vezin 
[q.v.]  and  voice  production  with  Emil 
Behnke.    As   an   amateur   she   appeared 


during  May  1895  as  Lady  Macbeth  in  a 
Shakespeare  Society  production  at  St. 
George's  Hall,  the  occasion  on  which  she 
first  used  the  stage  name  of  Lillah,  her 
real  names  being  Lila  Emma.  G.  B.  Shaw 
[q.v.],  who  went  to  the  play  for  the 
Saturday  Review  of  which  he  had  not  long 
been  dramatic  critic,  wrote  of  her:  'She 
is  as  handsome  as  Miss  [Julia]  Neilson; 
and  she  can  hold  an  audience  whilst  she 
is  doing  everything  wrongly  ...  I  venture 
on  the  responsibility  of  saying  that  her 
Lady  Macbeth  was  a  highly  promising 
performance,  and  that  some  years  of  hard 
work  would  make  her  a  valuable  recruit  to 
the  London  stage.' 

She  began  at  once  the  years  of  hard 
work  by  appearing  in  Shakespeare  with 
the  touring  manager  (Sir)  P.  Ben  Greet 
[q.v.],  and  in  playing  Berenice  in  the 
London  production  of  The  Sign  of  the 
Cross  (Lyric,  1896)  for  Wilson  Barrett 
[q.v.],  the  melodramatic  actor  with  whom 
she  spent  eight  years,  off  and  on,  touring 
England,  Australasia,  and  South  Africa. 
Her  parts  included  Mercia  in  The  Sign  of 
the  Cross^  Virginia  in  Virginius,  Desde- 
mona  in  Othello,  and  Ophelia  in  Hamlet. 
Barrett  had  intended  to  set  her  up  in 
her  own  company,  but  died  before  he 
could  do  so.  After  working  with  (Sir) 
Herbert  Beerbohm  Tree  [q.v.]  in  the 
theatrically  sumptuous  surroundings  of 
His  Majesty's  (among  her  parts  was 
Calpurnia  in  Julius  Caesar),  she  called 
upon  Shaw  to  tell  him  that  the  years  of 
apprenticeship  were  up.  In  consequence 
she  was  cast  presently  as  Nora  in  a 
revival  of  John  BulVs  Other  Island  (May 
1905)  and  Ann  Whitefield  in  the  original 
production  of  Man  and  Superman  (May 
1905),  each  play  produced  at  the  Court 
Theatre  by  Harley  Granville-Barker  [q.v.] 
whom  she  had  met  while  touring  with 
Greet.  She  played  through  the  Court 
season  of  1906,  succeeding  Tita  Brand  as 
Gloria  in  You  Never  Can  Tell  and  creating 
Jennifer  Dubedat  (whose  Celtic  quality 
she  could  suggest  with  ease)  in  The  Doctor's 
Dilemma.  By  now  this  tall,  statuesque 
young  woman  with  the  dark  velvet  voice 
was  bringing  to  every  part  a  sure  theatrical 
instinct :  her  fault  was  a  certain  heaviness. 
In  a  preface  to  her  autobiography  Shaw 
wrote :  'Lillah  McCarthy's  secret  was  that 
she  combined  the  executive  art  of  the 
grand  school  with  a  natural  impulse  to 
murder  the  Victorian  womanly  woman; 
and  this  being  just  what  I  needed  I 
blessed  the  day  when  I  found  her.' 

In  1906  she  married  Granville-Barker. 


666 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


MacDonald 


She  went  on  to  use  her  tragic  gift  in  the 
title-part  of  John  Masefield's  Gloucester- 
shire Nan  (Royalty,  1908).  Later,  in 
marked  contrast,  she  created  the  drawling 
Lady  Sybil  in  Barrie's  What  Every  Woman 
Knows  (Duke  of  York's,  1908) ;  and  she 
appeared  at  the  same  theatre  during 
the  repertory  season  of  1909  as  Madge 
Thomas  in  Galsworthy's  Strife.  Lillah 
McCarthy  needed  sustained  tragic  inten- 
sity: hence  her  success  (Court,  1911)  as 
Anne  Pedersdotter  in  The  Witch,  adapted 
by  John  Masefield  from  the  Norwegian 
of  H.  Wiers-Jenssen.  During  her  personal 
management  of  the  Little  Theatre  in  the 
Adelphi  during  1911,  she  played,  among 
other  parts,  Hilde  in  Ibsen's  The  Master 
Builder,  and  Margaret  Knox  in  Shaw's 
Fanny'' s  First  Play,  described  as  'a  strong, 
springy  girl  of  eighteen,  with  large 
nostrils,  an  audacious  chin,  and  a  gaily 
resolute  manner'.  Greek  tragedy,  which 
became  one  of  her  passions,  occupied  her 
at  the  beginning  of  1912:  Jocasta  in 
Oedipus  Rex,  presented  by  (Sir)  John 
Martin-Harvey  [q.v.]  at  Covent  Garden  in 
January,  and  Iphigenia  in  Iphigenia  in 
Tauris  at  the  Kingsway  in  March.  It  was 
almost  immediately  after  this  that  she 
entered,  with  her  husband,  upon  the 
management  of  the  Savoy  Theatre,  and 
later  of  the  St.  James's,  in  a  sequence  of 
provocative  and  historic  productions. 

At  the  Savoy  in  the  autumn  and  winter 
of  1912  she  was  Hermione  in  The  Winter's 
Tale  and  Viola  in  Twelfth  Night,  revivals 
from  which  all  stock  Shakespearian 
business  was  eradicated.  During  1913  her 
major  part  at  the  St.  James's  was 
Lavinia  in  Shaw's  Androcles  and  the  Lion ; 
she  returned  to  the  Savoy  in  February 
1914  as  Helena  in  her  husband's  third 
Shakespeare  production,  A  Midsummer 
Nighfs  Dream.  She  was  a  beautiful  and 
moving  actress,  but  not  an  intellectual 
match  for  Barker,  although  she  did  much 
for  him  by  finding  backers.  During  1915 
she  went  with  him  to  America,  acting  a 
few  parts.  Then  in  1916 — when  she  used 
her  lesser  gift  of  comedy  as  Maude  in 
Somerset  Maugham's  Caroline  (New) — 
she  heard  from  Barker  that  he  did  not 
wish  to  return  to  her.  It  was  a  grave  blow ; 
but  for  a  time,  with  the  counsel  and 
encouragement  of  Shaw,  she  went  on 
working  after  the  divorce  in  1918.  In 
April  1919,  during  a  brief  management  of 
the  Kingsway  Theatre,  she  played  Judith 
in  Arnold  Bennett's  Apocrypha-based 
drama  of  that  name,  a  second-rate  work 
which  she  could  not  lift. 


Lillah  McCarthy  did  little  more  in  the 
theatre  after  two  showy  parts'  with 
Matheson  Lang  [q.v.]  at  the  New:  Joanne 
in  Temple  Thurston's  The  Wandering  Jew 
(1920)  and  Dona  Sol  in  Tom  Cushing's 
Blood  and  Sand  (1921).  Later,  after  her 
second — and  intensely  happy — marriage 
to  (Sir)  Frederick  Keeble  [q.v.]  in  1920  she 
settled  down  near  Oxford.  During  the 
thirties  she  undertook  a  number  of  recitals 
in  various  parts  of  the  country  (scenes, 
for  example,  from  Twelfth  Night  and 
Iphigenia  in  Tauris)  and  her  voice  was 
the  first  to  be  heard  on  the  stage  of  the 
second  Shakespeare  Memorial  Theatre  at 
Stratford  on  Avon  on  its  opening  after- 
noon, 23  April  1982:  she  spoke  John 
Masefield's  prologue,  with  its  line,  'The 
acted  passion  beautiful  and  swift'.  Her 
husband  died  in  1952  and  she  was  living 
in  London  when  she  died  15  April  1960. 
She  had  no  children. 

Her  autobiography.  Myself  and  My 
Friends  (in  which  Granville-Barker  for- 
bade any  mention  of  his  name),  published 
in  1933,  is  the  record  of  a  warm-hearted 
woman  and  a  potentially  fine  actress. 
Owing  to  the  breaking  of  her  first  marriage, 
she  never  did  what  had  been  expected  of 
her,  although  she  won  the  loyalty  of  such 
diverse  figures  as  Masefield  and  Shaw. 

Two  portraits  of  Lillah  McCarthy  by 
Charles  Shannon  are  in  the  Cheltenham 
Art  Gallery.  These  represent  her  as 
Dona  Ana  in  the  dream  scene  (sometimes 
detached  as  Don  Juan  in  Hell)  of  Shaw's 
Man  and  Superman,  and  as  the  Dumb 
Wife  in  Anatole  France's  The  Man  Who 
Married  a  Dumb  Wife  which  she  acted  in 
the  Ashley  Dukes  [q.v.]  version.  Charles 
Ricketts  added  the  butterfly  on  the  veil 
of  the  high  head-dress. 

[The  Times,  16  April  1960 ;  Lillah  McCarthy, 
Myself  and  My  Friends,  1933;  Desmond 
MacCarthy,  The  Court  Theatre  1904-1907, 
1907 ;  C.  B.  Purdom,  Harley  Granville  Barker, 
1955  ;  G.  B.  Shaw,  Our  Theatres  in  the  Nineties, 
vol.  i,  1932 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.  C.  Trewin. 

MacDONALD,  Sir  MURDOCH  (1866- 
1957),  engineer,  was  born  6  May  1866 
in  Inverness,  the  seventh  of  the  nine 
children  of  Roderick  MacDonald,  of  Fail- 
lie,  Strathnairn,  carter,  and  his  wife,  Mar- 
garet Mackay,  of  Croy.  He  was  educated 
at  Dr.  Bell's  Institution,  later  known  as 
Farraline  Park  School,  Inverness.  On 
leaving  school  he  served  as  an  articled 
clerk  in  the  Highland  Railway  and  then 
was  apprenticed  to  the  chief  engineer.  In 
1891-4  he  was  resident  engineer  on  the 


667 


MacDonald 


D»N.B.  1951-1960 


Black  Isle  Railway  in  charge  of  its  loca- 
tion and  construction,  and  also  designed 
and  supervised  various  works  in  the 
district.  Following  this  he  worked  in  the 
engineering  office,  engaged  on  design  and 
superintendence  of  extensions  of  the 
railway. 

In  1898  he  resigned  from  the  Highland 
Railway,  and  almost  immediately  was 
appointed  by  Sir  Benjamin  Baker  [q.v.], 
consulting  engineer  to  the  Egyptian 
Government,  to  a  post  of  assistant 
engineer  on  the  Aswan  Dam  construc- 
tion. After  the  dam's  completion  he  was 
retained  in  the  Egyptian  service  as  resi- 
dent engineer  for  the  regulation,  and  for 
the  construction  of  protecting  aprons 
down-stream,  of  the  dam.  Following  this 
he  supervised  the  heightening  of  the 
Aswan  Dam  and  the  building  of  the 
Esna  Barrage.  While  this  work  was  in 
progress  there  was  a  disaster  at  the 
Delta  Barrage,  where  the  regulator  at  the 
head  of  one  of  the  three  main  canals  of 
Lower  Egypt  collapsed  in  a  few  hours. 
MacDonald  designed  and  built  the  new 
structure,  all  in  a  few  months.  For  this 
work  he  was  appointed  C.M.G.  (1910),  and 
in  1912  he  became  under-secretary,  and 
later  adviser,  to  the  Egyptian  Ministry  of 
Public  Works.  He  then  became  responsible 
for  developments  in  irrigation  in  Egypt 
and  in  particular  for  the  work  of  drainage 
and  reclamation  of  waste  land  in  the 
north  of  the  Delta.  At  the  same  time 
schemes  were  being  prepared  for  the 
extension  of  cultivation,  in  the  Sudan  by 
means  of  the  Sennar  Dam  on  the  Blue 
Nile,  and  in  Egypt  by  the  Gebel  Aulia 
Dam  on  the  White  Nile.  The  war  of  1914- 
18  held  up  progress  on  these  schemes,  and 
MacDonald,  who  had  been  advanced  to 
K.C.M.G.  in  1914,  served  as  a  colonel 
in  the  Royal  Engineers  to  advise  the 
commander-in-chief.  Middle  East,  on 
various  engineering  matters  connected 
with  the  defence  of  the  Suez  Canal  and 
the  water  supply  for  the  advance  across 
the  Sinai  Desert.  He  was  three  times 
mentioned  in  dispatches  and  appointed 
C.B.  in  1917. 

About  this  time  he  was  maliciously 
attacked  on  his  Nile  projects,  with  charges 
of  incompetence  and  falsification  of  infor- 
mation. The  charges  were  investigated  by 
two  conmaissions  of  eminent  engineers  and 
scientists,  and  finally  by  a  prosecution  in 
the  British  Supreme  Court  in  Egypt.  The 
result  of  each  of  these  three  inquiries  was 
that  the  charges  were  proved  to  be  entirely 
without  foundation.  In  1920  MacDonald 


published  Nile  Control  (2  vols.)  describing 
the  projects,  and  in  1921  he  retired  from 
the  Egyptian  Government  service.  A  few 
years  later  the  Sennar  and  Gebel  Aulia 
Dams  were  built  and  have  fully  justified 
themselves  by  their  results.  During  his 
service  he  received  six  decorations,  the 
highest  being  the  Grand  Cordon  of  the 
Nile ;  and  on  his  retirement  he  was  granted 
a  substantial  pension  in  recognition  of  his 
great  services  to  Egypt. 

In  1921  he  founded  the  London  firm  of 
MacDonald  and  MacCorquodale,  consult- 
ing engineers,  afterwards  Sir  Murdoch 
MacDonald  &  Partners,  of  which  his 
elder  son  became  the  senior  partner  after 
his  death.  While  MacDonald  was  working 
the  firm  carried  out  the  second  heightening 
of  the  Aswan  Dam,  designed  a  third  dam, 
and  investigated  five  other  proposals 
relating  to  Nile  dams  or  barrages,  which, 
however,  were  later  superseded  by  the 
High  Aswan  Dam  scheme.  The  firm  was 
also  employed  on  irrigation,  drainage, 
hydro-electric  power,  and  harbour  projects 
in  England,  Scotland,  Spain,  Portugal, 
Greece,  Jordan,  Iraq,  and  Pakistan. 

MacDonald  was  elected  member  of 
Parliament  for  Inverness  in  1922  as  a 
Liberal  supporting  Lloyd  George.  He 
retained  his  seat  as  a  National  Liberal 
until  1950  when  he  did  not  seek  re- 
election. His  political  opinions  were 
always  Liberal,  but  he  never  agreed  with 
extreme  views.  In  all  his  elections  he  was 
returned  on  his  personality  as  a  distin- 
guished Highlander,  and  throughout  his 
political  career  his  main  interest  was  the 
welfare  of  the  Highlands.  His  constituency 
stretched  right  across  Scotland  and  in- 
cluded some  of  the  isles,  but  even  when  he 
was  the  eldest  member  of  the  House  he 
continued  to  make  the  long  journeys  in- 
volved in  touring  his  district,  by  which  he 
had  become  personally  known  to  practi- 
cally all  his  constituents  to  whose  needs  he 
attended  assiduously. 

He  was  instrumental  in  getting  the 
secretary  of  state  for  Scotland  to  issue  an 
order  protecting  the  Loch  Ness  monster, 
which  someone  had  arranged  to  shoot,  and 
which  MacDonald  claimed  that  he  had 
once  seen.  He  was  very  quick-witted  and 
a  good  speaker.  One  of  his  professional 
characteristics  was  the  ability  to  make 
rapid  approximate  calculations  to  test 
results  found  by  more  elaborate  processes. 
He  was  slightly  above  the  average  height 
with  a  well-developed  head  and  impressive 
manner.  He  played  football  and  billiards 
well  and  was  a  good  shot.  In  1898  he  was 


668 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


McGrigor 


vice-president  of  the  North  of  Scotland 
Football  Association. 

He  was  president  of  the  Institution  of 
Civil  Engineers  (1932,  and  twice  received 
the  Telford  gold  medal) ;  of  the  Junior 
Institution  of  Engineers  (1927-8) ;  and  of 
the  Smeatonian  Society  (1952).  He  was 
a  member  of  the  Society  of  Engineers 
(gold  medallist) ;  of  the  Royal  Institution ; 
of  the  Royal  Astronomical  Society ;  and 
of  the  panel  of  consulting  engineers  to  the 
North  of  Scotland  Hydro-Electric  Board. 

In  1899  MacDonald  married  Margaret 
(died  1956),  daughter  of  Alexander  Munro, 
postmaster  of  Lochalsh,  Wester  Ross; 
they  had  two  sons.  MacDonald  died  at 
Nairn  24  April  1957. 

His  portrait  in  oils  by  (Sir)  James  Gunn 
is  in  the  Institution  of  Civil  Engineers, 
and  a  head  in  bronze  by  Mrs.  Gladys 
Barron  is  in  the  Town  Hall,  Inverness. 
He  was  made  a  freeman  of  the  royal  burgh 
of  Inverness  in  1930,  and  was  presented 
with  the  official  badge  of  the  Inverness 
town  council  in  1956. 

[The  Times,  25  April  1957;  Institution  of 
Civil  Engineers,  Proceedings,  September  1957 ; 
Engineer,  3  May  1957;  Inverness  Courier, 
26  April  1957 ;  private  information ;  personal 
knowledge.]  H.  E.  Hurst. 

MacFARLANE,  Sir  (FRANK)  NOEL 
MASON-  (1889-1953),  lieutenant-general. 
[See  Mason-MacFarlane.] 

McGRIGOR,  Sir  RHODERICK 
ROBERT  (1893-1959),  admiral  of  the 
fleet,  was  born  in  York  12  April  1893,  the 
only  son  of  Major  (later  Brigadier- 
General)  Charles  Rhoderick  Robert 
McGrigor,  of  the  King's  Royal  Rifles,  and 
his  wife,  Ada  Rosamond,  daughter  of 
Robert  Hartley  Bower,  of  Welham, 
Yorkshire.  He  was  a  great-grandson  of 
Sir  James  McGrigor  [q.v.],  chief  of  the 
medical  staff  of  WelUngton's  army  in  the 
Peninsular  War.  Although  he  had  no 
naval  connections,  McGrigor  from  a  very 
early  age  had  set  his  heart  on  joining  the 
navy.  He  spent  his  childhood  in  South 
Africa  and  did  not  go  to  a  preparatory 
school  in  England  until  he  was  eleven. 
He  missed  two  terms  at  Osborne  and 
Dartmouth  through  illness  but  neverthe- 
less passed  out  top  of  his  term. 

In  the  war  of  1914-18  he  served  in 
destroyers  in  the  Dardanelles  campaign, 
and  in  the  Malaya  in  the  Grand  Fleet  at 
the  battle  of  Jutland.  After  the  war  he 
specialized  in  torpedoes.  In  addition  to 
service  on  the  East  Indies  station  and  in 


the  Admiralty  he  commanded  destroyers 
in  the  Nyon  patrol  during  the  Spanish 
civil  war. 

The  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  found  him 
as  chief  of  staff  to  Sir  Percy  Noble  [q.v.] 
on  the  China  station,  and  there  he 
remained  until  after  the  fall  of  France. 
Returning  to  England  at  the  end  of  1940 
he  became  commanding  officer  of  the 
Renown,  where  he  served  under  Sir  James 
Somerville  [q.v.]  in  the  Bismarck  action 
and  also  at  the  bombardment  of  Genoa. 
His  special  selection  for  early  promotion 
to  rear-admiral  reduced  his  time  in 
command  to  only  eight  months.  This  was 
a  disappointment  since  he  was  essentially 
a  seaman  and  a  wartime  fighting  leader 
who  loved  nothing  better  than  being  on 
his  own  bridge  at  sea.  He  joined  the  Board 
of  Admiralty  towards  the  end  of  1941  as 
assistant  chief  of  naval  staff  (weapons),  a 
post  in  which  he  was  able  to  make  full  use 
of  his  interest  in,  and  unusual  grasp  of, 
technical  matters,  in  dealing  not  only 
with  the  traditional  weapons  of  the  navy 
but  also  with  the  many  new  devices, 
including  radar,  which  were  being  designed 
to  meet  the  novel  conditions  of  the  war. 

After  eighteen  months  of  desk  life 
McGrigor  was  appointed  a  Force  com- 
mander, first  for  the  capture  of  Pantel- 
leria  and  shortly  after  for  the  assault  of 
Sicily,  where  he  was  appointed  to  the 
D.S.O.  In  these  conditions  he  was  in  his 
element,  training  crews  of  the  many  and 
varied  kinds  of  landing  craft  to  be  used 
for  the  first  time.  He  remained  in  Sicily 
for  a  few  months  as  the  flag  officer  in 
charge,  and  then  moved  to  Taranto  where 
he  was  the  naval  commander  in  Southern 
Italy,  and  chief  naval  liaison  officer  with 
the  Italian  Navy. 

In  March  1944  he  returned  home  and 
took  command  of  the  first  cruiser  squadron 
in  the  Home  Fleet  based  on  Scapa  Flow. 
There  for  the  last  fifteen  months  of  the  war 
in  Europe  he  carried  out  many  successful 
attacks  against  the  enemy  off  the  coast  of 
Norway,  and  took  a  number  of  convoys  to 
and  from  North  Russia. 

Shortly  after  V.J. -Day  he  became 
vice-chief  of  the  naval  staff.  In  this 
appointment,  he  had  the  depressing  task 
under  the  first  sea  lord  of  putting  the 
navy's  fighting  machine  into  reverse,^ 
transforming  it  into  a  much  smaller 
peacetime  force,  and  of  closing  down  as 
rapidly  as  possible  bases  and  establish- 
ments built  up  during  the  war,  many  of 
which  had  only  just  been  completed. 

In   1948,   the   year  in  which  he  was 


McGrigor 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


promoted  admiral,  he  became  commander- 
in-chief  of  the  Home  Fleet,  when,  through 
a  temporary  shortage  of  personnel,  most  of 
his  fleet  was  immobilized  for  his  first  six 
months.  Nevertheless  he  did  a  great  deal 
to  maintain  the  standard  of  training  and 
keep  alive  the  traditions  of  the  Service  at 
a  difficult  time,  and  had  the  satisfaction  of 
turning  over  to  his  successor  an  efficient 
and  highly  trained  force. 

In  1950  he  was  appointed  conrmiander- 
in-chief,  Plymouth,  where  he  served  for 
eighteen  months  before  he  became  first 
sea  lord  in  December  1951  and  achieved 
a  lifelong  ambition  of  reaching  the  highest 
office  in  his  profession.  This  was  at  a  time 
when  the  whole  future  of  the  Royal  Navy 
was  at  stake  and  particularly  that  of  the 
aircraft  carriers.  McGrigor  fought  hard 
for  their  retention  and,  though  he  was  not 
to  know  it  when  he  left  in  1955,  his  work 
had  done  much  to  help  the  navy  through 
one  of  its  most  critical  peacetime  periods. 

He  was  appointed  C.B.  (1944),  K.C.B. 
(1945),  and  G.C.B.  (1951),  first  and  princi- 
pal aide-de-camp  to  the  Queen  in  1952, 
and  in  1953  was  promoted  admiral  of  the 
fleet. 

McGrigor  was  not  a  born  chairman  and 
was  by  temperament  better  at  stating 
his  case  on  paper  than  verbally.  A  man  of 
boundless  energy,  he  never  moved  slowly 
and  because  he  did  not  tire  easily  he  was 
never  happy  unless  doing  something.  He 
always  put  everything  he  had  into  the 
job  in  hand.  Modest  almost  to  the  point  of 
shyness,  McGrigor  was  essentially  a  kindly 
and  homely  man,  affectionately  known 
throughout  the  Royal  Navy  as  'The  Wee- 
Mac' — an  allusion  to  his  stature. 

He  spent  his  last  few  years  in  his 
beloved  Scotland,  having  been  elected 
rector  of  Aberdeen  University  in  1954. 
He  died  quite  suddenly  after  an  opera- 
tion in  Aberdeen  3  December  1959.  He 
married  in  1931  Gwendoline,  daughter  of 
the  late  Colonel  Geoffrey  Glyn  and  widow 
of  Major  Charles  Greville,  Grenadier 
Guards.  She  survived  him  only  a  short 
time.  They  adopted  twin  boys  both  of 
whom  joined  the  armed  forces. 

[Personal  knowledge.]  G.  B.  Teale. 

McINDOE,  Sir  ARCHIBALD  HECTOR 

(1900-1960),  plastic  surgeon,  was  born  in 
Dunedin,  New  Zealand,  4  May  1900,  the 
second  of  the  four  children  of  John 
Mclndoe,  printer,  and  his  wife,  Mabel 
Hill.  He  received  his  early  education  at 
Otago  High  School  and  University,  qualify- 
ing M.B.,  Ch.B.  in  1924  and  winning  the 


junior  medicine  and  senior  clinical  surgery 
prizes.  With  the  first  New  Zealand  fellow- 
ship of  the  Mayo  Foundation  he  left  for 
the  United  States  to  continue  his  post- 
graduate training.  At  the  Mayo  Clinic  he 
had  a  brilliant  career  and  was  considered 
one  of  the  most  promising  of  the  younger 
group.  Lord  Moynihan  [q.v.]  was  so 
impressed  with  his  surgical  skill  as  to 
suggest  a  permanent  career  for  him  in 
England.  With  an  M.S.  (Rochester)  added 
to  his  list  of  degrees,  Mclndoe  arrived 
in  London  in  the  winter  of  1930  to  find 
to  his  consternation  that  there  was  no 
appointment  and  no  remuneration  avail- 
able to  him. 

Fortunately  his  cousin,  Sir  Harold 
GilUes  [q.v.],  the  plastic  surgeon,  came  to 
his  rescue.  Mclndoe  had  unusual  skill  as 
an  abdominal  surgeon  and  was  already  an 
authority  on  the  surgery  of  the  liver  and 
biliary  passages.  He  lost  no  time  in  the 
ensuing  years  in  adapting  himself  to  the 
meticulous  plastic  surgery  practised  by 
his  cousin.  He  passed  his  F.R.C.S. 
(England)  in  1932  and  soon  afterwards 
was  appointed  to  the  Hospital  for 
Tropical  Diseases  as  a  general  surgeon. 
In  1934  he  obtained  the  fellowship  of  the 
American  College  of  Surgeons. 

By  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  Mclndoe 
was  a  plastic  surgeon  of  great  promise  and 
had  added  to  the  literature  of  plastic 
surgery  with  a  number  of  papers  on 
general  aspects  of  the  work.  In  order  to 
shed  some  of  his  responsibility.  Gillies 
arranged  for  Mclndoe  to  become  the 
consultant  in  plastic  surgery  to  the  Royal 
Air  Force.  He  also  sent  him  down  to  East 
Grinstead  to  make  arrangement  for  a 
centre  which  would  serve  the  south-east 
of  London  and  receive  facial  injuries  and 
burns  from  air-raid  casualties.  Mclndoe 
was  a  strong  and  determined  man  who 
had  the  knack  of  getting  what  he  wanted, 
even  if  it  meant  treading  on  other  people's 
toes.  His  advice  to  a  colleague  on  receiving 
his  fellowship  was:  'Well,  now  you  can 
put  on  your  heaviest  pair  of  boots  and 
tread  on  anybody  who  gets  in  your  way.' 
Mclndoe  did  just  that,  and  achieved  the 
impossible.  At  the  tiny  Queen  Victoria 
Hospital  he  built  up  a  centre  which 
rapidly  became  a  model  to  the  country 
and  which  by  careful  publicity  on  behalf 
of  the  Royal  Air  Force  became  widely 
known.  He  treated  several  hundred 
severely  burned  airmen,  fought  to  get 
them  better  pay  and  conditions  until  they 
were  rehabilitated,  saw  to  their  rehabili- 
tation himself,  and  even  lent  them  money 


670 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


McKenzie 


to  set  them  up  in  civilian  life.  He  did  this 
by  never  sparing  himself  or  those  around 
him  and  by  very  wisely  refusing  to  be 
put  into  uniform,  thus  being  able  to  talk 
directly  to  those  at  the  top.  It  was  a 
particularly  able  and  enlightened  air  staff 
with  which  he  had  to  deal  and  he  met  with 
few  of  the  tribulations  and  vexations 
which  other  pioneers  in  organization, 
such  as  Florence  Nightingale,  had  to 
suffer  in  their  time.  As  a  result  of  the 
combined  efforts  of  Mclndoe,  the  Air 
Council,  and  others,  every  airman  going 
into  action  knew  that  behind  him  there 
was  a  first-class  medical  service  to  take 
care  of  him,  however  severely  injured  he 
might  be.  Those  who  did  become  patients 
at  East  Grinstead  were  so  skilfully  handled 
psychologically  that  they  were  not  self- 
conscious  about  their  mutilations;  they 
founded  their  own  club,  'Mclndoe's 
Guinea  Pigs',  which  continued  to  meet 
annually  after  the  war  to  follow  up  the 
health  and  welfare  of  its  members. 

'Archie'  Mclndoe's  success  during  the 
war  can  be  attributed  to  the  fact  that 
for  once  the  right  man  was  in  the  right 
place.  There  were  only  three  other 
experienced  plastic  surgeons  available  in 
1939  and  his  personality  and  independent 
outlook,  together  with  his  American 
training,  put  him  into  a  unique  position. 
He  was  a  first-class  surgeon,  a  striking 
administrator,  and  a  powerful  personality ; 
so  powerful  that  there  was  no  share  of  the 
limelight  even  for  his  immediate  col- 
leagues. But  it  was  his  personality  which 
pulled  the  airmen  through. 

Mclndoe  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1944, 
knighted  in  1947,  and  received  numerous 
foreign  decorations.  His  last  years  were 
spent  largely  in  the  service  of  the  Royal 
College  of  Surgeons  on  the  council  of 
which  he  served  from  1948.  As  chairman 
of  the  finance  committee  he  is  reported 
to  have  raised  over  2^  million  pounds  for 
the  College,  of  which  he  was  vice-chairman 
in  1957-9.  In  the  post-war  years  he  also 
increased  the  facilities  at  East  Grinstead 
and  appointed  a  number  of  consultant 
staff  who  helped  with  the  training  of 
plastic  surgeons  from  all  over  the  world. 
He  helped  to  found  the  British  Association 
of  Plastic  Surgeons  and  was  its  third 
president  (1949).  He  managed  somehow 
to  run  an  extremely  busy  and  remuner- 
ative private  practice  and  still  find  time 
to  travel  abroad  and  write  articles  on  his 
own  subject.  He  will  not  be  remembered 
particularly  for  his  writings  or  for 
original  thinking  in  his  speciality,  although 


he  made  contributions  to  the  treatment 
of  burns  and  on  surgical  technique  which 
were  accepted  as  authoritative.  In  1953 
he  took  part  in  the  formation  of  the  first 
Hand  Club  of  Great  Britain.  Further 
recognition  of  his  work  came  from  abroad 
with  a  number  of  honorary  doctorates  and 
fellowships.  He  was  very  widely  liked  and 
admired  in  the  United  States  where  he 
was  a  frequent  visitor,  and  he  was  given 
a  second,  honorary,  fellowship  of  the 
American  College  in  1941. 

In  1924  Mclndoe  married  Adonia, 
daughter  of  Thomas  Aitken,  by  whom  he 
had  two  daughters.  The  marriage  was 
dissolved  after  the  war  and  in  1954  he 
married  Mrs.  Constance  Belchem,  daugh- 
ter of  John  Hutton,  a  member  of  Lloyd's. 
Mclndoe  died  in  London  12  April  1960 
and  his  ashes  were  buried  in  the  Royal  Air 
Force  church  of  St.  Clement  Danes  in  the 
Strand,  an  honour  unique  to  a  civilian 
doctor  from  his  combatant  colleagues. 

The  Queen  Victoria  Hospital,  East 
Grinstead,  has  a  portrait  by  M.  Easton 
and  the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons  one  by 
Edward  I.  Halliday.  In  the  possession  of 
his  elder  daughter  is  one  by  Cathleen 
Mann ;  and  his  second  wife  has  one  painted 
by  his  mother  who  was  a  talented  artist. 
The  Imperial  War  Museum  has  a  painting 
of  him  operating,  by  Anna  Zinkeisen. 

[Leonard  Mosley,  Faces  from  the  Fire,  1962 ; 
Hugh  McLeave,  Mclndoe:  Plastic  Surgeon^ 
1961 ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Richard  Battle. 

Mckenzie,  Alexander  (1869-1951), 

professor  of  chemistry,  was  born  at 
Dundee  6  December  1869,  the  eldest  son 
of  Peter  Mitchell  McKenzie,  a  Scottish 
dominie  of  the  old  type,  and  his  wife, 
Isobel  Buchanan,  of  farming  stock,  who 
came  from  Lochgoil.  He  received  his  early 
education  in  his  father's  schools  at 
Dundee  then  at  Tealing,  where  he  was  well 
grounded  in  the  classics.  In  1882  he  entered 
the  High  School  of  Dundee  and  drove  the 
four  miles  to  school  daily  with  a  local 
farmer's  son  in  a  pony  cart.  In  1885  he 
was  awarded  the  Edinburgh  Angus  Club 
medal  in  Latin.  At  the  early  age  of 
fifteen  he  entered  United  College,  St. 
Andrews,  graduating  M.A.  four  years 
later.  He  went  on  to  take  his  B.Sc, 
specializing  in  chemistry  and  natural 
philosophy,  in  1891.  His  interest  in 
chemistry  had  already  been  stimulated  at 
the  High  School  by  Frank  Young  and 
also,  as  he  himself  said,  from  an  inherited 
interest  from  forebears  alleged  to  have  had 


671 


McKenzie 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


an  illicit  still  in  Glen  Shee.  In  1891-3  he 
was  chemistry  lecture  assistant  to  Thomas 
Purdie,  thereby  gaining  much  knowledge 
of  the  art  of  lecturing  and  of  carrying  out 
lecture  bench  demonstrations,  the  latter 
to  become  a  great  feature  in  his  own  later 
first-year  courses.  In  1893-8  he  was  a 
university  assistant;  and  to  further  his 
chemical  research  work  he  next  went  to 
Berlin,  where  under  the  supervision  of 
Marckwald  he  graduated  Ph.D.  cum  laude 
in  1901.  While  in  Berlin  he  attended 
lectures  by  such  eminent  scientists  as 
Landolt,  Emil  Fischer,  Van't  Hoff,  Gabriel, 
and  Jacobson,  visited  art  galleries  and 
operas,  and  became  a  fluent  speaker  and 
writer  of  German. 

With  a  research  studentship  (1901-2) 
of  the  Grocers'  Company,  McKenzie 
worked  under  (Sir)  Arthur  Harden  [q.v.] 
at  the  Jenner  (later  Lister)  Institute. 
In  1902  he  became  assistant  lecttu:er  in 
chemistry  in  the  university  of  Birmingham 
and  began  his  thirty-six  years  of  academic 
teaching  and  research.  In  1905  he  returned 
to  London  as  head  of  the  chemistry 
department  in  Birkbeck  College,  where 
teaching  duties  were  very  heavy  and  he 
could  mostly  do  his  research  work  only  by 
using  what  would  normally  have  been  his 
leisure  hours.  His  final  move  was  in  1914 
to  the  chair  of  chemistry  at  Dundee.  With 
smaller  classes  and  no  evening  teaching 
and  after  completion  of  his  wartime  work 
of  national  importance  he  built  up  a 
vigorous  organic  research  school. 

His  main  topics  of  research  lay  in  the 
stereochemical  field  and  were  mainly  on 
the  Walden  Inversion,  racemization, 
catalytic  racemization,  asymmetric  syn- 
thesis, intramolecular  rearrangements, 
and  Grignard  reactions.  In  all  he  published 
alone  and  with  his  co-workers  122  papers, 
most  of  which  appeared  in  the  Journal 
of  the  Chemical  Society  and  the  Berichte 
of  the  German  Chemical  Society. 

During  his  professorship  many  honours 
came  his  way:  he  was  elected  F.R.S.  in 
1916  and  was  a  fellow  of  the  Chemical 
Society  and  of  the  Institute  of  Chemistry ; 
member  of  the  Deutsche  Chemische 
Gesellschaft ;  a  secretary  of  the  chemistry 
section  of  the  British  Association  (1908) 
and  for  several  years  a  member  of  the 
council  and  of  the  publication  committee 
of  the  Chemical  Society.  In  1932  he  was 
elected  to  the  Kaiserlich  Deutsche  Akade- 
mie  der  Naturforscher  zu  Halle,  and  in 
1939  was  given  an  honorary  LL.D.  by 
St.  Andrews.  He  lectured  in  Berlin  in  1931 
at  the  invitation  of  the  Kaiser  Wilhelm- 


Gesellschaft  and  later  in  the  same  year  at 
the  invitation  of  the  university  of  Basle 
delivered  a  course  of  six  lectures,  all 
given  by  him  in  German.  The  young 
country  lad  o'  pairts  had  developed  into 
a  man  of  wide  interests,  highly  regarded 
by  his  colleagues,  friends,  and  students 
as  a  man  of  great  honesty  in  thought  and 
action. 

In  the  Grey  City  by  the  Sea,  McKenzie 
learned  to  play  the  'royal  and  ancient' 
game  of  golf.  At  one  time  a  scratch 
player,  he  continued  to  play  an  excellent 
game  until  stopped  by  ill  health.  Although 
holding  a  life  appointment,  after  develop- 
ing asthma  he  retired  from  his  chair  in 
1938  in  the  interests  of  his  department. 
Until  his  death,  11  June  1951,  at  Barnhill, 
Angus,  he  continued  to  take  an  active 
interest  in  chemistry,  reading  the  monthly 
journals  and  making  notes  for  the  use 
of  his  former  colleagues  and  research 
students. 

In  1906  McKenzie  married  Alice  Helene 
Sand,  a  sister  of  Dr.  Henry  Sand,  well 
known  for  his  work  and  writings  oii 
electro-chemistry.  They  had  one  son  who 
became  an  electrical  engineer. 

[J.  Read  in  Obituary  Notices  of  Fellows  of 
the  Royal  Society,  No.  21,  November  1952; 
personal  knowledge.]  Isobel.  A.  Smith. 

MACLAGAN,  Sir  ERIC  ROBERT 
DALRYMPLE  (1879-1951),  director  of 
the  Victoria  and  Albert  Museum,  was  born 
in  London  4  December  1879,  the  only  son 
of  William  Dalrymple  Maclagan  [q.v.], 
bishop  of  Lichfield,  later  archbishop  of 
York,  by  his  second  wife,  Augusta  Anne, 
daughter  of  the  sixth  Viscount  Barrington. 
Educated  at  Winchester  and  Christ 
Church,  Oxford,  where  he  obtained  a  third 
class  in  honour  moderations  (1900)  and  a 
fourth  in  literae  humaniores  (1902),  he 
joined  the  staff  of  the  Victoria  and  Albert 
Museum  in  1905  as  assistant  in  the  depart- 
ment of  textiles.  Maclagan' s  capacity  for 
hard  work  and  ready  absorption  of  know- 
ledge was  revealed  when,  in  1907,  he  pro- 
duced A  Guide  to  English  Ecclesiastical 
Embroideries,  a  forerunner  of  the  many 
catalogues  and  handbooks,  published 
under  his  aegis,  which  set  a  standard  of 
scholarship  and  usefulness  sedulously 
followed  and  developed.  From  textiles, 
Maclagan  was  transferred  in  1909  to  the 
department  of  architecture  and  sculpture, 
to  which  he  was  to  bring  great  distinction, 
borne  out  in  the  publication,  in  1924,  of 
the  Catalogue  of  Italian  Plaquettes. 

In    1916    Maclagan    was    transferred 


672 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Maclagan 


temporarily  to  the  Foreign  Office  and 
later  to  the  Ministry  of  Information.  He 
became  head  of  the  Ministry's  bureau 
in  Paris  and  its  controller  for  France  in 
1918,  a  post  for  which  his  fluent  French 
especially  fitted  him.  In  1919  he  was 
attached  to  the  British  peace  delegation 
and  was  present  at  the  signing  of  the 
treaty.  Characteristically  Maclagan  found 
time  to  write  a  daily  account  of  these 
events  in  his  diary,  expressed  in  stylish, 
yet  economical,  prose,  and  written  in  an 
impeccable  hand.  For  his  services  in 
France,  Maclagan  was  appointed  C.B.E. 
in  1919. 

On  the  retirement  of  Sir  Cecil  Harcourt- 
Smith  [q.v.]  in  1924,  Maclagan  was  appoin- 
ted director.  During  his  twenty-one  years 
in  office,  the  museum  further  increased 
its  reputation  as  a  centre  for  research 
and  learning,  to  which  Maclagan's  monu- 
mental Catalogue  of  Italian  Sculpture, 
produced  in  1932  in  collaboration  with 
Margaret  Longhurst,  then  assistant  keeper 
(later  keeper)  in  the  department,  bears 
witness.  But  the  director's  scholarly 
approach  did  not  deflect  him  from  an 
awareness  of  the  growing  interest  of  the 
general  public  in  the  resources  of  the 
museum.  Under  his  influence  important 
advances  towards  the  popularization  of 
the  museum  were  made,  not  only  in  the 
increase  of  inexpensive  publications  and 
the  organization  of  public  lectures,  but 
also  in  various  devices  by  which  the  vast 
collections  could  be  made  more  accessible 
to  people  of  general  rather  than  special- 
ized knowledge.  A  welcome  innovation 
was  the  placing  in  the  entrance  hall  each 
Monday  of  the  'Object  of  the  Week'.  In 
this  connection  it  is,  perhaps,  significant 
that,  among  the  number  of  the  learned 
articles,  catalogues,  and  other  erudite 
material  which  he  produced,  he  was  the 
author  of  one  best-seller:  an  essay  on 
The  Bayeux  Tapestry,  published  as  a 
King  Penguin  in  1943.  Maclagan  was  the 
first  to  envisage  the  system  of  rearranging 
the  museum  according  to  primary  and 
secondary  collections,  thereby  making  the 
task  of  obtaining  some  impression  of  the 
museum  as  a  whole  a  less  formidable 
proposition  for  the  general  visitor.  This 
reorganization  proved  impracticable  in 
the  financial  climate  of  the  thirties  and 
was  not  realized  until  Sir  Leigh  Ashton 
reassembled  the  collections  after  1945, 
when  a  new  field  of  opportunity  was 
opened  and  a  fresh  emphasis  was  placed 
upon  the  whole  question  of  museum 
display.  iU!isBt>«"i?*vlli*U' 


During  Maclagan's  term  of  office,  fr^sh 
interest  was  focused  on  the  museum  either 
by  the  acquisitions  or  by  the  series  of 
distinguished  exhibitions  which  he  person- 
ally organized.  These  reflected  the  fastid- 
ious precision  of  his  scholarship  and  the 
wide  range  of  his  perceptions  as  a  con- 
noisseur. Among  the  most  outstanding 
were  the  exhibitions  of  works  of  art  be- 
longing to  the  livery  companies  of  the  City 
of  London  (1926);  of  English  medieval 
art  (1930),  a  landmark  in  its  time; 
the  William  Morris  centenary  exhibition 
(1934) ;  and  the  exhibition  of  the  Eumorfo- 
poulos  collection  (1936).  In  1933  Maclagan 
was  knighted  and  in  1945  he  was  ap- 
pointed K.C.V.O. 

Maclagan  had  many  outside  interests 
and  held  important  appointments  both  at 
home  and  abroad.  In  1927-8  he  was 
Charles  Eliot  Norton  professor  at  Harvard, 
his  lectures,  published  in  1935  as  Italian 
Sculpture  of  the  Renaissance,  representing, 
perhaps,  his  most  important  general  work. 
He  was  vice-president  of  the  Society  of 
Antiquaries  (1932-6),  president  of  the 
Museums  Association  (1935-^),  and  chair- 
man of  the  National  Buildings  Record. 
He  was  also  appointed  to  lectureships  at 
Edinburgh,  Belfast,  Dublin,  and  Hull 
and  was  given  honorary  degrees  at 
Birmingham  (LL.D.,  1944)  and  Oxford 
(D.Litt.,  1945).  As  chairman  of  the  fine 
arts  committee  of  the  British  Council 
Maclagan  organized  many  exhibitions 
and  undertook  many  journeys  to  distant 
countries  where  he  consolidated  his 
reputation,  not  only  as  a  scholar  of  deep 
and  wide  culture,  but  also  as  a  polished 
speaker  and  entertaining  conversational- 
ist. Maclagan  was  a  gifted  lecturer  and 
combined  this  talent  with  a  flair  for  after- 
dinner  speaking  which  he  could  under- 
take with  fluency  and  wit  in  French  as 
well  as  English.  He  was  proficient  in 
German  and  until  the  end  of  his  life  read 
Greek  and  Latin  for  pleasure.  A  familiar 
figure  at  the  Athenaeum  and,  latterly,  at 
the  Beefsteak,  his  discriminating  taste 
in  food  and  wine  made  him  a  valued 
dining  companion. 

Maclagan's  personal  predilections  were 
varied  and  extended  well  beyond  the 
confines  of  his  specialization  in  the  field 
of  Early  Christian  and  Renaissance 
studies;  he  was  sympathetic  with  the 
aims  of  many  modern  artists  and  had 
in  his  possession  a  bust  of  himself  by 
Mestrovi6 ;  he  was  one  of  the  first  private 
collectors  to  buy  the  work  of  Henry 
Moore  and  unveiled  the  painting  of  the 


678 


Maclagan 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Crucifixion  by  Graham  Sutherland  in  the 
church  of  St.  Matthew  at  Northampton. 
A  keen  churchman  and,  after  his 
retirement,  a  member  of  -  the  Church 
Assembly,  he  took  a  prominent  part  in 
the  affairs  of  the  Anglo- Catholic  move- 
ment; and  he  performed  much  public 
service  on  behalf  of  the  Church  through 
the  Cathedrals  Advisory  Council  and  the 
Central  Council  for  the  Care  of  Churches, 
which  then  had  its  headquarters  in  the 
Victoria  and  Albert  Museum.  Maclagan's 
knowledge  of  literature,  especially  of 
poetry,  was  profound;  he  could  quote 
extensively,  and  at  times  amusingly, 
from  poets  both  good  and  bad.  He  made 
several  translations  of  the  work  of  French 
poets,  especially  of  Rimbaud  and  Valery 
and,  whilst  an  undergraduate,  in  1902 
published  a  volume  of  poems.  Leaves  in 
the  Road,  for  which  he  designed  the 
jacket.  He  also  made  a  special  study  of 
Blake's  Prophetic  Books  and  with  A.  G.  B. 
Russell  published  editions  of  Jerusalem 
(1904)  and  Milton  (1907).  He  took  an 
interest  in  book  production  and  was 
one  of  the  first  to  recognize  the  genius 
of  Edward  Johnston  [q.v.]  on  whose 
formal  script  he  based  his  own  hand- 
writing. He  designed  several  bookplates, 
including  one  for  his  friend  Bernard 
Berenson. 

Maclagan's  overriding  interest  in  beauti- 
ful things  made  him  a  passionate  traveller. 
It  was  perhaps  fitting  that  he  should  have 
died,  suddenly,  14  September  1951,  in 
Spain,  when  making  the  ascent  to  see  the 
church  of  Santa  Maria  de  Naranco. 

In  1913  Maclagan  married  Helen 
Elizabeth  (died  1942),  daughter  of 
Commander  Frederick  Lascelles,  second 
son  of  the  fourth  Earl  of  Harewood. 
They  had  two  sons,  the  younger  of  whom 
was  killed  in  action  in  1942.  The  elder, 
Michael,  a  fellow  of  Trinity  College, 
Oxford,  contributes  to  this  Supplement. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Tbenchard  Cox. 


McLAREN,  HENRY  DUNCAN,  second 
Baron  Aberconway  (1879-1953),  indus- 
trialist, was  born  in  Barnes,  Surrey,  16 
April  1879,  the  eldest  child  of  Charles 
Benjamin  Bright  McLaren,  later  first 
Baron  Aberconway  [q.v.],  by  his  wife, 
Laura  Elizabeth,  daughter  of  Henry 
Davis  Pochin,  of  Bodnant,  Denbighshire. 
He  was  educated  at  Eton  where  he  became 
captain  of  the  Oppidans,  a  position  which 
he  was  proud  to   see  occupied  in  turn 


by  his  three  sons.  At  Balliol  College, 
Oxford,  he  obtained  a  second  in  modern 
history  (1902)  and  was  captain  of  the 
college  hockey  team.  He  then  travelled 
for  a  year  or  two  and  was  called  to  the 
bar  by  Lincoln's  Inn  in  1905  although  he 
never  practised. 

McLaren  had  inherited  a  strong  Liberal 
background  and  from  his  maternal  grand- 
father a  talent  for,  and  insight  into, 
industrial  techniques  despite  his  lack  of  a 
technical  education.  After  he  had  acquired 
some  business  experience  mainly  in  the 
enterprises  in  which  his  Pochin  grand- 
father had  concerned  himself,  he  entered 
the  House  of  Commons  in  1906  as  Liberal 
member  for  West  Staffordshire.  Until 
1910  he  was  parliamentary  private  secre- 
tary to  Lloyd  George  for  whose  intellect 
he  formed  and  kept  the  liveliest  admira- 
tion. Defeated  in  January  1910,  in 
December  he  was  elected  for  the  Bosworth 
division  of  Leicestershire  which  he  con- 
tinued to  represent  until  1922  when  he  was 
again  defeated  and  did  not  seek  re-election. 
After  he  succeeded  to  the  peerage  on  his 
father's  death  in  1934,  he  attended  the 
House  of  Lords  from  time  to  time,  but 
seldom  spoke.  His  other  interests  left  him 
too  little  time  for  politics,  and  while  in 
the  Commons  he  did  not  do  justice  to  his 
abilities. 

During  the  war  of  1914-18  McLaren 
was  director  of  area  organization  at  the 
Ministry  of  Munitions.  After  the  war  his 
business  interests  increased  and  in  due 
course  he  succeeded  his  father  as  chairman 
of  John  Brown  &  Co.  and  was  also  chair- 
man of  other  companies  including  the 
Sheepbridge  Coal  &  Iron  Co.,  Yorkshire 
Amalgamated  Collieries,  and  the  Tredegar 
Iron  &  Coal  Co.  He  was  a  director  of  the 
National  Provincial  Bank  and  the  London 
Assurance.  But  the  field  of  industry  in 
which  he  was  most  knowledgeable  was 
that  of  china  clay,  where  from  an  early 
age  he  had  closely  concerned  himself  with 
a  family  company,  H.  D.  Pochin  &  Co ;  in 
1932  he  brought  about  an  amalgamation 
of  several  china  clay  companies,  to  form 
English  Clays  Lovering  Pochin  &  Co., 
Ltd.,  of  which  he  was  chairman. 

McLaren's  political  and  business  activi- 
ties had  to  compete  with  his  many  other 
interests.  He  was  an  enthusiastic  and 
splendid  shot;  he  enjoyed  travelUrig;  he 
liked  to  drive  himself  in  open  Rolls-Royce 
cars  of  which  he  had  a  succession;  he 
presided  diligently  over  the  local  bench 
and  was  chairman  of  the  Denbighshire 
quarter-sessions;    he    was    a    keen    and 


674 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Maclay 


knowledgeable  collector  of  antique  furni- 
ture, ornaments,  and  pictures.  But  before 
all  these  came  plants  and  gardening  which 
were  his  great  love.  At  Bodnant,  taking 
advantage  of  the  site  and  the  lie  of  the 
land,  he  laid  out  with  great  skill  and  taste 
a  magnificent  series  of  terraces,  and 
fashioned  a  wonderful  wild  garden;  he 
planted  a  wide  range  of  rare  shrubs, 
especially  rhododendrons,  in  which  genus 
he  hybridized  extensively.  In  1949  he 
gave  the  garden  to  the  National  Trust. 
His  imagination,  drive,  and  business 
experience,  combined  with  his  presence 
and  personality,  made  him  a  most 
distinguished  president  of  the  Royal 
Horticultural  Society  from  1931  until  his 
death. 

McLaren  was  a  man  of  prodigious 
energy,  who  never  felt  tired ;  of  consider- 
able intellect  who  could  see  to  the  root  of 
each  problem  and  could  expound  irre- 
sistibly his  views  upon  it;  of  remark- 
able ability  to  switch  his  mind  from  one 
subject  to  another,  showing  deep  know- 
ledge of  each.  Above  all,  he  was  a 
creator,  in  his  work  and  in  his  hobbies; 
imaginative  and  forward  looking,  he  was 
resolute  that  his  companies  and  interests 
should  be  in  the  forefront  of  technical 
progress. 

In  1910  McLaren  married  Christabel 
Mary  Melville,  daughter  of  Sir  Melville 
Leslie  Macnaghten,  chief  of  the  Criminal 
Investigation  Department.  His  marriage 
was  exceptionally  happy.  His  gifted  wife 
shared  his  artistic  interests  and  he  de- 
pended greatly  upon  her  companionship 
and  judgement.  They  had  two  daughters 
and  three  sons,  the  eldest  of  whom,  Charles 
Melville  (born  1913),  succeeded  to  the 
title  when  he  died  at  Bodnant  23  May 
1953. 

A  portrait  by  P.  A.  de  Laszlo  is  at 
Bodnant.  The  Royal  Horticultural  Society 
and  John  Brown's  own  portraits  by  Sir 
Oswald  Birley. 

(Personal  knowledge.]  Aberconway. 

IVIACLAY,  JOSEPH  PATON,  first 
Baron  Maclay  (1857-1951),  shipowner 
and  shipping  controller,  was  born  in  Glas- 
gow 6  September  1857,  the  third  son  of 
Ebenezer  Maclay,  master  upholsterer,  and 
his  wife,  Janet,  daughter  of  Joseph  Paton, 
of  Paisley.  Maclay,  whose  ancestors  had 
for  several  generations  been  natives  of 
Glasgow,  was  educated  there  as  a  boy  and 
began  business  as  a  clerk.  In  1885  with 
Thomas  Walker  Mclntyre  (father  of  Lord 


Sorn)  he  established  the  trampship  firm  of 
Maclay  and  Mclntyre,  which  became  one 
of  the  largest  shipping  concerns  on  the 
Clyde.  He  served  on  the  Clyde  Trust  and 
the  Glasgow  town  council,  and  as  a  magis- 
trate. A  Liberal  in  politics,  he  was  a  strong 
advocate  of  temperance  and  was  active  in 
the  evangelical  and  philanthropic  life  of 
Scotland ;  and  for  his  services  he  was 
created  a  baronet  in  1914. 

It  was  with  the  formation  of  the  Lloyd 
George  administration  of  December  1916 
that  Maclay  emerged  from  the  life  of  a 
wealthy  and  public-spirited  Glasgow  ship- 
owner on  to  the  na,tional  stage.  The  new 
prime  minister  'felt  that  our  shipping  had 
become  the  most  vital  and  vulnerable 
point  in  the  issue  of  victory  or  defeat'. 
He  at  once  invited  Maclay,  not  previously 
known  to  him  but  suggested  by  Bonar 
Law,  to  be  shipping  controller  and  head  of 
a  new  Ministry  of  Shipping;  and  under 
their  combined  pressure  Maclay  reluc- 
tantly accepted.  He  faced  a  heavy  respon- 
sibility. The  organization  to  deal  with  the 
submarine  attack  on  shipping  and  its 
consequences  was  dispersed  and  inade- 
quate. The  Admiralty  was  failing  to  give 
effective  protection  and,  at  that  time,  had 
no  belief  in  the  convoy  system  which  in 
the  following  year  gave  the  answer  to  the 
even  more  formidable  submarine  cam- 
paign which  had  by  then  developed.  The 
Board  of  Trade,  the  department  mainly 
concerned  with  shipping  in  peacetime, 
was  now  on  the  side  lines  with  a  minor 
and  diminishing  role  in  war  control. 
AU  the  great  war  departments  were 
competing  for  the  inadequate  shipping 
available,  and  there  was  no  authority 
powerful  enough  to  control  their  demands 
and  adjudicate  between  them.  The  re- 
sponsibility for  allotting  ships  fell  on  the 
transport  department  of  the  Admiralty, 
in  peacetime  a  small  branch  of  the 
larger  office  with  modest  duties  and  status, 
but  now  a  pivotal  department  in  the 
whole  of  the  war  supply  system.  It  had 
recruited  the  best  brains  in  the  shipping 
world  and  by  1916  had  acquired  the 
requisite  ability  and  experience  and 
internal  organization.  Wliat  it  chiefly 
lacked  was  the  authority  to  impose  deci- 
sions upon  interests  and  departments 
more  powerful  than  itself.  The  new  ship- 
ping controller  was  well  qualified  to 
supply  this  authority  alike  by  his  person- 
ality, his  standing  in  the  shipping  world, 
and  the  circumstances  of  his  appointment. 
A  spare  form,  above  medium  height;  a 
head  of  light  red  hair ;  blue  eyes  with  a 


675 


Maclay 


D.N.B.  1951>1960 


glint  of  steel ;  a  straight  slit  of  a  mouth ; 
a  slightly  jutting  chin — constituted  an 
unmistakable  Scots  figure  which  would 
have  been  a  good  subject  for  Raeburn, 
and  at  once  suggested  self-discipline,  a 
strong  will,  and  an  inner  life.  A  certain 
hesitancy  in  speech  and  a  natural  courtesy 
sometimes  veiled,  but  did  not  long  disguise, 
a  confident  judgement  of  men  and  things 
which  did  not  easily  yield  to  either 
pressure  or  persuasion.  He  was  inclined  to 
regard  the  orderly  marshalling  of  the  pros 
and  cons  of  a  case  as  a  Whitehall  game 
bearing  Uttle  relation  to  the  process  by 
which  decisions  are,  or  should  be,  reached. 
In  seeking  cabinet  approval  he  stated  what 
he  wanted  starkly,  with  as  little  explana- 
tory information  as  possible  for  'those 
10  Downing  Street  fellows'.  He  never 
entered  Parliament  himself  and  had  indeed 
no  high  regard  for  politicians  as  a  class,  or 
even  for  ministers  as  such ;  and  in  dealing 
with  the  Cabinet  he  preferred  to  deal  with 
Bonar  Law,  whom  he  trusted,  and  through 
him  with  the  prime  minister. 

The  year  and  a  half  which  followed 
Maclay' s  appointment  comprised  the 
decisive  stages  in  the  shipping  struggle. 
Requisition  was  extended  over  all  British 
shipping;  with  this  as  the  pivot,  a  strict 
system  of  control  of  all  imported  supplies 
was  built  up ;  on  America's  entry  into  the 
war  the  shipping  effort  of  the  two  countries 
was  co-ordinated ;  the  convoy  system  was 
successfully  introduced;  the  British  con- 
trol of  shipping  and  supplies  was  expanded 
into  an  allied  organization  comprising 
also  America,  France,  and  Italy.  Ship- 
building had  been  increased,  and  supple- 
mented by  a  vast  American  programme. 
Long  before  the  end  of  the  war  the 
shortage  of  shipping  had  ceased  to  be  a 
limiting  factor  to  the  general  war  effort. 
This  success  was  due  partly  to  the  success 
of  the  convoys  and  partly  to  greater 
efficiency  in  the  use  of  ships  and  the 
materials  they  carried.  The  credit  must  be 
shared  among  many;  but  on  any  list  of 
honour  the  shipping  controller  must  stand 
high. 

Maclay  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council 
in  1916  and  created  a  baron  in  the  resigna- 
tion honours  of  1922.  He  was  a  man  of 
simple  piety,  and  it  is  characteristic  that 
his  one  publication,  in  1918,  was  The 
Starting  Place  of'  the  Day,  a  book  of 
prayers  for  family  worship  which  he 
compiled  and  edited. 

In  1889  he  married  Martha  (died  1929), 
daughter  of  William  Strang,  musUn 
manufacturer,  of  Glasgow,  by  whom  he 


had  five  sons  and  two  daughters.  Two 
sons  were  killed  in  the  war  of  1914-18 
and  in  their  memory  Maclay  and  his  wife, 
in  1921,  presented  to  the  university  of 
Glasgow  (of  which  he  had  been  made  an 
honorary  LL.D.  in  1919)  a  student  hostel, 
Maclay  Hall.  Of  his  other  sons,  Sir  Joseph 
Maclay,  K.B.E.  (1899-1969),  who  suc- 
ceeded him  when  he  died  at  his  home, 
Duchal,  Kilmacolm,  Renfrewshire,  24 
April  1951,  had  been  a  Liberal  member  of 
Pariiament  from  1931  to  1945,  and 
president  of  the  Chamber  of  Shipping  in 
1946-7 ;  and  John  Scott  Maclay,  secretary 
of  state  for  Scotland  in  1957-62,  was 
created  Viscount  Muirshiel  in  1964. 

[Glasgow  Herald  and  The  Times,  passim; 
David  Lloyd  George,  War  Memoirs,  vol.  iii, 
1934 ;  personal  knowledge.]  Salter. 

McLINTOCK,  WILLIAM  FRANCIS 
PORTER  (1887-1960),  geologist,  was 
born  in  Edinburgh  2  February  1887, 
the  third  child  and  elder  son  of  Peter 
Buchanan  McLintock,  cashier,  by  his 
wife,  Jane  Porter.  He  was  educated  at 
George  Heriot's  School  and  Edinburgh 
University,  graduating  B.Sc.  with  special 
distinction  in  botany  in  1907.  In  the 
summer  of  that  year  he  was  the  successful 
candidate  in  a  written  and  practical 
examination  in  crystallography,  minera- 
logy, and  chemistry  for  the  post  of  assist- 
ant curator  in  the  Museum  of  Practical 
Geology,  London.  There  he  worked  on  the 
mineral  and  gemstone  collections,  produc- 
ing studies  of  datolite  (1910)  and  beryl 
(1912),  and  a  short  guide  to  the  gem- 
stone  collection  (1912)  remarkable  for  its 
introduction  which  in  thirty-four  pages 
was  an  early  handbook  to  the  scientific 
study  and  identification  of  gemstones  and 
their  imitations.  In  1911  McLintock 
became  curator  of  geology  in  the  Royal 
Scottish  Museum,  Edinburgh,  where  he 
carried  out  a  brilliant  research  on  the 
zeolites  of  the  Tertiary  lavas  of  Mull 
which  he  successfully  offered  as  a  thesis 
for  the  D.Sc.  degree  of  Edinburgh 
University  in  1915.  While  in  Edinburgh 
he  lectm'ed  in  geology  as  part  of  his  duties 
in  the  museum  and  to  evening  classes  in 
the  Heriot-Watt  College. 

In  1914-18  McLintock  found  scope  for 
his  skill  in  precision  instrumentation 
in  the  devising,  preparation,  and  testing 
of  gauges  for  use  in  munition  factories. 
He  returned  to  the  Museum  of  Practical 
Geology  in  London  as  curator  early  in 
1921  and,  although  becoming  more  and 
more    occupied    by    administrative    and 


676 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


McLintock 


committee  work,  published  research  on 
the  Strathmore  meteorite  (1922)  and  on 
the  rare  mineral  petalite  first  identified 
by  him  as  a  British  species  (1923)  from 
Okehampton,  Devon.  He  travelled  to 
Persia  in  1926  as  the  senior  of  two 
representatives  of  the  Geological  Survey 
invited  by  the  Anglo-Iranian  Oil  Company 
to  study  the  geophysical  surveying  there 
in  progress.  Geophysical  survey  towards 
elucidation  of  concealed  geological  struc- 
ture was  then  in  its  infancy  and  little  of 
scientific  consequence  had  been  published 
on  its  geological  potentialities.  On  his 
return  test  surveys  were  undertaken  by 
the  Geological  Survey  under  McLintock' s 
charge  over  the  years  1927  to  1930  and 
impartial  reports  on  the  relation  of  the 
gravity  anomalies  to  known  geological 
structures  were  presented  for  assessment 
by  geologists. 

In  the  early  thirties  McLintock's  most 
urgent  and  momentous  duty  was  the 
planning  of  the  new  Geological  Museum 
at  South  Kensington  and  the  transfer  of 
the  library  and  collections  from  the 
dilapidated  building  in  Jermyn  Street. 
Alive  to  opportunity  and  after  a  tour  of 
European  museums  having  learned,  as 
he  said,  what  to  avoid,  McLintock 
developed  revolutionary  ideas  towards 
popular  exposition  of  a  science  largely 
unknown  and  without  apparent  appeal  to 
the  general  public.  Enthusiastically  sup- 
ported by  a  modern  outlook  in  the  Ministry 
of  Works  and  firm  in  his  conviction  that  it 
was  necessary  to  attract  as  well  as  in- 
struct, he  withstood  attack  from  scoffing 
and  outraged  authorities  of  scientific 
tradition.  The  new  museum  was  opened 
on  3  July  1935.  Laid  out  as  McLintock 
had  conceived  it,  the  gemstone  collection 
forming  the  centrepiece  supported  by 
illuminated  dioramas  of  practical  geo- 
logical interest,  the  exhibition  was  imme- 
diately and  progressively  successful.  When 
war  came  in  1939  McLintock,  as  deputy 
director  since  1937,  became  responsible 
for  the  administrative  side  of  the  war 
effort  of  the  Survey  and  Museum.  He 
initiated  the  organizations  dealing  with 
strategic  materials,  underground  storage, 
and  geological  issues  in  mihtary  and 
economic  warfare.  Appointed  director  in 
succession  to  Sir  Edward  Bailey  in  1945 
he  restored  the  museum  from  the  chaos 
of  wartime  occupation  as  Civil  Defence 
headquarters  and  reorganized  the  Survey 
to  peacetime  activities  greatly  expanded 
by  official  recognition  of  the  need  for 
geological  advice  on  underground  water, 


nationalized  coal,  hydro-electric  schemes, 
discovery  of  new  sources  of  the  raw 
materials  of  atomic  energy,  and  research 
on  their  mineralogy  and  evaluation.  His 
museiun  was  the  first  of  the  national 
museums  to  reopen,  in  1947.  His  pro- 
gramme for  the  post-war  development  of 
the  Survey — logically,  clearly,  concisely, 
forcefully,  and  promptly  presented,  as 
were  all  his  official  papers — was  accepted 
and  forthwith  he  conjoined  the  extending 
geological  activities  with  those  of  the 
appropriate  Ministries  and  Boards,  at 
once  preserving  the  integrity  of  the 
Survey  as  the  organ  of  official  geology 
and  ensuring  these  bodies  of  the  most 
experienced  and  balanced  advice. 

Entirely  loyal  to  his  service  and  to  the 
just  interests  of  his  staff  McLintock  was 
ready  to  battle  with  highest  authority  for 
the  resources  and  conditions  he  con- 
sidered necessary  for  the  efficiency  and 
welfare  of  his  organization.  His  long 
experience  in  official  negotiations,  a 
prodigious  memory,  acute  logical  intellect, 
and  capacity  for  clear  presentation 
combined  with  a  gift  for  discerning  and 
tenacious  argument  usually  brought  him 
success.  Towards  his  own  preferment  he 
was  not  indifferent  but  not  solicitous. 
After  resigning  his  appointment  as  direc- 
tor in  1950  he  was  appointed  C.B.  (1951). 

Outwith  his  official  service  McLintock 
was  vice-president  of  the  eighteenth 
International  Geological  Congress,  to 
which  he  offered  the  hospitality  of  the 
museum  headquarters  in  1948.  He  led  the 
British  delegation  to  the  United  Nations 
conference  on  the  conservation  of  mineral 
resources  at  Lake  Success  in  1949  and 
served  for  many  years  on  the  Board  of 
Overseas  Geological  Surveys,  the  geo- 
logical advisory  panel  of  British  Petro- 
leum, Ltd.,  and  the  Iron  and  Steel  Board. 

Tall,  spare,  and  of  distinguished  appear- 
ance McLintock  was  always  elegantly 
dressed  in  town.  A  keen  golfer  and  trout- 
fisher,  he  enjoyed  also  riding  and  shooting. 
He  was  a  ready,  illuminating,  and  witty 
conversationalist  and  an  evening's  argu- 
ment, in  which  he  was  ready  to  take  any 
side  to  draw  an  opponent,  was  a  spice  to 
fife.  To  his  family  he  was  a  responsibly 
loyal  son  and  brother.  In  1939  McLintock 
married  Maude  Alice,  widow  of  J.  M, 
Marshall  and  daughter  of  Major-General 
W.  L.  Dalrymple.  Some  years  after  retire- 
ment to  their  home  at  Rosemount, 
Perthshire,  he  suffered  a  serious  heart 
attack  from  which  under  his  wife's  care  he 
apparently  recovered,  but  on  a  visit  to 


677 


McLintock 


t).N.B.  1951-1960 


Edinburgh  he  collapsed  and  died,  21 
February  1960. 

[The  Times  and  Scotsman,  23  February  1960 ; 
Year  Book  of  the  Royal  Society  of  Edinburgh, 
1961 ;  Proceedings  of  the  Geological  Society  of 
London,  1960 ;  Sir  John  S.  Flett,  The  Geological 
Survey  1835-1935,  1937  ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]  James  Phemister. 

MACMILLAN,  HUGH  PATTISON, 
Baron  Macmillan  (1873-1952),  judge, 
was  born  in  Glasgow  20  February  1873, 
the  only  son  among  the  six  children  of 
the  Rev.  Hugh  Macmillan  [q.v.]  by  his 
wife,  Jane,  daughter  of  William  Patison, 
of  Edinburgh.  He  was  educated  at  the 
Collegiate  School,  Greenock,  at  Edinburgh 
University,  where  he  graduated  in  1893 
with  first  class  honours  in  philosophy, 
and  Glasgow  University  where  he  obtained 
his  LL.B.  in  1896,  becoming  Cunninghame 
scholar.  He  passed  advocate  in  1897  after 
devilling  to  C.  J.  (later  Lord)  Guthrie. 
While  building  up  his  practice  at  the 
Scots  bar  he  acted  as  reporter  for  the 
Scots  Law  Times,  as  an  examiner  in  law  at 
Glasgow  University,  and  as  editor  of  the 
Juridical  Review.  Macmillan  had  no 
influence  to  bring  him  work,  but  the  care 
and  assiduity  with  which  he  conducted 
his  cases  soon  brought  his  name  to  the 
attention  of  solicitors.  He  took  silk  in 
1912  and  his  practice  thereafter  continued 
to  grow  until  he  became  one  of  the  busiest 
seniors  at  the  Scots  bar.  He  was  in  great 
demand  in  cases  which  involved  muni- 
cipalities and  pubhc  bodies  and  was  senior 
legal  assessor  to  Edinburgh  Corporation 
(1920-24)  and  standing  counsel  to  the 
Convention  of  Royal  Burghs  (1923-30). 
In  1918  he  spent  some  months  as  an 
assistant  director  of  intelligence  at  the 
Ministry  of  Information. 

In  1924  the  Labour  Party,  in  office  for 
the  first  time,  had  no  member  with 
sufficient  legal  qualifications  to  become 
lord  advocate.  Macmillan  was  neither  a 
member  of  Parliament  nor  a  Socialist, 
and  had  indeed  earlier  been  adopted  as  a 
Unionist  candidate.  But  he  accepted  from 
Ramsay  MacDonald  the  office  of  lord 
advocate,  having  as  solicitor-general  Sir 
John  Fenton,  also  a  non-political  appoint- 
ment. The  experiment  worked  well 
enough  although  it  has  never  been 
repeated.  Macmillan  was  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council  and  made  an  honorary 
bencher  of  the  Inner  Temple.  When  the 
Labour  Government  fell  Macmillan  re- 
turned to  the  bar,  establishing  himself  in 
chambers  in  London,  where  he  enjoyed  a 


varied  practice  in  the  House  of  Lords,  the 
Privy  Council,  and  before  parliamentary 
committees.  He  was  appointed  standing 
counsel  for  Canada  (1928)  and  for 
Austraha  (1929).  One  of  his  most  distin- 
guished appearances  was  in  1928  on  behalf 
of  the  railway  companies  in  the  road 
transport  bills  in  which  they  obtained 
power  to  provide  road  services  in  face  of 
the  increasing  competition  of  bus  com- 
panies and  road  hauliers. 

In  1930  Macmillan  was  made  a  lord  of 
appeal  in  ordinary  with  a  life  peerage. 
After  a  period  (1939^0)  as  minister  of 
information,  he  returned  to  the  House  of 
Lords  as  a  lord  of  appeal  in  1941,  until 
his  resignation  in  1947.  Shortly  after  his 
appointment  he  sat  in  the  case  of  Donoghue 
v.  Stevenson,  [1932]  A.C.  562,  known  as 
the  case  of  the  snail  in  the  ginger  beer 
bottle.  He  delivered  a  careful  judge- 
ment justifying  the  result  that  the  manu- 
facturers were  liable  in  negligence  to  the 
consumer.  'The  law  takes  no  cognizance 
of  carelessness  in  the  abstract .  .  .  The 
grounds  of  action  may  be  as  various  and 
manifold  as  human  errancy  .  .  .  The 
categories  of  negligence  are  never  closed' 
are  passages  which  are  often  quoted. 
During  the  war  he  was  a  party  to  the 
decision  in  Blyth  v.  Lord  Advocate,  [1945] 
A.C.  32,  which  established  that  a  company 
commander  in  the  Home  Guard  was  a 
'common  soldier'  within  the  meaning  of 
the  Finance  Act  and  that  his  estate  was 
exempt  from  estate  duty.  Other  well- 
known  cases  in  which  he  delivered  judge- 
ments were  Woods  v.  Duncan,  [1946]  A.C. 
401  (the  Thetis  disaster),  and  Joyce  v. 
Director  of  Public  Prosecutions,  [1946]  A.C. 
347  ('Lord  Haw-Haw').  After  Macmillan's 
death  Viscount  Simonds  wrote :  'His  judg- 
ments have  a  clarity  and  precision  which 
will  lead  students  of  the  law  to  turn  to 
them  for  guidance  and  they  have  too  an 
elegance  and  felicity  which  would  delight 
the  adventurous  layman  who  strayed  into 
that  field  of  literature  .  .  .  Courteous  and 
patient,  even  long-suffering  his  less  patient 
colleagues  might  think,  ...  he  was  to  me 
the  model  of  what  a  member  of  an 
appellate  tribunal  should  be.' 

Macmillan's  wit,  urbanity,  and  charm 
were  accompanied  by  an  underlying 
seriousness  of  purpose  which  increasingly 
found  expression  in  public  service  as  his 
talents  for  chairmanship  were  recognized. 
He  had  an  astonishing  versatility  and 
could  give  his  mind  to  any  problem  with  a 
lucidity  tending  towards  solution  rather 
than  perplexity.  He  is  perhaps  best  known 


ms 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


McNeil 


for  his  chairmanship  of  the  Treasury 
committee  on  finance  and  industry  (1929- 
31),  which  surveyed  the  nation's  financial 
system  in  relation  to  industry.  Its  report 
became  known  by  his  name  although  much 
of  it  was  written  by  J.  M.  (later  Lord) 
Keynes  [q.v.].  Macmillan  was  chairman 
also  of  the  royal  commission  on  lunacy 
(1924-6) ;  of  the  court  of  inquiry  into  the 
coal  mining  industry  dispute  (1925) ;  of  the 
sub-committee  on  the  British  Pharma- 
copoeia (1926-8);  of  the  Home  Office 
committee  on  street  offences  (1927-8); 
of  the  shipbuilding  industry  conferences 
(1928-30) ;  of  the  Treasury  committee  on 
income-tax  law  codifications  (1932-6) ;  of 
the  royal  commission  on  Canadian  banking 
and  currency  (1933) ;  and  of  the  committee 
on  the  preservation  of  works  of  art  in 
enemy  hands  (1944-7).  He  was  a  member 
of  the  Political  Honours  Committee  from 
1929  and  chairman  from  1935.  An  original 
trustee  of  the  Pilgrim  Trust  he  was 
chairman  from  1935  until  his  death.  He 
was  chairman  of  the  court  of  London 
University  (1929-43)  and  of  the  lord 
chancellor's  committee  on  an  institute 
of  advanced  legal  studies  which  was 
inaugurated  in  1948.  He  was  chairman 
also  of  the  Great  Ormond  Street  Hospital 
for  Sick  Children  (1928-34) ;  of  the  King 
George  V  memorial  fund ;  of  the  general 
committee  of  the  Athenaeum  (1935-45) ; 
and  of  the  B.B.C.  advisory  council  (1936- 
46).  Other  bodies  on  which  he  served  were 
the  British  Museum,  the  Soane  Museum, 
the  Carnegie  Trust  for  Scottish  Univer- 
sities, the  National  Trust,  King  George's 
Jubilee  Trust,  and  the  Society  for  the 
Promotion  of  Nature  Reserves.  He  was 
president  of  the  Scottish  Text  Society 
and  instrumental  in  founding  the  Stair 
Society  in  1934.  It  was  largely  due  to  his 
efforts  that  the  Advocates  Library  was 
taken  over  as  the  National  Library  of 
Scotland  in  1925.  He  himself  possessed  a 
library  of  outstanding  quaUty  and  at  his 
wish  part  has  been  placed  in  the  House  of 
Lords  library  and  part  in  the  Advocates 
Library  at  Parliament  House,  Edinburgh, 
where  closely  adjacent  there  is  a  com- 
memorative plaque. 

A  collection  of  Macmillan's  essays  and 
addresses  was  published  in  1987  under 
the  title  Law  and  Other  Things  and  his 
autobiography,  A  Man  of  Law's  Tale, 
appeared  in  1952  shortly  after  his  death. 
He  was  a  regular  contributor  to  this 
Dictionary. 

Macmillan  received  honorary  degrees 
from  thirteen  universities.  He  was  made 


an  honorary  burgess  of  Edinburgh  in  1938 
and  appointed  G.C.V.O.  in  1937. 

He  married  in  1901  Elizabeth  Katharine 
Grace  (died  1967),  daughter  of  William 
Johnstone  Marshall,  M.D.,  of  Greenock; 
they  had  no  children.  He  died  at  Ewhurst, 
Surrey,  5  September  1952.  A  portrait  by 
L.  Campbell  Taylor  is  in  the  Senate  House 
of  London  University  and  a  drawing  by 
Sir  William  Rothenstein  belongs  to  the 
Athenaeum. 

[The  Times,  6,  11,  12,  and  16  September 
1952;  Law  Times,  12  September  1952;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  Guest. 

McNEIL,  HECTOR  (1907-1955), 
journalist  and  politician,  was  born  at 
the  Temperance  Hotel,  Garelochhead, 
Dumbartonshire,  10  March  1907,  the 
second  of  seven  children  of  Donald 
McNeill,  journeyman  shipwright,  and 
his  wife,  Margaret  McPherson  Russell. 
His  father's  family  originated  in  the 
island  of  Barra  and  his  mother's  in  Islay. 
When  the  family  moved  to  Glasgow, 
McNeil  attended  secondary  schools  and 
the  university.  At  first  he  studied  for  the 
ministry,  but  after  touring  Canada  and 
the  United  States  in  1931-2  as  a  member 
of  the  British  universities'  debating  team 
he  decided  to  devote  himself  to  journalism 
and  politics.  After  a  period  as  a  freelance 
he  joined  the  staff  of  the  Scottish  Daily 
Express  as  a  reporter,  later  becoming  a 
sub-editor,  night  news  editor,  and  finally 
leader-writer.  In  1938  he  was  transferred 
for  a  time  to  London  but  subsequently 
returned  to  Glasgow  as  assistant  to  the 
editor.  He  was  active  in  local  politics, 
served  on  the  Glasgow  town  council  (1933- 
6,  1937-8),  and  was  river  bailie  (1937-8). 

In  the  meantime  he  had  stood  un- 
successfully as  a  Labour  candidate  in 
Galloway  at  the  general  elections  of  1929 
and  1931.  In  the  general  election  of  1985 
he  failed  by  only  149  votes  to  defeat 
Walter  Elliot  [q.v.],  the  sitting  member 
for  Kelvingrove,  Glasgow ;  and  in  February 
1936  he  nearly  doubled  the  previous 
Labour  vote  in  a  by-election  contest 
against  Malcolm  MacDonald  in  Ross  and 
Cromarty.  Finally,  as  a  result  of  the 
wartime  electoral  truce  between  the 
parties,  he  was  returned  unopposed  in 
July  1941  for  the  burgh  of  Greenock, 
a  constituency  which  he  succeeded  in 
retaining  at  four  subsequent  elections  and 
which  he  represented  until  his  death. 

In  1942-5  McNeil  was  parliamentary 
private  secretary  to  Philip  Noel-Baker, 
parliamentary  secretary  to  the  Ministry  of 


679 


McNeil 


D.N.B.  1P5X^1060 


War  Transport.  After  the  election  of  1945 
C.  R.  (later  Earl)  Attlee  appointed  him 
parliamentary  under-secretary  of  state  at 
the  Foreign  Office  under  Ernest  Bevin 
[q.v.].  In  the  following  year  he  was  sworn 
of  the  Privy  Council  on  his  promotion  to 
be  minister  of  state  for  foreign  affairs,  in 
which  office  he  remained  until  Parliament 
was  dissolved  in  February  1950.  It  was 
this  period  at  the  Foreign  Office  which 
gave  McNeil  most  satisfaction  and  brought 
him  most  prominently  before  the  public. 
He  became  the  recognized  spokesman  of 
the  Government  at  the  annual  General 
Assemblies  of  the  United  Nations,  where 
the  propaganda  contest  between  the 
Soviet  Union  and  the  western  powers  was 
then  reaching  its  height.  McNeil  had 
always  been  a  debater  of  unusual  force, 
and  he  more  than  held  his  own  in  this 
forum,  becoming  even  better  known  in  the 
United  States  than  he  was  at  home.  Among 
his  many  other  activities  were  his  partici- 
pation in  the  Paris  peace  conference  of 
1946,  and  in  negotiations  leading  up  to  the 
Brussels  Treaty  in  1948.  He  also  took  part 
in  some  of  the  more  specialized  work  of 
the  United  Nations,  in  particular  in  the 
formation  of  the  International  Refugee 
Organization,  a  subject  for  which  he  felt 
a  special  sympathy  and  concern. 

Following  the  election  of  1950  McNeil 
became  secretary  of  state  for  Scotland, 
with  a  seat  in  the  Cabinet,  until  the 
defeat  of  the  Labour  Party  at  the  polls  in 
October  1951.  During  this  brief  period  he 
showed  a  keen  interest  in  the  breeding  of 
Highland  cattle;  and  scored  a  personal 
success  in  arranging  that  facilities  in 
Switzerland  for  the  treatment  of  tuber- 
culosis should  be  available  to  the  British 
health  services.  He  was  also  able  to  use 
his  own  international  connections  to 
attract  new  industries  to  Clydeside.  After 
his  party  went  into  opposition  he  gave 
part  of  his  time  to  private  business,  be- 
coming managing-director  and  chairman 
of  the  British  company  producing  the 
Eneyclopcedia  Britannica.  He  also  became 
very  popular  on  radio  and  television. 
While  travelling  to  the  United  States  on 
business  he  suffered  a  haemorrhage  and 
died  in  New  York  11  October  1955.  His 
early  death  cut  short  a  career  which  had 
seemed  to  ensure  for  him  an  important 
place  for  many  years  to  come. 

In  1939  McNeil  married  Sheila,  daughter 
of  Dr.  James  Craig,  of  Glasgow ;  they  had 
one  son. 

[Public  records ;  private  information ;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  Kknneth  Younger. 


MACQUEEN-POPE,  WALTER  JAMES 

(1888-1960),  theatre  manager,  publicist, 
and  historian,  was  born  in  Farnham, 
Surrey,  11  April  1888,  the  elder  son  of 
Walter  George  Pope,  hop  factor,  and  his 
wife,  Frederika  Macqueen.  He  was  proud 
of  his  theatrical  connections,  a  great-aunt 
several  times  removed  having  been  the 
celebrated  Mrs.  Elizabeth  Pope  [q.v.],  the 
original  Mrs.  Candour  in  The  School  for 
Scandal.  'Popie',  as  he  was  universally 
known  in  his  long  career  as  manager  and 
as  press-agent,  could  further  trace  his 
theatrical  ancestry  back  to  Morgan  Pope, 
owner  of  the  Bear  Garden,  Bankside,  and 
to  Thomas  Pope,  one  of  Burbage's  actors 
and  shareholder  of  the  Globe  Theatre, 
Bankside,  in  the  late  sixteenth  century. 

'Popie'  was  educated  at  Tollington 
School  and  began  his  working  life  as  a 
shipping  clerk,  but  transferred  to  the 
theatre  world  as  soon  as  possible,  acting 
for  several  years  as  secretary  to  the 
impresario.  Sir  George  Dance,  and  then 
becoming  business-manager  for  Sir  Alfred 
Butt  at  the  Queen's,  St.  James's,  the 
Lyric,  and  other  theatres.  For  three  years 
(1922-5),  he  was  manager  of  the  Alexandra 
Palace.  But  this  was  not  the  inner  heart 
of  the  theatre  for  Pope.  After  1925 
he  worked  in  a  managerial  capacity 
successively  at  the  Duke  of  York's 
Theatre  (1927-9),  the  new  Whitehall 
Theatre  (1929-32,  in  Walter  Hackett's 
highly  successful  seasons),  at  the  Aldwych 
Theatre  (in  the  heyday  of  the  Walls-Lynn 
farces),  and  then  as  press  representative 
for  Drury  Lane  (1935-56)  and  many  other 
managements. 

For  the  first  four  years  of  the  war  he 
worked  for  E.N.S.A.  as  public  relations 
officer,  with  his  headquarters  at  Drury 
Lane  Theatre.  He  was  a  marvellous 
personal  guide  to  this  theatre  and  would 
particularly  dwell  there  on  stories  of  the 
building's  reasonably  well-authenticated 
ghost  in  the  upper  circle. 

In  his  last  fifteen  years  Pope  turned 
author  and  produced  an  astonishing  num- 
ber of  big  volumes,  at  least  one  a  year, 
about  particular  theatres  and  their  history 
(among  them  Drury  Lane,  St.  James's,  the 
Haymarket,  and  the  Gaiety),  about  panto- 
mime and  the  music-hall,  about  London's 
pleasure  gardens,  and  about  'the  good  old 
times'  generally.  These  voliunes  were 
enthusiastic  and  accurate  rather  than 
brilliantly  descriptive  or  informative. 

From  1955  until  his  death  'Popie'  was 
also  in  demand  as  a  lecturer  on  the 
theatrical  subjects  he  loved,  and  he  ap- 


680 


D.N.B.  1051^1960 


Malan 


peared  often  in  the  same  capacity  on  radio 
and  on  television.  Vivian  Ellis  sketches  a 
vivid  picture  of  him  in  his  book,  7'w  on  a 
See-Saw  (1953):  'Somewhere  in  a  series 
of  offices,  in  the  upper  circles  of  darkened 
theatres  or  high  above  the  roar  of  the 
London  traffic,  Macqueen-Pope  has  always 
sat,  rather  like  an  extinct  bird  in  its 
lofty  eyrie.  There  he  broods,  surrounded 
with  bound  volumes  of  old  plays  and 
prints,  typing,  smoking,  and  saying  how 
tired  he  is  of  it  all,  but  never  too  tired  to 
share  a  laugh,  a  sorrow,  or  his  own 
unrivalled  knowledge  of  our  contemporary, 
as  well  as  non-contemporary,  stage.' 

Two  notices  by  Macqueen-Pope  appear 
in  this  Supplement,  but  he  died,  in 
London,  27  June  1960,  before  he  could 
complete  all  that  he  had  undertaken. 

He  married  in  1912  Stella  Suzanne 
Schumann,  by  whom  he  had  one  daughter. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Alan  Dent. 

MALAN,  DANIEL  FRANgOIS  (1874- 
1959),  South  African  prime  minister, 
was  born  22  May  1874  in  the  Western 
Cape  Colony  on  the  farm  AUesverloren, 
near  Riebeek  West.  J.  C.  Smuts  [q.v.]  had 
been  born  on  a  neighbouring  farm  four 
years  earlier.  Malan  was  the  eldest  son  of 
Daniel  Francois  Malan,  a  wine  farmer  of 
Huguenot  descent,  and  his  wife,  Anna 
Magdalena  du  Toit.  With  Smuts,  a  boy- 
hood friend  and  for  a  time  his  Sunday- 
school  teacher,  Malan  had  his  early 
schooling  in  Riebeek  West.  He  was  a 
serious-minded  but  not  outstanding 
scholar.  Suffering  from  weak  eyesight,  he 
took  little  part  in  sport  but  preferred 
social  problems  upon  which  he  could  bring 
to  bear  a  kind  of  idealistic  discontent. 
In  his  twenty-seventh  year,  after  obtain- 
ing an  M.A.  in  philosophy  at  Stellenbosch, 
he  went  on  to  the  university  of  Utrecht 
where  he  obtained  his  doctorate  in  divinity 
with  a  thesis  on  'The  Ideahsm  of  Berkeley'. 
On  his  return  to  South  Africa  he  began 
as  a  teacher  but  soon  exchanged  the 
schoolroom  for  the  Church.  In  1906  he 
went  to  Montagu  in  the  Cape  Colony 
where  from  his  Dutch  Reformed  Church 
pulpit  he  preached  strict  temperance, 
if  not  prohibition,  to  the  wine  farmers. 
Admiring  his  courage,  they  hardly  ap- 
preciated his  views  and  in  1912  he 
migrated  to  Graaf-Reinet,  a  town  in  a 
sheep-farming  area  of  the  Cape  Midlands, 
where  the  different  agricultural  interests 
provided  a  more  congenial  atmosphere  for 
local  veto  and  kindred  subjects. 


It  was  soon  clear  that  the  pulpit  was 
too  confined  and  academic  for  Malan  who 
had  already  shown  himself  a  great  force 
in  the  promotion  of  the  Afrikaans  language 
and  now  began  to  take  an  interest  in 
pohtics.  His  career  as  a  predikant  came  to 
a  close  in  1915  when  the  Nationalist 
Party  decided  to  launch  its  own  newS' 
paper  in  Cape  Town.  Malan  was  persuaded 
to  accept  the  editorship  and  on  26  July 
1915  he  produced  the  first  issue  of  Die 
Burger.  His  declared  mission  was  to  raise 
the  tone  of  polemics  and  foster  a  spirit  of 
unity  among  the  people.  For  many  years, 
however,  he  brought  not  peace,  but  a 
political  sword.  His  editorials  breathed 
the  race-exclusiveness  of  the  Old 
Testament.  He  turned  his  wrath  upon 
General  Botha  [q.v.]  as  a  Judas  of  the 
Afrikaner  race  when  he  was  leading  South 
African  troops  in  German  South  West 
Africa  on  the  side  of  the  Allies ;  Botha  and 
Smuts  were  accused  of  having  involved 
South  Africa  in  a  foreign  war  in  which 
she  had  no  interest,  an  indictment  of 
Smuts  which  Malan  repeated  in  1939. 
Secession  and  republicanism  were  the 
constant  theme,  Malan  insisting  that  only 
independence  from  the  British  Empire 
could  ensure  the  future  inviolability  of 
South  Africa.  He  remained  editor  of  Die 
Burger  for  nearly  nine;  years  and  until  his 
death  he  retained  a  close  bond  with  the 
newspaper  which  grew  to  wield  immense 
influence  in  South  African  politics. 

Malan's  entry  into  politics  coincided 
with  his  first  association  with  Die  Burger. 
He  took  a  lead  in  the  somewhat  protracted 
formalities  of  launching  the  Cape  National- 
ist Party ;  and  in  September  1915  presided 
over  its  first  congress  at  Middelburg.  He 
remained  the  party's  leader  in  the  Cape 
until  1953.  He  was  defeated  in  the  general 
election  of  1915  at  Cradock  and  again,  by 
only  sixteen  votes,  in  a  by-election  at 
Victoria  West  in  1917.  In  1919  W.  P. 
Louw,  who  many  years  later  became  his 
father-in-law,  resigned  to  enable  Malan  to 
take  over  his  Calvinia  seat.  This  he 
retained  until  1938  when,  scenting  danger, 
he  transferred  to  Piketberg  which  he 
held  with  overwhelming  majorities'  until 
his  retirement  from  politics. 

Malan's  first  visit  to  England  was  in  1919 
when  he  was  one  of' the  freedom  deputa- 
tion whose  representations  in  favour  of 
secession  met  with  a  brusque  refusal.  In 
1924  J.  B.  M.  Hertzog  [q.v.]  entered  into 
an  election  pact  with  the  Labour  Party., 
Malan,  who  had  earUer  vehemently  op- 
posed  any   idea   of  coalition,   gave   his 


Malan 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


blessing  to  the  arrangement  which  de- 
feated Smuts  and  resulted  in  a  Pact 
government.  By  this  time  Malan  had  also 
modified  his  secessionist  and  anti-English 
tone.  He  drew  subtle  distinctions  between 
'sovereign  independence'  and  'republican 
independence',  averring  that  the  National- 
ists had  never  contemplated  the  abolition 
of  the  common  monarchy.  On  the  eve  of 
the  election  he  had  publicly  repudiated  a 
leading  article  in  Die  Burger  which  merely 
reiterated  his  own  pre-Pact  sentiments. 
He  resigned  his  editorship  and  was  given 
the  portfolios  of  interior,  public  health, 
and  education  in  Hertzog's  Cabinet.  He 
soon  revealed  the  qualities  of  an  able 
administrator  and,  once  again,  the  zeal  of 
the  reformer.  He  reformed  the  language 
settlement  in  the  South  Africa  Act  by 
substituting  Afrikaans  for  Dutch  as  the 
second  official  language  of  the  Union.  He 
reformed  the  Senate.  He  reformed  the 
conduct  of  elections  and  introduced 
voting  by  post.  He  reformed  the  Civil 
Service.  And  he  attempted  to  reform  the 
press.  He  gave  South  Africa  its  own  flag 
after  days  of  bitter  controversy.  He  also 
attempted  a  settlement  of  the  problem  of 
Indians  in  South  Africa  by  concluding  the 
Cape  Town  round  table  agreement  in  1927 
which  aimed  at  a  reduction  in  their 
numbers  through  repatriation,  although 
this  subsequently  proved  impracticable. 
While  openly  advocating  the  principle 
that,  all  things  being  equal.  Civil  Service 
posts  should  be  given  to  Nationalists,  he 
refused  to  indulge  in  witch  hunts  and 
there  were  fewer  complaints  of  political 
bias  in  his  departments  than  in  any 
other. 

When  Hertzog  and  Smuts  formed  a 
coalition  government  in  1933  Malan  gave 
it  nominal  support  but  refused  office.  In 
1934  he  resisted  the  fusion  of  their  parties 
into  the  United  Party  and  with  a  small 
group  of  diehard  republican  Nationalists 
crossed  the  floor  to  the  opposition  benches, 
where  he  became  the  leader  of  the  group 
calling  themselves  the  'Purified'  National- 
ists. He  was  branded  a  schismatic,  a 
traitor  to  his  leader,  and  a  racialist. 
Hertzog  now  became  the  target  of  Malan's 
contumely,  and  a  period  of  bitter  verbal 
conflict  followed.  But  departure  from  the 
gold  standard  (December  1932)  led  to  a 
spectacular  economic  revival  and  little 
thought  was  given,  outside  political  ranks, 
to  Malan's  fulminations.  The  general 
election  of  1938  increased  the  strength  of 
his  group  from  19  to  27  in  a  House  of  154 
members. 


The  split  between  Smuts  and  Hertzog 
on  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  brought 
about  a  temporary  reunion  between 
Hertzog  and  Malan  who  had  sent  a  letter 
to  Hertzog  pledging  support  for  neutrality 
which  Hertzog  had  failed  to  disclose  to 
his  colleagues.  The  new-found  unity, 
however,  did  not  last  long.  An  internal 
crisis  in  the  reunited  National  Party  came 
to  a  head  at  a  Free  State  congress  in 
November  1940  which  adopted  a  pro- 
gramme which  Hertzog  declared  ignored 
the  rights  of  the  English-speaking  people 
of  the  Union.  He  and  N.  C.  Havenga,  the 
former  minister  of  finance,  left  the  congress 
hall  and  the  field  clear  to  Malan. 

At  the  general  election  in  1943  Malan 
gained  only  forty-three  seats  but  his 
confidence  was  increased  by  the  fact  that 
all  the  various  dissenting  Nationalist 
movements  were  rejected  by  the  elector- 
ate; with  a  limited  following  in  Parlia- 
ment he  pursued  his  pressure  on  Smuts. 

In  1946  the  Government  received  copies 
of  papers  found  in  the  German  Foreign 
Office  in  which  there  was  a  reference  to 
communications  which  Hans  Denk,  a 
Nazi  formerly  residing  in  South  West 
Africa,  was  alleged  to  have  had  in  1940 
with  Malan  through  Mrs.  Denk  who 
entered  the  Union  from  Portuguese  East 
Africa.  A  select  committee  appointed  by 
Parliament  exonerated  Malan  and  ac- 
cepted that  although  he  had  had  an 
interview  with  Mrs.  Denk  there  was  no 
connection  between  this  and  a  Nationalist 
peace  resolution  tabled  in  the  House  three 
days  later. 

In  March  1947  Malan  reached  an 
election  agreement  with  Havenga,  the 
sequel  of  which  was  Malan's  victory  on 
a  policy  of  apartheid  in  May  1948  by  a 
majority  of  five  members  over  the  United 
Party.  For  Smuts  a  lifelong  struggle  with 
Malan  had  ended  in  defeat  and  with  the 
aid  of  Havenga  Malan  emerged  from  the 
political  wilderness  at  the  age  of  seventy- 
four  to  become  the  fourth  prime  minister 
of  the  Union.  The  formation  of  an 
exclusively  Afrikaner  and  republican 
Government  followed. 

There  were  those  who  thought  that  his 
narrow  victory  would  soon  be  reversed. 
Malan,  however,  resolutely  set  about  en- 
trenching himself  in  power  and  paving  the 
way  for  a  republic.  The  South  West  Africa 
constitution  was  amended  to  give  the 
mandated  territory  six  seats  in  the  Assem- 
bly and  four  in  the  Senate,  all  of  which 
went  to  the  National  Party.  Dual  citizen- 
i^ip  for  immigrants  from  the  Common- 


682 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Malcolm 


wealth  and  the  right  of  appeal  to  the 
Privy  Council  were  abolished.  Malan  was 
the  author  of  apartheid,  a  policy  which 
brought  South  Africa  in  conflict  with  world 
opinion.  Under  his  guidance  there  were  in- 
troduced the  Group  Areas  Act,  the  Mixed 
Marriages  Act,  and  the  Immorality  Act 
which  made  intercourse  between  white  and 
non-white  a  criminal  offence.  Apartheid 
was  insisted  upon  in  railway  stations, 
suburban  trains,  post  offices,  and  many 
other  places.  Malan's  efforts  to  remove 
Cape  Coloured  voters  from  the  common 
roll,  a  right  they  had  enjoyed  for  a  century, 
were  frustrated  by  decisions  of  the  Court  of 
Appeal.  Nevertheless  Malan  gained  a  deci- 
sive victory  at  the  1953  election.  As  prime 
minister  he  went  to  London  to  attend  the 
coronation  of  Queen  Elizabeth.  At  the 
1949  Commonwealth  prime  ministers'  con- 
ference he  had  concurred  in  the  decision 
to  allow  India,  although  an  independent 
repubhc,  to  remain  in  the  Commonwealth. 
Malan  subsequently  defined  his  attitude 
to  the  Commonwealth  by  saying  that, 
whatever  differences  might  exist  about  a 
republic,  it  was  his  wish  to  remain  within 
it.  His  views  had  mellowed  considerably 
and  during  the  period  of  his  premiership  he 
revealed  a  less  exclusive  attitude  towards 
Enghsh-speaking  South  Africans. 

Malan  resigned  as  Cape  leader  in  1953 
and  as  prime  minister  in  November  1954. 
His  decision  to  leave  the  political  scene  at 
the  height  of  his  success  and  before  his 
leadership  was  affected  by  his  diminishing 
physical  strength  showed  his  objectivity 
towards  himself.  He  tried  unsuccessfully 
to  designate  Havenga  as  his  successor. 
Thereafter  he  lived  in  seclusion  at  his 
home  Morewag  at  Stellenbosch  where  he 
settled  down  to  write  his  memoirs  which 
dealt  with  the  restoration  of  the  unity  of 
Afrikanerdom.  He  died  at  Stellenbosch 
7  February  1959. 

Malan's  first  marriage,  in  1926,  was  to  a 
widow,  Mrs.  Van  Tonder,  formerly  Martha 
Margaretha  Elizabeth  Zandberg,  who  died 
in  1930.  They  had  two  sons.  In  1937  Malan 
married  Maria  Ann  Sophia,  daughter  of 
W.  P.  Louw.  They  adopted  a  German 
orphan  girl  in  1948.  In  1955  the  airport  at 
Cape  Town  was  named  after  Malan  and  a 
portrait  by  Geoffrey  Wylde  was  presented 
to  the  South  African  Parhament. 

[D.  F.  Malan,  Afrikaner-Volkseenheid  en 
my  Ervarings  op  die  Pad  Daarheen,  1959; 
Eric  Robins,  This  Man  Malan,  1953 ;  L.  E. 
Neame,  Some  South  African  Politicians, 
1929;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Harry  Lawrence. 


MALCOLM,  Sir  DOUGAL  ORME  (1877- 
1955),  scholar  and  imperialist,  was  a 
cadet  of  the  house  of  Malcolm  of  Poltalloch, 
belonging  to  a  branch  of  which  his  cousin 
and  brother-in-law  Sir  Neill  Malcolm  was 
the  head.  He  was  the  younger  son  of 
William  Rolle  Malcolm,  senior  partner  of 
Coutts's  bank,  and  his  first  wife,  Georgina 
Wellesley,  sister  of  the  fourth  Duke  of 
WeUington,  and  was  born  in  Epsom  6 
August  1877.  Although  his  career  lay 
wholly  in  England  and  the  Empire 
oversea,  he  was  tenacious  of  his  Scottish 
patriotism.  He  was  educated  at  Eton  and 
New  College,  Oxford,  where  he  graduated 
with  a  double  first  in  the  classical  schools 
of  honour  moderations  (1897)  and  literae 
humaniores  (1899).  While  his  fine  scholar- 
ship, which  was  a  great  part  of  the  man, 
was  literary  rather  than  philosophical, 
the  Greats  teaching  had  developed  in  him 
an  exceptionally  keen  logical  faculty.  In 
1899  he  was  elected,  like  his  father  before 
him,  a  fellow  of  All  Souls,  a  rare  family 
'double'  since  the  abolition  of  the  privi- 
leges of  founder's  kin ;  later  he  was 
joined  there  by  his  schoolfellow  and 
lifelong  intimate  Robert  (later  Lord) 
Brand. 

In  1900  Malcolm  entered  the  Colonial 
Office,  where  he  acted  as  private  secretary 
to  Sir  Alfred  (later  Viscount)  Milner  [q.v.], 
high  commissioner  in  South  Africa,  during 
Milner's  visits  to  headquarters  in  London. 
Like  many  of  his  New  College  contempor- 
aries he  fell  under  Milner's  spell  and  de- 
sired to  enlist  under  his  leadership.  Brand 
had  already  obtained  an  appointment  as 
assistant  town  clerk  of  Johannesburg 
which  enrolled  him  in  the  band  of  yoimg 
Oxford  men,  nearly  all  from  New  College, 
afterwards  nicknamed  'Milner's  kinder- 
garten' ;  but  Malcolm's  chance  did  not 
come  until  1905,  when  he  went  out  to 
Cape  Town  as  private  secretary  to  Lord 
Selborne  [q.v.]  who  had  been  appointed 
to  succeed  Milner  and  carry  on  his  work 
of  reconstructing  the  four  colonies  of 
South  Africa  after  the  South  African 
war. 

Malcolm  was  immediately  accepted  into 
the  brotherhood  of  the  kindergarten.  He 
fell  also  under  the  influence  of  the  ideas  of 
Cecil  Rhodes  [q.v.]  for  imperial  develop- 
ment north  of  the  Limpopo,  mediated 
through  (Sir)  Leander  Starr  Jameson 
[q.v.],  for  Rhodes  himself  had  died  in 
1902.  The  immediate  task  of  the  kinder- 
garten, however,  was  to  work  for  the 
achievement  of' Milner's  project  of  uniting 
the  four  colonies  into  a  single  state.  This 


Malcolm 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


project  eventually  took  shape  in  the 
document  which  was  adopted  by  the 
high  commissioner  and  became  known  as 
the  Selborne  memorandum.  While  the 
text  of  the  memorandum  was  from  the 
pen  of  Lionel  Curtis  [q.v.],  in  the  long 
debates  in  the  kindergarten  out  of  which 
it  emerged,  it  was  largely  Malcolm's 
critical  analysis  which  translated  Curtis's 
enthusiasm  into  practical  politics. 

After  the  Union  of  South  Africa  in  1909, 
the  kindergarten  began  to  break  up. 
Curtis,  Brand,  and  others  transferred 
themselves  to  London,  where  they  em- 
barked on  study  of  schemes  for  applying 
the  principles  of  the  union  of  the  four 
colonies  on  the  larger  scale  of  the  British 
Empire.  They  founded  the  quarterly  re- 
view, the  Round  Table,  as  an  organ  for  dis- 
cussion of  the  imperial  problem.  Malcolm 
remained  in  South  Africa  until  Selborne's 
term  of  office  ended  in  1910,  but  kept  in 
touch  with  them  by  post  and  continued  to 
criticize  the  drafts  of  the  work  eventually 
published  under  Curtis's  name  as  The 
Problem  of  the  Commonwealth  (1916).  Then, 
after  a  few  months  as  private  secretary 
to  Lord  Grey  [q.v.],  governor-general  of 
Canada,  he  was  transferred  in  1912  to  the 
Treasury  and  later  in  the  year  appointed 
secretary  to  the  dominions  royal  commis- 
sion. 

At  the  end  of  the  year,  however, 
Malcolm  retired  from  the  Civil  Service, 
having  been  nominated  a  director  of  the 
British  South  Africa  Company  on  the 
departure  of  the  vice-president,  James 
Rochfort  Maguire  (whose  notice  he 
subsequently  contributed  to  this  Diction- 
ary), to  take  charge  of  the  company's 
affairs  in  Rhodesia.  This  was  Rhodes's 
chartered  company,  founded  in  1889,  and 
still  administering  the  territories  of 
Matabeleland  and  Mashonaland,  where 
the  founders  had  obtained  concessions  of 
mining  and  other  rights  from  Lobengula. 
The  management  of  this  great  enterprise 
was  Malcolm's  main  professional  occupa- 
tion for  the  remainder  of  his  life,  although 
as  the  years  passed  he  accepted  places  on 
the  boards  of  many  other  companies, 
including  another  chartered  company, 
that  of  British  North  Borneo,  of  which 
he  became  vice-president.  In  1923  the 
British  South  Africa  Company  surrendered 
its  political  functions  to  the  colonial 
governments  of  Southern  and  Northern 
Rhodesia,  so  that  Malcolm,  when  he 
became  president  in  1937,  succeeded  only 
to  the  control  of  a  powerful  commercial 
corporation,  the  principal  assets  of  which 


were  the  mineral  rights  and  the  major 
share  in  the  ownership  of  the  railways. 
In  due  course  the  movement  towards 
self-government,  which  always  had 
Malcolm's  warm  sympathy,  became 
jealous  of  this  privileged  position.  It  fell  to 
him,  therefore,  to  conduct  the  prolonged 
negotiations  which  led,  first  to  the  sale  of 
the  railways,  on  profitable  terms,  to  the 
Government  in  1947,  and  to  a  new 
agreement  for  the  mining  rights  in  1950. 
By  this  the  company  agreed  to  surrender 
its  rights  in  1986,  meanwhile  paying  one- 
fifth  of  its  net  revenue  from  mining  to 
the  Northern  Rhodesian  Government,  the 
amount  to  be  regarded  as  an  expense  for 
the  purpose  of  the  colony's  income-tax. 
In  return  the  Government  agreed  that  no 
special  tax  should  be  imposed  on  mining 
royalties  as  such.  For  the  remaining 
years  of  his  life  Malcolm  continued  to 
take  a  close  consultative  interest  in  the 
progress  of  the  two  Rhodesias  towards 
independence;  but  he  was  strongly 
opposed  to  the  creation  of  the  Federation 
of  the  two  colonies  and  Nyasaland,  holding 
that  they  could  prosper  only  under  a 
unitary  government.  He  maintained  also 
that  the  attempts  to  give  special  consti- 
tutional protection  to  native  interests 
must  be  illusory,  there  being  no  aspect  of 
Rhodesian  politics  in  which  the  race 
question  was  not  involved. 

Public  work  undertaken  during  the  last 
thirty  years  of  Malcolm's  life  included  the 
chairmanship  of  the  1820  Settlers  Memor- 
ial Association,  through  which  he  did 
much  to  encourage  migration  to  South 
Africa ;  the  chairmanship  from  1925  of  the 
inter-departmental  committee  on  educa- 
tion and  industry  which  reported  in  1926 
and  1928  ;  and  membership  of  the  British 
economic  mission  which  visited  Australia 
in  1928.  Although  his  staunchly  Conser- 
vative and  imperialist  principles  had 
nothing  in  common  with  the  trend  of 
thought  popularly  associated  with  the 
London  School  of  Economics,  he  served 
that  institution  faithfully  as  vice-chairman 
of  the  court  of  governors.  He  was  par- 
ticularly assiduous  in  his  attention  to  the 
editorial  affairs  of  the  Round  Table,  co- 
operating with  his  old  friends  of  the  kin- 
dergarten and  the  younger  men  who  were 
brought  in  to  fill  the  gaps  that  mortality 
from  time  to  time  created,  and  occasion- 
ally contributing  an  anonymous  article 
himself,  generally  on  some  Rhodesian 
topic. 

Busy  as  were  Malcolm's  days  in  his 
many  board-rooms  or  at  Charter  House, 


684 


©J^.B.  1951-1960 


Mann 


Salisbury,  he  was  the  most  gregarious 
of  men  and  hved  for  civilized  social 
intercourse.  He  was  a  fascinating  con- 
versationalist, drawing  upon  an  astonish- 
ing memory  for  four  great  literatures, 
Greek,  Latin,  English,  and  French.  He 
was  most  at  home  in  the  kind  of  coteries 
where  these  deUghts  are  appreciated. 
One  was  the  Literary  Society  in  London, 
whose  dinners  he  could  seldom  be  per- 
suaded to  forgo,  even  when  the  severe 
asthma  which  afflicted  his  old  age  made 
it  medically  undesirable.  Another  was  the 
Beefsteak  Club.  But  above  all  he  belonged 
to  the  intimate  brotherhood  of  All  Souls 
where  he  spent  every  week-end  in  term 
that  was  physically  possible.  By  a 
dispensation  made  in  1922  to  cover  the 
missing  age-group  due  to  the  wartime 
casualties  and  suspension  of  elections,  the 
college  made  it  possible  for  him  and  one 
or  two  contemporaries  to  be  re-elected 
periodically  all  their  Uves,  in  spite  of 
marriage  which  was  conventionally  a  bar 
for  non-residents.  This  was  Malcolm's 
spiritual  home.  When  in  1928  his  close 
friend  Cosmo  Lang  [q.v.]  vacated  his 
fellowship  on  becoming  archbishop  of 
Canterbury  and  visitor  ex  officio^  Malcolm 
succeeded  to  the  dignity  of  Lord  Mallard, 
which  is  not  mentioned  in  the  statutes 
but  conveys  an  informal  presidency  of 
the  convivial  side  of  college  life.  At  the 
'mallard  table'  in  the  common-room  the 
younger  fellows,  and  some  seniors  who  had 
retained  the  youthful  spirit,  gathered 
eagerly  round  Malcolm  on  Saturday  and 
Sunday  nights.  It  was  also  remarked  that 
more  than  one  academic  dignitary,  in  and 
out  of  the  college,  whose  duties  required 
the  delivery  of  an  occasional  Latin  oration, 
contrived  to  do  so  with  an  elegance 
equally  suggestive  of  Marcus  Cicero  and 
Dougal  Malcolm.  One  of  his  lifelong 
intimates,  the  first  Earl  of  HaUfax  [q.v.], 
chancellor  of  the  university,  made  no 
secret  of  his  reliance  on  this  source  of 
inspiration.  This  was  Malcolm  in  exclu- 
sively male  environments ;  but  his  hand- 
some features  and  courtly  manners  gave 
him  also  great  popularity  among  women, 
especially  yoiuig  women,  hosts  of  whom 
adopted  him  as  a  sort  of  honorary  uncle 
and  later  brought  their  daughters  to  him, 
from  the  schoolroom  or  even  at  the  font. 
In  his  old  age  he  was  a  figure  of  infinite 
benignity,  almost  too  great  a  Christian, 
wrote  his  oldest  friend.  Lord  Brand, 
because  he  could  not  be  brought  to  think 
ill  of  even  the  most  obviously  malicious 
adversary. 


Malcolm  was  appointed  K.C.M.G.  in 
1938  and  in  1950,  in  recognition  of  his 
services  to  good  relations  between  the 
Rhodesias  and  Portuguese  Africa,  was 
awarded  the  grand  cross  of  the  Order  of 
Clirist. 

Malcolm  left  no  issue.  He  married  in 
1910  Dora  Claire,  daughter  of  John 
Montagu  Stopford;  she  died  in  1920.  In 
1923  he  married  Lady  Evelyn  Farquhar, 
daughter  of  the  fifth  Earl  of  Donoughmore 
and  widow  of  Colonel  Francis  Farquhar 
who  had  been  killed  in  action.  Malcolm 
died  in  London  30  August  1955 ;  his  widow 
died  in  1962. 

He  wrote  The  British  South  Africa 
Company  1889-1939,  a  short  commemor- 
ative volume  published  for  the  anniver- 
sary in  the  latter  year ;  and  Nuces  Relictae 
(1926)  which  includes  a  selection  of  his 
epigrams  in  Greek  and  Latin  elegiacs. 

A  portrait,  in  Highland  dress,  was 
painted  for  his,  wife  by  Sir  Oswald 
Birley ;  a  replica  of  the  upper  part  of  the 
figure  is  at  All  Souls. 

[The  Times,  31  August  and  2  September 
1955;  Round  Table  papers;  Curtis  papers; 
personal  knowledge.]  Dkrmot  Morrahj 


MANECKJI  BYRAMJI  DADABHOY, 

Sir  (1865-1953),  Indian  lawyer,  industrial- 
ist, and  parliamentarian.  [See  Dadabhoy.] 


MANN,  CATHLEEN  SABINE  (1896^ 
1959),  painter,  was  born  in  Newcastle 
upon  Tyne  31  December  1896,  the  second 
of  the  three  daughters  of  Harrington 
Mann,  a  gifted  Scottish  portrait  painter, 
and  his  first  wife,  Florence  Sabine  Pasley. 
She  showed  artistic  skill  early,  though  her 
first  ambitions  were  towards  the  stage. 
Having  found  her  vocation,  she  studied 
in  her  father's  studio  in  London  and  at 
the  Slade  School.  Through  her  father  she 
came  to  know  (Dame)  Ethel  Walker 
[q.v.]  who  gave  her  a  rare  degree  of 
encouragement  and  private  lessons.  Hep 
influence  is  often  happily  discernible  in 
Cathleen  Mann's  best  portraiture  and 
flower  pictures. 

Her  development  was  interrupted  by 
ambulance  service  during  the  war  of 
1914-18,  but  as  early  as  1924  Cathleen 
Mann  had  two  portraits  in  the  Royal 
Academy  where  she  became  a  regular 
exhibitor  after  1980,  as  also  at  the  Royal 
Society  of  Portrait  Painters.  In  1926  she 
married  the  tenth  Marquess  of  Queens- 
berry.  Artistically  this  had  the  unfortunate 


665 


Mann 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


effect  of  giving  her  a  meretricious  reputa- 
tion as  a  'painting  peeress'  which  obscured 
her  genuine  merit  and  which  she  bitterly 
resented,  not  least  when  financial  embar- 
rassment obliged  her  to  exploit  it. 

In  the  war  of  1939-45,  after  completing 
a  series  of  commissions  in  America, 
Cathleen  Mann  was  appointed  an  oflicial 
war  artist,  working  chiefly  as  a  portraitist, 
her  models  including  Sir  Adrian  Carton  de 
Wiart.  The  post-war  years  were  ones  of 
great  distress.  Her  marriage  to  Lord 
Queensberry  was  dissolved  in  1946  and 
she  married  as  her  second  husband  John 
Robert  FoUett.  His  death  in  1953  was 
followed  in  the  next  year  by  that  of  her 
first  husband  for  whom  she  had  never 
lost  her  affection.  The  impact  of  these 
events  nearly  caused  a  complete  nervous 
breakdown  from  which  she  was  saved 
only  with  difficulty  and  by  the  devotion 
of  friends.  Yet  it  was  during  this  unhappy 
period  that  her  painting  took  on  new 
energy,  through  the  influence  of  Sir 
Matthew  Smith  [q.v.].  Her  best  and  most 
interesting  work  belonged  to  her  last  ten 
years  and  included  a  portrait  of  Smith 
(National  Portrait  Gallery),  some  remark- 
able child  studies,  and  landscapes  which 
often  drew  Smith's  warm  approbation. 
She  also  did  a  number  of  interesting 
drawings  of  nude  models  and  with  her 
ceaseless  love  of  experiment  made  some 
vigorous  essays  in  abstract  painting  and 
sculpture.  Generous  in  her  praise  of  other 
artists,  she  remained  dissatisfied  with  her 
own  achievement.  She  was  fully  aware  of 
the  handicap  of  her  own  excessive  faciUty 
which  could  certainly  lead  her  astray, 
especially  in  her  fashionable  years,  and 
she  often  underestimated  the  originality 
of  her  later  work.  A  study  of  a  group  of 
boys  by  the  Serpentine,  completed  within 
a  few  days  of  her  death,  is  among  the  best 
things  she  ever  did. 

Of  diminutive  stature  and  infectious 
vitaUty,  Cathleen  Mann  appeared  to 
enjoy  Umitless  energy.  She  worked  hard, 
often  starting  at  dawn  and  continuing 
until  last  light.  To  this  she  added  a  full 
social  life  and  numerous  charitable  works 
little  known  to  her  friends.  But  through- 
out life  her  high  spirits  had  to  be  paid  for 
in  periods  of  nervous  exhaustion  which 
in  later  years  became  frequent  and 
dangerous.  It  was  during  one  of  them  that 
she  took  her  own  life,  8  September  1959, 
in  her  London  studio.  She  had  one  son, 
the  eleventh  Marquess  of  Queensberry, 
and  a  daughter.  In  the  possession  of  the 
Queensberry  family  there  are  portraits  of 


her  by  Harrington  Mann  (as  a  child  and 
as  a  young  woman)  and  by  Sir  Matthew 
Smith. 

[The  Times,  10  September  1959;  personal 
knowledge.]  Christopher  Sykes. 

MANSBRIDGE,  ALBERT  (1876-1952), 
founder  of  the  Workers'  Educational 
Association,  was  born  at  Gloucester  10 
January  1876,  the  fourth  son  of  Thomas 
Mansbridge,  carpenter,  and  his  wife, 
Frances  Thomas.  Educated  at  board 
schools  and  at  Battersea  Grammar  School, 
of  which  he  was  a  scholar,  he  ended  his 
primary  education  when  he  was  fourteen, 
owing  to  narrow  home  circumstances. 
During  the  next  ten  years  he  was  occupied 
in  clerical  work,  being  a  boy  copyist  in  the 
Department  of  Inland  Revenue  and  in 
the  Committee  of  the  Privy  Council  on 
Education  (ultimately  the  Ministry  of 
Education)  and  later  a  clerk  in  the 
Goldsmiths'  and  Silversmiths'  Company 
and  then  in  the  Co-operative  Wholesale 
Society,  becoming,  in  1901,  cashier  of  the 
Co-operative  Permanent  Building  Society. 
During  these  years  he  had  continued  his 
education  by  attending  university  exten- 
sion lectures  and  classes  at  King's  College, 
London;  later,  he  himself  became  a 
teacher,  under  the  London  School  Board, 
of  evening  classes  in  industrial  history, 
typewriting,  and  economics.  Always  keenly 
interested  in  the  Church  of  England,  he 
was  an  active  worker  in  its  service  and 
was  admitted  as  a  lay  reader  at  the  age 
of  eighteen.  It  was  at  this  time  that 
he  first  met  Charles  Gore  [q.v.],  then 
a  canon  of  Westminster,  who  remained 
his  friend  and  counsellor  for  the  rest  of 
his  life. 

From  his  experiences  of  evening  classes, 
both  as  a  student  and  as  a  teacher, 
Mansbridge  came  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  time  was  ripe  for  a  great  development 
in  adult  education.  The  university  exten- 
sion movement,  founded  in  1873,  which 
had  made  some  appeal  to  the  working 
classes,  particularly  in  the  north,  had 
been  discovered  by  the  leisured  classes, 
and  by  the  end  of  the  century  had  be- 
come mainly  a  middle-class  movement. 
Mansbridge  visualized  a  new  organization, 
under  which  the  demand  for  further 
education,  however  inarticulate  and  ill- 
defined  it  might  appear,  should  come  from 
the  workers  themselves,  the  function  of 
the  universities  being  to  meet  it.  In  other 
words,  the  demand  was  to  create  the 
supply  rather  than  supply  the  demand, 
thus    putting    the    initiative    and    the 


686 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


organization  upon  the  workers  themselves. 
On  this  assumption,  he  had  contributed 
an  article  in  January  1903  to  the  University 
Extension  Journal,  followed  by  two  more 
(in  March  and  May)  in  which  he  outlined 
a  scheme  for  placing  adult  education  on  a 
new  footing.  In  the  same  year  he  formed 
an  Association  to  Promote  the  Higher 
Education  of  Working  Men,  a  title 
afterwards  changed  to  the  Workers' 
Educational  Association,  and  thus  began 
the  great  work  of  his  life.  In  August,  the 
Association  was  placed  on  a  permanent 
basis,  with  Mansbridge  as  its  honorary 
secretary.  In  1905  he  resigned  his  post 
in  the  Co-operative  Permanent  Building 
Society,  to  become  general  secretary  of 
the  W.E.A.  The  first  branch  had  been 
formed  at  Reading  in  October  1904,  and 
for  the  next  ten  years  Mansbridge  was 
occupied  in  starting  other  branches  all 
over  the  country,  organizing  them  in 
districts  and  conducting  ceaseless  propa- 
ganda to  win  the  support  of  working-class 
and  academic  opinion.  William  Temple 
[q.v.]  became  president  of  the  Association 
in  1908  and  it  received  recognition  from 
most  of  the  English  imiversities. 

Mansbridge  considered  that  the  out- 
standing creation  of  the  W.E.A.  in  its 
early  years  was  the  university  tutorial 
class.  He  had  never  ceased  to  regret  that 
circumstances  had  denied  him  a  university 
education,  and  the  idea  behind  this  further 
development  of  adult  education  was  that 
those  wishing  to  study  the  subjects  of  uni- 
versity extension  lectures  as  completely 
as  possible  should  pledge  themselves  to 
attend  courses  regularly  for  three  years, 
to  write  essays  and  to  read  as  widely  as 
they  could,  imder  the  direction  of  highly 
qualified  university  tutors.  Backed  by 
Mansbridge's  unrivalled  combination  of 
moral  earnestness  and  practical  sense,  the 
proposal  quickly  won  its  way  in  quarters 
which  a  less  persuasive  advocate  might 
well  have  left  unmoved.  Canon  S.  A. 
Barnett  and  R.  D.  Roberts  [qq.v.]  had 
already  contemplated  continuous  class 
study  in  connection  with  the  university 
extension  movement,  and  at  Rochdale, 
with  its  strong  educational  tradition,  as 
well  as  at  several  other  centres,  it  had 
been  the  practice  for  the  university 
extension  lectures  to  be  followed  by  a 
class.  In  1906  a  conference  was  held  at 
the  university  of  London,  which  resulted 
in  a  proposal  to  start  a  tutorial  class,  and 
in  1907  a  class  similar  in  some  respects  to 
those  afterwards  established  under  the 
same  name  met  in  Battersea  under  (Sir) 


Mansbridge 

Patrick  Geddes  [q.v.].  A  deputation  of 
working  men  from  Rochdale  convinced 
T.  B.  Strong  [q.v.],  then  chairman  of  the 
Oxford  University  Extension  Delegacy, 
that  there  was  a  real  demand,  and  (Sir) 
Robert  Morant  [q.v.],  fired  by  the  idea, 
did  everything  possible  to  secure  the 
support  of  the  Board  of  Education.  As  a 
result  of  a  conference  of  working-class  and 
educational  organizations  held  at  Oxford 
in  1907  under  the  auspices  of  the  Workers' 
Educational  Association,  a  committee  was 
appointed  consisting  of  seven  persons 
nominated  by  the  vice-chancellor  and 
seven  persons  nominated  by  the  Workers' 
Educational  Association,  which  issued  a 
report  recommending  that  Oxford  should 
promote  the  estabUshment  of  tutorial 
classes.  In  1908,  before  the  report  ap- 
peared, classes  of  some  thirty  students  at 
Rochdale  and  Longton  pledged  themselves 
to  attend  for  three  years  and  to  write 
essays,  and  R.  H.  Tawney,  then  an 
assistant  in  political  economy  at  Glasgow, 
undertook  to  be  their  tutor.  The  demand 
for  classes  spread  rapidly,  and  by  1914 
there  were  145  in  England  and  Wales, 
with  3,234  students  attending  them, 
undertaking  work  of  university  standard 
under  tutors  provided  by  every  university 
in  the  country. 

In  1913  Mansbridge  visited  Australia, 
on  the  invitation  of  the  university  of 
Melbourne,  where  he  organized  the 
foundation  of  the  W.E.A.  in  each  state 
of  the  Commonwealth.  Briefer  visits  to 
New  Zealand  and  Canada,  on  his  way 
home,  enabled  him  to  arouse  interest  in 
the  movement  in  these  countries  also. 
On  his  return  to  England,  however,  in 
1914,  he  was  stricken  with  cerebro-spinal 
meningitis,  and  after  a  long  and  grave 
illness  he  was  compelled  to  retire  from  the 
secretaryship  of  the  Association.  In  1910 
he  had  become  a  director  of  the  Co- 
operative Permanent  Building  Society, 
and  this,  together  with  a  Civil  List 
pension  and  assistance  from  an  educational 
trust  fund  formed  by  some  of  his  friends, 
enabled  him  to  continue  his  work  for  the 
promotion  of  adult  education  in  various 
directions.  Thus,  in  1916,  he  saw  the 
realization  of  his  work  for  the  foundation 
of  a  students'  library,  the  Central  Library 
for  Students,  afterwards  renamed  the 
National  Central  Library.  Lack  of  access 
to  the  books  necessary  for  advanced  or 
specialized  study  by  students  uncon- 
nected with  academic  institutions,  par- 
ticularly with  the  increase  in  university 
tutorial  classes,  had  induced  an  imperative 


Q87 


Mansbridge 

ne^d  for  an  efficient  central  library 
containing  many  duplicates  of  essential 
books.  Local  libraries,  public  and  other- 
wise, could  have  recourse  to  it  for  books 
not  on  their  own  shelves  required  by 
students,  and,  particularly,  by  groups  of 
students  attending  advanced  classes. 
Financial  support  was  forthcoming  from 
the  beginning  from  the  Carnegie  United 
Kingdom  Trust,  and  in  due  course  a 
Treasury  grant  was  approved  conditional 
upon  adequate  contributions  being  made 
by  public  library  authorities.  Thus,  in 
some  dozen  years,  the  organization  of  adult 
education,  as  Mansbridge  had  conceived  it, 
was  complete — in  the  W.E.A.,  the  tutorial 
classes,  and  the  National  Central  Library. 

Although  Mansbridge's  health  was 
never  robust  after  his  illness,  he  con- 
tinued for  the  rest  of  his  life,  through 
writing,  lecturing,  organizing,  and  serving 
on  numerous  public  bodies  and  commis- 
sions, to  work  for  the  cause  of  adult 
education.  In  1918  he  founded  the  World 
Association  for  Adult  Education,  in  1919 
the  Seafarers'  Educational  Service,  and 
in  1921  the  British  Institute  of  Adult 
Education.  He  was  a  member  of  the 
adult  education  committee  of  the  Minis- 
try of  Reconstruction,  which  reported  in 
1919,  and  of  the  royal  commission  on  the 
universities  of  Oxford  and  Cambridge, 
which  reported  in  1922,  and  became  a 
member  of  the  statutory  commission  on 
Oxford  in  1923.  He  delivered  a  course  of 
lectures  on  the  Lowell  foundation,  Boston, 
United  States,  in  1922  on  'The  Older 
Universities  of  England',  and  in  1934  on 
*An  EngUsh  Gallery' ;  and  in  1926  on  the 
Earle  foundation  in  the  university  of 
California  on  'The  Spiritual  Basis  of 
Adult  Education'.  A  selection  of  his 
essays  and  addresses.  The  Kingdom  of  the 
Mind,  was  pubUshed  in  1944;  his  other 
published  works  included  a  life  of  Margaret 
McMillan  (1932),  whose  notice  he  also 
contributed  to  this  Dictionary,  and 
Brick  upon  Brick  (1934),  an  account  of 
the  Co-operative  Permanent  Building 
Society.  He  was  made  an  honorary  M.A. 
of  Oxford  in  1912,  an  honorary  LL.D. 
of  Manchester  (1922),  Cambridge  (1923), 
Pittsburgh  (1927),  and  Mount  AUison 
(1938).  In  1931  he  was  appointed  a 
Companion  of  Honour. 

Mansbridge  married  in  1900  Frances 
Jane,  daughter  of  John  Pringle,  of  Dublin. 
Their  only  child,  John  Mansbridge,  the 
painter,  was  born  in  1901.  A  portrait  of 
Mansbridge,  painted  by  his  son,  hangs 
in    the    board-room    of    the    National 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Central  Library,  another  is  in  the  National 
Portrait  Gallery.  He  died  at  Torquay 
22  August  1952. 

[The  Times,  25  and  30  August  1952 ;  Albert 
Mansbridge,  An  Adventure  in  Working-Class 
Educatim,  1920,  and  The  Trodden  Road, 
1940 ;  T.  W.  Price,  The  Story  of  the  Workers' 
Educational  Association,  1903-1924,  1924; 
personal  knowledge.]  C.  S.  Orwin. 

MANSON,  THOMAS  WALTER  (1893- 
1958),  bibhcal  scholar,  was  born  at  North 
Shields,  Northumberland,  22  July  1893, 
the  only  son  of  Thomas  Francis  Manson, 
schoolmaster  in  his  own  private  school, 
and  his  wife,  Joan,  daughter  of  Walter 
Johnston,  of  Cunningsburgh,  Shetland. 
The  eldest  child,  he  was  followed  by  eight 
sisters.  He  was  educated  by  his  father, 
then  at  Tynemouth  Municipal  High 
School  and  Glasgow  University  where  he 
took  his  M.A.  with  honours  in  logic  and 
moral  philosophy  (1917),  his  course  being 
interrupted  by  war  service  in  the  Royal 
Field  Artillery  during  which  he  was 
wounded  in  France.  In  1919  he  was 
awarded  the  Clark  scholarship  by  Glasgow 
and  the  Ferguson  scholarship  in  philo- 
sophy open  to  all  four  Scottish  universities. 
At  Westminster  College,  Cambridge,  he 
prepared  for  the  ministry  of  the  Presby- 
terian Church  of  England,  and  also 
entered  Christ's  College,  gaining  a  first 
class  in  part  ii  of  the  oriental  languages 
tripos,  in  Hebrew  and  Aramaic,  in  1923. 
At  Westminster  College  he  was  awarded 
the  Crichton-Munro  scholarship  and  the 
Williams  and  Elmslie  open  scholarships; 
Christ's  College  made  him  a  research 
scholar  and  he  won  the  Tyrwhitt  Hebrew 
scholarship  (1924)  and  the  Burney  (1923) 
and  Mason  (1924)  prizes. 

After  a  short  period  as  tutor  in  West 
minster  College,  Manson  was  ordained 
in  1925  at  Howard  Street  church.  North 
Shields,  and  served  for  a  year  in  the 
Jewish  Mission  Institute  in  Bethnal 
Green.  In  1926  he  married  and  took  charge 
of  the  church  at  Falstone,  Northumber- 
land. There  he  produced  his  first  book, 
The  Teaching  of  Jesus  (1931),  for  which 
Glasgow  awarded  him  a  D.Litt.  in  1932. 
His  specialized  work  in  Cambridge  had 
been  in  Hebrew  and  Semitic  studies  in 
which  he  retained  a  lifelong  interest. and 
might  readily  have  attained  distinction; 
but  with  the  publication  of  this  book  his 
eminence  as  a  New  Testament  scholar 
was  immediately  recognized ;  thenceforth, 
his  work  lay  principally  in  this  field. 
It  was  enriched  by  his  expert  knowledge 


<M(^ 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Marie  Louise 


of  the  Old  Testament  and  his  access  to 
rabbinical  Hebrew  and  Syriac.  Already  he 
had  taken  a  particular  interest  in  the 
Septuagint,  and  this  led  to  his  developing 
interest  in  the  Apocryphal  and  Pseud- 
epigraphical  literature.  Later  he  acquired 
Coptic,  making  his  linguistic  equipment  for 
New  Testament  work  exceptionally  strong ; 
the  breadth  of  his  learning  gave  a  richness 
to  all  his  work  which  was  widely  recognized . 

In  1932  Manson  was  appointed  to  the 
Yates  chair  of  New  Testament  Greek  in 
Mansfield  College,  Oxford,  in  succession 
to  C.  H.  Dodd,  and  in  1936  he  again 
succeeded  Dodd,  in  the  Rylands  chair  of 
biblical  criticism  at  Manchester  where  he 
remained,  despite  attractive  opportunities 
elsewhere,  until  his  death.  For  many  years 
he  served  as  dean  of  the  faculty  of 
theology,  and  for  four  years  as  pro-vice- 
chancellor.  He  was  also  a  governor  of  the 
John  Rylands  Library  and  a  feoffee  of 
Chetham's  Library.  In  the  war  of  1939-45 
he  was  an  operations  officer  in  the  room 
which  controlled  civil  defence  operations 
in  the  north-west  from  Chester  to  Carlisle 
during  the  period  of  heavy  bombing.  He 
also  took  charge  of  St.  Aidan's  Presby- 
terian church,  Didsbury. 

Many  honours  came  to  him  including  the 
honorary  degrees  of  D.D.  from  Glasgow 
(1937),  Durham  (1938),  Cambridge  (1951), 
Pine  Hill  (Halifax,  Nova  Scotia,  1953), 
and  Trinity  College,  Dublin  (1956),  and 
of  D.Theol.,  Strasbourg  (1946).  He  was 
elected  F.B.A.  in  1945  and  was  awarded 
the  Academy's  Burkitt  medal  in  1950.  He 
took  a  leading  part  in  the  formation  of 
the  Studiorum  Novi  Testamenti  Societas 
and  was  its  president  in  1949-50.  He 
lectured  in  universities  in  several  foreign 
countries,  was  an  honorary  member  of 
the  American  Society  of  Biblical  Litera- 
ture and  Exegesis  and  of  the  Gottingen 
Akademie  der  Wissenschaften,  and  for 
many  years  delivered  an  annual  lecture  in 
the  John  Rylands  Library.  These  were 
published  in  the  library's  Bulletin  and  a 
number  reissued  in  a  volume  edited  by 
Matthew  Black,  Studies  in  the  Gospels  and 
Epistles  (1962). 

Manson's  books  were  not  nimierous, 
but  were  always  important.  Among  them 
may  be  mentioned  The  Sayings  of  Jesus 
(Part  II  of  The  Mission  and  Message  of 
Jesus,  in  collaboration,  1937;  published 
separately,  1949) ;  The  Church's  Ministry 
(1948);  and  The  Servant-Messiah  (1953). 
He  was  a  member  of  the  New  Testament 
and  Apocrypha  panels  for  the  preparation 
of  the  New  English  Bible.  He  accepted 


the  editorship  of  the  Cambridge  Larger 
Septuagint  (he  had  been  Grinfield  lecturer 
at  Oxford,  1943-5)  and  had  hoped  to 
devote  his  retirement  to  the  continuation 
of  this  great  task. 

With  all  his  academic  work  Manson 
never  lost  his  interest  in  the  work  of  the 
Church.  As  a  preacher  he  was  welcomed 
in  the  pulpits  of  his  own  and  other 
denominations.  He  was  not  gifted  with  a 
strong  voice,  but  he  could  arrest  and  hold 
the  interest  of  his  congregation  with  a 
word  which  was  always  addressed  to  both 
mind  and  heart.  For  ten  years  he  was 
president  of  the  Manchester,  Salford,  and 
District  Free  Church  Council,  and  in  1958 
he  was  moderator  of  the  General  Assembly 
of  the  Presbyterian  Church  of  England. 
He  had  great  administrative  gifts,  which 
Manchester  University  fully  exploited. 
His  gentleness  of  spirit  was  combined 
with  a  strong  conviction,  and  he  could 
speak  with  much  force  and  fire.  He  was  a 
good  raconteur,  and  his  admirable  wit 
showed  to  most  advantage  when  he 
presented  honorary  graduands  in  the 
university  (he  was  presenter  for  twenty 
years).  He  was  a  brilliant  teacher, 
commanding  the  admiration  and  the 
affection  of  his  students,  for  whom  he 
would  never  spare  himself.  Every  subject 
he  touched  he  illuminated.  Whatever  he 
did  he  did  well,  and  there  were  few  things 
relevant  to  the  career  he  chose  which  he 
did  not  do  with  supreme  distinction. 

In  1926  Manson  married  Nora,  daughter 
of  James  Robert  Wilkinson  Wallace, 
master  butcher,  of  North  Shields;  they 
had  no  children.  Some  time  before  his 
death,  failing  health  caused  him  to  move  to 
Milnthorpe,  Westmorland,  near  waters  in 
which  he  had  long  delighted  to  fish.  He 
died  there,  1  May  1958.  His  colleagues  and 
friends  planned  to  present  him  with  a 
Festschrift  for  his  sixty-fifth  birthday, 
but  it  became  a  memorial  volume.  New 
Testament  Essays  (ed.  A.  J.  B.  Higgins, 
1959).  The  wide  esteem  in  which  he  was 
held  was  shown  by  a  memorial  service 
held  in  Manchester  Cathedral  at  which  the 
bishop  of  Manchester  gave  the  address. 

[M.  Black  in  Proceedings  of  the  British 
Academy,  vol.  xliv,  1958 ;  H.  H.  Rowley,  fore- 
word to  Studies  in  the  Gospels  and  Epistles,  1 962 ; 
private    information;    personal   knowledge.] 

H.    H.    ROWLKY. 

MARIE  LOUISE,  Princess,  whose  full 
names  were  Franziska  Josepha  Louise 
Augusta  Marie  Christiana  Helena 
(1872-1966),   was   born   at   Cumberland 


Marie  Louise 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Lodge,  Windsor,  12  August  1872,  the 
youngest  child  of  Prince  Christian  of 
Schleswig-Holstein  and  his  wife,  Princess 
Helena  Augusta  Victoria,  Queen  Victoria's 
third  daughter.  Her  conventional  educa- 
tion at  home  was  relieved  by  holidays  with 
relations  in  Germany,  during  one  of  which 
visits  she  met  Prince  Aribert  of  Anhalt. 
With  the  encouragement  of  her  cousin 
the  Emperor  William  II  she  married  him  in 
St.  George's  chapel,  Windsor,  6  July  1891. 
He  proved  an  unsatisfactory  husband. 
After  nine  distressing  years  the  childless 
marriage  was  annulled  by  Prince  Aribert's 
father,  exercising  his  medieval  right  as 
a  sovereign  prince.  The  Princess,  a  devout 
churchwoman,  believed  her  wedding 
vows  to  be  binding  and  never  remarried. 

Retiurning  to  her  family  in  England, 
she  devoted  more  than  half  a  century  of 
her  life  to  furthering  charitable  causes 
and  social  services.  Nursing,  the  care  of 
lepers,  youth  clubs,  the  relief  of  poverty, 
and  organizations  for  international  under- 
standing particularly  touched  her  imagina- 
tion. She  became  a  familiar  figure  at  balls 
and  bazaars,  committees  and  receptions, 
commemorative  services  and  picture 
exhibitions.  Standing  above  average 
height  and  with  imposing  features,  she 
brought  to  all  formal  occasions  an  air  of 
dignity  softened  by  kindliness.  Her  neat 
and  pointed  speeches  always  refreshed 
and  sometimes  surprised  her  audience. 
There  was  charm,  too,  in  her  conversation. 
She  was  a  tireless  traveller,  and  few 
corners  of  the  world  had  escaped  her 
curiosity  or  failed  to  stimulate  her  talents 
for  humour  and  mimicry. 

Princess  Marie  Louise's  patronage  of  the 
arts  enabled  her  to  acquire  a  wider  circle 
of  friends  than  usually  surrounds  royal 
personages.  She  moved  at  ease  in  the 
society  of  writers,  actors,  and  musicians, 
and  at  one  time  in  her  life  Uved  content- 
edly in  a  bedsitting-room  at  a  ladies'  club. 
Her  happiest  years  were  spent  between 
the  wars  at  Schomberg  House,  Pall  Mall, 
which  she  shared  with  her  sister  Princess 
Helena  Victoria  [q.v.].  Together  they 
gave  memorable  parties  which  became  a 
valued  institution  among  London  music 
lovers.  From  her  mother  Princess  Marie 
Louise  had  inherited  a  passion  for  Bach, 
to  which  was  added  a  later  appreciation 
of  Wagner.  She  visited  Bayreuth  more 
than  once,  attended  Covent  Garden 
regularly,  and  was  the  friend  of  Lauritz 
Melchior,  the  tenor. 

Among  the  Princess's  recreations  was 
the  delicate  art  of  enamelling  in  precious 


metals.  Her  work  in  this  medium  included 
the  clasp  on  the  cope  worn  by  the  prelate 
of  the  Order  of  St.  Michael  and  St.  George. 
She  was  also  an  assiduous  collector  of 
Napoleonic  relics,  though  free  from  the 
megalomania  which  often  accompanies 
such  a  pursuit.  A  self-imposed  task  which 
gave  her  pleasure  was  the  planning  of  an 
elaborate  doll's  house,  now  at  Windsor 
Castle,  for  presentation  to  Queen  Mary. 
To  secure  contributions  to  this  record 
of  twentieth-century  craftsmanship  she 
wrote  two  thousand  letters  in  her  own 
masterful  but  barely  legible  hand. 

Throughout  her  long  life  the  Princess 
was  a  voracious  reader,  particularly  of 
history,  biography,  and  detective  fiction. 
In  November  1956  she  published  a  volume 
of  her  own  reminiscences.  My  Memories  of 
Six  Reigns,  of  which  40,000  copies  were 
sold  within  a  few  months,  is  a  penetrating 
portrait  of  a  vanished  age.  In  a  style  of 
confiding  intimacy,  the  Princess  mingled 
a  playful  disrespect  for  the  etiquette  of 
German  courts  with  a  loving  reverence 
for  her  grandmother  Queen  Victoria. 
Although  in  visibly  failing  health  she 
insisted  on  attending  a  luncheon  to 
mark  the  publication  of  the  book,  but  was 
unable  personally  to  deliver  the  message 
of  greeting  she  had  composed  for  all  who 
shared  her  delight  in  writing. 

She  died  a  few  days  later,  8  December 
1956,  at  her  grace-and-favour  residence  in 
Fitzmaurice  Place.  The  funeral  was  at 
Windsor  on  14  December,  that  most 
melancholy  of  dates  in  Victorian  memory, 
exactly  ninety-five  years  after  the  death 
of  her  grandfather  the  Prince  Consort. 
The  congregation  in  St.  George's  chapel 
included  three  'pearly  queens'  and  a 
'pearly  king'  who,  in  the  gay  colours  of 
their  calling,  had  come  from  Finsbury  to 
pay  a  farewell  tribute  to  their  friend  and 
patron.  The  remains  of  the  Princess  were 
later  transferred  to  the  private  cemetery 
at  Frogmore. 

Princess  Marie  Louise,  the  last  British 
princess  to  bear  the  style  of  Highness,  was 
also  one  of  the  last  surviving  members  of 
the  Royal  Order  of  Victoria  and  Albert. 
She  was  appointed  a  lady  of  the  Imperial 
Order  of  the  Crown  of  India  by  Queen 
Victoria  (1893),  G.B.E.  by  King  George  V 
(1919),  and  G.C.V.O.  by  Queen  Elizabeth 
II  (1953).  There  is  a  portrait  by  Harring- 
ton Mann  in  the  Forum  Club,  Belgrave 
Square. 

[H.  H.  Princess  Marie  Louise,  My  Memories 
of  Six  Reigns,  1956;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  Kenneth  Rose. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Marillier 


MARILLIER,  HENRY  CURRIE  (1865- 
1951),  journalist  and  expert  on  tapestries, 
was  born  at  Grahamstown,  South  Africa, 
2  July  1865,  the  eldest  child  and  only  son 
of  Captain  Charles  Henry  Marillier  of- 
the  Cape  Mounted  Rifles  and  formerly 
fellow  of  King's  College,  Cambridge.  His 
mother,  Margaret,  daughter  of  Alexander 
Braithwaite  Morgan,  surgeon  to  the  57th 
Regiment  of  Foot,  had  been  brought  up 
in  Grahamstown  by  her  uncle  Sir  Walter 
Currie  who  was  Marillier' s  godfather.  In 
1870  Marillier's  father  became  aide-de- 
camp to  his  brother-in-law  Major-General 
(Sir)  John  Jarvis  Bisset  at  Gibraltar  and 
died  there  suddenly  in  1875. 

Instead  of  going  to  Eton,  Marillier  was 
entered  at  Christ's  Hospital,  leaving  with 
a  scholarship  for  Peterhouse,  Cambridge, 
where,  helped  by  friendship  with  his 
father's  contemporaries  at  King's,  he  was 
able  to  make  the  most  of  his  social 
opportunities.  He  was  a  member  of  the 
Shelley  Society,  interested  in  the  per- 
formance of  the  Eumenides  and  enter- 
tained Oscar  Wilde  [q.v.].  He  took  a 
second  class  (division  2)  in  part  i  of  the 
classical  tripos  in  1887,  and  having 
previously  failed  to  obtain  a  Royal 
Engineers'  commission  in  the  Indian 
Army,  he  travelled  to  Egypt  as  private 
secretary  to  F.  A.  Yeo,  M.P.  He  then 
worked  at  Hinchinbrooke  on  the  papers 
of  the  fourth  Earl  of  Sandwich  [q.v.], 
discovering  letters  from  Lady  Mary 
Fitzgerald,  a  selection  from  which  he  later 
quoted  in  a  paper  read  in  1897  (published 
1910)  before  the  Sette  of  Odd  Volumes  to 
which  he  was  knyght-erraunt.  In  the 
following  year  he  read  another  paper  on 
'University  Magazines  and  their  Makers' 
which  was  published  in  1899. 

In  search  of  experience  Marillier  mean- 
while entered  the  turbine  works  of  (Sir) 
Charles  Parsons  [q.v.]  at  Heaton  as  a 
labourer's  apprentice,  and  after  two 
years  became  the  outside  manager, 
supervising  the  electrical  tests  of  Chilean 
gunboats  at  Laird's,  Birkenhead.  Before 
his  marriage  in  1893  he  went  to  London 
to  study  with  the  idea  of  becoming  a 
consulting  engineer,  but  instead  accepted 
the  editorship  of  Lighting,  a  new  electrical 
weekly.  In  the  golden  age  of  freelance 
journalism,  Marillier  began  to  contribute 
occasional  verse  to  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette, 
and  after  his  articles  in  October  1893 
showing  up  Harness's  'electropathic  belt' 
joined  the  editorial  staff  of  H.  J.  C.  Cust 
[q.v.]  as  scientific  correspondent.  This 
led  to  his  reporting  on  the  Nobel  patents 


case,  investigating  the  growing  of  opium, 
a  flight  in  the  steam-driven  aeroplane  of 
(Sir)  Hiram  Maxim  [q.v.]  and  later  in  the 
first  Zeppelin. 

Becoming  interested  in  book  illustra- 
tion, MariUier  wrote  the  biographies  to  go 
with  the  outstandingly  good  photogravure 
and  half-tone  reproductions  of  Men  and 
Women  of  the  Century  (1896)  portrayed  by 
Rudolf  Lehmann  [q.v.],  and  after  Cust 
left  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette,  Marillier  joined 
Cameron  Swan,  his  wife's  cousin,  in  the 
Swan  Electric  Engraving  Company.  His 
circle  of  friends  in  the  world  of  art  widened, 
he  wrote  the  preface  to  the  Early  Works  of 
Aubrey  Beardsley  printed  by  the  Swan 
Company  (1899)  and  then  a  memoir  of 
D.  G.  Rossetti  (1899)  with  a  chronological 
list  of  paintings.  George  Rae  of  Birkenhead 
who  owned  a  number  of  Rossetti' s  paint- 
ings next  encouraged  MarilUer  to  write 
The  Liverpool  School  of  Painters  1810-67 
(1904)  which  has  remained  a  standard 
work.  In  the  meantime  Marillier  had 
joined  W.  A.  S.  Benson's  art  metal 
business,  but  the  vogue  for  beaten  copper- 
work  was  already  passing. 

Although  he  had  rented  Kelmscott 
House,  Hammersmith,  from  Mrs.  Morris 
since  1897,  Marillier  did  not  enter  the 
Morris  company  until  1905.  There  again  he 
found  a  decline,  but  as  the  demand  for 
Morris  textiles  fell,  he  wisely  developed 
the  craft  of  repairing  tapestries.  In  the 
war  of  1914-18,  during  which  Marillier 
was  an  anti-aircraft  gimner  in  London, 
the  Merton  Abbey  Tapestry  Works 
profitably  manufactured  aeroplane  pro- 
pellers ;  but  the  post-war  deterioration  of 
materials,  especially  of  dyes,  led  to  further 
loss  of  business.  In  1940  Marillier  wound 
up  the  company,  having  written  the 
history  of  its  tapestries  in  1927.  Many  of 
the  original  designs  passed  into  the  hands 
of  museums,  but  all  the  records  of'  the 
firm  were  destroyed. 

During  the  last  thirty  years  of  his  life 
MariUier' s  most  important  work  was  the 
compilation  of  a  huge  subject-index  and 
illustrated  catalogue  of  the  tapestries  of 
Europe.  On  behalf  of  the  Morris  company 
he  visited  most  of  the  larger  private  houses 
in  the  United  Kingdom;  he  collected 
photographs  on  the  Continent,  and  advised 
collectors  of  tapestries,  dealers,  and 
auctioneers.  When  in  1945  the  material 
was  finally  given  to  the  department  of 
textiles  in  the  Victoria  and  Albert 
Museum,  it  extended  to  fifty  volumes  of 
script  and  photographs.  Marillier  wrote 
occasional  articles  on  tapestries,  including 


691 


Marillier 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


those  at  Hampton  Court  (1912),  but  only 
published  two  sections  of  his  researches, 
English  Tapestries  of  the  Eighteenth  Century 
(1930)  and  a  Handbook  to'  the  Tenters 
Tapestries  (1932). 

Marillier  left  Kelmscott  House  soon 
after  his  second  marriage  and  lived  in 
St.  John's  Wood  until  1940,  when  he  and 
his  wife  joined  Sir  Ernest  Pooley  at 
Westbrook  House  near  Petworth.  After 
the  war  he  continued  to  act  as  a  tapestry 
consultant.  He  died  27  July  1951  at  his 
home  and  was  buried  in  Brighton  ceme- 
tery. 

Marillier  was  a  sociable  man,  musical, 
keen  on  travel,  fishing,  and  shooting.  He 
belonged  to  the  Bath  Club  and  finally  to 
the  Athenaeum  where  he  found  congenial 
company.  He  was  twice  married :  first,  in 
1893,  to  Katherine  Isabella  (died  1901), 
daughter  of  John  Pattinson,  public  analyst 
of  Newcastle  upon  Tyne.  They  had  two 
daughters.  In  1906  Marillier  married 
Winifred  Christabel,  daughter  of  Arthur 
Hopkins,  artist,  by  whom  he  had  one 
son. 

[The  Times,  28  July  1951;  unpublished 
autobiographical  notes ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]  J.  L.  Nevinson. 


MARKHAM,  VIOLET  ROSA  (1872- 
1959),  public  servant,  was  born  at 
Brimington  Hall,  near  Chesterfield,  Derby- 
shire, 3  October  1872,  the  younger  daugh- 
ter and  fifth  child  of  Charles  Markham, 
colliery  owner,  and  his  wife,  Rosa,  daughter 
of  Sir  Joseph  Paxton  [q.v.],  designer  of 
the  Crystal  Palace.  A  few  months  later  the 
family  moved  to  Tapton  House,  once  the 
home  of  George  Stephenson  [q.v.],  on  a 
hill  a  mile  outside  Chesterfield. 

Violet  Markham  went  to  no  university. 
At  West  Heath,  Ham  Common,  she 
learned  a  great  deal;  but  she  always 
declared  that  she  received  most  of  her 
education  from  her  mother.  She  grew  up  in 
a  house  where  mining  problems  were  daily 
discussed  although  the  living  conditions 
of  the  miners  were  seldom  touched  upon. 
She  herself  early  turned  her  mind  to  the 
study  of  the  slum  conditions  in  which 
they  lived  with  no  recreational  facilities. 
In  1902  she  started  a  settlement  in 
Chesterfield  where  she  met  with  op- 
position, incredulity,  and  even  ridicule, 
but  she  persisted  in  her  project  and 
for  many  years  to  come  her  settlement 
was  a  centre  for  a  wide  variety  of  activi- 
ties. 

In  1901  she  had  received  a  legacy  from 


an  old  friend  of  her  father  which  made  her 
independent  and  she  set  up  house  at  8 
Gower  Street,  London,  which  soon  became 
a  meeting-place  for  many  people  who 
counted  in  the  worlds  of  politics,  the  arts, 
and  personal  social  service.  In  the  war  of 
1914r-18,  through  the  influence  of  Sir 
Robert  Morant  [q.v.],  she  joined  the 
executive  committee  of  the  National 
Relief  Fund ;  and  in  1917  she  was  deputy 
director  under  her  friend  May  Tennant 
(whose  notice  she  contributed  to  this 
Dictionary)  of  the  women's  section  of 
Neville  Chamberlain's  department  of 
national  service. 

In  common  with  many  other  members 
of  the  Liberal  Party,  Violet  Markham 
was  opposed  to  women's  suffrage,  although 
she  never  ceased  to  declare  that  women 
should  take  part  in  local  government  and 
herself  sat  on  the  committees  of  many 
and  varied  public  bodies.  In  the  course  of 
the  war  she  changed  her  views  and  in  1918 
she  stood  for  the  Mansfield  division  of 
Nottinghamshire  which  was  a  supposedly 
safe  Liberal  seat  and  had  been  represented 
by  her  brother  Sir  Arthur  Markham  from 
1900  until  his  death  in  1916.  She  was 
handsomely  beaten  by  the  Labour  candi- 
date and  never  again  stood  for  Parliament. 
Her  rejection  was  unfortunate,  for  she 
would  have  made  her  mark  in  the  House. 
She  was  an  admirable  debater,  her 
speeches  in  both  form  and  content  were  on 
a  high  level  of  excellence;  and  she  had 
formidable  powers  of  hard  work.  These 
she  now  devoted  to  a  very  heavy 
programme  of  public  service.  She  had 
been  a  member  since  its  inception  in  1914, 
and  was  for  many  years  chairman,  of  the 
Central  Committee  on  Women's  Training 
and  Employment  which  in  its  first  twenty 
years  trained  nearly  100,000  women, 
principally  for  domestic  service.  She  was 
especially  interested  in  this  side  of  the 
committee's  work  for  what  she  had  seen 
of  the  conditions  of  domestic  service  made 
her  wish  to  raise  its  status.  In  1919  she 
was  appointed  a  member  of  the  Industrial 
Court  and  she  was  an  early  member  of 
the  lord  chancellor's  advisory  committee 
for  women  justices.  In  1934  she  entered 
upon  what  was  probably  the  most 
important  work  of  her  life  when  she 
joined  the  new  Assistance  Board  of 
which  she  was  deputy  chairman  in  1937- 
46. 

In  addition  to  her  work  in  London 
and  in  Chesterfield  (where  she  was  town 
councillor  (1924),  mayor  (1927),  and  vice- 
chairman  of  the  education  committee). 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Markham 


Violet  Markham  was  interested  in  the 
overseas  dominions,  especially  Canada 
and  South  Africa,  countries  which  she 
visited  more  than  once.  She  kept  in 
regular  touch  with  W.  L.  Mackenzie 
King  [q.v.]  of  whom  she  wrote  an 
admirable  character  sketch  in  her  book 
Friendship's  Harvest  (1956).  In  1923  she 
represented  the  Canadian  Government  on 
the  governing  body  of  the  International 
Labour  Office  in  Geneva. 

After  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939, 
while  continuing  with  her  work  on  the 
Assistance  Board,  she  started  and  largely 
financed  and  ran  a  canteen  in  south 
London.  When  the  canteen  was  bombed 
she  started  it  again  in  other  premises. 
She  also  sat  on  the  appeal  tribunal  on  the 
internment  of  aliens  and  others  under  the 
defence  of  the  realm  regulations,  and  on 
an  advisory  committee  on  air-raid  shelters. 
In  1942  when  there  were  highly  coloured 
rumours  of  immorality  in  the  women's 
Services  she  was  chairman  of  a  com- 
mittee of  investigation  whose  report  to 
a  gi'eat  extent  dissipated  the  rumours  and 
paid  strong  tribute  to  the  work  and  cour- 
age of  the  members  of  the  women's 
Services.  She  coined  the  phrase  'virtue  has 
no  gossip  value'.  In  1945  she  and  (Dame) 
Florence  Hancock  turned  their  minds  to 
post-war  organization  of  private  domestic 
employment.  Their  report  published  in 
June  of  that  year  attracted  much  interest. 
She  also  lectured  for  the  British  Council 
in  France  and  elsewhere. 

Violet  Markham  was  a  woman  of  middle 
height  who  wore  appropriate  and  well- 
chosen  clothes.  She  had  small  features  and 
dark  expressive  eyes.  Her  movements 
expressed  a  controlled  force  and  energy. 
She  talked  well,  throwing  out  ideas  and 
showing  great  fairness  when  discussing 
controversial  matters  with  companions 
who  disagreed  with  her.  Her  house  in  the 
country,  Moon  Green,  near  Wittersham 
in  Kent,  was  a  converted  oasthouse  to 
which  she  had  added  a  library  and  other 
rooms.  It  stood  in  a  pleasant  garden  and 
orchards  and  was  a  place  of  welcome  and 
cheerfulness.  She  had  a  succession  of 
Labrador  dogs  to  which  she  was  devoted. 
She  enjoyed  good  wine,  good  food, 
warmth  and  comfort,  and  she  saw  to  it 
that  as  many  people  as  possible  enjoyed 
these  good  things  with  her.  Many  who 
spend  much  of  their  time  sitting  on  com- 
mittees tend  to  regard  people  as  'cases' 
and  to  legislate  for  them  in  the  mass.  Violet 
Markham  had  the  rare  gift  of  seeing  every- 
one with  whom  she  came  in  contact  as  an 


individual  and  however  busy  she  was  she 
entered  with  zest  into  their  joys  and 
sorrows  and  difficulties.  Her  generosity 
with  her  time  was  amazing  and  her  finan- 
cial help  to  those  in  need  prompt,  useful, 
and  anonymous. 

In  1915  she  married  Lieutenant-Colonel 
James  Carruthers,  D.S.O.,  M.V.O., 
younger  son  of  Peter  Carruthers  of 
Portrack,  Dumfriesshire.  She  continued 
for  the  convenience  of  her  public  life 
to  be  known  (except  to  her  friends)  by 
her  maiden  name.  After  the  war  she 
accompanied  her  husband  to  Cologne 
where  he  had  a  command  and  in  1921  she 
published  A  Woman''s  Watch  on  the  Rhine 
in  which  she  packed  a  great  deal  of 
shrewd  observation.  Her  marriage  sur- 
prised her  friends  for  Colonel  Carruthers 
was  a  racehorse  owner  whose  interests 
were  not  primarily  intellectual.  But  she 
added  an  interest  in  racing  to  her  own 
widely  different  ones  and  she  grieved 
deeply  when  her  husband  died  suddenly 
in  1936.  They  had  no  children. 

In  her  last  years  Violet  Markham  had 
to  fight  against  blindness,  but  sustained 
by  the  deep  religious  faith  to  which  she 
came  through  the  influence  of  Hensley 
Henson  [q.v.],  she  neither  grumbled  nor 
complained  but  carried  on  with  her  work; 
Her  books  include  Paxton  and  the  Bachelor 
Duke  (1935)  which  treats  of  her  grand- 
father's work  at  Chatsworth;  her  auto- 
biography Return  Passage  (1953);  and 
Friendship's  Harvest  in  which  she  gives 
recollections  of  her  friends,  among  them 
Lord  Haldane,  Sir  Robert  Morant,  Thomas 
Jones,  and  John  Buchan  [qq.v.].  She 
wrote  discursively  but  with  vividness  and 
sincerity.  Her  autobiography  gives  a 
picture  of  her  upbringing  in  a  rich  mine 
owner's  household.  Her  innate  sense  of 
fairness  made  her  show  the  best  of  those 
days  as  well  as  the  darker  and  less 
fortunate  lives  of  many  people  at  that 
time.  She  was  equally  fair  in  describing 
what  she  felt  to  be  the  gains  and  also  the 
losses  sustained  by  her  own  country  in 
the  latter  days  in  which  she  wrote. 

Violet  Markham  was  appointed  C.H,- 
in  1917;  received  the  honorary  degrees 
of  Litt.D.  (Sheffield,  1936)  and  LL.D; 
(Edinburgh,  1938),  and  the  freedom  of 
Chesterfield  (1952).  She  was  a  fellow  of 
the  Royal  Historical  Society  and  the 
Royal  Geographical  Society.  She  died  at. 
Moon  Green  2  February  1959. 

[The  Times,  3  February  1959;  Violet 
Markham,  Return  Passage,  1953;  personal 
knowledge.]       v^i^q  «i> Susan  Tweedsmuib. 


693 


Marsh 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


MARSH,     Sir     EDWARD     HOWARD 

(1872-1953),  civil  servant,  scholar,  and 
patron  of  the  arts,  was  born  in  London 
18  November  1872,  the  second  child  and 
only  son  of  Frederick  Howard  Marsh,  by 
his  first  wife,  Jane,  daughter  of  Spencer 
Perceval,  Irvingite  angel  to  Italy  and 
eldest  son  of  Spencer  Perceval  [q.v.], 
the  prime  minister  who  was  assassinated 
in  1812  in  the  lobby  of  the  House 
of  Conunons.  Jane  Perceval  had  become 
a  nurse  and  had  founded  in  Queen  Street 
the  Alexandra  Hospital  for  Children  with 
Hip  Disease  where  she  had  met  her 
husband,  a  surgeon  who  later  became 
professor  of  surgery  at  Cambridge  and 
(1907-15)  master  of  Downing  College. 
Their  elder  daughter  died  in  infancy ;  the 
younger  married  Sir  Frederick  Maurice 
[q.v.].  As  a  result  of  mumps  and  German 
measles  in  early  adolescence  Marsh  was 
destined  never  to  marry.  He  was  educa- 
ted at  Westminster,  studying  Greek  under 
W.  Gunion  Rutherford  [q.v.],  and  at 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  where  he 
continued  his  classical  studies,  specializing 
in  the  emendation  of  texts  under 
A.  W.  Verrall  [q.v.].  This  grounding  in 
pure  scholarship  prepared  'Eddie'  Marsh 
for  the  work  which  occupied  his  leisure  in 
the  latter  part  of  his  life.  He  obtained 
first  classes  in  both  parts  of  the  classical 
tripos  (1893-5)  and  in  the  latter  year  was 
awarded  the  senior  Chancellor's  medal. 
At  Cambridge  his  view  of  life  was  in- 
fluenced by  his  close  friendship  with  his 
fellow  'Apostles'  G.  E.  Moore  [q.v.]  and 
Bertrand  (later  Earl)  Russell;  whilst 
through  Maurice  Baring  [q.v.]  he  was 
brought  to  the  notice  of  (Sir)  Edmund 
Gosse  [q.v.]  who  admitted  him  to  his 
literary  circle  in  London.  His  association 
with  Oswald  Sickert,  editor  of  the  short- 
lived Cambridge  Observer ,  gave  him  the 
opportunity  for  his  first  essays  in  criticism, 
and  through  his  ardent  championship  of 
Ibsen,  whose  work  was  then  making  its 
first  appearance  on  the  English  stage. 
Marsh  attracted  considerable  attention 
before  ever  he  was  launched  upon  a 
professional  career. 

In  1896  he  was  appointed  a  junior  clerk 
in  the  Australian  department  of  the 
Colonial  Office  under  Joseph  Chamberlain 
and  subsequently  Alfred  Lyttelton  [qq.v.]. 
By  December  1905  he  had  become  a  first 
class  clerk  and  was  at  work  in  the  West 
African  department  when  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  became  parliamentary  under- 
secretary for  the  colonies  and  invited 
Marsh  to  become  his  private  secretary. 


For  the  next  twenty-three  years  Marsh 
was  at  Churchill's  right  hand  whenever 
he  was  in  office.  He  toured  British  East 
Africa,  Uganda,  and  Egypt  with  him  in        ] 
1907-8;  followed  him  to  the  Board  of        * 
Trade  (1908-10)  and  to  the  Home  Office        X 
(1910-11),  being  present  with  him  at  the 
Sidney  Street  siege.  In  1911  he  moved 
with  him  to  the  Admiralty  where  he  saw 
the  pre-war  reconstitution  of  the  fleet, 
the  foundation  of  the  Royal  Naval  Air 
Service,  and  the  early  vicissitudes  of  war 
culminating  in  the  failure  to  force  the 
Dardanelles.    From    May    to    November 

1915  Churchill  was  chancellor  of  the 
Duchy  of  Lancaster ;  on  his  departure  on 
active  service  in  the  army  Marsh  became 
an  assistant  private  secretary  to  the 
prime  minister,  his  especial  responsi- 
bility being  the  Civil  List  pensions,  in 
which  capacity  he  was  able  to  be  of 
assistance  to  James  Joyce  [q.v.]  and 
others.  After  Asquith's  fall  in  December 

1916  Marsh  was  virtually  unemployed 
until  Churchill  was  appointed  minister  of 
munitions  (July  1917)  and  subsequently 
(1919-21)  secretary  of  state  for  war. 
Marsh  went  with  him  in  1921  to  the 
Colonial  Office  where  he  played  a  more 
than  normally  active  part  in  negotiations 
over  the  Irish  treaty.  He  remained  at  the 
Colonial  Office  as  secretary  to  the  Duke 
of  Devonshire  (1922-4)  and  (1924)  to 
J.  H.  Thomas  [qq.v.]  and  then  served  for 
the  last  time  under  Churchill,  at  the 
Treasury  (1924-9).  When  Labour  came 
into  power  in  1929  he  returned  to  J.  H. 
Thomas,  moving  with  him  to  the  Domin- 
ions Office  in  1930.  There  he  remained 
until  his  retirement  in  February  1937, 
serving  from  November  1935  as  secretary 
to  Malcolm  MacDonald. 

While  still  at  Cambridge  Marsh  had 
made  the  acquaintance  of  W.  R.  Sickert 
[q.v.]  through  the  latter's  brother  Oswald, 
but  it  was  not  until  1896  when  he  met 
Neville  (later  the  Earl  of)  Lytton,  then  an 
art  student  in  Paris,  that  Marsh  began  to 
cultivate  the  eye  of  an  art  connoisseur 
and  started  collecting  pictures.  With 
Lytton's  guidance  he  specialized  at  first 
in  the  English  water-colourists,  in  par- 
ticular Girtin,  Sandby,  Cotman,  and  the 
two  Cozens  [qq.v.],  and  in  1904,  through 
the  good  offices  of  Robert  Ross,  acquired 
the  Home  collection  of  drawings,  so  that 
almost  overnight  he  became  one  of  the 
most  important  private  collectors  in  the 
country.  The  turning-point  came  in 
December  1911,  when  his  purchase  of  a 
painting  by  Duncan  Grant,  contrary  to 


694 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Marsh 


Lytton's  advice,  led  him  to  launch  out  on 
his  own  as  -a  patron  of  contemporary 
British  painting,  and  he  gathered  around 
him  several  of  the  young  men  from  the 
Slade,  chief  among  them  John  Currie  and 
Mark  Gertler  [q.v.].  Turning  his  back  on 
the  past  he  also  took  under  his  wing  the 
brothers  John  and  Paul  Nash  [q.v.]  and 
(Six)  Stanley  Spencer  [q.v.],  and  by  1914 
had  brought  together  the  nucleus  of  what 
was  to  be  one  of  the  most  valuable  col- 
lections of  modern  work  in  private  hands. 

Meanwhile  he  had  been  no  less  active  in 
the  field  of  literature  and  his  apartments 
at  5  Raymond  Buildings,  Gray's  Inn,  had 
become  the  rendezvous  of  poets  as  well  as 
painters.  Early  in  1912  his  critical  appre- 
ciation of  the  poems  of  Rupert  Brooke 
(whose  notice  he  was  to  write  for  this 
Dictionary)  in  the  Poetry  Review  brought 
him  the  acquaintance  of  Harold  Monro 
[q.v.]  and  established  his  friendship  with 
Brooke  on  a  new  footing.  A  casual  remark 
of  Brooke's  led  to  the  scheme  of  an  an- 
thology of  modern  verse  which  Marsh 
undertook  to  edit  under  the  title  Georgian 
Poetry.  With  Monro's  Poetry  Bookshop 
as  the  publishing  house  the  anthology 
appeared  in  December  1912  and  eventually 
developed  into  a  series  of  five  volumes 
published  over  a  period  of  ten  years. 
During  those  years  Marsh  introduced  to  the 
general  reader  almost  three  generations 
of  poets.  Among  the  original  'Georgians' 
were  Brooke,  J.  E.  Flecker,  Lascelles 
Abercrombie,  Gordon  Bottomley,  W.  H. 
Davies,  Walter  de  la  Mare,  and  D.  H. 
Lawrence  [qq.v.].  In  1917  a  new  group 
appeared,  characterized  by  the  powerful 
'realistic'  war  poetry  of  Siegfried  Sassoon, 
Robert  Nichols  [q.v.],  and  Robert  Graves. 
The  fourth  volume  (1919)  revealed  a  cer- 
tain limitation  of  theme  and  a  pervading 
mannerism  of  style,  and  although  the  fifth 
volume  of  the  series  (1922)  introduced 
Edmund  Blunden,  yet  another  new  poet  of 
high  promise,  it  was  clear  that  the  move- 
ment had  played  itself  out,  yielding  place 
to  a  less  traditional  conception  of  poetry 
derived  from  the  pre-war  work  of  T.  E. 
Hulme  and  Ezra  Pound. 

By  instituting  a  royalty  system  instead 
of  outright  payment  Marsh  was  able  to 
make  the  anthologies  of  considerable 
benefit  to  his  contributors  over  the  years, 
and  through  undertaking  to  do  the 
accounting  himself  he  not  only  kept 
himself  in  regular  touch  with  his  poetical 
'family'  but  was  often  able  to  eke  out  their 
portion  with  a  small  gift  wherever  there 
was  hardship.  For  this  Marsh  used  what 


he  called  his  'murder  money',  a  source  of 
income  which  he  had  inherited  on  the 
death  of  an  uncle  in  1903,  being  one- 
sixth  of  what  remained  of  the  compen- 
sation granted  to  the  Perceval  family  in 
1812.  This  fund,  now  reserved  for  the 
patronage  of  the  arts,  was  augmented  by 
the  royalties  from  Marsh's  memoir  of 
Rupert  Brooke,  a  biographical  essay 
attached  as  introduction  to  the  Collected 
Poems  which  he  edited  and  brought  out 
in  1918.  From  the  poet's  death  in  1915 
until  1934  he  was  indefatigable  as  literary 
executor,  editing  Brooke's  posthumous 
prose  and  verse,  thereby  laying  the  basis 
of  Brooke's  reputation. 

By  the  end  of  the  Georgian  enterprise  a 
new  interest  had  entered  Marsh's  life  when 
he  began  translating  the  Fables  of  La 
Fontaine.  These  came  out  in  two  small 
volumes,  followed  by  a  complete  edition 
in  two  volumes  in  1931.  Thereafter  he 
published  translations  of  the  Odes  of 
Horace  (1941),  Fromentin's  Dominique 
(1948),  and  two  works  by  the  Princess 
Marthe  Bibesco,  The  Sphinx  of  Bagatelle 
(1951)  and  ProusVs  Oriane  (1952).  In 
1939  he  published  a  book  of  reminiscences 
entitled  A  Number  of  People,  and  in  1952 
the  Fables  were  reissued  in  Everyman's 
Library.  A  scholarly  form  of  hobby  which 
proved  of  considerable  benefit  to  English 
letters  was  the  correcting  of  proofs  for 
other  authors  which  in  Marsh's  practice 
was  an  elaborate  process  involving  the 
composition  of  numerous  notes  on  syntax, 
literary  style,  matters  of  fact,  and  conduct 
of  the  writer's  argument.  His  first  major 
operation  of  this  kind  was  Churchill's 
Marlborough  (4  vols.,  1933-8),  which  was 
followed  by  all  Churchill's  subsequent 
literary  productions  up  to  the  first  volume 
of  the  History  of  the  English-Speaking 
Peoples  (1956).  In  1934  Marsh  was  invited 
by  Somerset  Maugham  to  do  likevdse-  for 
his  Don  Fernando  (1935)  and  the  next 
fifteen  of  that  author's  productions  were 
submitted  to  Marsh's  painstaking  scrutiny. 

On  his  retirement  from  the  Civil  Service 
Marsh  was  appointed  a  trustee  of  the  Tate 
Gallery  and  a  governor  of  the  Old  Vic, 
having  for  several  years  served  on  the 
committee  of  the  Contemporary  Art 
Society  (of  which  he  was  chairman^ 
1936-52)  and  the  council  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Literature.  His  taste  in  con- 
temporary painting  advanced  with  the 
times  with  easier  adaptability  than  his 
appreciation  of  verse,  yet  he  remained 
loyal  to  the  principles  of  representational 
art    as    against    the    various    'abstract' 


695 


Marsh 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


manifestations  which  won  favour  in  his 
time.  His  thorough  grounding  in  the  Greek 
and  Roman  classics,  and  his  friendship 
with  Robert  Bridges  [q.v.]  which  began  in 
boyhood,  determined  his  predilection  for 
verse  in  the  central  tradition.  In  spite  of 
an  abnormally  acute  aesthetic  sensi- 
bility, his  temperament  was  essentially 
methodical  and  rational,  so  that  the  one 
Bide  of  his  nature  was  nicely  balanced  by 
the  other,  checking  him  from  ever  erring 
to  an  extreme  on  either  side,  except  at  the 
theatre  where,  by  his  own  admission,  he 
enjoyed  the  play  like  a  child,  and  showed 
it.  Through  his  friendship  with  Ivor 
Novello  [q.v.]  he  developed  an  ardent 
enthusiasm  for  first  nights. 

In  appearance  Marsh  was  fair-haired, 
a  little  over  middle  height,  broad- 
shouldered,  erect  in  carriage,  groomed  to 
a  nicety,  and  invariably  composed  in 
manner.  He  used  a  monocle  to  point  his 
discourse,  but  was  most  easily  distin- 
guished from  the  throng  by  his  tufted 
eyebrows  swept  up  at  their  outer  extremi- 
ties lending  this  genial  and  softly-spoken 
scholar  a  curiously  mephistophelian  air. 
Although  correct  in  the  presentation  of 
himself,  almost  to  the  point  of  dandjdsm, 
his  physical  make-up  was  of  exceptional 
toughness;  he  set  high  store  by  the 
creature  comforts  of  food  and  drink  in 
society,  but  his  life  at  home  was  plain 
and  on  occasion  almost  Spartan.  He  was 
eminently  sociable,  though  at  first  his 
somewhat  stiff  demeanour  could  be  for- 
bidding to  a  stranger.  Always  anxious  to 
please  in  social  intercourse,  which  was  his 
favourite  pastime,  for  he  was  a  master  of 
anecdote,  nevertheless  he  could  be  ruth- 
lessly imcompromising  whenever  one  of 
his  cherished  principles  of  scholarship  was 
at  stake.  He  was  agnostic  in  religion  and 
in  the  Uteral  sense  conservative  in  politics. 
His  was  an  eighteenth-century  cast  of 
mind,  and  his  humorous  observation  of 
men  and  manners  was  brilliantly  served  by 
an  easy  gift  for  gossiping  on  paper  with 
wit  and  elegance,  so  that  the  reader  of  his 
letters  is  inevitably  reminded  of  Horace 
Walpole  [q.v.].  Asked  what  he  would  say 
if  told  that  he  would  die  next  day,  he  re- 
plied without  hesitation  'Thanks  for  the 
party'.  In  him  the  late  Victorian  educa- 
tional system  with  its  aristocratic  tradition 
produced  what  was  perhaps  its  most 
highly  evolved  and  representative  figure. 
He  died,  13  January  1953,  in  the  Knights- 
bridge  flat  which  had  been  his  post-war 
home. 

Marsh  was  appointed  K.C.V.O.  on  his 


retirement  in  1987.  There  are  portraits 
by  Sir  Oswald  Birley  in  the  National 
Portrait  Gallery  and  by  Neville  Lewis  in 
the  possession  of  the  Royal  Society  of 
Literature.  He  featured  in  a  conversation 
piece  by  Anthony  Devas  which  remained 
the  property  of  the  painter.  A  drawing  by 
Violet,  Duchess  of  Rutland,  became  the 
property  of  Mr.  Wilfrid  Gibson.  There  are 
also  portraits  by  Leonard  Appelbee, 
Neville  Lytton,  and  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill,  a  pencil  drawing  by  Joan 
Hassall,  and  a  portrait  bust  by  Frank 
Dobson.  Marsh  featured  with  Churchill 
in  two  caricatures  by  Sir  Max  Beerbohm. 

[Sir  Edward  Marsh,  A  Number  of  People, 
1939 ;  Eddie  Marsh,  Sketches  for  a  Composite 
Literary  Portrait,  ed.  Christopher  Hassall  and 
Denis  Mathews,  1953;  Christopher  Hassall, 
Edward  Marsh,  A  Biography,  1959 ;  personal 
knowledge.]  Christopher  Hassajll. 

MARSHALL,  Sm  GUY  ANSTRUTHER 
KNOX  (1871-1959),  entomologist,  was 
born  in  Amritsar,  Punjab,  20  December 
1871,  the  only  son  of  (Colonel)  Charles 
Henry  Tilson  Marshall,  Bengal  Staff  Corps, 
and  his  wife,  Laura  Frances,  daughter  of 
Sir  Jonathan  Frederick  Pollock,  first 
baronet  [q.v.].  His  uncle  was  Major- 
General  George  Frederick  Leycester 
Marshall,  R.E.  Both  these  distinguished 
officers  were  keen  naturalists,  Marshall's 
father  being  joint  author  with  A.  O.  Hume 
[q.v.]  of  The  Game  Birds  of  India,  Burmah 
and  Ceylon  (3  vols.,  1879-81),  whilst  his 
uncle  wrote  on  Birds'  Nesting  in  India 
(1877)  and  on  the  butterflies  of  India, 
Burma,  and  Ceylon. 

Marshall  was  sent  at  an  early  age  to  a 
preparatory  school  at  Margate,  where  his 
interest  in  natural  history  was  further 
stimulated  by  his  headmaster.  At  Charter- 
house (on  the  governing  body  of  which 
he  was  later  to  serve)  he  transferred  his 
attentions  from  butterflies  to  beetles, 
considered  a  less  eccentric  hobby.  He 
failed  the  Indian  Civil  Service  examina- 
tions to  his  father's  disappointment  but 
perhaps  not  greatly  to  his  own.  His 
father's  reaction  was  to  pack  him  off  at 
the  age  of  nineteen  to  a  sheep  farmer  in 
Natal ;  for  the  next  fifteen  years  he  had  a 
most  varied  career,  leaving  the  sheep  farm 
to  become  a  cattle  man  and  later  to  join 
a  firm  of  mining  engineers  in  Salisbury, 
Rhodesia.  Finally  he  became  co-manager 
of  the  SaHsbury  Building  and  Estates 
Company. 

Despite  these  activities  Marshall  main- 
tained the  keenest  interest  in  entomology. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Marshall,  G.  A.  K. 


By  1806  he  was  in  touch  with  (Sir) 
Edward  Poulton  [q.v.],  Hope  professor  of 
zoology  at  Oxford,  who  encouraged  him 
to  carry  out  a  considerable  series  of 
experiments  on  mimicry  and  protective 
resemblance,  the  results  of  which  appeared 
under  their  joint  authorship  in  the 
Transactions  of  the  Entomological  Society 
of  London  in  1902.  It  was  presumably 
through  Poulton's  influence  that  Marshall 
was  appointed  curator  of  the  Sarawak 
Museum  in  1906,  but  on  his  way  there 
he  was  taken  ill  in  London  with  a  com- 
plaint contracted  in  Africa  and  had  to 
relinquish  the  post. 

In  1909  Marshall  was  appointed  scien- 
tific secretary  to  the  Entomological 
Research  Committee  (Tropical  Africa) 
by  the  secretary  of  state  for  the  colonies. 
It  was  from  this  committee  that  there 
evolved  in  1913  the  Imperial  Bureau 
(later  the  Commonwealth  Institute)  of 
Entomology  of  which  Marshall  was 
director  until  he  retired  in  1942.  Soon 
after  the  Bureau  came  into  being,  war 
broke  out  and  Marshall's  energy,  foresight, 
and  guidance  helped  it  to  survive  this 
critical  period ;  his  accurate  assessment  of 
the  needs  of  overseas  entomologists,  from 
his  own  personal  experience,  enabled  him 
to  lay  down  the  sound  lines  on  which  its 
future  development  was  based.  The 
function  of  the  Bureau  was  to  act  as  a 
centre  of  information  on  all  matters 
relating  to  insect  pests  and  so  successfully 
was  this  carried  out  that  the  Bureau 
formed  the  model  for  the  creation  subse- 
quently of  two  new  institutes  and  ten 
bureaux  covering  all  branches  of  agri- 
cultural science.  All  these  information 
services  were  brought  together  in  1933 
under  an  organization  later  known  as 
the  Conunonwealth  Agricultural  Bureaux. 

Marshall  played  an  important  role  as 
adviser  on  entomological  matters  to  the 
Colonial  Office  between  the  two  world 
wars  and  in  advising  on  specific  problems, 
thus  exerting  a  direct  influence  on  the 
development  of  economic  entomology  in 
the  colonies;  he  was  always  ready  to 
welcome  entomologists  from  the  colonies 
and  to  hear  about  their  work  and  problems, 
and  he  never  ceased  to  stimulate,  in- 
spire, and  help  them.  His  reputation  was 
such  that  he  was  well  known  personally  or 
by  repute  to  entomologists  throughout  the 
world  irrespective  of  nationality.  These 
contacts  throughout  the  years  enabled 
him  to  amass  an  encyclopedic  knowledge 
of  world  entomology  and  entomologists. 

Marshall's  career  was  remarkable  in  that 


he  had  never  attended  a  university  or 
received  any  formal  education  in  science. 
Moreover  he  did  not  take  up  entomology 
as  a  profession  until  the  age  of  thirty- 
eight,  but  his  family  background  coupled 
with  his  enthusiastic  amateur  spare-time 
work  stood  him  in  good  stead.  Conse- 
quently he  was  not  unduly  impressed  by 
academic  degrees  despite  the  fact  that 
the  university  of  Oxford  conferred 
an  honorary  D.Sc.  on  him  in  1915.  His 
outlook  was  also  unorthodox  in  that 
he  did  not  allow  his  choice  of  staff  to  be 
hampered  by  nationalistic  considerations 
and  at  various  times  he  appointed  a  Rus- 
sian, a  Swiss,  a  Dutchman,  and  Canadians. 
He  was  a  firm  believer  in  commercial 
companies  and  insecticide  manufacturers 
employing  their  own  entomologists  and 
his  influence  in  the  latter  direction  did 
much  to  raise  the  standard  of  insecticide 
products.  In  later  years  he  developed  an 
interest  in  comrjiercial  entomology  and 
founded  one  of  the  first  companies  for 
pest  control  which  occupied  him  for  some 
years  after  his  retirement. 

After  he  left  Africa  in  1906  Marshall's 
personal  research  work  was  almost  exclu- 
sively taxonomic.  Through  his  identifica- 
tion work  in  the  early  days  at  the  Bureau 
he  developed  a  wide  knowledge  of  all 
groups  of  insects  but  he  came  to  specialize 
on  the  beetles  of  the  family  Curculionidae, 
His  choice  of  this  particular  field  was 
determined  by  the  curious  accident  that 
when  he  returned  to  England  on  leave  in 
1896  the  greater  part  of  his  beetle  collec- 
tion was  lost  in  transit  and  there  survived 
only  the  Curculionidae  which  happened 
to  have  been  packed  separately,  so  that 
he  was  able  to  study  this  weevil  material 
at  the  British  Museum  during  his  leave. 
Altogether  he  published  some  200  papers 
on  the  Curculionidae,  including  several 
major  works,  and  he  described  some 
2,300  species  new  to  science.  He  was  an 
acknowledged  authority  on  the  family  on 
which  he  continued  to  work  at  the  Natural 
History  Museum  until  a  very  few  weeks 
before  his  death  in  London  8  April  1959i 

Marshall  was  a  very  able  administrator 
who  believed  in  delegating  responsibility 
and  seldom  interfered  unless  it  became 
necessary  or  his  advice  was  sought ;  he  was 
most  approachable.  He  was  of  medium 
height,  compact  build,  and  distinguished 
appearance;  he  never  sought  publicity 
and  was  by  nature  of  a  retiring  disposition. 
He  consistently  refused  to  accept  the 
presidency  of  the  Royal  Entomological 
Society  of  London.  He  was  elected  F.R.S. 


607 


Marshall,  G.  A.  K. 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


in  1923  and  was  an  honorary  member  of 
many  overseas  societies.  He  was  appointed 
C.M.G.  in  1920,  knighted  in  1930,  advan- 
ced to  K.C.M.G.  in  1942,  andreceived  the 
Belgian  Order  of  the  Crown. 

In  1933  he  married  Hilda  Margaret 
(died  1964),  daughter  of  the  late  David 
Alexander  Maxwell  and  widow  of  James 
Ffolliott  Darling.  They  had  no  children. 

[The  Annals  and  Magazine  of  Natural 
History,  13th  Series,  vol.  i,  1958-9 ;  Nature, 
16  May  1959;  W.  R.  Thompson  in  Bio- 
graphical Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal 
Society,  vol.  vi,  1960 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

W.  J.  Hall. 

MARSHALL,     Sir     JOHN     HUBERT 

(1876-1958),  archaeologist,  was  born  at 
Chester  19  March  1876,  the  youngest  son 
of  Frederic  Marshall,  who  took  silk  in 
1893,  by  his  first  wife,  Annie,  daughter  of 
J.  B.  Evans,  of  Wanfield  Hall,  Stafford- 
shire. He  was  educated  at  Dulwich 
College  and  King's  College,  Cambridge, 
where  he  took  first  classes  in  the  classical 
tripos  (1898-1900),  was  Porson  prizeman 
(1898),  Prendergast  Greek  student  (1900), 
and  Craven  student  (1901).  From  1898  to 
1901  he  was  at  the  British  School  at  Athens 
and  took  part  in  the  excavations  then 
beginning  in  Crete.  In  1902,  in  spite  of 
his  youth  and  inexperience,  he  was 
appointed  to  the  director-generalship  of 
archaeology  in  India,  a  post  which,  after 
a  long  period  of  neglect,  had  just  been 
revived  and  greatly  enlarged  by  the 
viceroy,  Lord  Curzon  [q.v.]. 

The  task  which  awaited  Marshall  in 
India  was  immense.  Throughout  the  land 
age-long  indifference  had  imperilled 
ancient  structures,  sculptures,  and  paint- 
ing, often  of  great  beauty  and  importance. 
No  methodical  effort  had  been  made  to 
explore  the  buried  history  and  prehistory 
of  the  sub-continent.  There  was  no  anti- 
quities law  on  a  modern  pattern.  Marshall, 
improvising  as  he  went  along,  resurrected 
the  Archaeological  Survey  of  India  on  an 
adequate  scale  and  turned  it  first  to  the 
clearance  and  conservation  of  upstanding 
structures.  Alongside  this  urgent  work 
of  salvage  he  began  to  survey  and  dig, 
and  in  1913  inaugurated  the  systematic 
exploration  of  the  ancient  Taxila,  near 
Rawalpindi,  a  project  which  was  to  oc- 
cupy some  part  of  his  attention  for  more 
than  twenty  years.  The  results,  published 
in  1951,  justified  his  persistence.  For 
a  thousand  years  (500  b.c.-a.d.  500) 
Taxila  had  been  both  a  local  capital  and 
a  trading  station  on  an  arterial  route  into 


India ;  with  it  were  associated  the  names 
of  Alexander  the  Great,  the  Buddhist 
king  Asoka,  King  Gondofares,  St.  Thomas, 
and  Kanishka.  Its  periodical  removal 
from  site  to  site  in  the  same  general 
locality  helped  incidentally  to  provide  an 
automatic  substitute  for  archaeological 
stratification,  which  Marshall  never 
adequately  understood.  Even  more  im- 
portant in  a  wider  view  was  his  develop- 
ment, in  and  after  1922,  of  discoveries 
made  by  members  of  his  staff  in  the  Indus 
valley  of  the  Punjab  and  Sind.  His 
announcement  in  1924  that  he  had  there 
found  a  new  civilization  of  the  third 
millennium  marked  an  epoch  in  modern 
discovery;  the  so-called  Indus  Valley 
Civilization  is  now  recognized  as  the  most 
extensive  civilization  of  the  pre-classical 
world.  Parallel  with  these  enterprises  he 
directed  a  large  number  of  projects  which 
partook  rather  of  conservation  than  of 
excavation :  notably  on  the  great  Buddhist 
site  of  Sanchi  in  central  India,  where  his 
restorations  gave  a  new  meaning  and 
security  to  a  remarkable  group  of  build- 
ings and  carvings  mostly  of  the  last  two 
centuries  b.c. 

Marshall's  methods  were  often  sum- 
mary, and  have  been  criticized ;  and  it  is 
true  that,  preoccupied  from  an  early  age 
and  largely  in  isolation  with  a  task  of 
gigantic  proportions,  he  was  insufficiently 
aware  of  developing  standards  and  modes 
in  the  West.  But  alike  at  Taxila  and 
in  his  exploration  of  the  Indus  Valley 
Civilization  at  Mohenjo-daro,  his  whole- 
sale and  speedy  methods  revealed  expres- 
sive, if  synthetic,  pictures  of  great  cities 
in  a  measure  which  more  scientific  and 
necessarily  slower  techniques  would  have 
failed  to  approach.  His  mass-excavation 
of  large  areas  at  Mohenjo-daro,  for 
example,  published  in  1931,  showed  a 
great  city,  dating  from  before  and  after 
2000  B.C.,  planned  and  drained  on  a  vast 
scale  and  in  a  regimented  fashion,  with 
wide  thoroughfares  and  closely  built 
houses  and  shops.  Detail,  and  often 
important  detail,  was  recklessly  lost; 
but,  like  Schliemann  before  him,  Marshall 
got  to  the  heart  of  the  matter  and  gave 
what  was  needed  first  in  the  current  state 
of  knowledge,  namely  the  general  shape, 
the  sketch,  of  a  thitherto  imknown 
civilization.  He  was  a  pioneer  of  a  high 
order. 

His  two  major  excavations,  at  Taxila 
and  at  Mohenjo-daro,  are  his  outstanding 
contributions.  Nevertheless,  they  repre- 
sent but  a  fraction  of  his  actual  achieve- 


688 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Martel 


ment.  There  is  scarcely  a  part  of  India, 
or  Pakistan,  or  indeed  of  Burma,  which 
also  came  within  his  province,  where  his 
care  and  zeal,  particularly  in  conserva- 
tion, are  not  manifest  in  one  form  or 
another.  Behind  all  this  lay  the  tedious 
negotiation  and  persuasion  constantly 
necessitated  by  a  Government  and  people 
which,  apart  from  Curzon's  initial  stimu- 
lus, were  not  yet  ready  to  appreciate  the 
value  of  the  country's  immense  heritage. 
As  an  administrator  in  these  circum- 
stances Marshall  was  personally  brilliant ; 
if  he  failed  at  any  point,  it  was  in  the 
training  of  his  colleagues  in  individual 
responsibility  and  in  technical  practice, 
with  the  result  that  his  retirement  from 
the  director-generalship  to  take  up  special 
duties  in  1928  (from  which  he  finally 
retired  in  1934)  was  followed  by  a  sharp 
decline  in  standards.  It  has  been  said  of 
him,  with  some  truth,  that  he  was  'a  tree 
under  which  nothing  grew' ;  but  there 
are  no  two  opinions  about  the  splendour 
of  the  tree. 

In  the  course  of  his  work  Marshall 
prepared  a  comprehensive  Antiquities 
Law  on  the  lines  of  those  which  had  al- 
ready been  tried  out  by  British  authorities 
in  western  Asia  and  Europe.  In  modified 
form  this  law  has  remained  in  force  and 
is  a  testimony  to  its  draftsman.  In  this 
and  in  other  ways  he  gradually  brought 
under  firm  central  control  the  monuments 
and  ancient  sites  of  'British'  India,  and, 
by  example  and  advice,  those  of  the 
Indian  states  where  his  writ  did  not  run. 
His  successful  work  as  conservator  of 
ancient  buildings  aided  this  process;  he 
began  to  create  an  appreciative  if  still 
uninstructed  public  opinion.  He  took 
especial  deUght  in  the  restoration  of  the 
gardens  which,  particularly  in  Mogul 
India,  had  formed  an  essential  feature  of 
tombs  and  palaces  but  which  had  been  al- 
lowed to  decay  or  even  to  revert  to  jungle. 
Good  taste  lies  at  the  core  of  good  con- 
servation and  Marshall's  taste  was  nearly 
impeccable.  Thus  it  was  that  the  consoli- 
dation of  ancient  structures  was  in 
general  accompanied  by  the  re-creation  of 
their  ancient  amenities  and  the  recapture 
of  much  of  their  original  beauty  and 
significance.  His  work  has  remained  as 
an  accepted  pattern  and  challenge  to  his 
successors. 

During  his  active  period  of  office 
Marshall  produced  a  substantial  Annual 
Report  which  is  a  permanent  source. 
Otherwise  his  principal  published  works 
are  Mohenjo-Daro  and  the  Indus  Civili- 


zation (3  vols.,  1931);  The  Monuments  of 
Sanchi  (with  A.  Foucher,  3  vols.,  Calcutta, 
1940) ;  and  Taxila  (3  vols.,  1951). 

Marshall  was  appointed  CLE.  in  1910 
and  knighted  in  1914.  He  was  elected 
an  honorary  fellow  of  King's  College, 
Cambridge,  in  1927  and  F.B.A.  in  1936. 
On  the  eve  of  sailing  for  India  in  1902 
he  married  Florence,  daughter  of  Sir 
Henry  Bell  Longhurst,  surgeon-dentist. 
They  had  one  son  and  one  daughter. 
Marshall  died  at  Guildford  17  August 
1958. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Mortimer  Wheeler. 

MARTEL,  Sir  GIFFARD  LE  QUESNE 

(1889-1958),  lieutenant-general,  was  born 
in  Millbrook,  Southampton,  10  October 
1889,  the  only  son  of  (Sir)  Charles  Philip 
Martel,  later  chief  superintendent  of 
ordnance  factories,  and  his  wife,  Lilian 
Mar>%  daughter  of  W.  H.  Mackintosh, 
M.D.  He  was  educated  at  Wellington 
College,  where  he  won  the  Wellesley 
scholarship  awarded  annually  to  the  top 
boy  on  the  modern  side,  and  represented 
the  school  in  gymnastics.  In  1908  he 
entered  the  Royal  Military  Academy, 
Woolwich,  and  the  next  year  was  com- 
missioned in  the  Royal  Engineers.  In 
1912  and  1913  he  won  the  welterweight 
championship  not  only  of  the  army  but 
of  the  combined  Services ;  after  the  war 
he  won  the  army  championship  (1920)  and 
the  imperial  Services  championship  (1921 
and  1922). 

In  August  1914  Martel  went  to  France 
where  for  two  years  he  carried  out  the 
normal  duties  of  a  field  company  officer, 
attaining  command  of  his  unit  in  the 
second  year.  In  the  summer  of  1916  he 
was  sent  home  temporarily  to  design  a 
practice  battlefield,  based  on  the  trench- 
front  in  France,  in  the  secret  area  at 
Thetford,  in  Norfolk,  where  the  crews  for 
the  newly  produced  tanks  were  being 
trained.  This  had  a  far-reaching  effect  on 
his  career:  early  in  October,  three  weeks 
after  the  tanks  had  made  their  debut  on 
the  battlefield  in  France,  he  was  chosen 
for  the  key  appointment  of  brigade -major 
in  the  small  headquarters  of  the  new  arm 
at  Bermicourt.  There  were  only  three  other 
members,  apart  from  the  commander, 
(Sir)  Hugh  EUes  [q.v.] ;  but  in  the  follow- 
ing May,  as  the  result  of  enlargements, 
Martel  became  G.S.O.  2  and  was  promoted 
from  captain  to  major. 

In  November  1916  Martel  wrote  a 
paper  entitled  'A  Tank  Army'  (reprinted 


<«W 


Martel 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


jUi  Our  Armoured  Forces,  1945)  which 
showed  his  long-range  vision  at  a  time 
when  the  tank  was  generally  regarded  as 
no  more  than  a  limited  aid  to  the  infantry 
assault,  and  when  no  tank  could  move  at 
more  than  four  miles  an  hour.  His  paper 
forecast  the  creation  of  'tank  armies'  and 
their  domination  of  future  great  wars.  He 
proposed  that  they  should  be  organized 
and  operate  like  fleets  at  sea,  with 
'destroyer',  'battle',  and  'torpedo'  tanks, 
carrying  with  them  in  'supply'  tanks  their 
requirements  for  an  extensive  operation. 
His  forecast  overlooked  some  basic 
differences  between  the  conditions  of  sea 
and  land  warfare,  and  was  only  fulfilled 
in  part,  but  it  was  of  great  value  in  hfting 
thought  out  of  the  rut  of  trench  warfare. 
The  extent  to  which  Martel  overshot  the 
mark  of  potentiality  was  less  than  that 
by  which  the  general  run  of  military 
thought  fell  short. 

In  a  more  immediate  way  he  contri- 
buted much  to  the  performance  of  the 
Tank  Corps  in  1917-18  by  his  activity  and 
boldness  in  reconnaissance.  He  was  con- 
tinually up  at  the  front  and  lived  up 
there  with  unit  representatives  during  the 
preparatory  period  before  offensives  were 
launched.  There  is  a  vivid  pen  portrait 
of  him  in  a  private  record  written  by 
Sir  Evan  Charteris.  He  described  'Q' 
Martel  as  a  man : 

Of  a  desperate  bravery,  who  was,  however, 
supposed  to  have  an  exact  instinct  for  the 
falling  place  of  shells  and  to  be  a  very  safe 
guide.  He  was  a  small,  loose-limbed  man,  a 
natural  bruiser,  and  winner  of  the  army  box- 
ing, with  a  deep  hoarse  laugh  which  .  .  . 
had  a  most  peculiar  note  of  good-humoured 
ferocity  in  it.  Tales  which  made  the  ordinary 
mortal's  fiesh  creep  produced  from  him  regular 
salvos  of  this  notable  laughter . . .  On  leave,  his 
idea  of  recreation  was  to  shut  himself  up  in  a 
mobile  workshop  of  his  own  and  work  at  a 
lathe.  At  the  front,  his  idea  of  pleasure  was 
to  get  into  a  shelled  area  and  dodge  about 
to  avoid  the  bursts. 

After  the  war,  during  which  he  was 
appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  and  awarded  the 
M.C.,  Martel  returned  to  duty  with  the 
Royal  Engineers,  and  remained  with  them 
when  the  Royal  Tank  Corps  was  formed 
on  a  permanent  basis  in  1923,  a  choice 
for  which  he  was  later  criticized  by  some 
of  his  comrades  in  the  wartime  Tank 
Corps  and  by  others  who  joined  it  after 
its  creation.  But  he  continued  to  take  a 
very  active  interest  in  the  development  of 
tanks  and  armoured  warfare,  writing 
much  on  the  subject  as  well  as  conducting 
experimental  work — initially  in  the  prob- 


lems of  tank-bridging.  Shortly  before 
the  armistice  in  November  1918  he  had 
been  sent  home  to  command  a  tank- 
bridging  battalion  of  the  Royal  Engineers 
which  had  been  formed  at  Christchurch  in 
Hampshire,  and  after  the  war  this  was 
converted  into  an  experimental  establish- 
ment. One  product  of  this  period  was  the 
Martel  box  girder  bridge,  which  became 
the  standard  girder  bridge  of  the  army, 
in  place  of  the  more  expensive  and  less 
adaptable  tubular  girder  bridge. 

In  1921  Martel  went  to  the  Staff  College 
and  after  graduating  was  appointed  in 
1923  to  the  directorate  of  fortifications 
and  works  at  the  War  Office,  where  he 
remained  until  the  summer  of  1926. 
Meanwhile  he  had  become  convinced  of 
the  need  for  small  and  inconspicuous 
armoured  and  tracked  vehicles  to  aid, 
and  operate  with,  the  infantry.  Finding 
little  official  encouragement,  he  designed 
and  built  such  a  machine  in  the  garage  of 
his  own  house  at  Camberley,  which  he 
completed  and  demonstrated  in  1925. 
At  first  called  the  'one-man  tank'  and 
then  the  tankette,  a  small  number  were 
ordered  for  the  original  Experimental 
Mechanized  Force  of  1927.  It  became  the 
prototype  both  of  the  light  tank  and  also 
of  the  machine-gun  carrier. 

In  1926  Martel  himself  was  given  com- 
mand of  the  first  field  company  R.E.  to  be 
mechanized,  and  with  it  took  part  in  the 
trials  of  the  Experimental  Force  during 
the  next  two  years.  In  this  period  he 
devised  a  'stepping-stone'  bridge,  made 
up  of  timber  crates  spaced  at  short 
intervals,  which  a  tank  pressed  down  into 
the  bed  of  the  stream  as  it  ran  across 
them — a  device  of  which  the  Russians 
made  use  during  their  1943  advance  and 
later.  He  also  devised  a  'mat  bridge* 
composed  of  a  chain  of  timber  panels,  or 
rafts,  which  were  pushed  across  the  stream 
and  over  which  vehicles  could  cross  so 
long  as  they  kept  moving — an  idea  which 
was  revived  in  the  Normandy  landings  of 
1944. 

His  numerous  articles  in  the  military 
journals  during  the  twenties  made  a  wide 
impression,  especially  abroad.  Guderian, 
the  creator  of  the  German  armoured 
forces,  refers  to  Martel  in  his  memoirs  as 
one  of  the  three  men  who  'principally' 
excited  his  interest  in  such  forces  and 
describes  Martel  as  one  of  those  three 
'who  became  the  pioneers  of  a  new  type  of 
warfare  on  the  largest  scale'.  In  1929 
Martel  went  out  to  India  where  in  1930 
he  became  an  instructor  at  the  Quetta 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


'.X.'>  Mattel 


Staff  College,  remaining  until  1933. 
There  followed  in  1935  a  year's  course  at 
the  Imperial  Defence  College.  In  1931  he 
published  a  book  entitled  In  the  Wake  of 
the  Tank,  and  an  enlarged  edition  in  1935, 
but  he  did  not  otherwise  write  so  much 
in  this  decade  as  in  the  previous  one. 

Much  of  his  technical  inventive  work 
had  been  done  at  his  own  expense  and 
with  little  or  no  aid  from  official  quarters. 
He  was  not  given  an  opportunity  to  take 
a  hand  in  directing  tank  development 
and  production  until  1936,  by  which  time 
Britain  had  lost  her  former  lead  in  this 
field.  Then, as  assistant  director  of  mechani- 
zation, and  from  January  1938  as  deputy 
director,  he  strove  vigorously  to  make  up 
the  lost  years.  In  the  autumn  of  1937  the 
new  secretary  of  state  for  war,  Leslie 
(later  Lord)  Hore-Belisha  [q.v.],  con- 
sidered making  him  master-general  of 
the  ordnance,  although  he  was  still  only  a 
colonel.  Martel's  own  diffidence  about  such 
a  big  jump  over  the  heads  of  his  seniors 
was  one  of  the  factors  which  led  to  a  dif- 
ferent decision.  At  the  beginning  of  1939 
he  left  the  War  Office  on  promotion  to 
conunand  a  motorized  division — ^the  50th 
Northumbrian,  of  the  Territorial  Army. 

After  the  German  break-through  on 
the  Meuse  in  May  1940  which  was  followed 
by  the  Panzer  forces'  drive  to  the 
Channel,  Martel's  division,  which  had 
been  in  France  since  January,  was  rushed 
to  the  scene.  He  was  put  in  charge  of  the 
improvised  counter-attack  delivered  at 
Arras  on  21  May  by  two  of  his  battahons 
and  all  the  serviceable  tanks  of  the  1st 
Army  Tank  brigade.  This  stroke  hit  the 
flank  of  Rommel's  Panzer  division, 
causing  disorder,  and  the  news  so  alarmed 
the  German  higher  command  that  their 
drive  was  nearly  suspended.  The  shock 
effect,  out  of  all  proportion  to  the  small 
size  of  the  force,  enhanced  Martel's 
reputation,  but  his  conduct  of  the 
operation  and  its  faulty  co-ordination  led 
to  much  sharp  criticism  from  the  tank 
officers  taking  part,  who  felt  that  his 
powers  as  a  commander  and  tactician 
did  not  match  his  gifts  as  a  technician. 

After  the  fall  of  France  there  was 
growing  pressure  for  the  appointment  of 
a  single  chief  of  the  armoured  forces  in 
Britain.  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill  himself 
supported  the  proposal  and  wished  to  see 
the  post  given  to  (Sir)  Percy  Hobart 
[q.v.].  Although  the  Army  Council  reluc- 
tantly agreed  to  the  appointment  of  a 
single  head  of  the  armoured  forces,  they 
were  unwilling  to  meet  Hobart's  condi- 


tions and  felt  that  of  the  few  armoured 
experts  available  Martel  was  likely  to  be 
the  most  amenable :  in  December  1940  he 
was  appointed  commander  of  the  Royal 
Armoured  Corps,  under  the  commander- 
in-chief  Home  Forces. 

This  soon  brought  Martel  into  conflict 
with  Hobart,  and  the  tension  between 
these  two  old  friends  became  severe.  It 
was  sharpened  when  Churchill  created 
what  he  called  a  'tank  parliament'  where 
the  various  armoured  division  commanders 
and  other  experts  could  meet  and  express 
their  differing  points  of  view.  Martel  dis- 
liked the  arrangenient  as  interfering  with 
his  authority  and  showing  a  lack  of  confi- 
dence in  himself.  Moreover,  hke  many 
champion  boxers  he  was  basically  a  gentle 
and  conciliatory  man,  anxious  to  please  as 
well  as  to  avoid  trouble,  and  in  his  over- 
tactful  efforts  to  reconcile  differing  views 
and  interests,  particularly  of  cavalrymen 
and  tankmen,  he  eventually  lost  the  con- 
fidence of  both. 

In  September  1942  he  went  to  India  and 
Burma  on  a  lengthy  tour  and  while  he  was 
away  his  post  was  aboUshed.  On  return 
he  was  sent  to  Moscow  as  head  of  the 
military  mission :  another  frustrating  post: 
He  returned  to  London  in  February  1944 
and  a  fortnight  later  lost  an  eye  in  the 
bombing  of  the  Army  and  Navy  Club. 
He  was  placed  on  retired  pay  in  1945.  In 
the  general  election  of  that  year  he  stood 
unsuccessfully  as  a  Conservative  candi- 
date for  the  Barnard  Castle  division  of 
Durham.  In  the  same  year  he  pubUshed 
Our  Armoured  Forces  which  aroused  wide 
interest,  but  also  considerable  criticism. 
In  subsequent  years  he  wrote  several 
more  books,  deaUng  with  his  experiences 
in  Russia  and  expressing  a  strongly  anti- 
Communist  view;  his  writings  always 
received  more  attention,  and  circulation, 
in  Russia  than  they  did  at  home.  Although 
his  career  ended  in  a  series  of  disappoint- 
ments, Martel  deserves  recognition  for 
the  mark  he  made  on  the  development  of 
modern  warfare.  He  was  appointed  C.B. 
(1940),  K.B.E.  (1943),  and  K.C.B.  (1944). 
He  had  been  promoted  lieutenant-general 
in  1942. 

In  1922  he  married  Maud,  daughter  of 
Donald  Fraser  MacKenzie,  of  Collingwood 
Grange,  Camberley,  by  whom  he  had  a 
son  and  a  daughter,  the  latter  killed  tragi- 
cally in  1941  in  a  riding  accident.  Martel 
died  in  Camberley  3  September  1958. 

[Sir  Giffard  Martel,  An  Outspoken  Soldier^ 
1949;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.]      •  t.'rS.irt.d      B.  H.  LiDDELL  Habt. 


701 


Martin,  C.  J. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


MARTIN,  Sir  CHARLES  JAMES  (1866- 
1955),  physiologist  and  pathologist,  was 
born  at  Hackney  9  January  1866,  the 
twelfth  child  and  youngest  son  of  Josiah 
Martin,  actuary  in  the  British  Life  (later 
merged  with  the  Prudential)  Assurance 
Company,  by  his  second  wife,  Elizabeth 
Mary  Lewis  who  also  had  been  married 
before.  In  his  own  words  'the  family  was 
a  Nonconformist  middle  class  one  charac- 
teristic of  the  period,  with  a  fading  flavour 
of  piety  and  a  small  revenue  .  .  .  the  boys 
had  to  start  earning  their  living  at  15 
years  of  age'.  Charles  Martin  was  nomina- 
ted for  Christ's  Hospital,  then  in  the  City 
of  London,  but  being  a  delicate  child  went 
instead  to  a  boarding-school  at  Hastings. 
When  fifteen  he  became  a  junior  clerk  in 
his  father's  actuarial  department,  but 
against  his  family's  wishes  he  decided  to 
become  a  doctor.  By  home  study  and 
evening  classes  at  Birkbeck  College 
and  King's  College,  he  matriculated  and 
entered  St.  Thomas's  Hospital  where  he 
concentrated  on  physiology.  In  1886  he 
took  his  B.Sc,  gaining  the  gold  medal  in 
physiology  and  a  university  scholarship 
which  took  him  to  Leipzig  to  work  under 
Karl  Ludwig.  After  six  months  he  re- 
turned to  London  as  demonstrator  in 
biology  and  physiology  and  lecturer  in 
comparative  anatomy  at  King's  College 
(1887-91).  He  continued  his  medical 
studies  at  St.  Thomas's  and  qualified 
M.R.C.S.,  L.S.A.  in  1889  and  M.B.  London 
in  1890. 

In  1891  Martin  went  to  Australia  as 
demonstrator  in  physiology  at  the  uni- 
versity of  Sydney;  six  years  later  he 
moved  to  Melbourne  where  he  later  occu- 
pied the  chair  of  physiology  (1901-3). 
While  in  Australia  he  made  his  classic 
study  on  the  venom  of  certain  native 
snakes,  and  cleared  up  the  confusion  about 
the  variable  nature  of  their  action.  He  was 
skilful  with  his  hands  and  a  master  of 
apparatus.  His  gelatin  ultra-filter,  which 
figured  subsequently  in  much  research, 
enabled  him  to  demonstrate  two  separate 
poisons  in  black  snake  {Notechis  pseud- 
echis)  venom ;  one,  a  neurotoxin,  passed 
through  the  filter;  the  other,  a  blood- 
clotting  enzyme  with  a  larger  molecule, 
did  not.  Martin  investigated  also  the 
metabolism  and  internal  heat  regulation 
of  the  Australian  monotremes,  primitive 
half-mammals,  intermediate  between  cold- 
blooded reptiles  and  true  warm-blooded 
mammals.  His  Australian  researches  re- 
vealed him  as  an  outstanding  investi- 
gator and  he  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1901. 


He  was  no  less  successful  as  a  teacher 
and  his  vivid  method  of  imparting 
knowledge  made  a  profound  impression 
on  Australian  medical  education,  then  in 
its  formative  years.  His  lasting  influence 
was  recognized  in  1951  by  the  foundation 
by  the  National  Health  and  Medical 
Research  Council  of  Australia  of  the  Sir 
Charles  James  Martin  fellowships  in 
medical  science  to  give  young  graduates 
experience  overseas. 

In  1903  Martin  returned  to  England  to 
become  director  of  the  Lister  Institute 
of  Preventive  Medicine,  the  first  establish- 
ment in  Britain  devoted  to  medical 
research.  Under  his  guidance  the  Institute 
expanded  in  many  directions.  Very  little 
of  the  original  work  published  from  the 
Institute  bore  his  name,  but  little  was 
done  without  his  help  and  inspiration: 
he  was  an  unselfish  director  caring  little 
where  the  credit  went  as  long  as  the 
work  was  well  done.  At  times  he  could  be 
impatient  and  harshly  critical  but  he  was 
also  sympathetic  and  appreciative  of  any 
good  work,  including  that  performed  by 
'lab  boys'  and  charwomen.  His  personal 
investigations  were  important.  The  work 
on  bubonic  plague  in  Bombay  between 
1905  and  1908,  by  which  the  Indian  rat 
flea  was  proved  to  be  responsible  for  its 
spread,  owed  much  to  the  plans  laid  at  the 
start  when  Martin  spent  several  months 
with  the  team  drawn  from  the  Institute's 
staff  and  the  Indian  Medical  Service. 

Work  on  the  internal  heat  regulation 
of  man  and  animals,  made  in  experiments 
largely  on  himself,  was  summarized  in  the 
Croonian  lectures  of  the  Royal  College  of 
Physicians  delivered  in  1930  and  in  the 
presidential  address  to  the  hygiene  section 
of  the  Pan  Pacific  Congress  meeting  in 
Sydney  in  1923,  when  the  use  of  white 
labour  in  tropical  conditions  was  under 
discussion.  Other  of  his  investigations 
included  the  mechanics  of  the  disinfection 
process,  heat  coagulation  of  proteins,  virus 
of  rabbit  myxomatosis,  vitamins  and  defi- 
ciency diseases,  and  nutritional  value  of 
proteins.  In  all  his  work  he  used  precise 
and  quantitative  methods,  a  practice 
unusual  at  the  time  in  biological  studies. 
In  1912  he  was  appointed  professor  of 
experimental  pathology  in  London. 

In  1915  Martin  joined  the  Australian 
forces  with  the  rank  of  lieutenant- 
colonel  as  pathologist  to  the  Third 
Australian  General  Hospital  on  the 
island  of  Lemnos.  There  he  improvised  an 
efficient  pathological  laboratory  serving 
10,000  hospital  beds.  He  foimd  that  the 


702 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Martin,  H.  H. 


cause  of  the  prevalent  enteric  fever  was 
not  the  typhoid  bacillus  against  which  the 
men  had  been  vaccinated,  but  the  related 
organisms  of  paratyphoid  A  and  B. 
Vaccination  against  those  microbes  was 
therefore  added  to  the  existing  routine 
vaccination,  a  measure  adopted  later  by 
the  British  Army  medical  service.  While 
in  Lemnos,  Martin  diagnosed  as  beriberi  a 
disease  among  the  soldiers  which  had 
baffled  the  physicians ;  he  realized  that  the 
Australian  soldiers'  ration  of  white  bread 
and  tinned  meat  had  the  same  vitamin 
deficiency  as  that  of  polished  rice  which 
caused  epidemics  of  beriberi  in  Asia. 
He  therefore  caused  experimental  work  on 
soldiers'  rations  to  be  started  immediately 
at  the  Lister  Institute.  In  consequence  a 
vitamin  'soup  cube'  was  devised  for  use 
by  the  troops  in  the  Middle  East,  and  a 
division  of  nutrition  which  was  active  for 
the  next  thirty  years  was  created  at  the 
Institute. 

After  retirement  in  1930  under  the  age 
limit,  Martin  in  the  next  year  accepted 
the  invitation  of  the  Australian  Council 
of  Scientific  and  Industrial  Research  to 
become  director  of  its  division  of  nutrition 
at  the  university  of  Adelaide  where  he 
was  made  professor  of  biochemistry  and 
general  physiology.  Research  was  centred 
on  protein  and  mineral  requirements  of 
sheep,  in  view  of  the  deficiencies  in  certain 
Australian  pastures. 

He  stayed  three  years  and  then  settled 
at  Roebuck  House,  Chesterton,  Cam- 
bridge, but  again  retirement  was  but 
nominal.  At  the  request  of  the  Australian 
authorities  he  made  an  experimental 
study  of  the  virus  of  myxomatosis  and  its 
method  of  spread  among  rabbits.  The 
work  was  carried  out  at  the  Cambridge 
University  department  of  experimental 
pathology  and  on  the  rabbit-infested 
island  of  Skokholm  in  Pembrokeshire ;  it 
was  pubHshed  in  1936.  In  collaboration 
with  colleagues  at  the  Lister  Institute 
pellagra  was  produced  experimentally 
at  Cambridge  in  pigs  fed  largely  on  maize. 
The  disease  followed  the  pattern  of  human 
pellagra  as  seen  among  populations  having 
maize  as  their  staple  food. 

At  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  Martin 
offered  space  at  his  home  to  the  division 
of  nutrition  evacuated  from  the  Lister 
Institute.  He  contributed  much  to  its 
research,  concerned  perforce  with  war- 
time food  problems.  Work  on  the  vitamin 
and  protein  value  of  different  portions  of 
the  wheat  grain  enabled  the  authorities 
to    decide    which    fractions    should    be 


included  in  the  flour  to  make  the 
most  nutritious  and  economical  national 
loaf. 

Martin  was  a  lover  of  the  country  and  of 
many  open-air  activities ;  as  a  young  man 
he  spent  vacations  in  camping  and  canoe- 
ing. He  was  a  good  swimmer,  fond  of 
playing  tennis,  and  among  the  early 
owner-drivers  of  a  motor-car. 

Martin's  honours  included:  fellowships 
of  King's  College,  London  (1899),  of  the 
Royal  College  of  Physicians  (1913),  and 
of  the  Royal  Society  (1901)  from  which  he 
received  a  Royal  medal  in  1923 ;  honorary 
degrees  from  the  universities  of  Shef- 
field, Dublin,  Edinburgh,  Durham,  and 
Cambridge.  He  was  appointed  C.M.G. 
in  1919  for  his  war  service  and  twice 
mentioned  in  dispatches.  He  was  knighted 
in  1927. 

In  1891  Martin  married  Edith  Harriette 
(died  1954),  daughter  of  Alfred  Cross, 
architect,  of  Hastings;  they  had  one 
daughter.  He  died  at  Chesterton  15 
February  1955.  A  portrait  by  M.  Lewis  is 
in  the  possession  of  the  family;  there  is 
also  a  drawing  by  A.  J.  Murch.  Copies  of 
both  are  in  the  Lister  Institute. 

[The  Times,  17  February  1955;  Dame 
Harriette  Chick  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ii,  1956; 
British  Journal  of  Nutrition,  vol.  x,  No.  1, 
1956 ;  Journal  of  Pathology  and  Bacteriology, 
vol.  Ixxi,  No.  2,  April  1956;  Lancet,  26  Febru- 
ary 1955 ;  Nature,  2  April  1955 ;  personal 
knowledge.]  Harriette  Chick, 

MARTIN,  HERBERT  HENRY  (1881- 
1954),  secretary  of  the  Lord's  Day 
Observance  Society,  was  born  4  December 
1881  in  Norwich,  the  fourth  of  the  five 
children  of  James  William  Martin,  boot 
and  shoe  manufacturer,  by  his  wife,  Mary 
Ann  Blyth.  He  was  educated  at  Alderman 
Norman's  Endowed  School,  Norwich,  a 
school  founded  for  the  education  of 
Alderman  Norman's  male  descendants 
among  whom  Martin  was  included  through 
his  mother. 

Martin  was  apprenticed  to  his 
father's  trade  but,  having  experienced 
conversion  to  Christ  at  the  age  of  fourteen, 
he  felt  the  urge  to  enter  whole-time 
Christian  service.  His  principals  released 
him  from  his  indentures  and  at  the  early 
age  of  sixteen  he  became  the  first  of  the 
*Wycliffe  preachers'  of  the  Protestant 
Truth  Society  founded  by  John  Kensit 
[q.v.].  His  first  public  address  in  that 
capacity  was  delivered  17  August  1898  on 
the  beach  at  Great  Yarmouth.  For  the 


70? 


Martin,  H.  H. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


next  twenty-five  years  Martin  threw  all 
his  energy  and  religious  zeal  into  this 
society's  work  of  protest  against  the 
doctrines  and  practices  of  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church  and  the  Romeward 
movement  in  the  Church  of  England — a 
task  involving  self-sacrifice,  hardship,  and 
some  personal  danger.  In  1902  Martin 
preached  on  Thornbury  Plain,  Bristol; 
refusing  to  desist  he  was  fined  Is. ;  de- 
clining payment  he  was  imprisoned  for 
three  days  in  Horfield  jail,  an  experience 
he  was  fond  of  citing  as  an  important 
landmark  of  his  life-work. 

During  these  years  of  travelling  through- 
out Britain,  the  need  for  arresting  the  ever- 
growing disregard  for  Sunday  as  the 
divinely  appointed  day  for  rest  and  wor- 
ship impressed  itself  increasingly  upon 
Martin  until  it  became  the  conviction 
which  shaped  the  remainder  of  his  career. 
He  took  up  whole-time  work  in  this  cause 
when  he  joined  the  staff  of  the  Imperial 
Alliance  for  the  Defence  of  Sunday  in 
1923.  Finding  insufficient  outlet  there  for 
his  boundless  energy  and  evangelistic 
fervour  he  welcomed  the  invitation  which 
came  in  1925  to  become  secretary  of  the 
Lord's  Day  Observance  Society  which 
from  its  foundation  in  1831  had  always 
been  the  foremost  instrument  for  the 
preservation  of  Sunday.  Martin  found  the 
society  in  dire  straits  financially  and  in  a 
state  of  ineffectiveness.  By  dint  of  his 
great  organizing  capacity,  his  unique 
flair  for  advertising  and  publicity,  his 
infectious  enthusiasm,  and,  above  all,  his 
deep  spiritual  conviction,  he  put  this  old 
society  on  the  map  and  made  it  a  power 
to  be  reckoned  with  in  the  national  life. 
He  soon  gathered  around  him  a  loyal  and 
steadily  increasing  staff  by  means  of  whom 
every  part  of  the  country  was  reached 
in  the  campaign  to  defend  Sunday  from 
secular  encroachment.  He  revolutionized 
the  publications  of  the  society  which,  in 
some  years,  ran  into  millions  of  copies; 
and  exploited  to  the  full  such  national 
occasions  as  the  silver  jubilee  of  King 
George  V  and  the  coronation  of  King 
George  VI  for  the  issue  of  special 
propaganda  inculcating  not  only  the 
observance  of  Sunday  but  also  the 
reading  of  the  Bible  and  acceptance  of  its 
teaching. 

Fearing  the  introduction  of  the  conti- 
nental Sunday  into  Britain,  Martin  paid 
several  visits  to  Paris  and  other  European 
cities  in  order  to  study  the  subject 
closely,  following  which  he  wrote  many 
articles  on  the  theme.  He  travelled  to 


Geneva  in  1931  and  spoke  against 
calendar  reform  proposals  before  a  Leagu6 
of  Nations  committee.  In  the  same  year 
he  organized  nation-wide  opposition  to 
the  legalization  of  the  Sunday  opening  Of 
cinemas.  He  was  more  successful  in  1941 
when  his  vigorous  endeavours  helped  to 
bring  about  the  rejection  by  the  House 
of  Commons  of  the  Sunday  opening  of 
theatres. 

A  convinced  churchman,  Martin  en- 
joyed fellowship  with  those  Christians  of 
other  persuasions  who  shared  his  evan- 
gelical principles.  The  very  nature  of  his 
activities  brought  upon  him  much  un- 
popularity, misunderstanding,  and  even 
abuse,  but  his  radiant  buoyancy  sur- 
mounted it  all.  Even  his  adversaries 
admired  him  as  a  clean  fighter,  and  those 
who  journalistically  dubbed  him  'Misery 
Martin'  knew  and  loved  his  happy 
jubilant  personality.  In  1951  he  retired; 
his  powers  thereafter  failed  rapidly  and 
he  died  30  March  1954  at  Tunbridge 
Wells. 

Martin  married  in  1903  Gertrude 
Elizabeth  Eugene  (died  1939),  daughter 
of  John  Farley,  by  whom  he  had  one  son. 
In  1942  he  married  Elsie  Lilian,  daughter 
of  John  Verdon,  builder,  of  Kilburn. 

[Records  of  the  Lord's  Day  Observance 
Society ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] H.  J.  W.  Legerton. 

MARTINDALE,  HILDA  (1875-1952), 
civil  servant,  was  born  in  Leytonstone, 
London,  12  March  1875,  the  third 
daughter  of  William  Martindale,  City 
merchant,  by  his  second  wife,  Louisa, 
daughter  of  James  Spicer  of  a  great 
Liberal-Nonconformist  family  whose  busi- 
ness was  paper  manufacture.  Her  father 
and  one  sister  died  before  she  was  born 
and  Hilda  and  her  elder  sister  Louisa 
(who  became  one  of  the  first  women 
surgeons)  were  brought  up  by  their 
mother,  a  woman  of  remarkable  person- 
ality. She  was  tirelessly  energetic  in  the 
Liberal  cause,  the  women's  suffrage 
movement,  and  many  other  social,  poHti- 
cal,  and  religious  activities.  To  Margaret 
Bondfield  [q.v.]  as  to  many  others,  she 
was  *a  most  vivid  influence  in  my  life',  and 
she  early  decided  that  her  youngest 
daughter's  vocation  was  to  social  service. 
Hilda  Martindale  was  educated  in 
Germany,  at  the  Brighton  High  School, 
the  Royal  Hollo  way  College,  and  at 
Bedford  College  where  she  studied  hygiene 
and  sanitary  sciences.  On  the  advice  of 
Graham  Wallas  [q.v.]  she  next  spent  some 


704 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Martindale 


months  visiting  poor-law  schools  and 
other  institutions  and  then  for  eight 
months  helped  with  a  boarding-out  plan 
for  infants  sent  to  the  homes  of  Dr. 
Barnardo  [q.v.].  In  1900  she  went  with  her 
mother  and  sister  on  a  world  tour.  Her 
interest  then,  as  throughout  her  life,  lay 
mainly  with  children,  and  she  was  inde- 
fatigable in  studying  what  was  being  done 
for  them  in  the  countries  which  she 
visited.  On  her  return  she  addressed  the 
State  Children's  Association  on  the  subject, 
whereupon  (Dame)  Adelaide  Anderson, 
principal  lady  inspector  of  factories  at  the 
Home  Office,  who  was  in  the  audience, 
offered  Hilda  a  temporary  post  as  an 
inspector  (1901). 

Hilda  Martindale  began  by  visiting 
west-end  dressmakers  where  women  and 
girls  over  fourteen  were  allowed  by  law  to 
work  twelve  hours  a  day  but  were  all  too 
often  kept  longer  and  over  the  week-end. 
Their  fear  of  dismissal  made  it  difficult  to 
obtain  evidence  and  to  prosecute  offending 
employers;  but  so  extensive  was  the 
abuse  that  Hilda  Martindale  felt  it  a  waste 
of  time  to  go  to  court  unless  she  had 
sunmioned  three  or  four  firms  to  appear  on 
the  same  day.  She  next  reported  on 
conditions  in  the  brickfields  of  England, 
Wales,  and  Scotland,  the  dust-yards 
of  London,  on  the  breeze  banks  of  South 
Staffordshire,  and  in  home  industries 
in  the  Midlands.  In  1903  she  was 
stationed  in  the  Potteries  where  many 
women  and  children  were  the  victims  of 
lead  poisoning  despite  the  efforts  of  the 
Women's  Trade  Union  League,  and  in 
particular  of  Gertrude  Tuckwell  [q.v.],  to 
draw  public  attention  to  the  danger. 

In  1905  Hilda  Martindale  was  sent  to 
Ireland  where  she  travelled  the  whole 
country  visiting  factories,  workshops, 
laundries,  cottages — ^wherever  women  and 
children  worked.  It  was  a  hard  life  spent 
in  hotels,  with  no  office  or  clerk,  visiting 
late  at  night  and  very  early  in  the  morning, 
meeting  acute  poverty  among  the  people 
and  sometimes  shameful  maltreatment  of 
labour.  Nor  from  an  Irish  bench  was  it 
always  possible  to  get  a  conviction  for 
even  the  most  blatant  offence.  But  she 
never  lost  heart  and  the  steady  stream  of 
her  reports  (written  in  her  early  days  at 
marble  wash-stands  in  hotel  bedrooms) 
contributed  much,  in  time,  to  the  improve- 
ment of  labour  regulations.  In  1908  she 
was  made  a  senior  lady  inspector  and 
established  an  office  in  Belfast  but  in  1912 
she  moved  to  Birmingham  as  senior  lady 
inspector  of  factories  for  the  Midlands. 

8852002 


The  substitution  of  men  by  women  during 
the  war  added  to  her  duties  but  she  was 
encouraged  by  the  improvement  which 
it  brought  in  wages  and  conditions.  Other 
tasks  which  fell  to  her  included  the 
investigation  with  (Dame)  Ellen  Pinsent 
[q.v.]  of  excessive  drinking  by  the  young 
girls  working  in  Birmingham.  In  1918  she 
was  appointed  O.B.E.  and  moved  to 
London  as  deputy  principal  lady  inspector 
and  later  senior  lady  inspector  for  the 
South-Eastern  Division.  Her  unquestion- 
able success  in  her  work  and  the  affection 
and  respect  which  she  inspired  both  among 
her  colleagues  and  among  her  many 
contacts  in  the  industrial  world  contri- 
buted much  to  the  gradual  acceptance  of 
equality  of  opportunity  for  women:  in 
1921  the  men's  and  women's  sides  of  the 
inspectorate  were  amalgamated  and  she 
became  a  superintending  inspector  and 
in  1925  a  deputy  chief  inspector.  In  this 
year  she  was  deputed  to  help  in  creating 
the  Home  Office  Industrial  Museum  under 
the  inspiration  of  Sir  Malcolm  Delevingne 
(whose  notice  she  contributed  to  this 
Dictionary).  Much  of  her  time  was 
henceforth  to  be  spent  in  committee  work, 
on  selection  boards,  and  as  technical 
adviser  to  the  British  Government 
delegation  at  International  Labour 
Conferences. 

In  1933  Hilda  Martindale  was  appointed 
director  of  women  establishments  at  the 
Treasury  and  in  1935  she  was  promoted 
C.B.E.  A  position  which  was  confined  to 
women's  problems  was  not  altogether 
congenial  to  her  for  she  was  always  a 
convinced,  and  indeed  dogmatic,  believer 
in  equal  opportunity  for  women  in  the 
Civil  Service.  Although  herself  a  quiet  and 
even  diffident  person,  she  fought  obsti- 
nately for  this  principle  throughout  her 
career  and  particularly  after  some  mis- 
givings which  she  had  felt  about  the 
ability  of  women  to  share  the  work  of 
men  in  the  factory  inspectorate  had  proved 
unfounded ;  gentle  and  reserved,  she  was 
seldom  roused,  but  she  could  be  very 
persistent.  She  made  herself  a  useful  and 
most  acceptable  member  of  the  Treasury 
and  in  so  doing  continued  the  process  of 
breaking  down  the  fear  of  women  in  high 
position.  She  retired  in  1937  at  her  owii 
request  so  that  her  post  might  be  absorbed 
into  the  ordinary  grade  and  she  had  the 
satisfaction  of  seeing  a  woman  appointed 
an  assistant  secretary  responsible  for  men 
and  women  alike.  When  some  years  later 
a  woman  became  principal  assistant 
secretary    in    charge    of    all    Treasury 

705  A  a 


Martindale 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


general  establishment  work,  she  wrote: 
'Now  indeed  my  desire  was  fulfilled.' 

In  her  retirement  Hilda  Martindale 
found  many  opportunities '  for  public 
service  and  wrote  a  history  of  Women 
Servants  of  the  State  (1938),  Some  Victorian 
Portraits  and  Others  (1948),  and  memoirs 
of  her  mother,  her  sister,  and  herself  in 
From  One  Generation  to  Another  (1944) 
which  gives  a  drily  vivid  description  of 
industrial  conditions  as  she  found  them  in 
the  first  quarter  of  the  century.  She  died, 
unmarried,  in  London  18  April  1952. 

[Personal  knowledge.]  Sharp. 

MARY,  (VICTORIA  MARY  AUGUSTA 
LOUISE  OLGA  PAULINE  CLAUDINE 
AGNES)  (1867-1953),  queen  consort  of 
King  George  V,  was  born  26  May  1867  at 
Kensington  Palace  in  the  room  in  which 
Queen  Victoria  was  born.  She  was  the 
eldest  child  and  only  daughter  of  Francis, 
Prince  (after  1871  Duke  of)  Teck  and  his 
wife.  Princess  Mary  Adelaide.  The  Prince 
was  the  only  son  of  Duke  Alexander  of 
Wurtemberg  by  his  morganatic  marriage 
with  Claudine,  Countess  Rhedey,  of  an 
illustrious  Protestant  Hungarian  house. 
Her  ancestor,  Samu  Aba,  married  a 
sister  of  St.  Stephen  and  was  King  of 
Hungary  (1041-5).  The  Prince  was  brought 
up  in  Vienna  and  in  due  course  served  the 
Emperor  with  considerable  military  pro- 
mise in  the  7th  Imperial  Hussars.  At  the 
invitation  of  the  Prince  of  Wales  he  first 
paid  a  visit  to  England  in  1864,  but  it  was 
not  until  1866  that  he  met  Princess  Mary 
Adelaide.  His  wooing  was  of  the  briefest. 
Queen  Mary's  mother  was  the  younger 
daughter  of  Adolphus,  Duke  of  Cambridge 
(q.v.,  seventh  son  of  George  III),  and 
therefore  a  first  cousin  of  Queen  Victoria. 
Three  sons  in  due  course  followed  the 
Princess:  Princes  Adolphus  (afterwards 
created  Marquess  of  Cambridge,  died 
1927),  Francis  (died  1910),  and  Alexander 
(afterwards  the  Earl  of  Athlone,  q.v.,  died 
1957)  for  whom  his  sister  always  felt  a 
special  devotion,  perhaps  tinged  with  envy 
for  his  successes  in  public  life  in  fields 
open  only  to  men.  The  Princess  was 
popularly  known  as  Princess  May  until  her 
marriage  although  she  used  the  official 
'Victoria  Mary'  as  her  signature. 

Early  influences  in  the  formation  of 
Princess  May's  character  are  not  to  be 
lightly  dismissed.  The  Tecks  were  a 
devoted  if  tempestuous  couple  and  re- 
markably different  in  character.  He  was 
tall  and  good-looking,  orderly  and  neat  in 
dress  and  habits,  often  quick-tempered, 


extremely  conservative  especially  on  the 
question  of  women's  spheres  of  usefulness, 
and  a  stickler  for  etiquette.  He  had  some 
artistic  tastes  and  hobbies,  but  outside 
his  family  his  life  perhaps  was  not  made  as 
happy  as  his  modest  ambitions  may  have 
expected.  He  may  have  suffered  some  of 
the  handicaps  which  early  faced  the  Prince 
Consort.  The  Duchess  was  liberal-minded, 
expansive,  cheerful,  warm-hearted,  a 
garrulous  but  very  intelligent  conversa- 
tionalist, a  good  mixer,  catholic  in  her 
choice  of  friends — her  devoted  admirers 
came  from  every  class — typically  English 
if  rather  bohemian,  a  bad  manager,  and 
incurably  unpunctual;  indeed  her  un- 
punctuality  was  heinous  in  a  royalty; 
but  she  delighted  in  and  deserved  her 
popularity.  The  Duke  had  no  private 
fortune.  The  Duchess's  parliamentary 
grant,  eked  out  by  graces  and  favours 
from  the  Queen,  was  insufficient  to  meet 
the  costs  of  moderate  'State'  in  the  rooms 
allotted  at  Kensington  Palace  and  at  the 
large  and  graceful  White  Lodge  in  Rich- 
mond Park,  and  generous  gifts  to  charity. 
Princess  May  in  her  childhood  was  con- 
stantly with  her  popular  mother  and 
learned  from  her  to  understand  and  sym- 
pathize in  the  lives  and  aspirations  of  all 
classes,  and  to  comprehend  the  relative 
values  of  money  in  the  income  groups. 
For  the  Duchess  had  an  understanding 
far  ahead  of  her  times  of  what  'the  poor' 
really  needed,  as  her  Village  Homes  at 
Addlestone  and  her  Holiday  Homes 
proved.  Princess  May  was  clearly  often 
overshadowed  by  her  mother's  popu- 
larity and  no  doubt  by  reaction  she 
acquired  the  virtue  of  punctuality;  shfe 
had  few  opportunities  of  practising  small 
talk  in  her  mother's  company.  Her  parents 
had  no  ambition  for  her  education  beyond 
the  normal  drawing-room  accomplish- 
ments of  her  kind  in  her  day.  It  was  her 
own  determination,  later  reinforced  by  her 
Alsatian  governess,  Helene  Bricka,  a  very 
strong-minded,  well-educated,  politically 
liberal  companion,  to  pursue  it  beyond 
that  range.  Accordingly  when  in  1883-5 
the  family  spent  eighteen  months  in 
Italy  by  the  need  for  retrenchment, 
although  the  Princess  was  at  first  intensely 
homesick,  her  interest  in  art  and  history, 
later  to  be  enlarged  among  the  royal 
collections,  quickly  expanded.  When  she 
returned  to  England,  to  enter  the  social 
round  of  London  society,  she  continued 
for  several  hours  a  day  to  improve  her  own 
education  without  parental  encourage- 
ment, and  she  became  proficient  in  French 


706 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Mary 


and  German  and  in  European  history.  By 
the  time  she  became  Queen,  she  had  gained 
a  wide  knowledge  of  pohtieal  and  social 
life  in  the  German  principalities. 

She  had  from  childhood  seen  something 
of  the  children  of  the  Prince  of  Wales, 
the  first  cousins  being  all  too  young  to 
share  their  interests,  and  she  and  her 
brothers  had  sometimes  found  the  rough 
manners  and  boisterous  fun  of  their 
second  cousins  rather  trying.  In  1887  she 
began  to  know  them  well.  From  the  first 
Queen  Victoria,  who  was  fond  of  the 
Duchess,  had  taken  an  interest  in  the 
daughter  and  henceforth  watched  her 
closely  and  began  to  see  in  her  a  worthy 
choice  for  the  Prince  of  Wales's  eldest 
son,  the  Duke  of  Clarence.  She  had  all 
the  qualifications,  lacking  only  the  self- 
confidence  which  is  required  of  a  social 
leader.  In  later  life  Queen  Mary  sometimes 
questioned  the  verdict  that  she  was  very 
shy.  She  certainly  never  shared  Queen 
Alexandra's  taste  for  ragging  nor  perhaps 
Queen  Victoria's  liking  for  an  occasional 
robust  laugh,  although  among  her  inti- 
mates she  could  reveal  her  own  sense  of 
fun.  She  argued  that  a  love  of  serious  con- 
versation and  of  relevance  could  be  des- 
cribed as  shyness  and  suggested  that 
people  who  were  themselves  natural  and 
truth-loving  had  no  need  to  be  shy  in  her 
presence.  Yet  the  attribution  that  she  was 
shy  and  shy-making  survived  and  it  can- 
not be  said  that  in  her  twenties  the  Prince 
of  Wales's  family  helped  her  to  cure  it. 
Nevertheless,  Princess  May  enjoyed  her 
dancing  years  in  London  with  her  brothers, 
now  coming  to  man's  estate  and  all 
destined  for  the  army,  and  amid  the  rural 
charms  of  White  Lodge  and  in  the  pre- 
Edwardian  circle  of  the  Prince. 

There  was  a  certain  inevitability  in  the 
announcement  of  her  engagement  to  the 
Duke  of  Clarence  at  the  end  of  1891  when 
Princess  May  was  approaching  twenty- 
five.  She  was  the  only  available  English 
Princess  not  descended  from  the  Queen. 
In  that  sense,  it  was  an  'alliance'.  The  test 
of  whether  it  would  prove  a  love  match 
was  eliminated  by  the  Duke's  sudden 
death  in  January  1892.  Prince  George, 
becoming  heir  to  the  throne  next  after  his 
father,  was  created  Duke  of  York  and  the 
public's  anxiety  for  the  succession  was 
transferred  to  him.  In  May  1893  his 
engagement  to  Princess  May  was  an- 
nounced to  the  intense  satisfaction  of  the 
Queen.  The  Prince  of  Wales  approved  it, 
if  the  Princess's  enthusiasm  was  modified 
by  the  recent  memory  of  her  elder  son's 


death.  The  marriage  was  solemnized 
6  July  1893  in  the  chapel  of  St.  James's 
Palace.  Once  more  no  doubt  it  was  argued 
that  this  was  a  'marriage  of  convenience'. 
The  Duke  of  York's  private  diary  and 
contemporary  letters  to  his  friends  make 
it  quite  clear  that  it  was  soon  very  much 
a  love  match,  and  in  the  first  years  of 
marriage,  largely  spent  at  York  Cottage 
at  Sandringham,  his  home  for  much  of 
his  life,  his  happiness  grew  and  broad- 
ened into  a  placid  contentment  with 
his  lot.  They  were  quiet  years.  Children 
were  born — the  eldest  (subsequently  the 
Duke  of  Windsor)  at  White  Lodge, 
23  June  1894,  the  second  (subsequently 
King  George  VI,  a  notice  of  whom  appears 
in  this  Supplement)  at  York  Cottage  14 
December  1895;  on  25  April  1897  a 
daughter  (subsequently  the  Prinpess 
Royal) ;  and  on  31  March  1900  a  third  son 
(subsequently  the  Duke  of  Gloucester). 
The  Duke's  diary  is  proof  positive  that 
for  him  life  was  an  idyll  whether  at  York 
House,  St.  James's,  or  at  the  ugly,  incon- 
venient cottage  at  beloved  Sandringham. 

For  the  Duchess,  as  her  family  increased, 
the  idyll  was  sometimes  marred  by  the 
benevolent  tyranny  exercised  from  the 
Big  House.  The  Duke  himself  was  aware 
of  it.  To  his  mother  he  remained  to  the 
last  the  second  son.  She  always  addressed 
her  letters  to  him  as  'King  George',  never 
'The  King'.  In  a  letter  to  the  writer 
(25  July  1939)  Queen  Mary  commented 
that  for  King  George  V  his  reign  was  the 
most  interesting  part  of  his  life  'but  a 
good  deal  of  the  early  times  helped  him 
to  understand  the  human  point  of  view. 
The  rough  and  tumble  of  former  days 
was  very  good  for  us  both.'  Those  early 
years  had  an  influence  on  the  Duchess's 
character.  She  was  living  on  an  estate 
which  drew  its  inspiration  wholly  from  the 
Prince  and  Princess  of  Wales  and  she  had 
married  into  a  family  which  was  certainly 
a  closely  guarded  clique  and  was  not  far 
short  of  a  mutual-admiration  society. 
It  was  a  family  little  given  to  intellectual 
pursuits,  not  easily  to  be  converted  to 
any  other  manner  of  life  than  that  which 
they  had  found  all-sufficing.  The  Duchess 
was  intellectually  on  a  higher  plane,  and 
constantly  seeking  to  increase  her  store  of 
knowledge  in  many  fields  beyond  the 
range  of  the  Princess  of  Wales  and 
Princess  Victoria.  Their  recreations  were 
not  hers.  She  needed  outlets  and  wider 
horizons;  sometimes  her  intellectual  fife 
may  have  been  starved  and  her  energies 
atrophied. 


707 


Mary 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


^' It  was  for  her  no  training  in  self- 
confidence.  Her  husband  was  very  con- 
servative, not  easy  to  convert  or  remould. 
Sandringham  ways  were  perfect  in  his 
eyes.  His  admiration  for  his  father  was 
boundless  and  tinged  with  awe.  Yet  soon 
enough  the  Duchess  began  to  improve  his 
taste  and  education.  Late  in  her  life,  in 
conversation  with  an  intimate  and  in  her 
valiance  for  the  truth.  Queen  Mary  re- 
marked: *It  is  always  supposed  that  my 
mother-in-law  had  no  influence  whatever 
over  my  father-in-law  and  that  I  have 
strong  influence  over  my  husband.  The 
truth  happens  to  be  the  exact  opposite 
in  each  case.'  Some  influence  over  the 
Duke  must,  however,  be  conceded  her 
in  those  early  times.  But  all  her  life  she 
was  afraid  of  taking  too  much  upon  her- 
self, in  her  reverence  for  'The  Sovereign'. 
Indeed,  in  many  ways  she  was  timid. 

Shortly  after  the  diamond  jubilee  the 
Duke  and  Duchess  paid  a  most  successful 
visit  to  Ireland.  With  the  death  of  Queen 
Victoria  and  the  coronation  of  Edward 
VII  they  began  to  assume  (but  modestly) 
some  of  the  duties  of  the  heir  to  the 
throne.  Before  mourning  for  the  Queen 
was  over  the  Ophir  tour  gave  them  an 
opportunity  to  test  their  own  qualities  and 
to  find  their  feet  in  an  Empire  which  knew 
little  of  them  and  in  a  society  which 
regarded  them  as  too  little  go-ahead  for 
Edwardian  brilliance  and  initiative.  They 
travelled  as  Duke  and  Duchess  of  Cornwall 
(to  which  title  the  Duke  succeeded)  and 
York.  The  prime  purpose  was  to  open  the 
first  federal  Parliament  of  the  new  Com- 
monwealth of  Australia,  but  the  tour 
embraced  the  greater  part  of  the  Empire 
and  lasted  more  than  seven  months.  Of 
the  two,  the  Duchess  was  better  equipped 
to  meet  the  tests.  Once  or  twice,  when  the 
Duke  was  overstrained,  she  stepped  into 
the  breach  and  did  his  part.  Her  own 
embraced  the  interests  of  the  women  of  the 
Empire  and  for  both  of  them  it  was  a 
successful  education  and  graduation  under 
the  careful  coaching  of  Sir  Arthur  Bigge 
(afterwards  Lord  Stamfordham,  q.v.). 
The  bitter  parting  from  their  young  family 
was  forgotten  in  the  happy  reunion  and 
the  warm  approval  of  the  people  and  of 
the  King  who  now  created  the  Duke  Prince 
of  Wales.  In  a  speech  in  the  City  the 
Prince  jolted  the  public  out  of  its  com- 
placent views  on  the  Empire  and  revealed 
that  he  had  gained  a  good  deal  of  self- 
confidence  during  his  tour. 

The  new  Prince  and  Princess  of  Wales 
began    to    take    a    larger  share  of  cere- 


monial and  of  the  responsibilities  of  the 
heir  to  the  throne.  They  resisted,  with 
mild  criticism  from  some  quarters,  going 
with  the  Edwardian  stream.  Nevertheless, 
they  entertained  constantly  and  carried 
out  a  number  of  engagements  during  and 
after  the  coronation,  a  few  months  after 
which  on  20  December  1902  the  Princess 
gave  birth  to  her  fourth  son,  Prince 
George  (subsequently  the  Duke  of  Kent, 
q.v.).  In  the  next  year  they  moved  into 
Marlborough  House.  On  12  July  1905  the 
youngest  child.  Prince  John,  was  born; 
he  died  18  January  1919.  Never  robust,  he 
was  very  dear  to  his  family  who  treasured 
his  quaint  sayings. 

In  the  winter  of  1905-6  the  Prince  and 
Princess  of  Wales  had  another  oppor- 
tunity to  extend  their  knowledge  of  the 
Empire  and  increase  their  self-confidence 
when  they  made  a  highly  successful  tour 
of  India.  Their  coach  and  guide  on  this 
occasion  was  Sir  Walter  Lawrence  [q.v.] 
and  before  and  during  the  arduous  tour 
they  both  went  through  the  most  complete 
and  detailed  preparation.  The  Princess's 
interest,  assiduity,  and  energy  in  master- 
ing and  executing  her  special  functions 
among  the  women  of  India  were  highly 
praised.  The  tour  covered  India  from  end 
to  end,  and  all  her  life  Queen  Mary's  love 
of  India  was  graven  on  her  heart.  She 
would  sometimes  compare  her  sense  of 
loss,  when  the  Indian  Empire  ceased,  to 
another  Queen  Mary's  feelings  over  the 
loss  of  Calais. 

In  May  1906  they  went  to  Madrid  for 
the  marriage  of  Princess  Ena  of  Batten- 
berg  to  the  King  of  Spain  and  were 
unhurt  when  a  bomb  was  thrown  at  the 
wedding  procession.  In  June  they  were  in 
Norway  for  the  coronation  of  the  King  and 
Queen.  Thenceforward  to  the  end  of  the 
reign  of  King  Edward  their  lives  continued 
on  a  fixed  and  not  too  arduous  pattern. 
No  shadow  of  jealousy  marred  the  relations 
between  the  King  and  his  heir.  King 
Edward  died  6  May  1910  and  the  new 
Queen  became  known  as  Queen  Mary. 
She  and  the  King  faced  some  early 
criticism  of  a  pin-pricking  sort.  There  were 
lampoons  ('The  King  is  duller  than  the 
Queen'  and  vice  versa,  ran  a  refrain) 
whispered  among  the  old  set  which  feared 
(with  reason)  that  the  'great  days'  and 
the  brilliance  were  gone  from  court  and 
society,  and  some  scandalous  imputations 
against  the  King  were  soon  exploded. 
In  the  face  of  these  small  discouragements 
(not  unfamiliar  at  the  accession  of  British 
sovereigns),   the   King  and  Queen   soon 


708 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Mary 


began  to  strike  out  a  line  of  their  own  and 
once  again  proved  that  the  changing 
times  had  found  appropriate  leadership 
from  the  throne.  After  the  exhausting 
funeral  ceremonies,  followed  in  1911  by 
the  unveiling  of  Queen  Victoria's  memorial 
in  the  Kaiser's  presence  and  by  the  corona- 
tion, made  specially  remarkable  by  the 
grace  and  dignity  of  the  new  Queen,  they 
paid  their  second  visit  to  India  for  the 
durbar.  Neither  ever  forgot  the  splendours 
and  the  strain  of  this  tour  (1911-12) 
throughout  which  the  energy  and  sus- 
tained interest  of  the  Queen  were  uni- 
versally remarked  and  praised. 

State  visits  to  Berlin  (1913)  and  Paris 
(1914)  further  impressed  on  the  nation 
the  worth  and  the  dignity  of  the  new 
sovereigns.  There  were  also  tours  of 
industrial  areas.  There  Queen  Mary  was 
in  her  element.  Margaret  Bondfleld  [q.v.] 
once  remarked  that  Queen  Mary  would 
have  made  a  good  factory  inspector.  She 
could  comprehend  poverty,  her  sympathy 
was  genuine,  her  clear  mind,  her  curiosity 
and  skill  in  detail  enabled  her  to  enter 
with  remarkable  understanding  into  the 
problems  of  the  small  house  and  the 
family  budget.  Not  for  her  the  dazzling 
smile,  the  apt  and  gracious  word  in  a 
non-stop  progress.  Her  visits  were  exhaus- 
tively and  exhaustingly  carried  out,  and 
they  created  a  new  model  of  a  sovereign's 
functions.  She  was  genuinely  interested 
and  never  taken  in  by  surface  appearances. 

In  their  private  life  the  King  and 
Queen  continued  to  live  very  simply  and 
sought  to  accord  to  their  children  a  sen- 
sible and,  as  far  as  possible,  democratic 
upbringing.  From  the  earliest  years,  and 
even  as  her  official  and  self-imposed 
functions  increased,  Queen  Mary  usually 
found  time  for  'the  children's  hour'. 
She  superintended  their  religious  ground- 
ing, and  gave  them  practical  rather  than 
sentimental  attention.  The  maternal  in- 
stincts were  never  strong  in  her,  although 
she  had  an  understanding  of  children,  a 
sympathy  too,  unless  they  were  spoilt  and 
tiresome.  She  always  backed  up  the 
justified  discipline  meted  out  by  tutors, 
governesses,  and  servants,  but  was  always 
ready  to  contest  any  over-harsh  discipline 
by  their  father.  She  would  reason  her 
eldest  son  out  of  his  natural  revolts, 
insisting  on  the  obligations  of  his  unique 
position.  For  already  with  her  and  her 
husband  loyalty  to  the  monarchy  tran- 
scended all  other  loyalties.  Soon  enough  it 
was  to  her  the  children  turned  for  sym- 
pathy   and    advice,    for    their    father's 


methods  inspired  in  them  an  awe  and  unt: 
ease  which  in  time  (until  their  marriages, 
and  always  with  the  eldest)  grew  into  a 
major  and  almost  national  tragedy.  Her 
influence  over  them  grew.  It  Was  a  pity, 
that  her  influence  over  her  husband  on 
such  matters  did  not  keep  pace.  With  her 
children  she  was  not  austere.  No  doubt 
Prince  George  was  her  favourite  son- 
because  he  most  keenly  shared  her  intel- 
lectual tastes.  She  joined  occasionally 
in  their  jokes,  even  practical  jokes,  and 
taught  them  hobbies ;  and  since  she 
disliked  yachting,  although  she  usually 
attended  Cowes  week,  and  was  bored  by. 
grouse  shooting,  she  would  have  the 
children  to  herself  in  August  and  Sep- 
tember at  Frogmore  or  Abergeldie,  when, 
she  did  not  go  abroad.  Gradually  life 
consolidated  into  an  unchanging  routine^' 
as  the  boys  moved  on  from  Osborne,; 
Dartmouth,  or  private  schools  to  Oxford 
or  into  the  Services.  The  King  and  Queen 
set  a  new  pattern  in  the  face  of  criti-: 
cism  which  soon  enough  turned  to  ap- 
proval and  admiration.  And  so  they  came 
to  the  test  of  world  war. 

Queen  Mary's  part  between  1914  and 
1918  was  arduous  and  invaluable.  She 
turned  her  Needlework  Guild  into  a 
world-wide  collecting  and  distributing 
organization.  There  was  at  first  some  fear, 
which  Mary  Macarthur  [q.v.]  did  not 
hesitate  to  express  to  the  Queen,  that 
this  voluntary  work  might  increase  the 
already  serious  problem  of  unemployment 
among  women.  The  Queen  at  once  insisted 
that  the  problem  should  be  tackled* 
The  Central  Committee  on  Women's 
Employment  was  set  up  with  Mary 
Macarthur  as  honorary  secretary  and 
The  Queen's  Work  for  Women  Fund  was 
administered  by  the  committee.  This 
brought  Queen  Mary  into  close  touch  with 
the  leading  women  in  the  Labour  move-r 
ment  such  as  Gertrude  Tuckwell  [q.v.]. 
Queen  Mary  was  indefatigable  in  visiting 
hospitals  and  largely  responsible  for 
founding  the  workshops  at  Roehampton 
and  a  number  of  hospitals  for  troops  in 
and  round  London.  When  the  reputation 
of  the  Women's  Army  Auxiliary  Corps 
stood  low  Queen  Mary  gave  it  her 
patronage.  She  directed  the  austerity  of 
the  royal  household  and  her  example 
and  unwearying  energy  were  everywhere 
acknowledged.  The  King's  duties  were 
heavy  at  home  and  in  his  visits  to  the 
troops  and  navy.  In  the  summer  of  1917 
the  Queen  accompanied  him  to  France 
where  her  visits  to  the  hospitals  established 


TOO 


Mary 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


a  legend  of  her  tirelessness  and  practical 
sympathy.  And  through  it  all,  a  very 
personal  anxiety  for  their  sons  and  other 
relations  and  friends  played  a  heavy  part 
in  the  strain  and  stress  of  war.  When  it 
ended,  both  had  triumphantly  passed 
their  supreme  tests. 

The  war  had  marked  them  both,  and 
the  King,  who  was  never  the  same  man 
after  an  accident  in  France,  showed  it 
clearly.  The  armistice  and  the  celebrations 
of  their  silver  wedding  in  1918  gave  them 
further  proofs  of  public  respect  and  affec- 
tion and  led  the  way  to  an  abnormal 
amount  of  state  ceremonial  in  the  years 
which  followed.  There  were  state  visits 
from  allied  sovereigns  and  leaders,  the 
great  Wembley  Exhibition,  and  more 
personal  and  private  events  to  occupy 
them  in  the  marriages  of  Princess  Mary 
(1922)  and  the  Duke  of  York  (1923).  The 
post-war  years  passed  in  a  social  revolu- 
tion which  affected  all  classes  and  called 
for  the  highest  examples  of  restraint, 
dignity,  and  tact,  and  to  these  duties  the 
King  and  Queen  gave  constant  attention. 
Their  concern  for  the  convenience  of  the 
first  Labour  Government  did  much  to 
remove  socialist  misconception  about  the 
monarchy.  For  the  King  they  were  years 
of  almost  ceaseless  difficulty  and  anxiety 
which  he  was  physically  ill-fitted  to  en- 
dure. When  in  1928  he  became  desperately 
ill.  Queen  Mary  proved,  first  to  the 
doctors  and  to  her  family,  and  gradually 
to  the  whole  nation,  the  strength  of  her 
character.  The  King's  doctors  acknow- 
ledged her  great  share  in  the  miracle  of  his 
recovery.  The  Duke  of  York,  meeting  the 
Prince  of  Wales  on  his  arrival  from 
East  Africa,  remarked:  'Through  all  the 
anxiety  she  has  never  once  revealed  her 
feelings  to  any  of  us.  She  is  really  far  too 
reserved  ...  I  fear  a  breakdown  if  any- 
thing awful  happens.  She  has  been 
wonderful.'  There  was  no  breakdown. 
In  the  period  of  convalescence,  in  the  years 
which  remained  to  the  King,  she  knew 
the  truth:  she  carried  the  anxiety  and 
maintained  before  the  world  a  serenity  and 
calm  and  dignity,  half  comprehended 
and  wholly  admired.  Henceforward,  the 
King  was  physically  unfit  for  half  the 
duties  of  his  office  and  he  was  not  an  easy 
man  to  deflect  from  duty  or  habituated 
routine.  She  was  constantly  at  his  side 
in  his  public  engagements.  In  the  cele- 
brations of  their  jubilee  in  1935  the  full 
realization  of  the  nation's  respect  and 
affection  for  them  came  to  both,  and  King 
George's  personal  reference  to  her,  spoken 


in  deep  emotion  in  Westminster  Hall, 
acknowledged  his  own  debt  to  her  lifelong 
service  to  himself  and  the  nation.  Eight 
months  later  the  King  died  at  Sandring- 
ham  on  20  January  1936,  in  the  presence  of 
his  family,  soon  after  the  last  council  at 
his  bedside.  At  once  the  Queen  kissed  the 
hand  of  her  eldest  son.  Her  self-command 
in  those  anxious  hours  was  noted  by  all 
who  saw  her.  She  completed  the  last  entry 
in  King  George's  diary  with  a  touching 
note  and  spoke  in  a  message  to  the  nation 
her  heartfelt  gratitude  for  the  affection 
shown  to  them. 

After  the  King's  death,  Queen  Mary 
moved  into  Marlborough  House  which 
had  stood  empty  since  the  death  of  Queen 
Alexandra.  It  had  been  to  some  extent 
renovated  and,  when  Queen  Mary's  taste 
had  had  full  play  in  the  arrangement  of 
her  own  collections,  gradually  assumed  a 
dignity  and  even  charm  which  it  had  never 
known.  But  the  normal  period  of  mourn- 
ing held  for  her  the  tremendous  stress  and 
strain  of  the  abdication  crisis.  She  met 
it  with  the  calmness,  sympathy,  tact, 
restraint,  and  dignity  of  which  she  was  a 
mistress  and  was  guided  in  her  course  by 
the  chief  loyalty  of  her  life — to  the 
monarchy — in  the  best  interest  of  the 
nation.  But  that  crisis  might  well  have 
marked  and  aged  a  woman  less  physically 
and  mentally  strong.  It  was  not  in  her 
character  to  accept  retirement  or  the 
hitherto  conventional  lifelong  privacy  of 
Queen  Mothers.  She  began  to  resume  her 
public  engagements  and  created  a  pre- 
cedent in  attending  the  coronation  of  her 
son  King  George  VI.  Her  interest  in  works 
of  art  continued  to  develop  and  she  made 
her  own  a  large  variety  of  cultural  and  in- 
dustrial projects.  She  was  already  famous 
for  her  interest  (and  endurance)  at  the 
British  Industries  Fair  (it  was  calculated 
that  from  first  to  last  she  walked  a  hundred 
miles  round  the  Fairs) ;  and  she  became  a 
regular  visitor  to  the  Wimbledon  tennis 
championships. 

In  May  1939  Queen  Mary  had  a  car 
accident  which  severely  shook  her  and 
permanently  injured  her  eyesight.  With 
the  outbreak  of  war  she  reluctantly 
accepted  the  necessity  for  her  removal 
from  London  and  she  established  herself 
at  Badminton,  the  home  of  her  nephew- 
by-marriage,  the  Duke  of  Beaufort.  Her 
activities  varied  but  did  not  lessen: 
she  worked  and  planned  in  the  woods, 
visited  the  neighbouring  towns,  would 
stop  to  give  lifts  to  servicemen,  and  got 
through  a  great  deal  of  tapestry  work  at 


710 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Mary 


which  she  was  an  acknowledged  expert. 
Some  of  it — a  great  carpet  in  particular — 
was  exhibited  and  sold  overseas  and 
earned  praise  and  dollars  for  worthy 
objects.  She  was  at  Badminton  when  she 
received  the  news  of  the  death  of  the 
Duke  of  Kent  in  a  Service  flying  accident 
25  August  1942.  She  went  at  once  to  her 
daughter-in-law  and  attended  the  funeral 
at  Windsor.  She  refused  to  surrender  to 
the  shock  and  bitter  grief.  She  returned 
to  London  when  the  war  with  Germany 
was  over  and  resumed  her  public  engage- 
ments right  up  to  and  indeed  beyond  the 
death  of  King  George  VI  in  1952.  She 
never  failed  to  receive  important  visitors 
such  as  J.  C.  Smuts  [q.v.]  and  General 
Eisenhower  and  many  social  workers 
from  the  dominions.  In  1947  she  cele- 
brated her  eightieth  birthday,  an  occasion 
saddened  by  the  death  of  her  son-in-law 
the  Earl  of  Hare  wood  [q.v.].  Her  own 
death  took  place  after  a  short  illness, 
24  March  1953,  at  Marlborough  House,  in 
her  eighty-sixth  year,  and  she  was  buried 
beside  King  George  V  in  St.  George's 
chapel,  Windsor.  Her  effigy,  later  set 
over  the  tomb  beside  that  of  King  George, 
had  been  made  simultaneously  by  Sir 
William  Reid  Dick.  Her  death  and  funeral 
evoked  remarkable  tributes  of  public 
respect  and  affection.  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  in  a  broadcast  spoke  of  the  long 
range  of  her  experience ;  but  Queen  Mary, 
he  said,  did  not  cling  to  the  past.  She 
moved  easily  in  the  swiftly  changing 
scenes.  New  ideas  had  no  terrors  for  her. 
Dispassionate  in  judgement,  practical  in 
all  things,  she  was  far  too  much  interested 
in  the  present  to  be  unduly  prejudiced  by 
the  past.  Above  all,  she  died  in  the  know- 
ledge that  the  Crown  was  far  more  broadly 
based  on  the  people's  love  and  on  the 
nation's  will  than  in  the  sedate  days  of 
her  youth. 

She  was  a  great  queen-consort.  It  was 
her  destiny  during  many  troubled  years 
of  war  and  social  revolution  to  serve  as  an 
example  at  the  head  of  the  State,  through 
times  of  bitterness  and  disillusion  when 
ethical  standards  and  conventions  were 
being  questioned  or  abandoned  and  a 
looser  morality  gained  ground  in  society ; 
and  the  chief  quality  with  which  she 
performed  her  function  was  perhaps  a 
golden  sense  of  what  was  fitting,  not  alone 
for  a  queen,  a  court,  or  a  monarchy,  but 
for  men  and  women  in  every  rank  of  life. 
She  was  elastic  for  change,  rigid  for  con- 
duct, resolute  for  the  dignity  of  the 
Crown  and  of  human  life.  She  possessed 


few  of  the  graces  and  the  dazzling  charms 
of  her  mother-in-law.  Indeed,  she  was 
formidable  and  could  appear  austere.  But 
she  had  the  charm  of  incisive  judgement 
tempered  by  great  kindness.  Nothing 
could  hide  her  practical  human  sympathy 
or  chill  the  warmth  of  her  heart.  Simple, 
straightforward,  forthright,  blazingly 
truthful,  she  could  feel  sympathy  for  the 
delinquent  when  she  visited  the  juvenile 
courts  in  East  London,  but  none  for  the 
liar,  while  to  the  end  her  spirit  scorned 
the  laggard  and  the  fainthearted.  Only  her 
remarkable  physical  strength  and  extra- 
ordinary self-discipline  and  mental  vigour 
could  have  enabled  her  to  do  the  public 
work  she  did  in  anxiety,  sorrow,  and 
old  age. 

'Genius'  in  the  usual  sense  cannot  justly 
be  applied  in  any  field  to  Queen  Mary, 
Her  genius  lay  in  her  intense  loyalty  and 
selfless  service  to  the  monarchy,  in  her 
tact  and  most  particularly  in  her  political 
tact,  for  she  never  discussed  politics 
(taking  a  lesson  from  Queen  Adelaide's 
failing),  in  her  safety  as  a  recipient  of  con- 
fidences, in  her  rigid  upholding  of  all  that 
was  of  good  report,  in  her  self-discipline 
in  controlling  inherent  timidity  and 
shyness. 

But  genius  in  the  accepted  sense  of 
rare  intellectual  powers  she  would  not 
have  claimed.  Her  mind,  essentially 
urban,  was  factual  rather  than  analytical. 
Of  country  matters  she  knew  little.  Life 
at  Balmoral  was  not  to  her  taste;  she 
preferred  Sandringham  which  was  less 
remote.  Dihgent  always,  she  absorbed 
information  and  stored  it  in  a  strong  and 
orderly  memory.  Thus,  her  collection  of 
art  treasures  was  guided  less  by  intuition 
and  taste  than  by  accepted  doctrine.  The 
monarchy  being  her  first  interest,  her 
preference  in  paintings  spread  outward 
from  the  basic  subject  of  English  royal 
portraiture  and,  although  this  led  her  into 
wider  fields,  she  never  acquired  a  taste 
for  gallery  pictures  outside  the  historical. 
This  did  not  prevent  her  lending  con- 
tinuous encouragement  to  museums  and 
galleries,  and  often  she  impressed  the 
staffs  by  her  memory.  The  latter  years  of 
her  life  were  chiefly  devoted  to  adding  to 
her  collection  of  bibelots,  and  perhaps  the 
quality  of  the  whole  would  have  profited 
had  she  paid  more  for  less.  Her  reading 
she  pursued  steadily  to  the  end,  usually 
in  the  field  of  serious  memoirs,  historical 
and  contemporary,  English  and  foreign. 
She  read  some  current  fiction,  but  when 
in  her  last  years  her  ladies  read  to  her,  she 


711 


Mary 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


usually  chose  classic  novels.  Her  brief  and 
factual  diary  throws  little  light  on  her 
private  thoughts  and  inner  life,  and  is 
devoid  of  criticism  of  political  events  or  of 
personalities.  She  cared  intensely,  to  the 
minutest  detail,  for  any  subject  great  or 
small  which  she  set  out  to  master,  or  for 
any  object  to  achieve,  however  trivial, 
even  to  the  choice  of  a  birthday  present 
(she  was  the  first  Queen  to  visit  the  shops) 
or  some  practically  thoughtful  action  to  a 
humble  dependant  who  had  served  her 
well. 

It  was  this  capacity,  allied  to  that 
refusal  to  be  prejudiced  by  the  past,  which 
enabled  her  with  her  husband  King  George 
V  to  create  a  new  conception  of  consti- 
tutional monarchy  and  its  responsibilities. 
It  was  durable  and  remained  a  pattern  for 
succeeding  reigns  because  it  was  based  on 
the  human  virtues  of  duty  and  integrity, 
simplicity  and  sympathy,  loyalty  and  love. 

In  appearance  Queen  Mary  was  above 
the  average  height  of  women.  Her  inti- 
mates among  women  considered  that  she 
looked  her  best  in  black,  a  colour  she 
detested.  Her  own  favourites  were  pale 
pastel  shades,  preferably  blue.  She  always 
wore  a  toque,  except  occasionally  in  the 
garden  when  she  would  wear  a  hat,  and 
on  suitable  occasions  she  carried  a  long 
umbrella  or  parasol.  She  appeared  often, 
owing  to  her  dress  and  carriage,  to  tower 
over  King  George,  although  she  was 
exactly  the  same  height.  This  gave  her  in 
the  public  view  the  appearance  of  moral 
ascendancy  also.  It  was  an  illusion.  The 
King  was  very  much  master  in  his  house 
and  she,  even  to  the  subduing  of  an  innate 
gaiety  of  heart,  known  only  to  her  inti- 
mates, was  a  submissive  partner  in  her 
loyalty  to  the  monarchy. 

Queen  Mary  sat  to  many  artists  during 
her  life.  (Sir)  William  Llewellyn  painted 
the  state  portrait  (1911-12),  remarkable 
for  its  dignity,  which  is  now  at  Bucking- 
ham Palace.  (Sir)  John  Lavery's  group 
(1913)  of  the  King  and  Queen  with  the 
Prince  of  Wales  and  Princess  Mary  is  in 
the  National  Portrait  Gallery  where  there 
is  also  a  bronze  by  Sir  William  Reid  Dick. 
There  are  several  more  portraits  at 
Windsor  Castle  or  the  Palace.  A.  T.  Nowell 
produced  the  best  likeness.  Tyrell,  von 
Angeli,  G.  Koberwein,  and  E.  Hughes 
painted  her  before  1900;  (Sir)  Oswald 
Birley,  David  Jagger,  and  Simon  Elwes 
painted  her  in  the  thirties  or  later.  She 
was  a  good  and  constant  subject  for 
photographers. 

[H.R.H.  The  Duke  of  Windsor,  A  King's 


Story,  1961 ;  John  Gore,  King  George  V,  1941 ; 
James  Pope-Hennessy,  Queen  Mary,  1959; 
Queen  Mary's  private  diaries;  private  infor- 
mation.] John  Goju^ 

MASON-MacFARLANE,  Sir  (FRANK) 
NOEL  (1889-1953),  lieutenant-general, 
was  born  23  October  1889  in  Maidenhead, 
the  elder  son  of  Dr.  David  James  Mason, 
a  Scotsman  who  later  changed  his  name 
to  Mason-MacFarlane,  and  his  wife,  Mary 
Blanche  Anstey.  He  was  educated  at 
Rugby  and  the  Royal  Mihtary  Academy, 
Woolwich,  and  was  gazetted  to  the  Royal 
Artillery  in  1909.  War  service  in  France, 
Belgium,  and  Mesopotamia  gained  him  a 
Military  Cross  with  two  bars,  two  men- 
tions in  dispatches,  and  a  croix  de  guerre. 
He  took  part  in  the  Afghan  war  of  1919, 
and  in  1920  went  to  the  Staff  College 
at  Quetta.  In  1931  he  became  military 
attache  in  Vienna  with  responsibility  also 
in  Budapest  and  Berne.  He  graduated 
from  the  Imperial  Defence  College  in 
1935,  and  two  years  later  became  mili- 
tary attache  in  Berlin,  with  responsibility 
also  in  Copenhagen.  He  acquired  an  un- 
rivalled knowledge  of  the  German  Army 
and  twice  observed  it  in  action:  on  its 
entries  into  Austria  and  Czechoslovakia. 
Concluding  that  Hitler's  word  was  not  to 
be  trusted  and  that  Germany  was  bent 
on  unlimited  expansion  by  military 
aggression,  he  believed  that  to  attempt  to 
negotiate  with  the  Nazis  was  futile  and 
dangerous.  Since  war  appeared  to  him 
inevitable  he  argued  further  that  Hitler 
should  not  be  allowed  to  choose  his  own 
time  but  should  be  driven  into  aggression 
when  circumstances  were  unfavourable 
to  him.  These  views  brought  Mason- 
MacFarlane  into  conflict  with  authority. 

As  director  of  military  intelligence, 
with  the  rank  of  major-general,  with  the 
British  Expeditionary  Force  in  France  in 
1939,  Mason-MacFarlane's  knowledge  of 
Germany  and  the  German  Army  was 
invaluable.  W^hen  the  Germans  broke  the 
Ninth  French  Army  front  he  improvised 
and  commanded  a  scratch  force  to  pro- 
tect the  British  right  and  immediate  rear. 
'MacForce'  was  behind  the  First  French 
Army,  whose  front  never  actually  broke, 
was  afterwards  withdrawn  to  prepare  the 
defence  of  Cassel,  and  was  then  disbanded. 
Mason-MacFarlane  and  other  key  officers 
were  ordered  back  to  Britain.  For  his 
work  in  France  he  was  appointed  to 
the  D.S.O. 

In  June  1940  he  was  sent  as  deputy 
governor  to  Gibraltar  where  his  energy, 


712 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Massingham 


character,  and  leadership,  in  extremely 
difficult  circumstances,  performed  mira- 
cles in  reorganizing  the  defences  and 
maintaining  morale.  After  a  brief  but 
treasured  interlude  commanding  a  divi- 
sion in  Kent,  Mason-MacFarlane  was  sent 
to  Moscow  in  1941  as  head  of  the  British 
military  mission,  with  the  task  of  maxi- 
mizing the  effectiveness  of  allied  aid  to 
Russia.  Once  more  he  came  up  against 
authority  by  deprecating  over-optimistic 
promises  and  opposing  aid  without 
conditions.  In  June  1942  he  returned  to 
Gibraltar,  this  time  as  governor  and 
commander-in-chief.  He  now  had  the 
invidious  task  of  continuing  preparations 
for  defence,  and  maintaining  morale  while 
the  risks  of  attack  decreased.  He  accom- 
modated General  Eisenhower's  head- 
quarters for  the  invasion  of  North  Africa 
and  gave  valuable  support  to  these  opera- 
tions. In  1943  he  was  promoted  K.C.B. ; 
he  had  been  appointed  C.B.  in  1939. 

Italy  surrendered  on  3  September  1943 
and  Mason-MacFarlane  headed  a  military 
mission  to  Brindisi  on  the  13th,  Then,  and 
later  as  head  of  the  Allied  Control  Com- 
mission from  January  1944,  he  set  about 
converting  an  enemy  into  a  co-belligerent. 
The  King  and  Marshal  Badoglio  had  at 
first  to  be  supported  because  it  was  they 
who  had  agreed  to  fight  the  Germans,  and 
were,  indeed,  the  only  government  avail- 
able. But  they  lacked  popular  support. 
The  King  was  persuaded  to  resign  and 
Mason-MacFarlane  was  charged  to  form  a 
democratic  government  on  the  liberation 
of  Rome,  where  liberal  political  leaders 
were  gathered.  These  refused  to  serve 
under  Badoglio,  but  agreed  to  form  a 
government  under  Bonomi.  Hesitation, 
or  the  continuance  of  Badoglio  in  power, 
might  have  resulted  in  the  emergence  of  a 
rival  government,  or  even  governments, 
and  Mason-MacFarlane  accepted  Bonomi 
and  his  Cabinet.  But  Whitehall  wanted 
Badoglio  because  it  was  he  who  had  bound 
himself  to  bring  the  Italian  forces  on  to 
the  allied  side,  and  withheld  recognition. 
(Sir)  Winston  Churchill  made  his  dis- 
pleasure clear.  Eventually  the  Bonomi 
government  was  accepted;  but  Mason- 
MacFarlane,  already  a  grievously  sick 
man,  resigned. 

As  a  schoolboy  he  had  broken  his  neck. 
Later  a  fall,  pigsticking,  injured  his  back, 
and  a  motor  accident  broke  a  number  of 
ribs  close  to  the  spine.  From  about  1940, 
as  a  result,  presumably,  of  these  injuries, 
he  suffered  increasing  paralysis.  By  1944 
he  was  in  constant  pain.  The  rest  of  his 


life  was  a  tra^c  tale  of  operations  and 
increasing  disability.  Nevertheless,  in  the 
general  election  of  1945,  moved  by  a 
long-standing  lack  of  sympathy  with  the 
ruling  party,  he  stood  for  Parliament  in 
the  Labour  interest  and  from  his  wheel- 
chair won  the  constituency  of  North 
Paddington  from  Brendan  (later  Viscount) 
Bracken  [q.v.].  He  was  mentioned  as  ^ 
possible  secretary  of  state  for  war,  but 
his  health  forced  him  to  give  up  in  1946. 
He  died  12  August  1953  at  his  home  at 
Twyford,  Berkshire. 

Mason-MacFarlane  has  been  described 
by  one  who  served  under  him  (and  later 
became  a  field-marshal)  as  a  near-genius. 
Basically,  he  was  a  very  fine  fighting 
soldier.  He  had  an  acute  brain,  a  real- 
istic understanding  of  people  and  events, 
and  a  gift  of  lucid  exposition.  He  was  a 
fine  linguist,  speaking  excellent  French 
and  German,  and  some  Spanish,  Hun-» 
garian,  and  Russian.  He  was  an  outstand- 
ing athlete.  To  his  staff  he  was  a  most 
inspiring  leader.  He  had  the  panache  and 
idiosyncracy  which  focus,  but  also  the 
conamon  touch  which  retains,  the  loyalty 
of  troops.  He  was  impetuous  to  espouse 
causes  which  were  lost,  or  nearly  so.  Less 
well  liked  by  contemporaries  and  those 
under  whom  he  served,  he  was  too  often 
right,  and  there  was  a  sarcastic  edge  to 
his  tongue.  He  had,  too,  a  full  share  of 
personal  ambition.  In  the  last  resort,  there 
was,  perhaps,  some  lack  of  judgement. 
But  of  his  dynamism,  will-power,  and 
courage  there  was  never  any  doubt. 

In  1918  he  married  Islay  (died  1947), 
daughter  of  Frederick  Islay  Pitmanj 
stockbroker ;  they  had  one  son  and  one 
daughter. 

There  are  two  portraits  of  Mason- 
MacFarlane  by  R.  G.  Eves  in  the  Imperial 
War  Museum. 

[L.  F.  Ellis,  (Official  History)  The  War  in 
France  and  Flanders  1939-40,  1953 ;  C.  R.  S, 
Harris,  (Official  History)  Allied  Military 
Administration  of  Italy,  1943-45, 1957 ;  private 
information.]  F.  S.  V.  Donnison^ 

MASSINGHAM,  HAROLD  JOHN  (1888^ 
1952),  author  and  journalist,  was  born  in 
London  25  March  1888,  the  eldest  of  the 
six  children  of  Henry  William  Massingham 
[q.v.]  by  his  first  wife,  Emma  Jane 
Snowdon.  Educated  at  Westminster 
School  and  the  Queen's  College,  Oxford, 
where  owing  to  illness  he  did  not  graduate, 
he  began  his  career  on  the  editorial  staffs 
of  the  Morning  Leader,  where  he  survived 
for  only  three  weeks,  and  the  National 


713 


Massingham 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Press  Agency.  Articles  in  the  New  Age 
brought  him  into  touch  with  a  remarkable 
group  of  writers  and  artists,  including 
W.  H.  Davies  [q.v.]  and  Ralj5h  Hodgson, 
although  no  one  influenced  him  more  than 
his  friend  W.  H.  Hudson  [q.v.]. 

Between  1916  and  1924  Massingham 
was  a  regular  contributor  on  literary  and 
natural  history  topics  to  the  Nation  and 
the  Athenaeum,  and  for  a  time  he  served 
on  their  editorial  staffs.  It  was  Ralph 
Hodgson,  in  a  poem  burning  with  rage  and 
pity,  who  inspired  him  to  launch  a  small 
society  called  the  Plumage  Group.  On  the 
successful  completion  of  its  campaign 
against  the  trade  in  the  feathers  of  birds, 
he  joined  the  Board  of  Trade  committee 
formed  to  implement  the  Importation  of 
Plumage  (Prohibition)  Act  of  1921. 

Soon  after  publishing  his  successful 
Treasury  of.  Seventeenth  Century  Verse 
(1919),  Massingham  embarked  on  those 
long  treks  across  comparatively  untrodden 
corners  of  the  English  countryside  which 
resulted  in  his  admirable  Wold  Without 
End  (1932),  English  Downland  (1936), 
Cotswold  Country  (1937),  and  many  other 
books.  They  portrayed  the  English  scene 
through  the  eyes  of  a  warm  and  vigorous 
character  who  was  both  naturalist  and 
archaeologist  as  well  as  an  authority  on 
country  crafts.  For  a  time  he  explored 
the  upland  homes  of  prehistoric  man  as 
a  member  of  the  anthropological  staff 
of  (Sir)  Grafton  Elliot  Smith  [q.v.]  at 
University  College,  London,  and  Downland 
Man  (1926)  reveals  his  skill  in  bringing 
the  buried  past  to  life.  Yet  he  was  always 
the  enthusiastic  and  self-taught  amateur, 
quick  to  observe  how  attractively  the 
Cotswold  villages  were  clustered  on  the 
hills  or  dispersed  along  the  valleys, 
delighting  in  the  way  the  winds  and  sheep 
of  Sussex  made  midgets  of  the  dowrjland 
flora,  pausing  in  wonder  and  gratitude 
before  the  skill  of  native  craftsmen  whose 
work  reflected  the  traditions  of  the 
region.  During  these  walks  with  his 
faithful  sheep-dog,  or  between  weeks 
preparing  The  Great  Victorians  (1932) 
which  he  edited  with  his  brother  Hugh 
Massingham,  he  liked  nothing  better  than 
to  converse  with  the  country  craftsmen 
he  chanced  to  encounter,  just  as  Langland 
or  Cobbett  might  have  done.  Indeed, 
Massingham  and  Cobbett  had  much  in 
common — ^the  same  deep  love  for  the  land 
and  its  peasantry,  a  keen  appreciation  of 
the  virtues  of  smallness,  a  habit  of  ex- 
pressing forceful  opinions  on  matters  on 
which  they  were  not  always  well  informed, 


a  rare  sense  of  the  organic  unity  of  the 
countryside. 

Massingham  wrote  regularly  for  the 
Field  from  1938  to  1951  (and  then  for 
the  Spectator)  without  'one  single  word  of 
complaint  from  the  editor',  and  he  was 
a  brisk  and  conscientious  correspondent. 
He  and  Esther  Meynell  wrote  to  each 
other  week  after  week  for  many  years, 
although  they  never  met,  nor  possessed 
any  strong  desire  to  do  so.  Nothing, 
unless  it  was  his  Nonesuch  edition  in  two 
volumes  of  The  Writings  of  Gilbert  White  of 
Selborne  (1938),  gave  him  more  pleasure 
than  his  garden  on  the  western  slopes 
of  the  Chilterns,  where  he  planted  a  few 
score  trees,  kept  two  geese  and  a  pig, 
and  regretted  that  his  days  could  not  be 
shared  between  the  pen  and  the  plough.  It 
was  when  cutting  ivy  from  an  ash  in  the 
Upper  Windrush  valley,  one  evening  in 
1937,  that  he  tripped  over  a  hidden  feeding 
trough,  rusty  from  disuse,  an  accident 
which  was  to  cost  him  a  leg  and  a  foot  and 
which  nearly  ended  his  life.  He  attributed 
his  survival  through  1940,  when  struggling 
to  find  the  strength  to  edit  England  and 
the  Farmer  (1941),  largely  to  the  skill  of 
his  surgeon  and  the  courage  of  his  wife. 

He  celebrated  his  recovery  with  the 
publication  of  perhaps  his  best  work, 
The  English  Countryman  (1942),  a  vivid 
study  of  the  peasant  and  parson,  yeoman 
and  squire,  and  other  rural  types.  If  he 
wrote  too  much — more  than  forty  books 
and  many  articles  and  reviews  in  some 
thirty  years — it  was  because  he  was  a 
man  with  a  mission,  the  ex-townsman 
who  longed  to  save  the  English  country- 
side from  decay,  the  youthful  free-thinker 
turned  Roman  Catholic  who  wanted  the 
post- Christian  age  to  rediscover  the 
ancient  links  between  worship,  work,  and 
recreation.  It  was  typical  of  the  man  that 
shortly  before  his  death  he  presented  his 
treasured  collection  of  some  250  bygones 
to  the  new  Museum  of  English  Rural  Life 
at  the  university  of  Reading.  He  died  at  his 
home  at  Long  Crendon,  Buckinghamshire, 
22  August  1952. 

In  1914  he  married  Gertrude  Speedwell, 
daughter  of  Arthur  Black,  of  Brighton. 
The  marriage  was  dissolved  and  in  1933 
he  married  Anne  Penelope,  daughter  of 
the  late  A.  J.  Webbe.  There  wer«  no 
children  of  either  marriage.  Always  as 
self-effacing  as  he  was  charming,  Massing- 
ham was  never  the  subject  of  a  portrait, 
apart  from  a  crayon  drawing  by  Powys 
Evans  which  has  been  lost. 

[H.    J.     Massingham,     RemembrancCy     an 


714 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Mathews,  B.  J. 


Autobiography,  1942;  The  Times,  25  August 
1952;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Garth  Christian. 

MATHEWS,  BASIL  JOSEPH  (1879- 
1951),  writer  and  teacher  on  the  mission- 
ary and  ecumenical  movement,  was  born 
at  Oxford  28  August  1879,  the  eldest  son  of 
Angelo  Alfred  Hankins  Mathews,  insur- 
ance broker,  and  his  wife,  Emma  Colegrove. 
The  Mathews  line  has  been  traced  to 
Sir  David  Mathew  who  was  standard 
bearer  to  Edward  IV  at  the  battle  of 
Towton  and  whose  tomb  is  in  Llandaff 
Cathedral.  The  name  acquired  its  final  's' 
in  the  lifetime  of  William  Mathew  of 
Bristol  (1746-1830),  author,  and  publisher 
to  John  Wesley  and  Hannah  More. 

Mathews's  formal  schooling,  which  was 
begun  at  the  Oxford  High  School,  ended 
through  family  misfortunes  at  the  age  of 
fourteen.  After  working  in  the  Bodleian 
and  Oxford  Public  libraries  Mathews 
became  private  secretary  to  A.  M.  Fair- 
bairn  [q.v.],  principal  of  Mansfield  College. 
Contact  with  Fairbairn  strengthened  a 
natural  aptitude  for  study  and  hard  work 
and  while  still  in  his  employ  Mathews 
entered  the  university  through  what  was 
then  the  non-collegiate  delegacy.  In  1904 
he  took  second  class  honours  in  modern 
history.  With  journalism  in  view  he 
joined  the  staff  of  the  Christian  World 
and  in  1910  attended  as  a  reporter  the 
World  Missionary  Conference  at  Edin- 
burgh, a  turning-point  in  the  modern 
history  of  the  ecumenical  movement. 
This  experience  kindled  in  Mathews  a 
lifelong  enthusiasm  for  Christian  missions 
and  in  the  same  year  he  became  editor 
of  the  London  Missionary  Society's  publi- 
cations. It  was  quickly  apparent  that 
missionary  propaganda  under  Mathews's 
pen  was  entering  a  new  phase.  To  the  skill 
of  a  professional  journalist  he  joined 
natural  teaching  gifts,  a  fine  under- 
standing of  a  great  field  of  Christian 
thought  and  action,  and  the  persuasive- 
ness of  a  man  who  believed  what  he  wrote 
and  wrote  what  he  beUeved.  One  of  his 
earliest  books,  Livingstone  the  Pathfinder 
(1912),  won  speedy  and  widespread 
popularity  and  set  the  pattern  for  a 
successful  series  of  missionary  biographies. 

The  war  of  1914-18  brought  Mathews 
into  a  fresh  field  of  activity.  He  joined  the 
staff  of  the  Ministry  of  Information  and 
became  chairman  and  secretary  of  its 
literature  committee.  After  the  war  his 
widening  range  of  interests  included  work 
with  the  opium  commission  of  the  League 


of  Nations  in  1923.  In  the  meantime  he 
had  in  1919  left  the  London  Missionary 
Society  to  become  editor  of  the  Far  and 
Near  Publications  Company,  a  task  which 
included  the  editorship  of  a  short-lived  but 
valiant  monthly  journal.  Outward  Bound, 
From  1920  to  1924,  as  head  of  the  Press 
Bureau  of  the  Conference  of  British 
Missionary  Societies,  he  served  all  the 
British  missions  and  was  active  in  the 
affairs  of  the  United  Council  for  Missionary 
Education  and  its  counterpart  in  the 
United  States,  the  Missionary  Education 
Movement.  From  1924  until  1929  he  was 
Hterary  secretary  to  the  World's  Com- 
mittee of  Young  Men's  Christian  Associa- 
tions in  Geneva.  In  addition  to  his 
editorial  work  he  was  in  growing  demand 
as  a  public  speaker,  especially  to  student 
audiences.  In  these  years  he  travelled 
widely  in  the  Near  East,  West  Africa, 
and  India,  and  in  1931  paid  his  first  visit 
to  the  United  States.  From  1932  to  1944 
he  was  first  visiting  lecturer  and  then 
resident  professor  of  Christian  world- 
relations  in  the  school  of  theology  of 
Boston  University  and  at  the  Andover- 
Newton  Theological  Seminary,  Massa- 
chusetts. From  1944  to  1949  he  held  a 
similar  professorship  at  Union  College, 
university  of  British  Columbia,  from 
which  he  received  the  honorary  degree  of 
LL.D.  in  1949. 

Mathews  was  a  prolific  writer.  In 
addition  to  editorial  work  and  a  constant 
stream  of  articles,  he  published  over 
forty  books,  many  of  which  appeared 
in  translations.  Among  the  best  known, 
apart  from  his  biography  of  Livingstone, 
were  those  on  John  R.  Mott  (1934)  and 
Booker  T.  Washington  (1949)  and  his 
presentation  of  racial  and  ethnic  problems 
in  The  Clash  of  Colour  (1924)  and  The  Jew 
and  the  World  Ferment  (1934).  Much  of 
his  writing  was  topical,  but  behind  a 
vivid  popular  style  there  lay  great  industry 
and  a  power  of  discernment  which  made 
his  work  more  than  transient.  Students 
remembered  him  as  an  inspiring  teacher 
and  men  and  women  of  many  nationalities 
took  delight  in  his  friendship.  He  endured 
a  long  illness,  in  which  he  knew  that 
he  was  under  sentence  of  death,  with 
fortitude  and  grace.  To  the  end  his  pen 
was  busy  and  he  still  conversed  with 
zest  on  the  great  causes  to  which  he  had 
dedicated  uncommon  gifts.  In  the  history 
of  the  ecumenical  movement  during  the 
twentieth  century  Mathews  represents,  in 
his  writing  and  standpoint,  a  significant 
period;  it  was  one  in  which,  primarily 


715 


Mathews,  B,  J, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


through  practical  co-operation  in  the 
missionary  enterprise,  the  course  was 
being  set  towards  the  Churches'  deeper 
understanding  of  their  unity  and  mission. 

Mathews  married  first,  in  1905,  Harriett 
Anne  (died  1989),  daughter  of  WilHam 
Henry  Passmore,  farmer;  secondly,  in 
1940,  Winifred  Grace,  daughter  of  John 
Wilson,  chemist.  There  were  no  children 
of  either  marriage.  He  died  29  March 
1951  in  Oxford. 

[T?ie  Times,  31  March  and  3  April  1951; 
private  information.]         Norman  Goodax,l. 

MATHEWS,  Dame  VERA  (ELVIRA 
SIBYL  MARIA)  LAUGHTON  (1888- 
1959),  director  of  the  Women's  Royal 
Naval  Service,  was  born  in  London 
25  September  1888,  daughter  of  (Sir)  John 
Knox  Laughton  [q.v.],  naval  historian, 
notable  contributor  to  this  Dictionary, 
and  founder  of  the  Navy  Records  Society, 
of  which  he  was  secretary  for  twenty  years. 
A  child  of  his  second  marriage,  with 
Maria  Josefa,  daughter  of  Eugenio  di 
Alberti,  of  Cadiz,  she  inherited  from  her 
father  her  great  love  for  the  sea. 

She  was  educated  at  convents  of  the 
Religious  of  St.  Andrew  in  Streatham  and 
Tournai  and  at  King's  College,  London. 
Shortly  before  1914  she  became  deeply 
interested  in  the  women's  suffrage  move- 
ment, being  at  one  time  sub-editor  of 
Suffragette.  Immediately  on  the  outbreak 
of  war  she  volunteered  for  service  at  the 
Admiralty,  but  was  told  that  no  women 
were — or  would  be — employed.  She  turned 
to  journalism,  but  on  learning  in  Novem- 
ber 1917  that  the  Admiralty  proposed  to 
form  a  Women's  Royal  Naval  Service  for 
shore  duties  she  immediately  gave  up  her 
post  as  sub-editor  of  the  Ladies^  Field  in 
order  to  apply. 

After  taking  the  first  officers'  course 
she  was  sent  to  the  R.N.V.R.  depot  at 
the  Crystal  Palace  to  recruit  and  train 
Wrens.  She  was  appointed  M.B.E.  for  her 
services  but  in  1919  the  Wrens  were 
completely  disbanded. 

In  1920  Vera  Laughton  helped  to  found 
the  Association  of  Wrens,  while  con- 
tinuing her  career  as  a  journalist,  becom- 
ing the  first  editor  of  Time  and  Tide.  She 
became  a  commissioner  of  the  Girl  Guides 
and,  under  Dame  Katharine  Furse  (whose 
notice  she  has  contributed  to  this  Supple- 
ment), founded  the  Sea  Guides,  later  called 
the  Sea  Rangers. 

In  1924  she  married  Gordon  Dewar 
Mathews  (died  1943),  an  engineer,  with 
whom  she  spent  several  years  in  Japan, 


and  by  whom  she  had  two  sons  and  a 
daughter.  On  her  return  to  England  she 
once  again  interested  herself  in  the  Sea 
Rangers,  local  politics,  and  women's 
movements,  becoming  chairman  of  St. 
Joan's  Social  and  Political  Alliance  in 
1932  and  representing  this  body  at  the 
League  of  Nations  Assembly  in  1935. 

Late  in  1938  the  Admiralty  started 
discussions  on  a  women's  auxiliary 
service  and  shortly  afterwards  called  for 
1,500  volunteers.  It  received  over  15,000 
replies.  In  February  1939  Mrs.  Mathews 
was  summoned  to  the  Admiralty  and  in 
April  appointed  director  of  the  Women's 
Royal  Naval  Service,  about  to  be  re- 
formed. 

For  the  next  eight  years  her  story  was 
largely  that  of  the  Service  which  she 
formed,  organized,  and  led  with  signal 
ability.  Her  declared  aim  was  that  'what- 
ever the  Navy  demands  of  the  Wrens 
shall  be  fulfilled'.  This,  to  a  remarkable 
degree,  she  achieved,  thanks  to  a  strong, 
friendly  and  unselfconscious  personality, 
excellent  organizing  ability  and,  above 
all,  insistence  that  only  the  best  was  good 
enough — either  for  the  Wrens  or  by  the 
Wrens.  Progressively  through  the  war 
years  Wrens  took  over  more  and  more 
jobs  previously  thought  of  as  beyond 
their  skill  or  strength,  or  as  'unsuitable' 
for  a  niunber  of  reasons,  none  of  which 
proved  valid:  visual  signalling  and  W/T, 
heavy  transport,  armament  maintenance, 
naval  control  of  shipping  (including 
boarding  officer's  duties),  and  many  more. 
In  1942  the  first  Wren  officer  qualified  as 
a  signal  officer — passing  out  top  of  her 
course.  The  introduction  of  the  'boat's 
crew'  category  gave  scope  to  those  who 
'really  wanted  to  go  to  sea'.  Thanks  to 
her  insistence  and  encouragement,  the 
Wren  crews  became  an  integral  and  highly 
efficient  part  of  the  base  organization. 
On  the  subject  of  categories  and  their 
popularity,  she  once  commented:  'It's 
difficult  to  recruit  stewards  to  clean  rooms, 
but  put  them  in  dungarees  to  swab  a 
deck,  call  them  "Maintenance"  and  there's 
a  queue.' 

In  1946  the  Admiralty  announced  that 
the  W.R.N.S.  would  continue  as  a 
permanent  Service.  Shortly  afterwards, 
in  November  1946,  Dame  Vera  retired 
from  the  post  which  she  had  held  through- 
out the  hostilities — a  unique  distinction 
among  the  women's  Services  in  the  second 
world  war.  Over  a  hundred  thousand 
women  had  served  in  the  W.R.N.S. 
during  her  years   as   director.    She   had 


716 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Matthews 


been  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1942  and  D.B.E. 
in  1945  and  had  also  received  the  Cross 
of  Orange  Nassau  for  her  work  in  con- 
nection with  the  training  of  MARVA,  the 
Netherlands  counterpart  of  the  Service. 
Her  history  of  the  W.R.N.S.,  entitled 
Blue  Tapestry,  was  published  in  1948. 

After  her  retirement  Dame  Vera  became 
chairman  of  the  Domestic  Coal  Consumers' 
Council  and  a  member  of  the  South 
Eastern  Gas  Board,  also  holding  the 
appointment  of  adviser  on  women's 
affairs  to  the  Gas  Council.  She  was  presi- 
dent of  the  Smoke  Abatement  Society. 
She  died  in  London  25  September  1959, 
on  her  seventy-first  birthday.  There  is 
a  memorial  alcove  in  the  north  aisle 
of  Westminster  Cathedral  in  which  St. 
Christopher  is  seen  holding  a  boat  with  a 
wren  perched  on  an  anchor.  A  portrait  by 
Anthony  Devas  is  in  the  Imperial  War 
Museum  and  a  copy  is  at  the  W.R.N.S. 
establishment  at  Burghfield,  Reading. 

[Private  informatioHiJui    Jij.  M.  Palmer. 

MATTHEWS,      ALFRED      EDWARD 

(1869-1960),  actor,  was  born  at  Bridling- 
ton, Yorkshire,  22  November  1869,  the 
son  of  William  Matthews  and  his  wife, 
Alice  Mary  Long.  His  father  was  one  of 
the  Matthews  brothers  of  the  original 
Christy  Minstrels  and  his  great-uncle  was 
the  famous  clown,  Thomas  Matthews 
[q.v.],  who  had  been  a  pupil  of  Grimaldi 
[q.v.].  He  was  educated  at  Stamford, 
Lincolnshire.  Thereafter,  according  to 
his  own  story  (of  which  he  had  plenty), 
he  proceeded  to  an  office-boy's  desk 
in  London  on  which  were  carved  the 
initials  'J.H.B.'  which  he  was  told  were 
those  of  (Sir)  Henry  Irving  [q.v.]  whose 
original  name  was  Brodribb.  Inspired  by 
this  coincidence  he  got  himself  a  job  as  a 
call-boy.  He  soon  rose,  via  stage  manage- 
ment and  understudy,  to  touring  actor 
and,  in  1889,  he  toured  South  Africa  with 
Lionel  Brough  [q.v.].  In  1893-6  he  toured 
Australia  and  then  returned  to  the  west 
end  of  London  in  a  long  list  of  plays.  In 
1910  he  made  his  first  trip  to  New  York 
and  played  Algernon  Moncrieffe  in  The 
Importance  of  being  Earnest.  By  then 
*Matty'  was  in  great  demand  at  home  and 
overseas,  among  his  authors  being  Pinero, 
Galsworthy,  and  Barrie  [qq.v.]. 

After  the  war  one  finds  him  taking  over 
from  such  players  as  (Sir)  Gerald  du 
Maurier  [q.v.]  (in  Bulldog  Drummond, 
1921,  New  York  and  London),  Owen 
Nares,  or  Ronald  Squire.  Yet,  at  all  times, 
like    other    actors    in    his    constellation 


who  employed  initials  rather  than  their 
Christian  names,  his  star,  though  minor, 
was  truefixed  and  constant,  only  waiting 
for  the  opportunity  to  show  it  had  no 
fellow  in  its  chosen  firmament.  It  had  to 
wait  another  twenty  years.  Meanwhile, 
however,  in  the  twenty-five  years  after 
1918,  he  was  in  a  further  thirty  different 
plays. 

In  1947,  in  his  seventy-eighth  year, 
Matty  at  last  became  a  great  star  in  his 
own  right,  in  the  line  of  Sir  Charles 
Hawtrey  [q.v.]  and  du  Maurier — the  part 
the  Earl  of  Lister,  the  play  The  Chiltem 
Hundreds,  the  theatre  the  Vaudeville 
where  he  had  once  been  call-boy.  In  1949 
he  went  to  New  York  in  the  same  play 
(renamed  Yes,  M'Lord)  and  then  returned 
to  make  the  film  at  Pinewood  in  his 
eightieth  year.  He  was  appointed  O.B.E. 
in  1951,  pubUshed  Matty,  his  autobio- 
graphy, in  1952,  repeated  his  success  as 
Lord  Lister  in  a  sequel  to  The  Chiltem 
Hundreds  in  1954,  and  went  on  acting  in 
both  films  and  plays.  Aged  ninety, 
indomitable  to  the  last  and  working  still, 
'How  do  I  do  it  ?'  he  echoed  an  inquiring 
reporter,  'Easy!  I  look  in  the  obituary 
column  of  The  Times  at  breakfast  and,  if 
my  name's  not  in  it,  I  go  off  to  the 
studio.' 

Matty  was  a  playwright's  dream — ^the 
grand  old  man  of  the  theatre  without 
being  remotely  grand — the  oldest  actor 
acting  with  the  youngest  mind — the 
best-dressed  member  of  the  Garrick 
Club,  even  though  he  would  travel  by 
underground  on  a  wet  day  in  a  deer- 
stalker hat  and  a  pyjama  coat  over  his 
tweed  suit  and  gumboots.  He  knew  more 
about  the  technique  of  light  comedy 
acting  than  any  of  his  colleagues,  yet, 
such  was  his  spontaneity,  he  succeeded  in 
giving  the  impression  that  he  knew  nothing 
at  all.  He  was  as  selfish  as  any  actor  ever 
was  but  he  was  kindness  personified.  He 
was  crochety  but  he  had  a  heart  of  gold. 
He  was  unpredictable,  easily  bored, 
perhaps  a  shade  close  with  the  drinks,  but 
he  had  as  much  charm  as  any  man  in  any 
other  walk  of  life  and  he  loved  beauty 
in  women  and  animals  and  he  encouraged 
youth. 

He  married  first,  in  1909,  Caroline  May, 
divorced  wife  of  Richard  Cave  Chinn 
and  daughter  of  James  Blackwell. 
They  had  twin  sons  and  a  daughter. 
The  marriage  was  dissolved  and  in  1940 
he  married  Patricia  Lilian,  the  divorced 
wife  of  William  Robson  Davies  and 
daughter  of  Jeremiah  O'Herlihy,  solicitor. 


717 


Matthews 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Matthews  died  as  Bushey  Heath  25 
July  1960. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
William  Douglas-Home. 

MAUGHAM,  FREDERIC  HERBERT, 

first  Viscount  Maugham  (1866-1958), 
lord  chancellor,  was  born  in  Paris  20 
October  1866,  the  second  of  the  four  sons 
of  Robert  Ormond  Maugham  and  his  wife, 
Edith  Mary,  daughter  of  Major  Charles 
Snell  who  had  died  in  India  in  1841. 
The  youngest  son  was  the  writer  William 
Somerset  Maugham.  His  grandfather  was 
the  eminent  solicitor  Robert  Maugham 
[q.v.];  his  fathet  was  also  a  solicitor, 
with  a  large  practice  in  Paris  where  he  was 
legal  adviser  to  the  British  Embassy.  One 
of  Maugham's  earliest  memories  was  the 
flight  to  England  as  the  German  army 
approached  the  city,  and  it  was  not  until 
the  Franco-Prussian  war  had  ended  and 
order  had  been  restored  that  they  re- 
turned to  Paris.  There  he  was  educated 
first  by  English  governesses,  then  for  a 
short  time  at  a  lycde,  until  with  his  two 
brothers  he  was  sent  to  Dover  College. 
Before  he  had  left  school  both  his  parents 
had  died  and  it  was  only  by  winning  a 
leaving  school  scholarship  and  a  senior 
mathematical  scholarship  at  Trinity  Hall 
that  he  was  able  to  go  to  Cambridge 
where,  as  he  wrote,  he  had  very  little 
money  and  no  one  to  assist  or  encourage 
him  in  making  a  success  in  his  chosen 
profession  of  the  bar.  In  the  mathematical 
tripos  of  1888  he  was  a  senior  optime. 
His  success  might  have  been  greater  had 
he  not  given  himself  wholeheartedly  first 
to  rugby  football,  then  to  rowing.  He 
rowed  No.  7  in  the  victorious  Cambridge 
boats  of  1888  and  1889  and  was  regarded 
as  an  outstanding  oar  of  his  generation. 
For  his  future  career  he  prepared  himself 
by  speaking  at  the  Union  of  which  he  be- 
came president  in  1889. 

In  1890  Maugham  was  called  to  the  bar 
by  Lincoln's  Inn.  His  choice  of  inn  was 
determined  by  his  friendship  formed  in 
his  first  days  at  Trinity  Hall  with  Mark 
(later  Lord)  Romer,  son  of  Sir  Robert 
Romer  [qq.v.].  Apart  from  his  valuable 
connection  with  the  Romer  family, 
cemented  by  his  marriage  in  1896  to 
Romer's  sister  Helen,  Maugham  had  no 
friends  in  the  law.  His  progress  was  slow : 
'I  shall  never  forget  those  unhappy  days', 
he  wrote.  But  to  such  ability  as  his, 
success  could  not  for  ever  be  denied. 
In  1913  he  took  silk,  attaching  himself  to 
the  court  of  Mr.  Justice  Eve  [q.v.],  and 


by  1928,  when  he  was  appointed  a  judge 
in  the  Chancery  division  of  the  High 
Court  (with  the  customary  knighthood), 
he  had  acquired  one  of  the  largest 
practices  at  the  bar.  As  an  advocate 
he  was  forceful  and  lucid,  courteous,  and 
scrupulously  fair,  and  his  wide  knowledge 
of  the  law  and  careful  study  of  the  facts 
of  the  particular  case  made  him  as 
formidable  an  opponent  as  any  member 
of  the  bar. 

In  1934  Maugham  was  promoted  to  the 
Court  of  Appeal  and  sworn  of  the  Privy 
Council ;  in  the  next  year  he  was  appointed 
a  lord  of  appeal  in  ordinary,  with  a  life 
peerage.  As  a  judge  in  the  Chancery 
division  and  in  the  appellate  courts 
Maugham  deserved  and  won  a  high 
reputation.  The  qualities  which  gave  him 
pre-eminence  at  the  bar  did  not  leave  him 
on  the  bench.  The  same  thoroughness  and 
courtesy,  joined  with  a  conspicuous 
determination  to  do  justice,  made  him  an 
ideal  judge.  It  may  be  true  that  the 
practitioner  will  seldom  turn  to  one  of 
his  judgements  as  the  locus  classicus  upon 
any  branch  of  the  law,  but  it  is  beyond 
dispute  that  he  made  a  solid  contribution 
to  the  corpus  of  English  law,  particularly 
in  relation  to  such  difficult  subjects  as 
patents  and  trademarks.  Examples  of  his 
thoroughness  and  power  of  lucid  exposi- 
tion may  be  found  in  such  cases  as 
Crofter  Hand  Woven  Harris  Tweed  Co.  v. 
Veitch,  [1942]  A.C.  435,  in  which  it  was 
held  that,  if  the  predominant  purpose  of 
combination  is  the  legitimate  interest 
of  the  persons  combining  and  the  means 
employed  are  not  criminal  or  tortious 
in  themselves,  the  combination  is  not 
unlawful;  or  the  much-debated  case  of 
Liversidge  v.  Anderson,  [1942]  A.C.  206, 
in  which  in  a  discussion  of  Regulation 
18B  of  the  Defence  General  Regulations 
1939  it  was  held  that  a  court  of  law  could 
not  question  the  statement  of  a  secretary 
of  state  that  he  had  reasonable  cause  for 
belief  in  certain  facts;  or  again  in 
Wolstanton  Ltd.  v.  Newcastle-under-Lyme 
Corporation,  [1940]  A.C.  860,  where  an 
alleged  custom  for  the  lord  of  a  manor  to 
get  minerals  beneath  the  surface  of  copy- 
hold or  customary  freehold  lands  without 
making  compensation  for  subsidence  or 
damage  to  buildings  was  held  to  be 
invalid.  In  Sammut  v.  Strickland,  [1938] 
A.C.  678,  delivering  the  judgement  of  the 
Judicial  Committee  of  the  Privy  Council, 
Maugham  made  a  valuable  contribution 
to  constitutional  law  in  his  discussion  of 
the   prerogative   right  of  the   Crown  to 


718 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Maurice 


legislate  for  a  ceded  colony  by  letters 
patent  or  order  in  Council. 

In  March  1938  Maugham  was  invited 
to  become  lord  chancellor  in  place  of  Lord 
Hailsham  [q.v.]  who  was  in  failing  health. 
He  accepted  with  reluctance;  although 
in  1922  Bonar  Law  had  suggested  that 
he  might  become  solicitor-general,  he 
had  been  unable  to  find  a  seat;  he  had 
consequently  no  political  experience  and 
was  of  an  age  at  which  the  new  duties  of 
a  very  onerous  office  might  appear  in- 
supportable. He  was,  however,  persuaded 
to  undertake  them  upon  the  under- 
standing that  in  the  troublesome  state  of 
affairs  then  prevailing  he  might  be  asked 
to  resign  before  the  end  of  the  Govern- 
ment, when  he  would,  if  there  were  a 
vacancy,  return  to  his  former  office.  On 
the  outbreak  of  war  in  September  1939 
he  willingly  and  gracefully  gave  way  to 
Lord  Caldecote  [q.v.];  was  created  a 
viscount;  and  shortly  afterwards  was 
reappointed  a  lord  of  appeal  in  ordinary, 
from  which  office  he  finally  resigned  in 
1941. 

Although  Maugham  did  not  for  long 
occupy  the  Woolsack  he  was  able  to  take 
a  leading  part  in  the  passing  of  several 
important  bills,  notably  the  Coal  Act, 
in  which  117  amendments,  mostly  drafted 
by  him,  were  made  in  the  House  of  Lords, 
and  the  Law  of  Evidence  Act  which  he  had 
introduced  shortly  before  he  became  lord 
chancellor.  Upon  his  resignation  the  leader 
of  the  Labour  Party  in  the  House  of  Lords, 
Lord  Snell  [q.v.],  expressed  appreciation 
of  his  courtesy  and  helpfulness  to  them  in 
their  work. 

While  still  at  the  bar  Maugham  wrote 
The  Case  of  Jean  Calas  (1928),  the  story 
of  a  celebrated  French  judicial  error  in 
1761-2  which  Voltaire  had  long  before 
exposed.  This  involved  much  research  in 
the  libraries  of  France  during  vacations. 
In  1936  he  published  The  Tichborne  Case, 
an  elaborate  review,  upon  which  he  had 
long  been  engaged,  of  the  trial  of  the 
Tichborne  claimant.  To  many  people  it 
may  have  seemed  that  with  this  book  the 
last  word  had  been  said  on  the  subject 
and  that  the  claim  of  Arthur  Orton  [q.v.] 
had  for  ever  been  exploded.  If  so,  they 
have  been  disappointed.  After  his  retire- 
ment Maugham  wrote  a  short  book  called 
The  Truth  About  the  Munich  Crisis  (1944), 
in  which  he  vigorously  refuted  what  he 
deemed  to  have  been  unfair  attacks  upon 
Neville  Chamberlain.  Later,  in  U.N.O. 
and  War  Crimes  (1951),  he  was  moved  to 
challenge  the  theory  that  the  Charter  of 


Nuremberg  was  justified  by  any  rule  of 
international  law.  It  appeared  to  him,  as 
to  Lord  Hankey,  who  wrote  a  postscript 
to  the  book,  that  although  the  judgements 
of  the  Nuremberg  tribunal  might  be 
regarded  as  lawful  in  Germany  during  her 
occupation  by  the  allied  forces,  it  was  a 
misnomer  and  a  dangerous  precedent  to 
treat  them  as  justified  by  international 
law,  the  whole  basis  of  which  rests  on 
the  previous  agreement  of  the  nations 
concerned. 

Finally,  in  1954  Maugham  published  a 
discursive  book  called  At  the  End  of  the 
Day  in  which  he  not  only  reviewed  the 
events  of  his  own  life  but  also  commented 
at  large  on  public  affairs  in  general 
whether  or  not  he  had  played  any  part  in 
them.  The  legal  profession  would  have 
preferred  a  larger  share  to  have  been 
given  to  his  own  life  story. 

During  his  professional  vacations 
Maugham  travelled  widely  both  in 
Europe  and  farther  afield.  He  was  an 
earnest  and  competent  golfer  and  a  fair 
shot,  although  he  had  little  opportunity 
of  indulging  in  this  sport.  In  1896  he 
married  Helen  Mary  (died  1950),  daughter 
of  Sir  Robert  Romer.  They  had  one  son, 
Robert  Cecil  Romer  (born  1916),  who 
succeeded  as  second  viscount  and  who  as 
Robin  Maugham  is  known  as  a  writer; 
and  three  daughters,  all  of  whom  have 
distinguished  themselves  in  literature  or 
art :  Kate  Bruce  and  Diana  Marr-Johnson 
as  writers  and  Honor  Earl  as  a  portrait 
painter.  Maugham  died  in  London  28 
March  1958,  in  his  ninety-second  year. 
There  are  portraits  of  him  by  R.  G.  Eves 
in  Lincoln's  Inn  (of  which  he  was  a 
bencher)  and  by  Sir  Gerald  Kelly  in 
Trinity  Hall  (of  which  he  became  an 
honorary  fellow  in  1928).  A  charcoal 
drawing  by  Honor  Earl  is  in  the  possession 
of  the  family. 

[Viscount  Maugham,  At  the  End  of  the  Day, 
1954;  Robin  Maugham,  Somerset  and  all  the 
Maughams,  1966  ;  The  Times,  24  March  1958 ; 
private  information;  personal  knowledge.] 

SiMONDS. 

MAURICE,  Sir  FREDERICK  BARTON 

(1871-1951),  major-general,  was  born  in 
Dubhn  19  January  1871,  the  eldest  son 
of  (Major-General  Sir)  John  Frederick 
Maurice  [q.v.],  and  grandson  of  Frederick 
Denison  Maurice  [q.v.].  He  was  edu- 
cated at  St.  Paul's  School  and  the  Royal 
Military  College,  Sandhurst,  from  which 
he  was  commissioned  in  1892  in  the 
Derbyshire  Regiment  (later  renamed  the 


719 


Maurice 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Sherwood  Foresters).  While  a  subaltern 
he  served  as  aide-de-camp  to  his  father 
and  with  his  battalion  in  the  Tirah 
campaign  of  1897-8.  He  took  part  in  the 
South  African  war  as  special  service 
officer  and  as  D.A.A.G.,  and  was  men- 
tioned in  dispatches  and  promoted  brevet 
major  at  the  age  of  twenty-nine.  On  his 
return  to  England  he  graduated  at  the 
Staff  College  and  held  a  number  of  staff 
appointments  including  service  at  the 
War  Office  in  the  directorate  of  staff  duties 
under  Sir  Douglas  (later  Earl)  Haig  [q.v.]. 

In  1913  Maurice  went  as  instructor  to 
the  Staff  College  where  his  father  had  been 
professor  of  military  history  over  twenty 
years  earlier.  For  the  first  nine  months 
Sir  William  Robertson  [q.v.]  was  com- 
mandant, and  a  close  friendship  began 
which  had  a  marked  influence  on  Maurice's 
subsequent  career.  When  war  broke  out 
in  1914  he  went  to  France  with  the 
headquarters  of  the  3rd  division,  and 
during  the  retreat  from  Mons  was  pro- 
moted to  be  head  of  the  general  staff  of 
the  division.  Officers  who  were  serving 
with  him  have  recorded  his  coolness  in 
action  and  the  clarity  and  speed  with 
which  he  dictated  orders. 

At  the  end  of  January  1915  Robertson 
became  chief  of  the  general  staff,  British 
Expeditionary  Force,  and  a  few  months 
later  he  selected  Maurice  to  take  charge  of 
the  operations  section  at  G.H.Q.  Maurice 
thoroughly  understood  his  chief's  method 
of  work  and  served  him  admirably 
throughout  1915.  He  was  appointed  C.B. 
and  promoted  to  brevet  colonel.  When 
Robertson  became  chief  of  the  imperial 
general  staff  in  December  1915  he  took 
Maurice  with  him  to  the  War  Office  as 
director  of  military  operations  with  the 
rank  of  major-general,  and  they  continued 
in  the  complete  accord  which  had  marked 
their  association  in  France.  For  his 
services  Maurice  was  appointed  K.C.M.G. 
in  January  1918.  In  February  Robertson 
relinquished  his  appointment  and  Maurice 
did  the  same  on  21  April. 

Shortly  afterwards  Maurice  brought  his 
military  career  to  an  abrupt  end  by 
writing  a  letter  to  the  London  newspapers 
in  which  he  accused  Lloyd  George's 
government  of  deceiving  Parliament  and 
the  country  about  the  strength  of  the 
British  Army  on  the  western  front,  the 
extension  of  the  British  line  there,  and 
other  matters.  Robertson  and  Maurice 
had  for  long  been  at  loggerheads  with  the 
prime  minister  whom  they  distrusted  both 
as  a  man  and  as  an  amateur  strategist. 


They  consistently  maintained  that  the 
western  front  was  the  decisive  theatre 
but  Lloyd  George,  shocked  by  the 
terrible  casualties  in  Haig's  battles,  was 
ever  seeking  some  more  effective  and  less 
costly  strategy  and  was  strongly  attracted 
by  the  eastern  policy  of  defeating  Germany 
by  'knocking  away  the  props'.  He  had  no  J 
confidence  in  his  military  advisers  and  he  I 
would  gladly  have  dismissed  Haig  had  he 
felt  strong  enough  to  do  so. 

The  Cabinet  had  underrated  Robertson's 
warnings  of  the  impending  German  attack 
in  the  west,  and  had  not  acted  upon  his 
recommendations  for  reinforcing  Haig  and 
raising  more  men  for  the  army.  When  the  J 
Germans  broke  through  our  lines  in  I 
March  and  drove  us  back  almost  to  the 
Channel  ports,  the  Government  was 
charged  with  having  contributed  to  these 
disasters  by  failing  to  strengthen  the  army 
in  France  with  drafts  which  were  avail- 
able at  home.  Lloyd  George  defended 
himself  and  his  ministers  by  stating  on 
9  April  1918  that  on  1  January  1918 
Haig's  army  was  'considerably  stronger' 
than  it  had  been  on  1  January  1917. 
Maurice's  letter,  published  on  7  May, 
gave  the  direct  lie  to  this  and  other 
statements  made  by  the  Government. 

The  military  reverses  in  France  had 
alarmed  the  whole  nation  and  this 
indictment  came  at  a  time  when  the 
general  direction  of  the  war  had,  for 
some  months,  been  under  severe  criticism 
in  Parliament  and  the  press.  Formidable 
forces  existed  which  were  ready  to  combine 
against  Lloyd  George,  and,  as  he  himself 
recorded,  the  controversy  which  ensued 
threatened  the  life  of  his  Government. 
The  debate  on  the  Maurice  letter  took 
place  on  9  May  and  in  it  Lloyd  George 
defended  himself  successfully  and  by  a 
majority  of  almost  three  to  one  defeated 
the  Opposition  motion  which  amounted 
to  a  vote  of  censure.  He  reaffirmed  his 
statement  of  9  April  and  a  further  state- 
ment made  by  J.  I.  Macpherson  (later 
Lord  Strathcarron,  q.v.),  the  under- 
secretary for  war,  on  18  April  with  regard 
to  the  strength  of  Haig's  army.  These,  he 
said,  were  based  upon  figures  supplied  to 
him  by  the  War  Office,  which  indeed  was 
true. 

The  figures  on  which  Lloyd  George  had 
based  his  statement  of  9  April  were  his 
own  analysis  of  a  War  Office  statistical 
return.  Maurice  considered  that  Lloyd 
George  had  deceived  the  House  of 
Commons  both  by  misuse  of  the  statistics 
of  the  non-combatants  as  distinguished 


720 


p 


D.N.B    1951-1060 


Maurice 


from  the  combatant  strength  of  the  army 
and  by  implying  that  there  had  been  no 
diminution  between  January  and  March 
1918.  This  was  the  foundation  of  the  main 
charge  of  his  letter.  On  18  April  Maurice's 
department  provided  material  for  the 
answer  by  Macpherson  to  a  question  in 
the  House  on  the  point  of  combatant  as 
distinct  from  non-combatant  forces.  But 
in  these  figures  the  strength  of  the  army 
in  Italy  was  inadvertently  included  in 
that  of  the  army  in  France.  A  return  from 
the  adjutant-general's  department  of 
7  May  showed  a  decrease  in  the  fighting 
forces  in  France  in  January  1918  as 
compared  with  the  position  in  1917  of 
some  95,000,  of  which  some  70,000  were 
infantry.  It  now  seems  certain  that  these 
figures  were  known  to  Lloyd  George 
before  the  debate  of  9  May,  but  that  he 
chose  to  ignore  them.  A  copy  of  the  return 
was  sent  by  the  War  Office  to  10  Downing 
Street  where  on  the  morning  of  9  May 
Philip  Kerr  (later  the  Marquess  of 
Lothian,  q.v.),  the  prime  minister's  secre- 
tary, on  noting  the  discrepancy,  made  in- 
quiries of  the  deputy  director  of  military 
operations.  Only  then  was  it  that  the  mis- 
take in  the  figures  provided  on  18  April 
was  discovered.  Kerr  was  informed  before 
limcheon  on  the  9th.  Nevertheless  in  that 
afternoon's  debate  Lloyd  George  relied 
upon  the  incorrect  figures.  After  the 
debate  he  was  officially  informed  by 
Macpherson  and  Lord  Milner  [q.v.]  of  the 
mistake,  of  which  he  already  knew,  but 
he  took  no  action  to  correct  it,  saying 
that  he  could  not  be  held  responsible  for 
an  error  made  by  General  Maurice's 
department. 

Although  Maurice  was  still  technically 
in  charge  of  his  department  on  18  April 
his  successor  was  already  in  the  War 
Office  and  Maurice  himself  knew  nothing 
of  the  question  and  answer  until  Lloyd 
George  repeated  the  inaccurate  figures 
during  the  debate  of  9  May.  He  knew 
that  the  prime  minister,  although  informed 
of  the  mistake  after  the  debate,  took  no 
action  to  put  the  matter  right.  It  was  not 
apparently  until  December  1919  that  he 
learned  that  correct  figures  had  been 
supplied  to  the  prime  minister  before  the 
debate.  Many  years  later,  after  both 
Lloyd  George  and  Maurice  were  dead. 
Lord  Beaverbrook  pubhshed  an  extract 
from  a  diary  kept  by  Miss  Frances 
Stevenson,  later  Lloyd  George's  second 
wife,  which  recorded  the  burning  by  (Sir) 
J.  T.  Davies  of  a  paper  from  the  D.M.O. 
found  forgotten  in  a  dispatch  box.  Much 


publicity  was  given  to  the  *burnt  paper' 
and  it  was  supposed  Lloyd  George  had 
never  received  the  revised  figures;  but 
further  evidence  suggests  that  this  was 
another  copy  of  the  adjutant-general's 
return  which  had  been  sent  to  the 
secretary  of  the  War  Cabinet. 

Whether  Maurice  hoped  to  bring  the 
Government  down  when  he  wrote  his 
letter  must  remain  one  of  the  enigmas  of 
history.  Beyond  a  shadow  of  doubt  he 
was  not  a  party  to  any  intrigue,  military 
or  political,  to  oust  Lloyd  George. 
Whether  he  was  right  or  wrong  in  what  he 
did,  there  can  be  no  difference  of  opinion 
regarding  his  supreme  moral  courage  and 
sense  of  duty.  His  action  was  instigated 
by  a  sincere  belief  confirmed  by  a  visit  to 
France  that  the  morale  of  the  troops  was 
in  danger  of  being  undermined  by  attempts 
to  shift  responsibility  for  the  March 
disaster  on  to  the  shoulders  of  the 
military  leaders  and  by  the  conviction 
that  a  plot  was  being  hatched  to  remove 
Haig.  To  the  end  of  his  life  Maurice 
believed  that  he  had  saved  Haig,  whose 
only  reaction  at  the  time  was  a  character- 
istic disapproval  of  conduct  which  he 
regarded  as  mistaken  and  improper. 

Before  Maurice's  letter  appeared  in  the 
press,  he  wrote  to  his  daughter  Nancy, 
who  was  then  seventeen,  telling  her  with 
moving  sincerity  that  he  fully  realized 
what  the  consequences  might  be  for 
himself  and  his  family.  He  ended:  'I  am 
persuaded  that  I  am  doing  what  is  right, 
and  once  that  is  so,  nothing  else  matters 
to  a  man.  That  is  I  believe  what  Christ 
meant  when  he  told  us  to  forsake  father 
and  mother  and  children  for  his  sake.' 

The  Maurice  debate  had  a  lasting 
importance  in  pohtical  history,  far  tran- 
scending the  immediate  issue.  It  marked 
a  turning-point  in  Lloyd  George's  career, 
for  his  triumph  left  him  in  a  position  of 
undisputed  authority.  But  in  the  sequel 
the  debate  had,  as  Lloyd  George  put  it, 
*a  disruptive  effect  upon  the  fortunes  of 
the  Liberal  Party',  by  bringing  about  the 
emphatic  cleavage  between  his  followers 
and  those  of  Asquith. 

In  writing  the  letter  Maurice  had  com- 
mitted a  grave  breach  of  discipline  which 
could  not  be  condoned  or  overlooked  by 
the  Army  Council  however  much  the  mem- 
bers may  have  appreciated  his  motives.  He 
was  at  once  retired  from  the  army,  and 
was  refused  a  court  martial  or  inquiry. 

He  tackled  the  problem  of  earning  his 
living  with  courage  and  enterprise.  He 
turned  to  teaching  and  writing  and  in 


721 


Maurice 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


both  he  achieved  considerable  success. 
From  1922  to  1933  he  was  principal  of 
the  Working  Men's  College,  which  his 
grandfather  had  helped  to  found  in  1854. 
In  1927  he  was  appointed  professor  of 
military  studies  at  London  University, 
and  a  year  later  he  became  chairman 
of  the  adult  education  committee  of 
the  Board  of  Education.  He  became 
D.Lit.,  London,  in  1930.  From  1933  to 
1944  he  was  principal  of  the  East  London 
College  (later  Queen  Mary  College), 
university  of  London,  where  he  was  not 
only  highly  successful  in  maintaining 
the  academic  standards  but  also  made  a 
great  contribution  to  the  development  of 
the  social  life  of  both  staff  and  students. 
He  became  a  fellow  of  Queen  Mary  College 
in  1946  and  was  a  member  of  the  univer- 
sity senate.  He  was  made  an  honorary 
LL.D.  of  Cambridge  in  1926,  was  Lees 
Knowles  lecturer  at  Trinity  College  in 
1925-6,  and  was  elected  an  honorary 
fellow  of  King's  College  in  1944  in 
recognition  of  the  good  relations  he 
established  between  the  colleges  when 
Queen  Mary  College  was  moved  to 
Cambridge  in  the  war. 

Maurice  published  a  number  of  admir- 
able historical  studies  including  books  on 
the  RussO'Turkish  War  1877  (1905)  and 
Robert  E.  Lee  (1925).  He  wrote  a  life 
of  his  father,  and  collaborated  with 
Sir  George  Arthur  in  a  biography  of 
Lord  Wolseley  (1924).  He  also  wrote  bio- 
graphies of  Lord  Haldane  (2  vols.  1937-9) 
and  Lord  Rawlinson  (1928).  Among  his 
other  books  are  Governments  and  War 
(1926),  British  Strategy  (1929,  based  on  a 
series  of  lectures).  The  16th  Foot  (1931), 
a  History  of  the  Scots  Guards  (2  vols.,  1934), 
and  The  Armistices  of  1918  (1943).  Forty 
Days  in  1914  (1919)  is  a  particularly  good 
study  of  the  B.E.F.  in  the  opening  cam- 
paign of  the  war ;  The  Last  Four  Months 
(1919)  is  hardly  on  the  same  level.  He  was 
for  a  time  military  correspondent  to  the 
Daily  Chronicle  and  the  Daily  News,  and 
was  a  contributor  to  many  magazines 
and  reviews  and  also  to  the  Cambridge 
Modern  History.  His  contributions  to  this 
Dictionary  include  the  notices  of  Haig, 
Robertson,  and  Rawlinson. 

Maurice  took  a  deep  interest  in  the 
British  Legion  and  was  indefatigable  in 
his  work  for  the  welfare  of  ex-servicemen. 
He  became  its  honorary  treasurer  in  1930 
and  was  president  in  1932-47.  In  Sep- 
tember 1938  he  flew  to  Berlin  and  offered 
the  services  of  the  Legion  to  Hitler  for 
duty  in  the  plebiscite  areas  of  Czecho- 


slovakia, with  the  result  that  a  contingent 
of  1,200  ex-servicemen  was  assembled 
before  the  plebiscite  was  called  off.  A  year 
later,  three  days  before  Great  Britain 
entered  the  war,  he  broadcast  to  the 
soldiers  of  the  German  Army  on  behalf  of 
the  Legion,  appealing  to  them  not  to  bring 
about  another  fight  with  England  by 
attacking  Poland.  He  was  colonel  of  his 
regiment  from  1935  to  1941 ;  was  a  com- 
mander of  the  Legion  of  Honour  and  of  the 
Order  of  the  Crown  of  Belgium,  and  had 
the  Russian  Order  of  St.  Stanislas  and  the 
French  croix  de  guerre. 

In  appearance  Maurice  was  tall  and  fair, 
a  little  bent,  with  a  round  face  and  a 
boxer's  flattened-out  nose.  He  had  a 
rather  abrupt  manner  and  he  spoke  and 
wrote  with  great  clarity  and  conciseness. 
Those  with  whom  he  served  were  im- 
pressed by  his  efficiency,  loyalty,  and 
capacity  for  friendship.  He  loved  poetry 
and  when  he  was  incapacitated  by  illness 
in  his  last  years  he  would  recite  aloud 
favourite  passages  from  Tennyson,  Words- 
worth, and  Kipling.  As  a  soldier  his  talents 
were  those  of  a  staff  officer  rather  than  a 
commander.  He  inherited  a  family  tradi- 
tion of  high  idealism  and  readiness  to 
sacrifice  personal  interests  to  the  cause  of 
truth,  and  the  letter  which  ended  his 
military  career  was  in  that  tradition. 

He  married  in  1899  Helen  Margaret 
(died  1942),  daughter  of  Frederick  Howard 
Marsh,  later  professor  of  surgery  at  Cam- 
bridge and  master  of  Downing  College, 
and  sister  of  (Sir)  Edward  Marsh  [q.v.]. 
They  had  one  son  and  four  daughters, 
one  of  whom,  Joan  Violet  Robinson, 
became  professor  of  economics  at  Cam- 
bridge in  1965.  Maurice  died  at  his  home 
in  Cambridge  19  May  1951.  A  portrait  by 
Henry  Lamb  is  in  Queen  Mary  College. 

[The  Times,  21  May  1951 ;  Westminster 
Gazette,  passim,  1922;  Spectator,  2,  16,  23 
November  and  7  December  1956 ;  Sir  Frederick 
Maurice,  Intrigues  of  the  War  (preface  by  the 
Marquess  of  Crewe),  1922;  David  Lloyd 
George,  War  Memoirs,  vol.  v,  1936 ;  Sir  Edward 
Spears,  Prelude  to  Victory,  1939;  Lord 
Beaverbrook,  Men  and  Power,  1956;  S.  W. 
Roskill,  Hankey,  Man  of  Secrets,  vol.  i,  1970; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

John  Kennedy. 

MAYOR,  OSBORNE  HENRY  (1888- 
1951),  better  known  as  the  playwright 
James  Bridie,  was  born  in  Glasgow 
3  January  1888,  the  eldest  son  of  Henry 
Alexander  Mavor,  a  man  of  many  gifts 
who  made  a  comfortable  living  as  an 
engineer,   and  his  wife,   Janet  Osborne. 


722 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Mavor 


*The  houses  in  which  the  Mavors  lived  had 
an  atmosphere  of  dignity  and  good  man- 
ners and  a  smell  of  old  books  and  ink.'  So 
wrote  O.  H.  Mavor  in  One  Way  of  Living 
(1939),  an  autobiography  which  refuses, 
with  charm  and  gaiety,  to  endow  its 
subject  with  the  importance  he  deserved. 
Educated  at  Glasgow  Academy,  he  took 
advantage  of  the  solid  comfort  in  which 
he  had  grown  up  to  spend  nine  or  ten 
years  at  Glasgow  University,  ostensibly 
as  a  medical  student,  but  more  remarkably 
as  a  source  of  high  spirits,  light  verse, 
ingenious  ragging,  and  talkative  and 
persistent  friendships :  one  of  his  fellow 
students,  and  a  friend  until  death,  was 
Walter  Elliot  [q.v.]. 

Having  qualified  in  1913  Mavor,  hke 
Elliot,  joined  the  Royal  Army  Medical 
Corps  and  the  war  of  1914  with  an  en- 
thusiasm typical  of  his  generation.  This 
enthusiasm  somehow  survived  service  in 
Flanders,  was  depressed  in  Mesopotamia, 
but  revived  in  the  romantic  circumstances 
of  the  expedition  which  Major-General 
Dunsterville  led  from  northern  Persia  to 
the  Caspian  shore  of  Russia.  Some  twenty 
years  later,  at  the  age  of  fifty-one,  Mavor 
returned  to  the  R.A.M.C.  and  a  second 
war,  and  saw  brief  service  in  Norway. 
Although  by  then  he  had  found  his  true 
vocation,  it  was  not  so  exclusive  as  to 
despise  a  latent  romanticism  or  reject  an 
old-fashioned  call  to  duty. 

As  a  practitioner  and  teacher  his  medical 
career  was  respectable :  he  was  a  consulting 
physician  to  the  Victoria  Infirmary  and 
for  some  time  professor  of  medicine  in 
the  Anderson  College  of  Glasgow.  But  the 
work  for  which  he  is  known  began,  or  had 
its  public  beginnings,  in  1928,  when  he 
wrote  a  play  called  The  Sunlight  Sonata 
which  bewildered  a  Glasgow  audience  and 
included  in  its  dramatis  personae  Beelze- 
bub, some  ebullient  Deadly  Sins,  and 
three  starchy  redeeming  Graces.  This  was 
a  romping  prologue  to  the  vigorous, 
imaginative,  and  wonderfully  diversified 
ceuvre  of  the  next  twenty  years. 

He  wrote  in  all  some  forty  plays,  under 
the  pseudonym  James  Bridie,  and  entered 
the  great  world  of  the  theatre  under  the 
auspices  of  Sir  Barry  Jackson,  who  pre- 
sented The  Switchback  in  Birmingham 
in  1929  and  at  the  Malvern  Festival  in 
1931.  The  Anatomist,  with  Henry  Ainley 
[q.v.]  in  the  leading  part,  had  a  London 
production  in  the  latter  year,  and  Bridie 
was  involved  in  an  argument  which  was  to 
becloud  his  reputation  for  the  rest  of  his 
life.  It  was  said — by  James  Agate  [q.v.] 


the  first  time — and  endlessly  repeated, 
that  he  could  not  construct  a  last  act. 
The  accusation  may  not  be  logically 
maintained,  for  his  last  acts  were  always 
logical,  but  what  may  readily  be  admitted 
is  that  they  did  not  always  meet  the 
expectation  of  critics  or  of  an  audience 
anticipating  a  conventional  gesture  of 
conclusion.  The  eponym  of  The  Anatomist 
was  Dr.  Knox,  the  teacher  of  anatomy 
whose  cadavers  were  supplied  by  Burke 
and  Hare.  In  1933  Bridie  again  found  a 
subject  for  drama  in  his  familiar  medical 
world  and  wrote  one  of  his  best  plays, 
A  Sleeping  Clergyman,  in  which,  declaring 
that  'to  make  for  righteousness  is  a  bio- 
logical necessity',  he  admitted  his  sanguine 
temperament  and  the  stubborn  remnant 
of  a  faith  which  his  Calvinist  forebears 
had  bred  in  him.  It  was  one  of  his  private 
jokes  to  pretend  that  he  kept  the  Calvin- 
ist belief;  more  certainly,  an  invaluable 
part  of  his  heritage  was  his  profound 
knowledge  of  the  Bible. 

His  biblical  plays — Tobias  and  the  Angel 
(1930),  Jonah  and  the  Whale  (1932), 
Susannah  and  the  Elders  (1937) — are  the 
most  delightful  of  his  writings,  instinct 
with  wit,  insight  into  character,  and 
essential  common  sense ;  or,  perhaps, 
uncommon  understanding.  They  are, 
moreover,  written  with  a  gracious  and 
fluent  command  of  language,  and  his 
dialogue  demonstrates  to  perfection  how 
phrases  may  be  carpentered  to  reveal  the 
precise  and  necessary  meaning  of  their 
words.  He  was  a  master  of  polite  English, 
he  was  at  home  on  the  borderland  of 
poetry,  and  he  could  make  his  Scotch 
characters  talk  as  convincingly  as  did 
Sir  Walter  at  his  best. 

As  popular  successes,  Mr.  Bolfry  (1943), 
a  brilliant  and  immensely  comic  sermon 
with  Alastair  Sim  in  the  pulpit,  and 
Daphne  Laureola  (1949),  in  which  Dame 
Edith  Evans  played  with  entrancing 
virtuosity,  were  outstanding.  A  good  play. 
The  Queen's  Comedy,  was  insufficiently 
rewarded  at  the  Edinburgh  Festival  in 
1950 ;  The  Baikie  Charivari  (1952),  his  last 
work,  is  admittedly  difficult,  and,  unique 
in  his  oeuvre,  darkened  by  pessimism  and 
anger ;  but  Walter  Elliot  declared  it  to  be 
Scotland's  Peer  Gynt. 

Of  Bridie's  importance  to  Scotland,  as 
well  as  to  the  Scottish  theatre — which, 
indeed,  hardly  existed  before  his  time,  and 
has  shown  no  great  liveliness  since  his 
death — ^there  is  no  doubt  whatever.  He 
was  an  innovator,  and  a  creator  of  more 
than   words   and    dramatic    scenes:    he 


723 


Mavor 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


treated  an  ambiance  of  confidence,  gaiety, 
and  affection,  and  while  he  might  des- 
cribe his  fellow  man  as  'a  droll  wee 
slug  wi'  the  shifty  e'e',  he  loved  all 
life  and  welcomed  all  sorts  and  kinds 
of  his  fellow  men  for  their  comical 
and  unexpected  contributions  to  it. 
Although  fundamentally  serious,  passion- 
ately devoted  to  the  Citizens'  Theatre 
which  he  established  in  Glasgow  in  1943, 
and  most  patiently  concerned  with  the 
improvement  of  young  writers  whom  his 
work  had  inspired,  Bridie  never  let 
solemnity  darken  his  utterance  or  magnify 
his  personality.  He  thought  well  of  his 
work,  but  preferred  to  live  in  the  relaxed 
and  easy  temper  which  his  natural  genial- 
ity prompted.  Without  protestation  of 
virtue  or  inhibition  of  his  fine  talent  for 
invective,  he  was  essentially  a  good  man, 
and  the  clarity,  the  fine  manners,  and  the 
fun  which  pervade  his  writings  were  all 
reflections  of  his  intrinsic  charity. 

Bridie  himself  was  a  man  of  no  great 
physical  attraction,  but  his  appearance  in 
maturity  acquired  a  ponderous,  craggy, 
and  magnificent  benignity.  In  compensa- 
tion for  his  own  plainness,  he  married  in 
1923  Rona  Bremner,  a  girl  of  notable 
beauty,  who  had  loved  him  all  her  life. 
They  had  two  sons,  one  of  whom,  serving 
with  the  Lothians  and  Border  Horse,  was 
killed  in  France  in  1944 ;  the  other,  having 
qualified  and  practised  in  medicine,  chose 
to  exemplify  the  proverb  Bon  chien  chasse 
de  race  by  taking  to  the  theatre  and 
dramatic  criticism. 

Bridie  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1946 
and  died  in  Edinburgh  29  January  1951. 
In  1939  he  received  the  honorary  degree 
of  LL.D.  from  Glasgow  University  where 
there  is  a  bronze  bust  of  him  by  Loris 
Rey.  A  water-colour  self-portrait  is  in  the 
possession  of  Mrs.  Bannister ;  a  terracotta 
by  Benno  Schotz  belongs  to  the  Arts 
Council,  Scottish  committee ;  an  oil  paint- 
ing by  Stanley  Cursiter,  showing  Bridie 
in  conversation  with  other  Scottish 
authors  (Edwin  Muir,  q.v.,  Neil  Gunn,  Eric 
Linklater)  is  in  the  Glasgow  City  Art 
Gallery. 

[James  Bridie,  Some  Talk  of  Alexander, 
1926,  and  One  Way  of  Living,  1939 ;  Winifred 
Bannister,  James  Bridie  and  his  Theatre, 
1955 ;  personal  knowledge.]  Eric  Linklater. 

MAWSON,  Sir  DOUGLAS  (1882-1958), 
scientist  and  explorer,  was  bom  at  Shipley, 
near  Bradford  in  Yorkshire,  5  May  1882, 
the  son  of  Robert  Ellis  Mawson,  who  came 
from  sturdy  yeoman  stock,  and  his  wife, 


Margaret  Ann  Moore,  of  the  Isle  of  Man. 
His  colouring  and  striking  physique 
seemed  to  indicate  Viking  blood.  During 
Mawson' s  childhood  the  family  moved  to 
Australia ;  he  was  educated  at  the  famous 
Fort  Street  School  and  the  university  of 
Sydney  where  in  1902  he  obtained  his 
B.E.  in  mining  and  a  demonstratorship 
in  chemistry,  and  in  1905  his  B.Sc. 
During  this  period  he  came  under  the 
influence  of  Professor  A.  Liversidge,  who 
interested  him  in  chemical  geology,  and 
of  his  lifelong  friend  (Sir)  Edgeworth  David 
(whose  notice  he  subsequently  contri- 
buted to  this  Dictionary). 

In  the  New  Hebrides  in  1903  Mawson 
carried  out  geological  investigations  in 
dangerous  jungles  infested  by  hostile 
natives  upon  which  he  subsequently 
reported.  In  1905  he  went  as  a  lecturer 
in  mineralogy  and  petrology  to  Adelaide 
where  he  took  his  D.Sc.  in  1909  and 
served  as  first  professor  of  geology  and 
mineralogy  from  1920  until  1952. 

On  David's  recommendation  Mawson 
was  invited  to  join  the  1907  expedition  of 
(Sir)  Ernest  Shackleton  [q.v.]  as  a  physi- 
cist. Sailing  to  Ross  Sea  in  Nimrod 
Mawson  was  chiefly  concerned  with 
geomagnetic  and  auroral  studies,  but  he 
opened  his  outstanding  contribution  to 
Antarctic  exploration  by  two  notable 
achievements  with  David :  the  ascent  and 
geological  examination  of  the  active  vol- 
canic cone  of  Mount  Erebus  (1908)  and  the 
attainment  of  the  south  magnetic  pole 
(1909),  a  success  which  demanded  a 
pioneer  ascent  of  the  high  and  bitter 
Antarctic  plateaux  and  the  man-hauling 
of  sledges  for  some  1,300  miles.  Captain 
R.  F.  Scott  [q.v.]  asked  Mawson  to  join 
his  last  and  fatal  expedition  to  the  Pole, 
but  the  scientific  and  mechanical  age  of 
Antarctic  exploration  was  succeeding  the 
'heroic  period'  and  Mawson  preferred  to 
concentrate  on  the  scientific  appraisal  of 
the  coastlands  of  what  was  to  become  the 
Australian  sector.  He  organized  and  led 
the  noted  Australasian  Antarctic  Expedi- 
tion of  1911-14.  Sailing  in  the  Aurora 
(Captain  J.  K.  Davis)  Mawson  left  a  wire- 
less station  at  Macquarie  Island  under 
G.  F.  Ainsworth  and  in  the  continent 
established  his  own  main  base  at  Cape 
Denison  in  what  was  later  to  become 
George  V  Land  and  that  of  J.  R.  F.  Wild 
[q.v.]  on  the  Shackleton  Ice  Shelf  in  Queen 
Mary  Land  farther  west.  Davis  and  the 
land  parties  explored  nearly  2,000  miles 
of  coastline  while  sledge  parties  traversed 
some  4,000  miles  in  the  coastlands  and 


724 


D.N.B.  1051-1060 


Mawson 


hinterlands  gaining  scientific  information 
of  great  value.  In  George  V  Land  the 
explorers  encountered  one  of  the  most 
stormy  and  crevasse-imperilled  regions 
of  the  world ;  on  one  inland  sledging  ex- 
pedition Mawson  lost  both  his  companions, 
Xavier  Mertz  and  B.  E.  S.  Ninnis,  and 
only  survived  himself  by  the  exercise 
of  iron  determination,  superb  physique, 
and  the  unfailing  courage  evident  in  all  his 
expeditions.  His  return  to  base  was  so 
delayed  that  the  party  was  obliged  to 
stay  another  winter  before  they  could  be 
relieved. 

The  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  naturaUy 
submerged  the  achievements  of  the 
expedition  and  delayed  the  publication 
of  the  valuable  scientific  information  it 
had  secured.  Later,  however,  the  reports 
on  geography,  oceanography,  glaciology, 
biology,  terrestrial  magnetism,  and  other 
scientific  subjects  proved  of  major  impor- 
tance. In  the  meantime  Mawson  enlisted 
for  war  service;  was  promoted  major; 
carried  out  important  work  with  ex- 
plosives and  supervised  the  supply  of 
munitions  to  various  countries,  including 
Russia,  which  he  visited. 

After  the  war  international  rivalry 
developed  in  the  Antarctic,  due  mainly 
to  the  growth  of  the  whaling  industry 
based  on  improved  methods  of  locating  and 
killing  the  mammals  and  on  huge  diesel- 
engined  factory  ships.  In  1923  Britain 
established  the  Ross  Dependency  under 
New  Zealand  to  preserve  her  whaling 
rights  and  licence  fees;  the  Australian 
Government  secretly,  and  Mawson  openly, 
urged  the  annexation  of  Antarctica  from 
the  Ross  Dependency  to  Enderby  Land, 
mainly  on  account  of  the  eastward 
advance  of  the  Norwegian  whaling  fleets. 
Britain  reached  a  secret  agreement  with 
Norway  under  which  that  country  would 
respect  the  lands  discovered  by  Britons 
in  this  sector  in  return  for  British  recogni- 
tion of  the  Norwegian  annexation  of 
Peter  I  and  Bouvet  islands,  which  had 
been  discovered  by  the  Russians  and  the 
French.  This  arrangement,  however,  did 
not  protect  the  unknown  coast  between 
Wild's  area  of  operations  in  Queen  Mary 
Land  and  Enderby  and  Kemp  Lands. 
Britain  refused  to  annex  the  region  without 
the  dispatch  of  a  further  exploring  ex- 
pedition which  was  organized  by  Mawson 
with  the  help  of  private  supporters  and 
the  Governments  of  Britain,  Australia, 
and  New  Zealand,  and  was  known  as 
Banzare  (1929-31). 

Lars  Christensen,  the  great  Norwegian 


scientific  whaler,  and  Mawson,  in  Scott's 
old  steam  vessel  Discovery,  now  both  had 
expeditions  at  sea,  nominally  with  scien* 
tific  but  also  with  territorial  objectives. 
In  an  almost  romantic  climax  Mawson, 
after  conducting  scientific  work  on  Ker- 
guelen,  possibly  sighted  Princess  Elizabeth 
Land  in  December  1929;  certainly  dis- 
covered MacRobertson  Land,  which  he 
named  after  his  principal  financial  sup- 
porter (Sir)  MacPherson  Robertson,  and 
landing  at  Proclamation  Island  in  Enderby 
Land,  annexed  what  became  the  west- 
ern end  of  the  Australian  sector.  The 
Norwegian  explorer,  Riiser  Larsen  in 
Norvegia,  now  arrived  from  the  west 
where  he  had  been  coaling  after  reach- 
ing and  proclaiming  the  annexation  of 
Enderby  Land,  an  action  which  the 
Norwegians  repudiated.  The  rival  explor- 
ers agreed  to  work  westwards  and  east- 
wards respectively ;  the  Norwegian  turned 
and  steamed  westward  to  conduct  explor- 
ations which  helped  to  give  his  country 
the  vast  territory  of  Queen  Maud  Land. 

In  the  following  year  Mawson  landed 
at  the  scene  of  his  earlier  explorations 
in  George  V  Land,  which  he  annexed. 
Discovery  and  her  aircraft  then  made  a 
sporadic  examination  of  the  coastline  right 
around  to  Princess  Elizabeth  Land,  and  to 
the  Mackenzie  Sea  coast  of  MacRobertson 
Land  which  the  party  discovered  only 
two  days  before  the  Norwegians.  Landing 
at  Scullin  Monolith  in  East,  and  at  Cape 
Bruce  in  West,  MacRobertson  Land, 
Mawson  proclaimed  further  annexations. 

The  expedition  had  now  fulfilled  the 
requirements  of' the  British  Government 
which  in  1933  annexed,  with  the  exception 
of  Adelie  Land,  the  vast  territory  of 
nearly  two  and  a  half  million  square  miles 
between  the  Ross  Dependency  and  Ender- 
by Land,  and  handed  it  to  Australia. 
Although  the  United  States  and  Russia 
refused  to  recognize  any  annexation  of 
Antarctic  territory  unless  accompanied 
by  occupation,  it  may  be  fairly  said  that 
Mawson  staked  for  the  Commonwealth  a 
legal  and  widely  admitted  claim  to  the 
Australian  Antarctic. 

The  Banzare  expedition  also  gained 
notable  scientific  results  although  publi- 
cation was  again  delayed  by  the  world- 
wide economic  depression  and  the  out- 
break of  war  in  1939.  Later,  however,  the 
federal  Government  provided  the  means 
to  issue  the  reports  which  Mawson  him- 
self edited  until  he  died. 

Despite  his  Hfelong  interest  in  Antarctic 
affairs  Mawson  gave  notable  services  also 


725 


Mawson 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


to  South  Australian  geology,  reports  on 
which  comprise  the  larger  part  of  the 
123  books  and  articles  which  he  published. 
He  travelled  over  much  of  -the  difficult 
and  arid  regions  of  this  state  of  380,000 
square  miles,  usually  taking  parties  of 
students  with  him.  Very  early  in  his 
career  he  was  attracted  by  the  arc  of  Pre- 
Cambrian  and  highly  mineralized  rocks 
which  runs  eastwards  from  the  Mount 
Lofty  and  Flinders  ranges  to  New  South 
Wales  and  contains  the  noted  Broken  Hill 
silver  lead  deposits.  Mawson  postulated 
that  these  rocks  should  be  grouped  into 
an  older  *Willyama'  and  a  younger 
'Torrowangee'  series,  a  supposition  which 
isotopic  age  determination  has  proved 
correct,  as  also  his  belief  that  the  older 
series  is  Archaean  and  the  younger 
Proterozoic.  In  1906  Mawson  identified 
some  specimens  as  uranium  minerals  which 
were  in  consequence  developed  at  Radium 
Hill  near  Olary.  There,  too,  he  discovered  a 
new  radioactive  mineral  which  he  named 
Davidite.  Subsequent  discoveries  of  ura- 
nium and  other  minerals  at  Mount  Painter 
were  also  of  importance. 

Mawson' s  work  in  the  Antarctic  gave 
him  an  intense  interest  in  glaciology.  Pro- 
terozoic sediments  and  glacial  beds  had 
been  found  in  the  gorge  of  the  Sturt  river 
near  Adelaide  and  Mawson  showed  the  ex- 
istence of  similar  beds  of  extraordinary 
extent,  thickness,  and  importance.  Indeed, 
he  made  the  remarkable  discovery  that 
these  glacial  formations,  in  some  places 
tillite  but  generally  glaciomarine,  extend 
for  a  thousand  miles  in  the  interior  of 
South  Australia  and  indicate  that  glacial 
conditions  existed  intermittently  in  the 
Proterozoic  over  an  immense  period  of 
time. 

Mawson  was  knighted  in  1914;  ap- 
pointed O.B.E.  in  1920;  received  the 
King's  Polar  medal  with  three  bars,  and 
awards  from  many  British  and  foreign 
learned  societies,  including  the  Antarctic 
(1909)  and  Founder's  (1915)  medals  of 
the  Royal  Geographical  Society.  The  uni- 
versity of  Adelaide  established  in  1961 
the  Mawson  Institute  of  Antarctic  Re- 
search where  most  of  Mawson' s  papers 
are  deposited.  Nevertheless,  although 
Mawson' s  Antarctic  nomenclature  was 
very  generous,  not  only  to  his  supporters 
and  colleagues  but  also  to  his  foreign 
rivals,  his  own  name  was  not  adequately 
recognized  in  Antarctica  until  his  death. 
At  that  time  the  Russians  in  particular 
proclaimed  him  as  the  outstanding  scien- 
tific explorer  of  the  Antarctic  and  the 


Australian  Government  named,  in  his 
honour,  a  Mawson  coast.  The  region 
selected  in  MacRobertson  Land  was 
most  appropriate  as  it  was  discovered 
by  Mawson,  is  the  site  of  the  Mawson 
scientific  station,  and  adjoins  the  coast 
named  after  his  great  Norwegian  rival, 
Lars  Christensen. 

For  his  services  to  geology  Mawson 
received  medals  from  a  number  of 
geological  societies  including  the  Bigsby 
medal  of  the  Geological  Society  of 
London.  He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1923; 
the  Australian  and  New  Zealand  Associa- 
tion for  the  Advancement  of  Science 
awarded  him  the  Mueller  memorial  medal 
in  1930  and  elected  him  to  its  presidency 
in  1935-7.  The  new  laboratories  in  the 
school  of  geology  at  Adelaide  were  named 
after  him. 

Mawson  married  in  1914  Francisca 
Adriana  (Paquita),  daughter  of  Guillaume 
Daniel  Delprat,  the  leading  founder  of  the 
Broken  Hill  Proprietary.  They  had  two 
daughters,  the  elder  of  whom,  Patricia 
Marietje  Thomas,  of  the  university  of 
Adelaide,  continued  her  father's  work 
as  general  editor  of  the  Banzare  publica- 
tions. Humble-minded  and  almost  re- 
tiring as  Mawson  was,  unless  he  was 
fighting  with  iron  determination  in  a 
worthwhile  issue,  he  and  Lady  Mawson, 
who  received  the  O.B.E.  for  her  services 
to  infant  welfare,  made  an  important 
contribution  to  the  life  and  development 
of  South  Australia.  When  Mawson  died  in 
Adelaide,  14  October  1958,  he  was  accorded 
the  honour  of  a  state  funeral.  The  Mawson 
Institute  for  Antarctic  Research  has  a 
portrait  of  Mawson  (1933)  by  H.  J.  Haley. 
A  portrait  (1957)  by  Ivor  Hele  is  in  the 
Bonython  Hall  of  the  university  of 
Adelaide  and  another  (1959)  by  the  same 
artist  belongs  to  the  Royal  Geographical 
Society  of  London. 

[Sir  Douglas  Mawson,  'Geographical  Nar- 
rative and  Cartography',  AAE  Scientific 
Reports,  series  A,  vol.  i,  Sydney,  1942 ;  The 
Home  of  the  Blizzard,  2  vols.,  1915;  'The 
B.A.N.Z.  Antarctic  Research  Expedition, 
1929-31'  in  Geographical  Journal,  August 
1932 ;  A.  Grenfell  Price,  'Geographical  Nar- 
rative', Banzare  Scientific  Reports,  series  1, 
vol.  i,  1962 ;  A.  R.  Alderman  and  C.  E.  Tilley 
in  Biographical  Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal 
Society,  vol.  v,  1959  ;  E.  M.  Suzyumov,  A  Life 
given  to  the  Antarctic — the  Antarctic  Explorer, 
Sir  Douglas  Mawson,  Moscow,  1960;  R.  A. 
Swan,  Australia  in  the  Antarctic,  Melbourne, 
1961 ;  Sir  Douglas  Mawson  Anniversary 
Volume,  Adelaide,  1952  ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]      A.  Grenfell  Price. 


726 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Maxse 


MAXSE,  Sir  (FREDERICK)  IVOR  (1862- 
1958),  general,  was  born  in  London 
22  December  1862,  the  elder  son  of 
Admiral  Frederick  Augustus  Maxse  [q.v.] 
and  his  wife,  Cecilia,  daughter  of  Colonel 
James  Steel,  Indian  Army.  His  father  was 
a  friend  of  George  Meredith  [q.v.]  who 
portrayed  his  character  in  Beauchamp's 
Career.  Leo  Maxse  [q.v.],  his  younger 
brother,  became  editor  of  the  National 
Review.  His  sister  Violet,  of  whom  there  is 
a  notice  in  this  Supplement,  married  first 
Lord  Edward  Cecil  [q.v.],  and  secondly 
Lord  Milner  [q.v.]. 

Maxse  was  educated  at  Rugby  and  the 
Royal  Military  College,  Sandhurst,  and 
was  commissioned  in  the  7th  Royal  Fusi- 
liers in  1882.  With  family  encouragement 
he  transferred  to  the  Coldstream  Guards  in 
1891  with  the  rank  of  captain.  In  1893 
and  1894  he  was  aide-de-camp  to  Sir 
A.  J.  Lyon  Fremantle  in  command  first 
of  Scottish  District,  then  of  Malta,  but 
finding  Malta  too  far  from  the  social  and 
cultural  life  of  London  Maxse  resigned. 
Active  soldiering  interested  him  more 
than  the  Staff  College  and  in  1897  he  went 
instead  to  Cairo  where  he  was  seconded  to 
the  Egyptian  Army  and  saw  service  as  a 
staff  officer;  he  was  a  brigade -major  in 
the  battles  of  Atbara  and  Khartoum  in 
1898,  being  appointed  to  the  D.S.O.,  and 
was  a  battalion  commander  in  the  final 
defeat  of  the  Khalifa  in  1899.  On  the 
recommendation  of  Lord  Kitchener  [q.v.] 
he  was  sent  straight  on  to  South  Africa  as  a 
brevet  lieutenant-colonel.  He  was  a  trans- 
port officer  on  the  staff  of  Lord  Roberts 
[q.v.]  as  a  deputy-assistant-adjutant- 
general.  After  the  capture  of  Pretoria  he 
became  commander  of  its  police. 

Back  in  England  the  pattern  of  the 
fashionable  officer  once  more  unfolded: 
brevet  colonel  in  1905  and  command  of 
a  battalion  of  the  Coldstream.  Yet  he 
possessed  an  extremely  quick  and  curious 
mind  and  his  experiences  of  war  had 
awakened  him  to  the  dangers  threatening 
the  world  of  Edwardian  London.  In  1905 
he  published  a  biography  of  Seymour 
Vandeleur,  some  chapters  of  which  had 
already  appeared  in  the  National  Review, 
in  which  he  made  penetrating  criticisms 
of  the  English  public  school,  its  ethos, 
and  its  education,  as  inadequate  in  a 
competitive  world. 

VHien  war  broke  out  in  1914  Maxse  had 
been  brigadier-general  in  command  of  the 
1st  Guards  brigade  since  1910.  He  was 
promoted  major-general  and  took  the 
brigade  to  France  and  led  it  through  the 


campaigns  of  Mons,  the  Marne,  and 
the  Aisne,  but  only  saw  serious  action  at 
the  Aisne  (14  September).  He  was  sent 
home  to  command  and  train  the  18th  divi- 
sion, one  of  Kitchener's  New  Army  forma- 
tions, which  went  to  France  in  July  1915 
and  took  part  in  the  tragically  miscon- 
ceived grand  assault  of  1  July  1916  which 
opened  the  battle  of  the  Somme.  Maxse  was 
fortunate :  his  division  was  on  the  right  of 
the  British  line,  in  XIII  Corps  which  profi- 
ted from  the  heavier  and  denser  artillery 
bombardment  of  the  neighbouring  French 
Army  and  the  rapid  advance  of  the 
experienced  French  infantry.  Maxse's 
division  captured  its  allotted  objectives. 
On  14  July  his  division  took  part  in  the 
successful  surprise  dawn  attack  on  the 
Bazentins  and  Longueval  which  marked 
an  abandonment  of  the  earlier  rigid  linear 
tactics.  In  September  1916  the  18th 
division  took  part  in  the  successful  attack 
on  the  powerfully. fortified  Thiepval  ridge 
and  captured  the  Schwaben  Redoubt,  and 
in  October  Maxse's  troops  were  involved 
in  the  battle  of  the  Ancre. 

At  the  beginning  of  1917  Maxse  was 
promoted  temporary  lieutenant-general 
and  given  the  XVIII  Corps.  In  this 
command  he  took  part  in  the  Passchen- 
daele  campaign  of  July-November  1917 
and  in  the  spring  of  1918  formed  part  of 
the  Fifth  Army  under  Sir  Hubert  Gough 
during  the  great  German  offensive. 
Although  in  the  end  swamped  by  German 
weight  and  numbers  his  defence  was  as 
successful  as  any  in  Gough's  army; 
during  the  retreat  he  handled  his  corps 
with  energy  and  decision,  despite  some 
confusion  of  understanding  with  Gough 
which  led  to  the  premature  retreat  of  the 
XVIII  Corps  to  the  line  of  the  Somme. 

The  operations  of  Maxse's  corps  had 
been  marked  by  the  thoroughness  and 
excellence  of  his  preliminary  training; 
and  training,  thorough,  professional,  and 
based  on  open-minded  evaluation  of 
the  lessons  of  battle,  was  henceforth  the 
keynote  of  his  career.  He  was  a  member 
of  the  board  of  inquiry  into  the  local 
collapse  of  the  British  defence  at  Cambrai 
and  contributed  a  note  on  the  needs  and 
methods  of  training  troops.  He  was  among 
the  first  British  commanders  to  accept 
the  new  German  concepts  of  attack  by 
infiltration  and  defence  in  greater  depth. 
In  April  1918  he  was  appointed  inspector- 
general  of  training  in  France,  a  post  in 
which  he  was  able  to  do  much  to  amend 
the  rigidity  and  orthodoxy  of  the  British 
tactics  and  command  methods :  the  results 


72T 


Maxse 


DJ«J3,  1951-1960 


were  seen  in  the  offensive  battles  of 
August-October  1918. 

In  1919  Maxse  went  to  Northern  Com- 
mand in  the  United  Kingdom  where  he 
remained  until  1923.  There  he  had  a 
marked  but  regrettably  not  long-lasting 
influence  on  the  post-war  training,  organi- 
zation, and  tactics  of  the  British  Army.  It 
was  Maxse's  interest  and  patronage  which 
launched  the  career  as  a  military  thinker 
of  (Sir)  B.  H.  Liddell  Hart.  At  his  request 
Liddell  Hart  was  transferred  to  Northern 
Command  headquarters  to  collaborate  in 
rewriting  the  War  volume  of  Infantry 
Training.  Despite  Maxse's  encouragement 
the  novelties  of  idea  and  presentation 
were  well  watered  down  by  the  War 
Office  before  publication.  Maxse  also 
superseded  the  Cardwell  system  by  draft- 
ing direct  from  the  depots. 

In  1923  Maxse  was  promoted  full  general 
and  in  1926  he  retired  to  enter  upon 
a  successful  career  of  commercial  fruit 
growing.  He  was  appointed  C.B.  (1900), 
C.V,0.  (1907),  and  K.C.B.  (1917) ;  and  was 
elected  a  fellow  of  the  Royal  Geographical 
Society  for  exploration  on  the  River 
Sobat,  Upper  Nile. 

A  formidable  personality,  Maxse  has 
been  described  by  Liddell  Hart  as 
'short  and  dark,  with  a  sallow  complexion, 
small  deep-set  eyes,  and  a  long  drooping 
moustache,  which  gave  him  the  look  of  a 
Tartar  chief — all  the  more  because  the 
descriptive  term  "a  Tartar"  so  aptly  fitted 
his  manner  in  dealing  with  lazy  or 
inefficient  seniors  and  subordinates.  . .  . 
His  fierce  manner  concealed  a  very  warm 
heart,  and  he  particularly  liked  people 
who  showed  that  they  were  not  afraid  of 
him.' 

In  1899  Maxse  married  Mary  Caroline 
Wyndham  (died  1944),  eldest  daughter 
of  the  second  Baron  Leconfield ;  they  had 
two  sons  and  one  daughter.  He  died  at 
Midhurst  28  January  1958. 

Maxse  was  painted  by  Sir  Oswald 
Birley  and  Sir  John  Lavery  and  there  is 
a  charcoal  and  water-colour  drawing 
by  Francis  Dodd  in  the  Imperial  War 
Musexim. 

[The  Maxse  papers  in  the  Imperial  War 
Museum ;  B.  H.  Liddell  Hart,  Memoirs,  vol.  i, 
1965;  Sir  Hubert  Gough,  The  Fifth  Army, 
1931;  The  Times,  29  January,  5  and  14 
February  1958.]  Coreelu  Bahnett. 

MEGHNAD  SAHA  (1893-1956),  scien- 
tist, was  born  6  October  1893  in  the  village 
of  Seoratali  in  the  district  of  Dacca,  later 
in  East  Pakistan.   He  was  the  fifth  child 


in  the  family  of  five  sons  and  three 
daughters  of  Jagannath  Saha,  shopkeeper, 
and  his  wife,  Bhubaneswari  Devi.  A 
precocious  student,  he  was  equally  good 
in  mathematics  and  languages ;  in  1905  he 
received  a  government  scholarship  which 
enabled  him  to  join  the  Government 
Collegiate  School  in  Dacca  but  which  he 
soon  had  to  forfeit  for  his  part  in  the 
boycott  of  a  visit  by  the  governor  of  the 
Bengal  Presidency.  In  1911  he  passed 
the  intermediate  science  examination  from 
Dacca  College.  He  then  moved  to  the 
Presidency  College,  Calcutta,  where  he 
obtained  his  B.Sc.  with  honours  in  1913 
and  the  M.Sc.  degree  in  applied  mathe- 
matics in  1915.  In  the  next  year  he  was 
appointed  lecturer  in  mathematics  in  the 
newly  established  postgraduate  University 
College  of  Science  in  Calcutta.  About  a 
year  later  (Sir)  C.  V.  Raman,  who  in  1928 
discovered  the  effect  known  by  his  name, 
joined  the  college  as  Palit  professor  of 
physics. 

Saha  became  especially  interested  in  the 
quantum  theory  of  the  atom  then  being 
developed  by  Niels  Bohr.  It  was  fortunate 
that  at  about  the  same  time  he  came  across 
the  popular  books  of  Agnes  Clerke  [q.v.]  on 
the  sun  and  stars  which  gave  him  some 
idea  of  the  outstanding  problems  in 
astrophysics.  This  background,  in  a  sense, 
paved  the  way  for  his  theory  of  tem- 
perature ionization  which  marked  the 
first  effective  step  in  linking  the  atoms 
and  the  stars  together.  In  1919  he 
obtained  the  equation  of  temperature 
ionization  which  goes  by  his  name.  His 
classic  paper  on  the  physical  theory  of 
stellar  spectra  appeared  in  1921.  Much 
of  the  later  work  in  stellar  spectroscopy 
has  been  dominated  by  Saha's  theory  and 
ideas.  The  theory  has  all  the  simplicity 
and  inevitableness  which  characterize  an 
epochal  contribution.  It  is  a  direct  conse- 
quence of  the  recognition  that  the  laws 
of  classical  thermodynamics  and  kinetic 
theory  of  gases  can  be  extended  to  a  gas 
of  free  electrons.  Apart  from  astrophysics, 
the  theory  has  found  numerous  other 
applications,  as  in  the  study  of  ionosphere, 
conductivity  of  flames,  electric  arcs,  ex- 
plosive phenomena,  and  shock  waves. 

Saha  was  awarded  the  Premchand 
Roychand  scholarship  of  Calcutta  Uni- 
versity and  spent  two  years  travelling  in 
Europe.  He  worked  for  some  time  in 
London  in  the  laboratory  of  the  great 
spectroscopist,  Alfred  Fowler  [q.v.],  and 
spent  about  a  year  in  W.  Nernst's 
laboratory   in   Berlin.    On   returning   to 


728 


D.N.B.  1951^1960 


Meighen 


India,  Saha  joined  the  university  of 
Calcutta  as  Khaira  professor  of  physics, 
but  in  1923  accepted  the  professorship 
at  the  Allahabad  University.  A  most  con- 
scientious and  inspiring  teacher,  he  com- 
pletely reorganized  the  teaching  in  the 
department  and  developed  a  vigorous 
school  of  research  in  theoretical  astro- 
physics and  experimental  spectroscopy. 

In  1938  Saha  left  Allahabad  to  take  up 
the  PaHt  professorship  at  Calcutta  in 
succession  to  Raman.  There  he  developed 
an  extensive  progrannne  of  work  in 
nuclear  physics.  It  was  due  to  him 
that  the  Institute  of  Nuclear  Physics 
was  established  at  Calcutta  in  1948; 
after  his  death  it  was  named  after  him. 
Saha  took  an  active  interest  in  the  Indian 
Association  for  the  Cultivation  of  Science 
and  was  largely  responsible  for  its  new 
laboratories. 

Saha's  scientific  work  may  be  divided 
under  three  periods:  1918-25  when  he 
was  largely  occupied  with  astrophysics; 
1925-38  devoted  mostly  to  spectroscopic 
and  ionospheric  studies;  and  1939-55 
when  he  was  mainly  concerned  with  nu- 
clear physics.  The  most  creative  years 
belong  to  the  first  period,  when  he  devoted 
himself  almost  completely  to  scientific 
work.  Later  his  interests  became  more 
widespread.  He  was  deeply  involved  in 
problems  of  national  planning  and  the 
impact  of  science  and  technology  on 
economic  growth.  He  was  an  active 
member  of  the  National  Planning  Com- 
mission (1939-41);  and  at  the  time  of 
his  death  he  was  an  elected  independent 
member  of  the  Indian  legislature. 

Saha  was  the  general  president  of  the 
Indian  Science  Congress  Association  in 
1934.  In  his  presidential  address  he  drew 
pointed  attention  to  the  problem  of 
recurring  floods  in  Indian  rivers.  It  was 
due  to  his  pioneering  efforts  that  the 
multi-purpose  Damodar  River  Valley 
Project  was  established,  on  the  lines  of 
the  Tennessee  Valley  Authority  in  the 
United  States.  It  served  as  the  fore- 
runner of  several  other  multi-purpose 
river  projects  in  India.  As  a  member  of 
the  governing  body  of  the  Indian  Council 
of  Scientific  and  Industrial  Research  he 
played  an  active  role  in  the  establishment 
of  several  national  laboratories;  and  he 
was  a  member  of  the  Indian  Education 
Commission  appointed  by  the  Govern- 
ment of  India  in  1948  under  the  chairman- 
ship of  Dr.  S.  Radhakrishnan. 

In  1927  Saha  was  elected  F.R.S.  He 
was  president  of  the  National  Institute 


of  Sciences  of  India  and  of  the  National 
Academy  of  Sciences  (Allahabad).  He 
published  about  a  hundred  scientific 
papers  in  Indian  and  foreign  journals  and 
wrote  extensively  on  scientific  policy  and 
national  affairs  in  the  journal  Science 
and  Culture  which  he  founded.  He  also 
published,  in  1931  (with  B.  N.  Srivastava), 
an  internationally  famous  textbook  on 
heat  which  has  gone  into  several  editions. 

The  Ufe  of  Saha  was  an  integral  part 
of  the  scientific  renaissance  in  India. 
He  was  fearless  in  his  criticism  of  men  and 
things;  extremely  simple  in  his  habits 
and  completely  dedicated  to  his  chosen 
vocation  to  the  total  disregard  of  his 
personal  comforts.  A  detailed  accoimt  of 
his  work  and  life  is  given  in  the  com- 
memoration volume  brought  out  by  the 
Indian  Association  for  the  Cultivation  of 
Science  for  Saha's  sixtieth  birthday. 

In  1918  Saha  married  Shrimati  Radha 
Rani  Saha ;  they  had  three  sons  and  three 
daughters.  Saha  died  in  Delhi  16  February 
1956. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

D.    S.    KOTHARI. 

MEIGHEN,  ARTHUR  (1874r-1960), 
Canadian  statesman,  was  born  at  Ander- 
son, Perth  County,  Ontario,  16  June 
1874,  the  second  child  and  eldest  son  of 
Joseph  Meighen,  farmer,  and  his  wife, 
Mary  Jane,  daughter  of  Henry  Bell, 
farmer.  He  attended  rural  public  schools, 
the  St.  Mary's  Collegiate  Institute,  and 
the  university  of  Toronto,  from  which  he 
graduated  in  1896  with  first  class  honours 
in  mathematics.  He  then  enrolled  in  the 
Ontario  College  of  Pedagogy  but  after 
one  year  as  a  high-school  teacher  moved 
to  Winnipeg  and  began  studying  law  as 
an  articled  clerk.  Upon  being  admitted  to 
the  Manitoba  bar  in  1903  he  established 
his  own  practice  in  the  town  of  Portage 
la  Prairie. 

In  his  first  bid  for  public  office  Meighen 
was  elected  to  the  House  of  Commons 
in  1908  as  a  Conservative,  representing 
the  Portage  la  Prairie  riding,  and  was 
re-elected  in  1911  and  1917.  He  soon 
distinguished  himself  in  Parliament  by 
his  remarkable  industriousness,  brilliance 
of  mind,  political  courage,  and  forensic 
power.  In  1913  he  entered  the  ministry  of 
(Sir)  Robert  Borden  [q.v.]  as  solicitor- 
general  and  was  promoted  to  cabinet 
rank  two  years  later.  Occupying  succes- 
sively the  positions  of  secretary  of  state 
(1917)  and  minister  of  the  interior  (1917- 
20)  he  became  one  of  the  leading  figures  in 


Meighen 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


the  wartime  Government,  not  because  of 
the  importance  of  the  portfolios  he  held, 
but  because  of  his  prominence  in  the 
framing  of  contentious  measures  and  in 
their  passage  through  Parliament.  These 
included  the  Military  Service  Act,  im- 
posing a  system  of  selective  conscription, 
the  Wartime  Elections  Act,  drastically 
altering  the  franchise  for  the  general 
election  of  1917,  and  numerous  enact- 
ments bringing  under  public  ownership 
various  railways  later  combined  in  the 
Canadian  national  railway  system. 

His  close  connection  with  such  widely 
unpopular  policies,  coupled  with  his 
earlier  prominence  in  introducing  closure 
into  the  rules  of  the  House  to  overcome 
Opposition  obstruction,  and  his  activity 
in  suppressing  the  Winnipeg  general 
strike  of  1919,  won  him  much  enmity. 
So  did  his  pre-eminence  as  a  parliamen- 
tarian. Although  his  exceptional  ability 
earned  him  the  respect  of  all,  his  skill  and 
self-assurance  in  debate,  along  with  his 
caustic  wit  and  at  times  arrogant  manner, 
aroused  on  many  occasions  the  fury 
of  his  opponents.  The  cold,  analytical 
brilliance  of  his  mind  seemed  suited  to  his 
slight,  frail-looking  body  and  to  the  asce- 
tic quality  of  his  countenance,  with  its 
pronounced  cheek  bones  and  brooding, 
deepset  blue  eyes.  There  was  an  austerity 
about  him  as  a  public  man,  both  in 
appearance  and  demeanour,  which  hid 
the  warmer  side  of  his  nature :  his  capacity 
for  affection,  his  love  of  droll  stories,  his 
gift  of  mimicry,  and  detestation  of 
snobbery  and  affectation.  In  his  public 
capacity  he  was  a  controversialist  to  the 
manner  born  who  asked  and  gave  no 
quarter.  It  was  in  part  the  knowledge  that 
he  had  made  many  enemies,  and  especially 
that  policies  with  which  he  was  closely 
identified,  like  conscription  and  the 
public  ownership  of  railways,  were  parti- 
cularly repugnant  to  the  province  of 
Quebec,  that  caused  powerful  elements 
in  the  Government  to  oppose  his  selection 
as  successor  to  Borden  when  the  latter 
retired  as  prime  minister  in  1920.  However, 
there  was  also  strong  support  for  Meighen, 
who  was  thought  to  have  earned  advance- 
ment, and  in  the  event  he  received  and 
accepted  a  commission  to  form  an 
administration. 

The  regime  of  which  he  now  took 
command  was  disintegrating.  The  coali- 
tion of  Conservatives  and  Liberal  con- 
scriptionists,  formed  in  1917,  began  to 
break  apart  with  the  end  of  the  war  which 
had  called  it  into  being.  Quebec  had  been 


alienated  from  the  Conservative  Party 
and  among  the  farmers  of  the  prairies 
and  Ontario  there  was  developing  a  power- 
ful movement  of  agrarian  protest,  in  the 
shape  of  the  National  Progressive  Party, 
against  the  policies  of  both  Liberals  and 
Conservatives  and  in  some  measure  against 
the  party  system  itself.  There  now  began  a 
long,  bitter  struggle  for  power  between 
Meighen  and  the  Liberal  leader  W.  L. 
Mackenzie  King  [q.v.].  The  latter's  ob- 
jective was  to  assimilate  the  Progres- 
sive movement  into  the  Liberal  Party 
with  the  claim  that  the  two  were  not 
separated  by  any  real  difference  of  policy 
or  principle.  Meighen  sought  to  counter 
this  strategy  and  to  re-establish  the 
Conservatives  in  Quebec,  the  province 
which  was  King's  main  bulwark,  with  the 
argument  that  King  would  seriously 
impair  the  protective  tariff  system  in 
order  to  obtain  Progressive  support 

King  won  the  first  round.  The 
general  election  of  1921  installed  him  in 
power  and  reduced  Conservative  strength 
in  the  235-seat  House  of  Commons  to 
fifty  members.  During  the  next  few  years, 
however,  the  Conservatives  made  a 
remarkable  recovery  and  in  the  1925 
election  gained  a  plurality,  though  not  a 
majority,  of  the  seats.  Despite  this  re- 
verse King  was  able  to  hold  precariously 
to  office  with  the  help  of  various  minor 
groups  in  the  House.  Late  in  June  1926, 
threatened  with  defeat  in  the  Commons 
as  the  result  of  a  scandal  in  the  Depart- 
ment of  Customs  and  Excise,  King  ad- 
vised the  governor-general,  Lord  Byng 
[q.v.],  to  dissolve  Parliament  before  a 
motion  censuring  his  Government  was 
voted  on.  When  Byng  rejected  this  advice 
King  resigned.  Meighen  was  asked  to  form 
an  administration  and  did  so.  In  short 
order  his  Government  met  defeat  in  the 
House  and  Byng  accepted  Meighen's  ad- 
vice to  dissolve.  Mackenzie  King  fought  the 
ensuing  campaign  mainly  on  the  alleged 
'constitutional  issue'  arising  from  Byng's 
refusal  to  accept  his  advice.  Although  the 
issue  probably  had  less  influence  on  the 
outcome  of  the  1926  election  than  has 
generally  been  believed.  King  was  return- 
ed to  office  and  Meighen,  having  failed 
as  Conservative  leader  in  three  general 
elections  to  gain  a  secure  hold  on  power, 
retired  from  politics,  joining  an  invest- 
ment banking  firm  in  Toronto  in  a  senior 
executive  capacity. 

In  1932  he  returned  to  public  life  as 
government  leader  in  the  Senate  and 
minister  without  portfolio  in  the  Cabinet 


730 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Mellanby 


of  R.  B.  (later  Viscount)  Bennett  [q.v.]. 
Late  in  1941  he  reluctantly  resumed  the 
leadership  of  the  Conservative  Party  and 
resigned  from  the  Senate  in  order  to  re- 
enter the  House  of  Commons.  His  effort 
to  do  so,  in  a  by-election  in  the  riding  of 
South  York,  Ontario,  failed  and  he  re- 
signed as  leader  at  the  end  of  1942,  retiring 
once  more  from  public  life,  this  time 
permanently. 

In  1904  Meighen  married  Isabel, 
daughter  of  Charles  Cox,  of  Granby, 
Quebec;  they  had  two  sons  and  one 
daughter.  He  died  in  Toronto  5  August 
1960  and  was  buried  at  St.  Mary's, 
Ontario,  near  his  birthplace.  A  portrait 
by  Ernest  Fosbery  hangs  in  the  House  of 
Commons,  Ottawa. 

[Eugene  Forsey,  The  Royal  Power  of  Dis- 
solution of  Parliament  in  the  British  Common- 
wealth, 1943 ;  Roger  Graham,  Arthur  Meighen, 
a  Biography,  3  vols :  The  Door  of  Opportunity, 
1960,  And  Fortune  Fled,  1963,  No  Surrender, 
1964;  Arthur  Meighen,  Unrevised  and  Un- 
repented:  Debating  Speeches  and  Others,  1949.] 
Roger  Graham. 


MELLANBY,  Sm  EDWARD  (1884- 
1955),  medical  scientist  and  administra- 
tor, was  born  at  West  Hartlepool,  county 
Durham,  8  April  1884,  the  youngest  of 
the  four  sons  and  six  children  of  John 
Mellanby,  manager  of  the  shipyard  of  the 
Furness-Withy  Company,  and  his  wife, 
Mary  Isabella  Lawson.  Elder  brothers  were 
John  Mellanby  [q.v.],  the  physiologist, 
and  Alexander  Lawson  Mellanby  (1871- 
1951),  who  became  professor  of  civil  and 
mechanical  engineering  at  the  Royal 
Technical  College,  Glasgow.  From  Barnard 
Castle  School,  where  he  was  head  boy  and 
captain  of  cricket  and  football,  Mellanby 
gained  an  exhibition  to  Emmanuel  College, 
Cambridge.  Having  been  placed  in  the 
second  class  in  part  i  of  the  natural 
sciences  tripos  (1904)  and  the  first  class 
Avith  physiology  as  his  special  study  in 
part  ii  (1905),  he  obtained  a  research 
studentship  at  Emmanuel,  which  he  held 
until  1907,  working  under  the  guidance  of 
(Sir)  Frederick  Gowland  Hopkins  [q.v.], 
his  former  tutor,  whose  influence  largely 
determined  the  rest  of  his  career.  He 
completed  his  medical  studies  at  St. 
Thomas's  Hospital,  London,  where  in 
1909-11  he  was  a  demonstrator  in 
physiology  and  in  1910-12  held  a  Beit 
memorial  fellowship  for  medical  research. 
In  1913  he  became  a  lecturer  in  and  later 
professor  of  physiology  at  King's  College 
for  Women,  London,  where  he  remained 


until  1920.  He  maintained  a  highly 
distinguished  association  with  Cambridge 
where  he  proceeded  M.D.  in  1915  and  was 
awarded  the  Walsingham  medal  (1907)  and 
the  Gedge  (1908)  and  Raymond  Horton- 
Smith  (1915)  prizes. 

In  1914  Mellanby  married  May,  eldest 
daughter  of  George  Tweedy,  of  London, 
who  had  been  a  fellow  student  at 
Cambridge,  was  by  this  time  engaged  in 
physiological  research  at  Bedford  College, 
London,  and  was  to  be  his  lifelong 
colleague  ;  they  had  no  children. 

Mellanby  was  appointed  in  1920  to  the 
newly  founded  chair  of  pharmacology  at 
the  university  of  Sheffield  and  honorary 
physician  to  the  Royal  Infirmary.  This 
double  appointment  he  held  until,  in  1933, 
he  succeeded  Sir  Walter  Fletcher  [q.v.] 
as  secretary  of  the  Medical  Research 
Council.  Prior  to  taking  this  office,  he  was 
a  member  of  the  Council  for  two  years, 
and  shortly  after  his  appointment  he 
accepted  the  FuUerian  professorship  of  the 
Royal  Institution  (1936-7).  He  retired 
from  the  Council's  service  in  1949,  the 
year  before  there  was  opened  at  Mill  Hill 
the  new  Institute  for  Medical  Research, 
with  the  planning  of  which  he  had  been 
closely  concerned. 

The  research  work  for  which  Mellanby 
was  perhaps  best  known  was  his  investi- 
gation on  rickets,  begun  in  1914  at  the 
request  of  the  Medical  Research  Commit- 
tee. His  first  major  publication  on  the 
subject  was  in  1919 :  he  established  that 
the  main  cause  of  the  disease  was  defi- 
ciency of  a  fat-soluble  vitamin,  which 
came  to  be  known  as  vitamin  D.  At  a  later 
stage  he  demonstrated  the  rachitogenic 
action  of  certain  cereals.  His  researches, 
however,  extended  over  a  wide  range  and 
he  was  recognized  as  an  outstanding 
expert  in  the  biochemical  and  physiological 
field.  He  continued  his  work  until  the  end 
of  his  life:  it  was  in  1946  that  he  drew 
attention  to  the  toxic  effect  of  agenized 
flour. 

While  Mellanby  was  in  Sheffield  he  was 
appointed  chairman  of  an  international 
conference  for  the  standardization  of 
vitamins  in  1931 ;  further  conferences  took 
place  in  1934  and  1949.  He  was  also  chair- 
man of  the  international  technical  com- 
mission on  nutrition  in  1934,  and  was  part 
author  of  an  influential  report  on  the  rela- 
tionship of  human  nutrition  to  agriculture. 
Before  and  during  the  war  of  1939-45  he 
was  involved  in  schemes  concerning  war- 
time diet  as  well  as  the  welfare  of  Service 
personnel  and  civilians,  and  was  chairman 


781 


Mellanby 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


of  the  Royal  Naval  and  the  Flying  person- 
nel research  committees,  a  member  of  a 
similar  committee  relating  to  the  army, 
a  member  of  the  Scientific  Advisory 
Committee  of  the  Cabinet,  and  chairman 
of  the  Colonial  Medical  Research  Com- 
mittee. The  Medical  Research  Council, 
under  Mellanby's  direction,  and  the  Minis- 
try of  Health  were  jointly  responsible  in 
1939  for  the  setting  up  of  an  Emergency 
Pubhc  Health  Service,  which  after  the 
war  became  the  Public  Health  Laboratory 
Service. 

Mellanby  was  appointed  K.C.B.  in  1937 
and  G.B.E.  in  1948  and  received  a  number 
of  foreign  decorations.  From  1937  to  1941 
he  was  an  honorary  physician  to  King 
George  VI.  He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in 
1925,  F.R.C.P.  in  1928,  and  honorary 
F.R.C.S.Ed.  in  1946.  In  1935  he  and 
his  wife  were  jointly  awarded  the  Charles 
Mickle  fellowship  of  Toronto  University. 

Among  other  awards  were  the  Royal  and 
Buchanan  medals  from  the  Royal  Society 
and  the  Bissett-Hawkins,  Moxon,  and 
Baly  medals  from  the  Royal  College  of 
Physicians,  the  Halley-Stewart  prize  for 
medical  research  from  the  British  Medical 
Association,  and  the  Cameron  prize  from 
Edinburgh  University.  He  was  elected  an 
honorary  fellow  of  Emmanuel  College, 
Cambridge  (1946),  and  received  honorary 
degrees  from  a  number  of  universities. 
He  gave  many  special  lectures  on  medical 
and  scientific  subjects,  including  the 
Croonian  lecture  of  the  Royal  Society,  the 
Oliver  Sharpey  and  Croonian  lectures  and 
the  Harveian  oration  of  the  Royal  College 
of  Physicians,  the  Linacre  and  Rede 
lectures  of  Cambridge  University,  the 
Ludwig  Mond  lecture  (Manchester  Uni- 
versity), a  special  bicentenary  lecture 
at  the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons,  and 
the  Robert  Boyle,  Stephen  Paget,  and 
Hopkins  memorial  lectures.  In  1947  he 
held  the  Abraham  Flexner  lectureship 
at  Vanderbilt  University,  Nashville, 
Tennessee,  which  involved  a  period  of 
three  months'  residence  in  Nashville. 

During  the  last  year  or  two  of  his 
secretaryship  of  the  Medical  Research 
Council,  Mellanby  attended  meetings 
abroad  on  behalf  of  the  British  Govern- 
ment and  the  Colonial  Office  and  at  the 
invitation  of  the  South  African  Council  of 
Scientific  and  Industrial  Research.  After 
his  retirement  he  undertook  two  further 
advisory  missions,  the  first  to  India 
(where  he  played  a  significant  part  in  the 
establishment  of  the  Central  Drug  Re- 
search Institute  at  Lucknow  and  was  its 


first  director  for  a  few  months  in  1950^51) 
and  the  second  to  Australia  and  New 
Zealand.  For  the  most  part,  however,  he 
spent  his  retirement  at  work  in  his 
laboratory  at  Mill  Hill  and  it  was  there 
that  death  came  to  him,  quietly  and 
unexpectedly,  30  January  1955. 

Mellanby  was  tall  and  handsome, 
friendly  and  unaffected,  with  a  great 
sense  of  fun  and  a  certain  boyishness 
which  was  one  of  his  most  lovable 
characteristics.  To  those  who  did  not 
know  him  well,  his  more  endearing 
personal  qualities  were  sometimes  masked 
by  his  rather  brusque,  forthright  manner, 
which  made  him  say  what  he  thought, 
apparently  without  consideration  for  the 
feelings  or  position  of  the  person  to  whom 
he  was  speaking ;  generally,  however,  this 
was  really  due  to  a  wish  to  stimulate 
argument  and,  if  his  help  was  being 
sought,  to  find  out  what  was  in  the  mind 
of  his  inquirer,  so  that  he  could  advise  to 
the  best  of  his  knowledge  and  ability. 
As  one  of  his  friends  wrote  after  his  death, 
'what  a  listener  thought  about  him 
temporarily  did  not  matter,  so  long  as 
medical  science  was  advanced  or  a  new 
scientist  born'.  He  had  a  rare  gift  for 
recognizing  the  possibilities  in  both 
people  and  research  and  spared  no  pains 
to  see  that  the  necessary  facilities  were 
provided. 

There  is  a  portrait  of  Mellanby  by 
(Sir)  James  Gunn  in  the  possession  of  the 
family  and  a  chalk  drawing  by  H.  A. 
Freeth  in  the  Imperial  War  Museum. 

[Sir  Henry  Dale  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  i,  1955; 
British  Medical  Journal,  5  and  12  February 
1955 ;  Prefatory  chapter,  Annual  Review  of 
Biochemistry,  vol,  xxv,  1956  ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.]  B.  S.  Platt. 

MENDELSOHN,  ERIC  (1887^1953), 
architect,  was  born  in  AUenstein,  East 
Prussia,  21  March  1887,  of  German- Jewish 
parents ;  he  was  the  fifth  of  the  six  chil- 
dren of  David  Mendelsohn,  who  kept  a 
store  in  the  town,  and  his  wife,  Emma 
Jaruslawsky.  Among  the  important  influ- 
ences of  his  childhood  was  his  mother's 
enthusiasm  for  music  (she  was  a  gifted 
musician)  and  for  plants  and  flowers,  which 
she  imparted  to  her  son.  Mendelsohn  was 
educated  at  the  Gymnasium  in  Allen- 
stein  and  early  entertained  an  ambi- 
tion to  be  an  architect ;  but  by  his  father's 
wish  he  was  apprenticed  to  a  Berlin  firm 
of  merchants.  This  he  detested  and 
abandoned.  He  then  studied  architecture 


733 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Mendelsohn 


for  four  years,  first  at  the  Technische 
Hochschule  in  Berlin-Charlottenburg,  then 
at  Munich  where  he  graduated  in  archi- 
tecture in  1912.  At  the  outset  of  his  career 
he  was  engaged  in  stage  designing  and 
during  this  period  he  became  interested 
in  the  German  Expressionist  movement. 
Shortly  after  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914 
he  enhsted  with  the  Engineers  and  served 
first  on  the  Russian,  later  on  the  western, 
front. 

In  1919,  at  Paul  Cassirer's  galleries  in 
Berlin,  Mendelsohn  held  an  exhibition 
of  his  sketch  designs  which  he  called 
'Architecture  in  Steel  and  Reinforced 
Concrete'  and  which  represented  the  work 
of  several  years,  a  large  number  having 
been  made  while  he  was  on  military 
service.  They  are  projects  for  a  wide 
variety  of  buildings  in  which  steel  and 
concrete  partly  determine  the  character 
of  the  buildings,  and  where  purpose  is 
partly  expressed  by  symbolic  forms,  thus 
showing  the  influence  of  Expressionism. 
The  most  famous  of  Mendelsohn's  early 
buildings  is  the  Einstein  Observatory  at 
Potsdam  (1920)  which,  although  con- 
ceived in  reinforced  concrete,  was  built 
mainly  in  brick  owing  to  the  shortages 
of  materials.  The  rounded  shapes  which 
compose  the  buildings  are  expressive  of 
optical  instruments,  and  these  forms, 
together  with  the  deep  window  recesses  on 
the  curved  surfaces,  allow  a  dramatic 
play  of  light  and  shadow,  and  convey  a 
sense  of  mystery  particularly  appropriate 
to  the  purpose  of  the  building.  After  the 
Einstein  Observatory  Mendelsohn  built 
up  a  very  extensive  practice ;  he  was  the 
architect  of  a  large  number  of  buildings, 
among  them  a  hat  factory  at  Lucken- 
walde;  the  Herpich  Fur  Store,  Berlin; 
the  Petersdorff  store  at  Breslau  and  the 
Schocken  stores  at  Stuttgart  and  Chemnitz; 
and  in  Berlin  a  group  of  buildings 
adjoining  the  Kurfurstendamm  which 
included  houses,  a  block  of  flats,  a  cinema 
and  a  cabaret  theatre,  and  Columbus 
House  in  the  Potsdamerplatz,  a  large 
block  of  offices  with  shops  below.  In  all 
these  buildings  the  newer  materials  of 
steel  and  concrete  are  used  expressively, 
and  the  designs  of  the  fa9ades  show  a 
strong  horizontal  emphasis  with  large 
alternating  bands  of  fenestration  and 
opaque  panelling.  In  the  Schocken  store 
at  Chemnitz  and  in  Columbus  House 
an  effect  of  lightness  is  achieved  by 
a  cantilevering  which  thrusts  the  walls 
forward  beyond  the  structural  supports. 

After   the   advent   of  Hitler   in    1933 


Mendelsohn  moved  to  London  where  he 
began  practice  in  partnership  with  Serge 
Chermayeff.  Their  first  work  in  England 
was  a  house  at  Chalfont  St.  Giles  in  1983. 
Early  in  the  next  year  they  won  the  com- 
petition for  a  municipal  social  centre  at 
Bexhill  which  was  named  the  De  La  Wan- 
Pavilion  and  opened  by  the  Duke  of 
York.  The  long  low  mass  of  this  building 
in  steel  and  concrete  with  horizontal 
emphasis  accords  well  with  its  position  by 
the  sea,  and  the  glass  wall  terminating  in 
the  semi-circular  glass  projection  of  the 
stairway  is  reminiscent  of  a  similar 
feature  in  the  famous  Schocken  store  at 
Stuttgart.  Another  work  in  England  was  a 
house  in  Church  Street,  Chelsea,  while  the 
partners  were  responsible  also  for  several 
projects:  a  large  scheme  for  flats  and 
exhibition  centre  at  the  White  City,  and 
large  hotels  at  Southsea  and  Blackpool. 

Mendelsohn's  original  permit  to  stay  in 
England  for  five  weeks  was  extended  to 
five  years  as  a  result  of  the  representations 
of  the  Royal  Institute  of  British  Archi- 
tects which  elected  him  a  fellow  in  February 
1939  after  his  naturalization  in  the 
previous  year.  In  the  meantime  the 
partnership  with  Chermayeff,  which  was 
not  a  happy  one,  had  been  dissolved  in 
1936.  Thereafter  Mendelsohn's  principal 
work  was  in  Palestine  to  which  he  made 
long  and  frequent  visits.  He  became  the 
architect  for  houses  for  Chaim  Weizmann 
[q.v.]  and  Salman  Schocken,  the  Hadassah 
University  Medical  Centre  on  Mount 
Scopus,  Jerusalem,  the  Anglo-Palestine 
Bank,  Jerusalem,  and  the  Research 
Laboratories  and  Agricultural  College  at 
Rehoboth. 

In  June  1939  Mendelsohn  finally  left 
England,  and  after  two  years  in  Palestine, 
and  unsuccessful  attempts  to  join  the 
British  Army,  he  went  to  America.  In 
1945  he  started  afresh  in  San  Francisco 
and  such  was  his  reputation  that  he 
quickly  built  up  a  considerable  practice. 
He  was  the  architect  of  the  Maimonides 
Hospital  in  San  Francisco  and  of  a  series 
of  large  combined  synagogues  and  com- 
munity centres.  Those  completed  during 
his  life  were  at  St.  Louis,  Missouri;  at 
Cleveland,  Ohio,  which  includes  a  dome 
100  feet  in  diameter;  at  Grand  Rapids, 
Michigan;  and  at  St.  Paul,  Minnesota. 
He  was  also  the  architect  of  laboratories 
for  the  Atomic  Energy  Commission  in 
California.  Among  his  projects  was  an 
impressive  design  for  a  memorial  in 
New  York  to  the  six  million  Jews  killed 
by  the  Nazis. 


Mendelsohn 


D.N.B.  1931-1960 


Mendelsohn's  architecture  was  charac- 
terized by  an  expression  of  purpose 
partly  by  means  of  symbolic  forms.  He 
was  one  of  the  first  to  realize  the  archi- 
tectural potentialities  of  steel,  concrete, 
and  glass,  which  he  used  expressively. 
His  designs  were  always  actuated  by  the 
principles  of  organic  structure  so  that 
each  part  by  its  character  denotes  its 
relation  to  the  whole,  and  he  always 
aimed  at  the  integration  of  the  building 
with  the  site  and  the  surroundings.  In  his 
work  the  laws  which  govern  natural  forms 
were  applied  to  architectural  design,  and 
his  great  achievement  was  that  in  most  of 
his  buildings  there  is  this  feeling  of  organic 
rhythm  and  unity  combined  with  expres- 
sion of  purpose  in  terms  of  steel,  concrete, 
and  glass.  His  work  has  been  one  of 
the  vital  architectural  influences  of  the 
century.  In  the  period  of  austere  building 
in  England  after  the  war  of  1939-45  his 
reputation  suffered  something  of  an  eclipse 
but  about  the  year  1958  there  came  a 
revival  of  interest  with  a  renewed 
appreciation  of  the  value  of  architectural 
expression  of  a  more  positive  and  symbolic 
character. 

Mendelsohn  was  a  man  of  wide  cultural 
interests.  Probably  his  chief  enthusiasm 
after  architecture  was  music,  and  he  had  a 
particular  fondness  for  Bach  whose  music 
he  liked  to  hear  while  he  worked.  He  often 
said  that  music  gave  him  ideas  for  designs, 
and  many  of  his  sketch  projects  bear  the 
titles  of  musical  compositions.  Physically 
he  was  a  man  of  medium  height,  rather 
thickset.  His  was  a  dynamic  personality. 
He  was  a  tireless  worker  and  rarely  took 
a  holiday.  He  had  a  remarkable  intuitive 
faculty  of  quickly  grasping  the  essential 
significance  of  relationships  and  situa- 
tions, revealed  in  his  masterly  analysis 
of  the  relation  of  the  Jews  to  modern 
society  in  a  pamphlet  which  he  wrote 
in  1933  on  the  political,  economic,  and 
social  conditions  of  the  world. 

In  1915  Mendelsohn  married  Luise 
Maas,  a  cellist,  daughter  of  Ernst  Maas, 
a  tobacco  merchant  in  Baden;  they  had 
one  daughter.  Mendelsohn  died  in  San 
Francisco  15  September  1953. 

[Oskar  Beyer,  EHc  Mendelsohn.  Briefe 
eines  Architekten,  Munich,  1961 ;  Wolf  Von 
Eckardt,  Eric  Mendelsohn,  1960;  Mario 
Federico  Roggero,  II  Contributo  di  Mendel- 
sohn alia  evoluzione  delV architettura  moderna, 
Milan,  1952 ;  Arnold  Whittiek,  Eric  Mendel- 
sohn, 2nd  ed.  1956;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.] 

Arnold  Whittick. 


MENDL,  Sir  CHARLES  FERDINAND 

(1871-1958),  press  attache,  was  born  in 
London  14  December  1871,  the  second 
son  of  Ferdinand  Mendl  and  his  wife, 
Jeannette  Rachel  Hyam.  His  elder  brother 
was  Sir  S.  F.  Mendl  who  became  distin- 
guished in  the  City.  Their  father  had  been 
born  at  Tarbor  in  Bohemia  and  sent  to 
London  as  a  youth  to  work  on  the  Baltic 
Exchange ;  he  had  subsequently  formed  a 
small  family  grain  firm  and  become  a 
British  subject.  Mendl,  on  leaving  Harrow, 
entered  the  family  firm  and  later  started  a 
branch  in  Buenos  Aires.  He  next  migra- 
ted to  Paris  and  went  into  another 
business.  On  the  outbreak  of  war  he 
volunteered,  but  was  seriously  injured 
in  an  accident  whilst  an  interpreter  with 
the  25th  Infantry  brigade  and  invalided 
out  in  1915.  After  working  in  Paris  on 
intelligence  for  the  Admiralty  in  1918, 
he  was  attached  to  the  British  embassy 
during  the  peace  conference  and  in  1920 
appointed  Paris  representative  of  the 
Foreign  Office  news  department.  Knighted 
in  1924,  he  was  press  attache  at  the 
embassy  from  1926  until  1940. 

Mendl  quickly  established  friendly 
relations  with  the  Paris  press,  whether 
correspondents,  editors,  or  proprietors. 
His  relationship  with  the  British  corre- 
spondents was  equally  friendly.  Press 
attaches  were  then  a  new  institution  and 
journalists  readily  responded  to  the 
appointment  of  a  man  who  was  always 
available  to  them.  Mendl  was  ever  ready 
to  produce  information  as  far  as  he  was 
authorized  and  to  arrange  meetings  with 
appropriate  officials.  But  it  was  always 
a  two-way  traffic.  Mendl  proved  no  less 
effective  as  a  news-gatherer  for  the 
embassy  and  this  came  to  be  almost  his 
most  important  function.  His  genial  social 
qualities,  which  blossomed  in  these 
surroundings,  made  him  a  first-class 
mixer  and  brought  him  wide  contacts 
with  the  political  and  social  world.  A 
generous  and  hospitable  man,  an  excel- 
lent judge  of  wine,  he  loved  to  entertain. 
To  small  intimate  parties  at  his  flat  in  the 
Avenue  Montaigne,  he  would  invite  care- 
fully selected  guests  two  or  three  times  a 
week:  it  might  be  journalists  one  day, 
politicians  another,  business  people,  or  a 
skilfully  chosen  mixture,  not  excluding 
the  social  world.  Without  profundity 
himself,  he  had  the  knack  of  evoking  those 
witty  and  salty  discussions  which  French- 
men enjoy.  He  would  always  have  at  his 
table  one  or  two  members  of  the  embassy, 
often  a  senior  whom  his  guests  wanted 


734 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Mercer 


to  meet;  and  he  was  especially  kind  in 
providing  new  arrivals  on  the  staff  with 
contacts.  A  lover  of  music  and  a  former 
pupil  of  Jean  de  Reszke,  he  had  a  fine 
baritone  voice  and  would  delight  his 
friends  by  his  singing  of  German  Lieder. 

As  time  went  on  Mendl  became  an 
institution.  He  was  essentially  a  contact 
man,  able  to  adapt  himself  and  make 
himself  agreeable  to  anybody.  Shrewd, 
if  without  great  political  judgement,  he 
absorbed  information  and  passed  it  on 
to  his  chiefs  for  their  assessment.  He 
produced  the  talk  of  the  town  with  his 
own  comments,  but  he  was  not,  as  legend 
had  it,  a  sort  of  Eminence  grise.  Loving 
France  as  he  did,  he  was  yet  a  robust  up- 
holder of  Britain  and  served  his  five 
successive  ambassadors  faithfully  and 
stoutly,  being  particularly  close  to  Lord 
Tyrrell  and  Sir  Eric  Phipps  [qq.v.].  His 
reports  may  sometimes  have  aroused 
indignation,  as  when  he  foresaw  that  the 
French  would  not  fight  in  1939,  but  he 
was  unfortunately  correct.  He  had  a 
particularly  close  friendship  with  the 
famous  Pertinax  of  the  Echo  de  Paris. 
A  generous,  genial  and  kindly  man,  Mendl 
was  a  typical  figure  of  Paris  between  the 
wars,  sharing  its  standards  and  its  frivoli- 
ties. He  went  everywhere,  knew  everyone, 
and  entertained  everyone.  He  was  a  man 
of  his  period  which  ended  fittingly  with 
his  resignation  in  May  1940. 

In  1926  Mendl  married  Elsie  Anderson, 
daughter  of  Stephen  de  Wolfe,  doctor. 
She  was  an  American  who  had  made  a 
fortune  in  New  York  as  a  fashionable 
decorator  and  during  the  war  had 
nursed  in  Paris.  She  rented  the  Villa 
Trianon  at  Versailles  where  both  before 
and  after  her  marriage  she  entertained 
lavishly  the  international  world  of  Paris. 
Although  Mendl  alwaj^s  attended  her 
Sunday  gatherings,  he  himself  continued 
to  live  and  entertain  his  own  friends  at  the 
Avenue  Montaigne,  whose  society  was 
more  congenial  to  him.  On  the  collapse 
of  France  the  Mendls  left  for  Lisbon  and 
the  United  States  where  they  settled  in 
Beverly  Hills.  After  the  war  they  returned 
to  France,  but  the  days  of  the  Avenue 
Montaigne  were  gone.  Paris  was  a  new 
world,  run  by  new  people  too  young  to 
have  known  Charles  Mendl  in  his  heyday. 
He  continued  to  entertain  his  old  friends 
to  little  parties,  now  in  the  Avenue  d'lena, 
where  he  resided,  whilst  his  wife,  who  was 
considerably  older,  lived  at  the  Villa 
Trianon  until  she  died  in  1950.  In  1951 
Mendl  married  a  talented  Belgian  lady. 


Yvonne  Marie  Marguerite  Isabelle,  daugh- 
ter of  Jules  Hector  Henri  Victor  Steinbach 
of  Brussels  and  divorced  wife  of  Baron 
de  Heckeren,  but  she  died  of  a  lingering 
disease  in  1956.  Mendl  himself  died  in 
Paris  14  February  1958.  There  were  no 
children. 

[The   Times,    15   February   1958 ;   private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Harvey  of  Tasburgh. 


MERCER,  CECIL  WILLIAM  (1885- 
1960),  novelist  under  the  name  of 
DoRNFORD  Yates,  was  born  at  Wellesley 
House,  Upper  Walmer,  Kent,  7  August 
1885,  the  only  son  of  Cecil  John  Mercer, 
solicitor,  of  King's  Bench  Walk,  and  his 
wife,  Helen  Wall.  He  was  a  first  cousin  of 
'Saki'  (H.  H.  Munro,  q.v.).  He  was 
educated  at  Harrow  and  University 
College,  Oxford,  where  he  obtained  a 
third  in  jurisprudence  (1907)  and  was 
president  of  the  O.U.D.S.  (1906-7).  He 
was  called  to  the  bar  by  the  Inner 
Temple  in  1909  and  in  the  following  year 
made  a  dramatic  beginning  by  assisting 
(Sir)  Travers  Humphreys  [q.v.]  through- 
out the  Crippen  case.  In  the  war  of  1914- 
18  he  was  commissioned  in  the  3rd  County 
of  London  Yeomanry  and  saw  service  in 
Egypt  and  Salonica.  It  left  him  with  the 
rank  of  captain  and  extremely  painful 
chronic  rheumatism.  After  the  war  he 
therefore  began  to  spend  his  winters  in  the 
south  of  France  and  settled  at  Pau  with 
the  American  wife  whom  he  married  in 
1919 — Bettine,  daughter  of  Robert  Ewing 
Edwards,  of  Philadelphia.  Later,  when  he 
had  earned  a  comfortable  fortune,  he  was 
to  build  a  house  there,  exactly  to  his 
wishes,  which  he  described  in  The  House 
that  Berry  Built  (1945). 

In  some  stories  in  the  pre-war  Windsor 
Magazine,  writing  under  the  name  of 
Dornford  Yates,  he  had  already  created  a 
group  of  characters  who  were  to  become 
increasingly  popular  with  the  publication 
of  The  Brother  of  Daphne  (1914),  The 
Courts  of  Idleness  (1920),  Berry  and  Co. 
(1921),  Jonah  and  Co.  (1922),  and  their 
successors,  written  to  meet  an  eager 
demand.  'Berry'  Pleydell  and  his  relatives 
— 'of  White  Ladies,  in  the  county  of 
Hampshire' — were  all  handsome,  well- 
born, rich,  and  witty;  they  took  part  in 
romantic  comedies  narrated  by  'Boy' 
Pleydell,  and  one  of  the  group,  Jonah 
Mansel,  a  strong  silent  bachelor  with  a 
taste  for  adventure,  was  the  chief  pro- 
tagonist in  the  romantic  thrillers,  such  as 


9f8$ 


Mercer 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


She  Fell  Among  Thieves  (1925),  narrated 
by  William  Chandos. 

Dornford  Yates  readily  acknowledged 
his  debt  to  Ruritania:  setting  these 
adventures  in  such  parts  of  Europe  as 
might  provide  mountain  castles  with 
dungeons,  splendid  or  villainous  nobility, 
and  unpoliced  spots  suitable  for  the 
burial  of  slain  caitiffs.  One  book,  The 
Stolen  March  (1926),  acknowledged  itself 
the  stuff  of  dreams  by  turning  into  an 
actual  fairy-tale;  but  this  was  a  mere 
frolic ;  his  general  purpose  was  to  intro- 
duce high  romance  into  an  increasingly 
drab,  democratic,  and  mechanized  world. 
As  romance  is  a  timeless  human  need,  his 
readers  were  accordingly  grateful;  and 
never  suffered  any  of  his  books  to  go  out 
of  print,  but  bought  more  than  two 
million  copies  of  them,  excluding  large 
American  sales.  With  one  feature  of  the 
mechanical  age  Dornford  Yates  made 
friends ;  since  his  chivalrous  paladins  and 
their  faithful  henchmen  could  not  go 
adventuring  on  horseback,  they  were 
equipped  from  the  start  with  the  noblest 
of  cars — ^the  Rolls-Royce.  A  Rolls  of  the 
twenties,  sumptuous,  silent,  powerful,  and 
big  enough  to  live  in,  takes  a  leading  part 
in  Blood  Royal  (1929).  Even  in  later  books, 
when  the  characters  are  allowed  a  few 
money  troubles  and  White  Ladies  has 
been  handed  over  to  the  nation,  they  are 
seldom  reduced  to  their  last  Rolls-Royce. 

In  1933  Mercer's  first  marriage,  by 
which  he  had  one  son,  was  dissolved;  in 
1934  he  married  Elizabeth,  daughter  of 
David  Mather  Bowie.  In  1939  his  fine 
house  at  Eaux  Bonnes  was  completed; 
but  during  the  next  year  it  had  to  be 
vacated  before  the  German  advance. 
Escaping  through  Spain  they  went  to 
South  Africa  where  Mercer  volunteered 
for  service  first  at  imperial  headquarters, 
then  with  the  Southern  Rhodesia  forces 
with  the  rank  of  major.  His  health, 
however,  did  not  permit  him  to  serve  for 
long.  Upon  returning  to  Europe  at  the 
end  of  the  war,  he  found  Uving  conditions 
difficult  and  his  once  cherished  home 
shabby  and  neglected;  he  therefore  de- 
signed and  built  another  such  house  at 
Umtali,  Southern  Rhodesia,  where  he 
settled  down  to  write  several  more  books. 
These  included  As  Berry  and  I  Were 
Saying  (1952)  and  B-Berry  and  I  Look 
Back  (1958)  in  which  he  identified  himself 
as  *Boy'  and  recounted  and  discussed  his 
experiences  and  opinions  with  his  other 
not  altogether  fictional  characters.  He 
died  at  Umtali  5  March  1960. 


[The  Times,  7  March  1960;  Richard  Us- 
borne,  Clubland  Heroes^  1953.] 

M.  B&IXASIS. 


MICHELL,  ANTHONY  GEORGE 
MALDON  (1870^1959),  engineer,  was 
born  21  June  1870  in  Islington,  London, 
the  younger  son  of  John  Michell  and  his 
wife,  Grace  Rowse.  Of  Cornish  and  per- 
haps Huguenot  extraction,  his  parents 
were  reared  near  Tavistock  in  Devon. 
Energetic  and  adventurous  people,  un- 
scholastic  but  serious  minded,  they  emi- 
grated to  Australia  about  1855  and  settled 
in  the  small  gold-mining  community  of 
Maldon,  north-west  from  Melbourne.  To 
further  the  education  of  their  sons,  the 
younger  of  whom  had  been  born  during  a 
visit  to  England,  they  removed  first  to 
Melbourne;  then  to  Cambridge.  George 
Michell  completed  his  schooling  at  the 
Perse  School,  while  his  elder  brother,  John 
Henry  Michell,  F.R.S.  (1863-1940),  was 
becoming  successively  senior  wrangler. 
Smith's  prizeman,  and  fellow  of  Trinity. 
About  1890  the  family  returned  to 
permanent  residence  in  Melbourne,  where 
Michell  took  up,  simultaneously,  the 
courses  in  civil  and  mining  engineering 
at  the  university.  After  completing  his 
studies  with  great  distinction  (B.C.E. 
1895,  M.C.E.  1899),  he  became  pupil 
assistant  and  later  partner  with  Bernhard 
Alexander  Smith  in  his  engineering 
practice. 

In  1903  Michell  commenced  an  inde- 
pendent practice,  centred  on  hydraulic 
engineering;  this  involved  extensive 
travel  in  Victoria  and  Tasmania.  Inter  alia 
he  was  consultant  to  the  Mount  Lyell 
Copper  Mining  Company  which  made 
one  of  the  first  hydro -electric  installations 
in  Australia;  designer  of  the  pumping 
machinery  for  the  Murray  Valley  irriga- 
tion works;  and  investigator  (1919)  for 
the  Victorian  Government  of  the  hydro- 
electric possibilities  later  developed  on 
the  Kiewa  River.  Along  with  this  activity 
he  pursued  his  ideas  for  mechanical 
inventions,  which  probably  had  begun  to 
germinate  before  1900.  Amongst  engineers 
and  shipbuilders  his  name  (properly 
pronounced  Mitchell)  became  famous 
through  his  invention  of  the  Michell 
thrust-block,  a  device  for  supporting  a 
rotating  propeller-  or  turbine-shaft  against 
a  large  longitudinal  force  externally 
applied  to  it.  This  invention,  patented  in 
1905,  was  based  on  theoretical  investi- 
gations regarding  fluid  motion  and  the 
principles  of  lubrication.  It  was  in  every 


7M 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Milford 


way  superior  to  those  previously  in  use — 
dissipating  less  energy,  more  reliable  and 
compact,  and  easier  to  adjust;  it  made 
possible  much  of  the  modern  develop- 
ment of  steam  and  water  turbines  and  of 
large  fast  ships.  Of  his  other  inventions  the 
most  striking  and  potentially  revolution- 
ary was  the  'Michell  crankless  engine', 
which  was  patented  in  or  before  1922. 
In  an  endeavour  to  arrange  for  the  manu- 
facture of  these  engines  Michell  gave  up 
his  Victorian  practice  in  1925  and  spent 
some  years  travelling  in  Britain,  Europe, 
and  the  United  States.  He  returned 
permanently  to  Melbourne  about  1933. 

In  1934  Michell  was  elected  F.R.S. ; 
in  1988  he  was  awarded  the  Kernot 
memorial  medal  of  the  university  of 
Melbourne ;  and  in  1942  the  James  Watt 
international  medal  of  the  Institution  of 
Mechanical  Engineers,  London.  In  publi- 
cation he  was  sparing ;  the  most  accessible 
are  his  book  Lubrication:  its  principles 
and  practice  (1950)  and  three  theoretical 
papers  reprinted  in  1964  along  with 
those  of  his  brother.  Many  of  his  results 
in  theoretical  and  experimental  mech- 
anics were  published  only  in  the  specifica- 
tions of  his  patented  inventions,  which 
numbered  a  dozen  or  more. 

Michell's  achievements  rested  on  the 
rare  combination  of  mathematical  and 
theoretical  power  with  mechanical  flair 
and  inventiveness,  all  of  which  he  had  in 
high  degree ;  his  own  assessment  of  their 
relative  importance  is  shown  on  the  title- 
page  of  his  book  on  lubrication,  where  he 
quoted  Leonardo  da  Vinci's  'theory  is  the 
captain,  practice  the  soldiers'.  But  his 
achievements  rested  equally  on  his  charac- 
ter, in  the  formation  of  which  family 
influence  was  very  strong.  In  work  and 
conduct  he  adhered  firmly  to  the  highest 
standards;  he  found  refreshment  from 
contact  with  nature  and  simple  country 
life  which  to  him  was  'essential  to  his 
mental  health  and  comfort'.  Hence  came 
his  ideal,  'that  the  products  of  mechanical 
art  should  be  truly  serviceable  and 
durable,  and  hence  of  necessity  simple  in 
construction,  however  recondite  in  theory*. 
A  reticent  man,  who  sought  only  a  small 
circle  of  friends,  Michell  displayed  always 
a  direct  quiet  manner  and  genuine 
courtesy  and  modesty.  His  conversation 
was  (in  his  latter  years  at  any  rate) 
rather  deliberate,  underpinned  by  wide 
knowledge  and  keen  intelligence,  with 
sometimes  a  flash  of  dry  humour. 

Michell,  who  never  married,  died  at 
Melboiurne  17  February  1959. 


[T.  M.  Cherry  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  viii,  1962; 
personal  knowledge.]  T.  M.  Chkrry. 

MILFORD,  Sir  HUMPHREY  SUMNER 
(1877-1952),  pubHsher,  was  born  at 
East  Knoyle,  Wiltshire,  8  February  1877, 
the  youngest  of  the  ten  children  of  the 
rector,  (Canon)  Robert  Newman  Milford, 
by  his  wife,  Emily  Sarah  Frances,  daugh- 
ter of  Charles  Richard  Sumner,  bishop  of 
Winchester  [q.v.].  He  was  a  scholar  of 
Winchester  and  of  New  College,  and 
obtained  first  classes  in  classical  modera- 
tions (1898)  and  literae  humaniores  (1900). 
He  was  then  appointed  assistant  to 
Charles  Cannan  [q.v.],  the  secretary  to 
the  delegates  of  the  Oxford  University 
Press,  and  six  years  later  was  transferred 
to  the  London  office,  where  he  was  to  spend 
the  rest  of  his  working  life.  In  1913  he  suc- 
ceeded Henry  Frowde  [q.v.]  as  manager 
of  the  London  business  and  publisher  to 
the  university  of  Oxford. 

The  range  and  scale  of  the  output  of  the 
University  Press  during  Milford' s  forty- 
five  years  in  its  service  grew  almost 
beyond  recognition.  When  he  joined  in 
1900  it  had  long  been  known  for  its 
learned  books  and  had  acquired  a  more 
recent  reputation  for  school  textbooks. 
Outside  academic  circles,  however,  to  the 
general  reader  and  in  the  book  trade, 
almost  the  only  well-known  Oxford  books 
were  the  Bibles  and  prayer  books  pubUshed 
cum  privilegio.  By  1945  when  Milford 
retired  the  Press  had  become  one  of  the 
three  or  four  largest  publishing  houses  in 
the  country,  with  more  branches  overseas 
than  any  other.  In  this  transformation 
Milford  played  an  indispensable  part. 
The  Bible  warehouse  set  up  in  London  in 
the  eighteenth  century  had  grown,  under 
Frowde,  into  the  headquarters  for  the 
trade  distribution  of  all  Oxford  books. 
Cannan  determined  to  make  the  Oxford 
Press  'what  it  ought  to  be :  the  first  Press 
in  the  world'.  He  discerned  the  possi- 
bilities of  a  great  extension  of  its  useful- 
ness by  encouraging  the  London  office  to 
enter  active  publishing  on  its  own  account. 
Milford  was  the  chosen  instrument.  It 
was  not  long  before  'Humphrey  Milford, 
Oxford  University  Press,  London'  became 
a  well-known  imprint  on  books  in  many 
fields,  distinguishing  the  'London'  books 
from  the  'Clarendon  Press'  books  pro- 
duced under  the  direct  supervision  of  the 
delegates  in  Oxford.  Oxford  Medical 
Publications  were  launched  in  1907  (the 
year     after    Milford    became     Frowde's 


^ 


Milford 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


assistant)  with  the  advice  and  assistance 
of  (Sir)  William  Osier  [q.v.],  himself  a 
delegate,  and  grew  into  a  notable  series 
of  books  for  practitioners.  In  the  same 
year  a  new  department  was  set  up 
for  the  production  of  children's  books, 
for  the  schoolroom  and  the  nursery. 
A  thriving  family  of  hymn  books  (includ- 
ing the  English  Hymnal  and  Songs  of 
Praise)  stemmed  from  the  prayer  book 
privilege ;  and  Milford' s  lifelong  interest 
in  music  led  to  his  most  striking  enter- 
prise, the  Oxford  music  department, 
started  in  1923  under  the  energetic 
direction  of  Hubert  Foss  [q.v.].  Its  first 
modest  group  of  publications  was 
cautiously  classified  in  the  general  cata- 
logue as  'general  literature'. 

Milford' s  main  preoccupation  was  in 
fact  literature.  He  was  specially  devoted 
to  the  poets,  novelists,  and  letter-writers 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  a  preference 
perhaps  drawing  its  strength  from  the 
country  rectory  of  his  childhood — the 
rectory  where  Sir  Christopher  Wren  was 
born — and  reflected  in  the  inclusion  of 
the  bulk  of  Trollope's  novels  in  the  World's 
Classics,  and  in  Milford's  own  scholarly 
editions  of  Leigh  Hunt,  Browning,  and 
others.  But  he  was  an  omnivorous,  and 
very  rapid,  reader,  devouring  great 
quantities  of  history,  biography,  and 
letters,  snapping  up  detective  stories 
by  the  dozen,  and  working  with  hard- 
won  enjoyment  at  modern  poetry.  He  was 
the  originator  of  the  Oxford  Dictionary 
of  Quotations  and  editor  of  the  Oxford 
Book  of  English  Verse  of  the  Romantic 
Period. 

Milford  was  of  middle  height  and  slightly 
built,  nimble  and  athletic,  but  clumsy 
with  his  fingers.  He  was  a  first-class 
lawn  tennis  player,  difficult  to  beat  even 
at  Wimbledon ;  but  he  could  not  niend  a 
fuse.  His  handwriting  was,  in  his  middle 
and  later  years,  strikingly  illegible,  but 
his  communications  were  very  brief. 
His  personality  was  strongly  marked  but 
elusive.  What  he  said  or  did  was  seen  to 
be  characteristic,  yet  could  not  easily  be 
predicted,  and  he  inspired  a  lively  but 
wary  devotion  in  his  staff.  He  was  a 
leading  figure  in  the  publishing  world, 
and  from  1919  to  1921  president  of  the 
Publishers'  Association.  On  the  completion 
of  the  Oxford  English  Dictionary  in  1928 
he  received  the  honorary  degree  of  D.Litt. 
from  his  university.  He  was  knighted  in 
1936. 

He  married  first,  in  1902,  Marion 
Louisa  (died  1940),  daughter  of  Horace 


Smith,  metropolitan  police  magistrate; 
and  secondly,  in  1947,  Rose  CaroHne 
(died  1966),  widow  of  Sir  Arnold  Wilson 
[q.v.].  There  were  two  sons  and  one 
daughter  of  the  first  marriage.  The  elder 
son,  Robin,  a  composer  of  note,  died  in 
1959 ;  the  younger,  David,  a  schoolmaster, 
was  many  times  amateur  rackets  cham- 
pion of  England.  A  portrait  of  Milford  by 
(Sir)  William  Coldstream  is  in  the  posses- 
sion of  his  niece,  Anne  Ridler,  the  poet 
(Mrs.  Vivian  Ridler).  Milford  died  in 
Oxford  6  September  1952. 
[Personal  knowledge.] 

A.    L.    P.    NORRINGTON. 

MILLAR,  GERTIE  (1879-1952),  actress, 
was  born  at  Bradford  21  February  1879, 
of  humble  and  obscure  parentage.  When 
still  under  fourteen  she  had  an  instan- 
taneous success  on  her  first  public  ap- 
pearance in  a  Manchester  pantomime,  and 
thereafter  she  never  looked  back.  Slender, 
tall,  and  remarkably  graceful,  Gertie 
made  no  pretence  at  rivalling  the  more 
massive  and  handsome  beauties  of  the 
lyric  stage.  But  her  small  and  winning 
face  sparkled  with  fun  and  her  smile  was 
enchanting  and  infectious.  Her  singing 
voice  had  a  delicious  squeak  to  it,  and  it 
was  this  combined  with  the  champagne- 
like effect  of  her  personality  which  led  an 
Edwardian  wag  to  bestow  on  her  the  nick- 
name 'Bubble  and  Squeak'.  Her  histrionic 
ability  did  not  range  very  widely  beyond 
the  sparkling  (as  in  Our  Miss  Gibhs)  and 
the  demure  (as  in  The  Quaker  Girl).  These 
two  musical  comedies  (1909-10)  belong  to 
her  heyday,  and  both  had  lilting  music  by 
Lionel  Monckton  whom  she  married  in 
1902. 

It  was  a  halcyon  time  when  ladies  wore 
feather-boas  and  huge  hats  with  osprey 
feathers,  and  when  a  dashing  new  game 
called  diabolo  was  all  the  rage,  and  the 
world  seemed  to  revolve  in  three-four 
time  to  the  irresistible  tunes  of  composers 
like  Monckton  and  Ivan  Caryll  and  Paul 
Rubens,  or  Leo  Fall  and  Franz  Lehar. 
The  Toreador  (1901)  at  the  Gaiety  (with 
music  by  Monckton  and  Caryll)  began 
Gertie  Millar's  triumphant  series,  and  the 
revival  of  A  Country  Girl  at  Daly's 
Theatre  (the  music  wholly  by  Monckton) 
concluded  it  in  the  darkling  autumn  of 
1914.  She  made  some  intermittent  ap- 
pearances thereafter  in  less  successful 
plays  and  in  variety.  Most  often  her 
manager  was  the  great  George  Edwardes ; 
usually,  although  by  no  means  always,  the 
theatre  was  the  Gaiety,  and  throughout 


738 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


Mills 


the  first  half  of  the  century  she  was 
regarded  as  the  Gaiety  Girl  par  excellence. 
Long  afterwards  ancient  playgoers  were 
still  to  be  met  who  could  hum  her 
favourite  ditties  in  Our  Miss  Gibbs: 
'We  never  do  that  in  Yorkshire'  and  'I'm 
such  a  silly  when  the  moon  comes  out'. 
In  other  of  the  shows  she  had  an  unfailing 
appeal  when  being  sung  to  by  the  young 
men  of  the  chorus  in  top  hats,  addressing 
her  gallantly  as  'Elsie  from  Chelsea',  or 
'Sweet  Katie  Connor — I  dote  upon  her', 
or  even,  at  the  beginning  of  the  war,  as 
'Sister  Susie  sewing  shirts  for  soldiers'. 

After  Monckton's  death  in  1924,  she 
married  the  second  Earl  of  Dudley  [q.v.], 
a  second  happy  marriage  which  lasted 
until  his  death  in  1932.  To  the  end  of  her 
life  she  was  a  keen  first-nighter,  and  her 
appearance  always  caused  a  stir  of  acclaim 
in  the  crowd  outside  as  well  as  in  the 
foyer.  In  her  last  few  years  she  might  be 
supported  by  two  walking-sticks  or  even 
be  wheeled  into  the  theatre  in  a  chair. 
But  she  was  enthusiastic  for  the  theatre 
to  the  end  of  her  charmed  and  charming 
life.  She  wrote  no  autobiography  nor  any 
books  or  articles  of  reminiscence. 

Gertie  Millar  died  at  Chiddingfold  in 
Surrey  25  April  1952.  She  had  no  children. 

[Private  information.]  Alan  Dent. 

MILLS,  WILLIAM  HOBSON  (1873- 
1959),  organic  chemist,  was  born  in 
London  6  July  1873,  the  eldest  of  the 
five  children  of  William  Henry  Mills, 
a  Lincolnshire  architect,  by  his  wife, 
Emily  Wiles  Quincey,  daughter  of  William 
Hobson,  of  Spalding,  Lincolnshire.  Mills's 
parents  returned  to  Spalding  in  the 
autumn  of  1873,  so  that  he  became  a 
Lincolnshire  man  in  every  respect  other 
than  that  of  his  birthplace. 

Mills  was  educated  at  Spalding  Granunar 
School  and  Uppingham.  He  entered  Jesus 
College,  Cambridge,  in  October  1892,  but 
spent  the  academic  year  1893-4  at  home 
recovering  from  a  foot  injury  received  at 
school.  He  obtained  a  first  class  in  part  i 
of  the  natural  sciences  tripos  in  1896  and 
in  part  ii  (chemistry)  in  1897,  being  elected 
a  fellow  of  Jesus  in  1899.  In  this  year  he 
went  to  Tubingen  to  work  for  two  very 
interesting  and  happy  years  under  Hans 
von  Pechmann.  His  interest  arose  from 
his  chemical  work  and  his  novel  and 
congenial  environment ;  his  happiness  was 
due  largely  to  an  early  meeting  in  the 
Tubingen  laboratory  with  N.  V.  Sidgwick 
[q.v.]  who  became  his  lifelong  friend. 
The  two  men  shared  a  deep  interest  in  both 


chemistry  and  natural  history;  in  later 
years  they  occupied  very  similar  positions, 
Sidgwick  at  Oxford  as  a  chemist  interested 
primarily  in  matters  of  structure.  Mills 
at  Cambridge  as  an  organic  chemist. 

In  1902  Mills  became  head  of  the  chemi- 
cal department  of  the  Northern  Poly- 
technic Institute  in  London.  In  1912  he 
returned  to  Cambridge  to  occupy  the 
demonstratorship  to  the  Jacksonian  pro- 
fessor of  natural  philosophy,  Sir  James 
Dewar  [q.v.],  and  was  elected  a  fellow 
and  lecturer  of  Jesus  College.  He  was 
appointed  a  university  lecturer  in  organic 
chemistry  in  1919,  and  reader  in  stereo- 
chemistry in  1931,  an  appointment  from 
which  he  retired  in  1938.  In  1940-48  he 
was  president  of  Jesus. 

Mills's  chemical  work  can  be  divided 
almost  entirely  into  two  main  groups, 
stereochemistry  and  the  cyanine  dyes,  in 
each  of  which  he  attained  an  outstanding 
position.  The  most  important  stereo- 
chemical investigations  of  Mills  and  his 
co-workers  were:  (a)  the  first  experi- 
mental confirmation  of  the  Hantzsch- 
Werner  theory  of  the  isomerism  of  the 
oximes ;  {b)  the  first  optical  resolution  of 
a  spirocyclic  compound  and  of  an  allene 
compound;  (c)  the  confirmation  of  the 
tetrahedral  configuration  of  the  ammo- 
nium ion  and  of  the  planar  configuration 
of  the  platinous  complex ;  (d)  the  'obstacle' 
theory,  involving  restricted  rotation,  to 
explain  the  optical  activity  of  certain 
substituted  diphenic  acids.  He  synthesized 
and  resolved  several  novel  types  of 
compounds,  the  optical  activity  of  which 
was  dependent  on  restricted  rotation. 

His  work  on  cyanine  dyes  arose  early  in 
the  war  of  1914-18.  German  photographic 
reconnaissance  was  carried  out  using 
plates  which,  by  the  addition  of  minute 
quantities  of  certain  highly  coloured 
compounds,  had  been  'sensitized'  through- 
out the  violet-blue-red  regions,  whereas 
the  Allies  were  initially  using  untreated 
plates  which  were  not  sensitive  in  the  red 
region  and  thus  gave  particularly  poor 
results  in  the  red  sky  of  early  morning. 
(Sir)  William  Pope  [q.v.]  and  Mills 
investigated  the  preparation  and  chemis- 
try of  these  'photographic  sensitizers', 
with  the  result  that  nearly  all  the  sensi- 
tizing dyestuffs  used  by  the  Allies  in  the 
manufacture  of  panchromatic  plates  were 
produced  in  the  Cambridge  laboratory. 
Mills  subsequently  extended  widely  our 
knowledge  of  the  structure  and  chemical 
range  of  these  compounds. 

Mills  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1923  and 


s'm& 


Mills 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


received  its  Davy  medal  in  1938.  The 
Chemical  Society  of  which  he  was 
president  in  1941-4  awarded  him  the 
Longstaff  medal  in  1930.  He  was  president 
of  the  chemistry  section  at  the  British 
Association  meeting  in  1932. 

After  his  retirement  Mills  devoted  his 
leisure  to  the  study  of  the  sub-species 
of  British  bramble  which  he  collected, 
classified,  and  finally  preserved  in  the 
botany  department  of  the  university. 
His  collection  of  examples  of  320  of  the 
889  'micro-species'  of  Rubus  fruticosus 
consists  of  about  2,400  sheets,  of  which 
2,200  were  meticulously  mounted  and 
arranged  in  systematic  order. 

In  1903  Mills  married  Mildred  May, 
daughter  of  George  James  Gostling,  a  den- 
tal surgeon  and  pharmaceutical  chemist; 
they  had  one  son  and  three  daughters. 
Mills  died  in  Cambridge  22  February  1959. 
A  pencil  sketch  by  Randolph  Schwabe 
(1945)  is  at  Jesus  College. 

[The  Times,  23  February  1959;  Nature, 
4  April  1959;  F.  G.  Mann  in  Biographical 
Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  vi, 
1960;  Proceedings  of  the  Chemical  Society, 
1960 ;  personal  knowledge.]         F.  G.  Mann. 

MILNE,  ALAN  ALEXANDER  (1882- 
1956),  author,  was  born  18  January  1882 
at  Henley  House  in  Kilburn.  He  was  the 
yoiuigest  of  a  family  of  three  sons,  a  fact 
which  seems  to  have  suggested  to  him  as 
he  grew  up  the  romantic  approach  to  life 
of  a  fairy-tale.  His  father,  John  Vine 
Milne,  a  Scotsman  of  Aberdonian  descent, 
had  married,  at  Buxton,  Sarah  Maria, 
daughter  of  Peter  Heginbotham,  a  manu- 
facturer. Both  parents  at  the  time  con- 
ducted private  schools.  While  the  mother 
is  remembered  chiefly  as  an  embodiment 
of  all  the  domestic  virtues,  his  father 
was  an  educational  enthusiast,  hero  and 
mentor  to  his  sons.  H.  G.  Wells  [q.v.]  was 
for  a  time  a  science  master  at  Henley 
House  and  remained  always  a  family 
friend. 

A.  A.  Milne  obtained  a  Westminster 
scholarship  at  the  age  of  eleven,  an 
unprecedented  achievement,  and  pro- 
ceeded to  Trinity  College,  Cambridge, 
where  he  disappointed  his  tutor  by 
accepting  the  editorship  of  the  Granta 
and  preferring  journalism  to  the  mathe- 
matical tripos,  in  which  he  gained  a  third 
class  (1903).  It  was  not  only  his  ambition  to 
write,  but  to  write  exactly  as  he  pleased, 
and  returning  to  London  he  became  in 
1906,  after  various  less  successful  ven- 
tures, assistant  editor  of  Punch  under  (Sir) 


Owen  Seaman  [q.v.].  In  this  capacity  he 
showed  a  remarkable  gift  for  light  and 
witty  dialogue  and  a  sense  of  dramatic 
form,  which  soon  attracted  the  attention 
and  admiration  of  a  large  circle  of  readers. 

The  war  interrupted  his  literary  career. 
He  served  as  a  signalling  officer  in  the 
Royal  Warwickshire  Regiment  in  England 
and  overseas,  but  he  was  able  in  1917  to 
stage  his  first  fantasy,  Wurzel-Flummery, 
which  was  followed  in  1920  by  the  far 
more  considerable  comedy,  Mr.  Pirn 
Passes  By. 

Leaving  the  staff  of  Punch  in  1919, 
Milne  thereafter  devoted  the  greater  part 
of  his  time  to  stage  comedy.  Clearly  the 
success  of  Sir  J.  M.  Barrie  [q.v.]  was  a 
guiding  influence:  the  paradoxical  situa- 
tion, the  mingling  of  much  laughter  with 
a  little  pathos,  and,  if  need  be,  the  fairy 
wand.  But  Milne  had  a  fancy  and  a  style 
which  were  all  his  own,  and  if  his  dream 
world  was  not  so  wistful  as  Barrie's,  it 
was  whimsical  enough  and  his  characters 
could  sustain  ingenious  and  airy  con- 
versations which  never  failed  to  amuse. 

His  first  successes  were  followed  by  a 
long  series  of  plays  in  which  the  attempt 
to  create  genuine  characters  became  more 
marked.  The  most  notable  of  these  were 
The  Truth  About  Blayds  (1921),  the  story 
of  a  poetical  imposter,  which  provided  an 
excellent  part,  as  the  unmarried  daughter, 
for  (Dame)  Irene  Vanbrugh  [q.v.];  The 
Dover  Road  (1922),  a  light-hearted  homily 
on  divorce,  in  which  Henry  Ainley  [q.v.] 
appeared;  and  The  Great  Broxopp  (1923), 
in  which  the  role  of  a  romantic  adver- 
tising agent  was  assumed  by  Edmund 
Gwenn.  Later  came  To  Have  the  Honour 
(1924) ;  The  Fourth  Wall  (1928),  a  cleverly 
contrived  murder  mystery;  Michael  and 
Mary  (1930);  and  Other  People's  Lives 
(1932).  Toad  of  Toad  Hall,  his  dramatiza- 
tion of  The  Wind  in  the  Willows  by 
Kenneth  Grahame  [q.v.],  was  first  staged 
in  1929. 

Milne  also  wrote  The  Red  House  Mystery, 
a  detective  story  (1922);  two  novels: 
Two  People  (1931)  and  Chloe  Marr  (1946) ; 
and  many  essays  in  various  moods,  some 
of  them  an  expression  of  his  serious  views 
on  world  politics  and  peace.  But  he  had 
found  a  new  and  wider  public  as  early  as 
1924  when  he  published  When  We  Were 
Very  Young,  a  series  of  verses  for  children 
dedicated  to  his  son,  Christopher  Robin, 
who  was  born  in  1920.  Now  We  Are  Six 
followed  in  1927.  In  the  same  genre,  but 
in  prose,  he  produced  Winnie-the-Pooh 
(1926)   and   The  House  at  Pooh   Corner 


740 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Milheir 


(1928),  which  bring  to  life  the  un- 
forgettable character  of  a  child's  nursery 
toys,  a  thought  suggested  to  him  by  his 
wife.  On  both  sides  of  the  Atlantic  and 
in  other  languages,  including  Japanese 
and  Bulgarian,  these  enchanting  stories 
with  their  attractive  illustrations  by 
E.  H.  Shepard  acquired  a  popularity 
which  seemed  almost  likely  to  rival  an 
earlier  Wonderland. 

Milne  married  in  1913  Dorothy  (Daphne), 
daughter  of  Martin  de  Selincourt,  a  City 
merchant.  He  died  at  his  home  at 
Hartfield,  Sussex,  31  January  1956.  The 
National  Portrait  Gallery  has  a  drawing 
by  Powys  Evans. 

[The  Times,  1  February  1956 ;  A.  A.  Milne, 
IV s  Too  Late  Now,  1939 ;  private  information  ; 
personal  knowledge.]  E.  V.  Knox. 

MELNER,        VIOLET        GEORGINA, 

Viscountess  Milner  (1872-1958),  editor 
of  the  National  Review,  was  born 
1  February  1872  at  38  Rutland  Gate, 
London,  the  youngest  of  the  five  children 
of  Admiral  Frederick  Augustus  Maxse 
[q.v.]  and  his  wife,  Cecilia,  daughter  of 
Colonel  James  Steel,  Indian  Army.  Her 
parents  suffered  from  incompatibility 
and  separated ;  but  she  derived  something 
from  both  of  them  and  improved  upon  it. 
From  her  father  came  courage  and  a 
better  version  of  the  restlessness  which 
caused  him  to  move  through  a  succession 
of  dwelling-houses.  In  her  it  became  a 
determination  to  get  to  the  bottom  of 
every  incident  and  issue  which  she  came 
across ;  and  she  had  the  vivid  intelligence 
necessary  to  do  so.  From  her  mother  came 
her  passionate  devotion  to  the  arts,  which 
in  her  early  days  meant  all  things  French, 
Her  addiction  to  France  owed  something 
also  to  her  father  who  became  a  lifelong 
friend  of  Clemenceau.  After  education 
by  governesses,  she  spent  over  two  years 
with  her  father  in  Paris  where  she  studied 
painting. 

Although  the  Maxse  family  was  con- 
nected with  the  peerage  through  the 
barony  of  Berkeley  into  which  her  grand- 
father had  married,  she  did  not  really 
enter  the  highest  echelons  of  society  and 
politics  until  her  marriage  in  1894  to  Lord 
Edward  Cecil  [q.v.],  son  of  the  third 
Marquess  of  Salisbury  [q.v.].  Her  husband 
was  a  distinguished  soldier  who  was  ap- 
pointed to  the  D.S.O.  in  the  Sudan  in  1898 
at  the  same  time  as  her  brother  (Sir)  Ivor 
Maxse  [q.v.].  She  accompanied  her  hus- 
band to  South  Africa  during  the  Boer  war 
and  it  was  there  that  she  first  met  Sir 


Alfred  (later  Viscount)  Milrier  [q.v.]  whom 
she  married  in  1921  after  the  death  of  her 
first  husband  in  December  1918.  It  is 
generally  supposed  that  she  was  respon- 
sible for  the  publication  in  1921  of  Lord 
Edward's  book  The  Leisure  of  an  Egyptian 
Official,  a  witty  skit  on  Cairene  personali- 
ties which  was  not  popular  on  the  Nile. 

Her  only  son  George  was  killed  in 
action  in  September  1914  and  she  had 
perhaps  never  quite  the  same  delight  in 
life  thereafter,  although  the  child  of  her 
only  daughter  Helen,  the  third  Lord 
Hardinge  of  Penshurst,  replaced  him  in 
name  and  in  her  affections.  She  had 
always  declared  the  Germans  to  be  bent 
on  war  before  1914  and  she  repeated  these 
warnings  before  1939  with  all  the  more 
force  because  she  was  wielding  an  instru- 
ment of  her  own.  This  was  the  National 
Review  which  she  took  over  as  a  labour 
of  love,  and  at  a  moment's  notice,  after 
the  sudden  illness  and  death  in  1932  of 
her  brother  Leo  Maxse  (a  notice  of  whom 
she  contributed  to  this  Dictionary).  She 
found  it  one  of  the  most  original,  inde- 
pendent, and  forthright  periodicals  of  all 
time,  renowned  for  its  line  on  the  Dreyfus 
case  and  the  pre-1914  German  menace ; 
this  prestige  she  enhanced. 

The  general  tone  of  the  paper  caused  her 
to  be  suspected  of  being  on  the  extreme 
Right.  But  many  right-  as  well  as  left- 
wing  swans  appeared  geese  to  her  and  the 
gaggle  included  not  only  the  League  of 
Nations,  the  Socialists,  Lloyd  George, 
the  Front  Populaire,  and  Hitler,  but  also 
Dr.  Malan  [q.v.],  Neville  Chamberlain,  and 
even  on  occasion  Stanley  Baldwin  and 
(Sir)  Winston  Churchill.  One  reason  why 
Milner  attracted  her  was  probably  that  he 
also  was  a  curious  political  mixture,  and 
he  too,  having  been  largely  brought  up  in 
Germany,  had  a  similar  assessment  of  the 
Germans.  In  any  case,  the  marriage  gave 
Milner  a  golden  evening  and  left  his  widow 
with  a  mass  of  documents,  the  historical 
importance  of  which  she  well  understood. 
She  gave  Milner' s  papers  about  the 
DouUens  meeting  in  1918,  when  Foch  was 
appointed  generalissimo,  to  the  Public 
Record  Office,  and  most  of  the  other 
Milner  papers  to  New  College,  Oxford. 
To  the  King's  School,  Canterbury,  she 
gave  the  lovely  Jacobean  house  Sturry 
Court  which  became  the  junior  school. 

It  is  as  much  for  what  she  was  as  for 
what  she  did  that  Lady  Milner  is  remem- 
bered. The  glow  of  a  lively,  incisive,  and 
sometimes  fierce  mind  shone  in  a  face 
framed  in  an  aureole  of  curly  hair.  Until 


:T41 


Milner 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


the  accident  which  brought  her  editorship 
of  the  National  Review  to  an  end  in  1948 
she  was  as  lithe  and  active  in  body  as  in 
mind.  To  the  very  last  her  mind  never 
lost  its  full  powers.  She  had  read  and  re- 
membered all  the  chief  treasures  of  English 
and  French  literature.  A  brilliant  racon- 
teuse,  there  poured  from  her  a  spate  of 
stories  about  the  famous:  Clemenceau, 
Rhodes,  Queen  Victoria,  Meredith,  Kipling. 
Her  only  volume  of  autobiography,  My 
Picture  Gallery  1886-1901  (1951),  was  not 
a  success,  perhaps  because  it  was  not  so 
vivid  as  her  conversation.  She  would 
not  have  minded  much.  What  she  liked 
was  not  material  success  but  meeting 
people,  liking  and  sometimes  loathing 
them,  encouraging  the  young,  consoling 
the  old,  probing,  perfecting,  prophesying. 
Every  epoch  has  its  grains  of  gold  and 
she  was  one  of  them.  Her  talents  made  her 
one  of  that  small  band  which  raised  the 
whole  status  and  sphere  of  her  sex  during 
the  latter  half  of  the  Victorian  age  and 
the  subsequent  generation.  She  died,  10 
October  1958,  in  the  lovely  home  she  had 
made  for  herself  at  Great  Wigsell  in  Kent. 

A  portrait  by  Noemi  Guillaume  and 
a  sketch  by  Sickert  are  reproduced  in  her 
autobiography. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Colin  Coote. 

MINETT,  FRANCIS  COLIN  (1890- 
1953),  veterinary  pathologist,  was  born 
in  Acton  Turville,  Gloucestershire,  16 
September  1890,  the  son  of  Francis 
Minett,  farmer,  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth 
Louisa  Birch.  He  attended  King  Edward's 
School,  Bath,  and  the  Royal  Veterinary 
College,  London,  becoming  M.R.C.V.S. 
in  1911.  In  1912  he  obtained  the  degree  of 
B.Sc.  (veterinary  science)  of  the  imiver- 
sity  of  London,  and  was  awarded  a  research 
scholarship  by  the  Board  of  Agriculture. 
He  continued  his  studies  in  Paris  at  the 
Institut  Pasteur,  and,  returning  to  the 
Royal  Veterinary  College,  came  under 
the  influence  of  Sir  John  McFadyean 
who,  with  A.  L.  Sheather,  was  studying 
contagious  abortion,  tuberculosis,  and 
other  diseases  of  the  domesticated  animals. 
On  the  outbreak  of  war  Minett  joined  the 
Royal  Army  Veterinary  Corps  with  which 
he  served  for  ten  years  in  France,  Egypt, 
and  England,  attaining  the  rank  of 
captain,  and  was  awarded  the  M.B.E. 
During  his  period  of  service  he  studied 
and  wrote  on  the  pathology  and  control 
of  equine  infections,  especially  ulcerative 
lymphangitis,  a  disturbing  disease  among 


the  horses  in  France  during  the  war.  Some 
of  Minett's  observations  were  of  interest  to 
comparative  pathologists,  for  he  demon- 
strated the  presence  of  diphtheria  bacilli, 
presumably  of  human  origin,  in  some  of 
the  lesions  on  the  limbs  of  horses.  It  is 
now  recognized  that  diphtheria  bacilli  may 
be  involved  in  skin  wounds  in  man,  horses, 
and  elephants. 

Returning  to  civilian  life  in  1924, 
Minett  worked  on  foot  and  mouth 
disease  as  a  research  officer  at  the  Ministry 
of  Agriculture's  veterinary  laboratory  at 
Weybridge.  In  1927  he  was  appointed 
director  of  the  research  institute  in 
animal  pathology  at  the  Royal  Veterinary 
College,  which  at  that  time  was  separate 
from  the  teaching  activities  of  the  college. 
In  the  same  year  he  obtained  the  D.Sc. 
degree  of  the  university  of  London. 
With  his  colleagues,  A.  W.  Stableforth  and 
S.  J.  Edwards,  he  made  a  survey  of  the 
bacterial  causes  of  bovine  mastitis,  a 
disease  which  had  not  previously  been 
studied  extensively  in  this  country. 
Minett  and  his  colleagues  were  responsible 
not  only  for  drawing  attention  to  its 
economic  significance,  but  for  distinguish- 
ing the  different  bacteria  which  cause  the 
disease  in  this  country,  paying  special 
attention  to  the  types  of  streptococci 
involved.  Minett  also  extended  his  in- 
vestigations to  include  problems  involving 
staphylococci.  Brucella,  and  other  organ- 
isms. Some  of  these  bacteria  are  patho- 
genic for  man  and  conveyed  by  cows' 
milk;  he  thereupon  collaborated  with 
many  who  were  interested  primarily  in 
human  health. 

In  1933  there  was  some  reorganization 
in  the  Royal  Veterinary  College  and 
Minett  combined  his  duties  as  director  of 
the  institute  with  those  of  professor  of 
pathology.  He  himself  undertook  the 
teaching  of  the  morbid-anatomical  aspects 
of  the  pathology  of  animal  diseases  and  of 
those  diseases  caused  by  viruses.  He  held 
this  dual  post  until  1939  when  he  resigned 
to  become  director  of  the  Imperial 
Veterinary  Research  Institute  at  Muk- 
teswar  in  India.  He  was  appointed 
CLE.  in  1945  but  in  1947  left  Mukteswar, 
which  was  within  the  Indian  part  of  the 
sub-continent,  and  accepted  the  post  of 
animal  husbandry  commissioner  with  the 
Government  of  Pakistan.  He  remained  for 
about  two  more  years  and  was  back  in 
England  by  1950. 

In  the  same  year  he  joined  the  Animal 
Health  Trust  as  director  of  their  farm 
livestock  research  station;  shortly  after 


742 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Minton 


accepting  this  post,  however,  he  was 
released  to  advise  the  Turkish  Government 
on  some  of  their  difficulties  connected 
with  diseases  of  animals.  He  returned  to 
England  in  1952  to  resume  the  direction 
of  the  station,  where  he  continued  his 
work  on  Johne's  disease  in  which  he  had 
been  interested  for  many  years,  and  also 
investigated  the  diseases  of  young  pigs. 

Minett  was  a  curious  individual,  not 
easy  to  know.  He  was  meticulous  in 
everything  he  did ;  this  was  demonstrable 
in  his  technique  at  the  laboratory  bench 
and  in  his  attention  to  detail  in  the 
writing  of  reports.These  were  his  character- 
istics, but  there  were  times  when  he  was 
unable  to  see  broader  issues  because  he 
was  surrounded  with  such  a  mass  of 
detail.  His  energy  and  enthusiasm  coloured 
his  outlook,  and  it  was  some  time  before 
one  realized  that  a  sensitive  nature  lay 
beneath  a  rather  brusque  exterior. 

In  1919  Minett  married  Iza,  daughter 
of  Robert  Stitt,  of  Belfast ;  they  had  one 
son.  Minett  died  at  Hartley,  near  Dartford, 
Kent,  26  December  1953. 

[Veterinary  Record,  13  February  1954; 
personal  knowledge.]  R.  Lovell. 

MINTON,  FRANCIS  JOHN  (1917-1957), 
artist,  was  born  at  Great  Shelf ord, 
Cambridgeshire,  25  December  1917,  the 
second  of  three  sons  of  Francis  Minton, 
solicitor,  then  of  East  Sheen,  and  his  wife, 
Kate  Key  Webb.  He  received  his  education 
between  1925  and  1935  at  Northcliffe 
House,  Bognor  Regis,  and  at  Reading 
School.  Thereafter  he  studied  for  a  time 
under  P.  F.  Millard  at  the  now  defunct 
St.  John's  Wood  Art  School.  It  was  there 
that  he  met  Michael  Ayrton  who,  though 
his  junior  by  several  years,  greatly 
affected  his  development  by  introducing 
him  to  James  Thrall  Soby's  After  Picasso. 
Minton's  response  to  the  work  of  the 
Parisian  neo-romantics  described  therein 
was  only  increased  by  eight  months  spent 
in  Paris  and  les  Baux  de  Provence 
immediately  prior  to  the  outbreak  of  war. 
The  influence  of  Eugene  Berman, 
Tchelitchew,  and  the  early  de  Chirico  was 
plainly  evident  in  the  crepuscular  street 
scenes  which  formed  the  core  of  his  work 
until  about  1942.  He  collaborated  with 
Ayrton  on  costumes  and  decor  for  (Sir) 
John  Gielgud's  production  of  Macbeth 
(1942);  in  the  same  year  he  shared  an 
exhibition  with  Ayrton  at  the  Leicester 
Galleries. 

Having  withdrawn  an  earlier  expressed 
conscientious  objection  to  the  war,  Minton 


was  called  into  the  Pioneer  Corps  in  the 
autumn  of  1941,  was  commissioned  in 
1943,  but  released  on  medical  grounds  in 
the  summer  of  that  year.  On  his  return 
to  London  he  shared  a  studio  until 
1946  with  the  Scottish  painters  Robert 
Colquhoun  and  Robert  MacBryde ;  there- 
after for  some  years  with  Keith  Vaughan. 
It  was  now  that  his  mature  style  was 
formed :  a  compound  of  urban  romanticism 
learned  from  Berman  and  rural  intricacy 
learned  from  Samuel  Palmer  [q.v.];  of 
the  metallic  formalizations  employed  by 
Wyndham  Lewis  [q.v.]  and  the  rich  colour 
employed  by  Colquhoun  and  MacBryde. 
These  diverse  influences  were  completely 
digested,  however,  and  Minton  quickly 
gained  recognition  as  a  leading  figure  in 
that  generation  of  young  romantics  which 
dominated  English  painting  during  the 
first  post-war  years. 

His  activities  were  manifold  and  his 
capacity  for  work  exceptional.  He  taught 
in  turn  at  three  distinguished  schools — 
Camberwell,  the  Central  School  of  Arts 
and  Crafts,  and  the  Royal  College  of  Art. 
He  undertook  very  many  decorations  and 
illustrations  for  books,  magazines,  and 
advertising — notably  a  travel  book  on 
Corsica  (Time  Was  Away,  1948)  with 
Alan  Ross  and  an  English  translation  of 
Alain-Fournier's  Le  Grand  Meaulnes 
(1947).  He  made  occasional  sorties  into 
almost  every  field  of  design,  from  wall- 
paper to  the  Chelsea  Arts  Ball,  and 
returned  to  the  theatre — ^to  which  his 
gifts  were  peculiarly  suited — ^with  settings 
for  Don  Juan  in  Hell  at  the  Royal  Court 
Theatre  (1956).  All  this  time  paintings, 
drawings,  and  water-colours  poured  forth 
in  a  steady  stream,  many  reflecting  his 
travels  in  Spain  (1948  and  1954),  the 
West  Indies  (1950),  and  Morocco  (1952). 
Between  1945  and  1956  he  held  no  fewer 
than  seven  one-man  shows  at  the  Lefevre 
Gallery,  as  well  as  contributing  to  many 
mixed  exhibitions.  From  1949  he  showed 
regularly  at  the  Royal  Academy's  summer 
exhibitions  and  in  the  same  year  he  was 
elected  a  member  of  the  London  Group. 
His  work  is  to  be  found  in  the  Tate 
Gallery  and  in  many  public  and  private 
collections  at  home  and  abroad. 

His  natural  facility  for  picture-making 
was  great.  An  exceptional  sense  of 
decoration  and  colour  was  combined 
with  precision  of  draughtsmanship — seen 
clearly  in  his  many  admirable  portraits 
of  friends- — and  with  an  unfailing  feeling 
for  his  medium.  He  made  for  himself 
a    place    in    the    English    topographical 


748 


Minton 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


tradition;  in  the  elegiac  undertones  of 
his  best  work,  he  added  a  sharp  sense 
of  the  poignant  evanescence  of  physical 
beauty  that  was  entirely  personal. 

Increasingly,  after  1950,  Minton  felt 
himself  out  of  contact  with  international 
fashion.  This  was  possibly  one  factor, 
among  others  springing  from  the  ambi- 
guities of  his  own  nature,  which  added  an 
increasingly  febrile  note  to  his  way  of  life. 
He  lived  in  the  moment,  impelled  urgently 
by  a  need  for  company  and  change. 
These  he  found  in  full  measure  in  the  pubs 
and  clubs  of  Soho.  Ranged  always  on  the 
side  of  the  'have-nots',  generous  to  a 
degree,  'Johnny'  Minton  was  an  exuberant 
companion  beloved  by  his  very  many 
friends  for  the  sweetness  of  his  character, 
for  his  gaiety,  and  for  the  intelligence 
which  imderlay  his  defensive  clowning. 

In  appearance  he  was  striking,  with  a 
shock  of  jet-black  hair  surmounting  a 
lantern  face,  of  extraordinary  gravity  in 
repose  but  totally  transformed  by  mirth. 
His  hands  were  long  and  lean.  From  his 
gangling  presence  came  a  ceaseless  crackle 
of  nervous  energy.  He  died  in  London, 
by  an  overdose  of  drugs,  in  his  fortieth 
year,  20  January  1957,  predeceased  by  his 
parents  and  both  his  brothers. 

A  number  of  portraits  and  self-portraits 
exist,  the  latter  including  a  head  (1953) 
in  the  possession  of  the  Leicestershire 
Education  Committee. 

[Personal  knowledge.] 

Michael  Middleton. 

MIRZA     MOHAMMAD     ISMAIL,     Sir 

(1883-1959),  Indian  administrator  and 
statesman.  [See  Ismail.] 

MOLLISON,  JAMES  ALLAN  (1905- 
1959),  airman,  was  born  in  Glasgow 
19  April  1905,  the  son  of  Hector  Alexander 
Mollison,  consultant  engineer,  and  his 
wife,  Thomasina  Macnee  Addie.  He  was 
educated  at  the  Glasgow  and  Edinburgh 
academies  and  received  a  short-service 
commission  in  the  Royal  Air  Force  in 
1923  on  the  nomination  of  the  lord  provost 
of  Glasgow.  He  learnt  to  fly  at  Duxford, 
was  posted  to  India  in  1925,  and  after 
returning  to  England  took  the  Central 
Flying  School  course  at  Wittering  and 
went  on  as  an  instructor  to  the  Flying 
Training  School  at  Sealand.  On  trans- 
ferring to  the  reserve  in  1928  he  went  to 
Australia  where  he  was  first  a  bathing 
beach  attendant,  next  an  instructor  at  the 
Adelaide  branch  of  the  Australian  Aero 
Club,  then  an  airline  pilot. 


Lord  Wakefield  [q.v.],  who  helped  so 
many  ambitious  pilots,  gave  Mollison  the 
initial  impetus  in  his  meteoric  career  of 
record-breaking  flights  by  providing  him 
with  a  Gipsy  Moth.  Seeking  to  establish 
a  new  record  for  the  solo  flight  in  a  light 
aeroplane  from  Australia  to  England, 
Mollison  wrecked  his  heavily  loaded 
machine  on  taking  off  from  Darwin. 
Wakefield  gave  him  another  Moth,  a 
D.H.60  Gipsy  2,  in  which  Mollison  took 
off  from  Wyndham  on  30  July  1931,  and 
set  course  for  England,  making  Pevensey 
Bay  in  just  over  8  days  19  hours.  As  in 
most  of  his  record-breaking  flights  he 
pressed  himself  and  his  aircraft  to  the 
limits  of  endurance. 

His  flight  from  England  to  the  Cape  in 
1932  again  revealed  those  qualities  which 
were  to  make  him  famous.  After  leaving 
on  24  March  in  a  Puss  Moth  with  Gipsy  3 
engine,  he  took  only  just  over  4  days 
17  hours  for  the  flight  and  arrived  over 
Cape  Town  aerodrome  in  the  evening  in 
such  a  state  of  physical  fatigue  that 
double  vision  caused  him  to  land  on  an 
adjacent  beach  and  overturn  his  machine 
into  the  sea. 

A  solo  flight  east  to  west  across  the 
North  Atlantic,  not  previously  attempted 
and  fraught  with  risk  because  of  pre- 
vailing adverse  winds,  attracted  intense 
public  interest,  enhanced  by  his  marriage 
in  July  1932  to  Amy  Johnson  [q.v.].  The 
flight  was  made  in  the  de  Havilland  Puss 
Moth  G-ABXY  with  120  horse-power 
Gipsy  3  engine  and  an  extra  160-gallon 
fuel  tank  in  the  cabin.  It  was  named  the 
'Heart's  Content'  after  a  town  in  New- 
foundland. He  took  off  18  August  1932 
from    Portmarnock    Strand   in    Ireland; 

19  hours  5  minutes  afterwards  he  crossed 
the  Newfoundland  coast  only  20  miles 
north  of  the  landfall  he  had  planned. 
Finally  he  landed  in  a  field  at  Pennfield 
Ridge,  New  Brunswick,   after  31   hours 

20  minutes  flying.  It  was  the  longest 
duration  flight  in  a  light  aircraft,  the  first 
crossing  of  the  Atlantic  in  such  a  machine, 
and  the  fastest  east-west  crossing. 

On  6  February  1933  Mollison  set  out 
from  Lympne  to  fly  the  South  Atlantic 
solo  from  east  to  west  in  the  'Heart's 
Content'.  He  flew  by  way  of  Casablanca, 
Agadir,  Villa  Cisneros,  and  Thies  in 
French  West  Africa,  to  Port  Natal,  Brazil, 
making  the  2,000-mile  ocean  crossing  in 
the  record  time  of  17  hours  40  minutes. 
With  Amy  Johnson  on  22-3  July  1933  he 
flew  from  Britain  to  the  United  States  in 
a  de  Havilland  Dragon.  After  a  flight  of 


744 


D.N.B.  1951^1960 


Moore 


39  hours  42  minutes  they  ran  short  of  fuel, 
landed  in  the  dark  at  Bridgeport,  over- 
turned their  machine  in  a  swamp,  and  were 
slightly  injured.  In  October  1934  in  a 
de  Havilland  Comet  they  set  a  record  of 
22  hours  for  the  stage  from  England  to 
India  in  the  England  to  Melbourne  race. 
In  October  1936  in  a  Bellanca  aeroplane 
MolUson  made  the  first  flight  from  New 
York  to  London  in  17  hours,  crossing  the 
North  Atlantic  in  13^  hours.  In  November 
and  December  1936  he  flew  from  England 
to  the  Cape  by  the  eastern  route  in  3  days 
6  hours. 

In  1933  MoUison  was  awarded  the 
Britannia  Trophy  for  his  flight  from 
England  to  South  America.  He  was  also 
awarded  the  Johnston  memorial  air 
navigation  trophy  and  the  Argentine 
gold  medal  for  aeronautics.  He  was  twice 
awarded  the  gold  medal  of  the  City  of 
New  York  and  received  the  freedom  of 
Atlantic  City. 

In  1946  MoUison  was  appointed  M.B.E. 
for  his  work  with  Air  Transport  Auxiliary 
and  with  'Atfero'  which  assisted  with 
ferrying  American  machines  across  the 
Atlantic.  He  undertook  many  difficult 
ferrying  missions  and  delivered  a  vast 
number  of  machines  for  the  Royal  Air 
Force.  He  earned  a  high  reputation  both 
as  a  pilot  and  as  an  especially  gifted 
navigator.  His  determination  not  to 
take  things  too  seriously  was  indicated 
by  his  oft-repeated  claim  that  in  an 
emergency  he  would  rather  jettison  a 
navigational  instrument  than  his  bottle  of 
brandy.  He  faced  danger  with  an  ironical 
smile  and  to  the  hazardous  flights  he 
undertook  he  always  contrived  to  give 
his  own  characteristic  faintly  humorous 
flourish. 

His  marriage  to  Amy  Johnson  was 
dissolved  in  1938  and  he  married,  secondly, 
in  the  same  year  Phyllis  Louis  Verley 
Hussey.  This  marriage  was  dissolved  in 
1948  and  he  married,  thirdly,  in  1949, 
Maria  Clasina  Eva  Kamphuis.  He  had  no 
children. 

A  film  based  on  some  of  the  flights  by 
MoUison  and  Amy  Johnson  called  They 
Flew  Alone  was  made  with  Robert  Newton 
and  Anna  Neagle.  MoUison  published  Deaf^ 
Cometh  Soon  or  Late  (1932),  in  which 
is  reproduced  a  portrait  by  Margaret 
Lindsay  WiUiams,  and  Playboy  of  the  Air 
(1937).  He  died  at  Roehampton  30 
October  1959. 

[C.  CoUinson  and  F.  McDermott,  Through 
Atlantic  Clouds,  1934 ;  Who's  Who  in  British 
Aviation,    1935;    Royal   Aero    Club    Gazette, 


November  1963;  The  Times,  2  and  6  Nov- 
ember  1959;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  Oliver  Stewart. 

MONTAGU-DOUGLAS-SCOTT,  Lord 
FRANCIS  GEORGE  (1879-1952),  soldier, 
Kenya  farmer  and  poUtical  leader. 
[See  Scott.] 

MOORE,  GEORGE  EDWARD  (1873- 
1958),  philosopher,  was  born  in  the  London 
suburb  of  Upper  Norwood,  4  November 
1873,  the  third  son  and  fifth  of  the  eight 
children  of  Daniel  Moore,  M.D.,  and  his 
wife,  Henrietta  Sturge.  George  Moore 
(1803-80,  q.v.)  was  his  grandfather; 
his  eldest  brother  was  T.  Sturge  Moore, 
the  poet.  He  was  educated  at  Dulwich 
College  where  for  the  last  two  years  he 
was  captain  of  the  school  and  at  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge,  where  he  held  a  major 
scholarship.  He  was  placed  in  the  first 
class  of  part  i  of  the  classical  tripos  (1894), 
won  the  Craven  scholarship  (1895), 
obtained  a  second  class  in  part  ii  of  the 
classical  tripos  and  a  first  in  part  ii  of  the 
moral  sciences  tripos  (1896),  and  in  1898 
was  elected  by  his  college  into  a  fellowship 
which  he  held  for  six  years.  From  1904 
to  1911  he  lived,  first  in  Edinburgh,  then 
in  Richmond,  Surrey,  having  sufficient 
private  means  to  work  at  philosophy 
without  an  academic  appointment. 
Returning  to  Cambridge  he  was  university 
lecturer  in  moral  science  (1911-25)  and 
professor  of  philosophy  (1925-39).  From 
1921  to  1947  he  was  editor  of  Mind. 

Among  Moore's  friends  at  Cambridge 
was  Bertrand  (later  Earl)  Russell,  philo- 
sopher and  mathematician,  and  it  was 
due  to  his  advice  and  encouragement 
that  Moore  began  to  study  philosophy. 
The  reciprocal  influence  of  Moore  and 
Russell  upon  each  other  was  very  great 
and  of  immense  importance  for  the 
development  of  their  thought.  Each 
published  his  first  major,  and  probably 
his  greatest,  work  in  1903,  Russell  The 
Principles  of  Mathematics  and  Moore 
Principia  Ethica.  In  the  preface  to  his 
book  Russell  wrote : 

'On  fundamental  questions  of  philoso- 
phy my  position,  in  all  its  chief  features, 
is  derived  from  Mr.  G.  E.  Moore.  I  have 
accepted  from  him  the  non-existential 
nature  of  propositions  (except  such  as 
happen  to  assert  existence)  and  their 
independence  of  any  knowing  mind ;  also 
the  pluraUsm  which  regards  the  world, 
both  that  of  existents  and  that  of  entities, 
as   composed   of  an  infinite   number  of 


745 


Moore 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


mutually  independent  entities,  with  rela- 
tions which  are  ultimate,  and  not  re- 
ducible to  adjectives  of  their  terms  or  of 
the  whole  which  these  conipose.  Before 
learning  these  views  from  him,  I  found 
myself  completely  unable  to  construct 
any  philosophy  of  arithmetic,  whereas 
their  acceptance  brought  about  an  im- 
mediate liberation  from  a  large  number  of 
difficulties  which  I  believe  to  be  otherwise 
insuperable.' 

In  a  short  'Autobiography'  which  he 
contributed  to  an  American  book,  The 
Philosophy  of  G.  E,  Moore  (1942),  Moore 
remarked  that  this  passage  had  caused 
many  people  to  believe  that  he  was  older 
than  Russell  and  that  Russell  had  been 
his  pupil,  whereas  he  was  two  years  junior 
to  Russell.  In  the  ten  years  before  the 
publication  of  their  major  works  in  1903 
they  met  frequently  in  Cambridge  and 
were  in  the  habit  of  discussing  philosophi- 
cal questions,  and  it  was  thus  that  Moore 
developed  the  philosophy  which  had  so 
profound  an  effect  upon  Russell.  But 
owing  to  these  discussions  their  influence 
was  reciprocal,  and  Moore  wrote  of 
Russell  that  although  'I  have  not  agreed 
and  do  not  agree  with  nearly  everything 
in  his  philosophy',  yet  'I  should  say  that 
I  certainly  have  been  more  influenced  by 
him  than  by  any  other  single  philosopher'. 

When  Moore  began  to  study  philosophy, 
the  most  influential  teacher  of  the  subject 
in  Cambridge  was  J.  M.  E.  M'Taggart 
[q.v.],  fellow  of  Trinity,  who  was  a 
Hegelian.  Russell  and  Moore  were  personal 
friends  of  his  and  it  was  due  to  his  influence 
that  they  both  began  their  philosophical 
careers  as  adherents  of  the  school  of 
idealism  and  Hegelianism.  It  was  Moore 
who  first  revolted ;  'he  found  the  Hegelian 
philosophy  inapplicable  to  chairs  and 
tables',  wrote  Russell  many  years  after- 
wards, 'and  I  found  it  inapplicable  to 
mathematics;  so  with  his  help  I  climbed 
out  of  it,  and  back  to  common  sense 
tempered  by  mathematical  logic  .  .  .With 
a  sense  of  escaping  from  prison,  we  allowed 
ourselves  to  think  that  grass  is  green,  that 
the  sun  and  stars  would  exist  if  no  one 
was  aware  of  them.' 

The  key  words  in  Russell's  statement — 
and  indeed  in  Moore's  philosophy — are 
'back  to  common  sense'.  Moore  himself 
once  said  that  with  him  the  main  stimulus 
to  philosophize  had  always  been,  not  the 
world  or  the  sciences,  but  things  which 
other  philosophers  had  said  about  the 
world  and  the  sciences,  and  he  had  been 
interested    in    two    sorts    of    problems. 


The  first  was  'what  on  earth  a  given 
philosopher  meant  by  something  which 
he  said',  and  the  second  was  the  problem 
of  discovering  what  reasons  there  are  for 
believing  that  what  he  meant  was  true  or 
false.  In  dealing  with  these  two  problems 
his  philosophical  method  was  twofold.  In 
order  to  discover  the  philosopher's  mean- 
ing he  subjected  his  statements  to  inten- 
sive analysis;  having  established  the 
meaning,  he  subjected  the  statement,  in 
order  to  establish  its  truth  or  falsehood, 
mainly  to  the  test  of  experience  and 
common  sense.  His  personal  statement, 
contributed  to  Contemporary  British 
Philosophy  (vol.  ii,  1925),  was  entitled 
'A  Defence  of  Common  Sense'. 

Moore's  most  important  philosophical 
work  was  in  ethics  and  epistemology. 
From  the  first  he  was  concerned  with  these 
two  branches  of  philosophy.  In  1896, 
when  he  decided  to  compete  for  a  Trinity 
fellowship,  he  chose  Kant's  Ethics  as 
the  subject  of  his  dissertation.  His  first 
attempt  was  unsuccessful,  but  in  1898  he 
successfully  resubmitted  the  dissertation 
with  the  addition  of  a  new  section  in 
which  he  dealt  with  Kant's  term  'reason' 
and  the  nature  of  'truth'  and  'ideas'.  In 
the  next  few  years  he  worked  intensively 
on  the  subject  of  ethics,  first  in  preparing 
two  courses  of  lectures  in  London, 
secondly  in  writing  Principia  Ethica. 
The  book  contained  the  essence  of  his 
philosophy  and  nearly  all  the  important, 
fundamental  ideas  through  which  he  had 
a  profound  influence  upon  other  thinkers 
in  the  years  which  followed. 

Moore  began  by  asking  two  questions: 
first,  what  things  ought  to  exist  for  their 
own  sakes,  or  in  other  words  are  good  in 
themselves,  have  intrinsic  value  ?  secondly, 
what  kinds  of  actions  ought  we  to  perform  ? 
But  the  formulation  of  these  two  questions 
leads  directly  to  a  third  question :  what  is 
the  nature  of  the  evidence  by  which  an 
ethical  proposition  can  be  proved  or 
disproved,  i.e.  what  kind  of  reasons  are 
relevant  as  arguments  for  proving  or 
disproving  any  particular  answer  to  the 
first  two  questions?  Practically  all  the 
most  original  and  important  contributions 
of  Moore  to  philosophy  he  made  in  the 
process  of  formulating  and  answering 
these  three  questions. 

It  was  in  the  process  of  formulating  the 
questions  that  Moore  made  his  major 
contribution  to  epistemology  and  became 
a  leading  figure  in  the  twentieth-century 
revolution  in  philosophy.  He  insisted  that, 
if  we  want  to  know  the  truth  about  an 


746 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Moore 


ethical  question,  we  must  first  determine 
exactly  what  the  question  means,  and 
further  that,  as  soon  as  we  see  the  exact 
meaning  of  the  first  two  ethical  questions 
posed  by  him,  the  nature  of  the  evidence 
which  can  prove  or  disprove  them  becomes 
plain.  Here  is  the  bald  description  and 
justification  of  Moore's  analytic  method  of 
philosophical  investigation,  and  it  was 
through  this  method  that  he  had  the  most 
important  connection  with  and  influence 
on  contemporary  schools  of  philosophy. 
From  the  original  logical  positivism  of 
the  Vienna  Circle,  through  the  logical 
atomism  of  Russell  and  Ludwig  Wittgen- 
stein [q.v.],  to  the  later  logical  positiv- 
ism when  the  school  was  translated 
to  or  reborn  in  Britain  and  America, 
modern  philosophers  have  concentrated 
their  attention  more  and  more  upon  the 
analysis  of  ideas,  statements,  words,  and 
questions  as  a  means  to  the  under- 
standing of  reality  and  the  nature  of 
evidence  by  which  propositions  can  be 
proved  or  disproved.  Moore  himself  was 
never  a  member  of  any  school  of 
philosophy,  but  he  influenced  them  all: 
'it  is',  wrote  Professor  Gilbert  Ryle,  'no 
freak  of  history  that  the  example  and  the 
reputation  of  Moore's  analytic  method 
of  philosophizing  proved  so  influential; 
since  here  was  a  philosopher  practising  a 
specific  method  of  investigation,  with 
obviously  high  standards  of  strictness'. 

Another  important  attribute  of  Moore's 
thought  is  immediately  obvious  in  Prin- 
cipia  Ethica:  his  attitude  to  common 
sense.  He  insisted  that  philosophy  should 
stick  closely  to  common  sense.  For  instance, 
he  points  out  that,  when  he  asks  the  main 
question  of  ethics:  What  is  good?  he  is 
concerned  with  the  idea  which  the  word 
'good'  is  generally  used  to  stand  for, 
i.e.  the  common  sense  meaning  of  the 
word.  But  he  went  farther  than  this. 
He  refused  to  accept  philosophical, 
particularly  metaphysical,  propositions 
which  seemed  to  him  to  contradict  common 
sense.  His  attitude  is  admirably  shown 
in  an  anecdote  which  he  related  about 
himself.  When  a  young  man  at  Cambridge, 
he  heard  M'Taggart  'express  his  well- 
known  view  that  Time  is  unreal.  This 
must  have  seemed  to  me  then  (as  it  still 
does)',  wrote  Moore  fifty  years  later, 
'a  perfectly  monstrous  proposition.' 

The  basis  of  Moore's  ethics  was  his 
distinction  between  what  is  good  as  an 
end  or  intrinsically  good  and  what  is  good 
as  a  means,  and  his  assertion  that  good  in 
itself   cannot    be    defined.    This    ethical 


doctrine  was  attacked  from  many  different 
sides,  as  also  was  one  of  his  central 
epistemological  doctrines,  the  view, 
namely,  that  what  we  are  directly  aware 
of  in  sense  perception  are  'sense-data'. 
As  regards  his  original  propositions  about 
good  as  an  end,  he  admitted,  with  his 
usual  simplicity  and  directness,  towards 
the  end  of  his  life,  that  he  could  not  make 
up  his  mind  whether  they  were  true  or 
false. 

Moore  was  an  unprolific  writer,  for 
he  wrote  slowly  and  unwillingly.  After 
Principia  Ethica  he  published  only  three 
books:  Ethics  (1912),  a  small  book  in  the 
Home  University  Library;  Philosophical 
Studies  (1922),  a  volume  of  collected 
essays;  and  Some  Main  Problems  of 
Philosophy  (1953),  consisting  of  lectures 
delivered  at  Morley  College  in  1910-11. 
His  literary  style  was  an  exact  reflection 
of  his  character  and  his  conversation, 
remarkable  for  its  simplicity,  remorse- 
less clarity,  unadorned  sincerity.  Beneath 
the  simple,  sometimes  almost  naive, 
surface,  Moore  had  extraordinary  passion, 
primarily  for  truth;  but  he  played  the 
piano  and  sang,  played  games  or  shook  his 
head  when  he  disapproved  of  a  statement 
with  the  same  kind  of  passion.  It  was  the 
combination  of  a  powerful  mind  with 
this  profound  simplicity  and  passion 
which,  quite  apart  from  his  books,  gave 
him  great  influence  over  many  genera- 
tions of  Cambridge  young  men,  which  in- 
cluded, for  instance,  Lytton  Strachey  and 
Lord  Keynes  [qq.v.].  He  was  an  outstand- 
ing teacher  and  lecturer.  'Moore  was, 
I  think',  wrote  G.  A.  Paul,  'at  his  very 
best  in  his  class  at  Cambridge.  It  is  not 
easy  to  imagine  how  lecturing  could  be 
done  better  than  he  did  it.'  In  the  classroom 
he  seemed,  not  to  be  delivering  a  prepared 
lecture,  but  to  be  working  out  again  the 
problems  which  he  had  come  to  discuss, 
and  the  audience  soon  felt  that  they  were 
not  mere  spectators  or  listeners,  but  were 
themselves  taking  an  active  part  in  Moore's 
passionate  search  for  truth. 

Moore  had  a  shy  retiring  disposition 
and  was  the  last  man  to  seek  publicity  or 
honours.  It  was  therefore  remarkable  that 
in  1951  he  consented  to  be  appointed  to 
the  Order  of  Merit.  He  was  elected  F.B.A. 
and  received  an  honorary  degTee  from 
St.  Andrews  in  1918. 

In  1916  he  married  Dorothy  Mildred, 
daughter  of  George  Herbert  Ely,  of 
Croydon ;  they  had  two  sons.  From  1940 
to  1944  he  was  in  the  United  States 
as  visiting  professor  in  various  colleges 


W 


Moore 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


and  universities.  Thereafter  he  hved  in 
Cambridge  where  he  died  24  October 
1958.  There  is  a  drawing  by  Percy  Horton 
in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery  and 
anoth^  by  H.  A.  Freeth  in  the  Fitzwilliam 
Museum,  Cambridge. 

[The  Philosophy  of  G.  E.  Moore,  ed.  P.  A. 
Schilpp,  1942  ;  llie  Revolution  in  Philosophy, 
with  introduction  by  Gilbert  Ryle,  1956 ;  The 
Autobiography  of  Bertrand  Russell,  1872-1914^ 
1967 ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Leonard  Woolf. 

MORGAN,  CHARLES  LANGBRIDGE 

(1894-1958),  noveHst,  critic,  and  play- 
wright, was  born  at  Bromley,  Kent, 
22  January  1894,  the  younger  son  of 
(Sir)  Charles  Langbridge  Morgan,  civil 
engineer,  president  of  the  Institution  of 
Civil  Engineers  in  1923-4,  and  his  wife, 
Mary,  daughter  of  William  Watkins.  Both 
parents  were  of  Welsh  origin:  their  fore- 
bears had  migrated  to  Australia  to  take 
part  in  the  construction  of  railways, 
whence  Charles  Morgan  senior  returned 
to  make  his  career  in  England. 

Charles  Morgan,  youngest  of  his  four 
children,  entered  the  Royal  Navy  in  1907 
and  served  in  the  Atlantic  Fleet  and  China 
station.  Although  he  was  always  proud  of 
his  naval  training,  it  proved  a  false  start 
for  an  acutely  sensitive  boy  already 
ambitious  to  become  a  writer.  The  ill 
treatment  which  he  and  his  fellow 
midshipmen  suffered  in  the  Good  Hope 
became  the  theme  of  his  first  novel  The 
Gunroom  (1919).  In  1913,  encouraged  by 
(Commander)  Christopher  Arnold-Forster 
whom  he  encountered  in  the  Monmouth 
and  who  became  a  lifelong  friend,  Morgan 
resigned  from  the  navy.  He  was  entered  at 
Brasenose  College,  Oxford,  but  with  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1914  immediately 
rejoined  the  Service  and  took  part  in  the 
disastrous  Antwerp  expedition  with  the 
Naval  Brigade  of  the  R.N.V.R.  After 
the  fall  of  Antwerp,  part  of  the  Naval 
Brigade  crossed  the  frontier  into  Holland, 
where  Morgan  remained  interned  until 
1917.  This  period  was  of  the  greatest 
importance  in  his  development  as  a 
writer,  since  he  had  the  good  fortune  to 
be  put  on  parole  and  to  live  almost  as 
a  guest  of  the  de  Pallandt  family  on 
their  estate  of  Rosendaal  in  Guelderland. 
There  he  received  an  education  in  the 
culture  and  languages  of  Europe,  acquired 
especially  an  enduring  love  of  French 
thought,  and  learned  to  believe  that 
literature  has  no  frontiers.  Later,  in  The 
Fountain  (1932),  he  used  the  background 


of  Rosendaal  Castle  (but  not  the  family  of 
Baron  de  Pallandt)  for  one  of  his  most 
successful  novels.  Meanwhile  in  Holland 
he  had  written  The-  Gunroom^  and  re- 
written it  after  a  German  mine  had  sunk 
the  ship  in  which  he  was  returning  to 
England,  with  all  his  baggage,  including 
the  manuscript  of  his  novel. 

The  year  1919  brought  Morgan  to  the 
long-desired  goal  of  Oxford,  where  he 
read  history  and  became  president  of 
the  Oxford  University  Dramatic  Society. 
A  meeting  with  A.  B.  Walkley  [q.v.], 
dramatic  critic  of  The  Times,  led  to  his 
joining  the  paper's  editorial  staff  in  1921, 
and  on  Walkley's  death  in  1926  he  suc- 
ceeded him  as  principal  dramatic  critic, 
a  post  which  he  held  until  1939. 

A  second  novel.  My  Name  is  Legion, 
was  published  in  1925.  Morgan  later 
regarded  his  first  two  books  as  juvenilia ; 
not  until  1929  did  he  achieve  an  ac- 
complished mastery  of  the  novelist's 
craft  with  Portrait  in  a  Mirror,  which 
brought  him  recognition  and  the  Femina 
Vie  Heureuse  prize  (1930).  Turgenev's 
influence  is  apparent  in  the  form  of  the 
book.  On  the  nature  of  inspiration,  where 
the  artist's  joy  is  described  as  receptive 
rather  than  creative,  there  is  a  debt  to 
Keats  and  a  key  to  much  of  Morgan's 
thought.  The  Fountain  (1932),  winner  of 
the  following  year's  Hawthornden  prize, 
to  the  author's  surprise  was  an  immediate 
best-seller  in  England,  on  the  Continent, 
and  in  America.  The  amalgam  of  a  passion- 
ate love  story,  set  in  1915,  with  echoes  of 
the  poetry  and  quietism  of  seventeenth- 
century  mystics,  told  with  great  lucidity, 
technical  skill,  and  beauty  of  diction, 
proved  to  the  taste  of  critics  and  public 
alike. 

Epitaph  on  George  Moore  (1935),  a 
brilliant  essay  in  place  of  the  full  biography 
which  Moore  had  wished  Morgan  to  under- 
take, was  followed  by  Sparkenbroke  in 
1936.  It  is  the  longest  and  most  inward- 
looking  of  his  novels,  set  partly  in  Italy, 
with  the  triple  theme  of  'art,  love,  and 
death'.  Two  years  later,  Morgan  turned 
playwright  with  The  Flashing  Stream, 
produced  in  London,  September  1938,  with 
(Sir)  Godfrey  Tearle  [q.v.]  and  Margaret 
Rawlings  in  the  leading  parts.  The  play 
prospered,  but  the  author  considered  it 
'a  swerve'  from  his  novels  and  returned 
gladly  to  The  Voyage  (1940),  a  story  warm 
with  his  love  of  France,  placed  in  the 
country  of  the  Charente  and  the  Paris 
music-halls,  which  won  the  James  Tait 
Black  memorial  prize. 


748 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Morgan,  J.  H. 


During  the  war  of  1939-45  Morgan 
served  with  the  Admiralty,  with  an 
interval  for  a  lecture  tour  in  the  United 
States  on  behalf  of  the  Institute  of 
International  Education.  A  short  novel, 
The  Empty  Room,  appeared  in  1941.  The 
following  year,  while  still  working  for 
naval  intelligence,  he  began  a  series  of 
weekly  articles  for  The  Times  Literary 
Supplement  under  the  title  of  'Menander's 
Mirror',  republished  in  the  two  volumes 
of  Reflections  in  a  Mirror  (1944-6).  Their 
purpose — a  reconsidering  of  values  in  life 
and  literature — showed  the  range  of  his 
ideas  and  his  quahty  as  an  essayist. 

Among  Frenchmen  exiled  in  England 
in  these  years,  and  with  Resistance 
workers  abroad,  the  name  of  Charles 
Morgan  was  potent.  Articles  from  his  pen 
circulated  secretly  through  Occupied 
France.  For  Morgan  the  permanence  of 
French  genius  was  freedom  of  thought. 
Regimentation  of  ideas,  in  his  opinion, 
as  shown  constantly  in  his  writing,  was 
the  greatest  danger  threatening  humanity. 
When  the  liberation  of  Paris  came  in 
August  1944,  he  was  among  the  first 
English  civilians  to  enter  the  city.  A 
month  later  an  'Ode  to  France'  from  his 
pen  was  read  aloud  at  the  reopening  of  the 
Comedie  Fran9aise. 

This  passionate  belief  in  a  man's  right 
to  think  for  himself  can  be  found  in  the 
next  novel.  The  Judge's  Story  (1947),  a 
conflict  between  good  and  evil  which 
reflects  Morgan's  innate  puritanism.  A 
lecture  tour  of  French  universities  in  the 
following  year  became  a  triumphal  journey 
among  delighted  students.  France  was  the 
partial  scene  of  his  next  book,  The  River 
Line  (1949),  later  turned  into  a  play 
(1952).  It  is  atale  of  enemy  occupation :  the 
study  of  a  spiritually  minded  man  against 
a  backgroimd  of  movement  and  violence. 

At  this  period  Morgan  was  obsessed 
by  a  sombre  vision  of  the  human  lot  if 
science  were  allowed  to  outstrip  man's 
moral  nature.  In  another  book  of  essays, 
Liberties  of  the  Mind  (1951),  he  predicted 
the  overthrow  of  human  personality, 
threatened  by  possessive  control  and 
*barren  materialism'.  The  same  grave 
warning  was  the  theme  of  his  last  play. 
The  Burning  Glass,  produced  in  1953; 
yet  in  the  preface  to  the  printed  edition 
he  wrote,  'To  doubt  that  there  is  a  way 
out  is  to  acquiesce  in  chaos  and  to  doubt 
God's  mercy.'  For  some  years  Morgan  had 
been  working  on  an  inunense  novel  dealing 
with  this  same  problem.  It  was  never 
finished,  but  for  a  time  he  abandoned  it 


and  wrote  a  youthful  love  story,  A  Breeze 
of  Morning  (1951),  which  returned  happily 
to  the  spirit  of  his  master,  Turgenev,  and 
to  his  own  Portrait  in  a  Mirror,  The  last 
of  his  novels,  Challenge  to  Venus,  with  an 
Italian  setting,  was  pubhshed  in  1957. 

Charles  Morgan  was  a  romantic,  a  philo- 
sophic idealist,  and  something  of  a  mystic. 
The  strong  appeal  which  he  made  to  his 
Enghsh  pubhc  in  the  thirties  and  early 
forties  had  ebbed  by  the  time  he  reached 
middle  age,  so  that  he  grew  isolated  from 
the  young  intellectuals  of  the  day,  not 
then  concerned  with  Morgan's  attentive- 
ness  to  an  inner  world,  his  message  of 
renewal,  or  the  loftiness  of  his  standards. 
The  highest  integrity,  with  extreme  care 
and  polish,  marked  everything  he  touched, 
from  the  urbane  essays  of  his  ripe  years  to 
the  smallest  piece  of  anonymous  dramatic 
criticism.  His  books  were  translated  into 
nineteen  languages,  and  readers  on  the 
Continent  continued  to  hold  him  in  the 
greatest  esteem  as  a  novelist. 

Although  good-looking  and  distin- 
guished in  appearance,  Morgan  was  often 
suspected  of  being  cold  and  aloof.  He  was 
neither,  being  a  man  of  deep  friendships, 
a  kind,  witty,  and  even  gay  companion. 
His  presidency  of  International  P.E.N, 
from  1953  to  1956  was  a  notable  success. 
He  received  many  honours,  including 
honorary  degrees  at  Scottish  and  French 
universities  and  was  an  officer  of  the 
Legion  of  Honour.  Nothing  gave  him 
keener  pleasure  than  when,  in  1949,  he 
was  made  a  member  of  the  Institute  of 
France,  to  which  no  other  English  novelist, 
except  Rudyard  Kipling  [q.v.],  had  been 
elected. 

In  1923  Morgan  married  the  novelist, 
Hilda  Vaughan,  daughter  of  Hugh 
Vaughan  Vaughan  of  Builth,  Breconshire, 
a  solicitor,  descended  from  the  family  of 
Henry  Vaughan  [q.v.],  the  seventeenth- 
century  poet.  They  had  one  son  and  a 
daughter  who  married  the  seventh  Mar- 
quess of  Anglesey  in  1948.  Morgan  died 
in  London  6  February  1958. 

A  drawing  of  Morgan  by  Augustus 
John  is  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery. 
There  are  other  portraits  in  the  possession 
of  the  family. 

[Personal  knowledge ;  private  information, 
and  the  editing  of  Charles  Morgan's  letters 
published  in  1967.]  Eiluned  Lewis. 

MORGAN,  JOHN  HARTMAN  (1876- 
1955),  lawyer,  the  son  of  the  Rev. 
David  Morgan,  Congregational  minister 
of  Ystradfellte,  Glamorgan,  and  his  wife. 


749 


Morgan,  J.  H. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Julia,  daughter  of  Felix  Wethli,  of  Zurich, 
was  born  on  20  March  1876.  From 
Caterham  School  he  went  with  a  scholar- 
ship to  the  University  College  of  South 
Wales  where  he  obtained  his  London  M.A. 
in  1896,  and  with  another  scholarship  to 
Balliol  College,  Oxford,  where  in  1900  he 
was  placed  in  the  second  class  of  the 
honour  school  of  modern  history.  He 
made  his  mark  at  the  Union,  and  also  as 
a  serious  scholar  of  modern  history,  es- 
pecially diplomatic  history.  Accordingly, 
although  on  leaving  Oxford  he  joined  the 
Inner  Temple,  and  began  to  read  for  the 
bar  (to  which  he  was  called  in  1915),  at 
the  same  time  joining  the  literary  staff  of 
the  Daily  Chronicle  (1901-3),  he  continued 
his  postgraduate  studies  at  the  London 
School  of  Economics  under  W.  A.  S. 
Hewins  [q.v.].  He  gained  a  research 
studentship  with  which  he  studied  for  a 
time  at  the  university  of  Berlin.  Shortly 
after  his  return  to  England  he  became  a 
leader-writer  for  the  Manchester  Guardian 
(1904-5).  In  addition,  he  had  political 
ambitions,  standing  unsuccessfully  in  1910 
as  a  Liberal  candidate  for  the  Edgbaston 
division  of  Birmingham  in  January  and 
West  Edinburgh  in  December. 

At  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914,  Morgan 
volunteered  for  combatant  service,  but  his 
special  qualifications  were  responsible  for 
his  appointment  to  the  adjutant-general's 
staff  as  Home  Office  representative  with 
the  British  Expeditionary  Force,  to 
inquire  into  the  conduct  of  the  Germans 
in  the  field.  His  report  was  published  by 
the  Parliamentary  Recruiting  Committee. 
In  1919  he  attended  the  peace  conference 
as  assistant  adjutant-general,  and  was 
later  sent  to  Cologne  to  report  on  the 
British  occupation  of  the  Rhineland, 
becoming  British  military  representative 
on  the  Prisoners  of  War  Commission. 
Later  still,  he  was  for  some  years  in 
Germany  as  a  member  of  the  Inter- 
Allied  Council  of  the  Control  Commission 
for  the  disarmament  of  Germany,  finally 
retiring  from  the  army  in  1923  with  the 
rank  of  brigadier-general.  Morgan  was 
convinced  from  the  outset  of  his  work 
with  the  Control  Commission  that 
Germany  had  no  intention  of  disarming, 
and  after  his  return  he  attempted  by 
letters  and  articles  to  show  that  Germany 
was  preparing  for  another  war.  But  his 
efforts  evoked  little  response,  until,  at  the 
conclusion  of  the  war  of  1939-45,  his  book. 
Assize  of  Arms  (1945),  gathered  together 
the  record  of  his  experiences  into  a 
formidable  indictment. 


In  1916  Morgan  appeared  as  counsel  for 
the  defence  in  the  trial  of  Sir  Roger 
Casement  [q.v.]  and  it  was  at  Morgan's 
suggestion  that,  on  appeal,  it  was  strenu- 
ously argued  on  Casement's  behalf  that 
seeking  to  seduce  troops  from  their 
allegiance  whilst  prisoners  of  war  in 
Germany  was  not  within  the  Statute  of 
Treason  of  1351.  Morgan  had  given  some 
lectures  on  constitutional  law  as  early  as 
1908,  and  in  1915  had  been  appointed 
professor  of  constitutional  law  at  Univer- 
sity College,  London.  During  his  absence, 
Dr.  Thomas  Baty  deputized  for  him, 
but  in  1923  Morgan  returned  to  active 
teaching  and  until  his  retirement  in  1941 
his  lectures,  with  their  forceful  expression 
of  clear-cut  opinions  upon  constitutional 
developments,  never  failed  to  attract 
large  audiences.  In  addition,  in  1926-36 
he  was  reader  in  constitutional  law  to  the 
Inns  of  Court.  He  took  silk  in  1926  and 
his  authority  in  the  field  of  constitutional 
law  was  recognized  by  his  appointment, 
first  to  advise  the  Indian  Chamber  of 
Princes  on  constitutional  changes  in  India 
from  1934  to  1937,  then  to  advise  Western 
Australia  at  hearing  before  Parliament 
of  the  secession  petition  of  that  state  in 
1935. 

To  the  end  of  his  life  Morgan  remained 
actively  opposed  to  German  rearmament, 
and  he  appeared  in  person  at  Nuremberg 
at  the  trial  of  the  major  war  criminals, 
most  of  whom  he  had  himself  interrogated, 
and  his  last  official  duty  was  to  act  as 
legal  adviser  to  the  American  War  Crimes 
Commission  from  1947  to  1949. 

Morgan  wrote  freely,  and  with  the  same 
force  which  he  displayed  in  court  and  in 
lecturing,  and  he  enjoyed  controversy. 
Among  his  principal  publications  were 
The  House  of  Lords  and  the  Constitution 
(1910) ;  a  translation  of  The  German  War 
Book  (1915) ;  IFar,  its  Conduct  and  Legal 
Results  (with  T.  Baty,  1915);  Leaves 
from  a  Field  Note-Book  (1916);  Gentle- 
men at  Arms  (1918) ;  The  Present  State  of 
Germany  (1924);  Viscount  Morley^  an 
Appreciation  (1924) ;  Remedies  against  the 
Crown  (1925) ;  The  Great  Assize  (1948) ;  and 
many  contributions  to  legal  and  other 
periodicals. 

Morgan  died  at  Wootton  Bassett  8  April 
1955.  His  marriage  in  1905  to  Clara  Maud, 
daughter  of  Henry  Antony  Hertz  (the 
actress  Margaret  Halstan,  died  1967),  did 
not  last. 


[Personal  knowledge.] 

George  W.  Keeton. 


750 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Mountbatten 


MORSHEAD,     Sm     LESLIE     JAMES 

(1889-1959),  lieutenant-general,  was  born 
18  September  1889  at  Ballarat,  Victoria, 
Australia,  the  fourth  son  and  fifth  child 
of  William  Morshead,  miner,  and  his  wife, 
Mary  Eliza  Rennison.  He  was  educated  at 
Mount  Pleasant  state  school,  Ballarat, 
and  the  Teachers'  Training  College, 
Melbourne.  When  war  broke  out  in  1914 
Morshead  was  a  master  at  the  Melbourne 
Church  of  England  Grammar  School, 
having  previously  been  on  the  teaching 
staff  of  the  Armidale  School  in  New  South 
Wales.  Commissioned  in  the  2nd  bat- 
talion, First  Australian  Imperial  Force,  in 
September  1914,  he  landed  at  Anzac  on 
25  April  1915  as  a  captain  and  second-in- 
command  of  a  company.  He  was  promoted 
major  in  June  1915  but  in  October  he 
contracted  enteric  fever  and  was  in- 
valided to  Australia.  On  recovery  he  was 
promoted  lieutenant-colonel  and  given 
command  of  the  newly  formed  33rd 
battalion  (3rd  division),  which  he  trained 
in  Australia  and  England  and  took  to 
France  in  September  1916.  He  remained 
in  command  of  the  battalion  until  the 
conclusion  of  hostilities,  leading  it  with 
rare  distinction  at  Armentieres,  Messines, 
Passchendaele,  Villers-Bretonneux,  and 
along  the  Somme  in  the  final  offensives. 
By  the  end  of  the  war  he  had  been 
wounded  twice,  mentioned  in  dispatches 
six  times,  and  had  been  appointed  to  the 
D.S.O.,  and  received  the  C.M.G.  and  the 
French  Legion  of  Honour. 

After  demobilization,  Morshead  tried  his 
hand  at  sheep  farming  near  Merriwa,  New 
South  Wales,  but  soon  joined  the  staff  of 
the  Orient  Steam  Navigation  Company. 
In  1948  he  became  the  company's  general 
manager  in  Australia. 

Between  the  wars  Morshead  combined 
success  in  business  with  continued  interest 
in  the  Citizen  Military  Forces.  From  1920 
to  1931  he  commanded  Citizen  Force 
battaHons,  and  in  1933  he  was  promoted 
colonel  and  given  command  of  an  infantry 
brigade.  When  war  broke  out  in  1939  he 
was  selected  to  command  18th  brigade, 
one  of  the  first  formations  to  be  raised 
for  overseas  service  with  the  Second 
Australian  Imperial  Force.  In  February 
1941  he  was  promoted  major-general 
and  given  command  of  the  newly  formed 
9th  Australian  division. 

Before  it  was  fully  equipped  and 
trained,  Morshead' s  division  was  sent  to 
Cyrenaica  to  relieve  the  more  experienced 
formations  withdrawn  for  service  in 
Greece.    When    the    British    forces    in 


Cyrenaica  were  driven  back  into  Tobruk 
by  the  sudden  onslaught  of  the  German 
Africa  Corps,  Morshead  became  the 
fortress  commander.  His  resolute  leader- 
ship quickly  welded  his  motley  collection 
of  troops  into  an  effective  fighting  force 
which  defied  all  Rommel's  efforts  to 
capture  the  bastion. 

The  division  was  relieved  in  October 
1941  and  was  recuperating  in  Syria  when 
the  remainder  of  the  Australian  Corps  was 
transferred  from  the  Middle  East  to  the 
Pacific  early  in  1942.  Morshead  was  promo- 
ted lieutenant-general  and  became  general 
officer  commanding  the  Australian  Im- 
perial Force  in  the  Middle  East.  He  led 
his  division  with  distinction  at  the  battle 
of  El  Alamein,  and  then  took  it  to  the 
South  West  Pacific  Area.  After  a  short 
period  in  command  of  New  Guinea 
Force  he  became  general  officer  com- 
manding 1st  Australian  Corps  and  directed 
the  complicated  amphibious  operations 
which  resulted  in  the  recapture  of 
Borneo. 

Morshead  was  one  of  the  finest  products 
of  the  Australian  Citizen  Force  system  of 
military  service.  Slight  of  build,  he  had  a 
mild  facial  expression  which  masked  a 
strong  personality,  the  impact  of  which, 
even  on  first  acquaintance,  was  quickly 
felt.  He  was  unsparing  and  outspoken  in 
criticism,  yet  quick  to  commend  and 
praise  when  the  occasion  demanded. 
First  nicknamed  'Ming  the  Merciless'  by 
his  troops,  he  became  just  'Ming'  as  they 
learned  to  appreciate  the  quality  of  his 
leadership,  particularly  his  talents  as  a 
battle  commander.  He  was  appointed 
K.B.E.  and  K.C.B.  in  1942  and  received 
a  number  of  foreign  decorations. 

After  the  war  Morshead  returned  to 
business  pursuits  and  occupied  many 
important  appointments  in  Australian 
commerce  and  industry. 

In  1921  Morshead  married  Myrtle, 
daughter  of  the  late  William  Woodside, 
of  Melbourne;  they  had  one  daughter. 
He  died  in  Sydney  26  September  1959. 
A  portrait  by  Ivor  Hele  is  in  the  Australian 
War  Memorial. 

[Australian  War  Memorial  records;  Aus- 
tralia in  the  War  of  1939-45,  Series  1  (Army), 
vols  i-vii,  ed.  Gavin  Long,  1952-63;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

£.  G.  Keogh. 

MOUNTBATTEN,  EDWINA  CYNTHIA 
ANNETTE,  Countess  Mountbatten 
OF  Burma  (1901-1960),  was  born  in 
London   28   November    1901,   the   elder 


751 


Mountbatten 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


daughter  of  Colonel  W.  W.  Ashley,  P.C., 
M.P.,  later  Baron  Mount  Temple  [q.v.], 
of  Broadlands,  Romsey,  and  Classiebawn 
Castle,  county  Sligo  (both  inherited  from 
Palmerston),  and  his  first  wife,  Amalia 
Mary  Maud,  only  child  of  Sir  Ernest 
Cassel  [q.v.].  On  her  father's  side  she  was 
the  great-granddaughter  of  the  seventh 
Earl  of  Shaftesbury  [q.v.],  the  social 
reformer.  King  Edward  VII  was  her 
godfather. 

She  was  nearly  twenty  when  Cassel  died 
and  left  between  her  and  her  younger 
sister  the  income  from  an  immense 
fortune.  In  1922  she  married,  at  St. 
Margaret's,  Westminster,  Lieutenant  Lord 
Louis  Mountbatten,  Royal  Navy,  younger 
son  of  Admiral  of  the  Fleet  the  Marquess 
of  Milford  Haven,  formerly  Prince  Louis 
of  Battenberg  [q.v.],  and  his  wife,  Victoria, 
a  granddaughter  of  Queen  Victoria.  As  the 
wife  of  Lord  Louis,  who  was  pursuing  a 
highly  successful  career  in  the  navy,  she 
had  a  very  full  social  life,  but  her  energy 
and  inquiring  mind  led  her  to  undertake 
world-wide  tours  and  numerous  chari- 
table activities  on  her  own  account. 

The  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  provided 
the  real  outlet  for  her  talents  and  aspira- 
tions for  social  welfare  work  and  marked 
the  beginning  of  a  distinguished  career 
of  service  with  the  Order  of  St.  John. 
After  undertaking  numerous  duties  for 
the  Order,  including  work  in  the  east  end 
of  London  at  the  time  of  the  intensive 
raids,  she  was  appointed  superintendent- 
in-chief  of  the  St.  John  Ambulance 
Brigade  in  July  1942.  The  scope  of  her 
operations,  involving  extensive  tours  of 
inspection,  widened  with  the  course  of  the 
war  and  her  husband's  rapid  military 
promotion.  When  he  was  appointed  chief 
of  Combined  Operations  in  1942  she 
organized  the  Command's  welfare  branch. 
But  it  was  after  he  had  become  supreme 
allied  commander  South  East  Asia  in 
1943,  and  in  the  wake  of  the  Japanese 
surrender  in  1945,  that  she  was  able  to 
make  perhaps  her  greatest  contribution 
to  the  allied  cause.  In  a  gigantic  rescue 
operation  covering  effectively  the  whole 
of  South  East  Asia  she  inaugurated 
desperately  needed  welfare  services  for 
the  returned  allied  prisoners  of  war  and 
internees. 

No  sooner  had  this  task  been  completed 
than  another  historic  role  awaited  her. 
She  was  to  be  at  her  husband's  side  for  the 
decisive  period  (March  1947  to  June  1948) 
when  he  was  the  last  viceroy  and  the  first 
governor-general   of  independent   India. 


The  implementation  of  his  policy  for 
rapid  transfer  of  power  involved  many 
acts  of  social  as  well  as  political  concilia- 
tion in  which  Lady  Mountbatten's  insight 
and  initiative  were  of  primary  importance 
in  strengthening  the  ties  of  friendship  be- 
tween the  British  and  Indian  peoples. 

Independence,  however,  brought  in  its 
train  grave  massacres  and  the  migrations 
of  whole  populations  in  the  Punjab  to 
which  she  responded  with  prodigious 
efforts  to  stem  the  tide  of  human  suffering. 
Under  her  chairmanship  the  United 
Council  for  Relief  and  Welfare  was 
formed  which  included  all  the  major 
voluntary  organizations  and  co-ordinated 
their  activities. 

On  their  return  from  India,  Lord 
Mountbatten's  resumption  of  his  Service 
career  meant  no  diminution  of  Lady 
Mountbatten's  welfare  work.  In  1948  she 
became  chairman  of  the  St.  John  and 
Red  Cross  Services  Hospitals  welfare 
department  and  in  1950  superintendent- 
in-chief  of  the  St.  John  Ambulance 
Brigade  Overseas,  making  further  long- 
range  tours  of  inspection  and  severely 
taxing  her  strength  in  the  process.  It  was 
on  one  of  these  exhausting  missions  to  the 
Far  East  on  behalf  of  the  Order  of  St. 
John  that  she  died  in  her  sleep  at  Jesselton, 
North  Borneo,  on  the  night  of  20-21 
February  1960.  Her  body  was  flown  back 
to  England  and  buried  at  sea  off  Ports- 
mouth with  naval  honoiu's. 

She  was  actively  and  officially  associated 
with  some  hundred  organizations.  In 
addition  to  the  St.  John  Ambulance 
Brigade  she  took  a  special  interest  in  the 
Save  the  Children  Fund  of  which  she  was 
president,  and  the  Royal  College  of 
Nursing,  of  which  she  was  a  vice-president. 
To  enable  her  work  for  these  three 
particular  causes  to  be  perpetuated  the 
Edwina  Mountbatten  Trust  was  formed. 

Many  dignities  and  decorations  were 
conferred  on  the  Mountbattens.  He  was 
created  successively  viscount  (1946)  and 
earl  (1947)  for  his  services  in  South  East 
Asia  and  India.  She  was  appointed  C.I. 
(1947),  G.B.E.  (1947),  D.C.V.O.  (1946), 
and  G.C.St.J.  (1945). 

She  had  two  daughters,  Patricia,  born 
in  1924,  who  married  the  seventh  Baron 
Braboume  in  1946,  and  Pamela,  born  in 
1929,  who  married  David  Hicks  in  January 
1960. 

Lady  Mountbatten  was  not  content  to 
rest  on  her  inheritance  of  beauty,  wealth, 
and  privilege  but  made  her  mark  on  the 
history  of  her  times  as  an  emancipator, 


752 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Muir,  E. 


a  tough  and  relentless  fighter  against 
poverty  and  suffering.  She  had  an 
abundance  of  charm  and  compassion 
which  reinforced  her  powers  of  leadership. 
In  support  of  her  husband  in  South  East 
Asia  and  India  her  social  conscience  played 
a  significant  part  in  mitigating  the  conse- 
quences of  the  political  and  military  crises 
with  which  her  husband  was  grappling. 
She  had,  as  India's  prime  minister, 
Jawaharlal  Nehru,  said  of  her,  'the 
healer's  touch'. 

There  are  portraits  of  her  by  P.  A.  de 
Laszlo  and  Salvador  Dali  (at  Broadlands) 
and  by  Edward  I.  Halliday  (in  New 
Delhi). 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Alan  Campbell-Johnson. 


MOUNTEVANS,  first  Baron  (1880- 
1957),  admiral.  [See  Evans,  Ed^abj) 
Ratcliffe  Garth  Russell.]  ,  I%!  \ 

MUIR,  EDWIN  (1887-1959),  writer,  was 
born  at  the  Folly  in  Deerness  on  the 
Orkney  mainland  15  May  1887,  the  young- 
est of  the  six  children  of  James  Muir, 
farmer,  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth,  daughter 
of  Edwin  Cormack.  Two  years  later  the 
family  moved  to  the  Bu,  a  hundred-acre 
farm  on  the  small  island  of  Wyre,  where 
there  was  a  strong  sense  of  community 
among  its  few  families.  The  child  had  also 
a  sense  of  a  larger  unity — between  the 
human  community  and  the  animals  and 
the  natural  surroundings.  In  the  home  the 
arts  were  a  natural  part  of  life,  and  the 
evenings  were  filled  with  story-teUing  and 
singing.  When  he  was  eight  the  family 
moved  to  Garth,  another  hundred-acre 
farm,  four  miles  from  Kirkwall  on  the 
mainland.  He  went  irregularly  to  the 
grammar  school  and  began  to  read  avidly. 
The  farm  did  not  prosper  and  when  he 
was  fourteen  the  family  moved  to 
Glasgow — a  sudden  transition  from  a  pre- 
industrial  community  into  the  modern 
world.  Within  five  years  his  father  and 
mother  and,  after  slow  painful  illnesses, 
two  of  his  brothers  were  dead.  Muir  worked 
as  office-boy  and  clerk  in  Glasgow  and 
Greenock.  As  a  boy  he  had  experienced 
two  emotional  conversions  at  revivalist 
meetings,  but  his  early  religious  faith  was 
undermined  by  what  he  saw  in  the  slums 
and  by  the  deaths  of  his  brothers,  and 
was  replaced  by  faith  in  socialism  and 
later  in  Nietzscheanism,  two  philosophies 
which  he  desperately  tried  to  reconcile. 
He  was  a  member  of  the  Clarion  Scouts, 


of  the  Independent  Labour  Party,  and  of 
the  Guild  Socialist  movement.  From  1918 
he  contributed  to  the  New  Age  propa- 
gandist verses  of  little  merit  and  later 
aphorisms  in  the  manner  of  Nietzsche 
which  were  collected  in  We  Modems 
(1918).  He  volunteered  for  the  army  but 
was  rejected  as  physically  unfit. 

In  1919  he  married  Wilhelmina  (Willa) 
Johnstone,  daughter  of  Peter  Anderson, 
draper,  of  Montrose,  Angus,  left  Glasgow 
for  London,  and  became  assistant  to 
A.  R.  Orage  [q.v.]  on  the  New  Age.  The 
unhappiness  of  the  Glasgow  years  had 
brought  him  close  to  nervous  breakdown 
and  he  underwent  a  course  of  psycho- 
analysis. This,  and  more  congenial  work, 
but  especially  his  wife  helped  him  in  the 
quiet  years  which  followed,  in  Prague, 
Germany,  Italy,  and  Austria  (1921-4),  to 
recover  inner  peace ;  his  imagination  woke, 
and  he  began  to  write  poetry. 

In  Buckinghamshire  (1924-5),  France 
(1925-7),  Surrey  (1927-8),  Sussex  (1928- 
32),  Hampstead  (1932-5),  and  St.  Andrews 
(1935-42),  Muir  made  his  living  by 
volimiinous  work  as  critic  and,  with  his 
wife,  translator;  wrote  three  novels,  a 
life  of  John  Knox  (1929),  and  Scottish 
Journey  (1935),  and  gradually  improved 
in  skill  as  a  poet.  With  his  wife,  a  better 
linguist  who  did  most  of  the  work,  he 
produced  some  forty  volumes  of  transla- 
tions, mostly  from  German,  making  the 
works  of  Kafka  and  of  Hermann  Broch 
available  to  English  readers,  as  well  as 
Feuchtwanger's  Jew  Siiss.  His  criticism 
is  contained  in  about  a  thousand  reviews ; 
in  numerous  articles  (some  collected  in 
Latitudes  (1924),  Transition  (1926),  arid 
Essays  on  Literature  and  Society  (1949)) ; 
in  broadcast  talks ;  and  in  The  Structure  of 
the  Novel  (1928),  Scott  and  Scotland  (1936), 
The  Present  Age  (1939),  and  The  Estate  of 
Poetry  (1962) ;  it  is  marked  by  scrupu- 
lous fairness  and  independence  of  judge- 
ment. T.  S.  Eliot  thought  his  *the  best 
criticism  of  our  time'.  Fiction  was  not  his 
metier^  but  his  novels  are  of  interest  for 
their  poetic  quality.  His  finest  prose  work 
is  An  Autobiography  (1954)  in  which 
visionary  radiance  is  combined  with  the 
realism  to  be  expected  in  a  farmer's  child. 
His  mature  prose  reflects  his  character — 
quiet,  lucid,  witty  without  striving  after 
effect.  But  his  poetry  is  his  great 
achievement. 

Coming  to  poetry  late,  Muir  went  on 
maturing  to  the  end,  and  wrote  his  best 
poems  when  over  fifty.  He  used  traditional 
metres  and  made  no  startling  innovations 


753 


Muir,  E, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


in  technique,  being  concerned  only  to 
convey  his  vision  clearly  and  honestly. 
Beneath  the  story  of  his  life  he  saw  the 
fable  of  man — Eden,  the  Fall,  the 
journey  through  the  labyrinth  of  time.  He 
made  much  use  of  his  dreams  and  of  m>i;hs , 
for  in  them  the  fable  is  most  clearly  seen ; 
but  in  his  later  poems  he  was  able  to  relate 
a  widening  range  of  temporal  experiences 
— the  war,  the  Communist  victory  in 
Prague,  fears  of  atomic  war,  his  marriage — 
to  his  perception  of  an  underlying  timeless 
reality.  He  experienced  to  the  full  the 
doubts  and  fears  characteristic  of  his 
century,  and  his  honest  facing  of  them 
makes  the  more  impressive  his  vision  of 
'boundless  union  and  freedom'.  He  came 
to  see  the  Incarnation  as  the  answer  to 
the  problems  of  time  and  eternity, 
necessity  and  freedom;  but  his  poetry 
embodied  vision  rather  than  belief. 
Immortality  was  to  him  a  state  of  being, 
something  immediately  experienced.  His 
apparently  simple  words  carry  a  great 
weight  of  meaning.  His  poems  are  mostly 
short ;  but  they  are  not  fragments — all  are 
related  to  his  central  vision  of  the  mystery 
of  our  common  humanity.  His  collected 
poems  were  pubhshed  in  1960. 

From  1942  to  1945  Muir  worked  for 
the  British  Council  in  Edinburgh  and 
was  then  director  of  its  Institutes  in 
Prague  (1945-8)  and  Rome  (1949-50), 
and  warden  of  Newbattle  Abbey,  an 
adult  education  college  near  Edinburgh 
(1950-55).  After  a  year  as  Charles  Eliot 
Norton  professor  at  Harvard  (1955-6), 
he  settled  at  Swaffham  Prior  near 
Cambridge.  He  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in 
1953  and  received  honorary  degrees  from 
Prague  (1947),  Edinburgh  (1947),  Rennes 
(1949),  Leeds  (1955),  and  Cambridge 
(1958).  He  died  in  Cambridge  3  January 
1959.  He  had  one  son.  Willa  Muir  died  in 
1970. 

Muir  was  a  man  of  complete  integrity ; 
gentle,  unassiuning,  and  vulnerable,  but 
with  firm  tenacity  of  purpose ;  sometimes 
abstracted,  but  strongly  affectionate  and 
quick  in  sympathy.  He  spoke  in  a  soft 
lilting  voice  and  sang  almost  in  tune. 

In  a  picture  by  Stanley  Cursiter  in  the 
Glasgow  City  Art  Gallery,  Muir  is  por- 
trayed with  O.  H.  Mavor  [q.v.],  Eric 
Linklater,  and  Neil  Gunn.  There  is  a  bust 
by  Marek  Szwarc  owned  by  the  Saltire 
Society,  Edinburgh. 

[Edwin  Muir,  An  Autobiography,  1954; 
P.  H.  Butter,  Edwin  Muir:  Man  and  Poet, 
1966;  Willa  Muir,  Belonging:  a  Memoir, 
1968 ;  personal  knowledge.]      P.  H.  Butter. 


MUIR,  Sir  ROBERT  (1864^1959),  patho- 
logist, was  born  at  Balfron,  Stirlingshire, 
5  July  1864,  the  second  child  and  only  son 
of  the  Rev.  Robert  Muir,  a  Presbyterian 
minister  of  saintly  character  and  de- 
cidedly liberal  outlook,  and  his  wife, 
Susan  Cameron,  daughter  of  William 
Duncan,  a  Dundee  merchant.  One  of  his 
four  sisters  wrote  short  stories,  another 
was  a  classical  scholar  of  Edinburgh 
University,  and  the  youngest,  Anne 
Davidson  Muir,  acquired  fame  in  Scotland 
as  a  painter  in  water-colours,  especially 
of  flowers.  In  later  life  Muir,  who  never 
married,  lived  with  two  of  his  sisters. 

Following  a  brilliant  career  at  Hawick 
High  School  and  Teviot  Grove  Academy, 
Muir  entered  the  university  of  Edinburgh 
with  the  Sir  Walter  Scott  bursary  in 
classics  and  mathematics.  He  graduated 
M.A.  in  1884  and  M.B.,  CM.  with  first 
class  honours  in  1888,  after  obtaining  the 
Grierson  bursary  and  the  much-coveted 
Vans  Dunlop  research  scholarship.  Most 
of  this  time  he  carried  a  heavy  burden 
of  coaching,  for  his  father's  death  in 
1882  faced  him  with  considerable  family 
responsibilities.  Nevertheless  he  chose  the 
rather  precarious  career  of  pathology, 
largely  through  the  influence  of  William 
Smith  Greenfield,  Edinburgh's  unrivalled 
pathologist  and  clinician.  Muir  acquired 
valuable  experience  as  a  clinician,  bacterio- 
logist, and  what  is  now  called  haemato- 
logist  as  assistant  to  Greenfield  (1892-8) 
and  lecturer  on  pathological  bacteriology 
(1894-8).  He  examined  at  the  university 
and  at  the  Royal  Colleges  of  Physicians 
and  Surgeons  of  Edinburgh  and  fostered 
closer  personal  contacts  between  staff  and 
students  with  whom  he  was  a  universal 
favourite.  With  James  Ritchie,  lecturer 
in  pathology  at  Oxford,  he  wrote  the 
Manual  of  Bacteriology  (1897)  which  has 
passed  through  eleven  editions. 

In  1898  Muir  was  called  to  the  new 
chair  of  pathology  at  St.  Andrews,  held 
in  Dundee,  where  his  reputation  as  an 
original  researcher  and  far-seeing  admini- 
strator led  to  the  offer  of  the  chair  of 
pathology  at  Glasgow  which  he  held  from 
1899  until  1936.  There  he  gained  world 
fame  as  a  teacher,  investigator,  and 
writer,  for  in  1924  his  Textbook  of  Pathology 
became  a  substantial  success  and  has 
maintained  its  place  among  the  leaders. 
Muir's  pupils,  too,  have  included  many 
men  whose  contributions  to  pathology 
are  well-nigh  inestimable,  while  his 
integrity  and  sound  judgement  brought 
many  calls  from  university  and  public 


754 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Munnings 


life.  He  served  on  the  university  court  at 
Glasgow,  the  Medical  Research  Council 
(1928-32),  the  councils  of  the  Imperial 
Cancer  Research  Fund  and  the  British 
Empire  Cancer  Campaign,  and  on  com- 
mittees for  investigation  of  foot  and 
mouth  disease.  During  the  war  of  1914-18 
he  held  the  rank  of  lieutenant-colonel  and 
was  in  charge  of  the  pathological  and 
bacteriological  routine  of  the  3rd  and 
4th  Scottish  General  Hospitals,  and  also 
acted  as  inspector  of  laboratories  in 
Scotland.  Elected  F.R.S.  in  1911,  he 
served  on  the  council  (1926-7)  and  was 
awarded  a  Royal  medal  for  his  work  on 
immunity  in  1929.  He  was  knighted  in 
1934 ;  received  honorary  degrees  from  the 
universities  of  Bristol,  Dublin,  Durham, 
Edinburgh,  Glasgow,  and  Leeds;  was  an 
honorary  fellow  of  the  Royal  Colleges  of 
Physicians  of  London  and  Edinburgh,  of 
the  Royal  Faculty  of  Physicians  and 
Surgeons  of  Glasgow,  and  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Medicine,  and  an  honorary 
member  of  the  Pathological  Society. 
He  was  awarded  the  Lister  medal  for 
1936. 

Muir's  discoveries  fit  so  well  into  the 
mosaic  of  progress  in  pathology  that  it  is 
difficult  to  realize  now  how  fresh  and 
original  they  seemed  at  the  time  of  their 
announcement.  His  papers  are  still  worth 
reading  for  they  teem  with  unusual 
observations  and  offer  many  admirable 
lessons  in  planning  and  explaining  experi- 
ments for  the  young  pathologist.  Three 
major  fields  of  medical  endeavour  Muir 
made  his  own.  He  was  an  unrivalled 
exponent  on  diseases  of  the  blood  cells, 
largely  because  he  had  realized  that  much 
of  their  puzzling  behaviour  reflects  the 
closely  geared  relationship  between  the 
bone  marrow,  where  the  red  corpuscles  and 
many  of  the  white  corpuscles  are  formed, 
and  the  sites  of  cell  destruction.  From  these 
studies  came  fundamental  knowledge  about 
the  meaning  of  the  leucocytosis  of  infection 
and  pus  formation.  Red  cell  destruction 
was  linked  up  with  iron  metabolism, 
since  these  corpuscles  are  important  iron 
carriers,  and  in  tliis  way  came  an  explana- 
tion of  some  of  the  anomaUes  of  anaemia. 
Such  studies  brought  Muir  face  to 
face  with  the  vigorous  science  of  im- 
munology and  he  joined  the  ranks  of 
Ehrlich,  Bordet,  and  Landsteiner  with 
whom  he  bears  comparison.  Thus  he 
added  many  new  facts  about  the  nature 
and  mode  of  action  of  immune  body  and 
complement,  from  which  emerged  im- 
provements in  techniques,  especially  of 


the  Wassermann  reaction  for  syphilis, 
which  gave  a  strong  impetus  to  clinical 
serology.  Muir  played  no  small  part  in 
earning  for  the  United  Kingdom  a  high 
place  in  world  immunology.  Finally,  in 
his  latter  years,  he  returned  in  earnest 
to  the  problems  of  cancer  and  in  a 
brilliant  series  of  papers  devoted  to 
cancer  of  the  breast  he  clarified  the 
relationship  which  exists  between  duct 
papillomas,  cystic  hyperplasia,  and  intra- 
duct  cancer.  His  microscopical  study  of 
Paget' s  disease  of  the  nipple  is  un- 
surpassed and  has  left  no  doubt  about 
the  serious  nature  of  this  misleading 
disease. 

Muir  was  a  shy,  aloof  man  who  gave 
praise  rarely,  never  shirked  an  unpleasant 
duty,  yet  seldom  made  an  enemy.  Only 
his  most  intimate  friends  knew  of  the 
warm  heart  which  was  carefully  concealed 
by  a  deUberately  cultivated  austerity. 
He  knew  instinctively  when  young  people 
needed  help  and  made  it  his  business  to 
see  that  it  was  forthcoming.  His  habit  of 
absent-mindedly  pocketing  other  people's 
matches,  his  fanatical  devotion  to  golf, 
and  his  ill-concealed  delight  in  deflating 
pompous  colleagues  endeared  him  to  his 
juniors.  Many  good  stories  are  told  of 
him,  some  no  doubt  invented,  for  his 
Olympian  reserve  was  fair  game  for 
boisterous  Scottish  students.  They  were 
devoted  to  the  one  and  only  'Bobby'  and 
he  in  turn  loved  them  all. 

He  retired  in  1936  and  spent  the 
remainder  of  his  life  in  Edinburgh 
where  he  quietly  pursued  his  interest  in 
botany  and  geology,  fished  a  stream,  or 
played  his  favourite  golf  and  bridge.  He 
flew  to  Australia  to  see  his  eldest  sister 
when  he  was  close  upon  ninety;  and 
died  peacefuUy  in  Edinburgh  30  March 
1959. 

Muir's  portrait,  painted  in  1931  by 
G.  Fiddes  Watt,  hangs  in  the  university 
of  Glasgow ;  a  bust  by  G.  H.  Paulin  is  in 
the  Pathological  Institute  of  the  univer- 
sity. A  pencil  sketch  by  his  sister  Anne  has 
been  widely  reproduced. 

[Sir  Roy  Cameron  in  Biographical  Memoirs 
of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  v,  1959 ; 
Journal  of  Pathology  and  Bacteriology,  vol. 
Ixxxi,  No.  1,  January  1961 ;  private  informa- 
tion; personal  knoi^ledge.]     Roy  Cameron. 

MUNNINGS,     Sir     ALFRED     JAMES 

(1878-1959),  painter,  was  born  8  October 
1878  at  Mendham  Mill  on  the  Waveney, 
Suffolk,  the  second  of  the  four  sons  of 
the  miller,  John  Munnings,  and  his  wife, 


755 


Munnings 


t>:S.B.  1951-1960 


Ellen,  daughter  of  William  Ringer,  a 
farmer.  His  mother  gave  him  greater 
encouragement  and  sympathy  than  his 
father  who  was  often  short-tempered, 
though  he  captivated  his  family  by  read- 
ing aloud  in  the  evenings,  usually  from 
Dickens.  Munnings  himself  became  famous 
for  his  spirited  recitations  from  Surtees, 
Shakespeare,  and  other  favourites,  though 
he  sometimes  caused  embarrassment. 

Educated  at  the  village  school,  at  the 
BmaU  grammar  school  at  Redenhall,  and 
for  four  unhappy  terms  at  Framlingham 
College,  Munnings  left  school  at  fourteen. 
He  was  apprenticed  to  Page  Brothers, 
lithographers  at  Norwich,  where  for  six 
years  he  worked  with  enthusiasm  for  ten 
hours  a  day  at  tasks  which  were  almost 
entirely  commercial,  and  then  rushed  off 
for  a  couple  of  hours  at  the  Norwich 
School  of  Art.  Lithography  permits  no 
mistakes  and  through  his  strict  training 
Munnings  acquired  an  enviable  facihty 
and  assurance  in  drawing.  He  was 
fortunate  in  finding  encouragement  from 
Norwich  art  dealers,  from  Walter  Scott, 
the  head  of  the  Art  School,  from  James 
Reeve,  curator  and  connoisseur  of  Crome 
and  Cotman,  who  bought  one  of  his 
earliest  paintings  for  £85,  and  from  Shaw 
Tomkins,  manager  of  Caley's  chocolate 
factory,  who  took  the  boy  with  him  on 
trips  abroad  which  enabled  him  to  see 
fine  art  galleries.  Munnings  designed 
posters  for  the  firm's  chocolates  and 
crackers  and  continued  to  do  so,  when 
hard  up,  after  he  had  left  Pages. 

Although  fortunate  too  in  the  robust 
health  he  inherited  from  his  East  Anglian 
forebears,  Munnings  had  the  misfortune 
to  lose  the  sight  of  his  right  eye  in  1898 
when  it  was  accidentally  pierced  by  a 
thorn.  From  the  age  of  thirty  he  also 
suffered  from  painful  attacks  of  gout  to 
which  was  sometimes  attributed  his  ex- 
plosive and  liu-id  language. 

There  was  never  any  doubt  about  Mun- 
nings's  vocation.  He  loved  the  country- 
side; he  loved  painting;  he  loved  all 
animals;  in  particular  he  idolized  horses 
which  he  rode  untiringly  and  of  which 
he  made  thousands  of  sketches  and  paint- 
ings. He  was  not  moved  by  nature's 
mystery  but  by  the  visual  beauty  of  skies, 
trees,  meadows,  and  especially  of  flowing 
water.  He  was  never  in  a  studio  if  he  could 
be  in  the  open  air.  At  first  he  painted 
landscapes,  gipsies  and  their  horses  in 
Norfolk;  but  about  1911  he  moved  to 
Cornwall  where  he  was  warmly  welcomed 
by  the  Newlyn  group  around  Stanhope 


Forbes  [q.v.]  which  included  Harold  and 
(Dame)  Laura  Knight  and  Lamorna 
Birch. 

Refused  by  the  army  because  of  his 
disability,  Munnings  eventually  got  him- 
self accepted  in  1917  to  look  after  the 
welfare  of  horses.  He  was  next  attached, 
without  military  rank,  to  the  Canadian 
Cavalry  Brigade  as  an  official  war  artist. 
He  went  to  France,  fitted  comfortably 
into  army  life,  was  popular  with  every- 
body, and  worked  tremendously  hard 
making  sketches  and  paintings  in  oils  and 
water-colours.  His  fine  portrait  (now  in 
the  National  Art  Gallery  at  Ottawa)  of 
General  J.  E.  B.  Seely  (later  Lord 
Mottistone,  q.v.)  on  his  horse  Warrior  was 
his  first  sensational  success.  It  started  a 
vogue  and  for  the  next  forty  years  he 
produced  a  great  many  equestrian  por- 
traits in  the  same  style,  such  as  Lord 
Mildmay  [q.v.]  on  Davy  Jones,  Lord 
Hare  wood  [q.v.]  with  the  Princess  Royal, 
and  Lord  Birkenhead  [q.v.],  'about  my 
best  portrait  of  a  man  on  horseback'. 

At  Epsom  races  Munnings  was  always 
surrounded  by  members  of  the  gipsy 
families  he  had  painted  on  visits  to  Alton 
before  the  war,  and  it  was  his  studies  of 
them,  both  new  and  old,  which  first 
brought  him  fame  and  financial  success. 
The  sale  of  a  great  number  of  sketches  and 
paintings  to  James  Connell  &  Sons  of 
Old  Bond  Street  set  Munnings  up  for  life 
by  giving  him  an  initial  capital.  In  1919 
he  took  his  first  studio  in  London,  in 
Glebe  Place,  and  entered  boisterously 
into  London's  social  life,  first  at  the 
Chelsea  Arts  Club,  then  at  the  Cafe  Royal, 
the  Arts  Club  in  Piccadilly,  and  the 
Garrick  Club.  He  was  a  robust  and 
delightful  companion,  vital,  warm-hearted, 
gay,  impulsive  and  totally  unaffected. 
He  took  little  interest  in  politics  or  in 
current  affairs,  but  he  was  absorbed  in 
his  work  as  a  painter,  read  widely,  espe- 
cially the  work  of  sporting  writers,  and  had 
a  hfelong  passion  for  poetry  about  the 
English  countryside.  Later  he  had  a 
spacious  studio  built  in  Chelsea  Park 
Gardens  and  was  able  to  fulfil  a  dream  by 
the  purchase  of  a  Georgian  house.  Castle 
House,  in  Dedham,  near  Colchester. 

Between  the  wars  Munnings's  vogue  was 
tremendous,  and  he  stayed  at  many 
great  houses  in  order  to  draw  horses  and 
hoimds.  He  was  considered  the  finest 
painter  of  the  epoch  of  animals  and  of  the 
English  country  scene.  During  the  war 
of  1939-45  he  developed  a  voracious 
appetite  for  painting  on  Exmoor  where  he 


756 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Murray 


frequented  the  grazing  grounds  of  herds  of 
wild  ponies  and  would  be  out  painting 
them  all  day. 

In  1924  at  the  invitation  of  the  director 
of  the  Carnegie  Institute  at  Pittsburgh, 
Munnings  had  paid  his  first  visit  to 
America  in  order  to  be  a  judge  at  a 
Pittsburgh  international  exhibition  of 
pictures.  But  he  allowed  himself  to  become 
worn  out  by  accepting  too  many  portrait 
commissions  from  enthusiastic  Americans. 
In  1926  he  went  to  Spain  where  he  saw 
pictures  by  Velazquez,  El  Greco,  and  Goya, 
but  despite  the  impression  made  upon  him 
by  the  Prado  and  his  visits  to  Toledo, 
Seville,  Granada,  and  Ronda,  the  memory 
which  haunted  him  ever  afterwards  was 
the  misery  of  the  horses  in  the  country 
and  particularly  in  the  bullring. 

Munnings  had  been  elected  A.R.A.  in 
1919  and  R.A.  in  1925,  and  was  elected 
president  of  the  Royal  Academy  in  1944 
when  he  received  twenty-four  votes  to 
Augustus  John's  eleven.  He  had  no 
administrative  gifts,  no  patience  with 
meetings,  agenda  or  minutes,  and  no 
interest  in  the  financial  position  of  the 
Academy,  although  he  appreciated  its 
amenities  and  privileges  and  felt  pride  in 
it  as  an  institution.  He  took  no  part  in 
the  arrangement  of  the  exhibition  of  the 
royal  collection  in  the  winter  of  1946-7; 
but  his  was  the  excellent  idea  for  the 
Chantrey  Bequest  exhibition  in  1949 ;  and 
he  showed  enthusiasm  for  many  of  the 
nineteenth-century  pictures  which  had 
become  unfashionable.  Also  in  1949  it 
was  his  idea,  and  his  alone,  that  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill,  who  was  devoted  to 
painting  and  who  had  practised  it  for  years, 
should  be  made  honorary  academician 
extraordinary;  and  it  was  at  Churchill's 
suggestion  that  Munnings  restored  the 
famous  annual  dinner,  suspended  by  the 
war.  Unfortunately  he  chose  the  occasion 
to  make  a  prejudiced,  indiscreet  speech  in 
which  he  spoke  ill  of  artists  of  whom  he 
disapproved  and  of  modern  art  in  general. 
His  hostility  towards  the  whole  modern 
movement  made  him  unable  to  believe 
that  any  sincere  artist  could  think  differ- 
ently from  himself. 

Munnings  was  knighted  in  1944  and 
received  an  honorary  LL.D.  from  Sheffield 
in  1946.  In  1947  he  was  appointed 
K.C.V.O.,  received  the  freedom  of 
Norwich,  and  an  exhibition  of  his  work 
at  the  Leicester  Galleries  under  the  title 
'The  English  Scene'  brought  in  £20,788, 
a  record  for  a  living  artist.  In  1951-2  he 
gave  two  unexpectedly  splendid  lectures 


on  Stubbs  and  Constable  at  the  Royal 
Institution;  and  in  1956  an  enthusiastic 
public  flocked  to  a  one-man  exhibition 
of  his  work  in  the  diploma  gallery  of  the 
Royal  Academy,  the  presidency  of  which 
he  had  resigned  at  the  end  of  1949. 

Munnings  published  a  discursive  auto- 
biography, richly  illustrated,  in  three 
volumes:  An  ArtisVs  Life  (1950),  The 
Second  Burst  (1951),  and  TheFinish  (1952). 
When  speaking  in  public  or  writing  he  was 
unwilling  and  unable  to  keep  to  his 
subject,  a  characteristic  which  often 
added  to  the  charm  of  what  he  had  to  say. 
By  his  gay  exuberance  and  love  of  life, 
Munnings  attracted  friends  throughout 
his  long  life,  although  they  were  exasper- 
ated by  his  headstrong  follies  and  un- 
reasonable temper. 

In  1912  Munnings  married  Florence 
Carter- Wood  who  died  in  1914.  In  1920  he 
married  a  young  widow,  and  accomplished 
rider,  Violet  McBride,  daughter  of  Frank 
Golby  Haines,  an  Edgware  riding  master. 
She  proved  an  ideal  wife.  He  gave  her  his 
power  of  attorney  and  she  took  complete 
control  of  the  business  and  domestic  sides 
of  his  life,  leaving  him  free  to  devote 
himself  to  his  painting.  Yet  she  it  was  who 
said:  'He  was  never  such  a  good  artist- 
after  he  married  me  ...  It  meant  painting 
for  money.'  He  earned  enormous  sums 
from  the  rich,  though  these  canvases  are 
not  his  best;  his  best  are  close  to  the 
poetry  he  loved  and  to  the  country  as  he 
loved  it ;  his  good  pictures  (and  there  are 
many  of  them)  will  probably  outlast  much 
art  as  it  is  now  practised.  In  1969  his 
painting  'The  Whip'  sold  for  17,000 
guineas.  He  was  among  the  best  painters 
of  a  horse  who  have  ever  lived  and  im- 
mortalized many  famous  horses,  among 
them  Humorist,  Radium,  Hyperion,  and 
Brown  Jack,  whose  statuette  is  on  view  at 
Ascot  when  the  Brown  Jack  stakes  are  run. 

Munnings,  who  had  no  children,  died  at 
Castle  House,  17  July  1959,  and  his  ashes 
were  buried  in  the  crypt  of  St.  Paul's 
Cathedral.  The  National  Portrait  Gallery 
has  a  drawing  of  Munnings  by  himself; 
and  he  figures  in  his  fine  portrait  of  his 
wife  on  horseback. 

[Sir  A.  J.  Munnings's  own  writings ;  A.  J. 
Munnings,  R.A.,  Pictures  of  Horses  and  English 
Life,  with  an  appreciation  by  Lionel  Lindsay, 
1927 ;  Reginald  Pound,  The  Englishman,  1962  ; 
private  information;  personal  knowledge.] 
GEBAiiD  Kelly, 

MURRAY,  GEORGE  GILBERT  AIMfi 
(1866-1957),  classical  scholar  and  inter- 
nationalist, was  born  in  Sydney  2  January 


757 


Murray 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


1866.  His  father,  (Sir)  Terence  Murray, 
and  his  brother,  (Sir)  Hubert  Murray 
[qq.v.],  early  awoke  his  love  of  books 
and  of  aboriginal  peoples.  The  family,  of 
Irish  descent  and  military  tradition,  had 
been  expropriated  after  the  battle  of  the 
Boyne.  'We  tended  to  be  "agin  the 
Government"  ',  he  writes ;  '  "Pity  is  a 
rebel  passion"  and  we  were  .  .  .  passion- 
ately on  the  side  of  those  likely  to  be 
oppressed.'  His  misery  at  the  torture  of 
animals  and  his  fights  with  bullies  re- 
mained sharp  memories  of  the  little 
school  in  the  bush  where  he  began 
Greek. 

He  left  for  London  at  the  age  of  eleven 
with  his  widowed  mother,  whose  cousin 
(Sir)  W.  S.  Gilbert  [q.v.],  the  origin  of  his 
name  Gilbert,  was  then  at  work  on 
H.M.S.  Pinafore.  At  Merchant  Taylors' 
Murray  got  a  first-rate  classical  training, 
a  Uttle  Hebrew,  and  leisure  to  read  English 
poetry,  J.  S.  Mill,  and  Comte.  In  his  first 
year  at  St.  John's  College,  Oxford,  he  won 
the  Hertford  and  Ireland  scholarships 
(1885)  and  made  40  runs  in  the  Fresh- 
men's match ;  then  came  a  full  bag  of 
academic  honours  including  a  first  in 
literae  humaniores  and  a  fellowship  of 
New  College  (1888).  He  had  already  fore- 
shadowed his  international  activities  in  a 
motion  at  the  Oxford  Union  calling  the 
free  nations  to  unite  against  German  and 
Russian  militarism ;  and  in  his  concern  for 
peace,  characteristically,  he  joined  the 
Volunteers.  He  had  made  many  friends, 
notably  Charles  Gore  and  H.  A.  L.  Fisher 
[qq.v.].  To  senior  scholars  the  Australian 
seemed  a  model  of  English  classical 
education. 

Yet  English  classical  education  dis- 
satisfied him,  like  many  others  of  his 
day,  by  its  narrow  insistence  on  the 
arts  in  which  he  excelled:  Greek  and 
Latin  composition.  His  excellence — still 
unrivalled  in  Greek — came  of  a  power 
to  make  the  language  his  own  by 
intensely  imaginative  reading  of  the 
literature;  and  this  recipe  he  always 
prescribed.  But  some  tutors  were  treating 
the  literature  as  a  stock  of  serviceable 
tags  for  pupils'  exercises;  its  remote 
and  difficult  beauty,  without  rekindling 
interpretation,  seemed  to  many  minds 
cold  beside  the  living  poets — Browning, 
Tennyson,  Swinburne.  At  Oxford  the 
consummate  learning  of  Ingram  Bywater 
[q.v.]  was  expounded  too  drily  to  inspire 
most  young  men.  Of  Murray's  tutors 
Arthur  Sidgwick  had  the  live  spark,  but 
Sidgwick  was  no  savant ;  indeed,  the  range 


of  erudition  expected  of  a  Hellenist  was  so 
limited  that  even  Sir  Richard  Jebb  [q.v.] 
could  describe  the  twenty-three-year-old 
Murray  as  'the  most  accomplished  Greek 
scholar  of  the  day'.  Murray  himself  was 
eager  for  an  expansion  of  Greek  studies 
into  fresh  fields  of  research;  and  if,  as 
Derby  scholar  in  1889,  he  had  taken 
his  projected  road  to  Gottingen,  he  would 
have  gained  this  enrichment  under 
Wilamowitz,  whose  wide  and  exact 
learning  overcame  Murray  with  longing 
for  such  guidance. 

But  in  1889  Murray  was  in  love  with 
the  beautiful  and  ardent  Lady  Mary 
Howard;  the  chair  of  Greek  at  Glasgow 
offered  him  a  marriageable  income;  and 
the  work  among  poorer  students  appealed 
strongly  to  the  liberal  idealism  of  the  pair. 
In  his  inaugural  lecture,  and  ever  after, 
Murray  took  another  road  to  the  expan- 
sion of  classical  studies.  Their  monopoly 
was  broken ;  the  claim  of  new  disciplines 
was  just;  Greek,  too  stiflf  for  the  masses 
but  too  precious  for  a  class's  preserve, 
must  compete  in  a  free  market  on  its 
merits,  without  the  subsidy  of  vested 
interests  or  other  forms  of  what  Murray 
often  called  paracharaxis — stamping  a 
false  value  on  a  coin.  For  this  experiment 
Glasgow,  poor  in  social  privilege  and  rich 
in  brains,  was  a  promising  field,  and 
Murray  a  masterly  director.  He  taught 
by  the  strictest  standards,  but  never 
snubbed  ignorance  or  spared  himself 
pains.  His  power  of  communicating  the 
life  of  a  subject  is  attested  even  by  those 
who  disputed  some  of  his  judgements. 
He  had  a  natural  presence,  an  actor's 
gift  of  staging  and  rendering,  great 
beauty  of  voice  and  language,  a  proved 
telepathic  faculty;  but  it  was  his  inner 
experience  of  Greek  poetry  which  con- 
vinced critical  spirits — John  Buchan, 
H.  N.  Brailsford  [qq.v.],  Janet  Spens. 
His  lectures  (another  pupil  wrote)  'for 
some  of  us  changed  the  whole  outlook  of 
our  world'. 

The  problem  of  students  wanting 
Greece  on  inadequate  Greek  forced 
Murray  into  translation.  He  had  written 
plays;  his  Carlyon  Sahib  was  produced 
(1899)  in  London  by  Mrs.  Patrick  Campbell 
[q.v.]  but  was  found  too  grim  for  the 
public  taste.  His  versions  of  Greek  drama 
began  as  lecturing  devices,  and  Glasgow 
men  received  them  with  Scottish  stam- 
pedes of  applause,  but  he  published  none 
until  1902,  on  a  peremptory  request  from 
G.  B.  Shaw  [q.v.].  They  'came  into  our 
dramatic  literature'  (Shaw  wrote  in  1905) 


758 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Murray 


*with  all  the  impulsive  power  of  an  origi- 
nal work' ;  to  shouts  of  'Author !'  Murray 
had  to  reply  that  the  author  was  dead. 
The  translations  filled  a  cockney  music- 
hall  as  full  as  west-end  theatres,  and  drew 
poets  and  scholars,  miners  and  villagers, 
over  the  English-speaking  world.  By  the 
mid-century  their  idiom  seemed  alien, 
even  repellent.  For  all  its  faults,  Murray 
was  faithful  to  the  Greek  in  choosing  a 
poetic  diction,  removed  from  prose  and 
common  speech,  unafraid  of  archaisms, 
sharply  contrasting  the  metre  of  rhetoric 
with  the  lyric  chorus,  and  rendering  both 
in  formal  verse  which  contemporary  actors 
enjoyed.  He  knew,  besides,  that  action  on 
the  stage  is  more  than  diction  in  the  arm- 
chair. It  is  true  that  both  in  his  versions 
and  in  his  book  Euripides  and  his  Age 
(1913)  Murray  often  made  the  ideas  of 
Euripides  too  like  his  own.  Yet,  above  all 
ideas,  Euripides  was  a  playivright;  and 
this  was  what  Murray  demonstrated  to  a 
generation  who  could  not  believe  that  the 
Troades  would  act.  They  were  converted 
by  his  theatrical  sense  and  his  effort  to 
obey  his  own  precept:  'so  understand  as 
to  relive'. 

For  a  generous  teacher  Glasgow  was 
hard  work,  and  in  1899  exhaustion  was 
mistaken  for  a  fatal  disease.  He  retired 
from  his  chair  to  Churt  in  Surrey.  In  1905 
he  returned  to  New  College  as  a  fellow; 
he  was  elected  F.B.A.  in  1910.  In  these 
years  he  edited  Euripides  for  the  Oxford 
Classical  Texts  (3  vols.,  1901-9).  His 
edition,  still  the  best  after  sixty  years, 
shows  his  keen  intellect  and  sensitive  tact 
of  the  Greek  language ;  but  as  an  editor 
he  had  faults  of  method,  and  some 
waywardness  in  emendation  or  choice  of 
readings  was  immediately  rebuked  by 
his  friend  A.  E.  Housman  [q.v.],  who 
generally  approved  his  edition  and  his 
translations.  Not  every  scholar  had 
applauded  his  youthful  Ancient  Greek 
Literature  (1897;  republished  1956);  in 
the  margin  of  the  preface  Henry  Jackson 
[q.v.]  scribbled  'Insolent  puppy'.  He  had 
misgivings  of  his  own ;  in  1908,  just  before 
his  appointment  as  regius  professor  at 
Oxford,  he  wrote  to  his  wife:  'In  the 
watches  of  the  night  it  has  become  clear 
to  me  that  I  am  not  fit  for  the  Chair  of 
Greek.  I  am  not  learned  or  industrious 
enough  to  organize  the  study;  I  am  too 
diverse  in  my  interests.'  Housman  soon 
proposed  to  visit  him,  with  the  words: 
'I  have  chosen  a  dry  subject  for  my  paper, 
as  I  have  no  doubt  that  scholarship  at 
Oxford  is  taking  an  excessively  literary 


tinge  under  the  influence  of  the  new 
Professor  of  Greek.'  But  Murray  as  can- 
didly disapproved  Housman's  dichotomy 
between  scholarship  and  literature.  He 
admired,  but  lacked,  Housman's  ambition 
to  leave  an  enduring  monument ;  he  chose 
the  ephemeral  work  of  a  teacher  and 
interpreter.  In  its  day  his  impact  was 
extraordinary.  His  Rise  of  the  Greek  Epic 
(1907)  has  been  republished  since  his  death, 
though  scientifically  out  of  date,  for  its 
vivid  poetic  feeling  and  its  style  of  elo- 
quent speech  directly  attuned  to  listeners, 
which  made  his  voice  famous  as  a 
broadcaster.  His  Four  Stages  of  Greek 
Religion  (1912;  extended  in  1925  to 
Five  Stages)  is  his  most  typical  book. 
It  reflects  the  temper  of  an  agnostic  able 
to  apprehend  religious  experience  outside 
his  personal  belief.  His  anthropological 
curiosity,  enlarged  by  the  work  of  Sir 
James  Frazer  and  Jane  Harrison  [qq.v.], 
quickened  his  awareness  of  the  savage  and 
irrational  elements  behind  Greek  civiliza- 
tion. In  Murray's  conception  of  these 
elements  and  of  the  mature  canons  of 
Hellenism  much  is  now  obsolete,  but  his 
chapters  on  the  later  Pagans  displayed  a 
vision  far  beyond  the  classical  conventions 
of  the  time,  and  prophetic  of  later 
explorations. 

After  Glasgow,  the  other  turning-point 
was  1914.  Murray's  Foreign  Policy  of 
Sir  Edward  Grey  (1915)  temporarily 
estranged  him  from  such  close  friends  as 
Brailsford  and  Bertrand  (later  Earl) 
Russell.  In  1900  he  had  denounced 
nationalism  with  ferocity  ('National 
Ideals'  reprinted  in  Essays  &  Addresses, 
1921).  Now  he  argued  that  Germany's 
desire  of  power  after  power  had  to  be  met 
with  force  after  conciliation  had  failed. 
The  corollary  duty  was  to  prevent  more 
wars  by  international  action,  and  from 
1919  until  his  death  it  ate  up  his  leisure. 
He  was  a  founder  (and  chairman  of  the 
executive  council,  1923-38)  of  the  League 
of  Nations  Union,  with  the  Council  for 
Education  in  World  Citizenship ;  and  after 
the  war  of  1939-45  joint  president  (1945-7, 
1949-57)  and  sole  president  (1947-9)  of 
the  United  Nations  Association.  To  his 
ninetieth  year  he  travelled  indefatigably 
lecturing  in  these  causes.  Much  of  his  time 
between  the  wars  was  spent  at  Geneva  as 
a  delegate  for  South  Africa  (1921-3)  and 
from  1922  as  a  member  (for  eight  years 
chairman)  of  the  Committee  on  Intel- 
lectual Co-operation — 'a  subject  which 
bores  me  stiff',  he  wrote  at  first,  but 
he    soon    warmed    to    the    work    with 


759 


Murray 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Einstein,  Mme  Curie,  and  Paul  Valery  as 
colleagues. 

In  1923  the  vice-chancellor  of  Oxford 
asked  him  whether  he  ought  to  pursue 
these  activities  while  retaining  his  chair. 
He  was  teaching  to  the  full,  but  he  had 
not  time  for  the  sustained  research  and 
bibliographical  digestion  expected  of  a 
professor.  His  Classical  Tradition  in  Poetry 
(1927,  Harvard  lectures)  and  Aristophanes 
(1933)  are  books  of  a  scholar  but  not  of 
scholarship ;  his  text  of  Aeschylus  (1937) 
was  poor,  though  later  improved  (1955) ; 
his  translations  (except  those  of  Menander) 
grew  tired,  a  hobby  for  odd  moments. 
Some  regretted  the  dispersal  of  his 
phenomenal  energies  in  the  uncertain 
cause  of  peace.  Murray  was  surprised  and 
angry.  To  decUne  public  service  for  one's 
privately  preferred  studies  was  a  reversal 
of  his  classical  and  Victorian  principles. 
He  replied  (with  indubitable  truth): 
'I  care  far  more  for  teaching  Greek  than 
for  any  other  pursuit  in  life';  and  he 
taught  it,  financing  a  research  studentship 
from  his  salary  for  full  measure,  until  he 
retired  from  his  chair  in  1936.  As  it 
happened,  his  most  permanent  service  to 
pure  scholarship  was  given  in  these 
latter  years — not  by  his  own  research  but 
by  his  personal  exertions,  backed  by 
all  his  international  influence,  for  the 
reception  of  refugee  scholars  in  British 
universities.  Murray's  academic  standards 
were  never  provincial,  and  he  saw  it  not 
only  as  a  hmnanitarian  concern  but  as  a 
fertilization  of  humane  studies  through 
that  widened  erudition  which  he  himself 
had  not  fetched  from  Gottingen  to 
Glasgow  and  Oxford. 

He  still  regarded  classics  as  an  education 
for  others  besides  specialists,  and  Hel- 
lenism (like  a  Greek  play)  as  something 
to  be  imderstood  by  reliving.  The 
magnanimous  ideal  sometimes  touched 
his  picture  of  Hellenism  with  anachron- 
istic colours;  his  thought,  though  lucid 
and  trenchant,  was  unhistorical.  He  had 
rare  sincerity  of  mind  and  feeling  without 
Housman's  rare  passion  for  exactitude. 
Not  that  he  tolerated  woolliness;  his 
Greek  composition  kept  its  brilliance  and 
resource,  and  his  curiosity  its  alertness; 
all  the  week  before  his  last  illness  he  was 
absorbed  in  new  Aeschylean  labours  and 
in  his  first  reading  of  Etienne  de  la  Boetie. 
Yet  he  had  blind  spots — Tacitus,  the 
Psalms,  music.  Liberal  in  politics  (he 
thrice  stood  unsuccessfully  for  Oxford 
University)  and  in  ideas,  he  saw  both 
sides  of  a  question,  but  he  was  obstinate 


in  his  underlying  beliefs.  Rationalism  he 
defined  not  as  the  sufficiency  of  reason 
but  as  its  limitation  to  frontiers  facing 
unknown  worlds;  the  child  of  a  mixed 
marriage,  he  maintained  a  reverent  aloof- 
ness from  institutional  religion.  An  epi- 
sode near  his  death,  when  Roman  Catholic 
sacraments  were  administered  according 
to  his  own  and  his  father's  baptism,  was 
later  publicized;  a  responsible  comment 
appeared  in  the  Tablet^  29  June  1957. 

Murray's  personality  had  a  striking 
coherence,  which  made  him  (in  Auden's 
phrase)  a  mythopoeic  character.  The 
pubhc  perceived  clear  outlines  and  en- 
dowed him  with  virtues  or  absurdities 
which  he  did  not  possess.  Shaw's 
portrait  in  Major  Barbara  catches  the 
paradox  in  'the  life-long  struggle  of  a 
benevolent  temperament  and  a  high 
conscience  against  impulses  of  inhxunan 
ridicule  and  fierce  impatience',  from 
which  his  noted  serenity,  gentleness,  and 
balance  emerged.  He  was  agile  and 
footsure,  a  capable  boxer  in  youth,  a 
fearless  glacier- walker  in  his  sixties.  Many 
were  surprised  by  his  irrepressible  sense 
of  the  thrill  in  war  and  his  buoyancy 
at  its  outbreak  in  1939.  Working  with 
incessant  hope  for  humanity,  he  saw 
human  nature  as  'the  carnivorous 
ape  ...  a  vain  mischievous  cruel  licen- 
tious beast'.  Devoted  to  international 
concord,  he  was  none  too  fond  of  foreign 
travel,  and  harboured  some  insular  dis- 
trust of  'small  dark  nations'.  The  tee- 
totaller and  vegetarian  was  at  home  in 
any  good-humoured  society,  a  versatile 
host  at  Yatscombe,  near  Oxford,  a  born 
mimic  and  parodist  (his  Ramsay  Mac- 
Donald  speech  ended:  'I  shall  not  shrink 
from  hesitating  to  refuse').  In  that  house 
the  duty  of  response  to  present  demands 
was  paramount,  and  he  was  too  busy  to 
take  much  thought  for  posterity's  opinion 
of  his  work  ('none  of  it  is  great  or  soHd 
achievement'  was  his  own,  written  to  his 
wife).  Yet  he  was  pleased  by  public 
honour,  proud  of  the  Order  of  Merit  (1941) 
and  the  proffered  freedom  of  the  City  of 
London.  His  place  in  Westminster  Abbey 
was  a  congenial  tribute  to  a  high  mind  and 
an  illuminating  spirit  in  his  generation. 

By  his  marriage  in  1889  to  Lady  Mary 
Henrietta  Howard  (died  1956),  eldest 
daughter  of  the  ninth  Earl  of  Carlisle,  he 
had  three  sons  and  two  daughters.  He  died 
at  his  home  on  Boar's  Hill  20  May  1957. 
The  National  Portrait  Gallery  has  a 
drawing  by  Augustus  John  and  a  painting 
by  Murray's  grandson  Lawrence  Toynbee. 


760 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Murry 


A  drawing  by  Francis  Dodd  is  in  St.  John's 
College,  Oxford. 

[The  Gilbert  Murray  papers  (Bodleian 
Library);  An  Unfinished  Autobiography, 
with  essays  by  friends,  1960 ;  J.  A.  K.  Thomson 
in  Proceedings  of  the  British  Academy,  vol. 
xliii,  1959;  E.  R,  Dodds  in  Gnomon,  1957; 
Sir  C.  M.  Bowra,  Memories,  1966;  personal 
knowledge.]  M.  I.  Henderson. 

MURRY,  JOHN  MIDDLETON  (1889- 
1957),  author,  was  born  at  Peckham, 
London,  6  August  1889,  the  elder  of 
two  sons  of  John  Murry,  a  clerk  in  the 
Inland  Revenue  Department,  and  his  wife, 
Emily  Wheeler.  Murry's  father  had  taught 
himself  to  read  and  write  and  had  begun 
as  a  boy  messenger ;  the  family  was  poor 
and  it  was  through  scholarships  that 
Murr>^  obtained  his  education  at  Christ's 
Hospital  and  Brasenose  College,  Oxford, 
where  he  obtained  a  first  class  in  honour 
moderations  (1910)  and  a  second  in 
liter ae  humaniores  (1912).  He  wrote  for 
the  Westminster  Gazette  (1912-13),  then 
for  the  Times  Literary  Supplement,  and 
worked  in  the  political  intelligence  depart- 
ment of  the  War  Office  from  1916,  being 
appointed  chief  censor  in  1919  and  O.B.E. 
in  1920.  In  Between  Two  Worlds  (1935)  he 
has  described  his  early  life  up  to  and 
including  his  marriage  in  1918  to  Katherine 
Mansfield  [q.v.]  with  whom  he  had  lived 
since  1912.  His  second  marriage  (1924) 
was  to  Violet,  daughter  of  Charles  le 
Maistre,  general  secretary  of  the  Inter- 
national Electrotechnical  Commission. 
After  her  death  in  1931  he  married 
Elizabeth  Ada,  daughter  of  Joseph 
Cockbayne,  farmer;  and  on  her  death  in 
1954,  fourthly,  Mary,  daughter  of  Henry 
Gilbert  Gamble,  architect,  with  whom 
he  had  lived  since  1941. 

Murry  had  been  forced  to  overwork 
as  a  child  and  for  the  greater  part  of  his  life 
he  worked,  at  first  from  financial  necessity 
and  later,  perhaps,  partly  from  habit, 
at  abnormally  high  pressure.  It  is  there- 
fore all  the  more  remarkable  that  so  much 
of  his  prodigious  output  of  both  hterary 
and  social  criticism  should  be  of  value. 
When  he  was  appointed  editor  of  the 
Athenaeum  in  1919,  at  the  age  of  thirty, 
he  was  a  key  figure,  and  perhaps  then  the 
leading  figure,  of  the  post-war  literary 
generation  which  included  T.  S.  Eliot, 
Aldous  Huxley,  and  D.  H.  Lawrence 
[q.v.]  with  whom  his  relations  were 
particularly  intimate  and  stormy.  Murry's 
literary  popularity  was  short-lived  and  he 
came  to  be  described  by  a  friendly  critic 


as  'the  best-hated  man  of  letters  in  the 
country'.  Although  it  had  been  briUiantly 
successful  intellectually,  the  Athenaeum 
had  lost  money  and  in  1921  it  was 
merged  with  the  Nation,  when  Murry 
resigned,  mainly  on  account  of  Katherine 
Mansfield's  serious  illness.  After  her  death 
in  1923  Murry  founded  the  Adelphi, 
which  he  controlled  until  1948.  At  first 
it  was  a  sensational  success,  but  the 
success  was  of  a  kind  to  alienate  some  of 
his  most  discriminating  readers.  Although 
this  was  partly  due  to  their  own  im- 
percipience,  it  is  nevertheless  true  that 
in  the  Adelphi  Murry  did  at  times  exhibit 
an  emotionaUsm  which  was  the  flaw  in 
the  element  of  mysticism  which  had  been 
latent  in  his  work  from  the  beginning  and 
became  more  manifest  after  Katherine 
Mansfield's  death.  At  its  best  this  mystical 
element  was  responsible  for  the  extra- 
ordinary penetration  of  Murry's  criticism, 
which  is  evident  in  his  first  critical  study, 
Dostoevsky  (1916),  and  in  all  his  more 
important  works.  It  was,  however,  com- 
pletely at  odds  with  the  prevailing  literary 
trends. 

For  many  years  after  Katherine 
Mansfield's  death,  Murry  lived  a  strenuous 
and  tormented  life  which  was  divided  into 
what  appeared  to  be  three  almost  water- 
tight compartments:  first,  his  literary 
work,  which  included  books  on  Keats, 
D.  H.  Lawrence,  Blake,  and  Shakespeare ; 
second,  his  poUtical  and  social  activities, 
which  included  lectiu'ing  and  the  organiz- 
ation of  a  farm  community,  but  which 
also  produced  books  on  his  religious 
thought,  on  Communism,  and  on  pacifism ; 
third,  his  home  fife,  which  was  almost 
continuously  painful.  His  second  wife, 
by  whom  he  had  a  son  and  a  daughter, 
died,  hke  his  first,  of  consumption.  There 
were  also  a  son  and  a  daughter  of  his 
third  marriage  which  was  unhappy;  it 
was  only  with  his  fourth  wife  that  he  at 
last  achieved  a  life  of  peaceful  happiness. 
With  his  Jonathan  Swift  (1954),  Un- 
professional Essays  (1956),  and  Love, 
Freedom  and  Society  (1957)  he  began  to 
regain  some  of  his  former  reputation  as  a 
literary  critic.  Yet  Love,  Freedom  and 
Society,  which  was  based  upon  a  compara- 
tive study  of  Albert  Schweitzer  and 
D.  H.  Lawrence,  was  in  reality  a  masterly 
synthesis  of  his  own  literary,  religious,  and 
social  thought,  and  its  favourable  re- 
ception might  suggest  that  readers  were 
beginning  to  catch  up  with  Murry's 
method.  In  the  long  run,  however,  he 
will   probably   be   best   remembered   for 


761 


Murry 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


his  studies  of  Shakespeare,  Keats,  and 
D.  H.  Lawrence,  and  perhaps  even  more 
for  his  adherence,  in  an  age  of  academic 
sterility,  to  the  humane  tradition  of 
culture.  In  the  words  of  his  biographer, 
F.  A.  Lea,  he  owed  'his  unique  under- 
standing of  the  Romantics  and  his  total 
neglect  by  the  academics  to  the  persistence 
of  his  quest  for  "the  good  life" — a  quest 
that  carried  him,  as  it  did  Coleridge  and 
Arnold,  ever  farther  away  from  litera- 
ture in  the  direction  of  philosophy  and 
sociology'  {A  Defence  of  Philosophy,  1962). 
Murry  died  at  Bury  St.  Edmunds, 
Suffolk,  13  March  1957.  There  is  an 
interesting  drawing  of  him  in  his  youth 
in  (Sir)  William  Rothenstein's  Twenty- 
Four  Portraits  (2nd  series,  1923). 

[J.  M.  Murry,  Between  Two  Worlds,  1935, 
and  other  works,  passim;  F.  A.  Lea,  Life  of 
John  Middleton  Murry,  1959  ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.]     Richard  Rees. 

MYRES,  Sir  JOHN  LINTON  (1869- 
1954),  archaeologist  and  historian,  was 
born  3  July  1869  at  Preston,  Lancashire, 
the  only  son  of  the  Rev.  William  Miles 
Myres,  vicar  of  St.  Paul's,  Preston,  and  his 
first  wife,  Jane,  daughter  of  the  Rev. 
Henry  Linton.  He  won  scholarships  to 
Winchester,  thence  to  New  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  took  first  classes  in 
honour  moderations  (1890)  and  literae 
humaniores  (1892).  He  had  already  shown 
a  lively  interest  in  antiquities  and  local 
history  as  an  undergraduate,  publishing 
articles,  digging  at  Alchester,  and  organiz- 
ing the  local  history  museum  at  Aylesbury. 
As  a  fellow  of  Magdalen  (1892-5)  and 
Craven  fellow  (1892)  he  was  able  to  visit 
the  Mediterranean,  travelling  in  the 
Greek  islands,  exploring  Caria  and  the 
Dodecanese,  and  working  with  (Sir) 
Arthur  Evans  (whose  notice  he  later 
contributed  to  this  Dictionary).  He 
travelled  widely  in  Crete,  collecting  minor 
antiquities  and  copying  inscriptions.  These 
were  the  early  days  of  excavation  in  the 
island  and  of  the  discovery  of  Minoan 
civiUzation,  although  Knossos  itself  had 
yet  to  be  dug.  By  comparing  Cretan 
vases  with  some  vase  fragments  found  by 
(Sir)  Flinders  Petrie  [q.v.]  in  Egypt,  at 
Kahun,  he  found  the  first  important  link 
and  correlation  to  be  observed  between 
the  two  ancient  civilizations.  He  did  not 
join  Evans  in  the  excavations  at  Knossos, 
but  dug  with  the  British  School  at 
Palaikastro,  and,  notably,  at  the  hill- 
top shrine  of  Petsofa,  the  finds  from  which 
he  soon  published. 


It  was  to  Cyprus  and  to  Cypriot  anti- 
quities that  much  of  his  archaeological 
work  was  at  first  devoted,  and  he  several 
times  returned  to  the  problems  of  its 
archaeology  in  his  writings.  He  had  con- 
ducted excavations  in  the  island  in  1894, 
at  Kition;  he  wrote  a  catalogue  of  the 
Cyprus  Museum  (1899,  with  M.  Ohnefalsch- 
Richter) ;  and  in  1914  published  an 
exemplary  catalogue  of  the  rich  Cesnola 
collection  in  New  York.  In  these  years  he 
had  been  a  student  of  Christ  Church 
(1895-1907)  and  university  lecturer  in 
classical  archaeology,  and  he  went  to 
Liverpool  as  professor  of  Greek  and 
bcturer  in  ancient  geography  (1907-10). 
In  his  early  teaching  and  writing  his 
knowledge  of  the  geography  of  the 
Aegean  was  put  to  good  account  and  he 
had  the  happy  gift  of  being  able  to  eluci- 
date problems  of  antiquity  by  modern 
analogies.  Quite  apart  from  his  Greek 
studies  he  wrote  a  schools'  History  of  Rome 
which  was  published  in  1902. 

The  creation  of  the  new  Wykeham 
professorship  in  ancient  history  brought 
Myres  back  to  Oxford  in  1910  and  he  held 
this  chair  until  his  retirement  in  1939. 
The  title  of  his  inaugural  lecture — 'Greek 
Lands  and  the  Greek  People' — set  the 
theme  of  his  future  interests  and  these 
years  saw  the  publication  of  several 
books  on  the  various  aspects  of  ancient 
history  which  his  wide  experience  could 
control.  The  Dawn  of  History  (1911)  was 
a  semi-popular  exposition  of  fundamental 
principles  about  the  study  of  early  civiliza- 
tions and  approach  to  ancient,  history. 
It  displayed  already  the  easy  style  of 
writing  which  informed  all  his  work. 
To  the  Cambridge  Ancient  History  he 
contributed  several  chapters.  Who  were 
the  Greeks?  (1930)  was  his  most  brilliant  and 
provocative  work,  based  on  the  Sather 
lectures  which  he  had  been  again  invited 
to  deliver  in  California  in  1927  (the  first 
time  had  been  in  1914).  On  Sir  Arthur 
Evans's  death  in  1941  he  took  on  the 
task  of  editing  the  Linear  B  tablets  from 
Knossos  which,  half  a  century  after  their 
discovery,  were  finally  published  (as 
Scripta  Minoa  II)  in  1952,  and  he  lived  to 
applaud  the  decipherment  by  Michael 
Ventris  [q.v.]  of  their  language  as  Greek. 
Myres  continued  writing  until  his  death — 
a  vivid  and  highly  personal  account  of 
Herodotus^  Father  of  History  (1953)  and 
essays  on  Homer  and  his  Critics,  edited 
after  his  death  by  Miss  D.  H.  F.  Gray 
in  1958.  To  his  collection  of  essays, 
Geographical  History  in  Greek  Lands  (1953), 


762 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Namier 


he  appended  a  select  bibliography  of  his 
writings.  The  most  valuable  aspect  of 
his  work  was  probably  not  so  much 
the  new  material  or  solutions  which  he 
presented — although  these  were  numerous 
— ^but  the  challenging  approach  to  the 
more  conventional  problems  of  ancient 
history  which  a  scholar  versed  in  geo- 
graphy, anthropology,  and  the  classics 
could  take.  His  services  to  scholar- 
ship were  recognized  by  honorary  degrees 
from  Wales,  Manchester,  Witwatersrand, 
and  Athens,  and  the  Victoria  medal  of  the 
Royal  Geographical  Society  (1953).  He 
was  elected  F.B.A.  in  1923  and  knighted 
in  1943. 

Myres's  interests  were  not  confined  to 
any  narrow  field  of  research  in  antiquity. 
When  he  went  to  Greece  in  1892  one  of  his 
awards  was  the  Burdett-Coutts  geological 
scholarship.  As  an  anthropologist  he 
served  the  Royal  Anthropological  Insti- 
tute as  its  honorary  secretary,  then  presi- 
dent (1928-31);  and  in  1901  he  had 
inaugurated  its  new  monthly  periodical 
Man  which  he  edited  in  1901-3,  and  again 
in  1931-46,  and  to  which  he  regularly 
contributed  on  subjects  often  far  removed 
from  classical  studies.  As  a  Hellenist  and 
archaeologist  he  was  vice-president  of  the 
Society  of  Antiquaries  (1924-9)  and  its 
gold  medallist  in  1942 ;  president  of  the 
Hellenic  Society  (1935-8);  chairman  of 
the  British  School  at  Athens  (1934-^7), 
and  organizer  of  its  jubilee  exhibition  in 
Burlington  House  in  1936.  He  was  librarian 
of  New  College  up  to  1946.  He  was  general 
secretary  of  the  British  Association  from 
1919  to  1932,  following  its  conferences  to 
many  parts  of  the  world.  His  range  in 
scholarship  was  matched  by  the  variety 
and  vigour  of  his  other  activities.  As  well 
as  his  concern  for  the  administration  and 
welfare  of  the  various  societies  which  he 
served  he  was  active  in  Oxford  politics,  in 
the  establishment  of  new  graduate  de- 
grees, and  the  promotion  of  new  subjects, 
notably  geography  and  anthropology. 
In  the  war  of  1914-18  he  commanded 
small  craft  in  raiding  operations  on  the 
Turkish  coast  on  the  tug  Syra  and  then  the 
former  royal  yacht  Aulis.  In  this  his 
ingenuity  and  buccaneering  spirit  served 
him  no  less  than  his  detailed  knowledge 
of  the  geography  and  people  of  the  Asia 
Minor  coast.  He  ended  the  war  as  acting 
commander  R.N.V.R.  and  was  awarded 
the  O.B.E.  and  the  Greek  Order  of  George 
I.  In  the  war  of  1939-45  he  used  his  great 
experience  of  the  geography  of  Greece 
in  editing  handbooks  for  naval  intelligence. 


Through  most  of  his  life  Myres  was 
troubled  by  his  eyesight  and  at  the  end, 
although  still  writing,  was  quite  blind. 
In  appearance  he  was  a  handsome  man, 
bearded  and  blue-eyed.  Drawings  of  him, 
by  Albert  Rutherston,  hang  in  New  College 
senior  common-room  and  the  Oxford 
School  of  Geography.  In  his  dealings  with 
younger  scholars  he  was  generous  and 
kindly,  and  his  work  must  be  judged  not 
only  by  what  he  wrote  but  also  by  what  he 
inspired  in  others,  by  example  or  casual 
precept.  He  founded  no  school.  In  his 
lifetime  he  saw  classical  archaeology  grow 
from  a  dilettante  study  to  a  discipline 
which  has  much  to  contribute  to  all 
departments  of  classical  scholarship.  His 
part  in  this  development  was  to  show  how 
historian,  archaeologist,  anthropologist, 
and  geographer  should  combine  their 
skills  in  the  study  of  antiquity. 

In  1895  Myres  married  Sophia  Florence 
(died  1960),  daughter  of  Charles  Ballance, 
by  whom  he  had  two  sons  and  one 
daughter.  The  younger  son,  John  Nowell 
Linton  Myres,  was  Bodley's  librarian  at 
Oxford,  1948-65.  Myres  died  in  Oxford 
6  March  1954. 

[T.  J.  Dunbabin  in  Proceedings  of  the 
British  Academy,  vol.  xli,  1955 ;  private 
information.]  J.  Boardman. 

NAMIER,  Sir  LEWIS  BERNSTEIN 
(1888-1960),  historian,  was  born  27  June 
1888  at  Wola  Okrzejska,  to  the  east  of 
Warsaw,  the  only  son  of  Joseph  Bernstein 
(originally  Niemirowski),  advocate  and 
landowner,  by  his  wife,  Ann,  daughter 
of  Maurice  Theodor  Sommerstein.  Both 
parents  were  Polonized  Jews  who  no 
longer  adhered  to  the  Jewish  religion. 
Ludwik  Bernstein  was  educated  privately, 
and  after  brief  periods  at  Lwow  and 
Lausanne  universities  came  to  England, 
where  he  spent  a  year  at  the  London 
School  of  Economics  and  entered  Balliol 
College,  Oxford,  in  1908.  He  took  a  first  in 
modern  history  in  1911  and  was  awarded 
a  share  in  the  Beit  prize  in  1 913.  Through- 
out his  life  Oxford,  and  especially  Balliol, 
had  a  high  place  in  his  affections.  He  took 
British  nationality  in  1913  and  changed 
his  name  by  deed  poll. 

In  1913  Namier  went  to  the  United 
States  to  take  up  a  post  with  one  of  his 
father's  business  associates.  There  he 
began  research  on  eighteenth-century 
parliamentary  history,  and  he  returned  to 
England  in  1914  with  the  intention  of 
writing  a  book  on  the  British  Parliament 
during  the  American  revolution.  On  the 


768 


Namier 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


outbreak  of  war  he  joined  the  army  and 
served  as  a  private  in  the  Royal  Fusiliers, 
but  his  knowledge  of  east  European 
affairs  led  to  his  transfer  t6  the  Foreign 
Office  where  he  worked  from  1915  to  1920, 
first  in  the  propaganda,  then  in  the  politi- 
cal intelligence,  department.  He  was  much 
concerned  with  the  settlement  of  Polish 
affairs  at  the  Paris  peace  conference. 

Namier  spent  1920  and  1921  as  a  tutor 
at  Balliol.  He  had  hoped  to  resume  his 
historical  work  but  found  teaching  oc- 
cupied too  much  of  his  time,  and  in  1921 
he  again  entered  business  in  order  to 
amass  a  competence.  He  became  the 
European  representative  of  a  firm  of 
Manchester  cotton  manufacturers,  with 
his  headquarters  in  Czechoslovakia,  and 
a  correspondent  of  the  Manchester 
Guardian.  From  1924  to  1929  he  was 
occupied  fully  with  liistorical  research. 
He  had  no  private  income,  and  when  his 
capital  ran  out  he  Uved  on  his  earnings 
from  journalism,  loans  from  friends,  and 
two  grants  from  the  Rhodes  Trustees. 
The  results  of  his  labours,  The  Structure 
of  Politics  at  the  Accession  of  George  III 
(1929)  and  England  in  the  Age  of  the 
American  Revolution  (1930),  were  im- 
mediately recognized  as  epoch-making 
for  the  study  of  the  eighteenth  century 
and  established  him  in  the  front  rank  of 
British  historians.  Yet  they  represented 
only  the  first  instalment  of  what  was 
intended  to  be  a  multi-volumed  study  of 
ParUament  during  the  period  of  the 
American  revolution — a  project  which 
Namier  did  not  resume  imtil  over  twenty 
years  later. 

While  rejecting  the  Jewish  religion 
Namier  had  early  become  a  Jewish  nation- 
ahst,  and  his  sympathy  with  Zionism 
increased  during  the  post-war  period.  In 
1929  he  became  political  secretary  to  the 
Jewish  Agency  for  Palestine,  but  his 
position  was  ambiguous  and  in  1931  he 
left  to  take  up  the  chair  of  modern  history 
in  the  university  of  Manchester.  This  he 
retained  until  his  retirement  in  1953. 
From  1931  to  the  outbreak  of  war  his 
historical  work  took  the  form  largely  of 
essays  and  lectures,  notably  the  Ford's 
lectures  in  1933-4  on  'King,  Cabinet  and 
Parliament  in  the  Early  Years  of  George 
III'.  What  time  he  could  spare  from 
university  teaching  was  spent  in  helping 
Jewish  refugees  from  Germany.  In  1939 
he  was  adviser  to  Chaim  Weizmann  [q.v.] 
at  the  Palestine  conference,  and  from 
1940  to  1945  he  was  again  engaged  on  full- 
time    political    work    with    the    Jewish 


Agency.  The  events  of  the  war  reawakened 
his  old  interest  in  European  history,  and 
in  1946  he  published  1848:  The  Revolution 
of  the  Intellectuals,  an  expanded  version 
of  the  Raleigh  lecture  delivered  to  the 
British  Academy  in  1944,  the  year  of  his 
election  as  a  fellow.  This  masterly  study 
of  the  revolutions  in  eastern  Europe  was 
followed  by  one  on  the  German  revolution 
of  1848,  delivered  as  a  series  of  lectures 
at  Magdalen  College,  Oxford. 

Namier  had  been  a  determined  op- 
ponent of  the  policy  of  appeasement,  and 
during  the  war  of  1939-45  he  settled  down 
to  study  the  diplomatic  origins  of  the 
conflict.  Although  the  principal  documents 
were  not  then  available,  he  was  able  to 
talk  with  men  who  had  taken  part  in  the 
events  he  narrated  and  much  of  Diplo- 
matic Prelude  (1948)  was  based  on  their 
recollections  and  notes.  This  was  followed 
by  two  further  volumes  of  essays  on 
pre-war  diplomatic  history  {Europe  in 
Decay,  1950,  and  In  the  Nazi  Era,  1952), 
and  in  1951  Namier  returned  to  what  he 
described  as  his  chosen  field  of  British 
parliamentary  history.  He  had  been  a 
member  of  the  Treasury  committee  set 
up  in  1929  to  consider  plans  for  writing 
a  history  of  Parliament,  and  when  the 
scheme  was  revived  in  1951  he  was 
appointed  to  the  editorial  board  and 
given  responsibility  for  the  period  1754-90. 
The  last  nine  years  of  his  life  were  devoted 
almost  entirely  to  this  task,  despite  the 
handicaps  of  increasing  deafness  and  a 
paralysed  right  hand  which  made  writing 
almost  impossible.  He  lived  to  see  the 
biographies  and  constituency  histories 
almost  completed,  but  the  introductory 
survey,  in  which  he  had  planned  to  sum 
up  the  results  of  a  lifetime's  research, 
was  hardly  begun,  when  he  died  suddenly 
in  London  19  August  1960.  The  work  was 
completed  by  his  chief  assistant  John 
Brooke  and  published  in  three  volumes  in 
1964. 

Namier  was  both  a  stimulating  and  a 
controversial  figure.  His  foreign  birth  and 
his  experience  in  business  and  politics  gave 
him  an  attitude  towards  history  which  was 
not  shared  by  most  of  his  academic 
contemporaries,  and  with  scholars  he  was 
ill  at  ease.  An  historical  sense,  he  once 
remarked,  is  'an  intuitive  understanding 
of  how  things  do  not  happen'.  He  had  vast 
learning  and  creative  imagination  of  a 
high  order,  but  was  unable  to  discipline 
either,  so  that  his  published  work  repre- 
sents but  a  fragment  of  what  he  had 
intended  to  do.  Two  problems  in  history 


764 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Namier 


particularly  interested  him:  the  composi- 
tion and  working  of  legislative  assemblies 
(particularly  the  British  Parliament)  and 
the  growth  of  nationalism  in  modern 
Europe.  But  England  in  the  Age  of  the 
American  Revolution  stops  short  before 
the  American  revolution  has  even  begun, 
while  instead  of  the  history  of  Europe 
during  the  nineteenth  century  which 
he  had  planned  to  write  he  left  only 
detached  essays  on  isolated  subjects. 
Many  of  Namier's  profoundest  observa- 
tions on  history  and  historical  problems 
are  scattered  in  essays  which  he  wrote  as 
pieces  d'occasion  or  in  the  guise  of  book 
reviews  and  afterwards  republished  in 
book  form  (in  particular,  Avenues  of 
History,  1952,  Personalities  and  Powers, 
1955,  Vanished  Supremacies,  1958,  and 
Crossroads  of  Power,  1962).  In  part 
Namier's  failure  to  achieve  his  aims  was 
due  to  his  meticulous  concern  for  ac- 
curacy and  an  exact  prose  style,  but  in 
part  also  it  was  due  to  his  inability  to 
correlate  ends  to  means.  Although  he 
believed  that  'what  matters  in  history  is 
the  great  outline  and  the  significant 
detail',  he  could  never  resist  the  tempta- 
tion to  wander  down  some  fascinating 
by-path  of  his  story,  regardless  of  his 
main  theme,  and  his  books  are  spoilt  for 
the  general  reader  by  the  proliferation  and 
over-elaboration  of  his  footnotes. 

Despite  these  defects  in  his  work, 
Namier  exerted  a  greater  influence  over 
historians  than  perhaps  any  other  scholar 
of  his  generation.  Although  strongly  criti- 
cized, especially  in  his  later  years,  his 
view  of  eighteenth-century  political  his- 
tory has  been  generally  accepted,  and  it  is 
impossible  to  write  on  this  period  in  terms 
of  the  pre-Namier  era.  It  is  in  the  field  of 
his  method  and  technique  that  his  critics 
have  gained  most  ground.  He  believed 
that  in  order  to  understand  an  institution 
or  a  society  it  must  be  broken  up  into 
its  component  parts,  and  these  studied  in 
isolation  and  then  in  relation  to  the  whole. 
When  he  began  work  on  The  Structure  of 
Politics  he  tried  to  find  out  all  he  could 
about  every  member  who  sat  in  the 
Parliament  of  1761  and  then  to  study 
'how  they  consorted  together'  (in  the 
words  of  a  quotation  from  Aeschylus 
which  he  took  as  the  motto  for  the  book). 
Critics  have  pointed  out,  not  always 
unfairly,  that  he  was  more  interested  in 
the  parts  than  the  whole,  and  that  his 
method  of  structm^al  analysis  ignored  the 
importance  of  ideas  in  history.  What  in 
fact  Namier  did  was  to  bring  to  the  study 


of  history  the  post-Freudian  conception  of 
the  mind :  the  belief  that  the  reasons  men 
give  for  their  actions  are  rationalizations 
designed  to  cloak  their  deeper  purposes. 
This  led  him  to  distrust  political  ideas  as 
the  explanations  of  historical  movements 
and  to  stress  the  determinism  underlying 
history. 

It  would  be  more  correct  to  say  that 
Namier  paid  insufficient  attention  to 
culture,  of  which  ideas  are  but  a  part. 
Although  a  tireless  searcher  after  histori- 
cal material,  he  was  little  acquainted  with 
the  art,  music,  literature,  or  science  of  the 
period  he  studied.  As  a  result  he  placed  a 
low  value  on  human  achievements.  His 
mind  was  powerful  but  his  interests  were 
narrow,  and  while  for  those  of  similar 
tastes  he  could  be  a  fascinating  companion 
he  lacked  the  ability  to  make  himself 
generally  agreeable.  A  Conservative  in 
politics  in  the  tradition  of  Burke  and  a 
Calvinist  in  rehgion,  he  had  also  great 
sympathy  for  human  distress  and  weak- 
ness. The  dominating  passion  in  his  his- 
torical work  was  the  search  for  truth :  he 
would  take  immense  pains  to  check  the 
most  insignificant  details;  and  he  dealt 
harshly  and  not  always  wisely  with  the 
errors  of  others.  Yet  he  could  also  accept 
criticism  or  correction  of  his  own  work, 
and  would  praise  a  research  student  who 
had  discovered  a  mistake  in  one  of  his 
books.  He  could  win  loyalty,  and  his 
assistants  on  the  History  of  Parliament 
were  devoted  to  him. 

Namier  was  a  tall,  heavily  built  man, 
with  a  serious  if  not  grim  expression, 
lightened  by  vivacious  eyes.  Although  a 
master  of  written  English,  he  habitually 
spoke  with  a  foreign  accent;  and  he  had 
a  wide  conunand  of  languages.  In  later 
years  he  mellowed  considerably,  under  the 
influence  of  his  second  marriage  and  the 
general  recognition  of  his  work.  He  was 
knighted  in  1952;  was  an  honorary 
D.Litt.  of  Durham  (1952),  Oxford  (1955), 
and  Rome  (1956);  honorary  Litt.D.  of 
Cambridge  (1957);  and  honorary  D.C.L; 
of  Oxford  (1960).  Perhaps  he*^  derived 
most  pleasure,  however,  from  his  election 
to  an  honorary  fellowship  of  Balliol  in 
1948  and  from  the  invitation  to  deliver 
the  Romanes  lecture  at  Oxford  in  1952. 

In  1917  Namier  married  Clara  Sophie 
Edeleff,  a  widow,  and  daughter  of  the 
late  Alexander  Poniatowski,  doctor  of 
medicine.  She  died  in  1945.  He  married 
secondly,  in  1947,  lulia,  daughter  of 
the  late  Mikhail  Kazarin,  barrister  at 
the  Russian  Law  Court,  and  widow  of 


765 


Namier 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Nicholas  de  Beausobre.   There  were   no 
children. 

[Lucy  S.  Sutherland  in  Proceedings  of  the 
British  Academy,  vol.  xlviii,  1962;  Sir 
Isaiah  Berlin,  'Lewis  Namier:  A  Personal 
Impression',  in  A  Century  of  Conflict,  Essays 
for  A.  J.  P.  Taylor,  ed.  Martin  Gilbert,  1966 ; 
Arnold  J.  Toynbee,  Acquaintances,  1967; 
private  information;  personal  knowledge.] 

John  Brooke. 


NEILSON,  JULIA  EMILIE  (1868-1957), 
actress,  was  born  in  the  Tottenham 
Court  Road,  London,  12  June  1868,  the 
only  child  of  Alexander  Ritchie  Neilson, 
silversmith,  and  his  wife,  Emilie  Davis. 
The  latter,  a  Jewess,  en  secandes  noces 
became  the  wife  of  an  eminent  solicitor, 
William  Morris,  who  had  been  previously 
married  to  Florence,  sister  of  Fred  Terry 
[q.v.]  who  in  1891  became  Julia  Neilson' s 
husband. 

Julia  Neilson' s  career  began  with  her 
eyes  fixed  on  the  concert  platform  rather 
than  the  stage.  At  the  age  of  fifteen,  after 
several  years  at  school  in  Wiesbaden,  she 
began  her  studies  at  the  Royal  Academy  of 
Music,  where  she  won  several  prizes,  and 
studied  elocution  under  Walter  Lacy 
[q.v.].  She  was  still  a  student  when  she 
made  her  first  professional  appearance 
at  the  St.  James's  Hall  on  1  April  1887, 
when  she  sang  as  a  mezzo-soprano. 
Influenced,  however,  by  the  friendly 
counsel  of  (Sir)  W.  S.  Gilbert  [q.v.],  she 
abandoned  music  for  the  theatre,  and 
made  her  first  stage  appearance  at  the 
Lyceum  Theatre  on  21  March  1888  as 
Cynisca  in  Pygmalion  and  Galatea  with 
Mary  Anderson,  and  later  in  the  same  play 
as  Galatea  at  the  Savoy  with  Lewis 
Waller  [q.v.].  Engagements  followed  with 
Rutland  Barrington  [q.v.]  for  a  season  at 
the  St.  James's,  and  with  (Sir)  Herbert 
Beerbohm  Tree  [q.v.]  at  the  Haymalrket, 
where  she  stayed  for  five  years — a  period 
which  included  Hester  Worsley  in  A 
Woman  of  No  Importance  (1893)  and  Lady 
Chiltern  in  An  Ideal  Husband  (1895).  In 
December  1895  she  went  with  (Sir)  John 
Hare  [q.v.]  to  the  United  States,  making 
her  first  appearance  in  New  Yorjc  at 
Abbey's  Theatre  in  The  Notorious  Mrs. 
Ebbsmith.  On  her  return  to  England  she 
joined  (Sir)  George  Alexander  [q.v.]  at  the 
St.  James's  to  play  Princess  Flavia  in  the 
immortal  Prisoner  of  Zenda  (1896)  and 
remained  there  until  1898  playing,  among 
other  parts,  Rosalind  in  A$  You  Like  It 
and  Beatrice  in  Much  Ado  About  Nothing. 
This  was  followed  by  a  return  to  Tree 


for  whom  she  played  Constance  in  King 
John  (1899)  and  Oberon  in  A  Midsummer 
NighVs  Dream  (1900). 

The  turning-point  of  her  career  came 
in  1900  when,  following  a  tour  of  As 
You  Like  It  with  William  Mollison,  she 
entered  on  London  management  for  the 
first  time  with  her  husband,  Fred  Terry, 
the  youngest  of  the  famous  acting  family. 
Their  first  venture.  Sweet  Nell  of  Old 
Drury,  with  Julia  Neilson  in  the  part  of 
Nell  Gwyn,  opened  at  the  Haymarket  on 
30  August.  This  initiated  not  only  a 
management  but  an  acting  partnership 
which  continued  until  1930.  Some  people 
lamented  that  talents  which  had  been  seen 
to  advantage  in  the  plays  of  Pinero,  Wilde, 
and  Shakespeare  should  have  been — 
comparatively  speaking — squandered  with 
such  generosity  in  the  field  of  romantic- 
costume-fustian  ;  just  as  they  complained 
that  Fred  Terry,  who  might  well  have 
been  the  supreme  Falstaff  of  all  time, 
was  wasted  as  Sir  Percy  Blakeney  or 
Henry  of  Navarre.  The  fantastically  large 
and  touchingly  faithful  audiences,  which 
in  London,  America,  and  especially  on 
tours  throughout  the  United  Kingdom 
took  the  couple,  complete  with  cloaks, 
swords,  and  all  the  paraphernalia  of 
romance,  to  their  hearts,  would  not  have 
agreed  for  a  moment.  Histrionic  romance 
was  mingled  agreeably  with  a  suggestion 
of  an  idealized  domesticity. 

The  Scarlet  Pimpernel,  perennial  and 
most  famous  of  plays  associated  with  the 
Neilson-Terry  partnership,  made  his  bow 
at  the  New  Theatre  5  January  1905.  This 
piece,  together  with  Sweet  Nell  of  Old 
Drury  and  Henry  of  Navarre,  formed  the 
backbone  of  the  material  for  the  seasons 
of  touring,  and  they  came  to  be  welcomed 
regularly  as  old  friends.  Dorothy  Vernon 
in  Dorothy  o'  the  Hall,  Margaret  Goodman 
in  Mistress  Wilful,  Queen  Mary  in  The 
Borderer,  Sarah,  Duchess  of  Marlborough 
in  The  Marlboroughs,  and  Katherine  in  The 
Wooing  of  Katherine  Parr  never  quite 
reached  the  triumphant  successes  of  Lady 
Blakeney,  Nell  Gwyn,  and  Marguerite  de 
Valois. 

Julia  Neilson's  acting  talent  is  re- 
markably difficult  to  appraise.  Perhaps 
she  owed  her  first  successes  rather  to 
her  face  and  voice  than  to  her  acting  ptir 
sang.  And  most  of  the  material  of  the  great 
years  of  partnership  was  hardly  testing 
from  the  point  of  view  of  the  highest  stan- 
dards. But  she  possessed  that  personality 
so  essential  to  success  for  English  players, 
to  the  degree  of  'star  quality'.  Nothing 


766 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Newman 


that  she  did  could  lack  significance.  Her 
record  was  that  of  a  genuine  trouper  and 
she  unquestionably  gave  immense  pleasure 
to  thousands  who  saw  her  over  the  years. 
She  may  not  have  been  a  great  actress,  but 
she  was  accomplished,  vital,  and  much 
loved  in  her  profession.  She  was  one  of  the 
acknowledged  beauties  of  an  era  famous 
for  feminine  beauty.  Hers  was  a  loveliness 
essentially  dignified,  designed  to  grow 
with  the  years  into  the  elegant  and 
almost  majestic  grande  dame.  Yet  the 
few  people  who  knew  her  intimately  were 
aware  of  a  remarkable  sense  of  fun; 
usually  hidden,  but  when  released  almost 
diabolic  in  its  lack  of  inhibition.  She  lived, 
as  she  acted,  on  the  grand  scale :  a  splendid 
vitality  against  a  background  of  outsize 
furniture.  She  was  a  vigorous  and  spirited 
conversationalist.  And  she  had  the  warm- 
est and  most  generous  of  hearts. 

After  Fred  Terry's  death  in  1933  Julia 
Neilson  appeared  at  Daly's  in  Vintage 
Wine  in  1934 ;  was  the  guest  of  honour  at 
a  testimonial  luncheon  given  in  honour 
of  her  jubilee  on  the  stage  in  1938 ;  and 
acted  for  the  last  time  in  1944  at  the 
Q  Theatre  in  The  Widow  of  Forty.  She 
died  in  London  27  May  1957.  Both  her 
son,  Dennis  Neilson-Terry  (died  1932),  and 
her  daughter,  Phyllis  Neilson-Terry,  made 
for  themselves  distinguished  theatrical 
careers. 

[Julia  Neilson,  This  for  Remembrance,  1940 ; 
Who's  Who  in  the  Theatre;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]  Vai.  Gielgud. 

NEWMAN,  ERNEST  (1868-1959),  musi- 
cal critic,  whose  real  name  was  William 
Roberts,  was  born  30  November  1868  in 
Everton,  Lancashire,  the  only  child  of 
Seth  Roberts,  a  tailor,  and  his  second 
wife,  Harriet  Spark,  whose  first  married 
name  was  Jones.  Both  parents  also  had 
families  by  their  first  spouses.  William 
Roberts  was  educated  at  Liverpool 
College  and  University  College,  Liverpool. 
He  was  intended  for  the  Indian  Civil 
Service,  but  illness  prevented  him  from 
taking  the  examination  and  he  became  a 
clerk  in  the  Bank  of  Liverpool  (1889- 
1903),  meantime  contributing  to  a  number 
of  progressive  journals  articles  not  only 
on  music  but  on  literature,  religion,  and 
philosophical  subjects.  He  pubhshed  his 
first  book,  Gluck  and  the  Opera,  in  1895, 
as  Ernest  Newman.  The  pseudonym  was 
intended  to  signify  his  outlook,  but  it 
corresponded  to  some  psychological 
need,  since  he  thereafter  adopted  it  in 
private  as  well  as  public  life,  although  he 


never  legally  ratified  the  change.  In  1897 
he  published  Pseudo-Philosophy  at  the 
End  of  the  Nineteenth  Century,  a  criticism 
from  the  point  of  view  of  aggressive 
rationalism  of  writings  by  Benjamin  Kidd, 
Henry  Drummond,  and  A.  J.  Balfour 
[qq.v.],  under  the  name  Hugh  Mortimer 
Cecil,  but  he  did  not  use  this  name  again. 

In  a  series  of  articles  contributed  to 
CasselVs  Weekly  from  March  1923 
Newman  described  how  he  contrived  to 
find  time  for  an  immense  amount  of  read- 
ing and  for  self-education  in  music  during 
his  time  at  the  bank.  He  had  only  one 
half-hour  lesson  in  harmony,  which  was 
enough  to  convince  him  that  he  could  do 
better  for  and  by  himself  than  by  formal 
instruction,  but  he  worked  at  composition 
for  five  years  and  at  playing  the  piano, 
and  made  himself  an  expert  score-reader. 

His  first  musical  journalism  was  writ- 
ten for  (Sir)  Granville  Bantock  [q.v.]  in 
his  New  Quarterly  Musical  Review.  He 
also  owed  to  Bantock  commissions  to 
write  programme-notes  for  his  concerts 
at  New  Brighton,  and  later  (1903)  when 
Bantock  was  principal  of  the  Birmingham 
and  Midland  Institute  school  of  music, 
an  invitation  to  join  the  staff.  In  1905 
Newman  published  his  Musical  Studies 
and  left  Birmingham  to  become  music 
critic  of  the  Manchester  Guardian,  in 
which  his  trenchant  pen  and  independence 
of  view  sometimes  upset  the  Halle  com- 
mittee and  Hans  Richter  but  established 
his  critical  reputation.  So  much  so  that 
in  1906  the  Birmingham  Daily  Post 
recalled  him  to  Birmingham  where  he 
remained  until  1919. 

During  these  years  Newman  wrote 
studies  of  Wagner  (1899  and  1904), 
Strauss  (1908),  Elgar  (1906),  and  Hugo 
Wolf  (1907).  This  last  book  remained 
for  thirty  years  the  best  monograph  on 
its  subject  and  was  translated  into  Ger- 
man. In  1914  came  Wagner  as  Man 
and  Artist  which  showed  Newman's 
analytical  powers,  his  independence — it 
was  critical  of  Mein  Leben  and  conse- 
quently not  well  received  at  Bayreuth 
— his  appreciation  of  the  Wagnerian 
music-drama,  and  his  extreme  care  over 
documentation  and  detail.  It  led  him  on 
to  his  magnum  opus.  The  Life  of  Richard 
Wagner  in  four  volumes  published  in  1933, 
1937, 1945,  and  1947,  which  itself  gave  rise 
as  a  by-product  to  a  study  of  The  Man 
Liszt  (1934).  Newman  had  no  illusions 
about  Wagner's  moral  character  and  no 
doubts  about  his  unique  genius.  Such  was 
the  clarity  of  his  mind  in  the  small  things 


767 


Newman 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


as  well  as  the  great  that  the  biography, 
which  involved  a  stupefying  mass  of 
material,  is  likely  to  remain  definitive, 
unless  Bayreuth  improbably  yields  up 
further  material  of  some  wholly  un- 
expected importance. 

When  he  went  to  London  in  1919 
Newman  began  to  write  regularly  for  the 
Observer,  but  in  the  following  year  he 
joined  the  Sunday  Times  and  thereafter, 
until  1958,  he  was  its  music  critic,  writing 
a  weekly  article  and  noticing  the  more 
important  events  in  London  music.  His 
critical  aim  was  objectivity — not  for  him 
the  adventures  of  the  soul  among  master- 
pieces— although  he  professed  no  interest 
in  anything  but  the  best,  at  any  rate  not 
until  the  second-rate  had  acquired  histori- 
cal interest.  Although  he  could  not  turn 
criticism  into  a  science,  as  he  would  have 
liked  to  do,  he  set  out  his  critical  creed 
in  A  Musical  Critic's  Holiday  (1925),  and 
in  The  Unconscious  Beethoven  (1927)  a 
method  of  what  soon  came  to  be  known 
as  style  criticism.  A  collection  of  his 
articles  was  published  in  1919  entitled 
A  MuMcal  Motley ;  and  from  the  Sunday 
Times  two  other  selections  were  culled 
by  Felix  Aprahamian  in  1956  and  1958. 
These  served  to  show  Newman's  great 
range,  which  was  sometimes  overlooked 
because  of  his  undoubted  predilection  for 
the  nineteenth  century  and  for  opera,  on 
which  he  published  Opera  Nights  (1943), 
Wagner  Nights  (1949),  and  More  Opera 
Nights  (1954).  He  had  translated  most  of 
Wagner's  opera  texts  by  1912  and  he 
was  also  responsible  for  translations  of 
Weingartner's  On  Conducting  (1906)  and 
Schweitzer's  J.  S.  Bach  (1911). 

Newman  rigidly  refused  all  honours 
until  in  extreme  old  age  he  no  longer  had 
the  energy  to  decline  them:  Finland 
conferred  on  him  the  Order  of  the  White 
Rose  in  1956;  Germany  the  Grosse 
Dienstkreuz  in  1958;  and  the  university 
of  Exeter  the  D.Litt.  in  1959.  In  1955  he 
was  presented  with  a  Festschrift,  a  collec- 
tion of  essays  by  colleagues  and  admirers. 
Fanfare  for  Ernest  Newman,  edited  by 
Herbert  van  Thai  who  later  (1962) 
edited  a  further  selection  of  Newman's 
essays  and  papers  in  Testament  of  Music. 

In  conversation  Newman  was  as  witty 
and  kindly  as  he  was  witty  and  formidable 
in  writing.  In  both  and  behind  his  amused 
smile  was  to  be  detected  an  underlying 
pessimism.  In  extreme  age  Beethoven's 
late  quartets  became  his  bible,  for  though 
he  affected  boredom  with  listening  to 
music  and  was  a  rationalist  by  creed  his 


values  were  determined  by  the  big  things 
in  music.  In  appearance  he  was  slight  in 
build  and  after  an  illness  in  early  middle 
life  totally  bald. 

Newman  was  twice  married:  first,  in 
1894,  to  Kate  Eleanor  (died  1918), 
daughter  of  Henry  Woollett,  an  artist 
descended  from  the  engraver  William 
Woollett  [q.v.];  secondly,  in  1919,  to 
Vera,  daughter  of  Arthur  Hands,  a 
Birmingham  jeweller.  There  were  no 
children  of  either  marriage.  He  died  at 
Tadworth,  Surrey,  7  July  1959. 

[Vera  Newman,  Ernest  Newman,  1963; 
private  information;  personal  knowledge.] 

Frank  Howes. 

NICHOLSON,      CHARLES      ERNEST 

(1868-1954),  yacht  designer,  was  born  at 
Gosport  12  May  1868,  the  second  son  in 
the  family  of  three  boys  and  five  girls 
of  Benjamin  Nicholson,  naval  architect, 
and  his  wife,  Sarah  Watson.  Educated 
at  Mill  Hill  School  he  joined  the  family 
firm  of  Camper  and  Nicholsons,  Ltd.,  in 
1886  and  at  the  age  of  twenty-one  became 
the  firm's  chief  designer,  a  post  which 
he  filled  until  his  death.  Later,  he  was 
chairman  and  managing-director,  to  the 
age  of  seventy-two. 

Nicholson  rapidly  made  his  presence 
felt  in  the  firm  and  soon  sailing  yachts  of 
all  kinds  from  his  board  were  challenging 
those  of  G.  L.  Watson  [q.v.],  the  acknow- 
ledged master  of  the  time.  Nicholson,  a 
rare  combination  of  artist,  technical  genius, 
and  business  man,  was  undoubtedly 
one  of  the  greatest  and  most  versatile 
yacht  architects  of  all  time.  His  skill  as  a 
helmsman  contributed  in  no  small  measure 
to  his  success.  He  built  up  the  greatest 
yacht  yard  in  this  country  at  Gosport  and 
later  a  second  at  Southampton.  Both  had 
difficulty  in  keeping  pace  with  the  designs 
of  yachts  of  all  conceivable  kinds  which 
flowed  in  a  steady  torrent  from  his 
imaginative  brain. 

He  designed  sailing  craft  of  all  sizes 
from  a  12 -ft.  dinghy  for  his  grandchildren 
to  J-class  America's  Cup  challengers  of 
which  he  built  four,  notably  Shamrock  IV 
in  1914  and  Endeavour  in  1934,  both  poten- 
tial winners ;  that  they  failed  to  win  the 
cup  was  due  to  extraneous  circumstances 
and  no  fault  of  Nicholson's.  In  .1939, 
which  marked  the  end  of  the  pageant  of 
big-class  yacht  racing,  the  12-metre  fleet 
was  almost  entirely  of  Nicholson's  design 
and  construction.  By  the  mid-thirties 
ocean  racing  was  becoming  popular  and 
inevitably  Nicholson  was  commissioned 


768 


D.N.B.  1S5I-I960 


Noble 


to  design  and  build  a  suitable  vessel.  Not 
limited  by  cost,  he  produced  the  cutter 
Foxhound  in  1935,  45-ft.  on  the  waterline, 
about  the  same  size  as  a  12-metre. 
Nothing  comparable  had  been  built  in 
this  country.  She  was  followed  by  the 
yawl  Bloodhound  and  Stiarnay  a  cutter, 
of  similar  design.  These  yachts  were 
highly  successful  and  throughout  long 
careers  stood  up  to  the  hard  punishment  of 
offshore  racing;  and,  in  the  sixties,  were 
still  in  commission,  Bloodhound  being  then 
owned  until  1969  by  Queen  Elizabeth  II 
and  the  Duke  of  Edinburgh.  Nicholson 
designed  cruising  yachts  of  all  kinds  from 
5-tons  up  to  such  vessels  as  the  699-ton 
schooner  Creole  (1927). 

Nicholson  was  always  a  jump  ahead. 
He  was  the  first  yacht  designer  to  see  the 
possibilities  of  Bermuda  rig  and,  in  1921, 
re-rigged  the  23-metre  Nyria,  which  he 
had  designed  and  built  in  1906,  with  a 
jib -headed  mainsail.  This  brought  a  storm 
of  derision  characteristically  and  rightly 
ignored  by  Nicholson.  She  proved  a  great 
success  and  revolutionized  the  rig  of  all 
modern  yachts. 

In  between  the  saiUng  vessels  came 
steam  and  motor  yachts,  enough  of  them 
alone  to  constitute  a  man's  life-work.  In 
about  1911  he  produced  two  beautiful 
traditional  chpper-stem  steam  yachts 
Marynthea  (900  tons)  and  Miranda.  He 
then  turned  his  attention  to  diesel  yachts, 
the  first  being  Pioneer  (400  tons),  and,  in 
1937,  Philante  (1,612  tons),  the  largest 
motor  yacht  until  then  built  in  Britain.  She 
later  became  the  Norwegian  royal  yacht. 
These  fine  vessels  were  of  a  type  quite 
different  from  the  traditional  steam  yacht. 
Entirely  'Nicholson'  in  conception,  they 
were  excellent  sea  boats,  with  fine  accom- 
modation and  a  wide  radius  of  action. 

In  the  war  of  1914-18,  as  a  separate 
venture,  Nicholson  designed  and  built 
flying-boat  hulls  in  wood.  In  the  same 
period  he  formed,  as  a  separate  firm,  the 
Laminated  Wood  Ship  Company,  to  design 
and  build  wooden  cargo  vessels  of  1,000 
tons  dead  weight  to  help  the  urgent  need 
for  tonnage  to  replace  losses  due  to  enemy 
submarine  action.  The  method  of  con- 
struction was  original,  based  on  a  longi- 
tudinal system  of  framing  with  multi-skin 
planking  and  deck,  and  planned  to  use 
home-grown  timbers  such  as  oak,  fir,  and 
larch.  Some  of  these  ships  were  still  in 
commission  many  years  after  the  war. 
As  a  further  example  of  his  versatility, 
Nicholson  designed  a  training  ship 
Sebastian  de  Elccmo,  3,000  tons,  for  the 


Spanish  Government.  She  was  a  fore-and- 
aft  four-masted  schooner.  The  drawings 
included  the  minutest  detail  so  that  she 
could  be  built  in  Spain. 

Nicholson's  vast  output  was  due  not 
only  to  his  tremendous  capacity  for  con- 
centrated thought  and  work  but  also  to 
his  abiUty  and  judgement  in  gathering 
to  work  under  him  a  team  of  men  each  an 
expert  in  his  own  sphere.  Unfortunately 
for  students  of  Nicholson's  work  most  of 
his  drawings  and  plans  were  burned  in  a 
fire  at  the  works  in  1910  and  again  in 
1941  when  the  yard  at  Gosport  was  virtu- 
ally destroyed  by  enemy  action.  Fortun- 
ately Beken's  matchless  photographs  are 
still  available. 

Nicholson  was  the  technical  brain  of 
the  Yacht  Racing  Association  from  1910 
until  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939.  He  was 
also  a  member  of  the  Royal  Institution  of 
Naval  Architects.  In  1944  he  was  awarded 
the  diploma  of  royal  designer  for  industry 
and  in  1949  he  was  appointed  O.B.E. 
Throughout  his  life  he  devoted  much  time 
to  the  Gosport  War  Memorial  Hospital  of 
which  he  became  chairman  in  1934;  in 
that  year  he  was  made  the  first  honorary 
freeman  of  the  borough  of  Gosport. 

In  1895  Nicholson  married  Lucy  Ella 
(died  1937),  daughter  of  William  Edmonds, 
a  solicitor.  They  had  two  daughters  and 
three  sons,  the  second  of  whom,  John, 
followed  his  father  in  the  firm  and  became 
chairman  in  1940.  He  owns  a  portrait  of 
his  father  by  Percy  Beer.  Nicholson  died 
at  his  home  at  Hill  Head,  Hampshire, 
27  February  1954. 

[Yachting  World,  April- July  1954;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

E.  F.  Haylock, 

NOBLE,  Sir  PERCY  LOCKHART 
HARNAM  (1880-1955),  admiral,  son  of 
Charles  Simeon  and  Annie  Georgina 
Noble,  was  born  16  January  1880  in  India 
where  his  father  was  a  major  in  the  Bengal 
Staff  Corps.  He  entered  the  Britannia  in 
1894  and  spent  his  midshipman's  time 
in  the  Immortality  on  the  China  station. 
In  view  of  his  subsequent  career  it  seems 
strange  that  his  captain  should  notice 
him  in  his  report  as  lazy  and  dull.  During 
his  sub-lieutenant's  courses  Noble  was 
detailed  for  the  naval  guard  of  honour 
mounted  at  Windsor  for  the  funeral  of 
Queen  Victoria.  When  the  horses  which 
were  to  draw  the  gun-carriage  bearing  the 
coffin  became  restive,  and  later  unmanage- 
able. Noble  suggested  that  they  be  un- 
hitched and  the  gun  carriage  drawn  by 


8662062 


769 


cc 


Noble 


D.N.B.  1931-1960 


the  naval  guard  of  honour,  a  precedent 
followed  in  every  subsequent  royal  funeral. 
He  was  appointed  M.V.O. 

After  service  in  the  battleships  Hannibal 
in  the  Channel  squadron  and  Russell  in 
the  Mediterranean,  Noble  was  appointed 
flag  lieutenant  to  (Sir)  A.  L.  Winsloe, 
commanding  destroyer  flotillas  at  home. 
He  commanded  the  destroyer  Ribble 
from  1907  to  1908,  when  he  joined  the 
signal  school  at  Portsmouth  and  quali- 
fied as  a  signal  specialist.  A  brief  ap- 
pointment to  the  royal  yacht  Victoria  and 
Albert  for  King  Edward's  visit  to  Copen- 
hagen was  followed  by  a  commission  in 
China  as  flag  lieutenant  to  Winsloe,  and 
on  completion  of  that  duty  he  returned  to 
the  royal  yacht  as  first  lieutenant,  being 
promoted  commander  when  he  completed 
the  appointment  in  1913.  In  December  he 
joined  the  Achilles,  in  the  second  cruiser 
squadron.  Home  Fleet,  as  executive 
officer,  and  three  years  later  was  trans- 
ferred, still  as  executive  officer,  to  the 
large  cruiser  Courageous,  flagship  of  the 
light  cruiser  force,  Grand  Fleet.  His  promo- 
tion to  captain  came  in  June  1918  and  in 
October  of  that  year  he  was  made  flag 
captain  to  Sir  Allan  Everett  in  the  Calliope, 
transferring  to  the  Calcutta  in  1919.  In 
1922  he  was  appointed  to  the  Barham  in 
command  and  as  flag  captain  to  Sir 
Edwyn  Alexander-Sinclair  [q.v.],  then 
commanding  first  battle  squadron,  Atlan- 
tic Fleet.  He  was  promoted  C.V.O.  in 
1920. 

His  next  command  (1925)  was  the 
Ganges,  the  boys'  training  establishment 
at  Shotley,  and  his  experience  in  this 
post  led  to  his  selection  two  years  later 
(1927)  as  the  first  commanding  officer 
of  the  St.  Vincent,  a  new  boys'  training 
establishment  being  set  up  at  Gosport. 
This  was  followed  by  an  appointment  as 
director  of  the  operations  division  on  the 
naval  staff,  1928-9,  and  his  promotion 
to  rear-admiral  (1929). 

In  1931  he  became  director  of  naval 
equipment  in  the  Admiralty  and  at  the 
end  of  the  following  year  was  selected  to 
command  the  second  cruiser  squadron  in 
the  Home  Fleet,  flying  his  flag  in  the 
Dorsetshire,  then  in  the  Leander.  In  1935 
he  was  brought  back  to  the  Admiralty 
as  fourth  sea  lord  where  he  was  success- 
ful in  obtaining  marriage  allowances  for 
naval  officers.  He  was  promoted  vice- 
admiral  while  holding  this  appointment 
and  in  1937  was  chosen  to  command  the 
China  station.  He  was  appointed  C.B.  in 
1932  and  K.C.B.  in  1936. 


Noble's  qualities  of  tact  and  restraint 
were  continuously  called  into  play  during 
this  difficult  period  in  the  Far  East.  The 
Japanese  were  engaged  in  their  war  with 
China  and  frequently  made  threatening 
advances  to  the  borders  of  the  British 
settlements  at  Hong  Kong  and  Shanghai. 
Noble  managed  to  prevent  any  of  these 
threats  from  developing  into  outright 
hostilities,  and  the  skill  with  which  he 
handled  all  such  incidents  brought  him 
many  expressions  of  the  Admiralty's 
appreciation. 

In  1939  Noble  was  promoted  admiral, 
relinquished  his  command  in  July  1940, 
and  in  February  1941  was  appointed 
commander-in-chief  Western  Approaches. 
It  was  this  command  which  bore  the 
responsibility  for  the  war  against  German 
U-boats,  which  by  that  time  had  estab- 
lished a  definite  ascendancy  in  the 
Atlantic.  Setting  up  his  headquarters  in 
Liverpool,  Noble  set  about  his  task 
with  his  usual  thoroughness.  He  realized 
that  special  training  in  anti-submarine 
warfare  was  the  key  to  ultimate  vic- 
tory in  this  campaign,  and  although 
he  was  continuously  hampered  by  a 
shortage  of  anti-submarine  forces,  he 
laid  down  the  principles  of  training  and 
also  established  the  group  organization 
of  escort  forces  which  was  later  to  pay  a 
high  dividend  in  the  Atlantic  war.  He 
himself  went  to  sea  and  flew  with  Coastal 
Command  so  that  the  crews  knew  that  he 
understood  their  problems  and  there  were 
forged  'links  of  mutual  confidence  of 
inestimable  value'.  By  the  time  he  left 
the  command,  the  British  anti-submarine 
forces  had  reached  a  degree  of  organiza- 
tion and  training  which  left  his  successor 
Sir  Max  Horton  [q.v.]  a  firm  and  lasting 
foundation  on  which  to  wage  successful 
warfare. 

On  leaving  Liverpool  in  the  autumn  of 
1942  Noble  was  sent  to  Washington  as  head 
of  the  British  Admiralty  delegation.  He  saw 
the  switch  from  the  defensive  to  the 
offensive  in  the  naval  war,  and  much  of 
the  credit  for  the  smooth  co-operation  both 
in  planning  and  in  operations  between  the 
British  and  American  navies  was  owed  to 
Noble  for  the  qualities  of  firmness,  tact, 
and  sound  sense  which  he  brought  to  the  de- 
liberations of  the  combined  chiefs  of  staff. 
For  his  services  in  Washington  he  was 
appointed  G.B.E.  in  1944  and  was  made 
a  commander  of  the  U.S.  Legion  of  Merit 
in  1946. 

In  1943  Noble  was  appointed  first  and 
principal    naval    aide-de-camp    to    King 


770 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Norton 


George  VI.  He  retired  from  the  navy  on 
16  January  1945  and  was  made  rear- 
admiral  of  the  United  Kingdom.  He 
received  the  grand  cross  of  the  royal 
Order  of  St.  Olaf  for  his  services  to  the 
Royal  Norwegian  Navy.  He  died  in 
London  25  July  1955. 

Noble  was  twice  married:  first,  in  1907, 
to  Diamantina  Isabella  (died  1909), 
daughter  of  Allan  Campbell.  Their  son, 
Commander  Sir  Allan  Noble,  on  retiring 
from  the  navy  entered  Parliament  and 
was  minister  of  state  for  foreign  affairs 
in  1956-9.  In  1913  Noble  married, 
secondly,  Ceha  Emily  (died  1967),  daugh- 
ter of  Robert  Kirkman  Hodgson;  there 
was  one  son. 

A  portrait  by  Sir  Oswald  Birley  is  in 
the  Greenwich  Collection  and  a  pen-and- 
ink  drawing  by  Jan  Rosciwewski  is  in  the 
Imperial  War  Museum. 

[Admiralty  records ;  The  Times,  26  July 
1955 ;  S.  W.  Roskill,  (Official)  History  of  the 
Second  World  War.  The  War  at  Sea,  vol.  ii, 
1956 ;  personal  knowledge.]         P.  K.  Kemp. 

NORTON,  EDWARD  FELIX  (1884- 
1954),  lieutenant-general,  was  born  21 
February  1884  at  San  Isidro,  Argentina, 
the  second  son  of  Edward  Norton,  a  direc- 
tor of  the  Royal  Mail  and  Union  Castle 
lines,  and  his  wife,  Edith  Sarah,  daughter 
of  Sir  Alfred  Wills,  judge  of  the  Queen's 
Bench  division.  Norton's  father  estab- 
lished the  Estancia  la  Ventura  on  wild 
pampa  some  300  miles  south  of  Buenos 
Aires,  but  Norton  was  brought  back  to 
England  as  an  infant.  He  was  educated 
at  Charterhouse  and  the  Royal  Military 
Academy,  Woolwich,  and  was  commis- 
sioned in  1902.  In  1907  he  was  posted  to  the 
Royal  Horse  Artillery  at  Meerut  and  dur- 
ing this  period  was  aide-de-camp  to  the 
viceroy.  In  1914  he  went  to  France  with  D 
battery.  Royal  Horse  Artillery,  and  later 
served  as  staff  officer.  Royal  Artillery,  to 
the  Canadian  Corps.  He  was  three  times 
mentioned  in  dispatches,  was  appointed  to 
the  D.S.O.  and  awarded  the  M.C.  After  the 
war  he  commanded  D  battery  in  India  and 
later  served  on  the  staff  at  Chanak  at  a 
time  when  British  relations  with  the  Turks 
called  for  much  diplomacy  and  tact.  He 
attended  the  Staff  College  and  later  the 
Imperial  Defence  College  before  returning 
to  India  as  senior  instructor  at  the  Staff 
College  at  Quetta  (1929-32).  He  then  be- 
came commander,  Royal  Artillery,  to  the 
1st  division  at  Aldershot,  and  subse- 
quently chief  of  staff  to  the  Aldershot 
Command.    He   was   appointed   aide-de- 


camp to  King  George  VI  in  1937.  In  1938 
he  commanded  the  Madras  District  and 
was  appointed  C.B.  in  the  following  year. 
He  was  acting  governor  and  commander- 
in-chief.  Hong  Kong  (1940-41),  where  he 
had  a  serious  accident  from  which  he  never 
quite  recovered  and  which  forced  him  to 
retire  in  1942,  while  holding  command  of 
the  Western  Independent  District,  India. 
He  was  granted  the  honorary  rank  of 
lieutenant-general,  and  in  1947  he  was 
appointed  colonel  conmiandant  of  the 
Royal  Horse  Artillery. 

Norton  began  alpine  climbing  at  the 
'Eagle's  Nest'  above  Sixt,  in  Savoy,  origin- 
ally built  by  his  grandfather.  Sir  Alfred 
Wills,  who  was  a  founder  and  third  pre- 
sident of  the  Alpine  Club.  There,  with  his 
brother,  he  successfully  stalked  chamois 
over  ground  which  was  so  bad  that  the 
local  men  kept  off  it,  although  the  shoot- 
ing was  not  preserved.  He  also  visited  the 
Patagonian  Andqs  and  climbed  wherever 
opportunity  offered  during  his  service 
abroad.  In  1922  he  was  selected  for  the 
second  Mount  Everest  expedition.  With 
George  Leigh  Mallory  [q.v.]  and  Dr.  T.  H. 
Somervell  he  reached  the  then  record 
height  of  26,985  feet.  They  were  the  first 
to  pass  the  critical  level  of  8,000  metres ; 
and  this  without  oxygen.  For  the  third 
Everest  expedition,  in  1924,  he  was  selec- 
ted as  second-in-command  to  C.  G.  Bruce 
[q.v.]  who  developed  malaria  in  Tibet  and 
had  to  be  evacuated,  so  that  Norton  be- 
came leader.  After  many  difficulties  and 
hazards,  due  to  bad  weather,  he  led  the 
first  serious  assault.  At  28,000  feet  his  com- 
panion, Somervell,  had  to  fall  out  with 
severe  throat  trouble  and  Norton  con- 
tinued alone  to  a  height  of  28,126  feet: 
a  new  altitude  record,  again  without 
oxygen,  which  was  possibly  not  surpassed 
until  the  successful  ascent  of  Mount 
Everest  twenty-nine  years  later.  The 
second  assault  was  undertaken  by  Mallory 
and  A.  C.  Irvine,  but  they  never  returned. 

In  1922  Norton  was  elected  to  the 
Alpine  Club  of  which  in  later  years  he 
twice  refused  the  presidency.  In  1926  he 
was  awarded  the  Founder's  medal  by  the 
Royal  Geographical  Society. 

Norton  was  a  fine  horseman,  a  hunting 
man  and  pig-sticker,  and  runner-up  for 
the  Kadir  Cup  in  1922.  Although  a  keen 
big-game  shot  and  an  enthusiastic  fisher- 
man, he  was  just  as  interested  in  natural 
history  as  in  sport.  He  was  fondest  of 
birds  and  flowers  and  during  the  two 
Mount  Everest  expeditions  made  collec- 
tions of  both  for  the  Natural  History 


771 


Norton 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Museum.  He  took  a  deep  interest  in  pic- 
tures and  himself  had  considerable  artis- 
tic skill.  A  man  of  many  interests  he  was 
widely  read  and  well  informed  upon  many 
subjects.  Integrity  was  the  essence  of  his 
character.  He  was  a  charming  companion 
and  a  born  leader.  In  the  army  he  was 
very  popular  with  all  ranks;  he  under- 
stood and  got  on  well  with  Indians  and 
with  the  Gurkhas,  Sherpas,  and  Bhotias 
on  Everest.  When  leading  the  Everest 
expedition  he  would  make  up  his  own 
mind  about  the  best  line  to  pursue  and 
then  call  in  the  whole  team  for  discussion  : 
they  invariably  accepted  his  advice. 

In  1925  Norton  married  Isabel  Joyce, 
daughter  of  William  Pasteur,  C.B.,  C.M.G., 
physician,  by  whom  he  had  three  sons. 
He  died  at  Morestead  Grove,  Winchester, 
3  November  1954. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

T.    G.    LONGSTAFF. 

•1 

NORWAY,  NEVIL  SHUTE  (1899-1960), 
novelist  under  the  name  of  Nevil  Shute 
and  aeronautical  engineer,  was  born  in 
Ealing  17  January  1899,  the  younger  son 
of  a  Cornishman,  Arthur  Hamilton  Nor- 
way, who  became  an  assistant  secretary  of 
the  General  Post  Office,  and  his  wife,  Mary 
LfOuisa  Gadsden.  At  the  age  of  eleven 
Norway  played  truant  from  his  first  pre- 
paratory school  in  Hammersmith,  spend- 
ing days  among  the  model  aircraft  at  the 
Science  Museum  examining  wing  control 
on  the  Bleriot  and  trying  to  puzzle  out  how 
the  engine  of  the  Antoinette  ran  without 
a  carburettor.  On  being  detected  in  these 
precocious  studies  he  was  sent  to  the 
Dragon  School,  Oxford,  and  thence  to 
Shrewsbury.  He  was  on  holiday  in  Dublin, 
where  his  father  was  then  secretary  to  the 
Post  Office  in  Ireland,  at  the  time  of  the 
Easter  rising  of  1916  and  acted  as  a 
stretcher-bearer,  winning  commendation 
for  gallant  conduct.  He  passed  into  the 
Royal  Military  Academy  with  the  aim  of 
being  commissioned  into  the  Royal  Flying 
Corps ;  but  a  bad  stammer  led  to  his  being 
failed  at  his  final  medical  examination  and 
returned  to  civil  life.  The  last  few  months 
of  the  war  (in  which  his  brother  had  been 
killed)  were  spent  on  home  service  as  a 
private  in  the  Suffolk  Regiment. 

In  1919  Norway  went  up  to  Balliol 
College,  Oxford,  where  he  took  third  class 
honours  in  engineering  science  in  1922  and 
rowed  in  the  college  second  eight.  During 
the  vacations  he  worked,  unpaid,  for  the 
Aircraft  Manufacturing  Company  at  Hen- 
don,  then  for  (Sir)  Geoffrey  de  Havilland's 


own  firm,  which  he  joined  as  an  employee 
on  coming  down  from  Oxford.  He  now 
fulfilled  his  thwarted  wartime  ambition  of 
learning  to  fly  and  gained  experience  as  a 
test  observer.  During  the  evenings  he 
diligently  wrote  novels  and  short  stories, 
unperturbed  by  rejection  slips  from  pub- 
lishers. 

In  1924  Norway  took  the  post  of  chief 
calculator  to  the  Airship  Guarantee  Com- 
pany, a  subsidiary  of  Vickers,  Ltd.,  to 
work  on  the  construction  of  the  R.IOO.  In 
1929  he  became  deputy  chief  engineer 
under  (Sir)  Barnes  Wallis  and  in  the 
following  year  he  flew  to  and  from  Canada 
in  the  R.IOO.  He  had  a  passionate  beUef 
in  the  future  of  airships  but  his  hopes 
foundered  in  the  crash  of  its  government 
rival,  the  R.lOl,  wrecked  with  the  loss  of 
Lord  Thomson  [q.v.],  the  minister  of 
aviation,  and  most  of  those  on  board.  He 
had  watched  with  mounting  horror  what 
he  regarded  as  the  criminal  inefficiency 
with  which  the  R.lOl  was  being  con- 
structed. His  experience  in  this  phase  of 
his  career  left  a  lasting  bitterness ;  it  bred 
in  him  almost  pathological  distrust  of 
politicians  and  civil  servants. 

Recognizing  that  airship  development 
was  a  lost  cause,  he  founded  in  1931  Air- 
speed, Ltd.,  aeroplane  constructors,  in  an 
old  garage  and  remained  joint  managing- 
director  until  1938.  The  pioneering  atmo- 
sphere of  aircraft  construction  in  those 
years  suited  his  temperament.  He  revelled 
in  individual  enterprise  and  doing  things 
by  improvisation  on  a  financial  shoestring. 
When  the  business  grew  and  was  becom- 
ing one  of  humdrum  routine,  producing 
aircraft  to  government  orders,  he  decided 
to  get  out  of  the  rut  and  live  by  writing. 
He  had  by  1938  enjoyed  some  success  as  a 
novelist  and  had  sold  the  film  rights  of 
Lonely  Road  (1932)and  Ruined  City  (1938). 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  Norway 
joined  the  Royal  Naval  Volunteer  Reserve 
as  a  sub-lieutenant  in  the  miscellaneous 
weapons  department.  Rising  to  lieutenant- 
commander  he  found  experimenting  with 
secret  weapons  a  job  after  his  own  heart. 
But  his  growing  celebrity  as  a  writer 
caused  him  to  be  in  the  Normandy  land- 
ings on  6  June  1944,  for  the  Ministry  of 
Information,  and  to  be  sent  to  Burma  as  a 
correspondent  in  1945.  He  entered  Ran- 
goon with  the  15th  Corps  from  Arakan. 
Soon  after  demobilization  in  1945  he 
emigrated  to  Australia  and  made  his  home 
in  Langwarrin,  Victoria.  High  taxation 
and  what  he  felt  to  be  the  decadence  of 
Britain,  with  the  spirit  of  personal  inde- 


772 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Norwood 


pendence  and  freedom  dying,  led  him  to 
leave  the  old  country. 

His  output  of  novels,  which  began  with 
Marazan  (1926),  continued  to  the  end. 
Writing  under  his  Christian  names,  Nevil 
Shute,  he  had  an  unaffectedly  popular 
touch  which  made  him  a  best-seller 
throughout  the  Commonwealth  and  the 
United  States.  The  secret  of  his  success 
lay  in  the  skill  with  which  he  combined 
loving  familiarity  with  technicalities  and 
a  straightforward  sense  of  human  rela- 
tionships and  values.  He  conveyed  to  the 
readers  his  own  zest  for  making  and  flying 
aircraft.  The  hazards  and  rewards  of  back- 
room boys  have  never  been  more  sympa- 
thetically portrayed  nor  with  closer  inside 
knowledge.  His  natural  gift  for  creating 
briskly  moving  plots  did  not  extend  to  the 
delineation  of  character  in  anything  more 
than  conventional  terms.  He  retained  to 
the  last  the  outlook  of  a  decent,  average 
public-school  boy  of  his  generation. 
Although  he  lived  into  the  James  Bond 
era  he  never  made  the  slightest  concessions 
to  the  fast-growing  appetite  in  the  mass 
fiction  market  for  sadism  and  violence. 

No  Highway  (1948),  dealing  with  the 
drama  of  structural  fatigue  in  aircraft,  set 
in  human  terms  of  those  responsible  for  a 
competitive  passenger  service,  gave  full 
scope  to  both  sides  of  his  talent.  Machines 
and  men  and  women  share  in  shaping  the 
drama.  A  Town  Like  Alice  (1950),  describ- 
ing the  grim  Odyssey  of  white  women  and 
children  in  Japanese-occupied  Malaya, 
captured  the  cinema  audiences  as  com- 
pletely as  it  did  the  reading  public.  Round 
the  Bend  (1951)  was  thought  by  Norway 
himself  to  be  hrs  most  enduring  book. 
It  told  of  the  aircraft  engineer  of  mixed 
eastern  and  western  stock  who  taught  his 
men  to  worship  God  through  work  con- 
scientiously and  prayerfully  performed 
and  came  to  be  regarded  as  divine  by 
people  of  many  creeds.  On  the  Beach  (1957) 
expressed  Norway's  sensitive  appreciation 
of  the  frightful  possibilities  of  global  war- 
fare and  annihilation  by  radio-active  dust. 

Other  novels,  several  of  them  filmed, 
were  What  Happened  to  the  Corbetts  (1939), 
An  Old  Captivity  (1940),  Landfall  (1940), 
Pied  Piper  (1942),  Pastoral  (1944),  In  the 
Wet  (1953),  and  Requiem  for  a  Wren  (1955). 

In  Slide  Rule  (1954),  sub-titled  'the 
autobiography  of  an  engineer',  he  told, 
candidly  and  racily,  of  his  life  up  to  1938 
when  he  left  the  aircraft  industry. 

The  stammer,  which  was  as  much  a 
stimulus  as  a  handicap,  did  not  prevent 
Norway  from  being  good  company,  always 


welcome  at  social  gatherings  of  his  many 
friends.  An  enthusiastic  yachtsman  and 
fisherman  as  well  as  an  air  pilot,  he 
delighted  in  outdoor  life,  and  his  gaiety 
was  not  dimmed  by  the  heart  attacks  from 
which  he  suffered. 

In  1931  Norway  married  Frances  Mary 
Heaton,  by  whom  he  had  two  daughters. 
He  died  in  Melbourne  12  January  1960. 

[Norway's  own  writings;  personal  know^^ 
ledge.]  A.  P.  Ryan* 

NORWICH,  first  Viscount  (1890-1954). 
poUtician,  diplomatist,  and  author.  [See 
Cooper,  Alfred  Duff.] 

NORWOOD,  Sir  CYRIL  (1876-1956), 
educationist,  was  born  15  September  1875 
at  Whalley  in  Lancashire,  the  only  child 
by  his  second  marriage,  to  Elizabeth 
Emma  Sparks,  of  the  Rev.  Samuel  Nor- 
wood, headmaster  of  the  local  grammar 
school  which  was  closed  in  1886,  when  the 
family  moved  to  Leytonstone.  He  never 
spoke  of  his  early  years  in  a  home  which 
was  darkened  and  impoverished  by  his 
father's  intemperance:  the  lasting  im- 
pression they  made  was  later  shown  in 
Norwood's  deep  reserve,  his  teetotalism, 
special  sympathy  with  early  hardship,  and 
the  resolve  that  his  own  children  should 
have  a  happy  home.  His  education  was 
won  by  his  own  effort ;  and  hard  work  at 
school  and  university,  to  qualify  himself 
to  support  his  mother  and  make  his  own 
home,  deprived  him  of  much  normal  social 
enjoyment.  He  entered  Merchant  Taylors' 
School  in  1888  and  left  as  head  of  the 
school  and  scholar  of  St.  John's  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  won  first  classes  in 
classical  moderations  (1896)  and  literae 
humaniores  (1898).  In  1899  he  headed  the 
list  for  entry  to  the  Civil  Service  and  was 
posted  to  the  Admiralty. 

As  a  junior  civil  servant  Norwood  found 
small  scope  for  initiative  and  in  1901  he 
left  the  service  and  went  as  sixth-form 
master  to  Leeds  Grammar  School.  Before 
the  end  of  the  year  he  married  the  lady  to 
whom  he  had  long  been  engaged,  Cath- 
erine Margaret,  daughter  of  Walter  John 
Kilner,  a  medical  practitioner,  of  Kens- 
ington. She  bore  him  three  daughters.  His 
marriage  and  the  discovery  of  his  true 
vocation  gave  Norwood  lasting  content 
and  happy  release  of  energy.  In  1906  he 
was  appointed  headmaster  of  Bristol 
Grammar  School  and  so  started  the  career 
of  command  which  made  his  name.  This 
post,  already  declined  by  two  selected 
applicants,  was  a  bold  undertaking.  The 


T78 


Norwood 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


school  was  in  poor  condition,  with  falling 
numbers  and  a  general  loss  of  confidence ; 
but  Norwood  brought  it  fresh  vigour  and 
new  esteem  in  the  city  of  Bristol.  Within 
ten  years  he  had  almost  tripled  the  number 
of  boys  and  attracted  generous  local  bene- 
faction to  enlarge  and  improve  their  accom- 
modation. Academic  and  other  success 
multiplied  and  the  school  throve  in  every 
way.  Bristol  University  recognized  his 
achievement  by  an  honorary  doctorate, 
and  Norwood  became  known  as  'second 
founder'  of  the  school. 

Late  in  1916  he  was  made  master  of 
Marlborough  College,  an  appointment 
which  was  at  first  criticized  on  the  ground 
that  he  knew  nothing  of  boarding-schools ; 
but  it  was  soon  amply  justified.  The  school 
had  lost  momentum  under  war  conditions 
and  nine  months  of  interregnum,  but  it 
quickly  felt  Norwood's  strong  and  wise 
direction.  He  was  the  first  among  public 
school  headmasters  to  adapt  the  curri- 
culum to  the  system  of  external  school 
examinations,  and  he  gave  new  emphasis 
and  scope  to  the  study  of  natural  science. 
After  the  war  there  ensued  a  period  of 
striking  academic  success  and  great  well- 
being  at  Marlborough,  and  the  school's 
reputation  rose  high.  Norwood  and  his 
family  were  nowhere  happier  than  in  their 
Wiltshire  home,  and  his  public  status  was 
established  by  his  appointment  in  1921 
as  chairman  of  the  Secondary  Schools 
Examination  Council,  an  office  which  he 
held  until  1946. 

In  1925  the  headmastership  of  Harrow 
School  fell  vacant  and  strong  pressure 
from  the  chairman  of  governors  and  the 
archbishop  of  Canterbury  persuaded  Nor- 
wood to  leave  Marlborough  for  the  Hill 
(January  1926).  His  mandate  was  to  raise 
the  standard  of  work  and  discipline  and 
he  started,  as  at  Marlborough,  by  himself 
devising  a  new  timetable  of  work  through- 
out the  school.  On  the  side  of  discipline, 
his  problem  was  to  make  his  authority 
generally  felt  and  especially  above  that  of 
certain  senior  masters.  He  waited  patiently 
for  clear  opportunity  to  remove  those 
whose  support  he  could  not  win.  Some  of 
the  changes  Norwood  made  in  life  at 
Harrow  were  not  wholly  welcome  at  first, 
but  it  became  obvious  that  the  school  was 
growing  stronger  and  healthier  under  his 
control,  and  when  he  said  good-bye  to 
them  in  1934  the  boys  expressed  their 
loyalty  and  admiration  in  a  remarkable 
ovation. 

On  leaving  Harrow,  Norwood  started 
his  twelve  years'  presidency  of  St.  John's 


College,  Oxford,  to  which  he  had  been 
elected.  Although  accustomed  to  a  head- 
master's autocracy,  he  never  sought  to 
dominate  his  college  but  was  content  to 
give  careful  service  there  and  in  the  uni- 
versity. He  lacked,  however,  the  social 
adaptability  which  counts  for  much  in 
university  life  and,  especially  during  years 
of  war,  public  and  other  outside  claims 
filled  much  of  his  time.  As  a  result,  his 
presidency  was  not  so  memorable  as  his 
headmasterships  had  been. 

Norwood  gave  important  service  as 
governor  of  schools,  notably  to  a  group 
of  recent  foundations,  including  Stowe, 
Canford,  and  Westonbirt,  which  were  re- 
organized in  1934  as  the  Allied  Schools 
under  a  central  council  of  which  he  was 
chairman  for  many  years.  His  construc- 
tive courage  and  financial  acumen  were 
decisive  in  saving  these  schools  from  pre- 
mature collapse.  But  his  interest  and 
influence  in  school  education  spread  far 
beyond  the  independent  schools,  and  he 
was  a  leading  speaker  and  writer  on  educa- 
tion: his  best-known  book.  The  English 
Tradition  of  Education,  was  published  in 
1929.  His  advice  was  often  sought  by  the 
Board  of  Education  and  in  1938  he  was 
knighted  for  his  public  service.  This  cul- 
minated in  the  report,  made  in  1943  and 
known  as  the  Norwood  report,  of  a  special 
committee  under  his  chairmanship  on 
curriculum  and  examinations  in  secondary 
schools.  Many  of  the  recommendations  of 
this  report,  including  the  provision  of 
secondary  education  for  all  children,  were 
embodied  in  the  Education  Act  of  1944, 
introduced  by  R.  A.  Butler  (later  Lord 
Butler  of  Saffron  Walden),  who  had  first 
known  Norwood  as  his  headmaster  at 
Marlborough. 

When  he  left  Oxford  in  1946  for  Iwerne 
Minster  in  Dorset,  Norwood  was  a  tired 
man,  but  the  countryside  and  village  life 
refreshed  him  and,  free  from  office,  he 
enjoyed  local  society  and  endeared  him- 
self to  many  neighbours.  But  soon  his 
happiness  was  clouded  by  his  wife's  failing 
health,  and  her  death  in  1951  ended  a 
close  companionship  of  almost  fifty  years. 
He  died  in  hospital  in  Oxford  13  March 
1956. 

Norwood  was  a  man  of  impressive  sta- 
ture, physical,  intellectual,  and  moral.  High 
courage,  strategic  foresight,  and  tactical 
skill  might  have  made  him  a  great  soldier ; 
and  his  measured  utterance  from  pulpit  or 
platform  commanded  the  allegiance  of  all 
but  his  most  critical  hearers.  His  greatest 
happiness  was  found  in  his  home  and  with 


774 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Novello 


close  friends,  to  whom  he  discovered  a  gay- 
humour  and  warmth  of  spirit  which  few 
who  knew  him  less  intimately  suspected. 
Throughout  his  life  he  was  guided  by  firm 
Christian  conviction,  uncomplicated  by 
theological  or  ecclesiastical  dogmatism  (he 
was  for  ten  years  president  of  the  Modern 
Churchmen's  Union),  and  he  had  always 
a  vivid  sense  of  over-ruling  Providence. 
More  than  any  of  his  contemporaries,  Nor- 
wood was  in  the  tradition  of  the  great 
Victorian  headmasters,  and  the  rapid 
spread  of  English  education  gave  him  a 
wider  stage  than  theirs  on  which  to  play 
his  part. 

There  are  portraits  by  Sir  Oswald  Bir- 
ley  at  St.  John's  College,  Oxford ;  George 
Harcourt  at  Marlborough  College,  with 
copies  at  Bristol  Grammar  School  and 
Harrow ;  and  R.  G.  Eves  at  Marlborough. 
A  drawing  by  H.  A.  Freeth  is  in  the 
London  board-room  of  the  Allied  Schools. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
G.  C.  Turner. 

NOVELLO,  IVOR  (1893-1951),  actor- 
manager,  dramatist,  and  composer,  whose 
real  name  was  David  Ivor  Davies,  but  who 
took  the  name  of  Ivor  Novello  by  deed  poll 
in  1927,  was  born  in  Cardiff  15  January 
1893.  He  was  the  only  son  of  David  Davies, 
a  rate  collector  for  the  municipality  of 
Cardiff,  and  his  wife,  Clara  Novello  Davies, 
a  well-known  musician  and  teacher  of 
music  and  singing,  who  won  many  inter- 
national awards  with  her  Welsh  Ladies' 
Choir.  Brought  up  in  an  atmosphere  of 
music,  he  showed  an  early  aptitude  both 
as  musician  and  singer.  He  was  educated 
privately  in  Cardiff  and  Gloucester  and 
then  won  a  scholarship  at  Magdalen  College 
School,  Oxford,  in  the  celebrated  choir  of 
which  he  became  prominent  as  soloist ;  but 
after  his  voice  broke  he  had  no  mature  sing- 
ing voice  at  all.  He  soon  began  to  compose 
and  evinced  a  great  love  for  the  theatre.  In 
his  early  teens  his  first  song  was  published. 
Called  'Spring  of  the  Year'  it  was  sung  at 
the  Royal  Albert  Hall  with  Novello  as 
accompanist  and  attracted  no  attention 
whatever,  but  when  in  1910  his  song  'The 
Little  Damozel'  was  sung  there  it  scored 
a  considerable  success. 

For  a  time  Novello  taught  the  piano  in 
Cardiff  but  soon  he  joined  his  mother  in 
London,  spending  all  the  time  he  could  at 
the  theatres,  especially  Daly's  and  the 
Gaiety,  watching  the  musical  productions 
of  George  Edwardes  by  which  he  after- 
wards set  his  standards.  He  would  wait 
at  stage  doors  for  the  autographs  of  players 


many  of  whom  were  later  to  appear  under 
his  own  management.  He  wanted  to  go  on 
the  stage,  but  his  mother  disapproved  and 
managed  to  prevent  him  from  joining  the 
chorus  at  Daly's.  He  continued  to  compose 
and  Ada  Crossley  sang  his  setting  of  'Oh 
God  Our  Help  in  Ages  Past'  at  the  Crystal 
Palace.  Novello  wrote  some  music  for  a 
Festival  of  Empire  there  and  when  this 
went  to  Canada  and  the  United  States  he 
went  with  it.  He  spent  some  time  in  New 
York  and  there  wrote  and  composed  his 
first  musical  play,  The  Fickle  Jade,  which 
was  never  produced,  although  he  used 
much  of  the  music  from  it  in  subsequent 
successes.  His  mother  now  moved  into  a 
flat  on  the  roof  of  the  Strand  Theatre — 
No.l  1 ,  Aldwych — ^which  remained  his  home 
until  he  died  there.  Later  he  bought  his 
beloved  country  house,  'Redroofs',  at 
Little  wick  Green,  near  Maidenhead. 

When  war  broke  out  in  1914  Novello 
was  twenty-one.  In  competition  with  his 
mother,  he  wrote  a  patriotic  song,  'Keep 
the  Homes  Fires  Burning',  which  was  an 
immediate  success  when  sung  at  a  National 
Sunday  League  concert.  It  swept  the 
country,  made  him  a  fortune,  and  rocketed 
him  into  fame.  He  had  songs  in  revues  and 
musical  comedies,  such  as  See-Saw,  Arlette^ 
and  Tabs,  and  had  his  first  chance  to  write 
a  full  score  in  1916  for  Theodore  and  Co. 
which  was  a  big  success  at  the  Gaiety 
Theatre.  In  the  meantime  he  had  joined 
the  Royal  Naval  Air  Service,  but  he  was 
no  good  as  an  airman  and  after  two  bad 
crashes  was  put  on  to  clerical  work  at  the 
Air  Ministry.  Demobilized  in  1919  he  again 
visited  America.  On  the  ship  returning 
home  he  received  a  cable  offering  him,  on 
the  strength  of  a  photograph,  a  part  in  the 
film  The  Call  of  the  Blood.  Almost  at  once 
this  dark,  handsome  young  man  with  the 
wonderful  smile  and  exceptional  profile 
became  a  star  of  the  silent,  as  later  of  the 
talking,  films.  He  made  many,  but  his 
heart  was  firmly  in  the  theatre.  He  had 
music  in  Who's  Hooper?  (1919),  A  to  Z 
(1921),  and  other  shows,  and  was  success- 
ful with  his  second  full-length  score,  The 
Golden  Moth,  at  the  Adelphi  in  1921. 

Novello's  chance  to  appear  on  the  stage 
came  in  the  same  year  when  he  played  a 
small  part  in  Deburau  at  the  Ambassadors' 
Theatre.  The  play  failed,  but  he  never 
looked  back.  Very  soon  crowds  of  admirers 
began  to  wait  at  the  stage  door  for  Ivor, 
as  everybody  called  him,  and  nobody,  with 
the  possible  exception  of  Lewis  Waller 
[q.v.]  in  his  prime,  ever  had  such  a  tremen- 
dous or  so  devoted  a  following  of  fans. 


775 


Novello 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


He  made  many  more  pictures  and  at  the 
end  of  1922  went  to  Hollywood  for  D.  W. 
Griffith,  the  great  film  director ;  but  he  was 
using  the  films  as  a  means  to  becoming  an 
actor-manager.  He  achieved  that  ambition 
in  1924  when  with  Constance  Collier  he 
wrote  The  Rat,  staged  it  himself  at  the 
Prince  of  Wales's  Theatre,  London,  and 
played  the  lead.  It  was  an  immense  success 
and  they  followed  it  with  Down  Hill  at  the 
Queen's  Theatre  in  1926.  Novello  also 
made  acting  successes  in  1925  in  revivals 
of  Old  Heidelberg  at  the  Garrick  Theatre 
and  Iris  at  the  Adelphi.  He  was  now  an 
established  actor  as  well  as  dramatist. 
Between  1928  and  his  death  in  1951  he 
wrote  thirteen  comedies,  only  four  of 
which  were  not  successful,  and  he  played 
in  the  greater  number  of  them  himself. 
They  included  The  Truth  Game,  A  Sym- 
phony in  Two  Flats,  Fresh  Fields,  Pro- 
scenium, Murder  in  Mayfair,  Full  House, 
Comedienne,  and  We  Proudly  Present.  In 
1936  he  presented  a  very  beautiful  version 
of  The  Happy  Hypocrite  by  (Sir)  Max 
Beerbohm  [q.v.],  dramatized  by  Clemence 
Dane,  in  which  he  played  Lord  George  Hell. 

In  1935  Novello  undertook  to  supply 
the  book  and  music  for  a  musical  play  at 
the  Theatre  Royal,  Drury  Lane.  He  had 
not  an  idea  when  he  accepted  the  offer, 
but  the  result  was  Glamorous  Night  which 
brought  that  famous  theatre  back  into 
success  and  prestige.  He  wrote,  devised, 
composed,  and  played  in  three  more  suc- 
cesses at  Drury  Lane:  Careless  Rapture 
(1936),  Crest  of  the  Wave  (1937),  and  The 
Dancing  Years  (1939).  He  also  played 
Henry  V  there  (1938),  composing  the  in- 
cidental music.  He  wrote  and  composed 
Arc  de  Triomphe  produced  at  the  Phoenix 
Theatre  in  1943,  but  this  was  less  success- 
ful than  his  other  musical  plays,  chiefly 
because  he  did  not  appear  in  it  hiniself. 
His  plays,  straight  or  musical,  were  always 
successes  when  he  was  in  them. 

The  Dancing  Years,  brought  back  to  the 
Adelphi  Theatre  in  1942,  was  the  out- 
standing success  of  the  war  of  1939-45  and 
Novello's  own  popularity  in  it  was  un- 
diminished after  a  month's  absence  in 
1944  whilst  he  served  a  prison  sentence 
for  evading  the  petrol  restrictions.  Before 
the  end  of  the  war  he  had  written  and 
composed — and  played  in — Perchance  to 
Dream  which  ran  for  over  a  thousand  per- 
formances at  the  London  Hippodrome. 
He  followed  this  in  1949  with  King's 
Rhapsody  at  the  Palace  Theatre  which  was 
in  many  ways  his  best  work  and  in  which 
he  gave  his  best  performance.  Whilst  it  was 


running  he  wrote  and  composed  Gay's  The 
Word  which  proved  a  big  success  at  the 
Saville  Theatre.  It  was  whilst  playing  in 
King's  Rhapsody  that  early  in  the  morning 
of  6  March  1951  he  died  very  suddenly  of 
thrombosis.  He  was  unmarried. 

Novello  was  a  good  and  improving, 
although  never  a  great,  actor,  and  his  com- 
plete understanding  of  the  art  of  the 
theatre  made  him  one  of  the  notable  figures 
of  the  British  stage.  He  was  a  completely 
happy  man  and  never  happier  than  when 
working  in  the  theatre  which  he  loved  so 
much.  His  success  never  turned  his  head 
or  made  him  conceited;  he  took  infinite 
pains  to  achieve  it  and  was  always  grateful 
for  it.  He  set  himself  a  high  standard  and 
never  fell  below  it.  He  was  much  beloved 
in  and  out  of  the  theatre  and  tens  of  thou- 
sands of  people  attended  his  funeral,  as  a 
tribute  to  the  man  who  had  given  them 
so  much  pleasure.  As  a  composer  he  will 
always  be  remembered,  for  his  works  are 
in  the  national  repertory  of  theatre  music. 

A  bust  of  Novello  by  Clemence  Dane 
stands  in  the  Theatre  Royal,  Drury 
Lane. 

[Peter  Noble,  Ivor  Novello,  1951;  W. 
Macqueen-Pope,  Ivor,  1951 ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] W.  Macqueen-Pope. 

NOYES,  ALFRED  (1880-1958),  poet,  was 
born  in  Wolverhampton  16  September 
1880,  the  eldest  of  the  three  sons  of  Alfred 
Noyes,  a  grocer  who  later  became  a  tea- 
cher, and  his  wife,  Amelia  Adams  Rowley, 
who  became  an  invalid  after  the  birth  of 
the  youngest  child.  Educated  on  the  clas- 
sics at  schools  in  Aberystwyth  amid  the 
mountains  and  sea-coast  of  Wales,  which 
inspired  his  early  gift  for  verse,  Noyes 
went  in  1898  to  Oxford  and  rowed  for 
three  years  for  Exeter  College,  collecting 
two  oars,  with  one  of  which  he  rowed  at 
Henley.  He  missed  his  degree,  for  which 
Oxford  forgave  him,  through  keeping  an 
appointment  which  obtained  publication 
of  his  first  book  of  verse.  The  Loom  of 
Years  (1902).  He  owned  Ernest  de  Selin- 
court  [q.v.]  as  his  teacher  and  influence 
and  henceforth  all  his  life  wrote  poetry  in 
a  strain  of  old-fashioned  metre  and  Vic- 
torian romance.  The  Flcywer  of  Old  Japan 
(1903)  was  followed  by  a  collection  of 
Poems  (1904)  which  included  'The  Barrel- 
Organ'  with  its  well-known  refrain  'Come 
down  to  Kew  in  lilac- time'.  His  epic  on 
Drake  (2  vols.,  1906-8)  which  was  serial- 
ized in  Blackwood's  Magazine  made  his 
name  widely  known  and  he  learnt  to  his 
pleasure  that  a  copy  accompanied  Admiral 


776 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Noyes 


Beatty  [q.v.]  into  the  combats  of  the  war 
of  1914-18.  In  the  meantime  Forty  Singing 
Seamen  had  appeared  in  1907. 

In  1913  Noyes  gave  the  Lowell  lectures 
at  Boston  on  'The  Sea  in  English  Poetry' 
and  in  1914-23  he  held  the  chair  of  modern 
English  literature  at  Princeton.  During 
the  war  of  1914r-18  he  was  an  effective 
advocate  of  the  British  cause  in  the  United 
States ;  but  returned  for  a  time  to  work  at 
the  Foreign  Office  and  in  France,  writing 
several  books  on  the  war  at  sea.  He  was 
appointed  C.B.E.  in  1918. 

Although  Noyes  wrote  novels  and 
poetic  plays,  it  was  by  lyric,  ballad, 
and  epic  that  he  won  his  public.  In  The 
Torch-Bearers,  an  epic  in  three  volumes 
(1922-30),  he  sought  to  harmonize  the 
great  scientists  with  the  Christian  faith. 
This  led  him  to  move  to  the  religious  Right 
and  to  his  reception  into  the  Roman 
Cathohc  ChiD-ch  in  1927  when  he  was  at 
the  top  of  his  career.  There  followed  his  two 
most  important  books :  The  Unknown  God 
(1934),  a  work  of  apologetics  directed  pri- 
marily to  the  agnostics;  and  Voltaire 
(1936),  designed  to  show  that  in  his  deism 
Voltaire  was  nearer  to  the  Christians  than 
to  the  agnostics.  This  caused  a  tremor  in 
Catholic  circles  but  the  matter  was  tact- 
fully dealt  with  by  Cardinal  Hinsley  [q.v.]. 
More  than  a  tremor  was  caused  by  Noyes's 
attack  on  the  authenticity  of  the  diaries 
of  Roger  Casement  [q.v.]  which  he  had 
become  convinced  bore  the  mark  of  the 
forger.  This  was  after  W.  B.  Yeats  [q.v.] 
had  bitterly  attacked  Noyes  as  an  official 
traducer. 

Noyes  was  fond  of  controversy  which 
he  carried  on  with  gay  determination.  He 
would  not  allow  the  Victorian  classics  to 
be  mocked  and  in  consequence  took  a  con- 
siderable amount  of  mockery  himself.  His 
teaching  place  in  English  letters  will  be 
marked  by  the  steady  and  satiric  campaign 
which  he,  with  such  as  G.  K.  Chesterton 
and  Lord  Dunsany  [qq.v.],  maintained 
against  the  eccentricities  of  modern  poetry. 
Of  those  who  defied  the  moral  code  in  the 
name  of  art  he  was  an  implacable  enemy. 
He  attacked  the  works  of  James  Joyce 
[q.v.]  so  far  as  to  stop  the  public  auction 
of  a  copy  of  Ulysses  in  the  catalogue  of  the 
first  Earl  of  Birkenhead  [q.v.]  and  he 
once  ordered  Sir  Hugh  Walpole  [q.v.]  to 
leave  his  house  for  recommending  the  book 
to  a  young  girl. 

After  1929  Noyes  made  his  home  in  the 
Isle  of  Wight  where  he  became  friends 
with  his  neighbour  Admiral  Jellicoe  [q.v.] 
and  composed  the  noblest  wreath  crown- 


ing his  funeral.  During  the  war  of  1989-45 
he  took  his  children  to  Canada  and  re- 
mained to  lecture  there  and  in  the  United 
States,  once  more  proving  himself  an  able 
interpreter  of  British  war  aims.  By  this 
time  his  sight  was  failing  and  an  operation 
in  California  resulted  in  serious  damage. 
Thereafter  he  could  not  read  a  book  and 
became  slowly  blind.  Hence  his  continual 
interest  in  the  blind  and  his  poignant  poem 
'Look  down  on  us  gently  who  journey  by 
night'  which  became  a  widespread  anthem 
for  the  sightless.  He  met  his  disaster  with 
perfect  courage,  blaming  no  one,  but  fall- 
ing back  upon  the  stores  which  his  mind 
had  already  gathered  from  the  English  and 
Latin  poets,  as  well  as  from  the  English 
classics,  among  whom  he  set  challengingly 
first  Johnson,  Dickens,  and  Tennyson. 
In  their  company  he  continued  his  gallant 
journey  from  twilight  to  the  darkening 
end.  He  was  practically  blind  when  he 
appeared  at  a  heartening  reception 
which  friends  of  all  manner  of  letters  and 
beliefs  offered  him  on  his  seventieth  birth- 
day. 

In  1949  he  had  returned  to  his  home  in 
the  Isle  of  Wight  and  there  he  wrote  his 
autobiography  Two  Worlds  for  Memory 
(1953)  in  which  he  described  contacts  with 
fellow  poets  hke  Hardy,  Meredith,  and 
Swinburne  whose  adoration  of  the  sea  he 
shared,  and  showed  a  genius  for  humorous 
anecdote  which  could  only  be  equalled  by 
his  friend  Sir  Edmund  Gosse  [q.v.].  He  died 
in  hospital  in  the  Isle  of  Wight,  28  June 
1958,  and  was  buried  near  Farringdon,  as 
he  wished,  for  he  had  ever  knelt  at  the 
shrine  of  Tennyson. 

Noyes  was  president  of  the  Dickens 
Fellowship  and  the  Johnson  Society  and 
received  honorary  degrees  from  Yale,  Glas- 
gow, Syracuse,  and  Berkeley  (California). 
At  Oxford,  Exeter  College  added  his  name 
to  her  worthies  in  a  commemorative  win- 
dow in  her  Hall. 

Noyes's  family  life  was  always  happy. 
He  married  first,  in  1907,  Garnet,  daughter 
of  Colonel  B.  G.  Daniels,  of  the  United 
States  Army.  She  died  in  1926  and  in  the 
next  year  he  married  Mary  Angela,  widow 
of  Richard  Shirburne  Weld-Blundell  and 
granddaughter  of  Sir  Frederick  Weld 
[q.v.].  They  had  one  son  and  two  daugh- 
ters. His  best  likeness  is  a  bronze  relief, 
owned  by  the  family,  by  William  King 
which  shows  the  inspiration  and  strength 
underlying  his  blindness.  A  marble  repUca 
is  in  the  Newport  asylum  for  the  blind. 

His  collected  poems  appeared  first  in 
two  volvimes  in  1910.  A  final  collection, 


777 


Noyes 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


edited  and  introduced  by  his  son  Hugh, 
was  published  in  1963. 

[Walter  Jerrold,  Alfred  N ayes,  1930 ;  Alfred 
Noyes,  Two  Worlds  for  Memory,  1953  ;  Tablet, 
5  July  1958;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  Shane  Leslie. 

OGDEN,  CHARLES  KAY  (1889-1957), 
linguistic  psychologist  and  the  originator 
of  Basic  English,  was  born  1  June  1889 
at  Rossall  School,  Fleetwood,  the  elder 
son  of  a  housemaster,  Charles  Burdett 
Ogden,  and  his  wife,  Fanny  Hart.  He  was 
educated  at  a  preparatory  school  in 
Buxton  by  his  uncle,  Thomas  Jones 
Ogden,  then  at  Rossall.  He  was  a  good 
athlete,  with  school  colours  for  fives, 
until  a  serious  attack  of  rheumatic  fever 
when  he  was  sixteen.  Turning  to  intensive 
study  he  won  a  scholarship  to  Magdalene 
College,  Cambridge,  where  he  obtained  a 
first  class  in  part  i  of  the  classical  tripos  in 
1910  and  played  billiards  for  the  univer- 
sity. During  the  year  1913  he  visited  schools 
and  universities  in  Italy,  Germany, 
Switzerland,  and  India,  investigating 
methods  of  language  teaching.  On  his 
return  in  1914  he  published,  with  R.  H. 
Best,  The  Problem,  of  the  Continuation 
School  and  also  translated  Dr.  Kerschen- 
steiner's  Grundfragen  der  Schulorganisation 
as  Th£  Schools  and  the  Nation  (1914). 

In  1912  Ogden  founded  the  weekly 
Cambridge  Magazine  which,  selling  at  a 
penny,  was  astonishingly  successful.   In 

1916  he  converted  it  into  an  organ  of 
international  opinion  and  comment  on 
politics  and  the  war,  digesting  and  trans- 
lating from  200  periodicals  weekly  for  a 
regular  survey  of  the  foreign  press  which  in 

1917  and  1918  filled  more  than  half  of  each 
issue.  The  circulation  rapidly  rose  to  over 
20,000.  Poems  by  Siegfried  Sassoon  and 
John  Masefield,  contributions  from  Hardy, 
Shaw,  Bennett  [qq.v.]  and  other  well- 
known  authors  were  another  unusual 
feature  of  this  university  magazine. 
Throughout  this  period  Ogden  was  also 
very  busy  as  president  of  the  Heretics 
Society  which  he  had  founded  in  1911 
together  with  H.  F.  Jolowicz  [q.v.], 
P.  Sargant  Florence,  and  F.  P.  Ramsey. 
The  Heretics  too  became  a  publishing 
outlet  and  papers  read  before  the  society 
by  Jane  Harrison,  Shaw,  Chesterton, 
F.  M.  Cornford  [qq.v.],  and  G.  M. 
Trevelyan  were  published  between  1911 
and  1914. 

During  a  discussion  with  I.  A.  Richards 
on  11  November  1918  Ogden  outlined  a 
work  to   correlate   his   earlier   Unguistic 


studies  with  his  wartime  experience  of 
'the  power  of  Word-Magic'  and  the  part 
played  by  language  in  contemporary 
thought.  Ogden  converted  the  Cambridge 
Magazine  into  a  quarterly  in  which  he  and 
Richards  published  a  series  of  articles  as  a 
first  draft  of  the  book  which  appeared  in 
1923  as  The  Meaning  of  Meaning,  This 
concrete  approach  to  theoretical  confusion 
about  language,  setting  forth  principles 
for  the  understanding  of  the  function  of 
language,  rapidly  became  one  of  the 
important  books  of  the  decade.  A  special 
study  at  the  same  time  of  the  linguistics 
factor  in  aesthetics,  with  I.  A.  Richards 
and  the  artist  James  Wood,  appeared  as 
The  Foundations  of  Aesthetics  in  1922. 

The  year  1922  saw  the  end  of  the 
Cambridge  Magazine  and  to  a  great  extent 
the  end  of  Ogden's  Cambridge  period. 
He  took  over  the  editorship  of  the  inter- 
national psychological  journal  Psyche 
as  a  vehicle  for  publishing  research  in 
international  language  problems  and 
continuing  the  work  of  the  post-war 
Cambridge  Magazine.  Also  in  1922  he 
accepted  the  planning  and  editing  of  two 
major  series:  'The  History  of  Civilisation' 
and  'The  International  Library  of  Psycho- 
logy, Philosophy  and  Scientific  Method'. 
The  latter  series  produced  a  hundred 
volumes  in  its  first  decade,  many  of  them 
stimulated  and  initiated  by  Ogden.  With 
the  help  of  F.  P.  Ramsey  he  translated 
for  this  series  the  Logisch-Philosophische 
Abhandlung  of  Ludwig  Wittgenstein  [q.v.] 
whom  he  introduced  to  English  readers  in 
Tractatus  Logico-Philosophicu^s  as  early  as 
1922. 

Throughout  this  busy  period  his  linguis- 
tic researches  gathered  pace  and  momen- 
tum. From  his  earlier  studies  of  the  writings 
of  Home  Tooke  and  Bishop  Wilkins 
[qq.v.]  he  moved  to  the  neglected  contri- 
butions to  linguistics  of  Jeremy  Bentham 
[q.v.].  Basic  English  first  took  shape 
between  1925  and  1927,  as  'an  auxiliary 
international  language  comprising  850 
words  arranged  in  a  system  in  which 
everything  may  be  said  for  all  the 
purposes  of  everyday  existence.  Its 
distinctive  features  are  the  selection 
of  words  so  that  they  cover  the  field, 
the  restriction  of  the  vocabulary,  and  the 
elimination  of  verbs  except  for  the  six- 
teen verb-forms  which  deal  with  the 
fundamental  operations  ("put",  "take", 
"get",  etc.)  and  their  replacement  by  the 
names  of  operations  and  directions  ("go 
in",  "put  in",  etc.).'  Ogden  established  the 
Orthological  Institute  in  1927  and  com- 


778 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Oliver 


pleted  the  Basic  vocabulary  in  1928, 
revised  and  published  it  for  copyright 
purposes  in  1929,  and  in  rapid  succession 
published  the  first  four  essential  books: 
Basic  English  (1930),  The  Basic  Vocabu- 
lary (1930),  Dehabelization  (1931),  and 
The  Basic  Words  (1932).  After  a  detailed 
study  of  Bentham's  writing  both  published 
and  unpublished  Ogden  wrote  several 
articles  in  Psyche,  edited  editions  of 
Bentham's  Theory  of  Legislation  (1931) 
and  Theory  of  Fictions  (1932),  and  pub- 
lished his  Bentham  centenary  lecture  en- 
titled Jeremy  Bentham,  1832-2032  (1932). 

Basic  EngUsh  developed  rapidly,  setting 
up  agencies  in  thirty  countries  and  at  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1939  Ogden  had  pro- 
duced in  Psyche,  'Psyche  Monographs', 
and  'Psyche  Miniatures'  and  other  series 
some  200  titles  in  print  in  or  about  Basic 
Enghsh.  In  1943  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill 
set  up  a  cabinet  committee  on  Basic 
English  under  the  chairmanship  of 
L.  S.  Amery  [q.v.]  and  made  a  statement 
to  the  House  of  Commons  on  its  report  on 
9  March  1944.  He  outlined  the  steps 
which  the  Government  would  take  to 
develop  Basic  English  as  an  auxiliary 
international  and  administrative  language 
through  the  British  Council,  the  B.B.C., 
and  other  bodies.  A  Basic  English  version 
of  this  statement  and  of  the  Atlantic 
Charter,  side  by  side  with  the  original 
texts,  was  published  as  a  white  paper 
(Cmd.  6511)  later  in  the  month.  There- 
after Ogden,  as  he  tersely  recorded  in 
Who's  Who,  was  'bedevilled  by  officials, 
1944-6'.  He  was  requested  to  assign  his 
copyright  to  the  Crown  which  he  did  in 
June  1946  and  was  compensated  by 
£23,000,  a  sum  selected  because  it  was  the 
compensation  paid  to  Bentham  for  his 
expenditure  on  the  Panopticon  or  re- 
formed prison.  The  Basic  English  Founda- 
tion was  established  with  a  grant  from  the 
Ministry  of  Education  in  1947. 

Throughout  his  Ufe  Ogden  was  a  vor- 
acious collector  of  books,  amassing 
complete  houses-full  of  thousands  of 
volumes.  In  1953  University  College, 
London,  bought  his  manuscripts,  incuna- 
bula, early  printed  books,  and  his  col- 
lection on  Bentham  and  Brougham  which 
included  almost  60,000  letters  to  Lord 
Brougham  [q.v.].  The  100,000  books  he 
left  when  he  died  in  London  20  March 
1957  were  bought  by  the  university  of 
California  at  Los  Angeles. 

Ogden  never  married.  The  best  known 
drawing  of  him  by  his  friend  James  Wood 
is  privately  owned. 


[I.  A.  Richards,  'Some  Recollections  of 
C.  K.  Ogden'  in  Encounter,  September  1957; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.  W.  Scott. 


OLIVER,  FRANCIS  WALL  (1864-1951), 
palaeobotanist  and  ecologist,  was  born  10 
May  1864  at  Richmond,  Surrey,  where  his 
parents  lived  prior  to  his  father's  appoint- 
ment as  keeper  of  the  herbarium  at  Kew. 
His  mother  was  Hannah,  daughter  of 
James  Wall,  of  Sheffield,  and  his  father 
Daniel  Oliver,  F.R.S.,  a  distinguished  sys- 
tematist  who  exhibited  a  great  flair  for 
plant  affinities  and  was  the  author  of  the 
first  three  volumes  of  the  Flora  of  Tropical 
Africa.  He  was  a  member  of  the  Society 
of  Friends  and  sent  his  son  at  the  age  of 
nine  to  the  Friends'  School  at  Kendal 
where  he  developed  a  passion  and  skill 
for  mountaineering  which  persisted;  in 
later  years  he  climbed  the  Alps  with  J. 
Norman  Collie  [q.v.]  and  E.  J.  Garwood. 
He  went  next  to  Bootham  School,  York, 
where  he  was  given  charge  of  their  4  J-inch 
telescope  and  might  have  adopted  astro- 
nomy as  a  career  but  for  an  enthusiast  who 
developed  in  him  a  predilection  for  botany. 
After  a  year  at  University  College,  London, 
he  went  to  Trinity  College,  Cambridge, 
where  he  obtained  a  foundation  scholar- 
ship and  first  class  honours  in  both  parts 
of  the  natural  sciences  tripos  (1885-6). 
Vacations  were  occupied  in  study  at  Bonn 
and  Tubingen,  where  he  met  many  of 
the  leading  botanists  of  the  day. 

In  1888  Oliver  took  his  father's  place 
at  University  College,  London,  first  as 
lecturer,  then  in  1890  as  Quain  professor 
of  botany,  a  chair  which  he  held  until 
1929.  In  1894-5,  with  the  help  of  others, 
he  translated  the  Pflanzenleben  of  Kemer 
von  Marilaun,  under  the  title  of  The 
Natural  History  of  Plants,  which  was  a 
great  success  financially  and  doubtless 
stimulated  in  Oliver's  mind  the  ecological 
bias  which  had  been  aroused  by  his 
contacts  at  Bonn  and  which  he  in  turn 
imparted  with  good  effect  to  (Sir) 
A.  G.  Tansley  [q.v.]  and  others. 

At  the  Jodrell  laboratory  at  Kew, 
Oliver  became  associated  with  D.  H.  Scott 
[q.v.]  and  induced  him  to  give  the  famous 
lectures  on  fossil  plants  at  University 
CoUege.  Soon  afterwards  Oliver  began  his 
fruitful  researches,  which  might  be  de- 
scribed as  meticulous  palaeobotanical 
detection,  on  fossil  seeds,  and  led  to  the 
recognition  of  Lagenostoma  Lomaxi  as 
the  seed  of  a  woody,  fern-like  plant,  the 
well-known  fossil,  Lyginopteris  Oldhamia 


779 


Oliver 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


{Phil.  Trans.  Roy.  Soc.  (B)  1905).  Oliver 
thus  established  the  existence  of  a  group, 
the  Pteridosperms,  with  fern-like  habits 
but  bearing  seeds,  as  an  important 
feature  of  the  Coal-Measure  vegetation. 
Apart  from  this,  his  chief  contributions  to 
the  subject  were  a  detailed  account  of  a 
primitive  type  Physostoma  elegans  {Ann. 
Bot.  1909),  of  Stephanospermum  {Trans. 
Linn.  Soc.  1904)  and,  with  (Sir)  E.  J. 
Salisbury,  an  account  of  the  seeds  of  the 
genus  Conostoma  {Ann.  Bot.  1911).  For 
his  contributions  to  palaeobotany  Oliver 
was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1905. 

From  1904  to  1908  Oliver  organized 
September  visits  to  the  Brittany  coast 
to  study  salt-marsh  vegetation,  and  after 
1910  he  annually  took  his  honours  students 
for  a  fortnight  to  Blakeney  Point,  Norfolk, 
to  study  plant  life  in  relation  to  habitat 
conditions  and  raised  the  funds  to  erect 
the  field  laboratory  there.  In  his  later 
years  Oliver  turned  his  attention  increas- 
ingly towards  the  dynamic  aspects  of 
ecology,  studying  in  particular  the  physio- 
graphy of  shingle  beaches  and  salt-marsh 
development  in  relation  to  their  vegeta- 
tion. As  an  outcome  he  became  interested 
in  the  value  of  Cord  Grass  {Spartina 
townsendii)  as  a  reclaimer  of  mud  flats 
and  subsequently  in  collaboration  with  a 
marine  engineer,  A.  E.  Carey,  published 
a  book  on  Tidal  Lands  (1918)  which 
emphasized  the  role  which  plants  could 
play  in  coastal  conservation.  Oliver's 
earliest  papers  were  mostly  of  a  physio- 
logical character  and  mention  should  be 
made  of  his  pioneer  investigations  of  the 
effect  of  fog  on  vegetation  at  the  time 
when  'London  particulars'  could  turn 
daylight  into  darkness  {Journal  R.H.S. 
1891). 

On  retiring  from  University  College, 
Oliver  became  professor  at  the  Cairo 
University  until  1935,  when  he  went  to 
live  on  the  edge  of  the  desert  and  studied 
the  changing  aspects  of  its  vegetation. 
He  returned  finally  to  England  only  a 
year  before  he  died.  Robust  physically, 
with  a  strikingly  well-cut  physiognomy, 
Oliver  had  only  one  serious  illness.  He  was 
fundamentally  shy  and  reserved,  with  a 
marked  capacity  for  silence,  but  he  evoked 
the  affection  of  his  close  associates. 

Oliver  married  in  1896  Mildred  Alice 
(died  1932),  daughter  of  Charles  Robert 
Thompson,  surgeon,  of  Westerham,  whom 
he  encountered  when  climbing  in  the  Alps. 
They  had  one  daughter  and  two  sons 
both  of  whom  attained  distinction  in  the 
navy.  Oliver  died  at  Limpsfield,  Surrey, 


14  September  1951.  A  drawing  by  Miss 
F.  A.  de  Biden  Footner  is  at  University 
College,  London. 

[Sir  Edward  Salisbury  in  Obituary  Notices 
of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  No.  21, 
November  1952 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

E.  J.  Salisbury. 

OPPfi,  ADOLPH  PAUL  (1878-1957), 
art  historian  and  collector,  was  born  in 
London  22  September  1878,  the  third 
son  of  Siegmund  Armin  Oppe,  a  silk 
merchant,  by  his  wife,  Pauline  Jaff^. 
He  was  educated  at  Charterhouse,  St. 
Andrews  University,  and  New  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  was  an  exhibitioner  and 
took  first  classes  in  classical  moderations 
(1899)  and  literae  humaniores  (1901).  In 
1902  Oppe  was  appointed  assistant  to  the 
professor  of  Greek  and  then  lecturer  at 
St.  Andrews,  and  in  1904  lecturer  in 
ancient  history  at  Edinburgh  University. 
In  1905  he  entered  the  Board  of  Edu- 
cation, where  he  remained,  with  three 
years  (1910-18)  as  deputy  director  of  the 
Victoria  and  Albert.  Museum,  until  his 
retirement  in  1938,  after  serving  as  head 
of  the  branch  dealing  with  the  training  of 
teachers.  He  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1937. 

Apart  from  essays  on  classical  subjects 
published  while  he  was  at  St.  Andrews 
and  Edinburgh,  Oppe's  first  writings 
were  studies  in  Italian  art:  Raphael  (1909) 
and  Botticelli  (1911).  After  these,  he  wrote 
almost  entirely  on  English  subjects.  He 
had  collected  drawings,  both  English  and 
foreign,  since  1904,  starting  with  a  beauti- 
ful early  Cotman  [q.v.],  and  his  interest 
had  soon  been  caught  by  the  then  almost 
unstudied  English  water-colours  of  the 
eighteenth  and  early  nineteenth  centuries, 
and  the  discoveries  he  made  among  them. 

In  1910  he  made  the  most  remarkable 
of  these  discoveries :  acquiring  for  twenty- 
five  shillings  a  lot  of  seventeen  drawings 
by  Francis  Towne  [q.v.],  including  the 
artist's  two  masterpieces  of  the  Source  of 
the  Arveyron.  At  that  time  they  could  be 
related  only  to  a  practically  unseen  col- 
lection at  the  British  Museum ;  but  some 
years  later  a  chance  remark  led  Oppe  to 
the  Devon  home  of  the  Merivales  who 
still  owned  the  mass  of  Towne's  drawings, 
which  the  artist  himself  had  left  to  them. 
These  and  some  Merivale  papers  enabled 
Oppe  in  1920  to  establish  this  forgotten 
artist's  position  with  an  article  in  a 
Walpole  Society  volume. 

The  year  before  (1919),  in  the  Burlington 
Magazine,  Oppe  had  demolished  the 
legend  that  Alexander  Cozens  [q.v.]  was 


780 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Oppenheimer 


the  son  of  Peter  the  Great.  Under  his 
iconoclastic  pen  many  similar  legends 
about  English  artists  were  to  be  shat- 
tered. It  was  typical  of  his  painstaking 
quest  for  finality  that  he  did  not  publish 
any  book  on  Alexander  Cozens  until  1952 
when  his  Alexander  cfe  John  Robert  Cozens 
embodied  the  researches  of  over  forty 
years.  In  this,  as  in  all  his  books,  his 
criticism  was  constantly  enriched  by  his 
extensive  knowledge  of  the  art  of  other 
countries  and  by  his  classical  scholarship. 

As  well  as  these  works,  Oppe  published 
books  on;  Rowlandson  (1923);  Cotman 
(1923) ;  Turner,  Cox  and  de  Wint  (1925) ; 
the  Sandhy  Drawings  at  Windsor  Castle 
(1947);  Hogarth  (1948);  and  the  English 
Dratmngs  at  Windsor  Castle  (1950). 
He  also  wrote  the  section  on  'Art'  in 
Early  Victorian  England  (1934),  edited 
by  G.  M.  Young  [q.v.].  In  all  these  publica- 
tions the  same  exacting  and  uncompromis- 
ing scholarship  prevailed.  The  chiselled 
precision  of  his  prose  owed  a  great  deal 
to  his  classical  attainments.  His  style 
was  terse  but  never  dull,  for  he  succeeded 
in  combining  in  all  he  wrote  the  scholar's 
love  of  truth  with  the  aesthete's  love  of 
beauty. 

Paul  Oppe  was  a  born  collector.  With  a 
very  perceptive  eye,  he  bought  regardless 
of  fashion  at  a  time  when  drawings  were 
still  relatively  cheap.  His  collection  inclu- 
ded, besides  its  English  treasures,  draw- 
ings by  such  masters  as  Fra  Bartolomeo, 
Giovanni  da  Udine,  Barocci,  Veronese, 
Poussin,  and  Claude.  Oppe's  judgement  of 
drawings  was  widely  respected  and  for 
the  last  twenty  years  of  his  life  he  acted 
as  adviser  to  the  department  of  drawings 
of  the  National  Gallery  of  Canada. 

The  critical  faculties  which  distin- 
guished Oppe  as  a  scholar  were  reflected 
in  his  temperament.  He  was  quickly 
irritated  by  false  attributions,  careless 
assumptions,  and  slovenly  writing,  and 
the  culprits  were  liable  to  be  castigated 
by  his  caustic  wit.  It  was  reserved  for  his 
friends  to  appreciate  what  one  of  them 
has  described  as  'the  humour,  humanity 
and  generous  width  of  sympathy  which 
were  the  complement  to  his  rigorous 
intellect'. 

Opp6  was  elected  F.B.A.  in  1952  and 
made  an  honorary  LL.D.  of  Glasgow  in 
1953.  He  died  in  London  29  March  1957. 
A  life-size  bronze  bust  of  Oppe,  modelled 
by  Uli  Nimptsch  in  1949,  was  presented 
by  his  friends  to  the  print  room  of  the 
British  Museum  as  a  memorial  to  one 
whose  influence  had  done  so  much  to 


estabhsh  the  study  of  Enghsh  drawings 
on  a  sound  and  scholarly  basis.  Opp6 
married  in  1909  Valentine  (died  1951), 
daughter  of  the  late  Rev.  Ralph  WiUiam 
Lyonel  Tollemache-Tollemache.  They  had 
a  son  and  a  daughter. 

[The  Times,  1, 3,  and  12  April  1057 ;  BurKng- 
ton  Magazine,  June  1957;  Royal  Academy 
Catalogue  of  the  Paul  Oppi  Collection,  1968, 
which  contains  a  list  of  his  principal  publica- 
tions and  articles  and  a  foreword  by  Sir 
Kenneth  Clark;  personal  knowledge.] 

Brinsley  FORP. 

OPPENHEIMER,  Sir  ERNEST  (1880- 
1957),  South  African  financier,  was  born 
in  Friedberg,  Germany,  22  May  1880,  the 
fifth  son  and  eighth  in  a  family  of  ten 
children  born  to  Eduard  Oppenheimer, 
a  cigar  merchant,  and  his  wife,  Fanny 
Hirschhorn.  He  was  educated  at  the 
Augustinerschule  in  Friedberg  and  began 
his  career  in  189Q  when  he  became  a  junior 
clerk  in  the  London  firm  of  Dunkels- 
buhler  &  Co.,  a  member  of  the  Diamond 
Syndicate  with  important  afliliations  with 
Rand  gold  mining  interests.  Two  older 
brothers,  (Sir)  Bernhard  and  Louis,  were 
successively  connected  with  the  firm, 
Louis  until  the  final  dissolution  of  the 
business.  Ernest  Oppenheimer  was  natural- 
ized in  1901  and  in  1902  went  to  represent 
his  firm  at  Kimberley  where  he  entered 
municipal  politics  and  was  mayor  in 
1912-15. 

Moving  to  London  for  a  while  he  en* 
tered  into  close  relations  with  the 
Consolidated  Mines  Selection  Company, 
one  of  the  two  linked  Rand  mining 
concerns  with  which  Dunkelsbuhlers  were 
closely  related,  the  other  being  the  Rand 
Selection  Company.  The  area  of  expansion 
in  gold  mining  at  that  time  was  the  Far 
East  Rand,  where  the  C.M.S.  Company 
was  represented.  It  was  on  the  basis  of 
this  contact  and  with  this  area  in  view 
that  Oppenheimer  decided  to  form  his 
own  mining  house.  With  the  aid  of  W.  L. 
Honnold,  he  got  in  touch  with  Herbert 
Hoover,  a  distinguished  mining  engineer 
and  later  president  of  the  United  States, 
and  through  him  with  American  interests, 
J.  P.  Morgan  &  Co.  and  the  Newmont 
Corporation.  This  association  of  American 
finance  with  South  African  mining  enter- 
prise was  a  new  and  dramatic  feature. 
The  Anglo  American  Corporation  of 
South  Africa,  Ltd.,  was  formed  in  1917 
and  its  first  activities  were  concerned  with 
the  Far  East  Rand. 

It    was    not    long,    however,    before 


781 


Oppenheimer 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Oppenheimer  extended  the  interests  of 
the  new  corporation.  When  he  first  went 
to  South  Africa  the  De  Beers  Company 
dominated  the  world  output  of  diamonds, 
whilst  the  market  was  managed  by  the 
Diamond  Syndicate.  The  output  of 
diamonds  outside  the  Union  (and  it  was  in 
the  main  alluvial  output  which  mattered) 
was  now  to  expand,  first  by  the  discovery 
of  the  S  juth  West  African  fields,  and  gradu- 
ally to  include  Angola,  the  Belgian 
Congo,  West  and  East  Africa.  By  acquir- 
ing control  of  the  South  West  African 
production  in  1920  and  creating  a  single 
unit  there  in  the  Consolidated  Diamond 
Mines  of  South  West  Africa,  Ltd. ;  by 
obtaining  control  over  the  new  Lichten- 
burg  field,  and  of  the  diamonds  found  in 
Namaqualand ;  by  sales  agreements  with, 
and  participation  in  stock-ownership  in, 
other  African  producers;  by  associating 
his  corporation  with  the  Diamond  Syndi- 
cate and  subsequently  reorganizing  it,  he 
gradually  acquired  bargaining  power  suffi- 
cient to  force  his  full  acceptance  by  De 
Beers,  of  which  he  became  chairman  in  1929 . 
In  this  position  he  succeeded  in  bringing 
about  a  much  greater  degree  of  integration 
among  South  African  producers.  The 
difficulties  caused  by  the  depression  of  the 
thirties  enabled  him  in  the  end  to  replace 
the  Syndicate  by  the  Diamond  Corpora- 
tion (1930) ;  to  create  a  new  unifying 
agency  between  all  South  African  pro- 
ducers (which  now  included  the  Union 
Government)  in  the  shape  of  the  Diamond 
Producers'  Association  (1934) ;  and  finally, 
by  arranging  that  the  control  of  the 
Diamond  Corporation  should  pass  to  South 
African  producers  whilst  it  maintained 
sales  relations  with  the  outsiders,  he 
unified  the  diamond  industry  throughout 
Africa  on  a  scale  hitherto  deemed 
impossible. 

The  courage  and  skill  required  to  bring 
all  this  to  pass  served  him  in  good  stead 
in  the  second  great  enterprise  of  his  career : 
copper  mining  in  Northern  Rhodesia. 
His  first  step  was  to  get  his  firm  to  act  as 
consulting  engineers  to  the  new  'conces- 
sion companies'  floated  as  a  result  of  the 
British  South  Africa  Company's  'forward' 
policy  in  Northern  Rhodesia ;  this  gradu- 
ally led  to  financial  participation  in 
mining  and  to  the  creation  of  a  subsidiary, 
Rhodesian  Anglo  American,  Ltd.  (1928). 
A  competing  group,  created  earlier  in  the 
year,  the  Rhodesian  Selection  Trust,  led 
by  (Sir)  A.  Chester  Beatty,  was  strongly 
representative  of  American  interests. 
These  interests  were  invited  to  assist  in  the 


further  financing  of  copper  production, 
which  would  have  meant  the  control  of 
the  Copperbelt  by  American  mining 
houses.  Strongly  resisted  by  Oppenheimer 
and  his  group  'for  imperial  and  financial 
reasons',  this  move  was  in  the  end  de- 
feated. American  participation  continued, 
but  the  balance  of  power  shifted  decisively 
to  the  British  side. 

Oppenheimer' s  third  great  enterprise 
was  the  opening  up  of  the  Orange  Free 
State  goldfield.  The  devaluation  of  the 
South  African  pound,  following  the 
British,  in  1931,  stimulated  prospecting 
activity,  first  on  the  Far  West  Rand  and 
the  Klerksdorp  areas,  a  little  later  on  the 
area  south  of  the  Vaal  River.  In  the  end, 
the  area  round  Odendaalsrust,  hitherto  an 
obscure  little  'dorp'  to  the  south,  proved 
to  be  the  centre  of  activity.  By  a  series 
of  bold  financial  coups,  Oppenheimer 
acquired  control  of  the  most  promising 
'prospects',  taking  over  the  interests  of 
Sir  Abe  Bailey  [q.v.]  (Western  Townships) 
and  obtaining  the  ownership  of  Lewis  and 
Marks.  Consequently  when  production 
began  the  dominating  name  was  the  Anglo 
American  Corporation  and  its  subsidiary, 
the  Orange  Free  State  Investment  Trust 
(1944). 

From  1924  until  1938  Oppenheimer, 
who  was  knighted  in  1921,  represented 
Kimberley  in  the  Union  Parliament  as  a 
supporter  of  J.  C.  Smuts  [q.v.].  He  was 
a  man  of  great  charm,  great  modesty, 
infinite  kindness,  and  a  passionate  believer 
in  the  Commonwealth  and  in  African 
advancement.  His  influence  above  all  was 
responsible  for  the  loan  made  by  the 
mining  houses  of  three  million  pounds  to 
the  municipality  of  Johannesburg  for  the 
creation  of  adequate  housing  for  the 
Bantu  population.  His  own  benefactions 
included  a  considerable  grant  towards  the 
establishment  of  Queen  Elizabeth  House 
at  Oxford;  towards  medical  research  in 
South  Africa;  and  towards  scientific 
research  at  Leeds  University  and  else- 
where. He  was  a  benefactor  of  and 
honoured  by  the  leading  South  African 
universities  and  received  an  honorary 
D.C.L.  from  Oxford  in  1952.  His  bene- 
factions were  continued  after  his  death  by 
the  Ernest  Oppenheimer  Memorial  Trust 
to  which  his  son  and  sole  heir .  to  his 
personal  estate  of  £3,600,000  gave  a 
million  pounds. 

Oppenheimer  married  first,  in  1906, 
May  Lina  (died  1934),  daughter  of  Joseph 
Pollak,  a  London  stockbroker.  Her  sister 
married  his  brother  Louis.  Oppenheimer 


782 


D.N.B.   1951-1960 


Orwin 


had  two  sons,  the  elder  of  whom  succeeded 
him  as  head  of  the  Anglo  American 
Corporation;  the  younger  died  as  the 
result  of  an  accident  in  1935.  Oppenheimer 
married  secondly,  in  1935,  Caroline 
Magdalen,  widow  of  his  nephew,  Sir 
Michael  Oppenheimer. 

When  Oppenheimer  died  in  Johannes- 
burg, 25  November  1957,  there  was 
national  mourning  and  flags  were  flown  at 
half-mast  on  all  government  buildings 
throughout  South  Africa. 

There  are  portraits  by:  W.  Bartis  (1913) 
in  the  possession  of  the  municipality  of 
Kimberley;  T.  Epstein  (1936)  and  R. 
ToUast  (1957)  belonging  to  the  Anglo 
American  Corporation ;  T.  Cuneo  (1954)  in 
the  possession  of  the  family.  A  posthumous 
pastel  by  G.  A.  Campbell  belongs  to  the 
Anglo  American  Corporation  and  is 
based  on  a  portrait  by  the  same  artist 
which  was  presented  by  H.  F.  Oppen- 
heimer to  the  South  African  Institute  of 
International  Affairs  in  1960. 

[Cape  Times,  26  November  1957 ;  The  Times, 
26  and  29  November  1957;  Sir  Theodore 
Gregory,  Ernest  Oppenheimer  and  the  Econo- 
mic Development  of  Southern  Africa,  1962; 
private  information;  personal  knowledge.] 
Theodore  Gregory. 

ORWIN,  CHARLES  STEWART  (1876- 
1955),  agricultural  economist,  was  born 
26  September  1876  at  Horsham,  Sussex, 
into  a  medical  family  with  a  reputation 
for  independent,  radical  thinking.  He  was 
the  only  son  of  Frederick  James  Orwin, 
gentleman,  by  his  wife,  Elizabeth,  daugh- 
ter of  Robert  Campbell  Stewart,  of 
Blackheath,  and  niece  of  George  Gawler 
[q.v.],  governor  of  South  Australia  (1838- 
41).  From  his  earliest  days  Orwin  wanted 
to  be  a  farmer  and,  on  leaving  Dulwich 
College,  he  obtained  a  county  scholarship 
and  entered  the  South  Eastern  Agri- 
cultural College  at  Wye.  There  he  estab- 
lished a  lasting  friendship  with  the 
principal,  (Sir)  (A.)  Daniel  Hall  (whose 
notice  he  later  contributed  to  this 
Dictionary),  which  enriched  his  whole 
hfe.  He  left  Wye  with  a  college  diploma, 
another  from  Cambridge — there  was  no 
degree  in  agriculture  in  those  days — and  an 
associateship  of  the  Surveyors'  Institution. 
Since  there  was  not  enough  money  in 
the  family  to  start  him  in  farming,  Orwin 
decided  on  a  career  as  land  agent  and 
joined  a  west-end  house  agent;  a  year 
later,  when  the  firm  opened  a  country 
office,  he  found  himself  in  charge  of  it. 
In  1903  he  accepted  a  lectureship  at  his 


old  college  at  Wye,  of  which  he  later 
became  an  honorary  fellow.  In  1906  he 
was  recommended  as  agent  to  Christopher 
Turnor  (whose  notice  Orwin  later  con- 
tributed to  this  Dictionary).  Turnor  had 
recently  inherited  nearly  25,000  acres 
in  Lincolnshire.  Orwin  accepted  a  job 
which  was  to  enable  him  to  use  to  the 
full  his  already  remarkably  comprehen- 
sive knowledge  of  the  country  and  to 
develop  his  latent  talent  as  a  far-sighted 
administrator.  The  property,  although 
large,  was  not  wealthy ;  and  he  had  to 
work  hard  and  quickly,  assisted  by  only 
one  clerk.  He  was  also  active  in  local 
government  and,  then  and  later,  in  the 
affairs  of  the  Church.  This  did  not  prevent 
him  from  finding  time  to  work  out  a  system 
of  cost  accounting  which  would  give 
the  farmer  much  the  same  control  over 
his  affairs  as  the  industrialist  had  over  his 
factory  and  would  also  provide  a  reliable 
basis  for  sound  agricultural  policy,  a 
contribution  soon  to  be  given  an  added 
significance  by  war. 

When  (Sir)  Daniel  Hall,  representing  the 
Development  Commission,  persuaded  the 
university  of  Oxford  to  sponsor  a  research 
institute  in  agricultural  economics,  Orwin 
became  its  first  director  (1913).  Hitherto 
the  subject  had  not  been  recognized  as 
one  for  academic  study;  it  fell  to  Orwin 
to  be  the  architect  in  this  new  field,  to 
introduce  the  subject  to  a  rather  suspicious 
public,  to  attract  promising  young  men  to 
study  it,  and  to  lead  the  way  with  his  own 
lively  and  penetrating  researches.  He  was 
the  first  to  use  extensively  surveys,  first  by 
county,  then  by  topic,  in  the  study  of 
agricultural  economics.  When  he  retired 
in  1945  nearly  every  university  in  England, 
Scotland,  and  Wales  had  a  department 
of  agricultural  economics,  and  the  Ministry 
of  Agriculture  its  economics  branch; 
most  of  these  were  led  or  staffed  by  men 
who  had  had  their  initial  training  at  the 
Oxford  Institute  for  Research  in  Agri- 
cultural Economics.  Orwin's  energy  and 
capacity  for  original  thinking  appealed 
to  young  men,  whom  he  went  out  of  his 
way  to  encourage. 

Early  in  his  career  at  Oxford  he  became 
connected  with  Balliol,  of  which  he  was  a 
fellow  (1922),  estates  bursar  (1926-46), 
and  honorary  fellow  (1946).  In  1939  he 
became  the  first  D.Litt.  in  the  Oxford 
school  of  social  studies.  As  a  research 
worker  in  land  problems,  he  did  not  lose 
sight  of  practical  issues.  He  served  on  the 
council  of  the  Land  Agents'  Society  and 
of  the   Royal   Institution   of   Chartered 


783 


Orwin 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Surveyors ;  as  editor  of  the  Journal  of  the 
Royal  Agricultural  Society  (1912-27)  he 
was  in  touch  with  the  more  prominent 
landowners  and  farmers  in  England ;  and 
he  was  a  member  of  the  first  Agri- 
cultural Wages  Board  (1917-21).  He  was 
also  president  of  the  agricultural  section 
of  the  British  Association  (1921)  and 
assessor  to  the  Agricultural  Tribunal  of 
Investigation  (1922-^). 

Orwin  had  remarkable  talents  as  an 
advocate  of  original  views  derived  from 
experience  and  prolonged  study.  He 
contended  that  many  farms  were  too 
small  in  acreage  to  take  advantage  of  the 
economies  offered  by  modern  techniques, 
and  that  this  could  not  be  rectified  with- 
out drastic  changes  in  the  system  of  land 
tenure.  In  later  years  the  need  dominated 
his  thinking.  No  one  can  now  give  serious 
thought  to  land  reform  without  incur- 
ring a  heavy  debt  to  the  author  of  such 
books  as  The  Tenure  of  Agricultural  Land 
(with  W.  R.  Peel,  1925),  The  Future  of 
Farming  (1930),  Speed  the  Plough  (1942) 
and  Problems  of  the  Countryside  (1945),  and 
to  the  editor  of  Country  Planning  (1944). 
His  mastery  of  English  prose,  grasp  of  logic, 
and  avoidance  of  provocation  enabled  him 
to  write  books  and  articles  which  were  as 
enjoyable  as  they  were  persuasive.  He  also 
brought  to  bear  on  present-day  problems 
a  strong  sense  of  history.  In  addition  to 
books  on  farming  as  a  business,  among 
them  Farm  Accounts  ( 1914),  T/ie  Determina- 
tion of  Farming  Costs  (1917),  and  Estate 
Accounts  (with  H.  W.  Kersey,  1926),  he 
wrote  The  Reclamation  of  Exmoor  Forest 
(1929)  during  the  time  he  had  his  home  in 
Minehead,  A  History  of  English  Farming 
(1949),  and,  with  his  second  wife.  The 
Open  Fields  (1938,  2nd  ed.  1954,  his  most 
enduring  work),  and  Farms  &  Fields 
(1944). 

Charles  Orwin  was  very  tall,  his  ap- 
pearance most  impressive,  his  face  hand- 
some and  leonine.  Generous  in  his 
affections  and  opinions,  he  could  be 
easily  hurt,  for  he  was  a  deeply  sensitive 
man.  He  gave  short  shrift  to  the  sillinesses 
of  cleverer  men,  as  Balliol  anecdotes 
testify,  but  to  the  young  he  reached  out 
with  an  especial  and  characteristic 
courtesy. 

In  1902  Orwin  married  Elise  Cecile 
(died  1929),  daughter  of  Edouard  Renault, 
of  Cognac,  France;  they  had  three  sons 
and  three  daughters.  In  1931  he  married, 
secondly,  Christabel  Susan,  daughter  of 
the  late  Charles  Lowry,  headmaster  of 
Tonbridge  School  (1907-22).  Orwin  died 


at  Blewbury,  Berkshire,  30  June  1955. 
There  is  a  portrait  by  Richard  Murray  at 
the  Institute  for  Research  in  Agricultural 
Economics,  Oxford. 

[Countryman,  Autumn  and  Winter  1946, 
Autumn  1955;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  John  Cripps. 

PAGE,  Sir  LEO  FRANCIS  (1890-1951), 
magistrate,  was  born  at  Hobart,  Tas- 
mania, 2  April  1890,  the  youngest  of  six 
sons,  only  two  of  whom  survived  child- 
hood, of  Wilham  Humphrey  Page,  of  the 
Indian  Civil  Service,  and  his  wife,  Alice, 
daughter  of  Richard  Pope.  His  father  had 
become  a  Roman  Catholic  in  early  man- 
hood and  Leo  was  educated  at  Beaumont 
College.  At  the  wish  of  his  father  he  en- 
tered the  Royal  Military  Academy,  Wool- 
wich, and  after  a  year  transferred  to  the 
16th  Lancers.  But  he  was  not  suited  to  the 
army  and  withdrawing  he  entered  Uni- 
versity College,  Oxford,  where  he  obtained 
second  class  honours  in  jurisprudence  in 
1914.  On  the  outbreak  of  war  he  joined  the 
Royal  Flying  Corps,  but  after  a  serious 
accident  while  bringing  home  a  plane 
from  France  he  was  invalided  out  in 
1916,  having  attained  the  rank  of  flight 
commander.  In  that  year  he  married 
Edith  Violet,  daughter  of  Captain  Fred- 
erick Cleave  Loder-Symonds,  R.A.,  of 
Hinton  Manor,  Faringdon,  Berkshire, 
by  whom  he  had  two  sons  and  a  daughter. 

Page  became  a  member  of  the  Inner 
Temple  and  was  called  to  the  bar  in  1918. 
He  practised  for  several  years  and  had 
reason  to  anticipate  success,  but  he  was 
never  robust  and  tuberculosis  developed. 
Enjoying  a  secure  private  income,  he 
abandoned  practice  and  settled  with  his 
family  at  Faringdon.  There  in  1925  he 
became  a  justice  of  the  peace  for  Berk- 
shire and  a  member  of  the  bench  at 
Faringdon  where  his  father-in-law  had 
earlier  been  chairman  for  many  years. 
In  1946  he  was  elected  chairman,  an 
office  which  he  held  until  his  death.  He 
also  served  as  chairman  of  the  local 
juvenile  court  and  for  a  period  as  chairman 
of  the  appeals  committee  at  the  Berkshire 
quarter-sessions. 

In  all  this  work  Page  took  more  than 
the  ordinary  interest.  While  doing  his 
full  share  of  the  court  work,  he  made  a 
deep  study  of  the  problems  of  local 
justice.  Not  content  with  his  limited 
experience  in  a  rural  court,  he  visited 
many  other  courts  in  different  parts  of 
the  country.  This  qualified  him  to  write 
several  books  about  the  work  of  magis- 


784. 


D.N.B.  1851-1960 


Page 


trates  on  which  he  became  a  leading 
authority.  The  most  influential  were 
Justice  of  the  Peace  (1936)  and  Crime  and 
the  Community  (1937).  In  court,  while 
always  merciful,  Page  was  a  realist  and 
more  open  to  appeals  to  reason  than  to 
sentiment. 

Although  he  was  known  primarily  as  a 
leading  justice  of  the  peace,  Page  also 
gave  much  time  and  enthusiasm  to 
helping  prisoners  and  ex-prisoners,  and 
this  became  his  main  interest  in  his  later 
years.  From  1939  for  many  years  after- 
wards he  was  chairman  of  the  visiting 
magistrates  at  Oxford  prison;  he  also 
became  chairman  of  its  Discharged 
Prisoners'  Aid  Society.  He  took  a  keen 
interest  in  many  individual  cases  and  kept 
in  touch  with  some  of  them  after  their 
release.  No  case  which  Page  considered 
deserving  was  too  much  trouble  for  him, 
although  he  had  a  quick  eye  for  those 
who  sought  to  impose  on  him  without 
adequate  effort  to  make  good. 

From  1940  to  1945  Page  served  in  the 
lord  chancellor's  department  as  secretary 
of  commissions  of  the  peace.  He  had  a 
freer  hand  than  was  usual  since  Lord 
Simon  [q.v.]  was  much  occupied  with  war- 
time problems  outside  his  office.  Page  was 
considerably  shocked  by  much  of  what  he 
saw.  Many  of  those  recommended  for 
appointment  as  justices  of  the  peace  in 
local  areas  were,  in  his  own  words,  'older 
than  was  desirable',  and  selected  in 
recognition  of  some  other  form  of  public 
service.  It  was  'rare  to  find  anyone  wholly 
without  political  connection'.  Page  did 
all  he  could  to  improve  matters.  The 
reforms  which  took  place  after  the  war 
were  not  yet  being  planned,  but  when  they 
came  Page's  influence  was  apparent.  It  was 
he  who  influenced  the  lord  chancellor  to 
secure  the  passing  into  law  of  an  Act  in 
1941  which  empowered  him  to  prevent 
elderly  and  infirm  lay  justices  from  sitting 
in  court. 

Page  was  essentially  a  conservative 
reformer.  Keen  and  successful  though  he 
was  in  bringing  about  many  reforms  within 
the  existing  system,  he  was  apparently 
not  aware  that  demands  were  being  made 
for  radical  changes  in  the  system  itself. 
To  some  extent  his  mind  widened  as  his 
experience  increased.  In  1937  Page  was 
nominated  by  his  bench  as  its  representa- 
tive on  the  council  of  the  Magistrates' 
Association,  many  of  whose  members, 
without  being  in  any  way  extremists,  had 
ideas  for  reform  beyond  what  Page  then 
considered  reasonable.  To  such  members 


Page  seemed  unwilling  to  pursue  his  ideas 
to  their  logical  conclusions.  For  instance, 
while  he  profoundly  believed  that  crimi- 
nal courts  should  be  better  informed 
about  the  offenders  whom  they  convicted, 
he  was  at  first  satisfied  with  the  existing 
method  whereby  such  social  inquiries  as 
were  made  about  offenders  took  place 
before  trial  and  thus  before  guilt  was 
established.  A  substantial  majority  took 
the  view  that  most  serious  cases  should 
be  adjourned  after  conviction  for  full 
inquiries  to  be  made  before  sentence  was 
passed.  Page  resigned  in  protest  in  1940 
and  took  no  further  part  in  the  Associa- 
tion's work.  This  was  mainly  due  to  the 
claims  of  his  official  work,  but  when  this 
ceased  he  did  not  return  to  the  Association 
although  he  later  accepted  the  idea  that 
serious  cases  should  be  adjourned  for 
inquiries  after  conviction. 

In  1946  a  strong  royal  commission  was 
set  up  under  Lord  du  Parcq  [q.v.]  to 
inquire  into  the 'work  of  justices  of  the 
peace.  Page's  evidence  was  printed  as  an 
appendix  to  its  minutes  of  evidence.  The 
report  of  this  commission  (1948)  greatly 
influenced  the  preparation  of  the  post- 
war reforms  and  reflected  many  of  the 
ideas  which  Page  had  laid  before  it. 
Valuable  as  the  new  code  was,  the  reforms 
were  all  within  the  existing  system  and 
on  some  points  were  less  drastic  than 
Page  himself  had  hoped. 

The  usefulness  of  psychiatry  was 
gradually  realized  by  Page  who  wrote 
'Medical  men  who  have  speciaUsed  in  this 
branch  of  research  have  a  very  definite 
and  valuable  contribution  to  make  to 
the  treatment  of  dehnquency'  {Quarterly 
Review,  April  1940).  But  in  his  view  the 
help  of  such  experts  appUed  only  to 
abnormal  cases  and  should  be  Umited  to 
examining  and  reporting  on  offenders. 
He  was  not  in  sympathy  with  the  sug- 
gestion that  psychiatrists  should  share  the 
responsibility  of  selecting  appropriate 
sentences,  a  task  which  Page  considered 
those  on  the  bench  were  competent  to 
perform,  although  he  urged  that  they 
should  be  better  informed  about  the 
various  methods  of  dealing  with  offenders. 
Thus  in  1948  he  wrote  in  his  book  Th^ 
Sentence  of  the  Court  that  all  those  on  the 
bench,  including  professional  lawyers, 
should  receive  instruction  which  would 
fit  them  to  pass  sentence.  But  he  put 
forward  no  plan  whereby  lawyers  ap- 
pointed in  mid-life  to  the  criminal  bench 
could  receive  such  instruction. 

Page  was  high  sheriff  for  his  county  in 


785 


Page 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


1937.  In  1948  he  received  a  knighthood, 
but  he  was  already  in  severe  ill  health 
although  continuing  bravely  with  as  much 
work  as  he  could  undertake.  His  consis- 
tent love  for  suffering  humanity  and  his 
humility  were  the  qualities  most  valued 
by  his  friends;  to  the  end  his  sense  of 
humour  never  left  him.  He  died  at  his 
home  at  Faringdon  31  August  1951. 
[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Claud  Mullins. 

PAGET,  Sir  RICHARD  ARTHUR 
SURTEES,  second  baronet,  of  Cranmore 
(1869-1955),  barrister  and  physicist,  the 
eldest  son  of  (Sir)  Richard  Horner  Paget, 
M.P.,  later  first  baronet,  by  his  wife, 
Caroline  Isabel,  daughter  of  Henry  Edward 
Surtees,  of  Redworth  Hall,  county 
Durham,  was  born  at  Cranmore  Hall, 
Somerset,  13  January  1869.  He  was  edu- 
cated at  Eton  and  Magdalen  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  obtained  a  third  class 
in  chemistry  in  1891 ;  was  called  to  the 
bar  by  the  Inner  Temple  in  1895;  and 
succeeded  his  father  in  1908. 

Paget's  legal  and  scientific  background, 
together  with  his  engaging  personal 
qualities,  fitted  him  admirably  for  nego- 
tiatory  tasks  such  as  those  of  secretary 
successively  to  the  patent  law  committee 
(1900),  the  court  of  arbitration  dealing 
with  the  Grimsby  fishing  dispute  (1900), 
the  court  of  arbitration  under  the 
Metropolitan  Water  Act  (1902),  the 
University  College  transfer  commission 
(1905),  and  the  submarine  and  electrical 
section  of  the  Admiralty  board  of  in- 
ventions (1915-18). 

Possessed  of  intellectual  gifts  and 
potentialities  of  an  unusually  high  order, 
coupled  with  originality  and  inventive- 
ness of  mind,  Paget  was  obviously  marked 
out  for  distinction  in  whatever  field  he 
cared  to  cultivate.  As  it  happened,  it  was 
not  necessary  for  him  to  become  a  narrow 
scientific  specialist;  instead,  he  made 
contributions  of  significance  to  many 
varied  departments  of  knowledge,  both 
scientific  and  artistic,  such  as  acoustics, 
music,  architecture,  town-planning,  agri- 
culture, anthropology,  and  human  speech, 
besides  cultivating  practical  music  and 
artistic  crafts  such  as  pottery  and  drawing. 
The  versatility  and  boldness  of  his 
achievements  surprised  as  much  by 
their  novelty  and  unexpectedness  as 
by  their  shrewd  perspicacity.  His  pene- 
trating foresight  into  the  innate  possi- 
bilities of  ideas  prompted  the  remark  that 
he  was  always  'forty  years  ahead  of  his 


time* ;  this  was  certainly  true  with  regard 
to  the  streamline  car  he  designed  in  191O4 
also  of  some  aspects  of  speech.  His  book, 
Human  Speech^  first  published  in  1930, 
was  reissued  in  1964  because  of  its 
connection  with  modern  developments  in 
communication  engineering. 

Undoubtedly,  Paget's  most  important 
original  investigations  were  those  con- 
nected with  language,  not  only  in  regard 
to  phonetics  and  the  technique  of  vocaliza- 
tion, or  linguistics  and  vocabulary — to  all 
of  which  he  added  new  conceptions — but 
in  the  most  fundamental  processes  and 
means  through  which  individuals  can 
transfer  ideas  from  one  to  another.  Hisl 
famous  theory  of  pantomimic  action  of 
the  tongue  and  lips  explained  lucidly  how 
language  arises  at  all  and  related  it 
directly  to  the  senses  and  affections.  From 
this  followed  naturally  his  special  interest 
in  the  communication  problems  of  the 
deaf  and  dumb.  The  models  he  designed 
for  illustrating  the  action  of  the  human 
speech  organs  were  deposited  in  the 
Royal  Institution. 

Paget  was  singularly  well  equipped  for 
work  in  language  and  speech  for  he 
possessed  an  abnormally  remarkable 
musical  aural  sensitivity  which  was  no 
doubt  responsible  for  that  instinctive 
harmonic  creative  ability  ascribed  to 
him  by  all  those  who  heard  his  improvisa- 
tory musical  performances ;  in  addition,  he 
had  a  passionate  interest  in  his  fellow  men, 
being  genial,  deeply  sympathetic,  not 
without  humour,  and  capable  of  great 
affection  for  young  and  old  alike ;  hence 
his  efforts  on  behalf  of  those  deprived  of 
the  powers  of  speech  and  hearing.  He 
laid  down  the  principles  for  an  entirely 
new  approach  in  communication  with 
deaf  and  dumb  people  by  means  of  a 
systematic  sign  language,  the  further 
development  of  which  was  continued  after 
his  death. 

Paget  was  frequently  described  as  an 
amateur  scientist :  a  term  of  both  admira- 
tion and  honour.  He  was  one  of  the 
rare  number  of  distinguished  individual 
workers  who  pursued  scientific  investiga- 
tion privately  and  did  so  much  to  promote 
discovery  and  invention  before  the  age  of 
organized  science  and  the  professional 
scientists.  Greatly  esteemed  as  a  lecturer 
and  research  worker,  he  was  an  active 
member  of  several  learned  societies: 
fellow  of  the  Institute  of  Physics,  of  the 
Physical  Society,  and  of  the  Royal 
Anthropological  Institute,  honorary  as- 
sociate of  the  Royal  Institute  of  British 


786 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Palairet 


Architects,  honorary  associate  member  of 
the  Town  Planning  Institute,  and  member 
and  sometime  manager  of  the  Royal 
Institution. 

By  his  first  wife,  whom  he  married  in 
1897,  Lady  Muriel  Paget  [q.v.],  he  had 
two  sons  (one  of  whom  died  in  infancy) 
and  three  daughters.  His  second  wife, 
whom  he  married  in  1939,  was  Grace 
Hartley,  only  daughter  of  Walter  Herbert 
Glover,  of  Birkdale  and  Grasmere.  Paget 
died  in  London  23  October  1955  and  was 
succeeded  by  his  surviving  son,  John 
Starr  (born  1914). 

There  is  a  portrait  in  the  book  Portrait 
Drawings  (1949)  by  Peter  Scott  of  which 
the  original  is  in  the  possession  of  the 
family. 

[The  Times,  24  and  28  October  1955; 
Year  Book  of  the  Physical  Society,  1956; 
Nature,  31  December  1955 ;  Motor,  29  August 
1956 ;  personal  knowledge.]  H.  Lowery. 

PAINE,  CHARLES  HUBERT  SCOTT- 
(1891-1954),  pioneer  of  aviation  and  of 
high-speed  motor-boats.  [See  Scorr- 
Paine.] 

PALAIRET,  Sir  (CHARLES)  MICHAEL 

(1882-1956),  diplomatist,  was  born  29 
September  1882  at  Berkeley,  Gloucester- 
shire, the  youngest  of  the  three  sons  of 
Charles  Harvey  Palairet,  captain  in  the 
9th  Lancers,  and  his  wife,  Emily  Henry. 
He  was  descended  from  a  French  family 
called  Palayret  who  settled  in  Holland 
after  the  revocation  of  the  Edict  of 
Nantes.  John  and  Elias  Palairet  [qq.v.] 
settled  in  England  where  subsequent 
members  of  the  family  usually  resided. 
In  Palairet's  lifetime  the  family  name  was 
notable  for  the  cricketing  prowess  of  his 
older  cousins,  L.  C.  H.  and  R.  C.  N. 
Palairet.  On  his  mother's  side  he  was  a 
great-grandson  of  Thomas  Allan,  the 
mineralogist  [q.v.]. 

Educated  at  Eton,  he  went  next  to 
Touraine  to  perfect  his  French  and  to 
Weimar  for  German.  He  was  nominated 
for  the  diplomatic  service  in  1905  and 
sent  in  the  following  year  to  Rome  where 
in  1907  he  was  appointed  third  secretary. 
He  served  successively  in  Vienna,  Paris, 
where  he  and  his  wife  were  received  into 
the  Roman  Catholic  Church  in  1916,  and 
Athens.  He  returned  to  Paris  on  the  staff 
of  the  British  delegation  to  the  peace 
conference  (1918-19)  and  later  in  the 
embassy  (1920-22).  As  counsellor  in 
Tokyo  (1922-5)  he  took  charge  during  the 
absence  of  the  ambassador.  Sir  Charles 


Eliot  [q.v.],  and  narrowly  escaped  injury 
in  the  (hsastrous  earthquake  of  1923  when 
the  embassy  buildings  collapsed.  He  and 
his  wife  became  friends  of  Paul  Claudel 
who  was  then  the  French  ambassador. 

In  1928  Palairet  went  as  counsellor  to 
Rome  but  in  December  1929  was  pro- 
moted to  be  minister  in  Bucharest  where 
their  charm  and  hospitality  and  keen 
interest  in  Romanian  culture  won  the 
Palairets  a  wide  circle  of  friends.  Prince 
Carol,  who  returned  from  exile  and  be- 
came king  in  1930,  showed  no  grudge  at 
having  been  requested  to  leave  England 
in  1928  because  of  his  alleged  involvement 
in  a  plot  to  place  him  on  the  Romanian 
throne.  Good  Anglo-Romanian  relations, 
both  political  and  conmiercial,  were 
estabUshed,  but  before  Palairet's  transfer 
to  Stockholm  in  February  1935  German 
economic  and  political  penetration  had 
become  menacing. 

Transferred  to  Vienna  in  1937,  Palairet 
found  German  National  Socialism  ruth- 
less and  aggressive.  He  keenly  realized  the 
dangers  to  which  Nazi  control  of  Austria 
would  lead  and  had  little  patience  with 
those  in  Great  Britain  and  France  who 
were  complacent  or  defeatist  over  the 
problem.  Palairet  admired,  though  he 
thought  it  risky.  Dr.  Schuschnigg's  bold 
challenge  to  Hitler  by  announcing  a 
plebiscite.  Early  in  the  morning  of  11 
March  1938  Palairet  reported  the  closing 
of  the  Austrian  frontier  with  Germany, 
the  prelude  to  the  Nazi  invasion  of 
Austria,  after  which  he  was  recalled  and 
the  legation  closed.  In  June  of  the  same 
year  he  was  appointed  K.C.M.G.  and  in 
September-December  he  took  charge  of 
the  British  legation  in  Bucharest  during 
the  illness  of  Sir  Reginald  Hoare  [q.v.]. 

In  June  1939  Palairet  went  as  minister 
to  Athens,  a  welcome  appointment  but 
soon  overshadowed  by  war.  In  October 
1940  the  Italians  invaded  Greece  but 
met  with  such  effective  resistance  that  in 
the  following  April  German  forces  were 
sent  to  their  assistance.  Despite  British 
intervention  which  Palairet  had  ad- 
vocated with  notable  pertinacity  it 
proved  impossible  to  prevent  the  German 
occupation  of  the  mainland  and  the 
abandonment  of  Crete,  to  which  the 
Greek  king,  accompanied  by  Palairet,  had 
withdrawn  on  23  April.  A  month  later 
they  were  taken  off  Crete  and  eventually 
arrived  in  London  in  September.  Palairet 
remained  accredited  to  the  Greek  mon- 
arch and  in  May  1942  his  status  was 
raised  to  ambassador.  He  retired  in  April 


787 


Palairet 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


1943,  but  returned  to  the  Foreign  Office 
as  a  temporary  assistant  under-secretary 
of  state,  dealing  with  matters  concerning 
prisoners  of  war,  until  July  1945. 

Palairet  was  tall,  slim,  distinguished 
in  appearance;  scrupulous  and  tolerant, 
with  a  wide,  cultivated  taste.  His  integ- 
rity and  steadfastness  of  character  sprang 
from  a  deep  religious  faith,  which  never 
wavered  even  in  the  most  frustrating  and 
dangerous  crises  of  his  career.  In  his 
retirement  one  of  his  occupations  was  the 
translation  of  German  religious  books. 
He  died  5  August  1956  at  his  home  at 
Allerford,  Minehead,  Somerset. 

In  1915  Palairet  married  Mary  de  Vere, 
daughter  of  Colonel  (later  Brigadier- 
General)  Herbert  William  Studd,  of  the 
Coldstream  Guards.  They  had  one  son, 
and  a  daughter  who  married  the  second 
Elarl  of  Oxford  and  Asquith. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Alec  Randall. 

PANETH,  FRIEDRICH  ADOLF  (1887- 
1958),  scientist,  was  born  in  Vienna  31 
August  1887,  the  second  of  the  three  sons 
of  Joseph  Paneth,  a  distinguished  physio- 
logist, and  his  wife,  Sophie  Schwab,  the 
daughter  of  a  leading  industrialist.  Living 
in  a  highly  cultured  milieu,  Paneth  was 
educated  at  the  Schotten  Gymnasium 
and  the  university  of  Vienna.  He  then 
studied  for  a  year  under  Adolph  von 
Baeyer  in  Munich  before  returning  to 
Vienna  to  obtain  his  Ph.D.  in  1910.  In 
1912  he  became  an  assistant  in  the  Radiiun 
Research  Institute  attached  to  the  Vienna 
Academy  of  Science;  in  1917  he  joined 
the  Prague  Institute  of  Technology ;  but 
two  years  later  he  went  as  assistant 
professor  to  the  university  of  Hamburg. 
In  1922  he  became  head  of  the  inorganic 
department  of  the  chemical  institute  of 
the  university  of  Berlin  and  in  1929  head  of 
the  chemical  institute  of  the  university 
of  Konigsberg,  an  unusual  distinction  for 
an  inorganic  chemist.  When  Hitler  came 
into  power  in  1933  Paneth  happened  to 
be  in  London  and  remained  there  as  a 
guest  of  the  Imperial  College  of  Science 
and  Technology  where  in  1938  he  became 
reader  in  atomic  chemistry.  In  1939  he 
was  invited  to  the  chair  of  chemistry  at 
Durham.  In  1943-5  he  was  in  charge  of 
the  chemistry  division  of  the  joint  British- 
Canadian  atomic  energy  team  in  Montreal. 
After  the  war  he  returned  to  Durham 
where  he  established  the  Londonderry 
Laboratory  for  radiochemistry  and  re- 
sumed his  former  researches.  After  his 


retirement  in  1953  he  accepted  an  invita- 
tion to  become  a  director  of  the  Max- 
Planck  Institute  of  Chemistry  in  Mainz 
where  the  last  five  years  of  his  life  were 
spent  in  building  up  an  active  research 
school. 

One  of  Paneth' s  first  pieces  of  research 
was  an  attempt  to  separate  radium  D 
from  radiolead.  George  Hevesy  was 
engaged  in  a  similar  attempt  in 
Manchester  and  the  results  of  their 
investigations  were  published  in  a  joint 
paper  in  1913.  Early  in  January  of  that 
year  the  first  joint  investigation  with 
radioactive  tracers  was  carried  out  in  the 
study  of  the  solubility  of  lead  sulphide 
and  lead  chromate ;  and  labelled  lead  and 
bismuth  were  used  in  electrochemical 
studies.  In  the  ensuing  years  Paneth  carried 
out  several  important  studies  applying 
radium  D  and  E  and  thorium  B  as 
tracers.  One  of  these  was  the  study  of 
adsorption  of  TkB,  ThC,  and  Ra  on  such 
compounds  as  titanium,  chromium  and 
manganese  oxides,  barium  sulphate  and 
chromate,  and  the  silver  halides.  Adsorp- 
tion was  strong  when  the  radioelements 
formed  an  insoluble  compound  with  the 
electronegative  component  of  the  adsorb- 
ing material. 

Before  he  left  the  Radium  Research 
Institute  Paneth  discovered  the  existence 
of  a  volatile  polonium  hydride.  This  led 
to  the  discovery  of  a  volatile  bismuth 
hydride  and  later  of  a  volatile  lead  hy- 
dride. After  he  left  Vienna  he  discovered 
a  volatile  hydride  of  tin  and  much  en- 
larged the  knowledge  of  an  already  known 
germanium  hydride.  These  studies  led  to 
the  recognition  that  all  elements  with 
atomic  nimibers  which  have  one  to  four 
units  less  than  a  rare  gas  are  capable  of 
forming  gaseous  hydrides.  Through  these 
investigations  Paneth  became  the  greatest 
authority  of  his  time  on  volatile  hydrides. 

At  Hamburg  Paneth  continued  his 
important  studies  on  the  surface  adsorp- 
tion and  worked  out  a  method  which 
enabled  him  to  determine  the  surface 
area  of  powders  by  using  radioactive 
indicators. 

Possibly  Paneth's  most  important  work, 
the  demonstration  of  the  existence  of  free 
radicals,  was  to  a  large  extent  carried  out 
whilst  he  was  at  Konigsberg.  The  prepa- 
ration of  free  methyl  had  been  attempted 
by  Kolbe  in  1849  and  from  that  time  the 
concept  of  an  organic  radical  was  promi- 
nent in  many  theories  of  organic  reactions, 
although  direct  proof  was  lacking.  Paneth 
and  his  co-workers  succeeded  in  showing 


788 


r).N.B.  1051-1960 


Pankhurst 


that  free  methyl  radicals  produced  in  the 
gas  phase  could  persist  for  a  small  but 
measureable  time  before  recombining  to 
form  methane.  Free  ethyl  was  similarly 
produced  from  lead  tetraethyl  and  shown 
to  react  with  zinc,  cadmium,  antimony, 
and  lead.  He  also  succeeded  in  estimating 
the  mean  half -life  of  radicals. 

In  the  spring  of  1913  Paneth  had  spent 
a  few  months  with  Frederick  Soddy 
[q.v.]  at  Glasgow  where  he  became  inter- 
ested in  gas  analytical  methods  which  he 
later  developed  to  a  most  remarkable 
extent  and  appUed  to  the  study  of  the 
isolation  and  measurement  of  minute 
amounts  of  heUum  and  other  gases  of 
the  atmosphere.  He  then  applied  these 
methods  of  helium  analysis  to  the  deter- 
mination of  the  age  of  meteorites.He  arrived 
at  very  high  values  for  the  age  of  some 
meteorites  but  the  discovery  of  the  pro- 
duction of  helium  by  cosmic  rays  led  him  in 
1952  to  re-examine  some  of  his  conclusions. 
He  arrived  at  the  result  that  a  substantial 
part  of  the  helium  present  in  iron  meteor- 
ites was  composed  of  He3  and  the  age  of  the 
meteorites  correspondingly  less.  According 
to  his  paper  published  in  1954  the  age  of 
most  meteorites  is  between  100  and  200 
million  years  and  some  very  much  less. 
He  investigated  numerous  meteorites 
and  bequeathed  to  the  Radium  Research 
Institute  in  Vienna  his  collection  of  over 
a  hundred  specimens  together  with 
literature  on  the  subject.  His  studies  of 
meteorites  led  him  on  to  the  problem  of 
the  formation  of  the  elements  and  the 
universe.  Always  a  most  fascinating 
lecturer,  he  was  especially  stimulating  on 
these  topics. 

The  methods  of  separating  and  measur- 
ing very  small  quantities  of  helium  and 
other  rare  gases  were  used  in  other  ways 
by  Paneth.  The  first  recorded  measure- 
ment of  a  microscopic  product  in  a 
nuclear  reaction  involving  neutrons  was 
made  by  him  when  he  succeeded  in 
measuring  the  heUum  formed  in  the 
neutron  irradiation  of  methyl  borate.  He 
also  made  numerous  contributions  to  the 
study  of  the  stratosphere. 

The  energy  with  which  Paneth  pursued 
his  professional  activities  did  not  prevent 
him  from  developing  his  early  cultural 
interests  which  in  later  years  focused 
mainly  on  history,  especially  the  history 
of  science.  He  was  an  eminent  connoisseur 
of  the  history  of  alchemy  and  made  a 
special  study  of  the  works  of  Robert 
Boyle  [q.v.].  When  he  went  to  Durham 
he  was  astonished  to  find  that  hardly 


anyone  there  was  familiar  with  the  name 
of  Thomas  Wright  [q.v.]  who  first  dis- 
cerned the  nature  of  the  Milky  Way,  or 
knew  that  the  round  stone  tower  at 
Westerton  near  Durham  had  been  Wright's 
observatory.  Paneth  succeeded  in  arousing 
public  interest  with  the  result  that  a 
memorial  plaque  was  affixed  to  the  tower 
and  the  two  hundredth  anniversary  of  the 
pubhcation  of  Wright's  Original  Theory 
duly  celebrated  in  1950. 

Paneth  was  naturalized  in  1939  and 
while  conserving  his  feeUngs  of  gratitude 
towards  his  native  country  became 
thoroughly  steeped  in  the  British  way  of 
life.  He  was  a  member  of  the  Athenaeum 
and  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1947.  In  1913  he 
married  Else  Hartmann,  a  doctor  of  medi- 
cine of  Vienna  and  later  of  Edinburgh. 
She  was  the  daughter  of  the  distinguished 
historian  Ludo  Moritz  Hartmann,  Austrian 
ambassador  in  Berlin  after  the  war  of 
1914-18.  Paneth  had  a  son  and  a  daughter. 
He  died  in  Vienna  17  September  1958 
and  is  buried  in  the  suburban  churchyard 
of  Dobling,  where  by  his  wish  the  inscrip- 
tion on  his  grave  bears  no  more  than  his 
name  followed  by  the  letters  F.R.S. 

[H.  J.  Emel6us  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  vi,  1960; 
personal  knowledge.]  G.  ELevesy. 

PANKHURST,  Dame  CHRISTABEL 
HARRIETTE  (1880-1958),  suffragette, 
was  born  at  Manchester  22  September 
1880,  the  eldest  child  of  Richard  Marsden 
Pankhurst,  a  lawyer  of  advanced  poUtical 
opinions,  and  his  wife,  Emmeline  Pank- 
hurst [q.v.].  Although  Richard  Pankhurst 
in  public  life  was  an  austere  character, 
he  was  an  indulgent  family  man.  He 
chose  Christabel  for  the  name  of  his  first 
child  because  of  the  Unes  in  Coleridge's 
poem: 

The  lovely  lady,  Christabel, 
Whom  her  father  loves  so  well. 

Although  intellectually  exciting  the 
Pankhurst  home  was  not  prosperous. 
After  a  few  years  the  family  migrated  to 
London  and  lived  in  Russell  Square, 
Mrs.  Pankhurst  opening  a  shop  in 
Bloomsbury  where  she  sold  silks,  pottery, 
lampshades,  and  the  like,  while  Richard 
Pankhurst  divided  his  time  between 
chambers  in  Manchester  and  London. 
They  retiu*ned  eventually  to  Manchester 
where  Richard  Pankhurst  died  prema- 
turely in  1898.  In  an  age  when  poverty 
was  regarded  as  something  of  a  disgrace 
the    Pankhursts    comforted    themselves 


780 


Pankhurst 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


with  the  knowledge  that  they  were  only- 
poor  because  they  were  idealists :  they 
preferred  causes  to  comfort.  Although 
after  her  husband's  death  Mts.  Pankhurst 
was  compelled  to  work,  she  devoted  her 
spare  time  and  distinctive  talents  to 
the  two  causes  with  which  he  had  been 
most  closely  associated — the  Independent 
Labour  Party  and  women's  suffrage. 

From  the  first  she  formed  the  highest 
opinion  of  the  talents  and  capacity  of  her 
eldest  daughter,  and  it  was  decided  that 
she  should  follow  in  her  father's  footsteps 
and  read  law  at  Manchester.  She  was 
refused  admission  to  Lincoln's  Inn,  of 
which  her  father  had  been  a  member, 
because  she  was  a  woman.  At  this  time 
she  met  two  remarkable  women,  Esther 
Roper  and  Eva  Gore-Booth  (sister  to  the 
Countess  Markievicz  who  was  the  first 
woman  elected  to  the  House  of  Commons) ; 
they  had  come  to  the  north  to  organize 
women  workers  in  the  mills  for  economic 
and  political  purposes.  The  three  young 
women  were  much  influenced  by  the  spirit 
of  revolt  against  the  depressed  position  of 
women  which  was  then  making  itself  felt 
among  independent  and  intelligent  youth. 
Mrs.  Pankhurst  was  working  to  form  what 
she  had  almost  decided  to  call  the 
Women's  Labour  Representation  Com- 
mittee, on  the  precedent  of  the  Labour 
Representation  Committee.  Christabel 
Pankhurst  then  intervened  with  the 
suggestion  that  the  body  should  be 
called  the  Women's  Social  and  Political 
Union.  This  was  formed  in  1903,  and,  in 
its  abbreviated  form  of  W.S.P.U.,  was  to 
attract  the  loyalty  of  countless  women 
and  to  introduce  militant  action  into  the 
calm  of  British  politics. 

Christabel  Pankhurst  had  grown  into 
an  attractive  young  woman — essentially 
feminine,  with  a  lovely  complexion  and  a 
beautiful  speaking  voice,  but  where  the 
women's  cause  was  concerned  there  was 
in  her  character  that  streak  of  iron  which 
had  marked  her  father.  A  close  friend  of 
the  family  observed  that  both  Christabel 
and  her  next  sister,  Sylvia,  had  a  harden- 
ing influence  on  the  personality  of  their 
mother.  Certainly  from  the  time  of  the 
organization  of  the  W.S.P.U.  Mrs.  Pank- 
hurst deferred  to  the  zeal  and  markedly 
martial  qualities  of  her  eldest  daughter. 
For  two  years  after  1903  they  devoted 
themselves  to  propaganda  in  Lancashire, 
attracting  to  them  a  valuable  recruit  in 
Annie  Kenney  [q.v.]  to  whom  Christabel 
Pankhurst  became  warmly  attached.  In 
1905    came   the   first   act   of  militancy. 


On  13  October,  with  Annie  Kenney, 
Christabel  Pankhurst  attended  a  Liberal 
meeting  in  the  Free  Trade  Hall,  Man- 
chester, held  in  support  of  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill's  candidature  for  north-west 
Manchester.  The  principal  speaker  was 
Sir  Edward  Grey  (later  Viscount  Grey  of 
Fallodon,  q.v.),  and  ironically  enough  both 
men  were  supporters  of  women's  franchise. 
Annie  Kenney  asked  whether  the  Liberals, 
if  they  came  to  power,  would  make 
women's  suffrage  a  government  measure. 
When  no  reply  was  given,  Christabel 
Pankhurst  rose  and  held  up  a  banner  on 
which  was  written  'Votes  for  Women'. 
The  two  girls  were  then  somewhat 
roughly  expelled  from  the  meeting,  and 
on  attempting  to  make  a  speech  outside 
were  arrested  and  subsequently  fined  a 
few  shillings  with  the  alternative  of  prison, 
which  they  chose.  This  episode  is  com- 
memorated in  the  Free  Trade  Hall  by  a 
plaque  which  was  put  up  in  1960.  As  soon 
as  the  girls  were  set  free  they  were  wel- 
comed by  a  mass  demonstration  at  the 
Free  Trade  Hall,  organized  by  the 
Independent  Labour  Party  with  Keir 
Hardie  [q.v.]  as  principal  speaker;  the 
wit  and  accomplished  oratory  of  Christabel 
captured  the  audience. 

When  the  general  election  of  1906  was 
over  Christabel  Pankhurst  concentrated 
on  working  for  her  degree  at  Manchester 
and  in  that  year,  with  one  other,  obtained 
a  first  class  with  honours  in  the  final  LL.B. 
examination.  She  then  went  to  join  her 
family  in  London  where  the  headquarters 
of  W.S.P.U.  were  estabhshed  in  Clement's 
Inn.  After  an  internal  convulsion  (which 
was  not  to  be  the  last),  the  Union  was 
reformed  in  the  autumn  of  1907  and 
Christabel  Pankhurst  was  appointed  its 
organizing  secretary.  Her  organizing 
genius  was  remarkable  and  it  was  backed 
by  authority  which  was  absolute.  She 
took  little  direct  part  in  the  militant 
demonstrations,  her  work  as  organizer 
being  too  useful  to  risk  the  interruptions 
of  imprisonment.  On  21  June  1908  the 
Union,  supported  by  all  shades  of 
opinion  favouring  the  women's  vote,  was 
responsible  for  a  gigantic  rally  in  Hyde 
Park,  at  which  half  a  million  people  were 
calculated  to  be  present.  Christabel 
Pankhurst,  speaking  from  a  farm-cart, 
made  a  speech  which  was  long 
remembered. 

Later  in  the  same  year  she  and  her 
mother  were  arrested  for  appealing  to  the 
public  to  help  the  suffragettes  rush  the 
House  of  Commons.  The  case  came  up  at 


1 


790 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Parker,  E.  F.  M.  S. 


Bow  Street  on  21  October  1908.  Christa- 
bel  Pankhurst  subpoenaed  and  cross- 
examined  the  home  secretary,  H.  J.  (later 
Viscount)  Gladstone  [q.v.]  and  the  chan- 
cellor of  the  Exchequer,  Lloyd  George. 
(Sir)  Max  Beerbohm  [q.v.]  was  in  court 
and  has  left  this  impression  of  Miss 
Pankhurst : 

She  has  all  the  qualities  which  an  actress 
needs,  and  of  which  so  few  actresses  have  any. 
Her  whole  body  is  alive  with  her  every  meaning. 
As  she  stood  there  with  a  rustling  sheaf  of 
notes  in  one  hand,  the  other  hand  did  the 
work  of  twenty  average  hands.  ...  As  she 
stood  there  with  her  head  inclined  merrily 
to  one  side,  trilling  her  questions  to  the 
Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer,  she  was  like 
nothing  so  much  as  a  little  singing  bird  bom 
in  captivity. 

In  the  result  she  was  sent  to  prison  for 
ten  weeks  but  was  released  in  time  for 
Christmas. 

Innumerable  plots  and  ruses  sprang 
from  Christabel  Pankhurst's  fertile  brain 
during  the  militant  campaign,  which 
gathered  momentum  from  1908  onwards. 
When  the  methods  of  the  suffragettes 
progressed  from  clashes  with  the  poUce 
to  attacks  on  property  and  arson,  the 
Government  decided  to  arrest  the  leaders 
of  the  Union  on  a  charge  of  conspiracy 
(1912).  In  order  to  continue  the  work 
of  organization  Christabel  Pankhurst 
escaped  to  Paris,  where  she  remained  in 
'hiding'  until  the  outbreak  of  war.  In  1912 
there  was  a  second  split  in  the  Union 
which  resulted  in  the  removal  of  its 
journal  Votes  for  Women.  To  fill  this  gap 
Christabel  Pankhurst  edited  a  new  paper. 
The  Suffragette,  from  Paris.  This  was 
conducted  with  vigour  and  even  ferocity 
and  indulged  in  many  rather  wanton 
diatribes  against  the  male  sex. 

With  the  outbreak  of  war  in  August 
1914  Christabel  Pankhurst  returned  to 
England  to  put  her  talents  at  the 
service  of  the  State ;  she  spoke  at  many 
recruiting  meetings.  In  1918  she  stood 
as  coalition  candidate  for  Smethwick; 
although  she  was  unsuccessful  she  polled 
a  remarkable  vote,  8,614,  the  largest  for 
any  woman  at  that  election,  the  first  in 
which  they  could  take  part.  In  1919  she 
became  candidate  for  the  Abbey  division 
of  Westminster  but  did  not  contest  an 
election.  With  the  return  of  peace  there 
was  some  discussion  whether  W.S.P.U. 
should  be  continued,  not  so  much  for 
poUtical  and  militant  purposes,  but  as  a 
rallying  force  for  women  in  national  hfe. 
Mrs.  Pankhurst  and  her  daughter  decided 


against  this,  with  the  result  that  both  of 
them  became  somewhat  withdrawn  from 
public  notice.  Mrs.  Pankhurst  went  to 
Canada  where  she  was  joined  by  Christabel 
who  subsequently  lived  much  in  the 
United  States,  proclaiming  her  belief  in 
the  Second  Advent.  She  was  appointed 
D.B.E.  in  1936;  finally  settled  in  the 
United  States  in  1940;  and  died  at  Los 
Angeles  13  February  1958.  Her  younger 
sister,  Estelle  Sylvia,  who  was  born  in 
Manchester  in  1882,  worked  for  the 
suffrage  cause  in  the  east  end  of  London : 
she  was  imprisoned  many  times  and  also 
forcibly  fed.  But  her  violent  opposition 
to  the  war  caused  her  to  be  pubUcly 
repudiated  by  her  mother.  She  en- 
thusiastically embraced  the  Russian  revo- 
lution and  in  later  years  took  up  the 
cause  of  Abyssinian  independence,  dying 
in  Addis  Ababa  27  September  1960. 

The  youngest  sister,  Adela  Constantia 
Mary,  was  born  in  1885  and  was  perhaps 
the  most  extreme  of  the  family.  She 
worked  for  a  short  time  with  her  mother 
for  the  Women's  Social  and  Political 
Union.  When  she  was  in  her  early  twenties 
she  emigrated  to  Australia  where  she 
organized  the  Women's  Party  and  later 
the  Australian  Socialist  Party.  She 
published  Put  up  the  Sword  in  the  first, 
and  was  interned  in  the  second,  war.  She 
married  Tom  Walsh,  sometime  president 
and  secretary  of  the  Australian  Seamen's 
Union,  and  had  one  son  and  three  daugh- 
ters. She  died  in  Australia  23  May  1961. 

While  the  value  of  militancy  in  speeding 
the  women's  vote  is  a  matter  of  opinion, 
the  courage  and  resourcefulness  shown  by 
Christabel  Pankhurst,  at  a  time  when 
women  were  still  excluded  from  whole 
regions  of  the  national  life,  made  forcibly 
plain  to  all  the  world  that  this  exclusion 
could  no  longer  be  maintained.  In  1959  a 
bronze  medalUon  of  Christabel  by  Peter 
Hills  was  added  to  the  memorial  statue 
of  Emmeline  Pankhurst  in  Victoria 
Tower  Gardens.  There  is  an  oil-painting 
by  Ethel  Wright  in  the  possession  of 
Mrs.  Victor  Duval ;  the  National  Portrait 
Gallery  has  a  drawing  by  Jessie  Holhday. 

[E.  Sylvia  Pankhurst,  The  Suffragette  Move- 
ment, 1931 ;  Dame  Christabel  Pankhurst,  Un- 
shackled, ed.  Lord  Pethick-Lawrence,  1959; 
Roger  Fulford,  Votes  for  Women,  1957.] 

Roger  Fulford. 

PARKER,  ERIC  (FREDERICK 
MOORE  SEARLE)  (1870-1955),  author 
and  journalist,  was  born  at  East  Barnet, 
Hertfordshire,  9  October  1870,  the  eldest 


791 


Parker,  E.  F.  M.  S, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


son  of  Frederick  Searle  Parker,  a  solicitor 
of  Bedford  Row,  by  his  wife,  Elisabeth, 
daughter  of  WiUiam  Wilkieson,  of  Wood- 
bury Hall,  Bedfordshire.  As  a  King's  scho- 
lar at  Eton,  fishing  was  already  his  passion 
and,  with  no  encouragement,  he  was  a 
keen  naturalist.  He  went  as  a  postmaster 
to  Merton  College,  Oxford,  where  he 
obtained  a  second  class  in  classical  modera- 
tions (1891)  and  a  fourth  in  literae  humani- 
ores  (1893).  Then  came  a  few  years  of 
schoolmastering  until  in  1900,  at  the  age 
of  thirty,  he  entered  journalism  as  a  junior 
assistant  editor  on  the  St.  Jameses 
Gazettey  at  first  under  (Sir)  Theodore  Cook. 
He  soon  started  to  write  also  for  St.  Loe 
Strachey  [q.v.]  in  the  Spectator,  to  which 
he  was  a  regular  contributor  for  twelve 
years.  In  1902  Strachey  bought  the 
County  Gentleman,  a  sporting  weekly 
devoted  mainly  to  horses,  and,  with 
Parker  as  editor,  set  about  widening  its 
appeal.  Meanwhile  Macmillan's  Magazine 
had  serialized  Parker's  first  novel,  The 
Sinner  and  the  Problem,  published  as  a 
book  in  October  1901  and  twice  reprinted 
within  three  months. 

When  Strachey's  ownership  and  his 
editorship  of  the  County  Gentleman  came 
to  an  end  in  1907,  Parker  devoted  himself 
with  his  customary  thoroughness  to  the 
Surrey  voliune  (1908)  in  Macmillan's 
*Highways  and  Byways'  series,  exploring 
on  foot  every  nook  and  cranny  of  the 
county  where  much  of  his  hfe  was  to  be 
spent;  few  came  to  know  it  better  or 
loved  it  more.  For  two  years  (1908-10) 
he  edited  the  monthly  Gamekeeper;  and 
it  was  then,  in  A  Book  of  the  Zoo  (1909), 
that  he  foresaw  that  the  grey  squirrel 
might  'become  a  country  problem',  a 
couple  of  decades  before  it  was  officially 
recognized  as  such.  In  1910  Parker  was  in 
the  running  for  the  post  of  editor-in-chief 
of  the  Field;  but  the  trustees  regarded 
him  as  'too  much  of  a  poet'  and  appointed 
the  same  Theodore  Cook  with  whom  he 
had  started  his  journalistic  career.  Cook 
invited  Parker  to  help  him  and  a  year 
later  appointed  him  shooting  editor, 
a  post  he  was  to  fill  with  distinction  for 
over  twenty  years  (1911-32).  At  this  time 
he  was  writing  regularly  for  the  Field, 
Spectator,  and  Cornhill  Magazine,  but  he 
found  time  to  finish  a  novel  of  child  life. 
Promise  of  Arden  (1912),  to  prepare  with 
William  Hyde  A  West  Surrey  Sketch-book 
(1913),  and  to  undertake  at  the  request 
of  Reginald  J.  Smith  [q.v.]  a  book  of 
reminiscences,  Eton  in  ike  ^Eighties 
(1914). 


In  November  1914  Parker  was  gazetted 
to  a  captaincy  in  the  6th  battalion  of  the 
Queen's  Royal  West  Surrey  Regiment, 
in  which  he  served  until  June  1918,  when 
he  was  sent  to  the  War  Office.  During  the 
war  years  he  wrote  Shooting  Days  (1918) 
and  began  Playing  Fields  (1922),  the  story 
of  life  at  a  prep,  school  and  at  Eton  as  seen 
through  the  eyes  of  a  schoolboy;  it  has 
been  described  as  the  best  school  story 
ever  written.  Between  the  wars  not  a  year 
passed  without  the  appearance  of  at  least 
one  book  written,  compiled,  or  edited  by 
him.  A  few  titles  must  suffice  to  indi- 
cate their  range:  Elements  of  Shooting 
(1924),  Between  the  Wickets  (1926),  Field, 
River  and  Hill  (1927),  English  Wild  Life 
(1929),  Ethics  of  Egg-Collecting  (1935), 
The  Gardener's  England  (1936),  and  the 
autobiographical  Memory  Looks  Forward 
(1937). 

In  1928  Parker  became  editor  of  'The 
Lonsdale  Library  of  Sports,  Games  & 
Pastimes'.  Then,  in  December  1929,  came 
Sir  Leicester  Harmsworth's  offer  of  the 
post  of  editor-in-chief  of  the  Field,  In  the 
eight  years  which  followed  he  put  new 
life  into  the  weekly,  widening  its  interest 
and  appeal.  His  most  noteworthy  achieve- 
ment was  the  devastating  exposure  of  the 
trapping  and  caging  of  linnets,  gold- 
finches, and  other  small  birds  which  was 
largely  responsible  for  the  passage  of  the 
Protection  of  Birds  Act,  1933.  He  also 
campaigned  against  the  docking  of  horses, 
which  was  later  made  illegal.  At  the  end  of 
1937  Parker  gave  up  his  post  with  the 
Field,  so  that  he  might  have  more  time 
for  writing  and  broadcasting,  and  accepted 
a  seat  on  the  board. 

His  literary  output  was  maintained, 
although  with  less  emphasis  on  field  sports 
and  more  on  cricket,  dogs,  natural  history, 
and  gardens.  He  contributed  the  volume 
on  Surrey  (1947)  to  Hale's  'County  Books' 
series  and  added  to  the  Lonsdale  Library 
The  History  of  Cricket  (1950).  The  last  of 
his  fifty-odd  books,  Surrey  Gardens  (1954), 
was  published  shortly  before  his  death  at 
his  home  at  Hambledon,  Surrey,  13 
February  1955. 

In  his  bearing,  talk,  kindness,  honesty 
of  mind  and  purpose,  outlook  on  life,  and 
general  character  Parker  was  outstandingly 
an  English  country  gentleman.  He  had  a 
fund  of  humour,  was  a  keen  observer,  and 
wrote  with  ease  and  sureness.  He  enabled 
readers  to  see  about  them  things  which 
had  hitherto  passed  unobserved,  and 
shared  with  them  delightfully  his  appreci- 
ation of  beauty  in  the  countryside. 


792 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Parker,  J, 


Parker  married  in  1902  Ruth  Margaret 
(died  1933),  daughter  of  Ludwig  Messel, 
of  Nymans,  Handcross,  Sussex.  They  had 
four  sons,  two  of  whom  were  killed  in  the 
war  of  1939-45,  and  two  daughters. 

[Eric  Parker,  Memory  Looks  Fonvard, 
1937 ;  The  Times,  14  February  1955 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

John  Cripps. 

PARKER,  JOHN  (1875-1952),  founder 
and  editor  of  Who's  Who  in  the  Theatre, 
was  born  Jacob  Solomons,  in  New  York 
City  28  July  1875,  the  only  child  of  David 
Solomons  and  his  wife,  Florence  Joel. 
His  father,  a  sailor,  was  a  native  of 
Warsaw,  but  all  family  hnks  with  Poland 
were  lost  after  his  death  by  drowning  in 
1881.  The  widow,  who  had  been  born  in 
Cardiff,  decided  to  return  to  the  United 
Kingdom  where  some  of  her  family  still 
lived;  choosing  to  keep  both  her  son  and  her 
independence,  she  took  the  post  of  care- 
taker at  Clarence  Chambers,  King  William 
Street,  in  the  City  of  London,  and  enrolled 
her  son  at  the  Whitechapel  Foundation 
School  where  he  was  a  fellow  pupil  of 
Herman  Finck. 

After  a  short  period  as  an  office  boy, 
he  accepted  the  offer  of  a  commercial 
acquaintance  to  return  to  the  United 
States  to  improve  his  prospects,  but  with- 
in a  few  months  he  found  himself  stranded 
and  obliged  to  work  his  passage  back  to 
England.  It  was  about  this  time  that  he 
decided,  on  the  advice  of  his  mother,  to 
adopt  the  name  of  John  Parker,  which  he 
legalized  in  1917.  There  is  evidence  that 
between  the  years  1892  and  1903,  while 
employed  in  various  capacities,  Parker 
had  made  a  start  in  journalism ;  he  soon 
became  sufficiently  well  informed  on 
theatrical  matters  to  be  able  to  write  to 
the  eminent  critic,  Clement  Scott  [q.v.], 
of  the  Daily  Telegraph  and  point  out 
errors  of  fact  where  they  occurred  in  his 
columns.  This  enthusiasm  and  passion  for 
accuracy  appealed  to  Scott  who  allowed 
the  boy  the  pleasure  of  carrying  his  copy 
to  the  newspaper  office,  encouraged  his 
talent  for  research,  and  from  1900 
published  regular  contributions  from  him 
in  his  weekly  paper  the  Free  Lance.  In 
1903  Parker  was  appointed  London 
manager,  critic,  and  correspondent  of  the 
New  York  Dramatic  News,  a  post  which  he 
held  for  seventeen  years,  and  in  the  same 
year  he  was  made  the  London  correspon- 
dent of  the  New  York  Dramatic  Mirror. 
From  1901  until  his  death,  Parker  managed 
to  divide  his  time  between  his  business  as 


a  shipping  agent  and  his  work  for  the 
theatre  which  was  his  first  love. 

During  the  nineteenth  century  several 
reference  works  of  dramatic  biography 
appeared,  but  none  of  these  was  to  reach 
more  than  two  issues.  For  the  1907  edition 
of  the  Green  Room  Book  Parker  was  in- 
vited to  provide  additional  information 
for  the  biographies  and  to  contribute  the 
entire  section  on  the  American  theatre. 
He  then  succeeded  as  editor  but  was  able 
to  bring  out  only  two  more  editions  (1908 
and  1909)  before  it  came  to  an  end  with 
the  death  of  the  publisher. 

Parker's  reputation  as  a  theatre  his- 
torian had  by  this  time  become  well 
established,  and  in  1912  Sir  Isaac  Pitman 
&  Sons,  Ltd.,  published  his  new  venture 
Who's  Who  in  the  Theatre.  The  success 
of  the  very  first  edition  brought  from  Sir 
Herbert  Beerbohm  Tree  [q.v.]  the  com- 
mendation 'As  a  monument  of  industry. 
Who's  Who  in  the  Theatre  seems  to  me  to 
be  absolutely  pyramidal. ...  It  is  a  work 
which  assuredly  deserves  the  gratitude 
of  everyone  connected  with  the  theatre.' 
Over  a  period  of  forty  j^ears,  until  his  death, 
and  surviving  the  publishing  hazards  of 
two  world  wars,  Parker  compiled  eleven 
editions  of  his  Who's  Who  almost  single- 
handed,  an  astonishing  achievement  in 
view  of  the  ever-expanding  spheres  of  the 
theatre  with  the  growth  of  the  cinema  and 
television.  His  success  as  an  editor  lay  in 
the  accuracy  and  balance  of  his  records. 
The  motto  which  headed  his  editorial 
stationery  'Sine  timore,  aut  favore' 
indicated  his  inflexible  rule,  a  rule  which 
made  him  a  number  of  enemies  in  the 
profession,  principally  by  his  refusal  to 
allow  his  subjects  to  falsify  their  ages.  It  is 
conceivable  that  the  unsolved  mystery  of 
the  burglary  of  his  study  in  September 
1928  was  the  work  of  some  aggrieved 
actor.  All  Parker's  notes  and  all  the  copy 
for  his  sixth  edition,  then  ready  for  press, 
were  stolen.  After  his  first  shock  had 
subsided,  he  rewrote  in  his  own  hand  all 
the  new  material,  including  more  than  450 
new  biographies. 

Parker  was  a  regular  contributor  to  this 
Dictionary.  He  also  found  time  to  give 
active  support  to  the  Critics'  Circle, 
of  which  he  was  a  founder-member, 
honorary  secretary  (1924-52),  and  in  one 
year  president.  In  1987  he  represented 
the  Circle  as  British  delegate  at  the  Inter- 
national Congress  of  Critics  in  Paris.  He 
was  also  the  honorary  editor  of  the 
Critics'  Circular. 

With  little  time  to  spare  for  the  more 


798 


Parker,  J. 


D.N.B.  1951-19eO 


conventional  recreations,  Parker  had  one 
passing  'hobby'  and  one  sport,  albeit 
as  a  spectator.  He  was  an  accomplished 
illuminator,  and  spent  many  a  Sunday 
morning,  during  1905  and  1906,  in  night- 
shirt, silk  dressing-gown,  and  smoking 
cap,  designing  and  carrying  out,  in  all 
their  elaborate  colour  and  gold  leaf,  two 
Vellums'  for  presentation  to  Lionel 
Brough  [q.v.]  and  (Dame)  Ellen  Terry 
[q.v.],  respectively,  on  the  celebration  of 
their  stage  jubilees.  His  enthusiasm  for 
cricket — he  was  a  member  of  the  Surrey 
County  Cricket  Club — ^was  lifelong,  but 
chiefly  as  a  spectator. 

Parker  was  fastidious  in  both  dress  and 
speech.  At  one  time  he  took  lessons  in 
elocution  and  delighted  in  imparting  what 
he  had  learned  to  his  family.  In  1899  he 
married  Edith  Maud  (died  1942),  daughter 
of  his  schoolmaster,  Montague  Belfleld 
Pizey,  by  whom  he  had  a  daughter,  and 
a  son  who  produced  a  twelfth  edition  of 
Who's  Who  in  the  Theatre  in  1957.  In  1944 
Parker  married,  secondly,  Doris  Mary, 
daughter  of  George  Sinclair.  He  died  in 
Twickenham  18  November  1952. 

[The  Times,  20  November  1952;  Green 
Boom  Booky  1909  ;  private  information.] 

Freda  Gave. 

PARSONS,  Sir  JOHN  HERBERT  (1868- 
1957),  ophthalmologist  and  physiologist, 
was  born  in  Bristol  3  September  1868, 
the  youngest  of  the  five  children  of  Isaac 
Jabez  Parsons,  grocer,  and  his  wife,  Mary 
Goodhind  Webb.  He  was  educated  at 
Thomas  Turner's  private  school,  Bristol 
Grammar  School,  and  University  College, 
Bristol,  where  he  studied  arts,  science,  and 
medicine.  His  entry  into  the  college  was 
aided  by  his  gaining  a  Gilchrist  scholar- 
ship and  his  medical  studies  by  a  Stewart 
scholarship  and  the  first  entrance  scholar- 
ship to  Bristol  Royal  Infirmary.  Leaving 
Bristol  in  1889  he  pursued  his  medical 
studies  at  University  College,  London, 
where  he  graduated  B.Sc.  with  honours 
in  physiology  (1890)  and  completed  his 
medical  course  in  St.  Bartholomew's 
Hospital,  graduating  M.B.  in  1892.  He 
thereupon  returned  to  University  College 
as  Sharpey  scholar  and  assistant  and 
demonstrator  to  (Sir)  E.  A.  (Sharpey-) 
Schafer  [q.v.]  in  physiology.  After  a  short 
period  in  general  practice  in  Finchley 
Parsons  found  himself  compelled  to  return 
to  his  initial  interest  in  physiology  and 
through  this  took  up  ophthalmology, 
becoming  a  clinical  assistant  at  Moorfields 
Eye  Hospital.  Acquiring  his  F.R.C.S.  in 


1900,  he  was  elected  pathological  curator 
and  librarian  at  Moorfields  Hospital  and 
in  1904  was  elected  to  the  consulting 
surgical  staff  of  that  hospital  and  Univer- 
sity College  Hospital,  both  of  which  he 
served  throughout  his  working  life;  he 
was  also  for  a  time  consulting  surgeon  to 
the  Hospital  for  Sick  Children,  Great 
Ormond  Street.  At  the  same  time  he 
conducted  a  large  ophthalmic  practice  at 
a  house  in  Queen  Anne  Street. 

Parsons's  interest,  however,  did  not  lie 
essentially  in  hospital  work  or  private 
practice;  to  explore  the  working  of  the 
eye  and  its  behaviour  in  health  and  disease 
was  his  main  object  in  life,  first  by  him- 
self and  later  by  the  encouragement  of 
others  for  the  same  end.  His  first  book 
was  a  small  manual,  Elementary  Ophthal- 
mic Optics  (1901),  an  attempt  to  impress 
on  the  student  that  it  was  wrong  to  test 
a  patient's  vision  or  examine  him  clinically 
without  a  thorough  understanding  of  the 
optics  of  the  methods  he  was  using. 
Simultaneously  he  undertook  research 
work  on  the  physiology  of  the  eye  in  the 
department  of  physiology  of  University 
College.  The  innervation  of  the  pupil  and 
the  lacrimal  gland  claimed  his  attention 
initially  and  his  fundamental  work  on  the 
control  of  the  intra-ocular  pressure  was 
summarized  in  his  second  book,  The 
Ocular  Circulation  (1903).  For  these 
researches  he  obtained  the  degree  of  D.Sc. 
(London,  1904).  Thereafter  he  turned  his 
attention  seriously  to  ocular  pathology 
and  from  his  laboratory  at  Moorfields  there 
emanated  a  series  of  original  papers, 
while  the  whole  subject  was  correlated 
and  integrated  for  the  first  time  in  his 
first  classical  treatise,  The  Pathology  of  the 
Eye,  which  appeared  in  four  volumes 
(1904-8).  With  its  appearance  Parsons 
became  a  world  authority  and  his  hospital 
clinics  a  Mecca  for  students  from  abroad. 
At  the  same  time  his  maturing  clinical 
experience  was  reflected  in  the  appearance 
of  a  comprehensive  and  yet  concise  clinical 
textbook.  Diseases  of  the  Eye,  which,  soon 
after  its  appearance  in  1907,  became  the 
most  popular  of  its  type  ;  the  tenth  edition 
appeared  in  1942  and  was  reprinted  in 
1944,  whereafter  he  transferred  the  author- 
ship to  other  hands. 

After  this  preliminary  phase  which  by 
itself  could  well  be  said  to  constitute  a 
life-work,  Parsons's  interests  diverted  to 
the  psychology  of  vision  and  perception ; 
in  this  vast  field  his  main  thesis  was  that 
perceptive  phenomena  could  be  analysed 
only  on  a  factual  basis,  that  the  only  safe 


794 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Parsons 


approach  to  their  understanding  was  a 
materialistic  one  through  physiological 
experimentation,  and  that  introspective 
psychology  divorced  from  biology  was 
dangerous.  Endowed  with  untiring  energy, 
unusually  wide  knowledge  and  critical 
ability  as  well  as  great  scientific  honesty, 
he  attained  a  unique  place  in  the  scientific 
world  by  the  publication  of  four  books  on 
this  wide  subject,  two  of  them  classical. 
An  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Colour 
Vision  (1915)  and  An  Introduction  to  the 
Theory  of  Perception  (1927),  and  two  of 
them  small  and  incidental,  Mind  and  the 
Nation:  A  Pricis  of  Applied  Psychology 
(1918)  and  The  Springs  of  Conduct  (1950), 
the  latter  a  summary  of  his  neuro- 
psychological creed  written  when  he  was 
eighty-two. 

Parsons  had  wide  interests  in  public, 
professional,  and  cultural  life.  He  served 
on  several  government  commissions,  his 
greatest  contribution  in  this  respect 
being  in  the  adequate  lighting  of  factories, 
a  subject  gravely  neglected  at  the  time. 
During  the  thirty-one  years  of  the  activi- 
ties of  the  departmental  committee  set 
up  by  the  Home  Office  on  factory  lighting 
he  played  a  prominent  part ;  and  he  was 
one  of  the  founder-members  of  the 
Illuminating  Engineering  Society  of  which 
he  was  the  first  chairman  of  council,  its 
president  in  1924,  and  honorary  member 
(1943).  In  professional  societies  he  partici- 
pated wholeheartedly.  To  the  Ophthalmo- 
logical  Society  of  the  United  Kingdom, 
which  he  joined  in  1900,  he  made  some 
140  contributions  and  was  its  president 
in  1925.  He  was  president  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Medicine  (1936-8)  and  honorary 
fellow  (1942).  In  international  ophthalmo- 
logy he  took  a  prominent  part,  directing 
his  influence  towards  the  resumption  of 
friendly  relations  between  ophthalmo- 
logists throughout  the  world  after  the 
war  of  1914-18  ;  he  was  one  of  the  moving 
spirits  in  creating  the  International 
Council  of  Ophthalmology  (1927)  and  in 
arranging  for  the  very  successful  13th 
International  Congress  of  Ophthalmology 
in  Amsterdam  (1929).  In  addition  he  acted 
as  chairman  of  the  editorial  committee 
of  the  British  Journal  of  Ophthalmology 
from  its  foundation  in  1917  to  1948.  He 
was  one  of  the  founder-members  of  the 
British  Council  of  Ophthalmologists  and 
was  largely  responsible  for  its  substitu- 
tion by  the  Faculty  of  Ophthalmologists 
to  serve  as  the  co-ordinating  and  aca- 
demic custodian  of  the  speciality.  Of 
the   greatest   importance   was   his   asso- 


ciation with  the  Medical  Research  Council 
on  which  he  served  in  1929-32;  to  his 
influence  was  largely  due  its  efforts  to 
maintain  an  interest  in  research  in  visual 
problems  in  the  period  between  the  two 
wars.  In  the  first  of  these  he  served  ini- 
tially with  the  rank  of  captain  as  ophthalmic 
surgeon  to  the  3rd  London  General 
Hospital  (1916-17)  and  then  with  the 
rank  of  colonel  as  ophthalmic  consultant 
to  the  Home  Forces  (1917-18),  and  there- 
after served  in  an  advisory  capacity  to 
the  Army,  the  Navy,  and  the  Royal  Air 
Force.  In  1919  he  was  appointed  C.B.E. 

The  Royal  College  of  Surgeons  invited 
Parsons  to  give  the  Arris  and  Gale 
lectures  (1903-4) ;  from  the  British  Medical 
Association  he  received  the  Middlemore 
prize  in  1904  and  again  in  1914.  From  the 
Ophthalmological  Society  he  received  the 
Nettleship  gold  medal  (1907)  and  the  Bow- 
man lectureship  (1925) ;  from  the  Oxford 
Ophthalmological  Congress  the  Doyne 
medal  (1919);  and  from  the  Ameri- 
can Ophthalmological  Society  the  Howe 
medal  (1936).  He  was  given  the  hono- 
rary degree  of  D.Sc.  from  his  own 
university  of  Bristol  (1925)  and  an  LL.D. 
from  Edinburgh  (1927).  In  1921  he  was 
elected  F.R.S.,  serving  on  its  council 
(1926-7  and  1941-3)  and  becoming  a 
vice-president  (1941-2).  In  1922  he  was 
knighted.  On  his  eightieth  birthday  he 
was  presented  with  his  portrait,  painted 
by  John  Gilroy,  by  the  Faculty  of  Oph- 
thalmologists and  the  Ophthalmological 
Society ;  and  the  same  occasion  was  marked 
by  the  appearance  of  a  special  number 
of  the  British  Journal  of  Ophthalmology 
consisting  of  contributions  made  by  his 
scientific  and  clinical  pupils  and  associates. 

Parsons's  life  was  full  of  work,  but  he 
also  enjoyed  leisure.  He  appreciated  good 
company  and  was  a  delightful  host, 
particularly  to  the  young,  on  whom  he 
lavished  much  kindness,  assisting  them 
freely  in  their  work  and  professional 
troubles.  He  had  a  great  appreciation  of 
music  and  used  to  go  to  the  opera  armed 
with  a  score.  His  knowledge  of  languages 
was  wide  and  Persian  literature  and  art 
interested  him  greatly.  Golf  was  an 
absorbing  hobby  most  of  his  life  and  even 
in  advanced  age  he  frequently  found 
refreshment  and  rest  in  periodic  holiday 
cruises. 

At  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  Parsons 
left  London  and  retired  from  practice, 
lending  his  London  house  to  the  French 
Red  Cross,  and  went  to  live  in  Leeds  with 
long-standing  friends,  but  visited  London 


795 


Parsons 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


frequently.  In  his  later  years  progressive 
deafness,  an  annoying  tremor,  and 
cardiac  troubles,  disabilities  exasperating 
to  a  nature  so  forceful  and  active, 
gradually  curtailed  his  activities.  He  died 
in  London  7  October  1957.  His  wife,  Jane 
Roberta,  daughter  of  John  Hendrie,  of 
Uddingston,  near  Glasgow,  whom  he 
married  in  1894,  died  in  1911,  and  he  left 
a  son  and  a  daughter.  His  portrait  hangs 
in  the  board-room  of  the  Institute  of 
Ophthalmology,  university  of  London. 
[Personal  knowledge.] 

Stewart  Duke-Elder. 

PATERSON,  Sir  WILLIAM  (1874- 
1956),  mechanical  engineer,  was  born  at 
Roslin,  Midlothian,  5  August  1874,  the 
fifth  (and  youngest)  son  of  James  Pater- 
son,  director  and  manager  of  Stewart  and 
Widnall,  Ltd.,  by  his  wife,  Anne  Hall. 
He  was  educated  in  Edinburgh  at  the 
Heriot-Watt  College,  afterwards  serving 
six  years'  apprenticeship  in  the  drawing 
office  and  workshops  of  a  firm  of  paper 
mill  engineers.  From  his  earliest  days 
he  realized  the  importance  of  water 
treatment  developments  and  filed  patents 
in  1898-1902  covering  processes  and  equip- 
ment in  this  field.  In  the  latter  year  he 
formed  in  Edinburgh  a  company  concerned 
particularly  with  the  purification  of 
water  for  industrial  purposes  and  public 
drinking  supplies.  In  1904  he  transferred 
his  offices  to  London  and  for  some  years 
shared  lodgings  with  two  other  Scotsmen 
also  destined  to  attain  eminence  in  their 
professions — John  Anderson  (later  Vis- 
count Waverley,  q.v.)  and  (Sir)  Alexander 
Gray,  both  of  whom  were  present  at  the 
celebration  in  1952  of  the  jubilee  of  the 
founding  of  William  Paterson's  company. 
In  the  earlier  years  of  his  company  he 
was  particularly  concerned  in  developing 
and  patenting  improved  means  for  treating 
water  for  industrial  use,  a  matter  of  great 
importance  with  the  growing  develop- 
ment of  large  manufacturing  organiza- 
tions, but  within  ten  years  he  had 
directed  his  attention  to  the  need  for 
improved  methods  for  purifying  public 
drinking-water  supplies.  Amongst  early 
installations  in  this  field  was  one  for  the 
Weardale  &  Consett  Water  Company  for 
the  pre -treatment  of  two  and  a  half 
million  gallons  of  water  per  day  to  improve 
its  condition  before  passing  through  slow 
sand  filters  then  in  general  use.  This  pre- 
treatment  greatly  prolonged  the  runs  of 
the  slow  filters  and  obviated  large  and 
costly  extensions.  In  1910  he  designed  and 


installed  a  plant  for  the  complete  purifi- 
cation of  four  million  gallons  daily  pumped 
from  the  river  Severn  for  the  drinking 
supply  of  Cheltenham,  and  this  was  the 
first  plant  in  Britain  using  chlorine  for 
the  routine  sterilization  of  a  water  supply 
to  eliminate  pathological  bacteria.  He 
was  always  interested  in  the  prevention 
of  water-borne  diseases,  and  had  extensive 
researches  carried  out  on  the  use  of 
chlorine  gas  for  this  purpose,  either  alone 
or  in  connection  with  ammonia  to  form 
chloramine.  This  led  to  important  improve- 
ments in  the  manner  of  and  equipment 
for  applying  these  reagents  for  water 
sterilization,  and  also  in  the  use  of  ozone 
(O3)  for  the  same  purpose. 

In  1913  Paterson  was  asked  by  the 
Indian  Army  medical  authorities  to  visit 
their  headquarters  in  Poona  to  advise  on 
the  most  suitable  means  of  purifying  the 
polluted  water  supplies  in  general  use  in 
India,  where  widespread  joutbreaks  of 
dysentery  and  other  water-borne  diseases 
were  common.  A  successful  demonstration 
plant  built  at  Poona  led  to  the  adoption  of 
this  process  throughout  India  and  eventu- 
ally to  the  formation  of  a  Paterson 
company  in  that  country. 

The  war  of  1939-45  presented  problems 
in  the  supply  of  drinking  water  to  troops 
in  the  field,  and  a  mobile  filtration  and 
sterilizing  unit  was  designed  which 
combined  light  weight  and  compactness 
with  high  capacity  and  great  efficiency. 
This  type  of  filter  was  adopted  widely 
by  the  British,  American,  and  colonial 
forces,  and  was  responsible  to  a  large 
degree  for  the  extremely  low  incidence 
of  fatal  outbreaks  of  water-borne  diseases. 

Many  important  new  developments  in 
water  treatment  were  the  result  of 
Paterson's  activities  including  the  excess 
lime  process  of  water  softening  and 
sterilization  for  public  supplies  in  which 
he  collaborated  with  Sir  Alexander 
Houston  (then  director  of  water  examina- 
tion of  the  Metropolitan  Water  Board) 
and  the  use  of  chlorine  gas  for  inhibiting 
algal  accumulations  in  power-station 
condenser  systems,  a  method  adopted  on 
a  world-wide  scale,  with  consequent 
important  fuel  economies. 

Paterson  was  a  man  of  singular  direct- 
ness of  thought,  with  the  power  of 
simplifying  problems  and  mechanical 
designs  by  the  elimination  of  all  non- 
essential or  adscititious  features. 

As  a  result  of  his  lifelong  association 
with  John  Anderson  he  was  asked  by  him 
in    1938    to    devise    a    form    of   shelter 


796 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Pearce 


suitable  for  economical  construction  and 
simple  and  rapid  erection  in  individual 
homes  for  protection  against  blast  from 
bombing  attacks.  A  simple  shelter  (known 
as  the  Anderson  shelter)  was  designed 
and  patented  by  Paterson  and  Oscar  C. 
Kerrison,  this  patent  (taken  out  to  prevent 
conmiercial  exploitation)  being  presented 
to  the  nation.  The  extensive  adoption  of 
this  shelter  (of  which  over  three  million 
were  supplied  to  the  pubhc)  was  respon- 
sible for  the  saving  of  many  lives. 

In  1944  Paterson  was  knighted.  In 
1948  he  was  elected  an  honorary  member 
of  the  Institution  of  Water  Engineers,  and 
in  the  subsequent  year  an  honorary 
member  of  the  Royal  Sanitary  Institute. 
He  was  the  donor  to  the  Institution  of 
Water  Engineers  of  the  Whitaker  medal 
and  the  Alexander  Houston  medal  to  be 
awarded  for  outstanding  papers  on  the 
treatment  of  water  supplies. 

In  January  1955  he  retired  from  active 
participation  in  the  affairs  of  the  numerous 
companies  comprising  the  Paterson  group. 
He  died  in  London  9  August  1956.  After 
his  death  Lady  Paterson  presented  to  the 
Heriot-Watt  College  a  portrait  (attributed 
to  Raeburn)  of  his  great  hero  James 
Watt. 

Paterson  married  in  1910  Dorothy 
Isabel,  daughter  of  Herbert  Frank  Steed- 
man,  accountant,  of  Bournemouth;  they 
had  one  daughter. 

His  portrait  by  Philip  Kaufmann  is  in 
the  possession  of  the  family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
O.  C.  Kerrison. 

PEAKE,  Sir  CHARLES  BRINSLEY 
PEMBERTON  (1897-1958),  diplomatist, 
was  born  2  January  1897  in  Leicester,  the 
third  child  and  only  son  of  William 
Pemberton  Peake,  surgeon  and  medical 
officer,  and  his  wife,  Alice  Ambrosing 
Bucknell.  From  Wyggeston  School, 
Leicester,  he  joined  the  army  in  1914, 
serving  throughout  the  war  as  an  officer 
in  the  Leicestershire  Regiment.  He  was 
mentioned  in  dispatches  and  awarded 
the  M.C.  He  was  badly  wounded  in  the 
leg  and  suffered  from  the  wound,  often 
severely,  throughout  his  life. 

After  the  war  Peake  went  to  Magdalen 
College,  Oxford,  where  he  took  his  degree 
in  J^ench  in  1921.  He  entered  the 
diplomatic  service  in  1922.  After  serving 
at  various  posts  abroad,  he  was  trans- 
ferred to  the  news  department  of  the 
Foreign  Office  in  1936  and  became  its 
head  in  1939.  When  Lord  Halifax  [q.v.] 


was  appointed  ambassador  in  Washington 
in  1941  Peake  accompanied  him  as  a 
personal  assistant  and  became  his  inti- 
mate and  devoted  friend.  In  1942-3  Peake 
had  the  difficult  assignment  of  British 
representative  to  the  French  National 
Committee ;  and  in  1943-5  he  was  politi- 
cal adviser  to  the  supreme  commander. 
Allied  Expeditionary  Force.  In  1945  he 
was  appointed  to  Tangier  as  consul- 
general;  in  1946  he  went  as  ambassador 
to  Belgrade  and  in  1951  to  Athens.  He 
retired  from  the  Foreign  Service  in  1957 
and  acted  for  a  time  as  special  adviser 
to  the  Colonial  Office  on  Cyprus. 

Peake's  principal  aptitude  was  with 
people.  His  talents  were  employed  most 
conspicuously  in  Yugoslavia,  where  his 
term  as  ambassador  covered  the  period 
during  which  Marshal  Tito  broke  with  the 
Cominform  (1948).  By  that  time  Peake  had 
gained  some  influence  with  the  Yugoslav 
leaders  and  a  good  understanding  of  their 
mentality.  He  was  thus  able  to  play  an 
important  part  in  the  delicate  task  of  re- 
establishing good  relations  between  the 
western  powers  and  Yugoslavia  after  a 
period  of  considerable  bitterness.  Most 
of  his  time  at  Athens-  was  overshadowed 
by  the  dispute  with  Greece  over  Cyprus, 
which  could  hardly  be  mitigated  by  per- 
sonal diplomacy. 

Peake  devoted  fully  to  his  work  the 
resources  of  a  colourful  and  many-sided 
personality.  He  was  a  notable  raconteur, 
whose  conversation  displayed  an  often 
flamboyant  command  of  English  and  a 
keen  sense  both  of  the  dramatic  and  of 
the  nonsensical.  Together  with  his  wife, 
he  was  most  generous  in  hospitality  and 
friendship,  the  reflection  of  a  profoundly 
and  openly  religious  nature.  In  1926  he 
had  married  Catherine  Marie,  daughter  of 
George  Wiliam  Knight,  of  the  Indian 
Educational  Service ;  they  had  four  sons. 

Peake  was  appointed  C.M.G.  (1941), 
K.C.M.G.  (1948),  and  G.C.M.G.  (1956). 
He  died  in  London  10  April  1958. 

[The  Times,  11  and  17  April  1958 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Duncan  Wilson. 

PEARCE,  Sir  GEORGE  FOSTER  (1870- 
1952),  Australian  statesman,  was  bom 
at  Mount  Barker,  South  Australia,  14 
January  1870,  the  fourth  son  in  the  family 
of  ten  children  of  James  Pearce,  a  black- 
smith who  had  emigrated  from  Cornwall, 
and  his  wife,  Jane  Foster,  of  London.  He 
was  educated  at  a  government  school  in 
Redhill  until  the  age  of  eleven  and  at 


797 


Pearce 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


fifteen,  after  some  years  as  a  farm  labourer, 
became  an  apprentice  carpenter.  On  com- 
pleting his  time  he  moved  to  Adelaide 
where  he  was  caught  up  in  the  turmoil  of 
the  maritime  strike  and  the  economic 
recession.  Continuous  imemployment  in- 
duced him  to  migrate  in  1892  to  Western 
Australia  where  he  immediately  became 
associated  with  the  embryonic  Labour 
movement.  For  the  next  nine  years  he 
worked  untiringly  organizing  unions  and 
agitating  for  democratic  and  social 
reforms.  He  also  did  his  utmost  to 
interest  conservative  craft  unionists  in 
political  action,  a  frustrating  task  which 
fully  tested  his  patience  and  perseverance. 
By  1900  he  had  become  the  best  known 
and  most  popular  labour  leader  in  the 
colony. 

In  1901  Pearce  was  elected  to  the  first 
federal  Senate.  He  retained  his  seat  for 
thirty-seven  years  and  held  ministerial 
and  cabinet  rank  for  twenty-five:  as 
minister  for  defence  in  1908-9,  1910-13, 
1914-21,  and  1931-4;  minister  for  home 
and  territories,  1921-6 ;  vice-president  of 
the  executive  council,  1926-9 ;  and  minis- 
ter for  external  affairs,  1934-7.  In  the 
defence  department  he  was  responsible 
for  putting  into  operation  the  scheme 
for  compulsory  military  training  recom- 
mended by  Lord  Kitchener  [q.v.]  and  in 
1913  he  established  a  military  aviation 
school  at  Point  Cook  which  proved  to  be 
the  origin  of  the  Royal  Australian  Air 
Force.  During  the  war  of  1914-18  he 
arranged  and  supervised  the  transporta- 
tion and  provisioning  of  the  Australian 
troops  and  in  1919  he  came  to  Britain  to 
take  control  of  their  demobilization. 
On  Australia's  behalf  he  signed  the  peace 
treaty  with  Austria  at  St.  Germain.  He 
represented  his  country  also  at  the 
Washington  conference  of  1921-2  and 
led  the  Australian  delegation  to  the 
League  of  Nations  Assembly  in  Geneva 
in  1927.  At  home  in  the  twenties  the 
development  schemes  showed  many  signs  of 
his  influence,  particularly  in  the  efforts 
made  to  apply  science  to  industry ;  and  in 
1935  he  reorganized  the  Department  of 
External  Affairs  along  lines  which  sub- 
stantially endured.  He  was  an  exemplary 
administrator,  attentive  to  detail,  willing 
to  take  advice  but  equally  willing  to  take 
decisions.  His  counsel  was  much  valued 
by  the  prime  ministers  under  whom  he 
served. 

In  1916  the  Australian  Labour  move- 
ment split  irreparably  on  the  question  of 
conscription  for  overseas  military  service. 


Pearce,  W.  M.  Hughes  [q.v.],  and  a  number 
of  other  prominent  Labour  politicians 
supported  conscription,  were  conse- 
quently expelled  from  the  federal  Labour 
Party,  and  formed  a  minority  Government 
of  their  own,  soon  to  be  amalgamated  in 
1917  with  the  Liberal  Party  to  form  a 
national  Government.  Hitherto  Pearce 
had  been  held  in  high  regard  by  Labour. 
But  the  conscription  dispute  engendered 
such  bitterness  that  past  services  were 
forgotten  and  for  years  he  was  mercilessly 
harried,  his  offence  heightened  by  his 
continual  occupancy  of  ministerial  posts 
in  non-Labour  Governments.  He  became 
increasingly  involved  in  controversy.  From 
1922  onwards,  as  Western  Australia's 
only  federal  minister,  he  was  held 
accountable  for  the  evils,  real  and 
imaginary,  which  federation  had  imposed 
on  the  state.  Although  he  fought  hard  for 
his  state's  interests  Pearce  was  never  a 
parochial  politician  and  he  refused  to 
support  irresponsible  state  rights  claims. 
He  strongly  opposed  the  Western  Austra- 
lian secession  movement  which  gathered 
strength  in  the  early  thirties.  At  the 
elections  of  1937  the  'Put  Pearce  last' 
campaign  of  the  leading  secessionist  body, 
'The  Dominion  League',  brought  about 
his  defeat. 

Pearce  made  no  attempt  to  re-enter 
Parliament,  but  further  demands  were 
made  upon  his  great  experience.  He  served 
on  the  Commonwealth  Grants  Commission 
in  1939-44  and  made  a  considerable 
contribution  during  the  war  of  1939-45 
as  a  member  of  the  Defence  Board  of 
Business  Administration  of  which  he  was 
chairman  from  1940  until  it  was  disbanded 
in  1947. 

Neither  outgoing  nor  convivial,  Pearce 
was  a  serious-minded  man  and  a  tee- 
totaller who  lacked  the  gift,  though  not  a 
sense,  of  humour.  He  was  uncommunica- 
tive to  all  but  his  closest  friends  and  kept 
his  feelings  well  under  control.  His  politi- 
cal ideas  were  never  extremist.  He  was 
an  empirical  reformer,  his  political  creed 
stemming  from  a  keen  sense  of  fair  play. 
He  often  claimed  that  he  sought  a  'fair 
and  reasonable'  deal  for  the  working  class. 
He  was  not  a  socialist  yet  he  possessed 
the  Labour  man's  traditional  fear  of 
monopolies  and  favoured  the  nationaliza- 
tion of  certain  industries.  Even  in  the 
nineties  he  was  reckoned  a  moderate 
among  Labour  men  and  it  was  not  long 
before  the  movement  accepted  his  ideas 
as  basic  policy.  He  ended  his  political 
career   opposed  to   militant   trade-union 


798 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Pease 


leaders  and  supporting  conservative 
schemes  for  Australia's  recovery  from  the 
world-wide  economic  collapse.  The  re- 
forms which  most  interested  him  were 
implemented  by  the  Labour  Government 
of  1910-13  and  its  Liberal  predecessor. 
Thereafter  he  had  little  to  offer  in  the  way 
of  new  social  legislation  and  he  was 
quite  unable  to  sympathize  with  the 
radical  socialists  who  became  increasingly 
influential  in  Australia. 

In  1897  Pearce  married  Eliza  Maude 
(died  1947),  daughter  of  Richard  Barrett, 
a  french  polisher,  of  Perth,  Western 
Australia;  they  had  two  sons  and  two 
daughters.  Pearce  was  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council  in  1921  and  appointed 
K.C.V.O.  in  1927.  He  died  at  his  home  at 
Elwood  24  June  1952.  He  had  no  firm 
religious  beliefs  although  towards  the  end 
of  his  life  he  regularly  attended  Presby- 
terian services.  A  portrait  by  W.  A. 
Dargie  hangs  in  the  library  of  the  Common- 
wealth Parliament  at  Canberra. 

[Sir  G.  F.  Pearce,  Carpenter  to  Cabinet^ 
1951 ;  Ernest  Scott,  Australia  During  the  War, 
vol.  xi  of  the  Official  History  of  Australia  in 
the  War  of  1914-18,  1936;  West  Australian, 
25  June  1952 ;  Argus,  1  July  1938.] 

John  Merritt. 

PEASE,  EDWARD  REYNOLDS  (1857- 
1955),  founder-member  and  secretary  of 
the  Fabian  Society,  was  born  23  December 
1857  at  Henbury  Hill,  near  Bristol.  He 
was  the  eldest  son  by  his  third  marriage 
of  Thomas  Pease,  a  well-to-do  retired 
woolcomber;  his  mother  was  Susanna 
Ann  Fry  of  the  Quaker  family  of  cocoa 
manufacturers.  Thomas  Pease  was  him- 
self a  Quaker,  a  cousin  of  the  more 
famous  Peases  of  Darlington  [qq.v.]. 
Edward  Pease  was  educated  at  home, 
until  at  the  age  of  seventeen  he  went 
up  to  London  to  become  a  clerk  in  a 
firm  of  textile  merchants  run  by  his 
brother-in-law  (Sir)  Thomas  Hanbury. 
Six  years  later  he  went  into  partnership 
with  a  stockbroker ;  but  his  heart  was  not 
in  the  City,  and  when  in  1884  his  father 
died  and  "^  left  him  £3,000  he  made  all 
haste  to  leave  it. 

Meantime  his  future  for  his  long  life 
had,  in  effect,  been  settled.  Through  his 
cousin  Emily  Ford  who  was  an  ardent 
spiritualist  he  had  made  the  acquaintance 
of  another  spiritualist,  Frank  Podmore 
[q.v.],  the  biographer  of  Robert  Owen 
[q.v.];  and  as  a  result  of  long  talks, 
conducted  sometimes  while  waiting  for 
spirits  to  materialize,  Podmore  induced 


Pease  to  join  an  earnest  body  called  the 
Fellowship  of  the  New  Life,  founded  by 
the  wandering  scholar  Thomas  Davidson. 
The  objects  of  the  Fellowship  were  all- 
embracing,  including  'the  attainment  of  a 
perfect  character  by  all  and  each' ;  and  not 
long  after  j oining ,  Pease  and  Podmore ,  with 
several  others,  decided  to  form  a  rather 
less  ambitious  body,  the  socialist  Fabian 
Society,  which  was  officially  founded  in 
January  1884  and  was  almost  immediately 
joined  by  Bernard  Shaw  and  later  by 
Sidney  Webb  [qq.v.].  Its  early  meetings 
were  held  in  Pease's  rooms  at  Osnaburgh 
Street,  St.  Pancras. 

Pease,  like  many  other  socialists  of  his 
day,  had  been  much  influenced  by  William 
Morris  [q.v.],  and  after  his  father's  death 
he  decided  that  he  ought  to  become  a 
working  craftsman.  He  trained  himself  as 
a  cabinet-maker  and  in  1886,  having  failed 
to  secure  employment  in  Morris's  firm,  he 
moved  to  Newcastle,  where  he  worked 
as  a  cabinet-maker  for  three  years  and  in 
1889  married  Mary  Gammell  (Marjory), 
daughter  of  the  Rev.  George  Smyttan 
Davidson,  minister  of  the  parish  of 
Kinfauns.  Sydney  (later  Lord)  Olivier 
[q.v.]  took  over  the  secretaryship  of  the 
Fabian  Society;  but  Pease  kept  in  close 
touch.  Following  the  great  success  of 
Fabian  Essays  in  Socialism  (1889),  the 
Fabian  Society  decided  to  venture  upon 
employing  paid  staff.  Pease  was  taken 
on  in  1890  as  part-time  secretary  at  £1  a 
week ;  and  earned  a  similar  sum  nominally 
as  secretary  to  Sidney  Webb,  but  really 
on  Fabian  duties.  (A  year  previously, 
Webb  and  Pease  had  gone  together  on  a 
tour  of  the  New  World.)  After  a  year,  the 
appointment  was  made  full-time,  and  Pease 
held  it  until  1913.  In  that  year  he  inherited 
a  capital  sum  from  his  uncle,  Joseph 
Storrs  Fry  [q.v.],  which  enabled  him  to 
retire  from  paid  work.  The  parting  gift 
of  the  society  was  a  set  of  the  Encyclopcedia 
Britannica,  exactly  appropriate,  Shaw 
remarked,  since  Pease  was  now  to  be 
deprived  of  daily  access  to  Sidney  Webb. 
His  post  at  the  Fabian  Society  was  taken 
by  W.  Stephen  Sanders  while  he  himself 
became  honorary  secretary  (acting  as 
general  secretary  from  1915  to  1918  while 
Sanders  was  in  the  army),  and  retained 
that  position  and  his  seat  on  the  executive 
committee  until  the  reconstruction  of  the 
society  in  1939. 

Pease's  secretaryship  coincided  almost 
exactly  with  all  the  excitements  of  the 
first  thirty  years  of  the  Fabian  Society. 
He  was  a  founder;  he  became  its  paid 


799 


Pease 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


servant  just  when  its  influence  was 
beginning  to  make  itself  felt  in  polities — 
the  Newcastle  programme  of  the  Liberal 
Party,  which  was  largely  a  Eabian  draft, 
was  carried  in  1891,  and  in  the  London 
County  Council  elections  of  the  following 
year  the  Progressives,  including  Webb, 
came  home  to  victory  on  a  Fabian  policy ; 
Pease  took  part  in  the  formation  of  the 
Labour  Representation  Committee  which 
became  the  Labour  Party  and  sat  as 
Fabian  representative  on  its  executive 
for  fourteen  years ;  and  he  was  the  faithful 
watchdog  of  the  Fabian  executive  through 
its  recurrent  political  excitements,  from 
the  quarrel  about  the  South  African  war 
to  the  famous  battle  of  Shaw  and  Webb 
with  H.  G.  Wells  [q.v.]  recalled  in  the 
pages  of  The  New  Machiavelli  (1911),  and 
the  later  Guild  Socialist  attack  led  by 
G.  D.  H.  Cole  [q.v.]  and  WiUiam  Mellor. 
In  Pease,  as  Wells  remarked,  the  execu- 
tive had  a  man  who  'did  the  work  of  a 
cabinet  minister  for  the  salary  of  a  clerk' ; 
and  they  invested  well.  In  all  the  disputes, 
Pease  was  firmly  on  the  side  of  the  strict 
coUectivist  faith  of  the  leaders;  he 
admired  Sidney  Webb  more  than  any 
other  man  in  the  world  and  was  convinced 
of  his  rightness  on  every  occasion,  and  of 
the  foolishness  of  his  opponents.  After  the 
outbreak  of  war  the  storms  died  away; 
during  the  long  period  of  quiescence  there 
was  little  for  Pease  to  do,  and  he  turned 
more  and  more  to  local  political  work — 
and  gardening — at  his  home  in  Limps- 
field  in  Surrey,  where  he  had  a  number  of 
distinguished  and  like-minded  friends; 
when  the  society  revived  he  was  too  old 
and  too  deaf  to  take  part.  He  wrote  its 
official  History  in  1916  (revised  ed.  1925), 
several  Fabian  Tracts,  as  well  as  reviews 
and  articles,  and  a  book  on  The  Case  for 
Municipal  Drink  Trade  (1904);  but  his 
main  work  was  administrative. 

Pease  was  a  shy  man  whose  rather 
gruff  manner  and  disUke  of  all  ceremony 
sometimes  obscured  at  first  sight  his 
natural  kindliness,  which  was  none  the 
less  considerable.  He  was  a  man  of  his 
own  pleasures,  including  Norse  sagas; 
and  he  was  a  completely  disinterested 
servant  of  the  cause  he  had  made  his  own. 
His  wife,  herself  a  magistrate  and  local 
councillor,  died  in  1950 ;  two  sons  survived 
him  when  he  died  at  Limpsfleld  5  January 
1955. 

[E.  R.  Pease,  History  of  the  Fabian  Society, 
revised  ed.  1925,  and  unpublished  remini- 
scences; Beatrice  Webb,  Our  Partnership, 
ed.  Barbara  Drake  and  Margaret  Cole,  1948 ; 


Fabian  Society  records;  Fabian  Journal 
March  1955;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  Margaret  Cole. 

PEERS,  Sir  CHARLES  REED  (1868- 
1952),  antiquary,  was  born  at  Westerham, 
Kent,  22  September  1868,  the  eldest  son 
of  the  Rev.  William  Henry  Peers,  then 
curate  at  Westerham,  and  later  vicar  of 
Harrow  Weald  and  lord  of  the  manor  of 
Chiselhampton,  Oxfordshire,  and  his  wife, 
Dora  Patience,  daughter  of  William  Carr, 
of  Dene  Park,  Tonbridge.  Peers  was 
educated  at  Charterhouse  and  at  King's 
College,  Cambridge,  where  he  obtained  a 
second  class  in  both  parts  of  the  classical 
tripos  (1890-91).  He  then  studied  at 
Dresden  and  Berlin  and  in  1893  entered 
the  office  of  the  distinguished  architect 
(Sir)  Thomas  Jackson  [q.v.]  who  encour- 
aged his  pupil's  early  interest  in  medieval 
architecture.  A  season  in  Egypt  as  a 
colleague  of  Somers  Clarke  at  El  Kab  and 
elsewhere  was  followed  by  six  years' 
work  as  a  practising  architect ;  but  in  1902 
he  returned  to  Egypt  for  another  season,  j 
and  thereafter  devoted  himself  exclu-  | 
sively  to  the  historical  and  archaeological 
aspects  of  his  profession.  In  1903  he 
was  appointed  architectural  editor  to  the 
Victoria  County  Histories  of  England^  and 
the  high  reputation  acquired  by  these 
Histories  as  an  architectural  record  was  in 
considerable  measure  his  creation. 

When  in  1910  he  was  appointed 
inspector  of  ancient  monuments  in  the 
Office  of  Works,  a  wide  administrative 
field  was  opened  to  him.  His  first  task 
was  to  advise  on  the  reform  of  the 
Ancient  Monuments  Act  which,  as  formu- 
lated in  1882,  had  long  fallen  behind  the 
growing  sense  of  responsibiUty  for  the 
well-being  of  ancient  sites  and  buildings. 
The  new  Act  of  1913  enlarged  the  powers 
of  the  commissioners  of  works  to  conserve 
ancient  structures  and  to  prevent  or  at 
any  rate  delay  damage  to  listed  'monu- 
ments'. To  cope  with  these  new  charges, 
the  inspectorate  was  increased;  Peers 
became  chief  inspector  of  ancient  monu- 
ments, with  inspectors  for  England, 
Scotland,  and  Wales.  The  Act  was  further 
strengthened  in  1931,  still  under  Peers's 
guidance.  He  retired  in  1933  on  reaching 
the  age  of  sixty-five. 

During  the  twenty-four  years  in  which 
Peers  thus  controlled  the  Ancient  Monu- 
ments Department,  he  laid  down  the 
principles  which  have  governed  archi- 
tectural conservation  in  the  United 
Kingdom  and  have  served  as  a  model  in 


800 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Peers,  C.  R. 


other  parts  of  the  world.  His  cardinal 
principle  was  to  retain  but  not  to  restore 
the  surviving  remains  of  an  ancient 
structure ;  and  in  this  respect  he  departed 
emphatically  from  the  tradition  of 
Viollet-le-Duc  and  his  successors  in 
France  and  Italy,  where  exuberant 
restoration  frequently  obscured  the  evi- 
dence upon  which  it  was  based.  The  stern 
Puritanism  with  which  Peers  stripped  ab- 
beys and  castles  of  their  'romantic'  but 
destructive  weeds  found  compensation  in 
the  smooth  lawns  and  clean  masonry  which 
became  a  sort  of  sign-manual  of  our 
national  monuments  under  his  direction. 
Above  all,  his  sound  scholarship  ensured 
that  the  historical  evidence  implicit  in 
these  structures  was  preserved  and  dis- 
played, both  by  clearance  on  the  ground 
and  by  the  publication  of  succinct  guides, 
many  of  them  written  by  himself.  If  the 
process  of  clearance  was  sometimes  carried 
through  with  less  than  the  meticulous 
supervision  demanded  by  modern  stan- 
dards, the  immensity  of  Peers's  pioneer 
task  is  at  least  a  partial  excuse.  In  matters 
of  excavation,  which  lay  outside  his 
personal  experience,  he  was  always  ready 
to  listen  to  criticism  and  to  accept  advice 
if  proffered  from  authoritative  quarters. 
But  he  never  suffered  fools  gladly. 

In  his  retirement  his  experience  was 
put  to  active  use  in  other  ways.  In  1935 
he  became  surveyor  of  Westminster 
Abbey,  where  his  ashes  were  eventually 
buried  in  the  Islip  chapel.  He  was  consult- 
ing architect  to  York  Minster  and  Durham 
Cathedral,  and  at  Durham  supervised 
the  difficult  enterprise  of  pinning  the 
Bishop's  Castle  to  the  steep  rock  from 
which  it  was  slipping.  He  was  also 
seneschal  of  Canterbury  Cathedral,  and  at 
Oxford  he  sat  on  the  diocesan  advisory 
committee  and  carried  out  architectural 
work  within  the  university.  Alongside  all 
these  preoccupations  he  was  throughout 
his  life  employed,  often  anonymously, 
in  a  great  variety  of  ways.  From  its 
establishment  in  1908,  he  was  closely 
associated  with  the  Royal  Commission  on 
Historical  Monuments  (England)  and  in 
1921  became  a  commissioner.  To  the 
preparation  of  the  Commission's  reports 
he  gave  much  time  and  thought,  and 
regularly  found  opportunity  to  collabor- 
ate with  the  Commission's  staff  in  the 
field.  From  1900  until  1903  he  was 
honorary  editor  of  the  Archaeological 
Journal,  the  publication  of  the  Royal 
Archaeological  Institute ;  and  in  1901  his 
election  to  a  fellowship  of  the  Society  of 


Antiquaries  began  a  long  and  fruitful 
association  with  that  senior  body.  In  1908 
he  became  its  secretary,  and  occupied  the 
office  until  1921  when  he  was  elected 
director.  From  1929  to  1934  he  held  the 
five-year  tenure  of  the  presidency,  and  to 
the  end  he  was  closely  identified  with  the 
society's  interests.  In  1988  he  received  its 
gold  medal.  Other  honours  came  to  him: 
the  C.B.E  in  1924;  knighthood  in  1931; 
the  Order  of  knight  commander  of  St. 
Olaf  when  he  went  in  1936  to  Oslo  as  the 
retiring  president  of  the  Congress  of 
Prehistoric  and  Protohistoric  Sciences; 
honorary  doctorates  of  Leeds  (1983)  and 
London  (1936);  the  Royal  gold  medal  of 
the  Royal  Institute  of  British  Architects 
(1933).  He  was  an  honorary  fellow  of 
King's  College,  Cambridge,  and  a  gover- 
nor of  Charterhouse.  He  was  a  trustee  of 
the  British  Museum  from  1929  and  of  the 
London  Museum  from  1980,  and  he  was 
antiquary  to  the  Royal  Academy  of  Arts. 
He  was  also  a,  fellow  of  the  British 
Academy  (1926). 

In  his  early  days  Peers  had  sought  a 
post  in  the  British  Museum.  His  successful 
competitor,  (Sir)  George  Hill  [q.v.],  later 
director  of  the  museum,  became  his  fife- 
long  friend,  and  it  was  in  the  company 
of  chosen  companions  such  as  Hill  that 
Peers  shone  as  a  conversationalist,  with 
the  quick  wit  and  wide  learning  that  some- 
times suggested  another  age.  His  was  in 
the  fullest  sense  a  cultivated  mind,  sym- 
pathetic to  the  listener  but  sharpened  by 
idiosyncrasy.  As  a  companion  he  was  an 
unceasing  stimulus,  with  an  ardour  which, 
in  the  field,  stretched  the  endurance  of  his 
associates.  With  the  younger  generation 
in  particular  he  was  always  at  home,  and 
many  of  his  successors  owed  more  to  his 
restless  and  comprehensive  intelligence 
than  they  themselves  perhaps  fully 
reaUzed.  In  1924  he  returned  to  live  in 
the  family  Georgian  manor  house  at 
Chiselhampton,  where  he  entertained  his 
friends  in  a  singularly  appropriate  setting. 
His  spare  time  was  devoted  to  his  garden 
and  his  farms  under  increasingly  difficult 
economic  conditions. 

In  1899  Peers  married  Gertrude 
Katherine  (died  1953),  daughter  of  the 
late  Rev.  Frederick  Shepherd,  vicar  of 
Stoke-sub-Hamdon,  Somerset,  by  whom 
he  had  three  sons.  He  died  at  Coulsdon, 
Surrey,  16  November  1952. 

[C.  A.  Ralegh  Radford  in  Proceedings  of 
the  British  Academy,  vol.  xxxix,  1953; 
private  information;  personal  knowledge.] 

MOBTIMEB   WhEJELKB. 


8652062 


801 


Dd 


Peers,  E.  A. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


PEERS,  EDGAR  ALLISON  (1891-1952), 
Hispanic  scholar  and  educationist,  was 
born  at  Leighton  Buzzard  7  May  1891,  the 
only  son  and  elder  child  of  .John  Thomas 
Peers,  civil  servant,  by  his  wife,  Jessie 
Dale,  daughter  of  Charles  Allison.  From 
Dartford  Grammar  School  and  study 
abroad  he  proceeded  to  Christ's  College, 
Cambridge,  of  which  he  was  a  scholar  and 
prizeman,  his  first  interests  being  English 
and  French  literature.  In  1910  he  ob- 
tained his  B.A.,  London,  with  second 
class  honours  in  English  and  French,  and 
in  1912  at  Cambridge  a  first  class  in  the 
medieval  and  modern  languages  tripos. 
He  shared  the  Winchester  reading  prize 
(1912),  and  won  the  Harness  (1913)  and 
the  Members'  English  essay  (1914)  prizes. 
From  1913  to  1919  he  taught  successively 
at  Mill  Hill,  Felsted,  and  Wellington  as 
modern  languages  master.  His  first 
publications  still  concerned  English  and 
French  literature  {Elizabethan  Drama 
and  its  Mad  Folk,  1914;  The  Origins  of 
French  Romanticism,  with  M.  B.  Finch, 
1920),  but  already  he  was  becoming 
attracted  to  Spain,  and  in  1920  he  was 
appointed  to  the  Gilmour  chair  of  Spanish 
at  Liverpool,  where  he  remained  there- 
after. 

Peers  was  among  the  first  to  realize  the 
importance  and  the  potentialities  of 
Spanish  studies  in  Great  Britain  after 
the  war  of  1914-18.  Through  lectures, 
visits  to  schools,  teachers'  conferences, 
vacation  courses  in  England  and  in 
Spain,  and  the  editing  of  a  steady  stream 
of  textbooks,  anthologies,  and  study  aids 
(notably  Spain,  A  Companion  to  Spanish 
Studies,  1929;  A  Handbook  to  the  Study 
and  Teaching  of  Spanish,  1938  ;  A  Critical 
Anthology  of  Spanish  Verse,  1948)  he 
laboured  indefatigably  and  with  great 
effect  to  further  them  at  both  school  and 
imiversity  level.  Always  keenly  interested 
in  the  methods  and  aims  not  merely  of 
modern  language  teaching  but  of  higher 
studies  in  general,  he  wrote  under  the 
pseudonym  of  Bruce  Truscot  two  books, 
Redbrick  University  (1943)  and  Redbrick 
and  These  Vital  Days  (1945),  which  made 
a  major  contribution,  from  the  standpoint 
of  the  modern  civic  university,  to  the 
discussion  of  university  problems  and 
policies  at  the  close  of  the  war  of  1939-45. 
To  his  talent  for  organizing  he  gave 
expression  in  a  number  of  directions. 
He  founded  in  1918,  and  was  for  eleven 
years  honorary  secretary  of,  the  Modern 
Himianities  Research  Association,  and  its 
president  in  1931-2 ;  founded  in  1923  and 


edited  until  his  death  the  quarterly 
Bulletin  of  Spanish  (from  1949  Hispanic) 
Studies;  founded  in  1934  at  Liverpool 
the  Institute  of  Hispanic  Studies ;  and  was 
educational  director  from  1943  to  1946  of 
the  Hispanic  Council. 

These  manifold  activities  threw  into  the 
higher  relief  a  record  in  scholarship 
impressive  both  in  its  scope  and  in  its 
originality.  Two  fields  in  Spanish  letters, 
nineteenth-century  romanticism  and  the 
sixteenth-century  mystics,  he  made  par- 
ticularly his  own  while  they  were  still 
comparatively  little  known  and  studied 
even  in  Spain.  Much  penetrating  spade- 
work  and  genuine  research,  fructifying  in 
both  cases  in  a  number  of  preliminary 
volumes,  underlay  his  great  History  of  the 
Romantic  Movement  in  Spain  (2  vols., 
1940)  and  his  Studies  of  the  Spanish 
Mystics  (2  vols.,  1927-30).  The  latter, 
along  with  the  masterly  translations  of 
the  complete  works  of  St.  John  of  the 
Cross  (3  vols.,  1934-5)  and  of  St.  Teresa 
(3  vols.,  1946,  and  her  Letters,  2  vols., 
1951),  caused  Spanish  mysticism  to  be 
known  and  appreciated  by  English 
readers  as  never  before.  His  achievement 
here,  which  received  the  imprimatur  of  the 
Catholic  Church,  was  the  more  remarkable 
in  one  who  was  neither  a  Roman  Catholic 
by  persuasion  nor  a  theologian  by  training. 
A  number  of  his  critical  works  in  both 
these  fields  were  republished  in  Spanish 
translation  in  Spain.  Peers's  other  great 
enthusiasm  was  Catalonia  and  its  medi- 
eval splendours :  of  Ramon  Lull  he  trans- 
lated much,  including  Blanquerna  (1926), 
and  wrote  a  full-scale  biography  (1929), 
while  in  Catalonia  Infelix  (1937)  he  traced 
a  sympathetic  picture  of  the  Catalan 
people  and  its  history. 

Peers's  interest  in  Spain  was  always 
warm  and  personal.  Over  many  years  he 
spent  there  some  four  months  out  of 
every  twelve  and  a  number  of  travel 
volumes,  chief  among  them  Spain,  A  Com- 
panion  to  Spanish  Travel  (1930)  and  The 
Pyrenees,  French  and  Spanish  (1932),  bear 
witness  to  his  feelings  for  and  gift  in  de- 
scribing the  Spanish  scene.  A  close  student 
no  less  of  contemporary  events,  he  analysed 
these  for  close  on  a  quarter  of  a  century  in 
'Spain  Week  by  Week',  a  regular  feature 
of  the  Bulletin  of  Spanish  Studies.  The 
outbreak  of  the  Spanish  civil  war  in  July 
1936  thus  found  him  admirably  equipped 
to  interpret  to  the  English-speaking 
world  its  underlying  causes.  This  he  did  in 
The  Spanish  Tragedy  which,  written  with 
striking  prescience,  appeared  within  three 


802 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Pepler 


months  of  the  outbreak  of  the  confiict  and 
was  many  times  reprinted.  The  Spanish 
Dilemma  (1940)  and  Spain  in  Eclipse 
(1943)  provided  a  similarly  penetrating 
guide  to  its  aftermath.  Himself  an 
Anglican  of  deep  rehgious  conviction,  he 
wrote  in  Spain,  the  Church  and  the  Orders 
(1939)  a  warm  defence  of  the  record  of  the 
Catholic  Church  in  Spain. 

Peers  received  the  honorary  degree  of 
LL.D.  from  Glasgow  University  in  1947. 
Foreign  distinctions  included  visiting  pro- 
fessorships of  English  literature  at  Madrid 
University  (1928  and  1929),  of  modern 
comparative  literature  at  Columbia 
University  (1929-30),  and  of  Spanish 
at  the  universities  of  New  Mexico  and 
California  (1930).  He  was  Rede  lecturer 
at  Cambridge  (1932),  Centennial  lecturer 
at  New  York  University  (1932),  and 
Taylorian  lecturer  at  Oxford  (1939), 
and  was  a  member  and  medallist  of 
the  Hispanic  Society  of  America,  and 
honorary  member  of  the  American 
Academy  of  Arts  and  Sciences,  and  of  the 
Institut  d'Estudis  Catalans. 

Peers  lived  single -mindedly  for  his 
subject,  and  accomplished  so  much  in 
part  through  meticulous  planning  and  use 
of  his  time,  down  to  the  shortest  train 
journey.  Apart  from  a  keen  delight  in 
music  he  confessed  to  no  recreations,  and 
was  of  somewhat  brusque  exterior  and 
approach,  although  affable  and  given  to 
the  exercise  of  a  keen  sense  of  mimicry 
in  the  company  of  intimate  friends. 
He  married  in  1924  Marion,  daughter  of 
James  Frederic  Young,  director  of  educa- 
tion for  Devon;  there  were  no  children. 
He  died  at  Liverpool  21  December 
1952. 

[Btdletin  of  Hispanic  Studies,  No.  117, 
January-March  1953  (memorial  number  with 
selective  bibliography) ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.] 

William  C.  Atkinson. 

PEPLER,  Sir  GEORGE  LIONEL  (1882- 
1959),  town  planner,  was  born  at  Croydon, 
Surrey,  24  February  1882,  the  third  child 
and  second  son  of  George  Henry  Pepler, 
brewer,  and  his  wife,  Emma  Florence 
Mills.  Educated  at  Bootham  School, 
York,  and  the  Leys  School,  Cambridge,  and 
articled  to  Walter  Hooker,  surveyor,  of 
Croydon,  he  carried  on  a  practice  in 
surveying  and  the  then  emerging  vocation 
of  town  planning  from  1905  until  1914  in 
partnership  with  Ernest  G.  Allen.  They 
were  awarded  three  gold  medals  at 
housing  exhibitions  in  1908  and  1910  and 


were  among  the  first  to  specialize  in  laying 
out  new  villages  and  housing  estates  for 
landowners:  among  others  at  Fallings 
Park  near  W^olverhampton  and  at  Kneb- 
worth,  Hertfordshire.  During  that  period 
Pepler  became  a  member  of  the  Garden 
City  (later  Town  and  Country  Planning) 
Association,  and  was  active  in  the 
advocacy  of  the  garden  city  concept  and 
of  the  operation  by  local  authorities  of 
their  permissive  planning  powers  under 
the  first  Town  Planning  Act,  of  1909. 
In  1914  John  Burns  [q.v.],  the  'father'  of 
the  Act,  called  Pepler  into  the  planning 
administration  of  the  Local  Government 
Board  where  he  succeeded  Thomas  Adams 
as  chief  technical  planning  officer,  a 
position  which  he  retained,  through 
several  changes  of  his  designation  and 
that  of  the  department,  until  1946. 

Pepler' s  qualities  proved  admirably 
suited  to  the  task  of  inducing  local 
authorities  to  adopt  town  planning  powers 
and  guiding  them  in  putting  these  into 
practice.  Having  a  passionate  belief  in  the 
necessity  of  planning,  as  well  as  persuasive- 
ness, patience,  and  tact,  he  was  allowed  by 
successive  ministers,  or  perhaps  quietly 
assumed,  exceptional  freedom  and  scope 
in  what  was  essentially  propaganda.  He 
was  a  major  influence  in  the  conversion 
of  public  and  official  opinion  to  acceptance 
of  a  new,  contentious,  and  difficult  govern- 
mental process.  The  experience  and 
authority  which  he  gained  in  this  key 
position  enabled  him,  just  before  his 
retirement,  to  make  a  weighty  contribu- 
tion to  the  formulation  of  the  Town  and 
Country  Planning  Act  of  1947  which 
established  the  planning  of  all  land  as  a 
normal  function  of  central  and  local 
government. 

His  work  and  influence  in  planning 
extended  far  outside  his  official  position. 
He  was  one  of  the  founders  in  1913  of  the 
Town  Planning  Institute;  its  honorary 
secretary  and  treasurer  until  his  death; 
twice  president  (1919-20,  1949-50);  and 
first  gold  medalHst  (1953).  Keenly  inter- 
ested in  the  training  of  planners,  he  was 
unfailingly  helpful  in  encouragement  and 
advice  to  students  and  young  members  of 
the  profession,  and  was  chairman  (1930- 
59)  of  the  Town  Planning  Joint  Examina- 
tion Board.  He  attended  regularly  the 
annual  sessions  of  the  Town  and  Country 
Planning  Summer  School  from  its  founda- 
tion in  1933,  and  was  its  president  in 
1943-59. 

Realizing  the  importance  and  value  of 
exchanges  of  experience,  Pepler  was  active 


Pepler 


.D.N.B.  1951-1960 


in  the  work  of  the  International  Federa- 
tion for  Housing  and  Town  Planning  of 
which  he  was  president  (1935-8,  1947-52) 
and  thereafter  honorary  president  for 
life.  The  survival  of  the  Federation  from 
the  disruption  of  the  war  of  1939-45  was 
due  mainly  to  his  devotion  and  that  of 
his  second  wife  (as  honorary  secretary) 
during  the  war  years. 

Pepler  was  a  member  of  the  regional 
survey  committee  for  South  Wales  (1920), 
of  the  unhealthy  areas  committee  over 
which  Neville  Chamberlain  presided 
(1921),  and  of  the  royal  commission  on 
common  land  (1955-8) ;  chairman  of  the 
Institution  of  Professional  Civil  Servants 
(1937-42),  of  the  inter-allied  committee 
for  physical  planning  and  reconstruction 
(1942-5),  and  for  many  years  an  active 
influence  in  the  Council  for  the  Preserva- 
tion of  Rural  England  and  the  National 
Playing  Fields  Association.  With  P.  W. 
Macfarlane  he  prepared  the  outline  plan 
for  the  north-east  development  area  (1949) 
and  in  1950-54  he  was  planning  adviser 
to  Singapore. 

His  interests  extended  into  all  the  wide 
range  of  issues  with  which  planning  is 
interconnected.  By  his  official  work  and 
by  incessant  effort  in  the  education  of 
specialist  and  general  opinion  through 
lectures,  conference  papers,  and  articles 
in  learned  journals,  he  made  a  massive, 
indeed  unique,  contribution  to  progress  in 
his  field.  His  success  in  this  was  due  to 
consistency  of  purpose  and  thought,  with 
a  tactical  elasticity  of  course  when 
obstacles  were  encountered  and  a  resilient 
resmnption  as  they  were  overcome. 
Always  calm  and  unruffled,  he  never 
seemed  to  seek  to  dominate  opponents, 
but  waited  patiently  until  they  saw  for 
themselves  the  force  of  his  suggestions. 
He  was  much  aided  in  this  by  his  sense  of 
humour  and  gentle  wit,  which  made  him 
highly  popular  with  colleagues  and  an 
admirable  chairman  of  conamittees  and 
conferences.  Perhaps  his  most  notable 
attribute,  however,  was  the  discipUned 
energy  with  which  he  carried  out  any  re- 
sponsibiUty  he  undertook.  He  scarcely  ever 
missed  a  meeting  of  any  body  of  which 
he  was  a  member,  or  failed  to  produce 
punctually  any  report,  article,  review, 
or  memorandum  he  had  promised.  He 
was  appointed  C.B.  in  1944,  knighted  in 
1948,  and  elected  an  honorary  associate 
of  the  Royal  Institute  of  British  Archi- 
tects in  1937. 

His  recreations  were  mainly  out  of  doors 
and    included    golf    and    other    games, 


swimming,  gardening,  and  bonfires.  He 
had  a  cottage  in  a  much-loved  country- 
side at  Lulworth,  Dorset,  where,  with  his 
family,  for  nearly  fifty  years  he  spent 
happy  holidays  by  the  sea.  In  1960  the 
headland  previously  known  as  East  Point, 
Lulworth  Cove,  was  renamed  'Pepler's 
Point'. 

Pepler  married  first,  in  1903,  Edith 
Amy  (died  1942),  daughter  of  Alfred 
E.  Bobbett,  soUcitor,  of  Bristol,  by  whom 
he  had  two  daughters  and  one  son; 
secondly,  in  1947,  Elizabeth,  daughter  of 
Eldred  Halton,  of  London,  merchant  in 
China;  she  was  deputy  chairman  of 
the  London  County  Council  in  1956-7. 
Pepler  died  at  Weymouth  13  April 
1959.  A  posthumous  portrait  in  oils  by 
(Sir)  Robin  Darwin  was  presented  in 
1959  to  the  Town  Planning  Institute. 

[Journal  of  the  Town  Planning  Institute, 
June  1959;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  Frederic  J.  Osborn. 

PERCY,  EUSTACE  SUTHERLAND 
CAMPBELL,  Baron  Percy  of 
Newcastle  (1887-1958),  politician  and 
educationist,  was  born  in  London  21 
March  1887,  the  seventh  son  of  Henry 
George  Percy,  then  Earl  Percy  and 
subsequently  seventh  Duke  of  North- 
umberland, by  his  wife.  Lady  Edith 
Campbell,  eldest  daughter  of  the  eighth 
Duke  of  Argyll  [q.v.].  He  grew  up  in  a 
household  which  even  in  that  day  was 
somewhat  old-fashioned,  dominated  by 
evangelical  Christianity,  an  austere  tradi- 
tion of  public  service,  and  a  contempt  for 
opulent  idleness.  He  was  educated  at 
Eton  and  at  Christ  Church,  Oxford, 
where  in  1907  he  was  awarded  the  Stan- 
hope historical  essay  prize  and  placed  in 
the  first  class  of  the  honour  school  of 
modern  history.  In  1909  he  entered  the 
diplomatic  service.  From  1910  to  1914 
he  served  in  the  Washington  embassy, 
finding  an  exuberant  interest  in  many 
aspects  of  American  life.  The  Foreign 
Office,  where,  apart  from  another  year  in 
Washington,  he  spent  the  years  1914-18, 
was  less  to  his  taste,  and  although  he 
attended  the  peace  conference  in  1919 
as  assistant  to  Lord  Robert  Cecil  (later 
Viscoimt  Cecil  of  Chelwood,  q.v.)  he 
resigned  from  the  service  in  that  year. 
It  was  his  grief  then,  and  more  acutely 
afterwards,  that  neither  the  war  nor  the 
peace  had  provided  a  basis  for  future 
Anglo-American  co-operation:  the  social 
demands  of  a  European  embassy  or  lega- 
tion would  have  bored  and  repelled  him. 


804 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Lord  Eustace  Percy  stood,  unsuccess- 
fully, as  a  Conservative  candidate  for 
Central  Hull  in  1919  but  in  1921  was 
elected  for  Hastings,  a  seat  which  he  held 
without  difficulty  until  he  left  politics  in 
1987.  His  rise,  at  first,  was  rapid  and, 
after  holding  minor  office,  he  was  ap- 
pointed president  of  the  Board  of  Edu- 
cation with  a  seat  in  the  Cabinet,  and  was 
sworn  of  the  Privy  Council,  in  November 
1924.  It  was  not  a  time  when  spectacular 
advances  could  be  made.  Percy  was 
sceptical  about  raising  the  school-leaving 
age,  deeply  interested  in  the  development 
of  technical  education,  and  assiduous  in 
encouraging  by  personal  contact  the  hard- 
pressed  men  and  women  on  whom  the 
burden  of  teaching  and  administration 
fell.  But  he  was  not  proving  himself 
a  'good  House  of  Commons  man'.  He  was 
hampered  by  lack  of  partisanship,  by  a 
too  obvious  distrust  of  political  pro- 
nouncements unrelated  to  administrative 
experience,  and  perhaps  by  the  gradual 
realization  of  a  conclusion  which  he  was 
to  express  in  1935,  that  'many  of  the 
greatest  crimes  and  greatest  failures  of 
history  have  been  due  to  the  attempt  to 
realize  the  highest  human  ideals  through 
political  authority'. 

The  defeat  of  the  Conservatives  in  1929 
removed  a  possibility  which  had  much 
attracted  him,  that  of  going  as  ambassador 
to  Washington,  and  his  exclusion  from 
office  between  1931  and  1935  was  fatal 
to  his  political  career.  These  were  not, 
however,  idle  or  wasted  years.  They  saw 
the  publication  of  his  Democracy  on  Trial 
(1931),  Government  in  Transition  (1934), 
The  Study  of  History  (1935),  and  the 
writing  of  John  Knox,  published  in  1937. 
His  interest  in  active  participation  in 
politics,  though  declining,  was  not  yet 
extinct.  He  played  some  small  part  in 
framing,  and  a  prominent  part  in  defend- 
ing, the  Government's  India  policy ;  and 
he  would  probably  have  accepted  the 
secretaryship  for  war  had  it  been  offered 
to  him  in  1935.  Instead,  in  June  of  that 
year  he  became  minister  without  portfolio. 
Afterwards  he  described  his  acceptance  of 
that  office,  with  undefined  duties  and  no 
staff,  as  'suicidal'.  His  resignation  in 
March  1936,  during  the  crisis  caused  by 
the  German  re-militarization  of  the  Rhine- 
land,  was  not,  explicitly,  a  protest  against 
the  lack  of  effective  British  reaction: 
it  was,  rather,  the  result  of  a  sense  of 
national,  governmental,  and  personal 
inadequacy. 

After  a  short  term  as  chairman  of  the 


Percy- 


British  Council,  Percy  in  1987  accepted 
the  rectorship  of  King's  College,  New- 
castle upon  Tyne»  i^^^o  which  the  College 
of  Medicine  and  Armstrong  College  had 
recently  been  amalgamated.  He  thus 
became  head  of  the  Newcastle  division 
of  the  university  of  Durham  and  vice- 
chancellor  of  the  university  in  rotation 
with  the  warden  of  the  Durham  colleges. 
Later  he  came  to  believe  that  the  federal 
structure  of  the  university  was  a  drag 
upon  the  progress  of  both  divisions, 
particularly  on  that  of  Newcastle,  which 
he  wanted  to  see  established  as  an  inde- 
pendent university.  In  this  he  proved  to  be 
a  dozen  years  aheaid  of  events.  There  were 
other  things  with  which  he  was  impatient : 
pedantry  masquerading  as  scholarship; 
the  concept  of  universities  as  'ivory 
towers'  whose  inhabitants,  relieved  of 
public  responsibilities,  were  to  pursue 
individual  excellence  in  increasingly  nar- 
row fields;  the  failure,  on  the  national 
level,  to  find  a  solution  to  the  problems  of 
technological  education.  In  1944  he  was 
chairman  of  a  departmental  committee  on 
higher  technological  education.  Yet  his 
was,  for  the  most  part,  a  genial  impatience, 
the  product  of  a  selfless  devotion  to  his 
duties,  a  fertile  imagination,  and  a  deter- 
mination to  translate  policy  into  action. 
The  speed  with  which  King's  College  was 
able  to  begin  its  programme  of  building 
after  the  war  was  largely  due  to  the  plans 
Percy  had  made  in  anticipation  of  new 
requirements.  But  it  would  be  mistaken 
to  regard  him  as  concerned  merely  or 
chiefly  with  physical  expansion  and 
administrative  efficiency.  His  greater 
contributions  to  the  college  and  the  uni- 
versity lay  in  the  high  standard  of  intel- 
lectual and  moral  integrity  which  he  stood 
for  and  the  inspiration  of  a  leadership 
which,  though  occasionally  impetuous, 
was  never  harsh  or  insensitive. 

Weakening  health  determined  Percy's 
resignation  in  October  1952  and  in  the  years 
of  his  retirement  he  wrote  The  Heresy  of 
Democracy  (1954)  and  Some  Memories 
(1958),  a  sensitive  and  perhaps  unduly 
self-critical  piece  of  autobiography.  In 
1954-7  he  was  chairman  of  the  royal  com- 
mission whose  recommendations  were 
embodied  in  the  Mental  Health  Act, 
1959. 

A  portrait  by  Lawrence  Gowing,  in  the 
possession  of  the  university  of  Newcastle, 
gives  a  just  impression  of  Percy's  strength 
and  thoughtfulness.  He  was  not  a  simple, 
but  he  was  an  uncomplicated,  man,  with 
depths  of  serenity  and  humility  beneath 


805 


Percy 


D,N.B.  1951-1960 


an  agile  intelligence  and  a  briskness  of 
purpose.  In  the  tradition  of  his  family  he 
was  a  member  of  the  Catholic  Apostolic 
Church  as  well  as  of  the  Church  of  England. 
In  his  youth  it  seemed  that  no  great 
office  of  state  was  beyond  his  reach:  it 
was  wholly  consistent  with  his  deep 
religious  convictions  and  his  acute  sense 
of  public  duty  that  in  his  last  years  he 
should  serve  as  churchwarden  and  lay- 
reader  at  Etchingham  in  Sussex  where 
he  settled  after  his  retirement,  and  where 
he  took  much  pleasure  in  gardening.  He 
had  never  shown  much  sympathy  for  the 
preoccupations,  still  less  for  the  opinions, 
of  the  sporting  aristocrat,  but  in  his 
youth  he  shot  and  hunted  a  good  deal. 

In  1918  he  married  Stella  Katherine, 
daughter  of  Major- General  Laurence 
George  Drummond.  It  was  a  marriage  of 
rare  and  manifest  felicity.  Lady  Percy 
and  their  two  daughters  survived  him  when 
he  died  at  Etchingham  3  April  1958.  He 
had  been  created  Baron  Percy  of  New- 
castle in  1953  and  the  title  became  extinct 
upon  his  death. 

[The  Times,  5  April  1958;  Eustace  Percy, 
Some  Memories,  1958 ;  Durham  University 
Journal,  new  series,  vol.  xx.  No.  3,  June  1959 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

W.  L.  Burn. 

PERKINS,  ROBERT  CYRIL  LAYTON 
(1866-1955),  entomologist,  was  born  15 
November  1866  at  Badminton,  the  second 
of  the  five  children  of  the  Rev.  Charles 
Mathew  Perkins  and  his  wife,  Agnes 
Martha  Beach,  daughter  of  the  Rev. 
Percy  Thomas.  His  grandfather,  father, 
and  imcle  were  all  interested  in  natural 
history  in  which  Perkins  himself  showed 
an  interest  at  a  very  early  age.  He  was 
educated  at  Merchant  Taylors'  School  and 
Jesus  College,  Oxford,  where  after  two 
years,  due  to  the  good  offices  of  (Sir) 
E.  B.  Poulton  [q.v.],  he  changed  from 
classics  to  science  in  which  he  obtained 
a  fourth  class  in  1889.  His  first  great  in- 
terest in  entomology  was  Lepidoptera, 
but  in  his  last  years  at  school  he  got 
in  touch  with  Edward  Saunders  [q.v.] 
who  fostered  his  developing  interest  in 
Aculeate  Hymenoptera  which  remained 
a  prime  interest  throughout  his  life. 

Perkins's  first  employment  was  as  a  pri- 
vate tutor  at  Dartmouth,  but  in  1891  he 
was  selected  by  the  'Sandwich  Islands 
committee'  (set  up  by  the  British  Associa- 
tion and  the  Royal  Society)  to  go  as  col- 
lector to  the  Hawaiian  Islands.  There  he 
spent  the  greater  part  of  the  next  ten 


years,  collecting  all  groups  of  terrestrial 
animals,  returning  to  England  periodic- 
ally to  aid  in  working  out  the  results. 
His  expeditions  into  the  mountain  forests 
were  almost  always  made  alone  since 
native  porters  refused  to  stay  in  the  forest. 
Each  trip  lasted  about  six  weeks,  for  he 
was  unable  to  carry  equipment  for  a 
longer  stay,  and  being  short  and  spare  in 
stature  required  great  stamina  for  his 
work.  In  1895  he  met  Albert  Koebele,  and 
in  the  next  few  years  helped  him  at  times 
with  the  liberation  of  insect  parasites 
which  Koebele  was  sending  to  Honolulu 
for  the  control  of  pests.  In  1897  they 
visited  Mexico  and  from  observations  of 
the  Lantana  weed  there  they  started  the 
successful  use  of  insects  in  controlling 
its  spread  in  the  Hawaiian  Islands. 

In  1902-4  Perkins  worked  for  the  board 
of  agriculture  of  the  Territory  of  Hawaii, 
his  concern  the  inspection  of  imported 
plants  in  order  to  prevent  the  intro- 
duction of  pests.  In  1904  the  Hawaiian 
Sugar  Planters'  Association  added  to  its 
experimental  station  a  division  of  ento- 
mology with  Perkins  as  director.  The 
most  urgent  problem  was  to  prevent 
the  havoc  being  caused  in  the  cane  fields 
by  the  sugar-cane  leaf-hopper.  No  suitable 
means  could  be  found  of  applying  insecti- 
cides in  cane  fields.  Perkins  and  Koebele 
therefore  went  for  six  months  to  Australia 
to  collect  the  parasites  of  leaf -hoppers  in  the 
cane  fields  there,  where  the  hoppers  ap- 
peared to  cause  little  damage.  The  stocks  of 
parasites  thus  obtained  were  increased  in 
the  laboratory  for  liberation  and  dispersal 
in  the  Hawaiian  fields  where  their  intro- 
duction proved  of  great  benefit.  This  work 
occupied  Perkins  throughout  the  day.  At 
night  he  spent  long  hours  studying  the 
classification  of  these  insects  of  which 
little  was  known.  In  several  groups  he 
was  able  to  correlate  various  biological 
observations  with  taxonomy,  particularly 
in  the  Dryinidae.  The  results  of  this  work 
were  published  by  the  Hawaiian  Sugar 
Planters'  Association  in  a  series  of 
Bulletins. 

Perkins  retired  from  his  post  in  1912 
on  account  of  ill  health  and  returning 
to  England  settled  in  Devon,  but  was 
retained  on  the  staff  as  a  consulting 
entomologist.  Henceforth  his  work  on 
Hawaiian  insects  was  concerned  mainly 
with  taxonomy.  He  also  resumed  his 
study  of  the  British  Aculeate  Hymenop- 
tera which  led  to  a  series  of  papers  on  the 
species  of  the  larger  and  more  difficult 
genera,   greatly  simplifying  their  recog- 


806 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Perring 


nition.  Associated  with  this  work,  he 
studied  the  Stylops  parasites  of  British 
bees.  He  had  a  large  correspondence  and 
was  most  prompt  in  his  repHes,  determin- 
ing much  material  for  other  workers  and 
in  particular  helping  young  students  of 
Hymenoptera.  This  encouraged  a  con- 
tinued interest  in  the  group  which  was  con- 
sequently one  of  the  best  worked  of  the 
order  in  Britain,  both  systematically  and 
biologically.  In  the  early  twenties  Perkins 
turned  his  attention  to  the  British 
Sawflies  in  order  to  aid  the  Rev.  F.  D. 
Morice  in  his  contemplated  revision  of  the 
group.  This  led  to  preliminary  revisions 
of  some  of  the  critical  genera. 

In  addition  to  his  entomological  work, 
Perkins  had  wide  interests  in  terrestrial 
zoology  and  the  information  which  he 
supplied  on  the  Hawaiian  birds,  many  of 
which  are  now  extinct,  was  of  con- 
siderable importance.  He  had  most  acute 
vision  and  a  remarkable  visual  memory. 
This  greatly  aided  his  flair  for  both  field 
and  taxonomic  work.  In  the  latter  he  had 
a  faculty  for  observing  and  selecting 
characters  which  vary  little  within  a 
species  and  thus  making  identification 
simpler. 

Although  not  robust  Perkins  had  a 
great  interest  in  sport.  In  his  young  days 
he  enjoyed  skating  and  while  working  at 
Dartmouth  he  used  to  run  with  the  beagles. 
Above  all  else  he  preferred  trout  fishing 
which  he  continued  until  his  eyesight 
began  to  fail.  He  retained  his  great 
interest  in  classics  throughout  his  life. 

In  1906  Perkins  was  awarded  an  Oxford 
D.Sc.  and  in  1912  he  received  the  gold 
medal  of  the  Linnean  Society  of  London. 
He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1920. 

In  1901  Perkins  married  Zoe  Lucy 
Sherrard  Alatau  (died  1940),  daughter  of 
A.  T.  Atkinson,  sometime  superintendent 
of  public  schools  in  the  Hawaiian  Islands, 
and  granddaughter  of  Thomas  Witlam 
Atkinson  [q.v.].  Of  the  four  sons,  one  died 
in  infancy.  In  1942  Perkins  married  Mrs. 
Clara  M.  J.  Senior  who  died  in  1949.  In 
his  last  days  Perkins  went  blind ;  he  died 
at  Bovey  Tracey  29  September  1955. 

[Hugh  Scott  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ii,  1956; 
personal  knowledge.]  J.  F.  Pkrkins. 

PERRING,  WILLIAM  GEORGE 
ARTHUR  (1898-1951),  director  of  the 
Royal  Aircraft  Establishment,  was  born 
16  December  1898  at  Gillingham,  Kent, 
the  eldest  son  of  John  Richard  Brooking 
Perring,  a  shipwright,  and  his  wife,  Alice 


Johns.  Educated  locally,  it  seemed  natural 
that  lie  should  start  his  career  by  becom- 
ing apprenticed  at  the  Royal  Naval 
Dockyard,  Chatham,  in  1913.  This  gave 
him  very  wide  experience  in  all  branches 
of  ship  work,  both  design  and  con- 
struction. With  a  scholarship  from  the 
Worshipful  Company  of  Shipwrights  he 
took  the  three-year  course  at  the  Royal 
Naval  College,  Greenwich,  where  in  1922 
in  the  final  examination  he  gained  a  first 
class  professional  certificate  in  naval 
architecture.  He  was  next  awarded  an 
1851  Royal  Commission  postgraduate 
research  scholarship  with  which  he 
worked  for  two  years  in  the  Froude  ship 
tank  at  the  National  Physical  Laboratory, 
Teddington.  During  this  time  he  became 
an  associate  member  of  both  the  Institu- 
tion of  Naval  Architects  and  the  North- 
East  Coast  Institution  of  Engineers  and 
Shipbuilders,  and  won  a  prize  for  a  paper 
on  'The  Stability  of  Ships'.  Another 
paper  on  'The  Influence  of  the  Type  of 
Engine  on  the  Running  Costs  of  Ships' 
was  significant  in  revealing  that  he  was 
not  only  well  qualified  in  the  more  scien- 
tific aspects  of  ship  propulsion  (he  made  a 
study  of  the  application  of  airscrew  vortex 
theory  to  the  performance  of  ships'  pro- 
pellers), but  had  also  a  wide  appreciation 
of  the  many  factors  affecting  the  overall 
economy  of  ships'  operation.  This  breadth 
of  approach  was  later  of  profound 
importance  in  a  different  field. 

Perring  next  sought  to  join  one  of  the 
leading  shipbuilding  firms,  but  owing  to 
the  onset  of  the  industrial  depression  they 
were  not  recruiting.  Finally,  he  applied 
in  1925  for  a  modest  post  in  the  Royal 
Aircraft  Establishment  at  Farnborough, 
thus  changing  his  professional  field  from 
ship  design  to  aeronautics — a  change 
not  very  violent,  but  fortunate  for 
aeronautics  and  one  which  gave  him  at 
that  time  much  better  opportunity. 
He  spent  several  years  on  wind  tunnels  at 
Farnborough,  working  on  a  wide  variety 
of  tests,  and  was  then  sent  for  six  months 
to  Felixstowe  to  gain  experience  in  marine 
aircraft  before  returning  to  Farn- 
borough to  help  construct  and  operate 
an  entirely  new  flying-boat  test  tank.  In 
1937  he  was  promoted  to  take  charge  of 
the  design  and  construction  of  the  new 
high-speed  tunnel  at  Farnborough,  the 
most  novel  and  difficult  design  problem 
of  its  kind  in  England.  Besides  being  a 
most  able  design  engineer,  Perring  was 
a  first-class  research  scientist  capable  not 
only  of  good  experimentation  but  also 


807 


Perring 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


of  dealing  with  the  mathematics  of  his 
subject.  These  abihties,  coupled  with  a 
prodigious  appetite  for  work,  marked  him 
as  a  leader  in  his  field.  He  was  not  modest 
in  the  sense  of  being  too  retiring ;  he  knew 
his  own  value  and,  without  bombast, 
claimed  his  deserts.  He  could  champion 
his  staff  and  his  Establishment  fiercely 
if  necessary,  but  as  a  personality  and  a 
leader  he  was  always  considerate  and  kind. 

Appointed  superintendent  of  scientific 
research  in  1940,  Perring  served  from  1941 
as  deputy  to  the  director  at  the  Royal 
Aircraft  Establishment;  his  vast  ex- 
perience as  a  scientific  worker,  coupled 
with  his  gifts  as  a  leader,  made  him, 
when  the  director's  post  fell  vacant  in 
1946,  the  natural  successor.  The  war  years 
saw  him  busy  with  the  commissioning  of 
his  high-speed  tunnel  and  by  1943  he  was 
already  looking  forward  to  the  post-war 
national  need  for  new  aeronautical  re- 
search facilities.  The  planning  of  Bedford 
National  Aeronautical  Establishment  was 
largely  his  personal  work,  including  the 
design  of  the  new  tunnels  and  their  novel 
driving  plant.  In  the  last  year  of  the  war 
he  assembled  overnight  a  small  team 
which  achieved  remarkable  success  in 
investigating  the  characteristics  of  the 
German  V.2  weapon  from  fragments 
sent  over  to  England.  He  wisely  found 
time  to  keep  in  touch  with  trends  in  the 
United  States  where  he  paid  several  visits 
and  where  he  was  welcomed  as  a  highly 
expert  colleague.  As  deputy  director  and 
later  as  director  he  welded  together  the 
various  specialist  departments  in  the 
Royal  Aircraft  Establishment  so  that  he 
was  able  to  bring  to  bear  on  any  aero- 
nautical problem  a  fully  integrated  team 
able  to  explore  it  in  all  its  aspects.  As  a 
result  the  effectiveness  of  the  Establish- 
ment was  enormously  enhanced. 

Perring  was  a  member  of  the  Aero- 
nautical Research  Council,  a  member  of 
the  council  of  the  Royal  Aeronautical 
Society  (whose  gold  medal  he  received), 
and  he  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1949. 

He  married  in  1926  Joyce  Carver,  by 
whom  he  had  one  son,  who  died  in  1939, 
and  two  daughters.  His  wife  died  in  1933 
and  in  1942  he  married  May  Ehzabeth 
Willstrop,  widow  of  an  old  friend  of  his 
college  days.  He  died  suddenly  at  his 
home  in  Camberley  8  April  1951.  A 
portrait  in  oils  by  H.  J.  Proctor  hangs  in 
the  Perring  memorial  room  at  the  Royal 
Aircraft  Establishment. 


[Personal  knowledge ;  private  information.] 
J.  E.  Serby. 


PERRINS,  CHARLES  WILLIAM 
DYSON  (1864-1958),  collector  and  bene- 
factor, was  born  in  the  parish  of  Claines, 
near  Worcester,  25  May  1864,  the  only 
son  of  James  Dyson  Perrins  by  his  wife, 
Frances  Sarah,  daughter  of  Charles 
Perrins.  His  father  was  one  of  the 
original  partners  in  the  firm  of  Lea  and 
Perrins,  makers  of  Worcester  sauce,  from 
which  the  family  derived  its  wealth. 
Educated  at  Charterhouse  and  the  Queen's 
College,  Oxford,  he  served  from  1888  in 
the  4th  battalion  of  the  Highland  Light 
Infantry,  but  retired  in  1892  with  the  rank 
of  captain  and  began  to  devote  himself 
to  the  family  business  and  to  public 
service.  He  was  mayor  of  Worcester  in 
the  jubilee  year  1897,  and  high  sheriff 
of  Worcestershire  two  years  later.  His 
benefactions  went  hand  in  hand  with  his 
services  to  public  life  and  to  education; 
after  twenty-six  years  as  a  member  of  the 
governing  body  of  the  Worcester  Royal 
Grammar  School,  in  1916  he  became  its 
chairman  for  the  next  thirty-four  years, 
and  built  for  the  school  the  Perrins  Hall, 
in  memory  of  his  father  who  had  been 
a  governor  before  him,  and  a  science 
laboratory.  He  maintained  a  continuing 
interest  in  education  as  a  life  governor  of 
Birmingham  University  and  a  member  of 
the  council  of  Malvern  College.  To  Malvern, 
where  he  lived,  he  presented  Rose  Bank 
house  and  gardens  on  his  retirement  in 
1918  from  the  chairmanship  of  the  urban 
district  council,  and  also  gave  the  town 
its  hospital  (himself  providing  the  site, 
buildings,  and  equipment)  and  its  public 
library,  in  conjunction  with  the  Carnegie 
Trust.  His  own  university  received  from 
him  a  large  gift  of  money  to  foster  the 
study  of  organic  chemistry,  and  a  further 
sum  for  the  construction  of  the  laboratory 
named  in  his  honour,  which  was  opened 
in  1916  and  for  which  Oxford  expressed 
its  gratitude  in  1919  by  making  him  an 
honorary  D.C.L. 

Meanwhile  his  name  had  begun  to 
become  familiar  in  the  world  of  the  arts 
and  of  book-collecting.  His  father  had 
collected  pictures — among  them  the 
great  painting  of  'Palestrina'  from  the 
middle  period  of  J.  M.  W.  Turner 
[q.v.]  which  Dyson  Perrins  was  to 
bequeath  to  the  National  Gallery — but  his 
own  tastes  were  as  wide  as  were  his  means 
to  gratify  them,  while  his  choice  was  as 
sure  as  his  generosity  was  public-spirited 
in  buying  treasures  and  presenting  them 
to  appropriate  national  institutions. 
Always  a  discriminating  benefactor,   he 


808 


D.NiB.  1951-1060 


Perrins 


gave  or  bequeathed  objects  of  the  highest 
artistic  value  and  historic  interest  to,  for 
example,  the  Victoria  and  Albert  Museum, 
the  National  Gallery,  the  Ashmolean  at 
Oxford,  and  the  British  Museum,  which 
received  by  bequest  two  of  his  most 
splendid  manuscripts,  to  which  his  heir 
allowed  a  further  eight  to  be  added  by 
purchase  at  a  specially  reduced  price. 
The  main  period  of  his  book-collecting 
lay  in  the  two  decades  from  1900  to  1920, 
when  he  boldly  took  opportunities,  the 
like  of  which  will  hardly  recur,  to  acquire 
manuscripts  and  printed  books  of  the 
finest  quality  from  a  series  of  great  auction 
sales  such  as  those  of  the  libraries  of 
Lord  Amherst,  Bishop  Gott,  and  A.  H. 
Huth  [qq.v.].  He  was  no  less  inspired  in 
his  purchases  by  private  treaty:  in  1906 
he  bought  33  manuscripts  from  Charles 
Fairfax  Murray,  and  in  the  same  year 
acquired  en  bloc,  on  the  eve  of  its  dis- 
persal by  public  auction,  the  great  col- 
lection of  early  woodcut  books  formed  by 
Richard  Fisher  of  Midhurst. 

His  prowess  as  a  collector  was  recog- 
nized in  1908  by  his  election  to  the 
Roxburghe  Club,  and  though  he  wrote 
nothing  himself  his  patronage  and  his 
collections  led  to  the  publication  of  a 
notable  series  of  volumes  written  by 
scholars  who  enjoyed  his  friendship. 
First  among  these  was  the  monograph  on 
the  Gorleston  Psalter,  published  in  1907 
by  (Sir)  Sydney  Cockerell,  on  whose 
advice  Dyson  Perrins  had  bought  the 
manuscript  in  1904,  under  the  very  nose 
of  his  friend  and  rival  Henry  Yates 
Thompson  [q.v.].  His  own  presentation 
volume  to  the  Roxburghe  Club  followed 
in  1910,  the  Epistole  et  Evangelii  . .  .  in 
lingua  Toscana,  reproducing  over  500 
Florentine  woodcuts  from  an  all  but 
unique  1495  edition  which  he  owned. 
This  was  edited  by  A.  W.  Pollard  [q.v.], 
who  went  on  to  publish  in  1914  Italian 
Book-illustrations  and  Early  Printing. 
A  catalogue  of  early  Italian  books  in  the 
Library  of  C.  W.  Dyson  Perrins,  which 
remains  a  prime  work  of  reference.  In  1916 
the  Roxburghe  Club  members  jointly 
issued  Topographical  Study  in  Rome  in 
1581,  edited  by  Thomas  Ashby  [q.v.] 
from  a  manuscript  in  Dyson  Perrins's 
library.  Four  years  later  came  the 
sumptuous  Descriptive  Catalogue  of  his 
illuminated  manuscripts,  the  work  of 
Sir  George  Warner  [q.v.],  in  two  volumes, 
describing  in  detail  what  has  proved  to  be 
almost  the  last,  and  certainly  one  of  the 
finest,   gatherings  of  illiuninated  manu- 


scripts formed  by  a  single  individual  of 
the  golden  age  of  private  collecting.  The 
end  of  the  series  inspired  by  the  Dyson 
Perrins  collections  came  with  a  volume 
pubhshed  in  1927  devoted  to  another 
single  manuscript,  the  Apocalypse  in 
Latin,  described  by  M.  R.  James  [q.v.]. 

Only  a  few  additions  were  made  after  the 
issue  of  the  1920  catalogue  of  his  manu- 
scripts, but  one  such  purchase,  made  from 
a  Yates  Thompson  sale,  was  the  finest  of 
the  three  surviving  mid-twelfth-century 
bindings  executed  at  Winchester;  this 
he  later  presented,  with  characteristic 
generosity,  to  Winchester  Cathedral 
Library.  In  1946  Dyson  Perrins  decided  to 
sell  his  printed  books,  in  order  to  spend  the 
proceeds  on  what  had  always  been  one  of 
his  special  interests,  the  Royal  Worcester 
Porcelain  Factory.  His  own  collection  of 
Worcester  china,  probably  the  best  in 
existence,  and  as  strong  in  everyday 
pieces  as  in  special  ones,  he  eventually 
presented  to  the-  china  works,  which  he 
had  so  long  befriended  and  supported. 
After  the  first  world  war,  when  the  factory 
was  in  economic  difficulties  and  closure 
would  have  added  to  local  unemployment 
as  well  as  ending  an  historic  enterprise, 
Dyson  Perrins  himself  had  for  a  time  taken 
over  the  management  and  kept  the  china 
works  in  operation  at  his  own  expense. 
After  the  second  war  he  determined  to  re- 
equip  the  factory  to  resume  production 
up  to  the  highest  standard  of  the  past, 
and  the  money  raised  by  the  auction  of 
his  printed  books  at  four  sales  during 
1946-7,  which  totalled  £147,627,  was 
earmarked  for  this  purpose.  After  his 
death,  29  January  1958,  in  Malvern  in  his 
ninety-fourth  year,  his  illuminated  manu- 
scripts, with  a  few  outstanding  printed 
books,  were  dispersed  in  three  auction 
sales  during  1968-60,  at  which  foreign 
national  libraries  competed  with  book- 
sellers from  all  over  the  world  to  pay  a 
record  sum  for  only  154  lots.  Including  the 
earlier  printed  book  sales  and  the  British 
Museum's  private  purchases,  the  Dyson 
Perrins  library  brought  nearly  £1,100,000, 
the  largest  amount  ever  fetched  by  one 
man's  collection. 

Despite  the  fame  of  his  possessions  and 
the  publicity  attendant  on  his  numerous 
benefactions,  Dyson  Perrins  was  person- 
ally extremely  modest  and  deliberately 
shunned  the  Umelight.  Besides  his  various 
fields  of  collecting  he  enjoyed  pursuits 
such  as  photography,  and  was  a  keen 
sportsman,  for  whom  an  estate  in  Ross- 
shire  provided  the  stalking,  fishing,  and 


809 


Perrins 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


shooting  in  which  he  delighted.  He  married 
twice:  first,  in  1889,  Catherine  Christina, 
daughter  of  Alexander  Allan  Gregory, 
corn  merchant,  of  Inverness ;  she  died  in 
1922  and  in  1923  he  married  Frieda, 
younger  daughter  of  John  Milne,  of 
Belmont,  Cheadle.  By  his  first  marriage 
he  had  two  sons  and  two  daughters, 
one  of  whom  predeceased  him.  A  portrait 
of  Perrins  by  Arthur  Hacker  hangs  in 
the  Perrins  Hall  in  the  Worcester  Royal 
Grammar  School. 

[The    Times,    30    January    1958    and    9 

January  1959;  Berrow's   Worcester  Journal, 

31  January  1958  ;  Times  Literary  Supplement, 

1946-7, 1958-61 ;  The  Book  Collector,  1958-61.] 

David  Rogers. 

PERTH,  sixteenth  Earl  of  (1876-1951), 
first  secretary-general  of  the  League  of 
Nations.  [See  Drummond,  James  Eric] 

PETERSON,  Sir  MAURICE  DRUM- 
MOND (1889-1952),  diplomatist,  was 
born  in  Dundee  10  March  1889,  the 
younger  son  of  the  classical  scholar  and 
university  administrator,  (Sir)  William 
Peterson  [q.v.],  and  his  wife,  Lisa  Ross. 

Taken  to  Montreal  at  the  age  of  six, 
when    his    father    became    principal    of 
McGill  University,  he  spent  eight  happy 
years  in  Canada  (for  which,  as  for  North 
America    as    a    whole,    he    cherished    a 
lasting  affection),   before   being   sent   to 
Rugby   and   Magdalen    College,    Oxford, 
where  he  took  a  first  in  modern  history 
in  1911.  In  December  1913  he  qualified 
by    examination    for    a    Foreign    Office 
clerkship  and  was  posted  to  the  parlia- 
mentary department,  where  he  came  under 
the  wing  of  Miles  Lampson  (later  Lord 
Killearn),    whose    path    his    was    again 
to    meet,    on    Egyptian    affairs    twenty 
years  later.  The  Baghdad  Railway  negotia- 
tions and  the  revolutionary  troubles  in 
Mexico  engaged  his  attention  until  the 
outbreak  of  war  (in  which  he  was  rejected 
for  military  service  because  of  an  eye 
defect).    After    passing    the    customary 
Foreign     Office    examination    in    inter- 
national law,  he  moved  in  1916  to  the 
newly  created  foreign  trade  department, 
later  the  Ministry  of  Blockade.  There  his 
duties  twice  took  him  across  the  Atlantic, 
first  after  the  pubhcation  of  the  British 
black  Ust,  and  then  again,  after  the  entry 
of  the   United   States  into  the  war,  as 
a   member    of   the    Balfour   mission    to 
Washington.  Immediately  after  the  armis- 
tice he  moved  to  the  Eastern  department 
of  the  Foreign  Office,  and  into  a  somewhat 


chastening  contact  with  Lord  Curzon 
[q.v.]  whom  he  greatly  admired  as  a 
foreign  secretary,  much  as  he  resented  his 
bullying. 

At  the  end  of  January  1920,  as  a  mem- 
ber of  the  reorganized  diplomatic  service, 
Peterson  was  sent  as  second  secretary  to 
Washington,  where,  in  October  1921,  a 
few  months  after  his  promotion  to  first 
secretary,    he    was    detached    from    the 
embassy  staff  to  serve  as  private  secretary 
to  A.  J.  Balfour,  then  head  of  the  British 
Empire    delegation    to    the    naval    dis- 
armament  conference.    He   worked   well 
with  Balfour,  and  this  helped  to  establish 
his  reputation  as  an  'all-rounder',  which 
led,  after  a  further  period  in  the  Foreign 
Office,  to  his  appointment  in  the  summer 
of  1923  as  first  secretary  at  Prague  (where 
he  deemed  it  a  great  privilege  to  meet 
Thomas  Masaryk),  and  then,  in  December 
1924,  to  his  transfer  in  a  similar  capacity 
to  Tokyo.  During  his  two  and  a  quarter 
years  in  Japan  he  took  pains  to  become 
proficient  in  the  language  and  he  liked  the 
country ;  but  the  'singularly  childlike  and 
undeveloped'  personality  of  his  ambas- 
sador.   Sir    Charles    Eliot    [q.v.],    irked 
him,  as  did  later  similar  characteristics  in 
another  diplomat  of  the  same  school.  Sir 
George  Grahame,  under  whom  he  was  to 
serve  as  counsellor  in  Madrid  from  1929  to 
1931.  But  the  late  twenties  were  not  with- 
out   their    compensations.    In    1927    he 
contracted  a  singularly  happy  marriage 
with  Eleanor  Angel,  the  second  daughter 
of  the   Rev.    Henry   WiUiam   Leycester 
O'Rorke,    of    North    Litchfield    Manor, 
Hampshire,  by  whom  he  had  three  sons. 
Shortly  after  his  marriage  he  was  sent  as 
counsellor  of  the  residency  in  Cairo  under 
Lord   Lloyd   [q.v.],   whose   resolute   but 
complex  character  and  methods  made  a 
lasting    if    not     completely    favourable 
impression   upon   him.    He    became   ex- 
tremely fond  of  Egypt,  and  was  happy  to 
return  there  temporarily  as  acting  high 
commissioner  in  the  summer  and  autumn 
of  1934. 

In  October  1936,  having  served  for  a 
few  months  as  head  of  the  new  department 
set  up  to  deal  with  Abyssinia,  and 
having  been  intimately  concerned  with  the 
negotiation  of  the  abortive  Hoare-Laval 
proposals  (which  he  believed  to  be  far 
better  than  the  alternatives  posed  by  their 
rejection),  Peterson  received  his  first 
independent  mission  as  minister  to 
Bulgaria.  Eighteen  happy  months  followed 
before  he  was  promoted  and  sent  east  of 
Suez  again  as  ambassador  to  Baghdad. 


8lft. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Philby 


There  he  managed  to  establish  good 
relations  first  with  Jamil  Madfai,  then 
with  Nuri  Said,  and  to  keep  to  a  minimum 
the  harm  done  to  British  interests  by  King 
Ghazi's  instability  and  the  growing  un- 
rest in  Iraq.  He  believed  himself  to  be 
deserving  well  of  his  country,  and  it  was 
with  regret  that  he  learned  early  in  1939 
that  he  was  to  be  transferred  to  San 
Sebastian  as  first  British  ambassador  to 
Franco  Spain  which  the  Chamberlain 
Government  had  recently  recognized.  His 
sympathies  having  incHned  towards  the 
Nationalists  in  the  civil  war,  he  now  did 
his  best  to  establish  harmonious  relations 
with  the  new  Spanish  regime,  if  only  to 
mitigate  the  hardships  to  which  British 
subjects  living  under  its  jurisdiction  found 
themselves  exposed  and  also  to  keep  Spain 
neutral  after  the  outbreak  of  the  second 
world  war.  Confident  that  he  was  suc- 
ceeding in  both  these  objectives,  and 
having  been  personally  congratulated  by 
Lord  Halifax  [q.v.]  upon  his  success,  he 
was  dumbfounded  to  receive  on  12  May 
1940  a  letter  from  the  Foreign  Office 
complaining  of  his  alleged  failure  to 
obtain  'hoped-for  results'  or  to  safeguard 
British  interests  in  the  manner  expected, 
and  stating  that  he  was  to  be  replaced 
immediately.  The  news  that  his  successor 
was  to  be  the  ex -foreign  secretary,  Sir 
Samuel  Hoare  (later  Viscount  Temple- 
wood,  q.v.),  did  nothing  to  soften  the 
blow  to  his  pride,  from  which  he  never 
completely  recovered. 

Returning  home,  Peterson  found  em- 
ployment, first  as  controller  of  foreign 
publicity  at  the  Ministry  of  Information 
(1940-41),  and  then,  after  a  few  months 
en  disponibilite,  as  under-secretary  super- 
intending the  Eastern,  Far  Eastern, 
Egyptian,  and  Refugee  departments  of 
the  Foreign  Office,  before  again,  in 
September  1944,  receiving  an  appoint- 
ment much  to  his  liking,  as  ambassador 
to  Turkey.  During  the  next  two  years  he 
was  to  make  many  new  and  close  friends, 
not  least  the  Turkish  president,  Ismet 
Inonu,  and  the  prime  minister,  Sukri 
Sarajoglu. 

In  May  1946  Peterson  was  chosen  by 
Ernest  Bevin  [q.v.]  to  be  ambassador  to 
Moscow  in  what  was  to  be  his  last  and  in 
some  ways  least  agreeable  post.  While  he 
never  ceased — as  he  later  emphasized  in 
retirement — ^to  believe  that  Anglo-Soviet 
understanding  could  and  should  be 
achieved,  he  found  this  aim  unattainable 
in  the  face  of  Stalin's  growing  suspicion 
of,  and  hostility  towards,  the  West,  and 


of  Molotov's  'obstructive',  'evasive  and 
insincere'  tactics.  Life  in  Moscow,  with  the 
restrictions  which  the  Russians  imposed 
upon  western  diplomats,  began  to  pall, 
and,  to  add  to  his  other  difficulties,  his 
health  now  failed,  necessitating  his  recall 
in  1948  and  his  retirement  in  the  following 
year.  Joining  the  board  of  the  Midland 
Bank  shortly  afterwards,  he  found  time 
before  he  died  at  his  home  at  Kintbury  in 
Berkshire,  15  March  1952,  both  to  record 
with  great  acumen  the  lessons  of  his 
diplomatic  career  and  to  ventilate  his 
accumulated  and  pent-up  resentments  in 
an  elegantly  written  volume  of  memoirs, 
Both  Sides  of  the  Curtain  (1950). 

Peterson,  who  was  appointed  C.M.G.  in 
1933,  K.C.M.G.  in  1938,  and  G.C.M.G.  in 
1947,  was  one  of  the  ablest,  although  not 
the  most  successful,  of  the  Foreign  Office 
clerks  who  passed  into  the  new  diplo- 
matic service  with  the  reforms  of  1920. 
He  had  a  quick  mind  and  an  impatient 
temper,  which  was  roughened  by  his  dis- 
appointments;  beneath  this  the  warmth 
of  his  nature  showed  warily.  When  amused, 
he  could  giggle  rather  unexpectedly; 
and  his  friendship  and  trust,  when  given, 
were  warming.  It  was  unfortunate  that 
he  should  have  become  embittered; 
he  was  a  man  who  was  respected, 
if  perhaps  relatively  few,  in  his  later 
years  at  any  rate,  penetrated  beneath  the 
shyness  and  reserve  sufficiently  to  like 
him. 

[Sir  Maurice  Peterson,  Both  Sides  of  the 
Curtain,  1950 ;  Foreign  Office  records ;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  Clifton  J.  Child. 

Roger  Allen. 

PHILBY,  HARRY  ST.  JOHN 
BRIDGER  (1885-1960),  explorer  and 
orientalist,  born  at  St.  John's,  Badula, 
Ceylon,  3  April  1885,  was  the  second  son 
of  Henry  Montague  Philby,  tea  planter, 
and  through  his  mother,  May  Beatrice,  a 
grandson  of  General  John  Duncan  who 
had  commanded  the  troops  in  Ceylon 
and  later  the  Bombay  Army.  A  scholar 
of  Westminster  and  head  boy,  he  went 
with  a  scholarship  to  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge,  where  with  visits  to  Europe 
he  early  showed  his  bent  for  languages. 
After  a  second  class  in  part  i  of  the  clas- 
sical tripos  (1906)  he  achieved  a  first  class 
in  the  modern  languages  tripos  and  passed 
high  into  the  Indian  Civil  Service  in  1907. 
He  was  posted  to  the  Punjab  where  his 
trop  de  zele  in  one  of  his  early  appoint- 
ments caused  a  temporary  setback  in  his 
career,  and  turned  his  attention  again  to 


811 


Philby 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


languages  in  which  he  gained  the  highest 
honours  in  Urdu  and  Persian,  and  the 
appointment  in  1915,  owing  to  a  wartime 
vacancy,  of  secretary  to  the  board  of 
examiners  in  Calcutta.  The  demand  for 
linguists  with  the  forces  in  Mesopotamia 
was  now  high,  and  after  a  few  months  he 
found  himself  an  assistant  pohtical  officer, 
Mesopotamian  Expeditionary  Force,  and 
was  at  Basra,  and  later  Baghdad,  from 
1915  until  1917,  being  appointed  CLE. 
(1917).  His  relations  with  his  superiors 
and  with  the  army  were  not  entirely  happy 
and  in  the  autumn  of  1917  the  opportunity 
was  taken  of  attaching  him  to  a  mission 
to  Abdul  Aziz  ibn  Saud  (later  King  of 
Saudi  Arabia)  at  his  capital  of  Riyadh, 
whose  help  the  Government  was  anxious 
to  secure  against  the  Turks.  The  mission 
was  successful  and  Philby,  instead  of 
returning  to  Basra  to  report,  sent  his 
report  by  messenger  and  set  off  with 
transport  provided  by  Ibn  Saud  for 
Jedda,  achieving  in  forty-four  days  the 
first  east-west  crossing  of  Arabia  from  sea 
to  sea. 

This  journey  and  contacts  with  the 
Sharifian  regime  in  the  Hejaz  convinced 
him  of  the  unsuitability  of  the  Sharif 
Hussain  (King  Hussain  of  the  Hejaz),  at 
that  time  the  favoured  candidate  of  the 
British  Government  for  ruler  of  liberated 
Arabia,  and  of  the  inevitability  of  the 
eventual  success  of  Ibn  Saud.  Philby  was 
posted  again  to  Riyadh  whence  he  under- 
took a  remarkable  journey  to  the  Wadi 
Duwasir.  He  was  in  England  when,  after 
the  Arab  rebellion  of  1920  in  Mesopotamia 
(Iraq),  he  was  asked  by  Sir  Percy  Cox 
[q.v.]  to  accompany  him  as  one  of  his 
staff  on  his  recall  to  Baghdad.  The  nomina- 
tion of  Faisal,  son  of  the  Sharif  Hussain 
of  the  Hejaz,  as  King  of  Iraq  by  the  British 
Government,  which  he  held  to  be  a 
contravention  of  the  promise  of  free 
elections  made  to  the  people  of  Iraq,  led  to 
Philby' s  resignation.  He  became  (1921) 
chief  British  representative  in  Trans- 
Jordania  in  succession  to  T.  E.  Lawrence 
[q.v.]  but  resigned  in  1924 ;  there  followed 
an  abortive  attempt  in  a  private  capacity 
to  act  as  an  intermediary  between  the 
forces  of  Ibn  Saud  surrounding  Jedda 
and  the  beleaguered  Sharif  Ali,  which 
caused  some  embarrassment  in  official 
circles;  his  resignation  from  the  Indian 
Civil  Service  took  effect  in  1925. 

His  fortunes  were  now  bound  to  Arabia, 
and  his  friend  to  whom  he  was  loyally 
devoted.  King  Abdul  Aziz  ibn  Saud. 
He  set  up  business  as  Sharqieh  Ltd.  in 


Jedda,  and  acted  as  an  unofficial  counsel- 
lor of  the  king's.  In  1930  he  embraced  the 
Moslem  faith.  A  great  portion  of  his  time 
he  devoted  to  exploration,  with  the  help 
and  finance  of  the  king  and  if,  to  that 
extent,  his  lot  as  an  explorer  was  easier 
than  some  of  his  great  predecessors  in  the 
Arabian  field,  this  in  no  way  detracts 
from  the  outstanding  quality  of  his  work. 
He  was  a  skilled  cartographer,  naturalist, 
and  botanist,  and  his  contribution  in  the 
field  of  archaeology  to  knowledge  of 
early  Thamudic  inscriptions  in  Arabia  was 
of  considerable  importance. 

In  1939  during  a  stay  in  England 
Philby  was  attracted  to  politics  and  he 
unsuccessfully  fought  a  by-election  at 
Hythe  as  the  anti-war  candidate  of  the 
British  People's  Party.  He  then  returned 
to  Arabia,  and  his  strong  advocacy  of  a 
policy  of  'non-involvement'  for  Saudi 
Arabia  and  his  general  anti-war  attitude 
resulted  in  his  arrest  in  1940  in  India  on  a 
journey  to  America,  and  his  incarcera- 
tion in  England  under  Section  18B  of  the 
Defence  Regulations.  Some  five  months 
later  a  conmiittee  charged  with  the 
examination  of  his  case  completely 
exonerated  him.  After  a  brief  flirtation 
with  the  short-lived  Commonwealth 
Party  he  returned  to  Arabia  in  1945. 

By  1952  his  growing  criticism  of  the 
extravagance  and  inefficiency  of  the 
Saudi  regime  following  on  the  vastly 
increased  oil  revenues  found  expression  in 
his  book  Arabian  Jubilee.  In  November 
1953  the  old  king  died.  In  1955  Philby 
was  exiled  from  Saudi  Arabia  and  took 
up  his  residence  in  Beirut.  A  reconcilia- 
tion was  effected  with  the  new  king  a  year 
later,  but  Philby's  remaining  years  were 
spent  in  Beirut  in  literary  studies  and 
completing  his  memoirs.  He  died  there 
30  September  1960. 

Philby  was  a  prolific  author  and  his 
Heart  of  Arabia  (2  vols.,  1922),  Sheba's 
Daughters  (1939),  and  Arabian  Highlands 
(1952)  give  an  illuminating  and  valuable 
account  of  his  journeys  in  hitherto  un- 
known portions  of  the  Arabian  peninsula. 
He  also  wrote  on  Islam  and  Arabian 
history  and  numerous  papers  to  the  Royal 
Geographical  Society,  of  which  he  was 
awarded  the  Founder's  gold  medal  in  1920, 
and  other  societies.  He  received  the  first 
Sir  Richard  Burton  memorial  medal  of  the 
Royal  Asiatic  Society  in  1925. 

Although  his  work  as  an  explorer  and 
as  an  adviser  to  King  Ibn  Saud  was 
praised  and  received  recognition,  it  was 
perhaps    inevitable    that    Philby's    out- 


812 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


Phillpotts 


spokenness  and  at  times  anti-British  atti- 
tude aroused  considerable  criticism  in 
England.  It  is  doubtful  if  this  was  justi- 
fied. He  firmly  believed  that  friendship 
between  British  and  Arabs  was  essential 
for  the  security  and  progress  of  the  Middle 
East,  but  that  the  open  political  support 
of  Whitehall,  which  entailed,  in  his  view, 
involvement  in  policies  dangerous  and 
irrelevant  to  Arabia  and  the  Arabs,  was 
fatal  for  an  Arab  ruler.  The  disturbed 
times  in  which  he  lived,  and  the  fluctuations 
of  British  Middle-East  policy  undoubtedly 
reinforced  these  views.  He  was  throughout 
his  life  a  strong  individualist,  who  found 
discipline  and  even  collaboration  difficult. 
Yet  it  is  mainly  to  him  that  the  world 
owes  its  present  knowledge  of  Central 
Arabia, 

In  1910  Philby  married  Dora  (died 
1957),  daughter  of  Adrian  Hope  Johnston, 
of  the  Indian  Public  Works  Department, 
and  granddaughter  of  Alexander  Johnston, 
the  painter  [q.v.].  They  had  three  daugh- 
ters and  one  son,  Harold  (Kim)  Philby, 
who  after  service  as  a  diplomat  became  a 
journaUst  in  the  Middle  East  and  sub- 
sequently took  up  residence  in  the 
U.S.S.R.,  whose  agent  he  had  been  while 
serving  in  British  inteUigence. 

A  drawing  by  EUsabeth  Ada  Mont- 
gomery is  reproduced  in  Philby's  auto- 
biography Arabian  Days  (1948). 

[Philby's  own  works;  Sir  Arnold  Wilson, 
Loyalties,  1930;  The  Times,  3  October  1960; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Ronald  Wingate. 

PHILLPOTTS,  EDEN  (1862-1960), 
writer,  was  born  at  Mount  Aboo,  Raj- 
putana,  India,  4  November  1862,  the  son 
of  Henry  Phillpotts,  an  officer  in  the 
Indian  Army  and  political  agent  in  two 
Indian  states,  who  died  when  his  wife 
was  only  twenty-one.  She  was  Adelaide 
Matilda  Sophia,  daughter  of  George 
Jenkins  Waters,  of  the  Madras  Civil 
Service,  and  on  the  death  of  her  husband 
she  returned  to  England  with  her  three 
sons  of  whom  Eden,  the  eldest,  in  his 
youth  gave  no  indication  that  he  was  to 
become  a  writer.  He  was  educated  at 
Mannamead  School  (later  incorporated 
with  Plymouth  College),  and  at  seventeen 
went  to  London  where  he  earned  his 
living  for  ten  years  as  a  clerk  in  the  Sun 
Fire  office.  His  mother  hoped  he  would 
enter  the  Church,  but  his  own  ambition 
was  to  be  an  actor,  and  after  office  hours 
he  studied  at  a  school  of  dramatic  art, 
only  to  reaUze  that  he  was  unfitted  for 


acting.  His  two  years'  training,  however, 
came  in  useful  when  he  turned  to  writing, 
to  which  he  devoted  his  evenings.  Before 
long  he  was  earning  £400  a  year  in  his 
leisure  by  writing  novels  and  short  stories, 
and  also  one-act  plays,  sometimes  in 
association  with  Arnold  Bennett  [q.v.] 
who  became  his  friend.  Eventually  leav- 
ing the  insurance  business  he  became 
assistant  editor  to  a  weekly  periodical. 
Black  and  White,  for  three  days  of  his 
writing  week. 

Lying  Prophets  (1897),  Phillpotts's 
first  important  work  of  fiction,  was  com- 
mended by  James  Payn  [q.v.] ;  his  next. 
Children  of  the  Mist  (1898),  won  him  wider 
welcome  and  was  praised  by  R.  D. 
Blackmore  [q.v.],  author  of  Lorna  Doone, 
whose  memorial  Phillpotts  was  to  unveil 
in  Exeter  Cathedral  six  years  later. 
Mostly  with  Dartmoor  as  the  background, 
a  flood  of  novels  followed.  Year  after  year, 
indeed  for  more  than  half  a  century,  an 
average  of  three  or  four  books  came 
regularly — poetry,  short  stories,  plays 
and  essays,  mystery  fiction,  and  retold 
legends  from  the  classics. 

Phillpotts  commenced  playwright  in 
1895  when  he  collaborated  with  Jerome 
K.  Jerome  [q.v.]  in  a  comedy,  The  Prude's 
Progress.  Wlien  success  eventually  re- 
warded his  writing  for  the  theatre,  it 
was  with  The  Farmer's  Wife,  entirely 
his  own  work.  Theatre-managers  looked 
doubtfully  at  this  comedy  of  rustic 
life,  and  more  than  a  dozen  rejec- 
tions preceded  its  presentation  at  the 
Birmingham  Repertory  Theatre  in  1916. 
The  eventual  London  production  in 
1924  was  phenomenally  popular.  It  ran 
for  three  years,  bringing  to  the  play- 
house a  reminder  that  the  rural  atmo- 
sphere and  coimtry  dialogue  which  had 
been  a  characteristic  of  English  drama  in 
Shakespeare's  time  could  well  be  exploited 
anew.  There  followed  other  plays  in  the 
same  genre,  notably  Yellow  Sands  (1926, 
with  his  daughter  Adelaide). 

Only  one  setback  marred  these  succes- 
ses. A  peasant  tragedy.  The  Shadow  (1913), 
written  prior  to  The  Farmer's  Wife,  had 
given  a  hint  of  what  was  possible  to 
Phillpotts  in  the  theatre,  and  The 
Secret  Woman,  originally  a  novel  (1905), 
was  recast  for  the  stage  seven  years  later. 
It  was  banned  by  the  censor  because  the 
author  refused  on  principle  to  delete  two 
sentences  'that  mattered  nothing  to  the 
play  and  involved  no  sacrifice  of  art', 
he  afterwards  recalled.  A  protest  was 
widely    signed    by    his    fellow    writers. 


818 


Phillpotts 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


including  G.  B.  Shaw  and  Henry  James 
[qq.v.].  Nevertheless,  looking  back,  Phill- 
potts felt  that  he  should  have  done  what 
was  directed  'without  demur'. 

As  a  novel  The  Secret  Woman  stands 
high,  not  only  among  Phillpotts's  writings, 
but  in  English  regional  fiction.  The 
granite  of  central  Devon  and  Dartmoor's 
'unchanging  vastness'  brood  like  an  age- 
less world  in  the  mind  of  the  generations 
who  have  lived  and  died  there.  The 
opening  pages  of  the  localized  stories  are 
devoted  to  the  'unchanging  vastness'  as 
a  prelude  to  and  in  preparation  of  the 
human  scene.  Not  only  the  Dartmoor 
novels  have  'these  chaotic  wastes  of  earth 
and  stone'  for  background,  but  the  poetry 
of  Eden  Phillpotts — ^ten  volumes  in  all, 
beginning  with  Wild  Fruit  (1910) — and 
the  essays,  first  collected  in  My  Devon 
Year  (1904),  have  the  flavour  of  a  rich 
ancestral  speech.  The  artist's  use  of 
dialect  led  him,  as  he  matured,  from  word 
distortion  to  rhythmic  suggestion  and 
Phillpotts' s  creative  prose  had  as  a  con- 
sequence something  of  the  easeful  power 
of  his  exemplars,  Thomas  Hardy  and 
Henry  Fielding  [qq.v.].  His  rationalist 
philosophy,  genial  and  manly,  but  less 
oppressed  by  such  fatalism  as  Hardy's, 
was  steadfast.  My  Devon  Year  and  From 
the  Angle  of  88  (1952)  could  not  conceiv- 
ably have  come  from  any  other  mind  and 
spirit,  although  half  a  century  separated 
the  two. 

In  1892  Phillpotts  married  Emily 
(died  1928),  daughter  of  Robert  Topham. 
They  had  a  daughter  who  became  an 
author  under  her  father's  tutelage  and  a 
son  on  whose  future  the  novelist  may 
have  allowed  imagination  to  play  as  well 
as  memory  of  his  own  early  growth,  so 
that  when  he  turned  to  his  'hohday  task', 
as  he  called  it,  he  wrote  humorous  stories 
of  boyhood,  among  them  The  Human  Boy 
(1899)  and  The  Human  Boy  Again  (1908). 
Phillpotts  married  secondly,  in  1929, 
Lucy  Robina  Joyce,  daughter  of  Dr. 
Fortescue  Webb.  He  died  at  his  home  at 
Broad  Clyst,  Exeter,  29  December  1960. 
There  is  a  portrait  of  him  in  the  possession 
of  the  family  by  Beryl  Trist. 

[Eden  Phillpotts,  From  the  Angle  of  '88, 
1952;  Percival  Hinton,  Eden  Phillpotts, 
ahibliography  of  first  editions,  1931  •,EdenPhill- 
pottSf  AnAssessment  and  a  Tribute,  ed.  Wave- 
ney  Girvan,  1953;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  Thomas  Moult. 

PIGOU,  ARTHUR  CECIL  (1877-1959), 
economist,  was  born  18  November  1877 


at  Ryde,  Isle  of  Wight,  the  son  of  Clarence 
George  Scott  Pigou  and  his  wife,  Nora, 
second  daughter  of  Sir  John  Lees. 
Clarence  Pigou  was  a  retired  army  officer 
of  little  distinction,  but  descended  from  a 
Huguenot  family  which  had  long  con- 
nections with  China  and  India,  first  as 
traders,  then  as  members  of  the  Indian 
Civil  Service.  The  Lees  were  equally  un- 
distinguished in  that  generation,  but 
again  descended  from  a  family  which 
acquired  distinction  and  wealth  in  Irish 
administration.  Pigou  went,  like  his 
father,  to  Harrow  where  his  natural 
abilities  won  him  an  entrance  scholarship. 
He  was  athlete  enough  to  win  approval 
in  the  sphere  then  more  important; 
scholar  enough  to  win  a  number  of  prizes. 
He  was  the  first  boy  on  the  modern  side 
to  be  head  of  the  school. 

At  King's  College,  Cambridge,  Pigou 
first  read  history  under  Oscar  Browning 
[q.v.],  became  a  scholar  in  1898,  and 
obtained  a  first  class  in  the  history  tripos 
of  1899.  It  was  in  the  Union  Society  that 
he  first  made  his  mark  in  a  generation  of 
brilliant  debaters,  becoming  president  in 

1900.  It  was  in  that  year  that  he  obtained 
a  first  in  part  ii  of  the  moral  sciences 
tripos  and  thus  came  to  economics  as  part 
of  the  tripos.  That  introduction  was 
important  in  the  shaping  of  Pigou's  sub- 
sequent thinking.  He  came  to  economics 
first  by  way  of  history,  then  by  way  of 
philosophy  and  ethics,  and  only  later 
acquired  the  mathematical  techniques 
which  he  used  in  the  writings  of  his  more 
mature  years.  When  he  began  to  teach 
economics  he  was  scarcely  regarded  as  a 
specialist  in  the  subject  in  an  age  in  which 
specialism  was  less  regarded  and  less  neces- 
sary. Indeed,  he  had  won  the  Chancellor's 
medal  for  English  verse  in  1899,  the 
Burney  prize  in  1900,  and  submitted  as  his 
first,  and  unsuccessful,  attempt  for  a 
fellowship  at  King's  a  thesis  on  'Browning 
as  a  Religious  Teacher'. 

Pigou  began  to  lecture  on  economics  in 

1901,  before  his  election  to  a  King's  fellow- 
ship in  1902  at  his  second  attempt,  and 
was  made  Girdler's  lecturer  in  the  summer 
of  1904.  He  lectured  in  those  early  years 
on  a  variety  of  subjects  which  would  seem 
uncongenial  to  those  who  knew  him  in 
later  life.  But  already  in  1901-2  he  had 
begun  to  give  the  course  on  advanced 
economics  to  second-year  students  which 
formed  the  basis  of  the  education  of 
countless  Cambridge  economists  over  the 
next  thirty  years.  In  1908  he  was  elected 
at   the   remarkable    age,    in    Edwardian 


814. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Pigou 


Cambridge,  of  thirty,  to  the  chair  of 
poHtical  economy,  to  the  delight  of 
Alfred  Marshall  [q.v.]  whom  he  succeeded, 
but  to  the  chagrin  of  some  of  the  older 
generation,  and  especially  H.  S.  Foxwell 
[q.v.],  who  had  believed  their  claims  to  be 
greater.  He  held  the  professorship  until 
1943  when  he  reached  the  age  of  retire- 
ment and  continued  to  live  in  King's 
until  his  death  7  March  1959.  He  was 
elected  F.B.A.  in  1927. 

Pigou  was  throughout  his  life  a  devo- 
ted— some  would  say  a  too  devoted  and 
uncritical — pupil  of  Alfred  Marshall. 
Pigou's  course  of  lectures  became  the 
principal  channel  through  which  the  oral 
tradition  of  Marshall's  economics  was 
passed  down.  Marshall  himself  had  never 
been  a  systematic  lecturer.  Pigou,  until 
illness  in  later  years  impaired  his  vigour, 
was  a  brilliantly  lucid  and  systematic 
expositor,  maintaining  the  traditions  the 
school  of  moral  sciences  had  inherited  from 
Henry  Sidgwick  [q.v.],  whose  lectures 
he  had  attended,  and  giving  Marshall's 
ideas  a  clarity  and  architecture  they  had 
lacked  in  Marshall's  own  lecturing.  Pigou 
was  uncritical,  however,  in  the  sense  that 
it  was  he,  more  than  any  other,  who 
brought  up  a  generation  of  Cambridge 
economists  in  the  conviction  that  (in  his 
oft-repeated  words)  'it's  all  in  Marshall'. 
In  the  thirties  he  found  his  loyalties  to 
Marshall  too  constraining  when  first  Piero 
Sraffa  and  later  J.  M.  (later  Lord)  Keynes 
[q.v.],  both  in  his  own  college,  challenged 
some  of  the  orthodoxies  of  Marshallian 
economics.  But  it  was  Pigou  who,  as 
Marshall  had  rightly  foreseen,  provided 
what  was  essential  in  the  Cambridge 
school  of  economics.  Keynes  gave  those 
generations  of  students  their  enthusiasms, 
their  sense  of  the  importance  of  discover- 
ing solutions  to  the  economic  problems 
of  the  world.  Pigou  gave  them  their 
training  in  the  disciplines  and  tech- 
niques of  economic  reasoning.  Clarity  of 
analysis  and  a  willingness  to  follow  an 
argument  through  to  the  end  were  the 
essence  of  his  own  exposition  and 
of  what  he  demanded  in  others. 

Pigou's  first  book,  Principles  and 
Methods  of  Industrial  Peace  (1905),  was  an 
expansion  of  an  essay  which  had  won 
him  the  Adam  Smith  prize  in  1903  and 
also,  in  modified  form,  his  fellowship 
at  the  second  attempt.  Its  later  interest 
lies  largely  in  the  method  of  writing  of  the 
young  Pigou — so  different  from  that  of 
his  more  mature  years.  He  uses  the 
method  of  the  philosopher,  clarifying  the 


issues,  dissecting  them  and  analysing 
them,  trying  to  see  how  far  varied  assump- 
tions will  lead  to  varied  results — the 
analytical  method  applied  with  great 
precision.  But  he  uses  scarcely  any  statis- 
tical argument  and  no  mathematics.  The 
book  reflects  throughout  his  own  upbring- 
ing in  the  moral  sciences. 

It  was  in  1912  that  Pigou  published  the 
first  edition  of  the  book  by  which  his 
ultimate  standing  as  an  economist  will 
almost  certainly  be  judged — Wealth  and 
Welfare  as  it  was  originally  called.  The 
Economics  of  Welfare  as  it  became  in  the 
later  editions  in  which  it  grew  vastly  in 
size.  This  book  created  the  branch  of 
economics  which  has  subsequently  come 
to  be  known  as  the  theory  of  welfare. 
Pigou  started  from  two  existing  ideas, 
both  to  be  found  in  the  Cambridge  tra- 
dition of  Marshall  and  Sidgwick.  Mar- 
shall had  discussed  (as  had  Bastiat  before 
him)  the  concept  of  maximum  satisfaction 
and  the  conditions  in  which  it  might  be 
achieved.  Sidgwick,  in  a  much  less  rigorous 
discussion  of  the  same  problem,  had  made 
use  of  the  idea  of  divergence  between  utility 
to  the  individual  and  utility  to  society  as  a 
whole.  Pigou's  treatment  was  both  more 
ambitious  and  more  rigorous.  He  set  out 
to  examine  the  full  conditions  for  maximum 
satisfaction,  the  conditions  in  which  private 
and  social  net  product  (as  he  called  them) 
might  diverge,  and  the  measures  which 
could  be  taken  to  bring  them  into  equality 
and  maximize  satisfaction. 

It  was  not  to  be  expected  that  Pigou's 
work  in  the  years  before  1912  would  sur- 
vive unchallenged  by  subsequent  genera- 
tions. Challenge  was,  perhaps,  the  more 
likely  because  he  argued  that  more  equal 
distribution  of  income  was  likely  to 
increase  economic  welfare.  This  led, 
inevitably,  to  vigorous  discussion  of  the 
legitimacy  of  making  comparisons  of  the 
welfare  of  different  individuals,  or  of 
attaching  meaning  to  an  aggregate  of 
welfare  of  many  individuals.  Most  of  the 
subsequent  argument  has  been  about  these 
issues.  The  challenges  came  principally 
in  the  fifties  when  Pigou  had  retired  from 
his  chair  and  was  no  longer  as  vigorous  as 
in  early  years.  He  was  himself  never 
convinced  by  his  critics,  and  in  his 
seventy-fourth  year  wrote  an  eloquent 
and  moving  defence  of  his  position, 
arguing  that  satisfactions  are  not  in 
principle  incomparable,  even  if  they  are 
not  directly  measurable,  that  there  was  a 
sufficient  body  of  evidence  that  people 
were   on  average   much  alike   in  many 


815 


Pigou 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


characteristics  and  that,  for  large  groups 
of  people,  it  was  not  unreasonable  to 
treat  them  as  such.  In  the  views  which 
stimulated  this  controversy  some  of 
Pigou' s  own  personal  characteristics  were 
evident.  He  was  a  passionate  believer  in 
justice.  He  insisted  through  life  in  protect- 
ing the  under-dog.  To  him  it  was  just  and 
proper  to  treat  all  men  as  equals  and  to 
treat  the  poor  as  if  they  were  equal  in 
value  and  capacity  to  the  rich.  If  one 
sought  to  invent  exceptions,  to  one  of 
his  Victorian  uprightness  they  seemed  to 
savour  of  special  pleading. 

Pigou' s  strong  principles  created  prob- 
lems for  him  when  war  came  in  1914. 
Although  he  was  still  young,  he  was  not 
prepared  to  undertake  military  service  to 
the  extent  of  accepting  an  obligation  to 
destroy  a  human  life.  He  remained  in 
Cambridge,  but  devoted  all  his  vacations 
to  driving  an  ambulance  at  the  front  for 
the  Friends'  Ambulance  Unit,  and  no 
doubt  at  the  instigation  of  the  same 
conscience  insisted  on  undertaking  jobs  of 
particular  danger.  Towards  the  end  of  the 
war  he  was  persuaded  to  accept  a  post  in 
the  Board  of  Trade,  but  showed  little 
aptitude  for  the  type  of  work  in  which 
others  of  his  Cambridge  colleagues  and 
pupils  were  making  names  for  themselves. 
In  the  years  soon  after  the  war  he  ac- 
cepted rather  reluctantly  the  obligation 
to  serve  on  the  Cunliffe  committee  of  1918- 
19  and  the  Chamberlain  committee  of 
1924-5,  where  he  was  one  of  those  who 
recommended  an  early  return  to  the  gold 
standard — a  recommendation  severely 
attacked  by  Keynes  in  his  Economic 
Consciences  of  Mr.  Churchill.  It  became 
evident  to  Pigou  that  this  was  not  a  field 
in  which  he  could  make  his  best  con- 
tributions to  economics  and  in  later  years 
he  withdrew  from  national  affairs,  save 
for  the  occasional  letter  to  The  Times, 
and  devoted  himself  almost  completely 
to  more  academic  economics. 

Through  the  remaining  years  Pigou 
gradually  retreated  into  the  ordered  life 
of  a  recluse.  In  term  time  he  lived  in  his 
rooms  in  King's,  emerging  to  give 
lectures,  to  take  his  afternoon  walk  to 
Coton,  to  dine  in  the  college  Hall.  In 
vacations,  he  removed  to  his  beloved 
cottage  in  Buttermere,  or  in  the  earUer 
years  to  cUmb  the  Alps.  The  lectures  cost 
him  little  effort.  He  worked  incessantly 
and  regularly  at  his  books.  He  read 
widely  in  economics,  but  rather  to 
find  the  pertinent  example  or  quotation 
for  his  own  work  than  to  learn  from  the 


thinking  of  others.  Within  this  private 
world  there  were  a  few  privileged  and 
devoted  friends.  They  were  chosen  usually 
because  they  shared  his  love  of  the 
mountains.  He  was  a  competent  but  not 
supremely  great  climber;  he  introduced 
to  chmbing  several  who,  like  Wilfrid 
Noyce,  became  far  greater  climbers.  The 
mountains  were  his  love,  and  they  served 
to  illustrate  one  problem  after  another 
in  his  lectures  and  writings.  Into  this 
private  world  few  women*  were  admitted. 
And  as  the  years  went  on  Pigou  tended  to 
become  more  isolated,  more  eccentric, 
and  in  more  sartorial  disarray.  All  this  was 
accentuated  by  an  illness  affecting  his 
heart  which,  from  the  beginning  of  the 
thirties,  curtailed  his  climbing,  impaired 
his  vigour,  and  left  him  intermittently 
through  the  rest  of  his  fife  in  phases  of 
debihty.  And  with  this,  something  was 
lost  both  from  the  liveUness  of  his 
lecturing  and  the  vigour  of  his  writing. 

Through  the  years  after  1918  he  was 
prolific  as  a  writer.  The  Economics  of 
Welfare  went  through  four  main  editions 
and  numerous  reprintings  and  consumed 
much  of  his  time.  Apart  from  a  number  of 
smaller  books  and  papers  in  the  journals, 
he  wrote  five  major  books  during  these 
years:  Industrial  Fluctuations  (1927); 
A  Study  in  Public  Finance  (1928);  The 
Theory  of  Unemployment  (1933);  The 
Economics  of  Stationary  States  (1935); 
Employment  and  Equilibrium  (1941).  All 
these  were  important  in  their  generation. 
Most  of  them  have  been  overtaken  by 
other  work  and  have  left  less  permanent 
impress  on  the  body  of  economics  than  did 
The  Economics  of  Welfare. 

When  Keynes  pubhshed  his  General 
Theory  in  1936,  it  affected  Pigou  doubly: 
Keynes  had  dared  to  attack  Marshall; 
and  had  used  Pigou's  Theory  of  Un- 
employment as  a  stalking  horse,  quoting 
widely  from  Pigou  as  a  representative  of 
the  classical  theories  he  was  seeking  to 
demolish.  Pigou  retaliated,  more  on 
Marshall's  account  than  on  his  own,  with 
a  severe  review  of  Keynes's  book  in 
Economica.  But  shortly  before  the  end  of 
his  life  he  came  to  see  more  clearly  the 
essentials  of  Keynes's  arguments  and, 
asking  permission  to  give  a  public  lecture, 
he  said  with  great  generosity  that  he  had 
come  with  the  passage  of  time  to  feel  that 
he  had  failed  earlier  to  appreciate  some  of 
the  important  things  that  Keynes  was 
trying  to  say.  It  was  the  very  noble  act 
of  a  man  who  put  truth  beyond  vanity  and 
another's    reputation    beyond    his    own. 


816 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Pirow 


Pigou  and  Keynes  had  a  great  mutual  re- 
gard and  affection  for  each  other,  and  their 
personal  friendship  was  never  seriously 
jeopardized  by  their  intellectual  differences. 

It  is  not  easy  to  place  Pigou  in  the 
theogony  of  economists.  Since  his  death 
he  has  probably  been  more  underrated 
than  any  economist  of  first  distinction, 
mainly  because  writers  have  tended  to 
define  their  own  views  in  terms  of  their 
differences  from  Pigou.  As  teacher  and 
builder  of  the  Cambridge  school  of 
economics  in  the  Marshallian  tradition  and 
on  the  basis  of  Marshall's  economics  tripos 
he  set  a  pattern  for  Cambridge  economists 
fot  a  generation  and  saw  his  pupils 
filling  the  chairs  of  economics  around 
the  world.  But  his  innate  and  notorious 
shyness,  increasing  as  the  years  went 
by,  cut  him  off  from  close  personal 
influence  on  the  development  of  econo- 
mics apart  from  his  writings.  He  was,  it 
might  truly  be  said,  the  last  of  the  great 
classical  school  of  economists,  who  sur- 
vived into  a  generation  which  had  lost 
something  of  its  reverence  for  them. 

There  are  two  portraits  of  Pigou,  both 
by  E.  H.  Nelson.  One  hangs  in  the  Hall  of 
King's  College,  the  other  is  in  the  Marshall 
Library  of  Economics  in  Cambridge. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
E.  A.  G.  Robinson. 

PIROW,  OSWALD  (1890-1959),  South 
African  lawyer  and  politician,  born  at 
Aberdeen,  Cape  Province,  14  August 
1890,  was  the  eldest  of  three  children. 
His  German  parents,  Carl  Bernhard 
Ferdinand  Pirow  and  his  wife,  Henrietta 
Tomby,  went  to  South  Africa  in  1888. 
Pirow's  schooling  began  at  Potchefstroom, 
Transvaal,  where  his  father  practised 
medicine.  For  further  study,  Pirow 
proceeded  to  the  Itzehoe  Gymnasium  in 
Germany,  then  to  London  to  read  law, 
being  called  to  the  bar  by  the  Middle 
Temple  in  1913.  After  returning  to  South 
Africa  he  practised  as  an  attorney,  and 
in  1915  transferred  to  the  Pretoria  bar. 
His  effectiveness  as  an  advocate  soon  won 
wide  recognition,  and  in  1925  he  took  silk. 
As  one  of  the  Afrikaner  'Young  Turks' 
of  the  Transvaal  imder  Tiebnan  Roos, 
Pirow  had  meanwhile  entered  politics. 
He  supported  J.  B.  M.  Hertzog  [q.v.] 
and  his  National  Party.  After  three  un- 
successful attempts,  dating  from  1915, 
Pirow  entered  Parliament  in  1924  as  the 
member  for  Zoutpansberg.  At  the  next 
general  election  in  1929  he  unsuccessfully 
opposed  J.  C.  Smuts  [q.v.]  in  Standerton. 


After  Roos's  resignation  from  the 
Cabinet  later  in  1929,  Hertzog  invited 
Pirow  to  take  his  place  as  minister  of 
justice.  Having  consulted  Roos  himself, 
Pirow  agreed.  Following  a  spell  as  a 
nominated  senator,  Pirow,  in  a  by- 
election  in  October  1929,  was  returned  to 
the  Assembly  for  Gezina,  the  constituency 
which  he  continued  to  represent  until  1943. 

His  friendship  with  Roos  notwith- 
standing, Pirow  supported  Hertzog  in 
negotiating  the  coalition  with  Smuts  in 
1933  which  spelt  ruin  to  Roos  who  had 
returned  to  politics  during  the  gold 
standard  crisis.  Pirow  also  approved  the 
fusion  of  the  National  and  South  African 
parties  in  1934.  In  the  new  Government 
Pirow  held  the  portfolios  of  defence  and  of 
railways  and  harbours.  With  Smuts  and 
N.  C.  Havenga  he  was  also  a  member  of 
Hertzog's  'inner  Cabinet'.  Recognizing 
Pirow's  parliamentary  skills,  Hertzog 
delegated  to  him  the  piloting  of  several 
important  measvures,  notably  the  Status 
Act  of  1934.  An  able  administrator  of  his 
departments,  Pirow,  who  was  a  keen 
amateur  flyer,  encouraged  the  formation 
of  South  African  Airways  in  1934. 
Although  he  was  discredited  after  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1939  by  Smuts's 
mockery  of  his  notorious  'bush  carts', 
Pirow's  stewardship  of  the  Defence  Minis- 
try had  not  earlier  been  attacked. 

In  October  1938  Pirow  began  a  tour  of 
western  Europe.  At  Smuts's  suggestion. 
Chamberlain  evidently  utilized  Pirow, 
who  was  in  England  on  defence 
business,  as  an  informal  mediator  with 
Hitler.  Pirow  subsequently  claimed  that 
at  Berchtesgaden  in  November  he  sounded 
Hitler  on  an  offer  of  a  free  hand  in  eastern 
Europe  in  return  for  an  undertaking  to 
allow  the  German  Jews  to  emigrate. 
Pirow's  tour,  during  which  he  also  met 
Mussolini,  Salazar,  and  Franco,  profoundly 
affected  his  outlook.  Already  an  admirer 
of  Hitler's  domestic  policies,  he  returned 
to  South  Africa  convinced  that  in  the 
approaching  war  the  forces  of  National 
Socialism,  to  which  he  was  shortly  to 
announce  his  conversion,  would  triumph. 

With  the  outbreak  of  war  Pirow  sup- 
ported Hertzog  after  his  defeat  in 
ParUament  and  resignation  on  the  neutral- 
ity issue  and  in  his  later  reunion,  in  the 
Herenigde  Nasionale  Party^  with  the 
'purified'  Nationalists  of  D.  F.  Malan  [q.v.] 
who  had  declined  to  enter  fusion  in  1934. 

At  the  end  of  1940,  when  Hertzog  and 
Havenga  broke  with  the  H.N.P.,  Pirow 
remained  in  the  party  and  in  Parliament. 


817 


Pirow 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


At  this  point  he  launched  his  New  Order 
for  South  Africa,  a  movement  based  on  the 
Nazi  ideology  of  race  and  on  a  rejection 
of  parliamentary  democracy.  For  a  time 
Pirow  tried  to  keep  his  group  within 
the  H.N.P.  on  the  basis  of  a  common 
republicanism;  but  the  condemnation 
of  a  national  socialism  by  Malan  and 
J.  G.  Strijdom  [q.v.]  forced  him  and  his 
followers  to  quit  the  H.N.P.  caucus  in 
January  1942.  In  the  general  election  of 
1943  supporters  of  the  New  Order  were 
eliminated,  while  Pirow  himself  declined 
to  stand  for  re-election.  He  continued 
to  propagate  his  views  in  his  newsletter 
until  1958,  but  his  political  influence  had 
disappeared  long  before. 

After  leaving  Parliament,  Pirow  re- 
sumed his  practice  in  Pretoria.  He  retired 
in  1957,  but  re-emerged  later  in  the  year 
when  he  was  briefed  by  the  Crown  in  the 
Pretoria  treason  trial — a  tribute  as  much 
to  his  consistent  advocacy  of  uncom- 
promising white  supremacy  as  to  his 
legal  skills.  The  trial  was  still  in  progress 
at  the  time  of  his  sudden  death  in 
Pretoria  11  October  1959. 

At  the  height  of  his  career  in  the  thirties, 
Pirow's  ability  and  energy  had  marked 
him  out  as  Hertzog's  lieutenant  and 
likely  successor.  Turbulent  in  spirit, 
brusque,  dynamic,  and  combative,  Pirow 
was  a  vigorous  personality.  A  notable 
athlete  in  youth  and  a  keen  hunter,  he 
was  also  a  prolific  writer,  his  most  serious 
work  being  his  biography  of  Hertzog 
(1958).  After  the  early  promise,  Pirow's 
political  eclipse,  with  its  note  of  wasted 
talent,  reflected  not  only  his  misjudge- 
ment of  the  course  of  world  events  and 
of  Afrikaner  political  proclivities  in  a 
crisis,  but  also  a  streak  of  undisciplined 
opportunism  in  his  own  character. 

In  1919  Pirow  married  Else,  daughter  of 
Albert  Piel,  the  founder  of  a  cold  storage 
concern;  there  were  two  sons  and  two 
daughters. 

[O.  Pirow,  J.  B.  M.  Hertzog,  1958;  Die 
Burger,  13  and  21  October  1959 ;  Star  (Johan- 
nesburg), 12  October  1959;  The  Times,  12 
October  1959 ;  private  information.] 

N.  G.  Garson. 

PLIMMER,  ROBERT  HENRY  ADERS 

(1877-1955),  biochemist,  was  born  at 
Elberfeld,  Germany,  25  April  1877,  the 
eldest  son  of  Alfred  Aders,  a  Manchester 
business  man,  and  his  German  wife  and 
first  cousin,  Bertha  Helena  Aders.  The 
child  was  brought  to  England  when  a 
few  months  old  and  soon  afterwards  the 


Aders  settled  in  Surrey  on  the  southern 
outskirts  of  London.  Alfred  Aders  died  in 
1885  and  in  1887  his  widow  married 
Henry  George  Plimmer,  F.R.S.,  who  later 
became  professor  of  comparative  patho- 
logy at  Imperial  College.  By  example  and 
advice  Plimmer  greatly  influenced  the 
lives  and  characters  of  the  Aders  children, 
especially  the  eldest  son  who  later 
acknowledged  his  indebtedness  by  adopt- 
ing the  surname  of  Plimmer  by  the  wish 
of  his  stepfather. 

Educated  at  Dulwich  College  and 
University  College,  London,  where  he 
studied  chemistry  under  (Sir)  Wilfiam 
Ramsay  [q.v.],  Plimmer  graduated  B.Sc. 
in  1899,  then,  on  his  stepfather's  advice, 
turned  his  attention  to  the  chemistry 
of  living  organisms.  A  year  at  Geneva 
University  was  followed  by  two  years  at 
Berlin  under  Emil  Fischer,  where  began 
his  lifelong  interest  in  the  chemistry  of 
proteins.  He  obtained  a  Ph.D.  (Berlin)  and 
D.Sc.  (London)  in  1902,  and  was  awarded 
a  Grocers'  Company  research  studentship 
which  enabled  him  to  work  for  two  years 
at  the  Lister  Institute  of  Preventive 
Medicine. 

In  1904  Plimmer  returned  to  University 
College  as  an  assistant  in  the  department 
of  physiology  under  (Sir)  W.  M.  Bayliss 
and  E.  H.  Starling  [qq.v.].  His  duties 
were  to  teach  physiological  chemistry  and 
to  engage  in  research.  He  soon  became  well 
known  in  both  spheres.  Practical  notes  for 
his  students  developed  into  a  textbook 
of  Organic  and  Bio-Chemistry  (1915)  and 
his  contributions  to  scientific  journals 
drew  attention  to  his  researches  into  the 
chemistry  of  proteins.  With  (Sir)  Frederick 
Gowland  Hopkins  [q.v.]  he  was  co-editor 
of  an  extremely  valuable  series  of  mono- 
graphs on  biochemistry  to  which  he  himself 
contributed  'The  Chemical  Constitution  of 
the  Proteins'  (1908).  He  also  wrote  an 
account  of  the  work  of  Emil  Fischer  and 
his  school. 

Plimmer  was  elected  a  fellow  of 
University  College  in  1906,  assistant 
professor  of  physiological  chemistry  in 
1907,  and  university  reader  in  1912. 
Biochemists  of  his  generation  remembered 
him  with  affection  for  the  part  he  played 
in  the  founding  of  the  Biochemical  Society 
and  in  nursing  it  through  the  early 
difficult  years.  He  and  his  friend  J.  A. 
Gardner  are  regarded  as  the  co-founders 
in  1911  of  the  Biochemical  Club  which 
became  the  Society  in  1913.  The  first 
meeting  was  held  in  Plimmer's  depart- 
ment, and  the  annual  general  meetings 


818 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Plunkett 


continue  to  be  held  at  University  College. 
Plimmer  was  the  first  secretary  (1911-19), 
was  made  an  honorary  member  (1943), 
and  wrote  the  History  of  the  Biochemical 
Society  (1949).  He  lived  to  see  the  society 
flourish  beyond  all  expectations  of  the 
founders,  the  original  membership  of 
fifty  growing  into  thousands. 

During  the  war  of  1914-18,  PHmmer, 
with  the  rank  of  captain,  was  attached  to 
the  directorate  of  hygiene.  War  Office,  and 
analysed  common  foodstuffs,  the  results 
being  pubHshed  in  1921  as  Analyses  and 
Energy  Values  of  Foods.  This  work 
stimulated  his  interest  in  nutrition,  and 
in  1919  he  left  University  College  to 
become  biochemist  at  the  Rowett  Insti- 
tute for  Research  in  Animal  Nutrition, 
Aberdeen,  where  he  was  able  to  take  part 
in  feeding  experiments  on  a  large  scale. 
But  in  1922  he  returned  to  London  as 
professor  of  chemistry  at  St.  Thomas's 
Hospital  medical  school,  a  position  which 
he  filled  with  great  distinction  for  twenty- 
one  years.  He  continued  his  research  work 
with  great  vigour,  and  a  steady  stream  of 
papers  appeared  in  various  journals.  In 
addition  to  his  teaching  duties,  examiner- 
ships,  and  service  on  numerous  university 
boards  and  committees  he  found  time  to 
give  public  lectures  on  diet,  vitamins, 
etc.,  and  with  his  wife  to  write  popular 
books  on  nutrition,  balanced  diets,  vita- 
mins, and  the  choice  of  foods. 

PUmmer  reached  retiring  age  in  1942 
when  he  was  made  honorary  consulting 
chemist  to  the  hospital;  in  1944  the  title 
of  professor  emeritus  of  chemistry  was 
conferred  upon  him  by  the  university  of 
London.  In  January  1943  he  joined  the 
staff  of  the  Postgraduate  Medical  School, 
Hammersmith,  to  assist  Professor  E.  J. 
King  in  the  biochemistry  department. 
It  was  intended  to  be  a  temporary  ap- 
pointment during  a  staff  shortage  but 
lasted  for  more  than  twelve  useful  years. 

A  tall,  lean  figure,  with  strong,  deeply 
lined  face  and  kindly  eyes  beneath  bushy 
eyebrows,  Plimmer  had  a  very  friendly 
disposition  and  loved  entertaining  his 
many  friends.  He  enjoyed  good  music, 
art,  literature,  theatre,  cricket,  and 
motoring.  He  was  especially  kind  and 
helpful  to  younger  colleagues. 

In  1912  Plimmer  married  Violet 
Geraldine  (died  1949),  daughter  of 
Frederick  Sheffield,  solicitor;  they  had 
one  son  and  three  daughters.  He  died 
in  London  18  June  1955. 

[The  Times,  21  June  1955 ;  British  Medical 
Journal,   2  July   1955;   Nature,   13  August 


1955 ;  St.  Thomases  Hospital  Gazette,  October 
1955;  Biochemical  Journal,  vol.  Ixii,  1956; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

John  Lowndes, 

PLUNKETT,  EDWARD  JOHN 
MORETON  DRAX,  eighteenth  Baron 
OF  DuNSANY  (1878-1957),  writer,  was  born 
in  London  24  July  1878  in  the  house  of 
his  grandfather.  Admiral  Lord  Dunsany. 
He  was  the  eldest  son  of  John  William 
Plunkett,  wit,  amateur  scientist,  and 
member  of  ParUament  (1886-92)  for 
South  Gloucestershire.  His  mother,  Ernie 
EUzabeth  Louisa  Maria  Grosvenor,  daugh- 
ter of  Colonel  Francis  Augustus  Plunkett 
Burton,  Coldstream  Guards,  was  very  tall, 
an  heiress,  and  a  beauty.  She  was  a 
relative  of  the  Dunsany  family  and  of  Sir 
Richard  Burton  [q.v.],  the  translator  of 
the  Arabian  Nights,  and  said  to  be  of 
Romany  descent.  The  Plunketts  are  an 
old  Norman  family ;  the  title  is  a  fifteenth- 
century  Irish  one. 

The  boy's  early  years  were  passed  at 
Dunstall  Priory,  a  small  but  attractive 
property  in  Kent  belonging  to  his  mother ; 
and  after  his  father  had  succeeded  to  the 
title  in  1889  he  spent  some  of  his  holidays 
at  the  familj'-  seat,  Dunsany  Castle, 
county  Meath.  By  birth  and  upbringing 
he  may  truly  be  called  an  Anglo-Irishman ; 
an  intermediate  position  which  was  very 
noticeable  throughout  his  life.  He  went  to 
Eton  where  he  was  not  industrious.  Sport 
meant  more  to  him  than  learning,  although 
he  always  felt  an  interest  in  writing  and, 
like  his  father,  in  amateur  science.  His 
father  removed  him  and  sent  him  to 
crammers  to  enable  him  eventually  to 
enter  Sandhurst.  He  joined  the  Coldstream 
Guards  in  1899,  the  year  in  which  he  suc- 
ceeded to  the  title,  and  served  as  a  second 
lieutenant  throughout  most  of  the  South 
African  war.  The  continent  influenced 
him  profoundly  and  African  themes  were 
to  appear  much  in  his  writing.  For  a  short 
time  his  uncle  (Sir)  Horace  Plunkett  [q.v.] 
was  his  guardian,  but  they  were  not  very 
sympathetic  to  each  other.  After  the  war 
he  settled  at  Dunsany,  where  he  started 
a  pack  of  harriers  and  devoted  himself  to 
various  sports,  shooting,  hunting,  and 
cricket.  He  went  big-game  shooting  in 
Africa  and  Dunsany  Castle  was  adorned 
with  many  trophies.  He  was  a  superb  shot 
with  a  rifle  and  also  a  first-class  chessplayer. 

Meanwhile  Dunsany  had  begun  to 
write  short  stories  and  poems  and  in  1905 
published  his  first  book  of  stories.  The  Gods 
of  Pegana.  In  1906  he  stood  unsuccess- 
fully for  Parliament  in  Wiltshire.  Although 


819 


Plunkett 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


he  held  strong  Conservative  views,  he  was 
not  particularly  suited  for  polities  and 
thenceforth  he  devoted  himself  increas- 
ingly to  literature.  Originally  a  man  of 
some  wealth,  changing  circumstances 
made  him  partly  dependent  on  his  pen 
for  support,  although  he  continued  to 
figure  as  landlord,  sportsman,  and  soldier. 
His  natural  bent  was  for  lyric  poetry, 
short  stories,  and  short  plays.  He  became 
associated  with  the  Irish  literary  renais- 
sance and  his  first  play.  The  Glittering 
Gate,  was  produced  at  the  Abbey  Theatre, 
DubUn,  in  1909.  He  did  not  find  it  easy  to 
agree  with  those  controlhng  the  theatre 
and  afterwards  had  little  to  do  with  the 
movement.  He  was  not  in  any  case  a  man 
who  fitted  into  movements.  He  took  no 
part  in  Irish  politics  and  in  a  half- 
passionate  half -humorous  way  was  utterly 
opposed  to  Irish  nationalism,  although  he 
loved  the  country  and  retained  many 
Irish  literary  friends,  notably  Oliver  St. 
John  Gogarty  and  George  Russell  [qq.v.]. 

In  1911  his  short  play  The  Gods  of  the 
Mountain  was  produced  in  London.  He 
wrote  a  number  of  other  plays,  often 
dealing  with  imaginary  countries,  un- 
historic  periods,  and  fantastic  religions. 
Irish  themes  he  avoided  at  this  time. 
In  the  war  of  1914-18  he  was  a  captain  in 
the  Royal  Inniskilling  Fusiliers.  Becoming 
involved  in  the  suppression  of  the  Easter 
week  rebellion  in  Dublin  in  1916  he  was 
wounded  and  taken  prisoner  by  the 
rebels.  He  also  saw  service  in  France. 

From  1916  Dunsany's  short  plays  be- 
came enormously  popular  in  the  United 
States  where  they  were  presented  in 
Little  Theatres  and  colleges  all  over  the 
country.  On  his  first  American  lecture 
tour  (1919-20)  he  was  welcomed  as  an 
international  literary  celebrity.  He  visited 
America  five  times  in  all.  In  England  he 
also  became  famous  although  only  one 
full-length  play,  If  (1921),  reached  the 
west  end.  Believing  the  market  for  short 
stories  to  be  limited,  he  now  attempted 
the  novel  with  The  Chronicles  of  Rodriguez 
(1922),  The  Blessing  of  Pan  (1927),  and 
others.  But  he  did  not  desert  the  short 
story.  Further  visits  to  Africa  in  search 
of  big  game  inspired  the  Jorkens  stories, 
perhaps  his  best,  purporting  to  be  the 
tales  of  an  outrageous  drink-cadging  liar, 
who  claimed  among  other  things  to  have 
married  the  mermaid  at  Aden.  Short 
stories,  novels,  and  verse  flowed  easily 
from  his  quill,  and  he  was  successful  as  a 
writer  of  plays  and  stories  for  broadcasting. 
He    also    wrote    three    autobiographical 


works:  Patches  of  Sunlight  (1938),  While 
the  Sirens  Slept  (1944),  and  The  Sirens 
Wake  (1945);  a  book  on  Ireland,  My 
Ireland  (1937) ;  and  some  novels  on  Irish 
themes  such  as  The  Curse  of  the  Wise 
Woman  (1933)  and  Rory  and  Bran  (1936). 
After  1939  he  served  for  a  time  in  the 
Home  Guard  in  Kent  and  then  went 
to  Athens  as  Byron  professor  of  English 
literature,  visiting  Turkey  en  route.  The 
arrival  of  the  Germans  forced  him  to 
escape  under  aerial  attack.  His  travels  and 
experiences  at  this  time  he  treated  in  a 
narrative  poem,  A  Journey  (1943),  his 
finest  and  most  sustained  work  in  verse. 

Dunsany  was  a  striking  figure,  very  tall, 
athletic,  handsome,  and  in  later  years 
bearded.  He  was  unconventional  in  dress 
and  manner.  He  expressed  his  opinions 
freely  and  strongly.  He  objected  to  many 
features  of  modern  life,  especially  adver- 
tising and  patent  foods.  Although  his 
outspokenness  sometimes  made  enemies, 
he  was  the  kindest  of  men,  particularly 
to  the  young,  and  he  delighted  to  assist 
literary  aspirants.  He  was  devotedly 
interested  in  animals,  and  a  great  observer 
of  nature,  in  particular  of  facts  which 
others  fail  to  observe.  He  painted  a  little, 
and,  although  not  a  performer,  loved 
music.  He  also  attempted  pottery.  As  a 
writer  he  was  above  all  original  and 
outspoken,  following  the  lights  of  poetry 
and  humour  wherever  they  might  lead 
him.  His  handwriting  was  beautiful:  he 
usually  wrote  with  a  goose-quill  and 
never  blotted  a  line.  He  was  amazingly 
prolific  and,  as  might  be  expected,  uneven. 
He  followed  no  fashion;  founded  no 
school ;  and  had  no  use  for  selfconsciously 
modern  writing.  His  work,  although 
occasionally  influenced  by  his  period,  is 
above  all  his  own.  He  was  a  popular 
lecturer  and  broadcaster  and  was  an 
honorary  Litt.D.  of  DubUn  (1940). 

In  1904  Dunsany  married  Lady  Beatrice 
Child- ViUiers  (died  1970),  daughter  of  the 
seventh  Earl  of  Jersey  [q.v.].  They  had  one 
son,  Randal  Arthur  Henry  (born  1906), 
to  whom  Dunsany  handed  over  Dunsany 
Castle  after  1945  and  who  succeeded  him 
in  the  title  when  he  died  in  Dublin 
25  October  1957. 

At  Dunsany  there  is  a  portrait  by  A. 
Jonniaux  and  a  bust  by  A.  Power;  at 
Dunstall  a  portrait  by  E.  March,  a  bust 
by  Strobl,  and  a  water-colour  by  G. 
Brockhurst. 

[Lord  Dunsany's  own  writings;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Longford. 


820 


P.N.B.  1051-1966 


Pole 


POLE,   Sir  FELIX  JOHN  CLEWETT 

(1877-1956),  railway  general  manager  and 
industrialist,  was  born  at  Little  Bedwyn, 
Wiltshire,  1  February  1877,  the  second 
son  of  Edward  Robert  Pole,  schoolmaster, 
and  his  wife,  Enmia,  daughter  of  Charles 
Clewett,  of  Wincanton,  Somerset.  With  a 
village  school  education,  agreeable  manner, 
quick  comprehension,  retentive  memory, 
and  healthy  ambition,  at  the  age  of 
fourteen  he  joined  the  Great  Western 
Railway  as  a  telegraph  clerk  at  Swindon. 
After  two  years  he  was  promoted  to 
Paddington,  serving  in  the  offices  of  the 
telegraph  superintendent,  chief  engineer, 
and  (from  1904)  general  manager.  He 
revived  the  moribund  staff  magazine,  and 
edited  it  for  several  years  with  conspi- 
cuous success,  undertaking  literary  work 
for  the  railway  press  in  his  spare  time. 
He  also  became  a  fluent  speaker  and 
conversationalist,  and,  from  close  associa- 
tion with  the  earliest  staff  conciliation 
schemes,  a  skilled  negotiator.  He  was 
rejected  for  military  service  in  the  war  of 
1914-18  owing  to  poor  eyesight.  His 
abilities  brought  him  rapid  promotion. 
By  1919  he  was  assistant  general  manager, 
and  in  1921,  when  forty-four,  he  became 
general  manager,  the  highest  executive 
officer. 

Two  pressing  tasks  confronted  Pole :  to 
restore  financial  stability  after  wartime 
government  control ;  and  to  weld  together 
the  seven  constituent  and  twenty-six 
subsidiary  companies  which,  under  the 
Railways  Act  of  1921,  were  now  to  form 
the  enlarged  Great  Western  Railway. 
He  accomplished  the  first  by  firmer  control 
of  departmental  expenditure,  with  fixed 
targets,  streamlining  the  organization, 
more  intensive  use  of  roUing  stock,  and 
a  'drive'  for  increased  traffic.  Net 
revenue  was  increased  and  dividends 
improved.  The  second  was  completed  with 
the  minimum  of  friction  and  delay  by 
skilful  reconciliation  of  differing  practices 
and  personalities.  His  innate  friendliness 
and  honesty  of  purpose  gave  him  a 
remarkable  ability  to  handle  men.  He 
strove  for  keenness  and  efficiency,  foster- 
ing the  family  spirit  amongst  all  ranks, 
whether  at  official  meetings  or  staff 
functions,  and  won  their  confidence.  He 
could  also  be  firm  when  necessary,  as 
instanced  by  his  energetic  and  resourceful 
action,  when  chairman  of  the  railway 
general  managers'  conference,  in  helping 
to  break  the  general  strike  of  1926. 
He  encouraged  good  customer  relations 
and  frequently    addressed   chambers    of 


commerce.  Rotary  clubs,  and  civic  func- 
tions. 

Receptive  to  new  ideas,  he  pursued  an 
imaginative  progressive  policy,  endorsed 
by  his  board.  Strengthening  of  track  and 
bridges  enabled  the  most  powerful  ('King' 
class)  locomotives  in  the  country  to  be 
designed  to  haul  heavier,  high-speed 
trains ;  higher  capacity  wagons  were  adop- 
ted, reducing  track  occupation;  safety 
techniques  lowered  the  staff  accident  rate ; 
propaganda  and  publicity  received  a  new 
look ;  housing  schemes  were  established.  , 

In  1923^  Pole  visited  the  Sudan^ 
investigated  the  operation  of  the  govern- 
ment railways  and  steamships,  and 
effected  improved  organization  and  ac- 
counting. In  1931  he  again  reviewed  the 
expenditure,  also  visiting  Egypt  and 
Palestine,  advising  on  railway  policy  and 
development. 

In  1929  Pole  became  chairman  of  {^ 
newly  formed  group  of  electrical  com'-^ 
panics  (British  Thomson-Houston,  Metro- 
politan Vickers,  Edison  Swan,  Ferguson 
Pailin,  and  others)  known  as  Associated 
Electrical  Industries,  the  largest  group 
in  the  country,  but  was  retained  by  the 
Great  Western  Railway  for  special  consul- 
tation. His  first  concern  was  the  integra- 
tion of  these  large  electrical  undertakings, 
with  conflicting  traditions,  practices,  and 
capital  structures,  in  one  case  largely 
American-owned.  Initially,  the  goodwill 
and  individuality  of  the  separate  com- 
panies were  maintained,  with  central  direc-^ 
tion.  Serious  trade  depression  in  the  early, 
thirties  made  inter-company  co-operation 
extremely  difficult,  delaying  co-ordination 
of  manufacturing  and  marketing  effort, 
but  a  start  was  soon  made  by  combining 
British  and  American  interests  in 
Australia,  estabhshing  A.E.I.  (India), 
Ltd.,  and  concentrating  the  manufacture 
of  electric  motors,  traction  equipment, 
lamps,  etc.  By  frequent  consultation  with 
the  principal  executive  officers  and  staff 
at  all  levels,  he  won  their  co-operation, 
and  inculcated  the  team  spirit.  Staff 
welfare  was  improved,  and  a  pension 
scheme  introduced.  Trade  revived,  the 
efficiency  and  morale  of  the  new  giant 
was  at  a  high  level  and  A.E.I,  achieved 
world-wide  reputation.  Pole  travelled 
extensively  in  its  interests,  and  in  ten 
years  visited  most  European  countries, 
as  well  as  Russia,  Turkey,  Iraq,  Syria, 
Southern  Rhodesia,  South  Africa,  India, 
Ceylon,  Brazil,  the  United  States,  and 
Canada.  The  contribution  to  the  war 
effort,  of  ,1939-45  by. A.E.I,  was  massive. 


821 


Pole 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


and  the  Trafford  Park  works,  Manchester, 
materially  assisted  in  winning  the  Battle 
of  Britain  by  producing  radar. 

Pole  resigned  the  chairmanship  in  1945 
owing  to  blindness,  but  remained  a 
director.  He  learnt  Braille  and  continued 
many  former  activities,  including  the 
chairmanship  of  the  Reading  Standard  and 
his  lifelong  recreations,  natural  history  and 
fishing.  Friends  all  over  the  world,  high 
and  low,  still  corresponded  with  him  and 
visited  his  home.  Selected  for  the  office 
of  high  sheriff  of  Berkshire  in  1947,  he 
renounced  the  honour  owing  to  his  blind- 
ness. His  affection  for  the  G.W.R.  never 
waned,  and  in  1956  an  express  *Castle' 
engine  was  renamed  'Sir  Felix  Pole'  in  his 
memory.  He  had  served  on  numerous 
government  committees. 

He  married  in  1899  Ethel  Maud  (died 
1966),  daughter  of  Horace  Flack,  a  west- 
end  shoemaker,  and  had  one  son  and  two 
daughters.  He  was  knighted  in  1924  and 
died  in  Reading  15  January  1956. 

[Felix  J.  C.  Pole,  His  Book,  privately 
printed,  1954 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

K.  W.  C.  Grand. 

POLLITT,  HARRY  (1890-1960),  general 
secretary  and  subsequently  chairman  of 
the  British  Communist  Party,  was  born 
in  Droylsden,  Lancashire,  22  November 
1890,  the  second  of  the  six  children  of 
Samuel  Pollitt,  blacksmith's  striker,  and 
his  wife,  Mary  Louisa  Charlesworth.  His 
mother,  who  came  of  a  Yorkshire  family, 
was  a  foundation  member  of  the  Inde- 
pendent Labour  Party  and  the  British 
Communist  Party,  a  Co-operator,  and  a 
member  of  the  Ashton  and  District 
Weavers'  Association  until  she  died.  She 
was  her  son's  original  political  mentor  and 
ideal  representative  of  the  working  class 
for  whom  he  worked  all  his  life.  He  went 
to  his  local  elementary  school  and  at  the 
age  of  twelve  became  a  half-timer  in  the 
local  weaving  mill.  At  thirteen  he  became 
a  full-time  worker.  At  this  period  he  was 
taken  by  his  mother  to  his  first  socialist 
lecture,  by  Philip  (later  Viscount)  Snowden 
[q.v.]  whose  claim  that  'Only  when  capital- 
ism has  been  abolished  will  it  be  possible 
to  abolish  poverty,  unemployment  and 
war'  stuck  in  Pollitt's  memory,  for  it 
confirmed  his  own  observations  of  con- 
ditions in  Lancashire. 

At  fifteen  Pollitt  was  apprenticed  to 
Gorton  Tank,  the  locomotive-building 
plant  of  the  Great  Central  Railway; 
he  attended  night  classes  in  mathematics, 
machine-drawing,   shorthand,   and  econ- 


omics, reading  political  writings  vora- 
ciously; in  1912  he  became  a  first-class 
member  of  the  Boilermakers'  Society.  He 
had  joined  the  Independent  Labour  Party 
in  1909  and  his  first  leaflet,  on  'Reform  v. 
Revolution',  was  published  by  the  Open- 
shaw  Socialist  Society.  He  had  also  begun 
to  earn  a  reputation  as  a  political  speaker 
and  between  1911  and  1914  he  addressed 
socialist  meetings  all  over  Lancashire 
and  Yorkshire.  In  1911  and  1912,  as  a 
member  of  the  British  Socialist  Party,  he 
worked  for  them  against  the  less  radical 
Labour  Party  in  Manchester  city  council 
elections. 

During  the  war  Pollitt  opposed  British 
participation  and  in  1915  as  a  trade- 
unionist  he  organized  a  strike  against 
dilution  in  Thornycroft's  Southampton 
shipyard.  He  was  elected  secretary  of 
the  London  district  of  the  Boilermakers' 
Society  in  1919  and  later  in  the  year 
national  organizer  of  the  'Hands  Off 
Russia'  movement  which,  although  it 
failed  to  achieve  immediate  industrial 
action  against  the  supply  of  arms  to  the 
counter-revolutionary  forces,  encouraged 
the  London  dockers  to  strike  in  1920  and 
so  prevented  the  Jolly  George  from  sailing 
with  ammunition  for  Poland. 

Pollitt  was  a  foundation  member  of  the 
British  Communist  Party  when  it  was 
formed  in  1920,  and  in  the  following  year 
he  attended  the  third  congress  of  the 
Communist  International  in  Moscow 
where  he  met  Lenin.  From  then  on  he  was 
always  at  the  centre  of  political  militancy. 
In  1924  he  became  secretary  of  the 
National  Minority  Movement  which  aimed 
to  bring  the  trade  unions  under  Communist 
control.  The  fall  of  the  first  Labour 
Government  in  that  year  drove  the 
British  Communists  to  even  greater 
activity  and  in  1925  Pollitt  was  one  of  the 
twelve  leading  members  tried  at  the  Old 
Bailey  for  publishing  seditious  libels  and 
incitement  to  mutiny.  He  was  sentenced 
to  twelve  months'  imprisonment  and  so 
missed  the  general  strike. 

But  it  was  from  1936,  at  the  time  of  the 
Spanish  civil  war  and  the  Popular  Front 
movement,  that  Pollitt's  gifts  as  an 
agitator,  orator,  and  a  warm-hearted 
personality  were  at  their  height.  This 
short,  strongly  built  man  of  shining 
honesty  and  twinkling  humour  could  work 
and  express  hate  against  political  reaction 
most  effectively,  but  it  is  doubtful  if  he 
could  feel  personal  animosity  against  any 
individual.  He  was  the  epitome  of  the 
British  revolutionary  movement  in  the 


822 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Ponsonby 


first  half  of  the  twentieth  century;  and, 
despite  his  extremism,  one  of  the  most 
loved  figures  of  his  time  in  radical 
politics. 

In  1929,  when  PoUitt  became  general 
secretary  of  the  British  Communist  Party, 
it  was  a  small,  sectarian  organization,  out 
of  the  mainstream  of  the  Labour  move- 
ment. Under  his  leadership  it  developed 
into  a  significant  (if  still  very  small)  politi- 
cal force  which  exerted  an  influence  out  of 
all  proportion  to  its  size.  He  himself  stood 
several  times,  unsuccessfully,  in  parlia- 
mentary elections.  When  England  declared 
war  on  Hitler's  Germany,  PoUitt  was 
probably  the  happiest  man  in  the  country : 
he  immediately  wrote  a  pamphlet,  How  to 
Win  the  War.  Although  he  loyally  stood 
by  his  party's  switch  against  the  war 
only  a  few  days  later,  the  decision 
certainly  saddened  as  much  as  it  em- 
barrassed him.  For  some  two  years  he 
ceased  to  lead  his  party,  but  when  Russia 
joined  the  Allies  he  was  reinstated;  in 
1956  he  became  chairman  and  so  re- 
mained until  his  death,  27  June  1960,  on 
board  the  liner  Orion  on  his  way  home 
from  Australia. 

In  1925  PoUitt  married  Marjory  Edna 
Brewer  who  stood  as  a  Communist 
parliamentary  candidate  in  1950.  They 
had  a  daughter  and  a  son,  Brian,  who 
was  president  of  the  Cambridge  Union  in 
1962. 

[Harry  PoUitt,  Serving  My  Time,  1940,  and 
Selected  Articles  and  Speeches,  2  vols.,  1953^ ; 
The  Times,  28  and  30  June  1960;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

James  MacGibbon. 

PONSONBY,    \^RE    BRABAZON,    in 

the  peerage  of  Ireland  ninth  and  in  the 
peerage  of  the  United  Kingdom  first 
Earl  of  Bessborough  (1880-1956), 
governor-general  of  Canada,  was  born  in 
London  27  October  1880,  the  eldest  son 
of  Edward  Ponsonby,  later  eighth  Earl 
of  Bessborough,  by  his  wife,  Blanche  Vere, 
daughter  of  Sir  Josiah  John  Guest  [q.v.] 
and  his  wife.  Lady  Charlotte  Guest 
(later  Schreiber,  q.v.).  He  went  to  Harrow 
in  the  family  tradition,  then  to  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge,  and  after  taking  his 
degree  in  1901  was  caUed  to  the  bar  by 
the  Inner  Temple  in  1903.  Bessborough, 
county  Kilkenny,  stiU  remained  the  famUy 
home,  and  there  his  father,  who  suc- 
ceeded to  the  title  in  1906,  established 
a  pack  of  hounds  to  hunt  the  neigh- 
bouring country,  and  Duncannon,  as  he 
then  became,  carried  the  horn. 


He  held  a  commission  in  the  Bucks 
Hussars  and  in  1906  stood  for  Parliament 
unsuccessfully  at  Carmarthen.  During 
these  years,  he  might  well  have  been  spoilt 
in  the  role  of  an  eligible  and  good-looking 
parti  in  the  Edwardian  Vanity  Fair.  But 
he  was  level-headed  and  industrious  and, 
after  failing  for  Parliament,  he  put  in 
three  useful  years  (1907-10)  representing 
Marylebone  East  on  the  London  County 
Council.  In  January  1910  he  was  returned 
to  Parliament  for  Cheltenham  but  lost 
his  seat  in  the  election  of  December.  In 
1912  he  made  the  happiest  of  marriages 
with  Roberte,  only  daughter  of  Baron  de 
Neuflize,  banker,  of  Paris,  and  next  year 
was  returned  to  Parliament  for  Dover, 
which  he  continued  to  represent  until 
his  father's  death  in  1920. 

In  the  war  of  1914-18  he  served  in 
GaUipoU  as  G.S.O.  3  and  later  and  longer 
in  France  imder  Sir  Henry  Wilson  [q.v.] 
on  the  staff.  He  was  appointed  C.M.G.  in 
1919.  After  the  war  he  went  into  the  City 
and  became  chairman  of  the  San  Paulo 
Railway,  deputy  chairman  of  De  Beers,  and 
chairman  of  the  Margarine  Union  until  its 
merger  in  1929  into  Unilever  of  which  he 
became  a  joint  chairman  with  (Sir)  D'Arcy 
Cooper  [q.v.]. 

In  1923  the  family  home  in  Ireland  was 
bm-ned  down  in  the  troubles.  Earlier, 
prudence  had  decided  that  pictures  and 
other  treasures  should  gradually  be  re- 
moved to  England,  and  thus  a  number  of 
them  were  saved.  Bessborough  spent  a 
year  or  so  looking  round  for  another  home 
and  settled  on  Stansted  Park,  Rowland's 
Castle,  on  the  Hampshire  border  of 
Sussex,  a  fine  Queen  Anne  replica  in  a 
wide  and  classic  setting,  and  possessing 
a  400-year-old  chapel,  with  literary  and 
historic  associations,  which  he  restored. 
Inheriting  also  the  family  flair  for  acting, 
he  bmlt  a  theatre,  and  soon  enough  per- 
formances of  a  high  order  were  annuaUy 
given  before  the  neighbourhood.  He 
encouraged  cricket  and  maintained  an 
excellent  shoot.  But  before  aU  these  mat- 
ters were  completed,  he  accepted  in  1931 
the  post  of  governor-general  of  Canada. 
If  at  first  the  appointment  caused  surprise 
in  some  quarters,  he  could  offer  many 
qualifications:  his  service  on  the  L.C.C. 
and  in  Parliament,  his  business  experience, 
an  innate  dignity,  proved  thoroughness 
and  industry,  and,  perhaps  not  least,  the 
fact  that  he  and  his  wife,  who  though 
French  had  a  Protestant  background, 
were  bilingual,  and  her  beauty  and  ability 
and  charm  outstanding.  He  was   sworn 


823 


Ponsonby 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


of  the  Privy  Council  and  advanced  to 
G.C.M.G.  in  1931  and  remained  in  Canada 
until  1935,  years  in  which  he  was  not 
called  on  to  deal  with  constitutional 
problems  of  the  gravity  which  had  faced 
his  predecessors.  Throughout  his  term,  he 
proved  a  valuable  cultural  influence  all 
over  Canada,  encouraging  drama  and  the 
arts  generally.  His  monthly  *duty'  letters 
to  the  sovereign  were  well  written,  full, 
and  lucid,  and  received  the  King's  careful 
attention,  and  he  conducted  the  office 
with  great  dignity  after  he  had  adapted 
himself  to  the  manners  and  customs  of  a 
new  world  with  which  he  was  unfamiliar. 
In  1937  his  Irish  earldom  was  raised  to  an 
earldom  of  the  United  Kingdom  for  his 
services. 

On  his  return  to  England  in  1935 
Bessborough  resumed  many  of  his  City 
interests  and  became  in  1936  president  of 
the  Council  of  Foreign  Bondholders  and 
director  (he  was  later  chairman)  of  the 
Rio  Tinto  Company.  Among  his  volun- 
tary activities  he  was  chairman  of  the 
board  of  governors  of  Cheltenham  Ladies' 
College  and  president  and  chairman  of 
the  council  of  the  British  Hotels  and 
Restaurants  Association.  He  found  time, 
too,  to  edit  some  of  the  family  archives, 
and  in  Lady  Bessborough  and  her  Family 
Circle  (1940)  he  presented  with  consider- 
able literary  skill  the  first  authentic 
portrait  of  his  great-grandmother,  Hen- 
rietta, and  disposed  of  some  of  the  in- 
accuracies which  malice  and  gossip  had 
piled  up  round  her  and  her  daughter 
Caroline  Lamb  [q.v.].  He  also  edited 
(1950-52)  two  volumes  of  diaries  and 
papers  of  his  grandmother.  Lady  Charlotte 
Schreiber. 

With  the  influx  into  Britain  of  refu- 
gees and  the  Resistance  after  the  out- 
break of  war  in  1939  Bessborough  was  an 
obvious  choice  to  organize  at  the  Foreign 
Office  in  1940-45  a  department  to  co- 
ordinate all  activities  concerned  with  the 
welfare  of  the  French  in  Great  Britain. 
This  he  did  very  well,  and  it  was  a  cause 
for  which  he  worked  xmtil  his  death  with 
constant  interest  and  remarkable  tact  and 
ability,  to  which  Lord  Silkin  paid  high 
tribute  in  the  House  of  Lords.  Among 
other  foreign  decorations,  Bessborough 
received  the  grand  cross  of  the  Legion  of 
Honour. 

As  he  grew  old,  his  activities  became  no 
less,  but  more  local.  He  was  instrumental 
in  the  foundation  of  both  the  Regency 
exhibitions  in  the  Brighton  Pavilion  and 
the  Regency  Society.  In  the  diocese  of 


Chichester  he  was  for  years  chairman  of 
the  board  of  finance  and  did  a  great  deal 
of  more  general  work  for  the  Church  in 
Sussex  and  in  the  Empire,  to  which  his 
friend  and  bishop,  G.  K.  A.  Bell  [q.v.], 
paid  unqualified  tribute  after  his  death. 

He  was  an  excellent  landlord,  knowing 
the  family  details  of  his  tenants  and 
neighbours  and  taking  a  deep  interest  in 
their  affairs.  He  and  his  wife  suffered  two 
separated  and  grievous  tragedies  in  the 
deaths  by  accidents  of  their  two  younger 
sons;  that  of  his  youngest  in  1951  was 
a  blow  which  must  have  shortened 
Bessborough' s  life.  Yet  he  never  sur- 
rendered to  grief  and  continued  his  activi- 
ties to  the  end.  Nor  did  his  own  tragedies 
ever  reduce  the  interest  he  felt  and  the 
sympathy  he  showed  to  the  children  of 
others.  He  died  10  March  1956  at  Stan- 
sted  and  was  succeeded  by  his  eldest  and 
surviving  son,  Frederick  Edward  Neuflize 
(born  1913).  There  was  also  one  daughter. 
Portraits  of  him  by  P.  A.  de  Laszlo  (1914) 
and  by  Alphonse  Jongers  (in  the  uniform 
of  governor-general,  1935),  and  a  group 
picture  of  the  opening  of  Parliament  in 
Ottawa  in  1932,  by  Richard  Jack,  hang 
at  Stansted. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

John  Gore. 

POPE,  WALTER  JAMES  MACQUEEN- 

(1888-1960),  theatre  manager,  publicist, 
and  historian.  [See  Macqueen-Pope.] 

POPHAM,  Sm  (HENRY)  ROBERT 
(MOORE)  BROOKE-  (1878-1953),  air 
chief  marshal.  [See  Brooke-Popham.] 

PORTER,  SAMUEL  LOWRY,  Baron 
Porter  (1877-1956),  judge,  was  born  in 
Headingley,  Leeds,  7  February  1877,  the 
son  of  Hugh  Porter,  warehouse  manager, 
and  his  wife,  Mary  Ellen  Lowry.  He  was 
educated  at  the  Perse  School  and  Em- 
manuel College,  Cambridge,  of  which  he 
eventually  became  an  honorary  fellow 
(1937),  for  which  he  always  retained  a 
deep  affection,  and  where  he  frequently 
resided.  He  obtained  a  third  class  in  part  i 
of  the  classical  tripos  (1899)  and  a  second 
in  part  ii  of  the  law  tripos  (1900).  He  was 
called  to  the  bar  by  the  Inner  Temple  in 
1905,  and,  having  first  worked  up  a  good 
general  practice,  later  specialized  in  the 
Commercial  Court.  His  practice  was  inter- 
rupted by  the  war  of  1914-18,  when  he 
served  as  a  captain  on  the  general  list. 
He  took  silk  in  1925,  was  recorder 
of  Newcastle-under-Lyme,  1928-32,  and 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Porter 


Walsall,  1932-4.  In  1934  he  wa$  appointed 
a  judge  of  the  King's  Bench  division  and 
knighted,  and  in  1938  a  lord  of  appeal  in 
ordinary  (when  he  received  a  life  peerage 
and  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council), 
without  passing  through  the  Court  of 
Appeal. 

Porter's  judgements  in  the  King's 
Bench  division  were  always  very  sound. 
They  were  not  spectacular,  as  he  aimed  at 
conciseness,  and  avoided  the  utterance  of 
an  unnecessary  word.  The  two  most 
notable  are  perhaps  Mutual  Finance, 
Ltd.  V.  John  Wetton  &  Sons  Ltd.,  [1937] 
2  K.B.  389,  and  Lloyds  Bank,  Ltd.  v. 
Bank  of  America  etc.  Association,  [1937] 
2  K.B.  631.  The  former  is  a  valuable 
contribution  to  the  doctrine  of  undue 
influence,  and  lays  down  that  a  trans- 
action can  be  avoided  if  it  has  been 
procured  by  a  threat  to  prosecute  any 
person  whose  safety,  for  whatever  reason, 
was  desired  by  the  promisor,  such  desire 
being  known  to  the  promisee.  The  latter, 
which  was  affirmed  by  the  Court  of  Appeal 
([1938]  2.  K.B.  147),  concerns  agency,  as 
an  exponent  of  which  Porter  attained  the 
rank  of  EUenborough.  It  enunciates  the 
proposition  that  where  B  pledges  docu- 
ments relating  to  merchandise  to  A,  and  A 
hands  them  back,  to  enable  B,  in  con- 
formity with  a  course  of  dealing  pursued 
between  the  parties  over  several  years, 
to  sell  the  merchandise  as  trustee  for  A, 
but  B,  instead,  pledges  the  documents 
with  C,  who  takes  them  in  good  faith, 
A  cannot  recover  them  from  C. 

Although  Porter  never  courted  publi- 
city, as  a  lord  of  appeal  he  inevitably 
achieved  it  by  the  very  high  standard  of 
his  speeches.  The  two  by  which  he  should 
perhaps  be  best  remembered  are  speeches 
of  dissent:  in  Joyce  v.  Director  of  Public 
Prosecutions,  [1946]  A.C.  347,  and  National 
Anti-Vivisection  Society  v.  I.R.C.,  [1948] 
A.C.  31.  In  the  former,  a  treason  trial,  the 
Crown  based  its  case  on  the  very  dubious 
ground  that  the  mere  renewal  by  Joyce 
of  his  British  passport  on  24  August  1939, 
for  the  customary  period  of  one  year, 
necessarily  imposed  on  him,  although  an 
alien  resident  outside  the  realm,  the  duty 
of  allegiance  to  the  Crown.  The  trial  judge 
left  to  the  jury  simply  the  question 
whether  Joyce,  in  delivering  his  broad- 
casts from  Germany  during  the  war,  had 
or  had  not  adhered  to  the  King's  enemies, 
a  question  which  could  clearly  be  answered 
only  in  one  way.  The  Court  of  Criminal 
Appeal,  and  the  majority  of  the  House  of 
Lords,    regarded    this    as    an    adequate 


direction,  but  Lord  Porter  unhesitatingly 
pointed  out  the  error,  which  lay  in  the 
placing  of  the  onus  of  proof.  It  should,  in 
his  view,  be  incumbent  on  the  Crown  to 
prove,  not  only  the  renewal  of  the  pass- 
port, but  also  its  retention  and  use  on  and 
after  18  September  1939,  when  Joyce  was 
first  employed  by  the  German  radio  com- 
pany of  Berlin  as  broadcaster  to  Great 
Britain.  His  speech  concluded  with  a 
serious  warning  that,  especially  in  a  case 
of  treason,  the  jury  should  never,  even  in 
war  time,  unless  under  statutory  authority, 
be  ousted  from  a  function  that  is  rightly 
its  own. 

The  other  case  is  one  of  the  most  im- 
portant authorities  on  the  law  of  chari- 
table trusts.  Here  again,  Porter  was  the 
sole  dissentient.  The  majority  held  that 
the  objects  of  the  Anti-Vivisection  Society 
could  not  be  charitable  because  (a)  they 
contemplated  legislation,  and  therefore 
were  of  a  political  character,  which  neces- 
sarily excluded  them  from  the  charitable 
field,  (b)  they  were  not  beneficial  to  the 
community,  because  any  benefit  to  public 
morals  obtained  by  their  success  would  be 
outweighed  by  the  detriment  which  would 
inevitably  be  suffered  by  medical  science. 
Porter  dissented  on  both  grounds.  On  (a) 
he  would  exclude  from  the  charitable 
definition  only  those  trusts  whose  objects 
could  be  attained  by  no  other  means  than 
by  legislation.  On  (b)  his  view  may  be  sum- 
marized as  suggesting  that  a  judge  need 
not  take  upon  himself  the  burden  of  weigh- 
ing against  one  another  the  possible  ad- 
vantages and  disadvantages  which  may 
accrue  from  the  success  of  the  objects  of 
a  trust,  which,  if  it  once  satisfies  the  defini- 
tion of  charitable,  does  not  cease  to  satisfy- 
it  merely  because  it  may  bring  harm  asi 
well  as  benefit  to  the  community. 

He  delivered  the  leading  speech  in 
Reading  v.  A.G.,  [1951]  A.C.  507,  a 
unanimous  and  bold  decision,  in  that  it 
extended  the  scope  of  the  action  for  money 
had  and  received,  by  allowing  the  Crown 
to  claim  sums  obtained  illegally  and  cor- 
ruptly, and  quite  outside  his  employment, 
by  an  army  sergeant.  Here,  as  in  many 
other  cases,  Porter  showed  himself  a 
really  learned  lawyer,  who  could  tm*n  his 
mind  with  equal  facility  to  any  branch  of 
the  law.  But  he  came  more  into  prominence 
in  a  quasi- judicial  capacity,  as  chairman 
of  the  tribunal  appointed  to  inquire  into 
the  budget  leakage  of  1936  which  resulted 
in  the  resignation  of  J.  H.  Thomas  [q.v.]. 
He  was  much  interested  in  international 
law,  and  did  much  valuable  work  for  the 


825 


Porter 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


International  Law  Association.  He  was 
chairman  of  the  committee  on  the  law  of 
defamation  which  reported  in  1948,  and 
for  some  years  until  his  death  chairman 
of  the  national  reference  tribunal  of  the 
coal-mining  industry.  He  received  the 
honorary  degree  of  LL.D.  from  Birming- 
ham (1940)  and  Cambridge  (1947),  and 
was  appointed  G.B.E.  in  1951.  He  retired 
in  1954  and  died,  unmarried,  in  London 
13  February  1956. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
H.  G.  Hanbury. 

POWER,  Sir  ARTHUR  JOHN  (1889- 
1960),  admiral  of  the  fleet,  was  born  in 
London  12  April  1889,  the  son  of  Edward 
John  Power,  corn  merchant,  by  his  wife, 
Harriet  Maud  Windeler.  He  entered  the 
Britannia  in  1904  and  won  the  King's 

fold  medal  for  the  best  cadet  of  the  year, 
n  his  sub-lieutenant's  courses  he  gained 
first  class  certificates  in  each  subject  and 
in  1910  he  was  promoted  lieutenant. 
In  1913  he  was  appointed  to  the  Excellent 
to  specialize  in  gunnery.  His  service  in  the 
war  included  appointments  as  gunnery 
officer  of  the  battleship  Magnificent^  the 
cruiser  Royal  Arthur,  the  monitor  Raglan 
in  which  he  took  part  in  the  Dardanelles 
operations,  and  the  battle  cruiser  Princess 
fioyal  in  the  Grand  Fleet. 

Power  was  promoted  commander  in 
1922  and  served  for  two  years  in  the 
Admiralty  as  assistant  to  the  director  of 
naval  ordnance.  He  was  selected  for  a 
Staff  College  course  in  1924  and,  after 
passing,  joined  the  battle  cruiser  Hood  as 
executive  officer.  From  1927  to  1929  he  was 
on  the  instructional  staff  of  the  Naval 
Staff  College  at  Greenwich,  and  after 
promotion  to  captain  in  1929  became  naval 
member  of  the  Ordnance  Committee.  He 
conmianded  the  cruiser  Dorsetshire  from 
1931  to  1933  as  flag  captain  and  chief 
staff  officer  to  E.  A.  Astley-Rushton, 
rear-admiral  commanding  second  cruiser 
squadron,  and  to  his  successor  (Sir)  Percy 
Noble  [q.v.].  He  was  appointed  to  the 
Imperial  Defence  College  as  naval  member 
of  the  directing  staff  in  1933,  and  from 
1935  to  1937  commanded  the  naval  gun- 
nery school  Excellent.  He  was  in  charge 
of  the  naval  party  which  drew  the  gun 
carriage  at  the  funeral  of  King  George  V 
in  January  1936  and  was  appointed 
C.V.O. 

In  January  1938  Power  was  appointed 
to  command  the  new  aircraft  carrier 
Ark  Royal  and  was  still  holding  this 
appointment  at  the  outbreak  of  war  in 


1939.  The  target  for  many  attacks  by  the 
German  air  force  and  her  sinking  many 
times  claimed,  she  was  torpedoed  off 
Gibraltar  in  November  1941.  Meantime 
Power  was  called  to  the  Admiralty 
in  May  1940  as  assistant  chief  of  naval 
staff  (Home)  and  was  promoted  rear- 
admiral  one  month  later. 

In  August  1942  Power  returned  to  sea  to 
fly  his  flag  in  the  Cleopatra  as  flag  officer 
commanding  fifteenth  cruiser  squadron, 
but  early  in  1943  was  appointed  flag  officer 
Malta  as  acting  vice-admiral,  a  post  of 
particular  importance  at  that  time  since 
it  was  in  Malta  that  the  planning  and 
organization  of  the  invasions  of  Sicily  and 
Italy  were  being  prepared.  Power's  keen 
brain  and  his  gifts  of  quick  decision  and 
high  organizing  ability  did  much  to  ensure 
the  rapid  success  of  both  invasions  with 
remarkably  few  casualties.  After  the  sur- 
render of  Italy  he  went  to  sea  again  in 
command  of  the  naval  force  occupying 
Taranto  and  was  appointed  as  head  of 
the  allied  military  mission  for  admini- 
stration to  the  Italian  Government. 
His  promotion  to  vice-admiral  was  dated 
4  August  1943,  and  for  a  brief  period 
he  acted  as  second-in-command  of  the 
Mediterranean  Fleet. 

In  January  1944  Power  arrived  in  Cey- 
lon as  second-in-command  of  the  Eastern 
Fleet.  Many  of  the  bombardments  and 
naval  air  strikes  carried  out  against  the 
Japanese  positions  in  the  East  Indies  were 
under  his  active  leadership.  On  the  forma- 
tion of  the  British  Pacific  Fleet  in 
November  1944  Power  became  com- 
mander-in-chief. East  Indies,  initiating 
many  of  the  naval  strikes  and  assaults 
which  brought  the  Japanese  to  defeat  in 
Borneo  and  Malaya.  Flying  his  flag  in  the 
Cleopatra  he  entered  Singapore  on  3  Sep- 
tember 1945,  the  first  ship  of  the  Royal 
Navy  to  do  so  since  1942. 

Power  returned  to  England  in  1946  and 
for  the  next  two  years  was  a  lord  com- 
missioner of  the  Admiralty  and  second 
sea  lord,  an  appointment  in  which  he  was 
in  charge  of  the  complicated  run-down  of 
the  personnel  of  the  navy  to  its  peace- 
time strength.  He  was  promoted  admiral 
in  1946  and  in  1948  took  command  of  the 
Mediterranean  Fleet.  In  1950-52  he  was 
commander-in-chief  at  Portsmouth  and 
while  holding  this  post  was  promoted 
admiral  of  the  fleet  (1952).  He  was  also 
in  that  year  allied  commander-in-chief 
Channel  and  Southern  North  Sea.  The 
previous  year  he  had  been  made  first  and 
principal  naval  aide-de-camp  to  the  King. 


826 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


For  his  war  services  he  was  appointed 
C.B.  (1941),  K.C.B.  (1944),  and  G.B.E. 
(1946).  He  was  promoted  G.C.B.  in  1950 
and  held  a  number  of  foreign  decorations. 

Power  was  twice  married:  in  1918  to 
Amy  Isabel  (died  1945),  daughter  of 
Colonel  D.  A.  Bingham,  by  whom  he  had 
three  sons ;  secondly,  in  1947,  to  Margaret 
Joyce,  a  second  officer  in  the  W.R.N.S., 
daughter  of  A.  H.  St.  C.  Watson,  of 
Hendon.  Power  died  at  the  naval  hospital 
at  Haslar  28  January  1960.  A  portrait  by 
Sir  Oswald  Birley  is  in  the  Greenwich 
Collection. 

[Admiralty  records ;  The  Times,  29  January 
1960 ;  personal  knowledge.]         P.  K.  Kemp. 

PRESTAGE,  EDGAR  (1869-1951),  his- 
torian and  professor  of  Portuguese,  was 
born  in  Manchester  20  July  1869,  the  only 
surviving  child  of  John  Edward  Prestage 
and  his  wife,  Elizabeth  Rose,  of  High 
Wycombe.  His  interest  in  Portugal  arose 
from  the  reading  of  stories  of  adventure, 
particularly  Vasco  da  Gama's  voyage  to 
India,  and  while  still  at  school  at  Radley 
he  began  to  study  Portuguese  with  a 
shilling  grammar.  He  was  converted  to 
Roman  Catholicism  with  his  mother  in  1 886 
and  in  1891  he  first  visited  Portugal  where 
the  kindness  of  his  reception,  at  a  time  when 
Lord  Salisbury's  ultimatum  had  caused 
much  distress  to  the  ancient  ally,  gave  him 
a  permanent  bond  with  the  Portuguese. 
Religion,  he  said,  proved  a  closer  tie  than 
nationality.  His  lecture  on  'Portugal: 
a  Pioneer  of  Christianity'  (1933)  was 
perhaps  the  fruit  of  this  early  approach. 

Prestage  graduated  at  Balliol  College, 
Oxford,  with  a  second  class  in  modern 
history  in  1891,  was  admitted  in  1896  and 
practised  as  a  solicitor  in  his  father's 
firm,  Allen,  Prestage  &  Whitfield,  at 
Manchester,  until  1907.  His  first  published 
work  (1893)  was  a  translation  from  the 
French  of  the  celebrated  Letters  of  a 
Portuguese  Nun  ('Marianne  Alcoforado'), 
now  usually  considered  a  literary  fabrica- 
tion. Prestage  himself  became  convinced 
of  this  and  refused  to  allow  further  edi- 
tions after  the  third.  He  also  translated 
for  the  Hakluyt  Society  the  chronicler 
Azurara  in  collaboration  with  (Sir)  C.  R. 
Beazley  (2  vols.,  1896-9).  Between  1891 
and  1906  he  often  visited  Lisbon,  mainly 
for  historical  research,  and  made  friends 
with  a  number  of  prominent  Portuguese 
scholars.  Already  in  the  nineties  he  was 
elected  to  the  Portuguese  Royal  Academy 
of' Sciences.  He  was  introduced  in  Lisbon 
to  the  salon  of  Dona  Maria  Amalia  Vaz  de 


Prestage 


Carvalho,  herself  a  distinguished  writer 
and  widow  of  the  Brazilian  poet  Gon9alves 
Crespo.  In  1907  Prestage  married  her  only 
daughter  Maria  Christina.  His  mother, 
who  had  a  strong  influence  over  him,  op- 
posed his  intention  of  settling  in  Portugal, 
but  his  wife  was  unhappy  in  Southport 
and  they  soon  returned  to  Lisbon  and 
occupied  the  flat  over  Dona  Maria  Amalia's 
in  the  Travessa  Santa  Catarina  over- 
looking the  Tagus  and  the  Arrabida 
mountains. 

During  the  following  years  Prestage 
worked  continuously  at  his  researches  in 
the  Portuguese  state  and  private  libraries. 
A  traditionalist  by  temperament,  he  was 
much  attached  to  the  monarchy,  and 
never  reconciled  himself  to  the  republican 
regime  until  the  advent  of  Dr.  Salazar. 
He  published  numerous  articles  in  Portu- 
guese historical  reviews,  completed  his 
long  biography,  in  Portuguese,  of  the 
great  writer  D.  Francisco  Manuel  de  Mello 
(Coimbra,  1914),  and  published  various  of 
the  Lisbon  parish  registers.  From  1917  to 
1918  he  was  press  officer  at  the  British 
legation  in  Lisbon.  In  the  latter  year  his 
wife  died  by  her  own  hand. 

In  1923  Prestage  was  appointed  to  the 
Camoens  professorship  of  Portuguese  at 
King's  College,  London.  It  involved  little 
teaching  and  he  was  able  to  devote  most 
of  his  time  to  research,  arranging  periodi- 
cal public  lectures  on  Portuguese  themes. 
In  1924  he  married  Victoria,  daughter  of 
Charles  Davison  Cobb,  who  had  family 
connections  with  Oporto,  and  they  settled 
down  at  her  Queen  Anne  house  at  16 
Holland  Street,  Kensington,  visiting 
Lisbon  frequently  in  the  spring. 

At  this  time  Prestage 's  main  publica- 
tions were  connected  with  the  period  of  the 
Portuguese  Restoration  of  1640.  He  printed 
much  of  the  relevant  diplomatic  corre- 
spondence including  (in  collaboration) 
that  of  Joao  F.  Barreto,  Relagao  da 
Embaixada  a  Franga  em  1641  (Coimbra, 
1918),  and  F.  de  Sousa  Coutinho,  Corre- 
spondincia  Diplomdtica  (Coimbra,  vol.  i, 
1920,  vol.  ii,  1926,  vol.  iii  unpublished). 
His  account  of  the  Diplomatic  Relations 
of  Portugal  with  France,  England  and 
Holland  from  1640  to  1668  was  published 
at  Watford  in  1925  and  in  Coimbra  in  1928. 
It  is  a  valuable  survey  of  the  whole  sub- 
ject, skilfully  reduced  to  readable  propor- 
tions, but  like  much  of  Prestage's  work 
somewhat  deficient  in  human  values.  In 
1929  he  pubhshed  an  account  of  Afonso 
de  Albuquerque  which  was  followed  by 
a    general    survey    of    the    Portuguese 


827 


Prestage 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


discoveries,  The  Portuguese  Pioneers 
(1933),  which  has  been  translated  into  vari- 
ous languages.  He  delivered  the  Norman 
MacCoU  lectures  at  Cambridge  in  1933, 
and  his  short  and  necessarily  incomplete 
account  of  the  Anglo-Portuguese  Alliance 
was  presented  as  a  lecture  to  the  Royal 
Historical  Society  and  included  in  the 
society's  Transactions  for  1934.  After  this 
he  wrote  no  major  work,  for  in  his  later 
years  he  was  more  concerned  with  spiritual 
matters  than  with  his  life-work,  although 
he  contributed  chapters  to  several  publi- 
cations, and  compiled  a  bibliography  on 
Portugal  and  the  War  of  the  Spanish 
Succession.  He  remained  professor  until 
two  years  after  the  usual  retiring  age  and 
died  in  London  10  March  1951. 

Prestage  was  a  devoted  and  meticulous 
scholar,  many  of  whose  works  have  per- 
manent value  for  reference.  He  was 
elected  F.B.A.  in  1940,  was  a  grand 
officer  of  the  Order  of  Sao  Tiago,  a 
corresponding  member  of  the  Lisbon 
Academy  of  Sciences,  the  Portuguese 
Academy  of  History,  and  the  Lisbon 
Geographical  Society. 

[H.  V.  Livermore  and  W.  J.  Entwistle, 
Portugal  and  Brazil,  1953,  dedicated  to  Pres- 
tage and  A.  F.  Bell  as  the  pioneers  of  Portu- 
guese studies  in  the  United  Kingdom,  contains 
an  autobiographical  memoir  by  Prestage; 
personal  knowledge.]         H.  V.  Livermore. 

PUGH,  Sir  ARTHUR  (1870-1955),  trade- 
union  official,  was  born  at  Ross-on-Wye 
19  January  1870,  the  fourth  son  and  fifth 
and  youngest  child  of  William  Thomas 
Valentine  Pugh,  a  native  of  Neath  and  a 
civil  engineer,  who  was  at  one  time  en- 
gaged on  the  construction  of  the  Ross 
to  Monmouth  railway,  and  his  wife, 
Amelia  Rose  Adlington,  of  Malvern  Link, 
Worcestershire.  He  had  an  elementary 
education  and  at  an  early  age  was  ap- 
prenticed to  a  farmer  and  butcher.  When 
he  was  twenty-four  he  migrated  to  South 
Wales  and  secured  employment  at  the 
Cwmavon  Steel  Works.  In  his  600-page 
book,  Men  of  Steel  (1951),  a  chronicle  of 
eighty-eight  years  of  trade-unionism  in 
the  British  iron  and  steel  industry,  he 
gives  a  vivid  description  of  the  job  in 
which  he  was  first  employed:  the  hours 
were  long,  the  heat  intense,  and  the  wages 
4>s.  6d.  a  shift  of  twelve  hours. 

Later  Pugh  went  to  work  as  a  steel 
smelter  at  the  Frodingham  Iron  and  Steel 
Company  in  Lincolnshire.  At  the  age  of 
twenty-eight  he  joined  the  British  Steel 
Smelters'  Association  and  soon  became 


an  active  trade-unionist,  becoming  asvsist- 
ant  secretary  of  his  union  in  1906.  He 
laboured  assiduously  for  the  amalgama- 
tion of  the  several  unions  then  existing 
and,  largely  as  a  result  of  his  efforts,  a 
highly  centralized  organization,  the  Iron 
and  Steel  Trades  Confederation,  was 
formed  in  1917,  Pugh  becoming  the  general 
secretary. 

In  the  early  days  of  the  Confederation, 
its  largest  constituent  organization  was 
the  British  Iron,  Steel  and  Kindred 
Trades  Association,  which  formed  an 
essential  element  in  the  process  of  amalga- 
mating the  unions  and  of  which  Pugh  was 
also  secretary.  His  administrative  ability 
attracted  attention  in  the  wider  trade- 
union  movement  and  in  1 920  he  was  elected 
to  the  Parliamentary  Committee  of  the 
Trades  Union  Congress,  and,  on  that 
body's  being  replaced  by  the  General 
Council,  he  remained  a  member  until  his 
retirement  at  the  end  of  1936. 

Pugh  was  a  born  conciliator  and  did 
much  to  promote  the  good  relations 
which  existed  between  the  workers  and 
the  trade  unions  in  the  iron  and  steel 
industry  and  the  employers.  In  September 
1925  he  became  chairman  of  the  Trades 
Union  Congress.  In  the  summer  of  that 
year  important  discussions  had  taken 
place  between  the  T.U.C.,  the  miners,  and 
the  Government,  in  respect  of  the  threat- 
ened lockout  of  miners  by  the  owners  to 
enforce  a  severe  reduction  in  wages.  The 
outcome  of  this  was  that  for  twelve  months 
the  Government  granted  a  subsidy  of 
some  £20  million  in  the  aid  of  wages  in  the 
industry.  In  the  interim,  a  royal  commis- 
sion under  the  chairmanship  of  Sir  Herbert 
(later  Viscount)  Samuel  was  actively  at 
work  considering  means  to  reorganize  the 
industry.  Pugh  took  no  direct  part  in  these 
discussions  but  as  chairman  of  the  T.U.C. 
industrial  committee  was  intimately 
concerned  with  the  negotiations  with  the 
Government  which  ensued  in  the  first 
half  of  1926  following  the  Samuel  report 
in  March.  At  this  time,  he  was  about 
fifty-six  and  at  the  height  of  his  powers 
as  a  negotiator.  Throughout  the  exhaust- 
ing discussions,  sometimes  lasting  well 
after  midnight,  Pugh  never  showed  signs 
of  the  severe  strain  under  which  he  was 
labouring.  A  man  of  temperate  habits, 
medium  height,  and  wiry  build,  of  fresh 
complexion,  with  greying  hair  and  mous- 
tache, and  a  high  bald  forehead,  he  looked 
what  he  was,  a  kindly  but  resolute  and 
energetic  man,  of  equable  temperament 
and  balanced  judgement. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Distressed  as  he  was  when  the  negotia- 
tions were  broken  off  by  the  Government 
in  the  early  hours  of  3  May  1926,  he 
remained  throughout  his  calm,  courteous 
self.  The  national  strike  which  followed 
involved  nearly  three  milhon  workers 
and  lasted  nine  days,  during  which 
the  T.U.C.,  under  Pugh's  chairmanship, 
met  daily  in  an  almost  continuously 
tense  atmosphere.  Discussions  also  went 
on  with  Samuel  on  the  memorandum 
which  he  eventually  presented  to  the 
Government  as  a  basis  for  setthng  the 
dispute.  It  became  apparent  that  there 
was  no  hope  of  a  settlement  satisfactory 
to  the  miners,  and  in  a  final  meeting  with 
the  Miners'  Executive  Pugh  made  an 
earnest  appeal  for  them  to  join  with  the 
General  Council  in  accepting  the  principles 
of  the  Samuel  memorandum  and  to  end 
the  strike.  Suspicion  and  bitterness 
frustrated  this,  and  Pugh  clearly  saw  that 
a  decision  of  the  T.U.C.  alone  to  terminate 
the  strike  would  lead  to  recriminations. 
Nevertheless  he  courageously  faced  this 
issue  with  his  colleagues,  and  after  nine 
days  the  national  strike  was  ended.  The 
lockout  of  the  miners  continued  for  nearly 
six  months,  and  when  the  position  was 
reviewed,  at  a  special  conference  of  all 
the  unions,  the  action  of  the  T.U.C.  was 
vindicated. 

Until  his  retirement  from  the  General 
Council  in  1936,  Pugh  continued  to  serve 
the  movement  with  dihgence  and  capacity. 
He  was  an  ardent  educationist,  and,  as 
chairman  of  the  Workers'  Educational 
and  T.U.C.  committee,  gave  unstinted 
service  to  this  cause. 

He  was  not  an  orator,  but  his  speeches 
were  fluent,  factual,  and  constructive. 
Unlike  the  vast  majority  of  trade-union 
officials  of  his  day,  he  read  most  of  the 
speeches  he  made  in  conference  or  in  public 
meetings.  This  habit  militated  somewhat 
against  his  success  as  a  platform  speaker, 
the  absence  of  any  emotional  appeal  being 
characteristic  of  Pugh's  method  of  advo- 
cacy. He  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1930  and 
knighted  in  1935. 

In  1901  he  married  Elisabeth  (died 
1939),  daughter  of  David  Morris,  of  Port 
Talbot;  they  had  one  son  and  three 
daughters.  Pugh  died  in  Bedford  2 
August  1955. 

[Personal  knowledge.]  Citbine. 

PYE,  Sir  DAVID  RANDALL  (1886- 
1960),  engineer  and  administrator,  was 
born  29  April  1886  in  Hampstead,  London, 
the  sixth  of  the  ^yen  c}iild^en  of  William 


Pye 

Arthur  Pye,  wine  merchant,  and  his  wife, 
Margaret  Thompson,  daughter  of  James 
Burns  Kidston,  writer  to  the  signet,  of 
Glasgow.  A  scholar  of  Tonbridge  School 
and  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  he  was 
placed  in  the  first  class  of  the  mechanical 
sciences  tripos  in  1908;  he  also  won  his 
half  blue  for  rifle  shooting.  In  1909  he  was 
invited  by  C.  F.  Jenkin  [q.v.],  who  had 
just  been  appointed  the  first  professor  of 
engineering  science  at  Oxford,  to  join  him 
in  laying  the  foundations  of  the  Oxford 
engineering  school.  He  was  elected  a 
fellow  of  New  College  in  1911. 

During  the  war  of  1914-18  Pye  taught 
at  Winchester  (1915-16),  then  worked  as 
an  experimental  officer  in  the  Royal  Fly- 
ing Corps  on  design  and  testing  and  learned 
to  fly  as  a  pilot.  In  1919  he  returned  to 
Cambridge  as  a  lecturer,  and  became  a 
fellow  of  Trinity.  There  he  met  (Sur) 
Henry  Tizard  [q.v.]  and  (Sir)  Harry 
Ricardo,  his  association  with  whom  led  to 
important  pioneejr  work  on  the  internal 
combustion  engine.  His  outstanding  ex- 
positions on  The  Internal  Combtistion 
Engine  (2  vols.,  1931-4)  were  published  in 
the  Oxford  Engineering  Science  series,  of 
which  he  became  an  editor.  In  1925  he 
was  appointed  deputy  director  of  scien- 
tific research  at  the  Air  Ministry  under 
H.  E.  Wimperis  [q.v.].  He  succeeded  him 
as  director  in  1937  and  in  the  same  year 
was  appointed  C.B.  and  elected  F.R.S. 
During  the  early  war  years  he  became 
closely  associated  with  the  development 
of  the  new  jet  propulsion  aircraft  engine 
which  he  did  much  to  encourage. 

Pye  was  a  man  of  many  interests  be- 
sides science  and  engineering  and  the  fact 
that  he  devoted  so  much  of  his  earlier 
life  to  miUtary  aircraft  engines  was  per- 
haps the  result  of  the  two  wars  which 
made  demands  upon  his  services  which  he 
could  hardly  decline.  It  was  no  surprise 
when  in  1943  he  accepted  the  provostship 
of  University  College,  London.  He  entered 
upon  his  new  duties  with  enthusiasm  and 
determination  to  make  a  real  contribution 
to  the  college  and  to  post-war  education. 
Before  serious  illness  caused  his  resigna- 
tion in  1951,  he  had  seen  the  college 
through  an  extremely  difficult  period  of 
rebuilding,  following  war  damage,  and  of 
reorganization:  probably  the  greatest 
achievement  of  his  career.  He  was  knighted 
in  1952  and  in  the  same  year  became  presi- 
dent of  the  Institution  of  Mechanical 
Engineers,  to  which  he  gave  a  memorable 
presidential  address  on  the  higher  educa- 
tion of  en^neera,  ,  .  ,     ,  i 


Pye 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Pye  was  fastidious  and  had  the  charm 
of  a  man  of  taste  and  intelligence  who 
preferred  to  convince  others  by  persuasion 
rather  than  by  asserting  the  superiority 
of  his  own  ideas.  Believing  in  the  highest 
standards,  he  was  never  arrogant  or  cer- 
tain that  he  was  right.  Partly  perhaps 
because  he  appeared  to  have  no  ambitions 
to  leadership  he  was  trusted  and  followed 
by  his  many  colleagues  in  all  his  working 
life. 

An  enthusiastic  climber,  Pye  led  the 
first  ascent  of  the  severe  Crack  of  Doom 
in  Skye;  in  1922  he  was  elected  to  the 
Alpine  Club  of  which  he  became  vice- 
president  in  1956.  He  was  a  friend  of 
G.  L.  Mallory  (whose  notice  he  contri- 
buted to  this  Dictionary)  and  in  writing  of 
his  loss  on  Everest,  with  his  companion 
A.  C.  Irvine,  Pye  perhaps  best  revealed 
his  own  character  and  sensitivity :  'Those 
two  black  specks,  scarcely  visible  among 
the  vast  eccentricities  of  nature,  but 
moving  up  slowly,  intelligently,  into 
regions  of  unknown  striving,  remain  for  us 
a  symbol  of  the  invincibility  of  the  human 
spirit.' 

In  1926  Pye  married  Virginia  Frances, 
daughter  of  Charles  Moore  Kennedy, 
barrister.  She  became  a  well-known  writer 
of  books  for  children  under  the  name  of 
Virginia  Pye  and  was  a  younger  sister 
of  the  writer  Margaret  Kennedy.  Pye  had 
two  sons  and  a  daughter.  He  died  in 
Godalming  20  February  1960. 

[O.  A.  Saunders  in  Biographical  Memoirs 
of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  vii,  1961 ; 
Alpine  Journaly  1960 ;  personal  knowledge.] 
O.  A.  Saunders. 


QUICKSWOOD,  Baron  (1869-1956), 
politician  and  provost  of  Eton.  [See 
Cecil,  Hugh  Richard  Heathcote 
Gascoyne-.] 

QUILTER,  ROGER  CUTHBERT  (1877- 
1953),  composer,  born  in  Brighton  1 
November  1877,  was  the  third  son  of  (Sir) 
Cuthbert  Quilter,  who  became  the  first 
baronet  [q.v.],  and  his  wife,  Mary  Ann 
Bevington.  He  learnt  from  his  parents, 
to  whom  he  was  devoted,  to  cultivate 
kindness  and  restraint  and  his  artistic 
impulses  were  fostered  in  particular  by 
his  mother.  He  was  educated  at  Eton  and 
then  went  to  Frankfurt  where  he  studied 
music  with  Iwan  Knorr.  There  he  belonged 
to  a  circle  of  young  British  musicians 
which  also  included  Balfour  Gardiner 
[q.v.],  Percy  Grainger,  Norman  O'Neill, 


and  Cyril  Scott;  their  individuality  was 
encouraged  but  their  training  was 
thorough.  A  marked  feature  of  Quilter's 
subsequent  work  was  his  fastidiousness  in 
technical  matters  amid  the  warmth  and 
glow  of  his  essentially  romantic  muse. 

The  music  of  Quilter  reflects  with  con- 
siderable accuracy  the  relationship  be- 
tween his  native  temperament,  his 
upbringing,  and  his  particular  artistic 
bent.  His  quiet,  sympathetic  nature 
ripened  in  a  cultivated  and  spacious  home. 
He  learnt  to  appreciate  and  enjoy  things 
of  beauty  and  among  them  the  treasures 
of  the  best  lyric  poetry  in  the  English 
language.  His  gentleness  was,  however, 
seasoned  with  a  puckish  humour  which 
often  saved  the  day  when  his  romanti- 
cism might  have  degenerated  into  senti- 
mentality. Although  unmarried  he  was 
devoted  to  children  and  his  musical 
parties  seem  often  to  have  developed  into 
a  good  romp  in  which  the  children  were 
by  no  means  the  only  participants. 

Quilter  was  under  no  compulsion  to  earn 
a  living.  He  never  took  pupils  or  held  any 
appointment  and,  with  his  talent  for  easy- 
flowing  melody,  he  might  well  have  be- 
come a  mere  dilettante  but  for  his  eclectic 
taste  and  his  searching  self-criticism.  He 
would  not  have  recognized  the  modern 
line  dividing  the  professional  from  the 
amateur.  Much  of  his  music-making  was 
with  amateurs  but  there  is  nothing  ama- 
teurish about  his  compositions.  His  vein 
as  a  composer  was  a  small  one,  almost — 
although  not  entirely — limited  to  the  field 
of  English  song.  He  chose  only  first-rate 
texts  and  his  earliest  success  was  with 
'Three  Shakespeare  Songs'  (1905)  which 
are  still  firmly  in  the  repertoire.  Besides 
much  else  of  Shakespeare  he  set  many 
texts  of  Herrick,  Shelley,  Keats,  R.  L. 
Stevenson,  and  others. 

Quilter  was  long  interested  in  the  theatre 
and  from  1911,  when  (Sir)  Charles  Hawtrey 
[q.v.]  commissioned  him  to  write  the  music 
for  the  children's  play  Where  the  Rainbow 
Ends,  to  1936  when  his  own  opera  Julia 
was  produced,  he  wrote  much  incidental 
music  of  delicate  charm.  His  best  known 
orchestral  work,  A  Children's  Overture 
(1914)  incorporating  tunes  from  The 
Baby's  Opera,  a  favourite  nursery  picture- 
book  by  Walter  Crane  [q.v.],  conceals 
beneath  its  ingenuous  appeal  his  usual 
technical  adroitness. 

In  1934  a  'Pageant  of  Parliament'  was 
produced  by  Walter  Creighton  to  whom 
Quilter  had  dedicated  his  first  'Shakespeare 
Songs'.  Quilter  contributed  a  fine,  broad 


830 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Raikes 


jhoral  setting  of  'Non  nobis,  Domine' 
ivhich  has  been  popular  at  musical  festi- 
i^als  ever  since. 

It  may  well  be  that  Quilter's  continued 
lold  on  public  affection — and  scarcely  less 
)n  the  respect  of  discerning  musicians — is 
iue  to  the  fact  that  he  never  buried  his  lyric 
:alent  beneath  the  weight  of  sterile  essays 
n  symphonic  forms.  The  significance  of 
lis  share  in  the  renaissance  of  the  English 
irt  song  lay  in  his  ability  to  write,  with 
:rue  purity  of  style,  songs  which  were  yet 
icceptable  to  audiences  accustomed  to  the 
banalities  of  the  Victorian  ballad.  He  did 
lot  cultivate  the  continental  tradition  of 
lis  musical  education  or  explore  the  new 
Daths  of  his  contemporaries.  His  work 
shows  no  trace  of  the  influence  of  the 
blk-song  revival.  He  speaks,  without 
m  accent,  in  a  voice  inveterately  English 
ind  in  a  tone  of  voice  unmistakably  his 
Dwn. 

Most  of  the  leading  singers  of  his  day, 
imong  them  Plunket  Greene  [q.v.]  and 
John  Coates,  were  glad  to  sing  Quilter's 
songs,  but  the  predominant  influence  on 
lis  work  and  its  reputation  was  his  friend- 
ship with  Gervase  Elwes  [q.v.]  in  whom  he 
'ound  an  ideal  interpreter.  'He  inspired  me 
JO  much',  wrote  Quilter,  'that  I  could 
lever  have  written  in  quite  the  same  way 
f  I  had  not  known  Gervase.'  Both  were 
Tien  of  cultivated  background,  and  of 
refined  tastes.  Both  were  acutely  sensi- 
tive to  the  nuances  of  verbal  inflexion, 
rhe  sincerity  and  integrity  of  Elwes  made 
jvery  song  the  better  for  his  singing  and 
the  eloquence  of  his  interpretations  con- 
i^eyed  Quilter  in  the  best  possible  light,  not 
east  in  assimilating  the  weaker  musical 
Tioments  into  the  unity  of  the  whole.  For 
nany  years  the  sound  of  Quilter's  songs 
ivas  inseparable  from  the  memory  of  the 
i^oice  of  Gervase  Elwes. 

Quilter  was  no  musical  philosopher. 
More  poet  than  prophet  he  did  not  seek 
to  plumb  the  depths  or  argue  the  im- 
nensities  through  his  art.  He  sought  to 
jnchant  rather  than  to  edify,  to  persuade 
rather  than  to  perplex.  But,  by  the  time 
Df  his  death  in  London,  21  September 
1953,  he  had  decorated  a  page  of  English 
musical  history  with  a  distinctly  indivi- 
iual  mark. 

The  National  Portrait  Gallery  has  a 
portrait  by  W.  G.  de  Glehn. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Henry  Havergal. 

RAIKES,  HUMPHREY  RIVAZ  (1891- 
1955),  chemist,  and  principal  and  vice- 


chancellor  of  the  university  of  the 
Witwatersrand,  Johannesburg,  was  born 
14  July  1891  at  Ide  HiU,  Kent,  the  third 
son  of  the  vicar,  (Canon)  Walter  Allan 
Raikes,  by  his  wife,  Catherine  Amelia, 
daughter  of  William  Cotton  Oswell  [q.v.], 
the  great  African  hunter.  Raikes  was 
first  at  Tonbridge,  then  at  Dulwich,  where 
he  learnt  to  use  tools  and  machines  on 
the  engineering  side.  He  was  a  Williams 
exhibitioner  at  Balliol  College,  Oxford, 
in  1910,  Abbott  scholar  in  1911,  and  took 
a  first  class  in  the  final  honour  school  of 
chemistry  in  1914.  He  was  a  keen  soldier 
and  while  an  undergraduate  held  a 
special  reserve  commission  with  the  Buffs 
with  whom  he  went  to  France  in  the 
autumn  of  1914.  After  recovering  from  a 
severe  wound  in  May  1915  he  transferred 
to  the  Royal  Flying  Corps  for  experi- 
mental work  and  took  a  leading  part  in 
the  development  of  the  early  bombing 
techniques!  In  January  1918  he  became 
chief  experimental  officer.  Royal  Flying 
Corps,  and  later  was  a  member  of  the 
Royal  Air  Force  mission  to  the  United 
States.  He  was  awarded  the  A.F.C.  in 
1918. 

Returning  to  Oxford  in  1919  Raikes 
was  elected  to  a  tutorial  fellowship  at 
Exeter  College  where  he  became  sub- 
rector  in  1924  (and  in  1946  an  honorary- 
fellow).  He  was  a  most  stimulating 
teacher,  his  main  interest  being  electro- 
chemistry, and  his  colleagues  in  the 
growing  school  of  physical  chemistry 
owed  much  to  his  skilful  administration 
of  the  Balliol  and  Trinity  laboratories 
where  much  of  the  teaching  and  research 
in  this  subject  were  then  done.  In  1925 
he  rejoined  the  Royal  Air  Force  as  chief 
instructor  to  the  Oxford  University  Air 
Squadron  with  the  rank  of  wing 
commander. 

Raikes's  striking  personality  and 
breadth  of  interests  had  marked  him  out 
for  action  in  a  wider  sphere  and  in  1927 
he  was  appointed  principal  of  the  univer- 
sity of  the  Witwatersrand,  Johannesburg, 
of  which  he  became  in  addition  vice- 
chancellor  in  1948.  He  had  inherited  an 
interest  in  the  African  continent  from  his 
grandfather  whose  sketch-map  of  his 
journeys  used  to  hang  in  his  study.  Those 
who  had  the  perspicacity  to  appoint 
Raikes  could  not  have  made  a  wiser  choice. 
The  university  with  1,500  students  had 
just  moved  to  an  almost  empty  site  at 
Milner  Park,  and  the  medical  school  at 
Hospital  Hill  was  housed  in  the  un- 
finished fragment  of  the  final  building. 


831 


Raikes 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Raikes's  constructive  mind,  care  for 
detail,  aesthetic  sense  of  fitness,  deter- 
mination, and  untiring  energy  found 
expression  in  the  fine  group  of  buildings 
which  the  university  and  medical  school 
enjoy.  When  he  retired  in  1954  the 
number  of  students  had  trebled.  The 
destruction  of  the  university  library  by 
fire  in  1931  gave  him  the  opportunity  to 
build  a  new  and  finer  library,  for  which 
his  appeal  (in  which  he  was  helped  by 
William  Cullen,  q.v.)  brought  contribu- 
tions of  books  from  universities  in  many 
countries, 

Raikes  never  lost  his  love  for  scientific 
work  and  he  did  much  to  encourage  the 
development  of  postgraduate  studies  in 
pure  and  applied  sciences.  For  some 
years  after  he  went  to  Johannesburg  he 
took  an  active  part  in  the  teaching  of 
chemistry  and  one  of  his  first  tasks  was 
to  reorganize  the  university  laboratories. 
When  war  came  in  1939  he  advised  the 
older  men  to  finish  their  courses  and  the 
younger  to  join  up  at  once.  He  served  as 
commanding  officer  of  the  Rand  Univer- 
sity Training  Corps  and  his  work  as  chair- 
man of  the  Aptitude  Tests  Board,  which 
was  responsible  for  the  methods  of 
personnel  selection  for  the  South  African 
Air  Force,  was  the  major  influence  in 
establishing  the  National  Institute  for 
Personnel  Research  under  the  South 
African  Council  for  Scientific  and  In- 
dustrial Research.  After  the  war  he  did 
his  best  by  skilful  improvisation  to  ensure 
that  those  who  could  profit  by  a  university 
education  should  not  suffer  for  their 
devotion  to  duty.  Nearly  3,000  ex- 
servicemen  entered  the  university  and 
its  numbers  rose  from  three  to  five 
thousand. 

In  his  final  charge  to  his  students 
Raikes  spoke  of  'the  divine  gift  of  states- 
manship'. It  was  this  quahty,  together 
with  his  modesty,  which  won  the  respect 
and  confidence  of  those  whom  he  did  not 
hesitate  to  criticize  if  he  felt  it  necessary. 
He  held  decided  views  on  the  relationship 
of  white  and  black  in  South  Africa, 
urging  that  the  white  race  could  not  pre- 
vent but  should  encourage  the  advance 
of  the  other  races.  He  approved  the 
inclusion  of  all  races  in  the  university  and 
felt  that  this  was  of  special  value  to  the 
training  of  medical  students.  When  he 
first  went  to  South  Africa,  he  quickly 
decided  that  the  university  should  assist 
the  development  of  the  Afrikaans-medium 
university  of  Pretoria  in  every  way 
possible,  and  he  took  infinite  pains  in 


understanding  the  Afrikaans  point  of 
view  and  in  addressing  meetings  in  that 
language  so  far  as  he  was  able. 

He  took  a  broad  progressive  view  of  the 
place  of  a  university  in  modern  life  and 
under  his  guidance  Witwatersrand  de- 
veloped on  lines  which  enabled  it  to  meet 
the  varied  needs  of  commerce  and 
industry  as  well  as  to  strengthen  its 
position  as  a  centre  of  academic  studies 
and  research.  His  services  were  recognized 
by  honorary  degrees  from  the  univer- 
sities of  Bristol,  Cambridge,  Cape  Town, 
and  Toronto,  and  finally  of  the  Witwaters- 
rand only  a  fortnight  before  his  sudden 
death  in  Johannesburg  13  April  1955. 

Raikes  married  first,  in  1931,  Joan, 
daughter  of  Charles  Mylne  MuUaly, 
Indian  Civil  Service;  the  marriage  was 
dissolved  and  he  married  secondly,  in 
1936,  Alice  Joan,  daughter  of  William 
Arthur  Hardy,  accountant,  of  Norwich. 
There  was  no  issue  of  either  marriage. 
A  portrait  by  R.  Broadley  hangs  in  the 
senate  room  at  Johannesburg. 

[The  Times,  22  April  1955;  Journal  of 
the  Chemical  Society,  June  1956;  personal 
knowledge.]  Harold  Hartley. 

RAM,  Sir  (LUCIUS  ABEL  JOHN) 
GRANVILLE  (1885-1952),  parUamentary 
draftsman,  was  born  in  Chester  Square, 
London,  24  June  1885,  the  only  surviving 
son  of  Abel  John  Ram,  barrister,  who 
became  a  distinguished  leader  of  the 
parliamentary  bar,  and  his  wife,  Mary 
Grace  O'Brien,  daughter  of  the  thirteenth 
Lord  Inchiquin.  He  was  educated  at  Eton 
and  Exeter  College,  Oxford,  and  called  to 
the  bar  by  the  Inner  Temple  in  1910, 
being  a  pupil  of  (Sir)  H.  A.  McCardie 
[q.v.].  In  the  war  of  1914-18  he  served  in 
Egypt,  GaUipoli,  and  France  with  the 
Hertfordshire  Yeomanry,  in  which  he 
attained  the  rank  of  captain,  and  was 
later  adjutant  of  the  South  Irish  Horse. 

After  the  war  he  did  not  return  to 
practise  at  the  bar,  although  he  possessed 
the  qualities  for  success,  but  embarked  on 
a  career  in  the  public  service,  as  assistant 
solicitor,  and  from  1923  soUcitor,  to  the 
Ministry  of  Labour.  In  1925  he  was  ap- 
pointed third  parhamentary  counsel  to 
the  Treasury  and  for  the  remainder  of  his 
life  was  a  leading  figure  in  the  field  of 
government  legislation.  He  became  second 
parliamentary  counsel  in  1929,  was  first 
parliamentary  counsel  from  1937  to  1947, 
and  thereafter  took  charge  of  the  consolida- 
tion branch  of  the  parliamentary  counsels' 
office  until  his  death.  He  was  appointed 


882 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Rau 


C.B.  in  1931,  K.C.B.  in  1938,  and  took 
silk  in  1943. 

Ram  believed  that  the  draftsman  had  a 
part  to  play  in  working  out  the  policy  as 
well  as  shaping  the  form  of  a  bill  and  that 
his  interests  and  experience  outside  his 
specialist's  field  could  be  of  value.  His 
own  work  certainly  bore  this  out.  Thus,  in 
drafting  the  big  Unemployment  Act  of 
1934  his  earlier  experience  at  the  Ministry 
of  Labour  was  very  useful.  His  deputy 
chairmanship  and  subsequent  chairman- 
ship of  the  Hertfordshire  quarter-sessions 
gave  him  a  special  interest  in  the  adminis- 
tration of  justice  and  penal  reform,  and 
this  was  the  background  of  his  work  on 
the  Administration  of  Justice  Acts  of 
1933  and  1938  and  (in  its  initial  stages) 
the  important  measure  which  became  the 
Criminal  Justice  Act  of  1948.  Perhaps  the 
best  example  was  the  notable  Education 
Act  of  1944,  when  he  worked  in  unusually 
close  association  with  R.  A.  Butler  (later 
Lord  Butler  of  Saffron  Walden),  the 
minister  of  education.  Ram  was  again  in 
his  element  for  he  had  much  knowledge 
of  and  interest  in  education,  was  a 
member  of  the  Association  of  Governing 
Bodies  of  Public  Schools,  and  himself  a 
governor  of  a  number  of  schools. 

Ram  was  not  a  lawyer  of  an  academic 
stamp  and  he  relied  a  good  deal  on  the 
researches  of  his  assistants.  He  was  in- 
clined to  be  impatient  when  the  niceties 
of  the  law  or  the  details  of  administration 
got  in  the  way  of  his  conception  of  the 
form  a  bill  should  take.  His  strength  lay 
in  his  creative  approach,  his  refusal  to  be 
defeated  by  difficulties,  and  his  resource  in 
finding  solutions  which  were  politically 
acceptable.  When  he  was  convinced  that 
the  course  he  favoured  was  the  right  one 
he  could  deploy  a  formidable  advocacy 
and  tenacity  of  purpose. 

During  the  decade  before  the  war  he 
was  mainly  responsible  for  building  up  the 
strength  of  the  office  of  the  parliamentary 
counsel  by  recruiting  a  number  of  excep- 
tionally able  men,  and  he  also  did  much 
then  and  later  to  improve  its  status  and 
salary  structure.  The  result  was  that  when 
the  spate  of  legislation  broke  after  the  war 
the  office  was  equal  to  it.  Ram  himself 
was  a  very  good  head  of  the  office,  with 
a  sure  touch  in  matters  of  administra- 
tion and  a  readiness  to  stand  up  for  his 
colleagues    in    times    of    difficulty    and 


When  he  retired  in  1947  from  the  post  of 
first  parliamentary  counsel  he  took  charge 
of  the  new  consolidation  branch  of  the 


office.  The  reform  of  the  statute  book  was  a 
project  dear  to  his  heart  and  perhaps  he 
had  too  rosy  a  vision  of  a  tidy  and  syste- 
matic arrangement  of  the  law.  If  so,  he 
carried  the  lord  chancellor  with  him  in  his 
enthusiasm,  for  Lord  Jowitt  [q.v.]  wrote 
after  his  death :  'To  no  man  was  it  given  to 
make  a  more  profound  alteration  to  the 
form  of  our  legislation.  No  man  ever  did 
more  to  produce  order  out  of  chaos.'  The 
phrase  'profound  alteration'  was  putting 
it  too  high,  but  'order  out  of  chaos'  was 
nearer  the  mark.  Ram's  combination  of 
idealism  and  ability  to  get  things  done 
succeeded  where  many  had  failed  before 
him,  and  the  steady  stream  of  consolida- 
tion Acts,  proceeding  under  the  aegis  of  a 
revitalized  Statute  Law  Committee,  has 
made  a  big  difference  to  the  availability 
and  manageability  of  the  ever-growing 
body  of  statute  law. 

In  1924  Ram  married  Elizabeth, 
youngest  daughter  of  Edward  Alfred 
Mitchell-Innes,  K.C.  They  had  three  sons 
and  two  daughters  and  their  family  life  at 
Berkhamsted  Place  was  a  full  and  happy 
one.  In  spite  of  the  demands  upon  his 
time  Ram  was  never  too  busy  to  enjoy 
the  company  of  his  family  and  friends  and 
was  always  ready  to  advise  and  help 
others  in  their  troubles.  It  was  this  in- 
terest in  people  and  human  affairs  which 
gave  depth  and  purpose  to  his  pubUc 
work.  He  died  in  London  23  December 
1952. 

[The  Times,  27  December  1952  and  8 
January  1953;  Burke's  Landed  Gentry  of 
Ireland,  1958 ;  private  information ;  personal 
knowledge.]  H.  S.  Kknt. 

RAU,  Sir  BENEGAL  NARSING  (1887^ 
1953),  Indian  judge  and  diplomatist,  was 
born  at  Karkala  in  South  India  26 
February  1887,  the  second  of  four  sons  of 
Senegal  Raghavendra  Rao,  a  doctor  in  the 
service  of  the  Madras  government,  and 
his  wife,  Radha  Bai.  A  younger  brother 
was  Sir  Benegal  Rama  Rau.  Rau  stood 
first  in  every  examination  of  the  Madras 
University  for  which  he  sat  and  then  went 
up  to  Trinity  College,  Cambridge.  He  was 
ninth  wrangler  in  1909 ;  and  in  the  same 
year  he  passed  the  Indian  Civil  Service 
examination. 

Rau  was  posted  to  Bengal  in  1910  and 
served  as  a  magistrate  in  various  districts, 
transferring  to  Assam  in  1920  in  the  same 
capacity.  In  1925  he  became  secretary 
to  the  legislative  department  and  legal 
adviser.  In  1933  he  went  to  London  to 
present  the  case  of  Assam  before  the  joint 

888  =e 


Rau 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


select  committee  of  Parliament  on  consti- 
tutional reforms.  He  also,  at  the  request 
of  that  committee,  prepared  a  scheme  for 
a  federal  upper  chamber  under  the  new 
constitution.  He  was  appointed  CLE.  in 
1934. 

On  his  return  to  India,  Rau  was  offered  a 
/judgeship  in  the  Calcutta  high  court  but 
opted  for  the  less  remunerative  but  to 
him  more  rewarding  post  of  draftsman  in 
the  law  department  of  the  Government  of 
India.  He  revised  the  central  and  provin- 
cial statutes  to  bring  them  into  line  with 
the  Government  of  India  Act  of  1935. 
Sir  Maurice  Gwyer  [q.v.],  the  first  chief 
justice  of  the  federal  court,  was  anxious  to 
have  Rau  as  a  colleague ;  but  as  Rau  could 
not  be  considered  until  he  had  served  for 
at  least  five  years  as  a  judge  of  a  high 
court,  Gwyer  persuaded  Rau  to  return  to 
Calcutta  as  a  judge  in  1938,  the  year  in 
which  he  was  knighted.  Even  in  that 
capacity  Rau's  services  were  sought  by  the 
Government  of  India.  He  arbitrated  in  a 
dispute  between  the  Government  and  a 
railway  company,  served  as  chairman  of  a 
conamittee  to  suggest  revision  of  the  civil 
laws  pertaining  to  Hindus,  and  presided 
over  a  commission  to  consider  the  distri- 
bution of  the  waters  of  the  Indus  River. 

These  demands  on  Rau's  time  robbed 
him  of  the  appointment  to  the  federal 
court  and  in  1944  he  retired  from  the 
Civil  Service  and  accepted  the  prime- 
ministership  of  Kashmir  State.  The  in- 
trigues of  an  Indian  court  were,  however, 
distasteful  to  him;  and  in  addition  he 
found  himself  in  disagreement  with  the 
Maharaja  on  fundamental  issues  of  policy. 
So  in  June  1945  he  resigned  and  secured 
re-employment  in  the  reforms  office  of 
the  Government  of  India. 

His  work  at  Delhi  brought  Rau  into 
contact  with  the  Indian  nationalist 
leaders,  who  were  now  out  of  jail;  and, 
although  an  official  in  British  service, 
his  objectivity  and  silent  patriotism  com- 
manded their  respect.  He  assisted,  from 
behind  the  scenes,  in  the  defence  of  the 
members  of  the  Indian  National  Army  who 
were  tried  for  treason  in  1945.  The  next 
year  he  was  appointed,  with  the  approval 
of  all  concerned,  constitutional  adviser  to 
the  Constituent  Assembly.  It  was  testi- 
mony to  the  general  regard  for  Rau  that  his 
advice  was  sought  by  the  Government, 
the  representatives  of  the  Congress,  and 
by  the  president  of  the  Moslem  League, 
M.  A.  Jinnah  [q.v.].  Some  of  Rau's  memo- 
randa on  the  constitution  have  been 
published  since  his  death  {India's  Consti- 


tution in  the  Making,  1960).  He  also 
assisted  the  Government  of  Burma  in 
drafting  its  constitution. 

After  the  attainment  of  independence, 
the  prime  minister,  Jawaharlal  Nehru, 
was  anxious  to  utilize  Rau's  services  in 
implementing  India's  foreign  policy.  Rau 
was  a  member  of  the  Indian  delegation  to 
the  United  Nations  General  Assembly  in 
1948,  and  represented  India  on  the 
Security  Council  during  1950-51.  He  was 
president  in  June  1950  when  the  Council 
recommended  intervention  to  help  South 
Korea,  was  active  in  the  discussions'  for  a 
peaceful  settlement,  and  was  one  of  the 
three  members  of  the  cease-fire  com- 
mission. His  name  gained  wide  support 
for  the  post  of  secretary-general  but  he 
accepted  election  in  December  1951  as 
a  judge  of  the  International  Court  of 
Justice  at  The  Hague.  He  had  little  time 
to  make  his  mark  there  before  his  death 
in  Zurich  29  November  1953. 

Rau  was  one  of  the  outstanding  Indian 
members  of  the  Indian  Civil  Service,  whose 
integrity  and  legal  acumen  won  world- 
wide recognition.  He  was  a  man  of  small 
build  with  a  soft  voice  and  refined  features, 
crowned,  in  later  years,  with  silver  hair. 
He  was  an  excellent  player  of  bridge,  golf, 
billiards,  and  in  particular  tennis. 

[The  Times,  1  December  1953;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

S.    GOPAL. 

RAVERAT,      GWENDOLEN      MARY 

(1885-1957),  artist,  daughter  of  (Sir) 
George  Howard  Darwin  [q.v.]  and  his  wife, 
Maud  du  Puy,  of  Philadelphia,  was  born 
26  August  1885  in  Cambridge  where  her 
childhood  was  spent,  with  periodic  visits 
to  Down  House  in  Kent,  the  home  of  her 
grandfather,  Charles  Darwin  [q.v.].  Her 
father  was  professor  of  astronomy  and 
she  had  two  uncles  at  Cambridge,  while 
her  mother's  uncle  by  marriage  was  Sir 
Richard  Jebb  [q.v.],  professor  of  Greek. 

By  the  age  of  ten  she  was  already 
drawing  continuously  from  life  and 
strongly  wished  to  become  an  artist,  and 
in  1908  went  to  the  Slade  School  then 
under  Frederick  Brown  and  Henry  Tonks 
[qq.v.].  At  Cambridge  before  the  war  she 
found  herself  a  member  of  a  group  of 
clever  young  men  and  women  of  whom  the 
most  prominent  was  Rupert  Brooke  [q.v.]. 
She  fell  in  love  with  Jacques  Pierre 
Raverat,  a  young  French  mathematical 
student  from  the  Sorbonne  who  was  con- 
tinuing his  studies  at  Emmanuel  College, 
and  persuaded  him  to  become  a  painter 


834* 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


and  join  her  at  the   Slade.   They  were 
married  in  1911. 

At  the  outbreak  of  war  they  were 
living  in  Cambridgeshire  but  in  1915  they 
went  to  Le  Havre  to  be  near  her  husband's 
family.  Raverat,  by  then  suffering  from 
disseminated  sclerosis,  tried  to  join  the 
French  Army  as  an  interpreter.  Failing 
over  this,  they  returned  to  England  and 
lived  at  Weston,  near  Baldock,  where 
their  two  daughters  were  born.  In  1920 
they  went  again  to  France  and  lived  at 
Vence  where  Jacques  Raverat  died  in 
1925.  Gwen  Raverat  then  returned  to 
England  to  live  at  the  Old  Rectory  at 
Harlton  near  Cambridge  until  1941  when 
she  moved  into  rooms  in  Cambridge  and 
finally  took  the  Old  Granary  at  the  end 
of  the  garden  of  Newnham  Grange  where 
she  had  been  born. 

Everything  that  Gwen  Raverat  under- 
took was  done  with  intelligence  and  skill : 
her  graphic  work  for  naval  intelligence  in 
the  second  war  as  well  as  her  theatre 
designs  and  paintings  and  drawings;  but 
it  was  through  wood-engraving  that  she 
was  able  to  communicate  her  vision  most 
fully.  In  her  engraving  she  did  not  aim  at 
decoration  or  use  a  strong  decorative  line, 
like  her  friend  Eric  Gill  [q.v.],  or  experi- 
ment with  new  textures;  nor  was  she  a 
naturalist  interested  in  the  rendering  of  a 
bird's  plumage  or  an  animal's  fur  Uke 
Thomas  Bewick  [q.v.].  Rather,  she  was  a 
master  of  chiaroscuro  and  her  simple 
technique  was  completely  adequate  for  its 
purpose.  By  her  handling  of  light  and  by 
good  drawing  she  was  able  to  turn  the 
blackness  which  the  uncut  block  repre- 
sents into  a  mirror  of  something  she  had 
seen  or  imagined. 

Apart  from  illustrating  Spring  Morning 
(1915),  a  little  paper-bound  book  of  early 
poems  by  her  lifelong  friend  and  cousin 
Frances  Cornford  [q.v.],  her  work  until 
the  thirties  consisted  of  single  prints. 
These  gave  her  a  standing  among  fellow 
artists  and  collectors  and  she  was  a 
founder-member  of  the  Society  of  Wood 
Engravers  in  1920.  But  after  1932,  when 
the  Cambridge  University  Press  published 
her  engravings  for  a  second  edition  of 
The  Cambridge  Book  of  Poetry  for  Children, 
selected  by  Kenneth  Grahame  [q.v.],  her 
work  was  in  continual  demand  from  pub- 
lishers. Her  illustration,  including  a  few  in 
colour,  has  the  seriousness  and  vividness 
of  the  best  Victorian  work  and  often  a 
sharp  sense  of  humour.  Her  last  important 
work  was  the  writing  of  her  altogether 
delightful  Period  Piece  (1952),  an  account. 


Redmayne 

mainly,  of  her  childhood.  She  had  con- 
tributed art  criticism  to  Time  and  Tide 
between  1928  and  1939  but  had  never 
thought  of  herself  as  a  writer  and  was 
amazed  to  find  her  book  a  best-seller  on 
both  sides  of  the  Atlantic. 

After  a  stroke  in  1951  she  could  no 
longer  engrave  but  she  continued  to  paint. 
In  her  last  years  she  looked  like  one  of 
her  own  engravings  of  an  ancient.  'You 
are  an  old  monolith',  Virginia  Woolf 
[q.v.]  once  said  to  her.  She  enjoyed  the 
company  of  the  young  who  gave  her  their 
respect  and  affection  and  were  delighted 
to  sit  at  her  feet.  She  died  in  Cambridge 
11  February  1957.  A  self-portrait  became 
the  property  of  Sir  Geoffrey  and  Lady 
Keynes. 

[The  Wood  Engravings  of  Gwen  Raverat^ 
selected  with  an  introduction  by  Reynolds 
Stone,  1959;  Cambridge  Review,  23  January 
I960.]  Reynolds  Stone. 

READ,  GRANTLY  DICK-  (1890-1959), 
obstetrician  and  advocate  of  natural  child- 
birth. [See  Dick-Read.] 

REDMAYNE,  Sir  RICHARD  AUGUS- 
TINE STUDDERT  (1865-1955),  mining 
engineer,  was  born  at  South  Dene,  Low 
Fell,  county  Durham,  22  July  1865, 
the  fourth  son  of  John  Marriner  Red- 
mayne, alkali  manufacturer,  by  his  wife, 
Jane  Anna  Fitzgerald  Studdert.  He  was 
educated  privately  and  at  the  College  of 
Physical  Science,  Newcastle  upon  Tyne. 
An  articled  apprentice  of  William  Arm- 
strong, a  prominent  north -country  mining 
engineer,  he  was  trained  at  Hetton 
Collieries,  county  Durham.  There  he  rose 
to  be  an  under-manager,  before  leaving 
for  South  Africa  in  1891  to  develop  a 
coal  property  in  Natal.  Two  years  later  he 
returned  to  England  and,  in  1894,  became 
the  resident  manager  at  Seaton  Delaval 
Collieries,  Northumberland. 

In  1902  he  was  appointed  professor  of 
mining  in  the  newly  created  university  of 
Birmingham.  His  first  task  was  to  design 
and  equip  a  new  department  and  prepare 
a  scheme  of  instruction.  The  mining 
industry  at  that  time  laid  little  stress  on 
university  education  for  its  engineers, 
dependence  being  mainly  placed  on 
articled  apprenticeship,  or  practical  ex- 
perience as  a  mine  workman  and  minor 
official,  supplemented  by  education  ob- 
tained at  local  technical  colleges.  With 
only  two  British  mining  schools  approach- 
ing university  standard,  Redmayne  stud- 
ied at  first  hand  the  methods  followed  by 


835 


Redmayne 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


advanced  mining  schools  in  the  United 
States  and  Canada.  There  he  found 
systems  based  on  simulating  in  the  lab- 
oratory, classroom,  and  field,  the  con- 
ditions in  which  the  student  had  to  work 
in  the  practice  of  his  profession.  With 
these  in  mind,  Redmayne  drafted  his 
syllabus  and  designed  his  department 
which,  for  the  first  time  in  this  country, 
included  an  ore-dressing  laboratory  and  a 
model  underground  coal  mine  where  prob- 
lems associated  with  the  practical  working 
of  a  mine  could  be  studied  and  explained. 
His  pioneer  work  in  this  field  stimulated 
new  thought  about  higher  education  and 
training  for  mining  engineers,  and  greatly 
encouraged  its  extension. 

Redmayne  was  much  at  home  on  com- 
mittee work  and  official  inquiries.  In  1906 
he  was  a  member  of  a  committee  which 
inquired  into  the  probable  economic 
effect  of  a  limit  of  eight  hours  to  the 
working  day  of  coal  miners — ^the  first 
time  any  British  government  had  essayed 
to  fix  by  law  the  length  of  the  daily 
period  of  employment  of  workers  in  that 
industry.  In  1908  he  became  chairman 
of  a  committee  to  study  the  causes  and 
means  of  prevention  of  accidents  in  mines 
arising  from  falls  of  ground,  underground 
transport,  and  in  shafts.  The  voluminous 
report  of  this  committee — ^written  by 
Redmayne — was  probably  the  best  piece 
of  work  of  his  career.  He  rejoiced  that 
all  its  conclusions  were  subsequently  in- 
corporated in  legislation.  The  year  1908 
also  saw  his  appointment  as  commissioner 
to  inquire  into  a  disaster  at  Hamstead 
Colliery,  the  first  of  many  such  appoint- 
ments. Between  1908  and  1913  he  con- 
ducted inquiries  into  disasters  at  Maypole, 
West  Stanley,  Wellington,  Hulton,  Cadeby, 
and  Senghenydd  collieries — disasters  which 
caused  a  loss  of  1,250  lives. 

In  1908  Redmayne  resigned  his  pro- 
fessorship to  join  the  Home  Office  as  the 
first  chief  inspector  of  mines  in  Britain, 
with  duties  which  included  supervising 
the  work  of  district  inspectors  of  mines, 
advising  the  secretary  of  state  on  im- 
portant mining  matters,  conducting  in- 
quiries into  accidents  in  mines,  and 
editing  the  annual  report  on  mines  and 
quarries.  Since  he  was  not  a  civil  servant 
this  appointment  met  with  considerable 
criticism,  but  Redmayne  easily  weathered 
the  storm.  From  1914  he  undertook  ad- 
ditional duties,  including  that  of  chief  tech- 
nical adviser  (1917-19)  to  the  controller 
of  coal  mines.  In  1919  he  acted  as  assessor 
to  Sir  John  (later  Viscount)  Sankey  [q.v.], 


chairman  of  the  royal  commission  on 
coal  mines.  Of  Redmayne's  twelve  years 
as  chief  inspector,  perhaps  the  years 
1910-11  were  the  most  strenuous,  devoted 
as  they  were  to  framing  a  comprehensive 
Coal  Mines  Act,  1911.  The  Act — often 
called  the  miner's  safety  charter — was  to 
regulate  the  conditions  of  work  in  British 
mines  for  over  forty  years.  Altogether, 
his  was  a  memorable  period  of  service, 
saddened  by  many  serious  colliery  dis- 
asters, but  relieved  by  the  beneficial  effect 
of  the  Act  of  1911,  which,  with  its  at- 
tendant regulations,  greatly  helped  to 
ensure  those  higher  standards  of  safety 
in  mines  which  Redmayne  and  his  col- 
league (Sir)  Malcolm  Delevingne  [q.v.]  had 
done  so  much  to  promote. 

He  resigned  in  1919  to  devote  himself 
to  the  work  of  the  Imperial  Mineral 
Resources  Bureau  (amalgamated  in  1925 
with  the  Imperial  Institute),  of  which  he 
was  chairman  from  1918  until  1935,  and 
to  practise  as  a  consulting  engineer. 
Chairman  of  the  Board  for  Mining 
Examinations  from  its  inception  in  1912 
until  1950,  he  also  became,  in  1922,  the 
first  president  of  the  Institution  of 
Professional  Civil  Servants,  an  office  to 
which  he  was  re-elected  annually  until 
his  death.  For  several  years  he  was 
chairman  of  the  Road  Haulage  Wages 
Board.  He  played  an  active  part  in  the 
work  of  professional  engineering  institu- 
tions, by  some  of  which  he  was  honoured, 
being  elected  honorary  member  of  the 
Institution  of  Mining  Engineers  in  1909, 
president  of  the  Institution  of  Mining  and 
Metallurgy  in  1916,  and  president  of  the 
Institution  of  Civil  Engineers  in  1934-5. 
He  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1912  and  K.C.B. 
in  1914.  He  was  a  companion  of  the  Order 
of  St.  John  of  Jerusalem  and  a  chevalier 
of  the  Legion  of  Honour. 

An  able  administrator  and  speaker,  a 
man  of  fine  presence,  tact,  and  charm,  he 
was  a  good  mixer.  He  enjoyed  the  confi- 
dence of  the  miners.  Possessing  a  keen 
sense  of  humour  he  was  a  superb  teller  of 
stories  in  the  Tyneside  dialect.  He  enjoyed 
walking,  fishing,  and  natural  history. 

Redmayne  made  numerous  contribu- 
tions to  professional  and  technical  journals 
and  was  the  author  of  several  books. 
The  best  known  are:  Colliery  Working 
and  Management  (5th  ed.  1951);  Modem 
Practice  in  Mining  (5  vols.,  1908-32); 
and  Men,  Mines  and  Memories  (1942),  an 
autobiography  written  in  fine  style  which 
throws  interesting  sidelights  on  some  little- 
known  aspects  of  British  industrial  life. 


886 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Richardson,  L.  F. 


In  1898  he  married  Edith  Rose  (died 
1942),  daughter  of  Thomas  Picton 
Richards,  shipowner,  of  Swansea;  they 
had  one  son  and  two  daughters.  He  died  at 
Little  Hadham  27  December  1955.  His 
portrait,  by  Dorothy  Vicaji,  hangs  in  the 
Institution  of  Civil  Engineers. 

[Sir  Richard  A.  S.  Redmayne,  Men,  Mines 
and  Memories,  1942 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Andrew  Bryan. 

REED,  AUSTIN  LEONARD  (1878- 
1954),  men's  outfitter,  was  born  at 
Newbury,  Berkshire,  6  September  1873, 
the  eldest  son  of  William  Bilkey  Reed, 
hosier  and  hatter  in  Reading,  and  his 
wife,  Emily  P'lorence  Bowler.  After  educa- 
tion at  Reading  School,  Reed  joined  his 
father's  business  in  1888.  Within  a  few 
years  he  went  to  the  United  States  to 
study  American  business  methods,  work- 
ing with  Wanamaker's  in  Philadelphia 
and  Chicago,  and  returned  with  the  am- 
bition of  founding  a  store  which  could 
provide  a  man,  within  a  few  hours,  with 
everything  necessary  for  any  occasion, 
from  an  investiture  to  a  tour  of  service  in 
the  tropics.  At  the  age  of  twenty-seven  he 
asked  his  father  to  lend  him  a  thousand 
pounds  with  which  to  start  a  business  in 
the  City  of  London.  With  a  further 
thousand  from  the  bank  this  was  forth- 
coming, and  on  2  July  1900  Reed  opened 
his  first  shop,  in  Fenchurch  Street. 

From  the  beginning  he  worked  on  clear 
principles.  Good  merchandise  was  to  be 
presented  without  extravagant  eulogy; 
prices  were  to  be  plainly  marked;  and  com- 
plaints met  in  a  civil  and  generous  spirit. 
Much  attention  was  devoted  to  originahty 
in  window  display  and  from  the  first 
advertising  played  an  important  part  in  the 
expansion  of  the  business.  By  1908  there 
were  three  shops  in  the  City  and  in  1911 
came  the  first  west-end  branch,  in  Regent 
Street.  In  1913  Reed  made  his  first 
excursion  into  the  provinces,  in  Birming- 
ham. Manchester  followed  the  next  year 
and  by  1930  most  of  the  largest  cities  in 
England  were  served,  as  well  as  Glasgow 
and  Belfast.  In  1929  a  shop  was  opened 
aboard  the  liner  Aquitania.  Two  each 
were  later  placed  in  the  Queen  Mary  and 
the  first  Qi(een  Elizabeth. 

In  1910  the  concern  had  become  a 
private  company;  in  1920  Austin  Reed, 
Ltd.,  offered  their  shares  to  the  public  on 
the  Stock  Exchange.  It  was  in  1920  also 
that  Reed  implemented  his  plan  to  pro- 
vide what  he  called  'a  Savile  Row  suit  for 
the  middle-class  man'  at  a  price  he  could 


afford.  He  deplored  the  decline  in  British 
taste  and  especially  deprecated  the  habit 
of  going  hatless :  to  Reed  'man's  crowning 
glory  is  his  hat!'  A  worthy  setting  for  his 
ideas  was  the  new  Regent  Street  shop 
opened  in  1926.  Nash's  Regent  Street  was 
in  process  of  demolition  and  Reed  was 
lucky  to  obtain  a  place  in  the  admirable 
Quadrant  at  the  lower  end  designed  by 
Sir  Reginald  Blomfield  [q.v.].  There  the 
firm  was  able  to  provide  every  facility, 
including  bathrooms  and  changing-rooms 
where  men  could  exchange  office  clothes 
for  evening  dress.  'Austin  Reed  of 
Regent  Street'  became  the  slogan.  Reed 
was  a  founder-member  of  the  Regent 
Street  Association  and  its  chairman  in 
1927.  He  was  also  a  founder-member  of 
the  National  Association  of  Outfitters, 
a  president  of  the  City  of  London  Trade 
Association,  a  council  member  of  the 
Multiple  Shops  Federation,  and  master  of 
the  Glovers'  Company. 

Austin  Reed  was  not  only  a  highly 
skilled  business  man,  but  won  wide  re- 
gard and  friendship  by  his  ideals  of  sim- 
plicity, sincerity,  and  a  service  devoted  to 
good  distribution  with  fair  dealing  and 
avoidance  of  exploitation.  He  was  an 
active  Congregationalist  and  was  deeply 
influenced  by  Frank  Buchman,  founder  of 
the  Moral  Rearmament  movement,  whom 
he  met  in  1933. 

In  1902  Reed  married  Emily  (died  1953), 
daughter  of  Alfred  Wilson,  a  Reading 
butcher;  they  had  two  sons  and  four 
daughters.  The  younger  son  was  killed  as 
a  fighter  pilot  in  North  Africa  during  the 
war.  The  elder,  Douglas,  became  vice- 
chairman  of  the  firm  when  his  father  re* 
tired  as  advisory  director  in  1953.  Reed 
died  at  Gerrard's  Cross  5  May  1954. 
A  portrait-  by  (Sir)  James  Gunn  is  in 
the  possession  of  the  family  and  there 
is  a  replica  in  the  firm's  board-room. 

[Fine  and  Fifty  (jubilee  booklet),  1950; 
The  Times  and  Daily  Telegraph,  6  May  1954; 
Berkshire  Chronicle,  7  May  1954;  private 
information.]  Herbert  B.  Grimsditch. 

RENDEL,  HARRY  STUART 
GOODHART-  (1887-1959),  architect* 
[See  Goodhart-Rendel.] 

RHONDDA,  Viscountess  (1883-1958), 
founder  and  editor  of  Time  and  Tide, 
[See  Thomas,  Mabgaret  Haig.] 

RICHARDSON,  LEWIS  FRY  (1881-^ 
1953),  physicist  and  meteorologist,  was 
born  at  Newcastle  upon  Tyne  11  October 


887 


Richardson,  L.  F. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


1881,  the  youngest  of  the  seven  children  of 
David  Richardson,  a  Quaker  and  a  tanner 
in  an  old  family  business,  and  his  wife, 
Catherine  Fry,  of  a  family  of  corn  mer- 
chants in  Devon.  Sir  Ralph  Richardson, 
who  contributes  to  this  Supplement,  is 
his  nephew.  Richardson  left  Bootham 
School  in  1898  with  the  conviction  'that 
science  ought  to  be  subordinate  to  morals', 
spent  two  years  at  Durham  College, 
entered  King's  College,  Cambridge,  in 
1900  and,  obtained  a  first  class  in  part  i 
of  the  natural  sciences  tripos  in  1903. 
After  a  number  of  appointments  including 
one  with  the  National  Peat  Industries, 
Ltd.,  he  entered  the  Meteorological 
Office  in  1913  as  superintendent  of 
Eskdalemuir  Observatory,  to  begin  his 
fruitful  association  with  (Sir)  Napier 
Shaw  [q.v.].  In  1916-19  he  served  in  the 
Friends'  Ambulance  Unit  with  the 
French  Army.  In  1920  he  took  charge  of 
the  physics  department  of  Westminster 
Training  College  and  in  1929  he  became 
principal  of  Paisley  Technical  College  and 
School  of  Art,  retiring  in  1940  to  do 
research  on  the  causes  of  war  and  on  eddy 
diffusion. 

It  was  the  practical  problem  of  the  flow 
of  water  in  peat  which  led  Richardson  to 
devise  his  method  for  the  approximate 
solution  of  the  intractable  differential 
equations  of  this  and  similar  problems  in 
physics  and  engineering.  He  demonstrated 
how  the  appropriate  use  of  finite  differ- 
ences should  and  could  secure  a  degree  of 
accuracy  far  surpassing  that  previously 
obtainable.  It  was  natural  that  in  the 
Meteorological  Office  he  should  use  this 
knowledge  to  construct  'a  scheme  of 
weather  prediction  which  resembles  the 
process  by  which  the  Nautical  Almanac  is 
produced  in  so  far  as  it  is  founded  upon  the 
differential  equations  and  not  upon  the 
partial  recurrence  of  phenomena  in  their 
ensemble'.  Richardson's  achievement  was 
to  set  out  the  dynamics  and  thermo- 
dynamics of  the  atmosphere  in  the  light  of 
the  recently  acquired  knowledge  of  the 
upper  air  and  the  roles  of  radiation  and 
eddy  diffusion  and  to  show  how  the  result- 
ing equations  could  be  solved  with  the 
accuracy  permitted  by  the  basic  data, 
the  actual  meteorological  observations. 
The  result  was  published  in  1922  in  his 
classical  work  Weather  Prediction  by 
Numerical  Process.  Application  of  the 
method  proved  conclusively  that  the  re- 
quired degree  of  accuracy  and  promptness 
in  producing  the  prediction  could  not  be 
achieved  with  the  means  of  observation 


and  computation  then  available.  Eddies, 
various-sized  parcels  of  air  in  circulatory 
motion  of  which  the  atmosphere  is  consti- 
tuted, collectively  represent  its  turbulence. 
Richardson  showed  that  a  suitable  cri- 
terion for  increase  or  decrease  of  turbu- 
lence was  the  ratio  between  the  opposing 
effects  of  wind  and  temperature.  There  are 
ancillary  effects  but  the  ratio,  now  called 
the  Richardson  number,  Ri,  ranks  in 
atmospheric  turbulence  with  the  Reynolds 
number,  R,  the  criterion  for  turbulence 
due  to  molecular  viscosity.  A  further 
method  of  treating  eddy  diffusion, 
introduced  by  Richardson  in  1926,  lay 
dormant  for  twenty  years  until  it  was 
rediscovered. 

Richardson  was  also  a  pioneer  in  the 
mathematical  investigation  of  the  causes 
of  war,  first  publishing  a  paper  on  the 
mathematical  psychology  of  war  in  1919. 
The  relations  between  nations  can  be 
expressed  by  mathematical  symbolic 
equations,  readily  soluble  if  the  different 
elements  can  be  given  numerical  values,  a 
recognized  difficulty,  practically  insuper- 
able for  the  imponderables.  Nevertheless 
useful  conclusions  may  be  drawn  from 
the  symbolic  equations  themselves.  An 
arresting  example  is  that  unilateral  dis- 
armament cannot  be  permanent.  He  ex- 
panded his  early  paper  in  a  book  Arms  and 
Insecurity  and  added  a  second  book  Statis- 
tics of  Deadly  Quarrels  in  which  he  tabula- 
ted all  the  wars  between  1820  and  1949, 
classified  according  to  their  magnitude 
and  their  origins,  adding  ten  chapters  of 
comment  and  explanation.  The  two 
books  were  published  in  1960  through 
the  efforts  of  American  scientists  and 
publicists  who,  recognizing  the  value  of 
Richardson's  work,  raised  the  necessary 
funds. 

Richardson's  character  and  his  ex- 
perimental ability  and  gift  for  the 
improvisation  of  apparatus  stood  him  in 
good  stead  at  Westminster  and  Paisley. 
Problems  in  practical  physics  which 
troubled  his  staff  were  soon  solved  by 
consultation  with  the  principal.  He  was 
a  clear  lecturer  but  regarded  adminis- 
trative work  though  rather  dreary  as  a 
task  to  be  performed  with  diligence  and 
foresight  but  with  none  of  the  thrill  of 
research.  Nevertheless  it  was  by  the  full 
exercise  of  such  diligence  and  foresight  that 
he  succeeded  in  obtaining  an  extension  of 
the  laboratories  at  Paisley  during  a  period 
of  general  retrenchment. 

Research  for  Richardson  was  the 
inevitable  consequence  of  the  tendency 


888 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Richardson,  O.  W. 


of  his  mental  machine  to  run  almost,  but 
not  quite,  of  itself.  So  he  was  a  bad 
listener,  distracted  by  his  thoughts,  and 
a  bad  driver,  seeing  his  dream  instead  of 
the  traffic.  The  same  tendency  explains 
why  he  sometimes  appeared  abrupt  in 
manner,  otherwise  inexplicable  in  one  of 
his  character.  In  the  motor  convoy  in 
France  he  evoked  the  affection  of  all  and 
demonstrated  the  dignity  of  service  by  the 
simplicity  with  which  he  performed  the 
most  menial  tasks;  that  character  of 
kindness  and  service  was  maintained  at 
Westminster  and  Paisley. 

Richardson  married  in  1909  Dorothy, 
daughter  of  William  Garnett,  after  whom 
Garnett  Technical  Training  College  was 
named.  They  had  no  children  but  adopted 
two  sons  and  a  daughter.  Richardson 
was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1926  and  died  at 
his  home  at  Kilmun,  Argyllshire,  30 
September  1953. 

[E.  Gold  in  Obituary  Notices  of  Fellows  of 
the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ix,  1954;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

E.  Gold. 

RICHARDSON,  Sir  OWEN  WILLANS 

(1879-1959),  physicist,  was  born  26  April 
1879  in  Dewsbury,  Yorkshire,  the  eldest 
of  the  three  children  of  Joshua  Henry 
Richardson,  woollen  manufacturer,  and 
his  wife,  Charlotte  Maria  Willans.  From 
St.  John's  church  day  school,  Dewsbury, 
Richardson  won  a  scholarship  to  Batley 
Grammar  School.  Another  scholarship  took 
him  to  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  where 
he  gained  a  first  class  in  part  i  of  the 
natural  sciences  tripos  (with  distinction  in 
physics,  chemistry  and  botany,  1899)  and 
proceeded  in  physics  and  chemistry  to 
a  first  in  part  ii  (1900).  He  was  elected  a 
fellow  of  Trinity  in  1902,  became  Clerk 
Maxwell  scholar  in  1904,  and  was  awarded 
the  London  D.Sc.  in  the  same  year. 

By  this  time  Richardson  was  absorbed 
in  research  among  the  illustrious  company 
inspired  by  (Sir)  J.  J.  Thomson  [q.v.]  at 
the  Cavendish  Laboratory.  One  of  his 
first  investigations  (c.  1901)  concerned  the 
maximum  electron  current  {i)  which  could 
be  drawn  by  an  electric  field  from  a  hot 
platinum  filament  (temperature  T)  con- 
tained in  a  vacuum  tube.  He  formulated 
a  general  theory  of  the  process  wherein 
electrons  in  the  metal,  responsible  for  its 
electrical  conductivity,  were  regarded  as 
evaporating  through  a  potential  barrier 
at  its  surface.  The  classical  kinetic  theory 
of  gases  was  applied  to  a  postulated  elec- 
tron 'gas'  inside  the  metal.  His  measure- 


ments fitted  his  formula  i^AJ'he-^ikT 
where  A^  and  k  are  constants  and  ^  (the 
'work  function')  is  the  energy  needed  to  get 
the  electrons  over  the  barrier.  However, 
difficulties  in  other  fields  of  physics  led 
to  reconsideration  of  the  theory  from 
less  specific  thermodynamical  approaches. 
Richardson,  Harold  Albert  Wilson,  and 
several  others  gradually  improved  the 
derivation  of  the  emission  formula  ob- 
taining i  =  A^T^e-^lkT  which  has  become 
known  as  Richardson's  law,  familiar  to 
physicists  and  electronic  engineers.  A^ 
is  a  constant  different  from  A-^.  Experi- 
mentally the  formulae  are  difficult  to 
distinguish  because  of  the  overwhelming 
control  by  the  exponential  term.  The 
second  formula  has  withstood  the  test  of 
experiment  and  time ;  nevertheless  almost 
a  quarter  of  a  century  elapsed  after  its 
original  derivation  about  1903,  whilst 
radical  changes  in  the  electron  'gas' 
concept  occurred,  before  the  theory  was 
hammered  into  something  Uke  its  present 
form.  The  basic,  evaporation-potential 
barrier,  idea  is  retained.  Richardson's 
contribution  in  this  field  was  recognized 
by  the  award  of  the  Nobel  prize  in  physics 
in  1928.  He  coined  the  word  thermion, 
hence  thermionics  referring  to  the  emission 
of  electricity — negative  or  positive — ^by 
hot  bodies. 

The  difficulties  encountered  raised  other 
questions.  Mathematical  studies  of  ionic 
recombination  contributed  to  understand- 
ing of  what  was  going  on  in  the  imperfect 
vacuum  outside  the  emitting  surface.  Ex- 
perimental and  theoretical  investigations 
of  diffusion  problems,  e.g.  of  hydrogen 
through  palladium  and  platinum,  contri- 
buted to  ideas  on  what  was  going  on  inside 
metals.  These  seem  to  have  been  guiding 
principles  for  Richardson's  further  Cam- 
bridge researches  in  physics,  but  an  ele- 
ment of  indecision  regarding  his  future 
course  is  evident  from  other  investigations 
in  physical  chemistry  and  from  a  record 
of  an  application  for  a  chair  of  physical 
chemistry  at  Liverpool. 

In  1906  Richardson  was  appointed  to 
the  chair  of  physics  at  Princeton.  His 
researches  soon  covered  most  phenomena 
directly  relatable  to  thermionic  emission: 
cooling  and  heating  effects  accompanying 
thermionic  emission  and  absorption, 
energy  distribution  and  properties  of 
thermions,  reflexion  of  slow  electrons 
from  metallic  surfaces,  theory  of  contact 
e.m.f.  and  thermo-electricity,  the  photo- 
electric effect  and  the  emission  of  positive 
ions    from    heated    salts.    With    K.    T. 


Richardson,  O.  W. 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Compton  he  played  an  important  part  in 
the  verification  of  the  Einstein  photo- 
electric law.  His  acquisition  of  a  powerful 
X-ray  machine  probably  enabled  A.  H. 
Compton  to  discover  the  Compton  effect. 
These  and  other  of  Richardson's  Princeton 
students  later  became  outstanding  figures 
of  American  science.  Richardson  intro- 
duced the  technique  of  screening  electro- 
meter leads  in  dry  metal  tubes  and  so 
enabled  work  in  the  humid  summer 
months. 

In  broader  fields  of  electron  physics 
Richardson  speculated  on  the  possibility 
of  explaining  gravitation  in  terms  of 
electron  theory  and  predicted  (1908)  a 
rotational  reaction  on  magnetization  of 
iron.  He  failed  to  detect  this  effect,  but  it 
was  observed  by  Einstein  and  de  Haas 
in  1919  and  has  been  called  the  Richardson 
-Einstein-de  Haas  effect.  The  converse 
phenomenon,  observed  by  S.  J.  Barnett 
(1914),  has  been  termed  the  Richardson- 
JBarnett  effect.  These  'gyromagnetic'  and 
'magneto-mechanical'  phenomena  were 
more  fully  explained  after  the  electron 
'spin'  concept  had  been  introduced  by 
Uhlenbeck  and  Goudsmit  (1925). 

In  1914  Richardson  returned  to  England 
to  assume  the  Wheatstone  chair  of  phy- 
sics at  King's  College,  London.  His 
splendid  book,  The  Electron  Theory  of 
Matter  (1914),  based  on  his  Princeton 
lectures,  was  followed  by  The  Emission  of 
Electricity  from  Hot  Bodies  (1916).  At 
King's  College,  under  the  impact  of  the 
quantum  theory  and  the  stimulus  of 
Bohr's  explanation  of  the  hydrogen 
spectrum,  he  began  a  protracted  series  of 
spectroscopic  researches,  although  therm- 
ionics,  the  photoelectric  effect,  metallic 
conduction,  reflexion  of  slow  electrons 
from  metals,  emission  of  electrons  in 
chemical  reactions,  and  problems  of 
theoretical  physics  continued  to  occupy 
him.  He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1913  and 
appointed  Yarrow  research  professor  in 
1924,  being  thereby  relieved  of  teaching 
duties. 

Richardson  will  always  be  remembered 
for  his  basic  contributions  to  the  analysis 
of  the  molecular  hydrogen  spectrum.  His 
book  Molecular  Hydrogen  and  its  Spectrum 
(1934)  is  based  on  his  Silliman  memorial 
lectures  at  Yale  in  1932.  He  acquired  a 
magnificent  reflexion  echelon  for  which  he 
devised  a  bold  and  stimulating  programme 
mainly  to  test  what  have  proved  key- 
stones of  physics :  theories  of  the  spectra 
of  atomic  hydrogen  and  its  isotopes.  By 
far    the    most    accurate    wave    number 


measurements  of  hydrogen  spectrum  lines 
hitherto  made  were  obtained  with  this 
instrument  (1940)  but  a  flaw  in  the  analysis 
of  the  fine  structure  components  (probably 
occasioned  by  disruption  of  work  due  to 
the  imminence  of  war)  most  regrettably 
obscured  a  vital  feature  only  cleared  up 
in  1947  by  Lamb  and  Retherford. 
Richardson's  greatest  project,  to  use  this 
instrument  for  measurements  on  the 
Lyman  a-line,  was  abandoned  because  of 
the  war,  but  before  the  evacuation  of 
King's  College  in  1940  and  the  destruction 
of  his  laboratory  by  enemy  action,  some 
measurements  were  obtained  on  fine 
structures  in  the  molecular  hydrogen 
spectrum  which  beautifully  confirmed 
his  previous  work.  He  continued  scientific 
work  long  after  retiring  from  his  Yarrow 
professorship  in  1944  and  between  1901 
and  1958  published,  with  his  collaborators, 
over  130  scientific  papers. 

He  received  honorary  degrees  from 
Leeds,  St.  Andrews,  and  London;  was  a 
fellow  of  King's  College,  London  (1925), 
and  an  honorary  fellow  of  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge  (1941 ).  From  the  Royal 
Society  he  received  the  Hughes  medal 
(1920)  and  a  Royal  medal  (1930).  He  was 
knighted  in  1939.  He  was  president  of  the 
Physical  Society  in  1926-8  and  its  honor- 
ary foreign  secretary  from  1928  to  1945. 

Richardson  married  in  1906  Lilian 
Maude  (died  1945),  daughter  of  Albert 
William  Wilson,  goods  manager  to  the 
North  Eastern  Railway  Company  at 
Darlington,  and  sister  of  his  friend  H.  A. 
Wilson.  The  Richardsons  had  two  sons  and 
a  daughter.  The  elder  son  became  professor 
of  physics  at^  Bedford  College,  London, 
and  the  younger  a  psychiatrist.  In  1948 
Richardson  married  Henrietta  Maria 
Rupp,  family  friend  for  many  years  and 
former  wife  of  Professor  E.  Rupp  of 
Berlin-Reinickendorf.  Richardson's  sisters 
married  distinguished  Americans,  the 
physicist  C.  J.  Davisson,  and  the  mathe- 
matician Otto  Veblen. 

Richardson  was  short,  wiry,  and  sharp- 
featured,  in  contrast  with  his  first  and  in 
common  with  his  second  wife.  In  his 
younger  days  he  was  fond  of  fell  and 
mountain  walking,  sometimes  alone,  and 
could  cover  forty  miles  in  one  day.  He 
had  been  known  to  take  a  sleeper  to  Fort 
William,  climb  Ben  Nevis,  and  return  by 
the  next  sleeper. 

The  Richardsons  had  a  home  of  extra- 
ordinary beauty  containing  the  finest 
English  period  furniture  and  a  wonderful 
collection  of  paintings  by  Dutch  and  other 


840 


old  masters.  They  kept  a  large  and 
beautiful  garden.  Richardson  had  a  fund  of 
humorous  after-dinner  stories,  sometimes 
told  in  the  West  Riding  dialect,  which  he 
could  speak  perfectly.  He  had  a  hesitant 
but  precise  manner  of  speech.  He  kept  a 
good  table  and  a  well-stocked  cellar  (where- 
in whisky  was  drawn  from  the  wood).  He 
rose  late  but  seldom  retired  before  3  a.m. ; 
this  he  said  left  it  too  late  for  burglars  to 
start  operations  and  he  could  work  well 
in  the  early  hours  of  the  morning.  He  was 
a  kindly  man  with  much  sympathy  for 
refugees  from  totalitarian  countries  whose 
misdirection  of  science  he  detested.  He 
once  remarked  that  he  held  practically 
no  absolute  conviction  about  anything 
except  that  science  should  be  free.  His 
work  had  practical  applications  in  radio 
and  other  fields  but  he  declined  himself 
to  be  sidetracked  from  fundamental 
investigations. 

In  1939  Richardson  moved  from  Hamp- 
stead  to  Alton,  Hampshire.  Partly  as  a 
war  effort  he  bought  a  large  farm  at 
Medstead,  near  by,  which  he  supervised 
closely  for  several  years.  He  was  president 
of  the  North-East  Hampshire  Agricultural 
Association  in  1948-9.  He  died  at  Alton 
15  February  1959. 

[The  Times,  16  and  21  February  1959; 
H.  T.  Flint  in  Yearbook  of  the  Physical 
Society,  1959 ;  William  Wilson  in  Biographical 
Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  v, 
1959 ;  Nature,  4  April  1959 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  person^  knowledge.]      E.  W.  Foster. 

RIDLEY,  HENRY  NICHOLAS  (1855- 
1956),  plant-geographer  and  economic 
botanist,  was  born  10  December  1855  at 
West  Hariing  Hall,  Norfolk,  the  third 
child  of  the  Rev.  Oliver  Matthew  Ridley 
and  his  wife,  Louisa  Pole,  daughter  of 
William  Stuart,  of  Aldenham  Abbey. 
A  great-great-grandfather  was  John 
Stuart,  Earl  of  Bute  [q.v.],  who  also 
achieved  botanical  distinction  and  acted 
as  scientific  adviser  to  Princess  Augusta 
when  she  was  initiating  the  botanical 
gardens  in  her  private  domain  at  Kew.  At 
Haileybury,  Ridley's  biological  predilec- 
tions received  encoiu-agement.  At  Exeter 
College,  Oxford,  where  he  obtained  a 
second  class  in  natural  science  in  1878,  his 
interests  were  centred  more  on  geology  and 
zoology  than  on  botany;  in  1880  he  was 
awarded  the  Burdett-Coutts  scholarship 
in  geology.  Nevertheless  the  necessity  of 
obtaining  a  remimerative  post  led  him  in 
1880  to  apply  for  a  position  in  the  botani- 
cal department  of  the  British  Museum  at 


D.N.B.  1951-1960  Ridley 

South  Kensington,  where  he  began  to 
develop  his  hfelong  interest  in  the  geo- 
graphical distribution  of  plants.  Seven 
years  later  he  was  selected  to  accompany 
the  Edinburgh  zoologist,  G.  A.  Ramage, 
on  an  expedition  to  Brazil  which  was 
sponsored  by  the  Royal  Society. 

This  tropical  experience  led  to  his  selec- 
tion, in  1888,  as  director  of  the  gardens 
at  Singapore.  Part  of  his  duties  there  was 
the  making  of  a  preliminary  forest  survey 
and  the  expeditions  he  carried  out  in  this 
connection  and  his  extensive  exploration 
in  the  adjacent  territories  provided  much 
of  the  material  and  information  which 
resulted  in  his  Flora  of  the  Malay  Penin- 
sula (5  vols.,  1922-5).  In  addition  to 
his  travels  within  the  Malay  peninsula 
Ridley  also  visited  Borneo  and  Sumatra 
(1897)  and  the  Christmas  and  Keeling 
Islands  (1890-91).  He  was  in  Sarawak 
four  times  between  1903  and  1915.  In  1911 
he  was  in  southern  Siam  and  in  the  follow- 
ing year  in  Burma,  India,  and  Egypt.  In 
1915  he  was  in  Java  and  a  year  later  in 
Jamaica.  From  all  these  areas  he  brought 
back  material  which  enriched  the  col- 
lections at  Kew  and  one  genus  Ranalisma 
is  known  only  from  the  specimens  which 
Ridley  collected. 

On  his  appointment  to  Singapore 
Ridley  found  there  seedlings  of  the  Para 
rubber  tree  which  had  been  sent  from 
Kew  through  the  enterprise  of  Sir 
Clements  Markham  and  Sir  Joseph  Hooker 
[qq.v.].  But  it  was  Ridley's  faith  in  the 
value  of  the  Para  rubber  as  a  plantation 
crop  in  Malaya  which  led  him  to  persuade 
planters  to  experiment  with  the  new  crop 
and  to  surmount  the  initial  difficulties. 
His  services  in  estabUshing  the  rubber 
plantation  industry  were  recognized  by 
the  award  of  the  gold  medal  of  the  Rubber 
Planters'  Association  in  1914  and  fourteen 
years  later  by  the  award  of  the  American 
Frank  Meyer  medal.  His  active  interest 
in  the  applied  aspects  of  botany  was 
further  demonstrated  by  his  initiation  of 
the  Agricultural  Bulletin  of  the  Malay 
States  which  contained  many  papers  con- 
tributed by  himself,  and  by  his  book  on 
Spices  (1912), 

Ridley  was  always  keenly  interested 
in  problems  of  dispersal,  especially  by 
animals  and  wind.  This  finally  found 
expression  in  his  book,  The  Dispersal  of 
Plants  Throughout  the  World  (1930), 
which  he  wrote  after  his  retirement- from 
Singapore  in  1911,  when  he  returned  toi 
England  to  live  until  he  died  in  the: 
Cumberland  Road,  Kew, 


841 


Ridley 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Ridley  was  a  versatile  and  entertaining 
conversationalist  who,  ^almost  to  the  end 
of  his  days,  enjoyed  imparting  his 
reminiscences  to  others.  He  was  elected 
F.R.S.  in  1907,  appointed  C.M.G.  in  1911, 
and  awarded  the  gold  medal  of  the 
Linnean  Society  in  1950.  On  his  hundredth 
birthday  he  received  numerous  tributes 
from  home  and  overseas  amongst  which 
was  an  appreciation  from  the  president 
and  council  of  the  Royal  Society.  He  was 
a  prolific  writer.  On  botanical  subjects 
alone  his  papers  comprised  some  270  items, 
over  fifty  others  dealt  with  zoological 
topics;  about  ninety  more  were  on  agri- 
cultural and  applied  botanical  subjects 
and  some  forty  on  a  variety  of  topics, 
geological,  medical,  ethnological,  and  bio- 
graphical. Until  he  became  bedridden  he 
was  a  never-failing  observer  of  the  birds 
in  Kew  Gardens.  Ridley  was  short  in 
stature  and  in  later  years  distinctly  rotund, 
but  his  appearance  was  not  undistin- 
guished because  of  the  keen  observant 
eyes. 

In  1941  Ridley  married  his  house- 
keeper Lily  Eliza,  daughter  of  the  late 
Charles  Doran,  builder.  He  died  24 
October  1956  less  than  two  months  before 
his  101st  birthday.  He  was  the  last  sur- 
viving founder-member  of  the  Society  for 
Psychical  Research. 

[Sir  Edward  Salisbury  in  Biographical 
Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iii, 
1957 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

E.  J.  Salisbury. 

RIVERDALE,  first  Baron  (1873-1957), 
industrialist.  [See  Balfour,  Arthur.] 

ROBEY,  Sir  GEORGE  EDWARD 
(1869-1954),  comedian,  whose  original 
name  was  George  Edward  Wade,  was  the 
elder  son  of  George  Wade,  civil  engineer, 
and  his  wife,  Elizabeth  Mary  Keene.  He 
was  born  at  334  Kennington  Road, 
London,  20  September  1869.  Since  his 
father's  profession  involved  moving  from 
one  constructional  task  to  another,  Robey 
spent  his  boyhood  and  youth  in  a 
variety  of  addresses  and  at  several 
schools.  The  family  moved  at  various 
times  from  London  to  Hoylake,  back  to 
London,  and  then  to  Germany,  where  his 
father  was  engaged  on  tramway  work. 
At  the  age  of  eleven,  Robey  was  at  an 
academy  in  Dresden,  where  he  learned 
to  speak  excellent  German  and  did  well 
in  classics.  He  then  moved  to  Leipzig 
University  where  he  studied  science  for 
a  year  and  a  half  and  was  wounded  in 


a  duel  which  might  have  proved  fatal  to 
both  parties. 

When  his  father's  contract  was  con- 
cluded the  Wades  returned  to  England 
and  Robey  found  a  post  in  his  father's 
profession,  beginning  on  the  clerical 
side  in  connection  with  tramway  work 
in  Birmingham.  His  recreations  were 
football,  painting,  and  music:  he  soon 
developed  a  talent  for  singing,  was  a 
favourite  amateur  performer  at  con- 
certs, with  voice  and  mandolin,  and  then 
discovered  his  capacity  as  a  comedian. 
He  returned  to  his  family  at  Brixton  Hill 
in  London  and  there  he  continued  his 
amateur  appearances  with  increasing 
success :  soon  he  found  that  he  could  earn 
small  but  welcome  fees.  Since  there  was 
some  domestic  dismay  that  he  should  be 
earning  money  in  this  way,  he  took  the 
stage-name  of  Roby,  later  Robey.  This 
was  the  name  of  a  builder's  business  in 
Birmingham,  and  it  appealed,  for  stage 
purposes,  as  simple,  robust,  and  easily 
pronounced.  He  adopted  it  later  by  deed 
poll. 

His  first  success  came  by  co-operation 
with  a  hypnotist,  'Professor'  Kennedy, 
who  staged  a  popular  act  at  the  Royal 
Aquarium  in  Westminster.  This  hall  had 
largely  abandoned  the  display  of  fish  and 
was  exploiting  a  variety  entertainment. 
Young  Robey's  miming  of  a  hypnotized 
singer  was  so  effective  that  he  attracted 
professional  and  managerial  notice  and 
was  engaged  to  make  his  first  music-hall 
appearance  at  the  Oxford  in  June  1891  at 
the  age  of  twenty-one.  He  was  billed  only 
as  'an  extra',  but  his  popularity  was  imme- 
diate and  his  name  was  soon  exhibited 
on  the  posters  and  proved  an  attraction. 
He  rapidly  established  not  only  a  name 
but  an  aspect,  the  aspect  by  which  the 
public  knew  and  richly  enjoyed  his  turns 
for  much  of  the  rest  of  his  long  life.  Part 
of  the  aspect  was  conventional :  the  'red- 
nosed  comedian'  was  a  fact  as  well  as  a 
phrase  and  so,  accepting  the  tradition,  he 
applied  the  scarlet.  But  to  this  he  added 
strongly  blackened  eyebrows  and  he  chose, 
as  a  contrast  to  the  bibulous  colour- 
scheme,  a  long  black  frock-coat  and  top- 
hat.  (Later  this  was  abandoned  and  a 
squashed  bowler  took  its  place.)  This 
almost  funereal  solemnity  was  countered 
by  the  total  absence  of  any  collar  and  by 
the  carrying  of  a  masher's  cane.  So  the 
total  effect  was  that  of  a  debauched  piety 
and  of  a  respectability  at  once  tattered, 
raffish,  and  gay,  half  Bardolph,  half 
Stiggins,  wholly  Robey. 


842 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Robey 


His  career  in  *the  halls'  was  one  of  great 
assiduity — often  he  played  several  'houses' 
a  night — and  of  continuously  mounting 
esteem.  He  possessed  the  qualities  essen- 
tial to  capturing  the  huge  and  often 
restless  audience  of  the  old  'palaces  of 
variety':  quenchless  vitality  and  an  im- 
mense power  of  attack.  He  was  billed  later 
on  as  'The  Prime  Minister  of  Mirth',  but 
prime  ministers  are  the  dominant  figures 
of  democracies,  ruling  by  persuasion. 
Robey  could  more  accurately  have  been 
called  the  dictator  of  laughter,  so  firmly 
did  he-  grip  and  subdue  his  audiences. 
The  immediate  assault  upon  the  centre  of 
the  stage,  the  beetling  brows,  the  abrupt 
and  shattering  defiance  of  any  unruly 
laughter,  the  swift  plunge  into  song  and 
patter,  the  absolute  sureness  of  command 
— these  were  the  signs  and  proofs  of 
sovereign  power. 

There  were  occasional  alterations  from 
the  customary  Robey  uniform.  He  ran- 
sacked history  for  a  series  of  famous  or 
infamous  characters ;  and  in  pantomime, 
where  he  was  a  constant  favourite,  he 
usually  played  the  dame,  bonneted  and 
bridling,  at  once  grotesque  and  genial, 
creating  out  of  a  termagant's  tantrums  a 
fountain  of  hilarity.  The  leading  dramatic 
critics  made  a  point  of  seeing  Robey 
when  they  could  and  he  evoked  notices 
from  the  most  distinguished  pens.  C.  E. 
Montague  [q.v.]  wrote  of  Robey's  work  in 
his  Dramatic  Values  (1911)  that,  while 
the  range  of  characterization  was  small, 
'the  study  is  diabolically  intimate,  and  the 
execution  edged  and  finished  like  a  cut 
jewel.  . .  .  You  may  call  the  topics  out- 
worn and  trivial,  the  mere  words  insig- 
nificant, the  humour  metallic,  rasping, 
or  worse,  but  the  art,  within  its  limits,  is 
not  to  be  surpassed  in  its  gleaming, 
elliptical  terseness,  the  volumes  it  speaks 
in  some  instants,  its  suddenness,  fire,  and 
zest.' 

When  the  'single  turn'  began  to  go  out 
of  fashion,  Robey  appeared  frequently  as 
the  comedian  of  large-scale  revues.  One 
of  his  most  notable  appearances  in  this 
kind  of  revue  was  during  the  war  of  1914- 
18.  With  Alfred  Lester  and  Violet  Loraine 
[q.v.]  he  made  The  Bing  Boys  are  Here  at 
the  Alhambra  one  of  the  greatest  of  war- 
time consolations  for  men  on  leave.  Its 
most  popular  number  was  the  straight 
duet,  'If  you  were  the  only  girl  in  the 
world  .  . .  ',  which  he  sang  with  Violet 
Loraine. 

He  left  revue  for  operetta  in  1932 
when  he  played  Menelaus  in  (Sir)  A.  P. 


Herbert's  version  of  Offenbach's  La 
Belle  Hdene  with  Max  Reinhardt  as 
producer  and  (Sir)  C.  B.  Cochran  [q.v.]  as 
manager.  The  weak  husband  was  an  odd 
part  for  Robey,  to  whose  comedy  trucul- 
ence  was  natural.  In  such  a  situation  he 
had  to  tone  down  the  vigour  of  his  usual 
bravura  comicality  and  he  accepted  the 
discipline  so  well  that  James  Agate  [q.v.] 
described  his  performance  as  'a  miracle 
of  accommodation  like  that  of  a  trombone- 
player  obliging  with  a  pianissimo'. 

In  1935  came  a  Shakespearian  interlude. 
Robey  was  persuaded  to  play  Falstaff  in 
a  revival  of  Henry  IV,  Part  I  at  His 
Majesty's  Theatre.  He  took  this  risk  with 
natural  trepidation  and,  although  on  the 
first  night  he  had  not  completely  mastered 
his  lines,  he  triumphantly  mastered  his 
audience,  including  the  critics.  It  was 
agreed  that  the  man  from  the  music-halls 
could  play  the  classic  character  as  well  as 
the  classic  buffoon,  with  communicable 
relish  of  Shakespeare's  wit  and  with  a 
well-controlled  ability  to  make  the  most 
of  the  fat  knight's  ebullience  and  humilia- 
tions. When  a  colour  film  of  Henry  V  was 
produced  by  (Sir)  Laurence  Olivier  nine 
years  later,  the  death-scene  of  Falstaff, 
only  described  in  the  text,  was  inserted 
pictorially,  with  Robey  briefly  appearing 
as  the  knight  in  his  last  moments. 

At  all  times,  and  especially  during  two 
wars,  his  services  to  charity  were  un- 
grudging :  he  was  at  the  head  of  an  always 
generous  profession  and  he  led  the  appro- 
priate response  to  all  calls  on  its  good  will. 
Honours  were  now  coming  to  the  theatre 
and  he  had  been  offered  a  knighthood  after 
the  first  war,  but  he  modestly  thought  that 
this  was  too  much  for  a  comedian  and  in 
1919  accepted  a  C.B.E.  instead.  Knight- 
hood did  come  to  him  in  the  late  evening 
of  his  life,  in  1954. 

Robey's  recreations,  when  beyond  the 
years  of  field-sports,  were  the  collection  of 
stamps,  china,  and  porcelain,  painting,  and 
the  making  of  violins.  Thus  he  relieved  the 
leisure  moments  of  a  long  and  industrious 
as  well  as  an  illustrious  life,  during  which 
he  won  a  full  meed  of  friendships  far  and 
wide  as  well  as  of  honours  from  the  State. 
An  athletic  youth,  prudent  living,  and 
great  natural  vigour  sustained  him  to 
his  ripe  maturity,  and  great  knowledge  of 
the  comedian's  craft  promoted  him  at 
length  from  the  broader  to  the  finer  drol- 
lery. That  he  could  hold  his  own  in  a 
Shakespearian  company  of  many  talents 
showed  the  measure  of  his  art  and  his 
adaptability.  But  it  was  as  Robey  of  the 


848 


Robey 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


abbreviated  bowler-hat  and  the  suit  of 
solemn  black,  rubicund  and  raffish,  that 
his  contemporaries  would  most  grate- 
fully remember  a  radiant  and  uproarious 
presence. 

His  first  marriage,  in  1898,  to  a 
musical-comedy  actress,  Ethel,  daughter 
of  Thomas  Haydon,  of  Melbourne,  was 
dissolved  in  1988 ;  his  second  wife,  whom 
he  married  in  that  year,  was  Blanche, 
daughter  of  F.  R.  Littler,  an  active 
member  of  a  family  highly  placed  in 
theatrical  management.  By  his  first  mar- 
riage he  had  a  son,  Edward  George  Robey, 
who  practised  at  the  bar  and  in  1954  be- 
came a  metropolitan  magistrate,  and  a 
daughter,  Eileen  Robey,  a  portrait  painter. 
Robey  died  at  Saltdean,  Sussex,  29 
November  1954.  Drawings  of  himself  are 
at  the  National  Portrait  Gallery. 

[George  Robey,  My  Life  Up  Till  Now,  1908, 
and  Looking  Back  on  Life,  1933 ;  A.  E.  Wilson, 
Prime  Minister  of  Mirth,  1956;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Ivor  Brown. 

ROBINSON,  (ESMfi  STUART) 
LENNOX  (1886-1958),  Irish  dramatist 
and  theatre  director,  was  born  in  Douglas, 
county  Cork,  4  October  1886,  the  youngest 
of  the  seven  children  of  Andrew  Craig 
Robinson,  stockbroker,  and  his  wife, 
Emily  Jones.  His  father  took  orders  in 
1892  and  served  as  curate  of  Kinsale  until 
1900  when  he  became  rector  of  Bally- 
money.  Robinson  was  educated  at  home 
and  at  Bandon  Grammar  School.  His 
first  dramatic  work,  a  one-act  play,  The 
Clancy  Name,  based  on  a  story  by  his 
sister,  was  staged  at  the  Abbey  Theatre, 
Dublin,  in  1908.  The  theatre  was  soon  to 
absorb  almost  all  his  activity,  although 
he  also  worked  (1915-25)  as  organizing 
librarian  for  the  Carnegie  Trust  in  Ireland. 
This  was  a  time  of  change  in  the  Irish 
theatre.  The  work  of  J.  M.  Synge  [q.v.] 
was  almost  finished  and  the  Abbey  was 
still  suffering  from  that  lack  of  public 
enthusiasm  not  quite  amounting  to  a 
boycott  which  followed  the  hostile  re- 
ception of  The  Playboy  of  the  Western 
World  (1907).  There  was  need  for  some 
more  popular  appeal  and  the  trend  seemed 
to  be  away  from  romanticism.  The  Clancy 
Name^  although  inclined  in  this  direction, 
was  rather  melodramatic,  telling  of  a 
family  saved  from  disgrace  over  giving 
help  to  a  murderer  by  the  accidental 
death  of  John  Clancy  while  trying  to  save 
a  child  from  a  runaway  horse.  In  1909 
Robinson  tried  a  problem  play,  The  Cross 


Roads,  more  akin  to  the  later  'Manchester 
School'.  His  third  play.  Harvest  (1910), 
was  didactic  but  showed  him  as  a  man 
well  started  on  the  way  to  a  dramatist's 
career.  At  this  time  W.  B.  Yeats  [q.v.] 
wrote  of  him  that  he  'does  not  argue  like 
the  imitators  of  Ibsen  though  his  expres- 
sion of  life  is  as  logical,  hence  his  grasp  on 
active  passion'  and  'He  is  a  serious  intel- 
lect and  may  grow  to  be  a  great  drama- 
tist'. He  did  not  become  great  in  the  sense 
that  Synge  or  Sean  O' Casey  did,  but  the 
Abbey  Theatre  was  deeply  in  his  debt  for 
furnishing  a  steady  flow  of  good  plays 
during  thirty  years — plays  which  were  as 
typical  of  the  modern  Irish  drama  as  any 
of  those  by  dramatists  with  more  re- 
sounding reputations.  Among  them  may 
be  mentioned  Patriots  (1912) ;  The  Dream- 
ers (1915) ;  The  Whiteheaded  Boy  (1916) ; 
The  Lost  Leader  (1918) ;  Crabbed  Youth  and 
Age  (1922);  The  Round  Table  (1922); 
Never  the  Time  and  the  Place  (1924); 
Portrait  (1925);  The  White  Blackbird 
(1925);  The  Big  House  (1926);  The  Far- 
Off  Hills  (1928);  Ever  the  Twain  (1929); 
Drama  at  Inish  (1933);  Church  Street 
(1934);  Killycreggs  in  Twilight  (1937); 
and  Bird's  Nest  (1938). 

From  the  first  Robinson  applied  him- 
self particularly  to  the  technical  problems 
of  building  plays  which  could  be  acted  in 
the  limitations  of  a  small  theatre  with  a 
small  cast  and  not  much  money.  On  these 
foundations  he  developed  into  a  craftsman 
of  the  theatre  whose  work  was  an  example 
to  younger  dramatists  who  thought  plays 
were  something  to  be  easily  and  quickly 
thrown  together.  Many  other  Irish 
dramatists  owed  a  lot  to  Robinson  for 
advice  on  what  to  do  with  the  intractable 
play.  The  care  with  which  he  built  up  his 
characters  and  the  situations  he  put  them 
in  is  typified  by  one  of  his  beliefs  that  even 
when  dealing  with  imaginary  people, 
'there  must  always  remain  the  country 
on  the  dark  side  of  the  moon,  unknown  to 
the  audiences  but  as  vivid  to  the  play- 
wright as  the  side  that  shines  on  the 
stage'. 

Robinson  was  appointed  manager  of  the 
Abbey  Theatre  in  1910  and  almost  at 
once  ran  into  trouble.  His  was  the  only 
theatre  in  the  then  United  Kingdom  to 
remain  open  on  the  night  after  King 
Edward  VII's  death.  He  had  telegraphed 
for  instruction  to  Lady  Gregory  [q.v.] 
whose  advice  to  close  'through  courtesy' 
arrived  too  late.  The  theatre  remained 
open.  Robinson  was  treated  almost  as  a 
hero  by  the  nationalists,  but  there  were 


844 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Robinson,  R.  L. 


serious  consequences  for  the  theatre.  The 
incident  brought  to  a  head  disagree- 
ments between  the  directors  and  Miss 
A.  E.  F.  Horniman  [q.v.]  who  was  then 
subsidizing  the  theatre  but  shortly  after- 
wards-severed all  connection  with  it. 

Robinson's  first  period  of  management 
(1910-14)  was  a  difficult  one  financially 
for,  without  the  Horniman  money,  the 
theatre  had  little,  sometimes  nothing,  in 
reserve.  His  second  period  (1919-23)  was 
still  more  difficult  owing  to  the  Anglo- 
Irish  war.  In  1923  he  became  a  director 
of  the  theatre  which  in  the  next  year 
became  the  first  state -subsidized  theatre 
in  any  English-speaking  country.  The 
same  year  (1924)  saw  the  production  of 
Juno  and  ihe  Paycock  by  Sean  O'Casey 
whose  qualities  Robinson  was  among  the 
first  to  reahze.  More  perceptively  he 
backed  O'Casey's  change  of  style  which 
began  to  show  in  The  Silver  Tassie  (1929) 
with  the  remark  that  he  was  glad  to  see 
him  groping  towards  a  new  manner  since 
he  could  not  go  on  writing  slum  plays  for 
ever. 

A  vigorous  and  authoritative  lecturer, 
Lennox  Robinson  paid  a  number  of  visits 
to  the  United  States.  His  two  main 
excursions  into  journalism  were  in  1924 
when  he  contributed  to  the  Observer  for  a 
year,  and  in  the  fifties  when  he  became  a 
regular  essayist  for  the  Irish  Press.  The 
circumstances  in  which  he  lost  this  post 
were  in  character.  He  was  not  a  strongly 
politically  minded  man  and  believed 
firmly  that  politics  were  better  kept  out 
of  cultural  matters  (except  possibly  in  the 
case  of  plays  by  Sean  O'Casey).  Therefore 
he  saw  no  wrong  in  accepting  an  invita- 
tion to  visit  China  as  a  representative 
Irish  intellectual.  Nobody  could  have  had 
less  inclination  towards  Conununism,  but 
his  journey  compromised  him.  I  Sometimes 
Think  (Dublin,  1956)  is  a  selection  from 
the  essays  written  at  this  period.  His  many 
other  publications  included  other  essays, 
a  novel,  short  stories,  anthologies  of 
verse,  and  two  volumes  of  autobiography : 
Three  Homes  (with  his  brother  and  sister, 
1938)  and  Curtain  Up  (1942).  He  edited 
Further  Letters  of  J.  B.  Yeats  (1920)  and 
Lady  Gregory's  Journals  (1946).  In  1951 
he  published  Ireland's  Abbey  Theatre,  the 
best  collection  of  facts  so  far  made  about 
the  first  half-century  of  the  modern  Irish 
theatre,  but  not  in  itself  a  complete  guide 
to  all  that  happened  in  the  period.  He 
received  the  honorary  degree  of  D.Litt. 
from  Trinity  College,  Dublin,  in  1948. 

In    1931    Robinson   married   Dorothy 


Travers  Smith,  of  Dublin ;  there  were  no 
children.  He  died  at  Monkstown,  county 
Dublin,  14  October  1958,  and  was  buried 
in  St.  Patrick's  Cathedral,  Dublin.  He  was 
a  tall,  fragile-looking  man  with  a  faraway 
look  in  his  eye,  but  entirely  down  to  earth 
when  looking  after  the  business  of  the 
Abbey  Theatre,  where  there  is  a  portrait 
by  James  Sleator.  A  drawing  by  (Sir) 
William  Rothenstein  is.  reproduced  in 
Twenty-four  Portraits,  second  series,  1923. 
[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Gbrard  Fay. 

ROBINSON,  ROY  LISTER,  Baron 
Robinson  (1883-1952),  forester,  was  born 
8  March  1883  in  the  village  of  Macclesfield, 
near  Adelaide,  South  Australia,  the  eldest 
son  of  William  Robinson,  a  mechanical 
engineer,  and  his  wife,  Annie  Lowe.  He 
was  educated  at  St.  Peter's  College,  and  at 
the  university,  Adelaide,  where  he  gradual 
ted  B.Sc.  in  1903  and  obtained  his  dip- 
loma in  applied  science  (mining  engin- 
eering) in  1904.  A  briUiant  scholar  and 
also  an  athlete,  he  was  selected  as  the 
second  Rhodes  scholar  from  the  state  of 
South  Australia,  and  went  up  to  Magdalen 
College,  Oxford,  in  1905.  He  obtained  a 
first  class  in  natural  science  (geology)  in 
1907  and  was  awarded  the  Burdett- 
Coutts  scholarship.  He  then  obtained  his 
diploma  in  forestry  which  he  studied  under 
Sir  William  SchUch  [q.v.]  who  on  more 
than  one  subsequent  occasion  acclaimed 
Robinson  as  his  most  brilliant  student. 
His  athletic  prowess  was  equally  remark- 
able for  he  represented  his  university  at 
lacrosse  (1906-9),  athletics  (1907-9),  and 
cricket  (1908-9).  He  continued  to  play 
cricket  until  middle  life,  when  he  changed 
to  golf  but  retained  his  cricket  stance. 

He  decided  to  stay  in  Britain  and  in 
1909  he  was  appointed  an  assistant 
inspector  in  the  Board  of  Agriculture  and 
Fisheries,  and  was  rapidly  promoted 
inspector  and  superintendent.  By  inten-r 
sive  surveys  in  Wales  and  the  north  of 
England  he  laid  the  foundations  of  his 
wide  knowledge  of  the  growth  of  trees  in 
Britain.  In  1915  he  was  seconded  to  the 
Ministry  of  Munitions  but  in  the  next 
year  he  became  secretary  to  the  forestry 
sub-committee  of  the  Reconstruction  Com- 
mittee, and  helped  to  frame  its  final  report 
which  became  the  basis  of  forest  policy 
for  the  next  twenty  years.  Robinson  was 
appointed  O.B.E.  in  1918  and  became 
technical  commissioner  in  the  Forestry 
Commission  which  was  set  up  in  the 
following  year.  He  became  vice-chairman 


$45 


Robinson,  R.  L. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


in  1929  and  was  chairman  from  1932  until 
his  death.  On  the  post-war  reorganization 
of  the  department  he  was  also  director- 
general  (1945-7). 

For  over  thirty  years  Robinson  laboured 
to  build  up  the  forests  of  this  country.  The 
task  was  full  of  difficulties,  political, 
economic,  and  technical.  War  and  its 
consequences  had  been  responsible  for  the 
birth  of  the  Commission,  and  again  from 
1939  war  called  for  even  greater  contribu- 
tions from  the  woodlands.  After  a  year 
as  deputy  controller  in  the  Ministry  of 
Supply's  timber  control,  Robinson  re- 
turned to  forestry.  He  took  a  leading  part 
in  the  preparation  of  the  forestry  commis- 
sioners' report  on  'Post-War  Forest 
Policy'  (Cmd.  6447,  1943)  which  became 
the  basis  of  government  policy  and  in  the 
supplementary  report  on  private  wood- 
lands (Cmd.  6500,  1944).  In  both  wars 
most  of  the  timber  had  come  from  private 
woodlands  and  to  restock  them  a  scheme 
known  as  the  'Dedication  of  Woodlands' 
was  devised  as  a  means  of  co-operation 
between  the  State  and  the  private  owner. 

Robinson's  work  was  not  limited  to  the 
United  Kingdom.  He  was  the  only  man  to 
attend  each  of  the  first  six  Commonwealth 
Forestry  Conferences  held  after  1918  to 
review  and  discuss  forestry  problems  in 
all  parts  of  the  Empire.  At  each  successive 
conference  he  played  an  increasingly 
important  part  in  shaping  its  deliberations. 
He  returned  to  Australia  in  1928  for  the 
third  conference  of  which  he  was  a  vice- 
chairman,  and  he  was  chairman  of  the 
fourth  conference  held  in  1935  in  South 
Africa  and  of  the  fifth  held  in  1947  in 
Britain.  It  was  while  attending  the  sixth 
conference  in  Canada  that  he  died,  5 
September  1952,  in  Ottawa.  His  ashes  were 
brought  home  and  scattered  in  Kielder 
Forest,  Northumberland,  the  largest  State 
forest  in  Britain. 

To  the  task  of  creating  these  forests 
Robinson  brought  a  combination  of 
distinctive  qualities:  he  had  a  first-class 
brain,  a  forceful  personality,  and  an 
impressive  physique  which  gave  him  a 
natural  authority.  Success  in  a  long-term 
enterprise  calls  for  tenacity  of  purpose  and 
this  was  one  of  his  chief  attributes, 
while  he  was  always  cautious  when  faced 
with  difficult  technical  problems.  Although 
much  of  his  work  was  administrative,  he 
went  continually  into  the  woods  and  re- 
mained an  observant  and  practical  forester 
until  the  end. 

Robinson  was  knighted  in  1931  and 
raised  to  the  peerage  in  1947,  the  first 


Rhodes  scholar  to  receive  either  distinc- 
tion. He  took  the  title  of  Baron  Robinson, 
of  Kielder  Forest  and  of  Adelaide.  He 
was  the  first  recipient  (1947)  of  the  medal 
of  the  Society  of  Foresters  of  Great  Britain 
of  which  he  had  been  first  president 
(1926-8),  and  he  received  the  honorary 
degree  of  LL.D.  from  the  university  of 
Aberdeen  (1951).  He  was  a  member  of 
the  Forest  Products  Research  Board,  a 
governor  of  the  Imperial  Forestry  Insti- 
tute, Oxford,  from  its  inception  in  1924 
until  1934,  an  honorary  member  of  the 
American  Society  of  Foresters  and  of  the 
Institute  of  Foresters  of  Australia,  and  a 
corresponding  member  of  the  Agricultural 
Academy  of  France.  In  the  last  year  of 
Robinson's  life  the  forestry  commissioners 
and  their  staff  commissioned  T.  C.  Dugdale 
to  paint  a  portrait  which  is  in  the  posses- 
sion of  the  family. 

In  1910  Robinson  married  Charlotte 
Marion  Cust,  daughter  of  Henry  Cust 
Bradshaw.  They  had  two  daughters  and 
one  son,  a  wing  commander  who  was  killed 
in  action  in  1942.  The  peerage  therefore 
became  extinct  when  Robinson  died.  One 
of  the  daughters  married  J.  J.  B.  Hunt  who 
became  first  civil  service  commissioner  in 
1968. 

[The  Times,  6  and  11  September  1952; 
Empire  Forestry  Review,  vol.  xxxi,  No.  4, 
1952 ;  Forestry,  vol.  xxvi,  No.  1, 1953 ;  Nature, 
4  October  1952 ;  Scottish  Forestry,  vol.  vi, 
No.  4,  1952;  Quarterly  Journal  of  Forestry, 
vol.  xlvii,  No.  1,  1953;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  H.  M.  Steven. 

ROCHE,  ALEXANDER  ADAIR,  Baron 
Roche  (1871-1956),  judge,  was  born  24 
July  1871,  the  second  son  of  William 
Roche  by  his  wife,  Mary,  daughter  of 
William  Fraser.  Roche's  father  and  grand- 
father were  doctors  in  Ipswich  (the  grand- 
father having  come  from  county  Cork). 
The  Frasers  were  of  Highland  extraction 
but  established  as  merchants  in  Ipswich. 
Roche  was  born  there  and  went  to  Ipswich 
Grammar  School  whence  he  won  a  classi- 
cal scholarship  to  Wadham  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  was  a  contemporary  of 
two  future  lord  chancellors  (Birkenhead 
and  Simon,  qq.v.).  He  took  a  first  in 
honour  moderations  in  1892  and  in 
liter ae  humaniores  in  1894.  He  became  an 
honorary  fellow  of  his  college  in  1917. 

On  leaving  Oxford,  Roche  worked  for 
a  time  in  the  office  of  his  uncle,  a  solicitor 
specializing  in  maritime  matters.  This 
experience  was  to  shape  his  future 
career.  After  reading  as  a  pupil  with  Scott 


846 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Roche 


Fox  of  the  North-Eastern  circuit  he  was 
called  to  the  bar  by  the  Inner  Temple  in 
1896.  He  was  elected  a  bencher  of  his  Inn 
in  1917  and  served  as  treasurer  in  1939. 

At  first  Roche's  practice  was  almost  ex- 
clusively on  the  North-Eastern  circuit  and 
included  both  criminal  and  civil  work  but 
the  former  soon  gave  place  to  commercial 
cases.  At  that  time  the  British  merchant 
fleet  dominated  the  seas  and  no  small 
part  of  it  was  built  and  owned  on  the 
north-east  coast.  Individual  fleets  were 
smaller,  merchants  more  numerous,  the 
law  less  settled,  and  the  mercantile  com- 
munity more  litigious  than  in  later  times 
and  as  a  result  seaborne  trade  gave  rise  to 
a  substantial  volume  of  litigation.  To  deal 
with  this  class  of  case  the  Commercial 
Court  was  estabUshed  in  London  in  1895. 
For  some  years,  however,  a  substantial 
volume  of  commercial  work  continued  to 
be  tried  at  Newcastle,  Durham,  and  Leeds 
assizes  and  there  were  small  Admiralty 
cases  in  county  courts.  Roche  was  soon 
well  established  in  both  these  classes  of 
work  on  circuit  and  early  in  the  new 
century  began  to  get  corresponding  work 
in  London.  At  first  the  work  came  from 
chents  on  the  north-east  coast  but  the 
field  soon  widened  to  give  him  an  exten- 
sive practice  in  the  Commercial  Court 
and  a  substantial  one  in  the  Admiralty 
Court. 

After  taking  silk  in  1912  Roche  con- 
centrated almost  entirely  on  commercial 
cases  and  arbitrations  in  London  and  for 
a  period  just  short  of  five  years  held  one 
of  the  largest  leading  practices  in  this 
field.  Of  the  182  cases  reported  in  the 
Commercial  Reports  for  this  period  Roche 
was  counsel  in  88.  These  figures  probably 
reflect  correctly  enough  both  his  share  of 
the  business  and  the  high  esteem  in  which 
his  services  were  held  by  the  maritime 
community  who  still  formed  the  bulk — 
though  by  no  means  the  whole — of  his 
clients.  The  outbreak  of  war  in  1914 
brought  business  to  the  Prize  Court 
(which  had  last  sat  in  the  Crimean  War) 
and  Roche  appeared  as  counsel  in  several 
important  cases  both  before  the  judge  and 
on  appeal  to  the  Privy  Council. 

In  1917  he  was  appointed  a  judge  of  the 
King's  Bench  division  and  knighted.  He 
took  his  regular  turn  in  the  Conmiercial 
Court  but  when  not  so  required  he  had  a 
strong  preference  for  circuit  work.  This 
was  due  in  part  to  his  belief  in  the  value 
of  the  circuit  system  and  his  pride  in  its 
traditions  and  in  part  to  the  faciUties  it 
provided  for  sport  on  non-sitting  days. 


In  1934  he  was  appointed  a  lord  justice 
and  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council.  In  1935 
he  became  a  lord  of  appeal  in  ordinary 
with  a  life  peerage.  On  both  occasions  the 
promotion  was  to  succeed  a  judge  trained 
in  the  same  school  of  commercial  law  as 
himself:  Lord  Justice  Scrutton  [q.v.]  and 
Lord  Wright.  After  so  many  years  as 
master  in  his  own  court  Roche  found  life 
in,  and  the  slower  pace  of,  the  then  Court  of 
Appeal  somewhat  irksome,  but  he  found 
no  such  difficulties  in  either  the  House  of 
Lords  or  the  Judicial  Committee  and  very 
much  enjoyed  the  work.  He  retired  in 
1938  to  have  more  time  to  devote  to 
country  pursuits  but  continued  to  sit 
occasionally  in  commercial  and  Admi- 
ralty appeals  for  a  further  nine  years. 

As  an  advocate  Roche  was  clear  and 
concise,  but  was  best  remembered,  even 
forty  years  later,  for  his  vigour.  As  a 
judge  he  was  intensely  interested  in  the 
due  administration  both  of  criminal  and 
of  commercial  law.  In  criminal  matters 
he  was  a  sound  judge  and  devoted  much 
thought  to  the  difficult  task  of  sentencing. 
In  the  commercial  field  his  wide  knowledge 
of  the  relevant  law,  his  firm  grasp  of  the 
principles  involved,  and  his  long  ex- 
perience of  the  ways  of  the  sea  and  of 
commerce  enabled  him  to  proceed  with 
considerable  expedition.  Outside  these 
fields  his  interest  was  practical  rather  than 
theoretic  and  his  judgements  explored  the 
law  no  farther  than  was  strictly  necessary 
for  the  matter  in  hand. 

Apart  from  the  law  Roche's-  main  inter- 
ests were  in  sport  and  country  life.  As  a 
boy  he  drove  his  father  long  distances  in 
a  dog  cart  on  his  country  rounds  and  he 
never  lost  his  eye  for  and  love  of  horses. 
He  was  a  fearless  man  to  hounds  and  after 
he  went  to  Hve  in  Oxfordshire  in  1920  was 
well  known  in  the  Heythrop  country. 
As  late  as  1930  he  'went'  the  North- 
Eastern  circuit  accompanied  by  four 
hunters  and  he  rode  to  hounds  until  he 
was  eighty.  He  was  a  competent  shot 
but  the  sport  he  loved  above  all  others 
was  fly  fishing.  Roche  was,  however, 
willing  to  accept  the  duties  as  well 
as  the  pleasures  of  country  life.  He  was 
chairman  of  the  Agricultural  Wages 
Board  (1940-43)  and  of  the  county 
quarter-sessions,  and  after  his  retirement 
took  part  in  many  local  activities.  He  was 
a  stalwart  member  of  the  Church  of 
England.  He  married  in  1902  Elfreda 
(died  1955),  daughter  of  John  Fenwick, 
of  Wimbledon ;  they  had  two  sons  and 
a  daughter,  Jioche  died  at  Chadlington, 


847 


Roche 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Oxfordshire,  22  December  1956.  Wadham 

College  has  a  portrait  by  (Sir)  James  Gunn. 

[Personal  knowledge.l  Tom  Roche. 

ROE,  Sir  (EDWIN)  ALLIOTT  VERDON 
VERDON-  (1877-1958),  aircraft  designer 
and  constructor.  [See  Verdon-Roe.] 

ROSENHEIM,  (SIGMUND)  OTTO 
(1871-1955),  organic  chemist  and  bio- 
chemist, was  born  at  Wiirzburg,  Germany, 
29  November  1871,  the  second  son  of 
Meier  Rosenheim  and  his  wife,  Adelheid 
Rosenheim.  He  studied  in  Wiirzburg  for 
his  Ph.D.,  being  examined  on  his  thesis  by 
Hantzsch,  and  also  spent  some  time  in 
Bonn  where  he  attended  lectures  by  that 
pioneer  of  organic  chemistry,  Kekule. 
Thus  he  was  linked  with  the  'classical' 
period  of  development  of  structural 
organic  chemistry,  and  when  his  interests 
turned  to  physiology  his  natural  inclina- 
tion brought  him  into  the  main  stream  of 
contemporary  ideas  in  which  the  task 
was  to  elucidate  by  the  methods  of 
organic  chemistry  those  specific  chemical 
structures  associated  with  specific  physio- 
logical activities.  In  a  more  personal  sense 
his  student  days  were  decisive.  Once, 
when  it  was  rather  naively  remarked  that 
Bonn  must  have  been  a  pleasant  place  in 
which  to  be  a  student,  Rosenheim  replied 
*Not  when  one  was  a  Jew!'  In  the  days  of 
Hitler's  persecution  he  said  that  he  had 
*seen  this  coming  thirty-five  years  ago'. 

After  his  military  service,  in  the  horse 
artillery  and,  because  of  his  race,  in  the 
ranks,  Rosenheim  went  to  Geneva  to 
work  with  Graebe.  Thence,  having  been 
accepted  by  W.  H.  Perkin  [q.v.]  as  a 
research  student  for  the  session  1894-5 
at  Manchester  University,  he  came  to 
England.  Here  he  made  his  career,  was 
naturalized  in  1900,  married  an  English- 
woman, and  acquired  a  grammatical  and 
scholarly  style  in  writing  English  although 
his  speech  retained  a  marked  accent.  He 
was  not  happy  to  be  reminded  of  his 
German  origin  and,  perhaps  as  a  result 
of  his  early  experiences,  was  extremely 
reticent  about  his  personal  affairs. 

In  1896  he  joined  Philip  Schidrowitz  in 
a  practice  as  analytical  and  consulting 
chemists  in  London.  Schidrowitz  de- 
scribed him  as  greatly  interested  in  the 
scientific  side  of  his  work  and  as  a  re- 
markable craftsman,  excelling  in  glass- 
blowing,  photography,  and  manipulative 
procedures.  He  became  interested  in  bio- 
logical chemistry  and  his  true  life's  work 
began  in  1901  when  he  was  appointed 


research  student  of  pharmacological  chem- 
istry at  King's  College  in  the  Strand.  In 
1904  he  was  appointed  lecturer  in  chemical 
physiology  and  in  1915  the  title  of  reader 
in  biochemistry  was  conferred  on  him. 
Having  financial  independence,  he  re- 
signed from  this  position  with  its  teaching 
duties  in  1920  so  that  he  might  undertake 
research  free  from  interruption  and  at  his 
own  pace.  In  1923  he  and  his  wife  went  to 
work  at  the  National  Institute  for  Medical 
Research  where  they  were  associated  with 
H.  W.  Dudley  in  the  chemical  laboratory. 
The  atmosphere  was  congenial  and  there 
followed  perhaps  the  most  productive 
period  of  his  career,  until  in  1932  he  again 
decided  to  retire.  He  took  with  him  a 
scientific  problem  which  would  not  let 
him  rest,  and  within  six  weeks  he  was  back 
in  the  laboratory  to  discuss  with  Harold 
King  [q.v.]  the  structure  of  the  ring- 
system  of  sterols  and  bile  acids.  The  joint 
publication  which  resulted  was  a  major 
event  in  this  field  of  the  chemistry  of 
natural  products. 

Rosenheim's  first  scientific  publica- 
tions were  with  Schidrowitz  and  with 
F.  W.  Tunnicliffe  of  King's  College.  With 
F.  S.  Locke  he  collaborated  in  a  classical 
investigation  of  the  effect  of  sugars  on 
the  isolated  mammalian  heart  and  on  the 
quantitative  disappearance  of  dextrose 
when  perfused  through  such  a  heart.  With 
Miss  Tebb,  whom  he  subsequently  married, 
he  worked  on  protagon  and  other  com- 
pounds from  brain,  a  task  in  which  his 
great  manipulative  skill  was  fully  used. 
His  interest  in  spermine  brought  him  into 
contact  with  Dudley;  then,  pursuing 
another  trail  of  his  own,  he  was  led  to  the 
discovery,  with  T.  A.  Webster,  that  ergo- 
sterol  was  a  parent  substance  of  vitamin  D, 
the  antirachitic  vitamin.  His  individual- 
ism kept  him  from  collaboration  with  the 
team  which  subsequently  took  up  this 
investigation  in  competition  with  conti- 
nental laboratories.  Rosenheim  was  at 
his  best  with  a  single  partner  in  a  research 
which  proceeded  at  a  deliberate  pace. 

He  continued  work  in  the  Hampstead 
laboratory  with  several  collaborators  until 
his  final  retirement  in  1942.  The  last 
of  his  133  scientific  publications  was  in 
1945,  jointly  with  the  pioneers  of  paper 
chromatography,  on  *The  non-identity  of 
Thudichum's  glycoleucine  and  worleucine'. 
It  reflected  a  lively  interest  of  some  years' 
standing  in  the  pioneer  work  of  Thudichum 
on  the  chemistry  of  brain,  reinforced  by 
his  discovery  of  many  of  Thudichiun's 
original  specimens,  and  also  his  continu- 


846 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Ross 


ing  intellectual  activity  and  awareness  of 
the  applicability  and  importance  of  new 
techniques. 

Rosenheim  was  affectionately  remem- 
bered by  many  at  the  Institute  as  the 
elderly  and  dumpy  but  dignified  figure 
which  came  into  the  laboratory  in  the 
latter  part  of  the  morning  wearing  in  his 
lapel,  whenever  possible,  a  flower  from 
his  rock  garden.  After  this  had  been  ad- 
mired he  would  inquire  what  his  assistant 
had  been  doing  and  his  own  day's  work 
began.  They  also  remembered  the  kind 
and  fatherly  interest  he  took  in  junior 
colleagues  and  their  work,  giving  advice 
and  criticism  and  suggesting  subjects 
which  'might  be  interesting  to  play  with*. 

Rosenheim  was  one  of  the  original 
members  of  the  Biochemical  Society 
(formed  in  1911  as  the  Biochemical  Club), 
serving  on  its  conmiittee  from  1916  to 
1920.  He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1927,  was  a 
fellow  of  the  Linnean  Society,  and  served 
the  Medical  Research  Council  as  a  member 
of  the  accessory  food  factors  committee. 
In  1910  he  married  his  collaborator,  Mary 
Christine  (died  1953),  daughter  of  William 
Tebb,  of  Rede  Hall,  Burstow.  They  had 
no  children.  He  died  at  his  home  in 
Hampstead  Garden  Suburb  7  May  1955. 

[H.  King  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ii,  1956; 
personal  knowledge.]  R.  K.  Callow. 

ROSS,  Sir  IAN  CLUNIES  (1899-1959), 
veterinary  scientist  and  scientific  adminis- 
trator, was  born  22  February  1899  at 
Bathm-st,  New  South  Wales,  the  youngest 
of  four  sons  of  William  John  Clunies  Ross, 
school  teacher  and  amateur  natural  scien- 
tist. His  father  had  been  born  in  London 
amidst  'a  confusion  of  Clunies  Ross  and 
Ross-Clunies  relatives',  some  of  whom 
'followed  vague  but  picturesque  occupa- 
tions in  Siam  or  Singapore  or  the  Cocos 
Islands'.  The  Clunies-Ross  'dynasty'  of 
the  Keeling-Cocos  Islands  came  from 
the  same  stock.  His  mother,  Hannah 
Elizabeth  Tilley,  was  born  in  Australia, 
the  daughter  of  an  English  Nonconformist 
missionary. 

When  Clunies  Ross  was  four  years  of 
age  the  family  moved  to  Sydney  where 
he  was  educated  at  Newington  College 
and  the  university,  graduating  B.V.Sc. 
with  honours  in  1921.  A  Walter  and  Eliza 
Hall  research  fellowship  (1922-4)  took 
him  to  England  for  postgraduate  studies 
at  the  London  School  of  Tropical  Medicine 
and  the  Molteno  Institute,  Cambridge. 
He  returned  to   Sydney   as   lecturer   in 


veterinary  parasitology  in  1925.  In  the 
following  year  the  Council  for  Scien- 
tific and  Industrial  Research  (C.S.I.R.) 
was  established  by  the  Commonwealth 
Government  and  Clunies  Ross  was  ap- 
pointed veterinary  parasitologist.  There 
followed  a  period  of  intensive  laboratory 
research  with  tick  paralysis  and  hydatid 
disease  as  the  two  central  topics.  For  this 
work  he  received  his  D.V.Sc,  Sydney,  in 
1928. 

It  was  by  now  evident  that  Clunies  Ross 
had  qualities  which  would  take  him  into 
wider  fields,  and  in  the  decade  before  1939 
the  general  pattern  of  his  subsequent 
career  became  evident.  His  interest  in 
international  affairs  was  kindled  by  a  two 
years'  visit  to  Japan  (1929-30)  where  he 
carried  out  research  at  the  Institute  of 
Infectious  Diseases  in  Tokyo,  learned  to 
speak  Japanese,  and  developed  an  abiding 
interest  in  Asia.  In  1931  he  was  appointed 
officer-in-charge  of  the  McMaster  Lab- 
oratory which  had  been  built  for  research 
in  animal  health  by  C.S.I.R.  in  the  grounds 
of  the  university  of  Sydney  veterinary 
school.  At  this  time  Clunies  Ross's 
primary  interest  was  in  the  internal 
parasites  of  sheep;  a  textbook  on  the 
subject,  written  in  collaboration  with 
H.  M.  Gordon  (Sydney,  1936),  remained  a 
standard  work.  It  was  natural,  however, 
that  his  interests  should  expand  to  cover 
the  whole  biology  of  the  sheep  and  even- 
tually the  pastoral  industry  in  all  its 
aspects.  For  the  rest  of  his  life  Clunies 
Ross  was  concerned  with  Australia's  wool 
and  all  that  this  entailed  at  scientific, 
pastoral,  financial,  and  political  levels. 
In  1935-6  he  studied  sheep  and  wool 
production  in  North-East  Asia  and  in 
1937  he  became  Australian  representative 
on,  and  chairman  of,  the  International 
Wool  Secretariat  in  London.  After  war 
broke  out,  he  returned  in  1940  as  professor 
of  veterinary  science  to  Sydney,  but  was 
immediately  seconded  to  the  Common- 
wealth Government  for  tasks  concerned 
with  scientific  manpower  and  the  war 
organization  of  the  pastoral  industry. 

In  1946  Clunies  Ross  joined  C.S.I.R.  as 
executive  officer  and  in  1949,  following 
the  retirement  of  Sir  David  Rivett,  he 
became  first  chairman  of  the  renamed  and 
reorganized  Commonwealth  Scientific 
and  Industrial  Research  Organization 
(C.S.I.R.O.).  In  this  position,  which  he 
held  up  to  the  time  of  his^  death,  he  was 
brilliantly  successful.  He  saw  the  Organi- 
zation's activities  enlarge  enormously 
and  its  repute  increase  amongst  both  the 


849 


Ross 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


scientists  of  the  world  and  the  people  and 
the  politicians  of  Australia.  His  early  scien- 
tific work  was  comj>etent  and  opened  up 
an  immensely  important  approach  to  the 
improvement  of  sheep  husbandry  in  Aus- 
tralia ;  but  its  real  significance  lay  in  the 
background  it  provided  to  his  work  as  a 
scientific  administrator.  His  main  interest 
was  in  people;  he  was  utterly  remote 
from  the  ivory  tower  of  academic  science, 
but  he  could  imderstand  and  appreciate 
the  academic  as  well  as  the  politician  or 
the  pastoraUst.  He  hked  people  and  could 
make  them  like  him.  He  was  strikingly 
good-looking  in  a  dark,  well-groomed, 
slightly  MephistopheUan  style,  youthful- 
looking  even  in  his  fifties.  He  was  an 
excellent  conversationalist,  humorous  and 
eager  to  open  up  whomever  he  was  talking 
to,  whether  the  driver  of  his  car  or  a 
visiting  dignitary  from  Asia.  He  had  an 
extraordinary  memory  for  people  and 
events,  but  seemed  never  quite  able  to 
immerse  himself  comfortably  in  the  world 
as  it  was.  He  looked  on  things  a  little  from 
outside,  being  always  something  of  an 
actor  with  slightly  exaggerated  courtesies 
and  some  characteristic  mannerisms  of 
mobile  Ups  and  eyebrows,  or  the  styUzed 
manipulation  of  a  long  cigarette-holder. 
It  was  all  part  of  a  vivid  and  charming 
personality  which  helped  very  greatly  in 
building  up  enthusiasm  for  C.S.I.R.O. 
amongst  the  pastoralists  and  industrialists 
whose  prosperity  was  the  objective  of  his 
Organization,  and  equally  amongst  its 
scientific  employees.  He  had  the  loyalty 
and  liking  of  his  colleagues  and  was  on 
excellent  terms  with  his  political  masters. 
C.S.I.R.  had  been  built  up  and  made  a 
going  concern  by  Rivett,  in  many  ways  a 
greater  man  than  Clunies  Ross,  but  it 
needed  the  human  qualities  of  the  younger 
man  to  bring  the  Organization  to  its  full 
usefulness. 

Amongst  a  wide  range  of  ancillary  ac- 
tivities it  may  be  mentioned  that  Clunies 
Ross  was  Australian  delegate  to  the 
League  of  Nations  (1938-9) ;  first  chairman 
of  International  House,  a  residential  hall 
for  Asian  and  other  overseas  students, 
Melbourne  University  (1958);  member  of 
the  Murray  commission  on  Austrahan 
universities  (1957) ;  and  deputy  chancellor 
of  Melbom*ne  University  (1958-9).  He  was 
appointed  C.M.G.  in  1954  and  knighted 
later  in  the  same  year.  He  received  honor- 
ary degrees  from  Melbourne,  New  Eng- 
land, and  Adelaide  universities  and  the 
gold  medal  of  the  Royal  Agricultural 
Society  of  England.  He  was  a  fellow  of 


the  Australian  Academy  of  Science  and 
received  the  James  Cook  medal  of  the 
Royal  Society  of  New  South  Wales. 

In  1927  Clunies  Ross  married  Janet 
Leslie,  daughter  of  H.  B.  L.  Carter ;  they 
had  three  sons  and  an  adopted  daughter. 
He  died  in  Melbourne  20  June  1959.  The 
only  portrait  painted  during  his  life  was 
by  Norman  Carter  and  remained  in  the 
possession  of  the  artist.  Of  two  post- 
humous portraits,  one  by  Judy  Cassab 
is  in  the  McMaster  Laboratory,  Sydney, 
and  the  other  by  Harley  Griffiths  in  the 
C.S.I.R.O.  head  office  in  Melbourne. 

[Ian  Clunies  Ross,  Memoirs  and  Papers, 
ed.  F.  Eyre,  Melbourne,  1961;  Nature,  25 
July  1959 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

F.  M.  Burnet, 

ROWLANDS,  Sir  ARCHIBALD  (1892- 
1953),  civil  servant,  fourth  son  of  David 
Rowlands,  grocer,  and  his  wife,  Sarah 
Thomas,  was  born  at  Twyn-ny-rodyn, 
Glamorgan,  26  December  1892.  Educated 
at  Penarth  County  School,  the  University 
College  of  Wales,  where  he  obtained  first 
class  honours  in  modern  languages  in 
1914,  and  as  a  Welsh  scholar  of  Jesus 
College,  Oxford,  Rowlands's  university 
career  was  interrupted  by  three  years' 
service  in  the  war.  He  reached  the  rank 
of  captain,  was  appointed  M.B.E.,  and 
mentioned  in  dispatches.  Appointed  in 
1920  to  the  War  Office  on  entering  the 
administrative  Civil  Service,  Rowlands 
was  promoted  principal  in  1923  and 
assistant  secretary  in  1936.  His  exceptional 
quahties  had  already  attracted  notice,  not 
only  as  private  secretary  to  three  con- 
secutive secretaries  of  state,  but  for  the 
breadth  of  his  approach  and  his  personal 
contribution  towards  breaking  down  the 
traditional  barrier  between  military  and 
civilian  functions  in  a  department  with  a 
single  purpose. 

Seconded  to  the  Government  of  India 
as  defence  finance  adviser  in  1937,  after 
a  year  at  the  Imperial  Defence  College, 
Rowlands  brought  a  similarly  constructive 
and  energetic  personality  to  bear  on 
building  up  India's  defences  at  the  time 
of  the  Chatfield  inquiry.  His  assignment 
was  one  of  wide  and  substantially  inde- 
pendent financial  responsibility,  for,  in 
collaboration  with  the  commander-in- 
chief;  subject  only  to  the  control  of  the 
finance  member  and  Executive  Council, 
he  had  virtually  full  powers  over  the 
employment  of  the  funds  allocated 
annually  to  defence  which  then  absorbed 
over  half  India's  central  revenues. 


850 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Rowlands 


Rowlands  emerged  with  a  widely 
enhanced  reputation  for  farsighted  defence 
thinking  and  his  abilities  carried  him 
rapidly  to  high  responsibilities  once  war 
began.  Recalled  to  London  in  1939  as 
deputy  under-secretary,  Air  Ministry,  he 
was  appointed  in  May  1940  first  perma- 
nent secretary  of  the  Ministry  of  Aircraft 
Production,  newly  created  to  push  through 
an  unparalleled  output  of  military  aircraft. 
Unorthodox,  even  privateering,  methods 
were  initially  invoked  to  requisition 
premises  and  plant,  and  to  compete  for 
labour.  The  department  itself  was  a 
rapidly  assembled  concentration  of  power- 
ful figures  drawn  largely  from  outside, 
many  accustomed  to  wielding  indepen- 
dent authority.  If  results  were  to  be  both 
quickly  achieved  and  soundly  based,  a 
co-ordinated  departmental  machine  had 
swiftly  to  be  forged  to  encourage,  harness, 
and  control  the  energies  of  so  many 
capable  if  mettlesome  personalities.  Indis- 
putably, Rowlands  stood  out  as  principal 
architect  in  forming,  from  a  partially 
random  amalgam  of  officials,  techno- 
logists, and  industriaUsts,  an  uncharac- 
teristic government  department,  with  a 
total  strength  ultimately  exceeding  50,000, 
to  organize  the  activities  of  nearly  two 
million  people  eventually  employed  on 
aircraft  work.  Rowlands  regarded  him- 
self throughout  as  managing  director  of  an 
immense  industrial  enterprise,  rather  than 
conventional  senior  official.  Difficulties 
encountered  with  his  first  minister,  Lord 
Beaverbrook,  whose  abundant  vitality 
stimulated,  but  whose  idiosyncratic  meth- 
ods sometimes  confused,  direction  of  the 
task,  were  composed  in  terms  of  mutual 
and  enduring  respect.  The  output  of 
aircraft,  8,000  in  1939,  quintupled  in 
numbers  by  1944,  and  by  a  far  greater 
multiple  in  all-up  weight. 

Meanwhile,  by  late  1943,  India  was 
being  prepared  as  a  base  for  offensive 
against  Japan.  There  was  a  great  influx 
of  Conmionwealth  and  United  States 
forces;  the  Indian  armed  forces,  which 
had  expanded  tenfold  to  over  two  million, 
were  fighting  in  virtually  all  theatres  of 
war  with  complex  logistic  cross-currents  of 
supplies  moving  into  and  out  of  the  sub- 
continent. By  agreement  between  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill  and  Lord  Wavell  [q.v.], 
Rowlands  was  appointed  adviser  to  the 
viceroy  on  war  administration,  with  the 
function  of  co-ordinating  and  mitigating 
the  impact  of  all  these  pressures  on  the 
ports,  transport  system,  resources,  and 
food  suppHes  of  a  country  which,  although 


increasing  in  industrial  potential,  was  still 
essentially  a  primitive  peasant  economy. 
Rowlands  approached  this  task  of  cre- 
ating understanding  between  India  and  her 
military  guests  not  merely  with  adminis- 
trative acumen  and  vigour,  but  with  a  wide 
human  interest  in  Indian  affairs  nurtured 
by  deep  reading  and  many  friendships  de- 
riving from  his  earlier  sojourn.  In  1944-5, 
following  public  disorder  consequent  upon 
famine  in  Bengal,  Rowlands  presided  over 
an  inquiry  which  reported  in  compre- 
hensive, clearsighted,  and  far-thinking 
terms  on  Bengal's  administration.  The 
war  ending,  Rowlands  was  appointed  in 
1945  finance  member  of  the  viceroy's 
Executive  Council  to  initiate  the  process 
of  post-war  reconstruction  and  social 
development  with  independence  already 
in  view,  and  through  a  budget  which  his 
Indian  successor  would  carry  out. 

Save  for  a  three  months'  assignment  in 
1947  as  special  adviser  to  M.  A.  Jinnah 
[q.v.]  on  the  administrative  structure  of 
Pakistan  after  partition,  Rowlands,  re- 
turning to  London  in  mid-1946,  spent  the 
remainder  of  his  career,  until  retirement 
early  in  1953,  as  permanent  secretary  of 
the  Ministry  of  Supply  in  work  of  re- 
habilitation and  development  at  a  time  of 
post-war  economic  change  and  experiment. 
Following  amalgamation  with  the  Minis- 
try of  Aircraft  Production,  the  Ministry 
was  confronted  by  intimidating  responsi- 
bilities: the  future  size  and  shape  of  the 
aircraft  industry;  atomic  energy;  the 
highly  controversial  nationalization,  and 
subsequent  denationaUzation,  of  the  steel 
industry ;  the  manufacture  in  government 
factories  of  goods  for  the  civil  market; 
facilitating  the  transition  to  peacetime 
export  objectives  of  the  entire  engin- 
eering industry;  rearmament  for  the 
Korean  war.  For  seven  years,  energies 
unabated,  Rowlands  presided  over  a 
leviathan  of  a  department,  still  employ- 
ing over  100,000  people,  which  had  con- 
stantly to  adapt  itself  to  the  stresses  of  the 
times. 

Rowlands  brought  to  tbJs  varied  career 
a  formidably  effective  administrative 
personality,  in  which  prodigious  powers 
of  application  were  compounded  with 
characteristic  Welsh  vivacity,  shrewdness, 
and  a  catholic  human  sympathy  and  sensi- 
bihty.  Clear  thinking  and  unambiguous; 
forceful  and  determined  in  action  yet  quiet 
spoken  and  imperturbable ;  impatient  but 
often  disarming  of  opposition;  attracting 
and  sustaining  devoted  subordinates, 
intellectually  stimulating,  he  dominated 


851 


Rowlands 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


his  official  environment,  sometimes  tread- 
ing on  toes,  making  few  enemies.  Combin- 
ing in  his  make-up  the  training  and 
technique  of  an  official  with  ^  clubbable 
masculine  outlook  and  the  robust  habits 
of  a  man  of  the  world,  he  met  the  varied 
world  on  its  own  terms  of  social  exchange 
and  did  business  with  it.  Industrialists 
responded  to  him ;  so  did  Indians.  He  was 
a  conspicuous  example  of  the  senior  civil 
servant  equipped  and  eager  to  travel 
beyond  Whitehall  into  more  uncharted 
areas  of  administration.  He  was  appointed 
K.C.B.  in  1941  and  promoted  G.C.B.  in 
1947. 

In  1920  Rowlands  married  Constance 
May,  daughter  of  P.  W.  Phillips,  general 
manager  of  the  Swansea  Harbour  Trust ; 
they  had  no  children.  He  died  at  Henley- 
on-Thames  18  August  1953. 

[J.  D.  Scott  and  R.  Hughes,  (Official  History) 
The  Administration  of  War  Production,  1955 ; 
B.  H.  Liddell  Hart,  Memoirs,  vol.  ii,  1965; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Howard  Hoopeb. 

ROWNTREE,  BENJAMIN  SEEBOHM 
(1871-1954),  sociologist,  was  born  in  York 
7  July  1871,  the  second  son  of  Joseph 
Rowntree  [q.v.]  and  his  second  wife, 
Emma  Antoinette,  daughter  of  Wilhelm 
Seebohm.  He  followed  his  father  to  Boot- 
ham  School,  York,  then  read  for  five 
terms  at  the  Owens  College,  Manchester, 
where  his  studies  included  chemistry.  He 
joined  the  family  firm  of  H.  I.  Rowntree 
&  Co.  in  1889,  becoming  a  director  when 
it  was  converted  into  a  limited  UabiUty 
company  in  1897,  and  chairman  in  1923- 
41.  His  father  took  the  view  that  his 
employees  should  'never  merely  be  re- 
garded as  cogs  in  an  industrial  machine, 
but  rather  as  fellow  workers  in  a  great 
industry',  and  applying  his  Quaker 
beliefs  to  capitalist  enterprise  endeavoured 
to  develop  his  business  as  a  trust.  He 
translated  this  conception  into  practical 
and  legal  form  by  creating  charitable, 
social  service,  and  village  trusts,  with 
which  Seebohm  Rowntree  was  closely 
associated.  His  father's  influence  on  his 
fife  and  thoughts  was  decisive ;  it  has  been 
said  that  the  relationship  was  'a  process 
of  cross-fertilization,  and  no  one  now  can 
tell  how  many  of  Seebohm's  theories  he 
owed  to  his  father,  or  how  many  of 
Joseph's  projects  grew  out  of  discussions 
with  his  sons'.  In  the  twentieth  century 
the  firm  became  a  leader  in  the  field 
of  scientific  management  and  industrial 
welfare.  Seebohm  Rowntree  was  its  fiurst 


labour  director;  the  eight-hour  day  was 
introduced  in  1896,  a  pension  scheme  in 
1906;  a  works  doctor  was  appointed  in 
1904.  To  deal  with  the  problems  of  em- 
ploying large  numbers  of  women,  'social 
helpers'  were  recruited  as  early  as  1891 ; 
under  Seebohm's  direction  they  ultimately 
became  members  of  a  full-fledged  labour 
department.  Works  councils  were  set  up 
in  1919  and  in  the  same  year  a  44-hour 
five-day  week  was  introduced;  profit- 
sharing  was  introduced  in  1923  ;  a  psycho- 
logical department  was  set  up  in  1922. 
Until  he  retired  from  his  executive 
directorship  in  1936,  labour  management 
was  one  of  Seebohm  Rowntree's  chief 
interests,  but  he  did  not  allow  this  to 
restrict  a  steadily  growing  awareness  of, 
and  responsibility  for  the  solution  of, 
problems  of  industrial  management  in 
general.  He  was,  as  Beatrice  Webb  [q.v.] 
put  it,  'more  a  philanthropist  than  a 
capitalist'.  His  study  of  the  problem  of 
unemployment  which  he  published  in 
1911  with  Bruno  Lasker  showed  that 
welfare  had  become  a  dominant  interest 
in  his  life,  and  this  is  true  also  of  much  of 
the  other  work  which  he  produced  at  this 
time.  During  the  war  he  was  director  of 
the  welfare  department  of  the  Ministry 
of  Munitions  (1915-18)  and  a  member  of 
the  Reconstruction  Committeee  in  1917. 
This  provided  the  background  to  his 
Human  Factor  in  Business  (1921),  re- 
garded at  the  time  as  complementary  to 
his  Human  Needs  of  Labour  (1918,  revised 
ed.  1937).  Turning  from  the  examination 
of  the  needs  of  the  individual  as  a  con- 
sumer he  studied  his  equally  important 
requirements,  as  an  employee,  for  reason- 
able comfort  at  work,  and  the  provision 
of  the  kind  of  industrial  conditions  which 
promote  efficiency.  This  interest  lay  out- 
side the  field  of  philanthropy  as  it  is 
usually  thought  of,  and  ultimately  led 
Rowntree  to  play  an  active  part  in  the 
study  and  practice  of  industrial  manage- 
ment. He  participated  in  the  Liberal  in- 
dustrial inquiry  which  published  Britain's 
Industrial  Future  in  1928  and  assisted  in 
the  foundation  of  the  Industrial  Welfare 
Society  in  1918  and  of  the  National 
Institute  of  Industrial  Psychology  in  1921, 
remaining  a  member  of  its  executive  com- 
mittee until  1949  and  serving  as  chairman 
in  1940-47.  He  was  responsible  for  the 
foundation  of  the  Oxford  conferences  of 
employers,  managers,  and  foremen  in  1920 
and  of  the  Management  Research  Groups 
(1927).  In  1952  he  was  presented  with  an 
honorary  fellowship  of  the  British  Instil 


8^3 


D.N.B.  lOSl-lOfiO 


Rowntree 


tute  of  Management  in  recognition  of  the 
debt  which  the  management  movement 
owed  to  him. 

The  most  formative  incident  in  Rown- 
tree's  Ufe  was,  perhaps,  his  visit  to  the 
slums  of  Newcastle  upon  Tyne  in  1895, 
which  sharpened  his  Quaker  sense  of 
obligation  to  the  downtrodden  to  such  an 
extent  that  he  may  be  said  to  have-  spent 
the  rest  of  his  life  in  an  endeavour  to 
discharge  it.  The  work  of  Charles  Booth 
[q.v.]  in  London  made  a  great  impression 
on  his  mind,  giving  him  a  clearer  sense  of 
direction  and  purpose.  He  determined  to 
find  out  whether  the  state  of  the  poor  in  his 
own  city  of  York  was  as  bad  as  Booth  had 
found  it  to  be  in  London.  Rowntree  spent 
most  of  1897  and  1898  away  from  the  fac- 
tory, pursuing  the  necessary  investiga- 
tions, and  in  1901  was  able  to  publish 
Poverty,  a  Study  of  Town  Life,  which  soon 
became  one  of  the  classic  texts  of  the 
social  sciences.  With  Booth  before  him  and 
(Sir)  Arthur  Bowley  [q.v.]  afterwards,  he 
helped  to  create  a  methodology,  the 
importance  of  which  for  British  empirical 
sociology  is  hard  to  exaggerate.  Poverty 
was  clearly  written,  and  its  conclusions 
were  accepted  as  supporting  Booth's.  Its 
influence  on  the  public  mind  and  on  the 
development  of  social  policy  was  great. 
From  the  point  of  view  of  the  social 
sciences  it  was  an  advance  on  Booth's 
work,  in  so  far  as  it  was  based  on  data 
collected  from  an  entire  population, 
rather  than  a  selected  group ;  Rowntree's 
definition  of  'poverty'  was  more  precise, 
taking  into  consideration  'physical  effi- 
ciency' alone,  and  he  employed  his  own 
staff  to  obtain  information,  rather  than 
relying  on  'indirect  interviewing'  as 
Booth  had  done.  In  some  respects  he 
sought  for  more  precision  than  was 
possible.  On  the  one  hand  he  was  later 
compelled  to  admit  that  his  distinction 
between  'primary'  and  'secondary'  poverty 
(the  latter  arising  if  earnings  sufficient  for 
physical  efficiency  were  spent  on  some 
other  object)  could  not  be  maintained. 
On  the  other,  his  desire  to  exclude  any 
exaggeration  in  his  estimate  of  the  number 
of  the  poor  led  him  to  a  very  strict  defini- 
tion of  poverty  which  assumed  that  the 
smallest  amounts  of  the  cheapest  food 
would  be  bought,  and  his  work  was  used 
afterwards  by  Bowley  and  others  to 
determine  the  lowest  wage  on  which  a 
member  of  the  working  classes  could  meet 
his  responsibilities.  Harsh  rigour  of  this 
kind  had  little  bearing  on  social  realities, 
however,  and.Ufti^Jentionally  on  his  part 


Rowntree's  desire  to  produce  a  firm  esti*- 
mate  of  poverty  created  trouble  later  on 
with  the  labour  movement. 

The  Second  York  Survey,  carried  out 
in  1936,  which  was  published  under  the 
title  Poverty  and  Progress  in  1941,  dis- 
played more  sophistication  in  the  analysis 
of  the  data ;  to  establish  the  poverty  line 
use  was  made  of  material  included  in  The 
Human  Needs  of  Labour.  The  Second 
Survey  also  dealt  with  housing,  religion, 
and  leisure-time  activities.  Finally,  in 
collaboration  with  G.  R.  Lavers,  Rown- 
tree produced  in  1951  Poverty  and  the 
Welfare  State,  the  report  of  the  Third 
Survey  of  York,  which  was  restricted  to 
an  examination  of  the  extent  to  which 
poverty  in  York  had  been  reduced  by  the 
operation  of  the  various  social  services, 
and  English  Life  and  Leisure  which  was 
unfavourably  compared  with  his  earlier 
work,  on  the  ground  that  it  contained 
too  much  moralizing,  and  that  the  case 
studies  in  it  could  not  be  held  to  be 
representative  of  any  social  group  or  class. 
Even  so,  the  case  studies  themselves  were 
valued  for  their  vividness,  and  the  irony 
of  the  comments  embodied  in  them. 

As  a  sociologist,  Rowntree  shared  with 
Booth  an  interest  aroused  by  conscience, 
a  distaste  for  a  priori  reasoning,  and  a  de- 
sire to  ascertain  'actual  facts'.  He  avoided 
sweeping  generalizations,  and  possessed 
an  ability  to  ask  really  significant  ques- 
tions, ranging  from  the  frequency  of 
poverty  in  1901  to  the  nature  of  'mass 
culture'  fifty  years  later.  It  was  perhaps 
because  of  this  more  than  anything  else 
that  his  work  was  highly  esteemed  by 
contemporaries,  such  as  R.  H.  Tawney. 
In  his  best  writing  he  gave  a  precise 
picture  of  the  life  of  the  people  with 
whom  he  was  concerned ;  this  was  espe- 
cially true  of  Poverty  and  of  How  the  Lab- 
ourer  Lives,  a  small  book  published  in  1913 
in  collaboration  with  May  Kendall  which 
dealt  with  the  way  of  life  of  the  agricul- 
tural labourer.  An  earlier  publication. 
Land  and  Labour,  Lessons  from  Belgium 
(1910),  had  led  to  his  appointment  by 
Lloyd  George  to  the  land  inquiry  com- 
mittee of  1912-14. 

Rowntree  was  never  prominent  in  politi- 
cal life  although  he  was  intimate  with 
Lloyd  George,  especially  between  1926 
and  1935  when  he  advised  him  on  ques- 
tions of  unemployment,  housing,  and 
agriculture.  He  collaborated  with  Lord 
Astor  [q.v.]  in  a  series  of  studies  of  British 
agriculture,  in  the  hope  that  farming 
could  be  made  to  contribute  to  the  relief 


858 


Rowntree 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


of  unemployment  and  the  development 
of  the  economy,  but  he  was  speedily  dis- 
illusioned. The  first  report,  The  Agri- 
cultural Dilemma,  was  published  in  1935 ; 
it  challenged  Lloyd  George's'  optimistic 
estimate  of  the  number  of  persons  who 
could  be  settled  on  the  land,  and  this 
ended  Rowntree's  friendship  with  him. 
Rowntree's  collaboration  with  Astor  con- 
tinued, however,  until  1946. 

Rowntree  was  never  able  to  make  close 
relations  with  the  Labour  Party,  and  this 
restricted  the  extent  to  which  he  was  able 
to  participate  in  politics.  He  was  an  in- 
dependent and  successful,  if  unacknow- 
ledged, conciliator  in  the  railway  strike  of 
1919 ;  he  attempted  to  mediate  in  the  coal 
dispute  in  1926  when  he  was  highly  critical 
of  the  intervention  of  the  Churches' 
committee.  But  he  had  neither  the  neces- 
sary temperament  nor  the  desire  to  play 
a  leading  role ;  he  was  not  the  kind  of  man 
to  lead  movements  or  to  exercise  power. 
In  Beatrice  Webb's  opinion  he  was  even 
'too  modest  and  hesitating  in  opinion  to 
lead  a  conunittee'.  He  was  rather,  as 
Sir  Patrick  Abercrombie  [q.v.]  put  it, 
'one  of  those  who  combine  imaginative 
outlook  with  the  most  exact  study'.  His 
poverty  surveys  were  his  most  scholarly 
achievements  and  his  most  effective 
contributions  to  social  policy,  though  the 
part  he  played  in  the  development  of  a 
more  humane  understanding  of  problems 
of  industrial  welfare,  which  he  combined 
with  a  very  practical  approach  to  busi- 
ness administration,  also  contributed 
perhaps  as  much  to  his  reputation.  He 
was  a  trustee  of  the  Nuffield  Fund  for 
distressed  areas  from  1936,  president  of 
the  Outward  Bound  Trust,  and  in  1944-6 
chairman  of  the  Nuffield  committee  on 
old  age.  He  received  an  honorary  LL.D. 
from  Manchester  in  1942.  He  was  ap- 
pointed C.H.  in  1931,  but  he  rejected 
those  distinctions  which,  he  thought, 
might  put  a  barrier  between  him  and  his 
fellow  men.  Although  not  fully  recognized 
in  this  way,  his  influence  was  consider- 
able, especially  in  the  United  States, 
where  he  had  many  friends  and  was  widely 
consulted  both  in  business  and  in  the 
universities. 

In  1897  Rowntree  married  Lydia  (died 
1944),  daughter  of  Edwin  Potter,  of 
Middlesbrough ;  there  were  four  sons  and 
one  daughter.  He  died  at  his  home  in  a 
wing  of  Disraeli's  old  house  at  Hughenden, 
High  Wycombe,  7  October  1954. 

[AsaBriggs,  Seebohm  Rowntree^  1961 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.]        Simcy. 


ROXBURGH,      JOHN      FERGUSSON 

(1888-1954),  first  headmaster  of  Stowe 
School,  was  born  in  Edinburgh  5  May  1888, 
the  second  son  of  Archibald  Roxburgh, 
foreign  merchant,  of  Valparaiso  and 
Liverpool,  by  his  wife,  Janet  Briggs, 
daughter  of  John  Cathcart,  of  Edinburgh. 
At  Charterhouse  he  won  several  prizes 
including  the  Thackeray  prize  for  English 
literature  three  years  in  succession.  But 
he  was  not  wholly  happy  and  it  was  said 
at  Stowe  that  he  meant  there  to  enjoy 
vicariously  the  happy  schooldays  he  had 
missed.  An  exhibitioner  of  Trinity  Col- 
lege, Cambridge,  he  was  placed  in  the 
third  division  of  the  first  class  in  part  i  of 
the  classical  tripos  in  1910.  He  obtained 
his  L.  es  L.  of  the  university  of  Paris  and 
in  1911-22  was  sixth-form  master  at 
Lancing  College,  where  his  pupils  re- 
membered him  as  liking  to  wear  his  Sor- 
bonne  gown,  which  went  well  with  his  air 
of  being  a  great  actor  whose  audience 
must  never  suffer  a  dull  moment.  He 
loved  to  recite  French,  Latin,  and  English 
poetry,  resonantly  thumping  the  metres 
into  his  pupils'  heads.  He  was  fond  of 
saying  that  'a  classroom  in  which  the 
master  is  talking  is  a  classroom  in  which 
no  education  is  going  on',  but  when  he 
himself  was  teaching  his  voice  could  be 
heard  six  classrooms  away;  he  was  an 
outstanding  teacher  of  oral  French. 

After  the  war,  during  which  he  served 
for  a  time  in  France  with  the  Corps  of 
Signals  and  was  mentioned  in  dispatches, 
Roxburgh  returned  to  Lancing  where 
he  was  Sandersons  housemaster  until  in 
December  1922  he  was  appointed  first 
headmaster  of  Stowe  before  it  opened  in 
May  1923  with  99  boys.  He  took  with  him 
some  Lancing  boys  as  prefects ;  and  two  of 
the  early  masters  had  also  been  educated 
at  Lancing.  By  September  1930  there  were 
500  boys  at  Stowe  and  the  intervening 
years  had  seen  a  steady  programme  of 
development  of  the  school,  yet  without 
greatly  changing  the  character  of  the 
former  palace  of  the  Dukes  of  Buckingham 
which  housed  it.  In  1924, 160  old  Etonians 
subscribed  to  purchase  the  Great  Avenue 
for  the  school,  and  the  same  year  saw  the 
opening  of  laboratories,  a  gymnasium, 
and  squash  courts.  In  1927  Queen  Mary 
laid  the  foundation  stone  of  the  chapel 
which  was  opened  two  years  later  by  Prince 
George.  The  first  university  scholarships 
were  won  in  1927  (two  at  Oxford  and  one  at 
Cambridge)  and  in  1930  one  old  Stoic  was 
president  of  the  Oxford  Union  and  another 
won  the  sword  of  honour  at  Sandhurst. 


854 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Royden 


The  school  was  very  much  Roxburgh's 
personal  creation.  Although  he  could  not 
arrange  work  to  economize  energy,  his 
Scots  thoroughness  and  industry  made  his 
administration  sufficiently  successful.  He 
made  no  major  changes  in  the  conven- 
tional public  school  curriculum,  beyond 
introducing  regular  teaching  in  geography, 
but  he  was  an  unusual  headmaster  in 
maintaining  a  very  close  personal  relation- 
ship with  all  the  boys  in  the  school  and 
with  old  boys.  Every  Stowe  boy  killed  in 
the  war  of  1939-45  was  a  personal  tragedy 
for  him.  His  correspondence,  largely  in 
his  own  hand,  with  boys,  old  boys,  parents, 
and  past  masters,  was  so  vast  as  to  seem 
incredible  to  anyone  who  did  not  know 
him.  His  manners  were  so  charming  that 
parents  often  thought  they  had  them- 
selves charmed  him,  but  when  after  re- 
tiring he  taught  in  a  prep,  school  he  made 
the  condition  'no  contact  with  parents'. 
To  his  masters  he  was  at  home  every 
weekday  from  10  p.m.  onwards.  It  was 
once  said  that  when  the  door  closed  behind 
the  last  master  the  room  was  left  empty. 
This  criticism,  though  unjust,  was  under- 
standable, for  he  had  developed  an 
ability  to  be  interested  in  every  individual 
whom  he  felt  to  be  socially  on  his  own 
level.  But  his  undue  sensitiveness  to 
social  levels  narrowed  the  range  of  his 
response  to  individuals  as  human  beings 
and  often  concealed  his  real  virtues  from 
those  whose  good  opinion  would  have  been 
weU  worth  having. 

A  master  once  asked  Roxburgh  why  he 
had  originally  appointed  him  and  was  told 
that  at  the  interview  he  had  ignored  some 
questions  and  answered  all  the  others 
wrongly,  but  that  Roxburgh  had  felt  that 
he  'had  a  dynamo  inside'.  Sometimes  in 
giving  way  to  such  impulses  Roxburgh 
chose  unsuccessfully;  he  then  felt  very 
guilty  and  would  support  the  inadequate 
master  with  unshakeable  loyalty.  Al- 
though this  attitude  caused  occasional 
difficulties,  it  gave  his  staff  the  confidence 
of  being  trusted  and  on  balance  was  good 
for  the  school.  So  also  was  his  curious 
habit,  rare  in  anyone  so  circumspect  as 
a  headmaster  must  be,  of  occasionally 
speaking  the  exact  truth  as  he  saw  it, 
without  warning.  A  boy  asked  to  go  to  the 
test  match.  'No,  you  may  not.'  'Why  not, 
sir  ?'  'Because  your  parents  and  your  house- 
master would  disapprove.'  'If  I  get  leave 
from  my  parents  and  my  housemaster, 
may  I  go,  sir?'  'No,  you  may  not.'  'Why 
not,  sir  ?'  'I  can't  think  why  not  at  the  mo- 
ment, but  I'm  sure  there  must  be  a  reason.' 


Roxburgh  published  two  books:  The 
Poetic  Procession  (1921)  and  Eleutheros 
(1930).  His  feeling  for  the  arts  was  never 
generalized  but  always  attached  to  par- 
ticular works.  He  kept  a  gramophone  in 
his  study  solely  to  play  Beethoven's 
Kreutzer  Sonata.  An  intense  desire  that 
his  own  words  should  be  well  chosen  and 
should  give  pleasure  made  his  sermons — 
never  more  than  once  a  term — immensely 
attractive.  The  masters  were  the  only 
group  of  regular  voluntary  attenders,  and 
the  fullness  of  their  stalls  when  'J.F.'  was 
preaching  was  very  striking.  The  actual 
content  of  his  sermons  was  not  memorable ; 
what  was  attractive  was  the  charm  and 
grace  of  his  words,  vitalized  by  the 
sympathy  for  individual  people  which 
shone  behind  them.  His  capacity  for 
personal  affection  for  a  very  large  number 
of  individuals,  particularly  boys  who  had 
been  at  Stowe,  was  generally  recognized 
for  the  extremely  unusual  virtue  it  was, 
and  notably  demonstrated  one  way  of 
being  a  great  headmaster. 

Roxburgh,  who  never  married,  retired 
in  1949  and  died  at  Great  Brickhill, 
Bletchley,  6  May  1954.  There  is  a  portrait 
by  (Sir)  James  Gunn  at  Stowe. 

[Some  Notes^  on  the  Early  History  of  Stowe^ 
by  a  Member  of  the  Sixth  Form,  1932 ;  Lord 
Annan,  Roxburgh  of  Stowe,  1965;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Hugh  Heckstall-Smith. 

ROYDEN,  (AGNES)  MAUDE  (1876- 
1956),  preacher,  was  born  23  November 
1876  at  Mossley  Hill  near  Liverpool,  the 
sister  of  Thomas  (later  Lord)  Royden 
[q.v.]  and  youngest  daughter  of  (Sir) 
Thomas  Bland  Royden,  shipowner  and 
later  first  baronet,  and  his  wife,  Alice 
EUzabeth,  daughter  of  Thomas  Dowdall, 
stockbroker,  of  Liverpool.  She  was  edu- 
cated at  Cheltenham  Ladies'  College  and 
Lady  Margaret  Hall,  Oxford,  where  she 
obtained  a  second  class  in  modern  history 
in  1899.  After  three  years  at  the  Victoria 
Women's  Settlement,  Liverpool,  she  be- 
came parish  worker  at  South  Luffenham, 
county  Rutland,  whose  incumbent  was 
the  Rev.  George  William  Hudson  Shaw. 
As  a  lecturer  in  English  literature  to  the 
Oxford  University  extension  delegacy  she 
discovered  her  gift  for  public  speaking, 
which  from  1908  to  1914  was  mainly 
devoted  to  women's  suffrage ;  during  the 
last  two  years  of  this  period  she  edited  the 
Common  Cause.  The  religious  and  ethical, 
rather  than  the  strictly  political,  aspects 
of  the   women's   movement  were   those 


855 


Royden 


D.N.B*  1051-1960 


which  most  strongly  appealed  to  her, 
although  she  did  not  then  foresee  that  the 
pulpit  rather  than  the  platform  was  to 
become  her  mdtier. 

In  1917  she  accepted  Dr.  Fort  Newton's 
invitation  to  become  assistant  preacher 
at  the  City  Temple,  Anglican  pulpits  not 
being  open  to  women.  There  she  soon 
established  her  reputation  as  a  preacher. 
Throughout  her  life  she  remained  a  de- 
voted member  of  the  Church  of  England 
and  described  herself  as  'a  soul  naturally 
Anglican'  (/  Believe  in  God,  preface,  1927), 
although  after  going  down  from  Oxford 
she  had  for  a  time  been  attracted  by 
Roman  Catholicism.  It  was  the  misfor- 
tune of  the  Church  of  her  adherence  that 
her  oflftcial  connection  with  Noncon- 
formity at  the  City  Temple  (1917-20) 
synchronized  with  the  beginnings  of  the 
Life  and  Liberty  Movement  in  the  Church 
of  England,  for  it  was  that  connection 
which  lost  to  the  council  of  the  Movement 
one  whom  F.  A.  Iremonger,  in  his  Ufe 
of  Archbishop  William  Temple  [q.v.], 
described  as  'one  of  the  strongest  and 
most  influential  personalities  of  all  the 
religious  leaders  and  teachers  of  the  day'. 

In  1920  Maude  Royden  acquired  an 
interdenominational  pulpit  through  the 
'Fellowship  Services'  which  started  at 
Kensington  town  hall  but  were  soon 
transferred  to  the  Guildhouse  in  Eccleston 
Square.  There  she  found  a  work  after  her 
own  heart  in  which  she  was  ably  assisted 
by  Percy  Dearmer  [q.v.]  and  Martin  Shaw. 
Her  sermons,  deUvered  without  notes  and 
effectively  phrased,  in  which  she  drew 
upon  her  extensive  knowledge  of  theology, 
literature,  and  social  history,  covered  a 
wide  range  of  subjects,  including  current 
international  and  political  issues.  She  was 
a  demanding  and  persuasive  preacher,  her 
constant  theme  being  the  application  of 
Christian  principles  to  all  moral,  social, 
and  poUtical  problems.  What  she  called 
'hard  thinking'  was  to  her  a  Christian 
duty  and  the  'after-meetings'  for  dis- 
cussion were  an  important  part  of  the 
Guildhouse  progranune.  Among  visiting 
preachers  there  was  Albert  Schweitzer,  for 
whom  she  acted  as  interpreter.  Thanks 
to  the  generosity  of  her  congregation 
Schweitzer  was  able  to  add  to  his  hospital 
at  Lambarene  a  ward  for  mental  patients. 

Her  preaching  tours  included  the  United 
States,  Australia,  New  Zealand,  India, 
and  China.  A  student  at  Oberlin  College 
described,  thirty  years  later,  an  address 
which  she  gave  in  the  chapel  as  the 
tiu-ning-point  in  the  lives  of  many  young 


men  who  were  then  'reaching  for  faith'. 
In  the  pulpit  and  on  the  radio  Maude 
Royden  had  the  advantage  of  a  voice  of 
unusual  charm  and  distinctiveness;  but 
all  her  life  she  suffered  from  lameness  due 
to  dislocated  hips,  a  physical  disability 
which  must  have  demanded  constant 
courage  on  the  part  of  one  who  worked 
so  hard,  travelled  so  far,  and  was  by 
temperament  athletic.  In  her  younger 
days  she  was  a  keen  swimmer.  Her  courage 
of  conviction,  which  enabled  her  to 
champion  unpopular  causes,  was  never 
more  clearly  exemphfied  than  by  her 
public  renunciation,  during  the  war  of 
1939-45,  of  her  former  pacifism.  In  1936 
she  had  resigned  her  pastorate  of  the 
Guildhouse  in  order  to  devote  herself  to 
the  cause  of  world  peace. 

In  October  1944  she  married,  two 
months  before  his  death,  the  Rev.  Hudson 
Shaw,  whom  she  had  known  and  loved, 
and  whose  work  she  had  shared,  for  forty- 
three  years. 

In  1930  Maude  Royden  was  appointed 
a  Companion  of  Honour.  In  1931  Glasgow 
University  conferred  on  her  an  honorary 
D.D.,  and  in  1935  she  became  an  honorary 
LL.D.  of  Liverpool.  She  died  at  her  home 
in  London  30  July  1956.  A  portrait  by 
P.  A.  de  L^szlo  is  at  Lady  Margaret  Hall, 
Oxford. 

[The  Times,  Si  July  1956 ;  Maude  Royden, 

A  Threefold  Cord,  1947 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Percy  Mabyon- Wilson. 

RUFFSIDE,  Viscount  (1879-1958), 
Speaker  of  the  House  of  Commons. 
[See  Brown,  Douglas  Clifton.] 

RUSSELL,  EDWARD  STUART  (1887- 
1954),  biologist,  was  born  at  Port  Glasgow, 
Renfrewshire,  25  March  1887,  the  eighth 
and  last  living  child  in  his  family.  His 
father,  John  Naismith  Russell,  whose 
second  Christian  name  indicates  a  relation- 
ship with  the  famous  engineer  and  the 
well-known  artist,  was  a  minister  of  the 
Free  Church  of  Scotland.  His  mother, 
Helen  Cockburn  Young,  was  the  daughter 
of  a  blacksmith  of  East  Lothian.  Russell 
was  educated  at  Greenock  Academy  and 
Glasgow  University  where  he  obtained 
his  M.A.  in  1907.  He  worked  for  a  while 
at  Aberdeen  where  contact  with  (Sir)  J. 
Arthur  Thomson  and  through  him.  with 
(Sir)  Patrick  Geddes  [q.v.]  helped  to  colour 
the  philosophy  of  his  zoological  thinking. 
For  some  years  work  on  the  morphology 
and  general  biology  of  coelenterate  and 
molluscan  species  occupied  his  attention 


856. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Russell,  E.  S, 


and  resulted  in  a  number  of  original 
papers.  Later  his  studies  of  animals 
turned  towards  their  behaviour  and  he 
began  to  formulate  an  underlying  zoolo- 
gical faith  which  was  well  expressed  in 
a  series  of  essays  on  current  biological 
themes.  Papers  in  Scientia  with  such 
titles  as  'The  transmission  of  acquired 
characters',  'Vitalism',  and  'Evolution  ou 
]Spigenese'  are  examples.  They  culmin- 
ated in  his  masterpiece  Form  and  Function 
(1916),  a  deep  and  scholarly  summary  of 
the  various  biological  theories  of  the 
origin  and  development  of  form.  It  led 
him  to  the  conclusion  that  the  most 
rewarding  study  of  the  Uving  organism 
was  in  the  concept  of  the  dynamic  en- 
tirety of  the  individual.  MateriaUst  and 
mechanistic  explanations  were  rejected 
and  contrary  to  prevailing  opinions  he 
gave  general  support  to  Lamarckian 
views.  Other  books  developing  this  main 
theme,  or  parts  of  it,  were  The  Study  of 
Living  Things  (1924),  The  Interpretation 
of  Development  and  Heredity  (1930),  The 
Behaviour  of  Animals  (1934),  The  Direc- 
tiveness  of  Organic  Activities  (1945)  and, 
published  since  his  death.  The  Diversity 
of  Animals  (1962). 

In  1909  Russell  was  appointed  to  the 
Board  of  Agriculture  and  Fisheries. 
During  the  short  period  before  the  out- 
break of  war  in  1914,  when  the  Board  had 
recently  taken  over  fisheries  research 
from  the  Marine  Biological  Association, 
he  began  to  examine  and  make  good  sense 
of  the  mass  of  catch  statistics,  fish 
measurements,  and  condition  analyses 
which  were  being  collected.  The  war  years 
were  spent  as  a  fishery  inspector  on  the 
south  coast  where  he  combined  an  under- 
standing friendliness  towards  the  fisher- 
men, to  whom  he  had  to  interpret  wartime 
regulations,  with  a  clear  conception  of 
how  to  wield  his  administrative  powers. 
In  1921  he  became  director  of  fishery 
investigations  for  England  and  Wales,  a 
post  which  he  held  until  1945  when  he 
became  fisheries  scientific  adviser  until 
he  retired  in  1947. 

Russell's  career  in  fisheries  research  was 
long  and  luminous  and  may  be  said  to 
constitute  another  life  than  that  of  Russell 
the  philosopher,  scholar,  and  student  of 
animal  behaviour.  From  the  start  he  had 
an  eye  for  the  essentials  of  sea  fishery 
management.  This  was  well  shown  by  his 
organization  of  the  collection  of  statistics 
by  small  square  areas  and  the  taking  of 
catch  as  well  as  fishing  effort  figures  each 
month  for  trawl-caught  fish  of  the  North 


Sea.  As  theories  of  fishing  and  yield 
calculation  developed  this  method  proved 
essential  and  was  adopted  by  most  of  the 
nations  of  North-West  Europe.  Between 
the  two  wars  he  did  much  to  foster  fishery 
conservation  methods  by  the  institution  of 
mesh  selection  experiments.  Much  of  this 
work  was  done  in  the  setting  of  the  pro- 
gramme of  the  International  Council  for 
the  Exploration  of  the  Sea,  a  body  in 
which  Russell  did  a  great  deal  to  bring  the 
United  Kingdom  into  a  position  of  leaders- 
ship.  As  its  first  editor  (1926-40)  he  set 
a  high  standard  for  the  Journal  du  ConseU 
and  from  1938  to  1946  he  was  chairman  of 
the  Council's  consultative  committee.  In 
a  classic  paper  in  the  Journal  in  1931  he 
set  out  in  simple  English  and  even  simpler 
arithmetic  a  statement  of  the  chief  factors 
which  affected  the  state  of  the  stocks 
subject  to  fishing.  It  is  largely  from  this 
paper  that  the  more  efficient  dynamic 
formulations  of  the  state  of  fish  stocks 
have  been  derived  and  used  as  bases  for 
many  international  conservation  measures. 
In  1942  he  summarized  what  was  then 
known  about  fishing  theory  in  The 
Overfishing  Problem^  a  small  book  based 
on  his  De  Lamar  lectures  given  at 
Johns  Hopkins  University  in  the  spring 
of  1939. 

The  atmosphere  necessary  for  good 
research  work  can  be  difficult  to  maintain 
in  a  government  department  but  Russell 
managed  to  provide  for  his  staff  at  the 
fisheries  laboratories  a  complete  shield 
from  the  vexations  which  might  otherwise 
have  come  to  them.  This  he  achieved  by 
stationing  himself  in  London  where  in  a 
small  attic  at  43  Parliament  Street  he 
handled  all  the  administrative  relation- 
ships with  great  skill.  The  main  laboratory 
at  Lowestoft  saw  its  director  about  once 
a  fortnight,  when  he  usually  managed  to 
wander  around  the  building  in  a  quiet 
and  unobtrusive  manner  and  have  a  few 
words>  with  everyone.  His  remarks  were 
short,  sometimes  facetious  or  even  cynical, 
but  he  managed  to  convey  an  underlying 
sympathy.  Everyone  knew  that  he  had  a 
very  complete  idea  of  what  was  going  on 
and  his  apparently  casual  suggestions  to 
natiuralists  were  treated  with  great  res- 
pect. While  his  views  and  opinions  had  not 
the  contagion  of  fire,  they  penetrated  and 
prevailed  like  oil;  and  they  were  rarely 
wrong.  He  possessed  a  quality  of  humility 
and  comradeship  with  his  associates, 
particularly  with  the  ordinary  people, 
and  was  widely  known  as  'Bill'.  He  dis- 
liked pomp,  had  little  desire  for  marks  of 


857 


Russell,  E.  S, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


preferment,  and  took  up  the  office  of 
director  with  reluctance.  Nevertheless  he 
would  accept  positions  of  distinction 
when  they  lay  in  the  path  of  his  scien- 
tific interest.  He  was  president  of  the 
zoology  section  of  the  British  Association 
in  1934  and  president  of  the  Linnean 
Society  in  1940-42.  He  was  appointed 
O.B.E.  in  1930.  Intellectually  in  his  later 
years  he  turned  towards  the  nihilistic 
philosophy  of  Schopenhauer — 'nothing 
mattered' — but  the  pursuit  of  truth 
and  knowledge  in  the  Aristotelian  sense 
mattered  a  lot  to  him,  and  he  showed  a 
tender  care  for  his  fellow  men. 

In  1911  he  married  Jeanne  Amelia, 
daughter  of  Charles  Owen  Minchin,  who 
had  been  a  chief  clerk  in  the  estate  duty 
office  of  the  Inland  Revenue.  He  died  at 
St.  Leonards-on-Sea  24  August  1954. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

R.    S.    WiMPENNY. 

RUSSELL  Pasha,  Sir  THOMAS 
WENTWORTH  (1879-1954),  Egyptian 
civil  servant,  was  born  22  November 
1879  at  Wollaton  Rectory,  fourth  child 
and  third  son  of  the  Rev.  Henry  Charles 
Russell,  grandson  of  the  sixth  Duke  of 
Bedford  [q.v.],  by  his  wife,  Leila  Louisa 
Millicent  WiUoughby,  daughter  of  the 
eighth  Baron  Middleton,  whose  Notting- 
hamshire property  comprised  Wollaton 
with  eight  hundred  acres  of  deer-park. 
From  the  rector,  who  combined  the 
functions  of  parson  and  squire,  Russell 
learned,  in  an  atmosphere  of  religious 
assurance  and  sporting  affluence,  to  box, 
shoot,  hunt,  and  fish  until,  like  his  father, 
'there  was  nothing  he  could  not  catch'. 
He  was  educated  at  Cheam,  Haileybury, 
and  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  contriv- 
ing throughout  to  gratify  his  passion  for 
field  sports.  His  choice  of  career  was 
settled  when,  on  vacation  at  Applecross  in 
Ross-shire,  another  WiUoughby  'paradise' 
with  eighty  thousand  acres  reserved  for 
sport,  he  was  invited  to  visit  Cairo  by 
Percy  Machell,  a  distant  cousin,  then 
adviser  to  the  Egyptian  minister  of  the 
interior.  He  came  home  to  graduate, 
entering  Egyptian  service  in  October 
1902. 

After  apprenticeship  with  the  Alex- 
andria coastguards  he  was  appointed 
provincial  sub-inspector  in  January  1903 
and  served,  later  as  inspector,  in  every 
]^gyptian  province,  thus  acquiring  un- 
rivalled knowledge  of  local  officials,  while 
directing  police  activities  which  ranged 
from   coping   with   the   consequences   of 


Nile  floods  and  plague  epidemics  to  pitched 
battles  against  bedouin  brigands;  their 
depredations  were  virtually  eliminated 
by  the  police  camel  corps  formed  on 
Russell's  initiative  in  1906.  In  1911  he 
was  appointed  assistant-commandant  of 
police  in  Alexandria  where  he  enjoyed  a 
foretaste  of  dealing  with  city  demonstra- 
tions, 'sporting  evenings'  raiding  gambling- 
dens,  and  an  interlude  in  command  of 
western  desert  anti-contraband  operations. 
He  was  transferred  to  Cairo  as  assistant- 
commandant  in  1913 ;  in  1917,  following  a 
line  of  British  notables,  he  was  appointed 
commandant  of  the  Cairo  city  police 
with  rank  of  Lewa  (major-general)  and 
title  of  Pasha.  By  then  Egypt  was  a 
British  protectorate;  under  war  stress 
British  power,  far  from  withering  away, 
was  everywhere  in  irritating  evidence; 
smouldering  Egyptian  resentment,  fully 
comprehensible  to  Russell,  flared  into 
violence  in  March  1919;  a  clash  between 
hysterical  mobs  determined  to  demon- 
strate and  British  troops  committed  to 
enforce  a  ban,  seemed  inevitable;  but, 
thanks  to  Russell's  inspired  intervention, 
the  demonstrations  were  converted  into 
orderly  processions  which  he  led  through 
Cairo  streets,  standing  in  an  open  car  or 
on  foot,  with  a  pause  for  brandy-and-soda 
at  the  Turf  Club. 

After  Egyptian  independence  in  1922 
Russell  served  under  twenty-nine  differ- 
ent ministers  of  interior;  opposition 
leaders  were  government  quarry,  but, 
by  adroit  manoeuvre  combined  with  per- 
sonal charm,  he  mitigated  the  violence  of 
internecine  political  warfare,  notably  in 
1932  when,  reducing  crisis  to  comedy,  he 
avoided  using  force  against  an  entire 
Wafdist  shadow  Cabinet.  While  retaining 
the  esteem  of  most  politicians,  he  de- 
plored their  quarrels,  which  seemed,  in 
his  perhaps  over-simplified  view,  to 
hamper  the  real  progress  of  a  nation  he 
loved.  His  own  talents  were  increasingly 
diverted  to  the  scourge  of  growing  drug- 
addiction.  He  pressed  evidence  on  the 
prime  minister;  in  1929  the  Egyptian 
Central  Narcotics  Intelligence  Bureau 
was  formed;  as  director,  operating  with 
small  capital  resources  and  hereditary 
enthusiasm,  he  hunted  the  sources  of 
supply ;  tracks  led  to  Switzerland,  France, 
Bulgaria,  Turkey,  and  Greece.  At  Geneva 
he  bluntly  presented  his  findings.  Moral 
pressure,  backed  by  incontrovertible 
evidence,  was  so  effective  that  by  1939, 
when  he  was  elected  vice-president  of  the 
League  of  Nations  advisory  committee  on 


85a 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Sadleir 


opium  traffic,  most  European  bases  of 
supply  were  destroyed.  In  1940  Cairo 
again  became  the  pivot  of  British  military 
operations.  Egyptian  police  discipline, 
buttressed  by  Russell's  presence,  held 
firm  under  strain;  co-operation  with  the 
visiting  army  was  close,  surviving  even  the 
use  of  British  tanks  to  compel  King 
Farouk  to  change  his  ministers  in  Feb- 
ruary 1942,  a  controversial  expedient 
which  pained  and  surprised  Russell.  In 
1946,  still  popular,  he  retired,  the  last 
British  officer  in  Egyptian  service. 

Amid  the  conflict  of  Egyptian  national- 
ism, British  exigencies,  and  European 
minority  pretensions,  Russell  remained 
an  impartial  guardian  of  law  and  order, 
justly  renowned  for  professional  expertise. 
Although  political  assassinations  were  all 
too  prevalent,  the  murderers  rarely  con- 
trived to  escape.  He  was  a  remarkable 
and  solicitous  police  chief,  a  link  in  the 
best  British  tradition  with  Egypt,  and, 
by  his  campaign  to  suppress  drug  traffic, 
a  pioneer  in  an  important  international 
cause. 

Tall  and  commanding,  a  sportsman,  a 
dandy,  a  horseman  who  made  history  by 
riding  his  camel  over  fences,  as  much  at 
ease  in  his  wife's  salon  as  in  any  desert 
company,  ready  for  any  discomfort  on  an 
ibex  trail  but  a  bon-viveur  in  town,  finding 
humour  in  everything  and  friends  every- 
where, Russell  was  a  legend  in  his  life- 
time. Some  of  the  flavour  was  happily 
preserved  in  his  own  published  reminis- 
cences. 

He  died  in  London  10  April  1954, 
survived  by  his  wife,  Evelyn  Dorothea 
Temple  (died  1968),  daughter  of  Francis 
Moore,  stock-jobber.  They  were  married 
in  1911  and  had  one  son,  Sir  John 
Wriothesley  Russell,  who  became  am- 
bassador to  Spain  in  1969,  and  one 
daughter,  Camilla  Georgiana,  married  to 
Christopher  Sykes  who  contributes  to 
this  Supplement.  Russell  Pasha  was  ap- 
pointed O.B.E.  in  1920,  C.M.G.  in  1926, 
and  K.B.E.  in  1938.  He  also  held  numer- 
ous foreign  decorations.  There  is  a  post- 
humous portrait  at  Haileybury  painted  by 
John  Ward. 

[Sir  Thomas  Russell  Pasha,  Egyptian  Ser- 
vice,  1949;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  P.  J.  V.  Rolo. 

SADLEIR,  MICHAEL  THOMAS 
HARVEY  (1888-1957),  vsrriter  and  pub- 
fisher,  was  born  in  Oxford  25  December 
1888,  the  only  child  of  (Sir)  Michael 
Ernest  Sadler  [q.v.].  He  adopted  an  early 


variant  of  the  family  name,  Sadleir,  as  'a 
nom  de  plume  to  distinguish  himself  from 
his  father,  whom  he  called  'my  best  and 
wisest  friend'  and  whose  biography  (1949) 
he  wrote  with  affectionate  understanding. 
Sadleir  was  educated  at  Rugby  and 
Balliol  College,  Oxford,  where  he  took 
second  class  honours  in  history  in  1912 
and  won  the  Stanhope  prize  for  an  essay 
on  Sheridan.  In  the  same  year  he  entered 
the  publishing  firm  of  Constable,  of  which 
he  became  a  director  in  1920  and  chairman 
in  1954.  He  served  in  the  war  trade 
intelligence  department  (1915-18),  was 
a  member  of  the  British  delegation  to  the 
peace  conference  in  1919,  and  for  a  brief 
period  in  the  following  year  of  the  secre- 
tariat of  the  League  of  Nations. 

Sadleir  was  an  all-round  man  of  letters 
who  notably  distinguished  himself  in  each 
department  of  his  activity;  he  may  be 
described,  however,  as  the  most  ac- 
complished book-collector  of  his  time. 
His  achievement;  as  a  collector  not  only 
laid  the  foundation  of  his  success  as  a 
novelist  and  biographer,  but  also  affected 
his  policy  as  a  publisher.  He  began  to 
collect  books  as  an  undergraduate, 
specializing  for  some  years  in  first  editions 
of  contemporary  poets  and  novelists,  of 
certain  authors  of  the  nineties,  and  of  the 
French  symbolists  and  decadents.  About 
1918  he  reverted  to  an  early  enthusiasm 
for  the  novels  of  Anthony  Trollope  which 
led  him,  in  turn,  to  form  an  unrivalled 
collection  of  Victorian  fiction  of  the  three- 
decker  period.  This  was  developed  into  a 
sort  of  bibliographical  museum  illustrating 
the  history  of  the  novel  during  the  nine- 
teenth century,  including  cheap  editions, 
among  them  the  famous  'yellow  backs', 
and  a  variety  of  material  on  Victorian 
night-life.  He  also  collected  the  Gothic 
romances  of  the  period  of  about  1780  to 
1820,  and  this  collection  found  its  way  in 
due  course  to  Charlottesville,  Virginia, 
just  as  his  TroUopes  eventually  went  to 
Princeton,  and  his  great  collection  of 
nineteenth-century  fiction,  over  10,000 
volumes,  to  the  university  of  California 
at  Los  Angeles. 

The  first  work  which  showed  that 
Sadleir  was  destined  to  revolutionize  the 
bibliographical  approach  to  books  of  the 
machine-printed  and  edition-bound  era 
was  his  Excursions  in  Victorian  Biblio- 
graphy (1922) ;  this  was  followed  by  two 
books  which  pioneered  the  revival  of 
interest  in  TroUope's  novels:  the  admir- 
able Trollope:  A  Commentary  (1927),  which 
has  become  the  standard  biography,  and 


859 


Sadleir 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


the  masterly  Trollope:  A  Bibliography 
(1928).  His  Evolution  of  Publishers' 
Binding  Styles,  1770-1900  (1930)  was 
another  fertile  and  influential  book. 
Sadleir's  study  of  Victorian  author- 
publisher  relationships,  distribution 
methods,  and  reading  habits  culminated 
in  his  two-volume  XIX  Century  Fiction: 
A  Bibliographical  Record  (1951).  He  was 
Sandars  reader  in  bibliography  at  Cam- 
bridge University,  1937,  and  president  of 
the  Bibliographical  Society,  1944-6. 

In  his  introduction  to  XIX  Century 
Fiction  Sadleir  confessed:  'I  have  never 
undertaken  the  intensive  collection  of  any 
author  or  movement  without  the  intention 
of  ultimately  writing  the  material  col- 
lected into  biography,  bibliography  or 
fiction.'  Sadleir's  avowed  practice,  most 
strikingly  exemplified  in  the  case  of 
Trollope,  was  continued  in  biography  with 
Bulmer:  A  Panorama  (1931),  later  renamed 
Bulwer  and  His  Wife,  1803-1836,  and  its 
successor  BUssington-d'Orsay :  A  Mas- 
querade (1933).  Both  these  books  were 
sparkling  original  studies  in  the  morals 
and  taste  of  the  early  nineteenth  century. 
As  a  biographer  Sadleir  combined  a  fluent 
and  graceful  style  with  an  unusually 
discriminating  sense  of  period. 

While  Sadleir's  narrative  gift  imparted 
zest  to  his  serious  historical  writing,  his 
work  as  a  novelist  brought  him  popular 
fame.  In  his  novels  his  understanding  of 
period  was  markedly  stronger  than  his 
imaginative  impulse.  Privilege  (1921) 
chronicled  the  collapse  of  the  old  order 
which  was  accelerated  by  the  war  of  1914- 
18,  and  The  Noblest  Frailty  (1925)  had  as 
its  theme  the  decay  in  the  ruhng  stock  of 
mid- Victorian  times.  Meanwhile  Desolate 
Splendour  (1923)  had  emphasized  Sadleir's 
weakness  for  melodrama  and  his  absorp- 
tion in  the  seamy  side  of  nineteenth- 
century  life,  which  he  investigated  with 
a  sociological  passion  worthy  of  Henry 
Mayhew  [q.v.].  He  returned  to  fiction  in 
1937  with  These  Foolish  Things,  described 
by  himself  as  'a  first-person  experiment  in 
emotional  intimacy'.  Fanny  by  Gaslight 
(1940),  his  most  successful  novel,  sold 
150,000  copies  at  its  original  price  in  five 
years,  was  made  into  a  film,  and  was 
widely  translated.  Both  this  novel  and 
Forlorn  Sunset  (1947)  depicted  the  vicious 
underworld  of  the  London  of  the  1870s 
in  authentic  detail,  but  while  the  scrup- 
ulous finish  of  Fanny  by  Gaslight  enabled 
Sadleir  to  carry  off  the  element  of  arti- 
ficial melodrama  so  often  found  in  his 
plots,    Forlorn    Sunset,    no    less    highly 


coloured,  proved  a  more  rambling  and 
consequently  less  convincing  book. 

Although  he  spent  much  of  his  life  in 
London,  Sadleir  lived  for  many  years  in 
Gloucestershire  and  latterly  at  Oakley 
Green  near  Windsor.  Tall,  distinguished 
in  appearance,  alert  in  movement,  he  was 
by  nature  retiring  but,  overcoming  his 
shyness,  could  dispense  hospitality  with 
great  personal  charm.  It  was  not  only 
through  his  own  writings  that  he  in- 
fluenced the  literary  life  and  taste  of  his 
time.  WTien  his  advice  was  sought,  no 
trouble  was  too  much  for  him,  and  many 
were  the  authors  who  benefited  from  his 
encouragement  and  enthusiasm,  not  least 
those  whose  nineteenth-century  studies 
were  published  by  his  firm.  The  rare  com- 
bination in  his  work  of  original  research 
and  creative  exposition  made  Sadleir  a 
figure  of  unique  authority  in  his  chosen 
sphere. 

Sadleir  married  in  1914  Edith,  daughter 
of  Albert  Darell  Tupper-Carey,  canon  of 
the  Church  of  England.  They  had  one 
daughter  and  two  sons,  of  whom  the  elder 
was  killed  in  action  while  serving  with  the 
Royal  Navy  during  the  war  of  1939-45. 
Sadleir  died  in  London  13  December  1957. 

[The  Times,  16  and  20  December  1957; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Derek  Hudson. 

SAHA,  MEGHNAD  (1893-1956), 
scientist.  [See  Meghnad  Saha.] 

SALAMAN,  REDCLIFFE  NATHAN 
(1874-1955),  authority  on  the  potato,  was 
born  in  London  12  September  1874,  the 
ninth  of  a  family  of  fifteen,  of  whom 
seven  boys  and  seven  girls  survived  as 
adults.  The  family  home  was  at  that  time 
in  Redcliffe  Gardens  and  this  was  the 
reason  for  what  was  originally  Salaman's 
second  forename.  His  father  was  Myer 
Salaman,  an  ostrich  feather  merchant; 
his  mother  was  Sarah  Soloman. 

Salaman  was  an  exhibitioner  at  St. 
Paul's  School  and  a  scholar  of  Trinity 
Hall,  Cambridge,  where  he  was  placed  in 
the  first  class  of  part  i  of  the  natural 
sciences  tripos  in  1896.  He  qualified  in 
medicine  from  the  London  Hospital  in 
1900,  and  obtained  his  M.D.  in  1904.  At 
this  date  he  developed  tuberculosis  of  the 
lung  and  had  to  give  up  all  his  medical 
work,  spending  six  months  in  Switzerland 
and  about  two  years  in  the  country  making 
a  recovery.  He  then  bought  a  fine  house, 
*HomestaU',    in    Barley,    near    Royston, 


860 


D.N.B.  1951^1060 


Salter 


Hertfordshire,  his  home  for  the  rest  of  his 
life. 

Perhaps  largely  through  his  friendship 
with  William  Bateson  [q.v.],  Salaman 
found  his  interests  turning  to  the  study  of 
genetics  but  he  was  uncertain  of  a  suitable 
subject  for  study.  'No  one,  so  I  thought', 
he  recorded,  'had  tackled  the  genetics  of 
any  of  our  common  vegetables-;  why 
should  I  not  have  a  try?  In  the  summer 
of  1905  I  declared  my  intentions  to  my 
gardener,  a  man  of  stately  mien  who, 
looking  down  on  me  from  his  6ft.  2  ins., 
said  that  if  a  gentleman  in  my  position 
must  use  his  spare  time  playing  about  with 
vegetables,  he  would  advise  the  Potato, 
because  he  himself  knew  more  about  the 
root  than  any  man  in  England.' 

All  Salaman' s  genetical  work  was  car- 
ried out  privately  in  his  garden  at  Barley. 
There,  also,  was  discovered  in  1908  the 
genetic  resistance  to  potato  blight, 
Phytophthora  infestans ;  this  was  repeated 
in  1914,  and  the  work  was  enlarged  and 
extended  at  Cambridge. 

The  results  of  Salaman's  work  at 
Barley  were  published  in  1926  in  a  book 
Potato  Varieties.  In  1926  also  he  interested 
his  friend  Sir  Daniel  Hall  [q.v.]  and  the 
Ministry  of  Agriculture  in  the  foundation 
of  an  institute  at  Cambridge  for  the 
investigation  of  plant  virus  diseases  with 
especial  reference  to  the  potato.  This  was 
known  as  the  Potato  Virus  Research 
Institute,  directed  by  Salaman  until  1939, 
and  was  the  forerunner  of  the  virus 
research  unit  of  the  Agricultural  Research 
Council. 

Salaman's  interest  however,  was  more 
in  the  potato  than  in  viruses ;  throughout 
his  fifty  years  of  preoccupation  with  it 
there  ran  one  continuous  thread  which  had 
nothing  to  do  with  genetics,  virus  diseases, 
or  pathology,  but  was  the  study  of  the 
potato  from  a  sociological  and  economic 
point  of  view.  For  many  years  he  methodi- 
cally collected  material  bearing  on  the 
progress  of  the  potato  as  a  food  of  the 
people,  and  finally  incorporated  his 
studies  in  The  History  and  Social  Influence 
of  the  Potato  (1949). 

A  man  of  culture  and  wide  interests 
Salaman  had  many  local  activities;  he 
was  vice-president  of  the  Royston  and 
District  Hospital  and  a  magistrate  for 
forty-three  years,  being  chairman  of  the 
bench  for  twenty-three  before  he  retired 
in  1950.  He  was  deeply  interested  in  the 
Hebrew  University  of  Jerusalem  and  did 
much  to  help  it  in  its  earlier  years.  His 
other  great  interest  was  the  Society  for 


the  Protection  of  Science  and  Learning 
and  he  worked  hard  to  give  new  oppor- 
tunities to  displaced  scientists  and 
scholars  and  personally  helped  many  to 
start  again. 

Salaman  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1935, 
of  all  his  honours  the  one  he  valued 
most.  In  1955  his  election  as  an  honorary 
fellow  of  Trinity  Hall  gave  him  great 
pleasure  but  came  too  late  for  him  to 
enjoy  it. 

In  1901  Salaman  married  Nina  (died 
1925),  daughter  of  Arthur  Davis,  by  whom 
he  had  four  sons  and  two  daughters; 
in  1926  he  married  Gertrude,  daughter  of 
Ernest  D.  Lowy.  Salaman  died  at  his 
home  in  Barley  12  June  1955.  A  portrait 
by  'Chattie'  Salaman  is  in  the  National 
Institute  of  Agricultural  Botany. 

[Kenneth  M.  Smith  in  Biographical  Mem- 
oirs of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  i,  1955 ; 
personal  knowledge.]      Kenneth  M.  Smith. 

SALTER,  HERBERT  EDWARD  (1863^ 
1951),  Oxford  historian,  the  second  son 
of  a  Harley  Street  doctor,  Henry  Hyde 
Salter,  F.R.S. ,  and  younger  brother  of 
(Sir)  Arthur  Clavell  Salter  [q.v.],  was  born 
in  London  6  February  1863.  His  father 
died  when  he  was  only  eight  years  old,  and 
his  mother,  Henrietta  Laura,  daughter  of 
the  Rev.  Edward  Powlett  Blunt,  took  him 
to  live  with  her  family  at  Spetisbury  in 
Dorset.  He  attended  Wimborne  Grammar 
School.  From  it  he  won,  in  1876,  a  scholar- 
ship at  Winchester,  where  he  became 
eventually  prefect  of  hall.  From  Win- 
chester he  went,  again  with  a  scholarship, 
to  New  College,  Oxford.  He  took  a  second 
class  in  classical  moderations  in  1883,  a 
first  in  literae  humaniores  in  1886,  and  a 
first  in  theology  in  1887.  He  then  went  to 
Cuddesdon  College,  was  ordained  in  1888 
and  took  priest's  orders  in  1889.  After 
serving  as  curate  at  Sandhurst  (1888-91) 
he  was  appointed  vice-principal  of  Leeds 
Clergy  School.  He  left  Leeds  in  1893 
when  he  married  and  became  vicar,  first 
of  Mattingley  in  Hampshire,  and  then, 
in  1899,  of  Shirburn  in  South  Oxfordshire. 
It  was  during  the  ten  years  which  he 
spent  at  Shirburn,  and  when  he  was 
nearing  forty,  that  Salter  first  began 
historical  work  by  collecting  material 
for  the  history  of  his  parish.  In  1904  he 
offered  to  edit  the  Eynsham  Cartulary  for 
the  Oxford  Historical  Society.  This  was 
the  first  of  thirty-four  volumes  which 
he  brought  out  for  that  society,  and 
he 'paid  for  the  cost  of  producing  eleven 
of  them.    The   Eynsham   Cartulary   was 


861 


Salter 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


straightforward  editing  and  in  that 
respect  differed  from  the  Cartulary  of  the 
Hospital  of  St.  John  the  Baptist  (1914-16) 
and  the  yet  more  elaborate  six-volume 
edition  of  the  Oseney  CartiUary  (1929, 
1931,  1934-6)  both  of  which  were  based 
primarily  upon  the  original  deeds.  In  them 
and  in  other  works — Oxford  Balliol  Deeds 
(1913),  Oxford  City  Properties  (1926),  and 
Oriel  College  Records  (1926) — he  adopted 
the  plan  of  arranging  his  documents  under 
parishes  and,  within  the  parish,  under  tene- 
ments, and  of  carrying  down  the  history  of 
each  tenement  through  subsequent  leases 
to  the  nineteenth  century.  The  abundance 
of  his  sources  enabled  him  to  construct  a 
detailed  history  of  house -sites  in  a  manner 
which  had  not  been  attempted  for  any 
other  English  city.  The  results  are  re- 
corded in  an  unpublished  'Survey  of 
Oxford',  the  typescript  of  which  is  on  the 
open  shelves  of  the  Bodleian  Library.  He 
observed  the  principle  that  'whatever  is 
WTitten  about  Oxford  ought  to  be  thorough 
so  far  as  it  goes,  so  that  the  work  need  not 
be  done  again' :  so  his  Mediaeval  Archives 
of  the  University  of  Oxford  (1917,  1919) 
completed  the  publication  of  all  sur- 
viving university  archives  before  1485, 
and  his  Munimenta  Civitatis  Oxonie 
(1917)  contained  the  transcripts  by  Brian 
Twyne  [q.v.]  of  the  lost  city  deeds. 

Salter  did  more  than  edit.  He  contri- 
buted articles  on  ecclesiastical  history 
and  on  religious  houses  to  volume  ii  of 
the  Victoria  County  History  of  Oxfordshire 
(1907)  and  in  1933  was  appointed  to  edit, 
and  planned,  a  further  volume  on  the 
history  of  the  university  and  city.  His 
Medieval  Oxford  (1936)  was  a  publication 
of  the  Ford's  lectures  which  he  gave  in 
1934.  His  Early  History  of  St.  John's  Col- 
lege (1939)  was  compiled  from  materials 
left  by  his  friend,  W.  H.  Stevenson 
[q.v.].  And  although  he  disclaimed  ha,ving 
studied  history  of  any  kind  except  the 
medieval  history  of  Oxford,  he  edited 
for  the  Canterbury  and  York  Society 
(1922)  the  Chapters  of  the  Augustinian 
Canons  and  collaborated  with  G.  J.  Turner 
in  the  publication,  for  the  British  Acad- 
emy, of  the  Register  of  St.  Augustine's 
Abbey,  Canterbury  (1915,  1924). 

His  rich  store  of  transcripts,  largely 
from  Oxford  college  muniment  rooms, 
contained  in  nearly  a  hundred  notebooks, 
along  with  many  copies  of  plans  of 
property  in  Oxford,  is  in  the  Bodleian 
Library.  Transcribing  made  him  expert  in 
diplomatic,  as  may  be  seen  from  the  fine 
volume  of  Facsimiles  of  Early  Charters 


in  Oxford  Muniment  Rooms  which  he 
printed  privately  in  1929.  He  was  led  on 
to  a  special  study  of  the  royal  charters  of 
Henry  I,  Stephen,  and  Henry  II,  lending 
liberally  from  his  collections  both  to 
H.  W.  C.  Davis  [q.v.]  and  to  Leopold 
Delisle,  and  contributing  short  articles  to 
the  English  Historical  Reviezv. 

He  came  to  be  recognized  as  the 
leading  authority  on  Oxford  history  since 
Anthony  Wood  [q.v.].  Magdalen  College 
elected  him  to  a  research  fellowship  in 
1918,  and  this  he  held  until  1939,  de- 
voting his  stipend  to  the  cost  of  publi- 
cations. He  was  made  a  fellow  of  the 
British  Academy  in  1930  and,  in  the  same 
year,  an  honorary  freeman  of  the  city  of 
Oxford.  In  1933  he  received  from  his 
university  the  honorary  degree  of  doctor 
of  letters. 

He  was  twice  married:  first,  in  1893,  to 
Beatrice  Eva  (died  1932),  daughter  of  the 
Rev.  James  Steuart  Ruddach,  by  whom 
he  had  a  son  and  three  daughters.  Their 
son  died  when  still  a  boy  at  Winchester. 
He  married  secondly,  in  1933,  Gladys 
Nina,  daughter  of  Douglas  Dewar,  who 
survived  him.  Giving  up  parochial  duties 
in  1909,  he  went  to  Hve  nearer  to  Oxford 
at  Dry  Sandford,  and  later  at  Frilford ;  but 
in  1942  he  returned  to  Dorset,  the  county 
in  which  he  had  spent  his  boyhood, 
and  died  there,  23  April  1951,  at  Broad 
Oak,  Sturminster  Newton.  He  was  happy 
in  the  countryside;  was  given  to  the 
keeping  of  bees  and  ferrets,  to  the 
growing  of  fruit  and  vegetables,  and,  up 
to  the  last  year  of  his  life,  to  felling  trees 
and  sawing  logs.  Physically  active,  he  was 
a  good  walker ;  when  he  was  at  Shirburn  he 
used  to  cycle  the  fifteen  miles  into  Oxford 
two  or  three  times  a  week  to  work  in 
Oxford  libraries,  and  he  still  went  out 
with  the  beagles  when  he  was  seventy- 
five.  He  had  an  excellent  memory,  alike 
for  the  personnel  of  medieval  Oxford  and 
for  the  details  of  cricket  matches  played 
seventy  years  before.  He  shared  to  the 
full  the  qualities  of  industry  and  accuracy 
with  which  he  credited  an  earlier  Oxford 
antiquary,  Thomas  Hearne  [q.v.].  To  great 
modesty  he  united  shrewd  common  sense, 
and,  though  full  of  a  quiet  reserve,  he  was 
kindly  and  liberal  in  the  help  he  gave 
to  younger  students  of  medieval  history, 
a  number  of  whom  united  to  publish  in 
his  honour  in  1934  a  volume  of  Oxford 
Essays  in  Medieval  History.  The  work 
contains  a  good  photograph  of  Salter  and  a 
list  of  his  published  writings  up  to  1933. 

[The  Times,  2  May  1951 ;  W.  A.  Pantin  in 


862 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Sarkar 


Proceedings  of  the  British  Academy,  vol.  xl. 
1954;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Edmund  Craster. 

SARKAR,  Sir  JADUNATH  (1870-1958), 
Indian  historian,  third  son  of  Raj  Kumar 
Sarkar  and  Hari  Sundari,  was  born  10 
December  1870  at  Karachmaria  in  the 
Rajshahi  district  of  Bengal.  His  father 
belonged  to  a  Kayastha  zamindari  family. 
Educated  at  the  Rajshahi  and  Calcutta 
collegiate  schools  and  the  Presidency 
College,  Calcutta,  in  1892  he  stood  first 
in  the  first  class  in  the  university  of 
Calcutta's  M.A.  examination  in  English. 
From  1893  to  1896  he  taught  English  at 
Ripon  College  before  serving  as  professor 
of  English  at  the  Vidyasagar  College. 
Winning  the  Prem  Roychand  scholar- 
ship in  December  1897,  Sarkar  entered 
the  provincial  educational  service  in  June 
1898.  After  a  year  at  the  Presidency  Col- 
lege he  was  transferred  in  1899  to  Patna 
College  where  he  served  as  professor  of 
English  and  then  as  professor  of  history 
until  retirement  from  government  service 
in  1926,  with,  however,  an  interval  (1917- 
19)  as  head  of  the  department  of  history 
at  the  new  Hindu  University  of  Banaras 
and  as  professor  of  history  and  English 
literature  at  Ravenshaw  College,  Cuttack 
(1919-23).  In  1918  he  was  promoted  to 
the  Indian  Educational  Service. 

From  1926  to  1928  Sarkar  was  vice- 
chancellor  of  Calcutta  University.  From 
1929  to  1932  he  served  as  a  nominated 
member  of  the  Bengal  legislative  council. 
Appointed  CLE.  in  1926,  he  was  knighted 
in  1929.  He  was  a  founder-member  of  the 
Indian  Historical  Records  Conmiission 
(1919),  an  honorary  member  of  the  Royal 
Asiatic  Society  (1923),  Campbell  gold 
medallist  and  honorary  fellow  of  the 
Bombay  branch  of  the  Royal  Asiatic 
Society  (1926),  and  a  corresponding  mem- 
ber of  the  Royal  Historical  Society  (1935). 

As  an  historian,  Sarkar  found  the  study 
of  the  history  of  the  later  Moguls  un- 
certainly dependent  on  European  travel- 
lers' accounts  and  late  Persian  histories 
in  challengeable  English  translations.  He 
left  it  resting  firmly  upon  rich  resources  of 
contemporary  letters,  news  reports,  offi- 
cial documents,  and  histories  in  Persian, 
Marathi,  French,  and  Portuguese.  Holding 
that  Indian  historiography  at  the  be- 
ginning of  the  twentieth  century  stood 
where  European  historiography  had  stood 
at  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth,  Sarkar 
was  indefatigable  in  search  of  material 
hidden  away  in  libraries  and  private  col- 


lections in  India.  He  drew  attention  to 
the  Jaipur  archives  and  had  a  large  share 
in  the  publication  of  the  Poona  residency 
correspondence.  As  president  of  the 
Indian  Historical  Records  Commission 
Sarkar  inspired,  led,  and  directed  a 
generation  of  Indian  archivists  and  his- 
torians in  the  salvaging  of  historical  evi- 
dence. Sarkar  himself  was  ever  most 
generous  in  granting  access  to  his  own 
fine  collection  of  manuscripts,  particu- 
larly to  young  and  humble  scholars. 

In  his  own  work  on  Aurangzib  and  his 
successors  {History  of  Aurangzib,  5  vols., 
1912-24,  Fall  of  the  Mughal  Empire, 
4  vols.,  1932-50,  and  his  edition  and  con- 
tinuation of  W.  Irvine  [q.v.]  in  Later 
Mughals,  2  vols.,  1922),  Sarkar  narrated 
meticulously  the  fortunes  and  mis- 
fortunes of  the  Mogul  dynasty.  Although 
he  recognized  the  importance  of  economic, 
social,  and  cultural  history,  he  felt  that, 
for  his  lifetime,  the  establishment  of  a 
detailed  and  accurate  political  chronology 
must  be  given  priority.  But  in  his  choice 
of  subject  and  in  its  treatment  within  the 
framework  of  general  history,  Sarkar  was 
very  much  the  child  of  his  time.  Proud  of 
the  Bengali  renaissance  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  which  he  attributed  largely 
to  the  stimulus  and  protection  afforded 
by  British  rule,  Sarkar  wrote  from  the 
premiss  that  in  the  late  seventeenth  and 
eighteenth  centuries  the  history  of  India 
was  moving  in  the  right  direction  and  that 
the  passing  of  Moslem  rule  was  not  to  be 
regretted  as  under  it  India  had  lain  inert. 
Believing  that  'history  when  rightly  read 
is  a  justification  of  Providence  a  revela- 
tion of  a  great  purpose  in  time',  Sarkar  did 
not  always  avoid  anachronistic  judge- 
ments and  a  certain  lack  of  sympathetic 
awareness  of  the  dilemmas  facing  the 
peoples  of  India  in  the  eighteenth  century. 
He  regretted  that  they  failed  to  form  and 
the  Moguls  failed  to  foster  'a  compact 
nation  with  equal  rights  and  opportunities 
for  air. 

Sarkar's  study  of  Aurangzib  led  him  on 
to  Maratha  history  and  to  more  than 
fifty  years  of  friendship  and  co-operation 
with  the  doyen  of  Maratha  history.  Dr. 
G.  S.  Sardesai.  The  outcome,  e.g.  his 
Shivaji  and  his  Times  (1919)  and  House  of 
Shivaji  (1940),  did  not  altogether  please 
Maratha  sentiment  since  Sarkar  was  criti- 
cal of  what  he  regarded  as  the  mercenary 
shortsightedness  of  eighteenth-century 
Maratha  leadership. 

Sarkar's  acquisition  of  Persian,  Sanskrit, 
Portuguese,  Hindi,  Urdu,  Marathi,  and 


863 


Sarkar 


P.N.B.  1951-1960 


French  did  not  prevent  him  from  ventur- 
ing into  general  history  as  his  Chaitanya, 
Pilgrimages  and  Teachings  (1913),  India 
through  the  Ages  (1928),  and  Military 
History  of  India  (1960)  bear  witness. 
Sarkar  was  moreover  a  voluminous  writer 
in  Bengali,  popularizing  the  findings 
of  his  scholarly  work  in  his  mother 
tongue.  In  numerous  articles  for  the 
Modem  Review  and  other  English  language 
periodicals  and  newspapers  he  often  drew 
contemporary  morals  for  India  from  her 
past  history.  He  was  a  severe  critic  of 
Indian  education,  calling  for  the  estab- 
lishment of  higher  academic  standards  and 
for  reforms  of  the  examination  system. 

Sarkar  was  a  stern  Victorian  moralist, 
a  staunch  patriot,  but  critical  of  the 
generation  which  brought  India  to  in- 
dependence and  partition.  He  himself 
practised  what  he  preached — habits  of 
regularity,  frugality,  punctuality,  self- 
discipline,  and  devotion  to  his  calling. 
Reserved  and  taciturn,  sharp  and  out- 
spoken, not  a  clubbable  man,  Sarkar 
lived  up  to  his  own  conceptions,  expressed 
in  his  Economics  of  British  India  (1919, 
1st  ed.  1909),  of  the  Englishmen  of  his 
earher  days  as  'methodical,  cool-headed, 
strenuous  and  thorough  in  all  they  under- 
take, self-confident  and  filled  with  a 
divine  discontent  with  things  as  they  are'. 

In  1893  Sarkar  married  Kadambini, 
daughter  of  Madhu-sudan  Chaudhuri; 
they  had  two  sons  and  three  daughters. 
He  died  in  Calcutta  15  May  1958. 

[Life  and  Letters  of  Sir  Jadunath  Sarkar, 
ed.  Hari  Ram  Gupta,  Hoshiarpur,  1957; 
The  Times,  21  May  1958 ;  private  information.] 

P.  Hardy. 

SAYERS,  DOROTHY  LEIGH  (1893- 
1957),  writer,  was  born  in  Oxford  13  June 
1893,  the  only  child  of  the  Rev.  Henry 
Sayers,  headmaster  of  Christ  Church 
Choir  School  and  later  rector  of  Blunti- 
sham  in  Huntingdonshire.  Her  mother, 
Helen  Mary  Leigh,  was  a  great-niece  of 
Percival  Leigh  [q.v.],  one  of  the  earliest 
members  of  the  staff  of  Punch.  She  was 
educated  at  the  Godolphin  School,  Salis- 
bury, and  went  as  a  Gilchrist  scholar  to 
Somerville  College,  Oxford,  where  in  1915 
she  took  first  class  honours  in  modern 
languages.  After  teaching  for  a  year  at 
Hull  High  School  she  became  an  adver- 
tiser's copy-writer  with  S.  H.  Benson, 
Ltd.,  an  employment  which  she  retained 
until  1931. 

Her  earliest  publications  were  in  verse : 
Op,  1  (1916)  and  Catholic  Tales  (1918). 


Shortly  after  1920  she  appears  to  have 
formed  a  plan  for  earning  a  livelihood  by 
writing  detective  stories,  and  she  pro- 
ceeded, characteristically,  to  master  the 
mechanics  of  the  craft  by  making  a  close 
analytical  study  of  the  best  models.  It 
was  a  period  at  which  the  'classical'  mys- 
tery story  had  already  become  an  estab- 
lished genre  and  was  understood  to  be  the 
favourite  reading  of  intelligent  and  culti- 
vated persons.  Dorothy  Sayers  foresaw 
the  success  which  might  attend  upon  a 
more  specific  appeal  to  such  readers  whose 
approval  would  establish  a  reputation; 
and  since  the  books  need  not  be  difficult 
— except  in  the  teasing  sense — a  wider 
public  might  quickly  be  educated  up  to 
them.  There  were  already  many  ingenious 
writers,  but  most  of  them  either  wrote  in 
a  pedestrian  style,  with  little  concern  for 
anything  except  a  puzzle,  or  rashly  in- 
corporated out  of  traditional  fiction  ele- 
ments over  which  they  had  no  command. 
Dorothy  Sayers  was  not  always  to  know 
in  advance  what  she  could  bring  off.  But 
her  academic  training  enabled  her  to  learn 
quickly.  She  mastered  the  art  of  giving  a 
pleasant  literary  flavour  to  her  stories 
while  at  the  same  time  keeping  within  her 
own  imaginative  range. 

Perhaps  no  writer  of  detective  novels 
has  yet  succeeded  in  fusing  the  attrac- 
tions of  the  kind  with  the  values  of  serious 
fiction.  But  no  writer  since  Wilkie  Collins 
[q.v.]  has  come  nearer  to  it  than  Dorothy 
Sayers.  That  her  mysteries  all  fall  within 
little  more  than  a  decade,  and  that  in  the 
remaining  twenty  years  of  her  life  she 
chose  to  contribute  only  to  entirely  differ- 
ent fields,  must  suggest  that  it  was  with 
impatience  that  she  came  finally  to  realize 
the  necessary  limits  of  the  twentieth- 
century  version  of  the  sensation  novel. 
But  although  she  was  to  write  other 
things  with  success,  her  detective  stories 
are  likely  to  constitute  her  best  memorial. 
As  with  Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle  [q.v.] 
before  her,  she  remains  the  prisoner  of  her 
own  felicity  in  a  literary  form  of  which  she 
came  to  speak  without  much  respect. 

Whose  Body?  (1923),  the  first  fruit  of 
her  study,  introduced  Lord  Peter  Wimsey, 
a  private  detective  equipped  with  learned 
and  artistic  interests,  nonchalant  manners, 
an  insatiable  interest  in  crime,  and  a 
reliable  manservant  named  Bunter.  These 
attributes  in  themselves  would  not  have 
taken  him  out  of  the  ruck ;  but  Dorothy 
Sayers  developed  extraordinary  skill 
in  contriving  for  him  the  illusion  of 
penetrating  intelligence  and  outstanding 


dQ4 


©.N.B.  1051-1960 


Scholes 


powers  of  logical  inference.  Within  nine 
years  he  had  appeared  in  eight  further 
books:  Clouds  of  Witness  (1926);  Un- 
natural Death  (1927);  Lord  Peter  Views 
the  Body  (1928) ;  The  Unpleasantness  at  the 
Bellona  Club  (1928) ;  Strong  Poison  (1930) ; 
The  Documents  in  the  Case  (with  Robert 
Eustace,  1930);  The  Five  Red  Herrings 
(1931);  and  Have  his  Carcase  (1932). 
The  constant  but  varied  excellence  of 
these  was  the  product  of  a  mind  always  on 
the  alert  for  seminal  ideas. 

Monsignor  Ronald  Knox  [q.v.],  him- 
self a  writer  of  detective  novels,  told 
a  story  illustrating  this.  A  group  of 
writers  was  discussing  a  proposed  colla- 
boration in  a  play  for  broadcasting,  and 
one  was  in  favour  of  beginning  with 
a  river  of  blood  flowing  from  under  a 
curtain  and  surrounding  a  group  of  intent 
bridge  players.  Another  declared  that 
blood  would  not  behave  in  such  a  way, 
'unless  it  were  from  a  haemophiliac',  and 
the  idea  was  abandoned.  Dorothy  Sayers 
did  not  contribute  to  the  discussion  at 
this  point,  but  was  observed  to  make  an 
entry  in  a  notebook.  From  this  she  evolved 
one  of  her  cleverest  novels. 

In  her  last  few  years  as  a  mystery 
writer  she  made  some  interesting  attempts 
to  extend  her  range.  In  Murder  Must 
Advertise  (1933),  The  Nine  Tailors  (1934), 
and  Gaudy  Night  (1935)  she  allowed  in- 
creased scope  to  her  powers  as  an  atmo- 
spheric writer  and  a  writer  of  social 
comedy.  And  there  was  another  develop- 
ment. In  Strong  Poison  Lord  Peter  had 
cleared  of  a  charge  of  murder,  and  fallen 
in  love  with,  a  woman  writer  of  detective 
stories.  The  relationship  was  continued 
in  Gaudy  Night  and  again  in  Busman's 
Honeymoon  (1937),  which  was  sub-titled 
*A  love  story  with  detective  inter- 
ruptions'. Dorothy  Sayers  rang  down  the 
curtain  on  Lord  Peter  at  this  point 
(Uterally  so,  since  Bu,sman's  Honeymoon 
was  successfully  dramatized  in  collabora- 
tion with  M.  St.  Clare  Byrne).  It  seems 
probable  that  the  writer  had  come  to  share 
with  her  readers  a  sense  that  her  hero  was 
getting  a  little  out  of  hand.  She  had  pro- 
vided him  with  an  entry  for  Who's  Who 
and  with  ancestors  whose  histories  and 
iconography  she  elaborated  in  the  course 
of  private  literary  diversions  among  her 
friends.  Although  she  was  not  without 
pronouncedly  masculine  characteristics 
her  temperament  was  essentially  feminine ; 
loving  Lord  Peter,  she  contrived  for  him 
these  little  gifts  of  Tudor  portraiture  and 
sixteenth-century  manuscripts. 


The  death  of  the  detective  novelist 
was  the  birth  of  the  Christian  apologist. 
With  The  Zeal  of  Thy  House  (1937)  and 
The  Devil  to  Pay  (1939),  plays  written  for 
the  Canterbury  Festival,  she  established 
a  second  reputation  which  was  subse- 
quently much  extended  by  a  radio  drama, 
The  Man  Bom  to  be  King  (broadcast  at 
monthly  intervals  between  December 
1941  and  October  1942),  and  by  several 
similar  pieces.  From  1940  onwards  she 
published  a  number  of  volumes  con- 
taining studies,  essays,  and  speeches  on 
critical,  theological,  and  political  topics. 
She  had  already  shown  an  interest  in  the 
problems  of  verse  translation  by  pro- 
ducing Tristan  in  Brittany  in  1929 ;  in  1949 
she  published  a  translation  of  Dante's 
Inferno  and  in  1955  of  the  PurgatoriOy 
each  with  a  commentary.  She  was  at  work 
upon  the  Paradiso  at  the  time  of  her 
death,  which  took  place  at  Witham, 
Essex,  17  December  1957. 

In  1926  Dorothy  Sayers  married 
Captain  Oswald  Atherton  Fleming,  well 
known  as  a  war  correspondent,  who  died  in 
1950.  She  had  no  children,  but  adopted 
a  son.  In  1950  she  received  an  honorary 
D.Litt.  from  Durham  University. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
J.  I.  M.  Stewaht. 

SCHOLES,  PERCY  ALFRED  (1877- 
1958),  musical  writer  and  encyclopedist, 
was  born  at  Headingley,  Leeds,  24  July 
1877,  the  third  child  of  Thomas  Scholes, 
commercial  agent,  and  his  wife,  Kath- 
arine Elizabeth  Pugh.  Ill  health  limited 
his  attendance  at  school  (he  was  a  lifelong 
sufferer  from  severe  bronchitis),  but  he 
gave  much  time  to  miscellaneous  reading 
and  the  assiduous  study  of  the  elements  of 
music.  After  a  couple  of  years  earning 
lOs.  a  week  as  assistant  librarian  of  the 
Yorkshire  College  (later  the  university 
of  Leeds),  he  taught  music  at  Kent  College, 
Canterbury  (1901),  and  Kingswood  College, 
Grahamstown,  South  Africa  (1904).  On  his 
return  to  England  at  the  age  of  twenty- 
eight  his  career  began  to  take  a  more  defi- 
nite direction.  He  became  an  extension 
lecturer  to  the  university  of  Manchester  on 
what  was  coming  to  be  known  as  'musical 
appreciation',  and  continued  in  this  way 
very  successfully  for  the  next  six  years. 
Meanwhile  he  took  his  A.R.C.M.  diploma 
and  (after  a  false  start  at  Durham) 
entered  St.  Edmund  Hall,  Oxford,  gain- 
ing his  B.Mus.  in  1908. 

In  1907,  following  a  series  of  lectures 
for  the  Co-operative  Holidays  Association, 

865  Ff 


Scholes 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


he  formed  the  Home  Music  Study  Union, 
whose  organ,  The  Music  Student  (in  later 
years  The  Music  Teacher),  he  edited  from 
its  foundation  in  1908  until  1921.  He 
married  in  1908  and  in  191^  made  the 
decisive  step  of  moving  to  London,  his 
only  guaranteed  income  being  £40  a  year 
as  assistant  to  J.  S.  Shedlock,  music  critic 
of  the  Queen.  With  the  support  of  such 
men  as  H.  C.  CoUes  [q.v.]  and  (Sir)  Percy 
Buck,  he  was  soon  making  his  mark  as  a 
journalist  and  as  an  extension  lecturer  for 
the  universities  of  Oxford,  Cambridge,  and 
London.  From  1913  to  1920  he  was  music 
critic  of  the  Evening  Standard. 

When  war  broke  out  in  1914  he  was 
on  a  lecture  tour  of  colleges  in  the  United 
States  and  Canada.  On  his  return  he 
headed,  until  1919,  the  'music  for  the 
troops'  section  of  the  Y.M.C.A.  in  France, 
further  developing  his  twin  gifts  of  de- 
tailed organization  and  the  ability  to  hold 
the  attention  of  the  unpractised  listener. 
From  this  work  came  his  very  successful 
Listener's  Guide  to  Music  (1919). 

Early  in  1920  he  became  music  critic 
of  the  Observer,  following  the  abrupt  de- 
parture of  Ernest  Newman  [q.v.]  who  had 
accepted  a  substantial  offer  from  the  rival 
Sunday  Times.  For  the  next  five  years 
Scholes  filled  the  position  with  notable 
success.  His  style,  always  fluent  and  read- 
able, gained  distinction.  He  continued  to 
regard  his  role  as  primarily  that  of  an  edu- 
cator, and  was  undoubtedly  among  the 
first  to  see  the  educational  potentialities  of 
broadcasting,  the  gramophone,  and  the 
player-piano.  He  gave  a  weekly  radio 
talk  commenting  on  the  previous  week's 
broadcasts:  from  1926  to  1928  he  was 
musical  editor  of  the  Radio  Times.  He 
was  usually  at  work  on  several  books  at 
once.  His  home  was  a  busy  office  with  as 
many  as  six  or  more  typists  and  co- 
workers, including  his  devoted  wife. 

A  contract  to  provide  pianola  roll  an- 
notations for  the  Aeolian  Company  pro- 
vided him  with  the  means  to  detach 
himself  from  journalism.  In  1928  he 
moved  to  Switzerland,  and  thence- 
forward lived  in  the  neighbourhood  of 
Montreux.  The  following  year  he  organized 
an  'Anglo-American  Music  Educators' 
Conference'  at  Lausanne,  which  was  re- 
peated in  1931.  He  made  four  further 
lecture  tours  of  the  United  States.  He  was 
now  able  to  give  time  to  more  solid 
scholarship  and  his  thesis  on  'The  Puritans 
and  Music'  gained  him  in  1934  his  D.es  L. 
from  Lausanne  University. 

For  some  time   Scholes  had  planned 


a  more  comprehensive  work,  tentatively 
called  'Everyone's  Musical  Encyclopedia', 
for  the  great  new  body  of  listeners  brought 
into  being  by  radio  and  the  gramophone. 
The  book  finally  appeared  as  the  Oxford 
Companion  to  Music  in  the  autumn  of 
1938.  Scholes's  varied  experience  as 
teacher,  lecturer,  journalist,  critic,  and 
scholar  was  at  last  drawn  together  in 
one  accomplishment — 'the  most  extra- 
ordinary range  of  musical  knowledge, 
ingeniously  "self-indexed",  ever  written 
and  assembled  between  two  covers  by 
one  man'  (Grove). 

In  1940  he  made  his  way  to  England 
just  before  the  fall  of  France ;  his  wartime 
homes  were  first  at  Aberystwyth,  then  at 
Oxford,  where  he  was  elected  to  the 
board  of  the  faculty  of  music.  He  com- 
pleted a  monumental  biography  of  Dr. 
Charles  Burney  (2  vols.,  1948,  James 
Tait  Black  memorial  prize),  a  model  of 
humane  scholarship,  and  continued  his 
lexicographical  labours  with  his  Concise 
Oxford  Dictionary  of  Music  (1952)  and 
Oxford  Junior  Companion  to  Music  (1954). 
After  the  war  he  returned  to  Switzerland, 
and  built  a  house  at  Clarens.  In  1950 
the  devaluation  of  the  pound  drove  him 
back  to  Oxford,  where  he  spent  the 
next  six  years  losing  inch  by  inch  his 
battle  against  the  complications  in  his 
lifelong  bronchitis  brought  on  by  ad- 
vancing age  and  an  inimical  climate. 
Every  winter  he  returned  to  Switzerland ; 
and  there,  at  Vevey,  he  died,  31  July  1958. 
He  was  survived  by  his  wife,  Dora 
Wingate,  daughter  of  Richard  Lean,  civil 
engineer.  There  were  no  children. 

Scholes  was  of  middle  height,  and  al- 
though not  robust,  an  active  walker. 
He  worked  long  hours  with  great  concen- 
tration, with  methodical  interruptions  for 
exercise.  His  conscience  was  strongly 
protestant,  totally  divorced  from  any 
conventional  religious  expression.  He  was 
warmly  humanitarian;  a  long-standing 
and  articulate  vegetarian  and  opponent 
of  blood  sports.  There  were  those  for  whom 
his  clarity  of  thought,  total  absence  of  hum- 
bug and  affectation,  and  ironic  humour 
made  him  seem  something  of  a  philistine. 
He  was  charitable  in  good  causes,  warm 
and  generous  in  personal  dealings,  at  the 
same  time  disinclined  to  give  ground  in 
business  matters.  Traces  of  his  native 
Yorkshire  speech  remained  with  him  to 
the  end.  In  a  letter  to  his  publisher  he 
once  wrote,  'the  epitaph  I  should  desire 
for  myself,  were  it  not  already  applied 
to   another  and  a  greater  man,    would 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Schuster 


be  "The  common  people  heard  him 
gladly".' 

Scholes  valued  his  well-earned  academic 
distinctions  which  in  addition  to  those 
already  mentioned  included :  from  Oxford 
the  honorary  degree  of  D.Mus.  (1943), 
M.A.  (by  decree,  1944),  and  D.Litt. 
(1950),  and  from  Leeds  an  honorary 
Litt.D.  (1953).  He  was  an  honorary  fellow 
and  trustee  of  St.  Edmund  Hall,  Oxford ; 
an  officer  of  the  Star  of  Romania  (1930), 
F.S.A.  (1938),  and  O.B.E.  (1957).  His 
remarkable  library,  one  of  the  largest  of 
its  kind  in  private  hands,  was  acquired  by 
the  National  Library  of  Canada,  Ottawa. 
[Private  information;  personal  knowledge.] 
John  Owen  Ward. 

SCHUSTER,  CLAUD,  Baron  Schuster 
(1869-1956),  civil  servant,  was  born  in 
Manchester  22  August  1869,  the  only 
son  of  Frederick  Leo  Schuster,  merchant, 
by  his  wife,  Sophia  Ellen,  daughter  of 
Lt. -Colonel  Herbert  William  Wood, 
Madras  Army.  Schuster  was  a  second 
cousin  of  Sir  Arthur  Schuster  and  Sir 
Felix  Schuster  [qq.v.].  Schuster's  father 
and  uncles  were  born  in  England,  their 
father,  Samuel  Schuster,  having  come 
from  Frankfurt  in  1824.  One  of  the 
uncles,  the  Rev.  William  Percy  Schuster, 
became  curate  at  Corfe  Castle  and  later 
vicar  of  Lulworth.  As  a  boy  Schuster  used 
to  stay  with  him  and  so  acquired  such  a 
love  of  Dorset  that  in  later  life  he  made 
his  country  home  there.  Schuster  was 
educated  at  Winchester  and  New  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  obtained  a  second  class 
in  history  (1892),  was  called  to  the  bar 
by  the  Inner  Temple  (1895)  and  joined 
the  Northern  circuit.  His  father  having 
lost  his  money,  Schuster  had  to  earn  his 
own  living.  He  doubted  whether  he  would 
succeed  quickly  at  the  bar  and  went  as 
secretary  to  the  London  Government 
Act  Commission  from  1899  to  1902. 

There  he  caught  the  eye  of  (Sir)  Robert 
Morant  [q.v.]  in  the  Board  of  Education 
and  became  his  legal  assistant  (1903), 
legal  adviser  (1907),  and  principal  assistant 
secretary  (1911).  His  experience  under 
Morant  was  invaluable.  He  confirmed 
his  grasp  of  the  importance  and  the  work- 
ing of  local  government ;  he  was  in  close 
touch  with  Sir  Arthur  Thring  on  the 
drafting  of  education  bills  under  two 
Governments  with  widely  differing  poli- 
cies on  Church  schools;  and  he  was 
actively  concerned  in  the  consequent 
litigation. 

In    1911    Morant,    on   his   transfer   to 


national  insurance,  insisted  on  taking 
Schuster  with  him.  The  change  taught 
Schuster  new  lessons.  The  education 
office  had  been  highly  specialized.  Under 
Lloyd  George's  complicated  scheme  of 
insurance  Schuster  became  one  of  the  able 
team  of  commissioners  who  used  the 
whole  Civil  Service  as  a  single  instrument 
of  policy  to  bring  the  Act  into  operation 
within  six  months  and  thereafter  to 
administer  it.  Schuster  served  in  various 
capacities,  but  most  usefully  as  legal 
adviser. 

In  1915  the  offices  of  clerk  of  the  Crown 
in  Chancery  and  permanent  secretary  in 
the  lord  chancellor's  office  were  due  to 
fall  vacant  by  the  retirement  of  Lord 
Muir  Mackenzie.  Lord  Haldane  [q.v.] 
with  good  reason  chose  Schuster,  a 
lawyer  with  twelve  years'  experience  of 
constructive  administration  and  with  the 
machinery  of  government  at  his  finger- 
tips. Haldane  regarded  the  office  of  chan- 
cellor as  an  intolerable  burden  for  one 
minister  to  carry.  His  mind  was  moving 
towards  a  division  of  the  duties  between 
the  chancellor  and  a  minister  of  justice  to 
be  appointed  after  the  war;  Schuster,  he 
thought,  would  be  the  very  man  to  create 
the  new  Ministry  when  the  time  came. 

By  the  time  Schuster  took  up  his  post 
on  1  July  1915,  however,  Haldane  had 
ceased  to  be  lord  chancellor  and  his 
proposals  were  later  rejected  by  Lord 
Birkenhead,  the  first  chancellor  to  be  ap- 
pointed after  the  war  (and  whose  notice 
Schuster  contributed  to  this  Dictionary). 
The  lord  chancellor  continued  therefore 
to  bear  an  exceedingly  heavy  burden  and 
his  staff  had  to  make  it  possible  for  him 
to  sustain  it.  Schuster,  until  his  retire- 
ment in  1944,  enabled  ten  successive 
chancellors  to  perform  their  amazingly 
multifarious  duties. 

For  this  task  Schuster  had  natural 
advantages.  He  was  a  quick  reader  and 
thinker,  fluent  on  paper  and  lucid  in 
stating  a  case.  He  was,  on  principle,  as 
anxious  as  Haldane  himself  to  see  that  the 
right  men  were  put  in  the  right  places 
with  the  best  possible  conditions  of  service 
in  both  the  public  interest  and  their  own. 
He  had  to  adapt  his  technique  of  a  higher 
civil  servant  to  a  new  environment  in 
which  judges  receive  with  circumspection 
any  advice  from  an  emissary  of  the  execu- 
tive. A  chancellor,  although  head  of 
the  judiciary,  does  not  command  judges, 
but  seeks  their  advice.  Schuster's  role 
was  often  to  suggest  who  should  be  asked 
to  advise,   what  should  be   referred   to 


867 


Schuster 


D.N.B.  1951^1960 


a  committee,  who  should  be  invited 
to  serve,  and  what  should  be  done  with 
the  report.  He  saw  to  it  that  action 
swiftly  followed ;  and  the  judges,  the  bar, 
the  Law  Society,  and  members  of  both 
Houses  were  the  more  ready  to  give  the 
chancellor  their  help  when  they  found 
that  it  yielded  practical  results. 

The  chancellors'  reforms  during  Schus- 
ter's tenure  of  office  were  many  and 
technical.  They  included  the  Law  of 
Property  Act,  1922,  and  the  Acts  of  1925 
which  replaced  and  superseded  it.  The 
most  fruitful  committees  which  he  sug- 
gested and  on  which  he  sat  were  the 
Swift  committee  of  1919  which  led  to 
much  greater  efficiency  in  the  county 
court  system,  the  Law  Revision  Com- 
mittee of  1934  from  which  sprang  the 
first  series  of  Acts  reforming  defects  in 
the  common  law,  and  the  Rushcliffe 
conunittee  of  1944  which  gave  birth  to 
legal  aid.  But  executive  action  is  not  all 
initiative.  It  is  also  the  response  to  what 
happens;  and  the  chancellor  being  a 
kind  of  universal  joint  between  Cabinet, 
judiciary,  and  Parliament,  there  was 
hardly  a  public  event  which  did  not  call 
for  action  of  some  sort  on  his  behalf. 
Schuster  was  always  alert,  his  reaction 
to  the  news  immediate,  his  course  of 
action  soundly  planned  and  quickly  put 
in  train.  The  benefit  to  the  chancellor  was 
that  whenever  he  had  an  administrative 
decision  to  make,  Schuster  presented  the 
facts  so  clearly  and  above  all  so  fairly, 
that  the  chancellor  could  give  a  decision 
which  was  truly  his  own  in  the  brief 
time  available  to  him  for  departmental 
business. 

With  the  conspicuous  exception  of 
Lord  Hewart  [q.v.],  the  author  of  The 
New  Despotism  (1929),  who  had  a  deep- 
rooted  antipathy  to  administrators  and 
feared  them  et  dona  ferentes,  Schuster,  as 
the  years  went  by,  obtained  more  and 
more  co-operation  between  the  judges 
and  the  chancellor.  When  he  retired,  the 
bench  and  both  branches  of  the  legal 
profession  had  come  to  regard  the 
chancellor's  office  as  itself  a  Ministry 
which  could  serve  them  well,  and  through 
them  the  cause  of  justice. 

The  independence  of  the  judiciary  can 
be  more  surely  defended  by  a  chancellor 
than  by  any  other  minister.  By  stilling 
the  movement  for  a  Ministry  of  Justice 
during  his  tenure  of  office  Schuster  en- 
abled chancellors  to  retain  for  a  genera- 
tion the  duty  of  choosing  judges,  a 
^mction  on  which  the   liberties  of  the 


nation  largely  depend ;  and  if  some  of  the 
other  duties  of  the  chancellor  have  to  be 
transferred  to  another  minister,  Schuster's 
development  of  the  chancellor's  office 
will  have  smoothed  the  way  for  the 
transfer. 

From  1944  to  1946  Schuster  was  head 
of  the  legal  branch  of  the  Allied  Control 
Commission  (British  zone)  in  Austria.  He 
was  over  seventy-five  and  tackled  the 
unexpected  with  the  zest  of  a  young  man. 
After  his  return  he  initiated  a  debate  in 
the  House  of  Lords  on  Austria  (28 
January  1947)  and  wrote  a  technical  but 
lively  article  on  military  government  in 
Austria  in  the  Journal  of  the  Society  of 
Public  Teachers  of  Law  for  1947.  In  the 
same  year  he  did  good  work  as  treasurer 
of  the  Inner  Temple  in  its  reconstruction 
after  the  bombing  of  the  war.  His  mind 
never  lost  its  vigour,  and  he  died  on  28 
June  1956  while  attending  an  old  Wyke- 
hamist dinner. 

As  a  young  man  Schuster  had  black 
hair,  piercing  blue  eyes,  and  the  neat 
spare  figure  which  he  kept  all  his  life. 
He  climbed  in  the  Alps  from  the  age  of 
seventeen  and  took  to  ski  in  1921.  He  was 
the  first  man  to  be  president  both  of  the 
Ski  Club  of  Great  Britain  (1932-4)  and  of 
the  Alpine  Club  (1938-40).  At  the  age  of 
sixty-four  he  took  to  hunting  again, 
which  he  had  not  done  since  he  was  a  boy 
in  Cheshire.  His  love  of  natural  beauty 
and  his  sensitive  appreciation  of  litera- 
ture are  both  reflected  in  the  style  and 
matter  of  his  Peaks  and  Pleasant  Pastures 
(1911)  and  Postscript  to  Adventure  (1950). 

His  friendships  were  lasting  and  his 
fine  description  of  Lord  Sterndale  [q.v.] 
in  Men^  Women  and  Mountains  (1931) 
shows  the  kind  of  man  he  admired  most. 
He  had  many  of  the  prejudices  common 
amongst  Englishmen  of  his  class,  and  he 
often  gave  pungent  expression  to  his 
dislikes.  This  was  occasionally  undiplo- 
matic in  official  life,  but  for  his  friends  it 
added  spice  to  friendship. 

Schuster  was  knighted  in  1913,  appoin- 
ted C.V.O.  in  1918,  K.C.  in  1919,  K.C.B. 
in  1920,  and  G.C.B.  in  1927.  He  served 
as  high  sheriff  of  Dorset  in  1941  and  was 
raised  to  the  peerage  in  1944.  He  was  aa 
honorary  fellow  of  St.  Catharine's  College, 
Cambridge. 

He  married  in  1896  Mabel  Elizabeth 
(died  1936),  daughter  of  W.  W.  Merry 
[q.v.],  rector  of  Lincoln  College,  Oxford. 
They  had  one  son,  who  was  killed  on 
active  service  in  France  in  1918,  and  one 
daughter. 


868 


D.N.B.  1061-1060 


Scott,  F.  G.  M.-D.- 


An  oil-painting  of  Schuster  by  Harry 
CoUison  is  in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[The  Times,  29  June,  4  and  11  July  1956; 
Law  Times,  6  July  1956;  Alpine  Journal, 
1956;  Bntish  Ski  Year  Book,  1957;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Albert  Napier. 

SCOTT,  Lord  FRANCIS  GEORGE 
MONTAGU-DOUGLAS-  (1879-1952), 
soldier,  Kenya  farmer  and  political 
leader,  was  born  at  Dalkeith  1  November 
1879,  the  sixth  and  youngest  son  of 
William  Henry  Walter  Montagu-Douglas- 
Scott,  Earl  of  Dalkeith  and  later  sixth 
Duke  of  Buccleuch  and  eighth  Duke  of 
Queensberry,  by  his  wife,  Louisa  Jane 
Hamilton,  third  daughter  of  the  first 
Duke  of  Abercorn  [q.v.].  Francis  Scott 
was  educated  at  Eton  and  Christ  Church, 
Oxford,  but  did  not  graduate  as  he 
abandoned  his  studies  for  the  Grenadier 
Guards  and  the  South  African  war. 
From  1905  to  1910  he  was  aide-de-camp 
to  the  Earl  of  Minto  [q.v.],  viceroy  of 
India,  whose  daughter,  Eileen  Nina 
Evelyn  Sibell  EUiot  (died  1938),  he 
married  in  1915  and  by  whom  he  had  two 
daughters.  His  recreations  were  cricket 
and  pigsticking  but  all  this  was  ended  by 
the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914.  Severely 
wounded  in  the  leg  at  the  battle  of  Mons 
with  the  Grenadier  Guards  he  was  ap- 
pointed to  the  D.S.O.  and  mentioned  in 
dispatches.  He  served  the  rest  of  the  war 
in  command  of  the  depot  battalion  of  his 
regiment  at  Wellington  Barracks.  Many 
men  later  to  be  distinguished  or  famous  in 
the  military  and  poUtical  world,  including 
Lords  Gort  [q.v.],  Alexander  of  Tunis,  and 
Chandos,  and  Harold  Macmillan,  experi- 
enced the  measure  of  his  sense  of  duty  and 
integrity  during  this  period. 

After  the  war  Lord  Francis  Scott 
retired  vnth  the  rank  of  lieutenant- 
colonel  and  emigrated  to  Kenya  where  in 
1920  he  bought  3,500  acres  of  land  at 
Rongai  from  the  third  Lord  Delamere 
[q.v.]  and  built  his  home,  a  rather  severe 
patrician  stone  house  with  sweeping 
lawns  and  tall  dark  glossy-leaved  green- 
heart  trees.  He  soon,  in  1924,  entered 
politics  in  his  new  country  as  a  substi- 
tute for  Delamere  and  in  1925  was  elected 
in  his  own  right  for  the  Ukamba  con- 
stituency. In  1931  he  was  chosen  by  his 
colleagues  to  lead  the  settlers'  delegation 
to  give  evidence  on  closer  union  before 
the  joint  select  committee  of  both 
Houses  of  ParUament  presided  over  by 
Lord  Stanley  of  Alderley.  His  modera- 


tion and  realistic  assessment  of  the 
Kenya  opposition  to  closer  union  im- 
pressed the  committee  and  his  colleagues. 
On  Delamere's  death  in  November  of  the 
same  year  he  succeeded  him  as  leader  of 
the  European  elected  members  and  repre- 
sented the  Rift  Valley  constituency,  the 
heart  of  the  colony's  agriculture  and 
politics.  He  was  a  member  of  the  gover- 
nor's executive  council  in  1932-6  and 
again  in  1937-44  and  was  appointed 
K.C.M.G.  in  1937,  an  unusual  distinc- 
tion for  an  unofficial  representative  in 
those  restricted  days  of  colonial  official* 
dom. 

In  the  war  of  1939-45  Scott  was  again 
mentioned  in  dispatches  and  his  intimate 
knowledge  of  everyone  and  everything 
in  the  colony  served  him  well  as  military 
secretary  to  the  commander-in-chief.  East 
African  Forces,  from  1943.  His  constitu- 
ents, however,  did  not  appreciate  his  long 
and  exhausting  hours  of  work  in  Nairobi, 
often  more  than  a  hundred  miles  away 
from  their  own  troubles,  over  difficult  and 
sometimes  impassable  roads.  In  1944,  as 
a  result  of  increasing  criticism,  he  re- 
signed from  his  constituency  and  devoted 
himself  solely  to  his  military  work  until 
the  termination  of  his  appointment  in 
1946.  The  next  year  was  spent  in  England 
but  in  1948  on  his  return  to  Kenya  his 
many  old  supporters  pressed  him  to 
contest  once  again  the  Rift  Valley  seat. 
In  a  three-cornered  contest  he  was 
opposed  and  defeated  by  86  votes  by  a 
younger  farmer,  (Sir)  Michael  Blundell, 
who  had  returned  from  the  war  and  was 
to  follow  Scott  in  the  Rift  Valley  for  the 
next  fifteen  years.  In  a  momentary  wave 
of  bitterness  Scott,  after  twenty  years  of 
great  influence  in  the  life  of  the  colony, 
retired  to  Deloraine.  Subsequently  he 
felt,  however,  that  the  long  election 
campaign  had  done  much  to  mould 
Blundell's  political  thinking  and  as  a 
result  the  two  men  became  great  friends 
and  Scott  was  able  to  put  his  knowledge 
and  experience  freely  at  the  service  of 
the  younger  man  to  whom  it  was  invalu^ 
able. 

Scott's  political  views  were  not  always 
popular.  He  was  far  in  advance  of  his 
constituents  in  his  appreciation  of  the 
future  position  of  the  African  people. 
By  the  European  voters,  the  day  for 
African  responsibility  was  not  even 
dreamed  of,  but  in  1939  Scott  wrote 
a  memorandum  in  which  he  foresaw  the 
advent  of  African  poUtical  leaders  with 
responsibilities  as  ministers  of  the  Crown. 


Scott,  F.  G.  M.-D- 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


He  was  critical  of  Colonial  Office  handling 
of  educated  African  leaders  and  felt  that 
more  positions  of  responsibility  should 
be  open  to  men  like  Mbiu  Koinange 
(later  one  of  Jomo  Kenyatt^s  strongest 
nationalist  supporters).  He  was  also  heir 
to  the  full  tradition  of  opposition  to  the 
colonial  Government  which  was  the  stan- 
dard political  doctrine  of  the  day.  Perhaps 
he  was  too  optimistic  but  he  felt  that  a 
Government  formed  from  his  fellow 
settlers  would  deal  with  the  problems  of 
the  country  and  understand  the  Africans 
much  more  realistically  than  the  remote 
arbiters  of  the  country's  fate  in  White- 
hall. Above  all  he  never  ceased  to  attack 
the  Government  in  the  pursuit  of  econo- 
mies in  the  cost  of  administration.  As  he 
would  exclaim:  'The  people's  money  is 
best  in  the  people's  pocket.'  He  had  one 
bitter  disillusionment.  True  to  his  beliefs 
and  his  age  he  strongly  opposed  the 
imposition  of  income-tax.  He  finally 
agreed — much  to  the  anger  of  his  con- 
stituents—on the  understanding  that 
it  would  be  a  temporary  measure.  Subse- 
quently, when  the  Government  insisted 
that  the  system  was  intended  to  become  a 
permanent  feature  of  the  taxation  struc- 
ture he  felt  strongly,  like  the  leaders  of  the 
European  community  before  and  after 
him  in  other  matters,  that  the  British 
Government  had  been  dishonest  and  had 
misled  him.  These  may  seem  small 
problems  and  small  upsets  in  the  forma- 
tive years  of  an  African  country  but  to 
him  they  were  real  and  important  issues 
of  principle.  Spare  of  figure,  with  a 
pronounced  limp,  an  attractive  decisive 
voice,  he  was  the  embodiment  of  a 
simple  sense  of  duty  and  desire  to  serve 
his  country.  He  did  not  suffer  fools  gladly, 
indeed  was  rather  short-tempered,  but 
the  charitable  dismissed  this  with  an 
explanation  of  the  constant  pain  arising 
from  his  leg  which  was  amputated  in  1933 
as  a  result  of  his  war  wound. 

Death  came  to  him,  26  July  1952,  in  a 
manner  which  fitted  his  life  and  his 
traditions.  He  died  peacefully  after  a 
heart  attack  as  he  waited  in  his  railway 
carriage  at  Paddington  on  his  way  to 
meet  Queen  Elizabeth  at  Windsor  on  the 
occasion  of  the  presentation  of  new 
colours  to  the  Blues. 

An  excellent  portrait  of  him  by  Sir 
Oswald  Birley,  the  property  of  the 
Government  of  Kenya,  is  hung  at  Delor- 
aine  on  loan  to  his  elder  daughter. 

[Personal  knowledge.] 
... ,,  Michael  Blundell. 


SCOTT,  Sir  GILES  GILBERT  (1880- 
1960),  architect,  was  born  in  Church  Row, 
Hampstead,  9  November  1880,  the  son  of 
George  Gilbert  Scott,  a  noted  exponent 
of  the  Gothic  revival  in  Britain,  and  his 
wife,  Ellen  King-Sampson.  He  was  a 
grandson  of  Sir  George  Gilbert  Scott 
[q.v.],  chiefly  remembered  for  that 
courageous  work,  the  Albert  Memorial. 
He  was  educated  at  Beaumont  College; 
then  became,  in  1898,  a  pupil  of  the 
architect  Temple  Moore  [q.v.]  in  whose 
office,  probably,  he  saw  the  possibility  of 
designing  in  Gothic,  without  reproducing 
all  its  detail.  There  too,  by  working  at 
night,  he  went  in  for  and  won  the  com- 
petition for  the  new  Liverpool  Anglican 
cathedral.  This  remarkable  feat  embar- 
rassed the  selection  committee  when  it 
discovered  the  winner  to  be  a  young  man 
of  twenty-two,  of  no  experience,  and 
furthermore  a  Roman  Catholic.  Scott 
himself  was  surprised.  Nevertheless  he 
was  appointed  architect  for  the  cathedral, 
with  G.  F.  Bodley  [q.v.j,  once  a  pupil  of 
Sir  Gilbert  Scott,  as  collaborator.  That 
imposition  was  removed  when  the  plans 
were  finally  drawn  up  and  the  first  con- 
tract placed  in  1903. 

This  great  undertaking  covered  an  area 
almost  twice  that  of  St.  Paul's.  Scott 
made  all  the  drawings  and  onlv  one  major 
revision :  he  abandoned  the  twin  towers  of 
his  winning  design  in  favour  of  a  much 
larger  central  tower.  Looking  at  the 
whole  exterior  sixty  years  later  one  is 
struck  by  the  dependence  on  mass  rather 
than  intricacy,  and  on  well-proportioned 
stone  surfaces,  deftly  pierced  by  windows 
betraying  no  more  than  a  Gothic  ancestry. 
The  cathedral  shows  both  a  knowledge  of 
structure  and  a  belief  in  its  anatomy  as 
the  chief  factors  in  architectural  design. 

Naturally  such  an  early  triumph 
launched  Giles  Scott  on  an  evenly  suc- 
cessful career.  The  other  churches  he  was 
asked  to  design  in  the  ensuing  years  all 
had  a  quality  traceable  to  the  parent 
building  at  Liverpool:  the  same  reliance 
on  mass  for  effect;  a  look  of  strength 
always;  together  with  an  i'naginative 
and  wise  handling  of  detail.  He  never 
repeated  himself;  but,  when  he  was  able 
to  incorporate  it,  he  preferred  a  strong 
square  tower  at  the  west  end.  An  excep- 
tion to  this  is  St.  Alban's  at  Golders 
Green,  where  a  very  squat  central  tower 
draws  together  happily  the  sloping  tiled 
roofs  grouped  round  it.  Another  is  the 
chapel  for  Charterhouse  School.  This  is 
no  more  than  a  long,  narrow,  and  lofty 


87Q 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Scott,  G.  G^ 


edifice,  almost  in  the  class  of  industrial 
architecture ;  but  admirably  proportioned 
and  lit  by  tall  narrow  windows  with  deep 
reveals.  More  interesting  is  the  large  chapel 
for  Ampleforth  Abbey  in  Yorkshire, 
which  took  over  twenty  years  to  build. 
One  is  impressed  again  here  by  the 
massive  piling  up  of  the  exterior;  and, 
internally,  by  tlie  roughly  plastered  sur- 
faces between  the  piers  and  arches.  Scott 
was  inspired  by  the  narrowness  of  the  site 
allowed  to  the  chapel  to  form  a  crypt 
under  the  south  half  of  the  slope  of  the 
ground,  which  provides  space  for  side 
chapels  and  is  reached  most  attractively 
by  a  wide  stone  staircase  taking  up  much 
of  the  south  transept.  Moreover,  the  high 
altar,  standing  roughly  in  the  centre,  is  a 
double  one  facing  east  and  west.  A  strong 
richly  designed  stone  baldachino  rises 
darkly  to  a  great  height  above  it. 

Other  churches  which  must  be 
mentioned  are  St.  Michael's,  Ashford, 
Middlesex;  St.  Francis,  Terriers,  Buck- 
inghamshire; St.  Andrew's,  Luton;  and 
St.  Maughold's,  Ramsey,  Isle  of  Man.  The 
last  two  have  west  end  towers.  The  church 
Scott  built  in  Oldfield  Lane,  Bath,  differs 
from  those  four  in  that  it  achieves  unusual 
charm  from  its  great  simplicity  inside. 
The  aisles  are  divided  from  the  nave  by 
very  short  fat  round  columns,  joined  by 
thick  semi-circular  arches,  which  spring 
from  sculptured  capitals  reminiscent  of 
ninth-century  work  in  the  Vosges.  Then 
there  is  Oban  cathedral,  built  for  the 
Roman  Catholic  diocese  of  Argyll  and  the 
Isles;  a  late  work,  and  not  very  well 
known;  but  finished  in  time  for  Scott 
to  see  it.  All  his  churches  with  west  end 
towers  are  crowned  by  this  instance:  the 
massive  square  feature,  built  in  roughly 
hewn  granite — grey  with  a  touch  of  pink — 
stands  very  dominantly  almost  on  the 
edge  of  the  sea,  facing  the  Atlantic  blasts. 
It  is  anchored  there  by  twin  porches  at  its 
base,  rising  unusually  high  but  effectively 
integral  with  the  tower  itself.  Although  a 
small  cathedral,  it  looks  large  inside,  due 
partly  to  the  absence  of  subdivisions  in 
its  length  and  partly  to  the  extreme 
simplicity — almost  innocence — of  the 
treatment.  The  nave  piers  are  very  tall 
and  very  plain;  and  a  rugged  look  is 
given  by  the  roof,  seemingly  constructed 
of  old  ships'  timbers.  The  high  altar, 
again,  richly  outshines  all  the  other 
furnishings.  Oban  cathedral  is  a  notable 
example  of  a  design  most  suitable  to  its 
site  and,  in  every  way,  to  its  purpose.  It 
was  Scott's  power  to  grasp  clearly  the 


practical  object  of  a  building  and  design 
it  on  that  basis.  Appearance  followed 
from  the  expression  of  this  more  than 
from  a  preconceived  idea  of  beauty. 

The  University  Library  which  Scott 
built  for  Cambridge  is  little  more  than 
a  towering  bookstack.  Fortunately  it  is 
not  overwhelmingly  too  near  the  ancient 
colleges.  But  the  large  addition  to  the 
Bodleian  at  Oxford  had  of  necessity  to  be 
in  the  centre  of  the  city  to  provide  storage 
for  millions  of  books  within  easy  reach  of 
the  ancient  reading-rooms.  An  immense 
stack  on  a  corner  site  in  Broad  Street 
would  have  been  impossible.  Hence  the 
new  structure,  deeply  sunk  into  the  earth 
and  screened  by  two  elevations  no  higher 
than  its  neighbours.  In  an  attempt  to  be 
polite  to  these — ^which  vary  from  late 
Gothic  to  Victorian  Tudor — Scott  pro- 
duced a  not  very  impressive  neo- Jacobean 
design.  If  this  is  compared  to  the  addition 
he  made  to  Clare  College,  Cambridge,  the 
Bodleian  extension  loses  interest.  For  the 
former  is  the  straight  provision  of  two 
blocks  of  rooms  in  a  simple  Georgian 
idiom,  linked  by  a  memorial  arch  of  great 
beauty.  The  unexpected  value  of  this  lies 
in  its  showing  that  Scott  could  design  in 
the  spirit  of  the  late  eighteenth  century 
with  a  facility  equalling  his  handling  of 
Gothic. 

Scott  was  appointed  architect  for  the 
new  Waterloo  Bridge  in  1932 ;  and  it  was 
opened  to  traffic  in  1945.  This  is  an 
engineering  work  married  to  architecture 
most  properly  and  in  sharp  contrast  to 
the  fanciful  liaison  of  Tower  Bridge.  The 
clean  sweep  of  the  five  unadorned  arches 
reflects  admirably  the  invisible  steel 
anatomy.  One  feels  and  enjoys  the 
tension  expressed  in  the  form.  The  great 
spans  bounding  across  the  Thames  testify, 
to  the  purpose  of  the  structure — the  rapid 
conveyance  of  traffic.  And  again,  the  right 
collaboration  between  engineer  and  archi- 
tect can  be  appreciated  in  the  great  Batter- 
sea  power-station.  Its  high  walls  of  plain 
good  brickwork  seem  as  if  they  encased  big 
machinery ;  while  the  huge  chimneys — as 
pleasant  to  look  at  as  many  campaniles — • 
hint,  in  the  strength  and  delicacy  of  their 
design,  at  the  puffing  of  smoke  in  tall 
clouds. 

Some  restoration  of  buildings  damaged 
or  destroyed  by  enemy  bombing  in  the 
war  of  1939-45  fell  to  his  lot.  The  mid- 
Victorian  Gothic-revival  Carmelite  churcH 
in  Kensington,  popular  but  of'little  charm, 
with  a  number  of  altars  in  the  sugary 
foiui^eenth-century  style  much  favoured 


871 


Scott,  G.  G. 


D.N.B.  1051-1060 


at  that  time,  was  practically  obliterated. 
Scott  made  no  attempt  to  reproduce  it; 
as  the  church  was  hemmed  in  closely  by 
narrow  streets  at  each  side,  he  made  the 
new  building  follow  the  plan'  of  the  old 
but  lit  it  with  top  lights  inserted  in  the 
curve  of  the  roof.  His  restoration  of  the 
Guildhall  consisted  chiefly  of  saving  what 
remained  and  strengthening  the  roof 
with  steel,  inserted  above  the  old  timbers. 
In  what  amounted  to  a  rebuilding  of  the 
House  of  Commons,  Scott  was  instructed 
by  the  select  committee  to  re -state  the 
Chamber  in  its  original  form,  but  to 
eliminate  much  of  the  ecclesiastical 
Gothic  detail  and  ornament.  The  founda- 
tion stone  was  laid  in  1948  and  the  new 
Chamber  first  used  in  October  1950. 

Scott  was  elected  an  associate  of  the 
Royal  Academy  in  1918  and  a  full 
academician  in  1922.  He  was  knighted  in 
1924  and  appointed  to  the  Order  of  Merit 
in  1944.  He  was  an  honorary  D.C.L.  of 
Oxford  (1933)  and  LL.D.  of  Liverpool 
(1925)  and  of  Cambridge  (1955).  He  re- 
ceived the  Royal  gold  medal  of  the  Royal 
Institute  of  British  Architects  (of  which 
he  became  a  fellow  in  1912)  in  1925; 
in  1933-5  he  was  president  of  the  Insti- 
tute which  celebrated  its  centenary  in 
1934.  When  in  1949  Princess  Ehzabeth 
presented  him  with  the  Albert  medal  of 
the  Royal  Society  of  Arts  she  hailed  him 
as  *the  builder  of  a  lasting  heritage  for 
Britain'. 

This  excellent  architect  was  a  man  of 
medium  height  and,  at  first  sight,  not 
unduly  impressive,  in  view  of  his  high 
distinction.  He  was  very  modest  and 
approachable,  with  a  charming  sense  of 
humour.  Golf  was  his  great  recreation. 
He  married  in  1914  Louisa  Wallbank 
Hughes  who  died  in  1949,  leaving  two 
sons.  Scott  himself  died  in  London  8 
February  1960.  The  National  Portrait 
Gallery  possesses  drawings  of  him  by 
Robin  Guthrie  and  Powys  Evans  and  a 
painting  by  R.  G.  Eves. 
^  [Private  information.]     A.  S.  G.  Butler. 

'r'.P, 

SCOTT-JAMES,      ROLFE       ARNOLD 

(1878-1959),  journalist,  editor,  and  literary 
critic,  was  bom  at  Stratford  on  Avon  21 
December  1878,  the  son  of  the  Rev.  John 
Scott  James,  a  Congregational  minister,  by 
his  wife,  Elizabeth  Barnard.  He  was  the 
youngest  but  one  of  eight  children,  six 
of  them  girls.  They  were  an  enterprising 
family  whose  active  careers  took  them  to 
many  parts  of  the  world.  Scott-James 
was  educated   at  Mill   Hill    School   and 


won  a  scholarship  to  Brasenose  College, 
Oxford.  After  obtaining  a  third  class  in 
literae  humaniores  (1901)  he  worked  at  the 
Canning  Town  Settlement  and  at  Toynbee 
Hall  before  joining  the  staff  of  the  Daily 
News  in  1902.  He  was  appointed  literary 
editor  at  the  early  age  of  twenty-seven 
and  occupied  this  post  with  notable 
success  for  the  next  six  years,  during 
which  he  also  became  a  leader-writer  for 
the  paper,  his  assistant  editor  at  this  time 
being  the  essayist  Robert  Lynd  (whose 
notice  he  subsequently  contributed  to 
this  Dictionary). 

The  Daily  News  was  a  journal  rooted 
in  the  Liberal  and  humanitarian  tradi- 
tion— Dickens  had  been  its  first  editor — 
and  Scott-James  himself  possessed  a 
strongly  developed  social  conscience: 
this  manifested  itself  at  many  different 
points  in  his  career  in  activities  which, 
if  distinct  from  his  literary  gifts,  at  the 
same  time  enriched  them.  He  travelled  in 
Macedonia  shortly  before  the  first  Balkan 
war  and  served  for  many  years  on  the 
Balkan  Committee;  and  immediately 
after  the  loss  of  the  Titanic  he  sailed  to 
America  in  her  sister-ship  to  investigate 
the  case  of  the  five  hundred  firemen  who 
had  struck  in  protest  against  conditions 
revealed  by  the  sinking  of  the  liner.  He 
was  also  one  of  the  earliest  advocates  of 
the  National  Theatre,  championed  the 
idea  in  the  Daily  News,  and  remained  a 
member  of  the  committee  until  the  end 
of  his  life.  These  experiences  sharpened 
his  awareness  of  the  potentialities  of  press 
comment,  and  in  1913  he  published  The 
Influence  of  the  Press,  a  study  of  news- 
papers as  a  factor  in  moulding  public 
opinion.  He  was  a  lifelong  supporter  of 
the  Liberal  Party  and  frequently  wrote 
political  commentaries  for  the  Daily  News. 
In  1924  he  contributed  a  report  on 
'Housing  Conditions  in  Mining  Areas'  to 
Lloyd  George's  survey  of  Coal  and  Power 
and  in  1932,  the  year  of  Roosevelt's  first 
election  as  president,  he  accompanied 
Lloyd  George's  tour  of  the  United  States 
as  correspondent  for  the  Daily  Chronicle. 
During  his  years  with  the  Daily  News 
Scott-James  became  acquainted  with 
many  of  the  principal  figures  of  the 
Edwardian  literary  world,  and  among 
the  younger  generation  he  was  a  close 
friend  of  Wyndham  Lewis  [q.v.].  In 
March  1914  he  became  the  first  editor  of 
the  New  Weekly,  one  of  the  most  vigor- 
ous journals  of  a  period  which  abounded 
in  new  and  meteoric  literary  enterprises. 
Within    four    months    its    contributors 


872 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


Scott-Paine 


included  Agate,  Belloc,  Bennett,  Chester- 
ton, W.  H.  Davies,  de  la  Mare,  Ford 
Madox  Hueffer  (later  Ford),  Forster, 
Galsworthy,  Gosse,  Cunninghame  Gra- 
ham, Edward  Thomas,  Tomlinson,  Wells, 
Yeats,  and  the  French  critic  Val^ry 
Larbaud.  The  New  Weekly  quickly  earned 
a  high  prestige,  but  it  could  not  survive 
the  outbreak  of  war.  At  the  age  of  thirty- 
seven  Scott-James  enlisted  and  was  com- 
missioned in  the  Royal  Garrison  Artillery. 
He  served  in  France,  rose  to  the  rank  of 
captain,  and  in  1918  was  awarded  the 
M.C. 

In  the  following  year  he  returned  to 
journahsm:  he  worked  from  1919  to  1930 
as  leader-writer  for  the  Daily  Chronicle, 
from  1933  to  1935  and  throughout  the  war 
of  1939-45  as  leader-writer  and  assistant 
editor  of  the  Spectator,  and  he  was  well 
known  to  the  readers  of  the  Christian 
Science  Monitor  as  a  leader-writer  on 
foreign  news.  In  1940  he  became  editor 
of  the  British  Council  monthly  journal 
Britain  To-day,  an  appointment  which  he 
held  until  1954,  when  he  was  appointed 
O.B.E.  Apart  from  his  versatility  in 
daily  journalism,  his  more  permanent 
achievements  undoubtedly  lay  in  Uterary 
criticism  and  in  editorship,  where  he 
combined  an  intellectual  integrity  with 
a  warmth  of  personality  which  greatly 
endeared  him  to  his  colleagues. 

In  1934  Scott- James  succeeded  Sir  John 
Squire  [q.v.]  as  editor  of  the  London 
Mercury,  In  the  first  editorial  Squire  had 
claimed  a  wider  scope  than  that  of  any 
previous  English  literary  magazine,  and 
the  jom*nal  published  poetry,  fiction,  and 
belles-lettres  besides  reviewing  literature 
and  the  arts.  Scott-James  proved  himself 
both  an  exacting  and  a  receptive  editor: 
he  restored  the  originally  high  standard 
of  visual  presentation  and  continued  to 
broaden  the  range  of  contributors.  If  the 
Mercury  did  not  attain  the  critical  power 
of  the  Criterion  or  Scrutiny,  nevertheless 
it  performed  the  important  function  of 
bringing  together  the  new  and  the  estab- 
lished, and  its  last  issue  in  April  1939 
fittingly  contained  one  of  its  finest  contri- 
butions, W.  H.  Auden's  'In  Memory  of 
W.  B.  Yeats'. 

Of  Scott-James's  critical  writings  Th£ 
Making  of  Literature  (1928)  remains  a 
remarkably  perceptive  survey  of  the  de- 
velopment not  only  of  criticism  but  of  the 
literary  aesthetic  from  the  Periclean  age 
to  the  twentieth  century.  If  the  approach 
is  a  little  academic  compared  with  that  of 
the  critical  pioneers  of  the  inter-war  years. 


the  book  admirably  illustrates  the  breadth 
of  its  author's  classical  scholarship,  his 
inquiring  cast  of  mind,  and  his  recogni- 
tion of  an  underlying  unity  in  the  creative 
processes  of  literature.  His  Fifty  Years 
of  English  Literature  1900-1950  (1951) 
reveals  the  catholicity  of  his  taste  and 
his  capacity  to  communicate  his  enjoy- 
ment of  the  imaginative  writing  of  his 
lifetime.  His  other  pubhcations  include 
Modernism  and  Romance  (1908),  Persona^ 
lity  in  Literature  (1913),  and  short  studies 
of  Thomas  Hardy  (1951)  and  Lytton 
Strachey  (1955). 

Scott- James  married  in  1905  Violet 
Eleanor  (died  1942),  daughter  of  Captain 
Arthur  Brooks ;  there  were  a  son  and  tw© 
daughters  of  the  marriage:  Marie,  a 
literary  critic  (died  1956),  and  Anne,  well 
known  as  a  journalist.  His  second  mar- 
riage, to  Paule  Honorine  Jeanne,  daughter 
of  P.  E.  Lagarde  (barrister,  Paris  Court  of 
Appeal)  and  head  of  the  department  ot 
French  at  the  London  School  of  Econo- 
mics, took  place  in  1947.  ( 

Scott-James  died  in  London  3  Novem- 
ber 1959. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
I.  Scott- KiL VERT. 

SCOTT-PAINE,    CHARLES    HUBERT 

(1891-1954),  pioneer  of  aviation  and  of 
high-speed  motor-boats,  was  born  at  New 
Shoreham,  Sussex,  11  March  1891,  one  of 
three  sons  of  Henry  Paine,  an  iron- 
monger, by  his  wife,  Roseanna  Scott. 
From  his  earliest  youth  Paine  (he  and  his 
brothers  later  added  their  mother's  family 
name  to  their  own)  had  a  passion  for  the 
sea  and  ships.  In  the  best  tradition,  he  is. 
said  to  have  run  away  to  sea  from  school. 
However,  in  1910  he  had  a  short  flight  in 
an  aeroplane  and  this  was  the  start  of  an 
equal  enthusiasm  for  the  air.  In  1912  he 
met  Noel  Pemberton  Billing  who  was 
already  active  in  aviation  and  in  thC; 
following  year  Scott-Paine  joined  Pember- 
ton Billing,  Ltd.,  on  its  formation  to 
manufacture  seaplanes  at  Woolston, 
Southampton.  This  company,  which  later 
became  Supermarine,  concentrated  from 
the  beginning  on  flying  boats:  seaplanes 
with  hulls  which  performed  the  dual 
functions  of  accommodation  and  flotation. 
The  first  Supermarine  product,  an  ad- 
vanced but  unsuccessful  flying  boat  with 
circular-section  hull,  was  displayed  at 
the  fifth  Aero  Show  held  at  Olympia  in 
1914.  Following  the  outbreak  of  war  the 
prototype  of  a  landplane  scout  was 
designed   and   built   in   the   remarkably 


873 


Scott-Paine 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


short  time  of  eight  days.  This  was  followed 
by  a  number  of  other  experimental  air- 
craft of  unusual  design. 

When  Pemberton  Billing  joined  the 
Royal  Naval  Air  Service  in  1914  Scott- 
Paine  became  the  firm's  general  manager. 
In  1916  Pemberton  Billing  entered  Parlia- 
ment and  sold  his  interest  in  Supermarine, 
transferring  some  of  his  shares  to  Scott- 
Paine  who  became  managing  director. 
For  the  rest  of  the  war,  under  government 
control,  Supermarine  manufactured  in 
quantity  a  successful  series  of  flying  boats. 
It  also  produced  several  experimental 
seaplanes  to  Admiralty  designs.  In  1919, 

1922,  and  1923  Scott-Paine  entered 
Supermarine  seaplanes  for  the  inter- 
national Schneider  Trophy  races.  Victory 
in  1922  and  three  successive  Supermarine 
victories  some  years  later  were  finally  to 
win  the  contest  outright  for  Britain  in 
1931  with  (Sir)  John  Boothman  [q.v.]  as 
pilot. 

In  1919  Scott-Paine  opened  a  flying- 
boat  airline  service  to  the  Isle  of  Wight, 
and,  in  the  following  year,  one  between 
Southampton  and  Le  Havre.  These 
experimental  services  did  not  long  sur- 
vive but  in  1923  Scott-Paine  and  (Sir) 
James  Bird  [q.v.],  who  had  joined  Super- 
marine  in  1919,  founded  the  British 
Marine  Air  Navigation  Co.,  Ltd.  This 
pioneer  airline  operated  regular  services 
from  Southampton  to  the  Channel  Islands 
with  Supermarine  flying  boats  and  be- 
came one  of  the  four  constituent  com- 
panies in  the  national  'chosen-instrument' 
airline,  Imperial  Airways,  Ltd.,  formed  in 
1924.  Scott-Paine  remained  on  the  board 
of  Imperial  Airways  until  it  was  itself 
absorbed  into  British  Overseas  Airways 
Corporation  after  the  latter's  formation 
m  1939. 

In  1922  outside  interests,  represented 
on  the  board  by  Bird,  took  shares  in  Super- 
marine  and  acquired  complete  control  in 

1923,  when  Scott-Paine  left  the  company. 
He  and  a  colleague  then  bought  the  boat- 
yard of  May,  Harden  and  May  at  Hythe 
near  Southampton,  and  there  in  1927 
founded  the  British  Power  Boat  Co.,  Ltd., 
of  which  he  remained  chairman  for  the 
rest  of  his  life.  His  enthusiasm  for  the  sea 
was  given  greater  scope  in  the  new  com- 
pany, and  he  was  able  to  concentrate  en- 
tirely on  the  fascinations  of  producing 
and  racing  high-speed  motor-boats.  A 
skilful  boat  driver,  he  won  many  races  and 
made  records  himself. 

The  most  famous  of  his  boats,  'Miss 
Britain  III'  (now  in  the  National  Mari- 


time Museum),  was  the  first  really  suc- 
cessful all-metal  motor-boat  and  the  first 
to  be  powered  with  an  aero-engine.  From 
this  boat  were  developed  the  Royal  Navy's 
M.T.B.s  and  motor  gunboats  and  the 
R.A.F.'s  rescue  launches  which  rendered 
notable  service  during  the  war  of  1939-45. 
Shortly  before  the  war  started  Scott- 
Paine  took  one  of  his  boats  to  the  United 
States  and  the  Electric  Boat  Company  of 
Bayonne,  N.Y.,  undertook  the  manu- 
facture of  similar  craft  for  the  U.S.  Navy. 
Scott-Paine  then  settled  in  Greenwich, 
Connecticut,  and  formed  the  Marine 
Design  and  Engineering  Development 
Corporation  and  the  Canadian  Power 
Boat  Co.,  Ltd.  After  the  war  he  was 
associated  with  the  Sea  Beaver  Corpora- 
tion at  Greenwich  which  successfully 
marketed  fast  pleasure  boats  and  later 
became  a  supplier  of  PT  boats  to  the 
U.S.  Navy. 

Scott-Paine  was  a  burly,  good-natured, 
exceptionally  energetic  man,  with  a  will 
to  get  things  done.  His  far-sightedness 
stimulated  the  early  development  of 
marine  aircraft  and  their  later  application 
to  air  transport.  He  made  a  significant 
contribution  to  the  inauguration  of  the 
airline  industry  and  was  one  of  the  most 
important  figures  in  the  development  of 
the  modern  high-speed  motor-boat,  by 
initiating  the  hard-chine  boat  of  high 
power-to-weight  ratio  which  owed  much 
to  aircraft  design  and  construction  tech- 
niques. His  sound  engineering  common 
sense  and,  particularly,  his  practical  eye 
for  good  hull  design  contributed  to  the 
success  of  the  early  Supermarine  aircraft 
and  later  to  that  of  his  motor-boats.  It 
also  helped  him  to  make  full  use  of  engin- 
eers like  R.  J.  Mitchell  [q.v.]  who  joined 
Supermarine  as  Scott-Paine's  personal 
assistant  in  1916,  became  chief  engineer 
in  1919,  and  later  designed  the  Spitfire 
and  other  outstanding  aircraft.  Scott- 
Paine  was  a  born  salesman  and  this  quality 
almost  as  much  as  their  intrinsic  merits 
was  perhaps  responsible  for  the  success  of 
his  boats. 

Scott-Paine  was  first  married  between 
the  wars  but  was  later  separated  from  his 
wife.  He  married  a  second  time  in  1946,  to 
Margaret  Dinkeldein,  and  had  a  son  and 
three  daughters.  He  died  14  April  1954 
at  his  home,  Smythe  House,  Greenwich, 
Connecticut. 

[Aeroplane,  9  October  1953  and  30  April 
1954 ;  Flight,  18  April  1940,  2  October  1953, 
29  January  1954,  and  30  April  1954;  C.  G. 
Grey,  British  Fighter  Planes,  1941,  and  Sea- 


874 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Senanayake 


flyers,  1942 ;  Jane's  All  the  World's  Aircraft, 
1913-23 ;  private  information.] 

Peter  W.  Brooks. 

SENANAYAKE,  DON  STEPHEN  (1884- 
1952),  first  prime  minister  of  Ceylon,  was 
born  in  Ceylon  20  October  1884,  the 
younger  son  of  Mudaliyar  Don  Spater 
and  Elizabeth  Catherine  Senanayake.  His 
father,  a  devout  Buddhist,  none  the  less 
sent  his  elder  son  to  an  English  university 
and  the  younger  to  St.  Thomas's  College, 
Colombo.  There  he  made  his  mark,  not  as 
a  scholar  but  as  a  keen  sportsman  and 
ardent  cricketer.  He  remained  a  loyal 
supporter  of  his  old  school  and  became 
a  member  of  its  governing  body.  After 
a  short  period  as  a  clerk  in  the  surveyor- 
general's  office  he  left  to  manage  the 
family  coconut  and  rubber  estates  and 
their  interests  in  plumbago  mines.  His 
energy  in  jungle  clearing  earned  him  the 
nickname  'Jungle  John'. 

In  1912  his  brother,  F.  R.  Senanayake, 
was  active  in  organizing  a  temperance 
campaign  in  which  D.  S.  Senanayake  made 
his  first  appearance  as  a  public  speaker. 
He  is  reported  as  having  no  great  com- 
mand of  either  Sinhalese  or  English  at 
that  time.  In  the  riots  of  1915  he  was 
under  arrest  for  a  few  weeks.  The  after- 
math of  the  riots  led  to  the  formation 
in  1917  of  the  Ceylon  Reform  League 
which  in  1919  was  merged  in  the  Ceylon 
National  Congress  of  which  Senanayake 
was  a  founder-member.  Pressure  for  con- 
stitutional reform  in  1924  culminated  in 
the  grant  of  an  unofficial  majority  in  the 
legislative  council  and  in  that  year 
Senanayake  was  returned  unopposed  as 
one  of  three  members  representing  the 
Western  Province.  As  secretary  to  the 
unofficial  members  he  gained  much  prac- 
tical experience  of  the  working  of  the 
government  machine.  In  1928  the  report 
of  the  constitutional  commission  under 
Lord  Donoughmore  [q.v.]  received  a  very 
mixed  reception  in  Ceylon.  Sir  Herbert 
Stanley  [q.v.],  the  governor,  was  luke- 
warm; the  professional  politicians  were 
indignant.  Many  of  them  had  been  to 
English  universities  and  were  looking  for 
constitutional  advance  on  the  West- 
minster model.  Instead  they  felt  they  were 
being  fobbed  off  with  a  London  County 
Council  form  of  administration.  They 
also  felt  that  the  introduction  of  universal 
suffrage,  sponsored  by  (Sir)  Drummond 
Shiels  [q.v.],  would  lead  to  gross  abuses. 
Senanayake  with  his  shrewd  common 
sense  and  much  courage  took  the  line  that 


half  a  loaf  was  better  than  no  bread.  At 
the  end  of  1929  the  legislative  council 
accepted  the  report  by  a  majority  of  only 
two,  Senanayake  and  (Sir)  Baron  Jayati- 
lake  voting  for  it.  In  1931  Senanayake 
was  elected  unopposed  as  member  for 
Minuwangoda,  unanimously  elected  chair- 
man of  the  executive  committee  of 
agriculture,  and  appointed  minister.  He 
was  thus  in  a  position  to  give  practical 
proof  of  his  determination  to  raise  the 
standard  of  living  of  the  Ceylon  peasant 
whose  interests  he  had  passionately  at 
heart.  He  had  big  ideas  and  was  in  a  hurry 
to  carry  them  out.  He  was  apt  to  be 
suspicious  of  criticism  of  his  schemes; 
but  once  he  was  satisfied  that  it  was 
intended  to  be  constructive  and  not  ob- 
structive it  left  no  abiding  rancour.  He 
was  no  respecter  of  persons;  but  the 
civil  servant  who  won  his  confidence 
could  count  on  his  support.  The  Land 
Development  Act  and  the  irrigation 
schemes  which  he  revived  or  initiated 
are  a  lasting  tribute  to  his  achievements. 

A  clash  in  1940  between  the  governor 
and  the  board  of  ministers  over  the  action 
of  the  inspector-general  of  police  in  chal- 
lenging the  orders  of  Jayatilake,  home 
minister,  resulted  in  the  ministers,  led  by 
Senanayake,  resigning  office.  Although 
the  breach  was  subsequently  healed,  the 
entry  of  Japan  into  the  war  in  December 
1941  brought  Ceylon  within  the  danger 
zone.  In  these  circumstances  Admiral  Sir 
Geoffrey  Layton  was  appointed  com- 
mander-in-chief with  responsibility  for 
defence,  while  Sir  Andrew  Caldecott 
[q.v.]  remained  titular  governor  in  charge 
of  the  civil  administration.  A  war  council 
was  established  under  the  presidency  of 
the  commander-in-chief,  of  which  the 
governor,  all  the  ministers,  and  the  civil 
defence  commissioner,  (Sir)  Oliver  Goone- 
tilleke,  were  members.  Jayatilake  became 
Ceylon  representative  in  India  and  was 
succeeded  in  the  leadership  of  the  State 
Council  (1942)  by  the  more  forceful  Sena- 
nayake. 

The  demand  for  dominion  status  con- 
tinued unabated,  and  in  1943  the  British 
Government  issued  a  statement  that  the 
post-war  re-examination  of  the  consti- 
tution would  be  'directed  towards  the 
grant  to  Ceylon  of  full  responsible  govern- 
ment under  the  Crown  in  all  matters  of 
internal  civil  administration'.  This  declar- 
ation, while  it  was  regarded  as^  a  personal 
triumph  for  Senanayake,  became  the  sub- 
ject of  much  controversy,  but  on  the 
strength  of  it   the   ministers,   with   the 


875 


Senaniayake 


D.N.B.  1051-1660 


assistance  of  (Sir)  Ivor  Jennings,  pre- 
pared a  draft  order  in  Council  and  sub- 
mitted it  to  the  British  Government  in 
February  1944,  urging  that  it  should  be 
considered  at  once  and  not  await  the  end 
of  the  war.  The  Government  appointed 
another  commission  under  Lord  Soulbury ; 
but  the  ministers  decided  ofRcially  to 
boycott  it  and  withdraw  their  own  draft. 
Thanks  to  the  wisdom  of  Senanayake 
and  the  wiles  of  Sir  Oliver  Goonetilleke, 
however,  the  commission  was  cour- 
teously received  and  enabled  to  obtain  a 
reasonable  cross-section  of  local  opinion. 
Senanayake  was  then  invited  to  London 
to  discuss  the  commission's  report.  His 
position  was  delicate.  He  had  co-operated 
with  the  commission  in  Ceylon,  but  as  its 
recommendations  fell  short  of  full  domi- 
nion status  he  knew  that  they  would  be 
bitterly  attacked  by  his  political  op- 
ponents, and  might  even  lose  him  the 
support  of  some  of  his  own  party.  He 
therefore  continued  to  press  officially 
for  dominion  status,  while  being  personally 
prepared  to  accept  something  less  if  he 
could  satisfy  his  critics  that  he  had  done 
his  best.  This  was  reflected  in  the  terms  of 
the  motion  which  he  moved  in  the  Council 
in  November  1945.  It  accepted  the  Soul- 
bury  report  by  51  votes  to  3.  But  the 
motion  was  very  nearly  never  tabled  at  all, 
for  in  London  Senanayake  had  gained  the 
impression,  rightly  or  wrongly,  that  the 
new  Labour  Government  was  prepared 
to  grant  full  dominion  status.  He  felt  he 
had  been  duped  and  returned  to  Ceylon 
a  very  angry  man. 

When  at  the  end  of  1946  Burma  was 
offered  independence  within  or  without 
the  Commonwealth,  Senanayake  returned 
to  the  attack.  In  the  light  of  the  new 
situation  the  governor.  Sir  Henry  Moore, 
gave  his  wholehearted  support.  Sir 
Oliver  Goonetilleke  was  deputed  to  press 
Ceylon's  claims  in  London  and  eventually 
the  British  Government  bowed  to  the 
inevitable  and  on  4  February  1948  Ceylon 
became  independent,  with  Senanayake  as 
prime  minister  and  minister  of  defence 
and  external  affairs.  He  was  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council  in  1950,  but  died  in 
Colombo  as  the  result  of  a  fall  from  his 
horse  22  March  1952. 

Senanayake  inspired  popular  confidence 
by  his  personal  integrity  and  powers  of 
leadership.  He  was  a  big  man  both 
physically  and  in  his  approach  to  the  prob- 
lems which  confronted  him.  Although  a 
devout  Buddhist  he  was  tolerant  of  the 
religious  susceptibilities  of  others.  No  one 


suggested  that  he  coveted  power  for  his 
own  personal  aggrandizement.  He  wanted 
it  for  the  accomplishment  of  the  schemes 
which  were  so  near  his  heart.  He  hoped 
to  build  up  the  United  Party  as  repre- 
sentative of  a  Ceylonese  nationhood 
working  for  the  improvement  of  local 
conditions  regardless  of  caste,  creed,  or 
race.  Although  he  could  castigate  his 
opponents  in  debate,  they  bore  him  no 
ill  will,  as  he  would  meet  them  on  the  most 
friendly  terms  outside  the  Chamber  and 
was  always  ready  to  listen  to  complaints. 
Perhaps  one  of  the  best  tributes  to  his 
memory  was  made  by  one  of  his  most 
implacable  political  opponents:  'I  have 
differed  from  him  bitterly  and  even 
violently  on  most  political  issues.  But 
never  once  had  I  an  occasion  to  falter  in 
my  regard  and  respect  for  him.  He  was 
indeed  a  political  foe  worthy  of  our  steel.* 
In  1909  Senanayake  married  Emily 
Maud  Dunuwille  (died  1964).  They  had 
two  sons,  the  elder  of  whom,  Dudley 
Shelton,  after  serving  under  his  father 
as  minister  of  agriculture,  succeeded  him 
for  a  short  time  as  prime  minister  (1952r 
3),  and  returned  to  office  again  in  March-^ 
April  1960  and  in  1965. 

[Sir  Ivor  Jennings,  The  Constitution  of 
Ceylon,  1949 ;  Sir  Charles  Jeffries,  Ceylon— The 
Path  to  Independence,  1962 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.]     Henry  MoobeI 

SERVICE,  ROBERT  WILLIAM  (1874- 
1958),  versifier,  was  born  16  January  1874 
in  Preston,  Lancashire,  the  eldest  in  a 
family  of  seven  boys  and  three  girls  of 
Robert  Service,  a  Scottish  bank  teller,  and 
his  wife,  Emily  Parker,  daughter  of  an 
English  owner  of  Lancashire  cotton  mills. 
Between  the  ages  of  six  and  twenty-one 
Service  lived  in  Glasgow,  where  he  was 
educated  at  Hillhead  High  School,  attended 
a  few  university  classes,  read  books  which 
kindled  his  wanderlust,  and  worked  in  the 
Commercial  Bank  of  Scotland.  In  1895  he 
emigrated,  crossed  the  Atlantic  in  a  tramp 
steamer,  and  proceeded  to  British  Colum- 
bia, where  he  enjoyed  the  freedom  of  a 
backwoods  ranch  in  a  rough,  but  not  law- 
less, part  of  the  'wild'  west.  Then  he 
turned  again  to  wandering ;  he  worked  his 
way  up  and  down  the  Pacific  coast  of 
the  United  States,  becoming,  as  he  said, 
'half  a  hobo'. 

The  other  'half  of  Service  was  a  sensi- 
tive Scot,  an  observer  rather  than  a  whole- 
hearted participant.  He  had  an  ear  for 
popular  speech,  and  he  strove  to  'feel  and 
know'  life  in  its  raw-exotic  aspects  while 


876 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Seton-Watson 


he  guarded  his  moral  detachment,  akin 
to  artistic  objectivity.  A  steady  position, 
taken  when  he  was  twenty-nine,  happily 
led  to  his  most  romantic  adventure.  The 
Canadian  Bank  of  Commerce  moved  him 
through  branches  at  Victoria  and  Kani- 
loops  in  British  Columbia  to  Whitehorse 
and  Dawson  in  the  Yukon,  almost  in  the 
Canadian  Arctic.  From  1904  until  1912,  as 
a  bank  clerk  and  then  as  a  freelance  writer, 
he  watched  the  decline  of  the  Klondike 
gold  rush,  which  had  reached  its  height  in 
1898.  Rhyming  was  easier  than  digging: 
he  made  his  fortune  with  'The  Shooting  of 
Dan  McGrew'  and  'The  Cremation  of  Sam 
McGee'. 

These  and  other  verses  were  published 
in  1907  in  Toronto  as  Songs  of  a  Sourdough 
and  in  New  York  as  The  Spell  of  the  Yukon. 
A  sequel,  Ballads  of  a  Cheechako,  appeared 
in  1909.  'Sourdough'  and  'cheechako' 
became  household  words  for  'prospector' 
and  'newcomer'.  Fresh  frontier  realism, 
romantic  motifs,  and  rollicking  measures 
made  the  Yukon  a  legendary  land.  Be- 
cause Service  was  in  this  rough  life,  but 
not  of  it,  he  could  follow  up  his  casual  suc- 
cess by  deliberate  literary  exploitation. 
The  Trail  of  '98,  a  novel  (1910),  was  weak 
and  rhetorical,  but  his  readers  again  felt 
that  they  shared  his  gay  eloquence  and 
his  virility  in  Rhymes  of  a  Rolling  Stone 
(1912).  Service  left  Canada  in  that  year  to 
report  the  Balkan  war  for  the  Toronto 
Star. 

As  long  as  he  lived  after  1913,  Service 
had  homes  in  France  but  remained  a 
British  subject.  During  the  war  he  served 
with  the  American  ambulance  unit  and 
with  Canadian  army  intelligence;  his  ex- 
periences yielded  a  very  popular  book. 
Rhymes  of  a  Red-Cross  Man  (1916).  When 
tlie  war  was  over,  he  resumed  his  life  in  the 
Latin  quarter  (see  The  Pretender,  a  novel, 
1914),  adopted  a  monocle,  travelled  to 
Hollywood  (1921-2),  indulged  in  a  trip  to 
Tahiti,  and  returned  to  explore  the  Pari- 
sian slums. 

Moving  pictures  of  the  'magic  land  of 
make  believe'  encouraged  him  to  write 
more  negligible  melodramatic  romances. 
The  Poisoned  Paradise  (1922),  The  Rough- 
neck (1923),  The  Master  of  the  Microbe 
(1926),  and  The  House  of  Fear  (1927).  In 
these  years  his  avowed  programme  for  a 
good  Ufe  took  shape :  to  enjoy  in  health  and 
leisure  the  huge  income  he  had  gained 
until  he  was  a  hundred  years  old  (see  Why 
Not  Grow  Young?,  1928).  Few  readers 
would  have  recognized  this  quiet,  hand- 
some, rosy-hued  gentleman  as  the  'rough- 


neck poet'.  'I  was  not  my  type',  he  said, 
while  he  wrote  what  his  public  liked, 
Ballads  of  a  Bohemian  (1921)  and  Bar- 
Room  Ballads  (1940). 

When  another  war  began,  shortly  after 
Service's  return  from  a  second  trip  to 
Russia,  he  and  his  family  found  refuge  in 
Hollywood.  In  1945  he  went  back  to  Brit- 
tany and  Nice,  and  purchased  a  villa  in 
Monte  Carlo.  More  books  appeared :  Songs 
of  a  Sun-Lover  (1949),  Rhymes  of  a  Rough- 
neck (1950),  Lyrics  of  a  Lowbrow  (1951), 
Rhymes  of  a  Rebel  (1952),  Songs  for  my 
Supper  (1953),  Carols  of  an  Old  Codger 
(1954),  and  Rhymes  for  My  Rags  (1956). 
Two  volumes  of  Service's  collected  verse 
contain  more  than  1,700  pages;  to  the 
last  he  wanted  only  the  title  of  a  popular 
poet.  He  died  11  September  1958  at 
'Dream  Haven',  Lancieux,  Brittany. 

In  1913  Service  married  Germaine, 
daughter  of  Constant  Bourgoin,  owner  of 
a  distillery  at  Brie-contre-Robert,  near 
Paris ;  they  had,  one  daughter. 

[Robert  Service,  Ploughman  of  ihe>  Moon, 
1945,  and  Harper  of  Heaven,  1948;  private 
information.]  Cakl  F.  Klinck. 

SETON-WATSON,  ROBERT  WILLIAM 

(1879-1951),  historian,  was  born  in  Lon- 
don 20  August  1879,  the  only  child  of 
William  Livingston  Watson,  a  well-to-do 
Scottish  merchant  in  Calcutta  and  London 
and  a  landowner  in  Scotland,  and  his  wife, 
Elizabeth  Lindsay,  daughter  of  the  Scot- 
tish genealogist  George  Seton  [q.v.].  His 
mother  was  an  invalid  and  his  upbringing 
was  entrusted  to  a  female  relative  whose 
strict  discipline  may  have  accounted  in 
part  for  an  apparent  diffidence  of  manner 
which  he  never  quite  overcame.  Behind 
this  manner  lay  passionate  devotion  to 
what  he  felt  to  be  right  and  true,  and  a 
temperament  in  which  his  father's  cau- 
tious shrewdness  and  his  mother's  ideal- 
ism were  curiously  blended.  Winchester, 
under  a  famous  headmaster,  and  New 
College,  Oxford,  where  H.  A.  L.  Fisher 
[q.v.]  was  his  tutor,  set  their  stamp  on  him 
and  encouraged  him  to  follow  his  bent  for 
exact  historical  research.  Before  taking 
his  degree  with  a  first  class  in  modem 
history  in  1902  he  revealed  his  talent  by 
winning  the  Stanhope  historical  essay 
prize  in  1901.  He  next  spent  a  winter  at 
BerUn  University,  a  year  at  the  Sorbonne, 
and  roamed  through  the  cities  of  Italy, 
half-disposed  to  undertake  a  history  of 
Bologna. 

In  1905  Seton-Watson  arrived  in  Vienna 
with  the  intention  of  writing  a  history  oaf 


877 


Seton-Watson 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Austria  since  Maria  Theresa.  The  conflict 
between  the  Crown  and  a  majority  of  the 
Hungarian  Chamber  over  the  constitu- 
tional right  of  the  Crown  not  to  permit  the 
substitution  of  Magyar  for  German  as  the 
language  of  command  in  the  Hungarian 
regiments  of  the  joint  regular  Army  was 
at  its  height  and  rekindled  Seton-Watson's 
Scottish  Liberal  sympathies  for  Hungary 
as  'a  nation  rightly  struggling  to  be  free'. 
He  had  already  written  occasionally  to  the 
Spectator  over  the  signature  'Scotus  Via- 
tor' and  he  resolved  to  use  this  channel  to 
correct  what  he  thought  the  unfairness  to 
Hungary  of  British  newspaper  reports  from 
Vienna.  With  characteristic  thorough- 
ness he  went  to  Hungary  in  the  spring  of 
1906  to  spend  three  months  studying  the 
situation  before  writing  upon  it.  His  ap- 
petite for  facts  was  keen,  and  he  felt  sure 
they  would  give  him  full  proof  that  his 
cherished  convictions  were  well  founded. 
Within  six  weeks  he  returned  to  Vienna, 
filled  with  wrath.  The  Magyars,  he  ex- 
plained, had  'lied'  to  him.  Exactly  how 
they  had  disillusioned  him  was  not  quite 
clear.  His  apparent  timidity,  abundant 
good  faith,  and  eager  simplicity  may  have 
tempted  them  to  overload  his  mind  with 
assurances  which  would  not  bear  investi- 
gation. The  trouble  was  that  he  did 
investigate  them.  He  found  it  hard  to 
believe  that  Slovaks,  Rumanes,  and  other 
non-Magyars  were  really  Magyars  of 
slightly  different  kinds;  nor  could  he  re- 
concile his  faith  in  Hungarian  parlia- 
mentary democracy  with  the  discovery 
that  the  non-Magyar  half  of  the  popula- 
tion held  fewer  than  40  seats  in  a  Chamber 
of  415.  In  short,  he  caught  a  glimpse  of  the 
reality  which  lay  behind  the  imposing 
frontage  presented  by  Hungary  to  west- 
ern Europe — a  shattering  experience  for  so 
earnest  a  seeker  after  truth. 

Not  less  important  than  the  change  it 
wrought  in  his  view  of  Hungary  was  the 
effect  of  this  experience  upon  Seton- 
Watson' s  respect  for  the  Dual  System 
fashioned  by  the  constitutional  settlement 
of  1867.  The  Magyars,  he  felt,  were  abus- 
ing the  power  it  gave  them  to  oppress  the 
non-Magyars;  but  was  the  Dual  System 
otherwise  sound  and  workable?  He  saw 
in  the  Habsburg  dominions  a  wide  field 
for  research  and  inquiry  which  British 
writers  had  left  almost  wholly  unsurveyed. 
He  resolved  to  study  it  thoroughly,  never 
dreaming  that  he  himself,  by  writing  upon 
it,  would  become  a  feature  of  it.  He  could 
hardly  foresee  that  knowledge  of  what  he 
was  telling  the  outer  world  about  them 


would  put  heart  into  the  Slovaks  and  Ru- 
manes of  Hungary,  or  that  'Scotus  Viator' 
would  presently  be  impersonated  in  a  Cro- 
atian election  as  a  British  observer  sent  to 
see  fair  play.  Yet  so  it  was ;  and  Magyar 
denunciations  of  his  'corrupt'  and  per- 
nicious activities  served  only  to  enhance 
his  reputation. 

His  conscientious  diligence  was  exemp- 
lary. To  his  proficiency  in  German,  French, 
and  Italian  he  added  a  working  knowledge 
of  Magyar,  Serbo-Croatian,  and  Czech.  If  his 
first  work  in  permanent  form.  The  Future 
of  Austria-Hungary  (1907),  was  partly  a 
reprint  of  immature  Spectator  articles,  his 
Racial  Problems  in  Hungary  (1908),  Politi- 
cal Persecution  in  Hungary  (1908),  Cor- 
ruption and  Reform  in  Hungary  (1911), 
Absolutism  in  Croatia  (1912),  and  espe- 
cially The  Southern  Slav  Question  and  the 
Habsburg  Monarchy  (1911),  with  an  en- 
larged, German,  edition  (1913),  were 
painstaking  records  of  facts  and  docu- 
ments almost  unknown  to  British  readers. 
His  work  on  the  Southern  Slav  (or  Yugo- 
slav) question  was  remarkable  for  its  scope 
and  erudition.  It  remains  an  indispens- 
able record  of  the  movement  for  Yugoslav 
unity  and  of  the  inner  history  of  Austro- 
Hungarian  failure  to  deal  constructively 
with  an  issue  decisive  for  the  survival  of  the 
Habsburg  monarchy  itself.  So  impressed 
was  Seton-Watson  by  the  importance  of 
the  problem  that  he  dedicated  his  book  to 
'that  Austrian  statesman  who  shall  pos- 
sess the  genius  and  the  courage  necessary' 
to  solve  it ;  but  he  also  expressed  his  fore- 
bodings. He  was  deeply  distressed  by  the 
administrative  and  judicial  unmorality, 
not  to  say  the  downright  wickedness,  he 
had  seen  in  the  notorious  'high  treason' 
trial  of  Habsburg  Serbs  at  Zagreb  in  the 
summer  of  1909  and  by  the  proof  that 
forgeries  had  been  officially  used  against 
the  Yugoslav  leaders  in  the  Croatian  Diet 
which  was  furnished  by  the  still  more 
notorious  Friedjung  trial  in  the  following 
December. 

Disillusioned  about  Hungary,  Seton- 
Watson  had  clung  to  a  belief  that  saving 
grace  might  be  found  in  Austria  and,  in 
the  case  of  the  Southern  Slavs,  that  the 
heir  apparent  would  somehow  manage  to 
bring  about  the  replacement  of  Dualism 
by  a  Triple  System,  or  'Trialism',  in  which 
a  union  of  Habsburg  Yugoslavs  would 
offset  Hungarian  preponderance.  This  be- 
lief was  sorely  shaken  by  the  Friedjung 
trial  and  totally  dispelled  by  Thomas 
Masaryk's  subsequent  revelations  that  the 
anti- Yugoslav  forgeries  had  been  fabri- 


878 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Seton-Watson 


cated  in  the  Austro-Hungarian  legation  at 
Belgrade.  As  a  Scottish  Puritan,  for  whom 
right  was  right  and  wrong  was  wrong, 
Seton-Watson  concluded  mournfully  that 
a  polity  so  unethical  as  he  now  recognized 
the  Habsburg  monarchy  to  be  was  self- 
doomed  to  disaster.  Nor  was  he  alone  in 
this  conclusion.  Masaryk  shared  it  for 
other  and  more  comprehensive  reasons. 
Indeed,  when  the  two  men  first  met  in 
1910,  after  the  Friedjung  trial,  Masaryk 
doubted  the  soundness  of  Seton-Watson's 
ideas.  Not  till  they  met  again,  at  Rotter- 
dam in  October  1914,  were  the  foundations 
of  their  enduring  friendship,  and  of  Seton- 
Watson's  later  academic  career,  unwit- 
tingly laid.  His  little  work,  Masaryk  in 
England  (1943),  tells  too  modestly  the 
story  of  their  relations  at  that  time,  and  of 
the  part  Seton-Watson  played  in  obtain- 
ing for  Masaryk  in  1915  a  lectureship  in 
the  new  School  of  Slavonic  Studies  at 
King's  College,  London.  It  was  therefore 
pecuharly  fitting  that  he  should  become 
in  1922  Masaryk  professor  of  Central 
European  history  at  King's  College  after 
having  been  for  some  years  an  honorary 
lecturer  in  East  European  history.  With 
Sir  Bernard  Pares  [q.v.]  he  founded  and 
edited  the  Slavonic  Review  and  helped  the 
eventual  estabhshment  of  the  School  as  a 
'central  activity'  of  the  university. 

Between  1915  and  1922  Seton-Watson's 
activities  were  many  and  varied.  He  was 
honorary  secretary  of  the  Serbian  Relief 
Fund  (1914^21)  and  in  1916  he  and 
Masaryk  founded  and,  for  a  while,  edited 
jointly  an  excellent  weekly  review,  the  New 
Europe,  which  Seton-W^atson  financed. 
Soon  it  gained  noteworthy  influence  upon 
serious  opinion,  not  least  because  his  own 
contributions  to  it  were  free  from  the 
insistent  documentation  which  was  apt  to 
encumber  his  historical  works.  In  quarters 
where  its  frankness  was  resented  an  attempt 
was  made  to  silence  it,  and  him,  by  calling 
him  up  for  military  service ;  and,  since  he 
was  physically  unfit  for  active  soldiering, 
he  was  drafted  in  1917  into  the  Royal  Army 
Medical  Corps,  and  employed  in  scrubbing 
hospital  floors.  Only  after  the  War  Cabi- 
net had  twice  ordered  his  release  was  he 
seconded  for  work  in  the  Cabinet's  intelli- 
gence bureau  until,  early  in  1918,  he  was 
entrusted  with  the  Austrian  section  of  the 
Crewe  House  enemy  propaganda  depart- 
ment. As  a  member  of  that  department's 
mission  to  Italy  he  helped  to  prepare  a 
basis  for  the  successful  Rome  congress  of 
subject'  Habsburg  nationalities  in  April 
1918;  and  he  also  wrote,  at  the  ItaUan 


front,  a  guide  to  the  racial  composition 
of  the  Austro-Hungarian  army  for  the 
British  commander,  Lord  Cavan  [q.v.]. 
At  the  Paris  peace  conference,  as  a  private 
observer,  his  advice  was  sought  upon  the 
delimitation  of'  Italo-Austrian  and  Italo- 
Yugoslav  frontiers,  but  he  grew  increas- 
ingly indignant  about  the  inadequacies 
of  'the  pygmies  at  Paris'.  Meantime  his 
literary  output  continued ;  one  of  his  best 
works.  The  Rise  of  Nationality  in  the 
Balkans,  had  appeared  in  1917.  There 
followed  Europe  in  the  Melting-Pot  (1919), 
The  New  Slovakia  (1924),  Sarajevo  (1926), 
and  other  books  of  which  the  most  notable 
were  A  History  of  the  Roumanians  (1934), 
Disraeli,  Gladstone,  and  the  Eastern  Ques- 
tion (1935),  and  especially  Britain  in 
Europe  1789-1914  (1937).  From  current 
problems  he  had  turned  gradually  to  a 
study  of  the  history  of  the  countries  in 
which  he  was  interested  and  of  British 
diplomacy. 

Many  honours  were  bestowed  on  him, 
not  less  as  retrospective  tributes  to  'Scotus 
Viator'  than  in  recognition  of  his  academic 
standing.  The  universities  of  Prague 
(1919),  Zagreb  (1920),  Bratislava  (1928), 
Belgrade  (1928),  Cluj  (1930)  gave  him 
honorary  degrees  as  well  as  Birmingham 
(1946),  and  he  was  an  honorary  citizen  of 
Cluj  (Transylvania)  and  Turciansky  Sv. 
Martin  (Slovakia).  In  Romania  in  1920 
the  chamber  of  deputies  suspended  its 
sitting  to  acclaim  him  when  he  appeared 
in  the  gaUery.  In  1928  he  was  Creighton 
lecturer  in  the  university  of  London,  and 
for  1931  Raleigh  lecturer  to  the  British 
Academy  of  which  he  became  a  fellow  in 
1932.  In  1939  he  delivered  the  Montague 
Burton  lecture  at  University  College, 
Nottingham.  In  1945  he  became  president 
of  the  Royal  Historical  Society  and  was 
appointed  first  professor  of  Czechoslovak 
studies  in  Oxford.  If^  as  a  lecturer,  he 
never  quite  shook  off'  the  semi-apologetic 
shyness  which  usually  marked  his  bearing 
on  public  occasions,  the  depth  and  range 
of  his  learning,  and  his  personal  kind- 
liness, won  him  the  admiration  and  often 
the  affection  of  students  who  found  in 
him  a  teacher  and  guide  untiring  in  his 
efforts  to  lead  them,  as  an  elderly  comrade, 
in  search  of  knowledge  and  truth.  For 
university  business  he  found  no  time; 
he  was  unpunctual,  untidy,  and  too  pre- 
occupied with  more  important  matters. 

At  no  period  of  his  life  was  Seton-Watson 
more  clear-sighted  or  more  insistent-  in 
a  conscientious  endeavour  to  enlighten 
public  opinion    than    during   the    years 


879 


Seton-Watson 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


immediately  before  and  after  the  sacrifice 
of  Czechoslovakia  to  Hitler  at  Munich  in 
September  1938.  In  closer  touch  it  seemed 
with  the  realities  of  the  European  situa- 
tion than  any  member  of  the  Government, 
he  published  in  May  1938  Britain  and  tlie 
Dictators  as  a  massive  warning  against  a 
foreign  policy  neglectful  of  moral  values. 
An  equally  outspoken  though  smaller 
work,  Munich  and  the  Dictators  (March 
1939),  dealt  perspicaciously  with  'the 
crisis  that  culminated,  or  at  least  seemed 
to  culminate,  in  the  settlement  of  Munich'. 
It  closed  with  the  prediction  ''Nondum  est 
finis\  On  the  outbreak  of  war  he  joined  the 
foreign  research  and  press  service  and  in 
1940  the  political  intelligence  department  of 
the  Foreign  Office,  serving  as  a  personal  link 
with  his  friend  Dr.  Benes,  then  head  of  the 
provisional  Czechoslovak  Government  in 
London. 

The  last  of  Seton- Watson's  major  works, 
A  History  of  the  Czechs  and  Slovaks,  ap- 
peared late  in  1943  avowedly  with  the  aim 
of  depriving  future  politicians  of  any  pre- 
text for  saying  that  the  Czechoslovaks 
were  'people  of  whom  we  know  nothing'. 
It  was  an  exhaustive  and  somewhat 
exhausting  account  of  Czech  and  Slovak 
history  in  a  volume  of  250,000  words. 
Containing  all  the  ascertained  facts, 
it  tended  to  become  an  historical  cata- 
logue with  rare  excursions  into  luminous 
generalization;  and  for  these  excur- 
sions, grateful  though  readers  might  be 
for  them,  he  felt  bound  to  plead  extenua- 
ting circumstances;  Seton-Watson' s  pas- 
sion for  facts  once  more  overcame  his  care 
for  literary  artistry.  Yet,  like  his  other 
major  works,  it  remains  a  volume  indis- 
pensable to  any  true  understanding  of  its 
subject. 

The  satisfaction  he  had  felt  in  1945  at 
the  restoration  of  Czechoslovak  indepen- 
dence, within  the  pre-Munich  frontiers, 
waned  as  the  ascendancy  of  Communist 
Russia  became  more  evident.  His  end  was 
undoubtedly  hastened  by  grief  at  the 
tragic  death  of  his  intimate  friend  Jan 
Masaryk  in  March,  and  that  of  Benes, 
again  ex-president,  in  September,  1948.  If 
his  faith  in  'the  indwelhng  righteousness 
of  things'  was  too  deeply  rooted  for  des- 
pair to  prevail  over  his  conviction  that  his 
life-work  had  been  done  to  the  best  of  his 
ability  and  with  total  honesty  of  purpose, 
his  sorrow  told  upon  a  physique  that  had 
never  been  robust.  Yet  it  was  in  keeping 
with  his  undeniable  greatness  of  spirit  that 
no  word  of  complaint  should  have  escaped 
him.  He  was  a  dear  soul,  tender  and  sensi- 


tive, tenacious  and  righteous,  prudentfand 
brave.  On  relinquishing  his  chair  at  Oxford 
in  1949  he  was  elected  an  honorary  fellow 
of  both  New  College  and  Brasenose  and 
retired  to  his  country  home  Kyle  House 
in  the  Isle  of  Skye — ^where  in'happier  days 
he  could  indulge  a  modest  taste  for  yacht- 
ing and  sea  fishing — until  he  died  there 
25  July  1951. 

In  1911  Seton-Watson  married  Marion 
Esther,  daughter  of  Edward  Stack,  of  the 
Bengal  Civil  Service,  to  whose  under- 
standing companionship  and  devoted  help- 
fulness his  achievements  were  in  large 
measure  due.  They  had  one  daughter  and 
two  sons,  both  of  whom  attained  academic 
distinction,  the  elder,  George  Hugh  Nicho- 
las, becoming  professor  of  Russian  history 
in  the  School  of  Slavonic  Studies,  the 
younger,'Christopher  Ivan  William,  fellow 
of  Oriel  College,  Oxford. 

A  bronze  by  Ivan  Mestrovic  is  part  of  a 
memorial  tablet  to  Seton-Watson  in  the 
School  of  Slavonic  and  East  European 
Studies. 

[The  Times,  28  July  1951 ;  G.  H.  Bolsover 
in  Proceedings  of  the  British  Academy, 
vol.  xxxvii,  1951;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  Wickham  Steed. 

SHEPHERD,  GEORGE  ROBERT,  first 
Baron  Shepherd  (1881-1954),  Lab- 
our Party  national  agent,  was  born  in 
Spalding,  Lincolnshire,  19  August  1881, 
the  son  of  George  Robert  Shepherd,  tailor, 
and  his  wife,  Helena  Sophia  Hensman. 
Educated  at  a  board-school  he  was  re- 
quired at  an  early  age  to  support  a  large 
family  on  the  death  of  his  father.  Starting 
work  as  a  shoe  shop  assistant,  he  continued 
his  studies  by  reading  extensively,  a 
practice  which  he  followed  throughout  his 
life.  In  1901  he  joined  the  Shop  Assistants' 
Union  and  the  Independent  Labour  Party 
and  in  1908  became  an  organizer  for  the 
Midland  division  of  the  latter.  In  1909-18 
he  was  agent  for  Alex  Wilkie,  Labour 
member  for  Dundee,  and  then  went  to 
Blackburn  as  agent  for  Phihp  (later  Vis- 
count) Snowden  [q.v.]. 

In  1924  Shepherd  was  appointed  assis- 
tant national  agent  for  the  Labour  Party 
and  in  1929  became  national  agent.  He 
soon  gained  a  reputation  of  sagacity  and 
resourcefulness  as  an  organizer  and  stra- 
tegist. The  stresses  of  the  inter-war  years 
showed  the  strength  of  the  organization 
he  had  created.  Leaders  might  come  and 
go;  the  rank  and  file  remained  stead- 
fast. Those  who  knew  him  then  were 
impressed  most  of  all  by  the  combina- 


880 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Sherrington 


tion  of  justice  and  mercy  with  which  he 
administered  party  discipline.  At  times, 
under  the  instructions  of  the  national 
executive,  he  had  to  take  fundamental 
steps  to  maintain  order  but  no  one  could 
doubt  his  reluctance  to  enforce  the  full 
rigour  of  the  party  laws  if  gentleness  and 
patience  offered  an  alternative  solution. 
He  more  than  anyone  ensured  that  the 
party  was  ready  for  the  general  election 
of  1945  which  swept  Labour  into  office. 

Shepherd  then  retired  from  his  post  and 
in  1946  entered  the  House  of  Lords  where 
he  was  soon  appointed  a  whip,  and  became 
chief  whip  in  1949.  His  political  know- 
ledge and  his  capacity  for  clear  reasoning 
in  debate  impressed  friend  and  foe  alike. 
He  seemed  to  come  into  his  own  in  quite  a 
new  way  and  played  a  large  part  in  giving 
the  Labour  Party  a  new  image  in  the  upper 
House — radical,  resolute  for  change,  but 
always  good-tempered  and  dignified  and 
British  through  and  through.  His  ex- 
perience as  a  party  organizer  was  an 
important  factor  in  his  work  on  the  Repre- 
sentation of  the  People  Act  of  1948  and 
the  measures  dealing  with  electoral  laws. 
He  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council  in  1951. 

In  1915  Shepherd  married  an  early 
trade-union  worker,  Ada,  daughter  of 
Alfred  Newton,  jobbing  gardener.  They 
had  a  son  and  a  daughter.  Shepherd  died 
in  London  4  December  1954  and  was 
succeeded  by  his  son,  Malcolm  Newton 
(born  1918),  who,  after  making  his  mark  in 
the  army  in  the  war  (his  father  in  1914-18 
had  been  a  conscientious  objector)  and  in 
business,  became  Opposition  chief  whip  in 
1963  and  followed  his  father  as  chief 
government  whip  (1964-7)  when  the 
Labour  Party  came  into  office. 

[The  Times,  6  December  1954;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Longford. 

SHERRINGTON,  Sir  CHARLES 
SCOTT  (1857-1952),  physiologist,  was 
bom  27  November  1857  in  Ishngton, 
London,  the  son  of  James  Norton  and 
Anne  Brookes  Sherrington,  of  Great  Yar- 
mouth. Sherrington  and  his  two  younger 
brothers  went  to  Ipswich  Granmier  School 
where  Charles  was  deeply  influenced  by 
one  of  the  masters,  Thomas  Ashe  [q.v.],  a 
poet  of  some  note.  Sherrington  was  rather 
small  in  stature  but  sturdy  and  full  of  fire. 
He  was  good  at  his  studies  and  excellent 
on  the  soccer  field.  Later  he  played  rugger 
for  St.  Thomas's  and  Caius  and  also  rowed 
for  his  college. 

At  Cambridge,  where  Sherrington  be- 


came a  scholar  of  GonviUe  and  Caius 
College  (1881-4),  (Sir)  Michael  Foster  [q.v.] 
had  a  way  of  selecting  promising  students 
to  carry  out  research  in  his  laboratory  and 
here  Sherrington  worked  in  a  stimulating 
atmosphere  with  Balfour,  Gaskell,  Lang- 
ley,  and  others.  His  first  publication  in 
1884,  written  with  J.  N.  Langley  (whose 
notice  Sherrington  subsequently  con- 
tributed to  this  Dictionary),  was  read  to 
the  Royal  Society  while  he  was  still  a 
student.  It  was  an  anatomical  study  of  the 
nervous  system  of  a  famous  dog  presented 
before  the  International  Medical  Congress 
in  1881  by  Professor  F.  Goltz  of  Germany. 
The  dog  had  moved  about  in  a  placid  man- 
ner for  months  after  surgical  excision  of 
the  forebrain. 

Sherrington  obtained  first  classes  in 
both  parts  of  the  natural  sciences  tripos 
(1881-3)  and  completing  his  studies  at 
St.  Thomas's  Hospital  in  London  obtained 
his  M.R.C.S.  (1884)  and  L.R.C.P.  (1886) 
and  his  Cambridge  M.B.  (1885),  M.D. 
(1892),  and  Sc.D.  (1904).  After  his  M.B.  he 
spent  much  of  the  next  two  years  upon 
graduate  work  in  Germany  and  France. 
At  considerable  risk  to  himself  he  made 
a  study  of  cholera  in  Spain  and  later  Italy, 
carrying  out  autopsies  when  possible.  In 
1887  he  returned  to  Cambridge  as  a  fellow 
of  his  college  and  also  became  a  lecturer  in 
systematic  physiology  at  St.  Thomas's.  He 
now  turned  from  pathology  to  physiology. 
In  1891  he  moved  to  London  as  professor- 
superintendent  of  the  Brown  Animal 
Sanatory  Institution.  Sherrington  was 
never  the  narrow-minded  specialist  in 
science.  Before  he  left  Cambridge  he  was 
already  a  book -collector.  In  time  off  he  was 
a  skier  in  Switzerland,  an  ardent  sailor,  an 
interested  traveller,  a  lover  of  art  and 
music  and  drama.  He  was  a  briUiant 
conversationalist  in  any  social  gathering. 
He  always  seemed  more  enthusiastic 
about  the  work  of  others  than  about  his 
own.  He  lectured  as  though  his  researches 
were  no  more  than  a  series  of  questions 
asked  and  answered. 

The  Spanish  anatomist,  Ramon  y  Cajal, 
was  his  guest  at  his  house  in  London  when 
on  the  way  to  Cambridge  for  an  honorary 
degree.  Cajal  had  established  the  neurone 
theory  showing  that  nerve  cells  were  sepa- 
rate units  connected  to  each  other  by 
conducting  expansions.  'This',  Sherrington 
wrote,  'was  something  so  much  clearer  and 
so  other  than  it  had  been  as'to  be  a  system 
almost  new,  and  one  immensely  more 
inteUigible.' 

In  1895  Sherrington  moved  to  Liveipool 


881 


Sherrington 


P.N.B.  1951-1960 


as  Holt  professor  of  physiology.  The 
following  sixteen  years  were  happy  ones, 
a  time  of  solid  achievement.  He  set  out 
to  explain  the  reflexes  and  reactions  of 
Goltz's  dog.  Making  acute  decerebrate 
preparations  of  his  own,  he  studied 
'decerebrate  rigidity'.  He  worked  out  the 
neurone  connections,  in  the  spinal  cord 
and  brain -stem,  that  subserve  the  normal 
maintenance  of  muscle  tone  and  the  main- 
tenance postures  or  reflex-movements  in 
the  hmbs  as  in  walking.  He  explained  the 
reciprocal  innervation  that  relaxes  the 
antagonistic  muscles  automatically  while 
the  muscles,  which  cause  the  limb  to 
move,  contract.  Passing  on  from  the 
spinal  cord  and  brain-stem  to  the  fore- 
brain  of  cat  and  anthropoid  ape,  he  map- 
ped out  the  motor  key-board  of  the 
cerebral  cortex  and  showed  that  the  res- 
ponse to  electrical  stimulation  at  any 
cortical  point  was  subject  to  facilitation 
and  augmentation  or  even  reversal  by 
means  of  immediately  preceding  applica- 
tions of  the  electrode. 

In  1904  Sherrington  gave  the  Silliman 
lectm-es  at  Yale,  published  in  1906  under 
the  title  of  The  Integrative  Action  of  the 
Nervous  System.  In  1947  the  Physiological 
Society  reprinted  the  book  without  altera- 
tion so  that  it  might  be  read  by  'all 
students  of  physiology  and  reread  by  their 
teachers'.  As  Lord  Adrian  was  later  to 
remark,  Sherrington's  researches  had 
'opened  up  an  entirely  new  chapter  in  the 
physiology  of  the  central  nervous  system'. 

In  1913  Sherrington  was  offered  the 
Waynflete  chair  of  physiology  at  Oxford, 
with  a  fellowship  at  Magdalen.  He  was 
fifty -six :  there  was  no  stated  age  of  retire- 
ment, or  promise  of  a  pension.  But 
intrigued  by  Oxford  life  Sherrington 
accepted.  A  pleasant  house  was  found  at 
9  Chadlington  Road:  near  the  laboratory 
and  also  near  the  Cherwell  where  he  and 
his  wife  delighted  to  spend  pleasant  hours 
in  punt  or  canoe.  He  sometimes  wrote  his 
scientific  papers  on  the  river.  Oxford 
society  he  found  'a  trifle  rigid'  but  in  the 
home  of  the  regius  professor  of  medicine. 
Sir  William  Osier  [q.v.],  there  was  'refresh- 
ing and  stimulating  refuge  from  formality'. 

In  May  1913  British  physiologists 
accepted  an  invitation  to  St.  Petersburg 
and  Sherrington  dined  privately  with  the 
famous  physiologist,  Ivan  Pavlov.  Enter- 
tained by  the  Tsar,  who  asked  for  news  of 
his  cousin,  Sherrington  had  to  reply  that 
he  had  not  seen  much  of  the  King  of 
England  lately. 

So  little  was  the  value  which  Sherrington 


put  on  his  own  work  that  during  the  war  he 
wrote  to  a  friend  that  feeling  it  to  be  re- 
mote 'from  the  great  practical  effort  now 
in  hand'  he  had  undertaken  unskilled  work 
in  a  munitions  factory.  He  was  in  fact 
studying  industrial  fatigue  for  the  War 
Office,  and  he  became  chairman  of  the 
Industrial  Fatigue  Research  Board.  He 
served  also  on  committees  on  lockjaw  and 
on  alcohol  and  was  FuUerian  professor  of 
phvsiology  at  the  Royal  Institution  in 
1914-17. 

In  1920-25  Sherrington  was  president 
of  the  Royal  Society  of  which  he  had  been 
elected  a  fellow  in  1893.  In  1922  he  was 
president  of  the  British  Association  meet- 
ing at  Hull  and  in  that  year  he  was 
appointed  G.B.E.  In  1924  he  was  admitted 
to  the  Order  of  Merit.  In  the  next  year,  to 
the  surprise  of  even  his  most  intimate 
friends,  he  published  a  slender  book  The 
Assaying  of  Brahantius  and  Other  Verse. 
In  1932  he  shared  with  E.  D.  (later  Lord) 
Adrian  the  Nobel  prize  for  medicine.  Other 
honours  and  awards  came  to  'the  philo- 
sopher of  the  nervous  system'  from  all 
over  the  world  and  were  received  with 
modest  surprise  that  they  should  not  have 
gone  to  others  more  deserving. 

After  retiring  from  his  chair  at  Oxford 
at  the  end  of  1935  Sherrington,  with 
regret,  left  his  Magdalen  friends.  It  had 
been  'a  busy  and  fruitful  autumn  of 
scientific  endeavour  in  which  much  of  his 
earlier  work  came  to  full  harvest'.  In  1937 
and  1938  he  gave  the  Gifford  lectures  at 
Edinburgh  and  published  them  in  1940 
under  the  title  Man  on  his  Nature.  The 
book  was  widely  read  and  went  into  an 
exceedingly  popular  paperback  edition. 
Thus  the  physiologist  turned  to  man  and 
to  philosophy.  In  1946  he  published  an 
excellent  biography  of  an  early  French 
physiologist,  The  Endeavour  of  Jean 
Fernel. 

In  1950  at  a  special  meeting  of  the 
Soviet  Academy  of  Science  Sherrington 
was  referred  to  as  the  world's  leader  in 
regard  to  the  dualist  point  of  view  among 
physiologists.  But  Sherrington  had  con- 
cluded only  this:  'We  have  to  regard  the 
relation  of  mind  to  brain  as  still  not  merely 
unsolved  but  still  devoid  of  a  basis  for  its 
very  beginning.'  {The  Brain  and  Its 
Mechanisniy  Rede  lecture,  Cambridge, 
1933). 

In  1891  Sherrington  married  Ethel  Mary 
(died  1933),  daughter  of  John  Ely  Wright, 
of  Preston  Manor,  Suffolk.  She  was  a 
musician,  a  good  linguist  which  made  her 
an    excellent    comrade    on    many    trips 


882 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Shiels 


abroad,  and  one  who  loved  the  out  of 
doors.  She  made  their  home  in  Oxford  a 
centre  of  hospitality  and  laughter  and 
much  kindness.  They  had  one  son  who 
becameia  railway  economist. 

Sherrington  died  at  Eastbourne  4  March 
1952.  In  1948  the  Sherrington  lectures  had 
been  founded  in  his  honour  in  the  univer- 
sity of  Liverpool  where  the  University 
Club  has  a  portrait  by  Augustus  John. 
Portraits  by  R.  G.  Eves  are  in  the  posses- 
sion of  the  Royal  Society  and  the  National 
Portrait  Gallery. 

[Lord  Cohen  of  Birkenhead,  Sherrington, 
1958;  E.  G.  T.  Liddell,  The  Discovery  of 
Reflexes,  1960 ;  Selected  Writings  of  Sir  Charles 
Scott  Sherrington,  ed.  D.  Denny-Brown,  1939 ; 
C.  E.  R.  Sherrington,  Memories,  1957; 
personal  knowledge.]         Wilder  Penfield. 

SHIELS,  Sir  (THOMAS)  DRUMMOND 

(1881-1953),  physician  and  poUtician,  was 
born  in  Edinburgh  7  August  1881,  the 
second  of  the  eight  children  of  James 
Drummond  Shiels,  Uthographic  printer, 
and  his  wife,  Agnes  Campbell.  After  an 
elementary  school  education  in  Glasgow 
where  his  family  lived  for  a  time,  Shiels 
entered  the  employment  of  a  firm  of 
photographers  at  the  age  of  twelve  and 
continued  his  education  at  night  schools. 
Later  he  joined  his  father  and  a  brother  in 
setting  up  a  photographic  studio  in  Lauri- 
ston  Place,  Edinburgh. 

In  the  war  of  1914-18  Shiels  served  with 
the  9th  (Scottish)  division,  reaching  the 
rank  of  captain  and  being  awarded  the 
M.C.,  the  Belgian  croix  de  guerre,  and  a 
mention  in  dispatches.  On  returning  to  the 
family  business  his  growing  urge  towards 
social  service  impelled  him,  in  his  spare 
time,  to  study  medicine  at  Edinburgh 
University  where  in  1924  he  qualified 
M.B.,  B.Ch.  He  had  already  been  elected 
Labour  member  of  the  town  council  and 
had  taken  part  in  various  political  and 
local  government  activities  and  was  in- 
vited to  stand  for  Parliament  as  Labour 
candidate  for  Edinburgh  (East).  He  won 
the  seat  in  1924  and  held  it  until  he  was 
defeated  at  the  general  election  of  1931. 

During  these  seven  parliamentary  years 
Shiels  developed  what  was  to  be  a  lifelong 
interest  in  Commonwealth  and  Empire 
affairs.  In  1927-8  he  was  a  member  of  the 
commission  on  the  constitution  of  Ceylon, 
the  report  of  which  led  to  the  introduction 
of  democratic  self-government  based  upon 
universal  adult  suffrage.  On  the  formation 
of  the  Labour  administration  of  1929 
Shiels  became  under-secretary  of  state  for 


India  and  later  in  the  year  transferred  to 
the  corresponding  post  at  the  Colonial 
Office.  After  1931  he  became  a  medical 
school  inspector  under  the  London  County 
Council  and  medical  secretary  to  the 
British  Social  Hygiene  Council.  In  1940 
he  was  appointed  deputy  and  later  acting 
secretary  of  the  Empire  Parliamentary 
Association;  from  1946  to  1949  he  served 
as  public  relations  officer  in  the  Post 
Office;  and  in  1950  he  was  appointed 
secretary  to  the  Inter-Parliamentary  Union 
(British  Group),  a  post  which  he  held  until 
his  death. 

Shiels  was  continuously  active  in  writ- 
ing, speaking,  and  in  editorial  work  in 
connection  with  many  social  and  political 
subjects,  especially  those  concerning  Com- 
monwealth relations  and  the  advancement 
of  the  colonial  territories.  His  energy  and 
influence  contributed  much  to  the  awaken- 
ing in  the  Parliament  and  public  of  the 
United  Kingdom  of  a  sense  of  respon- 
sibility for  the  progress  and  welfare  of  the 
colonial  peoples,  and  helped  to  create  the 
new  climate  of  opinion  which  found 
expression  in  the  Colonial  Development- 
and  Welfare  Acts  of  1940  onwards.  His 
prominence  in  this  sphere  was  recognized 
by  his  appointment  as  an  original  member 
of  the  Colonial  Economic  and  Develop- 
ment Council  in  1946.  He  had  refused  a 
peerage  when  under-secretary  but  accep- 
ted a  knighthood  in  1939. 

Shiels  was  a  man  of  warm-hearted  and 
indeed,  sometimes,  undiscriminating  gene- 
rosity in  both  public  and  private  affairs. 
The  deep  impression  made  upon  him  by 
his  family's  early  struggle  with  poverty 
left  him  without  bitterness  but  possessed 
by  a  passionate  desire  to  champion  the 
cause  of  the  less  fortunate,  first  in  his  own 
country  and  then,  as  his  experience  broad- 
ened, in  the  oversea  territories  for  which  the 
United  Kingdom  was  responsible.  A  power- 
ful advocate  of  radical  reform,  he  desired 
always  that  it  should  be  brought  about  by 
peaceable  persuasion  and  constitutional 
methods.  He  was  indifferent  to  personal 
success  or  financial  profit.  Much  of  his 
time  and  energy  was  given  ungrudgingly 
to  the  work  of'voluntary  organizations  and 
institutions  serving  the  causes  to  which  he 
was  devoted,  especially  the  Royal  Empire 
Society,  the  Royal  African  Society,  the 
East  India  Association,  the  Anti -Slavery 
and  Aborigines  Protection  Society,  the 
Royal  Society  of  Medicine,  and  the  Royal 
Society  for  the  Prevention  of  Cruelty  to 
Animals.  If  earnestness  and  a  single- 
minded  tenacity  of  purpose  were  amongst 


Shiels 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


his  chief  traits,  they  were  balanced  by 
simplicity,  sincerity,  and  general  friendli- 
ness, allied  to  the  saving  grace  of  a  pawky 
humour. 

In  1004  Shiels  married  Christian  Blair 
(died  1948),  daughter  of  Alexander  Young, 
of  Gilmerton,  Edinburgh,  by  whom  he  had 
one  daughter ;  secondly,  in  1950,  he  married 
Gladys  Louise  (died  1968),  daughter  of 
John  James  Buhler.  Shiels  died  in  London 
1  January  1958. 

[The  Times,  3  January  1953;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Charles  Jeffries. 

SHUCKBURGH,  Sm  JOHN  EVELYN 

(1877-1953),  civil  servant,  was  born  at 
Eton  18  March  1877,  the  eldest  son  of 
Evelyn  Shirley  Shuckburgh  [q.v.],  an 
assistant  master.  A  scholar  of  Eton  and 
King's  College,  Cambridge,  he  took  his 
degree  with  first  class  honours  in  the  clas- 
sical tripos  in  1899.  He  passed  the  first 
division  examination  of  the  Civil  Service 
and  in  1900  entered  the  India  Office,  where 
he  spent  twenty-one  years,  the  last  four 
as  secretary  of  the  political  department. 
He  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1918.  In  1921  he 
was  selected  by  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill, 
the  colonial  secretary,  to  be  the  first 
assistant  under-secretary  of  state  in 
charge  of  the  new  Middle  East  department 
formed  to  administer  and  set  up  civil 
government  in  those  parts  of  the  Turkish 
Empire  (Mesopotamia,  Palestine,  and 
Trans-Jordan)  which  were  then  under 
British  military  administration  as  occu- 
pied enemy  territories. 

The  task  was  an  unusual  one,  and 
Shuckburgh,  with  his  long  experience  of 
dealing  with  Indian  native  states,  was 
probably  the  man  best  qualified  for  it.  The 
team  which  was  given  him  to  help  was 
also,  to  put  it  no  higher,  unusual.  An 
Indian  political  officer,  (Sir)  Hubert  Young 
[q.v.],  who  had  spent  most  of  the  war 
and  post-war  period  in  various  military 
appointments,  mainly  in  the  field  of  occu- 
pied enemy  territory  administration  in 
the  Middle  East,  became  assistant  secre- 
tary ;  one  principal  was  transferred  from 
the  Foreign  Office,  and  one  principal  and 
two  assistant  principals  were  supplied  by 
the  Colonial  Office.  The  team  was  com- 
pleted by  three  advisers— political,military, 
and  financial.  The  four  senior  administra- 
tive officers  were  all  Old  Collegers,  and 
five  of  the  team  had  seen  long  active 
service  in  the  territories  which  they  were 
to  administer.  Between  them  the  team  had 
more  'man  on  the  spot'  knowledge  of  these 


territories,  and  probably  less  experience 
of  the  techniques  of  civil  administration, 
than  had  ever  been  assembled  in  a  depart- 
ment of  the  Colonial  Office.  It  says  much 
for  Shuckburgh's  ability  and  tact  that 
he  succeeded  in  converting  them  into 
an  efficient  administrative  organization, 
although  T.  E.  Lawrence  [q.v.],  the  politi- 
cal adviser,  left  a  few  months  later. 

In  Mesopotamia  Sir  Percy  Cox  [q.v.] 
was  well  qualified  to  place  the  Emir  Feisal 
on  the  throne  and  hand  over  the  reins  of 
government  to  him,  while  still  supplying 
a  strong  and  efficient  team  of  British 
advisers  to  help  him  to  organize  his  king- 
dom. Nor  did  lYans-Jordan  present  great 
difficulties.  The  Emir  Abdullah,  once  he 
had  got  over  his  initial  chagrin  at  seeing 
his  younger  brother  given  a  bigger  and 
richer  kingdom  than  himself,  settled  down 
happily  to  the  congenial  task  of  ruling  a 
rather  primitive  country  with  the  support 
of  a  competent  team  of  British  advisers 
and  substantial  grants  in  aid  from  the 
British  Treasury.  In  Palestine  the  prob- 
lems were  infinitely  more  complex.  The 
high  commissioner,  Sir  Herbert  (later  Vis- 
coimt)  Samuel,  had  been  a  distinguished 
cabinet  minister  and  so  was  much  less 
amenable  to  guidance  than  an  ordinary 
colonial  governor,  although  neither  he  nor 
more  than  very  few  of  his  principal  officers 
had  any  experience  of  the  particular  kind 
of  administration  which  they  were  called 
upon  to  organize.  Furthermore,  as  a 
practising  Jew,  Samuel  found  it  equally 
difficult  to  convince  the  Arabs  that  he  was 
not  favouring  his  co-religionists  and  the 
Jews  that  he  was  not  showing  undue 
favoiu*  to  the  Arabs,  although  he  took 
infinite  pains  to  treat  them  both  alike.  It 
required  endless  tact,  patience,  and  firm- 
ness on  Shuckburgh's  part  to  convert  the 
rough  and  ready  do-it-yourself  Palestine 
government  by  remote  control  into  a 
normal  and  competent  administration  and 
curb  the  wilder  eccentricities  of  its  officers, 
one  of  whom  had  a  habit  of  describing  him- 
self as  a  direct  successor  of  Pontius  Pilate. 

As  the  immediate  pressure  of  Middle 
East  affairs  diminished,  Shuckburgh's 
responsibilities  in  the  Colonial  Office  were 
gradually  widened  and  more  departments 
were  placed  under  his  supervision.  He  was 
appointed  K.C.M.G.  in  1922  and  in  1931, 
as  part  of  a  reorganization  of  the  Office, 
the  new  post  of  deputy  under-secretary  of 
state  was  created  with  Shuckburgh  as  its 
first  holder. 

In  1939  when  he  had  already  passed  the 
normal  age  of  retirement,  he  agreed  to 


884 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Sidgwick 


succeed  Sir  Bernard  Bourdillon  [q.v.]  as 
governor  of  Nigeria,  but  in  the  event  he 
remained  to  help  to  see  the  Colonial  Office 
into  the  war.  In  1942  on  reaching  the  age 
of  sixty-five  he  retired,  but  only  to  cross 
the  road  to  the  Cabinet  Office,  where  he 
spent  the  next  six  years  in  the  historical 
section,  writing  the  history  of  the  colonial 
empire  in  the  war.  It  was  during  this 
period,  in  1946,  that  he  published  a  voliune 
of  collected  essays  from  the  Spectator  and 
other  periodicals  under  the  title  An  Ideal 
Voyage. 

In  1906  Shuckburgh  married  Lilian 
Violet,  elder  daughter  of  Arthur  George 
Peskett,  fellow  of  Magdalene  College, 
Cambridge,  by  whom  he  had  three  sons 
and  two  daughters.  His  eldest  son,  (Sir) 
(Charles  Arthur)  Evelyn  Shuckburgh, 
joined  the  diplomatic  service  in  1933  and 
was  ambassador  to  Italy  in  1966-9 ;  his 
youngest  son  was  killed  in  action  over 
France  in  1941.  Shuckburgh  himself  died 
in  London  8  February  1953. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Gerard  Clauson. 

SHUTE,  NEVIL  (pseudonym),  novelist. 
[See  Norway,  Nevil  Shute.]  =    ^ 

SIDGWICK,  NEVIL  VINCENT  (1873- 
1952),  chemist,  was  born  in  Oxford  8  May 
1873,  an  only  child,  of  intellectual  stock 
on  both  sides.  His  father,  William  Carr 
Sidgwick,  from  whom  he  inherited  his  dia- 
lectic skill,  had  been  a  classical  fellow  of 
Merton  and  later  became  a  lecturer  at 
Oriel.  His  uncles  were  Henry  Sidgwick 
[q.v.],  professor  of  moral  philosophy  in 
Cambridge,  and  Arthur  Sidgwick,  reader  in 
Greek  at  Oxford.  His  mother,  to  whom  he 
owed  his  love  of  science,  was  descended 
from  a  Swiss  family  called  Perronet.  She 
was  Sarah  Isabella,  daughter  of  John  Vin- 
cent Thompson,  serjeant  at  law,  brother 
of  General  Thomas  Perronet  Thompson 
[q.v.].  Her  sister  married  Sir  Benjamin 
Brodie,  second  baronet  [q.v.].  Sidgwick  was 
educated  at  Summer  Fields  and  Rugby, 
where  he  was  in  both  the  classical  and 
science  sixths.  After  failing  to  win  a  classi- 
cal scholarship,  in  1892  he  was  elected  to 
a  scholarship  in  natural  science  at  Christ 
Church  where  his  tutor,  A.  G.  Vernon 
Harcourt  [q.v.],  introduced  him  to  the 
new  domain  of  physical  chemistry.  After 
getting  a  first  class  in  chemistry  in  1895 
Sidgwick  decided  to  read  literae  humaniores 
and  got  another  first  class  in  1897,  helped 
by  a  brilliant  viva  voce  in  philosophy. 
After  this  remarkable  intellectual  feat 


he  demonstrated  in  the  Christ  Church 
laboratory  for  a  year  and  then  went  to 
Leipzig  to  work  in  Ostwald's  laboratory 
but  fell  ill  and  had  to  return  home.  In  1899 
he  went  to  Tubingen  to  work  under  von 
Pechmann  and  in  1901  was  awarded  a 
Sc.D.,  summa  cum  laudCy  for  his  thesis  on 
some  new  organic  derivatives.  He  had 
already  been  dected  to  a  tutorial  fellow- 
ship at  Lincoln  College  which  was  to  be 
his  home  all  his  life  as  he  never  married. 
For  some  years  he  taught  at  both  Lincoln 
and  Magdalen  and  he  continued  to  work 
as  a  college  tutor  until  1948  when  he  was 
made  a  supernumerary  fellow  of  Lincoln. 
Sidgwick  taught  by  example  rather  than 
by  precept  and  he  won  the  gratitude  and 
affection  of  many  generations  of  pupils  by 
his  stimulating  intellect  and  his  personal 
interest  in  their  lives.  Among  them  were 
Sir  Henry  Tizard  [q.v.],  Sir  David  Rivett, 
D.  LI.  Hammick,  and  L.  E.  Sutton. 

In  1901  there  was  no  school  of  chemical 
research  in  Oxford  so  Sidgwick  struck  out 
on  his  own  line  by  examining  the  physico- 
chemical  properties  of  organic  compounds, 
their  ionization,  solubility,  and  colour. 
With  the  exception  of  the  discovery  of  one 
anomaly  which  later  paid  a  dividend,  the 
results  were  not  striking.  However,  in 
1910  Sidgwick  published  his  first  book 
Organic  Chemistry  of  Nitrogen  which 
immediately  attracted  attention  by  the 
originality  of  its  treatment.  It  displayed 
Sidgwick's  encyclopedic  knowledge,  his 
lucid  style,  and  his  success  in  blending  the 
disciplines  of  organic  and  physical  chem- 
istry. During  the  war  of  1914-18  he  was 
working  on  government  projects  which 
made  his  ability  known  to  a  wider  circle 
outside  Oxford. 

The  turning-point  in  Sidgwick's  career 
had  already  come  in  1914  when  he  sailed 
to  Australia  for  a  meeting  of  the  British 
Association  in  the  same  ship  as  Sir  Ernest 
(later  Lord)  Rutherford  [q.v.],  fresh  from 
the  triumphs  of  his  nuclear  atom.  Sidgwick 
fell  under  Rutherford's  spell  and  became 
his  lifelong  admirer.  It  was  at  Rutherford's 
suggestion  that  he  determined  to  devote 
himself  to  the  electronic  theory  of  atomic 
structure  and  chemical  constitution.  With 
this  in  mind  his  work  was  given  a  fresh 
stimulus  in  1919.  It  quickly  gave  results 
leading  to  his  election  into  the  Royal 
Society  in  1922.  In  these  years  Sidgwick 
was  developing  the  ideas  already  suggested 
by  Kossell,  G.  N.  Lewis,  Langmuir,  and 
(Sir)  G.  T.  Morgan  [q.v.].  His  immediate 
objective  was  to  elucidate  the  structiu« 
of  various  types  of  complex  compounds 


885 


Sidgwick 


•D.N.B.  1951-1960 


which  had  not  been  satisfactorily  ex- 
plained. His  ideas  were  confirmed  by  a 
remarkable  series  of  experimental  papers 
by  his  young  assistants.  Meanwhile  his 
mind  was  moving  in  a  wider  orbit  and  in 
1927  he  published  his  second  book  The 
Electronic  Theory  of  Valency  which  made 
him  famous.  He  had  recognized  that  to  be 
valid  a  theory  must  be  abte  to  explain  all 
known  instances  not  merely  a  few  selected 
tests.  So  he  set  himself  the  task  of  apply- 
ing the  theory  of  the  Rutherford-Bohr 
atom  to  the  whole  range  of  chemical 
compounds  without  infringing  the  physi- 
cal concepts  on  which  it  was  based.  This 
he  succeeded  in  doing  in  a  remarkable  way 
thanks  to  his  penetrating  intellect,  his 
orderly  and  critical  mind,  his  prodigious 
memory,  and  dogged  perseverence.  His 
book  had  a  widespread  influence  on  the 
minds  of  chemists  as  for  the  first  time  the 
most  diverse  structural  phenomena  cover- 
ing the  whole  field  of  chemistry  were  ration- 
ally systematized.  Sidgwick  was  not  a 
mathematician  but  he  had  the  knack  of 
expressing  physical  theory  in  clear  lucid 
words. 

The  next  development  came  from  a 
suggestion  from  Debye,  when  he  was  stay- 
ing with  Sidgwick  in  1928,  that  the  investi- 
gation of  dipole  moments  might  help  him 
over  a  difficulty.  Sidgwick  followed  up  this 
new  route  and  the  results  appeared  in  the 
lectures  he  gave  at  Cornell  University  in 
1931,  which  were  published  in  1933  under 
the  title  Some  Physical  Properties  of  the 
Covalent  Link  in  Chemistry. 

From  then  onwards  Sidgwick's  energy 
was  mainly  given  to  lectures  and  review 
articles  and  to  writing  the  second  volmne 
of  his  Electronic  Theory  of  Valency  fore- 
cast in  volimie  one.  Gradually  he  realized 
the  magnitude  of  the  task  he  had  under- 
taken which  developed  into  two  volumes 
of  750,000  words.  He  left  the  revision  of 
his  Organic  Chemistry  of  Nitrogen  to  his 
younger  collaborators  after  rewriting  the 
first  five  chapters  and  devoted  himself  to 
collating  the  known  facts  relating  to  the 
occurrence,  stability,  and  structure  of  the 
typical  compounds  of  all  the  known  ele- 
ments. This  involved  the  consultation  of 
10,000  papers.  The  great  task  occupied 
Sidgwick  for  nearly  twenty  years  and  he 
was  seventy-seven  when  his  final  book, 
The  Chemical  Elements  and  their  Com- 
pounds (2  vols.,  1950)  was  published.  The 
edge  of  his  mind  had  not  lost  its  keenness 
and  this  massive  work  of  scholarship  was 
distinguished  by  its  clarity  and  by  its 
astonishing  freshness  and  liveliness. 


Sidgwick's  vigorous  personality  played 
an  important  part  in  the  development  of 
the  Oxford  school  of  chemistry  and  his 
generous  hospitality  brought  many  emi- 
nent scientists  to  Oxford  and  helped  to 
give  the  school  a  sense  of  unity.  His  out- 
standing characteristics  were  his  passion- 
ate devotion  to  truth  in  all  matters,  his 
insatiable  curiosity,  his  desire  to  go  deep 
into  things,  and  his  loyalty  to  his  friends. 
He  had  a  sharp  tongue  and  pungent  wit, 
quickly  roused  by  any  loose  or  pretentious 
statement  or  by  a  sense  of  injustice,  from 
which  few  of  his  colleagues  escaped  at  one 
time  or  another.  He  enjoyed  the  society 
of  young  people  and  was  gentle  with  them. 
At  Cornell  in  1931  he  lived  in  a  fraternity 
house  with  undergraduates  where  he 
formed  friendships  which  brought  him 
much  happiness  in  later  life.  From  then 
onwards  he  often  returned  to  America, 
where  he  had  countless  friends.  In  1951  he 
underwent  a  serious  operation  in  order  to 
pay  a  final  visit  to  Cornell.  He  had  a  stroke 
on  the  boat  coming  home  and  after  some 
months  in  a  nursing-home  died  peacefully 
in  Oxford  15  March  1952. 

Sidgwick  held  the  readership  in  chem- 
istry of  the  university  of  Oxford  in  1924- 
45,  with  the  title  of  professor  from  1935 ; 
and  he  was  for  many  years  a  delegate  of 
the  University  Press.  Among  the  many 
honours  which  fell  to  him  were  a  Royal 
medal  and  the  Bakerian  lectureship  of  the 
Royal  Society,  the  Longstaff  medal  and 
Liversidge  lectureship  of  the  Chemical 
Society,  the  presidency  of  the  Chemical  and 
Faraday  societies  and  honorary  member- 
ship of  the  American  Academy  of  Arts 
and  Sciences.  He  was  appointed  C.B.E. 
in  1935. 

A  portrait  commissioned  by  some  of  his 
old  pupils  from  John  Merton  is  at  Lincoln 
College,  Oxford. 

[Sir  Henry  Tizard  in  Obituary  Notices  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ix,  1954; 
Proceedings  of  the  Chemical  Society,  1958; 
The  Times,  17  March  1952 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Harold  Haktley. 

SILBERRAD,  OSWALD  JOHN  (1878- 
1960),  scientist,  was  born  at  Buckhurst 
Hill,  Essex,  2  April  1878,  the  third  son  of 
Arthur  Pouchin  du  Toict  Silberrad,  38th 
Baron  (Franconian  cr.  1002)  of  the  house 
of  WiUigis  (von  der  Silber-Rad),  prince 
of  the  Holy  Roman  Empire,  merchant, 
and  his  wife,  Clarissa  Lucy  Savill,  sister 
of  Thomas  Dixon  Savill  [q.v.].  His  aunt 
Enrnia   married    Sir    Charles   Wyndham 


886 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Simon,  E.  E.  D. 


[q.v.].  His  sister,  Una  Lucy,  was  an 
authoress.  He  was  educated  at  Dean  Close 
Memorial  School,  Cheltenham,  the  City 
and  Guilds  Technical  College,  Finsbury, 
and  the  university  of  Wiirzburg.  In  1902 
he  was  appointed  head  of  the  experimental 
establishment  at  Woolwich  of  the  War 
Office  explosives  committee  of  which 
Lord  Rayleigh  [q.v.]  was  chairman. 
Neither  Silberrad  nor  the  small  staff  of 
six  chemists  with  which  he  was  originally 
provided  had  prior  acquaintance  with 
explosives,  but  under  his  brilliant  leader- 
ship and  youthful  urge  fundamental  re- 
searches were  put  in  hand  which  proved 
of  inestimable  value  to  the  fighting 
Services.  Most  notable  among  the  ex- 
plosives which  he  developed  was  trini- 
trophenylmethyl  nitroamine,  orginally 
dubbed  Silberrad' s  Explosive  S.  15,  later 
known  as  Tetryl,  which  continues  to  find 
important  application  in  a  wide  variety 
of  munitions.  Through  its  agency  he  found 
means  of  detonating  lyddite  shell  which 
had  failed  lamentably  to  explode  during 
the  South  African  war.  Sir  William 
Crookes  [q.v.]  was  a  frequent  visitor  to 
the  laboratories  and  impressed  by  the 
work  in  progress  minuted  the  War  Office 
emphasizing  the  need  for  larger  labora- 
tories and  additional  staff.  Of  Silberrad 
he  wrote  that  it  was  'wrong  to  employ  a 
racehorse  to  cart  bricks'.  As  a  result 
Silberrad  was  instructed  to  design  new 
buildings  and  to  include  provision  for 
metallurgical  research.  These  when  erec- 
ted were  known  as  the  chemical  research 
department  and  Silberrad  was  appointed 
superintendent  of  chemical  research  and  a 
member  of  the  explosives  committee. 

In  1906  this  committee  was  disbanded 
and  in  the  same  year  Silberrad  resigned 
to  become  for  the  rest  of  his  career  a 
consulting  research  chemist  and  director 
of  the  Silberrad  Research  Laboratories 
first  at  Buckhurst  Hill,  then  at  Loughton. 
Although  primarily  a  chemist  he  had 
picked  up  a  valuable  knowledge  of  metal- 
lurgy and  in  1908  at  the  instigation  of  the 
director  of  naval  construction  he  investi- 
gated the  cause  of  a  form  of  erosion  in 
ships'  propellers  so  severe  that  it  looked 
as  if  the  application  of  the  steam  turbine 
to  shipbuilding  was  doomed  and  that  a 
speed  exceeding  about  20-22  knots  was 
impracticable  for  surface  craft.  Silberrad 
discovered  the  cause  of  this  erosion  and 
produced  a  bronze  which  withstood  it  and 
with  which  the  propellers  were  made 
throughout  the  navy.  It  was  also  used  in 
other    high-speed    ships    including    the 


world's  great  liners.  In  conjunction  with 
the  firm  of  Hotchkiss  he  worked  on  erosion- 
resisting  gunsteel  which  rendered  the 
75-mm.  gun  a  practical  proposition  in  the 
war  of  1914-18. 

In  1915  the  scientific  committees 
advising  the  Ministry  of  Munitions  had 
insisted  that  lyddite  could  be  made  only 
in  earthenware,  hence  its  manufacture 
from  dinitrochlorbenzene  via  dinitrophenol 
which  requires  a  high  temperature  was 
impracticable.  Silberrad  showed  how  this 
could  be  done  in  large  charges  in  iron 
vessels  with  perfect  safety  and  many 
thousands  of  tons  were  made  by  this 
method  in  both  world  wars.  He  also  de- 
veloped a  fiashless  propellent  for  use  in 
large  howitzers.  He  discovered  how  to 
make  dyestuffs  from  a  special  type  of 
carbon  and  also  from  the  residues  from 
T.N.T.  manufacture.  Among  his  many 
other  discoveries  may  be  mentioned  a  new 
chlorinating  agent,  a  method  for  manu- 
facturing isoprene,  the  artificial  retting  of 
flax,  a  plastic  explosive  free  from  nitro- 
glycerine, and  a  new  method  of  blasting 
petroleum  wells.  He  was  the  author  of 
numerous  scientific  papers  and  of  a 
treatise  on  the  chemical  stability  of 
nitrocellulose.  He  was  a  fearless  experi- 
menter, on  one  occasion  making  a 
kilogram  of  nitrogen  iodide,  an  explosive 
which  when  dry  detonates  on  the  slightest 
touch.  He  had  great  personal  charm  and 
was  altogether  a  lovable  man. 

In  1922  he  married  Lilian  Glendora, 
daughter  of  Edward  George,  knight  of  the 
Order  of  MiUtia  Templi,  of  Ballinasloe  and 
Oxford ;  they  had  one  son.  Silberrad  died 
at  his  home.  Dryads'  Hall,  Loughton,. 
Essex,  17  June  1960. 

[The  Times,  18  June  1960;  Nature,  13 
August  1960;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  Godfrey  Rotter. 

SIMON,  ERNEST  EMIL  DARWIN,  first 
Baron  Simon  of  Wythenshawe  (1879- 
1960),  industrialist  and  public  servant, 
was  born  in  Didsbury,  Manchester,  9 
October  1879,  the  eldest  son  by  his  second 
wife,  Emily  Stoehr,  of  Henry  Gustav 
Simon  who  had  arrived  in  Manchester 
from  Germany  in  1860.  Like  many  liberal 
Germans,  Henry  Simon  found  the  political 
cUmate  of  his  native  Prussia  uncongenial. 
He  became  a  naturalized  British  citizen, 
and  founded  two  engineering  firms: 
Henry  Simon,  Ltd.,  which  made  flour- 
milling  machinery,  and  Simon  Carves, 
Ltd.,  which  exploited  a  French  patent  for 
a  by-product  coke  oven.  Both  achieved 


887 


Simon,  E.  E.  D. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


immediate  success  and  in  due  course  be- 
came the  Simon  Engineering  Group,  with 
world-wide  commitments.  Ernest  Simon 
was  destined  to  take  command  of  both  at 
an  early  stage  owing  to  his  father's  death 
in  1899.  Educated  at  Rugby  and  Pem- 
broke College,  Cambridge,  where  he  ob- 
tained a  first  in  part  i  of  the  mechanical 
sciences  tripos  in  1901,  even  before  com- 
pleting his  engineering  degree  he  was 
burdened  with  responsibility  for  both 
companies  and  for  the  destinies  of  a  large 
family  of  younger  brothers  and  sisters.  It 
was  under  his  leadership  that  the  family 
business  triumphantly  survived  the  impact 
of  two  world  wars  and  provided  the  ample 
resoiu*ces  which  Ernest  Simon  required  for 
the  prosecution  of  his  public  work  outside 
his  business  commitments. 

It  is  possible  that  this  early  assumption 
of  leadership,  plus  the  enjoyment  of  com- 
parative wealth,  isolated  him  from  the 
day-to-day  experiences  of  common  men 
and  intensified  a  natural  shyness  which 
made  him  appear  both  impersonal  and 
insensitive.  He  was  in  fact  a  dedicated 
and  altruistic  humanitarian  with  a 
sensitive  and  self-searching  social  con- 
science. Like  Sidney  and  Beatrice  Webb 
[qq.v.],  whose  work  inspired  his  earliest 
commitment  to  social  reform,  and  with 
whom  he  was  associated  in  founding  the 
New  Statesman,  he  thought  statistically 
rather  than  personally.  Statistics  of  over- 
crowding, as  later  the  measured  mileage 
of  devastation  achievable  by  a  hydrogen 
bomb,  roused  him  to  a  fury  of  reforming 
zeal.  This  led  him  to  a  progressive  delega- 
tion of  business  responsibility  which 
caused  him  to  be  known  to  the  public 
rather  as  a  great  social  reformer  than  as 
the  successful  industrial  tycoon  which 
indeed  he  was. 

By  1912  he  had  found  time  to  become  a 
member  of  the  Manchester  city  council, 
an  activity  which  led  in  1921  to  his  elec- 
tion as  lord  mayor.  During  these  years  he 
became  widely  known  as  an  expert  on 
smoke  abatement,  housing,  and  the  machi- 
nery of  local  administration — on  all  of 
which  subjects  he  wrote  and  published 
books.  Subsequent  events  rendered  much 
of  what  he  wrote  out  of  date;  but  his 
book  A  City  Council  from  Within  (1926) 
remains  an  illiuninating  study  of  incen- 
tives and  personal  relations  in  municipal 
administration.  In  all  this  work  he  was 
supported  by  his  wife,  Dorothy  Shena, 
daughter  of  John  Wilson  Potter,  ship- 
owner, of  Westminster,  whom  he  married 
in    1912.    In    many   ways    the    working 


partnership  of  the  Simons-  resembled  that 
of  the  Webbs.  Both  Simon  and  Webb 
married  beautiful  and  intelligent  women, 
shared  their  public  work  and  lived  happy 
ever  after.  But  for  the  Simons  the  interest 
of  a  family  was  added.  Two  sons,  neither 
of  whom  chose  to  enter  the  family  business, 
provided  in  due  course  daughters-in-law 
and  grandchildren.  Their  youngest  child, 
a  daughter  of  remarkable  intelligence  and 
charm,  died  at  the  age  of  twelve,  leaving 
a  shared  sadness  which  the  years  did  not 
dim. 

From  local  government,  Simon  moved 
by  stages  into  the  sphere  of  national  poli- 
tics. But  Manchester  remained  his  home* 
and  an  honorary  LL.D.  of  its  university 
(1944)  and  the  freedom  of  the  city  (1959) 
probably  caused  him  more  satisfaction 
than  the  knighthood  conferred  in  1932  or 
the  peerage  conferred  in  1947,  Neverthe- 
less experiences  in  municipal  housing  had 
convinced  him  that  local  frustrations  were 
conditioned  by  national  legislation ;  at  the 
same  time  association  with  Manchester 
liberalism  and  C.  P.  Scott  [q.v.]  of  the 
Manchester  Guardian  brought  him  into 
touch  with  the  intellectual  elite  of  the 
Liberal  Party.  He  became  a  leading  mem- 
ber of  the  Liberal  summer  schools  which, 
starting  from  a  small  house-party  of  his 
own  in  1920,  developed  into  the  periodic 
gatherings  which  in  1928  produced 
Britain's  Industrial  Future  (better  known 
as  the  Yellow  Book),  a  programme  of 
social  and  economic  reform  with  which 
the  Liberal  Party  faced  the  general  elec- 
tion of  1929.  These  political  contacts 
involved  Simon  in  two  brief  spells  of 
House  of  Commons  membership  (1923-4, 
1929-31),  during  the  Labour  Party's  two 
experiences  of  minority  office.  Both,  in 
spite  of  a  fortnight's  enjoyment  of  office 
as  parliamentary  secretary  to  the  Minis- 
try of  Health  in  Ramsay  MacDonald's 
pre-election  'national'  Government,  left 
him  with  tarnished  faith  in  party  politics. 
He  was  neither  a  good  party  man  nor  a 
congenial  House  of  Commons  man.  He 
could  not  suspend  his  critical  faculties  in 
the  interest  of  party  policy  and  he  found 
the  procedure  of  the  House  frustrating 
and  unbusinesslike.  Its  club  life  left  him 
cold. 

The  war  of  1939-45  (like  the  first  war) 
found  him  busily  engaged  in  the  conduct 
of  the  Simon  engineering  firms,  working 
at  high  pressure.  But  demands  were  also 
made  on  his  business  experience  by 
various  official  bodies.  From  his  point  of 
view,  the  most  significant  of  these  was  the 


888 


D.N.B.  1051-^1000 


Central  Council  for  Works  and  Buildings. 
What  he  learned  under  its  auspices  of  the 
structure  and  potentialities  of  the  building 
industry  served  as  the  basis  of  his  book 
Rebuilding  Britain,  a  Twenty  Year  Plan 
published  in  the  spring  of  1945.  It  was 
typical  of  him  to  start  planning  for  peace 
while  his  country  was  still  at  war. 

In  1946  he  joined  the  Labour  Party, 
though  remaining  critical,  in  the  light  of 
his  own  business  experience,  of  its  general- 
ized commitment  to  the  nationalization  of 
industry.  It  was  now  effectively  in  power ; 
and  he  felt  that  working  from  within  he 
could  best  serve  the  causes  he  had  at 
heart:  education,  municipal  ownership, 
town  planning.  His  peerage  enabled  him 
to  do  this  without  again  enduring  the 
boredom  of  the  House  of  Commons.  The 
title  adopted  was  derived  from  Wythen- 
shawe  Park  and  Hall,  which  he  and  his 
wife  had  bought  and  presented  to  the 
city  of  Manchester  to  form  a  central 
feature  of  the  great  municipal  housing 
estate  which  both  had  worked  hard  to 
bring  into  being.  A  second  result  of  his 
new  party  affiliation  was  his  appointment 
for  a  five  years'  term  as  chairman  of  the 
British  Broadcasting  Corporation  (1947- 
52).  This  brought  him  into  touch  with  an 
unfamiliar  sphere  of  human  activity :  the 
world  of  entertainment.  He  threw  himself 
into  its  complexities  with  a  zest  which 
on  occasions  bewildered  the  B.B.C.  His 
reign  coincided  with  the  renewal  of  its 
charter.  A  journey  to  the  United  States 
convinced  him  of  the  superiority  of  public 
service  over  commercial  broadcasting  and 
he  found  himself  in  violent  opposition  to 
the  campaign  waged  by  the  commercial 
interests  supported  by  the  Conservative 
Party  to  secure  the  introduction  of  com- 
mercial television  in  competition  with  the 
B.B.C.  On  this  issue  the  close  of  his  chair- 
manship brought  disappointment  and 
defeat. 

It  was  during  these  post-war  years  that 
Simon's  attention  was  for  the  first  time 
in  his  life  diverted  from  local  and  national 
to  world  problems.  It  seemed  to  him  that 
the  whole  future  of  humanity  was  menaced 
by  two  developments:  overpopulation 
and  nuclear  armaments.  To  both  subjects 
he  devoted  time,  money,  and  deep  study. 
His  interest  in  the  first  involved  an  in- 
vestigation on  the  spot  of  Barbadian 
economic  resources  in  relation  to  popula- 
tion growth,  and  was  perpetuated  after 
his  death  by  the  endowment  of  a  Simon 
Population  Trust  for  research  and  educa- 
tion on  population  problems.  The  second 


Simon,  E.  E.  D. 


led  him  into  active  co-operation  with  the 
Campaign  for  Nuclear  Disarmament.  It 
was  a  campaign  which  involved  more 
emotional  drive  and  less  opportunity  for 
objective  investigation  than  any  he  had 
yet  undertaken.  Nor  was- he  wholly  at  ease 
with  those  of  his  fellow  campaigners  who 
advocated  civil  disobedience.  But  he  was 
able  to  challenge  government  nuclear 
policy  in  the  House  of  Lords,  and  finance 
the  pubUcation  of  an  informative  book  on 
the  subject  by  Wayland  Young. 

It  was  fortunate  for  Simon  that  through- 
out his  working  life  his  faith  in  human 
betterment  was  sustained  by  a  belief  in 
the  saving  grace  of  education.  If  political 
democracy  was  found  wanting,  it  was 
because  humanity  was  ill  equipped  to 
understand  the  operation  of  political  and 
economic  controls  for  the  greatest  hap- 
piness of  the  greatest  number.  It  must  be 
made  to  understand.  In  the  thirties  he 
initiated  and  financed  a  campaign  for 
'Education  for  Citizenship'  in  secondary 
schools.  But  ah-eady,  as  early  as  1916,  had 
begun  an  association  with  Manchester 
University  which  ended  with  the  chair- 
manship of  its  council  (1941-57)  and  in- 
volved the  endowment  by  him  of  the 
Simon  Fund  for  the  provision  of  research 
fellowships.  Outside  his  own  university 
he  used  his  membership  of  the  House  of 
Lords,  which  otherwise  he  seldom  at- 
tended, to  promote  a  series  of  debates  on 
the  inadequacy  of  government  provision 
for  university  and  technological  education. 

During  the  closing  years  of  his  life  this 
was  the  main  focus  of  his  activities ;  and 
the  last  public  act  of  his  long  and  varied 
career  was  the  introduction  in  the  House 
of  Lords  on  11  May  1960  of  a  motion 
calling  on  the  Government  to  'appoint  a 
committee  to  inquire  and  report  on  the 
extent  and  nature  of  the  provisions  of 
full-time  education  for  those  over  the 
age  of  18,  whether  in  universities  or  in 
other  educational  institutions'.  The  reply 
on  behalf  of  the  Government  was  in- 
decisive and  Simon  was  disappointed.  He 
need  not  have  been;  for  on  20  Decem- 
ber 1960  the  Government  announced  the 
appointment  of  a  committee  under  the 
chairmanship  of  Lord  Bobbins,  granting 
all  that  Simon  had  asked.  Simon's  death 
in  Manchester,  3  October  1960,  robbed 
him  of  the  satisfaction  of  knowing  that 
his  meticulously  prepared  campaign  had 
initiated  a  stirring  of '  educational  waters 
destined  to  usher  in  a  new  era  of  expansion 
in  universities,  colleges  of  technology, 
and  teacher  training.  The  House  of  Lords 


Simon,  E.  E.  D, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


debate  on  11  May  1960  was  his  finest 
hour. 

Simon  was  succeeded  in  his  peerage  by 
his  elder  son,  Roger  (born  1913),  who 
preferred  not  to  use  the  title.* 

A  bust  by  Sir  Jacob  Epstein  belongs  to 
the  Simon  Engineering  Group. 

[Mary  Stocks,  Ernest  Simon  of  Manchester, 
1963 ;  personal  knowledge.]  Stocks. 

SIMON,  Sir  FRANCIS  (FRANZ) 
EUGEN  (1893-1956),  physicist,  was  born 
2  July  1893  in  Berlin,  the  only  son  and 
second  of  the  three  children  of  Ernst 
Simon,  a  well-to-do  real  estate  developer, 
and  his  wife,  Anna,  daughter  of  Philibert 
Mendelssohn,  a  surveyor  and  an  able 
mathematician.  An  ancestor  was  the 
brother  of  Moses  Mendelssohn,  the 
eighteenth-century  Jewish  philosopher ; 
two  of  Simon's  cousins  became  scientists : 
Dr.  K.  Mendelssohn,  F.R.S.,  reader  in 
physics  in  the  university  of  Oxford,  and 
Dr.  H.  Mendelssohn,  professor  of  zoology 
at  the  university  of  Tel  Aviv. 

At  the  Kaiser  Friedrich  Reform  Gym- 
nasium in  Berlin,  Franz  Simon's  talent  for 
mathematics  and  physics  soon  showed 
itself.  After  overcoming  strong  family 
opposition — his  father  thought  physics  an 
insecure  profession — he  matriculated  in 
1912  at  the  university  of  Munich  where  he 
spent  two  semesters  followed  by  one  at 
Gottingen.  His  studies  were  interrupted 
first  in  1913  by  compulsory  military  ser- 
vice then  by  the  war  of  1914f-18  in  which 
he  served  in  the  Field  Artillery,  mainly  on 
the  western  front.  He  became  an  officer, 
was  twice  wounded,  and  was  one  of  the 
earliest  poison  gas  casualties. 

In  the  spring  of  1919  he  resumed  his 
studies  of  physics  and  chemistry  at  the 
university  of  Berlin,  where  he  came  under 
the  influence  of  Planck,  von  Laue,  Haber, 
and  in  particular  of  Nernst,  then  director 
of  the  Physikalisch-Chemisches  Institut 
of  the  university,  under  whom  he  did  his 
thesis  work  on  specific  heats  at  low  tem- 
peratures. He  obtained  his  Dr.  Phil,  in 
December  1921  and  spent  the  next  ten 
years  in  the  same  laboratory,  becoming  in 
1924  a  Privatdozent  and  in  1927  an  'extra- 
ordinarius'  (associate  professor). 

The  Berlin  period  was  a  most  fruitful 
one  and  established  Simon's  reputation  as 
a  great  thermodynamician  and  the  out- 
standing low-temperature  physicist  of  his 
generation.  Much  of  his  work  in  Berlin  was 
directly  connected  with  the  Nernst  heat 
theorem,  which  in  its  fifteen  years  of 
existence  had  already  proved  its  worth  by 


enabling  the  prediction  of  chemical  equi- 
librium with  the  help  of  the  postulate  of 
vanishing  entropy  differences  between 
condensed  phases  at  the  absolute  zero  of 
temperature.  There  were,  however,  a 
number  of  cases  which  seemed  to  contra- 
dict the  Nernst  heat  theorem  and  in  the 
ensuing  controversy  Simon  took  the  line 
that  these  violations  were  only  apparent 
and  were  due  either  to  incorrect  extra- 
polation of  specific  heats  to  absolute  zero 
or  to  the  fact  that  the  system  was  not  in 
internal  equilibrium  and  hence  thermo- 
dynamic arguments  were  not  applicable. 
Many  specific  heat  measurements  were 
carried  out  in  his  laboratory  to  prove  this 
view  and  it  is  largely  thanks  to  Simon's 
work  that  the  Nernst  heat  theorem  has 
come  to  be  regarded  as  the  third  law  of 
thermodynamics  equal  in  fundamental 
importance  to  the  first  and  second  laws. 

It  was  in  Berlin  that  Simon  began  his 
extensive  researches  on  fluids  at  high 
pressures  and  low  temperatures  in  what 
he  called  'model'  experiments.  The  basic 
idea  was  that  by  studying  the  melting 
pressures  of  substances  with  low  boiling- 
points,  i.e.  weak  intermolecular  attractive 
forces,  one  could  predict  how  other  sub- 
stances would  behave  under  conditions 
difficult  to  realize  in  practice.  Thus,  his 
success  in  solidifying  helium  at  50  °K, 
that  is  ten  times  the  critical  temperature, 
enabled  him  to  make  hypotheses  about 
the  earth's  core. 

These  and  other  experiments  required 
liquid  hydrogen  and  liquid  heUum,  and 
the  Berlin  phase  was  notable  for  the 
development  of  many  new  low-tempera- 
ture techniques.  For  the  liquefaction  of 
helium  on  a  small  but  useful  scale  Simon 
developed  the  'desorption'  method  and  in 
1927  his  laboratory  became  the  fourth 
institution  in  the  world  where  experiments 
down  to  the  temperature  of  liquid  helium 
could  be  carried  out. 

Early  in  1931  Simon  succeeded  A.  Eucken 
as  professor  of  physical  chemistry  at  the 
Technische  Hochschule  of  Breslau:  an 
appointment  of  some  piquancy  in  view  of 
Simon's  recent  heated  controversies  with 
Eucken  about  the  third  law.  The  spring 
semester  of  1932  was  spent  as  visiting 
professor  at  the  university  of  California  at 
Berkeley,  where  Simon  conceived  and  de- 
veloped his  idea  of  the  so-called  'expansion' 
method  for  helium  liquefaction  and  was 
thus  the  first  person  to  liquefy  helium  in 
the  United  States.  The  simplicity  and 
cheapness  of  the  method  made  it  for  the 
next  twenty  years  the  mainstay  of  many 


890 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Simon,  F.  E. 


low-temperature  laboratories ;  it  was  with 
one  of  the  earliest  Simon  expansion  lique- 
fiers  installed  at  the  Clarendon  Laboratory 
in  Oxford  in  1933  that  helium  was  first 
liquefied  in  Britain. 

When  Hitler  came  to  power  Simon 
decided  to  leave  Germany  although  as  a 
war  veteran  and  holder  of  the  Iron  Cross 
first  class  he  was  exempt  from  the  decree 
dismissing  Jews  from  university  posts.  He 
correctly  foresaw  the  trend  of  events  and 
in  August  1933,  at  the  invitation  of  F.  A. 
Lindemann  (later  Viscount  Cherwell,  q.v.), 
he  moved  to  the  Clarendon  Laboratory  in 
Oxford  on  one  of  the  research  grants 
provided  by  Imperial  Chemical  Industries 
for  refugee  scientists  from  Germany.  He 
became  reader  in  thermodynamics  in 
1936 ;  was  accorded  the  title  of  professor 
and  became  a  student  of  Christ  Church  in 
1945 ;  in  1949  a  chair  of  thermodynamics 
was  specially  created  for  him. 

The  Clarendon  Laboratory  when  Simon 
came  to  it  was  small  and  not  too  well 
equipped,  but  the  period  of  1933-9  was 
nevertheless  rich  in  achievements.The  mag- 
netic cooling  method  to  reach  tempera- 
tures down  to  0001  °K  proposed  in  1926  by 
Debye  and  by  Giauque  fascinated  Simon 
who  had  earlier  carried  out  experiments  to 
estimate  the  scope  of  the  method  and  now 
devoted  much  of  his  energy  to  develop- 
ing it  as  a  practical  technique  for  experi- 
menting in  an  entirely  new  temperature 
range.  This  work,  carried  out  with  a  small 
group  of  collaborators,  led  to  the  discovery 
of  new  super-conductors  and  new  magnetic 
phenomena  in  paramagnetic  substances 
and  included  experiments  on  thermal  con- 
ductivity and  thermal  relaxation.  It  was 
during  the  same  period  that  experiments 
with  helium  II  (the  'superfluid'  low- 
temperature  modification  of  liquid  helium) 
led  Simon  to  postulate  the  existence  of 
a  mobile  helium  II  film  on  all  surfaces  in 
contact  with  the  liquid. 

The  outbreak  of-  war  in  1939  brought 
this  research  work  to  an  end.  Simon,  a 
naturalized  British  subject  since  1938, 
tried  hard  to  contribute  to  the  war  effort 
but  there  was  reluctance  to  entrust  secret 
work  to  ex-enemy  aliens.  With  other  refu- 
gee scientists,  notably  (Sir)  R.  E.  Peierls 
and  (Professor)  O.  R.  Frisch,  he  became 
interested  in  the  possibility  of  an  atomic 
bomb  and  began  to  work  on  the  problem 
before  it  had  become  an  official  project: 
hence  the  paradoxical  fact  that  in  its  early 
days  the  'Tube  Alloys'  project  was  run 
mainly  by  foreign-born  scientists.  Sinion 
was  mainly  cpoc^rn^d  Jjvith  the  separation 


of  the  uranium  isotopes  by  the  gaseous 
diffusion  method  and  his  report  in  late 
1940  contained  the  first  realistic  proposal 
for  a  sizeable  separation  plant.  He  was 
also  involved  in  many  other  aspects  of 
atomic  energy  and  his  stimulating  views 
played  a  part  in  Britain's  atomic  energy 
developments  both  during  and  after  the 
war. 

With  the  resumption  of  peacetime  re- 
search at  the  Clarendon  Laboratory,  Simon, 
while  continuing  some  of  the  earlier  work, 
turned  his  attention  to  some  new  fields. 
With  H.  Halban  he  initiated  work  on 
nuclear  orientation:  the  study  of  the 
anisotropy  in  the  intensity  of  radiation 
emitted  by  preferentially  oriented  radio- 
active nuclei,  a  technique  fruitful  for  both 
nuclear  and  solid  state  physics.  Even  more 
spectacular  were  the  experiments  on 
nuclear  cooling,  an  extension  of  the  mag- 
netic cooling  method  to  nuclear  magnetic 
moments,  which  resulted  in  temperature 
of  about  1  /1 ,000,000th  of  a  degree  absolute. 

During  the  last  ten  years  of  his  life 
Simon  devoted  much  of  his  time  to  the 
wider  social  and  political  aspects  of  science 
and  technology.  His  varied  activities  had 
one  basic  idea :  an  uncompromising  dislike 
of  waste  in  any  form.  He  castigated  the 
Government  for  its  lack  of  an  integrated 
power  and  fuel  policy;  he  deplored  the 
waste  of  fuel  in  open  grates  and  the  waste 
of  scientific  manpower  through  the  lack  of 
good  technological  education  or  through 
the  ineffective  use  of  the  intellectual  po- 
tential of  the  country.  Many  of  his  ideas 
found  expression  in  his  articles  in  the 
Financial  Times  of  which  he  was  scientific 
correspondent  between  1948  and  1951.  His 
immediate  impact  on  public  affairs  was 
only  slight,  partly  because  the  uncom- 
promising crusading  fervour  with  which 
he  propounded  his  many  ideas  tended  to 
put  people  off.  But  through  public  dis- 
cussions, stimulated  by  his  views,  he  did 
ultimately  influence  the  country's  think- 
ing. 

Underlying  Simon's  whole  work  was  a 
vivid  appreciation  of  thermodynamics 
which  to  him  was  a  living  subject,  drawing 
strength  continuously  from  the  interpre- 
tation of  new  phenomena.  His  career 
roughly  coincided  with  the  period  during 
which  low-temperature  physics  grew  into 
a  varied  yet  unified  discipline  and  he  was 
the  outstanding  figure  of  that  era.  It  was 
largely  thanks  to  him  that  the  Clarendon 
Laboratory  came  to  possess  one  of  the 
world's  largest  and  most  renowned  low- 
temperature  schools.  As  chairman  of  the 


891 


Simon,  F.  E. 


I).N.B.  1951-1960 


commission  of  very  low  temperatures  of 
the  International  Union  of  Pure  and 
Applied  Physics,  and  as  president  of  the 
first  commission  of  the  International 
Institute  of  Refrigeration,  he  played  an 
important  part  in  fostering  the  exchange 
of  ideas  and  international  collaboration  in 
these  fields.  He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1941 
and  received  the  society's  Rumford  medal 
in  1948.  He  became  an  honorary  foreign 
member  of  the  American  Academy  of  Arts 
and  Sciences  in  1952  and  was  awarded  the 
Kamerlingh  Onnes  gold  medal  of  the 
Dutch  Institute  of  Refrigeration  (1950) 
and  the  Linde  medal  of  the  German 
Refrigerating  Association  in  1952.  He  was 
appointed  C.B.E.  in  1946  and  knighted  in 
1954. 

On  Cherwell's  retirement  in  1956  Simon 
succeeded  him  as  Dr.  Lee's  professor  of 
experimental  philosophy  and  head  of  the 
Clarendon  Laboratory;  but  within  a 
month  of  taking  up  his  new  position  he 
died  in  Oxford,  31  October  1956. 

Simon's  most  notable  quality  was  a 
profound  and  warm-hearted  interest  in 
people  for  their  own  sake.  He  was  kindly 
and  generous,  devoid  of  all  pomposity; 
he  made  friends  easily  and  was  particu- 
larly successful  in  gaining  the  confidence 
and  devotion  of  young  people.  He  was 
proud  of  his  pupils — many  of  whom 
reached  prominence  in  academic  and  in- 
dustrial life — and  tended  to  regard  them 
as  members  of  a  large  family.  His  influence 
as  a  teacher  and  as  the  founder  and  head 
of  a  great  low-temperature  school  was 
mainly  through  personal  contact ;  lectur- 
ing was  not  his  strength.  Although  tolerant 
by  nature  he  was  uncompromising  on 
matters  of  principle.  To  the  end  of  his  life 
he  could  neither  forget  nor  forgive  the 
record  of  Nazi  Germany  and  remained 
convinced  that  the  spirit  which  made 
Nazism  possible  was  still  alive  in  Germany. 
He  was  a  scientist  to  the  core.  His  scien- 
tific outlook  permeated  his  whole  life  and 
coloured  his  judgements  on  public  affairs 
and  his  relations  with  others.  It  was  the 
blend  of  lovable  subjective  qualities  with 
the  disciplined  objectivity  of  the  physi- 
cist which  gave  Simon's  personality  its 
cachet. 

In  1922  Simon  married  Charlotte, 
daughter  of  a  successful  Berlin  business 
man,  Sigismund  Miinchhausen ;  they  had 
two  daughters. 

[N.  Kurt!  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of  Fellows 
of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iv,  1958;  Nancy 
Anns,  A  Prophet  in  Two  Countries,  1966; 
personal  knowledge.]  N.  Kurti. 


SIMON,  JOHN  ALLSEBROOK,  first 
Viscount  Simon  (1873-1954),  statesman 
and  lord  chancellor,  was  born  in  Manches- 
ter 28  February  1873,  the  only  son  and 
elder  child  of  the  Rev.  Edwin  Simon, 
Congregational  minister,  and  his  wife, 
Fanny,  daughter  of  William  Pole 
AUsebrook,  a  farmer.  To  his  mother  who 
claimed  connection  with  Cardinal  Pole 
[q.v.]  he  was  devoted.  His  father  was  the 
son  of  a  small  farmer  and  mason  at 
Stackpole  Elidor  in  Pembrokeshire.  After 
a  period  at  Bath  Grammar  School,  Simon 
went  with  an  entrance  scholarship  to 
Fettes  where  he  had  a  respectable  aca- 
demic and  athletic  career  and  was  head  of 
the  school.  To  the  end  Simon  retained  an 
interest  in  games  and  was  a  devoted  up- 
holder of  the  public  school  system.  In  1892 
he  went  up  to  Wadham  College,  Oxford, 
as  a  classical  scholar.  After  a  second  in 
mathematical  (1893)  and  classical  (1894) 
moderations  he  obtained  a  first  in  literae 
humaniores  and  was  president  of  the  Union 
in  1896  and  in  1897  was  elected  a  fellow 
of  All  Souls.  To  the  companionship  of  All 
Souls,  as  exacting  intellectually  as  un- 
demanding emotionally,  he  owed  much,  and 
in  an  increasing  degree,  throughout  his  life. 
He  also  owed  something  to  a  group  of  men 
of  remarkable  abilities  who  were  members 
of  Wadham  at  the  same  time — F.  E.  Smith 
(later  the  Earl  of  Birkenhead,  q.v.),  C.  R. 
Hone,  later  bishop  of  Wakefield,  C.  B.  Fry 
[q.v.],  H.  M.  Giveen,  A.  A.  (later  Lord) 
Roche  [q.v.],  and  F.  W.  Hirst  [q.v.]. 

In  1899  Simon  was  called  to  the  bar  by 
the  Inner  Temple.  In  the  same  year  he 
married  Ethel  Mary,  daughter  of  Gilbert 
Venables.  She  died  in  1902.  A  widower 
while  still  under  thirty  Simon  became 
increasingly  reserved.  He  himself,  as  well 
as  his  friends,  ascribed  his  'frigid  and  un- 
responsive' manner  to  this  tragedy,  but  his 
nature  had  always  been  self-contained. 
'Shyness  has  always  been  my  trouble, 
though  I  have  learned  to  conceal  it.'  At 
the  bar  Simon's  career  followed  the  pattern 
usual  to  the  lives  of  successful  advocates. 
A  pupil  of  (Sir)  Reginald  Acland,  he 
earned  27  guineas  in  his  first  year  but  soon 
moved  into  the  very  highest  class  of  civil 
practice,  taking  silk  only  nine  years  after 
he  had  been  called.  Simon's  qualities  as 
an  advocate  were  admirably  summarized 
in  his  own  description  of  Rufus  Isaacs, 
Marquess  of  Reading  [q.v.].  He  'had  every 
accomplishment  that  goes  to  make  a  great 
advocate  in  the  courts — an  uncanny  sense 
of  the  point  that  would  impress  the  tri- 
bunal, a  manner  that  was  authoritative 


892 


D.N,B.  1951-1960 


Simon,  J.  A;' 


without  being  truculent,  a  fine  presence, 
a  perfect  temper,  anda  complete  command 
of  every  detail  in  the  most  complicated 
brief.  To  this  might  be  added  Simon's  own 
peculiar  ability  to  expound  the  most  com- 
plicated matters  in  language  of  extreme 
simplicity.  In  later  years  this  was  to  make 
him  a  leading  authority  on  revenue  law. 

Nevertheless  he  did  not  rate  the  law  as 
one  of  the  highest  achievements  of  the 
liuman  mind ;  nor  did  he  plan  to  devote 
his  entire  life  to  forensic  disputes.  He 
regarded  the  bar  as  a  stepping-stone  to 
politics.  He  was  elected  Liberal  member 
of  Parliament  for  Walthamstow  in  1906 
and  held  this  seat  until  1918,  when,  not 
holding  Lloyd  George's  'coupon',  he  was 
defeated  at  the  general  election  of  that 
year.  But  in  1922  he  was  returned  for 
Spen  Valley  and  retained  the  seat  until 
May  1940. 

In  1910  Simon  was  appointed  solicitor- 
general,  with  a  knighthood,  at  the  early 
age  of  thirty-seven.  He  was  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council  in  1912  and  in  1913  he 
succeeded  Rufus  Isaacs  as  attorney- 
general  with  a  seat  in  the  Cabinet.  In  1914 
he  at  first  supported  those  like  Morley  and 
Burns  [qq.v.]  who  favoured  neutrality 
rather  than  intervention,  but  in  the  end 
withdrew  his  proposed  resignation.  In  May 

1915  he  refused  the  position  of  lord  chan- 
cellor; had  he  accepted  he  would  have 
been  the  youngest  lord  chancellor  with  the 
exception  of  Jeffreys  in  1685.  His  refusal 
was  almost  certainly  due  to  his  desire  not 
to  put  a  premature  end  to  his  political 
career  by  going  to  the  upper  House :  'The 
sack  rather  than  the  Woolsack',  he  wrote. 
Instead  he  went  to  the  Home  Office,  a 
position  from  which  he  resigned  in  January 

1916  on  the  issue  of  conscription.  He  later 
realized  that  from  all  points  of  view  this 
decision  had  been  a  mistake,  but  at  the 
time  he  was  able  to  produce  some  tradi- 
tional Liberal  arguments  in  support  of 
it.  Simon  was  now  out  of  ministerial  office 
for  fifteen  years.  The  intervening  period 
was  occupied  partly  by  war  service  in  the 
Royal  Flying  Corps  and  partly  by  steady 
devotion  to  his  careers  at  the  bar  and  in 
the  House  of  Commons.  In  May  1926  he 
achieved  what  had  hitherto  eluded  him — 
a  major  parliamentary  success,  when  his 
speech  on  the  illegality  of  the  general 
strike  indubitably  had  some  effect  in 
bringing  it  to  an  end. 

In  the  spring  of  1927  Simon  gave  up  his 
practice  at  the  bar  in  order  to  accept  the 
chairmanship  of  the  Indian  statutory 
commission  which  was  to  investigate  the 


development  of  the  government  of  India 
since  the  Montagu-Chelmsford  reforms  of 
1919  and  to  recommend  on  the  degree  of 
constitutional  progress  which  would  be 
suitable  for  the  future.  This  vast  task 
called  out  all  that  was  best  in  Simon— 
his  exceptional  powers  of  analysis  and  ex- 
position, his  ability  to  master  complex 
material,  and  his  wHlingness  to  work  hard 
in  the  public  interest.  It'  was  a  major 
disappointment  when  the  Labour  Govern- 
ment in  October  1929  issued  a  statement 
to  the  effect  that  'the  natural  issue  of 
India's  constitutional  progress  ...  is  the 
attainment  of- dominion  status'  before  the 
commission  had  reported  on  the  matter. 
In  India  Simon  was  dealing  with  local 
politicians  who  were  even  more  sensitive 
and  unwilling  to  take  responsibility  than 
he  was  said  to  be,  but  he  got  the  best  out 
of  them  and  secured  a  general  assent  to 
the  proposals  made  by  his  commission  in 
its  report  of  1930.  Unfortunately  events 
were  in  control  and  by  1935  the  huge 
report  with  so  much  careful  learning 
clearly  set  out  was  no  more  than  a  store- 
house for  historians.  In  1930,  after  refusing 
a  peerage,  Simon  returned  to  the  bar. 
In  the  following  year  he  formed  and  led 
the  Liberal  National  Party  (which  later 
changed  its^  name  to  National  Liberals), 
whose  object  was  to  support  the  newly 
formed  'national'  Government  and  the 
basis  of  whose  policy  was  anti-socialism. 

From  1931  to  1935  Simon  was  foreign 
secretary  and  had  to  deal  with  Germany, 
Italy,  and  Japan  in  general  and  disarma- 
ment in  particular.  It  is  probable  that 
those  who  were  responsible  for  the  forma- 
tion and  execution  of  British  foreign 
policy  in  those  years  would  never  have 
been  entirely  satisfied  that  justice  had 
been  done  to  them.  But  after  all  allow- 
ances have  been  made  it  must  be  recog- 
nized that  Ramsay  MacDonald  had  lost 
and  Simon  was  lacking  in  the  power  to 
seize  and  take  the  initiative  in  matters,  of 
high  policy.  Simon  was  criticized  especially 
for  his  failure  to  take  a  stronger  line  over 
Japanese  aggression  in  Manchuria.  Nor 
was  his  view  that  'we  must  keep  out  of 
trouble  in  Central  Europe  at  all  costs' 
calculated  to  deflect  Hitler  and  Mussolini 
from  their  designs ;  by  the  time  Simon  left 
office  the  aggressors  were  well  away. 

In  1935  Baldwin  transferred  Simon  to 
the  Home  Office  and  in  1937  Chamberlain 
on  his  accession  to  the  premiership  moved 
him  to  the  chancellorship  ofthe  Exchequer. 
Throughout  this  period  Simon  was  part 
of  the  inner  Cabinet  concerned  with  the 


Simon,  J.  A. 


D.N.B.  1951«1960 


formation  and  execution  of  both  domestic 
and  foreign  policy.  He  took  a  prominent 
part  in  such  events  as  the  abdication  of 
King  Edward  VIII  in  1936.  His  talents 
were  those  of  the  efficient  chief  of  staff 
rather  than  of  the  inspiring  commander-in- 
chief,  and  he  was  neither  responsible  for, 
nor  even  showed  any  desire  to  introduce, 
any  major  legislative  reform.  At  the  same 
time  Simon's  own  personal  popularity 
with  the  younger  members  of  both  parties 
in  the  House  of  Commons  sank  still  farther. 
In  part  this  may  have  been  due  to  the 
traditional  House  of  Commons  belief  that 
lawyers  are  lacking  in  conviction  and 
willing  to  speak  on  either  side  of  any  issue. 
But  Simon's  self-contained  manner  had 
often  caused  deep  offence,  and  also  con- 
veyed an  unjustified  impression  of  insin- 
cerity and  deviousness.  He  seemed  to  be 
entirely  lacking  in  any  of  those  human 
failings  which  the  British  public  likes  its 
politicians  to  possess  in  a  mild  degree.  His 
unpopularity  became  associated  with  that 
of  the  Government  which  was  swept  away 
in  the  Churchillian  gale  of  May  1940.  With 
Churchill  personally  Simon  had  been  on 
friendly  terms  since  the  days  when  they 
both  sat  in  Asquith's  Cabinet,  and  he  ac- 
cepted the  office  of  lord  chancellor,  with 
a  viscountcy. 

Although  he  had  been  for  so  long  out  of 
the  practice  of  the  law  Simon  had  no  diffi- 
culty in  presiding  on  the  Woolsack  with 
exceptional  distinction  during  a  period 
when  the  other  law  lords  were  a  team 
of  unusual  strength:  Maugham,  Wright, 
Porter,  Atkin,  Russell  of  Killowen,Romer, 
and  Macmillan.  These  Simon  was  careful 
to  consult  at  all  stages  about  proposed 
judgements  or  law  reforms — he  introduced 
and  carried  through  Parliament  two  im- 
portant statutes,  the  Law  Reform  (Frus- 
trated Contracts)  Act,  1943,  and  the  Law 
Reform  (Contributory  Negligence)  Act, 
1945.  It  is  paradoxical  that  at  the  end  of 
his  long  public  career  Simon  should  have 
been  more  successful  as  a  lawyer  than  as 
a  politician.  (He  was  not  a  member  of  the 
War  Cabinet,  and  had  little  contact  with 
the  direction  of  the  war.)  The  Appeal  Cases 
of  these  years  contain  numerous  decisions 
of  the  highest  importance  in  which  his 
skill  as  a  jurist  is  manifested  to  the  full. 
He  delivered  judgements  on  torts,  con- 
tracts, property,  criminal  law,  revenue 
law,  and  evidence.  In  each  of  these  differ- 
ent fields  he  moved  with  easy  mastery. 
His  judgements  were  soundly  based  on  the 
authorities  but  contain  no  unnecessary 
parade  of  elaborate  learning.  Occasionally 


he  attempted  to  restate  the  law  in  the 
form  of  numbered  propositions.  These  dis- 
played all  his  analytical  skill  and  power 
of  exposition  and  although  on  occasion 
later  courts  have  felt  constrained  to 
modify  them  he  has  an  assured  place 
among  the  greatest  jurists  who  have  been 
on  the  Woolsack. 

In  appearance  Simon  was  a  tall  and 
well-built  man  with  a  fine  head.  He  was 
not  exactly  handsome  or  distinguished, 
but  his  manner,  and  still  more  his  conver- 
sation, at  once  displayed  him  as  a  person 
of  consequence.  He  was  appointed 
K.C.V.O.  in  1911,  G.C.S.I.  in  1930,  and 
G.C.V.O.  in  1937.  He  was  proud  to  become 
high  steward  of  Oxford  University  in 
1948.  After  1945  Simon  continued  to  take 
an  active  part  in  the  legal  and  political 
business  of  the  House  of  Lords.  He  showed 
few  signs  of  advancing  years:  he  could 
still  consult  the  London  telephone  direc- 
tory without  the  aid  of  glasses.  It  was 
noted  that  on  his  eightieth  birthday  he 
had  many  more  friends  than  on  his  seven- 
tieth. He  died  in  London  11  January  1954 
and  in  accordance  with  his  express  in- 
structions was  cremated  in  his  D.C.L. 
gown  without  any  religious  ceremony. 

By  his  first  wife  Simon  had  one  son, 
John  Gilbert  (born  1902),  who  succeeded 
him  as  second  viscount  (and  who  contri- 
butes to  this  Supplement),  and  two  daugh- 
ters. There  were  no  children  by  his  second 
marriage  (1917)  to  Kathleen  (died  1955), 
widow  of  Thomas  Manning  and  daughter 
of  Francis  Eugene  Harvey,  of  Kyle, 
county  Wexford.  She  was  devoted  to  many 
good  causes,  especially  the  emancipation 
of  slaves,  and  in  1933  was  appointed 
D.B.E.  for  her  work. 

There  are  portraits  of  Simon  by  Sir 
Oswald  Birley  (Inner  Temple),  P.  A.  de 
Laszlo  (All  Souls),  and  Frank  O.  Salisbury 
(Privy  Council).  A  pencil  drawing  by 
Edward  I.  Halliday  (1948)  is  an  admirable 
likeness.  A  bust  by  Lady  Kennet  is  in 
All  Souls. 

[Viscount  Simon,  Retrospect^  1952;  The 
Times,  12  January  1954;  Oxford  Magazine, 
11  March  1954;  Law  Quarterly  Review,  April 
1954;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] R.  F.  V.  Heuston. 

SIMON,  OLIVER  JOSEPH  (1895-1956), 
printer,  was  born  29  April  1895  at  Sale, 
Cheshire,  the  eldest  son  of  Louis  Simon, 
cotton  merchant,  and  his  wife,  Louisa, 
sister  of  (Sir)  WiUiam  Rothenstein  [q.v.] 
and  Albert  Rutherston.  He  was  educated 
at  Charterhouse  and  Jena.  In  the  war  of 


894 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Simonsen 


1914-18  he  served  in  Gallipoli,  Egypt, 
and  Palestine,  countries  which  made  a 
profound  impression  on  him.  Later  he 
revisited  Palestine  and  his  intense  interest 
in  the  country  led  to  the  founding  of  the 
Paladin  Club.  The  membership  included 
Sir  Ronald  Storrs,  Chaim  Weizmann 
[qq.v.].  Lord  Samuel,  Malcolm  Mac- 
Donald,  and  Norman  Bentwich. 

With  no  certain  idea  of  what  his  future 
should  be,  Simon  went  to  London  in  1919. 
Seeing  a  collection  of  finely  printed  books, 
he  realized  with  a  flash  of  certainty  that 
his  Ufe's  work  must  be  with  printing.  His 
uncles  helped  him  with  introductions  and 
after  a  short  time  as  a  pupil  with  Charles 
T.  Jacobi  at  the  Chiswick  Press,  he  met 
Harold  S.  Curwen  who  agreed  to  take  him 
for  a  year's  training  at  the  Curwen  Press. 
At  the  end  of  1920  he  persuaded  Curwen 
to  let  him  stay  on  and  examine  the 
prospects  of  adding  book-printing  to  the 
Curwen  activities,  with  the  result  that 
he  remained  with  the  Press  for  the  rest  of 
his  life ;  in  1949  he  became  its  chairman. 

In  1923  Simon  pubhshed  the  first 
volume  of  The  Fleuron,  a  journal  of  typo- 
graphy, of  which,  in  conjunction  with 
Stanley  Morison,  seven  numbers  were 
produced,  the  last  three  being  edited  by 
Morison.  It  was  characteristic  that  the 
first  number  contained  no  introduction 
with  elaborate  statement  of  aims  and 
objects,  and  no  promises  for  the  future. 
Exquisitely  produced,  it  made  its  own 
way. 

Simon  and  Hubert  Foss  [q.v.]  helped 
by  two  or  three  others  founded  in  1924 
the  Double  Crown  Club,  a  dining  club  for 
typographers,  designers,  artists,  authors, 
and  publishers.  Its  influence  on  the 
design  and  production  of  British  books 
cannot  be  exactly  measured,  but  it  was 
certainly  responsible  for  fostering  and 
encouraging  a  sound  contemporary  style 
of  printing  in  all  its  forms. 

In  November  1935  Simon  brought  out 
the  first  number  of  a  periodical,  Signature, 
which  was  to  appear  two  or  three  times  a 
year  until  1954  with  the  exception  of  the 
war  years,  1941-5.  It  contained  articles 
on  the  arts  of  design,  illustration,  printing, 
and  calligraphy,  and  provided  a  fitting 
monument  to  his  own  ideals  of  beautiful 
production.  In  1945  he  published  an 
Introduction  to  Typography  which  was 
quickly  accepted  as  a  standard  work. 

Although  he  was  recognized  internation- 
ally as  a  typographical  authority  with  an 
intimate  knowledge  of  the  importance  and 
influence  of  the  famous  English  private 


presses,  Simon's  aim  was  to  do  first-rate 
contemporary  and  commercial  printing. 
Under  his  guidance,  the  Curwen  Press 
played  a  major  part  in  the  improvement 
of  printing  in  all  its  aspects  after  1918. 
He  encouraged  many  artists  to  use  their 
talents  in  the  direction  of  printing  and 
book  design,  among  them  Eric  Ravilious, 
Paul  Nash,  Barnett  Freedman  [qq.v.], 
Edward  Ardizzone,  Edward  Bawden, 
Reynolds  Stone,  John  Piper,  and  Graham 
Sutherland. 

Printer  and  Playground  (1956),  Simon's 
autobiography,  is  the  story  of  an  idealist, 
a  man  dedicated  to  his  calling,  a  typo- 
graphical craftsman  of  uncompromising 
standards,  but  no  pedant.  He  appears 
sociable  but  not  gregarious,  ever  modest 
of  his  own  accomplishments,  affectionate, 
humorous,  with  an  invincible  courage  and 
unflinching  tenacity  of  purpose. 

Simon  was  appointed  O.B.E.  in  1953 
and  died  in  London  18  March  1956. 
He  married  in  1>926  Ruth,  daughter  of 
Christopher  Henry  Ware,  of  Hereford- 
shire, and  had  one  daughter  and  one  son, 
who,  in  his  turn,  became  a  director  of  the 
Curwen  Press.  A  drawing  by  Brian  Robb 
is  reproduced  in  Printer  and  Playground. 

[The  Times,  20  March  1956;  private  in- 
formation; personal  knowledge.] 

G.  Wren  Howard. 

SIMONSEN,  Sir  JOHN  LIONEL  (1884- 
1957),  organic  chemist,  was  born  in 
Levenshulme,  Manchester,  22  January 
1884,  the  only  son  of  naturalized  British 
parents  of  Danish  origin.  His  father, 
Lionel  Michael  Simonsen,  was  a  velveteen 
merchant,  of  Jewish  stock,  and  his  mother, 
Anna  Sophie  Bing,  had  relatives  in  aca- 
demic circles  in  Denmark  and  Sweden. 
Simonsen  was  educated  at  Manchester 
Grammar  School  where  he  was  stimulated 
by  Francis  Jones,  a  distinguished  pioneer 
in  the  teaching  of  the  elements  of  chem- 
istry. Fortunately  some  of  his  schoolmates 
had  a  definite  predilection  for  science. 
Among  them  were  C.  S.  Gibson,  D.  M.  S. 
Watson,  and  K.  Fisher.  The  last  (who 
later  became  headmaster  of  Oundle),  after 
working  under  Knorr  at  Jena,  met 
Simonsen  again  in  the  laboratory  of 
W.  H.  Perkin  [q.v.]  at  Manchester 
University.  Summer  holidays  were  spent 
in  the  Copenhagen  laboratory  of  an  uncle 
by  marriage.  Professor  V.  Henriques,  a 
physiologist.  This  and  other  contacts 
with  his  Danish  scientific  relatives  doubt- 
less determined  the  direction  of  Simonsen's 
interests.     Forfeiting    a    scholarship    in. 


895 


Simonsen 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


modern  languages,  he  became  a  student  in 
the  school  of  chemistry  of  Manchester 
University,  already  a  renowned  and 
leading  centre  of  research.  He  graduated 
with  first  class  honours  in  1904,  obtained 
his  D.Sc.  in  1909  and  from  1907  was 
assistant  lecturer  and  demonstrator. 

Even  in  those  early  days  Simonsen  was 
recognized  as  a  brilliant  experimentalist. 
His  work  was  always  neat  and  careful  and 
so  well  described  that  it  could  be  easily 
reproduced  by  other  chemists.  His  main 
task  was  to  find  a  synthesis  of  norpinic 
acid.  This  end-product  of  a  degradation 
of  pinene  carried  out  by  A.  von  Baeyer 
proved  elusive  but  the  syntheses  inciden- 
tally effected  gave  fresh  starting-points 
in  unanticipated  directions.  Simonsen  re- 
corded new  syntheses  of  terebic  acid 
and  two  homologues  and  in  collaboration 
with  (Sir)  Robert  Robinson  reinvesti- 
gated rhein  and  alo-emodin  which  were 
shown  to  be  respectively  dihydroxyanthra- 
quinonecarboxylic  acid  and  the  related 
jo-alcohol,  (HO)2Ci4H50a.C02H  and 
(HO)2Ci4H502  •  CH2OH.  This  interest  arose 
from  a  study  of  barbaloin  which  Simonsen 
resumed  much  later  and  then  estabhshed 
facts  which  were  fundamental  for  the  final 
solution  of  the  difficult  problem. 

In  1910  Simonsen  went  to  Madras  as 
professor  of  chemistry  at  the  Presidency 
College.  Almost  at  once  he  devoted  him- 
self to  the  improvement  of  Indian  scien- 
tific work  and  education  beyond  the  limits 
of  his  post.  He  took  the  initiative  in  1914 
in  helping  to  found  the  Indian  Science 
Congress  Association  of  which  he  was 
general  secretary  until  1926  and  which 
owed  its  success  largely  to  his  efforts. 
Indian  science  became  much  better  known 
to  and  appreciated  by  Europeans,  and 
many  western  scientists,  most  of  them 
British,  were  enabled  to  visit  India. 
Simonsen  also  assisted  the  Government  in 
various  ways :  during  the  war  of  1914-18 
he  was  controller  of  oils  and  chemical 
adviser  to  the  Indian  Munitions  Board. 
In  1919-25  he  was  chief  chemist  of  the 
Forest  Research  Institute  and  College 
at  Dehra  Dun  and  in  1925-8  professor  of 
organic  chemistry  at  the  Indian  Institute 
of  Science  at  Bangalore. 

In  1928  Simonsen  returned  to  England 
and  worked  for  a  time  at  the  chemical 
laboratory  of  Guy's  Hospital,  but  in  1930 
he  resumed  academic  work  as  professor 
of  chemistry  at  the  University  College  of 
North  Wales,  Bangor,  where  he  remained 
until  1942.  The  main  current  of  his  mature 
original  scientific  work  was  concerned  with 


the  chemistry  of  the  terpenes  and  sei 
quiterpenes.  His  name  will  always  be 
associated  with  the  very  interesting  dis- 
covery of  /^,2-carene  in  Indian  turpentine. 
This  gave  the  clue  to  the  reason  for  the 
apparent  structural  anomaly  presented  by 
sylvestrene  and  thus  strengthened  the 
belief  that  the  'head  to  tail'  isopentane 
rule  is  valid.  Some  of  his  studies  of  sesqui- 
terpenes were  started  in  India  (longi- 
folene,  1920)  but  the  greater  part  of  this 
important  work  was  carried  out  in 
Bangor,  partly  in  collaboration  with 
A.  E.  Bradfield  and  often  with  A.  R. 
Penfold,  director  of  the  Museum  of 
Applied  Arts  and  Sciences  in  Sydney, 
N.S.W.  This  long-distance  arrangement 
was  very  effective;  Penfold  isolated  new 
natural  products  and  Simonsen  devel- 
oped their  chemistry.  Their  fruitful 
labours  led  to  the  establishment  of  the 
structure  of  the  sesquiterpenoid  ketone, 
eremophilone,  though  not  without  stumbles 
on  the  way.  The  final  elucidation  de- 
pended on  the  recognition  of  an  intra- 
molecular migration  of  a  methyl  group  at 
some  stage  in  the  biosynthesis  from  these 
'head  to  tail'  isopentane  units  (farnesane 
type).  This  type  of  migration,  first  indi- 
cated in  the  case  of  eremophilone,  be- 
came of  great  value  in  helping  to  an 
understanding  of  the  biogenesis  of  the 
sterols. 

Simonsen  and  his  colleagues  determined 
the  molecular  structure  of  a-  and  j8- 
cyperones,  discovered  the  ci/cZobutane 
element  of  the  caryophyllene  molecule  and 
laid  the  foundations  for  the  determination 
of  the  structure  of  longifolene.  He  made 
numerous  further  significant  contribu- 
tions to  knowledge  which  are  described 
in  about  180  memoirs.  In  addition  to  his 
scientific  papers  Simonsen's  literary  out- 
put included  a  comprehensive  account  of 
the  terpenes  published  in  five  volumes 
(1947-57,  with  L.  N.  Owen,  D.  H.  R. 
Barton,  and  W.  C.  J.  Ross)  which  con- 
stitute the  standard  work  of  reference  in 
the  field. 

In  1943-52  Simonsen  was  director  of 
research  of  the  Colonial  Products  Research 
Council.  He  also  worked  on  the  insecticide 
panel  and  stored  foods  committee.  He  was 
appointed  member  of  the  Agricultural 
Research  Council  in  1945  and  was  British 
delegate  to  the  Food  and  Agriculture 
Organization  specialists  committee  in 
London  in  1947.  In  all  this  work  he  dis- 
played impressive  energy  and  administra- 
tive ability.  In  1944  with  Sir  Robert 
Robinson  he  visited  the  United  States  and 


J 


896 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Singer 


the  Caribbean.  Results  of  this  visit  were 
the  founding  of  the  Microbiological  Insti- 
tute in  Trinidad  and  the  clearance  of 
mosquitoes  from  the  coastal  strip  of 
British  Guiana.  The  infantile  mortality 
rate  was  dramatically  reduced,  an  ad- 
vance which  brought  further  problems  in 
its  wake.  In  1946  with  Sir  Ian  Heilbron 
[q.v.]  he  visited  East  and  South  Africa. 
The  necessity  for  a  wider  front  than  that 
implied  by  'colonial  products  research' 
became  apparent  and  eventually  the 
term  'tropical  products  research'  was 
adopted. 

Simonsen's  abilities  as  a  scientist  were 
almost  entirely  on  the  experimental  side ; 
he  had  little  interest  in  theory  but  his 
laboratory  work  was  superb  both  in  plan 
and  execution.  He  had  many  students  and 
junior  collaborators  whose  subsequent 
achievements  bear  testimony  to  his 
ability  as  a  teacher.  Simonsen  was  at  the 
same  time  exacting  and  generous ;  formal 
when  occasion  demanded  it,  but  always 
warm-hearted.  He  would  go  to  any  poss- 
ible lengths  Jto  help  a  younger  man  and  his 
loyalty  to  his  high  ideals,  his  friends,  and 
his  country,  had  no  limits. 

Simonsen  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1932  and 
awarded  the  Davy  medal  in  1950.  He  was 
the  first  recipient  of  the  American  Chemi- 
cal Society's  Fritzsche  award  (1949)  and 
received  honorary  degrees  from  the 
universities  of  Birmingham,  Malaya,  and 
St.  Andrews.  He  was  honorary  secretary 
of  the  Chemical  Society  (1945-9)  and  was 
knighted  in  1949. 

In  1913  he  married  Jannet  (Nettie) 
Dick  (died  1960),  daughter  of  Robert 
Hendrie,  of  Nairn.  She  had  been  a  bril- 
liant surgeon  and  at  the  time  of  her 
marriage  was  in  charge  of  the  Caste  and 
Gosha  Hospital  at  Madras.  They  had  no 
children  but  adopted  a  daughter.  Simon- 
sen died  in  London  20  February  1957. 

[Sir  Robert  Robinson  in  Biographical 
Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol. 
v,  1959 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

R.  Robinson. 

SINGER,  CHARLES  JOSEPH  (1876- 
1960),  historian  of  medicine  and  science, 
was  born  in  Camberwell  2  November 
1876,  the  fifth  child  and  fourth  son  of 
the  Rev.  Simeon  Singer  and  his  wife, 
Charlotte  Pyke.  Three  years  later  his 
father,  a  notable  classical  and  Hebrew 
scholar,  became  rabbi  of  the  New  West  End 
Synagogue.  Singer  went  to  the  City  of 
London  School,  then  to  a  tutorial  college  to 
prepare  for  his  matriculation.  He  began 


8652062 


the  medical  course  at  University  College, 
London,  did  well  in  zoology  and  decided 
to  read  for  a  B.Sc.  in  zoology  under 
W.  F.  R.  Weldon  [q.v.],  to  whom  he  be- 
came demonstrator.  But  he  obtained  an 
exhibition  in  zoology  at  Magdalen  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  read  nothing  but 
zoology.  The  subject  remained  a  lifelong 
interest,  and  he  was  especially  grateful  for 
the  assistance  and  friendship  of  E.  S. 
Goodrich  [q.v.].  Singer  obtained  second 
class  honours — ^there  were  no  firsts  in 
zoology  that  year — in  1899,  and  circum- 
stances now  induced  him  to  return  to  the 
study  of  medicine.  He  entered  St.  Mary's 
Hospital,  Paddington,  as  a  medical  stu- 
dent and  quahfied  M.R.C.S.,  L.R.C.P.  in 
1903.  He  had  thus  spent  ten  years  over 
his  university  studies.  Immediately  on 
qualifying  Singer  was  appointed  medical 
officer  to  a  small  geographical  expedition 
to  Abyssinia  where  he  spent  nearly  a 
year. 

On  his  return  Singer  filled  various  posts 
in  London,  Brighton,  and  in  Singapore 
(1908).  During  these  years  he  graduated 
B.M.  at  Oxford  (1906)  and  on  his  return 
he  was  admitted  M.R.C.P.  London  (1909) 
and  was  appointed  registrar  to  the  Cancer 
Hospital  and  physician  to  the  Dread- 
nought Hospital.  At  the  former  he  did 
pathological  research  of  some  importance 
and  at  the  latter  he  extended  his  already 
deep  interest  in  tropical  diseases.  He  re- 
tained these  posts  until  he  went  to  Oxford 
in  1914  and  for  a  time  he  was  concurrently 
in  consulting  practice  in  the  west  end  of 
London. 

In  1910  Singer  married  Dorothea 
Waley  Cohen  (1882-1964),  second  daugh- 
ter of  Nathaniel  Louis  Cohen  and  sister  of 
(Sir)  Robert  Waley  Cohen  [q.v.].  Dorothea 
Singer  devoted  herself  to  many  hiunani- 
tarian  and  social  activities,  but  she  will 
be  best  remembered  for  her  scholarly 
work  in  the  history  of  science  and  medi- 
cine, notably  her  monumental  catalogue 
of  Greek,  Latin,  and  vernacular  alchemi- 
cal manuscripts  in  the  British  Isles  (1924- 
31),  her  unpublished  extension  of  that 
work  to  cover  all  scientific  subjects,  depo- 
sited on  cards  in  the  British  Museum,  and 
her  study  of  Giordano  Bruno  (1950).  In 
1911  Singer  graduated  D.M.  at  Oxford  and 
in  that  year  also,  while  he  was  actively 
pursuing  his  pathological  researches,  he 
was  led  by  accident  to  write  on  an  hist- 
orical subject.  The  result  was  two  papers 
on  Benjamin  Marten,  a  precursor  of  the 
germ-theory  of  disease,  and  within  the 
next  three  years  several  other  historical 

897  Gg 


Singer 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


papers  followed.  A  parting  of  the  ways 
occurred  in  1914  when  Sir  William  Osier 
[q.v.]  offered  Singer  a  studentship  in 
pathology — the  duties  of  which  were  to  be 
mainly  historical — at  Oxford.  After  their 
removal  to  Oxford  the  Singers  threw  them- 
selves into  the  task  of  improving  the  facili- 
ties for  the  study  of  the  history  of  science 
in  the  Radcliffe  Camera.  During  most  of 
the  war  Singer  served  as  a  pathologist, 
with  the  rank  of  captain,  in  the  Royal 
Army  Medical  Corps,  and  he  saw  much 
service  in  Malta  and  at  Salonika.  While  he 
was  on  military  service  he  published  some 
fifteen  notable  papers  on  medieval  and 
renaissance  medicine,  and  also  his  first 
major  work,  the  first  volume  of  his  Studies 
in  the  History  and  Method  of  Science  (1917). 

On  his  return  from  the  war  Singer  found 
that  the  Oxford  which  he  had  known  had 
changed,  and  he  was  in  1920  induced  to 
accept  a  lectureship  in  the  history  of 
medicine  at  University  College,  London. 
The  mental  stimulus  provided  by  the  staff 
of  that  college  at  that  time  proved  very 
congenial  to  him,  and  the  next  twelve 
years  were  richly  productive.  In  1921  the 
second  volume  of  his  Studies  appeared, 
and  in  the  same  year  he  contributed  the 
chapters  on  biology  and  medicine  to  The 
Legacy  of  Greece.  He  wrote  also  for  later 
volumes  of  the  'Legacy'  series,  and  with 
E.  R.  Bevan  [q.v.]  he  edited  The  Legacy 
of  Israel  (1927)  to  which  both  he  and  his 
wife  contributed.  In  the  first  volume  of  the 
Studies  Singer  had  included  his  important 
discussion  of  the  visions  of  St.  Hildegard 
of  Bingen,  and  in  1922  the  university  of 
Oxford  awarded  him  a  D.Litt.  for  that 
and  other  historical  essays.  He  had  been 
elected  F.R.C.P.  in  1917  and  in  1923-4 
he  gave  the  FitzPatrick  lectures  of  that 
College.  They  were  published  in  extended 
form  in  1925  with  the  title  The  Evolution 
of  Anatomy,  the  first  serious  study  of  that 
subject  in  English.  In  that  and  the  fol- 
lowing year  there  appeared  his  transla- 
tions of  significant  medieval  anatomical 
works.  In  1927  he  published  his  important 
paper  on  the  herbal  in  antiquity,  and  in 
1928  his  well-known  works  From  Magic 
to  Science  and  a  Short  History  of  Medicine. 

In  1930  Singer  gave  the  first  Noguchi 
lectures  at  Johns  Hopkins  University, 
Baltimore,  and  after  a  short  time  at  the 
Huntington  Library  at  Pasadena  he  spent 
three  months  as  a  visiting  professor  at 
the  university  of  California  at  Berkeley. 
In  1931  he  was  invited  to  fill  the  chair  of 
the  history  of  medicine  at  Johns  Hopkins, 
but  this  he  refused  after  much  considera- 


tion as  he  had  just  had  conferred  on  him 
the  title  of  professor  of  the  history  of 
medicine  in  the  university  of  London. 
From  January  1932  he  spent  another  year 
as  visiting  professor  at  Berkeley,  and  the 
results  of  the  lectures  given  during  these 
two  extended  visits  appeared  as  his  Short 
History  of  Biology  (1931)  and  his  Short 
History  of  Science  (1941). 

In  1934  the  Singers  removed  to  the  fine 
house,  'Kilmarth',  near  Par,  Cornwall, 
which  for  a  quarter  of  a  century  was  to 
be  a  focal  point  for  scholars  from  many 
countries,  and  in  which  his  magnificent 
library  was  adequately  housed.  In  it 
during  the  war  years  he  taught  practical 
biology  with  great  success  to  boys  of  the 
King's  School,  Canterbury,  evacuated  to 
Cornwall.  In  the  pre-war  years  he  was 
much  engaged  with  the  activities  of  the 
Society  for  the  Protection  of  Science  and 
Learning  in  helping  scholars  suffering 
from  Nazi  oppression. 

The  end  of  the  war  marked  the  begin- 
ning of  Singer's  Indian  summer.  In  1946 
he  published  (with  Chaim  Rabin)  a  study 
of  the  Arabic  sources  in  the  Tabulae 
anatomicae  sex  of  Vesalius;  in  1948  a 
sumptuous  book  on  the  early  history  of  the 
alum  industry;  in  1952  a  translation  and 
study  of  the  writings  of  Vesalius  on  the 
human  brain,  and  also  (with  J.  H.  G. 
Grattan)  an  important  work  on  Anglo- 
Saxon  magic  and  medicine,  a  subject 
which  Singer  had  first  explored  in  a 
British  Academy  lecture  in  1920 ;  and  in 
1956  an  annotated  translation  of  Galen's 
work  On  Anatomical  Procedures.  Mean- 
while, from  about  1950,  he  had  been 
engaged  on  what  may  prove  to  be  his 
most  enduring  work,  the  arrangements 
for  the  great  History  of  Technology  (5  vols., 
1954-8),  of  which  he  was  throughout 
editor-in-chief. 

Singer  was  always  very  active  in  the 
international  field,  and  he  was  president 
(1928-31)  of  the  Academic  Internationale 
d'Histoire  des  Sciences,  and  of  the 
international  congresses  held  in  London 
in  1922  and  in  1931.  He  was  an  original 
member  and  president  (1920-22)  of  the 
history  of  medicine  section  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Medicine,  and  founder-president 
of  the  British  Society  for  the  History  of 
Science.  In  1936  Oxford  made  him  an 
honorary  D.Sc,  and  he  was  thus  probably 
the  only  man  to  hold  the  three  Oxford 
doctorates  in  medicine,  science,  and  letters. 
He  was  an  honorary  fellow  of  Magdalen 
College,  Oxford,  and  of  the  Royal  Society 
of  Medicine,  and  a  fellow  of  University 


898 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Singleton 


College,  London.  He  was  awarded  the 
Osier  medal  by  the  university  of  Oxford, 
and  he  and  Dorothea  Singer  jointly  re- 
ceived the  Sarton  medal  of  the  American 
Society  for  the  History  of  Science.  In 
1953  Singer  was  presented  with  a  work  in 
two  volumes,  Science  Medicine  and  History 
(edited  by  E.  A.  Underwood),  consisting 
of  essays  written  in  his  honour  by  scholars 
from  many  countries ;  it  contains  a  biblio- 
graphy of  Singer's  published  writings  to 
1953. 

Singer  was  sturdily  built,  but  he  took 
little  interest  in  sport,  and  his  main  out- 
door activities  were  walking  and  swim- 
ming. His  chief  recreations  were  travel, 
talking,  reading,  and,  in  later  life,  growing 
succulent  plants.  He  was  a  witty  con- 
versationalist, and  his  talk  was  salted  with 
anecdote.  To  the  end  he  kept  up  an 
immense  correspondence,  and  his  in- 
fluence was  felt  even  in  fields  remote  from 
his  main  subjects.  He  died  at  his  home  in 
Cornwall  10  June  1960. 

[E.  A.  Underwood  in  Science  Medicine  and 
History,  1953;  in  Medical  History,  October 
1960;  in  Proceedings  of  the  Royal  Society 
of  Medicine,  vol.  Iv,  1962 ;  in  British  Medical 
Journal,  18  June  1960;  in  British  Journal  for 
the  History  of  Science,  June  1965;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

E.  A.  Underwood. 


SINGLETON,    Sir    JOHN    EDWARD 

(1885-1957),  judge,  was  born  at  St. 
Michael's  on  Wyre,  Lancashire,  18  Jan- 
uary 1885,  the  third  son  of  George 
Singleton,  of  Howick  House,  Preston,  and 
his  wife,  Eleanor  Parkinson.  He  was 
educated  at  the  Royal  Grammar  School, 
Lancaster,  and  Pembroke  College,  Cam- 
bridge, where  he  obtained  third  classes  in 
both  parts  of  the  law  tripos  (1904-5)  and 
became  an  honorary  fellow  in  1938.  He 
read  for  the  bar  first  in  Lincoln's  Inn, 
afterwards  in  Liverpool,  and  was  called 
at  the  Inner  Temple  in  1906,  when  he 
joined  the  Northern  circuit.  He  quickly 
built  up  a  reputation  as  a  junior  before  his 
career  was  interrupted  by  the  war  in  which 
he  served  in  France  and  Belgium  in  the 
Royal  Field  Artillery,  was  mentioned  in 
dispatches,  and  rose  to  the  rank  of  captain. 
Returning  to  his  practice  he  soon  acquired 
a  large  common  law  business  based  on 
Liverpool  and  was  principally  engaged 
on  the  Northern  circuit  until  in  1922  he 
took  silk  and  accordingly  moved  to 
London,  although  he  never  lost  contact 
with,  or  wavered  in  his  devotion  to,  his 
native  county.  In  the  same  year  (1922)  he 


fought  the  Lancaster  division  as  a  Con- 
servative and  defeated  his  Labour  oppon- 
ent, Fenner  (later  Lord)  Brockway,  by  a 
large  majority;  but  in  1923  he  lost  his 
seat  to  the  Liberal  candidate  and  never 
afterwards  returned  to  politics.  His  suc- 
cess in  his  profession  continued  and  he 
became  a  prominent  leader  of  the  common 
law  bar.  He  was  a  judge  of  appeal,  Isle  of 
Man  (1928-33),  and  recorder  of  Preston 
(1928-34). 

A  keen,  straightforward  advocate, 
devoted  to  his  art  and  thoroughly  compe- 
tent. Singleton's  standards  were  of  the 
highest.  In  two  lectures  given  to  students 
at  the  instance  of  the  Council  of  Legal 
Education  and  published  in  book  form  as 
Conduct  at  the  Bar  (1933)  he  set  forth  his 
views  on  the  true  professional  spirit  and 
the  conduct  required  of  a  barrister.  Since 
then  each  student  called  by  the  Inner 
Temple  has  been  handed  a  copy  of  this 
book  which  is  consequently  in  the  pos- 
session of  many  hundreds  of  barristers 
throughout  the  Commonwealth ;  it  is  not 
only  a  valuable  work  of  instruction  but  a 
memorial  of  the  esteem  in  which  Singleton 
was  held  as  an  exemplar  of  the  art  of 
advocacy  in  the  courts. 

Singleton  was  appointed  a  judge  of  the 
King's  Bench  division  (with  a  knighthood) 
in  1934  and  a  lord  justice  of  appeal  (and 
sworn  of  the  Privy  Council)  in  1948,  in 
which  office  he  served  until  his  death, 
becoming  at  the  end  of  his  career  the 
senior  lord  justice  in  the  Court  of  Appeal. 
In  1949  he  received  an  honorary  LL.D. 
from  the  university  of  Liverpool.  Soon 
after  he  was  appointed  judge  he  was 
called  upon  to  try  Dr.  Buck  Ruxton  on  a 
charge  of  the  murder  of  his  wife,  Isobella, 
at  Manchester  assizes.  This  sensational 
trial  in  which  eminent  counsel  were  en- 
gaged lasted  no  less  than  eleven  days, 
at  the  end  of  which  the  accused  was 
convicted. 

As  a  judge  Singleton  will  be  remembered 
as  a  man  of  stout  Lancastrian  common 
sense,  ready  to  apply  the  law  as  he  under- 
stood it,  if  possible  in  the  simplest  manner, 
without  recourse  to  subtlety,  and  anxious 
at  all  times  to  do  justice.  He  may  not 
have  had  a  profound  interest  in  the  law 
as  a  science,  but  he  was  none  the  less 
well  equipped  for  his  work,  for  his  mind 
never  deviated  from  the  purpose  of  doing 
justice  in  the  particular  case  with  which 
he  had  to  deal.  He  was  not  concerned  to 
extend  the  law  or  to  be  remembered  for 
the  grace  of  his  judgements  but  rather  to 
perform  that  which  he  had  to  do,  not  so 


899 


Singleton 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


H 


much  as  a  jurist  or  a  craftsman,  but  as  a 
just  and  workmanlike  professional.  He 
carried  out  the  judicial  task  as  well  as  in 
him  lay  and  continued  to  find  satisfaction 
in  it  until  the  end  of  his  life.  He  would 
no  doubt  like  to  be  remembered  as  a  no- 
nonsense  judge,  ready  to  listen  patiently 
to  evidence  and  to  argument,  yet  intolerant 
of  waste  of  time  or  any  lapse  from  the 
standard  of  conduct  which  he  expected 
from  the  bar. 

Singleton  became  a  bencher  of  his  Inn  in 
1929  and  in  due  course  treasurer  in  the 
year  (1952)  in  which  the  Queen  laid  the 
foundation  stone  for  the  new  buildings  to 
replace  those  destroyed  in  the  war.  He 
was  always  devoted  in  his  service  to  the 
Inn  for  which  he  had  an  enduring  affec- 
tion and  in  which  he  made  his  home 
during  the  last  years  of  his  life. 

In  the  war  of  1939-45  Singleton  gave 
valuable  service  in  connection  with  govern- 
ment inquiries  into  submarine  services,  the 
production  of  stabilized  bomb  sites,  and  the 
comparative  strength  of  British  and  Ger- 
man air  forces.  In  December  1945  he  was 
appointed  British  chairman  of  the  Anglo- 
American  F'alestine  commission ;  this  was 
perhaps  the  most  important  of  his  public 
services  outside  his  judicial  work. 

Singleton  never  married.  He  was  a  sturdy 
and  affectionate  friend,  full  of  fun,  and 
popular  within  and  without  his  profession. 
He  enjoyed  life  in  all  its  aspects,  was  a 
keen  though  indifferent  golfer  and  a  good 
shot,  and  during  the  shooting  season 
spent  as  much  time  as  he  could  on  the 
Yorkshire  moors.  It  was  shortly  after 
returning  from  a  day's  shooting  on  the 
moors  near  Pateley  Bridge  which  he 
loved  so  well  that  he  died,  6  January 
>957. 
"*  fPrivate  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

-■'•  HODSON. 

SMART,  Sir  MORTON  WARRACK 

(1877-1956),  manipulative  surgeon,  was 
born  in  Edinburgh  1  December  1877,  the 
third  son  of  John  Smart,  a  landscape 
painter,  by  his  wife,  Agnes  Purdie  Main. 
He  was  educated  in  Edinburgh  at  George 
Watson's  College,  the  university,  and  the 
Royal  College  of  Surgeons,  graduating 
M.B.,  Ch.B.  in  1902  and  proceeding  M.D. 
in  1914.  He  served  with  the  Black  Watch 
in  the  South  African  war  and  in  1914-18 
was  a  combatant  with  the  Royal  Naval 
Volunteer  Reserve  in  many  parts  of  the 
world.  In  1914  he  was  chief  of  staff  to  the 
admiral  in  command  of  gunboats  on  the 
Belgian  canals.  In  1916  he  was  attached 


to  the  First  Army  in  France;  in  1915-16 
he  commanded  a  gunboat  flotilla  in  the 
Dardanelles ;  he  was  in  command  of  a  flo- 
tilla of  motor-launches  which  made  the 
passage  from  England  to  Mudros  in  the 
Aegean  and  later  at  Salonika;  reached 
the  rank  of  commander,  was  mentioned  in 
dispatches,  and  appointed  to  the  D.S.O. 
in  1917.  In  1918-19  he  was  senior  naval 
officer  in  Trinidad. 

In  his  early  days  Smart  was  attached  to 
the  medical  staff  of  the  Great  Ormond 
Street  Hospital  for  Sick  Children  in 
charge  of  the  electrical  department.  He 
became  one  of  the  leading  exponents  of 
manipulative  surgery  and  an  authority  on 
physical  medicine  and  rehabilitation.  He 
founded  and  was  for  many  years  in  charge 
of  the  London  Clinic  for  Injuries  at 
Grosvenor  Square.  He  was  manipulative 
surgeon  to  Kings  George  V,  Edward 
VIII,  George  VI,  and  Queen  Elizabeth  II. 
He  was  appointed  C.V.O.  (1932),  K.C.V.O. 
(1933),  and  G.C.V.O.  (1949),  and  received 
a  number  of  foreign  decorations.  He  was  a 
member  of  the  Central  Medical  War  Com- 
mittee and  of  the  Empire  Rheumatism 
Council  and  a  fellow  of  the  Royal  Society 
of  Medicine.  In  the  war  of  1939-45  he 
acted  as  consultant  in  physical  medicine  to 
the  Royal  Air  Force  at  their  rehabilitation 
clinic  in  Regent's  Park.  He  contributed 
many  articles  on  muscle  and  joint  injuries 
to  medical  journals  and  encyclopedias  and 
in  1933  published  The  Principles  of  Treat- 
ment of  Muscles  and  Joints  by  Graduated 
Muscular  Contractions. 

Smart  was  a  man  of  many  facets,  for 
apart  from  being  one  of  the  pioneers  of 
physical  medicine  and  manipulative  tech- 
niques, he  was  a  fearless  sailor  and  an 
early  exponent  of  motor-boat  racing;  a 
great  horticulturist,  winning  many  prizes 
for  his  gladioli  in  which  he  specialized 
and  serving  as  president  of  the  British 
Gladiolus  Society;  and  he  was  a  superb 
raconteur  of  his  experiences  in  the  many 
spheres  of  his  busy  life. 

In  1923  he  married  Lilian,  daughter  of 
William  S.  Gibson,  J.P.,  of  London,  and 
widow  of  Major  P.  V.  Lavarack,  M.C. 
They  had  no  children.  He  died  at  his  home 
at  Cooden  Beach,  Bexhill-on-Sea,  16  March 
1956. 

[British  Medical  Journal,  31  March  1956; 
personal  knowledge.]  W.  E.  Tucker. 

SMITH,    Sir   ERNEST   WOODHOUSE 

(1884-1960),  fuel  technologist,  was  born 
in  Gorton,  Manchester,  13  February  1884, 
son   of  the   Rev.  Harry  Bodell   Smith, 


900 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Smith,  M.  A.  B, 


Unitarian  minister,  and  his  wife,  Mary 
Miranda  Woodhouse.  He  was  educated  at 
Arnold  School,  Blackpool,  and  the  uni- 
versity of  Manchester  where  his  brilliance 
brought  him  eventually  the  award  of  the 
D.Sc.  (1918).  In  the  meantime,  after  an 
adventurous  year  as  chemist  to  the  Gold 
Dredging  Company  in  Saskatchewan,  he 
had  become  in  1908  the  first  research 
chemist  to  be  appointed  by  the  Institution 
of  Gas  Engineers  to  work  at  the  university 
of  Leeds:  the  start  of  a  unique  and  un- 
broken association  between  the  university 
and  the  gas  industry  of  inunense  benefit 
to  both. 

After  distinguished  service  to  the  city 
of  Birmingham  gas  department  (1910-20), 
Ernest  Smith  went  to  London  as  tech- 
nical director  of  the  Woodall-Duckham 
Companies,  a  position  which  he  held  until 
1944.  During  the  war  he  was  seconded  in 
1942-3  as  director-general  of  gas  supply 
in  the  Ministry  of  Fuel  and  Power.  From 
1949  to  1956  he  was  technical  adviser  to 
district  valuation  boards  of  the  coal 
industry  (coke  ovens  division).  He  had 
given  outstanding  service  to  the  Woodall- 
Duckham  Companies  but  his  decision  to 
resign  in  1944  to  devote  himself  to  the 
problems  of  fuel  during  the  period  of  post- 
war reconstruction  betokened  both  his 
strong  sense  of  public  duty  and  his  avoid- 
ance of  self-interest. 

As  a  pioneer  in  the  field  of  fuel  Smith 
had  contributed  greatly  to  the  technical 
progress  of  the  gas  industry  and  he  was 
one  of  the  founders  of  the  Gas  Research 
Board.  Among  his  many  distinctions  may 
be  mentioned  his  honorary  membership 
of  the  Institution  of  Gas  Engineers  and 
the  presentation  to  him  of  its  highest 
award,  the  Birmingham  medal.  His  long 
experience,  shrewdness  and  constructive 
outlook,  and  his  charm  and  friendliness 
in  particular  inevitably  brought  him  to 
many  high  offices  in  fuel  affairs :  honorary 
secretary  of  the  World  Power  Conference 
(1928) ;  chairman  of  the  Society  of  British 
Gas  Industries  (1931-2)  and  president 
(1954) ;  and  chairman  of  the  Industrial 
Coal  Consmners'  Council  (1947-57).  His 
presidency  of  the  Institute  of  Fuel  from 
1943  to  1945  reflected  his  long  devotion 
to  the  service  of  the  Institute  and  the 
prominent  part  he  played  in  the  petition 
for  a  royal  charter  which  was  successful 
in  1946.  He  was  continually  active  in  the 
cause  of  smoke  abatement,  being  honorary 
treasurer  and  later  president  for  two  years 
of  the  society  which  was  to  become  the 
National  Society  for  Clean  Air.  He  was 


appointed  C.B.E.  in  1930  and  knighted 
in  1947. 

In  1912  Smith  married  Beatrice  (died 
1955),  daughter  of  George  Arnfield,  of 
Dolgelly;  they  had  one  son  and  one 
daughter.  Smith  died  at  Effingham, 
Surrey,  7  November  1960. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
A.  L.  Roberts. 

SMITH,  Sir  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 
BRACY  (1879-1959),  painter,  was  bom 
in  HaUfax  22  October  1879,  the  second  of 
three  sons  of  Frederic  Smith,  wire  manu- 
facturer, and  his  wife,  Frances  Holroyd. 
He  was  educated  at  Halifax  Grammar 
School  and  Giggleswick  School.  His 
childhood  and  youth  were  dominated  by 
the  commanding  figure  of  his  father,  a 
strict  Nonconformist  who  went  to  chapel 
twice  every  Sunday,  ran  his  business  with 
notable  success,  and  in  his  spare  time 
passed  for  a  lover  of  the  arts.  Frederic 
Smith's  collection  of  violins  was  well 
known  to  visiting  virtuosi;  he  had  pub- 
lished a  book  of  Browningesque  verses; 
and  he  had  commissioned  a  painting 
called  'Stradivarius  in  his  Studio'  from 
Seymour  Lucas. 

Attempts  to  place  his  son  in  the  business 
world  were  a  failure  and  in  the  face  of 
his  father's  intense  disapproval  Matthew 
Smith  won  permission  to  study  applied 
design  at  the  Manchester  School  of  Art. 
His  range  of  activity  was  severely  res- 
tricted— 'I  was  twenty-one',  he  said 
later,  'before  I  saw  a  good  picture.'  But 
an  iron  determination  lay  concealed  with- 
in his  frail  body  and  apparently  timorous 
nature  and  at  the  late  age  of  twenty-six 
he  was  allowed  to  go  to  the  Slade.  In  fact 
he  was  unhappy  there  for  Henry  Tonks 
[q.v.]  often  handled  him  roughly  in  front 
of  the  entire  class,  and  on  his  doctor's 
advice  he  went  to  Pont  Aven  in  Brittany 
in  the  late  summer  of  1908:  a  decision, 
he  would  often  say,  which  marked  the 
true  beginning  of  his  life. 

The  great  days  of  Pont  Aven  as  an 
artistic  centre  were  over,  but  Smith  fell 
in  love  with  France  and  with  French  life, 
and  thereafter  never  felt  really  at  home 
anywhere  else.  Enough  of  the  Gauguin 
tradition  lingered  in  Pont  Aven  for  him  to 
learn  the  uses  of  pure  colour,  as  distinct 
from  the  tyranny  of  'pure  drawing* 
maintained  at  the  Slade.  When  he  moved 
to  Paris  he  was  able  to  show,  in  1911  and 
1912,  at  the  Salon  des  Independants  in 
company  with  Matisse,  Kandinsky,  Leger, 
and  Rouault.  He  was  lucky  enough,  also, 


901 


Smith,  M.  A.  B. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


to  glimpse  Matisse  and  his  methods  at  first 
hand  through  attendance  at  the  school, 
soon  to  be  disbanded,  which  Matisse  had 
run  since  1908;  and  if  his  personal  con- 
tacts with  Matisse  were  of  the  slightest  the 
experience  was  revelatory  in  the  highest 
degree. 

Towards  1914  Smith's  personal  circum- 
stances were  radically  altered  by  the 
death  of  his  mother  (1912)  and  of  his 
father  (1914),  and  by  his  marriage  in  1912 
to  Gwendolen  Salmond  (died  1958),  a 
fellow  student  of  his  at  the  Slade  and  a 
close  friend  both  of  Gwen  John  and  of 
Ida  Nettleship  (the  first  Mrs.  Augustus 
John).  Her  two  brothers  were  Sir  Geoffrey 
Salmond  [q.v.]  and  Sir  John  Salmond. 

Matthew  Smith  had  yet  to  show  a 
painting  in  his  own  country,  but  when  the 
war  forced  him  and  his  wife  to  interrupt 
their  sojourns  in  France  he  took  a  studio 
in  Fitzroy  Street,  where  W.  R.  Sickert  and 
(Sir)  Jacob  Epstein  [qq.v.]  were  among  his 
neighbours.  There  he  painted  the  first  of 
the  pictures  in  which  the  lessons  of  France 
were  truly  digested,  and  in  1916  Epstein 
persuaded  him  to  show  a  painting  in  the 
London  Group  exhibition.  From  1916  to 
1919  Smith  was  in  the  army — initially  in 
the  Artists'  Rifles  and  later  as  an  officer 
in  the  Labour  Corps — and  in  1918  he  was 
wounded  by  shrapnel.  After  his  demobi- 
lization he  went  with  his  wife  and  their 
two  sons  to  Cornwall.  At  St.  Columb  Major 
he  produced  a  series  of  landscapes  in  which 
the  dark,  saturated  colour  of  Gauguin  was 
happily  combined  with  reminiscences  of 
the  spatial  organization  in  certain  Floren- 
tine predellas.  With  the  two  'Fitzroy  Street 
nudes'  of  1916  these  constitute  Smith's 
first  original  contribution  to  English  paint- 
ing. 

Smith  had  always  been  delicate,  and 
there  was  throughout  his  life  an  apparent 
discrepancy  between  his  aghast  and  tenta- 
tive approach  to  the  practical  aspects  of 
living  and  the  imperious  energy  which 
went  into  his  work.  Early  in  the  twenties 
the  normal  shortcomings  of  his  health 
allied  with  the  sense  of  something  unful- 
filled in  his  personal  life  to  produce  a 
serious  breakdown ;  and  it  was  not  until 
he  found  in  Vera  Cuningham  the  ideal 
model  for  his  art  that  he  recovered  and, 
indeed,  redoubled  his  ability  to  work. 
He  took  a  studio  at  6bis  Villa  Brune,  in 
Montparnasse,  and  was  soon  producing  one 
after  another  the  long  series  of  female 
nudes  which  established  him  as  one  of  the 
few  English  painters  ever  to  master  this 
most  exacting  of  subjects.  Of  the  'Femme 


de  Cirque'  (National  Gallery  of  Modern 
Art,  Edinburgh)  Roger  Fry  [q.v.]  wrote 
that  'It  is  a  picture  planned  in  the  great 
tradition  of  pictorial  design,  and  carried 
through  without  any  failure  of  the  im- 
pulse.' From  1923  until  1940  Smith  en- 
joyed a  period  of  unbroken  creativity. 
If  Paris  and  the  nude  were  predominant 
in  the  twenties,  the  thirties  saw  a  shift  to 
Provence,  in  geographical  terms,  and  to 
landscape  as  his  preferred  theme.  Through- 
out these  years  his  first  responsibility  was 
owed  to  his  work ;  and  although  he  was  a 
devoted  father  he  was  inflexible  in  his 
will  to  cut  free  from  any  entanglement 
which  might  impair  the  freedom  to  work 
which  he  had  sought  for  so  long  and  had 
found  only  in  his  middle  forties. 

In  June  1940  Smith  had  to  be  evacuated 
from  France  by  the  R.A.F.,  leaving  many 
canvases  behind  him  in  Aix-en-Provence. 
There  followed  a  period  of  great  private  un- 
happiness  on  more  than  one  count ;  above 
all,  the  loss  of  his  two  sons  on  active 
service  was  a  blow  from  which  he  took  a 
long  time  to  recover.  The  petty  vicis- 
situdes of  London  life  during  and  after 
the  war  found  in  Smith  a  most  consistent 
victim;  he  was  troubled,  also,  by  an 
affliction  of  the  eyes  which  later  caused 
him  to  undergo  a  serious  operation.  In 
spite  of  all  this  his  natural  toughness 
empowered  him  to  go  on  working,  and  the 
still-lifes  and  large  decorative  subjects  of 
the  mid-fifties  have  a  grandeur  of  spirit 
and  an  unforced  amplitude  which  put 
them  very  high  in  the  canon  of  his  work. 
The  year  1955  saw  the  onset  of  the  illness 
from  which  he  eventually  died ;  but  even 
when  it  was  clear  that  life  was  with- 
drawing its  benefits  one  by  one  he  went 
on  working  as  best  he  could.  His  last 
years  saw  a  general  realization  that  as  a 
master  of  paint  he  had  had  few  rivals 
among  the  English  artists  of  this  century. 
He  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1949  and 
knighted  in  1954.  In  1953  a  large  retro- 
spective exhibition  of  his  work  was  held  at 
the  Tate  Gallery,  and  in  1956  London 
University  gave  him  an  honorary  D.Lit. 
Equally  precious  was  the  affection  and 
respect  in  which  he  was  held  not  only  by 
friends  and  colleagues  of  a  lifetime,  like 
Augustus  John  and  Jacob  Epstein,  but  by 
younger  artists :  Francis  Bacon  above  all. 

Smith  was  most  often  talked  of  as  a 
colourist,  but  he  did  not  altogether  care 
for  the  appellation.  'They  all  praise  the 
colour',  he  would  say,  'but  if  the  pictures 
hold  together  there  must  be  something 
else,   you  know.   There   must  be   some- 


902 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Smith,  V.  H. 


thing  else.'  Tenaciously,  although  with 
characteristic  discretion,  he  had  studied 
Ingres,  Courbet,  Rembrandt,  and  Tintor- 
etto. His  landscape-practice  was  based  to 
a  surprising  degree  on  the  study  of  Rubens's 
landscape-sketches.  He  read  enormously 
in  an  unstudied  way,  and  although  he  was 
the  last  man  to  'keep  up  with'  his  friends 
in  a  conventional  sense,  few  people  have 
had  a  securer  hold  on  the  affections  of 
others.  He  spoke,  someone  once  said, 
'like  a  highly  intelligent  moth';  but, 
once  his  confidence  had  been  won,  the 
high  seriousness  implicit  in  two  of  his 
given  names  (Matthew  Arnold)  was  allied 
in  his  talk  with  an  idiosyncratic  and  un- 
forgettable sense  of  fun. 

Matthew  Smith  died  in  London  29 
September  1959.  A  self-portrait  and  a 
portrait  by  Cathleen  Mann  are  in  the 
National  Portrait  Gallery  and  a  portrait 
by  Augustus  John  is  in  the  Tate  Gallery. 

[Philip  Hendy,  Matthew  Smith,  1944; 
Catalogue  of  the  memorial  exhibition  at  the 
Royal  Academy,  1960;  Sir  Philip  Hendy, 
Francis  Halliday,  and  John  Russell,  Matthew 
Smith,  1962 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

John  Russell. 

SMITH,  VIVIAN  HUGH,  first  Baron 
Bicester  (1867-1956),  banker,  was  born 
in  London  9  December  1867,  the  eldest 
of  six  sons  of  Hugh  Colin  Smith,  a  descen- 
dant of  the  banking  family  which  founded 
Smith's  Bank  at  Nottingham,  eventually 
absorbed  into  the  National  Provincial 
Bank,  and  his  wife,  Constance  Maria 
Josepha,  daughter  of  Henry  John  Adeane, 
of  Babraham,  Cambridge.  Two  of  the  six 
sons  entered  the  Royal  Navy  and  retired 
as  admirals ;  the  remaining  four  achieved 
conspicuous  success  in  various  spheres  of 
activity  in  the  City  of  London. 

Educated  at  Eton  and  Trinity  Hall, 
Cambridge,  without  any  particular  aca- 
demic success,  Vivian  Hugh  Smith  entered 
the  firm  of  Hay's  Wharf,  wharfingers  in 
the  Pool  of  London,  of  which  his  father 
was  chairman,  bringing  to  the  business 
that  energy  and  vision  which  were  notable 
throughout  his  life.  In  his  thirties  he 
joined  the  merchant  banking  firm  of 
Morgan  Grenfell,  &  Co.  where  he  was 
associated  with  his  cousin  Edward  Gren- 
fell (later  Lord  St.  Just,  q.v.)  and  with 
the  American  partners  of  J.  P.  Morgan 
&  Co.  of  New  York.  The  two  houses, 
as  the  bankers  and  buying  agents  of  the 
British  and  French  Governments  during 
the  early  years  of  the  war  of  1914-18 
before  the  United  States  came  in,  played 


an  indispensable  part  in  the  war  effort  of 
the  Allies.  Vivian  Smith  became  a  director 
of  many  important  companies  but  was 
most  notable  in  the  City  for  his  term  of 
no  fewer  than  sixty  years  as  a  director 
and  later  as  governor  of  the  Royal  Ex- 
change Assurance  which  he  built  up  to 
become  one  of  the  major  insurance  com- 
panies in  the  country.  He  was  created  a 
baron  in  1938. 

All  his  life  Bicester  loved  horses;  his 
time  at  Eton  was  marred  by  a  painful 
episode  for  absenting  himself  to  attend  the 
Ascot  Summer  Meeting  which  resulted  in 
the  continuing  restriction  of  the  move- 
ment of  Etonians  at  that  time  of  year. 
Although  he  preferred  to  live  in  the 
country  while  working  in  London,  it  was 
only  late  in  life  that  he  acquired  a  property 
of  his  own,  at  Tusmore  Park  near  Bicester 
where  he  was  able  to  indulge  at  close 
quarters  his  passionate  interest  in  horses. 
When  owing  to  a  hunting  accident  he  was 
no  longer  able  to  ride  much,  he  acquired  a 
string  of  steeplechasers — he  was  not  really 
interested  in  flat  racing — which  in  the 
heyday  of  his  racing  career  were  second  to 
none  in  the  country.  His  ambition  to  win 
the  Grand  National  failed  but  he  achieved 
at  one  time  or  another  all  the  other  major 
steeplechases. 

Unintellectual  but  with  a  good  com- 
mand of  words  and  a  fantastic  memory 
shared  with  many  of  his  family,  Bicester 
found  it  difficult  to  express  himself  on 
paper:  but  his  humour  and  quickness  in 
repartee  enabled  him  to  mix  well  with  all 
sorts  of  people.  It  was  because  of  the  con- 
fidence he  inspired  in  people  by  his  sense 
of  justice  and  right  behaviour  that  he 
became  the  confidant  and  adviser  of  many 
who  brought  their  troubles  to  him  whether 
or  not  he  was  personally  concerned.  If  he 
was  quick-tempered,  he  bore  no  malice 
because  he  liked  helping  people,  especially 
the  young,  and  he  liked  to  be  asked  to 
help.  In  his  prime  between  the  wars  he 
was  one  of  the  leading  personalities  in 
the  City  where  he  was  looked  upon  with 
respect  for  all  his  qualities  of  leader- 
ship and  fairmindedness.  Politically  he 
never  played  any  public  part  in  spite  of 
being  for  many  years  chairman  of  the 
Conservative  Party  in  the  City.  He  was 
one  of  the  last  survivors  of  a  generation 
of  business  men  descended  from  business 
people:  a  man  who  will  be  remembered 
for  his  great  contribution  to  all  the  rami- 
fications of  commerce  and  finance,  but 
most  of  all  as  an  Englishman  whose  first 
and  foremost  characteristic,  behind  all  the 


903 


Smith,  V.  H. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


conventional  appearance  of  dress,  habits, 
and  standards,  was  that  of  justice,  decency, 
and  a  deep  appreciation  of  the  point  of 
view  of  the  other  man.  He  accepted  in 
religious,  artistic,  and  intellectual  matters 
what  he  did  not  understand  or  care  to 
pursue  provided  he  personally  had  con- 
fidence in  the  men  whom  he  recognized 
as  leaders  in  their  own  fields.  He  was  lord- 
lieutenant  of  the  county  of  Oxford  (1934- 
54)  and  received  the  freedom  of  Oxford 
aty  in  1955. 

He  married  in  1897  Lady  Sybil  Mary 
McDonnell,  the  only  daughter  of  the  sixth 
Earl  of  Antrim,  and  had  three  sons  and 
four  daughters.  He  died  at  Tusmore  Park 
17  February  1956  and  was  succeeded  by 
his  eldest  son,  Randal  Hugh  Vivian 
(1898-1968). 

There  is  a  portrait  by  Sir  William  Orpen 
at  the  Royal  Exchange  Assurance  and  one 
by  (Sir)  James  Gunn  is  owned  by  Morgan 
Grenfell,  &  Co.  Another  portrait  of 
Bicester,  on  horseback  in  hunting  pink,  by 
Sir  Alfred  Munnings,  is  in  the  possession 
of  the  family. 

[Personal  knowledge.]  Rennell. 

SODDY,  FREDERICK  (1877-1956), 
chemist,  was  born  at  Eastbourne  2  Sep- 
tember 1877,  the  seventh  and  youngest  son 
of  Benjamin  Soddy,  a  London  corn  mer- 
chant, and  his  wife,  Hannah  Green,  who 
died  some  eighteen  months  after  he  was 
born.  At  Eastbourne  College  he  came 
under  the  influence  of  the  science  master, 
R.  E.  Hughes.  They  worked  together  in  a 
striking  way  and  in  1894  were  joint  auth- 
ors of  a  paper  in  the  Chemical  News  on 
the  action  of  dried  ammonia  on  dried 
carbon  dioxide.  This  followed  the  pattern 
of  the  work  of  Brereton  Baker  [q.v.]  on 
dried  gases.  From  Eastbourne  Soddy  went 
for  a  period  to  University  College,  Aberyst- 
wyth, before  going  as  a  postmaster  to  Mer- 
ton  College,  Oxford,  where  he  obtained  first 
class  honours  in  chemistry  in  1898.  For 
the  Oxford  Junior  Science  Club  he  wrote 
a  very  fine  paper  on  the  life  and  work  of 
Victor  Meyer. 

Learning  that  the  chair  of  chemistry  at 
Toronto  University  was  vacant  Soddy 
decided  to  apply  for  it  and  went  there  to 
further  his  application.  He  quickly  de- 
cided that  his  prospects  were  non- 
existent, and  before  returning  to  England 
decided  to  call  in  at  the  chemistry  de- 
partment of  McGill  University,  Montreal. 
There  he  was  offered  and  accepted  a  posi- 
tion as  a  demonstrator  at  a  salary  of  £100 
per  annum.  Ernest  (later  Lord)  Ruther- 


ford [q.v.]  had  recently  been  elected  to  6k 
junior  professorship  in  physics  and  it  was 
not  long  before  the  two  came  together  to 
collaborate  on  radioactive  investigations 
on  thorium  salts.  This  joint  work  resulted 
in  the  formulation  of  the  theory  of  atomic 
disintegration,  which  has  had  such  a 
profound  effect  on  scientific  thought.  The 
collaboration  extended  over  some  two  and 
a  half  years  and  it  can  be  said  that  the 
joint  authors  were  truly  equal  contribu- 
tors. Attempts  on  numerous  occasions  to 
discuss  with  Soddy  their  relative  contri- 
butions always  met  with  the  same  answer: 
fundamental  concepts  were  supplied  by 
both  contributors  and  no  distinction 
could  be  made  as  between  the  thinkers  on 
the  concepts  produced. 

In  1903  Soddy  decided  to  return  to 
London  to  investigate  the  position  of  helium 
in  the  context  of  radioactive  disintegration. 
For  this  he  worked  with  Sir  William  Ram- 
say [q.v.],  and  together  they  demonstrated 
the  production  of  helium  from  radium. 

Glasgow  University  was  now  taking  an 
active  interest  in  the  newer  aspects  of 
physical  chemistry  and,  before  leaving  for 
a  lecturing  tour  in  Western  Australia, 
Soddy  agreed  to  go  there  as  lecturer  in 
physical  chemistry  and  radioactivity.  He 
took  up  his  duties  at  the  beginning  of  the 
session  1904-5.  Soddy's  time  at  Glasgow 
was  as  he  himself  said  his  most  productive 
period.  He  began  his  important  measure- 
ments on  the  rate  of  production  of  radium 
from  uranium.  Under  his  guidance  an 
important  series  of  measurements  were 
made  on  the  uniformity  of  y  rays  and  he 
inspired  and  indeed  supervised  the  work 
on  the  Displacement  Law  and  all  that 
that  meant  in  the  conception  of  isotopes. 
By  the  end  of  the  Glasgow  period  that 
work  was  finished.  In  particular,  the 
formulation  of  the  Displacement  Law 
was  completed:  (a)  after  the  emission  of 
the  alpha  particle,  the  remaining  atom 
moved  back  two  places  in  the  periodic 
table,  and  (b)  after  the  emission  of  the 
beta  particle  the  remaining  atom  moved 
forward  one  place  in  the  periodic  table. 
All  this  work  led  to  the  conception  of 
isotopes,  i.e.  elements  of  differing  atomic 
weight  which  occupy  the  same  place  in 
the  periodic  table.  Such  elements  have  the 
same  atomic  number  and  have  identical 
chemical  properties. 

In  1914  Soddy  moved  to  the  professor- 
ship of  chemistry  in  Aberdeen  where  his 
work  took  on  a  new  direction.  Active 
chemical  ideas  were  not  so  pronounced, 
but  they  were   still  there.   This    period 


904 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Somervell 


includes  the  initiation  of  the  work  which 
was  basically  carried  out  by  J.  A.  Cranston 
on  the  parent  of  actinium  and  also  saw 
the  publication  of  the  work  (with  H. 
Hyman)  on  the  atomic  weight  of  lead  from 
Ceylon  thorite.  This  was  the  first  time  it 
was  demonstrated  that  lead  from  a  parti- 
cular radioactive  element  had  an  atomic 
weight  differing  consistently  from  the 
atomic  weight  of  the  international  tables 
and  this  was  because  the  lead  was  reason- 
ably believed  to  be  derived  from  what  was 
essentially  a  radioactive  mineral.  The 
straightforward  work  of  scientific  re- 
search was  much  interrupted  by  the  events 
of  the  war  and  Soddy  devoted  much  effort 
to  ancillary  war  problems.  For  example, 
he  worked  on  the  recovery  of  olefines  and 
benzene  from  town's  gas.  This  and  similar 
types  of  work  were  carried  out  under  the 
general  aegis  of  the  Board  of  Inventions 
and  Research. 

Soddy  moved  in  1919  to  Oxford  as 
Dr.  Lee's  professor  of  chemistry  and  re- 
tired in  1936.  In  many  ways  this  was  an 
unhappy  period:  he  failed  to  capture  the 
imagination  of  his  pupils ;  he  found  cause 
to  enter  into  fierce  and  frequently  acri- 
monious discussions  with  his  academic 
colleagues.  It  was  perhaps  not  surprising 
therefore  that  he  turned  his  attention  to 
matters  which  had  long  interested  him. 
After  Aberdeen  he  published  practically 
no  research  results  but  he  was  always 
a  very  vigorous  writer,  often  on  matters 
not  connected  with  science,  although 
his  publications  included  such  notable 
works  as  The  Interpretation  of  Radium 
(1909)  and  The  Interpretation  of  the  Atom 
(1932).  While  his  interests  in  science 
ranged  over  a  wide  field  he  took  a  broad 
outlook  on  world  affairs  in  general. 
Women's  suffrage  and  the  Irish  question 
were  subjects  which  interested  him 
intensely.  As  early  as  1906  he  lectured  to 
the  Electrical  Engineers  on  the  'Internal 
Energy  of  Elements'  and  involved  himself 
in  a  discussion  about  the  wisdom  of  using 
gold  as  a  currency  material.  This  led  him 
to  be  interested  in  all  aspects  of  economic 
and  monetary  reform.  Such  papers  as 
'Cartesian  Economics'  (1921)  and  'A 
Physical  Theory  of  Money'  (1934)  he  re- 
garded as  of  great  importance,  but  they 
were  not  so  regarded  by  the  economists. 

Soddy's  character  was  an  immensely 
complicated  one.  Personally  he  was 
generous  in  his  outlook  and  to  his  friends 
and  collaborators  no  one  could  be  more 
kind  and  considerate.  Of  physicists  in 
general,  however,  he  took  a  very  bitter 


view  and  blamed  them  for  being  un- 
appreciative  of  the  workings  of  the 
chemical  mind.  During  his  Aberdeen 
period  he  gave  voice  to  views  which  on  the 
surface  seemed  to  indicate  that  he  was 
becoming  rather  socialistic  in  outlook; 
but  in  fact  he  remained  a  rugged  indi- 
vidualist to  the  end  of  his  Hfe.  He  was 
always  willing  to  fight  against  what  he 
conceived  to  be  wrongful  activities  in  any 
sphere  of  public  service.  Thus  he  did  battle 
with  the  Carnegie  Trustees  because  he 
thought  they  were  not  properly  carrying 
out  the  terms  of  their  trusteeship.  Again 
'Frederick  Soddy  calling  all  taxpayers' 
(1950)  was  a  complaint  against  what  he 
considered  unjust  methods  used  for  tax 
purposes.  His  attitude  on  such  matters 
was  not  negative ;  in  1926  he  put  forward 
a  'Reformed  Scientific  National  Monetary 
System'. 

Soddy  married  in  1908  Winifred  MoUer 
(died  1936),  the  only  daughter  of  (Sir) 
George  Beilby  [q.v.];  there  were  no 
children.  The  marriage  was  a  very  happy 
one;  they  travelled  extensively  together, 
mainly  in  the  Alps  and  other  mountain- 
ous regions.  She  undertook  research 
measurement  work  on  various  types  of 
radioactive  questions,  and  there  are  a 
number  of  papers  published  in  their  joint 
names. 

Soddy  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1910  and 
received  the  Nobel  prize  for  chemistry  in 
1921.  He  died  in  Brighton  22  September 
1956. 

[Sir  Alexander  Fleck  in  Biographical 
Memairs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol. 
iii,  1957 ;  Muriel  Howorth,  Pioneer  Research  on 
the  Atom,  1958 ;  private  information ;  personal 
knowledge.]  Fleck. 

SOMERVELL,  DONALD  BRADLEY, 

Baron  Somervell  of  Harrow  (1889- 
1960),  politician  and  judge,  was  bom  at 
Harrow  24  August  1889,  the  second  son 
of  Robert  Somervell,  master  and  biu'sar 
(1888-1919)  of  Harrow  School,  and  his 
wife,  Octavia  Paulina,  daughter  of  the 
Rev.  John  Churchill.  He  went  himself  to 
Harrow,  going  up  to  Oxford  in  1907  with 
a  demyship  at  Magdalen.  He  obtained  first 
class  honours  in  chemistry  (1911),  a  choice 
of  subject  surprising  in  light  of  his  subse- 
quent career,  but  typical  of  his  exceptional 
mental  energy  and  versatility.  In  1912  he 
was  elected  a  fellow  of  All  Souls,  an  event 
which,  like  his  first  election  to  Parliament, 
he  himself  regarded  as  particularly  memo- 
rable, since  he  was  the  first  man  who, 
having  taken  a  degree  in  chemistry,  was 


905 


Somervell 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


later  elected  to  an  All  Souls  fellowship. 
He  joined  the  Inner  Temple  but  his  pro- 
jected career  was  interrupted  by  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  which  he  served  in 
India  (1914-17)  and  Mesopotamia  (1917- 
19),  with  the  1/9  Middlesex  Regiment  and 
as  staff  captain  with  the  53rd  Infantry 
brigade ;  he  was  appointed  O.B.E.  in  1919. 

Somervell  had  been  called  to  the  bar 
in  absentia  in  1916  and  began  practice  in 
the  chambers  of  W.  A.  (later  Earl)  Jowitt 
[q.v.]  whose  pupil  he  had  been.  Somervell's 
mental  agility  and  temperament  did  not 
attract  him  to  the  ordinary  run-of-the- 
mill  common  law  practice;  the  art  of 
cross-examination  did  not  appeal  to  him, 
seeming  indeed  to  his  naturally  kind  heart 
apt  to  be  unfair.  His  arguments  were  ex- 
pressed briefly  and  lucidly,  without  any 
emotional  or  histrionic  quality.  He  applied 
himself  to  the  mentally  exacting  problems 
created  by  the  commercial  clauses  of  the 
Treaty  of  Versailles,  gaining  a  consider- 
able practice  before  the  mixed  arbitral 
tribunal  established  under  the  treaty. 

He  took  silk  in  1929  and  soon  began  his 
political  career.  Politics  had  a  special 
fascination  for  him  since  boyhood  and  his 
choice  of  profession  was  largely  governed 
by  his  belief  that  the  bar  would  provide  a 
ready  introduction  to  politics.  At  Oxford 
his  friendship  with  Cyril,  later  Lord, 
Asquith  of  Bishopstone  [q.v.],  had  much 
incUned  him  to  the  Liberals,  but  the 
serious  decline  of  that  party,  his  disap- 
proval of  the  performance  of  the  Labour 
Party,  and  above  all  his  admiration  for 
Stanley  Baldwin,  whom  he  particularly 
respected  for  his  freedom  from  class  bitter- 
ness, self-esteem,  or  ambition,  converted 
Somervell  to  the  Conservative  cause. 
He  was  defeated  at  Crewe  in  1929  but  was 
successful  in  1931  and  again,  by  a  narrow 
majority,  in  1935  when  he  characteristically 
refused  a  safer  seat,  preferring  to  remain 
where  he  had  made  and  valued  many 
local  contacts. 

To  Somervell  the  House  of  Commons 
was  both  a  goal  and  a  home.  In  his  view 
it  was  a  truly  democratic  institution  in 
which  the  ministers  were  in  a  real  sense 
subject  to  the  influence  of  the  elected 
representatives  of  the  nation.  He  was  an 
assiduous  attender,  particularly  in  com- 
mittees, and  he  genuinely  enjoyed  the 
discussions  on  public  affairs.  'Having  got 
a  seat  he  sat  in  it.'  His  maiden  speech  was 
on  the  Statute  of  Westminster  bill,  when 
he  found  himself  (as  often,  before  1940) 
in  a  measure  of  disagreement  with  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill. 


In  1932  Somervell  appeared  as  one  of 
the  leading  counsel  for  the  Bank  of 
Portugal  in  the  important  case  of  Waterlow 
&  Sons  V.  Banco  de  Portugal  in  the  House 
of  Lords.  In  the  autumn  of  1933  he  suc- 
ceeded Sir  Boyd  (later  Lord)  Merriman  as 
solicitor-general  and  was  knighted  accord- 
ingly. Sir  Thomas  Inskip,  later  Viscount 
Caldecote  [q.v.],  was  attorney-general.  As 
attorney-general  himself  from  1936  he  had 
under  him  first  his  old  friend  Sir  Terence 
O'Connor  who  had  greatly  influenced  and 
helped  him  early  in  his  political  career; 
then  Jowitt ;  and  later  Sir  David  Maxwell 
Fyfe,  afterwards  the  Earl  of  Kilmuir. 
Somervell  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council 
in  1938. 

The  functions  of  a  law  officer  vis-a-xns 
the  heads  of  the  various  Ministries,  a 
subject  on  which  he  addressed  the 
Holdsworth  Club  in  the  university  of 
Birmingham  in  1946,  gave  exceptional 
scope  to  Somervell's  qualities.  His  empha- 
tic view  was  that,  as  a  law  officer,  he 
should  always  be  available  to  informal 
approach  by  the  legal  advisers  of  the  vari- 
ous Ministries,  a  view  which  bore  remark- 
able fruit  during  the  war  of  1939-45. 
Never  afraid  of  quick  decision,  he  was 
confident  in  his  judgement  which  was 
undoubtedly  sound  and  based  on  a  robust 
common  sense.  He  wished  especially  to 
avoid  having  to  say  'if  only  you  had  told 
me  of  this  before'.  Nor  was  he  a  man  ever 
to  worry  over  hypothetical  situations. 

The  exceptionally  long  period  of  his  law 
officership  included  problems  such  as  the 
budget  leakage  in  1936,  the  abdication  of 
King  Edward  VIII,  and  the  form  of  the 
Oath  appropriate  to  the  coronation  of 
King  George  VI,  a  matter  involving  him 
in  successful  negotiations  with  the  repre- 
sentatives of  the  Commonwealth  coun- 
tries. He  also  played  an  important  part  in 
debate  on  such  measures  as  the  incitement 
to  disaffection  bill  and  the  government  of 
India  bill.  He  strongly  supported  the  line 
taken  by  Neville  Chamberlain  at  Munich. 
During  the  war  his  considerable  energies 
were  greatly  called  upon  in  connection 
with  the  very  numerous  statutory  instru- 
ments which  the  exigencies  of  war  de- 
manded, with  such  legislation  as  the  War 
Damage  Act,  and  with  the  vexed  problem 
of  war  crimes.  In  respect  of  all  these 
exacting  duties  his  lucidity,  friendliness, 
and  above  all  his  quickness  of  mind  gained 
him  the  respect  of  members  of  all  parties. 
He  applied  himself  to  his  duties,  in  back- 
bencher opinion,  'without  publicity  and 
with  great  ability  and  diligence'. 


906 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Sorabji 


Somervell  frequently  began  his  day  at 
the  Law  Courts  at  8.30  a.m.  and  remained 
in  the  House  until  late  risings,  finding 
none  the  less  time  to  prepare  fully  for  his 
appearance  in  a  complicated  case  next 
day.  His  remarkable  energy  was  assisted 
by  his  capacity  for  decision  without 
worry.  But  his  intellectual  capacities  were 
not  even  exhausted  by  his  pressing  duties 
as  a  member  of  the  bar,  as  a  law  officer, 
or  later  as  a  judge.  He  was  an  insatiable 
reader  and  found  time  to  study  diverse 
and  complex  subjects,  upon  which  he 
would  summarize  his  conclusions  in  papers 
prepared  not  for  publication  but  for  his 
own  clarification,  such  as  'Christian  Art 
12th-15th  Centuries',  'The  Background 
to  the  New  Testament',  and  'Relativity'. 

From  1940  to  1946  Somervell  was  re- 
corder of  Kingston  upon  Thames.  His 
twelve  years  as  a  law  officer  ended  with  his 
appointment  as  home  secretary  in  the 
caretaker  Government  of  1945.  The  defeat 
of  the  Conservative  Party  put  an  end  to 
his  political  career  but  in  1946  he  was 
appointed,  on  the  recommendation  of 
Jowitt,  by  now  lord  chancellor,  a  lord 
justice  of  appeal,  a  position  which  he  held 
until  1954;  for  most  of  this  time  he  pre- 
sided over  one  of  the  divisions  of  the  Court 
of  Appeal.  After  the  exertions  of  his 
ministerial  work  he  felt  judicial  life  to  be 
relatively  unexacting  since  he  was  able  to 
reach  clear  conclusions  rapidly  and  to  deal 
speedily  with  the  cases  which  came  before 
his  court.  Frequently  he  would  shorten 
the  argument  of  counsel,  not  by  putting 
questions  critical  of  their  arguments,  but 
rather  by  summarizing  them  and  then 
asking;  'That  is  your  case,  is  it  not?'  or 
'Do  you  see  what  I  mean  ?'  If  Somervell's 
judgements  were  not  always  framed  in 
careful  literary  style  and  were,  in  his  own 
words,  inchned  to  be  slapdash,  they  were 
notable  for  lucidity  and  absence  of  pro- 
lixity. It  was  his  strong  view  that  our  law 
suffered  from  too  much  verbal  inflation, 
and  of  one  of  his  colleagues  he  observed 
that  'he  would  never  use  one  word  when 
ten  would  do'.  As  in  his  political  career, 
he  earned  the  affection  of  his  colleagues 
both  in  the  court  and  at  the  bar. 

In  1933  Somervell  married  Laelia 
Helen,  daughter  of  Sir  Archibald  Buchan- 
Hepburn.  They  had  no  children.  If  1933— 
the  year  of  his  marriage  and  his  appoint- 
ment as  solicitor-general — had  been  a 
triumphant  year  for  Somervell,  1945  was, 
by  contrast,  a  bleak  one.  In  that  year  the 
death  of  his  wife  after  a  long  illness  ended 
a  perfect  partnership  and  about  the  same 


time  the  defeat  of  the  Conservative  Party 
ended  his  career  in  politics  which  had  been 
the  principal  focus  of  his  mind  and  ener- 
gies. Somervell  tried  to  maintain  as  his 
home  the  Old  Rectory  at  Ewelme  in 
Oxfordshire  which  he  had  bought  shortly 
after  his  marriage  (and  where  he  was 
buried)  but  in  1955  he  felt  compelled  to 
abandon  it.  Thereafter  he  lived  in 
chambers  in  the  Inner  Temple,  paying 
frequent  visits  to  All  Souls.  In  1953  he 
suffered  a  slight  thrombosis.  From  this  he 
recovered  but  in  1954  he  assumed  the  less 
arduous  work  of  a  lord  of  appeal  in  ordin- 
ary, with  a  life  peerage;  he  later  became 
afflicted  with  a  cancer  which  caused  his 
judicial  retirement  in  1960  and  his  death 
in  London  18  November  of  the  same  year. 
Meanwhile  he  had  served  in  1957  as 
treasurer  of  his  Inn  and  in  1959  was  made 
an  honorary  D.C.L.  of  Oxford ;  he  had  been 
elected  an  honorary  fellow  of  Magdalen  in 
1946  and  received  an  honorary  LL.D. 
from  St.  Andrews  in  1947.  He  had  also 
been  a  governor  of  Harrow  from  1944  to 
1953  and  for  the  last  six  years  a  most 
energetic  and  influential  chairman  of  the 
governors. 

Apart  from  reading  Somervell  derived 
great  pleasure  from  music,  especially  the 
gramophone  records  of  chamber  music  by 
the  classical  masters.  He  was  for  many 
years  on  the  governing  body  of  the  Royal 
College  of  Music.  He  was  also  chairman 
of  the  reviewing  committee  on  the  export 
of  works  of  art  and  from  1944-9  a  trustee  of 
the  Tate  Gallery.  His  pleasures  through- 
out his  life  had  never  been  the  playing  of 
games  although  at  one  time  he  was  an 
enthusiastic  if  not  greatly  skilled  horseman. 
For  him  the  greatest  enjoyment,  whether 
alone  or  in  company,  lay  in  travel  and  the 
open  countryside  and  its  wild  bird  and 
animal  life.  He  bore  his  last  illness  with 
extraordinary  cheerfulness  and  courage, 
spending  more  and  more  of  his  time  at  All 
Souls,  his  love  of  which  was  demonstrated 
by  his  gift  of  the  iron  gate  in  the  north- 
west corner  of  the  Great  Quadrangle  which 
he  did  not  live  to  see  in  place. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

EVEBSHED. 

SORABJI,  CORNELIA  (1866-1954), 
Indian  barrister  and  social  reformer,  was 
born  at  Nasik,  in  the  Bombay  presidency, 
15  November  1866,  the  fifth  daughter  of 
the  Rev.  Sorabji  Karsedji,  a  Christian 
convert  from  the  Parsee  community,  and 
his  wife,  Franscina.  Cornelia,  her  six 
sisters,  and  one  surviving  brother  were 


907 


Sorabji 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


brought  up  to  respect  all  that  was  best  in 
both  the  Indian  and  British  ways  of  life. 
The  whole  family  were  encouraged  to  share 
their  mother's  interest  in  social  service; 
and  it  was  out  of  her  concern  at  the  in- 
justices often  suffered  by  Indian  women 
who  Uved  purdah  nasheen  (sitting  behind 
the  curtain),  that  Cornelia's  later  vocation 
arose.  She  resolved  to  fight  the  legal 
battles  of  wives,  widows,  and  orphans 
who  could  not  be  expected  to  break  from 
their  customary  seclusion.  She  was  the 
first  woman  student  admitted  to  the 
Deccan  College,  Poona.  The  first  class 
degree  she  was  awarded  there  in  1886 
would,  but  for  her  sex,  have  entitled  her 
to  a  scholarship  at  a  British  university. 
She  taught  instead  at  Gujerat  College, 
Ahmedabad,  and  in  1888,  through  the 
help  of  friends,  went  to  Somerville  Hall, 
which  had  been  opened  at  Oxford  nine 
years  earlier.  At  Oxford  she  enjoyed  the 
friendship  of  Benjamin  Jowett  [q.v.]  who 
introduced  her  to  many  people  distin- 
guished in  politics,  the  law,  social  service, 
and  hterature.  She  met  the  aged  Florence 
Nightingale  [q.v.]  and  was  presented  at 
court.  She  read  the  B.C.L.  course  and  in 
1892  was  given  special  permission  to  sit 
for  the  examination,  the  first  woman  ever 
to  do  so.  She  was  placed  in  the  third  class 
and  then  continued  to  read  law  with  a 
firm  of  solicitors  at  Lincoln's  Inn.  It  was 
not  possible  until  1919  for  women  to  be- 
come barristers ;  and  she  had  to  wait  until 
1922  before  she  actually  received  her  B.C.L. 
degree.  In  that  year  she  was  admitted  a 
member  of  Lincoln's  Inn ;  and  in  the  follow- 
ing year  she  was  called  to  the  bar. 

All  this  took  place,  however,  after  she 
had  already  laboured  on  behalf  of  her 
purdah-nasheens,  as  she  called  them,  for 
well  over  a  quarter  of  a  century.  She  had 
returned  to  India  in  1894  and  had  under- 
taken educational  work  in  Baroda.  Then 
one  day  she  appeared  at  the  Poona  ses- 
sions court  as  a  private  person  speaking 
in  defence  of  a  woman  accused  of  the 
murder  of  her  husband.  The  woman  was 
acquitted.  Then  followed  a  period  during 
which  Cornelia  Sorabji  appeared  in  a 
similarly  private  capacity  in  the  agency 
courts  of  Kathiawar  and  Indore.  Seeking 
to  persuade  the  Indian  legal  world  to 
grant  her  some  professional  standing,  she 
sat  for  the  LL.B.  examination  of  the 
university  of  Bombay  and  a  high  court 
pleader's  examination  at  Allahabad ;  but, 
in  spite  of  passing  both,  she  was  still  not 
allowed,  because  of  her  sex,  to  be  regis- 
tered as  a  practising  lawyer. 


During  a  second  visit  to  Britain  she 
suggested  to  the  India  Office  that  an 
adviser  might  be  attached  to  the  court  of 
wards  in  Bengal,  Bihar,  and  Orissa  to 
deal  with  the  problems  connected  with 
women  and  minors  whose  estates  were 
being  administered  by  that  court,  as  a 
kind  of  liaison  officer  between  women  in 
purdah  and  the  outside  world.  In  1904 
Cornelia  Sorabji  was  invited  to  return  to 
Calcutta  to  begin  such  work.  Her  ex- 
periences while  so  engaged  may  be  found  in 
her  autobiographical  India  Calling  (1934) 
and  India  Recalled  ( 1936 ) .  Although  she  had 
no  other  status  than  that  of  adviser,  some 
six  hundred  wives,  widows,  orphans,  and 
minor  heirs  received  the  benefit  of  her  help. 
In  addition  to  her  legal  work,  she  was  an 
organizer  of  social  service,  infant  welfare, 
and  district  nursing.  She  was  awarded  the 
Kaisar-i-Hind  gold  medal  in  1909,  with 
the  bar  of  the  first  class  in  1922.  At  the 
end  of  1918  her  eyesight  gave  trouble 
but  a  temporary  cure  was  effected.  When 
she  came  to  London  in  1922  to  prepare  for 
her  call  to  the  bar  she  also  retired  from 
her  work  for  the  court  of  wards.  But  in 
1924  she  returned  to  India  where  she  was 
at  last  able  to  practise  as  a  barrister. 

In  1929  she  visited  the  United  States 
and  while  there  her  eyesight  began  seri- 
ously to  fail.  From  then  on  she  settled  in 
London,  going  to  India  only  during 
winters.  She  had  a  great  love  for  Britain 
and  scant  sympathy  with  the  movement  in 
India  for  independence.  She  turned  more 
and  more  to  writing  and  produced  many 
vivid,  moving,  or  humorous  sketches 
arising  out  of  her  work,  and  also  a  bio- 
graphical account  of  her  parents  entitled 
Therefore  (1924)  and  Susie  Sorabji,  A 
Memoir  (1932),  the  life  of  an  educationist 
sister  who  had  died  in  1931.  Her  last 
literary  work  was  to  help  in  the  editing 
of  Queen  Mary's  Book  for  India  (1943),  a 
small  anthology  on  themes  connected  with 
India  published  in  support  of  the  Indian 
Comforts  Fund.  By  this  time  Cornelia 
Sorabji  was  approaching  eighty  and  was 
almost  blind.  She  died  in  London  6  July 
1954.  A  writer  in  the  Manchester  Guardian 
(9  July  1954)  described  her  as  'an  arrest- 
ing figure  with  a  superb  profile,  always 
perfectly  dressed  in  the  richly  coloured 
silk  sari  to  which  the  modern  Parsee 
woman  has  remained  faithful.  Her  English 
speech  was  distinguished.  She  talked  and 
spoke  in  public  with  equal  brilliance,  and 
her  gift  of  phrase  remained  with  her  to  the 
end.' 

[Her  own  writings ;  The  Times,  8  July  1954 ; 


im 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


J.    H.    Mair,    Behind  the    Curtain,    Madras, 
1961 ;  private  information.] 

William  A.  W.  Jakvis. 


SPARE,  AUSTIN  OSMAN  (1886-1956), 
artist,  was  born  in  King  Street  in  the 
City  of  London  30  December  1886,  the 
son  of  Philip  Newton  Spare,  a  policeman, 
and  his  wife,  Eliza  Ann  Osman.  He  left  his 
elementary  school  at  thirteen,  and  was 
afterwards  self-educated.  He  had,  how- 
ever, some  formal  tuition  in  art  at  the 
Lambeth  School  of  Art  and  the  Royal 
College  of  Art.  At  the  age  of  sixteen  he  was 
already  exhibiting  at  the  Royal  Academy, 
but  soon  ceased  to  do  so.  His  first  one-man 
exhibition  was  at  the  Baillie  Gallery  in 
July  1914. 

Spare  was  passionately  interested  in  the 
occult  and  not  without  psychic  gifts,  some 
of  his  drawings  being  done  apparently 
without  the  co-operation  of  the  conscious 
mind.  If  these  tended  to  be  somewhat 
deficient  in  clear  draughtsmanship  this 
was  certainly  not  true  of  his  ordinary 
work  which  combined  strength  and 
delicacy. 

From  October  1922  to  July  1924  he 
collaborated  with  CUfford  Bax  in  the 
stunptuous  quarterly  the  Golden  Hind  and 
reproduced  in  this  periodical  were  some  of 
his  finest  drawings. 

During  the  war  of  1939-45  he  was  injured 
by  a  bomb  while  fire  watching  and  for 
a  time  lost  the  use  of  both  arms.  However 
he  started  painting  again  in  1946  in  a 
cramped  basement  in  Brixton  and  shortly 
afterwards  was  able  to  exhibit  more  than 
150  pictures.  He  died  in  hospital  in 
London  15  May  1956. 

[Book-Lover's  Magazine,  vol.  viii,  1909 ;  The 
Times,  16  May  1956 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

James  Laver. 


SPENCE,  Sir  JAMES  CALVERT  (1892- 
1954),  paediatrician,  was  born  at  Amble, 
Northumberland,  19  March  1892,  the 
fourth  son  and  seventh  child  of  David 
Magnus  Spence,  architect,  and  his  wife, 
Isabella  TurnbuU,  both  of  old  North- 
umbrian stock.  Spence  was  educated  at 
Elmfield  College,  York,  and  entered  the 
university  of  Durham  College  of  Medicine, 
Newcastle  upon  Tyne,  in  1909.  His  career 
as  a  medical  student,  though  more  parti- 
cularly characterized  by  athletic  prowess, 
was  not  undistinguished,  and  he  graduated 
in  1914  with  second  class  honours.  On 
the  outbreak  of  war  in  August,  he  joined 
the    Royal    Army    Medical    Corps    with 


Spence 

which  he  served  continuously  until  early 
1919  in  various  theatres  of  war,  including 
Gallipoli,  Egypt,  France,  and  Belgium.  He 
was  awarded  the  M.C.  as  a  field  ambulance 
medical  officer  in  1917,  and  a  bar  thereto 
in  1918, 

On  his  return  to  civil  life,  the  course  of 
his  medical  career  was  at  first  somewhat 
uncertain.  He  held  a  junior  appointment 
at  the  Hospital  for  Sick  Children,  Great 
Ormond  Street,  and  subsequently  it  looked 
as  if  he  might  be  attracted  to  biochemistry, 
his  first  contributions  to  scientific  litera- 
ture, from  St.  Thomas's  Hospital,  being 
in  that  field.  But  his  appointment  as 
medical  registrar  and  chemical  pathologist 
brought  him  back  in  1922  to  his  old  teach- 
ing  hospital,  the  Royal  Victoria  Infirmary, 
Newcastle  upon  Tyne,  and  enabled  him  to 
continue  both  his  clinical  and  laboratory 
interests.  In  one  capacity  or  another  he 
was  associated  with  the  hospital  for  the 
rest  of  his  life. 

Shortly  after  his  return  to  Newcastle, 
he  resumed  his  interest  in  paediatrics  by 
joining  the  medical  staff  of  a  day  nursery 
which  had  been  established  for  the  bene- 
fit of  wartime  munition  workers.  Largely 
as  a  result  of  his  energetic  reorganization 
and  reorientation  this  nursery  later  be- 
came the  Newcastle  Babies'  Hospital.  In 
this  institution,  Spence  with  the  enthusi- 
astic assistance  of  medical,  nursing,  and 
lay  colleagues  developed  the  practice  of 
social  paediatrics  with  which  his  name  will 
always  be  associated.  Together  with  his 
friend  and  later  professorial  colleague, 
A.  F.  Bernard  Shaw,  the  pathologist, 
Spence  spent  the  academic  year  1926-7  as 
a  Rockefeller  fellow  at  Johns  Hopkins 
Hospital,  Baltimore,  and  laid  the  founda- 
tions of  many  of  his  American  friendships. 

On  his  return  to  Newcastle  he  was 
appointed  in  January  1928  assistant 
physician  to  the  Royal  Victoria  Infirmary, 
with  all  the  heavy  responsibilities  of 
hospital  duties,  teaching,  research,  and 
consultant  practice  which  this  involved. 
The  next  six  years  saw  the  publication  of 
a  number  of  his  most  important  contri- 
butions to  scientific  medicine  on  such 
subjects  as  chronic  nephritis  in  childhood, 
night  blindness  due  to  nutritional  de- 
ficiencies, and  benign  tuberculosis  in 
children.  He  also  carried  out,  at  the  re- 
quest of  the  Medical  Research  Council, 
one  of  the  earliest  controlled  trials  in  the 
use  of  individual  drugs.  This  was  con- 
cerned with  ascertaining  the  efficiency 
(which  it  did)  of  pure  crystalline  vitamin 
D  in  the  treatment  of  rickets. 


909 


Spence 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


In  1933  Spence  made  his  first  major 
excursion  into  the  field  of  communal  and 
social  paediatrics.  Newcastle,  like  the 
whole  of  Tyneside,  was  suffering  severely 
from  the  economic  depression,*  and  there 
had  been  press  references  to  the  great 
increase  in  poverty,  sickness,  and  mal- 
nutrition amongst  the  poorest  classes 
of  the  city.  The  Newcastle  city  health 
committee  accordingly  invited  Spence  to 
carry  out  a  comparative  study  of  'The 
Health  and  Nutrition  of  Certain  of  the 
Children  of  Newcastle  upon  Tyne  between 
the  Ages  of  One  and  Five  Years'.  He 
showed  that  36  per  cent  of  the  children 
from  'poor  districts  of  the  City  .  .  .  were 
unhealthy  or  physically  unfit,  and  as  a 
result . .  .  appeared  malnourished'.  The 
fact  that  he  was  unable  to  find  this  high 
incidence  of  malnutrition  in  the  control 
group  of  children  of  better  class  families 
suggested  that  it  was  due  to  preventable 
causes. 

Meanwhile  at  the  Babies'  Hospital, 
Spence  was  developing  another  aspect  of 
social  paediatrics,  which  at  that  time  was 
unique  in  Great  Britain.  He  began  ad- 
mitting mothers  to  the  hospital  with  their 
sick  children,  so  that  they  might  nurse 
them.  Spence  described  it  as  an  advantage 
to  the  mother  'to  have  felt  that  she  has 
been  responsible  for  her  own  child's 
recovery',  thereby  establishing  a  new  re- 
lationship with  her  child.  Already  Spence's 
reputation  was  growing,  and  he  began  to 
receive  invitations  to  professorial  chairs, 
none  of  which  he  accepted  as  they  would 
have  involved  his  leaving  Newcastle  and 
the  work  to  which  he  felt  himself 
dedicated.  He  was  by  now  paediatric 
physician  at  the  Newcastle  General  Hos- 
pital and  honorary  physician  to  the 
Royal  Victoria  Infirmary. 

In  1942,  however,  the  Nuffield  Founda- 
tion decided  to  establish  a  chair  of  child 
health  in  Newcastle,  for  which  Spence  was 
the  only  possible  choice.  He  accepted 
gladly,  as  it  gave  him  greater  facilities  and 
opportunities  for  research,  both  scientific 
and  sociological,  for  the  organized  teaching 
of  paediatrics,  and  for  the  study  of  the 
field  of  medical  education  as  a  whole. 

Although  it  was  created  in  1942,  war- 
time conditions  prevented  the  full  func- 
tioning of  the  department  of  child  health 
until  1945.  This  interval  was  not  without 
its  advantages  for  from  1940  onwards 
Spence  had  been  called  upon  to  undertake 
a  number  of  medical  and  scientific  com- 
mittee activities  for  which  his  background 
and  experience  especially  fitted  him.  He 


was  appointed  chairman  of  the  social 
medicine  committee  of  the  Royal  College 
of  Physicians  (1941),  and  a  member  of 
the  medical  advisory  committee  of  the 
Nuffield  Provincial  Hospitals  Trust  (1940), 
the  University  Grants  Committee  (1943), 
and  the  Medical  Research  Council  (1944). 
He  also  gave  evidence  to  the  inter- 
departmental committee  on  medical 
schools  under  the  chairmanship  of  Sir 
William  Goodenough  [q.v.],  which  had 
been  appointed  to  advise  the  Government 
on  the  steps  which  should  be  taken  to 
provide  the  increased  number  of  doctors 
required  by  the  proposed  reorganization 
of  the  country's  health  services  and  which 
reported  in  1944.  When  the  National 
Health  Service  came  into  existence  in 
1948,  Spence  was  one  of  the  original 
members  of  the  minister  of  health's 
general  health  services  council,  and  its 
standing  medical  advisory  committee. 
He  was  also  appointed  to  the  board  of 
governors  of  his  own  teaching  hospital. 

With  the  completion  of  the  staffing  of 
the  department  of  child  health,  Spence 
was  able  to  create  something  new  both  in 
the  training  of  the  medical  student  in  the 
social  context  of  medicine,  and  in  the 
inclusion  of  the  home  as  well  as  the  hos- 
pital in  the  medical  care  of  the  sick  child. 
Throughout  his  teaching,  account  was 
taken  both  of  the  preventive  and  curative 
aspects  of  paediatrics.  His  many  contri- 
butions to  medical  literature  about  this 
time  included  the  Bradshaw  and  Charles 
West  lectures  at  the  Royal  College  of 
Physicians  on  'The  Nature  of  Disease  in 
Infancy'  and  'The  Care  of  Children  in 
Hospital'. 

Spence's  reputation  as  a  combination 
of  paediatrician,  educationist,  and  philo- 
sopher brought  many  requests  for  his 
services  as  a  lecturer  and  adviser.  In  this 
capacity,  he  visited  Belgium,  Czecho- 
slovakia, Australia,  New  Zealand  Canada, 
and  the  United  States.  In  1949  he  de- 
livered the  Cutter  lecture  at  Harvard, 
taking  as  his  subject  the  most  ambitious 
of  the  inquiries  which  he  had  inspired  in 
the  field  of  social  medicine.  The  lecture 
was  entitled  'Family  Studies  in  Preventive 
Paediatrics',  but  it  was  essentially  a  pre- 
liminary report  on  'A  Thousand  Families 
in  Newcastle  upon  Tyne'.  This  was  a  long- 
term  study  carried  out  by  the  department 
of  child  health  and  the  Newcastle  city 
health  department  into  the  incidence  and 
causation  of  disease  amongst  a  thousand 
children  born  of  Newcastle  parents  in 
May-June  1947.  It  ultimately  extended 


910 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Spencer,  L.  J. 


over  fifteen  years,  and  became  a  classic  of 
social  paediatrics. 

In  1952  Spence  was  again  invited  to 
serve  on  the  Medical  Research  Council. 
This  was  at  a  time  when  the  respective 
roles  of  the  universities  and  the  medical 
research  institutions  as  regards  medical 
research  were  under  review.  Spence  was 
very  apprehensive  lest  the  universities  play 
a  minor  part,  and  at  his  last  appearance  at 
the  Council,  before  his  untimely  death  at 
Newcastle  26  May  1954,  he  had  vigor- 
ously expressed  himself  in  their  support. 

By  his  contemporaries,  Spence  was 
universally  accepted  as  a  wise  counsellor, 
moderate  in  the  presentation  of  his  views, 
but  nevertheless  enthusiastic :  a  practical- 
minded  visionary.  As  a  cUnician  he  was 
in  the  highest  class,  and  his  sensitivity 
to  the  needs  and  fears  of  patients  and 
parents  made  him  a  supremely  under- 
standing physician,  with  a  whimsical 
charm  which  made  him  a  most  attractive 
personality.  His  scientific  ability  was 
perhaps  overshadowed  by  his  clinical 
interests,  but  as  a  teacher  and  leader  of 
younger  men  he  was  exceptional.  'The 
first  aim  of  my  department'  he  wrote  'is 
comradeship,  not  achievement.'  But  his 
achievements  were  in  fact  great,  and  his 
constructive  and  far-sighted  aims  for 
British  medicine  and  medical  education 
were  recognized  in  1950  by  his  knighthood. 

Throughout  his  life  Spence  was  a  lover 
of  the  countryside,  a  hardy  fell  walker, 
and  an  experienced  mountaineer. 

He  married  Kathleen,  daughter  of 
Robert  Downie-Leslie  in  1920;  they  had 
one  son  and  four  daughters. 

[The  Purpose  and  Practice  of  Medicine, 
selected  writings  of  Sir  James  Spence,  with 
bibliography  and  memoir,  1960;  British 
Medical  Journal  and  Lancet,  5  June  1954; 
personal  knowledge.]  J.  A.  Charles. 

SPENCER,  LEONARD  JAMES  (1870- 
1959),  mineralogist  and  geologist,  was  born 
at  Worcester  7  July  1870,  the  eldest  son 
of  James  Spencer  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth 
Bonser.  His  father  was  a  schoolmaster  who 
became  head  of  the  day  school  department 
of  Bradford  Technical  College,  in  which 
school  his  sons  were  educated.  At  the 
age  of  sixteen  Spencer  gained  a  Royal 
exhibition  to  the  Royal  College  of  Science, 
Dublin,  where  he  obtained  a  first  class  in 
chemistry  in  1889  and  also  read  geology 
under  J.  P.  O'Reilly.  Proceeding  with  a 
scholarship  to  Sidney  Sussex  College, 
Cambridge,  he  obtained  first  classes  in 
both  parts  of  the  natural  sciences  tripos 


(1892-3)  and  won  the  Harkness  scholar- 
ship for  geology  in  1893.  At  Cambridge  he 
had  added  mineralogy  to  his  other  subjects 
and  the  occurrence  of  a  vacancy  in  the 
department  of  mineralogy  at  the  British 
Museum  (Natural  History)  offered  an 
opportunity  which  decided  his  future 
career.  He  was  successful  in  the  examina- 
tion for  the  posr  and  after  a  few  months 
at  Munich  studying  mineralogy  under 
Paul  Groth  and  petrology  under  Ernst 
Weinschenk  he  took  up  his  appointment 
on  1  January  1894  and  devoted  himself 
heart  and  soul  to  mineralogy  for  the  re- 
mainder of  his  life. 

During  his  forty-one  years  at  the  British 
Museum,  Spencer  wrote  a  great  many 
papers  on  minerals  and  on  meteorites  and 
earned  a  high  international  reputation  in 
those  fields.  He  also  translated  Max 
Bauer's  Edelsteinkunde  (1904)  and  Rein- 
hard  Brauns'  Das  Mineralreich  (1908-12) 
and  wrote  two  useful  textbooks.  The 
World's  Minerals  (1911)  and  A  Key  to 
Precious  Stones  (1936).  The  discovery  of 
meteorite  craters  in  South  Australia  in 
1931  and  by  H.  St.  J.  B.  Philby  [q.v.]  in 
Arabia  in  the  following  year  provided 
material  then  new  to  science,  and  it  fell 
to  Spencer  to  study  it.  He  published 
several  papers  on  meteorite  craters  giving 
evidence  of  the  very  high  temperatures 
produced  by  the  impact  of  very  large 
meteorites  and  drawing  comparisons 
between  the  few  known  meteorite  craters 
on  the  earth  and  the  craters  on  the  moon. 

Apart  from  his  own  publications 
Spencer  made  two  other  contributions  to 
mineralogy.  At  the  British  Museum  he 
established  the  present  system  of  labelling 
and  registering  the  vast  collection  of 
minerals,  taking  great  pains  over  every 
detail  of  the  registers,  labels,  and  even  the 
ink  employed.  At  first  he  did  a  great  part 
of  this  work  himself  and  when  he  suc- 
ceeded G.  T.  Prior  as  keeper  of  minerals 
in  1927  his  assistants  continued  on  the 
lines  he  had  laid  down.  When  he  retired  in 
1935  the  collection  was  probably  the 
largest  and  certainly  the  best  documented 
collection  of  minerals  in  the  world. 

Spencer's  other  major  contribution  lay 
in  the  field  of  mineralogical  literature  and 
bibliography.  He  took  over  the  editorship 
of  the  Mineralogical  Magazine  from  (Sir) 
Henry  Miers  [q.v.]  in  1900  and  continued 
as  editor  for  over  fifty  years,  carrying  out 
his  duties  with  meticulous  care.  In  1920 
he  voluntarily  undertook  the  preparation 
and  editing  of  Mineralogical  Abstracts^ 
a  new  publication  by  the  Mineralogical 


911 


Spencer,  L.  J. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Society.  Spencer  had  already  catalogued 
mineralogical  literature  for  the  Royal 
Society's  Catalogue  of  Scientific  Papers,  4th 
series  (1884-1900)  and  for  the  mineralogy 
volumes  of  the  International  Caialogtie  of 
Scientific  Literature  (1901-14).  Minera- 
logical Abstracts  was  intended  to  preserve 
continuity  with  the  latter  by  covering  the 
period  from  1915  onwards.  For  many 
years  Spencer  contributed  by  far  the 
greater  part  of  the  abstracts  himself, 
devoting  most  of  his  spare  time  to  the 
work,  which  he  continued  long  after  his 
retirement  from  the  museum.  He  retired 
from  the  editorship  of  the  Mineralogical 
Magazirhe  and  the  Abstracts  in  1955  at  the 
age  of  eighty -five,  but  he  continued  to 
write  occasional  papers  and  to  prepare 
abstracts,  particularly  on  meteorites, 
almost  until  the  day  of  his  death. 

In  his  early  years  at  the  museum 
Spencer  did  not  travel  extensively  out- 
side the  British  Isles,  but  attendance  as  a 
delegate  to  meetings  of  the  British  Asso- 
ciation gave  him  opportunity  to  travel  and 
collect  minerals  in  the  United  States  and 
Canada  in  1924  and  in  South  Africa, 
Southern  Rhodesia,  and  South  West 
Africa  in  1929.  In  1934,  although  then 
sixty-four,  he  took  part  in  an  expedition 
to  the  Libyan  Desert  to  investigate  the 
site  where  Colonel  P.  A.  Clayton  had  dis- 
covered the  mysterious  Libyan  Desert 
glass,  a  silica  glass  of  unknown  origin  but 
thought  to  have  some  connection  with 
meteorites. 

From  his  Cambridge  undergraduate 
days  Spencer  put  his  work  before  almost 
everything  else.  He  worked  extremely 
long  hours  and  allowed  himself  little  re- 
laxation of  any  kind.  Gardening  was  the 
only  hobby  on  which  he  spent  much  time, 
and  most  of  his  vacations  were  given  up 
to  visiting  mines  and  collecting  minerals. 
His  manner  was  at  times  brusque  and  he 
spoke  his  mind  unhesitatingly  but  he  had 
a  saving  sense  of  humour  and  a  more 
generous  and  kindly  character  than  he 
allowed  to  appear.  He  never  sought  com- 
pany but  he  never  missed  a  Mineralogical 
Society  meeting.  Visiting  mineralogists 
were  always  welcome  at  his  London  home 
and  to  the  end  of  his  life  he  had  many 
friends  among  mineralogists  of  many  ages 
and  many  nations. 

Spencer  became  Sc.D.  of  Cambridge  in 
1921.  He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1925, 
appointed  C.B.E.  in  1934,  awarded  the 
Murchison  medal  of  the  Geological  Society 
of  London  in  1937,  and  the  Roebling  medal 
of  the  American  Mineralogical  Society  in 


1941.  He  was  president  of  the  Minera- 
logical Society  of  Great  Britain  in  1936-9 
and  its  foreign  secretary  in  1949-59. 

In  1899  Spencer  married  Edith  Mary 
(died  1954),  daughter  of  Islip  J.  Close,  of 
Mortimer,  Berkshire.  They  had  one  son 
and  two  daughters,  the  elder  of  whom 
provided  a  fund  in  memory  of  her  father 
to  be  used  for  travelling  grants  to  students 
working  in  the  department  of  mineralogy 
and  petrology  at  Cambridge  and  engaged 
on  research.  Spencer  died  in  London 
14  April  1959. 

[The  Times,  16  April  1959 ;  Nature,  6  June 
1959 ;  Mineralogical  Magazine,  December  1950, 
March  1956,  and  September  1959;  personal 
knowledge.]  W.  Campbell  Smith. 

SPENCER,  Sir  STANLEY  (1891-1959), 
artist,  was  born  at  Cookham-on-Thames, 
Berkshire,  30  June  1891,  the  seventh  son 
in  a  family  of  eleven  children  of  William 
Spencer,  an  organist  and  music  teacher, 
and  his  wife,  Anna  Caroline  Slack.  His 
brother  Gilbert  was  born  in  the  following 
year.  Spencer  had  no  formal  education, 
attending  only  a  class  which  met  in  a 
corrugated  iron  building  in  the  Spencer 
garden  and  was  presided  over  by  his  sister 
Annie,  who,  he  said,  despaired  of  him. 

In  1907  Lady  Boston,  who  had  been 
giving  Spencer  private  drawing  lessons, 
sent  him  to  the  Technical  School  at 
Maidenhead.  A  year  later  she  sent  her 
proteg^  to  the  Slade  School  with  intro- 
ductions to  Professors  Tonks  and  Brown 
[qq.v.].  He  was  accepted  but  continued 
to  live  at  home  catching  an  evening  train 
back — a  routine  which  nourished  his  gifts : 
his  already  vivid  imagination  was  rooted 
in  Cookham  and  its  surroundings  and 
inhabitants.  The  subject-matter  of  his 
art  was  already  clear  and  distinct  in  his 
mind ;  the  Slade  developed  his  powers  to 
express  the  vision.  In  1912  he  gained  the 
Melville  Nettleship  prize  (a  scholarship) 
and  the  composition  prize  for  a  painting 
*The  Nativity'. 

Spencer  painted  a  series  of  memorable 
canvases  while  stiD  a  Slade  student :  *Two 
Girls  and  a  Beehive'  (1910),  'John  Donne 
arriving  in  Heaven'  (1911),  'Joachim 
among  the  Shepherds'  (1912),  'Apple 
Gatherers'  (1912-13),  the  last  of  which 
was  acquired  by  the  Tate  Gallery.  In  1912, 
his  last  year  at  the  Slade,  he  began  one 
of  his  finest  paintings,  'Zacharias  and 
Elizabeth'  (1912-13). 

Spencer  had  attained  both  technical 
and  imaginative  maturity  while  still  a 
student.  In  the  introduction  he  contri- 


912 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Spencer,  S. 


buted  in  1955  to  the  catalogue  of  the 
Tate  Gallery  retrospective  exhibition  of 
his  work,  Spencer  himself  commented  on 
what  he  considered  the  best  period  of  his 
painterly  life.  He  described  the  'state  of 
sureness'  he  was  in  before  the  war  of 
1914-18,  a  state  which  after  the  war 
continued  to  about  1922-3  'when  I  did 
the  Betrayal.  At  this  time  I  did  the  series 
of  drawings  for  the  Burghclere  Memo- 
rial and  also  the  drawing  for  the  1927 
Resurrection.  So  that  all  the  painting  I 
was  to  do  from  1922  to  1932  was  settled 
in  nearly  every  detail :  ten  years  of  solid 
bliss  were  ahead  of  me.  But  I  knew  in 
1922-3  that  I  was  changing  or  losing  grip 
or  something.  I  was,  I  feared,  forsaking 
the  vision  and  I  was  filled  with  consterna- 
tion. All  the  ability  I  had  was  dependent 
on  that  vision.' 

The  vision  he  lived  with  was  a  vision  of 
heaven  in  Cookham's  streets  and  of  the 
incidents  of  Christ's  life,  with  which  the 
family  Bible-readings  had  enkindled  his 
imagination,  as  enacted  there;  it  was  a 
vision  in  which  Cookham  scenes  and 
bibhcal  stories  were  simultaneously  in 
focus  and  interpenetrated.  This  private 
and  ecstatic  way  of  seeing  so  engrossed 
him  that  even  in  so  large  (and  so  vivid) 
a  family  circle  he  lived  much  within  him- 
self, and  when  not  painting  his  'vision' 
was  walking  alone  along  the  river  or 
around  the  village  seeing  the  everyday 
things  in  which  he  delighted  all  the  more 
sharply  for  their  irradiation  in  a  light  of 
heaven. 

These  were  the  seminal  years  of 
Spencer's  career.  This  trance-like  life  was 
interrupted  by  the  war.  He  joined  the 
Royal  Army  Medical  Corps  in  1915  and 
was  sent  to  Macedonia  in  the  summer  of 
1916.  In  1917  he  volunteered  for  the 
infantry  (the  17th  Royal  Berkshires),  also 
in  the  Macedonian  theatre,  and  served 
there  until  demobilization. 

While  still  in  Macedonia  he  had  been 
commissioned  to  do  a  war  painting,  and 
this  he  carried  out  on  his  return  home — 
'Travoys  arriving  with  Wounded'  (Im- 
perial War  Museum).  He  also  finished 
'Swan  Upping'  (Tate  Gallery),  which  he 
had  left  two-thirds  completed  foiur  years 
earlier. 

To  the  years  1919-23  belong  either  in 
execution  or  in  conception  most  of  his 
finest  and  also  most  mature  works :  paint- 
ings such  as  'The  Robing  of  Christ'  and 
'The  Disrobing  of  Christ',  of  1922  (Tate 
Gallery) ;  the  drawings  for  the  great  'Resur- 
rection, Cookham'  which  he  painted  in 


1928-7 — the  completed  picture  was  exhib- 
ited in  Spencer's  first  one-man  exhibition 
in  1927  and  bought  by  Sir  Joseph  (later 
Lord)  Duveen  [q.v.]  and  presented  to  the 
Tate  Gallery;  and  the  drawings  for  one 
of  his  'chapels  in  the  air',  which  subse- 
quently became  the  Burghclere  murals. 
For  in  1926-7  Mr.  and  Mrs.  J.  L.  Behrend 
built  a  war  memorial  chapel  at  Burgh- 
clere in  Berkshire,  in  commemoration  of 
their  relative  Harry  Willowby  Sandham, 
in  order  to  make  it  possible  for  Spencer  to 
realize  this  cycle  of  drawings.  The  paint- 
ing of  these  murals  occupied  him  without 
interruption  from  1927  to  1932  and  they 
are  his  most  impressive  achievement. 

In  1925  Spencer  had  married  Hilda 
Anne  Carline.  Two  daughters  were  born: 
in  1925  and  1930.  The  marriage  was  a 
failure  (his  wife  showed  progressive 
symptoms  of  mental  ill  health)  and  by 
the  time  Spencer  returned  to  Cookham  in 
1932  it  had  broken.  But  he  continued  to 
see  Hilda  frequently  until  her  death  in 
1950  and  his  love  for  her  remained  the  one 
enduring  bond  of  his  life.  In  the  early 
thirties  he  grew  acquainted  with  Patricia 
Preece,  whom  he  married  in  1937  after 
divorce  from  Hilda. 

This  new  emotional  relationship  in 
his  life  was  largely  responsible  for  a 
radical  change  in  his  painting.  He  now 
had  two  women  to  provide  for,  in  addition 
to  two  daughters  (one  of  whom  was  cared 
for  by  relatives).  Until  this  period  in  his 
fife  he  had  been  virtually  maintained  by 
friends  and  patrons  (from  1919  to  1923, 
for  example,  he  had  lived  in  the  houses  of 
friends),  but  now,  back  in  Cookham,  he 
had  to  stand  on  his  own  feet  and  to  earn 
all  the  money  he  could:  'I  was  making 
big  demands  on  life  at  the  time',  he  sub- 
sequently wrote,  'and  had  to  paint  far 
more  than  I  would  have  wished.'  He 
turned  out  what  he  called  his  'pot-boilers', 
landscapes  and  flower-pieces,  at  the  rate 
of  one  a  week  or  every  ten  days.  These 
pictures,  rendered  in  pre-Raphaelite  ex- 
actitude, are  often  beautiful,  sometimes 
mechanical,  but  they  afforded  no  joy  of 
creation  to  their  maker. 

Moreover,  since  (according  to  Spencer) 
the  relationship  with  Patricia  had  no 
physical  fulfilment,  his  sexuality  sought 
expression  in  erotic  paintings  and  in 
erotic  writings  in  the  form  of  a  diary- 
letter  to  Hilda.  The  paintings  had  little 
appeal  and  were  largely  unsaleable. 

The  thirties  were  years  of  artistic 
frustration  for  Spencer,  although  he  pain- 
ted some  figure-pieces  which  brought  him 


913 


Spencer,  S, 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


further  acclaim  and  were  bought  by  many 
art  galleries  both  in  the  provinces  and  in 
London.  Among  his  best  paintings  of  these 
years  are  'Sarah  Tubb  and  the  Heavenly 
Visitors'  (1933);  'Separating  Fighting 
Swans'  (1933)  and  'Hilda,  Unity  and  Dolls' 
(1937),  both  at  the  City  Art  Gallery, 
Leeds ;  'St.  Francis  and  the  Birds'  (1935) ; 
and  'The  Cedar  Tree,  Cookham'  (1934^5). 
Among  the  erotic  paintings  were  a  number 
of  nudes  of  Patricia  Preece,  some  of  which 
were  bought  by  W.  A.  Evill.  'Promenade 
of  Women'  (1937)  and  a  series  entitled 
'The  Beatitudes  of  Love'  (1937-8)  were 
among  Spencer's  own  favourites  of  the 
period. 

In  1935  he  resigned  from  the  Royal 
Academy,  to  which  he  had  been  elected  as 
an  associate  member  three  years  before, 
on  its  rejection  of  two  of  his  pictures  for 
the  simimer  exhibition.  He  rejoined  as  a 
full  R.A.  in  1950.  In  1938  twenty-two  of 
his  paintings  were  exhibited  at  the  Venice 
Biennale,  at  which  he  had  also  been 
represented  six  years  earlier. 

Although  he  was  prolific  of  landscapes 
and  flower-pieces  and  also  of  portraits, 
and  although  they  sold  well,  Spencer  was 
sued  by  Hilda  on  a  number  of  occasions 
during  the  thirties  for  arrears  of  main- 
tenance. Even  the  tiny  sum  of  fifty  shill- 
ings a  week  for  herself  and  their  daughter 
Unity  was  not  forthcoming.  Spencer 
himself  lived  on  about  forty  shillings  a 
week  or  less.  The  shock  of  appearing  in 
court  together  with  years  of  over- work  on 
his  pot-boilers  brought  on,  in  1938,  a 
breakdown  of  several  months'  duration, 
during  which  he  was  quite  unable  to  paint 
at  all.  At  this  time  his  dealer  and  friend, 
Dudley  Tooth,  however,  agreed  to  take 
over  the  management  of  his  finances, 
paying  a  weekly  allowance  to  each  of  the 
dependants  as  well  as  a  small  sum  to 
Spencer  himself.  He  also  paid  off  the  many 
debts  contracted  in  the  thirties  and  the 
arrears  of  income-tax. 

The  tribulations  of  these  years,  when 
Spencer  was  also  without  a  home  and 
(as  he  said)  felt  himself  a  vagrant,  were  the 
inspiration  for  a  series  of  small  paintings 
of  'Christ  in  the  Wilderness' ;  four  of  the 
series  belong  to  1939,  two  to  1940,  one  to 
1942,  while  the  eighth  and  last  was  painted 
in  1953.  The  first  of  them  was  made  in 
lodgings  in  London,  for  in  the  autumn  of 
1938  Spencer  left  Cookham  on  account  of 
personal  unhappiness.  He  had  never  lived 
with  his  second  wife. 

In  1940  Spencer  was  commissioned  by 
the  war  artists  advisory  conunittee  to 


paint  pictures  of  shipyards.  He  began 
work  at  Port  Glasgow,  making  visits  to 
the  shipyards  for  studies  for  larger  paint- 
ings until  the  end  of  the  war.  While  in 
Port  Glasgow  the  sight  of  a  cemetery — 
cemeteries  were  always  powerful  imagina- 
tive stimulants  for  him — inspired  him  to 
another  series  of  resurrection  canvases ; 
he  painted  eight  in  all.  It  had  been  his 
earnest  wish  that  the  complete  cycle  might 
hang  together,  but  the  pictures  were 
bought  separately:  'Resurrection:  Tidy- 
ing' (1945)  by  the  City  Art  Gallery, 
Birmingham ;  'Resurrection :  Reunion' 
(1945)  by  the  Aberdeen  Art  Gallery; 
'Resurrection  with  Raising  of  Jairus's 
Daughter'  (1947)  by  the  Southampton 
Art  Gallery;  'Resurrection:  the  Hill  of 
Sion'  (1946)  by  the  Harris  Museum  and 
Art  Gallery,  Preston ;  'Resurrection :  Port 
Glasgow'  (1947-50)  by  the  Tate  Gallery. 

In  1945  Spencer  returned  to  his  native 
Cookham  and  remained  there  until  his 
death,  devoting  his  time  principally  to  an 
enormous  cycle  of  about  sixty  drawings  of 
'Christ  preaching  at  Cookham  Regatta' 
and  later  to  the  painting  of  it.  He  worked 
on  these  canvases  until  too  weak  to  con- 
tinue. Another  huge  painting  of  his  last 
years,  an  altar-piece  in  praise  of  Hilda, 
was  also  not  completed  by  the  time  of  his 
death. 

A  retrospective  exhibition  of  Spencer's 
work  (68  paintings  and  27  drawings)  was 
held  at  Temple  Newsam  House,  Leeds,  in 
1947,  and  another  (83  paintings)  at  the 
Tate  Gallery  in  1955.  He  was  appointed 
C.B.E.  in  1950  and  knighted  in  1959.  In 
1958  the  vicar  of  Cookham  organized 
an  exhibition  of  Spencer's  paintings  in 
Cookham  church  and  vicarage;  it  drew 
large  crowds  and,  set  in  his  own  beloved 
Cookham,  gave  particular  gratification  to 
Spencer  himself.  The  following  winter  he 
fell  ill  and  he  died  in  hospital  at  Cliveden 
14  December  1959  and  is  buried  in  Cook- 
ham churchyard. 

Stanley  Spencer  was  the  outstanding — 
the  most  potent  and  fertile — imaginative 
painter  of  the  English-speaking  people 
in  the  first  half  of  the  twentieth  century. 
As  he  himself  often  said  and  wrote,  the 
quality  of  his  imaginative  work  deterior- 
ated after  the  twenties;  after  the  com- 
pletion of  the  Burghclere  murals  both  the 
intensity  and  the  focused  and  integrated 
unity  of  inspiration  which  animated  his 
early  works  and  fused  into  one  his  dual 
vision  of  the  commonplace  and  of  the 
divine  consistently  evaded  him.  How  this 
came  about  has  been  suggested  above, 


914. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


but  it  may  be  added  that  Spencer  was  in 
no  sense  strongly  rooted  in  a  religious 
faith  nor  had  he  any  clear  or  reasoned 
convictions,  so  that  in  the  pressures  of  life 
his  early  poetic  empathy  with  the  New 
Testament  faltered  and  waned  and  the 
dual  vision  was  no  longer  possible.  Cook- 
ham  became  no  longer  the  suburbs  of 
heaven  but  suburbs;  the  later  Resurrec- 
tions are  just  vast  conversation-pieces 
crammed  with  anecdote.  His  figure  paint- 
ing, including  much  which  was  in  intention 
religious,  came  to  be  an  expression  of 
grotesquerie  and  whimsy.  The  ordinary 
things  and  objects  and  events  of  life  he 
loved  with  passion,  and  in  his  painting  he 
wanted  to  show  them  as  being,  in  what 
they  are,  heavenly  and  somehow  divine 
— this  is  why  his  Resurrections  are 
insistently  filled  with  incidents  of  trivial 
daily  life — but  it  was  an  aim  which  in 
the  second  half  of  his  fife  he  could  no 
longer  successfully  achieve. 

Spencer's  early  paintings  were  not  only 
strong  in  their  draughtsmanship  and 
composition ;  they  were  distinguished  by 
painterly  qualities  as  well.  Later  on, 
however,  he  came  to  take  delight  only  in 
the  drawing  and  in  the  composition  of  his 
pictures.  With  the  painting  of  them  he 
was,  he  admitted,  bored.  His  paintings, 
therefore,  came  to  be  coloured  drawings, 
conceived  as  drawings,  rather  than  paint- 
ings conceived  in  terms  of  paint.  It  was 
another  element  in  the  fragmentation  of 
his  imagination  in  consequence  of  which, 
in  place  of  a  dominant  and  unifying  in- 
tensity, there  is  an  evenly  distributed 
intensity  over  his  themes,  so  that  every- 
thing is  illumined  but  nothing  is  picked 
out  and  the  whole  is  but  the  sum  of  its 
parts. 

It  was  Spencer's  proud  claim  to  be  an 
ordinary  Cookham  villager.  'My  mother 
was  just  a  little  village  biddy.'  In  appear- 
ance, even  to  the  end  of  his  life,  he  was 
like  a  village  urchin.  So  tiny  was  he  that 
his  clothes  were  always  too  large,  but  as  he 
quite  often  wore  his  suit  over  his  pyjamas, 
which,  even  so,  peered  out  at  ankle  and 
wrist,  this  was  an  advantage. 

His  hair,  unparted,  hung  in  an  unkempt 
fringe  over  his  eyes.  His  glasses  he  usually 
bought  at  Woolworths.  They  did  not  fit 
and  shd  to  the  end  of  his  nose,  so  that,  to 
keep  them  in  balance,  Spencer  had  a  habit 
of  tilting  his  head  slightly  backwards. 

In  repose  his  features  were  without 
distinction;  his  eyes  looked  tired  and 
sleepy.  When  he  was  aroused,  however,  by 
enthusiasm  (over  his  own  work  or  imagin- 


Spry 


ings)  or  by  anger,  the  eyes  widened  and 
glittered.  His  speech,  which  was  ordinarily 
a  village  diction  uttered  in  a  squeaky 
nasal  voice,  would  then  become  resonant 
with  language  cast  in  biblical  words  and 
phrases.  On  such  occasions — and  they  were 
very  numerous — he  was  a  fierce,  prophet- 
like presence,  and  a  compelling  speaker. 

Spencer  drew  and  painted  innumerable 
self-portraits.  The  first,  painted  in  1913, 
hangs  in  the  Tate  Gallery.  The  central, 
nude,  figure  in  'The  Resurrection,  Cook- 
ham',  also  in  the  Tate,  is  the  painter 
himself.  The  last  self-portrait,  and  the 
finest,  was  painted  in  1959  and  became  the 
property  of  Mrs.  Dennis  Smith. 

[Stanley  Spencer,  a  Retrospective  Exhibition^ 
Tate  Gallery,  1955;  Stanley  Spencer:  Resur- 
rection Pictures  (1945-1950),  1951;  Gilbert 
Spencer,  Stanley  Spencer,  1961 ;  John  Rothen- 
stein,  Modem  English  Painters,  vol.  ii,  1956 ; 
Elizabeth  Rothenstein,  Stanley  Spencer,  1962 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Elizabeth  Rothenstein. 

SPRY,  CONSTANCE  (1886-1960),  artist 
in  flower  arrangement,  was  born  in  Derby 
5  December  1886,  the  only  daughter  and 
eldest  of  the  six  children  of  George 
Fletcher,  railway  clerk,  later  assistant 
secretary  to  the  department  of  agriculture 
and  technical  instruction  in  Ireland,  and 
his  wife,  Henrietta  Maria  Clark.  She  was 
educated  at  Alexandra  School  and  College, 
Dublin,  and  in  early  life  her  natural  talent 
and  rare  skill  with  flowers  were  already 
clearly  evident.  But  in  her  teens  her  sym- 
pathy and  enthusiasm  were  devoted  to 
helping  Lady  Aberdeen  [q.v.]  in  her  work 
for  the  children  in  South  Ireland,  es- 
peciaUy  against  tuberculosis.  During  the 
war  of  1914-18  she  was  head  of  women's 
staff  at  the  department  of  aircraft  produc- 
tion of  the  Ministry  of  Munitions  and  later 
she  was  principal  of  the  London  County 
Council  day  continuation  school  in 
Homerton. 

If  primarily  a  lecturer,  her  totally  fresh 
approach  to  the  use  of  flowers,  their  leaves, 
branches,  and  fruits,  for  decorative  pur- 
poses, soon  established  her  world-wide 
reputation  after  she  opened  a  shop  in 
London  under  the  name  of  Constance 
Spry.  The  artist  in  her  was  irrepressible, 
so  that  for  royal  occasions  and  society 
functions,  when  sheer  beauty  matched  with 
imagination  and  a  break-away  from  the 
ordinary  were  required,  the  name  of 
Constance  Spry  came  uppermost.  Her  ex- 
quisite handling  of  flowers  was  seen  at  the 
weddings  of  the  Duke  of  Gloucester  and 
the  Princess  Elizabeth.  For  the  latter' s 


915 


Spry 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


coronation  she  was  made  adviser  to  the 
minister  of  works ;  did  the  flowers  for  the 
Abbey  annexe  and  decorations  on  parts  of 
the  royal  route ;  and  in  Parliament  Square 
she  and  her  staff  actually  pl£lnted  all  the 
plants  sent  over  from  various  parts  of  the 
Conunonwealth.  For  her  services  she  was 
appointed  O.B.E.  (1953). 

Prior  to  the  war  of  1939—45  Constance 
Spry  had  started  a  school  of  floristry 
and  flower  decoration.  A  suggestion  from 
students  that  when  it  was  reopened 
cookery  should  be  added  to  the  curriculum 
proved  impracticable ;  but  with  her  friend 
Rosemary  Hume,  a  professional  cordon- 
bleu  cook  and  teacher,  the  Cordon  Bleu 
Cookery  School  was  started  in  London. 
Later,  at  Winkfield  Place,  near  Windsor, 
a  residential  school  was  established  for 
young  people  to  learn  all  aspects  of  running 
a  home  efficiently. 

Constance  Spry  wrote  twelve  books  on 
flower  arrangement,  entertaining,  and 
cookery;  completed  a  correspondence 
course  on  flower  arrangement;  designed 
many  flower  vases;  and  for  some  years 
designed  floral  carpets.  As  a  lecturer  and 
demonstrator  she  was  well  known  in 
Britain,  the  United  States,  and  Austraha. 
She  had  a  singularly  easy  manner,  a  lively 
wit,  and  her  enthusiasm  for  what  she  was 
saying  and  doing  just  bubbled  over;  her 
vitality  was  so  contagious  that  those  who 
heard  her  would  not  want  to  miss  a  word 
and  right  away  would  want  to  follow  her 
example.  She  was  eternally  young  in 
heart  and  mind  and  from  this  stemmed 
her  exceptional  capacity  for  inspiring  and 
handling  the  younger  generation.  To  her 
fingertips  she  was  essentially  a  woman — of 
rare  and  original  talent.  At  flower  shows 
she  was  an  exacting,  fair,  and  stimulating 
judge.  She  did  much  to  encourage  the 
Flower  Club  movement,  while  her  work 
for  the  Royal  Gardeners'  Orphan  Fund 
raised  considerable  money  for  children 
in  need.  After  her  death,  at  Winkfield 
Place,  3  January  1960,  this  charity  set 
up  a  special  Constance  Spry  Fund  to  her 
memory.  A  pastel  by  M.  Forestier-Walker 
is  in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Julia  Cairns. 

SQUIRE,  Sir  JOHN  COLLINGS  (1884- 
1958),  poet  and  man  of  letters,  was  born 
at  Plymouth  2  April  1884,  the  only  son  of 
Jonas  Squire,  veterinary  surgeon,  and  his 
wife,  Elizabeth  Rowe  CoUings.  He  was 
educated  at  Plymouth  Corporation  Gram- 
mar School,  Blundell's  School,  Tiverton, 


and  was  a  scholar  of  St.  John's  College, 
Cambridge,  where  he  obtained  a  second  in 
history  (1905).  He  was  prominent  in  the 
Fabian  Society  but  his  love  of  literature, 
especially  of  poetry,  strove  with  his  poli- 
tical ardour,  although  in  later  years  he 
stood  unsuccessfully  for  Parliament,  con- 
testing Cambridge  University  for  Labour 
in  1918  and  Brentford  and  Chiswick  in 
1924  for  the  Liberals.  His  first  book. 
Poems  and  Baudelaire  Flozvers  (1909), 
made  little  impression,  but  signalled  his 
principal  interest. 

After  working  as  a  journalist  in  Ply- 
mouth and  London,  Squire  in  1913  be- 
came literary  editor  of  the  newly  founded 
New  Statesman.  His  critical  essays,  which 
he  signed  with  humorous  melancholy 
'Solomon  Eagle',  became  popular.  Three 
volumes  of  these  papers,  entitled  Books  in 
General  (1918-21),  showed  that  few  auth- 
ors of  importance  had  escaped  him.  He 
wrote  for  the  common  reader.  Throughout 
his  life  he  contributed  regular  causeries  to 
weekly  journals  and  now  and  then  collec- 
ted them  in  such  volumes  as  Sunday 
Mornings  (1930)  from  the  Observer.  His 
liking  for  witty  company  perhaps  helped 
in  his  production  of  parodies,  which  also 
won  him  a  name ;  generous  as  he  was  by 
nature,  he  could  write  them  cuttingly, 
referring  nevertheless  to  'a  not  wholly 
admirable  art'.  His  Collected  Parodies 
appeared  in  1921. 

A  small  book  of  poems  by  Squire  called 
The  Survival  of  the  Fittest  (1916)  was  re- 
printed several  times,  and  calls  for  mention 
as  being  perhaps  the  earliest  poetic  protest 
against  the  war  to  win  much  attention  in 
England.  It  included  the  epigram,  'God 
heard  the  embattled  nations  sing  and 
shout',  which  was  quoted  by  many  who 
did  not  know  the  name  of  the  author.  In 
1917  the  other  side  of  Squire's  poetical 
character  was  shown  in  a  visionary  poem, 
still  remarkable,  in  which  'the  exotic 
struggles  with  the  homely',  entitled  The 
Lily  of  Malud. 

On  the  return  of  peace,  Squire  in  1919 
set  up  a  nobly  printed  monthly  magazine 
with  a  title  revived  from  the  eighteenth 
century :  the  London  Mercury.  Its  contents 
were  well  varied,  and  the  first  volume 
opened,  editorial  greetings  apart,  with 
poems  by  Thomas  Hardy  [q.v.]  and  others 
and  closed  with  an  estimate  of  the  collec- 
ted scientific  papers  of  an  ingenious  Vic- 
torian, John  Henry  Poynting  [q.v.].  The 
encouragement  of  the  poets  in  the  new 
magazine  never  failed.  In  the  original 
series  the  London  Mercury  lasted  until 


910 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Stacpoole 


1934  by  which  time  Squire,  despite  his 
catholicity  and  editorial  vivacity,  had 
offended  many  intellectuals,  not  least  by 
his  unbusinesslike  methods. 

After  the  war  Squire  also  founded  a 
cricket  club,  'The  Invalids',  whose  mem- 
bers were  usually  men  concerned  with 
literature  and  many  of  whom  were  sur- 
vivors from  the  battlefield.  This  meant' 
often  a  day  in  the  country,  and  Jack 
Squire  at  his  happiest.  In  the  intervals  of 
the  game  he  might  touch  on  the  desira- 
bility of  a  minister  of  the  fine  arts,  and  the 
London  Mercury  was  part  of  his  campaign 
for  a  reunion  in  English  life  of  the  useful 
and  the  beautiful.  From  1922  to  1928  he 
was  chairman  of  the  Architecture  Club; 
his  distinctions  included  the  F.S.A.  and 
the  honorary  A.R.I.B.A. ;  such  facts 
show  his  outlook.  His  zeal  for  the  arts  in 
action,  for  design  and  colour  in  our  prac- 
tical setting,  was  one  of  the  makings  of 
his  magazine.  In  another  way  his  enthu- 
siasm resulted  in  his  many  anthologies  of 
poetry  old  and  new,  serious  and  light- 
hearted.  They  were  his  own  choice,  of 
course,  yet  they  were  intended  for  general 
circulation ;  the  most  influential  probably 
was  his  series  of  selections  from  contem- 
porary poets,  ultimately  in  a  single  volume 
(1927).  He  also  edited  A  Book  of  Women's 
Verse  for  the  Oxford  University  Press 
(1921)  and  the  Cambridge  Book  of  Lesser 
Poets  (1927).  His  labours  were  eased  by 
his  exceptional  memory ;  he  had  merely  to 
read  and  like  a  poem  once  to  have  it  in  his 
mind  for  life.  He  was  also  continually 
editing  or  introducing  volumes  of  prose  or 
verse  by  authors  from  the  poet  J.  E. 
Flecker  [q.v.]  onwards. 

In  1926  his  dramatization,  with  J.  L. 
Balderston,  of  The  Sense  of  the  Past  by 
Henry  James  [q.v.]  as  a  play  in  three  acts 
called  Berkeley  Square^  had  a  considerable 
success.  In  the  following  year  Squire  took 
part  in  the  first  broadcast  rtmning  com- 
mentary on  the  boat  race.  He  was  by  now 
a  celebrity  and  in  1933  he  was  knighted. 
After  leaving  the  London  Mercury  he  con- 
tinued as  a  reader  for  Macmillans  and  in 
1937  became  a  reviewer  for  the  Illustrated 
London  News.  He  presided  over  the  later 
additions  to  the  EngUsh  Men  of  Letters 
series ;  and  in  1937  stood  forth  as  host  in 
a  volume  on  cheeses,  Cheddar  Gorge,  his 
special  topic  therein  being  Stilton.  His 
professional  and  private  Ufe,  however,  had 
become  increasingly  disorganized:  he  had 
left  home  and  was  dependent  on  the  care 
of  friends  and  the  stimulus  or  sedative  of 
alcohol.  i,nu     *  i  J         .     ! 


Still,  Squire  was  naturally  what  he 
modestly  hoped  to  be  accounted  in  years 
to  come :  a  poet  with  his  own  conceptions. 
In  the  thirties  he  replied  to  the  question 
why  did  he  not  pubUsh  more :  'Oh,. . .  the 
world  is  too  much  with  us.'  But,  so  long  as 
his  crowding  avocations  left  him  energy, 
Squire  was  a  poet  of  some  power.  It  is 
likely  that  'The  Rugger  Match'  was  the 
first  noteworthy  poem  in  English  on  foot- 
ball; 'Rivers',  'The  Moon',  'The  Birds', 
were  resourceful  meditations.  In  American 
Poems  (1923)  a  long  interpretation  of 
Chicago  struck  English  readers.  Later  on, 
quieter  and  shorter  pieces  still  had  a  note 
which  may  be  called  Squire's  private  tune. 
His  Collected  Poems  were  published  in  1959 
with  an  introduction  by  (Sir)  John 
Betjeman. 

Squire,  eminent  to  the  last  among  the 
critics  of  current  books  week  by  week,  be- 
came patriarchal  in  appearance,  and  the 
cricket  captain's  romantic  Devonian  face 
was  disguised  with  a  grey  beard.  The 
utterances  from  that  visage  were  more 
fragmentary  than  of  old,  but  decisive 
and  entertaining.  He  is  affectionately  por- 
trayed by  A.  G.  Macdonell  in  England  their 
England  (1933)  which  includes  a  hilarious 
account  of  the  Invalids  at  cricket. 

In  1908  Squire  married  Eileen  Harriet 
Anstruther,  daughter  of  the  Rev.  Anthony 
Anstruther  Wilkinson;  they  had  three 
sons,  the  youngest  of  whom  was  killed  on 
active  service  in  1943,  and  one  daughter. 
He  died  at  Rushlake  Green,  Sussex,  20 
December  1958  ;  his  widow  in  1970. 

A  portrait  by  John  Mansbridge  is  in  the 
National  Portrait  Gallery  and  a  drawing 
by  (Sir)  William  Rothenstein  is  reproduced 
in  Twenty-four  Portraits,  2nd  series,  1923. 

[Patrick  Howarth,  Squire:  Most  Generous 
of  Men,  1963 ;  private  information ;  personal 
knowledge.]  Edmund  Blunden. 

STACPOOLE,     HENRY     DE     VERB 

(1863-1951),  noveUst,  was  born  at  Kings- 
town, county  DubUn,  in  April  1863,  the 
youngest  son  of  the  Rev.  William  Church 
Stacpoole,  who  conducted  Kingstown 
School,  and  his  wife,  Charlotte  Augusta 
Mountjoy,  of  Sally  Park,  TaUaght.  His 
mother,  like  his  father,  was  of  Irish  origin, 
but  she  had  been  born  and  spent  the  first 
twelve  years  of  her  life  in  Canada.  Stac- 
poole travelled  widely  with  his  mother  as 
a  boy  and  was  then  sent  to  Malvern 
College.  He  subsequently  studied  medicine 
at  St.  George's  and  St.  Mary's  hospitals, 
London,  and,  after  quaUfying  in  1891, 
made  several  voyages  as  a  ship's  doctor. 


9X7 


Stacpoole 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


during  which  he  went  all  over  the  world 
and  was  able  to  indulge  his  great  love  of 
the  sea  and  to  accumulate  experience 
which  he  later  used  in  his  novels. 

Stacpoole  first  appeared  in  print  with 
a  poem  in  Belgravia,  an  outcome  of  his 
youthful  friendship  with  Mrs.  Pearl  Craigie 
(q.v.,  John  Oliver  Hobbes).  In  the  nineties 
he  was  friendly  with  many  of  the  writers 
and  artists  of  the  Yellow  Book  period,  in- 
cluding Aubrey  Beardsley  [q.v.].  His  ear- 
liest novels,  such  as  The  Intended  (1894), 
Pierrot!  (1896),  and  Death,  the  Knight  and 
the  Lady,  a  ghost  story  (1897),  reflect  the 
preoccupations  of  that  period.  The  Doctor 
(1899) — ^the  first  of  his  next  group  of  novels 
which  included  The  Bourgeois  (1901)  and 
The  Lady-Killer  (1902) — showed  a  con- 
siderable advance,  and  this  portrait  of  an 
old-time  practitioner  remains  an  attractive 
social  study.  Stacpoole  was  not  financially 
successful  with  these  novels,  however,  or 
with  some  excursions  into  farce,  but  his 
perseverance  was  amply  rewarded  when 
he  produced  two  novels  with  exotic  and 
tropical  settings,  The  Crimson  Azaleas 
(1907),  set  in  Japan,  and  The  Blue  Lagoon 
(1908). 

A  romantic  story  of  two  children  ship- 
wrecked on  a  Pacific  island.  The  Blue 
Lagoon  at  once  captured  public  attention 
and  was  reprinted  twenty-three  times  in 
the  next  twelve  years.  It  takes  its  place  in 
an  historical  perspective  along  with  Peter 
Pan,  Maeterlinck's  The  Blue  Bird,  and 
certain  tales  of  Algernon  Blackwood  [q.v.] 
as  representative  of  an  Edwardian  vein  of 
childhood  fantasy  and  sentiment ;  but  the 
novel  was  distinguished  by  genuine  charm 
in  the  writing  and  a  poet's  delight  in  com- 
municating the  wonders  of  a  tropical 
island.  The  Blue  Lagoon  was  made  into  an 
episodic  play  produced  at  the  Prince  of 
Wales's  Theatre,  London,  in  1920,  and  was 
also  filmed.  Stacpoole  followed  up  its  suc- 
cess in  a  long  series  of  books  of  romantic 
tropical  appeal,  such  words  as  blue,  coral, 
pearls,  reef,  and  beach  appearing  signifi- 
cantly in  their  titles;  and  as  late  as  1933 
there  was  a  market  for  The  Blu£  Lagoon 
Omnibus. 

It  would  be  a  mistake  to  think  of 
Stacpoole  as  unduly  obsessed  by  his  best- 
selling  tropical  formula.  The  Street  of  the 
Flute-Player  (1912)  was  set  in  Athens  and 
Monsieur  de  Rochefort  (Idlii)  in  eighteenth- 
century  France.  Goblin  Market  (1927)  was 
a  tender  story  of  the  Isle  of  Wight.  He 
published  several  volumes  of  simple  un- 
complicated verse  about  England,  the  sea, 
and  the  countryside,  which,  though  often 


rather  thin,  had  its  effective  moments ;  he 
also  translated  Sappho  and  Villon,  and 
produced  a  popular  biography  of  Villon 
(1916). 

Many  of  his  fifty  or  so  novels  are  hardly 
to  be  taken  seriously,  but  Stacpoole  was 
a  skilful  and  sensitive  craftsman  with  a 
real  gift  for  describing  natural  scenery  and 
an  easy  flow  of  humour  at  his  command. 
His  chatty  discursive  autobiographies. 
Men  and  Mice  (1942)  and  More  Men  and 
Mice  (1945),  do  not  show  him  at  his  best 
as  a  writer,  but  they  give  a  good  idea  of 
the  man.  Tall,  broad,  and  handsome,  he 
had  a  happy  disposition,  typical  Irish 
geniality  mingling  with  an  occasional  dash 
of  hot  temper.  He  found  great  joy  in 
flowers,  and  during  his  later  years  he  zest- 
fully took  up  the  cause  of  the  sea  birds  and 
the  problem  of  the  pollution  of  the  sea 
with  oil. 

In  1907  Stacpoole  married  Margaret 
Ann,  daughter  of  William  Robson,  of 
Tynemouth.  They  lived  for  some  years  at 
Stebbing,  Essex,  where  Stacpoole  was  a 
justice  of  the  peace,  but  later  moved  to 
Cliff  Dene,  Bonchurch,  Isle  of  Wight.  After 
his  wife's  death  in  1934  he  presented  a 
pond  at  the  foot  of  his  garden,  a  haunt  of 
rare  birds,  to  Ventnor  as  a  memorial  to 
her.  In  1938  he  married  his  first  wife's 
sister,  Florence,  who  survived  him.  There 
were  no  children  of  either  marriage. 
Stacpoole  died  in  Shanklin  12  April 
1951. 

[The  Times,  13  April  1951 ;  private  informa- 
tion.] Derek  Hudson. 


STANLEY,     Sir     HERBERT    JAMES 

(1872-1955),  colonial  administrator,  was 
born  in  Manchester  25  July  1872,  the  son 
of  Sigismund  Sonnenthal  (later  Stanley), 
merchant,  and  his  wife,  Anna  Rose  Meyer. 
He  was  educated  at  Eton,  where  he  won 
the  Prince  Consort's  German  prize  and  the 
EngUsh  essay  prize ;  and  at  Balliol  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  obtained  a  third  class 
in  classical  honour  moderations  (1893)  and 
graduated  in  1897.  He  retained  throughout 
his  life  a  strong  affection  for  his  old  school 
and  college. 

Stanley  entered  public  life  by  holding 
a  series  of  private  secretaryships :  to  the 
British  minister  at  Dresden  (1897-1902) ; 
to  the  first  lord  of  the  Admiralty  (1906-8) ; 
to  the  lord  president  of  the  Council  (1908- 
10) ;  and,  finally,  to  Lord  Gladstone  [q.v.], 
whom  he  accompanied  to  South  Africa  on 
his  appointment  as  the  first  governor- 
general  of  the  Union.  In  1913  Stanley  was 


918 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Stanley 


made  official  secretary  to  the  governor- 
general;  and  in  1915  he  became  resident 
commissioner  for  Rhodesia. 

In  1918  a  new  post  of  imperial  secretary 
was  created  to  help  the  governor-general 
in  his  special  responsibihties  as  high  com- 
missioner for  the  British  territories  in 
South  Africa.  Stanley  was  selected  and 
carried  out  the  duties  with  conspicuous 
success,  earning  a  particularly  warm 
commendation  from  Prince  Arthur  of 
Connaught  [q.v.]  for  his  skill  in  negotiat- 
ing the  complex  constitutional  settlement 
by  which  the  British  Government  took 
over  from  the  British  South  Africa  Com- 
pany responsibility  for  the  administration 
of  Northern  and  Southern  Rhodesia  and 
estabUshed  the  two  territories  as,  respec- 
tively, a  British  protectorate  and  a  self- 
governing  colony.  The  value  of  Stanley's 
work  and  experience  was  fittingly  recog- 
nized by  his  appointment  as  the  first 
governor  of  Northern  Rhodesia  in  1924. 

Stanley  was  a  less  obvious  choice  for  the 
governorship  of  Ceylon  when  it  became 
vacant  in  1927.  Doubts  were  expressed  in 
some  quarters  as  to  the  wisdom  of  sending 
to  the  'premier  colony'  a  governor  whose 
experience  was  confined  to  Southern 
Africa  and  who  was  quite  unacquainted 
with  the  technique  of  administering  an 
oriental  country.  In  fact,  the  historian 
may  well  conclude  that  Stanley's  four 
years  in  Ceylon,  although  in  a  sense  but 
an  interlude  in  a  career  otherwise  con- 
cerned entirely  with  Africa,  were  decisive 
not  only  for  Ceylon  but  for  the  whole 
future  of  the  British  colonial  empire. 

Ceylon  had  reached  a  stage  of  politi- 
cal, social,  and  economic  development  at 
which  the  traditional  system  of  crown 
colony  administration  had  ceased  to  be 
acceptable,  but'  no  provision  existed  for 
further  constitutional  advance.  The  British 
Government  sent  out  an  inter-party  com- 
mission, under  Lord  Donoughmore  [q.v.], 
to  examine  the  problem,  and  in  its  report 
of  1928  the  commission  proposed  a  bold 
scheme  for  a  new  constitution  giving  the 
colony  internal  self-government  based 
upon  universal  adult  suffrage.  The  issue 
was  highly  controversial:  the  political 
parties'  and  racial  and  religious  groups 
in  the  island  all  disagreed  with  various 
parts  of  the  plan,  but  disagreed  radicaUy 
amongst  themselves  upon  what  amend- 
ments were  desirable.  Stanley  had  the 
extremely  difficult  and  exacting  task  of 
carrying  out  long  and  patient  discussions 
and  negotiations  with  the  numerous  par- 
ties and  factions,  of  evaluating  the  possi- 


bilities of  the  situation,  of  advising  the 
British  Government  on  the  action  to  be 
taken,  and  of  persuading  the  Ceylonese  to 
accept  that  Government's  decision  when 
made.  In  the  result,  the  Donoughmore 
scheme,  with  only  minor  modifications, 
was  accepted  by  the  Ceylon  legislative 
council  and  remained  the  basis  of  the 
island's  government  until  1947.  Under  it 
the  ground  was  prepared  for  indepen- 
dence; and,  once  Ceylon  had  established 
the  principle  that  a  British  colony  could 
become  an  independent  State,  it  became 
inevitable  that  other  territories  would 
follow  suit.  Had  Stanley's  negotiations 
broken  down,  the  outcome  might  have 
been  very  different. 

In  1931  Stanley  returned  to  South  Africa 
as  the  first  high  commissioner  for  the 
United  Kingdom.  He  combined  the  dip- 
lomatic fimctions  of  this  post  with  ad- 
ministrative responsibility  for  the  British 
high  commission  territories  which  had 
previously  rested  with  the  governor- 
general.  In  1935  he  moved  to  his  last 
official  post :  the  governorship  of  Southern 
Rhodesia.  He  was  due  to  retire  in  1937, 
but  so  greatly  was  he  valued  that  his  term 
of  office  was  extended  until  1941. 

Stanley  then  settled  in  Cape  Town  and 
continued  to  take^  an  active  interest  in 
South  African  affairs.  He  was  chief  com- 
missioner of  Boy  Scouts  in  South  Africa, 
sub-prior  of  the  Order  of  St.  John,  presi- 
dent of  Toe  H,  and  a  director  of  De  Beers 
Consolidated  Mines,  Ltd.,  and  of  the 
Anglo  American  Corporation  of  South 
Africa. 

Dignified  and  impressive  in  person, 
Stanley  was  also  sociable  and  a  well-known 
figure  at  race  meetings  and  other  sporting 
events.  He  was  immensely  hard  working 
and  conscientious,  and  had  a  genuine  con- 
cern for  the  welfare  of  the  less  privileged 
members  of  the  community.  Although  of 
Jewish  origin,  he  was  himself  a  devout 
Anglican  churchman. 

In  1918  Stanley  married  Reniera, 
daughter  of  Henry  Cloete,  C.M.G.,  of 
Wynberg.  She  was  appointed  D.B.E.  in 
1941  and  died  in  1950.  There  were  two 
sons  and  two  daughters  of  the  marriage. 

Stanley  was  appointed  C.M.G.  in  1913, 
promoted  K.C.M.G.  in  1924,  and  G.C.M.G. 
in  1930.  He  died  in  Cape  Town  5  June 
1955.  A  portrait  by  a  Ceylonese  artist  was 
added  to  the  collection  of  governors' 
portraits  at  Queen's  House,  Colombo. 

[The  Times,  6  June  1955 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.  ] 

Charles  Jeffries. 


919 


Stansfeld 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


STANSFELD,  MARGARET  (1860-1951), 
pioneer  in  physical  training  for  women, 
was  bom  in  London  10  March  1860,  the 
third  of  the  six  children  of  James  Stansfeld 
(or  Stansfield),  baker,  and  his'wife,  Mary, 
daughter  of  James  Fallon,  a  clerk.  Their 
father  died  young  and  their  education  was 
guided  and  controlled  chiefly  by  their 
mother.  From  a  day  school  in  Bloomsbury 
Margaret  Stansfeld  and  her  eldest  sister 
went  as  pupil  teachers  with  their  head- 
mistress when  she  took  charge  of  a  large 
school  under  the  School  Board.  Later  the 
Board  appointed  as  lecturer  in  physical 
education  Miss  Bergman  (afterwards 
Mme  Osterberg)  whose  pioneer  college  at 
Hampstead  Margaret  Stansfeld  eventually 
joined.  Her  duties  involved  a  good  deal  of 
travelling  to  schools  outside  London  and 
in  1887  she  began  to  teach  at  Bedford 
High  School  which  had  been  founded  five 
years  earlier.  The  gynmasium  was  a  shed 
with  very  little  apparatus  and  games  were 
played  in  the  gravel  playground  until 
Margaret  Stansfeld's  immense  enthusiasm 
brought  about  the  acquisition  of  a  proper 
playing  field  and  the  building  of  a  fine 
gynmasium. 

In  1903  Margaret  Stansfeld,  with  six 
students  resident  in  one  house,  founded 
the  Bedford  Physical  Training  College 
which  by  the  time  of  her  retirement  had 
grown  to  twelve  houses  accommodating 
a  himdred  and  fifty  students.  From  the 
beginning  the  college  was  recognized  as 
one  of  the  principal  centres  of  physical 
education  in  the  country  because  of  the 
thoroughness  of  the  training,  the  good 
conditions  for  teaching  practice,  and  the 
excellence  of  the  staff.  Physical  education 
to  Margaret  Stansfeld  meant  a  way  of  life, 
and  the  training  was  disciplined,  varied, 
and  sound.  She  was  a  woman  of  brilliant 
intellect,  forceful  personality,  and  immeas- 
urable generosity  who  inculcated  in  her 
pupils  her  own  wide  outlook  and  regard 
for  the  deepest  values.  She  believed  that 
in  education  the  child  should  take  prece- 
dence over  the  subject  taught,  and  health 
education  and  child  psychology  were  im- 
portant parts  of  the  curriculum.  She  laid 
stress  on  an  erect  posture,  control  and 
precision,  good  balance  and  rhythm,  for 
she  sought  a  harmonious  development  of 
the  whole  body.  Hitherto  physical  training 
had  implied  over-developed  muscles,  and 
gymnastics  had  been  no  more  than 
'physical  jerks'.  The  college  first  intro- 
duced into  this  country  modern  'educa- 
tional dance'  which  is  now  widely  taught 
in  Britain. 


Margaret  Stansfeld  was  appointed 
O.B.E.  in  1939.  She  was  a  founder- 
member  of  the  Ling  Association  of  Teach- 
ers of  Physical  Education  and  its  vice- 
president  or  president  continuously  from 
1901  until  1920.  She  was  also  presented 
with  the  Swedish  'Grand-titre  honorofique 
de  la  Federation  Internationale  de  Gym- 
nast ique  Ling'.  On  her  retirement  in  1945 
she  went  to  live  at  Berkhamsted.  Two 
years  later  the  sudden  death  of  her  suc- 
cessor brought  her  back  to  the  college  for 
several  weeks.  She  died  at  Bedford  28  June 
1951.  The  portrait  of  her  which  hangs  in 
the  college  was  painted  by  Arthur  Mills 
from  a  photograph. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
K.  M.  Westaway. 

STANSGATE,  first  Viscount  (1877- 
1960),  parliamentarian.  [See  Benn, 
William  Wedgwood.] 

STAPLEDON,  Sir  (REGINALD) 
GEORGE  (1882-1960),  pioneer  of  grass- 
land science,  was  born  in  Northam,  Devon, 
22  September  1882.  A  member  of  a  large 
family  he  was  the  youngest  son  of  William 
Stapledon,  a  man  with  marine  interests, 
and  his  wife,  Mary  Clibbett.  He  was 
educated  at  the  United  Services  College, 
Westward  Ho!,  and  Emmanuel  College, 
Cambridge,  where  he  obtained  a  second 
class  in  part  i  of  the  natural  sciences  tripos 
in  1904.  After  two  years  in  the  Mediter- 
ranean as  representative  of  the  family 
business,  Stapledon  was  invalided  home, 
a  turning-point  in  his  career.  He  became 
interested  in  agriculture  and  spent  another 
year  at  Cambridge  devoting  his  time  to 
the  biological  sciences  and  particularly  the 
ecological  aspects  of  herbage  flora.  In  1910 
he  joined  the  staff  of  the  Royal  Agricul- 
tural College,  Cirencester,  and  during  the 
dry  summer  of  1911  he  made  an  intensive 
study  of  the  spread  of  wild  white  clover 
on  the  Cotswolds.  From  that  time  onwards 
he  became  not  only  a  scientist  but  also  a 
philosopher,  enthusiastically  interested  in 
the  part  which  white  clover  could  play  in 
the  improvement  of  pastures  and  still  more 
in  building  up  the  fertility  of  the  soil. 

In  1912  Stapledon  went  to  Aberystwyth 
as  advisory  officer  in  agricultural  botany 
at  the  University  College  of  Wales.  During 
the  war  of  1914-18  he  spent  much  time  in 
London  with  the  food  production  depart- 
ment of  the  Board  of  Agriculture,  where 
his  chief  aim  became  the  provision  of 
better  seed,  free  from  weeds  and  of  a 
reliable  'type'.  This  eventually  led  to  the 


920 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Steed 


establishment  of  the  Seed  Testing  Station 
which  Stapledon  himself  directed  during 
its  initial  temporary  phase  in  London 
before  it  transferred  to  the  National 
Institute  of  Agricultural  Botany  in 
Cambridge. 

Whilst  this  transfer  was  in  progress 
Stapledon  in  1919  received  another  call 
from  Wales,  to  start  an  entirely  new  ven- 
ture in  the  form  of  the  Welsh  Plant  Breed- 
ing Station  at  Aberystwyth,  where  he 
remained  until  1942.  As  director  of  this 
Station  and  through  his  versatile  pen, 
Stapledon  drew  the  attention  of  research 
workers,  farmers,  and  poUticians  through- 
out the  Commonwealth  to  the  tremendous 
part  which  grassland  has  to  play  in  the 
feeding  of  the  people.  Through  the  efforts 
of  his  team  of  workers  he  gave  farmers  new 
and  improved  varieties  of  grasses,  clovers, 
and  oats,  all  of  which  were  designated  as 
the  'S'  strains.  Many  of  these  became  the 
basic  and  standard  varieties  in  use 
throughout  the  temperate  areas  within 
the  Commonwealth,  particularly  in  New 
Zealand. 

Stapledon  soon  gained  an  international 
reputation  as  the  greatest  authority  on 
grassland  development,  and  in  1937  the 
grassland  research  workers  from  thirty- 
eight  countries  paid  him  their  tribute  by 
electing  him  president  of  the  Fourth 
International  Grassland  Congress  held  that 
year  in  Britain  with  Aberystwyth  as  the 
venue.  In  1939  he  was  knighted  and  in  the 
same  year  elected  F.R.S. 

During  the  war  of  1939-45  Stapledon 
again  threw  himself  wholeheartedly  into 
the  problems  of  food  supply  and  particu- 
larly the  improvement  of  hill  pastures  to 
replace  the  lowland  areas  turned  over  to 
arable  cropping.  Accordingly  in  1942  he 
relinquished  his  position  at  Aberystwyth 
to  start  another  research  station  at 
Drayton,  Stratford  on  Avon,  devoted  ex- 
clusively to  the  improvement  of  grassland, 
especially  in  the  most  difficult  areas  of 
Britain.  There  he  was  able  to  put  into 
operation  aU  the  modern  techniques  result- 
ing from  his  experimental  work,  a  great 
opportunity  which  he  appreciated  and 
enjoyed  as  director  until  he  retired  in  1946, 
by  which  time  he  had  impressed  upon  the 
Government  the  need  for  tackling  grass- 
land research  on  a  totally  different  scale, 
with  a  far  bigger  station  and  improved 
facilities.  That  dream  materiaUzed  as  the 
Grassland  Research  Station  at  Hurley, 
Berkshire,  where  it  had  been  arranged  for 
the  foundation  stone  to  be  laid  by  Staple- 
don in  person.  Unfortunately  the  break- 


down in  his  health  made  this  impossible 
but  the  tribute  remains,  and  through  the 
medium  of  his  portrait,  by  Allan  Gwynne- 
Jones,  which  hangs  in  the  main  hall  at 
Hurley  there  will  always  be  a  reminder  of 
the  true  foundation  to  grassland  science 
laid  by  Stapledon. 

The  most  notable  feature  of  his  person- 
ality was  his  enthusiasm  for  all  he  under- 
took. He  was  a  great  pioneer  and  his 
success  was  due  in  large  measure  to  the 
infectious  way  he  managed  to  make  his 
colleagues  share  in  his  enthusiasm.  In  the 
formation  of  the  British  Grassland  Society 
Stapledon  took  a  leading  part  and  he  be- 
came its  first  president  in  1945. 

In  addition  to  many  scientific  papers 
mainly  dealing  with  ley  farming,  Stapledon 
published  several  books  including  A  Tour 
in  Australia  and  Neiv  Zealand  (1928),  The 
Land:  Now  and  Tomorrow  (1935),  The 
Plough-up  Policy  and  Ley  Farming  (1939), 
The  Way  of  the  Land  (1943),  and  Disraeli 
and  the  New  Age  (1943).  Among  the 
honours  conferred  upon  him  was  the  gold 
medal  of  the  Royal  Agricultural  Society 
of  England  and  an  honorary  life  member- 
ship of  the  Royal  Highland  and  Agricul- 
tural Society  of  Scotland. 

Stapledon  was  a  keen  golfer,  regularly 
enjoying  his  round  or  two  each  week.  In 
this,  as  well  as  in  all  his  travels,  he  was 
accompanied  by  his  devoted  wife,  Doris 
Wood  (died  1965),  daughter  of  Thomas 
Wood  Bourne,  whom  he  married  in  1913. 
They  had  no  children.  Stapledon  died  in 
Bath  16  September  1960. 

[Sir  John  Russell  in  Biographical  Memoirs 
of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  vii,  1961 ; 
Robert  Waller,  Prophet  of  the  Nexv  Age,  1962 ; 
personal  knowledge.]  Martin  Jones. 

STEED,  HENRY  WICKHAM  (1871- 
1956),  editor  of  The  Times,  was  born  at 
Long  Melford,  Suffolk,  10  October  1871, 
the  son  of  Joshua  George  Steed,  solicitor's 
clerk,  and  his  wife,  Fanny  Wickham.  He 
was  educated  at  Sudbury  Grammar  School 
and  a  cycling  accident  on  the  eve  of  the 
examination  prevented  his  entry  into  the 
Civil  Service.  Instead  he  went  into  a  City 
office,  but  in  1891  he  heard  J.  A.  Spender 
[q.v.]  lecture  at  Toynbee  Hall  on  old-age 
pensions  and  submitted  a  report  which 
was  pubUshed  in  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette. 
This  turned  his  thoughts  to  journalism 
and  he  decided  to  study  economics  and 
sociology  at  German  and  French  univer- 
sities. From  Berlin  he  sent  reports  to 
Dalziel's  news  agency.  In  1893  he  moved 
to  Paris  to  study  history  at  the  Sorbonne 


921 


Steed 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


and  in  1895  an  interview  with  Millerand 
which  he  contributed  to  the  Westminster 
Gazette  brought  from  Joseph  PuHtzer  an 
invitation  to  act  as  his  Paris  correspon- 
dent. In  one  day  he  interviewed  seven  of 
the  leading  French  economic  authorities, 
monometaUists  and  bimetalHsts,  and  his 
remarkable  memory  enabled  him  to  write 
their  statements  without  having  taken  a 
single  note.  This  so  impressed  Pulitzer  that 
lie  sent  Steed  back  to  Germany  to  obtain 
the  opinion  of  German  currency  experts. 

Steed  became  Times  correspondent  in 
Berlin  in  1896  and  made  his  mark  by  his 
detection  of  the  authorship  of  an  anony- 
mous article  in  the  Hamburger  Nachrichten 
which  revealed  the  secret  treaty  of  re- 
insurance which  until  1890  had  existed  be- 
tween (Germany  and  Russia  and  had  been 
concluded  behind  the  back  of  Germany's 
partners  in  the  Triple  Alliance.  Steed  was 
alone  in  Germany  in  immediately  attri- 
buting the  disclosure  to  Bismarck.  In  1897 
he  was  appointed  Times  correspondent  in 
Rome  and  in  1902  transferred  to  Vienna. 
When  he  returned  to  London  in  1913  he 
published  his  book  The  Hapsburg  Mon- 
archy based  on  the  very  wide  knowledge 
which  he  had  acquired  during  his  time  in 
Austria. 

In  January  1914  Steed  was  appointed 
head  of  the  foreign  department  of  The 
Times  by  Ix)rd  Northcliffe  [q.v.]  who  de- 
clared that  he  would  not  be  susceptible  to 
the  German  propaganda  which,  according 
to  Northcliffe,  had  gained  considerable  in- 
fluence over  the  British  Government  and 
some  sections  of  the  press.  Northcliffe  and 
Steed  were  convinced  that  Berlin  was 
striving  to  drive  a  wedge  between  England 
and  France.  After  the  assassination  at 
Sarajevo  at  the  end  of  June,  Steed  felt 
that  the  crime  might  be  used  by  the  mili- 
tary party  in  Vienna  as  an  excuse  for  an 
attack  on  Serbia,  and  in  a  series  of  leading 
articles  warned  that  this  would  end  only 
with  disaster  to  both  the  Central  Powers. 
It  fell  to  Steed,  as  foreign  editor  through- 
out the  war,  to  advise  his  paper  and  also 
the  responsible  statesmen  on  problems  of 
Austrian  diplomacy.  He  opposed  a  sepa- 
rate peace  with  Austria,  seeing  more 
clearly  than  most  her  dependence  uf>on 
Germany  and  the  problem  of  the  future 
of  the  non-Germanic  and  non-Magyar 
peoples  of  Central  Europe.  He  was  closely 
associated  with  Northcliffe  in  organizing 
propaganda  in  enemy  countries  and  in 
1918  undertook  a  successful  mission  at  the 
Italian  front. 

When    owing   to    personal    differences 


between  Northcliffe  and  Geoffrey  Dawson 
[q.v.]  the  latter  resigned  in  February  1919, 
the  editorship  was  accepted  by  Steed,  who 
outlined  that  it  would  be  his  policy  in 
The  Times  to  maintain  its  independence 
towards  all  parties,  politicians,  and 
governments ;  to  work  immediately  for  a 
settlement  of  the  Irish  question,  both  for 
its  own  sake  and  for  the  sake  of  stability  in 
Anglo-American  relations ;  to  support  the 
just  claims  of  France  and  the  other  allies 
so  that  admonitions  might  be  addressed 
to  them  when  it  should  be  necessary  in  the 
interests  of  Great  Britain  and  of  Europe ; 
to  advocate  and  support  constructively 
and  critically  the  League  of  Nations  as  the 
chief  hope  of  avoiding  future  war ;  and  to 
deal  fairly  with  Labour  demands  and 
movements  in  Great  Britain  while  resisting 
any  Bolshevist  tendency. 

Steed  had  become  profoundly  distrustful 
of  Lloyd  George  and  The  Times  played  no 
small  part  in  the  return  of  the  Bonar  Law 
government  in  1922.  But  he  had  'im- 
pressed his  own  personality  so  strongly  on 
the  paper's  policy'  that  his  editorship 
ended  on  30  November  1922,  little  more 
than  a  month  after  The  Times  had  been 
taken  over  by  its  new  proprietors.  Colonel 
John  Astor  (later  Lord  Astor  of  Hever) 
and  John  Walter.  The  History  of  'The 
Times'  remarks  that  'Steed  joined  The 
Times  as  a  junior  foreign  correspondent 
in  1896  at  the  age  of  twenty-five  and  was 
dismissed  from  the  highest  position  on  the 
paper  at  the  age  of  fifty-one.'  'Steed's  edi- 
torship was  the  shortest,  most  anxious, 
and  most  eventful  in  the  whole  history  of 
The  Times.'  There  were  few  more  dramatic 
occasions  than  the  editorial  conference 
when  Steed  announced  with  quiet  dignity 
that  he  was  no  longer  the  editor  and  the 
rest  of  the  business  was  carried  on  with  an 
empty  editorial  chair.  When  he  left  Print- 
ing House  Square  the  circulation  of  The 
Times  stood  at  184,166,  the  highest  figure 
it  had  attained  since  1914  when  the  price 
was  lowered  to  one  penny. 

The  idea,  entertained  by  some  of  the 
public  men  of  his  day,  that  Steed  cared 
too  little  for  his  own  country  was  utterly 
misleading.  Those  who  came  into  contact 
with  him  in  his  daily  work  at  Printing 
House  Square  knew  that  he  was  intensely 
interested  in  domestic  affairs  and  no  editor 
was  ever  more  delighted  to  publish  a  well- 
written  home  news  story.  Many  journalists 
treasured  notes  of  congratulation  from 
their  chief  for  the  manner  in  which  a  home 
news  story  had  been  presented  to  the 
reader. 


922 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Stewart,  P.  M. 


After  leaving  The  Times  Steed's  life 
remained  a  full  one.  He  bought  the  Review 
of  Reviews  which  he  edited  from  1923  to 
1930;  wrote  his  autobiography  Through 
Thirty  Years  (2  vols.,  1924) ;  lectured  in 
England,  France,  Germany,  and  the 
United  States,  and  attended  regularly  the 
Assemblies  of  the  League  of  Nations.  He 
was  lecturer  at  King's  College,  London,  on 
Central  European  history  from  1925  to 
1938 ;  and  from  1937  to  1947  was  one  of 
the  chief  broadcasters  on  world  affairs  for 
the  empire  and  overseas  services  of  the 
British  Broadcasting  Corporation. 

In  1937  Steed  married  Violet  Sybille, 
daughter  of  the  late  James  Francis  Mason, 
of  Eynsham  Hall,  Witney.  He  died  13 
January  1956  at  Wootton-by- Woodstock. 

A  portrait  in  oils  by  Charles  Shannon  is 
in  the  possession  of  The  Times. 

[The  Times,  14  January  1956;  History  of 
''The  Times',  vols,  iii  and  iv,  1947-52  ;  personal 
knowledge.]  A.  P.  Robbins. 

STEWART,  Sir  (PERCY)  MALCOLM, 
first  baronet,  of  Stewartby,  county 
Bedford  (1872-1951),  industrialist,  was 
born  at  Hastings  9  May  1872,  the  second 
son  of  (Sir)  Halley  Stewart  [q.v.],  the 
founder  of  the  trust  bearing  his  name. 
He  inherited  a  robust  constitution  and  a 
strong  radical  outlook  from  his  father  and 
grandfather,  Alexander  Stewart,  whose 
diary,  when  a  prisoner  in  France  during 
the  Napoleonic  wars,  was  one  of  his  most 
treasured  possessions.  He  was  educated  at 
the  University  School,  Hastings,  King's 
School,  Rochester,  the  Royal  High  School, 
Edinburgh,  and  in  Germany.  At  the  age  of 
nineteen  he  joined  a  Thames  lighterage 
firm  and  later  his  father's  oil  seed  crushing 
business. 

In  1900  his  lifelong  link  with  the  brick 
industry  was  forged  when  his  father  ac- 
quired a  financial  interest  in  B.  J.  Forder 
&  Son,  Ltd.,  a  company  owning  brick, 
lime,  whiting,  and  cement  works  in  Bed- 
fordshire. Malcolm  Stewart  became  mana- 
ging director,  a  position  he  held  for  fifty 
years,  and  after  Forder's  had  absorbed 
London  Brick  Company  in  1923,  and  fin- 
ally adopted  its  name,  he  was  chairman 
for  twenty-five  years  until  his  retirement 
in  1950  when  he  was  elected  president  for 
life.  In  1900  the  annual  output  of  bricks 
was  seventeen  millions;  in  1950,  in  its 
jubilee  year,  it  was  seventeen  himdred  and 
fifty  millions. 

In  1912  Forder's  cement,  lime,  and 
whiting  assets  were  sold  to  British  Port- 
land   Cement    Manufacturers,    of   which 


Stewart  became  a  managing  director,  and 
thus  began  his  long  association  with  what 
was  to  become  the  'Blue  Circle'  group.  By 
1924  he  was  chairman  and  a  managing 
director  of  the  Associated  Portland  Cement 
Manufacturers  and  British  Portland  Ce- 
ment Manufacturers.  This  position  he  held 
until  he  retired  from  executive  responsi- 
bility at  the  end  of  1945  and  became 
president.  He  was  successively  chairman 
and  president  of  the  Cement  Makers'  Fed- 
eration from  1918  until  his  death. 

When  Stewart  joined  the  brick  and 
cement  companies,  he  found  them  engaged 
in  cut-throat  competition  and  in  the  throes 
of  depression.  Under  his  guidance  each  of 
them  became  the  largest  producer  in  the 
world  in  its  own  field.  The  secret  of  Stew- 
art's success  was  that  he  persuaded  the 
makers  of  both  bricks  and  cement  to  co- 
operate with  their  competitors  and  to  end 
the  rivalry  between  individual  producers. 
Thus,  planned  production  and  stability 
of  price  were  achieved.  Furthermore,  he 
was  a  generation  ahead  of  his  time  in 
management-labour  relations.  Welfare 
and  pension  schemes,  joint  consultation, 
profit-sharing,  holidays  with  pay,  all  these 
he  introduced  into  the  companies  of  which 
he  became  chairman,  with  the  result  that 
stoppages  and  strikes  were  almost  un- 
known. His  quick  comprehension  and 
foresight  inspired  confidence,  and  his  con- 
sideration for  those  working  for  him  and  his 
understanding  of  their  problems  created 
in  them  a  desire  to  give  of  their  best  and  a 
feeling  of  partnership  in  a  common  adven- 
ture. He  was  fond  of  quoting  'Let  him  that 
laboureth  be  first  partaker  of  the  fruits', 
and  this  was  the  very  kernel  of  his  indus- 
trial philosophy.  From  1919  onwards  he 
was  chairman  for  twenty-seven  years  of 
the  cement  industry's  national  joint  in- 
dustrial council,  for  the  formation  of  which 
he  was  largely  responsible.  He  was  also 
the  first  chairman  of  the  national  joint 
council  for  the  Fletton  brick  industry. 

Stewart  took  great  pride  in  converting 
the  drab  hamlet  of  Wootton  Pillinge  in 
Bedfordshire  into  a  garden  village  which 
bore  the  new  name  of  Stewartby.  There, 
beneath  the  shadow  of  towering  brick 
chimneys  grew  a  model  village,  architect- 
planned,  with  low-rented  modern  houses 
for  employees,  a  united  church,  schools, 
sportsground,  swimming  bath,  canteens, 
offices,  research  centre,  and  a  memorial 
hall. 

From  1917  to  1919  Stewart  was  director 
for  the  Ministry  of  Munitions  of  the  gov- 
ernment rolling  mills  at  Southampton; 


923 


Stewart,  P.  M. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


but  it  is  for  his  great  contribution  to  the 
problem  of  alleviating  unemployment  that 
this  clear-sighted  industrialist  will  be  re- 
membered. As  commissioner  for  the  special 
areas  in  England  and  Wales  from  1934  to 
1936,  he  devised  and  operated  schemes  for 
bringing  industry  to  trading  estates  in 
areas  of  high  unemployment.  In  his  report 
for  1936  he  drew  attention  to  the  impor- 
tance of  the  'location  of  industry'  which 
resulted  in  the  appointment  of  a  royal 
conunission  on  the  distribution  of  the 
industrial  population  (Barlow  report, 
1940);  he  is  generally  regarded  as  the 
father  of  the  Greater  London  Plan  of  1944. 

Stewart  inherited  and  made  consider- 
able fortunes,  which  he  used  for  innumer- 
able benefactions.  He  gave  an  estate  of 
540  acres  at  Potton,  Bedfordshire,  to 
settle  unemployed  men  in  smallholdings 
to  make  a  living  by  market  gardening. 
He  was  a  generous  supporter  of  the  Royal 
Caledonian  Schools  and  the  National 
Council  of  Social  Service  (of  both  of  which 
he  was  president),  of  the  Industrial  Co- 
partnership Association  (of  which  he  was 
a  vice-president),  and  of  Ruskin  College. 
His  presentations  to  the  National  Mari- 
time Museum  included  Nelson's  famous 
telescope. 

Not  only  was  Stewart  chairman  of  his 
father's  charitable  trust,  but  in  1945  he 
founded  and  generously  endowed  a  general 
charitable  trust  called  after  himself.  This 
trust  has  promoted  a  scheme  for  providing 
homes,  rent-free,  and  a  community  hall, 
for  retired  employees  of  London  Brick 
Company.  The  plans  and  layout  were 
designed  by  Sir  Albert  Richardson.  Situa- 
ted in  a  beautiful  setting  in  the  centre  of 
Stewartby,  the  homes  are  a  fitting  tribute 
to  Malcolm  Stewart's  memory. 

Stewart  was  fond  of  swimming,  shoot- 
ing, stalking,  and  big-game  hunting.  He 
went  on  safari  in  Kenya  the  year  before 
his  death.  His  real  passion  was  motoring: 
a  fast  but  careful  driver,  he  was  never  so 
happy  as  when  driving  at  speed  in  his 
four-and-a-half  litre  Bentley. 

In  1918  he  was  appointed  O.B.E.,  and 
in  1937  created  a  baronet  for  his  work  as 
special  commissioner.  He  was  high  sheriff 
of  Bedfordshire  in  1941,  a  justice  of  the 
peace,  and  a  deputy-lieutenant  for  the 
county.  He  received  the  honorary  degree 
of  LL.D.  from  Manchester  in  1937. 

Stewart  was  twice  married:  first,  in 
1896,  to  Cordelia  (died  1906),  second 
daughter  of  Sir  Joseph  Compton  Rickett, 
then  Liberal  member  of  Parliament  for 
Scarborough,  by  whom  he  had  two  sons 


and  one  daughter;  secondly,  in  1907,  to 
Beatrice  Maud  (died  1960),  second  daugh- 
ter of  Joseph  Bishop  Pratt  [q.v.],  the 
mezzotint  engraver,  by  whom  he  had  one 
son  and  one  daughter.  He  died  at  his  home 
at  Sandy  in  Bedfordshire,  27  February 
1951,  and  was  succeeded  in  the  baronetcy 
by  his  second  son,  Ronald  Compton  (born 
1903).  There  are  two  portraits  by  (Sir) 
James  Gunn  and  Sir  Oswald  Birley  respec- 
tively, and  a  bronze  bust  by  Sir  William 
Reid  Dick,  all  in  the  possession  of  the  Sir 
Malcolm  Stewart  General  Charitable  Trust 
to  which,  on  the  death  of  his  widow, 
Stewart  Ibequeathed  the  residue  of  his 
estate  of  over  half  a  miUion  pounds.  The 
two  portraits  are  in  the  custody  of  Sir 
Ronald  Stewart  at  Maulden  Grange,  and 
the  bust  is  loaned  to  the  community  hall, 
Stewartby.  Most  of  his  valuable  pictures, 
tapestries,  furniture,  and  objets  d^art,  how- 
ever, he  left  to  the  National  Trust,  to  be 
assembled  as  a  collection  in  Montacute 
House,  near  Yeovil,  Somerset. 

[Phorpres  News  (magazine  of  London  Brick 
Company),  Jmie  1950;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.] 

Geoffrey  Shakespeare. 

STEWART,  Sir  (SAMUEL)  FIND- 
LATER  (1879-1960),  civil  servant,  was 
born  22  December  1879,  at  Brisbane 
School  House,  Largs,  one  of  the  seven 
children  of  Alexander  Stewart,  a  teacher, 
and  his  wife,  Isabella  Finlator,  the  origi- 
nal version  of  Stewart's  second  name. 
He  entered  Edinburgh  University  at 
fourteen,  took  his  M.A.  with  honours  in 
1899,  and  spent  the  period  before  he  was 
of  age  to  compete  for  the  Civil  Service 
teaching  astronomy  and  navigation  in  the 
training  ship  Conway. 

Appointed  after  the  examination  of 
1903  to  the  India  Office,  in  which  he  spent 
most  of  his  official  career,  he  became  joint 
secretary  in  the  military  department  in 
1920;  assistant  under-secretary  of  state, 
and  clerk  of  the  Council  of  India,  in  1924; 
and  permanent  under-secretary  of  state 
for  India  in  1930. 

Stewart  was  closely  associated  with  the 
two  major  Indian  inquiries  which  took 
place  between  the  passing  of  the  Govern- 
ment of  India  Acts  of  1919  and  1935.  In 
1923  he  was  made  joint  secretary  (with 
(Sir)  Arthur  Street,  q.v.)  of  the  royal  com- 
mission on  the  superior  civil  services  in 
India,  which  recommended  a  great  and 
progressive  Indianization,  coupled  with 
the  encouragement  of  increased  British 
recruitment  in  the   years  of  transition. 


024 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Stewart,  S.  F. 


The  Government's  acceptance  of  these 
proposals  held  the  Indian  services  to- 
gether, and  in  good  heart,  over  an  anxious 
period.  It  also  contributed  materially  to 
equipping  the  future  independent  India 
with  a  substantial  and  highly  trained 
Indian  nucleus  in  all  services. 

On  the  appointment  in  1927  of  the 
statutory  commission  headed  by  Sir  John 
(later  Viscount)  Simon  [q.v.]  to  in- 
quire into  Indian  political  advancement, 
Stewart  was  selected  as  its  secretary. 
Its  labours,  over  two  years,  complicated 
as  they  were  by  a  Congress  boycott  and 
the  absence  of  Indian  membership,  were 
heavy.  Stewart's  familiarity  with  India, 
his  knowledge  and  ability,  his  clear  and 
excellent  draftsmanship,  his  realistic 
approach,  and  his  capacity  for  selecting 
the  essential,  made  his  contribution  to  its 
report  of  real  importance. 

Stewart  held  office  as  permanent  under- 
secretary (1930-40)  during  a  critical 
period  in  India's  history.  It  fell  to  him  to 
advise  successive  secretaries  of  state 
during  the  three  sessions  (1930-33)  of  the 
Indian  Round  Table  conference;  and 
thereafter  during  the  deliberations  of  the 
joint  select  committee  of  both  Houses  of 
Parliament,  under  the  chairmanship  of 
Lord  Linlithgow  [q.v.].  On  the  recom- 
mendations of  the  select  committee  were 
based  the  proposals  for  the  future  Govern- 
ment of  India,  and  for  the  separation  of 
Burma  from  India,  which,  after  lengthy 
and  controversial  debates  in  both  Houses, 
were  embodied  in  the  Acts  of  1935. 

The  labour  involved  was  formidable. 
Sir  Samuel  Hoare  (later  Viscount  Temple- 
wood,  q.v.),  who  was  secretary  of  state 
for  India  from  1931  to  1935,  paid  tribute 
in  his  Nine  Troubled  Years  (1954)  to  the 
assistance  he  had  from  Stewart,  who,  he 
said,  of  all  the  civil  servants  who  had 
helped  him  in  his  various  departments, 
stood  out  'pre-eminent  as  a  dependable 
counsellor  and  friendly  colleague'. 

On  the  passing  of  the  India  and  Burma 
Acts  of  1935,  and  the  separation  of  Burma 
from  India,  Stewart  became  permanent 
under-secretary  of  state  for  Burma  as 
well  as  for  India,  and  was  closely  associa- 
ted with  the  earlier  stages  of  constitu- 
tional advance  in  Burma. 

In  India,  the  Act  provided  for  the  insti- 
tution in  the  British  provinces  of  provin- 
cial autonomy,  based  on  a  much  enlarged 
franchise,  and  for  a  Federation,  at  the 
centre,  of  British  India  and  the  Indian 
princely  states.  Stewart  saw  the  success- 
ful   introduction    in   1937,   not   without 


initial  difficulties,  of  provincial  autonomy. 
Arrangements  for  establishing  the  com- 
plicated structure  of  the  proposed  Federa- 
tion of  India  had  advanced  materially  by 
the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939,  but  much 
still  remained  to  be  done,  particularly  in 
terms  of  the  accession,  and  the  terms  of 
accession,  of  the  requisite  minimum  of 
Indian  princely  states,  and  the  outbreak 
of  war  inevitably  meant  postponement. 

Early  in  the  war  Stewart  was  for  a  few 
weeks  seconded  from  the  India  Office  as 
director-general  of  information.  On  the 
fall  of  France  in  1940  he  left  the  India 
Office,  as  it  proved,  for  good,  to  hold  a 
series  of  posts  of  great  importance  to  the 
war  effort.  He  was  appointed  chairman  of 
the  Home  Defence  Executive  and  chief 
civil  staff  officer  (designate)  to  the 
commander-in-chief,  Home  Forces.  The 
success  he  achieved  in  co-ordinating  the 
work  of  the  civil  departments  with  mili- 
tary requirements  in  the  face  of  threatened 
invasion  led  to  a  variety  of  tasks,  as  the 
pattern  of  the  war  changed,  in  which 
combined  military  and  civil  effort  was 
required.  The  techniques  he  formulated 
have  influenced  subsequent  organization 
in  the  defence  field. 

With  the  entry  of  the  United  States  into 
the  war,  Stewart  became  chairman  of  the 
Anglo-American  co-ordinating  committee 
set  up  to  deal  with  the  logistic  problems 
of  the  establishment  of  the  United 
States  forces  in  Britain.  He  played  a 
significant  part  during  this  period  in 
dealing  with  the  problems  of  security; 
and  was  particularly  successful  in  dealing, 
among  other  major  questions,  with  the 
vdde  variety  of  tasks — especially  in  re- 
spect of  supply,  accommodation,  and 
other  provision  for  the  United  States 
forces — arising  out  of  the  mounting  of 
the  'Overlord'  operation.  His  excellent 
relations  with  his  American  colleagues 
were  recognized  at  the  end  of  the  war  by 
the  United  States  medal  of  freedom  with 
gold  palm. 

Retiring  from  the  Civil  Service  at  the 
end  of  the  war,  Stewart  entered  the  City 
as  first  chairman  of  the  new  British  and 
French  Bank,  set  up  to  promote  Anglo- 
French  trade.  He  was  also  a  director  of 
the  Finance  Corporation  for  Industry,  and 
he  served  too  in  a  variety  of  governmental 
capacities.  They  ranged  widely  from 
membership  of  a  selection  jury  at  an 
International  Film  Festival  to  inquiries 
into  Services'  entertaining  allowances, 
and  the  work  and  organization  of  both 
the    British    Council    and    the    Security 


Stewart,  S.  F. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Service,  and  an  inquiry  into  matters 
affecting  the  Order  of  St.  John  of 
Jerusalem. 

Stewart's  sound  practical  judgement  of 
men  and  things ;  his  capacity  to  delegate ; 
his  economy  of  the  written  word;  the 
confidence  inspired  in  ministers  by  his 
pungent  and  concise  advice ;  his  gift  for 
friendship,  and  his  ability  to  command 
the  respect  and  affection  of  his  colleagues 
and  subordinates,  whether  in  the  Civil 
Service  or  in  business,  all  these  were  re- 
flected in  his  distinguished  and  varied 
career. 

After  retirement  he  made  his  home  near 
Blandford,  where  he  died  II  April  1960. 
He  married  in  1910  Winifred,  daughter 
of  the  late  James  Tomblin,  by  whom  he 
had  two  daughters.  She  died  in  1915  and  he 
married  secondly,  in  1940,  Mary  Stephanie, 
only  daughter  of  S.  Whitmore  Robinson. 
Stewart  was  appointed  CLE.  (1919), 
C.S.I.  (1924),  K.C.I.E.  (1930),  K.C.B. 
(1932),  G.C.I.E.  (1935),  and  G.C.B.  (1939). 
In  1931  he  was  made  a  chevalier  of  the 
Legion  of  Honour.  He  had  also  from  his 
own  university  (Edinburgh),  and  from 
Aberdeen,  the  honorary  LL.D. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Gilbert  Laithwaite. 

STEWART-MURRAY,  KATHARINE 
MARJORY,  Duchess  of  Atholl  (1874- 
1960),  public  servant,  was  born  in  Edin- 
burgh 6  November  1874,  the  eldest  child 
of  Sir  James  Ramsay  [q.v.],  tenth 
baronet,  of  Bamff,  in  East  Perthshire, 
by  his  second  wife,  Charlotte  Fanning, 
daughter  of  Major  William  Stewart,  of 
Ardvorlich.  Her  father  was  an  Oxford 
double  first  in  classics  and  history,  her 
mother  a  gifted  singer.  Her  half-sister 
Agnata,  who  married  H.  M.  Butler  [q.v.], 
after  winning  a  scholarship  at  Girton 
headed  the  Cambridge  classical  honours 
list  in  the  first  division  of  the  first  class. 
Katharine  herself  was  both  scholar  and 
musician.  She  was  educated  at  Wimbledon 
High  School  and  the  Royal  College  of 
Music,  handing  over  the  proceeds  of  a 
piano  scholarship  to  a  needy  student, 
Samuel  Coleridge-Taylor  [q.v.].  It  seemed 
at  one  time  as  though  music  would  be  her 
chosen  career;  public  service  associated 
with  her  husband,  shared  interest  in  his 
military  life  (she  was  the  editor  and  main 
contributor  to  a  Military  History  of 
Perthshire^  2  vols.,  1908),  and  later  a 
political  career  of  her  own  diverted  her. 
But  it  remained  throughout  her  life  a 
solace  to   herself  and   a  delight   to   her 


friends.  In  1899  she  married  John  George 
Stewart-Murray,  Marquess  of  Tullibardine, 
eldest  surviving  son  of  the  seventh  Duke 
of  Atholl  to  whose  title  he  succeeded  in 
1917. 

Public  •  service  in  many  fields  brought 
the  Duchess  of  Atholl  recognition  in  the 
form  of  a  D.B.E.  (1918)  and  in  due  course 
honorary  doctorates  from  seven  univer- 
sities. Successive  Governments  found  her 
a  competent  and  hard-working  member  of 
innumerable  official  committees  and  com- 
missions. She  was  a  prominent  figure  in 
Scottish  social  service  and  local  govern- 
ment, and  an  active  supporter  of  the 
Conservative  Party  organization.  Her 
election  to  the  House  of  Commons  in  1923 
as  member  for  Kinross  and  West  Perth- 
shire, and  the  first  woman  member  from 
Scotland,  seemed  a  logical  outcome  of 
these  activities  and  brought  her  into 
national  politics  in  time  to  make  feminist 
history,  though  herself  no  feminist.  Her 
party  standing  and  intellectual  calibre 
marked  her  for  ministerial  office.  Margaret 
Bondfield  [q.v.]  had  been  first  in  the  field 
as  parliamentary  secretary  to  the  Ministry 
of  Labour  in  the  Labour  Government. 
Katharine  Atholl  came  second  on  her 
appointment  in  1924-9  as  parliamentary 
secretary  to  the  Board  of  Education.  She 
was  clearly  the  right  woman  in  the  right 
job,  for  the  educational  world  was  her 
spiritual  home. 

To  her  contemporaries  at  this  time, 
Katharine  Atholl  presented  the  picture 
not  so  much  of  a  duchess  as  of  an  inspired 
but  somewhat  humourless  headmistress, 
slight,  upright,  and  uncompromising.  To 
many  she  appeared  both  highly  conven- 
tional and  socially  reactionary,  an  im- 
pression confirmed  by  a  book  entitled 
Women  and  Politics  which  she  published 
in  1931.  In  the  same  year  labour  condi- 
tions in  Soviet  Russia  inspired  her  to  write 
The  Conscription  of  a  People.  But  the  fire 
which  smouldered  undetected  in  her  small 
body  had  not  in  1931  encountered  the 
blast  which  was  to  fan  it  into  a  flame. 
When  it  did,  the  flame  burned  through 
party  loyalties,  social  conventions,  heredi- 
tary prejudices,  and  landed  her  in 
strange  company. 

This  was  because  Katharine  Atholl, 
behind  a  demure  exterior,  had  a  nerve 
peculiarly  and  undiscriminatingly  sensi- 
tive to  cruelty  and  oppression.  From  1933 
to  the  end  of  her  life  world  events  pressed 
relentlessly  on  this  nerve  and  perpetually 
inflamed  it.  Many  of  those  who  reacted 
violently  to  the  cruelties  of  the  Russian 


926 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Stirling 


revolution  remained  undisturbed  during 
the  thirties  by  the  rigours  of  Nazi  rule. 
Many  who  crusaded  against  fascism  turned 
a  blind  eye  to  the  darker  aspects  of  Com- 
munism. Katharine  AthoU  knew  no  such 
distinction.  Cruelty  was  cruelty  by  whom- 
soever committed,  and  was  an  evil  not  to 
be  tolerated.  This,  as  time  went  on,  under- 
mined her  influence  as  a  reliable  party 
politician  and  involved  her  in  extraneous 
causes.  For  instance,  in  1929  she  declared 
war  on  a  cruel  African  custom  known  as 
'female  circumcision',  and  conducted  a 
campaign  in  association  with  the  left- 
wing  independent  member,  Eleanor  Rath- 
bone  [q.v.].  As  she  said  many  years  later, 
'it  was  not  a  very  easy  thing  to  do'.  This 
was  an  understatement ;  it  was  a  difficult 
and  unpleasant  but  to  her  a  wholly 
necessary  thing  to  do. 

The  Duchess  supported  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  in  his  opposition  to  the  Govern- 
ment's proposals  for  a  new  constitution 
for  India,  and  on  this  issue  she  gave  up 
the  party  whip.  She  returned  to  the  fold 
when  Mussolini  declared  war  on  Abyssinia 
but  the  Spanish  civil  war  brought  her  again 
into  conflict  with  her  own  Government 
and  finally  lost  her  the  party  whip.  She 
was  not  convinced  of  the  rightness  of 
General  Franco's  campaign,  still  less  of 
the  methods  by  which  he  waged  it.  She 
made  a  close  study  of  the  Spanish  situa- 
tion and  herself  visited  Spain  in  company 
with  Eleanor  Rathbone  and  the  socialist 
Ellen  Wilkinson  [q.v.].  What  she  saw 
involved  her  in  active  work  for  the  care 
of  Spanish  republican  refugees  as  well  as 
open  criticism  of  the  Conservative  Govern- 
ment's toleration  of  fascist  support  for 
Franco  in  violation  of  a  non-intervention 
pact  to  which  Great  Britain  was  party. 
Her  Penguin  Searchlight  on  Spain  (1938) 
was  widely  read. 

Finally  her  opposition  to  the  Chamber- 
lain policy  of  appeasement  in  face  of 
increasingly  flagrant  German  aggression 
caused  her  in  1938  to  resign  her  parlia- 
mentary seat  and  seek  re-election  in  her 
own  constituency  as  a  supporter  of 
Churchill's  policy  of  resistance  to  further 
German  encroachments.  There  ensued  in 
December  a  campaign  in  which  the 
Duchess's  cause  commanded  the  support 
of  a  galaxy  of  political  and  literary  talent 
comprising  members  of  all  parties.  That, 
however,  did  not  save  her  seat,  which  she 
lost  by  1,313  votes  to  an  official  Con- 
servative candidate.  She  celebrated  her 
defeat  by  playing  Beethoven's  Waldstein 
and  Appassionata   sonatas,   hoping,   she 


said,  that  she  would  now  have  more  time 
for  her  husband  and  for  music. 

This  hope  was  frustrated  by  war  activi- 
ties, the  illness  and  death  in  1942  of  her 
husband,  and  the  persistence  of  cruelty 
in  the  world  at  large.  Her  autobiography, 
published  in  1958  under  the  title  Working 
Partnership^  makes  clear  that  the  driving 
force  which  in  the  thirties  had  caused  her 
to  be  pilloried  as  'the  Red  Duchess'  was 
the  same  as  that  which  in  the  fifties 
earned  her  the  designation  of  'fascist 
beast'.  For  now  the  cruelty  and  oppression 
was  coming  mainly  from  the  Left,  and 
resistance  to  it  brought  her  into  associa- 
tion with  right-wing  elements.  The  fate 
of  Poland,  Czechoslovakia,  Hungary,  the 
care  of  refugees  from  Communist  tyranny, 
the  horrors  of  Stalinism,  these  causes 
now  focused  her  interest  and  inspired  her 
activities.  She  was  from  1944  the  moving 
spirit  and  active  chairman  of  a  British 
League  for  European  Freedom,  a  body 
which  she  served,  though  by  now  a  rather 
frail  and  lonely  figure  in  the  political 
world,  until  her  death  in  Edinburgh  21 
October  1960.  She  had  no  children. 

Portraits  by  George  Henry  (1903)  and 
Sir  James  Guthrie  (1924)  and  a  bronze 
bust  by  Prince  Serge  Yourievitch  are  at 
Blair  Atholl. 

[Duchess  of  Atholl,  Working  Partnership, 
1958 ;  personal  knowledge.]  Stocks. 


STIRLING,  WALTER  FRANCIS  (1880- 
1958),  lieutenant-colonel,  was  born  in 
Southsea  31  January  1880,  the  only  son 
and  younger  child  of  Captain  Francis 
Stirling,  R.N.,  and  his  wife,  Mary  Caroline 
Francis.  He  never  knew  his  father,  who 
was  commanding  the  training  ship  Atalanta 
when  it  left  Bermuda  on  a  trial  voyage  in 
January  1880  and  was  lost  at  sea.  His 
mother  was  offered  apartments  at  Hamp- 
ton Court,  Stirling's  home  for  many  years. 
He  was  educated  at  Kelly  College,  Tavi- 
stock, and  the  Royal  Military  College, 
Sandhurst,  being  gazetted  to  the  Royal 
Dublin  Fusiliers  in  1899.  This  was  the  pre- 
lude to  an  astonishingly  varied  career  in 
which  'Michael'  Stirling,  as  his  wife  and 
many  of  his  friends  later  called  him, 
stamped  himseli  on  all  who  met  him  as  one 
of  the  most  vital  and  colourful  characters 
of  his  time. 

Soon  after  being  commissioned  Stirling 
went  out  to  the  South  African  war,  and 
after  a  short  period  with  his  regiment, 
during  which  he  took  part  in  the  relief  of 
Ladysmith,  he  transferred  to  the  newly 


927 


Stirling 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


formed  Mounted  Infantry  of  the  4th 
division.  Subsequently  he  became  adju- 
tant of  the  14th  battalion  M.I.,  serving  in 
the  action  at  Laing's  Nek  and  the  later 
operations  in  the  Orange  River  Colony 
and  the  Transvaal,  receiving  a  mention  in 
dispatches  and  being  appointed  to  the 
D.S.O.  In  1906  he  was  seconded  to  the 
Egyptian  Army  and  spent  some  five  years 
with  an  Arab  battalion  patrolhng  the 
Eritrean  and  Abyssinian  borders,  in  the 
course  of  which  he  acquired  a  fluent 
knowledge  of  Arabic.  In  1912  he  retired 
from  the  army  and  after  spells  of  fruit 
farming  in  Canada  and  working  with  Shell 
in  London  he  became  secretary  of  the 
Sporting  Club  in  Alexandria,  then  of  the 
Gezira  Sporting  Club  in  Cairo. 

After  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914 
Stirling  joined  the  Royal  Flying  Corps  as 
an  observer  in  Ismailia  until  he  learned 
that  his  old  regiment  had  lost  almost  all 
its  officers  in  the  Gallipoli  landings,  when 
he  obtained  leave  to  rejoin.  After  three 
months  in  Gallipoli  he  was  invalided  home. 
Returning  to  Egypt  he  served  as  G.S.O.  2 
Intelligence,  then  Operations,  in  the 
Palestine  campaign  until  in  1918  he  was 
appointed  chief  staff  officer  to  T.  E. 
Lawrence  [q.v.]  whose  close  companion  he 
became  in  the  final  phase  of  the  war,  the 
advance  to  Damascus.  'Stirling  the  im- 
perturbable', as  Lawrence  called  him,  was 
awarded  the  M.C.  and  a  bar  to  his  D.S.O. 
He  was  promoted  lieutenant-colonel  in 
1920. 

After  serving  as  adviser  to  Emir  Feisal 
and  as  deputy  chief  political  officer  in 
Cairo  (1919),  Stirling  in  1920  was  appoin- 
ted acting  governor  of  Sinai  and  later  in 
the  year  became  governor  of  the  Jaffa 
district  in  Palestine.  He  succeeded  in 
gaining  the  trust  of  the  Jews  as  well  as  the 
Arabs,  his  house  becoming  a  meeting-place 
for  both,  before  in  1923  a  reorganization 
dispensed  with  his  post.  He  then  became 
adviser  to  the  Albanian  Government, 
under  Ahmed  Bey  Zogu,  who  in  1928 
became  King  Zog  I:  a  very  difficult  task 
because  both  Italy  and  Yugoslavia  were 
striving  for  control  of  the  country. 
Stirling  steered  an  impartial  course,  al- 
though politely  threatened  with  assassina- 
tion from  both  sides.  In  seeking  to  keep  a 
balance  he  took  a  large  part  in  establish- 
ing a  force  of  gendarmerie. 

After  giving  up  this  turbulent  task  in 
1931  Stirling  returned  home  to  discover 
that  employment  was  difficult  to  find. 
Eventually  he  joined  the  firm  of  Marks 
and  Spencer,  working  his  way  up  from 


assistant  porter  via  floor  walker  to  junior 
buyer.  He  left  to  collaborate  with  (Sir) 
Alexander  Korda  [q.v.]  on  a  film  of  Seven 
Pillars  of  Wisdom  which  it  proved  im- 
possible to  finance. 

When  war  broke  out  in  1939  Stirling  had 
just  returned  from  Romania  where  he 
was  representing  a  British  firm  of  wool 
merchants.  For  a  time  he  worked  in  the 
continental  telephone  censorship  but  in 
June  1940  the  War  Office  sent  him  back 
to  the  Balkans  on  intelligence  work.  After 
the  German  invasion  he  moved  to  Jerusa- 
lem; then  joined  the  Spears  mission  and 
became  political  officer  for  northern  Syria. 
In  1943  he  was  appointed  military  com- 
mander of  east  Sjrria  and  in  1944  of  the 
desert  and  frontier  areas  with  head- 
quarters in  Damascus.  There  he  remained 
after  the  war,  becoming  local  correspon- 
dent for  The  Times.  In  1949  three  armed 
men  broke  into  his  house  when  he  was  at 
dinner  in  an  attempt  to  assassinate  him, 
apparently  from  political  motives;  his 
cook  and  nightwatchman  died  and  he  him- 
self was  left  riddled  with  bullets.  His  steady 
courage  was  never  more  impressive  than 
during  the  last  eight  years  of  his  life: 
that  he  survived  so  long  was  perhaps  the 
most  extraordinary  feature  of  his  extra- 
ordinary career.  He  moved  to  Egypt, 
but  was  expelled  by  the  Government  there 
in  1951  and  settled  in  Tangier. 

Stirling's  autobiographical  account  of 
his  varied  career.  Safety  Last  (1953),  was 
a  challenge  to  the  motto  'Safety  First' 
which  he  complained  had  been  'inscribed 
not  only  on  every  London  omnibus  but  on 
the  very  hearts  of  the  country's  rulers, 
thus  denying  us  our  Elizabethan  birth- 
right: the  right  to  adventure  in  every 
quarter  of  the  globe'.  Stirling  amply 
lived  up  to  his  own,  opposite,  motto.  He 
was  a  'new  Elizabethan'  in  actuality,  not 
merely  in  aspiration.  Yet  for  all  the 
variety  and  unconventionality  of  his  career 
he  was  much  more  than  a  seeker  of  ad- 
venture. It  was  his  diplomatic  gifts  and 
knack  of  handling  widely  different  types 
of  men  which  most  impressed  Lawrence, 
who  described  him  as  'a  skilled  staff 
officer,  tactful  and  wise' :  qualities  notably 
called  for  during  his  time  in  Palestine  and 
Albania. 

Stirling  died  in  Tangier  22  February 
1958.  He  was-  fortunate  in  that  his  wife 
had  a  courage  matching  his  own.  In  1920 
he  had  married  Eileen  Mary  May  (Mary- 
gold),  elder  daughter  of  Lieutenant- 
Colonel  Mackenzie-Edwards  of  the  Royal 
Berkshire  Regiment,  They  had  a  son  who 


928 


3D.N.B.  1051>^1960 


Stoop 


died  a  few  months  after  birth  and  one 
daughter. 

A  portrait  by  Joseph  Oppenheimer  is 
reproduced  in  Safety  Last. 

[Lt.-Col.  W.  F.  Stirling,  Safety  Last,  1953 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

B.  H.  LiDDEix  Hart. 

STOOP,  ADRIAN  DURA  (1883-1957), 
rugby  footballer,  was  born  in  London 
27  March  1883,  the  elder  son  of  Frederick 
Cornelius  Stoop,  stockbroker,  and  his 
wife,  Agnes  Macfarlane  Clark.  His  father 
was  of  Dutch  origin.  Stoop  was  educated 
at  Dover  College,  Rugby  School,  and 
University  College,  Oxford,  where  he  ob- 
tained a  third  in  law  in  1905.  He  was 
called  to  the  bar  by  the  Inner  Temple  in 
1908  but  had  only  one  brief;  it  is  doubtful 
whether  he  really  ever  intended  to  prac- 
tise. His  great  interest  was  rugby  football 
and  it  was  as  a  notable  player  of  the  game 
that  he  became  legendary.  More  than 
anyone  Stoop  designed  the  game  as  it 
came  to  be  played.  There  have,  of  course, 
been  a  few  variations,  but  basically  it 
is  still  what  was  developed  by  Stoop 
and  other  famous  Harlequins — H.  J  .H. 
Sibree,  R.  W.  Poulton-Pahner,  J.  G.  G. 
Birkett,  and  D.  Lambert. 

Stoop's  association  with  the  Harlequins 
began  in  1900  when  he  was  invited  to  join 
the  club  when  still  at  Rugby.  It  was  not 
until  1902  that  he  played  his  first  game 
for  the  club:  against  Oxford  University 
where  he  was  then  an  undergraduate. 
In  the  same  year  he  got  his  blue  and  in 
1904  he  captained  the  university  against 
Cambridge.  While  he  was  at  Oxford  his 
appearances  with  the  Harlequins  were 
necessarily  limited  but  when  he  left  the 
university  he  threw  himself  whole- 
heartedly into  club  activities.  In  1905  he 
was  elected  vice-captain  and  secretary. 
That  was  the  real  starting-point  of  the 
'Stoop  era'.  From  1906  to  1914  he  was 
captain  and  secretary  and  the  master  mind 
of  the  Harlequins  whose  methods  were 
quickly  adopted  by  other  leading  clubs. 

Stoop  was  not  a  big  man  but  anything 
he  lacked  in  inches  was  more  than  made 
up  by  courage.  Between  1905  and  1912  he 
was  capped  for  England  fifteen  times, 
although,  surprisingly,  he  was  not  inclu- 
ded in  the  Enghsh  side  in  the  years  1908 
and  1909.  While  he  was  a  ^eat  individual 
player  and  a  great  individualist  in  his 
ideas  he  was,  even  more,  a  magnificent 
leader  who  had  a  ready  sense  for  spotting 
a  promising  player  and  deciding,  nearly 
always  rightly,  which  was  that  player's 

8652062  i 


ideal  position  in  the  field.  It  was  typical 
that  he  switched  Sibree  from  full-back  to 
scrum-half  and  those  who  saw  Stoop  and 
Sibree  as  partners  at  half-back  for  Harle- 
quins and  England  saw  one  of  the  great 
partnerships  of  rugby  football. 

D.  Lambert  was  another  example  of 
Stoop's  flair  for  picking  the  right-  man  for 
the  right  job.  In  a  pre-season  trial  game 
Lambert  was  playing  forward.  Coming 
into  personal  contact  with  Lambert's 
great  speed  Stoop  at  once  made  him  into 
a  wing  three-quarter  in  Harlequins'  first 
fifteen  and  in  that  position  Lambert 
played  seven  times  for  England.  It  is 
remarkable  that  no  fewer  than  six 
Harlequin  half-backs  or  three-quarters^  of 
the  great  Stoop  era  were  capped  for 
England:  a  tribute  to  Stoop's  magnetic 
influence  on  his  club  in  particular  and  the 
game  in  general. 

It  was  always  a  strong  argument  in 
Stoop's  teaching  that  it  was  the  three- 
quarters  generally  who  were  to  be  the 
scorers  of  tries.  This,  of  course,  had  always 
been  a  recognized  feature  of  rugby  foot- 
ball, but  Stoop  developed  it.  As  a  critic  at 
the  time  said,  the  Harlequins  'never  miss 
an  opportunity  of  throwing  the  ball  about 
with  a  freedom  bordering  on  recklessness, 
but  they  have  learnt  the  art  not  only  of 
passing,  but  of  taking  the  ball  on  the  run 
with  safe  hands' .  That  summed  up  what  the 
Harlequins,  guided  by  Stoop,  were  doing 
for  rugby  football.  It  was  not  really  new ; 
but  Stoop  had  seen  how  the  game,  hitherto 
much  slower,  with  little  in  it  that  was  un- 
expected, could  be  developed. 

Stoop  was  an  officer  in  the  5th  bat- 
tahon  the  Queen's  Royal  West  Surrey 
Regiment  (Territorial  Army).  For  his 
soldiering  as  for  his  rugby  football  he  had 
intense  enthusiasm  and  it  was  almost 
inevitable  that  during  the  fighting  in 
Mesopotamia  in  the  war  of  1914-18  he 
won  the  M.C. 

When  the  Harlequins  were  re-formed 
after  the  war  Stoop  at  thirty-six  was  of  an 
age  when  most  men  are  content  to  be 
watchers.  Not  so  Stoop,  who  as  president 
(1920-^9)  and  until  1946  secretary  once 
again  became  the  guiding  spirit  of  the 
fortunes  of  the  club;  he  even  played  a 
few  times  for  the  first  fifteen  and,  as  ever, 
set  a  standard  of  perfection.  He  said  once 
that  any  player  accepted  for  membership 
should  be  able  to  win  a  blue  if  he  were 
at  Oxford  or  Cambridge.  It  was  an  ex- 
aggerated idea  but  it  showed  the  high 
standard  he  expected.  He  had  no  use 
for  anything  mediocre.   When  his.  own 

Q.  Hh 


Stoop 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


playing  days  were  finally  ended  he  was  still 
a  keen  follower  and  outspoken  critic  of 
the  Harlequins,  whether  as  a  team  or  as 
individuals.  At  one  club  meeting  a  certain 
famous  international  was  projJosed  as  cap- 
tain. Stoop's  terse  comment  that  although 
X  was  a  great  player  he  would  be  a  bad 
captain  was  met  by  X's  reply  that  as  long 
as  Adrian  was  on  the  touch-line  there 
was  no  need  for  a  captain  on  the  field. 
Both  remarks  underline  Stoop's  influence. 
For  several  years  he  was  an  England 
selector  and  in  1932-3  was  president  of  the 
Rugby  Union. 

One  facet  of  Stoop's  character  was  a 
great  interest  in  spiritual  healing  and  he 
himself  developed  considerable  powers  as 
a  healer.  He  was  also  an  enthusiastic 
beekeeper   and   a   keen   ornithologist. 

In  1918  Stoop  married  Audrey,  daugh- 
ter of  Frederick  Needham,  of  East  Bengal ; 
there  were  four  sons. 

He  died  at  his  home  at  Hartley  Wintney 
27  November  1957.  There  is  a  portrait  of 
Stoop  by  D.  Q.  Fildes. 

[H.  B.  T.  Wakelam,  Harlequin  Story,  1954; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Cedric  Venables. 

STOPES,  MARIE  CHARLOTTE 
CARMICHAEL  (1880-1958),  scientist 
and  sex  reformer,  was  born  in  Edinburgh 
15  October  1880,  the  elder  daughter  of 
Henry  Stopes,  a  man  of  private  means 
whose  passionate  hobby  was  archaeology, 
by  his  wife,  Charlotte  Carmichael,  a 
pioneer  of  women's  university  education 
who  had  studied  at  Edinburgh  University, 
and  who  became  well  known  for  her 
research  on  Shakespearian  questions. 
Marie  Stopes  sometimes  called  herself  a 
child  of  the  British  Association,  for  her 
parents  first  met  at  one  of  its  meetings, 
and  as  a  girl  she  attended  them  regularly. 
When  she  was  six  weeks  old  her  parents 
moved  to  London.  Her  mother  tried  to 
initiate  her  at  the  age  of  five  into  Latin 
and  Greek,  but  she  showed  no  aptitude, 
becoming  far  more  interested  in  her 
father's  large  collection  of  flint  imple- 
ments. She  had  little  formal  education 
until  at  the  age  of  twelve  she  went  to 
St.  George's,  Edinburgh,  then  two  years 
later  to  the  North  London  Collegiate 
School.  At  University  College,  London, 
in  1902  she  obtained  at  the  same  time 
first  class  honours  in  botany  and  third 
class  honours  in  geology  and  physical 
geography.  After  a  year  of  research  under 
F.  W.  Oliver  [q.v.],  she  went  with  a  scholar- 
ship to  Munich  where  she  obtained  her 


Ph.D.  for  work  on  the  cycad  ovules  which 
proved  fundamental  to  the  understanding 
of  the  evolution  of  integumentary  struc- 
tures. In  the  same  year  she  was  appointed 
assistant  lecturer  and  demonstrator  in 
botany  at  Manchester  where  she  was  the 
first  woman  to  join  the  science  faculty. 
She  obtained  her  D.Sc,  London,  in  the 
following  year.  In  1907-8  she  spent  some 
eighteen  months  in  Japan  with  a  grant  for 
research  from  the  Royal  Society.  After  a 
further  period  as  lecturer  in  palaeobotany 
in  Manchester  she  settled  in  London  after 
her  marriage  in  1911,  and  from  1913  to 
1920  she  was  lecturer  on  the  same  subject 
at  University  College,  London,  of  which 
she  became  a  fellow  in  1910. 

In  the  same  year  she  published  an  ele- 
mentary textbook  Ancient  Plants.  Her 
main  interest  at  this  time  was  the  Creta- 
ceous floras  on  which  she  was  invited  to 
work  by  the  British  Museum:  her  Cata- 
logue of  the  Cretaceous  Flora  in  the  British 
Museum  was  published  in  two  volumes 
(1913-15).  Meantime  the  advent  of  war  had 
turned  her  attention  increasingly  to  coal 
itself.  She  published  a  number  of  memoirs 
of  fundamental  importance,  mainly  with 
R.  V.  Wheeler,  with  whom  she  collabora- 
ted in  a  standard  work,  The  Constitution 
of  Coal  (1918).  A  short  paper  which  the 
Royal  Society  published  in  1919,  The  Four 
Visible  Ingredients  in  Banded  Bituminous 
Coal:  Studies  in  the  Composition  of  Coal, 
changed  the  attitude  of  palaeontologists 
and  chemists  to  its  structure,  and  her 
later  classification  of  coal  ingredients  {Fuel, 
1935)  was  almost  universally  adopted. 

It  was,  however,  for  her  work  for  sex 
education  and  birth  control  that  Marie 
Stopes  became  widely  known.  Her 
concern  was  undoubtedly  aroused  by  her 
first  marriage,  to  a  Canadian  botanist, 
Reginald  Ruggles  Gates,  whom  she  met  in 
America  and  married  in  Montreal  in  1911. 
The  marriage  was  annulled  in  1916  on  her 
suit  of  non-consummation.  In  1918  she 
married  Humphrey  Verdon-Roe  (died 
1949),  who  had  joined  his  brother,  (Sir) 
AlHott  Verdon-Roe  [q.v.],  in  the  manu- 
facture of  aircraft.  He  was  already  inter- 
ested in  birth  control  and  the  marriage 
was  initially  a  perfect  union  of  common  in- 
terests :  together  they  founded  the  Mothers' 
CUnic  for  Birth  Control  in  London  in  1921, 
the  first  of  its  kind  in  England.  Dr.  Stopes, 
who  retained  her  maiden  name  in  both 
her  marriages,  relinquished  her  lecture- 
ship and  henceforth  her  dominating 
interest  was  family  planning  and  sex 
education  for  married  people. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Storrs 


Her  first  book  on  the  subject,  Married 
Love  (1918),  had  been  drafted  in  1914  to 
crystallize  her  own  ideas.  It  became  an 
immediate  success  and  was  eventually 
translated  into  thirteen  languages,  in- 
cluding Hindi.  Its  frank  discussion  of 
sexual  relations  for  the  ordinary  public 
was,  by  the  standards  of  the  time,  sensa- 
tional, and  it  caused  a  furore.  The  book 
dealt  scarcely  at  all  with  birth  control 
but  she  received  so  many  requests  for 
instruction  on  the  subject  that  she 
published  later  in  1918  a  short  book.  Wise 
Parenthood,  with  a  preface  by  Arnold 
Bennett  [q.v.].  This  too  was  an  immediate 
success  and  quickly  outstrode  its  pre- 
decessor :  within  nine  years  it  had  sold  half 
a  million  copies  in  the  original  English 
edition  alone.  (Like  other  of  her  works  it 
was  banned  in  several  states  of  America.) 
For  some  twenty  years  Dr.  Stopes's  books 
were  leading  popular  works  on  their 
subject.  She  published  some  ten  others 
of  which  Radiant  Motherhood  (1920)  and 
Enduring  Passion  (1928)  were,  to  judge 
by  their  sales,  the  most  influential.  By 
the  time  of  her  death  their  romantic 
presentation  had  become  outmoded,  but 
she  was  still  regarded  as  the  great  pioneer 
fighter  for  the  movement.  And  a  fighter 
she  was,  for,  especially  in  the  early  days, 
she  was  attacked  sometimes  to  the  point 
of  persecution,  notably  during  her  pro- 
longed libel  action  against  Halliday 
Sutherland  [q.v.]  which  she  won  on  ap- 
peal but  lost  when  the  case  went  to  the 
House  of  Lords. 

Marie  Stopes's  great  achievement  was 
the  transformation  of  the  subject  of  birth 
control  into  one  which  was  openly  dis- 
cussed. Her  advocacy  of  birth  control 
was  based  on  her  wish  to  see  woman's  lot 
become  a  happier  one — a  pursuit  of  a 
general  happiness  which  she  did  not 
herself  attain.  Her  elder  son  was  still- 
born, while  both  her  younger  son  and 
her  husband  eventually  became  alienated 
from  her.  But  this  fearlessly  dedicated 
woman,  with  a  touch  of  the  mystic,  for 
all  her  arrogant  argumentativeness  and 
vanity  which  made  co-operation  so  diffi- 
cult, had  very  many  loyal  friends  and 
supporters  among  leading  churchmen, 
doctors,  and  writers  as  well  as  social 
workers.  For  a  quarter  of  a  century  the 
personalities  of  the  day  corresponded  with 
or  visited  her  at  Norbury  Park,  her  fine 
eighteenth-century  mansion  near  Dorking. 
Friendship  with  Dr.  Stopes  was  a  prickly, 
demanding,  but  always  stimulating  busi- 
ness. Her  demonic  advocacy  of  planned 


parenthood  never  waned;  but  towards 
the  end  of  her  life  her  interest  in  her 
own  poetry  and  in  literature  generally 
occupied  more  of  her  time ;  in  the  forties 
she  took  an  almost  naive  pride  in  reading 
a  paper  on  her  friend,  Lord  Alfred 
Douglas  [q.v.],  to  the  Royal  Society  of 
Literature  of  which  she  was  a  fellow  and 
to  which  she  bequeathed  Norbury  Park 
and  the  residue  of  her  estate.  Almost  all 
her  publications  after  1939  were  volumes 
of  verse,  of  which  her  long  poem.  The 
Bathe  (1946),  a  sensuous  and  rather  high- 
flown  work,  was  typical. 

Convinced  until  almost  the  end  that  she 
would  live  to  be  120,  Marie  Stopes  died  at 
Norbury  Park  2  October  1958.  She  left 
her  portraits  by  Sir  Gerald  Kelly  and 
Augustus  John  to  the  National  Portrait 
Gallery  and  that  by  Gregorio  Prieto  to  the 
National  Gallery  of  Edinburgh. 

[Aylmer  Maude,  The  Authorized  Life  of 
Marie  C.  Stopes,  1924 ;  Keith  Briant,  Marie 
Stopes,  1962 ;  The  Times,  3  and  8  October  1958 ; 
Nature,  1  November  1958;  private  informa- 
tion; personal  knowledge.] 

James  MacGibbon. 

STORRS,  Sir  RONALD  HENRY 
AMHERST  (1881-1955),  Near  Eastern 
expert  and  governor,  was  born  at  Bury 
St.  Edmunds  19  November  1881,  the 
eldest  son  of  the  Rev.  John  Storrs  by  his 
wife,  Lucy  Anna  Maria  Cust,  sister  of  the 
fifth  Baron  Brownlow.  His  father,  for 
thirty  years  the  popular  vicar  of  St. 
Peter's,  Eaton  Square,  became  dean  of 
Rochester  in  1913.  Storrs  went  from 
Charterhouse  with  a  classical  scholarship 
to  Pembroke  College,  Cambridge,  taking  a 
first  class  in  the  classical  tripos  in  1903.  In 
the  following  year  he  entered  the  Egyptian 
Civil  Service  and  was  first  posted  in  the 
Ministry  of  Finance.  In  this  and  other 
administrative  departments  he  spent  the 
next  five  years,  but  administration  was 
never  in  his  line.  He  was  more  interested 
in  absorbing  the  genius  loci,  in  perfecting 
himself  in  the  study  of  Arabic  and  the 
manners  and  customs  of  the  Egyptians, 
and  in  laying  the  foundation  of  the  art 
collection  later  to  be  destroyed  in  un- 
happy circumstances.  He  did  not  really 
find  his  metier  until  1909  when  he  was 
appointed  oriental  secretary  at  the  British 
Agency  in  Cairo  under  Sir  Eldon  Gorst 
[q.v.]. 

Storrs  was  now  in  his  element.  For 
an  Englishman  without  a  drop  of  non- 
English  blood  he  had  a  surprisingly  cosmo- 
politan outlook  on  life,  to  which  were 


931 


Storrs 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


added  a  discriminating  taste,  a  Voltairian 
cynicism,  a  lucidity  of  thought  recalling 
Anatole  France,  and  a  wide  but  critical 
and  discerning  appreciation  of  the  good 
things  of  this  life,  whether  in  art,  litera- 
ture, cooking,  conversation,  or,  may  it 
be  added,  the  company  of  those  prominent 
socially  and  in  the  world  of  affairs.  He  was 
ready,  indeed  anxious,  to  mix  with  all 
and  sundry,  with  Turks,  Jews,  heretics, 
and  infidels,  provided  always  that  their 
company  was  worth  while.  He  would  de- 
rive amusement  and  pleasure  from  inter- 
course with  an  entertaining  scoundrel; 
none  from  that  with  a  socially  orthodox 
bore.  Beneath  his  little  foibles  and  poses 
he  was  a  deep  lover  of  literature,  classical 
and  modern;  and  Dame  Ethel  Smyth 
[q.v.]  described  him  as  one  'who  really 
loves  music'.  In  his  philosophy  of  life  as 
in  his  dress  he  modelled  himself  on  his 
brilliant  uncle  Harry  Cust  [q.v.]. 

Gorst's  tenure  of  office  in  Egypt  pro- 
vided a  sharp  contrast  with  that  of  his 
predecessor  Lord  Cromer  [q.v.]  and  was 
not  altogether  happy.  But  Storrs,  with  his 
quick  and  almost  feminine  perceptions, 
understood  what  Gorst  was  driving  at 
and  remained  loyal  to  his  memory.  With 
Gorst's  successor  Lord  Kitchener  [q.v.] 
he  found  himself  as  oriental  secretary  even 
more  closely  en  rapport.  Both  men  under- 
stood, as  few  others  have  done,  the  de- 
vious methods  and  mentality  no  less  than 
the  cynical  humour  of  oriental  poUticians, 
and  enjoyed  the  interplay  of  wit  with 
them;  both  were  ardent  collectors  of 
objets  d'art  in  the  same  field,  and  Storrs, 
while  assisting  his  chief  in  forming  his 
collection,  was  able  simultaneously  to 
develop  his  own.  His  taste  was  impec- 
cable, his  flair  for  discovering  something 
good  remarkable,  and  his  command  of 
colloquial  Arabic,  his  aplomb,  and  a  com- 
plete absence  of  self-consciousness  com- 
bined to  make  him  one  of  the  few  people 
able  to  defeat  a  Mouski  dealer  on  his  own 
ground. 

After  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914 
Storrs  remained  at  the  residency  under 
Sir  Henry  McMahon  [q.v.],  being  closely 
concerned  with  the  negotiations  which 
were  initiated  with  Sherif  Husain.  T.  E. 
Lawrence  (whose  notice  Storrs  later 
contributed  to  this  Dictionary)  has  a  good 
deal  to  say  of  Storrs's  activities  at  this 
time  in  Seven  Pillars  of  Wisdom  (1935)  and 
in  its  abridgement,  Revolt  in  the  Desert 
(1927),  the  first  chapter  of  which  is  entitled 
-Storrs  goes  to  Jiddah'  and  illustrated 
with  a  clever  portrait  of  him  by  Erie 


Kennington  [q.v.].  In  1917  Storrs  was  assis- 
tant political  officer  to  the  Anglo-French 
political  mission  of  the  Egyptian  Expedi- 
tionary Force  and  visited  Baghdad  on  its 
behalf.  He  was  also  for  a  short  time 
attached  to  the  secretariat  of  the  British 
War  Cabinet  in  the  autumn  of  1917.  At 
the  end  of  the  year  came  his  appointment 
to  Jerusalem,  as  military  governor  from 
1917,  as  civil  governor  of  Jerusalem  and 
Judaea  from  1920  with  the  beginning  of  the 
mandate.  Storrs  had  no  easy  time,  and  with 
his  staff  had  constantly  to  be  on  the  alert. 
Lawrence  describes  him  in  Jerusalem  as  'the 
urbane  and  artful  Governor  of  the  place'. 
The  description  is  apt,  but  Storrs  was  more 
than  this.  For  the  detail  and  drudgery  of 
official  administration  he  had  neither 
liking  nor  time  and  he  left  it  to  others. 
But  the  post  was  a  new  one,  its  possi- 
biUties  unfettered  by  precedent;  and 
Storrs,  with  his  imagination  and  urge 
to  foster  the  things  of  the  mind,  promoted 
musical  societies,  chess  clubs,  art  exhibi- 
tions, and  above  all  the  Pro-Jerusalem 
Society,  guardian  of  the  city's  beauties 
and  the  only  body  in  the  Holy  Land 
which  could  bring  together  to  its  council- 
table  the  leaders  of  Jerusalem's  diverse 
and  bitterly  opposed  communities.  And  his 
was  the  impetus  in  the  revival  of  the  arts 
of  pottery,  weaving,  and  glass-blowing. 

In  1926  Storrs  went  as  governor  to 
Cyprus  where  one  of  his  first  acts  was  to 
bring  about  the  cancellation  of  the  island's 
share  of  the  Turkish  debt.  For  a  time  he 
enjoyed  considerable  popularity  but  this 
waned  with  the  growth  of  the  agitation 
for  union  with  Greece  on  the  part  of  the 
Cypriot  Greek  politicians.  Always  better 
at  negotiating  than  in  coping  with  vio- 
lence, he  refused  to  be  provoked  by  the 
aggressiveness  of  the  Enosis  extremists; 
in  1931  there  was  a  sudden  and  unexpected 
outburst  in  which  the  wooden  Govern- 
ment House,  where  Storrs  was  in  resi- 
dence, was  burned  down.  Order  was 
restored  within  a  fortnight  by  ships  and 
troops  promptly  dispatched  from  Malta 
and  Egypt ;  but  utterly  destroyed  were  the 
works  of  art  and  books  whose  acquisition 
had  been  one  of  the  main  joys  of  his  life. 

At  the  end  of  1932,  on  the  expiry  of  his 
normal  term  in  Cyprus,  Storrs  was  ap- 
pointed governor  of  Northern  Rhodesia, 
where  one  of  his  first  tasks  was  to  organize 
the  transfer  of  the  capital  from  Living- 
stone to  the  more  conveniently  situated 
Lusaka.  It  was  an  uncongenial  post  for  a 
man  of  his  background;  he  found  the 
contrast     'almost    overwhelmingly    dis- 


932 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


agreeable',  and  he  did  not  repine  unduly 
when  ill  health  caused  him  to  be  in- 
valided from  the  service  in  1984.  Ip  a 
sense  there  could  be  'no  promotion  after 
Jerusalem',  as  he  remarked  in  his  memoirs, 
Orientations  (1937),  a  fascinating  record, 
brilliantly  told,  which  achieved,  despite 
its  length,  an  outstanding  success.  He  had 
also  a  gift  for  conversation  which  he 
consciously  developed  into  an  art;  and 
in  his  latter  years  was  a  sought-after  pro- 
fessional lecturer  on  Dante,  the  Bible, 
Shakespeare,  and  T.  E.  Lawrence.  He 
represented  East  Islington  on  the  London 
County  Council  (1937-45),  was  chairman 
of  the  Lesser  Eastern  Churches  committee 
of  the  Church  of  England  Council  on 
Foreign  Relations,  and  gave  his  services  to 
many  other  bodies,  especially  those  con- 
cerned with  music. 

Storrs  married  in  1923  Louisa  Lucy, 
daughter  of  Rear-Admiral  the  Hon. 
Algernon  Charles  Littleton  and  widow  of 
Lieutenant-Colonel  Henry  Arthur  Clowes. 
He  was  popular  with  the  young  who 
enjoyed  his  humorously  chaffing  way 
with  them,  but  he  had  no  children  of  his 
own;  Lady  Storrs  had  a  family  by  her 
first  husband.  She  died  in  1970. 

Storrs  was  appointed  C.M.G.  (1916), 
C.B.E.  (1919),  K.C.M.G.  (1929);  he  had 
been  knighted  in  1924.  He  was  a  knight 
of  justice  of  the  Order  of  St.  John  of 
Jerusalem,  held  Italian  and  Greek  decora- 
tions, and  was  an  honorary  LL.D.  of 
Aberdeen  and  Dublin.  He  died  in  London 
1  November  1955. 

[Sir  Ronald  Storrs,  Orientations,  1987; 
Sir  George  Hill,  A  History  of  Cyprus,  vol.  iv, 
1952 ;  Sir  Harry  Luke,  Cities  and  Men,  vol.  ii, 
1953 ;  personal  knowledge.]       Harry  Luke. 

STRADLING,  Sir  REGINALD 
EDWARD  (1891-1952),  civil  engineer, 
was  born  in  Bristol  12  May  1891,  the 
second  of  three  children  and  only  surviv- 
ing son  of  Edward  John  Stradling,  forage 
merchant,  and  his  wife,  Sarah  Mary 
Bennet.  Educated  at  Bristol  Grammar 
School,  he  was  awarded  in  1909  a  Sur- 
veyors' Institution  scholarship  to  the 
university  of  Bristol  where  he  read  civil 
engineering  and  graduated  B.Sc.  in  1912. 
After  practical  training  with  A.  P.  I. 
Cotterell,  a  consulting  engineer  of  Bristol 
and  Westminster,  he  worked  successively 
with  firms  in  Bolton  and  Birmingham. 

At  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  he 
volunteered  for  service  with  the  Royal 
Engineers,  was  commissioned,  and  went 
to  France  with  the  16th  division  in  1915. 


Stradling 

By  1917,  when  he  was  invalided  from  the 
army,  he  was  captain  and  adjutant, 
Divisional  Engineers;  had  been  twice 
mentioned  in  dispatches,  and  awarded  the 
M.C.  On  his  recovery  he  became  a  lec- 
turer in  civil  engineering  in  Birmingham 
University  and  began  research  into  the 
properties  of  building  materials  which  led 
in  turn  to  the  award  of  the  Ph.D.  (Birming* 
ham,  1922)  and  the  D.Sc.  (Bristol,  1925). 
In  1922  he  accepted  the  headship  of  the 
civil  engineering  and  building  department 
of  Bradford  Technical  College  but  two 
years  later  resigned  it  to  become  director 
of  building  research  in  the  Department 
of  Scientific  and  Industrial  Research. 

StradUng's  work  during  the  inter-war 
years  was  invaluable  in  establishing  a 
department  which  was  to  assume  during 
that  period  and  afterwards  a  key  position 
in  the  application  of  science  to  building. 
One  of  his  memorable  achievements  was 
to  set  up  the  Steel  Structures  Research 
Committee  under  the  chairmanship  of 
Sir  Clement  Hindley  [q.v.]  with  Stradling 
himself  as  executive  officer  and  (Sir)  John 
Baker  (who  contributes  to  this  Supple- 
ment) as  technical  officer.  The  work  of 
this  committee  has  had  far-reaching 
results,  both  directly  and  through  the 
stimulus  it  provided  to  the  search  for  a 
scientific  and  practical  approach  to  the 
design  of  structural  steelwork. 

Stradling  would  have  wished  for  nothing 
better  than  to  continue  his  work  in  the 
department  which  owed  so  much  to  his 
initiative  and  in  1935-9  included  also 
road  research,  but  in  1937  the  threat  of 
war  caused  the  Home  Office  to  constitute 
an  inter-departmental  committee  on  Air 
Raid  Precautions.  The  resources  of  the 
Building  Research  Station  were  placed  at 
its  disposal  and  research  was  at  once 
directed  to  the  problems  connected  with 
bomb  damage  from  blast,  spUnters,  etc. 
Stradling  took  a  great  personal  interest 
in  this  work  which  soon  became  so  exact- 
ing that  in  1939  he  had  to  relinquish  his 
post  as  director  of  building  research  to 
become  chief  adviser  to  the  Ministry  of 
Home  Security.  When  war  began  in  1989 
the  research  and  development  department 
of  this  new  Ministry,  of  which  Stradling 
had  already  organized  a  nucleus,  was  trans- 
ferred to  the  Forest  Products  Research 
Laboratory  at  Princes  Risborough  and 
with  the  help  of  the  Civil  Defence  Research 
Committee,  set  up  earlier  that  year  under 
the  chairmanship  of  (Sir)  Edward  Apple- 
ton,  this  became  the  centre  of  all  civil 
defence  scientific  activity  throughout' the 


938 


Stradling 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


war.  The  work  grew  rapidly  and  ultimately 
embraced  camouflage,  smoke-screen  pro- 
tection, and  operational  research  as  well 
as  the  development  of  direct  protection 
such  as  the  Morrison  and  Anderson  air- 
raid shelters. 

After  the  war,  housing  was  one  of  the 
most  urgent  questions  facing  the  country 
and  Stradling,  chief  scientific  adviser  to 
the  Ministry  of  Works  (1944-9)  and 
adviser  on  civil  defence  to  the  Home 
Office  (1945-8),  assumed  responsibility 
for  the  direction  of  research  to  increase 
the  efficiency  of  post-war  reconstruction. 
In  1947  he  became  a  member  of  the  Advis- 
ory Council  on  Scientific  Policy  under  the 
chairmanship  of  Sir  Henry  Tizard  [q.v.] 
and  in  the  same  year  made  an  extensive 
tour,  of  some  three  months,  of  New 
Zealand  and  Australia,  at  the  invitation 
of  their  respective  Departments  of  Scien- 
tific Research,  to  advise  them  on  building 
research. 

In  the  following  year  his  health  failed 
and  he  relinquished  his  posts,  but  a  partial 
recovery  enabled  him  in  1949  to  undertake 
half-time  duty  as  dean  of  the  Military 
College  of  Science,  Shrivenham,  and  he 
found  much  satisfaction  in  a  return  to 
academic  pursuits.  He  worked  with  his 
characteristic  enthusiasm  to  the  last  and 
died  suddenly  at  Shrivenham  26  January 
1952. 

Stradling  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1934, 
knighted  in  1945,  and  awarded  the 
American  medal  for  merit  in  1947.  In  1943 
he  received  the  James  Alfred  Ewing  medal 
for  1942  and  was  also  elected  F.R.S.  He 
was  an  active  member  of  the  council  of 
the  Institution  of  Civil  Engineers  from 
1939  until  his  death  and  had  been  nomina- 
ted for  the  presidency  in  1949  when  illness 
forced  him  to  withdraw. 

In  1918  he  married  Inda,  daughter  of 
Alfred  William  Pippard,  builder  and  con- 
tractor, of  Yeovil,  Somerset.  They  had 
one  daughter  and  one  son.  Dr.  Peter 
Stradling,  who  became  physician  in 
charge  of  the  chest  clinic  of  Hammer- 
smith Hospital. 

A  portrait  by  Rodney  Burn  is  in  the 
Imperial  War  Museum. 

[A.  J.  S.  Pippard  in  Obituary  Notices  of 
Fellows  of  tlie  Royal  Society,  vol.  viii,  No.  21, 
November  1952;  private  information;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  A.  J.  S.  Pippard. 

STRANGWAYS,  GILES  STEPHEN 
HOLLAND  FOX-,  sixth  Earl  of 
Ilchester  (1874-1959),  landowner  and 
historian.  [See  Fox-Strangways.] 


STRATTON,  FREDERICK  JOHN 
MARRIAN  (1881-1960),  astrophysicist, 
was  born  in  Birmingham  16  October  1881, 
the  eighth  and  youngest  child  of  Stephen 
Samuel  Stratton,  professor  of  music,  and 
his  wife,  Mary  Jane  Marrian.  He  was 
educated  at  King  Edward's  Grammar 
School,  at  Mason  University  College 
(afterwards  the  university  of  Birmingham), 
and  at  Gonville  and  Caius  College,  Cam- 
bridge. He  was  third  wrangler  in  the 
mathematical  tripos  of  1904  (the  senior 
wrangler  was  (Sir)  A.  S.  Eddington,  q.v.), 
Isaac  Newton  student  in  1905,  and  a 
Smith's  prizeman  in  1906,  the  year  in 
which  he  was  elected  a  fellow  of  Caius 
College.  Until  1914  he  was  a  mathematics 
lecturer  at  his  college  and  also  assistant 
director  of  the  Solar  Physics  Observatory 
under  H.  F.  Newall  [q.v.].  His  early  publi- 
cations in  astronomy  covered  a  wide  range, 
including  celestial  mechanics,  but  the  out- 
burst of  the  star  Nova  Geminorum  (1912) 
focused  his  attention  on  novae,  which 
proved  to  be  a  problem  of  lifelong 
interest. 

A  few  years  earlier  he  had  organized  a 
Signal  Company  in  the  Cambridge  Univer- 
sity Officers'  Training  Corps,  to  pioneer  the 
military  use  of  wireless  telegraphy,  then 
in  its  infancy.  The  group  of  young  en- 
thusiasts he  collected  at  that  time  was 
also  remarkable  for  a  wide  range  of  very 
distinguished  careers  in  later  life.  On  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1914  Stratton  was  with 
Newall  in  the  Crimea,  where  they  were 
preparing  to  observe  the  total  solar 
eclipse  of  21  August.  Leaving  immediately, 
he  hurried  back  to  England,  and  joined 
the  Signal  Service,  R.E.  He  served  in 
France,  reaching  the  rank  of  brevet 
lieutenant-colonel  and  being  appointed  to 
the  D.S.O.  and  awarded  the  Legion  of 
Honour. 

The  war  over,  Stratton  returned  to 
Caius,  first  as  tutor,  then  as  senior  tutor, 
to  face  what  was  a  difficult  time  of 
readjustment  for  the  university,  as  for 
Britain  as  a  whole.  It  was  a  job  for  which 
his  personality  and  experience  admirably 
suited  him  and  which  he  carried  out  with 
much  success.  He  continued  to  give  lec- 
tures on  astronomy,  among  them  one  of 
the  first  general  courses  on  astrophysics 
to  be  given  in  Britain,  which  later  ap- 
peared in  book  form.  Astronomical  Phy- 
sics  (1925).  He  contributed  an  article  on 
novae  to  the  Handbuch  der  Astrophysik 
(1928).  Somehow  he  also  found  time  to 
go  for  the  1926  total  solar  eclipse  to 
Sumatra,  where  with  C.  R.  Davidson  he 


934 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Stratton 


made  important  observations  of  the  spec- 
trum of  the  sun's  chromosphere. 

On  Newall's  retirement  in  1928,  Strat- 
ton was  appointed  professor  of  astro- 
physics and  director  of  the  Solar  Physics 
Observatory,  relinquishing  his  tutorship 
at  Caius.  He  held  this  post  until  1947, 
although  his  tenure  was  interrupted, 
first  by  a  serious  illness  in  1931,  and  later 
much  more  extensively  by  the  war.  He 
organized  three  more  eclipse  expeditions, 
to  Siam,  Canada,  and  Japan,  but  was 
dogged  by  bad  luck  with  the  weather. 
Only  in  Japan  in  1936  were  results  of 
any  scientific  value  obtainable,  and  even 
then  success  was  only  partial,  the  sun 
being  covered  by  a  cloud  almost  at  the 
instant  when  totality  commenced.  How- 
ever, members  of  his  team  made  good 
measurements  of  wavelengths  in  the 
spectrum  from  near  the  edge  of  the  sun's 
disc,  settling  a  technical  point  then  of 
some  interest,  and  obtained  photographs 
of  the  chromospheric  spectrum,  study 
of  which  stimulated  a  good  deal  of  later 
work. 

In  1934  Nova  Herculis  appeared,  one 
of  the  most  interesting  stars  of  its  kind, 
and  despite  the  inadequate  equipment  of 
the  observatory  at  Cambridge,  Stratton 
and  his  staff  during  the  next  few  months 
obtained  a  remarkable  record  of  the 
changes  in  its  spectrum.  Work  on  this 
absorbed  much  of  his  energies  for  several 
years,  culminating  in  the  production  with 
W.  H.  Manning  of  the  Atlas  of  Spectra  of 
Nova  Herculis  1934  (1939),  using  material 
made  available  from  all  over  the  world. 
It  is  still  one  of  the  most  complete  records 
of  a  nova  outburst. 

In  1939  Stratton  was  bitterly  disappoin- 
ted to  be  refused  for  active  service  at  the 
age  of  fifty-seven.  Eventually  he  spent 
the  war  travelling  extensively,  in  Canada, 
Australia,  India,  and  elsewhere,  on  duties 
for  the  Royal  Corps  of  Signals.  There- 
after he  had  only  two  more  years  as 
professor  of  astrophysics,  and  in  the 
disorganized  post-war  conditions  he  real- 
ized that  he  could  do  little.  He  did, 
however,  complete  an  interesting  History 
of  the  Cambridge  Observatories  (1949). 
After  his  retirement  he  was  deputy 
scientific  adviser  to  the  Army  Council 
for  two  years  and  continued  to  serve  on 
innumerable  committees.  He  was  elected 
F.R.S.  in  1947. 

To  celebrate  his  seventieth  birthday 
some  of  his  pupils  undertook,  with  A.  Beer 
as  editor,  to  produce  what  was  to  have 
been  a  Festschrift,  but  which  expanded, 


as  more  and  more  of  his  friends  came-  to 
hear  of  it,  into  two  large  volumes.  Vistas 
in  Astronomy  (1955-6).  The  publication 
quite  outgrew  its  original  purpose  and 
several  later  volumes  were  produced. 

Stratton's  official  posts  formed  only  a 
part  of  his  activities.  In  1925-35  he  was 
general  secretary  of  the  International 
Astronomical  Union,  and  did  much  to 
foster  what  was  one  of  the  earliest  and 
most  successful  of  the  international 
scientific  unions.  He  was  also  general 
secretary  of  the  International  Council  of 
Scientific  Unions  from  1937  to  1952,  and 
general  secretary  of  the  British  Associa- 
tion, 1930-35.  He  was  president  of  the 
Royal  Astronomical  Society  (1933-5), 
treasurer  (1923-7),  and  its  foreign  secre- 
tary (1945-55).  He  helped  to  found  the 
Society  for  Visiting  Scientists  and  was  its 
honorary  secretary,  1948-55.  He  was 
president  of  Caius  College  in  1946-8  and 
at  the  time  of  his  death  the  senior 
fellow.  He  was  president  of  the  Society  for 
Psychical  Research  in  1953-5.  For  more 
than  fifty  years  he  was  chairman  of  the 
Unitarian  Church  at  Cambridge.  He  was 
ever  active  on  behalf  of  ex-servicemen's 
societies  and  causes  and  in  the  early 
thirties  he  gave  much  help  to  refugee 
scientists  from  Central  Europe. 

To  his  many  friends  and  acquaintances 
he  was  variously  known  as  Professor, 
Colonel,  Tubby,  or  Chubby.  Short  and 
rotund,  until  his  last  years  he  lived  life  at 
the  double.  He  thought  fast,  talked  fast 
(so  that  even  close  friends  sometimes  had 
difficulty  in  following  him),  decided  fast, 
and  in  his  younger  days  moved  fast.  He 
allowed  himself  fewer  hours  for  sleep  than 
most.  Despite  his  great  sociableness  and 
much  hospitality,  few  people  knew  him 
really  well,  in  part  because  he  tended  to 
keep  a  life  of  wide  interests  and  activities 
in  watertight  compartments.  His  chief 
contributions  to  science  and  learning  were 
through  help  and  encouragement  to 
younger  men,  and  not  merely  in  Britain 
alone.  As  president  of'I.A.U.  Commission 
38  his  activities  in  this  direction  continued 
until  a  few  days  before  his  death.  A 
bachelor,  he  was  completely  devoted  to  his 
college,  to  his  pupils,  to  astronomy  and 
especially  to  the  International  Astronomi- 
cal Union,  to  his  comrades  of  the  first 
world  war,  and  to  his  duty  wherever  he 
thought  it  to  lie.  Personal  convenience, 
comfort,  or  profit  came  very  low  indeed 
on  his  scale  of  priorities.  Accurately  de- 
scribed as  a  man  of  tremendous  principle, 
he  also  bubbled  with  good  humour  and 


935 


Strattoh 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


was  of '  outstanding  generosity  and  mod- 
esty. 

Stratton  died  in  Cambridge  2  September 
1960.  A  portrait  by  Sir  Oswald  Birley  is  at 
Caius  College. 

[Vistas  in  Astronomy,  ed.  A.  Beer,  vol.  i, 
1955;  Nature,  5  November  1960;  Quarterly 
Journal  of  the  Royal  Astronomical  Society, 
March  1961 ;  Sir  James  Chadwick  in  Bio- 
graphical Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal 
Society f  vol.  vii,  1961 ;  personal  knowledge.] 
R.  O.  Redman. 

STREET,  Sir  ARTHUR  WILLIAM 
(1892-1951),  civil  servant,  was  born  16 
May  1892  at  Cowes,  Isle  of  Wight,  the  son 
of  William  Charles  Street,  a  licensed 
victualler,  by  his  wife,  Minnie  Clark.  He 
was  educated  at  the  county  school,  San- 
down.  At  the  age  of  fifteen  he  went  to 
London  to  start  in  the  Civil  Service  as 
a  boy  clerk.  Street  was  determined  to 
improve  his  position  by  further  study  at 
King's  College  in  the  Strand  and  by  1914 
had  become  an  established  second  division 
clerk  at  the  Board  of  Agriculture  and 
Fisheries. 

During  the  war  of  1914-18  he  served  on 
various  fronts — mainly  in  the  Middle  East 
— was  wounded,  mentioned  in  dispatches, 
awarded  the  M.C.,  and  attained  the  rank 
of  major. 

On  his  return  to  his  old  department, 
Street  became  private  secretary  to  Lord 
Lee  of  Fareham  [q.v.],  who  was  so  im- 
pressed with  Street's  ability  that  he  took 
him  with  him  to  the  Admiralty.  ^ATien 
Street  retxu'ned  in  1922  to  the  Ministry  of 
Agriculture  as  a  principal,  a  small  market- 
ing department  was  created  in  which  he 
served  and  which  issued  reports  on  co- 
operative marketing  in  other  countries 
and  on  the  marketing  in  the  United  King- 
dom of  agricultural  commodities.  These 
reports  bore  fruit  in  agriculture  market- 
ing Acts  in  the  thirties,  affording  some 
protection  for  the  producers  on  condition 
that  they  organized  themselves  more 
efficiently,  and  creating  new  admini- 
strative machinery  for  these  purposes 
in  the  form  of  marketing  boards  indepen- 
dent of  the  Government. 

Throughout  the  thirties  Street  moved 
up  rapidly  in  the  Ministry  of  Agriculture 
and  Fisheries,  becoming  second  secretary  in 
1936-8.  He  was  fast  gaining  a  reputation 
in  Whitehall  and  beyond  as  a  leading 
civil  servant,  who  combined  an  intense 
devotion  to  duty  with  an  ability  to  formu- 
late proposals  on  which  ministers  could 
make  decisions  on  policy. 


It  was  no  surprise,  therefore,  when 
Street  was  transferred  to  the  Air  Ministry 
in  1938,  becoming  permanent  under- 
secretary of  state  and  a  member  of  the 
Air  Council  in  1939.  This  was  a  difficult 
change.  The  role  of  the  permanent  head  of 
a  Service  department  is  less  clear-cut  than 
in  a  civil  department.  The  Air  Council 
in  Street's  day  consisted  of  the  minister, 
his  parliamentary  secretary,  the  leading 
Service  officers,  and  one  civil  servant. 
Moreover,  the  Air  Ministry  was,  perhaps, 
the  most  difficult  of  Service  departments. 
A  war  was  imminent  which  for  the  first 
time  in  history  would  be  extensively 
fought  in  the  air.  The  air  marshals  who 
formed  the  Air  Council  believed  pas- 
sionately in  the  importance  of  the  Royal 
Air  Force  and  they  considered  it  Street's 
function  to  find  the  resources  they  deemed 
necessary  for  expansion.  But  Street,  as 
accounting  officer  to  the  Air  Ministry, 
was  responsible  for  its  expenditm-e  and  it 
was  his  duty,  therefore,  from  time  to 
time,  to  ask  questions  which  the  air 
marshals  might  dislike.  Moreover,  as  a 
newcomer  he  had  to  work  doubly  hard  to 
master  the  unfamiliar  facts  of  a  rapidly 
expanding  department. 

Street  took  to  his  task  very  carefully. 
By  intensive  hard  work  and  with  his 
remarkable  ability  for  working  with  other 
people,  he  convinced  his  fellow  members 
of  the  Air  Council  that  he  had  the  interests 
of  the  Air  Force  as  much  at  heart  as 
anyone.  The  air  marshals  found  in  Street 
an  adviser  and  a  friend  to  whom  they 
could  bring  their  problems  with  the  full 
confidence  that  they  would  obtain  guid- 
ance and  inspiration. 

Before  the  war  broke  out  in  1939  Street 
completed  one  congenial  task  in  the  field 
of  civil  aviation:  he  took  a  leading  part 
in  the  preparation  of  the  British  Overseas 
Airways  Act  in  1939. 

During  the  war  Street  did  not  spare 
himself.  He  worked  far  into  the  night,  and 
slept  at  his  office.  His  influence  on  the  de- 
partment was  profound :  he  always  found 
time  to  attend  to  the  personal  problems  of 
his  staff.  His  own  tragedy  was  the  death 
of  his  youngest  son,  who  was  one  of  the 
fifty  Air  Force  officers  who  were  shot 
attempting  to  escape  from  Stalag  Luft 
III. 

At  the  end  of  the  war  Street  took  charge 
of  a  new  Office  to  supervise  the  British 
Control  Commissions  in  Germany  and 
Austria.  But  in  July  1946  he  was  called  to 
his  last  great  task — the  deputy  chairman- 
ship of  the  National  Coal  Board  which 


936 


D.N.B.  1051-1060 


in   January    1947   took   over   the   coal- 
mining industry  of  Great  Britain. 

Street's  task  at  the  Coal  Board  was 
herculean:  he  had  to  create  an  organiza- 
tion to  replace  800  colliery  companies  and 
he  had  to  do  it  quickly.  The  nationaliza- 
tion Act  of  1946  left  the  Board  to  devise 
its  ovm  organization.  The  coalmining 
industry  was  run  down  after  the  war: 
coal  was  in  very  short  supply  and  in 
February  1947  there  was  the  worst  fuel 
crisis  in  British  history.  There  was  the 
intensely  human  and  long-standing  prob- 
lem of  relations  with  the  miners.  Again 
Street  did  not  spare  himself  and  gradually 
the  organization  took  root.  It  should  have 
been  no  siu^rise  that  Street,  worn  out 
with  his  incessant  labours,  died  in  London 
24  February  1951.  Had  he  lived  he  was 
to  have  succeeded  Lord  Hyndley  as 
chairman. 

Street  had  a  commanding  presence  and 
personality;  his  powers  of  persuasion 
were  legendary  yet  he  rarely  seemed  to 
argue.  He  was  always  good  company,  and 
his  interest,  enthusiasm,  and  capacity  for 
work  swept  along  all  who  met  him.  A  man 
of  great  vision  and  a  designer  of  large 
policies,  he  could  yet  lavish  tremendous, 
somewhat  excessive,  pains  on  matters  of 
detail.  Among  his  wide  circle  of  friends 
were  men  of  affairs  and  leaders  of  thought, 
not  only  in  this  country  but  also  abroad, 
especially  in  France  and  the  dominions. 
Not  the  least  of  his  achievements  was  his 
interest  in  and  influence  on  the  group  of 
young  administrative  officers  in  the  Air 
Ministry,  many  of  whom  subsequently 
rose  to  high  positions  in  other  depart- 
ments. 

In  1924  Street  was  appointed  CLE. 
(he  had  been  joint  secretary  with  (Sir) 
Findlater  Stewart  [q.v.]  of  the  royal  com- 
mission on  superior  civil  services  in  India) ; 
in  1933  he  was  appointed  C.M.G.  after  the 
Ottawa  conference;  in  1935  he  was  ap- 
pointed C.B.,  in  1941  advanced  to  K.C.B., 
and  in  1946  to  G.C.B. ;  in  1938  he  had  been 
appointed  K.B.E.  He  was  also  a  com- 
mander of  the  Legion  of  Honour  and  held 
other  foreign  decorations. 

Street  was  first  married,  in  1915,  to 
Denise,  daughter  of  Jules  Mantanus,  a 
Belgian  man  of  business.  By  her  he  had 
three  sons  and  a  daughter.  In  1926,  his 
wife  having  died.  Street  married  her  sister, 
Angele  Eleanore  Theodorine  Mantanus. 

A  portrait  by  Henry  Carr  is-  in  the 
Imperial  War  Museum. 

[Ptiblic  Administration,  Winter  1951; 
private  information.]  R.  Kelf-Cohen. 


Strijdom 

STRIJDOM,  JOHANNES  GERHARDUS 
(1893-1958),  South  African  prime  minister, 
born  14  July  1893  near  WUlowmore, 
Cape  Province,  was  the  second  son  in 
the  family  of  eleven  children  of  Petrus 
Gerhardus  Strijdom,  farmer,  and  his  wife, 
Ellen  Elizabeth  Nortje.  After  attending 
the  Fransch  Hoek  High  School,  Strij- 
dom proceeded  to  Victoria  College  (later 
Stellenbosch  University),  and  in  1912 
graduated  B.A.  Following  a  spell  of 
ostrich-farming,  Strijdom  moved  to  Pre- 
toria, joining  the  public  service  in  1914. 
After  the  outbreak  of  war,  he  served  in 
South  West  Africa,  first  as  a  trooper  and 
subsequently  as  a  non-combatant.  After 
his  discharge  in  August  1915,  he  joined  a 
firm  of  Pretoria  attorneys,  obtained  his 
LL.B.,  and  in  1918  was  admitted  to  the 
bar. 

Strijdom  next  moved  to  Nylstroom  in 
the  northern  Transvaal  to  practise  as 
an  attorney.  There  he  entered  politics, 
becoming  secretary  for  the  Waterberg 
division  of  the  National  Party  of  J.  B.  M. 
Hertzog  [q.v.].  A  part-time  farmer, 
Strijdom  also  served  as  secretary  to  the 
Waterberg  Agricultural  Union  (1923-9). 
In  the  general  election  of  1929  Strijdom 
was  returned  to  Parliament  as  the  mem- 
ber for  Waterberg,  the  constituency  which 
he  continued  to  represent  until  his  death. 

Although  Strijdom,  like  D.  F.  Malan 
[q.v.],  the  Cape  Nationalist  leader,  stood 
as  a  coalitionist  in  the  general  election  of 
1933,  he  joined  Malan  in  the  following 
year  in  denouncing  the  fusion  of  parties, 
led  respectively  by  Hertzog  and  J.  C. 
Smuts  [q.v.],  as  a  betrayal  of  Nationalist 
principles.  Following  the  formation  of  the 
'purified'  National  Party,  Strijdom  until 
1938  was  its  only  parliamentary  repre- 
sentative from  the  Transvaal,  and  became 
its  leader  in  that  province.  As  chairman  of 
the  company  publishing  the  Nationalist 
newspaper.  Die  Transvaler,  he  was  as- 
sisted in  building  up  the  party  by  its 
editor,  H.  F.  Verwoerd,  subsequently  his 
successor  as  prime  minister. 

After  Hertzog's  defeat  in  Parliament 
and  resignation  over  the  war  issue, 
Strijdom  became  joint  leader  in  the  Trans- 
vaal with  General  J.  C.  G.  Kemp,  of  the 
Hermigde  (reunited)  Nasionale  Party, 
formed  in  1940.  Opposing  any  compromise 
over  the  republican  aim,  to  which  he  had 
long  been  committed,  Strijdom  believed 
that  a  German  victory  might  furnish  an 
opportunity  to  achieve  it.  He  refused  to 
follow  Hertzog  in  undertaking  to  guaran- 
tee    English-speaking    rights.     Insistent 


087 


Strijdom 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


nevertheless  that  the  republic  should 
be  achieved  by  constitutional  means, 
Strijdom  supported  Malan  in  successfully 
resisting  (as  the  general  election  of  1943 
demonstrated)  the  claims  of  extra- 
parUamentary  movements  to  challenge 
the  H.N.P.  as  the  political  voice  of  the 
Afrikaner  volk. 

When  the  Nationalists  came  to  power 
in  1948,  Strijdom  received  the  relatively 
minor  portfolio  of  lands  (and  later  also 
irrigation)  in  Malan's  Cabinet.  He  tackled 
his  departmental  work  with  vigour  and 
simultaneously  succeeded  in  raising  his 
prestige  in  the  party  as  a  whole.  Malan, 
upon  retiring  in  1954,  intended  to  advise 
the  governor-general  to  invite  N.  C. 
Havenga,  the  minister  of  finance,  to 
succeed  him ;  but  Strijdom's  supporters, 
representing  the  radical  element  in  the 
party  and  especially  strong  in  the  Trans- 
vaal, insisted  that  the  parliamentary 
caucus  elect  the  new  party  leader  and 
prime  minister.  Strijdom's  unanimous 
election  was  ensured  by  Havenga's 
withdrawal. 

In  the  four  years  of  his  premiership 
Strijdom,  who  by  now  accepted  that  the 
republic  could  not  be  established  by  a 
simple  majority  in  Parliament  and  that 
English-speaking  rights  must  be  res- 
pected, continued  to  pursue  his  republi- 
can goal.  Legislation  in  1957  secured  that 
South  Africa  would  have  one  national 
flag  and  anthem. 

The  most  controversial  issue  of 
Strijdom's  premiership  derived  from  the 
struggle  to  remove  the  Cape  Coloured 
voters  from  the  common  roll.  Through 
the  enlargement  of  the  Senate  Strijdom 
in  1956  obtained  the  necessary  two- 
thirds  majority  of  both  Houses,  and  the 
Appeal  Comi;  upheld  the  Government  by 
validating  the  Senate  Act. 

Strijdom,  who  suffered  poor  health 
throughout  his  premiership,  became  ill 
shortly  before  the  general  election  of  1958. 
He  recovered  sufficiently  to  participate  in 
the  campaign,  but  afterwards  his  con- 
dition deteriorated.  He  died  in  Cape 
Town  24  August  1958. 

As  a  volksleieTf  Strijdom  commanded 
the  almost  unqualified  devotion  of  many 
of  his  followers.  His  personal  appeal  and 
integrity,  his  accessibility  and  his  active 
membership  of  the  Dutch  Reformed 
Church  all  played  their  part.  To  his  op- 
ponents, however,  his  steadfastness  and 
his  blunt  oratory  typified  the  intransi- 
gent Broederbonder,  pursuing  a  narrow  and 
exclusive  Afrikaner  cause. 


In  1931  Strijdom  married  Susan, 
daughter  of  the  Rev.  W.  J.  de  Klerk ;  they 
had  a  son  and  a  daughter.  An  earlier 
marriage  to  Margaretha  van  Hulsteyn 
(the  actress  Marda  Vanne),  daughter  of 
Sir  Willem  van  Hulsteyn,  a  former 
member  of  Parliament,  had  been  dis- 
solved. 

[G.  Coetsee,  Hans  Strijdom,  1958;  G.  M. 
Carter,  The  Politics  of  Inequality,  1958; 
J.  M.  Strydom,  J.  G,  Strijdom,  1965.] 

N.  G.  Garson. 

STRONG,  LEONARD  ALFRED 
GEORGE  (1896-1958),  writer,  was  born 
in  Plymouth  8  March  1896,  the  elder  child 
and  only  son  of  Leonard  Ernest  Strong, 
who  worked  for  a  firm  of  manufacturers 
of  artificial  fertilizers  and  ultimately 
became  a  director  of  Fisons,  by  his  wife, 
Marion  Jane,  daughter  of  Alfred  Mongan, 
a  lawyer's  clerk  in  Dublin.  His  father  was 
half-English,  half-Irish;  his  mother  was 
wholly  Irish.  A  delicate  boy,  Strong  won 
an  open  scholarship  to  Brighton  College, 
and  thence  an  open  classical  scholarship 
to  Wadham  College,  Oxford.  Illness 
interrupted  his  schooling  and  kept  him 
from  active  service  in  the  war.  In  1917 
he  became  an  assistant  master  at  Summer 
Fields  School,  Oxford,  returning  to  Wad- 
ham  in  1919  to  take  pass  classics  and 
English,  graduating  B.A.  in  1920.  He  went 
back  to  Summer  Fields  and  remained  a 
master  there  until  1930,  when  his  in- 
creasing reputation  as  a  writer  enabled 
him  to  devote  himself  entirely  to  literary 
work. 

Strong's  early  years  influenced  him 
profoundly.  His  childhood  Irish  and 
Devon  memories  reappeared  in  his  fiction, 
which  often  had  Ireland,  Devonshire,  or 
the  Scottish  Highlands  as  the  background. 
The  obscure  spinal  trouble  from  which  he 
suffered  kept  him  from  sport,  except 
swimming,  and  may  explain  the  emphasis 
in  much  of  his  writing  on  physical  strength 
not  unmixed  with  brutaUty. 

He  began  to  send  contributions  to 
editors  in  1915.  At  Oxford  he  wrote  for 
undergraduate  journals,  and  in  1921  he 
settled  down  in  earnest  to  freelance 
writing,  deriving  many  of  his  subjects 
from  schoolmastering.  As  an  author  he 
started  with  two  books  of  poems,  Dublin 
Days  (1921)  and  The  Lowery  Road  (1923), 
and  he  drew  on  these  and  later  volumes  of 
poetry  for  his  collected  poems  The  Body^s 
Imperfection  (1957).  His  achievement  as 
a  lyric  poet  of  tenderness  and  wit,  and 
often  of  epigrammatical  conciseness,  was 


938 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Sueter 


perhaps  not  sufficiently  appreciated  in  his 
lifetime.  Poetry  undoubtedly  lay  at  the 
heart  of  his  talent  as  a  novelist. 

The  great  success  of  Strong's  first  pub- 
lished novel  Dewer  Rides  (1929),  a  story 
of  Dartmoor,  encouraged  him  to  give 
up  schoolmastering,  and  he  followed  it 
with  The  Jealous  Ghost  (1930);  The 
Garden  (1931),  which  was  largely  auto- 
biographical; The  Brothers  (1932),  a 
story  of  Highland  fishermen;  Sea  Wall 
(1933),  set  chiefly  in  Dubhn ;  and  Corporal 
Tune  (1984).  By  this  time  he  had  become 
an  established  novelist  with  a  regular 
following  of  readers.  Among  his  more 
notable  later  novels  may  be  mentioned 
The  Seven  Arms  (1935),  The  Open  Sky 
(1939),  The  Bay  (1941),  The  Director 
(1944),  full  of  perceptive  Irish  characteri- 
zation, and  Deliverance  (1955).  His 
collections  of  short  stories,  The  English 
Captain  (1929),  Travellers  (1945),  which 
was  awarded  the  James  Tait  Black  mem- 
orial prize,  and  Darling  Tom  (1952), 
showed  him  in  turn  as  a  master  of  comedy 
and  sentiment,  of  the  macabre,  the  fear- 
ful, and  the  ironic. 

Strong  developed  into  an  extremely 
prolific  and  versatile  writer,  increasingly 
willing  to  turn  his  hand  to  anything  that 
came  along.  He  became  a  zealous  specta- 
tor and  defender  of  boxing,  on  which  he 
wrote  in  Shake  Hands  and  Come  Out 
Fighting  (1938).  He  was  the  biographer 
of  Thomas  Moore  (The  Minstrel  Boy,  1937), 
of  John  McCormack  (1941),  and  of  Thomas 
Dover  {Dr.  Quicksilver,  1955).  He  com- 
piled anthologies  and  wrote  one-act  plays, 
books  for  children,  school  books,  detec- 
tive stories,  film  scripts,  radio  and  tele- 
vision plays,  and  even  The  Story  of  Sugar 
(1954).  As  a  literary  critic  he  is  not  to  be 
underestimated,  as  his  book  on  James 
Joyce,  The  Sacred  River  (1949),  and  his 
Personal  Remarks  (1953),  containing 
memorable  studies  of  Synge  and  Yeats, 
both  showed.  He  turned  his  novel  The 
Director  into  a  play  which  was  put  on  at 
the  Gate  Theatre,  Dublin.  A  singer  him- 
self, he  had  a  passionate  interest  in  the 
art.  He  was  an  impressive  lecturer  and 
became  an  inspiring  teacher  of  drama  and 
voice  production,  notably  at  the  Central 
School  of  Speech  and  Drama ;  he  was  the 
author  of  a  book  on  the  speaking  of 
English,  A  Tongue  in  Your  Head  (1945). 
As  an  adjudicator  in  amateiu"  dramatics 
he  travelled  all  over  the  country.  Strong 
was  a  member  of  the  Irish  Academy  of 
Letters,  a  fellow  of  the  Royal  Society  of 
Literature,  and  for  many  years  honorary 


treasurer  of  the  Society  of  Authors.  In 
1938  he  became  a  director  of  Methuens, 
the  publishers. 

Although  Strong  may  be  criticized  as 
something  of  a  'literary  chameleon',  and 
although  this  attitude  to  writing,  which  he 
did  not  deny,  deprived  him  of  a  certain 
single-mindedness  even  in  his  fiction,  he 
may  be  remembered  by  his  early  novels, 
his  short  stories,  and  his  poetry. 

Strong  was  of  medium  height  and  pleas- 
ant in  looks.  Contradictory  as  he  could 
appear  in  his  writings,  he  was  personally 
a  man  of  most  engaging  modesty,  charm, 
and  humour  who  would  go  to  any  length 
to  help  a  fellow  writer.  In  1926  Strong 
married  Dorothea  Sylvia  Tryce,  younger 
daughter  of  Hubert  Brinton,  assistant 
master  at  Eton  College;  they  had  one 
son.  Strong  died  in  Guildford,  Surrey, 
17  August  1958.  He  left  a  posthumous 
autobiography  of  his  early  life.  Green 
Memory  (1961),  and  there  is  considerable 
autobiographical  material,  as  well  as 
much  practical  advice,  in  his  book  The 
Writer's  Trade  (1953).  A  drawing  by 
Wyndham  Lewis  and  a  caricature  by  (Sir) 
David  Low  are  in  the  possession  of 
the  family. 

[The  Times,  19,  23,  and  26  August  1958; 
R.  L.  M^groz,  Five  Novelist  Poets  of  Today, 
1933;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Derek  Hudson. 


STUART,  Sir  JOHN  THEODOSIUS 
BURNETT-  (1875-1958),  general.  [See 
Burnett-Stuart.] 


SUETER,     Sir     MURRAY     FRAZER 

(1872-1960),  rear-admiral,  was  born  in 
Alverstoke,  Gosport,  6  September  1872, 
the  son  of  fleet-paymaster  John  Thomas 
Sueter  and  his  wife,  Ellen  Feild  Light- 
bourn.  He  entered  the  Britannia  in  1886, 
served  as  a  midshipman  in  the  Swiftsure, 
flagship  on  the  Pacific  station,  was 
promoted  lieutenant  in  1894,  and  appoin- 
ted to  the  Vernon  to  qualify  as  a  torpedo 
speciaUst  in  1896.  He  commanded  the 
destroyer  Fame  at  the  diamond  jubilee 
naval  review  of  1897,  and  after  a  further 
two  years'  service  on  the  staff  of  the 
Vernon  was  appointed  in  1890  to  the 
Jupiter  for  torpedo  duties. 

In  1902  Sueter  received  an  appointment 
to  the  gunboat  Hazard,  at  the  time 
commanded  by  (Sir)  Reginald  Bacon 
[q.v.]  and  recently  commissioned  as  the 
first  parent  ship  for  submarines,  of  which 


939 


Sueter 


D^.B*  1951-1060 


the  Holland  boats  were  just  entering  for 
service  as  the  navy's  first  submarines. 
While  serving  in  the  Hazard,  Sueter 
distinguished  himself  by  entering  the 
battery  compartment  of  the  submarine 
A.l,  after  an  explosion  caused  by  a 
concentration  of  hydrogen,  to  assist  in 
the  rescue  of  injured  men  who  would 
otherwise  have  been  badly  burned.  This 
period  of  service  with  the  early  sub- 
marines led  to  a  lifelong  interest  in  these 
vessels,  and  in  1907  Sueter  published  one 
of  the  first  books  of  real  merit  on  this 
subject  under  the  title  The  Evolution  of 
the  Submarine  Boat,  Mine  and  Torpedo. 

Sueter  was  promoted  commander  in 
1903  and  appointed  in  1904  to  the 
Admiralty  to  serve  as  assistant  to  the 
director  of  naval  ordnance.  He  returned 
to  sea  in  1906  to  command  the  cruiser 
Barham  in  the  Mediterranean,  returning 
two  years  later  to  the  naval  ordnance 
department  in  the  Admiralty.  He  was 
promoted  captain  in  1909. 

The  Admiralty  at  this  time  was  con- 
sidering the  use  of  aircraft,  especially 
airships,  for  reconnaissance  duties  with  the 
fleet  and  in  1909  had  placed  contracts  for 
the  construction  of  a  rigid  airship  to  be 
named  Mayfly.  Sueter  took  a  very  keen 
interest  in  her  construction  and  con- 
tributed many  useful  suggestions  during 
her  building.  As  a  result  he  was  appointed 
in  1910  to  command  the  cruiser  Hermione 
with  the  additional  title  of  inspecting 
captain  of  airships.  Unfortunately  before 
her  first  flight  the  Mayfly's  back  was 
broken  while  she  was  being  manceuvred 
out  of  her  hangar  in  a  high  wind  in  1911, 
an  accident  which  for  a  time  put  a  stop  to 
further  airship  development  for  the  navy. 
In  1912  Sueter  was  brought  back  to  the 
Admiralty  to  take  over  the  new  air 
department  and  much  of  the  rapid 
development  of  the  seaplane  as  a  naval 
aircraft  was  due  to  his  enthusiasm. 
Shortly  before  the  outbreak  of  war  in 
1914,  and  largely  on  Sueter's  suggestions, 
the  naval  wing  broke  away  from  its  parent 
body,  the  Royal  Flying  Corps,  to  become 
the  Royal  Naval  Air  Service.  For  his 
work  on  the  development  of  naval  flying 
Sueter  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1914. 

Sueter  was  promoted  commodore  2nd 
class  shortly  after  the  outbreak  of  war  and, 
still  as  director  of  the  air  department, 
was  largely  instrumental  in  the  rapid 
build-up  of  the  R.N.A.S.  to  a  full  war 
strength.  In  this  he  was  encouraged  by 
(Sir)  Winston  Churchill,  the  first  lord, 
and  by  Lord  Fisher  [q .v.],  recalled  as  first 


sea  lord  in  October  1914.  Sueter,  who 
had  continued  with  some  success  to  press 
for  airship  development,  was  very  largely 
responsible  for  the  design  and  rapid 
production  of  small  non-rigid  airships 
designed  to  search  out  U-boats  operating 
in  British  coastal  waters.  In  all,  some  200 
of  these  were  built  and  proved  of  great 
value  particularly  when  convoy  was 
adopted  later  in  the  war.  Sueter  also 
interested  himself  in  the  development  of 
torpedo-carrying  aircraft,  and,  working 
with  Lieutenant  Douglas  Hyde-Thomson, 
it  was  he  who  initiated  the  design  which 
was  adopted  in  the  navy.  An  early  success 
when  a  Turkish  supply  ship  was  sunk  by 
an  air-launched  torpedo  in  the  sea  of 
Marmara  in  1915  not  only  vindicated 
Sueter's  ingenuity  and  foresight  but 
proved  to  be  the  first  step  in  the  develop- 
ment of  one  of  the  navy's  most  powerful 
weapons. 

In  1915  Sueter  turned  his  inventive 
mind  to  new  avenues  of  service  for  the 
R.N.A.S.  and  advanced  the  idea  of  pro- 
viding armoured  cars  for  the  defence  of 
airfields  established  abroad.  During  the 
early  months  these  cars  did  useful  work 
in  Flanders  and  northern  France  but  as 
the  war  settled  into  its  static  phase  of 
trench  warfare  their  value  declined.  Two 
squadrons  of  these  armoured  cars  were 
sent  abroad,  one  to  Russia  under  Com- 
mander Oliver  Locker-Lampson  and  one 
to  Egypt  under  the  Duke  of  Westminster. 

Sueter's  restless  brain,  not  content  with 
the  armotu'ed  car  design,  concentrated 
on  means  of  giving  it  a  cross-country 
capability  by  fitting  it  with  caterpillar 
tracks.  From  this  advance  it  was  a  short 
step  to  the  development  of  the  tank. 

With  the  appointment  of  an  officer  of 
flag  rank  in  September  1915  as  fifth  sea 
lord  with  responsibility  for  naval  aviation, 
Sueter  was  made  superintendent  of  air- 
craft construction  with  full  responsibility 
for  the  materiel  side  of  all  naval  aircraft. 
At  the  same  time  he  was  promoted 
commodore  1st  class.  But  in  1917,  after 
some  differences  of  opinion  with  the  Board 
of  Admiralty,  he  was  sent  to  southern 
Italy  to  command  the  R.N.A.S.  units 
there.  Later  in  the  year  Sueter  wrote  a 
letter  to  King  George  V  on  the  subject  of 
recognition  of  his  work,  and  that  of  two 
other  officers  associated  with  him,  in 
initiating  the  idea  of  tanks.  This  was 
passed  to  the  Admiralty  in  the  normal 
manner  and  roused  considerable  resent- 
ment. Sueter  was  informed  that  he  had 
incurred  their  lordships'  severe  displeasure 


940 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Sullivan 


and  relieved  of  his  command.  He  returned 
to  England  in  January  1918  and  despite 
his  protests  no  further  employment  was 
found  for  him.  He  was  placed  on  the 
retired  list  early  in  1920  and  shortly 
afterwards  the  Admiralty  obtained  a 
special  order  in  Council  to  promote  him 
to  rear-admiral. 

Sueter  was  gifted  with  a  restless  brain 
which  he  used  skilfully  and  effectively  to 
suggest  means  of  overcoming  difficulties, 
both  technical  and  professional.  He  was 
always  outspoken,  and  intolerant  of 
official  lethargy  in  any  matter  in  which 
he  took  an  interest.  It  was  this  intolerance, 
allied  to  a  headstrong  character,  which 
brought  to  an  end  a  naval  career  of 
considerable  future  promise. 

After  the  war  Sueter  did  much  useful 
work  in  the  development  of  the  Empfa-e 
air  mail  postal  services,  and  he  received 
the  thanks  of  three  successive  postmasters- 
general  for  his  assistance  in  organizing 
these  services.  In  1921  he  was  elected  an 
independent  member  of  Parliament  for 
Hertford,  remaining  a  member  as  a  Con- 
servative until  the  general  election  of  1945. 
He  was  knighted  in  1934.  In  1928  he 
wrote  Airmen  or  Noahs,  largely  auto- 
biographical but  also  attacking  current 
concepts  of  naval  and  miUtary  warfare 
and  advocating  the  development  of  inde- 
pendent air  power.  It  was  followed  in  1937* 
by  The  Evolution  of  the  Tank. 

Sueter  married  in  1903  EHnor  Mary  de 
Winton  (died  1948),  only  daughter  of  Sir 
Andrew  Clarke  [q.v.],  and  had  two  daugh- 
ters. He  died  at  his  home  at  Watlington, 
Oxfordshire,  3  February  1960.  A  portrait 
by  (Sir)  WiUiam  Russell  Flint  was  exhibi- 
ted at  the  Royal  Academy  in  1928. 

[Admiralty  records ;  The  Times,  5  February 
I960.]  P.  K.  Kemp. 

SULLIVAN,  ALEXANDER  MARTIN 
(1871-1959),  barrister,  was  born  at  Bel- 
field,  Drumcondra,  Dublin,  14  January 
1871,  the  second  son  of  Alexander  Martin 
SulUvan  [q.v.],  one  of  the  founders  of  the 
Home  Rule  League  and  proprietor  and 
editor  of  the  Nation  after  (Sir)  Charles 
Gavan  Duffy  [q.v.]  had  left  for  AustraUa. 
He  was  educated  at  Ushaw,  Belvedere, 
and  Trinity  College,  Dublin,  and  in  early 
life  worked  as  a  journaUst  on  the  Dublin 
Evening  News,  contributing  also  to  the 
Nation  and  the  Weekly  News.  He  was 
called  to  the  Irish  bar  in  1892  and,  having 
joined  the  Middle  Temple,  to  the  Enghsh 
bar  in  1899,  taking  silk  in  Ireland  in  1908 
and  in  England  in  1919.  He  was  third 


King's  Serjeant  in  Ireland  (1912),  second 
Serjeant  (1913),  and  first  Serjeant,  the 
last  to  hold  office  (1920) ;  he  continued  to 
use  the  title  by  courtesy  after  he  left 
Ireland  and  practised  exclusively  at  the 
English  bar. 

Sullivan's  rise  at  the  Irish  bar  was  rapid ; 
since  in  Ireland  there  was  little  tendency 
to  speciahze  in  common  law  or  Chancery 
work,  he  acquired  familiarity  with  both, 
although  his  style  of  advocacy  was  better 
suited  to  the  former.  His  professional 
background  and  experiences  in  a  system 
free  and  easy  in  its  personal  contacts  and 
far  less  technically  rigid  than  the  English 
are  vividly  recreated  in  his  two  books  of 
reminiscences  Old  Ireland  (1927)  and  The 
Last  Serjeant  (1952). 

From  childhood  Sullivan,  through  his 
father,  family,  and  friends,  had  been 
strongly  attached  to  the  Irish  Nationalist 
Party  and  its  constitutional  methods. 
In  the  long  crisis  of  violence  which  began 
with  the  Easter  Rising  of  1916  he  was 
uncompromisingly  opposed  to  the  physical 
force  and  terrorism  of  Sinn  Fein,  which  he 
regarded  as  no  better  than  that  of  the 
Black  and  Tans.  As  violence  developed 
he  played  an  active  and  courageous  part 
in  the  courts  in  striving  as  he  saw  it  to 
maintain  order  through  the  established 
forms  of  administration  of  justice.  In 
January  1920  an  attempt  was  made  on 
his  life  near  Tralee  and  later  shots  were 
fired  at  a  railway  carriage  in  which  he  was 
travelling. 

After  the  establishment  of  the  Free 
State  in  1922  Sullivan  moved  to  England 
where  he  was  already  well  known  for  his 
brave  defence  of  Sir  Roger  Casement 
[q.v.]  in  1916,  which  he  had  undertaken 
out  of  a  sense  of  professional  duty, 
although  he  personally  was  strongly 
opposed  to  the  accused.  He  was  warmly 
received  at  the  Enghsh  bar,  became  a 
bencher  of  the  Middle  Temple  in  1925, 
and  served  as  treasurer  in  1944,  the  year 
in  which  the  Queen  was  admitted  as  a 
bencher.  Tall  and  neatly  bearded,  Sulhvan 
was  an  impressive  figure  in  the  courts, 
fiercely  independent  and  zealous  for  his 
cUents'  rights  to  the  point  of  personal 
recklessness.  He  was  a  profound  and 
learned  lawyer  with  a  superb  memory, 
and  beneath  a  grave  demeanour  there  ran 
his  own  vein  of  ironical  wit.  Among  his 
best  known  cases  was  the  Ubel  action 
brought  by  Marie  Stopes  [q.v.]  against 
HalUday  Sutherland  [q.v.],  whom  Sulli- 
van, himself  a  devout  Roman  Cathohc,  suc- 
cessfully represented.  Hia  most  notorious 


949. 


Sullivan 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


client  was  W.  C.  Hobbs,  the  villain  of  the 
'Mr.  A'  case,  for  whom  he  appeared  in  his 
libel  actions  against  various  newspapers. 
In  these  proceedings  Sullivan  quarrelled 
bitterly  with  Lord  Chief  Justice  Hewart 
[q.v.]. 

After  the  Republic  of  Ireland  Act  of 
1949  Sullivan  considered  himself  an  alien 
disqualified  from  practising  at  the  English 
bar  and  retired  to  Dublin ;  but  he  retained 
his  house  at  Beckenham,  Kent,  where  he 
died  9  January  1959. 

)  In  1900  Sullivan  married  Helen  (died 
1952),  daughter  of  Major  John  D.  Keiley, 
of  Brooklyn,  New  York ;  they  had  five  sons 
and  seven  daughters.  One  of  the  daughters, 
Mrs.  Nora  Ambrose,  received  the  Queen's 
Commendation  for  bravery  for  tackling  an 
armed  robber  in  1967. 

Sullivan  figures  in  a  painting  of  the 
Casement  trial  by  Sir  John  Lavery  which 
is  in  the  President's  House  in  Phoenix 
Park. 

[The  Times,  10  January  1959 ;  Solicitors'' 
Journal,  16  January  1959 ;  Law  Times,  23 
January  1959 ;  Irish  Law  Times,  17  and  31 
January  1920,  31  January  1959;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

F.   H.    COWPER. 

SUMNER,    BENEDICT    HUMPHREY 

(1893-1951),  historian,  was  born  in  Lon- 
don 8  August  1893,  the  second  of  the  three 
sons,  in  a  family  of  five  children,  of  George 
Heywood  Maunoir  Sumner  and  his  wife, 
Agnes  Mary,  daughter  of  William  Benson, 
a  sister  of  Lord  Charnwood  and  Sir 
Frank  Benson  [qq.v.].  Heywood  Sumner, 
a  figure  of  patriarchal  dignity  and  the  son 
and  grandson  of  bishops  (his  father  was 
bishop  of  Guildford  and  his  grandfather 
was  C.  R.  Sumner  [q.v.],  bishop  of 
Winchester),  forsook  the  episcopal  tradi- 
tion for  art.  He  was  a  disciple  of  William 
Morris  [q.v.]  and  a  painter  who  in  later 
life  became  a  distinguished  archaeologist. 
Nevertheless  the  Barchester  atmosphere 
lingered  in  the  Sumner  household,  and 
Heywood's  mother,  the  foundress  of  the 
Mothers'  Union,  made  a  deep  impression 
on  her  five  grandchildren.  Sumner  went 
up  to  Balliol,  his  grandfather's  college, 
as  a  Brackenbury  scholar  from  Winches- 
ter in  1912,  but  his  career  there  was  inter- 
rupted by  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914. 
After  three  gruelling  years  as  an  officer 
in  the  King's  Royal  Rifle  Corps  he  was 
invalided  home  and  transferred  to  the 
directorate  of  military  intelligence  at  the 
War  Office  in  1917.  Thence  he  passed  to 
the  peace  conference,  and  from  1920  to 


1922  served  in  the  International  Labour 
Office.  In  1919  he  had  been  elected  to  a 
fellowship  at  All  Souls,  and  from  Geneva 
he  returned  to  Balliol  in  1922  to  serve  as 
fellow  (1925)  and  tutor  in  modern  history 
for  the  next  twenty  years. 

In  this  difficult  period  Sumner  was  a 
tower  of  strength  in  the  life  of  the  college. 
The  effects  of  the  war  upon  Oxford  were 
profound  and  to  many  disquieting.  The 
numbers  of  the  college  rose  steeply; 
accommodation,  staffing,  and  finance 
became  major  problems,  and  new  schools 
were  altering  the  traditional  balance 
between  the  humanities  and  the  sciences. 
The  teaching  load,  too,  was  very  heavy, 
and  in  this  Sumner,  despite  the  efforts  of 
his  colleagues,  carried  always  more  than 
his  proper  share.  His  life  as  a  tutor  was 
of  a  piece  with  the  whole  man — a  pro- 
digious capacity  for  work,  an  almost 
over-developed  conscientiousness,  and  an 
unusual  ability  for  assimilating  facts. 
In  teaching  he  distrusted  generalization 
and  disliked  epigram.  His  own  range  was 
immense,  and  if  he  set  both  himself  and 
his  pupils  an  unattainable  standard,  yet 
his  teaching  had  always  a  wide  horizon. 

In  scholarship,  his  personal  interests 
ran  to  contemporary  history,  and  he  was 
closely  concerned  with  the  inception  and 
development  of  the  (Royal)  Institute  of 
International  Affairs  at  Chatham  House. 
He  had  already  begun  to  learn  Russian 
while  at  school,  and  characteristically 
published  little  until  he  had  achieved  a 
mastery  unique  in  this  country  in  his 
chosen  subject.  Then  in  1937  he  published 
a  large  book  on  Russia  and  the  Balkans, 
a  work  of  patient  learning,  which  was  to 
be  his  chief  contribution  to  history.  He 
followed  this  up  in  1944  with  his  more 
popular  Survey  of  Russian  History,  which 
went  into  two  editions,  and  though  not 
easy  reading  was  soon  recognized  as  the 
safest  guide  yet  written  to  Russian 
history.  In  1945  he  was  elected  to  the 
British  Academy,  and  four  years  later  he 
published  Peter  the  Great  and  the  Ottoman 
Empire  (1949),  a  short  but  original  work  of 
complicated  research ;  and  in  1950  his  last 
book,  Peter  the  Great  and  the  Emergence  of 
Russia,  which  has  been  described  as 
'much  the  best  short  account  of  its 
subject  in  English,  perhaps  in  any  lan- 
guage'. The  'immense  mass  of  ojdered 
material'  on  which  all  his  books,  whether 
learned  or  popular,  were  based  was  gained 
the  hard  way,  and  he  left  behind  him  a 
large  collection  of  notebooks  in  which, 
with   meticulous   thoroughness,    he   had 


942 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Sumner 


epitomized  the  most  fundamental  original 
works  on  Russian  history  of  all  periods 
The  early  years  at  Balliol  were  perhaps 
the  happiest  of  Sumner's  hfe.  Tall  and  wiry, 
a  great  pipe  smoker  and  a  keen  walker' 
he  was  the  very  centre  of  the  teaching  in 
modern  history  and  'Modern  Greats'.  He 
seemed  to  have  endless  reserves  of  strength 
and  energy  until,  in  the  year  1931,  a  per- 
forated appendix  involved  three  major 
operations.  He  made  an  excellent  re- 
covery, but  between  1939  and  1943  in  the 
midst  of  a  second  world  war,  he  came  near 
to  breaking  down  under  the  double  strain 
of  college  work  and  a  post  with  the  foreign 
research  and  press  department,  organized 
by  the  Royal  Institute  of  International 
Affairs,  which  was  then  located  in  Balliol 
College.  There  was  another  serious  opera- 
tion, due  to  ulcer  trouble ;  and  although 
he  again  made  a  good  recovery,  his  health, 
as  it  proved,  was  permanently  impaired. 
In  1944  he  was  induced  to  leave  Balliol 
for  the  less  exacting  position  of  professor  of 
history  at  Edinburgh,  but  only  to  return 
to  Oxford  in  the  course  of  the  next  year 
as  warden  of  All  Souls. 

Succeeding  Dr.  W.  G.  S.  Adams  on  his 
retirement,  Sumner  threw  himself  not 
only  into  the  task  of  building  up  All 
Souls  after  the  war,  but  also  of  ensuring 
its  co-operation  with  the  university.  In 
the  period  of  reconstruction,  he  was 
constantly  on  the  alert  that  the  college  by 
its  finance,  by  its  elections,  and  not  least 
by  its  hospitahty,  should  make  its  maxi- 
mum contribution,  while  retaining  its  dis- 
tinctive character  as  a  place  of  haison 
between  public  and  academic  hfe.  His 
efforts  won  general  confidence,  founded  as 
they  were  upon  the  respect  he  enjoyed  for 
his  farsighted  and  sober  judgement ;  while 
within  the  college  itself  his  consideration 
for  each  individual,  and  his  private  hospi- 
tality in  the  Lodgings,  which  owed  much 
to  his  sister  Beatrix,  made  a  lasting  im- 
pression. But  the  work  was  very  heavy, 
and  he  was  drawn  into  endless  committees, 
of  which  not  the  least  onerous  was  the 
University  Grants  Committee.  His  health 
began  to  fail.  He  was  often  confined  to  bed 
for  weeks  on  end,  and  there  was  another 
serious  operation.  For  the  last  time  he 
recovered :  but  a  new  illness  required  still 
another  operation,  faced  with  the  same 
imperturbability  as  the  others,  and  he 
died  in  hospital  in  Oxford  25  April  1951. 
He  was  unmarried. 

It  would  be  a  great  mistake  to  think 
that  Sumner's  last  years,  clouded  though 
they  were  by  ill  health,  were  imhappy. 


It  was  not  for  nothing  that  he  had  been 
nicknamed  'the  Emperor'  in  his  early 
days  at  All  Souls,  for  he  lived  on  a  very 
high  plane  and  was  above  all  that  is 
implied  by  ambition.  Much  more  might 
be  added  of  his  artistic  and  literary 
interests ;  and  more  especially  of  his  love 
of  Shakespeare  and  of  Dante,  on  whom 
he  published  two  papers.  He  delighted 
in  parodies  and  in  round  games  like  demon 
patience  (at  which  he  was  a  real  expert), 
and  he  was  a  valued  accession  at  nursery 
tea  in  the  houses  of  his  married  friends. 
Not  unnaturally,  as  a  student  of  Russia, 
he  took  a  prominent  part  in  the  affairs 
of  the  British  national  committee  of 
the  International  Congress  of  Historical 
Sciences,  and  he  strove  though  without 
success  to  be  allowed  to  entertain  Russian 
historians  in  Oxford. 

A  scholar's  life,  spent  largely  in  Oxford, 
is  naturally  uneventful,  and  Sumner  is 
especially  hkely  to  be  remembered  more  for 
what  he  was  than  for  what  he  did.  Even 
his  scholarship,  only  fully  appreciated 
since  his  death,  seemed  then  merely 
incidental.  His  influence — and  it  was  very 
great — was  essentially  that  of  a  com- 
manding personality  who  struck  all, 
friends  and  pupils  alike,  as  a  good  and 
a  great  man.  His  impenetrable  reserve, 
although  no  bar  to  friendship,  repelled 
intimacy,  and  it  was  only  on  the  rarest 
occasions  he  showed  by  a  sudden  forth- 
right judgement  the  strength  of  feeling 
that  underlay  his  iron  restraint.  Even  his 
friends  were  sometimes  tempted  to  sup- 
pose hidden  depths  of  repression  behind 
such  invariable  moderation ;  but  it  seems 
more  likely  that  he  was  a  man  moulded 
by  the  traditional  religious  influence  of  his 
childhood  against  which  he  never  rebelled. 
A  loyal  member  of  the  Church  of  England, 
he  delighted  in  its  liturgy,  and  as  warden 
the  details  of  every  special  college  service 
engaged  his  attention.  Here  too  he  some- 
times lifted  the  veil  of  his  reserve,  as 
when  he  wrote  to  an  old  Balliol  pupil: 
'Sheer  human  friendliness :  more  and  more, 
I  feel,  that  is  what  makes  life  deeply 
worth  while :  that,  and  the  ineffability  of 
God  keep  me  going  when  I  am  most 
despondent,  or  irritated  and  tired.' 

An  unfinished  portrait  by  Augustus 
John  and  a  bronze  bust  by  David  Wynne 
are  at  All  Souls  College. 

[The  Times,  26  April  1951;  Sir  Charles 
Webster  in  Proceedings  of  the  British  Acad- 
emy, vol.  xxxvii,  1951 ;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.] 

y.  H.  Galbraith. 


94a 


Sutherland 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


SUTHERLAND,  HALLIDAY  GIBSON 

(1882-1960),  physician,  author,  and  con- 
troversialist, was  born  in  Glasgow  24 
June  1882,  the  elder  son  of  John  Francis 
Sutherland,  M.D.,  deputy  commissioner 
for  lunacy  in  Scotland,  and  his  wife,  Jane, 
daughter  of  John  Mackay,  a  Free  Church 
minister  in  Caithness.  After  the  Glasgow 
High  School  and  Merchiston  Castle  School, 
Edinburgh,  he  studied  medicine  at  Edin- 
burgh University,  where  he  graduated 
M.B.,  Ch.B.  in  1906  and  M.D.  with 
honours  in  1908,  As  an  undergraduate, 
Sutherland  was  a  leading  debater  and 
prominent  personality  in  Liberal  politics, 
although  in  1945  it  was  as  a  Labour  candi- 
date that  he  stood  unsuccessfully  for  the 
Scottish  Universities. 

One  of  Sutherland's  Highland  relatives 
happened  to  be  in  medical  practice  at  the 
Rio  Tinto  mines  at  Huelva  in  Spain  where 
Sutherland  spent  some  time  learning  many 
things,  including  the  rudiments  of  bull- 
fighting— knowledge  which  he  later  de- 
veloped imaginatively  in  one  of  his  books. 

Soon  after  graduation,  Sutherland 
came  under  the  influence  of  (Sir)  Robert 
William  Philip,  pioneer  of  modern  anti- 
tuberculosis schemes,  on  whose  model  in 
1911  he  opened  a  tuberculosis  dispensary 
in  St.  Marylebone,  London.  It  included  the 
original  feature  of  an  open-air  school, 
conducted  in  the  bandstand  of  Regent's 
Park.  He  also  produced  a  cinema  film 
on  tuberculosis  which  was  probably  the 
first  health  education  film  in  this  country. 
In  1911  Sutherland  edited  a  remarkable 
compilation  of  tributes  to  Philip's  work 
from  pupils  all  over  the  world.  Brought 
to  the  attention  of  a  prime  minister's  wife, 
the  volume  gained  Philip  a  knighthood 
and  secured  official  approval  for  his  tuber- 
culosis schemes  in  which  Sutherland 
played  a  leading  part. 

War  service  in  the  Royal  Navy  and  the 
Royal  Air  Force  interrupted  his  career. 
He  used  the  opportunity  to  write  a  text- 
book on  Pulmonary  Tuberculosis  (1916). 
Although  planned  before  the  war,  it  was 
actually  written  near  the  equator  when 
he  was  medical  officer  in  the  armed  mer- 
chant cruiser  Empress  of  Britain. 

On  returning  to  practise  in  London, 
Sutherland  became  physician  to  St. 
Marylebone  (later  St.  Charles')  Hospital, 
Ladbroke  Grove,  and  assistant  physician 
to  the  Royal  Chest  Hospital.  Between 
1920  and  1925  he  was  deputy  commis- 
sioner (tuberculosis)  for  the  south-west  of 
England,  and  then  joined  the  medical 
service,  of  the  London  County  Council. 


Sutherland's  many-sided  personality 
was  now  ripe  for  new  expression.  In  1920 
he  had  married  and  become  a  Roman 
Catholic.  It  happened  that  a  book  by 
Marie  Stopes  [q.v.]  called  Married  Love, 
published  in  1918,  had  made  birth  control 
a  lively  public  issue,  and  Sutherland 
plunged  into  controversy,  attacking  the 
practice  on  sociological  and  religious 
grounds.  The  subject  was  new  and  shock- 
ing, and  Sutherland  became  an  unin- 
hibited and  pungent  critic.  He  asserted 
in  his  book  Birth  Control,  a  Statement 
of  Christian  Doctrine  (1922)  that  it  was 
truly  amazing  that  this  monstrous  cam- 
paign of  birth  control  should  be  tolerated 
by  the  home  secretary,  and  that  Charles 
Bradlaugh  [q.v.]  had  been  condemned  to 
jail  for  a  less  serious  crime.  Dr.  Stopes, 
herself  no  mean  controversialist,  sued 
him  for  libel.  After  prolonged  litigation, 
Sutherland's  defence  to  this  action  was 
upheld  by  the  House  of  Lords  (1924)  and 
the  case  became  a  leading  one  in  the 
English  law  of  defamation.  His  opponent 
described  Sutherland  as  'the  most  cocksure 
man  in  the  British  Empire'.  This  self- 
confidence  was  both  his  strength  and  a 
limitation.  He  never  had  any  doubts.  He 
could  produce  an  impressive  argument, 
but  it  did  not  always  seem  convincing. 
In  truth,  he  was  more  temperamentally 
fitted  for  law  or  politics  than  for  medicine, 
in  which  his  reputation  never  maintained 
the  level  of  a  brilliant  beginning.  In  1941 
he  became  deputy  medical  officer  of  health 
for  Coventry,  and  in  1943  started  the  Mass 
Radiography  Centre  in  Birmingham  which 
he  directed  imtil  1951.  He  also  spent 
periods  of  general  medical  practice  in 
north  London. 

In  the  meantime  he  had  made  his  name 
as  a  writer,  publishing  in  1933  a  very 
readable  volume  of  reminiscences.  The 
Arches  of  the  Years,  a  title  taken  from  'The 
Hound  of  Heaven'  by  Francis  Thompson 
[q.v.].  Enormously  successful,  it  ran  to 
thirty-two  English  editions,  and  was 
translated  into  eight  languages.  It  was 
followed  by  further  anecdotal  auto- 
biographies— A  Time  to  Keep  (1934),  In 
My  Path  (1936),  Lapland  Journey  (1938), 
Hebridean  Journey  (1939),  Southward 
Journey  (1942),  Spanish  Journey  (1948), 
and  Irish  Journey  (1956).  Sutherland's 
great  theme  was  himself.  When  describing 
his  triumphs  or  misadventures,  with 
doctors,  with  bullfighters,  or  in  the  law 
coiuls,  his  style  is  terse,  emphatic,  and 
very  sympathetic.  He  explored  no  new 
pathways  of  human  experience,  but  his 


944 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Swinburne 


idiosyncrasies  and  pugnacious  judgements 
were  highly  entertaining. 

Sutherland  had  red  hair  and  blue  eyes. 
He  was  thickset  and  not  very  tall.  Touches 
of  humour  came  through  his  ceremonious 
and  resonant  tones  of  voice  in  which  there 
were  echoes  of  the  pulpit.  He  was  indeed 
gifted  with  his  mother's  Highland  tempera- 
ment and  his  grandfather's  Free  Church 
fervour.  Courage  and  provocative  wit 
gained  him  friends  but  also  enemies. 

In  1920  Sutherland  married  Muriel, 
daughter  of  John  Frederick  Fitzpatrick, 
the  managing  director  of  a  City  firm  of 
oriental  importers.  They  had  five  sons 
and  one  daughter.  He  was  made  a  knight 
conmiander  of  the  Order  of  Isabel  the 
Catholic  in  1954  and  died  in  London  19 
April  1960.  There  is  in  the  possession  of 
the  family  an  oil  portrait  by  an  Australian 
artist. 

[The  Times,  20  April  1960 ;  Bntish  Medical 
Journal  and  Lancet y  30  April  1960 ;  personal 
knowledge.]  Haeley  Williams. 

SWINBURNE,  Sir  JAMES,  ninth  baronet 
(1858-1958),  pioneer  of  electrical  en- 
gineering and  of  plastics,  was  born  in 
Inverness  28  February  1858,  the  third  of 
the  six  sons  of  Lieutenant  (later  Captain) 
Thomas  Anthony  Swinburne,  R.N.,  and 
his  wife,  Mary  Anne,  daughter  of  Captain 
Edward  Eraser  of  Gortuleg.  A  descendant 
of  the  second  baronet,  Swinburne  suc- 
ceeded ra  kinsman  in  1934.  Much  of  his 
childhood  was  spent  in  the  lonely  little 
island  of  Eilean  Shona  in  Loch  Moidart, 
where  the  servants  and  the  children  all 
spoke  GaeUc.  He  was  educated  at  CHfton 
College  which  was  particularly  strong  on 
the  science  side;  then  apprenticed  to  a 
locomotive  works  in  Manchester  where  he 
developed  his  remarkable  inherent  skill 
with  his  hands.  Later  he  went  to  a 
Tyneside  engineering  firm  and  became 
interested  in  the  rising  electrical  industry. 
In  1881  (Sir)  Joseph  Swan  [q.v.]  engaged 
him  to  establish  a  lamp  factory  in  Paris 
and  in  the  next  year  he  went  to  America 
on  a  similar  mission.  For  some  three  years 
after  1885  he  worked  as  technical  assis- 
tant and  later  manager  in  the  dynamo 
works  of  R.  E.  B.  Crompton  [q.v.]  and  it 
was  during  this  time  that  he  invented  a 
watt-hour  meter  and  his  well-known 
hedgehog  transformer.  Then  he  set  up  as  a 
consultant,  moving  in  1894  to  Victoria 
Street  where  he  had  his  own  beautifully 
equipped  workshop  and  a  chemical  and 
physical  laboratory. 

Swinburne's  contribution  to  the  early 


development  of  electrical  engineering 
included  work  on  the  theories  of  dynamo 
design,  of  armature  reaction  in  direct  cur- 
rent machines  and  in  alternating  current 
dynamos  and  motors,  and  of  alterna- 
ting-current measuring  instruments;  he 
worked  also  on  Clark's  standard  cells; 
investigated  the  action  of  various  kinds 
of  secondary  batteries  with  lead  and 
other  electrodes;  and  questions  of  high 
vacua  and  methods  of  measuring  very 
small  pressures.  It  was  he  who  coined 
the  words  *rotor'  and  *stator'.  He  was 
president  of  the  Institution  of  Electrical 
Engineers  (1902-3)  and  of  the  Faraday 
Society  (1909-11),  and  was  recognized  as 
one  of  the  leading  authorities  of  the 
electrical  industry.  He  was  elected  F.R.S. 
in  1906. 

Swinburne's  professional  interests  were 
not  confined  to  electrical  engineering.  In 
1904  he  published  a  useful  book  on 
Entropy,  or  Thermodynamics  from  an 
Engineer's  Standpoint.  Much  of  his  re- 
search work  -^as  intimately  connected 
with  the  appUcation  of  physics  and 
chemistry  to  industrial  purposes  and  he 
was  particularly  susceptible  to  any  sug- 
gestion for  the  development  of  new  mat- 
erials. It  was  he  who  suggested  that  lamp 
filaments  and  artificial  silk  might  be  made 
from  viscose ;  he  had  a  share  in  the  syndi- 
cate manufacturing  artificial  silk  which 
not  long  afterwards  was  taken  over  by 
Courtaulds.  On  seeing  an  interesting  but 
useless  specimen  of  resin  obtained  from 
the  reaction  between  phenol  and  formal- 
dehyde, he  came  to  the  conclusion  that 
something  useful  could  be  made,  and 
formed  a  syndicate  to  investigate  the 
process.  When  he  sought^to  file  his  patent 
in  1907  he  found  that  he  had  been  anti- 
cipated by  the  Belgian  chemist,  tL,  H. 
Baekeland,  working  in  the  United  States, 
who  thus  swept  the  soUd  field.  But  Swin- 
burne was  successful  in  making  a  lacquer 
and  in  1910  estabUshed  the  Damard 
Lacquer  Company  in  Birmingham.  Even- 
tually Baekeland  bought  the  Damard  and 
other  companies  and  established  Bakelite, 
Ltd.,  in  Great  Britain  (1926),  making 
Swinburne  its  first  chairman,  in  which  office 
he  continued  until  1948,  remaining  on  the 
board  imtil  1951  when  he  became  honorary 
life  president.  He  was  prewdent  of  the 
Plastics  Institute  in  1937-8. 

On  the  occasion  of  Swinburne's  hun- 
dredth birthday,  Mr.  Justice  Lloyd-Jacob 
in  the  Chancery  division  paid  tribute  to 
the  tremendous  contribution  which  he  had 
made  to  patent  jurisprudence.   Over   a 


945 


Swinburne 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


long  period  he  was  greatly  in  demand  as 
an  expert  witness  in  fields  which  extended 
far  beyond  those  of  electrical  engineering 
and  included  such  diverse  inventions  as 
pneumatic  tyres,  soda  syphons,  and  golf 
balls.  Given  with  candour  and  humour, 
his  evidence  was  unshakeable  and  com- 
pletely honest.  He  himself  filed  123  patents. 
His  vigour  was  as  remarkable  as  the 
range  of  his  interests  which  included 
paper-bag  machinery  and  naval  gunnery ; 
raising  bullion  from  the  Egypt^  organ- 
building,  and  the  work  of  the  Royal 
Musical  Association ;  sociology,  and  horo- 
logy to  which  he  returned  as  a  hobby  in  the 
years  of  his  retirement.  A  man  of  great  in- 
tegrity, Swinburne  was  quite  unimpressed 
by  himself  and  never  alluded  to  his  own 
achievements.  He  was  usually  laconic  in 
speech  but  could  be  a  good  talker  and  was 
an  excellent  listener.  His  sense  of  humour 
was  acute;  he  could  be  scathing  but 
rarely  was;  seldom  lost  his  temper,  and 
gave  the  impression  of  complete  im- 
perturbability. He  neither  smoked  nor 
drank  and  had  a  lifelong  sympathy  with 
poor  people  deriving  from  his  apprentice 
days  when  he  had  little  money.  He  was  of 
medium  height,  very  good  looking,  and 
had  the  courteous  manners  of  a  Victorian 
gentleman  at  his  best. 

In  1886  Swinburne  married  Ellen  (died 
1893),  daughter  of  Robert  Harrison 
Wilson,  doctor,  of  Gateshead-upon-Tyne, 
by  whom  he  had  three  sons,  the  second 
of  whom,  Spearman  Charles  (1893-1967, 
the  survivor  of  twins),  succeeded  as  tenth 
baronet.  In  1898  he  married  Lilian 
Gilchrist  (died  1964),  daughter  of  (Sir) 
Thomas  Godfrey  Carey,  bailiff  of  Guernsey 
(1895-1902),  by  whom  he  had  two 
daughters.  He  died  in  Bournemouth  30 
March  1958,  the  third  fellow  of  the  Royal 
Society  to  live  to  be  over  a  hundred  years 
old;  the  second  was  H.  N.  Ridley,  also 
noticed  in  this  volume. 

There  is  a  portrait  by  T.  C.  Dugdale  in 
the  possession  of  the  family. 

[F.  A.  Freeth  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  v.  1959; 
New  Scientist,  27  February  1958;  Journal 
of  the  Plastics  Institute,  Jidy  1958 ;  Journal 
of  the  Institution  of  Electrical  Engineers,  May 
1958 ;  M.E.S.  and  K.R.S.,  Sir  Joseph  Wilson 
Swan  F.R.S.,  1929;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  F.  A.  Freeth. 

SWINTON,     Sir    ERNEST     DUNLOP 

(1868-1951),  major-general,  was  born  in 
Bangalore,  Mysore,  21  October  1868,  the 
fourth  son  of  Robert  Blair  Swinton,  a 


judge  in  the  Madras  civil  service,  and  his 
wife,  Elizabeth  Dorothy  Rundall,  daugh- 
ter of  a  business  man  in  India.  He  was 
educated  at  University  College  School, 
Rugby,  Cheltenham,  and  Blackheath 
Proprietary  School  before  passing  into  the 
Royal  Military  Academy,  Woolwich.  In 
1888  he  was  commissioned  in  the  Royal 
Engineers  and  he  spent  five  years  in  India 
before  being  appointed  in  1896  assistant 
instructor  in  fortification  at  the  school 
of  military  engineering,  Chatham.  Soon 
after  the  outbreak  of  the  South  African 
war  he  was  sent  out  for  bridging  duties 
on  railways  and  became  adjutant  to  and 
later  commanded  the  1st  battalion  Rail- 
way Pioneer  Regiment,  an  irregular  unit. 
He  was  appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  in  1900 
and  remained  on  railway  work  throughout 
the  war. 

Swinton  had  a  marked  tactical  bent, 
combined  with  literary  talent,  and  trans- 
muted the  results  of  his  observation  and 
reflection  into  a  stimulating  and  amusing 
little  treatise  on  minor  tactics  cast  in 
fictional  form,  and  reprinted  in  1904  from 
the  United  Service  Magazine  under  the 
title  The  Defence  of  Duffer's  Drift  and  the 
pseudonym  'Backsight  Forethought'.  It 
soon  came  to  be  widely  recommended  to 
young  officers  as  simple  to  read  and  easy 
to  assimilate.  It  ran  through  many  edi- 
tions, was  published  in  numerous  coun- 
tries, and  was  still  much  used  during  the 
war  of  1939-45.  Subsequently  Swinton 
wrote  a  series  of  superb  stories  dealing 
with  future  warfare,  particularly  with 
its  psychological  aspects,  pubUshed  as 
The  Green  Curve  (1909)  under  the  pseud- 
onym 'Ole  Luk-Oie',  a  Danish  term 
meaning,  roughly,  'Shut-Eye'.  It  likewise 
had  a  wide  and  long  circulation.  A  further 
volume  of  stories.  The  Great  Tab  Dope, 
was  published  in  1915. 

Meanwhile,  Swinton  served  on  the 
engineer  side  of  the  War  Office,  was 
promoted  major  in  1906,  and  in  1907 
became  chief  instructor  in  fortification 
and  geometrical  drawing  at  the  Royal 
Military  Academy,  Woolwich.  In  1910 
he  was  posted  to  the  historical  section  of 
the  Committee  of  Imperial  Defence  and 
employed  on  the  British  official  history  of 
the  Russo-Japanese  war,  for  which  he  was 
awarded  the  Chesney  gold  medal  of  the 
Royal  United  Service  Institution.  In  1913 
he  was  made  assistant  secretary  of  the 
Committee  of  Imperial  Defence. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  Swinton 
was  appointed  deputy  director  of  railway 
transport  but  was  soon  diverted,  by  choice 


946 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Swinton 


of  Lord  Kitchener  [q.v.],  to  be  a  kind 
of  official  war  correspondent  with  the 
expeditionary  force,  reporting  under  the 
pen-name  'Eyewitness'  when  Joffre's 
ban  on  press  correspondents  in  the  war 
zone  aroused  growing  pubUc  complaint 
about  lack  of  information.  While  the 
official  position  was  a  handicap  on  frank 
comment,  Swinton's  reports  were  well 
enough  written  to  appease  public  clamour 
for  a  time.  Far  more  important,  however, 
was  the  opportunity  it  provided  for 
fresh  thought  based  on  close  observation. 
He  was  quick  to  perceive  the  trench 
deadlock,  even  as  it  developed,  from  the 
growing  defensive  domination  of  the 
the  machine-gun  in  conjunction  with 
trenches  and  wire  entanglements. 

In  his  book  Eyewitness  (1932)  Swinton 
tells  the  story  of  how  the  solution  of  the 
problem  came  to  him.  The  vague  idea 
of  an  armoured  vehicle  crystallized  into 
the  more  definite  idea  that  it  should  be 
'capable  of  destroying  machine-guns,  of 
crossing  country  and  trenches,  of  breaking 
through  entanglements,  and  of  climbing 
earthworks'.  Later  in  the  book  Swinton 
refers  to  'The  Land  Ironclads',  a  prophetic 
story  by  H.  G.  Wells  [q.v.]  in  1903,  but 
says:  'I  had  read  this  story  when  it 
first  came  out,  but  had  looked  upon  it 
as  a  pure  phantasy  and  had  entirely 
forgotten  it.'  It  is  reasonable  to  surmise 
that  the  impression  had  remained  in  his 
subconscious  mind — as  it  had  in  others. 

Swinton's  account  relates  that  on  20 
October  1914,  during  a  brief  visit  to 
London,  he  went  to  see  his  erstwhile 
chief,  Maurice  (later  Lord)  Hankey, 
secretary  of  the  Committee  of  Imperial 
Defence,  described  the  stalemate  on  the 
western  front,  reminded  him  of  the  Holt 
caterpillar  tractor,  and  suggested  that 
some  of  these  tractors  might  be  converted 
into  fighting  machines.  Although  the 
prime  minister  was  interested,  the  idea 
was  rebuffed  in  high  military  quarters 
but  was  seized  upon  by  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill,  then  first  lord  of  the  Admiralty, 
who  had  already  ordered  experiments 
with  a  trench-crossing  machine  to  be 
carried  out  by  the  Royal  Naval  Air 
Service  armoured  car  force.  In  February 
1915  he  set  up  a  'landships  committee' 
under  (Sir)  Eustace  Tennyson-d'Eyncourt 
[q.v.],  but  the  machine  envisaged  was 
primarily  for  transporting  troops  forward. 

The  failure  of  the  alUed  offensives  in  the 
spring  of  1915  now  gained  more  support 
for  Swinton  who  had  been  fostering  his 
suggestion  at  G.H.Q.  At  the  beginning 


of  June  1915  he  defined  his  proposals  in 
a  memorandum  wliich  made  a  consider- 
able impression  despite  the  engineer-in- 
chief's  caustic  comment  that  'before 
considering  this  proposal  we  should 
descend  from  the  realms  of  imagination 
to  solid  facts'.  Later  that  month  Swinton 
submitted  specific  details  of  the  conditions 
to  be  fulfilled  including  the  ability  to 
surmount  a  parapet  5  feet  high  and 
cross  a  trench  up  to  8  feet  wide.  He  also 
provided  a  clear  picture  of  how  these 
armoured  machine-gun  destroyers  should 
be  used  in  battle. 

A  fresh  threat  to  the  project  had  been 
caused  on  the  formation  of  a  coaUtion 
Government  by  Churchill's  departure 
from  the  Admiralty.  But  his  successor, 
Arthur  Balfour,  took  a  sympathetic 
interest,  preserving  the  experimental 
detachment  which  the  sea  lords  wanted 
to  disband,  and  it  received  powerful 
backing  from  Lloyd  George  in  the  new 
post  of  minister  of  munitions.  Swinton's 
memoranda  were  forwarded  by  Sir  John 
French  (later  the  Earl  of  Ypres,  q.v.) 
and  with  the  newly  gained  support  of 
G.H.Q.  the  landships  committee  was 
converted  into  a  joint  naval  and  miUtary 
body.  Fresh  impetus  came  from  its  secre- 
tary, (Sir)  Albert  Stern,  as  well  as  con- 
tinued efforts  from  (Sir)  Murray  Sueter 
[q.v.]  the  leading  enthusiast  on  the  naval 
side. 

In  July  1915  Swinton  was  brought 
back  to  London,  at  Hankey's  instigation, 
to  act  as  secretary  to  the  Dardanelles 
committee  of  the  Cabinet  while  Hankey 
went  out  to  visit  that  theatre.  Swinton 
was  thus  well  placed  to  follow  up  his 
memoranda  and  co-ordinate  activities. 
Before  the  end  of  the  month  a  definite 
contract  was  placed,  with  Foster's  of 
Lincoln,  and  early  in  September  a 
prototype  emerged  from  the  workshop, 
designed  by  (Sir)  William  Tritton  and 
Lieutenant  (later  Major)  W.  G.  Wilson 
[qq.v.].  The  first  two  trials  of  'Little 
Willie'  were  disappointing  but  by  the 
time  of  the  second  (19  September)  Tritton 
and  Wilson  had  produced  a  fresh  design 
and  mock-up  of  such  obvious  promise 
that  it  was  promptly  adopted:  'Big 
Willie'  also  came  to  be  called  'Mother' 
and  for  camouflage  it  was  given  in 
December,  at  Swinton's  suggestion,  the 
generic  name  'tank'.  A  demonstration  for 
ministers  and  higher  generals  was  held 
on  2  February  1916  which  greatly  im- 
pressed most  of  them  although  Kitch- 
ener dubbed  it  'a  pretty  mechanical  toy' 


947 


Swinton 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


which  would  quickly  be  knocked  out 
by  the  enemy's  artillery.  G.H.Q.  asked  for 
forty  machines;  on  Swintpn's  initiative 
the  figure  was  raised  to  a  hundred; 
Sueter  thought  the  figure  'should  be 
three  thousand. 

A  start  in  providing  personnel  to  man 
the  tanks  was  made  by  appointing 
Swinton  as  commander,  but  it  was  made 
clear  to  him  that  he  was  only  to  train  the 
new  force  and  that  once  it  reached  France 
it  would  be  placed  under  the  local 
commanders.  The  force  was  initially 
entitled  the  Heavy  Section,  then  Heavy 
Branch,  Machine  Gun  Corps,  and  in  July 
1917  re-entitled  the  Tank  Corps. 

In  February  1916  Swinton  completed 
his  lengthy  'Notes  on  the  Employment 
of  Tai3cs'.  Unfortunately  some  of  the 
keypoints  were  ignored  in  the  planning 
of  operations  in  France  until  the  epoch- 
making  Cambrai  offensive  of  November 
1917.  In  April  1916  Swinton  saw  Sir 
Douglas  (later  Earl)  Haig  [q.v.]  in 
London  who  expressed  agreement  with 
the  memorandum  but  then  asked  if  he 
could  have  some  tanks  for  the  coming 
summer  offensive  on  the  Somme.  Swinton 
swallowed  his  own  inclination  to  protest 
against  the  premature  use  and  conse- 
quent disclosure  of  the  new  secret  weapon. 
Under  further  pressure,  after  the  tragic 
opening  failure  of  the  offensive  on  1  July, 
some  fifty  tanks  were  sent  over  to  France 
in  August  with  semi-trained  crews, 
and  used  in  the  renewed  attack  of  15 
September.  In  places  they  had  a  startling 
effect,  but  this  was  naturally  limited  by 
their  small  number  and  the  shortness  of 
training,  while  the  enemy  was  alerted 
to  the  threat. 

When  Swinton  went  over  to  France 
early  in  October  1916  Haig  showed  more 
satisfaction  with  the  results  than  did 
most  of  his  subordinates.  Swinton  found 
that  the  detailed  organization  of  the  new 
arm  was  being  drafted,  without  reference 
to  him,  and  heard  privately  that  he  was 
to  be  superseded  even  at  home.  Shortly 
after  his  return  to  England  he  was  're- 
leased' to  retm-n  to  his  former  duties  in  the 
War  Cabinet  secretariat.  Thus  ended  the 
connection  between  the  new  force  and 
the  man  who  had  fathered  it,  until  in 
1934  he  was  chosen  to  be  colonel- 
commandant  of  the  Royal  Tank  Corps. 
By  that  time  the  significance  of  his 
early  services  had  come  to  be  better 
appreciated;  above  all  in  the  Corps 
itself. 

After  the  United  States  entered  the  war 


Swinton  accompanied  Lord  Reading  [q.v.] 
to  that  country  in  1917  and  again  in  1918 
when  he  was  given  the  temporary  rank  of 
major-general.  At  the  request  of  the  State 
Department  he  toured  the  country  speak- 
ing on  behalf  of  the  Third  Liberty  Loan. 
He  retired  from  the  army  in  1919  and  until 
1921  was  at  the  Air  Ministry  as  controller 
of  information  in  the  civil  aviation  depart- 
ment. For  the  next  three  years  he  devilled 
for  Lloyd  George  who  was  preparing  to 
write  his  war  memoirs.  He  also,  in  1922, 
became  a  director  of  the  Citroen  Company, 
an  appointment  which  he  retained  to  the 
end  of  his  life.  In  1925  Swinton  was  elected 
Chichele  professor  of  military  history  at 
Oxford  and  held  the  chair  until  1939.  He 
was  popular  in  All  Souls  common-room, 
where  his  humour  was  appreciated,  and  in 
the  university  generally,  although  he  left 
no  deep  mark  on  the  teaching.  He  had  been 
chosen  in  the  hope  that  his  lecturing  gift 
and  'Ole  Luk-Oie'  style  would  arouse 
interest  in  the  subject,  but  he  felt,  regret- 
tably, that  he  must  endeavour  to  be  more 
academic  and  discourse  upon  Clausewitz. 
But  he  had  made  his  own  indelible  mark 
on  the  history  of  warfare  by  his  pioneering 
work  in  the  origination  of  tanks  and 
armoured  forces.  He  was  appointed  C.B.  in 
1917  and  K.B.E.  in  1923. 

In  1897  Swinton  married  Grace  Louisa, 
second  daughter  of  his  second  cousin 
Major  (Sir)  Edward  Gilbert  Clayton, 
secretary  to  the  Prison  Commission. 
They  had  two  sons,  and  a  daughter  who 
was  killed  in  a  road  accident  during  the 
war  of  1939-45.  Swinton  died  in  Oxford 
15  January  1951. 

A  portrait  by  Eric  Kennington  is  in 
the  Royal  Tank  Regiment's  Officers* 
Club  in  London. 

[Sir  Ernest  Swinton,  Over  My  Shoulder, 
1951 ;  B.  H.  Liddell  Hart,  The  Tanks,  vol  i, 
1959 ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] B.  H.  LiDDEix  Hart, 

SYKES,      Sir     FREDERICK     HUGH 

(1877-1954),  chief  of  air  staff  and  governor 
of  Bombay,  was  born  in  Croydon,  Surrey, 
23  July  1877.  His  father,  Henry  Sykes, 
who  died  less  than  two  years  later,  was 
a  mechanical  engineer;  his  mother, 
Margaret  Sykes,  was  a  distant  cousin 
of  her  husband.  Sykes  had  'a  somewhat 
chequered  education':  five  years  at  a 
preparatory  school  on  the  south  coast; 
then  from  the  age  of  fifteen  two  years 
in  Paris  learning  French  in  the  hope  of  a 
diplomatic  career.  For  a  time  he  worked 
in  a  general  store  in  order  to  save  money. 


948 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


On  returning  to  London  he  entered  a 
shipping  firm;  then  spent  some  time 
working  on  tea  plantations  in  Ceylon, 
eventually  making  a  leisurely  return  to 
England  via  Burma,  China,  Japan,  and 
the  United  States. 

On  the  outbreak  of  the  South  African 
war,  Sykes  booked  a  passage  to  Cape 
Town  and  joined  the  Imperial  Yeomanry 
Scouts  as  a  trooper.  He  was  taken  prisoner 
by  C.  R.  De  Wet  [q.v.]  at  Roodevaal 
but  was  soon  released.  He  was  next 
commissioned  in  the  bodyguard  of  Lord 
Roberts  [q.v.]  and  was  wounded  diu-ing 
a  commando  raid  in  1901.  Later  in  the 
year  he  joined  the  regular  army  and  was 
gazetted  second  lieutenant  in  the  15th 
Hussars. 

He  served  in  India  and  West  Africa, 
was  promoted  captain  in  1908,  and  passed 
the  Staff  College  in  1909.  Very  early  on  he 
was  an  enthusiast  for  ballooning.  In  1910 
he  learned  to  fly  and  obtained  his  pilot's 
certificate  (No.  96)  in  1911.  In  1912  he  be- 
came commander  of  the  Military  Wing  of 
the  newly  founded  Royal  Flying  Corps. 
But  on  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  he  was 
considered  too  junior  to  command  the 
R.F.C.  in  action  abroad,  as  still  only  an 
acting  lieutenant-colonel.  The  command 
was  given  to  Sir  David  Henderson  [q.v.], 
previously  director-general  of  military 
aeronautics,  and  Sykes  served  as  his  chief 
of  staff.  He  was  succeeded  as  commander 
of  the  Military  Wing  by  Major  Hugh  (later 
Marshal  of  the  R.A.F.  Viscount)  Tren- 
chard  [q.v.].  The  two  men  were  deeply 
antipathetic,  and  a  bitter  argument  during 
the  takeover  set  the  keynote  to  their 
relationship  for  the  rest  of  Sykes's  military 
career. 

Trenchard's  hostility  was  soon  dis- 
played. In  November  1914  Sykes  was 
appointed  to  command  the  R.F.C.  in 
place  of  Henderson  who  was  promoted 
to  command  the  1st  division.  Meanwhile 
Trenchard  had  been  posted  to  France 
to  take  charge  of  one  of  the  new  opera- 
tional wings  into  which  the  R.F.C.  had 
been  divided.  As  soon  as  he  found  that 
he  was  to  be  under  Sykes  he  requested  to 
be  transferred  to  his  original  regiment. 
Lord  Kitchener  [q.v.]  intervened  to  insist 
upon  Henderson  and  Sykes  reverting  to 
their  previous  posts:  an  episode  not 
calculated  to  improve  relations. 

During  the  next  few  months  Henderson 
was  on  sick  leave  and  Sykes  acted  as 
his  deputy.  According  to  Trenchard, 
Henderson  came  to  the  conclusion  that 
Sykes    was    intriguing    to    replace    him. 


Sykes 

Whatever  the  truth  of  it,  the  upshot  was 
that  Henderson  developed  a  deep  dis- 
trust of  Sykes  who  was  sent  in  May  to 
Gallipoli  to  report  on  air  requirements 
there  and  in  July  was  given  command 
of  the  Royal  Naval  Air  Service  in  the 
Eastern  Mediterranean  when  the  GalUpoli 
campaign  was  at  its  height.  He  remained 
there  until  the  end,  carrying  out  his  task 
with  conspicuous  success  and  being 
appointed  C.M.G.  in  recognition. 

In  March  1916  Sykes  was  made  assis- 
tant adjutant  and  quartermaster-general 
of  the  4th  Mounted  division  at  Col- 
chester. In  June  he  became  assistant 
adjutant-general  at  the  War  Office  with 
the  task  of  organizing  the  Machine  Gun 
Corps.  In  February  1917  he  was  promoted 
temporary  brigadier-general  and  deputy 
director  of  organization  at  the  War  Office. 
At  the  end  of  the  year  he  joined  the 
planning  staff  of  the  Supreme  War 
Council  under  Sir  Henry  Wilson  [q.v.]. 
Meanwhile  the  Government,  on  the 
recommendation  of  J.  C.  Smuts  [q.v.], 
strongly  backed  by  Henderson  yet  oppo- 
sed by  Trenchard,  had  decided  to  create 
an  independent  air  force  with  its  own 
Ministry.  Nevertheless  Trenchard  became 
the  first  chief  of  air  staff,  under  Lord 
Rothermere  [q.v.],  the  first  air  minister; 
both  were  appointed  on  3  January  1918. 
Henderson  was  made  vice-president  of 
the  newly  formed  Air  Council. 

Trenchard  and  Rothermere  soon  quar- 
relled and  Trenchard  tendered  his  resig- 
nation on  19  March  but-  was  persuaded 
to  defer  it  until  after  the  official  birth 
of  the  Royal  Air  Force  on  1  April.  On 
13  April  Sykes,  promoted  to  major- 
general,  succeeded  him:  a  choice  inevi- 
tably controversial  in  these  circumstances ; 
Henderson  promptly  resigned  too.  The 
confusion  was  increased  by  Rothermere's 
own  resignation  which  took  effect  on  the 
25th.  He  paid  a  high  tribute  to  Sykes  in  his 
resignation  letter  as  'this  brilliant  officer 
with  his  singularly  luminous  mind  ...  an 
ideal  Chief  of  Staff  of  the  Royal  Air  Force'. 

Rothermere  was  succeeded  by  Sir 
William  (later  Viscount)  Weir  [q.v.] 
who  retained  the  post  until  the  end  of 
the  war.  Sykes  was  chief  of  staff  through- 
out this  significant  period  and  as  a 
convinced  supporter  of  an  independent 
air  force  did  much  to  establish  the  new 
Service.  His  post-war  plans,  however, 
were  regarded  as  too  grandiose  by  Weir's 
successor,  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill,  who 
from  January  1919  held  the  posts  of 
both  war  and  air  minister.  He  preferred 


949 


Sykes 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


those  of  Trenchard  whom  he  was  con- 
sulting behind  Sykes's  back.  In  February 
1919  Trenchard  again  became  chief  of 
air  staff  and  Sykes  was  shunted  into  the 
post  of  controller  of  civil  aviation.  One 
of  the  conditions  of  this  appointment  was 
that  he  gave  up  his  military  commission 
and  thus  ended  his  career  in  the  armed 
Services. 

In  1920  he  married  Isabel  (died  1969), 
elder  daughter  of  Andrew  Bonar  Law 
[q.v.] ;  they  had  one  son.  Sykes  resigned 
from  the  Air  Ministry  in  April  1922,  dis- 
satisfied with  the  financial  treatment  of 
civil  aviation.  He  was  offered  but  refused 
the  governorship  of  South  Australia,  and 
decided  to  enter  poUtics.  At  the  general 
election  of  1922  he  was  elected  Unionist 
member  for  the  Hallam  division  of 
Sheffield.  In  May  1923  he  conveyed  to  King 
George  V  his  father-in-law's  letter  of  resig- 
nation from  the  premiership.  He  retained 
his  parhamentary  seat  until  1928  when  he 
was  appointed  governor  of  Bombay. 

His  term  of  office  in  India  covered  a 
period  of  unprecedented  financial  diffi- 
culties and  political  and  industrial  unrest 
which  Sykes  faced  with  resolution  and  a 
patient  determination  to  improve  the  lot 
of  the  conmion  people.  He  would  have 
wished  for  greater  powers  to  deal  more 
promptly  and  effectively  with  civil  dis- 
obedience, but  was  loyal  in  conforming 
to  the  central  Government's  policy  of 
conciliation.  It  was  not  until  1932  that 
emergency  powers  were  granted;  then, 
with  civil  disobedience  on  the  decline, 
Sykes  was  able  to  give  attention  to  the 
social  and  economic  difficulties  which  he 
felt  to  be  the  real  problem  of  India. 
When  he  left  Bombay  in  1933  he  had  the 
satisfaction  of  knowing  that  the  outlook 
for  the  presidency  was  more  hopeful 
than  it  had  been  five  years  earlier. 

Sykes  was  again  in  Parliament  from 
1940  to  1945  as  Conservative  member 
for  the  Central  division  of  Nottingham. 
He  was  chairman  of  government  commit- 
tees on  meteorological  services  (1920-22), 
and  broadcasting  (1923),  of  the  Broad- 
casting Board  (1923-7),  of  the  Miners' 
Welfare  Conmiission  (1934-46),  of  the 
Royal  Empire  Society  (1938-41),  and 
for  many  years  honorary  treasurer  of  the 
British  Sailors'  Society.  He  was  also  a 
director  of  various  public  companies. 
His  autobiography.  From  Many  Angles^ 
was  published  in  1942.  He  died  in 
London  30  September  1954. 

Sykes  was  a  person  of  high  intelligence 
and  much  charm,  although  he  did  not 


thaw  very  easily.  He  was  clearly  a  most 
capable  administrator  but  his  contribution 
to  the  formative  period  of  the  air  force 
as  an  independent  arm  has  been  obscured 
by  the  hostility  between  him  and  some  of 
his  brother  officers,  Trenchard  especially, 
whose  opinions  subsequently  became 
gospel  in  the  Royal  Air  Force,  there- 
by conditioning  much  of  the  Service's 
historiography. 

Sykes  was  appointed  K.C.B.  and  G.B.E. 
in  1919,  G.C.I.E.  in  1928,  and  G.C.S.I.  in 
1934.  He  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council 
in  1928.  His  portrait,  painted  by  Sir 
William  Orpen  while  he  was  chief  of  air 
staff,  is  at  his  home,  Conock  Manor,  near 
Devizes.  A  bronze  bust  by  L.  F.  Roslyn  is 
in  the  Imperial  War  Museum. 

[Sir  Walter  Raleigh  and  H.  A.  Jones,  (Official 
History)  The  War  in  the  Air,  6  vols.,  1922-37 ; 
Sir  F.  Sykes,  From  Many  Angles,  1942 ;  Robert 
Blake,  The  Unknown  Prime  Minister,  1955 ; 
Lord  Beaverbrook,  Men  and  Power,  1956; 
Andrew  Boyle,  Trenchard,  1962;  Sir  Philip 
Joubert  de  la  Ferte,  The  Third  Service,  1955 ; 
W.  J.  Reader,  Architect  of  Air  Power:  the  Life 
of  the  first  Viscount  Weir  of  Eastwood,  1968 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Robert  Blake. 

TALLENTS,  Sir  STEPHEN  GEORGE 
(1884-1958),  civil  servant,  was  born  in 
London  20  October  1884,  the  eldest  son 
of  George  William  Tallents,  conveyancing 
barrister,  and  his  wife,  Mildred  Sophia, 
daughter  of  the  first  Baron  Ashcombe.  He 
was  descended  from  a  brother  of  Francis 
Tallents  [q.v.],  a  seventeenth-century  fel- 
low of  Magdalene  College,  Cambridge,  and 
through  his  mother  from  Thomas  Cubitt 
[q.v.],  who  designed  Osborne  and  the  east 
front  of  Buckingham  Palace  for  Queen 
Victoria,  and  died  leaving  over  a  million 
pounds  and  the  longest  will  then  on  record. 
Tallents  was  educated  at  Harrow 
where  his  father  had  been  (as  each  of 
his  two  younger  brothers  was  later) 
head  of  the  school.  At  Balliol  College, 
Oxford,  he  obtained  a  second  class  in 
both  classical  moderations  (1905)  and 
literae  humaniores  (1907).  After  a  short 
time  at  Grenoble,  then  at  Toynbee  Hall, 
he  entered  the  Civil  Service  in  April  1909 
and  was  posted  to  the  marine  department 
of  the  Board  of  Trade.  In  January  1911 
he  was  transferred  to  the  labour  exchanges 
and  unemployment  insurance  department, 
where  he  worked  with  William  (after- 
wards Lord)  Beveridge  and  Sir  Hubert 
Llewellyn  Smith  [q.v.].  In  January  1912 
he  was  put  in  charge  of  staff.  On  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1914  he  was  employed 


950 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Tallents 


with  Humbert  Wolfe  [q.v.]  in  a  con- 
tinuous night  and  day  shift  for  the 
rapid  recruitment  of  dockyard  labour. 

From  1903  until  1912  Tallents  had  held 
a  commission  in  the  Surrey  Yeomanry, 
but  in  1914  it  had  a  full  complement 
of  officers  and  in  September  he  joined 
instead  the  reserve  battalion  of  the 
Irish  Guards.  He  was  severely  wounded 
at  Festubert  in  May  1915,  but  not  before 
he  had  written  and  sent  home  a  3,000- 
word  pamphlet  *for  the  guidance  of 
platoon  commanders  in  the  trenches', 
which  was  later  adopted  by  the  War 
Office.  As  soon  as  he  had  discarded  his 
crutches  in  the  autumn  of  1915  he  was 
brought  by  his  old  chiefs  into  the  Ministry 
of  Munitions,  where  Lloyd  George  was 
minister.  He  was  concerned  in  the  struggle 
with  the  War  Office  to  secure  exemption 
from  military  service  for  genuine  munition 
workers ;  and  in  the  course  of  this  conflict 
on  one  occasion,  although  dressed  only  as 
a  subaltern  in  the  Irish  Guards,  he  with- 
stood Lord  Kitchener  [q.v.]  himself.  In 
August  1916  he  was  passed  fit  for  military 
service,  but  was  retained  by  the  Civil 
Service  and  in  December  transferred  to  the 
Ministry  of  Food.  At  the  climax  of  the 
food  problem  he  was  mainly  instrumental, 
against  departmental  opposition,  but 
finally  with  the  approval  of  Lord  Rhondda 
[q.v.],  in  doing  away  with  food  queues  by 
a  system  of  swift  local  rationing.  In  1918 
he  was  made  chairman  of  a  new  Milk 
Control  Board. 

After  the  armistice  Tallents  at  his  own 
suggestion  was  appointed  chief  British  dele- 
gate for  the  relief  and  supply  of  Poland, 
and  later  British  commissioner  in  the 
Baltic  provinces,  with  the  acting  rank  of 
lieutenant-colonel.  There,  on  a  somewhat 
vague  assignment,  he  had  the  help  of  three 
British  officers,  one  of  them  the  future 
Earl  Alexander  of  Tunis,  and  the  support 
of  an  occasional  destroyer.  Conditions  in 
the  Baltic  states  were  chaotic,  with  Ger- 
man, Bolshevik,  Latvian,  Estonian,  and 
Lithuanian  troops  under  no  unified  com- 
mand, and  recognizing  no  common  auth- 
ority. While  their  fate  was  being  settled  at 
the  peace  conference,  the  day-to-day  task 
of  restoring  peace  and  order  fell  on  the 
commissioners  of  the  allied  powers.  In 
conditions  of  great  discomfort  and  per- 
sonal risk,  Tallents  came  to  realize,  he 
said,  'that  there  was  no  problem  to  which 
a  British  representative  in  the  Baltic 
states  must  confess  himself  unequal' . 
In  this  spirit  he  accepted  every  sort  of 
responsibility,  drawing  up  the  teims  of 


an  armistice  between  the  Germans  and  the 
Estonians,  acting  for  five  days  as  governor 
of  Riga  whilst  supervising  the  German 
evacuation,  and  delimiting  the  Latvian- 
Estonian  frontier. 

Replaced  by  a  professional  diplomat, 
Tallents  served  in  1921-2  as  private 
secretary  to  Lord  FitzAlan  of  Derwent 
[q.v.],  the  last  lord-lieutenant  of  Ireland, 
and  in  1922-6  was  imperial  secretary 
in  Northern  Ireland  where  he  administered 
certain  reserved  services  and  acted  as 
liaison  officer  with  the  Northern  Ireland 
Parliament. 

In  1926  he  returned  to  England  and 
was  secretary  to  the  cabinet  committee 
which  dealt  with  the  general  strike. 
His  services  were  then  obtained  by  L.  S. 
Amery  [q.v.]  who  had  his  eye  on  Tallents 
as  the  ideal  man  for  what  has  been 
described  as  'that  gallant  adventure, 
the  Empire  Marketing  Board'.  To  this 
Tallents  brought,  said  Amery,  'a  com- 
pletely open  and  receptive  mind,  unlimited 
fertility  of  imagination  and  contrivance 
and  remarkable  organizing  power'.  These 
years  were  the  most  prolific  in  Tallents's 
official  career.  In  the  next  seven  years 
the  Board  evolved  a  new  technique 
in  marketing,  advertising,  and  research. 
It  was  on  the  last  that  65  per  cent  of  the 
Board's  resources  were  spent,  and  Tallents 
put  intense  labour  into  that  side  of  its 
work.  It  was  through  him  that  there 
were  set  up  the  eight  inter-imperial 
bureaux  which  the  Empire  countries 
decided  in  1927  to  maintain  in  the 
United  Kingdom  for  the  scientific  study 
of  agricultural  problems  and  for  keeping 
each  part  of  the  Empire  in  touch  with 
the  most  recent  developments  in  those 
fields  of  research  which  most  concerned  it. 

That  was  only  part  of  his  contribution 
to  the  national  cause,  although  perhaps 
the  part  most  likely  to  survive.  His 
pamphlet  The  Projection  of  England  (1932, 
reissued  1955)  was  a  convincing  plea  for 
the  projection  by  England  upon  the  screen 
of  world  opinion  of  'such  a  picture  of 
herself  as  will  create  a  belief  in  her  ability 
to  serve  the  world  under  the  new  order 
as  she  has  served  it  under  the  old'. 
Projection  to  him  meant  more  than 
mere  publicity.  When  he  popularized, 
perhaps  even  invented,  the  term  'public 
relations',  he  was  thinking  always  of  a 
two-way  traffic.  He  was  the  first  civil 
servant  to  make  a  study  of  publicity, 
and  he  owed  much  to  the  help  of  experts 
like  Frank  Pick  [q.v.]  of  the  London 
Underground  and  Sir  William  Crawford. 


951 


Tallents 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


The  effects  of  posters,  exhibitions,  Empire 
shops  and  shopping  weeks  were  all 
studied  and  tried  out.  Later  his  appoint- 
ment of  John  Grierson  as  film  officer, 
and  the  formation  of  a  film  unit,  led  to 
the  British  documentary  film.  'The  in- 
fluence of  documentary  film  production 
all  over  the  world  to-day  is  .  .  .  one  of  his 
monuments'  (John  Grierson  in  The  TimeSf 
23  September  1958). 

In  1931  Tallents  was  appointed  by  C.  R. 
(later  Earl)  Attlee  to  the  Post  Office  tele- 
phone publicity  committee,  and  when  the 
Empire  Marketing  Board  closed  down  in 
1933,  Sir  Kingsley  Wood  [q.v.],  as  part  of 
his  adoption  of  commercial  methods  at  the 
Post  Office,  appointed  Tallents  to  the  new 
post  of  public  relations  officer.  Tallents 
saved  the  life  of  the  film  unit  and  library 
by  getting  permission  to  take  them  with 
him  to  the  Post  Office.  In  1935  he  was  the 
first  civil  servant  to  win  the  cup  of  the 
Publicity  Club  of  London,  and  his  success 
in  this  more  or  less  new  field  was  marked 
when  he  retired  from  it  in  the  same  year 
by  a  comment  in  the  New  Statesman  (13 
July) :  *If  the  Post  Office  is  no  longer  criti- 
cised that  is  not  only  because  long  impend- 
ing changes  have  actually  matured  under 
the  energetic  administration  of  Sir  Kings- 
ley  Wood,  but  also  because,  for  the  first 
time,  we  have  had  a  Government  depart- 
ment properly  advertised.' 

In  1935  Tallents  transferred  to  the 
British  Broadcasting  Corporation  as  con- 
troller of  public  relations  until  1940,  and 
of  the  Overseas  Service  from  1940  to 
1941  when  he  resigned.  He  was  also 
(1936-8)  director-general-designate  of  an 
embryonic  Ministry  of  Information.  But 
he  was  disappointed  at  not  succeeding 
Sir  John  (afterwards  Lord)  Reith  as 
director-general  of  the  B.B.C.  in  1938. 
From  1943  to  1946  Tallents  was  principal 
assistant  secretary  to  the  Ministry  of 
Town  and  Country  Planning.  His  sub- 
sequent leisure  was  very  fully  occupied 
by  public  services  and  private  interests. 
He  was  fellow  and  first  president  of  the 
Institute  of  Public  Relations  (1948-9) 
and  president  again  (1952-3).  He  was 
made  an  honorary  A.R.I.B.A.  in  1946 
and  honorary  fellow  of  the  Society  of 
Industrial  Artists  in  1949;  member 
of  the  council  of  the  Royal  Society  of 
Arts  (1958)  and  elected  president  of  the 
Design  and  Industries  Association  (1954). 
He  took  an  active  part  in  various  ven- 
tures, among  them  'Cockade',  an  enter- 
prise aimed  at  enlisting  at  every  stage 
of  production  the  services  of  the  trained 


designer  and  the  accomplished  craftsman ; 
Group  I  Ltd.,  a  consortium  of  civil 
engineering  firms  aimed  at  securing 
contracts  for  British  industry;  and  a 
number  of  lesser  enterprises. 

Nobody  without  a  combination  of  un- 
usual qualities  could  have  made  a  success 
of  such  a  multiplicity  of  posts.  Tallents 
combined  a  wide-ranging  imagination  with 
relentless  attention  to  detail.  But  his 
imagination  was  always  controlled  by 
realism,  and  never  ran  away  with  him.  The 
more  people  he  met  and  the  more  things 
he  noticed,  the  more  ideas  there  were  to 
work  out  and  to  translate  into  practical 
effect.  He  had  a  well-compartmented 
memory,  and  all  through  his  career  his 
numerous  contacts  with  every  sort  of 
person  resulted  in  striking  examples  of 
the  cross-fertilization  of  ideas.  He  went 
through  life  with  receptive  eyes  and  ears, 
missing  little  and  extracting  full  value 
from  every  experience.  He  was  an  early 
riser  and  never  spent  an  idle  hour.  There 
was  nobody  quite  like  him,  but  of  all  his 
many  qualities  perhaps  the  one  which 
endeared  him  most  to  his  friends  was  his 
faithfulness  to  people,  places,  and  things. 

His  more  private  interests  chiefly  centred 
round  his  home  at  St.  John's  Jerusalem, 
Dartford,  which  he  gave  to  the  National 
Trust  in  1943.  They  included  among  others 
the  growing  of  willows  for  cricket-bat 
blades,  the  collection  of  mole  skins,  the 
making  of  rat  skins  into  light  leather,  the 
use  of  grey  squirrels  for  food,  the  collection 
of  thistledown  for  pillows,  the  testing 
of  the  combustion  qualities  of  different 
timbers,  the  simplification  of  chimney 
sweeping,  a  medicinal  herb  garden,  and  a 
complete  history  of  the  science  and  art  of 
scything.  He  also  gave  his  services  most 
generously  as  a  lecturer  all  over  the  coun- 
try on  these  and  other  favourite  subjects. 

Tallents's  literary  output  by  contrast 
was  small.  It  began  in  1918  with  The 
Starry  Pool  and  Other  Tales,  mostly 
short  sketches  written  for  the  Manchester 
Guardian.  This  was  followed  by  The 
Dancer  and  Other  Tales^  (1922)  inspired 
by  his  early  married  life  and  the  nursery. 
In  1943  came  his  autobiography  Man 
and  Boy,  adventurous  and  revealing, 
but  unfortunately  not  extending  past 
1920.  Green  Thoughts  (1952),  the  most 
attractive  of  all  his  books,  contains 
his  reflections  on  and  researches  into 
out-of-door  things  and  country  life. 
In  1950-55  he  contributed  fortnightly 
articles  to  the  Sunday  Times. 

Tallents   was   appointed    C.B.    (1918), 


953 


C.B.E.  (1920),  C.M.G.  (1929),  and 
K.C.M.G.  (1932).  He  married  in  1914 
Bridget  (died  1968),  daughter  of  Major 
Samuel  Hugh  Francklin  Hole,  of  Caimton 
Manor,  Newark  on  Trent,  son  of  Samuel 
Reynolds  Hole  [q.v.].  He  had  two  sons 
and  two  daughters.  He  died  in  London 
11  September  1958. 

[Sir  Stephen  Tallents,  Man  and  Boy,  1943 ; 
The  Times,  13,  17, 18,  and  23  September  1958 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

A.  L.  F.  Smith. 

TANSLEY,  Sir  ARTHUR  GEORGE 
(1871-1955),  plant  ecologist,  was  born  in 
central  London  15  August  1871,  the  only 
son  and  younger  child  of  George  Tansley 
and  his  wife,  Amelia  Lawrence.  George 
Tansley  conducted  a  profitable  London 
business  providing  for  society  functions, 
but  his  real  interest  was  devoted  to  the 
Working  Men's  College,  where  he  studied, 
then  taught.  Arthur  admired  his  father 
who  was  the  primary  source  of  his  own 
liberal  outlook.  From  another  instructor 
at  the  college  he  received  early  encourage- 
ment in  field  botany.  Finding  Highgate 
School  'farcically  inadequate'  in  science, 
he  left  and  went  to  classes  at  University 
College,  London.  In  1890  he  entered 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge.  With  a  first 
in  part  i  of  the  natural  sciences  tripos 
(1893),  but  part  ii  (1894,  another  first) 
still  to  come,  he  returned  to  University 
College,  now  a  colleague  instead  of  pupil 
of  F.  W.  Oliver  [q.v.],  the  youthful  profes- 
sor of  botany.  Oliver's  interest  in  fern-hke 
plants  was  echoed  by  Tansley's  earliest 
published  investigations  (in  which  one  of 
his  student  collaborators  became  his  wife). 
Oliver  was  also  developing  the  study  of 
vegetation  and  its  habitats— the  newly 
expanding  subject  of  ecology.  Tansley 
never  lost  interest  in  the  development  of 
botany  as  a  whole  and  soon  became  influ- 
ential through  his  single-handed  launch- 
ing in  1902  of  a  botanical  journal,  The  New 
Phytologisty  which  he  edited  for  thirty 
years.  But  ecology  was  becoming  his  chief 
concern.  In  1904  a  dozen  British  botanists, 
with  Tansley  at  their  centre,  had  consti- 
tuted themselves  as  the  'British  Vegeta- 
tion Committee'  in  order  to  further  the 
description  of  British  plant  communities. 
Their  efforts  led  to  the  pubUcation  in  1911 
of  Types  of  British  Vegetation,  which 
Tansley  edited  and  largely  wrote.  In  1913 
the  ground  was  ready  for  the  formation  of 
the  British  Ecological  Society.  Tansley 
became  the  first  president  and,  in  1917, 
editor  for  twenty-one  years  of  the  Journal 


D.N.B.  1951^1060  Tansley 

of  Ecology,  a  periodical  which  enhanced 
the  society's  reputation  and  his  own.  From 
1907  onwards  he  had  been  a  lecturer  in 
botany  at  Cambridge,  with  a  house  at 
Grantchester  which  always  remained  his 
home. 

In  1923  Tansley  resigned  his  university 
post.  His  interest,  always  inclined  to- 
wards philosophy,  had  now  become 
preoccupied  with  psychology,  particularly 
as  expounded  by  Freud.  After  writing 
his  successful  book  The  New  Psychology 
and  its  Relation  to  Life  (1920),  he  had 
visited  Freud  in  Vienna.  In  1923-4  he 
studied  there  as  Freud's  pupil.  During 
four  years  of  uncertain  prospect  he 
continued  his  botanical  writing,  which 
included  substantial  additions  made 
jointly  with  his  friend  Stephen  Adamson 
to  their  hitherto  separate  studies  of  the 
vegetation  of  the  South  Downs. 

The  uncertainty  was  ended  by  the 
university  of  Oxford,  where  in  1927 
Tansley  was  appointed  Sherardian  pro- 
fessor of  botany.  He  raised  the  standing 
of  Oxford  botany  by  his  own  teaching  and 
prestige  and  by  gaining  very  able  staff. 
He  never  amassed  a  following  of  per- 
sonally directed  research  students,  but 
many  were  helped  by  the  trouble  he 
took  in  correspondence  and  editing. 
His  own  research  largely  avoided  ex- 
perimentation and  was  devoted  to  de- 
scription, comparison,  and  synthesis.  In 
the  sphere  of  ecological  theory  his  lucid 
writing  argued  for  realism  and  moderation. 

Two  years  after  his  retirement  from 
Oxford  appeared  Tansley's  largest, 
celebrated  book,  The  British  Islands 
and  their  Vegetation  (1939).  There  was  yet 
to  come  what  may  be  thought  his  greatest 
work.  Concerted  planning  began  in  1941 
for  the  post-war  conservation  of  natiu« 
in  Britain  as  a  government  responsibility. 
Tansley's  energies  were  transferred  whole- 
heartedly to  this  task,  and  he  played 
a  guiding  part  in  the  work  which  led 
to  the  foundation  of  the  Nature  Con- 
servancy in  1949.  Now  aged  seventy- 
seven,  he  became  the  Conservancy's  first 
chairman  and  held  office  until  1953.  His 
knighthood  came  in  1950.  He  had  been 
a  fellow  of  the  Royal  Society  since 
1915  and  in  1944  was  elected  an  honorary 
fellow  of  Trinity  CoUege,  Cambridge. 

After  middle  age  Tansley's  silvering 
hair,  tallish,  spare  figure  and  somewhat 
unathletic  movements  suited  his  un- 
assuming distinction.  On  relaxed  oc-^ 
casions  he  was  jovial  and  humorous. 
He  overlooked  faults  in  others,  thinking 


958 


Tansley 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


virtues  more  important.  To  his  close 
friends,  whether  distinguished  or  not, 
'A.G.'  made  it  impartially  clear  that 
he  valued  their  friendship. 

He  died  at  Grantchester  25"  November 
1955.  His  wife,  whom  he  married  in  1903, 
was  Edith,  daughter  of  Samuel  Chick, 
lace  merchant.  They  had  three  daughters, 
whose  careers — respectively  in  physiology, 
architecture,  and  economics — ^were  all 
distinguished.  A  vivid  painting  of  Tansley 
by  W.  G.  de  Glehn  and  two  crayon  por- 
traits by  Mrs.  de  Glehn  have  remained  with 
the  family. 

One  of  the  first  National  Nature 
Reserves  established  was  Kingley  Vale  on 
the  Sussex  Downs,  a  place  beloved  by 
Tansley.  His  name  is  inscribed  there  on  a 
memorial  stone. 

[H.  Godwin  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iii,  1957,  and 
Journal  of  Ecology,  vol.  xlvi,  1958 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.    F.    HOPE-SIMPSON. 

TARN,  Sir  WILLIAM  WOODTHORPE 

(1869-1957),  ancient  historian,  was  born 
in  London  26  February  1869,  the  elder 
son  of  William  Tarn,  silk  merchant, 
of  Fan  Court,  Surrey,  and  his  wife, 
Frances  Arthy.  He  was  a  King's  scholar 
at  Eton  and  captain  of  the  school.  Thence 
he  entered  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  as 
a  pensioner,  soon  to  be  elected  scholar. 
He  was  fortunate  in  his  teachers,  above 
all,  Henry  Jackson  [q.v.],  to  whom  he 
owed  a  lasting  interest  in  Greek  philo- 
sophy while  he  studied  for  part  ii  (1892) 
of  the  classical  tripos,  after  taking  a 
first  in  part  i  (1891).  He  might  well  have 
become  a  candidate  for  a  fellowship, 
but  his  father  had  always  wished  him  to  go 
to  the  bar,  and  this  he  did.  He  studied  at 
the  Inner  Temple  in  the  chambers  of  a 
leading  Chancery  barrister,  Spencer  Per- 
ceval Butler,  brother  of  the  master  of 
Trinity.  On  being  called  in  1894  he  began 
what  soon  became  a  promising  career. 

In  London,  Tarn  had  many  friends,  and 
the  practice  of  the  law  gave  scope  to  his 
keen  mind,  shrewd  judgement,  and  precise 
memory.  Then  a  long  dangerous  illness  of 
his  wife,  whom  he  tended  with  anxious 
care,  and  the  stress  of  professional  work 
undermined  his  strength.  In  1905  a  serious 
breakdown  compelled  him  to  retire  to  the 
country  until,  as  his  health  returned, 
the  intellectual  interest  he  had  found  in  the 
law  revived  in  the  leisurely  study  of  Helle- 
nistic culture  and  political  history,  in 
which  field  Tarn  won  and  maintained  for 


forty  years  a  pre-eminent  position.  His 
interest  in  Greek  philosophy  reappears  in 
his  first  book,  Antigonos  Gonatas  (1913), 
dedicated  to  Henry  Jackson. 

In  1914  Tarn  was  refused  by  the  army 
because  of  his  sight,  but  he  spent  the 
next  four  years  in  confidential  work 
for  the  intelligence  division  of  the  War 
Office,  in  which  his  literary  gifts  were 
skilfully  employed.  The  war  ended, 
he  had  no  need  to  seek  academical 
employment  and  no  desire  to  limit 
his  freedom  by  its  claims.  He  published 
in  learned  journals  work  which  revealed 
an  especial  interest  in  ancient  geography 
and  military  and  naval  establishments 
and  Greek  warships.  His  most  notable 
single  contribution  to  the  art  of  war 
was  his  Lees  Knowles  lectures  at  Trinity, 
published  under  the  title  Hellenistic 
Military  and  Naval  Developments  (1930). 
This  small  book  was  written  con  amore 
and  with  an  easy  command  of  the 
scattered  evidence,  more  enlightening 
to  the  specialist  than  anything  before 
on  these  matters. 

Tarn's  most  productive  period  lay 
between  the  two  wars.  He  wrote,  first, 
nine  chapters  in  volumes  vi  and  vii  of  the 
Cambridge  Ancient  History,  describing  the 
rise  of  the  Hellenistic  world.  Long  study 
had  made  its  personalities  come  alive 
to  him,  and  he  added  to  his  narrative 
of  war  and  diplomacy  a  just  appreciation 
of  the  culture,  the  pohtics,  and  the 
economic  forces  of  the  time.  The  chapters 
on  Alexander  were  infused  with  admira- 
tion amounting  to  hero-worship,  also  re- 
flected in  a  doctrine  very  dear  to  him, 
that  Alexander  was  the  true  begetter 
of  the  idea  of  the  unity  of  mankind, 
which  went  beyond  the  fusion  of  Mace- 
donians and  Iranians  under  his  kingship. 
In  1948  he  added  to  these  chapters  a 
volume  of  studies  on  the  sources  for 
Alexander  and  on  particular  problems. 
This  crowned  an  achievement  unsur- 
passed by  any  other  ancient  historian  of 
his  day.  He  also  completed  a  masterly 
work  which  justified  its  title  Hellenistic 
Civilisation  (1927).  Tarn  contributed 
to  volume  ix  of'  the  Ancient  History  a 
chapter  on  Parthia,  in  which  he  combined 
Chinese  and  Greek  sources  in  a  balanced 
survey.  In  volume  x  he  wrote  parts  of  the 
chapters  between  the  death  of  Caesar 
and  the  death  of  Cleopatra,  in  which  the 
figure  of  the  last  of  the  great  Macedonian 
queens  stands  out  with  clarity  and 
brilliance. 

As  he  grew  older.  Tarn  rarely  met  other 


954 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Tatlow 


scholars,  but  his  advice  was  often  sought 
and  never  refused.  He  conducted  a  wide 
correspondence,  as  appears  from  the 
material  used  in  his  The  Greeks  in  Bactria 
and  India  (1938),  a  pioneer  work  in 
which  much  evidence  was  marshalled  and 
combined  for  the  first  time.  Even  so,  it 
remains  an  adventure  in  scholarship  of 
great  range  and  lasting  value.  In  1928 
Tarn  was  elected  F.B.A.  and  in  1931  he 
proceeded  to  the  Cambridge  degree  of 
Litt.D.  He  was  a  foreign  member  of  the 
Royal  Netherlands  Academy,  the  Ameri- 
can Philosophical  Society,  and  the  German 
Archaeological  Institute.  The  university  of 
Edinburgh  conferred  upon  him  its  honor- 
ary LL.D.  (1933)  and  in  1939  he  received 
the  distinction  which  he  prized  above 
them  all,  an  honorary  fellowship  of  Trinity. 
Finally,  in  1952  he  was  knighted. 

In  1896  Tarn  to  his  great  happiness 
married  Flora  Macdonald,  third  daughter 
of  John  Robertson,  landowner,  of  Orbost 
in  the  Isle  of  Skye.  They  had  one  child, 
a  daughter,  for  whom  Tarn  wrote  a 
fairy  story.  The  Treasure  of  the  Isle  of 
Mist  (1919),  which  became  a  classic  of 
its  kind.  So  long  as  his  health  allowed, 
Tarn  was  devoted  to  the  avocations  of 
a  country  gentleman,  in  which  he  was 
skilled,  being  accounted  among  the  six 
best  game  shots  in  Great  Britain.  He 
was  also  a  good  pianist  and  a  student 
of  English  literature.  Until  his  wife 
died  in  1937  his  house,  Mountgerald,  and 
afterwards  Muirtown,  near  Inverness, 
was  the  centre  of  much  hospitality  to  his 
English  friends  and  his  Highland  con- 
nections. With  the  approach  of  old  age 
he  lost  something  of  his  zest  for  life. 
But  he  had  much  affection  to  give  and 
receive,  and,  summer  after  sunmier,  he 
would  travel  to  Skye  and  find  a  kind  of 
rejuvenation  in  his  daughter's  house 
(where  there  is  a  portrait  of  him  by  Somer- 
led  Macdonald).  He  died  at  Muirtown 
House,  7  November  1957. 

[Sir  Frank  Adcock  in  Proceedings  of  the 
British  Academy,  vol.  xliv,  1958;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

F.  E.  Adcock. 

TATLOW,  TISSINGTON  (1876-1957), 
general  secretary  of  the  Student  Christian 
Movement,  was  born  in  Crossdoney, 
county  Cavan,  11  January  1876,  the 
eldest  son  of  Tissington  W.  G.  Tatlow, 
land  agent  to  Lord  Kingston's  estate, 
and  his  wife,  Blanche,  daughter  of 
Thomas  Steuart  Townsend  who  was 
bishop    of    Meath    in    1850-52.    Tatlow 


was  educated  at  St.  Columba's  College, 
Rathfarnham,  and  in  the  engineering 
school  of  Trinity  College,  Dublin.  He 
decided  to  become  a  foreign  missionary 
and  on  graduating  at  the  age  of  twenty- 
one  became  travelling  secretary  of  the 
recently  formed  Student  Volunteer  Mis- 
sionary Union.  A  year  later  he  was 
appointed  secretary  of  its  associated 
body,  the  British  College  Christian  Union, 
soon  renamed  the  Student  Christian 
Movement,  which  had  been  founded  in 
1893.  In  1900  he  returned  to  Trinity 
College,  this  time  to  the  divinity  school, 
and  he  was  ordained  deacon  in  1902  and 
priest  in  1904.  In  1902  he  became  curate 
at  St.  Barnabas,  Kensington,  but  in  1903 
he  was  called  back  to  the  general  secretary- 
ship of  the  S.C.M.,  an  office  which  he  held 
until  1929.  Although  not  its  founder,  it 
was  owing  to  him  more  than  to  any  other 
one  man  that  the  Movement  came  to 
exercise  its  great  influence  over  the  life  of 
the  Church.  Tatlow  was  the  vital  centre 
of  its  committee  and  secretarial  group,  its 
spiritual  leader  and  brilliant  organizer. 
Not  content  to  remain  in  his  office  chair 
he  travelled  widely  to  visit  the  colleges  and 
universities  not  only  of  this  country  but 
also  of  Europe  and  America,  and  took  a 
leading  part  in  the  life  of  the  World's 
Student  Christian  Federation.  When  Edin- 
burgh University  made  him  an  honorary 
D.D.  in  1925,  W.  P.  Paterson  [q.v.] 
deservedly  hailed  him  as  'the  apostle 
of  the  student  world'. 

In  1926  Tatlow  was  appointed  rector  of 
All  Hallows,  Lombard  Street,  and  in  1937, 
on  the  amalgamation  of  a  number  of  City 
parishes,  rector  of  St.  Edmund  the  King. 
In  addition  to  the  normal  work  of  a  City 
parish  he  made  his  church  a  centre  for 
students  and  teachers.  He  held  the  living 
until  his  death.  In  1926  he  was  appointed 
honorary  canon  of  Canterbury.  He  was 
honorary  fellow  and  treasurer  of  Sion 
College  and  president  in  1940-41. 

Tatlow  was  a  man  of  many  interests. 
In  1936  he  launched  the  Institute  of 
Christian  Education  and  as  its  honorary 
director  for  over  twenty  years  gave 
outstanding  leadership  in  its  work  of 
promoting  the  cause  of  Christian  edu- 
cation in  this  country  and  overseas. 
His  name  soon  became  as  well  known 
among  the  schools  as  it  had  been  for  years 
in  the  universities.  He  was  founder 
in  1912  of  the  influential  AngUcan 
Fellowship,  its  first  secretary,  and  in 
1913-17  its  chairman.  He  was  associated 
with  William  Temple  [q.v.]  and  others 


955 


Tatlow 


D.N,B.  1951-1960 


in  the  gallant  attempt  to  launch  a  new 
kind  of  Anglican  weekly,  the  Challenge, 
and  was  chairman  of  its  board  (1915-22). 
Under  his  leadership  the  Student  Christian 
Movement  had  a  way  of  initiating  other 
enterprises  in  such  realms  as  religious 
education,  foreign  missions,  literature, 
social  responsibility,  care  for  foreign 
students,  theological  education,  and 
Christian  unity,  which  after  a  while  were 
deliberately  detached  from  the  Movement 
so  that  often  they  became  unaware  of  the 
source  of  their  initial  impulse.  He  brought 
a  most  creative  mind  to  the  service  of  the 
whole  Church  and  touched  its  life  for  good 
at  many  points.  His  achievement  was  not 
less  because  normally  he  was  content  to 
remain  in  the  background,  not  caring  who 
got  the  credit  so  long  as  the  job  was  done. 

Next  to  students  and  teachers,  nearest 
to  his  heart  was  the  cause  of  Christian 
imity.  He  had  a  large  share  in  securing  the 
success  in  1910  of  the  World  Missionary 
Conference  at  Edinburgh  which  was 
by  common  consent  the  starting-point 
of  the  modern  ecumenical  movement. 
The  archbishops  made  him  honorary 
secretary  of  their  committee  to  prepare 
for  the  world  conference  on  Faith  and 
Order,  in  Lausanne  (1927),  and  Tatlow 
became  the  European  treasurer  of  the 
resulting  Faith  and  Order  Movement, 
which  was  to  become  a  constituent 
part  of  the  World  Council  of  Churches. 
So  closely  was  he  associated  with  a 
number  of  the  organizations  involved 
that  he  must  be  reckoned  one  of  the 
chief  architects  of  the  British  Council 
of  Churches  and  of  the  ecumenical 
movement  as  a  whole.  At  a  luncheon  in 
Tatlow's  honour  on  his  eightieth  birthday. 
Archbishop  Fisher,  who  presided,  paid 
tribute  to  his  far-reaching  influence, 
and  spoke  of  the  debt  which  he  and  his 
three  immediate  predecessors  felt  they 
owed  him. 

Perhaps  Tatlow's  most  profound  mark 
on  the  Chiurch  was  made  through  his 
training  of  generations  of  S.C.M.  secre- 
taries. Many  thousands  of  students 
came  under  his  influence  at  the  annual 
conferences  and  in  other  ways,  but  closely 
associated  with  him  were  young  colleagues, 
twenty  to  thirty  at  a  time,  who  served  the 
Movement  for  two  or  three  years  before 
going  on  to  their  life  work.  Tatlow  knew 
how  to  pick  men  and  women  and  how  to 
get  the  best  out  of  them,  and  many  who 
later  occupied  positions  of  leadership  in 
different  walks  of  life  have  testified  to 
what  they  owed  to  his  pastoral  care  and 


inspiring  guidance.  A  man  who  got  things 
done  with  efficiency,  'T',  as  everybody 
called  him,  was  also  a  strong  and  sym- 
pathetic personality. 

Tatlow  married  in  1903  Emily,  daughter 
of  Richard  Scott,  insurance  manager,  of 
Dublin,  and  had  three  daughters.  He  died 
in  London  3  October  1957.  A  portrait  by 
Delmar  Banner  is  at  S.C.M.  headquarters 
and  a  drawing  by  Alice  M.  Burton  is  in 
the  possession  of  the  family. 

[Tissington  Tatlow,  The  Story  of  the  Student 
Christian  Movement,  1933 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.]       Hugh  Martin. 

TATTERSFIELD,  FREDERICK  (1881- 
1959),  chemist,  was  born  at  Kilpin  Hill 
near  Dewsbury,  Yorkshire,  23  April  1881, 
the  third  son  of  Frederick  Tattersfield, 
woollen  manufacturer,  and  his  wife, 
Frances  Mary  Walker.  He  was  educated 
at  the  Wheelwright  Grammar  School, 
Dewsbury,  and  the  university  of  Leeds, 
taking  first  class  honours  in  chemistry  at 
London  University  (1908)  as  an  external 
student.  He  was  awarded  a  D.Sc.  in 
1927.  His  first  job  was  in  association 
with  the  Leeds  city  analyst,  where 
his  work  ranged  over  all  the  typical 
activities  in  such  a  department,  from 
food  and  drug  analysis  to  post-mortems. 
In  1908  he  joined  the  International 
Paint  and  Antifouling  Co.,  Ltd.,  where 
for  five  years  his  work  was  chiefly 
concerned  with  research  on  anti-fouling 
paints.  On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914 
he  went  to  France  as  a  founder-member 
of  the  Friends  Ambulance  Unit.  In  1917 
he  was  invalided  back  to  England  and 
early  in  1918  went  to  the  Rothamsted 
Experimental  Station  to  work  with 
A.  W.  Rymer  Roberts  on  soil  insecticides. 
He  remained  at  Rothamsted  for  the  rest 
of  his  working  life.  He  originally  had  a 
temporary  appointment  in  the  chemistry 
department,  but  he  soon  founded  the 
department  of  insecticides  and  fungicides 
of  which  he  was  the  head  for  twenty-nine 
years. 

His  earliest  work  was  concerned  with 
the  control  of  soil  pests,  and  he  carried 
out  some  work  on  the  structure-toxicity 
relationships  of  chemicals  to  wireworms. 
He  also  studied  the  factors  influencing 
the  decomposition  of  naphthalene  in  the 
soil  and  the  effect  of  different  rates  of 
decomposition  on  its  insecticidal  action. 
He  then  proceeded  to  study  the  effect 
of  a  wide  range  of  chemicals  on  the 
insects  which  attack  the  aerial  parts 
of  the  plant,  again  attempting,  as  far  as 


956 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


possible,  to  relate  toxicity  with  structure 
in  some  systematic  way.  In  the  course  of 
this  work  he  discovered  the  outstanding 
ovicidal  properties  of  dinitro-o-cresol,  a 
substance  which  has  been  used  in  winter 
washes  for  fruit  trees  ever  since.  At  that 
time  the  chemical  manufacturers  had  little 
confidence  in  the  development  of  effective 
synthetic  organic  chemicals  for  pest  con- 
trol and  the  resources  of  laboratories 
financed  from  government  or  private 
sources  were  much  too  meagre  for  such  a 
project,  so  Tattersfield  in  his  search  for 
highly  biologically  active  chemicals  for 
insect  control  turned  his  attention  to 
plants  as  a  source  for  these  materials. 

He  examined  a  wide  variety  of  plants 
for  insecticidal  activity,  but  his  main 
work  was  done  on  the  fish  poison  group, 
particularly  Derris  spp.  and  Tephrosia 
spp.  and  on  pyrethrum.  His  contributions 
on  the  isolation  of  the  active  principles 
of  these  plant  products,  the  assessment 
of  their  insecticidal  activity  and  their 
chemical  estimation  were  quite  out- 
standing. He  studied  many  phases  of 
the  production  and  assay  of  pyrethrum 
as  an  insecticide  and  played  a  large 
part  in  the  founding  of  the  Kenya 
pyrethrimi  industry  which  became  of  the 
greatest  value  to  the  economy  of  that 
country.  Furthermore  the  Kenya  pyre- 
thrum industry  proved  a  great  asset  in  the 
war  of  1939-45  when  an  accessible  supply 
of  pyrethrum  greatly  helped  to  safeguard 
health  by  controlling  insect  carriers  of 
disease  and  food  supplies  by  controlling 
insect  pests  of  stored  food.  During  the 
course  of  his  work  Tattersfield  evolved 
precise  methods  of  administering  doses 
of  chemicals  to  insects  and  introduced 
statistical  procedures  for  the  quantitative 
assessment  of  results. 

A  catalogue  of  Tattersfield's  contri- 
butions to  knowledge  on  insecticides,  sub- 
stantial though  they  were,  gives  a  very 
inadequate  idea  of  what  the  subject 
owes  to  his  influence,  which,  fortunately, 
was  widely  felt  owing  to  his  high  inter- 
national reputation.  When  he  started 
work  on  the  subject  the  standard  of 
research  work  was  very  low  and  seldom 
was  any  serious  attempt  made  to  obtain 
reproducible  quantitative  results  of 
known  significance.  He  insisted  on  the 
importance  of  precise  quantitative  data 
where  the  factors  known  to  influence 
the  results  were  standardized,  so  far 
as  possible,  and  where  both  the  design 
of  the  experiment  and  the  results  would 
satisfy   accepted   statistical   criteria.    In 


Taylor,  F.  S 


doing  this  he  set  standards  which,  over 
the  course  of  years,  have  been  accepted, 
to  the  inestimable  benefit  of  the  subject. 

Tattersfield  may  legitimately  be  de- 
scribed as  the  founder  of  modem  research 
on  insecticides  and  he  led  the  way  for 
many  years.  He  was  always  most  anxious, 
however,  that  anyone  who  was  associated 
with  him  should  not  be  left  out  and  would 
insist  on  the  value  of  the  help  he  received 
from  Sir  John  Fryer,  C.  T.  Gimingham, 
and  R.  A.  Fisher,  and  later  from  his 
junior  colleagues.  Tattersfield  was  always 
a  source  of  inspiration  to  his  colleagues 
to  whom  he  was  unfailingly  kind  and 
helpful.  His  justly  acquired  reputation 
never  changed  his  modest  and  unassuming 
manner,  or  affected  the  uncompromising 
integrity  which  was  perhaps  his  most 
notable  quality,  combined  with  great 
gentleness  and  a  dehghtful  sense  of  fun. 
He  retired  in  1947  and  was  appointed 
O.B.E. 

In  his  youth .  Tattersfield  was  a  very 
good  cricketer  and  he  remained  keenly 
interested  throughout  his  life.  He  was  also 
a  man  of  wide  cultural  interests.  He  was 
at  one  time  an  active  member  of  the  Liter- 
ary and  Philosophical  Society  of  Newcastle 
and  he  had  a  fine  appreciation  of  poetry. 
He  coUected  etchings,  engravings,  and 
mezzotints.  He  was  keenly  interested  in 
archaeology  and  was  a  member  of  the 
Pre-Historical  Society.  A  member  of  the 
Society  of  Friends,  he  became  a  much 
respected  elder. 

In  1981  Tattersfield  married  Janie, 
elder  daughter  of  Archibald  Campbell, 
farmer,  of  Ennerdale,  Cumberland ;  they 
had  one  son.  Tattersfield  died  in  Har- 
penden  1  May  1959.  A  drawing  by  Herry 
Perry  is  in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[Nature,  27  June  1959 ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]  C.  Potteb. 

TAYLOR,  FRANK  SHERWOOD  (1897- 
1956),  chemist,  historian  of  science,  and 
director  of  the  Science  Museum,  South 
Kensington,  was  born  at  Bromley  26 
November  1897,  the  son  of  Seaton 
Frank  Taylor,  solicitor,  and  his  wife, 
Helen  Sennerth  Davidson.  He  was  edu- 
cated at  Sherborne  School  and  Lincoln 
College,  Oxford,  where  he  was  elected 
to  a  classical  scholarship.  The  war  of 
1914-18,  in  which  he  was  severely 
wounded  at  Passchendaele  in  1917,  while 
serving  in  an  infantry  unit  of  the  Honour- 
able Artillery  Company,  deflected  his 
more  active  interests  from  classics  to 
chemistry^  After  graduating  at   Oxford 


957 


Taylor,  F.  S. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


in  1921,  he  taught  chemistry  at  various 
public  schools,  including  Gresham's  and 
Repton,  until  1933,  when  he  was  appointed 
assistant  lecturer  in  inorganic  chemistry 
at  Queen  Mary  College,  university  of 
London,  where  he  remained  until  1938. 
After  some  experience  with  a  firm  of 
publishers  and  following  the  outbreak 
of  war  in  1939,  he  returned  temporarily 
to  teaching  chemistry  at  Llandovery 
College,  Carmarthenshire,  until  in  1940 
he  was  appointed  to  the  curatorship  of  the 
Science  Museum,  Oxford.  In  1950  he  be- 
came director  of  the  Science  Museum, 
South  Kensington. 

In  the  meantime  Taylor's  interest  in 
chemistry  had  extended  to  the  history 
of  alchemy  and  in  1931  he  had  been 
awarded  the  degree  of  Ph.D.  by  the 
university  of  London,  his  thesis  being 
entitled  'A  Conspectus  of  Greek  Alchemy', 
a  notable  research  which  was  published 
in  the  Journal  of  Hellenic  Studies  (June 
1930).  This  work  was  followed  by  an  anno- 
tated translation  {Ambix,  December  1937 
and  June  1938)  of  the  alchemical  writings 
of  Stephanos  of  Alexandria  (seventh 
century  a.d.)  which,  with  his  later 
study.  The  Alchemists  (1949),  revealed 
his  deep  understanding  of  a  literature 
generally  obscure  and  often  mystical. 
During  these  years  he  wrote  a  number 
of  textbooks  of  chemistry,  which  brought 
him  a  considerable  reputation  for  their 
lucid  exposition;  his  Inorganic  and 
Theoretical  Chemistry  (1931)  appeared  in 
a  ninth  edition  (1952)  and  his  Organic 
Chemistry  (1933)  in  a  fifth  edition  (1953), 
while  his  General  Science  for  Schools 
(1939)  reached  revised  editions  in  1952 
and  1953 ;  and  there  were  many  others. 

Taylor,  classic  and  chemist,  disliked 
the  widening  gulf  between  the  arts 
and  the  sciences,  and  The  World  of 
Science  (1936,  with  revised  editions  and 
reprints),  a  large  volume  written  for 
the  general  reader,  was  perhaps  his 
greatest  success,  holding  its  place  as  an 
outstanding  work  of  its  kind  thirty  years 
after  its  first  publication.  lie  wrote  also 
several  books  on  the  history  of  science: 
Galileo  and  the  Freedom  of  Thought  (1938) ; 
A  Short  History  of  Science  (1939) ;  Science 
Past  and  Present  (1945  and  1949:  an 
anthology  of  extracts  from  the  classics  of 
science  with  commentaries);  The  Century  of 
Science  (1941  and  later  editions) ;  British 
Inventions  (1950) ;  and  An  Illustrated  His- 
tory of  Science  (1955).  A  Century  of  British 
Cliemistry  (1947)  was  written  for  the  cen- 
tenary of  the  Chemical  Society  of  London 


and  A  History  of  Industrial  Chemistry 
(published  posthumously  in  1957)  was 
completed  during  his  last  illness.  He  was 
active  in  the  foundation  of  the  Society 
for  the  Study  of  Alchemy  and  Early 
Chemistry  and  was  honorary  editor  of  the 
society's  journal,  Ambix,  from  its  incep- 
tion in  1937  until  his  death  in  1956.  He 
was  similarly  concerned  in  the  foundation 
of  the  British  Society  for  the  History  of 
Science  and  served  as  the  society's  presi- 
dent (1951-3). 

During  his  later  period  in  Oxford, 
Taylor  joined  the  Roman  Catholic  Church, 
which  was  no  surprise  to  his  close  friends 
who  had  always  been  aware  of  the 
religious  and  mystical  element  in  his 
thought.  In  The  Fourfold  Vision  (1945)  he 
pleaded  with  his  usual  sincerity  for  the  re- 
jection of  materialism  and  the  unification 
of  science  and  religion.  His  other  publica- 
tions included  papers  on  the  history  of 
science  in  Ambix  and  Annals  of  Science^ 
and  a  chapter  in  Singer  and  Holmyard's 
History  of  Technology, 

All  Taylor's  writings  were  marked  by 
scholarship,  clarity,  and  unity  of  purpose, 
and  those  on  the  history  of  science, 
especially  of  alchemy,  have  an  en- 
during value;  his  reorganization  of  the 
Museum  of  the  History  of  Science  in 
Oxford  was  memorable ;  when  director  of 
the  Science  Museum  in  London,  admini- 
stration took  too  great  a  toll  of  his  time 
for  research,  and  he  often  longed  for  the 
different  life  of  Oxford;  the  strain  told, 
and  he  died  at  Crowthorne,  Berkshire, 
5  January  1956. 

He  was  of  middle  height,  dark -haired 
and  pale,  bearded  in  later  life;  when 
tired,  he  limped  from  his  war  wounds; 
he  was  an  attentive  listener,  often  shy 
and  hesitant  in  discussion,  disliking 
dissension  and  always  anxious  to  under- 
stand the  basis  of  a  different  opinion. 
He  was  an  unswervingly  loyal  friend 
and  much  attracted  to  such  mystics  as 
Henry  Vaughan  the  Silurist  and  his 
twin-brother  Thomas,  and  William  Blake. 

[The  Times,  7  and  11  January  1956; 
Nature,  28  April  1956;  AmMx,  October  1956; 
personal  knowledge.]  Douglas  McKie. 

TAYLOR,  Sir  GORDON  GORDON- 

(1878-1960),  surgeon.  [See  Gordon- 
Taylor.] 

TAYLOR,  Sir  THOMAS  WESTON 
JOHNS  (1895-1953),  scientist  and  aca- 
demic administrator,  was  born  in  Little 
Ilford,  Essex,  2  October  1895,  the  only 


958 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


son  of  Thomas  George  Taylor,  account- 
ant, and  his  wife,  Alice  Bessie  Aston 
Johns.  He  was  educated  at  the  City  of 
London  School  and  Brasenose  College, 
Oxford.  From  1914  to  1918  he  served 
in  the  Essex  Regiment,  in  France  and  at 
Gallipoli,  and  was  twice  wounded.  He  re- 
turned to  Oxford  after  the  war,  obtained  a 
first  in  chemistry  and  was  elected  fellow  of 
his  college  in  1920,  and  became  university 
lecturer  in  organic  chemistry  in  1927.  In 
1931  he  was  a  Rhodes  travelling  fellow. 

Taylor  was  an  able  and  versatile,  if  not  a 
remarkably  original,  scientist.  He  edited 
a  new  edition  of  Organic  Chemistry  of 
Nitrogen  by  N.  V.  Sidgwick  [q.v.]  (with 
W.  Baker,  1937) ;  and  with  A.  F.  Millidge 
the  second  volume  of  Richter-Anschiitz, 
The  Chemistry  of  the  Carbon  Compounds 
(1939).  He  contributed  a  number  of  papers 
to  the  Journal  of  the  Chemical  Society, 
and  served  on  its  council  from  1936  to 
1939.  His  greatest  ability,  however,  lay  in 
teaching.  He  had  a  genius  for  communi- 
cating enthusiasm  as  well  as  knowledge. 
He  greatly  enjoyed  teaching  under- 
graduates and  his  help  was  much  sought 
after  by  research  students,  some  of  whom 
themselves  subsequently  achieved  great 
distinction.  Sometimes  in  later  life  he 
expressed  a  mild  regret  that  he  had  not 
himself  reached  the  highest  academic 
honours ;  but  the  range  of  his  interests  was 
so  wide  that  he  would  have  found  it  hard 
— even  had  he  so  wished — to  maintain  a 
single-minded  devotion  over  a  long  period 
to  a  particular  line  of  research.  He  was 
interested  in  too  much:  he  was  a  capable 
field  naturalist,  with  an  encyclopedic 
knowledge  of  the  flora  and  fauna  of  many 
parts  of  the  world ;  he  took  part  in  two 
important  ecological  investigations,  in 
Spitsbergen  in  1936  and  in  the  Galapagos 
islands  in  1938-9,  and  on  each  occasion  his 
skill  in  improvising  field  techniques  contri- 
buted much  to  the  success  of  the  expedition. 
Outside  the  range  of  the  natural  sciences, 
he  was  a  competent  amateur  in  water- 
colours  ;  a  more  than  competent  amateur 
musician ;  a  voracious  reader,  with  an  open 
book  on  every  flat  surface  in  his  home ;  and 
an  ardent  francophil,  steeped  in  the  litera- 
ture, archaeology,  history,  and  natural 
history  of  France,  where,  between  the 
wars,  he  spent  most  of  his  long  vacations. 

When  war  broke  out  in  1939  Taylor 
joined  the  chemical  branch  of  the  Royal 
Engineers.  He  served  for  three  years 
in  the  Middle  East  and  was  mentioned 
in  dispatches.  In  1943  he  was  appointed 
secretary,    and    a    little    later    director, 


Taylor,  T.  W.  J. 

of  the  British  Central  Scientific  Office 
in  Washington,  a  post  for  which  his 
wide  interests  and  out-of-the-way  know- 
ledge made  him  peculiarly  well  fitted. 
The  range  of  his  concerns  included 
such  unconnected  topics  as  insecticides, 
the  design  of  paper  parachutes  for 
dropping  small  packages,  the  prevention 
of  metal  corrosion,  and  the  composition 
of  shark  repellents.  In  1944,  pursuing  a 
similarly  wide  range  of  problems,  he 
was  transferred  to  South-East  Asia 
Command  as  head  of  the  operational 
research  division,  where  he  remained  to 
the  end  of  the  war.  He  was  appointed 
C.B.E.  in  1946. 

Taylor's  war  experience  revealed  in 
him  an  unsuspected  talent  for  organi- 
zation, and  gave  him  a  taste  for  life  in 
the  tropics.  At  that  time  the  Government 
was  much  concerned  with  the  establish- 
ment of  university  institutions  in  a 
number  of  tropical  colonies  and  in 
1946  Taylor  was,  appointed  principal  of 
the  proposed  University  College  (later 
the  University)  of  the  West  Indies, 
which  was  to  be  sited  in  Jamaica  but  to 
serve  all  the  countries  of  the  British 
Caribbean.  The  difficulties  of  the  task 
included  shortage  of  capital  money  in 
a  time  of  rapid  inflation,  the  mutual 
jealousies  of  the  Caribbean  governments, 
and  many  local  misconceptions  of  the 
nature  and  purpose  of  a  university. 
Taylor  assembled  a  gifted  and — under  his 
leadership — closely  united  senior  team.  He 
quickly  infected  not  only  these  chosen 
colleagues,  but  many  of  the  leaders  of 
local  opinion  also,  with  his  own  energy  and 
enthusiasm.  His  prodigious  capacity  for 
work  and  his  talent  for  improvisation  over- 
came, at  least  in  part,  financial  stringency. 
The  university  became  a  lasting  success: 
a  sturdy,  growing  institution  with  high 
academic  standards  in  teaching  and  re- 
search and  with  a  tradition  of  devoted 
service  to  the  peoples  of  the  West  Indies. 
The  physical  aspect  of  the  university 
buildings  is  a  standing  memorial  to 
Taylor's  sense  of  urgency  and  of  good 
design.  He  was  knighted  in  1952,  the  year 
in  which  he  left  Jamaica  to  become  princi- 
pal of  the  University  College  of  the  South 
West,  later  the  university  of  Exeter.  But 
he  died  suddenly  in  the  following  year, 
29  August  1953,  while  on  holiday  in  Italy. 

'T'  was  a  slight,  bird-like  man,  who 
seemed  to  irradiate  ideas  and  restless 
energy.  He  had  a  quick,  irreverent  wit, 
and  was  often  impatient  of  people  slower 
than  himself.  With  friends  and  colleagues 


959 


Taylor,  T.  W.  J. 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


he  was  direct  and  plain  in  speech,  some- 
times to  the  point  of  rudeness ;  but  any 
offence  he  might  have  given  was  quickly 
removed  by  his  evident  warmth  and  friend- 
liness, and  by  a  quick  smile"  of  singular 
sweetness  and  charm.  His  colleagues  were 
devoted  to  him. 

In  1922  Taylor  married  Rosamund 
Georgina,  younger  daughter  of  Colonel 
Thomas  Edward  John  Lloyd,  of  Plas 
Tregayan,  Anglesey,  who  shared  his  wide 
interests  and  introduced  him  to  some 
new  ones,  including  painting  and  botany. 
They  had  no  children.  His  portrait, 
painted  by  Hector  Whistler  in  Jamaica,  is 
in  the  University  of  the  West  Indies. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
J.  H.  Parry. 

TEARLE,  Sir  GODFREY  SEYMOUR 
(1884-1953),  actor,  was  born  in  New  York 
12  October  1884,  of  theatrical  stock 
on  both  sides.  He  was  the  elder  son  of 
Osmond  Tearle  [q.v.],  by  his  second 
wife,  Marianne  Levy,  widow  and  actress, 
daughter  of  F.  B.  Conway,  the  American 
actor  and  manager.  Godfrey  Tearle  and 
his  younger  brother  Malcolm  who  also 
became  an  actor  were  therefore  familiar 
with  the  atmosphere  of  the  playhouse 
from  babyhood.  He  had  his  first  speaking 
part  when  he  was  nine,  in  his  father's 
touring  Shakespearian  company  which 
was  well  known  in  the  English  provinces 
and  a  famous  training  ground  for  young 
actors.  After  1899  he  remained  with  it 
until  his  father's  death  in  1901  when 
he  himself  was  nearly  seventeen. 

With  such  antecedents  and  training, 
and  great  natural  gifts,  Godfrey  Tearle 
might  well  have  been  expected  to  make 
an  early  leap  to  the  head  of  his  profession. 
He  had  inherited  from  his  father  a 
notably  fine  voice,  and  had  learnt  from 
him  how  to  use  it  to  the  best  advantage. 
He  trod  the  stage  with  a  natural  autho- 
rity. Yet  it  seemed  that  in  his  early 
manhood  he  failed  to  make  the  impression 
that  might  have  been  expected  either  upon 
the  public  or  upon  the  theatre  managers, 
for  he  was  kept  year  after  year  playing 
important  but  never  quite  leading  parts. 

The  war  of  1914-18  helped  to  retard  his 
career  and  it  was  not  until  J.  B.  Fagan 
[q.v.]  invited  him  to  appear  as  Othello 
at  the  Royal  Court  Theatre  in  1921  that 
London  playgoers  were  given  their  first 
chance  to  see  what  he  could  do  in  one 
of  the  great  classical  parts.  It  was  a  per- 
formance of  beauty  and  emotional  power 
which  fell  only  just  short  of  greatness. 


But  here,  too,  he  was  unlucky.  In  that  post- 
war decade  the  classics  were  out  of  fashion. 
Although  he  now  took  rank  as  a  leading 
London  actor,  his  talents  were  wasted  on 
run-of-the-mill  comedies,  and  he  was  not 
given  another  chance  to  appear  in  Shake- 
speare until  1930,  when  he  was  cast  as 
Horatio  in  an  all-star  special  performance 
of  Hamlet  at  the  Haymarket.  To  many  in 
the  audience  it  seemed  that  here  was  an 
actor  whose  full  quality  had  not  been 
recognized.  As  a  result  he  was  invited  to 
play  Hamlet  at  the  same  theatre,  which  he 
did  in  1931,  but  without  notable  success. 
He  had  to  wait  until  1946,  when  he  acted 
Antony  opposite  Dame  Edith  Evans's 
Cleopatra  at  the  Piccadilly,  and  until  1948 
when  he  repeated  his  Othello  at  Stratford 
on  Avon  with  the  added  authority  of 
twenty-five  years,  before  he  could  bring  it 
truly  home  to  critics  and  playgoers  that  he 
had  the  stuff  of  greatness  in  him. 

It  was  said  of  Tearle  by  some  among 
his  multitude  of  friends  that  the  only 
reason  why  he  was  not  a  great  actor 
was  that  he  was  too  nice  a  man;  and 
although  this  was  intended  as  a  witticism 
it  may  well  have  been  the  truth.  He 
lacked  the  core  of  hardness,  the  dedicated 
purpose,  the  ruthless  ambition,  which 
carries  men  to  the  top  of  the  tree,  and 
this  streak  of  softness  showed  some- 
times in  the  characters  he  played. 
It  was  impossible  for  Tearle  to  be  con- 
vincingly cruel,  as  was  seen  when  in  1950 
he  took  over  the  part  of  the  father  in  The 
Heiress.  He  went  through  all  the  motions 
of  cruelty,  but  the  character  remained 
almost  benign. 

Nevertheless  Tearle  was  a  superbly 
well-endowed  actor.  It  was  remarked 
that  he  had  an  abihty  to  suggest,  as 
some  actors  of  an  older  day  had  learned 
to  suggest,  magnificence  borne  in  on  the 
senses  of  an  audience  by  his  mere  presence 
and  sheer  authority,  so  that  he  seemed 
a  little  larger  than  life.  This  made  him 
an  ideal  hero  of  romance,  and  he  was 
much  in  request  for  such  parts  when  he 
returned  to  the  stage  after  his  three 
years  in  the  army.  Perhaps  the  most 
striking  of  these  was  Boris  Androvsky 
in  the  spectacular  and  very  popular 
stage  version  at  Drury  Lane  in  1920 
of  the  novel  The  Garden  of  Allah  by 
Robert  Hichens  [q.v.]. 

After  winning  a  prize  in  a  sweepstake 
amounting  to  several  thousand  pounds, 
Tearle  used  the  money  to  go  into  manage- 
ment at  the  Apollo;  everybody  wished 
him  well  for  he  was  very  popular,  but 


060 


D.N.B.  1951-1960        TennysoTi-d'Eyncourt 


his  first  production  failed  outright  and 
his  second,  The  Fake  (1924)  by  Frederick 
Lonsdale  [q.v.],  did  only  moderately, 
and  the  money  was  lost.  It  was  not  in 
his  nature  to  repine.  A  chance  to  become 
a  prosperous  actor-manager  had  been 
missed,  but  engagements  continued  to 
flow  in.  On  stage  or  film,  in  England  or 
America,  at  headquarters  or  on  tour,  he 
pursued  his  career,  rising  to  opportu- 
nities for  distinction  when  they  came 
his  way,  yet  never  going  out  of  his  way 
to  seek  for  them,  except  perhaps  in  1938 
when  he  made  his  second  and  more 
successful  appearance  as  actor-manager, 
presenting  at  the  Lyric  The  Flashing 
Stream,  the  first  play  by  Charles  Morgan 
[q.v.].  Though  Tearle's  career  was  not 
that  of  an  ambitious  man,  it  was  that  of  a 
man  of  excellent  gifts  and  a  high  sense  of 
professional  integrity,  and  when  it  was 
rewarded  in  1951  with  a  knighthood  there 
was  a  general  sense  of  satisfaction.  He  had 
been  the  first  president  of  Equity  in  1932. 
Tearle's  first  marriage,  to  Mary  Malone, 
actress,  was  dissolved.  He  married,  sec- 
ondly, in  1932,  Stella  Freeman,  actress, 
who  died  in  1936;  his  third  marriage  in 
1937  to  Barbara  Mary  Palmer,  actress, 
was  also  dissolved.  He  had  no  children. 
He  died  in  London  8  June  1953. 

[Who's  Who  in  the  Theatre;  The  Times, 
10  June  1953 ;  private  information ;  personal 
knowledge.]  W.  A.  Darlington. 

TEMPLEWOOD,  Viscount  (1880-1959), 
statesman.  [See  Hoare,  Sir  Samuel  John 
GuRNEY,  second  baronet.] 

TENNYSON-D'EYNCOURT,  Sir 
EUSTACE  HENRY  WILLIAM,  first 
baronet  (1868-1951),  naval  architect,  the 
sixth  and  youngest  child  of  Louis  Charles 
Tennyson-d'Eyncourt,  metropolitan  magi- 
strate, and  his  wife,  Sophia,  daughter 
of  John  Ashton  Yates,  of  Dinglehead, 
Lancashire,  was  born  1  April  1868  at 
Hadley  House  by  Barnet  Green,  Hertford- 
shire. His  father  was  a  cousin  of  Alfred 
Tennyson  [q.v.] ;  his  grandfather  Charles 
Tennyson  had  added  to  his  name  that  of 
d'Eyncourt,  the  family  through  which  he 
was  descended  on  the  maternal  side. 

Leaving  Charterhouse  at  eighteen 
Tennyson-d'Eyncourt  became  an  appren- 
tice at  the  Elswick  shipyard  of  Armstrong, 
Whitworth  &  Co.,  and  after  two  years 
spent  in  going  through  the  various 
shops  took  as  a  private  student  the 
naval  architecture  course  at  the  Royal 


Naval  College,  Greenwich.  Returning  to 
Elswick,  he  was  placed  in  the  design 
office  under  J.  R.  Perrett  and  remained 
there  on  the  permanent  staff  at  the  con- 
clusion of  his  five  years'  apprenticeship. 
At  that  time  very  many  warships  were 
being  built  for  the  British  and  other 
navies,  the  *Elswick  cruisers'  having  a 
specially  high  reputation.  This  was 
valuable  experience,  but  it  did  not  include 
mercantile  shipbuilding,  and  in  1898 
he  obtained  a  post  as  naval  architect 
with  the  Fairfield  Shipbuilding  and 
Engineering  Company,  at  Govan,  Glas- 
gow, where,  in  addition  to  naval  vessels, 
both  passenger  liners  and  cargo  ships 
were  under  construction. 

In  1902,  however,  d'Eyncourt  received 
what  he  termed  'an  irresistible  oppor- 
tunity to  go  back  to  the  Tyne'.  (Sir) 
Philip  Watts  [q.v.]  had  left  Elswick  to 
become  director  of  naval  construction; 
Perrett  had  succeeded  Watts  at  Elswick 
and  invited  d'Eyncourt  to  take  charge 
of  the  design  office.  This  j)ost  involved 
many  trips  abroad  to  negotiate  naval 
contracts.  In  1904,  after  handing  over 
the  new  cruiser  Hamidieh,  he  was  asked 
by  the  Turkish  Government  to  report 
on  the  condition  of  its  navy.  In  view 
of  the  poor  state  of  many  of  the  ships, 
this  called  for  very  tactful  wording  and 
he  was  awarded  a  third  class  Medjidieh 
for  his  efforts. 

In  1912  d'Eyncourt  was  appointed 
director  of  naval  construction  in  succes- 
sion to  Watts,  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill 
having  decided  to  bring  to  the  Admi- 
ralty a  relatively  young  man  instead  of 
promoting  a  senior  constructor  who  was 
near  the  retiring  age.  During  d'Eyncourt's 
term  of  office  21  capital  ships,  53  cruisers, 
133  submarines  of  eleven  different  classes, 
and  numerous  other  vessels  were  added  to 
the  Royal  Nav> .  The  battleships  of  the 
Royal  Sovereign  class  were  the  first  capital 
ship  designs  for  which  he  was  responsible. 
In  lieu  of  two  of  the  class,  the  battle 
cruisers  Renown  and  Repulse  were  designed 
and  built  in  under  twenty  months.  He 
introduced  the  'bulge'  form  of  protection 
against  torpedo  attack  and  no  ship  so 
fitted  was  sunk  in  the  war  of  1914-18  by 
torpedoes.  In  1915  he  was  entrusted  with 
the  design  of  rigid  airships  for  the  navy  and 
retained  this  responsibility  until  it  was 
transferred  to  an  air  department.  In  Feb- 
ruary of  the  same  year  Churchill  had  asked 
him  to  undertake  the  design  of  a  'land- 
ship'.  Material  for  the  army  was  certainly 
not  normally  his  province,  but  d'Eyncourt 


8652062 


961 


II 


Tennyson-d'Eyncourt        d.n.b.  losi-ioeo 


was  keenly  interested  in  the  project  and 
agreed  to  head  a  committee  formed  to 
design  and  produce  landships  or  'tanks'  as 
they  were  later  termed.  The  prototype  was 
ready  for  trials  early  in  1916  and  the  first 
tanks  saw  action  at  the  battle  of  the 
Somme.  Although  the  original  Admiralty 
landship  committee  was  disbanded  after 
the  early  and  successful  trials,  d'Eyncourt 
was  retained  as  chief  technical  adviser. 

Among  the  many  naval  developments 
which  took  place  during  the  war  perhaps 
the  most  important  were  those  in  the 
design  of  aircraft  carriers.  Under  d'Eyn- 
court's  guidance  there  was  rapid  progress 
and  a  pattern  of  bridge  and  superstructure 
was  set  which  has  been  followed  by  all 
other  navies.  His  most  impressive  design 
was  that  of  the  battle  cruiser  Hood,  the 
first  capital  ship  to  be  fitted  with  small 
tube  boilers,  a  tj^pe  he  had  long  advocated. 
In  the  post-war  years,  he  had  to  contend 
with  the  difficult  problems  consequent  on 
the  Washington  Treaty  of  1922  and  the 
Nelson  and  Rodney  represented  his  solu- 
tion for  the  most  powerful  battleship  of 
less  than  35,000  tons. 

D'Eyncourt  resigned  from  the  Ad- 
miralty in  1924,  but  remained  for  some 
time  a  special  adviser.  From  1924  to 
1928  he  was  a  director  of  his  old  firm, 
Armstrong,  Whitworth  &  Co.  He  then 
joined  the  board  of  Parsons  Marine  Steam 
Turbine  Company  until  his  retirement  in 
1948.  During  the  inter- war  years  he  de- 
signed numerous  merchant  ships  includ- 
ing the  very  novel  heavy  lift  'Belships'. 
He  was  appointed  K.C.B.  in  1917  and 
in  1918  was  made  a  commander  of  the 
Legion  of  Honour  and  also  awarded  the 
American  D.S.M.  He  was  elected  F.R.S. 
in  1921,  and  received  honorary  degrees 
from  Durham  and  Cambridge.  In  1930  he 
was  created  a  baronet  and  in  1937  he  was 
elected  foreign  associate  member  of  the 
French  Academic  de  Marine  in  succession 
to  Lord  Jellicoe  [q.v.]. 

D'Eyncoi^rt  was  chairman  of  the 
advisory  committee  of  the  William 
Froude  Laboratory  for  fifteen  years 
and  was  a  prominent  and  active  member 
of  many  societies  and  institutions,  includ- 
ing the  Worshipful  Company  of  Ship- 
wrights, becoming  a  master  in  1927. 
He  read  several  important  papers  before 
the  Royal  Institution  of  Naval  Architects 
and  was  elected  a  vice-president  in  1916 
and  an  honorary  vice-president  in  1935. 
He  was  president  of  the  North-East 
Coast  Institution  of  Engineers  and  Ship- 
builders from  1925  to  1927. 


In  1898  d'Eyncourt  married  Janet, 
daughter  of  Matthew  Watson  Finlay, 
of  Langside,  near  Glasgow,  and  widow 
of  John  Burns,  of  Glasgow.  She  had 
two  children  by  her  first  marriage  and 
a  son  and  a  daughter  by  her  second 
and  died  in  1909  when  accompanying 
her  husband  on  a  business  visit  to  the 
Argentine.  D'Eyncourt  died  in  London 
1  February  1951  and  was  succeeded  as 
second  baronet  by  his  son,  Eustace 
Gervais  (born  1902). 

A  portrait  by  Sir  Oswald  Birley  was 
hung  in  the  office  of  Brixton  Estate, 
Ltd.,  a  company  d'Eyncourt  had  formed 
in  conjunction  with  his  son  and  son-in- 
law. 

[Sir  Charles  Lillicrap  in  Obituary  Notices  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  No.  20,  November 
1951 ;  Sir  Eustace  Tennyson-d'Eyncourt, 
A  Shipbuilder's  Yarn,  1948 ;  private  informa- 
tion.] K.  C.  Barnaby. 

THOMAS,  DYLAN  MARLAIS  (1914- 
1953),  poet,  was  born  in  Swansea 
27  October  1914,  the  only  son  and 
younger  child  of  David  John  Thomas, 
Enghsh  master  at  the  Swansea  Grammar 
School,  by  his  wife,  Florence  Hannah 
Williams.  'Marlais',  the  name  of  a  small 
stream  in  Carmarthenshire,  links  Thomas 
with  his  parents'  native  county.  After 
the  normal  primary  school  education, 
Thomas  entered  the  Swansea  Grammar 
School,  and  its  school  magazine,  of  which 
he  first  became  sub-editor  then,  in  his 
final  year,  editor,  bears  ample  testimony, 
in  prose  and  verse,  to  the  creative 
assiduity  with  which  he  applied  him- 
self to  his  editorial  tasks.  He  left  school 
with  an  undistinguished  academic  record 
in  1931  to  join  the  South  Wales  Daily 
Post  as  a  reporter  but  by  the  end  of 
1932  he  had  left  the  paper.  This  marked  the 
beginning  of  his  career  as  a  professional 
poet. 

In  September  1933  the  Sunday  Referee 
printed  his  first  poem  to  find  publication 
in  the  London  press,  and  in  the  next 
year  he  was  awarded  the  paper's  'major 
prize'  which  led  to  the  publication 
of  his  18  Poems  (1934).  These  were 
marked  by  an  impression  of  early 
maturity.  The  themes  which  were  to  sus- 
tain his  poetic  output  to  the  end  of 
his  days  are  all  found  here:  the  'Genesis' 
theme,  the  'Adam'  myth,  and  the  creative 
'Word'.  These  themes,  continually  de- 
veloped throughout  his  career,  and  worked 
out  with  meticulous  craftsmanship,  jus- 
tify his  later  claim  that  his  poems  were 


962 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


Thomas,  D.  M. 


'written  for  the  love  of  Man  and  in 
praise  of  God'. 

In  November  1934  Thomas  moved  to 
London  to  work  as  a  freelance  and 
there  he  laid  the  foundations  of  the 
legend  of  the  beer-swilling,  roystering 
Bohemian,  who  behaved  as  some  people 
imagined  a  poet  should.  At  intervals 
he  returned  to  Swansea  where  he  spent 
the  end  of  1935  and  the  beginning  of 
1936  working  on  Twenty -five  Poems, 
published  in  the  latter  year.  In  these 
poems  he  continues  his  probing  into  the 
nature  of  man,  his  beginning  and  end, 
and  his  place  in  the  economy  of  creation. 
His  essentially  religious  nature  informs 
these  poems,  and  his  perceptive  glimpse 
of  the  sacramental  nature  of  the  universe 
in  the  beautifully  turned  lyric,  'This 
Bread  I  Break',  presages  the  change 
which  was  to  be  even  more  clearly 
discerned  in  The  Map  of  Love,  published 
in  1939.  In  the  words  of  his  close  friend, 
Vernon  Watkins,  'Each  [poem]  is  an 
experience  perceived  and  controlled  by 
the  religious  sense,  and  each  answers 
its  own  questions.  He  has  pared  his 
imagery  without  losing  any  of  its  force.' 

In  1937  Dylan  Thomas  married  Caitlin, 
daughter  of  Francis  Macnamara;  they 
had  two  sons  and  one  daughter.  At 
this  time  they  settled  in  Laugharne. 
In  1939  The  World  I  Breathe  was  pub- 
lished in  America.  It  contained  selec- 
tions from  18  Poems,  Twenty -five  Poems, 
The  Map  of  Love,  and  additional  new 
stories.  In  the  following  year.  Portrait 
of  the  Artist  as  a  Young  Dog  appeared — a 
thinly  disguised  autobiographical  account 
of  his  boyhood  in  Swansea,  Gower,  and 
the  Carmarthenshire  countryside.  In  these 
stories  we  find  the  quintessence  of 
Thomas's  rich  humour  and  sense  of  the 
comic,  allied  to  a  compassionate  affection 
for  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men. 

During  the  war  Thomas  lived  in 
London,  interrupted  by  frequent  spells  in 
Laugharne  and  Swansea.  He  returned 
to  Carmarthenshire  in  1944,  and  in  the 
autumn  of  that  year  settled  in  New  Quay, 
Cardiganshire,  moving  back  to  London  in 
September  1945,  where  he  remained  until 
March  1946  when  he  moved  to  Holy- 
well Ford,  Oxford.  In  1947  he  moved  to 
South  Leigh  and  in  1949  returned  to 
Laugharne.  The  war  period  was  perhaps 
the  most  fruitful  of  Thomas's  whole  career. 
Apart  from  his  radio  writing,  collected 
posthumously  in  Quite  Early  One  Morning 
(1954),  he  began  to  be  used  extensively  by 
the  B.B.C.  as  an  actor  and  reader  of  poetry. 


His  gifts  as  a  reader  were  outstanding. 
At  his  best,  he  displayed  a  sensitivity 
which  enabled  him  to  ally  himself,  as  it 
were,  with  the  poet,  in  the  very  act  of 
creating.  There  is  little  doubt  that  it  was 
this  gift  for  reading,  which  insinuated  an 
ease  of  understanding  into  the  most  diffi- 
cult of  his  own  poems,  that  brought  him 
his  early  fame  and  popularity.  He  con- 
fessed that  his  work  for  the  B.B.C.  and  his 
public  readings  contributed  towards  that 
greater  simplification  and  clarity  which  is 
displayed  in  his  later  work. 

Apart  from  his  work  with  the  B.B.C, 
he  was  engaged  in  this  period  on  script- 
writing  for  films — Lidice,  The  Three  Weird 
Sisters,  These  are  the  Men,  Our  Country, 
The  Doctor  and  the  Devils  (published  1953), 
The  Beach  of  Falesd  and  Twenty  Years 
A-Gr owing  (the  last  two  published  post- 
humously). Among  his  posthumous  publi- 
cations is  Adventures  in  the  Skin  Trade 
(1955),  an  unfinished  novel  describing  the 
arrival  of  a  young  poet  in  London,  which 
was  begun  at  some  time  prior  to  1941 .  It  is, 
like  many  of  his  stories,  richly  comic,  and 
is  all  of  a  piece  with  his  other  writing. 
It  was  never  completed,  perhaps  because 
of  the  war  and  the  changed  vision  of  this 
city  of  fire-raids  and  holocausts. 

It  was  Deaths  and  Entrances,  published 
in  1946,  which  sealed  his  promise,  and 
secured  for  him  a  place  in  the  English 
poetic  tradition — in  the  direct  line  of 
his  Welsh  predecessors  Donne,  Herbert, 
and  Vaughan.  Although  this  volume 
contains  a  number  of  poems  which  arise 
from  the  great  tragedy  and  holocaust  of 
the  war,  yet  it  succeeds  in  conveying  an 
impression  of  light  and  illumination. 
Here  are  the  great  poems  of  the  holy 
innocence  of  childhood.  This  movement 
into  light  is  accompanied  by  a  simpli- 
fying of  style,  and  an  attendant  gain 
in  lucidity.  In  these  poems,  Thomas  is 
a  ritualist,  celebrating  the  glory  of  the 
material  order  and  his  imagery  takes 
on  a  'Catholic'  flavour,  no  doubt  under 
the  influence  of  Gerard  Manley  Hopkins, 
a  poet  whose  work  he  loved. 

The  first  of  Thomas's  four  visits  to 
America  was  made  in  the  spring  of  1950. 
There  is  little  doubt  that  these  trips  were 
undertaken  'to  make  some  money'  which 
he  badly  needed.  He  was  completely  in- 
capable of  ordering  the  material  side  of  his 
life,  and  even  the  prospect  of  'making 
money'  bored  him.  His  account  of  one  of 
his  marathon  tours  is  described  in  the 
hilariously  funny  broadcast  talk  'Visit  to 
America'  and  is  a   healthy  antidote   to 


963 


Thomas,  D.  M. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


J.  M .  Brinnin's  lurid  but  one-sided  account 
in  Dylan  Thomas  in  America. 

Collected  Poems  was  put  together  at  the 
suggestion  of  his  publishers  in  1952,  and 
contained  all  that  he  wished  to  preserve. 
The  following  January  he  was  presented 
with  the  William  Foyle  poetry  prize.  When 
the  tinie  comes  to  make  a  final  assessment 
of  his  work,  his  stature  will  be  determined, 
not  so  much  upon  the  strength  of  a  hand- 
ful of  random  poems,  nor  even  on  Deaths 
and  Entrances,  but  on  the  Collected  Poems 
seen  as  a  unity,  the  fruit  of  a  life  of 
dedication  to  his  'craft  and  sullen  art'. 
The  *  Author's  Prologue',  a  poem  written 
expressly  as  an  introduction  to  the 
Collected  Poems,  was  to  be  his  last  com- 
pleted poem  and  his  final  declaration 
of  the  relevance  of  his  art  to  the  human 
condition. 

In  January  1952  he  made  his  second 
visit  to  America,  and  in  April  1953 
his  third.  Then  came  the  final  visit  in 
the  autumn  of  the  same  year  when  he 
arrived  a  sick  man.  He  was  scheduled 
to  take  part  in  the  first  performance 
of  his  'play  for  voices',  Under  Milk  Wood, 
on  24  October  at  the  Poetry  Center, 
New  York.  (The  first  part  of  this  play 
had  already  appeared  in  Botteghe  Oscure 
in  1952  under  the  title  Llareggub,  but  it 
seems  that  Thomas  worked  on  it  right 
to  the  end.  The  final  version  was  broad- 
cast in  the  Third  Programme  of  the 
B.B.C.  on  25  January  1954.) 

The  presentation  in  New  York  was 
agreed  by  critics  to  be  the  finest  per- 
formance of  Under  Milk  Wood.  It  was 
his  last  appearance.  Within  a  few  days, 
after  bouts  of  excessive  drinking  of  hard 
liquor,  he  succumbed  to  alcoholic  poison- 
ing and  died  in  New  York  9  November 
1953.  His  body  was  brought  back  to 
Laugharne  and  was  interred  in  the  burial 
ground  of  the  parish  church  of  St. 
Martin. 

Portraits  by  Augustus  John  and  Alfred 
Janes  and  a  bronze  bust,  from  a  death 
mask,  by  David  Slivka  and  Ibram 
Lassaw,  are  in  the  National  Museum  of 
Wales.  The  National  Portrait  Gallery 
has  portraits  by  G.  T.  Stuart  and  Rupert 
Shephard  and  drawings  by  Michael 
Ayrton  and  Mervyn  Levy.  The  Tate 
Gallery  has  a  head  painted  by  Eileen 
Agar. 

[The  Times,  10  November  1953;  Dylan 
Thomas,  Letters  to  Vernon  Watkins,  1957; 
J.  M.  Brinnin,  Dylan  Thomas  in  America, 
1956 ;  J.  A.  Rolph,  Dylan  Thomas :  A  Biblio- 
graphy,   1956;    Augustus    John,    Finishing 


Touches,  1964;  Constantine  FitzGibbon,  The 
Life  of  Dylan  Thomas,  1965;  Poet  in  the 
Making :  The  Notebooks  of  Dylan  Thomas,  ed. 
Ralph  Maud,  1968  ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Aneirin  Talfan  Davies. 


THOMAS,      FREDERICK     WILLIAM 

(1867-1956),  orientalist,  was  born  at 
Wilnecote,  Tamworth,  Staffordshire,  21 
March  1867,  the  son  of  Frederick  Thomas, 
colliery  clerk,  and  his  wife,  Frances 
Blainey.  He  was  educated  at  King 
Edward  VI's  High  School,  Birmingham, 
whence  he  gained  a  scholarship  at 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge.  He  was 
awarded  a  first  class  in  part  i  (1887) 
and  part  ii  (with  distinction,  1889)  of 
the  classical  tripos,  followed  by  a  first 
class  in  the  Indian  languages  tripos 
(1890).  He  won  medals  for  Greek  epigram 
(1887),  Latin  epigram  (1888),  and  Greek 
ode  (1889),  the  Members'  prize  for  Latin 
essay  (1888),  and,  twice,  the  Le  Bas 
essay[prize  (1890-91 ).  Captain  of  his  school, 
he  practised  many  sports  at  Cambridge 
and  was  capped  for  lacrosse.  In  1892 
he  was  elected  into  a  fellowship  at  Trinity 
College,  which  he  held  in  absentia  while 
headmaster's  assistant  (1891-8)  at  his 
old  school.  In  1898  he  was  appointed 
assistant  librarian  of  the  India  Office 
under  C.  H.  Tawney,  whom  he  succeeded 
as  librarian  in  1903.  This  post  he  held 
until  1927,  when  he  was  elected  Boden 
professor  of  Sanskrit  at  Oxford.  He 
vacated  his  chair,  and  with  it  his  fellow- 
ship at  Balhol,  in  1937. 

As  a  classical  scholar  Thomas  had 
specialized  in  philology,  and  it  was  as 
a  philologist  that  he  contributed  most 
to  oriental  studies.  His  first  publications, 
the  two  Le  Bas  essays,  were  devoted  to 
the  history  of  British  education  in  India 
and  the  mutual  influence  of  Mohamme- 
dans and  Hindus.  He  soon  turned  to 
more  austere  topics  and  in  1897, 
in  collaboration  with  his  teacher  E.  B. 
Cowell  (whose  notice  he  contributed 
to  this  Dictionary),  he  produced  the 
standard  translation  of  the  Harsa-carita 
of  Bana.  At  the  India  Office  he  threw  him- 
self with  enthusiasm  into  the  massive 
task  of  arranging  and  cataloguing  the 
large  accumulations  of  oriental  books 
and  manuscripts  in  many  languages. 
When  Sir  Aurel  Stein  [q.v]  discovered 
the  famous  'hidden  library'  near  Tun- 
huang  and  all  the  documents  in  Tibetan 
passed  to  the  India  Office  library,  Thomas 
found  a  wonderful  outlet  for  his  lin- 
guistic gifts  which  occupied  him  for  the 


964 


D.N.B.  1051-1060 


Thomas,  H. 


rest  of  his  life.  Among  his  many  dis- 
coveries in  this  collection  was  a  hitherto 
miknown  language  of  the  Sino-Tibetan 
borderland  which  he  successfully  deci- 
phered and  to  which  he  gave  the  name 
*Nam'.  His  speciaUst  interests,  however, 
ranged  far  beyond  pure  philology.  He 
made  important  contributions  to  Buddh- 
ist studies,  and  was  an  authority  on 
Jainism.  His  acute  mind  found  deUght 
in  expounding  the  intricacies  of  Indian 
philosophy  and  logic.  He  wrote  important 
papers  on  Tibetan  mythology  and  folk- 
lore. In  all  he  pubhshed  250  books  and 
articles.  True  to  the  exact  tradition  of 
Indian  scholarship  established  by  men 
like  Jones,  Wilkins,  and  Colebrooke, 
he  also  inherited  their  universality  in  a 
time  when  the  frontiers  of  Indian  studies 
were  widely  extended  to  the  north  and 
east.  He  was  a  pioneer  of  the  new  school 
of  Asian  philology  and  his  influence  has 
proved  to  be  far-reaching. 

In  1937  to  mark  his  seventieth  birth- 
day, ninety-nine  colleagues  in  orientahsm 
of  many  lands  signed  a  memorial  in  his 
honour;  two  years  later  he  received  a 
volume  of  studies  to  which  forty-eight 
scholars  contributed  and  which  contained 
a  bibliography  of  his  writings  down  to 
1939.  He  was  elected  F.B.A.  in  1927; 
appointed  CLE.  in  1928 ;  received  hono- 
rary degrees  from  Munich,  Allahabad, 
and  Birmingham;  and  in  1941  was 
awarded  the  triennial  gold  medal  of  the 
Royal  Asiatic  Society. 

To  his  last  years  Thomas  retained 
the  lean  and  athletic  figure  of  the  strenu- 
ous sportsman.  His  manner  was  keen 
and  affable,  and  he  enjoyed  speaking  in 
learned  company.  He  celebrated  his 
retirement  by  undertaking  a  tour  of 
India  in  1938  which  would  have  taxed 
the  strength  and  energies  of  the  most 
intrepid  traveller.  He  retained  the  full 
scope  of  his  great  intellectual  powers 
to  the  end,  although  deafness  at  the  last 
diminished  his  social  enjoyment.  He 
died  at  Bodicote,  Oxfordshire,  6  May 
1956. 

In  1908  Thomas  married  Eleanor 
Grace,  daughter  of  Walter  John  Ham- 
mond, engineer,  of  The  Grange,  Knock- 
holt,  Kent;  they  had  one  son  and  one 
daughter. 

[H.  N.  Randle  in  Proceedings  of  the  British 
Academy,  vol.  xliv,  1958  (bibliography, 
1940-57);  L.  D.  Bamett  in  Journal  of  the 
Royal  Asiatic  Society,  part  2,  1957 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 


iiiiHiyi>jf;i^ijHJ<> 


A.  J.  Arbebry. 


THOMAS,  Sir  HENRY  (1878-1952), 
Hispanologist  and  bibliographer,  was  born 
at  Eynsham,  near  Oxford,  21  November 
1878,  the  tliird  child  and  second  son  of 
Alfred  Charles  Thomas,  minister  of  the 
local  Irvingite  congregation,  and  his  wife, 
Hannah  Friday.  The  family  derived  from 
Coventry,  where  its  members  had  long 
been  silk- weavers.  His  parents  moving  to 
Birmingham,  Thomas  entered  King  Ed- 
ward VI  Grammar  School,  Aston,  where 
he  soon  distinguished  himself  and  as  head 
boy  matriculated  at  Mason  College,  later 
the  university  of  Birmingham.  There  he 
did  brilliantly  in  the  classical  languages, 
French,  and  EngUsh  philology,  becoming 
research  scholar  in  classics  and  Constance 
Naden  memorial  gold  medallist.  In  Octo- 
ber 1903  he  entered  the  British  Museum  as 
assistant  in  the  department  of  printed 
books.  Soon  after, he  began  to  learn  Spanish 
and  by  1910  he  was  already  well  known  as 
a  Spanish  scholar.  Iberian  studies  re- 
mained his  chief  interest  and  brought  him 
many  honours ;  he  was  an  honorary  coun- 
cillor of  the  Spanish  Higher  Council  for 
Scientific  Research,  a  member  of  the 
Spanish  and  Luso-Brazilian  Councils,  and 
president  of  the  Anglo-Spanish  Society 
(1931-47).  A  monograph  on  Spanish  and 
Portuguese  Romances  of  Chivalry  (1920), 
expanded  from  his  Norman  MacColl  lec- 
tures at  Cambridge  in  1917,  brought 
Thomas  the  Bonsoms  prize  and  gold  medal 
of  the  Institut  d'Estudis  Catalans  in  1921, 
and  in  1922  he  delivered  the  Taylorian 
lecture  at  Oxford  on  'Shakespeare  and 
Spain'.  His  Spanish  Sixteenth-Century 
Printing  (1926)  was  translated  into  Ger- 
man (1928).  For  the  Bibliographical 
Society  of  London,  of  which  he  was  presi- 
dent in  1936-8,  he  wrote  a  monograph. 
Early  Spanish  Bookbindings,  XI-XV 
Centuries,  with  plates  from  photographs 
of  his  own  taking  (1939),  and  a  paper  on 
'Copperplate  Engravings  in  Early  Spanish 
Books'  (1940).  He  produced  an  edition 
(1923)  and  a  verse  translation  (1935)  of  the 
anonymous  drama  La  Estrella  de  Sevilla 
(2nd  eds.  1930  and  1950)  and  a  verse 
translation  of  J.  E.  Hartzenbusch's  Los 
Amantes  de  Teruel  (1938,  2nd  ed.  1950), 
doing  much  translating  in  daily  suburban 
trains. 

Thomas's  vacations  were  usually  passed 
in  Spain,  where  he  had  many  friends. 
Retracing  on  foot  the  medieval  pilgrim 
way  to  the  shrine  of  Santiago  de  Com- 
postela,  he  corrected  certain  errors  in 
the  accepted  itinerary,  and  he  gave 
a  humorous  account  of  a  miracie  story 


965 


Thomas,  H. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


current  among  the  medieval  pilgrims 
in  Monster  and  Miracle  (privately  printed, 
1935) ;  a  Catalan  translation  appeared  in 
1942  and  he  himself  did  .a  Spanish 
version  in  1946.  When  after  the  Spanish 
civil  war  and  the  war  of  1939-45  he  was 
able  to  revisit  Spain,  Thomas  earnestly 
set  himself  to  counteract  Anglo-Spanish 
misunderstandings.  He  broadcast  several 
times  in  'La  Voz  de  Londres'.  In  1947 
he  was  the  guest  of  the  Spanish  Govern- 
ment at  the  Cervantes  quatercentenary 
celebrations. 

At  the  British  Museum,  Thomas  was 
responsible  for  the  Short-Title  Cata- 
logtie  of  Books  printed  in  Spain  and  of 
Spanish  Books  printed  elsewhere  in  Europe 
before  1601  now  in  the  British  Museum 
(1921).  This  volume  sets  out  the  biblio- 
graphical essentials  concerning  at  least 
2,500  books  and  Thomas  worked  out  a 
very  successful  scheme  for  keeping  the 
entries  as  succinct  as  was  compatible 
with  accuracy.  He  applied  the  same 
method,  still  within  the  compass  of  a 
single  volume,  to  the  museum's  12,000 
French  books  printed  before  1601  (1924) 
and  later  to  the  Portuguese  (1940)  and 
Spanish- American  books  (1944).  When 
in  1936  the  museum  acquired  the  manu- 
script of  an  unknown  Portuguese  account 
of  the  discovery  of  Abyssinia,  Thomas 
contributed  to  the  officially  published 
edition  of  this  an  introduction,  an 
English  translation,  and  notes  (1938). 
Thomas  became  deputy  keeper  in  the 
department  of  printed  books  in  1924  and 
principal  keeper  in  1943,  when  it  fell 
to  him  to  deal  with  the  problems  of 
post-war  reconstruction.  In  these  he 
was  greatly  interested  and  overtaxed 
his  strength  by  his  labours.  In  December 
1944  he  accompanied  the  director  of 
the  museum  to  the  United  States  and 
Canada  on  a  three-months'  official  visit 
for  study  of  recent  library  design  and 
organization.  He  retired  in  1947  and 
immediately  resumed  the  Spanish  studies 
which  other  occupations  had  made  him 
put  aside,  but  his  health,  which  had  at 
all  times  given  him  trouble,  was  now 
manifestly  failing  and  in  the  autumn 
of  1950  he  had  a  seizure.  Others  followed 
and  he  died  at  Birmingham  after  great 
suffering,  21  July  1952. 

Thomas  was  knighted  in  1946.  He  was 
D.Litt.  and  honorary  LL.D.  of  Birming- 
ham University  and  D.Lit.  of  London 
University,  and  became  a  fellow  of  the 
British  Academy  in  1936.  Numerous 
Spanish,  Portuguese,  and  South  American 


learned  societies  elected  him  honorary 
or  corresponding  member. 

Thomas  had  many  subsidiary  interests 
and  held  detached  and  moderate  views. 
He  was  a  skilful  photographer  and  a 
resourceful  motorist.  He  was  long  a 
member  of  the  Oxford  and  Cambridge 
Musical  Club  and  read  a  paper  on 
'Musical  Settings  of  Horace's  Lyric 
Poems'  before  the  Musical  Association 
in  1920. 

Unconditional  integrity  and  devotion 
to  duty  were  the  basis  of  Thomas's 
character  and  he  could  be  severe  on 
derelictions  in  these  respects.  A  very 
quiet  manner  was  the  cover  both  for 
great  kindness  and  generosity  and  for 
great  determination,  and  he  was  the  most 
loyal  of  friends.  He  had  much  dry 
humour  and  could  on  occasion  be  a  great 
talker.  He  never  married  but  was  devoted 
to  the  family  at  Birmingham. 

[V.  Scholderer  and  S.  Morison  in  Proceedings 
of  the  British  Academy,  vol.  xl,  1954; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Victor  Scholderer. 

THOMAS,  JAMES  PURDON  LEWES, 

Viscount  Cilcennin  (1903-1960),  poli- 
tician, was  born  13  October  1903  at  Cae- 
glas,  Llandilo,  Carmarthenshire,  the  only 
son  of  John  Lewes  Thomas,  a  justice  of 
the  peace,  by  his  wife,  Anne  Louisa, 
daughter  of  Commander  George  Purdon, 
R.N.,  of  Tinarana,  county  Clare.  He  was 
educated  at  Rugby  (becoming  a  governor 
in  1937  and  chairman  in  1958)  and  at  Oriel 
College,  Oxford,  where  he  obtained  an 
aegrotat  degree  in  French  in  1926. 

From  a  minor  post  in  the  central 
office  of  the  Conservative  Party  Thomas 
was  in  1929  appointed  an  assistant 
private  secretary  to  the  prime  minister, 
Stanley  Baldwin.  In  the  same  year  he 
stood  unsuccessfully  as  member  of  Par- 
liament for  Llanelly.  He  was  elected 
in  1931  for  Hereford,  retaining  the  seat 
until  created  a  peer  in  1955. 

Preferring  the  discreet  business  of 
political  manoeuvre  to  the  open  exercise 
of  power,  Thomas  made  an  ideal  parlia- 
mentary private  secretary.  His  first 
master  (1932-6)  was  his  namesake  J.  H. 
Thomas  [q.v.],  secretary  of  state  for 
the  dominions  and  later  for  the  colonies. 
Outwardly  they  were  an  ill-assorted 
pair,  the  defiant  plebeian  and  the  self- 
possessed  patrician.  Yet  each  took  a 
humorous  view  of  life  which  led  many 
to  underestimate  their  judgement.  At 
no  time  was  the  younger  man's  affection 


966 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Thomas,  J.  P.  L. 


and  loyalty  more  movingly  displayed 
than  during  his  chief's  resignation  in 
1936,  the  result  of  a  leak  of  budget 
secrets.  During  the  war,  too,  he  was  to 
place  personal  allegiance  above  cautious 
conformity  by  openly  visiting  Baldwin  at 
the  nadir  of  that  statesman's  fortunes. 

Thomas  gave  the  same  unstinted  de- 
votion to  Anthony  Eden  (later  the  Earl  of 
Avon),  secretary  of  state  for  foreign  affairs, 
whose  parliamentary  private  secretary  he 
became  in  1937.  Less  than  a  fortnight 
after  his  appointment,  Thomas  was 
approached  by  emissaries  of  the  prime 
minister,  Neville  Chamberlain.  Fearing 
that  Eden's  open  mistrust  of  Hitler 
and  Mussolini  threatened  Chamberlain's 
policy  of  appeasement,  they  begged 
Thomas  'to  build  a  bridge  between 
10  Downing  Street  and  the  Foreign 
Office'.  This  he  interpreted  as  an  invi- 
tation to  spy  on  his  chief  and  he  rejected 
their  overtures  with  indignation.  On 
Eden's  resignation  in  1938,  Thomas 
unflinchingly  followed  him  into  what 
then  seemed  the  political  wilderness, 
and  he  abstained  from  voting  in  favour  of 
the  Munich  agreement. 

At  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  he 
volunteered  for  military  service,  but 
was  rejected  because  of  a  permanently 
injured  knee,  and  instead  joined  Eden 
at  the  Dominions  Office.  From  1940  to 
1943  he  was  a  tactful  and  popular  govern- 
ment whip  in  the  Commons.  Then  he 
became  financial  secretary  to  the  Admi- 
ralty, his  first  opportunity  of  showing 
that  attachment  to  the  Royal  Navy 
which  was  the  ruUng  passion  of  his  life. 
An  irresistible  charm  and  a  readiness  to 
admit  to  ignorance  of  technical  subjects 
ensured  his  success  in  solving  labour 
problems  in  the  dockyards — a  necessary 
prelude  to  the  invasion  of  Normandy. 

After  the  general  election  of  1945, 
Thomas  became  the  Opposition  spokes- 
man on  naval  affairs  and  deputy  chair- 
man of  the  Conservative  Party.  From 
Lord  Woolton,  the  chairman,  he  accepted 
the  task  of  preparing  a  list  of  parlia- 
mentary candidates  for  the  guidance 
of  constituencies.  His  ability  to  win  the 
confidence  of  those  he  interviewed 
while  shrewdly  assessing  their  character 
enabled  him  to  recruit  much  youthful 
talent.  This  was  reflected  in  the  return 
of  his  party  to  power  at  the  general 
election  of  1951. 

Thomas  had  no  illusions  that  he  was 
fitted  either  by  temperament  or  by 
reverence    for   party    dogma    to   occupy 


the  highest  offices  in  the  Cabinet.  Since 
his  wartime  years  at  the  Admiralty, 
however,  he  had  pined  to  return  to  this 
department  and  his  ambition  was  ful- 
filled when  he  became  first  lord  in 
October  1951.  He  was  sworn  of  the  Privy 
Council  in  November.  'There  is  only  one 
test  of  a  first  lord',  he  used  to  remark, 
'Will  he  look  well  in  a  yachting  cap  when 
visiting  the  fleet?'  Standing  over  six  foot, 
with  boldly  cut  features  and  a  fresh  com- 
plexion, Thomas  was  as  much  at  ease  on 
the  lower  deck  as  in  the  ward  room.  His 
popularity  was  immediate  and  lasting,  his 
progress  round  any  naval  establishment  a 
convivial  occasion.  During  his  five  years 
at  the  Admiralty  he  accepted  the  contro- 
versial recommendation  that  no  officer 
should  be  recruited  under  the  age  of  eigh- 
teen, a  measure  subsequently  endorsed  by 
other  first  lords.  He  resisted  pressure  to 
abolish  the  Fleet  Air  Arm,  considered  by 
some  to  be  unduly  expensive  in  both  men 
and  money.  Working  with  the  first  sea 
lord.  Lord  Mountbatten,  he  also  set  up 
a  committee  which  achieved  remarkable 
economies  without  substantially  reducing 
naval  strength. 

In  December  1955  Thomas  was  created 
Viscount  Cilcennin,  taking  his  title  from 
the  little  river  which  runs  through  his 
family  property  in  Carmarthenshire.  Less 
than  a  year  later,  although  only  fifty-two, 
he  decided  with  regret  to  retire  from  poli- 
tics to  his  house  at  the  foot  of  the  Malvern 
hills.  His  instinct  of  hospitality  and  the 
splendour  of  his  official  residence.  Admi- 
ralty House,  had  tempted  him  to  spend 
more  than  he  could  afford.  He  also  suffered 
increasing  pain  from  arthritis  of  the  hip, 
which  he  bore  with  stoicism.  So  that  his 
links  with  the  navy  should  not  be  snapped 
too  abruptly,  he  was  invited  to  join  the 
royal  yacht  Britannia  for  the  Duke  of 
Edinburgh's  tour  of  the  Commonwealth 
in  1956-7. 

Having  represented  Hereford  in  the 
Commons  for  nearly  twenty-five  years, 
he  was  no  less  delighted  to  be  appointed 
lord-lieutenant  of  the  county  in  1957. 
His  financial  burden  was  eased  by  invita- 
tions to  serve  on  the  boards  of  several 
companies,  and  he  proved  an  energetic 
and  lively  chairman  of  Television  Wales 
and  Western.  In  his  leisure  hours  he  wrote 
an  attractive  little  volume  on  Admiralty 
House,  the  profits  from  which  he  character- 
istically decided  should  be  given  to  a  naval 
charity.  He  did  not  five  to  see  its  pub- 
lication, but  died  in  London  13  July  1960. 
He  was  unmarried. 


967 


Thomas,  J.  P.  L. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Jim  Thomas  had  a  genius  for  friendship. 
He  was  an  entertaining  talker  who  radiated 
gaiety  as  he  sat  on  into  the  early  hours 
recounting  those  personal  adventures 
which  owed  as  much  to  a  sense  of  poetry 
as  to  historical  accuracy.  He  loved  gossip 
but  was  utterly  without  malice.  The 
malice  of  others  he  dismissed  with 
chuckles  and  puffs  of  his  pipe.  He  was 
quietly  well  read,  a  gardener,  and  a  gour- 
met. 

A  portrait  by  Simon  Elwes  remained  the 
possession  of  the  artist.  Others  by  Mary 
Rennell  and  John  Ward  belong  to  the 
family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Kenneth  Rose. 

THOMAS,      MARGARET     HAIG, 

Viscountess  Rhondda  (1883-1958), 
foiuider  and  editor  of  Time  and  Tide,  was 
born  in  London  12  June  1883,  the  only 
child  of  David  Alfred  Thomas,  later  Vis- 
count Rhondda  [q.v.],  a  coal  owner  and 
politician,  of  Llanwern,  and  his  wife,  Sybil 
Margaret,  fourth  daughter  of  George 
Augustus  Haig,  of  Pen  Ithon,  Radnorshire, 
a  member  of  the  ancient  family  of  Bemer- 
syde  to  which  Earl  Haig  [q.v.]  belonged. 

She  was  educated  by  governesses 
until  she  was  thirteen  and  then  as  a  day 
girl  at  Notting  Hill  High  School.  She 
edited  a  printed  magazine  called  The 
Shooting  Star,  for  the  doubtful  benefit, 
as  both  readers  and  contributors,  of 
her  family.  Two  years  later,  by  her  own 
wish,  she  went  as  a  boarder  to  St.  Leo- 
nards School  where  she  was  very  happy. 
Afterwards  she  had  three  London  sea- 
sons, which,  being  shy,  she  disliked, 
and  spent  a  scarcely  more  fruitful  year  at 
Somerville  College,  Oxford.  In  1908  she 
married  (Sir)  Humphrey  Mackworth  (died 
1948),  later  the  seventh  baronet,  of  Caer- 
leon-on-Usk.  The  marriage  was  not  a  suc- 
cess. Mackworth  loved  hunting,  his  wife 
loved  books ;  she  wanted  children  and  had 
none.  She  divorced  him  in  1923,  but  always 
insisted  that  he  was  'a  very  nice  man'. 

Because  her  husband  was  a  Conser- 
vative, she  joined  the  Conservative 
Party  although  she  had  been  brought 
up  as  a  Liberal;  but  only  a  few  months 
after  her  marriage  she  detached  herself 
from  aU  party  allegiance  by  joining 
the  miKtant  suffragettes  in  the  Women's 
Social  and  Political  Union.  Searching 
for  a  rational  basis  to  an  emotional 
decision,  she  read  widely  and  began 
to  write  articles  on  the  suffrage  question ; 
later   she   looked   back   on   this   as  the 


time  of  her  real  education.  Her  militant 
activities  culminated  in  an  attempt 
to  destroy  the  letters  in  a  pillar  box 
with  a  chemical  bomb.  She  was  sent  to 
Usk  prison  where  she  went  on  hunger 
strike  and  was  released  after  five  days. 

Her  father,  whom  she  described  as  a 
liberal  education  in  himself,  took  her 
still  farther  out  of  her  husband's  world 
by  appointing  her  his  personal  assistant 
and  proxy  in  many  business  interests. 
In  1915  they  returned  from  a  visit  to 
America  in  the  Ltisitania.  When  the 
ship  was  torpedoed  she  went  down 
with  it  and  floated  in  a  lifebelt  for 
three  hours  before  being  picked  up  un- 
conscious. Just  a  month  before  he  died  in 
1918,  Lord  Rhondda,  then  a  baron,  was 
created  a  viscount  with  special  remainder 
to  his  daughter.  She  inherited  both 
his  title  and  his  many  business  interests. 
In  a  long  legal  dispute  she  claimed  the 
right  to  sit  in  the  House  of  Lords ; 
an  attempt  which  was  finally  defeated 
largely  by  the  opposition  of  Lord  Birken- 
head [q.v.]. 

Much  though  she  enjoyed  business 
life,  there  was  something  else  she  wanted 
more:  to  run  a  weekly  political  review 
which  should  be  influential  because  it 
reached  influential  people.  In  1920  she 
founded  Time  and  Tide,  which  she 
effectively  controlled  from  the  beginning 
although  she  did  not  assume  the  editorship 
until  1926.  Under  Mrs.  Helen  Archdale 
the  paper  was  left-wing  and  aggressively 
feminist.  By  the  time  Lady  Rhondda 
died,  it  was  called  right-wing  and  women 
were  seldom  mentioned  in  it.  These 
changes  were  partly  apparent,  because  the 
world  had  moved  to  the  Left,  partly  real, 
because  Lady  Rhondda's  political  judge- 
ment had  matured.  She  saw  that  her 
old  principles,  consistently  applied,  must 
be  maintained  against  new  opponents.  She 
still  believed  in  equal  rights  for  women 
(although  she  said  latterly  that  it  had  been 
wrong  to  lower  the  voting  age  to  twenty- 
one)  but  realized  that  the  fight  was  over 
and  that  her  influence  would  be  greater  if 
she  detached  herself  and  the  paper  from  it. 

Tim£  and  Tide  became  one  of  the 
leading  weeklies,  impressed  always  with 
her  own  strong  personality,  shaped  in 
every  detail  to  her  wishes,  standing  for 
the  things  in  which  she  passionately 
believed :  the  infinite  value  of  individuals, 
personal  freedom,  opposition  to  tyranny 
both  at  home  and  abroad.  She  wrote  of 
Munich  with  relief  that  'there  will  be  no 
bombs  tonight'  but  in  the  certainty  that 


968 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Thomas,  W.  B. 


it  was  a  disastrous  betrayal.  After  the  war 
she  held  that  the  new  enemies  of  freedom 
were  Communism  abroad  and  socialism 
at  home. 

She  loved  and  knew  good  writing. 
Many  of  the  distinguished  authors  of 
the  day  contributed  to  Time  and  Tide: 
G.  B.  Shaw  (who  would  never  accept  pay- 
ment), G.  K.  Chesterton,  Charles  WilUams, 
Gilbert  Murray,  G.  M.  Young  [qq.v.], 
(Dame)  Rebecca  West,  and  many  others. 
Theodora  Bosanquet  (Lady  Rhondda's 
closest  friend  and  companion),  (Sir)  John 
Betjeman,  and  (Dame)  C.  V.  Wedgwood 
were  among  those  who  worked  on  the 
staff. 

Except  during  the  war  years  Time  and 
Tide  always  required  a  heavy  subsidy. 
By  1958  Lady  Rhondda's  money  was 
nearly  at  an  end.  She  had  made  desperate 
attempts  to  obtain  new  backing  or  to 
find  an  acceptable  purchaser,  but  to 
little  avail.  At  the  last  moment  a  fund 
was  started  among  the  paper's  own  readers 
and  enough  money  was  raised  to  enable 
it  to  continue  temporarily.  Exhausted 
by  the  struggle  Lady  Rhondda  died 
suddenly  in  London  20  July  1958.  Her 
ashes  were  buried  at  Llanwern.  It  emerged 
that  she  had  spent  some  quarter  of  a 
million  pounds  on  Time  and  Tide  and  that 
there  was  not  enough  left  to  meet  even 
the  principal  legacies  in  her  will.  For 
thirty-eight  years  the  paper  had  been  her 
whole  life.  People  found  her  difficult 
because  she  expected  from  them  an 
equally  single-minded  devotion  to  the 
paper.  She  had  deliberately  discarded 
all  her  other  interests,  except  her  love 
of  gardening  and  of  the  Welsh  country- 
side. 

Mill  and  Plato  were  two  of  her  favourite 
authors.  She  was  a  democrat  but  not  an 
egalitarian ;  a  strong  patriot ;  and  in  later 
life  a  strong  Christian.  Many  tributes  were 
paid  to  her  political  acumen  and  the 
nobility  of  the  causes  she  espoused,  but 
those  who  knew  her  best  admired  most 
the  indomitable  courage  which  refused 
to  accept  defeat. 

In  looks  she  was  sturdily  built  with  curly 
hair  and  a  very  determined  mouth  and 
jaw,  softened  by  a  hint  of  ready  laughter. 
A  portrait  of  her  in  early  middle  age, 
painted  by  S.  J.  Solomon,  is  at  Pen  Ithon ; 
another,  painted  in  1932  by  Alice  M. 
Burton,  was  hung  in  the  offices  of  Time 
and  Tide. 

[Viscountess  Rhondda,  This  Was  My  World, 
1933;  private  information;  personal  know- 


ledge.] 


Viiii.-:- 


Anthony  Lejeune. 


THOMAS,      Sir     WILLIAM     BEACH 

(1868-1957),  journalist  and  author,  was 
born  at  Godmanchester,  Huntingdon, 
22  May  1868,  the  second  son  of  the  Rev. 
Daniel  George  Thomas,  who  became 
rector  of  Hamerton,  Huntingdonshire, 
in  1872,  by  his  wife,  Rosa  Beart.  His 
early  years  in  his  father's  parish  gave 
him  a  deep  love  for  the  countryside. 
He  was  educated  at  Shrewsbury,  where  he 
was  a  member  of  the  football  and  cricket 
elevens  and  distinguished  himself  as  a 
runner,  being  appointed  huntsman  of  the 
Royal  Shrewsbury  School  Hunt.  In  1887 
he  went  with  a  Careswell  exhibition  to 
Christ  Church,  Oxford,  winning  a  full 
college  scholarship  in  1891  but  obtaining 
only  a  third  class  in  classical  moderations 
(1889)  and  liter ae  humaniores  (1891).  His 
record  as  an  athlete  was,  however,  most 
impressive.  With  his  conspicuous  height 
and  huge  stride,  he  was  magnificent  in 
action;  for  three  years  in  succession  he 
represented  the  university,  first  in  the 
mile,  then  in  the  hundred  yards,  and  in 
the  quarter-mile  which  he  won  in  1890. 
In  1890-91  he  was  president  of  the 
Athletics  Club.  He  also  played  both 
association  and  rugby  football  and  cricket 
for  his  college. 

On  leaving  Oxford,  Beach  Thomas — he 
used  his  second  Christian  name  as  a  sur- 
name— taught  at  Bradfield  (1891-6),  then 
at  Dulwich  (1897-8) ;  but  teaching  proved 
uncongenial  and  he  turned  to  journalism 
as  one  of  the  writers  of  the  'By  the  Way* 
column  in  the  Globe.  J.  L.  Garvin  [q.v.] 
then  invited  him  to  write  about  the  open 
air  for  the  Outlook  which  he  was  editing, 
and  Beach  Thomas  was  thus  happily 
employed  for  nearly  two  years  until  the 
Outlook  changed  hands.  For  some  time 
he  was  on  the  staff  of  the  Saturday 
Review,  which  he  did  not  greatly  enjoy, 
and  he  contributed  both  prose  and  verse 
to  many  other  papers.  He  wrote  the 
volume  on  Athletics  for  the  Isthmian 
Library  (1901),  but  the  next  milestone 
in  his  career  was  an  interview  at  the 
Daily  Mail  office  with  Lord  NorthclifTe 
[q.v.],  whom  he  at  once  felt  to  be  a  'chief 
'whom  it  was  very  pleasant  and  honourable 
to  serve'.  Northcliffe  engaged  him  as  a 
writer  on  country  life,  and  to  his  joy 
agreed  that  he  should  five  in  the  country 
and  'not  come  to  London  more  than 
twice  a  week'.  He  settled  in  a  cottage 
in  the  valley  of  the  Mimram  in  Hert- 
fordshire, and  as  early  as  1908  pubUshed 
a  selection  of  his  essays  under  the  title 
From  a  Hertfordshire  Cottage,  which  well 


Thomas,  W.  B. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


displayed  his  powers  of  observation  and 
his  unusual  gifts  as  a  writer  on  natural 
and  rural  subjects.  Beach  Thomas's  style 
was  distinctive;  it  came  frgm  a  deep 
love  of  words  and  a  determination  to 
present  a  picture  and  a  personal  feeling, 
not  primarily  to  tabulate  facts. 

One  of  Beach  Thomas's  best  works 
was  also  one  of  the  earliest — the  three 
distinguished  volumes  of  The  English 
Year  (1913-14)  which  he  wrote  in  colla- 
boration with  A.  K.  CoUett.  He  spent 
most  of  the  war  as  an  outstandingly 
successful  correspondent  in  France  for  the 
Daily  Mail — he  wrote  With  the  British  on 
the  Somme  (1917) — and  in  1918  he  was 
sent  on  an  American  tour,  meeting  Theo- 
dore Roosevelt,  President  Wilson,  and 
Henry  Ford,  from  which  he  returned  in 
time  to  report  the  allied  victories.  He 
treasured  a  tribute  to  his  vivid  war  re- 
porting from  an  unknown  correspondent 
who  wrote :  'Without  your  despatches  we 
could  never  have  persuaded  the  men  to 
work  throughout  the  bank  holiday.'  Beach 
Thomas  remained  in  Germany  until  May 
1919  (and  was  back  there  for  the  occupa- 
tion of  the  Ruhr  in  1923).  In  1922  he  went 
on  a  tour  of  the  world  for  the  Daily  Mail 
and  The  Times.  Most  of  his  later  writing 
on  country  matters  is  to  be  found  in  the 
Observer^  the  paper  in  which,  renewing 
his  friendship  with  its  editor  J.  L.  Garvin, 
he  became  most  at  home  and  for  which  he 
wrote  regularly  until  1956.  He  also  con- 
tributed the  'Country  Life'  column  to  the 
Spectator  for  many  years,  and  wrote  its 
centenary  history,  The  Story  of  the  'Spec- 
tator'' (1928). 

Beach  Thomas  showed  himself  a  pro- 
lific author  in  his  sixties  and  seventies. 
Among  other  books,  he  produced  A  Letter 
to  my  Dog  (1931),  The  Yeoman's  England 
(1934),  in  which  he  took  the  reader  month 
by  month  through  the  country  calendar, 
The  Squirrel's  Granary  (1936),  Hunting 
England  (1936),  The  English  Landscape 
(1938),  The  Poems  of  a  Countryman 
(1945),  which  displayed  a  sensitive  writer 
of  light  verse  with  a  taste  for  epigram, 
A  Countryman's  Creed  (1946),  The  Way 
of  a  Dog  (1948),  and  Hertfordshire  (1950), 
a  pleasantly  discursive  account  of  his  own 
county. 

He  wrote  two  autobiographies:  A 
Traveller  in  News  (1925)  and  The  Way  of 
a  Countryman  (1944).  The  first  is  perhaps 
the  more  interesting,  not  only  for  his 
war  experiences  but  also  because  it  con- 
tains his  vindication  and  warm  apprecia- 
tion of  Lord  Northcliffe,   whose  success 


he  attributed  to  a  perception  which  was 
'almost  uncanny' ;  the  second  condenses 
some  of  the  same  material  and  empha- 
sizes his  delight  in  the  country  life. 

Beach  Thomas  excelled  in  all  the  attri- 
butes of  a  countryman  and  naturalist.  In 
addition,  he  was  a  great  bookman.  Tall 
and  lean,  with  thin  weather-beaten  features 
and  a  moustache,  he  was  a  man  of  the 
utmost  charm  and  humour.  He  died  in 
the  house  he  had  built  for  himself.  High 
Trees,  Wheathampstead,  Hertfordshire, 
12  May  1957.  He  was  a  chevalier  of 
the  Legion  of  Honour  (1919),  and  was 
appointed  K.B.E.  (1920)  for  his  work 
as  a  war  correspondent. 

Beach  Thomas  married  in  1900  Helen 
Dorothea,  daughter  of  Augustus  George 
Vernon  Harcourt  [q.v.],  F.R.S.,  chemist, 
and  tutor  of  Christ  Church,  Oxford.  There 
were  three  sons  and  one  daughter.  The 
second  son,  a  lieutenant-commander  in 
the  navy,  was  killed  in  the  war  of  1939- 
45.  A  chalk  drawing  of  Beach  Thomas  by 
Sir  Muirhead  Bone  is  in  the  Imperial  War 
Museum. 

[Spectator,  15  September  1950;  The  Times, 
14  May  1957 ;  private  information.] 

Derek  Hudson. 

THOMPSON,  ALEXANDER  HAMIL- 
TON (1873-1952),  historian,  the  eldest 
child  and  elder  son  of  the  Rev.  John 
Thompson,  then  vicar  of  St.  Gabriel's, 
Bristol,  and  his  wife,  Annie  Hastings, 
daughter  of  Canon  David  Cooper,  was  born 
7  November  1873  at  Clifton.  He  entered 
Clifton  College  as  a  scholar  in  1883,  leaving 
in  1890,  and  proceeding  to  St.  John's  Col- 
lege, Cambridge,  in  1892,  where  he  was 
placed  in  the  third  division  of  the  second 
class  in  part  i  of  the  classical  tripos  three 
years  later.  Weak  health  at  this  time  led 
him  to  take  up  tutoring  on  the  Riviera  for 
two  years.  In  1897  he  was  appointed  extra- 
mural teacher  by  Cambridge  University, 
and  in  the  same  year  appeared  his  first 
published  work,  a  popular  guide  to  'Cam- 
bridge and  its  Colleges'.  For  the  next 
dozen  years,  however,  his  publications, 
although  wide  in  scope,  were  compara- 
tively small  in  number  and  at  the  end  of 
the  period  only  the  shrewdest  observer 
would  have  seen  something  of  the  shape 
of  things  to  come.  Inevitably  Hamilton 
Thompson  was  mainly  occupied  with  lec- 
turing, and  the  constant  travelling  that 
now  involved,  together  with  conduct  of 
examinations,  constituted  a  serious  drain 
on  his  time.  But  the  extensive  travel 
involved  facilitated  the  acquisition  of  that 


970 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Thompson,  A.  H. 


enormous  knowledge  of  English  topo- 
graphy which  was  to  be  one  of  his  major 
historical  assets,  and  the  work  stimulated 
the  humanity  and  developed  the  clarity 
which  impregnated  his  studies.  He  lived 
at  this  time  partly  at  Henbury  and  partly 
at  Chichester  and  St.  Albans.  In  1903  he 
married  Amy,  daughter  of  Alfred  Gosling, 
of  Colchester,  and  soon  after  moved  to 
Lincoln. 

By  this  time  he  had  made  the  acquain- 
tance of  two  of  the  leading  medieval 
archaeologists  of  the  day,  (Sir)  WilUam 
St.  John  Hope  (whose  notice  he  contribu- 
ted to  this  Dictionary)  and  John  Bilson, 
both  of  whom  were  to  be  his  closest 
friends  for  the  rest  of  their  days.  His  own 
work  in  their  field  bore  its  first  major 
fruits  in  the  publication  of  his  Military 
Architecture  in  England  during  the  Middle 
Ages  (1912) ;  this,  with  the  much  slighter 
but  valuable  'Ground  Plan  of  the  English 
Parish  Church'  (1911)  and  'English  Monas- 
teries' (1913),  showed  a  remarkable  grasp 
of  English  medieval  architecture  and  its 
problems.  Hamilton  Thompson  never 
returned  to  general  architectural  surveys 
of  this  nature,  for  which  he  developed 
unparalleled  qualifications.  But  a  stream 
of  monographs  on  particular  buildings  or 
localities  continued  almost  unbroken  until 
the  end,  including  studies  of  Bolton  Priory 
(1928)  and  Welbeck  Abbey  (1938). 

But  in  these  years  a  very  large  part  of 
Hamilton  Thompson's  activities  centred 
not  on  history  but  on  literature.  His 
second  publication  had  been  a  History  of 
English  Literature  (1901)  founded  on  that 
of  T.  B.  Shaw  [q.v.]  and  this  was  quickly 
followed  by  school  editions  of  various 
literary  texts,  chiefly  of  the  English 
Romantics.  In  1919  Hamilton  Thompson 
was  appointed  lecturer  in  English  at 
Armstrong  College,  Newcastle  upon  Tyne, 
where  two  years  later  a  readership  in 
medieval  history  and  archaeology  was 
instituted  for  him  in  recognition  of  his 
scholarship.  Like  his  contemporary,  G.  G. 
Coulton  [q.v.],  Hamilton  Thompson  thus 
entered  full  academic  teaching  after  and 
not  before  acquiring  a  reputation  for 
scholarship.  Almost  immediately  he  moved 
to  Leeds  where  he  became  reader  in  medi- 
eval history  in  1922,  professor  in  1924,  and 
head  of  the  department  in  1927,  a  post 
which  he  held  until  his  retirement  in  1939. 

As  time  went  on,  Hamilton  Thompson's 
main  interest  lay  increasingly  in  the 
publication  of  original  records  of  English 
medieval  Church  history.  His  first  major 
venture  was  based  on  the  registers  of  the 


medieval  bishops  of  Lincoln  and  in  1914 
appeared  the  first  volume  of  his  Visita- 
tions of  Religious  Houses  in  the  Diocese  of 
Lincoln.  As  Hamilton  Thompson  once 
remarked  to  the  writer,  no  small  fraction 
of  his  life  had  been  passed  in  making  tran- 
scripts in  the  Archbishop's  Registry  at 
York.  In  1928  he  completed  for  the  Sur- 
tees  Society  Part  II  of  the  Register  of  Arch- 
bishop Thomas  Corbridge,  and  followed 
this  up  by  the  publication  of  the  Register 
of  Archbishop  William  Greenfield  in  five 
volumes  (1931,  1934,  1936-8).  Meanwhile 
steadily  he  produced  other  texts  which 
included  Northumberland  Pleas  from  the 
Curia  Regis  and  Assize  Rolls  (1922), 
Registers  of  the  Archdeaconry  of  Richmxmd 
(1919,  1930,  1935),  Liber  Vitae  Ecclesiae 
Dunelmensis  (1923),  A  Calendar  of  Char- 
ters and  other  Documents  belonging  to  the 
Hospital  of  William  Wyggeston  at  Leicester 
(1933).  In  the  year  before  the  latter 
appeared,  he  was  made  Ford's  lecturer  at 
Oxford  and  in  1933  Birkbeck  lecturer  at 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge.  For  both  he 
took  as  his  theme  the  English  Church  at 
the  end  of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  the  fruits 
of  his  labour  here  finally  appeared  in  1947 
in  The  English  Clergy  and  their  Organiza- 
tion in  the  later  Middle  Ages,  a  massive 
and  masterly  consideration  of  'ecclesias- 
tical institutions  in  fifteenth  century 
England'.  The  death  of  his  wife  in  1945 
had  ended  a  married  life  of  singular  feli- 
city and  to  her  Hamilton  Thompson,  in 
a  touching  dedication,  inscribed  this  his 
greatest  work  of  scholarship. 

As  a  professor  at  Leeds  he  had  a  unique 
reputation.  He  had  little  interest  in  the 
generality  of  committees,  although  as 
chairman  of  the  library  committee  he  put 
the  university  not  a  little  in  his  debt.  His 
innate  friendliness  led  him  to  entertain 
great  and  small  in  remarkable  numbers  at 
his  little  house  at  Adel  and  this,  with  his 
immense  memory  for  detail,  gave  him  an 
astounding  knowledge  of  his  pupils.  He 
answered  indefatigably  and  immaculately 
the  hosts  of  historical  and  antiquarian 
queries  which  beset  him  unceasingly  and 
equally  unstintingly  gave  his  services  as 
a  lecturer  and  guide  to  no  small  fraction 
of  the  local  archaeological  societies  of 
England.  By  1940  his  output  of  published 
works  totalled  373  items  of  one  kind  or 
another,  but  this  did  not  prevent  a  con- 
siderable social  activity  or  painstaking 
membership  of  the  various  official  bodies 
to  which  he  belonged ;  he  was  a  member 
of  the  Cathedrals  Commission  (1925-8), 
a    cathedral    commissioner   for    England 


971 


Thompson,  A.  H. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


(1932-42),  a  member  of  the  Archbishops' 
Commission  on  Canon  Law  (1943-7),  of  the 
Royal  Commission  on  Historical  Monu- 
ments (1933-52),  and  of  the  Ancient 
Monuments  Board  for  England  (1935-52). 
So  full  a  life  was  only  made  feasible  by 
Hamilton  Thompson's  remarkable  powers 
of  work.  Until  shortly  before  his  retire- 
ment it  was  usual  enough  for  him  to  work 
daily  into  the  early  hours  although  he  was 
almost  invariably  at  work  at  the  univer- 
sity by  nine.  In  later  life  he  never  took 
exercise,  but  his  health  was  unbroken 
until  his  final  illness.  He  died  in  Exmouth 
4  September  1952. 

Recognition  of  his  eminence  had  been 
widespread.  He  was  elected  F.B.A.  in 
1928,  honorary  A.R.I.B.A.,  an  honorary 
fellow  of  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge 
(1938),  and  president  of  the  Royal 
Archaeological  Institute  (1939-45).  He 
was  awarded  the  C.B.E.  in  1938  and 
given  honorary  doctorates  by  Durham, 
Leeds,  and  Oxford. 

Vicarage  bred,  Hamilton  Thompson 
remained  steadfastly  a  devout  son  of  the 
Church  of  England,  exhibiting  unfaiUng 
concern  for  its  welfare,  although,  like  most 
of  his  generation,  not  always  at  home  in 
the  social  and  economic  problems  of  the 
post-war  world.  He  had  two  daughters, 
the  elder  of  whom,  Beatrice  Mary,  was 
awarded  the  EUerton  theological  essay 
prize  at  Oxford  in  1931  and  was  librarian 
of  St.  Hugh's  College  (1931-6). 

[An  Address  presented  to  Alexander  Hamilton 
Thompson,  with  a  Bibliography  of  his  Writings, 
privately  printed,  1948 ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]  J.  C.  Dickinson. 

THOMPSON,       JAMES       MATTHEW 

(1878-1956),  scholar,  was  born  27  Sep- 
tember 1878  at  Iron  Acton,  Gloucester- 
shire, the  eldest  son  of  the  rector,  the  Rev. 
Henry  Lewis  Thompson,  formerly  student 
and  censor  of  Christ  Church,  Oxford. 
From  his  beautiful  and  gifted  mother, 
Catharine,  elder  daughter  of  Sir  James 
Paget,  first  baronet  [q.v.],  the  surgeon, 
Thompson  probably  inherited  his  remark- 
able energy,  love  of  nature,  and  artistic 
skill.  A  sheltered  and  happy  childhood  in 
the  country  was  followed,  after  his  father 
had  become  warden  of  Radley  College  in 
1887,  by  an  invigorating  early  education 
at  the  Dragon  School,  Oxford,  which 
Thompson  left  as  head  of  the  school  and 
winner  of  the  eleventh  scholarship  to 
Winchester.  There  he  formed  some  of  his 
Ufelong  friendships,  matured  his  classical 
scholarship,  and  began  to  work  out  his 


highly  individual  outlook  on  life.  In  1897 
he  went  up  to  Christ  Church,  as  open 
scholar.  He  displayed  little  enthusiasm 
for  honour  classical  moderations  in  which 
he  took  a  second  class  in  1899,  but  this 
was  redeemed  by  a  first  in  literae  humani- 
ores  in  1901  and  by  his  election  as  Liddon 
student  at  the  House.  A  year  later  he  ob- 
tained second  class  honours  in  theology. 
Ordination  in  1903  as  deacon  (following  two 
terms  at  Cuddesdon  theological  college), 
and  a  brief  curacy  at  St.  Frideswide's, 
Poplar,  were  the  prelude  to  his  election, 
on  taking  priest's  orders,  as  fellow  of 
Magdalen  College,  Oxford,  in  1904. 

Thompson's  career,  which  promised  to 
be  so  outwardly  untroubled,  was  first 
broken  by  his  involvement  in  distressing 
theological  controversy  and  then  inter- 
rupted and  diverted  by  the  war,  which 
also  led  him  towards  virtual  agnosticism. 
From  1905,  when  he  became  full  official 
fellow  at  Magdalen,  to  1915  when  he  ceased 
to  be  dean  of  divinity  at  the  college, 
Thompson  was  a  vigorous  protagonist  of 
modernist  theology  at  Oxford  and  an  ener- 
getic promoter  of  university  reform.  After 
various  forms  of  non-combatant  service  in 
France  and  at  the  Admiralty  during  the 
war  and  two  years'  teaching  at  Eton,  he 
returned  to  Oxford  where  in  1920  he  found 
a  more  congenial  vocation  as  tutorial 
fellow  in  modern  history  at  Magdalen. 

Between  the  wars  Thompson  quickly 
made  his  mark  by  his  published  works  on 
modern  European  history  and,  after  his 
election  in  1931  to  a  university  lectureship 
in  French  history,  by  specialist  studies  in 
the  history  of  the  French  revolution.  He 
also  gave  unstinted  service  to  his  college 
both  as  a  devoted  and  inspiring  tutor  and, 
between  1920  and  1927,  as  home  bursar 
and,  from  1935  to  1937,  as  vice-president. 
His  retirement  at  the  age  of  sixty  in  1938 
and  the  challenge  of  the  second  war  gave 
him  the  stimulus  to  renewed  activity  as 
historian,  occasional  poet,  and  editor  of 
the  Oxford  Magazine  (1945-7)  and  to 
further  voluntary  public  service  as  trustee 
and  convener  of  the  Oxford  Preservation 
Trust. 

By  any  standard  Thompson's  achieve- 
ments and  literary  craftsmanship  as  an 
historian  of  revolutionary  and  Napoleonic 
France  were  outstanding.  His  record  was 
all  the  more  impressive  since,  in  this-field, 
he  was  virtually  self-taught  and  since  his 
professional  career  as  an  historian  began 
when  he  was  over  forty.  Yet  it  may 
well  seem  that  his  early  career  as  a 
modernist  theologian,  blighted  by  episco- 


97a 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Tilley 


pal  disapproval  and  inhibition,  was  an 
unconscious  and  even  fruitful  preparation 
for  his  later  historical  studies.  The  non- 
miraculous  view  of  Christianity  which  he 
had  expounded  in  one  of  his  theological 
treatises — Miracles  in  the  New  Testament 
(1911) — had  been  based  not  merely  on  the 
Catholic  modernism  of  Loisy,  but  also  on 
the  methods  of  modern  bibUcal  criticism 
which  were  essentially  historical.  From 
first  to  last  Thompson  remained  faithful  to 
the  personal  approach  to  history  and,  with 
the  exception  of  his  general  study  of  the 
French  revolution  published  in  1943,  all 
his  major  works  were  biographical  in 
form.  Although  he  continued,  in  retire- 
ment, to  maintain  his  mastery  over  this 
medium,  by  biographies  of  Napoleon  I 
(1951)  and  Napoleon  III  (1954),  his  most 
enduring  achievement  will  probably  prove 
to  be  his  two-volume  study  of  Robes- 
pierre (1935).  His  work  gained  him  inter- 
national recognition,  election  in  1944  to  an 
honorary  fellowship  at  Magdalen,  and  in 
1947  to  a  fellowship  of  the  British  Academy. 

Thompson  married  in  1913  Mari  Mere- 
dyth,  daughter  of  the  Rev.  David  Jones, 
vicar  of  Penmaenmawr,  and  had  one  son. 
A  gifted  athlete,  a  sensitive  artist  in  water- 
colours,  and  a  fine  contemporary  poet, 
Thompson  had  a  rationalist  philosophy 
unshaken  in  its  integrity  and  a  reticent 
but  charming  personality.  He  died  in 
Oxford  8  October  1956.  Magdalen  College 
has  a  pencil  drawing  of  him  by  Randolph 
Schwabe. 

[A.  Goodwin  in  Proceedings  of  the  British 
Academy,  vol.  xliii,  1957;  J.  M.  Thompson, 
My  Apologia,  1940,  Collected  Verse  (1939-46), 
1947,  'Oxford  Modernism,  1910-1914'  in 
Oxford  Magazine,  28  October  1948;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

A.  Goodwin. 

TILLEY,  VESTA  (1864^1952),  male  im- 
personator, whose  real  name  was  Matilda 
Alice  Powles,  was  born  in  Worcester  13 
May  1864,  the  second  child  of  the  family  of 
thirteen  of  William  Henry  Powles  and  his 
wife,  Matilda  Broughton.  Her  father  was 
a  painter  on  chinaware  and  also  a  clever 
entertainer  and  musician,  playing  the 
violin  and  piccolo.  He  found  this  more 
lucrative  than  his  painting  and  became 
manager  of  a  variety  hall  in  Gloucester,  to 
which  city  the  family  moved.  He  took  the 
name  of  Harry  Ball.  Father  and  daughter 
were  devoted  to  each  other  and  when  she 
was  three  years  old  little  Matilda  showed 
remarkable  talent.  Her  father  took  her  to 
the  hall  with  him  each  evening  and  on 
returning  home  she  would  re-enact  all  that 


she  had  seen.  He  arranged  a  medley  of 
songs  which  she  sang  to  friends  and  when 
he  was  given  a  benefit  in  Gloucester 
Matilda  made  her  d^but  at  the  ripe  age 
of  three  and  a  half.  She  first  wore  boy*s 
clothes  on  the  stage  at  Birmingham  when 
she  was  five  and  that  determined  her  future. 
Touring  with  her  fiather,  she  appeared  all 
over  the  country  and  came  to  London 
in  1878.  She  was  a  great  success  and  ap- 
peared at  three  or  four  music-halls  each 
evening,  billed  as  'The  Great  Little  Tilley*. 
Since  audiences  were  puzzled  whether  she 
was  a  boy  or  a  girl  she  eventually  adopted 
the  name  of  Vesta  Tilley.  As  she  grew  up 
she  represented  the  perfect  pattern  of 
the  well-dressed  man  of  the  period.  Her 
clothes,  hats,  gloves,  shirts,  everything  she 
wore,  were  of  superlative  cut  and  quality. 
She  became  a  celebrated  principal  boy 
in  provincial  pantomimes  and  twice 
appeared  at  Drury  Lane:  in  Sindbad  in 
1882  in  a  part  specially  written  for  her  and 
in  1890  as  principal  boy  in  Beauty  and  the 
Beast.  She  also  appeared  in  musical  comedy, 
straight  plays,  and  burlesque,  and  was 
as  successful  in  the  United  States  as  in  her 
own  country.  Her  real  fame  was  achieved 
on  the  music-halls  which  were  then  at 
the  very  peak  of  their  popularity.  Popu- 
larly known  as  'the  London  Idol',  in  the 
eyes  of  her  faithful  pubHc  she  could  do  no 
wrong.  She  never  descended  to  vulgarity ; 
no  breath  of  scandal  ever  touched  her; 
and  she  was  a  perfectionist  in  everything 
she  undertook.  This  tiny  woman  with  the 
trim  figure,  the  piquant  face,  and  the  clear 
voice  and  diction  and  the  most  imma- 
culate male  clothing,  had  a  succession  of 
splendid  songs  and  sang  them  in  a  manner 
all  her  own.  Among  them  were  'Follow- 
ing in  Father's  Footsteps',  'BurHngton 
Bertie',  'The  Piccadilly  Johnny  with 
the  little  glass  eye',  'The  Midnight  Son', 
'Angels  without  wings',  'Oh!  you  Girls', 
'The  Tablet  of  Fame',  'For  the  sake  of  the 
dear  little  Girls',  'Daughters',  and  'Sweet- 
heart May'.  She  represented  not  only 
smart  young  men-about-town,  but  also 
judges,  clergymen,  and  boys  in  Eton  suits. 
Some  of  her  biggest  successes  were  sung 
in  military  uniform.  She  championed  the 
soldier  when  most  music-hall  songs  glori- 
fied the  sailor.  One  such  song,  'Jolly  Good 
Luck  to  the  Girl  who  Loves  a  Soldier', 
caused  a  boom  in  recruiting ;  another  big 
hit  was  'The  Army  of  To-day's  all  right'. 
During  the  war  of  1914-18  her  soldier 
songs  'London  in  France',  'Six  Days' 
Leave',  and  'A  Bit  of  a  Blighty  One'  were 
a  great  aid  to  morale. 


973 


Tilley 


P.N.B.  1951-1960 


On  5  June  1920  she  retired  and  said 
farewell  from  the  stage  of  the  London 
Coliseum.  It  was  an  occasion  of  great 
enthusiasm  and  very  considerable  emo- 
tion. The  immense  auditorium  was  packed 
from  ceiling  to  floor.  And  as  Vesta  Tilley 
stood,  in  khaki  uniform  and  half  buried  in 
bouquets,  bowing  to  the  wonderful  ova- 
tion, (Dame)  Ellen  Terry  [q.v.]  made  a 
charming  speech  and  presented  her  with 
a  set  of  handsomely  bound  volumes  con- 
taining the  signatures  of  nearly  two 
million  of  her  admirers. 

In  1890  Vesta  Tilley  married  (Sir) 
Walter  de  Frece  (died  1935),  a  music- 
hall  magnate  who  later  entered  politics 
and  was  a  member  of  Parliament  from 
1920  to  1931.  It  was  an  ideally  happy 
marriage.  She  greatly  helped  him  in  his 
political  career  and  did  much  quiet  un- 
obtrusive work  for  charity.  They  had  no 
children.  She  died  in  London  16  Sep- 
tember 1952. 

[Lady  de  Frece,  Recollections  of  Vesta 
Tilley,  1934;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  W.  Macqueen-Pope. 

TIZARD,       Sir      HENRY      THOMAS 

(1885-1959),  scientist  and  administrator, 
was  born  at  Gillingham,  Kent,  23  August 
1885,  the  only  son  among  the  five  children 
of  Thomas  Henry  Tizard  [q.v.],  navigator 
of  the  Challenger  and  later  assistant 
hydrographer  of  the  navy,  and  his  wife, 
Mary  Elizabeth  Churchward.  He  came  of 
stock  distinguished  in  engineering  and  the 
fighting  Services;  a  remote  ancestor  was 
Sir  Paul  Rycaut,  F.R.S.  [q.v.].  Unable  to 
enter  the  navy  because  of  defective  eye- 
sight, Tizard  went  first  as  an  exhibitioner, 
later  as  a  scholar,  to  Westminster  where 
he  studied  science  and  mathematics  and 
learnt  to  write  good  English.  Elected  to 
a  science  demy  ship  at  Magdalen  College, 
Oxford,  in  1903,  he  went  up  in  1904  and 
gained  a  first  class  in  mathematical 
moderations  (1905)  and  in  chemistry 
(1908).  His  tutor  was  Nevil  Sidgwick 
[q.v.],  with  whom  he  formed  a  lifelong 
friendship.  After  starting  research  with 
Sidgwick  in  Oxford,  he  spent  a  semester 
with  Nernst  in  Berlin,  when  he  met  F.  A. 
Lindemann  (later  Viscount  Cherwell,  q.v.). 
Ten  years  later  Tizard's  support  was  a 
major  factor  in  Lindemann's  election  to 
lead  the  Clarendon  Laboratory  in  Oxford. 
As  neither  of  the  projects  chosen  for  him 
by  Nernst  showed  any  promise,  Tizard 
returned  to  Oxford  for  the  summer  of  1909 
and  then  spent  a  year  at  the  Royal  Insti- 
tution, investigating  the  colour  changes 


of  indicators.  The  papers  he  published 
revealed  a  clarity  and  elegance  of  ap- 
proach which  established  Tizard's  reputa- 
tion as  an  investigator.  His  report  in  1911 
to  the  British  Association  on  'The  Sensi- 
tiveness of  Indicators'  was  published  in 
extenso  in  the  report  of  the  Portsmouth 
meeting. 

In  1911  Tizard  returned  to  Oxford  as 
a  tutorial  fellow  at  Oriel,  and  he  also 
held  a  demonstratorship  in  the  electrical 
laboratory,  which  led  to  several  papers  on 
the  motion  of  ions  in  gases  of  which  he  was 
a  part  author.  August  1914  found  him  on 
board  a  ship  with  Sir  Ernest  (later  Lord) 
Rutherford  (whose  notice  he  later  con- 
tributed to  this  Dictionary)  bound  for  the 
meeting  of  the  British  Association  in 
Australia.  He  came  home  at  once  and 
joined  the  Royal  Garrison  Artillery,  where 
his  unorthodox  methods  of  training  re- 
cruits were  supported  by  higher  authority. 
In  June  1915  R.  B.  Bourdillon,  who 
had  just  started  experimental  work  on 
bomb-sights  with  G.  M.  B.  Dobson  at 
the  Central  Flying  School  at  Upavon, 
secured  Tizard's  transfer  to  the  Royal 
Flying  Corps  as  an  experimental  equip- 
ment officer.  Tizard,  whose  eyesight  had 
improved,  soon  learned  to  fly,  an  indis- 
pensable qualification  for  understanding 
the  airman's  problems.  From  bomb-sights 
Tizard  turned  his  attention  to  the  testing 
of  new  aircraft  and  in  1917  Bertram 
Hopkinson  [q.v.],  who  was  responsible  for 
research  and  development  in  aeronautics, 
put  him  in  charge  of  the  testing  of  air- 
craft at  the  experimental  station  at 
Martlesham.  There  Tizard  developed  a 
scientific  system  for  investigating  the 
performance  of  aircraft  which  he  described 
in  a  paper  published  by  the  Aeronautical 
Society  in  1917.  Martlesham  was  the 
prototype  of  future  experimental  stations 
such  as  Boscombe  Down.  Tizard  flew  as 
one  of  his  own  test  pilots,  showing  skill 
and  imaginative  foresight  as  well  as  cour- 
age. When  Hopkinson  went  to  the  head- 
quarters of  the  Ministry  of  Munitions  at 
the  end  of  1917  Tizard  went  with  him  as 
his  deputy  with  the  rank  of  lieutenant- 
colonel  and  after  Hopkinson's  death  in 
1918  Tizard  carried  on  in  his  place. 

In  the  spring  of  1919  Tizard  returned 
to  Oxford  and  early  in  1920  he  was 
made  reader  in  chemical  thermodynamics. 
Meanwhile  he  had  been  working  in  a  new 
and  important  field.  During  the  war  when 
supplies  of  aviation  fuel  were  short  owing 
to  loss  of  tankers,  Tizard  had  suggested 
the  addition  of  gasworks  benzole  which 


974 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Tizard 


gave  excellent  results,  apart  from  the 
freezing  of  the  benzene  at  low  tempera- 
tures. Toluene  from  Borneo  petroleum 
proved  to  be  equally  good  and  did  not 
freeze.  This  brought  Tizard  into  contact 
with  (Sir)  Harry  Ricardo  who  was  investi- 
gating the  performance  of  petrol  engines. 
He  invited  Tizard  and  (Sir)  David  Pye 
[q.v.]  to  join  him.  Tizard  agreed,  on 
condition  that  the  results  of  the  work  were 
published,  to  which  (Sir)  Robert  Waley 
Cohen  [q.v.],  of  Shell  who  were  financing 
the  work,  agreed. 

By  the  summer  of  1919  Tizard  and  Pye 
had  prepared  an  analysis  of  the  physical 
and  chemical  properties  of  the  range  of 
fuels  which  were  to  be  examined  and 
Ricardo  had  built  a  new  variable  compres- 
sion engine.  Tizard's  help  was  particularly 
valuable  in  devising  ingenious  tests  and  in 
his  astuteness  in  analysing  the  results.  As 
they  expected,  the  incidence  of  detonation 
was  found  to  be  the  most  important  single 
factor  limiting  the  performance  of  the 
petrol  engine.  Tizard  suggested  the  term 
'toluene  number'  to  express  the  detonation 
characteristics  of  each  fuel.  Toluene  was 
the  least  prone  to  detonate  of  all  the  fuels 
they  examined,  and  the  'toluene  number' 
was  the  proportion  of  toluene  that  was 
added  to  heptane,  the  most  prone  to 
detonation,  in  order  to  match  the  perfor- 
mance of  each  fuel  they  examined.  Several 
years  later  the  Americans  substituted  the 
use  of  iso-octane  for  toluene  and  the  ex- 
pression 'octane  number'  became  univer- 
sal. The  results  of  this  classic  investigation 
were  published  in  a  series  of  papers  which 
were  Tizard's  major  contribution  to  scien- 
tific literature.  They  marked  a  new  era  in 
the  understanding  of  the  internal  combus- 
tion engine. 

In  1920  Tizard  accepted  an  invitation 
from  Sir  Frank  Heath  (whose  notice  he 
contributed  to  this  Dictionary)  to  go  to 
the  Department  of  Scientific  and  Indus- 
trial Research  as  assistant  secretary.  He 
had  realized  that  he  was  unlikely  to  do 
outstanding  work  in  pure  research  and  had 
seen  the  great  opportvmities  offered  in  the 
application  of  science  to  practical  prob- 
lems, for  which  he  felt  himself  to  be 
better  suited.  He  was  first  in  charge  of 
a  new  division  created  to  implement  a 
government  decision  charging  the  D.S.I.R. 
with  the  co-ordination  of  the  scientific 
work  of  the  defence  and  civil  departments. 
Several  co-ordinating  research  boards 
were  set  up  which  led  to  numerous  cross- 
contacts  at  scientific  working  level  be- 
tween the  departments,  and  this  continued 


when  the  rather  cumbrous  machinery  of 
the  boards  was  abandoned.  Meanwhile 
they  gave  Tizard  a  most  valuable 
bird's-eye  view  of  what  was  happening. 
In  1924  he  saw  the  need  to  co-ordinate 
scientific  research  in  the  Air  Force  and 
suggested  the  appointment  of  a  director 
with  similar  responsibilities  to  (Sir)  Frank 
Smith,  the  director  of  scientific  research 
in  the  Admiralty.  Pressed  to  accept  the 
post  himself,  Tizard  declined  and  H.  E. 
Wimperis  [q.v.],  the  deputy  director,  was 
promoted  to  it  in  1925. 

In  1922  Tizard  had  become  principal 
assistant  secretary  and  in  1927  he  suc- 
ceeded Heath  as  permanent  secretary. 
During  these  years  he  exercised  an  in- 
creasing influence  on  the  policy  of 
D.S.I.R,  and  was  largely  responsible  for 
establishing  the  Chemical  Research  Lab- 
oratory at  Teddington,  renamed  later  the 
National  Chemical  Laboratory.  He  left  the 
D.S.I.R.  in  1929  when  he  became  rector  of 
the  Imperial  College,  an  office  he  held  until 
1942.  Tizard's  decision  to  go  to  Imperial 
College  was  influenced  by  his  conviction 
of  Britain's  need  for  more  scientists  and 
engineers.  He  soon  raised  funds  to  com- 
plete the  new  Beit  building  and  his  great 
service  to  the  College  was  his  imaginative 
grasp  of  the  site  planning  needed  for  its 
future  expansion.  He  fought  tooth  and  nail 
and  with  his  customary  opportunism  to 
secure  the  use  of  the  whole  site  north  of 
Imperial  Institute  Road  for  education  and 
to  move  all  museums  south  of  it.  His  fore- 
sight undoubtedly  made  the  later  develop- 
ment of  the  College  possible.  In  many  other 
ways  the  College  benefited  by  his  imagina- 
tive approach  to  its  problems  such  as  the 
introduction  of  an  undergraduate  course 
in  chemical  engineering,  and  a  scheme  for 
entrance  scholarships  for  boys  who  had 
not  specialized  in  science  at  school.  He  had 
the  great  gift  of  being  able  to  talk  on  seem- 
ingly equal  terms  to  people  of  all  kinds  and 
all  ages  and  find  out  what  they  were  think- 
ing so  that  he  kept  his  finger  effectively  on 
the  pulse  of  the  organization  and  inspired 
people  with  his  own  enthusiasm  for  getting 
things  done. 

Meantime  Tizard  was  increasingly 
occupied  with  the  problems  of  defence.  He 
had  been  a  member  of  the  Aeronautical 
Research  Committee  since  1919  and  in 
1933  he  became  chairman.  He  was  also 
chairman  of  the  engine  sub-committee. 
It  was  a  period  of  revolutionary  advances 
in  aircraft  and  engines  and  Tizard,  with 
his  background  of  experience  in  the 
first  war  and  his  knack  of  selecting  the 


975 


Tizard 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


significant  factors,  was  an  admirable 
choice.  While  he  did  not  contribute  much 
in  the  way  of  original  ideas  he  was  a  most 
stimulating  chairman  and  he, gave  great 
encouragement  to  those  like  (Sir)  Frank 
Whittle,  with  his  jet  engine,  who  were 
endeavouring  to  break  fresh  ground.  One 
important  suggestion  arising  out  of  his 
work  with  Ricardo  was  that  new  engines 
should  be  tested  at  pressures  higher  than 
those  reached  with  normal  fuel  so  that 
they  could  use  higher  octane  fuels  when 
they  became  available.  In  1938  at  the  end 
of  his  five-year  term  of  office  he  was  in- 
vited by  the  Air  Council,  who  wished  to 
retain  his  'invaluable  assistance',  to  serve 
for  a  second  five  years  and  he  continued  as 
chairman  until  1943. 

Baldwin's  statement  in  November  1932 
that  'the  bomber  will  always  get  through', 
underlined  by  the  air  exercises  in  1934, 
had  the  merit  of  concentrating  attention 
on  this  issue.  Lindemann  in  August  1934 
wrote  a  letter  to  The  Times  calling  for 
action.  His  papers  show  that  on  15 
November  he  met  Tizard  and  told  him 
of  his  plan  for  a  sub-committee  of  the 
Committee  of  Imperial  Defence,  since  it 
was  too  important  to  be  dealt  with  by  a 
departmental  committee.  He  noted  that 
Tizard  promised  his  help  if  possible. 

Meanwhile  Wimperis  at  the  Air  Minis- 
try a  few  days  earlier  had  recommended 
the  appointment  of  a  small  committee, 
with  Tizard  as  chairman,  Dr.  A.  V.  Hill, 
P.  M.  S.  (later  Lord)  Blackett,  and  himself 
as  members,  and  Dr.  A.  P.  Rowe  as  secre- 
tary, to  consider  how  far  recent  advances  in 
scientific  and  technical  knowledge  could 
be  used  to  strengthen  defence  against 
hostile  aircraft.  His  recommendation  was 
accepted,  and  all  three  men  agreed  to 
serve. 

In  December  Lindemann,  unaware  of 
these  proceedings,  wrote  to  the  air  minis- 
ter pressing  for  a  C.I.D.  committee.  When 
he  was  told  of  the  existence  of  the  Tizard 
committee  he  regarded  it  as  a  plot  by  the 
Air  Ministry  and  Tizard  to  circumvent  his 
own  proposal.  This  was  the  start  of  the 
unfortunate  quarrel  between  them  which 
was  to  loom  so  large  over  the  next  five 
years.  Both  were  convinced  of  the  impor- 
tance of  science  in  future  warfare  and 
each  anxious  to  play  his  part.  With  this 
common  objective  they  might  have 
worked  together,  but  the  trouble  lay 
largely  in  their  different  avenues  of 
approach.  Tizard  relied  on  his  influence 
with  the  air  staff  and  civil  servants, 
whom  he  understood  and  whose  confi- 


dence he  had  won.  Lindemann  relied  on 
the  politicians  which,  in  Tizard's  mind, 
implied  intrigue  and  was  anathema  to 
him. 

The  Tizard  committee  met  first  on  28 
January  1935  when  Wimperis  told  them 
of  (Sir)  Robert  Watson- Watt's  view  that 
it  might  be  possible  to  detect  the  presence 
of  aircraft  by  a  radio  beam.  At  the  next 
meeting  on  21  February  they  had  a 
memorandum  by  Watson-Watt  and, 
after  a  successful  experiment  to  detect 
an  aircraft  in  flight  at  Daventry  on  26 
February,  Sir  Hugh  (later  Lord)  Dowding, 
air  member  for  research  and  develop- 
ment, agreed  to  an  expenditure  of  £10,000 
to  carry  out  experiments  at  Orfordness. 
By  June,  planes  were  detected  at  fifteen 
miles.  The  Tizard  committee  was  only 
advisory,  without  executive  functions, 
but  Tizard  kept  the  air  staff  in  close  touch 
with  its  proceedings  so  that  they  were 
actively  concerned  with  its  deliberations 
from  the  start. 

Meanwhile  Lindemann  and  (Sir) 
Winston  Churchill  combined  to  press  for 
a  C.I.D.  committee  to  deal  with  the  politi- 
cal and  financial  problems  of  air  defence 
and  in  April  such  a  committee  held  its 
first  meeting  under  the  chairmanship  of 
Sir  Philip  Cunliffe-Lister  (later  the  Earl  of 
Swinton),  soon  to  become  air  minister. 
The  Tizard  committee  became  its  sub- 
committee, responsible  for  research.  In 
June  Churchill  joined  the  C.I.D.  com- 
mittee, of  which  Tizard  was  a  member, 
and  Lindemann  became  a  member  of 
Tizard's  committee. 

From  his  first  meeting  Lindemann  was 
at  odds  with  his  colleagues  over  both  pro- 
jects and  priorities.  The  crisis  came  in 
June  1936  when  Lindemann  went  behind 
the  backs  of  his  colleagues  by  arranging  a 
meeting  between  Churchill  and  Watson- 
Watt,  who  said  that  he  was  dissatisfied 
with  the  rate  of  progress  under  the  nor- 
mal ministry  machinery.  This  led  to  a 
stormy  meeting  of  the  Swinton  committee 
when  Churchill  attacked  Tizard.  Shortly 
afterwards  Lindemann  announced  his 
intention  of  standing  for  Parliament 
where  he  could  raise  the  question  of  the 
country's  air  defences.  Four  days  later 
A.  V.  Hill  sent  his  resignation  to  Swinton ; 
this  was  followed  by  Blackett's  and 
Tizard's.  In  October  Swinton  recon- 
stituted the  committee,  substituting  (Sir) 
Edward  Appleton  for  Lindemann,  and  in 
1939  (Sir)  T.  R.  Merton  was  added  as  a 
member. 

In    spite    of  these    controversies,    the 


976 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Tizard 


development  of  radar  had  continued  and 
when  Tizard  reported  progress  to  the 
Swinton  committee  the  large  sums 
needed  for  the  work  were  always  forth- 
coming. In  September  1935  Watson- 
Watt  moved  to  Bawdsey  and  in  December 
1935  sanction  was  given  to  build  the  first 
five  radar  stations.  In  the  summer  of  1936 
Tizard  told  the  air  staff  that  the  time  had 
come  for  the  Royal  Air  Force  to  learn  how 
to  use  RDF,  as  it  was  called,  in  combat 
and  to  find  out  the  ground  organization 
which  would  be  needed.  On  4  August  1936 
Tizard  met  the  officers  of  the  bombers  and 
fighters  who  had  been  detailed  to  Biggin 
Hill  for  such  trials  and  explained  to  them 
that  they  were  to  investigate  the  best  way 
of  intercepting  a  formation  of  enemy 
bombers,  if  they  were  given  fifteen  min- 
utes' warning  of  its  approach  and  its  posi- 
tion and  altitude  at  minute  intervals. 
Hitherto  the  normal  procedure  was  to  put 
fighters  up  on  patrol  at  suitable  points  in 
anticipation  of  attacks.  The  Biggin  Hill 
trials  were  a  classic  instance  of  operational 
research.  Methods  were  gradually  evolved 
for  tracking  the  bombers  which  gave  their 
position  by  wireless,  thus  enabling  the 
fighters  to  take  off  and  secure  an  inter- 
ception. Tizard  took  an  active  part  in  the 
trials  and  on  one  occasion  simplified  pro- 
cedure by  pointing  out  an  easier  means 
of  determining  the  correct  course  of  the 
fighter:  this  was  generally  adopted  and 
known  as  the  *Tizzy  angle'. 

The  trials  having  proved  the  practica- 
bility of  this  new  method  of  interception, 
Fighter  Command  then  took  over  the 
introduction  of  the  new  technique  into  the 
defence  organization.  This  was  a  complex 
task  and  it  had  its  difficulties,  but  Tizard 
kept  in  close  touch  with  developments, 
ever  ready  with  help  and  advice.  He  was 
largely  responsible  for  the  introduction  of 
the  'filter  room'  by  means  of  which  the 
corrected  courses  of  enemy  aircraft  were 
clearly  presented  to  the  controller  in  the 
operations  room.  When  war  broke  out 
both  the  radar  chain  and  the  means  of 
using  the  information  it  obtained  were 
ready,  thus  providing  a  new  system  of  air 
defence  by  day. 

The  Biggin  Hill  trials  were  only  one  of 
the  practical  steps  which  Tizard  took  to 
ensure  the  effective  use  of  radar.  In  1938 
he  persuaded  (Sir)  Mark  Oliphant,  then  at 
Birmingham,  to  drop  some  of  his  nuclear 
research  and  concentrate  on  the  develop- 
ment of  an  improved  source  of  short- 
wave radiation.  This  led  to  the  invention 
by  (Sir)  John  Randall  and  Dr.  H.  A.  H. 


Boot  of  the  cavity  magnetron,  a  major 
advance  in  radar  technique.  Foreseeing 
the  numbers  of  scientists  that  would  be 
required  to  service  the  radar  stations, 
Tizard  early  in  1938  told  (Sir)  John 
Cockcroft,  then  working  in  the  Cavendish 
Laboratory,  what  was  on  foot  and  took 
him  to  one  of  the  new  radar  stations. 
After  a  visit  by  Watson-Watt  to  Cam- 
bridge, scientists  were  enlisted  and  shown 
the  stations.  Large-scale  trials  were 
planned  for  1  September  1939,  so  that 
when  war  broke  out  all  the  stations  were 
manned  for  action. 

The  ground  radar  stations  were  not 
effective  by  night  and  much  effort  was 
directed  to  various  means  of  night  defence. 
Tizard  realized  that  the  solution  lay  in  the 
development  of  airborne  radar,  and,  thanks 
to  his  encouragement,  the  research  team 
led  by  E.  G.  Bowen  had  produced  in  1939 
an  airborne  radar  set,  AI,  which  needed 
considerable  development  before  it  was 
suitable  for  operational  use.  Tizard  gave 
it  his  full  support  in  its  early  stages  when 
doubt  was  cast  on  its  operational  value. 
Success  depended  on  intimate  co-opera- 
tion between  the  radar  observer  and  the 
pilot  and  gradually  the  difficult  art  of 
interception  was  learnt.  The  air-crews' 
confidence  in  AI  owed  much  to  Tizard's 
advice  on  his  visits  to  the  squadron.  He 
was  also  responsible  for  the  night  inter- 
ception committee,  and  the  fighter  inter- 
ception unit  for  carrying  out  scientific 
trials  of  AI  in  combat,  which  paid  a  divi- 
dend in  its  later  stages.  Tizard's  advocacy 
won  the  day  and  airborne  radar  played  a 
decisive  part  in  the  air  war  by  land  and  sea. 

Intelligence  was  another  field  in  which 
Tizard's  initiative  was  to  prove  decisive. 
In  1939  we  knew  little  or  nothing  of  what 
Germany  was  doing  in  military  research 
and  in  April  Tizard  persuaded  Pye, 
Wimperis's  successor,  to  ask  for  someone 
to  be  appointed  in  the  Air  Ministry  to 
deal  with  scientific  intelligence.  (Professor) 
R.  V.  Jones,  known  to  Tizard  by  his  work 
on  infra-red  radiation,  then  in  the  Admi- 
ralty research  laboratory,  was  selected  for 
the  appointment.  He  was  not  released  by 
the  Admiralty  until  1  September,  but 
from  then  on  his  flair  for  interpreting 
intelligence  reports,  backed  by  his  shrewd 
scientific  judgement,  played  a  vital  part  in 
our  defences. 

During  the  first  ten  months  of  the  war 
Tizard  had  advised  the  chief  of  the  air 
staff  on  scientific  matters  in  addition  to 
continuing  the  chairmanship  of  the  De- 
fence and  Offence  committees  which  in 


977 


Tizard 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


October  1939  amalgamated  as  the  Com- 
mittee for  the  Scientific  Survey  of  Air 
Warfare.  Its  most  important  decision  was 
to  form  the  Maud  committee  under  (Sir) 
George  Thomson  in  March  1940  to  inves- 
tigate the  feasibility  of  an  atomic  bomb 
after  Oliphant  had  given  Tizard  the  re- 
markable memorandum  by  (Professor) 
O.  R.  Frisch  and  (Sir)  R.  E.  Peierls. 

When  Churchill  went  to  the  Admiralty 
in  1939  with  Lindemann  as  his  scientific 
adviser,  and  in  1940  became  prime  minis- 
ter, Tizard's  position  gradually  became 
more  difficult  and  when  Sir  Archibald 
Sinclair  (later  Viscount  Thurso)  became 
air  minister  he  also  sought  Lindemann's 
advice.  This  uncertainty  as  to  his  respon- 
sibility led  to  Tizard's  resignation  in  June 
1940  from  all  his  Air  Ministry  commit- 
ments, with  the  exception  of  the  Aero- 
nautical Research  Committee. 

From  the  outbreak  of  war  Tizard  was 
seized  with  the  importance  of  winning  the 
sympathy  and  technical  support  of  the 
United  States  of  America.  At  his  sugges- 
tion, A.  V.  Hill  went  to  Washington  in 
1940  as  'supernumerary  air  attache'  to 
Lord  Lothian  [q.v.].  Hill's  exploration  of 
the  position  made  it  clear  that  the  Presi- 
dent would  welcome  a  proposal  from 
Britain  to  share  all  scientific  knowledge  of 
weapons  and  equipment.  Lothian  strongly 
supported  the  plan  to  send  a  British 
scientific  mission  and  the  mission,  led  by 
Tizard,  went  to  America  in  August  1940. 
Very  wisely  he  went  first  to  Canada, 
taking  details  of  Britain's  war  inventions 
and  a  list  of  problems  in  which  Canada 
might  help.  This  gave  Canada  her  first 
start  in  war  research  and  won  for  Tizard 
the  regard  and  affection  of  all  the 
Canadians  he  met.  Subsequently  he  was 
frequently  their  guest  and  they  attached 
great  value  to  his  advice  on  their  military 
and  scientific  problems.  When  he  left  for 
Washington  Tizard  took  with  him  Pro- 
fessor C.  J.  Mackenzie  as  Canada's  rep- 
resentative on  his  mission.  It  was  a  stroke 
of  genius  on  Tizard's  part  to  take  with 
him  a  mixed  team  of  scientists  and  serving 
officers  from  the  Army,  Navy,  and  Air 
Force  with  battle  experience.  This  gave 
him  the  entree  to  the  armed  Services  in 
Washington,  not  easy  for  civilians  at  that 
time,  and  within  a  few  days  Tizard, 
Cockcroft,  and  other  civilians  were  lectur- 
ing to  the  military  Services  and  establish- 
ing a  confidence  and  co-operation  which 
were  maintained  throughout  the  war. 
Tizard  also  took  with  him  in  his  famous 
black  box  the  prints  of  Britain's  war  de- 


vices such  as  radar  and  a  specimen  of 
Randall  and  Boot's  9-5  cm.  resonant 
cavity  magnetron  which  gave  the  American 
work  on  radar  a  new  stimulus.  Tizard's 
brilliant  leadership  of  the  mission  was  one 
of  his  greatest  services  to  Britain. 

After  his  return  from  America  in  the 
autumn  of  1940  Tizard  became  a  semi- 
official adviser  to  successive  ministers  of 
aircraft  production,  sitting  on  the  Aircraft 
Supply  Committee  and  representing  the 
Ministry  on  the  Air  Council  from  June 
1941.  He  was  particularly  active  in  secur- 
ing the  flow  of  up-to-date  information 
to  Washington.  In  April  1941  after  the  jet 
engine  had  left  the  ground  on  a  taxi- 
ing run,  he  sent  a  verbal  message  to 
Dr.  Vannevar  Bush,  unintelligible  to  the 
bearer,  but  sufficient  to  keep  Bush  in- 
formed of  progress.  The  development  of 
(Sir)  Barnes  Wallis's  dam-busting  bomb 
owed  much  to  Tizard's  support.  His  influ- 
ence was  felt  in  the  greater  use  of  scientific 
evaluation  of  our  military  operations,  such 
as  (Sir)  Solly  Zuckerman's  mission  to 
North  Africa,  and  in  the  expansion  of 
operational  research.  When  in  March  1942 
Cherwell  recommended  bombing  built- 
up  areas  of  Germany  in  order  to  break  the 
spirit  of  the  German  populace,  Tizard 
queried  his  estimate  of  the  number  of 
bombers  available  and  the  amount  of 
damage  to  be  expected,  concluding  that 
the  policy  would  not  be  decisive  and  by 
concentrating  bombers  on  the  offensive 
might  risk  losing  the  war  through  inade- 
quate defence.  But  by  this  time  Cherwell's 
influence  with  the  prime  minister  was 
much  greater  than  Tizard's. 

In  1942  Tizard  felt  that  his  whole- 
time  service  in  the  Ministry  was  no  longer 
needed  and  he  accepted  the  presidency  of 
Magdalen  College,  Oxford,  at  a  time  when 
the  college  was  preparing  for  the  adjust- 
ments which  would  be  needed  in  a  post- 
war world.  Tizard  quickly  acquired  an 
admirable  grasp  of  the  rather  complicated 
college  statutes  and  he  gave  much  thought 
to  the  financial  fortunes  of  the  college, 
incidentally  reorganizing  the  bursary.  He 
soon  made  up  his  mind  about  what  he 
wanted  the  college  to  do  and  he  gave  a 
clear  lead  to  those  who  worked  closely 
with  him  in  small  committees.  He  was  less 
successful  in  handling  a  large  college 
meeting  when  he  had  to  pilot  controver- 
sial issues  through  a  very  varied  and 
independent-minded  body  of  fellows. 
Perhaps  he  had  too  authoritarian  a  back- 
ground to  fit  easily  into  the  democratic 
ways  of  a  college. 


978 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Tizard 


During  the  years  at  Magdalen,  Tizard's 
advice  was  much  in  demand  by  the  Ser- 
vice chiefs,  both  here  and  in  the  domin- 
ions. In  1943  he  was  preparing  to  lead  a 
mission  to  Russia  on  the  same  lines  as  his 
mission  to  America,  but  eventually  this 
was  abandoned.  He  was  then  invited  by 
the  Australian  Government  to  spend  tliree 
months  visiting  defence  establishments 
and  advising  them  on  scientific  develop- 
ments, particularly  in  relation  to  the 
Pacific  war.  Tizard's  experiences  of 
government  machinery  and  his  personal 
knowledge  of  people  in  key  positions  en- 
abled him  to  help  the  Australians  to  clarify 
a  number  of  war  problems  and  to  secure 
the  co-ordination  of  their  war  research 
with  developments  at  home. 

In  1944  Tizard  was  chairman  of  a 
conmiittee  set  up  by  the  chiefs  of  staff  to 
assess  the  probable  effects  of  new  weapons 
on  defence  policy.  Soon  after  its  report  in 
1945  the  Labour  Government  turned  to 
Tizard  for  advice  on  the  place  of  science  in 
post-war  development.  In  September  at 
a  meeting  of  the  chiefs  of  staff  Tizard 
pressed  for  the  formation  of  a  scientific 
organization  under  a  defence  ministry  to 
keep  scientific  development  under  con- 
tinuous review.  He  developed  this  idea  in 
October  in  a  paper  on  'The  Central  Direc- 
tion of  the  Scientific  Effort'  advocating 
the  appointment  of  a  scientific  adviser 
who  would  act  as  chairman  of  a  deputy 
chiefs  of  staff  committee  and  would  also 
serve  on  a  new  body  to  consider  science  in 
relation  to  civilian  needs.  These  recom- 
mendations were  approved  but  a  year 
elapsed  before  action  was  finally  taken. 
Meanwhile  in  the  spring  of  1946  Tizard 
had  acted  as  chairman  of  a  Common- 
wealth conference  on  defence  science  at 
which  he  advocated  the  dispersal  of  scien- 
tific effort  and  the  encouragement  in  the 
dominions  of  great  centres  of  scientific 
education  and  research.  In  1945  he  had 
already  made  suggestions  which  led 
directly  to  the  Woomera  rocket  range.  In 
August  1946  Tizard  was  invited  to  under- 
take the  chairmanship  of  the  two  com- 
mittees he  had  suggested,  involving  his 
resignation  of  the  presidency  of  Magdalen. 
He  was  divided  in  his  mind  and  asked  the 
advice  of  his  colleagues,  who  suggested 
combining  one  chairmanship  with  the 
presidency.  A  large  majority  wished  him 
to  remain  at  Magdalen,  but  since  it  was 
not  a  unanimous  decision  he  resigned. 

So  in  January  1947  Tizard  found  him- 
self again  in  Whitehall.  Both  positions,  as 
chairman  of  the  Defence  Research  Policy 


Committee  and  the  Advisory  Council 
on  Scientific  Policy,  were  fraught  with 
difficulties.  Tizard's  instinct  was  always 
for  action,  but  with  the  end  of  the  war 
the  motive  of  urgency  had  disappeared, 
people  were  tired,  including  Tizard,  and 
needed  time  for  recovery.  Moreover,  they 
were  looking  again  to  their  own  immediate 
interests  and  resented  any  encroachment 
of  their  authority.  The  authority  of  the 
Defence  Ministry  was  as  yet  uncertain  and 
the  Services  were  inclined  to  stand  on 
their  own.  The  fact  that  the  Defence 
Committee  was  debarred  from  discussing 
nuclear  weapons  did  not  help. 

It  was  an  uphill  fight  and  some  of 
Tizard's  most  effective  work  was  done  in 
the  dominions,  during  visits  to  Canada  and 
Australia.  However,  Tizard,  in  his  position 
of  authority  as  chairman  of  the  Defence 
Research  Policy  Committee,  succeeded  in 
establishing  the  position  that  science  had 
an  extremely  important  part  to  play  in 
framing  the  policies  of  the  defence  depart- 
ments and  the  later  organization  evolved 
directly  from  his  efforts. 

On  the  civil  side  Tizard  had  a  more 
difficult  task,  lacking  the  prestige  and 
record  of  achievement  with  other  scienti- 
fic administrators  that  he  had  earned  so 
fully  with  the  Services.  There  was  less 
belief  amongst  the  interested  parties  that 
co-ordination  of  their  activities  towards 
the  formation  of  a  national  scientific 
policy  was  necessary,  let  alone  achiev- 
able. The  bodies  concerned,  the  Research 
Councils,  under  their  own  autonomy,  had 
already  achieved  much  success. 

Nevertheless  Tizard  succeeded  in  laying 
some  foundations.  A  small  fact-finding 
staff  was  created  and  a  forum  for  discus- 
sion provided,  but  the  body  was  far  less 
executive  than  was  even  its  military 
counterpart,  and  Tizard  undoubtedly  felt 
frustration.  But  he  had  three  important 
successes.  He  was  able  strongly  to  influ- 
ence the  need  for  a  long-term  plan  for 
the  training  of  scientists,  particularly 
technologists.  His  influence  in  ensuring 
that  scientific  views  were  fed  in  at  the 
policy-forming  stage  was  pervasive  and 
effective,  and  he  succeeded  in  securing  the 
appointment  of  a  chief  scientist,  who  had 
the  necessary  powers  and  appropriate 
access,  in  Ministries  which  lacked  such 
senior  scientific  officers  and  needed  them 
most. 

The  long  strain  had  told  on  Tizard's 
health  and  in  1949  he  had  wished  to  retire. 
Finally  in  1952  he  left  Whitehall  for  the 
last  time.  'These  last  six  years  of  his  active 


979 


Tizard 


P.N.B.  1951-1060 


life  were  in  a  real  sense  the  fulfilment  of 
his  quarter-of-a-century-old  belief  in  the 
importance  to  the  life  and  prosperity  of 
Great  Britain  of  a  close  relationship  be- 
tween the  administrative  arid  scientific 
worlds  .  .  .'  (P.  M.  S.  Blackett,  Tizard 
memorial  lecture  to  the  Institute  for 
Strategic  Studies,  11  February  1960). 

The  rest  of  Tizard' s  life  was  directed 
partly  to  his  educational  interests  as  pro- 
chancellor  of  Southampton  University  and 
chairman  of  the  Goldsmiths'  education 
committee  and  partly  to  his  services  on  the 
board  of  the  National  Research  Develop- 
ment Corporation  and  of  several  chemical 
concerns.  He  took  an  active  interest  in 
their  affairs,  frequently  visiting  their 
plants  and  research  laboratories  where  his 
presence  gave  encouragement  to  younger 
chemists  and  engineers.  He  foresaw  the 
need  for  a  large  expansion  of  university 
education  and  his  advice  was  eagerly 
sought  on  his  visits  to  Southampton.  He 
died  of  a  cerebral  haemorrhage  at  his  home 
at  Fareham  9  October  1959.  His  ashes 
were  buried  in  the  floor  of  the  ante-chapel 
of  Oriel  College,  Oxford. 

Tizard  had  a  quick,  alert,  well-stored 
mind,  great  moral  and  physical  courage, 
and  a  high  sense  of  integrity  which  was  a 
handicap  in  political  infighting.  Without 
marked  scientific  originality,  he  was  quick 
to  see  the  practical  issues  raised  by  new 
discoveries  and  indeed  to  foresee  the  fields 
in  which  research  was  most  needed.  He 
could  draw  out  the  best  from  young 
scientists  or  engineers  or  Service  officers. 
Wit  and  humour  were  his  in  abundance. 
On  his  own  wide  range  of  topics  he  was  an 
excellent  critic,  reserving  his  more  barbed 
shafts  for  his  equals,  superiors,  or  the 
scientifically  arrogant.  He  was  at  his  best 
when  faced  with  a  problem  calling  for  a 
decisive  answer  as  he  saw  so  clearly  the 
practical  issues  involved  and  could  explain 
them  in  simple  words.  This  made  him  the 
ideal  interpreter  between  the  Services  and 
the  scientists,  having  the  confidence  of 
both ;  it  was  in  this  respect  that  Britain 
had  the  advantage  over  Germany. 

Tizard  received  many  honours:  an  Air 
Force  Cross  in  1918,  a  C.B.  in  1927, 
K.C.B.  in  1937,  and  G.C.B.  in  1949,  and 
the  American  medal  for  merit  in  1947.  He 
was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1926,  was  foreign 
secretary  of  the  Royal  Society  in  1940-45, 
and  vice-president  (1940-41  and  1944-5). 
He  was  an  honorary  doctor  of  ten  British 
and  Commonwealth  universities,  an  hono- 
rary fellow  of  Oriel  and  Magdalen  at  Oxford, 
and  of  the  Imperial  College  and  University 


College  in  London.  He  was  awarded  the  gold 
medals  of  the  Royal  Society  of  Arts  and  the 
Franklin  Institute,  and  the  Messel  medal 
of  the  Society  of  Chemical  Industry. 
Many  learned  societies  acclaimed  him  as 
an  honorary  member.  In  1948  he  was 
president  of  the  British  Association ;  and 
from  1937  until  1959  he  served  as  a 
trustee  of  the  British  Museum. 

In  1915  Tizard  married  Kathleen 
Eleanor  (died  1968),  daughter  of  Arthur 
Prangley  Wilson,  mining  engineer;  they 
had  three  sons. 

There  is  a  portrait  of  Tizard  by  Bernard 
Hailstone  in  the  Imperial  War  Museum ; 
one  by  Cuthbert  Orde  at  the  Imperial 
College ;  and  a  pastel  by  William  Dring  at 
Magdalen  College,  Oxford. 

[Sir  William  Farren  (and  R.  V.  Jones)  in 
Biographical  Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal 
Society,  vol.  vii,  1961 ;  R.  W.  Clark,  Tizard, 
1965 ;  R.V.  Jones  in  The  Times,  6, 7,  and  8  April 
1961  and  Oxford  Magazine,  9  May  1963; 
C.  P.  Snow,  Science  and  Government,  1961 ; 
C.Webster  andN.  Frankland,( Official  History) 
The  Strategic  Air  Offensive  Against  Germany, 
1939-45,  vol.  i,  1961;  Sir  Harold  Hartley  in 
Proceedings  of  the  Chemical  Society,  May  1964 ; 
Nature,  5  March  1960  (P.  M.  S.  Blackett, 
Tizard  memorial  lecture) ;  Journal  of  the 
Royal  Aeronautical  Society,  August  1967 
(A.  R.  Collar,  Tizard  memorial  lecture); 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Harold  Hartley, 

TOMLINSON,  GEORGE  (1890-1952), 
politician,  was  born  21  March  1890  at 
Rishton,  Lancashire,  the  fourth  child  of 
John  Wesley  Tomlinson,  a  weaver,  and 
his  wife,  Alice  Varley.  Educated  at 
Rishton  Wesleyan  School  he  began  half- 
time  work  in  the  local  cotton  mill  at  the 
age  of  twelve  and  went  on  full  time  a  year 
later.  For  a  while  he  attended  evening 
classes  and  then  studied  for  the  ministry 
for  which,  however,  he  was  not  accepted. 
Turning  his  attention  to  trade-union 
matters  he  became  president  of  the  Rish- 
ton District  Weavers'  Association  when 
only  twenty- two  and  in  1914  was  elected 
to  the  urban  district  council.  In  the  same 
year  he  married  a  fellow  worker,  Ethel, 
daughter  of  Humphrey  Pursell,  a  taper, 
by  whom  he  had  one  daughter.  Not  long 
afterwards  he  moved  to  Farnworth  to 
work  with  his  brother-in-law  who  was  a 
herbal  brewer.  He  registered  as  a  con- 
scientious objector  in  1916  and  for  three 
years  was  obliged  to  take  agricultural 
work  away  from  home. 

In  1925  Tomlinson  returned  to  public 
life  as  a  member  of  the  Farnworth  urban 


980 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Tomlinson,  G. 


district  council.  He  became  chairman  of 
the  education  committee  in  1928  and 
before  long  his  special  interest  in  educa- 
tion brought  him  on  to  the  executive  of 
the  Association  of  Education  Committees 
of  which  he  was  afterwards  to  be  president 
(1939  and  1940).  In  1931  he  was  elected 
to  the  Lancashire  County  Council  where 
again  education  was  one  of  his  main 
interests.  In  1935  he  left  Farnworth  to  be- 
come secretary  to  the  Rishton  Weavers' 
Association,  but  in  1938  he  was  returned 
to  ParUament  for  the  Farnworth  division 
of  Lancashire,  a  seat  which  he  retained 
until  his  death. 

In  February  1941  Tomlinson  began  his 
first  experience  in  office  as  joint  parlia- 
mentary secretary  to  the  Ministry  of 
Labour  and  National  Service.  Because 
'George  cares  for  people',  Ernest  Bevin 
[q.v.]  put  the  Ministry's  work  for  disabled 
persons  in  his  charge,  and  he  was  chairman 
of  the  inter-departmental  conmiittee  on 
their  rehabilitation  and  resettlement,  the 
report  of  which  was  generally  known  as 
the  Tomlinson  report.  It  was  left  to  Tom- 
linson to  move  the  second  reading  of  the 
disabled  persons  (employment)  biU  which 
was  enacted  in  1944  and  for  which  he  was 
primarily  responsible.  He  also  did  useful 
work  in  transferring  textile  workers  to 
munitions.  There  followed  an  interval 
during  which  he  headed  the  British 
delegation  to  the  International  Labour 
Conference  at  Philadelphia  (1944)  where 
his  success  was  due  in  large  measure  to 
the  sincerity,  good  temper,  and  unfailing 
humour  which  he  brought  to  a  difficult 
task.  He  later  took  part  in  the  inaugural 
meeting  of  the  United  Nations  at  San 
Francisco.  Probably  nobody  was  more 
surprised  than  Tomlinson  to  find  himself 
one  of  a  world  assembly  of  statesmen ;  but 
in  after  years  his  chief  recollection  was  of 
journeys  through  the  American  continent 
so  astonishing  to  one  who  had  never 
travelled  abroad. 

In  the  Labom*  Government  of  1945 
Tomlinson  became  minister  of  works  and 
was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council.  It  was 
not  the  office  he  would  have  chosen 
although  he  found  sufficient  scope  for  his 
energies  and  his  trade-union  experience. 
His  work  brought  him  into  contact  with 
members  of  the  royal  family  with  some 
of  whom,  and  particularly  with  Queen 
Mary  who  called  him  'my  minister',  he  was 
privileged  to  enjoy  a  personal  friendship. 

On  the  death  of  Ellen  Wilkinson  [q.v.] 
in  February  1947,  Tomlinson  came  into 
his  own  as  minister  of  education  with  a 


seat  in  the  Cabinet.  It  was  a  difficult  time. 
What  was  required  of  the  minister  was  not 
to  negotiate  a  new  legislative  settlement 
(that  had  already  been  achieved,  in  the 
Education  Act  of  1944)  but  to  complete 
the  new  pattern  of  schools,  colleges,  and 
administration  and  help  to  make  it  work. 
Those  (and  they  were  not  the  educationists) 
who  felt  misgivings  that  this  task  should 
be  entrusted  to  a  man  of  elementary 
school  education  proved  wrong.  Tom- 
linson knew  his  own  limitations  and  was 
determined  that  other  people's  children 
should  not  suffer  as  he  had  done  from 
stunted  education.  Moreover,  in  dealing 
with  the  particular  task  that  faced  him 
as  minister  he  had  two  great  advantages : 
first,  his  long  experience  of  local  govern- 
ment and  his  sympathy  with  local  educa- 
tion authorities  helped  him  to  build  up 
a  powerful  partnership  between  local  and 
central  government ;  secondly  his  endear- 
ing personal  qualities  made  a  firm  ally 
of  the  whole  organized  teaching  profes- 
sion. He  was  sometimes  criticized,  espe- 
cially for  accepting  the  recommendation 
of  the  Secondary  School  Examinations 
Council  that  a  minimum  age  should  be 
fixed  for  taking  the  General  Certificate  of 
Education.  But  his  term  of  office  (which 
lasted  until  the  defeat  of  Labour  in  1951) 
was  not  only  longer  than  that  of  most  of 
his  predecessors  but  at  least  as  successful 
as  any  in  administrative  achievement. 
The  raising  of  the  school-leaving  age  to 
fifteen  and  a  spectacular  rise  in  the  birth- 
rate combined  with  post-war  housing 
developments  called  for  an  inunense 
increase  in  school  places  at  a  time  when 
materials  and  labour  were  both  scarce. 
The  architects  and  buildings  branch  which 
Tomlinson  established  at  the  Ministry 
brought  together  in  a  new  working  part- 
nership all  the  various  types  of  expert 
concerned  and  created  a  new  relationship 
with  the  local  authorities  which  not  only 
led  to  the  building  of  a  record  number  of 
schools  each  year  but  won  praise  for 
British  school  building  from  informed 
opinion  in  many  countries.  Nor  did  he 
allow  his  judgement  on  questions  of 
educational  organization  or  theory  to  be 
warped  by  party  politics  or  denomina- 
tional prejudice  but  courageously  apphed 
it  to  the  merits  of  each  case.  The  chief 
reason,  however,  for  the  remarkable 
popularity  of  'this  capable,  vigorous  and 
genial  son  of  Lancashire'  was  his  palpable 
sincerity. 

Tomlinson  was  a  product  of  those  twin 
influences ^  w|uch  did  so,  nauch  to  shape 


981 


Tomlinson,  G. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


the  Labour  movement  in  its  early  days: 
trade-unionism  and  the  Methodist  Church. 
By  upbringing  and  conviction  he  was  a 
fervent  Wesleyan  and  throughout  his  life 
he  gave  his  services  from  time  to  time  as 
a  preacher  at  local  chapels.  He  had  been 
nourished  on  the  finest  models  of  English 
and  throughout  his  life  he  spoke  and 
wrote  with  a  simplicity  and  vigour  not 
unworthy  of  John  Bunyan.  In  his  public 
career  his  desire  was  to  improve  social 
conditions  for  the  people  and  particularly 
to  help  those  who  by  misfortune  or  in- 
justice were  prevented  from  leading  a  full 
life.  Although  he  had  suffered  much  him- 
self from  the  hardships  of  a  faulty  educa- 
tional and  industrial  system  he  never  bore 
malice.  He  had  little  liking  for  party 
polemics  and  distinctions  of  class  or 
wealth  were  of  no  importance  to  him.  His 
attitude  to  persons  or  things  was  friendly 
and  understanding  and  it  was  only  rarely — 
when  he  found  himself  rebuffed  or  treated 
with  condescension — that  his  good  temper 
deserted  him. 

Tomlinson  had  an  inexhaustible  fund 
of  stories  which  he  told  on  all  occasions. 
Most  of  them  derived  from  Lancashire 
which  came  to  have  an  almost  mystical 
value  for  him.  Occasionally  he  lapsed 
into  sentimentality  and  startled  a  sophis- 
ticated gathering  with  some  piece  of 
childish  whimsy  but  more  often  his 
native  humour  and  simplicity  made 
him  a  welcome  and  effective  speaker. 
In  his  later  years  he  was  obliged  to  spend 
much  of  his  time  in  London.  He  was 
perfectly  content  to  sit  in  the  House 
of  Commons  listening  to  the  debates  and 
going  out  from  time  to  time  to  meet  friends 
in  the  lobbies  or  tea  rooms.  Occasionally 
he  went  to  the  theatre  and  he  was  equally 
pleased  by  a  play  of  Shakespeare  or  a 
musical  show  with  plenty  of  healthy 
slapstick.  He  never  missed  an  important 
football  match  on  Saturday  if  he  could 
help  it  and  when  a  Lancashire  side  was 
playing  it  became  a  holiday  of  obligation. 
He  had  hoped  to  retire  to  a  cottage  near 
Blackpool  among  his  friends  but  symp- 
toms of  serious  illness  appeared  in  1951 
and  he  died  after  an  operation  in  London 
22  September  1952.  He  received  the 
honorary  degree  of  LL.D.  from  the 
university  of  Liverpool  in  1947. 

[The  Times,  23  September  1952;  Fred 
Blackburn,  George  Tomlinson,  1954 ;  personal 
knowledge.]  Griffith  Williams. 

TOMLINSON,  HENRY  MAJOR  (1873- 
1958),    writer,    was   born   in   Poplar    21 


June  1873,  the  eldest  in  the  family  of 
three  sons  and  one  daughter  of  Henry 
Tomlinson  and  his  wife,  Emily  Major, 
daughter  of  a  master  gunner  in  the  navy. 
His  father  was  a  foreman  at  the  West 
India  Dock,  and  as  a  boy  Tomlinson 
became  familiar  with  ships  and  seamen 
and  the  lure  of  the  sea.  After  his 
father's  death  in  1886  he  was  taken  from 
school  and  placed  in  a  City  shipping 
office  at  a  wage  of  six  shillings  a  week. 
He  knew  poverty  and  remembered  it 
all  his  life;  but  with  his  mother's  en- 
couragement he  soon  began  to  read 
widely,  especially  in  the  history  of  travel 
and  navigation,  and  in  time  he  turned 
to  the  study  of  geology,  to  which  he 
added  botany,  zoology,  and  mineralogy. 
In  1894  he  was  considered  as  a  possible 
geologist  for  the  Jackson-Harmsworth 
polar  expedition,  but,  much  to  his  dis- 
appointment, was  advised  that  his  health 
would  not  stand  the  strain. 

Tomlinson  grew  increasingly  restive  in 
his  office  occupation  although  his  fre- 
quent opportunities  for  visiting  the 
ships  and  the  docks  were  a  source  of 
inspiration  for  much  of  his  future  writing. 
It  was  not  until  1904,  however,  that, 
after  an  office  quarrel,  he  applied  for  a 
job  with  the  radical  Morning  Leader, 
a  paper  to  which  he  had  already  contri- 
buted. He  was  engaged  as  a  reporter, 
and  his  love  of  the  sea  was  soon  turned  to 
good  account  by  his  editor,  Ernest  Parke, 
who  sent  him  to  live  for  several  weeks, 
in  midwinter,  with  a  fleet  of  trawlers 
on  the  Dogger  Bank.  An  assignment 
to  the  naval  manoeuvres  was  a  sequel. 
Parke  later  made  him  still  happier  by 
sending  him,  ostensibly  as  ship's  purser, 
on  a  voyage  to  Brazil  and  two  thousand 
miles  up  the  Amazon  and  Madeira  rivers 
in  the  first  English  steamer  to  make 
that  passage.  His  first  book,  The  Sea  and 
the  Jungle,  followed  in  1912.  It  was 
immediately  hailed  as  a  classic  and 
subsequently  appeared  in  many  editions. 
The  beauty  of  the  prose  and  the  de- 
scriptive writing  showed  Tomlinson  to  be 
a  new  author  of  unusual  quality.  He  was 
also  at  this  time  contributing  to  the 
English  Review  edited  by  Ford  Madox 
Hueffer  (later  Ford,  q.v.).  When  the 
Morning  Leader  was  amalgamated  with 
the  Daily  News  in  1912  Tomlinson 
stayed  on  as  a  leader-writer;  he  became 
a  war  correspondent  in  Belgium  and 
France  in  August  1914  and  was  official 
correspondent  at  British  G.H.Q.  in 
France  in  1914-17.  He  was  literary  editor 


982 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Townsend 


under  H.  W.  Massingham  [q.v.]  of  the 
Nation  from  1917  to  1923. 

Thoreau  and  Emerson  helped  to  mould 
Tomlinson's  thought  and  a  style  which 
was  never  that  of  a  fashionable  author 
but  won  the  deep  admiration  of  fellow 
craftsmen.  In  the  post-war  years  he 
travelled  widely  and  established  him- 
self as  a  writer  of  poetic  essays  and 
stories  in  collections  such  as  Old  Junk 
(1918),  Waiting  for  Daylight  (1922),  and 
Gifts  of  Fortune  (1926).  London  River 
(1921)  was  a  moving  book  of  personal 
memories  and  self-communings  on  the 
theme  nearest  his  heart,  while  Tidemarks 
(1924)  took  the  reader  to  the  islands 
and  straits  of  the  Dutch  East  Indies. 
His  first  novel,  Gallions  Reach  (1927), 
which  was  awarded  the  Femina  Vie 
Heureuse  prize,  was  acclaimed  as  an 
important  work  on  both  sides  of  the 
Atlantic.  Yet,  although  Tomlinson  was 
a  born  descriptive  writer,  he  was  not 
a  born  novelist.  His  next  book.  All  Our 
Yesterdays  (1930),  a  story  of  the  war  of 
1914^18,  demonstrated  that  he  was  more 
of  a  poet,  journalist,  philosopher,  and 
student  of  humanity,  than  an  inventor 
of  plot  and  fictional  character. 

Tomlinson  continued  to  produce  novels 
until  the  end  of  his  life.  His  writings 
became  increasingly  permeated  by  a 
hatred  of  war — specifically  proclaimed 
in  Mars  His  Idiot  (1935) — but  they  also 
showed  a  redeeming  belief  in  the  supreme 
value  of  individual  personality.  Although 
his  later  work  was  somewhat  uneven,  he 
still  conveyed  his  old  mastery  as  an 
essayist  in  collections  such  as  The  Turn 
of  the  Tide  (1945),  while  A  Mingled  Yarn 
(1953),  a  series  of  autobiographical 
sketches,  displays  him  at  his  characteristic 
best  in  reminiscence  and  description. 
Tomlinson's  gifts  as  a  writer  can  be 
well  studied  here,  and  in  the  selection 
from  his  work  made  by  Kenneth  Hopkins 
(1953).  In  his  last  book.  The  Trumpet 
Shall  Sound  (1957),  the  story  of  the 
impact  of  the  blitz  on  an  English  family, 
Tomlinson  put  into  memorable  words 
what  many  of  those  who  lived  through 
the  war  of  1939-45  thought  only  in  their 
hearts. 

Tomlinson  was  short  of  stature  and  his 
deeply  lined  face  reflected  a  thought- 
ful and  contemplative  disposition.  He 
suffered  from  deafness  caused  by  a  foot- 
ball accident  in  early  youth  and  aggra- 
vated by  gunfire  on  the  western  front. 
This  handicap  led  people  to  think  of 
him  as  a  shy  man,  but  he  was  constantly 


sought  after  by  his  many  friends,  who 
appreciated  his  fine  sense  of  humour 
and  fondness  for  good  conversation  in  a 
small  company.  A  keen  naturalist,  Tom- 
linson loved  walking,  and  even  in  his 
later  years  thought  nothing  of  taking 
long  walks  through  the  unspoiled  Dorset 
countryside  where  he  spent  each  summer. 
In  1899  he  married  Florence  Margaret, 
daughter  of  Thomas  Hammond,  ship's 
chandler,  by  whom  he  had  one  son  and 
two  daughters.  Tomlinson  received  the 
honorary  degree  of  LL.D.  from  Aberdeen 
in  1949.  He  died  in  London  5  February 
1958  and  was  buried  in  the  churchyard 
at  Abbotsbury,  Dorset.  A  portrait  by 
Richard  Murry  became  the  possession 
of  Mrs.  Mary  Middleton  Murry;  pencil 
drawings  by  William  A.  Wildman  and 
Colin  Moss  and  a  bronze  head  by  Sava 
Botzvaris  are  in  the  possession  of  the 
family. 

[The  Times,  6  and  14  February  1958; 
H.  M.  Tomlinson,-  A  Mingled  Yarn,  1953; 
Frank  Swinnerton,  The  Georgian  Literary 
Scene  1910-1935,  1935,  and  Figures  in  the 
Foreground,  1963 ;  private  information.] 

Derek  Hudson. 

TOWNSEND,  Sir  JOHN  SEALY 
EDWARD  (1868-1957),  pioneer  in  physics 
of  ionized  gases,  was  born  at  Galway, 
Ireland,  7  June  1868,  the  second  son 
of  Edward  Townsend,  professor  of  civil 
engineering  at  Queen's  College,  Galway, 
by  his  wife,  Judith,  daughter  of  John 
Sealy  Townsend,  a  Dublin  barrister. 
He  was  educated  at  Corrig  School  and 
Trinity  College,  Dublin,  where  he  read 
mathematics,  mathematical  physics,  and 
experimental  science.  In  1888  he  was 
elected  to  a  foundation  science  scholar- 
ship in  mathematics ;  in  1890  he  obtained 
a  double  senior  moderatorship,  being 
placed  first  in  mathematics,  and  gradu- 
ated B.A.  For  the  next  four  years  he 
was  a  fellowship  prizeman  and  engaged 
in  teaching,  especially  mathematics.  In 
1895,  at  the  age  of  twenty-seven,  he 
became  a  member  of  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge,  and  an  advanced  student  of 
the  university.  He  was  one  of  the  research 
students  of  (Sir)  J.  J.  Thomson  [q.v.] 
who  worked  in  the  Cavendish  Laboratory 
together  with  Ernest  (later  Lord)  Ruther- 
ford, (Sir)  J.  Larmor,  C.  T.  R.  WUson 
[qq.v.],  as  well  as  Paul  Langevin  with 
whom  he  maintained  a  close  friendship 
throughout  his  fife.  Already  Townsend's 
earliest  experimental  work  showed  both 
originality   in  thought  and  tenacity  in 


983 


Townsend 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


execution:  he  was  elected  in  1898  a  Clerk 
Maxwell  scholar  and  in  1899  a  fellow 
of  Trinity,  coupled  with  an  assistant 
demonstratorship  in  the  Cavendish. 

When  in  1900  the  Wykeham  chair 
of  experimental  physics  was  founded 
in  Oxford,  Townsend  was  elected  the 
first  professor,  with  a  fellowship  at  New 
College.  At  that  time  the  physics  depart- 
ment, the  old  Clarendon  Laboratory, 
was  directed  by  R.  B.  Clifton,  the 
professor  of  experimental  philosophy. 
Townsend' s  duties  were  chiefly  to  lecture 
and  give  instruction  in  electricity  and 
magnetism,  subjects  which  were  ap- 
parently not  Chfton's  favourites.  From 
1902  Townsend  occupied  research  rooms 
first  at  the  Observatory,  then  in  the 
department  of  physiology,  and  later 
in  the  University  Museum,  until  1910 
when  the  new  electrical  laboratory 
was  opened,  a  gift  of  the  Drapers' 
Company  to  the  university,  where  Town- 
send  worked  xintil  his  retirement  in  1941. 

In  Cambridge  Townsend  had  studied 
the  electric  properties  of  gases  obtained 
by  electrolysis  of  liquids  and  shown 
that  the  condensation  of  atmospheric 
clouds  is  due  to  electrification  of  gases. 
This  was  followed  by  the  first  measure- 
ment of  the  elementary  ionic  charge, 
an  outstanding  example  of  elegance 
and  simplicity,  using  but  a  laboratory 
balance,  an  electrometer,  and  a  photo- 
graphic camera.  Subsequently  he  studied 
secondary  X-rays  and  also  the  diffusion 
of  ions  in  gases  which  he  found  to  be 
slower  than  that  of  neutral  particles. 

In  Oxford,  Townsend  laid  the  founda- 
tion to  the  theory  of  multiplication  of 
electrical  charges  in  gases  under  the 
influence  of  an  electric  field.  He  assumed 
ionization  to  occur  by  electrons  colliding 
with  gas  molecules,  later  including  posi- 
tive ions.  He  showed  that  the  electron 
energy  required  to  accomplish  ionization 
was  about  an  order  of  magnitude  smaller 
than  was  thought.  These  theoretical 
and  experimental  studies  led  to  a  simple 
mathematical  relation  which  will  always 
be  connected  with  Townsend's  name. 

Another  new  concept  which  he  intro- 
duced was  the  'electron  gas'.  He  showed 
that  electrons  form  an  assembly  of  their 
own  which  may  have  a  much  higher 
average  energy  than  the  molecules  of 
the  gas  in  which  they  move.  However,  the 
'hot'  electron  gas  is  not  easily  cooled 
by  the  cold  neutral  gas  because  of  the 
large  difference  in  mass  between  electrons 
and  molecules. 


Townsend  contributed  to  the  problem 
of  electric  breakdown  of  gases  which 
results  from  multiplication  of  charges 
in  the  gas  supported  by  secondary 
electrons  released  from  the  negative 
electrode  as  well  as  in  the  emission  of 
light  from  electrically  excited  gases. 

Another  major  contribution  was  the 
relation  between  the  diffusion  of  ions  and 
their  mobility,  showing  Townsend's  pro- 
found insight  in  kinetic  theory  of  gases,  by 
proving  the  equivalency  of  singly  charged 
ions  in  gases  and  of  monovalent  ions  of 
electrolytes.  Finally,  he  discovered  simul- 
taneously with  German  workers  that 
the  mean  free  path  of  electrons  depends 
on  their  energy;  in  particular  he  found 
that  slow  electrons  can  traverse  argon 
gas  without  feeling  its  presence.  This, 
the  Ramsauer-Townsend  effect,  puzzled 
physicists  until  wave-mechanics  provided 
the  solution.  Townsend  showed  early 
an  interest  in  wireless  and  later  in  high 
frequency  research,  including  the  mag- 
netron and  the  electrodeless  discharge. 

Townsend  made  the  electrical  labora- 
tory the  centre  of  research  on  ionized 
gases  long  after  Cambridge  had  aban- 
doned the  field.  He  had  usually  only 
a  few  researchers  around  him  at  a 
time,  many  of  them  Rhodes  scholars. 
Some  of  them  became  well  known  in  the 
world  of  science :  Moseley,  Tizard,  Bailey, 
Huxley,  Focken,  van  de  Graaff,  Gill, 
Pidduck,  and  Llewellyn  Jones,  many 
in  positions  of  responsibility.  He  rarely 
read  scientific  publications  and  was 
very  sceptical  of  others'  new  ideas. 
He  was  always  picking  holes  in  Max- 
well's theory  and  disliked  the  concept 
of  displacement  currents. 

He  was  fond  of  walking  and  talking, 
a  good  shot,  a  huntsman  and  a  keen 
rider.  He  liked  sporting  competitions 
and  played  a  good  game  of  tennis.  His 
striking  personality  made  many  of  his 
pupils  and  followers  reason  and  work 
along  the  lines  their  master  had  laid 
down  and  some  have  continued  to  do  so. 
As  a  true  Irishman  he  loved  arguments 
and  was  an  excellent  storyteller.  His 
experimental  skill,  draughtsmanship, 
knowledge  of  workshop  practice,  and 
shrewdness  in  design  of  apparatus  were 
remarkable.  He  seldom  attended  scientific 
gatherings,  though  there  were  exceptions, 
like  his  visit  to  the  United  States  in 
1924  when  he  was  made  a  member 
of  the  Franklin  Institute,  and  the  recep- 
tion at  the  first  International  Conference 
on  Ionized  Gases  in  Oxford  in  1953. 


984 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Trenchard 


Besides  a  large  number  of  papers 
Townsend  wrote  a  classic  book.  Elec- 
tricity in  Gases  (1915),  which  followed 
an  earlier  small  book,  The  Theory  of 
Ionization  of  Gases  by  Collision  (1910). 
After  his  retirement  he  pubhshed  three 
smaller  books:  Electricity  and  Radio 
Transmission  (1943),  Electrcms  in  Gases 
(1947),  and  Electromagnetic  Waves  (1951). 
He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1903,  was  an 
officer  of  the  Legion  of  Honour  and 
a  corresponding  member  of  the  Institut 
de  France  (Academic  des  Sciences), 
received  an  honorary  D.Sc.  of  Paris, 
and  was  elected  an  honorary  fellow  of 
New  College.  He  was  knighted  in  1941. 

Townsend  married  in  1911  Mary 
Georgiana,  the  daughter  of  Peter  Fitz- 
walter  Lambert,  of  Castle  Ellen,  county 
Galway.  She  became  an  active  worker 
in  municipal  affairs,  an  alderman,  twice 
mayor,  and  an  honorary  freeman  of  the 
city  of  Oxford.  They  had  two  sons.  Town- 
send  died  in  Oxford  16  February  1957. 

[A.  von  Engel  in  Biographical  Memoirs 
of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iii,  1957 ; 
Year  Book  of  the  Physical  Society,  1957; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

A.  VON  Engel. 

TRENCHARD,    HUGH    MONTAGUE, 

first  Viscount  Trenchard  (1873-1956), 
marshal  of  the  Royal  Air  Force,  was 
born  at  Taunton  3  February  1873, 
the  second  son  and  third  of  the  six 
children  of  Henry  Montague  Trenchard,  a 
provincial  lawyer,  and  his  wife,  Georgiana 
Louisa  Catherine  Tower,  daughter  of 
John  McDowall  Skene,  captain  R.N.  His 
father  came  of  an  ancient  west-country 
family,  among  them  Sir  John  Trenchard 
[q.v.],  once  considerable  landowners, 
but  latterly  dependent  on  professional 
earnings.  A  happy  early  childhood, 
from  which  conventional  learning  was 
almost  completely  absent,  ended  when 
he  went  to  a  preparatory  school  and 
thence  to  a  crammer's  for  entry  to  the 
Royal  Navy.  However,  he  failed  the 
Dartmouth  entrance,  and  so  was  sent 
to  an  army  crammer,  where  his  strong 
preference  for  sports  and  games,  and 
the  absence  of  any  properly  balanced 
studies,  produced  in  him  a  certain 
Philistinism  which  subsequently  took 
many  years  to  eradicate.  At  the  age  of 
sixteen,  while  still  a  boarder  at  this 
school,  he  learnt  that  his  father's  law 
practice  had  failed,  and  bankruptcy 
followed.  This  disgrace  weighed  heavily 
upon  the  boy.  Maintained  at  school  by 


the  generosity  of  relatives,  he  reluctantly 
worked  out  a  most  unhappy  period  of 
his  life,  first  failing  the  Woolwich  entrance 
examination,  then  twice  faiUng  the  ex- 
amination for  militia  candidates.  Finally, 
in  1893,  he  just  passed,  was  gazetted  as 
a  second  lieutenant  in  the  2nd  battaUon 
Royal  Scots  Fusihers,  and  posted  at 
once  to  his  regiment  in  India. 

These  formative  years  had  been  almost 
wholly  disastrous,  and  produced  a  man 
tense,  taciturn,  reserved,  and  half-educa- 
ted. The  five  years'  garrison  and  frontier 
duty  he  now  served  slowly  eased  some 
of  this  tension.  Trenchard  was  a  large 
man,  tall  and  strong.  He  devoted  him- 
self to  riding,  and  principally  to  polo, 
during  most  of  his  leisure  hours,  finding 
in  the  arrangement  of  teams  and  tourna- 
ments a  natural  gift  for  organization,  and 
reading  extensively  to  repair  the  gaps  in 
his  education. 

Comparatively  uneventful  years  in 
India  ended  with  the  outbreak  of  war 
in  South  Africa  where  Trenchard  went 
to  rejoin  his  battalion.  He  was  promoted 
to  the  rank  of  captain,  and  given  the 
task  of  raising  and  training  a  mounted 
company.  By  unorthodox  methods,  in- 
cluding the  incorporation  of  Australian 
volunteers,  he  quickly  assembled  a  small 
flying  colunm.  While  commanding  this 
unit  he  pursued  a  large  Boer  raiding 
party,  cornering  them  at  Dwarsvlei 
in  Western  Transvaal.  During  the  en- 
gagement that  followed  he  was  hit  in  the 
chest  by  a  bullet,  narrowly  escaping 
death.  Half-paralysed,  with  his  left  lung 
permanently  damaged,  he  was  invalided 
back  to  England.  Six  months  of  violent 
self-cure,  including  winter  sports  and 
tennis,  miraculously  fitted  him,  in  his 
own  opinion  at  least,  for  further  active 
service,  and  he  returned  to  South  Africa 
as  a  captain  in  the  12th  Mounted  In- 
fantry. Until  the  end  of  the  war  he 
continued  to  serve  with  irregular  mounted 
infantry  units,  gaining  a  high  reputation 
for  daring,  initiative,  and  will-power. 

On  leave  in  England  at  the  end  of  the 
war  he  was  considering  leaving  the  army 
when  he  was  offered  the  post  of  assistant 
commandant  of  the  Southern  Nigeria 
Regiment  as  a  brevet  major.  He  accepted 
and  sailed  for  Nigeria  in  1903.  For  the 
next  seven  years  he  led  the  life  of  a 
soldier  and  administrator  in  an  unknown 
country  just  opening  to  colonial  law 
and  organization.  He  was  twice  mentioned 
in  dispatches,  appointed  to  the  D.S.O. 
in    1906,    and    in    1908    was    promoted 


985 


Trenchard 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


temporary  lieutenant-colonel  and  became 
commandant  of  the  regiment.  Expedi- 
tions, surveys,  patrolling,  road-building, 
aiid  occasional  clashes  with  the  Ibos  of 
t^  interior  passed  the  years  until  in 
1910  he  fell  dangerously  ill  with  an 
abscess  of  the  liver  and  was  once  more 
invalided  home.  After  a  long  conva- 
lescence, still  unfit  for  tropical  duty, 
he  rejoined  his  old  regiment,  dropping 
iii  rank  to  major,  and  served  in  Ireland 
for  the  next  two  years. 

In  1912  he  was  a  thirty-nine-year-old 
bachelor,  and  still  held  the  rank  of 
major.  Although  he  had  many  adventures 
behind  him  there  was  little  in  his  military 
career  or  prospects  to  distinguish  him 
from  hundreds  of  other  officers  of  his 
age.  Once  more  he  thought  of  retirement. 
It  was  then  that  Captain  Eustace  Loraine, 
an  old  colleague  of  his  Nigeria  service, 
wrote  to  tell  him  that  he  had  taken  up 
flying,  and  enthusiastically  advised  him 
to  do  the  same.  To  Trenchard  it  seemed 
as  good  an  idea  as  any.  Obtaining  three 
months'  leave,  he  paid  £75  for  flying 
lessons  at  the  Sopwith  School  at  Brook- 
lands.  As  he  began  his  instruction 
he  learnt  that  Loraine  had  been  killed 
in  a  flying  accident,  but  he  passed  his 
tests  after  two  weeks,  including  one  hour 
and  four  minutes  flying  time,  and  quali- 
fied for  his  pilot's  certificate  (R.  Ae.  C. 
No.  270)  on  31  July  1912. 

The  Royal  Flying  Corps  had  formed 
on  the  previous  13  May.  The  new  aviator 
was  seconded  to  it,  and  posted  to  the 
Central  Flying  School  at  Upavon.  Instead 
of  a  pupil's  course,  his  age  and  military 
experience  sent  him  at  once  to  the  staff, 
first  as  an  instructor  and  later  as  assis- 
tant commandant.  There  he  played  a 
leading  part  in  devising  the  so  far  un- 
known techniques  of  flying  instruction, 
setting  the  standards  of  technical  know- 
ledge required  of  pupils  while  continuing 
his  own  training.  His  age  and  his  fierce 
reticence  made  him  a  figure  more  res- 
pected than  loved  by  the  much  younger 
pupils,  and  it  was  here  that  his  large 
frame,  ponderous  manner,  and  loud 
voice  first  earned  him  his  lifelong  nick- 
name of  *Boom'.  He  was  out  of  his  age- 
group  but  he  had  found  his  metier. 

By  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  Tren- 
chard was  a  well-known  figure  in  the 
Royal  Flying  Corps,  and  when  senior 
aviation  officers  were  so  scarce  he  had 
liigh  hopes  of  a  flying  command  with 
the  British  Expeditionary  Force.  Instead 
he    was  posted  as   commandant  of  the 


Military  Wing  at  Farnborough,  respon- 
sible for  the  organization  backing  the 
rapidly  expanding  front-line  squadrons. 
Trenchard  found  himself  called  upon  to 
improvise  the  complete  groundwork 
of  a  considerable  new  fighting  force. 
Hardly  had  he  started  when  a  reorgani- 
zation of  the  Royal  Flying  Corps  in 
France  gave  him  command  of  No.  1 
Wing  in  the  First  Army  Corps  and  the 
opportunity  to  pursue  the  war  from  the 
muddy  airfields  of  the  western  front. 
The  early  months  of  1915  found  him 
strongly  pressing  for  the  equipment  of 
his  squadrons  with  airborne  radio  and 
cameras.  The  British  spring  offensives 
gave  him  his  first  opportunity  to  try 
out  tactical  bombing  techniques.  But 
his  chief  concern  was  always  for  the 
morale  of  his  men  and  for  inculcating 
in  them  an  aggressive  fighting  spirit:  his 
first  rule  of  war. 

In  August  1915  he  succeeded  Sir  David 
Henderson  [q.v.]  in  command  of  the  Royal 
Flying  Corps  in  France  with  the  temporary 
rank  of  brigadier-general.  Sir  Douglas 
(later  Earl)  Haig  [q.v.]  was  his  immediate 
superior;  Maurice  Baring  [q.v.]  his  im- 
probable but  indispensable  aide.  The 
advent  of  the  Fokker  monoplane  curbed 
his  new  tactical  innovations  and  forced  his 
squadrons  on  to  the  defensive,  a  state  of 
war  intensely  distasteful  to  him.  Regret- 
fully restricting  his  scope,  he  instituted 
larger  escorts  and  bigger  formations,  and 
so  held  on  until  in  early  1916  the  new 
British  fighters  arrived  to  redress  the 
balance. 

In  the  meantime  in  London,  resolution 
of  the  responsibilities  and  claims  of  the 
army  and  navy  in  the  field  of  aviation 
was  becoming  monthly  more  difficult, 
as  the  air  arms  grew  in  size.  Trenchard 
continued  to  push,  wheedle,  and  inspire 
his  squadrons  through  the  great  land 
battles  they  supported  from  time  to  time, 
and  the  fight  for  air  superiority  they 
waged  continually.  His  struggles  in  France 
were  matched  at  home  by  an  ever- 
increasing  contest  of  the  two  fighting 
Services  for  complete  control  of  the  new 
air  weapon. 

Through  the  battles  of  the  Somme, 
Arras,  and  Messines,  third  Ypres,  and 
Cambrai,  Trenchard's  reputation  grew 
with  the  size  and  effectiveness  of  his  force. 
In  these  campaigns  he  was  able  to  drive 
home  his  greatest  precept,  and  his  legacy  to 
the  modern  Royal  Air  Force,  that  only  by 
persistent  attack  can  air  mastery  be  ob- 
tained. This  he  made  into  an  instinctive 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Trenchard 


and  a  fundamental  basis  for  all  air 
doctrine,  which  was  never  questioned  by 
anybody  who  came  under  his  influence. 

In  London  the  Derby  committee, 
the  Bailhache  committee,  and  the  Air 
Board  each  wrestled  ineffectively  with 
the  problem  of  controlling  inter-Service 
air  priorities.  At  last  the  committee 
under  J.  C.  Smuts  [q.v.]  finally  gained 
acceptance  of  its  recommendations  for 
an  Air  Ministry,  and  a  third  Service, 
the  Royal  Air  Force.  Although  com- 
pletely convinced  of  the  rightness  of  this 
doctrine  Trenchard  did  not  want  to 
execute  it  in  the  middle  of  the  war. 
By  the  end  of  1917  he  had  begun  bombing 
(Jermany  and  his  squadrons  were  heavily 
engaged  throughout  the  length  of  the 
British  front.  He  therefore  heard  with 
mixed  feelings  of  his  appointment,  under 
Lord  Rothermere  [q.v.]  as  air  minister, 
to  be  first  chief  of  the  new  air  staff, 
in  January  1918,  at  which  date  he 
was  also  appointed  K.C.B.  Haig  parted 
from  him  with  the  utmost  reluctance,  but 
it  was  not  long  before  Trenchard  was 
back  in  France.  Before  the  day  for  the 
formation  of  the  new  Royal  Air  Force, 
1  April  1918,  could  dawn,  Trenchard 
and  Rothermere  had  proved  utterly 
incompatible.  Extreme  political  pliability 
met  unyielding  principle,  and  the  new 
chief  of  air  staff's  resignation  took  effect 
on  13  April,  an  event  closely  followed, 
under  pressure  from  his  own  colleagues, 
by  that  of  the  air  minister. 

Trenchard  returned  to  France  in  May 
1918  at  the  head  of  a  new  concept,  an 
independent  bombing  force,  which  after 
lengthy  negotiation  was  confirmed  in 
October  as  the  Inter-Allied  Independent 
Air  Force,  subordinate  only  to  Marshal 
Foch  the  supreme  allied  commander, 
charged  with  the  task  of  carrying  the  war 
directly  to  Germany  by  strategic  bombing. 
Although  the  first  squadrons  assigned 
flew  a  large  number  of  raids  against 
the  enemy  homeland,  the  force  was  not 
designed  to  develop  its  full  potential  until 
mid-1919,  and  so  was  disbanded  before 
it  could  show  its  power.  It  is  sometimes 
stated,  wrongly,  that  Trenchard  was  a 
fanatical  advocate  of  the  military  value 
of  this  force.  In  fact  he  had  some  consider- 
able doubts  concerning  its  strategic  worth 
at  that  time  and  place  and  compared 
with  other  war  requirements,  though 
none  about  the  details  of  its  training 
and  employment. 

For  his  war  services  Trenchard  received 
a    baronetcy    (1919)    and    a    grant    of 


£10,000.  Once  again  he  thought  of  civi- 
lian life.  But  in  1919  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  became  war  and  air  minister 
and  invited  Trenchard  to  return  to  his 
briefly  held  post  as  chief  of  air  staff. 
He  took  office  on  15  February  and  kept 
it  for  more  than  ten  years.  He  now 
embarked  on  two  tasks,  of  a  size  which 
taxed  even  his  immense  energy  and  appli- 
cation. The  first  was  to  create  a  new 
permanent  fighting  Service  out  of  the 
ruins  left  by  the  precipitate  disarma- 
ment of  1919,  and  to  build  strongly  and 
soundly  for  the  future  on  the  slender 
budgets  allowed  by  the  aftermath  of 
world  war.  Everything  was  new,  and 
he  had  to  design  everything,  down 
to  ranks,  uniforms,  and  insignia.  The 
second  task  was  to  guard  this  growing 
infant  from  the  wicked  uncles  whose 
neglect  had  helped  to  create  it — the  two 
older  Services.  He  was  convinced,  as 
of  nothing  else,  that  the  air  weapon 
could  only  develop  its  full  potential  in 
an  independent  Service,  and  with  the 
war  and  its  immediate  dangers  over 
nothing  could  hold  him  back  from  full 
insistence  on  this  doctrine.  If  air 
power  was  to  be  shackled  to  fleets  or 
armies,  he  declared  with  a  new  fluency, 
it  would  go  down  before  any  opponent 
who  had  grasped  the  lesson  that  the  air 
was  indivisible,  and  centrally  controlled 
air  power  the  spearhead  of  national 
defence. 

Thus  the  chief  of  air  staff  of  the  new 
Royal  Air  Force  divided  his  time  between 
building  up  his  young  Service  and 
fiercely  protecting  it  from  the  attempts 
of  the  War  Office  and  Admiralty  to 
reabsorb  it  into  the  army  and  navy. 
These  attempts  were  not  long  delayed, 
or  easily  disposed  of,  or  very  scru- 
pulously conducted.  First  the  War  Office 
attacked,  in  a  campaign  lasting  many 
months.  A  useful  weapon  in  Trenchard's 
defence  was  his  scheme  for  'Air  Control' 
of  Iraq,  whereby  small  numbers  of 
R.A.F.  aircraft  and  armoured  cars  kept 
the  peace  in  an  area  which  had  previously 
needed  three  times  as  large  a  force  of 
soldiers.  The  outstanding  success  of  this 
scheme  greatly  improved  his  standing, 
and  that  of  the  Air  Force,  in  the  eyes 
of  the  politicians.  By  1925  the  army 
campaign  died  down,  but  in  the  mean- 
time the  navy,  headed  by  the  first  sea 
lord.  Admiral  Beatty  [q.v.],  developed  a 
continuous,  virulent,  and  wearing  assault. 

Trenchard  fought  off  these  and  other 
attacks,  simultaneously  consolidating  the 


987 


Trenchard 


D.N.B.  1951-1000 


Royal  Air  Force  by  such  important 
foundations  as  an  Apprentice  School, 
a  Cadet  College,  and  a  Staff  College. 
In  all  of  these  the  importance  of  quality 
above  quantity  was  persistently  preached. 
He  received  some  criticism  for  this 
policy  from  those  who  would  have 
had  all  Air  Force  money  devoted  to  the 
maximum  number  of  first-line  squadrons, 
but  when  in  the  middle  thirties  govern- 
ment policy  permitted  the  introduction 
of  a  phased  expansion  of  the  Royal 
Air  Force,  this  early  doctrine  ensured 
that  the  quality  of  the  whole  was  un- 
matched, and  able  to  absorb  the  further 
enormous  expansions  of  the  war  of 
1939-45. 

His  long  period  as  chief  of  air  staff 
transformed  a  high  reputation  into 
a  legend.  As  a  founding  father  with 
a  long  unbroken  reign  he  knew  every- 
thing there  was  to  know  of  a  force  which 
never  exceeded  a  total  of  some  30,000 
men.  His  formidable  appearance,  strong 
voice,  and  decisive  manner  made  him 
a  source  of  affection,  admiration,  and 
apprehension  to  all  who  worked  for  him. 
He  was  promoted  G.C.B.  in  1924, 
became  the  first  marshal  of  the  Royal 
Air  Force  in  1927,  and  in  1930,  after 
his  retirement  at  the  end  of  1929,  he 
was  created  a  baron.  It  seemed  impos- 
sible to  imagine  the  Royal  Air  Force 
without  him. 

He  had  scarcely  time  to  settle  into 
civilian  life  before  the  Government  asked 
him  to  take  office  as  commissioner  for 
the  Metropolitan  Police,  whose  morale 
and  efficiency  then  gave  grounds  for 
concern.  He  accepted  in  November 
1931,  and  plunged  at  once,  with  charac- 
teristic energy,  into  a  programme  of 
reforms  and  reorganizations.  The  most 
important  of  these  were  the  creation 
of  a  Police  College  and  Forensic  Labora- 
tory at  Hendon  and  a  ten-year  engage- 
ment scheme  for  police  officers,  both 
designed  to  improve  the  qualifications 
of  the  higher  ranks  of  the  force.  Once 
more  his  prime  concern  was  for  the 
creation  of  a  high  quality  individual, 
by  training,  selection,  and  care  of  the 
human  units  of  the  organization.  For 
this  work  he  was  appointed  G.C.V.O.  in 
1935.  Inevitably  his  actions  aroused  great 
controversy  inside  and  outside  the  force, 
particularly  among  the  more  traditional 
officers.  When  he  gave  up  the  post  in  1935 
his  major  reforms  were  not  pressed  home 
by  his  successor,  and  many  of  them  lapsed 
in  1939.^•«<3iHX1i- 


Created  a  viscount  (1936),  and  once 
more  released  from  government  service, 
Trenchard  joined  the  board  of  the 
United  Africa  Company,  whose  Nigerian 
interests  brought  him  back  to  ground 
familiar  in  his  youth.  He  became  chair- 
man in  1936  and  held  that  position 
until  1953.  At  the  age  of  sixty-six,  with 
the  outbreak  of  war,  he  put  on  uniform 
again,  once  more  to  serve  his  country, 
as  a  kind  of  roving  ambassador  of  the 
Air  Council,  travelling  far  and  wide 
among  the  units  of  the  Service,  informing, 
reporting,  and  inspiring.  Completely  with- 
out ceremony  he  moved  about,  greeted 
everywhere  as  a  universal  elder  brother 
to  the  Royal  Air  Force.  When  the  war 
was  over,  until  the  end  of  his  life,  he 
continued,  in  the  House  of  Lords  and 
elsewhere,  to  support  the  cause  of  air 
power.  He  was  appointed  to  the  Order 
of  Merit  in  1951.  He  was  also  an  hono- 
rary LL.D.  of  Cambridge  and  D.C.L. 
of  Oxford,  an  honorary  major-general 
in  the  army,  and  colonel  of  the  Royal 
Scots  Fusiliers. 

Although  his  work  as  police  commis- 
sioner was  memorable,  and  his  early 
career  by  no  means  negligible,  Tren- 
ch ard's  fame  was  established  for  all  time 
on  his  work  between  1912  and  1929. 
In  these  seventeen  short  years  of  his 
forties  and  fifties  he  built  up  and  proved 
in  action  the  principles  of  air  operation ; 
and  then  created  an  Air  Force  which, 
within  his  own  lifetime,  saved  his  country 
from  certain  disaster.  He  not  only 
created  and  preserved  the  third  fighting 
Service  and  hammered  it  out  in  his 
own  image,  but  he  also  fathered  the 
doctrine  of  air  power  as  an  independent 
force,  the  prerequisite  of  successful 
operations  by  land  and  sea.  He  had  the 
supreme  satisfaction  of  seeing  all  his 
prophecies  completely,  indeed  lavishly, 
fulfilled  before  his  eyes.  Although  he  dis- 
liked the  label  'Father  of  the  Royal  Air 
Force'  he  was  in  fact  the  progenitor  of 
almost  all  independent  air  forces.  His 
character:  strong,  stern,  touched  with 
eccentricity,  but  basically  kind  and 
humane,  assured  him  the  love  of  all  who 
worked  for  him. 

In  1920  Trenchard  married  Katherine 
Isabel  Salvin  (died  1960),  daughter 
of  the  late  Edward  Salvin  Bowlby, 
and  widow  of  Captain  the  Hon.  James 
Boyle.  Her  sister  was  the  wife  of  Lord 
Keyes  [q.v.].  There  were  two  sons,  of 
whom  the  elder  was  killed  in  action  in 
North    Africa    in    1943.    The    yoimger, 


QAA 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Trevelyan,  C.  P. 


Thomas  (born  1923),  succeeded  his  father 
when  he  died  in  London  10  February 
1956.  He  was  buried  in  Westminster 
Abbey. 

There  are  portraits  by  Sir  William 
Orpen  and  Francis  Dodd  in  the  Imperial 
War  Museum;  by  A.  R.  Thomson  at 
the  Royal  Air  Force  State  CoUege, 
Bracknell;  by  E.  Verpilleux  at  the 
Royal  Air  Force  College,  Cranwell; 
by  Frank  Beresford  at  H.Q.  Fighter 
Command,  Bentley  Priory;  and  by  Sir 
Oswald  Birley  at  the  Royal  Air  Force 
Club.  A  memorial  bronze  statue  by 
William  McMillan  stands  in  Embank- 
ment Gardens,  outside  the  Ministry  of 
Defence.  >  humu 

[The   Times,   11   February  1956;  Andrfew 

Boyle,  Trenchard,  1962 ;  Sir  Walter  Raleigh 

and  H.  A.  Jones,  (Official  History)  The  War  in 

the  Air,  6  vols.,  1922-37 ;  private  information.] 

Peter  Wykeham. 

TREVELYAN,  Sir  CHARLES 
PHILIPS,  third  baronet,  of  Wallington 
(1870-1958),  politician,  was  born  28 
October  1870  in  London,  the  eldest 
son  of  (Sir)  George  Otto  Trevelyan  [q.v], 
later  second  baronet,  and  his  wife, 
Caroline,  daughter  of  Robert  Needham 
Philips,  Liberal  M.P.  for  Bury,  Lanca- 
shire. He  succeeded  his  father  in 
1928  ;  his  brothers  were  Robert  Calverley 
Trevelyan,  the  writer,  and  George 
Macaulay  Trevelyan,  the  historian. 
Trevelyan  was  educated  at  Harrow  and 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  where  in  1892 
he  took  a  second  class  in  the  history 
tripos.  After  going  down  from  Cambridge 
he  lived  with  his  parents  on  the  family 
estate,  Wallington,  Cambo,  Northum- 
berland. He  took  much  interest,  along 
with  his  brothers,  in  walking  and  climb- 
ing, especially  in  the  Lake  District, 
where  he  initiated  a  game  of  hare  and 
hounds  over  the  mountains  which  has 
continued.  His  interests  were  more 
political  than  literary  and  in  1892-3 
he  was  secretary  to  Lord  Houghton 
(later  the  Marquess  of  Crewe,  q.v.) 
when  he  was  lord-lieutenant  of  Ireland; 
his  first  acquaintance  with  Ireland  had 
been  at  the  age  of  twelve  when  his 
father  was  made  chief  secretary  after 
the  Phoenix  Park  murders  and  he 
remembered  not  being  allowed  out  of  the 
grounds  of  the  Lodge  without  detectives. 
His  ambition  led  him  to  seek  election 
to  Pariiament  and  in  1895  he  unsuccess- 
fully contested  North  Lambeth.  In 
1896-7  as  a  member  of  the  London  School 


Board  he  had  his  first  experience  6f  the 
administration  of  education  in  which 
he  spent  some  of  the  most  active  years 
of  his  public  life.  His  chance  came  in 
1899  when  he  successfully  contested 
as  a  Liberal  the  EUand  division  of 
Yorkshire  which  he  retained  until  1918, 
during  which  time  he  developed  strong 
radical  sympathies.  He  took  part  in  a 
movement  to  open  the  mountains  and 
moors  to  the  public  and  introduced 
a  private  member's  bill  to  bring  this 
about;  he  did  not  succeed  in  getting 
it  on  the  statute  book  but  lived  to  see 
much  of  what  he  fought  for  in  this 
respect   carried   oiit. 

In  1906-8  Trevelyan  was  parliamentary 
charity  commissioner;  in  1908  he  was 
appointed  parliamentary  secretary  to 
the  Board  of  Education  where  he  was 
to  some  extent  able  to  use  his  influence 
in  favour  of  secular  and  undenomina- 
tional teaching.  His  junior  government 
appointment  moreover  did  not  prevent 
him  from  advocating  a  number  of  other 
causes  he  felt  strongly  about.  He  took 
part  in  the  formation  of  the  'Russia 
committee'  which  exposed  the  persecu- 
tion by  the  Tsar's  government  of  those 
in  Russia  who  had  taken  part  in  the 
revolution  of  1904.  He  also  took  steps 
behind  the  scenes  with  others  outside 
the  Government  to  oppose  Russian 
aggression  in  Persia.  When,  in  1913, 
it  began  to  be  known  that  Great  Britain 
had,  after  a  naval  understanding  with 
France,  taken  on  a  moral  obligation 
to  enter  a  war  in  her  defence,  he  became 
active  in  a  movement  to  oppose  secret 
treaties.  He  was  for  some  years  before 
1914  entirely  out  of  sympathy  with  his 
Government's  foreign  policy;  he  thought 
that  Sir  Edward  Grey  (later  Viscount 
Grey  of  Fallodon,  q.v.)  was  committing 
Great  Britain  to  support  certain  Euro- 
pean powers  in  the  interests  of  the 
'balance  of  power'  and  not  considering 
the  merits  of  international  issues  as  they 
arose. 

When  war  came  in  August  1914, 
he  resigned  from  the  Government  and 
became  active  in  the  creation  of  the 
Union  of  Democratic  Control,  along  with 
E.  D.  Morel,  Arthur  Ponsonby  (later  Lord 
Ponsonby  of  Shulbrede,  q.v.),  Ramsay 
MacDonald,  and  others.  He  continued 
throughout  the  war  to  advocate  'peace 
by  negotiation'  and  the  end  of  secret 
treaties.  These  activities  and  his  coura- 
geous idealism  made  him  increasingly 
unpopular  and   at  the   general  election 


Trevelyan,  C.  P. 


P.N.B.  1951-1960 


in  1918  he  lost  his  seat.  Soon  after  this 
he  joined  the  Labour  Party  and  its 
ginger  group,  the  I.L.P. 

At  the  general  election  in  1922  Tre- 
velyan was  elected  Labour  member  for 
the  Central  division  of  Newcastle ;  he 
became  the  spokesman  of  the  party 
on  education  and  when  the  first  Labour 
Government  was  formed  in  1924  he  was 
appointed  president  of  the  Board  of 
Education.  He  now  had  the  opportunity 
he  had  long  sought ;  he  was  undoubtedly 
a  good  administrator  and  knew  the 
way  about  his  department.  His  great 
ideal  was  to  popularize  education  and 
let  nothing  stand  in  the  way  of  giving 
every  child  a  full  opportunity  for  a 
career  in  life.  He  immediately  withdrew 
Circular  1190  which  had  been  issued  by 
his  predecessor  to  restrict  expenditure; 
local  education  authorities  were  now 
encouraged  to  go  ahead.  His  sincerity, 
however,  often  led  him  to  be  intolerant 
of  other  people's  opinions  and  with  a 
greater  degree  of  tact  he  could  prob- 
ably have  accomplished  much  of  what 
he  wanted ;  but  that  was  not  in  his  nature ; 
on  the  other  hand,  nobody  could  question 
his  idealism  and  sincerity.  He  had  no  great 
power  of  thinking  out  a  problem  but  he 
relied  on  instinct,  which  was  generally 
right. 

After  the  fall  of  the  Labour  Govern- 
ment Trevelyan  retained  his  seat  at 
the  election  in  the  autumn  of  1924. 
He  now  took  up  other  subjects  as  well 
as  education  and  was  very  active  in 
support  of  the  Soviet  Union.  His  un- 
critical enthusiasm  prevented  him  from 
seeing  any  fault  in  the  Russian  Communist 
system.  But  he  was  effective  from  the 
front  Opposition  bench  in  criticizing 
the  education  policy  of  the  Conservative 
Government  and  what  he  considered 
its  general  lack  of  expansion  and  its  short- 
sighted economy. 

On  the  formation  of  the  second  Labour 
Government  in  1929  Trevelyan  again 
became  president  of  the  Board  of  Edu- 
cation. He  introduced  an  education 
bill  which  was  to  raise  the  school-leaving 
age  to  fifteen  and  provide  grants  for 
parents  in  the  lower  income  groups. 
Trouble  arose  over  the  denominational 
schools:  Trevelyan  strongly  resisted  de- 
velopment grants  for  these  schools,  but 
after  the  Scurr  amendment,  moved 
from  his  own  side  of  the  House,  finally 
he  agreed  to  some  state  support.  The 
bill,  however,  was  rejected  by  the  House 
of  Lords  in  February  1931  on  the  grounds 


of  expense  in  view  of  the  grave  economic 
situation.  Trevelyan  resigned  from  the 
Cabinet  and  Government  in  March  because 
he  distrusted  some  of  his  colleagues  who, 
he  thought,  were  proposing  to  cut  public 
expenditure  on  projects  on  which  he  and 
a  large  part  of  the  parliamentary  Labour 
Party  had  set  their  hearts.  At  the  general 
election  following  the  formation  of  the 
*  national'  Government  he  lost  his  seat  in 
Newcastle  and  this  ended  his  active  politi- 
cal career.  He  had  been  appointed  lord- 
lieutenant  of  Northumberland  in  1930.  In 
this  capacity  he  took  steps  to  reorganize 
the  magistracy  in  the  county  and  make  it 
representative  of  all  sections  of  the  com- 
munity. He  was  prime  mover  in  the  found- 
ing of  the  People's  Theatre  in  Newcastle 
and  gave  steady  encouragement  to  the 
Youth  Hostels  Association  in  the  north. 

In  international  affairs  Trevelyan  never 
developed  a  mature  judgement  on  Russian 
Communism.  He  turned  a  blind  eye 
on  what  he  did  not  want  to  see.  What 
interested  him  was  the  epic  struggle 
of  the  Russian  people  to  throw  off  the 
yoke  of  Tsarism.  He  had  no  doubts  where 
the  menace  to  civilization  lay  and  when 
war  came  in  1939  he  wholeheartedly 
supported  it,  even  before  Russia  came  in. 
He  was  much  attached  to  his  family 
home  and  estate.  His  grouse  moors 
were  some  of  the  best  in  Northum- 
berland and  he  was  a  keen  shot;  he  did 
something,  however,  to  show  that  he 
felt  it  his  duty  to  use  his  property 
for  the  public  interest;  thus  he  made 
over  most  of  his  grouse  moors  to  the 
Forestry  Commission  and  did  extensive 
tree  planting  himself.  He  initiated  child- 
ren's allowances  for  his  employees  on 
the  estate  and  did  house  building. 
He  worked  to  keep  his  estate  together 
by  arranging  that  in  1941  the  whole 
property  should  be  made  over  to  the 
National  Trust  in  his  lifetime,  while 
he  continued  to  reside  at  Wallington 
as  tenant. 

In  1904  Trevelyan  married  Mary 
Katharine  (died  1966),  youngest  daughter 
of  Sir  Hugh  Bell,  half-sister  of  Gertrude 
Bell  and  granddaughter  of  Sir  Isaac 
Lowthian  Bell  [qq.v.].  They  had  four 
daughters  and  three  sons,  the  eldest 
of  whom,  George  Lowthian  (born  1906), 
succeeded  to  the  title  when  he  died 
at  Wallington  24  January  1958.  There 
is  a  bronze  bust  by  Gertrude  Hermes  at 
Wallington. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
M.  Philips  Price. 


990 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Trevelyan,  H. 


TREVELYAN,  HILDA  (1877-1959),  the 
stage  name  of  Hilda  Marie  Antoinette 
Anna  Blow,  actress,  was  born  at  West 
Hackney,  London,  4  February  1877, 
the  daughter  of  John  Joseph  Tucker, 
farmer,  and  his  wife,  Helene  Adolphine 
Marie  Foulon.  She  was  educated  at  an 
Ursuline  convent  and  made  her  first 
stage  appearance  at  the  age  of  twelve 
as  one  of  the  schoolchildren  in  a  revival 
of  The  Silver  King  (1889)  at  the  Princess's 
Theatre,  London.  When  she  was  sixteen 
she  was  touring  in  A  Gaiety  Girl,  and 
it  was  not  long  before  she  established 
herself  as  a  provincial  leading  lady, 
touring,  for  example,  in  a  play  called 
Newmarket  in  which  she  acted  the 
heroine  to  the  hero  of  (Sir)  George  Arliss 
[q.v.],  then  unknown.  Her  first  serious 
London  engagement,  at  the  Court  in  1898, 
was  as  understudy  to  Pattie  Browne  as 
Avonia  Bunn,  cheerful  soubrette  of  the 
Bagnigge-Wells  Theatre  in  Trelamny  of 
the  'Wells\  the  comedy  by  (Sir)  A.  W. 
Pinero  [q.v.].  Hilda  Trevelyan,  who  would 
play  her  many  times  in  later  life,  had 
the  personality  for  Avonia' s  affectionate 
exuberance.  There  were  few  actresses  with 
her  special  way  of  gaining  and  holding 
the  sympathy  of  an  audience ;  she  had  no 
mannerisms  but  she  took  listeners  into  her 
confidence  with  a  warmth  to  which  they 
responded  at  once. 

In  1899  she  went  out  as  Lady  Babbie 
in  a  touring  company  of  The  Little 
Minister  by  (Sir)  J.  M.  Barrie  [q.v.], 
a  dramatist  who  would  mean  so  much 
to  her  career.  The  'minister'  himself 
was  Sydney  Blow  (stage  name  of  Luke 
Sydney  Jellings  Blow,  died  1961)  whom 
Hilda  Trevelyan  married  in  1910;  he 
became  better  known  as  a  dramatist, 
particularly  of  light  comedy  and  farce. 
After  nearly  700  touring  performances 
in  The  Little  Minister,  Hilda  Trevelyan 
had  a  variety  of  London  parts.  She 
specialized  in  the  appealing  waif  or  the 
buoyant  soubrette:  her  comedy  and 
pathos  were  always  very  close  to  each 
other.  She  had  also  the  range  to  succeed 
the  comedienne  Louie  Freear  as  Fi-Fi 
in  A  Chinese  Honeymoon  at  the  Strand 
Theatre  during  1903.  It  was  in  the 
following  year  that  she  had  the  kind  of 
east-end  part  in  which  she  would  be 
unexampled :  the  cockney  Amanda  Afflick 
in  'Op  o'  Me  Thumb,  a  one-act  play 
at  the  Court.  She  was  so  affecting  in 
this  that  one  critic,  referring  to  T.  F. 
Robson  [q.v.],  the  Victorian  actor  of 
the  comic-pathetic,  called  her  'a  Robson 


in  petticoats'.  Later  that  year  she  toured 
with  (Sir)  John  Hare  [q.v.]  as  Moira  in 
one  of  Barrie's  lesser-known  comedies, 
Little  Mary,  a  character  described  by 
the  author  himself  as  'an  old-fashioned 
little  girl  of  twelve,  very  earnest  and 
practical  and  quaint,  and  with  all  the 
airs  of  an  experienced  mother.  She 
carries  the  baby  with  extraordinary 
rapture.'  This  was  an  exact  description 
of  Hilda  Trevelyan's  most  telling  style. 
It  was  not  surprising  that,  later  in  the 
year,  Barrie  cast  a  player  so  suited  to 
his  work,  physically  and  temperamentally, 
as  Wendy  in  the  Christmas  fantasy  of 
Peter  Pan,  It  opened  at  the  Duke  of 
York's  on  27  December  1904.  Hilda 
Trevelyan  would  repeat  this  perform- 
ance in  many  revivals  and  on  more  than 
900  occasions.  'You  are  Wendy,  and 
there  will  never  be  another  to  touch 
you',  Barrie  wrote  to  her  in  1920. 

After  this  she  became,  in  public 
imagination,  predominantly  'the  Barrie 
actress'.  She  had  the  shade  of  quaint- 
ness  and  whimsicality  that  Barrie  de- 
manded. During  her  stage  life  which 
lasted  for  just  half  a  century  until 
retirement  in  1939,  she  appeared  in  ten 
other  Barrie  parts,  either  new  or  in  a 
variety  of  revivals.  They  included  such 
creations  as  the  resourcefully  managing 
Maggie  Wylie  who  knew  that  charm  was 
'a  sort  of  bloom  on  a  woman',  in  What 
Every  Woman  Knows  (Duke  of  York's, 
1908),  and  Miss  Thing,  the  cockney 
maidservant  who  becomes  her  own 
version  of  Cinderella,  in  A  Kiss  for 
Cinderella  (Wyndham's,  1916).  She  was 
also  Tweeny  in  the  1908  revival  of 
The  Admirable  Crichton  at  the  Duke 
of  York's,  Mrs.  Morland  in  the  1926  and 
1929  Haymarket  revivals  of  Mary  Rose, 
and  the  maid  Patty  in  Quality  Street  at 
the  Haymarket  in  both  1921  and  1929. 
Besides  Barrie's  tribute  to  'my  incompar- 
able Wendy',  various  critics  called  her 
'almost  magical'  and  'unapproachable'. 
She  played  for  Barrie,  on  one  night  only, 
22  February  1908,  the  extra  scene  that 
he  devised  for  Peter  Pan  as  a  gift  to 
Charles  Frohman,  the  American  manager, 
who  came  to  London  for  the  last  night 
of  the  1907-8  run.  In  this  brief  episode 
that  followed  the  ordinary  performance 
of  the  play,  the  dramatist  answered  a 
question  often  asked :  'What  happened  to 
Wendy  when  she  grew  up  ?'  Hilda  Trevel- 
yan played  a  Wendy  now  twenty  years 
older,  a  real  mother  with  a  daughter 
Jane  who  had  been  the  Baby  Mermaid. 


991 


Trevelyan,  H. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


At  curtain-fall  Barrie  slipped  the  manu- 
script into  Hilda  Trevelyan's  hands, 
saying,  *Now  you  know  my  afterthought.' 

Hilda  Trevelyan  had  various  other 
parts  during  her  sustained  career.  Thus 
when  she  was  twenty-eight  she  played 
Oliver  Twist  most  winningly  in  the 
production  by  Sir  Herbert  Beerbohm 
Tree  [q.v.]  at  His  Majesty's  (July  1905). 
She  was  Lily  Wilson  in  Elizabeth  Baker's 
study  of  suburban  domesticity.  Chains 
(1910),  during  the  Frohman  repertory 
season  at  the  Duke  of  York's.  She  man- 
aged the  Vaudeville  Theatre  for  a  very 
short  time,  with  Edmund  Gwenn,  in  the 
summer  of  1912.  She  acted  Wish  Wynne's 
original  part  of  Janet  Cannot — another 
of  the  agreeably  managing  'Maggie' 
characters  she  assumed  so  easily — in  a  re- 
vival of  The  Great  Adventure  by  Arnold 
Bennett  [q.v.]  at  the  Haymarket  in 
1924;  and  at  the  Open  Air  Theatre, 
Regent's  Park,  in  June  1936,  a  surprising 
place  and  personage  for  her,  she  was — 
very  shrewdly  and  surely — the  Old  Lady, 
Anne  Boleyn's  confidante,  in  Robert 
Atkins's  production  of  Henry  VIII. 
After  leaving  the  stage  in  1939,  she 
lived  for  twenty  years  in  happy  retire- 
ment, with  her  husband,  at  their  country- 
house  near  Henley-on-Thames,  where  she 
died  10  November  1959.  They  had  no 
children. 

It  might  be  said  of  Hilda  Trevelyan 
that  she  played  Wendy  throughout  life. 
She  had  no  major  ambitions  and  never 
went  beyond  the  reach  of  her  technique, 
venturing  very  seldom  indeed  into  Shake- 
speare or  the  classics.  A  natural  actress, 
she  was  fortunate  enough  to  live  in  a 
period  fruitful  in  the  kind  of  work 
she  could  do  best.  Later  generations, 
demanding  a  more  astringent  tone, 
would  find  many  of  the  parts  unaccept- 
able, but  Hilda  Trevelyan  managed 
them  so  sensitively  that  in  her  day 
she  had  no  real  rival.  In  private  life 
she  kept  her  stage  charm;  and  when 
during  1910  P.  P.  Howe  described  her 
as  'the  most  reticent  and  sympathetic 
of  stars',  he  captured  an  endearing 
player's  quality. 

[The  Times,  11  November  1959;  Who's 
Who  in  the  Theatre ;  Sydney  Blow,  The  Ghost 
Walks  on  Fridays,  1935 ;  Denis  Mackail,  The 
Story  of  J.M.B.,  1941 ;  J.  M.  Barrie,  When 
Wendy  Grew  Up:  An  Afterthought,  1957; 
Roger  Lancelyn  Green,  Fifty  Years  of  Peter 
Pan,  1954 ;  P.  P.  Howe,  The  Repertory  Theatre: 
A  Record  and  a  Criticism^  1910;  personal 
knowledge.]  I"'^**  ^^i^  -^^  Ji  C.  Trewin. 


TRISTRAM,        ERNEST       WILLIAM 

(1882-1952),  painter  and  art  historian,  was 
born  27  December  1882  at  Carmarthen, 
Wales,  the  fourth  child  in  a  family  of  five, 
of  Francis  William  Tristram,  engineer 
(permanent  way  inspector),  by  his  wife, 
Sarah  Harverson. 

After  he  had  spent  some  years  at  the 
Grammar  School,  Carmarthen,  where  he 
early  showed  great  promise  and  ability 
in  drawing,  painting,  and  design,  Tris- 
tram obtained  an  exhibition  at  the 
Royal  College  of  Art,  South  Kensington, 
as  well  as  an  exhibition  in  chemistry 
at  the  Royal  College  of  Science.  He 
elected  to  take  up  the  College  of  Art 
award  and  studied  there  mainly  in  the 
design  school,  from  which  he  was  awarded 
a  travelling  studentship  which  enabled 
him  to  study  early  French  and  Italian 
painting,  as  well  as  examples  of  English 
medieval  art,  especially  wall  painting 
and  manuscripts,  in  which  he  had 
early  taken  a  particular  interest.  It 
proved  in  the  end  to  be  his  principal 
life's  work,  for  the  background  of  which 
he  was  particularly  well  equipped  as 
a  practising  member  of  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church  into  which  he  was 
received  in  1914.  (His  elder  brother 
Henry  was  a  priest  at  the  Birmingham 
Oratory,  and  author  of  several  books 
on  Cardinal  Newman,  and  his  younger 
brother  a  teacher.) 

While  still  a  student  Tristram  had 
begun  making  the  meticulous  water- 
colour  copies  of  medieval  wall  and  panel 
paintings  which  were  to  grow  into  a 
very  large  and  important  collection, 
representing  almost  the  only  approach 
to  a  national  record  of  such  things  which 
this  country  possesses.  Several  hundreds 
of  his  sketches,  copies,  reconstructions, 
and  other  records  are  in  the  department 
of  illustration  and  design  at  the  Victoria 
and  Albert  Museum,  and  were  acquired 
over  a  number  of  years.  A  further  large 
collection  was  bequeathed  at  his  death 
to  Buckfast  Abbey,  Devonshire.  He 
studied  under  and  was  much  influenced 
by  W.  R.  Lethaby  [q.v.]  who  had  pub- 
lished in  1906  his  study  of  Westminster 
Abbey  and  the  King's  Craftsmen.  Tristram 
thus  acquired  a  peculiar  feeling  for  the 
artists  of  the  Westminster  or  Court 
school  of  painting,  so  well  brought 
out  in  his  copies  and  reconstructions 
of  paintings  in  the  chapter  house,  on 
the  sedilia,  tombs,  and  south  transept 
in  the  Abbey,  and  in  the  fragments  in 
St.  Stephen's. 


992 


B.N.B.  1951-1960 


Tristram 


He  returned  to  the  Royal  College  of 
Art  as  a  member  of  the  staff  in  1906, 
and  after  passing  through  various  grades 
he  became  professor  of  design  in  1925, 
a  post  he  held  until  his  retirement  in 
1948,  when  he  became  professor  emeritus. 
A  queue  of  students  could  always  be  found 
in  the  corridor  outside  his  room  waiting 
to  discuss  their  work;  and  in  his  room 
were  generally  examples  of  medieval  work 
or  his  own  copies.  Although  he  was 
a  somewhat  unbusinesslike  man  and 
not  always  easy  of  approach,  he  was 
always  generous  of  his  advice  to  genuine 
students  of  interests  similar  to  his  own. 

One  of  the  earliest  occasions  on  which 
any  considerable  assembly  of  Tristram's 
facsimiles  was  seen  was  in  the  exhibition 
of  British  Primitives  at  Burlington 
House  in  1923.  The  catalogue,  pubhshed 
in  a  limited  edition  of  150  copies  in  1924, 
reproduced  some  twenty  of  these  copies, 
with  a  general  introduction  by  W.  G. 
Constable,  with  whom  Tristram  was 
also  associated. 

Tristram's  own  first  important  work 
was  the  English  Medieval  Painting, 
published  in  1927,  jointly  with  Tancred 
Borenius,  in  which  a  high  proportion 
of  the  plates  were  reproductions  of  Tris- 
tram's own  drawings.  Here  Tristram,  in 
addition  to  his  now  well-developed  and 
sensitive  artistic  technique  as  a  recorder  of 
English  medieval  paintings,  showed  his 
ability  as  an  art  historian,  and  demon- 
strated his  wide  knowledge  and  feeling  for 
the  whole  background  of  the  subject.  His 
deductions  and  interpretations  were  not 
always  sound  or  accurate  (the  'Christ 
as  Piers  Plowman'  is  an  example), 
and  his  dating  was  often  based  more  on 
stylistic  grounds,  intuition,  and  experience 
than  on  reasoned  argument  and  compari- 
son. But  this  did  not  seriously  detract 
from  his  great  knowledge  and  achieve- 
ment. 

There  had  been  a  paper  in  1924  on 
'English  Methods  of  Wall  Painting',  and 
a  very  important  paper  appeared  in 
Archaeologia  (1926/7),  jointly  with  M.  R. 
James  [q.v.],  on  the  wall  paintings 
in  Croughton  church,  Northampton- 
shire, one  of  the  eariier  parish  church 
series  with  the  uncovering,  preservation, 
and  recording  of  which  Tristram  had 
been  concerned  with  his  three  assistants, 
the  Mobberleys,  craftsmen  in  the  village, 
whom  he  had  trained. 

It  may  be  said  that  Tristram  handled 
and  recorded  almost  every  well-known 
wall   painting,    and   many   minor   ones, 


throughout  the  whole  country,  as  well 
as  a  number  of  monuments.  These 
examples  included  Westminster  Abbey, 
Canterbury,  Norwich,  Exeter,  St.  Al- 
ban's,  and  Winchester  cathedrals,  St. 
George's  (Windsor),  Eton  College,  Christ 
Church,  Oxford,  and  innumerable  lesser 
places.  He  was  also  concerned  with 
the  restoration  of  the  pre-Raphaelite 
paintings  in  the  Oxford  Union,  and 
the  cleaning  of  the  Thornhill  paintings 
in  the  dome  of  St.  Paul's  Cathedral. 

Publications  continued,  in  the  journals 
of  almost  every  county  archaeological 
society  where  he  had  done  work,  notably 
in  Norfolk,  Suffolk,  Essex,  and  Bucking- 
hamshire. But  his  greatest  works  were 
to  come.  These  were  the  monumental 
volumes  published  with  the  aid  of  the 
Pilgrim  Trust  in  1944  and  1950  on 
English  Medieval  Wall  Painting,  the 
twelfth  and  thirteenth  century  respec- 
tively, with  elaborate  discussions  of  icono- 
graphy, technique,  and  subject-matter, 
with  indexes  and  catalogues,  and  almost 
entirely  illustrated  by  his  own  copies. 
A  third  volume,  on  the  fourteenth 
century,  was  posthumously  published 
in  1955,  edited  by  his  second  wife, 
Eileen  Tristram,  with  a  catalogue  by 
Monica   Bardswell. 

In  addition  to  his  sensitive  copying 
of  ancient  examples,  Tristram  produced 
some  good  original  work,  such  as  the 
paintings  to  be  seen  in  York  Cathedral, 
St.  Elizabeth's  church,  Eastbourne,  St. 
Finbarre's  Cathedral,  Cork,  and  the 
reredos  in  Kedington  church,  Suffolk, 
where  his  second  wife  was  his  model 
for  the  Virgin  Mary. 

In  assessing  the  value  of  Tristram's 
work  (apart  from  his  teaching)  it  may 
be  said  to  lie  first  in  what  he  did  by 
publication  and  lecturing  to  record  and 
bring  to  public  notice  the  importance, 
value,  and  interest  of  English  medieval 
painting  and  the  crying  need  for  its 
preservation;  and  secondly  in  the  un- 
surpassed records  he  made  by  means 
of  a  series  of  water-colour  copies  in  which 
not  only  the  substance  and  texture,  but 
also  the  spirit  and  atmosphere,  of  the 
originals  were  reproduced  in  a  masterly 
way.  It  must  unhappily  be  said  that 
his  technical  methods  of  preservation 
or  treatment  were  in  a  great  many  cases 
not  merely  unsound,  but  disastrous.  The 
wax  which  he  often  used  as  a  fixative, 
dissolved  in  turpentine  and  driven  in 
with  heat,  produces  an  impervious  shiny 
surface     which     blooms     and     collapses 


998 


Kk 


Tristram 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


when  lime-impregnated  damp  in  walls 
cannot  get  out.  This  can  be  put  right, 
if  tackled  in  time,  by  technicians,  and 
should  not  be  allowed  to  detract  from 
the  greatness  of  Tristram's  achievement. 

Tristram  was  twice  married:  first, 
in  1920,  to  Mary  Esther  Hedgecock, 
daughter  of  the  Rev.  Henry  Colborn, 
vicar  of  St.  Barnabas  church,  Gillingham, 
Kent.  This  marriage  was  annulled  and 
there  were  no  children.  In  1934  he 
married  Eileen  Maude,  a  student  at  the 
Royal  College  of  Art,  daughter  of  the 
late  Henry  Churnside  Beaumont  Dann, 
a  lieutenant-colonel  in  the  Indian  Army. 
They  had  two  daughters. 

Tristram's  work  was  widely  recognized. 
He  received  an  honorary  D.Litt.  from 
Oxford  (1931)  and  Birmingham  (1946); 
he  was  an  honorary  A.R.I.B.A.  (1935) 
and,  for  a  time,  a  fellow  of  the  Society 
of  Antiquaries.  He  died  at  Newton 
Abbot  11  January  1952. 

[Records  of  the  Royal  College  of  Art; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

E.  Clive  Rouse. 

TRUEMAN,  Sir  ARTHUR  ELIJAH 
(1894-1956),  geologist  and  administrator, 
was  born  in  Nottingham  26  April  1894, 
the  son  of  Elijah  Trueman,  journeyman 
lacemaker,  and  his  wife,  Thirza  Newton 
Cottee.  He  was  educated  there  at  the 
High  Pavement  School  and  the  Univer- 
sity College,  where  he  graduated  in 
1914  with  first  class  honours  in  geology 
(London)  under  H.  H.  Swinnerton, 
with  whom  he  researched  until  1917, 
having  been  rejected  on  medical  grounds 
for  service  in  the  war.  He  was  awarded 
the  D.Sc.  degree  (London)  in  1918. 

Trueman  was  appointed  assistant  lec- 
turer at  University  College,  Cardiff,  in 
1917  under  (Sir)  FrankUn  Sibly  [q.v.]. 
Sibly  became  principal  of  University 
College,  Swansea,  and  Trueman  joined 
him  as  lecturer  and  head  of  the  depart- 
ment of  geology  when  the  college 
was  opened  in  1920.  He  played  an 
important  part  in  the  early  develop- 
ment of  the  college,  initiated  two  depart- 
ments, geology  and  geography,  and  in 
1930  was  appointed  professor  of  geology 
and  head  of  the  department  of  geography. 

In  1933  Trueman  was  appointed 
professor  of  geology  at  Bristol  and  four 
years  later  to  the  chair  of  geology  at 
Glasgow,  where  he  remained  until  1946. 
He  continued  active  in  teaching  and 
research  and  as  elsewhere  took  part  in 
the    general    work    of    the    university, 


serving  as  deputy  principal  during  his  last 
two  years  at  Glasgow.  He  had  many 
other  commitments,  among  them  mem- 
bership of  the  commission  on  higher 
education  in  West  Africa  under  Walter 
Elliot  [q.v.]. 

Trueman  was  appointed  deputy  chair- 
man of  the  University  Grants  Committee 
in  1946,  and  three  years  later  chairman, 
remaining  in  that  office  until  he  resigned 
because  of  ill  health  in  1953.  He  served 
in  the  critical  years  of  the  transition 
of  the  universities  from  war  to  peace 
conditions  and  the  great  expansion 
after  the  war.  There  was  concern  that 
the  development  of  the  universities 
should  be  adequate  for  the  national 
needs,  and  there  was  increasing  depen- 
dence of  the  universities  upon  public 
funds.  He  brought  to  these  tasks  aca- 
demic distinction  and  experience  in 
many  universities,  a  logical  mind  and 
the  highest  integrity,  which  gained  for 
him  the  respect  and  affection  of  his 
colleagues  in  the  committee  and  in  the 
universities. 

Trueman  was  an  outstanding  teacher; 
with  his  sense  of  humour,  clarity  of 
expression,  and  mastery  of  his  subject, 
he  secured  the  devotion  of  his  students. 
Furthermore,  he  was  interested  in  the 
popularization  of  geology,  writing  books 
appropriate  for  pupils  in  schools  and 
for  the  layman.  It  was  thus  natural 
that  he  was  a  prominent  member  of 
scientific  societies  both  local  and  national ; 
and  his  influence  was  widely  felt  in  the 
general  world  of  science. 

Whilst  at  school  he  was  interested 
in  natural  history  and  his  earliest  re- 
searches were  concerned  with  the  Liassic 
rocks  and  fossils  of  the  Nottingham 
district,  and  in  particular  with  ammo- 
nites; in  this  he  owed  a  great  deal  to 
the  guidance  and  stimulus  of  Swinnerton. 
His  appointment  at  Cardiff  provided 
an  opportunity  for  the  study  of  the 
Liassic  rocks  of  South  Wales;  this  was 
continued  at  Swansea  and  elsewhere; 
and  it  was  natural  that  he  should  extend 
his  researches  across  the  Bristol  Channel 
into  the  Mendips,  throwing  new  light  on 
the  varied  and  complicated  geological 
history  of  the  South  Wales-Mendip  region 
in  Liassic  times. 

He  also  continued  his  studies  in 
palaeontology.  He  made,  for  example,  a 
detailed  study,  using  statistical  methods, 
of  the  lamellibranch  Gryphaea  in  the 
Liassic  strata  of  the  Vale  of  Glamorgan, 
showing    that    this    represented    a    true 


994 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Tshekedi  Khama 


genetic  series.  He  worked  on  the  syste- 
matics  and  evolution  of  the  ammonites. 
He  was  interested  in  and  made  contri- 
butions to  the  principles  and  concepts  of 
palaeontology.  He  also  found  time  for 
valuable  studies  on  the  physical  and 
economic  geography  of  South  Wales. 

Trueman's  interest  in  the  Jurassic  rocks 
and  fossils  was  maintained  throughout 
his  life  but  whilst  in  South  Wales  he  began 
his  studies,  which  will  be  especially  re- 
membered, on  the  stratigraphical  palae- 
ontology of  the  Coal  Measures.  As  early  as 
1923  he  discussed  the  difficulties  of  classi- 
fying and  correlating  the  Coal  Measures, 
emphasizing  the  theoretical  and  practical 
importance  of  being  able  to  identify  hori- 
zons in  those  rocks.  He  stated  that  the 
evidence  derived  from  the  fossils  associa- 
ted with  the  coal  seams  was  not  only  re- 
liable but  permitted  precise  correlation; 
and  he  stressed  the  need  for  dividing  the 
Coal  Measures  into  zones  each  with  a 
characteristic  assemblage  of  fossils. 

It  had  been  thought  that  the  species  of 
non-marine  lamellibranchs  found  in  the 
Coal  Measures  were  of  little  value  in  classi- 
fication and  correlation  owing  to  their  long 
vertical  range  but  in  1927  a  classic  paper 
in  collaboration  with  J.  H.  Davies  on  the 
revision  of  these  fossils  in  the  South  Wales 
coalfield,  based  on  a  detailed  examination, 
using  statistical  methods,  of  several  thou- 
sand shells  of  Carbonicola,  Anthracomya, 
and  Naiadites  established  a  zonal  classifi- 
cation applicable  over  that  coalfield,  and 
later  was  shown  to  be  apphcable  over  other 
coalfields  in  Britain.  There  followed  many 
publications,  often  in  collaboration  with 
colleagues,  on  various  coalfields ;  by  1933 
Trueman  had  put  forward  a  correlation  of 
the  Coal  Measures  of  England  and  Wales. 
These  and  other  investigations  were 
reviewed  in  two  presidential  addresses 
to  the  Geological  Society  of  London 
dealing  with  stratigraphical  problems  in 
Britain,  Europe,  and  North  America. 
During  the  last  years  of  his  life,  he  edited 
and  contributed  to  an  authoritative  book 
on  the  coalfields  of  Great  Britain  published 
in  1954. 

Trueman  wrote  many  papers  with 
other  workers ;  his  friendliness  and  en- 
thusiasm made  him  especially  successful 
as  a  collaborator  in  research.  He  was 
also  in  close  touch  with  the  Geological 
Survey  of  Great  Britain,  particularly 
in  work  on  the  coalfields.  He  was  a  mem- 
ber of  the  Geological  Survey  Board 
for  sixteen  years  and  for  eleven  years 
its  chairman  (1943-54),  during  the  war 


and  in  the  post-war  years  of  reorganiza- 
tion and  expansion. 

Many  honours  were  conferred  upon 
Trueman:  the  gold  medal  of  the  South 
Wales  Institute  of  Engineers ;  the  Bigsby 
and  WoUaston  medals  of  the  Geological 
Society  of  London  ;  fellowship  of  the  Royal 
Societies  of  Edinburgh  and  London ;  the 
honorary  LL.D.  of  Rhodes,  Glasgow, 
Wales,  and  Leeds ;  and  he  was  appointed 
K.B.E.  in  1951. 

Trueman  married  in  1920  Florence 
Kate  Offler,  who  contributed  greatly  to 
his  many  achievements;  their  son,  Dr. 
E.  R.  Trueman,  became  a  zoologist  on 
the  staff  of  Hull  University.  Trueman 
died  in  London  5  January  1956. 

[Sir  William  Pugh  in  Biographical  Memoirs 
of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  iv,  1958 ; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

W.  J.  Pugh. 

TRUSCOT,  BRUCE  (pseudonym).  [See 
Peers,  Edgar  Allison.] 


TSHEKEDI  KHAMA  (1905-1959),  Afri- 
can leader,  was  born  17  September 
1905  at  Serowe  in  the  Bechuanaland 
Protectorate,  the  son  of  Khama,  chief 
of  the  Bamangwato,  and  of  Semane, 
his  fourth  wife.  Tshekedi  first  went 
to  school  at  Serowe  in  1912  and  then  in 
1916  to  Lovedale,  the  Church  of  Scot- 
land institution  in  Cape  Province.  In 
1923  he  entered  the  South  African 
Native  College  at  Fort  Hare. 

Khama  died  in  1923  and  was  suc- 
ceeded by  Tshekedi's  half-brother  Sek- 
goma,  a  son  of  one  of  Khama's  earlier 
marriages.  Sekgoma  died  in  1925  where- 
upon Tshekedi  was  called  to  rule  the 
Bamangwato  as  regent  for  Sekgoma's  son 
Seretse,  who  was  still  a  child. 

Tshekedi's  father  Khama  was  one  of 
the  most  remarkable  Africans  of  his 
time.  An  early  convert  to  Christianity 
he  was  a  zealous  moral  reformer  and  a 
man  of  rigid  principle.  He  was  also  a 
masterful  ruler,  and  his  authoritarian 
nature  did  not  welcome  opposition.  While 
he  had  many  admirers  he  had  also  made 
a  number  of  enemies,  especially  among 
his  own  relatives.  Tshekedi  thus  became 
heir  to  a  series  of  family  feuds,  and  the 
early  years  of  his  rule  were  punctuated 
by  disputes  and  disturbances.  These 
included  an  attempt  on  his  life,  a  con- 
spiracy to  oust  him  from  the  regency, 
allegations  of  tyranny  and  oppression, 
and    a    bitter    <iu^rrel    with    influential 


995 


Tshekedi  Khama 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


kinsmen.  The  young  regent  fought  back 
adroitly  and  with  vigour,  emerging 
successfully  from  trials  which  would 
have  undone  a  weaker  man. 

In  1930  Tshekedi  visited  England  to 
discuss  with  the  secretary  of  state  the 
mining  concession  which  Khama  had 
granted  to  the  British  South  Africa 
Company  in  1893.  Tshekedi  not  only 
Urged  that  the  concession  itself  should 
be  cancelled  but  also  declared  himself 
and  the  tribe  opposed  to  any  mining 
at  all  in  their  country.  However,  after 
complicated  negotiations  a  new  con- 
cession was  evolved  in  1932,  which  in  the 
event  the  company  abandoned  in  1934. 

In  1933  an  incident  occurred  which 
aroused  wide  public  interest.  The  regent 
was  accused  of  causing  a  European  to 
be  flogged.  The  affair  was  much  inflated 
and  led  to  the  visit  to  Serowe  of  the 
acting  high  commissioner,  Admiral  Evans 
(later  Lord  Mountevans,  q.v.),  with  a 
strong  naval  escort.  Tshekedi  was 
deposed  but  was  reinstated  shortly 
afterwards. 

In  1934  important  changes  were  made 
in  the  protectorate  system  of  native 
administration.  The  chiefs  had  hitherto 
adjudicated  in  their  own  courts  according 
to  native  law  and  custom.  It  was  now 
decided  to  regulate  their  administrative 
and  judicial  functions  by  law.  Tshekedi 
and  chief  Bathoen  of  the  Bangwaketse 
took  exception  to  the  draft  legislation 
on  the  grounds  that  it  infringed  the 
chiefs'  prerogative  and  was  against 
the  interests  of  the  people.  The  pro- 
clamations were  promulgated  neverthe- 
less and  in  1936  Tshekedi  and  Bathoen 
brought  an  action  against  the  high 
commissioner  to  test  their  validity. 
The  suit  was  not  successful. 

Tshekedi  played  a  loyal  and  effective 
part  in  the  war  of  1939-45,  heartily 
sponsoring  recruitment  to  the  forces. 
In  company  with  the  resident  commis- 
sioner he  toured  the  Middle  East, 
where  he  visited  units  in  which  Bechu- 
ana  were  serving. 

Soon  after  the  war  Tshekedi  started 
on  a  long-cherished  project,  that  of 
building  a  secondary  school  at  Moeng. 
Before  this  ambitious  task  was  com- 
pleted he  heard  in  1948  that  Seretse, 
his  nephew,  whom  he  had  sent  to  study 
at  Oxford,  was  about  to  marry  an 
Englishwoman. 

Tshekedi's  reaction  to  this  news  and 
the  subsequent  marriage  was  utter  dis- 
may.  He  found  support  for  his  oppo- 


sition among  the  conservative  elements 
in  the  tribe.  The  occasion  resuscitated 
dormant  rancours,  and  Tshekedi  removed 
himself  and  his  adherents  to  the  country 
of  the  Bakwena.  At  the  same  time  he 
made  it  clear  that  his  attitude  was 
based  on  principle  and  was  not  inspired 
by  any  wish  on  his  part  to  withhold 
the  chiefship  from  the  rightful  heir. 
Eventually  in  1950  the  British  Govern- 
ment debarred  both  Seretse  and  Tshekedi 
from  residence  in  the  Bamangwato 
country  for  reasons  of  security. 

It  soon  became  evident  that  Seretse 
had  the  support  of  the  majority  of  the 
tribesmen,  and  a  reconciliation  took 
place  between  uncle  and  nephew.  When 
in  1956  both  were  permitted  to  return 
to  the  country  as  private  persons, 
Tshekedi  and  Seretse  lived  henceforward 
in  perfect  amity.  It  was  at  this  time 
that  Tshekedi  initiated  negotiations  with 
the  Rhodesian  Selection  Trust  which 
ended  three  years  later  in  an  agreement 
for  mineral  development  in  the  Bama- 
ngwato country. 

In  1959  Tshekedi  was  taken  seriously 
ill  and  was  flown  to  England  for  treat- 
ment. He  died  in  London  10  June  1959 
and  his  body  was  taken  back  to  Bechu- 
analand  to  be  buried  near  Khama  at 
Serowe.  Seretse  Khama  became  first 
president  of  the  republic  of  Botswana  in 
1966  and  was  appointed  K.B.E.  in  that 
year. 

Tshekedi,  short  and  thick-set  in  stature, 
gave  an  impression  of  extraordinary 
mental  and  physical  energy.  He  was 
a  forceful  speaker  both  in  English  and 
Sechuana,  profoundly  versed  in  the  lore 
of  his  tribe,  extremely  well  read,  and 
intensely  aware  of  broad  political  issues, 
European  and  African.  Personally  he 
was  affable  and  courteous,  a  thoughtful 
host,  and  excellent  company  whether 
at  home  or  by  the  camp  fire.  He  was 
keenly  interested  in  farming,  stock  breed- 
ing, and  allied  activities  such  as  water 
conservation  and  grain  storage.  Though 
he  was  an  almost  fanatical  advocate  of 
African  advancement,  especially  in 
the  economic  and  educational  fields, 
he  was  quite  without  racial  bias  and 
never  lapsed  into  nationalist  cliches. 
He  was  known  and  admired  far  outside 
the  confines  of  Bechuanaland  and  in 
England  he  had  a  wide  and  distinguished 
circle  of  friends. 

Tshekedi  was  not  an  easy  man  with 
whom  to  co-operate.  Although  free 
from  personal  vanity,  he  was  extremely 


996 


D.N.B.  1051-1060 


Tuckwell 


sensitive  to  criticism  of  his  objects  and 
methods  and  prone  to  suspect  ill  will 
in  the  most  disinterested  opposition. 
This  led  to  conflicts  with  people  who 
were  also  in  their  way  unquestionably- 
devoted  to  African  welfare.  But  how- 
ever profound  such  disagreements  might 
be,  no  responsible  person  ever  doubted 
Tshekedi's  sincerity. 

Tshekedi  married  in  1936  his  cousin 
Bagakgametse,  the  daughter  of  Moloi. 
This  marriage  was  of  short  duration 
and  ended  in  divorce.  In  1938  he  married 
Ella  Moshoela,  by  whom  he  had  five  child- 
ren. A  bust  by  Siegfried  Charoux  became 
the  possession  of  the  Hon.  David  Astor. 

[Mary  Benson,  Tshekedi  Khama,  1960; 
Lord  Halley,  Native  Administration  in  the 
British  African  Territories,  Part  F,  H.M.S.O., 
1953;  Anthony  Sillery,  The  Bechuanaland 
Protectorate,  1952 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Anthony  Sillery. 

TUCKWELL,       GERTRUDE      MARY 

(1861-1951),  philanthropic  worker,  was 
born  in  Oxford  25  April  1861,  the  second 
daughter  of  the  Rev.  William  Tuckwell  at 
that  time  master  of  New  College  School, 
and  his  wife,  Rosa,  daughter  of  Captain 
Henry  Strong,  of  the  East  India  Com- 
pany. Educated  at  home  largely  by 
her  father  who  was  known  as  'the  Radical 
parson',  she  grew  up  from  her  earUest 
days  in  an  atmosphere  of  left-wing 
thought,  and  was  a  supporter  through- 
out her  life  of  the  Labour  Party.  Her 
father's  views  were  reinforced  by  those 
of  her  maternal  aunt,  Mrs.  Mark  Pattison, 
subsequently  Lady  Dilke  [q.v.],  a  re- 
markable woman  equally  gifted  as  an 
art  critic  and  a  pioneer  of  trade  unions 
among  women.  In  1885  Gertrude  Tuckwell 
became  a  teacher  under  the  London 
School  Board  until  in  1893  she  succeeded 
May  Abraham  (later  Mrs.  H.  J.  Tennant, 
q.v.)  as  secretary  to  her  aunt.  In  the 
household  of  Sir  Charles  Dilke  [q.v.] 
she  came  in  touch  with  the  progressive 
thinkers  of  the  day  in  and  out  of  Parlia- 
ment. As  the  honorary  secretary,  and 
after  the  death  of  her  aunt  as  presi- 
dent, of  the  Women's  Trade  Union 
League,  she  was  prominent  among  a 
little  group  of  women,  including  Mrs. 
Tennant,  Mary  Macarthur  [q.v.],  Lucy 
Deane  Streatfeild,  and  (Dame)  Adelaide 
Anderson,  who  made  a  frontal  attack 
on  low  wage  rates,  bad  sanitation,  and  bad 
industrial  conditions.  She  took  a  leading 
part  in  the  formation  of  the  Industrial 
Law  Committee,  in  the  campaign  against 


white  lead  poisoning,  and  in  promoting 
the  exhibition  of  sweated  industries 
in  1906  which  gave  a  powerful  impetus 
to  the  passing  of  the  Trade  Boards 
Act  in  1909. 

In  later  years,  as  a  recognized  autho- 
rity  on  industrial  matters,  she  served  on 
many  public  and  official  bodies  including 
various  committees  of  the  Ministry  of 
Reconstruction,  the  advisory  commit* 
tee  to  the  Ministry  of  Health  (1905-28), 
the  Central  Committee  on  Women's 
Training  and  Employment,  and  the 
royal  conunission  on  national  health 
insurance  (1924-6).  She  was  president 
of  the  Women  PubUc  Health  Officers' 
Association  and  chairman  of  the  National 
Association  of  Probation  Officers.  As 
one  of  the  first  women  justices  of  the 
peace  she  served  on  an  advisory  com- 
mittee to  assist  the  lord  chancellor  in 
appointing  women  justices;  she  took 
an  active  part  in  the  development  of 
probation  to  which  she  attached  great 
importance,  and  was  one  of  the  founders 
of  the  Magistrates'  Association.  With 
Mrs.  Tennant  and  others  she  established 
the  maternal  mortahty  committee  in 
1927.  In  1930  she  was  appointed  C.H. 

Margaret  Bondfield  [q.v.],  who  had 
read  Gertrude  Tuckwell's  book  The  State 
and  Its  Children  (1894)  some  years 
before  she  met  her,  'was  astonished  that 
so  lovely  a  lady  should  know  so  much 
more  than  I  did  about  the  children 
of  the  poor'.  Tall  and  beautiful,  Gertrude 
Tuckwell  was  not  only  a  highly  cultured 
and  distinguished  woman  but  she  had 
a  rare  and  tender  nature  unswerving 
in  its  affection  and  loyalty.  Passionately 
convinced  that  Sir  Charles  Dilke  had 
been  the  victim  of  a  miscarriage  of 
justice  she  never  ceased  to  work  for 
the  restoration  of  his  good  name.  She 
was  his  literary  executor  and  with 
Stephen  Gwynn  [q.v.]  wrote  a  bio- 
graphy based  on  his  memoirs  and  corre- 
spondence (2  vols.,  1917).  Like  her  aunt 
she  combined  love  of  the  arts  with 
generous  fervour  for  the  welfare  of  the 
poor.  Her  house  was  a  meeting-place 
for  friends  of  many  varying  views  who 
found  conunon  ground  in  her  single- 
minded  enthusiasms.  Failing  health  and 
eyesight  never  dimmed  her  spirit  or 
her  charm.  She  died  at  the  age  of  ninety 
as  the  result  of  an  accident,  in  hospital 
at  Guildford,  Surrey,  5  August  1951. 

[The  Times,  6  August  1951 ;  Labour  Leader, 
September  1951;  Magistrate,  October  1951; 
personal  knowledge.]  Violet  Markham. 


09T 


Turing 


D.N.B.  1051-1060 


TURING,  ALAN  IVIATHISON  (1912- 
1954),  mathematician,  was  born  in  Lon- 
don 23  June  1912,  the  younger  son  of 
Julius  Mathison  Turing,  of.  the  Indian 
Civil  Service,  and  his  wife,  Ethel  Sara, 
daughter  of  Edward  Waller  Stoney, 
chief  engineer  of  the  Madras  and  Southern 
Mahratta  Railway.  G.  J.  and  G.  G. 
Stoney  [qq.v.]  were  collateral  relations. 
He  was  educated  at  Sherborne  School 
where  he  was  able  to  fit  in  despite  his 
independent  unconventionality  and  was 
recognized  as  a  boy  of  marked  ability 
and  character.  He  went  as  a  mathematical 
scholar  to  King's  College,  Cambridge, 
where  he  obtained  a  second  class  in  part  i 
and  a  first  in  part  ii  of  the  mathematical 
tripos  (1932^).  He  was  elected  into  a 
fellowship  in  1935  with  a  thesis  'On  the 
Gaussian  Error  Function'  which  in  1936 
obtained  for  him  a  Smith's  prize. 

In  the  following  year  there  appeared  his 
best-known  contribution  to  mathematics, 
a  paper  for  the  London  Mathematical 
Society  'On  Computable  Numbers,  with  an 
Application  to  the  Entscheidungsproblem' : 
a  proof  that  there  are  classes  of  mathe- 
matical problems  which  cannot  be  solved 
by  any  fixed  and  definite  process,  that  is, 
by  an  automatic  machine.  His  theoretical 
description  of  a  'universal'  computing 
machine  aroused  much  interest. 

After  two  years  (1936-8)  at  Princeton, 
Turing  returned  to  King's  where  his 
fellowship  was  renewed.  But  his  research 
was  interrupted  by  the  war  during  which 
he  worked  for  the  communications  depart- 
ment of  the  Foreign  Office;  in  1946  he 
was  appointed  O.B.E.  for  his  services. 

The  war  over,  he  declined  a  lectureship 
at  Cambridge,  preferring  to  concentrate 
on  computing  machinery,  and  in  the 
autumn  of  1945  he  became  a  senior 
principal  scientific  officer  in  the  mathe- 
matics division  of  the  National  Physical 
Laboratory  at  Teddington.  With  a  team 
of  engineers  and  electronic  experts  he 
worked  on  his  'logical  design'  for  the 
Automatic  Computing  Engine  (ACE) 
of  which  a  working  pilot  model  was 
demonstrated  in  1950  (it  went  eventually 
to  the  Science  Museum).  In  the  mean- 
time Turing  had  resigned  and  in  1948 
he  accepted  a  readership  at  Manchester 
where  he  was  assistant  director  of  the 
Manchester  Automatic  Digital  Machine 
(MADAM).  He  tackled  the  problems 
arising  out  of  the  use  of  this  machine 
with  a  combination  of  powerful  mathe- 
matical analysis  and  intuitive  short  cuts 
which    showed   him    at   heart   more    of 


an  applied  than  a  pure  mathematician. 
In  'Computing  Machinery  and  Intelli- 
gence' in  Mind  (October  1950)  he 
made  a  brilliant  examination  of  the 
arguments  put  forward  against  the 
view  that  machines  might  be  said  to 
think.  He  suggested  that  machines  can 
learn  and  may  eventually  'compete 
with  men  in  all  purely  intellectual  fields'. 
In  1951  he  was  elected  F.R.S.,  one 
of  his  proposers  being  Bertrand  (Earl) 
Russell. 

The  central  problem  of  all  Turing's 
investigations  was  the  extent  and  limi- 
tations of  mechanistic  explanations  of 
nature  and  in  his  last  years  he  was 
working  on  a  mathematical  theory  of 
the  chemical  basis  of  organic  growth. 
But  he  had  not  fully  developed  this 
when  he  died  at  his  home  at  Wilmslow 
7  June  1954  as  the  result  of  taking 
poison.  Although  a  verdict  of  suicide 
was  returned  it  was  possibly  an  acci- 
dent, for  there  was  always  a  Heath- 
Robinson  element  in  the  experiments 
to  which  he  turned  for  relaxation: 
everything  had  to  be  done  with  materials 
available  in  the  house.  This  self-sufficiency 
had  been  apparent  from  an  early  age; 
it  was  manifested  in  the  freshness  and 
independence  of  his  mathematical  work ; 
and  in  his  choice  of  long-distance  run- 
ning, not  only  for  exercise  but  as  a  sub- 
stitute for  public  transport.  An  original 
to  the  point  of  eccentricity,  he  had 
a  complete  disregard  for  appearances 
and  his  extreme  shyness  made  him 
awkward.  But  he  had  an  enthusiasm 
and  a  humour  which  made  him  a  generous 
and  lovable  personality  and  won  him 
many  friends,  not  least  among  children. 
He  was  unmarried. 

[M.  H.  A.  Newman  in  Biographical 
Memoirs  of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  i, 
1955;  Sara  Turing,  Alan  M.  Turing,  1959; 
The  Times,  16  June  1954.] 

Helen  M.  Palmer. 

TURNBULL,     HUBERT    MAITLAND 

(1875-1955),  pathologist,  was  born  in 
Glasgow  3  March  1875,  the  fifth  of  the 
six  children  of  Andrew  Hugh  Turnbull, 
actuary,  who  later  became  manager 
of  the  Scottish  Widows  Fund  in  Edin- 
burgh, and  his  wife,  Margaret  Lothian, 
daughter  of  Adam  Black  [q.v.].  He  was 
educated  at  Charterhouse  and  Magdalen 
College,  Oxford,  where  he  played  asso- 
ciation football  for  the  university  (1897), 
obtained  a  second  in  physiology  (1898), 
and  was  awarded  the  Welsh  memorial 


998 


D.N.B.  1051-1060 


Turner 


prize  in  anatomy  (1899).  In  1900,  with 
the  Price  university  entrance  scholar- 
ship, he  began  his  cHnical  studies  at  the 
London  Hospital,  taking  the  conjoint 
quahftcation  (M.R.C.S.,  L.R.C.P.)  and 
the  degrees  of  B.M.,  B.Ch.,  and  M.A. 
(Oxford)  in  1902.  His  long  career,  up  to 
retirement  in  1946,  was  spent  at  the 
London  Hospital  with  a  brief  interlude 
(1904-6)  of  study  at  Copenhagen  and 
Dresden  as  Radcliffe  travelling  fellow. 
His  experiences  as  voluntary  assistant 
to  Professor  Georg  Schmorl  at  Dresden 
determined  his  choice  of  pathology  as 
his  career.  Schmorl  was  a  vivid  teacher 
and  leading  exponent  of  bone-pathology. 
His  pupil  carried  his  methods  back  to 
London  where  he  developed  that  as  a 
speciality. 

In  1906  TurnbuU  accepted  the  appoint- 
ment of  director  of  the  Institute  of  Patho- 
logy at  the  London  Hospital,  and  held 
this  until  1946,  receiving  the  title  of 
reader  in  morbid  anatomy  in  London 
University  (1915),  professor  (1919),  and 
professor  emeritus  (1947).  In  1906  he 
proceeded  to  the  degree  of  D.M.,  Oxford, 
and  in  1945  received  an  honorary  D.Sc. 
He  was  elected  a  fellow  of  the  Royal 
College  of  Physicians  in  1929  and  of  the 
Royal  Society  in  1939.  He  was  a  founder- 
member  of  the  Pathological  Society  of 
Great  Britain  and  Ireland  and  was  elected 
honorary  member  in  1948. 

Turnbull's  principal  aim  in  pathology 
was  to  raise  the  study  of  morbid  ana- 
tomy to  a  scientific  level.  To  this  end 
he  introduced  meticulous  methods  of 
observation  and  recording  of  biopsies 
and  necropsies,  building  up  a  body  of 
data  unrivalled  in  this  country  as  a 
source  for  research.  His  teaching  was 
mainly  based  upon  his  own  experience 
and  dictated  by  passion  for  truth;  it 
was  often  in  advance  of  the  current 
textbooks.  Thus  his  reputation  grew, 
and  a  steady  stream  of  postgraduates, 
from  home  and  abroad,  came  to  study 
in  the  Institute.  Inspired  by  their 
experience,  they  implanted  Turnbull's 
methods  widely  in  other  centres. 

Long  hours  spent  in  supervising  his 
pupils  meant  that  many  of  Turnbull's 
original  observations  were  published 
under  their  names.  His  own  reluctance 
to  publish  was  attributable  to  extreme 
caution  over  controlled  observation,  and 
criticism  of  his  own  arguments.  But 
he  could  speak  and  write  with  authority 
upon  any  tissue  of  the  body,  especially 
the  skeleton.  He  is  perhaps  best  known 


as  the  first  to  identify  post-vaccinal 
encephalomyelitis  (1922-3). 

In  person  Turnbull  was  tall  and  thin, 
with  scholarly  ascetic  features.  Life- 
long suffering  from  migraine  made  him 
somewhat  of  a  recluse,  but  his  visitors' 
book  proclaimed  his  international  repu- 
tation. Within  his  department  he  was  an 
exacting  master,  but  severity  masked  great 
depths  of  altruism  and  understanding. 

In  1916  he  married  Catherine  Nairne 
Arnold  (died  1933),  daughter  of  Frederick 
Arnold  Baker,  solicitor;  they  had  one 
daughter  and  three  sons.  The  family  home 
at  Woking  gave  scope  for  bird -watching, 
the  cultivation  of  rhododendrons,  and 
golf.  Other  hobbies  were  fishing,  geology, 
and  water-colour  sketching.  Turnbull  died 
in  the  London  Hospital  29  September 
1955. 

A  portrait  by  Wilhelm  Kaufmann 
is  in  the  Bernhard  Baron  Institute  of 
Pathology;  another,  by  Edmund  Nelson, 
hangs  in  the  Medical  College,  the  London 
Hospital. 

[Autobiographical  notes  prepared  for  the 
Royal  Society ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Dorothy  S.  Russell. 

TURNER,  GEORGE  GREY  (1877- 
1951),  surgeon,  was  born  in  Tynemouth 
8  September  1877,  the  second  son  of 
James  Grey  Turner,  a  bank  clerk,  and 
his  wife,  Evelyn  Grey.  He  was  educated 
at  a  private  school  and  at  the  Newcastle 
medical  school  of  Durham  University 
where  he  graduated  M.B.,  B.S.  with  first 
class  honours  (1898),  M.S.  (1901),  and 
was  Heath  scholar  in  1910.  He  obtained 
his  M.R.C.S.  in  1899  and  his  F.R.C.S. 
in  1903.  After  holding  resident  surgical 
posts  at  Newcastle,  Turner  went  to 
London  and  continued  his  postgraduate 
studies  at  King's  College  Hospital,  then 
situated  in  Portugal  Street,  just  behind 
the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons.  He  next 
visited  the  many  different  hospitals  in 
Vienna.  Returning  to  Newcastle  he 
soon  became  an  able  clinical  teacher 
and  was  appointed  to  the  staff  of  the 
Royal  Victoria  Infirmary.  He  greatly 
admired  Rutherford  Morison  who  was 
professor  of  surgery  at  Newcastle  and  was 
delighted  when  Morison  asked  him  to 
become  his  assistant. 

In  his  early  years  as  a  surgeon  Grey 
Turner  not  only  operated  at  the  In- 
firmary but  in  very  many  nursing- 
homes,  houses,  and  cottages  in  the 
surrounding  district.  He  was  to  be  seen 
at  his  best  operating  on  an  improvised 


Turner 


D.N.B.  1051-1060 


kitchen  operating  table,  with  an  oil 
lamp  as  a  source  of  light,  and  the  assis- 
tance of  a  country  practitioner.  (Anaes- 
thesia in  those  days  was  either  ether 
or  chloroform  or  a  mixture  of  both.) 
He  thoroughly  enjoyed  these  all  too 
common  occurrences  and  the  more 
difficult  and  urgent  the  operation 
the  better  he  became.  He  was  a  sound, 
experienced  surgeon  and  his  methods 
and  techniques  soon  became  familiar 
to  surgeons  both  at  home  and  abroad. 
The  Newcastle  school  of  surgery  owes 
much  to  such  men  as  Morison  and  Turner. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  Turner 
was  called  up  for  service  in  the  Royal 
Army  Medical  Corps  which  he  had 
joined  when  the  Territorial  Force  was 
formed,  and  after  two  years  as  con- 
sulting surgeon  in  the  Middle  East  with 
the  rank  of  colonel  became  consulting 
surgeon  and  specialist  in  chest  surgery 
to  the  Northern  Command  in  England. 
After  the  war  he  returned  to  his  duties 
at  the  Royal  Infirmary,  Newcastle, 
and  to  the  Tynemouth  Infirmary,  and 
was  professor  of  surgery  at  Newcastle 
from  1927  until  1934.  He  then  became 
the  first  director  of  surgery  at  the  new 
British  Postgraduate  Medical  School  at 
Hammersmith  where  he  remained  until 
1946.  There  he  gathered  around  him 
postgraduate  students  from  all  over 
the  world  to  hear  his  lectures  and  attend 
his  operation  sessions.  He  had  always 
shown  a  great  interest  in  cancer  and 
devised  many  new  techniques  for  the 
removal  of  cancer  in  different  parts 
of  the  body,  especially  the  gullet. 

Besides  his  active  academic  duties 
Turner's  other  interest  was  the  Royal 
College  of  Surgeons  of  England.  He  was 
elected  to  the  council  in  1926,  and  served 
three  terms  of  eight  years,  retiring  in 
1950.  He  was  Hunterian  professor  (1928 
and  1944),  Bradshaw  lecturer  (1935), 
and  Hunterian  orator  (1945),  and  was 
elected  trustee  of  the  Hunterian  Collec- 
tion in  1951.  He  was  particularly  inter- 
ested in  the  museum  and  the  library 
and  he  had  a  very  extensive  knowledge 
of  John  Hunter  [q.v.]  and  his  writings 
and  his  museum  which  the  government  of 
the  day  in  1799  gave  to  the  College.  Tur- 
ner's Hunterian  oration — 'The  Hunterian 
Museum:  yesterday  and  tomorrow' — 
formed  the  basis  for  the  replanning  of  the 
museum  after  the  war.  Turner  was  also 
active  at  the  Royal  Society  of  Medicine 
and  took  part  in  many  discussions  at 
its  meetings.   He  was  president  of  the 


sections  of  surgery  and  proctology  and 
was  president-elect  of  the  clinical  section 
at  the  time  of  his  death. 

Turner  travelled  widely  and  visited 
America,  Australia,  Canada,  Africa,  and 
the  main  cities  of  Europe,  particularly 
Athens,  Brussels,  Rome,  and  Stockholm. 
He  was  a  prodigious  writer  and  many 
hundreds  of  his  papers  were  published  in 
English  and  American  surgical  journals. 
He  was  an  honorary  fellow  of  the  Ameri- 
can (1918)  and  Royal  Australasian  (1937) 
Colleges  of  Surgeons  and  received  an 
honorary  LL.D.  from  Glasgow  (1939) 
and  D.Ch.  from  Durham  (1935). 

Turner  was  a  short  man  who  dressed 
shabbily  and  wore  a  very  old  bowler 
hat  on  the  back  of  his  large  head.  He 
wore  heavy  boots  with  thick  soles ;  and, 
in  the  winter  months,  his  hands  were 
encased  in  knitted  mittens.  His  friends 
were  apt  to  chaff  him  on  his  appearance 
and  ask  him  "if  he  had  come  to  mend 
the  clock'.  Turner  took  this  in  good 
part,  but  it  was  like  water  off  a  duck's 
back  for  he  never  altered.  His  kindness 
and  courtesy  were  appreciated  by  all 
who  knew  him  and  he  was  dearly  loved 
by  his  colleagues  and  students.  In  1908 
he  married  AUce  (Elsie)  Grey  (died  1962), 
daughter  of  Frederick  E.  Schofield,  J.P., 
of  Morpeth.  There  were  three  daughters, 
and  one  son,  Elston  Grey  Turner,  M.R.C.S., 
who  won  the  M.C.  in  Italy  in  1944. 

On  moving  to  London  in  1934  Grey 
Turner  settled  at  Huntercombe  Manor, 
near  Taplow,  an  historic  house  with  a 
beautiful  garden  and  fine  topiary  hedges. 
There  he  died  24  August  1951.  Two  good 
likenesses  of  him  can  be  seen  in  the 
Royal  College  of  Surgeons  of  England, 
in  the  portrait  groups  of  the  College 
council  by  Moussa  Ayoub  (1929)  and 
Henry  Carr  (1947). 

[The  Times,  28  August  1951 ;  British 
Journal  of  Surgery,  November  1951 ;  British 
Medical  Journal,  1  September  1951 ;  New- 
castle Medical  Journal,  December  1951; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Cecil  Wakeley. 

TWYMAN,  FRANK  (1876-1959),  de- 
signer of  optical  instruments,  was  born 
at  Canterbury  17  November  1876,  the 
seventh  of  nine  children  of  George 
Edmund  Twyman,  ropemaker,  by  his 
wife,  Jane  Lefevre.  He  was  educated 
at  the  Simon  Langton  School,  Canter- 
bury, and  at  Finsbury  Technical  College 
(under  Silvanus  Thompson,  q.v.,  Perry, 
and  Meldola)  where  he  won  the  Siemens 


1000 


scholarship  to  the  Central  Technical 
College,  South  Kensington,  which  later 
formed  part  of  the  Imperial  College 
He  assisted  W.  E.  Ayrton  [q.v.]  to  the 
detriment  of  his  own  studies  and  claimed 
that,  until  elected  F.R.S.  in  1924,  his 
highest  academic  distinction  had  been 
to  have  failed  in  chemistry  and  biology 
at  the  Intermediate  B.Sc.  examination. 

In  1897  he  obtained  a  post  with  the 
Fowler  Waring  Cables  Company  but, 
finding  the  work  uninteresting,  he  left 
in  February  1898  to  become  assistant, 
at  twenty-five  shillings  a  week,  to  Otto 
Hilger,  optical  instrvunent  maker,  who 
had  followed  his  brother  Adam  Hilger 
as  head  of  their  business  in  Camden 
Town  in  1897.  When  Otto  Hilger  died 
in  1902  Twyman  succeeded  him.  The 
company  was  incorporated  as  Adam 
Hilger,  Ltd.,  in  1904,  with  Twyman  as 
managing  director.  He  continued  in  that 
post  until  1946 ;  when  the  firm  was  amal- 
gamated in  1948  to  form  Hilger  and  Watts, 
he  became  a  director  until  1952,  and 
served  thereafter  imtil  his  death  as 
technical  adviser. 

It  was  from  Otto  Hilger  that  Twyman 
learned    the     fundamentals    of    optical 
design  of  which  he  himself  later  became 
a    master.    He    worked    at    the    bench, 
did     calculations,     and     tested,     mostly 
spectroscopes.  Until  1910  he  made  de- 
signs and  working  drawings  and  super- 
intended   the    construction    of   all    new 
instruments.  One  of  these,  the  constant 
deviation        wavelength       spectrometer 
(1902),    considerably   simplified   spectro- 
chemical  analysis  and  made  it  a  feasible 
industrial  and  research  method.  A  second 
step  in  this  development  was  the  design 
of  a  quartz  spectrograph  (1910)  for  work 
in  the  ultraviolet  part  of  the  spectrum. 
This  was  followed  by  a  larger  model  in 
1912.  These  instruments  were  used  in  the 
United  States  and  the  results  attracted 
considerable     attention.     Thenceforward 
Hilgers  developed  their  high  reputation  for 
spectroscopic   apparatus,   and   American 
and  continental  instrument  makers  were 
not  slow  to  enter  the  field.  In  1913  Twy- 
man designed  a  spectrometer  to  work  at 
infra-red  wavelengths  and,  later,  one  for 
very   short  wavelengths  for  which  the 
whole  instrument  needed  to  be  evacuated 
of  air.  He  also  made  an  instrument  for 
studying  X-ray  spectra.  The  development 
and  use  of  spectroscopes  for  analytical 
purposes,     now     standard     practice     in 
metallurgy,   was   described  in  detail  in 
Metal  Spectroscopy  (1951).  •     i«m 


D.N.B.  1951.1960  Twyman 

Twyman    became     an     acknowledged 
authority  in  the  design  of  optical  instru- 
ments of  all  kinds  except  microscopes 
which   did   not   seem   to   interest   him; 
he  was  also  an  authority  on  the  means 
of  manufacture.  He  had  introduced  the 
use  of  test  or  proof  plates  early  in  his 
association   with   Hilger.   Between   1918 
and   1923   in   collaboration   with  Alfred 
Green,  the  foreman  of  the  optical  shop, 
he  modified  the  Michelson  interferometer, 
in  the  Twyman-Green  interferometer,  in 
a  form  suitable  for  testing  the  profiles 
of  the   surfaces  of  optical  components. 
The    introduction    of    this    instrument 
into  the  technique  of  instrument  testing 
was  a  tremendous  step  forward  and  its 
use  became  universal  in  optical  practice. 
Twyman    was    awarded     the     Duddell 
medal    of   the    Physical    Society    (1927) 
and       the       John       Price       Wetherill 
medal  of  the  Franklin  Institute  (1926). 
He  was  interested  also  in  the  materials 
of     optical      instruments,      particularly 
in  glass.  During  the  war  of  1914-18,  in 
collaboration  with  Chance  Brothers,   he 
developed  new  techniques  for  studying 
the    annealing   of   glass,    based   on   the 
polarization  of  light,  which  ensured  the 
maintenance  of  vital  supplies  which  had 
hitherto  all  come  from  Germany.  His  book 
Prism  and  Lens  Making  (1943)  is  a  stand- 
ard work  of  reference  in  this  field. 

Twyman  was  an  approachable,  friendly 
man.  He  was  very  interested  in  young 
people,  especially  in  apprenticeship  and 
apprentices,  and  he  delighted  in  fine 
craftsmanship.  Despite  the  expansion 
of  his  business  interests,  he  claimed  to 
have  remained  a  scientist  at  heart  and 
demonstrated  it  by  freely  lending  new 
apparatus  to  young  research  workers 
on  terms  sometimes  too  generous  even 
for  his  very  tolerant  business  associates. 
His  hobby  was  music.  He  once  said 
that  had  he  been  allowed  to  choose 
as  a  young  man  he  would  have  wished 
to  become  a  musician.  Later  in  life  he 
often  shut  himself  in  his  office  during 
lunch  hours  and  played  his  violin, 
telling  visitors  privileged  to  intrude  into 
these  sessions  that  he  was  on  the  way 
to  becoming  a  third  class  amateur  instead 
of  a  third  class  professional.  He  read 
widely  and  was  a  keen  gardener.  He  was 
interested  in  the  theatre,  and  loved 
a  good  story.  Those  who  knew  him  re- 
spected him  for  his  kindness  and  help- 
fulness; but  his  influence  on  optical 
design  and  optical  manufacture  is  his 
memorial.    He    was     president    of    the 


1001 


Twyman 


r).N.B.  1951-1960 


Optical  Society  (1930-31)  and  was  a 
founder-member  of  the  Institute  of 
Physics.  He  received  the  gold  medal  of 
the  Society  of  Applied  Spectroscopists 
of  the  United  States  in  1956. 

In  1906  Twyman  married  Elizabeth 
K.  P.  Hilger;  they  had  three  daughters 
and  a  son  whose  death  in  a  motor-cycle 
accident  while  still  an  undergraduate 
was  a  grievous  blow.  Twyman  died  in 
London  6  March  1959. 

[A.  C.  Menzies  in  Biographical  Memoirs 
of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  v,  1959 ; 
Nature,  25  April  1959 ;  The  Times,  10  March 
1959 ;  personal  knowledge.]     C.  B.  Allsopp. 

TYRWHITT,  Sir  REGINALD  YORKE, 
first  baronet  (1870-1951),  admiral  of  the 
fleet,  was  born  in  Oxford  10  May  1870, 
the  fifth  son  of  the  Rev.  Richard  St. 
John  Tyrwhitt  [q.v.],  vicar  of  St.  Mary 
Magdalen,  and  the  fourth  by  his  second 
wife  Caroline,  daughter  of  John  Yorke, 
of  Bewerley  Hall,  Yorkshire.  He  entered 
the  Britannia  in  1883,  served  in  the 
Australia  and  Ajax  for  the  naval  man- 
ceuvres  of  1889  and  1890  respectively, 
and  in  1892  was  promoted  lieutenant  and 
appointed  to  the  light  cruiser  Cleopatra 
on  the  North  America  station. 

In  1896  Tyrwhitt  took  over  the  com- 
mand of  the  Hart,  one  of  the  very  early 
destroyers  in  the  navy,  and  thus  began 
a  long  and  distinguished  association 
with  this  class  of  ship.  Towards  the  end 
of  the  year  he  was  appointed  first  lieu- 
tenant in  the  Surprise,  the  commander-in- 
chief's  yacht  in  the  Mediterranean,  and 
followed  that  with  a  similar  post  in  the 
Indefatigable  on  the  North  America  station. 
He  was  promoted  commander  in  1903  and 
appointed  to  the  Aurora,  tender  to  the 
Britannia  at  Dartmouth.  He  commanded 
the  destroyer  Waveney  (1904-5)  and  the 
scouts  Attentive  (1906)  and  Skirmisher 
(1907). 

In  June  1908  Tyrwhitt  was  promoted 
captain  and,  with  a  long  record  of 
destroyer  command  behind  him,  was 
selected  in  August  to  command  the 
Topaze  as  captain  (D)  of  the  fourth 
destroyer  flotilla  at  Portsmouth.  After 
holding  that  command  for  two  years  he 
was  made  flag  captain  to  Sir  Douglas 
Gamble  on  the  Mediterranean  station, 
commanding  successively  the  Bacchante 
and  the  Good  Hope.  In  1912  he  returned 
home  to  command  the  Bellona  as  cap- 
tain (D)  of  the  second  destroyer  flotilla 
of  the  Home  Fleet,  and  in  1914  was 
promoted  commodore  (T)  being  then  in 


charge  of  all  destroyer  flotillas  in  the  fleet. 
In  addition  to  his  main  interest  in  des- 
troyer tactics,  Tyrwhitt  was  a  strong 
supporter  of  the  introduction  of  flying 
in  the  navy  and  his  encouragement  was 
a  considerable  factor  in  the  formation 
of  the  Royal  Naval  Air  Service. 

At  the  outbreak  of  war  Tyrwhitt  was 
at  Harwich,  flying  his  broad  pennant 
in  the  light  cruiser  Amethyst,  with  the 
first  and  third  destroyer  flotillas  in 
company.  As  commodore — and  from  1918 
rear-admiral — Harwich  Force,  he  served 
throughout  the  whole  war  in  that  single 
appointment,  an  indication  of  the  Admi- 
ralty's high  appreciation  of  the  skill 
and  leadership  with  which  he  led  the 
force  throughout  the  strenuous  opera- 
tions in  which  it  was  engaged. 

It  was  as  a  war  leader  that  Tyrwhitt 
really  blossomed.  He  had  in  abundance 
the  four  'aces'  which  make  the  great 
commander:  a  gift  for  leadership,  a 
fertile  imagination  and  a  creative  brain, 
an  eagerness  to  make  full  use  of  the 
brains  and  ideas  of  juniors,  and  an  offen- 
sive spirit.  His  were  the  first  ships 
to  be  in  action  in  the  war  when  they 
sank  the  German  minelayer  Konigin 
Luise  off  the  Thames  estuary  on  5  August 
1914.  Twenty-three  days  later  the  Har- 
wich Force  was  engaged  in  the  Heli- 
goland Bight  action,  an  operation  jointly 
planned  by  Tyrwhitt  and  Roger  (later 
Lord)  Keyes  [q.v.],  commanding  the 
British  submarine  flotillas.  Three  German 
cruisers  were  sunk  in  the  engagement, 
and  although  Tyrwhitt' s  ship,  the  Are- 
thusa,  was  severely  damaged  in  the 
action  she  returned  safely  to  Sheerness 
where,  Tyrwhitt  recorded,  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  'fairly  slobbered  over  me'.  He 
was  awarded  the  C.B. 

There  followed  the  German  battle- 
cruiser  raid  on  Scarborough  and  Hartle- 
pool on  16  December  1914  when,  although 
the  sea  was  too  rough  for  his  destroyers, 
he  was  at  sea  with  his  light  cruisers 
and  only  just  failed  to  make  contact 
with  the  enemy  ships.  He  commanded 
the  covering  force  in  the  Heligoland 
Bight  for  the  naval  seaplane  raid 
on  the  Zeppelin  sheds  at  Cuxhaven  on 
Christmas  Day  1914,  and  in  January 
1915  his  Harwich  Force  played  a  notable 
part  in  conjunction  with  the  battle 
cruisers  of  Sir  David  (later  Earl)  Beatty 
[q.v.]  at  the  battle  of  the  Dogger  Bank. 

On  intercepting  the  'enemy  sighted' 
signal  on  31  May  1916  which  heralded 
the  battle  of  Jutland,  Tyrwhitt  put  to 


1002 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Vachell 


sea  with  the  Harwich  Force  only  to  be 
recalled  by  signal  from  the  Admiralty. 
Eventually  he  was  permitted  to  sail,  but 
arrived  on  the  scene  too  late  to  take  any 
part  in  the  action.  In  the  German  fleet 
operation  of  19  August  1916,  which  was 
to  be  a  bombardment  of  Sunderland, 
the  ships  of  the  Harwich  Force  were 
the  only  British  vessels  to  sight  the 
German  fleet.  Scheer,  the  German  com- 
mander-in-chief, ordered  a  withdrawal 
before  the  bombardment  could  take 
place  and  it  was  as  the  enemy  retired 
that  Tyrwhitt  sighted  them.  He  was  in 
chase  until  nightfall,  but  as  his  only 
chance  of  making  an  attack  on  them 
would  be  after  the  moon  had  risen,  he 
was  forced  to  draw  off  before  bringing 
them  to  action.  In  uninformed  circles 
Tyrwhitt  was  later  criticized  for  failing 
to  press  an  attack  home,  but  virtual 
suicide  was  no  part  of  his  plan  and  his 
action  in  withdrawing  was  upheld  by 
both  Sir  John  (later  Earl)  JeUicoe  [q.v.] 
and  the  Admiralty. 

In  1917  and  1918  the  Harwich  Force 
engaged  in  several  small-scale  actions, 
mainly  off  the  Dutch  coast  or  in  co- 
operation with  the  destroyers  of  the 
Dover  Patrol,  and  as  the  covering 
force  for  naval  air  attacks  on  enemy 
installations.  After  the  armistice  it  was 
Tyrwhitt' s  Harwich  Force  which  accep- 
ted the  surrender  of  the  German  U-boats. 

Tyrwhitt  was  appointed  to  the  D.S.O. 
in  1916  and  in  1917  promoted  K.C.B. 
He  was  created  a  baronet  in  1919  and 
granted  £10,000  by  Parliament  for  his 
services  during  the  war.  He  received 
many  foreign  decorations  and  an  honorary 
D.C.L.  from  Oxford  (1919). 

After  the  war  Tyrwhitt  was  appointed 
senior  officer  at  Gibraltar  and  in  1921 
he  returned  to  sea  as  flag  officer  com- 
manding third  light  cruiser  squadron 
in  the  Mediterranean.  He  was  command- 
ing officer  Coast  of  Scotland  and  ad- 
miral superintendent  Rosyth  dockyard 
in  1923-5  and  in  1925  was  promoted 
vice-admiral.  He  was  commander-in- 
chief  China  station  from  1927  to  1929, 
serving  there  with  great  tact  and  dis- 
tinction during  the  threat  to  the  Inter- 
national Settlement  at  Shanghai  during 
the  Chinese  civil  war.  He  was  promoted 
admiral  on  relinquishing  command  in 
China  and  was  also  promoted  G.C.B.  In 
1930-33  he  was  commander-in-chief  at  the 
Nore,  becoming  first  and  principal  naval 
aide-de-camp  to  the  King  in  1932.  In 
1934,  being  the  senior  admiral  on  the  list, 


he  was  promoted  admiral  of  the  fleet 
when  a  vacancy  occurred.  During  the 
war  of  1939-45,  at  the  age  of  seventy, 
he  jomed  the  Home  Guard  in  1940  and 
for  a  short  time  commanded  the  3rd 
Kent  battalion. 

Tyrwhitt  married  in  1903  Angela 
Mary  (died  1953),  daughter  of  Matthew 
Corbally,  of  Rathbeale  Hall,  Swords, 
county  Dublin,  and  had  one  son  and 
two  daughters.  He  died  at  Sandhurst, 
Kent,  30  May  1951,  and  was  succeeded 
by  his  son,  St.  John  Reginald  Joseph 
(1905-1961),  who  also  entered  the  navy, 
becoming  second  sea  lord  in  1950.  His 
elder  daughter,  Dame  Mary  Tyrwhitt, 
retired  as  director  of  the  Women's  Royal 
Army  Corps  in  1950. 

Portraits  of  Tyrwhitt  by  Francis 
Dodd  and  Glyn  Philpot  are  in  the  Im- 
perial War  Museum.  Tyrwhitt  also  figures 
in  Sir  A.  S.  Cope's  'Some  Sea  Officers 
of  the  War  of  1914^18'  in  the  National 
Portrait  Gallery.- 

[Admiralty  records;  The  Times,  31  May 
1951.]  p.  K.  Kemp. 

VACHELL,      HORACE      ANNESLEY 

(1861-1955),  novelist,  was  born  at  Syden- 
ham 30  October  1861,  the  eldest  of  the 
three  sons  of  Richard  Tanfield  Vachell, 
late  of  Coptfold  Hall,  Essex,  and  his 
wife,  Georgina,  daughter  of  Arthur 
Lyttelton  Annesley,  late  of  Arley  Castle, 
Staffordshire.  He  was  a  distant  kinsman 
of  Edward  and  Alfred  Lyttelton  [qq.v.]. 
Part  of  his  boyhood  was  spent  at  Hursley, 
near  Winchester,  and  his  frequent  jour- 
neys to  the  city  and  its  cathedral  made 
a  profound  mark  upon  his  spirit.  He  was 
educated  at  Harrow  and  at  the  Royal 
Military  College,  Sandhurst,  where,  in 
1881,  he  won  the  half-mile  race  against 
Woolwich.  Afterwards  he  served  for 
a  time  as  lieutenant  in  the  Rifle  Brigade ; 
but  he  spent  most  of  the  eighties  in 
California.  There,  in  1889,  he  married 
Lydie,  daughter  of  C.  H.  Phillips,  of 
San  Luis  Obispo,  managing  director 
of  a  land  company,  with  whom  Vachell 
went  into  partnership.  Vachell  had  one 
son  who  became  a  captain  in  the  Royal 
Flying  Corps  and  died  as  a  result  of  an 
aeroplane  accident  in  1915,  and  one 
daughter,  whose  birth  in  1895  was  fol- 
lowed by  the  death  of  her  mother. 

Before  the  end  of  the  century  Vachell 
had  returned  to  England  and  settled 
down  to  his  long  career  as  a  writer. 
Independent  means  were  an  undoubted 
help,     but,    as    he     himself    admitted. 


1003 


Vachell 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


success  came  easily.  By  the  time  he 
ceased  work,  he  had  written  more  than 
fifty  novels  and  volumes  of  short  stories ; 
fourteen  plays,  several  of  them  adapted 
from  his  novels;  numerous  collections 
of  essays;  and  several  autobiographical 
books,  the  last  of  them,  More  from 
Methuselah  (1951),  published  when  he 
was  in  his  ninetieth  year.  Conspicuous 
among  the  novels  are  John  Charity 
(1900),  Brothers  (1904),  and  his  first 
great  popular  success.  The  Hill  (1905),  a 
school  story  with  Harrow  as  its  scene. 
Later  came  Her  Son  (1907),  The  Fourth 
Dimension  (1920),  and  The  Fifth  Com- 
mandment (1932). 

Vachell' s  most  famous  play,  Quinneys' 
(1915),  gave  Henry  Ainley  [q.v.]  a  York- 
shire role  which  was  probably  his  greatest 
success  in  a  character  part.  It  was  followed 
in  1916  by  the  oddly  titled  Fishpingle. 
Of  the  essays,  Little  Tyrannies  (1940)  gives 
a  characteristic  sample :  and  the  last  auto- 
biography but  one,  Methuselah's  Diary 
(1949),  showed  Vachell's  rambling,  inti- 
mate kindly  commentary  still  in  full  flower. 

In  any  of  his  chosen  media  Vachell 
was  not  an  important  writer.  He  was 
too  well  satisfied  with  the  world  around 
him,  and  accepted  too  readily  its  values 
and  conventions.  To  be  'out  of  the  top 
drawer'  was  for  him  a  virtue  in  itself. 
His  place  as  a  writer  lies  somewhere 
between  John  Galsworthy  [q.v.]  and 
such  purveyors  of  popular  entertain- 
ment as  W.  J.  Locke  [q.v]  and  E.  Temple 
Thurston.  He  wrote  honestly  and  care- 
fully, and  his  work  illumines,  with 
shrewdness  and  good  humour,  the  beliefs, 
customs,  and  circumstances  of  English 
upper-middle-class  life  over  a  long  period. 
Many  of  the  comments  in  his  autobio- 
graphical books  have  pith  in  them,  and 
all  reveal  a  sunny,  open  nature.  He  was  a 
fellow  of  the  Royal  Society  of  Literature. 

Vachell  had  at  all  times  a  distinguished 
appearance,  particularly  in  his  later 
years,  when  his  noble  head  and  silvery 
hair  gave  him  both  dignity  and  panache. 
He  affected  a  high  stiff  collar,  stock,  and 
morning  coat,  and  his  voice,  musical 
and  precise,  with  its  clipped  Edwardian 
diction,  enhanced  the  charm  of  his  talk. 
He  was  a  generous  and  vivid  raconteur: 
his  stage  reminiscences  were  exceptionally 
lively,  covering  a  period  of  vigorous 
development  and  change  in  the  English 
theatre.  He  kept  to  the  end  of  his  life 
an  alert  mind,  and  took  a  craftsman's 
interest  in  the  practice  of  the  new  novel- 
ists    and     dramatists.     He     kept,     too, 


his  delight  in  good  food  and  good  wine. 
His  home,  Widcombe  Manor,  near  Bath, 
an  old  house  of  great  beauty,  he  en- 
riched with  books  and  pictures  and 
fine  furniture.  The  terraced  garden 
was  his  particular  pride,  and  in  it  was 
set  a  superb  fountain  brought  from  Italy. 
In  his  last  years  he  moved,  much  to  his 
grief,  into  a  smaller  house  at  Sherborne. 
He  died  10  January  1955  at  Widcombe, 
Bath. 

[H.  A.  Vachell,  Distant  Fields,  1937 ;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  L.  A.  G.  Strong. 

VALLANCE,  GERALD  AYLMER 
(1892-1955),  journalist,  was  born  in 
Partick,  Lanarkshire,  4  July  1892,  the 
son  of  George  Henry  Vallance,  a  shawl 
manufacturer,  and  his  wife,  Agnes 
Felton.  He  was  given  the  names  George 
Alexander  Gerald,  but  later  in  his  life 
he  changed  to  Gerald  Aylmer.  He  won 
an  open  scholarship  to  Fettes,  became 
head  of  the  school,  won  two  Governors' 
prizes  and  a  Governors'  exhibition,  and 
an  open  classical  scholarship  to  Balliol 
College,  Oxford,  where  he  obtained  a  first 
class  in  honour  moderations  in  1913. 

At  this  point  his  career  of  brilliant 
promise  was  interrupted  by  the  outbreak 
of  war:  in  1914  he  was  commissioned 
a  second  lieutenant  in  the  Somerset 
Light  Infantry;  he  transferred  to  the 
Intelligence  Corps  in  1915;  graduated 
from  the  Staff  College  in  1917;  and 
ended  the  war  as  brigade -major  of  the 
2nd  Indian  division. 

Although  his  education  had  been 
classical,  Vallance's  interests  now  turned 
towards  economics  and  administration 
and  from  1919  to  1928  he  successfully 
filled  the  post  of  general  secretary  of 
the  National  Maritime  Board.  There  his 
gifts  attracted  the  attention  of  Walter 
(later  Lord)  Layton,  then  editor  and 
director  of  The  Economist,  and  in  1929  he 
joined  its  editorial  staff.  His  brilliance  and 
his  gifted  personality  increasingly  earned 
the  admiration  of  Layton  and  his  journal- 
istic colleagues  and  in  1933  the  board  of 
the  Daily  News,  Ltd.,  of  which  Layton  had 
become  chairman,  offered  him  the  editor- 
ship of  the  News  Chronicle,  vacant  through 
the  resignation  of  Tom  Clarke  [q.v.]. 
Vallance  made  an  immediate  impact  by 
the  incisiveness  of  his  judgement  and  his 
spirited  enthusiasm,  which  much  com- 
mended themselves  to  his  staff ;  and  he  set 
about  collecting  under  him  an  able  team 
of  young  men,  several  of  whom  were  to 
become    renowned    in    journalism.    Un- 


1004 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Vansittart 


happily  his  editorial  reign  was  brief:  to- 
wards the  end  of  1935  he  suddenly  fell  out 
with  the  proprietors  on  political  and  per- 
sonal grounds  and  at  the  beginning  of  1936 
he  resigned. 

This  event  proved  a  watershed:  the 
early  and  dazzling  success  was  not  there- 
after sustained,  although  his  intellectual 
abilities  and  his  ready  pen  continued  to 
be  put  to  valuable  creative  purpose. 
In  1937  he  acccepted  an  invitation  to 
serve  as  assistant  editor  of  the  New 
Statesman  under  Kingsley  Martin,  where 
he  remained  for  the  rest  of  his  life. 
It  was  not  a  position  in  which  he  had 
the  same  personal  opportunities  to  shine 
as  in  his  previous  posts,  but  the  New 
Statesman  greatly  benefited  from  his 
professionalism  and  versatihty. 

In  the  war  of  1939-45  Vallance  served 
on  the  general  staff  at  the  War  Office— as 
might  be  expected  in  the  field  of  intelli- 
gence, where  he  did  valuable  liaison  work 
with  the  press.  He  also  wrote  a  number 
of  pamphlets  for  the  Army  Bureau  of 
Current  Affairs.  In  1945  he  returned  to 
the  New  Statesman,  with  which  through- 
out the  war  he  had  never  lost  touch, 
writing  for  it  a  good  deal  anonymously. 

Aylmer  Vallance  made  a  vigorous 
contribution  to  journalism  in  a  period 
which  was  one  of  intense  political  con- 
troversy and  upheaval.  He  came  to  hold 
somewhat  extreme  political  views  on 
some  issues ;  but  while  this  may  possibly 
have  contributed  to  the  fact  that  his 
earlier  promise  was  not  completely  ful- 
filled, it  never  affected  his  loyalty  or  the 
professional  devotion  he  always  brought 
to  the  task  in  hand.  Those  who  worked 
with  and  for  him  responded  to  his  warmth 
of  personality,  and  found  particular  relish 
in  his  quick,  irreverent  sense  of  humour. 

Vallance  wrote  four  books :  The  Centre 
of  the  World  (about  the  City  of  London, 
1935);  Hire-Purchase  (1939);  Very  Pri- 
vate Enterprise  (a  study  of  famous 
frauds,  1955);  and  The  Summer  King, 
a  biography  of  the  King  of  Corsica, 
pubhshed  posthumously  in  1956. 

In  1928  Vallance  married  Phyllis 
Taylor  Bimstingl,  a  widow  with  two 
daughters.  The  marriage  was  dissolved 
and  in  1940  he  married  Helen,  divorced 
wife  of  J.  R.  H.  Chisholm  and  daughter 
of  Philip  Gosse,  medical  practitioner; 
they  had  one  son  and  one  daughter. 
After  the  dissolution  of  this  marriage 
he  married  in  1950  Ute,  daughter  of 
Max  Ferdinand  Fischinger,  an  officer 
in  the  German  Army. 


Vallance  died  in  London  24  November 
1955. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.) 
'  Gerald  Barry. 

VANSITTART,  ROBERT  GILBERT, 
Baron  Vansittart  (1881-1957),  diplo* 
matist,  came  of  a  long  line  of  dis^ 
tinguished  forebears,  six  of  whom  are 
recorded  in  this  Dictionary.  He  was 
bom  at  Wilton  House,  Farnham,  25 
June  1881,  the  eldest  of  three  sons  among 
the  six  children  of  Robert  Arnold  Van- 
sittart, of  Foots  Cray  Place,  Kent, 
a  captain  in  the  7th  Dragoon  Guards, 
and  his  wife,  Susan  (Alice),  daughter 
of  Gilbert  James  Blane,  of  Foliejon 
Park,  Berkshire. 

'Van'  to  his  many  friends,  'Bob  Van- 
sittart' to  the  fringe,  and  just  Vansittart 
to  the  rest,  he  spent  a  full  seven  years 
at  Eton,  unusual  at  any  time.  He  con- 
fesses in  his  autobiography  to  a  devotion 
to,  and  a  hope  of  success  in,  ball  games 
which  was  not  wholly  fulfilled;  but  he 
won  two  school  races  and  was  in  the 
cricket  Twenty-two.  His  forte  was  modem 
languages  and  he  won  the  rare,  if  not 
unique,  distinction  of  both  the  French 
and  German  Prince  Consort  prizes  in 
the  same  year.  He  finished  his  career  as 
captain  of  the  Oppidans  and  was,  of  course, 
in  Pop.  He  left  regretfully  and,  as  others 
before  and  since,  lingered  on  at  the  last 
day,  after  the  rest  had  gone  home.  This 
was  perhaps  symbolic  of  his  loyal  attach- 
ment to  all  he  held  dear — places,  family, 
friends,  and  last  but  not  least  his  country. 

He  next  turned  to  serious  work  for 
the  diplomatic  examination.  A  second 
visit  to  Germany,  less  unpleasant  than 
an  earher  one  which  was  perhaps  the 
foundation  for  his  subsequent  attitude  to 
the  Germans,  was  followed  by  a  sojourn 
in  Paris.  He  entered  the  service  as  an 
attache  and  was  posted  to  Paris  (1903) 
becoming  a  third  secretary  in  1905. 
In  1907  he  was  transferred  to  Tehran 
and  in  1909  to  Cairo  where,  as  in  Teh- 
ran, he  quahfied  for  an  allowance  for 
knowledge  of  the  local  language.  Two 
years  later  he  established  himself  in 
the  Foreign  Office  which  was  thence- 
forward his  headquarters. 

During  the  war  of  1914r-18  he  was 
joint  head  of  the  contraband  depart- 
ment ;  then  head  of  the  prisoners  of  war 
department  under  Lord  Newton  [q.v.]. 
He  attended  the  peace  conference  in  Paris 
and  emerged  in  1920  as  an  assistant 
secretary  in  the  Foreign  Office  and  in 


1005 


Vansittart 


P.N.B.  1951-1960 


1920-24  was  private  secretary  to  the 
secretary  of  state.  In  1928  he  became 
private  secretary  to  the  prime  minister, 
Stanley  Baldwin,  and  continued  in  the 
same  post  with  Ramsay  MacDonald 
until  on  1  January  1930  he  was  appointed 
permanent  under-secretary  in  the  Foreign 
Office.  Eight  years  later,  after  serving 
through  some  of  the  most  critical  years 
in  modern  times,  he  was  removed  to  the 
specially  created  post  of  diplomatic 
adviser. 

The  story  of  this  'kick  upstairs'  is 
long  and  tortuous.  It  has  been  put  in  a 
nutshell  by  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill  in 
The  Gathering  Storm  (1948).  It  begins 
in  1935  with  what  Churchill  rightly 
calls  Vansittart's  'fortuitous  connection 
with  the  Hoare-Laval  pact'  which  at 
the  time  was  regarded  as  a  scuttle.  His 
connection  may  only  be  judged,  if  at  all, 
as  that  of  a  wise  adviser;  the  ultimate 
decision  lay  with  the  Government,  with 
whom  must  lie  also  responsibility  for 
the  country's  weakened  situation.  As  the 
policy  of  appeasement  grew  in  strength 
the  direction  of  foreign  affairs  passed  from 
the  Foreign  Office  to  10  Downing  Street 
and  Vansittart  was  blamed  for  his  warn- 
ings against  imminent  German  aggression 
and  for  hostility  to  Germany.  He  was  re- 
moved from  his  direction  of  the  Foreign 
Office  to  the  unique  post,  created  ad  hoc^ 
of  'chief  diplomatic  adviser  to  His  Majes- 
ty's Government'  which  he  held  from 
1938  until  he  retired  in  1941.  Whether  his 
advice  was  ever  taken  is  doubtful,  but  in 
any  case  it  was  by  then  too  late  for  it  to  be 
effective.  He  continued  his  theme  both 
publicly  and  in  the  House  of  Lords  which 
he  entered  on  his  retirement ;  the  vigour  of 
his  campaign  against  the  Nazis  was  such 
that  it  was  seriously  asked  whether  he  was 
not  perhaps  at  heart  a  pro-German  whose 
campaign  was  deliberately  planned  to  pro- 
duce the  reaction  of  'Don't  let's  be  beastly 
to  the  Germans'.  Nothing  could  have  been 
farther  from  the  truth. 

The  epilogue  to  Vansittart's  auto- 
biography, The  Mist  Procession  (1958), 
one  of  the  outstanding  contemporary 
accounts  of  the  time,  begins  with  the 
words  'Mine  is  a  story  of  failure'.  But 
failure  is  an  expression  of  various  facets, 
and  though  he  may  have  'failed'  to 
convince  the  Government  at  the  climax 
of  his  career  that  he  was  right  and  they 
were  wrong,  no  life  can  be  called  a  failure 
which  was  enriched  by  so  noble,  affec- 
tionate, and  loyal  a  character,  by  such 
wide   experience,    and   such   remarkable 


ability.  Vansittart's  literary  style,  like 
his  speech,  was  rapid,  incisive,  and 
idiomatic.  It  often  needed  an  effort  to 
keep  up  with  his  thoughts,  but  if  you 
could  'take'  the  speed,  you  could  'take' 
the  meaning.  His  writings  were  numerous 
and  varied  and  included  poems  and 
plays.  Perhaps  his  most  original  feat 
was  to  have  a  play  in  French  run  for 
four  months  in  Paris  when  he  was  a 
secretary  at  the  embassy. 

Vansittart's  first  marriage  (1921)  to 
Gladys,  daughter  of  William  C.  Heppen- 
heimer,  of  the  United  States  Army, 
happy  in  other  respects,  was  clouded 
by  the  tragic  death  in  an  accident  of  her 
son  by  a  former  marriage;  and  she  her- 
self died  in  1928.  They  had  one  daughter. 
In  1931  Vansittart  married  Sarita  En- 
riqueta,  daughter  of  Herbert  Ward, 
of  Paris,  and  widow  of  his  late  colleague. 
Sir  Colville  Barclay.  She  sustained  him 
through  the  years  of  frustration  and 
enabled  him  to  surmount  with  cheerful- 
ness disappointments  which  he  was  perhaps 
too  much  inclined  to  take  to  heart,  and 
the  inevitable  concomitants  of  advancing 
age  which  he  bore  without  complaint. 
He  died  at  their  beautiful  home  at  Den- 
ham  14  February  1957.  The  peerage 
became  extinct.  A  portrait  by  A.  R. 
Thomson  remained  in  the  possession  of 
the  artist. 

Vansittart  was  appointed  M.V.O. 
(1906);  C.B.  (1927),  K.C.B.  (1929), 
G.C.B.  (1938);  C.M.G.  (1920),  G.C.M.G. 
(1931 ) ;  he  was  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council 
in  1940  and  created  a  baron  in  1941. 

[The  Times,  15  February  1957;  Lord 
Vansittart,  The  Mist  Procession,  1958 ;  Ian 
Colvin,  Vansittart  in  Office,  1965 ;  personal 
knowledge.]  Nevile  Bland. 

VAUGHAN        WILLIAMS,        RALPH 

(1872-1958),  composer,  was  born  12 
October  1872  at  Down  Ampney,  Glou- 
cestershire, into  a  family  of  mixed  Welsh 
and  English  descent  whose  members 
went  chiefly  into  the  law  or  the  Church. 
Sir  Edward  Vaughan  Williams  [q.v.] 
was  his  grandfather.  Sir  Roland  Vaughan 
W^illiams  [q.v.]  his  uncle.  He  was  the 
younger  son  of  the  vicar,  the  Rev. 
Arthur  Vaughan  Williams,  and  his  wife, 
Margaret,  daughter  of  the  third  Josiah 
Wedgwood,  grandson  of  the  potter,,  who 
had  married  his  cousin,  Caroline  Darwin, 
niece  of  Charles  Darwin  [q.v.].  His 
parents'  two  families  had  come  to  live 
at  Leith  Hill  in  Surrey  in  the  middle 
of  the    nineteenth   century   and   Ralph 


1006 


D.N.B.  1951-1960  Vaughan  Williams 


Vaughan  Williams  was  to  continue  his 
association  with  the  Leith  Hill  musi- 
cal festival  until  the  middle  of  the  twen- 
tieth. He  was  brought  up  at  Leith  Hill 
Place  because  his  father  died  when  he 
was  only  two.  There  was  music  in  both 
families  but  the  child  was  no  precocious 
genius.  He  wrote  a  little  piece  four 
bars  long  for  piano  when  he  was  six, 
and  by  the  time  he  was  eleven  he 
was  playing  the  violin  quite  well,  but, 
when  he  was  an  undergraduate  at  Cam- 
bridge his  Darwin  cousins  thought  he 
was  wasting  his  time  trying  to  be  a  com- 
poser, and  he  was  thirty  by  the  time  he 
had  found  his  real  idiom.  However, 
he  relates  in  a  musical  autobiography 
contributed  to  Ralph  Vaughan  Williams 
(1950)  by  Hubert  Foss  [q.v]  that  while 
he  was  still  at  Charterhouse  he  organized 
a  concert  at  which  one  of  his  own  works 
was  played.  Before  he  went  up  to  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge,  in  1892  he  spent  two 
years  at  the  Royal  College  of  Music 
studying  composition  with  (Sir)  Hubert 
Parry  and  (Sir)  Charles  Stanford  [qq.v.] 
and  he  was  able  to  take  his  Mus.  Bac. 
in  1894  while  still  reading  history  in 
which  he  obtained  a  second  in  1895. 
He  then  put  in  another  year  at  the 
Royal  College  but  he  still  had  not  found 
himself  and  went  off  to  Berlin  to  work 
with  Max  Bruch.  Years  later  he  was 
still  dissatisfied  with  his  technique 
and  in  1907-8  worked  for  some  months 
at  refining  it  with  Ravel  in  Paris.  But 
he  had  taken  his  Cambridge  doctorate 
in  1901.  Thereafter  he  was  known  to 
the  world,  since  he  declined  a  knight- 
hood, as  Dr.  Vaughan  Williams  and 
later  to  younger  generations  as  'Uncle 
Ralph'. 

Vaughan  Williams  was  by  creed  and 
practice  a  nationalist,  like  those  Slavonic, 
Latin,  and  Scandinavian  musicians  who 
in  the  nineteenth  century  turned  against 
the  long  hegemony  of  German  and  Italian 
music  to  native  sources  of  inspiration 
in  order  to  secure  emancipation  for  them- 
selves and  the  ultimate  enrichment  of 
European  music.  Chief  of  these  sources 
for  Vaughan  Williams  was  English  folk- 
song, but  other  influences  were  hymn- 
ody,  including  plainsong,  to  which  he 
was  led  by  his  editorship  of  The  English 
Hymnal  (1906),  Purcell,  of  whose  works 
he  edited  a  volume  of  the  Welcome 
Odes  for  the  Purcell  Society  (1904-6), 
and  the  Elizabethan  madrigals  to  which 
he  was  devoted  all  his  life  both  publicly 
and  domestically.  In  him  English  music 


secured  independence  of  the  continental 
dominance  which  had  been  exerted  by  the 
powerful  figures  of  Handel  and  Mendels- 
sohn for  a  century  and  a  half.  He  was 
assisted  in  this  movement  by  his  friend 
Gustav  Hoist  [q.v.],  but  he  did  not  in  the 
end  establish  a  school,  for  the  emanci- 
pation when  it  came  was  complete,  and 
nationalism  had  spent  most  of  its  force  in 
the  early  twentieth  century. 

Vaughan  Williams  had  the  integrity 
and  independence  of  his  middle-class 
origins,  the  lively  conscience  and  streak 
of  Puritanism  of  his  formal  education, 
and  an  impressive  physical  presence. 
He  belonged  to  that  small  class  of 
Englishmen  who  are  by  temperament 
and  upbringing  radical  traditionalists  or 
conservative  liberals ;  he  could  even 
be  described  as  an  agnostic  Christian, 
in  that  while  cherishing  the  main  tra- 
ditions of  English  life,  its  folksong,  its 
hymnody,  its  ecclesiastical  occasions,  its 
liberal  politics,  its  roots,  he  was  forward- 
looking,  outspoken,  and  quick  to  protest 
at  official  obscurantism,  timidity,  or  in- 
tolerance, as  when  he  publicly  depre- 
cated the  banning  of  Communist  musicians 
from  access  to  the  radio  during  the  war  of 
1939-45.  In  the  war  of  1914^18  he  enlisted 
as  a  private  in  the  Royal  Army  Medical 
Corps  and  went  to  France  and  then  to 
Salonica,  but  in  1917  he  was  transferred  to 
the  Royal  Garrison  Artillery  and  given  a 
commission.  He  was  sent  again  to  France 
in  March  1918  at  the  time  of  the  great 
retreat.  During  his  time  in  the  army  he 
had  organized  such  music  as  was  possible 
in  recreation  huts  and  after  the  armistice 
was  made  director  of  music.  First  Army, 
B.E.F.,  France,  imtil  he  was  demobilized. 

His  earliest  music,  apart  from  student 
and  prentice  work,  consisted  of  songs, 
of  which  'Linden  Lea'  (1902),  the  first 
published  work,  became  and  remained 
a  classic.  Another  early  song,  'Silent 
Noon'  (1908),  which  was,  however,  one 
of  a  sequence  of  six  settings  of  sonnets 
by  Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti  [q.v.],  also 
achieved  a  wide  and  lasting  currency. 
In  retrospect  Rossetti  seems  less  suited 
to  his  robust  imagination  than  R.  L. 
Stevenson  [q.v.]  {Songs  of  Travel,  1904) 
or  Walt  WTiitman  {Towards  the  Unknown 
Region,  1907)  who  provided  texts  for 
more  characteristic  music.  By  the  time 
the  latter  had  been  given  at  the  Leeds 
Festival  of  1907  and  had  proclaimed 
that  a  new  voice  was  to  be  heard  in 
English  music,  a  crisis  in  style  had 
been  resolved    by    Vaughan    Williams's 


1007 


Vaughan  Williams 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


discovery  of  English  folksong.  He  had  been 
attracted  in  youth  by  Christmas  carols 
and  such  few  folksongs  as  came  his  way 
— 'Dives  and  Lazarus'  was  a  favourite 
which  years  later  was  to  give  him  the 
'Five  Variants  of  "Dives  and  Lazarus'" 
for  harp  and  string  orchestra  (1939) 
— but  in  December  1903  he  collected 
'Bushes  and  Briars'  in  Essex,  the  first 
of  several  hundreds  of  authentic  folk- 
songs taken  down  from  the  lips  of  tradi- 
tional country  singers  in  the  course  of 
the  next  few  years.  The  modal  character  of 
these  tunes  unlocked  for  him  the  idiom 
which  had  been  struggling  to  erupt 
and  the  first-fruits  of  the  emancipation 
were  three  orchestral  'Norfolk  Rhap- 
sodies' (1906-7)  and  the  Fantasia  on 
Christmas  Carols  (1912).  The  rhapsody 
and  the  fantasia  were  the  forms  found 
by  all  nationalist  composers  to  be  more 
suited  to  thematic  material  derived 
from  national  tunes  than  conventional 
sonata  form,  which  is  recalcitrant  to 
extended  melody.  He  continued  to  com- 
pose songs  on  and  off  throughout  his 
life  but  in  diminishing  numbers  after 
about  1930,  although  his  last  completed 
work  was  a  set  of  'Four  Last  Songs' 
(1958). 

Vaughan  Williams  would  not  have 
been  the  traditionalist  he  was  had  he 
failed  to  contribute  to  the  long  tradition 
of  English  choral  music.  After  the 
success  of  his  Whitman  cantata  at  Leeds 
in  1907  it  was  natural  for  him  to  provide 
something  more  substantial  for  the 
premier  choral  festival :  the  Sea  Symphony ^ 
with  words  again  by  Whitman,  for  the 
festival  of  1910.  More  than  Beethoven's 
Ninth  is  this  a  true  choral  symphony 
since  all  its  four  movements  are  vocal 
and  at  the  same  time  are  cast  in  one  or 
other  of  the  symphonic  forms.  As  Vau- 
ghan Williams's  mind  gradually  turned 
towards  the  symphony,  which  was  even- 
tually to  form  the  central  corpus  of  his 
output,  this  large-scale  cantata  took  its 
place  as  the  first  in  the  canon  of  his 
nine  symphonies.  There  is  only  one 
oratorio  actually  so  called  among  his 
choral  works  with  biblical  words,  Sancta 
Cimtas  (1926),  of  which  the  words  are 
derived  from  the  Apocalypse  and  pre- 
faced by  a  quotation  from  Plato.  Hodie 
nearly  thirty  years  on  (1954),  however, 
is,  in  fact  if  not  in  official  nomenclature, 
a  Christmas  oratorio.  Of  the  other  choral 
works  some  are  occasional  pieces,  Bene- 
dicite  (1929),  Dona  nobis  pacem  (1936), 
Flourish  for  a  Coronation  (1937),  A  Song 


of  Thanksgiving  (1944),  and  only  Five 
Tudor  Portraits  (1935)  is  of  the  dimen- 
sions of  a  secular  oratorio,  although 
An  Oxford  Elegy  and  Fantasia  on  the 
'Old  104th'  (both  1949)  employ  a  chorus, 
the  one  with  an  obbligato  for  a  speaker, 
the  other  with  an  obbligato  for  piano- 
forte. 

His  first  purely  instrumental  symphony 
was  the  London,  completed  before  the 
war  but  revised  before  publication  in 
1920.  Two  other  of  his  nine  symphonies 
bear  titles.  No.  3,  the  Pastoral  (1922), 
and  No.  7,  Sinfonia  Antartica  (1952), 
which  was  an  overflow  from  the  music 
he  had  composed  for  a  film,  Scott  of  the 
Antarctic.  Nos.  4  (1935)  and  6  (1948) 
are  so  angry  and  disturbing  that  they 
have  also  suggested  a  submerged  pro- 
gramme, which  the  composer  himself 
firmly  deprecated.  No.  5  (1943)  had 
an  avowed  connection  with  The  Pilgrim's 
Progress,  on  a  setting  of  which  the  com- 
poser was  contemporaneously  working. 
Nos.  8  (1956)  and  9  (1958)  show  a  pre- 
occupation with  formal  experiment  and 
tone  colour.  No.  9  was  performed  only 
four  months  before  his  death  and  while 
it  showed  no  lack  of  vigour  it  did  sound 
a  note  of  something  like  resignation 
not  previously  heard  in  his  music.  The 
range  of  experience  covered  is  wide, 
although  the  subjective  emotions  explored 
by  the  German  symphonists  are  not  pro- 
minent. 

Vaughan  Williams  also  composed  a 
good  deal  of  dramatic  music,  which 
includes  incidental  music  to  pageants, 
masques,  Shakespeare,  Greek  plays  (of 
which  the  overture  and  suite  for  The 
Wasps  of  Aristophanes,  1909,  is  the  chief 
and  has  an  independent  existence), 
film  scores,  ballets,  and  operas.  These 
last  are  heterogeneous,  ranging  from 
the  quasi-ballad  opera  to  the  text 
of  Harold  Child  [q.v.],  Hugh  the  Drover 
(1924),  to  the  full-length  comedy  Sir 
John  in  Love  (1929);  from  the  farcical 
extravaganza  The  Poisoned  Kiss  (1936) 
to  the  word-for-word  setting  of  the 
tragic  Riders  to  the  Sea  (1937)  and  the 
'morality'  The  Pilgrim's  Progress  (1951). 
In  none  of  these  is  the  dramatic  touch 
as  certain  as  in  the  symphonies  and 
choral  works  and  they  are  not  wholly 
proof  against  theatrical  mischance,  yet 
the  work  which  is  not  only  utterly  charac- 
teristic but  reveals  supreme  mastery  is  a 
stage  work,  the  ballet  Job  (1931). 

Many  of  his  most  characteristic  works 
are  not  classifiable  in  the  normal  cate- 


1008 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Ventris 


gories.  Such  are  the  Serenade  to  Music 
(1938)  dedicated  to  Sir  Henry  Wood 
[q.v.],  Flos  Campi  (1925)  which  is  a 
suite  scored  for  solo  viola,  small  orches- 
tra, and  small  chorus,  and  his  most 
important  chamber  work  is  a  song  se- 
quence 'On  Wenlock  Edge'  (1909)  with 
accompaniment  for  string  quartet  and 
piano.  There  is  an  element  of  cussedness 
in  his  attitude  to  the  concerto:  he  wrote 
four  so  called,  besides  two  'Romances' 
and  a  suite,  for  instrumental  solo  with 
orchestra.  Those  for  violin  are  not  vir- 
tuoso works ;  that  for  piano  the  composer 
rearranged  for  two  keyboards  to  make 
it  more  effective;  on  the  other  hand  it 
was  a  particular  performer's  virtuosity 
which  evoked  the  concerto-type  works 
for  viola,  oboe,  harmonica,  and  tuba. 

There  is  no  side  of  music  which  Vau- 
ghan  WiUiams  did  not  touch  and  enrich, 
although  some  of  his  compositions  were 
primarily  of  occasional  and  local  signi- 
ficance, and  for  piano  and  organ  he 
wrote  little.  His  settings  and  arrange- 
ments of  folksongs,  however,  are  a  valu- 
able parergon.  He  conducted  the  Bach 
Choir  from  1921  to  1928  and  taught 
composition  at  the  Royal  College  of  Music 
for  twenty  years.  His  literary  output 
consisted  mostly  of  pamphlets  and  lec- 
tures, which  were  reprinted  in  book 
form,  the  chief  being  National  Music 
(1934)  in  which  his  aesthetic  creed  was 
formulated.  He  did  his  share  of  commit- 
tee work,  notably  in  connection  with  the 
English  Folk  Dance  and  Song  Society, 
of  which  he  became  president  in  1946. 
The  honours  which  came  to  him,  an 
honorary  doctorate  of  music  from  Oxford 
(1919),  an  honorary  fellowship  of  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge  (1935),  and  the  Order 
of  Merit  (1935),  were  no  doubt  for  his 
eminence  as  a  composer,  but  they  were 
also  a  recognition  of  the  manifold  services 
he  rendered  to  EngUsh  music.  It  was  not 
until  he  was  an  old  man  that  it  was  rea- 
lized that  there  was  no  formal  portrait 
of  him.  The  Royal  College  of  Music 
therefore  commissioned  one  from  Sir 
Gerald  Kelly  which  hangs  in  the  coUege. 
The  Manchester  City  Art  Gallery  has 
a  bronze  by  Epstein  and  the  National 
Portrait  Gallery  drawings  by  Juliet 
Pannett  and  Joyce  Finzi  and  a  bronze  by 
David  McFall. 

In  1897  Vaughan  WiUiams  married 
Adeline  (died  1951),  daughter  of  Herbert 
William  Fisher  and  sister  of  H.  A.  L. 
and  Sir  W.  W.  Fisher  [qq.v.].  In  1953 
he  married  Ursula,  daughter  of  Major- 


General  Sir  Robert  Lock  and  widow 
of  Lieutenant-Colonel  J.  M.  J.  Forrester 
Wood.  He  died  in  London  26  August  1958 
and  was  buried  in  Westminster  Abbey. 

[Ursula    Vaughan    Williams,    R.V.W.:    A 

Biography  of  Ralph  Vaughan  Williams,  1964; 

Michael    Kennedy,     The    Wwks    of    Italph 

Vaughan  Williams,  1964 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Frank  Howes. 

VENTRIS,  MICHAEL  GEORGE 
FRANCIS  (1922-1956),  architect  and 
archaeologist,  was  born  at  Wheathamp- 
stead,  Hertfordshire,  12  July  1922, 
the  only  child  of  Edward  Francis  Vere- 
ker  Ventris,  an  officer  in  the  Indian 
Army,  by  his  wife,  Dora  Janasz,  who  was 
partly  of  Polish  descent.  He  was  educated 
at  Stowe  School,  and  went  in  1940  to 
the  Architectural  Association  school  in 
London.  He  served  as  a  navigator  in  the 
Royal  Air  Force  during  the  war,  and 
afterwards  completed  his  training  as 
an  architect,  taking  his  diploma  with 
honours  in  1948.  He  worked  as  a  member 
of  the  Ministry  of  Education  develop- 
ment group  of  schools  branch,  and  to- 
gether with  his  wife  designed  their  own 
house  in  Hampstead.  His  work  had 
already  attracted  notice,  and  a  brilliant 
career  as  an  architect  had  been  predicted 
for  him.  In  1956  he  was  awarded  the 
first  research  fellowship  offered  by  the 
Architects'  Journal. 

His  fame,  however,  was  the  product 
of  his  hobby.  From  childhood  he  had 
been  keenly  interested  in  languages  and 
scripts — at  preparatory  school  in  Switzer- 
land he  ran  a  club  called  La  Kaboule — 
and  a  lecture  by  Sir  Arthur  Evans  [q.v.] 
turned  his  attention  at  the  age  of  fourteen 
to  the  problem  of  the  undeciphered 
Minoan  scripts.  These,  called  by  Evans 
Linear  A  and  Linear  B,  were  written 
on  clay  tablets  by  the  prehistoric  in- 
habitants of  Crete  and  mainland  Greece, 
The  Linear  B  script,  which  Ventris  even- 
tually deciphered,  may  be  dated  roughly 
between  1400  and  1200  b.c. 

He  began  by  proposing,  when  only 
eighteen,  in  an  article  published  in  the 
American  Journal  of  Archaeology  for 
1940,  that  the  language  was  related 
to  Etruscan;  and  he  clung  to  this  mis- 
taken idea  until  his  work  forced  him 
to  recognize  the  existence  of  Greek 
in  the  texts.  Returning  to  the  problem 
after  the  war,  he  corresponded  with  the 
chief  scholars  all  over  the  world  who 
were  working  in  this  field,  and  circulated 
month  by  month  reports  on  his  own  work. 


1000 


Ventris 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


The  publication  in  1951  of  the  tablets 
found  at  Pylos  in  south-west  Greece 
in  1939  provided  him  with  a  great  in- 
crease of  material,  and  his  systematic 
analysis  of  this  was  the  foundation  of 
his  success.  The  graphic  system  consists 
of  about  ninety  syllabic  signs,  supple- 
mented by  numerals  and  rough  picto- 
grams,  representing  persons,  objects, 
and  commodities.  Painstaking  work  com- 
bined with  imaginative  skill  enabled 
him  to  establish  connections  between 
the  syllabic  signs,  so  that  many  of  them 
could  be  linked  as  sharing  the  same 
vowel.  In  this  way  he  built  up  a  table, 
or  'grid'  as  he  called  it,  showing  the  rela- 
tionship of  the  signs  before  any  had 
been  given  a  phonetic  value. 

All  that  was  then  necessary  was  to  find 
the  values  of  a  few  signs,  which  would 
automatically  determine  the  linked  signs. 
This  vital  step  was  taken  by  means  of 
some  words  which  Ventris  identified  as 
Cretan  place-names ;  and  the  substitution 
of  these  values  in  other  words  inmie- 
diately  suggested  a  Greek  interpretation. 
The  Greek  solution  was  first  tentatively 
suggested  in  a  privately  circulated  note 
dated  1  June  1952,  and  repeated  with 
more  confidence  and  examples  in  a  broad- 
cast talk  a  month  later.  He  at  once  sought 
the  help  of  Greek  scholars  in  developing 
his  theory,  which  he  published  in  the 
Journal  of  Hellenic  Studies  for  1953. 
The  theory  was  at  first  treated  with  some 
scepticism,  but  within  a  year  of  the  first 
announcement  a  new  tablet  was  published 
which  strikingly  confirmed  the  values 
already  proposed.  This  proof  was  accepted 
by  the  great  majority  of  Greek  scholars. 

Ventris's  only  printed  book  was  Docu- 
ments in  Mycenaean  Greek  which  was 
on  the  point  of  publication  at  the  time 
of  his  death.  His  achievement  ranks 
not  only  with  the  great  decipherments 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  with  Grotefend, 
Rawlinson,  and  ChampoUion;  but  also 
with  the  archaeological  discoveries  of 
Schliemann  and  Evans,  in  opening  up 
a  new  vista  in  Greek  history.  The  demon- 
stration that  Greek  was  already  spoken  in 
Greece  in  the  Mycenaean  age  was  a  satis- 
fying confirmation  of  generally  held  views ; 
but  theories  of  the  relationship  of  Crete 
and  the  mainland  have  had  to  be  drastic- 
ally revised.  Knowledge  of  the  Mycenaean 
dialect  has  thrown  new  light  on  the  history 
of  the  Greek  language ;  and  the  study  of 
Mycenaean  institutions  as  revealed  by  the 
tablets  has  provided  much  new  material  for 
comparison  with  Homer. 


Ventris  received  the  O.B.E.  in  1955; 
the  university  of  Uppsala  conferred 
upon  him  an  honorary  doctorate,  and 
University  College,  London,  made  him 
an  honorary  research  associate.  In  spite 
of  honours  he  remained  modest  and 
unassuming;  gay,  witty,  and  versatile, 
he  was  never  too  busy  to  answer  a  re- 
quest for  help  or  to  listen  to  a  suggestion. 
His  charm  and  skill  as  a  linguist  made 
him  popular  at  international  meetings. 

He  was  killed  in  an  accident  near 
Hatfield,  while  driving  alone  in  his 
car  in  the  early  hours  of  the  morning 
of  6  September  1956.  A  fund  was  opened 
to  create  a  studentship  in  his  memory 
to  encourage  his  two  chief  interests: 
architecture  and  Mycenaean  civilization; 
and  he  was  posthumously  awarded  the 
Kenyon  medal  for  classical  studies  by 
the  British  Academy.  He  married  in 
1942  Lois  Elizabeth,  daughter  of  Hugh 
William  Knox-Niven,  lieutenant-colonel, 
by  whom  he  had  a  son  and  a  daughter. 

[The  Times,  8,  10,  and  17  September  1956 ; 
John  Chadwick,  The  Decipherment  of  Linear 
B,  1958 ;  private  information ;  personal  know- 
ledge.] John  Chadwick. 

VERDON-ROE,  Sir  (EDWIN) 
ALLIOTT  VERDON  (1877-1958), 
aircraft  designer  and  constructor,  was 
born  at  Patricroft,  Manchester,  26  April 
1877,  son  of  Edwin  Hodgson  Roe,  a 
doctor,  and  his  wife,  Sofia  Verdon. 
He  was  the  fourth  of  a  family  of  three 
girls  and  four  boys.  He  left  St.  Paul's  at 
the  age  of  fifteen  and  after  a  year  in 
British  Columbia  in  1893  became  an 
apprentice  at  the  Lancashire  and  York- 
shire Railway  Locomotive  works,  after- 
wards studying  marine  engineering  at 
King's  College,  London.  In  1899  he  joined 
the  British  and  South  African  Royal 
Mail  Company.  During  his  last  voyage  in 
1902  as  engineer  he  became  fascinated  by 
the  way  birds  flew  and  made  many  flying 
models  which  determined  him  to  take  up 
the  problem  of  mechanical  flight.  He  took 
a  job  in  the  motor-car  industry  and  spent 
all  his  spare  time  making  and  studying 
flying  models. 

In  1907  Roe  entered  a  model  aero- 
plane competition,  defeating  200  com- 
petitors to  win  a  £75  prize.  With  it  he 
built  a  full-sized  aeroplane,  a  copy  of 
his  winning  model.  He  was  grudgingly 
allowed  to  try  out  his  experimental 
machines  at  Brooklands,  then  a  motor 
track,  but  the  authorities  gave  him  no 
encouragement     whatsoever.      In     May 


1010 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Vickers 


1908  he  fitted  a  more  powerful  engine 
to  his  machine.  After  a  few  trials  he 
was  forced  to  leave  Brooklands,  despite 
the  fact  that  he  had  made  a  number 
of  short  flights.  They  were  the  first 
occasions  when  a  British-designed  and 
British-built  aeroplane  had  risen  from 
the  ground  under  its  own  power,  piloted 
by  the  designer  and  constructor. 

He  went  next  to  his  brother's  coach- 
house in  Putney  and  there  built  a  triplane 
fitted  with  a  9  h.p.  J.A.P.  motor-cycle 
engine.  The  triplane  made  a  number  of 
flights  in  1909  and  is  now  preserved  in  the 
Science  Museum,  South  Kensington.  In 
January  1910  his  brother,  H.  V.  Roe,  who 
was  head  of  a  manufacturing  firm  in  Man- 
chester, helped  to  found  the  Avro  Company 
in  Manchester.  The  new  facilities  brought 
dramatic  results  from  Roe,  who  showed  an 
astonishing  instinct  for  the  right  propor- 
tion and  shape  of  aeroplanes.  In  1911  he 
designed  the  first  enclosed  cabin  aeroplane, 
which  flew  in  1912  and  was  entered  in  the 
British  military  trials  that  year.  In  Octo- 
ber 1912  it  established  a  British  flying 
record  of  seven  and  a  half  hours. 

In  the  following  year  Roe  designed  and 
built  the  famous  Avro  504  which  in  its 
improved  form  became  the  best-known 
military  aeroplane  of  the  war  of  1914-18. 
It  was  revolutionary  in  its  design  and  so 
successful  that  the  greater  part  of  the 
world's  aircraft  designers  adopted  the 
general  layout  of  this  tractor  biplane.  In 
its  various  forms  and  improvements  it  was 
in  use  until  1939.  In  1917  it  became 
the  standard  trainer  and  for  a  quarter  of 
a  century,  with  very  little  change  except 
for  increased  engine  power,  it  was  renowned 
for  a  system  of  pilot  training  far  ahead  of 
any  other  method. 

The  Avro  504  was  also  used  as  a 
bomber  by  the  Royal  Navy:  three  naval 
pilots  carried  out  a  raid  on  the  Zeppelin 
sheds  at  Friedrichshafen  on  21  November 
1914,  the  first  air  raid  in  the  history  of 
warfare. 

In  1928  the  controlling  interest  in 
the  Avro  Company  was  obtained  by  the 
Armstrong  Siddeley  Motor  Company; 
Roe  sold  out  and  bought  an  interest  in 
Saunders,  Ltd.,  of  Cowes,  the  boat 
builders.  The  name  was  changed  to 
Saunders-Roe,  and  their  flying  boats 
became  famous.  He  remained  president 
of  the  company  for  the  rest  of  his 
life. 

On  8  June  1928,  the  twentieth  anni- 
versary of  his  first  flight,  the  leading 
aeronautical  bodies  united  to  give  Roe 


a  dinner  in  recognition  of  his  pioneer 
work  for  British  aviation. 

In  June  1954,  when  Brooklands  had 
ceased  to  be  a  race-track  and  testing- 
ground  for  motor-cars,  and  had  become 
the  centre  of  aircraft  design  and  con- 
struction, a  memorial  plaque  was  placed 
there  to  'the  first  of  the  long  line  of 
famous  pioneers  and  pilots  ...  on  this 
flying  field  of  Brooklands'. 

In  1929  Roe  was  knighted  although 
it  was  not  until  1933  that  he  assumed 
the  additional  name  of  Verdon  in  honour 
of  his  mother.  He  died  at  his  home, 
Long  Meadows,  Rowland's  Castle,  Hamp- 
shire, 4  January  1958.  He  married  in 
1910  Mildred  Ehzabeth  (died  1965), 
daughter  of  Samuel  Kirk,  of  Derby, 
by  whom  he  had  four  sons  and  five 
daughters.  Two  of  his  sons  were  killed 
on  operational  flying  duties  in  the  war  of 
1939-45.  To  the  last  Roe  beheved  that 
the  conquest  of  mechanical  flight  would 
bring  immense  .benefits  to  the  world. 
He  was  full  of  ideas  and  clear  in  his 
vision  of  the  future.  More  than  thirty 
years  before  his  death  he  had  predicted 
that  aircraft  would  be  flying  at  over 
a  thousand  miles  an  hour  at  heights 
of  over  twelve  miles,  with  passengers 
in  warm,  pressurized  cabins.  He  believed 
firmly  that  speeds  would  increase  with 
height  above  the  earth  and  the  times  of 
long  journeys  be  reduced  to  an  astonish- 
ing degree. 

Roe  joined  the  Royal  Aeronautical 
Society  in  1909,  only  a  year  after  he 
had  designed,  built,  and  flown  the  first 
British  aeroplane ;  in  1948  he  was  elected 
an  honorary  fellow.  Portraits  by  Frank 
Eastman  are  at  Avro's,  Manchester, 
the  Royal  Aero  Club,  and  in  the  posses- 
sion of  the  family. 

[L.  J.  Ludovici,  The  Challenging  Sky,  1956; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.  Laurence  Pritchard. 

VICKERS,        KENNETH       HOTHAM 

(1881-1958),  historian,  and  principal  of 
University  College,  Southampton,  was 
born  22  May  1881  at  Naburn,  near 
York,  where  his  father,  the  Rev.  Randall 
WiUiam  Vickers,  was  then  vicar.  He  was 
the  youngest  of  a  family  of  four,  having 
a  brother  and  two  sisters.  His  mother, 
Emma  Mary  Davidson,  was  of  Scottish 
descent.  He  was  at  school  at  Oundle  until 
the  age  of  fifteen,  when,  as  a  result  of 
polio,  he  was  left  with  a  serious  weak- 
ness in  one  arm  and  one  leg,  a  disability 
he   faced  with  great  courage,  to  live  a 


1011 


Vickers 


P.N.B.  1951-1960 


normal  life  full  of  activity.  He  had  been 
a  good  cricketer  at  Oundle  and  retained 
a  keen  interest  in  the  game.  In  spite  of 
his  leg  he  did  much  walking  in  Germany 
and  Eastern  Europe.  He  spoke  German 
well  and  liked  the  German  people. 

With  the  aid  of  private  tuition  Vickers 
gained  an  open  scholarship  in  history 
at  Exeter  College,  Oxford,  matriculating 
in  October  1900.  Among  his  fellow 
students  were  Herbert  (later  Lord)  du 
Parcq  [q.v.],  (Bishop)  Blunt,  and  Alfred 
Noyes  [q.v.].  Then,  as  later,  he  was  a 
friendly,  good-natured  man  who  'used 
to  sing'.  He  just  missed  a  first  in  the 
final  history  school  (1904),  but  was  twice 
proxime  accessit  for  the  Stanhope  prize 
essay,  college  prizeman  (1903),  and 
proxime  accessit  for  the  Arnold  prize 
(1906). 

For  three  years  (1905-8)  Vickers  was 
lecturer  in  history  at  University  College, 
Bristol;  he  was  organizer  and  lecturer 
in  London  history  for  the  London  County 
Council  (1907-9),  then  tutor  to  the 
university  of  London  joint  committee 
for  tutorial  classes  (1908-13).  Extra- 
mural work  was  developing  rapidly 
and  in  this  arduous  work  of  popular 
education  Vickers  revealed  himself  as  a 
teacher  of  great  power  and  devotion. 
He  attracted  students  to  his  voluntary 
classes  and  retained  them  year  after 
year.  Vickers  also  gained  experience  in 
the  organization  of  academic  teaching 
of  great  value  to  him  later  and  did  much 
work  for  the  Historical  Association 
and  similar  bodies.  He  became  a  fellow 
of  the  Royal  Historical  Society  in  1909. 
Meanwhile  his  own  studies  were  not 
neglected  and  the  results  were  published 
in  a  biography  of  Humphrey,  Duke  of 
Gloucester  (1907),  England  in  the  Later 
Middle  Ages  (1913),  and  A  Short  History 
of  London  (1914). 

In  1913  Vickers  was  elected  professor 
of  modern  history  in  the  university  of 
Durham  at  Armstrong  College,  later 
the  university  of  Newcastle.  There  he 
spent  the  war  years  and  in  1922  pub- 
lished volume  xi  of  the  Northumberland 
County  History. 

In  1922  he  became  principal  of  the 
University  College  of  Southampton,  and 
thereafter  until  his  retirement  in  1946 
devoted  himself  to  the  task  of  de- 
veloping the  college  to  full  university 
status.  The  provision  of  new  buildings 
was  a  major  need.  When  Vickers  was 
appointed  the  college  consisted  of  two 
wings  of  brickwork  united  by  a  corridor 


with  an  arched  roof,  which  he  once 
described  as  its  most  notable  archi- 
tectural feature,  and  a  number  of  wooden 
huts.  The  huts,  which  continued  in  use 
to  some  extent  throughout  Vickers's 
time,  were  a  legacy  of  war  when  the 
newly  erected  buildings,  formally  opened 
in  June  1914,  but  not  yet  occupied,  had 
been  handed  over  for  use  as  a  hospital. 

The  new  principal  faced  a  heavy  task: 
'Throughout  the  twenty-four  years  during 
which  I  was  responsible  for  the  admini- 
stration', he  wrote,  'there  was  no  time 
when  lack  of  money  did  not  prove  a 
serious  obstacle.'  The  long  succession 
of  financial  difficulties,  the  critical  situa- 
tions which  arose,  the  appeals  for 
money,  only  partially  successful,  and  the 
timely  aid  of  generous  benefactors  have 
been  set  out  in  detail  in  the  centenary 
history  of  The  University  of  Southampton 
(1962)  by  A.  Temple  Patterson. 

Deficits  of  two  or  three  thousand 
pounds,  mainly  due  to  capital  expendi- 
ture, in  those  days  caused  serious  concern 
and  even  reduction  of  staff  and  equip- 
ment. As  late  as  1937,  when  a  refectory 
and  students  union  building  was  planned 
at  the  modest  cost  of  £10,000,  the  Uni- 
versity Grants  Committee  undertook  to 
make  a  grant  of  £8,000  only  on  condi- 
tion that  the  remaining  £2,000  was 
obtained  from  private  donors.  Vickers 
fought  on  and  held  fast  to  the  principles 
he  considered  essential  to  a  university. 
He  stressed  the  importance  of  residence 
and  of  tutorial  supervision  of  students 
and  their  self-government  in  many  acti- 
vities, and  particularly  strove  to  ensure 
that  the  academic  body  should  have  a 
large  share  in  all  matters  of  policy. 

Much  had  been  achieved  by  1939. 
A  new  library  of  some  distinction  linked 
the  two  wings,  science  departments 
had  been  partly  rehoused,  and  work 
begun  in  some  new  and  promising  fields 
such  as  aeronautics.  Halls  of  residence 
had  been  provided  for  men  and  women 
and  further  building  was  planned.  Again 
the  incidence  of  war  suspended  develop- 
ment and  it  was  not  until  1952,  six  years 
after  Vickers  retired,  that  his  final  aim 
was  reached,  when  the  university  of 
Southampton  was  constituted  by  royal 
charter.  In  its  rapid  growth  and  expansion 
it  retains  much  of  Vickers's  design,  not 
least  in  its  social  and  democratic  quality. 
The  university  recognized  its  debt  to  him 
by  conferring  upon  him  an  honorary 
LL.D.  in  1953. 

Vickers's  career  was  characterized  by 


1012 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Villiers 


a  humane  and  liberal  outlook  owing 
much  to  deep  reUgious  conviction.  In 
some  autobiographical  papers  which  he 
left  he  recalled  the  religious  atmosphere 
of  his  home  leading  him  to  fall  naturally 
into  the  acceptance  of  religion  as  the 
foundation  of  life  and  the  guide  to 
conduct.  Himself  a  churchman  of  High 
Anglican  views  he  was  at  the  same  time 
singularly  free  from  bigotry  or  intoler- 
ance. 'In  my  opinion  true  Christianity 
teaches  men  to  look  at  the  other  man's 
point  of  view  and  to  feel  that  in  the 
grace  of  God  one  has  the  power  and  the 
duty  to  practise  charity  in  the  true  sense 
of  the  word.'  This  ideal,  his  devotion 
to  his  difficult  task,  his  shrewdness  of 
judgement,  and  his  courage  in  the  face 
of  all  obstacles  and  physical  handicaps 
enabled  Vickers  to  carry  his  team  with 
him  through  long  years  of  effort,  often 
of  frustration  and  disappointment. 

Vickers  married  in  1911  Alice  Mar- 
gretha  (died  1948),  daughter  of  Dr. 
Edward  Grossman;  they  had  two  sons 
of  whom  one  died  in  infancy.  Vickers 
died  5  September  1958  at  Southampton. 
There  is  a  portrait  by  Alexander  Stuart 
Hill  in  the  University  Library. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

G.    F.    FORSEY. 

VILLIERS,  GEORGE  HERBERT 
HYDE,  sixth  Earl  of  Clarendon 
(1877-1955),  public  servant,  was  born  at 
the  Grove,  Watford,  7  June  1877,  the 
only  son  of  the  fifth  Earl  of  Clarendon 
of  the  second  creation,  by  his  first  wife, 
Lady  Caroline  Elizabeth  Agar,  daughter 
of  the  third  Earl  of  Normanton.  His 
father  was  lord-in-waiting  to  Queen 
Victoria  (1895-1901)  and  lord  chamber- 
lain to  King  Edward  VII  (1901-5).  His 
ancestors  included  on  his  paternal  side 
Edward  Hyde  and  the  Villiers  family, 
who  were  close  friends  of  the  Stuart 
kings,  and  on  his  maternal  side  a  daughter 
of  Oliver  Cromwell.  Heredity  thus  pro- 
duced in  him  a  blend  of  Roundhead 
integrity  with  the  gaiety  and  tolerance 
of  the  Cavaliers. 

Wliile  at  Eton  he  fell  down  a  flight 
of  stone  stairs  running  for  a  fagmaster's 
call  and  broke  his  hip.  He  was  in  hospital 
for  eighteen  months.  When  the  college 
chapel  bell  tolled  for  the  death  of  the 
wife  of  the  vice-provost,  it  was  assumed 
that  it  was  for  the  young  Lord  Hyde, 
who  had  the  rare  experience  of  reading 
a  notice  of  his  death  in  The  Times  of  the 
following  day.  He  was  left  with  a  perma- 


nently stiff  hip,  and  an  athletic  career 
of  great  promise  was  brought  to  an 
abrupt  end.  His  father,  who  had  pinned 
great  hopes  on  him,  was  uncontrollably 
disappointed  and  immediately  took  his 
name  off  the  list  of  candidates  for  the 
M.C.C.,  the  Royal  Horse  Guards,  and 
Oxford  University. 

On  leaving  school  Lord  Hyde  lived 
at  his  father's  house,  the  Grove,  near 
Watford,  an  eighteenth-century  mansion 
which,  in  the  days  of  his  grandfather, 
the  fourth  Earl  of  Clarendon  [q.v.], 
had  been  a  centre  for  Victorian  Liberals 
such  as  Palmerston,  Macaulay,  and 
Lady  Holland.  There  he  spent  his  time 
in  such  country  pursuits  as  he  could 
indulge.  His  reputation  as  a  shot  and  his 
skill  at  billiards  and  golf  were  indi- 
cations of  the  games-player  and  sportsman 
he  might  have  become. 

In  1902  Lord  Hyde  went  to  Ireland 
as  extra  aide-de-camp  to  the  lord-lieu- 
tenant, Lord  Dudley  [q.v.].  In  1905  he 
returned  to  marry  Adeline  Verena  Ishbel 
(died  1963),  daughter  of  Herbert  Haldane 
Somers-Cocks,  sister  of  the  sixth  Lord 
Somers  [q.v.],  a  marriage  which  was 
ideally  happy  for  over  fifty  years.  His 
father  insisted  that  the  young  couple 
live  with  him  at  the  Grove  and  continued 
to  treat  his  son  with  the  austere  disci- 
pline of  a  Victorian  parent.  In  1909 
Lord  Hyde  became  a  deputy-lieutenant 
and  justice  of  the  peace  for  Hertford- 
shire. After  six  uncomfortable  and  frus- 
trating years.  Lord  and  Lady  Hyde  left 
England  with  Lord  Somers  and  their 
uncle,  Percy  Somers-Cocks,  to  settle  in 
Canada  where  they  built  their  own  farm- 
house and  ran  a  fruit  farm  in  Ontario. 
On  the  outbreak  of  war  and  on  the  death 
of  his  father  in  1914  they  returned  to 
England.  Unfit  for  active  service,  Lord 
Clarendon  nevertheless  joined  the  Hert- 
fordshire Volunteer  Regiment,  becoming 
temporary  lieutenant-colonel  and  county 
commandant  from  1916  to  1920. 

The  war  over,  he  entered  politics  as  a 
Conservative,  and  from  1919  to  1921 
was  chancellor  of  the  Primrose  League. 
In  1921  he  was  appointed  a  lord-in- 
waiting  to  King  George  V,  and  from 
1922  to  1925  he  was  chief  Conservative 
whip  in  the  House  of  Lords  and  captain 
of  the  Honourable  Corps  of  Gentlemen- 
at-Arms.  From  1925  to  1927  he  was 
parliamentary  under-secretary  for  domi- 
nion affairs  and  chairman  of  the  Over- 
seas Settlement  Committee,  in  which 
capacity  he  made  a  tour  of  Canada  and 


1013 


Villiers 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


reported  on  the  great  success  of  the 
group  system  of  settlement.  From  1927 
to  1930  he  was  chairman  of  the  British 
Broadcasting  Corporation,  of  which  Sir 
John  (later  Lord)  Reith  'was  then 
director-general.  There  Clarendon's  tact 
and  courtesy  made  him  a  popular  head 
of  a  new  and  growing  service. 

In  1931  Clarendon  succeeded  Lord 
Athlone  [q.v.]  as  governor-general  of 
South  Africa,  and  was  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council.  J.  B.  M.  Hertzog  [q.v.] 
had  asked  for  Clarendon  who  became 
entirely  acceptable  to  the  Afrikaans- 
speaking  population,  as  he  naturally  was 
to  the  British  element.  He  was  not  only 
the  first  governor-general  appointed  on 
the  direct  recommendation  of  the  prime 
minister  of  South  Africa  and  the  first 
to  serve  solely  as  the  representative 
of  the  Crown,  but  also  the  last  English- 
man to  hold  the  appointment.  At  the 
Imperial  Conference  of  1926  he  had 
impressed  Hertzog  by  his  frank  and  open 
manner,  and  by  his  tact  and  earnestness. 
He  also  had  a  gift  for  languages,  and 
quickly  acquired  a  working  knowledge 
of  Afrikaans  which  was  useful  when  he 
visited  the  country  districts  and  could 
discuss  weather  and  crops  with  farmers. 

Clarendon's  impartiality  and  straight- 
forwardness impressed  itself  on  all 
sections  of  political  opinion  and  his 
time  as  governor-general  was  not  com- 
plicated by  any  outstanding  political 
difficulties.  The  rapprochement  between 
Hertzog  and  J.  C.  Smuts  [q.v.],  in  which 
he  played  a  personal  part,  was  deeply 
satisfying  to  him.  Even  more  so  was 
the  return  of  prosperity  to  South  Africa 
due  to  the  revival  of  the  gold-mining 
industry  after  the  strain  of  maintaining 
the  gold  standard.  The  happy  tenure 
of  his  office  was  suddenly  clouded  (as  the 
Athlones'  had  been)  by  the  accidental 
death  in  1935  of  his  elder  son,  Lord  Hyde. 
He  was  immediately  offered  and  accepted 
a  two-year  extension  of  his  term  of  office. 

On  his  return  to  London  in  1937 
Clarendon  was  appointed  a  knight  of  the 
Garter.  In  the  following  year  he  succeeded 
Lord  Cromer  [q.v.]  as  lord  chamberlain 
of  the  household  to  King  George  VI  and 
chancellor  of  the  Royal  Victorian  Order. 
For  the  next  fourteen  years  his  dignity 
of  manner,  his  friendliness,  and  his  good 
judgement  stood  him  in  good  stead  as 
head  of  the  royal  household.  For  most  of 
his  time  the  ceremonial  side  of  his  work 
was  severely  restricted  by  the  war  and  the 
years  of  economy  which  followed  it.  The 


King,  however,  held  an  abnormally  large 
number  of  investitures  at  which  it  was  the 
duty  of  the  lord  chamberlain  to  announce 
the  names  of  recipients  of  awards  or  of  the 
next-of-kin  of  those  who  had  been  killed. 
Clarendon  had  a  resonant,  sympathetic 
voice,  and  a  remarkable  linguistic  capa- 
city for  pronouncing  foreign  names. 

Another  of  his  duties  was  to  supervise 
the  censorship  of  plays.  His  integrity, 
courtesy,  and  good  manners,  together  with 
a  gentle  and  tolerant  understanding,  made 
him  many  friends  in  the  theatrical  and 
literary  professions.  He  possessed,  how- 
ever, a  quiet  firmness  and  successfully 
intervened  in  1940  with  theatrical  mana- 
gers to  curb  immodesty  on  the  stage  and 
in  night  clubs. 

In  the  early  years  of  the  war,  the 
King  had  made  St.  James's  Palace, 
including  the  lord  chamberlain's  office, 
the  headquarters  of  the  British  Red 
Cross  and  St.  John's  War  Organization. 
Clarendon  was  appointed  head  of  the 
department  of  services  for  British 
prisoners  of  war  which  in  1941  was 
responsible  for  the  dispatch  of  no  fewer 
than  two  million  parcels.  He  then  became 
successively  vice-chairman  and  chair- 
man of  the  War  Organization,  which  had 
the  spending  of  over  fifty  miUion  pounds. 
He  found  time  too  to  serve  as  chairman 
of  the  council  of  the  Royal  Empire 
Society  from  1943  to  1948.  Other  offices 
which  he  filled  were  the  chancellorship 
(1938-46)  of  the  Venerable  Order  of  St. 
John  of  Jerusalem  of  which  he  was 
lord  prior  (1946-8),  and  the  chancellor- 
ship of  the  Order  of  St.  Michael  and 
St.  George  (1942-55).  He  had  also  played 
his  part  earlier  in  life  in  his  native  Hert- 
fordshire, having  been  chairman  of  the 
incorporation  committee  of  Watford 
borough  and  its  charter  mayor  in  1922. 
He  was  subsequently  made  an  honorary 
freeman  of  the  borough. 

On  the  death  of  the  sovereign  it  is 
the  duty  of  the  lord  chamberlain  to  break 
his  wand  of  office  over  the  coffin.  This 
moving  tradition  Clarendon  fulfilled  on 
the  death  of  King  George  VI  in  1952. 
Six  months  later  he  resigned,  being 
advised  that,  in  view  of  his  lameness,  he 
should  not  undergo  the  long  periods  of 
standing  which  the  coronation  cere- 
monies of  the  new  Queen  would  impose 
upon  the  lord  chamberlain.  He  was 
invested  with  the  Royal  Victorian  Chain 
and  made  a  permanent  lord-in-waiting. 
He  had  been  appointed  G.C.M.G.  in  1980 
and  G.C.V.O.  in  1939. 


1014 


Clarendon  died  in  London  13  December 
1955.  He  had  two  sons  and  a  daughter, 
and  was  succeeded  as  seventh  earl  by 
his  grandson,  George  Frederick  Laurence 
Hyde  (born  1933). 

A  portrait  by  a  Canadian  artist,  Molly 
Guion,  is  in  the  possession  of  the  family, 
and  another,  by  Sir  Oswald  Birley, 
is  at  Pretoria. 

[The  Times,  14  and  23  December  1955; 
personal  knowledge ;  private  information.] 

Edward  Ford. 

VOIGT,       FREDERICK     AUGUSTUS 

(1892-1957),  journaHst,  was  born  in 
Hampstead  9  May  1892,  the  youngest 
of  the  five  children  of  Ludwig  Reinhard 
Voigt,  a  wine  merchant  who,  like  his 
wife,  Helene  Mathilde  Elizabeth  Hoff- 
mann, had  been  born  in  Germany. 
Voigt,  who  was  originally  called  Fritz 
August,  was  educated  at  Haberdashers' 
Aske's  School,  Hampstead,  and  Birkbeck 
College,  where  he  obtained  first  class 
honours  in  German  in  1915.  He  was 
called  up  in  the  following  year  and  served 
as  a  private  in  the  Royal  Garrison  Artil- 
lery at  home  and  on  the  western  front. 
After  the  war  he  joined  the  staff  of  the 
Manchester  Guardian  where  he  worked 
at  first  in  the  advertising  office.  He  was 
next  transferred  to  reading  the  foreign 
press  and  reporting  upon  it  to  the  editor, 
C.  P.  Scott  [q.v.].  In  February  1920  he 
was  sent  to  report  on  Germany  for  the 
Manchester  Guardian  and  thus  was  there 
at  the  time  of  the  Kapp  Putsch  in  March. 
During  disturbances  arising  out  of  the 
Ruhr  miners'  strike  he  was  sentenced 
to  death  by  a  group  of  Freikorps  men 
but  reprieved  at  the  last  moment;  later 
he  received  an  official  apology  from  the 
German  Foreign  Office. 

F.  A.  Voigt  soon  became  one  of  the 
most  famous  foreign  correspondents  of  the 
period,  based  on  Berlin  but  reporting  on 
all  eastern  Europe.  In  December  1926 
he  published  an  article  which  revealed 
that,  in  order  to  evade  the  disarmament 
clauses  of  the  Treaty  of  Versailles,  the 
German  Army  was  collaborating  with  the 
Soviet  military  authorities  in  the  training 
of  airmen  and  the  manufacture  of  poison 
gas  on  Russian  territory.  This  long-term 
manoeuvre  was  parallel  with  the  policy 
exempUfied  by  the  Treaty  of  Rapallo. 
In  bringing  the  matter  up  in  the  Reichs- 
tag, the  Socialist  deputy,  Scheidemann, 
based  himself  upon  Voigt's  statements 
which  have  been  fully  justified  by  the 
evidence  later  made  available.  In  1930 


D.N.B.  1051-1960  Voigt 

he  added  to  his  fame  by  a  merciless 
description  of  the  'Pacification  of  the 
Ukraine',  the  ruthless  suppression  by  the 
Poles  of  the  Ukrainian  unrest  in  Eastern 
Galicia. 

Voigt  was  one  of  the  first  foreign 
correspondents  to  draw  public  attention 
to  the  true  nature  of  National  Socialism 
which  he  examined  on  the  spot  in  the 
provinces,  Thuringia  and  Brunswick, 
where  its  representatives  first  gained 
local  political  power.  Strangely  enough 
he  was  transferred  from  Berlin  to  Paris 
just  before  Hitler  became  German  chan- 
cellor in  January  1933.  Regarding  his 
successor's  accounts  of  the  early  days 
of  National  Socialism  in  power  as  too 
timid,  Voigt  persuaded  the  Manchester 
Guardian  to  send  him  back  to  Berlin 
as  a  special  correspondent  to  cover  the 
elections  of  March  1933.  After  this 
reportage  it  was  impossible  for  him 
to  stay  in,  or  return  to,  Nazi  Germany. 
He  was  appointed  diplomatic  corre- 
spondent of  the  Manchester  Guardian 
in  London:  he  remained  in  this  position 
until  after  the  outbreak  of  war  when 
for  a  short  time  he  held  a  government 
post  concerned  with  propaganda  against 
the  enemy. 

In  1938-46  Voigt  edited  The  Nine- 
teenth Century  and  After  and  in  his  re- 
maining years  he  was  absorbed  in  a  more 
literary  life.  In  his  youth  he  had  written 
a  very  early  war  book  called  Combed 
Out  (1920).  Later  he  had  done  a  good 
deal  of  translation  from  the  German, 
such  as  Billow's  Memoirs  (with  G.  Dun- 
lop,  1931-2)  and  E.  F.  Podach's  book  on 
The  Madness  of  Nietzsche  (1931).  In  1938 
he  brought  out  a  polemical  book  called 
Unto  Caesar  which  he  had  finished  writing 
just  before  Hitler  annexed  Austria.  In 
1949  he  published  Pax  Britannica  and 
The  Greek  Sedition. 

In  his  heyday  F.  A.  Voigt  was  an 
outstanding  figure  in  Berlin,  the  con- 
fidant of  a  number  of  liberals  and  leftists 
in  the  Weimar  Republic,  the  man  who 
exposed  the  Reichswehr:  he  was  a  great 
journalist  in  an  age  of  great  journalism. 
He  was  absolutely  fearless;  a  man  of 
erudition  to  the  point  of  pedantry;  and 
a  considerable  eccentric.  Stiff  and  pru- 
dish in  manner,  he  was  by  contrast 
somewhat  free  in  his  behaviour  and  his 
conversation.  There  was  a  touch  of  the 
macabre  and  pessimistic  about  him 
which  made  him  better  able  than  most 
of  his  contemporaries  to  face  the  stark 
reality   of  Hitlerism.    IJnto   Caesar  was 


1015 


Voigt 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


characteristic  of  the  later  Voigt.  Its 
furious  assertions  against  Hitler  and 
Lenin  are  fully  supported  by  learned 
footnotes.  The  Russia  of  the  Stalinist 
trials  is  condemned  as  the  ultimate 
wickedness.  There  are  signs  of  the  deeply 
Christian  feeling  of  the  last  years  of  his 
life  when  he  reversed  nearly  all  his 
earlier  tenets. 

Voigt  married  first,  in  1926,  Margaret 
Lola,  daughter  of  an  American  business 
man,  Bernard  Goldsmith,  and  herself 
a  writer.  She  divorced  him  in  1935  and 
he  married  in  that  year  Janka,  daughter 
of  Oskar  Radnitz  and  formerly  wife 
of  Johannes  Heinrich  Dransmann,  by 
whom  he  had  one  daughter.  The  marriage 
was  dissolved  and  in  1944  he  married 
Annie  Rachel,  daughter  of  the  late  Rev. 
Hugh  Frederic  Bennett. 

Voigt  died  in  Guildford  7  January  1957. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Elizabeth  Wiskemann. 

WADSWORTH,     ALFRED     POWELL 

(1891-1956),  journalist  and  economic 
historian,  was  born  at  Rochdale  26 
May  1891,  the  elder  son  of  John  WiUiam 
Wadsworth,  master  tailor,  by  his  wife, 
Jane  Seeley.  From  Cronkeyshaw  School 
he  won  a  scholarship  to  the  higher  grade 
school  in  Fleece  Street,  later  known 
as  the  Central  School.  At  the  age  of 
fourteen  he  started  as  a  copy  holder  in 
the  reading-room  of  the  Rochdale  Observer. 
The  editor,  W.  W.  Hadley  [q.v.],  pro- 
moted him  to  junior  reporter  two  years 
later  and  trained  him  in  accuracy  and 
newspaper  ethics,  lessons  which  remained 
with  him  all  his  life.  A  zest  for  know- 
ledge prompted  Wadsworth  to  join  as 
its  youngest  member  the  first  tutorial 
class  organized  by  the  Workers'  Educa- 
tional Association,  then  a  young  venture 
with  a  doubtful  future.  The  class  was 
arranged  at  Rochdale  under  R.  H. 
Tawney.  Wadsworth  developed  an  eager 
interest  in  the  economic  and  social 
features  of  our  history.  While  taking 
a  full  share  of  the  routine  duties  of  a 
young  reporter  he  began  to  specialize 
in  local  industrial  affairs,  and  in  the 
paper's  monthly  Uterary  supplement 
conducted  a  notes  and  queries  depart- 
ment to  save  local  antiquarian  lore  in 
danger  of  being  lost. 

In  1917,  already  an  accomplished 
cra,ftsman,  he  joined  the  staff  of  the 
Manchester  Guardian.  He  won  distinc- 
tion when  in  1920  he  went  to  Ireland 
to  report  'the  troubles'.  An  investigation 


of  Black  and  Tan  outrages  earned  him 
the  warm  approval  of  his  editor,  C.  P. 
Scott  [q.v.],  who  promoted  him  to  be 
labour  correspondent.  In  this  capacity 
he  wrote  occasional  leaders  on  industrial 
and  labour  subjects.  He  held  this  post 
for  about  sixteen  years  while  organized 
labour  was  growing  in  strength  and 
stature  and  sharpening  some  of  its 
methods.  On  the  death  of  E.  T.  Scott, 
C.  P.  Scott's  son,  in  1932  Wadsworth 
became  a  general  economic  and  political 
leader-writer,  but  continued  to  attend 
the  annual  conferences  of  the  Labour 
Party  and  Trades  Union  Congress  until 
1936.  He  became  an  assistant  editor 
in  1940  and  in  1944  became  editor  in 
succession  to  W.  P.  Crozier  (whose  notice 
he  contributed  to  this  Dictionary).  The 
circumstances  were  not  propitious.  Owing 
to  shortage  of  staff  under  war  conditions 
Wadsworth  had  not  been  able  to  take 
a  night  off  (except  on  a  Saturday)  for. 
many  months.  He  now  had  to  write  a 
leader  every  night,  and  sometimes  two, 
while  maintaining  a  minutely  critical 
oversight  of  the  paper  without  the  men 
to  help  him  he  would  have  h^d  in  peace- 
ful times.  He  worked  with  a  speed  and 
sureness  of  judgement  which  impressed 
all  his  colleagues. 

The  coming  of  peace  was  slow  to  faci- 
litate the  paper's  expansion  towards 
its  pre-war  fullness.  Like  its  rivals,  it 
continued  to  be  cramped  by  newsprint 
restrictions.  It  had  among  provincial 
papers  unrivalled  authority  as  a  national 
and  international  influence.  Wadsworth 
chose  to  concentrate  on  this  pubhc 
service  rather  than  on  spacious  treat- 
ment of  northern  affairs.  The  policy  was 
found  to  be  justified  when  the  govern- 
ment restraint  on  newspaper  sales  ended 
and  the  demand  for  the  Manchester 
Guardian  rose  significantly,  the  sales  in- 
creasing each  time  the  newsprint  ration 
was  adjusted.  Under  Wadsworth's  editor- 
ship they  rose  from  72,527  aday  to  168,773. 

Wadsworth  made  his  political  power 
felt  in  the  general  election  of  1945. 
Although  he  admired  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  as  the  greatest  living  English- 
man he  held  that  'nothing  could  be 
worse  than  another  House  of  Commons 
in  which  the  Tory  party  was  all-power- 
ful'. When  Labour  won  its  emphatic 
victory  he  hailed  it  as  'The  Silent  Revo- 
lution'. In  the  following  five  years  he 
gave  Labour  discriminating  support  but 
at  times  expressed  disappointment  with 
its  actions.  Intellectually  he  had  much  in 


1016 


OJ»I.B.  1051-1060 


Walkden 


common  with  Liberalism,  for  which  the 
Manchester  Guardian  had  done  so  much, 
but  his  long  experience  with  the  unions 
gave  him  a  sympathetic  understanding 
of  the  Labour  Party,  even  when  he  was 
criticizing  its  faults.  In  the  1950  election 
he  was  accused  of  impartial  ferocity  to- 
wards all  the  party  programmes.  In  1951 
his  dissatisfaction  with  Labour  increased. 
'For  the  next  few  years  at  any  rate',  he 
wrote,  'a  Churchill  Government  is,  it  seems 
to  us,  the  lesser  evil.'  It  was  not  that  he 
began  to  be  won  over  to  Conservatism.  He 
wanted  the  Left  to  find  a  settled  philo- 
sophy again  and  to  reconcile  its  idealism 
with  the  changed  economic  status  of  the 
country.  In  1955  he  hoped  there  would  not 
be  a  big  Conservative  majority. 

Besides  being  a  vigilant  and  outspoken 
editor,  in  the  C.  P.  Scott  tradition,  and 
creator  of  the  post-war  Gtuirdian,  Wads- 
worth  made  his  name  as  an  economic 
historian.  Stimulated  by  Professor  George 
Unwin  he  collaborated  with  Julia  Mann 
(then  principal  of  St.  Hilda's  College, 
Oxford)  in  The  Cotton  Trade  and  Indus- 
trial Lancashire  1600-1790  (1931),  a 
masterpiece  of  enhghtening  scholarship. 
With  R.  S.  Fitton  he  wrote  The  Strutts 
and  the  Arkwrights  1758-1830  (1958). 
Papers  for  such  bodies  as  the  Rochdale 
Literary  and  Scientific  Society  and  the 
Manchester  Statistical  Society  were  the 
outcome  of  patient  research. 

The  university  of  Manchester  conferred 
upon  Wadsworth  the  honorary  degree 
of  M.A.  in  1933  and  of  LL.D.  in  1955. 
He  was  a  governor  of  the  John  Rylands 
Library,  Manchester,  a  visiting  fellow 
of  Nuffield  College,  Oxford,  and  an 
enthusiastic  member  of  the  International 
Press  Institute. 

Wadsworth  saw  the  life  of  his  day 
with  an  historian's  perspective.  His  writing 
was  like  the  man — straightforward,  quick 
in  getting  to  the  point,  unpretentious. 
Though  modest  in  demeanour — 'a  small, 
plump,  soft-spoken,  twinkUng  man' — he 
stood  out  as  a  strong  personahty  in  the 
sudden  crises  of  a  newspaper  office,  when 
his  firm  judgement  gave  confidence  to  all 
his  colleagues. 

He  married  in  1922  AUce  LiUian 
(died  1955),  daughter  of  Handel  Ormerod, 
coal  merchant,  of  Rochdale;  they  had 
one  daughter.  Wadsworth  had  a  strong 
constitution  and  for  most  of  his  Ufe 
worked  twelve  hours  a  day,  six  days 
of  the  week.  But  in  1955-6  he  contracted 
what  appeared  to  be  an  obscure  virus 
disease   which   proved  to   be   incurable. 


and  five  days  after  his  official  retirement 
he  died  in  Manchester  4  November  1966, 
The  originals  of  a  drawing  of  Wads- 
worth by  (Sir)  David  Low  and  a  cartoon 
by  him  in  which  Wadsworth  appears 
with  other  newspaper  editors  are  in  the 
family's  possession. 

[Manchester  Guardian,  81  October  and 
5  November  1956 ;  The  Times,  5  November 
1956;  T.  S.  Matthews.  The  Sugar  Pill,  1057; 
personal  knowledge.]  Linton  Andrews. 

WALKDEN,  ALEXANDER  GEORGE, 
Baron  Walkden  (1873-1951),  railway 
trade-unionist,  was  born  in  Hornsey  H 
May  1873,  the  second  of  the  nine  children 
of  Charles  Henry  Scrivener  Walkden,  ac- 
countant, by  his  wife,  Harriet  Rogers.  He 
was  educated  at  the  Merchant  Taylors- 
School  and  in  1889  began  as  a  clerk  on  the 
Great  Northern  Railway,  subsequently 
becoming  a  freight  representative  at  Not- 
tingham, and  finally  achieving  the  posi- 
tion of  goods  agent  at  Fletton  by  1906. 

Very  early  in  his  career  Walkden  felt 
the  urge  to  organize  the  black-coated 
railway  employees  into  a  body  with 
sufficient  power  to  improve  their  almost 
intolerable  working  conditions.  The  Rail- 
way Clerks'  Association  was  founded 
in  1897  to  this  end  and  in  'Alec'  Walkden 
it  had  a  dedicated  and  enthusiastic 
servant.  For  some  years  the  very  exist- 
ence of  the  union  was  in  jeopardy  and 
it  was  due  to  Walkden's  indomitable 
spirit  that  it  survived.  The  pioneers  met 
with  much  to  discourage  them  and  at 
the  end  of  eighteen  months  a  proposal 
was  made  at  the  first  annual  conference 
to  abandon  plans  for  a  separate  union 
for  railway  clerks.  The  proposal  was 
defeated,  but  by  one  vote  only,  and  the 
great  need  for  such  an  organization 
was  ironically  demonstrated  by  a  decision 
to  reduce  union  dues  from  3d.  per  week 
to  6d.  per  month  because  members  could 
not  afford  the  former. 

By  1906  very  little  progress  in  real 
organization  had  been  made;  funds 
were  almost  depleted,  and  morale  low. 
Years  of  persuasion,  of  pleading  a  just 
cause,  of  fighting  injustice  had  increased 
the  membership  from  7  branches  with 
297  members  to  67  branches  with  4,000 
members,  but  the  future  was  far  from 
clear.  Walkden  was  a  member  of  the 
executive  committee,  and  such  was  his 
faith  in  the  rightness  of  the  cause  that 
he  agreed  to  become  the  full-time  secre- 
tary of  the  union. 

This  was  not  an  easy  decision  to  take. 


1017 


Walkden 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Walkden  himself  had  good  prospects  on 
the  railway,  having  become  a  goods  agent 
at  the  early  age  of  thirty -three ;  the  work 
was  congenial;  the  contacts  interesting. 
He  was  married.  On  the  other  side,  the 
prospects  of  the  union  were  not  encou- 
raging. But  for  Walkden  there  could  be 
but  one  decision,  and  to  his  new  task 
he  brought  rare  gifts  in  great  abundance : 
a  radiant  and  attractive  personality, 
faith,  courage,  imagination,  enthusiasm, 
^nd  boundless  energy.  In  full  measure  he 
poured  them  into  his  work,  believing 
sincerely  that  railway  clerks  could  and 
should  become  as  good  trade-unionists 
as  any  other  workers  without  abandoning 
the  greater  responsibilities  which  might 
devolve  upon  them.  In  fact,  under  his 
shrewd  guidance  and  wise  counsel  the 
union  came  to  be  recognized  as  one  of 
the  finest  in  the  world. 

For  many  years  Walkden  (widely 
known  as  'AG')  worked  tremendously 
hard.  He  had  to  scorn  delights,  and 
live  laborious  days ;  most  of  his  evenings, 
Saturday  afternoons,  and  Sundays  were 
given  to  union  service.  At  first  he  had 
to  do  everything,  including  the  humdrum 
tasks  and  irksome  routine.  He  was 
inclined  to  be  impetuous  but  he  always 
treated  his  branch  and  divisional  council 
workers  with  extreme  tact  and  patience. 
He  never  forgot  that  they  were  volun- 
tary workers  and  that  without  them  the 
association  could  not  succeed.  Slowly 
he  gathered  around  him  a  band  of  hand- 
picked  dedicated  men.  So  careful  was 
he  in  his  choice  that  they  all  achieved 
their  own  personal  success  in  their 
separate  ways  and  time. 

It  was  not  until  February  1919  that 
Walkden' s  dearest  wish  was  achieved 
and  this  only  after  the  threat  of  a 
strike.  Official  recognition  of  the  union 
as  a  negotiating  body  was  conceded  by 
the  railway  companies.  During  the  war 
of  1914-18  membership  had  risen  from 
25,791  to  71,441  and  with  recognition 
the  union  went  from  strength  to  strength. 
Until  that  time  each  railway  company 
had  its  own  rates  of  pay  and  conditions 
of  service  for  its  salaried  grades,  but  in 
1919  negotiations  were  begun  which 
resulted  in  the  introduction  of  a  national 
agreement  with  standard  minimum  con- 
ditions covering  all  railways.  Collected 
together  in  one  green-covered  book, 
they  represented  the  ultimate  outcome 
of  one  man's  dedicated  faith.  Walkden 
seldom  referred  to  it  as  other  than  the 
'Bible  of  the  RCA'. 


Walkden  was  an  excellent  speaker  and 
writer,  and  although  he  knew  that, 
especially  in  negotiations  and  agreements, 
it  was  necessary  to  be  clear,  exact,  and 
precise,  he  disliked  punctiliousness,  pedan- 
try, niggling,  and  hair-splitting.  His 
cleverness  showed  through  in  debate 
and  on  occasion  he  would  detract  from 
the  essential  values  of  the  subject  by 
casting  some  doubts  on  his  opponents' 
real  wish  to  nurture  such  thoughts. 
He  was  at  his  rhetorical  best  when  'fight- 
ing back'.  It  was  inevitable  that  such 
a  man  should  have  much  demand  made 
upon  his  time  and  ability,  and  the  wider 
sphere  of  the  trade-union  and  labour 
movement  made  its  claims  upon  him. 
He  sat  as  a  very  popular  member  of  the 
General  Council  of  the  Trades  Union 
Congress  from  1921  until  his  retirement 
in  1936,  serving  as  its  president  in  1932-3. 
His  trade-union  activities  spread  also 
to  the  international  field  through  his 
membership  of  the  International  Trans- 
port Workers'  Federation. 

Walkden  was  elected  Labour  member 
of  Parliament  for  Bristol  South  in 
1929  and  although  he  failed  to  secure 
re-election  in  1931,  he  was  successful 
in  1935  and  retained  the  seat  until  1945, 
when  he  was  created  a  baron.  Between 
1943  and  1945  he  served  on  the  admini- 
strative committee  of  the  parliamentary 
Labour  Party.  From  1945  to  1949  he  was 
captain  of  the  King's  Bodyguard  of  the 
Yeomen  of  the  Guard  and  government 
second  whip  in  the  House  of  Lords. 

Walkden  was  a  man  of  great  personal 
charm  with  a  twinkle  in  his  eyes,  but 
when  he  thought  injustice  was  being 
done  an  iron  will  prevailed,  and  his  eyes 
then  flashed  lightning.  Small  of  physical 
stature,  with  a  beard  which  particularly 
suited  his  features,  he  was  in  every  other 
sense  a  big  man.  Deep  of  voice,  his  dis- 
arming throaty  chuckle  was  at  its  best 
when  deriding  opposition.  When  the 
debate  was  tough  he  brought  into  play 
this  tactic  and  it  seldom  failed.  With 
his  audience  in  a  good  humour  he  strode 
in  with  all  his  command  of  words. 

Brought  up  in  the  country  by  a  father 
who  wrote  on  small-holdings  for  the 
socialist  paper  of  William  Morris  [q.v.], 
'AG'  always  remained  a  countryman  at 
heart.  He  liked  the  theatre  and  the 
cinema,  and  was  particularly  fond  of 
Gilbert  and  Sullivan  and  Garbo.  He  had 
a  profound  knowledge  of  trees,  birds, 
and  flowers.  Although  he  did  not  care 
for  sport,  it  was  most  appropriate  that 


1018 


this  dapper  little  man  of  the  flashing 
eye,  ready  wit,  and  determined  mind 
bred  as  a  hobby  some  of  the  best  old 
English  game-cocks  in  Britain. 

On  Walkden's  retirement  in  1936  testi- 
monial moneys  were  collected  through- 
out the  Association;  but  with  a  typical 
'AG'  gesture  he  asked  for  them  to  be 
used  to  endow  a  men's  ward  at  Manor 
House  Hospital,  Golders  Green,  and  to 
provide  books  for  the  library  of  Ruskin 
College,  Oxford.  Although  his  beloved 
Railway  Clerks'  Association  changed  its 
title  to  Transport  Salaried  Staffs'  Associa- 
tion, taking  cognizance  of  the  expanded 
interests  of  the  union,  its  registered 
office  has  been  named  Walkden  House  and 
has  his  portrait  in  bronze  by  E.  J.  Clack. 

In  1898  Walkden  married  Jenny  (died 
1934),  daughter  of  Jesse  Wilson,  director 
of  a  brickworks  at  Market  Rasen ;  there 
were  three  daughters.  Walkden  died  in 
Great  Bookham  25  April  1951. 

[Journal  and  Annual  Reports  of  the  Trans- 
port Salaried  Staffs'  Association;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Aubrey  C.  Ping. 

WALKER,  Dame  ETHEL  (1861-1951), 
painter  and  sculptress,  was  born  in 
Edinburgh  9  June  1861,  the  daughter 
of  Arthur  Abney  Walker  and  his  second 
wife,  Isabella  Robertson.  Her  father  was 
a  Yorkshireman,  a  member  of  the  firm 
of  iron  founders  which  built  Southwark 
Bridge.  About  1870  he  settled  in  Wim- 
bledon where  Ethel  Walker  attended  a 
private  school.  In  after-life  Yorkshire 
and  London  shared  her  affections.  She 
had  a  studio  in  Cheyne  Walk,  Chelsea, 
and  a  cottage  at  Robin  Hood's  Bay, 
where  she  painted  in  the  summer,  notably 
a  series  of  pictures  of  the  sea  in  all  its 
moods.  She  does  not  seem  to  have  been 
seriously  interested  in  art  until  her  late 
twenties  when  she  went  to  Putney  Art 
School.  Later  she  attended  the  School 
of  Art  at  Westminster  where  Frederick 
Brown  [q.v.]  was  quick  to  recognize  her 
talent.  When,  in  1892,  he  was  appointed 
Slade  professor  at  University  College, 
she  followed  her  teacher  and  remained 
at  the  Slade  for  two  years.  About  this 
time  she  visited  Spain  with  her  friend, 
Claire  Christian,  and  always  said  Velaz- 
quez made  her  a  painter.  Although 
it  is  difficult  to  see  any  direct  influence 
on  her  work,  she  copied  from  his  pictiu-es 
and  for  her,  as  for  many  others,  the  experi- 
ence made  her  realize  for  the  first  time 
what  great  painting  could  be.   On  her 


D.N.B.  1051-1060  Walker,  E. 

return  she  passed  through  Paris  and  met 
George  Moore  [q.v.]  who  introduced  her 
to  the  Impressionists,  and  the  impact 
of  Velazquez  was  tempered  by  that  of 
Manet.  Ethel  Walker  and  Claire  Chris- 
tian are  referred  to  under  the  pseudonyms 
of  'Florence'  and  'Stella'  in  George 
Moore's  Hail  and  Farewell. 

Her  early  painting  owes  a  great  deal 
to  Brown  and  to  the  general  ambience 
of  the  New  English  Art  Club.  She  painted 
mainly  figures  in  interiors  where  the 
emphasis  is  on  drawing,  tone,  and  atmo- 
sphere rather  than  colour.  She  confessed 
she  learnt  much  from  W.  R.  Sickert 
[q.v.].  Typical  of  her  work  at  this  time 
is  'Angela,  1899'  (privately  owned), 
which  appears  to  have  been  her  first 
exhibited  work.  The  subject,  a  girl  in  a 
white  dress,  is  clearly  derived  from 
J.  A.  McN.  Whistler  [q.v.]  but  painted 
in  a  more  rugged  and  less  precious 
manner.  In  the  early  1900s  she  broke 
away  from  the  New  English  tradition,  and 
developed  a  new  and  individual  style 
inspired  by  her  study  of  Impressionism 
and  her  poetic  vision  of  the  golden  age. 

Although  she  painted  good  portraits 
of  men  and  older  women,  notably  Miss 
Buchanan  (Tate  Gallery),  it  was  the 
freshness  and  sparkle  of  young  girls 
which  pleased  her  most,  and  it  was 
these  she  painted  most  often.  Her  por- 
traits are  modelled  in  quick  touches  of 
bright  colour,  usually  completed  at  one 
sitting.  As  in  all  her  work,  the  deco- 
rative use  of  colours  and  shape  was  always 
evident  in  her  portraits — sometimes,  it 
must  be  confessed,  at  the  expense  of 
character.  Flowers  provided  an  admir- 
able opportunity  for  exploiting  her 
somewhat  staccato  style  of  painting, 
and  her  imaginative  grouping  would 
defeat  the  ingenuity  of  a  most  accom- 
plished pupil  of  Constance  Spry  [q.v.]. 

Perhaps  her  most  individual  work 
was  as  a  designer  of  decorative  composi- 
tions inspired  by  her  vision  of  a  golden 
age,  notably  the  'Zone  of  Hate'  and  the 
'Zone  of  Love'  which  she  presented 
to  the  Tate  Gallery  in  1946.  She  was 
greatly  interested  in  philosophical  reli- 
gion, more  particularly  theosophy,  and 
these  visionary  decorations  owed  much 
to  her  speculation  in  this  field.  They  were 
composed  from  drawings,  the  colour 
being  suggested  by  a  few  bright  objects 
in  the  studio.  The  picture  surface  is  well 
organized,  but  whilst  emphasis  is  laid 
on  linear  and  colour  rhythms,  there  is 
always  a  sense  of  space,  and  although 


1019 


Walker,  E. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


essentially  decorative  they  communicate 
her  vivid  imagination  and  sense  of  wonder. 
At  her  best  her  draughtsmansliip  was  fine 
and  she  was  an  interesting  sculptress,  but 
it  was  colour  and  paint  •  she  loved, 
and  she  would  remark  somewhat  dis- 
concertingly when  showing  her  work, 
'Isn't  it  lovely?'  Yet  she  was  without 
conceit.  She  was  a  prolific  worker,  and 
the  unevenness  of  her  output  somewhat 
detracted  from  her  reputation. 

Ethel  Walker  was  a  wide  reader  and  a 
stimulating  conversationalist.  Her  vision- 
ary world  was  in  sharp  contrast  to  her 
appearance  and  to  the  studio  where 
she  lived  with  her  canvases  around  her, 
clearing  a  space  for  meals  on  a  table 
strewn  with  papers,  brushes,  and  paint. 
The  small  energetic  figure  dressed  in  a 
rough  tweed  suit  was  a  familiar  sight 
in  Chelsea,  striding  in  Battersea  Park 
with  her  dogs  who  shared  her  studio. 

During  her  lifetime  she  exhibited  a 
great  deal  at  the  New  English  Art  Club, 
of  which  she  became  a  member  in  1900, 
and  at  the  Royal  Academy  (she  was  made 
an  A.R.A.  in  1940),  and  at  many  mixed 
exhibitions.  She  also  had  a  number  of 
'one-man'  shows.  She  was  one  of  the  most 
distinguished  women  artists  of  her  day 
in  England  and  was  appointed  C.B.E. 
in  1938  and  D.B.E.  in  1943.  Her  work 
is  well  represented  in  the  Tate  Gallery 
(where  there  is  a  self-portrait)  and  in 
many  provincial  museums.  She  died  in 
London  2  March  1951. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Mary  Woodaix. 

WALKER,  Sir  GILBERT  THOMAS 
(1868-1958),  applied  mathematician  and 
meteorologist,  was  born  in  Rochdale, 
Lancashire,  14  June  1868,  the  fourth 
child  in  a  family  of  seven  of  Thomas 
H.  Walker,  civil  engineer,  and  his  wife, 
Charlotte  Haslehurst.  His  father  moved 
to  Croydon  and  Walker  was  educated  at 
St.  Paul's  School  from  which  he  gained 
a  mathematical  scholarship  to  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge.  He  was  senior  wrang- 
ler in  1889,  obtained  a  first  class  in  part 
ii  of  the  tripos  in  1890,  was  elected  a 
fellow  of  Trinity  in  1891,  and  became 
lecturer  in  mathematics  in  1895.  From 
1892  onwards  he  published  a  series  of 
papers  on  electromagnetism  for  one  of 
which,  'Aberration  and  some  other 
problems  connected  with  the  electro- 
magnetic field',  he  was  awarded  an 
Adams  prize  in  1899.  This  interest 
appears  to  have  come  to  a  close  with  the 


publication  of  his  lectures  on  the  Theory 
of  Electromagnetism  in  1910. 

An  equally  early  but  more  sustained 
interest  was  in  the  physics  of  projectiles, 
ball  games,  and  flight.  Here  his  work  was 
both  practical  and  theoretical,  for  he 
became  expert  in  the  design  and  use 
of  'primitive'  projectiles,  such  as  the 
boomerang  and  stone-age  celt — he  was 
known  to  his  early  Cambridge  friends  as 
'Boomerang  Walker' — and  he  contributed 
a  fine  article  entitled  'Spiel  und  Sport' 
to  the  great  Enzyklopddie  der  Mathema- 
tischen  Wissenschaften  in  1900.  His  interest 
in  flight  was  later  stimulated,  in  India, 
by  the  magnificent  soaring  and  gliding 
of  Himalayan  birds  whose  actions  in 
relation  to  their  environment  he  did 
much  to  clarify.  An  article  by  him 
on  natural  flight  in  the  Encyclopcedia 
Britannica  placed  much  of  this  work  on 
permanent  record.  Later  still  this  inter- 
est was  extended  to  human  gliding  and 
soaring  and  he  greatly  encouraged  the 
sport  in  England  in  its  early  days. 

Walker  left  Cambridge  for  India  in 
1904  to  become  director-general  of  obser- 
vatories, which  post  he  retained  until 
retiring  age  in  1924.  His  administration 
of  the  Indian  state  meteorological  service 
was  most  enlightened  and  in  particular 
he  gave  their  heads  to  the  notable  young 
scientists,  like  (Sir)  George  Simpson  and 
(Sir)  Charles  Normand,  whom  he  collected 
round  him.  From  the  beginning  of  his 
appointment  he  became  much  concerned 
with  the  vital  problem  for  India  of  the 
variability  of  monsoon  rainfall — the  great 
Indian  famine  of  1899-1900  was  much 
in  people's  minds — and  he  set  out  to 
find  sound  methods  of  forecasting  the 
incidence  of  the  Indian  monsoon.  This 
was  a  highly  intractable  problem  for 
there  was  practically  no  quantitative 
theory  of  the  monsoon  nor  therefore  of 
its  changes  from  year  to  year.  Walker 
was  thus  led  to  seek  empirical  relations 
between  antecedent  events  in  and  out- 
side India  and  the  Indian  monsoon 
itself.  Such  relations  are  not  difficult  to 
find  from  the  meteorological  records 
over  any  given  span  of  years  but  their 
persistence  into  the  future,  when  lacking 
any  theoretical  basis,  is  uncertain.  (Any 
two  series  of  random  numbers  may  show 
quite  high  but  chance  correlations  over 
some  part  of  their  course.)  Walker  was 
well  aware  of  the  pitfalls  pertaining 
to  the  method  and  he  adopted  the  most 
stringent  statistical  tests  of  his  analysis. 
Useful  results  were  achieved  but  in  spite 


1020 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Walton 


of  his  tremendous  effort  to  break  it  the 
monsoon  problem  really  remained  un- 
solved at  the  end  of  his  term  of  office. 

On  retirement  from  India  Walker 
became  professor  of  meteorology  at  the 
Imperial  College  of  Science  and  Techno- 
logy in  London  and  he  continued  to 
explore  the  relations  between  weather 
in  different  parts  of  the  world  in  a  series 
of  memoirs,  entitled  'World  Weather', 
to  the  Royal  Meteorological  Society. 
He  also  engaged  with  students  on  a 
series  of  laboratory  researches  on  the 
forms  of  motion  in  shallow  fluids  when 
heated  gently  from  below,  (Benard 
cells),  and  on  the  changes  induced  in 
these  motions  when  a  horizontal  motion, 
varying  with  height,  was  imposed  on  the 
fluid.  These  experiments  enabled  Walker 
to  identify  the  conditions  of  formation 
of  many  beautiful  thin  layer-clouds 
(alto-cumulus)  which  commonly  occur 
in  the  middle  troposphere.  He  retired 
from  his  chair  to  Cambridge  in  1934 
but  remained  active,  scientifically  and 
in  music  (he  was  responsible  for  improve- 
ments in  the  design  of  the  flute),  until 
well  over  eighty  years  of  age. 

Walker  was  president  of  the  Royal 
Meteorological  Society  (1926-8),  its 
Symons  gold  medallist  (1934),  and  editor 
of  its  Quarterly  Journal  (1935-41).  He  was 
elected  F.R.S.  in  1904;  appointed  C.S.I, 
in  1911;  and  knighted  in  1924.  These 
and  other  honours  he  wore  lightly  and 
ever  remained  modest,  kindly,  liberal 
minded,  wide  of  interest,  and  a  very 
perfect  gentleman. 

In  1908  he  married  May  Constance  (died 
1955),  daughter  of  Charles  Stephens  Car- 
ter, gentleman  farmer,  and  had  one  son 
and  one  daughter.  He  died  at  Coulsdon, 
Surrey,  4  November  1958. 

[Indian  Journal  of  Meteorology  and  Geo- 
physics,  January  1959;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  P.  A.  Sheppard. 

WALTON,  ARTHUR  (1897-1959),  phy- 
siologist, was  born  in  London  16  March 
1897,  the  second  son  of  Edward  Arthur 
Walton,  of  Renfrewshire,  one  of  the 
Glasgow  school  of  artists,  and  his  wife, 
Helen  Urie  Henderson,  also  of  Renfrew- 
shire. His  elder  brother,  John,  became 
professor  of  botany  at  Glasgow  (1930-62) 
and  a  sister  married  Sir  W.  O.  Hutchison, 
president  of  the  Royal  Scottish  Academy 
(1950-59).  He  was  educated  at  Daniel 
Stewart's  College  and  at  Edinburgh 
University  where  he  qualified  B.Sc. 
(Agric.)  in  1923.  In  Edinburgh,  in  the 


newly  created  Animal  Breeding  Research 
Department,  his  early  training  in  research 
took  place  under  Professor  F.  A.  E.  Crew, 
and  his  interest  in  sperm  physiology  led  to 
his  first  scientific  paper,  'The  Flocculation 
of  Sperm  Suspensions  in  Relation  to  Sur- 
face Charge',  which  was  published  in  1924. 
This  interest  took  him  to  Cambridge  to 
work  with  F.  H.  A.  Marshall  and  (Sir)  John 
Hammond,  which  led  to  a  Ph.D.  degree 
(1927)  for  research  on  the  preservation  of 
mammalian  spermatozoa.  He  remained  at 
Cambridge  for  the  rest  of  his  life,  on  the 
staff  of  the  School  of  Agriculture  and  as  a 
scientific  member  of  staff  of  the  Agricul- 
tural Research  Council  at  its  Animal 
Research  Station,  of  which  he  became 
deputy  director. 

Walton's  contribution  to  knowledge 
in  the  field  of  sperm  physiology  was  sus- 
tained and  fundamental.  He  demon- 
strated that  the  metabolic  activity  of 
ram  and  bull  spermatozoa,  particularly 
their  respiration,  is  directly  correlated 
with  motility  and  that  respiring  sperma- 
tozoa produce  under  certain  conditions 
hydrogen  peroxide  which,  in  turn,  is 
responsible  for  a  gradually  inhibitory 
effect  on  respiration  and  a  decline  in 
motility.  He  also  developed  an  ingenious 
method  of  maintaining  sperm  alive  for 
long  periods,  in  a  perfusion  apparatus 
where  nutrient  substrates  are  fed  con- 
tinuously to  a  sample  of  semen  and  the 
toxic  metabolites  removed  at  the  same 
time.  He  was  the  first  to  arrange  the 
long-distance  transport  of  ram  semen, 
properly  collected  and  stored,  to  Poland 
where  it  was  used  successfully  to  in- 
seminate ewes. 

His  agricultural  training,  linked  with  his 
main  research  interest,  caused  Walton  to 
be  a  strong  protagonist  of  the  introduction 
to  Great  Britain  of  the  application  of  the 
technique  of  artificial  insemination  to 
cattle  breeding.  He  was  joint-author  of 
a  memorandum  to  the  Agricultural  Im- 
provement Council  advocating  this  in  1941 
and  a  founder-member  of  the  Cambridge 
Cattle  Breeding  Society,  a  farmers*  co- 
operative, in  1942.  He  lived  to  see  the 
practice  become  national  in  scope,  and  in 
1957  was  awarded  the  Royal  Agricultural 
Society  of  England  medal  'for  outstanding 
research  in  agriculture'. 

Walton  will  be  remembered  by  research 
workers  in  animal  physiology  throughout 
the  world  who  came  to  Cambridge 
as  research  students  and  found  in 
him  a  most  humane,  patient,  and  very 
thorough  teacher.  His  interests  in  animal 


1021 


Walton 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


behaviour  and  in  social  medicine  led  him 
into  a  varied  circle  of  activities,  and  at 
a  time  when  the  subject  was  not  widely 
discussed  he  lectured  extensively  on  sex 
education. 

In  1939  he  married  Elsie  Anne  Sheldon ; 
they  adopted  a  son  and  a  daughter.  He 
died  in  Cambridge  6  April  1959.  A  portrait 
of  him  as  a  child,  painted  by  his  father,  is 
in  the  possession  of  the  family. 

[Nature,  27  June  1959  ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]  Joseph  Edwards. 

WARD,  FRANCIS  (FRANK)  KING- 
DON-  (1885-1958),  plant  collector,  ex- 
plorer, and  author.  [See  Kingdon-Ward.] 

WARD,  Sir  LANCELOT  EDWARD 
HARRINGTON-  (1884-1953),  surgeon. 
[See  Harrington- Ward.] 

WARDLAW,  WILLIAM  (1892-1958), 
chemist  and  university  teacher,  was 
born  29  March  1892  at  Newcastle  upon 
Tyne,  the  elder  son  of  William  Wardlaw, 
a  journeyman  joiner,  and  his  wife, 
Margaret  Kirkup.  He  was  educated  at 
Rutherford  College  and  then  at  Arm- 
strong College  (later  King's  College), 
university  of  Durham,  where  he  obtained 
his  H.Sc.  in  1913.  Early  in  his  career 
he  showed  an  aptitude  for  inorganic 
chemistry  and  in  1913,  entering  for  the 
Freire-Marreco  prize  and  medal  in  this 
subject,  he  was  awarded  an  honourable 
mention  and  a  special  prize.  He  retained 
his  interest  in  this  branch  of  chemistry 
throughout  his  life. 

Wardlaw  volunteered  for  military  ser- 
vice in  the  war,  but  was  transferred  to 
the  army  reserve  and  employed  as  a 
chemist  by  the  Ministry  of  Munitions. 
His  academic  career  began  in  1915  on  his 
appointment  as  assistant  lecturer  and 
demonstrator  in  chemistry  in  the  univer- 
sity of  Hirmingham.  He  was  promoted 
lecturer  in  1921  and  senior  lecturer  in 
1929.  There  was  an  interruption  in  his 
twenty-two  years'  service  in  Birmingham 
when  he  contracted  tuberculosis  but 
treatment  in  a  sanatorium  led  to  a  com- 
plete recovery.  Promotion  to  the  chair 
of  physical  chemistry  tenable  at  Birk- 
beck  College  in  the  university  of  London 
came  in  1937,  and  Wardlaw  held  this 
appointment  until  his  retirement  in 
1957.  On  joining  the  college  he  found  a 
department  in  which  quality  and  enthu- 
siasm had  perforce  to  compensate  for 
spaciousness  of  accommodation  and 
fashionable    equipment.    With    the    aid 


of  a  small  staff  he  had  to  teach  a  large 
number  of  students  in  inadequate  labora- 
tories, and  continue  his  research  work  in 
frustrating  circumstances. 

In  addition  to  his  academic  duties, 
Wardlaw  undertook  other  work  of 
national  importance.  In  1940  he  accep- 
ted an  appointment  on  the  staff  of  the 
central  register  of  the  Ministry  of  Labour 
and  National  Service.  Undoubtedly  he  had 
a  flair  for  accurate  judgement  of  character 
and  ability,  and  as  he  was  never  actuated 
by  self-interest,  he  was  universally  trusted. 
In  1944  he  was  invited  to  act  in  a  part- 
time  capacity  as  scientific  adviser  to  the 
Technical  and  Scientific  Register,  and 
he  held  this  post  until  his  death.  In 
1941-5  he  also  served  on  behalf  of  the 
Ministry  of  Production  as  joint-secretary 
of  the  Scientific  Advisory  Committee 
of  the  War  Cabinet.  He  was  appointed 
C.B.E.  in  1949. 

Wardlaw  held  strongly  the  belief  that 
scientists  should  contribute  to  the  well- 
being  of  their  subject  and  profession 
through  membership  of  scientific  socie- 
ties and  professional  bodies.  Through- 
out his  career  he  gave  unstinting  service 
in  this  connection  and  achieved  the  rare 
distinction  of  being  elected  president 
of  the  Chemical  Society  (1954-6)  and 
of  the  Royal  Institute  of  Chemistry  (1957 
until  his  death). 

Because  he  understood  himself  and 
knew  his  capabilities,  Wardlaw  was  an 
effective  man  in  everything  he  undertook. 
Although  kindly  and  understanding,  he 
was  not  sentimental  and  was  not  easily 
deceived.  He  could  not  bear  slipshod 
work  or  slackness  and  both  stung  him 
to  forthright  censure.  A  man  of  much 
charm  and  unfailing  courtesy  who  was 
gifted  with  a  sense  of  humour,  he  made 
many  friends  who  welcomed  his  com- 
panionship. In  the  opinion  of  many, 
Wardlaw  did  more  for  British  science 
and  scientists  than  most  men  of  his 
generation. 

Wardlaw  married  first,  in  1921,  Mar- 
garet Emily  (died  1930),  daughter  of 
William  Griffin,  printer,  of  Knares- 
borough.  He  married  secondly,  in  1932, 
Doris,  daughter  of  George  Whitfield,  who 
had  been  one  of  his  pupils ;  they  had  one 
daughter.  He  died  in  London  19  December 
1958. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

W.    G.    OVEREND. 

WARING,  Sir  HOLBURT  JACOB,  first 
baronet,  of  St.  Bartholomew's  in  the  City 


1022 


of  London  (1866-1953),  surgeon,  was  born 
at  Heskin,  Chorley,  Lancashire,  3  October 
1866,  the  eldest  son  of  Isaac  Waring, 
schoolmaster,  and  his  wife,  Catherine 
Holburt.  He  was  educated  at  the  Owens 
College,  Manchester,  and  entered  St. 
Bartholomew's  Hospital,  London,  as  a 
scholar.  He  qualified  M.R.C.S.,  L.R.C.P.  in 
1890  and  obtained  his  F.R.C.S.  in  1891. 
He  took  his  B.Sc,  London,  in  1888  with 
second  class  honours  in  physiology,  and 
proceeded  M.B.  (1890),  B.S.  (1891),  and 
M.S.  (1893). 

Waring's  whole  career  was  centred  on 
three  institutions:  St.  Bartholomew's 
Hospital,  the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons 
of  England,  and  the  university  of  London. 
At  the  hospital  he  held  several  teaching 
appointments  and  was  appointed  assis- 
tant surgeon  to  W.  Harrison  Cripps 
in  1902,  becoming  full  surgeon  in  1909. 
He  ultimately  became  consulting  sur- 
geon and  governor  of  the  hospital, 
and  had  the  distinction  of  having  a 
ward  named  after  him  during  his  life- 
time. He  was  also  consultant  surgeon 
to  the  Metropolitan  Hospital,  the  Royal 
Dental  Hospital,  and  the  Ministry  of 
Pensions.  He  was  very  interested  in  the 
subject  of  cancer  and  for  many  years 
was  treasurer  of  the  Imperial  Cancer 
Research  Fund  (1933-52).  He  published 
in  1928  a  book  Surgical  Treatment  of 
Malignant  Disease.  His  best-known  work 
was  A  Manual  of  Operative  Surgery  (1898) 
which  went  through  several  editions  and 
was  an  examination  classic. 

To  the  College  of  Surgeons  Waring 
devoted  a  great  deal  of  his  time  and 
energy.  He  was  Jacksonian  prizeman 
in  1894  for  his  essay  on  'The  diagnosis 
and  surgical  treatment  of  diseases  of  the 
liver,  gall-bladder  and  biliary  ducts'. 
He  was  Erasmus  Wilson  lecturer  (1898), 
Bradshaw  lecturer  (1921),  and  Hunterian 
orator  in  1928,  the  bicentenary  of  the 
birth  of  John  Hunter  [q.v.].  He  served 
as  vice-president  (1923-5)  and  as  presi- 
dent (1932-5).  While  on  the  College 
council  he  represented  that  body  on 
the  General  Medical  Council  and  was 
its  treasurer  (1917-32).  He  served  on 
the  court  of  examiners  (1911-20);  was 
a  Hunterian  trustee;  and  received  the 
first  past  president's  badge  in  1951. 

In  the  university  of  London,  Waring 
was  dean  of  the  faculty  of  medicine 
(1920)  and  vice-chancellor  (1922-4).  He 
was  governor  of  the  Imperial  College 
of  Science  (1930-47)  and  governor  and 
almoner  of  Christ's  Hospital  for  a  number 


D.N.B.  1951-1960  Watson,  M. 

of  years.  He  was  president  of  the  Medical 
Society  of  London  (1925-6)  and  president 
of  the  section  of  surgery  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Medicine  (1928-30).  He  served 
as  chairman  and  treasurer  to  the  London 
School  of  Hygiene.  He  promoted  the 
connection  of  the  medical  schools  with 
the  university  of  London  and  was  the 
first  to  develop  postgraduate  traininjj 
and  research  at  the  Royal  College  of 
Surgeons.  He  did  much  to  encourage 
Egyptian  medical  education  and  paid 
several  visits  to  Cairo.  In  1935  he  opened 
the  new  Royal  Australasian  College  of 
Surgeons  (of  which  he  was  an  honorary 
fellow)  at  Melbourne  and  was  presented 
with  a  ceremonial  gold  key. 

During  the  war  of  1914-18  Waring 
served  as  colonel  in  the  Royal  Army 
Medical  Corps  and  was  consulting  surgeon 
to  the  London  Command  in  addition 
to  his  hospital  work.  He  was  appointed 
C.B.E.  in  1919,  knighted  in  1925,  and 
created  a  baron.et  in  1935.  He  was  an 
officer  of  the  Legion  of  Honour  and 
received  honorary  degrees  from  Bristol, 
Durham,  and  Cairo. 

He  was  a  man  of  few  words,  inclined 
to  be  rude  to  his  juniors,  and  always 
liked  to  have  his  own  way.  Of  stern 
appearance,  he  seldom  smiled.  During  the 
last  ten  years  of  his  hfe  he  became  interes- 
ted in  printing  and  this  interest  made 
him  a  very  rich  man.  He  did  not  get  on 
well  with  his  only  son,  and  so  he  left 
his  money  to  a  potential  grandson,  and 
should  he  not  materiahze  Waring's  fortune, 
estimated  to  be  in  the  region  of  a  million 
pounds,  was  to  go  to  St.  Bartholomew's 
Hospital. 

In  1900  Waring  married  Annie  Cas- 
sandra (died  1948),  daughter  of  Charles 
Johnston  Hill.  Their  son,  Alfred  Harold 
(born  1902),  a  research  engineer  in  the 
Imperial  Chemical  Industries,  succeeded 
as  second  baronet  when  Waring  died 
at  Pen-Moel,  Tidenham,  Chepstow,  Glou- 
cestershire, 10  February  1953. 

[The  Times,  11  and  19  February  1953; 
Annals  of  the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons  of 
England,  vol.  xii,  1953;  Royal  College  of 
Surgeons  of  England,  A  Record  of  the  Years 
1901-1950,  1951 ;  St.  Bartholomew's  Hospital 
Journal,  May  1953 ;  Lancet  and  British  Medical 
Journal,  21  February  1953 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Cecil  Wakeley. 


WATSON,  Sir  MALCOLM  (1873- 
1955),  malariologist,  was  born  at  Cathcart, 
Scotland,   24  August   1873,   the   second 


1023 


Watson,  M. 


r).N.B.  1951-1960 


son  of  George  Watson,  clothier,  of  Bridge 
of  Allan,  and  his  wife,  Mary  McFarlane, 
and  a  kinsman  of  (Sir)  David  Bruce 
[q.v.]  of  tsetse-fly  fame.  Educated  at 
high  school  and  Glasgow  University  he 
graduated  in  medicine  with  commen- 
dation in  1895  and  proceeded  in  1903 
to  the  degree  of  doctor  of  medicine, 
again  with  commendation.  He  held 
resident  posts  at  the  Glasgow  Royal 
Infirmary  and  in  1900,  having  taken 
the  diploma  in  public  health  at  Cam- 
bridge University  and  travelled  as  a 
ship's  surgeon,  he  entered  the  Malayan 
medical  service.  The  Malay  States  were 
then  in  a  phase  of  rapid  development 
with  devastating  epidemics  of  malaria 
an  inevitable  sequel.  This  was  the  situation 
in  and  around  the  township  of  Klang 
where  in  1901  Watson  took  up  his  duties 
as  district  surgeon.  Inspired  by  the  work 
of  (Sir)  Ronald  Ross  [q.v.]  on  the  trans- 
mission of  malaria  by  mosquitoes,  he 
embarked  on  a  vigorous  programme 
of  mosquito  control.  His  success  was  a 
landmark  in  preventive  medicine.  Thence- 
forth malaria  and  its  prevention  were 
his  lifelong  interests. 

Working  in  a  field  where  little  was 
known,  Watson  set  himself  to  study  the 
carrier  mosquitoes  and  the  terrain  in 
which  they  bred.  The  vector  mosquitoes, 
he  found,  were  of  differing  habit:  one 
species  bred  in  sunlit  streams,  another  in 
shade,  a  third  in  the  brackish  water 
of  the  coastal  plains,  and  from  these 
and  other  differences  he  was  led  to  realize 
that  anti-mosquito  measures  must  be 
attuned  selectively  to  each  of  the  vector 
species.  Thus  he  introduced  into  malaria 
prevention  the  new  and  important 
concept  of'  'species  sanitation'.  Suiting 
his  approach  to  the  species  and  terrain, 
he  developed  methods  of  mosquito  con- 
trol— subsoil  and  other  types  of  drainage, 
larvicidal  oiling,  the  clearing  of  jungle 
or  the  promotion  of  shade,  and  other 
methods — ^which,  tested  and  proved  in 
the  towns  and  on  the  rubber  estates 
of  Malaya,  were  woven  into  the  pattern 
of  malaria  prevention  throughout  the 
world.  He  wrote  the  first  accounts  of  the 
early  sexual  development  in  the  blood 
of  the  malignant  malaria  parasites  and 
of  the  renal  complications  of  quartan 
malaria;  and  to  industrial  technology 
he  contributed  a  patent  process  for 
tapping  rubber  trees  and,  with  his  wife, 
a  device  for  controlling  dust  in  mines. 

In  1908  Watson  left  government 
service  for  general  and  consultant  prac- 


tice. Rubber  planters  and  others  saw 
the  promise  of  his  practical  approach 
to  malaria  control — a  factor  in  the  early 
development  of  the  great  Malayan  rubber 
industry — and  in  Malaya  and  elsewhere 
his  guidance  was  eagerly  sought.  He  was  a 
founder-member  of  the  Malayan  Malaria 
Advisory  Board  and  at  various  times  an 
adviser  on  the  prevention  of  malaria  to 
governments  or  industries  in  the  Malay 
States,  Singapore,  India,  Nepal,  Africa, 
the  Balkans,  and  South  America.  In 
1928  he  left  Malaya  to  serve  at  Ross's 
request  as  consultant  to  the  newly 
created  Ross  Institute  of  Tropical  Hy- 
giene and  from  1933  until  his  retirement 
in  1942  he  was  the  director  of  the  Insti- 
tute and  of  branches  he  established  in 
India  and  West  Africa.  There,  and  in  the 
Rhodesian  copper  belt  where  he  was 
medical  adviser  to  a  group  of  mining 
companies,  he  continued  to  promote  the 
spread  of  preventive  medicine  with  a 
special  regard  for  the  health  problems 
of  industry  and  the  training  of  laymen. 

For  his  work  on  the  prevention  of 
malaria  Watson  was  knighted  in  1924  and 
in  the  same  year  the  university  of  Glas- 
gow conferred  on  him  the  honorary 
degree  of  LL.D.  He  was  an  honorary 
fellow  of  the  Incorporated  Society  of 
Planters,  Malaya  (1925),  and  of  the  Royal 
Faculty  of  Physicians  and  Surgeons 
of  Glasgow  (1933),  and  a  fellow  of  the 
Geological  Society  of  London  (1943). 
Among  his  awards  were  the  gold  medal 
of  the  Rubber  Growers  Association 
(1914),  the  Stewart  prize  of  the  British 
Medical  Association  (1927),  the  Sir  Wil- 
liam Jones  gold  medal  of  the  Asiatic 
Society  of  Bengal  (1928),  the  Mary 
Kingsley  medal  of  the  Liverpool  School 
of  Tropical  Medicine  (1984),  and  the 
Albert  medal  of  the  Royal  Society  of 
Arts  (1939).  In  1948  at  the  age  of  seventy- 
five  he  delivered  the  Ronald  Ross 
oration  in  Washington  D.C.  His  writings 
include  The  Prevention  of  Malaria  in  the 
Federated  Malay  States  (1911,  2nd  ed. 
1921),  Rural  Sanitation  in  the  Tropics 
(1915),  and  African  Highway  (1953). 

In  1900  he  married  Jean  Alice,  eldest 
daughter  of  David  Gray,  engineer,  of 
Coatbridge,  Lanarkshire.  Herself  a  nurse, 
she  assisted  him  in  his  early  hospital 
work  in  Malaya.  They  had  four .  sons. 
His  wife  died  in  1935  and  in  1938  he 
married  Constance  Evelyn,  daughter  of 
Lieutenant- Colonel  Walter  L.  Loring, 
Royal  Warwickshire  Regiment,  by  whom 
he  had  one  daughter.  Watson  died  28 


1024 


D.N.B.  1G51-1960 


Watt 


December  1955  at  his  home  in  Peaslake. 
Surrey,  where  he  had  spent  his  decHning 
years  in  active  and  rewarding  retirement. 
[Lancet,  7  January  1956 ;  Journal  of  Tropical 
Medicine  and  Hygiene,  vol.  lix,  No.  2,  1956  • 
personal  knowledge ;  private  information.] 

John  Field. 

WATSON,  ROBERT  WILLIAM 
SETON-  (1879-1951)^  .  tiistorian. ,.  [See 
Seton- Watson.]      ;  y{,vi;  h  Av      ^i 

WATT,  GEORGE  FIDDES  (1873- 
1960),  portrait  painter,  was  born  in 
Aberdeen  15  February  1873,  the  only 
son  of  George  Watt,  joiner  and  ship- 
wright, and  his  wife,  Jean  Frost,  daughter 
of  a  North  of  England  weaver  working 
at  an  Aberdeen  Unen  factory.  Fiddes 
was  the  eldest  of  a  family  of  five. 
His  mother,  a  handsome  woman  of 
musical  tastes,  was  the  active  force  in 
bringing  up  the  family  and  looking  after 
their  welfare.  As  a  boy  Fiddes  Watt  was 
handicapped  by  a  stanmier  which  he 
overcame  later  in  life.  On  leaving  school 
at  fourteen,  he  was  apprenticed,  hke  so 
many  artists,  to  a  firm  of  Uthographic 
printers,  in  Aberdeen.  During  these 
seven  years  he  attended  evening  classes 
at  Gray's  School  of  Art  where  among 
his  fellow  students  were  Robert  Brough 
and  Douglas  Strachan  [qq.v.]. 

At  the  age  of  twenty-one  Watt  went 
to  Edinburgh  to  study  in  the  life  class 
of  the  Royal  Scottish  Academy.  For  a 
time  he  found  life  hard,  and  a  struggle 
to  make  ends  meet,  but  through  exhi- 
biting his  paintings  he  soon  obtained 
small  commissions.  One  of  the  earliest 
of  his  portraits  to  attract  attention 
was  that  of  Provost  Smith  of  Peterhead. 
Another  striking  portrait  painted  about 
this  time  was  of  Provost  Wallace  of 
Tain;  his  spirited  rendering  of  this 
bearded  Highlander — seated  with  a  walk- 
ing-stick in  hand — ^wasa  fine  achievement 
and  laid  the  foundation  of  Watt's  sue- 


In  1903  Watt  married  Jean  Willox, 
art  teacher  in  Peterhead  Academy,  and 
the  daughter  of  a  farmer  in  the  Buchan 
area.  They  had  three  sons  and  a  daughter. 
Shortly  after  his  marriage  Watt  painted 
his  wife  and  entitled  it  'The  Lady  in 
White'.  Shown  at  the  Royal  Scottish 
Academy  exhibition  it  was  acclaimed 
by  artists  and  laymen  alike.  It  was 
followed  by  several  portraits  of  women, 
including  the  fine  'Mrs.  Jas.  A.  Hood 
of  Midfield',  the  attractive   'Lady  with 


Violin',  and  a  portrait  of  his  mother 
which  was  bought  out  of  the  Chantrey 
Bequest  for  the  Tate  Gallery.  In  the 
opinion  of  many  Watt  never  did  any. 
thing  better  than  these  paintings.  His 
reputation,  however,  rests  on  his  portraits 
of  men.  He  was  interested  in  strong 
character,  expressed  with  vigour  and 
freedom  of  handling.  His  most  vital 
works  were  stimulated  by  men  with  the 
personality  and  type  of  Lord  Haldane 
whom  he  painted  for  Lincoln's  Inn.  Watt 
believed  'that  good  portraits  happen 
when  the  minds  of  sitters  and  artists 
"click",  when  some  spark  of  sympathy 
temporarily  unites  them'. 

When  commissions  continued  to  come 
in  steadily,  he  felt  justified  in  moving  to 
London  where  he  rented  a  large  studio  in 
the  Cromwell  Road.  Among  the  numerous 
portraits  of  distinguished  persons  he 
painted  are  those  at  Balliol  College, 
Oxford,  of  Asquith  and  Lord  Loreburn. 
Other  portraits  are  those  of  Lord 
Ullswater  (House  of  Commons) ;  the  first 
Viscount  Finlay  (Middle  Temple,  repUca 
at  the  Palace  of  Peace,  The  Hague); 
A.  J.  Balfour  (Eton);  H.  F.  NewaU 
(Cambridge  Solar  Physics  Observatory); 
and  Cosmo  Gordon  Lang  (All  Souls, 
Oxford). 

Throughout  his  career,  Watt's  paintt 
ing  did  not  change  much.  His  work  may 
be  regarded  as  that  of  a  sound  prac- 
titioner in  the  well-tried  Scottish  tradi* 
tion  stemming  from  Raebum,  with  its 
unaffected  simplicity  and  robust  direct- 
ness of  handling.  Another  early  influence 
was  that  of  Sir  George  Reid,  a  fellow 
Aberdonian,  a  painter  whose  work  had 
a  refinement  of  draughtsmanship  and  a 
largeness  of  design  which  attracted  him* 
Watt  was  elected  an  associate  (1910) 
and  a  full  member  (1924)  of  the  Royal 
Scottish  Academy.  In  1955  the  university 
of  Aberdeen  conferred  on  him  the  hono- 
rary degree  of  LL.D. 

During  the  war  of  1939-46,  when  the 
bombing  of  London  became  severe, 
Watt  retired  to  his  native  Aberdeen. 
From  then  on  he  painted  very  Uttle 
due  to  failing  eyesight  and  late  in  life 
he  was  granted  a  Civil  List  pension. 
His  wife  died  in  1956;  all  through  their 
long  married  life  she  had  been  a  steadying 
influence  and  her  death  was  a  severe 
blow  to  him.  He  was  of  a  convivial  dis- 
position; possessing  a  good  voice,  he 
was  fond  of  singing  Scottish  songs  and 
ballads.  In  his  later  years,  a  well-known 
figure   in   Aberdeen,    with   his   vandyke 


8652002 


1025 


Ll 


Watt 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


beard,  deer-stalking  cap,  and  carrying 
a  long  shepherd's  crook,  he  attracted 
attention  wherever  he  went.  He  died 
there  22  November  1960. 

There  is  a  bronze  head  of  Fiddes  Watt 
by  T.  Huxley  Jones  in  the  Aberdeen 
Art  Gallery. 

[Press  and  Journal  (Aberdeen),  3  November 
1932  and  28  January  1963;  People's  Journal 
(Dundee),  26  November  1960 ;  Royal  Scottish 
Academy  Annual  Report,  1960;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

D.  M.  Sutherland. 

WAVERLEY,  first  Viscount  (1882- 
1958),  administrator  and  statesman.  [See 
Anderson,  John.] 

WEBB,  CLEMENT  CHARLES 
JULIAN  (1865-1954),  theologian,  philo- 
sopher, and  historian,  was  born  in 
London  25  June  1865,  the  youngest 
child  of  Benjamin  Webb  [q.v.]  and 
his  wife,  Maria  Elphinstone,  daughter 
of  William  Hodge  Mill  [q.v.].  Webb  was 
much  influenced  by  the  interests  and 
environment  of  his  father  and  wrote 
about  them  in  this  Dictionary  (1899) 
and,  later,  in  the  Church  Quarterly  Re- 
view (vol.  Ixxv,  October  1912-January 
1913,  pp.  329-48).  He  liked  to  recall  a 
conversation  which  he  had  with  Mr. 
Gladstone  during  his  memorable  visit 
to  Oxford  in  1890.  Being  then  a  pro- 
bationer fellow  of  Magdalen,  Webb 
met  Gladstone  at  a  breakfast  party, 
'and  he  said  to  me  that  in  knowledge  of 
English  churches  my  father  came  next 
after  his  (Gladstone's)  own  brother-in- 
law,  Sir  Stephen  Glynne'  (Oxoniensia^ 
vol.  vi,  1941,  p.  91;  cf.  for  Webb's 
recollections  of  Gladstone,  Church  Quar- 
terly Review,  vol.  cliii,  July-September 
1952,  pp.  320-34).  Webb  was  educated 
at  Westminster  School,  where  he  was 
captain  of  the  school,  whence  he  passed 
to  Christ  Church,  Oxford,  as  a  West- 
minster scholar.  His  devotion  to  West- 
minster was  enduring.  From  1905,  when 
he  became  a  governor  of  the  school,  he 
remained  until  his  death  in  the  closest 
contact  with  its  affairs.  In  1888  he 
graduated  with  first  class  honours  in 
literae  humaniores. 

On  6  November  1889  Webb  was 
elected  a  fellow,  and,  in  the  next  year 
(12  March),  he  was  appointed  a  tutor 
in  philosophy  in  Magdalen  College, 
Oxford.  During  the  year  1889-90  he  did 
some  philosophical  teaching  at  New 
College,    where    one    of   his   pupils    was 


H.  W.  B.  Joseph  (whose  notice  he 
contributed  to  this  Dictionary),  later 
his  brother-in-law.  He  attended  his 
first  college  meeting  at  Magdalen  on 
10  December  1890.  Webb  was  a  fellow 
and  tutor  of  Magdalen  for  thirty  years, 
during  thirteen  of  which  (1907-20)  he  also 
acted  as  tutor  in  philosophy  in  the  Society 
of  Non-Collegiate  students.  In  1905-6  he 
was  senior  proctor.  Throughout  his  Oxford 
life  he  took  a  lively  interest  in  academic 
affairs,  with  active  periods  of  service  on  the 
hebdomadal  council  and  other  university 
bodies.  From  1911  to  1914  he  was  Wilde 
lecturer  on  natural  and  comparative  re- 
ligion. In  1920  he  became  the  first  Oriel 
professor  of  the  philosophy  of  the  Christian 
religion.  The  new  chair  had  been  founded 
by  C.  F.  NoUoth,  whose  name  it  now  bears, 
with  Webb's  peculiar  claims  directly  in 
view.  Hence  in  1922  he  vacated  his  fellow- 
ship at  Magdalen  and  became  a  fellow  of 
Oriel.  On  reaching  the  retiring  age  in  1930 
he  entered  upon  the  last,  but  no  less  active, 
period  of  his  life.  He  died  at  Oxford  5 
October  1954.  In  1905  he  had  married 
Eleanor  Theodora  (died  1942),  daughter 
of  the  Rev.  Alexander  Joseph,  honorary 
canon  of  Rochester.  There  were  no  child- 
ren. During  their  happy,  busy,  and  hospit- 
able life  together,  the  Webbs  lived  first  at 
Holywell  Ford,  close  to  Magdalen,  then  in 
Old  Marston  (where  Webb  was  a  church- 
warden), and  finally  at  the  Old  Rectory, 
Pitchcott,  near  Aylesbury. 

Webb  was  by  nature  both  determined 
and  possessed  of  a  spirit  of  inquiry. 
He  responded  to  every  call  on  his  loyalty 
(for  he  seemed  to  be  the  embodiment 
of  pietas)  without  loss  to  his  independence. 
His  mental  curiosity  constantly  enriched 
an  orderly  intelligence  which  tried  to 
take  account  of  everything  relevant 
to  its  purpose.  Indeed,  the  rich  experi- 
ences of  a  quiet  life,  at  school,  in  Oxford, 
and  in  foreign  travel,  were  related, 
to  an  unusual  degree,  to  his  literary 
output.  Most  of  his  theological  and 
philosophical  writings,  for  example,  were 
first  delivered  as  lectures ;  lectures  which, 
in  their  turn,  imparted  the  activity  of  a 
mind  eager  for  fresh  contacts  with  other 
minds  and  almost  naively  happy  in 
discussion.  On  the  other  hand,  beyond 
and  more  influential  upon  him  than 
the  more  casual  contacts  with  academic 
society  and  the  literary  world,  a  spiritual 
crisis,  through  which  he  passed  in  his 
first  year  as  an  undergraduate  and  which 
he  vividly  described  forty  years  later, 
best   explains   the   concentration   of  his 


1026 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Webb 


learning    and    interests    in    the    service 
of   the    philosophy    of   religion    and,    in 
more  practical  ways,  of  the  Church  of 
England.  As  he  wrote  in  1925  this  experi- 
ence   left    him    'with    a    profound    con- 
viction of  the  reality  of  God  and  of  the 
duty    of    openmindedness    and    intellec- 
tual honesty  ;  a  belief  that  it  was  the  first 
of  religious    duties   to   keep    one's   ears 
open  to  any  voice,  from  whatever  quarter, 
which  might  convey  a  message  from  God'. 
A  'sense  of  expectation  of  strange  and 
wonderful  things'  strengthened  his  life- 
long refusal  to  withdraw  dogma  based 
upon   historical   fact   from   the   scrutiny 
and  criticism  of  reason,  to  make  a  clear- 
cut  distinction  between  what  is  histori- 
cally   mediated    and    what    is    revealed 
through  a  process  of  philosophical  specu- 
lation,  and  to   admit  that   'within   the 
knowledge    of    God,    however    we    may 
have   come   by   it',   there   is   a   portion 
guaranteed   to   be   unmixed   with   error. 
Webb   could    recognize    infallibility    no- 
where,    in     Pope,     Church,     or     Bible. 
(See     Religious     Experience,     a     lecture 
of  19   May  1944,   printed  with   a   fore- 
word by  L.  W.  Grensted  and  a  biblio- 
graphy of  Webb's  published  writings  as 
presented  to  him  in  Oriel  College  on  his 
eightieth   birthday,    25   June    1945,   pp. 
41-5.)  As  he  himself  noted  in  1925  he  was 
acutely  aware  of  the  sense  of  insecurity 
which  so  easily  besets  the  mind  drawn 
to  metaphysical  reflection.   It  has  been 
observed  that  he  had  little  to  contribute 
to  the  age-long  discussion  of  the  problem 
of  immortality.   (Grensted,   in   op.    cit., 
p.  16.)  He  found  relief  from  the  sense 
of  tension    between   time    and   eternity 
in  his  profound  conviction  in  the  reality 
of  God,    in   his   personal   experience   of 
Gk)d   as   a   Person,   and   in   the   abiding 
impression  made  on  him  as  an  under- 
graduate    by     Kant's     presentation     of 
morality    as    a    categorical    imperative. 
Here  he  was  strengthened  by  the  com- 
panionship   of    his    school    and    college 
friend,    C.    J.    Shebbeare.    Mental   satis- 
faction   he    found    in    the    teaching    of 
John    Cook    Wilson    [q.v.],    'a    man    to 
whom   I   owe  more  than  to  any  other 
of  my  philosophical  instructors',  for,  in 
Cook  Wilson's  realism  he  saw  a  realism 
*for   which    spirit   is    no    less    real   than 
matter,  and  the  spiritual  values  of  truth, 
goodness,  and  beauty  no  mere  creations 
of  finite  minds'  (ibid.,  p.  35). 

Webb  rejoiced  in  the  meetings  of  the 
Aristotelian  Society,  which  at  first  met 
in  the  rooms  of  Ingram  Bywater  [q.v.], 


and,  perhaps  still  more,  in  the  discussions 
of    the    anonymous    philosophical    club 
which  had  its   centre   in   Cook   Wilson. 
As  boy  and  man  he  had  always  taken 
an  effortless  delight  in  the  rich  traditions 
of  his   surroundings.   He  made   full  use 
of   the    opportunities    revealed    to    him 
by  his  contemporaries  in    Magdalen  to 
train  and  indulge  his  historical  curiosity. 
Indeed  he  became  one  of  a  very  distin- 
guished group  of  scholars  at  Magdalen. 
His  closest  friends  in  the  college  were 
H.   A.   Wilson,    Cuthbert  Turner   [q.v.], 
and  Paul  Benecke,  but  probably  he  owed 
most    to    Reginald    Lane    Poole    [q.v.], 
who  was  elected  a  fellow  in  1898,  when 
he  was  forty-one  years  of  age  and  already 
recognized  as  one  of  the  best  historical 
scholars    of    his    time.    In    his    father's 
house   Webb   had  lived   in   an  ecclesio- 
logical   world   inspired   by  J.   M.   Neale 
[q.v].  At  Westminster  and  Christ  Church 
his     sense     of    historical     realities     was 
strengthened.  And  now  in  Magdalen  his 
intense  philosophical  interests  were  given 
an    historical    setting    which,     however 
strange  it  might  seem  to  be  to  others, 
was    very    satisfying    to    himself.     His 
scholarly    editions     of     two    important 
medieval   texts,   the   Policraticus   (1909) 
and    the    Metalogicon    (1929)    composed 
by  John  of  Salisbury  [q.v.]  when  he  was 
in  the  service  of  Theobald  [q.v.],  arch- 
bishop   of   Canterbury    (d.    1161),    were 
as    congenial    and    apposite    to    Webb's 
outlook  as  were  the   two  series  of  his 
Gifford    lectures,    God    and    Personality 
(1918)     and     Divine     Personality     and 
Human  Life  (1920).  In  his  work  on  John 
of  Salisbury,  work  which  in  part  was  taken 
over  from  R.  L.  Poole,  he  paid  tribute 
to  one  who,  more  than  any  other,  is  able 
to  guide  the  student  of  public  life  and 
of    the    various    schools    of    philosophy 
in  the  twelfth  century.  Webb  realized, 
perhaps  even  more  clearly  than  did  his 
friend  Hastings  Rashdall  (whose   notice 
he  contributed  to  this  Dictionary),  the 
permanent     significance     of    the     issues 
raised   in   the    twelfth    century   for   the 
student  of  the  history  and   philosophy 
of   religion.    His    mastery    of    historical 
technique   and  criticism,   which  is  very 
remarkable,    may    well    have    come    to 
him  so  easily  because  the  object  of  his 
investigations   gave   him   such   pleasure. 
As   the   numerous   essays,   reviews,   and 
notes    mentioned    in    the    bibliography 
of  his  writings  show,  medieval  problems 
fascinated   him  to  the   end   of  his   life. 
In  one  of  his  last  papers,  he  returned 


1027 


Webb 


'D.N.B.  1951-1960 


to  a  theme,  the  dialogue  of  Gilbert 
Crispin  [q.v.]  between  a  Christian  and  a 
heathen  (c.  1093-8),  with  which  he  had 
dealt  forty  years  earlier  in  his  Studies  in 
the  History  of  Natural  Theology  (1915), 
and  he  printed  the  dialogue  for  the 
first  time  {Mediaeval  and  Renaissance 
Studies,  ed.  R.  W.  Hunt  and  R.  Kli- 
bansky,  vol.  iii,  1954,  pp.  55-77). 

Webb  was  alert  to  the  practical  bearing 
of  movements  of  thought  upon  eccle- 
siastical activities  and  personal  religion 
both  throughout  the  centuries  and  in 
the  world  about  him.  His  first  review  was 
a  note  on  Lu^  Mundi  {Oxford  Magazine, 
12  February  1890),  his  first  articles  were 
on  Scotus  Erigena  and  John  of  Salisbury 
{Proceedings  of  the  Aristotelian  Society, 
vol.  ii,  1892,  1893).  His  first  book,  on 
the  devotions  of  St.  Anselm  (1903), 
appeared  soon  after  a  long  review  by 
him  of  a  big  book  on  the  philosophy  of 
the  Christian  religion  by  A.  M.  Fairbairn 
[q.v.]  {Journal  of  Theological  Studies, 
January  1903).  The  publication  of  his 
edition  of  the  Policraticus  in  1909  was 
followed  in  1910  by  a  report,  'Recent 
movements  in  Philosophy  in  relation 
to  Theistic  Belief.  And  so  he  was  engaged 
until  his  death.  He  wrote  a  short  history 
of  philosophy  for  the  Home  University 
Library  (1915)  and  in  1932  put  together 
what  he  knew  and  felt  about  John  of 
Salisbury  and  his  writings  in  another 
little  book  contributed  to  a  series  on 
great  medieval  churchmen.  His  wide 
range  is  best  revealed  in  his  fine  Gifford 
lectures,  notably  in  the  second  series 
in  which  he  relates  the  many-sided  experi- 
ences of  human  life,  economic,  aesthetic, 
political,  moral,  religious,  to  the  fact 
(as  he  insisted  it  to  be)  of  divine  person- 
ality (1920).  His  concern  with  the  'prob- 
lems in  the  relations  of  God  and  Man', 
the  title  of  one  of  his  books  (1911,  cor- 
rected ed.  1915),  increased  as  he  concen- 
trated less  on  problems  of  'natural  and 
comparative  religion'  and  more  on  the 
problems  of  'philosophy  and  the  Christian 
religion',  the  titles  of  his  inaugural  lectures 
as  Wilde  lecturer  (1912)  and  Oriel  professor 
(1920).  Significant  later  books  are  Re- 
ligious Thought  in  the  Oxford  Movement 
(1928),  Pascal's  Philosophy  of  Religion 
(1929),  Religion  and  the  Thought  of 
To-day  (the  Riddell  lectures,  1929), 
A  Study  of  Religious  Thought  in  England 
from  1850  (1933,  being  the  Olaus  Petri 
lectures  delivered  in  Uppsala  in  1932). 
Webb's  practical  expression  of  these 
interests  was  shown  between   1924  and 


1938  when  he  was  an  active  member  of 
the  Archbishops'  Commission  on  Doctrine 
in  the  Church  of  England.  His  critical 
power  in  discussion  was  freed  from  any 
trace  of  offence  by  his  modesty  and 
exquisite  courtesy.  These  traits  in  him 
were  revealed  very  happily  when  in 
1930-31  he  delivered  at  Calcutta  the 
Stephanos  Nirmalendu  Ghosh  lectures 
on  The  Contribution  of  Christianity  to 
Ethics  (published  1932,  and  later,  in 
Cairo,  in  an  Arabic  translation).  Webb's 
interests  seemed  to  know  no  limits,  and 
he  naturally  formed  many  friendships, 
whose  range  may  be  seen  in  his  memorial 
notices  of  Arthur  Balfour,  the  Abb6 
Bremond,  W.  G.  de  Burgh,  Charles 
Gore,  Friedrich  von  Hiigel,  Henry  Miers, 
C.  F.  Nolloth,  R.  L.  Poole,  Hastings 
Rashdall,  and  William  Temple. 

In  1927  Webb  was  elected  F.B.A.  and 
he  proceeded  to  his  Oxford  D.Litt.  in 
1930.  He  was  honorary  LL.D.  of  St. 
Andrews  (1921),  D.Theol.  of  Uppsala 
(1932),  and  D.D.  of  Glasgow  (1937). 
From  about  1880  until  his  death  he 
kept  a  diary  now  deposited  in  the  Bod- 
leian Library.  An  unpublished  auto- 
biographical sketch,  in  the  possession 
of  his  executor,  was  used  by  Sir  David 
Ross  in  his  British  Academy  memoir. 

A  portrait  of  Webb  painted  in  1929 
by  Delmar  Harmood  Banner  was  pre- 
sented after  his  death  to  Oriel  College 
and  hangs  in  the  Provost's  Lodging. 
A  sepia  drawing  by  Sir  William  Rothen- 
stein,  dated  1933,  is  at  Magdalen  College. 

[Webb's  article  in  Contemporary  British 
Philosophy,  Personal  Statements  (second 
series),  1925 ;  Religious  Experience,  with  a 
foreword  by  L.  W.  Grensted,  printed  with 
a  bibliography  of  Webb's  published  writings, 
and  presented  to  him  in  1945  {supra) ;  Sir 
David  Ross  in  Proceedings  of  the  British 
Academy,  vol.  xli,  1955 ;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.] 

F.  M.   POWICKE. 

WEBB-JOHNSON,  ALFRED  ED- 
WARD,  Baron  Webb- Johnson  (1880- 
1958),  surgeon,  was  born  at  Stoke-on-Trent 
4  September  1880,  the  second  son  and 
third  child  in  the  family  of  eight  of  Samuel 
Johnson,  medical  officer  of  health  for  the 
town,  by  his  wife,  Julia  Ann,  daughter  of 
James  Webb,  army  agent.  His  esteem  for 
his  mother  prompted  him  to  add  her 
surname  to  his  own  in  1915. 

He  was  educated  at  Newcastle  under 
Lyme  High  School  and  the  Owens  College, 
Manchester,  where  he  graduated  M.B., 
Ch.B.  with  honours   in   1903,   and  won 


1028 


D^.B.  1051-1900 


Webb-Johnson 


the  Dumville  surgical  prize  and  the  Tom 
Jones  scholarship  in  surgery ;  he  devoted 
this  time  to  a  study  of  ligature  materials 
and  developed  a  method  of  sterilization 
of  catgut.  He  was  appointed  demon- 
strator of  operative  surgery  in  the  uni- 
versity and  became  surgical  registrar 
at  the  Manchester  Royal  Infirmary  and 
assistant  medical  officer  at  the  Children's 
Hospital.  His  surgical  training  in  Man- 
chester was  greatly  influenced  by  (Sir) 
William  Thorburn.  Gaining  his  F.R.C.S. 
in  1906  Johnson  went  to  London  in  1908 
and  successfully  applied  for  the  post  of 
resident  medical  officer  at  the  Middlesex 
Hospital  in  succession  to  (Sir)  Gordon 
Gordon-Taylor  [q.v.].  Only  three  years 
later  he  was  elected  to  the  honorary  staff  of 
the  hospital  as  assistant  surgeon.  He  also 
served  as  clinical  assistant  to  St.  Peter's 
Hospital  where  he  developed  his  hfelong 
interest  in  urological  surgery.  He  visited 
urological  clinics  in  Berlin,  Vienna,  and 
Berne  and  was  a  pioneer  of  pyelography 
in  Great  Britain. 

When  war  broke  out  in  1914  Johnson 
was  called  up  for  service  in  the  Royal 
Army  Medical  Corps;  became  colonel 
A.M.S.  and  consulting  surgeon  to  the 
expeditionary  force;  and  at  one  time 
commanded  the  14th  General  Hospital, 
Wimereux.  He  was  appointed  to  the 
D.S.O.  (1916),  thrice  mentioned  in 
dispatches,  and  appointed  C.B.E.  (1919). 
His  interest  in  army  affairs  continued 
throughout  his  life :  he  became  consultant 
surgeon  to  the  Queen  Alexandra  Military 
Hospital  and  to  the  Royal  Hospital, 
Chelsea,  and  was  chairman  of  the  Army 
Medical  Advisory  Board  (1946-57). 

In  1919  Webb- Johnson  was  made  dean 
of  the  Middlesex  Hospital  medical  school 
and  at  once  took  steps  to  bring  it  up 
to  university  standards.  He  succeeded  in 
enlisting  the  help  of  wealthy  benefactors 
so  that  from  1920  there  were  university 
chairs  of  physics,  chemistry,  anatomy, 
physiology,  pathology,  and  experimental 
pathology,  all  adequately  endowed,  shortly 
to  be  followed  by  a  chair  of  biochemistry. 
At  the  same  time  the  existing  departments 
were  enlarged  or  rehoused.  The  changes 
made  in  clinical  teaching  were  influenced 
by  a  tour  of  North  America  in  1923.  What 
he  found  worthy,  Webb-Johnson  imitated 
at  Middlesex,  but  he  considered  there  was 
too  much  laboratory  work  in  the  American 
system  and  too  little  clinical  experience 
at  the  bedside.  Consequently,  rather  than 
clinical  professorships,  the  system  of  regis- 
trars was  adopted  at  Middlesex.  He  saw 


the  advantages  of  having  properly  de- 
veloped special  departments  in  a  general 
hospital  and  he  himself  started  the  uro- 
logical clinic  at  Middlesex. 

He  ended  his  term  of  office  as  dean 
in  1925,  the  year  in  which  serious  defects 
were  discovered  in  the  foundations  of 
the  old  hospital.  He  became  chairman 
of  the  plans  conunittee  and  the  chief 
moving  spirit  in  the  rebuilding.  With 
the  slogan  'The  Middlesex  Hospital  is 
falling  down'  he  was  instrumental  in 
raising  a  very  large  part  of  the  million 
and  a  quarter  pounds  needed.  On  the 
completion  of  the  building  in  1985  the 
board  took  the  unprecedented  step  of 
naming  his  own  ward  after  him  whilst  he 
was  still  on  the  active  staff.  In  1946  he 
retired  and  was  appointed  consulting 
surgeon  and  vice-president. 

From  1936  to  1953  Webb-Johnson 
was  surgeon  to  Queen  Mary  who  esteemed 
him  highly.  He  was  knighted  in  1936; 
appointed  K.C.V.O.  (1942)  and  G.C.V.O. 
(1954);  and  created  a  baronet  in  1945 
and  a  baron  in  1948. 

Concurrently  with  his  hospital  activi- 
ties, the  affairs  of  the  Royal  College 
of  Surgeons  of  England  occupied  an 
increasing  amount  of  his  time.  He  was 
a  member  of  the  court  of  examiners 
(1926-36)  and  of  the  council  (1932-50). 
In  1940,  as  vice-president,  he  gave  the 
Bradshaw  lecture  on  'Pride  and  Prejudice 
in  the  Treatment  of  Cancer'.  In  1941 
he  was  elected  president,  a  position  which 
he  held  for  a  record  period  of  eight  years 
and  which  he  made  a  full-time  job, 
rarely  missing  a  day  at  the  College.  Only 
a  few  weeks  before  his  election  the 
College  had  been  severely  damaged  in  an 
air  raid.  Temporary  repairs  were  quickly 
made  so  that  essential  work  could  continue. 
In  planning  the  rebuilding  he  seized 
the  opportunity  to  reorganize  and  expand 
the  College,  in  a  manner  previously 
unconceived,  as  a  centre  of  postgraduate 
education  and  research  and  a  live  head- 
quarters of  surgery  in  England  and  the 
Commonwealth.  The  primary  examina- 
tion for  the  fellowship  was  reorganized 
and  reciprocity  with  other  Colleges  estab- 
lished. Tenure  of  office  of  members 
of  the  council  and  court  was  limited. 
The  specialist  associations  were  encou- 
raged by  providing  them  with  a  secre- 
tariat which  would  keep  them  within 
the  orbit  of  general  surgery;  represen- 
tatives of  the  major  surgical  specia- 
lities and  of  general  practice  were  co-opted 
to  sejye  on  the  council.   A  faculty  of 


Webb-Johnson 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


dental  surgery  was  formed  in  1947  and 
of  anaesthetists  in  1948 ;  special  exa- 
minations for  the  fellowship  in  oph- 
thalmology and  in  otolaryngology  were 
instituted  in  1947;  teaching' in  the  basic 
sciences  was  assured  by  the  appoint- 
ment of  professors  in  physiology,  patho- 
logy, and  anatomy  for  which  he  again 
succeeded  in  obtaining  endowments  from 
wealthy  donors.  The  building  of  the 
Nuffield  College  of  Surgical  Sciences 
provided  residential  accommodation  for 
the  increasing  number  of  postgraduate 
students  coming  from  overseas;  it  en- 
abled him  to  realize  his  dream  of  an  'AH 
Souls  of  surgery'.  Overseas  ties  were 
strengthened  by  the  endowment  in  1946 
of  the  Sims  Commonwealth  travelling 
professorships  and  by  the  foundation 
in  1947  of  the  College's  own  monthly 
Annals,  which  obtained  a  world-wide 
circulation. 

In  1939  Webb- Johnson  visited  Egypt 
to  inspect  medical  schools  and  went  on 
to  Australia  where  he  delivered  the  Syme 
oration  to  the  Royal  Australasian  College 
of  Surgeons  on  'Surgery  in  England 
in  the  Making'.  He  received  the  honorary 
fellowship  of  the  College,  as  also  of  those 
of  America,  Edinburgh,  Glasgow,  Ireland, 
and  Canada,  and  of  the  faculties  of  dental 
surgery  and  anaesthetists  in  England. 
In  1949  an  annual  Webb- Johnson  lecture 
was  endowed  by  the  faculty  of  dental 
surgery.  He  was  made  an  honorary  LL.D. 
of  Liverpool  and  of  Toronto ;  was  awarded 
the  honorary  medal  of  the  Royal  College 
of  Surgeons  in  1950,  and  in  1956  was  one 
of  the  first  members  of  its  newly  formed 
court  of  patrons.  After  leaving  the  council 
of  the  College  he  was  elected  a  trustee 
of  the  Hunterian  Collection  and  took  an 
active  interest  in  the  rebuilding  of  the 
museum  up  to  the  time  of  his  death. 

Throughout  this  period  he  found 
time  to  devote  to  other  interests.  He  was 
president  of  the  Royal  Medical  Benevo- 
lent Fund  and  in  1951  president  of 
Epsom  College  for  which  he  organized  a 
successful  appeal.  He  played  a  promi- 
nent part  in  the  activities  of  the  Order 
of  St.  John,  becoming  hospitaller  (1946- 
54)  and  receiving  the  grand  cross  of  the 
order  in  1955.  After  the  destruction 
of  the  Ophthalmic  Hospital  in  Jerusalem 
in  1948  he  planned  a  new  hospital  with 
a  research  centre  for  the  prevention  of 
eye  diseases. 

No  truly  great  man  can  escape  criti- 
cism; at  the  birth  of  the  National 
Health   Service   Webb-Johnson   adopted 


the  role  of  mediator  between  the  minister 
of  health  and  the  British  Medical  Associa- 
tion when  tempers  ran  high.  He  wa-s 
criticized  for  accepting  a  barony  at  this 
time  but  few  of  his  critics  knew  that 
he  had  already  twice  declined  that 
honour.  His  intervention  in  debate  on  a 
medical  subject  in  the  House  of  Lords 
was  always  to  the  point. 

In  1950-52  Webb- Johnson  was  presi- 
dent of  the  Royal  Society  of  Medicine 
and  he  was  the  inevitable  chairman 
of  the  building  committee  when  funds 
were  forthcoming  from  the  Wellcome 
trustees  for  an  enlargement  of  the  society's 
house  which  was  completed  in  1953. 

His  achievements  as  an  administrator 
and  organizer  have  tended  to  divert 
attention  from  the  fact  that  Webb- Johnson 
was  first  and  foremost  a  surgeon.  His 
judgement  was  sound  and  his  technique 
faultless;  his  opinion  was  frequently 
sought  by  his  colleagues  and  he  excelled 
in  the  management  of  a  difficult  case. 
His  ready  wit  and  unfailing  good  humour 
and  sympathy  made  him  loved  by  his 
patients.  His  lectures  and  ward  rounds 
were  always  popular  and  he  taught  the 
students  the  essentials  of  surgery.  His 
own  special  subject  was  urology  and  he 
liked  to  remember  that  he  was  born  in 
1880,  the  year  when  Henry  Morris  was 
the  first  to  remove  a  stone  from  an  other- 
wise healthy  kidney.  He  was  a  most 
generous  chief  and  gave  his  assistants 
ample  opportunities  to  practise  what  he 
had  taught  them.  Postgraduate  surgical 
education  in  London  owes  much  to  his 
vision  and  foresight.  He  was  a  man 
of  resolution,  the  whole  pattern  of  whose 
life  showed  a  consistent  determination 
and  ability  to  see  what  was  wanted 
and  get  it  done.  The  experience  of  one 
phase  led  naturally  to  the  next  so  that 
whilst  his  career  was  one  of  constant 
preparation  it  was  also  one  of  constant 
achievement. 

Personally  he  was  a  man  of  great 
charm,  a  generous  host,  and  an  enter- 
taining after-dinner  speaker.  He  was 
slow  to  show  anger,  but  ready  to  give 
a  reprimand  whenever  and  wherever 
it  was  needed.  His  rebuke  might  be 
couched  in  terms  of  apparent  jest  but 
it  was  still  to  be  taken  seriously.  He  was 
always  immaculate  in  dress  and  his 
cartoon  in  the  hospital  journal  bore  the 
title  of  'The  Groomy  Dean'.  A  patron 
of  the  arts,  he  was  at  one  time  a  director 
of  the  Savoy  Theatre  and  was  a  frequent 
visitor    to    Covent    Garden.    His    know- 


1030 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


ledge  of  silver  was  great  and  he  was  the 
recognized  authority  on  the  silver  trea- 
sures of  the  College.  He  was  a  lover  of 
Kipling  and  like  his  mentor  Sir  John 
Bland-Sutton  [q.v.]  had  a  deep  know- 
ledge of  the  Bible  and  of  Shakespeare. 
His  memory  was  good  and  he  rarely 
used  notes  for  a  speech  or  a  lecture. 
Although  one  of  his  ambitions,  the  estab- 
lishment of  an  academy  of  medicine  on 
the  south  side  of  Lincoln's  Inn  Fields, 
was  never  realized,  he  left  behind  many 
material  reminders  of  his  achievements 
when  he  died  in  London  28  May  1958. 

He  married  in  1911  Cecilia  Flora 
(died  1968),  daughter  of  Douglas  Gordon 
MacRae,  the  founder  of  the  Financial 
Times.  To  commemorate  her  father 
and  her  husband  she  made  the  MacRae- 
Webb- Johnson  gift  in  1952  to  the  Hun- 
terian  trustees  to  maintain  and  improve 
the  museum.  There  were  no  children  and 
the  peerage  became  extinct. 

A  portrait  by  Francis  Hodge  (1943) 
is  in  the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons; 
one  by  T.  C.  Dugdale  (c.  1952)  at  the  Royal 
Society  of  Medicine;  another  by  Hodge 
(c.  1954)  at  the  Middlesex  Hospital, 
where  a  memorial  window  by  Miss  How- 
son  was  dedicated  in  the  chapel  in  1964. 

[H.  Campbell  Thomson,  The  Story  of  the 
Middlesex  Hospital  Medical  School,  1835-1935, 
1935 ;  Sir  Zachary  Cope,  The  History  of  the 
Royal  College  of  Surgeons  of  England,  1959 ; 
Maurice  Davidson,  The  Royal  Society  of 
Medicine,  1955;  The  Times,  29  May  1958; 
Lancet  and  British  Medical  Journal,  7  June 
1958;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] Eric  Riches. 

WEDGWOOD,  Sir  RALPH  LEWIS,  first 
baronet  (1874-1956),  railway  administra- 
tor, was  born  at  Barlaston,  north  Stafford- 
shire, 2  March  1874,  the  third  surviving 
son  of  Clement  Francis  Wedgwood,  master 
potter,  and  his  wife,  Emily  Catherine, 
daughter  of  James  Meadows  Rendel  [q.v.]. 
J.C.,  later  first  Baron,  Wedgwood  [q.v.] 
was  a  brother.  The  children  grew  up  in 
home  surroundings  noted  for  the  benevo- 
lent yet  youthful  attitude  of  their  father, 
for  the  idyllic  relationship  which  existed 
between  their  parents,  and  for  the  candour 
and  liberal  outlook  which  they  inspired, 
alien  to  so  many  contemporary  Victorian 
households.  Wedgwood  was  educated  at 
Clifton,  where  he  was  head  of  the  school, 
and  at  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  where 
he  obtained  first  classes  in  both  parts 
of  the  moral  sciences  tripos  (1895-6). 
At  the  age  of  twenty-two  Wedgwood 


Wedgwood 

entered  the  service  of  the  North  Eastern 
Railway,  becoming  district  superinten- 
dent at  Middlesbrough  in  1902  and 
secretary  of  the  company  two  years 
later.  Shortly  afterwards,  at  his  own 
request,  he  returned  to  the  traffic  depart- 
ment; rapid  promotion  followed.  He 
became  northern  divisional  goods  manager 
at  Newcastle  in  1905,  assistant  goods 
manager  at  York  in  1911,  and  chief 
goods  manager  soon  afterwards.  He 
added  the  passenger  department  to  his 
responsibilities  in  1914.  On  the  out- 
break of  war  Wedgwood  at  once  volun- 
teered for  service  abroad  and,  with  the 
rank  of  major,  Royal  Engineers,  acted  as 
deputy  assistant  director  of  railway 
transport  in  France.  In  July  1915  he  was 
transferred  to  the  Ministry  of  Munitions 
with  the  temporary  rank  of  lieutenant- 
colonel.  In  October  1916  he  was  made 
director  of  docks  in  France  with  the 
temporary  rank  of  brigadier-general. 
He  was  appointed  C.M.G.  in  1917,  C.B. 
in  1918,  received  a  number  of  foreign 
decorations,  and  was  five  times  men- 
tioned in  dispatches. 

Returning  to  the  North  Eastern  as 
chief  goods  and  passenger  manager  in 
June  1919  he  added  to  this  dual  office, 
two  months  later,  that  of  deputy  general 
manager.  At  the  beginning  of  1922  he 
succeeded  Sir  A.  Kaye  Butterworth 
as  general  manager  of  the  company. 
The  destinies  of  more  than  120  British 
railways  were  then  in  the  melting-pot, 
with  four  big  railway  groups  in  process 
of  formation.  The  second  largest,  the 
London  and  North  Eastern,  was  to  con- 
tain the  North  Eastern  as  its  financially 
strongest  component.  When  the  L.N.E.R. 
began  to  operate  on  1  January  1923  it  was 
natural  that  Wedgwood  should  become 
chief  general  manager  of  a  system  which 
employed  more  than  220,000  staff,  pos- 
sessed 6,590  route  miles  of  line,  and  was 
the  largest  dock-owning  railway  company 
in  the  world. 

Sustained  by  a  shrewd  board  and 
supported  by  a  versatile  band  of  senior 
aides,  Wedgwood  took  his  charge  through 
the  difficulties  of  trade  depression,  fluc- 
tuating traffics,  ever-increasing  road  com- 
petition, and  developing  air  services  for 
sixteen  eventful  years.  By  the  time  he  was 
approaching  the  calmer  waters  of  retire- 
ment the  L.N.E.R.  was  renowned  for  the 
thoroughness  of  its  staff  training  and  edu- 
cational schemes,  for  its  bold  incursions 
into  new  signalling  and  marshalling-yard 
techniques  and  for  the  all-round  excellencse 


1031 


Wedgwood 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


of  its  express  passenger  services.  The  lat- 
ter included  the  longest  non-stop  and  some 
of  the  fastest  runs  in  the  world,  and  Brit- 
ain's first  streamlined  trains.  Wedgwood, 
an  imaginative  and  adventufous  admini- 
strator, and  Sir  H.  Nigel  Gresley,  his 
brilliant  locomotive,  carriage,  and  wagon 
designer,  both  of  them  much-travelled 
men,  had  kept  the  L.N.E.R.  in  the  fore- 
front of  railway  progress.  Despite  these 
preoccupations  Wedgwood  often  acted  as 
spokesman  for  the  four  railway  groups 
and  served  outside  bodies  such  as  the 
Weir  main  line  electrification  committee 
(1930-31),  the  Central  Electricity  Board 
(1981-46),  and  the  Chinese  Government 
Purchasing  Commission  (1932-51).  He 
was  chairman  of  the  Indian  railways 
committee  of  inquiry  in  1936-7. 

In  March  1939  Wedgwood  retired,  but 
returned  in  September  on  the  outbreak  of 
war  as  chairman  of  the  railway  executive 
conunittee  and  was  thus  in  the  thick  of 
the  intensive  railway  reorganization  which 
took  place  in  the  early  years  of  the  war. 
He  finally  retired  in  August  1941. 

'R.L.W.',  as  he  was  known  in  railway 
circles,  was  remembered  for  his  tall,  dis- 
tinguished appearance,  his  brisk  walk, 
and  the  infectious  smile  which  would  so 
often  light  up  his  intelligent  counten- 
ance. Endowed  with  great  clarity  of 
mind,  he  was  a  recognized  expert  on  the 
intricacies  of  rail  and  road  freight  rates. 
Yet  with  all  his  accomplishments  he 
retained  an  innate  modesty,  preferred 
the  velvet  glove  to  the  mailed  fist, 
and  never  lost  a  childhood  love  for  maps 
and  the  complexity  of  a  railway  time- 
table. 

Wedgwood  was  knighted  in  1924  and 
created  a  baronet  in  1942  simultaneously 
with  the  elevation  to  a  peerage  of  his 
brother  Josiah.  By  mutual  agreement 
the  latter  assumed  'of  Barlaston'  as  his 
territorial  designation  and  Ralph  took 
*of  Etruria'  as  his,  in  remembrance  of  the 
original  pottery  works. 

In  1906  he  married  Iris  Veronica, 
daughter  of  Albert  Henry  Pawson,  of 
Farnley,  Leeds.  They  had  one  son,  John 
Hamilton  (born  1907),  who  succeeded 
to  the  baronetcy ;  and  a  daughter.  Cicely 
Veronica,  who  has  achieved  distinction 
as  an  historian,  influenced  by  her  father's 
friendship  with  G.  M.  Trevelyan,  and  was 
appointed  D.B.E.  in  1968. 

Wedgwood  died  at  his  home  near 
Dorking  5  September  1956  and  was 
buried  at  Barlaston.  A  bust  by  Arnold 
Machin  is  in  the  possession  of  the  family. 


[C.  V.  Wedgwood,  The  Last  of  the  Radicals, 
1951 ;  'The  London  &  North  Eastern  Railway 
1923-38'  by  R.  Bell  in  Journal  of  Transport 
History,  May  1962;  L.N.E.R.  records;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  George  Dow. 

WEEKS,  RONALD  MORCE,  Baron 
Weeks  (1890-1960),  industrialist  and 
soldier,  was  the  second  son  in  the  family 
of  five  children  of  Richard  Llewellyn 
Weeks,  mining  engineer,  and  his  wife, 
Susan  Helen  Walker  Mclntyre.  He  was 
born  at  Helmington  Row,  county  Durham, 
13  November  1890,  and  educated  at 
Charterhouse  and  Caius  College,  Cam- 
bridge, where  he  obtained  third  class 
honours  in  part  i  of  the  natural  sciences 
tripos  in  1911  and  captained  the  uni- 
versity association  football  team  before 
joining  Pilkington  Brothers,  Ltd.,  in  1912 
as  a  technical  trainee. 

Commissioned  into  the  Prince  of 
Wales's  Volunteers  T.F.  in  1913,  Weeks 
on  mobilization  experienced  active  service 
from  February  1915  until  the  end  of  the 
war.  He  displayed  notable  aptitude  for  the 
profession  of  arms,  and  in  recommending 
him  in  1917  for  a  regular  commission 
as  captain  in  the  Rifle  Brigade,  the 
general  commanding.  Fourth  Army,  per- 
sonally described  him  as  a  first-rate 
staff  officer,  with  an  exceptionally  quick 
brain  embodied  in  an  effective,  rounded 
personality.  Attaining  his  brevet  majority. 
Weeks  was  thrice  mentioned  in  dispatches, 
awarded  the  M.C.  (1917)  with  bar  (1918), 
and  the  croix  de  guerre  (1918),  and  was 
appointed  to  the  D.S.O.  (1918). 

On  returning  to  Pilkington's  in  1919, 
Weeks's  maturing  capacities  steadily 
established  themselves  on  the  basis 
of  a  far-seeing  view  of  the  wider  commer- 
cial and  financial  implications  of  con- 
temporary technical  change  in  the  glass 
industry.  Promptly  appointed  in  1920 
manager  of  the  plate  glass  works, 
he  was  made  a  director  in  1928  and 
eventually  chairman  of  the  executive 
directors  in  1939  while  still  under  fifty. 
Such  advance  demonstrated  a  catalytic 
contribution  which  Weeks's  persistently 
persuasive  energies  were  able  to  make 
in  leading  a  family  firm  towards  diver- 
sifying, modernizing,  and  extending  its 
scope  internationally  as  well  as  at  home. 

Nevertheless  in  1934^8  Weeks  had  made 
time  to  command  the  5th  battalion  of 
the  South  Lancashire  Regiment,  T.A. 
On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  he  was 
first  appointed  G.S.O.  1  of  the  66th 
division.   Although   amply   endowed  for 


1032 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Weeks 


command  in  the  field,  a  combination  of 
personal  capacity  and  circumstances  took 
him  in  fact  to  the  top  of  a  ladder  of 
appointments  responsible  for  equipping 
the  army  in  war.  He  was  first  posted 
as  brigadier  general  staff  (staff  duties) 
Home  Forces  headquarters  in  July  1940, 
concerned  with  the  restricted  field  of 
Home  Forces  equipment;  then  in  March 
1941  he  was  given  the  comprehensive 
responsibihties  of  director-general  of  army 
equipment;  next  in  June  1942  he  was 
made  deputy  chief  of  the  imperial  general 
staff,  with  the  rank  of  lieutenant-general 
and  a  seat  on  the  Army  Council,  a  unique 
position  for  a  citizen  soldier.  This  was 
a  newly  created  post,  acknowledging 
on  the  one  hand  the  prospect  that  both 
chief  and  vice-chief  of  the  imperial 
general  staff  must  necessarily  become 
more  exclusively  preoccupied  with  allied 
operations;  and  on  the  other,  the  need 
to  concentrate  at  the  centre  respon- 
sibility for  equipment  and  organization 
under  an  authority  of  outstanding  capa- 
city, percipiently  qualified  to  appraise 
the  ability  of  industry  to  provide  what 
would  be  required.  In  clarity  of  mind, 
tireless  industry,  decisiveness,  balanced 
approach.  Weeks  was  strikingly  equipped 
for  the  task  of  assembling  the  changing 
picture  of  a  fighting  army's  needs,  and 
negotiating  through  the  Ministry  of 
Supply  the  priorities  for  meeting  them. 
This  work  completed  in  June  1945, 
Weeks  spent  two  months  as  deputy 
military  governor  and  chief  of  staff 
in  the  Control  Commission  in  Germany 
before  returning  to  civil  life. 

While  retaining  his  seat  on  the  Pilking- 
ton  board.  Weeks  was  invited  to  join 
Vickers  in  1945  and  made  deputy  chair- 
man a  year  later,  with  the  chairmanship 
ultimately  in  prospect.  Attaining  this 
office  in  1949,  Weeks  saw  his  post  as  an 
essentially  executive  appointment  for  the 
purpose  of  co-ordinating  in  some  depth 
the  adjustments  which  would  be  called  for 
in  adapting  to  a  fresh  economic  environ- 
ment such  a  diversified  industrial  group 
embracing  engineering,  steel  shipbuilding, 
aviation,  and  nuclear  power.  There  again, 
his  varied  experience,  personal  vision,  vita- 
hty,  and  familiarity  with  the  working  of 
the  government  machine  were  brought  to 
constructive  effect  in  successfully  putting 
this  major  industrial  organization  on  a 
soundly  based  footing. 

Retiring  from  the  chairmanship  of  Vick- 
ers in  1956,  Weeks  found  his  experience 
and  energies  in  pressing  demand,  despite 


his  indifferent  health,  for  a  wide  range 
of  activities  bearing  mainly  on  indus- 
trial affairs  and  development.  He  became 
treasurer  of  the  Industrial  Fund  for  the 
Development  of  Scientific  Education  in 
Schools  which  raised  £8,500,000  for  a  pur- 
pose  in  which  he  felt  close  personal  interest ; 
he  had  been  chairman  (1948-56)  of  the 
National  Advisory  Council  for  Education 
in  Industry  and  Commerce.  He  also  be- 
came chairman  of  the  Finance  Corporation 
for  Industry ;  vice-chairman  of  the  King 
George's  Jubilee  Trust,  a  trustee  of  Chur- 
chill College,  Cambridge,  and  a  governor  of 
Charterhouse.  He  was  appointed  govern- 
ment director  of  British  Petroleum,  Ltd., 
and  served  on  the  boards  of  various  com- 
panies including  Associated  Electrical 
Industries,  Royal  Exchange  Assurance, 
and  the  Hudson's  Bay  Company. 

The  contribution  which  Weeks  made  in 
three  inter-related  environments :  industry, 
the  army,  and  public  service,  reflected  the 
personal  qualities  he  was  able  to  bring 
to  it.  In  particular,  he  was  prompt  to  re- 
cognize the  revolutionary  character  of  the 
evolving  economic  background.  His  mind 
was  inquisitive,  questioning  of  established 
practice,  attuned  to  change.  Hence  his 
preoccupation  with  technical  education, 
in  school  and  industry.  Supporting  this 
vision  were  the  characteristic  attributes  of 
managerial  ability.  Purposively  energetic, 
Weeks  was  gifted  with  an  acute  capacity 
for  penetrating  through  detail  towards  iso- 
lating the  objective,  and  then  delegating 
responsibility.  Sociable,  of  handsome  pres- 
ence, and  resolute  personality,  he  identi- 
fied himself  with  his  assignments  and 
expected  his  associates  to  be  equally  un- 
sparing. Fairminded,  tempering  criticism 
with  kindness,  he  remained  accessible  at 
all  levels,  with  a  retentive  interest  in 
people's  personal  affairs  from  shop  floor  to 
board-room.  Informing  these  qualities  was 
a  cathohc  and  imaginative  acquaintance 
with  the  world  at  large  and  how  it  could  be 
made  to  function. 

Weeks  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1939 
and  K.C.B.  in  1943,  and  made  commandei* 
of  the  U.S.  Legion  of  Merit.  He  was 
created  a  baron  in  1966.  He  was  elected 
honorary  fellow  of  Caius  College  (1945); 
given  honorary  doctorates  by  the  univer- 
sities of  Liverpool  (1946),  Sheffield  (1951), 
and  Leeds  (1957) ;  and  accorded  honorary 
recognition  by  the  Colleges  of  Technology 
of  Manchester  and  Birmingham. 

Weeks  died  in  London  19  August  1960, 
when  the  peerage  became  extinct.  He 
married    first,    in    1922,    Evelyn    Elsie 


1033 


Weeks 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


(died  1932),  daughter  of  Henry  Haynes, 
of  Clifton,  Nottinghamshire.  The  mar- 
riage was  dissolved  and  in  X931  he  married 
Cynthia  Mary  Camming,  daughter  of 
John  Wood  Irvine,  stockbroker,  of  Liver- 
pool, by  whom  he  had  two  daughters. 
His  portrait  by  Sir  Gerald  Kelly  is  in  the 
possession  of  the  family. 

[Private  information.]         H.  O.  Hooper. 

WEIR,  ANDREW,  first  Baron  Inver- 
FORTH  (1865-1955),  shipowner,  was  born 
at  Kirkcaldy,  Fifeshire,  24  April  1865,  the 
eldest  son  of  William  Weir  and  his  wife, 
Janet,  daughter  of  Thomas  Laing  of  the 
same  place.  Both  his  father  and  his  mater- 
nal grandfather  were  cork  merchants,  and 
none  of  his  immediate  ancestors  was  con- 
nected with  shipping. 

After  attending  the  high  school  at 
Kirkcaldy,  Weir  at  an  early  age  entered 
the  Commercial  Bank  of  Scotland,  but 
this  routine  work  gave  little  scope  for 
his  ambitions  and  interests  and  after 
a  few  years  he  forsook  his  cashier's 
desk  and  moved  to  Glasgow,  where  he 
served  for  a  short  time  in  a  shipping 
office.  On  5  May  1885,  shortly  after  his 
twentieth  birthday,  he  began  his  life 
as  a  merchant  shipowner,  buying  a 
sailing  ship,  the  barque  Willowhank, 
which  he  employed  in  the  coasting  trade, 
renting  a  small  room  in  Hope  Street, 
Glasgow,  as  an  office.  His  inborn  opti- 
mism and  opportunism  were  the  seed 
from  which  grew  the  great  shipping 
business  of  Andrew  Weir  &  Co.,  which 
became  managing  owners  of  the  Bank 
Line,  Invertanker,  Inver  Transport  and 
Trading  Company,  and  several  other 
shipping  companies.  The  next  year 
Weir  began  building  sailing  ships  of 
modern  design  and  within  a  few  years 
had  built  up  a  fleet  of  fifty-two,  the 
largest  sailing  ship  fleet  under  one  owner 
flying  the  red  ensign. 

In  1896,  moving  to  London,  Weir 
turned  from  sail  to  steam.  At  a  later 
period  he  recognized  the  advantages  of 
the  marine  internal  combustion  engine 
and  converted  the  majority  of  his  ships 
to  diesel  power.  In  all  these  develop- 
ments he  showed  an  innate  skill  and 
efficiency  in  management  and  ensured 
that  the  foundations  of  his  company 
were  on  sound  business  lines. 

During  the  war,  when  Lloyd  George 
formed  his  Government  in  1916,  Weir 
was  mentioned  as  a  possible  minister 
of  shipping,  but  this  appointment  went 
to  Sir  J.  P.  (later  Lord)  Maclay  [q.v.] 


and  Weir  directed  his  talents  into  other 
wartime  channels.  In  March  1917  Lord 
Derby  [q.v.],  then  secretary  of  state  for 
war,  asked  Weir  to  report  on  the  commer- 
cial organization  of  the  supply  branches 
of  the  army.  Weir  recommended  the  ap- 
pointment of  a  surveyor-general  of  supply, 
with  a  seat  on  the  Army  Council,  to  take 
over  from  the  various  War  Office  depart- 
ments the  work  of  supplying  the  army 
with  all  its  stores  and  equipment  other 
than  munitions.  His  recommendations 
were  accepted  and  he  himself  appoin- 
ted to  the  post.  At  first  that  caused  some 
resentment  and  opposition  among  certain 
senior  civil  servants,  but  his  directness 
and  sincerity  of  purpose,  his  natiu-al 
friendly  manner  and  approachability  soon 
won  their  co-operation.  Shortly  after  his 
appointment  he  made  a  tour  of  the  battle- 
fields on  the  Continent,  accompanied  by 
Sir  John  Cowans  [q.v.]  and  (Sir)  Crofton 
Atkins.  As  a  consequence  he  drew  up 
far-reaching  schemes,  which  resulted  in 
salvage  of  materials  in  the  various  war 
zones  and  the  elimination  of  tremendous 
wastage. 

His  success  in  this  field  led  to  his  ap- 
pointment in  January  1919  as  minister 
of  munitions,  with  the  gigantic  task  of 
liquidating  the  enormous  commitments  of 
the  war,  entailing  the  examination  of  some 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  accounts  and 
contracts  and  their  subsequent  disposal. 
He  remained  in  this  office  until  March 
1921,  when,  until  May,  he  took  over  the 
chairmanship  of  the  Disposals  and  Liqui- 
dation Commission,  which  was  responsible 
for  selling  the  vast  quantities  of  army 
stores  throughout  the  various  theatres  of 
war  and  in  the  British  Isles.  Again  his 
genius  for  organization  and  great  business 
acumen  converted  what  might  have  been 
worthless  goods  or  liabilities  into  consider- 
able assets.  It  was  not  without  reason  that 
he  was  termed  'the  man  who  saved 
Britain  millions'. 

For  his  services  in  the  war  he  was  in 
1919  sworn  of  the  Privy  Council,  created 
a  baron,  and  received  the  American 
D.S.M. 

On  returning  to  the  world  of  commerce 
and  business.  Lord  Inverforth,  as  he  now 
was,  devoted  his  energies  particularly  to 
communications.  He  interested  himself  in 
the  Marconi  group  of  companies,  becom- 
ing president  of  the  Radio  Communica- 
tion Company,  the  Marconi  International 
Marine  Communication  Company,  and 
Cable  and  Wireless  (Holding).  In  other 
spheres  he  was  chairman  of  the  Anglo- 


1034 


Burma  Rice  Company  and  of  the  Wilmer 
Grain  Company,  and  was  also  on  the  board 
of  Lloyds  Bank.  In  1945  he  was  elected 
president  of  all  the  associated  enterprises 
of  the  communications  group  of  companies. 
Inverforth  was  also  founder  and  first 
chairman  of  the  United  Baltic  Corpora- 
tion, which  came  into  existence  in  1919 
largely  through  King  George  V's  desire, 
after  the  war,  that  British  shipping  and 
trading  should  replace  that  of  Germany 
in  the  Baltic  and  with  Denmark.  To 
this  end  the  King  consulted  Inverforth, 
bringing  also  into  the  consultation  H.  N. 
Anderson,  founder  and  chairman  of  the 
East  Asiatic  Company  of  Denmark.  The 
corporation  was  unique  in  that  exactly  50 
per  cent  of  its  shares  were  held  by  British 
and  50  per  cent  by  Danish  shareholders, 
the  chairman  having  the  casting  vote.  It 
is  a  tribute  to  the  good  relations  which, 
since  its  formation,  have  existed  between 
the  directors  of  the  two  countries,  and 
also  to  the  sagacious  chairmanship  of 
Inverforth  and  of  his  successor  in  the 
chair,  the  second  Lord  Inverforth,  that 
a  casting  vote  has  never  yet  been  neces- 
sary. In  recognition  of  this  work  Inver- 
forth received  in  1937  the  grand  cross  of 
the  Order  of  Dannebrog  of  Denmark  and 
in  the  following  year  the  grand  cross  of  the 
Grand  Duke  Gedinimas  of  Lithuania. 

Inverforth  continued  his  active  life, 
attending  his  office  in  Bury  Street  four 
days  a  week,  into  his  ninety-first  year. 
On  his  ninetieth  birthday  he  received 
many  tributes  of  affection  from  his 
friends  and  staff.  He  died  at  his  home  in 
Hampstead  17  September  1955. 

Because  of  his  quiet  modesty  and  dislike 
of  publicity  and  limelight,  Inverforth's 
great  services  to  his  country  were  not 
widely  known.  But  those  who  knew  him 
closely  instinctively  recognized  his  high 
qualities.  He  possessed  great  energy  and 
enthusiasm  and  also  that  almost  essential 
quality  of  leadership :  the  ability  to  select 
suitable  subordinates  and  leave  them  to 
carry  on  without  interference.  His  in- 
tegrity, great  driving  force,  and  brilliant 
organizing  ability  made  him  a  man  of 
power  and  influence  in  the  commercial 
world.  His  friends  and  employees,  terms 
frequently  synonymous,  knew  his  un- 
obtrusive generosity  and  kindness.  He  was 
particularly  approachable :  even  the  most 
junior  employee,  who  had  some  suggestion 
towards  the  improvement  or  well-being  of 
the  firm,  would  be  sure  of  a  patient  and 
appreciative  hearing  and  would  carry  away 
the  remembrance  of  a  kindly  twinkle  in 


D.N.B.  1951-1960  Weir,  C.  McA. 

Inverforth's  eye  and  a  good-humoured 
quiet  voice.  In  many  ways  he  was  a  model 
employer,  taking  interest  in  the  welfare  of 
his  staff  and  their  families  both  during  and 
after  their  service  with  him.  For  many 
years,  until  he  was  eighty,  he  was  trea- 
surer of  the  Royal  Merchant  Navy  School 
and,  even  after  he  had  handed  over  this 
office  to  his  friend,  Sir  Leighton  Seager 
(later  Lord  Leighton  of  St.  Mellons),  he 
continued  to  take  a  deep  interest  in  the 
children. 

Inverforth  married  in  1889  Tomania 
Anne,  younger  daughter  of  Thomas  Kay 
Dowie,  coach  smith,  of  Kirkcaldy.  The 
celebration  of  their  golden  wedding  in 
1939  was  a  particularly  happy  occasion 
and  Lady  Inverforth's  death  in  1941  was 
keenly  felt  by  her  husband.  They  had  one 
son  and  five  daughters.  The  son,  Andrew 
Alexander  Morton  (bom  1897),  besides 
succeeding  his  father  in  the  title  and  as 
chairman  of  the  United  Baltic  Corpora- 
tion, did  so  also  as  chairman  of  Andrew 
Weir  &  Co. 

Four  portraits  by  Frank  O.  Salisbury 
and  one  by  R.  G.  Eves  are  in  the  posses- 
sion of  the  family  or  of  the  family  firms ; 
a  portrait  by  Frank  O.  Salisbury  is  in 
Glasgow  City  Art  Gallery. 

[The  Times,  19  and  24  September  1955; 
Manchester  Guardian,  19  September  1955; 
Transactions  of  the  Institute  of  Marine 
Engineers,  November  1955 ;  The  Navy,  April 
1965 ;  private  information.] 

G.  K.  S.  Hamilton-Edwards. 

WEIR,  Sir  CECIL  McALPINE  (1890- 
1960),  industrialist  and  public  servant, 
was  born  at  Bridge  of  Weir,  Renfrew- 
shire, 5  July  1890,  the  youngest  of  four 
sons  of  Alexander  Cunningham  Weir 
and  his  wife,  Isabella  McLeish.  He  was 
educated  at  Morrison's  Academy,  Crieff, 
and  in  Switzerland  and  Germany.  On  his 
return,  he  spent  two  years  in  business 
training  before  joining  the  family  firm, 
Schrader,  Mitchell,  and  Weir,  leather  and 
hide  merchants  in  Glasgow,  of  which  he 
was  a  partner  from  1910  until  1956.  On 
his  frequent  business  visits  to  the  Conti- 
nent his  fluency  in  French  and  German 
was  invaluable. 

In  the  war  of  1914-18  Weir  served 
in  the  Cameronians,  was  wounded,  and 
awarded  the  M.C.  Settling  afterwards  in 
Helensburgh,  he  took  a  keen  interest  in 
church  work,  the  Liberal  Party,  and 
other  local  activities,  including  tennis  and 
golf,  and  was  chairman  of  the  company 
which  administered   St.  Bride's   School. 


1035 


Weir,  C.  McA. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


He  became  increasingly  interested  in  public 
affairs  and  it  was  he  who  formulated  the 
idea  of  holding  an  Empire  Exhibition  in 
Glasgow,  for  which  he  obtained  wide 
support.  He  was  chairman "  of  the  ad- 
ministrative committee  and  it  was  largely- 
through  his  remarkable  leadership  that 
the  exhibition  of  1938  achieved  a  large 
measure  of  success  despite  the  menacing 
international  situation.  He  was  appointed 
K.B.E.  in  1938  ;  was  president  of  the  Glas- 
gow Chamber  of  Commerce  in  1939-40; 
and  a  director  of  the  Union  Bank  of  Scot- 
land from  1939  imtil  1947. 

From  August  1939  until  March  1940 
Weir  was  civil  defence  commissioner  for 
the  western  district  of  Scotland  and  re- 
sponsible for  the  operation  of  the  civil 
defence  organization  serving  sixty  per 
cent  of  the  population  of  Scotland.  Early 
in  1940,  however,  he  was  called  to  Lon- 
don by  Sir  Andrew  Duncan  [q.v.]  to 
become  an  executive  member  of  the  in- 
dustrial and  export  council  of  the  Board  of 
Trade,  on  which  he  remained  until  1946.  In 
1941-2  he  was  controller-general  of  factory 
and  storage  premises;  and  in  1942-6 
director-general  of  equipment  and  stores, 
Ministry  of  Supply.  In  1946  he  became 
economic  adviser,  Control  Commission  for 
(iermany,  and  on  his  return  to  the  United 
Kingdom  in  1949,  full-time  chairman  of 
the  Dollar  Exports  Board  until  1951.  In 
1952  he  became  head  of  the  United  King- 
dom delegation  to  the  High  Authority  of 
the  European  Coal  and  Steel  Community 
and  served  in  that  capacity  for  three  years. 
He  was  appointed  K.C.M.G.  in  1952.  In 
his  latter  years  he  was  executive  chairman 
of  International  Computers  and  Tabula- 
tors and  a  part-time  member  of  the  British 
Transport  Commission. 

Weir's  capacity  for  organization  was 
accompanied  by  great  personal  charm. 
He  had  a  remarkable  memory,  seldom 
forgetting  a  face  or  a  name,  a  good  sense 
of  humour,  and  a  gift  for  getting  the  best 
out  of  those  associated  with  him  in  any 
project. 

In  1915  Weir  married  Jenny  Paton, 
daughter  of  William  Paton  Maclay  and  a 
niece  of  the  first  Lord  Maclay  [q.v.] ;  her 
death  in  an  air  crash  in  Italy  in  1958  was 
a  tragic  loss.  They  had  a  son  and  a  daugh- 
ter. Weir  died  in  London  30  October  1960. 

[Sir  Cecil  Weir,  Civilian  Assignment,  1953 ; 
personal  knowledge.]  Bilsland, 

WEIR,  WILLIAM  DOUGLAS,  first 
Viscount  Weir  (1877-1959),  industria- 
list and  public  servant,  descended  from 


Robert  Burns  [q.v.]  through  his  illegiti- 
mate daughter  Elizabeth  Paton,  was  born 
in  Glasgow  12  May  1877,  the  eldest  of 
three  children  of  James  Weir,  engineer, 
and  his  wife,  Mary,  daughter  of  William 
Douglas,  of  Kilmarnock.  He  left  Glasgow 
High  School  at  sixteen  and  joined  his 
father's  firm  G.  &  J.  Weir,  becoming 
managing  director  in  1902  and  chairman 
by  1912.  In  July  1915  he  became  director 
of  munitions  for  Scotland.  His  main  task 
was  to  thrust  dilution  (chiefly  the  employ- 
ment of  women)  into  Clydeside  engineer- 
ing against  every  instinct  of  the  industry. 
In  the  spring  of  1916  commissioners 
appointed  at  Weir's  suggestion  broke  a 
strike  and  deported  the  men's  leaders; 
thereafter  there  was  no  more  serious 
trouble.  Restrictive  practices  had  to  go  if 
the  war  was  to  be  won ;  Weir  was  one  of 
those  chiefly  responsible  for  getting  rid 
of  them.  His  impatience  with  the  skilled 
craftsman's  traditional  outlook  made  him 
unpopular  with  the  Left ;  it  did  not  later 
prevent  Labour  ministers  from  seeking 
his  advice. 

In  February  1917  Weir  went  to  the 
Ministry  of  Munitions  as  controller  of 
aeronautical  supplies  and  member  of  the 
Air  Board  and  in  December  he  became 
director-general  of  aircraft  production. 
He  rationalized  the  production  of  air- 
frames and  engines  in  the  teeth  of  the 
rivalry  between  the  War  Office  and  the 
Admiralty,  each  of  which  had  its  own 
system  of  aircraft  supply.  In  April  1918, 
with  strong  backing  from  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill,  Weir  succeeded  Lord  Rother- 
mere  [q.v.]  as  air  minister.  He  found  Sir 
Hugh  (later  Viscount)  Trenchard  [q.v.] 
unemployed  and  distrustful  of  the  recent 
decision  to  create  a  third  fighting  Service. 
By  a  direct  exercise  of  authority  Weir 
persuaded  him  unwillingly  to  take  com- 
mand of  the  independent  air  force  then 
getting  ready  to  bomb  Germany,  the  post 
from  which  Trenchard  went  on  to  be- 
come the  acknowledged  father  of  the 
Royal  Air  Force.  Weir's  abrupt  dismissal 
of  the  commandant  (Miss  Violet  Douglas- 
Pennant)  of  the  Women's  Royal  Air 
Force,  although  justifiable,  was  widely, 
loudly,  and  influentially  held  to  be  un- 
justified. Weir  (with  the  support  of 
Churchill)  successfully  asserted  the  right 
of  a  minister  in  wartime  to  dismiss  with- 
out question  any  official  whom  he  con- 
sidered incapable. 

Weir  had  no  taste  for  ministerial  office 
and  resigned  as  soon  as  the  war  was  over. 
He  was  chairman  of  the  advisory  com- 


1036 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Weir,  W.  D. 


mittee  on  civil  aviation  in  1919  and  a 
succession  of  other  committees,  and  he 
remained  one  of  a  group  of  men,  many 
Scots,  mostly  in  business,  whose  advice 
was  continually  sought  and  sometimes 
acted  on  by  Governments.  He  influenced 
many  aspects  of  policy  but  between  1919 
and  1934  his  main  achievements  were 
three :  first  to  help  to  fight  off  the  assault 
by  Admiral  Beatty  [q.v.]  on  the  Royal 
Air  Force  in  1923;  secondly,  to  preside 
over  the  committee  which,  reporting  in 
1925,  devised  the  main  principles  of  the 
national  'grid'  for  distributing  electricity ; 
thirdly,  to  bring  about  the  Cunard- 
White  Star  merger  (1934).  Privately  he 
attached  great  importance  to  his  attempts 
to  introduce  factory-made  houses  (1923-7) 
which  again  brought  him  into  conflict  with 
traditionaUsts,  and  to  the  group  of  com- 
panies which  he  founded  in  the  mid- 
twenties  for  processing  sugar  beet. 

After  1933  Weir  was  drawn  increasingly 
into  preparing  for  war.  With  Sir  Arthur 
Balfour  (later  Lord  Riverdale)  and  Sir 
James  Lithgow  [qq.v.]  he  put  forward 
the  idea  of  'shadow  factories'  which  was 
fundamental  to  the  organization  of  British 
war  production.  As  a  member  of  the  prime 
minister's  defence  policy  and  require- 
ments committee  (1935-7)  he  influenced 
the  determination  of  the  widest  questions 
of  defence  policy,  always  in  the  direction 
of  the  supremacy  of  air  power  expressed 
chiefly  in  the  form  of  strategic  bombing. 
At  the  Air  Ministry  (1935-8)  as  adviser  to 
the  air  minister.  Lord  Swinton,  he  gave 
practical  effect  to  his  ideas  by  bringing 
officials,  serving  officers,  business  men, 
and  scientists  into  partnership  to  lay  the 
foundations  of  the  wartime  Royal  Air 
Force,  with  a  heavy  emphasis  on  bombers. 
In  1937  he  was  defeated  in  an  attempt  to 
stop  the  Admiralty's  take-over  bid  for  the 
Fleet  Air  Arm,  and  then  his  influence  began 
to  decline,  especially  after  Chamberlain 
replaced  Baldwin  as  prime  minister  in 
May  1937.  In  May  1938,  when  Swinton 
was  dismissed,  Weir  left  the  Air  Ministry 
in  sympathy,  and  the  historically  impor- 
tant part  of  his  career,  covering  nearly 
twenty-ftve  years,  was  over. 

In  1939  Weir  became  director-general 
of  explosives  at  the  Ministry  of  Supply 
and  deputy  chairman  of  the  Supply 
Council,  but  his  old  happy  relationship 
with  Churchill  had  perhaps  been  spoilt 
by  his  political  associations  just  before  the 
war.  He  left  when  Lord  Beaverbrook  be- 
came minister  in  June  1941,  was  chairman 
of  the  Tank  Board  in  1942,  but  took  no 


further  significant  part  in  the  organi- 
zation of  supplies  for  war.  He  devoted 
himself  largely  to  his  own  business  and 
to  his  directorships  of  I.C.I.,  Shell,  and 
especially  International  Nickel  of  Canada, 
all  of  which  marked  his  continuing  place 
at  the  centre  of  British  industry.  In  1958 
he  gave  up  the  chair  of  Weirs  and  all  his 
directorships  except  International  Nickel, 
and  retired  generally  from  affairs.  He  died 
at  his  home  at  Giffnock,  Renfrewshire, 
2  July  1959. 

Small  in  build,  very  sparing  of  words, 
'Willy  Weir'  could  nevertheless  carry  a 
point  against  the  giants  of  his  time: 
Trenchard,  Beatty,  Churchill  among 
them.  He  did  not  thereby  as  a  rule  make 
enemies,  although  his  speech  might  be 
blunt  enough,  and  his  gift  for  personal 
relationships  was  shown  by  the  fact  that  he 
could  be  a  close  friend  of  Trenchard 
whilst  Sir  Frederick  Sykes  [q.v.],  Tren- 
chard's  unsuccessful  rival,  could  deplore 
Weir's  passing  from  the  Air  Ministry  after 
the  first  war  as  a  national  misfortune.  The 
independent  existence  of  the  Royal  Air 
Force  in  1939  was  in  no  small  degree  due 
to  Weir's  force  of  character  many  years 
before,  and  the  excellence  of  British  war 
production  owed  perhaps  as  much  to 
Weir's  technical  knowledge,  skill  in  nego- 
tiation, and  grasp  of  complicated  problems 
as  it  did  to  Beaverbrook' s  rumbustious- 
ness. 

Weir  was  knighted  in  1917,  sworn  of  the 
Privy  Council  in  1918,  created  a  baron  in  the 
same  year,  advanced  to  viscount  in  1938, 
and  appointed  G.C.B.  in  1934.  He  received 
an  honorary  LL.D.  from  Glasgow  in  1919. 

In  1904  Weir  married  Alice  Blanche 
(died  1959),  daughter  of  John  Mac- 
Connachie,  soHcitor,  of  Glasgow ;  they  had 
a  daughter  and  two  sons,  the  elder  of  whom, 
James  Kenneth  (born  1905),  succeeded  his 
father. 

A  portrait  by  Dame  Laura  Knight  is 
in  the  possession  of  the  family ;  another 
by  T.  C.  Dugdale  is  in  the  board-room 
at  Holm  Foundry,  Cathcart,  Glasgow ;  a 
third  by  Cuthbert  Orde  is  at  the  premises 
of  the  Royal  Aeronautical  Society,  Lon* 
don. 

[Christopher  Addison,  Politics  from  Within, 
vol.  ii,  1924 ;  Sir  Frederick  Sykes,  From  Many 
Angles,  1942;  Andrew  Boyle,  Trenchard, 
1962;  Robin  Higham,  Britain'' s  Imperial 
Air  Routes,  1960;  N.  Potter  and  J.  Frost, 
The  Mary,  1961 ;  Lord  Swinton,  I  Remember, 
1948;  Lord  Swinton  in  collaboration  with 
J.  D.  Margach,  Sixty  Years  of  Power,  1966 ; 
William  Hornby,  (Official  History)  Factones 
and  Plant,  1958 ;  J.  D.  Scott  and  R.  Hughes, 


1087 


Weir,  W.  D. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


(Official  History)  The  AdminiMration  of  War 
Production,  1955 ;  W.  J.  Reader,  Architect  of 
Air  Power:  the  Life  of  th-e  first  Viscount  Weir 
of  Eastwood,  1968  ;  private  information.] 

W/J.  Reader. 

WEIZMANN,  CHAIM  (1874-1952), 
Zionist  leader  and  first  president  of  the 
State  of  Israel,  was  born  at  Motol,  near 
Pinsk  (province  of  Grodno)  in  the  Jewish 
Pale  of  Settlement  in  Russia,  most  prob- 
ably on  27  November  1874,  although 
certain  early  documents  give  the  date  as 
12  November  1873.  He  was  the  third 
child  of  Ezer  Weizmann,  a  struggling 
timber  merchant,  by  his  wife,  Rachel 
Leah,  daughter  of  Michael  Tzchmerinsky, 
of  Motol.  After  receiving  an  elementary 
education  on  traditional  Jewish  lines, 
Weizmann  was  sent  to  the  high  school  in 
Pinsk,  where  one  of  his  teachers  encour- 
aged him  to  specialize  in  chemistry.  Jews 
were  not  welcome  at  Russian  universities 
and  accordingly  he  turned  westwards  and, 
with  such  help  as  his  father  could  afford, 
supplemented  by  some  meagre  earnings 
from  teaching,  he  pursued  his  scientific 
studies,  with  the  emphasis  on  chemistry, 
at  the  Darmstadt  and  Charlottenburg 
poljrtechnics  and,  finally,  at  the  Swiss 
university  of  Freiburg  where,  in  1899, 
he  gained  his  doctorate  summa  cum  laude. 
Soon  afterwards  he  embarked  on  an 
academic  career  as  a  Privatdozent  in 
chemistry  attached  to  the  university  of 
Geneva. 

In  1904,  now  thirty  years  of  age,  he 
decided  that  the  time  had  come  for  him 
to  seek  larger  scope  for  his  talents.  His 
choice  fell  upon  England  where,  with  a 
useful  introduction  from  his  Geneva 
professor  to  W.  H.  Perkin  [q.v.],  he  soon 
found  an  opening  at  Manchester  Univer- 
sity, which  gave  him  facilities  for  research, 
employed  him,  despite  his  halting  English, 
as  a  lecturer,  and  in  1913  promoted  him 
to  a  readership  in  biochemistry.  Mean- 
while he  had  become  a  British  subject  in 
1910,  but  jealously  preserving  his  iden- 
tity as  an  unhyphenated  Jew  he  never 
became,  or  wished  to  become,  a  member 
of  the  assimilated  Anglo-Jewish  commu- 
nity. Nevertheless  he  spoke,  in  his  auto- 
biography, of  the  profound  admiration  for 
England  which  influenced  him  in  decid- 
ing where  to  make  a  fresh  start,  and  a 
significant  part  of  the  background  both 
to  his  successes  and  to  his  defeats  as  a 
Zionist  leader  lay  in  the  strength  of  his 
attachment  to  the  country  which  was  for 
some  forty  years  his  home. 
;?  During  his  student  years  Weizmann, 


like  many  others  of  the  younger  members 
of  the  Russian  Jewish  intelligentsia,  had 
been  attracted  by  the  'Back  to  Palestine' 
movement  known  by  the  Hebrew  name 
of  Hihbath  Zion  ('Love  of  Zion').  The 
response,  in  many  parts  of  the  Jewish 
world,  to  the  lead  given  by  Theodor 
Herzl  in  his  tract  'The  Jewish  State' 
resulted  in  the  setting  up,  in  1897,  of 
the  Zionist  Organization  and  the  super- 
session of  the  tentative  gropings  of 
Hibbath  Zion  by  a  more  precise  and  more 
ambitious  programme — the  establishment 
in  Palestine,  under  international  guaran- 
tees, of  a  home  for  the  Jewish  people. 
Weizmann  from  the  start  identified  him- 
self wholeheartedly  with  the  Zionist 
Movement  and  its  objective,  although,  as 
time  went  on,  he  began  to  be  openly  cri- 
tical of  what  he  regarded  as  an  excessive 
preoccupation  with  purely  political  acti- 
vities, urging  that  more  attention  should 
be  paid  to  stimulating  the  national  con- 
sciousness of  the  Jewish  masses.  By  the 
outbreak  of  war  in  1914  he  had  become  a 
prominent,  though  not  yet  a  command- 
ing, figure  in  the  Zionist  Organization, 
generally  recognized  as  a  coming  man,  but 
not  holding  any  position  entitling  him 
to  speak  for  the  Movement  as  a  whole  in 
a  representative  capacity.  This  did  not 
deter  him  from  taking  the  initiative  in 
grasping  the  opportunity  which,  as  he  at 
once  perceived,  was  presented  to  the 
Zionists  by  the  entry  of  Turkey  into  the 
war  on  the  side  of  the  Central  Powers. 
It  was  clear  that  an  allied  victory  would 
bring  with  it  the  dismemberment  of  the 
Turkish  Asiatic  empire,  of  which  Pales- 
tine formed  part.  To  Weizmann  it  seemed 
self-evident  that  a  determined  effort 
ought  to  be  made  to  convince  the  British 
Government  that,  by  sponsoring  Zionist 
aspirations.  Great  Britain  would  not  only 
be  helping  to  give  the  Jews  their  rightful 
place  in  a  new  world  order  but  would  be 
fortifying  her  own  political  and  strategic 
position  in  a  region  whose  future  could 
not  be  a  matter  of  indifference  to  her. 

Starting  almost  single-handed  but  in- 
spired by  his  sense  of  mission,  Weizmann 
had  within  a  few  weeks  after  the  outbreak 
of  war  taken  the  first  steps  on  the  road 
which  was  to  lead  to  the  Balfour  Decla- 
ration. By  sheer  force  of  personality, 
coupled  with  unwearying  persistence,  a 
sure  instinct  for  the  right  approach,  and 
an  intuitive  grasp  of  the  significance  of 
any  new  turn  in  the  political  situation,  the 
biochemist  from  Manchester,  endowed,  as 
it  turned  out,  with  diplomatic  gifts  of  the 


1038 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Weizmann 


first  order,  found  his  way  to  the  highest 
levels  of  public  hfe,  where  he  gradually 
built  up  an  impressive  body  of  support 
for  his  ideas  about  British  relations  with 
the  Zionists.  In  this  he  was  powerfully 
aided  by  Herbert  (later  Viscount)  Samuel, 
whom  he  found,  when  introduced  to  him 
towards  the  end  of  1914,  to  have  been 
thinking  independently  about  the  future 
of  Palestine  on  much  the  same  lines  as 
himself,  and  who,  from  within  the  Cabinet, 
and  later  from  outside,  but  with  all  the 
weight  of  an  ex-cabinet  minister,  pressed 
upon  the  Government  the  case  for  a  pro- 
Zionist  policy.  Among  other  leading 
figures  in  public  life  whose  active  interest 
was  engaged  were  Balfour  and  Lloyd 
George.  Remembering  how  greatly  he  had 
been  impressed  by  Weizmann's  expo- 
sition of  the  Zionist  case  at  an  interview 
in  Manchester  during  the  general  election 
of  1906,  Balfour  received  him  again  to- 
wards the  end  of  1914,  and  showed  him- 
self warmly  sympathetic.  So  did  Lloyd 
George,  to  whom  Weizmann  got  access 
early  in  the  war  through  C.  P.  Scott  [q.v.]  of 
the  Manchester  Guardian,  Soon  afterwards 
he  was  brought  closer  to  Lloyd  George, 
then  minister  of  munitions,  by  his  suc- 
cessful application  of  his  chemical  re- 
searches in  the  field  of  fermentation  to  the 
overcoming  of  a  serious  shortage  of  ace- 
tone, a  chemical  product  of  vital  impor- 
tance in  the  manufacture  of  explosives 
required  for  the  navy.  Besides  his  work 
for  the  Ministry  of  Munitions,  Weizmann 
was  in  the  autumn  of  1915  given  an 
Admiralty  appointment  as  adviser  on 
acetone  supplies,  and  by  the  end  of  that 
year,  having  been  released  from  his  uni- 
versity duties,  he  had  left  Manchester  and 
established  himself  in  London. 

The  tide  began  to  flow  more  strongly 
in  favour  of  the  Zionists  when  at  the 
end  of  1916  Lloyd  George  became  prime 
minister  with  Balfour  as  foreign  secretary. 
In  1917  there  were  practical  reasons  for 
believing  that  British  interests  would  be 
served  by  a  public  declaration  of  sympathy 
with  Zionist  aspirations.  It  was  these  con- 
siderations which  turned  the  scale  when 
the  War  Cabinet  finally  decided  to  autho- 
rize Balfour's  assurance,  in  his  letter  to 
Lord  Rothschild  [q.v.]  of  2  November 
1917,  that,  subject  to  certain  provisos,  the 
Government  would  use  their  best  en- 
deavours to  facilitate  the  establishment 
in  Palestine  of  a  national  home  for  the 
Jewish  people. 

In  1918  Weizmann  headed  a  Zionist 
Commission  sent  to  Palestine,  under  the 


auspices  of  the  British  Government,  to 
explore  the  ground.  In  February  1919  he 
took  a  leading  part  in  the  presentation 
of  the  case  for  a  Jewish  national  home  in 
Palestine  when  a  Zionist  delegation  was 
given  a  hearing  by  the  Council  of  Ten 
at  the  Paris  peace  conference.  In  the 
events  which  had  by  this  time  culmi- 
nated in  a  firm  understanding  between 
Great  Britain  and  the  Zionists,  Weizmann, 
having  started  with  no  formal  credentials, 
had  emerged  with  an  unchallengeable 
ascendancy  in  the  Movement,  as  was 
recognized  by  his  election  in  1920  as 
president  of  the  World  Zionist  Organi- 
zation. 

Great  Britain  having  accepted  a  man- 
date for  Palestine,  and  the  military  regime 
having  been  replaced  by  a  civil  adminis- 
tration under  Samuel,  the  time  had  now 
arrived  for  the  implementation  of  the 
British  assurances.  But  the  road  forward 
was  found  to  be  strewn  with  pitfalls,  and 
Weizmann  soon  began  to  run  into  diffi- 
culties. Mounting  signs  of  Arab  unrest, 
growing  dissatisfaction  with  what  the 
Jews  regarded  as  the  unhelpful  or  even 
unfriendly  attitude  of  some  of  the  members 
of  the  British  administration,  the  publi- 
cation, in  1922,  of  a  statement  of  British 
policy  in  Palestine  interpreted  by  many 
Zionists  as  a  serious  whittling  down  of 
the  Declaration  of  1917 — all  this  created 
an  awkward  dilemma  for  Weizmann  who 
could  not  close  his  eyes  to  the  Jewish 
grievances  but,  while  protesting  to  the 
British  authorities,  was  compelled  to 
justify  in  the  eyes  of  his  disappointed 
followers  his  conviction  that  Zionist 
interests  would  best  be  served  by  patience, 
moderation,  and  restraint. 

In  1929  Weizmann  realized  a  long- 
cherished  dream  by  his  success  in  creating 
a  Jewish  Agency  for  Palestine  with  a 
governing  body  including,  in  addition 
to  leading  Zionists,  Jews  of  high  standing 
and  reputation  not  identified  with  the 
Zionist  Movement  but  now  prepared  to 
co-operate  in  the  building  up  of  the  Jewish 
National  Home.  This  was  an  impressive 
achievement,  but  it  was  almost  imme- 
diately followed  by  anti-Jewish  demon- 
strations, accompanied  by  acts  of  vio- 
lence, on  the  part  of  the  Palestine  Arabs, 
and  Weizmann  found  himself  in  a  diffi- 
cult position  when,  in  1930,  the  British 
Government  published  a  fresh  statement 
of  policy,  making,  as  the  Zionists  saw 
it,  a  long  retreat  even  from  the  state- 
ment of  1922.  With  the  support  of 
powerful  elements  in  British  public  life. 


Weizmann 


D.N.B.  1051-19«0 


the  Zionists  managed  to  extract  what 
amounted  to  a  partial  retraction,  but  this 
did  not  suffice  to  restore  Weizmann's 
shaken  prestige.  Neither  th^  skill  with 
which  he  had  steered  the  Movement 
through  turbulent  waters  nor  his  inde- 
fatigable personal  exertions  in  propa- 
gandist campaigns  designed  to  provide  it 
with  the  large  resources  which  had  now 
become  indispensable  could  save  his  leader- 
ship from  being  seriously  challenged,  and 
in  1931  the  adoption  by  the  Zionist  Con- 
gress of  a  vote  of  no  confidence  led  to  his 
retirement  from  office.  Before  long  it  was 
realized  that  he  was  irreplaceable,  and  he 
was  recalled  to  the  presidency  in  1935  a 
few  months  before  the  appointment  of  the 
royal  conunission  on  Palestine  under  Lord 
Peel  [q.v.]  which,  in  1937,  reported  in 
favour  of  the  termination  of  the  British 
mandate  and  the  partitioning  of  Palestine 
into  Jewish  and  Arab  States.  Weizmann 
was  from  the  start  a  wholehearted  sup- 
porter of  the  partition  scheme  which,  how- 
ever, evaporated  with  the  Government's 
decision  in  1938  that  it  could  not  be  pro- 
ceeded with.  One  more  attempt  at  an 
agreed  settlement  of  the  Palestine  question 
failed  with  the  collapse  of  the  St.  James's 
Palace  conference  early  in  1939  and  the 
publication,  against  the  vehement  protests 
of  the  Zionist  delegates,  headed  by  Weiz- 
mann, of  a  statement  of  policy  even  less 
acceptable  to  the  Zionists  than  that  of 
1930. 

Weizmann's  contacts  with  British  states- 
men during  the  war  encouraged  him  to 
hope  that,  when  peace  came,  the  situ- 
ation might  still  be  restored.  The  report 
of  the  Anglo-American  conunission  of 
inquiry,  before  which  he  gave  evidence 
early  in  1946,  showed  how  deeply  it  had 
been  impressed  by  his  plea  for  the  recog- 
nition of  the  now  desperate  need  of  the 
Jews  for  a  secure  home  in  Palestine.  The 
British  response  was  chilhng,  but  Weiz- 
mann still  clung,  hoping  against  hope, 
to  his  faith  in  the  British  connection.  That 
faith  was  not  shared  by  the  majority  of 
the  first  post-war  Zionist  Congress  which, 
at  the  end  of  1946,  with  the  American 
delegation  in  the  lead,  declared  in  effect 
that  it  was  not  interested  in  further 
discussions  with  the  British  Government 
and,  without  appointing  a  successor,  let 
Weizmann  lay  down  his  office,  this  time 
not  to  return. 

Although  no  longer  occupying  any 
official  position  in  the  Movement,  Weiz- 
mann remained  its  most  impressive  and, 
in  the  eyes  of  the  outside  world,  its  most 


representative  figure.  It  was  to  him  that 
the  Zionists  turned  when  in  1947  they 
urgently  needed  American  support  for 
their  views  on  the  proposals  then  before 
the  United  Nations  for  the  partition  of 
Palestine.  His  personal  intervention  with 
President  Truman  helped  materially  to 
open  the  way  for  the  adoption  by  the 
Assembly  of  a  scheme  assigning  a  viable 
area  to  the  proposed  Jewish  State  and 
again  a  few  months  later  to  bring  about 
the  immediate  recognition  of  the  State 
of  Israel  by  the  United  States  when  its 
establishment  was  proclaimed,  directly 
after  the  British  withdrawal  from  Palestine 
in  May  1948.  Weizmann  was  at  once 
invited  to  become  president.  Though  now 
in  his  seventy-fourth  year  and  in  failing 
health,  he  had  expected  to  be  treated  as 
an  elder  statesman  and  not,  as  happened, 
as  little  more  than  a  figurehead.  This 
deeply  wounded  him,  but  his  frustrations 
were  in  some  measure  relieved  by  the 
solace  of  his  beloved  laboratories,  where,  in 
the  closing  years  of  his  life,  he  returned  to 
the  scientific  studies  for  which,  for  all  the 
distractions  of  his  public  career,  he  had 
never  lost  his  zest.  Although  it  is  as  a 
Zionist  leader  that  he  will  have  his  place 
in  history,  he  also  managed  by  some 
miracle  of  concentration  to  gain  a  con- 
siderable reputation  in  the  scientific 
world  of  his  day  both  on  the  academic 
plane  and  as  an  industrial  chemist  with 
important  inventions  to  his  credit.  It  was 
these  which,  after  the  end  of  the  war 
of  1914-18,  made  him  financially  inde- 
pendent and  free  to  devote  himself  to 
the  service  of  the  Zionist  cause  without 
anxiety  for  his  future.  Before  he  died, 
at  Rehovoth,  9  November  1952,  he  had 
had  the  happiness  of  seeing  both  the  seats 
of  learning  in  Israel  whose  foundation 
he  had  inspired — the  Hebrew  University 
of  Jerusalem  and  the  Weizmann  Institute 
of  Science  at  Rehovoth— securely  estab- 
Ushed  and  well  on  the  way  to  justifying 
the  high  hopes  he  had  reposed  in  them. 
Honorary  degrees  were  conferred  upon 
him  by  Manchester  (1919),  the  Hebrew 
University  (1947),  and  the  Haifa  Poly- 
technicum  (1952). 

With  an  unmistakably  Jewish  cast  of 
features,  but  of  a  Russian-Jewish  type 
bearing  no  resemblance  to  the  con- 
ventional image  of  the  Jew,  Weizmann 
was  a  little  above  middle  height,  broad- 
shouldered  and  well  proportioned,  with 
a  good  figure  and  an  erect  and  confident 
carriage.  Sir  Harold  Nicolson,  who  was  in 
frequent  contact  with  him  in  the  Balfour 


1040 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Wellesley,  D.  V. 


Declaration  period,  has  spoken  of  the 
respect — even  awe — inspired  by  his  com- 
manding presence  and  dignified  bearing: 
*I  sometimes  wonder  whether  his  fellow- 
Jews  realise  how  deeply  he  impressed  us 
gentiles  by  his  heroic,  his  Maccabean 
quality.'  As  he  grew  surer  of  himself  in  his 
English  environment,  he  developed  social 
gifts  which,  combined  with  the  elegance 
and  savoir-faire  of  his  wife,  made  him 
acceptable  both  as  host  and  guest  in 
circles  to  which  no  other  Zionist  leader 
had  access.  In  his  relations  with  the 
British  statesmen  and  civil  servants  with 
whom  he  had  to  deal  he  showed  diplomatic 
address  of  a  high  order,  with  a  sensitive 
feeling  for  atmosphere  and  an  intuitive 
grasp  of  the  right  approach  to  each  indi- 
vidual. His  charm,  when  he  chose  to  exert 
it,  served  him  well,  but  what  made  him 
incomparably  the  most  effective  advocate 
of  the  Zionist  cause  was  his  power  to  kindle 
the  imagination  of  those  who  came  under 
his  spell  and  to  impart  to  them  some  of  his 
own  mystical  faith  in  the  destiny  of  his 
people  and  the  significance  of  its  survival. 
If  he  not  only  captivated  them  but  won 
their  confidence,  it  was  because — as  one  of 
them.  Sir  Charles  Webster,  has  told  us — 'all 
those  with  whom  he  came  into  contact 
believed  absolutely  in  his  probity  and  sin- 
cerity and  learnt  to  work  with  him  as  a 
partner  in  a  great  enterprise'. 

By  his  marriage  in  1906  to  Vera  (died 
1966),  daughter  of  Isaiah  Chatzman,  of 
Rostov-on-the-Don,  he  had  two  sons,  the 
younger  of  whom  was  killed  in  1942  while 
serving  in  the  Royal  Air  Force. 

A  portrait  of  Weizmann  by  Sir  Oswald 
Birley  and  busts  by  (Sir)  Jacob  Epstein 
and  Benno  Elkan  are  in  the  Weizmann 
House,  Rehovoth. 

[Chaim  Weizmann,  Trial  and  Error,  1949 ; 
Chaim  Weizmann,  ed.  P.  Goodman,  1945; 
Sir  Isaiah  Berlin,  Chaim  Weizmann,  1958; 
Leonard  Stein,  Ttie  Balfour  Declaration, 
1961;  C?iaim  Weizmann,  ed.  M.  W.  Weisgal 
and  J.  Carmichael,  1962;  The  Impos^ble 
Takes  Longer,  memoirs  of  Vera  Weizmann  as 
told  to  David  Tutaev,  1967.] 

Leonard  Stein. 


WELLESLEY,     DOROTHY    VIOLET, 

Duchess  of  Wellington  (1889-1956), 
poet,  was  bom  30  July  1889  at  Heywood 
Lodge,  White  Waltham,  Berkshire,  the 
only  daughter  of  Robert  Ashton,  of 
Croughton,  Cheshire,  and  his  wife,  Lucy 
Cecilia  Dunn  Gardner.  After  her  father's 
death  her  mother  married,  in  1899,  the 
tenth    Earl    of    Scarbrough.     In     1914 


Dorothy  married  Lord  Gerald  Wellesley, 
who  succeeded  his  nephew  as  seventh 
Duke  of  Wellington  in  1943.  They  had 
one  son,  the  Marquess  Douro,  and  one 
daughter.  Lady  Elizabeth  Clyde. 

Dorothy  Wellesley  started  writing 
poetry  at  a  very  early  age.  Slight  of  huiid, 
almost  fragile,  with  blazing  blue  eyes, 
fair  hair,  transparently  white  skin,  she 
was  a  natural  rebel,  rejecting  all  con- 
ventions and  accepted  ideas,  loving  to 
proclaim  herself  an  agnostic,  a  fiery  spirit 
with  a  passionate  love  for  beauty  in  all 
forms,  whether  of  flowers,  landscape,  or 
works  of  art.  Her  friend  Sir  George 
Goldie  [q.v.],  whose  biography  she  wrote 
in  1934,  after  investigating  her  scalp 
when  she  was  eleven  years  old,  informed 
her  that  she  had  the  three  bumps  of 
temper,  pride,  and  combativeness  more 
developed  than  anyone  he  had  ever 
known.  She  was  a  born  romantic  by  tem- 
perament, but  the  bad  fairy  at  her  christ- 
ening had  decreed  that  her  intellectual 
power  should  never  equal  her  gifts  of  the 
imagination;  consequently,  the  poems 
which  she  dashed  off  as  fast  as  she  could 
write  them  down  never  received  the 
revision  they  demanded.  'Oh,  I  can't  be 
bothered' — grammar  and  syntax  bored 
her ;  impatiently  she  rejected  the  counsel 
of  her  friends.  Unfortunately  her  educa- 
tion was  carried  out  at  home,  mostly  by 
foreign  governesses,  when  the  discipline  of 
school  and  the  intellectual  stimulus-  of  a 
university  were  what  she  really  needed. 

Fancying  herself  as  something  of  a 
philosopher,  with  a  sense  of  history  and  a 
smattering  of  archaeology,  all  somewhat 
amateurish,  she  often  imposed  upon  her 
verse  a  weight  it  should  never  have  been 
asked  to  carry.  She  felt;  she  saw;  she 
interpreted.  Her  undoing,  as  a  poet, 
sometimes,  was  that  she  thought  she 
could  think.  She  should  have  stuck  to 
her  very  personal  vision  of  Nature,  and 
to  what  W.  B.  Yeats  [q.v.]  (who  greatly 
admired  her  work  and  whose  Letters  on 
Poetry  to  her  were  published  in  1940) 
called  her  'passionate  precision'.  This 
precise,  almost  myopic  observation  of 
Nature,  Tennysonian  in  its  detail,  might, 
under  the  floodlighting  of  her  spacious 
imagination,  have  produced  a  far  better 
poet  than  she  ever  troubled  to  become. 
Selections  of  her  poems  were  published  at 
intervals  from  1913  onwards ;  Early  Light, 
her  collected  poems,  appeared  in  1955. 

Dorothy  Wellesley  loved  entertaining 
her  friends,  both  at  Sherfield  Court  in 
Hampshire  and  subsequently  at  Penns  in 


1041 


Wellesley,  D.  V. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


the  Rocks,  Withyham,  Sussex,  where  she 
died  11  July  1956.  No  biographical  sketch 
of  her  would  be  complete  without  a  men- 
tion of  the  charm  and  gaiety  she  could 
display  as  a  hostess.  She  never  cared  much 
for  London,  but  was  happy  in  the  country 
with  her  garden,  her  books,  her  dogs,  her 
friends,  her  children,  her  grandchildren, 
and  her  writing.  Fortune,  in  the  material 
sense,  had  been  kind  to  her:  she  could 
indulge  her  taste  for  beautiful  objects  and 
all  the  amenities  of  a  comfortable  life,  in 
which  she  was  anxious  that  others  should 
participate.  Her  autobiography.  Far  Have 
I  Travelled  (1952),  was  unfortunately  writ- 
ten when  her  health,  never  very  robust, 
had  considerably  deteriorated  and  only 
her  natural  courage  kept  her  going. 

Two  pencil  portraits  by  Sir  William 
Rothenstein  are  in  the  possession  of  the 
family. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge,] 
V.  Sackville-West. 

WELLESLEY,  Sir  VICTOR  ALEX- 
ANDER AUGUSTUS  HENRY  (1876- 
1954),  diplomatist,  was  born  at  the  British 
Embassy,  St.  Petersburg  1  March  1876, 
the  only  child  of  the  miUtary  attache. 
Colonel  Frederick  Arthur  Wellesley,  and 
his  first  wife,  Emma  Anne  Caroline 
Bloomfield,  daughter  of  Lord  Augustus 
Loftus  [q.v.],  ambassador  in  Berlin  and 
Vienna.  His  father  was  the  son  of  Earl 
Cowley  [q.v.],  ambassador  in  Paris,  and 
the  grandson  of  the  first  Baron  Cowley 
[q.v.],  ambassador  in  Paris  and  Vienna, 
and  youngest  brother  of  the  Iron  Duke. 
Victor  Wellesley  who  thus  belonged  by 
birth  to  the  old  diplomacy  was  to  become 
an  originator  of  the  new  diplomacy,  based 
on  economics.  He  was  a  page  of  honour  to 
his  godmother  Queen  Victoria  (1887-92) 
and  was  educated  for  the  most  part  in 
Germany,  first  at  Wiesbaden,  where  his 
mother  lived,  and  later  at  Heidelberg.  He 
returned  to  England  when  he  was  about 
twenty  and  lived  with  his  grandfather 
Loftus  at  Leatherhead  where  he  studied 
by  himself  until  he  was  of  age  and  could 
raise  the  money  for  cramming  at  Scoones's. 
He  passed  into  Sandhurst,  but  was  rejected 
for  his  eyesight. 

He  was  accepted,  however,  for  the 
diplomatic  service  in  1899.  After  serving 
as  second  secretary  at  Rome  (1905-6),  he 
was  secretary  to  the  British  delegates  to 
the  labour  conference  at  Berne  (1906); 
commercial  attache  for  Spain  (1908-12); 
and  controller  of  commercial  and  con- 
sular affairs  at  the  Foreign  Office  (1916- 


19),  proceeding  on  a  tour  of  inspection  of 
missions  and  consulates  in  South  and 
Central  America  in  1919-20.  Thereafter 
he  remained  permanently  in  the  Foreign 
Office — as  counsellor  in  charge  of  the  Far 
Eastern  department  (1920-24),  as  assis- 
tant under-secretary  of  state  (1924^5), 
and  as  deputy  under-secretary  (1925-36). 
He  was  appointed  C.B.  in  1919  and 
K.C.M.G.  in  1926. 

Wellesley  was  thus  virtually  in  charge 
of  Far  Eastern  affairs  from  1920  on- 
wards, during  the  period  of  the  termina- 
tion of  the  Anglo- Japanese  alliance,  the 
Washington  conference  on  the  limitation 
of  armament,  the  second  Chinese  revo- 
lution and  the  establishment  and  recog- 
nition of  the  Kuomintang  Government, 
the  dispatch  of  the  British  defence  force 
to  Shanghai,  the  Japanese  invasion  of 
Manchuria,  and  the  commission  under 
Lord  Lytton  [q.v.].  Wellesley  was  pro- 
foundly suspicious  of  Japanese  ambitions 
and  methods  in  China.  He  believed  that 
the  continuance  of  our  alliance  was  dis- 
advantageous to  the  development  of  our 
trade  with  China  and  an  obstacle  to 
friendship  with  the  United  States.  He  was 
one  of  the  architects  of  the  Washington 
agreements  (1923). 

More  important  was  Wellesley' s  in- 
fluence in  the  encouragement  of  the 
economic  side  of  Foreign  Office  work, 
with  which  he  was  connected  from  1908. 
He  was  Foreign  Office  representative  on 
the  committees  which  towards  the  end  of 
the  war  of  1914r-18  were  appointed  to 
examine  the  inadequacies  of  the  existing 
machinery  for  the  development  of  British 
trade  abroad.  As  a  result,  his  old  com- 
mercial and  consular  department  was 
remodelled  and  the  new  semi-independent 
Department  of  Overseas  Trade  was  set 
up  in  1917.  This  did  not  meet  Wellesley's 
recorded  view  (1918)  that  the  economic 
factor  regulated  the  political  atmosphere 
in  all  countries  and  dominated  inter- 
national relations.  He  considered  it  the 
defect  of  the  Foreign  Office  that  it  was  not 
constituted  on  lines  best  calculated  to 
deal  with  the  economic  aspect  of  foreign 
affairs.  His  conception  of  diplomacy  was 
ignored  until  the  economic  crisis  of  1929- 
31.  Then,  backed  by  Arthur  Henderson 
[q.v.],  he  again  put  forward  arguments  for 
an  economic  department  in  the  Foreign 
Office.  Henderson's  approach  displeased 
Ramsay  MacDonald  and  the  project  was 
opposed  by  Sir  Warren  Fisher  [q.v.]  at  the 
Treasury;  but  a  small  economic  section 
crept  into  being  which  subsequently  grew 


1042 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


into  one  of  the  most  active  and  effective 
branches  of  the  Office. 

With  the  advent  of  the  'national' 
Government  in  1931  and  Lord  Reading 
[q.v.]  as  foreign  secretary,  Wellesley,  in 
the  absence  of  Sir  Robert  (later  Lord) 
Vansittart  [q.v.],  was  instructed  to  sub- 
mit the  views  of  the  Foreign  Office  on  the 
world  situation.  He  drew  special  attention 
to  German  restlessness,  the  uncertainties 
of  the  Polish  frontier,  French  fears  for 
her  security,  the  call  for  more  explicit 
guarantees  by  Great  Britain,  and  her 
opportunity  to  use  economic  and  financial 
weight  to  effect  a  political  settlement. 
Sir  John  (later  Viscount)  Simon  [q.v.], 
succeeding  to  Lord  Reading,  had  this 
memorandum  submitted  to  the  Cabinet 
but  took  no  further  steps  to  support  it 
or  to  get  it  adequately  considered  before 
the  Government  took  its  plunge  into 
successive  conferences  on  disarmament, 
reparations,  and  on  dominion  and  world 
economics  in  Ottawa  and  London.  The 
Foreign  Office  programme  did  not  suit 
the  'national'  Government,  it  offended  the 
Treasury  and  the  Board  of  Trade  which 
considered  that  the  Foreign  Office  was 
trespassing  on  their  ground.  As  it  was, 
he  lived  in  his  retirement  after  1936  to 
see  his  worst  apprehensions  reaUzed. 
Before  1939  he  had  completed  the  greater 
part  of  the  volume  which  embodies  his 
reflections,  Diplomacy  in  Fetters  (1944), 
a  book  full  of  experience  and  observation, 
but  devoid  of  the  sensationalism  which 
attracts  readers.  He  published  also 
Conversations  with  Napoleon  III  (with 
Robert  Sencourt,  1934)  and  Recollections 
of  a  Soldier-Diplomat  (1947),  embodying 
his  father's  lively  and  amusing  auto- 
biography. 

Wellesley  had  not  the  influence  on 
policy  of  his  more  famous  colleagues, 
Sir  Eyre  Crowe  and  Lord  Tyrrell  [qq.v.]. 
He  had  not  the  forcefulness  of  Crowe  or 
the  supple  brilliance  of  Tyrrell.  But  he 
was  a  mandarin  of  the  first  class,  in  some 
respects  in  advance  of  his  time,  a  Cas- 
sandra in  the  Office.  The  elephant  might 
be  taken  as  his  symbolic  beast — massive, 
ponderous  and  pondering,  noble,  patient, 
wise,  gentle,  loyal  and  lovable ;  yet  aloof 
and  very  different  from  the  other  creatures. 
In  1909  Wellesley  married  Alice  Muriel, 
daughter  of  Oscar  Leslie  Stephen.  She 
died  in  1949  and  they  had  lost  their  only 
child,  a  little  daughter.  He  was  a  lonely 
man,  after  1948  an  invaUd,  and  for  the 
last  two  or  three  years  of  his  life  very 
nearly  blind.  This  was  a  great  affliction. 


Whipple 

for  he  read  extensively  and  his  hobby  all 
his  life  had  been  painting.  He  was  a  dis- 
tinguished amateur  painter  of  landscapes 
and  portraits,  and  his  pictures  were 
frequently  exhibited  at  the  Royal  Aca- 
demy and  elsewhere.  He  also  had  an 
extensive  collection  of  autographs  and 
documents  which  was  dispersed  after  his 
death  which  took  place  in  London  20 
February  1954.  A  portrait  by  Louis 
Powles  is  privately  owned. 
[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

F.    ASHTON-GWATKIN. 

WELLINGTON,  Duchess  of  (1889- 
1956),  poet.  [See  Wellesley,  Dorothy 
Violet.] 

WHETHAM,  WILLIAM  CECIL 
DAMPIER  (1867-1952),  scientist  and 
agriculturist.  [See  Dampier.] 

WHIPPLE,       ROBERT       STEWART 

(1871-1953),  manufacturer  and  collector 
of  scientffic  instruments  and  books,  was 
born  in  Richmond,  Surrey,  1  August 
1871,  the  eldest  son  of  George  Mathews 
Whipple  [q.v.],  scientist  and  later  super- 
intendent of  the  Royal  Observatory, 
Kew,  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth  Martha, 
daughter  of  Robert  Beckley,  chief  in- 
strument mechanic  at  Kew.  Whipple  was 
educated  at  King's  College  School,  Wim- 
bledon. He  entered  Kew  Observatory  as 
an  assistant  in  1888,  leaving  eight  years 
later  to  become  assistant  manager  to 
L.  P.  Casella,  a  firm  of  instrument  makers. 
In  1898  he  was  appointed  private  assistant 
to  (Sir)  Horace  Darwin  [q.v.],  who  had 
founded  the  Cambridge  Scientific  Instru- 
ment Company,  of  which  Whipple  be- 
came manager  and  secretary  at  the  end 
of  that  year.  In  1899  he  matriculated  at 
Trinity  College,  but  did  not  proceed  to  a 
degree.  In  1909  Whipple  and  C.  C.  Mason 
became  joint  managing  directors  of  the 
firm,  a  post  he  held  until  his  retirement 
from  active  management  of  the  company 
in  1935.  For  ten  years  from  1939  he  was 
chairman  of  the  directors  of  the  firm. 

During  the  war  of  1914-18  Whipple 
rendered  important  service  to  the  Ministry 
of  Munitions  in  connection  with  the 
supply  of  optical  instruments  and  fine 
mechanisms  for  fuses;  and  early  in  the 
second  war  he  was  recalled  from  retire- 
ment to  give  further  help  with  instru- 
ment production.  Just  after  the  end  of  the 
first  war,  the  Government  sought  to  assist 
industry  with  research  and  development 


1043 


Whipple 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


by  supporting  conjoint  research  associa- 
tions for  each  of  a  few  carefully  selected 
industries.  The  first  of  these  was  the 
British  Optical  Instrument  Research  Asso- 
ciation, which  later  became  the  British 
Scientific  Instrument  Research  Associa- 
tion. It  was  hardly  surprising  to  his  con- 
temporaries that  Whipple's  infectious 
enthusiasm  for  scientific  instruments 
made  him  one  of  the  leaders  of  the  in- 
dustry which  succeeded  so  early  in  estab- 
lishing its  own  research  association. 

Whipple  was  a  founder-fellow  of  the 
Institute  of  Physics  and  served  on  its 
board  for  no  fewer  than  twenty-one 
years  in  five  spells  from  1920  to  1945. 
He  was  a  fellow  of  the  Physical  Society, 
one  of  its  vice-presidents  (1914-16  and 
1936-9),  and  honorary  treasurer  (1925- 
35).  He  was  also  a  fellow  of  the  Optical 
Society  over  which  he  presided  in  1920-22 ; 
and  was  president  of  the  mathematics 
and  physics  section  of  the  British  Asso- 
ciation at  its  Dundee  meeting  in  1939. 
He  was  a  member  of  the  Institution 
of  Electrical  Engineers,  serving  on  its 
council  from  1929  to  1932.  He  published 
a  number  of  papers  in  its  Journal,  for 
two  of  which,  concerned  with  medical 
applications  of  instruments,  he  was 
awarded  the  Ayrton  premium  in  1919. 
In  1937  he  gave  the  Institution's  Faraday 
lecture  on  'Electricity  in  the  Hospital'. 
He  was  president  (1926-8)  of  the  British 
Optical  Instrument  Manufacturers'  Asso- 
ciation which  later  became  the  Scientific 
Instnmient  Manufacturers'  Association 
of  Great  Britain,  Ltd.,  of  which  he  was 
president  in  1932-7.  Whipple  was  elected 
president  of  the  Highgate  Literary  and 
Scientific  Institution  in  north  London  in 
1937  and  was  re-elected  annually  until  his 
death.  That  this  institution,  founded  in 
1839,  remained  in  existence  was  largely 
due  to  his  leadership  and  generosity 
during  the  seventeen  years  he  was  presi- 
dent. Shortly  before  he  died,  in  High- 
gate  13  December  1953,  he  founded  a 
trust,  bearing  his  name,  for  the  promotion 
of  the  arts  and  science  in  north  London, 
which  was  able  to  continue  to  help  the 
institution. 

Whipple  was  intensely  interested  in  the 
history  and  development  of  scientific 
instruments  and  he  amassed  an  important 
and  valuable  collection  of  specimens  of 
historic  interest  dating  from  the  sixteenth 
century;  he  also  collected  valuable  origi- 
nal scientific  books  and  his  collection  of 
some  1,500  included  several  important 
works  such  as  those  of  Gilbert,  Bacon, 


Galileo,  Boyle,  Hooke,  and  Newton. 
In  a  characteristically  generous  manner 
he  presented  these  collections  to  the  uni- 
versity of  Cambridge  in  1944,  where  they 
are  displayed  in  the  museum  devoted 
to  the  history  of  science  and  known  as 
the  Whipple  Museum.  Whipple  was  a 
true  Victorian  gentleman,  whose  charm 
and  grace  made  it  a  delight  to  be  in  his 
company.  He  was  kindly  and  generous 
in  supporting,  often  anonymously,  the 
causes  in  which  he  believed.  Many  a  young 
scientist  and  engineer  owed  much  to  his 
gentle  help  and  encouragement. 

In  1903  Whipple  married  Helen,  daugh- 
ter of  the  late  Allan  Muir,  a  teacher,  of 
Glasgow.  There  were  two  daughters  of  the 
marriage  and  a  son,  George  Allan  Whipple, 
who  followed  his  father  in  the  scientific 
instrument  industry.  A  bas-relief  of 
Whipple  was  made  by  Mrs.  Mary  Gillick. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
H.  R.  Lang. 

WHITBY,  Sir  LIONEL  ERNEST 
HOWARD  (1895-1956),  medical  scientist 
and  regius  professor  of  physic  in  the 
university  of  Cambridge,  was  born  in 
Yeovil  8  May  1895,  the  second  of  the 
three  sons  of  Benjamin  Whitby,  glove- 
maker,  and  his  wife,  Jane  Elizabeth 
Milborne.  He  was  educated  at  King's 
College,  Taunton,  and  Bromsgrove  School 
(of  which  he  later  became  a  governor), 
and  won  a  senior  open  scholarship  for 
Downing  College,  Cambridge.  At  this 
point  war  broke  out  and  he  served  with 
distinction  as  a  machine-gunner  in  the 
Royal  West  Kent  Regiment  in  Serbia, 
Gallipoli,  and  France.  A  severe  wound 
in  March  1918  resulted  in  the  amputation 
of  a  leg,  and  he  ended  as  a  very  young 
major  with  the  M.C.  and  a  lifelong  dis- 
ability. 

Undeterred  by  this  misfortune  he  went 
up  to  Cambridge  in  October  of  the  same 
year  to  study  medicine  and  completed  his 
training  at  the  Middlesex  Hospital  in 
London  as  a  Freeman  scholar  and  Hudson 
and  Hetley  prizeman.  He  qualified  M.B., 
B.Ch.,  Cambridge  (1923),  took  the  diploma 
of  pubhc  health  (1924),  and  his  M.D., 
Cambridge,  and  M.R.C.P.  (1927). 

In  1923  Whitby  was  appointed  assistant 
pathologist  in  the  Bland- Sutton  Institute 
at  the  Middlesex  Hospital  where  he  began 
to  develop  the  wide  range  of  expert 
knowledge  in  pathology,  bacteriology, 
and  haematology  which  was  eventually 
embodied  in  his  three  books :  The  Labora- 
tory   in    Surgical    Practice    (1931,    with 


1044 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


(Sir)  Charles  Dodds),  Medical  Bactenology 
(1928,  6th  ed.  1956),  and  Disorders  of  the 
Blood  (with  C.  J.  C.  Britton,  1935,  7th 
ed.  1953).  These  books,  Uke  his  lectures, 
showed  a  most  effective  combination  of 
erudition,  clarity,  and  conunon  sense. 

Whitby  sprang  into  prominence  when 
he  was  invited  to  join  the  team  of  doctors 
attending  King  George  V  in  his  illness  of 
1928-9.  He  was  appointed  C.V.O.  During 
the  next  ten  years  he  busied  himself  with 
medical  research,  largely  on  blood  diseases, 
and  with  a  growing  practice  in  clinical 
pathology.  One  of  his  best  known  re- 
searches established  the  drug  sulpha- 
pyridene,  at  first  called  'M  «&  B  693',  after 
May  and  Baker,  the  firm  in  whose  labora- 
tories the  drug,  with  hundreds  of  others, 
was  first  synthesized  by  A.  J.  Ewins  [q.v.] 
and  his  colleagues.  This  work,  which  led 
to  a  vast  improvement  in  the  treatment  of 
pneumonia,  was  summed  up  in  Whitby's 
Bradshaw  lecture  to  the  Royal  College  of 
Physicians  (1938)  and  won  him  the  John 
Hunter  medal  and  prize  from  the  Royal 
College  of  Surgeons  (1939). 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1939  Whitby, 
who  had  stayed  with  the  Territorial 
Army,  held  the  rank  of  colonel.  He  was 
appointed  the  first  officer  in  charge  of  the 
army  blood-transfusion  service.  Under- 
standing of  the  complexity  of  the  blood- 
groups  was  still  rudimentary,  so  that 
both  basic  research  and  continual  im- 
provements of  technique  were  urgently 
necessary.  Whitby's  imperturbable  and 
friendly  competence  lightened  the  exacting 
team-work  of  his  assistants,  in  spite  of 
the  severe  bombing  of  Bristol  where  he 
had  his  chief  depot  for  the  collection  and 
processing  of  blood  and  for  training  trans- 
fusion units  to  work  with  the  army  at 
home  and  abroad.  By  the  end  of  the  war 
his  service  had  become  a  model  for  future 
peacetime  services  in  the  larger  medical 
centres,  and  he  himself  had  been  pro- 
moted a  brigadier.  The  development  of 
blood-transfusion  for  the  wounded  saved 
innumerable  lives  and  continues  to  be 
one  of  the  major  medical  and  surgical 
advances  of  our  time. 

Whitby  was  often  called  into  consul- 
tation when  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill  was 
ill  and  in  1944  went  with  him  to  the 
Quebec  conference.  He  was  knighted  in 
1945.  In  the  same  year  he  was  appointed 
to  the  regius  chair  of  physic  at  Cambridge 
where  he  inspired  and  helped  the  medical 
school  to  develop  important  new  features, 
such  as  the  organization  of  postgraduate 
studies,   the   health   service    for   under- 


Whitby 

graduates,  and  a  department  of  human 
ecology. 

These  years  also  proved  him  to  be  an 
ideal  chairman  of  large  medical  con- 
ferences. Able  at  a  moment's  notice  to 
compose  a  pithy  introductory  speech  and 
to  extract  the  essence  from  a  medley  of 
opinions,  he  acted  as  a  most  successful 
president  of  the  British  Medical  Asso- 
ciation (1948-9)  and  chairman  of  the 
Association's  educational  committee ;  and 
in  1953  he  was  equally  effective  as  presi- 
dent of  the  first  World  Conference  on 
Medical  Education.  He  was  president  also 
of  the  International  Society  of  Haemato- 
logy  (1950)  and  of  the  Association  of 
CUnical  Haematologists,  and  president  of 
the  Association  of  Clinical  Pathologists 
and  of  the  first  International  Congress  in 
that  subject  (1951). 

His  election  in  1947  to  the  mastership 
of  Downing  added  further  responsi- 
bihties.  The  college  was  enriched  with  a 
new  chapel,  a  spacious  court,  and  a  hall 
restored  and  freshly  adorned;  and  all 
branches  of  study  found  stimulation  in 
his  wide  intellectual  interests.  Meanwhile 
his  medical  research  continued  and  his 
books  needed  periodical  revision.  As 
chairman  of  the  medical  committee  of 
Addenbroke's  Hospital  he  played  a  leading 
part  in  planning  improvements,  in  easing 
the  take-over  of  the  hospital  by  the 
Health  Service,  and  in  organizing  the 
clinical  instruction  of  medical  graduates. 
In  1951-3  Whitby  reached  the  peak  of  his 
academic  career  when  he  served  as  vice- 
chancellor  of  the  university.  His  quickness 
of  thought  and  steadiness  of  judgement, 
'•ombined  with  a  sympathetic  under- 
standing of  diverse  characters,  ensured  a 
distinguished  term  of  office.  His  duties 
tied  him  closely  to  Cambridge,  but  before 
and  after  this  period  he  travelled  widely 
on  medical  and  academic  missions.  He 
gave  the  Cutter  lecture  when  he  was 
visiting  professor  at  Harvard  in  1946 ; 
and  was  Sims  Commonwealth  travelUng 
professor  in  1956. 

Whitby  was  elected  F.R.C.P.  in  1983 ; 
he  received  the  gold  medal  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Medicine  (1945)  and  of  the 
Society  of  Apothecaries  (1948).  He  was  a 
commander  of  the  American  Legion  of 
Merit  and  a  chevalier  of  the  Legion  of 
Honour;  an  honorary  member  of  the 
American  Association  of  Physicians  and 
of  the  New  York  Academy  of  Medicine ; 
an  honorary  fellow  of  Lincoln  College, 
Oxford;  and  received  honorary  degrees 
from  Glasgow,  Toronto,  and  Louvain. 


1045 


Whitby 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


In  1922  Whitby  married  Ethel, 
daughter  of  James  Murgatroyd,  leather 
merchant,  of  Shelf,  Yorkshire.  She  had 
been  a  fellow  undergraduate,  qualified 
in  medicine,  and  served  Under  him  in 
the  army  blood  transfusion  service  with 
the  rank  of  major  in  the  Royal  Army 
Medical  Corps.  Highly  gifted  in  physical, 
intellectual,  and  artistic  qualities,  she 
gave  her  husband  invaluable  help.  They 
had  a  daughter  and  three  sons,  two  of 
whom  followed  their  father  with  distinc- 
tion into  the  more  scientific  branches  of 
medicine. 

Two  portraits  of  Whitby  were  painted 
by  Waldron  West,  the  second  a  replica 
of  the  first.  One  hangs  in  Bromsgrove 
School,  the  other  in  Downing  College, 
Cambridge.  Whitby  died  in  London 
24  November  1956. 

[British  Medical  Journal  and  Lancet, 
1  December  1956;  Nature,  5  January  1957; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

A.  D.  Gardner. 


WHITE,  CLAUDE  GRAHAME- (1879- 
1959),  pioneer  aviator  and  aircraft  manu- 
facturer. [See  Grahame- White.] 

WHITE,  LEONARD  CHARLES  (1897- 
1955),  general  secretary  of  the  Civil  Service 
Clerical  Association,  was  born  at  Cromer, 
Norfolk,  12  November  1897,  the  son  of 
Charles  Harold  White,  a  postal  clerk,  and 
his  wife,  Lelita  Beatrice  Clayton.  'Len' 
White  had  part  of  his  education  at  Paston 
Grammar  School,  North  Walsham.  Enter- 
ing the  Post  Office  as  a  learner  in  1914,  the 
following  year  he  became  a  sorting  clerk 
and  telegraphist  at  Northampton.  There 
he  showed  early  interest  in  trade -union 
affairs. 

In  1916  he  enlisted  in  the  Royal  Naval 
Divisional  Engineers  as  a  sapper,  but  he 
was  invalided  out  in  1917  and  returned  to 
his  job  in  the  Post  Office.  Finding  that 
avenues  of  promotion  from  'minor  and 
manipulative'  grades  to  the  clerical  class 
were  closed  for  the  duration.  White  threw 
up  his  permanent  position  in  the  Post 
Office  to  become  a  temporary  clerk  in  the 
Admiralty.  He  was  successful  in  a  limited 
competition  for  clerical  posts  and  was 
appointed  to  the  Admiralty  naval  ord- 
nance in  1920. 

In  the  thick  of  union  work  again  he  was 
in  turn  elected  secretary  of  the  local 
branch,  assistant  secretary  of  the  wider 
Admiralty  section  of  the  Civil  Service 
Clerical  Association,   a   member   of  the 


Admiralty  departmental  Whitley  Council 
and,  more  significant  still,  to  the  national 
executive  committee  of  the  Civil  Service 
Clerical  Association,  all  within  the  four 
years  to  1924.  This  rapid  advance  to  the 
forefront  of  the  association  was  remarked 
by  the  general  secretary,  W.  J.  Brown 
[q.v.],  who  noted  that  in  the  Admiralty 
he  had  a  branch  secretary  of  unusually 
high  standard. 

When  strengthening  the  headquarters' 
staff  in  1925,  Brown  urged  White  to 
apply  for  a  post  of  clerical  assistant.  This 
was  obviously  an  apprenticeship.  It  was 
followed  by  elevation  to  assistant  secre- 
tary in  1928 ;  to  assistant  general  secre- 
tary in  1936 ;  and  to  general  secretary  in 
1942,  on  Brown's  election  to  Parliament. 
Although  Brown  became  'parliamentary 
general  secretary'  and  continued  until 
1949,  White  assumed  full  command  of 
administration  and  negotiation  and  had 
complete  authority  as  leader  of  the  Civil 
Service  Clerical  Association  from  1942.  He 
was  also  associated  with  Brown  as  adviser 
to  the  Prison  Officers'  Association;  and 
acted  as  secretary  of  the  Civil  Service 
Alliance  (of  the  four  clerical  unions)  for 
seventeen  years. 

The  repeal  of  the  Trade  Disputes  Act  of 
1927  by  the  Labour  Government  in  1946 
enabled  the  Civil  Service  Clerical  Asso- 
ciation, along  with  other  Civil  Service 
organizations,  to  resume  affiliation  to  the 
Trades  Union  Congress.  Two  attempts  to 
secure  White's  election  to  the  T.U.C. 
General  Council  failed.  His  first  defeat  in 
1946  by  the  general  secretary  of  the  Union 
of  Post  Office  Workers  was  not  surprising. 
By  the  time  a  second  seat  on  the  General 
Council  came  to  be  allotted  to  the  Civil 
Service  associations  in  1951,  there  was 
no  doubt  that  White  had  become  un- 
acceptable to  the  powerful  men  on  the 
General  Council  because  of  his  known 
Communist  sympathies  and  his  member- 
ship of  the  board  of  the  Daily  Worker. 
They  mobilized  their  large  card  votes 
against  him  and  elected  Douglas  Houghton, 
M.P.,  of  the  Inland  Revenue  Staff  Federa- 
tion, by  a  six  to  one  majority. 

Neither  in  this  defeat  nor  in  other 
disappointments  did  White  show  any 
personal  feeling  of  resentment.  He  was  a 
good  loser  and  a  lovable  man,  a  cheerful 
companion  and  a  staunch  friend. 

As  a  platform  speaker  he  was  rational, 
moderate,  and  convincing.  In  committee 
he  was  businesslike  and  spoke  to  the  point. 
In  negotiation  he  was  well  informed,  ably 
marshalled  his  facts,  and  presented  his  case 


1046 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Whitehead 


in  a  persuasive  manner  and  without  over- 
statement or  sabre-rattling. 

Wliite's  great  and  lasting  contribution 
to  Civil  Service  staff  unionism  was  his 
resolve  to  build  up  strong  central  govern- 
ment in  the  National  Staff  Side  of  the 
Civil  Service  Whitley  Council.  He  con- 
demned sectional  attempts  at  'leap- 
frogging' in  pay  claims.  To  White  the 
authority  of  the  National  Staff  Side  was 
all  important.  He  made  the  C.S.C.A. 
subordinate  to  it  and  called  upon  others  to 
do  the  same. 

In  his  last  years  he  was  for  curbing 
intemperate  policies  and  militant  pos- 
tures ;  he  stood  for  honouring  agreements, 
and  for  infusing  the  elements  of  states- 
manship in  the  governance  of  the  Asso- 
ciation and  the  wider  field  of  Civil  Service 
affairs.  His  aim,  his  strength,  and  his 
achievements  all  lay  in  the  opposite 
direction  to  those  of  his  predecessor.  On 
becoming  general  secretary  of  the  C.S.C.A. 
he  inherited  a  legacy  of  unilateral  action 
and  waywardness.  The  Civil  Service  staff 
movement  had  been  seriously  weakened. 
White  knew  this  and  was  determined 
to  repair  the  damage.  This  he  did  so 
successfully  that  when,  in  1955,  the 
National  Staff  Side  were  seeking  a  suc- 
cessor to  Sir  Albert  Day,  the  choice  fell 
unanimously  on  L.  C.  White.  No  higher 
tribute  could  have  been  paid  to  him:  no 
greater  confidence  shown  in  his  ability  and 
integrity.  White  was  ready  to  make  the 
change  but  he  died  in  London  11  May 
1955,  before  the  appointment  could  be 
made. 

White's  first  marriage,  to  Ellen  Ellis, 
was  dissolved.  He  married  secondly,  in 
1945,  Roma  Iris  Clara,  daughter  of  Harold 
Larmer,  civil  servant ;  they  had  one  son. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Douglas  Houghton. 

WHITEHEAD,  JOHN  HENRY  CON- 
STANTINE  (1904-1960),  mathematician, 
was  born  in  Madras  11  November  1904, 
the  only  child  of  Henry  Whitehead, 
bishop  of  Madras  and  sometime  fellow  of 
Trinity  College,  Oxford,  and  his  wife, 
Isobel,  daughter  of  the  Rev.  John  Duncan, 
vicar  of  Calne,  and  an  early  mathematical 
student  of  Lady  Margaret  Hall.  A.  N. 
Whitehead  [q.v.]  was  his  uncle.  He  was 
educated  at  Eton,  where  he  was  a  member 
of  the  Society,  and  at  Balliol  College, 
Oxford,  where  he  was  first  a  Williams 
exhibitioner,  chosen  it  is  said  from  far 
down  the  hst  by  J.  W.  Nicholson,  and  then 
an  honorary  scholar  and  where  he  obtained 


first  classes  in  mathematical  moderations 
(1924)  and  in  the  final  honour  school  ( 1 926), 
his  work  much  influenced  by  H.  O.  New- 
boult  of  Merton.  Whitehead  played  bil- 
liards and  boxed  as  a  welterweight  for  the 
university  and  was  elected  to  the  Authen- 
tics.  He  shared  with  G.  H.  Hardy  [q.v.], 
whom  he  met  at  this  time,  a  passion  for 
cricket. 

After  eighteen  months  in  the  City  under 
the  guidance  of  O.  T.  Falk  of  Buckmaster 
and  Moore,  stockbrokers,  Henry  White- 
head returned  to  Balliol  in  1928  for  further 
work  in  mathematics  and  in  the  following 
year  went  with  a  Commonwealth  Fund 
fellowship  to  Princeton  to  study  under 
Oswald  Veblen.  Much  of  his  work  was  done 
in  differential  geometry  and  in  1932,  with 
Veblen,  he  published  the  classic  Cambridge 
Tract  on  The  Foundations  of  Differential 
Geometry. 

In  1932  Whitehead  became  lecturer  in 
mathematics,  and  in  1933  fellow  and 
tutor,  at  Balliol  in  succession  to  Nicholson. 
During  the  war  of  1939-45  he  served  in 
the  Admiralty  and  the  Foreign  Office. 
Returning  to  Oxford  he  became  Wayn- 
flete  professor  of  pure  mathematics  in 
1947  and  thus  migrated  to  Magdalen. 
Towards  the  end  of  his  time  at  Princeton 
he  had  turned  to  the  study  of  topology 
in  which  most  of  his  remaining  work 
was  done  and  in  which  his  contribution 
was  both  massive  and  fundamental. 
Some  of  his  most  original  work  was  com- 
pleted in  the  years  before  the  war  although 
its  importance  was  not  fully  recognized 
until  later.  After  the  war  he  produced 
a  large  volume  of  work  in  combinatorial 
topology  and  then  in  the  algebraic  side  of 
homotopy  theory,  returning  in  the  last 
few  years  of  his  fife  to  a  more  geometrical 
kind  of  topology.  His  reputation  was 
international  and  research  students  came 
from  many  countries  to  work  enjoyably 
with  him.  He  was  largely  responsible  for 
establishing  the  Mathematical  Institute 
at  Oxford;  was  a  committee  member  of 
the  British  Mathematical  Colloquium; 
and  in  1953-5  presided  over  the  London 
Mathematical  Society.  He  was  elected 
F.R.S.  in  1944. 

A  sociable  and  inspiring  teacher, 
Whitehead  threw  himself  with  rotund 
zest  into  college  and  university  life.  He 
would  travel  willing  summer  miles  in  his 
elderly  motoring  car,  of  which  he  was  the 
most  conversational  of  drivers,  to  play 
village  and  especially  Barnacles  cricket, 
at  which  he  continued  to  wear  his  Eton 
Ramblers'  cap  which,  as  he  and  it  grew 


1047 


Whitehead 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


older,  made  him  come  more  and  more  to 
resemble  Tweedledum,  his  stance  at  the 
crease  and  more  notably  in  the  field  re- 
maining imperially  upright  to  the  end. 
After  and  sometimes  during  the  game 
he  was  an  enthusiastic  controversialist 
especially  in  coimtry  inns  where  he  was 
eternally  ready  to  engage  in  protracted 
discussions  of  social  and  athletic  problems 
which  he  had  just  invented.  He  remained 
too  a  learned  devotee  both  of  the  works 
of  P.  G.  Wodehouse  and  of  the  game  of 
poker  the  enjoyment  of  which  he  claimed 
to  have  learned  at  his  mother's  knee. 
Whatever  he  did  was  fun  for  him  and  for 
his  companions.  His  friendships  were 
wide  in  both  range  and  age-group;  and 
they  were  well  repaired.  'It  was  in  long 
mathematical  conversations  in  which 
every  detail  had  to  be  hammered  out  till 
he  had  it  quite  correct  and  secure  that  he 
most  delighted  and  it  is  by  these  conver- 
sations, gay  and  informal,  in  which  he 
contrived  to  make  everyone  his  own 
equal'  that  his  fellow  mathematicians 
have  recalled  him  most  gratefully.  Cosy 
to  everyone,  towards  women  he  had  an 
old-fashioned  courtesy  uniquely  his  own. 
He  was  very  happily  married.  In  1934  he 
married  a  concert  pianist,  Barbara  Sheila, 
daughter  of  Lieutenant-Colonel  W.  Carew 
Smyth,  R.E.,  and  they  had  two  sons. 
The  Whiteheads  excelled  in  informal 
hospitality,  first  in  North  Oxford,  then  at 
their  farm  at  Noke  on  Otmoor  where  they 
kept  with  great  success  the  well-bred 
herd  of  cattle  which  Henry  had  inherited 
from  his  mother.  Stories  about  him  were 
legion;  all  were  kindly;  and  the  most 
convincing  he  probably  made  up  himself. 
Nobody  ever  accused  him  of  wisdom. 
An  affectionate  and  lovable  character, 
Henry  Whitehead  was  a  seminal  mathe- 
matician and  an  ingenious  and  humane 
man. 

Whitehead  died  8  May  1960  while 
on  sabbatical  leave  at  the  Institute  for 
Advanced  Study  at  Princeton.  There  is  a 
portrait  by  Gilbert  Spencer  in  the  Mathe- 
matical Institute  at  Oxford  where  the 
library  has  been  named  after  Whitehead. 

[Journal  of  the  London  Mathematical 
Society,  1962 ;  Nature,  18  June  1960 ;  M.  H.  A. 
Newman  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of  Fellows  of 
the  Royal  Society,  vol.  vii,  1961 ;  biographical 
note  in  The  Mathematical  Works  of  J.  H.  C. 
Whitehead,  ed.  I.  M.  James,  vol.  i,  ]962; 
private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

E.  T.  Williams. 

WHITELEY,  WILLIAM  (1881-1955), 
politician,  was  born  3  October  1881  in  the 


mining  village  of  Littleburn  near  Durham, 
the  fourth  son  of  Samuel  Whiteley,  miner 
and  checkweighman,  and  his  wife,  Ellen 
Bragan.  A  man  of  strong  character, 
Samuel  Whiteley  was  for  many  years  a 
Methodist  local  preacher;  William  also 
held  many  Methodist  offices.  Leaving  the 
Brandon  Colliery  school  at  the  age  of 
twelve,  Whiteley  worked  in  the  pit  until 
he  was  fifteen  when  he  became  a  clerk 
in  the  offices  of  the  Durham  Miners' 
Association.  He  attended  classes  in  short- 
hand, book-keeping  and  kindred  subjects, 
gaining  a  first  class  certificate,  and  him- 
self teaching  evening  classes.  Strongly 
built,  he  was  a  good  cricketer  and  played 
football  for  the  Sunderland  League  side. 
He  might  have  become  a  professional,  had 
not  his  father,  a  strong  teetotaller,  finding 
that  the  team  changed  in  public  houses, 
burnt  his  son's  football  clothes  and  boots. 

In  early  life  a  Liberal,  and  prominent 
in  a  local  debating  society,  in  1906 
Whiteley  joined  the  Labour  Party.  He 
helped  to  found  the  Durham  City  Labour 
Party  and  became  president  of  the 
Durham  County  Federation  of  Labour 
Parties.  In  1912  he  was  appointed  a 
miners'  agent  and  from  1915  to  1922  he 
served  on  the  executive  of  the  Miners' 
Federation  of  Great  Britain.  In  1918  he 
unsuccessfully  contested  the  Blaydon  divi- 
sion of  Durham  for  Labour,  but  in  1922 
he  won  the  seat  and,  except  for  the  years 
1931-5,  held  it  until  his  death.  In  the 
House  of  Commons  he  was  soon  recognized 
as  a  steady  hard-working  member.  His 
speeches,  generally  on  mining  subjects, 
were  well  informed.  Respected  and  trusted 
by  his  colleagues,  he  was  elected  a  Labour 
whip  in  1926  and  in  1929-31  he  served 
in  the  Labour  Government  as  a  junior 
lord  of  the  Treasury.  Losing  his  seat  in 
the  Labour  rout  of  1931  he  earned  his 
living  by  working  in  the  public  assistance 
department  of  the  Durham  County  Coun- 
cil and  by  once  again  teaching  evening 
classes. 

Re-entering  Parliament  in  1935,  White- 
ley  resumed  his  position  in  the  whips' 
office,  and  on  the  formation  of  the 
coalition  Government  in  1940  he  became 
comptroller  of  the  household.  Two  years 
later  he  became  joint  parliamentary 
secretary  to  the  Treasury  and  chief  whip 
of  the  Labour  Party  in  succession  to  Sir 
Charles  Edwards;  in  the  difficult  condi- 
tions of  a  coalition  he  was  successful  in 
keeping  the  party  united.  He  was  sworn 
of  the  Privy  Council  in  1943. 

During  the  whole  period  of  the  Labour 


1048 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Whittaker 


Government  of  1945-51  Whiteley  was 
parliamentary  secretary  to  the  Treasmy, 
and  he  remained  chief  Labour  whip  until 
June  1955.  By  common  consent  he  was 
considered  one  of  the  greatest  of  all  chief 
whips.  To  a  dignified  presence  he  added 
a  fine  character.  Absolutely  just,  he  was 
firm  yet  concihatory,  earning  the  affection 
of  his  colleagues  as  well  as  their  respect 
and  that  of  their  opponents.  In  wartime 
he  worked  harmoniously  and  loyally  with 
his  Conservative  colleague.  The  task  of 
maintaining  discipline  without  cramping 
individual  initiative  is  never  easy,  parti- 
cularly in  the  Labour  Party  where  there 
is  always  an  impatient  left  wing,  but 
Whiteley  achieved  this.  He  had  the  diffi- 
cult task,  during  the  second  Parliament 
after  the  war,  of  sustaining  a  Govern- 
ment with  a  majority  of  only  six ;  yet  he 
was  never  defeated  on  a  major  issue.  He 
inspired  loyalty  in  his  junior  whips  and 
in  the  rank  and  file.  He  sought  no  higher 
office,  but  was  content  to  serve  in  the  post 
for  which  he  was  specially  fitted.  His 
appointment  as  C.H.  in  1948  was  generally 
approved  as  a  fitting  recognition  of  his 
services.  On  his  retirement  a  presentation 
was  made  to  him  at  the  annual  party  con- 
ference. 

Whiteley  was  a  deputy-Heutenant  of 
his  county.  A  well-read  man  himself,  he 
took  a  keen  interest  in  education.  He  was 
a  member  of  the  county  education  com- 
mittee, governor  of  several  schools,  and 
honorary  treasurer  of  the  northern  dis- 
trict of  the  Workers'  Educational  Asso- 
ciation. His  greatest  interest,  however, 
outside  politics,  was  in  the  Durham  Aged 
Miners'  Homes  Association  of  which  he 
was  president  for  over  thirty  years.  He 
had  a  broad  outlook  and  had  widened 
his  experience  by  much  travel,  including 
a  visit  to  Spain  during  the  civil  war. 

In  1901  Whiteley  married  Elizabeth 
Swordy,  daughter  of  James  Urwin  Jack- 
son, blacksmith  at  Littleburn  Colliery; 
they  had  one  son  and  one  daughter. 
He  died  in  Durham  3  November  1955. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

-:i.-JiS     ■!/'.■       ,'.  -'.^r  AtTLEE. 

WHITTAKER,  Sm  EDMUND 
TAYLOR  (1873-1956),  mathematician, 
astronomer,  and  philosopher,  was  born 
in  Southport  24  October  1873,  the  only 
son  of  John  Whittaker,  gentleman,  and 
his  wife,  Selina  Septima,  daughter  of 
Edmund  Taylor,  M.D.,  who  practised  as  a 
physician  at  Middleton  near  Manchester. 
In  his  earlier  years  his  only  teacher  was 


his  mother;  at  the  age  of  eleven  he  en- 
tered Manchester  Grammar  School  on  the 
classical  side  but  on  promotion  to  the 
upper  school  gladly  escaped  to  specialize 
in  mathematics.  A  scholar  of  Trinity  Col- 
lege, Cambridge,  he  was  bracketed  second 
wrangler  (1895) ;  obtained  a  first  class  in 
part  ii  of  the  tripos,  the  Tyson  medal, 
and  was  elected  a  fellow  of  Trinity  (1896) ; 
and  was  awarded  the  first  Smith's  prize 
(1897). 

In  1906  Whittaker  was  appointed 
professor  of  astronomy  in  the  imiversity 
of  Dublin,  with  the  title  of  royal  astro- 
nomer of  Ireland.  The  observatory  at 
Dunsink  was  poorly  equipped  and  it  was 
tacitly  understood  that  the  chief  function 
of  the  professor  was  to  strengthen  the 
school  of  mathematical  physics  in  the  uni- 
versity where  Whittaker  gave  courses  of 
advanced  lectures.  Some  of  his  pupils  were 
members  of  other  academic  foundations, 
among  them  Eamon  de  Valera. 

In  1912  Whittaker  was  elected  to  the 
professorship  of  mathematics  at  Edin- 
burgh where  he  taught  until  his  retire- 
ment in  1946  and  where  his  personal 
achievements  included  the  institution 
in  1914  of  what  was  probably  the  first 
university  mathematical  laboratory,  the 
establishment  of  a  flourishing  research 
school,  and  the  development  of  the  Edin- 
burgh Mathematical  Society. 

Whittaker  made  numerous  and  impor- 
tant contributions  to  mathematics  and 
theoretical  physics  which  had  a  profound 
effect  by  reason  of  their  great  range, 
depth,  and  fertility ;  but  these  are  rivalled, 
if  not  surpassed,  in  interest,  importance, 
and  influence  by  his  scientific  books 
and  monographs.  In  addition  to  these 
he  wrote  numerous  philosophical  and 
historical  papers  and  books,  which  aU 
bear  the  marks  of  his  learning,  literary 
powers,  and  critical  judgement. 

His  contributions  to  pure  mathematics 
were  mainly  to  the  theories  of  inter- 
polation, of  automorphic  functions,  of 
potential  theory,  and  of  special  functions. 
His  interest  in  the  theory  of  interpolation 
arose  from  his  association  with  the  actu- 
aries engaged  in  life  assurance  in  Edin- 
burgh, especially  G.  J.  Lidstone.  He 
succeeded  in  solving  two  fundamental 
questions  and  thus  provided  a  logical 
basis  for  the  Newton-Gauss  formula  and 
for  the  method  of  the  graduation  or  ad- 
justment of  observations.  In  the  theory 
of  automorphic  fimctions  he  solved  the 
problem  of  the  uniformization  of  algebraic 
functions  of  any  genus  by  considering  A 


1049 


Whittaker 


DJ^.B.  1951-1960 


special  discontinuous  subgroup  of  elliptic 
transformations  each  of  period  2. 

The  most  significant  section  of  his 
researches,  however,  relates  to  the  special 
functions  of  mathematical  physics  re- 
garded as  constituents  of  potential  func- 
tions. He  obtained  a  general  solution 
of  Laplace's  equation  which  brought  a 
new  unity  into  potential  theory  by  exhi- 
biting all  the  usual  special  functions 
in  the  form  of  a  'Whittaker'  integral,  and 
he  also  introduced  the  important  confluent 
hypergeometric  functions.  In  theoretical 
physics  he  made  substantial  contributions 
to  dynamics,  to  relativity  and  electro- 
magnetic theory,  and  to  quantum  theory. 
In  dynamics  his  discovery  of  the  'adelphic' 
integral  provided  the  solution  of  the  diffi- 
culties indicated  by  Poincare's  celebrated 
theorem  relative  to  the  convergence  of  the 
series  solutions  of  celestial  mechanics.  In 
electromagnetic  theory  he  gave  a  general 
solution  of  Maxwell's  equations  in  terms 
of  two  real  scalar  wave  functions,  and  gave 
a  relativistic  generalization  of  Faraday's 
theory  of  tubes  of  force.  In  general  rela- 
tivity he  investigated  the  problem  of 
giving  an  invariant  definition  of  distance 
which  should  correspond  to  the  actual 
procedure  adopted  by  astronomers,  and 
he  obtained  a  generalization  of  Gauss's 
theorem  on  the  Newtonian  potential. 
In  his  researches  on  quantum  theory  he 
generalized  Hamilton's  'principal  func- 
tions', expressing  them  in  terms  of  non- 
commutating  variables  and  thus  obtained 
a  new  foundation  for  Schrodinger's  wave 
equation. 

Three  of  Whittaker 's  scientific  books 
have  had  a  great  influence.  A  Course  of 
Modern  Analysis,  published  in  1902,  and 
in  many  subsequent  editions  with  the 
collaboration  of  Professor  G.  N.  Watson, 
F.R.S.,  was  the  first,  and  for  many  years 
almost  the  only,  book  in  English  to 
provide  students  with  an  account  of  the 
modern  theory  of  functions.  The  great 
Treatise  on  the  Analytical  Dynamics  of 
Particles  and  Rigid  Bodies  (1904)  remains 
the  standard  work  on  this  classical 
subject.  The  Calculus  of  Observations  (1924, 
with  G.  Robinson)  was  a  pioneer  work 
which  opened  up  a  new  field  of  mathe- 
matical exploration. 

A  fourth  great  work  stands  in  a  class 
apart:  the  monumental  treatise  on  A 
History  of  the  Theories  of  Aether  and 
Electricity,  first  published  in  one  volume 
in  1910  and  subsequently  in  a  greatly 
enlarged  edition  of  which  Whittaker  lived 
to  complete  only  two  volumes  (1951-3). 


The  History  provides  a  complete,  syste- 
matic, and  critical  account  of  the  develop- 
ment of  the  physical  theories  of  electro- 
magnetism,  atomic  structure,  and  of  the 
quantum  theory  from  their  remote  begin- 
nings up  to  the  year  1926.  It  will  remain 
an  outstanding  achievement  by  reason  of 
the  clarity  of  the  exposition,  the  compre- 
hension of  its  range,  and  the  penetration 
of  its  criticism,  which  give  it  all  the  force 
and  authority  of  an  original  investigation. 

Whittaker,  who  was  knighted  in  1945, 
was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1905,  served  on 
the  council  in  1911-12  and  1933-5  (vice- 
president  1934-5)  and  was  awarded  the 
Sylvester  medal  in  1931  and  the  Copley 
medal  in  1954.  With  the  Royal  Society  of 
Edinburgh  he  had  continuous  contact, 
being  Gunning  prizeman  in  1929  and 
president  in  1939-44.  He  was  president  of 
the  Mathematical  Association  (1920-21), 
of  the  mathematical  and  physical  section 
of  the  British  Association  (1927),  and  of 
the  London  Mathematical  Society  (1928- 
9),  being  awarded  its  De  Morgan  medal 
in  1935.  He  was  an  honorary  member  of 
a  number  of  foreign  learned  societies, 
received  honorary  degrees  from  several 
universities,  was  an  honorary  fellow  of 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge  (1949),  and  was 
frequently  invited  to  lecture  on  special 
foundations.  At  Cambridge  in  his  Tarner 
lectures  (1947)  he  lucidly  traced  the  de- 
velopment of  natural  philosophy  from 
Euclid  to  Eddington,  and  in  1951  he  gave 
the  Eddington  memorial  lecture  on  'Ed- 
dington's  Principle  in  the  Philosophy  of 
Science'.  At  Oxford  he  gave  the  Herbert 
Spencer  lecture  (1948)  on  'The  Modern 
Approach  to  Descartes'  Problem'.  He 
figured  as  a  natural  theologian  in  his  Rid- 
dell  memorial  lectures  (Durham,  1942)  on 
'The  Beginning  and  End  of  the  World'  and 
in  the  Donnellan  lectures  (Dublin,  1946) 
on  'Space  and  Spirit'  in  which  he  restated 
the  classical  scholastic  arguments  for  the 
existence  of  God  in  the  light  of  current 
theories  of  scientific  cosmogony.  He  was 
received  into  the  Roman  Catholic  Church 
in  1930;  was  honorary  president  of  the 
Newman  Association  (1943-5) ;  was  awar- 
ded the  cross  Pro  Ecclesia  et  Pontifice 
in  1935 ;  and  appointed  a  member  of  the 
Pontifical  Academy  of  Sciences  in  1966. 

Whittaker's  death  in  Edinburgh,  24 
March  1956,  marked  the  end  of  an  epoch, 
for  he  was  almost  the  last  polymath  who 
took  all  mathematical  knowledge  for  his 
province.  His  pervasive  influence  in 
mathematics  is  seen  in  his  peculiar  facility 
for  coining  names  for  analytical  concepts 


1050 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Whitworth 


and  entities,  many  of  which  have  obtained 
a  wide  currency  in  the  language  of  mathe- 
matics. Such  names  as  'isometric  circle', 
'adelphic  integral',  'cotabular  functions', 
'cardinal  function',  'congruent  hypergeo- 
metric  function',  'Mathieu  function',  and 
'calamoids'  are  examples  of  a  vocabulary 
which  ranges  easily  over  a  vast  field  of 
modern  mathematical  physics  and  forms 
a  lasting  tribute  to  Whittaker's  influence. 
That  influence  was  mainly  the  effect  of  his 
amazing  intellectual  powers — his  rapidity 
of  thought,  his  infallible  memory,  and  his 
remarkably  lucid  style  of  exposition — but 
it  was  reinforced  by  his  never-failing  kind- 
ness to  his  students,  the  hospitality  offered 
in  his  Edinburgh  home,  his  slightly  mis- 
chievous humour — and  by  the  devotion 
and  support  of  his  wife. 

In  1901  Whittaker  married  Mary 
Ferguson  McNaghten,  daughter  of  the 
Rev.  Thomas  Boyd,  of  Cambridge,  Scot- 
tish secretary  of  the  Religious  Tract 
Society,  and  granddaughter  of  Sir  Thomas 
Jamieson  Boyd  [q.v.].  They  had  three  sons 
and  two  daughters.  His  second  son,  'Jack', 
was  professor  of  pure  mathematics  at 
Liverpool  (1933-52)  and  vice-chancellor 
of  the  university  of  Sheffield  (1952-65). 

A  bronze  portrait  head  of  Whittaker 
by  Benno  Schotz  was  subscribed  for  by 
the  fellows  of  the  Royal  Society  of  Edin- 
burgh and  placed  in  the  Society's  House 
at  the  end  of  Whittaker's  tenure  of  the 
presidency.  The  National  Portrait  Gallery 
has  a  painting  by  Trevor  Haddon. 

[G.  Temple  in  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  ii,  1956; 
Journal  of  the  London  Mathematical  Society, 
vol.  xxxii,  April  1957;  private  information; 
personal  knowledge.]  G.  Temple. 

WHITWORTH,  GEOFFREY  ARUN- 
DEL (1883-1951),  founder  of  the  British 
Drama  League,  was  born  in  Kensington  7 
April  1883,  the  youngest  child  of  William 
Whitworth,  barrister,  by  his  wife,  Phyllis 
Mary  Draper;  he  had  two  brothers  and 
two  sisters.  Owing  to  early  developed 
spinal  trouble  which  prevented  him  from 
going  to  school  and  which  he  met  courage- 
ously, he  was  educated  privately  until  he 
went  up  to  New  College,  Oxford,  where  he 
obtained  a  third  class  in  modern  history  in 

1906.  He  next  joined  the  staff  of  the  Bur- 
lington  Magazine,  edited  by  (Sir)  Charles 
Holmes  [q.v.] ;  then,  from  the  autumn  of 

1907,  he  worked  for  Chatto  and  Windus, 
the  publishing  firm.  There,  in  the  task  of 
creating  a  list  of  contemporary  books  he 
was  a  colleague  of  Frank  S^^innerton,  the 


novelist,  who  remarked  his  'eager  ad- 
venturousness'  and  his  'indomitable  good 
temper,  a  part  of  his  nature  and  his  faith'. 
Whitworth  had  a  wide  acquaintance 
among  writers,  established  or  new ;  it  was 
through  him  that  there  ultimately  came  to 
the  firm  works  by  such  authors  as  G.  K. 
Chesterton,  Lytton  Strachey  [qq.v.],  and 
Clive  Bell. 

Whitworth's  main  love  was  the  theatre. 
He  enjoyed  going  to  plays,  and  occa- 
sionally writing  them ;  he  had  frequented 
the  Court  Theatre  and  was  devoted  to 
G.  B.  Shaw  [q.v.].  But  his  first  enthu- 
siasm at  that  time  was  for  the  project  of 
a  national  theatre,  to  be  regarded  as  a 
Shakespeare  memorial  and  (it  was  hoped) 
opened  in  time  for  the  tercentenary  in 
1916  of  Shakespeare's  death.  With  all 
his  preoccupations  in  publishing,  and  his 
own  writing — for  example,  A  Book  of 
Whimsies  (with  Keith  Henderson,  1909) 
and  a  study  of  The  Art  of  Nijinsky  (1913) 
— Whitworth  never  ceased  to  think  of 
the  national  theatre.  Although  with  the 
coming  of  war  in  1914  these  plans  were 
shattered,  Whitworth  became  in  1919  the 
honorary  secretary  of  his  own  organi- 
zation, the  British  Drama  League,  which 
he  founded  'to  assist  the  development  of 
the  art  of  the  Theatre  and  to  promote 
a  right  relation  between  Drama  and  the 
life  of  the  community'.  In  the  previous 
autumn  he  had  been  much  impressed  by 
an  amateur  rendering,  half-reading,  half- 
performance,  of  a  one-act  play  in  a  hut 
attached  to  a  factory  at  Crayford  in  Kent 
— something  undertaken,  he  said,  'in  the 
spirit  of  community  enterprise  .  .  .  which 
had  endowed  the  performance  with  a 
peculiar  dignity'.  He  held  that  this  dignity 
must  be  the  mark  of  a  national  theatre, 
and  that  the  theatre  itself,  'for  all  its  costly 
elaboration,  for  all  its  perfection  or  profes- 
sional technique',  must  be  'nothing  more 
and  nothing  less  than  a  Community 
Theatre  writ  large'.  For  him  the  drama 
was  ''par  excellence  the  art  of  the  people, 
and  the  theatre  everybody's  business'. 

Hence  the  conception  of  the  British 
Drama  League,  with  Lord  Howard  de 
Walden  [q.v.]  as  president,  Harley  Gran- 
ville-Barker  [q.v.]  as  chairman  of  council, 
and  Whitworth  as  honorary  secretary. 
It  held  its  first  annual  conference  in  the 
summer  of  1919  at  Stratford  on  Avon, 
where  one  resolution  pledged  members 
to  help  the  development  of  'acting,  the 
drama,  and  of  the  Theatre  as  forces  in 
the  Hfe  of  the  nation',  and  another  called 
for  'a  National  Theatre  policy  adequate 


1051 


Whitworth 


D.N.B.  1051-1060 


to  the  needs  of  the  people'.  These  phrases 
might  speak  for  Whitworth's  career: 
his  constant  and  ardent  advocacy  of  the 
theatre  as  a  power  in  life.  Rapidly  the 
Drama  League  burgeoned.  In  1928, 
when  Whitworth  at  last  left  publishing 
to  give  his  whole  time  to  the  League  as  a 
practical  achievement,  and  to  the  national 
theatre  as  a  hoped-for  vision,  he  was  able 
to  see  in  the  League's  growth,  its  many 
affiliated  societies,  its  hundred  thousand 
actors  and  playgoers,  its  training  depart- 
ment, its  National  Festival  of  Conmiunity 
Drama,  and  its  library  (eventually  the 
largest  in  the  world  devoted  solely  to  the 
theatre),  a  'new  and  extraordinary  out- 
break of  dramatic  energy'.  His  steady 
insistence  on  the  value  of  drama  in 
education  prepared  the  way  for  the 
appointment  of  full-time  professional 
county  drama  advisers. 

No  man  was  better  fitted  than  Whit- 
worth, selfless,  persuasive,  and  much- 
loved,  to  battle  for  causes  he  admired. 
As  director  of  the  League  and  as  honorary 
secretary  of  the  Shakespeare  Memorial 
National  Theatre  Committee  (1930-51),  he 
used  his  talents  as  speaker  and  organizer. 
Before  giving  his  entire  time  to  these 
tasks,  he  acted  as  drama  critic  of  John 
o" London's  Weekly  (1922)  and  the  Chris- 
tian Science  Monitor  (1923);  in  1924-5 
he  organized  the  theatre  section  of  the 
British  Empire  Exhibition  at  Wembley. 
From  1919  until  1948  he  edited  the 
League's  magazine.  Drama. 

At  a  public  tribute  to  him  in  1934,  the 
year  before  the  League's  move  from 
Adelphi  Terrace  to  Fitzroy  Square,  Shaw 
described  Whitworth  as  'one  of  the  most 
important  people  in  the  theatre  today'. 
When  war  again  intervened,  Whitworth 
did  not  cease  from  crusading.  It  was 
owing  to  his  persistence  and  vision  that 
the  League's  civic  theatre  scheme — first 
suggested  in  1942 — was  approved,  and 
that  in  1948  the  insertion  of  a  clause  (132) 
in  the  Local  Government  Act  enabled 
municipal  authorities  to  spend  up  to  the 
value  of  a  sixpenny  rate  on  providing  all 
kinds  of  entertainment,  including  the 
theatre.  Whitworth  had  a  final  reward 
when  the  Queen  laid  the  National  Theatre 
foundation  stone  (later  moved)  upon  the 
South  Bank  site  in  July  1951 :  it  was  just 
two  months  before  his  death  at  his  Oxford 
home,  9  September  1951.  He  had  retired 
from  the  directorship  of  the  Drama  League 
(a  retirement  he  described  as  'a  sort  of 
minor  death')  during  1948  and  become 
instead  chairman  of  the  council. 


Whitworth,  a  fellow  of  the  Royal 
Society  of  Literature,  translated  The 
Legend  of  Tyl  Ulenspiegel  (1918);  and 
wrote  a  novel.  The  Bells  of  Paradise 
(1918),  and  two  notable  plays.  Father 
Noah  (1918)  and  Haunted  Houses  (1934). 
He  was  also  the  author  of  works  on  his 
special  subject,  The  Theatre  of  My 
Heart  (1930;  revised  1938)  and  The 
Making  of  a  National  Theatre  (1951)  as 
well  as  The  Civic  Theatre  Scheme  (1942). 
He  served  on  the  executive  committee  of 
governors  of  the  Shakespeare  Memorial 
Theatre  and  the  committee  of  the  Car- 
negie United  Kingdom  Trust.  In  1947 
he  was  appointed  C.B.E. 

In  1910  Whitworth  married  Phyllis 
Grace,  fifth  daughter  and  ninth  of  the 
ten  children  of  the  Rev.  George  Edward 
Bell,  vicar  of  Henley-in-Arden,  Warwick- 
shire, from  1876  to  1914.  They  had  a  son, 
Robin,  who  became  deputy  chairman  of 
the  Drama  League,  and  a  daughter. 
During  the  first  two  years  of  their  mar- 
riage Mrs.  Whitworth  did  the  secretarial 
work  for  a  monthly  literary  magazine,  the 
Open  Window,  which  her  husband  pub- 
lished from  their  Chelsea  home  with 
Vivian  Locke  Ellis.  Later  she  was  tireless 
on  behalf  of  the  League.  Mrs.  Whitworth, 
who  died  in  1964,  also  directed,  and 
managed  between  1924  and  1931,  the 
Three  Hundred  Club  for  staging  plays  of 
merit  likely  at  first  to  have  a  limited 
public. 

A  portrait  of  Whitworth  by  Roger  Fry, 
and  two  busts,  by  Oscar  Nemon  and 
James  Butler,  are  at  the  headquarters  of 
the  British  Drama  League. 

[Th£  Times,  11  September  1951 ;  Drama, 
Winter,  1951;  Geoffrey  Whitworth,  The 
Theatre  of  My  Heart,  revised  1938 ;  A  Mystic 
of  the  Theatre  (biography  in  MS.)  by  Robin 
Whitworth  and  Charles  Tennyson,  with 
chapters  of  autobiography  by  Geoffrey 
Whitworth;  Frank  Swinnerton,  Swinnerton: 
An  Autobiography,  1937;  personal  know- 
ledge.] J.  C.  Trewin. 

WIGRAM,  CLIVE,  first  Baron  Wigram 
(1873-1960),  private  secretary  to  King 
George  V  (1931-6),  was  born  5  July  1873 
at  Madras,  the  eldest  son  of  Herbert 
Wigram,  Madras  Civil  Service  (of  the 
family  of  Wigram,  baronets  of  that  name 
since  1805).  His  mother.  Amy  Augusta, 
was  a  daughter  of  Lieutenant-General 
John  Wood  Rideout,  of  the  Indian  Army. 
His  two  younger  brothers  had  distin- 
guished careers  in  the  senior  fighting 
Services,  both  dying  unmarried  before 
him.    He   was   educated    at   Winchester 


1052 


where  his  prowess  at  ball  games,  notably 
cricket  and  rackets,  became  a  legend. 
Later  on,  in  India,  he  became  a  fine  polo 
player  and  shone  at  cricket  as  an  all- 
rounder.  In  due  course,  he  was  to  inspire 
King  George  V  with  some  of  his  enthu- 
siasm for  sporting  events.  In  1893  he  was 
commissioned  in  the  Royal  Artillery  and 
two  years  later  was  appointed  aide-de- 
camp to  Lord  Elgin  [q.v.],  viceroy  of 
India.  In  1897  he  exchanged  into  the 
18th  Bengal  Lancers,  serving  in  the  Tirah 
and  other  campaigns  on  the  North-West 
Frontier,  and  he  was  in  South  Africa  with 
Kitchener's  Horse  in  1900.  Lord  Curzon 
[q.v.]  on  succeeding  Elgin  retained  him 
as  aide-de-camp  until  1904.  When  Sir 
Walter  Lawrence  [q.v.]  was  invited  in 
1905  to  act  as  chief  of  staff  to  the  Prince  of 
Wales  on  his  first  visit  to  India,  he  'made 
it  a  condition'  that  Wigram  should  be 
his  assistant.  After  the  tour  Wigram  was 
appointed  equerry  to  the  Prince.  In  1906 
he  received  his  brevet  majority  and  in 
1908  became  military  secretary  to  the 
commander-in-chief  at  Aldershot.  He 
relinquished  this  post  in  1910  when  the 
Prince  succeeded  to  the  throne  as  King 
George  V  to  become  his  assistant  private 
secretary.  In  the  view  of  his  military 
contemporaries  he  thereby  sacrificed  an 
army  career  of  great  promise. 

Four-fifths  of  Wigram's  long  service  in 
the  secretariat  was  spent  as  assistant  to 
Arthur  Bigge,  Lord  Stamfordham  [q.v.], 
during  which  time  he  profited  by  the 
wisdom  and  experience  of  a  great  private 
secretary  who  steered  the  King  through 
the  major  shoals  of  his  reign.  He  learned 
to  appreciate  the  ever-growing  importance 
of  the  office,  as  a  result  of  the  gradual 
acceptance  that  a  constitutional  sove- 
reign's prerogative  is  strictly  limited  to 
the  right  'to  be  consulted,  to  encourage, 
and  to  warn'  and  in  consequence  of  the 
far-reaching  changes  in  dominion  status. 
From  Bigge's  example  he  learned  too,  to 
be  selfless  and  tireless,  to  be  completely 
trusted  by  his  sovereign,  yet  hardly  less 
so  by  politicians  of  all  parties  from  whom, 
as  'eyes  and  ears'  of  the  King,  he  must 
seek  the  best  sources  of  information. 
Above  all,  he  learned  that  in  matters 
trenching  on  the  sovereign's  prerogative, 
one  false  step  in  intervention  might 
precipitate  a  constitutional  crisis. 

When  Stamfordham  died  in  1931  the 
King  expressed  himself  as  'utterly  lost' 
at  the  death  of  the  man  who  'taught 
me  how  to  be  a  King'.  But  he  wrote 
in  his  diary:  'His  loss  is  irreparable.  I  shall 


D.N.B.  1951-1960  Wigraiti 

now  make  Wigram  my  Private  Secretary.' 
Wigram,  appointed  K.C.V.O.  in  1928, 
had  long  enjoyed  the  close  friendship 
and  trust  of  the  King  and  Queen.  If  in 
the  five  years  of  his  tenure  of  the  office 
he  never  attained  Bigge's  mastery  as  a 
draftsman  and  precis  writer,  he  proved 
that  he  had  acquired  many  of  the 
essentials.  He  was  more  approachable 
than  Bigge,  for  his  nature  was  genial  and 
he  was  a  man  with  many  friends  and 
possessed  of  a  fund  of  practical  sym- 
pathy for  all  sorts  and  conditions  of 
men,  young  and  old.  Shrewd,  but  far 
from  subtle,  his  success  was  due  to  the 
virtues  of  constant  loyalty  and  honesty 
rather  than  to  intellectual  gifts.  Indeed, 
he  was  very  like  the  King  he  served,  in 
his  geniality,  in  his  simple  and  direct 
nature  and  his  hatred  of  shams  and 
deceit.  He  knew  the  King's  mind. 

Within  a  few  months  of  his  appointment, 
he,  too,  was  faced  with  a  major  problem 
when  the  'national'  Government  was  set 
up  to  meet  the  financial  crisis  of  that 
year.  In  the  subsequent  five  years  several 
matters  arose  on  which  the  King  felt 
deeply,  as  trenching  on  his  own  'pre- 
rogative' or  threatening  the  integrity  of 
the  Commonwealth  of  which  he  was  now 
the  sole  unifying  symbol.  They  included 
the  questions  of  the  appointment  of 
governors-general,  of  the  royal  title  and 
of  the  removal  of  vestiges  of  subordination 
in  dominion  status,  and  the  question  of 
honours.  Not  less  anxiously  did  the  King 
follow  the  emergence  of  Indian  national- 
ism and  the  (Government  of  India  Act. 

Before  these  matters  were  all  decided, 
the  King's  health  rapidly  declined  and 
Wigram's  responsibilities  increased,  while 
he  added  to  his  other  duties  the  post 
of  keeper  of  the  privy  purse.  As  the  end 
approached,  with  Queen  Mary's  co- 
operation, he  added  the  role  of  nurse  and 
played  his  full  part  as  trusted  friend  and 
counsellor  to  his  dying  master. 

Six  months  after  the  King's  death, 'l^e 
handed  over  to  Alexander  Hardinge 
(later  Lord  Hardinge  of  Penshurst,  q.v.) 
and  was  appointed  deputy  constable  and 
lieutenant-governor  of  Windsor  Castle, 
living  in  the  Norman  Tower  where  he 
applied  his  mind  to  horticulture  and 
gradually  converted  the  moat  garden 
into  a  botanical  showplace.  After  the 
abdication  he  was  briefly  recalled  by 
King  George  VI  and  appointed  permanent 
lord-in-waiting.  He  finally  left  the  secre- 
tariat in  the  latter  half  of  1937.  In  1»45, 
having  reached  the  age  limit,  he  resigned 


1053 


Wigram 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


his  remaining  court  appointments  and 
went  to  live  in  London. 

Wigram  received  a  variety  of  honours. 
He  had  the  rare  distinction  of  gaining 
three  brevets.  He  was  appointed  C.S.I,  in 
1911 ;  between  1918  and  1933  he  was 
advanced  from  C.B.  to  G.C.B. ;  and 
between  1903  and  1932  rose  step  by  step 
in  the  grades  of  the  Victorian  Order  to 
G.C.V.O.,  receiving  the  Victorian  Chain 
in  1937.  He  was  sworn  of  the  Privy 
Council  in  1932  and  raised  to  the  peerage 
in  1935.  He  held  a  number  of  foreign 
orders  and  was  a  fellow  of  the  Royal 
Geographical,  Horticultural,  and  Zoolo- 
gical societies.  From  1932  to  1945  he 
was  colonel  of  the  19th  (K.G.O.)  Lancers, 
Indian  Army. 

During  and  long  after  his  tenure  of  the 
office  of  private  secretary,  Wigram  was 
constantly  active  in  the  welfare  and 
promotion  of  many  educational  and 
hospital  institutions.  He  was  at  various 
times  a  fellow  of  Winchester  and  a  gover- 
nor of  Wellington  and  of  Haileybury. 
For  a  quarter  of  a  century  he  worked 
inspiringly  on  behalf  of  the  Westminster 
Hospital;  he  was  a  very  active  vice- 
president  of  King  Edward  VII's  Sana- 
torium, on  the  council  of  Queen  Mary's 
Hospital,  Roehampton,  vice-president  of 
the  National  Association  of  Boys  Clubs, 
and  on  the  board  of  the  Jubilee  Trust 
and  other  youth  organizations.  He  was 
for  many  years  a  director  of  the  Midland 
Bank  and  of  the  L.M.S.  Railway. 

In  appearance  Wigram  was  good 
looking,  nearly  six  feet  tall,  of  athletic 
build  and  soldierly  bearing,  retaining  his 
youthful  appearance  and  vigour  of  speech 
to  a  remarkable  degree  until  near  the  end 
of  his  long  life. 

Wigram  married  in  1912  Nora  Mary, 
only  daughter  of  Colonel  Sir  Neville 
Chamberlain,  K.C.B.  They  had  two  sons, 
the  younger  of  whom  was  killed  in  action 
in  1943,  and  a  daughter.  They  were  a 
devoted  family.  Lady  Wigram  died  in 
1956  and  his  daughter  two  years  later. 
Thereafter  Wigram' s  health  declined  and 
his  mental  powers  began  to  fail.  He  died 
in  London  3  September  1960  and  was 
succeeded  by  his  elder  son,  George  Neville 
Clive  (born  1915). 

A  not  very  successful  picture  by  L. 
Calkin,  painted  in  1925,  is  in  the  possession 
of  the  family.  There  is  a  tablet  to  Wigram's 
memory  in  the  north  quire  aisle  of  St. 
George's  Chapel,  Windsor. 

[John  Gore,  King  George  V,  1941 ;  Harold 
Nicolson,   King   George    V,    1952;    John  W. 


Wheeler-Bennett,  King  George  VI,  1958; 
The  Times,  5  September  1960;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

John  Gore. 


WILBRAHAM,  Sir  PHILIP  WIL- 
BRAHAM  BAKER,  sixth  baronet 
(1875-1957),  ecclesiastical  lawyer  and 
administrator,  was  born  at  Rode  Hall, 
Scholar  Green,  Cheshire,  17  September 
1875,  the  younger  and  only  surviving  son 
of  (Sir)  George  Barrington  Baker,  who 
took  the  additional  surname  of  Wil- 
braham  by  royal  licence  in  1900,  and  his 
wife,  Katharine  Frances,  only  child  of 
General  Sir  Richard  Wilbraham.  A  de- 
scendant of  Sir  George  Baker  [q.v.],  the 
physician  who  demonstrated  the  possibility 
of  poisoning  through  the  use  of  leaden 
vessels,  notably  in  the  manufacture  of 
Devonshire  cider,  Wilbraham  succeeded 
his  father  in  the  baronetcy  in  1912.  He 
was  educated  at  Harrow,  where  he  was 
a  scholar  and  head  of  the  school,  and 
at  Balliol  College,  Oxford,  where  he  was 
an  exhibitioner  and  obtained  a  first  in 
classical  moderations  (1896)  and  second 
classes  in  literae  humaniores  (1898)  and 
jurisprudence  (1899).  Standing  as  a 
candidate  in  law  he  was  elected  a  fellow 
of  All  Souls  in  1899  but  having  married 
in  the  meantime  was  unable  to  renew  his 
fellowship  when  it  expired  in  1906 ;  he 
retained  a  deep  affection  for  All  Souls 
throughout  his  life. 

Entering  the  chambers  of  (Sir)  Charles 
Sargant  (whose  notice  he  subsequently 
contributed  to  this  Dictionary),  Wil- 
braham was  called  to  the  bar  by  Lincoln's 
Inn  in  1901  and  practised,  though  not 
with  the  compulsion  which  lack  of 
means  might  have  supplied.  Confining 
his  interest  to  ecclesiastical  matters,  he 
was  appointed  chancellor  of  the  diocese 
of  Chester  (1913),  chancellor  and  vicar- 
general  of  York  (1915),  and  chancellor 
of  the  dioceses  of  Truro  (1923),  Chelms- 
ford (1928),  and  Durham  (1929),  offices 
which  he  held  until  his  appointment 
in  1934  as  dean  of  the  Arches,  master 
of  the  faculties,  and  vicar-general  of 
the  province  of  Canterbury,  and  auditor 
of  the  chancery  court  of  York.  These 
appointments  he  resigned  in  1955  owing 
to  failing  health.  As  dean  of  the  Arches 
Wilbraham' s  reputation  is  overshadowed 
among  lawyers  by  that  of  his  immediate 
predecessor  Sir  Lewis  Dibdin  [q.v.].  Few 
appeals  came  before  him.  Throughout 
the  war  the  court  was  little  used ;  a  pre- 
war case  (St.  Hilary)  was  heard  by  deputy 


1054 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Wilkins 


since  Wilbraham  himself  had  already  been 
consulted  as  chancellor  of  the  diocese  of 
Truro ;  the  three  reported  judgements  of 
Wilbraham  were  Ogbourne  St.  George 
(1941),  St.  Saviour's  Walthamstow  (1950), 
and  Lapford  (1954). 

Wilbraham  was  one  of  the  original 
members  of  the  Church  Assembly  and 
its  first  secretary  (1920);  he  resigned 
the  secretaryship  in  1939  on  accepting 
from  the  Crown  the  office  of  first  Church 
estates  commissioner,  remaining,  how- 
ever, an  active  member  of  the  Assembly. 
His  influence  on  the  Assembly  during 
its  formative  years  was  very  great.  His 
co-operation  with  Lord  Hugh  Cecil  (later 
Lord  Quickswood,  q.v.)  produced  the 
rules  for  conducting  the  Assembly's 
business,  the  one  supplying  the  legal 
experience  and  the  other  knowledge 
of  parliamentary  procedure.  As  member 
and  secretary  of  the  Assembly  he  was 
also  member  and  secretary  of  all  the 
committees ;  he  used  the  power  thus  given 
so  constructively  as  to  earn  everybody's 
complete  trust.  It  fell  to  him  not  only  to 
prepare  reports  and  the  (at  least  first) 
drafts  of  measures,  work  he  especially  en- 
joyed, but  also  to  expound  often  compli- 
cated clauses  to  the  Assembly.  This  he  did 
in  short,  careful  sentences,  impossible  to 
misunderstand  and  entirely  convincing  by 
their  reasoned  impartiality.  In  the  verba- 
tim record  his  speeches  stand  out  from 
others  in  the  debates.  His  refusal  to 
fight  and  his  advocacy  of  acceptable  com- 
promises counteracted  that  divisive  ten- 
dency, induced  by  suspicions  between 
differing  schools  of  churchmanship,  which 
might  have  marred  the  Assembly's  work. 

To  administration,  as  first  Church 
estates  commissioner,  Wilbraham  in  1939 
came  late.  He  expected  to  carry  through 
amalgamation  of  the  ecclesiastical  com- 
missioners and  Queen  Anne's  bounty, 
plans  for  which  had  already  been  laid.  He 
looked  forward  to  visiting  the  estates. 
Instead  came  adaptation  of  curtailed 
activities  to  war  conditions;  evacuation 
of  sections  of  the  two  offices  to  different 
parts  of  the  country ;  estate  visits  imprac- 
ticable ;  his  London  house  given  up.  Case 
work  and  preparation  for  the  future 
occupied  him.  Yet  it  was  a  period  of 
greatest  happiness;  gradualness  suited 
his  inclination.  He  had  time  to  grow  into 
the  work  and  to  love  it.  When  the  delayed 
amalgamation  matured  after  the  war  he 
was  qualified  as  nobody  else  (and  not 
even  he  earher)  to  complete  it.  Trying 
negotiations    were     followed    by    legis- 


lation which  might  easily  have  become 
dangerously  controversial.  The  successful 
launching  of  the  Church  commissioners  in 
1948  and  their  harmonious  development 
over  the  first  five  critical  years  testify 
to  his  skill  and  patience  in  leadership. 
He  liked  to  carry  everybody  with  him. 
The  deliberately  slower  pace  he  preferred 
provided  a  firm  foundation  for  greater 
advances  to  follow.  Nevertheless,  it  was 
in  his  time  that  the  commissioners'  over- 
large  agricultural  holdings  were  reduced 
and  their  reinvestment  of  securities 
began.  He  put  through  the  Assembly 
the  measure  (diocesan  stipends  funds, 
1953)  which  freed  large  holdings  of 
trustee  stocks  for  profitable  reinvestment. 
He  retired  in  1954  and  was  appointed 
K.B.E.  in  the  same  year. 

By  virtue  of  tenure  of  the  Rode  estate 
Wilbraham  was  high  steward  of  Congleton 
from  1912 ;  he  was  a  J.P.  for  the  county 
of  Cheshire  from  1919;  he  was  appointed 
commissary  by  the  dean  and  chapter  of 
St.  Paul's  in  1942.  Archbishop  Lang  [q.v.] 
conferred  on  him  the  Lambeth  degree  of 
D.C.L.  in  1936  and  he  was  elected  a 
bencher  of  Lincoln's  Inn  in  1942. 

In  1901  Wilbraham  married  Joyce 
Christabel  (died  1958),  daughter  of  Sir 
John  Henry  Kennaway,  third  baronet. 
They  had  three  daughters  and  one  son, 
Randle  John  Baker  (born  1906),  who  suc- 
ceeded Wilbraham  in  the  baronetcy  when 
he  died  at  Rode  11  October  1957. 

Tall,  somewhat  forbidding,  Wilbraham 
exhibited  the  gravity  of  innate  shyness 
covering  natural  friendliness.  He  lost 
his  reserve  in  the  Athenaeum  billiard- 
room.  At  home  at  Rode  with  his  wife, 
who  was  of  the  utmost  help  to  him, 
he  was  a  delightful  host.  That  the  Church 
formed  the  centre  of  his  interests  was  no 
accident.  He  was  in  the  best  sense  a  good 
churchman,  deeply  religious,  conducting 
family  prayers  each  morning  in  the  old 
tradition.  A  portrait  by  Sir  Oswald  Birley 
hangs  in  Church  House,  Westminster; 
a  replica  is  at  Rode. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
James  Brown, 

WILKINS,    Sir    (GEORGE)    HUBERT 

(1888-1958),  polar  explorer,  climatologist, 
and  naturalist,  was  born  at  Mount  Bryan 
East,  South  Australia,  31  October  1888, 
the  thirteenth  and  youngest  child  of 
Harry  Wilkins,  grazier,  and  his  wife, 
Louisa  Smith.  Until  1903  he  lived  and 
worked  on  his  parents'  sheep  station 
where  outdoor  activities,  coupled  with  his 


1055 


Wilkins 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


early  experience  of  the  devastation 
caused  by  drought,  laid  the  foundations 
for  his  hfelong  interest  and  work  in  the 
natural  sciences,  climatology,  and  meteoro- 
logy. 

From  1903  to  1908,  at  the  Adelaide 
School  of  Mines,  he  studied  electrical 
and  general  engineering,  extending  his 
studies  also  to  photography  and  cinemato- 
graphy. In  1908  he  left  Australia  as 
a  ship  stowaway  and  commenced  his 
career  of  adventure  in  Algiers.  Later  he 
worked  in  London  as  a  newspaper  reporter 
and  cameraman  with  assignments  in 
many  countries,  the  most  interesting 
being  some  months  in  1912  spent  filming 
the  fighting  between  the  Turks  and  the 
Bulgarians.  Over  this  general  period  he 
found  time  also  to  take  flying  lessons  and 
to  experiment  in  aerial  photography. 

The  year  1913  saw  the  beginning  of 
his  career  as  a  polar  explorer  with  his 
appointment  as  photographer  to  Vilhjal- 
mur  Stefansson's  Canadian  Arctic  Expe- 
dition. Thereafter,  until  early  1916  when 
he  returned  to  Australia  to  enlist,  he 
acquired  much  experience  in  the  tech- 
niques of  living,  travelling,  and  working 
in  the  Arctic  region ;  added  greatly  to  his 
knowledge  of  the  natural  sciences ;  became 
convinced  that  the  aeroplane  could  be 
used  to  explore  and  map  the  polar  regions ; 
and  developed  a  plan  to  set  up  a  series 
of  permanent  weather  stations  in  those 
regions  as  part  of  a  world-wide  scheme 
for  systematic  and  co-ordinated  weather 
forecasting. 

With  a  commission  in  the  Australian 
Flying  Corps,  Wilkins  was  sent  to  Europe 
where  he  was  appointed  assistant  to  the 
official  photographer  to  the  Australian 
forces.  Captain  Frank  Hurley,  of  Ant- 
arctic fame.  His  subsequent  work  as  a. 
war  photographer  in  France  was  of  such 
quality  that  he  rose  to  the  rank  of  cap- 
tain, received  the  M.C.  with  two  bars,  and 
was  twice  mentioned  in  dispatches.  He 
was  several  times  wounded  and  acquired 
a  reputation  for  daring,  courage,  and 
leadership. 

The  war  over,  Wilkins  gained  further 
flying  experience,  first  as  navigator  on  an 
unsuccessful  attempt  to  fly  from  England 
to  Australia  in  late  1919,  then  in  British 
airships.  Later  he  was  appointed  photo- 
grapher to  a  mission  sent  to  the  Dar- 
danelles to  reconstruct  the  Gallipoli 
campaign.  On  his  discharge  from  the  ser- 
vices, he  immediately  took  steps  to  further 
his  own  plans  for  polar  exploration.  But 
his  scheme   for   polar   weather   stations 


was  rejected  by  the  Royal  Meteorological 
Society,  while  a  proposal  to  fly  an  airship 
in  the  Arctic  received  no  support  in  either 
England  or  Germany.  Finally,  in  1920-21 
he  had  his  first  taste  of  work  in  the 
Antarctic  as  second-in-command  of  J.  L. 
Cope's  ill-fated  expedition  working  in  the 
Graham  Land  area.  This  was  followed 
by  service  as  naturalist  with  Sir  Ernest 
Shackleton  [q.v.]  in  his  Quest  expedition, 
and  later  by  a  period  in  Soviet  Russia 
spent  surveying  and  filming  the  effects  of 
drought  and  famine — subjects  close  to  his 
mind  since  they  illustrated  the  need  for 
an  international  weather  forecasting  ser- 
vice. Next  came  an  expedition  (1923-5) 
for  the  British  Museum  through  Northern 
Australia,  to  carry  out  a  biological  survey 
and  to  collect  specimens  of  the  rarer 
mammals.  His  book  Undiscovered  Aus- 
tralia (1928)  shows  clearly  the  extent  and 
high  quality  of  his  work,  the  collections 
made  including  plants,  birds,  insects,  fish, 
minerals,  fossils,  and  aboriginal  artefacts, 
as  well  as  mammals. 

Plans  for  an  Antarctic  expedition 
failing  through  shortage  of  funds,  Wilkins 
turned  his  attention  to  the  Arctic  where 
he  successfully  carried  out  a  remarkable 
programme  of  pioneering  air  exploration 
which  culminated  in  his  historic  flight 
with  Carl  Ben  Eielson  as  pilot  from 
Barrow  in  Alaska,  eastward  over  the 
Arctic  Ocean,  to  Spitsbergen,  in  April 
1928.  The  purposes  behind  this  work 
(as  indicated  in  his  book  Flying  the  Arctic, 
1928)  were,  first,  to  prove  the  value  of  the 
aeroplane  for  polar  exploration,  and  then 
to  further  his  cherished  plan  for  polar 
meteorological  stations. 

Wilkins  next  revived  his  plans  for 
aerial  exploration  in  the  Antarctic  where, 
between  1928  and  1930,  he  led  two  ex- 
peditions, making,  with  Eielson,  the 
first  flight  in  that  area  on  16  November 
1928,  as  well  as  numerous  significant 
geographical  observations  and  discoveries 
from  the  air.  Wilkins's  reputation  as  a 
pioneer  of  the  air  age  in  polar  regions  was 
by  now  firmly  established. 

In  1931  came  his  famous  venture  by 
submarine  in  Arctic  waters  made,  as  he 
explained  in  Under  the  North  Pole  (1931), 
with  the  twofold  purpose  of  exploring  the 
region  from  Spitsbergen  westwards  via 
the  North  Pole  to  the  Siberian  coast  and 
experimenting  with  the  craft  as  a  weather 
station,  both  above  and  below  the  ice  and 
in  radio  contact  with  the  outside  world. 
A  series  of  mishaps  and  mechanical  break- 
downs   caused    the    expedition    of    the 


1056 


D.N.B.  1951-1940 


Wilkins 


Ncmtilus  to  be  abandoned,  but  not  before 
it  had  been  shown  that  a  submarine  could 
operate  safely  beneath  the  polar  ice. 

The  thirties  also  saw  Wilkins  working 
with  the  American,  Lincoln  Ellsworth, 
on  four  expeditions  to  the  Antarctic 
continent,  using  the  ship  Wyatt  Earp 
and  aeroplanes.  During  1937  and  1938  he 
also  played  a  major  role  in  search  opera- 
tions for  the  Soviet  aviator  Sigismund 
Levanevsky  lost  over  the  Arctic  Ocean, 
at  the  same  time  carrying  out  pioneering 
work  in  moonlight  flying  under  winter 
conditions ;  a  large  programme  of  meteoro- 
logical work;  and  constant  studies  of 
ice  movements  from  the  air. 

When  war  broke  out  in  1939  Wilkins, 
who  was  in  the  United  States,  became 
involved,  first  in  missions  concerned  with 
aircraft  manufacture  on  behalf  of  the 
allied  powers;  and  later  in  American 
government  missions  through  the  Office 
of  Strategic  Services,  work  which  took 
him  to  the  Middle  and  Far  East.  With  the 
entry  of  America  into  the  war  he  served 
from  1942  onwards  as  a  geographer, 
climatologist,  and  Arctic  adviser  with  the 
U.S.  Quartermaster  General's  Corps,  being 
particularly  concerned  with  the  develop- 
ment of  efficient  operational  and  survival 
techniques  and  equipment  for  the  Arctic 
and  sub-Arctic  regions.  After  the  war  he 
served  first  with  the  U.S.  Navy  Office 
of  Scientific  Research  (1946-7),  then  in 
an  advisory  capacity  with  the  U.S. 
Weather  Bureau,  later  with  the  Arctic 
Institute  of  North  America.  Finally  in 
1953  he  was  appointed  geographer  to  the 
research  and  development  command, 
specializing  in  studies  and  research 
connected  with  human  activities  in  the 
polar  regions. 

Wilkins  had  the  restless  mind  and  out- 
look of  the  true  pioneer.  He  possessed 
tremendous  mental  and  physical  drive — 
assets  which,  joined  to  a  vivid  imagination 
and  a  supreme  faith  in  his  purpose,  enabled 
him  to  overcome  all  obstacles.  He  was 
continually  on  the  move,  being  irresistibly 
drawn  to  new  ideas  and  practical  projects. 
He  rarely  concerned  himself  with  the  more 
obvious  results,  implications,  and  signifi- 
cance of  an  achievement  and  consequently 
the  published  records  of  his  many  projects 
and  expeditions  were  unfortunately  scanty. 
He  was  primarily  a  field  explorer  and  trail- 
blazer,  working  to  a  clear,  if  long-range 
plan,  based  upon  his  conviction  of  the 
necessity  for  a  world-wide  meteorological 
organization.  He  was  convinced  that  a 
direct  relationship  existed  between  the 


meteorology  of  the  polar  regions  and 
weather  conditions  elsewhere  and  that  a 
full  knowledge  of  polar  geography  would 
be  required  before  his  plan  for  polar 
weather  stations  could  be  realized.  In 
these  fields  he  was  a  pioneer,  as  he  was  in 
polar  exploration  by  air  and  submarine. 

As  a  person  Wilkins  was  reticent,  self- 
sufficient  and  infinitely  adaptable.  In- 
terested in  everything,  he  enjoyed  the 
company  of  his  fellows,  yet  found  it  easy 
to  live  and  work  among  primitive  peoples, 
if  only  because  he  shared  their  intense 
awareness  of  nature  in  all  her  moods.  He 
had  a  strong  religious  background  and  was 
actively  interested  in  such  matters  as 
telepathy  and  life  after  death.  A  solitary 
by  nature  and  by  no  means  the  ordinary 
gregarious  man,  he  was  yet  a  good  mixer 
and  companion  both  on  and  off  the  job. 

In  1929  he  married  a  fellow  Australian 
then  working  in  New  York  as  an  actress, 
Suzanne  Bennett  (Bennett  was  a  stage 
name),  daughter  of  John  Evans,  a  mining 
engineer  of  Victoria,  Australia.  They  had 
no  children.  It  was  a  happy  marriage  in 
which  both  parties  by  mutual  agreement 
pursued  their  chosen  careers. 

Wilkins  was  knighted  in  1928.  He  was 
a  fellow  of  the  Royal  Meteorological 
Society  and  of  the  Royal  Geographical 
Society  which  awarded  him  its  Patron's 
medal.  Among  the  many  other  medals 
which  he  received  were  the  Samuel  Finley 
Breese  Morse  medal  from  the  American 
Geographical  Society,  the  gold  medal  of 
the  International  League  of  Aviators, 
and  the  Norwegian  Air  Club's  gold  medal 
of  honour.  He  was  a  companion  of  the 
Order  of  St.  Maurice  and  St.  Lazarus  of 
Italy  and  in  1955  received  the  honorary 
degree  of  D.Sc.  from  the  university  of 
Alaska. 

On  30  November  1958  Wilkins  died 
suddenly  in  his  hotel  at  Framingham, 
Massachusetts.  He  had  often  expressed  a 
wish  that  his  ashes  might  be  scattered 
near  the  North  Pole  and  this  service  was 
carried  out  by  the  nuclear-powered  sub- 
marine Skate,  breaking  through  the  polar 
ice  after  a  long  voyage  thereunder  such 
as  Wilkins  himself  had  planned. 

Five  portraits  of  Wilkins  are  in  the 
possession  of  his  widow:  two  by  Lady 
Wilkins,  one  by  Vuk  Vuchnich,  one  by 
Roland  Hinton  Perry,  and  one  by  James 
Peter  Quinn.  Another  by  Lady  Wilkins  is 
in  the  museum  of  the  Marine  Historical 
Association,  Mystic,  Conn.,  U.S.A.;  one 
by  Reynolds  Mason  hangs  at  the  entrance 
to  the  Wilkins  Arctic  test  chamber  in  the 


8652062 


1067 


Wilkins 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


U.S.A.  Army  Quartermaster  Research 
and  Engineering  Center,  Natick,  Mass., 
U.S.A. 

[Vilhjalmur  Stefansson,  The  Friendly  Arctic, 
1921 ;  Frank  Wild,  Shackleton'S  Last  Voyage, 
1923 ;  J.  Gordon  Hayes,  T?ie  Conquest  of  the 
South  Pole,  1932 ;  National  Geographical 
Magazine,  August  1938;  C.  E.  W.  Bean, 
Gallipoli  Mission,  1948;  E.  W.  Hunter 
Christie,  The  Antarctic  Problem,  1951 ;  John 
Grierson,  Sir  Hubert  Wilkins:  Enigma  of 
Exploration,  1960 ;  Lowell  Thomas,  Sir 
Hubert  Wilkins:  His  World  of  Adventure, 
1961 ;  R.  A.  Swan,  Australia  in  the  Ant- 
arctic: Interest,  Activity  and  Endeavour,  1961 ; 
C.  E.  W.  Bean  and  others.  Official  History  of 
Australia  in  the  First  World  War,  12  vols., 
1921-42 ;  private  information.]  R.  A.  Swan. 

WILLIAMS,        RALPH        VAUGHAN 

(1872-1958),  composer.  [See  Vaughan 
Williams.] 

WILLIAMSON,       JOHN      THOBURN 

(1907-1958),  geologist  and  diamond  mil- 
lionaire, was  born  at  Montfort,  Quebec, 
Canada,  10  February  1907,  the  second  of 
four  children  and  elder  son  of  Bertie  J. 
Williamson,  manager  of  a  timber  com- 
pany, and  his  wife.  Rose  C.  Boyd.  His 
parents,  who  were  Canadian  by  birth 
but  of  Irish  descent,  moved  to  Montreal 
when  he  was  twelve.  From  Macdonald 
High  School  at  St.  Anne  de  Bellevue 
Williamson  entered  McGill  University 
where  he  was  soon  diverted  from  arts 
to  geology  in  which  he  became  so  in- 
terested that  he  spent  most  of  the  night 
studying  in  the  library.  He  also  became 
well  read  in  more  general  literature. 
Social  life  he  despised  but  he  liked  out- 
door activities  and  especially  enjoyed 
fencing.  He  obtained  his  B.A.  in  1928 
with  honours  in  geology,  was  awarded 
the  Leroy  memorial  fellowship  in  geology 
in  1929,  a  bursary  of  the  National 
Research  Council  of  Canada  in  1930-31, 
became  a  demonstrator  in  geology  and 
minerology,  and  took  his  M.A.  in  1930 
and  Ph.D.  in  1933. 

In  the  following  year  Williamson  was 
sent  as  a  geologist  to  Northern  Rhodesia 
by  the  Anglo  American  Corporation  of 
$outh  Africa,  but  he  moved  in  1935  to 
Tanganyika  where  he  spent  the  next 
two  years  prospecting  for  diamonds  with- 
out much  success  for  the  Tanganyika 
Diamond  and  Gold  Development  Com- 
pany, Ltd.  When  the  company  gave  up 
this  part  of  its  activities  in  1937  William- 
son took  out  rights  entitling  him  to 
prospect   for   diamonds   in   Tanganyika. 


He  prospected  all  over  the  Lake  and 
the  Western  Province  but  found  nothing 
worth  while.  He  next  took  a  sub-lease 
of  the  Mabuki  diamond  mine,  the  first 
to  be  discovered  in  Tanganyika,  which 
had  been  worked  since  1925  but  jielded 
too  few  diamonds  to  be  economic.  He 
pegged  two  claims  near  by  and  another 
area  at  Kizumbi.  By  now  he  had  found 
many  diamondiferous  areas  and  odd 
diamonds  here  and  there  in  the  course  of 
his  prospecting  and  had  formed  the  theory 
that  all  these  emanated  from  one  source 
somewhere  in  Lake  Province.  In  his 
search  for  this  he  lived  rough,  was  often 
ill,  and  had  very  little  money;  but  he 
had  a  determined  faith  in  his  theory 
which  finally  brought  him  to  an  area 
which  became  known  as  Mwadui.  There 
he  found  a  good  gem  and  from  the  for- 
mation of  the  gravel  came  to  the  con- 
clusion that  Mwadui  was  the  source  he 
had  been  seeking.  On  6  March  1940  he 
pegged  some  mining  claims  and  an  ex- 
clusive prospecting  licence.  In  April  he 
pegged  further  claims  and  another  licence. 
Suddenly  further  prospecting  in  the 
country  was  forbidden  and  Williamson 
was  unable  to  register  all  his  claims. 
An  Indian  lawyer,  I.  C.  Chopra,  living 
at  Mwanza,  who  was  his  legal  adviser, 
became  his  partner. 

Owing  to  the  war  and  the  threat  of  Italian 
invasion  Williamson  had  to  operate  with 
the  most  primitive  equipment  and  very 
little  help.  He  himself  started  the  men 
on  their  work  early  in  the  morning 
and  supervised  the  digging,  washing,  and 
sorting  of  the  gravel.  Then  he  drove 
twelve  miles  to  a  river  for  water  in  a 
lorry  which  often  got  stuck  or  broke 
down.  On  his  return  he  gave  food  to  the 
men,  then  dealt  meticulously  with  the 
paper  work.  Despite  the  difficulties 
Williamson  spared  no  effort  or  expense 
in  looking  after  his  workmen  of  whom 
there  were  soon  2,500.  Using  mostly  local 
materials  he  provided  houses,  a  hospital, 
offices,  and  other  buildings.  But  it  was 
not  until  after  1947  that  the  mine  could 
be  properly  developed. 

Meantime  in  1941  the  Colonial  Office 
had  advised  Williamson  of  the  urgent 
need  for  industrial  diamonds  and  he 
made  every  effort  to  produce  as  many  as 
possible.  The  Germans  who  were  in  still 
greater  need  managed  to  get  some 
parcels  of  stolen  diamonds  smuggled 
through  to  them  before  the  Alhes  put 
an  end  to  the  traffic.  The  theft  of 
diamonds  from  the  mine,  however,  con- 


1058 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Wilson,  C.  T.  R. 


tinued  and  by  1946  had  reached  such 
proportions  that  there  were  those  who 
thought  that  the  mine  had  petered  out. 
Williamson  knew  better,  but  it  was  not 
until  1947  that  the  Government  could 
provide  police  and  not  until  some  years 
later  that  the  ringleaders  were  caught 
and  given  sentences  so  stiff  that  the  theft 
of  diamonds  was  suppressed. 

After  1948  expansion  was  rapid.  Many 
buildings  were  erected,  a  heavy  media 
plant  was  ordered  to  be  built,  roads  were 
constructed  and  planted  with  shady  trees. 
Mwadui  became  a  garden  city,  and  the 
mine  became  a  sanctuary  for  birds  which 
came  in  hundreds  to  settle  on  the  ponds. 
Williamson  built  two  very  large  dams 
near  the  mine  so  that  the  country  round 
about  became  cool  and  green  and  the 
increased  rainfall  brought  many  benefits. 
He  was  most  averse  from  declaring  any 
dividend  of  the  profits  of  the  mine.  They 
were  either  ploughed  back  or  utiUzed 
for  contributing  to  the  general  good  of 
the  country.  He  provided  a  school  at 
Shinyanga,  financed  higher  education, 
and  gave  £50,000  to  Makerere  College, 
Uganda,  for  building  science  classrooms. 

Intensely  loyal  to  the  Crown  and 
Commonwealth,  Williamson  subscribed 
heavily  to  the  War  Loan,  gave  generously 
to  wartime  funds  and  the  Red  Cross,  and 
in  recognition  of  his  war  services  trans- 
ferred a  quarter  of  the  mine  to  his  brother 
who  had  been  seriously  wounded  in  a 
commando  raid.  A  pink  diamond  of  rare 
beauty  weighing  54J  carats  was  cut  and 
polished  and  made  into  a  brooch  sur- 
rounded with  over  a  hundred  blue  white 
diamonds  of  finest  purity  and  presented 
to  the  Queen.  Another  magnificent  brooch 
of  blue  white  diamonds  was  presented  to 
the  Princess  Margaret. 

Williamson  gave  large  sums  to  help 
mining  ventures  in  East  Africa  and  had 
he  not  died  he  would  have  contributed 
considerably  to  the  building  up  of  a  newly 
independent  East  Africa  and  especially 
Tanzania.  But  symptoms  of  cancer  of  the 
throat  became  manifest  and  despite 
consultation  and  treatment  in  London 
and  Canada  he  died  and  was  buried  at 
Mwadui  8  January  1958.  There  is  a  statue 
of  him  near  the  baobab  tree  where  he  first 
camped  when  he  started  prospecting  at 
Mwadui.  He  received  an  honorary  D.Sc. 
from  McGill  in  1956  but  as  a  Canadian 
citizen  had  to  refuse  the  offer  of  a  knight- 
hood. 

Williamson  seldom  spent  any  money 
on  himself  and  went  about  in  khaki  drill 


trousers  and  an  open-necked  shirt  with 
short  sleeves.  He  was  a  handsome  man, 
nearly  six  feet  tall,  with  dark  brown  hair, 
and  was  often  mistaken  for  a  well-known 
film  actor.  He  was  shy  and  retiring  but 
had  charming  manners.  He  received 
dozens  of  letters  a  day  from  women  all 
over  the  world  offering  marriage.  But 
he  died  a  bachelor.  The  mine  became 
owned  half  by  the  Government  of 
Tanganyika  and  the  other  half  by  De 
Beers  Consolidated  Mines,  Ltd. ;  the  pro- 
duction of  diamonds  in  1964  was  worth 
over  six  million  pounds. 

[Montreal  Gazette,  9  January  1958;  per- 
sonal knowledge.]  I.  C.  Chopra. 

WILSON,  CHARLES  THOMSON 
REES  (1869-1959),  physicist,  was  born 
at  Glencorse,  Midlothian,  14  February 
1869,  the  youngest  son  of  John  Wilson 
by  his  second  wife,  Annie  Clark  Harper, 
of  Glasgow.  His  father,  a  progressive 
sheep  farmer,  who  himself  wrote  on 
various  experirnents  in  farming,  died 
when  Wilson  was  four  years  old  and  the 
family  moved  to  Manchester.  Wilson  was 
educated  at  the  Owens  College  where  he 
graduated  B.Sc.  in  1887.  In  1888  he  gained 
an  entrance  scholarship  at  Sidney  Sussex 
College,  Cambridge,  where  he  obtained 
first  classes  in  both  parts  of  the  natural 
sciences  tripos  (1890-92).  He  held  the 
Clerk  Maxwell  scholarship  from  1895  to 
1898  and  in  1900  was  elected  fellow  of  his 
college.  He  was  university  demonstrator 
(1900-1)  and  lecturer  (1901-19)  in  experi- 
mental physics  and  reader  in  electrical 
meteorology  (1919-25).  In  1925  he  was 
elected  Jacksonian  professor  of  natural 
philosophy,  retiring  from  his  chair  in 
1934  but  remaining  in  Cambridge  for 
two  more  years  before  returning  to  Scot- 
land. 

Wilson  was  accustomed  to  trace  the 
main  lines  of  his  original  work  back  to 
his  experiences  as  a  relief  observer  at 
the  Ben  Nevis  observatory  in  September 
1894,  to  the  optical  properties  of  clouds  as 
he  then  saw  them,  and  to  the  scale  and 
magnitude  of  the  electrical  phenomena  in 
storms.  From  1895  to  1899  he  carried 
out  the  experiments  which  established 
the  main  features  of  condensation  of 
water  droplets  from  a  supersaturated 
dust-free  gas,  showing  that  at  a  definite 
supersaturation  condensation  took  place 
only  upon  ions,  and  that  there  was, 
further,  a  difference  of  the  limiting  value 
for  condensation  on  positive  and  negative 
ions.  The  abundant  condensation,  which 


1059 


Wilson,  C.  T.  R. 


D.N.B.  1 951-1  ioeO 


ensues  at  a  rather  higher  supersaturation, 
he  identified  as  drop  growth  from  small 
pure  aggregates  of  water  molecules.  This 
work  was  notably  to  lead,  ten  years  later, 
to  the  development  of  the  cloud  (track) 
chamber  but  immediately  it  led  Wilson 
to  speculate  and  experiment  on  the  way 
in  which  ions  are  normally  found  to  be 
present  in  clean  air,  and  on  the  small  but 
reproducible  electrical  conductivity  exhi- 
bited by  dust-free  air.  He  de\ised  a  gold- 
leaf  electroscope  in  which  surface  leakage 
from  the  charged  leaf  to  the  case  of  the 
instrument  was  not  possible,  thus  exclud- 
ing the  essential  source  of  uncertainty 
in  observations  of  gaseous  conductivity. 
He  established  that  the  conductivity  of 
the  gas  of  the  electroscope  was  the  same 
in  daylight  as  in  the  dark,  was  indepen- 
dent of  the  sign  of  charge  and,  for 
a  considerable  range,  of  leaf  potential, 
and  that  it  was  equivalent  to  that  to  be 
expected  from  the  continuous  release  of 
about  twenty  pairs  of  ions  per  second 
in  each  cubic  centimetre  of  gas.  In  1901, 
commenting  on  these  observations,  Wil- 
son wrote :  'Experiments  were  now  carried 
out  to  test  whether  the  production  of  ions 
in  dust-free  air  could  be  explained  as  being 
due  to  radiation  from  sources  outside  our 
atmosphere.  .  .  .'  Then  followed  a  descrip- 
tion of  what  must  be  the  first  deliberate 
investigation  of  a  cosmic  radiation.  The 
actual  experiment,  in  which  conductivity 
in  the  electroscope  gas  was  found  to  be 
indistinguishable  outside  and  inside  a  rail- 
way tunnel  near  Peebles,  gave  no  further 
lead. 

In  the  years  1903-10  Wilson's  main 
interest  was  directed  to  the  phenomena 
of  atmospheric  electricity  and  of  thunder- 
storms, and  this  was  to  remain  a  major 
field  of  interest  to  him ;  his  last  scientific 
paper  (1956)  was  on  'A  theory  of  thunder- 
cloud electricity'.  His  contributions  on 
this  subject  brought  out  to  the  full 
Wilson's  extreme  skill  and  insight  for 
physical  measurement.  The  work  led 
through  a  study  of  the  fine-weather 
potential  gradient  in  the  low  atmosphere, 
and  the  associated  earth  current,  to 
measurements  of  fields,  currents,  and 
field  changes  under  discharge  conditions. 
Such  measurements  allowed  the  altitude 
and  magnitude  of  the  region  of  charge 
separation  to  be  deduced,  while  the  rate 
of  recovery  after  discharge  drew  attention 
to  the  magnitude  of  the  system  of  charge 
separation  which  brought  conditions  to 
the  discharge  situation.  In  1920  he 
suggested  that  the   fields   and  currents 


in  fine-weather  conditions  were  balanced 
by  the  currents  and  rain-carried  charge 
in  storms,  a  view  which  has  come  broadly 
to  be  accepted,  and  in  later  papers  (1929, 
and  again  in  1956)  he  developed  his 
views  about  the  actual  mechanism  of 
charge  separation.  While  his  proposed 
mechanism,  in  which  he  considers  the 
movement,  polarization,  and  charge  col- 
lection of  water  droplets  of  differing  size 
in  a  vertical  potential  gradient,  must 
certainly  operate,  it  is  probably  inade- 
quate to  describe  the  full  magnitude  of 
charge  separation  which  takes  place  in 
nature.  His  contribution  to  the  study  of 
atmospheric  electricity  rests  not  upon 
the  success  of  any  particular  theory, 
but  rather  upon  the  stimulus  which  his 
exceptional  insight  and  experimental 
skill  gave  to  the  whole  mode  of  investi- 
gation. 

In  1910,  under  the  growing  interest  in, 
and  understanding  of,  the  radiations  from 
radioactive  substances.  X-rays,  and  the 
mechanism  of  ionization,  Wilson  resumed 
condensation  experiments  with  the  inten- 
tion of  achieving  conditions  in  which  the 
track  of  a  single  ionizing  particle  might 
be  made  visible  in  the  supersaturated  gas 
of  the  chamber.  He  developed  a  chamber 
in  the  form  of  a  short  cylinder  in  which 
controlled  supersaturation  was  attained 
by  the'mechanical  withdrawal  of  one  end  of 
the  cylinder  (the  piston)  through  a  deter- 
mined distance,  while  the  condensation 
phenomena  were  viewed  through  the 
other  end  (front  window),  and  in  1911  the 
first  cloud  chamber  photographs  were 
published.  These  preliminary  results  were 
quickly  followed  in  1912  by  photographs 
with  an  improved  chamber.  Although 
through  the  years  many  developments 
of  cloud  chambers  by  very  many  workers 
have  led  to  the  application  of  the  method 
over  a  greatly  extended  field,  the  quality 
of  the  photographs  published  in  1912  will 
bear  comparison  with  that  of  all  subse- 
quent work. 

The  stimulus  provided  by  these  photo- 
graphs among  workers  in  atomic  physics 
can  hardly  be  overstated.  Much  of  a  picture 
which  had  hitherto  been  painfully  pieced 
together  from  indirect  observations  was 
now  to  be  seen,  often  in  striking  detail,  as 
a  whole.  The  photographs  showed  con- 
vincingly that  ionization  by  X-rays  was  in 
fact  that  of  secondary  electrons,  while  the 
large  angle  scattering  of  alpha-particles, 
deduced  scarcely  a  year  earlier  by  E.  (later 
Lord)  Rutherford  [q.v.]  from  counting 
experiments,  was  there  for  all  to  see.  The 


1060 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Wilson,  C.  T.  R. 


cloud  chamber  was  indeed,  as  Rutherford 
described  it,  'the  most  original  apparatus 
in  the  whole  history  of  physics',  and  the 
beauty  of  fine  track  photographs  was  to 
fascinate  nuclear  physicists  in  the  coming 
years.  In  spite  of  his  recurring  interest  in 
atmospheric  electricity,  Wilson  returned 
to  cloud-chamber  work  in  1920^  and 
published  two  notable  papers  in  1923  on 
the  tracks  of  beta-particles  and  of  the 
secondary  electrons  from  X-rays,  but  the 
contribution  to  physical  method  which 
demanded  his  special  skills  and  experience 
was  accomplished  in  1912. 

Wilson  had,  in  quite  exceptional  mea- 
sure, a  combination  of  great  patience 
and  determination,  deep  and  seemingly 
intuitive  physical  understanding,  and  the 
ability  to  devise  effective  experimental 
arrangements  of  striking  simplicity  and 
elegance,  although  this  often  called  for 
daunting  skill  of  hand.  These  qualities 
are  not  only  to  be  seen  in  his  original 
work,  where,  none  the  less,  the  1912 
cloud  chamber,  the  tilted  gold-leaf 
electrometer,  and  his  development  and 
appUcation  of  the  Lippmann  capillary 
electrometer  in  his  work  on  atmospheric 
electricity  are  examples  interesting  in 
their  variety.  For  many  years  he  was  in 
charge  of  the  final  year  practical  class 
at  the  Cavendish  Laboratory.  The  simple 
but  searching  exercises  which  he  was 
accustomed  to  set  demanded  skill  which 
could  often  develop  only  from  patient 
improvement  of  dexterity  and  made  their 
contribution  to  the  aptitude  for  experi- 
ment of  many  of  those  who  worked  through 
the  most  notable  phase  in  the  history  of 
the  Cavendish.  As  a  lecturer  Wilson  was 
quite  deficient  in  the  normal  qualities: 
hesitant  in  delivery,  voice  little  above  a 
whisper,  and  blackboard  writing  almost 
invisible.  But  beyond  this  barrier,  his 
teaching  exhibited  the  outstanding  char- 
acteristics of  the  man  and  the  physicist. 
The  simplicity,  penetration,  and  elegance 
of  his  approach,  above  all  in  the  field  of 
physical  optics,  have  been  acknowledged 
by  those  who  themselves  were  to  become 
lecturers  of  distinction. 

In  general  estimation,  Wilson's  achieve- 
ments reach  a  climax  in  the  development 
of  the  cloud  chamber.  The  essential  sim- 
plicity of  the  device  might  well  obscure 
the  continuity  of  its  development  from 
the  earlier  condensation  experiments. 
Moreover,  it  does  not  stand  alone;  the 
whole  development  of  other,  and  in  some 
ways  more  powerful,  methods  of  tra- 
jectory recording  has  been  guided  and 


built  upon  the  successes  of  the  cloud 
track  method.  This  great  field  of  experi- 
mentation, decisive  in  its  impact  on  the 
development  of  almost  all  aspects  of 
particle  physics,  is  the  direct  growth 
from  the  intuition  and  skill  of  his  work. 

Wilson  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1900  and 
received  the  Hughes  medal  (1911),  a 
Royal  medal  (1922),  and  the  Copley 
medal  (1935).  With  the  appearance  of 
his  last  scientific  work  in  1956,  sixty 
years  after  his  first  publication,  for  the 
first  time  in  perhaps  three  hundred  years 
the  oldest  living  fellow  communicated 
a  paper  to  the  Society.  In  1927  jointly 
with  A.  H.  Compton  he  was  awarded 
the  Nobel  prize  for  physics,  and  in  108T 
he  was  appointed  C.H.  He  received  the 
honorary  Sc.D.  from  Cambridge  in  1947 
and  held  honorary  degrees  also  from 
Aberdeen,  Glasgow,  Manchester,  London, 
and  Liverpool. 

Among  the  most  distinguished  physi- 
cists of  his  time,  Wilson  stands  out  in  his 
quiet  kindliness  and  modesty.  To  those 
privileged  to  work  with  him,  these  qualif 
ties  were  the  other,  perhaps  natural, 
aspect  of  his  essentially  simple,  pene- 
trating, and  untiring  application  to  the 
problems  wliich  through  his  long  life 
attracted  and  held  his  thoughts.  Below 
average  height,  and  slightly  built,  Wilson 
was  a  man  whose  interests  remained 
throughout  those  of  the  countryman. 
In  conversation  his  keen  and  continuing 
interest  in  the  field  of  physics  in  which 
he  had  worked  was  closely  linked, 
through  the  deep  impression  which  the 
phenomena  of  atmospheric  physics  made 
always  upon  him,  with  his  enthusiasm 
for  the  mountains  of  Scotland  and  parti- 
cularly of  Arran.  There,  his  activity, 
beyond  his  eightieth  year,  matched  that 
of  men  a  generation  his  junior,  and  when 
at  the  age  of  eighty-six  he  flew  for  the 
first  time,  in  flights  carried  out  for 
students  of  meteorology,  his  interest  was 
torn  between  the  atmospheric  phenomena 
around  him  (once  so  rough  as  to  demand 
a  forced  landing)  and  the  interest  provided 
by  this  new  viewpoint  over  country  which 
he  had  known  so  long  from  the  ground. 

In  1908  Wilson  married  Jessie  Fraser 
(died  1967),  daughter  of  the  Rev.  George 
Hill  Dick,  of  Glasgow,  and  for  half  a 
century  owed  much  to  her  sympathy  and 
understanding.  They  had  one  son  and 
two  daughters.  Some  years  after  his 
retirement  he  settled  in  the  village  of 
Carlops  near  Edinburgh  and  no  great 
distance  from  his  birthplace.  There,  beside 


1061 


Wilson,  C.  T.  R. 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


the  road  to  Edinburgh  and  with  a  green 
path  leading  from  his  garden  over  a  rocky 
burn  and  then  directly  into  the  heart  of 
the  Pentland  hills,  he  spent  the  last 
ten  years  of  his  life  with  his  family.  There 
he  died  15  November  1959. 

A  portrait  by  (Sir)  James  Gunn,  de- 
lighting those  who  knew  him  well,  is  at 
Sidney  Sussex  College,  Cambridge. 

[P.  M.  S.  Blackett  in  Biographical  Memoirs 
of  Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  vol.  vi,  1960 ; 
The  Tirties,  16  November  1959 ;  private  in- 
formation ;  personal  knowledge.] 

John  G.  Wilson. 

WILSON,  WALTER  GORDON  (1874- 
1957),  engineer,  was  born  in  Blackrock, 
county  Dublin,  21  April  1874,  the  fifth 
son  of  George  Orr  Wilson,  barrister,  and 
his  wife,  Annie  Shaw.  Wilson  started  his 
career  as  a  naval  cadet  in  the  Britannia. 
In  1894  he  entered  King's  College, 
Cambridge,  where  he  was  elected  to  an 
honorary  exhibition  in  1896,  and  in  1897 
was  placed  in  the  first  class  in  part  i  of  the 
mechanical  sciences  tripos. 

The  inventive  genius  which  charac- 
terized the  engineering  achievements  for 
which  Wilson  later  became  known  was 
strikingly  evidenced  in  his  first  engineer- 
ing venture.  Through  Lord  Braye, 
Wilson  was  introduced  to  Percy  Pilcher, 
a  lecturer  in  naval  architecture  and  a 
keen  participant  in  the  art  of  gliding. 
Wilson  observed  Pilcher's  gliding  activi- 
ties with  a  profound  technical  interest 
and  soon  became  enthused  with  the 
possibilities  of  powered  flight.  In  1898 
the  three  formed  the  firm  of  Wilson  and 
Pilcher  with  the  primary  objective  of 
building  what  might  have  been  the 
world's  first  internal  combustion  aero- 
engine. One  year  later  Wilson  had  de- 
signed a  prototype  engine  which  Pilcher 
was  to  test,  but  before  it  was  built 
Pilcher  was  killed  in  a  gliding  accident 
in  1899.  The  shock  put  an  end  to  Wilson's 
plans  for  powered  flight  and  he  was  soon 
turning  his  pioneering  instincts  to  the 
field  of  the  'horseless  carriage'.  In  new 
premises  in  Westminster  he  created  the 
Wilson-Pilcher  motor-car  embodying  epi- 
cyclic  gears  and  some  remarkable  new 
features  which  in  later  years  came  to 
be  regarded  as  the  hallmark  of  good 
design  in  motor-cars  of  quality. 

In  1904  he  joined  the  firm  of  Arm- 
strong Whitworth  &  Co.,  where  he  de- 
signed the  Armstrong  Whitworth  car. 
From  1908  to  1914  he  worked  with 
J.  &  E.  Hall  of  Dartford  and  designed 


for  them  the  Hallford  lorry,  which  was 
extensively  used  by  the  army  in  the  war 
of  1914-18. 

When  war  broke  out  Wilson  rejoined 
the  navy  and  served  as  a  lieutenant  with 
armoured  cars,  which  at  that  time  were 
used  by  that  arm  to  defend  naval  air  bases 
on  the  coasts  of  France  and  Belgium. 
Already  well  known  as  an  engineer  he 
was  soon  engaged  in  the  construction 
of  these  vehicles.  When  (Sir)  Winston 
Churchill  set  up  the  landships  committee 
under  (Sir)  Eustace  Tennyson-d'Eyncourt 
[q.v.]  at  the  Admiralty  in  early  1915  to 
investigate  the  possibility  of  building 
an  armoured  fighting  vehicle  capable  of 
resisting  rifle  and  machine-gun  fire,  de- 
stroying barbed  wire  entanglements,  and 
crossing  trenches.  Squadron  20  of  the 
Royal  Naval  Armoured  Car  Division  was 
placed  at  the  committee's  disposal.  Wilson 
was  posted  to  Squadron  20  and  placed  in 
charge  of  the  first  experiments  at  Burton- 
on-Trent.  So  he  came  to  be  concerned  in 
the  birth  of  the  tank. 

In  the  designing  of  these  vehicles  he 
was  to  play  a  part  of  the  first  importance. 
Others  contributed  ideas,  but  it  was 
Wilson  and  his  colleague  in  design,  (Sir) 
William  Tritton  [q.v.],  who  created  a 
machine  capable  of  the  tasks  required 
of  it;  and  to  the  inventive  genius  and 
engineering  skill  of  these  two  men  the 
speedy  success  of  the  tank  was  chiefly 
due.  In  August  1915  the  design  of  the 
'Tritton'  machine,  or  'Little  Willie',  was 
already  well  advanced  when  fresh  and 
more  stringent  requirements  were  laid 
down  by  the  War  Office.  To  meet  them, 
Tritton  and  Wilson  concentrated  on  a  new 
design,  on  which  they  were  already  work- 
ing, in  which  the  tracks,  at  Wilson's  sug- 
gestion, were  carried  all  round  the  machine. 
This  design,  known  first  as  the  'Wilson', 
then  the  'Centipede',  next  'Big  Willie', 
was  ready  for  official  trials  early  in  1916. 
On  2  February  in  Lord  Sahsbury's  park 
at  Hatfield,  before  a  company  which  in- 
cluded Kitchener,  Balfour,  Lloyd  George, 
and  General  Robertson,  it  successfully 
demonstrated  its  ability  to  fulfil  not  only 
the  official  requirements  but  far  more 
exacting  tests.  Production  orders  were 
placed  immediately  and  'Big  Willie',  now 
named  'Mother',  became  the  prototype  of 
the  Mark  I  tank  which  went  into  action 
on  the  Somme  in  September  1916.  Other 
designs  followed,  and  Wilson's  develop- 
ment of  epicyclic  transmissions  for  these 
machines  was  an  achievement  of  out- 
standing importance,  culminating  in  1987 


1062 


with  his  design  for  a  new  epicyclic  steering 
which  provided  a  larger  turning  radius  at 
high  speeds  than  at  low  speeds. 

Wilson  transferred  to  the  army  in 
March  1916  with  the  rank  of  major  in 
the  Heavy  Branch,  Machine-Gun  Corps, 
renamed  in  1917  the  Tank  Corps.  He 
served  as  chief  of  design  in  the  mechanical 
warfare  department  of  the  War  Office 
until  the  war  ended.  He  was  twice  men- 
tioned in  dispatches  and  was  appointed 
C.M.G.  in  1917. 

After  the  war  he  invented  the  well- 
known  Wilson  self-changing  gearbox, 
used  in  many  cars,  and  founded  the  firm 
of  Self-Changing  Gears,  Ltd.,  of  Coventry. 
He  was  an  honorary  member  of  the 
Institutions  of  Automobile  and  Mecha- 
nical Engineers  and  of  the  Junior  Insti- 
tution of  Engineers  and  a  member  of  the 
Institution  of  Civil  Engineers.  A  man  of 
strong  character  and  shrewd  judgement, 
he  was  a  great  lover  of  the  countryside, 
a  fine  shot  and  an  expert  fly  fisher. 

Wilson  married  in  1904  Ethel  Crom- 
meHn  (died  1963),  daughter  of  Samuel 
Octavius  Gray,  chief  accountant  to  the 
Bank  of  England,  and  had  three  sons.  He 
died  at  his  home  in  Itchen  Abbas,  near 
Winchester,  30  June  1957.  A  portrait  by 
Cecil  Jameson  is  in  the  possession  of  the 
family. 

[King's  College,  Cambridge,  Annual  Report, 
1957 ;  B.  H.  Liddell  Hart,  The  Tanks,  2  vols., 
1959;  private  information;  personal  know- 
ledge.] A.  A.  Miller. 

WIMPERIS,  HARRY  EGERTON  (1876- 
1960),  scientist,  was  born  in  London  27 
August  1876,  the  only  son  of  Joseph  Price 
Wimperis,  who  was  in  the  London  office 
of  a  New  Zealand  merchant  firm,  and  his 
wife,  Jemima  Wood- Samuel.  His  father 
having  died  when  Wimperis  was  very 
young,  his  mother  had  a  struggle  to  edu- 
cate him.  After  an  early  but  short  ap- 
prenticeship as  an  engineer  he  resisted 
a  strong  attraction  towards  astronomy 
and  entered  the  Royal  College  of  Science 
(where  he  was  a  Tyndall  prizeman)  and 
subsequently  went  with  a  Whitworth 
scholarship  to  Gonville  and  Caius  College, 
Cambridge,  where  he  was  a  Salomons 
scholar  and  in  1899  took  part  ii  of  the 
mechanical  sciences  tripos  as  an  advanced 
student.  He  had  for  financial  reasons  to 
decline  a  fellowship  after  graduating  and 
went  to  Armstrong  Whitworths,  following 
which  he  was  appointed  engineering  ad- 
viser to  the  crown  agents  for  the  colonies. 
During  the  war  of  1914r-18,  he  served 


D.N.B.  1951-1960  Wimpcris 

as  an  experimental  scientist  with  the 
Royal  Naval  Aii:  Service  (he  was  a 
lieutenant-commander  in  the  R.N.V.R.) 
and  in  1918  was  gazetted  a  major  in 
the  Royal  Air  Force  aircraft  production 
department.  This  brought  to  the  fore 
his  latent  interest  in  aeronautics  and  his 
active  and  inventive  mind  found  scope 
there  in  certain  inventions,  notably  his 
course  setting  bombsight  which  the 
R.A.F.  used  until  1989.  When  the  Air 
Ministry  set  up  a  scientific  laboratory  in 
the  Imperial  College  in  London,  in  the 
latter  part  of  the  first  war,  Wimperis  was 
the  first  superintendent,  and  there  a 
small  team  worked  on  bombing  aids, 
aircraft  engines,  and  a  few  vital  tasks  of 
that  kind.  As  a  result,  when  the  Air 
Ministry  decided  to  set  up  a  more  formal 
relationship  with  science  and  establish 
a  directorate  of  scientific  research,  Wim- 
peris was  the  'sitting  candidate'  for  the 
post  of  director.  In  spite  of  the  showing 
he  had  made  by  directing  the  Air  Ministry 
laboratory  he  was  at  first  elected  as 
deputy  director  while  the  Air  Ministry 
sought  elsewhere  for  a  director,  and  it 
was  not  until  a  year  later  (1925)  that 
he  was  appointed  to  the  office  itself. 
This  was  his  first  great  opportunity.  It 
lay  in  his  hands  to  plan  and  then  construct 
and  mould  the  scientific  research  branch 
of  Britain's  youngest  Service  department. 
To  this  task  he  rose  magnificently,  novel 
though  it  was,  as  well  as  being  strangely 
limited  since  both  radio  and  armaments 
were  specifically  excluded.  A  man  less 
temperate  might  have  refused  a  task 
so  ludicrously  circumscribed,  but  for- 
tunately Wimperis  was  not  so  short- 
sighted— trusting  no  doubt  that  as  time 
went  by  he  would  be  allowed  a  proper 
coverage  of  the  whole  scientific  field: 
a  circumstance  not  finally  encompassed 
even  in  his  time. 

His  new  task  was  in  any  event  a  revo- 
lutionary one.  It  was  one  thing  for  senior 
military  officers  to  recognize  the  impor- 
tance of  scientists  and  even  commission 
them  to  do  specific  tasks,  but  to  set  up  a 
whole  nest  of  them  within  their  Ministry 
and  be  expected  to  share  work  and  secrets 
with  them — that  was  an  innovation  indeed. 
Wimperis  was  probably  ideal  for  this  task. 
His  scientific  work  in  the  navy  had  taught 
him  how  to  'live  with  the  Service',  he  was 
eminently  acceptable  in  personality,  he 
was  a  close  friend  and  colleague  of  many  of 
the  leading  scientists  of  the  country,  and 
he  learned  to  become  a  good  administrator. 
For  this  task  alone  he  would  have  deserved 


1063 


Wimperis 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


well  of  his  country.  He  was  to  bring  about 
one  further  achievement  of  far  greater 
national  importance.  He  caused  to  be  set 
up  the  Committee  for  the  Scientific  Sur- 
vey of  Air  Defence,  known  as  the  Tizard 
committee,  which  sponsored  the  develop- 
ment of  radar,  without  which  the  outcome 
of  the  war  of  1939-45  might  have  been 
very  different.  In  1934  a  few  thoughtful 
people  realized  that  the  state  of  air  defence 
of  Great  Britain  against  bomber  attack 
was  deplorably  weak,  largely  because  there 
was  no  method  of  detecting  the  approach 
of  aircraft  which  were  more  than  a  few 
miles  way.  Instead  of  setting  up  another 
departmental  committee  to  study  the 
problem,  Wimperis  persuaded  the  secre- 
tary of  state  for  air  to  set  up  a  com- 
mittee mainly  of  'independent'  scientists. 
Headed  by  (Sir)  Henry  Tizard  [q.v.], 
and  comprising  Dr.  A.  V.  Hill,  P.  M.  S. 
(later  Lord)  Blackett,  and  himself,  with 
Dr.  A.  P.  Rowe  as  secretary,  he  had 
assembled  as  powerful  and  competent  a 
committee  as  this  country  has  ever  con- 
gregated and  one  which  was  to  plan  and 
progress  radar  for  air  defence  in  such  a 
way  and  at  such  speed  that  England  was 
ready  with  a  warning  system  in  1939. 
This  came  about  by  chance.  Wanting  to 
dispose  of  the  'death  ray'  as  an  ogre, 
Wimperis  wrote  to  (Sir)  Robert  Watson- 
Watt  for  his  opinion.  The  reply  made  it 
clear  that  it  was  not  feasible,  but  in  the 
same  letter  Watson-Watt  pointed  out 
that  radio  detection  of  aircraft  in  the 
sky  at  some  miles'  range  should  be  pos- 
sible, if  one  used  techniques  which  he  and 
(Sir)  Edward  Appleton  had  already  used 
for  meteorology.  With  this  foundation 
and  with  strong  backing  from  the  Tizard 
committee,  a  radio  defence  technique 
(radar)  was  developed  in  a  surprisingly 
short  time. 

Wimperis  was  a  member  of  many 
bodies,  including  the  Aeronautical  Re- 
search Council,  the  Royal  Aeronautical 
Society  (of  which  he  was  president  in 
1936-8),  the  executive  committee  of  the 
National  Physical  Laboratory,  the  council 
of  the  Institution  of  Electrical  Engineers, 
and  he  was  a  fellow  of  the  American 
Institute  of  Aeronautical  Sciences.  He 
was  president  of  the  engineering  section 
of  the  British  Association  in  1939  (council 
member,  1948-54);  read  the  Wilbur 
Wright  lecture  to  the  Royal  Aeronautical 
Society  (1932);  and  the  Hawkesley 
lecture  to  the  Mechanical  Engineers  in 
1944.  Retiring  in  1937,  he  was  invited 
to     visit     Australia    and    advised    the 


Government  there  on  the  furthering  of 
aeronautical  research.  As  a  result  an 
Aeronautical  Research  Laboratory  under 
the  C.S.I.R.O.  was  set  up  at  Melbourne 
and  a  chair  of  aeronautics  at  Sydney 
University. 

As  a  leader  Wimperis — to  his  junior 
staff — was  stern  and  remote,  but  to  his 
closer  colleagues  and  to  the  younger 
ones  who  showed  courage  and  endeavour 
(gifts  pre-eminently  his  own)  he  was  a 
good  friend,  with  a  high  sense  of  truth, 
purpose,  and  intellectual  integrity.  As  a 
civil  servant  who  made  it  his  life-work  to 
build  up  a  new  branch  he  had  perforce 
to  fight  for  it  and  its  needs,  and  his  quiet 
perseverance  and  great  strength  of  charac- 
ter served  him  well.  From  his  father's 
side  there  was  a  strong  hereditary  bent 
towards  craftsmanship  (some  of  his 
cousins  were  prominent  in  water-colour 
painting  and  architecture)  and  this 
showed  itself  in  his  skill  with  delicate 
instruments.  As  well  as  being  a  most 
dutiful  son  to  his  mother,  to  whom  he 
owed  such  a  lot  in  his  early  struggles  and 
whom  he  was  proud  to  support  as  soon 
as  he  could,  he  was  a  devoted  husband 
and  father.  His  quiet  whimsical  humour 
delighted  his  close  friends,  including 
many  in  the  Athenaeum,  of  which  he  was 
for  long  a  member  and  staunch  supporter. 
He  married  in  1907  Grace  d'Avray,  third 
daughter  of  (Sir)  George  Parkin  [q.v.], 
who  was  for  many  years  organizing 
secretary  of  the  Rhodes  Trust.  Wimperis 
had  three  daughters.  He  was  appointed 
O.B.E.  (1918),  C.B.E.  (1928),  and  C.B. 
(1935).  He  died  in  Edinburgh  16  July 
1960,  his  wife  surviving  him  by  only  a 
few  weeks.  A  portrait  in  oils  by  Cuthbert 
Orde  hangs  in  the  lecture  hall  of  the 
Royal  Aeronautical  Society. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
J.  E.  Sekby. 

WINFIELD,     Sir     PERCY     HENRY 

(1878-1953),  lawyer  and  legal  scholar, 
was  born  at  Stoke  Ferry,  Norfolk,  16 
September  1878,  the  fifth  child  and 
youngest  son  of  Frederick  Charles 
Winfield,  corn  merchant,  and  his  wife, 
Mary  Flatt.  He  was  educated  at  King's 
Lynn  Grammar  School  (later  King  Edward 
VII  School)  and  at  St.  John's  College, 
Cambridge,  where  in  his  first  year  he 
took  a  first  class  in  the  college  examina- 
tions in  law  (1897)  and  was  elected  an 
exhibitioner  and  proper  sizar.  In  1898 
he  was  senior  in  part  i  of  the  law  tripos  and 
was  elected  a  foundation  scholar,  and  in 


1064 


D.N.B.  1051-1060 


Winaeld 


part  11  (1809)  was  again  at  the  head  of 
the  first  class.  In  1900  he  was  awarded  a 
Whewell  scholarship  in  international  law 
and  his  college  elected  him  to  a  McMahon 
scholarship  founded  for  graduates  in- 
tending to  prepare  themselves  for  the 
legal  profession.  Called  to  the  bar  by 
the  Inner  Temple  in  1903,  he  joined 
the  South-Eastern  circuit;  but  he  soon 
returned  to  Cambridge  to  teach,  both 
privately  and  (from  1911)  in  lecture  and 
problem  classes  recommended  by  the 
special  board  for  law.  After  the  war  of 
1914-18,  during  which  he  was  commis- 
sioned in  the  Cambridgeshire  Regiment 
(1915),  was  approved  in  absence  for  the 
LL.D.  degree,  and  was  wounded  in  action 
(August  1918),  he  lectured  (Roman  law, 
torts,  criminal  law)  under  the  auspices 
of  two  colleges.  Trinity  and  St.  John's. 
St.  John's  soon  elected  him  into  an  official 
fellowship  (1921).  In  1926  he  became  a 
university  lecturer  and  in  1928  he  was 
elected  to  the  new  Rouse  Ball  professor- 
ship of  English  law. 

Winfield's  lectures  were  well  attended 
and  appreciated.  One  recalls  the  elegant 
handwriting  upon  the  blackboard  before 
his  lecture-hour  began,  the  lecturer's 
spare  athletic  figure  and  lean  judicial 
face,  his  flashes  of  dry  humour,  and  the 
problem  classes  in  which  all  in  turn  must 
act  as  counsel.  His  success  as  author 
and  scholar  owed  much  to  his  habit  of 
thoroughly  investigating  the  history  of  a 
legal  topic  before  tackling  its  subtleties 
in  the  modern  law.  Early  in  1914  the 
Law  Quarterly  Review  published  the  first 
of  his  many  legal  articles,  'Some  Bibho- 
graphical  Difficulties  of  EngUsh  Law', 
exposing  the  deficiencies  which  then 
handicapped  that  method  of  approach. 
Then  followed  two  monographs,  both 
published  in  1921,  upon  the  History  and 
(largely  post-war  work)  the  Present  Law 
of  Abuse  of  Legal  Procedure,  in  which 
that  method  was  employed.  Next,  in 
1925,  his  admirable  Chief  Sources  of 
English  Legal  History  (based  upon  a 
course  of  lectures  he  had  delivered  at 
Harvard)  more  than  remedied  the  biblio- 
graphical deficiencies  which  his  first  legal 
article  had  deplored.  Then  his  writings 
turned  to  the  history  and  development 
of  various  aspects  of  the  law  of  torts, 
which  had  now  become  his  chief  concern, 
and  in  1931  he  pubUshed  his  Province  of 
the  Law  of  Tort,  examining  its  shadowy 
boundaries,  past  and  present,  and  those 
of  its  neighbours,  such  as  quasi-contract. 
The  book,  originally  his  Tagore  lectures 


m  Calcutta  (1980),  did  much  to  stimuUte 
academic  discussion— e.g.  is  there  a  general 
law  of  tort  ?-— and  enabled  him  to  proceed 
to  a  detailed  analysis  of  the  modem  law. 
This  he  did  in  his  Textbook  of  the  Lmv  of 
Tort  (1937).  'Intended  primarily  for  stu- 
dents', the  textbook  rapidly  attained  an 
outstanding  reputation  both  in  the  aca- 
demic world  and  among  practitioners  and 
judges  wherever  our  common  law  is  known. 
A  critical  review  of  it  {Laxv  Qunrteriy 
Review,  January  1938)  foresaw  this,  em- 
phasizing its  infectious  enthusiasm,  un- 
usual charm  of  style,  and  brilliant  analysis 
of  the  more  difficult  problems.  Before 
Winfield  died  it  had  reached  its  fifth 
edition.  It  has  been  a  formative  influence 
in  our  law. 

Winfield's  other  publications  included 
Salmond  and  Winfield  on  Contracts  (1927), 
in  which,  punctiliously  enclosing  his  own 
contributions  witliin  square  brackets, 
he  preserved  and  completed  Sir  John 
Salmond's  unfinished  work ;  three  editions 
of  Pollock  on  Contracts  (1942-50);  and 
a  little  book  on  the  Foundations  and 
Future  of  International  Law  (1941),  the 
fruit  of  wartime  lectures  to  groups  of  army 
officers.  His  Select  Legal  Essays  (1952)  con- 
tain fifteen  of  his  numerous  legal  articles, 
reprinted  from  the  learned  journals  of  this 
country  and  overseas,  including  some  of 
his  later  work  on  that  arduous  topic  quasi- 
contract  ('unjust  enrichment')  to  which  a 
chapter  of  his  Province  had  already  made 
notable  contributions.  He  edited  the 
Cambridge  Law  Journal  for  twenty  years 
(1927^7). 

As  reader  in  common  law  to  the  Council 
of  Legal  Education  (1938-49)  Winfield 
lectured  also  at  the  Inns  of  Court.  He  was 
elected  an  honorary  bencher  of  the  Inner 
Temple  (1938),  served  on  the  Lord  Chan- 
cellor's Law  Revision  and  Law  Reporting 
committees,  was  for  many  years  a  borough 
magistrate  and  at  one  time  a  deputy 
county  court  judge.  He  took  silk  in  1943, 
the  year  in  which  his  tenure  of  the  Rouse 
Ball  chair  expired.  He  was  elected  F.B.A. 
in  1934,  was  an  honorary  LL.D.  of  Har- 
vard (1929),  Leeds  (1944),  and  London 
(1949),  and  was  president  of  the  Society  of 
Pubhc  Teachers  of  Law  for  1929-30,  and 
a  vice-president  of  the  Selden  Society 
(1944-6).  He  was  knighted  in  1949. 

Winfield  had  a  great  capacity  for 
friendship  and  hospitality,  delighting  in  the 
company  of  old  and  young  alike  and  ever 
ready  to  spend  time  and  trouble  on  their 
problems.  His  chief  recreation  was  lawn 
tennis,  in  which  he  had  gained  college 


1065 


Winfield 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


and  'Grasshopper'  university  colours  and 
had  captained  the  county  (1912-14). 
He  was  also  a  keen  supporter,  latterly 
president,  of  the  rugby  football  clubs  of 
his  college  and  university. 

He  married  in  1909  Helena  Chapman, 
daughter  of  William  Thomas  Scruby, 
estate  agent,  of  Cambridge.  He  died 
at  Cambridge  7  July  1953  and  she,  his 
devoted  partner,  in  the  following  year. 
They  had  two  sons  and  one  daughter. 
A  drawing  of  Winfield  by  John  Hookham 
(1945)  is  in  the  library  of  St.  John's 
College. 

[S.  J.  Bailey  in  Proceedings  of  the  British 
Academy,  vol.  xli,  1955;  Cambridge  Law 
Journal,  1954;  private  information;  personal 
knowledge.]  S.  J.  Bailey. 

WINGATE,  Sir  (FRANCIS)  REGI- 
NALD, first  baronet  (1861-1953),  soldier 
and  governor-general  of  the  Sudan,  was 
born  at  Port  Glasgow  in  Renfrewshire  25 
June  1861,  the  seventh  son  and  youngest 
of  the  eleven  children  of  Andrew  Wingate, 
textile  merchant,  and  his  wife,  Elizabeth, 
daughter  of  Richard  Turner,  of  Hammer- 
smith, county  Dublin.  He  was  a  cousin  of 
the  father  of  Orde  Wingate  [q.v.].  In  1862 
his  father  died  and  the  family  moved  to 
Jersey  where  living  was  cheap. 

Wingate  went  to  St.  James'  Collegiate 
School  where  he  showed  'determination 
aqd  initiative',  and  in  December  1878 
entered  the  Royal  Military  Academy, 
Woolwich.  He  passed  out  tenth  in  1880 
and  was  gazetted  as  second  lieutenant 
in  the  Royal  Artillery.  He  was  posted  to 
India  but  soon  after  his  arrival  his  battery 
was  sent  to  Aden.  There  he  studied 
Arabic,  later  becoming  an  expert.  In  June 
1883  he  joined  the  reorganized  Egyptian 
Army. 

Before  General  Gordon  [q.v.]  left 
Cairo  for  the  last  time  in  1884  Wingate 
had  been  appointed  aide-de-camp  to 
Sir  Evelyn  Wood  [q.v.],  sirdar  of  the 
Egyptian  Army.  He  assisted  in  the 
preparations  for  the  Gordon  reUef  expe- 
dition and  took  part  in  it  with  distinction ; 
he  was  mentioned  in  dispatches  and 
received  three  decorations.  But  Gordon's 
death  and  the  consequent  withdrawal 
of  the  troops  put  an  end  to  Wingate's 
active  service.  He  was  appointed  assistant 
miUtary  secretary  to  the  sirdar;  shortly 
afterwards  assistant  adjutant-general ; 
then  in  1889  director  of  military  intelli- 
gence with  responsibihty  for  gathering 
information  of  every  kind  from  the  Sudan. 
His   book   Mahdiism   and  the   Egyptian 


Sudan  (1891)  and  the  accounts  of  Father 
Ohrwalder's  and  R.  C.  Slatin  Pasha's 
experiences  as  prisoners  of  the  Mahdi, 
which  he  translated  and  edited,  bear 
witness  to  his  profound  knowledge  of  the 
Sudan. 

His  intelligence  system  was  to  prove 
its  value  when  in  1895  the  reoccupation 
of  the  Sudan  was  begun  under  Sir  H.  H. 
(later  Earl)  Kitchener  [q.v.].  Dongola 
Province  was  occupied  without  difficulty 
in  1896  and  the  successful  battles  of  the 
Atbara  and  Omdurman  followed  in  1898. 
The  Khalifa's  power  was  broken  and  a 
year  later  a  force  under  Wingate  brought 
him  to  battle  and  he  was  killed  at  Debei- 
kerat. 

In  late  1899  Wingate  succeeded  Kitch- 
ener as  governor-general  of  the  Sudan 
and  as  sirdar  and  during  the  next  seven- 
teen years  Wingate  brought  the  country 
from  anarchy  to  stable  and  progres- 
sive government.  Slave  raiding  and  trading 
were  abolished ;  courts  of  justice  and  the 
rule  of  law  were  established ;  communica- 
tions (railways,  steamer  services  on  the 
Nile,  posts  and  telegraphs)  were  opened 
up  and  the  various  departments  of  a  mod- 
ern state  were  founded.  An  administrative 
machine  was  created,  whereby  a  chain  of 
authority  ran  from  the  governor-general  to 
the  district  officers  in  the  most  remote 
parts  of  the  country.  Economic  progress 
was  encouraged  and  experiments  in  cotton 
growing  led  ultimately  to  the  vast  Gezira 
irrigation  scheme.  This  project  Wingate 
sponsored  wholeheartedly  and  in  1913  he 
gained  the  support  of  Lloyd  George,  then 
chancellor  of  the  Exchequer.  Wingate  pre- 
sided over  all  this  creative  work  and  chose 
good  subordinates  in  Slatin,  (Sir)  Edgar 
Bonham-Carter  [q.v.],  (Sir)  James  Currie 
[q.v.],  and  (Sir)  Edgar  Bernard.  By  con- 
stant touring  and  inspection  he  encouraged 
his  officials,  winning  their  sincere  respect 
and  the  affectionate  nickname  of  'Master'. 
He  laid  the  foundations  of  an  administra- 
tion which  in  later  years  won  much  praise 
for  its  efficiency,  humanity,  and  progres- 
sive ideals. 

When  war  came  in  1914  it  was  doubtful 
whether  the  Sudan  peoples  would  remain 
loyal  to  the  British  or  side  with  Turkey 
as  a  Moslem  power,  but  headed  by  their 
civil  and  religious  leaders  they  remained 
unaffected,  except  for  the  Sultanate  of 
Darfur,  which  Wingate  occupied  in  1916 
after  a  short  and  well-planned  operation. 
Lord  Cromer  [q.v.]  wrote  to  Wingate  to 
say,  'It  is  to  my  mind  the  most  remarkable 
compliment  that  could  possibly  be  paid  to 


1066 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Witt 


British  rule  that  the  Sudan  should  have 
remained  quiet:  and  this  is  mainly  due  to 
your  wise  government.' 

The  Arab  revolt  in  the  Hejaz  gave 
Wingate  other  problems  and  he  carefully 
fostered  the  strength  of  Sharif  Hussain 
with  money,  food,  and  men  in  conditions 
of  considerable  difficulty  and  uncertainty ; 
work  he  was  able  to  continue  when 
in  January  1917  he  became  high  com- 
missioner in  Egypt. 

This  was  the  most  difficult  and  unhappy 
part  of  Wingate's  career.  As  a  British 
base,  Egypt  was  full  of  British  troops  to 
whom  the  delicacy  of  the  constitutional 
position  was  unknown;  for  the  civil 
population  supplies  were  short,  and  the 
requisitioning  of  animals  and  foodstuffs 
upset  the  peasant  population;  con- 
scription was  imposed  to  provide  labour 
for  the  army  and  in  spite  of  Wingate's 
efforts  to  ensure  honest  dealing,  there 
was  much  discontent. 

The  Sultan  and  his  ministers,  Uke  all 
Egyptians,  wanted  self-government,  and 
were  under  some  pressure  from  the 
extremists.  Wingate  foresaw  and  con- 
tinually warned  the  British  Government 
that  when  peace  came  relations  between 
Britain  and  Egypt  would  deteriorate. 
The  Anglo-French  declaration,  promising 
self-determination  to  the  Arabs,  who  had 
been  freed  from  Turkish  rule,  brought 
things  to  a  head  in  November  1918. 

The  British  Government  were  too 
occupied  with  Europe  and  the  start  of 
the  peace  conference  to  heed  Wingate's 
warnings,  and  in  January  1919  Wingate 
went  to  Paris  and  London  to  persuade 
the  British  ministers  to  receive  an 
Egyptian  delegation.  Lord  Curzon  [q.v.], 
however,  was  adamant  in  refusing  and 
his  telegram  to  Cairo  was  followed  by  the 
immediate  resignation  of  the  Egyptian 
Government:  agitation,  disorder,  and  the 
death  of  Europeans  and  British  officers 
resulted,  and  for  a  time  law  and  order 
were  completely  overthrown.  Although 
Wingate  had  given  correct  advice  and 
this  had  been  ignored,  he  clearly  could 
no  longer  represent  the  British  Govern- 
ment in  Egypt,  and  he  did  not  return. 
Lord  AUenby  [q.v.]  was  appointed  in  his 
place  with  instructions  to  carry  out  a 
conciliatory  policy  on  the  lines  of  Win- 
gate's previous  recommendations,  and 
Wingate  was  allowed  to  bear  the  blame 
for  the  Government's  failure  to  take 
his  advice  until  forced  to  do  so  by  blood- 
shed and  disaster. 

Wingate,  who  had  reached  the  rank 


of  general,  wa&  never  again  employed 
and  henceforth  occupied  himself  in  other 
ways.  A  director  of  various  companies, 
colonel  commandant  of  the  Royal  Artil- 
lery, a  governor  of  the  Gordon  College 
in  Khartoum,  and  president  of  several 
local  organizations  at  his  home  at  Dunbar, 
he  led  a  long  and  useful  life.  He  married 
in  1888  Catherine  Leslie  Bundle,  sister 
of  a  brother  officer  (Sir)  (H.  M.)  Leslie 
Bundle  [q.v.].  She  was  his  devoted  partner 
and  helper  and  Wingate  never  recovered 
from  her  death  in  1946.  He  died  in  his 
ninety-second  year  at  Dunbar  28  January 
1953.  He  had  three  sons  and  a  daughter; 
the  eldest  son,  Ronald  Evelyn  Leslie 
(born  1889),  who  contributes  to  this 
Supplement,  succeeded  his  father,  but  the 
second  died  an  infant  and  the  third  was 
killed  in  action  in  1918. 

Wingate  was  appointed  K.C.M.G. 
(1898),  K.C.B.  (1900),  G.C.V.O.  (1912), 
G.C.B.  (1914),  G.B.E.  (1918),  and  created 
a  baronet  in  1920.  He  was  appointed  to 
the  D.S.O.  in  1889. 

A  cartoon  by  *Spy'  was  published  in 
Vanity  Fair  in  1897;  and  a  portrait  by 
by  W.  W.  Ouless  was  presented  to  the 
borough  council  of  Dunbar. 

[Sir  Ronald  Wingate,  Wingate  of  the  Sudan, 
1955 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

J.    W.    ROBEBTSON. 

WITT,  Sir  ROBERT  CLERMONT 
(1872-1952),  art  collector,  was  bom  in 
London  16  January  1872,  the  eldest  of 
the  six  children  of  Gustavus  Andrew 
Witt,  merchant,  and  his  wife,  Helene  de 
Clermont.  He  was  educated  at  Clifton 
and  New  College,  Oxford,  where  he 
obtained  a  second  in  history  in  1894; 
he  subsequently  became  an  honorary 
fellow.  He  served  in  the  Matabele  war  in 
1896  and  acted  as  war  correspondent  with 
Cecil  Rhodes  [q.v.].  Returning  to  London 
he  qualified  as  a  solicitor  and  eventually 
became  senior  partner  in  the  firm  of 
Stephenson,  Harwood  and  Tatham,  making 
it  one  of  the  most  prominent  firms  of 
solicitors  in  London. 

Witt  was  a  man  of  great  energy  who 
contrived  to  combine  with  his  professional 
career  a  lifetime  of  intense  activity  in 
the  cause  of  art  which  was  his  governing 
passion.  He  made  no  claim  to  be  an 
authoritative  critic,  but  as  early  as  1902 
he  published  How  to  Look  at  Pictures 
which  was  several  times  reprinted  during 
his  lifetime  and  ranks  as  a  minor  classic 
in  criticism.  In  1903  he  co-operated  with 
Lord  Balcarres  (afterwards  the  Earl  of 


1067 


Witt 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


Crawford),  (Sir)  Claude  Phillips,  D.  S.  Mac- 
Coll,  and  Roger  Fry  [qq.v.]  in  founding  the 
National  Art-Collections  Fiind.  He  was  the 
first  honorary  secretary  of  the  Fund  (1903- 
20),  then  chairman  (1920-45),  and  saw  it 
grow  into  an  organization  of  great  national 
importance.  When  he  retired  from  the 
chairmanship  in  1945  he  was  made  its  first 
president  and  in  his  honour  a  special  ex- 
hibition of  the  principal  acquisitions  made 
for  the  nation  by  the  Fund  was  organized 
at  the  National  Gallery.  Witt  was  also  a 
trustee  of  the  National  Gallery  (1916-23, 
1924-31,  1933-40);  trustee  of  the  Tate 
Gallery  (1916-31) ;  and  of  the  Watts  Gal- 
lery, Compton.  In  1932  he  collaborated 
with  Samuel  Courtauld  and  Lord  Lee  of 
Fareham  [qq.v.]  in  founding  the  Courtauld 
Institute  of  Art  and  remained  a  member 
of  its  conunittee  of  management  until  his 
death. 

When  still  undergraduates  both  Witt 
and  his  future  wife  began  collecting 
photographs  and  reproductions,  a  hobby 
which  later  led  during  their  long  married 
life  to  the  formation  of  the  vast  Witt 
library  of  photographs  numbering  three- 
quarters  of  a  million.  In  1944  Witt 
executed  a  deed  of  gift  making  over  this 
Ubrary  to  the  Courtauld  Institute  but 
continued  to  administer  it  himself  at  his 
home  in  Portman  Square  where  he  had 
turned  his  spacious  house  into  a  refer- 
ence library;  all  the  walls  in  the  rooms, 
passages,  and  even  the  bedrooms  were 
crowded  with  shelves  containing  boxes 
of  photographs  always  readily  available 
to  students  and  collectors.  At  Witt's  death 
the  library  was  transferred  to  the  premises 
of  the  Institute  which  also  benefited  by 
the  bequest  of  his  large  collection  (4,000) 
of  Old  Master  drawings  planned  as 
a  complement  to  the  Library  of  Repro- 
ductions and  making  the  whole  'an 
incomparable  weapon  of  scholarship'. 
The  collection  has  since  been  extensively 
enlarged  through  a  fund  which  came  to 
the  Institute  as  his  residuary  legatee. 

Witt  published  a  catalogue  of  painters 
and  draughtsmen  represented  in  his 
library  in  1920  and  a  supplement  in  1925. 
His  conception  was  copied  abroad, 
notably  in  the  United  States  where  he 
personally  helped  Miss  Helen  Frick  to 
create  what  is  now  the  Frick  Library  of 
Reproductions  on  the  same  lines,  and  in 
Tokyo  by  Professor  Yukio  Yashiro. 

In  the  course  of  forming  his  library 
and  collection  Witt  acquired  an  encyclo- 
pedic knowledge  of  art  and  of  the  where- 
abouts  of  art  treasures  throughout  the 


world.  This  knowledge  he  placed  freely 
at  the  disposal  of  students  and  collectors, 
the  value  of  his  contribution  being  en- 
hanced by  his  quality  as  a  speaker  and 
lecturer.  An  excellent  talk  on  'The  Art  of 
Collecting'  was  reprinted  and  circulated 
to  the  ten  thousand  members  of  the 
National  Art-Collections  Fund.  He  was 
an  active  controversialist  on  art  subjects 
and  in  the  dispute  over  the  pictures 
of  Sir  Hugh  Lane  [q.v.]  his  solicitor's 
training  made  him  an  outspoken  defender 
of  the  strictly  legal  interpretation  of  the 
rival  claims  of  London  and  DubUn.  He 
played  a  prominent  part  in  the  organi- 
zation of  the  annual  winter  exhibitions 
of  foreign  art  at  Burlington  House  in  the 
thirties,  writing  the  introduction  to  the 
souvenir  catalogue  of  the  Italian  exhi- 
bition of  1930. 

Witt  found  time  to  show  himself  a 
devoted  son  of  his  school  and  college  and 
to  serve  as  the  vice-president  of  the 
Institute  of  Industrial  Psychology.  A  man 
of  spartan  habits,  he  never  wore  an  over- 
coat and  uncomplainingly  bore  many 
years  of  severe  arthritis  which  compelled 
him  to  use  crutches.  He  loved  young 
people  and  in  his  old  age  and  in  great 
pain  would  go  swimming  with  them  when 
on  holiday.  He  died  in  London  26  March 
1952,  retaining  to  the  end  his  interest 
and  vigour.  He  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in 
1918  and  knighted  in  1922. 

In  the  formation  of  his  vast  reference 
library  Witt  had  the  enthusiastic  help 
of  his  wife,  Mary  Helena,  daughter  of 
Charles  Henry  Marten,  stockbroker,  whom 
he  married  in  1899,  and  who  survived 
him  only  a  few  months.  Their  only  child, 
a  son,  John,  followed  his  father  as  senior 
partner  in  his  firm  of  solicitors  and  also 
on  the  board  of  the  trustees  of  the 
National  Gallery  of  which  he  was  chair- 
man when  the  arrangements  were  com- 
pleted with  the  Irish  Government  for 
the  exhibition  of  the  Hugh  Lane  pictures 
in  Dublin. 

A  presentation  portrait  of  Witt  by  Sir 
Oswald  Birley  is  in  the  Witt  Library  at 
the  Courtauld  Institute  where  there  is 
also  a  painting  by  T.  C.  Dugdale  of 
Witt  sitting  in  his  Ubrary  when  it  was 
in  his  home  in  Portman  Square. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
Alec  Martin. 

WITTGENSTEIN,  LUDWIG  JOSEF 
JOHANN  (1889-1951),  philosopher,  was 
born  in  Vienna  26  April  1889,  the 
youngest  in  a  family  of  eight  children. 


1068 


D.N.B.  1951-1906 


The  family  was  of  Jewish  origin.  Wittgen- 
stein's paternal  grandfather  had  moved 
from  Saxony  to  Austria;  his  father 
Karl  Wittgenstein,  was  prominent  in  the 
iron  and  steel  industry  of  the  Danubean 
monarchy.  Wittgenstein  was  educated  at 
home  until  his  fourteenth  year  when  he 
went  to  school  at  Linz  in  Upper  Austria. 
After  his  matriculation  in  1906  he  took  up 
mechanical  engineering  at  the  Technische 
Hochschule  in  Berlin-Charlottenburg.  In 
1908  he  moved  to  England  where  for  three 
years  he  was  a  research  student  in  the 
department  of  engineering  at  the  univer- 
sity of  Manchester.  His  early  interests 
were  in  aeronautics,  and  at  Manchester 
he  invented  a  jet  reaction  propeller  for 
aircraft.  It  seems  to  have  been  the  design 
of  this  propeller  which  stimulated  his 
interest  in  mathematics.  This  in  turn  led 
him  to  study  the  philosophical  founda- 
tions of  mathematics.  At  this  time  he 
read  Bertrand  (later  Earl)  Russell's  Prin- 
ciples of  Mathematics  (1903)  and  perhaps 
the  works  of  Frege.  Another  influence 
on  his  philosophic  development  was 
Schopenhauer. 

In  1911  Wittgenstein  changed  to  philo- 
sophy. It  may  have  been  on  Frege's 
advice  that  he  decided  to  go  to  Cam- 
bridge to  study  with  Russell.  He  cer- 
tainly met  Frege  at  about  this  time  and 
had  several  discussions  with  him.  Early 
in  1912  Wittgenstein  was  admitted  to 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  where  he 
spent  all  three  terms  of  1912  and  the  first 
two  terms  of  1913.  In  October  of  that 
year  he  settled  at  Skjolden  in  Sogn, 
Norway,  and  corresponded  with  Russell 
about  the  progress  of  his  work  in  logic. 

After  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914 
Wittgenstein  entered  the  Austrian  army 
as  a  volunteer.  He  fought  on  the  eastern 
and  southern  fronts  and  was  taken  prisoner 
by  the  Itahans  in  November  1918.  On  his 
release  in  August  of  the  following  year 
he  returned  to  Vienna  where  he  completed 
a  course  for  teachers.  During  the  war 
he  had  come  under  the  influence  of  the 
ethical  and  religious  writings  of  Tolstoy. 
He  now  gave  away  the  great  fortune 
which  he  had  inherited  from  his  father 
and  henceforward  his  manner  of  life  was 
characterized  by  great  simplicity.  Until 
1926  he  worked  as  a  schoolmaster  in 
various  remote  villages  in  Lower  Austria, 
and  from  1926  to  1928  as  an  architect  in 
Vienna. 

In  1918  Wittgenstein  had  finished  his 
Logisch-Philosophische  Abhandlung,  the 
work  which  has  become  more  widely  known 


Wittgenstein 

under  the  title  Tractatus  Logico-Phild- 
sophicus.  It  first  appeared  in  Ostwald's 
Annalen  der  Naturphilosophie  in  1921  and 
was  published  in  England  in  1922,  with 
a  translation  (by  C.  K.  Ogden  (q.v.]  with 
the  help  of  F.  P.  Ramsey)  running 
parallel  to  the  original  text.  Save  for  a 
short  paper,  *Some  Remarks  on  Logical 
Form',  in  the  supplementary  volume  to 
the  Proceedings  of  the  Aristotelian  Society 
for  the  year  1929,  the  Tractatus  was  the 
only  work  which  Wittgenstein  published 
in  his  lifetime.  During  his  years  as  a 
schoolmaster  and  an  architect,  he  did 
not  actively  engage  in  philosophical 
research.  He  had,  however,  some  contact 
with  F.  P.  Ramsey  of  Cambridge  and 
with  Moritz  Schlick  and  Priedrich  Wais- 
mann  in  Vienna.  Through  the  two  latter, 
Wittgenstein  came  to  exercise  a  con- 
siderable influence  on  the  so-called  Vienna 
Circle,  from  which  sprang  the  movement 
in  contemporary  thought  known  as  logical 
positivism. 

Early  in  1929  Wittgenstein  returned 
to  Cambridge  to  take  up  research  in 
philosophy.  In  June  of  the  same  year 
he  obtained  his  Ph.D.,  submitting  the 
Tractatus  as  a  thesis.  In  1980  he  was  made 
a  fellow  of  Trinity  College,  under  Title  B, 
a  singular  honour.  When  the  fellowship 
expired  in  1936,  Wittgenstein  left  Cam- 
bridge and  withdrew  for  nearly  a  year  to 
his  hut  near  Skjolden  in  Norway.  There 
he  began  writing  his  Philosophical  Investi- 
gations. He  returned  to  Cambridge  in 
1937  and  two  years  later  succeeded 
G.  E.  Moore  [q.v.]  in  the  chair  of  philo- 
sophy. He  had  been  a  probationary 
faculty  lecturer  from  1930  to  1938,  an 
assistant  faculty  lecturer  from  1933  to 
1935,  and  had  lectured  without  holding 
a  staff  appointment  in  1936,  1938,  and 
1939.  In  the  academic  year  1983-4  he 
dictated,  in  the  course  of  his  lectures,  the 
so-called  'Blue  Book',  which  signalized 
a  radical  change  in  his  thinking.  The 
'Brown  Book',  dictated  in  1935,  antici- 
pates leading  ideas  of  the  Philosophical 
Investigations. 

Wittgenstein's  teaching  was  interrupted 
during  part  of  the  war  of  1939-45  when 
he  took  up  voluntary  service,  first  as  a 
porter  in  Guy's  Hospital,  and  later  as  an 
assistant  in  a  medical  laboratory  at  New- 
castle. In  the  Easter  term  of  1947  he  gave 
his  last  lectures  at  Cambridge,  and  from 
the  end  of  the  year  he  resigned  his 
professorship.  He  lived  in  Ireland  until 
the  spring  of  1949  when  he  completed 
the    second    part    of    his    Philosophical 


1069 


Wittgenstein 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Investigations.  During  the  last  two  years 
of  his  life  he  was  severely  ill  and  he 
died  at  Cambridge  29  April  1951.  He 
was  unmarried. 

Although  Wittgenstein  liyed  the  major 
part  of  his  adult  life  in  England — he  became 
a  naturalized  subject  in  1938 — he  continued 
to  write  his  thoughts  in  German.  As  a 
master  of  German  prose  he  has  few  equals. 
His  style  bears  a  striking  resemblance 
to  some  writers,  such  as  Lichtenberg  and 
Lessing,  among  the  German  humanists 
of  the  late  eighteenth  and  early  nineteenth 
centuries,  the  period  most  congenial  to 
his  own  tastes  in  literature  and  the  arts. 

The  Philosophical  Investigations  were 
published  in  1953  and  Remarks  on  the 
Foundations  of  Mathematics  (written  in 
1938-44)  in  1956,  both  translated  by 
Miss  G.  E.  M.  Anscombe.  Of  considerable 
interest  are  some  writings  anterior  to  the 
'Blue  Book'.  They  show  Wittgenstein's 
thoughts  in  a  transitional  stage  between 
the  early  Tractatus  and  the  later  Investi- 
gations. 

Wittgenstein's  Tractatus  grew  out  of 
problems  of  logic  which  had  occupied 
Frege  and  Russell.  The  earliest  of  its  lead- 
ing ideas  is  that  logical  (formal,  necessary) 
truths  are  tautologies.  A  tautology  is  a  kind 
of  truth-function  which  has  the  peculiar 
property  that  the  function  is  a  true 
proposition,  independently  of  whether  its 
arguments  are  true  or  false  propositions. 
The  theory  of  truth-functions  forms  the 
basis  of  much  development  in  modern 
logic.  Wittgenstein's  contributions  to  this 
theory  are  considerable,  and  his  use  of  it  to 
clarify  the  notion  of  logical  truth  is,  even 
if  not  conclusive,  a  milestone  in  the  philo- 
sophy of  logic. 

The  most  consequential  of  Wittgen- 
stein's earlier  views  is  perhaps  his  picture- 
theory  of  language.  According  to  it,  any 
significant  proposition  can  be  analysed 
into  parts  which  correspond  to  elements 
in  reaUty.  The  simple  parts  of  propositions 
he  called  'names'  and  their  counterparts 
in  the  world  'things'.  The  way  in  which 
the  parts  of  the  proposition  are  com- 
bined— the  structure  of  the  proposition 
— depicts  a  possible  combination  of 
elements  in  reality,  a  possible  'state 
of  affairs'.  The  possibility  of  this  combi- 
nation Wittgenstein  calls  a  logical  form. 
Language  thus  has  its  logical  form  in 
common  with  reality. 

The  conception  of  language  as  a  picture 
has  as  a  consequence  an  interesting  theory 
of  the  limits  of  linguistic  expression.  The 
logical  form  of  a  proposition  cannot  be 


pictured.  Which  form  it  is  shows  itself  to 
the  understanding  but  cannot  be  said. 
It  is  a  further  consequence  of  this  distinc- 
tion between  saying  and  showing,  that 
there  are  no  propositions  of  philosophy. 
Philosophy,  Wittgenstein  contends,  is  an 
activity  and  not  a  doctrine.  This  activity 
consists  in  displaying  the  limits  of  the 
thinkable.  The  solution  to  the  problems  of 
philosophy  is  the  insight  that,  in  trying  to 
articulate  an  answer  to  them,  we  make  the 
self-frustrating  effort  to  say  the  unsayable. 

Wittgenstein's  idea  that  all  meaningful 
propositions  are  truth-functions  of  some 
elementary  propositions  which  stand  in 
a  picturing  relation  to  reality  was  inter- 
preted by  the  logical  positivists  as 
asserting  a  dependence  of  meaning  upon 
verifiability  through  sense-experience. 
(The  Veriflcationist  thesis).  This  inter- 
pretation has  no  ground  in  Wittgenstein's 
book.  It  is  worth  noticing  that  the 
positivists'  monistic  conception  of  the 
world  as  a  logical  unity  of  experiential 
data  and  constructions  out  of  them  is 
at  explicit  variance  with  Wittgenstein's 
view  of  the  anumerical  multipUcity  of 
logical  forms. 

In  his  later  writings  Wittgenstein 
abandoned  the  picture-theory  of  language, 
the  view  that  all  meaningful  propositions 
are  truth-functions  of  elementary  pro- 
positions, and  the  doctrine  of  the  unsayable. 
But  the  problem  of  meaning,  of  the 
'possibility  of  language',  remains  central 
to  his  later  thinking  too.  And  so  also  the 
view  that  philosophy  is,  in  some  sense,  a 
clarification  of  thought  through  a  critique 
of  language  and  not  a  theory  about  the 
foundations  of  knowledge  or  the  nature  of 
reality. 

Typical  of  the  later  Wittgenstein's 
thinking  is  the  discussion  of  language  in 
the  Philosophical  Investigations.  Instead 
of  raising  the  question  of  the  nature 
and  general  form  of  propositions,  as  he 
did  in  the  Tractatus,  Wittgenstein  con- 
siders simplified  situations,  language- 
games,  in  which  the  actual  working  of 
language  is  clearly  displayed,  perspicuous 
('ubersichtlich').  When  a  great  variety 
of  such  language-games  are  presented, 
it  becomes  clear  that  these  games  have  no 
features  in  common  which  characterize 
them  as  language ;  that  there  is  no  general 
form  of  proposition  or  'essence'  of  sym- 
bolism. The  mutual  interrelatedness  of  the 
various  language-games,  which  make  up 
all  the  variety  of  Hnguistic  usage,  is  a 
family-resemblance,  where  any  member 
of  the  family-tree  resembles  some  other 


1070 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Wolff 


member,  but  where  there  is  no  one 
pervading  feature  (or  combination  of 
features)  which  marks  them  as  members 
of  the  same  family. 

Thus  the  philosopher's  quest  for 
essences  is  an  uneasiness  of  the  mind 
which  is  brought  to  rest  by  a  perspicuous 
presentation  of  the  case.  The  method  of 
philosophy  is  strictly  descriptive.  And  the 
philosophic  achievement  is  not  an  answer 
to  a  question,  but  the  dropping  of  a 
question  which  rested  on  a  misunder- 
standing of  our  ordinary  use  of  words. 

Wittgenstein's  later  thinking  has  exer- 
cised an  influence  on  contemporary 
thought  comparable  to  the  influence  of 
the  Tractatus  on  the  teaching  of  the  logical 
positivists.  Most  of  what  is  known 
under  the  names  of  'analytic',  Hnguistic', 
or  'semantic'  philosophy  is  inspired, 
directly  or  indirectly,  by  Wittgenstein's 
teaching  at  Cambridge  in  the  thirties 
and  forties  or  by  his  published  work. 
To  what  extent  contemporary  philo- 
sophical analysis  can  be  regarded  as 
illustrative  of  Wittgenstein's  way  of 
thinking  is,  however,  uncertain.  Wittgen- 
stein tended  to  repudiate  the  results  of 
his  own  influence  and  was  probably  justi- 
fied in  thinking  that  his  ideas  were  usu- 
ally misunderstood  and  distorted  even  by 
those  who  professed  to  be  his  disciples. 

Wittgenstein  was  undoubtedly  a  philo- 
sopher of  rare  genius  and  originality. 
He  questioned  the  nature  of  philosophy 
itself  and  drew  a  line  of  demarcation 
between  philosophy  and  the  sciences 
which  constitutes  a  lasting  clarification 
of  the  possibilities  and  limitations  of  both 
types  of  inquiry.  He  was  a  man  of  force- 
ful and  unusual  personality,  who  could 
not  fail  to  make  an  impression  upon 
everyone  who  knew  him.  His  life  was 
an  unending  journey  in  search  of  truth. 
Doubt  was  the  moving  force  within  him, 
and  discussion  one  of  his  chief  means  of 
travel.  It  was  in  the  nature  both  of  his 
character  and  of  his  philosophy  to  raise 
questions  rather  than  to  answer  them. 
He  seldom  looked  back  on  his  earlier 
views,  and  when  he  did  so  it  was  usually 
to  repudiate  them. 

[G.  H.  von  Wright :  'Ludwig  Wittgenstein, 
a  Biographical  Sketch',  Philosophical  Review, 
vol.  Ixiv,  1955 ;  Norman  Malcolm,  Ludwig 
Wittgenstein,  a  Memoir,  with  a  biographical 
sketch  by  G.  H.  von  Wright,  1958. J 

G.  H.  VON  Wright. 

WOLFF,        MARTIN       (1872-1953), 
academic  lawyer,  was  born  in  Berlin  26 


September  1872,  the  elder  child  and  only 
son  of  Wilhelm  Wolff,  banker,  and  his 
wife,  Selma  Ball.  After  studying  under 
Heinrich  Brunner  and  Otto  Gierke,  he 
became  in  1900  a  Privatdozent  in  the  Berlin 
faculty  of  law  and  in  1903  an  extra- 
ordinary professor;  in  1914  he  was  called 
to  Marburg  as  an  ordinary  professor; 
in  1918  to  Bonn ;  and  finally  in  1922  back 
to  Berlin,  where  he  taught  until  1935 
when,  as  a  Jew,  he  was  ousted  by  the 
Nazis.  In  1938,  on  the  invitation  of  All 
Souls  College,  Oxford,  he  emigrated  to 
England  where  he  was  naturalized  in 
1945. 

Trained  in  the  German  universities  at 
a  period  when  the  best  energies  of  aca- 
demic lawyers  were  bent  towards  the 
completion  of  the  German  Civil  Code, 
it  fell  to  Wolff  more  than  anyone  else 
to  explain  that  part  of  the  Code  which 
enacted  the  law  of  property,  to  place 
it  in  its  historical  setting  and  to  draw  out 
its  consequences.  This  he  did  in  lectures 
which  have  become  a  legend  among 
German  lawyers  and  above  all,  in  1910-12, 
in  the  relevant  parts  of  Enneccerus-Kipp- 
Wolff,  Lehrbuch  des  BUrgerlichen  Rechts, 
a  book  of  the  highest  authority  and 
influence  which  in  his  lifetime  ran  into 
nine  editions  and  which  the  Nazis  found 
no  way  of  superseding.  All  German  private 
law,  indeed,  fell  within  his  province, 
and  he  wrote  extensively  on  it,  but  more 
significant  for  his  later  career  was  his 
interest  in  private  international  law  and 
comparative  law,  in  both  of  which  he 
acquired  an  audience  extending  far 
beyond  Germany.  He  wrote  a  succinct 
but  highly  authoritative  work  on  the 
former  subject  as  applied  in  Germany 
and  he  was  one  of  the  most  active  partici- 
pants in  the  work  of  the  great  Kaiser 
Wilhelm  Institute  for  Comparative  Law. 
He  was  one  of  the  editors  of  the  Zeitschrift 
fUr  ausldndisches  und  Internationales  Pri- 
vatrecht  and  of  the  Rechtsvergleichendes 
Handworterbuch  fiir  das  Zivil-  und  Handds- 
recht,  the  nearest  thing  that  has  yet 
appeared  to  a  comprehensive  encyclo- 
pedia of  comparative  private  law.  He 
also  lectured  regularly  on  French  civil 
law. 

In  England  Wolff  was  financially 
assisted  by  AU  Souls  College  in  preparing 
a  book  on  English  Private  International 
Law,  which  appeared  in  1945  and  rapidly 
established  itself  as  an  important  autho- 
rity. He  made  a  special  contribution  to 
the  subject  by  introducing  a  comparative 
element  and  used  foreign  experience  to 


1071 


Wolff 


X>.N.B.  Id51-1060 


suggest  the  solution  of  problems  which 
had  not  hitherto  come  before  the  courts ; 
but  so  accurate  was  his  exposition  of 
English  law  and  so  complete  his  familia- 
rity with  the  English  point  of  view  that 
reviewers  disagreed  with  him  as  though 
he  were  one  of  themselves  and  not  an 
intruder  from  abroad.  A  second  edition 
appeared  in  1950.  He  also  found  time  in 
England  to  contribute  a  long  account  of 
French  Private  Law  to  the  new  edition 
of  Chambers's  Encyclopaedia  and  a 
brilliant  summary  of  Commercial  Law  to 
the  Manual  of  German  Law  published 
under  the  auspices  of  the  Foreign  Office. 
He  saw  appear  at  last,  in  1950-52,  a  three- 
volume  work  to  which  he  had  made  large 
contributions,  the  TraitS  de  droit  compart 
by  Arminjon,  Nolde,  and  Wolff. 

Wolff's  greatest  strength  probably  lay 
in  his  lecturing,  which  was  characterized 
by  extreme  lucidity,  a  wonderful  gift  for 
making  abstract  principles  live  by  an 
apt  choice  of  examples,  and  a  patently 
sincere  pursuit  of  justice.  In  the  largest 
hall  of  Berlin  University,  holding  between 
one  and  two  thousand  students,  this  tiny 
man  with  his  light  but  clear  voice  com- 
manded absolute  silence  by  the  sheer 
force  of  his  personality,  except  when  some 
witticism  dissolved  his  audience  into 
laughter.  Moreover,  although  he  never 
sought  to  dominate  his  more  intimate 
pupils  but  strove  to  make  of  them 
independent  thinkers,  most  if  not  all  of 
them  remained  immune  from  Nazi 
influence. 

In  Oxford  Wolff  gave  only  one  lecture, 
a  famous  and  classical  one  on  'The  Nature 
of  Legal  Persons' ;  he  did,  however,  attend 
regularly  seminars  on  comparative  law 
and  so  came  into  contact  with  quite  a 
number  of  undergraduates,  who  learnt 
to  know  his  power  as  a  teacher.  He 
enjoyed  these  opportunities  of  meeting 
young  men  until  his  health  began  to  fail 
during  the  last  year  or  two  of  his  life. 
Since  he  made  no  attempt  to  put  himself 
forward,  in  the  impropitious  conditions 
of  the  war  and  the  immediate  post-war 
period  he  did  not  become  so  rapidly  known 
to  his  fellow  lawyers,  although  he  occa- 
sionally acted  as  examiner  of  a  thesis. 
But  in  the  end  he  became  well  known  and 
when  he  reached  the  age  of  eighty  the 
university  conferred  on  him  the  honorary 
degree,  rarely  given  to  academic  lawyers, 
of  D.C.L.  Scholars  from  different  countries 
combined  to  offer  him  a  Festschrift  which 
contains  a  full  bibliography  of  his  writ- 
ings, and  the  Bundesrepublik  conferred 


on  him  the  Grosser  Verdienstkreuz.  He 
held  honorary  doctorates  from  Marbiu-g 
and  Thessaloniki. 

Wolff  united  a  remarkably  sweet  and 
gentle  disposition  to  a  sharp  and  pungent 
wit  and  a  clear  insight  into  his  own 
and  other  people's  abilities  and  character. 
Those  qualities,  together  with  a  wide 
range  of  interests,  of  which  perhaps  the 
most  vital  was  in  the  theory  and  practice 
of  music,  made  him  excellent  company. 
One  of  the  greatest  jurists  of  his  age,  he 
influenced  deeply  a  whole  generation  of 
pupils  and  colleagues. 

In  1906  Wolff  married  Marguerite, 
daughter  of  Hermann  Jolowicz,  silk 
merchant  in  London,  and  sister  of  H.  F. 
Jolowicz  [q.v.].  They  had  two  sons. 
He  died  in  London  20  July  1953. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 
F.  H.  Lawson. 

WOOD,  EDWARD  FREDERICK 
LINDLEY,  first  Earl  of  Halifax  (1881- 
1959),  statesman,  was  born  at  Powderham 
Castle,  Devon,  the  home  of  his  maternal 
grandfather,  16  April  1881.  He  was  the 
fourth  son  and  youngest  of  the  six  children 
of  Charles  Lindley  Wood,  later  second  Vis- 
count Halifax  [q.v.],  by  his  wife.  Lady 
Agnes  Elizabeth  Courtenay,  only  daughter 
of  the  eleventh  Earl  of  Devon  [q.v.].  Born 
with  an  atrophied  left  arm  which  had  no 
hand,  he  shrugged  off  his  disability  even 
as  a  child ;  the  Christian  belief  which  was 
the  passion  of  his  father's  life  and  which 
permeated  his  own  upbringing  precluded 
self-pity.  He  quickly  learned  to  shoot  and 
ride  to  hounds,  and  as  heir  to  great  estates 
in  Yorkshire,  his  three  brothers  having 
died  young  while  he  himself  was  between 
the  ages  of  four  and  nine,  was  able  to  share 
without  embarrassment  the  traditional 
pursuits  of  a  countryman. 

He  was  educated  at  Eton  and  Christ 
Church,  Oxford,  where  in  1903  he  took  a 
first  class  in  history  followed  by  a  fellow- 
ship at  All  Souls.  He  taught  history, 
hunted  twice  a  week,  travelled  round  the 
world,  and  wrote  a  biography  of-  John 
Keble  (1909)  reflecting  the  Anglo-Catholic 
faith  he  shared  with  his  father.  In  1909  his 
marriage  to  Lady  Dorothy  Evelyn  Augusta 
Onslow,  younger  daughter  of  the  fourth 
Earl  of  Onslow  [q.v.],  brought  lasting  hap- 
piness and  a  family  of  three  sons,  and  twin 
daughters  only  one  of  whom  survived.  The 
loyalty  which  at  his  wedding  burdened 
him  with  a  solid  gold  cup  nearly  two  feet 
high  as  a  tribute  from  the  tenantry  helped 
to  ensure  his  election  in  January  1910  as 


1072 


D.N.B.  1951>-19«0 


Wood 


Conservative  member  of  Parliament  for 
Ripon.  He  held  the  seat  in  December,  and 
thereafter  was  returned  unopposed  untU 
created  a  peer  in  1925. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  Wood 
was  serving  as  a  yeomanry  officer  in  the 
Yorkshire  Dragoons.  The  failure  of  the 
allied  armies  to  pierce  the  western  front 
denied  his  regiment  the  mobile  role  of 
their  hopes,  confining  them  instead  to 
a  monotonous  routine  behind  the  Unes. 
Wood  was  mentioned  in  dispatches  in 
January  1917  and  later  that  year  returned 
to  England  at  the  invitation  of  Sir 
Auckland  (later  Lord)  Geddes  [q.v.]  to 
(Serve  for  the  rest  of  the  war  as  an  assis- 
tant secretary  in  the  Ministry  of  National 
Service.  In  1920,  when  not  yet  forty, 
he  accepted  the  governor-generalship  of 
South  Africa  but  was  obliged  to  with- 
draw when  the  Union  expressed  a  pre- 
ference for  a  man  of  cabinet  rank  or  a 
member  of  the  royal  family.  So  he  re- 
mained in  the  Commons  where,  although 
neither  fluent  nor  brilliant,  his  thought- 
ful contributions  to  debate  were  heard 
with  attention.  His  first  ministerial 
office,  as  under-secretary  for  the  colonies, 
began  bleakly  in  April  1921.  The  secre- 
tary of  state,  (Sir)  Winston  Churchill, 
had  wanted  someone  else  and  being  much 
preoccupied  with  Middle  Eastern  prob- 
lems made  no  time  to  receive  him.  The 
new  under-secretary  eventually  forced 
his  way  into  his  chief's  office,  where  a 
brisk  exchange  laid  the  foundations  of 
co-operation.  On  a  mission  to  the  West 
Indies  Wood  studied  the  economics  of 
sugar  and  demands  for  constitutional 
reform. 

Wood  felt  an  aloof  distaste  for  the  ways 
by  which  Lloyd  George  attempted  to  hold 
together  his  uneasy  coalition.  Character- 
istically, he  had  objected  less  to  the 
activities  of'  the  'Black  and  Tans'  in 
Ireland  than  to  the  Government's  eva- 
siveness on  the  subject.  He  was  also 
troubled  by  allegations  that  honours 
were  being  sold.  He  did  not  hesitate  to 
vote  for  the  downfall  of  Lloyd  George 
in  October  1922.  In  the  new  adminis- 
tration of  Bonar  Law  he  entered  the 
Cabinet  for  the  first  time,  as  president 
of  the  Board  of  Education,  and  was 
sworn  of  the  Privy  Council.  He  found 
the  work  uncongenial,  lacked  interest  in 
educational  problems,  and  could  not  hope 
to  inspire  a  department  which  was  being 
financially  starved;  but  he  remained 
until  the  fall  of  Baldwin's  government  in 
Januaiy  1924.  He  was  equally  ineffective 


as  minister  of  agriculture  in  Baldwin's 
second  administration.  However  rooted 
his  personal  belief  in  the  virtues  of  the 
land,  he  accepted  an  official  policy  that 
shrank  from  the  expense  of  sustaining 
an  enfeebled  industry.  He  was  released 
from  frustration  by  his  appointment  in 
November  1925  as  governor-general  and 
viceroy  of  India,  his  name  having  been 
suggested  to  Baldwin  by  King  George  V. 

For  a  man  without  overt  ambition, 
Wood  had  risen  swiftly  to  high  office. 
Initially  he  owed  it  to  family.  His  grand- 
father, the  first  Viscount  Halifax  [q.v.], 
was  one  of  the  earliest  secretaries  of  state 
for  India  and  author  of  the  dispatch  recog- 
nizing British  responsibility  for  Indian 
education.  Yet  in  his  own  right  the  new 
viceroy  was  hardly  less  well  equipped 
than  his  predecessors.  Immensely  tall, 
with  a  fine  domed  head  and  the  face  of 
an  ascetic,  he  bore  himself  as  majestically 
as  Lord  Curzon  [q.v.],  and  if  intellectually 
he  could  not  quite  match  that  relent- 
lessly energetic  mind,  he  brought  a  calmer 
and  more  balanced  temperament  to  the 
rule  of  400  million  people.  Once  only  in 
five  years,  it  was  afterwards  recalled,  did 
he  lose  his  temper — at  the  disappearance  of 
a  disreputable  old  hat  to  which  he  was 
much  attached.  Lord  Irwin,  as.  he  was 
created  in  December  1925,  landed  at 
Bombay  on  Maundy  Thursday,  1  April 
1926.  His  aim,  he  told  one  of  his  staff 
in  June,  was  'to  keep  a  contented  India 
in  the  Commonwealth  twenty-five  years 
hence'.  A  few  weeks  later,  on  17  July, 
speaking  in  Simla  at  the  Chelmsford 
Club,  one  of  the  few  open  to  both  Euro- 
peans and  Indians,  he  set  the  tone  of  his 
viceroyalty.  In  phrases  of  burning  sin- 
cerity which  accorded  with  the  Indian 
mind  he  appealed  in  the  name  of  religion 
for  an  end  to  communal  strife  between 
Hindu  and  Moslem:  a  theme  to  which 
he  returned  again  and  again.  For  as  long 
as  such  hatreds  persisted  even  the  most 
sympathetic  of  viceroys  would  be  reluc- 
tant to  meet  Indian  demands  for  self- 
government. 

The  Act  of- 1919  which  embodied  the 
Montagu-Chelmsford  reforms  had  pro- 
vided for  a  statutory  commission  to  report 
within  ten  years.  Upon  this  Indian  aspira- 
tions were  fixed.  Thus  the  announcement 
in  November  1927  that  the  commission 
was  to  consist  entirely  of  British  members 
of  Parliament  affronted  educated  Indian 
opinion.  Its  chairman  was  Sir  John  (later 
Viscount)  Simon  [q.v.],  and  its  members 
included  C.  R.  (later  Earl)  Attlee,  who  as 


1078 


Wood 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


prime  minister  in  1947  was  to  be  respons- 
ible for  granting  independence  to  the  sub- 
continent. Such  names  in  1927  were  of  no 
account  among  Indians  and  even  those  of 
temperate  views  determined  to  boycott 
an  inquisition  by  foreigners  into  their 
country's  fitness  for  self-government. 
Various  attempts  to  associate  Indians 
with  the  commission  proved  unsuccessful. 
Irwin  afterwards  admitted  that  he  had 
been  wrong  in  advising  the  secretary  of 
state,  Lord  Birkenhead  [q.v.],  not  to  in- 
clude Indians.  He  had  reasoned  that  a 
mixed  body  would  fail  to  reach  agreement ; 
that  the  Moslems  could  be  persuaded  to 
co-operate  with  an  all-British  commission ; 
and  that  the  Hindus  would  follow  suit, 
however  reluctantly,  rather  than  allow 
their  traditional  opponents  to  be  heard 
unchallenged.  For  his  part,  Birkenhead 
feared  that  an  alliance  between  British 
Labour  and  Indian  members  of  a  mixed 
conmiission  might  produce  dangerously 
inconvenient  majority  conclusions.  He 
must  share  responsibility  for  the  gravest 
mistake  of  Irwin's  viceroyalty. 

As  the  Simon  commission  gathered  its 
evidence  in  an  atmosphere  of  glacial  hosti- 
lity, the  viceroy  searched  for  a  formula  of 
reconciliation.  He  acted  as  resolutely  as 
any  predecessor  against  increasing  out- 
breaks of  violence  but  came  to  recognize 
that  only  a  generous  gesture  of  friend- 
ship would  break  the  sullen  silence.  The 
imaginative  scheme  which  he  evolved  was 
in  two  parts — a  Round  Table  conference 
embracing  all  parties  in  the  British  Parlia- 
ment, all  parties  and  interests  in  British 
India,  and  the  Indian  princes ;  and  a  for- 
mal declaration  on  dominion  status.  In 
this,  as  in  subsequent  policy,  his  hand  was 
strengthened  by  a  change  of  government 
at  home.  The  second  Labour  Government 
of  Ramsay  MacDonald,  which  took  office 
in  June  1929,  shared  the  viceroy's  view 
that  benevolent  paternalism  must  give 
way  to  partnership  no  less  in  India  than 
elsewhere  throughout  the  Commonwealth. 
In  the  talks  held  in  London  during  his 
leave  that  summer  Irwin  was  to  find  in 
Wedgwood  Benn  (later  Viscount  Stans- 
gate,  q.v.),  the  new  secretary  of  state,  a 
more  acconunodating  ally  than  Birken- 
head. It  was  therefore  with  confidence  that 
in  October  the  viceroy  risked  his  reputa- 
tion for  statesmanship  by  publicly  an- 
nouncing a  Round  Table  conference  and 
the  British  Government's  view  that  the 
natural  issue  of  India's  constitutional 
progress  was  dominion  status. 

The  result  was  tragically  disappointing. 


Among  Indians,  an  initial  restoration  of 
faith  in  the  motives  of  British  rule  rapidly 
gave  way  to  mistrust  and  dismay  at 
reports  of  the  scornful  fury  which  the 
viceroy's  words  had  evoked  in  London. 
Birkenhead  and  Churchill  were  predict- 
ably vehement  among  Conservatives; 
Lord  Reading  [q.v.]  condemned  him  with 
the  authority  of  a  popular  ex-viceroy, 
his  juridical  mind  outraged  by  the  impre- 
cision of  the  term  dominion  status ;  Simon 
was  annoyed  that  Irwin  had  anticipated 
the  commission's  report.  Hoping  to  save 
the  situation  by  personal  persuasion,  the 
viceroy  invited  Indian  political  leaders, 
including  M.  K.  Gandhi  [q.v.],  to  meet 
him  in  New  Delhi.  The  conference  was  abor- 
tive. Disillusioned  by  unfriendly  speeches 
at  Westminster  and  unable  to  extract 
an  early  or  exact  date  for  the  imple- 
mentation of  dominion  status,  Gandhi 
and  his  associates  withdrew  to  plan  a 
campaign  of  civil  disobedience  with  com- 
plete independence  as  its  ultimate  goal. 

Again  India  passed  through  the  weary 
cycle  of  resentment,  rebellion,  repression, 
and  reprieve.  In  the  spring  of  1930 
Gandhi  led  a  march  to  the  sea  to  defy  the 
salt  laws  which  imposed  a  tax  minute 
in  its  incidence  but  to  the  Indian  imagi- 
nation a  symbol  of  oppression.  Irwin, 
whose  compassion  concealed  a  steely 
regard  for  law  and  order,  was  reluctant 
to  add  martyrdom  to  the  other  spiritual 
quaUties  which  elevated  Gandhi  above 
all  other  Indian  leaders.  But  when 
defiance  provoked  violent  and  bloody 
riots,  the  viceroy  did  not  hesitate  to  auth- 
orize his  arrest  and  the  use  of  full  emer- 
gency powers  against  unlawful  gatherings 
and  a  seditious  press.  So  long  as  Gandhi 
remained  in  prison  there  could  be  peace 
of  a  sort  but  no  progress.  In  January  1931, 
combining  magnanimity  with  political 
shrewdness,  Irwin  ordered  the  release  of 
the  one  man  who  could  speak  for  India. 
They  met  eight  times  and  after  protracted 
discussion  came  to  an  understanding 
known  as  the  Delhi  Pact.  Few  proconsuls 
other  than  Irwin  could  have  demonstrated 
a  subtlety  of  mind  to  match  that  of 
Gandhi  or  driven  so  hard  a  bargain  clothed 
in  the  language  of  friendship :  there  was  to 
be  an  end  to  civil  disobedience  and  the 
economic  boycott  of  British  goods ;  Con- 
gress was  to  be  represented  at  future  ses- 
sions of  the  Round  Table  conference  to 
discuss  India's  future  in  an  All-India 
Federation,  Indian  responsibility,  and  re- 
servations or  safeguards  on  such  matters 
as  defence,  external  relations,  the  position 


1074 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Wood 


of  minorities,  and  India's  financial  credit. 
Conservative  opinion  in  England,  which 
had  begun  to  discern  some  good  in  a  vice- 
roy who  refused  to  entertain  criticisms  of 
a  much-tried  police  force  or  to  commute 
death  sentences  for  crimes  of  violence, 
reacted  harshly  both  to  the  discussions 
and  to  their  outcome.  Irwin  saw  things 
differently.  When  asked  whether  Gandhi 
had  not  been  tiresome  he  replied:  'Some 
people  found  Our  Lord  very  tiresome.' 

In  a  lifetime  of  public  service,  the 
viceroyalty  must  be  accounted  Irwin's 
most  exacting  task.  But  for  all  his  vision, 
his  sympathy  and  his  administrative 
skill,  he  could  not  secure  an  immediate 
measure  of  constitutional  progress  or  a 
calming  of  racial  strife.  Within  a  year 
of  his  sailing  for  England  in  April  1931 
the  second  Round  Table  conference 
had  ended  inconclusively,  civil  dis- 
obedience was  widespread,  and  Gandhi 
once  more  in  prison.  Irwin  nevertheless 
printed  on  the  Indian  mind  a  remem- 
brance of  tact  and  patience  and  a  courage 
which  recognized  neither  political  expe- 
diency nor  physical  fear.  More  than  once 
his  life  was  in  danger,  notably  when  his 
train  was  almost  derailed  by  a  terrorist 
bomb  as  he  approached  New  Delhi  to 
take  up  residence  for  the  first  time  in  the 
oriental  Versailles  created  by  Sir  Edwin 
Lutyens  and  Sir  Herbert  Baker  [qq.v.]. 
His  own  preference  in  the  capital  was 
for  the  Anglican  church  of  the  Redemp- 
tion, enriched  by  his  private  raising  of 
funds  and  consecrated  in  the  last  days  of 
his  rule.  Appointed  G.C.S.I.  and  G.C.I.E. 
in  1926,  he  was  made  K.G.  in  1931, 
becoming  chancellor  of  the  order  in  1943. 

In  the  autumn  of  1931  Irwin  was 
invited  to  become  foreign  secretary  in 
Ramsay  MacDonald's  'national'  Govern- 
ment. He  declined,  preferring  to  savour 
the  renewed  enjoyment  of  Garrowby,  his 
estate  near  York,  and  to  prolong  his 
reunion  with  his  father  whom  he  had 
hardly  dared  hope  to  see  again.  He  was 
also  aware  that  he  had  become  something  of 
an  embarrassment  to  right-wing  members 
of  his  own  party.  Such  tensions,  he  felt, 
unfitted  him  for  an  office  which  should  be 
as  far  removed  as  possible  from  parlia- 
mentary strife.  In  the  summer  of  1932, 
however,  he  was  persuaded  to  return  to 
the  Board  of  Education.  He  liked  in  later 
years  to  recall  how  the  proconsul  fresh 
from  the  rule  of  a  sub-continent  was 
refused  a  new  pair  of  curtains  for  his  office. 
The  appointment  he  found  as  drably  un- 
congenial and  as  economically  restricted 


as  it  had  been  earlier.  He  accepted  it 
only  when  urged  to  place  his  knowledge 
of  Indian  affairs  at  the  disposal  of  the 
Cabinet  and  assist  Sir  Samuel  Hoare 
(later  Viscount  Templewood,  q.v.),  the 
secretary  of  state,  in  the  drafting  and 
parliamentary  progress  of  an  immense 
government  of  India  bill  which  did 
not  reach  the  statute  book  until  1935. 
Two  pleasures  sustained  him  during 
this  gruelling  task.  In  1932  he  became 
master  of  the  Middleton  foxhounds  and 
in  1933  he  was  nominated  unopposed  as 
chancellor  of  Oxford  University  in  suc- 
cession to  Lord  Grey  of  Fallodon  [q.v.]. 
Early  in  1934  his  father  died  in  his  ninety- 
fifth  year  at  the  other  family  estate  of 
Hickleton,  in  Yorkshire.  It  was  a  bereave- 
ment which,  although  scarcely  unex- 
pected, left  the  son  conscious  of  an  acute 
loneliness  after  the  shared  intimacies  of 
half  a  century.  Five  months  as  secretary 
of  state  for  war  in  1935  revealed  to  him 
the  paucity  of  our  defences  but  did  not 
impress  him  with  an  urgent  need  for 
rearmament.  After  the  general  election 
in  November,  Halifax,  as  he  now  was, 
became  lord  privy  seal  and  leader  of  the 
House  of  Lords  and  on  Baldwin's  retire- 
ment in  1937  he  was  appointed  lord 
president  of  the  Council  in  Chamber- 
lain's administration.  During  his  tenure 
of  both  these  offices  without  departmental 
responsibilities  he  applied  himself  in- 
creasingly to  foreign  affairs. 

With  Anthony  Eden  (later  the  Earl  of 
Avon),  who  became  foreign  secretary  in 
December  1935,  Halifax  at  once  estab- 
lished a  harmonious  relationship.  Both 
were  disturbed  by  the  growing  belli- 
gerency of  Nazi  Germany ;  neither,  aware 
of  British  and  French  miUtary  weakness, 
was  prepared  in  March  1936  to  contem- 
plate resistance  to  Hitler's  occupation 
of  the  Rhineland.  Exposed  to  scorn  and 
easy  abuse  in  later  years,  their  caution 
at  the  time  accurately  reflected  the 
attitude  of  many  of  their  countrymen. 
What  began  increasingly  to  separate 
the  two  ministers  was  their  contrasting 
approach  to  the  efficacy  of  negotiation. 
Halifax  believed  that  the  Nazis  were 
reasonable  men  whose  ambitions  could 
be  modified  by  patient  and  persuasive 
discussion;  Eden  feared  that  without 
substantial  rearmament  such  exchanges 
would  be  mistaken  for  weakness  and 
serve  only  to  encourage  aggression.  The 
doubts  of  the  foreign  secretary  were 
justified  by  the  visit  which  Halifax 
made  to   Germany  in  November   1937. 


1075 


Wood 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Eden  had  reluctantly  agreed  that  Halifax 
should  meet  Hitler  in  Berlin  under  guise 
of  accepting  an  invitation,  bizarrely 
addressed  to  him  as  master  of  the 
Middleton,  to  shoot  foxes  and  to  attend 
a  hunting  exhibition.  By  subsequently 
agreeing  to  journey  to  Berchtesgaden 
for  his  interview  with  Hitler,  Halifax 
unwittingly  cast  himself  in  the  role  of 
eager  supplicant;  and  by  omitting  to 
deliver  an  unambiguous  warning  against 
German  designs  on  Austria  and  Czecho- 
slovakia, as  instructed  by  the  foreign 
secretary,  he  deprived  his  mission  of 
deterrent  effect.  'He  struck  me  as  very 
sincere',  Halifax  recorded  of  his  talk  with 
the  Fiihrer.  Other  Nazi  leaders  he  found 
likeable  though  slightly  comic.  The  squire 
of  Garrowby  could  well  discern  their 
social  inadequacies;  the  Christian  failed 
to  detect  their  wickedness. 

Eden  resigned  in  February  1938:  the 
essential  issue  was  whether  British  foreign 
policy  should  emanate  from  the  Foreign 
Office  or  from  No.  10  Downing  Street. 
In  agreeing  to  succeed  as  foreign  secre- 
tary Halifax  implicitly  accepted  a  more 
subordinate  role  than  that  of  his  prede- 
cessor, an  understanding  which  weakened 
his  tenure  of  the  Foreign  Office  and 
delayed  his  conversion  to  robustness. 
He  embarked  on  his  duties  assiduously 
but  without  enthusiasm.  His  knowledge 
of  European  history  and  thought  was 
not  profound  and  he  never  read  Mein 
Kampf.  He  was  nevertheless  welcomed, 
even  by  Churchill,  as  a  man  whose  desire 
for  peace  did  not  preclude  a  readiness 
to  resist  aggression.  His  attitude  was 
soon  put  to  the  test.  Three  weeks  after 
Halifax  became  foreign  secretary,  Hitler 
invaded  Austria  and  incorporated  it 
within  the  German  Reich.  Czechoslovakia 
now  lay  exposed  to  the  same  fate  and 
German  minorities  on  the  Sudeten 
border  were  incited  to  demonstrate 
with  increasing  violence  against  the 
alleged  oppression  of  the  Czech  Govern- 
ment. Three  factors  left  Halifax  Uttle 
room  for  diplomatic  manceuvre.  The 
first  was  British  military  weakness,  in 
spite  of  a  slowly  increasing  preoccupation 
with  rearmament.  The  second  was  a 
persistent  and  paralysing  over-estimate 
of  German  military  strength.  The  third 
was  the  geographical  remoteness  of 
Czechoslovakia.  To  guarantee  the  inde- 
pendence of  Czechoslovakia  in  March 
1938,  either  alone  or  in  alliance  with  a 
debilitated  France,  was  a  risk  Halifax 
dared  not  take.   If  his  bluff  had  been 


called  and  Britain  had  been  drawn  into 
a  declaration  of  war  on  Germany,  it 
would  have  been  without  hope  of  pro- 
tecting either  Czechoslovakia  from  Ger- 
man tanks  or  London  from  German 
bombs.  So  in  courteous  tones  which 
aroused  only  the  contempt  of  the  Nazi 
leaders  he  begged  them  to  moderate 
their  claims  in  the  interests  of  world 
peace ;  simultaneously  he  urged  the  Czechs 
not  to  be  so  disobligingly  slow  in  bowing 
to  German  demands.  In  July  he  dis- 
patched Lord  Runciman  [q.v.]  to  Czecho- 
slovakia as  a  mediator. 

Responsibility  for  that  chapter  of 
appeasement  in  British  foreign  policy 
belongs  more  to  Chamberlain  than  to 
Halifax.  The  foreign  secretary  did  not 
attend,  or  resent  not  attending,  any  of 
the  three  meetings  held  successively  at 
Berchtesgaden,  Godesberg,  and  Munich 
in  September  1938  at  which  the  prime 
minister  reached  agreement  with  Hitler 
on  the  dismemberment  of  Czechoslovakia. 
Nor  did  he  consider  Chamberlain's  depen- 
dence in  foreign  affairs  on  an  adviser 
such  as  Sir  Horace  Wilson,  who  was  not 
a  member  of  the  Foreign  Office,  a  matter 
on  which  he  should  protest,  much  less 
resign.  At  two  moments  during  the  crisis 
Halifax  did  show  to  some  advantage. 
Stiffened  by  Sir  Alexander  Cadogan, 
permanent  under-secretary  at  the  Foreign 
Office  and  his  mentor  in  the  realities  of 
international  affairs,  he  insisted  on  Cham- 
berlain's rejection  of  the  terms  proposed 
by  Hitler  at  Godesberg  for  the  immediate 
occupation  of  the  Sudeten  territories. 
His  gesture  of  defiance,  however,  was 
too  belated  to  earn  the  Czechs  more  than 
a  ten-day  reprieve  from  Germany  for 
their  Sudeten  territories  and  an  empty 
guarantee  of  what  was  left  of  their  country 
from  Britain  and  France.  Halifax  also 
felt  he  must  intrude  on  the  welcome 
given  to  Chamberlain  on  his  return  from 
Munich.  As  they  drove  together  through 
cheering  crowds  from  Heston  airport  to 
Downing  Street,  he  warned  the  prime 
minister  that  he  should  resist  the  temp- 
tation to  consolidate  his  position  by 
calling  for  an  inmiediate  general  election 
and  that  he  should  strengthen  his  Cabinet 
by  bringing  in  not  only  Churchill  and 
Eden  but  also  members  of  the  Labour 
Party  if  they  could  be  persuaded.  In 
the  event  there  was  no  general  election; 
but  neither  was  there  an  attempt  to 
construct  a  truly  national  govern- 
ment dedicated  to  rearmament.  Halifax 
was  the  one  member  of  Chamberlain's 


1076 


1>JS,B,  1951-1060 


Wood 


administration  who,  by  threatening 
resignation,  might  have  ensured  it.  His 
quiescence  did  not  spring  only  jfrom  loyalty 
to  a  leader  and  a  friend.  His  lifelong 
resort  to  regular  and  unhurried  worship 
brought  him  consolation  at  times  of 
stress,  a  serenity  transcending  the  cares 
of  statecraft,  and  a  detachment  from 
the  evil  realities  of  hfe  which  was  of  no 
service  to  a  foreign  secretary.  A  humble 
acceptance  of  Divine  Will  protected 
him  from  self-reproach,  even  from  self- 
examination,  on  the  consequences  of  his 
actions;  and  a  belief  in  immortality 
made  the  sufferings  of  those  enslaved 
by  the  Nazis  seem  less  tragic  than  they 
were. 

Hitler's  occupation  in  March  1939  of 
the  truncated  and  wholly  Slav  remains  of 
Czechoslovakia  which  had  been  denied 
him  five  months  before  roused  British 
public  opinion  and  caused  Halifax's 
attitude  to  harden  more  than  that  of  the 
prime  minister.  Although  there  were 
still  echoes  of  appeasement  in  his  speeches 
in  the  House  of  Lords,  he  recognized  that 
to  remain  inactive  in  the  face  of  Hitler's 
mounting  threats  towards  Poland  would 
be  merely  to  postpone  an  unavoidable 
war  against  an  enemy  who  drew  strength 
from  each  successive  plunder.  An  expand- 
ing programme  of  British  rearmament, 
even  if  still  inadequate,  also  engendered 
a  growing  spirit  of  confidence  in  the 
Foreign  Office.  So  within  a  few  days  of 
the  German  march  into  Prague  it  was 
announced  that  Britain  had  guaranteed 
the  independence  of  Poland.  In  April 
Italy  invaded  Albania  and  the  British 
Government  gave  firm  assurances  of 
support  to  Greece  and  Romania.  A 
measure  of  military  conscription  was 
introduced,  although  opposed  by  both 
the  Labour  and  Liberal  parties.  In  May 
Halifax  sent  a  representative  to  Moscow 
for  tripartite  talks  with  Russia  and 
France;  clouded  by  mistrust,  they  were 
stifled  in  August  by  the  conclusion  of  a 
Russo-German  pact  for  the  partition  of 
Poland.  Some  held  HaUfax  responsible 
for  the  belatedness  and  hesitancy  of  the 
British  approach  to  Moscow.  But  what- 
ever slender  prospect  there  may  have 
been  at  that  stage  of  securing  Russia 
as  an  ally  against  Germany  was  doomed 
by  Russia's  insistence  that  Britain  should 
recognize  her  right  of  miUtary  inter- 
vention in  the  Baltic  states  and  that 
Poland  should  agree  to  the  entry  of 
Soviet  troops  into  her  territory  in  the 
event  of  war  with  Germany.  On  1  Sep- 


tember German  armies  invaded  Poland. 
There  followed  a  day  of  confused  ex- 
changes with  the  French  Government 
on  the  timing  of  an  ultimatum  before 
Britain  was  at  war  with  Germany. 

Halifax  remained  foreign  secretary  and 
dn^cted  his  efforts  to  persuading  the 
neutral  nations  to  support  the  Allies  or 
at  least  to  withhold  aid  from  Germany. 
In  May  1940  a  vote  in  the  House  of  Com- 
mons reflected  the  disenchantment  of 
all  parties  with  Chamberlain's  irresolute 
conduct  of  the  war.  Halifax  escaped  much 
of  the  odium,  partly  because  he  had  been 
less  personally  identified  than  Chamber- 
lain with  Munich,  partly  because  there 
was  about  him,  as  in  India,  an  aura  of 
disinterestedness  and  moral  purpose  which 
transcended  the  grievous  consequences  of 
British  policy  during  his  tenure  of  the 
Foreign  Office.  He  was  thus  considered 
by  many  to  be  as  suitable  a  successor  as 
Churchill  in  the  hours  which  immediately 
preceded  Chamberlain's  resignation  as 
prime  minister  on  10  May.  The  prospect 
appalled  him.  He  knew  he  did  not  possess 
those  qualities  of  popular  leadership  and 
ruthlessness  which  the  situation  de- 
manded; he  realized  how  difficult  if  not 
impossible  it  would  be  for  any  prime 
minister  to  control  the  war  effort  from  the 
remoteness  of  the  House  of  Lords,  with 
Churchill  running  defence.  So  it  was  with 
relief  that  he  welcomed  the  choice  of 
Churchill  as  leader  of  an  all-party  govern- 
ment. Among  those  who  recorded  initial 
disappointment  on  both  pubUc  and 
private  grounds  was  King  George  VI, 
whose  friendship  extended  to  granting 
HaUfax  the  unusual  privilege  of  walking 
through  the  garden  of  Buckingham 
Palace  on  his  daily  journey  from  Eaton 
Square  to  the  Foreign  Office.  Halifax 
was  invited  by  the  new  prime  minister 
to  remain  at  his  old  post  and  to  continue 
as  a  member  of  the  War  Cabinet.  After 
the  German  advance  across  the  Low 
Countries  and  France  and  the  escape  of 
the  British  Expeditionary  Force  from 
Dunkirk,  he  flew  with  Churchill  to 
Tours  on  13  June  for  a  fruitless  meeting 
with  Paul  Reynaud,  the  French  prime 
minister,  five  days  before  Marshal  Petain 
sued  for  peace. 

In  December  Halifax's  own  fortunes 
took  an  unexpected  turn  when  he  was 
urged  by  Churchill  to  succeed  Lord 
Lothian  [q.v.]  as  British  ambassador 
in  Washington.  In  his  sixtieth  year  he 
was  justifiably  reluctant  to  exchange  an 
historic,  influential,  and  by  now  familiar 


1077 


Wood 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


office  of  state  for  a  *high  and  perilous 
charge'  among  a  people  he  barely  knew. 
He  was  sensitive,  too,  to  whispers  that 
the  prime  minister  would  not  be  sorry  to 
rid  himself  of  a  colleague  whose  long 
association  with  Chamberlain  detracted 
from  his  usefulness  at  home.  His  sense 
of  duty  prevailed  and  in  January  1941 
he  crossed  the  Atlantic  in  the  newly 
commissioned  battleship  King  George  V. 
Although  President  Roosevelt  paid 
Halifax  the  unusual  compliment  of  greet- 
ing him  personally  in  Chesapeake  Bay,  the 
welcome  given  to  the  ambassador  else- 
where was  discouraging.  In  spite  of  some 
sympathy  for  a  nation  under  enemy  fire, 
American  pubUc  opinion  was  largely 
isolationist;  and  the  initial  difficulty 
of  following  so  congenial  an  envoy  as 
Lothian  was  aggravated  by  indiscretions 
from  which  Halifax's  advisers  failed  to 
save  him.  He  called  on  the  chairman  of 
the  foreign  affairs  committee  in  the  House 
of  Representatives  while  lend-lease  pro- 
posals for  aid  to  Britain  were  being 
debated  in  Congress,  thereby  seeming 
to  interfere  in  the  decisions  of  the  legis- 
lature ;  he  accepted  an  invitation  to  hunt 
the  fox,  a  sport  suggestive  of  aristocratic 
leisiu^  even  more  in  the  New  World 
than  in  the  Old;  he  made  jokes  about 
baseball.  One  humiliating  incident,  how- 
ever, was  turned  neatly  to  advantage. 
Having  been  pelted  with  eggs  in  Detroit, 
he  was  widely,  although  incorrectly, 
reported  as  saying  that  the  United  States 
were  fortunate  to  have  eggs  to  throw, 
at  a  time  when  the  ration  in  England  was 
one  a  month.  As  the  prospect  of  war  with 
Japan  loomed  large,  American  critics 
of  the  supposedly  belligerent  and  reac- 
tionary country  he  represented  began  to 
lose  their  influence.  Halifax  reinforced 
his  growing  popularity  by  extensive 
speaking  tours,  a  burden  made  lighter 
both  by  the  radiant  sympathy  of  his  wife 
and  by  the  bonhomie  of  his  cousin, 
friend,  and  stage-manager,  Colonel  Angus 
McDonnell.  If  most  at  his  ease  with 
landowners  and  mystics,  HaUfax  soon 
learned  to  overcome  his  natural  re- 
serve among  audiences  which  did  not 
often  include  either.  Nor,  save  in  appear- 
ance, did  he  conform  to  the  expected 
caricature  of  an  English  aristocrat.  He 
reacted  with  good  humour  to  intrusive 
curiosity  and  with  deliberate  charm  to 
outspoken  and  sometimes  ill-informed 
criticism  of  his  country's  alleged  motives 
in  India  and  elsewhere.  Although  he 
never    quite    achieved    Lothian's   ascen- 


dancy, no  ambassador  more  adroitly  or 
more  successfully  adapted  himself  to  a 
role  for  which  at  heart  he  had  little 
relish.  A  speech  in  Canada,  however,  on 
24  January  1944,  about  the  future  of  the 
Commonwealth,  made  a  far  less  accep- 
table impression  there. 

The  Japanese  attack  on  Pearl  Harbour 
in  December  1941  welded  Britain  and  the 
United  States  into  alliance  against  Japan, 
Germany,  and  Italy.  The  emphasis  of 
Halifax's  task  shifted  accordingly  from 
public  relations  to  the  strengthening  of 
links  between  the  two  governments.  To 
this  end  the  British  missions,  both  civil 
and  military,  soon  came  to  number  1,200 
including  no  fewer  than  six  fellows  of 
All  Souls.  Halifax  had  already  won  the  con- 
fidence of  Cordell  Hull,  the  secretary  of 
state,  with  whom  he  transacted  day-to- 
day diplomatic  business.  Even  more  fruit- 
ful was  his  intimacy  with  Harry  Hopkins, 
the  president's  most  trusted  adviser, 
which  won  him  unprecedented  freedom 
of  access  to  the  White  House.  But  how- 
ever serviceable  the  easy  relationship  he 
established  with  Roosevelt,  his  personal 
influence  in  Washington  was  inevitably 
eclipsed  by  Churchill's  periodic  visits  and 
his  own  exclusion  from  talks  between 
president  and  prime  minister.  More  than 
pre-war  disagreements  over  India  and  the 
policy  of  appeasement,  a  fundamental 
difference  in  temperament  separated 
them.  One  was  accommodating,  reflective, 
and  cautious:  the  other  resolute,  impul- 
sive, self-inspired.  Thus  the  abassador's 
wary  affection  and  admiration  for  the 
prime  minister  as  a  war  leader  was  qualified 
by  doubts  about  the  clarity  of  his  judge- 
ment; and  understandable  irritation  at 
being  kept  ignorant  of  decisions  reached 
in  private  by  Churchill  and  Roosevelt 
was  sharpened  by  lesser  grievances.  He 
was  exhausted  by  his  guest's  apocalyptic 
table-talk  which  flowed  into  the  early 
hours  of  the  morning  and  he  com- 
plained of  the  cigars  which  left  the  em- 
bassy 'stinking  like  a  third  class  smoking 
carriage'.  Deep  personal  sorrow  was  added 
to  restiveness  when,  towards  the  end  of 
1942,  the  second  of  his  three  sons  was 
killed  in  battle  and  the  third  gravely 
wounded.  A  few  months  later  he  confided 
to  Eden,  his  successor  as  foreign  secretary, 
that  he  would  like  to  be  relieved  of  his 
appointment  and  come  home.  But  he  was 
persuaded  to  remain  in  Washington  for 
another  three  years,  thus  bridging  both 
Truman's  elevation  to  the  presidency  on 
Roosevelt's  death  in  April  1945  and  the 


1078 


IXN.B.  1951-1960 


Wood 


defeat  of  the  Churchill  government  which 
brought  Attlee  to  power  three  months 
later.  In  July  1944  he  was  created  an 
earl. 

On  the  abrupt  cancellation  by  America 
of  the  lend-lease  agreement  at  the  end 
of  the  Japanese  war,  Halifax  helped  Lord 
Keynes  [q.v.]  in  the  protracted  nego- 
tiations for  a  loan  of  3-75  billion  dollars 
from  the  United  States  Government.  The 
sum  was  smaller  and  more  hedged  about 
with  conditions  than  the  British  team 
had  hoped  for,  but  it  was  enough  to  tide 
a  near-bankrupt  nation  over  the  imme- 
diate crisis.  Halifax  also  took  part  in 
the  conference  at  Dumbarton  Oaks  in 
1944  which  began  to  shape  the  charter  of 
the  United  Nations  and  in  the  meetings 
at  San  Francisco,  where  he  took  a  strong 
stand  against  the  Russian  interpretation 
of  the  Yalta  formula  on  the  unanimity 
rule  in  the  proposed  Security  Council, 
whilst  persuading  Commonwealth  dele- 
gates reluctantly  to  concur  in  the  pro- 
cedure recommended.  His  perceptive 
description  of  Molotov,  the  Soviet  foreign 
minister,  as  'smiling  granite'  did  not, 
however,  extend  to  an  appreciation  of 
Stalin's  ambitions  in  Europe,  much  less 
to  the  formidable  nature  of  the  Com- 
munist society.  When  Churchill  drew  public 
attention  to  these  dangers  in  a  speech 
at  Fulton,  Missouri,  in  March  1946, 
Halifax  tried  to  persuade  him  to  qualify 
his  words  in  his  next  speech.  In  this 
Halifax  was  unsuccessful,  for  Churchill 
felt  it  would  be  'Uke  going  to  see  Hitler 
just  before  the  war'.  In  May  he  returned 
to  England  and  later  that  year  was 
admitted  to  the  Order  of  Merit. 

The  last  years  of  his  life  were  spent 
increasingly  in  familiar  places  and  among 
old  friends.  In  1946  he  rejoined  the  gov- 
erning body  of  Eton,  having  originally 
been  elected  a  fellow  in  1936,  and  drew 
much  refreshment  from  liturgical  disputes 
with  the  provost,  Lord  Quickswood  [q.v.]. 
As  chancellor  of  Oxford,  he  gave  a  more 
than  formal  attention  to  the  university's 
problems  and  took  every  opportunity 
of  renewing  his  Unks  with  All  Souls,  'a 
second  home  for  more  than  fifty  years'. 
Two  more  honours  came  to  him  in  1947 
when  he  was  appointed  chancellor  of 
Sheffield  University  and  high  steward  of 
Westminster.  He  liked  pageantry  and 
found  the  wearing  of  ceremonial  robes 
and  insignia  no  burden  either  as  chancel- 
lor of  the  Order  of  the  Garter  or  as  grand 
master  from  1957  of  the  Order  of  St. 
Michael  and  St.  George.  As  president  of 


the  Pilgrims  he  was  able  both  to  maintain 
his  transatlantic  friendships  and  to  relive 
those  evenings  of  sustained  oratory  which 
had  never  ceased  to  amaze  him  as 
ambassador.  In  1947  he  became  chair- 
man of  the  general  advisory  council  of 
the  B.B.C.  He  spoke  from  time  to  time 
in  the  House  of  Lords,  enjoyed  foreign 
travel,  and  wrote  a  gently  evasive  volume 
of  memoirs.  Fulness  of  Days  (1957).  But 
it  was  in  taking  up  once  more  the  threads 
of  his  family  life  in  Yorkshire  that  he 
found  true  happiness  and  peace.  He 
resumed  the  mastership  of  the  Middleton 
hunt  and  immersed  himself  in  farming, 
estate  management,  and  local  church 
affairs.  A  few  weeks  after  celebrating 
his  golden  wedding  he  died  at  Garrowby 
23  December  1959  and  was  buried  at 
Kirby  Underdale.  He  was  succeeded  by 
his  eldest  son,  Charles  Ingram  Courtenay 
(born  1912).  His  youngest  son,  Richard 
Frederick,  was  minister  of  power  (1959- 
63)  and  of  pensions  (1963-4),  and  his 
daughter,  Anne,  married  the  third  Earl 
of  Feversham. 

Halifax's  character  was  of  baffling 
opaqueness.  On  some  contemporary  minds 
he  left  the  imprint  of  statesmanship 
suffused  by  Christian  faith;  others  sus- 
pected that  his  churchmanship  concealed 
a  strain  of  shrewd  worldliness  and  expe- 
diency. Even  the  habitual  ambiguity  of 
his  speeches  might  be  variously  inter- 
preted either  as  a  humble  search  for 
truth  or  as  a  form  of  verbal  insurance 
against  the  unexpected.  His  rigid  ad- 
herence to  religious  principles  could  make 
him  seem  heartless  in  his  judgement 
of  human  frailty;  thus  he  regarded 
divorce  followed  by  remarriage,  whatever 
the  circumstances,  as  scarcely  removed 
from  bigamy.  He  loved  family  life  and 
guarded  his  privacy  well.  But  having  been 
brought  up  by  his  father  to  think  of 
racing  as  immoral  and  ballet  as  indecent, 
he  observed  with  tolerant  melancholy  the 
addiction  of  his  own  sons  to  those  pas- 
times. Among  friends  he  was  a  lively 
talker  with  a  smile  of  singular  sweetness : 
his  difficulty  in  pronouncing  the  letter  'r' 
added  charm  to  a  pleasant  tenor  voice. 
Those  who  saw  him  only  on  official  occa- 
sions thought  him  aloof  and  consciously 
representative  of  an  aristocracy  whose 
continued  and  effortless  lien  on  political 
power  seemed  anachronistic,  even  dan- 
gerous. Halifax  sometimes  doubted  his 
fitness  for  a  particular  task  yet  believed 
in  the  ordered  world  into  which  he  had 
been  born  and  did  not  question  his  right 


1079 


Wood 


f}JS,B,  1951-1960 


to  be  called  to  high  office.  To  his  inti- 
mates he  was  a  man  of  simple  disposition ; 
and  the  young,  who  are  sensitive  to  pre- 
tentiousness, found  him  an  enchanting 
companion. 

There  is  a  portrait  of  Halifax  by  Sir 
Oswald  Birley  at  All  Souls  and  another 
by  Lawrence  Gowing  at  Christ  Church, 
Oxford.  Lionel  Edwards  painted  him  with 
his  father,  then  aged  ninety-three,  and 
his  eldest  son,  at  a  meet  of  the  Middleton 
hounds:  the  picture  hangs  at  Garrowby. 

[The  Earl  of  Halifax,  Fulness  of  Days,  1957 ; 
S.  Gopal,  Ttie  Viceroyalty  of  Lord  Irwin, 
1926-31,  1957;  the  Earl  of  Birkenhead, 
Halifax,  1965 ;  private  information ;  personal 
knowledge.]  Kenneth  Hose. 

WOODS,  HENRY  (1868-1952),  palae- 
ontologist, was  born  in  Cottenham,  near 
Cambridge,  18  December  1868,  the  only 
child  of  Francis  Woods,  a  farmer,  and 
his  second  wife,  Mary  Ann,  daughter  of 
Thomas  Granger,  farmer,  of  Haddenham, 
Cambridgeshire.  His  father  died  when  he 
was  only  two  years  old.  He  began  his 
education  at  the  local  village  school  but 
in  1880  his  mother  moved  with  him  to 
Cambridge  where  he  was  admitted  to  the 
higher  grade  school  (later  the  Central 
School  for  Boys).  He  appears  to  have  been 
a  pupil  of  considerable  promise  and  gained 
several  prizes,  but  leaving  school  in  1883 
took  up  local  employment,  continuing 
with  his  studies  in  his  spare  time.  In 
October  1887  means  were  found  for  him 
to  enter  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge, 
where  he  proved  to  be  a  brilliant  student. 
In  1889  he  gained  a  first  class  in  part  i  of 
the  natural  sciences  tripos  and  was  made 
a  scholar  of  his  college ;  in  the  following 
year  he  obtained  a  first  class  in  part  ii  of 
the  tripos,  taking  geology  as  his  subject. 
He  was  also  awarded  the  Harkness 
scholarship  for  the  best  performance  in 
the  examination. 

In  1892  as  demonstrator  in  palaeo- 
botany  Woods  joined  the  teaching  staff 
of  the  Cambridge  University  department 
of  geology  with  which  he  remained  con- 
nected until  almost  the  end  of  his  life. 
In  1894  he  also  became  demonstrator 
in  palaeozoology ;  and  from  1899  until 
1934  he  held  the  post  of  lecturer  in  palaeo- 
zoology. Although  he  then  retired  from 
teaching  work,  he  continued  to  act  as 
departmental  Ubrarian  until  over  the 
age  of  eighty.  Even  prior  to  his  first 
official  appointment  Woods  had  evidently 
been  working  on  the  extensive  palaeonto- 
logical    collections    of    the    department, 


as  his  Catalogue  of  Type  Fossils  in  the 
Woodwardian  Museum,  Cambridge  ap- 
peared in  1891.  From  that  period  until 
it  was  recognized  (in  the  twenties)  that 
the  services  of  a  full-time  curator  were 
required  he  devoted  much  time  to  the 
care  of  the  collections.  He  also  became 
involved  almost  immediately  in  drawing 
up  plans  for  a  new  university  geological 
museum  (the  Sedgwick  Museum),  and 
when,  after  many  years'  discussion  and 
delay,  this  was  eventually  completed  in 
1904,  he  played  a  leading  part  in  the 
arrangement  of  the  exhibits  and  study 
collections  in  their  new  home.  The  zeal 
with  which  he  embarked  upon  his  teaching 
duties  was  also  noteworthy.  His  lecture 
notes  were  soon  transformed  into  a  text- 
book. Palaeontology:  Invertebrate,  a  much- 
needed  and  very  successful  elementary 
systematic  treatise  which  first  appeared 
in  1893  and  by  1946  had  reached  its  eighth 
edition. 

Woods's  original  contributions  to  science 
established  him  as  one  of  the  foremost 
invertebrate  palaeontologists  of  his  gener- 
ation. His  best-known  work  is  his  Moru)- 
graph  of  the  Cretaceous  Lamellibranchia 
of  England  (1899-1913),  pubhshed  in 
two  volumes  of  substantial  size  by  the 
Palaeontographical  Society.  It  has  re- 
mained an  indispensable  work  of  reference 
for  advanced  students  and  amateur  col- 
lectors of  fossils  alike.  Equally  thorough, 
but  not  so  well  known  since  it  deals  with 
a  less  abundant  group,  is  his  Mono- 
graph of  the  Fossil  Macrurous  Crustacea 
of  England  (1925-31),  pubhshed  by  the 
same  society.  Among  his  other  mono- 
graphs are  those  dealing  with  Cretaceous 
MoUusca  from  South  Africa,  New  Zea- 
land, and  Northern  Nigeria,  and  with 
Tertiary  MoUusca  from  Peru.  His  publi- 
cations were  embellished  by  the  admirable 
illustrations  of  his  lifelong  friend,  T.  A. 
Brock,  whose  drawings  of  fossils  have 
never  been  surpassed.  All  Woods's  scientific 
work  was  characterized  by  its  thorough- 
ness and  by  the  meticulous  care  with 
which  he  recorded  his  observations. 
Stress  was  placed  throughout  on  pure 
morphology.  He  was  generally  reluctant 
to  indulge  in  speculative  hypothesis, 
although  one  of  his  earlier  papers  dealt 
with  a  supposed  succession  of  evolutionary 
stages  shown  by  species  of  the  bivalve 
genus  Inoceramus  during  the  Cretaceous 
period. 

Woods  was  tall  and  spare,  with  a  quiet 
reserved  manner.  He  was  by  no  means 
a  dynamic  personality,  but  his  teaching 


1080 


D.N.B.  1951-1900 


Woollard 


methods  were  thorough  and  conscientious 
and  he  instilled  a  love  for  fossils  and 
their  study  in  many  of  the  students  who 
attended  his  lectures.  The  Geological 
Society  of  London  awarded  him  the 
Lyell  fund  (1898),  the  LyeU  medal 
(1918),  and  the  WoUaston  medal  (1940) 
He  was  elected  F.R.S.  in  1916,  and  also 
became  an  honorary  member  of  the 
Royal  Society  of  New  Zealand  and  of  the 
Yorkshire  Philosophical  Society. 

In  1910  Woods  married  Ethel  Gertrude 
(died  1939),  daughter  of  W.  W.  Skeat 
[q.v.],  professor  of  Anglo-Saxon  at  Cam- 
bridge. She  was  herself  a  palaeontologist 
who  made  useful  contributions  to  the 
science.  There  were  no  children.  Woods 
died  4  April  1952  at  his  home  at  Meldreth, 
near  Royston,  Hertfordshire,  where  he 
had  lived  since  1924. 

[O.  M.  B.  Bulman  in  Obituary  Notices  of 
Fellows  of  the  Royal  Society,  No.  22,  November 
1953 ;  personal  knowledge.]  L.  R.  Cox. 

WOOLLARD,    FRANK    GEORGE 

(1883-1957),  pioneer  of  mass  production 
in  the  motor  industry,  was  born  in 
Kensington  22  September  1883,  the  son 
of  George  Woollard,  general  steward  to 
a  firm  of  private  bankers,  and  his  wife, 
Emily  Constance  Powell.  He  was  educated 
at  the  City  of  London  School  and  at  the 
Goldsmiths'  and  Birkbeck  colleges  in 
London.  He  served  his  apprenticeship 
with  the  London  and  South- Western 
Railway  at  Eastleigh  and  was  involved 
in  the  design  and  development  of  the 
famous  Clarkson  steam  omnibus.  This 
led  him  to  turn  his  attention  to  motor-car 
design  and  production.  At  the  Birming- 
ham works  of  E.  G.  Wrigley  &  Co.,  Ltd., 
Woollard  was  responsible  for  designing 
and  producing,  under  sub-contract,  the 
axles  and  gear  boxes  of  the  first  Morris- 
Cowley  motor-car  to  go  into  serial  pro- 
duction. He  was  subsequently  appointed 
to  take  charge  of  the  engine  factory  of 
Hotchkiss  et  Cie  at  Coventry  and,  in 
1923,  general  manager  of  the  engines 
branch  of  Morris  Motors,  Ltd.  It  was  there 
during  the  period  1923-5  that  Woollard 
and  his  colleagues  commissioned  the  first 
automatic  transfer  machines  for  engineer- 
ing production,  some  twenty  years  ahead  of 
similar  developments  in  the  United  States, 
and  nearly  thirty  years  ahead  of  the  general 
adoption  of  this  form  of  automation  else- 
where in  the  United  Kingdom.  Woollard 
was  director  of  Morris  Motors,  Ltd. 
(1926-32),  managing  director  of  Rudge 
Whitworth,   Ltd.   (1932-6),  and  director 


of  the  Birmingham  Aluminium  Casting 
(1903)  Co.,  Ltd.,  and  of  the  Midland  Motor 
Cylinder  Co.,  Ltd.  (1936-53),  after  which 
he  retired. 

Woollard  was  an  active  member  of 
the  Institution  of  Mechanical  Engineers 
and,  especially,  of  the  Institution  of  Auto- 
mobile Engineers  of  which  he  was  presi- 
dent in  1945-6.  The  successful  merger  of 
the  two  institutions  in  1947  owed  much 
to  his  organizing  ability  and  to  his  flair 
for  creating  the  right  kind  of  atmosphere 
in  committee  negotiations.  After  the 
amalgamation  he  served  on  the  Insti- 
tution of  Mechanical  Engineers'  council 
as  chairman  of  its  automobile  division 
(1946-7),  and  did  much  to  foster  the 
activities  of  the  Motor  Industry  Research 
Association  of  which  he  was  a  founder- 
member.  He  was  a  member  also  of  the 
Institution  of  Production  Engineers, 
chairman  of  the  executive  committee  of 
the  Aluminium  Development  Association 
(194^52),  chairman  of  the  Zinc  Alloy 
Die  Casting  Association  (1952-6),  and 
chairman  of  the  industrial  administra- 
tion group  of  the  Birmingham  College  of 
Technology  (1951-7).  He  was  a  founder- 
member  of  the  British  Institute  of 
Management  and  a  member  of  the 
American  Society  of  Automotive  Engi- 
neers. 

His  extensive  experience  in  produc- 
tion engineering  and  management  was 
recorded  in  many  contributions  to  tech- 
nical journals  and  was  summarized  in  his 
Principles  of  Mass  and  Flow  Production 
(1954)  which  served  as  a  basis  for  a 
regular  series  of  lectures  to  postgraduate 
students  of  engineering  production  in  the 
university  of  Birmingham  and  in  the 
Birmingham  College  of  Technology,  which 
conferred  on  him  an  honorary  associate- 
ship.  Everyone  knew  him  as  'a  kindly 
personaUty,  gifted  and  philosophical, 
to  whom  one  could  turn  for  advice  and 
help.  They  will  remember  his  humour,  the 
apt  turn  of  phrase,  his  twinkling  eyes, 
the  direct  look  and  the  sincere  interest 
which  he  always  showed  for  the  welfare 
of  his  colleagues  and  his  students.' 

In  1911  Woollard  married  Catherine 
Elizabeth,  daughter  of  Henry  Richards, 
engraver;  they  had  a  son  who  died  in 
infancy  and  a  daughter  Joan,  who  became 
known  as  a  sculptor  and  painter.  He 
was  appointed  M.B.E.  in  1916,  and  died 
in  Edgbaston,  Birmingham,  23  December 
1957. 

Portraits  of  Woollard  *large  in  frame 
and   distinctive   in   appearance'    include 


1081 


Woollard 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


one  by  his  daughter  and  one  by  B. 
Fleetwood-Walker ;  both  remained  in  the 
possession  of  the  artists. 

[Journal  of  the  Institution  of  Production 
Engineers,  vol.  xxxvii,  No.  6,  1958 ;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

N.  A.  Dudley. 

WOOLLEY,  Sir  (CHARLES)  LEO- 
NARD (1880-1960),  archaeologist,  son  of 
the  Rev.  George  Herbert  Woolley,  curate 
of  St.  Matthew,  Upper  Clapton,  and  his 
wife,  Sarah  Cathcart,  was  born  in  Upper 
Clapton  17  April  1880.  He  was  a  member 
of  a  large  family  and  had  to  pay  for  his 
education  through  scholarships  which  he 
won  for  St.  John's,  Leatherhead,  and  sub- 
sequently for  New  College,  Oxford,  where 
he  obtained  a  first  class  in  literae  humani- 
ores  in  1903  and  a  second  in  theology  in 
1904.  It  was  W.  A.  Spooner  [q.v.]  who 
with  a  rare  discernment  told  him  that  he 
must  abandon  his  intention  of  becoming 
a  schoolmaster  and  make  archaeology  his 
career.  Much  of  his  youth  was  spent  in  a 
poor  parish  in  Bethnal  Green  and  at  an 
early  age  he  acquired  an  interest  in  paint- 
ings, was  a  frequent  visitor  to  the  White- 
chapel  Art  Gallery,  and  became  famihar 
with  the  Old  Masters.  This  taste  remained 
with  him  all  his  life  and  in  his  retirement 
he  collected  begrimed  paintings  at  country 
auctions,  cleaned  and  repaired  his  acquisi- 
tions, some  of  which  were  of  a  high  quality 
and  found  their  way  to  important  exhibi- 
tions and  national  art  galleries.  He  was 
deft  with  his  hands  and  many  a  delicate 
and  fragile  antiquity  was  salvaged  in  the 
course  of  his  excavations  by  his  imagina- 
tive methods  combined  with  an  excep- 
tional dexterity. 

After  graduating  from  Oxford  he  went 
to  France  and  Germany  in  order  to  study 
modern  languages  and  in  1905  was  appoin- 
ted assistant  to  (Sir)  Arthur  Evans  [q.v.], 
then  keeper  of  the  Ashmolean  Museum, 
where  he  served  a  valuable  apprenticeship 
before  committing  himself  entirely  to  field 
archaeology.  His  work  in  the  Near  East 
began  in  1907  when  he  excavated  in  Nubia 
in  partnership  with  D.  Randall-Mad ver 
[q.v.]  to  whose  precise  methods  he  owed 
much  and  who,  at  that  time,  was  field 
director  of  the  Nubian  expeditions  of  the 
University  Museum  of  the  university  of 
Pennsylvania.  At  Karanog  he  dug  the  first 
big  Meroitic  cemetery  on  record;  but  in 
spite  of  the  rich  finds  which  included  in- 
scribed and  painted  gravestones,  bronze 
vessels  of  Greek  workmanship,  and  painted 
pottery,   he  concluded  that   'the  whole 


Meroitic  civilization  was- but  a  backwater, 
remarkable  as  an  isolated  phenomenon  in 
African  history,  but  contributing  nothing 
to  the  general  stream  of  culture  and  of  art'. 
Such  discoveries  did  not  satisfy  his  ori- 
ginal and  creative  mind  but  he  was  all  the 
time  gaining  experience  in  practical  prob- 
lems, in  the  control  of  workmen,  and  in 
fields  of  discovery  which  ranged  from  the 
Early  Dynastic  down  to  Roman  times. 
A  brief  interlude  in  Italy,  where  he  con- 
ducted a  small  dig  in  the  ancient  baths  at 
Teano  on  a  wooded  hill-top  in  ancient 
Sabine  territory,  completed  the  formative 
stage  of  his  training  as  a  field  archaeologist. 

In  1912  Woolley  was  appointed  to 
succeed  R.  Campbell  Thompson  [q.v.]  as 
leader  of  the  British  Museum  expedition 
to  Carchemish  where  he  was  accompanied 
by  T.  E.  Lawrence  [q.v.].  There  he  made 
a  number  of  spectacular  discoveries  in  the 
temples  and  palaces  of  the  Neo-Hittite 
period.  A  series  of  orthostats  with  carvings 
of  north  Syrian  gods  and  rulers,  many 
contemporary  hieroglyphic  inscriptions, 
and  the  layout  of  the  town  defences  were 
considerable  contributions  to  knowledge 
at  that  time. 

While  he  was  employed  in  north  Syria 
Woolley,  together  with  Lawrence,  took 
the  opportunity  during  the  off  season  from 
Carchemish  to  make  an  archaeological  siu*- 
vey  in  Palestine  of  the  country  stretching 
northwards  from  Akaba  towards  the  south- 
ern end  of  the  Dead  Sea.  In  the  course  of  six 
weeks  the  two  men  obtained  a  general 
knowledge  of  an  area  which,  except  for  the 
few  centuries  of  settled  Byzantine  govern- 
ment, had  changed  little  since  the  days  of 
Moses.  The  account  of  this  work  under  the 
names  of  Woolley  and  Lawrence  was  first 
pubhshed  by  the  Palestine  Exploration 
Fund  as  The  Wilderness  of  Zin  (1915). 

The  dig  at  Carchemish  was  interrupted 
by  the  war  in  which  Woolley  undertook 
intelligence  work  on  the  staff  in  Egypt.  He 
was  blown  up  at  sea  off  the  coast  of  south 
Asia  Minor  and  in  1916-18  was  in  a  Turkish 
prison  camp,  where  his  manual  skill  and 
inventiveness  did  much  for  the  amenities. 

In  1919  he  concluded  the  dig  at  Carche- 
mish under  considerable  difficulties,  for 
he  found  that  his  camp  was  in  a  no-man's- 
land  between  the  French  army  and  Kurdish 
irregulars;  both  sides  consulted  him  at 
intervals.  Subsequently  he  moved  to  Egypt 
and  did  fruitful  work,  particularly  in  a 
house-quarter  once  occupied  by  ancient 
craftsmen  on  the  site  of  Tel-el-Amarna, 
for  the  Egypt  Exploration  Society. 

Fortified  by  much  experience  Woolley 


1082 


D.N.B.  1951-1060 


began  his  major  work  at  Ur  in  1922  and 
dug  there  systematically  at  intervals  for 
thirteen  years.  He  began  by  concentrating 
on  the  Temenos  or  sacred  area  within  which 
lay  the  principal  temples  and  palaces. 
There  he  established  a  tremendous  sequence 
of  cities  which  began  on  water-logged  soil, 
perhaps  in  the  fifth  millennium  b.c.  at 
whAt  is  known  as  the  Al-'Ubaid  period,  and 
rose  one  over  the  other  to  form  a  mound 
some  seventy  feet  in  height,  until  the  last 
occupation  in  the  fourth  century  b.c. 
At  Ur  he  exposed  a  complete  range  of 
town  plans  which  revealed  more  fully  than 
ever  before  the  architectural  achievements 
which  had  occurred  in  south  Babylonia 
from  Sumerian  times  onwards.  In  the  reve- 
lation of  Sumerian  civilization  Woolley  did 
his  richest  and  most  productive  work.  The 
climax  of  the  expedition  was  the  discovery 
of  the  famous  royal  cemetery  of  Ur 
which  yielded  the  incomparable  treasures 
of  Sumerian  civiUzation,  many  of  them 
deposited  in  shafts  with  multiple  burials, 
before  2500  b.c. 

The  documents,  which  included  some  of 
the  earliest  literature  known  to  mankind, 
were  also  of  extraordinary  archaeological 
interest  because  of  the  light  they  throw  on 
all  the  buildings  and  small  remains  associ- 
ated with  them.  The  sculpture  of  these 
early  periods,  as  well  as  the  metallurgy, 
is  of  a  very  high  order  and  WooUey's  re- 
markable insight  into  the  methods  used  by 
ancient  craftsmen  and  builders  was  one 
of  his  most  valuable  contributions  to 
knowledge.  His  understanding  of  ancient 
methods  also  enabled  him  to  follow  up 
clues  in  the  ground  with  a  penetration 
often  denied  to  skilled  diggers. 

Woolley,  however,  found  so  much  that^ 
he  was  handicapped  in  finding  time  to 
consult  other  authorities,  and  academic- 
ally his  work  often  suffered  accordingly; 
in  particular  his  chronology  was  often 
at  variance  with  accepted  criteria.  There 
seems  to  be  little  doubt  now  that  his 
dating  of  the  royal  cemetery  was  several 
centuries  too  early  and  similarly  there  are 
many  who  cannot  accept  his  sequence 
dating  for  the  sculpture  at  Carchemish.  In 
judging  works  of  art,  too,  a  Victorian  out- 
look was  not  acceptable  to  the  critics,  and 
his  book  on  The  Development  of  Sumerian 
Art  (1935),  while  invaluable  in  all  matters 
touching  on  craftsmanship,  appears  to  be 
aesthetically  defective.  His  books  on  The 
Sumerians  (1928)  and  Abraham  (1986) 
were  out  of  touch  with  linguistic  and 
literary  problems  and  thus  fell  short  of 
being  authoritative.     ,     '  I '  -  . 


Woolley 

For  aU  these  defects,  however,  there 
was  ample  compensation  in  the  imagina- 
tive treatment  throughout  his  writings  of 
whatever  he  found.  Gifted  with  an  un- 
usually fluent  style,  an  enchanting  lecturer, 
no  one  has  better  described  the  sequence 
of  his  discoveries,  and  many  of  his  popular 
books  have  enthralled  a  very  wide  public. 
Digging  up  the  Past  (1960)  ran  into  many 
editions,  and  even  more  successful  was 
Ur  of  the  Chaldees  (1929,  subsequently 
translated  into  many  languages),  which 
took  the  reader  on  a  tour  of  the  excava- 
tions and  enabled  him  to  feel  at  home 
among  ancient  Sumerian  as  well  as  Baby- 
lonian remains.  To  follow  Woolley  round 
the  site  at  Ur  and  to  hear  him  talk  about 
the  private  houses  was  to  feel  oneself  living 
among  a  vanished  people.  If  his  imagi- 
nation sometimes  outran  the  facts,  that 
to  him  was  preferable  to  allowing  know- 
ledge to  lie  dormant  and  inconclusive. 

His  industry  was  prodigious.  While  on 
the  dig  he  slept  little,  rising  with  the  sun 
and  often  still  at  work  in  his  study  or 
in  the  catalogue  room  until  two  or  three 
o'clock  in  the  morning.  He  could  not  have 
published  so  much  had  he  not  been  ex- 
ceptionally quick  in  composition,  and  he 
used  to  say  that  writing  was  an  enjoy- 
rnent  to  him.  The  large  definitive  pub- 
lications of  Ur  came  out  in  a  steady  stream 
from  1927  onwards.  These  volumes  include 
Ur  Excavations,  vol.  i,  Al-'Ubaid,  in  col- 
laboration with  H.  R.  Hall  (1927),  mostly 
concerned  with  prehistoric  and  Early 
Dynastic  remains ;  vol.  ii.  The  Royal  Ceme- 
tery (1934),  contained  in  two  parts  some 
600  pages  of  text  and  274  plates,  a  magnum 
opus  which  no  other  living  archaeologist 
could  have  produced  in  so  short  a  time. 
Volume  V,  The  Ziggurat  and  its  Surround- 
ings (1939),  is  a  testimonial  to  his  insight 
into  ancient  architecture.  Volume  iv,  The 
Early  Periods  (1955),  an  invaluable  sum- 
mary of  discoveries  concerned  with  remains 
prior  to  2000  B.C.,  could  no  longer  keep 
pace  with  collateral  evidence  from  else- 
where. He  left  two  more  completed  volumes 
in  manuscript.  For  the  general  reader  his 
Excavations  at  Ur,  A  Record  of  Twelve 
Years'  Work  (1954)  is  a  most  readable 
summary  account  of  these  achievements. 
To  have  dug  so  much  and  left  nothing  un- 
written was  indeed  a  phenomenal  record. 

When  he  had  completed  his  work  at  Ur 
Woolley  went  on  to  dig  at  Al  Mina  near 
Antioch  in  Syria,  where  he  made  many 
discoveries  concerning  the  import  and 
export  trade  between  the  Aegean  and 
Syria.  Even  more  remunerative  were  his 


1063 


WooUey 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


discoveries  at  Atchana  in  the  Hatay 
(1937-9  and  1946-9),  where  the  palaces, 
temples,  sculpture  and  pottery  of  the  second 
millennium  b.c.  were  of  a. type  hitherto 
little  known.  Once  again  a  rich  find  of 
associated  documents  provided  new  con- 
cepts of  tlie  political  history  and  everyday 
life  in  the  small  kingdoms  of  the  time. 

The  scientific  account  of  this  dig  was 
incorporated  in  a  book  entitled  Alalakhy 
excavations  at  Tell  Atchana  (1955),  full  of 
original  material  and  of  controversial 
matter ;  his  early  chronology  is,  however, 
not  generally  accepted.  The  popular  ac- 
count appeared  in  a  Pelican  book  entitled 
A  Forgotten  Kingdom  (1953). 

In  1938,  less  than  a  year  before  the  out- 
break of  war,  Woolley  accepted  an  invita- 
tion from  the  Government  of  India  to 
advise  them  about  their  programme  of 
archaeological  work.  He  completed  this 
task  in  a  remarkably  short  time  with 
considerable  perceptiveness.  Many  of  his 
recommendations  were  carried  out  and  the 
subsequent  fruitful  developments  in  India 
and  also  in  Pakistan  owed  much  to  his 
advice. 

During  the  war  he  served  with  the  rank 
of  lieutenant-colonel  and  devoted  his 
indefatigable  energy  to  the  safeguarding 
of  monuments,  work  of  art,  libraries,  and 
archives  in  Europe. 

Woolley  will  be  remembered  as  one  of 
the  most  successful  diggers  ever  engaged  in 
field  archaeology  on  account  of  his  extra- 
ordinary flair  not  only  for  choosing  a 
potentially  rich  site  but  also  for  attacking 
those  parts  of  it  which  concealed  the  most 
important  remains.  He  was  very  good 
company,  a  delightful  raconteur,  and  had 
a  good  understanding  of  his  workmen  in 
the  Orient.  Dead  Towns  and  Living  Men 
(1920)  contains  many  reminiscences  which 
well  illustrate  his  sense  of  humour,  in- 
genuity, and  an  unaffected  joie  de  vivre 
which  was  one  of  the  most  charming 
facets  of  his  character.  Between  him  and 
his  foreman  Sheikh  Hamoudi  Ibn  Ibrahim 
there  was  a  lifelong  friendship.  Hamoudi 
was  foreman  on  all  his  principal  expedi- 
tions from  the  time  he  went  to  Carchemish 
in  1912,  and  gave  devoted  service  which 
Woolley  would  always  have  wished  to  be 
remembered. 

Woolley  was  knighted  in  1935 ;  received 
honorary  degrees  from  the  universities  of 
Dublin  and  St.  Andrews ;  was  an  honorary 
fellow  of  New  College,  Oxford,  and  of  the 
Turkish  Historical  Society;  and  was  an 
honorary  A.R.I.B.A.  (1926).  He  was 
awarded  the  Lucy  Wharton  Drexel  medal, 


Museum  of  the  university  of  Pennsylvania 
(1955),  the  Flinders  Petrie  medal,  univer- 
sity of  London  (1957),  and  in  the  last  year 
of  his  life  was  to  have  been  presented  with 
the  gold  medal  of  the  Royal  Society  of 
Antiquaries,  London. 

In  1927  Woolley  married  Katharine 
Elizabeth,  widow  of  Lieutenant-Colonel 
Francis  Keeling.  She  took  an  active  part 
in  his  work  and  did  much  to  attract  finan- 
cial support  for  his  excavations.  She  died 
in  1945  and  Woolley  died  in  London  20 
February  1960. 

[The  Times,  22  February  1960;  Iraq,  vol. 
xxii,  1960 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

M.  E.  L.  Mallowan. 

WORKMAN,  HERBERT  BROOK  (1862- 
1951),  Methodist  divine  and  educationist, 
was  born  in  Peckham  2  November  1862,  a 
son  of  the  Rev.  John  Sansom  Workman, 
a  Wesleyan  minister,  and  his  wife,  Mary 
Brook.  Educated  at  Kingswood  School, 
of  which  his  younger  brother,  W.  P.  Work- 
man, was  later  headmaster  (1889-1918),  he 
tookaLondonB.A.(1884)andM.A.(1885), 
from  the  Owens  College,  Manchester, 
and  prepared  at  Didsbury  College  for  the 
Methodist  ministry.  He  had  a  notable 
spell  of  fifteen  years  as  a  circuit 
minister  before  serving  as  principal  of 
Westminster  Training  College  in  1903-30. 
After  the  long  regime  of  the  redoubtable 
J.  H.  Rigg  [q.v.]  the  college  needed  a  new, 
tough  broom.  Workman  brought  to  the 
task  not  only  his  own  growing  reputation 
as  a  scholar,  with  a  flair  for  picking  col- 
leagues and  pupils  of  coming  eminence,  but 
great  gifts  of  shrewdness  and  administra- 
tive prescience.  He  raised  the  college  to  a 
new  eminence,  and  his  concentration  on 
training  teachers  at  Westminster  and  at 
the  sister  college  of  Southlands  stood  his 
Church  in  valuable  stead  at  a  time  of 
crisis  in  its  educational  poUcy  when  num- 
bers of  Methodist  day  schools  were  closing. 
From  1919  until  his  retirement  in  1940  he 
held  the  important  office  of  secretary  of 
the  Methodist  Education  Committee.  The 
most  notable  of  his  achievements  was  the 
consolidation  of  a  ring  of  Methodist  resi- 
dential schools,  to  which,  through  his 
efforts,  there  were  notable  additions.  He 
was  a  member  of  the  senate  of  the 
university  of  London  which  awarded  him 
the  degree  of  D.Lit.  (1907). 

Workman  was  the  first  distinguished 
Church  historian  to  come  from  the  Metho- 
dist Church,  and  perhaps  the  first  Protes- 
tant and  Nonconformist  scholar  to  show 
sensitive    sympathy   with   the   medieval 


1084 


D.N.B.  1951-1 OGO 


Church.  It  is  true  that  his  first  historical 
writings,  begun  as  a  circuit  minister, 
treated  the  elements  of  dissent  within 
medieval  Christendom.  The  small  volumes, 
The  Church  of  the  West  in  the  Middle  Ages 
(2  vols.,  1898-1900)  and  The  Dawn  of  the 
Reformation  (2  vols.,  1901-2),  have  little 
survival  value,  but  they  are  remarkable 
for  the  care  and  accuracy  with  which  their 
author  had  studied  a  great  range  of  auth- 
orities, and  sought  the  truth  among  the 
primary  documents.  These  studies  found 
their  climax  in  the  sympathetic  portrayal 
of  John  Hus  to  which  his  Letters  of  John 
Hus  (1904)  formed  a  useful  epilogue!  There 
followed  studies  in  the  early  Church, 
Persecution  in  the  Early  Church  (1906)  and 
The  Evolution  of  the  Monastic  Ideal  (1913), 
which  show  his  flair  for  colourful  and 
interesting  narrative  material,  so  that 
despite  much  that  is  dated  in  his  approach 
these  volumes  are  still  in  demand.  His 
Christian  Thought  to  the  Reformation  (1911) 
is  in  contrast  disappointing  and  not  very 
perceptive.  His  great  work,  however,  was 
his  massive  study  of  John  Wyclif  (2  vols., 
1926).  Into  it  went  many  years  of  study 
and  research,  which  called  forth  the 
best  of  his  considerable  abilities.  Studies 
of  medieval  theology  have  subsequently 
advanced  far  and  a  whole  generation  of  re- 
search into  the  theologies  of  Wyclif  and 
Hus  has  modified  and  in  parts  much  dated 
many  of  Workman's  conclusions.  But  the 
volumes  are  still  to  be  read  with  profit,  and 
the  reader  may  easily  miss  the  pains- 
taking diUgence  which  went  into  the 
lucid  writing.  Workman  was  preparing 
a  further  volume  to  cover  the  history  of 
later  Lollardy  but  had  not  got  farther  than 
the  preparation  of  a  mass  of  beautifully 
arranged  notes  when  he  died.  Probably 
his  best  single  writing  was  his  classic  essay 
The  Place  of  Methodism  in  the  Catholic 
Church  (1921),  originally  written  for  the 
New  History  of  Methodism  (2  vols.,  1909) 
of  which  he  was  one  of  the  editors.  There 
his  evangeUcal  convictions  and  his  wide 
catholic  sympathies  enabled  him  to  set  the 
evangelical  revival  against  the  long  per- 
spective of  the  Christian  past.  The  worth 
of  his  studies  was  recognized  by  the  univer- 
sity of  Aberdeen  which  awarded  him  the 
degree  of  D.D.  in  1914. 

Workman  married  in  1891  Ethel  Mary, 
daughter  of  Alban  Gardner  Buller,  solici- 
tor, of  Birmingham;  they  had  two  sons 
and  one  daughter.  He  died  in  London  26 
August  1951. 

[Private  information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

E.  G.  RuPP. 


'Wylie 

WYLIE,  Sir  FRANCIS  JAMES  (1865- 
1952),  first  warden  of  Rhodes  House, 
Oxford,  was  born  in  Bromley,  Kent,  18 
October  1865,  the  second  son  of  Richard 
Northcote  Wylie  and  his  wife,  Charlotte 
Greenlaw.  The  Wylies  had  had  a  long  con- 
nection with  Russia.  Wylie's  father  was  a 
member  of  the  Bourse  in  St.  Petersburg, 
and  his  great-uncle,  Sir  James  Wylie  [q.v.]) 
had  been  physician  at  the  court  of  the 
Tsar.  Wylie  himself  spent  short  periods 
in  Russia  during  childhood,  but  had  no 
special  association  with  that  country  in 
later  life. 

He  was  educated  at  St.  Edward's 
School,  Oxford.  At  the  suggestion  of  his 
uncle  by  marriage,  Edward  Caird  [q.v.], 
(who  was  then  professor  of  moral  phiIo« 
sophy  at  Glasgow  and  was  later  to  become 
master  of  Balliol),  the  promising  young 
man  went  from  school  to  pursue  his  classi- 
cal studies  at  the  university  of  Glasgow, 
from  which  he  won  a  Snell  exhibition  to 
Balhol.  He  went  up  to  Oxford  in  1884  and 
soon  showed  himself  a  classical  scholar  of 
mark.  He  took  a  first  class  in  honour 
moderations  in  1886  and  in  literae  human- 
iores  in  1888.  He  was  not,  however,  the 
'mere  bookworm'  whom  Cecil  Rhodes 
[q.v.]  deprecated ;  though  of  slight  build 
he  rowed  in  the  Balliol  eight  and  was 
elected  to  Vincent's  Club  and  Leander. 
Throughout  his  long  life  he  retained  an 
alert  and  critical  interest  in  rowing. 

After  taking  his  degree  he  spent  a  few 
months  teaching  at  his  old  school  and  then 
engaged  in  private  tutoring  until,  after 
being  made  a  lecturer  of  the  college  in 
1891,  he  was  elected  a  fellow  of  Brasenose 
in  1892.  There  he  proved  himself  a  success- 
ful and  assiduous  tutor  and  when  he  died 
there  still  survived  a  few  of  his  former 
pupils  who  remembered  with  gratitude 
his  lectures  on  Aristotle's  Logic.  He  was 
junior  proctor  in  1903-4,  a  year  which 
was  to  prove  a  turning-point  in  his  life- 
work.  He  cultivated  a  brisk  diversity  of 
interests,  not  the  least  of  them  in 
mihtary  service.  It  was  characteristic  of 
his  dominant  sense  of  duty  that  he  was  a 
zealous  member  of  the  Oxford  University 
Volunteers.  As  a  company  commander  iit 
that  corps  he  took  part  in  the  official  obse- 
quies of  Queen  Victoria.  When,  in  the 
later  chapter  of  his  life,  war  broke  out  in 
1914,  he  was  too  old  for  service  in  the  field, 
but  he  threw  himself  with  energy  into  the 
work  of  the  Oxford  University  Training 
Corps  and  made  a  spirited  contribution 
to  its  courses  of  instruction. 

The  will  of  Cecil  Rhodes  was  made 


1085 


Wylie 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


public  in  April  1902,  and  the  trustees 
appointed  by  it  were  soon  busy  making 
plans  for  the  inauguration  of  the  scholar- 
ships. One  of  the  trustees  was  Lord  Rose- 
bery  [q.v.],  whom  Wylie  had  come  to 
know  as  private  tutor  to  his  two  sons.  (Sir) 
George  Parkin  [q.v.]  had  been  appointed 
organizing  secretary  to  the  Rhodes  Trust, 
and  in  February  1903  Wylie  was  invited, 
through  Rosebery,  to  supervise  the  Oxford 
side  of  the  system  and  to  assume  a  general 
tutelage  of  the  scholars  in  residence.  It  was 
not  an  easy  decision  to  make.  He  had  an 
established  position  in  a  college  to  which 
he  was  much  attached ;  he  was  well  known 
in  the  academic  sphere  and  was  about  to 
become  a  proctor ;  he  was  now  invited  to 
occupy  an  ofhce  with  no  academic  standing, 
since  the  Rhodes  trustees  were  a  body 
outside  the  university  organism,  and  to 
assist  in  launching  a  scheme  which  at 
that  time  was  highly  experimental.  The 
project  of  the  Rhodes  scholarships  was 
not  universally  welcomed  in  Oxford ;  the 
university  and  colleges  were  far  more 
inbred  in  1903  than  they  have  since  be- 
come, and  there  was  considerable  scep- 
ticism about  an  influx  of  'Colonials', 
Americans,  and  Germans,  who,  it  was 
feared,  might  lower  academic  standards, 
especially  in  the  classics,  besides  making 
undue  demands  on  the  limited  room  and 
resources  of  colleges.  Wylie  was  under  no 
illusions  about  the  problems  which  would 
face  him,  and  it  was  again  a  sense  of  duty 
which  prompted  him  to  accept  the  trus- 
tees' invitation.  He  had  the  opportunity, 
which  he  was  amply  to  fulfil,  of  doing 
a  notable  service  to  imperial  and  Anglo- 
American  relations,  and  he  was  never  the 
man  to  shrink  from  responsibilities. 

He  was  soon  to  receive  invaluable  aid  in 
his  task.  In  1904  he  married  Kathleen, 
daughter  of  Edmond  Kelly,  an  American 
lawyer  in  Paris,  where  much  of  her  girlhood 
was  spent.  Wylie  had  met  his  future  wife 
when  she  was  a  member  of  Lady  Margaret 
Hall,  Oxford.  For  the  next  twenty-eight 
years  this  was  to  prove  an  ideal  partner- 
ship for  developing  and  influencing  Cecil 
Rhodes' s  'great  idea'  in  both  its  adminis- 
trative and  its  personal  aspects.  Four  sons 
and  two  daughters  were  born  of  the  mar- 
riage, the  eldest  son  dying  in  childhood. 
The  fourth  son,  Shaun,  was  elected  a  fellow 
(mathematics)  of  Trinity  Hall,  Cambridge, 
in  1939.  One  of  the  daughters,  Vere, 
married  an  Australian  Rhodes  scholar, 
Lewis  Charles  Wilcher,  who  became  in 
1956  the  first  warden  of  Queen  Elizabeth 
House,  Oxford. 


The  story  of  the  growing-pains  and 
adventurous  adolescence  of  the  Rhodes 
scholarships  has  been  told  vividly  by  Wylie 
himself  in  his  contribution  (pp.  59-125) — 
which  he  wrote  almost  at  the  end  of  his 
life — to  the  volume  The  First  Fifty  Years  of 
the  Rhodes  Trust  and  the  Rhodes  Scholar- 
ships published  by  the  Rhodes  trustees  in 
1955.  To  him,  probably  more  than  to  any 
other  individual,  belongs  the  credit  for 
having  woven  a  fabric  which  was  to  be- 
come an  integral  part  of  the  whole  Oxford 
design.  There  were  vicissitudes  at  first; 
but  Wylie  and  his  wife  enjoyed  the  reward 
of  seeing  hundreds  of  young  men  from 
many  far  countries  derive  from  Oxford 
what  their  benefactor  had  intended 
for  them  and  acquit  themselves  with 
distinction  in  their  later  careers.  There 
was  none  of  them  who  did  not  acknow- 
ledge his  debt  to  the  Wylie  influence  and 
guidance. 

Responsibilities  constantly  increased 
with  the  expansion  of  the  Rhodes  network 
by  additional  scholarships  which  the 
trustees  established  in  British  areas  over- 
seas, until  the  number  of  Rhodes  scholars 
at  Oxford  at  any  one  time  grew  to  nearly 
two  hundred,  composed  about  equally  of 
British  and  American  nationals,  with  a 
small  group  of  Germans.  After  twenty- 
eight  years  of  arduous  service,  Wylie  re- 
tired in  1931,  but  not  before  he  had  had 
the  satisfaction  of  seeing  the  completion  of 
Oxford's  permanent  memorial  to  the  foun- 
der, Rhodes  House,  of  which  he  became 
the  first  warden.  He  was  knighted  in  1929, 
on  the  occasion  of  the  reunion  of  Rhodes 
scholars  at  Oxford  when  Rhodes  House 
was  formally  opened,  and  he  was  elected  an 
honorary  fellow  of  Brasenose  in  1931.  His 
portrait,  painted  by  Edward  I.  Halliday 
in  1952,  and  an  earlier  pencil  drawing  by 
Miss  F.  A.  de  Biden  Footner,  done  in  1935 
and  reproduced  for  presentation  to  all 
Rhodes  scholars  of  his  period,  hang  in 
Rhodes  House. 

Retirement,  however,  was  by  no  means 
the  end  of  Wylie's  services  to  the 
Rhodes  scholarships.  For  upwards  of 
another  twenty  years  he  kept  regular 
touch  with  his  former  charges.  His  world- 
wide correspondence  with  them  was  in- 
defatigable and  his  personal  memory  and 
knowledge  of  them  throughout  the  years 
were  remarkable.  Of  the  many  Rhodes 
scholars  who  revisited  Oxford  from  time  to 
time  few  failed  to  make  a  pilgrimage  to 
the  Wylie  home  near  Oxford,  where  peren- 
nial welcome  awaited  them,  their  kindred, 
and  their  friends.  On  Boar's  Hill,  with 


1086 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


a  panorama  of  the  Berkshire  downlands 
spread  before  him,  Wyhe's  tranquil  life  and 
temperament  made  light  of  the  burden  of 
years.  He  had  always  been  a  man  of  simple 
tastes,  and  he  found  continual  refresh- 
ment in  the  Matthew  Arnold  country, 
which  he  knew  intimately,  in  birds  and 
flowers,  in  parish  work,  and  in  country 
walks  which  to  the  end  of  his  life  lost 
nothing  of  their  zest  and  vigour.  His  facul- 
ties seemed  to  be  quite  unimpaired  when, 
without  warning,  he  died  in  his  sleep  at 
his  home  29  October  1952. 

With  his  wife  he  made  many  journeys 
throughout  the  English-speaking  world 
on  embassies  for  the  Rhodes  trustees.  Three 
universities  in  the  United  States— Union 
College,  Schenectady  (1932),  Swarthmore 
College  (1933),  and  Bowdoin  College  (1933) 
— conferred  honorary  degrees  upon  him. 
In  1945  the  Rhodes  trustees  permanently 
conmiemorated  his  name  in  Oxford  by  the 
foundation  of  a  Wylie  prize  for  an  essay 
on  some  aspect  of  the  relations  between 
the  American  colonies  or  the  United  States 
and  any  part  of  the  British  Empire  or 
Commonwealth.  Lady  Wylie  died  in 
1969. 

[The  Times,  80  October,  1,  15,  17,  and  20 
November  1952 ;  Oxford  Magazine,  29  January 
1953 ;  United  Empire,  November  1952 ;  New 
York  Times,  8  November  1952;  Bowdoin 
Alumnus,  November  1952;  The  First  Fifty 
Years  of  the  Rhodes  Trust  and  the  Rhodes 
Scholarships,  1903-1953,  ed.  Lord  Elton, 
1955;  personal  knowledge;  private  informa- 
tion.] C.  K.  Allen. 

YATES,  DORNFORD  (pseudonym), 
novelist.  [See  Mercer,  Cecil  William.] 

YEATS,  JACK  BUTLER  (1871-1957), 
painter,  was  born  29  August  1871  at  23 
Fitzroy  Street,  London,  the  youngest  of 
the  five  children  of  Irish  Protestant 
parents,  John  Butler  Yeats,  painter,  and 
his  wife,  Susan  Pellexfen.  Although  his 
eldest  brother  was  the  poet  W.  B.  Yeats 
[q.v.],  his  father  once  announced  that 
he  would  be  remembered  as  the  father 
of  a  painter.  When  he  was  only  eight 
Jack  B.  Yeats  joined  his  grandparents  in 
county  Sligo  and  for  the  next  eight  years 
he  roamed  in  the  countryside  around  and 
furnished  his  mind  with  all  those  images  of 
circuses,  fairdays,  sailing  boats  and  sailors, 
and  the  strange  customs  of  the  people 
which  even  fifty  years  later  were  still  to  be 
the  subject  matter  of  his  pictures.  Travel- 
ling players  specially  interested  him  and 
an  early  water-colour  shows  him  standing 


Yeats 


before  a  toy  theatre  which  he  had  received 
as  a  present  when  he  was  only  nine  or 
ten.  Later  he  wrote  plays  and  stories  and 
Illustrated  them  himself.  His  concept  of 
art,  therefore,  was  clearly  related  to  the 
heroic  and  imaginative  achievement  and 
he  always  seemed  to  measure  life  in  terms 
of  idealism  and  nobility. 

In  1888  he  attended  the  Westminster 
School  of  Art  and  later  he  made  a  living 
as  a  successful  illustrator  for  such  varied 
publications  as  Boy's  Oimi  Paper,  Judy, 
and  the  Vegetarian.  He  also  illustrated  a 
large  number  of  broadsheets  and  in  1912 
published  drawings  and  paintings  of  Life 
in  the  West  of  Ireland. 

Between  1890  and  1900  he  held  a 
number  of  one-man  shows  in  London  but 
they  were  confined  to  drawings  and  water- 
colours  and  then  he  returned  to  Ireland 
where  he  remained  for  the  rest  of  his 
life,  short  holidays  apart.  In  the  famous 
Armory  exhibition  of  1913  in  New  York 
he  showed  five  oils  and  from  then  onwards 
was  principally  engaged  as  an  oil  painter. 
He  returned  again  and  again  to  his  study 
of  figures  and  places  in  water-colour  arid 
to  the  various  sketch-books  of  drawings 
which  he  continued  to  fill  on  expedi- 
tions. 

His  oil  paintings  up  to  the  early  1930s 
were  comparatively  direct  transcriptions 
from  fife,  with  the  human  figure  graphic- 
ally treated  but  with  the  summary  style  of 
his  water-colours.  He  had  a  most  produc- 
tive period  following  the  1916  Rising  and 
some  of  his  most  moving  pictures  were 
inspired  by  this  period,  particularly 
'Bachelors  Walk,  in  Memory',  'Communi- 
cating with  Prisoners',  and  'The  Funeral  of 
Harry  Boland'. 

In  the  middle  1930s  he  began  to  depart 
from  the  illustrative  phase  and  he  com- 
menced to  use  paint  with  a  great  deal  more 
richness  and  sparkle  and  he  seemed  to 
avoid  simulating  natural  tones.  This  was 
the  period  of  'The  Scene  Painters  Rose' 
and  other  romantic  works  which  preceded 
the  war  of  1939-45. 

He  had  had  a  one-man  show  in  Arthur 
Tooth  &  Sons,  London,  in  1926  and  a 
number  of  exhibitions  in  Dublin  and  from 
1943  onward  Victor  Waddington  became 
his  dealer.  The  relationship  proved  fruit- 
ful and  the  demand  for  his  works  and  his 
prices  rose  steeply.  Not  only  was  he 
famous  but  he  was  also  the  centre  of  the 
avant  garde  movement  for  the  younger 
generation  although  he  was  by  then  two 
generations  ahead  in  years. 

In    1942    Yeats   had   a   retrospective 


1087 


Yeats 


D.N.B*  1951-1960 


exhibition  at  thfe  National  Gallery,  Lon- 
don, and  in  1945  a  national  loan  ex- 
hibition of  almost  a  hundred  pictures  was 
held  in  Dublin.  For  the  first  time  an  Irish 
artist  was  regarded  as  a  prophet  in  his  own 
land.  More  important  for  himself,  however, 
he  was  inspired  by  it  to  greater  freedom 
and  originality.  His  new  pictures  were 
filled  with  a  splendour  of  colour  and  he 
invented  imaginative,  dreamlike  places 
with  titles  of  accompanying  grandeur  like 
*A  Race  in  Hy-Brazil',  'Tinkers'  Encamp- 
ment— The  Blood  of  Abel',  *There  is  no 
Night',  and  'Death  for  Only  One'. 

Jack  B.  Yeats  died  in  Dublin  28  March 
1957  but  seemed  thereafter  to  suffer  no 
eclipse  of  reputation.  Exhibitions  in  var- 
ious parts  of  the  world  continued:  due 
in  part  to  the  fact  that  he  was  an  ex- 
pressionist artist — ^a  style  which  remained 
in  fashion;  but  due  also  to  his  essential 
optimism  and  his  belief  in  mystery, 
legend,  and  poetic  allusion.  He  affirmed 
man's  belief  in  himself  and  yet  remained 
modem. 

In  1894  Yeats  married  Mary  Cottenham 
(died  1947),  daughter  of  the  late  John 
Phillips  White.  The  National  Gallery  of 
Ireland  has  a  self-portrait  in  pencil  and 
portraits  by  J.  B.  Yeats  (as  a  boy)  and 
LiUan  Davidson. 

[Thomas  MacGreevy,  Jack  B.  Yeats,  1945.] 
Jamks  White. 

YOUNG,  EDWARD  HILTON,  first 
Baron  Kennet  (1879-1960),  politician 
and  writer,  was  bom  in  London  20  March 
1879,  the  fourth  child  and  third  son  of  Sir 
George  Young,  third  baronet  [q.v.].  His 
childhood  was  darkened  by  the  death  of  a 
beloved  sister,  Eacy,  and  lightened  by  a 
family  printing  press  on  which  his  pica- 
resque novel,  The  County  was  printed  when 
he  was  nine. 

After  a  brief  period  of  ill  health  and 
emotional  crisis  at  Marlborough,  he  went 
to  Eton  where  he  joined  the  army  class, 
then  the  only  way  to  study  science,  and 
became  its  captain.  After  a  short  time 
studying  chemistry  under  (Sir)  William 
Ramsay  [q.v.]  at  University  College, 
London,  he  went  to  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge,  whence  he  emerged  in  1900 
as  president  of  the  Union,  editor  of  the 
Cambridge  Review,  and  with  a  first  in 
natural  sciences.  His  friends  were  G.  M. 
Trevelyan,  E.  M.  Forster,  and  the  circle 
which  later  became  known  as  'Blooms- 
bury'.  It  was  to  him  that  'Bloomsbury' 
turned  in  1914  for  evidence  that  their 
pacifism  antedated  the  war. 


Leaving  chemistry  for  law  he  was  called 
by  the  Inner  Temple  in  1904.  He  held  a 
few  briefs,  but  it  did  not  take.  After  a 
short  period  studying  international  law  at 
the  university  of  Freiburg  he  found  a  truer 
line  of  progress  as  a  wTiter  and  journalist 
about  finance  and  a  Liberal  Party  worker. 
He  was  assistant  editor  of  The  Economist 
from  1908  to  1910,  and  organized  Free 
Trade  Unions  in  Yorkshire  and  the  City 
of  London.  In  1910  he  became  City  editor 
of  the  Morning  Post  and  London  corre- 
spondent of  the  New  York  Times  financial 
supplement.  In  1912  he  published  Foreign 
Companies  and  Other  Corporations,  and 
in  1915  The  System  of  National  Finance 
which,  reissued  in  1924  and  1936,  remained 
the  standard  textbook  until  1939. 

He  joined  the  Royal  Naval  Volunteer 
Reserve  in  1914.  His  war  service  was 
varied,  including  spells  with  the  Grand 
Fleet,  with  the  naval  mission  to  the  Ser- 
bian Army  on  the  Danube  and  its  evacua- 
tion to  Corfu,  with  light  cruisers  on  the 
Harwich  station,  and  with  naval  siege 
guns  ashore  on  the  Belgian  beach  at 
Nieuport  les  Bains.  For  this  last  he  was 
awarded  the  D.S.C.  and  the  croix  de  guerre. 
In  1918  he  volunteered  for  the  blocking  of 
Zeebrugge  and,  serving  in  the  Vindictive, 
commanded  a  gun  turret  while  smoking  a 
cigar  until  his  right  arm  was  shot  away. 
From  this  battle  he  acquired  a  bar  to  his 
D.S.C,  forty  years  of  intermittent  pain, 
and  the  beautiful  half-uncial  script  he 
learned  to  write  with  his  left  hand.  When 
he  had  recovered  he  volunteered  for  ser- 
vice in  Russia  where  he  found  himself  in 
command  of  an  armoured  train  fighting 
a  war  of  head-on  confrontation  with  Bol- 
shevik trains  coming  up  from  Vologda. 
For  this  he  was  appointed  to  the  D.S.O. 
In  1920  he  published  a  book  of  war 
memoirs  By  Sea  and  Land, 

Twice  before  the  war  he  had  stood  un- 
successfully for  Parliament  as-  a  Liberal ; 
in  1915  he  had  been  returned  unopposed 
in  his  absence  at  a  by-election  in  Norwich. 
At  the  1918  general  election  he  was  re- 
turned as  a  'free  Liberal'  but  soon  threw  in 
his  lot  with  Lloyd  George.  He  gained  the 
ear  of  the  House  of  Commons  with  speeches 
mainly  on  finance,  and  became  financial 
secretary  to  the  Treasury  in  1921.  After 
the  election  oM922  he  became  chief  whip 
of 'the  Lloyd  George  Liberals,  was  sworn  of 
the  Privy  Council,  and  regulated  the  dis- 
ordered finances  of  his  party.  He  lost  his 
seat  in  1923  but  regained  it  in  1924. 

Socialism  he  would  not  have,  and  when 
in  1926  Lloyd  George  propounded  a  land 


1088 


policy  which  he  thought  socialistic,  Hilton 
Young  left  the  Liberals  and  became  an 
independent.  At  the  time  of  the  general 
strike,  believing  that  socialism  and  'direct 
action'  could  be  effectively  met  only  by  a 
single  party,  and  that  this  could  never 
again  be  the  ruined  Liberal  Party,  he 
joined  the  Conservatives.  By  agreement 
with  his  constituents  he  kept  his  seat  until 
the  general  election  in  1929,  and  was  then 
returned  for  the  Sevenoaks  division  of 
Kent,  which  he  held  until  1935.  He  was 
appointed  G.B.E.  in  1927. 

During  the  Labour  Government  of 
1929-31  he  attended  the  Conservative 
shadow  Cabinet  and  attained  a  leading 
position  in  debate  in  the  House.  He  was 
also  general  editor  of  a  group  of  journals, 
of  which  the  Financial  News  was  the  chief. 
In  1931  he  became  minister  of  health  in 
Ramsay  MacDonald's  'national'  Govern- 
ment. His  main  job  was  slum  clearance  and 
rehousing.  His  policy  was  to  confine  sub- 
sidies to  clearance,  thereby  encouraging 
local  authorities  to  attack  that  vigor- 
ously, while  stimulating  private  builders 
to  provide  new  houses  by  releasing  them 
from  subsidized  competition.  The  policy 
resulted  in  an  unprecedented  rate  of  pro- 
gress with  both  clearing  and  building.  But 
it  was  unpopular  with  the  Left  because  of 
its  emphasis  on  the  private  builder,  and 
alienated  important  interests  on  the  Right 
because  it  had  no  place  for  compensation 
to  slum  landlords.  'You  do  not',  he  wrote, 
'compensate  the  butcher  for  selling  fly- 
blown meat.' 

He  was  responsible  for  the  Town  and 
Country  Planning  Act  of  1982,  the  first  to 
apply  to  all  'developable'  land,  and  for  a 
Housing  Act  (1935)  which  was  the  first  to 
lay  down  standards  of  accommodation  and 
provide  for  their  enforcement. 

When  Ramsay  MacDonald  resigned  in 
1985,  Hilton  Young  accepted  a  peerage  as 
Lord  Kennet  of  the  Dene,  and  took  no 
further  part  in  politics.  The  name  Kennet 
was  taken  from  the  river  by  which  he  had 
a  cottage  in  Wiltshire. 

The  unusual  breadth  of  his  early  train- 
ing— science,  law,  finance,  and  journalism, 
as  well  as  politics — ^had  made  him  a 
valuable  negotiator  and  committee  chair- 
man. He  was  British  representative  at  the 
Hague  conference  on  credits  for  the  Soviet 
Union  in  1922,  and  a  member  of  the 
British  delegation  to  the  League  of  Nations 
Assemblies  in  1926,  1927,  1928,  and  1932. 
He  headed  a  British  mission  to  Poland 
(1923-5)  which  laid  the  foundation  of  a 
balanced  budget  and  got  the  zloty  through 

8662068 


D.N.B.  1951-1060  Young,  E.  H. 

some  of  its  early  difficulties.  He  did  much 
the  same  for  Iraq  in  1925  and  1980, 
designing  the  Iraqi  currency  and  remain- 
ing chairman  of  the  Iraq  Currency  Board 
in  London  for  many  years.  In  1925-6  he 
was  chairman  of  the  royal  commission  on 
Indian  finance  which  stabilized  the  rupee 
and  drew  up  the  constitution  of  the  Indian 
Reserve  Bank.  In  1928  he  chaired  a  mis- 
sion to  East  Africa  which  advised  on  the 
closer  union  of  the  British  territories  there, 
drawing  up  a  plan  which  was  partially 
adopted  over  the  years. 

At  home  he  was  chairman  of  the  1925 
departmental  committee  on  the  con- 
stitution of  the  university  of  London,  and 
the  first  lay  member  (for  the  Crown)  of 
the  General  Medical  Council  (1926-31). 
Appointments  which  would  have  meant 
his  leaving  Parliament  he  refused. 

During  the  war  of  1989-45  he  was 
chairman  of  the  joint  committees  of  the 
Treasury  and  the  Ministry  of  Labour 
which  administered  the  exemption  from 
military  service  of  civil  servants,  workers 
in  financial  institutions,  and  university 
teachers,  and  in  1939-59  he  was  chairman 
of  the  Capital  Issues  Committee,  which 
administered  the  control  of  investment 
throughout  the  economy.  For  all  this  work 
he  accepted  no  payment,  public  or  private, 
and  it  was  his  practice  to  write  his  own 
reports. 

At  different  times  he  was  also  chairman 
and  director  of  many  commercial  and 
financial  corporations,  among  them  Eng- 
lish Electric,  Hudson's  Bay,  Denny  Mott 
and  Dickson,  Union  Discount,  British 
Bank  of  the  Middle  East,  and  Equity  and 
Law  Life  Assurance.  After  1935  his 
working  life  was  passed  mainly  in  the 
City,  where  he  was  known  as  a  specialist 
in  reordering  the  finances  of  companies 
standing  in  need  of  it. 

His  varied  presidencies  included  the 
Royal  Statistical  Society,  the  Association 
of  Technical  Institutions,  the  Poetry 
Society,  the  Gas  Federation  of  Great 
Britain,  the  Association  of  Municipal  Cor- 
porations, and  the  National  Association 
of  Youth  Clubs. 

His  leisure  interests  were  old  books, 
which  he  collected — principally  Venetian 
incunabula  and  first  editions  of  the  English 
philosophers — and  birds,  about  which  he 
published  a  book  of  essays  A  Bird  in  the 
Bush  (1936)  illustrated  by  his  stepson 
Peter  Scott.  He  also  published  a  book  of 
verse  A  Muse  at  Sea  (1919)  reprinted  with 
additions  as  Verses  in  1935.  One  became 
an  anthology  piece:  'A  boy  was  bom  at 


Young,  E.  H. 


,D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Bethlehem'.  He  was  an  enthusiastic  small 
boat  sailor  mitil  his  sixtieth  year,  sailing 
single-handed  in  a  stricter  sense  of  the 
word  than  is  usual,  and  a  good  swimmer 
and  diver.  He  was  a  spirited  draughtsman, 
usually  for  political  or  didactic  purposes. 
All  the  special  skills  which  were  necessary 
to  maintain  an  active  physical  life  with 
one  arm  he  carefully  learned  and  main- 
tained. 

He  was  of  compact  build  and  average 
height,  handsome  in  youth  with  curly  dark 
hair  and  straight  nose,  alert  and  courteous 
in  white-haired  age.  He  was  on  affable 
terms  with  his  eldest  brother,  Sir  George 
Young,  bart.,  the  eccentric  diplomat  and 
historian  of  Turkish  law,  and  on  terms  of 
intimate  affection  with  his  next  brother, 
Geoffrey  Winthrop  Young,  the  moun- 
taineer and  writer,  a  notice  of  whom  ap- 
pears below.  He  was  on  the  whole  a  man's 
man,  and  used  to  quote:  'A  man  of  the 
world !  Where's  my  hat  ?' 

He  was  brought  up  in  a  rather  rigid  Broad 
Church  family  but,  under  the  influence 
of  G.  E.  Moore  [q.v.]  and  Bertrand  Russell 
at  Cambridge,  abandoned  Christianity 
for  an  aesthetically  flavoured  humanism. 
Face  to  face  with  death  in  1914  he  felt  the 
need  for  a  stricter  system,  and  studied 
Spinoza  among  shellbursts.  He  remained 
a  Spinozan  pantheist  till  his  death.  To- 
wards the  end  of  his  life  he  wrote  essays 
for  private  circulation,  tracing  this  philo- 
sophical development,  and  examining  the 
defects  of  democracy  in  general  and  the 
House  of  Commons  in  particular.  He  held 
that  the  chief  threat  to  the  welfare  of  a 
community  comes  from  the  excesses  of 
extremists  both  left  and  right,  and  that 
it  is  the  duty  of  rulers  to  counteract  them 
by  leaning  right  or  left  as  the  times  require. 
Spinoza  was  his  philosopher,  'Trimmer' 
Halifax  [q.v.]  his  statesman. 

He  was  at  home  in  scholarship,  in 
administration,  and  in  debate,  but  never  in 
party  politics.  These  he  held  in  contempt, 
and  it  showed.  A  reserved  manner  and  a 
certain  caustic  and  even  farouche  integ- 
rity prevented  his  achieving  the  highest 
political  offices.  He  had  a  good  measure  of 
the  brilliant  contrariety  characteristic  of 
his  family,  but  balanced  it  with  a  genial 
empiricism  of  his  own.  He  called  himself  a 
jack  of  all  trades ;  his  admirers  called  him 
a  uomo  universale. 

In  1922  he  married  Kathleen  Scott  [q.v.] 
the  sculptor.  Although  entered  into  late  in 
life  the  marriage  was  singularly  successful, 
their  temperaments  being  nicely  comple- 
mentary: hers  passionate  and  intuitive; 


his  quizzical  and  rather  reserved.  He  died 
at  Lockeridge  in  Wiltshire,  11  July  1960, 
and  was  succeeded  by  his  only  child 
Way  land  Hilton  (born  1923).  There 
exist  portrait  drawings  of  him  by  Sir 
William  Rothenstein  and  Peter  Scott, 
and  a  statuette  by  his  wife.  All  are  in 
the  possession  of  his  son. 

Wayland  Young. 

YOUNG,  FRANCIS  BRETT  (1884-1954), 
novelist,  was  born  29  June  1884  at 
Halesowen,  Worcestershire,  the  eldest  son 
of  Thomas  Brett  Young  and  his  wife, 
Annie  Elizabeth,  daughter  of  John  Jack- 
son, a  surgeon,  of  Somerby,  Leicestershire. 
As  the  son  of  a  doctor  he  was  educated  at 
Epsom  College,  where  he  won  a  prize  for 
English  literature,  and  then  graduated 
M.B.,  Ch.B.  at  Birmingham  University 
(1907).  His  experiences  at  school  and 
university  were  the  basis  of  his  early  novel 
The  Young  Physician  (1919). 

In  1908  Brett  Young  married  a  teacher 
of  physical  training  who  later  became  a 
concert  singer,  Jessica,  daughter  of  John 
Hankinson,  farmer,  and  settled  in  practice 
in  Brixham,  Devon,  where  'in  between 
epidemics'  he  wrote  his  earliest  novels, 
Deep  Sea  (1914),  The  Dark  Tower  (1915), 
and  The  Iron  Age  (1916).  Joining  the 
Royal  Army  Medical  Corps  he  served  with 
the  2nd  Rhodesian  Regiment  in  Smuts's 
campaign  in  East  Africa.  Marching  on 
Tanga  (1917)  was  the  fruit  of  his  ex- 
periences, but  the  campaign  took  a  heavy 
toll  of  his  health.  He  wrote  The  Crescent 
Moon  (1918)  and  Poems  1916-1918  (1919) 
while  still  convalescent  in  Africa. 

Even  on  his  return  to  England  Brett 
Young  was  not  well  enough  to  resume 
medical  practice.  His  wife  gave  up  her 
concert  career  and  they  settled  in  Ana- 
capri.  There,  curiously  enough,  beneath 
Mediterranean  skies,  his  first  essentially 
West  Midland  stories,  The  Black  Diamond 
(1921)  and  Portrait  of  Clare  (1927),  were 
conceived  and  written.  The  latter,  a  story 
of  considerable  length  and  of  the  type  now 
generally  associated  with  his  name,  was 
awarded  the  James  Tait  Black  memorial 
prize  and  was  his  first  real  success.  In 
spite  of  the  exotic  friendships  of  Capri,  the 
couple  longed  for  an  English  home  which 
the  sales  of  this  novel  and  My  Brother 
Jonathan  (1928)  made  financially  possible. 
They  settled  in  the  Lake  District  until  in 
1933  they  purchased  Craycombe  House, 
standing  on  a  hill  overlooking  the  Avon 
valley  above  Evesham,  in  the  very  heart 
of  what  was  already  becoming  known  as 


1090 


*the  Brett  Young  country'.  Until  the  out- 
break of  war  in  1939  he  published  at  least 
one  book  a  year— among  them  Mr.  and 
Mrs.  Pennington  (1931),  The  House  Under 
the  Water  (1932),  and  a  moving  story  of  the 
life  of  a  general  practitioner.  Dr.  Bradley 
Remembers  (1938),  clearly  based  on  the  life 
of  his  own  father.  Most  of  them  were  set  in 
his  'own  country',  but  he  wrote  also  two 
vast  panoramic  novels — he  did  not  live  to 
complete  the  trilogy — They  Seek  a  Country 
(1937)  and  The  City  of  Gold  (1939)  which 
set  forth  the  story  of  the  South  African 
peoples  from  the  days  of  the  Great  Trek 
to  the  Jameson  raid. 

The  great  drama  of  the  Battle  of  Britain 
inspired  Brett  Young  to  undertake  his 
most  ambitious  work.  The  Island  (1944), 
in  which  he  described  in  verse  the  conquests 
and  vicissitudes  in  our  island  history  from 
the  earhest  times  until  the  final  defeat  of 
the  German  invader  in  the  air.  It  left  a 
strain  upon  his  heart  and  health  so  heavy 
that  on  medical  advice  he  settled  near 
Cape  Town,  where  he  died  28  March 
1954.  There  were  no  children.  His  widow 
brought  his  ashes  to  England  and  they 
were  laid  to  rest  in  Worcester  Cathedral 
which  he  greatly  loved. 

There  is  a  portrait  by  Cathleen  Mann, 
painted  in  1922,  in  the  library  of  the 
medical  faculty  in  the  university  of 
Birmingham.  Brett  Young  looked  what  in 
fact  he  was,  a  landowner  and  a  physician, 
a  man  typical  of  his  class.  Nowhere  was 
he  more  at  home  than  amongst  his  fel- 
low members  of  the  committee  of  the 
Worcestershire  County  Cricket  Club.  It 
is  from  this  background  that  his  novels 
in  the  main  derive.  They  have  the  charm 
of  being  typically  EngHsh,  written  in  a 
leisurely  and  accomplished  manner  which 
at  times  achieves  a  genuine  lyrical  quality. 
Brett  Young  received  the  honorary  degree 
of  D.Litt.  from  the  university  of  Birming- 
ham in  1950. 

[E.  G.  Twitehett,  Francis  Brett  Young, 
1935;  Jessica  Brett  Young,  Francis  Brett 
Young,  1962 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Arnold  Gyde. 

YOUNG,      GEOFFREY     W^INTHROP 

(1876-1958),  mountaineer,  the  second  son 
of  Sir  George  Young,  third  baronet  [q.v.], 
was  born  in  London  25  October  1876. 
A  notice  of  his  younger  brother  appears 
above.  He  was  educated  at  Marlborough 
and  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  where  he 
was  twice  awarded  the  Chancellor's  verse 
medal  (1898-9),  pubhshed  anonymously 
'The   Roof-Climber's   Guide   to  Trinity', 


D.N.B.  1951-1960  Young,  G.  W. 

and  graduated  in  1898.  After  further  study 
at  Jena  and  Geneva  universities  he  was 
an  assistant  master  at  Eton  (1900-5),  an 
inspector  of  secondary  schools  (1905-18), 
consultant  for  Europe  to  the  Rockefeller 
Foundation  (1925-33),  and  reader  in  com- 
parative education  in  the  university  of 
London  (1932-41).  During  the  war  of 
1914-18  he  commanded  the  Friends' 
Ambulance  Unit  in  Belgium  (1914-15) 
and  the  First  British  Ambulance  Unit  for 
Italy  (1915-19).  His  leg  was  amputated 
above  the  knee  as  the  result  of  wounds 
sustained  in  the  battle  of  San  Gabriele. 
He  was  mentioned  in  dispatches  and 
received  Belgian  and  Italian  decorations. 

Young  was  one  of  the  greatest  moun- 
taineers that  Britain  has  produced.  No 
one  in  the  twenty  years  before  1914  had  a 
longer  list  of  first  ascents,  among  them  a 
new  route  up  the  Weisshorn  from  Zinal, 
the  Younggrat  on  the  Zermatt  Breithorn, 
the  south  face  of  the  Taschhorn,  the  direct 
route  up  the  Grepon  from  the  Mer  de 
Glace,  and,  his  last  great  climb,  the  Rote 
Zahne  ridge  of  the  Gespaltenhorn.  After 
his  leg  had  been  amputated  he  climbed 
the  Wellenkuppe,  the  Weisshorn  to  within 
five  hundred  feet  of  the  summit,  the 
Matterhorn,  Petits  Charmoz,  Requin, 
Grepon  and  Zinal  Rothorn,  and  Monte 
Rosa.  To  have  climbed  one  peak  with  an 
artificial  leg  would  have  been  remarkable, 
but  to  continue  climbing  peak  after  peak 
with  an  artificial  leg  is  proof  of  indomit- 
able spirit.  On  most  of  these  climbs  Young, 
the  greatest  amateur  of  the  period,  was 
accompanied  by  the  greatest  of  con- 
temporary guides,  Joseph  Knubel. 

In  the  word  painting  of  mountain 
scenery  Young  is  only  surpassed  by  Sir 
Leslie  Stephen  and  Lord  Conway  [qq.v.] 
and  in  the  records  of  mountain  adventure 
there  is  nothing  more  enthralling  than 
Young's  story  of  the  Taschhorn  climb  in 
On  High  Hills  (1927),  and  little  more 
moving  than  his  story  of  his  one-leg  cHmbs 
in  Mountains  with  a  Difference  (1951).  But 
he  was  often  tempted  to  overwrite  and 
over-embroider  his  descriptions,  and  the 
first  versions  of  his  story  of  two  classic 
climbs,  the  north  face  of  the  Weisshorn 
and  the  south  face  of  the  Taschhorn, 
which  appeared  in  the  Comhill  are  prefer- 
able to  the  final  and  revised  versions  in 
On  High  Hills.  Young's  Mountain  Craft 
(1920)  was  recognized  throughout  the 
mountain  world  as  the  outstanding  ana- 
lysis of  mountaineering  technique.  Young 
made  a  most  important  contribution  to 
the  history  of  moimtaineering  not  only 


1091 


Young,  G.  W. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


in  the  Alps,  but  also  in  Great  Britain. 
His  contribution  to  the  Alpine  Journal 
(November  1943)  'Mountain  Prophets'  wa« 
notable  for  his  superb  characterization  of 
those  of  the  pioneers  whom  he  knew.  He 
was  proposed  for  the  Alpine  Club  in  1900 
by  Sir  Alfred  Wills,  from  whose  ascent  of 
the  Wetterhorn  in  1854  it  is  customary  to 
date  the  beginning  of  the  golden  age  of 
mountaineering.  Finally,  although  moun- 
tain beauty  is  the  theme  of  many  poems, 
Young  is  the  outstanding  poet  of  moun- 
taineering. His  Collected  Poems  were 
published  in  1936.  His  literary  ability  did 
not  decline  with  the  years.  Much  of  his  best 
work  was  written  in  his  eighties,  such  as 
his  admirable  contribution  to  the  Moun- 
tain World  (1955)  in  which  he  deplored  the 
increasing  tendency  of  mountain  nar- 
ratives to  be  written  in  the  style  of  an 
engineer's  report.  He  wrote  nothing  finer 
than  the  paper  which  he  read  before  the 
Alpine  Club,  10  December  1957,  his  last 
appearance  before  returning  to  the  London 
hospital  where  he  died  6  September  1958. 
As  his  musical  voice  lingered  on  the  phrases 
which  evoked  the  remembered  loveliness 
of  the  hills,  his  hearers  knew  that  from  the 
valley  of  death  he  was  lifting  his  eyes  to 
the  hills  of  memory  whence  help  would 
assuredly  come. 

The  influence  which  Young  exerted 
through  the  written  word  was  reinforced 
by  his  close  contacts  with  successive 
generations  of  mountaineers.  He  lived  for 
many  years  in  Cambridge  where  he  was 
accepted  as  a  discerning  authority  not  only 
on  the  technique  but  also  on  the  traditions 
of  mountaineering.  He  was  president  of 
the  Alpine  Club  in  1941-4  and  his  great 
services  to  the  club  during  that  difficult 
period  were  recorded  in  A  Century  of 
Mountaineering  ( 1 957) . 

In  1918  Young  married  Eleanor, 
daughter  of  a  great  mountaineer,  William 
Cecil  Slingsby;  she  had  an  affectionate 
understanding  of  his  endearing  weak- 
nesses and  a  discerning  admiration  for  his 
great  qualities  as  a  man  and  as  a  writer. 
They  had  one  son  and  one  daughter. 
''■  [Personal  knowledge.]  Arnold  Lunn. 


YOUNG,  GEORGE  MALCOLM  (1882- 
1959),  scholar,  was  born  at  Charlton, 
Kent,  29  April  1882,  the  only  son  of 
George  Frederick  Young,  waterman,  later 
a  steamer  master,  of  Greenhithe,  and  his 
wife,  Rosetta  Jane  Ehzabeth  Ross.  A 
scholar  of  St.  Paul's,  he  became  captain 
of  the   school.  A   scholar  of  Balliol,  in 


the  year  (1900)  in  which  William  Temple 
[q.v.]  was  elected  to  an  exhibition,  Young 
gained  a  first  in  classical  honour  mod- 
erations (1902)  and  a  second  in  literae 
humaniores  (1904),  having  rowed  in  the 
second  torpid.  He  was  elected  a  fellow  of 
All  Souls  in  1905  and  became  a  tutor  at 
St.  John's  (1906-8).  In  1908  he  joined  the 
Board  of  Education,  then  under  the  sway 
of  Sir  Robert  Morant  [q.v.]  to  whom  he 
remained  devoted.  Young  became  a  junior 
examiner  in  the  universities  branch  ;  then, 
in  1911,  the  first  secretary  of  what  was  to 
burgeon  into  the  University  Grants  Com- 
mittee. In  1916  he  joined  the  newly  formed 
Cabinet  Office.  Appointed  C.B.  in  1917,  he 
was  chosen  as  joint  secretary  of  the  new 
and  shortlived  Ministry  of  Reconstruction. 
He  accompanied  Arthur  Henderson  [q.v.], 
then  a  member  of  the  War  Cabinet,  as 
secretary  on  his  notorious  visit  to  Russia 
in  1917  where  Young  met  (Sir)  Francis 
Lindley  [q.v.]  at  that  time  counsellor  in 
the  British  Embassy.  He  went  with 
Lindley  to  Archangel  and  later  accom- 
panied him  to  Vienna  when  Lindley  went 
there  as  minister.  In  Vienna,  Young  was 
for  a  time  a  director  of  the  newly  founded 
Anglo-Austrian  Bank :  'a  curious  anaemic- 
looking  man'  not  mixing  readily  but 
already  recognized  by  his  younger  British 
colleagues  as  'a  great  scholar  with  a  wide 
range  of  knowledge  and  a  wonderful  com- 
mand of  the  English  language'. 

Abandoning  the  public  service  in  the 
early  post-war  disillusion.  Young  decided 
to  devote  himself  to  writing,  but  nothing 
could  remove  that  intense  interest  in 
education  which  shone  throughout  all  his 
work.  He  was  at  heart  a  born  teacher, 
thirsting  to  impart  the  results  of  his  own 
sharp  and  constructive  thoughts  bred  of 
a  wide  and  deep  reading  in  a  formidable 
variety  of  subjects.  Yet  he  was  in  no  hurry. 
Although  his  essay  on  'Victorian  History' 
had  caught  discerning  eyes  in  1931,  it 
was  not  until  he  was  fifty  that  he  pub- 
lished his  first  book.  Gibbon  (1932),  a  work 
of  pietas  but  partly  too  of  deliberation  to 
impress  upon  the  new  biographers  that 
neither  Freud  nor  Marx  had  yet  explained 
why  there  should  be  great  men.  And  he 
was  to  note  in  Gibbon  that  'sense  of 
place'  he  was  himself  so  compellingly  to 
reveal.  He  made  his  home  in  Wiltshire 
where  at  the  Old  Oxyard  at  Oare  near 
Marlborough  he  fell  upon  the  antiquities 
of  Wessex,  not  forgetting  'Pond  Barrows', 
with  far  more  knowledge  and  no  less 
eagerness  than  did  his  favourite  John 
Aubrey   [q.v.].    He    shared    house    with 


1092 


his  lifelong  friend  Mona  Wilson,  authoress 
and  sister  of  Sir  Arnold  Wilson  [q.v.]; 
there  she  took  charge  of  all  those  details 
of  everyday  life  in  which  Young  him- 
self was  oddly  helpless  and  dependent. 
Surrounded  in  this  neighbourhood  by 
many  cronies,  including  a  bevy  of  ex- 
ambassadors,  Young  became,  alongside 
Miss  Wilson  with  her  short  fireside  pipe, 
the  centre  of  intellectual  gossip  and  a 
dispenser  of  fascinating  talk  drawn  from 
the  resources  of  an  astonishing  memory. 
Urban  in  origin  and  urbane  by  disposition 
he  was  no  less  at  home  with  countrymen 
and  the  railway  workers  of  Swindon.  He 
took  pleasure  in  finding  himself  a  Tory 
and  'no  Tory  of  whatever  rank  or  class 
ever  thought  of  a  merely  moneyed  man  as 
his  social  equal'. 

At  the  perceptive  invitation  of  the 
Oxford  University  Press,  no  doubt  at  the 
instigation  of  (Sir)  Humphrey  Milford 
[q.v.],  he  edited  the  two  volumes  of  Early 
Victorian  England  which  appeared  in 
1934  and  to  which  he  himself  contributed 
that  final  summary  chapter  which  brought 
his  especial  quality  to  the  attention  of  a 
wider  and  delighted  pubhc,  an  essay  which 
he  developed  into  Victorian  England, 
Portrait  of  an  Age  (1936)  by  which  he  will 
be  remembered.  What  was  important  in 
history  was,  in  his  view,  'not  what  hap- 
pened, but  what  people  felt  about  it  when 
it  was  happening' .  Young  had  the  industry, 
the  learning,  the  memory,  and  above  all, 
the  penetration  to  disentangle  the  main 
themes  from  the  confused  Victorian 
clamour.  His  advice  to  the  historian  was 
'to  go  on  reading  until  you  can  hear  people 
talking'.  He  did  not  point  out  that  it 
might  still  require  an  interpreter  of  his 
talent,  erudition,  and  perception — or  with 
the  gifts  of  his  revered  F.  W.  Maitland 
[q.v.] ;  and  embedded  in  Young's  writing 
was  more  food  for  thought  than  the  com- 
mon reader  had  been  accustomed  to 
encounter.  Nor  was  his  aim  objective; 
even  in  narrative  he  would  not  forgo 
conunent,  with  an  epithet,  an  adverb,  a 
tone  of  voice.  His  Clio  was  a  muse  with 
a  sting. 

After  Charles  I  and  Cromwell  (1935),  an 
essay  in  detection  published  before  his 
developed  Victorian  masterpiece,  came 
Daylight  and  Champaign  (1937),  a  collec- 
tion of  essays  and  reviews  many  of  them 
reprinted  from  the  literary  periodicals  such 
as  the  Sunday  Times  to  which  Young  was 
by  now  a  valued  contributor.  There,  and 
in  other  reprints,  which  included  addresses 
such  as  his  Romanes  lecture  on  Gladstone 


D.N.B.  1051-1000  Young,  G.  M. 

in  1944,  in  his  Today  and  Yesterday  (1948) 
and  in  Last  Essays  (1950)  he  found  elbow- 
room  for  good  talk,  addressed  purposely 
to  the  middlebrow,  about  literature, 
persons,  and  manners.  Unbuttoned,  he 
might  be  colloquial,  give  full  play  to  his 
humour,  even  show  off  a  little  since  he  was 
enjoying  himself,  yet  literature  remained 
a  very  serious  matter  for  him,  as  were  the 
duties  of  the  clerisy  and  the  continuity  of 
civilization.  He  was  deeply  concerned 
with  language  as  a  means  of  communica- 
tion; good  speech  he  deemed  'the  first 
political  art'.  A  university  he  regarded  as 
'a  place  where  young  men  and  women 
educate  one  another  by  conversation, 
under  the  guidance  of  people  a  little  older, 
and,  more  often  than  they  might  imagine, 
somewhat  wiser  than  themselves'. 

Young  was  a  trustee  of  the  National 
Portrait  Gallery  (from  1937)  and  of  the 
British  Museum  (1947-57),  a  member  of 
the  Standing  Commission  on  Museums 
and  Galleries  (from  1938),  and  of  the 
Historical  Manuscripts  Commission  (from 
1948);  all  work  lying  very  close  to  his 
being  and,  until  his  health  began  to  fail, 
he  gave  it  much  attention  and  thought. 
His  was  a  sUght  figure  with  a  scholarly 
stoop ;  he  had  a  longish,  inquisitive  nose, 
eyes  twinkling  well  ahead  of  a  coming 
quip,  an  unusual  manner  of  clearing  his 
throat,  a  voice  warm  and  vibrant.  He  was 
a  shy  man  and  because  sensitive,  some- 
times sharp :  an  intellectual  who  lived  by 
his  deep  if  hidden  affections.  Mona  Wilson's 
death  not  long  after  the  war,  then  the  sale 
of  the  Oxyard  were  blows  from  which  he 
never  recovered,  but  he  built  himself  anew 
existence  on  his  re-election  in  1948  to  All 
Souls  which  provided  him  with  a  familiar 
and  congenial  refuge.  He  became  a  mem- 
ber of  the  royal  commission  on  the  press 
(1947-9)  and  he  received  honorary  degrees 
from  Durham  (1950)  and  Cambridge 
(1953) ;  and  what  he  valued  most,  BaUiol 
elected  him  to  an  honorary  fellowship  in 
1953. 

His  last  book,  Stanley  Baldwin  (1952), 
had  been  undertaken  reluctantly,  at 
Baldwin's  own  request.  As  he  grew  closer 
to  his  subject  Young  was  clearly  some- 
what taken  aback  by  his  discoveries  and  it 
is  not  a  satisfying  book ;  Young's  touch  had 
begun  to  fail  him.  In  1956  he  published, 
in  collaboration  with  W.  D.  Handcock,  a 
volume  of  English  Historical  Documents, 
1833-74,  but  Young's  part  in  it,  imder- 
taken  in  1947,  was  small.  An  invitation  to 
lecture  in  Athens,  which  he  had  never 
visited,  for  a  while  renewed  his  flagging 


Young,  G.  M. 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


spirits,  then.a  cloud  descended  on  him  and 
his  death  in  a  nursing-home  near  Oxford 
18  November  1959  was  a  genuine  release. 
Young  has  been  called  a  'pantomath'  \<  a 
comment  not  displeasing  to  him.  If  he  was 
not  quite  that,  it  was  well  said  of  him  that 
few  writers  have  said  so  many  good  things 
upon  so  many  subjects.  He  lived  up  to  his 
own  definition  of  the  historian  as  'one  for 
whom  the  past  keeps  something  of  the 
familiar  triviality  of  the  present,  and  the 
present  has  already  some  of  the  shadowy 
magnificence  of  the  past'.  The  National 
Portrait  Gallery  has  a  drawing  by  Henry 
Lamb. 

[The  Times,  19  and  24  November  1959; 
R.  H.  Bruce  Lockhart,  Retreat  from  Glory, 
1934;  W.  D.  Handcock,  introduction  to 
Victorian  Essays,  1962 ;  private  information ; 
personal  knowledge.]  I*.  E.  Jones. 

E.  T.  Williams. 

YOUNG,  Sir  ROBERT  ARTHUR  (1871- 
1959),  physician,  was  born  6  November 
1871  in  the  Norfolk  village  of  Hilborough, 
the  only  son  of  William  Young,  labourer, 
and  his  wife,  Hannah  Elizabeth  Ann  Fairs 
who  when  registering  the  birth  signed  her 
name  with  a  mark.  After  attending  West- 
minster City  School  and  King's  College, 
London,  he  became  a  medical  student  at 
the  Middlesex  Hospital.  He  obtained  his 
B.Sc.  with  a  first  class  in  physiology  in 
1891  and  his  M.B.  in  1894,  and  became  a 
licentiate  of  the  Society  of  Apothecaries  in 
a  period  when  the  quill  pen  was  still  used 
and  the  doctor  carried  his  stethoscope  in 
his  silk  hat.  He  was  elected  a  member  of 
the  Royal  College  of  Physicians  of  London 
in  1897  and  fellow  in  1905.  After  obtain- 
ing his  M.D.,  London,  with  a  gold  medal 
(1895),  and  doing  postgraduate  work  at 
Vienna,  he  settled  in  London  as  a  con- 
sulting physician  and  was  appointed  to  the 
Middlesex  Hospital,  the  Brompton  Hos- 
pital for  Diseases  of  the  Chest,  and  later  the 
King  Edward  VII  Sanatorium,  Midhurst. 
At  the  beginning  of  the  century  a  chest 
specialist  had  to  rely  entirely  upon  ob- 
servation and  the  patient's  story,  with 
only  his  five  senses  to  help  him.  Of  this 
personal  technique  Young  became  one  of 
the  greatest  exponents  medicine  has  ever 
known.  He  was  incapable  of  superficiality 
and  with  extraordinary  tenacity  would 
relentlessly  pursue  each  sign  and  symptom 
until  he  penetrated  its  meaning.  Even 
when  X-ray  diagnosis  became  general,  he 
never  consulted  the  film  until  he  had 
carried  his  personal  methods  as  far  as  they 
would  go. 


In  his  large  consulting  room  in  Harley 
Street,  over-furnished  with  cupboards  and 
clocks,  he  sat  at  an  overcrowded  desk  and 
inscrutably  pursued  his  remorseless  clini- 
cal routine.  Nothing  was  allowed  to  come 
between  him  and  the  patient,  and  he 
never  gave  up  until  he  had  used  every 
available  method  and  discovered  all  he 
needed.  His  remarkable  clinical  sense 
was  built  upon  memory  and  observation 
and  he  certainly  understood  that  the 
physician's  role  includes  giving  not  merely 
a  diagnosis  but  some  comfort  and  hope. 
He  would  take  endless  trouble  with  his 
patients.  Medicine  can  never  be  an  exact 
science  or  a  perfect  art,  but  in  his  hands 
it  seemed  both,  and  he  fully  deserved  his 
remarkable  success.  By  the  time  of  the  war 
of  1914-1 8  he  was  a  rising  chest  consultant ; 
but  during  the  twenties  and  thirties  he 
was  supreme. 

A  man  who  had  so  perfected  the  ortho- 
dox cHnical  methods  might  have  been 
expected  to  be  hesitant  about  accepting 
the  newer  technical  outlook,  but  Young 
was  able  to  preserve  the  one  and  acquire 
the  other,  for  his  gieatness  as  a  physi- 
cian included  remarkable  flexibility.  He 
took  up  X-rays  when  the  method  be- 
came universal  in  the  twenties.  Artificial 
pneumothorax  (for  lung  tuberculosis), 
mass  radiography,  and,  greatest  revolu- 
tion of  all,  penicillin  and  streptomycin, 
each  of  these  advances  he  mastered  with 
his  characteristic  thoroughness.  His  Lum- 
leian  lecture  (1929)  put  a  physician's  seal 
upon  surgery  in  the  treatment  of  lung 
diseases. 

His  practice  continued  to  flourish  long 
after  he  retired  in  1936  from  the  Middlesex 
Hospital  and  even  after  the  age  of  eighty 
he  gave  a  sound  opinion.  Before  King 
George  VI  underwent  an  operation  for 
lung  cancer  in  1951  Young  was  the  leader 
in  a  group  of  eminent  clinicians  summoned 
to  advise. 

Young  was  chairman  of  innumerable 
societies  and  committees,  notably  the 
National  Association  for  the  Prevention  of 
Tuberculosis.  He  was  an  excellent  leader, 
governing  the  proceedings  with  suavity 
and  an  extra  sense  of  what  was  being 
thought  round  the  table.  He  was  an 
accomplished  conciliator,  adept  in  the 
formula  which  unites.  Everyone  looked  to 
him  for  he  had  the  knack  of  being  right. 
He  could  express  well  the  majority  opin- 
ion because  this  was  the  way  he  felt  him- 
self. Large  affairs  did  not  attract  him,  and 
he  did  not  mingle  in  medical  controversies 
over  the  National  Health  Service. 


1094 


D.N.B.  1051-1960 


Yule 


A  rather  hieratic  manner,  sedulously 
cultivated  as  a  young  man,  mellowed 
greatly  in  later  life,  although  his  speech 
kept  a  touch  of  unctuous  sentiment  belong- 
ing to  an  earlier  period.  He  made  a 
considerable  fortune  from  practice  in  an 
age  when  this  was  the  accepted  measure  of 
professional  success.  His  private  passion 
was  collecting.  Over  the  years  a  prodigious 
accumulation  of  china,  glass,  prints,  clocks, 
and  old  instruments  filled  his  rooms.  He 
had  not  much  artistic  sense  and  preferred 
the  quaint  rather  than  the  enduring.  He 
cherished  every  object  and  nothing  was 
ever  allowed  to  go. 

'R.A.'  (as  he  was  affectionately  known) 
was  of  medium  height  with  a  large, 
impressive  head,  and  eyes  which  seemed  to 
penetrate  to  the  depths,  though  they  also 
flickered  with  kindly  reassurance.  He  was 
essentially  a  kindly  man,  wrapped  up  in 
his  grandchildren,  his  many  friends,  and 
favoured  organizations.  He  never  missed  a 
medical  banquet  and  kept  up  his  com- 
mittees, full  of  industrious  goodwill,  until 
a  week  before  his  death. 

Young's  prodigious  industry  and  im- 
pressive personal  qualities  brought  him 
wide  recognition.  He  was  Harveian  orator 
(1939)  of  the  Royal  College  of  Physicians ; 
both  the  Apothecaries  and  the  Royal 
Society  of  Medicine  gave  him  their  gold 
medals.  He  was  appointed  C.B.E.  in  1920 
and  knighted  in  1947.  He  was  one  of 
those  men  whose  contemporary  eminence 
is  seldom  understood  by  the  succeed- 
ing generation,  for  it  was  his  quality 
to  personify  the  best  average  of  his  time 
rather  than  to  display  a  unique  genius. 

In  1912  Young  married  Fanny  Caroline 
Phoebe  (died  1944),  daughter  of  Robert 
Muirhead  Kennedy,  of  the  Indian  Civil 
Service,  and  had  one  son.  Young  died  in 
London  22  August  1959. 

[The  Times,  24  and  26  August  1959; 
British  Medical  Journal,  29  August  1959; 
Lancet,  5  September  1959;  private  informa- 
tion ;  personal  knowledge.] 

Harley  Williams. 

YULE,  GEORGE  UDNY  (1871-1951), 
statistician,  was  >  born  at  Morham,  near 
Haddington,  East  Lothian,  18  February 
1871,  the  youngest  of  the  three  children 
surviving  infancy  of  Sir  George  Udny  Yule 
[q.v.],  Bengal  Civil  Service,  and  his  wife, 
Henrietta  Peach,  daughter  of  Captain 
Robert  Boileau  Pemberton,  of  the  Indian 
Army.  Sir  Henry  Yule  [q.v.]  was  his  uncle. 
Yule  was  educated  at  Winchester  and 
intended  for  the  Royal  Engineers,   but 


objecting,  instead  he  studied  civil  engineer- 
ing at  University  College,  London,  which 
he  entered  at  the  age  of  sixteen.  As  there 
was  then  no  engineering  degree  he  left 
after  three  years  without  graduating.  He 
spent  a  year  in  a  small  engineering  works, 
but  in  1892  he  went  to  study  physics 
at  Bonn  University.  While  at  University 
College  he  had  become  acquainted  with 
Karl  Pearson  [q.v.],  then  professor  of 
applied  mathematics,  and  in  1898  Pearson 
offered  him  a  job  as  demonstrator.  He  was 
promoted  to  assistant  professor  of  applied 
mathematics  in  1896.  Pearson  was  at  that 
time  just  beginning  to  work  on  statistics 
and  this  marked  the  beginning  of  Yule's 
interest  in  the  subject. 

In  1899  he  married  May  Winifred, 
daughter  of  William  Hayman  Cummings, 
principal  of  the  Guildhall  School  of  Music, 
but  the  marriage  was  not  a  success  and 
in  1912  it  was  annulled.  There  were  no 
children.  In  consequence  of  his  marriage 
he  gave  up  his  pdst  in  University  College 
and  took  up  more  remunerative  work  as 
assistant  to  Sir  Philip  Magnus,  super- 
intendent of  the  department  of  technology. 
City  and  Guilds  of  London  Institute.  Yule 
was,  however,  able  to  keep  up  his  statis- 
tical work  in  the  evenings  and  in  1902  he 
was  appointed  Newmarch  lecturer  in 
statistics  at  University  College,  holding 
the  two  posts  concurrently  until  1909. 
This  involved  lecturing  in  the  evenings 
to  a  small  class,  largely  of  civil  servants. 
These  lectures  provided  the  foundation  of 
his  Introduction  to  the  Theory  of  Statistics 
(1911),  which  became  a  standard  textbook 
and  by  1932  had  run  through  ten  editions ; 
in  revised  form  (Yule  and  Kendall)  it 
remained  widely  used. 

In  1912  Yule  accepted  the  newly  estab- 
lished university  lectureship  in  statistics  at 
Cambridge  and  concurrently  became  statis- 
tician to  the  School  of  Agriculture.  He 
wasmade  a  member  of  St.  John's  College  in 
1913,  elected  a  fellow  in  1922,  was  college 
director  of  studies  in  natural  sciences 
(1 923-35),  and  resided  in  college  for  almost 
the  whole  of  the  rest  of  his  life. 

In  the  war  of  1914-18  he  was  seconded 
as  a  statistician  to  the  director  of  army 
contracts  and  later  worked  with  the 
Ministry  of  Food,  being  appointed  C.B.E. 
in  1918. 

Yule  had  great  influence  on  the  early 
development  of  modem  statistics.  His 
main  contributions  in  the  theoretical 
field  were  concerned  with  regression 
and  correlation,  with  association,  particu- 
larly in   2x2  contingency   tables,   with 


1095 


Yule 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


time-series,  with  Mendelian  inheritance, 
and  with  epidemiology.  He  was  elected 
F.R.S.  in  1921.  He  played  a  very  active 
part  in  the  affairs  of  various  scientific 
societies,  in  particular  the  Royal  Statistical 
Society,  of  which  he  was  honorary  secre- 
tary (1907-19)  and  president  (1924-6), 
and  was  awarded  the  society's  Guy  medal 
in  gold  (1911). 

Yule  was  never,  nor  did  he  regard  him- 
self as,  a  great  mathematician,  but  he  had 
a  very  clear  idea  of  what  could  and  could 
not  be  accomplished  by  mathematical 
analysis  and  never  permitted  himself  to 
be  led  astray  by  mathematical  reasoning. 
In  his  early  years  he  was  a  good  friend  of 
Karl  Pearson :  they  spent  several  holidays 
together — in  Cumberland,  Yorkshire,  and 
Norway — and  Yule  found  him  always  a 
delightful  companion.  Had  Pearson  been 
of  a  more  accommodating  temperament, 
they  might  have  become  an  ideal  team, 
for  in  many  ways  their  abiUties  were 
complementary.  Yule's  caution,  his  much 
greater  regard  for  the  fundamentals  of  the 
phenomena  underlying  the  data  he  was 
examining,  and  his  more  critical  attitude 
to  the  conclusions  reached  by  mathe- 
matical analysis,  were  just  what  Pearson 
lacked.  But  as  Yule  himself  wrote  in  his 
obituary  of  Pearson  (Royal  Society,  1936). • 
'Those  who  left  him  and  began  to  think 
for  themselves  were  apt,  as  happened 
painfully  in  more  instances  than  one,  to 
find  that  after  a  divergence  of  opinion 
the  maintenance  of  friendly  relations  be- 
came difficult,  after  express  criticism 
impossible.' 

Yule  was  a  quiet  and  unassuming  man, 
Uked  by  all,  the  enemy  of  none.  His  wide 
knowledge  and  interests  and  his  kindly 
and  gentle  nature  made  him  an  excellent 
companion.  He  was  not  ambitious,  re- 
garding freedom  to  pursue  whatever 
inquiries  took  his  fancy  or  seemed  to  him 
worth  while  as  of  more  importance  than 
name  or  fortune.  He  was  a  man  of  varied 
and  surprising  attainments.  He  had  marked 
literary  interests  and  composed  humorous 
verses  in  both  Latin  and  English.  In  his 
fifties  he  developed  a  keen  interest  in 
motoring,  with  a  taste  for  fast  driving.  On 
his  retirement  from  his  university  post, 
raised  to  a  readership,  in  1931,  he  took  up 
flying,  purchasing  his  own  aeroplane 
because  it  was  impossible  to  arrange 
insurance  on  a  hired  machine.  He  obtained 
his  pilot's  'Certificate  A'  when  nearly  sixty- 
one.  When  nearing  retirement  he  resumed 
the  study  of  Latin  with  a  view  to  reading 
in  the  original  De  Imitatione  Christie  St. 


Augustine's  Confessions,  and  Boethius's 
De  Consolatione  Philosophiae.  The  first  of 
these  led  to  consideration  of  the  author- 
ship controversy  and  to  other  works  of 
Thomas  a  Kempis.  This  suggested  to  him 
the  idea  of  using  statistical  methods  to 
provide  evidence  of  authorship  and  in 
1944  he  published  The  Statistical  Study  of 
Literary  Vocabulary. 

After  his  retirement  Yule  continued  to 
take  an  active  part  in  college  affairs ;  but 
in  1935  his  heart  gave  serious  trouble  and 
thereafter  he  was  compelled  to  be  physi- 
cally inactive.  He  died  in  Cambridge  26 
June  1951.  St.  John's  College  has  a  draw- 
ing by  Henry  Lamb. 

[F.  Yates  in  Obituary  Notices  of  Fellows  of 
the  Royal  Society,  No.  21,  November  1952; 
The  Eagle,  vol.  Iv,  1952 ;  personal  knowledge.] 

F.  Yates. 

ZIMMERN,   Sir  ALFRED  ECKHARD 

(1879-1957),  scholar  and  authority  on 
international  institutions,  was  born  in 
Surbiton  26  January  1879,  the  only  son  of 
Adolf  Zimmern,  China  and  East  India 
merchant,  and  his  wife,  Matilda  Sophia 
Eckhard.  His  father  was  one  of  a  Jewish 
family  of  liberal  outlook  who  had  migrated 
from  Germany  to  England  after  the 
defeated  revolution  of  1848. 

A  scholar  of  Winchester  and  New 
College,  Oxford,  he  obtained  first  classes 
in  honour  moderations  (1900)  and  literae 
humaniores  (1902)  and  was  awarded  the 
Stanhope  historical  essay  prize  (1902).  He 
became  a  lecturer  in  ancient  history  and 
(1904-9)  a  fellow  and  tutor  of  his  college. 
After  an  early  study  of  Henry  Grattan 
(1902)  he  wrote  The  Greek  Commonwealth 
(1911)  which  quickly  won  a  world-wide 
reputation  and  proved  to  have  a  more 
enduring  quality  than  any  of  his  later 
books.  He  seemed  destined  to  a  distin- 
guished but  essentially  academic  career, 
as  scholar  and  historian,  although  he  had 
some  practical  work  in  relation  to  working- 
class  education  and  in  1912-15  was  an 
inspector  of  the  Board  of  Education. 

The  first  great  war  and  the  problems 
confronting  the  world  when  it  ended 
completely  changed  the  centre  of  gravity 
of  Zimmern's  interests.  During  the  war 
itself  he  joined  the  political  intelligence 
department  of  the  Foreign  Office  (1918- 
19)  and,  with  memories  doubtless  of  his 
own  family  history,  became  one  of  a  circle 
of  political  thinkers  who  influenced  policy 
towards  the  liberation  of  subject  peoples 
and  persecuted  minorities.  He  was  one  of 
those  who  helped  to  found  the  (Royal) 


1096 


D.N^.  1951-1060 


Zulueta 


Institute  of  International  Affairs  (Chat- 
ham House)  and  to  guide  and  inspire  its 
work  during  its  early  years.  It  was  above 
all,  however,  the  new  League  of  Nations 
which  became  the  focus  of  his  interests 
and  of  his  work  as  a  teacher  and  lecturer. 
For  two  years  (1919-21)  he  held  the  newly 
created  Wilson  professorship  of  inter- 
national pohtics  at  Aberystwyth.  In  1921 
he  married  Lucie  Anna  (died  1963), 
daughter  of  Pastor  Maurice  Hirsch,  pre- 
viously the  wife  of  a  colleague  there.  But 
his,  and  her,  hopes  and  interests  were 
centred  on  what  was  happening  in  Geneva. 
There  they  soon  went  and  not  only  studied 
the  early  development  of  the  new  institu- 
tion but  did  their  best  to  influence  the 
inner  circles^  of  those  who  participated  in 
the  Council  and  Assembly,  of  the  secre- 
tariat and  of  interested  public  supporters. 
His  own  convictions  as  to  the  desirable 
character  of  the  League's  organization 
and  policy  reflected  now  not  only  his 
previous  experience  and  philosophy  but 
also  the  influence  of  his  wife,  a  forceful 
personality  and  ardent  patriot.  To  his 
family  traditions,  his  classical  study  of 
Athenian  democracy,  and  his  deep  in- 
terest in  British  political  history  and  the 
gradual  transformation  of  the  British 
Empire  into  an  increasingly  self-govern- 
ing Commonwealth,  was  now  added  a 
continental,  and  in  particular  a  French, 
point  of  view.  In  personal  contacts,  in 
successive  books,  and  in  lectures  both 
elsewhere  and  in  Geneva,  where  he  was 
director  of  the  School  of  International 
Studies  (1925-39),  he  advocated  with 
persuasive  lucidity  his  transparently  sin- 
cere political  convictions.  In  1926-30  he 
had  official  responsibility  as  deputy  direc- 
tor of  the  Institute  of  Intellectual  Co- 
operation in  Paris.  This,  however,  was 
only  an  interlude,  and  his  essential  role, 
as  indeed  his  personal  outlook,  was  not 
that  of  an  administrator  but  of  a  student, 
teacher,  and  lecturer. 

In  1930  Zimmern  returned  to  Oxford  as 
the  first  Montague  Burton  professor  of 
international  relations  and  occupied  that 
chair  imtil  1944.  In  the  war  of  1939-45  he 
served  in  the  Foreign  Office  research  de- 
partment and  for  a  brief  period  at  the  end 
of  the  war  he  was  an  executive  director  of 
Unesco.  This  again  was  only  an  interlude  in 
his  normal  work  as  teacher  and  writer  and 
in  1947-9  he  was  a  visiting  professor  at 
Trinity  College,  Hartford,  Connecticut. 
His  work  and  the  wide  range  of  his  reputa- 
tion were  reflected  in  honorary  doctorates 
from  that   college  and  from  Aberdeen, 


Bristol »  and  Melbourne,  and  also  by  the 
knighthood  which  he  received  in  1986. 

Short  in  stature,  and  in  physical 
presence  at  first  unimpressive,  Zimmern's 
vitality,  his  rapid  response  in  discussion, 
his  persuasive  lucidity  in  exposition  or 
advocacy,  the  transparent  sincerity  of  his 
exceptionally  cosmopohtan  outlook,  re- 
mained a  vivid  memory  with  all  who  met 
him.  The  books  he  wrote,  after  the  first 
war  had  diverted  him  from  academic  life, 
recall  by  their  titles,  but  do  not  in  them- 
selves adequately  express,  hi*  actual 
contribution.  Nationality  and  Government 
(1918),  Europe  in  Convalescence  (1922), 
The  Third  British  Empire  (1926),  Solon 
and  Croesus  (1928),  Prospects  of  Democracy 
(1929),  The  League  of  Nations  and  the  Rule 
of  Law  (1936),  Spiritual  Values>and  World 
Affairs  (1939),  and  The  American  Road  to 
World  Peace  (1953)  are  for  the  most  part 
collected  essays,  written  in  relation  to 
current  problems  and  events.  Neither 
these  nor  other  extant  records  convey  ade- 
quately the  measure  of  his  influence  and 
authority  in  his  prime,  as  they  remained 
in  the  memory  of  his  contemporaries  and 
colleagues. 

Zinunern's  career  and  personal  life 
reached  their  climax  in  the  twenties,  the 
decade  of  both  political  recovery  and 
progress,  marked  by  Locarno,  the  League's 
brief  period  of  successful  authority,  the 
wide  extension  of  parliamentary  recovery, 
and  for  a  time  unprecedented  prosperity — 
the  temporary  triumph  of  all  the  causes 
whose  success  he  had  ardently  desired. 
The  twenty  years  of  his  life  that  remained 
witnessed  the  collapse  of  what  he  had 
hoped  for.  He  continued  to  work  inde- 
fatigably,  without  visible  decline  of  hia 
powers,  for  many  years,  although  in- 
evitably with  less  personal  influence  than 
he  had  had  in  his  prime.  He  died  at  Avon, 
Connecticut,  24  November  1957.  He  had 
no  children. 

[The  Times,  25  November  1957;  Arnold 
J.  Toynbee,  Acquaintances,  1967;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.]     Salter. 

ZULUETA,  FRANCIS  de  (FRANCISCO 
MARIA  JOSJfi)  (1878-1958),  academic 
lawyer,  was  born  12  September  1878  in 
the  Spanish  Embassy  in  London.  His 
father,  Don  Pedro  Juan  de  Zulueta,  was 
a  member  of  the  Spanish  diplomatic 
service ;  his  mother,  Laura  Mary,  daughter 
of  Sir  Justin  Shell  [q.v.],  at  one  time 
British  minister  in  Persia.  Although  a 
Spaniard  by  birth,  and  a  cousin  of 
Cardinal   Merry   del    Val,   he   was  only 


1097 


Zulueta 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


one-quarter  of  Spanish  blood:  his  father 
was  on  one  side  Scottish,  descended  in 
the  female  Hne  from  Brodie  M'Ghie  Will- 
cox,  one  of  the  founders  of  the  P.  &  O. 
Steam  Navigation  Company.  The  Zulu- 
etas,  a  Basque  family,  settled  in  Cadiz  in 
the  eighteenth  century,  had  left  Spain  on 
account  of  their  Liberal  opinions  and  later 
established  a  business  in  London  where 
for  much  of  the  nineteenth  century  they 
served  as  the  agents  of  the  Spanish 
(Jovernment.  Don  Pedro  felt  himself  so 
much  at  home  that  in  order  to  remain 
permanently  in  London  he  resigned  from 
the  Spanish  diplomatic  service.  His  son 
regarded  himself  as  British  rather  than 
Spanish. 

He  was  educated  at  Beaumont  and  the 
Oratory  School  and  went  with  an  open 
scholarship  to  New  College,  Oxford,  where 
he  was  placed  in  the  first  class  in  classical 
moderations  (1899),  liter ae  humaniores 
(1901),  and  jurisprudence  (1902).  He  was 
elected  to  a  prize  fellowship  at  Merton 
(1902),  won  the  Vinerian  law  scholarship 
(1903),  and  was  called  to  the  bar  by 
Lincoln's  Inn  (1904).  In  1907  he  returned 
to  New  College  as  a  tutorial  fellow  and 
from  1912  to  1917  was  All  Souls  reader  in 
Roman  law. 

On  the  outbreak  of  war  in  1914  he  felt 
himself  so  closely  identified  with  this 
country  that  he  became  naturalized,  ob- 
tained a  commission  in  the  Worcestershire 
Regiment,  and  served  in  France.  On  his 
return  to  Oxford  in  1919  he  was  appointed 
to  the  regius  chair  of  civil  law,  which  he 
held  until  1948. 

A  first-rate  classical  scholar,  Zulueta 
had  also  the  good  fortune  to  be  one  of  the 
earliest  members  of  the  seminar  of  (Sir) 
Paul  Vinogradoff  [q.v.],  the  first  to  be 
established  on  continental  lines  in  Oxford. 
He  always  admitted  his  deep  indebtedness 
to  Vinogradoff  and  the  methods  of  re- 
search inculcated  by  him.  The  fruit  of  this 
work  was  an  essay,  contributed  in  1909  to 
Vinogradoff's  Oxford  Studies  in  Social  and 
Legal  History,  on  ^Patronage  in  the  later 
Empire'.  Thereafter  he  published  much 
less  than  his  contemporaries  desired  and 
expected.  He  became  in  truth  too  learned 
to  see  opportunities  for  originality  in  a  well- 
tilled  field ;  and  his  scepticism  in  matters 
of  legal  scholarship  not  only  led  him  to 
leave  questions  open  which  others  might 
have  answered,  but  to  entertain  a  radical 
and  very  un-Catholic  disbelief  in  natural 
law.  He  was  out  of  tune  with  the  dominant 
school  of  Romanistic  research,  then  de- 
voted to  the  search  for  interpolations  in 


the  Corpus  Juris,  which  he  regarded  as 
piling  hypothesis  upon  hypothesis  and 
encouraging  anyone  who  practised  it  not 
to  admit  the  unsoundness  of  any  theory  he 
had  once  adopted.  He  is  also  reported  to 
have  said  to  a  younger  friend,  'Don't  read, 
or  you  won't  write'.  It  was  characteristic 
that  much  of  his  most  valuable  work  is  to 
be  found  in  his  bibliographical  contribu- 
tions to  the  Journal  of  Egyptian  Archaeo- 
logy. One  of  his  colleagues  once  likened 
him  to  a  person  with  a  big  bunch  of  keys : 
he  might  not  be  able  to  tell  you  what  you 
wanted  to  know  but  he  would  certainly  be 
able  to  tell  you  where  to  find  it.  His  rela- 
tive unproductiveness  was  perhaps  partly 
due  to  an  unfortunate  occasion,  during 
his  period  of  teaching  at  New  College,  when 
a  number  of  undergraduates,  finding  their 
stock  of  combustible  materials  running 
out,  burnt  the  papers  he  had  prepared  for 
a  forthcoming  book.  This  rankled,  though 
in  the  end  he  came  to  think  that  the  en- 
forced rewriting  had  resulted  in  a  much 
better  book.  However  surprising  it  may 
have  been  to  those  who  knew  him  later, 
he  was  at  that  time  rather  unpopular,  being 
less  able  than  subsequently  to  control  a 
naturally  quick  temper. 

In  1927  Zulueta  edited  for  the  Selden 
Society  Vacarius's  Liber  Pauperum.  But 
he  will  be  best  known  to  ordinary  students 
by  three  most  useful  works:  his  little 
edition  of  the  Digest  titles  on  Ownership 
and  Possession  (1922)  for  use  by  B.C.L. 
candidates,  his  Roman  Law  of  Sale  (1945), 
and  his  edition  of  the  Institutes  of  Gaiu^^ 
of  which  the  Text  and  Translation  ap- 
peared in  1946  and  the  Commentary  in 
1953.  In  all  these  he  displayed  a  con- 
ciseness of  utterance  which  is  often 
disconcerting,  not  only  to  the  elementary 
student,  but  which  on  more  diligent 
perusal  discloses  the  products  of  his 
profound  erudition. 

In  lecturing  he  believed  in  systematic 
exposition  which  did  not  perhaps  show 
him  at  his  best.  Temperamentally  he  was 
better  fitted  to  the  more  explosive  method 
appropriate  to  informal  instruction  or  to 
revision  lectures  in  which  he  could  assume 
a  general  knowledge  of  the  subject  and 
needed  only  to  draw  attention  to  interest- 
ing points  which  had  probably  been 
neglected. 

A  devout  Roman  Catholic,  he  actively 
supported  the  Oxford  University  Catholic 
Association  and  the  local  branch  of 
the  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul.  His 
religious  convictions  made  him  effective 
in  helping  Polish  refugees  during  the  war 


1098 


D.N.B.  1951-1960 


Zulueta 


of  1939-45  although  they  were  not  so 
exclusive  as  to  preclude  his  doing  just 
as  much  for  Jewish  and  other  refugees. 
They  prompted  his  intervention  in  Malta's 
constitutional  controversy  in  the  thirties 
and  combined  with  his  intense  conserva- 
tism to  make  him  an  ardent  supporter  of 
General  Franco  in  the  Spanish  civil  war. 
As  a  young  man  he  had  taken  a  promi- 
nent part  in  games.  Those  who  knew  him 
later  remember  his  handsome  face  and 
figure,  the  natural  courtesy  of  his  manners, 
perfect  in  his  relations  with  all  sorts  of 
people  and  especially  with  children,  and 
his  great  usefulness,  with  a  knowledge  of 
many  languages,  in  dealing  with  foreign 
scholars.  He  was*  a  loyal  colleague  whose 
sound  legal  instinct  was  displayed  not 
only  in  his  own  special  field  and  whose 
shrewdness  and  sagacity  in  discussions  of 
policy  and  of  ways  and  means  were  highly 
prized  by  his  colleagues  on  the  board  of 


the  faculty.  His  helpfulness  to  scholars  of 
all  ages  even  extended  to  the  humble  but 
exacting  tasks  of  the  editor  and  translator. 
He  received  many  honours,  including 
fellowship  of  the  British  Academy,  an 
honorary  fellowship  of  Merton,  an  honor- 
ary doctorate  of  Paris  and  of  Aberdeen, 
and  fellowship  of  the  Accademia  dei 
Lincei. 

In  1915  he  married  Marie  Louise  (died 
1970),  daughter  of  the  late  Henry  Alex- 
ander Lyne  Stephens,  of  Grove  House, 
Roehampton,  and  left  one  son,  (Sir) 
Philip  Francis  de  Zulueta. 

Zulueta  died  in  London  16  January 
1958.  A  list  of  his  publications  is  prefixed 
to  Studies  in  the  Roman  Law  of  Sale  (1959), 
dedicated  to  his  memory  and  edited  by 
David  Daube. 

[The  Times,  18  January  1958;  private 
information ;  personal  knowledge.] 

F.  H.  Lawson. 


1099 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX 

TO  THE  BIOGRAPHIES  CONTAINED  IN  THE  SUPPLEMENTS 
OF  THE  DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 

1901-1960 


Abbey,  Edwin  Austin 

Abbott,  Edwin  Abbott 

Abbott,  Evelyn 

A  Beckett,  Arthur  William 

Abel,  Sir  Frederick  Augustus 

Aberconway,  Baron.  See  Mc- 
Laren, Charles  Benjamin 
Bright 

Aberconway,  Baron.  See  Mc- 
Laren, Henry  Duncan 

Abercom,  Duke  of.  See  Hamil- 
ton, James 

Abercrombie,  Lascelles 

Abercrombie,  Sir  (Leslie)  Patrick 

Aberdare,  Baron.  See  Bruce, 
Clarence  Napier 

Aberdeen  and  Temair,  Marquess 
of.  See  GJordon,  John  Campbell 

Aberdeen  and  Temair,  Marchion- 
ess of  (1857-1939).  See  under 
Gordon,  John  Campbell 

Aberhart,  William 

Abney,  Sir  William  de  Wiveleslie 

Abraham,  Charles  John 

Abraham,  William 

Abul  Kalam  Azad,  Maulana. 
See  Azad 

Acland,  Sir  Arthur  Herbert  Dyke 

Acton,  Sir  Edward 

Acton,  John  Adams-.  See  Adams- 
Acton 

Acton,  Sir  John  Emerich  Edward 
Dalberg,  Baron 

Acworth,  Sir  William  Mitchell 

Adam,  James 

Adam  Smith,  Sir  George.  See 
Smith 

Adami,  John  George 

Adams,  James  Williams 

Adams,  Sir  John 

Adams,  William  Davenport 

Adams- Acton,  John 

Adamson,  Sir  John  Ernest 

Adamson,  Robert 

Adderley,  Charles  Bowyer,  Baron 
Norton 

Addison,  Christopher,  Viscount 

Adler,  Hermann 

Adshead,  Stanley  Davenport 

AE,  pseudonym.  See  Russell, 
(jeorge  William 

Aga  Khan,  Aga  Sultan  Sir 
Mohammed  Shah 

Agate,  James  Evershed 

Agnew,  Sir  James  WDlson 

Agnew,  Sir  William 


1852-1911      Agnew,  Sir  William  Gladstone 
1838-1926      Aid6,  Charles  Hamilton 
1843-1901       Aikman,  George 
1844-1909      Ainger,  Alfred 
1827-1902      Ainley,  Henry  Hinchliffe 

Aird,  Sir  John 

Airedale,    Baron.     See    Kitson, 
1850-1934  James 

Aitchison,  Craigie  Mason,  Lord 
1879-1953      Aitchison,  George 

Akers,  Sir  Wallace  Alan 
1838-1913      Akers-Douglas,  Aretas,  Viscount 
1881-1938  Chilston 

1879-1957      Akers-Douglas,  Aretas,  Viscount 

Chilston 
1885-1957      Albani,     Dame     Marie     Louise 

C^cilie  Emma 
1847-1934      Alcock,  Sir  John  William 

Aldenham,    Baron.    See    Gibbs, 
Henry  Hucks 

Alderson,  Sir  Edwin  Alfred  Her- 
1878-1943  vey 

1843-1920      Alderson,  Henry  James 
1814-1903      Aldrich-Blake,      Dame      Louisa 
1842-1922  Brandreth 

Alexander,  Mrs.,  pseudonym.  See 
1888-1958  Hector,  Annie  French 

1847-1926      Alexander,  Boyd 
1865-1945      Alexander,  Sir  George 

Alexander,  Samuel 
1830-1910      Alexander,  William 

Alexander-Sinclair,    Sir    Edwjni 
1834-1902  Sinclair 

1850-1925      Alexandra,  Queen 
1860-1907      Alexandra       Victoria       Alberta 
Edwina  Louise  Duff,  Princess 
1856-1942  Arthur  of  Connaught,  Duchess 

1862-1926  of  Fife 

1839-1903      Alger,  John  Goldworth 
1857-1934      Alington,     Baron.     See     Sturt, 
1851-1904  Henry  Gerard 

1830-1910      Alington,  Cyril  Argentine 
1867-1950      Alison,  Sir  Archibald 
1852-1902      Allan,  Sir  WiUiam 

Allbutt,  Sir  Thomas  Clifford 
1814-1905      Allen,  George 
1869-1951      Allen,  Sir  Hugh  Percy 
1839-1911      Allen,  Sir  James 
1868-1946      Allen,  John  Romilly 

Allen,  Percy  Stafford 
1867-1935      Allen,  Reginald  Clifford,  Baron 

Allen  of  Hurtwood 
1877-1957      Allen,  Robert  Calder 
1877-1947      AUenby,  Edmund  Henry  Hyn- 
1815-1901  man.     Viscount     Allenby     of 

1825-1910  Megiddo 


1898-1960 
1826-1906 
1830-1905 
1837-1904 
1879-1945 
1833-1911 

1835-1911 
1882-1941 
1825-1910 

1888-1954 

1851-1926 

1876-1947 

1852-1930 
1892-1919 

1819-1907 

1859-1927 
1834-1909 

1865-1925 

1825-1902 
1873-1910 
1858-1918 
1859-1938 
1824-1911 

1865-1945 
1844-1925 


1891-1959 
1836-1907 

1825-1904 
1872-1955 
1826-1907 
1837-1903 
1836-1925 
1832-1907 
1869-1946 
1855-1942 
1847-1907 
1869-1933 

1889-1939 
1812-1903 


1861-1936 


1100 


'/HqAXUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-19W) 


Allerton,    Baron.    See    Jackson, 

William  Lawies 
Allies,  Thomas  William 
AUman,  George  Johnston 
Alma-Tadema,  Sir  Lawrence 
Almond,  Hely  Hutchinson 
Altrincham,   Baron.    See   Grigg, 

Edward  William  Macleay 
Alverstone,  Viscount.  See  Web- 
ster, Richard  Everard 
Ambedkar,  Bhimrao  Ramji 
Ameer  Ali,  Syed 
Ameiy,  Leopold  Charles  Maurice 

Stennett 
Amherst,       William       Amhurst 

Tyssen-,    Baron    Amherst    of 

Hackney 
Amos,  Sir  (Percy)  Maurice  (Mac- 

lardie)  Sheldon 
Ampthill,    Baron.    See    Russell, 

Arthur  Oliver  Villiers 
Amulree,  Baron.  See  Mackenzie, 

William  Warrender 
Anderson,  Sir  Alan  Garrett 
Anderson,  Alexander 
Anderson,  Elizabeth  Garrett 
Anderson,  George 
Anderson,  Sir  Hugh  Kerr 
Anderson,  John,  Viscount  Waver- 

ley 
Anderson,   Sir  Kenneth  Arthur 

Noel 
Anderson  (formerly  Macarthur), 

Mary  Reid 
Anderson      (formerly    Benson), 

Stella 
Anderson,  Sir  Thomas  McCall 
Anderson,  Sir  Warren  Hastings 
Andrewes,  Sir  Frederick  William 
Andrews,  Sir  James 
Andrews,  Thomas 
Angus,  Joseph 

Angwin,  Sir  (Arthur)  Stanley 
Annandale,  Thomas 
Anson,  Sir  William  Reynell 
Anstey,     F.,     pseudonym.     See 

Guthrie,  Thomas  Anstey 
Anstey,  Frank 
Antal*  Frederick 
Arber,  Agnes 
Arber,  Edward 

Arbuthnot,  Sir  Alexander  John 
Arbuthnot,  Forster  Fitzgerald 
Arbuthnot,  Sir  Robert  Keith 
Arch,  Joseph 
Archer,  James 
Archer,  William 
Archer-Hind  (formerly  Hodgson), 

Richard  Dacre 
Ardagh,  Sir  John  Charles 
Arden-Close,   Sir  Charles   Fred- 

erick 
Ardilaun,  Baron.    See  Guinness, 

Sir  Arthur  Edward 
Arditi,  Luigi 
Ardwall,    Lord.    See    Jameson, 

Andrew 
Argyll,  Duke  of:  See  Campbell, 

John  Douglas  Sutherland 


1840-1917 
1813-1903 
1824-1904 
1836-1912 
1832-1903 

1879-1955 

1842-1915 

1891-1956 
1849-1928 

1873-1955 


1835-1909 

1872-1940 

1869-1935 

1860-1942 
1877-1952 
1845-1909 
1836-1917 
1826-1902 
1865-1928 

1882-1958 

1891-1959 

1880-1921 

1892-1933 
1836-1908 
1872-1930 
1859-1932 
1877-1951 
1847-1907 
1816-1902 
1883-1959 
1838-1907 
1843-1914 

1856-1934 
1865-1940 
1887-1954 
1879-1960 
1836-1912 
1822-1907 
1833-1901 
1864-1916 
1826-1919 
1823-1904 
1856-1924 

1849-1910 
1840-1907 

1865-1952 

1840-1915 
1822-1903 

1846-1911 


1845-1914 


Arkell,  William  Joscelvn  1904-1958 

Arkwright,  Sir  Joseph' Arthur  1864-1944 

Arlen,  Michael  .lunc^t  1895-1956 

Arliss,  George  1868-1946 

Armes,  Philip  1886-1908 

Armour,  John  Douglas  1830-1903 

Armstead,  Henry  Hugh  1828-1905 

Armstrong,  Edward  1846-1928 
Armstrong,  Sir  George  Carlyon 

Hughes  1886-1907 

Armstrong,  Henry  Edward  1848-1937 

Armstrong,  Thomas  1832-1911 

Armstrong,  William  1882-1952 

Armstrong-Jones,  Sir  Robert  1857-1943 

Arnold,  Sir  Arthur  1833-1902 

Arnold,  Sir  Edwin  1832-1904 

Arnold,  George  Benjamin  1832-1902 

Arnold,  Sir  Thomas  Walker  1864-1930 

Arnold,  William  Thomas  185^1904 

Amold-Forster,  Hugh  Oakeley  1855-1909 

Arrol,  Sir  William  1839-1913 
Arthur  of  Connaught,  Princess. 

See  Alexandra  Victoria  Alberta 

Edwina  Louise  Duff  1861-1959 
Arthur  Frederick  Patrick  Albert, 

prince  of  Great  Britain  1888-1938 
Arthur  William  Patrick  Albert, 

Duke  of  Connaught  and  Strath- 
earn  1850-19421 
Arthur,  William  1819-1901 
Asche,   (Thomas   Stange   Heiss) 

Oscar  1871-1936 

Ashbee,  Charles  Robert  1868-1942" 
Ashboume,  Baron.  See  Gibson, 

Edward  1887-1913 

Ashby,  Arthur  Wilfred  1886-1953 

Ashby,  Henry  1846-1908 

Ashby,  Thomas  1874-1931 

Asher,  Alexander  1835-1905 
Ashfield,  Baron.     See     Stanley, 

Albert  Henry  1874-1948 

Ashley,  Evelyn  1836-1907 
Ashley,  Wilfrid  William,  Baron 

Mount  Temple  1867-1938 

Ashley,  Sir  William  James  1860-1927 
Ashmead  Bartlett,  Sir  Ellis.   See 

Bartlett  1849-1902 
Ashton,    Thomas    Gair,    Baron 

Ashton  of  Hyde  1855-1933 

Ashwell,  Lena  Margaret  1872-1957 

Askwith,  George  Ranken,  Baron  1861-1942 

AsHn,  Charles  Herbert  1893-1959 
Asquith,    Lady    Cynthia    Mary 

Evelyn  1887-1960 
Asquith,    Cyril,   Baron   Asquith 

of  Bishopstone  1890-1954 
Asquith,  Emma  Alice  Margaret 

(Margot),  Countess  of  Oxford 

and  Asquith  1864-1945 
Asquith,  Herbert  Henry,  Earl  of 

Oxford  and  Asquith  1862-1928 

Astbury,  Sir  John  Meir  1860-1939 

Aston,  Francis  William  1877-1945 

Aston,  Sir  George  Grey  1861-1938 

Aston,  William  George  1841-1911 

Astor,  Waldorf,  Viscount  1879-1952 
Athlone,  Earl  of.  See  Cambridge, 

Alexander  Augustus  Frederick 

William  Alfred  George  1874-1957 


1101 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Atholl,  Duchess  of.  See  Stewart- 
Murray,  Katharine  Marjory 

Atholstan,  Baron.  See  Graham, 
Hugh 

Atkin,  James  Richard,  Baron 

Atkins,  Sir  Ivor  Algernon 

Atkinson,  Sir  Edward  Hale 
Tindal 

Atkinson,  John,  Baron 

Atkinson,  Robert 

Atthill,  Lombe 

Aubrey,  Melboum  Evans 

Aumonier,  James 

Austen,  Henry  Haversham  God- 
win-. See  Godwin-Austen 

Austen,  Sir  William  Chandler 
Roberts-.  See  Roberts- Austen 

Austen  Leigh,  Augustus 

Austin,  Alfred 

Austin,  Herbert,  Baron 

Austin,  John  Langshaw 

Avebury,  Baron.  See  Lubbock, 
Sir  John 

Avory,  Sir  Horace  Edmund 

Ayerst,  William 

Ayrton,  William  Edward 

Azad,  Maulana  Abul  Kalam 

Azariah,  Samuel  Vedanayakam 


Babington  Smith,  Sir  Henry. 
See  Smith 

Backhouse,  Sir  Edmund  Tre- 
lawny 

Backhouse,  Sir  Roger  Roland 
Charles 

Bacon,  John  Mackenzie 

Bacon,  Sir  Reginald  Hugh  Spencer 

Badcock,  Sir  Alexander  Robert 

Baddeley,  Mountford  John  Byrde 

Badeley,  Henry  John  Fanshawe, 
Baron 

Baden-Powell,  Robert  Stephen- 
son Smyth,  Baron 

Bailey,  Sir  Abe 

Bailey,  Cyril 

Bailey,  John  Cann 

Bailey,  Mary,  Lady 

Bailey,  Philip  James 

Bailhache,  Sir  Clement  Meacher 

Baillie,  Charles  Wallace  Alex- 
ander Napier  Ross  Cochrane-, 
Baron  Lamington 

Baillie,  Sir  James  Black 

Bain,  Alexander 

Bain,  Francis  William 

Bain,  Sir  Frederick  William 

Bain,  Robert  Nisbet 

Bainbridge,  Francis  Arthur 

Baines,  Frederick  Ebenezer 

Baird,  Andrew  Wilson 

Baird,  John  Logic 

Bairnsfather,  Charles  Bruce 

Bairstow,  Sir  Edward  Cuthbert 

Bajpai,  Sir  Girja  Shankar 

Baker,  Sir  Benjamin 

Baker,  Henry  Frederick 

Baker,  Sir  Herbert 

Baker,  Herbert  Brereton 


Baker,  James  Franklin  Bethune-. 
1874-1960  See  Bethune-Baker 

Baker,  Shirley  Waldemar 
1848-1938      Baldwin,  Stanley,  Earl  Baldwin 
1867-1944  of  Bewdley 

1869-1953      Baldwin    Brown,     Gerard.    See 

Brown 
1878-1957      Balfour,  Sir  Andrew 
1844-1932      Balfour,   Arthur,   Baron   River- 
1839-1908  dale 

1827-1910      Balfour,  Arthur  James,  Earl  of 
1885-1957  Balfour 

1832-1911      Balfour,  Lady  Frances 

Balfour,  George  William 
1834-1923      Balfour,  Gerald  William,  Earl  of 

Balfour 
1843-1902      Balfour,  Henry 
1840-1905      Balfour,  Sir  Isaac  Bayley 
1835-1913      Balfour,  John  Blair,  Baron  Kin- 
1866-1941  ross 

1911-1960      Balfour,  Sir  Thomas  Graham 

Balfour  of  Burleigh,  Baron.  See 
1834-1913  Bruce,  Alexander  Hugh 

1851-1935      Ball,  Albert 
1830-1904      Ball,  Francis  Elrington 
1847-1908      Ball,  John 
1888-1958      Ball,  Sir  Robert  Stawell 
1874-1945      Ballance,  Sir  Charles  Alfred 

Banbury,      Frederick      George, 
Baron  Banbury  of  Southam 

Bancroft,  Marie  Effie  (formerly 
1863-1923  Wilton),  Lady  (1839-1921).  See 

under    Bancroft,    Sir    Squire 
1873-1944  Bancroft 

Bancroft,  Sir  Squire  Bancroft 
1878-1939      Bandaranaike,    Solomon     West 
1846-1904  Ridgeway  Dias 

1863-1947      Bankes,  Sir  John  Eldon 
1844-1907      Banks,  Sir  John  Thomas 
1843-1906      Banks,  Leslie  James 

Banks,  Sir  William  Mitchell 
1874-195 1       Bannerman,  Sir  Henry  Campbell-. 

See  Campbell-Bannerman 
1857-1941      Banting,  Sir  Frederick  Grant 
1864-1940      Bantock,  Sir  Granville  Ransome 
1871-1957      Barbellion,  W.  N.  P.,  pseudonym. 
1864-1931  See  Cummings,  Bruce  Frederick 

1890-1960      Barbour,  Sir  David  Miller 
1816-1902      Barcroft,  Sir  Joseph 
1856-1924      Bardsley,  John  Wareing 

Barger,  George 

Baring,  Evelyn,  Earl  of  Cromer 
1860-1940      Baring,  Maurice 
1872-1940      Baring,  Rowland  Thomas,  Earl  of 
1818-1903  Cromer 

1863-1940      Baring,  Thomas  George,  Earl  of 
1889-1950  Northbrook 

1854-1909      Baring-Gould,  Sabine 
1874-1921       Barker,  Sir  Ernest 
1832-1911      Barker,  Harley  Granville  Gran- 
1842-1908  ville-.  See  GranvUle-Barker 

1888-1946      Barker,  Sir  Herbert  Atkinson 
1888-1959      Barker,  Dame  Lilian  Charlotte 
1874-1946      Barker,  Thomas 
1891-1954      Barkla,  Charles  Glover 
1840-1907      Barling,  Sir  (Harry)  Gilbert 
1866-1956      Barlow,  Sir  Thomas 
1862-1946      Barlow,  William  Hagger 
1862-1935      Barlow,  WiUiam  Henry 

1102 


1861-1951 
1835-1903 

1867-1947 

1849-1932 
1873-1931 

187a-1957 

1848-1930 
1858-1931 
1823-1903 

1853-1945 
1863-1939 
1853-1922 

1837-1905 
1858-1929 

1849-1921 
1896-1917 
1863-1928 
1861-1940 
1840-1913 
3856-1936 

1850-1936 


1841-1926 

1899-1959 
1854-1946 
1815?-1908 
1890-1952 
1842-1904 

1836-1908 
1891-1941 
1868-1946 

1880-1919 
1841-1928 
1872-1947 
1885-1904 
1878-1939 
1841-1917 
1874-1945 

1877-1953 

1826-1904 
1834-1924 
1874-1960 

1877-1946 

1869-1950 
1874-1955 
1838-1907 
1877-1944 
1855-1940 
1845-1945 
1833-1908 
1812-1902 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1960 


Bamaby,  Sir  Nathaniel 
Barnardo,  Thomas  John 
Barnes,  Ernest  WiUiam 
Barnes,  George  NieoU 
Barnes,  Sir  George  Reginald 
Barnes,     John     Gorell,     Baron 

Gorell 
Barnes,  Sir  Kenneth  Ralph 
Barnes,  Robert 
Barnes,  William  Emery 
Bamett,  Dame  Henrietta  Octa- 

via  Weston 
Barnett,  Lionel  David 
Bamett,  Samuel  Augustus 
Baroda,  Sir  Sayaji  Rao,  Maha- 
raja Gaekwar  of 
Baron,  Bernhard 
Barr,  Archibald 
Barrett,  Wilson 
Barrie,  Sir  James  Matthew 
Barrington,  Rutland 
Barrington-Ward,    Sir    Lancelot 

Edward 
Barrington-Ward,    Robert    Mc- 

Gowan 
Barry,  Alfred 
Barry,   Sir  John  Wolfe  Wolfe-. 

See  Wolfe-Barry 
Bartholomew,  John  George 
Bartlet,  James  Vernon 
Bartlett,  Sir  Ellis  Ashmead 
Bartley,  Sir  George  Christopher 

Trout 
Barton,  Sir  Edmund 
Barton,  John 
Barton,  Sir  Sidney 
Bashforth,  Francis 
Bass,    Michael    Arthur,    Baron 

Burton 
Bassett-Lowke,  Wenman  Joseph 
Bates,  Cadwallader  John 
Bates,  Sir  Percy  Elly 
Bateson,  Sir  Alexander  Dingwall 
Bateson,  Mary 
Bateson,  W^illiam 
Bathurst,    Charles,    Viscount 

Bledisloe 
Batsford,  Harry 

Battenberg,  Prince  Louis  Alex- 
ander of.  See  Mountbatten 
Bauerman,  Hilary 
Bax,  Sir  Arnold  Edward  Trevor 
Baxter,  Lucy,  'Leader  Scott' 
Bayley,  Sir  Steuart  Colvin 
Baylis,  Lilian  Mary 
Baylis,  Thomas  Henry 
Bayliss,  Sir  William  Maddock 
Bayliss,  Sir  Wyke 
Bayly,  Ada  Ellen,  'Edna  Lyall' 
Bayly,  Sir  Lewis 
Beach,     Sir     Michael     Edward 

Hicks,  Earl  St.  Aldwyn.  See 

Hicks  Beach 
Beale,  Dorothea 
Beale,  Lionel  Smith 
Beardmore,       William,      Baron 

Invernairn 
Bearsted,  Viscount.  See  Samuel, 

Marcus 


1829-1915 
1845-1905 
1874-1953 
1859-1940 
1904-1960 

1848-1913 
1878-1957 
1817-1907 
1859-1939 

1851-1936 
1871-1960 
1844-1913 

1863-1939 
1850-1929 
1855-1931 
1846-1904 
1860-1937 
1853-1922 

1884-1953 

1891-1948 
1826-1910 

1836-1918 
1860-1920 
1863-1940 
1849-1902 

1842-1910 
1849-1920 
1836-1908 
1876-1946 
1819-1912 

1837-1909 
1877-1953 
1853-1902 
1879-1946 
1866-1935 
1865-1906 
1861-1926 

1867-1958 
1880-1951 

1854-1921 
1835-1909 
1883-1953 
1837-1902 
1836-1925 
1874-1937 
1817-1908 
1860-1924 
1835-1906 
1857-1903 
1857-1938 


1837-1916 
1831-1906 
1828-1906 

1856-1936 

1853-1927 


Beatrice  Mary  Victoria  Feodore, 

princess  of  Great  Britain 
Beattie-Bro^-n,  William 
Beatty,  David,  Earl 
Beatty,  Sir  Edward  Wentworth 
Beauchamp,    Earl.    See  Lygon, 

William 
Beckett,    Sir    Edmund,    Baron 

Grimthorpe 
Beddoe,  John 
Bedford,  Duke  of.  See  Russell, 

Herbrand  Arthur 
Bedford,  Duchess  of  (1865-1987). 

See  under  Russell,  Herbrand 

Arthur 
Bedford,     William     Kirkpatrick 

Riland 
Beecham,  Thomas    . 
Beeching,  Henry  Charles 
Beerbohm,  Sir  Henry  Maximilian 

(Max) 
Beevor,  Charles  Edward 
Begin,  Louis  Nazaire 
Beilby,  Sir  George  Thomas 
Beit,  Alfred 
Beit,  Sir  Otto  John 
Beith,  John  Hay,  'Ian  Hay' 
Belcher,  John 
Belisha,    (Isaac)    Leslie    Hore-, 

Baron  Hore-Belisha.  See  Hore- 

Belisha 
Bell,  Alexander  Graham 
Bell,  Sir  Charles  Alfred 
Bell,  Charles  Frederic  Moberly 
Bell,  Sir  Francis  Henry  Dillon 
Bell,  George  Kennedy  Allen 
Bell,    Gertrude    Margaret    Low- 

thian 
Bell,  Sir  Henry  Hesketh  Joudou 
Bell,  Horace 
Bell,  Sir  Isaac  Lowthian 
Bell,  James 
Bell,  Sir  Thomas 
Bell,  Valentine  Graeme 
Bellamy,  James 
Bellew,  Harold  Kyrle 
Belloc,    Joseph    Hilaire    Pierre 

Ren^ 
Bellows,  John 
Bemrose,  William 
Bendall,  Cecil 
Benham,  William 
Benn,  Sir  Ernest  John  Pickstone 
Benn,  William  Wedgwood,  Vis- 
count Stansgate 
Bennett,  Alfred  William 
Bennett,  Edward  Hallaran 
Bennett,  (Enoch)  Arnold 
Bennett,  George  Macdonald 
Bennett,  Peter  Frederick  Blaker, 

Baron  Bennett  of  Edgbaston 
Bennett,       Richard       Bedford, 

Viscount 
Benson,  Arthur  Christopher 
Benson,  Edward  Frederic 
Benson,     Sir     Francis     Robert 

(Frank) 
Benson,      Godfrey      Rathbone, 

Baron  Chamwood 


1857-1944 
1831-1909 
1871-1936 
1877-1943 

1872-1938 

1816-1905 
182^1911 

1858-1940 


1826-1905 
1820-1907 
1859-1919 

1872-1956 
1854-1908 
1840-1925 
1850-1924 
1853-1906 
1865-1930 
1876-1952 
1841-1913 


1893-1957 
1847-1922 
1870-1945 
1847-1911 
1851-1936 
1883-1958 

1868-1926 
1864-1952 
1839-1903 
1816-1904 
1824-1908 
1865-1952 
1839-1908 
1819-1909 
1855-1911 

1870-1953 
1881-1902 
1831-1908 
1856-1906 
1831-1910 
1875-1954 

1877-1960 
1833-1902 
1837-1907 
1867-1931 

1892-1959 

1880-1957 

1870-1947 
1862-1925 
1867-1940 

1858-1939 

1864-1945 


1103 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Benson,  Richard  Meux 

Benson,  Robert  Hugh 

Benson,  Stella.  See  Anderson 

Bent,  Sir  Thomas 

Bentley,  Edmund  Clerihew 

Bentley,  John  Francis 

Benton,  Sir  John 

Beresford,  Lord  Charles  William 
De  La  Poer,  Baron 

Bergne,  Sir  John  Henry  Gibbs 

Berkeley,  Sir  George 

Berkeley,  Randal  Mowbray  Tho- 
mas (Rawdon),  Earl  of  Berkeley 

Bernard,  Sir  Charles  Edward 

Bernard,  John  Henry 

Bernard,  Thomas  Dehany 

Berners,  Baron.  See  Tyrwhitt- 
Wilson,  Sir  Gerald  Hugh 

Berry,  Sir  Graham 

Berry,  William  Ewert,  Viscount 
Camrose 

Bertie,  Francis  Leveson,  Viscount 
Bertie  of  Thame 

Besant,  Annie 

Besant,  Sir  Walter 

Bessborough,  Earl  of.  See  Pon- 
sonby,  Vere  Brabazon 

Betham-Edwards,  Matilda  Bar- 
bara. See  Edwards 

Bethune-Baker,  James  Franklin 

Betterton,  Henry  Bucknall, 
Baron  Rushcliffe 

Bevan,  Aneurin 

Bevan,  Anthony  Ashley 

Bevan,  Edwyn  Robert 

Bevan,  William  Latham 

Bevin,  Ernest 

Bewley,  Sir  Edmund  Thomas 

Bhopal,  Hamidullah,  Nawab  of 

Bhownaggree,  Sir  Mancherjee 
Merwanjee 

Bicester,  Baron.  See  Smith, 
Vivian  Hugh 

Bickersteth,  Edward  Henry 

Bidder,  George  Parker 

Biddulph,  Sir  Michael  Anthony 
Shrapnel 

Biddulph,  Sir  Robert 

Bidwell,  Shelford 

Biffen,  Sir  Rowland  Harry 

Bigg,  Charles 

Bigge,  Arthur  John,  Baron  Stam- 
fordham 

Bigham,  John  Charles,  Viscount 
Mersey 

Bikaner,  Maharaja  Shri  Sir  Ganga 
Singh  Bahadur,  Maharaja  of 

Biles,  Sir  John  Harvard 

Binnie,  Sir  Alexander  Richardson 

Binnie,  William  James  Eames 

Binyon,  (Robert)  Laurence 

Birch,  George  Henry 

Birch,  Sir  (James  Frederick)  Noel 

Bird,  Henry  Edward 

Bird,  Isabella  Lucy.  See  Bishop 

Bird,  Sir  James 

Birdwood,  Sir  George  Christo- 
pher Molesworth 

Birdwood,  Herbert  Mills 


1824-1915      Birdwood,       William      Riddell, 
1871-1914  Baron 

1892-1933      Birkenhead,  Earl  of.  See  Smith, 
1838-1909  Frederick  Edwin 

1875-1956      Birley,      Sir     Oswald     Hornby 
1839-1902  Joseph 

1850-1927      Birmingham,  George  A.,  pseud- 
onym.    See    Hannay,     James 
1846-1919  Owen 

1842-1908      Birrell,  Augustine 
1819-1905      Birrell,  John 

Biscoe,  Cecil  Earle  Tyndale-.  See 
186^1942  Tyndale-Biscoe 

1837-1901       Bishop,  Edmund 
1860-1927      Bishop  (formerly  Bird),  Isabella 
1815-1904  Lucy 

Blackburn,  Helen 
1883-1950      Blackbume,  Joseph  Henry 
1822-1904      Blackett,  Sir  Basil  Phillott 

Blackley,  William  Lewery 
1879-1954      Blackman,  Frederick  Frost 

Blackwell,  Elizabeth 
1844-1919       Blackwood,  Algernon  Henry 
1847-1933      Blackwood,    Frederick    Temple 
1836-1901  Haiiiilton-Temple,      Marquess 

of  Dufferin  and  Ava 
1880-1956      Blair,  Eric  Arthur,  'George  Or- 
well' 
1836-1919      Blake,  Edward 
1861-1951       Blake,  Dame  Louisa  Brandreth 

Aldrich-.  See  Aldrich-Blake 
1872-1949      Blakiston,       Herbert       Edward 
1897-1960  Douglas 

1859-1933      Blamey,  Sir  Thomas  Albert 
1870-1943      Bland,  Edith  (E.  Nesbit) 
1821-1908      Bland,  John  Otway  Percy 
1881-1951      Bland-Sutton,     Sir    John.     See 
1837-1908  Sutton 

1894-1960      Blandford,  George  Fielding 

Blanesburgh,  Baron.  See  Young- 
1851-1933  er,  Robert 

Blaney,  Thomas 
1867-1956      Blanford,  William  Thomas 
1825-1906      Blatchford,    Robert   Peel   Glan- 
1863-1953  ville 

Blaydes,Frederick  Henry  Marvell 
1823-1904  Bledisloe,  Viscount.  See  Bathurst, 
1835-1918  Charles 

1848-1909      Blennerhassett,  Sir  Rowland 
1874-1949      Blind,  Karl 
1840-1908      Blogg,  Henry  George 

Blomfield,  Sir  Reginald  Theodore 
1849-1931      Blood,  Sir  Bindon 

Bloomtield,  Georgiana,  Lady 
1840-1929      Blouet,  L^on  Paul,  'Max  O'Rell* 

Blount,  Sir  Edward  Charles 
1880-1943      Blumenfeld,  Ralph  David 
1854-1933      Blumenthal,  Jacques  (Jacob) 
1839-1917      Blunt,  Lady  Anne  Isabella  Noel 
1867-1949  (1837-1917).  See  under  Blunt, 

1869-1943  Wilfrid  Scawen 

1842-1904      Blunt,  Wilfrid  Scawen 
1865-1939      Blythswood,  Baron.  See  Camp- 
1830-1908  bell,  Archibald  Campbell 

1831-1904      Bodda  Pyne,  Louisa  Fanny 
1883-1946      Bodington,  Sir  Nathan 

Bodkin,  Sir  Archibald  Henry 
1832-1917       Bodley,  George  Frederick 
1837-1907      Body,  George 

1104 


1865-1951 
1872-1930 
1880-1952 


1865-1950 
1850-1933 
1836-1901 

1863-1949 
184^-1917 


1831- 
1842 
1841 
1882 
1830 
1866 
1821 
1869 


1904 
1903 
1924 
1935 
1902 
1947 
1910 
1951 


1826-1902 

1903-1950 
1833-1912 

1865-1925 

1862-1942 
1884-1951 
1858-1924 
1863-1945 

1855-1936 
1829-1911 

1861-1946 
1823-1903 
1832-1905 

1851-1943 
1818-1908 

1867-1958 
1839-1909 
1826-1907 
1876-1954 
1856-1942 
1842-1940 
1822-1905 
1848-1903 
1809-1905 
1864-1948 
1829-1908 


1840-1922 

1835-1908 
1832-1904 
1848-1911 
1862-1957 
1827-1907 
1840-1911 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1960 


Boldero,     Sir    Harold    Esmond 

Arnison 
Bols,  Sir  Louis  Jean 
Bomberg,  David  Garshen 
Bompas,   Henry    Mason    (1836- 

1909).     See     under    Bompas, 

William  Carpenter 
Bompas,  William  Carpenter 
Bonar,  James 

Bonar  Law,  Andrew.  See  Law 
Bond,  Sir  (Charles)  Hubert 
Bond,  Sir  Robert 
Bond,  William  Bennett 
Bondtield,  Margaret  Grace 
Bone,  Sir  Muirhead 
Bone,  Stephen 
Bone,  William  Arthur 
Bonham-Carter,  Sir  Edgar 
Bonney,  Thomas  George 
Bonney,  (William  Francis)  Victor 
Bonwick,  James 
Boot,  Jesse,  Baron  Trent 
Booth,  Charles 
Booth,  Hubert  Cecil 
Booth,  William  ('General'  Booth) 
Booth,  William  Bramwell 
Boothby,  Guy  Newell 
Boothman,  Sir  John  Nelson 
Borden,  Sir  Robert  Laird 
Borthwick,       Algernon,      Baron 

Glenesk 
Bosanquet,  Bernard 
Bosanquet,  Sir  Frederick  Albert 
Bosanquet,  Robert  Carr 
Boswell,  John  James 
Bos  well,  Percy  George  Hamnall 
Bosworth  Smith,   Reginald.   See 

Smith 
Botha,  Louis 
Bottomley,  Gordon 
Bottomley,  Horatio  William 
Boucherett,  Emilia  Jessie 
Boucicault,  Dion,  the  younger 
Boughton,  George  Henry 
Boughton,  Rutland 
Bourchier,  Arthur 
Bourchier,  James  David 
Bourdillon,  Sir  Bernard  Henry 
Bourinot,  Sir  John  George 
Bourke,  Robert,  Baron  Conne- 

mara 
Bourne,  Francis  Alphonsus 
Bourne,  Gilbert  Charles 
Bourne,  Henry  Richard  Fox 
Bourne,  Robert  Croft 
Bousfield,  Henry  Brougham 
Bowen,  Edward  Ernest 
Bower,  Frederick  Orpen 
Bowes,  Robert 
Bowes-Lyon,  Claude  George,  Earl 

of  Strathmore  and  Kinghome 
Bowhill,  Sir  Frederick  William 
Bowlby,  Sir  Anthony  Alfred 
Bowler,  Henry  Alexander 
Bowles,  Thomas  Gibson 
Bowley,  Sir  Arthur  Lyon 
Boyce,  Sir  Rubert  William 
Boycott,  Arthur  Edwin 
Boyd,  Henry 


1889-1960 
1867-1930 
1890-1957 


1834-1906 
1852-1941 
1858-1923 
1870-1945 
1857-1927 
1815-1906 
1873-1953 
1876-1953 
1904-1958 
1871-1938 
1870-1956 
1833-1923 
1872-1953 
1817-1906 
1850-1931 
1840-1916 
1871-1955 
1829-1912 
1856-1929 
1867-1905 
1901-1957 
1854-1937 

1830-1908 
1848-1923 
1837-1923 
1871-1935 
1835-1908 
1886-1%0 

1839-1908 
1862-1919 
1874-1948 
1860-1933 
1825-1905 
1859-1929 
1833-1905 
1878-1960 
1863-1927 
1850-1920 
1883-1948 
1837-1902 

1827-1902 
1861-1935 
1861-1933 
1837-1909 
1888-1938 
1832-1902 
1836-1901 
1855-1948 
1835-1919 

1855-1944 
1880-1960 
1855-1929 
1824-1903 
1842-1922 
1869-1957 
1863-1911 
1877-1938 
1831-1922 


Boyd,  Sir  Thomas  Jamieson 
Boyd    Carpenter,    William.    Sec 

Carpenter 
Boyle,  Sir  Courtenay  Edmund 
Boyle,  Sir  Edward 
Boyle,  George  David 
Boyle,  Richard  Vicars 
Boys,  Sir  Charles  Vernon 
Brabazon,  Hercules  Brabazon 
Brabazon,     Reginald,    Earl    of 

Meath 
Bracken,      Brendan       Rendall, 

Viscount 
Brackenbury,  Sir  Henry 
Brackley,  Herbert  George 
Bradbury,  John  Swanwick,  Baron 
Braddon,  Sir  Edward  Nicholas 

Coventry 
Braddon,    Mary   Elizabeth.    See 

Maxwell 
Bradford,    Sir    Edward    Ridley 

Colborne 
Bradford,  Sir  John  Rose 
Bradley,  Andrew  Cecil 
Bradley,  Francis  Herbert 
Bradley,  George  Granville       •  •■ 
Bradley,  Henry      •  il^.lii 

Bragg,  Sir  William  Henry 
Braid,  James 
Brailsford,  Henry  Noel 
Brain,  Dennis 
Braithwaite,    Dame    (Florence) 

Lilian 
Braithwaite,  Sir  Walter  Pipon 
Brampton,  Baron.  See  Hawkins, 

Henry 
Bramwell,  Sir  Byrom 
Bramwell,  Sir  Frederick  Joseph 
Brancker,  Sir  William  Sefton 
Brand,  Henry  Robert,  Viscount 

Hampden 
Brand,    Herbert    Charles    Alex- 
ander 
Brandis,  Sir  Dietrich 
Brangwyn,  Sir  Frank  (Francois 

Guillaume) 
Brassey,  Thomas,  Earl 
Bray,  Caroline 
Bray,  Sir  Reginald  More 
Brazil,  Angela 
Brennan,  Louis 
Brentford,  Viscount.  See  Hicks, 

William  Joynson- 
Brereton,  Joseph  Lloyd 
Bressey,  Sir  Charles  Herbert 
Brett,  John 
Brett,  Reginald  Baliol,  Viscount 

Esher 
Brewer,  Sir  Alfred  Herbert 
Brewtnall,  Edward  Frederick 
Bridge,      Sir     Cyprian     Arthur 

George  ^ 

Bridge,  Frank  '^,  '* '* 

Bridge,  Sir  John  Frederick '  •'"  '^ 
Bridge,  Thomas  William 
Bridgeman,  Sir  Francis  Charles 

Bridgeman 
Bridges,  Sir  (George)  Tom  (Moles- 
worth) 


1818>1902 

1841-1918 
1845-1901 
184a-1909 
1828-1901 
1822-1908 
1855-1944 
1821-1906 

1841-1929 

1901-1958 
1837-1914 
1894-1948 
1872-1950 

1829-1904 

1887-1915 

1836-1911 
1863-1935 
1851-1935 
1846-1924 
1821-1903 
1845-1923 
1862-1942 
1870-1950 
1873-1958 
1921-1957 

1873-1948 
1865-1945 

1817-1907 
1847-1931 
1818-1903 
1877-1930 

1841-1906 

1839-1901 
1824-1907 

1867-1956 
1836-1918 
181^1905 
1842-1923 
1868-1947 
1851&-1932 

1866-1932 
1822-1901 
1874-1951 
1831-1902 

1852-1930 

1865-1928 
1846-1902 

1839-1924 
1879-1941 
1844-1924 
1848-1909 

1848-1929 

1871-1939 


1105 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Bridges,  John  Henry 
Bridges,  Robert  Seymour 
Bridges,  Sir  William  Throsby 
Bridie,   James,  pseudonynii   See 

Mavor,  Osborne  Henry 
Brierly,  James  Leslie 
Briggs,  John 
Bright,  James  Franck 
Bright,  William 
Brightman,  Frank  Edward 
Brightwen,  Eliza 
Brise,  Sir  Evelyn  John  Ruggles-. 

See  Ruggles-Brise 
Broadbent,  Sir  William  Henry 
Broadhurst,  Henry 
Brock,  Sir  Osmond  de  Beauvoir 
Brock,  Sir  Thomas 
Brodetsky,  Selig 
Brodribb,  Charles  W^illiam 
Brodribb,  William  Jackson 
Brodrick,  George  Charles 
Brodrick,     (William)     St.  John 

(Fremantle),  Earl  of  Midleton 
Bromby,  Charles  Hamilton  (1843- 

1904).    See    under    Bromby, 

Charles  Henry 
Bromby,  Charles  Henry 
Broodbank,  Sir  Joseph  Guinness 
Brooke,  Alan  England 
Brooke,     Sir    Charles    Anthony 

Johnson 
Brooke,  Rupert  Chawner 
Brooke,  Stopford  Augustus 
Brooke,  Zachary  Nugent 
Brooke-Popham,     Sir     (Henry) 

Robert  (Moore) 
Brooking    Rowe,    Joshua.    See 

Rowe 
Broom,  Robert 
Brotherhood,  Peter 
Brough,  Bennett  Hooper 
Brough,  Lionel 
Brough,  Robert 
Broughton,  Rhoda 
Brown,  Sir  Arthur  Whitten 
Brown,  Douglas  Clifton,  Viscount 

Ruffside 
Brown,  Ernest  William 
Brown,  Frederick 
Brown,  George  Douglas,  'George 

Douglas' 
Brown,  Sir  George  Thomas 
Brown,  Gerard  Baldwin 
Brown,  Horatio  Robert  Forbes 
Brown,  Sir  John 
Brown,  Joseph 
Brown,  Peter  Hume 
Brown,     Sir    Walter    Langdon 

Langdon-.  See  Langdon-Brown 
Brown,  William  Francis 
Brown,  William  Haig.  See  Haig 

Brown 
Brown,  William  John 
Browne,  Edward  Granville 
Browne,  George  Forrest 
Browne,  Sir  James  Crichton- 
Browne,    Sir    James    Frankfort 

Manners 
Browne.  Sir  Samuel  James 


1832-1906      Browne,  Thomas 

1844-1930      Browning,  Sir  Montague  Edward 

1861-1915      Browning,  Oscar 

Bruce,  Alexander  Hugh,  Baron 
1888-1951  Balfour  of  Burleigh 

1881-1955      Bruce,  Charles  Granville 
1862-1902      Bruce,   Clarence  Napier,  Baron 
1832-1920  Aberdare 

1824-1901       Bruce,  Sir  David 
1856-1932      Bruce,  Sir  George  Barclay 
1830-1906      Bruce,  Sir  Henry  Harvey 

Bruce,  Victor  Alexander,  Earl  of 
1857-1935  Elgin 

1835-1907      Bruce,  William  Speirs 
1840-1911      Brunton,  Sir  Thomas  Lauder 
1869-1947      Brushfield,  Thomas  Nadauld 
1847-1922      Bryce,  James,  Viscount 
1888-1954      Brydon,  John  McKean 
1878-1945      Buchan,  Alexander 
1829-1905      Buchan,  Charles  Murray 
1831-1903      Buchan,   John,   Baron  Tweeds- 

muir 
1856-1942      Buchanan,  George 

Buchanan,  George 

Buchanan,  Sir  George  Cunning- 
ham 
1814-1907      Buchanan,  Sir  George  Seaton 
1857-1944      Buchanan,  Sir  George  William 
1863-1939      Buchanan,  James,  Baron  Wool- 

avington 
1829-1917      Buchanan,  Robert  Williams 
1887-1915      Buchanan,  Walter  John  (Jack) 
1832-1916      Buck,  Sir  Peter  Henry 
1883-1946      Buckland,  William  Warwick 

Buckle,  George  Earle 
1878-1953      Buckley,  Henry  Burton,  Baron 

Wrenbury 
1837-1908      Buckmaster,      Stanley      Owen, 
1866-1951  Viscount 

1838-1902      Buckton,  George  Bowdler 
1860-1908      Budge,  Sir  Ernest  Alfred  Thomp- 
1836-1909  son  Wallis 

1872-1905      Bulfin,  Sir  Edward  Stanislaus 
1840-1920      BuUen,  Arthur  Henry 
1886-1948      BuUer,  Arthur  Henry  Reginald 

Buller,  Sir  Redvers  Henry 
1879-1958      Buller,  Sir  Walter  Lawry 
1866-1938      Bulloch,  William 
1851-1941      Bulwer,  Sir  Edward  Earle  Gas- 

coyne 
1860-1902      Bulwer-Lytton,  Victor  Alexander 
1827-1906  George  Robert,  Earl  of  Lytton 

1849-1932      Bunsen,  Ernest  de 
1854-1926      Bunsen,     Sir    Maurice    William 
1880-1958  Ernest  de.  See  de  Bunsen 

1809-1902      Bunting,  Sir  Percy  William 
1849-1918      Burbidge,  Edward 

Burbidge,  Frederick  William 
1870-1946      Burbury,  Samuel  Hawksley 
1862-1951       Burdett-Coutts,     Angela     Geor- 

gina,  Baroness 
1823-1907      Burdon,  John  Shaw 
1894-1960      Burdon-Sanderson,      Sir      John 
1862-1926  Scott 

1833-1930      Burge,  Hubert  Murray 
1840-1938      Burgh  Canning,   Hubert  George 

De,  Marquess  of  Clanricarde 
1823-1910      Burkitt,  Francis  Crawford 
1824-1901       Burn,  Robert 


1876-1947 
1819-1903 

1852-1932 
1836-1911 
1839-1903 
1847-1905 
1831-1911 

1814-1906 
1826-1907 

1828-1905 
1862-1925 

1832-1916 
1864-1935 
1829-1904 


1106 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1060 


Bum-Murdoch,  John 
Bumand,  Sir  Francis  Cowley 
Burne,  Sir  Owen  Tudor 
Burnet,  John 
Burnet,  Sir  John  James 
Burnett,  Sir  Charles  Stuart 
Burnett,  Sir  Robert  Lindsay 
Burnett-Stuart,   Sir  John  Theo- 

dosius 
Burney,  Sir  Cecil 
Burnham,     Baron.     See    Levy- 

Lawson,  Edward 
Burnham,  Viscount.  See  Lawson, 

Harry  Lawson  Webster  Levy- 
Bums,  Dawson 
Bums,  John  Elliot 
Burnside,  William 
Burrell,  Sir  WUliam 
Burroughs     (afterwards     Traill- 

Burroughs),      Sir      Frederick 

William 
Burrows,  Christine  Mary  Elizabeth 
Burrows,  Montagu 
Burt,  Thomas 
Burton,  Baron.  See  Bass,  Michael 

Arthur 
Burton,  Sir  Montague  Maurice 
Bury,  John  Bagnell 
Bushell,  Stephen  Wootton 
Busk,  Rachel  Harriette 
Butcher,  Samuel  Henry 
Butler,  Arthur  Gray 
Butler,  Arthur  John 
Butler,  Edward  Joseph  Aloysius 

(Dom  Cuthbert) 
Butler,    Elizabeth    Southerden, 

Lady 
Butler,  Frank  Hedges 
Butler,    Sir    (George)    Geoffrey 

(Gilbert) 
Butler,  Sir  Harold  Beresford 
Butler,  Henry  Montagu 
Butler,  Josephine  Elizabeth 
Butler,    Sir    Montagu    Sherard 

Dawes 
Butler,  Sir  Richard  Harte  Keat- 

inge 
Butler,  Samuel 

Butler,  Sir  (Spencer)  Harcourt 
Butler,  Sir  William  Francis 
Butlin,  Sir  Henry  Trentham 
Butt,  Dame  Clara  Ellen 
Butterworth,     George     Sainton 

Kaye 
Buxton,    Noel    Edward    Noel-, 

Baron  Noel-Buxton.  See  Noel- 

Buxton 
Buxton,  Patrick  Alfred 
Buxton,  Sydney  Charles,  Earl 
Buxton,  Sir  Thomas  Eowell 
Buzzard,  Sir  (Edward)  Farquhar 
Byng,  Julian  Hedworth  George, 

Viscount  Byng  of  Vimy 
Byme,  Sir  Edmund  Widdrington 
Byron,  Robert 
Bywater,  Ingram 

Cable,  (Alice)  Mildred 
Cadbury,  George 


1852-1909 
1836-1917 
1837-1909 
1863-1928 
1857-1938 
1882-1945 
1887-1959 

1875-1958 
1858-1929 

1833-1916 

1862-1933 
1828-1909 
1858-1943 
1852-1927 
1861-1958 


1831-1905 
1872-1959 
1819-1905 
1837-1922 

1837-1909 
1885-1952 
1861-1927 
1844-1908 
1831-1907 
1850-1910 
1831-1909 
1844-1910 

1858-1934 

1846-1933 
1855-1928 

1887-1929 
1883-1951 
1833-1918 
1828-1906 

1873-1952 

1870-1935 
1835-1902 
1869-1938 
1838-1910 
1845-1912 
1872-1936 

1885-1916 


1860-1948 
1892-1955 
1853-1934 
1837-1915 
1871-1945 

1862-1935 
1844-1904 
1905-1941 
1840-1914 

1878-1952 
1830-1922 


Cadman,  John,  Baron 
Cadogan,  George  Henry,  Earl 
Caillard,    Sir     Vincent     Henry 

Penalver 
Caine,  Sir  (Thomas  Henry)  Hall 
Caine,  William  Sproston 
Caird,  Edward 
Caird,  Sir  James 
Caimes,  William  Elliot 
Cairns,  David  Smith 
Cairns,  Sir  Hugh  William  Bell 
Caldecote,  Viscount.  See  Inskip, 

Thomas  Walker  Hobart 
Caldecott,  Sir  Andrew 
Calderon,  George 
Calkin,  John  Baptiste 
Callaghan,  Sir  George  Astley 
Callendar,  Hugh  Longbourne 
Callender,    Sir    Geoffrey  Arthur 

Romaine 
Callow,  William 
Callwell,  Sir  Charles  Edward 
Caiman,  William  Thomas 
Calthorpe,    Baron.    See  Gough- 

Calthorpe,  Augustus  Cholmon- 

deley 
Calthorpe,  Sir  Somerset  Arthur 

Gough- 
Cambridge,  Duke  of.  See  George 

William  Frederick  Charles 
Cambridge,  Alexander  Augustus 

Frederick     ^Villiam        Alfred 

George,  Earl  of  Athlone 
Cameron,  Sir  David  Young 
Cameron,  Sir  Donald  Charles 
Campbell,  Archibald  Campbell, 

Baron  Blythswood 
Campbell,  Beatrice  Stella  (Mrs. 

Patrick  Campbell) 
Campbell,    Frederick    Archibald 

Vaughan,  Earl  Cawdor 
Campbell,  Gordon 
Campbell,    (Ignatius)    Royston 

Dunnachie  (Roy) 
Campbell,  James  Henry  Mussen, 

Baron  Glenavy 
Campbell,  Sir  James  Macnabb 
Campbell,  Dame  Janet  Mary 
Campbell,  John  Charles 
Campbell,  John  Douglas  Suther- 
land, Duke  of  Argyll 
Campbell,  I^ewis 
Campbell,  Sir  Malcolm 
Campbell,  Sir  Ronald  Hugh 
Campbell,  William  Howard 
Campbell-Bannerman,  Sir  Henry- 
Campion,  Gilbert  Francis  Mon- 

triou,  Baron 
Camrose,   Viscount.   See  Berry, 

William  Ewert 
Cannan,  Charles 
Caiman,  Edwin 
Canning,  Sir  Samuel 
Canton,  William 
Cape,  Herbert  Jonathan 
Capel,  Thomas  John 
Capes,  William  Wolfe 
Capper,  Sir  Thompson 
Carden,  Sir  Sackville  Hamilton 


1877-1941 

1840-1915 

1856-1930 
1853-1931 
1842-1903 
1&J5-1908 
186t-1954 
1862-1902 
1862-1946 
1896-1952 

1876-1947 
1884-1951 
1868-1915 
1827-1905 
1852-1920 
1863-1930 

1875-1946 
1812-1908 
1859-1928 
1871-1952 


1829-1910 
1864-1937 

1819-1904 


1874r-1957 
1865-1945 
1872-1948 

1835-1908 

1865-1940 

1847-1911 
1886-1953 

1901-1957 

1851-1931 
1846-1903 
1877-1954 
1894-1942 

1845-1914 

1830-1908 
1885-1948 
1883-1953 
1859-1910 
1836-1908 

1882-1958 

1879-1954 
1858-1919 
1861-1935 
1823-1908 
1845-1926 
1879-1960 
1836-1911 
1834-1914 
1863-1915 
1857-1930 


1107 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Cardew,  Philip 

Carey,  Rosa  Nouchette 

CarlUe,  Wilson 

Carling,  Sir  Ernest  Rock 

Carlisle,  Earl  of.  See  Howard, 
George  James 

Carlisle,  Countess  of.  See  How- 
ard, Rosalind  Frances 

Carlyle,  Alexander  James 

Carlyle,  Benjamin  Fearnley,  Dom 
Aelred 

Carlyle,  Sir  Robert  Warrand 

Carman,  William  Bliss 

Carmichael,  Sir  Thomas  David 
Gibson-,  Baron 

Carnarvon,  Earl  of.  See  Herbert, 
George  Edward  Stanhope 
Molyneux 

Carnegie,  Andrew 

Carnegie,  James,  Earl  of  Southesk 

Camock,  Baron.  See  Nicolson, 
Sir  Arthur 

Caroe,  William  Douglas 

Carpenter,  Alfred  Francis 
Blakeney 

Carpenter,  Edward 

Carpenter,  George  Alfred 

Carpenter,  Sir  (Henry  Cort) 
Harold 

Carpenter,  Joseph  Estlin 

Carpenter,  Robert 

Carpenter,  William  Boyd 

Carrington,  Sir  Frederick 

Carson,  Edward  Henry,  Baron 

Carte,  Richard  D'Oyly 

Carter,  Sir  Edgar  Bonham-.  See 
Bonham-Carter 

Carter,  Howard 

Carter,  Hugh 

Carter,  Thomas  Thellusson 

Carton,  Richard  Claude 

Carver,  Alfred  James 

Cary,  Arthur  Joyce  Lunel 

Case,  Thomas 

Casement,  Roger  David 

Casey,  William  Francis 

Cash,  John  Theodore 

Cassel,  Sir  Ernest  Joseph 

Cassels,  Sir  Robert  Archibald 

Cassels,  Walter  Richard 

Cates,  Arthur 

Cathcart,  Edward  Provan 

Catto,  Thomas  Sivewright,  Baron 

Cavan,  Earl  of.  See  Lambart, 
Frederick  Rudolph 

Cave,  George,  Viscount 

Cavell,  Edith 

Cavendish,  Spencer  Compton, 
Marquess  of  Hartington,  after- 
wards Duke  of  Devonshire 

Cavendish,  Victor  Christian  Wil- 
liam, Duke  of  Devonshire 

Cawdor,  Earl.  See  Campbell, 
Frederick  Archibald  Vaughan 

Cecil,  Edgar  Algernon  Robert 
Gascoyne-,  Viscount  Cecil  of 
Chelwood 

Cecil,  Lord  Edward  Herbert 
Gascoyne- 


1851-1910      Cecil,  Hugh  Richard  Heathcote 
1840-1909  Gascoyne-,  Baron  Quickswood 

1847-1942      Cecil,    James    Edward    Hubert 
1877-1960  Gascoyne-,  Marquess  of  Salis- 

bury 
1 843-191 1      Cecil,  Robert  Arthur  Talbot  Gas- 
coyne-, Marquess  of  Salisbury 
1845-1921       Chads,  Sir  Henry 
1861-1943      Chadwick,  Hector  Munro 

Chadwick,  Roy 
1874r-1955      Chalmers,  James 
1859-1934      Chalmers,  Sir  Mackenzie  Dalzell 
1861-1929      Chalmers,  Robert,  Baron 

Chamberlain,  (Arthur)  Neville 
1859-1926      Chamberlain,  Sir  Crawford  Trot- 
ter 

Chamberlain,  Houston  Stewart 
1866-1923      Chamberlain,  Joseph 
1835-1919      Chamberlain,  Sir  (Joseph)  Aus- 
1827-1905  ten 

Chamberlain,  Sir  Neville  Bowles 
1849-1928      Chambers,  Dorothea  Katharine 
1857-1938      Chambers,     Sir    Edmund    Ker- 

chever 
1881-1955      Chambers,  Raymond  Wilson 
1844-1929      Chamier,  Stephen  Henry  Edward 
1859-1910      Champneys,  BasU 

Champneys,  Sir  Francis  Henry 
1875-1940      Chance,  Sir  James  Timmins 
1844-1927      Chancellor,  Sir  John  Robert 
1830-1901      Channell,  Sir  Arthur  Moseley 
1841-1918      Channer,  George  Nicholas 
1844-1913      Chaplin,  Henry,  Viscount 
1854-1935      Chapman,  David  Leonard 
1844-1901      Chapman,  Edward  John 

Chapman,  Robert  William 
1870-1956      Chapman,  Sir  Sydney  John 
1874-1939      Charles,  James 
1837-1903      Charles,  Robert  Henry 
1808-1901       Charlesworth,  Martin  Percival 
1856-1928      Charley,  Sir  William  Thomas 
1826-1909      Chariot,  Andr^  Eugene  Maurice 
1888-1957      Chamwood,  Baron.  See  Benson, 
1844-1925  Godfrey  Rathbone 

1864-1916      Charrington,  Frederick  Nicholas 
1884-1957      Charteris,  Archibald  Hamilton 
1854-1936      Chase,  Drummond  Percy 
1852-1921       Chase,  Frederic  Henry 
1876-1959      Chase,  Marian  Emma 
1826-1907      Chase,  William  St.  Lucian 
1829-1901      Chatter jee.  Sir  Atul  Chandra 
1877-1954      Chauvel,  Sir  Henry  George 
1879-1959      Chavasse,  Francis  James 

Cheadle,  Walter  Butler 
1865-1946      Cheatle,  Arthur  Henry 
1856-1928      Cheetham,  Samuel 
1865-1915      Chelmsford,  Baron.  See  Thesiger, 
Frederic  Augustus 

Chelmsford,  Viscount.  See  Thesi- 
183a-1908  ger,  Frederic  John  Napier 

Chermside,  Sir  Herbert  Charles 
1868-1938      Cherry-Garrard,   Apsley  George 

Benet 
1847-1911      Cherwell,  Viscount.   See  Linde- 
mann,  Frederick  Alexander 

Chesterton,  Gilbert  Keith 
1864-1958      Chetwode,  Sir  Philip  Walhouse, 

Baron 
1867-1918      Chevalier,  Albert 


1108 


TTI<lX^UMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1060 


Cheylesmore,  Baron.  See  Eaton, 

Herbert  Francis 
Cheylesmore,  Baron.  See  Eaton, 

William  Meriton 
Cheyne,  Thomas  Kelly 
Cheyne,  Sir  (William)  Watson 
Chifley,  Joseph  Benedict 
Child,  Harold  Hannyngton 
Child,  Thomas 

Child- Villiers,    Margaret    Eliza- 
beth, Countess  of  Jersey.  See 

Villiers 
Child-VOliers,      Victor      Albert 

George,   Earl   of  Jersey.    See 

Villiers 
Childe,  Vere  Gordon 
Childers,  Robert  Erskine 
Childs,  William  Macbride 
Chilston,    Viscount.    See   Akers- 

Douglas,  Aretas 
Chilston,   Viscount.   See   Akers- 

Douglas,  Aretas 
Chirol,  Sir  (Ignatius)  Valentine 
Chisholm,  Hugh 
Cholmondeley,      Hugh,      Baron 

Delamere 
Christie,     Sir     William     Henry 

Mahoney 
Chrystal,  George 
Chubb,  Sir  Lawrence  Wensley 
Church,  Sir  William  Selby 
Cilcennin,  Viscount.  See  Thomas, 

James  Purdon  Lewes 
Clanricarde,    Marquess    of.    See 

Burgh  Canning,  Hubert  George 

De 
Clanwilliam,  Earl  of.  See  Meade, 

Richard  James 
Clapham,  Sir  Alfred  WiUiam 
Clapham,  Sir  John  Harold 
Clarendon,  Earl  of.  See  Villiers, 

George  Herbert  Hyde 
Clark.  Albert  Curtis 
Clark,  John  Willis 
Clark,  Sir  William  Henry 
Clark  Kerr,  Archibald  John  Kerr, 

Baron  Inverchapel 
Clarke,  Sir  Andrew 
Clarke,  Sir  Caspar  Purdon 
Clarke,  Charles  Baron 
Clarke,  Sir  Edward  George 
Clarke,  Sir  Fred 
Clarke,  George  Sydenham,  Baron 

Sydenham  of  Combe 
Clarke,  Henry  Butler 
Clarke,  Louis  Colville  Gray 
Clarke,  Sir  Marshal  James 
Clarke,  Maude  Violet 
Clarke,  Thomas 
Clasper,  John  Hawks 
Clausen,  Sir  George 
Clauson,  Albert  Charles,  Baron 
Claxton,  Brooke 
Clay,  Sir  Henry 
Clayden,  Peter  William 
Clayton,  Sir  Gilbert  Falkingham 
Clementi,  Sir  Cecil 
Clerk,  Sir  Dugald 
Clerk,  Sir  George  Russell 


1848-1925 

1843-1902 
1841-1915 
1852-1932 
1885-1951 
1869-1945 
1839-1906 


1849-1945 


1845-1915 
1892-1957 
1870-1922 
1869-1939 

1851-1926 

1876-1947 
1852-1929 

1866-1924 

1870-1931 

1845-1922 
1851-1911 
1873-1948 
1837-1928 

1903-1960 


1832-1916 

1832-1907 
1883-1950 
1873-1946 

1877-1955 
1859-1937 
183a-1910 
1876-1952 

1882-1951 
1824-1902 
1846-1911 
1832-1906 
1841-1931 
1880-1952 

1848-1933 
1863-1904 
1881-1%0 
1841-1909 
1892-1935 
1884^-1957 
1836-1908 
1852-1944 
1870-1946 
1898-1960 
1883-1954 
1827-1902 
1875-1929 
1875-1947 
1854-1932 
1874-1951 


Clerke,  Agnes  Mary  .^.f-v  ,, 

Clerke,  Ellen  Mary  (1840-1908). 

See  under  Clerke,  Agnes  Mary 
Clery,  Sir  Cornelius  Francis 
Cleworth,  Thomas  Ebenezer 
Clifford,  Frederick 
Clifford,  Sir  Hugh  Charles 
Clifford,  John 
Clive,  Sir  Robert  Henry 
Clodd,  Edward 
Close,     Sir     Charles     Frederick 

Arden-.  See  Arden-Close 
Close,  Maxwell  Henry 
Clowes,  Sir  William  Laird 
Clunies-Ross,  George 
Clunies  Ross,  Sir  Ian.  See  Ross 
Glutton,  Henry  Hugh 
Clutton-Brock,  Arthur 
Clyde,  James  Avon,  Lord 
Clydesmuir,  Baron.  See  Colville, 

David  John 
Clynes,  John  Robert 
Coates,  Eric 
Coates,  Joseph  Gordon 
Cobb,  Gerard  Francis 
Cobb,  John  Rhodes 
Cobbe,  Sir  Alexander  Stanhope 
Cobbe,  Frances  Power 
Cobden-Sanderson,  Thomas 

James 
Cochran,  Sir  Charles  Blake 
Cochrane,    Douglas    Mackinnon 

Baillie     Hamilton,     Earl     of 

Dundonald 
Cochrane-Baillie,  Charles  Wallace 

Alexander  Napier  Ross,  Baron 

Lamington.  See  Baillie 
Cockerell,  Douglas  Bennett 
Cocks,  Arthur  Herbert  Tennyson 

Somers-,   Baron   Somers.    See 

Somers-Cocks 
Codner,  Maurice  Frederick 
Coghlan,  Sir  Charles  Patrick  John 
Cohen,  Arthur 
Cohen,  Sir  Robert  Waley 
Coillard,  Franyois 
Cokayne,  (ieorge  Edward 
Coke,  Thomas  William,  Earl  of 

Leicester 
Coker,  Ernest  George 
Cole,  George  Douglas  Howard 
Coleman,  William  Stephen 
Coleridge,    Bernard    John    Sey- 
mour, Baron 
Coleridge,  Mary  Elizabeth 
Coleridge,        Stephen      William 

Buchanan 
Coleridge-Taylor,  Samuel 
Coles,    Charles    Edward,    Coles 

Pasha 
Coles,  Vincent  Stuckey  Stratton 
Collen,  Sir  Edwin  Henry  Hajrter 
Colles,  Henry  Cope 
Collett,  Sir  Henry 
Collie,  John  Norman 
Collier,  John 
CoUings,  Jesse 
CoUingwood,  Cuthbert 
Collingwood,  Robin  George 


1842-1907 


1888-1926 
1854-1909 
1828-1904 
1866-1941 
1836-1923 
1877-1948 
1840-1930 

1865-1952 
1822-1903 
1856-1905 
1842-1910 

1890-1959 
1850-1909 
1868-1924 
1863-1944 

1894-1954 
1869-1949 
1886-1957 
1878-1943 
1838-1904 
1899-1952 
1870-1931 
1822-1904 

1840-1922 
1872-1951 


1852-1935 


1860-1940 
1870-1945 


1887-1944 

1888-1958 
186,3-1927 
1829-1914 
1877-1952 
1834-1904 
1825-1911 

1822-1909 
1869-1946 
1889-1959 
1829-1904 

1851-1927 
1861-1907 

1854^1936 
1875-1912 

1853-1926 
184.5-1929 
1843-1911 
1879-1943 
1836-1901 
1859-1942 
1850-1934 
1831-1920 
1826-1908 
1889-1943 


1100 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Collins,  John  Churton 

Collins,  Josephine  (Jos^) 

Collins,  Michael 

Collins,  Richard  Henn,  Baron 

Collins,  William  Edward 

Colnaghi,  Martin  Henry 

Colomb,  Sir  John  Charles  Ready 

Colton,  Sir  John 

Colvile,  Sir  Henry  Edward 

Colville,    David     John,    Baron 

Clydesmuir 
Colville,  Sir  Stanley  Cecil  James 
Colvin,  Sir  Auckland 
Colvin,  Ian  Duncan 
Colvin,  Sir  Sidney 
Colvin,  Sir  Walter  Mytton.  See 

under  Colvin,  Sir  Auckland 
Commerell,  Sir  John  Edmund 
Common,  Andrew  Ainslie 
Comper,  Sir  (John)  Ninian 
Compton,  Lord  Alwyne  Frederick 
Comrie,  Leslie  John 
Conder,  Charles 
Conder,  Claude  Reignier 
Congreve,  Sir  Walter  Norris 
Coningham,  Sir  Arthur 
Connard,  Philip 
Connaught  and  Stratheam,  Duke 

of.  See  Arthur  William  Patrick 

Albert 
Connemara,  Baron.  See  Bourke, 

Robert 
Connor,  Ralph,  pseudonym.  See 

Gordon,  Charles  William 
Conquest,  George  Augustus 
Conrad,  Joseph 
Conway,  Robert  Seymour 
Conway,  William  Martin,  Baron 

Conway  of  Allington 
Conybeare,  Frederick  Comwallis 
Conyngham,  Sir  Gerald  Ponsonby 

Lenox-.  See  Lenox-Conyngham 
Cook,  Arthur  Bernard 
Cook,  Arthur  James 
Cook,  Sir  Basil  Alfred  KembaU-. 

See  Kemball-Cook 
Cook,  Sir  Edward  Tyas 
Cook,  Sir  Francis 
Cook,  Sir  Joseph 
Cook,  Stanley  Arthur 
Cooke,  George  Albert 
Coolidge,  William  Augustus  Bre- 

voort 
Cooper,  Sir  Alfred 
Cooper,    Alfred   Duff,    Viscount 

Norwich 
Cooper,  Sir  Daniel 
Cooper,  Edward  Herbert 
Cooper,  Sir  (Francis)  D'Arcy 
Cooper,  James 
Cooper,  James  Davis 
Cooper,  Sir  (Thomas)  Edwin 
Cooper,  Thomas  Mackay,  Baron 

Cooper  of  Culross 
Cooper,  Thomas  Sidney 
Cooper,  Thompson 
Cope,  Sir  Alfred  William 
Copeland,  Ralph 
Copinger,  Walter  Arthur 


1848-1908 
1887-1958 
1890-1922 
1842-1911 
1867-1911 
1821-1908 
1838-1909 
1823-1902 
1852-1907 

1894^1954 
1861-1939 
1838-1908 
1877-1938 
1845-1927 


1829-1901 
1841-1903 
1864-1960 
1825-1906 
1893-1950 
1868-1909 
1848-1910 
1862-1927 
1895-1948 
1875-1958 


1850-1942 

1827-1902 

1860-1937 
1837-1901 
1857-1924 
1864-1933 

1856-1937 
1856-1924 

1866-1956 
1868-1952 
1883-1931 

1876-1949 
1857-1919 
1817-1901 
1860-1947 
1873-1949 
1865-1939 

1850-1926 
1838-1908 

1890-1954 
1821-1902 
1867-1910 
1882-1941 
1846-1922 
1823-1904 
1874-1942 

1892-1955 
1803-1902 
1837-1904 
1877-1954 
1837-1905 
1847-1910 


Copisarow,  Maurice 
Coppard,  Alfred  Edgar 
Coppin,  George  Selth 
Coppinger,  Richard  William 
Corbet,  Matthew  Ridley 
Corbett,  Edward  James  (Jim) 
Corbett,  John 
Corbett,  Sir  Julian  Stafford 
Corbould,  Edward  Henry 
Corelli,    Marie,  pseudonym.    See 

Mackay,  Mary 
Corfield,  William  Henry 
Cornford,  Frances  Crofts 
Cornford,  Francis  Macdonald 
Cornish,  Charles  John 
Cornish,  Francis  Warre  Warre-. 

See  Warre-Comish 
Cornish,  Vaughan 
Cornwallis,  Sir  Kinahan 
Corn  well,  James 
Corry,  Montagu  William  Lowry, 

Baron  Rowton 
Cory,  John 

Coryndon,  Sir  Robert  Thome 
Couch,  Sir  Arthur  Thomas  Quil- 

ler-,  CQ').  See  Quiller-Couch 
Couch,  Sir  Richard 
Coulton,  George  Gordon 
Couper,     Sir    George    Ebenezer 

Wilson 
Coupland,  Sir  Reginald 
Courtauld,  Augustine 
Courtauld,  Samuel 
Courthope,  William  John 
Courtney,  Leonard  Henry,  Baron 

Courtney  of  Penwith 
Courtney,  William  Leonard 
Cousin,  Anne  Ross 
Cowan,  Sir  Walter  Henry 
Cowans,  Sir  John  Steven 
Coward,  Sir  Henry 
Cowdray,  Viscount.  See  Pearson, 

Weetman  Dickinson 
Cowell,  Edward  Byles 
Cowen,  Sir  Frederic  Hymen 
Cowie,  William  Garden 
Cowley,  Sir  Arthur  Ernest 
Cowper,     Francis     Thomas     de 

Grey,  Earl 
Cox,  Alfred 
Cox,  George  (called  Sir  George) 

William 
Cox,  Harold 

Cox,  Sir  Percy  Zachariah 
Cozens-Hardy,   Herbert   Hardy, 

Baron 
Craddock,  Sir  Reginald  Henry 
Cradock,  Sir  Christopher  George 

Francis  Maurice 
Craig,  Isa.  See  Knox 
Craig,  James,  Viscount  Craigavon 
Craig,  Sir  John 
Craig,  William  James 
Craigavon,  Viscount.  See  Craig, 

James 
Craigie,     Pearl     Mary     Teresa, 

'John  Oliver  Hobbes' 
Craigie,  Sir  Robert  Leslie 
Craigie,  Sir  William  Alexander 


1110 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  1001-1960 


Craigmyle,  Baron.  See  Shaw, 
Thomas 

Craik,  Sir  Henry 

Cranbrook,  Earl  of.  See  Gathome- 
Hardy,  Gathorne 

Crane,  Walter 

Craven,  Hawes 

Craven,  Henry  Thornton 

Crawford,  Earl  of.  See  Lindsay, 
David  Alexander  Edward 

Crawford,  Earl  of.  See  Lindsay, 
James  Ludovic 

Crawford,  Osbert  Guy  Stanhope 

Crawfurd,  Oswald  John  Frederick 

Crawfurd,  Sir  Raymond  Henry 
Payne 

Creagh,  Sir  Garrett  O'Moore 

Creagh,  William 

Creed,  John  Martin 

Cremer,  Sir  William  Randal 

Crew-Milnes,  Robert  Offley  Ash- 
burton,  Marquess  of  Crewe 

Crichton-Browne,  Sir  James.  See 
Browne 

Cripps,  Charles  Alfred,  Baron 
Parmoor 

Cripps,  Sir  (Richard)  Stafford 

Cripps,  Wilfred  Joseph 

Crocker,  Henry  Radcliffe-.  See 
Radcliffe-Crocker 

Crockett,  Samuel  Rutherford 

Croft,  Henry  Page,  Baron 

Croft,  John 

Crofts,  Ernest 

Croke,  Thomas  William 

Cromer,  Earl  of.  See  Baring, 
Evelyn 

Cromer,  Earl  of.  See  Baring, 
Rowland  Thomas 

Crompton,  Henry 

Crompton,  Rookes  Evelyn  Bell 

Crookes,  Sir  William 

Crooks,  William 

Cross,  Charles  Frederick 

Cross,  Richard  Assheton,  Vis- 
count 

Crossman,  Sir  William 

Crosthwaite,  Sir  Charles  Haukes 
Todd 

Crowe,  Sir  Edward  Thomas 
Frederick 

Crowe,  Eyre 

Crowe,  Sir  Eyre  Alexander  Barby 
Wichart 

Crozier,  William  Percival 

Cruikshank,  Robert  James 

Crum,  Walter  Ewing 

Crump,  Charles  George 

Cruttwell,  Charles  Robert  Mow- 
bray Eraser 

Cruttwell,  Charles  Thomas 

Cubitt,  William  George 

Cullen,  William 

CuUingworth,  Charles  James 

Cullis,  Winifred  Clara 

Cummings,  Arthur  John 

Cummings,  Bruce  Frederick, 
'W.  N.  P.  Barbellion' 

Cuningham,  James  McNabb 


1850-1937 
1846-1927 

1814-1906 
1845-1915 
1837-1910 
1818-1905 

1871-1940 

1847-1913 
1886-1957 
1834-1909 

1865-1938 
1848-1923 
1828-1901 
1889-1940 
1838-1908 

1858-1945 

1840-1938 

1852-1941 
1889-1952 
1841-1903 

1845-1909 
1860-1914 
1881-1947 
1833-1905 
1847-1911 
1824-1902 

1841-1917 

1877-1953 
1836-1904 
1845-1940 
1832-1919 
1852-1921 
1855-1935 

1823-1914 
1830-1901 

1835-1915 

1877-1960 
1824-1910 

1864-1925 
1879-1944 
1898-1956 
1865-1944 
1862-1935 

1887-1941 
1847-1911 
1835-1903 
1867-1948 
1841-1908 
1875-1956 
1882-1957 

1889-1919 
1829-1905 


Cunningham,  Daniel  John  ^^  ^  ''"'<' 
Cunningham,  William  ■• 

Cunninghame    Graham,    Robert 

Bontine.  See  Graham 
Currie,  Sir  Arthur  William 
Currie,  Sir  Donald 
Currie,  Sir  James 
Currie  (formerly  Singleton),  Mary 

Montgomerie,    Lady,     'Violet 

Fane' 
Currie,  Philip  Henry  Wodehouse, 

Baron 
Curtin,  John 
Curtis,  Edmund 
Curtis,  Lionel  George 
Curzon,  George  NathanieU-Mar- 

quess  Curzon  of  Kedleston 
Curzon-Howe,  Sir  Assheton  Gore 
Cushendun,  Baron.  See  McNeill, 

Ronald  John 
Cushny,  Arthur  Robertson 
Cust,  Henry  John  Cockayne 
Cust,  Sir  Lionel  Henry 
Cust,  Robert  Needhara 
Custance,  Henry 
Custance,  Sir  Reginald  Neville 
Cutts,  Edward  L«wes 


D'Abemon,  Viscount.  See  Vin- 
cent, Sir  Edgar 

Dadabhoy,  Sir  Maneckji  Byramji 

Dafoe,  John  Wesley 

Dakin,  Henry  Drysdale 

Dale,  Sir  David 

Dallinger,  William  Henry 

Dalrymple-Hay,  Sir  Harley 
Hugh.  See  Hay 

Dalton,  Ormonde  Maddock 

Dalziel,  Davison  Alexander, 
Baron 

Dalziel,  Ekiward 

Dalziel,  George 

Dalziel,  James  Henry,  Baron 
Dalziel  of  Kirkcaldy 

Dalziel,  Thomas  Bolton  Gilchrist 
Septimus 

Dampier,  Sir  William  Cecil  Dam- 
pier  (formerly  Whetham) 

Dane,  Sir  Louis  William 

Daniel,  Charles  Henry  Olive 

Daniel,  Evan 

Danvers,  Frederic  Charles 

Darbyshire,  Alfred 

D'Arcy,  Charles  Frederick 

Darling,  Charles  John,  Baron 

Darwin,  Sir  Francis 

Darwin,  Sir  George  Howard 

Darwin,  Sir  Horace 

Dashwood,  Edm^e  Elizabeth 
Monica,  'E.  M.  Delafield' 

Daubeney,  Sir  Henry  Charles 
Bamston 

Davenport-Hill,  Rosamond.  See 
Hill 

Davey,  Horace,  Baron 

David,  Albert  Augustus 

David,  Sir  (Tannatt  WUliam) 
Edgeworth 


1850-1909 
1849-1919 

1852-1936 
1875-1933 
1825-1909 
1868-1937 


1848-1905 

1834-1906 
1885-1945 
1881-1943 
1872-1955 

1859-1925 
1850-1911 

1861-1934 
1866-1926 
1861-1917 
1859-1929 
1821-1909 
1842-1908 
1847-1935 
1824-1901 


1857-1941 

1865-1953 
1866-1944 
1880-1952 
1829-1906 
1842-1909 

1861-1940 
1866-1945 

1854-1928 
1817-1905 
1815-1902 

1868-1935 

1823-1906 

1867-1952 
1856-1946 
1836-1919 
1837-1904 
1833-1906 
1839-1908 
1859-1938 
1849-1936 
1848-1925 
1845-1912 
1851-1928 

1890-1943 

1810-1903 

1825-1902 
1833-1907 
1867-1950 

1858-1934 


nil 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Davids,  Thomas  William  Rhys 
Davidson,  Andrew  Bruce 
Davidson,  Charles 
Davidson,  James  Leigh  Strachan-. 

See  Strachan-Davidson 
Davidson,  John 
Davidson,  Sir  John  Humphrey 
Davidson,  John  Thain 
Davidson,      Randall      Thomas, 

Baron  Davidson  of  Lambeth 
Davie,  Thomas  Benjamin 
Davies,  Charles  Maurice 
Davies,  David,  Baron 
Davies,  Sir  (Henry)  Walford 
Davies,  John  Llewelyn 
Davies,  Robert 
Davies,  (Sarah)  Emily 
Davies,  William  Henry 
Davies,  Sir  William  (Llewelyn) 
Davis,  Charles  Edward 
Davis,  Henry  William  Carless 
Davitt,  Michael 
Dawber,  Sir  (Edward)  Guy 
Dawkins,  Richard  McGillivray 
Dawkins,  Sir  William  Boyd 
Dawson,  Bertrand  Edward,  Vis- 
count Dawson  of  Penn 
Dawson,  (George)  Geoffrey 
Dawson,  George  Mercer 
Dawson,  John 
Day,  Sir  John  Charles  Frederic 

Sigismund 
Day,  Lewis  Foreman 
Day,  William  Henry 
Deacon,  George  Frederick 
Deakin,  Alfred 
Deakin,  Arthur 
Deane,  Sir  James  Parker 
Dearmer,  Percy 
De  Bunsen,  Sir  Maurice  William 

Ernest 
De  Burgh,  William  (Jeorge 
De     Burgh     Canning,     Hubert 

George,    Marquess    of  Clanri- 

carde.  See  Burgh  Canning 
De   Chair,   Sir  Dudley  Rawson 

Stratford 
Deedes,  Sir  Wyndham  Henry 
De    Ferranti,    Sebastian    Ziani. 

See  Ferranti 
De  Havilland,  Geoffrey  Raoul 
Delafield,  E.  M.,  pseudonym.  See 

Dashwood,   Edm^e   Elizabeth 

Monica 
De  la  Mare,  Walter  John 
Delamere,  Baron.  See  Cholmon- 

deley,  Hugh 
De    la    Ram^e,    Marie    Louise, 

'Ouida' 
De  la  Rue,  Sir  Thomas  Andros 
De  L4szl6,   Philip  Alexius.   See 

Laszl6  de  Lombos 
Delevingne,  Sir  Malcolm 
Delius,  Frederick 
Dell,  Ethel  Mary.  See  Savage 
Deller,  Sir  Edwin 
De  Montmorency,  James  Edward 

Geoffrey 
De      Montmorency,      Raymond 


1843-1922 
1831-1902 
1824-1902 

1843-1916 
1857-1909 
187&-1954 
1833-1904 

1848-1930 
1895-1955 
1828-1910 
1880-1944 
1869-1941 
1826-1916 
1816-1905 
1830-1921 
1871-1940 
1887-1952 
1827-1902 
1874-1928 
1846-1906 
1861-1938 
1871-1955 
1837-1929 

1864.-1945 
1874-1944 
1849-1901 
1827-1903 

1826-1908 
1845-1910 
1823-1908 
1843-1909 
1856-1919 
1890-1955 
1812-1902 
1867-1936 

1852-1932 
1866-1943 


1832-1916 

1864-1958 
1883-1956 

1864-1930 
1910-1946 


1890-1943 
1873-1956 

1870-1931 

1839-1908 
1849-1911 

1869-1937 
1868-1950 
1862-1934 
1881-1939 
1883-1936 

1866-1934 


Harvey,  Viscount  Frankfort 
de  Montmorency 

De  Morgan,  William  Frend 

Denman,  Gertrude  Mary,  Lady 

Denney,  James 

Denniston,  John  Dewar 

Denny,  Sir  Archibald 

Denny,  Sir  Maurice  Edward 

Dent,  Edward  Joseph 

Dent,  Joseph  Malaby 

Derby,  Earl  of.  See  Stanley,  Ed- 
ward George  Villiers 

Derby,  Earl  of.  See  Stanley, 
Frederick  Arthur 

De  Robeck,  Sir  John  Michael 

De  SauUes,  George  William 

Desborough,  Baron.  See  Gren- 
fell,  William  Henry 

De  Selincourt,  Ernest.  See  SeUn- 
court 

Des  Voeux,  Sir  (George)  William 

Detmold,  Charles  Maurice 

De  Vere,  Aubrey  Thomas 

De  Vere,  Sir  Stephen  Edward 

Deverell,  Sir  Cyril  John 

De  Villiers,  John  Henry,  Baron 

Devlin,  Joseph 

Devonport,  Viscount.  See  Kear- 
ley,  Hudson  Ewbanke 

Devonshire,  Duke  of.  See  Caven- 
dish, Spencer  Compton 

Devonshire,  Duke  of.  See  Caven- 
dish, Victor  Christian  William 

Dewar,  Sir  James 

De  Wet,  Christiaan  Rudolph 

De  Winton,  Sir  Francis  Walter 

De  Worms,  Henry,  Baron  Pir- 
bright 

Dewrance,  Sir  John 

D'Eyncourt,  Sir  Eustace  Henry 
William  Tennyson-.  See 
Tennyson-d'Eyncourt 

Dibbs,  Sir  George  Richard 

Dibdin,  Sir  Lewis  Tonna 

Dicey,  Albert  Venn 

Dicey,  Edward  James  Stephen 

Dick-Read,  Grantly 

Dickinson,  Goldsworthy  Lowes 

Dickinson,  Henry  Winram 

Dickinson,  Hercules  Henry 

Dickinson,  Lowes  (Cato) 

Dicksee,  Sir  Francis  Bernard 
(Frank) 

Dickson,  Sir  CoUingwood 

Dickson,  William  Purdie 

Dickson-Poynder,  Sir  John  Poyn- 
der,  Baron  Islington.  See 
Poynder 

Digby,  William 

Dilke,  Sir  Charles  Wentworth 

Dilke,  Emilia  Frances,  Lady 

Dill,  Sir  John  Greer 

Dill,  Sir  Samuel 

Dillon,  Emile  Joseph 

Dillon,  Frank 

Dillon,  Harold  Arthur  Lee-, 
Viscount  Dillon 

Dillon,  John 

Dimock,  Nathaniel 


1112 


«r  aCUMULATIVE  index  1901-1960 


Dines,  William  Henry 

Dix,    George   Eglington  Alston, 

Dom  Gregory 
Dixie,  Lady  Florence  Caroline 
Dixon,  Henry  Horatio 
Dixon,  Sir  Robert  Bland 
Dixon,  Walter  Ernest 
Dobbs,  Sir  Henry  Robert  Conway 
Dobell,  Bertram 
Dobson,  (Henry)  Austin 
Dodd,  Francis 
Dodgson,  Campbell 
Dodgson,  Frances  Catharine 
Dods,  Marcus 
Doherty,  Hugh  Lawrence 
Dolling,    Robert   William   Rad- 

clyffe 
Dolmetsch,  (Eugene)  Arnold 
Donald,  Sir  John  Stewart 
Donald,  Sir  Robert 
Donaldson,  Sir  James 
Donaldson,     St.     Clair     George 

Alfred 
Donat,  (Friederich)  Robert 
Donkin,  Bryan 
Donnan,  Frederick  (ieorge 
Donnelly,  Sir  John  Fretcheville 

Dykes 
Donnet,  Sir  James  John  Louis 
Donoghue,  Stephen 
Donoughmore,  Earl  of.  See  Hely- 

Hutchinson,   Richard  Walter 

John 
Dorrien,  Sir  Horace  Lockwood 

Smith-.  See  Smith-Dorrien 
Doubleday,  Herbert  Arthur 
Doughty,  Charles  Montagu 
Doughty- Wylie,  Charles  Hotham 

Montagu 
Douglas,  Sir  Adye 
Douglas,  Lord  Alfred  Bruce 
Douglas,  Sir  Charles  Whitting- 

ham  Horsley 
Douglas,  Clifford  (Hugh) 
Douglas,     George,     pseudonym. 

See  Brown,  George  Douglas 
Douglas,    George    Cunninghame 

Monteath 
Douglas,  (George)  Norman 
Douglas,  Sir  (Henry)  Percy 
Douglas,  Sir  William  Scott 
Douglas-Pennant,  George  Sholto 

Gordon,  Baron  Penrhyn 
Douglas-Scott-Montagu,       John 

Walter  Edward,  Baron  Mon- 
tagu of  Beaulieu 
Dove,  Dame  (Jane)  Frances 
Dove,  John  ,    <?fjijf*>-' 

Dowden,  Edward  7' !•';'•> 
Dowden,  John 
Dowie,  John  Alexander 
Downey,  Richard  Joseph 
Doyle,  Sir  Arthur  Conan 
Doyle,  John  Andrew 
Dredge,  James 
Dreschfeld,  Julius 
Drew,  Sir  Thomas 
Dreyer,  Sir  Frederic  Charles 
Drey er,  Georges  j  v  \. , 


1855-1927 

1901-1952 
1857-1905 
1869-1953 
1867-1939 
1870-1931 
1871-1934 
1842-1914 
1840-1921 
1874-1949 
1867-1948 
1883-1954 
1834-1909 
1875-1919 

1851-1902 
1858-1940 

1861-1948 
1860-1933 
1881-1915 

1863-1935 
1905-1958 
1835-1902 
1870-1956 

1834-1902 
1816-1905 
1884-1945 


1875-1948 

1858-1930 
1867-1941 
1843-1926 

1868-1915 
1815-1906 
1870-1945 

1850-1914 
1879-1952 

1869-1902 

1826-1904 
1868-1952 
187^1939 
1890-1953 

1836-1907 


1866-1929 
1847-1942 
1872-1934 
1843-1913 
1840-1910 
1847-1907 
1881-1953 
1859-1930 
1844^1907 
1840-1906 
1846-1907 
1838-1910 
1878-1956 
1873-1934 


Dreyer,  John  Louis  Emil 

Drinkwater,  John 

Driver,  Samuel  Rolles 

Druce,  George  Claridge 

Drummond,  Sir  George  Alex- 
ander 

Drummond,  Sir  Jack  Cecil 

Drummond,  James 

Drummond,  James  Eric,  Earl  of 
Perth 

Drummond,  Sir  Peter  Roy  Max- 
well 

Drummond,  William  Henrv 

Drury,  (Edward)  Alfred  (Briscoe) 

Drury-Lowe,  Sir  Drury  Curzon 

Dryland,  Alfred 

Drysdale,  Learmont 

Du  Cane,  Sir  Edmund  Frederick 

Duckett,  Sir  George  Floyd. Mi;i. 

Duckworth,  Sir  Dyce  ;  -■>!  wn 

Duckworth,  Wynfrid  Laurence 
Henry 

Du  Cros,  Sir  Arthur  Philip 

Dudgeon,  Leonard  Stanley 

Dudgeon,  Robert  Ellis 

Dudley,  Earl  of.  See  Ward, 
William  Humblci 

Duff,  Sir  Alexander  Ludovic 

Duff,  Sir  Beauchamp 

Duff,  Sir  Lyman  Poore 

Duff,  Sir  Mountstuart  Elphin- 
stone  Grant.  See  Grant  Duff 

Dufferin  and  Ava,  Marquess  of. 
See  Blackwood,  Frederick 
Temple  Hamilton-Temple 

Duffy,  Sir  Charles  Gavan 

Duffy,  Sir  Frank  Gavan 

Duffy,  Patrick  Vincent        '  f s-^  > ; 

Duke,  Sir  Frederick  William  n 

Duke,  Henry  Edward,  Baron 
Merrivale 

Dukes,  Ashley       ...u       uh.- 

Dulac,  Edmund 

Du  Maurier,  Sir  Gerald  Hubert 
Edward  Busson 

Duncan,  Sir  Andrew  Rae 

Duncan,  Sir  Patrick 

Dundonald,  Earl  of.  See  Coch- 
rane, Douglas  Mackinnon 
Baillie  Hamilton 

Dunedin,  Viscount.  See  Murray, 
Andrew  Graham 

Dunhill,  Thomas  Frederick 

Dunhill,  Sir  Thomas  Peel 

Dunlop,  John  Boyd 

Dunmore,  Earl  of.  See  Murray, 
Charles  Adolphus 

Dunphie,  Charles  James 

Dunraven  and  Mount-Earl,  Earl 
of.  See  Quin,  Windham 
Thomas  Wyndham- 

Dunsany,  Baron  of.  See  Plunkett, 
Edward  John  Moreton  Drax 

Dunstan,  Sir  Wyndham  Rowland 

Du  Parcq,  Herbert,  Baron. .    .1 

Dupr^,  August  - '     -  rv.  T  i  3  835-1907 

Durand,  Sir  Henry  Mortimtt.  J        1850-1924 

Dumford,  Sir  Walter  .o'  p.  i  >  1847-1926 

Dutt,  Romesh  Chunder       Hi    * : ' '- 1848-1909 


1852-1926 
1882-1937 
1846-1914 
1850-1932 

1829-1910 
1891-1952 
1835-1918 

1876-1951 

1894-1945 
1854-1907 
1856-1944 
1880-1908 
1865-1946 
1866-1909 
1830-1903 
M 1811-1902 
1  >1840-1928 

1870-1956 
1871-1955 
1876-1938 
1820-1904 

1867-1932 
1862-1933 
1855-1918 
1865-1955 

1829-1906 


1826-1902 

1816-1903 

1852-1936 

:/ 1836-1909 

.1863-1924 

1855-1939 
1885-1959 
1882-1953 

1873-1934 
1884-1952 
1870-1943 


1852-1935 

1849-1942 
1877-1946 
1876-1957 
1840-1921 

1841-1907 
1^20-1908 


1841-1926 

1878-1957 
1861-1949 
,1880-1949 


1113 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Button,  Joseph  Everett 
Duveen,  Joseph,  Baron 
Duveen,  Sir  Joseph  Joel 
Dyer,  Reginald  Edward  Harry 
Dyer,  Sir  William  Turner  Thisel- 

ton-.  See  Thiselton-Dyer 
Dyke,  Sir  William  Hart 
Dyson,  Sir  Frank  Watson 
Dyson,  William  Henry  (Will) 

Eady,    Charles    Swinfen,    Baron 

Swinfen 
Eardley-Wilmot,    Sir    Sainthill. 

See  Wilmot 
Earle,  John 
Earle,  Sir  Lionel 
East,  Sir  Alfred 
East,  Sir  Cecil  James 
East,  Sir  (William)  Norwood 
Eastlake,  Charles  Locke 
Eaton,  Herbert  Francis,  Baron 

Cheylesmore 
Eaton,  William  Meriton,  Baron 

Cheylesmore 
Ebs worth,  Joseph  Woodfall 
Eckersley,  Thomas  Lydwell 
Eddington,  Sir  Arthur  Stanley 
Eddis,  Eden  Upton 
Edge,  Sir  John 
Edge,  Selwyn  Francis 
Edge  worth,  Francis  Ysidro 
Edmonds,  Sir  James  Edward 
Edouin,  Willie 

Edridge-Green,    Frederick    Wil- 
liam 
Edward  VII,  King 
Edward  of  Saxe- Weimar,  Prince 
Edwards,  Alfred  George 
Edwards,  Sir  Fleetwood  Isham 
Edwards,  Henry  Sutherland 
Edwards,  John  Passmore 
Edwards,        Matilda       Barbara 

Betham- 
Edwards,  Sir  Owen  Morgan 
Egerton,  Sir  Alfred  Charles  Glyn 
Egerton,  Sir  Charles  Comyn 
Egerton,  Hugh  Edward 
Elgar,  Sir  Edward  William 
Elgar,  Francis 
Elgin,  Earl  of.  See  Bruce,  Victor 

Alexander 
Elias,    Julius    Salter,    Viscount 

South  wood 
Eliot,  Sir  Charles  Norton  Edge- 

cumbe 
Eliot,  Sir  John 
Elkan,  Benno 
EUerman,  Sir  John  Reeves 
Ellery,  Robert  Lewis  John 
Elles,  Sir  Hugh  Jamieson 
Ellrcott,  Charles  John 
Elliot,  Arthur  Ralph  Douglas 
Elliot,  Sir  George  Augustus 
Elliot,     Gilbert     John     Murray 

Kynynmond,  Earl  of  Minto 
Elliot,  Sir  Henry  George 
Elliot,  Walter  Elliot 
Elliott,  Sir  Charles  Alfred 
Elliott,  Edwin  Bailey 


1874-1905 
1869-1939 
1843-1908 
1864-1927 

1843-1928 
1837-1931 
1868-1939 
1880-1938 


1851-1919 

1852-1929 
1824-1903 
1866-1948 
1849-1913 
1837-1908 
1872-1953 
1836-1906 

1848-1925 

1843-1902 
1824-1908 
1886-1959 
1882-1944 
1812-1901 
1841-1926 
1868-1940 
1845-1926 
1861-1956 
1846-1908 

1863-1953 
1841-1910 
1823-1902 
1848-1937 
1842-1910 
1828-1906 
1823-1911 

1836-1919 
1858-1920 
1886-1959 
1848-1921 
1855-1927 
1857-1934 
1845-1909 

1849-1917 

1873-1946 

1862-1931 
1839-1908 
1877-1960 
1862-1933 
1827-1908 
1880-1945 
1819-1905 
1846-1923 
1813-1901 

1845-1914 
1817-1907 
1888-1958 
1835-1911 
1851-1937 


Ellis,  Frederick  Startridge 

Ellis,  Henry  Havelock 

Ellis,  John  Devonshire 

Ellis,  Robinson 

Ellis,  Thomas  Evelyn  Scott-, 
Baron  Howard  de  Walden. 
See  Scott-Ellis 

Ellis,  Sir  William  Henry 

Elphinstone,  Sir  (George)  Keith 
(Buller) 

Elsmie,  George  Robert 

Elton,  Oliver 

Elvin,  Sir  (James)  Arthur 

Elwes,  Gervase  Henry  [Cary-] 

Elwes,  Henry  John 

Elworthy,  Frederick  Thomas 

Emery,  William 

Emmott,  Alfred,  Baron 

Ensor,  Sir  Robert  Charles  Kirk- 
wood 

Entwistle,  William  James 

Epstein,  Sir  Jacob 

Ernie,  Baron.  See  Prothero, 
Rowland  Edmund 

Esdaile,  Katharine  Ada 

Esher,  Viscount.  See  Brett, 
Reginald  Baliol 

Esmond,  Henry  Vernon 

Etheridge,  Robert 

Euan-Smith,  Sir  Charles  Bean 

Eumorfopoulos,  George 

Eva,  pseudonym.  See  under 
O'Doherty,  Kevin  Izod 

Evan-Thomas,  Sir  Hugh 

Evans,  Sir  Arthur  John 

Evans,  Daniel  Silvan 

Evans,  Edmund 

Evans,  Edward  Ratcliffe  Garth 
Russell,  Baron  Mountevans 

Evans,  Sir  (Evan)  Vincent 

Evans,  George  Essex 

Evans,  Sir  John 

Evans,  John  Gwenogvryn 

Evans,  Meredith  Gwynne 

Evans,  Sir  Samuel  Thomas 

Evans,  Sebastian 

Evans,  Sir  (W^orthington)  Lam- 
ing Worthington- 

Eve,  Sir  Harry  Trelawney 

Everard,  Harry  Stirling  Crawfurd 

Everett,  Joseph  David 

Everett,  Sir  William 

Evershed,  John 

Eversley,  Baron.  See  Shaw- 
Lefevre,  George  John 

Eves,  Reginald  Grenville 

Ewart,  Alfred  James 

Ewart,  Charles  Brisbane 

Ewart,  Sir  John  Alexander 

Ewart,  Sir  John  Spencer 

Ewing,  Sir  (James)  Alfred 

Ewins,  Arthur  James 

Eyre,  Edward  John 


Faber,  Oscar 

Faed,  John 

Fagan,  James  Bernard 

Fagan,  Louis  Alexander 


1114 


VH-^I/^JUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1060 


)l'{ 


Fairbaim,  Andrew  Martin 

Fairbairn,  Stephen 

Fairbridge,  Kingsley  Ogilvie 

Fairey,  Sir  (Charles)  Richard 

Fairfield,  Baron.  See  Greer, 
(Frederick)  Arthur 

Falcke,  Isaac 

Falconer,  Lanoe,  pseudonym. 
See  Hawker,  Mary  Elizabeth 

Falconer,  Sir  Robert  Alexander 

Falkiner,  Caesar  Litton 

Falkiner,  Sir  Frederick  Richard 

Falkner,  John  Meade 

Fane,  Violet,  pseudonym.  See 
Cunie,  Mary  Montgomerie, 
Lady 

Fanshawe,  Sir  Edward  Gennys 

Fai-jeon,  Benjamin  Leopold 

Farmer,  Emily 

Farmer,  John 

Farmer,  Sir  John  Bretland 

Famell,  Lewis  Richard 

Farningham,  Marianne,  pseud- 
onym. See  Heam,  Mary  Anne 

Famol,  (John)  Jeffery 

Farquhar,  John  Nicol 

Farquharson,  David 

Farrar,  Adam  Storey 

Farrar,  Frederic  William 

Farren  (afterwards  Soutar),  Ellen 
(Nellie) 

Farren,  William 

Farrer,  William 

Farwell,  Sir  George 

Fausset,  Andrew  Robert 

Fawcett,  Dame  Millicent 

Fay,  Sir  Sam 

Fay,  William  George 

Fayrer,  Sir  Joseph 

Felkin,  Ellen  Thomeycroft 

Fellowes,  Edmund  Horace 

Fenn,  George  Manville 

Fenwick,  Ethel  Gordon 

Ferguson,  Harry  George 

Ferguson,  Mary  Catherine,  Lady 

Ferguson,  Ronald  Crauford 
Munro-,  Viscount  Novar 

Fergusson,  Sir  Charles 

Fergusson,  Sir  James 

Fermor,  Sir  Lewis  Leigh 

Ferranti,  Sebastian  Ziani  de 

Ferrers,  Norman  Macleod 

Ferrier,  Sir  David 

Ferrier,  Kathleen  Mary 

Festing,  John  Wogan 

ffoulkes,  Charles  John 

Field,  Sir  (Arthur)  Mostyn 

Field,  Sir  Frederick  Laurence 

Field,  Walter 

Field,  William  Ventris,  Baron 

Fife,  Duchess  of.  See  Alexandra 
Victoria  Alberta  Edwina  Louise 
Duff,  Princess  Arthur  of  Con- 
naught 

Fife,  Duchess  of.  See  Louise  Vic- 
toria Alexandra  Dagmar 

Figgis,  John  Neville 

Fildes,  Sir  (Samuel)  Luke 

Filon,  Louis  Napoleon  George 


1838-1912      Finberg,  Alexander  Joseph 
1862-1938      Finch-Hatton,  Harold  Heneace 

Finlay,  William,  Viscount 
186»-1945      Finlayson,  James 
1819-1909      Finnic,  John 

Finzi,  Gerald  Raphael 
1848-1908      Firth,  Sir  Charles  Harding 
1867-1943      Firth,  John  Rupert 
186a-1908      Firth,  Sir  William  John 
1831-1908      Fischer  Williams,  Sir  John.  See 
1858-1932  Williams 

Fisher,  Andrew 

Fisher,  Herbert  Albert  Laurens 
1843-1905      Fisher,  John  Arbuthnot,  Baron 
1814-1906      Fisher,    Sir   (Norman   Fenwick) 
1838-1903  Warren 

1826-1905      Fisher,  Robert  Howie 
1835-1901      Fisher,  Sir  William  Wordsworth 
1865-1944      Fison,  Lorimer 
1856-1934      Fitch,  Sir  Joshua  Girling 

FitzAlan  of  Derwent,  Viscount. 
1 834-1909  See  Howard,  Edmund  Bernard 

187^-1952  FitzAlan- 

1861-1929      FitzAlan-Howard,  Henry,  Duke 
1840-1907  of  Norfolk.  See  Howard 

1826-1905      Fitzclarence,  Charles 
1831-1903      FitzGerald,  George  Francis 

FitzGerald,   Sir  Thomas  Nagh- 
1848-1904  ten 

1825-1908      FitzGibbon,  Gerald 
1861-1924      Fitzmaurice,  Baron.  See  Petty- 
1845-1915  Fitzmaurice,  Edmond  George 

1821-1910      Fitzmaurice,  Sir  Maurice 
1847-1929      Fitzmaurice- Kelly,  James 
1856-1953      Fitzpatrick,  Sir  Dennis 
1872-1947      BMtzPatrick,  Sir  (James)  Percy 
1824-1907      FitzRoy,  Edward  Algernon 
1860-1929      Fleay,  Frederick  Gard 
1870-1951       Flecker,  Herman  Elroy  (James 
1831-1909  Elroy) 

1857-1947      Fleming,  Sir  Alexander 
1884-1960      Fleming,      Sir     Arthur     Percy 
1823-1905  Morris 

Fleming,  David  Hay 
1860-1934      Fleming,  David  Pinkerton,  Lord 
1865-1951       Fleming,  George 
1832-1907      Fleming,  James 
1880-1954      Fleming,  Sir  (John)  Ambrose 
1864-1930      Fleming,  Sir  Sandford 
1829-1903      Fletcher,  Sir  Banister  Flight 
1843-1928      Fletcher,  Charles  Robert  Leslie 
1912-1953      Fletcher,  Sir  Frank 
1837-1902      Fletcher,  James 
1868-1947      Fletcher,  Sir  Walter  Morley 
1855-1950      Flett,  Sir  John  Smith 
1871-1945      Flint,  Robert 
1837-1901       Flower,  Robin  Ernest  William 
1813-1907      Floyer,  Ernest  Ayscoghe 

Flux,  Sir  Alfred  William 

Foakes  Jackson,  Frederick  John. 
See  Jackson  '^^  If 

1891-1959      Fogerty,  Elsie 

Foot,  Isaac 
1867-1931       Forbes,  Sir  Charles  Morton 
1866-1919      Forbes,  George  William 
1844-1927      Forbes,  James  Staats  jo.' 

1875-1937      Forbes,  Stanhope  Alexander 

1115 


1866-1939 

1856-1904 

1842-1929 
1875-1945 
1840-1906 
1829-1907 
1901-1956 
1857-1936 
1890-1960 
1881-1957 

1870-1947 
1862-1928 
1865-1940 
1841-1920 

1879-1948 
1861-1934 
1875-1937 
1832-1907 
1824r-1903 


1855-1947 

1847-1917 
1865-1914 
1851-1901 

1888-1908 
1837-1909 

1846-1935 
1861-1924 
1857-1923 
1887-1920 
1862-1931 
1869-1943 
1831-1909 

1884-1915 
1881-1955 

1881-1960 
1849-1931 
1877-1944 
188,3-1901 
1830-1908 
1849-1945 
1827-1915 
1866-1953 
1857-1934 
1870-1954 
1852-1908 
1873-1933 
1860-1947 
1838-1910 
1881-1946 
1852-1903 
1867-1942 

!' 1855-1941 
1865-1945 
1880-1960 
1880-1960 
1869-1947 
^  1823-1904 
'  1857-1947 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Forbes-Robertson,  Sir  Johnston. 

See  Robertson 
Ford,  Edward  Onslow 
Ford,    Ford    Madox    (formerly 

Ford  Hermann  Hueffer) 
Ford,  Patrick 
Ford,  William  Justice 
Fordham,  Sir  Herbert  George 
Forestier-Walker,   Sir  Frederick 

William  Edward  Forestier 
Forman,    Alfred    William.    See 

Forman,  Henry  Buxton 
Forman,  Henry  Buxton 
Forrest,     Sir     George     William 

David  Starck 
Forrest,  John,  Baron 
Forster,  Hugh  Oakeley  Arnold-. 

See  Amold-Forster 
Forster,  Sir  Martin  Onslow 
Forsyth,  Andrew  Russell 
Fortescue,  George  Knottesford 
Fortescue,  Hugh,  Earl 
Fortescue,  Sir  John  William 
Foss,  Hubert  James 
Foster,  Sir  Clement  Le  Neve 
Foster,  Sir  George  Eulas 
Foster,  Joseph 
Foster,  Sir  Michael 
Foster,  Sir  (Thomas)  Gregory 
Fotheringham,  John  Knight 
Foulkes,  Isaac 
Fowle,  Thomas  Welbank 
Fowler,  Alfred 
Fowler,  Ellen  Thomeycroft.  See 

Felkin 
Fowler,  Henry  Hartley,  Viscount 

Wolverhampton 
Fowler,  Henry  Watson 
Fowler,  Sir  James  Kingston 
Fowler,  Sir  Ralph  Howard 
Fowler,  Thomas 
Fowler,  William  Warde 
Fox,  Dame  Evelyn  Emily  Marian 
Fox,  Sir  Francis 
Fox,  Samson 
Fox    Bourne,    Henry    Richard. 

See  Bourne 
Fox  Strangways,  Arthur  Henry. 

See  Strangways 
Fox-Strangways,   Giles  Stephen 

Holland,  Earl  of  Ilchester 
Foxwell,  Arthur 
Fox  well,  Herbert  Somerton 
Frampton,  Sir  George  James 
Frankau,  Gilbert 
Frankfort      de      Montmorency, 

Viscount.     See    de    Montmo- 
rency, Raymond  Harvey 
Frankland,  Percy  Faraday 
Fraser,  Alexander  Campbell 
Eraser,    Sir  Andrew  Henderson 

Leith 
Fraser,  Claud  Lovat 
Fraser,  Donald 
Fraser,  Peter 
Fraser,     Simon    Joseph,   Baron 

Lovat 
Fraser,  Sir  Thomas  Richard 
Frazer,  Sir  James  George 


1858-1937 
1852-1901 

1873-1939 
1837-1913 
1853-1904 
1854-1929 

1844-1910 


1842-1917 

1845-1926 
1847-1918 

1855-1909 
1872-1945 
1858-1942 
1847-1912 
1818-1905 
185^-1933 
1899-1953 
1841-1904 
1847-1931 
1844-1905 
1836-1907 
1866-1931 
1874^1936 
1836-1904 
1835-1903 
1868-1940 

1860-1929 

1830-1911 
1858-1933 
1852-1934 
1889-1944 
1832-1904 
1847-1921 
1874-1955 
1844-1927 
1838-1903 

1837-1909 

1859-1948 

1874-1959 
1853-1909 
1849-1936 
1860-1928 
1884-1952 


1835-1902 
1858-1946 
1819-1914 

1848-1919 

1890-1921 
1870-1933 
1884-1950 

1871-1933 
1841-1920 
1854-1941 


Fream,  William  ,-i£  yrotbr 

Fr^hette,  Louis  Honor^ 

Freedman,  Barnett 

Freeman,  Gage  Earle 

Freeman,  Johii 

Freeman,  John  Peere  Williams-. 
See  Williams-Freeman 

Freeman,  Sir  Ralph 

Freeman,  Sir  Wilfrid  Rhodes 

Freeman-Mitford,  Algernon  Ber- 
tram, Baron  Redesdale.  See 
Mitford 

Freeman-Thomas,  Freeman,  Mar- 
quess of  Willingdon 

Fremantle,  Sir  Edmund  Robert 

French,  Evangeline  Frances 

French,  Francesca  Law 

French,  John  Denton  Pinkstone, 
Earl  of  Ypres 

Frere,  Mary  Eliza  Isabella 

Frere,  Walter  Howard 

Freshfield,  Douglas  William 

Freyer,  Sir  Peter  Johnston 

Friese-Greene,  William.  See 
Greene 

Frith,  William  Powell 

Fritsch,  Felix  Eugen 

Frowde,  Henry 

Fry,  Charles  Burgess 

Fry,  Danby  Palmer 

Fry,  Sir  Edward 

Fry,  Joseph  Storrs         „,™.-_m**^' 

Fry,  Roger  Eliot  m 

Fry,  Sara  Margery 

Fry,  Thomas  Charles 

Fryatt,  Charles  Algernon 

Fuller,  Sir  Cyril  Thomas  Moulden 

Fuller,  Sir  (Joseph)  Bampfylde 

Fuller,  Sir  Thomas  Ekins 

Fuller-Maitland,  John  Alexan- 
der. See  Maitland 

FuUeylove,  John 

Fumeaux,  William  Mordaunt 

Fumess,  Christopher,  Baron 

Fumiss,  Harry 

Furniss,  Henry  Sanderson,  Baron 
Sanderson 

Fumivall,  Frederick  James 

Furse,  Charles  Wellington 

Furse,  Dame  Katharine 

Fust,  Herbert  Jenner-.  See 
Jenner-Fust 

Fyfe,  Henry  Hamilton 

Fyleman,  Rose  Amy 

Gadsby,  Henry  Robert 
Gainford,     Baron.     See     Pease, 

.Joseph  Albert 
Gairdner,  James 
Gairdner,  Sir  William  Tennant 
Gale,  Frederick 
Galloway,  Sir  William 
Gallwey,  Peter 
Galsworthy,  John 
Galton,  Sir  Francis 
Gamgee,  Arthur 

Gandhi,  Mohandas  Karamchand 
Gann,  Thomas  William  Francis 
Garbett,  Cyril  Forster 


1854-1906 
1839-1908 
1901-1958 
1820-1903 
1880-1929 

1858-1943 
1880-1950 

1888-1953 
I 

1837-1916 

1866-1941 
1836-1929 
1869-1960 
1871-1960 

1852-1925 
1845-1911 
1863-1938 
1845-1934 
1851-1921 


1116 


CUMULAtlVE  INDEX  1901-1960 


Garcia,  Manuel  Patricio  Rodri- 
guez 

Gardiner,  Alfred  George 

Gardiner,  Henry  Balfour 

Gardiner,  Samuel  Rawson 

Gardner,  Ernest  Arthur  (1862- 
1 939).  See  under  Gardner,  Percy 

Gardner,  Percy  •'•'     *' 

Gargan,  Denis  ^bunv.yU 

Garner,  Thomas 

Gamer,  William  Edward**^*^'  ^' 

Garnett,  Constance  Clai^' 

Garnett,  James  Clerk  Maxwell 

Garnett,  Richard 

Garran  (formerly  Gamman),  An- 
drew 

Garrard,  Apsley  George  Benet 
Cherry-.  See  Cherry-Garrard 

Garrett,  Fydell  Edmund 

Garrett  Anderson,  Elizabeth.  See 
Anderson 

Garrod,  Sir  Alfred  Baring 

Garrod,  Sir  Archibald  Edward 

Garrod,  Heathcote  William 

Garstang,  John 

Garstin,  Sir  William  Edmund 

Garth,  Sir  Richard 

Garvie,  Alfred  Ernest 

Garvin,  James  Louis 

Gaselee,  Sir  Alfred 

Gaselee,  Sir  Stephen 

Gask,  George  Ernest 

Gaskell,  Walter  Holbrook 

Gasquet,  Francis  Neil 

Gaster,  Moses 

Gatacre,  Sir  William  Forbes 

Gatenby,  James  Bronte 

Gathorne-Hardy,  Gathome,  Earl 
of  Cranbrook 

Gatty,  Alfred 

Gauvain,  Sir  Henry  John 

Geddes,  Auckland  Campbell, 
Baron 

Geddes,  ^ir  Eric  Campbell 

Geddes,  Sir  Patrick 

Gee,  Samuel  Jones 

Geikie,  Sir  Archibald 

Geikie,  John  Cunningham 

Gell,  Sir  James 

Gellibrand,  Sir  John 

George  V,  King 

George  VI,  King 

George  Edward  Alexander  Ed- 
mund, Duke  of  Kent 

George  William  Frederick 
Charles,  Duke  of  Cambridge 

George,  David  Lloyd,  Earl  Lloyd- 
George  of  Dwyfor.  See  Lloyd 
George 

George,  Sir  Ernest 

George,  Hereford  Brooke 

Gerard  (afterwards  de  Laszow- 
ska),  (Jane)  Emily 

Gerard,  Sir  Montagu  Gilbert 

Gere,  Charles  March      "'  *  ^  ^  '  '^ 

German,  Sir  Edward      ,     _, 

Gertler,  Mark 

Gibb ,  -  Sir  Alexander 

Gibb,  Sir  Claude  Dixon 


1805-1906 
1865-1946 
1877-1950 
1829-1902 


1846-1937 
1819-1903 
1839-1906 
1889-1960 
1861-1946 
1880-1958 
1835-1906 

1825-1901 

1886-1959 
1865-1907 

1886-1917 
1819-1907 
1857-1936 
1878-1960 
1876-1956 
1849-1925 
1820-1903 
1861-1945 
1868-1947 
1844-1918 
1882-1943 
1875-1951 
1847-1914 
1846-1929 
1856-1939 
1843-1906 
1892-1960 

1814--1906 
1813-1903 

1878-1945 

1879-1954 
1875-1937 
1854-1932 
1839-1911 
1835-1924 
1824-1906 
1823-1905 
1872-1945 
1865-1936 
1895-1952 

1902-1942 

1819-1904 


1863-1945 
1839-1922 
1838-1910 

1849-1905 
1842-1905 
1869-1957 
1862-1936 
1891-1939 
1872-1958 
1898-1959 


M- 


Earl 


Gibb,  Elias  John  Wilkinson '*'  ' 
Gibbings,  Robert  John         '    '    ' 
Gibbins,  Henry  de  Beltgeni"  "'*" 
Gibbon,  Sir  (loan)  Gwilym  '  '^- 
Gibbs,     Henry     Hucks,     Baron 

Aldenham 
Gibbs,  Vicary 
Gibson,    Edward,    Baron 

bourne 
Gibson,  Guy  Penrose 
Gibson,  Sir  John  Watson 
Gibson,  William  Pettigrew 
Giffard,  Hardinge  Stanley 

of  Halsbury 
Giffen,  Sir  Robert 
Gifford,  Edwin  Hamilton 
Gigliucci,  Countess.  See  Novello, 

Clara  Anastasia 
Gilbert,  Sir  Alfred 
Gilbert,  Sir  Joseph  Henry  '  "     , 
Gilbert,  Sir  William  Schweiick '    ' 
Giles,  Herbert  Allen 
Giles,  Peter 

Gill,  (Arthur)  Eric  (Rowton) 
Gill,  Sir  David 
Gilliatt,  Sir  William 
Gillies,  Duncan 
Gillies,  Sir  Harold  Delf 
Gilmour,  Sir  John 
Gilson,  Julius  Pamell 
Ginner,  Isaac  Charles 
Ginsburg,  Christian  David 
Girdlestone,  Gathome  Robert 
Girouard,  D^sir^ 
Girouard,   Sir  (Edouard)  Percy 

(Cranwill) 
Gissing,  George  Robert 
Gladstone,   Herbert  John,"Vls^' 

count  *^       ' 

Gladstone,  John  Hall 
Glaisher,  James 

Glaisher,  James  Whitbread  Lee 
Glazebrook,  Michael  George 
Glazebrook,  Sir  Richard  Tetley 
Gleichen,  Lady  Feodora  Georgina 

Maud 
Glenavy,  Baron.  See  Campbell, 

James  Henry  Mussen 
Glenesk,  Baron.  See  Borthwick, 

Algernon 
Gloag,  Paton  James 
Gloag,  William  Ellis,  Lord  Kin- 

caimey 
Glover,  Terrot  Reaveley    '^  *'* '  ' . 
Glyn,  Elinor  "*'"''* 

Godfrey,  Daniel 
Godkin,  Edwin  Lawrence 
Godlee,  Sir  Rickman  John       '. 
Godley,  Sir  Alexander  JohH  ""  "^ 
Godley,  Alfred  Denis 
Godley,    (John)   Arthur,   Baron 

Kilbracken 
Godwin,  George  Nelson 
Godwin-Austen,    Henry   Haver- 
sham 
Gogarty,  Oliver  Joseph  St.  John 
Gold,  Sir  Harcourt  Gilbey 
Goldie,    Sir    George    Dashwood 

Taubman 


bi^r 


1857-1901 
1889-1958 
1865-1907 
1674-1948 

1819-1907 
18«3-1932 

1887-1913 
1918-1944 
1885-1947 
1902-1960 

1823-1921 
1837-1910 
1820-1905 

1818-1908 
1854-1934 
1817-1901 
1836^1911 
1845-1935 
1860-1935 
1882-1940 
1843-1914 
1884-1956 
1834-1903 
1882-1%0 
1876-1940 
1868-1929 
1878-1952 
1881-1914 
1881-1950 
1836-1911 

1867-1932 
1857-1903 

1854-1930 
1827-1902 
1809-1903 
1848-1928 
1853-1926 
1854-1935 

1861-1922 

1851-1931 

1830-1908 
1823-1906 

1828-1909 
.1869-1943 
'1864-1943 
1831-1903 
1831-1902 
1849-1925 
1867-1957 
1856-1925 

1847-1932 
1846-1907 

1834-1923 
1878-1957 
1876-1952 

1846-1925 


1117 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Goldschmidt,  Otto 

Goldsmid,  Sir  Frederick  John 

Goldsmid-Montefiore,  Claude  Jo- 
seph. See  Montefiore 

Gollancz,  Sir  Hermann 

GoUanez,  Sir  Israel 

Goodall,  Frederick 

Goode,  Sir  William  Athelstane 
Meredith 

Gooden,  Stephen  Frederick 

Goodenough,  Frederick  Craufurd 

Goodenough,  Sir  William  Ed- 
mund 

Goodenough,  Sir  William  Mac- 
namara 

Goodey,  Tom 

Goodhart-Rendel,  Harry  Stuart 

Goodman  (formerly  Salaman), 
Julia 

Goodrich,  Edwin  Stephen 

Gordon,  Arthur  Charles  Hamil- 
ton-, Baron  Stanmore 

Gordon,  Charles  William,  'Ralph 
Connor' 

Gordon,  George  Stuart 

Gordon  (formerly  Marjoribanks), 
Ishbel  Maria,  Marchioness  of 
Aberdeen  and  Temair  (1857- 
1939).  See  under  Gordon,  John 
Campbell 

Gordon,  James  Frederick  Skinner 

Gordon,  John  Campbell,  Mar- 
quess of  Aberdeen  and  Temair 

Gordon,  Sir  John  James  Hood 

Gordon,  Mervyn  Henry 

Gordon,  Sir  Thomas  Edward 

Gordon-Lennox,  Charles  Henry, 
Duke  of  Richmond  and  Gordon 

Gordon-Taylor,  Sir  Gordon 

Gore,  Albert  Augustus 

Gore,  Charles 

Gore,  George 

Gore,  John  Ellard 

Goreil,  Baron.  See  Barnes,  John 
Gorell 

Gorst,  Sir  John  Eldon 

Gorst,  Sir  (John)  Eldon 

Gort,  Viscount.  See  Vereker, 
John  Standish  Surtees  Pren- 
dergast 

Goschen,  George  Joachim,  Vis- 
count 

Gosling,  Harry 

Gossage,  Sir  (Ernest)  Leslie 

Gosse,  Sir  Edmund  William 

Gosselin,  Sir  Martin  le  Marchant 
Hadsley 

Gosset,  William  Sealy,  'Student' 

Gotch,  John  Alfred 

Gott,  John 

Gott,  William  Henry  Ewart 

Gough,  Sir  Charles  John  Stanley 

Gough,  Sir  Hugh  Henry 

Gough,  John  Edmond 

Gough-Calthorpe,  Augustus  Chol- 
mondeley.  Baron  Calthorpe 

Gough-Calthorpe,  Sir  Somerset 
Arthur.  See  Calthorpe 

Gould,  Sir  Francis  Carruthers 


1829-1907      Gould,  Nathaniel  1857-1919 

1818-1908      Goulding,  Frederick  1842-1909 

Gower,       (Edward)       Frederick 

1858-1938           Leveson-.  See  Leveson-Gower  1819-1907 
1852-1930      Gower,  Sir  Henry  Dudley  Gre- 

1863-1930          sham  Leveson  1873-1954 

1822-1904      Gowers,  Sir  William  Richard  1845-1915 

Gowrie,     Earl     of.     See     Hore- 
1 875-1944  Ruthven,  Alexander  Gore  Ark- 

1892-1955          Wright  1872-1955 

1866-1934      Grace,  Edward  Mills  1841-1911 

Grace,  William  Gilbert  1848-1915 

1867-1945      Graham,  Henry  Grey  1842-1906 

Graham,  Hugh,  Baron  Atholstan  1848-1938 

1899-1951      Graham,  John  Anderson  1861-1942 
1885-1953      Graham,   Robert   Bontine   Cun- 

1887-1959          ninghame  1852-1936 

Graham,  Sir  Ronald  William  1870-1949 
1812-1906      Graham,  Thomas  Alexander  Fer- 

1868-1946          guson  1840-1906 

Graham,  William  1839-1911 

1829-1912      Graham,  William  1887-1932 

Graham-Harrison,    Sir    William 
1860-1937          Montagu  1871-1949 
1881-1942      Graham-Little,  Sir  Ernest  Gor- 
don Graham  1867-1950 

Grahame,  Kenneth  1859-1932 

Grahame- White,  Claude  1879-1959 

Granet,  Sir  (William)  Guy  1867-1943 

Grant,  Sir  (Alfred)  Hamilton  1872-1937 
1821-1904      Grant,  Sir  Charles  (1836-1903). 

See  under  Grant,  Sir  Robert 

1847-1934      Grant,  George  Monro  1835-1902 

1832-1908      Grant,  Sir  Robert  1837-1904 
1872-1953      Grant    Duff,    Sir     Mountstuart 

1832-1914           Elphinstone  1829-1906 

Grantham,  Sir  William  1835-1911 
1818-1903       Granville-Barker,  Harley  Gran- 

1878-1960          ville  1877-1946 

1840-1901       Graves,  Alfred  Perceval  1846-1931 

1853-1932      Graves,  George  Windsor  1873  ?-1949 

1826-1908      Gray,  Benjamin  Kirkman  1862-1907 

1845-1910      Gray,  George  Buchanan  1865-1922 

Gray,  George  Edward  Kruger  1880-1943 

1848-1913      Gray,  Herbert  Branston  1851-1929 

1835-1916      Greaves,  Walter  1846-1930 
1861-191 1       Green,  Alice  Sophia  Amelia  (Mrs. 

Stopford  Green)  1847-1929 

Green,  Charles  Alfred  Howell  1864-1944 
1886-1946  Green,  Frederick  William  Ed- 
ridge-.  See  Edridge-Green  1863-1953 
1831-1907  Green,  Samuel  Gosnell  1822-1905 
1861-1930  Green,  William  Curtis  1875-1960 
1891-1949  Greenaway,  Catherine  (Kate)  1846-1901 
1849-1928      Greene,  Harry  Plunket  1865-1936 

Greene,  Wilfrid  Arthur,  Baron  1883-1952 

1847-1905      Greene,  William  Friese-  1855-1921 

1876-1937      Greene,  Sir  (William)  Graham  1857-1950 

1852-1942      Greenidge,  Abel  Hendy  Jones  1865-1906 

1830-1906       Greenwell,  William  1820-1918 

1897-1942      Greenwood,  Arthur  1880-1954 

1832-1912       Greenwood,  Frederick  1830-1909 

1833-1909       Greenwood,  Hamar,  Viscount  1870-1948 

1871-1915      Greenwood,  Thomas  1851-1908 

Greer,  (Frederick)  Arthur,  Baron 

1829-1910           Fairfield  1863-1945 

Greet,  Sir  Phillip  Barling  Ben  1857-1936 

1864-1937      Greg,  Sir  Walter  Wilson  1875-1959 

1844-1925      Grego,  Joseph  1843-1908 

1118 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1960 


^;r 


Gregory,  Sir  Augustus  Charles 
Gregory,  Edward  John 
Gregory,  Isabella  Augusta,  Lady 
Gregory,  John  Walter 
Gregory,  Sir  Richard  Arman 
Gregory,  Robert 
Greiffenhagen,  Maurice  William 
Grenfell,  Bernard  Pyne 
Grenfell,  Edward  Charles,  Baron 

St.  Just 
Grenfell,  Francis  Wallace,  Baron 
Grenfell,  George 
Grenfell,  Hubert  Henry 
Grenfell,  Julian  Henry  Francis 
Grenfell,  Sir  Wilfred  Thomason 
Grenfell,  William  Henry,  Baron 

Desborough 
Greville,  Frances  Evelyn,  Coun- 
tess of  Warwick 
Grey,  Albert  Henry  George,  Earl 
Grey,  Charles  Grey 
Grey,  Sir  Edward,  Viscount  Grey 

of  Fallodon 
Grey  (formerly  Shirreff),  Maria 

Georgina 
Grierson,  Sir  George  Abraham 
Grierson,     Sir     Herbert     John 

Clifford 
Grierson,  Sir  James  Moncrieff 
Griffin,  Bernard  William 
Griffin,  Sir  Lepel  Henry 
Griffith,  Arthur 
Griffith,  Francis  Llewellyn 
Griffith,  Ralph  Thomas  Hotchkin 
Griffiths,  Arthur  George  Frederick 
Griffiths,  Ernest  Howard 
Griffiths,  Sir  John  Norton-.  See 

Norton-  Griffith  s 
Grigg,  Edward  William  Macleay, 

Baron  Altrincham 
Griggs,  William 
Grimble,  Sir  Arthur  Francis 
Grimthorpe,  Baron.  See  Beckett, 

Sir  Edmund 
Groome,  Francis  Hindes 
Grose,  Thomas  Hodge 
Grossmith,  George 
Grossmith,  George,  the  younger 
Grossmith,  Walter  Weedon  ( 1 854- 

1919).   See   under  Grossmith, 

George 
Grosvenor,  Richard  De  Aquila, 

Baron  Stalbridge 
Gubbins,  John 
Guedalla,  Philip 
Guest,  Frederick  Edward 
Guest,  Ivor  Churchill,  Viscount 

Wlmborne 
Guggisberg,  Sir  Frederick  Gordon 
Guinness,    Sir    Arthur  Edward, 

Baron  Ardilaun 
Guinness,  Edward  Cecil,  Earl  of 

Iveagh 
Guinness,  Henry  Grattan 
Guinness,  Walter  Edward,  Baron 

Moyne 
Gully,  William  Court,  Viscount 

Selby 
Gunn,  Battiscombe  George 


1819-1905 
1850-1909 
1852-1932 
1864-1932 
1864-1952 
1819-1911 
1862-1931 
1869-1926 

1870-1941 
1841-1925- 
1849-1906' 
1845-1906 

1888-1915" 
1865-1940 

1855-1945 

1861-1938 
1851-1917 
1875-1953 

1862-1933 

1816-1906 
1851-1941 

1866-1960 
1859-1914 
1899-1956 
1838-1908 
1872-1922 
1862-1934 
1826-1906 
1838-1908 
1851-1932 

1871-1930 

1879-1955 
1832-1911 
1888-1956 

1816-1905 
1851-1902 
1845-1906 
1847-1912 
1874-1935 


1847-1912 

1837-1912 
1838-1906 
1889-1944 
1875-1937 

1873-1939 
1869-1930 

1840-1915 

1847-1927 
1835-1910 

1880-1944 

1835-1909 
1883-1950 


Gunther,  Albert  Charles  Lewis 
Gotthilf 

Gunther,  Robert  William  Thee 
dore 

Gurney,  Sir  Henry  Lovell  Golds- 
worthy 

Gumey,  Henry  Palin 

Guthrie,  Sir  James 

Guthrie,  Thomas  Anstey,  *F. 
Anstey' 

Guthrie,  William 

Gutteridge,  Harold  Cooke 

Guy,  Sir  Henry  Lewis 

Gwatkin,  Henry  Melvill 

Gwyer,  Sir  Maurice  Linford 

Gwynn,  John 

Gwynn,  Stephen  Lucius 

Gwynne,  Howell  Arthur 


Hacker,  Arthur 

Haddon,  Alfred  Cort 

Haden,  Sir  Francis  Seymour 

Hadfield,  Sir  Robert  Abbott 

Hadley,  William  Waite 

Hadow,  Grace  Eleanor 

Hadow,  Sir  (William)  Henry 

Haggard,  Sir  Henry  Rider 

Haig,  Douglas,  Earl 

Haig  Brown,  William 

Haigh,  Arthur  Elam 

Hailsham,  Viscount.  See  Hogg, 
Douglas  McGarel 

Haines,  Sir  Frederick  Paul 

Haking,  Sir  Richard  Cyril  Byrne 

Halcrow,  Sir  William  Thomson 

Haldane,  Elizabeth  Sanderson 

Haldane,  John  Scott 

Haldane,  Richard  Burdon,  Vis- 
count 

Hale- White,  Sir  William 

Halford,  Frank  Bernard 

Haliburton,  Arthur  Lawrence, 
Baron 

Halifax,  Viscount.  See  Wood, 
Charles  Lindley 

Halifax,  Earl  of.  See  Wood,  Ed- 
ward Frederick  Lindley 

Hall,  Sir  (Alfred)  Daniel 

Hall,  Arthur  Henry 

Hall,  Sir  Arthur  John 

Hall,  Christopher  Newman 

Hall,  Sir  Edward  Marshall 

Hall,  FitzEdward 

Hall,  Harry  Reginald  Holland 

Hall,  Hubert 

Hall,  Sir  John 

Hall,  Sir  (William)  Reginald 

Hall^  (formerly  Norman-Neruda), 
Wilma  Maria  Francisca,  Lady 

Halliburton,  William  Dobinson 

Halliday,  Sir  Frederick  James 

Halsbury,  Earl  of.  See  Giffard, 
Hardinge  Stanley 

Halsey,  Sir  Lionel 

Hambleden,  Viscount.  See  Smith, 
William  Frederick  Danvers 

Hamblin  Smith,  James.  See 
Smith 


1880-1914 

186»>1940 

18G»-1951 
1847-1904 
1859-1930 

1856-1934 
1835-1908 
1876-1953 
1887-1956 
1844-1916 
1878-1952 
1827-1917 
1864-1950 
1865-1950 


1858-1919 
1855-1940 
1818-1910 
1858-1940 
1866-1960 
1875-1940 
1859-1937 
1856-1925 
1861-1928 
1823-1907 
1&55-1905 

1872-1950 
1819-1909 
1862-1945 
1883-1958 
1862-1937 
1860-1936 

1856-1928 
1857-1949 
1804-1955 

1832-1907 

1839-1934 

1881-1959 
1864-1942 
1876-1949 
1866-1951 
1816-1902 
1858-1929 
1825-1901 
1873-1930 
1857-1944 
1824-1907 
1870-1943 

1839-1911 
1860-1931 
1806-1901 

1823-1921 
1872-1949 

1868-1928 

1829-1901 


1119 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Hambourg,  Mark  1879-1960 

Hamidullah,  Nawab  of  Bhopal. 

See  Bhopal  1894-1960 

Hamilton,  David  James  1849-1909 

Hamilton,  Sir  Edward  Walter         1847-1908 

Hamilton,  Eugene  Jacob  Lee-. 

See  Lee-Hamilton  1845-1907 

Hamilton,  Lord  George  Francis       1845-1927 

Hamilton,  Sir  Ian  Standish  Mon- 

teith  1853-1947 

Hamilton,  James,  Duke  of  Aber- 

corn  1838-1913 

Hamilton,  John  Andrew,  Vis- 
count Sumner  1859-1934 

Hamilton,  Sir  Richard  Vesey  1829-1912 

Hammond,   John  Lawrence  Le 

Breton  1872-1949 

Hampden,  Viscount.  See  Brand, 

Henry  Robert  1841-1906 

Hanbury,  Charlotte  (1830-1900). 
See  under  Hanbury,  Elizabeth 

Hanbury,  Elizabeth  1793-1901 

Hanbury,  Sir  James  Arthur  1832-1908 

Hanbury,  Robert  William  1845-1903 

Handley,       Thomas       Reginald 

(Tommy)  1892-1949 

Hankin,  St.  John  Emile  Clavering     1869-1909 

Hahlan  (properly  Hanlon),  Ed- 

.   ward  1855-1908 

Hannay,  James  Owen,  'George 

A.  Birmingham'  1865-1950 

Hannay,  Robert  Kerr  1867-1940 

Hanworth,  Viscount.  See  Pol- 
lock, Ernest  Murray  1861-1936 

Harben,  Sir  Henry  1823-1911 

Harcourt,  Augustus  George  Ver- 
non 1834-1919 

Harcourt,  Leveson  Francis  Ver- 
non-. See  Vernon-Harcourt  1839-1907 

Harcourt,  Lewis,  Viscount  1863-1922 

Harcourt,    Sir    William    George 

Granville  Venables  Vernon  1827-1904 

Harcourt-Smith,  Sir  Cecil  1859-1944 

Harden,  Sir  Arthur  1865-1940 

Hardie,  James  Keir  1856-1915 

Hardie,  Martin  1875-1952 

Hardie,  William  Ross  1862-1916 

Hardiman,  Alfred  Frank  1891-1949 

Harding,  Sir  Edward  John  1880-1954 

Harding,  Gilbert  Charles  1907-1960 

Hardinge,  Alexander  Henry 
Louis,  Baron  Hardinge  of 
Penshurst  1894-1960 

Hardinge,  Charles,  Baron  Hard- 
inge of  Penshurst  1858-1944 

Hardwicke,  Earl  of.  See  Yorke, 

Albert  Edward  Philip  Henry       1867-1904 

Hardy,  Frederic  Daniel  1827-1911 

Hardy,  Gathorne  Gathome-,  Earl 

:  of  Cranbrook.  See  Gathorne- 
Hardy  1814-1906 

Hardy,  Godfrey  Harold  1877-1947 

Hardy,  Herbert  Hardy  Cozens-, 
Baron  Cozens-Hardy.  See 
Cozens-Hardy  1838-1920 

Hardy,  Thomas  1840-1928 

Hardy,  Sir  William  Bate  1864-1934 

Hare,  Augustus  John  Cuthbert        1834-1903 

Hare,  Sir  John  1844-1921 


Harewood,  Earl  of.  See  Lascelles, 

Henry  George  Charles 
Harington,  Sir  Charles  ('Tim') 
Harker,  Alfred 
Harland,  Henry 
Harley,  Robert 
Harmsworth,      Alfred      Charles 

William,  Viscount  Northcliffe 
Harmsworth,     Harold     Sidney, 

Viscount  Rothermere 
Harper,  Sir  George  Montague 
Harraden,  Beatrice 
Harrel,  Sir  David 
Harrington,  Timothy  Charles 
Harris,  Frederick  Leverton 
Harris,  George  Robert  Canning, 

Baron 
Harris,  (Henry)  Wilson 
Harris,  James  Rendel 
Harris,  James  Thomas  ('Frank') 
Harris,  Sir  Percy  Alfred 
Harris,  Thomas  Lake 
Harrison,  Frederic 
Harrison,  Henry 
Harrison,  Jane  Ellen 
Harrison,  Mary  St.  Leger,  'Lucas 

Malet' 
Harrison,  Reginald 
Harrison,  Sir  William  Montagu 

Graham-.  See  Graham-Harri- 
son 
Hart,  Sir  Raymund  George 
Hart,  Sir  Robert 
Hartington,    Marquess    of.    See 

Cavendish,  Spencer  ComptcMi 
Hartley,  Arthur  Clifford 
Hartley,  Sir  Charles  Augustus 
Hartog,  Sir  Philip(pe)  Joseph 
Hartree,  Douglas  Rayner 
Hartshorn,  Vernon 
Hartshome,  Albert 
Harty,  Sir  (Herbert)  Hamilton 
Harvey,  Sir  John  Martin  Martin-. 

See  Martin-Harvey 
Harwood,  Basil 
Harwood,  Sir  Henry  Harwood 
Haslett,  Dame  Caroline  Harriet 
Hassall,  John 
Hastie,  William 
Hastings,  James 
Hastings,  Sir  Patrick  Gardiner 
Hatton,  Harold  Heneage  Finch-. 

See  Finch-Hatton 
Hatton,  Joseph 
Havelock,  Sir  Arthur  Elibank 
Haverfield,  Francis  John 
Haweis,  Hugh  Reginald 
Haweis,  Mary  (d.  1898).  See  under 

Haweis,  Hugh  Reginald 
Hawke,  Sir  (John)  Anthony 
Hawke,   Martin   Bladen,   Baron 

Hawke  of  Towton 
Hawker,  Mary  Elizabeth,  'Lanoe 

Falconer' 
Hawkins,     Sir  Anthony     Hope, 

'Anthony  Hope' 
Hawkins,  Henry,  Barcm  Brampton 
Haworth,  Sir  (Walter)  Norman 
Hawthorn,  John  Michael 


1120 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1960 


Hawtrey,  Sir  Charles  Henry- 
Hay,  Sir  Harley  Hugh  Dalrymple- 

Hay,  Ian,  pseudonym.  See  Beith, 
John  Hay 

Hayes,  Edwin 

Hayman,  Henry 

Hayne,    Charles    Hayne    Scale-. 
See  Seale-Hayne 

Hayward,  Robert  Baldwin 

Hazlitt,  William  Carew 

Head,  Barclay  Vincent 

Head,  Sir  Henry 

Headlam,  Arthur  Cayley 

Headlam,  Walter  George 

Headlam-Morley,  Sir  James  Wy- 
cliffe 

Heal,  Sir  Ambrose 

Healy,  John  Edward 

Healy,  Timothy  Michael 

Hearn,   Mary   Anne,    'Marianne 
Famingham' 

Heath,  Christopher 

Heath,  Sir  (Henry)  Frank 

Heath,  Sir  Leopold  (ieorge 

Heath,  Sir  Thomas  Little 

Heath  Robinson,    William.    See 
Robinson 

Heathcote,  John  Moyer 

Heaton,  Sir  John  Henniker 

Heaviside,  Oliver 

Hector,     Annie     French,     'Mrs. 
Alexander' 

Hector,  Sir  James 

Heilbron,  Sir  Ian  Morris 

Heinemann,  William 

Hele-Shaw,  Henry  Selby 

Helena  Victoria,  Princess 

Hellmuth,  Isaac 

Hely-Hutchinson,  Richard  Wal- 
ter John,  Earl  of  Donoughmore 

Henmiing,  George  Wirgman 

Hemphill,  Charles  Hare,  Baron 

Henderson,  Arthur 

Henderson,  Sir  David 

Henderson,  George  Francis  Ro- 
bert 

Henderson,  George  Gerald 

Henderson,  Sir  Hubert  Douglas 

Henderson,  Joseph 

Henderson,  Sir  Nevile  Mejrrick 

Henderson,    Sir    Reginald    Guy 
Hannam 

Henderson,  William  George 

Henley,  William  Ernest 

Hennell,  Sara  (1812-1899).  See 
under  Bray,  Caroline 

Hennessey,  John  Bobanau  Nick- 
erlieu 

Hennessy,  Henry 

Henry,  Sir  Edward  Richard 

Henry,  Mitchell 

Henschel,  Sir  George 

Henson,  Herbert  Hensley 

Henson,  Leslie  Lincoln 

Henty,  George  Alfred 

Herbert,  Auberon  Edward  Wil- 
liam Molyneux 

Herbert,  Auberon  Thomas,  Baron 

^  Lucas 

8662062 


1858-1923 
1861-1940 

1876-1952 
1819-1904 
1828-1904 

1833-1903 
1829-1903 
1834-1913 
1844-1914 
1861-1940 
1862-1947 
1866-1908 

1863-1929 
1872-1959 
1872-1934 
1855-1931 

1834-1909 
1835-1905 
1863-1946 
1817-1907 
1861-1940 

1872-1944 
1834r-1912 
1848-1914 
1850-1925 

1825-1902 
1834-1907 
1886-1959 
1863-1920 
1854-1941 
1870-1948 
1817-1901 

1875-1948 
1821-1905 
1822-1908 
1863-1935 
1862-1921 

1854-1903 
1862-1942 
1890-1952 
1832-1908 
1882-1942 

1881-1939 
1819-1905 
1849-1903 

1814-1905 

1829-1910 
1826-1901 
1850-1931 
1826-1910 
1850-1934 
1863-1947 
1891-1957 
1832-1902 

1838-1906 

1876-1916 


Herbert,  George  Edward  Staii^ 
hope  Molyneux,  Earl  of  Car»»: 
narvon 

Herbert,     Sir     Robert     George 
Wyndham 

Herdman,  Sir  William  Abbott 

Herford,  Brooke 

Herford,  Charles  Harold 

Herford,  William  Henry 

Herkomer,  Sir  Hubert  von 

Herring,  George 

Herringham,  Sir  WUmot  Parker 

Herschel,  Alexander  Stewart 

Hertslet,  Sir  Edward 

Hertz,  Joseph  Herman 

Hertzog,  James  Barry  Munnik 

Heseltine,  Philip  Arnold,  'Peter 
Warlock' 

Hewart,  Gordon,  Viscount 

Hewett,  Sir  John  Prescott 

Hewins,  William  Albert  Samuel 

Hewlett,  Maurice  Henry 

Hibbert,  Sir  John  Tomlinson 

Hichens,  Robert  Smythe 

Hichens,  (William)  Lionel 

Hicks,  Edward  Lee 

Hicks,    Sir    (Edward)    Seymour 
(George) 

Hicks,  (ieorge  Dawes  ; . .  *  i 

Hicks,  George  Ernest  '«.;.>( 

Hicks,  Robert  Drew 

Hicks,    William   Jojrnson-,    Vis- 
count Brentford 

Hicks   Beach,   Sir  Michael  Ed- 
ward, Earl  St.  Aldwyn 

Higgins,  Edward  John 

Higgins,     Sir     John     Frederick 
Andrews 

Hiles,  Henry 

Hill,  Alexander  Staveley 

Hill,  Alsager  Hay 

Hill,  Sir  Arthur  William 

Hill,  Sir  (Edward)  Maurice 

Hill,  Frank  Harrison 

Hill,  George  Birkbeck  Norman 

Hill,  Sir  George  Francis 

Hill,  Sir  Leonard  Erskine 

Hill,  Leonard  Raven-.  See  Raven- 
Hill 

Hill,  Octavia 

Hill,  Sir  Roderic  Maxwell 

Hill,  Rosamond  Davenport* 

Hills,  Arnold  Frank 

Hills,  Sir  John 

Hilton,  James 

Hind,  Arthur  Mayger 

Hind,  Henry  Youle 

Hind,    Richard   Dacre    Archer-. 
See  Archer-Hind 

Hindley,    Sir    Clement    Daniel 


Hingeston-Randolph  (formerly 
Hingston),  Francis  Charles 

Hingley,  Sir  Benjamin 

Hingston,  Sir  William  Hales 

Hinks,  Arthur  Robert 

Hinkson  (formerly  Tynan), 
Katharine 

Hinsley,  Arthur 


1866^1923 

1831-1905 
18r>8-1924 
1830-1903 
185;J-1931 
1820-1908 
1849-1914 
1832-1906 
1855-1936 
1836-1907 
1824-1902 
1872-1946 
1866-1942 

1804-1930 

1870-1943 
1854-1941 
1865-1931 
1861-1923 
1824-1908 
1804-1950 
1874-1940 
1843-1919 

1871-1949 

\  1862-1941 

1879-1954 

1850-1929 

1865-1932 

1837-1916 
1864-1947 

1875-1948 
1828-1904 
1825-1905 
1839-1906 
1875-1941 
1862-1934 
1830-1910 
1835-1903 
1867-1948 
1866-1952 

1867-1942 
1838-1912 
1894-1954 
1825-1902 
1857-1927 
1834-1902 
1900-1954 
1880-1957 
1823-1908 

1849-1910 

1874-1944 

1833-1910 

1830-1905 
1829-1907 
1873-1945 

1861-1931 
1865-1943 


1121 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Hipkins,  Alfred  James 
Hirst,  Francis  Wrigley 
Hirst,  George  Herbert 
Hirst,  Hugo,  Baron 
Hitchcock,  Sir  Eldred  Frederick 
Hoare,  Joseph  Charles 
Hoare,  Sir  Reginald  Hervey 
Hoare,  Sir  Samuel  John  Gurney, 

Viscount  Templewood 
Hobart,     Sir     Percy     Cleghorn 

Stanley 
Hobbes,  John  Oliver,  pseudonym. 

See  Craigie,  Pearl  Mary  Teresa 
Hobday,  Sir  Frederick  Thomas 

George 
Hobhouse,  Arthur,  Baron 
Hobhouse,  Edmund 
Hobhouse,  Henry 
Hobhouse,  Leonard  Trelawny 
Hobson,  Ernest  William 
Hobson,  Geoffrey  Dudley 
Hobson,  John  Atkinson 
Hocking,    Joseph     (1860-1937). 

See  under  Hocking,  Silas  Kitto 
Hocking,  Silas  Kitto 
Hodge,  John 

Hodgetts,  James  Frederick 
Hodgkin,  Thomas 
Hodgkins,  Frances  Mary 
Hodgson,    Richard    Dacre.    See 

Archer-Hind 
Hodgson,  Sir  Robert  MacLeod 
Hodgson,  Shadworth  Hollway 
Hodson  (afterwards  Labouchere), 

Henrietta 
Hoey,     Frances     Sarah 

Cashel  Hoey) 
Hofmeyr,  Jan  Hendrik 
Hofmejrr,  Jan  Hendrik 
Hogarth,  David  George 
Hogg,    Douglas    McGarel, 

count  Hailsham 
Hogg,  Quintin 
Holden,  Charles  Henry 
Holden,  Luther 
Holder,  Sir  Frederick  William 
Holdemess,  Sir  Thomas  William 
Holdich,  Sir  Thomas  Hungerford 
Holdsworth,  Sir  William  Searle 
Hole,  Samuel  Reynolds 
Holiday,  Henry 
Hollams,  Sir  John 
Holland,  Henry  Scott 
Holland,    Sir   Henry    Thurstan, 

Viscount  Knutsford 
Holland,  Sydney  George,  Viscount 

Knutsford 
Holland,  Sir  Thomas  Erskine 
Holland,  Sir  Thomas  Henry 
Hollingshead,  John 
Hollbwell,  James  Hirst 
Holman     Hunt,     William.     See 
"  Hunt 

Holme,  Charles 
Holmes,  Augusta  Mary  Anne 
Holmes,  Sir  Charles  John 
Holmes,  Sir  Richard  Rivington 
Holmes,  Thomas 
Holmes,  Thomas  Rice  Edward 


(Mrs. 


Vis- 


1826-1903 
1873-1953 
1871-1954 
1863-1943 
1887-1959 
1851-1906 
1882-1954 

1880-1959 

1885-1957 

1867-1906 

1869-1939 
1819-1904 
1817-1904 
1854-1937 
1864-1929 
1856-1933 
1882-1949 
1858-1940 


1850-1935 
1855-1937 
1828-1906 
1831-1913 

1869-1947 

1849-1910 
1874-1956 
1832-1912 

1841-1910 

1830-1908 
1845-1909 
1894^-1948 
1862-1927 

1872-1950 
1845-1903 
1875-1960 
1815-1905 
1850-1909 
1849-1924 
1843-1929 
1871-1944 
1819-1904 
1839-1927 
1820-1910 
1847-1918 

1825-1914 

1855-1931 
1835-1926 
1868-1947 
1827-1904 
1851-1909 

1827-1910 
1848-1923 
1847-1903 
1868-1936 
1835-1911 
1846-1918 
1855-1933 


Holmes,  Timothy 
Holmes,  Sir  Valentine 
Holmyard,  Eric  John 
Holroyd,  Sir  Charles 
Holroyd,  Henry  North,  Earl  of 

Sheffield 
Hoist,  Gustav  Theodore 
Holyoake,  George  Jacob 
Hone,  Evie 
Hood,   Arthur  William  Acland, 

Baron 
Hood,  Sir  Horace  Lambert  Alex- 
ander 
Hook,  James  Clarke 
Hooker,  Sir  Joseph  Dalton 
Hope,  Anthony,  pseudonym.  See 

Hawkins,  Sir  Anthony  Hope 
Hope,    James    Fitzalan,    Baron 

Rankeillour 
Hope,  John  Adrian  Louis,  Earl 

of  Hopetoun  and  INIarquess  of 

Linlithgow 
Hope,  Laurence,  pseudonym.  See 

Nicolson,  Adela  Florence 
Hope,   Victor  Alexander   John, 

Marquess  of  Linlithgow 
Hope,  Sir  William  Henry  St.  John 
Hopetoun,   Earl  of.   See   Hope, 

John  Adrian  Louis 
Hopkins,  Edward  John 
Hopkins,  Sir  Frederick  Gowland 
Hopkins,  Jane  Ellice 
Hopkins,  Sir  Richard  Valentine 

Nind 
Hopkinson,  Sir  Alfred 
Hopkinson,  Bertram 
Hopwood,  Charles  Henry 
Hopwood,  Francis  John  Stephens, 

Baron  Southborough 
Horder,  Percy  (Richard)  Morley 
Horder,  Thomas  Jeeves,  Baron 
Hore-Belisha,      (Isaac)      Leslie, 

Baron 
Hore-Ruthven,  Alexander  Gore 

Arkwright,  Earl  of  Gowrie 
Hornby,  Charles  Harry  St.  John 
Hornby,  James  John 
Home,  Henry  Sinclair,  Baron 
Home,  Robert  Stevenson,  Vis- 
count Home  of  Slamannan 
Horniman,      Annie      Elizabeth 

Fredericka 
Horniman,  Frederick  John 
Horridge,  Sir  Thomas  Gardner 
Horsley,  John  Callcott 
Horsley,  John  William 
Horsley,    Sir   Victor   Alexander 

Haden 
Horton,  Sir  Max  Kennedy 
Horton,  Robert  Forman 
Hose,  Charles 
Hosie,  Sir  Alexander 
Hoskins,  Sir  Anthony  Hiley 
Hoskyns,  Sir  Edwyn  Clement 
Houghton,  William  Stanley 
Houldsworth,  Sir  Hubert  Stanley 
House,  (Arthur)  Humphry 
Housman,  Alfred  Edward 
Housman,  Laurence 


1122 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1960 


Houston,  Dame  Fanny  Lucy 
Howard,  Sir  Ebenezer 
Howard,       Edmund       Bernard 

FitzAlan-,  Viscount  FitzAlan 

of  Derwent 
Howard,  Esme  William,  Baron 

Howard  of  Penrith 
Howard,  George  James,  Earl  of 

Carlisle 
Howard,  Henry  FitzAlan-,  Duke 

of  Norfolk 
Howard,  Leslie 
Howard,       Rosalind      Frances, 

Countess  of  Carlisle 
Howard  de  Walden,  Baron.  See 

Scott-Ellis,  Thomas  Evelyn 
Howe,  Clarence  Decatur 
Howell,  David 
Howell,  George 
Howes,  Thomas  George  Bond 
Howitt,  Alfred  William 
Howland,  Sir  William  Pearce 
Hubbard,  Louisa  Maria 
Huddart,  James 
Huddleston,  Sir  Hubert  Jervoise 
Hudleston    (formerly   Simpson), 

Wilfred  Hudleston 
Hudson,  Charles  Thomas 
Hudson,  Sir  Robert  Arundell 
Hudson,  Robert  Spear,  Viscount 
Hudson,  William  Henry 
Hueffer,     Ford    Hermann.  See 

Ford,  Ford  Madox 
Hugel,  Friedrich  von.  Baron  of 

the  Holy  Roman  Empire.  See 

Von  Hiigel 
Huggins,  Sir  William 
Hughes,  Arthur 
Hughes,  Edward 
Hughes,  Hugh  Price 
Hughes,  John 
Hughes,  Sir  Sam 
Hughes,  William  Morris 
Hulme,  Frederick  Edward 
Hulton,  Sir  Edward 
Hume,  Allan  Octavian 
Hume,  Martin  Andrew  Sharp 
Humphrey,  Herbert  Alfred 
HumphrejT^s,  Sir  (Richard  Somers) 

Travers  (Christmas) 
Hunt,  Dame  Agnes  Gwendoline 
Hunt,  Arthur  Surridge 
Hunt,   George  William  (1829?- 

1904).  See  under  Macdermott, 

Gilbert  Hastings 
Hunt,  William 
Hunt,  William  Holman 
Hunter,  Sir  Archibald 
Hunter,  Colin 
Hunter,  Sir  George  Burton 
Hunter,  Philip  Vassar 
Hunter,  Sir  Robert 
Hunter,  Sir  William  Guyer 
Hunter-Weston,      Sir      Aylmer 

Gould.  See  Weston 
Huntington,  George 
Hurlstone,  William  Yeates 
Hurst,  Sir  Arthur  Frederick 
Hutchinson,  Arthur 


1857-1936 
1850-1928 


1855-1947 

1863-1939 

1843-1911 

1847-1917 
1893-1943 

1845-1921 

1880-1946 
1886-1960 
1831-1903 
1833-1910 
1853-1905 
1830-1908 
1811-1907 
1836-1906 
1847-1901 
1880-1950 

1828-1909 
1828-1903 
1864-1927 
1886-1957 
1841-1922 

1873-1939 


1852-1925 
1824-1910 
1832-1915 
1832-1908 
1847-1902 
1842-1902 
1853-1921 
1862-1952 
1841-1909 
1869-1925 
1829-1912 
1843-1910 
1868-1951 

1867-1956 
1866-1948 
1871-1934 


1845-1901 
1842-1931 
1827-1910 
1856-1936 
1841-1904 
1845-1937 
1883-1956 
1844-1913 
1827-1902 

1864-1940 
1825-1905 
1876-1906 

1879-1944. 
1866-1937 


Hutchinson,  Francis  Ernest  1871-1947 
Hutchinson,     Horatio     Gordon 

(Horace)  1859-1932 

Hutchmson,  Sir  Jonatlian  1828-1913 
Hutchinson,      Richard      Walter 

John  Hely-,  Earl  of  Donough- 

more.  See  Hely-Hutchinson  1875-1948 

Hutchison,  Sir  Robert  1871-1960 

Huth,  Alfred  Henry  1850-1910 

Hutton,  Alfred  1839-1910 

Hutton,  Frederick  Wollaston  1836-1905 

Hutton,  George  Clark  1825-1908 

Hutton,  William  Holden  1860-1930 

Huxley,  Leonard  1860-1933 

Hwfa  Mon.  See  W  illiams,  Rowland  1 823-1906 

Hyde,  Douglas  1860-1949 

Hyndman,  Henry  Mayers  1842-1921 


Ibbetson,  Sir  Denzil  Charles  Jelf  1847-1908 
Ibbetson,   Henry  John  Selwin-, 

Baron  Rookwood.  See  Selwin- 

Ibbetson  1826-1902 
Ignatius,     Father.     See     Lyne, 

Joseph  Leycester  1837-1908 

Ilbert,  Sir  Courtenay  Peregrine  1841-1924 
Ilchester,     Earl    of.     See    Fox- 

Strang^ays,     Giles      Stephen 

Holland  187-4-1959 

Iliffe,  Edward  Mauger,  Baron  1877-1960 

Image,  Selwyn  1849-1930 

Imms,  Augustus  Daniel  1880-1949 

Ince,  Sir  Godfrey  Herbert  1891-1960 

Ince,  William  1825-1910 
Inchcape,  Earl  of.  See  Mackay, 

James  Lyle  1852-1932 
Inderwick,  Frederick  Andrew  1836-1904 
Inge,  William  Ralph  1860-1954 
Inglis,  Sir  Charles  Edward  1875-1952 
Inglis,  Elsie  Maud  1864-1917 
Ingram,  Arthur  Foley  Winning- 
ton-.  See  Winnington- Ingram  1858-1946 
Ingram,  John  Kells  1823-1907 
Ingram,  Thomas  Dunbar  1826-1901 
Innes,  James  John  McLeod  1830-1907 
Innes,    Sir    James    Rose-.    See 

Rose-Innes  1855-1942 
Inskip,  Thomas  W^alker  Hobart, 

Viscount  Caldecote  1876-1947 
Inverchapel,    Baron.    See    Clark 

Kerr,  Archibald  John  Kerr  1882-1951 
Inverforth,    Baron.    See    Weir, 

Andrew  1865-1955 
Invernaim,  Baron.  See  Beard- 
more,  William  1856-1936 
Iqbal,  Sir  Muhammad  1876-1938 
Irby,  Leonard  Howard  Loyd  1836-1905 
Ireland,  William  Wotherspoon  1832-1909 
Ironside,  William  Edmund,  Baron  1880-1959 
Irvine,  Sir  James  Colquhoun  1877-1952 
Irvine,  William  1840-1911 
Irving,  Sir  Henry  1838-1905 
Isaacs,  Sir  Isaac  Alfred  1855-1948 
Isaacs,  Rufus  Daniel,  Marquess 

of  Reading  1860-1936 

Isherwood,  Sir  Joseph  William  1870-1937 
Islington,  Baron.  See  Poynder, 

Sir  John  Poynder  Dickson-  186-1936 

Ismail,  Sir  Mirza  Mohammad  188o-1959 


W2a 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Ismay,  Joseph  Bnice  1862-1937 
Iveagh,   Earl  of.   See   Guinness, 

Edward  Cecil  1847-1927 

Iwan-Miiller,  Ernest  Bruce  1853-1910 


Jacks,  Lawrence  Pearsall 

Jacks,  William 

Jackson,  Sir  Cyril 

Jackson,  Sir  (Francis)  Stanley 

Jackson,  Frederick  George 

Jackson,  Sir  Frederick  John 

Jackson,  Frederick  John  Foakes 

Jackson,  Henry 

Jackson,  Sir  Henry  Bradwardine 

Jackson,  Sir  Herbert 

Jackson,  John 

Jackson,  John  Hughlings 

Jackson,  Mason 

Jackson,  Samuel  Phillips 

Jackson,  Sir  Thomas  Graham 

Jackson,  William  Lawies,  Baron 

Allerton 
Jacob,  Sir  Claud  William 
Jacob,  Edgar 
Jacobs,  William  Wymark 
Jagger,  Charles  Sargeant 
James,  Alexander  Wilson 
James,  Arthur  Lloyd 
James,  Henry,  Baron  James  of 

Hereford 
James,  Henry 
James,  James 
James,  Montague  Rhodes 
James,  Rolfe  Arnold  Scott-.  See 

Scott-James 
Jameson,  Andrew,  Lord  Ardwall 
Jameson,  Sir  Leander  Starr 
Japp,    Alexander   Hay,    'H.   A. 

Page' 
Jardine,  Douglas  Robert 
Jardine,  Sir  Robert 
Jarvis,  Claude  Scudamore 
Jajme,  Francis  John 
Jeaffreson,  John  Cordy 
Jeans,  Sir  James  Hopwood 
Jebb,  Eglantyne 
Jebb,  Sir  Richard  Claverhouse 
Jeffery,  George  Barker 
Jelf,  George  Edward 
Jellicoe,  (John)  Basil  (Lee) 
Jellicoe,  John  Rushworth,  Earl 
Jenkin,  Charles  Frewen 
Jenkins,  Ebenezer  Evans 
Jenkins,  John  Edward 
Jenkins,  Sir  Lawrence  Hugh 
Jenkinson,  Francis  John  Henry 
Jenks,  Edward 
Jenner-Fust,  Herbert 
Jephson,  Arthur  Jermy  Mounte- 

ney 
Jerome,  Jerome  Klapka 
Jerram,    Sir    (Thomas    Henry) 

Martyn 
Jersey,  Countess  of.  See  Villiers, 

Margaret  Elizabeth  Child- 
Jersey,    Earl    of.    See    Villiers, 

Victor  Albert  George  Child- 
Jessop,  Gilbert  Laird 


1860-1955 
1841-1907 
1863-1924 
1870-1947 
1860-1938 
1860-1929 
1855-1941 
1839-1921 
1855-1929 
1863^1936 
1833-1901 
1835-1911 
1819-1903 
1830-1904 
1835-1924 

1840-1917 
1863-1948 
1844-1920 
1863-1943 
1885-1934 
1901-1953 
1884-1943 

1828-1911 
1843-1916 
1832-1902 
1862-1936 

1878-1959 
1845-1911 
1853-1917 

1837-1905 
1900-1958 
1825-1905 
1879-1953 
1845-1921 
1831-1901 
1877-1946 
1876-1928 
1841-1905 
1891-1957 
1834-1908 
1899-1935 
1859-1935 
1865-1940 
1820-1905 
1838-1910 
1857-1928 
1853-1923 
1861-1939 
1806-1904 

1858-1908 
1859-1927 

1858-1933 

1849-1945 

1845-1915 
1874-1955 


Jessopp,  Augustus 

Jeune,  Francis  Henry,  Baron  St. 

Helier 
Jex-Blake,  Sophia  Louisa 
Jex-Blake,  Thomas  William 
Jinnah,  Mahomed  Ali 
Joachim,  Harold  Henry 
Joad,  Cyril  Edwin  Mitchinson 
Joel,  Jack  Bamato  (1862-1940). 

See      under      Joel,     Solomon 

Bamato 
Joel,  Solomon  Barnato 
John,  Sir  William  Goscombe 
Johns,  Claude  Hermann  Walter 
Johnson,  Alfred  Edward  Webb-, 

Baron     Webb-Johnson.     See 

Webb-Johnson 
Johnson,  Amy 
Johnson,  John  de  Monins 
Johnson,  Lionel  Pigot 
Johnson,  Sir  Nelson  King 
Johnson,  William  Ernest 
Johnson,  William  Percival 
Johnston,  Christopher  Nicholson, 

Lord  Sands 
Johnston,  Edward 
Johnston,  George  Lawson,  Baron 

Luke 
Johnston,  Sir  Harry  Hamilton 
Johnston,  Sir  Reginald  Fleming 
Johnston,  William 
Joicey,  James,  Baron 
Jolowicz,  Herbert  Felix 
Joly,  Charles  Jasper 
Joly,  John 
Joly  de  Lotbinifere,   Sir  Henry 

Gustave 
Jones,  Adrian 
Jones,  (Alfred)  Ernest 
Jones,  Sir  Alfred  Lewis 
Jones,  Bernard  Mouat 
Jones,  (Frederic)  Wood 
Jones,  Sir  Harold  Spencer 
Jones,  Sir  Henry 
Jones,  Henry  Arthur 
Jones,  Henry  Cadman 
Jones,  Sir  Henry  Stuart- 
Jones,  (James)  Sidney 
Jones,  John  Daniel 
Jones,  Sir  John  Edward  Lennard-. 

See  Lennard- Jones 
Jones,    Sir    John    Morris-.    See 

Morris-Jones 
Jones,  John  Viriamu 
Jones,  Sir  Robert 
Jones,   Sir  Robert  Armstrong-. 

See  Armstrong-Jones 
Jones,  Thomas 
Jones,  Thomas  Rupert 
Jones,  William  West 
Jordan,  (Heinrich  Ernst)  Karl 
Jordan,  Sir  John  Newell 
Jordan    Lloyd,     Dorothy.     See 

Lloyd 
Joseph,  Horace  William  Brindley 
Jourdain,  Francis  Charles  Robert 
Jowitt,  William  Allen,  Earl 
Joyce,  James  Augustine 
Joyce,  Sir  Matthew  Ingle 


1124 


CUMUI.ATIVE  INDEX  1001-1060 


Joynson-Hicks,William,Viscount 

Brentford.  See  Hicks  1865-1932 

Julius,  Sir  George  Alfred  1873-1946 


Kane,  Robert  Romney 
Kearley,  Hudson  Ewbanke,  Vis- 
count Devonport 
Keay,  John  Seymour 
Keeble,  Sir  Frederick  William 
Keeble,   Lillah,    Lady.  See  Mc- 
Carthy, Lillah 
Keetley,  Charles  Robert  Bell 
Keith,  Sir  Arthur 
Keith,  Arthur  Berriedale 
Keith,  Sir  William  Johii 
Kekewich,  Sir  Arthur    --^-^r-r^ 
Kekewich,  Robert  George 
Kellaway,  Charles  Hallilev 
Kelly,  sir  David  Victor 
Kelly,  Frederick  Septimus 
Kelly,  James  B'itzmaurice-.  See 

Fitzmaurice-Kelly 
Kelly,  Sir  John  Donald 
Kelly,  Mary  Anne,  'Eva'  (1826- 

1910).   See   under  O'Doherty, 

Kevin  Izod 
Kelly,  William 
Kelly-Kenny,  Sir  Thomas 
Keltic,  Sir  John  Scott 
Kelvin,    Baron.     See  Thomson, 

William 
Kemball,  Sir  Arnold  Burrowes 
Kemball-Cook,  Sir  Basil  Alfred 
Kemble,  Henry 
Kemp,  Stanley  Wells 
Kendal,  Dame  Margaret  Shafto 

(Madge) 
Kendal,  William  Hunter 
Kennard,  Sir  Howard  William 
Kennaway,  Sir  Ernest  Laurence 
Kennedy,  Sir  Alexander  Blackie 

William 
Kennedy,  Harry  Angus  Alexander 
Kennedy,  Sir  William  Rann 
Kennet,     Baron.     See     Young, 

Edward  Hilton 
Kennet,  (Edith  Agnes)  Kathleen, 

Lady 
Kennett,  Robert  Hatch 
Kenney,  Annie 
Kennington,  Eric  Henri 
Kenny,  Courtney  Stanhope 
Kenny,  Elizabeth 
Kensit,  John 
Kent,     Duke     of.     See    George 

Edward  Alexander  Edmund 
Kent,  Albert  Frank  Stanley 
Kent,  (William)  Charles  (Mark) 
Kenyon,  Sir  Frederic  George 
Kenyon,  George  Thomas 
Kenyon-Slaney,  William  Slaney 
Keogh,  Sir  Alfred 
Keppel,  Sir  George  Olof  Roos-. 

See  Roos-Keppel 
Keppel,  Sir  Henry 
Ker,  William  Paton 
Kerr,     Archibald     John     Kerr 

Clark,  Baron  Inverchapel.  See 

Clark  Kerr 


1842-1902 

1856-1934 
1839-1909 
1870-1952 

1875-1960 
1848-1909 
1866-1955 
1879-1944 
1873-1937 
1832-1907 
1854-1914 
1889-1952 
1891-1959 
1881-1916 

1857-1923 
1871-1936 

1823-1905 
1821-1906 
1840-1914 
1840-1927 

1824-1907 
1820-1908 
1876-1949 
1848-1907 
1882-1945 

1848-1935 
1843-1917 
1878-1955 
1881-1958 

1847-1928 
1866-1934 
1846-1915 

1879-1%0 

^878-1947 
1864-1932 
1879-1953 
1888-1960 
1847-1930 
1880-1952 
1853-1902 

1902-1942 
1863-1958 
1823-1902 
1863-1952 
1840-1908 
1847-1908 
1857-1936 

1866-1921 
1809-1904 
1855-1923 


1882-1951 


Kerr,  John  1824-1907 

Kerr,  Sir  John  Graham  1869-1957 

Kerr,  (John  Martin)  Munro  1868-1960 
Kerr,  Philip  Henry,  Marquess  of 

Lothian  1882-1940 

Kerr,  Robert  1823-1904 

Kerr,  Lord  Walter  Talbot  18;J9-1927 

Ket^lbey,  Albert  William  1875-1959 

Kettle,  Edgar  Hartley  1882-1936 
Keyes,   Roger  Jolm  Brownlow, 

Baron  1872-1945 

Keynes,  John  Maynard,  Baron  1883-1946 

Khan  Sahib  1883-1958 

Kidd,  Benjamin  1858-1916 

Kiggell,  Sir  Launcelot  Edward  1862-1954 
Kilbracken,  Baron.  See  Godley, 

(John)  Arthur  .u,,  ..;   .*<>;  1847-1932 

Killen,  William  Dool  '.,^.  1806-1902 

Kimberley,  Earl  of.  See  Wode- 

house,  John  1826-1902 

Kimmina,  Dame  Grace  Thyrza  1870-1954 

Kinahan,  George  Henry  1829-1908 
Kincaimey,    Lord.    See    Gloag, 

William  Ellis  1828-190^ 
Kindersley,  Robert  Molesworth, 

Baron  ;  1871-1954 
King,  Edward                       if.;    ,  {  1829-1910 

King,  Sir  (P^ederic)  Truby  1858-1938 

King,  Sir  George  1840-1909 

King,  Harold  1887-1956 

King,  Haynes  1831-1904 

King,  William  Lyon  Mackenzie  1874-1950 

Kingdon-Ward,  Francis  (Frank)  1885-1958 
Kingsburgh,     Lord.     See    Mac- 

donald,  John  Hay  Athole  1836-1919 
Kingscote,     Sir     Robert     Nigel 

Fitzhardinge  1830-1908 

Kingsford,  Charles  Lethbridge  1862-1926 

Kingston,  Charles  Cameron  1850-1908 

Kinnear,  Alexander  Smith,  Baron  1833-1917 

Kinnear,  Sir  Norman  Boyd  1882-1957 

Kinns,  Samuel  1826-1903 
Kinross,    Baron.    See    Balfour, 

John  Blair  1837-1905 

Kipling,  (Joseph)  Rudyard  1865-1936 

Kipping,  Frederic  Stanley  1863-1949 

Kirk,  Sir  John  1882-1922 

Kirk,  Sir  John  1847-1922 

Kirk,  Kenneth  Escott  1886-1954 

Kirkwood,  David,  Baron  1872-1955 

Kitchener,  Horatio  Herbert,  Earl  1850-1916 

Kitchin,  George  William  1827-1912 

Kitson,  James,  Baron  Airedale  1835-1911 

Kitton,  Frederick  George  1856-1904 

Klein,  Melanie  1882-1960 

Knight,  Joseph     ..[..u-.:. .  1829-1907 

Knight,  Joseph  *  i,  :  ;,:,.j  1837-1909 
KnoUys,  Francis,  Viscount  1837-1924 
Knott,  Ralph  1878-1929 
Knowles,  Sir  James  Thomas  1831-1908 
Knox,  Edmund  Arbuthnott-roo.)  1847-1937 
Knox,  Sir  Geoffrey  George  ■  r.d^  1884-1958 
Knox,  Su-  George  Edward  .j  ;  ^  1845-1922 
Knox  (formerly  Craig),  Isa  m  , ,  / 1831-1903 
Knox,  RonaldArbuthnott  ct/.i!'  /- 1888-1957 
Knox,  Wilfred  Lawrence  ■he  <  T  -1886-1950 
Knox-Little,  William  John  .  1839-1918 
Knutsford,  Viscount.  See  Hol- 
land, Sir  Henry  Thiurstan  1825-1914 


1125 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Knutsford,  Viscount.  See  Hol- 
land, Sydney  George  1855-1931 

Komisarjevsky,  Theodore  1882-1954 

Korda,  Sir  Alexander  1893-1956 

Kotz^,  Sir  John  Gilbert  1849-1940 

Kruger   Gray,   George   Edward. 

See  Gray  1880-1943 

Kuczynski,  Robert  Rene  1876-1947 

Kylsant,    Baron.    See    Philipps, 

Owen  Cosby  1863-1937 

Kynaston  (formerly  Snow),  Her- 
bert 183.5-1910 

Labouchere,       Henrietta.       See 

Hodson  1841-1910 

Labouchere,  Henry  Du  Pr6  1831-1912 

Lacey,  Thomas  Alexander  1853-1931 

Lafont,  Eugene  1837-1908 

Laidlaw,  Anna  Robena  1819-1901 

Laidlaw,  John  1832-1906 

Laidlaw,  Sir  Patrick  Playfair  1881-1940 

Laird,  John  1887-1946 

Lake,  Kirsopp  1872-1946 

Lake,  Sir  Percy  Henry  Noel  1855-1940 

Lamb,  Henry  Taylor  1883-1960 

Lamb,  Sir  Horace  1849-1934 
Lambart,     Frederick    Rudolph, 

Earl  of  Cavan  1865-1946 
Lambe,  Sir  Charles  Edward  1900-1960 
Lambert,  Brooke  1834-1901 
Lambert,  Constant  1905-1951 
Lambert,  George  1842-1915 
Lambert,  George,  Viscount  1866-1958 
Lamboume,  Baron.  See  Lock- 
wood,  Amelius  Mark  Richard  1847-1928 
Lamington,   Baron.   See  Baillie, 

Charles      Wallace     Alexander 

Napier  Ross  Cochrane-  1860-1940 

Lanchester,  Frederick  William  1868-1946 

Lane,  Sir  Hugh  Percy  1875-1915 

Lane,  John  1854-1925 

Lane,  Lupino  1892-1959 

Lane,  Sir  (William)  Arbuthnot  1856-1943 

Lane  Poole,  Reginald.  See  Poole  1857-1939 
Lane-Poole,     Stanley     Edward. 

See  Poole  1854.-1931 

Lang,  (Alexander)  Matheson  1877-1948 

Lang,  Andrew  1844-1912 

Lang,  John  Marshall  1834-1909 
Lang,  (William)  Cosmo  Gordon, 

Baron  Lang  of  Lambeth  1864^1945 

Lang,  William  Henry  1874-1960 

Langdon,  Stephen  Herbert  1876-1937 
Langdon-Brown,      Sir      Walter 

Langdon  1870-1946 

Langevin,  Sir  Hector  Louis  1826-1906 

Langford,  John  Alfred  1823-1903 

Langley,  John  Newport  1852-1925 

Langton,  Sir  George  Philip  1881-1942 

Lankester,  Sir  Edwin  Ray  1847-1929 

Lansbury,  George  1859-1940 
Lansdowne,     Marquess  of.     See 

Petty-Fitzmaurice,  Henry 

Charles  Keith  1845-1927 

Larke,  Sir  William  James  1875-1959 

Larmor,  Sir  Joseph  1857-1942 

Lascelles,  Sir  Frank  Cavendish  1841-1920 
Lascelles,  Henry  George  Charles, 

Earl  of  Harewood  1882-1947 


Laski,  Harold  Joseph 

Last,  Hugh  Macilwain 

Laszlo  de  Lombos,  Philip  Alexius 

Laszowska,  (Jane)  Emily  de.  See 

Gerard 
Latey,  John 
Latham,  Henry 
Latham,  Peter  Walker 
Lauder,  Sir  Harry 
Laughton,  Sir  John  Knox 
Laurie,  James  Stuart 
Laurie,  Simon  Somerville 
Laurier,  Sir  Wilfrid 
Lauterpacht,  Sir  Hersch 
Lavery,  Sir  John 
Law,  Andrew  Bonar 
Law,  David 

Law,  Sir  Edward  FitzGerald 
Law,  Thomas  Graves 
Lawes  (afterwards  Lawes-Witte- 

wronge).  Sir  Charles  Bennet 
Lawes,  William  George 
Lawley,  Francis  Charles 
Lawrence,  Alfred  Tristram,  Baron 

Trevethin 
Lawrence,  (Arabella)  Susan 
Lawrence,  David  Herbert 
Lawrence,  Gertrude 
Lawrence,  Sir  Herbert  Alexander 
Lawrence,  Sir  Paul  Ogden 
Lawrence,       Thomas       Edward 

(Lawrence  of  Arabia) 
Lawrence,  Sir  Walter  Roper 
Laws,  Robert 
Lawson,  Edward  Levy-,  Baron 

Burnham.  See  Levy-Lawson 
Lawson,  George 
Lawson,  George  Anderson 
Lawson,  Harry  Lawson  Webster 

Levy-,  Viscount  Burnham 
Lawson,  Sir  Wilfrid 
Leach,  Arthur  Francis 
Leacock,  Stephen  Butler 
Leader,  Benjamin  Williams 
Leader,  John  Temple 
Leaf,  Walter 
Leake,  George 

Leathes,  §ir  Stanley  Mordaunt 
Lecky,   Squire  Thornton   Strat- 
ford 
Lecky,  William  Edward  Hartpole 
Ledingham,    Sir    John    Charles 

Grant 
Ledward,  Gilbert 
Ledwidge,  Francis 
Lee,  Arthur  Hamilton,  Viscount 

Lee  of  Fareham 
Lee,  Frederick  George 
Lee,  Rawdon  Briggs 
Lee,  Robert  Warden 
Lee,  Sir  Sidney 
Lee,    Vernon,    pseudonym.    See 

Paget,  Violet 
Lee-Hamilton,  Eugene  Jacob 
Lee- Warner,  Sir  William 
Lees,  George  Martin 
Leeson,      Spencer      Stottesbery 

Gwatkin 
Lefroy,  William 


1126 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1960 


Le  Gallienne,  Richard  Thomas 

Legg,  John  Wickham 

Legh,  Thomas  Wodehouse,  Baron 
Newton 

Legros,  Alphonse 

Lehmann,  Rudolf 

Leicester,  Earl  of.  See  Coke, 
Thomas  William 

Leigh-Mallory,  Sir  Trafford  Leigh 

Leighton,  Stanley 

Leiningen,  Prince  Ernest  Leopold 
Victor  Charles  Auguste  Joseph 
Emich 

Leishman,  Thomas 

Leishman,  Sir  William  Boog 

Le  Jeune,  Henry 

Lemmens-Sherrington,  Helen 

Lemon,  Sir  Ernest  John  Hatch- 
ings 

Lempriere,  Charles 

Leng,  Sir  John 

Leng,  Sir  William  Christopher 

Lennard-Jones,  Sir  John  Edward 

Lennox,  Charles  Henry  Gordon-, 
Duke  of  Richmond  and 
Gordon.  See  Gordon-Lennox 

Leno,  Dan 

Lenox-Conyngham,  Sir  Gerald 
Ponsonby 

Le  Sage,  Sir  John  Merry 

Leslie,  Sir  Bradford 

Lester,  Sean  (John  Ernest) 

Le  Strange,  Guy 

Lethaby,  William  Richard 

Lever,  Sir  (Samuel)  Hardman 

Lever,  William  Hesketh,  Vis- 
count Leverhulme 

Leverhulme,  Viscount.  See 
Lever,  William  Hesketh 

Leveson-Gower,  (Edward)  Frede- 
rick 

Leveson  Gower,  Sir  Henry 
Dudley  Gresham.  See  Gower 

Levick,  George  Murray 

Levy-Lawson,  Edward,  Baron 
Burnham 

Levy-Lawson,  Harry  Lawson 
Webster,  Viscount  Burnham. 
See  Lawson 

Lewis,  Agnes 

Lewis,  Bunnell 

Lewis,  David  (1814^1895).  See 
under  Lewis,  Evan 

Lewis,  Evan 

Lewis,  Sir  George  Henry 

Lewis,  John  Travers 

Lewis,  Percy  Wyndham 

Lewis,  Richard 

Lewis,  Rosa 

Lewis,  Sir  Thomas 

Lewis,  Sir  Wilfrid  Hubert  Poyer 

Lewis,  William  Cudmore  Mc- 
CuUagh 

Lewis,  William  Thomas,  Baron 
Merthyr 

Lewis,  Sir  Willmott  Harsant 

Leyel,  Hilda  Winifred  Ivy  (Mrs. 
C.  F.  Leyel) 

Liaqat  Ali  Khan 


1860-1947 
1843-1921 

1857-1942 
1837-1911 
1819-1905 

1822-1909 
1892-1944 
1837-1901 


1830-1904 
1825-1904 
1865-1926 
1819-1904 
1834-1906 

1884-1954 
1818-1901 
1828-1906 
1825-1902 
1894-1954 


1818-1903 
1860-1904 

1866-1956 
1837-1926 
1831-1926 
1888-1959 
1854-1933 
1857-1931 
1869-1947 

1851-1925 


1819-1907 

1873-1954 
1876-1956 

1833-1916 


1862-1933 
1843-1926 
1824-1908 


1818-1901 
1833-1911 
1825-1901 
1882-1957 
1821-1905 
1867-1952 
1881-1945 
1881-1950 

1885-1956 

1837-1914 
1877-1950 

1880-1957 
1895-1951 


Liberty,  Sir  Arthur  Lasenby 
Lidderdale,  William 
Lidgett,  John  Scott 
Light  wood,  John  Mason 
Lincolnshire,        Marquess        of. 

See  Wynn-Carrington,  Charles 

Robert 
Lindemann,  Frederick  Alexander, 

Viscount  Cherwell 
Lindley,  Sir  Francis  Oswald 
Lindley,  Nathaniel,  Baron 
Lindrum,  Walter  Albert 
Lindsay,      Alexander      Dunlop, 

Baron  Lindsay  of  Birker 
Lindsay,  David 

Lindsay,  David  Alexander  Ed- 
ward, Earl  of  Crawford 
Lindsay,  George  Mackintosh 
Lindsay,  James  Gavin 
Lindsay,   James  Ludovic,    Earl 

of  Crawford 
Lindsay  (afterwards  Loyd-Lind- 

say),    Robert    James,    Baron 

Wantage 
Lindsay,  Sir  Ronald  Charles 
Lindsay,  Thomas  Martin 
Lindsay,  Wallace  Martin 
Lingen,  Ralph  Robert  Wheeler, 

Baron 
Linlithgow,     Marquess  of.     See 

Hope,  John  Adrian  Louis 
Linlithgow,    Marquess    of.    See 

Hope,  Victor  Alexander  John 
Lipson,  Ephraim 
Jjipton,  Sir  Thomas  Johnstone 
Lister,  Arthur 
Lister,  Joseph,  Baron 
Lister,    Samuel    Cunliffe,  Baron 

Masham 
Lithgow,  Sir  James 
Little,  Andrew  George 
Little,  Sir  Ernest  Gordon  Graham 

Graham-.  See  Graham-Little 
Little,  William  John  Knox-.  See 

Knox-Little 
Littler,  Sir  Ralph  Daniel  Makinson 
Liveing,  George  Downing 
Livesey,  Sir  (^orge  Thomas 
Livingstone,  Sir  Richard  Winn 
Llan(£iff,    Viscount.    See    Mat- 
thews, Henry 
Llewellin,  John  Jestyn,  Baron 
Llewellyn,   Sir   (Samuel  Henry) 

William 
Lloyd,  Dorothy  Jordan 
Lloyd,  George  Ambrose,  Baron 
Lloyd,  Sir  John  Edward 
Lloyd,    Marie,    pseudonym.    See 

Wood,  Matilda  Alice  Victoria 
Lloyd  George,  David,  Earl  Lloyd- 
George  of  Dwyfor 
Lloyd  James,  Arthur.  See  James 
Loates,  Thomas 
Loch,  Sir  Charles  Stewart 
Lock,  Walter 
Locke,  William  John 
Lockey,  Charles 
Lockwood,      Amelius      Mark 

Richard,  Baron  Lamboume 


1848-1917 
1832-1902 
1854-1953 
1862-1947 


1843-1928 

1886-1957 
1872-1950 
1828-1921 
1898-1960 

1879-1952 
1856-1922 

1871-1940 
1880-1956 
1885-1903 

1847-1913 


1882-1901 
1877-1945 
1843-1914 
1858-1937 

1819-1905 

1860-1908 

1887-1952 
1888-1960 
1850-1931 
1830-1908 
1827-1912 

1815-1906 

1883-1952 
1868-1945 

1867-1950 

1839-1918 
1835-1908 
1827-1924 
1834-1908 
1880-1960 

1826-1913 
1898-1957 

1858-1941 
1889-1946 
1879-1941 
1861-1947 

1870-1922 

1863-1945 
1884-1943 
1867-1910 
1849-1923 
1846-1933 
1863-1930 
1820-1901 

1847-1928 


1127 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Lockyer,  Sir  (Joseph)  Norman 

Lodge,  Eleanor  Constance 

Lodge,  Sir  Oliver  Joseph 

Loc^e,  Sir  Richard 

Loftie,  VViUiam  John 

Loftus,  Lord  Augustus  William 

Frederick  Spencer 
Logue,  Michael 
Lohmann,  George  Alfred 
Londonderry,  Marquess   of.    See 

Vane-Tempest-Stewart,Charles 

Stewart 
Londonderry,  Marquess  of.  See 

Vane-Tempest-Stewart,Charles 

Stewart  Henry 
Long,   Walter   Hume,   Viscount 

Long  of  Wraxall 
Longhurst,  William  Henry 
Lonsdale,  Earl  of.  See  Lowther, 

Hugh  Cecil 
Lonsdale,  Frederick 
Lopes,  Sir  Lopes  Massey 
Loraine,  Violet  Mary 
Lord,  Thomas 
Lorebum,      Earl.      See      Reid, 

Robert  Threshie 
Lorimer,  Sir  Robert  Stodart 
Lotbiniere,   Sir  Henry   Gustave 

Joly  de.   See  Joly  de  Lotbi- 
niere 
Lothian,  Marquess  of.  See  Kerr, 

Philip  Henry 
Louise  Caroline  Alberta,  princess 

of  Great  Britain 
Louise  Victoria  Alexandra  Dag- 
mar,  Princess  Royal  of  Great 

Britain 
Lovat,  Baron.  See  Fraser,  Simon 

Joseph 
Love,  Augustus  Edward  Hough 
Lovelace,  Earl  of.  See  Milbanke, 

Ralph  Gordon  Noel  King 
Lovett,  Richard 
Low,  Alexander,  Lord 
Low,  Sir  Robert  Cunliffe 
Low,  Sir  Sidney  James  Mark 
Lowe,  Sir  Drury  Curzon  Drury-. 

See  Drury-Lowe 
Lowe,  Eveline  Mary 
Lowke,  Wenman  Joseph  Bassett-. 

See  Bassett-Lowke 
Lowry,  Clarence  Malcolm 
Lowry,  Henry  Dawson 
Lowry,  Thomas  Martin 
Lowther,    Hugh    Cecil,   Earl   of 

Lonsdale 
Lowther,  James 

Lowther,    James   William,    Vis- 
count Ullswater 
Lowy,  Albert  or  Abraham 
Loyd-Lindsay,     Robert    James, 

Baron  Wantage.  See  Lindsay 
Luard,  Sir  William  Gamham 
Lubbock,  Sir  John,  Baron  Ave- 

bury 
Luby,  Thomas  Clarke 
Lucas,     Baron.     See     Herbert, 

Auberon  Thomas 
Lucas,  Sir  Charles  Prestwood 


1836-1920 
1869-1936 
1851-1940 
1855-1936 

1839-1911 

1817-1904 
1840-1924 
1865-1901 


1852-1915 


1878-1949 

1854-1924 
1819-1904 

1857-1944 

1881-1954 
1818-1908 
1886-1956 
1808-1908 

1846-1923 
1864-1929 


1829-1908 
1882-1940 
1848-1939 

1867-1931 

1871-1933 
1863-1940 

1839-1906 
1851-1904 
1845-1910 
1838-1911 
1857-1932 

1830-1908 
1869-1956 

1877-1953 
1909-1957 
1869-1906 
1874-1936 

1857-1944 
1840-1904 

1855-1949 

1816-1908 

1832-1901 
1820-1910 

1834r-1913 
1821-1901 

1876-1916 
1853-1931 


Lucas,  Edward  Verrall 
Lucas,  Keith 

Luckock,  Herbert  Mortimer 
Lucy,  Sir  Henry  William 
Ludlow,  John  Malcolm  Forbes 
Lugard,  Frederick  John  Dealtry, 

Baron 
Luke,     Baron.     See     Johnston, 

George  Lawson 
Luke,  Jemima 
Lukin,  Sir  Henry  Timson 
Lunn,  Sir  Henry  Simpson 
Lupton,  Joseph  Hirst 
Lush,  Sir  Charles  Montague 
Lusk,  Sir  Andrew 
Lutyens,  Sir  Edwin  Landseer 
Lutz,  (Wilhelm)  Meyer 
Luxmoore,  Sir  (Arthur)  Fairfax 

(Charles  Coryndon) 
Lyall,  Sir  Alfred  Comyn 
Lyall,  Sir  Charles  James 
Lyall,    Edna,    pseudonym.    See 

Bayly,  Ada  Ellen 
Lygon,  William,  Earl  Beauchamp 
Lyle,    Charles   Ernest   Leonard, 

Baron  Lyle  of  Westbourne 
Lynch,  Arthur  Alfred 
Lynd,  Robert  Wilson 
Lyne,  Joseph  Leycester  (Father 

Ignatius) 
Lyne,  Sir  William  John 
Lynskey,  Sir  George  Justin 
Lyon,    Claude    George    Bowes-, 

Earl  of  Strathmore  and  King- 

horne.  See  Bowes-Lyon 
Lyons,  Sir  Algernon  McLennan 
Lyons,  Sir  Henry  George 
Lyons,  Joseph  Aloysius 
Lyte,  Sir  Henry  Churchill  Max- 
well 
Lyttelton,  Alfred 
Lyttelton,  Arthur  Temple 
Lyttelton,  Edward 
Lyttelton,  Sir  Neville  Gerald 
Lytton,    Earl    of.    See    Bulwer- 

Lytton,      Victor      Alexander 

George  Robert 
Lytton,  Sir  Henry  Alfred 

MacAlister,  Sir  Donald 
MacAlister,  Sir  (George)  Ian 
Macan,  Sir  Arthur  Vernon 
Macara,  Sir  Charles  Wright 
McArthur,  Charles 
Macarthur,     Mary     Reid.     See 

Anderson 
Macartney,  Sir  George 
Macartney,  Sir  Samuel  Halliday 
Macaulay,  Dame  (Emilie)  Rose 
Macaulay,  James 
Macbain,  Alexander 
Macbeth,  Robert  Walker 
McBey,  James 
McCabe,  Joseph  Martin 
MacCallum,  Andrew 
McCalmont,  Harry  Leslie  Blun- 

dell 
McCardie,  Sir  Henry  Alfred 
McCarrison,  Sir  Robert 


1128 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  l»01-19eO 


MacCarthy,    Sir   (Charles   Otto) 

Desmond 
McCarthy,  Dame  (Emma)  Maud 
M'Carthy,  Justin 
McCarthy,  Lillah,  Lady  Keeble 
McClean,  Frank 

McClintock,  Sir  Francis  Leopold 
McClure,  Sir  John  David 
McCoan,  James  Carlile 
MacColl,  Dugald  Sutherland 
MacCoU,  Malcolm 
MacColl,  Norman 
MacCormac,  Sir  William 
McCormick,     William     Patrick 

Glyn 
McCormick,  Sir  William  Syming- 
ton 
McCudden,  James  Thomas  Byford 
MacCunn,  Hamish  (James) 
MacDermot,     Hugh     Hyacinth 

O'Rorke,  The  MacDermot 
Macdermott,  Gilbert  Hastings 
MacDermott,  Martin 
Macdonald,  Sir  Claude  Maxwell 
Macdonald,  Sir  George 
MacDonald,  George 
Macdonald,  Sir  Hector  Archibald 
Macdonald,  Hector  Munro 
MacDonald,  James  Ramsay 
Macdonald,    Sir   James   Ronald 

Leslie 
McDonald,  John  Blake 
Macdonald,  Sir  John  Denis 
Macdonald,   John   Hay  Athole, 

Lord  Kingsburgh 
MacDonald,  Sir  Murdoch 
Macdonell,  Arthur  Anthony 
MacDonell,  Sir  Hugh  Guion 
Macdonell,  Sir  John 
Macdonell,  Sir  Philip  James 
MacDonnell,    Antony     Patrick, 

Baron 
McDonnell,  Sir  Schomberg  Kerr 
McDougall,  William 
Mace,  James  (Jem) 
McEvoy,  Arthur  Ambrose 
McEwen,  Sir  John  Blackwood 
Macewen,  Sir  William 
Macfadyen,  Allan 
M'Fadyen,  John  Edgar 
MacFarlane,    Sir    (Frank)    Noel 

Mason-.    See    Mason-MacFar- 

lane 
Macfarren,  Walter  Cecil 
McGrath,  Sir  Patrick  Thomas 
MacGregor,  Sir  Evan 
MacGregor,  James 
MacGregor,  Sir  William 
McGrigor,  Sir  Rhoderick  Robert 
Machell,  James  Octavius 
Machray,  Robert 
Mclndoe,  Sir  Archibald  Hector 
M'Intosh,  William  Carmichael 
Macintyre,  Donald 
Maclver,    David   Randall-.    See 

Randall-Maclver 
Mackail,  John  William 
Mackay,  ^neas  James  George 
Mackay,  Alexander  - 


1877-1952 
1858-1949 
1830-1912 
1875-1960 
1837-1904 
1819-1907 
1860-1922 
1829-1904 
1859-1948 
1831-1907 
1843-1904 
1836-1901 

1877-1940 

1859-1930 

1895-1918 
1868-1916 

1834^1904 
1845-1901 
1823-1905 
1852-1915 
1862-1940 
1824-1905 
1853-1903 
1865-1935 
1866-1937 

1862-1927 
1829-1901 
1826-1908 

1836-1919 
1866-1957 
1854-1930 
1832-1904 
1845-1921 
1873-1940 

1844-1925 
1861-1915 
1871-1938 
1831-1910 
1878-1927 
1868-1948 
1848-1924 
1860-1907 
1870-1933 


1889-1953 
1826-1905 
1868-1929 
1842-1926 
1832-1910 
1846-1919 
1893-1959 
1837-1902 
1831-1904 
1900-1960 
1838-1931 
1831-1903 

1873-1945 
1859-1945 
1839-1911 
1893-1902 


Mackay,  Donald  James,  Baron 

Reay 
Mackay,   James   Lyle,   Earl   of 

Inchcape 
Mackay,  Mary,  'Marie  Corelli' 
McKechnie,  William  Sharp 
McKenna,  Reginald 
Mackennal,  Alexander 
Mackennal,  Sir  (Edgar)  Bertram 
Mackenzie,  Sir  Alexander 
McKenzie,  Alexander 
Mackenzie,  Sir  Alexander  Camp- 
bell 
Mackenzie,  Sir  George  Sutherland 
Mackenzie,  Sir  James 
M'Kenzie,  Sir  John 
MacKenzie,  John  Stuart 
McKenzie,  (Robert)  Tait 
Mackenzie,  Sir  Stephen 
Mackenzie,  Sir  William 
Mackenzie,  WiUiam  Warrender, 

Baron  Amulree 
Mackenzie  King,  William  Lyon. 

See  King 
McKerrow,  Ronald  Brunlees 
Mackinder,  Sir  Halford  John 
MacKinlay,  Antoinette.  See  Ster- 
ling 
MacKinnon,  Sir  Frank  Douglas 
Mackinnon,  Sir  William  Henry 
Mackintosh,  Sir  Alexander 
Mackintosh,  Charles  Rennie 
Mackintosh,  Hugh  Ross 
Mackintosh,  John 
McLachlan,  Robert 
Maclagan,  Christian 
Maclagan,  Sir  Eric  Robert  Dal- 

rymple 
Maclagan,  William  Dalrymple 
Maclaren,  Alexander 
MacLaren,  Archibald  Campbell 
McLaren,      Charles      Benjamin 

Bright,  Baron  Aberconway 
McLaren,  Henry  Duncan,  Baron 

Aberconway 
Maclaren,   Ian,  pseudonym.  See 

Watson,  John 
McLaren,  John,  Lord 
Maclay,  Joseph  Paton,  Baron 
Maclean,  Sir  Donald 
Maclean,  Sir  Harry  Aubrey  de 

Vere 
Maclean,  James  Mackenzie 
McLean,  Norman 
Maclear,  George  Frederick 
Maclear,  John  Fiot  Lee  Pearse 
McLennan,  Sir  John  Cimningham 
Macleod,  Fiona,  pseudonym.  See 

Sharp,  William 
Macleod,  Henry  Dunning 
Macleod,  John  James  Rickard 
McLintock,  Sir  William 
McLintock,      William      Francis 

Porter 
Maclure,  Edward  Craig 
Maclure,  Sir  John  William  (1835- 

1901).     See     under    Maclure, 

Edward  Craig. 
McMahon,  Sir  (Arthur)  Henry 


1889-1921 

1852-1932 
1865-1924 
1863-1930 

186;i-1943 
1885-1904 
1863-1931 
1842-1902 
1869-1951 

1847-1935 
1844-1910 
1858-1925 
1836-1901 
1860-1935 
1867-1938 
1844-1909 
1849-1923 

1860-1942 

1874-1950 
1872-1940 

1861-1947 

1848-1904 
1871-1946 
1852-1929 
1858-1948 
1868-1928 
1870-1936 
1833-1907 
1887-1904 
1811-1901 

1879-1951 
1826-1910 
182&-1910 
1871-1944 

1850-1934 

1879-1963 

1850-1907 
1831-1910 
1857-1951 
1864-1932 

X848-1920 
1835-1906 
1865-1947 
1833-1902 
1838-1907 
1867-1935 

1855-1905 
1821-1902 
1876-1936 
1873-1947 

1887-1960 
1838-190)^ 


1862-1949 


iiaor 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


McMahon,  Charles  Alexander 
MacMahon,  Percy  Alexander 
Macmillan,  Sir  Frederick  Orridge 
Macmillan,  Hugh 
Macmillan,  Hugh  Pattison,  Baron 
McMillan,  Margaret 
McMurrich,  James  Playfair 
Macnaghten,  Sir  Edward,  Baron 
McNair,  John  Frederick  Adolphus 
Macnamara,  Thomas  James 
McNeil,  Hector 

McNeile,  (Herman)  Cyril,  'Sapper' 
McNeill,  James 

MacNeill,  John  (otherwise  Eoin) 
McNeill,  Sir  John  Carstairs 
MacNeill,  John  Gordon  Swift 
McNeill,    Ronald    John,    Baron 

Cushendun 
Macphail,  Sir  (John)  Andrew 
Macpherson,  (James)  Ian,  Baron 

Strathcarron 
Macpherson,    Sir    John    Moles- 
worth 
McQueen,  Sir  John  Withers 
Macqueen-Pope,  Walter  James 
Macready,  Sir  (Cecil  Frederick) 

Nevil 
Macrorie,  William  Kenneth 
M'Taggart,  John  M'Taggart  Ellis 
McTaggart,  William 
MacWhirter,  John 
Madden,  Sir  Charles  Edward 
Madden,  Frederic  William 
Madden,    Katherine    Cecil.    See 

Thurston 
Madden,  Thomas  More 
Magrath,  John  Richard 
Maguire,  James  Rochfort 
Mahaffy,  Sir  John  Pentland 
Mahon,  Sir  Bryan  Thomas 
Mair,  William 
Maitland,  Agnes  Catherine 
Maitland,    Sir    Arthur    Herbert 

Drummond       Ramsay-Steel-. 

See  Steel-Maitland 
Maitland,  Frederic  William 
Maitland,  John  Alexander  FuUer- 
Malan,  Daniel  Fran9ois 
Malan,  Francois  Stephanus 
Malcolm,  Sir  Dougal  Orme 
Malet,  Sir  Edward  Baldwin 
Malet,    Lucas,    pseudonym.    See 

Harrison,  Mary  St.  Leger 
Mallock,  William  Hurrell 
Mallory,  George  Leigh 
Mallory,     Sir     Trafford     Leigh 

Leigh-.  See  Leigh-Mallory 
Malone,  Sylvester 
Maneckji    Byramji    Dadabhoy, 

Sir.  See  Dadabhoy 
Manley,  William  George  Nicholas 
Mann,  Arthur  Henry 
Mann,  Cathleen  Sabine 
Mann,  Thomas  (Tom) 
Manners,    (Lord)    John    James 

Robert,  Duke  of  Rutland 
Manning,  Bernard  Lord 
Manning,  John  Edmondson 
Manns,  Sir  August 


1830-1904      Mansbridge,  Albert 
1854-1929      Mansel-Pleydell,  John  Ciavell 
1851-1936      Mansergh,  James 
1833-1903      Mansfield,  Sir  John  Maurice 
1873-1952      Mansfield,  Kathenne,  pseudonym. 
1860-1931  See  Murry,  Kathleen 

1859-1939      Mansfield,  Robert  Blachford 
1830-1913      Manson,  James  Bolivar 
1828-1910      Manson,  Sir  Patrick 
1861-1931      Manson,  Thomas  Walter 
1907-1955      Maple,  Sir  John  Blundell 
1888-1937      Mapleson,  James  Henry 
1869-1938      Mapother,  Edward  Dillon 
1867-1945      Mappin,  Sir  Frederick  Thorpe 
1831-1904      Marett,  Robert  Ranulph 
1849-1926      Margoliouth,  David  Samuel 

Marie  Louise,  Princess 
1861-1934  Marillier,  Henry  Currie 
1864-1938      Marjoribanks,    Edward,    Baron 

Tweedmouth 
1880-1937      Markham,  Sir  Albert  Hastings 

Markham,  Sir  Clements  Robert 
1853-1914      Markham,  Violet  Rosa 
1836-1909      Marks,  David  Woolf 
1888-1960      Marlowe,  Thomas 

Marr,  John  Edward 
1862-1946      Marriott,  Sir  John  Arthur  Ran- 
1831-1905  some 

1866-1925      Marriott,  Sir  William  Thackeray 
1835-1910      Marris,  Sir  William  Sinclair 
1839-1911       Marsden,  Alexander  Edwin 
1862-1935      Marsh,  Sir  Edward  Howard 
1839-1904      Marshall,  Alfred 

Marshall,  George  William 
1875-1911      Marshall,    Sir    Guy    Anstruther 
1844-1902  Knox 

1839-1930      Marshall,  Sir  John  Hubert 
1855-1925      Marshall,  Julian 
1839-1919      Marshall,  Sir  William  Raine 
1862-1930      Marshall  Hall,  Sir  Edward.  See 
1830-1920  Hall 

1850-1906      Martel,  Sir  Giffard  Le  Quesne 

Marten,    Sir    (Clarence)    Henry 
(Kennett) 
1876-1935      Martin,  Alexander 
1850-1906      Martin,  Sir  Charles  James 
1856-1936      Martin,  Herbert  Henry 
1874-1959      Martin,  Sir  Theodore 
1871-1941      Martin,  Sir  Thomas  Acquin 
1877-1955      Martin,  Violet  Florence,  'Martin 
1837-1908  Ross' 

Martin-Harvey,  Sir  John  Martin 
1852-1931      Martindale,  Hilda 
1849-1923      Marwick,  Sir  James  David 
1886-1924      Mary,  Queen 

Masham,     Baron.     See     Lister, 
1892-1944  Samuel  Cunliffe 

1822-1906      Maskelyne,  Mervyn  Herbert  Nevil 

Story-.  See  Story-Maskelyne 
1865-1953      Mason,  Alfred  Edward  Woodley 
1831-1901       Mason,  Arthur  James 
1850-1929      Mason-MacFarlane,  Sir  (Frank) 
1896-1959  Noel 

1856-1941       Massey,  Gerald 

Massey,  William  Ferguson 
1818-1906       Massingberd,       Sir       Archibald 
1892-1941  Armar      Montgomery'-.       See 

1848-1910  Montgomery-Massingberd 

1825-1907      Massingham,  Harold  John 


1130 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1060 


Massingham,  Henry  William 
Masson,  David 
Masson,  Sir  David  Orme 
Massy,  William  Godfrey  Dunham 
Masterman,     Charles    Frederick 

Gurney 
Masters,  Maxwell  Tylden 
Matheson,  George 
Mathew,  Sir  James  Charles 
Mathew,  Theobald 
Mathews,  Basil  Joseph 
Mathews,  Charles  Edward 
Mathews,  Sir  Charles  Willie 
Mathews,  Sir  Lloyd  William 
Mathews,    Dame    Vera    (Elvira 

Sibyl  Maria)  Laiighton 
Mathieson,  William  Law 
Matthews,  Alfred  Edward 
Matthews,       Henry,       Viseomit 

Llandaff 
Matthews,  Sir  William 
Maturin,  Basil  William 
Maud  Charlotte  Mary  Victoria, 

Queen  of  Norway 
Maude,  Aylmer 

Maude,  Sir  (Frederick)  Stanley 
Maugham,      Frederic     Herbert, 

Viscount 
Maurice,  Sir  Frederick  Barton 
Maurice,  Sir  John  Frederick 
Mavor,  Osborne  Henry,  'James 

Bridie' 
Mawdsley,  James 
Mawer,  Sir  Allen 
Mawson,  Sir  Douglas 
Maxim,  Sir  Hiram  Stevens 
Maxse,  Sir  (Frederick)  Ivor 
Maxse,  Leopold  James 
Maxton,  James 
Maxwell,  Sir  Herbert  Eustace 
Maxwell,  Sir  John  Grenfell 
Maxwell     (formerly     Braddon), 

Mary  Elizabeth 
Maxwell  Lyte,  Sir  Henry  Chur- 
chill. See  Lyte 
May,  George  Ernest,  Baron 
May,  Philip  William  (Phil) 
May,  Sir  William  Henry 
Maybury,  Sir  Henry  Percy 
Mayor,  John  Eyton  Bickersteth 
Meade,  Richard  James,  Earl  of 

Clanwilliam 
Meakin,  James  Edward  Budgett 
Meath,  Earl  of.  See  Brabazon, 

Reginald 
Medd,  Peter  Goldsmith 
Medlicott,  Henry  Benedict 
Mee,  Arthur  Henry 
Meghnad  Saha 
Meighen,  Arthur 
Meiklejohn,  John  Miller  Dow 
Melba,  Dame  Nellie 
Melchett,     Baron.     See     Mond, 

Alfred  Moritz 
Meldrum,  Charles 
Mellanby,  Sir  Edward 
Mellanby,  John 
Mellon  (formerly  Woolgar),  Sarah 

Jane  ^  >  i 


1860-1924 
1822-1907 
1858-1937 
1838-1906 

1874-1927 
1833-1907 
1842-1906 
1830-1908 
1866-1939 
1879-1951 
1834-1905 
1850-1920 
1850-1901 

1888-1959 
1868-1938 
1869-1960 

1826-1913 
1844-1922 
1847-1915 

1860-1938 
1858-1938 
1864-1917 

1866-1958 
1871-1951 
1841-1912 

1888-1951 
1848-1902 
1879-1942 
1882-1958 
1840-1916 
1862-1958 
1864^1932 
1885-1946 
1845-1937 
1859-1929 

1837-1915 

1848-1940 
1871-1946 
1864^1903 
1849-1930 
1864-1943 
1825-1910 

1832-1907 
1866-1906 

1841-1929 
1829-1908 
1829-1905 
1875-1943 
1893-1956 
1874-1960 
1836-1902 
1861-1931 

1868-1930 
1821-1901 
1884-1955 
1878-1939 

,1,8^1909 


Melville,  Arthur 

Mendelsohn,  Eric 

Mendl,  Sir  Charles  Ferdinand 

Menzies,  Sir  Frederick  Norton  Kay 

Mercer,  Cecil  William,  'Dom- 
ford  Yates' 

Mercer,  James 

Meredith,  George 

Meredith,  Sir  William  Ralph 

Merivale,  Herman  Charles 

Merriman,  Henry  Seton,  pseud- 
onym. See  Scott,  Hugh  Stowell 

Merriman,  John  Xavier 

Merrivale,  Baron.  See  Duke, 
Henry  Edward 

Merry,  William  Walter 

Merry  del  Val,  Rafael 

Mersey,  Viscount.  See  Bigham, 
John  Charles 

Merthyr,  Baron.  See  Lewis, 
William  Thomas 

Merz,  Charles  Hesterman 

Meston,  James  Scorgie,  Baron 

Metcalfe,  Sir  Charles  Herbert 
Theophilus 

Methuen,  Sir  Algernon  Methuen 
Marshall 

Methuen,  Paul  Sanford,  Baron 

Meux  (formerly  Lambton),  Sir 
Hedworth 

Mew,  Charlotte  Mary 

Meyer,  Frederick  Brotherton 

Meyer,  Sir  William  Stevenson 

Meynell,  Alice  Christiana  Ger- 
trude 

Meyrick,  Edward 

Meyrick,  Frederick 

Michell,  Anthony  George  Maldon 

Michell,  Sir  Lewis  Loyd 

Michie,  Alexander 

Micklethwaite,  John  Thomas 

Midlane,  Albert 

Midleton,  Earl  of:  See  Brodrick, 
(William)  St.  John  (Fremantle) 

Miers,  Sir  Henry  Alexander 

Milbanke,  Ralph  Gordon  Noel 
King,  Earl  of  Lovelace 

Mildmay,  Anthony  Bingham, 
Baron  Mildmay  of  Flete 

Milford,  Sir  Humphrey  Sumner 

Milford  Haven,  Marquess  of. 
See  Mountbatten,  Louis  Alex- 
ander 

Mill,  Hugh  Robert 

Millar,  Gertie 

Miller,  Sir  James  Percy 

Miller,  William 

Milligan,  George 

Milligan,  Sir  William 

Mills,  Bertram  Wagstaff 

Mills,  Sir  William 

Mills,  WilHam  Hobson 

Milne,  Alan  Alexander 

Milne,  Sir  (Archibald)  Berkeley 

Milne,  Edward  Arthur 

Milne,  George  Francis,  Baron 

Milne,  John 

Milne-Watson,  Sir  David  Milne 

Milner,  Alfred,  Viscount 


1855-1904 
1887-1953 
1871-1958 
1875-1949 

1885-1960 

188;i-1932 
1828-1909 
18^10-1923 
1830-1906 

1862-1903 
1841-1926 

1855-1939 
1835-1918 
1865-1930 

1840-1929 

1887-1914 
1874-1940 

1865-1943 

1858-1928 

1856-1924 
1845-1932 

1856-1929 
1860-1928 
1847-1929 
1860-1922 

1847-1922 
1854-1938 
1827-1906 
1870-1959 
1842-1928 
1833-1902 
1843-1906 
1825-1909 

1856-1942 
1858-1942 

1880-1906 

1000-1950 
1877-1952 


1854-1921 

1861-1950 
1870-1952 
1864-1906 
1864-1945 
1860-1934 
1864-1929 
1873-1938 
1856-1932 
1873-1959 
1882-1956 
1855-1938 
180^-1950 
1866-1948 
1850-1913 
1860-1945 
1854-1925 


1131 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Milner,    Violet    GJeorgina,    Vis- 
countess 
Milnes,  Robert  Offley  Ashburton 

Crewe-,    Marquess    of   Crewe. 

See  Crewe-Milnes 
Minett,  Francis  Colin 
Minto,  Earl  of.  See  Elliot,  Gilbert 

John  Murray  Kynynmond 
Minton,  Francis  John 
Mirza    Mohanmiad    Ismail,    Sir 

See  Ismail 
Mitchell,  Sir  Arthur 
Mitchell,  John  Murray 
Mitchell,  Sir  Peter  Chalmers 
Mitchell,  Reginald  Joseph 
Mitchell,  Sir  William  Gore  Suther- 
land 
Mitford,       Algernon       Bertram 

Freeman-,    Baron    Redesdale 
Moberly,  Robert  Campbell 
Mocatta,  Frederic  David 
Moens,  William  John  Charles 
Moeran,  Ernest  Jolin 
Moffatt,  James 
Moir,  Frank  Lewis 
Mollison,  Amy.  See  Johnson 
Mollison,  James  Allan 
MoUoy,  Gerald 
Molloy,  James  Lynam 
Molloy,  Joseph  Fitz(ierald 
Molony,  Sir  Thomas  Francis 
Molyneux,    Sir    Robert    Henry 

More-.  See  More-Molyneux 
'Mon,    Hwfa',    pseudonym.    See 

Williams,  Rowland 
Monash,  Sir  John 
Moncreiff,  Henry  James,  Baron 
Moncrieff ,  Sir  Alexander 
Mond,  Alfred  Moritz,  Baron  Mel- 

chett 
Mond,  Ludwig 
Mond,  Sir  Robert  Ludwig 
Monkhouse,  William  Cosmo 
Monro,  Sir  Charles  Carmichael 
Monro,  Charles  Henry 
Monro,  David  Binning 
Monro,  Harold  Edward 
Monro,  Sir  Horace  Cecil 
Monson,  Sir  Edmund  John 
Montagu  of  Beaulieu,  Baron.  See 

Douglas-Scott-Montagu,  John 

Walter  Edward 
Montagu,  Edwin  Samuel 
Montagu,  Lord  Robert 
Montagu,  Samuel,  Baron  Swayth- 

ling 
Montagu-Douglas-Scott,       Lord 

Charles  Thomas.  See  Scott 
Montagu-Douglas-Scott,      Lord 

Francis  George.  See  Scott 
Montague,  Charles  Edward 
Montague,  Francis  Charles 
Monteath,  Sir  James 
Montefiore,       Claude       Joseph 

Gk)ldsmid- 
Montgomerie,  Robert  Archibald 

James 
Montgomery-Massingberd,        Sir 

Archibald  Armar 


Montmorency,    James    Edward 
1872-1958  Geoffrey    de.    See    de    Mont- 

morency 

Montmorency,  Raymond  Harvey 
1858-1945  de.     Viscount    Frankfort    de 

1890-1953  Montmorency.    See  de   Mont- 

morency 
1845-1914      Monypenny,  William  Flavelle 
1917-1957      Moody,  Harold  Arundel 

Moor,  Sir  Frederick  Robert 
188a-1959      Moor,  Sir  Ralph  Denham  Ray- 
1826-1909  ment 

1815-1904      Moore,  Arthur  William 
1864-1945      Moore,  Edward 
1895-1937      Moore,  George  Augustus 

Moore,  George  Edward 
1888-1944      Moore,    Mary.    See    Wyndham, 

Mary,  Lady 
1837-1916      Moore,  Stuart  Archibald 
1845-1903      Moore,  Temple  Lushington 
1828-1905      Moorhouse,  James 
1833-1904      Moran,  Patrick  Francis 
1894-1950      Morant,  Sir  Robert  Laurie 
1870-1944      More-Molyneux,  Sir  Robert  Henry 
1852-1904      Moresby,  John 
1903-1941      Morfill,  William  Richard 
1905-1959      Morgan,  Charles  Langbridge 
1834-1906      Morgan,  Conwy  Lloyd 
1837-1909      Morgan,  Edward  Delmar 
1858-1908      Morgan,  Sir  Gilbert  Thomas 
1865-1949      Morgan,  John  Hartman 

Moriarty,  Henry  Augustus 
1838-1904      Morison,  Sir  Theodore 

Morland,  Sir  Thomas  Lethbridge 
1823-1905  Napier 

1865-1931      Morley,    Earl    of.    See    Parker, 
1840-1909  Albert  Edmund 

1829-1906      Morley,  John,  Viscount  Morley 

of  Blackburn 
1868-1930      Morley  Horder,  Percy  (Richard). 
1839-1909  See  Horder 

1867-1938      Morrell,    Lady    Ottoline    Violet 
1840-1901,  Anne 

1860-1929      Morris,  Edward  Patrick,  Baron 
1835-1908      Morris,  Sir  Lewis 
1836-1905      Morris,  Michael,  Baron  Morris  and 
1879-1932  Killanin 

1861-1949      Morris,  Philip  Richard 
1834-1909      Morris,  Tom 

Morris,  William  O'Connor 

Morris-Jones,  Sir  John 
1866-1929      Morrison,  Walter 
1879-1924      Morshead,  Sir  Leslie  James 
1825-1902      Moseley,  Henry  Gwyn  Jeffreys 

Mott,  Sir  Basil 
1832-1911      Mott,  Sir  Frederick  Walker 

Mottistone,    Baron.    See    Seely, 
1839-1911  John  Edward  Bernard 

Moule,  George  Evans 
1879-1952      Moule,  Handley  Carr  Glyn 
1867-1928      Moulton,  James  Hope 
1858-1935      Moulton,  John  Fletcher,  Baron 
1847-1929      Mount     Stephen,     Baron.     See 

Stephen,  George 
1858-1938      Mount  Temple,  Baron.  See  Ash- 
ley, Wilfrid  William 
1855-1908      Mountbatten,   Edwina  Cynthia 
Annette,     Countess     Mount- 
1871-1947  batten  of  Burma 


1132 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1060 


Mountbatten,  Louis  Alexander, 
Marquess    of   Milford    Haven 
(formerly  Prince  Louis  Alex- 
ander of  Battenberg)  1854-1921 
Mountevans,  Baron.  See  Evans, 
Edward  Ratcliffe  Garth  Rus- 
sell 1880-1957 
Mountford,  Edward  William  1855-1908 
Mowat,  Sir  Oliver  1820-1903 
Mowatt,  Sir  Francis  1837-1919 
Moyne,    Baron.    See    Guinness, 

Walter  Edward  1880-1944 
Moynihan,  Berkeley  George  An- 
drew, Baron  1865-1936 
Mozley,  John  Kenneth  188S-1946 
Muddiman,  Sir  Alexander  Phillips  1875-1928 

Muir,  Edwin                            1887-1959 

Muir,  (John)  Ramsay  (Bryce)  1872-1941 

Muir,  Sir  Robert  1864-1959 

Muir,  Sir  W  illiam  1819-1905 

Muirhead,  John  Henry  1855-1940 
Miiller,  Ernest  Bruce  I  wan-.  See 

Iwan-Miiller  1853-1910 

Mullins,  Edwin  Roscoe  1848-1907 

Munby,  Arthur  Joseph  1828-1910 

Munnings,  Sir  Alfred  James  1878-1959 

Munro,  Hector  Hugh  1870-1916 

Munro,  James  1832-1908 
Munro-Ferguson,  Ronald  Crauford, 

Viscount  Novar.  See  Ferguson  1860-1934 
Murdoch,  William  Lloyd  1855-1911 
Murison,  Alexander  Falconer  1847-1934 
Murray,  Alexander  Stuart  1841-1904 
Murray,  Andrew  Graham,  Vis- 
count Dunedin  1849-1942 
Murray,  Sir  Archibald  James  1860-1945 
Murray,  Charles  Adolphus,  Earl 

of  Dunmore  1841-1907 

Murray,  David  Christie  1847-1907 
Murray,    Sir    (George)    Evelyn 

(Pemberton)  1880-1947 

Murray,  George  Gilbert  Aim^  1866-1957 

Murray,  Sir  George  Herbert  1849-1936 

Murray,  George  Redmayne  1865-1939 

Murray,  George  Robert  Mihie  185^1911 
Murray,    Sir    James    Augustus 

Henry  ^^^-*2!^ 

Murray,  Sir  James  Wolfe  1853-1919 

Murray,  Sir  John  ^®*^-}21t 

Murray,  Sir  John  1851-1928 
Murray,     Sir     (John)     Hubert 

(Plur;kett)  1861-1940 
Murray,    Sir   Oswyn   Alexander 

Ruthven  ^^^^:„e2 

Murry,  John  Middleton  1889-1957 
Murry,     Kathleen,     *Katherine 

Ssfield'  ^T-\^J1 

Musgrave,  Sir  James  ^^??"}aX; 

Muybridge,  Eadweard  ^^^^J2?f 

Myers,  Charles  Samuel  ??T?-J2oi 

Myers,  Ernest  James  -^Strioll 

Myers,  Leopold  Hamilton  -^rxi'lA?? 

Myres,  Sir  John  Linton  1869-1954 
Mysore,    Sir    Shri    Krishnaraja 

Wadiyar  Bahadur,  Maharaja  of  1884-1V40 

Nair,  Sir  Chettur  Sankaran.  See 

SankaranNair  ISl  ?|^ 

Naime,  Alexander  1863-lVdO 


Namier,  Sir  I^wis  Bernstein  1888-1960 
Narbeth,  John  Harper  1863-1944 
Nares,  Sir  George  Strong  1831-1915 
Nash,  Paul  18H9-1946 
Nathan,  Sir  Matthew  1862-1939 
Nawanagar,  Maharaja  Shri  Ran- 
jitsinhji     Vibhaji,     Maharaja 
Jam  Saheb  of  1872-1933 
Nehru,  Pandit  Motilal  1861-1931 
Neil,  Robert  Alexander  1852-1901 
Neil,  Samuel  1825-1901 
Neilson,  George  1858-1923 
Neilson,  Julia  Emilie  1868-1957 
Nelson,   Eliza   (1827-1908).   See 
under  Craven,  Henry  Thorn- 
ton 181&-1905 
Nelson,  Sir  Hugh  Muir  1885-1906 
Neruda,  Wilma  Maria  Francises. 

See  Hall^,  Lady  1889-1911 

Nesbit,  Edith.  See  Bland  1858-1924 

Nettleship,  Edward  1845-1913 

Nettleship,  John  Trivett  1841-1902 

Neubauer,  Adolf  1882-1907 

Neville,  Henry  1887-1910 
Nevinson,   Christopher  Richard 

Wynne  188^1946 

Nevinson,  Henry  Woodd  1856-1941 
Newall      (formerly     Phillpotts), 

Dame  Bertha  Surtees  1877-1932 
NewaU,  Hugh  Frank  1857-1944 
Newberry,  Percy  Edward  1869-1949 
Newbold,  Sir  Douglas  1894-1945 
Newbolt,  Sir  Henry  John  1862-1938 
Newbolt,  William  Charles  Ed- 
mund 1844r-1930 
Newman,  Ernest  Iify  )  •uM868-1959 
Newman,  Sir  George  '  lu.  1870-1948 
Newman,  William  Lambert  1834-1923 
Newmarch,  Charles  Henry  1824-1903 
Newnes,  Sir  George  1851-1910 
Newsholme,  Sir  Arthur  1857-1943 
Newton,  Baron.  See  Legh,  Thomas 

Wodehouse  r.,[  .  unl  1857-1942 

Newton,  Alfred  •    '  ^  -  "•   1829-1907 

Newton,  Ernest  1860-1922' 

Nichols,  Robert  Malise  Bowyer  1893-1944 

Nicholson,  Sir  Charles  1808-1903 

Nicholson,  Sir  Charles  Archibald  1867-1949 

Nicholson,  Charles  Ernest  1868-1954 
Nicholson,     Edward     Williams 

Byron  ^^^1^2 

Nicholson,  George  ^^'^"}J?2 

Nicholson,  Joseph  Shield  1850-1927 

Nicholson,  Reynold  Alleyne  ^®^^}?TX 

Nicholson,  Sir  Sydney  Hugo  1875-1947 

Nicholson,    William    Gustavus,  ^ 

Baron  1845-1918 
Nicholson,  Sir  WUliam  Newzam 

Prior  1872-1V4V 

Nickalls,Guy  1B66-1935 

Nicol,  Erskine  J???"}™ 

Nicoll,  Sir  William  Robertson  1851-19^3 
Nicolson,  Adela  Florence,  'Laur- 


ence  Hope 
Nicolson,  Sir  Arthur,  Baron  Car- 

Nicolson,  Malcolm  Hassels  (1843- 
1904).  See  under  Nicolson, 
Adela  Florence 


1865-1904 
1849-1928 


1133 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Nightingale,  Florence 

Nixon,  Sir  John  Eccles 

Noble,  Sir  Andrew 

Noble,  Montagu  Alfred 

Noble,  Sir  Percy  Lockhart  Har- 

nam 
Nodal,  John  Howard 
Noel-Buxton,      Noel      Edward, 

Baron 
Norfolk,  Duke  of.  See  Howard, 

Henry  FitzAlan- 
Norgate,  Kate 
Norman,  Conolly 
Norman,  Sir  Francis  Booth 
Norman,  Sir  Henry  Wylie 
Norman,  Montagu  Collet,  Baron 
Norman-Neruda,    Wilma    Maria 

Francisca.  See  Hall6,  Lady 
Northbrook,  Earl  of.  See  Baring, 

Thomas  George 
Northcliffe,  Viscount.  See  Harms- 
worth,  Alfred  Charles  William 
Northcote,  Henry  Stafford,  Baron 
Northcote,  James  Spencer 
Northumberland,  Duke  of.   See 

Percy,  Alan  Ian 
Norton,    Baron.    See    Adderley, 

Charles  Bowyer 
Norton,  Edward  Felix 
Norton,  John 
Norton-Griffiths,  Sir  John 
Norway,    Nevil    Shute,     'Nevil 

Shute' 
Norwich,  Viscount.  See  Cooper, 

Alfred  Duff 
Norwood,  Sir  Cyril 
Novar,  Viscount.  See  Ferguson, 

Ronald  Crauford  Munro- 
Novello     (afterwards     Countess 

Gigliucci),  Clara  Anastasia 
Novello,  Ivor 
Noyes,  Alfred 

Nunbumholme,  Baron.  See  Wil- 
son, Charles  Henry 
Nunn,  Joshua  Arthur 
Nunn,  Sir  (Thomas)  Percy 
Nutt,  Alfred  Trubner 
Nuttall,  Enos 
Nuttall,  George  Henry  Falkiner 

Oakeley,  Sir  Herbert  Stanley 

Oakley,  Sir  John  Hubert 

Oates,  Lawrence  Edward  Grace 

O'Brien,  Charlotte  Grace 

O'Brien,  Cornelius 

O'Brien,  Ignatius  John,  Baron 
Shandon 

O'Brien,  James  Francis  Xavier 

O'Brien,  Peter,  Baron 

O'Brien,  William 

O'Callaghan,  Sir  Francis  Lang- 
ford 

O'Connor,  Charles  Yelverton 

O'Connor,  James 

O'Connor,  Thomas  Power 

O'Conor,  Charles  Owen  ('O'Conor 
Don') 

O'Conor,     Sir  Nicholas  Roderick 

0*Dohert  y,  Kevin  Izod 


1820-1910       O'Doherty      (formerlv      Kelly), 
1857-1921  Mary  Anne  (1826-1910).  See 

1831-1915  under  O'Doherty,  Kevin  Izod 

1873-1940      O'Donnell,  Patrick 

O'Dwyer,  Sir  Michael  Francis 
1880-1955      Ogden,  Charles  Kay 
1831-1909      Ogilvie,  Sir  Frederick  Wolff 

Ogle,  John  William 
1869-1948      O'Hanlon,  John 

O'Higgins,  Kevin  Christopher 
1847-1917       Oldham,   Charles   James    (1843- 
1853-1935  1907).  See  under  Oldham,  Henry 

1853-1908      Oldham.  Henry 
1830-1901       O'Leary  John 
1826-1904      Oliver,  David  Thomas 
1871-1950      Oliver,  Francis  Wall 

Oliver,  Frederick  Scott 
1839-1911       Oliver,  Samuel  Pasfield 

Oliver,  Sir  Thomas 
1826-1904      Olivier,  Sydney  Haldane,  Baron 

Olpherts,  Sir  William 
1865-1922      Olsson,  Julius 
1846-191 1      Oman,  Sir  Charles  William  Chad- 
1821-1907  wick 

Oman,  John  Wood 
1880-1930      Ommanney,  Sir  Erasmus 

Ommanney,  George  Druce  Wynne 
1814-1905  Onslow,  William  Hillier,  Earl 
1884-1954  of  Onslow 

1823-1904      Opp^,  Adolph  Paul 
1871-1930      Oppenheim,  Edward  Phillips 

Oppenheim,  Lassa  Francis  Law- 
1899-1960  rence 

Oppenheimer,  Sir  Ernest 
1890-1954      Orage,  Alfred  Richard 
1875-1956      Oram,  Sir  Henry  John 

Orchardson,  Sir  William  Quiller 
1860-1934      Orczy,  Emma  Magdalena  Rosa- 
lia   Marie    Josepha    Barbara, 
1818-1908  Baroness 

1893-1951       Ord,  William  Miller 
1880-1958      O'Rell,    Max,    pseudonym.    See 

Blouet,  L^on  Paul 
1833-1907      Ormerod,  Eleanor  Anne 
1853-1908      Orpen,   Sir  WUliam  Newenham 
1870-1944  Montague 

1856-1910      Orr,  Alexandra  Sutherland 
1842-1916      Orr,  William  McFadden 
1862-1937      Orton,  Charles  William  Previt^-. 

See  Previt^-Orton 
1830-1903      Orwell,  George,  pseudonym.  See 
1867-1946  Blair,  Eric  Arthur 

1880-1912      Orwin,  Charles  Stewart 
1845-1909      Osborne,  Walter  Frederick 
1843-1906      O'Shea,  John  Augustus 

O'Shea,  William  Henry 
1857-1930      Osier,  Abraham  FoUett 
1828-1905      Osier,  Sir  William 
1842-1914       O'Sullivan,  Cornelius 
1852-1928      Ott^,  Ehse 

Ottley,  Sir  Charles  Langdale 
1839-1909      Ouida,   pseudonym.    See    De    la 
1843-1902  Ram6e,  Marie  Louise 

1836-1910      Ouless,  Walter  William 
1848-1929      Overton,  John  Henry 

Overtoun,  Baron.  See  White, 
1838-1906  John  Campbell 

1843-1908      Owen,  John 
1823-1905      Owen,  Robert 

1134 


1856-1927 
1864-1940 
1889-1957 
1893-1949 
1824-1905 
1821-1905 
1892-1927 


1815-1902 
1830-1907 
1863-1947 
1864-1951 
1864-1934 
1838-1907 
1853-1942 
1859-1943 
1822-1902 
1864-1942 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1960 


Oxford  and  Asquith,  Countess  of. 
See  Asquith,  Emma  Alice  Mar- 
garet (Margot) 

Oxford   and   Asquith,    Earl   of. 

See  Asquith,  Herbert  Henry- 
Page,  Sir  Archibald 

Page,  H.  A.,  pseudonym.  See 
Japp,  Alexander  Hay 

Page,  Sir  Leo  Francis 

Page,  Thomas  Ethelbert 

Page,  William 

Paget,  Francis 

Paget,  Dame  (Mary)  Rosalind 

Paget,  Lady  Muriel  Evelyn  Ver- 
non 

Paget,  Sir  Richard  Arthur  Sur- 
tees 

Paget,  Sidney  Edward 

Paget,  Stephen 

Paget,  Violet,  'Vernon  Lee' 

Pain,  Barry  Eric  Odell 

Paine,  Charles  Hubert  Scott-. 
See  Scott-Paine 

Pakenham,  Sir  Francis  John 

Pakenham,  Sir  William  Christo- 
pher 

Palairet,  Sir  (Charles)  Michael 

Palgrave,  Sir  Reginald  Francis 
Douce 

Palles,  Christopher 

Palmer,  Sir  Arthur  Power 

Palmer,  Sir  Charles  Mark 

Palmer,  Sir  Elwin  Mitford 

Palmer,  George  Herbert 

Palmer,  George  William 

Palmer,  William  Waldegrave, 
Earl  of  Selbome 

Paneth,  Friedrich  Adolf 

Pankhurst,  Dame  Christabel 
Harriette 

Pankhurst,  Emmeline 

Pares,  Sir  Bernard 

Paris,  Sir  Archibald 

Parish,  William  Douglas 

Parker,  Albert  Edmund,  Earl  of 
Morley 

Parker,  Charles  Stuart 

Parker,  Eric  (Frederick  Moore 
Searle) 

Parker,  Sir  (Horatio)  Gilbert 
(George) 

Parker,  John 

Parker,  Joseph 

Parker,  Louis  Napoleon 

Parker,  Robert  John,  Baron 

Parkin,  Sir  George  Robert 

Parmoor,  Baron.  See  Cripps, 
Charles  Alfred 

Parr  (formerly  Taylor),  Louisa 

Parratt,  Sir  Walter 

Parry,  Sir  Charles  Hubert  Hast- 
ings 

Parry,  Joseph 

Parry,  Joseph  Haydn  (1864-1894) 
See  under  Parry,  Joseph 

Parsons,  Alfred  William 

Parsons,  Sir  Charles  Algernon 

Parsons,  Sir  John  Herbert 


1864-1945 

1852-1928 

1875-1949 

1837-1905 
1800-1951 
1850-1936 
1861-1934 
1851-1911 
1855-1948 

1876-1938 

1869-1955 
1860-1908 
1855-1926 
1856-1935 
1864-1928 

1891-1954 
1832-1905 

1861-1933 
1882-1956 

1829-1904 
1831-1920 
1840-1904 
1822-1907 
1852-1906 
1846-1926 
1851-1913 

1859-1942 
1887-1958 

1880-1958 
1858-1928 
1867-1949 
1861-1937 
1833-1904 

1843-1905 
1829-1910 

1870-1955 

1862-1932 
1875-1952 
1830-1902 
1852-1944 
1857-1918 
1846-1922 

1852-1941 

d.  1903 

1841-1924 

1848-1918 
1841-1903 


1847-1920 
1854-1931 
1868-1957 


Parsons,     Laurence,     Earl     of 

Rosse 
Parsons,  Sir  Leonard  Gregory 
Parsons,  Richard  Godfrey 
Partridge,  Sir  Bernard 
Passtield,    Baron.    See    Webb, 

Sidney  James 
Patel,  Vallabhbhai  Javerabhai 
Patel,  Vithalbai  Jhavabhai 
Paterson,  Sir  Alexander  Henry 
Paterson,  Sir  William 
Paterson,  William  Paterson 
Patiala,    Sir    Bhupindra    Singh, 

Maharaja  of 
Paton,  Diarmid  Noel 
Paton,  John  Brown 
Paton,  John  Gibson 
Paton,  John  Lewis  (Alexander) 
Paton,  Sir  Joseph  Noel 
Paton,  William 
Pattison,  Andrew  Seth  Pringle- 

( formerly  Andrew  Seth) 
Paul,  Charles  Kegan 
Paul,  Herbert  >Voodfield 
Paul,  William 
Pauncefote,  Julian,  Baron 
Pavy,  Frederick  William 
Payne,  Edward  John 
Payne,  Humfry  Gilbert  Garth 
Payne,  Joseph  Frank 
Peacocke,  Joseph  Ferguson 
Peake,  Arthur  Samuel 
Peake,     Sir     Charles     Brinsley 

Pemberton 
Peake,  Harold  John  Edward 
Pearce,  Ernest  Harold 
Pearce,  Sir  George  Foster 
Pearce,  Sir  (Standen)  Lecmard 
Pearce,  Stephen 
Pearce,  Sir  William  George 
Pears,  Sir  Edwin 
Pearsall  Smith,   (Lloyd)   Logan. 

See  Smith 
Pearson,  Alfred  Chilton 
Pearson,  Charles  John,  Lord 
Pearson,  Sir  Cyril  Arthur 
Pearson,  Karl 
Pearson,    Weetman    Dickinson, 

Viscount  Cowdray 
Pease,  Sir  Arthur  Francis 
Pease,  Edward  Reynolds 
Pease,    Joseph    Albert,    Baron 

Gainford 
Pease,  Sir  Joseph  Whitwell 
Peek,  Sir  Cuthbert  Edgar 
Peel,  Arthur  Wellesley,  Viscount 
Peel,  Sir  Frederick 
Peel,  James 
Peel,  William  Robert  Wellesley, 

Earl 
Peers,  Sir  Charles  Reed 
Peers,  Edgar  Allison 
Peet,  Thomas  Eric 
Peile,  Sir  James  Braithwaite 
Peile,  John 

Pelham,  Henry  Francis 
P^lissier,  Harry  Gabriel 
Pell,  Albert 
Pember,  Edward  Henry 


1840-1908 
187^1950 

1881^-1948 
1861-1945 

1859-1947 
1875-1950 
1870-1933 
1884-1947 
1874-1956 
1860-1939 

1891-1938 
1859-1928 
1830-1911 
1824-1907 
1863-1946 
1821-1901 
1886-1943 

1856-1931 
1828-1902 
1853-1935 
1822-1905 
1828-1902 
1829-1911 
1844^1904 
1902-1936 
1840-1910 
1835-1916 
1865-1929 

1897-1958 
1867-1946 
1865-1930 
1870-1952 
1873-1947 
1819-1904 
1861-1907 
1835-1919 

1865-1946 
1861-1935 
1843-1910 
1866-1921 
1857-1936 

1856-1927 
186^-1927 
1857-1955 

1860-1943 
1828-1903 
1855-1901 
1829-1912 
1823-1906 
1811-1906 

1867-1937 
186^-1952 
1891-1952 
1882-1934 
1833-1906 
1837-1910 
1846-1907 
1874-1913 
1820-1907 
1833-1911 


1135 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Pemberton,  Thomas  Edgar 

Pembrey,  Marcus  Seymour 

Penley,  William  Sydney 

Pemiant,  George  Sholto  Gordon 
Douglas-,  Baron  Penrhyn.  See 
Douglas-Pennant 

Penrhyn,  Baron.  See  Douglas- 
Pennant,  George  Sholto  Gordon 

Penrose,  Dame  Emily 

Penrose,  Francis  Cranmer 

Pentland,  Baron.  See  Sinclair, 
John 

Pepler,  Sir  George  Lionel 

Percival,  John 

Percy,  Alan  Ian,  Duke  of  North- 
umberland 

Percy,  Eustace  Sutherland  Camp- 
bell, Baron  Percy  of  New- 
castle 

Percy,  Henry  Algernon  George, 
Earl 

Pereira,  George  Edward 

Perkin,  Arthur  George 

Perkin,  Sir  William  Henry 

Perkin,  William  Henry 

Perkins,  Sir  ^Eneas 

Perkins,  Robert  Cyril  Layton 

Perks,  Sir  Robert  William 

Perowne,  Edward  Henry 

Perowne,  John  James  Stewart 

Perring,  William  (ieorge  Arthur 

Perrins,  Charles  William  Dyson 

Perry,  Sir  (Edwin)  Cooper 

Perry,  Walter  Copland 

Perth,  Earl  of.  See  Drunmiond, 
James  Eric 

Petavel,  Sir  Joseph  Ernest 

Peterson,  Sir  Maurice  Drummond 

Peterson,  Sir  William 

Petit,  Sir  Dinshaw  Manockjee 

Petre,  Sir  George  Glynn 

Petrie,  William 

Petrie,  Sir  (William  Matthew) 
Flinders 

Pettigrew,  James  Bell 

Petty-Fitzmaurice,  Edmond 

George,  Baron  Fitzmaurice 
(formerly  Lord  Edmond  Fitz- 
maurice) 

Petty-Fitzmaurice,  Henry  Charles 
Keith,  Marquess  of  Lansdowne 

Phear,  Sir  John  Budd 

Phelps,  Lancelot  Ridley 

Philby,  Harry  St.  John  Bridger 

Philip,  Sir  Robert  William 

Philipps,  Sir  Ivor 

Philipps,  Sir  John  Wynford,  Vis- 
count St.  Davids 

Philipps,  Owen  Cosby,  Baron 
Kylsant 

Phillimore,  John  Swinnerton 

Phillimore,  Sir  Richard  Fortescue 

Phillimore,  Sir  Walter  George 
Frank,  Baron 

Phillips,  Sir  Claude 

Phillips,  Stephen 

PhUlips,  Sir  Tom  Spencer 
Vaughan 

Phillips,  Walter  Alison 


1849-1906 
1868-1934 
1852-1912 


1836-1907 

1836-1907 
1858-1942 
1817-1903 

1860-1925 
1882-1959 
1834-1918 

1880-1930 


1887-1958 

1871-1909 
1865-1923 
1861-1937 
1838-1907 
1860-1929 
1834-1901 
1866-1955 
1849-1934 
1826-1906 
1823-1904 
1898-1951 
1864-1958 
1856-1938 
1814-1911 

1876-1951 
187a-1936 
1889-1952 
1856-1921 
1823-1901 
1822-1905 
1821-1908 

1853-1942 
1834-1908 


184&-1935 

1845-1927 
1825-1905 
1853-1936 
1885-1960 
1857-1939 
1861-1940 

1860-1938 

1863-1937 
1873-1926 
1864-1940 

1845-1929 
1846-1924 
1864-1915 

1888-1941 
1864-1950 


Phillips,  William 

Phillpotts,  Dame  Bertha  Surtees. 

See  Newall 
Phillpotts,  Eden 
Philpot,  Glyn  Warren 
Phipps,  Sir  Eric  Clare  Edmund 
Piatti,  Alfredo  Carlo 
Pick,  Frank 
Pickard,  Benjamin 
Pickard,  Sir  Robert  Howson 
Pickford,  William,  Baron  Stern- 
dale 
Picton,  James  Allanson 
Pigou,  Arthur  Cecil 
Pinero,  Sir  Arthur  Wing 
Pinsent,  Dame  Ellen  Frances 
Pirbright,  Baron.  See  De  Worms, 

Henry 
Pirow,  Oswald 

Pirrie,  William  James,  Viscount 
Pissarro,  Lucien 
Pitman,  Sir  Henry  Alfred 
Plaskett,  John  Stanley 
Plater,  Charles  Dominic 
Platts,  John  Thompson 
Playfair,  Sir  Nigel  Ross 
Playfair,  William  Smoult 
Plender,  William,  Baron 
Pleydell,  John  Clavell  Mansel-. 

See  Mansel-Pleydell 
Plinuner,  Robert  Henry  Aders 
Plumer,  Herbert  Charles  Onslow, 

Viscount 
Plummer,  Henry  Crozier  Keating 
Plunkett,  Edward  John  Moreton 

Drax,  Baron  of  Dunsany 
Plunkett,  Sir  Francis  Richard 
Plunkett,  Sir  Horace  Curzon 
Podmore,  Frank 
Poel,  William 
Poland,  Sir  Harry  Bodkin 
Pole,  Sir  Felix  John  Clewett 
Pollard,  Albert  Frederick 
Pollard,  Alfred  William 
Pollen,  John  Hungerford 
Pollitt,  Harry 
Pollock,  Bertram 
Pollock,  Ernest  Murray,  Viscount 

Hanworth 
Pollock,  Sir  Frederick 
Pollock,  Hugh  McDowell 
Ponsonby,  Arthur  Augustus  Wil- 
liam Harry,  Baron  Ponsonby 

of  Shulbrede 
Ponsonby,  Vere  Brabazon,  Earl 

of  Bessborough 
Poole,  Reginald  Lane 
Poole,  Stanley  Edward  Lane- 
Poore,  George  Vivian 
Pope,  George  Uglow 
Pope,  Samuel 
Pope,  Walter  James  Macqueen-. 

See  Macqueen-Pope 
Pope,  William  Burt 
Pope,  Sir  William  Jackson 
Popham,    Sir    (Henry)    Robert 

(Moore)  Brooke-.  Sfee  Brooke- 

Popham 
Portal,  Melville 


1822-1905 

1877-1932 
1862-1960 
1884-1937 
1875-1945 
1822-1901 
1878-1941 
1842-1904 
1874-1949 

1848-1923 
1832-1910 
1877-1959 
1855-1934 
1866-1949 

1840-1903 
1890-1959 
1847-1924 
1863-1944 
1808-1908 
1865-1941 
1875-1921 
1830-1904 
1874-1934 
1835-1903 
1861-1946 

1817-1902 
1877-1955 

1857-1932 
1875-1946 

1878-1957 
1835-1907 
1854-1932 
1855-1910 
1852-1934 
1829-1928 
1877-1956 
1869-1948 
1859-1944 
1820-1902 
1890-1960 
1863-1943 

1861-1936 
184S-1937 
1852-1937 


1871-1946 

1880-1956 
1857-1939 
1854-1931 
1843-1904 
1820-1908 
1826-1901 

1888-1960 
1822-1903 
1870-1939 


1878-1953 
1819-1904 


1136 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1960 


Portal,  Sir  Wyndham  Raymond, 

Viscount 
Porter,  Sir  Andrew  Marshall 
Porter,  Samuel  Lowry,  Baron 
Postan  (formerly  Power),  Eileen 

Edna  le  Poer 
Postgate,  John  Percival 
Pott,  Alfred 
Potter,    (Helen)    Beatrix    (Mrs. 

Heelis) 
Poulton,  Sir  Edward  Bagnall 
Poimd,     Sir     (Alfred)     Dudley 

(Piekman  Rogers) 
Powell,  Frederick  York 
Powell,  Sir  (George)  Allan 
Powell,  Sir  Richard  Douglas 
Powell,       Robert       Stephenson 
Smyth  Baden-,  Baron  Baden- 
Powell.  See  Baden-PoM'ell 
Power,  Sir  Arthur  John 
Power,  Sir  D'Arcy 
Power,  Eileen  Edna  le  Poer.  See 

Postan 
Power,  Sir  John  Cecil 
Power,  Sir  William  Henry 
Poynder,     Sir     John     Poynder 

Dickson-,  Baron  Islington 
Poynter,  Sir  Edward  John 
Poynting,  John  Henry 
Prain,  Sir  David 
Pratt,  Hodgson 
Pratt,  Joseph  Bishop 
Preece,  Sir  William  Henry 
Prendergast,    Sir    Harry   North 

Dalrymple 
Prestage,  Edgar 
Previt^-Orton,  Charles  William 
Price,  Frederick  George  Hilton 
I*rice,  Thomas 
Prichard,  Harold  Arthur 
Primrose,  Archibald  Philip,  Earl 

of  Rosebery 
Primrose,  Sir  Henry  William 
Pringle,  William  Mather  Ruther- 
ford 
Pringle-Pattison,  Andrew  Seth. 

See  Pattison 
Prinsep,  Valentine  Cameron  (Val) 
Prior,  Melton 

Pritchard,  Sir  Charles  Bradley 
Pritchett,  Robert  Taylor 
Probert,  Lewis         .  i 

Procter,  Francis      ..«•  *  tf?^ 
Proctor,  Robert  George  Collier 
Propert,  John  Lumsden 
Prothero,  Sir  George  Walter 
Prothero,     Rowland     Edmund, 

Baron  Ernie 
Prout,  Ebenezer 
Pryde,  James  Ferrier 
Prynne,  George  Bundle 
Puddicombe,      Anne      Adalisa, 

*Allen  Raine' 
Pugh,  Sir  Arthur 
Pullen,  Henry  William 
Purcell,  Albert  Arthur  William 
Purse,  Benjamin  Ormond 
Purser,  Louis  Claude 
Purvis,  Arthur  Blaikie 


Pye,  Sir  David  Randall 
1885-1949      Pyne,  Louisa  Fanny  Bodda.  See 
1837-1919  Bodda  Pyne 

1877-1956 

Quarrier,  William 
1889-1940      Quick,  Sir  John 
1853-1926      Quick,  Oliver  Chase 
1822-1908      Quickswood,   Baron.   See   Cecil, 
Hugh      Richard      Heathcote 
1866-1943  Gascoyne- 

1856-1943      Quiller-Couch,  Sir  Arthur  Tho- 
mas CQ') 
1877-1943      Quilter,  Harry 
1850-1904      Quilter,  Roger  Cuthbert 
1876-1948      Quilter,  Sir  William  Cuthbert 
1842-1925      Quin,  Windham  Thomas  Wynd- 
ham-,  Earl  of  Dunraven  and 
Mount-Earl 
1857-1941 

1889-1960      Rackham,  Arthur 
1855-1941      Radcliffe-Crocker,  Henry 

Rae,  William  Eraser 
1889-1940      Raggi,  Mario 
1870-1950      Raikes,  Humphrey  Rivaz 
1842-1916      Railton,  Herbert 

Raine,    Allen,    pseudonifm.    See 
1866-1936  Puddicombe,  Anne  Adalisa 

1836-1919      Raines,     Sir     Julias     Augustus 
1852-1914  Robert 

1857-1944      Rainy,    Adam    Rolland    (1862- 
1824-1907  1911).  See  under  Rainy,  Robert 

1854-1910      Rainy,  Robert 
1834-1913      Rait,  Sir  Robert  Sangster 

Raleigh,  Sir  Walter  Alexander 
18^4-1913      Ralston,  James  Layton 
1869-1951      Ram,    Sir  (Lucius   Abel   John) 
1877-1947  Granville 

1842-1909      Ram^,    Marie    Louise,    'Ouida'. 
1852-1909  See  De  la  Ram^ 

1871-1947      Ramsay,  Alexander 

Ramsay,  Sir  Bertram  Home 
1847-1929      Ramsay,  Sir  James  Henry 
1846-1923      Ramsay,  Sir  William 

Ramsay,  Sir  William  Mitchell 
1874-1928      Ramsay-Steel-Maitland,  Sir  Ar- 
thur     Herbert      Drummond. 
1856-1931  See  Steel-Maitland 

1838-1904      Ramsden,  Omar 
1845-1910      Randall,  Richard  William 
1837-1903      Randall-Mad ver,  David 
1828-1907      Randegger,  Alberto 
1841-1908      Randies,  Marshall 
1812-1905      Randolph,       Francis       Charles 
1868-1903  Hingeston-.     See     Hingeston- 

1834-1902  Randolph 

1848-1922      Randolph,  Sir  George  Granville 

Ranjitsinhji,      Maharaja      Jam 
1851-1937  Saheb     of    Nawanagar.     See 

1835-1909  Nawanagar 

186^-1941       Rankeillour,   Baron.   See  Hope, 
1818-1903  James  Fitzalan 

Rankin,  Sir  George  Claus 
1836-1908      Ransom,  William  Henry 
1870-1955      Raper,  Robert  William 
1836-1903      Rapson,  Edward  James 
1872-1935      Rashdall,  Hastings 
1874-1950      Rassam,  Hormuzd 
1854-1932      Rathbone,  Eleanor  Florence 
1890-1941      Rathbcme,  William 

11S7 


1886-1960 

1832-1904 

1829-1903 
1852-1932 
1885-1944 

1860-1956 

1863-1944 
1851-1907 
1877-1953 
1841-1911 

1841-1926 

1867-1939 
1845-1909 
1885-1905 
1821-1907 
1891-1955 
1858-1910 

1886-1908 

1827-1909 


1826-1906 
1874-1936 

1861-1922 
1881-1948 

1885-1952 

1839-1906 
1822-1909 
1883-1945 
1832-1925 
1852-1916 
1851-1939 


1876-1935 
1873-1939 
182^1906 
187a-1945 
1832-1911 
1826-1904 


1833-1910 
1818^1907 

1872-1933 

1870-1949 
1877-1946 
1824-1907 
1842-1915 
1861-1937 
1858-1924 
1826-1910 
1872-1946 
1819-1902 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Rattigan,  Sir  William  Henry 
Rau,  Sir  Senegal  Narsing 
Raven,  John  James 
Raven-Hill,  Leonard 
Raverat,  Gwendolen  Mary 
Raverty,  Henry  George 
Ravilious,  Eric  William 
Rawling,  Cecil  Godfrey 
Rawlinson,  George 
Rawlinson,  Sir  Henry  Seymour, 

Baron 
Rawlinson,  William  George 
Rawson,  Sir  Harry  Holdsworth 
Rayleigh,    Baron.    See    Strutt, 

John  William 
Rayleigh,    Baron.    See    Strutt, 

Robert  John 
Read,  Sir  Charles  Hercules 
Read,  Clare  Sewell 
Read,  Grantly  Dick-.  See  Dick- 
Read 
Read,  Sir  Herbert  James 
Read,  Walter  William 
Reade,  Thomas  Mellard 
Reading,  Marquess  of.  See  Isaacs, 

Rufus  Daniel 
Reay,  Baron.  See  Mackay,  Don- 
ald James 
Redesdale,  Baron.  See  Mitford, 

Algernon  Bertram  Freeman- 
Redmayne,  Sir  Richard  Augus- 
tine Studdert 
Redmond,  John  Edward 
Redmond,  William  Hoey  Kearney 
Redpath,  Henry  Adeney 
Reed,  Austin  Leonard 
Reed,  Sir  Edward  James 
Reed,  Edward  Tennyson 
Reeves,  Sir  William  Conrad 
Regan,  Charles  Tate 
Reich,  Emil  , 

Reid,  Archibald  David  "^^ 

Reid,  Forrest 

Reid,  Sir  George  Houstoun 
Reid,  James  Smith 
Reid,  Sir  John  Watt 
Reid,  Sir  Robert  Gillespie 
Reid,     Robert    Threshie,  Earl 

Lorebum 
Reid,  Sir  Thomas  Wemyss 
Reilly,  Sir  Charles  Herbert 
Reitz,  Deneys 
Rendall,  Montague  John 
Rendel,  Sir  Alexander  Meadows 
Rendel,  George  Wightwick 
Rendel,  Harry  Stuart  Goodhart-. 

See  Goodhart-Rendel 
Rendle,  Alfred  Barton 
Rennell,  Baron.  See  Rodd,  James 

Rennell 
Repington,  Charles  k  Court 
Reynolds,  James  Emerson 
Reynolds,  Osborne 
Rhodes,  Cecil  John 
Rhodes,  Francis  William 
Rhondda,  Viscount.  See  Thomas, 

David  Alfred 
Rhondda,       Viscountess.       See 
Thomas,  Margaret  Haig 


1842-1904      Rhys,  Ernest  Percival 

1887-1953      Rhys,  Sir  John 

1833-1906      Richards,  Sir  Frederick  William 

1867-1942      Richardson,       Ethel       Florence 

1885-1957  Lindesay,      'Henry      Handel 

1825-1906  Richardson' 

1903-1942      Richardson,  Henry  Handel.  See 

1870-1917  Richardson,     Ethel    Florence 

1812-1902  Lindesay 

Richardson,  Lewis  Fry 
1864^1925      Richardson,  Sir  Owen  Willans 
1840-1928      Richmond,  Sir  Herbert  William 
1843-1910      Richmond,  Sir  William  Blake 

Richmond  and  Gordon,  Duke  of. 
1842-1919  See    Gordon-Lennox,    Charles 

Henry 
1875-1947      Ricketts,  Charles  de  Sousy 
1857-1929      Riddell,  Charles  James  Buchanan 
1826-1905      Riddell,  Charlotte  Eliza  Lawson 
(Mrs.  J.   H.   Riddell),   'F.   G. 
1890-1959  Trafford' 

1863-1949      Riddell,  George  Allardice,  Baron 
1855-1907      Ridding,  George 
1832-1909      Ridgeway,  Sir  Joseph  West 

Ridgeway,  Sir  William 
1860-1935      Ridley,  Henry  Nicholas 

Ridley,     Sir     Matthew     White, 
1839-1921  Viscount 

Rieu,  Charles  Pierre  Henri 
1837-1916      Rigby,  Sir  John 

Rigg,  James  Harrison 
1865-1955      Rigg,  James  McMullen 
1856-1918      Ringer,  Sydney 
1861-1917      Ripon,  Marquess  of.  See  Robin- 
1848-1908  son,  George  Frederick  Samuel 

1873-1954      Risley,  Sir  Herbert  Hope 
1830-1906      Ritchie,    Anne    Isabella,    Lady 
1860-1933  (1837-1 919).  See  under  Ritchie, 

1821-1902  Sir      Richmond       Thackeray 

1878-1943  Willoughby 

1854-1910      Ritchie,  Charles  Thomson,  Baron 
1844-1908  Ritchie  of  Dundee 

1875-1947      Ritchie,  David  George 
1 845-19 1 8      Ritchie,  Sir  Richmond  Thackeray 
1846-1926  Willoughby 

1823-1909      Rivaz,  Sir  Charles  Montgomery 
1842-1908      Riverdale,  Baron.   See  Balfour, 

Arthur 
1846-1923      Riviere,  Briton 
1842-1905      Robeck,   Sir  John  Michael  De. 
1874-1948  See  De  Robeck 

1882-1944      Roberts,  Alexander 
1862-1950      Roberts,  Frederick  Sleigh,  Earl 
1829-1918      Roberts,  George  Henry 
1833-1902      Roberts,  Isaac 

Roberts,  Robert  Davies 
1887-1959      Roberts-Austen,      Sir      William 
1865-1938  Chandler 

Robertson,  Archibald 
1858-1941       Robertson,  Sir  Charles  Grant 
1858-1925      Robertson,       Douglas       Moray 
1844-1920  Cooper  Lamb  Argyll 

1842-1912  Robertson,  George  Matthew 
185a-1902  Robertson,  Sir  George  Scott 
1851-1905      Robertson,  James  Patrick  Ban- 

nerman.  Baron 
1856-1918      Robertson,  John  Mackinnon 

Robertson,  Sir  Johnston  Forbes- 
1883-1958      Robertson,  Sir  Robert 

1138 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX  1901-1960 


Robertson,  Sir  William  Robert 
Robey,  Sir  George  Edward 
Robinson,  (Esm6  Stuart)  Lennox 
Robinson,  Frederick  William 
Robinson,      George      Frederick 

Samuel,  Marquess  of  Ripon 
Robinson,  (George)  Geoffrey.  See 

Dawson 
Robinson,  Henry  Wheeler 
Robinson,  Sir  John 
Robinson,  Sir  John  Charles 
Robinson,  Sir  John  Richard 
Robinson,  Joseph  Armitage 
Robinson,  Sir  Joseph  Benjamin 
Robinson,  Philip  Stewart  (Phil) 
Robinson,  Roy  Lister,  Baron 
Robinson,  Vincent  Joseph 
Robinson,  Sir  (William)  Arthur 
Robinson,  William  Heath 
RobinsMi,  William  Leefe 
Robison,  Robert 
Robson,       William      Snowdon, 

Baron 
Roby,  Henry  John 
Roche,         Alexander         Adair, 

Baron 
Rodd,    James    Rennell,    Baron 

Rennell 
Roe,  Sir  (Edwin)  Alliott  Verdon 

Verdon-.  See  Verdon-Roe 
Rogers,  Annie  Mary  Anne  Henley 
Rogers,  Benjamin  Bickley 
Rogers,  Edmund  Dawson 
Rogers,  James  Guinness 
Rogers,  Leonard  James 
Rolleston,  Sir  Humphrey  Davy 
Rolls,  Charles  Stewart 
Romer,  Mark  Lemon,  Baron 
Romer,  Sir  Robert 
Ronald,  Sir  Landon 
Ronan,  Stephen 
Rookwood,  Baron.  See  Selwin- 

Ibbetson,  Henry  John 
Rooper,  Thomas  Godolphin 
Roos-Keppel,  Sir  George  Olof 
Roose,  Edward  Charles  Robson 
Ropes,    Arthur    Reed,    'Adrian 

Ross' 
Roscoe,  Sir  Henry  Enfield 
Rose,  John  Holland 
Rose-Innes,  Sir  James 
Rosebery,  Earl  of.  See  Primrose, 

Archibald  Philip 
Rosenhain,  Walter 
Rosenheim,  (Sigmund)  Otto 
Ross,    Adrian,   psetuionym. 

Ropes,  Arthur  Reed 
Ross,  Sir  Alexander  George 
Ross,  Sir  (Edward)  Denison 
Ross,  Sir  Ian  Clunies 
Ross,  Sir  John 
Ross,  Sir  John 
Ross,  Joseph  Thorburn 
Ross,  Martin,  pseudonym. 
Martin,  Violet  Florence 
Ross,  Sir  Ronald 
Ross,  William  Stewart,  'Saladm 
Rosse,    Earl    of.    See    Parsons, 
Laurence 


See 


See 


1860-1933      RossetU,  WUliam  Michael 
1869-1954      Rotlienstein,  Sir  William 
1886-1958      Rothermere,       Viscount.       See 
1830-1901  Harmsworth,  Harold  Sidney 

Rothschild,  Lionel  Walter,  Baron 
1827-1909      RothschUd,  Sir  Nathan  Meyer, 

Baron 
1874-1944      Round,  John  Horace 
1872-1945      Rousby,  William  Wybert 
1830-1903      Rouse,  William  Henry  Denham 
1824-1913      Routh,  Edward  John 
1828-1903      Rowe,  Joshua  Brooking 
1858-1933      Rowlands,  Sir  Archibald 
1840-1929      Rowlands,  David,  'Dewi  M6n' 
1847-1902      Rowlatt,  Sir  Sidney  Arthur  Tay- 
1883-1952  lor 

1829-1910      Rowntree,  Benjamin  Seebohm 
1874-1950      Rowntree,  Joseph 
1872-1944      Rowton,     Baron.     See     Cony, 
1895-1918  Montagu  WUliam  Lowry 

1883-1941      Roxburgh,  John  Fergusson 

Roy,  Camille  Joseph 
1852-1918      Royce,  Sir  (Frederick)  Henry 
1830-1915      Royden,  (Agnes)  Maude 

Royden,  Sir  Thomas,  Baron 
1871-1956      Rudolf,  Edward  de  Montjoie 

Ruffside,  Viscount.  See  Brown, 
1858-1941  Douglas  Clifton    ' 

Ruggles-Brise,  Sir  Evelyn  John 
1877-1958      Rumbold,  Sir  Horace 
1856-1937      Riunbold,    Sir    Horace    George 
1828-1919  Montagu 

1823-1910      Runciman,  Walter,  Baron 
1822-1911      Runciman,     Walter,     Viscount 
1862-1933  Runciman  of  Doxford 

1862-1944      Rundall,  Francis  Homblow 
1877-1910      Rundle,    Sir    (Henry    Macleod) 
1866-1944  Leslie 

1840-1918      Rusden,  George  William 
1873-1938      Rushbrooke,  James  Henry 
1848-1925      Rushcliffe,   Baron.    See   Better- 
ton,  Henry  Bucknall 
1826-1902      Russell,   Arthur  Oliver  Villiers, 
1847-1903  Baron  Ampthill 

1866-1921      Russell,  Sir  Charles 
1848-1905      Russell,  Edward  Stuart 

Russell,  Francis  Xavier  Joseph 
1859-1933  (Frank),     Baron     Russell     of 

1833-1915  Killowen 

1855-1942      RusseU,  George  WiUiam,  'AE* 
1855-1942      Russell,  Henry  Chamberlaine 

Russell,  Herbrand  Arthur,  Duke 
1847-1929  of  Bedford 

1875-1934      Russell,  Mary  Annette,  Countess 
1871-1955      RusseU,     Mary     du      Caurroy, 
Duchess    of    Bedford    (1865- 
1859-1933  1937).      See     under     RusseU, 

1840-1910  Herbrand  Arthur 

1871-1940      RusseU,  Thomas  O'NeiU 
1899-1959      RusseU,  Sir  Thomas  Wentworth, 
1829-1905  Russell  Pasha 

1853-1935      RusseU,  Sir  Walter  Westley 
1849-1903      Russell,  WUliam  Qark 

Russell,  Sir  WUliam  Howard 
1862-1915      RusseU,  William  James 
1857-1932      Rutherford,       Ernest,       Baron 
1844-1906  Rutherford  of  Nelson 

Rutherford,    Mark,    pseudonym, 
1840-1908  See  White,  WUliam  Hale 

11S9 


1889-1919 
1872-1945 

1868-1940 
1808-1937 

1840-1915 
1854-1928 
1835-1907 
1863-1950 
1831-1907 
18;J7-1908 
1892-1953 
1836-1907 

1862-1945 
1871-1954 
1836-1925 

1838-1903 
1888-1954 
1870-1943 
1863-1933 
1876-1956 
1871-1950 
1852-1933 

1870-1958 
1857-1935 
1820-1913 

1869-1941 
1847-1937 

1870-1949 
1823-1908 

1856-1934 
1819-1903 
1870-1947 

1872-1949 

1869-1935 
1863-1928 
1887-1954 


1867-1946 
1867-1935 
1836-1907 

1858-1940 
1866-1941 


1828-1908 

1879-1954 
1867-1949 
1844r-1911 
1820-1907 
1830-1909 

1871-1937 

1831-1913 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Rutherford,  William  Gunion 
Rutland,  Duke  of.  See  Manners, 

(Lord)  John  James  Robert 
Ryder,  Charles  Henry  Dudley 
Rye,  Maria  Susan 
Rye,  William  Brenchley 
Ryle,  Herbert  Edward 
Ryle,  John  Alfred 
Ryrie,  Sir  Granville  de  Laune 

Saekville-West,  Lionel  Sackville, 

Baron  Sackville 
Sadleir,  Michael  Thomas  Harvey 
Sadler,  Sir  Michael  Ernest 
Saha,    Meghnad.    See    Meghnad 

Saha 
St.    Aldwyn,    Earl.    See    Hicks 

Beach,  Sir  Michael  Edward 
St.      Davids,      Viscount.      See 

Philipps,  Sir  John  Wynford 
St.    Helier,    Baron.    See   Jeune, 

Francis  Henry 
St.  John,  Sir  Spenser  Bucking- 
ham 
St.  John,  Vane  Ireton  Shaftes- 
bury (1839-1911).  See  under  St. 

John,  Sir  Spenser  Buckingham 
St.    Just,    Baron.    See    Grenfell, 

Edward  Charles 
Saintsbury,      George      Edward 

Bateman 
Saklatvala,  Shapurji 
Saladin,  pseudonym.    See    Ross, 

William  Stewart 
Salaman,  Charles  Kensington 
Salaman,  Julia.  See  Goodman 
Salaman,  Redcliffe  Nathan 
Salisbury,     Marquess     of.     See 

Cecil,  James  Edward  Hubert 

Gascoyne- 
Salisbury,     Marquess     of.     See 

Cecil,   Robert  Arthur  Talbot 

Gascoyne- 
Salmon,  Sir  Eric  Cecil  Heygate 
Salmon,  George 
Salmond,  Sir  (William)  Geoffrey 

(Hanson) 
Salomons,  Sir  Julian  Emanuel 
Salter,  Sir  Arthur  Clavell 
Salter,  Herbert  Edward 
Salting,  George 
Salvidge,  Sir  Archibald  Tutton 

James 
Salvin,  Francis  Henry 
Samboume,  Edward  Linley 
Sampson,  George 
Sampson,  John 
Sampson,  Ralph  Allen 
Samson,  Charles  Rmraiey 
Samuel,  Marcus,  Viscount  Bear- 

sted 
Samuelson,  Sir  Bemhard 
Sanday,  William 
Sandberg,  Samuel  Louis  Graham 
Sanderson,  Baron.  See  Fumiss, 

Henry  Sanderson 
Sanderson,  Edgar 
Sanderson,    Frederick    William 


1853-1907      Sanderson,  Sir  John  Scott  Bur- 
don-.  See  Burdon-Sanderson 
1818-1906      Sanderson,  Thomas  Henry,  Baron 
1868-1945      Sanderson,  Thomas  James  Cob- 
1829-1903  den-.  See  Cobden-Sanderson 

1818-1901       Sandham,  Henry 
1856-1925      Sands,     Lord.     See     Johnston, 
1889-1950  Christopher  Nicholson 

1865-1937      Sandys,  Frederick 

Sandys,  Sir  John  Edwin 

Sanford,  George  Edward  Lang- 
ham  Somerset 
1827-1908      Sanger,    George    ('Lord'  George 
1888-1957  Sanger) 

1861-1943      Sankaran  Nair,  Sir  Chettur 

Sankey,  John,  Viscount 
1893-1^56      Sankey,  Sir  Richard  Hieram 

Santley,  Sir  Charles 
1837-1916      Sapper,  pseudonym.  See  McNeile, 

(Herman)  Cyril 
1860-1938      Sargant,  Sir  Charles  Henry 

Sargeaunt,  John 
1843-1905      Sargent,  John  Singer 

Sarkar,  Sir  Jadunath 
1825-1910      Sassoon,  Sir  Philip  Albert  Gus- 
tave  David 

Sastri,     Valangiman     Sankara- 
narayana  Srinivasa 

Satow,  Sir  Ernest  Mason 
1870-1941      Saumarez,  Thomas 

Saunders,  Edward 
1845-1933      Saunders,  Sir  Edwin 
1874-1936      Saunders,  Howard 

Saunderson,  Edward  James 
1844-1906      Savage    (formerly    Dell),    Ethel 
1814-1901  Mary 

1812-1906      Savage- Armstrong,  George  Fran- 
1874-1955  cis 

Savill,  Thomas  Dixon 

Saxe-Weimar,  Prince  Edward  of. 
1861-1947  See  Edward  of  Saxe-Weimar 

Saxl,  Friedrieh  ('Fritz') 

Sayce,  Archibald  Henry 
1830-1903      Sayers,  Dorothy  Leigh 
18^6-1946      Schafer,     Sir     Edward     Albert 
1819-1904  Sharpey- 

Scharlieb,     Dame     Mary     Ann 
1878-1933  Dacomb 

1835-1909      Schiller,  Ferdinand  Canning  Scott 
1859-1928      Schlich,  Sir  William 
1863-1951      Scholes,  Percy  Alfred 
1835-1909      Schreiner,   Olive    Emilie    Alber- 
tina   (1855-1920).   See   under 
1863-1928  Schreiner,  William  Philip 

1817-1904      Schreiner,  William  Philip 
1844-1910      Schunck,  Henry  Edward 
1873-1950      Schuster,  Sir  Arthur 
1862-1931      Schuster,  Claud,  Baron 
1866-1939      Schuster,  Sir  Felix  Otto 
1883-1931       Schwabe,  Randolph 

Scott,  Archibald 
1853-1927      Scott,  Charles  Prestwich 
1820-1905      Scott,     Lord     Charles    Thomas 
1843-1920  Montagu-Douglas- 

1851-1905      Scott,  Clement  William 

Scott,  Dukinfield  Henry 
1868-1939      Scott,     Lord     Francis     George 
1838-1907  Montagu-Douglas- 

1857-1922      Scott,  George  Herbert 

1140 


CUMULATIVE  INDEX   1901-1960  ^'Ha 


Scott,  Sir  Giles  Gilbert 

Scott,    Hugh    Stowell,    'Henry 

Seton  Merriman' 
Scott,  Sir  (James)  George 
Scott,  John 
Scott,  Sir  John 
Scott,    Kathleen.    See    Kennet, 

(Edith  Agnes)  Kathleen,  Lady 
Scott,   Leader,  pseudonym.   See 

Baxter,  Lucy 
Scott,  Sir  Leslie  Frederic 
Scott,  Sir  Percy  Moreton 
Scott,  Robert  Falcon 
Scott-Ellis,      Thomas      Evelyn, 

Baron  Howard  de  Walden 
Scott-James,  Rolfe  Arnold 
Scott-Paine,  Charles  Hubert 
Scrutton,  Sir  Thomas  Edward 
Seale-Hayne,  Charles  Hayne 
Seaman,  Sir  Owen 
Seccombe,  Thomas 
Seddon,  Richard  John 
Sedgwick,  Adam 
See,  Sir  John 
Seebohm,  Frederic 
Seeley,  Harry  Govier 
Seely,    John    Edward    Bernard, 

Baron  Mottistone 
Selbie,  William  Boothby 
Selborne,  Earl   of.    See   Palmer, 

William  Waldegrave 
Selby,     Viscount.     See     Gully, 

William  Court 
Selby,  Thomas  Gunn 
Selfridge,  Harry  Gordon 
Seligman,  Charles  Gabriel 
Selincourt,  Ernest  de 
Selous,  Frederick  Courteney 
Selwin-Ibbetson,    Henry    John, 

Baron  Rookwood 
Selwyn,  Alfred  Richard  Cecil 
Semon,  Sir  Felix 
Senanayake,  Don  Stephen 
Sendall,  Sir  Walter  Joseph 
Sequeira,  James  Harry 
Sergeant,(Emily  Frances)  Adeline 
Sergeant,  Lewis 
Service,  Robert  William 
Seth,     Andrew.     See     Pattison, 

Andrew  Seth  Pringle- 
Seton,  George 

Seton- Watson,  Robert  William 
Severn,  Walter 
Seward,  Sir  Albert  Charles 
Sewell,  Elizabeth  Missing 
Sewell,  James  Edwards 
Sexton,  Sir  James 
Sexton,  Thomas 
Seymour,  Sir  Edward  Hobart 
Shackleton,  Sir  David  James 
Shackleton,  Sir  Ernest  Henry 
Shadwell,  Charles  Lancelot 
Shand,  (afterwards  Bums),  Alex- 
ander, Baron 
Shand,  Alexander  Innes 
Shandon,  Baron.      See  O'Brien, 

Ignatius  John 
Shannon,  Charles  Haslewood 
Shannon,  Sir  James  Jebusa 


1880-1960      Sharp,  Cecil  James 

Sharp,    William,     'Fiona    Mac- 
1862-1903  leod'  ^ 

1851-1935  Sharpe,  Richard  Bowdler  ioJ.  i» 
1830-1903  Sharpey-Schafer,  Sir  Edward 
1841-1904  Albert.  See  Schafer 

Shattock,  Samuel  George 
1878-1947      Shaughnessy,    Thomas    George, 

Baron 
1837-1902      Shaw,  Alfred 
1869-1950      Shaw,  Sir  Eyre  Massey 
1853-1924      Shaw,  George  Bernard 
1868-1912      Shaw,  Henry  Selby  Hele-.  See 

Hele-Shaw 
1880-1946      Shaw,  James  Johnston 
1878-1959      Shaw,  John  Byam  Lister 
1891-1954      Shaw,  Richard  Norman 
1850-1934      Shaw,  Thomas,  Baron  Craigmyle 
1833-1903      Shaw,  Thomas 
1861-1936      Shaw,  William  Arthur 
1866-1923      Shaw,  Sir  (William)  Napier 
1845-1906      Shaw-Lefevre,      George     John, 
1854-1913  Baron  Eversley 

1844-1907      Shearman,  Sir  Montague 
1833-1912      Sheffield,  Earl  of.  See  Holroyd, 
1839-1909  Henry  North 

Sheffield,    Baron.    See    Stanley, 
1868-1947  Edward  Lyulph  ' 

1862-1944      Shelford,  Sir  William 

Shenstone,  William  Ashwell 
1859-1942      Shepherd,  George  Robert,  Baron 

Sheppard,  Hugh  Richard  Lawrie 
1835-1909      Sherbom,  Charles  William 
1846-1910      Sherrington,  Sir  Charles  Scott 
1858-1947      Sherrington,    Helen    Lemmens-. 
1873-1940  See  Lemmens-Sherrington 

1870-1943      Shields,  Frederic  James 
1851-1917      Shiels,  Sir  (Thomas)  Dnimmond 

Shipley,  Sir  Arthur  Everett 
1826-1902      Shippard,  Sir  Sidney  Godolphin 
1824-1902  Alexander 

1849-1921      Shirreff,    Maria    Georgina.    See 
1884-1952  Grey 

1832-1904      Shore,  William  Thomas 
1865-1948      Short,  Sir  Francis  (Frank)  Job 
1851-1904      Shorter,  Clement  King 
1841-1902      Shorthouse,  Joseph  Henry 
1874-1958      Shortt,  Edward 

Shrewsbury,  Arthur 
1856-1931       Shuckburgh,  Evelyn  Shirley 
1822-1908      Shuckburgh,  Sir  John  Evelyn 
1879-1951       Shute,    Nevil,    pseudonym.    See 
1830-1904  Norway,  Nevil  Shute 

1863-1941      Sibly,  Sir  (Thomas)  Franklin 
1815-1906      Sickert,  Walter  Richard 
1810-1903      Sidebotham,  Herbert 
1850-1938      Sidgreaves,  Sir  Arthur  Frederick 
1848-1932      Sidgwick,  Eleanor  Mildred 
1840-1929      Sidgwick,  Nevil  Vincent 
1863-1938      Siepmann,  Otto 
1874-1922      Sieveking,  Sir  Edward  Henry 
1840-1919      Sifton,  Sir  Clifford 

Silberrad,  Oswald  John 
1828-1904      Simmons,     Sir     John     Lintom 
1832-1907  Arabin 

Simon,    Ernest    Emil    Darwm, 
1857-1930  Baron  Simon  of  Wjrthenshawe 

1863-1937  Simon,  Sir  Francis  (Franz)  Eugen 
1862-1923      Simon,  Sir  John 

1141 


1869-1924 

1855-1905 
1847-1909 

1850-1935 
1852-1924 

1853-1923 
1842-1907 
18i«>-1908 
1850-1950 

1854-1941 
1845-1910 
1872-1919 
1831-1912 

1850-1937 
1872-1938 
186,^1943 
1854-1945 

1831-1928 
1857-1930 

1882-1909 

1889-1925 
1834-1905 
1850-1908 
1881-1954 
1880-1937 
1831-1912 
1857-1952 

1834-1906 
1883-1911 
1881-1953 

1861-1927 

1887-1902 

1810-1906 
1840-1905 
1857-1945 
1857-1926 
1884-1903 
186^1935 
1850-1903 
184;i-1906 
1877-1953 

1899-1960 
1883-1948 
1860-1942 
1872-1940 
1882-1948 
1845-1936 
1873-1952 
1861-1947 
1816-1904 
1861-1929 
1878-1960 

1821-1903 

1879-1%0 
1893-1956 
1810-1904 


DICTIONARY   OF   NATIONAL   BIOGRAPHY 


Simon,  John  Allsebrook,  Viscount 

Simon,  Oliver  Joseph 

Simonds,  James  Beart 

Simonsen,  Sir  John  Lionel 

Simpson,  Sir  John  William 

Simpson,  Maxwell 

Simpson,  Wilfred  Hudleston.  See 
Hudleston 

Simpson,  Sir  William  John 
Ritchie 

Sims,  Charles 

Sinclair,  Sir  Edwyn  Sinclair  Alex- 
ander-. See  Alexander-Sinclair 

Sinclair,  John,  Baron  Pentland 

Singer,  Charles  Joseph 

Singleton,  Sir  John  Edward 

Singleton,  Mary  Montgomerie. 
See  Currie,  Lady 

Sinha,  Satyendra  Prasanno, 
Baron 

Sitwell,  Sir  George  Reresby 

Skeat,  Walter  William 

Skipsey,  Joseph 

Slaney,  William  Slaney  Kenyon-. 
See  Kenyon-Slaney 

Smart,  Sir  Morton  Warrack 

Smartt,  Sir  Thomas  William 

Smeaton,  Donald  Mackenzie 

Smiles,  Samuel 

Smillie,  Robert 

Smith,  Sir  Archibald  Levin 

Smith,  Arthur  Hamilton 

Smith,  Arthur  Lionel 

Smith,  Sir  Cecil  Harcourt-.  See 
Harcourt-Smith 

Smith,  Sir  Charles  Bean  Euan-. 
See  Euan-Smith 

Smith,  Sir  Charles  Edward  Kings- 
ford 

Smith,  Donald  Alexander,  Baron 
Strathcona 

Smith,  Sir  Ernest  Woodhouse 

Smith,  Sir  Francis  (Villeneuve-) 

Smith,  Sir  Frederick 

Smith,  Frederick  Edwin,  Earl  of 
Birkenhead 

Smith,  Sir  George  Adam 

Smith,  George  Bamett 

Smith,  George  Vance 

Smith,  Goldwin 

Smith,  Sir  Grafton  Elliot 

Smith,  Sir  Henry  Babington 

Smith,  Henry  Spencer 

Smith,  Herbert 

Smith,  Sir  Hubert  Llewellyn 

Smith,  James  Hamblin 

Smith,  John  Alexander 

Smith,  (Lloyd)  Logan  Pearsall 

Smith,  Lucy  Toulmin 

Smith,  Sir  Matthew  Arnold  Bracy 

Smith,  Reginald  Bosworth 

Smith,  Reginald  John 

Smith,  Rodney 

Smith,  Sir  Ross  Macpherson 

Smith,  Samuel 

Smith,  Sarah,  'Hesba  Stretton* 

Smith,  Thomas 

Smith,  Sir  Thomas 

Smith,  Thomas  Roger 


1873-1954      Smith,  Vincent  Arthur 
1895-1956      Smith,     Vivian     Hugh,     Baron 
1810-1904  Bicester 

1884^1957      Smith,  Walter  Chalmers 
1858-1933      Smith,   William   Frederick  Dan- 
1815-1902  vers,  Viscount  Hambleden 

Smith,  William  Saumarez 
1828-1909      Smith-Dorrien,  Sir  Horace  Lock- 
wood 
1855-1931       Smithells,  Arthur 
1873-1928      Smuts,  Jan  Christian 

Smyly,  Sir  Philip  Crampton 
1865-1945      Smyth,  Dame  Ethel  Mary 
1860-1925      Smyth,  Sir  Henry  Augustus 
1876-1960      Smythe,  Francis  Sydney 
1885-1957      Snell,  Henry,  Baron 

Snell,  Sir  John  Francis  Cleverton 
1843-1905      Snelus,  George  James 

Snow,  Herbert.  See  Kynaston 
1864-1928      Snow,  Sir  Thomas  D'Oyly 
1860-1943      Snowden,  Philip,  Viscount 
1835-1912       Soddy,  Frederick 
1832-1903      Sollas,  William  Johnson 

Solomon,  Sir  Richard 
1847-1908      Solomon,  Simeon 
1877-1956      Solomon,  Solomon  Joseph 
1858-1929      Somers-Cocks,    Arthur    Herbert 
1846-1910  Tennyson,  Baron  Somers 

1812-1904      Somerset,  Lady  Isabella  Caroline 
1857-1940  (Lady  Henry  Somerset) 

1836-1901       Somervell,      Donald      Bradley, 
1860-1941  Baron  Somervell  of  Harrow 

1850-1924      Somerville,  Edith  Anna  GEnone 

Somerville,  Sir  James  Fownes 
1859-1944      Somerville,  Sir  William 

Sonnenschein,  Edward  Adolf 
1842-1910      Sorabji,  Cornelia 

Sorby,  Henry  Clifton 
1897-1935      Sorley,  William  Ritchie 

Sotheby,  Sir  Edward  Southwell 
1820-1914      Soutar,  Ellen.  See  Farren 
1884-1960      Southborough,  Baron.  See  Hop- 
1819-1909  wood,  Francis  John  Stephens 

1857-1929      Southesk,  Earl  of.  See  Carnegie, 

James 
1872-1930      Southey,  Sir  Richard 
1856-1942      Southward,  John 
1841-1909      Southwell,  Thomas 
1816  ?-1902      Southwood,  Viscount.  See  Elias, 
182a-1910  Julius  Salter 

1871-1937      Spare,  Austin  Osman 
1863-1923      Spearman,  Charles  Edward 
1812-1901       Spence,  Sir  James  Calvert 
1862-1938      Spencer,  Herbert 
1864-1945      Spencer,     John     Poyntz,     Earl 
1829-1901  Spencer 

186a-1939      Spencer,  Leonard  James 
1865-1946       Spencer,  Sir  Stanley 
1838-1911       Spencer,  Sir  Walter  Baldwin 
1879-1959       Spender,  John  Alfred 
1839-1908       Speyer,  Sir  Edgar 
1857-1916      Spiers,  Richard  Phen^ 
1860-1947      Spilsbury,  Sir  Bernard  Henry 
1892-1922      Spofforth,  Frederick  Robert 
1836-1906       Spooner,  William  Archibald 
1832-1911       Sprengel,       Hermann       Johann 
1817-1906  Philipp 

1833-1909      Sprigg,  Sir  John  Gordon 
1830-1903       Sprigge,  Sir  (Samuel)  Squire 

1142 


CUMULATIVE   INDEX   1901-1960 


Spring-Rice,  Sir  Cecil  Arthur 
Sprott,  George  Washington 
Spry,  Constance 
Spy,  pseudonym.  See  Ward,  Sir 

Leshe 
Squire,  Sir  John  Collings 
Squire,  William  Barclay 
Stables,  William  Gordon 
Stack,  Sir  Lee  Oliver  Fitzmaurice 
Stacpoole,  Frederick 
Stacpoole,  Henry  de  Vere 
Stafford,  Sir  Edward  Wiiliam 
Stainer,  Sir  John 
Stalbridge,  Baron.  See  Grosvenor, 

Richard  de  Aquila 
Stallybrass,  William  Teulpn  Swan 
Stamer,  Sir  Lovelace  Tofnlinson 
Stamfordham,  Baron.  See  Bigge, 

Arthur  John 
Stamp,  Josiah  Charles,  Baron 
Stanford,  Sir  Charles  Villiers 
Stanley,    Albert    Henry,    Baron 

Ashfield 
Stanley,  Sir  Arthur 
Stanlev,  Edward  George  Villiers, 

Earl  of  Derby 
Stanley,  Edward  Lyulph,  Baron 

Sheffield,   and  Baron  Stanley 

of  Alderley 
Stanley,  Frederick  Arthur,  Earl 

of  Derby 
Stanley,    Henry   Edward  John, 

Baron  Stanley  of  Alderley 
Stanley,  Sir  Henry  Morton 
Stanley,  Sir  Herbert  James 
Stanley,  Oliver  Frederick  George 
Stanley,    William   Ford   Robin- 
son 
Stanmore,   Baron.   See   Gordon, 

Arthur  Charles  Hamilton- 
Stannard,  Henrietta  Eliza  Vau- 

ghan,  'John  Strange  Winter' 
Stannus,  Hugh  Hutton 
Stansfeld,  Margaret 
Stansgate,  Viscount.  See  Benn, 

William  Wedgwood 
Stanton,  Arthur  Henry 
Stapledon,  Sir  (Reginald)  George 
Stark,  Arthur  James 
Starling,  Ernest  Henry 
Stead,  William  Thomas 
Stebbing,  (Lizzie)  Susan 
Steed,  Henry  Wickham 
Steel,  Allan  Gibson 
Steel,  Flora  Annie 
Steel-Maitland,  Sir  Arthur  Her- 
bert     Drummond      Ramsay- 

(formerly      Arthur      Herbert 

Drummond  Steel) 
Steer,  Philip  Wilson 
Steggall,  Charles 
Stein,  Sir  (Mark)  Aurel 
Stephen,  Sir  Alexander  Condie 
Stephen,  Caroline  Emelia  (1834- 

1909).  See  under  Stephen,  Sir 

Leslie 
Stephen,  George,  Baron  Mount 

Stephen 
Stephen,  Sir  Leslie 


1859-1918 
1829-1909 
1886-1%0 

1851-1922 

1884-1958 
1855-1927 
1840-1910 
1868-1924 
1813-1907 
1868-1951 
1819-1901 
1840-1901 

1837-1912 
1883-1948 
1829-1908 

1849-1931 
1880-1941 
1852-1924 

1874-1948 
1869-1947 

1865-1948 


1839-1925 

1841-1908 

1827-1903 
1841-1904 
1872-1955 
1896-1950 

1829-1909 

1829-1912 

1856-1911 
1840-1908 
1860-1951 

1877-1960 
1839-1913 
1882-1960 
1831-1902 
1866-1927 
1849-1912 
1885-1943 
1871-1956 
1858-1914 
1847-1929 


1876-1935 
1860-1942 
1826-1905 
1862-1943 
1850-1908 


1829-1921 
1832-1904 


Stephens,  Frederic  George 

Stephens,  James 

Stephens,  James 

Stephens,  James  Brunton 

Stephens,  William  Richard  Wood 

Stephenson,  Sir  Frederick  Charles 
Arthur 

Stephenson,  George  Robert 

Stephenson,  Marjory 

Sterling  (afterwards  MacKinlay), 
Antoinette 

Sterndale,  Baron.  See  Pickford, 
William 

Stevens,  Marshall 

Stevenson,  Sir  Daniel  Macaulay 

Stevenson,  David  Watson 

Stevenson,  James,  Baron 

Stevenson,  John  James 

Stevenson,  Sir  Thomas 

Stevenson,  William  Henry 

Stewart,  Charles 

Stewart,  Sir  Halley 

Stewart,  Isla 

Stewart,  James 

Stewart,  John  Alexander 

Stewart,  Sir  (Percy)  Malcolm 

Stewart,  Sir  (Samuel)  Findlater 

Stewart,  William  Downie 

Stewart,  Sir  William  Houston 

Stewart-Murray,  Katharine  Mar- 
jory, Duchess  of  Atholl 

Stiles,  Sir  Harold  Jalland 

Still,  Sir  (George)  Frederic 

Stirling,  Sir  James 

Stirling,  James  Hutchison 

Stirling,  Walter  Francis 

Stockdale,  Sir  Frank  Arthur 

Stocks,  John  Leofric 

Stoddart,  Andrew  Ernest 

Stokes,  Adrian 

Stokes,  Sir  Frederick  Wilfrid 
Scott 

Stokes,  Sir  George  Gabriel 

Stokes,  Sir  John 

Stokes,  Whitley 

Stoll,  Sir  Oswald 

Stone,  Darwell 

Stoney,  Bindon  Blood 

Stoney,  George  Gerald 

Stoney,  George  Johnstone 

Stoop,  Adrian  Dura 

Stopes,  Marie  Charlotte  Car- 
michael 

Stopford,  Sir  Frederick  William 

Storrs,  Sir  Ronald  Henry  Amherst 

Story,  Robert  Herbert 

Story-Maskelyne,  Mervyn  Her- 
bert Nevil 

Stout,  George  Frederick 

Stout,  Sir  Robert 

Strachan,  Douglas 

Strachan,  John 

Strachan-Davidson,  James  Leigh 

Strachey,  Sir  Arthur  (1858-1901). 
See  under  Strachey,  Sir  John 

Strachey,  Sir  Edward 

Strachey,  Sir  Edward,  Baron 
Strachie 

Strachey,  (Giles)  Lytton 


1828-1907 
1825-1901 
1880?-1950 
1885-1902 
1830-1902 

1821-1911 

1819-1905 
1885-1948 

1843-1904 

1848-1923 
1862-1936  ^ 

1851-1944/N 

1842-1904 

1873-1926 

1881-1908 

1888-1908 

1858-1924 

1840-1907 

1888-1937 

1855-1910 

1831-1905 

1848-1933 

1872-1951 

1879-1%0 

1878-1949 

1822-1901 

1874^-1960 
1863-1946 
1868-1941 
1836-1916 
1820-1909 
1880-1958 
1883-1949 
1882-1937 
1863-1915 
1887-1927 

1860-1927 
1819-1903 
1825-1902 
1830-1909 
1866-1942 
1859-1941 
1828-1909 
1863-1942 
1826-1911 
1883-1957 

1880-1958 
1854-1929 
1881-1955 
1835-1907 

1823-1911 
1860-1944 
1844^1930 
1875-1950 
1862-1907 
1843-1916 

1823-1907 
1812-1901 

1858-1936 
1880-1932 


1143 


DICTIONARY   OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Strachey,  Sir  John 
Strachey,  John  St.  Loe 
Strachey,  Sir  Richard 
Strachie,   Baron.   See  Strachey, 

Sir  Edward 
Stradling,  Sir  Reginald  Edward 
Strakosch,  Sir  Henry 
Strang,  William 

Strangways,  Arthur  Henry  Fox 
Strangways,       Giles       Stephen 

Holland  Fox-,  Earl  of  Ilches- 

ter.  See  Fox-Strangways 
Strathcarron,   Baron.   See   Mac- 

pherson,  (James)  Ian 
Strathclyde,    Baron.    See    Ure, 

Alexander 
Strathcona,   Baron.   See   Smith, 

Donald  Alexander 
Strathmore  and  Kinghome,  Earl 

of.    See   Bowes-Lyon,    Claude 

George 
Stratton,  Frederick  John  Marrian 
Street,  Sir  Arthur  William 
Streeter,  Burnett  Hillman 
Stretton,  Hesba,  pseudonym.  See 

Smith,  Sarah 
Strickland,  Gerald,  Baron 
Strijdom,  Johannes  Gerhardus 
Strong,  Eugenie 
Strong,  Leonard  Alfred  George 
Strong,  Sir  Samuel  Henry 
Strong,  Sandford  Arthur 
Strong,  Thomas  Banks 
Struthers,  Sir  John 
Strutt,  Edward  Gerald 
Strutt,    John    William,    Baron 

Rayleigh 
Strutt,  Robert  John,  Baron  Ray- 
leigh 
Stuart,     Sir    John    Theodosius 

Burnett-.  See  Burnett-Stuart 
Stuart-Jones,    Sir    Henry.    See 

Jones 
Stubbs,  Sir  Reginald  Edward 
Stubbs,  William 
Studd,  Sir  (John  Edward)  Kyn- 

aston 
Sturdee,    Sir   Frederick   Charles 

Doveton 
Sturgis,  Julian  Russell 
Sturt,  George 
Sturt,     Henry     Gerard,     Baron 

Alington 
Sueter,  Sir  Murray  Frazer 
Sullivan,  Alexander  Martin 
Sumner,  Viscount.    See    Hamil- 
ton, John  Andrew 
Sunmer,  Benedict  Humphrey 
Sutherland,  Alexander 
Sutherland,  Halliday  Gibson 
Sutherland,  Sir  Thomas 
Sutro,  Alfred 

Sutton,  Sir  Bertine  Entwisle 
Sutton,  Henry  Septimus 
Sutton,  Sir  John  Bland- 
Sutton,  Martin  John 
Swain,  Joseph 
Swan,  John  Macallan 
Swan,  Sir  Joseph  Wilson 


1823-1907      Swann,  Sir  Oliver 
1860-1927      Swayne,  Joseph  GriflBths 
1817-1908      Swaythling,    Baron.    See    Mon- 
tagu, Samuel 
1858-1936      Sweet,  Henry 
1891-1952       Swete,  Henry  Barclay 
1871-1943      Swettenham,   Sir  Frank  Athel- 
1859-1921  stan(e) 

1859-1948      Swift,  Sir  Rigby  Philip  Watson 

Swinburne,  Algernon  Charles 

Swinburne,  Sir  James 
1874-1959      Swinfen,     Baron.     See     Eady, 

Charles  Swinfen 
1880-1937      Swinton,  Alan  Archibald  Camp- 
bell 
1853-1928      Swinton,  Sir  Ernest  Dunlop 

Sydenham  of  Combe,  Baron.  See 
1820-1914  Clarke,  George  Sydenham 

Sykes,  Sir  Frederick  Hugh 

Sykes,  Sir  Mark 
1855-1944      Sykes,  Sir  Percy  Molesworth 
1881-1960       Syme,  David 
1892-1951      Symes-Thompson,  Edmund 
1874-1937      Symonds,  Sir  Charters  James 

Symons,  Arthur  William 
1832-1911       Symons,  William  Christian 
1861-1940      Synge,  John  Millington 
1893-1958 

1860-1943      Tadema,    Sir   Lawrence    Alma-. 
1896-1958  See  Alma-Tadema 

1825-1909      Tagore,  Sir  Rabindranath 
1863-1904      Tait,     Frederick     Guthrie.     See 
1861-1944  under  Tait,  Peter  Guthrie 

1857-1925      Tait,  James 
1854-1930      Tait,  Peter  Guthrie 

Tait,  Sir  (William  Eric)  Campbell 
1842-1919      Talbot,  Edward  Stuart 

Talbot,  Sir  George  John 
187^1947      Tallack,  William 

Tallents,  Sir  Stephen  George 
1875-1958      Tangye,  Sir  Richard 

Tanner,  Joseph  Robson 
1867-1939      Tansley,  Sir  Arthur  George 
1876-1947      Tarn,  Sir  William  Woodthorpe 
1825-1901       Tarte,  Joseph  Israel 

Taschereau,  Sir  Henri  Elz^ar 
1858-1944      Taschereau,  Sir  Henri  Thomas 

Tata,  Sir  Dorabji  Jamsetji 
1859-1925      Tata,  Jamsetji  Nasarwanji 
1848-1904      Tatlow,  Tissington 
1863-1927      Tattersfield,  Frederick 

Taunton,  Ethelred  Luke 
1825-1904      Taylor,  Alfred  Edward 
1872-1960      Taylor,  Charles 
1871-1959      Taylor,  Charles  Bell 

Taylor,  Frank  Sherwood 
1859-1934      Taylor,  Sir  Gordon  Gordon-.  See 
1893-1951  Gordon-Taylor 

1852-1902      Taylor,  Helen 
1882-1960      Taylor,  Henry  Martyn 
1834-1922      Taylor,  Isaac 
1863-1933      Taylor,  Sir  John 
1886-1946      Taylor,  John  Edward 
1825-1901       Taylor,  Louisa.  See  Parr 
1855-1936      Taylor,     Sir     Thomas     Weston 
1850-1913  Johns 

1820-1909      Taylor,  Walter  Ross 
1847-1910      Taylor,  William 
1828-1914      Teale,  Thomas  Pridgin 

1144 


1878-1948 
1819-1903 

1832-1911 
1845-1912 
1835-1917 

1850-1946 
1874-1937 
1837-1909 

1858-1958 

1851-1919 

1863-1930 
1868-1951 


CUMULATIVE   INDEX   1901-1960  i  3  ro 


Teall,  Sir  Jethro  Justinian 
Harris 

Tearle,  (George)  Osmond 

Tearle,  Sir  Godfrey  Seymour 

Tegart,  Sir  Charles  Augustus 

Teichman,  Sir  Eric 

Temperley,  Harold  William 
Vazeille 

Tempest,  Dame  Marie 

Temple,  Frederick 

Temple,  Sir  Richard 

Temple,  Sir  Richard  Camac 

Temple,  William 

Templewood,  Viscount.  See 
Hoare,  Sir  Samuel  John  Gurney 

Tennant,  Sir  Charles 

Tennant,  Sir  David 

Tennant,  Margaret  Mary  Edith 
(May) 

Tenniel,  Sir  John 

Tennyson-d'Eyncourt,  Sir  Eu- 
stace Henry  William 

Terry,  Dame  (Alice)  Ellen 

Terry,  Charles  Sanford 

Terry,  Fred 

Terry,  Sir  Richard  Runciman 

Thankerton,  Baron.  See  Watson, 
William 

Thesiger,  Frederic  Augustus, 
Baron  Chelmsford 

Thesiger,  Frederic  John  Napier, 
Viscount  Chelmsford 

Thiselton-Dyer,  Sir  William 
Turner 

Thomas,  Bertram  Sidney 

Thomas,  David  Alfred,  Viscount 
Rhondda 

Thomas,  Dylan  Marlais 

Thomas,  Frederick  William 

Thomas,  Freeman  Freeman-, 
Marquess  of  Willingdon.  See 
Freeman-Thomas 

Thomas,  George  Holt    -iK    \,h 

Thomas,  Sir  Henry        . .  > ; !      . 

Thomas,  Herbert  Henry 

Thomas,  Sir  Hugh  Evan-.  See 
Evan-Thomas  .iv>kjw>v 

Thomas,  James  Henry 'iiorri'f  r 

Thomas,  James  Purdon  Lewes, 
Viscount  Cilcennin 

Thomas,  Margaret  Haig,  Viscoun- 
tess Rhondda 

Thomas,  (Philip)  Edward 

Thomas,  Sir  William  Beach 

Thomas,  William  Moy 

Thompson,  Alexander  Hamilton 

Thompson,  D'Arcy  Wentworth 

Thompson,  Sir  D'Arcy  Went- 
worth 

Thompson,  Edmund  Symes-. 
See  Symes-Thompson 

Thompson,  Edward  John 

Thompson,  Sir  Edward  Maunde 

Thompson,  Francis 

Thompson,  Sir  Henry 

Thompson,  Sir  (Henry  Francis) 
Herbert 

Thompson,  Henry  Yates 

Thompson,  James  Matthew 


1840-1924 
1852-1901 
1884-1953 
1881-1946 
1884-1944 

1879-1939 
1864-1942 
1821-1902 
1826-1902 
1850-1931 
1881-1944 

1880-1959 
1823-1906 
1829-1905 

1860-1946 
1820-1914 

1868-1951 
1847-1928 
1864-1936 
lh6.J-1933 
1865-1938 

1873-1948 

1827-1905 

18«8-1933 

1843-1928 
1892-1950 

1856-1918 
1914-1953 
1867-1956 

18eO-194f 
1860-1929 
1878-1952 
1876-1935 

1862-1928 
1874-1949 

1908-1960 

1883-1958 
1878-1917 
1868-1957 
1828-1910 
187a-1952 
1829-1902 

1860-1948 

1837-1906 
1886-1946 
1840-1929 
1859-1907 
1820-1904 

1859-1944 

1838-1928 
1878-1956 


Thompson,  Lydia 
Thompson,  Reginald  Campbell 
Thompson,  Silvanus  Phillips 
Thompson,  William  Marcus 
Thomson,  Arthur 
Thomson,  Sir  Basil  Home 
Thomson,  Christopher  Birdwood, 

Baron 
Thomson,  Hugh 
Thomson,  Jocelyn  Home 
Thomson,  John 
Thomson,  Sir  Joseph  John 
Thomson,  William,  Baron  Kel- 
vin 
Thomson,  Sir  William 
Thome,  William  James  (Will) 
Thornton,  Alfred  Henry  Robin- 
son 
Thornton,  Sir  Edward 
Thornycroft,  Sir  John  Isaac 
Thomycroft,  Sir  (William)  Hamo 
Thorpe,  Sir  Thomas  Edward     •  * 
ThrelfaU,  Sir  Richard  "    •-- 

Thring,  Godfrey 
Thring,  Henry,  Baron 
Thrupp,  George  Athelstane 
Thuillier,     Sir    Henry    Edward 

Landor 
Thursfield,  Sir  James 
Thurston     (formerly     Madden), 

Katherme  Cecil 
Tillett,  Benjamin  (Ben) 
Tilley,  Vesta  *-     ^ 

Tinsley,  William  ' 

Tinworth,  George  mv/I  ."T  . 

Tiwana,  Nawab  Sir  (Muhammad) 

Umar  Hayat 
Tizard,  Sir  Henry  Thomas 
Tizard,  Thomas  Henry 
Todd,  Sir  Charles 
Tomlin,    Thomas    James    Ches- 

shy  re.  Baron 
Tomlinson,  George 
Tomlinson,  Henry  Major 
Toms(Mi,  Arthur 
Tonks,  Henry    »^   •>''^ 
Toole,  John  Lawrence 
Topley,  William  Whiteman  Cari- 

tCHl 

Torrance,  George  William 
Tout,  Thomas  Frederick 
Tovey,  Sir  Donald  Francis 
Townsend,    Sir    John    Sealy 

Edward 
Townsend,  Meredith  White  '  '  ' ' 
Townshend,    Sir    Charles    Vere 

Ferrers 
Towse,  Sir  (Ernest)  Beachcroft 
(Beckwith)  '  '"' 

Toynbee,  Paget  Jackson      '  '^* 
Tracey,  Sir  Richard  Edward 
Trafford,  F.  G.,  pseudonym.  See 
Riddell,  Charlotte  Eliza  Law- 
son  P'"-" 
Traill,  Anthony 
Traill-Burroughs,   Sir  Frederick 

William.  See  Burroughs 
Tree,  Sir  Herbert  Beerbohm 
Treloar,  Sir  William  Purdie 


1836-1908 
1876-1941 
1851-1916 
1857-1907 
1858-1936 
1861-1939 

1875-1930 
1860-1920 

1859-1908 
18r>6-1926 
1856-1940 

18«4-1907 
1848-1909 
1857-1946 

1863-1939 
1817-1906 
184J3-1928 
1850-1925 
1845-1925 
^1861-1932 
1823-1903 
1818-1907 
1822-1905 

1813-1906 
1840-1923 

1875-1911 
1860-1943 
1864-1952 
1831-1902 
1843-1913 

1874^1944 
1885-1959 
1839-1924 
1826-1910 

1867-1935 
1890-1952 
1873-1958 
1859-1905 
1862-1937 
1880-1906 

1886-1944 
1835-1907 
1855-1929 
1875-1940 

1868-1957 
>1881-1911 

1861-1924 

•1864-1948 
1L  855-1933 
1887-1907 


f  1832-1906 
1838-1914 

1881-1905 
1852-1917 
1843-1923 


•■•.V 


1145 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Trench,  Frederic  Herbert 
Trenchard,  Hugh  Montague,  Vis- 
count 
Trent,  Baron.  See  Boot,  Jesse 
Trevelyan,  Sir  Charles  Philips 
Trevelyan,  Sir  George  Otto 
Trevelyan,  Hilda 
Treves,  Sir  Frederick 
Trevethin,  Baron.  See  Lawrence, 

Alfred  Tristram 
Trevor,  William  Spottiswoode 
Tristram,  Ernest  William 
Tristram,  Henry  Baker 
Tritton,  Sir  William  Ashbee 
Trotter,  Wilfred  Batten  Lewis 
Troubridge,   Sir  Ernest  Charles 

Thomas 
Troubridge,  Sir  Thomas  Hope 
Troup,  Robert  Scott 
Tnieman,  Sir  Arthur  Elijah 
Truman,  Edwin  Thomas 
Truscot,  Bruce,  pseudonym.  See 

Peers,  Edgar  Allison 
Tshekedi  Khama 
Tucker,  Alfred  Robert 
Tucker,  Sir  Charles 
Tucker,  Henry  William 
Tuckwell,  Gertrude  Mary 
Tuke,  Henry  Scott 
Tupper,  Sir  Charles 
Tupjjer,  Sir  Charles  Lewis 
Turing,  Alan  Mathison 
TumbuU,  Hubert  Maitland 
Turner,  Sir  Ben 
Turner,  Charles  Edward 
Turner,  Cuthbert  Hamilton 
Turner,  George  Grey 
Turner,  Herbert  Hall 
Turner,  James  Smith 
Turner,  Walter  James  Redfem 
Turner,  Sir  William 
Tumor,  Christopher  Hatton 
Turpin,  Edmund  Hart 
Tutton,  Alfred  Edwin  Howard 
Tweed,  John 
Tweedmouth,  Baron.   See  Mar- 

joribanks,  Edward 
Tweedsmuir,  Baron.  See  Buchan, 

John 
Twyman,  Frank 
Tyabji,  Badruddin 
Tyler,  Thomas 
Tylor,  Sir  Edward  Burnett 
Tylor,  Joseph  John 
Tynan,  Katharine.  See  Hinkson 
Tyndale-Biscoe,  Cecil  Earle 
Tyrrell,  George 
Tyrrell,  Robert  Yelverton 
Tyrrell,  William  George,  Baron 
Tyrwhitt,  Sir  Reginald  Yorke 
T^rrwhitt-Wilson,      Sir      Gerald 

Hugh,  Baron  Berners 

Ullswater,  Viscount.  See  Low- 

ther,  James  William 
Underbill,  Edward  Bean 
Underbill,  Evelyn  (Mrs.  Stuart 

Moore) 
Unwin,  Sir  Raymond 


1865-1923 

1873-1956 
1850-1931 
1870-1958 
1838-1928 
1877-1959 
1853-1923 

1843-1936 
1831-1907 
1882-1952 
1822-1906 
1875-1946 
1872-1939 

1862-1926 
1895-1949 
1874-1939 
1894-1956 
1818-1905 

1891-1952 
1905-1959 
1849-1914 
1838-1935 
1830-1902 
1861-1951 
1858-1929 
1821-1915 
1848-1910 
1912-1954 
1875-1955 
1863-1942 
1831-1903 
1860-1930 
1877-1951 
1861-1930 
1832-1904 
1889-1946 
1832-1916 
1873-1940 
1835-1907 
1864-1938 
1869-1933 

1849-1909 

1875-1940 
1876-1959 
1844-1906 
1826-1902 
1832-1917 
1851-1901 
1861-1931 
1863-1949 
1861-1909 
1844-1914 
1866-1947 
1870-1951 

1883-1950 


1855-1949 
1813-1901 

1875-1941 
1863-1940 


Unwin,  William  Cawthome  1838-1933 
Ure,   Alexander,   Baron  Strath- 

clyde  1853-1928 

Urwick,  William  1826-1905 
Uthwatt,    Augustus    Andrewes, 

Baron  1879-1949 

Vachell,  Horace  Annesley  1861-1955 

Vallance,  Gerald  Aylmer  1892-1955 

Vallance,  William  Fleming  1827-1904 

Vanbrugh,  Dame  Irene  1872-1949 

Vanbrugh,  Violet  1867-1942 

Vandam,  Albert  Dresden  1843-1903 
Vane-Tempest-Stewart,    Charles 

Stewart,  Marquess  of- London- 
derry 1852-1915 
Vane-Tempest-Stewart,    Charles 

Stewart  Henry,   Marquess  of 

Londonderry  1878-1949 

Van  Home,  Sir  William  Cornelius  1 843-19 1 5 

Vansittart,  Edward  Westby  1818-1904 

Vansittart,  Robert  Gilbert,  Baron  1881-1957 

Vaughan,  Bernard  John  1847-1922 

Vaughan,  David  James  1825-1905 

Vaughan,  Herbert  Alfred  1832-1903 
Vaughan,  Kate                                1852  ?-1903 

Vaughan,  William  Wyamar  1865-1938 

Vaughan  Williams,  Ralph  1872-1958 

Veitch,  Sir  Harry  James  1840-1924 

Veitch,  James  Herbert  1868-1907 

Venn,  John  1834-1923 

Ventris,  Michael  George  Francis  1922-1956 
Verdon-Roe,  Sir  (Edwin)  AUiott 

Verdon  1877-1958 
Vereker,  John  Standish  Surtees 

Prendergast,  Viscount  Gort  1886-1946 
Vemey,  Margaret  Maria,  Lady  1844-1930 
Vernon-Harcourt,  Leveson  Fran- 
cis 1839-1907 
Verrall,  Arthur  Woollgar  1851-1912 
Vestey,  William,  Baron  1859-1940 
Vezin,  Hermann  1829-1910 
Vezin    (formerly    Mrs.    Charles 

Young),  Jane  Elizabeth  1827-1902 

Vickers,  Kenneth  Hotham  1881-1958 
Victoria  Adelaide  Mary  Louise, 

Princess  Royal  of  Great  Britain 

and  German  Empress  1840-1901 
Victoria  Alexandra  Olga  Mary, 

princess  of  Great  Britain  1868-1935 
Villiers,   George  Herbert  Hyde, 

Earl  of  Clarendon  1877-1955 
Villiers,  John  Henry  De,  Baron. 

See  De  Villiers  1842-1914 
Villiers,      Margaret      Elizabeth 

Child-,  Countess  of  Jersey  1849-1945 
Villiers,    Victor    Albert    (ieorge 

Child-,  Earl  of  Jersey  1845-1915 
Vincent,    Sir   (Charles   Edward) 

Howard  1849-1908 
Vincent,    Sir    Edgar,    Viscount 

D'Abemon  1857-1941 

Vincent,  James  Edmund  1857-1909 

Vines,  Sydney  Howard  1849-1934 
Vinogradoff,    Sir   Paul   Gavrilo- 

vitch  1854-1925 

Voigt,  Frederick  Augustus  1892-1957 
Von  Hiigel,  Friedrich,  Baron  of 

the  Holy  Roman  Empire  1852-1925 


1146 


CUMtJtAnVE   INDEX   1901-1960 


Voysey,  Charles 

Voysey,  Charles  Francis  Annes- 
ley 

Wace,  Henry 

Waddell,  Lawrence  Augustine 
(later  Austine) 

Wade,  Sir  Willoughby  Francis 

Wadsworth,  Alfred  Powell 

Wadsworth,  BMward  Alexander 

Waggett,  Philip  Napier 

Wain,  Louis  William 

Wake-Walker,  Sir  William 
Frederic 

Wakefield,  Charies  Cheers,  Vis- 
count 

Wakley,  Thomas  (1851-1909). 
See  under  Wakley,  Thomas 
Henry 

Wakley,  Thomas  Henry 

Walcot,  William 

Walkden,  Alexander  George, 
Baron 

Walker,  Sir  Byron  Edmund 

Walker,  Sir  Emery 

Walker,  Ernest 

Walker,  Dame  Ethel 

Walker,  Frederic  John 

Walker,  Frederick  William 

Walker,  Sir  Frederick  William 
Edward  Forestier  Forestier-. 
See  Forestier- Walker 

Walker,  Sir  Gilbert  Thomas 

Walker,  Sir  James 

Walker,  Sir  Mark 

Walker,  Sir  Norman  Purvis 

Walker,  Sir  Samuel 

Walker,  Vyell  Edward 

Walker,  Sir  William  Frederic 
Wake-.  See  Wake- Walker 

Walkley,  Arthur  Bingham 

Wallace,  Alfred  Russel 

Wallace,  Sir  Cuthbert  Sidney 

Wallace,  Sir  Donald  Mackenzie 

Wallace,  (Richard  Horatio)  Ed- 
gar 

Wallace,  William  Arthur  James 

Wallas,  Graham 

Waller,  Charles  Henry 

Waller,  Lewis 

Waller,  Samuel  Edmund 

Walls,  Tom  Kirby 

Walpole,  Sir  Hugh  Seymour 

Walpole,  Sir  Spencer 

W^alsh,  Stephen 

Walsh,  William  Pakenham 

Walsham,  Sir  John 

Walsham,  William  Johnson 

Walter,  Sir  Edward 

Walton,  Arthur 

Walton,  Frederick  Parker 

Walton,  Sir  John  Lawson 

Walton,  Sir  Joseph 

Wanklyn,  James  Alfred 

Wantage,  Baron.  See  Lindsay 
(afterwards  Loyd-Lindsay), 
Robert  James 

Warburton,  Adrian 

Ward,  Sir  Adolphus  William 


1828-1912      Ward,  Sir  Edward  Willis  Duncan 

Ward,  Francis  (Frank)  Kingdon-. 
1857-1941  See  Kingdon-Ward 

Ward,  Harry  Leigh  Douglas 
1836-1924      Ward,  Harry  Marshall 

Ward,  Henry  Snowden 
1854-1938      Ward,  Ida  Caroline 
1827-1906      Ward,  James 
1891-1956      Ward,  John 
1889-1949      Ward,  Sir  Joseph  George 
1862-1939      Ward,  Sir  Lancelot  Edward  Bar- 
1860-1939  rington-.  See  Barrington-Ward 

Ward,  Sir  Leslie,  'Spy' 
1888-1945      Ward,  Mary  Augusta  (Mrs.  Hum- 
phry Ward) 
1859-1941      Ward,  Robert  McGowan  Barring- 
ton-.  See  Barrington-Ward 

Ward,  Wilfrid  Philip 

Ward,  William  Humble,  Earl  of 
1821-1907  Dudley 

1874-1943      Wardlaw,  William 

Wardle,  Sir  Thomas 
1873-1951      Ware,  Sir  Fabian  Arthur  Goul- 
1848-1924  stone 

1851-1933      Waring,  Anna  Letitia 
1870-1949      Waring,  Sir  Holburt  Jacob 
1861-1951       Warington,  Robert 
1896-1944      Warlock,  Peter,  pseudonym.  See 
1830-1910  Heseltine,  Philip  Arnold 

Wame,  Frederick 

^Vameford,  Reginald  Alexander 
1844-1910  John 

1868-1958      ^Varne^,  Charles 
1863-1935      Warner,  Sir  George  Frederic 
1827-1902      Warre,  Edmond 
1862-1942      Warre-Comish,  Francis  Warre 
1832-1911      Warren,  Sir  Charles 
1837-1906      Warren,  Sir  Thomas  Herbert 

Warrender,     Sir     George    John 
1888-1945  Scott 

1855-1926      Warrington,       Thomas       Rolls, 
1823-1913  Baron  Warrington  of  Clyffe 

1867-1944      Warwick,  Countess  of.  See  Gre- 
1841-1919  ville,  Frances  Evelyn 

Waterhouse,  Alfred 
1875-1932      Waterhouse,  Paul 
1842-1902      Waterlow,  Sir  Ernest  Albert 
1858-1932      Wateriow,  Sir  Sydney  Hedley 
1840-1910      Watkin,  Sir  Edward  William 
1860-1915      Watkins,  Henry  George  ('Gino') 
1850-1903      Watson,  Albert 
1883-1949      Watson,  Sir  Charles  Moore 
1884-1941       Watson,  Sir  David  Milne  Milne-. 
1839-1907  See  Milne- Watson 

1859-1929      Watson,  Foster 
1820-1902      Watson,  George  Lennox 
1830-1905      Watson,  Henry  William 
1847-1903      Watson,  John,  'Ian  Maclaren* 
1823-1904      Watson,  John  Christian 
1897-1959      Watson,  Sir  (John)  WiUiam 
1858-1948      Watson,  Sir  Malcolm 
1852-1908      Watson,  Sir  Patrick  Heron 
1845-1910      Watson,  Robert  Spence 
1834-1906      Watson,  Robert  William  Seton-. 
See  Seton- Watson 

Watson,  William,  Baron  Thank- 
1832-1901  erton 

1918-1944      Watt,  George  Fiddes 
1837-1924      Watt,  Margaret  Rose 

1147 


1853-1928 

1885-1958 
1825-1906 
1854-1906 
1865-1911 
1880-1949 
1848-1925 
1866-1934 
1856-1930 

1884-1953 
1851-1922 

1851-1920 

1891-1948 
1856-1916 

1867-1932 
1892-1958 
1881-1909 

1869-1949 
1823-1910 
1866-1953 
1838-1907 

1894-1930 
1825-1901 

1891-1915 
1846-1909 
1845-1936 
1837-1920 
1839-1916 
1840-1927 
1853-1930 

1860-1917 

1851-1937 

1861-1938 
1880-1905 
1861-1924 
1850-1919 
1822-1906 
1819-1901 
1907-1932 
1828-1904 
1844-1916 

1869-1945 
1860-1929 
1851-1904 
1827-1903 
1850-1907 
1867-1941 
1858-1935 
1873-1955 
1882-1907 
1887-1911 

187^1951 

1873-1948 
1873-1960 
1868-1948 


DICTIONARY  OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Watts,  George  Frederic 

Watts,  Henry  Edward 

Watts,  John 

Watts,  Sir  Philip 

Watts-Dunton,  Walter  Theodore 

Wauchope,  Sir  Arthur  Grenfell 

Waugh,  Benjamin 

Waugh,  James 

Wavell,  Archibald  Percival,  Earl 

Wavell,  Arthur  John  Byng 

Waverley,  Viscount.  See  Ander- 
son, John 

Weaver,  Sir  Lawrence 

Webb,  Alfred  John 

Webb,  Allan  Becher 

Webb,  Sir  Aston 

Webb,  Clement  Charles  Julian 

Webb,  Francis  William 

Webb,  (Martha)  Beatrice  (1858- 
1943).  See  under  Webb,  Sidney 

,   James 

Webb,  Mary  Gladys 

Webb,  Philip  Speakman 

Webb,  Sidney  James,  Baron 
Passfield 

Webb,  Thomas  Ebenezer 

Webb-Johnson,  Alfred  Edward, 
Baron 

Webber,  Charles  Edmund 

Webster,  Benjamin 

Webster,    Dame    Mary    Louise 

.  (May)  (1865-1948).  See  under 
Webster,  Benjamin 

Webster,  Richard  Everard, 
Viscount  Alverstone 

Webster,  Wentworth 

Wedgwood,  Josiah  Clement, 
Baron 

Wedgwood,  Sir  Ralph  Lewis 

Weeks,  Ronald  Morce,  Baron 

Weir,  Andrew,  Baron  Inverforth 

Weir,  Sir  Cecil  McAlpine 

Weir,  Harrison  William 

Weir,  William  Douglas,  Viscount 

Weizmann,  Chaim 

Welby,  Reginald  Earle,  Baron 

Welch,  Adam  Cleghom 

Weldon,  Walter  Frank  Raphael 

Wellcome,  Sir  Henry  Solomon 

Welldon,  James  Edward  Cowell 

Wellesley,  Dorothy  Violet,  Duch- 
ess of- Wellington 

Wellesley,  Sir  (ieorge  Greville 

Wellesley,  Sir  Victor  Alexander 
Augustus  Henry 

Wellington,  Duchess  of.  See 
Wellesley,  Dorothy  Violet 

Wells,  Henry  Tanworth 

Wells,  Herbert  George 

Wemyss,  Rosslyn  Erskine,  Baron 
Wester  Wemyss 

Wemyss-Charteris-Douglas,  Fran- 
cis, Earl  of  Wemyss 

Wemher,  Sir  Julius  Charles 

West,  Sir  Algernon  Edward 

West,  Edward  William 

West,  Lionel  Sackville-,  Baron 
Sackville.  See  Sackville- West 

West,  Sir  Raymond         ^vH  iaiK 


1817-1904 
182&-1904 
1861-1902 
1846-1926 
1832-1914 
1874-1947 
1839-1908 
1881-1905 
1883-1950 
1882-1916 

1882-1958 
1876-1930 
1834-1908 
1839-1907 
1849-1930 
1865-1954 
1836-1906 


1881-1927 
1831-1915 

1859-1947 
1821-1903 

1880-1958 
1838-1904 
1864-1947 


1842-1915 
1829-1907 

1872-1943 

1874-1956 
1890-1960 
1865-1955 
1890-1960 
1824-1906 
1877-1959 
1874-1952 
1832-1915 
1864-1943 
1860-1906 
1853-1936 
1854r-1937 

1889-1956 
1814-1901 

1876-1954 

1889-1956 
1828-1903 
1866-1946 

1864-1933 

1818-1914 

1850-1912 
1832-1921 
1824-1905 

1827-1908 
1832-1912 


Westall,  William  (Bury) 

Westcott,  Brooke  Foss 

Wester     Wemyss,     Baron.     See 

Wemyss,  Rosslyn  Erskine 
Westlake,  John 
Westland,  Sir  James 
Weston,  Dame  Agnes  Elizabeth 
Weston,     Sir     Aylmer      Gould 

Hunter- 
Weston,  Frank 
Wet,     Christiaan    Rudolph    De. 

See  De  Wet 
Weyman,  Stanley  John 
Weymouth,  Richard  Francis 
Wharton,    Sir    William    James 

Lloyd 
Wheatley,  John 
Wheeler,  Sir  William  Ireland  de 

Courcy 
Wheelhouse,  Claudius  Galen 
Whetham,  William  Cecil  Dam- 
pier.  See  Dampier 
Whibley,  Charles 
Whibley,  Leonard 
Whipple,  Robert  Stewart 
Whistler,  James  Abbott  McNeill 
Whistler,  Reginald  John  (Rex) 
Whitby,      Sir     Lionel      Ernest 

Howard 
White,  Claude     Grahame-.     See 

Grahame- White 
White,     Sir     (Cyril)     Brudenell 

(Bingham) 
White,  Sir  George  Stuart 
White,  Henry  Julian 
White,   John    Campbell,    Baron 

Overtoun 
White,  Leonard  Charles 
White,     William     Hale,     *Mark 

Rutherford' 
WTiite,   Su-  William  Hale-.   See 

Hale- White 
White,  Sir  William  Henry 
Whitehead,  Alfred  North 
Whitehead,  John  Henry  Constan- 

tine 
Whitehead,  Robert 
Whiteing,  Richard 
Whiteley,  William 
Whiteley,  William 
Whiteway,  Sir  William  Vallance 
Whitla,  Sir  William 
Whitley,  John  Henry 
Whitley,  William  Thomas 
Whitman,  Alfred  Charles 
Whitmore,  Sir  George  Stoddart 
Whitney,  James  Pounder 
Whittaker,  Sir  Edmund  Taylor 
Whitten  Brown,  Sir  Arthur.  See 

Brown 
Whitty,     Dame     Mary     Louise 

(May)  (1865-1948).  See  under 

Webster,  Benjamin 
Whitworth,  Geoffrey  Arundel 
Whitworth,  William  Allen 
Whymper,  Edward 
Whymper,  Josiah  Wood 
Whyte,  Alexander 
Wickham,  Edward  Charles 


1834-1903 
1825-1901 

1864-1933 
1828-1913 
1842-1903 

1840-1918 

1864-1940 
1871-1924 

1854-1922 
1855-1928 
1822-1902 

1843-1905 
1869-1930 

1879-1943 
1826-1909 

1867-1952 
1859-1930 
1863-1941 
1871-1953 
1834-1903 
1905-1944 

1895-1956 

1879-1959 

1876-1940 
1835-1912 
1859-1934 

1843-1908 
1897-1955 

1831-1913 

1857-1949 
1845-1913 
1861-1947 

1904-1960 
1823-1905 
1840-1928 
1831-1907 
1881-1955 
1828-1908 
1851-1933 
1866-1935 
1858-1942 
1860-1910 
1830-1903 
1857-1939 
1873-1956 

1886-1948 


1864-1947 
1883-1951 
1840-1905 
1840-1911 
1813-1903 
1836-1921 
1834-1910 


1148 


YHS /CUMULATIVE   INDEX    1901-1960  T'JI   r 


Wiggins,  Joseph     ""  ' 

Wigham,  John  Richardson 
Wigram,  Chve,  Baron 
Wigram,  Woolmore 
Wirberforce,  Ernest  Roland 
Wilbraham,   Sir   Philip   Wilbra- 

ham  Baker 
Wild,  (John  Robert)  Francis 
Wilding,  Anthony  Frederick 
Wilkie,  Sir  David  Percival  Dal- 
«'  breck 

Wilkins,  Augustus  Samuel 
Wilkins,  Sir  (George)  Hubert 
Wilkins,  William  Henry 
Wilkinson,  Ellen  Cicely 
Wilkinson,  George  Howard 
Wilkinson,  (Henry)  Spenser 
Wilkinson,  Sir  Nevile  Rodwell 
Wilkinson,  Norman 
Wilks,  Sir  Samuel  "" '  -■ 

Will,  John  Shiress        '-hr^'.^  f; 
Willcocks,  Sir  James 
Willcox,  Sir  William  Henry 
Willes,  Sir  George  Ommanney 
Willett,  William 
Williams,  Alfred 
Williams,  (Arthur  Frederic)  Basil 
Williams,  Charles 
Williams,  Charles  Hanson  Gre- 

ville 
Williams,  Charles  Walter  Stansby 
Williams,  Sir  Edward  Leader 
Williams,  Sir  George        '    '   ' 
WilHams,  Hugh  ' 

Williams,  John  Carvell-  '    ^  ^  " 
Williams,  Sir  John  Fischer 
Williams,  Norman  Powell 
Williams,    Ralph  Vaughan.   See 

Vaughan  Williams 
Wilhams,    Sir   Roland   Bowdler 

Vaughan 
Williams,  Rowland,  'Hwfa  Mon' 
Williams,      Watkin      Hezekiah, 

'Watcyn  Wyn' 
Williams-Freeman,  John  Peere 
Williamson,  Alexander  William 
Williamson,  John  Thobum 
Willingdon,    Marquess    of.    See 

Freeman-Thomas,  Freeman 
Willis,  Henry 
WiUis,  William 
Willock,  Henry  Davis 
Willoughby,  Digby 
Wills,  Sir  George  Alfred 
Wills,    WUliam    Henry,    Baron 

Winterstoke 
Wilmot,  Sir  Sainthill  Eardley- 
Wilson,  Sir  Arnold  Talbot 
Wilson,      Arthur     (1836-1909). 
See     under    Wilson,    Charles 
Henry,  Baron  Nunbumholme 
Wilson,  Sir  Arthur  Knyvet 
Wilson,    Charles   Henry,   Baron 

Nunbumholme 
Wilson,  Sir  Charles  Rivers 
Wilson,  Charles  Robert 
Wilson,  Charles  Thomson  Rees 
Wilson,  Sir  Charles  William 
Wilson,  Edward  Adrian 


1882-1905 
1829-1906 
1873-1960 
1831-1907 
1840-1907 

1875-1957 
1873-1939 
1883-1915 

1882-1938 
1843-1905 
1888-1958 
1860-1905 
1891-1947 
1833-1907 
1853-1937 
1869-1940 
1882-1934 
1824-1911 
1840-1910 
1857-1926 
1870-1941 
1823-1901 
1856-1915 
1832-1905 
1867-1950 
1838-1904 

1829-1910 
1886-1945 
1828-1910 
1821-1905 
1843-1911 
1821-1907 
1870-1947 
1883-1943 

1872-1958 

1838-1916 
1823-1905 

1844-1905 
1858-1943 
1824-1904 
1907-1958 

1866-1941 
1821-1901 
1835-1911 
1830-1903 
1845-1901 
1854r-1928 

1830-1911 
1852-1929 
1884-1940 


1842-1921 

1833-1907 
1831-1916 
1863-1904 
1869-1959 
1836-1905 
1872-1912- 


Wilson,  George  Fergusson 
Wilson,  Sir  Gerald  Hugh  Tyr- 

whitt-,    Baron    Bemers.    See 

Tyrwhitt-WUson 
Wilson,  Sir  Henry  Hughes 
Wilson,  Henry  Schiitz  /  • 

Wilson,  Herbert  Wrigley     '/    *  <^ 
Wilson,  Sir  Jacob 
Wilson,  James  Maurice 
Wilson,  Jolm  Cook 
Wilson,  John  Dove 
Wilson,  Joseph  Havelock 
Wilson,  Samuel  Alexander  Kin- 

nier 
Wilson,  Sir  Samuel  Herbert^  ' '- 
Wilson,  Walter  Gordon      '  t  -  i  > 
Wilson,  William  Edward 
Wimbome,  Viscount.  See  Guest, 

Ivor  Churchill 
Wimperis,  Harry  Egerton  '^  ■    ' '» 
Wimshurst,  James  •''    '<  ^  • 

Windus,  William  Lindsay  i  '  <'- 
Winfield,  Sir  Percy  Henry'-'  '  '• 
Wingate,  Sir  (Francis)  Reginald   '  1861-1953 
Wingate,  Orde  Charles  1903-1944 

Winnington-Ingram,  Arthur  Foley  1858-1946 


1822-1902 


188a-1950 
1864-1922 
1824-1902 
1866-1940 

1886-1905 
1836-1931 
1840-1915 
1883-1908 
1868-1929 

1874-1937 

'1878-I95d 

"1874-1957 

"1851-1908 

1873-1939 
"1876-1960 
•^882-1903 
»' '1822-1907 
'  1878-1953 


Winstanley,  Denjrs  Arthur 
Winter,  Sir  James^  Spearman 
Winter,    John    Strange,   pseud- 
onym. See^Stsnn&Td,  Henrietta 

Eliza  Vaughan 
Winterstoke,  Baron.  See  Wills, 

William  Henry 
Winton,  Sir  Francis  Walter  De. 

See  De  Winton 
Wise,  Thomas  James      "  '^   uik>ii'' 
Withers,  Hartley       - '  »  <  nuuHt  // 1 
Witt,  Sir  Robert  Clermont 
Wittewronge,  Sir  Charles  Bennet 

Lawes-.      See      Lawes-Wittc- 

wronge 
Wittgenstein,      Ludwig      Josef 

Johann 
Wodehouse,  John,  Earl  of  Kim- 

berley 
Wolfe,  Humbert  (formeriy  Uih- 

berto  Wolff) 
Wolfe-Barry,  Sir  John  Wolfe 
Wolff,    Sir    Henry    Drummond 

Charles 
Wolff,  Martin 
Wollaston,  Alexander  Frederick 

Richmond 
Wolseley,   Garnet  Joseph,   Vis- 

coimt 
Wolverhampton,   Viscount.   See 

Fowler,  Henry  Hartley 
Wood,  Charles 
Wood,  Charles  Lindley,  Viscount 

Halifax 
Wood,  Edward  Frederick  Lindley, 

Earl  of  Halifax 
Wood,  Francis  Derwent 
Wood,  Sir  (Henry)  Evelyn 
Wood,  Sir  Henry  Joseph 
Wood,  Sir  (Howard)  Kingsley 
Wood,   MatUda   Alice    Victoria, 

'Marie  Lloyd* 
Wood,  Thomas 


1877-1947 
1845-1911 

If  7/ 
1856-rtU 

1880-1911 

1835-1901 
185^1937 
1867-1950 
1872-1952 


1843-1911 

1880-1951 

18B6-1902 

1886-1940 
1886-1918 

1880-1908 
1872-1953 

1875-1930 

1883-1913 

1830-1911 
1866-1926 

1889-1934 

1881-1959 
1871-1926 
1838-1919 
1869-1944 
1881-1943 

1870-1922 
1892-1950 


1149 


DICTIONARY   OF  NATIONAL  BIOGRAPHY 


Wood,  Thomas  McKinnon  1853-1927 
Woodall,  William  1832-1901 
Woodgate,  Walter  Bradford  1840-1920 
Woods,  Sir  Albert  William  1816-1904 
Woods,  Edward  1814-1903 
Woods,  Henry  1868-1952 
Woodward,  Sir  Arthur  Smith  1864-1944 
Woodward,  Herbert  Hall  1847-1909 
Woolavington,  Baron.  See  Bu- 
chanan, James  1849-1935 
Wooldridge,  Harry  Ellis  1845-1917 
Woolf,  (Adeline)  Virginia  1882-1941 
Woolgar,      Sarah      Jane.      See 

Mellon  1824-1909 

WooUard,  Frank  George  1883-1957 

Woolley,  Sir  (Charles)  Leonard  1880-1960 

Wordsworth,  Dame  Elizabeth  1840-1932 

Wordsworth,  John  1843-1911 

Workman,  Herbert  Brook  1862-1951 
Worms,  Henry  De,  Baron  Pir- 

bright.  See  De  Worms  1840-1903 
Worthington,  Sir  Percy  Scott  1864-1939 
Worthington-Evans,  Sir  (Worth- 
ington)   Laming.    See    Evans  1868-1931 
Wrenbury,  Baron.  See  Buckley, 

Henry  Burton  1843-1935 
Wright,  Sir  Almroth  Edward  1861-1947 
Wright,   Charles  Henry  Hamil- 
ton 1836-1909 
Wright,    Sir    Charles    Theodore 

Hagberg  1862-1940 

Wright,  Edward  Perceval  1834-1910 

Wright,  Joseph  1855-1930 

Wright,  Sir  Robert  Samuel  1839-1904 

Wright,  Whitaker  1845-1904 

Wright,  William  Aldis  1831-1914 

Wright,  Sir  (William)  Charles  1876-1950 

Wrong,  George  Mackinnon  1860-1948 

Wroth,  Warwick  William  1858-1911 

Wrottesley,  Sir  Frederic  John  1880-1948 

Wrottesley,  George  1827-1909 

Wyld,  Henry  Cecil  Kennedy  1870-1945 
Wylie,  Charles  Hotham  Montagu 

Doughty-.  See  Doughty- Wylie  1868-1915 

Wylie,  Sir  Francis  James  1865-1952 

Wyllie,  Sir  William  Hutt  Curzon  1848-1909 

Wyllie,  William  Lionel  1851-1931 

Wyndham,  Sir  Charles  1837-1919 

Wyndham,  George  1863-1913 
Wyndham     (formerly     Moore), 

Mary,  Lady  1861-1931 


Wyndham-Quin,  Windham  Tho- 
mas,  Earl  of  Dunraven  and 

Mount-Earl.  See  Quin  1841-1926 

Wynn-Carrington,  Charles  Ro- 
bert,   Baron    Carrington    and 

Marquess  of  Lincolnshire  1843-1928 

Wyon,  Allan  1843-1907 

Yapp,  Sir  Arthur  Keysall  1869-1936 

Yarrow,  Sir  Alfred  Fernandez  1842-1932 

Yate,  Sir  Charles  Edward  1849-1940 
Yates,  Dornford,  pseudonym.  See 

Mercer,  Cecil  William  1885-1960 

Yeats,  Jack  Butler  1871-1957 

Yeats,  William  Butler  1865-1939 

Yeo,  Gerald  Francis  1845-1909 

Yonge,  Charlotte  Mary  1823-1901 
Yorke,    Albert    Edward    Philip 

Henry,  Earl  of  Hardwicke  1867-1904 

Yorke,  Warrington  1883-1943 

Youl,  Sir  James  Arndell  1811-1904 

Young,  Sir  Allen  William  1827-1915 
Young,  Mrs.  Charles.  See  Vezin, 

Jane  Elizabeth  1827-1902 
Young,   Edward  Hilton,  Baron 

Kennet  1879-1960 

Young,  Francis  Brett  1884-1954 

Young,  Geoffrey  Winthrop           .  1876-1958 

Young,  George,  Lord  1819-1907 

Young,  Sir  George  1837-1930 

Young,  George  Malcolm  1882-1959 

Young,  Sir  Hubert  Winthrop  1885-1950 

Young,  Sir  Robert  Arthur  1871-1959 

Young,  Sydney  1857-1937 

Young,  William  Henry  1863-1942 

Young,  Sir  William  Mackworth  1840-1924 
Younger,       George,        Viscount 

Younger  of  Leckie  1851-1929 
Younger,  Robert,  Baron  Blanes- 

burgh  1861-1946 
Younghusband,  Sir  Francis  Ed- 
ward 1863-1942 
Yoxall,  Sir  James  Henry  1857-1925 
Ypres,  Earl  of.  See  French,  John 

Denton  Pinkstone  1852-1925 

Yule,  George  Udny  1871-1951 

Zangwill,  Israel  1864-1926 

Zimmern,  Sir  Alfred  Eckhard  1879-1957 
Zulueta,   Francis   de   (Francisco 

Maria  Jos^)  1878-1958 


^l 


1150 


5i2 


GENR 


D.N.B. 

SUPPLEMENT  1951-1960 


FACTS  AND 


PLEASE  DO  NOT  REMOVE 
CARDS  OR  SLIPS  FROM  THIS  POCKET 

UNIVERSITY  OF  TORONTO  LIBRARY