Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Volume people die to be in

John Nixon rarely figures alongside the likes of Charles I, Prince Rupert and Oliver Cromwell when the story of Oxford in the Civil War is told.

But fame looks to have finally been bestowed on the three times Oxford mayor more than 350 years after his death. For the 17th-century Oxford civic leader and school founder is to join the likes of the hell-raising actor Oliver Reed, Steptoe and Son star Harry H. Corbett and the comedian Harry Worth for inclusion in the new online edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The new edition of the ODNB adds biographies of 105 men and women to the dictionary viewed as bestowing immortality of a kind, described as being the National Portrait Gallery in print.

To qualify for a mention you must be firstly dead, and secondly British, although a few Commonwealth citizens and people who resided in Britain have been included. When, a few years ago, the DNB decided it was time to correct previous omissions, a staggering 15,000 people wrote in with suggestions, some listing 500 people.

The greatest of all national collections of biography was designed in 1882 by the great Victorian publisher George M. Smith, with some 63 quarterly volumes appearing between 1885 and 1900.

After 1900, three volumes were produced to include people who had been inadvertently omitted or who had died after the production of their alphabetical volume.

With Z having been reached (the 63rd volume ending with Zuylestein) the decision was taken to continue the publication of the DNB every 10 years to include the people who died in each decade.

Dr Christine Nicholls, the former co-editor of the dictionary, once explained to me: “There are many reasons why persons did not find a a place in past volumes. It can be as a result of posthumous fame as in the case of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

“Changing historical perspectives have also to be taken into account. Charles Babbage, the inventor of the computer, for example, did not warrant a mention.”

But omissions, it seems, could also be put down to prejudice, with more than a suspicion of bias against women at one time, This is confirmed in a letter from one DNB adviser who wrote of one unfortunate woman in 1926: “Had she been a man, her work would, I think, have entitled her to a short notice.”

There were many early taboo subjects which meant important aspects of people’s lives had to be simply omitted. Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality, for example, was hardly mentioned. Alcoholism and illegitimacy were always left out at all cost.

The fame of contributors down the years could match that of their subjects. In one volume Kingsley Amis wrote on Sir John Betjeman, Michael Foot on James Cameron and Richard Baker on broadcaster Roy Plomley, while the career of Eric Morecambe was charted by Morecambe and Wise script writer Dick Hills.

The year 2004 saw the big change when the Oxford DNB was published simultaneously in print and online. Since then there have been online updates in January, May and September every year.

The complete Oxford DNB has been available online to 48m residents in England and Northern Ireland via their public libraries since 2006 and since 2008 available via nearly all Welsh and Scottish libraries.

But it remains the ultimate national record of men and women who have shaped all walks of British life in the UK and overseas from the Roman occupation to the 21st century.

The new lives that went online this month make for an interesting and varied bunch, reckons DNB spokesman Anna Silva.

“It includes a special focus on British cinema and television – from the pioneering directors of the early 1900s to actors, directors and producers of mid and later 20th century films such as Oh, Mr Porter!, Bridge on the River Kwai, The Curse of Frankenstein and television classics including Steptoe and Son.”

And then there is the remarkable former Oxford mayor, who died in 1662. John Nixon’s portrait hangs alongside a painting of his wife in the council chamber in Oxford Town Hall – and now we can all learn why he fully deserves that honour.

Nixon was a prominent member of Oxford civic government from the 1620s to the 1650s, a period of turbulence, when war and religious divisions were preoccupations of those in local government as well as in Parliament. In a city that was to become the Royalist capital, was a prominent champion of the Parliamentarian cause.

Dr Vivienne Larminie, senior editor for the History of Parliament Trust and president of Oxford Historical Association, wrote up the entry on Nixon.

She said: “His changing fortunes as a local politician reflect those of the Parliamentarian cause, especially during the 1640s when Oxford changed hands between supporters of the King and Parliament.”

As the country slid towards war in the summer of1642, Oxford prepared to defend itself against a siege. Nixon contributed 4lb of gunpowder to the civic store, but when 160 Royalist troops arrived on August 28, receiving a warm welcome from the university vice-chancellor, Nixon was among those the antiquary Anthony Wood described as the “puritanical townsmen” who “out of guilt fled to Abendon [Abingdon], fearing they should be ill used and imprisoned”.

In September 1643, Nixon topped the list of townsmen disenfranchised and deprived of office by the mayor on the King’s instruction because they had “left the city many months since, to join the rebellion”.

In May 1644, we learn that Nixon was among the prosecution witnesses at the trial of Charles I’s Archbishop of Canterbury, the one-time President of St John’s College, William Laud, testifying both to the archbishop’s hostility to the Oxford corporation and to the deleterious effects of his religious policy.

Nixon described viewing from his house passers-by in the High Street pausing to bow by Laud’s newly-erected porch at the university church, doing outrageous homage to its statue of a crowned Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ.

Laud dismissed Nixon as a persistent troublemaker, stirring up town-gown hostility, and his story of the statue as without proof. However, it seems Nixon was the man believed, with Laud going to the block at Tower Hill in 1645.

When the Oxford garrison surrendered to Parliament in June 1646 Nixon returned to the city within days and was restored to the corporation, which he proceeded to dominate for the succeeding decade. In September he was again chosen mayor and in December was elected to Parliament.

Dr Larminie describes how Nixon dispensed much private charity, with his most lasting achievement the foundation in 1658 of a school for sons of poor freemen, situated within a collection of buildings in St Aldate’s parish.

Ironically, in her view Nixon may have missed out on a place in the DNB in the last century through being Oxford based, with local history previously not regarded as a subject of serious historical interest.

“Going online has helped redress the balance,” she said. “We are already seeing people included like Henry Box, who founded the school in Witney.”

Hopefully, other figures better known in Oxfordshire than on the national stage are still to find their way into the national dictionary of biography that people die to be in.