Dictionary of world biography

976 Pages·2019·6.247 MB·English

by  Barry O. Jones;

Dictionary of
World Biography
Sixth edition

Dictionary of
World Biography
Barry Jones
Sixth edition
Published by ANU Press
The Australian National University
Acton ACT 2601, Australia
Email: [email protected]
Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au
ISBN (print): 9781760462864
ISBN (online): 9781760462871
WorldCat (print): 1099184831
WorldCat (online): 1099184770
DOI: 10.22459/DWB.2019
This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
The full licence terms are available at
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode
The ANU.Lives Series in Biography is an initiative of the National Centre of Biography
at The Australian National University, ncb.anu.edu.au.
Cover design and layout by ANU Press
First edition © 2014 ANU Press
Second edition © 2015 ANU Press
Third edition © 2016 ANU Press
Fourth edition © 2017 ANU Press
Fifth edition © 2018 ANU Press
Sixth edition © 2019 ANU Press
About the Author
Jones, Barry Owen (1932– ). Australian politician, writer and lawyer, born in Geelong.
Educated at Melbourne University, he was a public servant, high school teacher,
television and radio performer, university lecturer and lawyer before serving as a Labor
MP in the Victorian Parliament 1972–77 and the Australian House of Representatives
1977–98. He took a leading role in reviving the Australian film industry, abolishing
the death penalty in Australia, and was the first politician to raise public awareness of
global warming, the ‘post-industrial’ society, the IT revolution, biotechnology, the rise
of ‘the Third Age’ and the need to preserve Antarctica as a wilderness. In the *Hawke
Government, he was Minister for Science 1983–90, Prices and Consumer Affairs 1987,
Small Business 1987–90 and Customs 1988–90. He became a member of the Executive
Board of UNESCO, Paris 1991–95 and National President of the Australian Labor Party
1992–2000, 2005–06. He was Deputy Chairman of the Constitutional Convention
1998. His books include Decades of Decision 1860– (1965), Joseph II (1968), Age of
Apocalypse (1975), and he edited The Penalty is Death (1968). Sleepers, Wake!: Technology
and the Future of Work was published by Oxford University Press in 1982, became
a bestseller and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish and braille.
The fourth edition was published in 1995. Knowledge Courage Leadership: Insights &
Reflections, a collection of speeches and essays, appeared in 2016.
He received a DSc for his services to science in 1988 and a DLitt in 1993 for his work on
information theory. Elected FTSE (1992), FAHA (1993), FAA (1996) and FASSA (2003),
he is the only person to have become a Fellow of four of Australia’s five learned Academies.
Awarded an AO in 1993, named as one of Australia’s 100 ‘living national treasures’ in
1998, he was elected a Visiting Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1999.
His autobiography, A Thinking Reed, was published in 2006 and The Shock of Recognition,
about music and literature, in 2016. In 2014 he received an AC for services ‘as a leading
intellectual in Australian public life’.
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Abbreviations
AC/AO Companion/Officer of the Order GCSI/ Grand Cross/Knight Commander/
of Australia KCSI/ Dame Commander/Companion of the
CSI Order of the Star of India
ADC Aide de camp
GCVO/ Grand Cross/Knight Commander/
AIDS Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
KCVO/ Dame Commander/Companion of the
a.k.a. also known as DCVO/ Royal Victorian Order
CVO
ALP Australian Labor Party
GOC General Officer Commanding
BAFTA British Academy of Film
and Television Arts ILO International Labour Organization
BBC British Broadcasting Corporation KC/QC King’s/Queen’s Counsel
BEF British Expeditionary Force KG/LG Knight/Lady of the Order of the Garter
CC/OC Companion/Officer of the Order KGB Committee of State Security
of Canada (former USSR)
CCP Chinese Communist Party KP Knight of St Patrick
CERN Conseil Européen pour la Recherche KT Knight of the Thistle
Nucléaire
MEP Member of the European Parliament
CH Companion of Honour
MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
MP Member of Parliament
CNRS Centre National de la Recherche
NASA National Aeronautics and Space
Scientifique
Administration
CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
DFC Distinguished Flying Cross
OM Order of Merit
DSO Distinguished Service Order
PC Privy Counsellor
EC European Community
RA Royal Academician, London
EU European Union
RAF Royal Air Force
FAA Fellow of the Australian Academy
SDP Social Democratic Party
of Science
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands
FBA Fellow of the British Academy
UK United Kingdom
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
UN United Nations
FRCP Fellow of the Royal College
of Physicians UNESCO United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization
FRS Fellow of the Royal Society
US(A) United States (of America)
FRSA Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
GBE/ Grand Cross/Knight Commander/
KBE/ Dame Commander/Companion of the VC Victoria Cross
DBE/ Order of the British Empire
WHO World Health Organization
CBE
GCB/ Grand Cross/Knight Commander/
KCB/CB Companion of the Order of the Bath
GCMG/ Grand Cross/Knight Commander/
KCMG/ Dame Commander/Companion of the
DCMG/ Order of St Michael and St George
CMG
vii

Introduction
In the mid-1950s I had been puzzled that no comprehensive biographical dictionary was
available in paperback and I determined to fill the gap. I wrote to Penguin Books in London/
Harmondsworth and received a thoughtful and encouraging letter from A. S. B. Glover,
a classical scholar and editor. The two generally available major biographical dictionaries,
Chambers’s and Webster’s, both had significant weaknesses. One was too British, with a poor
representation of names outside of Europe (a deficiency corrected somewhat in later editions)
and the second, while far more comprehensive, offered short entries, little more than concise
lists of dates, offices held or works produced, with no interpretation or context provided.
Both were heavy and expensive, while I planned a book that students could carry around.
As an undergraduate, I worked part-time as a draftsman in the Victorian Titles Office,
and my fellow workers included John Landy, John Button and other future public figures.
I began to work systematically on collating material for a dictionary of biography. In practice,
the TO clerks operated on a daily quota. There was no point in breaking records for
processing files because it would simply jam the system, because ‘engrossing’ Certificates of
Title was a slow, pre-Gutenberg process. So draftsmen (and they were all male at that time)
devoted surplus time to their special interests, such as working out sophisticated betting
systems for racing. My speciality was developing lists of names that should be included in
a reasonably portable paperback intended to be broader in range than existing hardcover
biographical dictionaries.
I worked on this project on and off for many years. While largely relying on instinct, I would
have backed my own judgment on the choice of names, and their relative length, against all
comers. My selections were influenced by my constant reading of biographies, noting how
often a particular name would have multiple references in indexes in a random sample of
books about, say, 20th-century politics. However, I could check my judgment objectively
by referring to The Biography Index, a cumulative list of biographical material in books and
magazines, published quarterly by the H. W. Wilson Company, New York. (This was long
before the Internet made the task of ranking name frequency so much easier.)
By the end of 1960 I had completed my first draft and had three bound volumes of typescript.
I was then teaching at Dandenong High School and my long period on the television quiz
‘Pick-a-Box’ had just begun. It was the time when Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Mao, de Gaulle,
Macmillan and Menzies held office and (other than me) only Queen Elizabeth II is a link
with that bygone era.
In January 1961 I took masses of material to London and arranged a meeting with Penguin
Books. Charles Clarke began by asking to see my entry on the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung,
and this impressed him enough to offer me a contract and a generous advance. Unfortunately,
soon after the contract was signed Charles left Penguin for the Tavistock Institute and years
of uncertainty and confusion followed.
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Dictionary of World Biography
Sir Allen Lane, Penguin’s founder, recruited Sir John Summerscale, formerly Minister
(Commercial) to Rio, to be editor-in-chief of reference books. He was an amiable, hospitable
man, but not one of Lane’s shrewdest appointments. He had a passion for the Edwardian
theatre, lawn tennis and South America.
Penguin’s headquarters was in Middlesex, but the reference books section was housed in an
oubliette in John Street, Holborn. I thought the people working there had a distinctly P. G.
Wodehouse flavour. I was already irritated by proposed lists of additions and omissions, with
a disproportionate emphasis on English subjects. I asked Penguin’s reference people if they
were familiar with the H. W. Wilson Biography Index. They had never heard of it. ‘How do
you choose which names to include or exclude?’ ‘We ask chaps.’
To provide an example, a man working in the office was called over to proffer advice. I have
always thought of his name as Wotherspoon, but this may be an embellishment. Sir John
said, ‘Wothers, old fruit, in a biographical dictionary of about 6000 entries, with some
bias towards the 20th-century and the English-speaking world, what would you do with
the South African novelist Stuart Cloete? In or out?’ Wotherspoon closed his eyes for a few
seconds, sucked his lips and blew out his cheeks. ‘I rather think … In.’ ‘There you are’,
said Sir John. ‘We ask chaps.’
The strategy adopted by Penguin, they told me, was to break up the work into categories
and send my entries out to specialists so that they could add a cachet of legitimacy to the
work of an unknown antipodean. Unhappily, because of the years wasted over the project,
some experts had died, dropped out or possibly gone mad. Then I was advised that an
experienced editor had been brought in, to ‘coordinate’ the book. He was M. (for Meredith)
Vibart Dixon, former editor-in-chief of Chambers’s Encyclopedia. I looked up Who’s Who and
found that he had been born in 1898, was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge
and had written The True Facts about the Disputed Frontiers of Europe (1940). We never
met or talked on the telephone. Sir John sent me a list of Dixon’s suggested additions and
omissions. Overwhelmingly, the additions were British, the proposed omissions non-British.
I protested vigorously. Then, in 1967, I was told that Vibart Dixon had died.
I was confident about the quality of my research. I had sent drafts to many subjects, inviting
comments, and received valuable information from E. M. Forster, P. G. Wodehouse, Ezra
Pound, Oskar Kokoschka, Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Noam
Chomsky and John Updike. Igor Stravinsky wrote: ‘Glad you corrected all those absurd
inventions of my so called “biographers” and, not critical, but critinitical reviews in musical
periodicals you mention … Thanking you very much for all these corrections.’
Obsessed about correcting error, I did not necessarily accept everything that my subjects
told me. My approach was opinionated and subjective. I set my entries in the broad sweep
of history, pointed to relationships between major characters and their times, and challenged
errors in other reference books. I was making judgments all the time. I included cross
references (*) and a bibliography to encourage discursive reading. Detail in entries often
reflected what I was teaching at the time, for example the artists of the Italian Renaissance,
or the leaders of the French and Russian revolutions.
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