In a long and proud history, Britain has celebrated a veritable who’s who of great public figures from Shakespeare to Wellington, with a plethora of kings and queens thrown in.
Baroness Margaret Thatcher today takes her place in that official hall of fame, as she enters the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, awarded the third longest entry in its pages.
Lady Thatcher has joined a small band of elite public figures to be honoured with their own separate book detailing their Oxford DNB entry, with an enormous 33,648-word biography detailing her background, long career and legacy.
The submission narrowly beats the entry for Sir Winston Churchill, at 33,268 words, making Lady Thatcher’s biography the most significant of any politician.
It is surpassed in length only by Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, beating leading figures in history including Cromwell, Henry VIII, Queen Victoria and Wellington.
Written by Sir David Cannadine, it will also be published as a book in its own right, complete with additional content such as pictures, letters and copies of official documents.
Lady Thatcher is one of 241 new entries to the ODNB this year, all made up of notable figures who died in 2013 in line with the convention that editors wait four years to best judge who should go down in history.
She is one of 59 new women to grace the biography pages, making up just a quarter of the total additions. Only five entries are from black or minority ethnic backgrounds.
Lady Thatcher’s entry, which does not pull any punches in describing the late Prime Minister’s attributes and weaknesses, concludes: “There are times when nations may need rough treatment. For good and for ill, Thatcher gave Britain plenty of it.”
It describes Lady Thatcher as “deeply and romantically patriotic”, relishing battle, devoid of sentiment, resorting to “devious means” to undermine her cabinet and yet the only 20th century leader to lend her name to an ideology in the shape of Thatcherism.
It follows accolades in her lifetime including a peerage, a Order of the Garter, the Order of Merit, and fellowship of the Royal Society.
The ODNB, which used to be published in a 60-volume printed set costing £6,500, is now updated online only, but remains the national record of “men and women who have made an impact on all walks of British life”.
Other high-profile entries this year include six Nobel Laureates, a Paralympian, veteran broadcasters, the Telegraph’s former cricket correspondent and the notorious Great Train Robbers.
More unusual entries include Fiona Gore, Countess of Arran, who was nicknamed “the fastest granny on water”, wrestler Mick McManus, and Lewis Morley, the photographer who shot the infamous picture of a nude Christine Keeler amid the scandal of the Profumo Affair.
Sir David Frost, the broadcaster, is joined by Alan Whicker, Sir Denis Forman of Granada Television, and Alasdair Milne, the director-general of the BBC ousted in 1987 after a series of confrontations with Lady Thatcher’s government.
David Coleman, the long-serving presenter of Grandstand and inspiration for Private Eye’s Colemanballs column, had entered the ranks, along with Christopher Martin-Jenkins, the much-loved cricket correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and longest-serving commentator for Test Match Special.
Nobel Laureate entries include the chemists Frederick Sanger and Sir John Cornforth, Sir Robert Edwards who helped develop ofin vitro fertilization, economist Ronald Coase, writer Doris Lessing and poet Seamus Heaney.
Entertainers making the grade this year include Mel Smith, Mike and Bernie Winters, Eddie Braben and Tom Sharpe, as well as writer Iain Banks, sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, composer Sir John Tavener and Mick Aston, who turned Time Team into an unlikely ratings hit.
Several war heroes will also find their names in the dictionary, from Sir Robert Clark, who operated behind enemy lines with the partisans in Italy as a young SOE officer, to Ulric Cross, the most highly decorated Caribbean serviceman of the Second World War, and Sir Steuart Pringle, who survived an IRA bomb in 1981.
Foreign reporter Richard Beeston will be honoured, along with Boris Berezovsky , the exiled Russian oligarch who died in mysterious circumstances, Paralympian swimmer and wheelchair racer Chris Hallam, and Bert Trautmann, a former German prisoner-of-war who became goalkeeper for Manchester City and played in the 1956 FA Cup Final despite having a broken neck.
Pointing out that the “dictionary has never been merely a compendium of the great and good”, a spokesman for the ODNB also announced the 2017 update would include “determined villains” of the Great Train Robbery, Bruce Reynolds and Ronnie Biggs, who both died in 2013 50 years after the crime made them notorious.
Following the 2017 update, the Oxford DNB records 60,302 people in 72 million words and is available online now.
- The Telegraph