# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Prefatory Note

PREFATORY NOTE
THIS volume contains the lives of notable persons who died in the years 1912-1921. It has been planned on less ample lines than the Supplement which was published by Messrs. Smith, Elder in 1912, under the editorship of the late Sir Sidney Lee. That work, dealing with the obits of eleven years, included 1,660 lives and extended to 2,035 pages. It was a bold and attractive experiment. If, however, the same policy of selection were to be pursued throughout the present century, the result would be to add about 15,000 lives (and nearly 20,000 pages of print) to the main work, which (with the three supplementary volumes published in 1901) contains a little more than 30,000 substantive articles. Est modus in rebus. A continuation on such a scale would be beyond the means of most of those for whose use such a work is primarily intended. The editors have endeavoured to reduce in some degree the average length of articles, so far as this could be done without sacrificing essential facts. But, whenever it was possible and seemed desirable to obtain personal appreciations of the kind that only contemporaries can supply, room has been found for such material, in the belief that it may be useful to the future historian of this age.
The period of time which these biographies cover is more than a hundred years. The late Lord Wemyss was born in 1818; Francis Bashforth, the mathematician, and Alexander Campbell Fraser, the metaphysical philosopher, in 1819. The decade 1820-1829 is represented by a substantial list of names, among which appear those of Joseph Arch, the pioneer of agricultural trade-unionism, Sir Nathaniel Barnaby, the naval designer, Sir Sandford Fleming, Sir Edward Fry, Lord Halsbury, Augustus Jessopp, Lord Lindley, Lord Lister, Lord Llandaff, Lord Peel, Lord Mount Stephen, Sir Charles Tupper, Alfred Russel Wallace and John Westlake, the international lawyer. With the next decade, 1880-18389, we enter the full stream of the era which this volume chiefly represents: this is the decade which produced Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Sir Francis Burnand, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Courtney of Penwith, Sir William Crookes, Emily Davies, William De Morgan, Sir Michael Hicks Beach (Lord St. Aldwyn), Thomas Hodgkin, Shadworth Hodgson, Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), Sir John Mahaffy, Sir Clements Markham, Sir James Murray, the lexicographer, Sir Andrew Noble, Sir Edward Poynter, Lord Roberts, Henry John Roby, Frederic Seebohm, Walter Skeat, Philip Webb, Lord Welby, William Hale White (‘Mark Rutherford’), Lord Wolseley, and Sir Evelyn Wood.
From these instances it will be evident that the spirit of the early ​Victorian age was still a living force in the second decade of the present century. Many articles in this volume relate to men and women whose characters matured and whose convictions were fully formed before 1870. Some of these illustrious survivals may owe a part of their current reputation to the fact that they survived so long. But a career must be judged as a whole; the effect of a life’s work is cumulative; and a man’s personal influence must be gauged, in some degree, by its duration as well as by its intensity. The Nestors of any period are to be remembered as links between the vivid present and the dissolving past, as the repositories of unwritten tradition, and faithful critics of their innovating juniors.
A biographical dictionary which covers four years and a half of European war might be expected to abound in names taken from that glorious, heart-rending roll of honour which records the names of 946,000 citizens of the British Empire. But the loss which that list represents to the Empire at large, and to Great Britain and Ireland in particular—since these sister islands contributed to the roll of honour more than 748,000 names—is not to be measured by those careers which a Dictionary of National Biography can chronicle. In the war years the hopes of the future were sacrificed to meet the imperious necessities of the present, and every battle took heavy toll of the, young, more especially of those who had proved their powers of leadership in thought and action; so that we may say, with Pericles: ἡ νεότης ἐκ τῆς πόλεως ἀνῇρηται ὥοπερ τὸ ἔαρ ἐκ τοῦ ἐνιαυτοῦ εἰ ἐξαιρεθείν. Such biographies as those of Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Francis Ledwidge, Henry Moseley, and Frederick Septimus Kelly illustrate | the richness and variety of the promise which sympathetic observers could perceive in that devoted generation.
Other aspects of the war, and national losses of other kinds which it occasioned, are revealed in the lives of Admirals Sir Robert Arbuthnot, Sir Christopher Cradock, Sir Horace Hood, and Captain Fryatt; of Lord Kitchener, drowned at sea, and Lord Lucas, killed by a fall from the air; of Generals Sir Thompson Capper, Sir Beauchamp Duff, Charles Fitzclarence, V.C., John Gough, V.C., Sir James Grierson, Sir Stanley Maude; of Nurse Edith Cavell, Sir Victor Horsley, Dr. Elsie Inglis, Arthur Wavell. The lives of Albert Ball, V.C., William Leefe Robinson, V.C., and Reginald Warneford, V.C., are included to illustrate the brilliant audacity which characterized the Royal Air Force in the war.
The acknowledgements of the Editors are due in particular to the following, for valuable criticisms and suggestions: Sir Hugh P. Allen, Sir Hugh K. Anderson, Sir Vincent Baddeley, Mr. C. F. Bell, Mr. ​E. I. Carlyle, Mr. H. C. Colles, Admiral Sir Reginald Custance, Mr. Geoffrey Dawson, Brigadier-General J. E. Edmonds, Sir Charles Firth, Mr. S. Vesey FitzGerald, Sir Archibald Garrod, Mr. Stephen Gaselee, Sir Edmund Gosse, Sir Edward Grigg, the Bishop of Durham, the Dean of St. Paul’s, Earl Jellicoe, Professor A. B. Keith, Lord Kilbracken, the Archbishop of York, the late Dr. Walter Leaf, Sir Richard Lodge, Professor J. W. Mackail, Mr. Justice Mackinnon, Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice, Mr. W. G. Newton, the Earl of Onslow, Professor A. F. Pollard, Professor R. S. Rait, Sir Harry Reichel, Mr. Bruce Richmond, Mr. C. P. Scott, Sir Charles S. Sherrington, Sir Squire Sprigge, the Bishop of Oxford, Dr. J. R. Tanner, and Professor G. M. Wrong.
In preparing the volume the Editors have had the advantage of the assistance of Miss Margaret Toynbee, B.A., formerly exhibitioner of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. Their thanks are due in special measure to the Rev. H. E. D. Blakiston, D.D., President of Trinity College, Oxford, Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher, and Dr. D. G. Hogarth for valuable help on the proof-sheets, and to the Officials of the Oxford University Press, who have assisted the work at every stage with criticism and advice.