Christopher Booker on national biography
Dictionary of National Biography 1951-60 edited by E. T. Williams and Helen M. Palmer (OUP £9.50) This latest instalment of the DNB, covering 760 men and women who died between 1951 and 1960, can be taken on two levels. As a work of reference, its workmanlike and occasionally brilliant brief biographies, by 603 contributors, most of whom were personally acquainted with their subjects, adds to the files the large part of another chapter in our national history, spanning the sixty years from the pre-1914 heyday of Beerbohm and Belloc, Gertie Millar and Christabel Pankhurst, C. B. Fry and Gilbert Jessop, to the giants of the post-war Labour government, Bevan, Bevin (at eight pages, the longest entry), Cripps (a good essay by Woodrow Wyatt), and even to those who did not make their name until the 'fifties — Gilbert Harding, Michael Ventris, Dennis Brain, Mike Hawthorn, the three latter all killed in car crashes. In between, we may find rank on rank of worthy lawyers, surgeons, architects, civil servants, occasionally leavened by " expert on the potato " or " destrOer of man-eating tigers," each summed up for posterity in appropriate manner. But on another level, this book cumulatively evokes in a remarkable way a half-forgotten world. Browsing through its pages, we are back in the England of Dean Inge writing in the Evening Standard, of Jack Squire's cricket matches, Stanley Spencer painting at Cookham, Vaughan Williams at the Three Choirs; the England of C. B. Cochran revues, of the Aga Khan leading in the Derby winner, of Ronnie Knox and Dorothy Sayers, of Queen Mary and George VI, of Eddie Marsh and Charles Morgan, Kathleen Ferrier and Professor Joad, the England of all our Younger days.
What really brings this volume alive is not so much its memories of long-dead headlines and controversies, the Maurice debate, the Lynskey tribunal, bodyline bowling, Barnes of Birmingham, nor the founding of great institutions, Trenchard's RAF, George Barnes's Third Programme, nor even less the dim political figures of the 'thirties, Sir Samuel Hoare, HoreBelisha, Vansittart — but its conjuring-up Of a fast-vanishing England, a slightly Improbable nation of gifted amateurs and eccentrics, of pig-sticking colonial administrators and detective-story-writing head/tasters, of judges who could be "a fearless man to hounds ... well-known in the Heythrop country . . . and as late as 1930 'went' the North-Eastern circuit With four hunters," of rich characters who lived their lives on several levels. We read, for instance, of the Red Duchess ' of Athol!, who celebrated her by-election defeat in 1938 by sitting down to play through the Waldstein and Appassionata sonatas, or of Roxburgh, the first headmaster of Stowe, who "kept a gramophone in his study solely to play lieethoven's Kreutzer "; of Admiral Max 4orton, of Western Approaches fame and "a great devotion to St. Therese of Lisieux which would have surprised his shipmates had they known of it "; of Edmund Clerihew Bentley, known for "adding a new word to the language" and "the best detective novel of the century "; of Lord Cherwell, who "had probably the unique distinction of appearing at Wimbledon after he had become a Professor "; of Princess Arthur of Connaught, who was shipwrecked in Morocco, worked in several London hospitals as "Nurse Marjorie," and died in the middle of writing a book on big-game hunting; of Gilbert Murray, professor of Greek at twenty-three, parodist (his Ramsay MacDonald speech ended "I shall not shrink from hesitating to refuse ") and polymath (" yet he had his blind spots — Tacitus, the psalms, music "); of Michael Ventris, the young architect who solved the riddle of Linear B in his spare time.
It was a nation which could not only produce such now quite fictional characters as Russell Pasha, "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 the discomfort of an ibex trail but a bon viveur in town," but could offer an appropriate home for such larger-than-life immigrants as Namier, Wittgenstein and Alexander Korda. Even the scientists, of whom there are more in this volume than ever before, were still able to take on this somewhat impossible colouring, apart from Sir Alexander Fleming, or Alan Turing, the "father of the computer," who took his own life, we read of the man who not only invented the vacuum cleaner, but also, in best Heath Robinson tradition, built the giant Ferris wheel in Vienna celebrated in The Third Man; or of Sir James Swinburne, ninth baronet and electrical pioneer, who spent his childhood on a Gaelic-speaking island in a Scots loch, was only beaten by months by the Belgian Baekeland to the discovery of plastics, and went on to live to be a hundred.
It was, of course, largely an upper and middle-class world, from the nursery stories of A. A. Milne to the distant presence of Viceroys (Halifax and Linlithgow), although it drew recruits from surprising places — Constance Spry, the daughter of a railway clerk, who rose to run a department in the Ministry of Munitions, Ivor Novello, the son of a Cardiff rate-collector, Ernest Bevin, the illegitimate son of an Exmoor midwife. Often we are too near their subjects' lifetimes for the contributors to avoid mere obituarist's guff — the " short, stronglybuilt man of shining honesty and twinkling humour" could easily be any judge or major-general, but turns out in fact to be Harry Pollitt. The nearest one contributor can come to complete frankness about his subject's shortcomings is to say that he was "respected, if perhaps comparatively few, in his later years at any rate, penetrated beneath the shyness and reserve sufficiently to like him." There are such euphemisms as, of Sir Edward Marsh, that "as a result of mumps and German measles in adolescence " he was " destined never to marry." There are one or two omissions (Gerard Hoffnung), some weak entries (several of the sportsmen in particular could have been painted more fully, such as C. B. Fry). But by and large the high level of competence is illumined by a number of outstanding essays (Sir Denis Brogan on Gilbert Harding, Wayland Young's pious memoir of his remarkable father), and one's only real regret must be that the price of this volume, three or four times that of any of its predecessors, will put it out of reach of any but the most determined maintainers of a reference library.
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