From Shakespeare to East End gangsters, Emmeline Pankhurst to Percy Shaw, who invented the luminous cat's eye, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography's 50,000 entries are contained in the 61,440 pages of its 60 volumes.
Among the most notable and eccentric, innovative and notorious, famous and infamous Britons of the past 2,400 years, social work figures are amply represented. This is no small feat: among the professions, social work is a Jenny-come-lately, a product of 19th century industrial societies.
When Sir Lesley Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf, was editing the first volume of the ODNB, which appeared in 1885, there was nothing recognisable of the profession that exists today. However, Octavia Hill (1838-1912) had pioneered casework in the Charity Organisation Society and the great children's charities had been founded: Rev Thomas Bowman Stephenson (1839-1912) had created what is now NCH; Thomas Barnardo (1845-1905) founded Dr Barnardo's; while Edward Rudolf (1852-1933) founded what is now the Children's Society; and the Rev Benjamin Waugh (1839-1908) what became the NSPCC.
The dictionary tends to use the phrase social work as a synonym for good works as well as the title of a recognised professional activity. And it throws up some unusual practitioners, such as the Zimbabwean politician Joshua Nkomo (1917-1999) and the post-war Labour prime minister Clement Attlee (1883-1967) from his days at London's Toynbee Hall. Here the most privileged people were brought in to live in the poorest area of London, Tower Hamlets, and paid for the honour. The founders hoped the experience would change society for the better. Now, the charity works to combat poverty in the same area.
In more modern times the almoner was the most distinctive form of social worker. Thus, not surprisingly, Margaret Kelly (1912-1989), Marjorie Steel (1904-1985) and Edith Warren (1903-1980), pioneers of hospital social work, find a place. Sheridan Russell (1900-1991), we are told, had a distinguished career as an almoner, but we aren't told that he was one of the first men to qualify to be one. He shares his entry with his wife, Kit (1909-1998), who with her friend, Eileen Younghusband (1902-1981), pioneered social work training. It was the latter's report that led to the establishment of a Council for Training in Social Work and a social work certificate.
Others listed include Barbara Kahan (1920-2000), who chaired the 1991 Pindown Inquiry and was said "not to suffer fools gladly", and Nicholas Hinton (1942-1997), who led voluntary agencies including Save the Children and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. He lived up to his dictum that "one should wear a dark suit and think radical thoughts" to gain influence in Britain.
Kenneth Brill (1911-1991), was 63 when he became a social services director and would also do out-of-hours duty work. But it was as the first director of the British Association of Social Workers that he helped to shape the emerging social services.
John Chant (1938-1995), the only person to grow up in the care of the service of which he later became director (Somerset), is referred to as "probably the most influential social work leader of his generation", a title that some might think could equally apply to Newcastle's Brian Roycroft, who is not listed as he died after the 2000 cut-off.
Some entrants - although not social workers - influenced practice, services and knowledge. Academics Richard Titmuss (1907-1973), Brian Abel-Smith (1926-1996) and Barbara Wootton (1897-1988) gain entries, as do child psychotherapists Donald Winnicott (1896-1971), whose wife, Clare (1906-1984) was both a social worker and psychotherapist, and Barbara Dockar-Drysdale (1912-1999).
Civil servants include the charismatic Derek Morrell (1921-1969) of the Department of Health and Social Security, who with Joan Cooper (1914-1999), later chief inspector of the social work service, developed what was to result in the Children and Young Persons Act 1969.
The new edition comes 103 years after the completion of the dictionary in 1901. Companion volumes are likely to appear every three or five years, with online updating three times a year. Ironically, another century's volumes may show that the newest profession's title soon became lost beneath a plethora of new job titles.
