REFERENCE WORKS

Website: http://specialcollections.le.ac.uk/digital/collection/p16445coll4

Crockford's

In 1985 Crockford's Clerical Directory became a joint publication between Church House and the Church Commissioners.

Pattinson came to have a good working relationship with Runcie that developed into a friendship.

In 1986 (the Rev Sir) Derek Pattinson (1930-2006), the Secretary-General of the General Synod of the Church of England, invited Canon Gareth Bennet, a Fellow of New College, Oxford, to write the anonymous preface to Crockford s. Pattinson was the moving force in the invitation because he had found the 1985 preface, which had been written by a liberal, very dull . Canon Bennett wrote an attack on the hierarchy for failing to appoint Anglo-Catholics to bishoprics and deaneries. A media storm erupted and Bennett soon became the prime suspect. He committed suicide.

Pattinson claimed not to have had time to read the text that Bennett had given him before he himself had passed it on to the publishers Robert Runcie had been under attack from an alliance of traditional Anglicans and right-wing evangelicals.

Location: Church House, 27 Great Smith Street, SW1P 3BL (purple, yellow)

Website: www.crockfords.org.uk

Cruden's Concordance

Alexander Cruden was a native of Aberdeen. While still a youth, he moved to London and worked as a proof-reader, a tutor, and a bookseller. In 1737 he published the first English language concordance of the King James Bible. The addresses in London that he was associated with included The Bible & Anchor under the Royal Exchange and The Golden Hart in Wild Court to the west of Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Location: 45 Camden Passage, N1 8EF. Camden Street was Cruden's final lodging place in London. (orange, yellow)

Encyclopaedia Metropolitana

The writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge strenuously objected to the Encyclopaedia Britannica because its alphabetical structure made the order of subjects appear to be random to a sequential reader. He planned his own dictionary - the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana - in which items would lead on to the next. He did not produce it.

Gray's Anatomy

Henry Gray was a very successful surgeon. However, he was frustrated in his application for a lectureship at The Royal Institution. The post went to Huxley instead.

Henry van Dyke Carter did the illustrations for Gray.

Location: St George's Hospital, 1 Lanesborough Place, SW1X 7TA (red, orange)

The Guinness Book of Records

With Christopher Brasher, (Sir) Christopher Chataway (1931-2014) was a member of the trio of runners who enabled Roger Bannister to break the four-minute-mile in 1954. Chataway was working for Guinness as a transport executive. He persuaded the company to publish a book of records that had been compiled by the twins Norris and Ross McWhirter, whom he knew through their involvement in amateur athletics.

Location: The Rookery, 2 Dyott Street, WC1A 1DE (purple, red)

Website: www.guinnessworldrecords.com

The Index Animalium

Charles Davies Sherborn (1861-1942) was born into modest circumstances in Chelsea. As a child he developed a fascination with scientific matters. When the Natural History Museum opened he became a habitu of it; he claimed to have been one of the first half dozen members of the public to have entered the building. Eventually, he was employed by its geology department to undertake palaeontological work. He was paid a piece-rate and was never to be an employee of the museum.

Davies Sherborn held the plant reference work Index Kewensis (1893) in high regard. He decided that there should be a counterpart for every living and extinct animal. He chose 1758 as his starting date because that was when the 10^th and definitive edition of Carl Linnaeus s work had been published. He opted to have 1850 as the terminal date.

In 1899 he announced in Nature that was he was going to start compiling Index Animalium the following year. Over the years he survived on occasional grants. He dealt with this situation by having an extremely frugal lifestyle; his tie was a piece of former umbrella fabric; he ended a decade-long engagement after he had included that he would never be able to provide financially for his intended. The British Association for the Advancement of Science was to prove to be his principal supporter. In 1892 it established a committee that sought to generate funds to aid project. The body never received any.

The first volume of Index Animalium was published in 1902. It covered the years 1758-1800. The work completed in 1933. The 9000 pages covered 440,000 species.

Website: www.sii.si.edu/DigitalCollections/indexanimalium

Dr Samuel Johnson

Jonathan Swift devised a plan for fixing the English language.

In France in took 40 academicians 40 years to produce a dictionary, whereas Johnson did it with six drudges in nine years.

Johnson intended that his dictionary would fix the English language.

The cultural importance to the English-speaking world of Dr Samuel Johnson lies in a m l e of literary activities.¹ His outstanding achievement was to lead to the compilation and writing of a dictionary that was published in 1755.

The earliest English proto-dictionaries had essentially been glossaries. Usually, they had been focused upon a single trade. Johnson's composition was the first comprehensive dictionary of English. It covered approximately 43,000 words and was technically superior to the reference works that had preceded it. It did not begin to become redundant until the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary started in 1884. Some of its definitions bore the mark of his personal outlook, e.g. Excise: a hateful tax levied upon commodities and Oats: a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people .

Johnson believed that the English language had been undergoing a decline since the end of the 16^thC. He saw his dictionary as being a means of trying to preserve it from further decay, or at least slowing down the rate of that deterioration. He sought to deny that the language changes by trying to set it in the aspic of his own definitions. His work was the product of a conservative mindset.

Website: www.johnsonsocietyoflondon.org (The Johnson Society of London)

¹. Nowadays, little of Johnson's diverse work as a critic, editor, essayist, novelist, playwright, poet, and translator is read outside of academic circles.

Dr Johnson's House

Johnson lived in a number of residences in London. However, the only one of them that survives is No. 17 Gough Square (1700) to the north of the eastern end of Fleet Street. It was his home and workplace during the 1750s. It was where he compiled the dictionary with the assistance of six clerks.

The property was bought by Baron Harmsworth, a member of the Harmsworth newspaper dynasty, who gave it to a trust. The building was opened to the public in 1912. (The Johnson commemorated in the nearby street name, Johnson's Court, was not the lexicographer but rather a speculative builder who bore the same surname.)

Location: 17 Gough Square, EC4A 3DE (purple, blue)

Website: www.drjohnsonshouse.org

Kelly's Directory

Kelly's Directory is a trade directory.

Website: https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/c/F166898

The King's England

Arthur Mee (1875-1943) came from a poor Nottinghamshire, Baptist family. He joined a local newspaper and reached London in his early twenties.

Mee wrote The Harmsworth Educator and The Children's Encyclopaedia.

He launched The Children's Newspaper.

The King's England (1936-) was a series of books to the localities of England. The work has a Utopian nature.

Location: 27 Lanercost Road, Tulse Hill, SW2 4DP

Kobbe's Complete Opera Book

The 7^th Earl of Harewood (1923-2011) was invited to edit Kobbe's Complete Opera Book after he had reviewed an edition of it in his magazine Opera in 1952. He edited three separate editions of the work.

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

The musicologist and radio producer Robert Layton (1930-2020), an expert on Scandinavian music, disapproved of what he regarded as being the pomposity of Grove exercise. Therefore, for the 1980 edition he contributed a biography of the Danish composer Dag Elrum-Hellerup. The man had not existed. His surname was derived from two districts of Copenhagen.

Website: www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic

Old Moore's Almanack

Francis Moore was an astrologer who lived in Southwark. In 1700 he issued the first edition of his almanac Vox stellarum. This was aimed at ordinary people and had an educational dimension that informed its readers about medical, astronomical, and scientific matters. The publication started out as one of several competing works. However, as the century progressed, it outperformed its rivals and established itself as the dominant popular almanac.

In the mid 19^thC the work was retitled Old Moore's Almanack.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

The printer George Murray Smith financed the D.N.B.. He had made much of his money from dominating the importation of German mineral water. It was edited by Leslie Stephen.

(Virginia Woolf's novels Orlando: A Biography (1928) and Flush: A Biography (1933) mocked her father's Dictionary of National Biography.)

Location: 29 Fitzroy Square, W1T 6LQ. Stephen's home. (orange, pink)

40 Park Lane, W1K 7AA. Smith's home. (purple, turquoise)

See Also: BIOGRAPHY

Website: www.oxforddnb.com

The Oxford English Dictionary

In the mid-19^thC there were a number of philological societies that were dedicated to advancing appreciation and understanding of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. Through these, Frederick Furnivall, Richard Chenevix Trench, and Herbert Coleridge came to know one another. The trio agreed that the English language needed an authoritative dictionary. In 1857 they induced the Philological Society of London to launch its A New English Dictionary On Historical Principles project. This sought to furnish an etymological context for English words since the Anglo-Saxon era. Furnivall served as the initial editor. However, he proved to be temperamentally ill-equipped for the role. James Murray succeeded him in the position.

In 1879 Oxford University Press assumed control of the scheme, which was relocated to Oxford. The work was renamed the Oxford English Dictionary. The same year Murray issued a public appeal for member of the public to furnish the project with quotations that were the earliest known usages of words in written English. One of the most industrious of the volunteers who emerged as a result of this was the American physician W.C. Minor. The editor soon found himself to be impressed by the doctor's contribution. After a number of years, he wangled himself an invitation to the man s residence. Upon arriving at his destination, the lexicographer realised that Dr Minor was an inmate of Broadmoor, a facility that held in the criminally insane in a secure environment.

In 1928 the final volume of the first edition of The O.E.D. was published.

Location: Belvedere Road, SE1 7AF. The site where Dr Minor murdered his victim.

Website: www.oed.com

Parliamentary Profiles

Parliamentary Profiles is a reference work that consists principally of a biographical sketches of every M.P.. The work was created by Andrew Roth (1919-2010), an American whose politics grew to be just slightly beyond the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. As a result, he was viewed by the authorities as having pro-Communist stances. At university he had studied Far Eastern history and Chinese. During the Second World War he was a translator within the U.S. Naval Intelligence. Following the return of peace he worked as a journalist and writer in the Far East. The McCarthyite witch-hunt blew up. A lawyer friend advised him to stay out of the country.

In 1950 Mr Roth moved to London, where he was to be based for the rest of his life. He continued in journalism and came to specialise in writing profiles of M.P.s; the abrasive descriptions owed a debt to Time magazine which he had devoured as a child. In 1953 he launched Parliamentary Profiles. Two years later he started publishing a weekly newsletter for embassies and foreign correspondents called Westminster Confidential. It was this publication that broke the story about John Profumo and the call girl Christine Keeler. Roth remained the subject of F.B.I. interest. In 1966 he took British citizenship. Subsequently, the American State Department was to invite him to resume his original nationality. He was to decline the offer. He continued to work on Westminster Confidential into his nineties.

Website: www.bishopsgate.org.uk/collections/parliamentary-profiles-archive

Pevsner Architectural Guides

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (n Nikolai Pewsner) (1902-1983) was from a Russian Jewish background. In 1914 the family acquired German citizenship. In 1921 he converted to Lutheranism.

Pevsner was appointed to a lectureship in art history at the University of G ttingen.

In 1933 the Nazis forced Pevsner out of his university post. He asked Britain's Academic Assistance Council to help him to move to Britain. It complied with his request.

Pioneers of The Modern Movement (1936) was his book to be printed in Britain.

Pevsner took a real pleasure in English buildings and wanted others to enjoy them.

Pevsner adored churches.

Despite his Modernist background he became a champion of London's Victorian heritage.

The Buildings of England (1951-74).

In his guides Pevsner extended the range of English adjectives that were applied to architecture. He deployed them in an unusual manner. It is reputed that one architectural critic described him as having kidnapped them.

Pevsner s personal quirks included a fascination with funerary inscriptions. Among the things that he had no interest in were bells and moats.

Location: 2 Wildwood Terrace, Hampstead, NW3 7HT. Pevsner's home.

See Also: HERITAGE

Website: https://yalebooks.co.uk/pevsner

Roget's Thesaurus

Abb Gabriel Girard (1677-1748) La Justeese de la langue fran oise, ou les diff rentes signications des mots qui passent pour synonymes (1718).

Hesther Thrale Piozzi's (n e Salusbury) (1741-1821) British Synonom, or, An Attempt At Regulating The Choice of Words In Familiar Conversation (1794) was an early form of thesaurus. For many years she was a close friend of Samuel Johnson.

In 1808 Peter Mark Roget established himself as a medical practitioner. He was a person who had wide intellectual interests. In 1814 he invented the logo-logarithmic slide rule. The following year he presented a paper to the Royal Society about the device. Subsequently, he was elected as one of the organisation's Fellows. In 1827 he was appointed to be its Secretary. In 1840 he retired from medical practice.

During his twenties Roget had compiled a manuscript notebook of synonyms. He appears to have started tinkering with this during the mid-1840s. In 1848 he fell foul of the Royal Society's internal politics and resigned from its Secretaryship. Thereafter, he devoted himself full-time to creating what he termed his Thesaurus. Four years later Longmans published the first edition of the work. By the time of the author's death, it had been through over twenty printings. New editions were overseen first by Roget s son and then by his grandson. During the 1920s the craze for crosswords prompted unparalleled sales of the work. In 1952 the family sold the work's copyright to Longmans.

Location: 18 Bedford Way (formerly Upper Bedford Place), WC1H 0DB (red, yellow)

The Survey of London

The London School Board wished to demolish the Old Palace, a Jacobean building in Bromley-by-Bow. This outraged C.R. Ashbee, who was an architect and social thinker. He determined to prevent the Trinity Hospital alms house in Mile End being torn down. He and some associates set up a Committee for the Survey of The Memorials of Greater London to catalogue the historic buildings of London. The London County Council made the body a grant of 100. The first volume was published in 1900. It was about Bromley-by-Bow.

In 1910 the Committee and the Council agreed that they would produce alternate volumes. In 1953 the local authority assumed full responsibility for the project, which by then had acquired a reputation for being characterised selfless eccentricity. Francis Sheppard (1921-2018), an Assistant Keeper at London Museum, was appointed to be its inaugural General Editor. His staff consisted of one and a half researchers. In 1970 The Survey published two volumes to commemorate the 300^th anniversary of the founding of Covent Garden Market. These facilitated the granting of listed status to a number of buildings in the district. He extended The Survey from its architectural origin to take consideration of how society had functioned within the buildings. He believed that it was more important to catalogue commercial and domestic architecture than well-known public buildings. The North Kensington (1973) volume was the first to reflect this shift in approach. His personal interests included theatres.

Hermione Hobhouse (1934-2014) was appointed to be the editor of The Survey of London in 1983. Under her guidance its resources were switched away from central London to examine Poplar. The looming redevelopment of Docklands meant that the area was about to undergo major changes.

Location: County Hall, Queen's Walk, SE1 7PB. The Survey operated from part of the attic.

See Also: HERITAGE

Website: www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london

The Victoria History of England

The Victoria History of England seeks to create a study of every county of England. This is done through writing studies of the histories of all the parishes in each county. The History was founded in 1899 as a private concern.

In 1933 the History took up residence in the University of London's Institute of Historical Research.

Location: Senate House, Malet Street, WC1E 7HU (orange, brown)

Whitaker's Almanack

Whitaker s Almanack is a current affairs reference book that seeks to contain Today s World In One Volume . It was launched in 1868 by Joseph Whitaker, a publisher of theology books.

In 1878 Cleopatra's Needle was erected upon the Victoria Embankment. By then Whitaker s had become such a part of contemporary life that a copy of the current edition was one of the items that was placed in a time capsule that was incorporated into the base that supports the obelisk.

Location: 68 Silver Street, Enfield, EN1 3EW. Whitaker's home.

Website: https://rebelionpublishing.com/whitakers

Who's Who

Who s Who was founded in 1849.

There is a story that Who's Who was put up for auction. Both Adam Black and John Wisden wanted to buy the work. However, they appreciated that neither of them wished to overpay for it as a result. Therefore, before the auction started, they tossed a coin as to which of them bid for it. Black won the toss.

Website: https://ukwhoswho.com

Wisden s

Wisden Cricketers Almanack is a cricket statistics annual that includes independently-minded opinion forming editorials, obituaries of leading figures in the sport, and coverage of some its quirkier aspects. The first edition of Wisden s was published in 1864 by John Wisden, the proprietor of a cricket and cigar shop in Leicester Square who had been an able cricketer. The first volume included the dates of the Crusades, a list of winners of the St Leger horserace, and an account of the trial of King Charles I (1649).

In 1891 Sydney Pardon became the editor of Wisden s. Under his leadership, which lasted until 1925, the publication developed into being the authoritative work of record for its chosen sport.

Writers have sourced characters names from. P.G. Wodehouse derived Jeeves from Percy Jeeves, a Warwickshire player. Conan Doyle may have drawn upon Shaklock of Nottinghamshire and Holmes of Yorkshire.

Location: 2 Coventry Street, W1D 6BH. For a time, Wisden and Fred Lillywite were joint owners of a cigar and cricket shop. The former became the sole proprietor. (orange, pink)

21 Cranbourn Street, WC2H 7AA. Its presence was commemorated by the architect Leslie Green in the cricket imagery in the ox blood tiles. (blue, turquoise)

See Also: CRICKET; OBITUARIES; SPORTS Lillywhites

Website: https://wisden.com

David Backhouse 2024